Cockney comic Micky Flanagan on fings like making it, money, paying your taxes and his missus

COCKNEY comic Micky Flanagan meets me in his local boozer and orders a black coffee – with one grim warning.

“I always take a kettle with me on tour,” he says, smoothing back his famous curly locks.

“You know, there are very famous bands that poo in them?”

I raise my eyebrows in disgust as he swirls his mug.

“No, seriously,” Micky continues, “I played a club once and I said to the geezer, ‘Is there a kettle so we can make a cup of tea?’

“So he says, ‘No, we had a heavy metal band in last week and they not only s*** in the kettle, but they nicked the iron an’ all’.

“I thought, ‘If ever I have any success, I’m going to get me own kettle’, so that’s what I did.

“There are O2 headliners that still s*** in them.”

Micky knows all about headlining the arena. He played 12 sell-out shows there on his most recent tour.

Not bad for a bloke who once worked as a Billingsgate Fish Market porter in East London.

The reigning king of comedy is fresh off the back of his An’ Another Fing gigs, which saw him play to 600,000 people across the country.

The DVD of the same name has not even been released yet but is already top of the Amazon comedy chart thanks to pre-orders.

It is hysterically funny. Marching out on to the stage, he tells the O2 crowd: “For the next couple of hours you have to imagine I’m still like you...but with money.”

Or as Micky, 55, puts it more succinctly, he’s “f***ing loaded”.

‘I'm of that generation whose dads were proper distant, hard fathers. If you come off your bike and smash your face on the floor, they picked the bike up first.

But when I catch up with him, he insists his lucrative success has not changed him.

“I’ve always been this much of a p***k,” he says. “I’m just an East End bloke who happens to have stumbled on something that he’s quite good at, and gets quite well paid for.”

So what does he spend all his dough on?

“Well, this jumper is cashmere. Of course I buy nice things, I go to nice places and have nice holidays — but I don’t think it’s changed me.

“I might like the look of a Maserati but my wife will tell me, ‘You’ll look like a proper d***head driving that’.

“I could go to five-star restaurants all the time but they get on my nerves. I’d rather have a burger and a pint with my mates somewhere like this.”

However, Micky is clear on what he would NOT do with his money.

The Paradise Papers, a huge leak of financial documents throwing light on the murky world of offshore finance, has clearly hit a nerve with him.

The files have implicated the likes of Bono, Lewis Hamilton and even the Queen — through the Duchy of Lancaster — in wealth-boosting and tax-avoiding schemes.

“I’m going into politician mode now,” Micky says, being deadly serious. “You’ve got to pay your taxes.

That’s it. Not only should you pay your taxes, but when you live in a country as great as this, you should WANT to pay your taxes. Because that’s why we live here.

“And if you want to live here, you’ve got to pay your taxes, otherwise f*** off.

“Go live somewhere where you don’t have to. Go to Monaco. Put that on the front of the paper — f*** off to Monaco, Ma’am.”

Ouch!

(Royal fans can take comfort in the fact that Her Maj is unlikely to become neighbours with anyone in the tax haven very soon, as she does voluntarily pay taxes.)

Suddenly the bright and breezy Micky is back, and he throws his head back in a fit of giggles. I ask if he has ever entertained the thought of salting away his cash overseas.

I've been asked to go on a TV show called Who Do You Think You Are? I said, 'That sounds like the start of a fight where I come from'.

“I was thinking about getting a caravan on the Isle of Sheppey,” he muses. “But apparently there aren’t any loopholes there. You still have to pay your caravan duty.

“No, honestly, all those things I’ve avoided like the plague.”

Not that Micky’s been squeaky-clean his whole life.

He dabbled with “pharmaceuticals” in his youth and grew up “surrounded” by crime in London’s East End.

But he smiles fondly and adds: “I would say it was more Derek Trotter than Ronnie Kray.”

Micky left school before he was 15 and spent the next few years doing odd jobs, including his stint at Billingsgate, as well as working as a window cleaner.

He later trained to become a teacher, but confesses: “My classrooms were an absolute disaster.

“To say I was floundering is an understatement. I never, ever got it together. I think I gave one lesson that wasn’t a disaster.

“On the plus side, it was the driving force behind me sort of starting to try comedy.”

He toiled on the circuit in the late-Nineties before breaking into the big time in the late-2000s.

Micky says: “Suddenly you’re playing decent, well-run comedy clubs rather than total hellholes.

“I played one gig and asked to go to the toilet. The promoter said, ‘We don’t have one. You can p*** in the sink if you want’.”

Micky now lives in East Dulwich, South East London, with wife Cathy and son Max, 11.

His “missus” comes in for some stick in his show. In one particularly frank section he discusses her love of Veet hair-removal cream.

“It’s always a shock, innit?” he asks, prowling the vast O2 stage.

“When your partner comes in with two massive white stripes up the side of her fanny?

“I said to my wife the other day, ‘You looked like Adam Ant when you walked in then’.”

I've worked out what an ambience is - it's a night without poor people

Is there any part of his home life he won’t use for a joke? Micky says: “There’s a line — she won’t let me go over it. Anything too personal. I mean, women use Veet, that much we know.

“I’ve seen it on the shelf and I’ve seen it in action. But a general joke about women using Veet and how odd it looks, and how dangerous it can be as well.”

Dangerous?

“Well, if you leave it on too long.” This year Micky briefly left the stage behind to investigate the burning questions that keep him up at night for Sky One’s Thinking Aloud documentary series.

Topics included gender equality, patriotism and sex.

When I ask if he would like to do more documentaries, he says with a mock drawl: “That’s the direction my artistic side is going in, yah.

“I loved working on that. It made me realise there’s a whole world out there — that’s quite secretive for various reasons — of people having sex for ... pleasure!

“People are — not perverted, that’s the wrong way to say it — but a lot more sexual than they allow themselves to be. It’s still frowned upon.

“We think sex is something done within a marriage or a close relationship, and anything outside of that is seen as slightly deviant.

“Brits don’t leave work and go, ‘Could I go early? Me and the missus are going dogging’. You never hear, ‘Listen, I might be late tomorrow, me and Terry are at a sex party tonight.’”

Not that Micky could drop in on a sex party. He gets recognised too much. “It can be a bit nerve-racking,” he says. “Every time someone drives past, they’re shouting out the windows, ‘Micky! MICKY! Way-hey!’ But it’s really not a problem. Once you start walking around with an entourage and dark glasses and, you know, being an a***hole, that’s when it all goes wrong.

“It’s just little things. I’ve got to get some conditioner for my hair after this and I’ll probably go into that corner shop, and the woman will probably say, ‘Hello, Micky’, where she wouldn’t have said that because she didn’t know me before.”

There used to be a darts player called the Crafty Cockney. Did he try and away with throwing four darts or something? 240!

I tell Micky I’m pleased to hear he’s looking after his locks.

“Oh it’s very important,” he says with a dramatic hair flip.

“I’m just waiting for L’Oreal to call.”
His legions of fans evidently think he’s worth it.

• Micky Flanagan An’ Another Fing is out on Monday, on DVD, Blu-ray and Digital.

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