Tom Allen: ‘Why do I always talk about being gay? Because I wasn’t … – iNews
‘“People frighten me a little bit,” says Tom Allen. “But music has always been an escape, a means of getting away into my own world. When I play the piano I get to be on the outside of expectations, on my own terms…” The 39-year-old comedian strikes a Garbo-esque pose. “…like Elsa in Frozen.”
BBC Radio 3 listeners were granted admission to Allen’s private musical world last week, when he “took over” the station’s beloved Late Junction slot to broadcast an eclectic mix of “maudlin, melancholy and camp” sounds. There were deep cuts from Kate Bush, Sufjan Stevens and Bjork along with sea shanties, choral music, 1950s folk and a genre he’s calling “Medieval Emo”.
“I listened to Late Junction to get to sleep when I was a teenager, on a little radio walkman my dad bought for me,” he tells me over video from a pre-gig hotel near Tower Bridge. As a closeted, working-class kid in Bromley, Kent, he says he would go to bed “feeling very isolated. There was no mention of homosexuality at all at school. There were just slurs.”
The Great British Bake Off An Extra Slice (Photographer: Mark Bourdillon)
Modern audiences often assume that Allen developed his quick wit in response to school bullies. But he says: “I didn’t say anything to the homophobic bullies. I just buried it. I dressed up like Julie Walters and did an Alan Bennett monologue at the school cabaret. People now say: ‘I bet that showed them!’ No! No it didn’t. Nothing changed. So I escaped to the music room to play the piano during the day. At night I would listen to Radio 3 where they’d play Gregorian chant and electronica from the Czech Republic.” Sounds that felt, like Allen, “strange and complicated and askew from the mainstream”.
Although Allen has finally found a comfortable place in that mainstream, presenting shows such as The Apprentice: You’re Fired and Bake Off’s Extra Slice, readers of his 2020 memoir, No Shame, will know that it took him a long time to feel at ease with himself. You feel that when watching him deliver his playful swipes at the Bake Off contestants and audience – “that kind of teasing and banter, it’s how we make people feel included in this country, isn’t it. We know we’re real friends when we’re safe enough to say mean things to each other. It’s a shield against all the actual cruelty in the world. It feels like an unspoken communion. That’s where I feel most real.”
He left school at 18 to pursue a career on the stage and spent 12 years on the comedy circuit before TV came calling. “The comedy scene in 2005 was still quite blokey. Still very much lad culture. It stumbled into something unkind. When I first went on television people said: ‘Why do you talk about being gay all the time?’ It was because, in the clubs, I felt I had to talk about it because otherwise the audience would whisper it, use it as a tool against me. So I chose to be brazen with it, to own my sexuality.”
He rallies. “And also: ’Why do you talk about being gay all the time?’ Well, it’s because people wouldn’t let me talk about it for the first half of my life! They say: ‘You’ve got gay marriage now so everything’s OK, isn’t it?’ But it’s not like there’s a switch that’s been flipped in me. You can still carry that sense of shame. That internalised homophobia.”
Although his dad, Paul, was a coach driver and his mum, Irene, worked in the Army & Navy Stores (“not the House of Fraser, alas”) Allen tells me has always been “cursed” with a “posh, adult” accent. He throws himself into a cheeky impersonation of his mum’s bewilderment at his Noel Coward vowels: “Must ‘av been somefing in the gas ’n’ air, I reckon! Maybe you was swapped!”
When Allen came out as a young adult – first to his mum and then to his dad on the phone – his parents were “hugely emotional. Families are naturally more compassionate than we give them credit for, I think. But my dad was born in 1941. Not only was [homosexuality] illegal but no one had time for it. But when I came out to him he was mainly upset that I hadn’t felt able to talk to him about it before.”
Paul Allen died suddenly of a heart attack, at Grove Park train station, last year, aged 80. His son’s second book, Too Much, explores the complexity of grief and charts a belated independence. After living at home with his parents and not having relationships until his late thirties, Allen finally moved out into his own home with his first partner (Alfie, an actor and events coordinator).
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“I talk about losing a parent as the moment you become an adult,” says Allen. “But I realised I spent a lot of my life up until then thinking I should be something more, somewhere else, doing better than I am. Then I realised that just to be in suburbia to be at peace with the people around you is quite a wonderful thing. I like the mundanity of suburbia. I like the fact it isn’t dramatic. It isn’t like Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares. People aren’t screaming at each other. You say hello in the street, hopefully you have a little garden and a moan about the neighbour isn’t taking their bins in. It’s enough. My little family was enough. It’s over now, much to my lament. But it was perfect in its way.”
Allen has found grief sitting him at unexpected – often absurd – moments. “You might not cry at the funeral, then find yourself in tears walking past the trifle in the supermarket. Another time, I got ridiculously angry at the state of the interior decoration at Jersey airport. I was like: ‘There’s a mark on that wallpaper. Why have they not got it off? Do they not care about people?’”
Allen’s dad “wasn’t particularly huggy. We don’t all express ourselves like hallmark cards, do we? He wouldn’t say: ‘I love you, son.’ He showed he cared by making you a bacon sandwich. The last text he sent me was an offer to come over and bleed the radiators. In the inevitable way of things I found myself going: ‘Dad! I’m a grown up! I don’t need you to help me with the bins!’ But it turns out I do. I keep forgetting to put out the bins.” He shrugs. “I think I really came to appreciate that was his love language through writing the book, although I knew it in my soul I suppose.”
While Allen knows “some people believe we use humour to deflect emotion, I think it can be a way to process emotion too. It allows us to bring our flaws out into the open, to talk about the things we’re not very good at and the issues that make us anxious. It can take the sting out of those things.” He loves the sound of laughter as relief when audience members connect and realise: “Oh, it’s not just me.” And he feels that “camp comedy, in particular, is subversion. It’s about treating light things seriously and seriously things lightly. It flips the world and gives us the power back. It allows us to stare death in the face.”
He wonders if younger generations understand camp culture. “I’ve been asked to name camp icons for magazine features in which other people have named Michelle Visage or somebody from Drag Race. To my mind, that’s not camp. Those people exist boldly. They’re overt. Camp is more about secret code, a nod and a wink: do we understand each other? As a teenager I was camp in the way I would escape to the music rooms. It’s a way of processing your inner world for your CHOSEN people. It’s not in your face and there’s something about that that is very exquisite and connecting.”
On Late Junction (still on BBC Sounds), Allen played music from one of the campest albums going: The Exotic Moods of Les Baxter. “He did the music for all these 1950s B movies, set in exotic locations. The songs are all called things like ‘The Misty Galleon’ – wonderfully evocative of this nonsense film world. Then we had the Sun Ra Arkestra jazz collective [led by 98 year old saxophonist Marshall Allen] doing a mixtape. They have this exuberant, flamboyant narrative about coming from Saturn on a mission to bring peace… I really love music that can transport the listeners, that has a story to it.”
And does Allen feel like a grown up now? “I do, to an extent, yes. Now that dad isn’t around to scoop me up and rescue me. So I want to pass on what wisdom I’ve learned.” But he still sleeps with the light on. “I’m scared of being misunderstood,” he says, “and I’m scared of the dark.”
Too Much is out now (Hodder & Stoughton, £20)