Today I am alerted by an excited mate to a feature today in a newspaper with some inaccuracies but I will confine myself here to the only subject on which I am a world authority and expert, me…
‘…a comedian who had a nervous breakdown when his career stalled.’
I am not disputing that my career stalled – anyone with a telly can conclude this – and as I say in my book, if it hadn’t stalled then I would not have written any book, let alone one called Eclipsed.
In the book, I explain that my ‘breakdown’ was not really a breakdown at all which is typical since ‘victim’ culture is now with us and so many ‘celebs’ play this card so well. But alas my breakdown was not mental – but just severe nervous exhaustion that comes wth having three sons under the age of three, none of whom slept very much and at the time I was doing up to 10 gigs a week.
Not that a nervous breakdown is anything to be ashamed of either but the implication that mine came when Telly looked elsewhere implies a petulant strop and is not the case.
As I also explain – so much has needed to be accounted for in chronicling such a story and writing something so personal. And I am happy with it and have no regrets. Nothing to be ashamed of here. It is a truthful account of a remarkable rise countered by a normal and ordinary plateau – and readers can assess for themselves my motives and its merits.
And I am glad that I wrote it also because I expect much will be published on Tom in the coming years. A lot of it conjecture and Eclipsed can serve as a source of what really happened and how an ordinary kid got to become I guess, extraordinary.