Bad higher results are not the end of the world –andishouldknow
◆ From Albert Einstein to Simon Cowell, many school underachievers have gone on great things, writes Jeff Stark
I’m terrified about it. But hey, it’s the terror that keeps me going. Terror is good. Terror is being alive
Not everyone will be celebrating their Higher results, but don’t stress, there’s still hope
So you’re worried your Highers marks may not be up to scratch. Don’t stress too much. You’re in good company. Richard Branson went to an expensive private school but dropped out at 16. Lord Sugar left school with no qualifications, and Simon Cowell only managed two O-levels.
Even the greatest genius of all, Albert Einstein, left school at 15 and became a clerk. Then there’s me. I left Stirling High School in 1961 and, even after repeating a year, only managed one Higher, English, at the minimum pass grade. Please forgive me if I do a bit of boasting but since then I’ve done okay.
It’s odd but when you get old there are certain moments in your teens that you remember with complete clarity: where you were sitting, what you were wearing, everything. One such moment was in 1961 when I was swotting for a history exam.
My two sisters were having a whale of a time at St Andrews University and I really wanted to go there too so I needed to pass this exam. I started reading the textbook. At the bottom of the first page, I realised my eyes had read the whole page but my brain had wandered off somewhere about line six. So I started again and again but my mind kept racing off somewhere else.
My problem was ADHD but in those days there was no such thing. I had a brain like a pinball machine, with hundreds of ideas bouncing around and the attention span of a goldfish. So at the age of 18, I left Stirling with my one Higher and hitchhiked to London to be a pop star. In those days pop stars had made-up names like Billy Fury, Adam Faith and Marty Wilde. I was going to be Clint Hunger.
Well I never got discovered as a pop star but I did discover advertising. “Fizzy brains buzzing with ideas? Thirtysecond
attention span? Come on in laddie,” they said. “That’s exactly the time length we’re looking for”. In short, I found something where ADHD was a positive advantage.
After that I built up my own advertising agency, won lots of awards for my work on Irn-bru, British Rail, and Fosters lager. After just two years, I sold the business to the mighty Saatchi & Saatchi and became their creative director. Then I retired at 45 to fulfil my lifelong dream of sailing my small yacht round the world.
Unsurprisingly I made it halfway (Tonga), before I got bored, flew back to London and started a TV commercials production company, which ran for 15 years back in the days when making commercials was a licence to print money. Again, I managed to snap up a few awards for my ads for Impulse, British Airways and Walls sausages as well as making a short film with Ewan Mcgregor that got into the Sundance Film Festival.
I have had the pleasure, and sometimes pain, of working with many big stars: Joan Collins, Helen Mirren, Iggy Pop, Malcolm Mclaren, Ronnie Barker, Terrence Stamp, Graham Norton, Zoe Ball, Adam Faith and Dudley Moore.
So my lack of Highers never held me back. At school, my plan had been to go to university, then become a teacher and, if I’d had a normal attention span, that’s what would have happened. I might have been quite good as I would have understood pupils who found it hard to concentrate.
I’m 81 now and I still have those fizzy brains, so retirement doesn’t suit me. That’s why this year I’m appearing in a one-man comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe. In my 30s, I discovered that writing jokes involved pretty much the same skill as writing ads, so I tried being a stand-up comedian.
The Comedy Store had just started. Alexei Sayle was the compere and I used to run him home after the show as we lived nearby and, unlike him, I had a car. It was a great springboard for lots of comedians but in those days I wasn’t much good. Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Keith Allen and Arnold Brown were all much better.
Also my advertising career was taking off so comedy was very much a side
nd hustle and I wasn’t putting in the time. However since retiring, I’ve done a lot of practising at the Cavendish pub in Stockwell, one of London’s top open-mic venues. They had about ten comedians per show. We each got five minutes, then the audience decided who was best. I won more often than not so decided to chance my arm on the big one: Edinburgh.
My show is called “Jeff Stark. Old Fart Gassing” and I’m on every night at Greenside in George Street from August 12-25. It’s all about the problems of getting old, starting off with flatulence and incontinence then prostate problems, memory loss, oldgit cardigans, the benefits of becoming invisible, hip replacements, joints that click when walking uphill so I sound like an antique clock shop, Viagra, funeral fun, the lot. I’m terrified about it. But hey, it’s the terror that keeps me going. Terror is good. Terror is being alive.
Highers? Stuff ’em. What I now realise is that I’ve cruised through life very happily without needing to know anything I learned at school beyond the age of 13. Never needed to know the capital of Bolivia, do a simultaneous equation or know the date of the Battle of Agincourt.
English is the only thing that’s been any use but even then it’s the stuff I read outside school that’s helped. Why clog up my memory with stuff I don’t need to remember? Especially now that I have a whole 55 minutes of comedy to memorise. I’m aiming to win the Best Newcomer award at the age of 81. In short, still a fizzy-brained dreamer. Wish me luck.
Jeff Stark is a stand-up comedian and the former creative director of ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi