The World According to Gogglebox Read online

  THE TAPPERS, NORTH LONDON

  JOSH: We want a dog but they won’t get one.

  AMY: I want a guinea pig, but apparently it smells.

  NIKKI: The thing is about pets is the people that end up looking after it are the parents. I work full time and I couldn’t have them in the house.

  AMY: Are you joking? I would look after a pet so much. It would be my baby.

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  LEON: We’re animal lovers. We had two much-loved cats, Tiger and Fudge. And I used to tell the girls stories about them. And Julie said, ‘Why don’t you write a story about them?’ So I wrote a book: Tiger and Fudge. And it sold quite a few.

  JUNE: You went round schools and nurseries reading it, didn’t you? We’re pet-free at the moment.

  LEON: But I’ve asked for a kitten for Christmas.

  JUNE: And we’ve got the old Labrador …

  LEON: … what?

  JUNE: You!

  THE MOFFATTS, COUNTY DURHAM

  SCARLETT: We have a hamster. Called Mordecai.

  BETTY: We did have Rigby as well. Like on Regular Show. He’s sadly gone to hamster heaven, hasn’t he?

  SCARLETT: So, my dad made a coffin at work. Like when I used to have goldfish and they used to die, he’d cut the thumb off a velvet glove, put the little fishy in. He’s a welder, so he made Rigby a metal coffin.

  MARK: Lined it with velvet. It’s buried down the back of our veggies.

  THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON

  ALEX: I cried when you told me that my dog Sammy was still alive. We gave our grandparents Sammy to look after when their dog died, and then I kind of lived the next couple of years not really ever seeing him. And then I was told by someone that he had died; so I was really upset. But then last week you told me that he was still alive and I was, like, what? My dog has been resurrected? NATURAL WORLD:

  AFRICA’S GIANT KILLERS

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  LEON: You used to lie like that with your legs in the air, June.

  SANDY & SANDRA, BRIXTON

  SANDRA: The way they eat the bones… I eat like that.

  SUPERSIZE VS SUPERSKINNY

  STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON

  STEPHEN: Do you remember in the paper there was that big fat lady and they found a cat in one of the folds of her skin? In the folds of her skin. It was the next door neighbour’s. They’d been searching for it for weeks and it was there, tucked in between her … gunt.

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  UMAR: Whenever I go swimming, it’s the fat people who are always overtaking me.

  EMBARRASSING BODIES

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  UMAR: I’ll be alright as long as it’s nothing to do with balls.

  SID: I think it must be hard coming to something like this and showing all your ailments and stuff, when the doctor’s, like, ultra buff. I’m not saying I have a thing for Doctor Christian …

  STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON

  CHRIS: If he put a paper bag over his head I would.

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  DOM: He’s the doctor that does warts on your knob.

  STEPH: Look how buff he is. He’s gymtastic. He’s a gay icon.

  DOM: He looks like a monkey.

  THE MAN WITH THE 10-STONE TESTICLE

  THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON

  CAROLYNE: Americans can send bloody ships to Mars, they can change the weather, they can … whatever it is, and they can’t give their own people a health service. It’s absolutely outrageous.

  STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON

  STEPHEN: Oh God. I’ll never be able to eat a faggot again.

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  STEPH: Life’s shit, isn’t it? Gives you a big bollock, takes it away, and then you die. And all he’ll be remembered for is having a massive bollock.

  ONE BORN EVERY MINUTE

  SANDY & SANDRA, BRIXTON

  SANDRA: My third and fourth, I said, ‘No way, no – I’m not pushing out nothing. Take it out yourself.’

  REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  KATE: Do you remember when you had to put your scrubs on? You looked like George Clooney. Well, you did to me. But I’d had a lot of drugs.

  STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON

  STEPHEN: I’ve always thought women were the stronger sex. They have to put up with periods, having babies, the menopause …

  CHRIS: … Men. And they have to walk in stilettos. And that fucking hurts.

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  SID: It’s an amazing feeling, when you hold your child in your own arms.

  SEX BOX

  THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON

  LOUIS: Shut up, Dad! ‘They should be married.’ ‘They can’t have sex out of wedlock.’ You are, literally, a thousand years old.

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  BAASIT: That box is going to stink.

  BILL & JOSEF, CAMBRIDGE

  BILL: Just a note: the first European to write about the clitoris was a man called Columbus in 1516.

  LIVE FROM SPACE

  SANDY & SANDRA, BRIXTON

  SANDRA: Every country in the whole world is in that ball?

  SANDY: Except the stars. The blue bits are water. We’re in space, we’re looking down, why isn’t the water falling down from Earth?

  SANDRA: Because it ain’t raining.

  SHAUN RYDER ON UFOS

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  LEON: If there are other civilisations, they should get in touch with us. Mind you, they’d probably get shot. You know how intolerant we are.

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  DOM: We’re going to hear of somebody telling us about the thing that came down, parked, took him upstairs, sucked him off, spat him out, kicked him back in – and it was the only way he could explain to his wife why he had a sore cock when he got home.

  LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA

  GEORGE: What a load of fucking bollocks. There’s definitely nothing coming in to our atmosphere from outer space. Anything that would have the technology to enter our atmosphere would be able to see everything we’re doing from outside of it. They would definitely not park up and make their self known, unless they’re abducting people.

  LINDA: What about ET?

  The Michaels

  BRIGHTON

  Retired hoteliers Andrew, 54, and Carolyne, 53, have been married for twenty-eight years. They live in Brighton with their son Louis, 17, who hopes to be a writer. They have three other children: Alex, 23, who works in marketing; Katy, 25, who works in recruitment; and Pascal, 20, who is studying neuroscience at Aberdeen. When the whole family are home, there is often a lively debate about what’s on telly.

  HOW DID YOU MEET?

  CAROLYNE: We were both doing a summer job as English Language teachers. There was a pre-arranged meeting and neither of us really wanted to go. Andy was managing his family’s hotel at the time, and I think he only wanted to do the teaching so he could meet girls.

  ANDREW: That’s exactly why I wanted to do it. I was negotiating to buy another hotel in Bournemouth at the time and I thought, right, I’ve got this couple of months’ window, what can I do? And I thought, well, what I’d like to do …

  CAROLYNE: … is meet all these Swedish girls.

  ANDREW: Yeah.

  CAROLYNE: I didn’t want to do it either. It was my mum that forced me to do it. At that time, every day Andy used to finish at the hotel and leave the keys for the safe in a hidden place at reception, for them to open up the next day.

  ANDREW: But the night before, I had decided I wasn’t going to go because it was on Sunday morning, and I thought, well, can’t be bothered. I can pick up girls some other way, you know.

  CAROLYNE: And then, at seven o’clock in the morning, he got this phone call from the duty manageress, waking him up to say …

  ANDREW: ‘The key’s not here. Have you taken it home with you?’ And I said, I’ve never taken it home with me. But I looked in the pocket of my trousers and I had taken it.
And I said, oh, I have! I’ll be right there with it. And I took it in and, you know, it was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, and I thought, well, I’m up and dressed, I might as well go to the thing that I’d decided I wasn’t going to go to … and that’s when we met.

  CAROLYNE: And you know how English people are very sort of … reserved? And if ever there’s a front-row seat, nobody ever wants to sit at the front, they all go to the back? So, because I was late, all the back seats had been taken, so there was nowhere to sit except the front, and it was just me, like a Larry, sitting at the front. And, of course, because Andy was also really late, he had nowhere else to sit, so it was just us two sitting in the front like idiots.

  ANDREW: And I sat there and I saw this girl with long hair. And I thought, my God, she looks good-looking: I bet when she moves her head she’s going to be a right old fucking goggler. But she moved her head and, of course, she was absolutely gorgeous. And I said, ‘Thank you, God.’

  CAROLYNE: And the day that I met Andy, I was wearing a dress that I had actually made myself. And I remembered thinking, as I put it on, what’s the point of looking nice? I don’t care if I wear this. I’m not going to meet anybody anyway. And there you go. We were thrown together.

  HOW DID YOU GET ON GOGGLEBOX?

  CAROLYNE: Katy, our eldest, was working in Hollister, and some street recruiters came in for the programme.

  ANDREW: They said, ‘We’re looking for interesting families,’ and Katy said, ‘My family’s really interesting.’

  CAROLYNE: But when they told us what the programme was about, we just said, ‘God, that’s got to be the most idiotic, boring programme.’ We actually didn’t want to do it. Who would watch other people watching television? How could that be interesting?

  LOUIS: I thought it was quite funny, actually.

  ANDREW: I said no, it’s just silly and I think there’s every chance we’re going to be made to look bad. But they insisted it would be fine, so I said to Louis, ‘I am genuinely going to leave it to you, as a sixteen-year-old, to decide.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Do you know what, Dad? Let’s do it.’ And that’s why we did it.

  LOUIS: I liked the idea.

  CAROLYNE: Katy was the one who really wanted to do it – she was desperately keen. And then, literally a week before filming was due to start, she went off travelling. Just upped and left and said, ‘I’m going to Australia. Bye!’

  ALEX: I was in London at university for all of this, so I didn’t really have a clue what was going on.

  WHAT DO YOU THINK

  OF YOURSELVES ON SCREEN?

  CAROLYNE: At first, it was like watching a home movie. It didn’t feel like it was on the telly at all.

  ANDREW: It didn’t feel like there were thousands of other people watching it.

  CAROLYNE: Because Gogglebox isn’t filmed in a TV studio, we’re just being ourselves, so it doesn’t actually feel like it is on the telly, it just feels like we’re at home.

  LOUIS: We don’t have to go anywhere, we don’t have to learn any lines …

  ANDREW: We’re not making an effort.

  LOUIS: We’re doing the most leisurely activity in the most leisurely room in our house.

  CAROLYNE: We don’t have to dress up; we don’t put any make-up on.

  LOUIS: We dress down, if anything.

  HAD YOU BEEN ON TV BEFORE?

  CAROLYNE: I did this makeover on This Morning.

  ALEX: She was the hair model.

  LOUIS: Basically they said, if anyone’s been meaning to have a radical haircut for a while and hasn’t got round to it, we’re doing a competition. So, just ring us up and you might be chosen. Mum had been meaning to get her hair cut for ages because it was a bit of a state, and so she rang up and she said, ‘I’d love to be involved.’

  CAROLYNE: It was very radical. I hated it. But you’re sitting there on the spot, and they do this big reveal, and everybody’s supposed to say, ‘Oh, we love it!’ But it was so horrible. I absolutely hated it. I actually wanted to cry, it was so bad.

  LOUIS: It was Alexandra Burke.

  ALEX: An inverted bob. Dyed dark brown.

  BEING RECOGNISED

  LOUIS: It’s very weird. If I’m sitting on the bus, I might catch someone looking at me. And I’ll maybe assume that they might recognise me. Or I’ve got food on my face.

  CAROLYNE: People give you a double look. They really stare at you. And, to begin with, I used to think, oh my God, have I got my skirt tucked in my pants or something?

  ANDREW: The bin men stopped me the other day, and one of them shouted, ‘Gogglebox!’ And I said, that’s right, guys. Do you like it? And he goes, ‘We love it.’ I said why? ‘Because it’s so real,’ he said.

  CAROLYNE: That’s what everybody says. ‘We absolutely love it, we love you and it’s just like we sit there as a family – we’re just the same as you.’ My mum, unfortunately, passed away quite recently. But she was in a nursing home and all the nurses watched it, so she was absolutely made up because she felt like she was something special.

  LOUIS: They gave her extra chicken.

  CAROLYNE: Everybody always says how happy it makes them. That’s the key. They all say it makes them happy and that’s great because, for me, that is such a wonderful feeling: to think that you’ve made somebody laugh.

  ANDREW: And they all like me, as well. Which is really weird. I’m not used to people liking me.

  LOUIS: A girl messaged me, and said, ‘I have been suffering from depression for a while and your positivity and your happiness is actually more helpful to me than all the drugs and psychiatric help that I’ve received.’

  ANDREW: And what did I say to you when you told me that story?

  LOUIS: That you were proud of me.

  ANDREW: I did. And I meant it.

  LOUIS: I think that was the first time I’d ever heard those words. That was really nice.

  Andrew and Carolyne on their wedding day, 7 June 1986

  WHAT DOES TV MEAN TO YOU?

  CAROLYNE: It’s relaxation.

  LOUIS: We can all reminisce and be nostalgic about it. Especially us four kids. We would always watch the same thing. So TV defines certain times of our childhood. In that sense, it’s a catalogue.

  ANDREW: Television can be unifying.

  ALEX: Everybody has quite disparate lives, you know – people are off doing their thing, we’re doing our thing – but when we’re watching the telly, we are all part of each other’s lives.

  ANDREW: That’s really the whole thing, isn’t it? It’s bonding.

  CAROLYNE: And then we can talk about it. And we reminisce. We think back to all those programmes that we did sit together and really enjoy.

  ANDREW: A shared history.Saying that reminds me of a friend of mine at school. He didn’t have a TV. So if anyone said to him, ‘Did you watch so and so?’ he would say, ‘No, you know I haven’t got a TV.’ His parents thought it would be awfully clever not to have a TV, so they could do activities. And I used to think how stupid it was. And, all these years later, I still think it’s stupid.

  CAROLYNE: When the children were very young I used to take them to a Steiner school. However, behind that Steiner philosophy is that you shouldn’t have television. But as much as I love the whole Steiner philosophy – you know: children should be in touch with nature – I just felt I couldn’t subject my children to having no TV.

  I know that sounds really silly, but I had a very strong feeling that if they didn’t have a television they’d be missing out on something about growing up. It’s something that you can talk about. It isn’t wasted time.

  THE WOERDENWEBERS, THE WIRRAL

  RALF: English people. Testicles in pies. Fucking hell, you’re perverts.

  SANDY & SANDRA, BRIXTON

  SANDRA: All I do is eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.

  SANDY: We all do what we do and that’s what makes Gogglebox, because if we didn’t Gogglebox wouldn’t work.

  SANDRA: Are we the only family on Go
gglebox that eat?

  SANDY: No, they do eat. We just eat a lot more.

  SANDRA: Yeah, pizza on the table. I love when I see a pizza.

  THE TAPPERS, NORTH LONDON

  AMY: If you get a banana skin and you go like that with your banana skin to your teeth, it makes your teeth whiter because of the potassium.