(Jewish Group) No prizes for writing a column about not rising above no prize
I don’t win many awards. I have spread my career over many genres, perhaps in an attempt to win a few more, but it’s not worked out. There’s a few. In 1992, I was, with Rob Newman, the Best Comedy Newcomer at the Radio Times Awards. In 2015, my first kids book, The Parent Agency, won a Laffie, the slightly naff name, short for the Laugh Out Loud Awards, which goes to the funniest kids book that year.
As a footnote, I should add I was annoyed at the time that the award had just changed its name from the much more impressive-sounding Roald Dahl Award, but that was before I’d read a number of things that made me realise Dahl was an antisemite, so thank heavens they did change it as otherwise I’d by now be thinking about returning it.
In 2011, my film The Infidel won best screenplay at the Cluj Comedy Awards (it’s a place in Romania — who knew?) And Three Lions, the thing for which I am best known, very much didn’t win a Brit or an Ivor Novello Award, but sitting on my shelves somewhere is a bronze fist with a raised finger, which is my NME Brat Award for Best Musical Moment of 1996 — but that isn’t really mine, it belongs to 87,000 now quite old football fans, for the singing of it that year at Wembley.
I’ve been nominated for a few, which when you lose often makes you think you’d rather not have been. My one-man show about my parents, My Family: Not The Sitcom, for example, was nominated for an Olivier Award but when it lost to a ballet — Matthew Bourne’s The Red Shoes — I sat there in my stupid tuxedo feeling hyper-aware, suddenly, of the absurdity of it all. Although no doubt I’d have somehow put that epiphany behind me if I’d won.
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Read his book, "Jews Don't Count." Seriously, read it.
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