Chris McCausland: 'I'd tell my younger self he's going to sit on the same toilets as his heroes'

Chris McCausland was born in June 1977 in Liverpool. His early career as a web developer was curtailed by deteriorating eyesight due to retinitis pigmentosa. In 2003, he tried stand-up and within a year had won the Jongleurs Last Laugh competition. He established himself with six stand-up shows at the Edinburgh Festival over the following decade while touring all over the world.

Television roles followed, included parts in Jimmy McGovern’s Moving On and the CBeebies series Me Too!. He has also presented his own four-part travelogue for the BBC, The Wonders Of The World I Can’t See, as well as becoming a familiar face on TV from his appearances on shows including Have I Got News For You, Would I Lie To You? and House Of Games. This year he has competed in the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, making him the first blind contestant to appear on the show.

Speaking to The Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Chris McCausland looks back on his schooldays, early stand-up gigs, using the same toilet as his heroes and more.

At 16 I was living with my mum and dad, doing my GCSEs and starting to get into the bars and clubs with my mate, who I’ve known since I was three. A year or two before, we had found the American grunge scene – Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, all those bands. There was a club in Liverpool called the Crazy House and we’d go every week for two-for-one drinks – do you remember Mad Dog 20/20 – and there was one called Blastaway, which was Diamond White cider and Castaway, a tropical alcohol thing, mixed together. You had no idea how drunk you were until you tried to move anywhere. This was back when you could get cardboard passports that were valid for a year – and it was easy to change your date of birth on them.

I lived on the same street from the age of three. It was very community spirited; we were in and out of each other’s houses. If there was no school, you’d be sent out into the streets after breakfast with a pound in your pocket and told to come back in time for tea. My mum and dad still live in the same three-bedroom semi in West Derby village in Liverpool that I grew up in.

I was a pain in the arse at school. There’s nothing worse than a disruptive kid that doesn’t buy into anything you’re saying. You derail the whole thing. I was rubbish at the things I had no interest in, so my RE teacher used to encourage me to put my head on the desk and have a nap because it was easier to have me asleep. But I was good at the things I wanted to be good at, and ended up doing software engineering at uni.

I was never a performer – I was very self-conscious and embarrassed by the focus being on me. I didn’t participate in school plays and was shy and introverted in those situations. But when I got older and would have a beer and go to gigs, that’s when I came out of my shell.

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Liverpool is known for its sense of humour – everyone thinks they’re a comedian. But we had tough times and some tragedy in the Thatcher period. It’s one of those tropes isn’t it? If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry – and that’s the way we got through darker periods. I was surrounded by a lot of people with upbeat personalities and my family were very funny around each other.

Being blind wasn’t just something that happened to me, it was hereditary. Nan was blind, my mum was losing her sight. It was always treated as just part of life, so you get on with it and have a laugh. That’s fed into my way of viewing it. But I did always think, things are moving so fast, we’ve got the internet now, surely there will be a cure and I’ll be able to see by the time I’m 30. I mean 40. I mean… and it just moves on and on. When somebody has a disability that comes out the blue, it is very easy and understandable for parents to be protective and wrap them in cotton wool. There’s a worry, there’s a panic, there’s a lack of experience. But having it in the family meant even with me having poor sight in my childhood, I was treated no different, sent out playing in the streets. All that forms your personality when you’re older.

I’d tell my younger self, don’t be so embarrassed, don’t feel such shame. I lost most of my sight in my late teens and early 20s and with it the ability to see the computer monitor, to see in the dark. So I also lost the independence that gives you. At that age, you’ve got this desire to be normal. So there was a lot of denial. When you’re losing your sight gradually, there’s never a clear moment when you are forced to deal with it. I’d refuse to be associated with things connected to it, like, ‘I’m not using a stick, I’m going to pretend I can see.’ But you get into more trouble pretending there’s nothing wrong. It wasn’t until I lost my sight completely that I accepted it. Going through that embarrassment and shame toughened me up, though. Which lent itself well to doing stand-up.

I was off sick from my job in a call centre and bored, so I decided to write five minutes of stand-up that I thought was funny. Then I looked up open mic gigs to see what the bottom level of stand-up was like. You have this fear that if you do comedy and it’s terrible, people will be pointing at you in the street for the rest of your life. But I watched some guy die a horrific death, his voice shaking because he was so nervous, and then couldn’t remember his name on the way home. I realised, actually, it’s really safe. No one cares. I was lucky – people laughed at my first gig. My first run of gigs really gave me the bug otherwise I’d still be at the call centre.  

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I certainly wouldn’t have believed what lay ahead for me, but now I know there is a path through comedy. I used to get stand-up videos every year for Christmas – Alan Davies, Jack Dee, Lee Evans and Eddie Izzard was my favourite. When you see the glitzy finished product on telly, you don’t realise they’ve all done 15 years, they’ve all died on their arse in a pub. I’ve now been doing stand-up for 21 years now so I’m hardly an overnight success. I’ve done my hours and earned my stripes on the circuit.

What advice would I give my younger self on relationships? Well, two of my long-term girlfriends were long distance relationships – so I’d say, find someone that’s closer to your house! But that’s the joke answer, isn’t it? Also, have as much fun as you can before you have kids because you won’t be going to see many bands when you’ve got a kid.

Liverpool is very much a Labour voting city and very open and inclusive. Liverpool is massively multicultural and open to the idea of being part of Europe. We had the European city of culture – and maybe because of the two football teams and being a port as well, Europe has been a key part of its identity. So it’s a left leaning liberal, inclusive, open city – and you take that with you, don’t you?

Don’t make me sound like a weirdo but I would tell my younger self he’s going to end up sitting on the same toilets as some of his heroes! I’d tell him about all the incredible bands he’s going to see at the best venues in the country. Then I’d tell him that, years afterwards, you are going to end up doing gigs in some of those venues. Every time I do a gig where I’ve seen a great band, I think about sitting on the same toilet they sat on. I’ve seen Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam at Hammersmith Apollo and when I played there, I had the same dressing room. So I’m sat there before the show, doing my lucky poo, and I’m on the same toilet Eddie used. And I watched Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains at Shepherd’s Bush Empire and then recorded my last tour there. Again, I’m on the toilet going, ‘this is where Jerry sat’.

My 16-year-old self would have thought the same as my 46-year-old self about going on Strictly Come Dancing – which is don’t be fucking stupid! I was asked last year and said no, then I turned down the Christmas special. It terrified me. I thought it would be a disaster. If it was pre-recorded and something went catastrophically wrong, I could do it again. But when it’s live on telly, there are no second chances. And because it was never something I could watch, I didn’t know what they even do. How good are they? How bad are the bad people? What are the moves like? I had no idea what a tango was on Monday morning because I can’t watch the others during the show. So even last year I would have thought it was insane that I’d be doing this.

I’ve got where I always aimed to get in comedy. So the fear was that I would be so disastrous at this dancing that I would almost lose some credibility or be looked at sympathetically. Which isn’t good for comedy, you know? So there was a lot of risk involved. But in the end, they wore me down.

I want to do more acting. I’ve made a Christmas comedy action caper for Sky and it’s reminded me how much I like it. Comedy is very solitary. You do a gig or a panel show then you go home. But doing Strictly, or making a film, you are part of a team. I did a TV series 10 years ago – just eight days of filming [on Jimmy McGovern’s Moving On] – and even then, I remember thinking what a different feeling it was being part of something. So I’d love to do more stuff where we’ve all got the same objective. But I’m aware I’m quite niche as an actor – it’s got to be a good-looking blind fella.

I would advise my younger self to just be yourself – because people like it. Be comfortable being who you are because people like it. Stop trying to be something you’re not – whether that means pretending you can see when you can’t or pretending to be a certain type of comedian when you’re not. People like people being genuine.

If you were to ask me about the 10 most scary things I’ve ever done in my life, the top six would be the first six shows of Strictly. It is, hands down, the most out of my comfort zone, nerve-wracking thing I’ve done. But coming out of this, it’s going to take a lot more to get me into that fear zone than ever. The threshold has moved significantly. The fear of doing this on live TV will make other things in the future not seem scary at all…

Strictly Come Dancing airs on Saturday nights on BBC One. Chris McCausland’s stand-up show Yonks! tours the UK from January.

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