James Acaster's Classic Scrapes

by James Acaster

I read a book recently that says the perfect sitcom plot should see the character acting logically to help themselves win, but actually making their situation worse with each action. This is the perfect description of James in the Scrapes.

I just think it’s important that you know that I don’t go around telling people that I get into lots of ‘scrapes’, as being seen as that kind of guy makes me feel uncomfortable.

The reason why I’m more scrape-prone than most is hard to pin down. But I think the difference between me and someone who stays more or less scrape-free is a couple of seconds. In most of these stories if I’d just taken a couple more seconds to consider my options I would’ve been fine. But instead I went with the first idea that popped into my head and ended up with a mouthful of urine.

If you compare the first story in this book to the final story you’ll see that they essentially happen to exactly the same person, a person who has learned absolutely nothing throughout his entire life.

have only existed for five years. So if you want to tell me off you should say, ‘James Acaster, because you do not know how the world works, you have understandably made a huge mistake. I’m now going to punish you for it so you don’t do it again. If you do do it again I will tell you that you should know better. But this time, you did not and that was your undoing.’

just think the Scouts should pick a species and follow it through logically. I vote to replace the name Beavers with ‘Cubs’ then change Cubs to ‘Tigers’ and Scouts to ‘Older Tigers’.

‘Dad, can you juggle?’ I asked, and he confidently replied, ‘Yes. Yes I can!’ Because as it turns out, I’m not the only liar in the family.

A child looks at your average office and sees a playground; an adult looks at an office and sees a prison sentence.

Oh, and by the way, it didn’t taste like hot chocolate did it? It tasted like chocolate. Nothing tastes like hot chocolate. Something can taste like chocolate but not hot chocolate. Hot chocolate is not a flavour. It’s a temperature that a flavour can be served at but it’s not its own flavour. Hot chocolate tastes like chocolate, the only thing that makes it taste like hot chocolate is the fact that it’s hot, so unless Cetin did a hot sneeze then his sneeze tasted like normal chocolate. These were the thoughts that went through my head during my very first shift.

I knew this would be even funnier than actual EastEnders itself.

Tying a tie for the first time when you’re twenty-eight is like never watching a single film until you’re twenty-eight and then trying to watch and understand 2001: A Space Odyssey.

at the end would just have learnt the one thing she knew all along – that I was a very odd man.

The first was an angry looking old boy, pint in hand, who told me in a slow and raspy voice, ‘No one – NO ONE – plays a disco beat to “All Along the Watchtower”.’ And I nodded because I had already figured that out all by myself.

when you see people get drunk it looks like the most pointless activity you could ever imagine. You are watching someone become progressively worse as the night goes on and yet they insist it’s the best.

Having a conversation with a drunk person when you are sober is like being a classroom assistant in a primary school for kids who are drunk.

Trashing the hotel room had been my very first act of rebellion. This was because I was a good boy who thought his parents were cool.

It may or may not have been pointed out to us by several people that we were an undeniable bunch of dweebs, and so one night we set out to do something well and truly naughty, just because we’d never been well and truly naughty before.

In fact, any chance you get to do something technically illegal while making zero difference to anyone’s life, take it.

She looked at me the way most people look at someone who’s just said something offensively ludicrous and then took the clipboard away from me.

this is the first of three stories in this book (a trilogy, yes) where I write off a car. Because I have written off three cars.

Here we go, get ready to slip a disc, James, that’s what’s about to happen to you – disc-slipping time. First your slip-on slips off and now your disc is about to do the same. Congratulations. That’s you, slipping all over the shop, king of the slips, say goodbye to your disc you slippy embarrassment.

while I will die one day, there are some things that are way worse than dying and it’s important to experience those things while we’re alive in order to put death into perspective; that way we won’t get too down about our own mortality.

Juliette said, ‘And this is a fiffle,’ and then all of the old people went, ‘No, no, it’s a thistle!’ So Juliette tried again.‘Fiffle?’ ‘No, thistle!’ ‘Fiffle?’ ‘Thistle!’ ‘Fiffle?’ ‘Thistle!’ ‘Fiffle?’ ‘Thistle!’ ‘Fiffle?’ ‘Thistle!’ ‘Fiffle?’ ‘Thistle!’ ‘Fiffle?’ ‘Thistle!’ ‘Fiffle?’ ‘Thistle!’ I’ll cut this short but it went on for longer than I ever dreamed it could have and neither side altered what they were saying.

I just thought I needed to have some new experiences and broaden my horizons before I would be dead for ever (yes, I was still eighteen at the time.)

I had ice skated once before for only five minutes when I was ten and had to stop because I had managed to stab myself in the back with my own ice skate while I was still wearing it.3

Sometimes it’s nice to confirm that the world is exactly as you thought it was and your role in it remains entirely the same.

if that flower-stomping bully won this fight I didn’t know how I was going to react. I’d be inconsolable; I’d be a wreck is what I’d be. The

You might think, never mind James, you discovered you love line dancing and going to the wrestling, you got two new pastimes out of just one week. And you’d be right, only I didn’t keep either of them up. I’ve never done either one of them ever again

I feel worse about the wild strawberries than I do about the next story, which is weird because many of you will think this next story is much, much worse.

That means that there was once a day in history when someone opened the doors of their new garage to discover two giant yellow polystyrene W’s staring back at them, completely out of context. They would’ve had absolutely no way of figuring out why they were there and then they would’ve had to figure out what to do with them.

The djembe jams (let’s call them what they are, dJAMbes)

One kid got so excited that he jumped as high as he could in the air and then when he landed on the shiny assembly room floor in his socks, he slipped and fully smacked one side of his head on the floor and the sound reverberated all over the room and through my very soul.

We were nowhere near each other for the entire game, because all the spinner ever landed on was feet so we were essentially just walking around a Twister mat, occasionally having a swig of tea because we could, and she was getting increasingly frustrated that the game was not as sexy as she’d thought it would be. After half an hour she gave up, threw the spinner on the floor and sat down, declaring that Twister was a stupid game for stupid idiots.

Both from Earth! That’s what I once said to someone during a disagreement – both from Earth! Where are you from, James? Why, I’m from Earth, of course, a man from Earth. This argument went on for longer than I care to remember, and at one point she said, ‘Well what about the creation story in the Bible, do you believe in that?’

This was not a good enough reason to not sit at the table for reasons I don’t have to explain to you because you are a reasonable person who knows that that is not a good enough reason for anything ever.

When I saw his eyes widen I realised that what I’d done was so much worse than if I’d simply returned to the restaurant dressed in the same clothes as earlier and had a meal without bothering him. This looked suspicious. This looked like I actually had something sinister planned. I had gone to the trouble of disguising myself, concealing my identity from him.

But I already knew we’d nearly derailed because I knew what being on a train while it was derailing felt like. Because it had happened to me before.

an announcement was made over the speakers in the carriage. ‘Hello. Just had a bit of problem . . . basically the wheels of the train that keep us on the tracks . . . they’ve fallen out . . . they’ve just fallen off . . . But don’t worry . . . the train is not on fire . . .’ None of us had even asked if the train was on fire! No one was worried about the train being on fire before he said it wasn’t on fire! As soon as he said we are not on fire, all I could think about was that we were definitely on fire!

This attitude only exists in Great Britain. We will forgive all manners of inconvenience if we end up with some free food and drink at the end, especially if it’s booze. We’re the first to complain and yet the easiest to trick out of formally complaining. Personally, I stocked up on marble cake and never contacted the train company asking for a refund.

and was left alone once for about seven minutes, during which time I managed to mess up in a way that surprised even myself.

been stolen.’ The lady behind the desk looked perplexed. As far as she was concerned this British tourist clearly believed that if you get mugged in San Francisco the first thing you’ve got to do is report directly to Alcatraz.

Maybe this was a common French sales tactic – do a presentation that appears not to be a sales pitch and then put them in an awkward position at the end and ask them if they want to buy all the things they’ve politely agreed were nice.

At one point I looked up at the gallery to see the kid who bullies me looking very disappointed indeed – it was all I could do to not shout up at him, ‘Yes! Are you watching this, you Satan?! You Devil?! Behold!’

You cannot compare a Christmas tree and a lasagne. But this man found about fifty different ways to compare the two as if they were the most interchangeable things on the entire planet.

I had not foreseen this. I’d never bothered to read what was printed on a receipt; how could this double-crossing-piece-of-snitch-paper betray me like this? My dad had followed the paper trail and rumbled me in seconds!

I said, trying my best to act like someone who had learned his lesson but somehow still deserved to reap the benefits of what he’d done wrong in the first place.

You can’t be a skeleton AND have a scar, it’s one or the other. You can have a crack in the bone or a hole in the skull but a scar makes zero sense. Pick a team.

I had queued up for my own cabadging. Or was it cabedging? I didn’t know any more. It’d happened to me twice and been spelt different both times, I assume to mess with me even further, and it’d worked. He was in my head now to the point where I didn’t even know what the proper, Oxford English Dictionary spelling of cabbage was either.

I must not be defeated and I must not be made to look like a weirdo by a nine-year-old boy.

From then on the cabadging was relentless and could happen at any time, in any place and there was no telling who the cabadger would be. It became a big, unwelcome part of my life.