The twin who stole my heart; Famous for his ruthless quick wit and bluntness, Nick Hancock has an answer for everything ... so why did he fall in love with one identical twin and not the other?
He is notorious for the cutting one-liners that have left the reputations of sports stars in shreds.Who could forget Nick Hancock's legendary attack on Torvill and Dean when he declared Jayne was not a real sportswoman for "twatting about on ice in a frock"? Certainly not the legions of outraged ice-skating fans.
It is this Northern bluntness and his image as the lad's lad who's obsessed by football that has helped turn They Think It's All Over into one of television's most controversial - and successful - quiz shows.
But take him away from his role as the rebellious referee scoring points for explicit language and sexual innuendo off Gary Lineker, David Gower, Rory McGrath and Lee Hurst, and you discover a man who's less sure of himself.
As Nick begins to talk about the women in his life - his wife, mother and three sisters - he's wary of being seen as a wimp.
"I don't sound too poncey, do I?" he asks quietly as he glances around the ultra-trendy Groucho Club in London's West End.
Two years ago the fanatical Stoke City supporter clinched his role on They Think It's All Over - and for Nick it was a prophetic title that was to echo the changes in his private life.
A chance meeting with beautiful Iranian girl Shari Eftekhari and her identical twin sister, Shiva, at a Rodney Marsh and George Best football roadshow, was to lead to the end of his bachelor days.
"Shari and Shiva were just completely different," Nick remembers. "It's a bizarre thing because some of their closest friends who've known them for years find it difficult to tell them apart.
"But for me there must have been something ... well, chemical. People ask how come I didn't fancy Shiva and I can't explain why, but I had an immediate reaction to Shari. She is very beautiful."
They moved in together soon afterwards and married in July this year - once in a Muslim ceremony and again in a traditional church service in Whitmore, Staffordshire.
Now they live between a pounds 100,000 house in Stoke and a flat in London's Forest Hill. Well, not really between, he jokes, as that would be somewhere in Oxford.
"She's very self-effacing, very family orientated, very supportive and very unimpressed," he says of Shari. "Because she's Iranian, she doesn't have a massive concept of what all this 'celebrity' thing is and that's great.
"Where I come from, I'm impressed if you're a nice person but not if you have a big car or a big house. You lose respect if you show off in Stoke. It's like that for Shari."
She gave up a job in advertising promotions after they met and he smiles again when he says her career nowadays is "babysitting me".
His married life has curious similarities to his childhood, throughout which he was mothered not only by his mum, but by three big sisters too.
"If I was going to psychoanalyse myself," he says, "I would say part of my attraction to Shari is that she does mother me.
"I have come to terms with the fact that maybe having three sisters has made that a basic need.
"Shiva looks after me too, but maybe that has more to do with her being fantastically close to Shari.
"They are bizarrely and weirdly close. They sometimes wear the same clothes and think the same thoughts.
"Thankfully, I've never got them muddled up, except for once or twice on the phone because they sound exactly the same too.
"But I never consciously thought, 'God, I've got to work really hard to get on with Shiva'. Luckily, I just did. Shiva means Goddess of Destruction after all."
And what does Shari mean?
"I don't know. Just wife," he says simply.
Having just endured the three-hour ordeal
of a press launch for the new series of They Think It's All Over that earns him a reputed pounds 5,000 a week and draws more than 10 million viewers, it's not surprising his defences are down.
He knocks back a Bloody Mary and pulls on a cigarette. The banal grilling has obviously taken its toll.
"I don't have a lifestyle. I have a life," he says, deadpan, at the start of our interview. It isn't meant to be a joke, he is deadly serious.
"I hate answering questions like, 'What did you have for breakfast?'" he huffs, scratching his spiky, grey-flecked hair.
"I'm completely baffled by the idea that anybody would be interested. It's embarrassing."
Nick, 35, was born the son of a builder. He went to Cambridge University where he developed his two passions - football and, as a performer at the Footlights Club, comedy.
He trained as a nursery school teacher but ended up buying media space for an advertising agency before breaking into the stand-up comedy circuit.
Appearances on hit shows such as The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Fantasy Football, Have I Got News For You and Mr Bean followed. He made his mark as the host of the cult TV show Room 101, but it took 26 failed pilots before he really hit the big time.
There are occasions when his wife Shari is refreshingly unimpressed. She moved to London from Iran when she was 12, so she has a very different set of cultural references to Nick and is notorious for not getting any of his jokes and not knowing the people he is putting down.
"It's chastening but healthy," Nick says sincerely. "But sometimes I have to say to her, 'Shari, just believe me, that was a really good joke'."
As with many successful comics, there is irony in his happy marriage.
"I'm very serious at home," he says. "I'm very depressive and introspective, all those things that a lot of comics are - and probably a lot of men are, actually. Just because I tell crappy jokes about ice-skating on television doesn't mean I know the answers to anything at all really."
If I were to psychoanalyse him, I would say that therein lies the dilemma for Nick Hancock.
He's an ordinary, middle-class lad who fancied a career in comedy and wanted to be successful. Not because he had an ambition to be rich and famous - that would be far too flashy for a son of Stoke. But because he was brought up with a Protestant work ethic that taught him to do his best in his chosen field.
The trouble was his best was extremely good. And now he's trapped by that same work ethic.
He would prefer to be Mr Boring, not Mr Rude. Bliss to him is watching Stoke City play at home, going down the pub with his mates, and being mothered by Shari at home.
But he feels it would be ungrateful to leave his success behind just because he couldn't be bothered to paint on his Mr Funny face when he gets out of bed in the morning. "Life gets more difficult but comedy gets easier," he says. "Fame means you can't get p***** and you can't behave badly ... well, not in public.
"Going out is not a release and I don't enjoy it as much as I used to. You know that at some stage somebody is going to corner you.
"People are usually very nice but it is galling when I want to talk to Shari and people look at me as if to say, 'Oh, so our conversation isn't good enough then?' - even if I've just chatted to them for 25 minutes."
His passion also brings out the defensive in him. When he recalls how a photographer snatched a poolside photograph of Shari wearing just a bikini, he found it intrusive and offensive.
"It felt a bit like having your house burgled," he says.
But he points out that it is particularly upsetting for a Muslim woman to be pictured that way.
He slugs another Bloody Mary and, as he is often inclined to do, uses the language of football to talk about his quest for privacy. "My release is going to the match. People know I've been going to watch Stoke for years and I don't get hassled," he says.
"It's not like my life is a theatre of pain, I don't want to give that impression, but I'm impressed by people's willingness to let me have my Saturdays."
His browbeaten mood leads him to share his prediction that he will quit comedy sooner rather than later, that this could well be his last series of They Think It's All Over. Again, he shows a genuine sense of vulnerability, a need for self-introspection.
"I don't believe I'm as good as people think," he admits. "I don't reckon it's going to go on forever and I want to finish before I get found out.
"I feel I've over-reached already. If I quit I'd have a couple of things under my belt by chance that I'm quite proud of and nobody can take that away from me.
"I feel terribly lucky at what's happened. But I'd be perfectly happy doing nothing and to have less money.
"A job is not one of my top priorities in life. Shari shares that outlook."
In fact, for an Iranian woman who was raised in the South of England, Shari has adapted to Nick's life remarkably well.
She travels around the country with him when he is working, so they are rarely apart. And he is never away from Stoke for longer than necessary.
But it's hard to believe that Shari, who attends about a third of all Stoke City matches, isn't being dragged along.
True, he has bought her a season ticket - but they also have an agreement that she will give up her seat if one of the lads can't get in for a big game.
"It's only fair," he explains. "The lads have been going for longer and it isn't a problem for Shari."
I'm sure it isn't. She even waited until the end of the football season to marry Nick so that he didn't miss a game and they could take a long honeymoon in Majorca. It lasted five weeks, joined by family and friends, and it's obviously still continuing.
But away from the terraces and his marriage, Nick still has a hectic work schedule, even branching out as an author. He's just co-written a book about sporting 'what ifs', knocking out 40,000 words in six days, and berates himself for being "no Thomas Hardy".
There is also the They Think It's All Over annual which takes another satirical sideswipe at sport.
But he is quick to deny any suggestions that he's cashing in on his TV success.
"You can rob the public once," he says. "But it's taking the p*** and you can't do it a second time. I wouldn't put my name to something that I hadn't worked very hard on. I find jumping on the bandwagon abhorrent."
But despite the success of his varied career - including the lead role in the TV sitcom Holding The Baby - Nick has what he calls, perhaps with a sense of irony, a "Miss World attitude". Even so, he is sincere in maintaining that he wants to contribute something more to society, something worthwhile. Doing Comic Relief in Africa two years ago made him realise he wants a better epitaph than: "Lad who can swear". And two events closer to home have also made him question whether he should perform comedy.
The parent of a good friend of his who had committed suicide came to watch Nick's show ... in which a fellow comic made a gag about suicide.
At another stand-up show, Nick made a joke about bald people and a man in the audience complained afterwards that his sister was having chemotherapy and it was in poor taste. At the time the sister of Nick's girlfriend was having chemo, too, but he didn't mention it to the guy in case it sounded like a cheap excuse.
"You couldn't be a comedian if you worried too much about things like that, because someone is the butt of every joke," he says.
"But those two incidents were very upsetting. You just have to hope that people aren't too introspective or sensitive to think it's aimed at them. That said, sometimes you walk in a room and somebody looks at you and laughs and you think, 'That's great'. It's a fantastic feeling, and I'm not being vain. It's just great to think that maybe I am doing something worthwhile."
Having children of his own is his only clear ambition, but he is afraid of setting his heart on them in case they don't arrive.
He has eight godchildren and eight nephews and nieces, so he's under no illusions about the dramatic impact they have on your life.
But he is also aware that children could change his view of wanting to quit comedy.
"Having kids is often something that keeps you going. And who am I to demand that my children have a lesser standard of living because I have a foible that says I don't want to do this any more?
"How dare I do that when there are other kids with no food on the table?"
Once again he worries about sounding too poncey. If his laddish image wasn't all over when he married Shari, it is now.
And it's not over yet ... with a heavy sense of irony Nick now chooses the finest sportsmen, women and horses of our age
They Think It's All Over annual is published by BBC Consumer Publishing priced pounds 9.99. Also available is the video, They Think It's All Over - Full Throttle
Illustrations: GEOFF TRISTRAM
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One-time World
Heavyweight Champion Mike Tyson is known as "Iron Mike", because he used to work in the prison laundry. Sky viewers had to pay a tenner to watch the Tyson/Bruno fight, or they could wake up and watch it next morning. That's the option Frank went for.
22
Jayne Torvill won innumerable ice-dancing trophies with her partner Christopher Dean, as well as becoming Sports Personality of the Year: although she's not technically a sportsperson, as all she does is twat about the ice in a frock.
31
Multiple Grand National winner Red Rum is the only horse to appear in Madame Tussaud's. It's the thing that looks like a dog in the corner. For years, Red Rum trained on Southport beach. He never ran any faster but he became bloody good at French cricket.
1
Much-injured Shearer is England's most expensive footballer, after joining Newcastle for pounds 15 million. He is also a man so dull that he was once in the papers for having a one-in-the-bed romp.
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| Title Annotation: | Features |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The Mirror (London, England) |
| Date: | Nov 8, 1997 |
| Words: | 2451 |
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