Frank Bruno (well, a guy who looked like Frank Bruno, the boxer) stepped onto the bus and immediately lit up a joint. Ten guys struggled aboard behind him carrying enough beer to last a year or two. We were going away for one night. I knew then I’d made a big mistake. I should never have taken the trip on. As a tour leader, I’d had plenty of experience of keeping paralytic Aussies under control but, only ten minutes into the Bucks Party Weekend, I knew this was going to be very different. I had no control at all. As we stopped at traffic lights in High Street, Tooting, in busy mid-morning traffic, one of the guys stepped out in the street and casually pissed into the gutter. 

I was taking this rowdy bunch to Bournemouth, on the south coast of England. Their ultimate destination was a nightclub called The Zoo. Apparently, the bestman told me, it would be full of girls. He had read that in a recent nationwide survey by a major condom manufacturer, Bournemouth beach was voted the best place in England for al-fresco sex. We were all going to sleep on the bus—a double-decker that had been converted into a cozy travelling holiday home for 24. Luckily, there were only 13 of us (we needed the other 11 beds to store the beer). Besides Frank Bruno, who was an east Londoner (who ended every single sentence with, ‘yunnowoteyemean?’), the rest were Kiwis (who ended every sentence with ‘eh?’). I’d been warned about taking a bucks party weekend trip. The company I worked for had only ever attempted one before. It wasn’t very successful. Well, for the tour leader at least. The passengers had literally thrown him off the bus halfway through the weekend.

We’d only been on the road for half a minute and my lot were handing me a can of beer. My driver, Nial, would get offered a beer every ten minutes all the way to Bournemouth. The best man’s name was Tum (Tim in English). He was carrying a jug full of money. ‘Thus uz our kutty money for beer,’ he told me. There was enough money in the jug to buy beer for the entire population of Bournemouth.

I was sitting upstairs when I heard a loud bang and a horrible fizzing noise from below. I rushed downstairs just as another loud bang echoed up the stairs. I got below just as Frank Bruno was setting off… another firecracker. That is, letting off a firecracker inside the bus. He was attempting to shoot sky-rockets at other cars on the motorway. I went back upstairs. I wasn’t telling Frank to stop it. He was the size of a small house. And every bit as smart.

We’d only been on the road for an hour and the groom had passed out upstairs. ‘I’m just having a rest,’ he told me, before he collapsed in one of the bunks. We stopped at a pub for lunch. Two of the lads had to carry the groom in. Thirteen servings of cod and chips didn’t even put a dent in the kitty. Frank Bruno stepped back on board carrying a large hat-rack. He’d stolen it from the pub. ‘I fought it might come in ’andy,’ he said, as he set it up in the corner of the bus. It did. Everyone hung their jackets on it.

Half an hour later we stopped at another pub for a drink. They once again carried the groom in and plonked him on a bar stool. He immediately fell off and slumped at the feet of a group of menacing looking bikies playing pool. Lucky we had Frank Bruno with us or they would have beaten him to a pulp with a pool cue. The bikies were listening to heavy metal on the jukebox. The songs were about Satan and how torturing people was just a bit of harmless fun. Just before we left, Frank and I put Kylie Minogue singing ‘I should be so lucky’ on. By the time it came on we would have been safely up the motorway. 

We parked in a massive car park by the Bournemouth seashore. Tum and I ran across the road to a telephone box to order pizza for dinner: ‘Yes, that’s right… deliver the pizza to the double-decker bus… in the middle of the carpark!’

The smell of after-shave in the bus was overpowering. Well, at least it got rid of the pizza smell. The boys were getting ready to ‘pick-up’. We arrived at the nightclub to find a queue of people waiting to get in. They were mostly girls. ‘Foockin alright!’ Frank said, rubbing his hands together.

‘Sorry. No jeans allowed,’ grunted the bouncer. Ten of us were wearing jeans. We had no choice. We went to the other nightclub down the road, which had hardly any girls and lots of blokes wearing jeans. The groom promptly fell asleep in the corner, while the rest of the lads did their very best to spend the entire ‘beer kitty’.

I crawled back to the bus sometime after two. The groom hadn’t even made it to one of the bunks. Or the bus. He’d collapsed in the gutter naked. He would have been warm, though. He was totally wrapped in toilet paper. 

The lads had beer for breakfast. I passed it up. The three-hour journey back to London involved more drinking, smoking, dancing, fireworks and the inevitable brown-eyes at passing traffic. Just before noon, I dropped the lads off at Church in Kings Cross. No, don’t worry, they weren’t going to mass. They were going to The Church, which was a regular Sunday event that involved comedians, strippers and a lot of people throwing up.

They all staggered off the bus and waddled inside. Oh, except the groom. They carried him in. It was his buck’s party and he’d been conscious for about ten minutes of the whole thing.

In Part Four of Brian’s Karaoke World Tour we’re off to Sweden. And Finland. Well, it’s actually in the middle of the two on the overnight Stockholm to Turku ferry (this was part of my ‘Ferry’ chapter for my book Planes, Trains & Elephants). I was leading a group of Hong Kong Chinese on a Russia/Scandinavia tour for tour company Top Deck and my passengers were very, very excited because there was an all-you-can-eat buffet followed by karaoke. I both love and loathe buffets. I love them because you have so much food to choose from, and I loathe them because you have so much food to choose from. I feel I should try everything, and end up heaping my plate with 14 different dishes. And I can tell you with some authority that Thai red curry chicken, spaghetti marinara and sausage rolls don’t taste that flash all mixed in together.

My passengers were already in their seats when I arrived. They were all eyeing off the piles of food just waiting for me to give them the go-ahead. What happened after that was sheer madness. I have to admit that I’ve been known to stack up the odd prawn or two at a buffet, but my passengers would have even out-stacked Santa Claus. They made me look like Weight-watcher of the Year. One fellow had created a feat of engineering that rivalled the Great Wall of China. He’d somehow managed to pile at least 50 prawns on to one plate. On second thoughts, maybe it looked more like the Eiffel Tower. The massive display of smoked salmon was gone in seconds. Other diners looked on in horror. I wouldn’t be surprised if it became forever known, and often talked about, as the Great Salmon Riot.

I think the passengers got ‘All you can eat’ confused with ‘Can you eat all?’. Dessert was another free-for-all. Even the normally sensible piled their plates high with leaning towers of cheesecake, apple Danish and chocolate mousse. And the not-so-sensible ones? Well, I thought I mixed odd food combinations together at a buffet. One guy had smoked eel on his Black Forest chocolate cake.

My group had been looking forward to the ship’s karaoke bar for the past few days. So much so in fact, that they’d been practicing—to the dismay of our neighbours in the campsite in Stockholm. I left the food frenzy to get a good table at the karaoke bar just as one of my passengers returned to the table with his fifth serve of cheesecake. The bar was quiet. There were only a few beautiful Scandinavian types propped up at the bar. No one was singing yet. I moved several tables together so my group all could sit together. An hour and a half later I was still sitting at the now-very-large table by myself. Not one single passenger had turned up. They couldn’t possibly still be at the buffet—they’d already eaten every prawn on the ship. They must have got lost. I’d better find them, I thought. Besides that, I was getting tired of saying, ‘Sorry, these 22 seats are taken.’

I found them in the enormous duty-free store. They were spending the equivalent of a small country’s GDP on perfume and stuffed toys. ‘Yes,’ they told me, ‘we are coming to karaoke soon.’ Three came. The rest collapsed in their rooms under the weight of prawns, cheesecake and perfume fumes. I sang first then my three remaining passengers got up together to sing. They did an extraordinarily accurate impression of a dying cat. By the time they had finished singing then promptly left they had cleared half the bar and I had 22 seats all to myself again.

Next week on Brian’s Karaoke World Tour: England