I Tried to Become Famous in Three Very Different Ways

The fame game is a famously hard one to penetrate. Or, at least, it used to be. Increasingly it appears that in order to have your 15 minutes you need do nothing more than do a dance on a camera phone, or accidentally drive a forklift into several containers of bottled water, causing a comical CCTV-captured tsunami. Maybe you're a vlogger and all you do to attain the love of the public is talk about what make-up you bought on the cheap, or what type of Styrofoam is keeping your drone in place before you do an "unboxing" of it.

These are the modern trappings of fame. They're easy, they're effortless, they hold no magic within. They consist of vanity and pratfalls. This isn't the sort of fame I want. I want fame earned from craft, training, guile, experience and bravery. That's why I started down the road to fame, and have scarcely looked back since.

In the new VICE.com series JOEBIZ, I, Joe Bish, attempt three different styles of entertainment in a bid to become the most well-rounded performer the world has ever known, and to escape the bottomless pit of content creation I've somehow found myself in. I had always wanted to be somebody. As a child I would tell smutty jokes to German tourists on holidays while they looked on concerned at how I knew so many dick gags. I was a natural even from a young age. But the trappings of pretension began to slowly grow inside me, and I began to believe that I was a writer, a thinker, even though I have no education beyond GCSE and I have the same basic level of intelligence as someone with a scaffolding pole lodged in their brain.

Still, I pursued it and ended up here at VICE, where I type type type type all day and then I get a sandwich and then I type type type type and then I go home and die for a few hours. It was time to get out into the real world and realise my dreams. But where to begin? It's always good to aim high, so I went straight to the top. Well, the middle. I'd got a part in a low budget action film called Vengeance, which was filming in Bricket Wood, Hertfordshire. My role was "protector of a drug lord". But being a breadstick-boned millennial gamer I didn't possess the requisite hardness to pull the part off, so I enlisted some help.

One man who gave me a lesson in being a bastard was WWE superstar Stu Bennett, AKA Wade "Bad News" Barrett. He asked me to try and get into an imaginary nightclub where he was bouncer, but turned my make-believe paramour and I away because he didn't like the look of her imaginary shoes. I tried to tell him to go fuck himself but he was simply too large and scary, like a big door you can't kick down. But we persevered and did a bit of growling and, in the end, I valiantly defended the honour of the lady, and in that moment became a hard bastard.

Hopefully this intensity, which I later brought to my performance as "Unnamed Guard", will help me make it into the film. Hey, perhaps I'll even be asked back to do the DVD commentary!

Though a big screen debut was a fantastic start, I felt I hadn't really got my hands dirty. Much like in my real life, I have only worked for media companies my whole life, aside from a very short stint on one of my dad's building sites where I wearily stripped wallpaper and hit a chimney with a hammer and smoked a lot of very strong Romanian cigarettes. I had to get back down to street level – a level the raconteurs and magicians call home – and learn the craft of the roadside entertainer.

I met a gentleman called Spikey, by name and nature, who agreed to assist me in becoming a street bod, a crafty pavement money-maker. Spikey taught me many things, like tricks and how not to scream when you nakedly lie on nails while a crew of bemused Turkish teenagers look on. But the street patter was one of the most important things. You see, when you're doing your performance, 90 percent of the deal is making sure people don't fuck off halfway through, so you have to keep them engaged by telling crap jokes and reminding them how much your young family relies on their change.

I'd completed two tasks that, to a natural like myself, came fairly easy. But if I was to become the greatest all-rounder – the Triple Threat – I needed to step out of my comfort zone. I wanted to write a song, be a singer, but it couldn't just be any song – it had to touch the heart of a nation in crisis. I travelled to Barnsley in "the north" to write a song with Andy Stocks, who is a YouTube-based guitar teacher. After that was completed I moseyed back to London to play a sell-out show supporting barefoot wailer Keir. He gave me some much needed vocal training before I stepped up to the plate. It was by far the scariest one I'd done, not least because I totally fucked it up in every conceivable way.

Though I mastered most of these classical crafts, I feel there is still a long way to go on my quest to become the ultimate entertainer, and I hope that you, viewer, reader, will come with me on that quest, and hold my bags and buy me pints and stuff.

@joe_bish

JOEBIZ is out on Monday, and you can watch all three episodes on our sparkly new video website.