Fry_ A Memoir Part 9

Spike Milligan, on account of Dennis's predilection for alcohol, had nicknamed him Dennis Main Drain and there is no question that he was a mockable ent.i.ty. His tweed jacket, Brylcreemed hair, scrawny neck and nicotine-stained fingers belonged to another age, an age far removed from the excitements of alternative comedy and youth entertainment that the soon-to-be-launched Channel 4 was preparing to offer the world. As a devotee of radio comedy I would have admired him whatever his character; as it is I adored him. We all did. Cautiously at first and then with gathering conviction. One thing, however, we soon discovered was essential when it came to working with Dennis Main Wilson. No matter how much he insisted upon meeting at twelve, one, two, three or four o'clock in the afternoon we had to make equally certain that the meetings should be at nine, ten or eleven in the morning. It was a simple question of productivity. The comedy department at Television Centre was on the sixth floor, with Dennis's office directly opposite the BBC Club, which was essentially a bar. Every morning at eleven thirty he would make the ten-yard journey from office to Club. A Senior Service unwinding its blue ribbon of smoke from between his fingers, a pint of bitter and a double scotch on the bar in front of him, he would enthral and absorb us with tales of Hattie Jacques, Peter Sellers and Sid James, but as the morning wore on his ability to concentrate on our little show and its looming recording date would become less and less certain, and we would begin nervously to wonder whether there would even be a studio booked, props organized or cameramen available for duty on the appointed night. Catch Dennis at nine in the morning, however, and he was a ball of fire. His fleshless body twitched and jerked, his fingers stabbed the air with each excited new idea, and his chesty, tobacco-enriched chuckle infected us all with grandiose self-belief. He gave us the impression that as far as he was concerned we were cut from the same cloth as Spike Milligan and Tony Hanc.o.c.k. Such attention and respect from one so august could only make us glow. This was perhaps counterbalanced by his complete lack of knowledge or even interest in the new wave lapping up against the ramparts. A small, disloyal, insecure part of me wondered if it wasn't like, to change the era of the musical comparison, Bobby Darin's manager a.s.suring him that rock and roll was a temporary blip. Dennis saw us as respectful inheritors of the Golden Age mantle and the new alternative comics as vandals and interlopers who were of no account. I, for such is my way part greasy sycophant desperate to please, part show-off, part genuine enthusiast played up to this with endless talk of Mabel Constanduros, Sandy Powell, Gert and Daisy, Mr Flotsam and Mr Jetsam and other music-hall radio stars for whom I had a pa.s.sion.

We rehea.r.s.ed in the BBC block popularly known as the North Acton Hilton. Each floor in this dull, impersonal tower tucked away in a dull and impersonal suburb had two sets of purpose-built rehearsal rooms and production offices. Not that I knew it then, but this soulless, sick-building-syndrome structure with its dripping, flaking and crumbling exterior, flickering fluorescent strip-lighting and smelly lifts was to be my second home for the next eight years through successive series of Blackadder Blackadder and and A Bit of Fry and Laurie A Bit of Fry and Laurie. I loved it. I loved the canteen, where you could nod h.e.l.lo to Nicholas Lyndhurst and David Jason, the kids from Grange Hill Grange Hill or the dancers from or the dancers from Top of the Pops Top of the Pops. I loved the poles on plinths in the rehearsal rooms that could be moved around to stand in for doorways and entrances. I loved the tape on the floor that marked out rooms and camera positions in different colours, like sports-hall courts. I loved looking out across the dreary roofs of west London and knowing that I was here, working for the BBC with All Creatures Great and Small All Creatures Great and Small next door and next door and Doctor Who Doctor Who the floor above. the floor above.

As we rehea.r.s.ed The Cellar Tapes The Cellar Tapes I had no knowledge of the years and series to come, of course, and no idea that it was quite normal for technical runs to be played out in silence. Let me explain. I had no knowledge of the years and series to come, of course, and no idea that it was quite normal for technical runs to be played out in silence. Let me explain.

Multi-camera studio comedy performed in front of an audience has become rare since single-camera location shooting became the norm some years ago. Back then it was the usual mode. Outside scenes were shot on 16mm film, and everything else on those skirted rostrum studio cameras that wheel around on castors and which inspired Terry Nation to dream up the Daleks. If you watch Fawlty Towers Fawlty Towers or other comedies of the seventies and early eighties you can see the manifest, almost ludicrous difference between grainy exterior film and shiny interior video. No one seemed to mind then, perhaps because TV reception and resolution were poorer, perhaps because we accepted what we had always been given. or other comedies of the seventies and early eighties you can see the manifest, almost ludicrous difference between grainy exterior film and shiny interior video. No one seemed to mind then, perhaps because TV reception and resolution were poorer, perhaps because we accepted what we had always been given.

The schedule for recording went like this. You went out into the world and shot the exteriors that your script demanded and then you spent a week in North Acton rehearsing the rest, the studio element. It was traditional to tape the show on a Sunday, I suppose because busy actors often worked in the theatre on other nights. On Friday morning at Acton came the occasion of the Tech Run. The camera and sound crews, set, production, costume and make-up personnel would all troop into the rehearsal room and watch a run-through of the show. And this is where, in March 1982, we received the greatest blow to our comedy egos that we had yet experienced.

Silence.

Silence, the comedian's enemy.

We ran through sketch after sketch and song after song. Not a smile. Just folded arms, teeth-sucking and the occasional note scribbled on to a Xeroxed copy of the script.

When we had finished the last number and the room began to clear of technical people we went off into a corner and watched in a frightened huddle as the lighting director and number-one cameraman lingered to ask John Kilby, the director, one or two questions. When they had at last gone Dennis bounded up to us.

'Drink?'

'Oh, Dennis,' we said. 'Is it still going to happen?'

'What do you mean?'

'It was a disaster. A complete disaster. Not a smile, not a t.i.tter, nothing. They hated hated us.' us.'

Dennis smiled a long, wide smile and the phlegm in the bottom of his lungs began to hiss, bubble and growl like a coffee-bar milk steamer as he wheezed out a great laugh.

'They have a job to do, my dears,' he said. 'No one, not even the sound crew, was listening. They are looking at where the cameras go, what the edge of frame is, a thousand different things. Ha ha! You thought they were making a judgement. That's very funny, ha!' Dennis's eyes ran as he laughed and choked and gasped to the bottom of his lungs.

On Sunday we performed the show in front of an audience. An audience that was warmed up by Clive Anderson, an ex-Footlights barrister who had yet to make the decision to become a performer in front of the cameras. The recording seemed to go well, but we were not making it for the studio audience, we were making it for television viewers, and whether they would like it we would not know for months.

In the meantime the Granada show demanded our attention.

Chelsea, Coleherne Clones and Conscience Kim and I moved from Hadley Wood into a flat in Draycott Place, just off Sloane Square in Chelsea, where the newly enroyaled Lady Diana's friends flitted between the Peter Jones department store, the General Trading Company and Partridge's delicatessen, all rigged out in identical green quilted Husky jackets and high Laura Ashley collars. Their boyfriends drove Golf GTi cabriolets, so prevalent in SW3 that they were nicknamed haemorrhoids ('sooner or later every a.r.s.ehole gets one'). Hooray Henries were getting proudly and hog-whimperingly drunk in the newly fashionable wine bars while their younger brothers wound silk scarves about their long pale necks and drooped like lilies, hoping to look as winning and doomed as Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited Brideshead Revisited. Pubs were beginning to ding and thrum to the sound of s.p.a.ce Invaders and from the open doors of the hairdressing salons and into the tumult of the King's Road pumped the sound of Adam and the Ants' 'Goody Two Shoes', Dexy's Midnight Runners' 'Come On Eileen' and Culture Club's 'Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?' Someone had found the k.n.o.b marked 'eighties' and turned it up full.

Just around the corner from Draycott Place in Tryon Street stood, and still stands, a safe, twee and very Chelsea gay pub called the Queen's Head. It was in the snug there that I first heard about something called GRID. Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. It all sounded most peculiar. Gay people in America were dying and 'you mark my words, dear,' said the barman, 'it's coming over here.'

The gay world was expressing itself fiercely and freely at this time. Larry Kramer's f.a.ggots f.a.ggots was the book of the age, portraying a world of Fire Island excess where happy hedonists frothed, creamed and pumped away their endless weekends of drug-driven partying, succ.u.mbing (and indeed sucking c.u.m) to intense physical gratification in eye-popping scenes of pitiless, guiltless detail. A lifestyle free from moral, personal or medical consequences. No restraint was shown, except perhaps a leather one swinging from the ceiling in which unimaginable acts would be perpetrated. I found it all about as arousing as a Tupperware party. It was a strange feeling to be in a minority within a minority. Most gay people aspired, or appeared to aspire, to that whole scene and to the Village People character types that defined it, especially the plaid-shirted, moustachioed look that was called the Clone. Squadrons of these tight-jeaned, heavy-booted individuals could be seen ma.s.sed inside the Coleherne Arms in Earls Court. I found the manliness, humourlessness and physical urgency that emanated like cheap musk from such people and places alarming and depressing. Not that I was even faintly drawn to these preposterous Tom of Finland caricatures with their muscle vests, leather caps and joyless stares. My dream partner was a friendly, dreamy, funny young man with whom I could walk, talk, laugh, cuddle and play. Nonetheless I did go to places like the Coleherne and the newly opened Heaven, which proclaimed itself to be the largest disco in Europe. I went because ... well, because it was what you did in those days if you were gay and in your twenties. To feel a hundred eyes instantly scan and dismiss me was humiliating and shaming and reminded me of being checked out in the school showers. Rejection, contempt and lack of interest were all instant, careless and unequivocal. Thumping music, the sniffing of poppers, the thrashing on the dance-floor and those endless raking, questing, needy eyes prohibited any conversation or laughter. I was completely uninterested in picking anyone up or in being picked up myself and I certainly had no desire to dance but I suppose I thought that if I went often enough I would somehow break through and start to like it, in the same way I had broken through with unsugared tea. I never did break through with the gay scene. I learned to hate the discos and bars and everything they stood for. I am not sure that I can successfully claim that it was moral repugnance that fuelled my hate, I think it was the remorseless battering to my was the book of the age, portraying a world of Fire Island excess where happy hedonists frothed, creamed and pumped away their endless weekends of drug-driven partying, succ.u.mbing (and indeed sucking c.u.m) to intense physical gratification in eye-popping scenes of pitiless, guiltless detail. A lifestyle free from moral, personal or medical consequences. No restraint was shown, except perhaps a leather one swinging from the ceiling in which unimaginable acts would be perpetrated. I found it all about as arousing as a Tupperware party. It was a strange feeling to be in a minority within a minority. Most gay people aspired, or appeared to aspire, to that whole scene and to the Village People character types that defined it, especially the plaid-shirted, moustachioed look that was called the Clone. Squadrons of these tight-jeaned, heavy-booted individuals could be seen ma.s.sed inside the Coleherne Arms in Earls Court. I found the manliness, humourlessness and physical urgency that emanated like cheap musk from such people and places alarming and depressing. Not that I was even faintly drawn to these preposterous Tom of Finland caricatures with their muscle vests, leather caps and joyless stares. My dream partner was a friendly, dreamy, funny young man with whom I could walk, talk, laugh, cuddle and play. Nonetheless I did go to places like the Coleherne and the newly opened Heaven, which proclaimed itself to be the largest disco in Europe. I went because ... well, because it was what you did in those days if you were gay and in your twenties. To feel a hundred eyes instantly scan and dismiss me was humiliating and shaming and reminded me of being checked out in the school showers. Rejection, contempt and lack of interest were all instant, careless and unequivocal. Thumping music, the sniffing of poppers, the thrashing on the dance-floor and those endless raking, questing, needy eyes prohibited any conversation or laughter. I was completely uninterested in picking anyone up or in being picked up myself and I certainly had no desire to dance but I suppose I thought that if I went often enough I would somehow break through and start to like it, in the same way I had broken through with unsugared tea. I never did break through with the gay scene. I learned to hate the discos and bars and everything they stood for. I am not sure that I can successfully claim that it was moral repugnance that fuelled my hate, I think it was the remorseless battering to my amour propre amour propre, my ego.

Problems with the physical self, you may have noticed by now, are central to my life story. The reckless feeding of my physical appet.i.tes on the one hand and the miserable dislike and fear of my physical appearance on the other have all been overseen by a pathological personal theology that has for most of my life robbed me of any true ease. I do not wish to sound self-pitying or to privilege myself with unique sensitivity or susceptibility to distress in these matters, but there is almost no moment in the day when I do not feel myself to be intensely guilty of numberless trespa.s.ses. Drinking too much coffee, not concentrating sufficiently hard, not answering emails quickly enough. Not being in touch with people I have promised to be in touch with. Going to the gym too infrequently. Eating too much. Drinking too much. Declining invitations to speak at charity dinners. Being slow in reading and commenting on entirely unsolicited scripts. These are almost meaningless offences; they are pathetic little particles of plankton in the deep ocean of sin to be sure, but my feelings are as craven, cringing and confessional as the most self-abasing Calvinists in their most prostrate and abject furies of repentance. I do not believe there is a G.o.d or a judgement day or a redeeming saviour, but I go through all the shame, trembling and self-castigation of the most pious and hysterical ascetic without the cheap promise of forgiveness and a divine cuddle in recompense.

Good gracious, I know how this reads. To listen to the neuroses of a spoilt, over-paid, over-praised, over-pampered celebrity must be unendurable. For me to wallow in the luxury of being worried only by such insignificant piffle while so many in the world suffer the traumas, terrors and torments of poverty, hunger, disease and war. Even here in the developed world there are plenty who have financial and familial worries enough to be to say the least unsympathetic to my plight. I know know. My G.o.d, do you think I do not know how monstrously self-indulgent, narcissistic and childish I must sound in so many ears? That is the point. My real dissatisfaction is with my dissatisfaction. How dare I be so discontent? How dare I? Or being discontent why cannot I shut up about it?

I know that money, power, prestige and fame do not bring happiness. If history teaches us anything it teaches us that. You know it. Everybody agrees this to be a manifest truth so self-evident as to need no repet.i.tion. What is strange to me is that, despite the fact that the world knows this, it does not want want to know it and it chooses almost always to behave as if it were not true. It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise. And I am all for that. For the greater part of the time I will smile and agree that I am the luckiest devil alive and that I am as happy as a bee in pollen. Most of the time. But not when writing a book like this. Not when it is understood that I will attempt to be as honest with you as possible. About other people, as I have said, I may palter and pretend, but the business of autobiography is at least to strive for some element of self-revelation and candour. And so I have to confess that, foolish as I know it sounds, I spend much of my life imprisoned by a ruthless, unreasoning conscience that tortures me and denies me happiness. How much is Conscience and how much is Cyclothymia, the particular flavour of bipolarity with which I have been diagnosed and to which we will (hurray!) not return in this book, I cannot tell. I am content to shuttle between all available moral, psychological, mythical, spiritual, neural, hormonal, genetic, dietary and environmental explanations for unhappiness. to know it and it chooses almost always to behave as if it were not true. It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise. And I am all for that. For the greater part of the time I will smile and agree that I am the luckiest devil alive and that I am as happy as a bee in pollen. Most of the time. But not when writing a book like this. Not when it is understood that I will attempt to be as honest with you as possible. About other people, as I have said, I may palter and pretend, but the business of autobiography is at least to strive for some element of self-revelation and candour. And so I have to confess that, foolish as I know it sounds, I spend much of my life imprisoned by a ruthless, unreasoning conscience that tortures me and denies me happiness. How much is Conscience and how much is Cyclothymia, the particular flavour of bipolarity with which I have been diagnosed and to which we will (hurray!) not return in this book, I cannot tell. I am content to shuttle between all available moral, psychological, mythical, spiritual, neural, hormonal, genetic, dietary and environmental explanations for unhappiness.

I hope then that you will excuse the unstartling revelation that I am often tortured and unhappy. Most of this unhappiness would appear to derive from my physical self being either disgusting in its lack of appeal or demanding in its requirements of calories and other damaging substances. In the light of this I will pursue further the point I was making about the Coleherne and related horrors of the eighties scene.

The gay ident.i.ty, if I can be excused for so squirm-worthy a phrase, drew attention to the physical in those days more than I think it does now. Heaven (both of them: the address in the clouds and the club under the arches of Charing Cross) knows there is still plenty of body fascism about today, but I think it is being accurate rather than charitable to say that the community has grown up a little. Being gay thirty years ago, however, seemed overwhelmingly to be about dancing, cruising, narcissism and anonymous s.e.x. I was gay and therefore I was supposed to care for and be capable of those things too. My problem was twofold. Firstly n.o.body seemed to be remotely attracted to me, and secondly I wasn't even interested anyway in all this heavy dance-floor heaving and casual erotic encountering.

Would it have been different if some of those harsh nighthawk glares had melted with desire when I came in through the door? Might I then have consented to dance the s.e.xual dance? Did I hate my own face and body with such a hot hate only because I thought others did? Was I really doing no more than getting my retaliation in first, like children who decide that chess or history or tennis are boring, but only because they don't have an instant apt.i.tude?

Blaise Pascal said that if Cleopatra's nose had been a little shorter, the whole history of the earth would have been different. If mine had been a little cuter then maybe I would have thrown myself into a life of carnal abandon at just that period in history when there were trillions of microscopic reasons for that being the most fatal game to play. So perhaps it is as well that I was unappealing.

If you are distressed or irritated to read me describe myself as such, then let it be understood that, while at that time I had no confidence in being anything else, I am fully aware that plenty of undeniably less good-looking men seemed to be getting all the s.e.x they required. Self-image was a lot to do with it, but there can be no disputing the misery caused by those hard eyes running up and down my body for a scorchingly humiliating instant before flicking away with contempt towards the next person coming through the door. Of course I know those glaring gazing gays were just as, perhaps even more, insecure than me. They too were getting their retaliation in first. But to think such unsmiling coldness is s.e.xy ... I am very proud and very happy to be gay, but I would be lying if I did not say that much about the world that gay people inhabited in those days sickened, repelled and frightened me.

As much as anything it was to be dismissed without being known that p.r.i.c.kled so fiercely. Without labouring the point, it was behaviour that I thought not far from racism, s.e.xism or any other kind of prejudice or sn.o.bbery. 'Because you are not cute I do not want to know you' was to me hardly different from suggesting, 'Because you are gay I dislike you' or 'Because you are Jewish, I dislike you' or, come to that, 'Because you went to Cambridge I dislike you.' Of course, anyone who believes themselves to be a victim of such discrimination ought to be sure. We first have to dismiss the worrying possibility that a true interpretation of another's antipathy might be 'Because you are a boring a.r.s.ehole I dislike you', a judgement from which there is little hope of comfortable escape.

Kim enjoyed the gay world more than I did. He was not, of course, fooled by it, but I think he was more at ease in it than I could ever be. He also had more opportunity to experience it, for I was beginning to be so consumed by work that such things as clubs and pubs were receding into the background for me. This new Granada comedy series was going to take me away from London for long periods of time.

Colonel and Coltrane It was hard not to like Manchester. Being called 'love', 'chuck' or a 'daft barmcake' can only delight a southerner used to the lonely and unsmiling lovelessness of London and the south-east. Granada lodged us at the grand and luxurious Midland Hotel and doled out to us the most unbelievably handsome per diem per diem cash payments in little brown packets. I had never had so much ready money in my life. We had had three months to write material and now we were here to sift, select and record. cash payments in little brown packets. I had never had so much ready money in my life. We had had three months to write material and now we were here to sift, select and record.

Hugh and I had been what is the word? Horror-struck? Staggered? Mortified? Shamed? Some mixture of all those perhaps to discover that our slow, mournful and insecure rate of writing had been trumped and trampled on by the one-man whirlwind of industry, creativity and prodigality that was Benjamin Charles Elton. For every one page of uncertain and unfinished sketch comedy that we held apologetically up for judgement, Ben produced fifty. That is no exaggeration. Where our comedy was etiolated, b.u.t.toned-up and embarra.s.sed, his was wild, energetic, colourful and confident to the point of c.o.c.kiness. While we would read ours out with a sorrowful cough and somehow framed in self-deprecating inverted commas, Ben would perform his, playing every part, with undisguised pleasure and demented relish. Despite our complete sense of humiliation and defeat we did laugh and we did unreservedly admire his astonishing talent and the unabashed zest with which he threw himself into performance.

Ben had instantly spotted the performing genius of Emma Thompson and warmed to the big-eyed hopelessness that Hugh could project in characters as well as his authority and range. In me he saw a crusty relict of Empire and created a character called Colonel Sodom, who might, I suppose, be regarded as a rather coa.r.s.ely sketched forerunner of Blackadder Goes Forth Blackadder Goes Forth's General Melchett. Another aspect of my limited performance scope that appealed to him resulted in Doctor de Quincey, a casually peremptory and callous doctor who reappeared some years later in Ben's comedy drama series Happy Families. Happy Families.

Single-handedly Ben seemed to have written every episode of the series, which was called, after much disputation, There's Nothing to Worry About. We shot it in and around Manchester, the director, Stuart Orme, using state of the art Electronic News Gathering equipment, which is to say new lightweight video cameras whose flexibility allowed the production to save money on set building, but at the price of a substandard look and soundtrack. Hugh and I managed to write a few sketches that made it through to performance, as a sop to our pride we suspected, one being a long sequence that involved a pair of characters called Alan and Bernard, who had featured in the Footlights Charades sketch and who would pop up again as Gordon and Stewart in A Bit of Fry and Laurie A Bit of Fry and Laurie. But all in all it was Ben's show, for good or ill.

It is no unfair criticism of anyone to say that the results were uneven. Richard Armitage, the agent who had taken me, Hugh and Emma under his wing, was loud in his dismay, disgust and disapproval. He was particularly revolted by Colonel Sodom's exploding bottom. The Colonel ate strong curries and in a series of shots I was seen striding through the streets of Didsbury all but propelled along the pavement by pyrotechnic special-effect farts. I think there was even a close-up of the seat of my pinstripe trousers bursting open with a smoking star-shaped bang. Richard muttered about this for weeks. He felt that the stylish, intelligent brand of graduate comedy for which he hoped we would be known, and on which he planned to build our careers, was being crippled at birth by a foul-mouthed c.o.c.kney street urchin with a sewer for a mind and he wanted none of it. Who knows what grumbling behind-the-scenes machinations took place. Richard may even have tried to get us out of our contract. Steve Morrison, the executive producer, and Sandy Ross stayed loyal to Ben, quite rightly recognizing his ferocious and fertile talent. They were aware nonetheless that There's Nothing to Worry About There's Nothing to Worry About had flaws, and their solution was to bring in a new cast member. Paul Shearer, through no fault of his own, left the show. As one who wrote less material even than Hugh and me he was, I suppose, considered dispensable. Paul's place was taken by a Glasgow Art School graduate called Anthony McMillan, who had just changed his name to Robbie Coltrane. had flaws, and their solution was to bring in a new cast member. Paul Shearer, through no fault of his own, left the show. As one who wrote less material even than Hugh and me he was, I suppose, considered dispensable. Paul's place was taken by a Glasgow Art School graduate called Anthony McMillan, who had just changed his name to Robbie Coltrane.

Big, loud and hilarious, Robbie combined the style and manners of a Brooklyn bus-driver, a fifties rock and roller, a motor mechanic and a Gorbals gangster. Somehow they all fitted together perfectly into one consistent character. He terrified the life out of me, and the only way I could compensate for that was to pretend to find him impossibly attractive and to rub my legs up against him and moan with ecstasy.

'You cheeky wee f.u.c.ker,' he would say and somehow tolerate me.

The only time in my life I ever wore a donkey jacket. Alfresco. Alfresco.

A t.w.a.t in tweed and cravat: inexcusably slappable. Alfresco. Alfresco.

Robbie has since said in an interview that he found Hugh and me to be arrogant, off-puttingly over-confident Establishment figures who looked down our well-bred noses at his blowsy, vulgar intrusion like thoroughbred racehorses shivering their fastidious flanks at the presence in their stables of an unwelcome donkey. I am not quoting him exactly, but that is certainly the gist of what he said. Whether he made this up to pad out a boring interview session or whether he truly believes it and remembers it that way, I cannot say. I always get on amicably, indeed affectionately, with Robbie on the rare occasions that I see him these days, but I have never dared raise the subject of that interview. They bring us back to the endless, and perhaps arid, problem of affect and appearance, the question of the figures we cut with others despite what we may feel inside. We see everyone else socially armed with great clubs while all we have hidden behind our backs is a pitiful cotton bud. I know how much Hugh and I were suffering a tormented sense of inadequacy, how much we felt out of place and how much we were embarra.s.sed by our d.a.m.nable public-school and Cambridge backgrounds. I also know that we were too proud and too well-brought-up, or I was certainly, to go around slouching and mooching with hang-dog expressions that begged for petting and pity. It is, at some sort of stretch, possible that we hid our feelings of hopelessness so well that Robbie could, in all conscience, claim that we came over as poncey, preening p.r.i.c.ks, but I honestly cannot believe it likely. Perhaps it suited Robbie to imagine himself as a lowborn grease-monkey endowed with natural, home-grown street talent, forced into a world of pale sn.o.bbery and mincing middle-cla.s.s privilege. In fact, of course, Robbie is the son of a doctor and went to school at Glenalmond College, perhaps Scotland's most elite private seat of learning and subject of the excellent 2008 doc.u.mentary Pride and Privilege Pride and Privilege. The 13th Duke of Argyll, the Marquess of Lothian, Prince Georg Friedrich of Prussia and the 9th Earl of Elgin, Viceroy of India, are numbered amongst its eximious alumni. That he managed to enter Glasgow School of Art as Anthony Robert McMillan with an accent like Prince Charles's and emerge the other end as Robbie Coltrane with an accent like Jimmy Boyle's is a fine achievement. I sometimes think I should have tried to do something similar.

There's Nothing to Worry About had emerged on screen, exploding bottoms and all, in June of 1982 in the Granada region only. We went back down to London to write in July, August and September for the new series which was to be called had emerged on screen, exploding bottoms and all, in June of 1982 in the Granada region only. We went back down to London to write in July, August and September for the new series which was to be called Alfresco Alfresco.

Hugh, Emma, Ben, self, Siobhan and Paul: There's Nothing to Worry About, There's Nothing to Worry About, Granada TV, 1982. Oh, but there was... Granada TV, 1982. Oh, but there was...

Computer 1 One free afternoon in Manchester I had walked to the Arndale Centre and drifted from shop to shop. In a branch of Lasky's I found myself staring in perplexity at a group of teenagers cl.u.s.tered around a display stand. I approached and looked over their shoulders ...

Half an hour later I was fiddling with the back of the television in my Midland Hotel bedroom. After ten frustrating and confused minutes Ceefax-style text appeared on the screen.

BBC Computer 32K BASIC.

It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair, the details of which will bore you dreadfully. I shall try not to linger on the subject too long, but the relationship was and is too important to me for it to be consigned to a quick sentence. Most of my spare hours were now spent in front of this transcendently lovely (to me) machine, an Acorn BBC Micro B computer. At that time microcomputers relied on two household appliances to work properly: a television for display and a ca.s.sette tape-recorder for recording and loading programs. The Lasky's salesman had persuaded me to buy a program called Wordwise, which came on a ROM chip that you plugged into one of four slots on the circuit board. The other s.p.a.ces were for the operating system and the BASIC programming language. With Wordwise plugged into the first slot the computer magically started up as a word-processor. I could attach it by a wide-ribboned parallel connector to a Brother electric typewriter which now became a slave printer. I cannot explain my fascination and delight. With exultation I would show my friends the computer, the programs I had written and the printer printing out. Everybody cooed and wowed obediently, but I could tell they were not moved in the same way that I was. It puzzled me that I should be so captivated by this new world when others were so relatively unengaged. Certainly the system was clever, one could do remarkable things with it, and most people were impressed in the standard 'Tch, whatever will they think of next?' way but for me the excitement was about so much more than function. I have long since given up trying to understand this undying obsession, which rapidly took on all the form, manner and behaviour of a cla.s.sic addiction. I pa.s.sed most of what spare time I had with my head buried in dedicated microcomputer magazines or haunting the Tottenham Court Road on the look-out for new peripherals. I would stay up at the keyboard until three, four or five in the morning writing pointless programs or attempting to master useless techniques. Within a very short time I had filled my corner of the Chelsea flat with a daisy-wheel printer, a plotter, a dedicated RGB monitor and an add-on for an extra processor and floppy disks. My lifelong battle to control cabling began at this time. All the cables I have ever owned would stretch to the moon and back. Except they would not be able to because they would fail to connect up with each other. Anyone can write a credible story in which humans can teleport, travel in time and make themselves invisible. A future in which there are cable compatibility standards, that would be real science fiction.

Cables, monitors, printers, books, magazines, disks all these were costing me money. Money that I did not have.

Richard Armitage had told me with an expansive wave of a cigar-brandishing hand that if ever I was running low, his a.s.sistant, Lorraine Hamilton, would send me cheques to cover my expenses. These would count as advances against future earnings. Despite Kim's relative wealth and his easy generosity, I had run up a debt of several thousand pounds with Richard by the August of 1982 and was beginning to worry that I would never earn enough to be able to pay him back.

Commercial One morning Lorraine called me up at the Chelsea flat. I know it was at the Chelsea flat because in those days when you rang someone you always knew where they were. The closest life came to a mobile phone was a handset with an extra-long flex. Lorraine told me to go to an office in Fitzrovia and meet a man called Paul Weiland, who was casting a beer commercial.

A beer commercial? Me? A low vulgar commercial, for a highly polished artist such as myself? How unbelievably insulting. I almost ran to the appointed place.

The golden age of British advertising was just coming to an end. The most prominent stars to have risen over the past decade had been Ridley and Tony Scott, Hugh Hudson, David Puttnam and Alan Parker, who now all devoted their time to feature films. Paul Weiland, a generation behind, had started his career as a tea boy at the production office where most of those big names had worked and was to become the leading commercials director of the eighties and nineties. Indeed he still reigns supreme.

He handed me a script that was really more of a photocopied storyboard. It showed a monocled Victorian aristocrat in a series of unlikely poses.

'There's no dialogue,' Paul said. 'The whole commercial is played out to a soundtrack. The song "Abdul Abulbul Amir". Do you know it?'

I had to confess that I did not.

'Never mind. Take this mug. You're drinking the beer. It's Whitbread Best Bitter. You're Count Ivan Skavinsky Skavar, and I'm Abdul. Just give me a really snooty look. Snootier! As if he's a caterpillar in your salad or s.h.i.t on your shoe.'

For ten minutes I pretended to drink Whitbread snootily while a most peculiar song played in the background. I am not sure I have ever been more embarra.s.sed and uncomfortable or felt more ill at ease, self-conscious and incompetent. When it was all over I left, blushing furiously.

'Well, Stephen,' I said to myself, 'that is the last you will ever hear of that that. Perhaps it is as well. Perhaps I was so bad because my innermost soul was revolting at the mercenary grubbiness of the whole enterprise. Yes. That will be it.'

The next day Lorraine called up and asked me to come into the Noel Gay offices in Denmark Street. Richard was sitting behind his enormous desk, beaming behind a thick curtain of Villiger cigar smoke.

'They want you for the Whitbread commercial,' he said. 'But I'm afraid they're being irritatingly tough on the money.'

Oh well, I thought. Five or six hundred pounds would come in useful. It would be as much as that, surely.

'They offered twenty,' said Richard, 'and I can't seem to get them above twenty-five. If you find that insulting we can always walk away.'

'For how many hours' work?'

Richard looked down at his notes. 'Three days.'

'Blimey,' I said, trying not to look too disappointed. 'It isn't much.'

'No,' said Richard. 'It's just over eight thousand a day. Well, if you feel ...'

Thousand! I swallowed drily, pushing my Adam's apple past a throbbing constriction that was rising in my throat and threatening to cause me to choke. I swallowed drily, pushing my Adam's apple past a throbbing constriction that was rising in my throat and threatening to cause me to choke. Twenty-five thousand pounds Twenty-five thousand pounds. For three days' work.

'No, no!' I faltered. 'I mean ... no. It's fine. I'll ...'

'They speak very highly of Paul Weiland. Good experience for you. Starts shooting in Shepperton on Monday. They'll want you at Bermans and Nathans for a costume fitting tomorrow at three. Excellent. I'll call the agency.'

I tottered about London for the rest of that morning in a dream.

I could pay back Noel Gay Artists everything I owed them and I would still be rich. Rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Well, not that, obviously. The dreams of avarice go well beyond twenty-five odd thousand pounds minus 15 per cent commission, minus tax and VAT, minus three and a half thousand already owing. But rich enough for me.

You would have just cause to hate me now, reader, when I tell you that from that day to this I have never had what one could seriously call money troubles. Not money troubles of the kind that cause so many people to wake up in the middle of the night with a ghastly feeling like molten lead leaking into their stomach as they contemplate mounting debt and the apparent impossibility of getting their finances in order. That tremble of panic and dread that so many feel in relation to money I have been spared. I feel it for other things but I know that many in the world would trade much for the kind of cushion of cash that has enveloped me for thirty years. I did not know, as I went about London window-shopping that day, that in two and a half years' time even more money would start pouring in.

The three days of the shoot in Shepperton Studios pa.s.sed in a sweat of worry, embarra.s.sment and confusion. I had no idea why everything took so long, what I was doing, who everyone was or what the commercial was about. Tim McInnerny, whom I was to get to know two years later when I joined the cast of Blackadder II Blackadder II, had been cast as a lute-wielding minstrel of some kind. The character of Abdul was played by an actor called Tony Cosmo, who was suitably swarthy and menacing. I, in my own estimation, failed to be suitably anything. Watching it today on YouTube (try searching for Whitbread Best Bitter 1982 Ad or similar) the film still appears to make very little sense, and I am sure that even now my discomfort in the role of Count Ivan transmits across the decades. I think I was cast on account of my pointy chin rather than because of any discernible skill or talent.

Paul Weiland was charming and easy-going. My memories of the exceptionally laid-back Hugh Hudson on the set of Chariots of Fire Chariots of Fire had prepared me to expect relaxation from the director and fiery shouting only from a.s.sistants, and this was exactly how it was. I spent most of the three days sitting in a canvas chair and drinking cups of tea while birds twitted and s.h.i.tted in the gantry far above. There are generations of pigeon, sparrow and chaffinch that have lived out their lives in the roof s.p.a.ces of the great sound stages of Pinewood and Shepperton. They have dumped their droppings on some of the immortal scenes of British cinema, and their screechings have interrupted dialogue from Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, Kenneth Williams, Roger Moore and a thousand others. Mostly, however, they have overseen the less glamorous business of commercial and pop video shoots that make up the bread-and-b.u.t.ter business for studio staff, film crews and happily overpaid actors. I know that I am supposed to be ashamed of advertising work and feel that it is either beneath me or some kind of sell-out, but I cannot bring myself to apologize or regret. Orson Welles always said with high-handed disdain, 'If it was good enough for Toulouse-Lautrec and John Everett Millais, then it is good enough for me,' but I don't really feel the need to adduce the names of great figures from the past, I just find it fun. had prepared me to expect relaxation from the director and fiery shouting only from a.s.sistants, and this was exactly how it was. I spent most of the three days sitting in a canvas chair and drinking cups of tea while birds twitted and s.h.i.tted in the gantry far above. There are generations of pigeon, sparrow and chaffinch that have lived out their lives in the roof s.p.a.ces of the great sound stages of Pinewood and Shepperton. They have dumped their droppings on some of the immortal scenes of British cinema, and their screechings have interrupted dialogue from Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, Kenneth Williams, Roger Moore and a thousand others. Mostly, however, they have overseen the less glamorous business of commercial and pop video shoots that make up the bread-and-b.u.t.ter business for studio staff, film crews and happily overpaid actors. I know that I am supposed to be ashamed of advertising work and feel that it is either beneath me or some kind of sell-out, but I cannot bring myself to apologize or regret. Orson Welles always said with high-handed disdain, 'If it was good enough for Toulouse-Lautrec and John Everett Millais, then it is good enough for me,' but I don't really feel the need to adduce the names of great figures from the past, I just find it fun.

Create!

We were back in Manchester by October filming for Alfresco which, unlike which, unlike There's Nothing to Worry About There's Nothing to Worry About, was to be broadcast nationally. Ben had created for us a fictional world which he called The Pretend Pub. The concept might kindly be described as playful meta-textual post-modernism. Most people, however, were not kind and seemed to regard it as incomprehensible self-indulgent twaddle, which I suppose is how most playful meta-textual post-modernism is received. We all portrayed heightened versions of ourselves in an obviously unreal studio pub. I was Stezzer, Hugh was Huzzer, Robbie Bobzer, Ben Bezzer, Emma Ezzer and Siobhan Shizzer. We still often call each other by those names to this day, although Ben, for reasons lost in time, usually calls me Bing.

Alfresco, series 2: The Pretend Pub.

In the first episode, I enter, covered in polystyrene flakes of stage snow, greeting Robbie with the words, 'My word, Pretend Landlord Bobzer, there's a h.e.l.l of a theatrical effect going on out there ...' We performed these sketches in front of a mostly silent and bemused audience. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we were ahead of our time. I think a great deal of the problem came from self-consciousness. Ben knew very well (partly because he was directly involved) what his contemporaries were doing in the field of alternative comedy, and Hugh and I were painfully and acutely aware of what our tradition had done in the field of sketch comedy, from Pete and Dud through to Python and Not the Nine O'Clock News Not the Nine O'Clock News. As a result we were guilty, it is clear looking back, of over-complicating everything out of a fear of being perceived as imitative and unoriginal. We ruled out parodies and 'Ah, come in, Perkins, shut the door, do sit down,' sketches because Python and Not Not had done these. Surreality and anarchic weirdness were out too because Rik, Ade and Alexei had cornered that market. So we wallowed about sightlessly, guiltily and confusedly without the confidence to do what we did best. Audiences, I now realize (and frankly it should always have been blindingly obvious), do not think along such lines. Novelty and originality do not come from the invention of new milieus, new genres or new modalities. They come from the had done these. Surreality and anarchic weirdness were out too because Rik, Ade and Alexei had cornered that market. So we wallowed about sightlessly, guiltily and confusedly without the confidence to do what we did best. Audiences, I now realize (and frankly it should always have been blindingly obvious), do not think along such lines. Novelty and originality do not come from the invention of new milieus, new genres or new modalities. They come from the how how and the and the who who, not from the what what. It hardly warrants pointing out, furthermore, that no one will get anywhere unless they do what they do best, and everyone, in their secret, secret heart, knows what they do best.

An Alfresco Alfresco sketch that a merciful providence has erased from my memory. sketch that a merciful providence has erased from my memory.

Meanwhile Steve Morrison, our Scottish executive producer, pleaded with us to stop bellyaching. 'Go out and create, man!' he yelled at me across a table one stormy afternoon, when I was behaving more than usually pedantically or sceptically or in some other manner guaranteed to annoy. He stood and pointed at the door. 'I want Ayckbourn with edge,' he screamed. 'Go out and bring me Ayckbourn with edge!' Well, quite.

It was made obvious to us that high up in Granada a problem with our writing had been identified. In the case of Ben it might have been over-productivity and a lack of self-censorship; in the case of Hugh and me it was exactly the opposite crippling constipation and a kind of apologetic, high-toned embarra.s.sment that must have been excessively irritating. For one excruciating week we all had to undergo a kind of comedy-writing mastercla.s.s with Bernie Sahlins, one of the producers of the Second City revue group and television show. Bernie, brother of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, was from a tradition of improvisation that he helped create back in the days of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, a tradition that had burst into television and more recently film with the Sat.u.r.day Night Live Sat.u.r.day Night Live generation of Aykroyd, Chase, Murray, Belushi and Radner. Ben wrote alone and wasn't faintly interested in the styles and techniques of Chicago improv. Hugh and I were pretty appalled too at the idea of 'building a scene' through improvisational dialogue in the approved American way. When we wrote together we sometimes did improvise, inasmuch as we made a sketch up out loud as we went along before committing it to paper. I suspect that if we had been accused of improvising we would have frozen in horror midway and would never have been able to continue. The cultural gulf between our way and Bernie Sahlins's way must have perplexed and even offended him, but it was an unbridgeable one and he left Manchester after five days without having made a dent in us. He did teach us that if we had been born American we would never ever have made it in the comedy business and we perhaps taught him that the British people are stubborn, shy and entirely dominated by their single predominant emotion, affect, vice, characteristic, disease ... whatever one might call it: embarra.s.sment. Ben carried on pouring out script after script in his way, and we carried on not pouring out anything much in ours. generation of Aykroyd, Chase, Murray, Belushi and Radner. Ben wrote alone and wasn't faintly interested in the styles and techniques of Chicago improv. Hugh and I were pretty appalled too at the idea of 'building a scene' through improvisational dialogue in the approved American way. When we wrote together we sometimes did improvise, inasmuch as we made a sketch up out loud as we went along before committing it to paper. I suspect that if we had been accused of improvising we would have frozen in horror midway and would never have been able to continue. The cultural gulf between our way and Bernie Sahlins's way must have perplexed and even offended him, but it was an unbridgeable one and he left Manchester after five days without having made a dent in us. He did teach us that if we had been born American we would never ever have made it in the comedy business and we perhaps taught him that the British people are stubborn, shy and entirely dominated by their single predominant emotion, affect, vice, characteristic, disease ... whatever one might call it: embarra.s.sment. Ben carried on pouring out script after script in his way, and we carried on not pouring out anything much in ours.

As well as Steve Morrison, Sandy Ross, Robbie and Siobhan, we now had a fifth Scot on board in the shape of a producer called John G. Temple. Hugh revealed that Temple had approached him early one morning as we had been getting into costumes for a day's filming and asked him what drugs I was on.

'No drugs,' Hugh had said. 'That's just how Stephen is.'

When he relayed this exchange to me I had been profoundly shocked. What was it about me that could possibly lead a stranger to leap to the instant conclusion that I must be on drugs? Hugh explained to me with as much tact as he could manage that it was possibly my excessive energy in the mornings. I had always been loud and verbally exuberant from the earliest hours, but it had never occurred to me that this mania might be extreme enough to present the appearance of drug abuse. Everyone else was used to my often exaggerated elation and bounce, but they were evidently weird enough to a newcomer like John to excite the wildest speculation.

Perhaps this should have sounded as a warning in my head for me to attend to my states of mind a little more carefully, but when one is young eccentricities, moods and behavioural ticks are easily overlooked, ignored or laughingly dealt with. One is so much more supple. One can bend with all the gnarls and twists and kinks that life and the caprices of one's mind confer. Past forty it is, of course, another story. What once was whippy and pliable now snaps like dried bone. So much that is charming, unusual, provocative and admirably strange in youth becomes tragic, lonely, pathological, boring, and ruinous in middle age. A hurt or troubled mind plays out a story very like that of an alcoholic's life. A twenty-year-old who drinks heavily is a bit of a rogue; sometimes he may be a little flushed in the face, sometimes too pie-eyed to turn up to this or that appointment on time, but usually he (or she of course) will be loveable enough and resilient enough to get on with life. Quite when the broken veins, spongy nose, humourless bloodshot eyes and hideous personality changes take full root it is hard to say, but one day everyone notices that their hard-drinking friend is no longer funny and no longer charming they have become an embarra.s.sment, a liability and a bore. I have seen and experienced the same with little personality wrinkles and dispositions that have been so acceptable and endearing and apparently harmless in youth, yet have proved destructive to the point of agony, addiction, degeneration, misery, self-harm and suicide in later years. There have been moments in writing this book when I have looked back at nearly all my friends and contemporaries (myself included of course), so many of them blessed with talent, brains, brilliance and good fortune, and I have found myself forced to believe that all of us have failed in life. Or life has failed us. In our fifties the physical deterioration which one would naturally expect has been far outstripped by disappointment, bitterness, despair, mental instability and failure.

Then I slap myself across the chops and tell myself not to be so hysterical and self-dramatizing. And yet the episode with the car might be regarded by some doctors as a typical episode of hypomanic grandiosity...

Car The sixth Scot in the Alfresco Alfresco line-up was Dave McNiven, our resident musical director and composer. Naturally I saw very little of him. Once his sensitive ear had heard me miming, our professional paths were set never to cross again. You may wonder how he can have line-up was Dave McNiven, our resident musical director and composer. Naturally I saw very little of him. Once his sensitive ear had heard me miming, our professional paths were set never to cross again. You may wonder how he can have heard heard me miming, but this just shows the depths of unmusicality to which I was capable of sinking. It is very hard to be in a chorus and to mime without one's vocal chords just occasionally making themselves heard. A musical ear can pick up a discord instantly, no matter how many voices are singing and no matter how low and inadvertent the tiny sound that emanates. I shall never forget the shocked look on Dave's face as he spun round in my direction. I had seen it before and I was destined to see it many times again. It was the particular look of dismay that registers on the countenance of one who only moments before has said with supreme certainty and unruffled confidence, 'Oh, believe me, me miming, but this just shows the depths of unmusicality to which I was capable of sinking. It is very hard to be in a chorus and to mime without one's vocal chords just occasionally making themselves heard. A musical ear can pick up a discord instantly, no matter how many voices are singing and no matter how low and inadvertent the tiny sound that emanates. I shall never forget the shocked look on Dave's face as he spun round in my direction. I had seen it before and I was destined to see it many times again. It was the particular look of dismay that registers on the countenance of one who only moments before has said with supreme certainty and unruffled confidence, 'Oh, believe me, everyone everyone can sing!' I exist on this planet precisely to teach such wrong-headed optimists the error of their convictions. can sing!' I exist on this planet precisely to teach such wrong-headed optimists the error of their convictions.

The afternoons given over to music rehearsals, therefore, I filled with more driving lessons. I had taken a few while teaching at Cundall Manor. Back then, as I had bucked and jerked the motoring-school's Austin Metro down the main street of Thirsk I had been told with hard Yorkshire disdain, 'Tha gear and clutch control is s.h.i.te, and tha steering is as much use as a chocolate teapot.' The Mancunian instructor four years later was much friendlier, as people so often are west of the Pennines, or perhaps it was that my car-handling skills had improved in the interval. He would hum quietly to himself and look interestedly out of the window at the street scenes that flashed by, apparently confident enough in my driving not to bother about what I was doing as I manoeuvred the dual-control Escort along his favourite route, past the university halls of residence in Rusholme and Fallowfield, down Kingsway and into the maze of residential backstreets around Cheadle Hulme. One afternoon, quite unexpectedly, he announced that I was ready to take my test and that he had booked me in for the following week.

'If you've no objection?'

Half an hour later I found myself in a BMW showroom, shaking hands on a deal. I have no idea what rush of blood to the head had propelled me there but by the time I left it was too late to do anything about it. I had called up my bank and arranged the financing and was now the legal owner of a second-hand 323i in metallic green. Sunroof, Blaupunkt stereo and 16,000 miles on the clock.

That evening, not having dared tell Hugh that I had done something so magisterially a.r.s.ey and recklessly tempting of providence as to buy a car before I had even pa.s.sed my driving test, we all gathered in my room at the Midland Hotel. I ordered up wine, beer and crisps and we watched a repeat of May's original transmission of our Footlights show. Two days later we a.s.sembled again with even more wine, beer and crisps to watch the launch of the all-new Channel 4, which included in its opening night line-up Comic Strip Presents ... Five Go Mad in Dorset Comic Strip Presents ... Five Go Mad in Dorset, in which Robbie played two parts. This was the first new channel on British television since the arrival of BBC 2 in 1964.

I pa.s.sed my driving test, raced around insurance offices and returned to the car showroom properly possessed of paperwork that allowed me to drive away. I had teased and flirted with destiny and got away with it. If I had failed my test I wonder what I would have done with the car? Simply left it there I suppose.

I host a bed party in my room at the Midland Hotel. We seem happy. I think perhaps we were.

Challenge 2 A week later we met for a third time in my hotel room and, surrounded by all the wine, beer and crisps the Midland staff could produce, we watched the first episode of The Young Ones, which Ben had co-written and in which he also appeared.