Dear Fatty (29 page)

I was nervous, but I felt compelled to come clean with Mrs McKeown and so I told her about the Comic Strip and my moonlighting escapades. She could have been furious, she was
my
employer after all, but instead she was sagacious. She considered for a moment and reasoned that, although she needed me at the school and it was a tricky transitional time for my students, they would survive it, and she could always find another, perhaps more experienced head of department. She had the foresight and generosity to say that I would probably always regret it if I didn’t take the opportunity to go to Australia. She was so right about that, but y’know, if at that moment she had chosen to remind me of my obligation to those kids, emotionally blackmailing me to remain, I would have, because I was so torn and felt so guilty. It’s all thanks to her savvy and her mental poise that I went off with my comedy chums Down Under, for some of the best times I’d ever know.

I THOUGHT YOU
might be interested to hear that a strange thing has happened in a pub near me. A couple of weeks ago, a chap walked in there, casual as you like, and asked for a pint. I don’t know of what. Maybe Scruttocks Old Dirigible with twigs and bits of beak in it, as Alexei used to say, although I suspect that was just a silly beer name he made up to enhance the joke he was telling at the time. He used to do that a lot, say things that weren’t quite true for comedy effect. Anyway, anyway, anyway, this chap ordered his beer and the barman went off to the cellar, to change the barrel since it had run out. To my mind, he should really have changed it before that, then he wouldn’t have had to keep the customer waiting and feeling neglected. He obviously wasn’t keeping his eye on the levels as closely as a good landlord oughta. Do barrels have levels? Like petrol gauges, or a dipstick? I wonder. I wouldn’t have been so tolerant if I had been the customer and thirsty for my Scruttocks. I personally wouldn’t actually be thirsty for that of course, because I detest beer. It is the urine of the devil with all its froth and rancid flavour. Pretty quickly, actually, it’s whoever’s drunk its urine, isn’t it? Because boys never seem to keep it in for long. They don’t buy it, they rent it, some say. I think that, possibly, boys must have very stupidly pointlessly small bladders. Perhaps it’s because the exit route is a pipe with an ever-open hole at the end. Is there a sphincter or valve mechanism anywhere along
that
route? I’ve certainly not come across one, and frankly that’s just bad design.

Anyway, anyway, anyway. While the barman or landlord (he could of course be both) was away from the bar, the man took the opportunity to look around and saw that there was absolutely no one else in the pub. I’m not sure why. Maybe someone, a regular perhaps, had died and everyone else was at the funeral except the barman who was furious he still had to open up because the brewery are strict about things like that? Or maybe there had been tell of a ghostly headless horseman charging through the pub which had frightened everyone off? With headless horsemen, by the way, is it the horse that’s headless usually, or the man? Or perhaps it was just a Tuesday before lunch and everyone was at work? We’ll never know. So anyway, anyway, anyway, the man was alone in the pub and he sat down on a tall stool at the bar. I hate those tall stools, never was there such a precarious place to perch, and
at a bar
where you will be full of alcohol for heaven’s sake. The only suitable place for a tall stool is under one of Sacha Distel’s lovely arse cheeks, as he lounges there with his long legs supporting him more than adequately all the way to the floor, one of them ever so slightly bent at the knee, as the heel of his snakeskin shoe effortlessly catches on the strut halfway up. He might, also, have a nice jumper on. Who knows?

Anyway, anyway, anyway, while he sat there at the bar on his own, the man inadvertently started to pick at a bowl of nuts on the counter. I wouldn’t do that myself because of the statistic about every bowl of nuts containing at least 20 specimens of different wee from dirty folk who don’t wash their hands after
the
loo. He obviously didn’t know this fact, or he didn’t care, or he might even have been some kind of wee connoisseur or appreciator. In which case, what a freak! Anyway, anyway, anyway, he was aimlessly popping the bar snacks into his mouth when he heard a little voice in his ear say, ‘Goodness, you’re handsome!’ I mean, honestly, how very forward was that? He looked all around, very confused, and of course, as previously established, nobody was there. And he hadn’t even had his pint yet, so we can’t blame the alcohol at this point. Before you could say, ‘Time, gentlemen, please! What is the time, gentlemen please?!’ he heard another little voice, this time saying, ‘Wow, those slacks really suit you.’ Again, he was utterly confused because he couldn’t work out where these little voices were coming from. Just as he heard the barman’s footsteps coming back up from the cellar, there came a third and final comment: ‘Mmm, you smell lovely, like limes on a summer evening in the Algarve.’ Well, you can imagine what state he was in by then, really quite flummoxed, and he was glad to see the incompetent barman emerge again. Apparently he then told the barman about his bizarre experience while sitting there waiting, to which the barman responded casually, ‘Oh don’t worry about that. It’s the peanuts. They’re complimentary.’ Can you believe that?

THE COMIC STRIP
was a phenomenon. Peter Richardson was the force that drove it on, and he was – still is – a very talented, determined chap. By the time Jennifer and I joined, it was already thriving. I had never seen a show like it. A repertory of eight or so regular performers with guests each night. Most people on the ‘circuit’ at that time had done the endless rounds of pub gigs, and back then the burgeoning Comedy Store was the hub of it all. Also based in a Soho strip club, the Comedy Store was ruled by a gong and the idea was to perform five to ten minutes without being gonged off. Considering that a large portion of the audience was drunk and thought they were there to see a strip show, the gong provided a perfect opportunity for them to be unnecessarily cruel. Some acts were gonged off as they walked onstage, even before they opened their mouths. You would have hated it there, Dad, no gentle humour or meandering understatement could survive in that boozy, gladiatorial, competitive arena. It was loud, uncouth, extremely masculine and – consequently – strangely thrilling. Fatty and I were already safely ensconced at the Comic Strip, which was much calmer – no gong, a regular income – but we knew we had to have a go at the Comedy Store for the sake of our credibility. Very few women were performing back then, unsurprisingly. The ones that did were fairly tough with confrontational political material, like Jenny Lecoat, or very dirty (good dirty, I mean!), like Jenny
Eclair
, or poets like Pauline Melville. We didn’t fit into any of these categories. Our ‘material’, such as it was, was character-based and chatty. Two people talking about something, that was us. From the minute Fatty and I went onstage at the Comedy Store the very first time, oafish drunkards started shouting, ‘Show us your tits!’ I just couldn’t abide the rudeness, Dad. I switched into teacher mode, stepped completely out of the sketch we were attempting, and ordered them to sit down and be quiet. Oddly enough, it worked and we finished our sketch with no further interruptions. However, we
did
perform it at eight times the usual speed! Maybe it was genuinely better that way.

Life at the Comic Strip was altogether more genial, though, and we were under the watchful eye of Alexei as our MC. There we could write and experiment with new material. Fatty and I were a bit green at the outset, and we used to try to perform a new sketch each night. She would come to Parly where I was teaching and we’d take advantage of the studio space to work up new material. It took us a while to realise it was the audience that changed each night, so the material didn’t have to – in fact we could have a good few weeks to work on it and edit it. Doh!

Jen and I didn’t have a proper name for our act at first. We spent ages trying to come up with something vaguely amusing, for instance we seriously considered calling ourselves ‘Kitch n’ Tiles’ … Oh Lord. Luckily Lexei soon tired of our indecision and eventually one night, exasperated, he introduced us with: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome French and Saunders.’ I though it sounded a bit like a new brand of mustard, but it seems to have stuck.

Although we had joined the group late on, we very quickly felt part of it. It was like having six older brothers who made you laugh a lot, teased you mercilessly and played a bit rough. They all operated out of one big smelly dressing room and we had the little one next door, which we shared with occasional visiting girls. The Boulevard Theatre is in Walker’s Court in Soho, right at the heart of the red-light district. Every other building was an ‘adult’ shop or a strip joint. The Boulevard contained two theatres and a bar. One of the theatres was ours and the other was a strip club, which we passed through nightly to get to our dressing rooms. The building was owned by Paul Raymond, who was the king of Soho at the time. He often used to hang out in the bar and I clearly remember nervously asking him if he would second my and Fatty’s application form to get our equity cards. He did. Paul Raymond was our sponsor, so to speak. I loved that. I loved the strange mixture of comedy and erotica in that building. On some more surreal occasions, the audiences for both shows would be thrust together in the tiny bar during the intervals. Our lot would be young people in acres of new-romantic ruffles and leather, ladles of make-up, big hair and shoulder pads, and their lot were mainly Japanese besuited men who came over all bashful when they encountered our audience. Two entirely different groups united by their common determination to be entertained. Wherever they are, comedy clubs and strip clubs have virtually the same decor and the same ambience, or so it seems to me. They are usually dark red with a small stage area and an abiding atmosphere of intensity and alcohol. They are fuggy, edgy dens where anything can and might happen. One of the most powerful sensory memories I have of
the
Comic Strip was the smell. Our dressing room wasn’t so bad, or if it was, it was masked by a heady top note of hairspray, perfume and deodorant. The boys’ room was a rank, acrid, humming place. They used to sweat a lot with nerves, then sweat more onstage, then take off their stage outfits, hang them up on the floor and never wash them. I think they thought it was unlucky to do so, or something. They might have been able to wash their armpits in the sink in their dressing room, if the sink hadn’t been full of ice and lager cans. Lexei was probably the most fragrant of the smelly lot, till Ben Elton turned up as the job-sharing MC on nights Lexei didn’t do. Ben was more familiar with soap and always smelt peachy!

Jennifer and I recently returned to the Boulevard to do a gig to help launch some try-out nights for the BBC Comedy Department. I was delighted to see that very funny Miranda Hart was the MC for the night, but other than her, the line-up was, still, staunchly all-male. And the smell in the dressing room was exactly the same: eau de nervous comedian. Mmmm.

The Comic Strip tour in Australia in 1981 was fantastic. The day we travelled was just like being on a buzzy school trip. We all rejigged our seats on the plane so’s we could sit together and drink and laugh for most of the very long flight. The minute we arrived at the Oberoi Hotel in Adelaide, we checked in and agreed to meet five minutes later at the swimming pool. We were in a hotel! In Australia! It had a swimming pool! So much for the supposed cool disdain of young, alternative comedians. We raced down there in our swimmers and on a count of three, jumped right in with a ferocious splash, and had a shouty freestyle race just like a gang of six-year-olds. I remember that the
Pina
Bausch dance troupe were also staying there, and were relaxing on their loungers, watching us scream about. There they were, all lithe and brown and elegant and slinkily nonchalant. There we were, all overexcited and goofy and fat and white. And so,
so
British.

I have rarely felt so clearly defined by my nationality as on that visit to Oz. Of course, being a Brit you’re a constant joke target for the Aussies, and we had plenty of that. Australians are so full-on. It takes a bit of getting used to, but I found it really refreshing. They do, at least, like to
commit
to everything and rush at all aspects of life with a cranked-up, full thrust of brio. The energy at the festival was swirling and we enjoyed the attention our show was getting. Conversely I witnessed a couple of incidents that shocked me rigid. One such was when I took a cab. I was chatting to the driver, who seemed perfectly friendly. We pulled up at some lights, and found ourselves next to a slumped Aboriginal guy. He was obviously the worse for wear and I was worried that he might roll onto the road into the oncoming traffic. I asked the driver if we could get out and at least help him to the other side of the road. The driver yelled a definite no and told me I could catch something if I so much as touched him. He then proceeded to wind down his window, and shouted to the unfortunate man that he was a ‘dirty lazy rock ape’, and spat on him. A big snotty, throaty, gobby spit, right on the man’s bowed head. The lights changed and we sped off. I was speechless. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen. Then the driver tried to re-engage me in breezy chat, as if nothing had happened. I asked him to pull over and I got out and walked back to the hotel in a dazed state of shock. I had never before witnessed one human being relating to
another
in this despicable way, I didn’t know how to process my reaction other than feeling sick. I tried to talk about it to work out what had happened to make relations so bad. I found that people were reluctant to say much, or if they did, I was surprised by the general dislike for the indigenous population from folk I had previously regarded as pretty liberal and broad-minded. People I expected to be humanitarian and left-thinking. People in the arts! I quickly realised that this subject was a minefield, that I was ill-equipped to wander through it until I was better educated about it. I knew the history of relations between Aboriginal Australians and white Australians was tricky but I didn’t know just what a total mess it had become. People were embarrassed about it, and quite angry at my confusion, at my questions. This was evidently a big ol’ can o’ racist worms and I wasn’t about to enter into it until I knew more. Nearly three decades later, I’m still baffled. On reflection, that was my first revolting taste of racism, which has since reared up many times in my life. I didn’t know then that before too long I would be on the receiving end of it ...