Where Did It All Go Right? (15 page)

My dad could draw as a kid, but he’d never pursued it – too busy prioritising by playing football and cricket and, on the strike of his 16th birthday,
earning a living
. His ability withered away like an unwatered plant. And
here’s
where I join the talent lobby: it seems self-evident to me that nurture counts for far more than nature. The genetic
potential
to draw Officer Dibble might be there, but if you ignore it and go and do something less boring instead, it will shrivel on the vine. If I’d been discouraged from making endless comics called
Smasher’n’Gloop
, or starved of all that praise, I might never have progressed any further than copying Beetle Bailey. My immense artistic genius needed cultivating just like Picasso’s and Turner’s and Giles’s.

If you don’t believe me, here is a cautionary tale.

After leaving college in 1987 I fell in with a group of medical students through a mutual friend. It was clearly my way of subliminally putting off ‘leaving’ higher education. Why acclimatise to civilian life, I figured, when you can just attach yourself to someone else’s college and carry on drinking subsidised Fosters and going to house parties like nothing has happened? For most of my first year out of Chelsea, the one where I drew cartoons for money, I was a surrogate of St George’s Medical School in Tooting. I spent my evenings at a hospital through choice. I even joined an amateur theatre group which rehearsed and staged plays there.
³

As a general rule, I found that medical students, while admirably up for it (boozing, staying out, eating takeaway food)
were
‘of a type’. Mostly sons and daughters of doctors (more hereditary careers), they all seemed to have been to public school, and for all I knew the very same one. Quite unlike the middle-class bohemians I’d mixed with at art school, they displayed a superhuman, boorish self-confidence and behaved as if the world owed them a living. The girls seemed like they would throw a tantrum at any moment, and the boys were always minutes away from drinking a pint of their own vomit for a bet. Lots of Jeremys and Fionas.

The theatre group, however, tended to attract the aesthetes. Nigel Tunstall was not a natural-born doctor. He was a film buff, like me, a reader of novels, like me, and a wannabe writer, like me. We clicked instantly. We took over the St George’s Film Club and ran Mickey Rourke double bills for our own pleasure; we travelled to Hampstead’s Everyman cinema to watch
Slamdance
and
Gardens of Stone
and anything by Peter Greenaway; and when I started my first fanzine, Nigel agonised over a Brian De Palma think-piece for weeks on end, as if he had been commissioned by
Cahiers du Cinema
. We also clicked because he’d not been to public school and his dad wasn’t a doctor.

One weekend Nigel and I visited his parents in Bournemouth and it turned out to be a revelatory experience. At one stage during our stay, his dad, who worked for the Post Office, insisted on getting out Nigel’s drawings from when he was a kid, for my benefit. I hadn’t been aware that Nigel
did
any drawings when he was a kid, but here they were, kept – just like mine – for parental posterity in a suitcase. While Mr Tunstall looked on proudly we sifted through them. They were brilliant; the work of a real child prodigy. Not copied or derivative cartoons like mine but beautiful, detailed sketches, many of them drawn from life (as opposed to
Yogi and His Toy
) or simply from Nigel’s young imagination. I was knocked out.

But Mr Tunstall’s pride was tinged I felt with sadness. We may as well have been admiring the work of a child who’d died. Nigel’s natural ability had been curtailed by his parents. His talent was cut off by the early decision – theirs – for him to go into medicine. He hadn’t even been allowed to take art at O-level (well, what’s the point, and you need all the sciences). The drawing simply stopped, and Nigel was pushed down the academic route.

Just like my dad and many of that immediate post-war generation, Mr Tunstall had been denied the opportunity to go to university and he regretted it. But it seemed to me that he was taking out what he wrongly saw as his own failure on his only son by forcing him to pursue a respectable academic career when he could have done something creative.

It struck me then how lucky I had been.

You can’t blame parents for fucking up their kids. They may not mean to but they do. Perhaps that’s why I’m intent on not having any. I mean, what if I pushed my son into the arts when he really wanted to be an insurance man?

* * *

The great Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci told me that he used to be shy. He told me this when I interviewed him for the radio, by the way – he wasn’t round my house for a cup of tea and a natter. Anyway, as a shy young man in Rome, when he went out on the town with his mates, he would stand with his back to the wall clutching a glass of Scotch while everyone else danced. Many years later, his analyst told him that he wasn’t shy at all: on the contrary, by separating himself from the group the young Bertolucci was drawing attention to himself. He was in fact an exhibitionist!

Well, that’s Freud for you. Everything means the opposite. If you dream about a cat, it represents a dog. But it made me think about my own shyness as a child. I was a reluctant show-off, better at blending in than standing out, especially in ‘rotten old defence’ at football. But was I secretly attracting attention to myself, or is Bertolucci’s shrink trying it on? Pre-school I used to cry or hide if anyone I didn’t know came to the house – no chance of me taking sweets off a stranger; I required ID first – and I would never go to the shops by myself, not even the little newsagent at the top of Nan Mabel’s street. Perhaps I was seeking attention, not avoiding it.

Drawing pictures, especially cartoons, may seem like a quiet, introverted, solitary thing to do, but you always draw a crowd. I may not have been a born leader of men at school but I always had cartoons up my sleeve if I wanted to grab the limelight by illustrating a carol sheet or making a poster. Richard Griffin and I drew
cartoons
for 2p each at a primary school fete, surrounded on all sides by a constant stream of admirers – and paying customers (we raised £1.30 for the school according to my diary, which is well over 60 cartoons between us).

At middle school when exams became the only true yardstick of performance, as I’ve mentioned I found myself top of the class twice, in 1976 and 1978. But the latter was a Pyrrhic victory: it was a fix. One of the exam marks that led to me beating off stiff competition from Anita and Kim was for Classical Studies, a somewhat rarefied subject taught by our form teacher Mrs Dennison. It was Greek mythology, basically, Zeus and Poseidon and all that – a fiction subject, like RE. But because this was only middle school and these were not
proper
exams, you were awarded marks for illustrating the fiction subjects. This was actually very unfair on those to whom drawing did not come naturally, but there it is.

I drew some very fetching pictures for my Classical Studies exam that year. But here’s the rub: I also got part of a question about Narcissus
wrong
. And yet my final mark for Classical Studies came back as 100 out of 100. A perfect paper.

I had unwittingly compensated for my lack of knowledge (or basic recall) with decoration, and they’d let me get away with it! What kind of example is that? You blew the Narcissus story but you drew a really funny cartoon of him gazing at his reflection in the water so we’ll turn a blind eye.

I knew, and they knew, that it was a miscarriage of justice. But it taught me an important lesson about sleight of hand (and the corruption of the system). This drawing lark could get me places when I grew up, I thought. If not quite on to
Jim’ll Fix It
.

1.
All these comic still exist. They’re howlingly derivative but the effort I put into constantly starting new ones is impressive (even if it’s rare I actually completed one). Here is a definitive catalogue of my childhood, home-made comics with a selection of story titles for flavour:
Smash
(Crazy Cars, Stan the Modelling Man, Puffer);
Spook
(‘the scariest comic you’ve seen’);
Horror
(Hunchback, Squelch, Witchy);
Scare; Bingo
(earliest incarnation: Dad’s Army, Pet Pete, Fred);
Smasher’n’Gloop
(Barmy Army; Griffin’s Gang, From Dr Pecker to Mr Slide; Spiddo – ‘he loves paper to eat’);
Bingo
(second incarnation: Potty Pop Groups, Scotso, Raver Rabbit and Hippie Potamus, The Tomato Squirter, Apple – ‘Hi! I’m as big as a person’);
Bingo
(third version: Superbloke, The Land That Time’s Forgotten About, Freak Fever),
Target
(Action Man, Walter Margin, Teef, Bionic Reg),
Ace!
(Evil McWeevil, Closed University, Stupidstars);
The Kidz; Ferret’s Own; Smashed Hits
(more of a parody than a comic).

2.
The Saturday morning art classes, which were free, ran until March 1980 when they fell victim to education cuts. I made some good friends there, notably Neil Stuart and David Freak (real name, although I think he played up to it with his long, Phil Oakeyesque hair and uncompromising musical tastes), who in turn introduced me to the delights of the film society run up at Northampton College of Further Education (see
diary 1980
). The mind was forever broadened.

3.
Leading light among whom was Matthew Hall, later the household name Harry Hill. Matt – as I still know him – seemed to write all the productions on his old manual typewriter, and most of the annual revue, but always graciously stepped back from the juiciest parts. Under his auspices, we renamed the group Renaissance Comedy Associates and took a comic play to the Edinburgh Fringe in 1989,
President Kennedy’s Big Night Out
(which Matt and I wrote together).
The Times listed it
(‘silliness and bizarre logic make for an entertaining spoof’) though the
Scotsman
spoke of a ‘general malaise’.

six

Has It Got an Aspirin in It?

HOW I WISH
I’d been David Bowie. As a teenager he was punched in the eye at school by a kid wearing a large ring, and ended up in the London Eye Hospital. Undergoing a number of tricky operations on the sphincter muscles in his eye, he spent the next eight months laid up. During this period of enforced bed-rest he underwent a Damascene conversion. First of all, he improved his mind, reading American and European literature, and filling his head with music and the arts. But more crucially Bowie made the decision to reinvent himself. ‘I felt very, very puny as a human. I thought, “Fuck that, I want to be a Superman.”’
¹
The injury also made his eye go funny-lookin’, a future visual trademark in his career as a pop alien.

What have I got to match that? The occasional chill.

By far the most significant ailment of my childhood was a chill. This meant no swimming at Kingsthorpe on a Saturday or, if I was
lucky
enough to get one in the week, a day off school. Barely enough time to read the Scoop catalogue, let along undergo a Damascene conversion.

I’d love to tell you I was a sickly, asthmatic child like, say, Martin Scorsese, and that it shaped me in later life, as it did him. (‘He was so allergic to animals he was taking his life in his hands if he petted a dog,’ wrote Peter Biskind of the young Scorcese.) But I was neither sickly nor asthmatic. Malady, bed-rest and hospital charts did not define me like some of my most admired artists – Dennis Potter had psoriasis; Ian Dury, polio; Frank McCourt, tuberculosis; Peter Fonda, a suspected tapeworm; David Bowie, his gammy eye. Christ, even Des O’Connor had rickets. No, I’m afraid my childhood was untroubled by dramatic injury or life-threatening illness. I was fine, thanks.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. A chill was better than no complaint at all. At least it had something of the exotic about it, like frostbite or trench foot. We were much more likely to get a chill than, say, a common cold. Common? Ha! Not in our house. Mum was obsessed with chills, the getting of them and the dealing with them; chills were her life. If any of us felt the slightest bit ‘off’ – as she called it – a diagnostic hand would be applied to our foreheads and she would tell us we had a chill. I was never sure if you caught one, or just developed one.

Check out this definitive diary entry for 20 July 1976, while we were on holiday in Wales:

We went to Llanbedrog for the day. I felt a bit off. Mum says I have a chill.

For years afterwards I assumed Mum had made the whole thing up. A bit like her signature diagnosis of a sore arm or leg: ‘You probably slept on it funny.’ I have never met anyone in my life who ever had a chill, unless from eating ice cream too fast or seeing a ghost. And I doubt John Travolta really had one in
Grease
– I mean, he would never have been allowed to go to that fair would he? Which is why I was so thrilled when I recently found the following definition in no less than the Royal Society of Medicine’s
Health Encyclopaedia
:

CHILL
A sudden short fever causing shivering (rigor) and a feeling of coldness. This may be caused by any acute infection, not necessarily of the respiratory tract.

I’m in the book. There
is
such a thing as a chill, and it’s ‘sudden’, ‘short’ and ‘acute’, which explains why it was only ever worth one day off. Always trust your mum. After all, might it
not
be because you slept on it funny?
²

Chills had their bad side too, no matter how short and sudden they were. You felt feverish and cold for a start, and there was all that rigor – and worse, you were in for a soluble aspirin, sometimes two. Like all good parents, Mum and Dad had proprietary medicines and creams for all ills stashed away: Junior Disprin, Vicks VapoRub, Betnovate, Savlon, Bonjela, Mu-cron, Dramamine and – eek! – Joy Rides. (More on those evil little pink bastards anon.)