by Lenny Henry
ENTER CHRIS TARRANT
In the meantime, unbeknownst to me Frank Carson had encouraged Chris Tarrant, the producer and lead presenter of the rambunctious Saturday-morning kids’ show Tiswas, to come and see me in the Minstrels’ show. I had a feeling that the Black and White Minstrels would most definitely not be Tarrant’s bag, but I was glad he was coming and just hoped he’d be impressed by my bits. Then, disaster!
Keith Harris had bronchitis and no voice, which meant that Orville and Cuddles couldn’t talk either! So Keith was out of the show, and I was designated to be compère for the night. Fortunately, I now had enough material to link the show together on my own, without using anyone else’s jokes. Tarrant was in the house, so I wanted to do my best. Tiswas had been running since 1974 and was gaining a reputation for anarchy and reckless behaviour, live and direct on your TV set every Saturday morning. Frank had recommended me for the show, and I didn’t want to let him down.
The night of the show, sans Keith. I am the host and, in a hastily rehearsed sequence, I’m escorted down some shiny stairs by the beautiful, sky-high, sequinned and befeathered Television Toppers. As I get to the stage, I slip and split my trousers. I get up immediately and attempt to regain my dignity by doing some impromptu crowd work, messing around with the front row, and eventually leave the stage with my hands covering the offending rip in my pants. I think I can see a blond hulk wetting himself in the audience.
I come back and do the rest of my pieces, and then the show is over. Afterwards Tarrant doesn’t even come backstage to say hello. I’m thinking, ‘Useless. He didn’t like it.’
I spend most of the next week moaning about this to Frank Carson whenever I see him. I call Tarrant as many names under the sun as I can conjure from the furthest reaches of my nasty mind. None of them do justice to the way I’m feeling. Then, one fateful evening, as I arrive at the stage door of the Britannia Pier, Great Yarmouth, the stage doorman gives me an envelope. It contains a handwritten letter from Chris Tarrant:
Dear Len
Would you like to pop down to ATV studios when Tiswas is back on the air and have a look at what we’re doing down there?
All the best, C.T.
And a drawing of a fish.
Great news! It certainly gave me the energy and the impetus to plough through to the end of the summer season. I’d also begun discussions with BBC Midlands and Don Maclean about a sketch show called The Cheapest Show on the Telly, so things were looking good. It would be screened only in the Midlands, mind, but at least I had work.
Don lived in the posh part of Brum, a place called Solihull. We would meet at his house to discuss what we might do in the show. I wasn’t sure about the title – didn’t that sound like we were doing rubbish telly? Don was adamant that there would be no fancy sets or costumes. It would be very much a no-frills-type show: very few costumes, even fewer sets. TV at its most basic.
There’d be an opening double-act bit that Don and I would do, then lots of sketches. Don had a working relationship with a guy called Gid Taylor, who was a folkie songwriter who helped us with parodies of all kinds. I did a parody of John Travolta’s solo number ‘Sandy’ from Grease:
Stranded in the car park
Feelin’ such a berk
What will they say
Monday at work …
We did two series of The Cheapest Show on the Telly, and my favourite part of it all was the time spent with my mentor Don. He really pushed me on every episode, helped me to think about the material we were being given. We also worked together on a BBC1 Saturday-night summer variety show called Seaside Special, and it was a hoot. But I was wary of people thinking that we were a double act. I knew that in my heart of hearts I was a single act. However rubbish I was at this stage (‘great for 5 minutes but becomes unspooled after 25’ – Dudley Herald), I valued the freedom of working on my own.
But whatever my innermost feelings about The Cheapest Show, it was a stepping stone to the next stage of my life. I jumped.
8
Tiswas
TODAY IS SATURDAY – WATCH AND SUFFER!
I responded to Chris Tarrant’s invitation to go down and watch an episode of Tiswas go out live. It was a chaotic mess, and I loved it. He hired me, which would lead to a massive, unforeseen change in my career.
I started work on the show at the end of 1978. I was as rough as a wolverine’s scabby arse, standing there trying to repeat my New Faces success in a format that was less traditional, less cabaret, less organised than mainstream telly. I was learning, whenever Tarrant could bear to have me on again, that a chaotic, anarchic Saturday-morning show was not the place to get up and do a short structured set. They wanted more than that. They wanted you to contribute throughout, not just perform one spot and disappear.
So that was me on Tiswas, thinking I was doing OK, but then watching John Gorman playing wild and anarchic characters such as Smello (who would release stink bombs when making an entrance), the irretrievably Scouse Masked Poet and PC Plod the thick copper, dropping in, getting a laugh and disappearing, then popping up again as a different character.
Tarrant would tell me off when he thought I hadn’t been funny, which was often. I would get really upset, but he always made it up to me by taking me out for lunch the day before the show. He would plough through an enormous plate of moules marinière, accompanied by a bottle of good red wine, and go through the previous week’s show with me, telling me what worked and what didn’t. I would listen to him week after week. This was valuable feedback.
I loved watching Chris and his co-presenter Sally James at the desk. They made live television look so easy. Kids would be everywhere, and Chris would leave the desk and run across the studio floor to pick up a bucket of ice-cold water and hurl it at some students trapped in a cage; then he’d reach up and pull on a lever, and they’d be well and truly gunged by a mixture of shaving foam, water and vegetable dye. He’d then run back to the desk and resume his position, saying, ‘Well, there you are! Marvellous!’ Or, ‘This is the stuff, this is what they want. Never mind the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop with Noel Edmonds, that smoothie with his popinjay beard and simpering voice. We don’t want that, we want this!’ – and he’d get up and throw more buckets of water at the trapped innocents.
I spent more time laughing on Tiswas than on any other show. The rest of them had been on the programme since 1974, so by 1978 there was a real sense that the juggernaut was on the road and pretty much unstoppable. The viewing figures were very good by comparison to our direct competition, the BBC’s Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. But the devil was in the detail. Tiswas’s audience was different to Noel Edmonds’s: we were told that 51 per cent of our audience was over eighteen. The people that wrote to the show asking to be in the cage weren’t little kids, they were firefighters and doctors and nurses and students and teachers and mechanics and Sunday-football players. Hell’s Angels would write asking for one of Sally’s garter belts.
Tarrant attracted folk club-type comics like Max Boyce and Jasper Carrott. They came on the show and got bucketed good and proper, but also became honorary team members. Tarrant and John Gorman were invited to appear at the closing ceremony of an Eisteddfod in Cardiff, where they appeared on the same bill as Boyce and a Welsh male voice choir. As the choir began to sing ‘Land of My Fathers’, there was uproar as the Phantom Flan Flinger invaded proceedings and, with the help of Flanderella and the Baby Bucket Bunger, began to systematically take the choir apart with foamy custard pies and buckets of water. Boyce, plastered in gunge, just kept repeating, ‘Never in the annals of history have we seen anything like this, boyo. Never …’
Jasper Carrott bestowed the Dying Fly on the show. This was a routine whereby members of the Tiswas fan club would lie on their backs and kick their arms and legs in time to the music. Kids were getting into trouble by doing this routine near railway lines and on dual carriageways. We eventually stopped this madness as people were getting upset with us.
After th
e first two series, something released in me. Tarrant’s guidance had begun to sink in, and I started to think properly about what I could do every week on the show. Everyone on the production team seemed to want me to succeed, but no one tried to push me into doing something I didn’t want to do, and I really appreciated that.
It would take me at least another eighteen months to really find my feet. Fairly early on we had discovered that my idiosyncratic impression of the ITN reporter Trevor McDonald (or McDonut, as we called him) was really handy. I could pop up anywhere and do a series of newsflashes (written by Graham Deykin, Howard Imber or David McKellar), which would get a laugh, and then I’d be drenched with ice-cold water. Tarrant would throw the buckets himself and took great pleasure in hurling them as aggressively as he could.
There was a whole subculture around the Tiswas posse. They were party people, so when the show ended at 12.30 p.m., we’d all go to the bar for a post-mortem, which usually ended up with all of us (apart from Sal) getting very drunk and laughing a lot. There was a lot of pitching for the next week’s show. I remember comedian Norman Collier (a fellow Tiswas aficionado) crawling on his hands and knees, trying to explain that he was a deep-sea diver who couldn’t follow a map. It never got on the show, but we laughed our heads off in the bar while he was improvising it. Tarrant loved Frank Carson’s bizarre turns on the show. The recurring idea was that Frank was always trying to get on the show to promote whatever he was doing at the time. He’d come on in disguise and pretend to be a reporter or a Mystic Meg-type character, and Tarrant, mid-routine, would always sniff out his true identity: ‘Hang on, I recognise that reddened bulbous nose, those rotting stump teeth! That ridiculous accent! You’re not a respected reporter. I put it to you that you are Frank Carson! Get out!!’ Sometimes he’d start hitting Frank and calling him names. It was nearly always a major-league hoot. Later, they’d go to a really rough pub called The Gary Owen, which served food and drinks way, way into the night, and crack gags and laugh for hours. I only ever did that once or twice – those guys could really drink. I was a lightweight and couldn’t keep up.
But the momentum of the show was unstoppable. It seemed that whatever happened on the show on a Saturday morning became ‘water cooler’ chat the following Monday morning. One week Sally James is being sawn in half by a magician. John Gorman mutters, ‘I bet I get the half that eats,’ and the whole studio collapses with laughter. Bernard Manning steps on a ‘speak your weight’ machine, and the thing explodes, bleating in a robotic, Dalek-style voice, ‘One. At. A. Time. Please!’ Phil Collins from Genesis stands in a plant pot, as I, dressed as David Bellamy, talk about ‘Gwoing pwog wock plants using vawious types of manure to encouwage gwowth.’
Loads of people made guest appearances: Michael Palin and Terry Jones, Jim Davidson, Status Quo, Annie Lennox, Paul McCartney and Wings, Motörhead, Billy Idol, the Pretenders … There was something of the zeitgeist about the show. We didn’t really understand why it had become this televisual force to be reckoned with, but clearly it demanded our full attention and hard work. So we pushed ourselves. Tarrant certainly felt that there was more potential to this live anarchy lark than he had at first thought. As my confidence grew and I met other writers and creators, I started to suggest people who could work on the show. More than thirty shows a year was a lot when you considered that Chris was responsible for each one. He relied on us to come up with our own bits and pieces to sprinkle throughout. So we did.
Although Tarrant was a bit of a tyrant, I think the process used in creating the show, with us chipping in, was what made it so successful. Everyone had ideas, which we were encouraged to pitch every week. There wasn’t a set format, apart from a very rough template that Chris worked from:
Pre-titles
Titles
Today’s menu
Smello interrupts
Menu continues
Frank Spencer in balcony interrupt
Sally James link to:
Pop video
First commercial break
It would continue like that for two and a half hours.
Chris produced this show, with the help of a diligent and hard-working team, from 1974 through till 1982. Later, in the 1990s, Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast would churn out five shows a week on a year-round basis (as one of its hosts, Johnny Vaughan, pointed out to me, ‘You guys had it easy’), but at the time we felt like we were the hardest-working team in television.
There was still the ever-present vibe of dissatisfaction. What the hell was I still doing in The Black and White Minstrel Show? Nobody talked about it at the Tiswas offices, but I could tell they pitied me. Tiswas was brilliant, as far as I was concerned; it was a release for me and I threw myself into it wholeheartedly. My favourite times on the show are the ones you’d imagine, such as when a tiny child called Matthew Butler wore a rabbit suit and sang ‘Bright Eyes’ from Watership Down. The first time I saw this little boy trying to sing in tune and failing, I laughed so hard my eyeballs nearly fell out. I also loved it when the entire team dressed as rabbits to sing along and dance to Chas and Dave performing their hit ‘Rabbit’.
When I was working in panto up north at the Civic Hall in Middleton, Chris and John Gorman showed up to support their fellow Tiswas colleague. It was great to have them in the audience cheering me on as I was doing Tiswas-related material. I did an Algernon Winston Churchill (etc.) Razamatazz routine with the pantomime cow. At just the right moment, I accidentally on purpose threw a tiny amount of water onto the front row, splattering Tarrant and Gorman as they sat there. I saw Tarrant’s eyebrows arch upwards – this was WAR! He disappeared.
My routine continued, but then suddenly I couldn’t see anything because I was drenched. The musicians were running away because the organ, drums and electrical equipment had begun fizzing. Thanks to Tarrant, it was all completely sodden, a major fire hazard.
I ran off and grabbed another bucket. Soon more of the front row were soaked. Gorman went off somewhere, and next minute he was on stage, upending a bucket on my head.
The audience were delighted that the two hairy-arsed blokes from Tiswas were creating havoc. What had been quite a conventional afternoon of genteel pantomime fun had become complete and utter ANARCHY! Needless to say, I was the one that got well and truly bollocked. I was determined to get my revenge, but Tarrant and Gorman had snuck out before the finale.
Even though I wasn’t particularly experienced at pantomime, I did learn new skills every time I performed. The audience, full of under-tens, may still have filled me with dread, but at least I had some experience of how to cope with that. My advice – RUN!
Who Am I #15
This is a press pic of me looking bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready for action. I’m nineteen and I’ve got a sort of Afro that’s growing upwards rather than outwards, but I’m also relaxed and smiling – and it seems like a real smile. What’s interesting is the unstructured, ungroomed air about the picture. If you were designing this shot for some campaign, you might have pressed the shirt and jeans and combed, or at least trimmed, my hair. I look like I’m ready to take on the entire universe … but I get a sense that at the time I wasn’t aware of the cannonball that was coming my way. (Getty)
THE REAL TREVOR MCDONUT
A huge, seminal moment for me on Tiswas was when Trevor McDonald interrupted one of my comedy bits as a big surprise. I was mid-joke:
Owing to severe cutbacks at the BBC the children’s programmes Crackerjack, Wacky Races and Jackanory are to be amalgamated. The new show is to be called Crackerwackyjackernackernory.
I’m almost at the punchline when I feel a tap on my shoulder. Tarrant’s shaggy visage is an inch away from my face, and he’s grinning, full of mischief. I look just past him and see Trevor Mc-Feckin’-Donald smiling at me. He improvs some banter, along the lines of ‘You’ve taken my job,’ and ‘Move over and let the real thing have a go.’ It takes me a second to get my bearings. When I see him properly, I start saying, ‘Hello,
Daddy. And how is Mummy coming along?’ – the first thing that enters my mind, obviously. I’m in the presence of a legend, and I’m talking utter bollocks. He sits in my place, and I roar with laughter when I read on the monitor the caption that appears beneath his image: ‘The Real Trevor McDonut’.
Trevor has made further appearances on shows I’ve been involved with. He always says yes and has become a good friend and colleague in subsequent years.
THE TISWAS EPIPHANY
My big epiphany regarding Tiswas came during my second Blackpool season in 1980, this time with Cannon and Ball. I was freaking because I knew the new series of Tiswas was coming up in the autumn, and my brain was wrecked. What new material did I have for the series? I had literally nothin’, zilch, zip, nichts. Luckily, I’d been hanging out with David McKellar, Cannon and Ball’s writer on their LWT show. McKellar was Oxbridge, lived in Brighton and was a Monty Python fan. He had shoulder-length hair, wore sunglasses all the time and, more importantly, was incredibly enthusiastic. He enjoyed working with Tommy and Bob, but he could also sniff out a main chance when it was looking him in the eye. He saw that I was seeking to make a change to my set-up at Tiswas and offered to help. He identified that the ‘churn’ aspect of the programme was a killer for a comic like me. What I needed were repeatable characters who did the same thing every week – just with different material.
I wanted to play a Rastafarian character called Algernon Winston Spencer Churchill Gladstone Disraeli Pitt the Elder, the Younger. There was a record out by a singer named Errol Dunkley called ‘OK Fred’, so Algernon’s catchphrase was: ‘Oooooooooooooookaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa