Drawn Out

by Tom Scott

  A number of prominent academics, writers, artists, some judges and a few MPs wrote letters to the editor expressing alarm and dismay at my sacking. Sam Hunt wrote saying he would never submit another poem. Gary McCormick said the Listener never published any of his poems anyway, but from now on they wouldn’t even get the chance to reject him, as he was boycotting them. The tipping point undoubtedly was Christchurch satirist A.K. Grant’s resignation in solidarity with me. I knew how much Allan’s weekly column meant to him, both emotionally and financially, so I rang to thank him and urged him to change his mind. He got quite cross with me and wouldn’t have a bar of it. The Listener concluded they could lose one humourist, but not two, so with Gordon Campbell playing the Henry Kissinger role, feelers were sent out to see if I would return. I did, on better terms and conditions than before. It was all due to Allan’s principled courage.

  When you get to a certain age you suffer from the conceit that there are no new flavours in the world—only variations and combinations on the old ones. One of the joys of my first trip to Asia in 1975 was coming down to breakfast in my Bangkok hotel and being presented with a bowl of fresh fruit I had never seen before—mango, papaya, lychees and langsat—and being gobsmacked by the astonishing new tastes.

  I had much the same sense of discovery when I stumbled upon the work of A.K. Grant in the late 1960s. I was sitting in the student cafe at Massey University when a friend approached with a copy of the Canterbury student newspaper Canta and insisted on reading aloud from an article printed on the inside of the back cover. It was a piece on the Otago gold-rush.

  Gold was one of New Zealand’s main exports during the latter half of the century, especially after the advent of refrigerated shipping enabled it to be transported to England without going bad in the tropics. Treasury and the Bank of England were fulsome in their praise of the first consignment to arrive at Threadneedle Street though their enthusiasm was moderated slightly by the discovery of a dead rat in one of the bars …

  I was blown away. As a fledgling comic myself, it was both an exhilarating and a painful moment. These were jokes that didn’t come from England or America. They were homegrown and they were brilliant. I memorised the writer’s name. I knew instinctively he was a force to be reckoned with. I cut out all his articles and read them many times, always with the same mixture of mirth and envy.

  He disappeared from view for several years, and the next I heard or saw of Allan was when I switched on the television one night and caught a dismal panel game featuring a plump, tweedy man introduced as A.K. Grant. I leaned forward keenly and was shattered to discover he was wearing a cravat. Satire and cravats didn’t go together, I thought, or perhaps they did and that depressed me. He looked exactly like what he was at the time—a respectable Christchurch lawyer and drawing-room wit—nothing at all like the man I had imagined responsible for the blazing invention I kept in a folder.

  I actually made it onto the Listener a few years ahead of Allan, an accident of history despite him being my senior by seven years. It gave me the temporary advantage of being the magazine’s elder statesman of comedy. When we finally met in person I was relieved to see he was wearing an open-necked shirt and a battered brown leather jacket. He was short, rotund and jolly—Sancho Panza to the tall, slim, solemn Roger Hall’s Don Quixote, who came in with him. After a polite exchange, the three of us retired to a bar. Roger had to depart early. Left on our own, Allan and I discovered we enjoyed each other’s company enormously through the simple expedient of laughing uproariously at each other’s jokes. He was booked on a late flight back to Christchurch but I persuaded him to ring his wife Liz and explain he was coming up to my home to meet my second wife, Helen. He thought her adorable, and she found him charming as well. That night, long after Helen had retired, we talked over a bottle of whisky about comedy writing and our favourite comedians.

  Comedy writing is a peculiar business. The intention is simple enough, but the task itself is daunting: triggering mirth. Laughter is one of the most complex and singular of all human responses, second only to orgasm. If you have just made love to a beautiful woman, given it your best shot so to speak, and she laughs in your face, this is still a considerable achievement in itself. When a sad movie fails to make you burst into tears you don’t feel the same sense of betrayal as when a comedy movie fails to make you laugh. Allan’s betrayal rate in his columns was one of the lowest in the game. I never ceased to admire his craft, his invention, his scholarship, his dogged Christchurch integrity and his dancing wit. His collection of pieces The Bedside Grant loses nothing in comparison with the writing of comic giants of yesteryear such as Jerome K. Jerome, P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Alan Coren, and more latterly, Woody Allen, Clive James, P.J. O’Rourke and David Sedaris. He was that good.

  I am not alone in thinking this. The celebrated English wit, comedy scriptwriter, and radio and television personality Frank Muir happened across Allan’s The Day of The Possum, in which he describes a hideous possum-skinning competition first in the tone-perfect prose style of Raymond Chandler, then Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Norman Mailer, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. It is brilliantly funny even if you are not familiar with the writers being parodied. Muir was so impressed he immediately included it in a tome he was compiling, The Oxford Book of Comic Prose. This article should be a permanent part of the English curriculum and taught in schools.

  I treasure one piece in particular of Allan’s because it captured perfectly the excruciating dilemma I faced every Monday—how to piece together another thousand words in some sort of order that made sense and was hopefully amusing. Allan channelled this familiar agony through a vicar wrestling with writing a sermon:

  From the window of my study I can see a clump of tall pine trees. They grow in a corner of the local golf course, and magpies nest in them at nesting time. The other day I watched as a solitary golfer lined up a shot near the trees. Suddenly a magpie swooped down out of the trees and flew past the golfer’s ear, startling him and disturbing his concentration.

  Angrily he waved his club at the magpie, just as you or I might have done. Then he concentrated on his shot again. And back came the magpie soaring past the golfer’s other ear. Absorbed, I watched the struggle between golfer and magpie, until it was time for me to attend to other duties. But as I went about these duties, my mind kept going back to the golfer and the magpie. Because, when you think about it, every one of us is either a golfer or a magpie.

  Some of us concentrate on the daily tasks at hand, oblivious of all other considerations except the desperate need to improve our performance. Such are the golfers of this life. Others of us soar aloft on wings of imagination, and then attack people. Those are the magpies of this world.

  And many of us, whether golfers or magpies, are unaware that there is Someone watching us, just as the golfer and the magpie were unaware of me, in my study, watching them, as I scrabbled round desperately for a laboured analogy with which to illustrate my Faith for Today …

  ALLAN DESERVES TO BE AS celebrated and honoured today as Janet Frame, Jane Campion, Roger Hall, Billy T. James and John Clarke, yet he is largely forgotten. It is partly because there were never any cameras around to capture him at his anarchic, freewheeling, unguarded best.

  I take some pride in encouraging him to step out of the shadows and finally become a solo comic performer. It was at a fundraising event for Amnesty International, based on the English model of Comic Relief, held in Wellington’s lovely Muppet Theatre, the Opera House. I organised it with Ian Fraser, I designed the poster, was one of the MCs alongside Ian, and I wrote the ensemble sketch with Allan that closed the show. But my single most important contribution was persuading Allan to put his white shirt on back to front and walk out into the spotlight and simply read his ‘Faith for Today’ sermon.

  He stepped out nervously and his awkwardness became a hysterical component of the performance. Two paragraphs in and the audience was roaring with laughter. He was one of th
e highlights of the night. He came off stage and hugged me in the wings, exclaiming he wanted to walk back on and do it again.

  Dave Dobbyn was also on the bill. Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, he sang ‘Loyal’ for the first time in public. It was a magical moment. My son Samuel Flynn Scott and Lukasz Buda (stalwarts of The Phoenix Foundation) produced Dave’s 2016 album Harmony House, which is fantastic. I wonder if Dave remembers being in the same show with five-year-old Sam?

  Helen had made a superb, very realistic, slightly larger than life-size papier-mâché mask of Muldoon. We put it on Sam, dressed him in a jacket with sleeves hitting the floor and got him to walk on stage while David McPhail, famous for his Muldoon impersonation, stood at a microphone in the wings doing the Prime Minister’s mirthless cackle. Sam stood rooted to the spot when the applause finished and I had to dash out and gently lead him off, which prompted David to ad-lib, ‘Oh no, Mr Scott! Security! Security!’—much the same words Muldoon had used when he had me escorted from his post-cabinet press conference. ‘Take your hands off me! Don’t touch me, Mr Scott! Don’t touch me!’ The crowd went wild.

  Allan and I wrote a television sitcom together, the critically panned Press for Service. Noam Pitlik, the American actor and director who won an Emmy for Outstanding Direction for the hugely successful and ground-breaking sitcom series Barney Miller, was brought out to New Zealand by the BCNZ to conduct a workshop on how to make television comedy in 1988. It was held out at Avalon Studios. Allan and I were ‘Exhibit A’ in the ‘what not to do’ category. I attended on my own, with a heavy heart. Big, burly, witty and charismatic, Noam announced that he was going to play three sitcom episodes back-to-back—Barney Miller and our own Gliding On, both of which were deemed successful, and Press for Service, which wasn’t. At the rear of the room I sank low in my chair.

  In the event, judging by the laughter, what Allan and I wrote more than held its own. Afterwards, Noam made a beeline for me and shook my hand.

  ‘I don’t know why they told me that yours stank. It’s pretty darn good. You’re a funny guy.’ We hung out during the rest of his visit. He and his gorgeous wife, Susan, fell in love with New Zealand and for a time lived in Auckland and worked here briefly. When my relationship with Helen foundered for the first time they took me on holiday with them to Taupō. It rained a lot, which made it miserable enough in the sea-grass-matting lodge, and with my self-pity needle on full I made it even worse. I think all three of us were ready to slit our wrists by the end but they were far too gracious to let on. I caught up with them whenever I went to Los Angeles. It was a sad day for me when Noam died in 1999.

  Allan and I also wrote the first draft of a screenplay together called Happy Families for Sam Pillsbury, now a vintner making gold-medal-winning Grenache and Shiraz wines in Arizona, but back then a whirling, twirling Energizer Bunny director and producer responsible for the provincial Gothic masterpiece The Scarecrow, still one of my favourite Kiwi films. Sam rented a bach for us at Waikanae Beach right on the sands, and with Allan thrashing away at the keyboard of an electronic typewriter, in less than a week we bashed out a screenplay that we at least thought was fantastic.

  Sam drove down and took us out to a fancy restaurant for a celebratory lunch, ordering a bottle of their finest Chardonnay—the first Chardonnay I had ever tasted, big and buttery. While Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Gris have roared in and out of fashion I have remained steadfastly besotted with this grape and this particular style ever since.

  I knew that our script had a vulgar energy, but I didn’t know how vulgar others would find it until some months later when I attended drinks at the Film Commission and a woman who assessed scripts for them, Helene Wong (now a film critic on the Listener), approached and asked if I was Tom Scott. I had just worked all through the night on a long article for the Auckland Star and was too bone-weary to appreciate how frosty and disapproving she was, otherwise I would have denied it, or at least braced myself for what was coming. When I confirmed that I was, she launched into a blunt and bruising critique that left me winded. She had just read the script that Allan and I wrote together. I can’t recall her exact words but what I took from the terse exchange was that she thought the screenplay was sexist and disgusting and that I should be ashamed of myself. It’s a bit late now, but if it helps I feel ashamed of myself on a fairly regular basis. My guess is that one of Allan’s great lines did the damage. He gleefully wrote that there was no such thing as premature ejaculation—only delayed orgasm, and that the sooner women sought professional help for this surprisingly common condition the better. Most men punch the air at this line, while women roll their eyes.

  I LOVED ALLAN. IT WAS heartbreaking for everyone who cared about him watching him descend ever deeper into alcoholism. He claimed he drank because he woke up every morning feeling depressed. I told him he woke up every morning hungover. The Japanese have a proverb—the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man. This was never more true than in Allan’s case. He loved his wife and daughters beyond measure, but this love was no match for his addiction.

  When his marriage folded, he moved into a dark, cramped, soulless flat in a block of apartments near Hagley Park. Gary McCormick, who is a very kind man beneath his sometimes testy alpha-male persona, flew back and forth to Christchurch solely to take Allan out to dinner and get food into him. Allan, of course, would only agree to a restaurant with a liquor licence.

  Whenever he stayed with Averil and me, he would head upstairs with a full glass of red wine and a cheerful cry of, ‘Goodnight, dear boy.’ I had a 9 a.m. deadline for my Evening Post cartoons back then, so I was an early riser and more often than not I would find him in the front room sitting contentedly in the low morning sun reading a novel with a freshly opened bottle of wine and a full glass on the coffee table in front of him. If he’d already been to the lavatory the bathroom was out of bounds for days. I would joke with him that he must have eaten a badger that was off. It was proof, if any were needed, that his liver was feeling the strain.

  He was briefly engaged to Jane, a lovely, pretty, generously proportioned woman who favoured riotously coloured kaftans. It was Allan himself who told me about introducing Jane to his friends in the Woolston Working Men’s Club. As he was wont to do, Allan theatrically rotated his left arm about like a tarmac marshal guiding a taxiing plane into docking position. ‘I present to you this dear woman! This divine creature is my fiancé!’ There was a cough on Allan’s right. It was Jane. ‘I’m over here, Allan. That is a pokie machine …’

  After that it was pretty much all over bar the shouting, which he still insisted on doing at his second home, The Brewers Arms in Merivale. He rang me in a state of considerable excitement one morning. A buxom barmaid had invited him to share her bedchamber the night before. He remembered lots of amorous grappling but for the life of him he couldn’t recall if penetration had occurred. It would mean a lot to him if it had. Should he ask her for confirmation of consummation? I said the minimum compliment you can pay any woman who has granted you the gift of her body is to remember this fact. Under no circumstances was he to ask her. Two days later I got another call, this time wistful, rueful and tinged with regret. ‘I should have listened to you, old boy. She’s not talking to me now.’

  It was similar to a call my son Shaun made one night. He asked me to hand the phone to Averil, which he always did when affairs of the heart were involved.

  ‘What’s the rule about sleeping with your best mate’s girlfriend, who you’ve always fancied, after they have split up? How long do you have to wait? When is it acceptable?’ There was a palpable urgency in his voice.

  ‘Just a second,’ said Averil dryly. ‘I’ll consult the manual. Here it is. Never. Never do that.’

  There was a pregnant silence, then, ‘Bugger! My question was retrospective in nature.’

  IN LATE MARCH 2000, ALLAN was admitted to Christchurch Hospital. I flew down the moment I heard. I wasn’t prepared for
what I found. It was a pitiful, shocking sight. His beard was long and clotted, his face sallow, his plump cheeks now hollow, he had a mad, terrified stare and the whites of his eyes were daffodil yellow. He couldn’t talk so I prattled on. I would come back next week with a CD player, headphones and his favourite Bob Dylan bootleg compilations. When it was time to leave I leaned over to hug him. It wasn’t easy. He smelled dreadful, like he was already decomposing. Holding my breath, I kissed his stubbly cheek. His eyes focused properly for the first time and he finally spoke a few words, hissing in my ear, ‘Bring a bottle of vodka!’

  Out in the corridor I passed a senior nurse on her way into his room.

  ‘He’s dying, isn’t he?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I cannot divulge such information.’ Back in Wellington I rang Trevor Grice, with whom I had written The Great Brain Robbery, a book warning teenagers about the dangers of drug and alcohol use—the book that prompted Allan to comment sadly when it was published, ‘I’m afraid, dear boy, you’ve really fallen off your perch here.’ When I told Trevor about Allan’s yellow eyes, he didn’t muck round. ‘His liver’s rooted. He’s fucked.’

  Three weeks later Allan was dead. When I rang my daughter Rosie in Melbourne she was devastated for me. ‘Oh, Dad, he was your kindest friend …’

  The packed, standing-room-only memorial service was held in a large chapel and crematorium complex on the outskirts of the city. After Allan’s immediate family had spoken, David McPhail came forward. Close to tears, he barely made it through his tender and generous eulogy. Next up was Gary McCormick. Utterly incapacitated by grief, he couldn’t finish and returned to his seat beside me, racked with sobs.