Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

  A week after the news, and just before her funeral, I sat at my desk as I had often done over the years and tried once again to see if I could find her online. I typed in her name. In the blink of an eye I got 19,000 results. I looked through the first few pages, only to find the same out-of-date references and articles. Nothing I could have used to connect with her. I’d tried. I’d tried before – I’d sent emails into the ether – and nothing.

  And then, halfway down the page, I saw it. Her Twitter account. She’d had a Twitter account. I clicked on it and up popped the face of my beautiful larger-than-life friend – head thrown back, mid-roar, as always. I could still hear that husky laugh in my ears. And then I saw, underneath her photo, two words:

  FOLLOWS YOU

  If I think about it too much, I cry. I cry because after all those years of silence she was one simple click away. She was only ever and always one click away.

  I owe you, you infuriating, brilliant Caerphilly nightmare. I owe you always. Because if you gave me my first gig, then you also gave me the greatest gift that came with it:

  Melanie Claire Sophie Giedroyc.

  Melanie

  I met Mel at that first open spot gig in the October of 1988. I had been at college less than a week. Here are a few basic things you need to know about her:

  She is two years older than me.

  Actually, that’s it. That’s all you need to know.

  So where were we? Ah yes.

  ‘DO IT,’ said Shayla, when I told her I might, at some point, want to give performing a try. ‘I’ll give you a tenner if you do.’

  DO IT. DO IT. DO IT.

  And so I did.

  That night I headed down to the Footlights, Cambridge’s comedy club, with a few random jottings in my hand. The Footlights is one of the most talked about, and most shrouded in mystery, of all university societies. How do you picture it – if, indeed, you care to picture it at all? Perhaps you see it as a sort of light-entertainment wing of the Bullingdon Club, where men with red cheeks and even redder chinos bray at one another like coked-up donkeys.

  Toff 1:

  Hugo, is your pa still running The Times?

  Toff 2:

  Totally, but he’s off to Deutsche Bank in the summer. Is yours still selling arms to Sierra Leone?

  Toff 1:

  God, yah. Now listen. Lollo and his chums are coming for sups at my rooms tonight. Fancy it? There’ll be totty for sure. We’re talking about some new thing called a dot.com start-up. You game, old chum?

  Toff 2:

  Yah, bloody yah.

  The truth is way more prosaic. The Footlights Club was a tatty little room in the basement of the Cambridge Union. It had a dusty, beer-stained carpet and benches upholstered in fake leather ran along each side. These were invariably decked with a multitude of props – rubber chickens, Swedish-blonde wigs, moustaches and sombreros. All the important stuff. And there, at the back of the room, was the stage, a slightly raised dais onto which a spotlight was trained. Maybe two. A deep fug permeated everything, no matter what time of day you entered the room – a perma-stink of booze, fags, fun and shame, the key notes of any comedic perfume.

  I cannot overstate what an unprepossessing space it was (and most likely still is). It didn’t resonate with a sense of its own history. It didn’t feel momentous or special. It was just another damp, stinking student hole. The posters on the walls, some from the 70s, were tatty and unframed, the black curtain hanging at the back of the stage as ripped as a witch’s hem. But I loved that. It’s not a museum – it doesn’t look backwards. It’s a clubroom. It’s for the now. It’s a dirty bustling hive of success, failure and silliness.

  History is reality distilled, events boiled down to a manageable partisan narrative we can easily remember. The Cambridge Footlights history has been duly reduced to the select list of those who ‘made it’ (Cleese, Cook, Idle, etc.), whereas the real lifeblood of the club came from the vast numbers who went on to do proper jobs. Oftentimes those people were the funniest – the ones who went on to be vets or gynaecologists or chemical engineers. My business isn’t, as I’m forced to admit daily, a meritocracy.

  To be part of the Cambridge University arts scene, and the Footlights Society in particular, was a pure privilege. The people weren’t particularly privileged; they were just nerds with good A-level results. The absolute privilege came from the ability to experiment. To do anything you wanted. Want to tour Europe in urine-coloured leggings with a same-sex production of King Lear? Here’s the cash. Want to put on Lorca’s Blood Wedding? In Spanish¿ Naked? Knock yourself out. Hell, if I had the power, I’d make every community, college and university arts society as well funded as the ones I was lucky enough to be part of as a student.

  At night the place came alive, transformed from generically unpleasant basement to Britain’s most exciting underground lair. And on one of those evenings, in the middle of October 1988, I walked down there, scrap of paper in hand, and took that single step onto the stage. It often still strikes me how small a distance it is, that walk from real to heightened – from normality to performance. One small step for a woman, one giant leap for your adrenal system. How quickly we can move from one part of ourselves into another. How performance formalizes that. How, if you’re not mindful of the gap, it can split you in two.

  I remember the singular glare of the spotlight, blocking out everything. I remember my ramblings being accompanied by the drunken burble of the crowd, sometimes listening, sometimes not. I remember I was wearing a hot, red lambswool jumper and that my neck starting itching furiously mid-routine.*

  But most of all, I remember Mel.

  She was standing at the back of the room at the end of the show, a shock of white hair and wayward teeth. She wore pink DMs and ripped jeans and was gassing with a gaggle of students wearing what looked like pyjamas.

  She sidled over to me and introduced herself like some post-punk Svengali, and we got chatting. I couldn’t tell you what we chatted about. All I can tell you is that there was just a feeling – that most perfect of feelings – a slow, unfolding understanding that I had met a person that I would know for the rest of my life.

  Mel and I didn’t work together much at college – on account of her being so much older than me. In my second year (her third) she went off to Bologna and power-ate spaghetti for a year. In many ways this was training for what was to come in our later careers. While she was gone, I spent my days trying to bluff my way through Jacobean tragedy and Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (boy, is it hard to bullshit in Norse). I spent my nights in the Footlights basement. By the time I hit my final year and Mel returned, I pretty much lived in that comedy bunker and rarely saw daylight.

  I ended up becoming president of the club, a presidency defined by the fact that on my watch we received sponsorship from a beer company. I still have no idea how that happened. I don’t remember ‘reaching out’ to them, ‘establishing core values’ or ‘cascading information with a view to establishing value-generating paradigms’. Plus, with my cropped hair, army boots and charity-shop clothes I looked more like an advert alerting people to the dangers of alcohol abuse, than an ambassador who could bring shiny new folk to the ‘brand’.

  All I remember was that a van turned up at the beginning of term and it was full, and I mean full, of lager. At the back of the van was a small fridge, which I put in my room, then filled. With lager. I don’t remember anything much for the next six months. By Christmas I had split up with Rob and was drinking heavily – you know, being a grown-up. I’d wake up on flo
ors and try to piece together how I’d got there. I collapsed in the street. I drank like a pro until I got a stomach ulcer, by which time I had scraped through graduation and left the pressure cooker of college, so no longer needed the grog to hide my insecurities.

  Considering how slapdash, hare-brained and ham-fisted we are, my double act with Mel had an extremely formal beginning. Shortly after we graduated I received a brief handwritten letter in the post.

  Dear Susan,

  Would you like to be in a double act with me?

  Love Melanie

  I believe I may have written back:

  Dear Melanie,

  Yes I would.

  Love Susan

  And so that was that.

  Auld Reekie

  Do you remember the Blair–Brown summit that famously took place in that Italian restaurant in north London? The power-transitioning pact made over meatballs, gnocchi and affogato? Well, I like to think Mel and I got there first, when in 1993, at the food court in Victoria station, on plastic chairs nestled between the warring outlets of Singapore Sam’s and Spud-U-Like, we shook hands on a plan to take our first show to Edinburgh.

  Mel and I had left it rather late to sort a venue for the festival, so after the highs of the Spud-U-Like summit we were forced to confront a more realistic reality. Come February, most venues are already fully booked, but we managed to get our friend Hartley, who was running the C Venue on Princess Street, to give us his last available slot, which happened to be at

  10.05 a.m.

  Yes, that holy grail of comedic timeslots, the hour of the day that every self-respecting performer wants to make their mark on. I can’t imagine why there wasn’t more of a clamour for the

  10.05 a.m.

  slot, since that’s universally acknowledged to be the most fun time of day. What you might not know, is that at

  10.05 a.m.

  your body and mind are at their most receptive to sixty minutes of surrealist, stream-of-consciousness sketches performed by total unknowns in an airless box overlooking a busy thoroughfare. And if that isn’t enough to convince you, the other amazing thing about the

  10.05 a.m.

  slot, is that it’s not the more conventional

  10.00 a.m.

  slot, which is when all the competing shows start.

  What can I say? We were way ahead of the curve.

  And so, for our first Edinburgh Festival together, an event world renowned for its bacchanalian excess and hedonistic splendour, we had the

  10.05 a.m.

  slot, meaning we had to get up at

  8.00 a.m.

  EIGHT A.M. Just as our peers were going to bed after a night on the tiles, we would be getting up and bracing ourselves for the long walk to Princess Street from our student digs.

  Putting on a show isn’t cheap, so we scraped together what we could and borrowed money from our families on the understanding we’d try to turn a profit. Part of our crowd-luring strategy focused on the name of the show, The Naked Brunch. Great, eh? Eh? What do you mean, it’s shit? You’re obviously missing the hilarious subtext. It’s a play on both William S. Burrough’s seminal drug-vignette novel and the time of day we were performing. Brilliant, isn’t it? And in no way obscure/pretentious/doomed to failure.

  I set off for this, our first Edinburgh Festival together, at around 8 p.m. one evening in August. I had a backpack and a large bin liner, which held my share of our vast array of props. Mum was having a dinner party, was elbow-deep in Marie Rose sauce and didn’t even hear me say goodbye. I slipped out of the house. It felt exciting. I felt like Dick Whittington.

  The plan was for me to take the direct train from Sanderstead to Victoria and meet Mel at the coach station. From there we’d get the all-night National Express to Scotland. It was a perfect plan, although if there was a flaw in it, that flaw would be called South East Trains.

  I waited at the deserted platform for the 8.03 p.m. train. 8:03 p.m. came and went. No worries, I thought – I can still catch the 8.33 and be in plenty of time. 8.33 came and went. Still no train. Finally a bored adenoidal voice on the tannoy, ‘South East Trains regrets to inform you that all trains have been cancelled due to a fault further up the line.’ The whine of feedback. Then a deafening silence.

  I went into a flat panic. You can’t do this, I thought. You can’t have a fault on the line! Not now! Not today! I have to peddle my ‘barely rehearsed’* form of sketch comedy at the Edinburgh Festival. I need to be there!

  I panicked. I didn’t own a mobile, and the nearby payphone was so lacquered in acrid man-piss it had long since stopped working. There was only one thing to do. This was a bona-fide crisis, so it followed I’d need someone who could embrace that crisis. I needed to get Ann Perkins – Mega-Mum – involved.

  I left the station and walked home, fast. The bag of props rattled in time with my footsteps. There was the rhythmic squeak of a plastic chicken and the rustle of a nylon Swedish-blonde-fantasy wig. From a distance it looked like I’d murdered Britt Ekland and kept her hair as some form of trophy.

  I arrived home just after 9.15 p.m. Mum was half-cut,* in a velour playsuit, breadcrumbing the hell out of some Icelandic prawns. Dad was exchanging blue jokes with his best mate Mick and his wife Eve.

  ‘What’s happened?’ said Mum, one eye on me, the other on a meringue nest.

  ‘There are no trains, Mum. They’re all cancelled. I’m going to miss my coach. I’m going to miss the festival.’ And I was so tired and so exasperated, I might just have had a little cry.

  There were two ways Mum could have gone. She could have pointed out that the festival runs for a whole month and therefore I would hardly miss a thing. OR she could join me in making a mountain out of a molehill. My mum’s whole life has been about waiting and preparing for catastrophe to come knocking. And here it was. An actual catastrophe. And she wasn’t about to look that shit-horse in the mouth.

  ‘Right,’ she said with a steeliness which was thrilling, ‘I’m taking you. Call Victoria and be ready to leave in the next few minutes.’

  I dragged down the enormous phone directory from the shelf and thumbed through its pages. Finally I arrived at the Customer Services number for Victoria Coach Station and dialled. Minutes later, someone answered.

  Woman:

  Hello. Victoria.

  Me:

  Hello, Victoria. I’m Sue. I need you to do me a massive favour. I’m due to meet a friend of mine around about now and I am late. Very late. I need you to get a message to her. Can you do that?

  Woman:

  Mmm. I don’t know. We’d have to put it out on the tannoy. Is it an emergency?

  I stared at the squeaky chicken in my bag. Yes, of course! I wanted to scream. I’m young! EVERYTHING is an emergency! ‘It’s very important I get in touch with her,’ I replied, moderately but firmly. ‘It’s urgent.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Who am I trying to contact?’

  And then the full nightmare struck me. I was going to have to spell Mel’s surname out to her. Over the years I’d come to realize that you have to set aside a good fifteen minutes to get that properly through to someone. I looked at my watch. It was 9.28 p.m.

  ‘Mel,’ I said desperately, hoping that would be sufficient.

  ‘Mel who?’ she replied.

  DAMN!

  Me:

  Won’t ‘Mel’ do?

  Woman:

  No, it won’t. There might be lots of Mels. I’m afraid I’m going to need a
surname.

  I take a deep breath in preparation.

  Me:

  Giedroyc.

  Woman:

  [slight pause] Goodrich?

  Me:

  Giedroyc.

  Woman:

  Oh. Oh. OK. [Another pause] Say it again?

  Me:

  [slower this time] Giedroyc.

  Woman:

  And how do you spell that?

  Trust me, that won’t help, I think, but carry on nonetheless.

  Me:

  G-I-E-D-R-O-Y-C.

  I hear the endless scratch of her pen.

  Woman:

  So that’s Guy-ed-ro-ik?

  Me:

  [raising my voice in desperation] It’s pronounced Ged-roy-ch.

  Woman:

  Gee-roy-cee.

  Me:

  [bellowing] GED-ROY-CH.

  Woman:

  Ged-royds?

  Me:

  That’ll do. Perfect. Thank you.

  I gave her the message and put the phone down. It was now 9.31 p.m.

  We ran down the front steps and hurled ourselves into the car. Then, of course, we had to negotiate the bloody garage.