by Sue Perkins
Mel:
It’s not my fault! It’s like a Pavlovian reaction. I get stressed.
Emma approaches, wearily.
Emma:
Is it Mel?
Me:
Yes.
Emma:
Does she need the toilet again?
Me:
Of course she needs the toilet …
Emma rolls her eyes and walks on.
Front-of-House Manager:
[emerging from the shadows] That’s clearance.
Mel:
But I’m busting!
Gerry:
[desperately trying to focus on the performance ahead] Well go downstairs, for goodness’ sake!
Opening music starts.
Mel:
Oh God! There’s no time!
Me:
Oh for goodness’ sake, Miggins, go in the bucket!
I point over to the black bucket in the wings that has been there since the beginning of the run. A paintbrush sits in a thin puddle of liquid at the bottom. Mel looks at it in desperation then parks herself above it. We look away. The sound of a zip. A deluge. The zip again. Then we all run onstage to do the show. Ah, showbiz.
Once done, we collected up the costumes and props littered at the side of stage and plonked ourselves in the auditorium in preparation for our mate’s solo show. This turned out to be a marvellously involved affair with multiple characters and complex plots. We were lost in it – lost in it almost to the point of sleep – when suddenly Penny started talking in an Irish accent, transforming into the character of a raging fire-and-brimstone priest. There was a lot of vengeful Old Testament babbling and shouting at us, which roused us from unconsciousness. The character reached fever pitch, cursing us as sinners and telling us we needed to be bathed in the holy water of Christ the Redeemer. Whereupon she left the stage and reappeared a moment later …
… with the bucket.
Emma, Mel and myself sat suddenly upright, rigid with fear. Like animals on the plains who know instinctively that danger is coming.
Penny dipped the paintbrush into the bucket, then flung the liquid at the audience. The spray flew to the left and right of us. The audience laughed. ‘Don’t laugh!’ I wanted to shout. ‘You’re being drenched in piss!’ But I was stopped in my tracks by a frenzy of droplets raining down on my head. Mel refused to look, burying her face in her palms as the wee kept on coming and coming and coming.
That was the last time I went to an experimental theatre show. You don’t get that with Shakespeare.
Anyhow, I’ve digressed. We’re back in Cambridge, 1995, and my brother was in charge of operating the show. We’d been told to get to the wings and stand by, so we duly headed backstage and waited. And waited.
Finally, the intro music and voice-over began. Then stopped, abruptly. Then started again, this time at a deafening volume. We waited for the lights to dim in the auditorium. They didn’t.
Mel:
[bellowing over the din] Is that us? Should we just go on?
Me:
I guess so …
The intro music suddenly stops. There is an all-encompassing silence.
Mel:
[pushing me forward, hissing] Go on! Now! Now!
The moment we stepped onstage a strange thing happened: the house lights increased in intensity, thus illuminating the audience further, and the spotlights went down, thus plunging Mel and me into darkness. We were now in total silence and total blackout. It was a devastating comedic double whammy.
I looked up to the lighting booth and saw David staring at the script and shaking his head. It’s not the sort of thing that inspires you to begin an eclectic offbeat hour of character comedy.
‘I told you,’ I hissed as another random piece of music exploded on the PA. ‘He’s a technological fucking idiot …’
A spotlight came on, stage left. Finally! We walked towards it. The moment we started to feel the heat of it, it flicked off again, only to reappear on the other side of the stage. So we turned around and walked across. The same thing happened. We began chasing visibility.
For the next hour we went on a voyage of audio-visual discovery. Sometimes we’d get a high-decibel burst of incongruous sound effect – a lion roaring, a juicy fart, some cicadas in the bush. Sometimes we would be squashed into a pinprick of light at the very back of the stage, desperate to be seen for at least a small percentage of the show. However, in the final ten minutes David appeared to find his mojo, opting for what became his signature lighting state – Guantanamo Bay. He decided to put every single light at his disposal on full – backstage, audience, side lights, spotlights – you name it. There was even a glitter ball going full pelt. He had also decided to alleviate some of the tension by stripping to the waist and donning a large Robin Hood hat that had obviously been lying around the booth.
The Cambridge Evening News review of that night said it all: ‘… it’s hard to comment on the quality of the show, as the multiple technical failures rather overwhelmed proceedings. In fact, in all my decades as a theatre critic it’s hard to bring to mind a more woeful display from a lighting and sound operator than the one witnessed last night.’
But hey, remember, ALL publicity is good publicity. Yes?
3. BRIGHTON
The old Komedia in Brighton’s Kemptown was one of my favourite venues ever – not least because its founders Colin, Marina and David were pretty much the only people who ever wanted to book us. It was like all great theatres – bijou and friendly, well loved by the locals, with good grub and a bit of jazz at the weekends.
It was 1996, and we were touring our third show, Women in Uniform. By now we had established a small (see also: negligible) posse of people who’d regularly turn out to see us – mainly sex workers, ex-offenders and those wrestling with their sexuality. Oh, and a man called Perv, who ran a nightclub nearby. I remember going to the Zap Bar with him one evening, and Mel had no idea it was gay night. At the end of the evening she merely said, ‘It’s nice that the women here are so friendly, isn’t it?’ I long for that naivety. Just for a second.
So, it’s the opening night of a week-long run at the venue. We are in the dressing room getting ready when we suddenly get the all-clear to head to stage. This news, albeit entirely expected, causes Mel’s digestive system, once again, to start firing on all cylinders.
‘Sorry, mate, I’m desperate …’
Her limbic system has gone into high alert. This is fight-or-flight time. She needs to run, and in order to do that most effectively, she needs to get rid of anything extraneous that might inhibit her movement. And what she decides to get rid of is her microphone receiver pack. She summarily drops it into my hands and dashes for the toilet.
There’s just one problem. The microphone equipment comes in two parts: firstly, the receiver, which I am now holding, and secondly, the microphone itself, which Mel is wearing on her lapel. Crucially, the two parts are connected by a metre-long cable. This expensive umbilical can’t be disconnected at speed without risking damage, which means only one thing.
Where Mel goes, I go also.
I find myself standing next to her in a cramped bog, palms up, holding the receiver like it’s the Holy Grail. She perches below making low moaning sounds. It begins like a distant rumble, like thunder. The
hairs on my arm stand to attention. Then comes the noise. Like a thousand tins of beans being hurled against a wall. Then the toxic gust. I feel like Karen Silkwood: contaminated, angry, compelled to seek legal advice.
‘Cheers, chum,’ says Mel once the horror is over. ‘Ooh, let me take that,’ retrieving the receiver from my grasp and clipping it back on her belt. I say nothing.
Mel did the greatest gig of her life that night. She was light and springy and refreshed. I spent that hour dry-retching and trying to get enough oxygen in my lungs to say my lines.
As part of my rider,* we now have separate dressing rooms.
4. LEIGHTON BUZZARD
And so it came to pass, in the Year of Our Lord 1996, that we visited the Bedfordshire town of Leighton Buzzard. Sadly, it transpired that the residents were far from ready for our unique brand of poorly thought-out ‘fun’. The venue we had been booked into was the council-run Library Theatre, which appeared on first impression to consist of an awful lot of library and not a lot of actual theatre.
There was a smattering of people in the audience, all of whom seemed furious before we’d even started. Well, if they were furious then, I don’t have a descriptor for the hostile vibes we were getting a mere five minutes into proceedings. There is a profound telepathy at work in all close relationships – a shorthand, if you will. A flicker of the eyelid, a tilt or cock of the head, and you’re both on the same page. Mel and I have that telepathy. As the atmosphere became increasingly toxic, we shot each other a glance. A glance that said, Let’s get this over with as quickly as possible.
If we couldn’t make them laugh, we could certainly get them home before they turned violent.
We increased the speed of our delivery, making snap cuts, overlapping one another’s lines. We did not pause, because pausing is for laughter, and why wait for something that will never arrive? Under normal conditions our show ran for just over an hour. In Leighton Buzzard it lasted exactly thirty-six minutes, beating our previous record (Stockton-on-Tees) by a full seven minutes. We didn’t bother coming back onstage for a bow; instead we used the closing music to cover the sound of our exit from the stage door. We sprinted for the station. Sprinted. Mercifully there was a London-bound train waiting on the platform as we arrived. As we hopped on, and the doors closed behind us, we saw a gang of young men running towards the carriage. To this day I have no idea whether they were members of our audience desperate to take us to the Old Mill and burn us or just regular Joes on a night out. But we’ve never gone back, just in case.
Three
* * *
LONDON
The Trouble with London
The essayist and lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson famously once said, ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’
Well, Samuel, when a woman is tired of London, she usually tries to get away for the weekend – you know, get some perspective. She doesn’t tend to think of it as a precursor for ending her existence. My advice would be: stop being so absolutist in your thinking. Think about changing it up. Failing that, some of the modern SSRIs are really very good.
I returned to London after college just as I was beginning my double act with Mel. I didn’t have a bean and so made like Blanche duBois and depended on the kindness of strangers. I stayed, briefly, with Nicola’s then boyfriend Seth, whose parents had a flat in a posh stucco square near Earl’s Court. It was the model of elegance from the outside, but empty on the inside – ‘all fur coat and no knickers’ as my nan liked to say, just before they arrested her for soliciting.
Seth was a wiry, febrile genius who wanted to be a poet and ended up a venture capitalist. Life as Tennyson, it turns out, was a shrub short of the full hedge fund. Having said that, I wanted to be a novelist but was working on a direct sales marketing manual for Kleeneze. So much for my integrity.
Seth and I smoked, talked shit and ate fancy burgers from a place called Hollywood down the road. Classy. We listened to Radiohead and The The, read e e cummings and didn’t use capitals for a year (which was both tough and compromising, since I was working as a copywriter at the time). We cried at Anne Sexton and Louis MacNeice and Pablo Neruda and felt part of a tribe. Although had that tribe found out that we were living in a half-million-pound flat in the Sloane heartlands it might have been time for our membership to be rescinded. I slept on a sofa bed in a lounge with no furniture save a chicken-mesh sculpture of a woman who appeared to be giving the Hitler salute. I have no idea why she was there or how Seth, a devout Jew of Ashkenazi hue, felt about her. But there she stood, eight feet high, her outstretched arm suggesting a lazy Lebensraum in the vague direction of Fulham.
I loved Seth. He was an emotional soul. Once he took a bread knife and carved up his entire book collection. I thought that was kind of arty. Then he took a lighter and set fire to his eyebrows. I thought that was the right time to move out.
For the next few years I lived with Sarah and Nicola. We were the Three Graces in reverse – uncouth, grotty and lazy. Shortly after my stay at Seth’s, his parents sold the Earl’s Court flat and bought a disused office space at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac in Hampstead, north London. While they waited for planning permission to come through for their minimalist dream home, they kindly asked if we wanted to live there and keep the place occupied.
I had never, in all my life, seen such a beautiful part of town – a pristine village within the city. It had cobbled streets, and early-Victorian cottages with handmade dimpled-glass windows that moved like water when the sun caught them. Every front garden seemed to burst with flowers, and every house was studded with blue plaques that boasted of Constable, Blake and the like.
I’d never seen a plaque in Croydon, not one – I’m not sure the sort of thing that happens in Croydon would merit the attentions of English Heritage.
CAPTAIN SENSIBLE URINATED ON THIS CORNER
DIZZEE RASCAL STOPPED HERE TO ASK FOR DIRECTIONS
ADELE GOT WOLF-WHISTLED BY A ROOFER HERE
Our accommodation was basic, at best. In truth, our existence trod an extremely fine line between squatting and tenancy. The building itself was a frail white prefab with weeds growing through the concrete steps and looked at odds with the neighbouring mansions, with their exfoliated brickwork and Farrow & Ball facelifts.
Next door lived a man who owned an entire mobile phone network, in a house so tall we spent the first summer listening to the soundtrack of his lift being installed. He spent his first summer listening to a bunch of stoners rowing about Tory education policies and how best to fire flaming clods of horse shit at the Rt Hon. Michael Howard.
His daughter once knocked on our door and asked for a cardigan.
‘I’d get my own, but I can’t go back in the house,’ she said.
‘Why?’ we asked, ignoring the look of horror on her face as she stared in at our accommodation.
‘Oh,’ she replied nonchalantly, ‘it’s on fire.’
It’s on fire. That’s the thing about the super-rich. Nothing, not even a domestic fireball, bothers them. Not even an inferno can dent their sense of entitlement.
I was unemployed, but hey, I had things to do. For starters, every other week Sarah and I would stroll down to the dole office on Finchley Road. Plus, since our building had no heating, much of our day was spent trying to get warm – like the Ancients did. Sarah devised an excellent thermal preservation technique whereby every morning we’d put our duvets on the floor, lie horizontally across them, then wrap ourselves up like albino sausage rolls. Finally, we’d stagger upright and take it in turns to run gaffer tape around each other to secure the wadding tight.
The whole day was spent like a game in
Jeux Sans Frontières, hopping from one room to the next like giant Tampax, yelling, ‘Who’s got my lighter?’
We had no money for internal decoration, so we glued bits of newspaper to the wall like wallpaper – the Underclass Range from Cole and Son, Benefit Seekers by Osborne and Little. I say we had no money, we had a five-pound note, which was lovingly stuck to the wall. This was a special five-pound note – sacred no less – as it had been sent by Jilly Cooper to Nicola in response to a begging letter for money to fund her RADA tuition fees. We loved Jilly so much, we kept the fiver there in honour of her and her kindness, and there was never any privation, nor desperation deep or profound enough to incite any one of us to touch it.
There were no white goods in the flat, so every other day we would make something lovingly referred to as ‘pants soup’. We’d gather our collective stash of underwear and dirty clothing, run a bath, chuck it all in with some cheap soda crystals and stir the resultant broth with a stick. Then we’d drain the bath, refill it a little to rinse, then hang the sodden items on a rail above the bath to drain. The soda had the same effect as Agent Orange – for the next twelve months I was puffy, red and horrendously, horrendously itchy.
I met a girl. Emma. She was a trainee lawyer who was a grown-up by day (she could cite precedents and article numbers and everything) and a total toddler by night. I know what you’re thinking – But Sue, you must have been inundated with women, what with you living in a squat with no washing facilities or heating – well you’d be wrong. You’d be amazed how many girls are put off by the fact that a) you live inside a duvet and b) everything underneath that duvet is unwashed.