by Sue Perkins
A deep and profound silence set in over the guests after the very first mouthful, which had the consistency of petroleum. It was as if we had reached a common consensus that our energies were best spent focusing on getting the pea-coloured potage down our throats rather than attempting conversation.
‘Get down, Blackie!’ bellowed Rhoda at a sable Labrador bolting towards the table. Though even the Labrador, a breed famed for its untrammelled appetite, baulked at the contents of the tureen once he’d clapped eyes on it. There’s a reason people don’t make soup out of avocados. And that reason was now making itself incredibly clear to my colon.
That particular night I had been sat opposite Rhoda, while Emma was at the other end of the table next to a twinkly-eyed Polish octogenarian. He had been referred to vaguely as a ‘war hero’ – in fact, he may have referenced himself as such. Either way, we were careful to show maximum respect. That’s why it felt particularly gauche that Emma should choose to pull faces at me for the entirety of the meal.
‘What’s up with you?’ I hissed across the table as dessert arrived, which appeared to be cold rice pudding with an unidentifiable drizzle on the top. ‘Why are you gurning at me?’ Emma and I had just broken up and we were finding the transition into friends a little fraught.
‘Him!’ hissed Emma back. ‘The guy next to me! He’s had his hand on my knee all night!’
‘What, the war veteran?’
‘Veteran sex pest more like. What should I do?’
‘I don’t know. Has he crossed The Maginot Line?’
‘Oh, piss off, Sue.’
It’s dilemmas like this one we really need to see in Debrett’s. Humans are tribal. We work through complex systems of affiliation which ebb and flow in individual importance. I am a human being, a woman, a daughter, a sibling, an agnostic, a feminist and a gay. Which of these important tribes I choose to affiliate with the most at any one point in time changes. So, what to do? Rumble him? Denounce him as a groper to the assembled diners and be true to ourselves as women and feminists? Or let him, a flaccid pensioner, keep his hand resting on Emma’s leg and take the broader, human perspective.
It was an infernally difficult decision. In the end Emma decided to respect his service to our country in time of conflict by allowing his palm to rest for another hour on her thigh.
‘It’s my way of saying thank you,’ she whispered.
Lest we forget.
Let Them Eat Lunch
A month after Rhoda’s dinner party, in the spring of 1997, our agent asked Mel and me if we’d be prepared to audition for a Channel 4 live daytime show called Light Lunch. We were, it’s fair to say, less than enamoured by the prospect. The daytime landscape was arid in those days, acres of dry Kilroy-ish terrain with the occasional Ricki Lake oasis. We turned up to the casting in our best ‘smart’ outfits – which in retrospect made us look like a supermarket security guard and GPO worker respectively. Despite repeated attempts by the channel and the production company to hire proper professionals, Nicky Campbell OBE and the like, we somehow managed to slip though the audition, through the pilot and on to the actual television. Up to that moment our combined media experience had been:
dressing in full bridal outfits (brief movie review, the Little Picture Show)
dressing up as bearded Highland crofters (non-speaking roles, French and Saunders)
dressing up as Elizabeth Bennett and Unnamed Georgian Woman (non-speaking roles, French and Saunders)
dressing up as Noel and Liam Gallagher (non-speaking roles in a thankfully un-broadcast pilot)
You can see from this extensive CV that we were, in so many ways, the ideal candidates for an hour-long live daily show.
Live television is the apotheosis of multi-tasking. It’s like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. Add to that a shit-eating grin and you’re pretty much there. Anything can happen and everything does – and that chaotic unpredictability is what I have always loved best, perhaps because it’s the medium that closest matches the pinball tangentialism in my head. Whether or not Light Lunch was the show that Channel 4 actually wanted, I don’t know – but it was a place where banality walked hand in hand with eccentricity, and I will always love it for that. Sometimes we got it right (I’m thinking of the unlikely but sublime pairing of Michael Bolton and John Inman) and sometimes, well, sometimes we got it wrong …
Mel and I had been obsessed with Kate O’Mara since we were kids – not only for her performance as the Rani, a power-dressing Time Lord in Doctor Who, but also for her mesmerizing turn in the epoch-defyingly abysmal Triangle. For those too young to remember Triangle, let me set the scene. It revolved around a ferry making its three-point journey from Felixstowe to Gothenburg to Amsterdam and back. I know – all the sexy places. Based on US show The Love Boat, the British version eschewed sun and fun, and instead gave us a soap opera on the choppy black waters of the North Sea. In one of the more memorable sequences Kate is forced to lie on deck, topless, sunbathing, while a punishing easterly wind necrotizes her nipples. Do watch it online and share her pain. For that sequence alone she will always be the stuff of legend.
I first crossed paths with Kate when I was on the Footlights tour in 1989 and we happened to converge at the Drum Theatre, Plymouth. I was in the studio space, in a wig, shouting; she was in the main house doing Blithe Spirit or something classy along those lines. I’d occasionally see her at the stage door, surrounded by adoring flunkies, beautiful and imperious, sporting cheekbones you could grate Parmesan on.
Connecting these two theatres was a public address system that fed into each and every dressing room. For a nineteen-year-old, it was just too much temptation. As part of a dare (I cannot, as you now know, resist any dare) I sneaked into the stage manager’s lair, commandeered the microphone and bellowed into it, ‘Kate O’Mara’s pants to the laundry. Kate O’Mara’s pants to the laundry, please.’
And then again, for good measure, just so every single room in the building could catch it, ‘Kate O’Mara’s pants to the laundry. Kate O’Mara’s pants to the laundry, please.’
Then I went back to our green room, got on with our little show and thought no more of it. Time passed. Everything got lost in its midst.
Years later Kate O’Mara accepted an invitation to be a guest on Light Lunch and duly appeared, with fellow Dynasty actress Stephanie Beacham, on the show on 8 May 1997. We wanted to show these grandes dames full respect, and, erroneously believing that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, we came to set with me dressed as Krystal Carrington (bouffant platinum hair, long fake nails, litres of lipgloss) and Mel as Alexis Carrington Colby (sharp black suit, shoulder pads, statement fascinator). Kate and Stephanie came dressed
as normal human beings.
What started as something hilarious soon became one of the most painful interviews of my life. From the moment they came on set it became clear we had hugely misjudged the situation. It was, after all, like inviting Sir David Attenborough on and dressing up as a bonobo and a manatee respectively. The interview went from bad to worse when, in an ad break, Mel elected to ask Kate whether she remembered her pants being discussed on the tannoy system of a regional theatre nearly a decade previously. She didn’t. But boy it must have been good for her to hear that story again.
By the time we came back live after the break, you could have not only cut the atmosphere with a knife, you could have portioned it up and served it to the assembled audience, who were now becoming aware there was ‘a problem’. As the final question fell out of my mouth and languished in the ensuing silence I heard Stephanie mutter under her breath, ‘You silly, silly g
irls.’
And do you know, she was absolutely right.
We were constantly putting our feet in it. When Patrick Duffy came on the show we sang an impromptu version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ to welcome him and were most irked when he failed to stand to salute. It turns out we were actually singing La Marseillaise. Weeks later I found a woman wandering aimlessly around backstage and asked her if she wanted help in finding the audience seating. She was Susanne Vega. In the ‘Star Wars Reunion Special’ Kenny Baker (R2D2) was accidentally dropped on the floor by our make-up supremo and mate ‘Madame’ JoJo. A Robin’s Nest special, where we had finally learned our lesson and NOT dressed up, featured Tessa Wyatt and Richard O’Sullivan – neither of whom, it transpired, could remember a single bloody thing about the programme. And last but not least, my own personal favourite – the unholy alliance of Nookie Bear and Sooty. Yes, it was a puppet special. Aaah. Lovely puppets. Lovely, sweet, children’s puppets. Lovely.
From the get-go it seemed that the personalities of Nookie and Sooty were not compatible. Or, perhaps more pertinently, the personalities of Roger de Courcey and Matthew Corbett were not compatible. Matthew was rolling with a benign kindergarten vibe, while Roger was going for something a little more late-night working men’s club. The pair of them in combination was unsettling enough – and then we added the late Keith Harris and Orville to the mix.
The problems began when Nookie (Roger) picked on Sooty (Matthew), who brushed him off with characteristically silent insouciance. Then Nookie (Roger) picked on Orville (Keith), who bore it, literally, through gritted teeth. Desperate to calm an escalating situation, Sooty (Matthew) began gently stroking Nookie’s (Roger’s) arm, who responded by rolling his eyes and maniacally hissing, ‘Go on, say something, Sooty.’ Panicking, Orville (Keith) returned to his default mode, expressing a strong desire for flight. The painful hour ended with Nookie (Roger) hitting Sooty (Matthew). It was in essence Roger hitting Matthew, the puppet acting as a boxing glove with a face. In the post-Clarkson world we would have all got the sack as accessories to ABH, but this was 1998, so we simply tucked into a Summer Pudding and waited till the credits rolled.
In 1998, after 150 episodes, the show had reached its peak, before our tired capitulation led to Light Lunch becoming the less effective Late Lunch, and we walked away from it all in an optimistic, unfocused daze. The schedule of the show was such that real life had not only taken a back seat, it had ceased feeling like real life at all. We had become institutionalized, with little time for the important stuff happening outside the four walls of the studio – family, friends, relationships.
Over the last few years there had been occasional mentions of Dad feeling tired, but his mutterings were lost in the hullabaloo of work. There’s always something, isn’t there? Something bright and shiny to take your gaze from where it should be. Change is often glacial. It happens under your nose, but so incrementally your eyes can’t detect its movement. Dad’s was a slow puncture. And I didn’t notice there was something wrong until he was nearly pancake-flat.
I knew that he’d gone to the doctor’s. I knew that he needed a scan. Then he had the scan and the next thing I knew was that it was cancer. On 23 December 1998 we found out Dad had cancer.
I arrived home on Christmas Eve and rang the doorbell. I’d lost my keys nearly a decade before but couldn’t bear to tell Mum, lest she run wild with visions of homicidal maniacs wading their way through our luxuriantly tufted hall carpet with a beady eye on her knick-knacks.
She opened the door. Dad shuffled towards me from behind her and promptly burst into tears.
My dad. Crying.
I’d only seen him cry once before, when I was six and decided to run away from home. It wasn’t much of a bid for freedom – in truth I’d talked a big game (‘I’m going and I’m never coming back!’), but I’d only made it as far as the privet hedge in the garden. I snuggled into the shrubbery and ate a packet of salt and vinegar Chipsticks while my parents frantically screamed my name. Once the packet was empty, I made my triumphant entrance, expecting a fanfare as the Prodigal returned. In fact I got a clip around the ear and a tear-stained lecture from my dad. Turns out those few minutes, when they really thought they’d lost me, were enough to reduce him to rubble.
Dad was admitted to Mayday Hospital as soon as the Christmas holidays were over, in early January 1999. I remember the reassuring list of West Indian hips as my favourite nurse walked through the ward with the drinks trolley. I remember the kindness of an Australian man called Craig Backway, who, with a name like that was always destined for a colo-rectal unit somewhere in the world. But most of all I remember trying not to think anything, not for a second, because thinking would lead to feeling, and feeling would lead me to the pressing reality that I might actually lose my dad.
I moved on. Kept busy. I was practical. It turns out that in a crisis I am 100 per cent my mother’s daughter. I can do it. I can do anything. Just don’t ask me to stop. I cannot, not for a second, stop.
Every night after work I would head down to sunny Thornton Heath and joke around with everyone on the ward. Look at me – I’m the life and soul – look at how much fun I am! I have never brought my work home with me, but there I was, taking that exhausting, inflated version of myself out of hours, bouncing cheerily around the beds until visiting time was up and I could give way to silence.
I’d come home and cook dinner with my sister, who was still living at home and bearing the brunt of it all. We’d serve acres of lasagne, steaming colanders of fusilli and cheap tomato sauce that tasted faintly of metal. There were buckets of tea. Then we would laboriously wash and dry the dishes. We had a dishwasher. No matter. We wanted the extra work. We wanted something to do. When I finally gave in to tiredness, I’d sleep until dawn. At 5 a.m. it was time to get in the car and head north of the river to work. And repeat.
And repeat.
Dad’s ward was like every NHS ward you’ve ever been in. The blue plastic sheeting, the beige plastic furniture, the tiny plastic cupboard where you keep the one or two things that mark you out as an individual human being. There are pipes and tubes and alarms. Trolleys rattle with packaged meds and blood-pressure monitors. The toilet signs take your gaze with a luminous yellow ferocity.
It was a men-only ward. Strong men. Fathers. They had been the axis on which their children plotted their burgeoning lives. And here they all were – brought down, levelled, lying there in hastily bought pyjamas and kept awake by each other’s coughs, moans and excretions. Welcome to the grim camaraderie of cancer.
One by one they left. A bed would fall empty and then be filled again. Sometimes you would dare to ask whether they had managed to walk out of the ward themselves, or whether they had been pushed, on a trolley, to the silent chill of the basement below.
Dad had several friends on that ward, but in particular he bonded with a man called John. John was a good man. A good family man – like my dad. And his wife, Marian, was a good woman – like my mum. And their kids were good kids – like we hope we’re good kids. John and Dad got diagnosed together (both tumours, graded C for ‘Christ that’s bad’), went through serial, brutal operations together and the endless ensuing blood tests, CT scans and radiotherapy. They even clicked their morphine pumps together, through the dead of night, in wordless synchronicity.
We shared a destiny. Their family and our family. Together.
As part of a randomized trial Dad wore a Hickman line for twelve months which pumped chemo through a capillary into the right atrium of his heart. I can still see my parents’ fridge now, full to bursting with fruit, vegetables and fluorouracil 5FU. John, on the other hand, received his chemo on
ce every month at the hospital. Random. Random. Random.
John didn’t make it.
Dad did.
Dad ‘beat’ cancer. His mate didn’t. Isn’t that the definition of a pyrrhic victory?
I hate that phrase – ‘beat cancer’. Cancer isn’t a war or a fight that you win or lose. It’s bad luck. It’s bad genes. It’s bad timing. It’s a postcode lottery. Call it what you will, just don’t call it a fight. Doing so makes all those who don’t make it weak. Or losers. I hate that.
Surviving cancer is hard. It returns you to your home a different person. It changes you, changes your world view. Sometimes it changes you for the better – you’re more resolved to squeeze the juice out of your remaining years. That at least is the trope we most often see in books and films. But sometimes it returns you scooped out and hollow – resentful that you’ve worked yourself to the bone for nearly fifty years and that what was supposed to be the glorious era of retirement has been scarred by disease and incapacitation.
That’s the dad who came home to us. Silent. Sad. Reduced.
Dad’s an empirical soul. He needs to see proof – evidence. And if you can’t see it – if you can’t pick through the mesh of your insides and see your guts free of taint for yourself – then how can you truly believe or trust that it is gone?
So yes, Dad survived cancer. But trust me, he didn’t ‘beat’ it.
Sadness grew up around him like ivy. This man, the vital father who had worked hard and played harder, now sat in his chair, exhausted, for the best part of a decade. And as his world narrowed, so did Mum’s. The two of them handcuffed together. For better, for worse. In sickness and ill health.
And perhaps that’s why I rush at everything now with such intensity – because I know that maybe, one day, all that is coming for me. Maybe. But until then …