by Peter Kay
'I crack the funnies in here, Mr Kay, and don't you forget it.'
The truth was Mr Delaney wasn't funny. His jokes were just a series of smutty innuendos and double entendres. He also had a fascination for all things farcical. He thought it was hysterical and he would drop everything (including his trousers) at the slightest hint of performing a farce.
Personally I can take or leave farce. All that running around half naked and tripping over next door's dog never did it for me.
I was never a huge fan of Fawlty Towers. I enjoyed the sarcastic, witty banter between Basil and Sybil but I was never too keen on the farcical element. When the guest dies in 'The Kipper and the Corpse' I really just want Basil to call a meeting of all the guests and announce that tragically due to circumstances beyond his control a guest has sadly passed away in the night. I do realise this ruins the whole point and would cut the episode down to ten minutes but I'd prefer that to twenty minutes of Basil and Manuel running from room to room with a dead body in a hamper. It drives me mad.
So you can imagine how frustrated I was to discover Mr Delaney had entered us for the annual Bolton Drama Festival*2 and told the organisers that we'd be performing a farce.
The play was called The Wages Of Sin and coincidentally it was written by an Andrew Sachs. Now whether this was the same Andrew Sachs who played Manuel in Fatuity Towers, I'm still none the wiser.
I was cast as Lord Peregrine Fortune-Mint, a wealthy eighteenth-century landowner with a shotgun and a penchant for the type of scantily clad maids who like to bend over. Not unlike Mr Delaney who also seemed to have a lingering enjoyment of the maid-bending-over scenes. In fact, it was all we ever seemed to rehearse.
'Now watch what I do,' he'd say in his thick Wigan accent. Then he'd approach the maid gropingly from behind with a naughty look on his face. Licking his lips and outstretching his hands, he leaned forward. Just then his wife walked in and caught him.
I'm referring to the character's wife, of course, not Mr Delaney's. She was shacked up with a marriage guidance counsellor in Clitheroe or so I heard.
Delaney spent so much time perfecting the maid scenes that he seemed not to notice the dwindling attendance figures, as one by one students resigned from the course. This meant that Delaney had to step in at the last minute and play the narrator, a part that he openly relished. Before you could say 'Ooo-er, Missus,' we were off to the Bolton Octagon for our first and final performance. The show was a farce, on more than one level. My heart sank when I saw the quality of some of the other performances that night. They were all thoughtful, funny pieces written and performed by children, some of them half my age. And then there was us. Students from Bolton's prestigious performing arts course, topping the bill with an out-of-date farce and a cross-eyed gardener.
But, as Freddie once sang, 'The Show Must Go On'.
The script required my character to have a moustache and, as funds were short on the old make-up front, I decided to take a trip to a local fancy-dress shop. I was after a real corker of a moustache and luckily they had one very much like the one I'd imagined in stock. Sadly though, it was light brown instead of black.
'We haven't had any black ones in for a while,' the girl behind the counter confessed. 'I get them from a friend of mine in Hull. She's a taxidermist and –'
I quickly raised my hand to shush her as she'd already provided me with too much information. I counted my change and made for the door.
'Can I interest you in some fake dogshit?' she shouted. 'Two for one this week only?' But I was gone.
Backstage, I eyed up some black-coloured greasepaint on a shelf in the dressing room. I fingered some out of the pot and smeared it on to my light brown moustache. It did the trick and with my newly blackened facial hair I winked at myself in the mirror and headed for the stage.
The lights dimmed, the audience fell quiet and through a small slash in the curtains I could see Delaney taking centre stage. There were a few initial chuckles from the audience but they quickly subsided when they realised that they were in fact Delaney's real eyes and not for comic effect.
Personally I was glad to hear any kind of laughter from the audience as I knew how barren the comic desert was that lay before them. Delaney, in his role of narrator, proceeded to introduce characters:
'Please would you welcome Lord Peregrine Fortune-Mint.' That was my cue.
I bounded out from behind the curtains to take my opening bow. So far so good. Next it was the turn of my wife, Lady Penelope Fortune-Mint, and sure enough Sonia Cassidy entered as gracefully as a baby elephant and took a bow.
The script then said we embraced and kissed. We'd choreographed it over a hundred times in the boiler room at college. I took her hand, spun her towards me, leaned her back and gave her an enormous kiss on the lips. Then I tilted her up and span her back out to face the audience. That's when they started to laugh and laugh and laugh. I was astonished by the reaction, it was only a kiss. Maybe I'd misjudged the play after all and the night wasn't going to be as painful I'd envisaged. But then I turned to the equally confused Sonia to find that she now had a moustache. Shit! The black greasepaint had rubbed off on her top lip during the kiss and now I realised why the audience was hysterical.
But Sonia was still confused. Subtly I nodded towards her top lip but she was helpless without any kind of reflection. We got through our lines as best we could despite the distracting howls of laughter. I could see Delaney angrily glaring at me from the side of the stage. Well, I think it was me but I couldn't quite tell, as he had one eye on Sonia and the other on my shoes. Either way I knew I was in for a bollocking.
After the show I couldn't tell who was more upset, Sonia or Delaney. I apologised to them both, and tried to reassure them that at least it had got big laughs but neither one of them was having it. My only regret was kissing her so soon. If I'd have known it was going to bring the house down I'd have saved it for the finale.
Something else happened to me that night as I waited nervously in the wings. It was the first time I'd ever done any kind of performing outside of school and occasionally I found myself glancing around, looking for a nun to take hold of my hand and lead me to the stage, but I suddenly realised that those days were over and that's when it hit me. I missed school.
It became clear to me why I'd failed to settle into the performing arts course. Deep down I expected to be returning to school. It was as if I was on a long holiday and soon it would be September. After twelve years of education this sudden change was a slow shock and a massive adjustment. What I was feeling was grief. It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't enjoyed school so much, but I did, and now all I wanted to do was go back.
But I couldn't even return for a visit because the nuns demolished the school the day after I left. Well, not them personally, but as far as I was concerned they might as well have driven those JCBs themselves. It was sacrilege.
School had been a very happy time for me. Sure, there were ups and downs, but on the whole I seemed to spend most of my time either laughing or making other people laugh. I also made some brilliant friends who I still cherish to this day. Well, two of them.
I walked up to the school one night during the demolition, climbed over the construction fence and jumped down into what would have been the Art department. Art was the only subject I passed in the end and that was only because I slipped the moderator twenty quid. I'm joking. Actually I was quite good at it and I'd come a long way from drawing cars on the front-room floor with my felt tips. (My mum still blames me for ruining that carpet.)
I continued walking through what remained of the school. It was eerily quiet and very surreal, especially when I found an empty bulldozer sitting in the middle of the dining hall. The nuns would have had a fit if they'd seen it. They'd mopped that floor every day for the last five years.
Contrary to popular myths I was also quite partial to a school dinner. I understand where Jamie Oliver OBE is coming from but personally I could never get enough of chips, beans and Turkey Twi
zzlers.
And you couldn't argue with the prices. When I was at school you could get a starter, main meal, pudding and carton of Vimto all for less than 50p. You've got to go to prison to get value for money like that these days.
I was also a sucker for seconds, even though it wasn't allowed. I'd tell the nun on the checkout that she'd given me the wrong change. She'd give me another 50p and I'd get straight back in the queue and buy another dinner. Magic. You can never have too much Manchester tart. Paddy McGuinness will back me up on that one. Only he won't be talking about the pudding.
If the dining hall was full and you just fancied a quick snack you could always opt for a tuck-shop lunch. Within easy reach of all amenities, you could pick up a carton of orange, a bag of cheesy corn puffs and a Texan, again for less than 50p. I sound like the presenter of a travel programme now. Our school tuck shop used to be run by Sister Swingout. She was an elderly nun but sharp as a tack when it came to business. Aided and abetted by two girl prefects, she had a strict no-nonsense policy and I would often find myself at the cold end of her ice pops.
Nevertheless, we'd get great enjoyment from winding her up, confusing her by asking for sweets that didn't exist.
'Have you had any Purple-Headed Warriors, Sister?'
or
'Have you got any of those Strawberry Strap-ons, Sister?'
She'd just shake her head in confusion.
And if we weren't inventing confectionery, then we'd just ask her for things she didn't sell like 'A Wham bar and twenty Benson & Hedges please, Sister', or 'A Highland toffee and a Packet of Three'. She'd just swear at us in Latin and chase us away with her mop.
I tried packed lunches for a few months but they weren't for me. I never found two spam sandwiches and a Munch Bunch yogurt very filling. There's only so much you can cram into an A-Team lunch box and I'd still always end up having a proper hot dinner as well. I was a growing boy at the end of the day.
But all that was gone for ever and there wouldn't be any more school dinners. I sat aloft the bulldozer, looking around at the empty room. What a waste. Surely they could have used this building for something else, evening classes or maybe they could have turned it into an enormous Whacky Warehouse for kids.
It wouldn't have needed adjusting that much, just fill the library up with coloured balls, stick a bumpy slide on the side of the convent and they would have made a fortune. I think the nuns would have probably objected, not that there were that many of them left to object any more, as the Sisters of the Divine Virginity were falling short on their recruitment drive. Well, what did they expect? There were no bright colours, no sex and no dental plan. I mean, what's the incentive? We used to send them a valentine card every year from Jesus, just to keep their spirits up.
This decline had been taking place for the last ten years, since someone had decided to change Mount St Joseph from an all girls' school into a mixed comprehensive. The nuns had had things cushy until 1980 but then the lads arrived and it all went tits up for the nuns. Talk about a shock, they'd never seen such behaviour in all their holy lives. And by the time I arrived in '84 things had gone from bad to worse. The nuns were dropping like flies and the defiant ones were on double novenas. It reminded me of that film Dangerous Minds, but without the rapping or Michelle Pfeiffer.
There were a few rotten apples in my year and when I say rotten I mean proper mentalists, who thrived on rule-breaking and bucking the system. They would go to any lengths to tip the nuns over the edge of insanity. From setting desks on fire to urinating on books (or vice versa). Every day was a different box of delights at Mount St Joseph.
They even shot a pigeon once with an air rifle, then left it on the steps of the convent in a Nike shoebox, and all because the nuns wouldn't play 'Relax' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood at the school disco (well, it had been banned by Radio 1 at the time).
I shudder when I remember the awful things that we did. I sometimes think there must have been devilment in the air during the summer of '73. As some of these kids were evil. It's hardly surprising, though, when you consider that most of them were probably conceived to Dark Side of the Moon. And what chance did I stand? Gary Glitter was number one with 'The Leader of the Gang' the week I was born.
(That's freaky, I just looked down at the word count at the bottom of my computer screen and it was on 666. Jesus!)
But I have to be honest with you and tell you that despite all of their badness these mentalists were very, very funny. I was no angel myself and even though I wasn't in their league, I was still great friends with all of them. I've tried keeping in touch with some of them over the years by going on Friends Reunited, but I don't think they're allowed access to t'Internet in prison.
It has to be said: some of the disruptive behaviour and stunts were quite original at the time.
Like when we deliberately arrived early for an RE lesson just so we could draw a mural on the blackboard. Using coloured chalk, we painstakingly drew the image of an Arizona desert road heading off into the distance up the centre of the blackboard. We drew a cactus, a few people and finally we drew a huge articulated lorry heading straight towards us. Then we flipped the blackboard over, took our seats and waited patiently for Sister Matic to arrive.
We were giggling with anticipation when eventually Sister turned in her seat and flipped the blackboard over revealing our mural. Then we'd take great delight in shouting,
'Sister, get out of the way quick, there's a truck coming.'
She always failed to see the humour in our pranks, even when we traced a full sized image of Pope John Paul II out of our RE book on to the blackboard. I thought she would have been made up sitting beside the Pope.
But disruptive behaviour almost always resulted in our being detained after the lesson for a talking-to and frig me, do nuns like to talk? I think all teachers do. They love the sound of their own voices, so much so that sometimes we could end up being detained for ages. So we came up with a sure-fire plan that would get us out of there fast. We used to fart on them. Seriously. We all used to push as hard as we could and eventually we'd create enough of an odour that they'd have no choice but to release us. It might seem a bit drastic on reflection but it worked a treat every time. Except for when Danny Thorncliffe followed through in Metalwork but I don't really want to talk about that (well, not yet anyway).
Another stunt we pulled was in Chemistry with Sister O'Mercy. Again we turned up early for class and hid ourselves behind the big wooden benches in the science lab. The lesson began and Sister O'Mercy slowly got more and more concerned as to why her class was half empty. Ten minutes went by, she'd glanced at her Rolex and mumbled something in Latin and still we were hiding behind the benches, each of us in position, poised with our textbooks and pens in our hands ready.
Then eventually she turned to the blackboard for a few seconds and that's when we all popped up into our seats simultaneously. She turned back and freaked out. Where? How did they get in here so fast? And we just casually copied from the board as if we'd been there all the time.
Sister O'Mercy never turned up for Chemistry the following week. Apparently she packed her bag and jumped over the convent wall in the middle of the night. The last I heard she was scaling Ben Nevis dressed as Bugs Bunny for muscular dystrophy.
But, as I say, it wasn't just nuns that we had teaching us, we had humans too. One of my favourites was the French teacher, Miss Plum. We all turned our desks around in her lesson once and then told her that she was at the wrong end of the classroom. It was a stand-off and as usual she burst into tears and went to get Mr Lawson. Of course, by the time they both returned we were back facing the right way. Bloody hell, we did some horrible things.
But the worst one I can think of is the time somebody (and I'm not saying who) dressed the school crucifix up for the end-of-year assembly. Whoever it was must have been planning it for a while. It was a highly skilled operation that took guts and incredible dexterity. How they managed it I'm still none the wiser b
ut I'll never forget the looks of hysteria on the nuns' faces when the curtains rolled back revealing Jesus nailed to the cross wearing a woolly Bolton Wanderers hat and a purple body warmer. The prefects were wheeling the nuns out with oxygen masks. What I still can't figure out is how they got the body warmer over Jesus's outstretched arms without ripping it? I'm not suggesting that it was a miracle for one second.