Friday, 17 October
I stayed for dinners and I actually won some marbles:9 one off Griff and two off Angus and two off Watson and even one off Lewis. We had cooking and we did stuffed egg salad and we cut the tomatoes up all criss-cross. I saw Invisible Man, Liver Birds and PC Penrose.
Saturday, 1 November
This evening I started making a new army comic called Army and I’m making loads of army stories like ‘D-Day’ and ‘Target: Adolf Hitler’.
Tuesday, 4 November
Maths was good because we did geometry. I went to Wilson’s house and we played Car Capers. I made two Arab kits for my two gripping Action Men out of two hankies10 and I did some sums for Dad on his calculator.
Wednesday, 12 November
I gave Dad £2 and he bought me the Goodies LP and it’s got ‘Wild Thing’ and ‘Funky Gibbon’ and loads more. This afternoon for art we had Mrs Peck about fabrics and it was brill. Tonight after playing the Goodies LP we saw Carry On Spying and it was brilliant.
Thursday, 13 November
We had basketball in the afternoon and we had millions of sweating hard races in teams – of course our team won every game. Our team was me, Roobarb, Deeksy, Jez and Marias. We saw Ken Dodd and Get Some In! I still like Lilley and Smith but now I like Richardson as well.
Tuesday, 2 December
Science was brilliant because we had a film about planets. Tonight me, Simon and Dad saw Invisible Man, Are You Being Served and The Doll and if I tried to figure out who murdered who my brains would go potty.
Wednesday, 10 December
This afternoon instead of art all the second year had a load of education films. One about trains, aeroplanes, silversmiths and, the best one, bread. Tonight we saw a fab war film Ice Cold in Alex.
Friday, 19 December
Last day of term. St Francis came first in the credits (skills) and this afternoon was the talent competition. Me, Griff, Angus, Lewis, Johnny and Roman did Puppy of the Baskervilles. We came third and got two credits each. Some teachers did a brilliant play starring Mrs Dennison, Mr Hanna, Miss Sabin and Mr Walman and Mrs Bream, it was fab.
Thursday, 25 December
My presents were: a watch, an Action Man Special Missions Pod,11 a Humbrol paint set, Beano annual, microscope set, desk set, a Parker pen, Idi Amin book,12 stapler, crayons, jigsaw, magic book, geometry set, diary, Shiver and Shake annual, Sketch-master, horror book, drawing book, Escape From Colditz game. Tonight we played Cluedo and I had some Cockburns port again.13
Friday, 26 December
This morning I played with my microscope set and we looked at some of Dad’s blood and spit. This afternoon Dean came and he brought his fab Action Man HQ14 and his machine gun and French Resistance kit. And we all watched Disney Time and part of Dad’s Army. Tonight all of us played Chase The Ace and Newmarket. I won 17p in all. We went to bed at 10.00.
1. I don’t know what went right here: I played Toad, top billing and a delicious comic turn to boot (Eddy played Rat, David Boulter was perfectly cast as Badger and Catherine Howard was Mole). Though welcome, this was anything but characteristic of my school drama career: Willows was the only time I had my name above the title, as it were, despite my predisposal towards minor showing off. I didn’t even get a part in the all-year primary school production of Joseph in 1973. I made a bid for glory at middle school by joining the drama club 1976–77 – guaranteeing at least a spear-carrying part in school plays. I had to be content with
‘small boy’ in The First Patient, a one-act comedy set in a dentist’s waiting room;
another small boy, that bathetic cripple Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (‘God bless us every one!’); and
with crushing inevitability a spear-carrier in The Happy Man (Angus and I played a pair of ‘sentinels’ who motionlessly flank the depressed king’s throne throughout the play – even when Anita Barker tickles us with her feather duster – and then utter one line at the very end: ‘Blimey!’).
I had tried the actor-manager route, casting myself in consecutive, self-written skits, notably for the annual middle school talent contest, playing Watson in The Puppy of the Baskervilles in 1975 and the hapless patient in The Dentist, 1976, a violent, Python-influenced two-hander in which Angus donned the white coat and the laying out of my dad’s tool kit before we started generated the most laughs. We came third with Baskervilles; The Dentist came nowhere. My dramatic profile improved at upper school, where I helped write and stage a sixth-form revue in 1982, and was then head-hunted to play the porter in Macbeth, February 1983 (‘I pray you’ll remember the porter’).
2. Mitchum.
3. See Chapter 10.
4. Gripping hands was the second landmark Action Man improvement in our short lifetime (the first had been the unveiling of ‘realistic hair’, a pleasing fuzz crop that mocked the previous shiny brown noggin). These new hands were made of moulded rubber – perishable in the long term but a significant upgrade from the frozen plastic hands of yore, fixed in a rifle-bearing position, trigger finger permanently cocked. The next depressing evolution from those Palitoy boffins was ‘eagle eyes’ (depressing only in that no pestered parent could possibly keep up, and the fact that it just created a master race effect, with fixed-hand, fixed-eye, no-fuzz Action Man finding himself relegated to menial jobs and eventually exiled to ghettos).
5. RKO’s 1939 classic, directed by William Dieterle and costing an astronomical $2 million. A treat for any boy. Except that this diary entry was written before we stayed up to watch what would have been my inaugural black and white horror film. The next day (in different pen), I have added the crestfallen truth: ‘Well we were going to but we were scared and we saw The Wooden Horse (a brill escape from prison camp film).’ I blew it. Chickened out of seeing Laughton in full Quasimodo make-up. Such would be my uneasy relationship with the films I was obsessed by.
6. Guinea pig. Melissa’s. You start on hamsters and work your way up.
7. A distinction worth making clear: ‘little soldiers’ were HO/OO scale, and ‘big soldiers’ were 1/32 scale. All Airfix, and a long-term Simon-and-Andrew staple. To avoid confusion, Simon collected little soldiers and I collected big (both had their advantages: he got more in a packet, mine were easier to paint).
8. As a registered adult junkie for ice-cold drinks, I find it quaint that such a thing was noteworthy then. But it was.
9. Marbles was the sport of kings between 1975 and 1977. I think perhaps the likes of John Lewis, Andy Virgin and Dave Watson, who joined Abington Vale Middle School from somewhere due north like Boothville or Parklands, imported the craze. But the playground at Abington Vale was tailor-made, with a modern drainage system that meant concrete channels all around the perimeter with a furrow the perfect width for marble-rolling. A tiered marble hierarchy held sway: ‘gobbies’ or ‘gobs’ were large-size marbles, which had to be struck twice by the regular kind in order to be claimed; ‘habitats’ or ‘habbies’ were opaque – also worth two of your standard glassy marble (though if you had a mutant transparent one without its regulation wisp of colour, it was a ‘clear’ and worth a ‘habby’ or a ‘gobby’). Ball bearings, or ‘ball bears’, extremely rare, were another matter altogether. Some bright spark, probably Lewis, discovered that there were miniature ball bearings in the end of a certain type of ink cartridge and attempted to play with those, but it was risky as they actually went irretrievably down the drain. Such innocent larks. Honestly, breaktime was like a Victorian etching of boys at play.
10. I told you we were poor. Poor but resourceful.
11. A modest black plastic tube containing a yellow inflatable dinghy. I am pleased to report that this item, along with most of our Action Man uniforms, boots, guns and equipment, lives on – in a box at my parents’ house, where it continues to grant hours of pleasure to my nephews Ben and Jack.
12. See Chapter 13.
13. I’m not very happy about this. You can’t give a baby booze! (We must assume it was no more than a nip.)
14. And there was us with our Special Missions Pod.
five
Spook and Fancy
The British Elvis.
(A 12-year-old David Bowie answers the question
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’)
WHEN I WAS in Mrs Munro’s class, aged 7–8, she asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. We were instructed to draw a picture of it in our jotters. No problem. I had already decided what I wanted to be and it was this: a ‘cartoonist’. (I guardedly apply those inverted commas only because I think my idea of what a cartoonist actually did for a living was a little – shall we say – two-dimensional.)
I remember the picture I drew that day, so clearly I could reproduce it for you now – if I had a jotter.
In it, the grown-up Andrew is sitting at a table with a big pencil in his fist and a wad of paper before him and he is just drawing cartoons. Really fast. Pictures of identifiable figures like Top Cat and members of the Hair Bear Bunch are flying off the table and falling around me like autumn leaves.
A somewhat idealised vision of the cartoonist’s lot I grant you: just draw cartoons until it’s time to clock off and go home – but draw them really fast. Understandably for a 7–8-year-old, I had no concept of who I was drawing the cartoons for, or why these people would want me to just draw Hair Bear on a sheet of paper and give it to them (after I’d picked it up off the floor of course); but this was a mere formality, like benefits and share options. As far as my young mind was concerned, cartoonists produced cartoons like bakers baked bread and fishermen fished for fish. I drew cartoons like this at home and I would like to turn that into a career please.
Perhaps I knew that somewhere down the long and industrialised animation process there were people who simply churned out preliminary sketches with pencils in their hands, and maybe pieces of paper did fly off their desks. In any case, I wanted to be one of them when I grew up. Have felt tips – will earn a handsome living.
And so it eventually came to pass. Some twelve years after the jotter vision, having graduated from Chelsea School of Art in 1987 with a 2:1 in Graphic Design (Mum and Dad have the certificate up), I spent at least a calendar year living solely off my artistic wits, drawing cartoons for money. That’s all I did. It was hairy at times but not once in that first trading year did I go overdrawn at the bank on the day of the month my mortgage payment went out (the 21st – it’s etched on my mind). I drew cartoons not of the Hair Bear Bunch, but of reindeers for corporate Christmas cards (including one for Virgin Atlantic), and cartoon cyclists for a Variety Club bike ride poster, and a cartoon sheepdog to help schoolchildren learn to love the benevolent works of ICI (I had uncomplicated morals in 1988), and cartoon owls and wizards and bears to go on the cover of Puzzled puzzle books, the kind you buy at stations. And sometimes, yes, I drew roughs with a pencil and the paper flew off my table.
I know, career Nostradamus.
Do other kids of 7–8 know precisely what they’re going to be when they grow up? Or do they just pick a random job, draw a picture of it and hope for the best? A lot of kids inevitably want to do what their dad does (or these days of course their stepdad). It’s a logical if unimaginative place to start and that’s why doctors beget doctors, actors form acting dynasties and circus people never seem to advertise for trainee clowns and acrobats. But my dad did something indistinct in an office! What inspiration was that to a boy who regularly blew up the guns at Navarone?
Dad was, in layman’s terms, an ‘insurance man’, which meant so little to me as a child that I actually pretended he was a policeman once. It was in Mrs Cox’s class so I must have been about 6 or 7: we had been asked to write down what job our dads did in our exercise books and draw a picture of it. Well how would you draw a man explaining the benefits of taking out full cover with personal liability? Paul Cockle’s dad was a pig farmer: easy. Kim Gupta’s dad was a doctor: finished! My dad was an insurance man. I couldn’t even spell ‘insurance’.
So it was that I denied my own father and drew him as a copper. There were mitigating circumstances – it was nearly home time and you had to queue up at Mrs Cox’s desk for spellings and the queue was looking long and there was no way I was going to miss Pixie & Dixie on telly. So with little or no regard for the dishonesty and bald opportunism of my actions I wrote these words:
‘My dad is a policeman.’
And drew a picture of him doing it. Easy. Finished!
My friends were really impressed. Probably thought he was a detective or something as he always wore plain clothes when he drove us to school.
It’s no surprise that I didn’t want to be an insurance man. It appears I didn’t even want my dad to be one. And to his eternal credit, he never once suggested it as a desirable career path either. He never put his arm around me, looked out of the window and said, ‘Son, people will always want insurance …’
It was, however, a proud moment for him when he took me to the AA Portakabin on the way to the M1 and signed me up for membership in 1985, sagely advising me to pay the extra for Home Start (which of course I needed more than any other service when I was at Chelsea Art School in Mum’s knackered old Metro). He didn’t but should’ve said, ‘You’re a man now, son. Fully covered. Nothing more I can teach you.’
Dad recently retired, but he was an insurance man for the whole of his working life. Started out as an office boy and ended up a company director. It may seem dull and officey – box files and bulldog clips – but as I grew older and wiser I realised it’s actually quite an existential job, insurance. It’s an entire industry founded on imponderables and unthinkables; they actually sell you death, pestilence, infirmity, accident and ‘acts of God’ (as they are still called with a straight face). People will always want insurance.
Insurance men are very much like policemen in fact: much maligned until you need one. Never mind Woody Allen’s facetious line from Love and Death (which raised my hackles on Dad’s behalf when I first heard it): ‘There are worse things than death. If you’ve ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.’
Yeah, and when your Central Park East apartment goes on fire, who you gonna call, Woody? There’s nothing wrong with insurance salesmen, or spending an evening with one, and anyway my dad wasn’t a salesman, he was a ‘man’.
That said, office life held no allure for me, aged 7–8. I wanted to draw Spook and Fancy off Top Cat and I wanted to be paid through the nose for it. Why? Because I could. I had … a talent for it. I WAS TALENTED.
Talent. I’m uncomfortable with the word, and don’t give me Mozart or McCartney. I prefer aptitude, faculty, capacity, bent … the more prosaic definitions for ‘being good at something’. Talent suggests gift, and gift suggests God given and I don’t believe in God or his acts so how can I countenance him giving things out?
I could draw though. In fact I could draw like a boy possessed. From an early age if you put a pen in my hand I could make a recognisable shape with it on paper. I quickly graduated to copying – in itself quite a skill, but little more – and pretty soon there wasn’t a character in TV Comic or Yogi and His Toy that I couldn’t reproduce by hand: Mighty Moth, Deputy Dawg, Texan Ted (‘Big hat, big head’), not just Spook and Fancy but every member of Top Cat and his gang.
Then I moved up to reproducing the casts of Wacky Races, The Hair Bear Bunch, Josie and the Pussycats, the family out of the Giles annuals (which Uncle Pete kept for me) and anyone and everyone from my regular comics: Beano, Buster, Knockout, Whizzer and Chips, Shiver and Shake, Beezer, Whoopee!, Monster Fun, Cracker, Krazy and its memorable spin-off Cheeky Weekly. Devouring these – and the inimitable style therein of artists like Leo Baxendale, Robert Nixon, Tom Patterson and Frank McDiarmid, whose signatures I would soon be seeking out like favourite brands – I was able to create my own hybrid characters, and eventually my own comic strips and entire comics. My comics were called things like Bingo!, Ace! and Smashw’n’Gloop.1 I
sold one of my earliest self-made comics in Class 3 to Jonathan Bailey for 2p and Richard Goodhall told me I could be arrested because I didn’t have a licence and I believed him. I’m sure I could’ve squared it with my dad, the policeman.
Drawing was my middle name. All I ever got for birthday presents were felt-tips and pads and crayons and colouring books and paints and Pop-a-Point pencils. In my early days I drew a lot of clowns because I was scared of them, and later I drew characters from old black and white horror movies because I was scared of them too – as in, too scared to watch the films when they came on TV but not too scared to fill my room with Aurora glow-in-the-dark models of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Phantom of the Opera. (There I go again, controlling my fear by getting it down.)
Relatives would ooh and aah at my drawings. ‘Isn’t he good at drawing?’ they would coo. ‘I’m going to be a cartoonist when I grow up,’ I would say, and they probably thought to themselves, ‘Dream on.’ So I did.
I only ever sent one letter to Jim’ll Fix It. It was in 1976. I asked Jim – or Jim’ll as we called him – to fix it for me to meet my hero, the aforementioned Daily Express cartoonist Giles, so I could show him how good I was at cartoons. I even drew some Giles characters on my letter and used coloured pens on the envelope as if no Jim wannabe had ever thought of that before. It was all for naught; I never got a sniff. But then neither did Simon and he’d asked Jim’ll to fix it for him to visit the Action Man factory, which ought to have been right up the programme’s street with their appetite for subliminal advertising. (It might have been just the piece of cross-promotion to save Palitoy from the storm cloud of post-Vietnam pacifism, but alas, no.)
Anyway, you get the picture. I was a child prodigy and it was Jim’ll’s loss if he couldn’t see it from my letter. I took Mum and Dad’s arts patronage for granted of course, as kids are wont to do. My parents never tried to stop me drawing. They never discouraged me from thinking of it as a career option – even when school started talking about career options, the point at which less empowering parents might have developed cold feet.
Where Did It All Go Right? Page 10