Small Man in a Book

by Rob Brydon

  Much as I wanted to hate Phil, I just couldn’t. He’d only recently loaned me Pièce de Résistance, a legendary bootleg cassette featuring Bruce’s concert at New Jersey’s Capitol Theatre on the 19th of September 1978, part of his renowned ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ tour. Many regard this as Bruce’s finest ever live performance and while I’d heard rumours of the existence of this tape I’d never seen one, let alone heard one. Well, here it was. It was mine, for a while; I was allowed to borrow it! My eyes lit up as I scampered back to my little room clutching my treasure. Clever, clever Phil; he’d cunningly used the two little C-90 cassettes like a burglar throwing a poisoned lump of steak to a particularly dim-witted guard dog.

  Peter Wingfield … ‘would soar past, cape flapping in the breeze, en route to Planet Sex’.

  Woof, woof.

  I returned to the National Youth Theatre of Wales the following year, this time to renew old friendships and play slightly, ever so slightly, bigger parts. We did Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. I had very little to do in this; it was produced in such a way that a lot of the actors were sitting on stage a lot of the time, so I spent much of it watching the older actors while simultaneously losing all feeling in my lower body. I have no memory of any line spoken; I was basically an audience member with a very good view.

  The Caucasian Chalk Circle, National Youth Theatre of Wales, 1983. ‘A lot of the actors were sitting on stage a lot of the time, so I spent much of it watching the older actors while simultaneously losing all feeling in my lower body. I was basically an audience member with a very good view.’

  The other production was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This was more like it; I played Starveling, one of the mechanicals who put on the play Pyramus and Thisbe. Steve Roberts played Bottom and was hilarious; my part was smaller, but was enlivened and enlarged slightly by my taking a dog on to the stage each night. It was decided that my character would have a dog on a piece of string and this at least meant I could engineer a few laughs from disparaging looks towards the bemused creature. It only became a problem during the special matinee performance for school parties, when most of the kids in the audience began calling the dog, whistling and clicking away at him to try to encourage him to break free from my clutches. He, in return, began to bark back at them. This was very funny for about a minute, and then it wasn’t.

  I suppose that I passed through my two years with the NYTW without ever displaying any great promise, or certainly none that anyone noticed. I can only remember the director Alan Vaughan Williams once commenting on my performance. It was after the last evening of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I ran into him in the corridor. He complimented me, saying that I had made something out of a very small part. This meant a lot and was enough for me to feel that my time there had not been entirely fruitless. It would have been nice to have played some more substantial parts, though. I suppose at that time I was still quite shy and hadn’t learned to push myself forward.

  When the organization had a tenth anniversary bash they produced a commemorative booklet in which were listed all the students who had been involved over the years. Some of the entries recalled funny moments, odd character traits and celebrations of roles past; a few of them ran to twenty or more lines. Mine read:

  Robert Jones. Robert was from Port Talbot and came twice on the course. Unfortunately he moved to Neath and was not eligible for a grant from his new authority. He is now at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.

  I couldn’t fault its accuracy.

  7

  While I was going from strength to strength at school (certainly in terms of the shows, if not academically), at home things were about to take a turn for the worse. The recession had hit Port Talbot hard and left many without jobs. The steelworks was far and away Port Talbot’s largest employer and when the workers began a fourteen-week strike, the knock-on effect was huge. This, coupled with record interest rates of 17 per cent, was too much for Dad’s business to take, and it folded. We sold the house and moved back to Baglan. We moved in with Nan, who was now living alone since Grandpa had passed away. This was of course a very difficult time for all the adults concerned, but I was wrapped up in my teenage life and much of the stress and strain passed me by.

  While Pete changed schools to Glan Afan Comprehensive in Port Talbot, I stayed on at Porthcawl, to continue with my A Levels (ha, ha) and, more importantly to me, to carry on with the school shows. I now had to get the bus from Baglan to Porthcawl every morning, a journey that took an hour given its painfully circuitous route. Unlike the other sixty-minute special that I’d taken to Dumbarton, I made this journey without the company of any school friends. There was, though, a regular cast of characters that I would observe on the bus each morning, joining at their usual stops like clockwork.

  From left to right: Nanny Margam, Me, Cousin Jayne and her husband Steve, Mum, Aunty Margaret, Pete and Dad.

  A small group of what I considered at the time to be old ladies – although, I suppose now, they would have been in their fifties – would sit in a huddle in the first two rows of the higher section of seats at the back. From the moment they sat down, they would smoke like chimneys and sit there in their own hazy blue atmosphere, a self-sufficient nicotine-fuelled ecosystem, taking much of it with them when they finally disembarked, while always leaving enough behind so that we wouldn’t forget them.

  For a while I became friendly with an older man who travelled part of my route each day. He would have been in his sixties and wore a dark pinstriped suit; his hair was whiter than white. We got talking and one day it emerged that he was none other than Bonnie Tyler’s father. There surely can’t be any readers who need reminding that Bonnie was a familiar voice in the charts from the seventies onwards with hits like ‘Lost in France’ and ‘It’s a Heartache’ – although, at the time of my daily journeys, she had been notable for some time by her absence from the hit parade. One morning on the bus, her dad, with some pride, told me how she had been in New York working with Jim Steinman.

  ‘Do you know who Jim Steinman is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He wrote and produced Bat Out Of Hell.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, she’s been working with him and the new record is coming out soon, and I think it’ll be a Number One.’

  ‘Ooh.’

  Deep down inside – in fact not that deep down, actually quite near the surface – I doubted that Bonnie would be enjoying a Number One hit. How wrong could I have been? A few months passed and before you could say, ‘Turn around, bright eyes,’ she was at the top of the charts everywhere with ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’. Given my early-morning chats with her father, I’ve always felt slightly connected to the record; I feel that I should, to some small extent, be credited with having played a part in its success.

  It was 1983, a good year for Number Ones: ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Every Breath You Take’ and ‘Baby Jane’ for Rod Stewart. David and I went to see him at Wembley on the weekend that ‘Baby Jane’ got to the top of the charts; we stayed at the flat behind the chemist’s shop. When we got back after the gig we put Rod’s album on loud and David walked into the bathroom to find me in front of the mirror, miming into a hairbrush.

  Not long after Bonnie had been at Number One, David Bowie took the spot with ‘Let’s Dance’; everyone had the album and stayed glued to the television, hoping to see the video. I’d had a soft spot for Bowie since singing along in the car to ‘Life On Mars?’ at the age of eight.

  It’s a God-awful small affair …

  To which my mother quickly replied, ‘It may well be, but we won’t have that sort of language here …’

  And especially since discovering that his real name was David Robert Jones.

  Years later, I was staggered to hear him being interviewed on Radio One and saying that, when on the tour bus, he liked to watch Cruise of the Gods. The presenter hadn’t heard of i
t and Bowie said, ‘It stars the guy from Marion and Geoff … you know … what’s his name? Umm …’ The presenter not only hadn’t seen Cruise of the Gods, he also had no idea who the guy from Marion and Geoff was.

  The two of them spent a good minute stumbling unsuccessfully towards my name while I shouted at the radio, ‘It’s me, it’s me!’

  My cries went unanswered by the Thin (Forgetful) White Duke.

  Ground Control was unable to make contact with Major Tom …

  I could go on.

  Cruise of the Gods was a curious melting pot of talent; new, established and undiscovered. Written by the splendid Tim Firth it tells the story of Andy Van Allen, former star of sci-fi series The Children of Castor, who has now fallen on hard times and accepts a booking to appear on a fan cruise where he will mingle with and answer questions from a collection of fanatical devotees of the show. While on the boat he comes into contact with his old co-star from the series, who is now a huge star in America. I played Andy and Steve Coogan played Nick Lee, now a big star. The head of the fan club was played by a pre-Little Britain David Walliams; a relatively unknown James Corden played the fan who turned out to be my son, and Russell Brand was an extra. We shot at what appeared at first sight to be an idyllic though, on closer inspection, turned out to be a mosquito-ridden beach resort a few hours from Athens and then on a cruise ship for a couple of weeks as it sailed between Athens, Venice, Dubrovnik, Santorini and other Mediterranean beauty spots.

  On location for Cruise of the Gods with James.

  This was the first time I had met David Walliams, and we hit it off from the start; he was a very appealing combination of Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams and a Pet Shop Boy, making us all laugh as he minced around the ship, camping it up. He did something very funny, though it’s hard to explain. As he walked around a room he would reach out and touch various pieces of furniture – a table top, a door frame, a vase of flowers. It doesn’t sound like much, but it had me in stitches.

  We began to form a little double act, two old queens cruising the seas in their retirement, one minute affectionately calling each other My David and My Rob (‘Ooh, My Rob’s enjoying that ice cream’ ‘My David’s loving it …’), the next bickering and mercilessly savaging each other in front of our fellow cast members (‘Ice cream? You don’t know the first thing about ice cream!’ ‘I’ll ice cream you in a minute!’ ‘I wish you would …’ ).

  It’s not how it looks.

  All the while that we were on the boat, David’s main topic of conversation was the pilot that he was going to be making with Matt Lucas once we got back to the UK. ‘Me ’n’ Matt are making a pilot of Li’l Britain … Li’l Britain, me ’n’ Matt … me ’n’ Matt, Li’l Britain …’ It was a constant bubbling in the background; he was fantastically focused.

  Midway through the cruise the ship ran aground and ripped a hole in the hull. All the guests were taken off the vessel by lifeboats that evening, slowly chugging towards land as, behind us, the brightly lit cruise ship shifted further away. It’s a tad obvious to say it was like something from Titanic, but it was. After a couple of hours waiting on the dockside, David and I shared a cabin on a rough and ready overnight ferry to Athens and kept up our old queens act as we struggled to get to sleep on hard bunk beds in a tiny cell, obviously too close to the engine room for comfort. David would call out in the night from the bottom bunk, ‘Oh, My Rob! This constant pounding, it’s incessant – will it ever stop?’

  When we eventually got back on the sister ship of the stricken original there were not enough cabins to go around so David and I said we’d share. Joining ship again at Athens, we were shown to our quarters by a smiling young stewardess who took us into the room and pointed to the beds, two singles pushed together to make a double. ‘Ooh, My Rob!’ squealed David with delight. Sometimes I would wake at night and make my way through the darkness to the loo, assuming David was asleep, until, mid-flow, I’d hear, ‘Ooh, My Rob!’

  We had such a laugh together; each night before dinner I’d take a bath and he’d arrive in the bathroom with a glass of champagne, which he would hand over like an inappropriately intimate butler, a butler gone bad. In Athens we visited the Acropolis together, very Kenneth Williams and Joe Orton; then, on the island of Santorini, David, Steve, James and I rode donkeys from the port up the steep hill to the town, all the while David wailing like a demented Frankie Howerd, ‘Ooh, yes … well, hmm … It’s a big donkey, I’ll give it that …’

  This trip was also the first time I’d met James Corden, an eager young pup of a boy, who loved to tag along with Steve, David and me and join in any banter that might arise, often starting it off himself and encouraging us to get involved. On one occasion we were in Istanbul and James came along with David and me for a look around the town. He says now that we were forever trying to give him the slip; I don’t remember it like that, but I do remember thinking that he was always around, a few yards behind us, puffing and panting as he caught up. In Venice he joined a group of us one lunchtime in the famous Harry’s Bar and we were asked to leave when our singing (in my opinion, our rather beautiful singing) disturbed some of the other customers.

  In Venice with David. James is tagging along.

  The first time I noticed his talent was when we were filming the scene where I realize that he’s the son I didn’t know I had. We were in a cabin, the windows covered up to simulate night, and I vividly remember playing the rather intimate, two-hander scene and thinking to myself, Bloody hell, he’s good! I’d better pull my socks up. Just at that moment the boat lurched violently one way, then the other, and a loud scraping sound was heard. We looked at each other in shock. That can’t be normal, can it? It wasn’t – we’d hit a rock. Opening the cabin door revealed crew members, normally the model of composure, panic-sticken and running through the narrow corridors. Within minutes, we were all up on deck wearing our life jackets. The official term is ‘mustering’, and we mustered with some degree of anxiety until being told that, while the boat wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon, we were in no immediate danger of sinking.

  One night, while filming at the infested beach resort, we were walking back from a taverna together along a dusty road in the darkness. James was telling me how he wanted to write, but didn’t know how to start. I told him to just get on with it. I wonder if he did?

  The last notable in this remarkable cast was a very young, slightly chubby and entirely unknown Russell Brand, playing one of the fans on the boat – more or less an extra, with maybe two lines. He was a remarkable boy even then, and would hold me spellbound on the deck each morning as he recounted his adventures of the previous night when he’d ventured off the ship and explored the seamier side of Istanbul.

  ‘I confidently predict that one day you will remake Dudley Moore’s Arthur.’

  ‘Her hand shot out from the darkness, a finger beckoning me onward … Should I enter hither? Behind me, gunshots filled the night air … I leapt on to a nearby canopy and began my escape across the rooftops of Istanbul …’

  Listening to him tell these wonderfully vivid and absorbing tales, as the ship chugged on around the Mediterranean and the wind blew through our hair, was like watching Peter Pan flying around the rigging of Captain Hook’s Jolly Roger. Although he was just an extra on the shoot, I took the unprecedented step of predicting that he would one day be a big star. Well done, me.

  Nineteen years earlier, I was continuing my mammoth daily bus journeys to school right through to the end of my time at Porthcawl Comprehensive, an occasion marked by spectacular failure at A level. This didn’t matter, as I’d really been staying on solely to enjoy more school shows and to keep on resitting O levels until I had the five required for a university grant. The A levels were never really needed. Academic historians might wish to note that I eventually walked away with O level passes in English Language, English Literature, Drama, Economics and Maths.

  Throughout these long-distance commutes I was involved in the va
rious unrequited yearnings detailed earlier in this book, and it was while on the bus that I would build up a modicum of confidence and belief that I might be in with a chance. This was due to the darkened plastic sheet that hung behind the driver’s cab, a device originally employed solely to separate the driver from his passengers but nowadays primarily used to protect the driver from his passengers. When sitting in the seats closest to and facing directly this large piece of darkened plastic, the reflection that came back was an altered image of oneself, as the plastic was slightly curved. This had the effect of squashing whatever it was reflecting, and so a fat person would appear fatter, making the seat something of a no-go area for the tubby. Long-faced horse whisperers like me, though, were able to see a far more solid fellow staring back at them, someone who had been working out for a while, and with some degree of success (to the point that, at the height of my state of denial, I became convinced I looked a little like Christopher Reeve, star of the Superman films).

  I can’t help wondering now whether my romantic history would have been different if I’d managed to strap any of my distantly adored beauties into the front seat of the Neath-to-Porthcawl bus. As it was, I ploughed on bus-less and living in hope of romance that was never to surface.

  Every year as Christmas approached, I would dread the Christmas Disco, which for us would take place at the now-vanished Stoneleigh Club, just along the road from the record shop in Porthcawl and not far from Fulgoni’s ice cream parlour. Here it was that I would chat happily with a variety of girls; dance with them, even. But come the end of the night and the dreaded slow dance to ‘Merry Xmas (War Is Over)’, I would be left at the edge of the dance floor wondering how so many of my mates had managed to find themselves wrapped around a girl. Each year it was the same, John Lennon taunting me, reminding me that it was Christmas and asking me what I’d done. The answer, when it came to girls, was an emphatic ‘nothing’. He’d bang on, reiterating that another year was over and that we were about to begin a new one. He’d then add insult to injury by cheerily informing me that he hoped I’d have fun. No one was hoping more than me, John, no one.