Small Man in a Book

by Rob Brydon

  The most telling piece of advice or observation that he uttered that day, though, was this: ‘It’s very hard to get to the top in this game, but it’s a damn sight harder staying there.’ That has never been far from my mind, from that day to this.

  So, why such a fan of Sir Jim? Well, he’s a one-off; there’s no one else like him, and that surely should count for something.

  I loved his radio style too. How about this (he’s just played ‘Way Down’ by Elvis)?

  ‘Elvis. “Way Down”. But … way … up … in … the … minds … of … his … many … fans.’

  Then he played the next record. That was the link. Brilliant.

  Our debut radio performance went well, the audience liked us, and we were deemed a success.

  Prowling the stage like a promiscuous panther …

  Hurrah!

  I very much liked the atmosphere of the broadcast, the efficiency of the team as they bustled around preparing the programme and completing last-minute checks before the audience was allowed in and the show began. Rather like when I auditioned for the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, this felt within my reach. Far from feeling especially daunted by it, I saw it more as a challenge at which I was fairly confident I would succeed.

  Buoyed by this success, I would revisit St David’s Hall every Friday lunchtime and loiter around the production team in the hope there might be something to do. There often was – basically, in the form of providing a silly voice for an announcement or sketch, which I was more than happy to supply.

  I was, quite unknowingly, taking the first steps towards my subsequent career. At the time, it simply felt as though I was going with the flow, taking an opportunity as it arose.

  10

  Back at college, James and I were flushed with our success and decided to take the band on the road. We secured a booking at the Wyke Regis Working Men’s Club. This was in a small town near Bournemouth, of which I had up to that point been unaware. James came from Hampshire so I suspect it was his idea, although I doubt he had any personal knowledge of the place, coming as he did from the other end of the social spectrum. The gig provided a modest fee, which we never saw; it failed even to cover the cost of renting a car to get us there in the first place, to say nothing of the petrol. So we were down on the deal before we started, but it didn’t matter. We weren’t in this for the money; that would come later. We were in this for the experience. And that’s what we got.

  With James, evoking the spirit of a young Stallone.

  We arrived at the venue after our long drive to see a list of the week’s attractions pinned to a board in the foyer. We scanned it with ill-concealed excitement, keen to see our names in print. It was a roll-call of the sort of acts you see advertising their services in the back of The Stage newspaper – the foot soldiers of show business, toiling away in the trenches of low-paying, hard-graft entertainment. Still, our names were going to be on there and that meant we had arrived. Admittedly, it was only Wyke Regis Working Men’s Club. But for us it was an arrival nonetheless. Finally spotting our billing, it would appear that we hadn’t in fact arrived; rather, it was someone who sounded almost but not quite like us. There on the board under tonight’s date was the name Robin James. Hmmm, there’d evidently been a breakdown in communication and somewhere along the line Rob and James had matured into Robin James. Not to worry, it doesn’t really matter, we told ourselves as we set about lugging the equipment in from the budget-breakingly expensive rental car.

  A couple of hours later, we launched into our act to a room that was filled to perhaps a quarter of its capacity. The inhabitants seemed, to our young eyes, to be on the other side of old, and we set about assaulting them with ‘Crocodile Rock’, ‘Hungry Heart’ and other foot-tappers of a similar ilk. The crowd, if it could be called that, seemed unimpressed but we carried on gallantly with our collection of upbeat tunes performed to the simple accompaniment of an electric piano, no percussion in sight. Our elderly audience grew less impressed by the minute; these people didn’t have time on their side and were livid at the prospect of it ebbing away in our company.

  After a very long period of us singing inappropriate songs into an empty void of nothingness, a blue-haired lady edged towards the stage, crossing the vast desert wilderness of the empty dance floor before coming to a faltering halt right in front of us. She smiled sweetly, but underneath the smile was a steely undercurrent that told us she was not to be messed with. Like Brian Dennehy’s redneck sheriff telling John Rambo that he wasn’t welcome in this town, she said, ‘We don’t want this kind of music. We like waltzes, you should play a waltz …’ Of course we didn’t have any waltzes in our set list, or even up our sleeves. We were strictly rock ’n’ roll. Pop, perhaps. But certainly not waltzes. Necessity being the biological mother of invention, we came up with a solution – one which still impresses me now, twenty-five years later, for its sheer guile and cunning. We had with us 101 Easy Hits for Buskers, a huge groaning book of sheet music within which was ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’. Now this may already be in 3/4 time – I don’t know, I’m not a proper musician – but what I do know is that we hammered the hell out of the song in a strict 3/4 rhythm, snapped out by my fingers as they conducted the dancing.

  ‘Wise [boom, boom] men [boom, boom] say [boom, boom, boom] only fools [boom, boom] rush [boom, boom] in [boom, boom, boom] …’

  It worked. The disappointed dancers, to their credit, slowly shuffled on to the dance floor and gamely supported our last-ditch effort at entertaining them. With a quarter of the available floor space bulging to capacity we sang and played on until there was no more ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ to give and we couldn’t help stopping.

  ‘Well, that’s all from us, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much and good night!’

  We left the stage to applause best described as angrily polite, and collapsed into a couple of chairs at the side of the dance floor in a heap of nervous exhaustion. We looked at each other. There was nothing to say. We had survived – just. Let’s leave it at that. While we were sitting there trying to comprehend the scale of our humiliation, we noticed a gentleman heading over to us. It was the chap who was in charge of the evening; we’d spoken to him briefly on our arrival when, for all he knew, he’d stumbled on the new U2. We were sure he wouldn’t have been overly impressed, but perhaps he’d admired the way we pulled the Elvis song out of the bag and almost turned the audience around. He stopped a couple of feet away from us. He didn’t smile.

  ‘You’ve got another ten minutes to do. Get back on.’

  A recurring fear in my professional life has been not having enough material for my designated slot. Whether it’s been the West End, a tour, or a spot on a charity show at the O2, it is something that has dogged me for as long as I can remember. Only now does it occur to me that this may have been the birth of my condition. Thank you, Wyke Regis Working Men’s Club social secretary. Thank you very much.

  We dragged our feet back to the stage and managed another ten minutes of faux waltz music to an audience giddy on a heady cocktail of anger, pity and contempt. When the ten minutes were up, we looked over to the social secretary. He gave the cold, steely nod of the professional executioner (‘Goodbye, Mr Bond …’ ), a thin smile spreading imperceptibly across his lips. We trudged back to the chairs at the edge of the dance floor and sat staring at our feet, scanning the floor tiles for a silver lining, when a pair of comfortable shoes entered our view. They belonged to a man, perhaps in his seventies, with a soft friendly face and a kindly disposition. He looked at us and thought for a moment. We knew he was about to tell us that it hadn’t been as bad as we’d thought and that he’d enjoyed it anyway, so what do they know?

  He began to speak.

  ‘Boys, I’ve been coming here for a long time, seen a lot of acts come and go over the years, but I have to say, you were the worst I’ve ever seen. You were crap.’

  He turned and was gone.

  We packed up our equi
pment in next to no time, jumped into the ‘never more expensive than now’ car, and began the journey home. These were the now-forgotten days before satellite navigation so I have to assume that we would have conversed at some point regarding the best route back to Cardiff. Try as I might, though, I can’t recall a single word being spoken the entire length of the journey.

  It’s an odd thing about performers, artistes, ‘turns’, call us what you will – and it will, I’m sure, become a recurring theme throughout this book – that no matter how bad the beating, how great the humiliation, we always dust ourselves down and get back in the ring. So often, comedians are told by friends and family, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’ This is to miss the point. All the successful comedians, actors or musicians that I’ve known have had one thing in common. Their job is a calling, not a choice. It’s something that I’m sure annoys the hell out of people with a degree of contempt for those whom they view as self-absorbed luvvies, but it’s true nonetheless. It’s something the person feels compelled to do, as opposed to a choice made while chatting to a careers officer on a wet Tuesday afternoon at the local school. It’s a feeling of having something to say, of wanting to get something ‘out’, and it’s what carries you through the traumas of many hostile audiences.

  We experienced a few more, James and I, in those early days with everything ahead of us and no guidebook to consult along the way. There was a nightclub in the centre of Cardiff called Jacksons, which in the mid-eighties was a fairly upmarket, sophisticated sort of place. It was a step up from Bumpers, another celebrated haunt for nocturnal Cardiffians, which had a more downmarket feel. Jacksons seemed the sort of place for young people on their way up; if a soap star was in town for an opening of a shop or an envelope, Jacksons was where you might find them relaxing after a hard day’s smiling. It had a touch of glamour (to my Port Talbot-trained eyes, anyway) and was undoubtedly a step in the right direction, a little further up the evolutionary ladder of sophistication than the Troubadour, sitting snugly as it did in the shadow of Cardiff Arms Park. It even had a dash of showbiz thrown into the mix with the presence of a manager who had recently appeared on Blind Date. Cilla Black’s massively popular dating show was huge and, although a little racy at the time, now of course appears positively Edwardian in its values.

  James and I somehow landed a try-out at the club. We were to perform early one evening, before too many of the paying customers had come in, and we had the added excitement of knowing that a coven of the company’s directors would also be in attendance, judging our fledgling performance. I don’t remember if we were nervous. Maybe we were. As I’ve said, there were some situations that I just didn’t get nervous over; I felt I was better than them, and therefore they were lucky to have me. This may have been one of them. What I do remember with alarming clarity is the sight of the celebrated blindly dated manager, one and a half songs into our try-out, walking hurriedly towards us from the huddle of directors while making a cutting motion across his throat.

  Our publicity card.

  We were to stop. Immediately. No ifs, no buts. And, more importantly, no more songs.

  This was embarrassing on many levels, not least because a small group of friends from the college had gamely come along to support us, amongst them a very young Hugo Blick (with whom, fifteen years later, I would go on to make Marion and Geoff ). Sadly, my lack of fortune-telling abilities meant that the prospect of awards and plaudits fifteen years down the road was of little comfort. So, with no other option open to us, we did as instructed and left the building, our metaphorical tails tucked metaphorically between our very real legs. The evening ended with James and I sitting on a bench on Cardiff’s Queen Street, contemplating our inability to entertain. It was dark now and the gloom of the night was easily matched, if not outdone, by the gloom we felt at another failure.

  As has been the case on so many occasions, the start of a new day brought renewed hope. And so we trudged on undeterred and determined to prove the naysayers wrong. We had a few successes; a gig at a golf club on the outskirts of Cardiff went very well, as did a twenty-first birthday party in Hampshire. At both of these outings we performed under a new name, as Tony Casino and the Roulette Wheels (the wheels in question being our backing singers). One of the Roulette Wheels was a girl named Jacqueline Gilbride.

  Jacque was from Glasgow, the daughter of a pharmacist; she was taking a one-year postgrad acting course, and had recently been awarded the title of My First Girlfriend. My initial sighting of her was in a student production of Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus. I felt she was the most naturally funny member of the cast and thought it would be nice to tell her so, which I did when we met in the bar later that evening.

  That was all.

  Most people, when writing of their formative college years, particularly with reference to their early romantic endeavours, often explain things away by reminding the reader that the events being recalled occurred during ‘my drinking years’. With me, the opposite is true. I didn’t begin to drink alcohol until my early to mid-thirties, so all these episodes came to pass without the liberating assistance of a drink. I take an odd pride in that now. Anyone can walk up to a girl and begin chatting her up if they’ve had a drink; I was going into battle, not without a sword – if you’d said I was entering the fray without a sword, I would have taken great offence – but certainly without a shield. The mind-boggling thing for me now is to think that, at the time, I was entirely unaware of the difference this would have made to my prospects. How could I not have realized? Well, sober as the chair of a judicial review I made my first faltering steps on the road to romance – a road which, let us not forget, is often described as ‘rocky’.

  I would not rush to oppose that view.

  It was during the winter of 1984, my first winter away from home, that I had taken a job at the New Theatre in Cardiff, selling programmes and ice creams during the run of that year’s pantomime. Robin Hood starred Ruth Madoc and Crackerjack’s Stu Francis (at that time on top of the world with his uncompromising catchphrase, ‘Ooh, I could crush a grape!’) alongside a still relatively unknown double act from Rotherham, the Chuckle Brothers. I was not toiling alone; both Dougray and Dave also had jobs there. The three of us would stand in the foyer of the theatre wearing our Robin Hood hats and holding little wooden toy bows and arrows above our heads as we sang our own little ditty, to the tune of the kids’ TV show Robin Hood.

  Bows and arrows, bows and arrows, only 90p,

  Bows and arrows, bows and arrows, buy them all from me.

  They’re made of wood,

  They fire really good,

  Bows and arrows, bows and arrows, bows and arrows …

  Anyone who works front of house in the theatre will tell you that it’s the best way to see beyond the supposed glitz and glamour of show business as you watch the same performance night after night after matinee. For an actor, it’s an invaluable education.

  The New Theatre was a receiving house and played host to dozens of touring productions which Dave, Dougray and I would watch, often standing high up at the back of the gods, sometimes weighed down with trays full of ice creams, drinks and chocolates. No greater incentive was needed to shift these overpriced refreshments than the fact that the more you sold, the lighter the tray became. Having shifted the programmes, we would head back to the office and hand over the cash, carefully counting out the remaining unsold items to ensure fair play, before loading up again for the interval. In between these duties you could just stand and watch.

  I saw Tom Baker, Tony Haygarth and Dora Bryan in the National Theatre’s tour of She Stoops to Conquer, was put off opera by the rudeness of the audience at an interminably long production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and also watched Ayckbourn’s Way Upstream, which featured in its cast Norman Rossington, an actor of great interest to me as he had appeared alongside not only The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, but also Elvis in Double Trouble. One afternoon, between the matinee and evening performances,
I cornered him in the corridor and asked him the question he must by then have been well and truly sick of: ‘What was he like?’

  Solo acts came too. I remember yawing at the prospect of two nights of Max Boyce. I couldn’t have been more wrong; he was astonishing, putting on a show somewhere between stand-up and a rock concert, on both nights performing as though it was the last show of his life. After one performance I happened to pass him on the stairs as he came off the stage and made his way to his dressing room. He looked like a man possessed, drenched in sweat, staring straight ahead. It was a glimpse into a distant world I would inhabit one day. But not yet.

  The Cardiff pantomime had an annual tradition it shared with its neighbours at the Grand Theatre in Swansea and across the River Severn at the Hippodrome in Bristol. Each year the three casts, crews and front-of-house staff would hold a huge party in one of those cities. As that year’s productions drew to a close, it was the turn of Cardiff to host, and so Dave and I made preparations for the big bash. Unbeknown to me, Dave had his eye on Jacque and had invited her as his guest, telling me that she would be bringing her friend Lisa. Lisa enjoyed some celebrity status within the college, having already appeared in a film with no less a person than Richard Gere. If you watch his Second World War movie, Yanks, towards the end as the aforementioned Americans begin to leave the Yorkshire town and travel home, a girl is seen crying and waving from a railway bridge. That was Lisa.

  The four of us poured into Dave’s tinny little black Fiat Panda and crossed our fingers that we would make the journey unscathed. We headed across Cardiff and arrived at the hotel, quickly and effortlessly mingling with Ruth Madoc, Stu Francis, Barry and Paul Chuckle and even Alfred Marks, recently arrived from Bristol, before getting some drinks and finding a table. I was seated next to Jacque and we began to talk. We talked and we talked and we talked. We really did talk a great deal; we got on like a house ablaze, its occupants running screaming out on to the street. I thought I might have noticed a few disgruntled looks from Dave, but couldn’t be sure. He seemed happy enough, chatting to Lisa, and even happier when, towards the end of the evening, the DJ called out the number of the winning raffle ticket as Jacque and I made our way to the dance floor. Lucky Dave was sole winner of a beautiful, extremely limited-edition plate, celebrating another successful year for the triumvirate of pantomimes. As he carried his commemorative crockery proudly back to our table, he looked across the room to the dance floor, to see Jacque and me entwined in each other’s arms, kissing. He wasn’t happy, even with his plate – which, in light of recent events, had taken on the role of consolation prize.