Next it was the short-lived duo Climie Fisher, a kind of less good Lighthouse Family, if that’s possible. Then we watched Mike Smith count down the top ten. Robin and I looked hungrily around the studio. Where were the Pet Shop Boys going to sing their latest chart-topper? We had to elbow our way to the front. ‘And for the second week at number one it’s Pet Shop Boys and “Heart”!’ announced Mike Smith as the video started playing on the screen. Robin and I were so disappointed. Behind us were a couple of rough-looking teenage girls from Essex in luminous tracksuits.
‘Shame the Pet Shop Boys aren’t here,’ said the blonde one.
To which the brunette replied, ‘Don’t worry, they’re just a couple of queers.’
The Dame Edna Experience was at the time one of the biggest entertainment programmes on television. It was a chat show which has since been imitated countless times in which real-life celebrities were humiliated by the host. Such was the esteem in which Barry Humphries, the creator of Dame Edna, was held that the biggest stars of the day would queue up to be destroyed by her (Cliff Richard and Sean Connery were guests on the first episode). Dame Edna is one of the greatest comedy characters of all time, if not the greatest. Despite ‘her’ actually being a man, the character is so utterly believable it would be demeaning to call Dame Edna a drag act. The Dame Edna Experience dominated Saturday night television, and when a season in the West End was announced, Robin and I booked tickets. We sat in the cheapest seats, at the very top and back of the theatre, and Dame Edna referred to us as the ‘paupers’.
‘Once in a while I will glance up at you, in strict accordance to the amount you have paid. [Pause.] Goodbye.’
Just like the experience of seeing Rowan Atkinson live, it was like being struck by lightning, but this show had a lot more spontaneity. If Rowan Atkinson was a scientist, Barry Humphries was an artist.
For the West End run, instead of celebrities, members of the audience were humiliated. When a large lady was brought up on the stage Dame Edna touched her newest victim’s dress.
‘Lovely material, darling.’
‘Thank you,’ said the large lady, basking in her moment in the spotlight.
‘I’m surprised you could get so much of it.’
The whole evening (which began with Humphries’ second most famous character, Sir Les Patterson) was explosively funny. A couple of thousand of us shook the Strand Theatre with laughter. The entire performance remains imprinted in my memory. It’s no coincidence that many of the characters Matt and I created for Little Britain such as Carol ‘Computer Says No’ excelled in cruelty, though they never managed to humiliate their victims with as much wit as Dame Edna.
My hero-worship of Barry Humphries dates from that night.
Friday 7/11/1997
On tour with Matt I brought a video of Barry Humphries’ South Bank Show to watch in the van during the journey home. I said, ‘He’s the man I want to be in forty years’ time: elegant, intellectual, impossibly funny.’
Monday 16/2/98
A read-through at the American church just off the Tottenham Court Road for the Channel 4 sketch series Barking I am doing. I read through scripts with Rhys Thomas, who is playing opposite me in a couple of scenes. We sneaked a peak in the rehearsal room next door. Barry Humphries rehearsing his new Edna show. I felt completely awestruck even though I didn’t even catch a glimpse of him.
In 2005 such was the huge success of Little Britain that Matt and I would be honoured with our very own South Bank Show special to be broadcast that Christmas. I told the producer how inspired I had been by seeing Dame Edna perform that night, and Barry Humphries very kindly agreed to appear on the programme with us. A breakfast at the Connaught Hotel in London was arranged, which would be filmed for the documentary. Matt and I sat like eager schoolboys waiting for our favourite teacher, and he didn’t disappoint. He arrived in a beautiful Savile Row suit, topped off perfectly with a fedora. Although this was meant to be a conversation all I wanted to do was listen. When the waiter asked Barry, ‘Would you like some freshly squeezed orange juice, sir?’ he replied, ‘Have you by any chance got any that was squeezed a week ago, that’s now going very slightly off?’
The waiter looked bemused.
‘I will ask kitchen, sir.’
Filming hadn’t even started but already Matt and I were in hysterics.
Two years later we returned the favour when Barry asked us to be guests on his new Saturday night chat show The Dame Edna Treatment. The only downside was that at one point we had to share the sofa with the most annoying man in Britain, Piers Morgan. He turned to Matt and me and in a typically Morganesque charmless attempt to break up a double act asked, ‘Who do you think is funnier out of you two? Because I know who I think is funnier.’
‘Well luckily we are both funnier than you,’ I said.
The audience applauded, and Barry Humphries stepped outside his Dame Edna persona for half a second and gave me a wink as if to say, That showed him!
Seeing Barry Humphries that night at the Strand Theatre gave me the confidence to accept my first paid gig as a comedian. I was seventeen …
11
A Swimmer Who Dabbles in Comedy
Soon everyone in my year at Reigate Grammar School was turning eighteen. That meant we could all drink alcohol, so birthday parties were held at local nightclubs with names like Bachelor’s, Vortex or Cinderella’s. They were universally awful. My cool friend Richard Gadd planned to have his at Reigate Rugby Club.
‘Williams, will you do some stand-up comedy at my party?’
‘Stand-up comedy?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t really do stand-up comedy.’
‘You’re funny. Of course you can do stand-up comedy.’
I thought for a moment.
‘Yes, Gadd, I’d love to.’
‘I’ll pay you five pounds.’
‘I’ll do it for free.’
‘No, I want to pay you. Is five pounds OK?’
‘Wow! Thank you.’
Of course I didn’t have an act, just the belief that I might be funny. I went through lots of ideas. I would sing. I would appear in drag.
Quickly I remembered I couldn’t sing, and I thought drag was risky for a rugby club. So I wrote some material and stole a great deal more, mostly from a video, Steve Martin Live, which captured one of the greatest comedy performances of all time. I wrote down my script on cards and arrived at the club three hours early to sound-check. I was so early that Richard Gadd had yet to arrive, and there were lots of tough-looking men who had been playing rugby all afternoon drinking in the bar.
I approached the barman. ‘I’m here for Richard Gadd’s party.’
‘The party’s not for two hours, son. What do you want to drink?’
‘Just some tap water, please.’
He rolled his eyes and got me some water. I took my glass and faced the room. There was nowhere to sit and I felt distinctly uncomfortable standing at the bar while all these rugby types were jostling to buy a drink. I spotted the end of a banquette that was unoccupied.
‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said the rugby type, having changed out of his rugby shirt into another more casual one in case anyone doubted his love of the sport. His ear was severely misshapen; perhaps it had been chewed in a scrum.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘I’m here for Richard Gadd’s party. I’m the stand-up comedian.’
‘Ha ha ha!’
I wasn’t sure why the idea that I might be a stand-up comedian was funny in itself. As a comedian you definitely want people to laugh, but when you decide and not before. The late Bob Monkhouse had the best self-deprecating one-liner on this theme: ‘People laughed when I said I’d become a comedian, well they’re not laughing now.’
‘Tell us a fucking joke then,’ goaded the rugby type.
‘I don’t really do jokes.’
‘You’re a stand-up comedia
n who doesn’t do jokes. Good fucking luck! Ha ha! You’re going to need a drink. We are all having whiskies. Do you want a whisky?’
‘Just another tap water, please.’
‘A tap water for the fucking comedian over here!’
Finally Richard Gadd arrived. I was so relieved. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to the man with the misshapen ear.
As I was the kind of person who would arrive at 7.55 for a party at 8.00, I was confounded that I had to wait for a few hours until everyone had arrived and I could take to the stage, which was little more than a wooden box.
The music stopped and I could hear boos.
‘Here to do some stand-up comedy for my birthday is Williams,’ announced Richard Gadd. There was a smattering of reasonably enthusiastic applause from my contemporaries in the upper sixth.
‘Good evening, everybody,’ I said too loudly into the microphone. The clicking sound was actually my mouth dry with fear.
‘Boy, those French. They have a different word for everything! I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks! I gave my cat a bath the other day – they love it. He sat there, he enjoyed it. It was fun for me. The fur would stick to my tongue, but other than that …’
Of course they weren’t my jokes; they were Steve Martin’s. Jokes that propelled him to playing stadiums in America in the late 1970s. To become the biggest stand-up comedian in the world. Even though I was reading them from cards because I was scared I would forget them, I got laughs. The jokes are so good they would still get laughs if Professor Stephen Hawking was delivering them. I was seventeen so I hope I can be forgiven. I have never really understood that Oscar Wilde quote, ‘Talent borrows. Genius steals.’ In comedy originality is everything. A joke is a surprise. And there’s no surprise when you’ve heard the joke before.
A few days after I swam the Channel in 2006 I was introduced to the great Steve Martin, whose jokes I had stolen, by Alan Yentob at Wimbledon, where I had been invited to watch the tennis by the BBC.
‘Steve, do you know David?’ said Alan.
‘Ah! Are you the gentleman who swam the Channel? I read about that in the newspaper.’
‘Yes, Steve, that’s me,’ I beamed. Steve Martin, one of the greatest comedians of all time, knows who I am. ‘But I also do comedy. Have you ever heard of a TV series called Little Britain?’ I asked excitedly.
‘No,’ he said.
Steve Martin obviously assumed I was a swimmer who dabbled in comedy. (Maybe he was correct!) It served me right for stealing his jokes twenty years before.
After Richard Gadd’s eighteenth, which went so well that in my elation I refused to take his five pounds, I was asked to perform at a ball that some boys in the upper sixth were organizing. They thought this would make them rich, as at the time all most people in the year wanted was an opportunity to cop off with someone of the opposite sex. This would be a much bigger event, with hundreds of teenagers not just from Reigate Grammar School but also from all over Surrey.
Emboldened by my success I said yes, and agreed a fee of twenty pounds, which was then reduced to a free ticket, which seemed odd as I was going anyway. I was never any good at the business side of things, and still take little interest in what I get paid. Just like today, all I cared about was being up on that stage again.
So I went about writing a new set, by which I mean re-renting Steve Martin Live from the video shop. The problem was I had already taken all the jokes that could be transmuted for a British audience, so I was left with the more bizarre routines such as ‘Cat Juggling’. I borrowed my dad’s dinner suit, as this was a black-tie event, and my mum drove me to the hall in Redhill.
I stood by the DJ holding the microphone waiting for my moment. Finally Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers faded down and the DJ (who I was told had great connections in the show business world in London) announced me.
‘Now for some comedy with a very funny man … David Williams!’
There were boos when the music stopped. But this time the boos never stopped. These teenagers wanted to drink and dance and snog. What’s more I was probably the worst stand-up comedian of all time. Seventeen and reading someone else’s jokes off cards. A few of my friends from Reigate Grammar School gathered around the stage, but soon even they were wandering off to buy drinks, such was my unfunniness. I could see the hall emptying, so I looked down at my cards and read from them as quickly as I could, trying to get the ordeal over as quickly as possible. The boos grew louder, and soon a slow handclap echoed around the room.
‘Get off!’ A drunk girl in a purple ball gown that made her look like a Quality Street chocolate shouted from the back of the room.
‘Thank you; you’ve been a great audience. Goodnight,’ I finally said.
The worst thing was that the DJ pretended to find me funny as he faded in Yazz’s ‘The Only Way Is Up’. ‘Ha ha!’ he said. ‘Cat juggling, very funny.’
Even I looked at him with contempt. I knew I had been epically unfunny.
I just wanted to walk off the stage and disappear for ever. The thought of hanging around in a room full of people who had all been booing me moments before was humiliating. However, I had told my mum not to pick me up until midnight, as I had thought I would be the guy all the girls would want to talk to or even kiss after I had made the whole room laugh. Instead I waited for my mum on a wall outside, as teenager after teenager came out into the cold night air to snog or throw up or both.
‘So, how did it go?’ enquired my mum.
She already knew it had gone badly as my face was white and I was still shaking when I got into the seat beside her in the Vauxhall Cavalier.
‘Not well.’
‘Oh dear. What happened?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Were you nervous?’
‘Of course I was nervous.’
‘Well maybe your nerves got the better of you.’
‘Maybe.’ I couldn’t begin to paint the scene in all its horrifying detail. This was the Guernica of gigs.
‘Maybe the comedy thing isn’t for you,’ she said kindly.
I thought for a moment.
‘No. I still want to do it.’
If you are aspiring to be a comedian and you get booed off and you still want to be a comedian, one day you will be.
Life at Reigate Grammar School became easier the older we became. I was even made a prefect, most likely as a reward for my acting and public speaking. There was a special prefect’s tie, though no one wore one as it was deeply uncool. My mother had different ideas. She took me to the school outfitters in Reigate.
‘David, I want to buy you the prefect’s tie.’
‘It’s OK thanks, Mum. No one wears them.’
‘Please. For me. Please …’ she implored.
Reluctantly I let her buy me the tie, though I changed it when I arrived at school. Her pride in my achievements has always outweighed my own.
One of the perks of being a prefect was that you were allowed to leave the school grounds if you didn’t have a lesson. Robin was also made a prefect and we would walk into downtown Reigate at lunchtime. We would buy chips from the cafe and then go to Our Price and sort through the latest releases from the Pet Shop Boys, saving up to buy the twelve-inch remixes of ‘Suburbia’ or ‘It’s a Sin’, songs that spoke to us more than any other. We loved Neil and Chris and we still do. Robin and I have never met up and not discussed them. I chose ‘Later Tonight’ from the album Please as one of my Desert Island Discs. A story of waiting and waiting just to catch a glimpse of the one you love, without them even knowing you exist.
That boy never cast a look in your direction,
Never tried to hook for your affection …
It was typical of their songs, as most were full of longing, as I was at the time. Moreover, they dominated the charts in the late 1980s. Everything the Pet Shop Boys touched turned to gold.
And we wanted to touch them.
During the summ
er holiday Robin secured a part-time job answering the telephone at a theatre booking office. This allowed him access to a computer database of everyone who had booked tickets for West End shows. So one day he just happened to insert the words ‘Neil’ and ‘Tennant’ into the database and found out that the Pet Shop Boy was going to see the Oscar Wilde play An Ideal Husband on Saturday night.
‘Neil’s going to be at the theatre at 7.30 p.m. He’s booked two tickets,’ said Robin breathlessly.
‘Shall we wait outside?’ I asked. I was no less a potential stalker than my friend.
‘Let’s book tickets for the play, then we can go up to him in the interval.’
‘Brilliant!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m sure he’ll be delighted to meet two of his biggest fans.’
‘His two biggest!’ proclaimed Robin.
So Saturday came, and we went up to London on the train in the afternoon. When you have grown up in Surrey and you are seventeen, London is beyond thrilling, and just walking around is entertainment in itself. So we enjoyed an all-you-can-eat buffet at Pizzaland, then went for a walk in Covent Garden. On Long Acre the most extraordinary thing happened. We saw Neil Tennant!
So we followed him. For around an hour.
We followed Neil Tennant into a stationery shop and watched him buy pens. Then we followed Neil Tennant into a bookshop and watched him browse through some books and magazines. Then we followed Neil Tennant to a clothes shop, where he looked in the window at a shirt for a short but thrilling while.
Then Neil Tennant walked to Shaftsbury Avenue and tried to hail a cab. We had to approach him. And fast. So we crept up behind Neil Tennant.
‘You say something,’ I whispered.
‘No you …’ said Robin.
‘Mr Tennant?’ I said, my voice trembling.
The Pet Shop Boy turned to face his stalkers.
‘Yes?’ he replied in his lovely north-eastern lilt.
‘I just want to say you are a living god,’ I spluttered.
Neil smiled uncertainly, and then fortunately for all of us a cab stopped, and he got in. He smiled weakly out of the window at us as it sped off. We stood on Shaftesbury Avenue and watched the cab disappear out of sight.
Camp David Page 8