WHAT AN OLD PILE OF RUBBISH
It’s typical that none of the recent obituaries for Johnny Morris mentioned one key fact about the man: that the loveable ‘voice of the animals’ once roundly insulted me. ‘You’re a cretin,’ were his exact words – and all because I’d confided to him my childhood theory about those stags’ heads you often see mounted on the walls of stately homes.
As an infant, I’d always assumed that the unlucky animals must have been involved in freak, high-speed accidents, and that their antlers had somehow smashed holes right through brick and plaster. Indeed, I’d often check round the back of the house, to see if the body was dangling there, but it never was.
However, as I told Johnny at the time, it seemed a reasonable assumption to make, because who (except possibly a member of the clergy or the Metropolitan Police) would want to mount an animal? Now he’s gone, but I understand that Johnny Morris was impersonating animals right to the end. In fact, during his final moment on earth, he croaked. Sadly missed.
There were stags’ heads aplenty on the walls of the fictional Baxter Grange, the setting of last night’s episode of Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes (BBC2). Theatrical raconteur Sir Bernard Chumley is the creation of Matt Lucas (better known as Vic and Bob’s bald sidekick George Dawes), and he’s noteworthy for three things: a dreadful rug, an accent that veers between Belgravia and Bermondsey (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not) and a visceral hatred of other, more successful thespians.
Last night’s tour around ‘the ancestral home of Lord Nelson’ began promisingly enough, although the deliberately crass message from his sponsors (‘in association with Allen’s crisps, the cheaper crisp’) was a little too close to the truth in Mr Lucas’ case.
Sorry, but it ill-behoves a man whose career to date has peaked with a series of Cadbury’s Creme Egg commercials to point the finger at actors who shamelessly exploit their fame for money.
‘Work started on Baxter Grange in 1805, and in 1805 Nelson took up residence until his death in 1805 …’ he began, neatly parodying the jumble of unmemorable and unremembered facts with which visitors to stately homes are invariably assaulted by tour guides.
But oh dear. Just as I was delighting in the fact that Lucas had finally divested himself of partner David Walliams, the dismally untalented man popped up in the role of a jobsworth gardener.
Living proof that you are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely, he persistently interrupted the filming in the mistaken belief that he possesses the stroppy charm and immaculate comic timing of a Michael Palin (he doesn’t).
From then on, the programme speedily went down-market, from mansion to pre-fab, relying on puerile jokes that were reminiscent of Trevor and Simon with a couple of A levels (and we know how easy those are to get nowadays). Indeed, I doubt whether even Punt and Dennis (the world’s unfunniest typing error) would even agree to perform such abysmal material. No, on second thoughts, I take that back. I’ve heard The Now Show on Radio 4. Punt and Dennis will perform anything.
As regular readers know, I’m all in favour of scatology (although at university I confused it with eschatology and inadvertently spent three semesters studying ‘apocalyptic theology’), but double entendres like ‘Lord Nelson entered Lady Hamilton from behind when he got caught in her bush’ fell hopelessly flat through the sheer ineptness of the set-up and wording.
A plot about finding the location of a mysterious ‘golden potato’ hove fleetingly into view late in the day, but such a flimsy premise cannot possibly bear the weight of six episodes, and by the end of this first instalment Lucas was already reduced to dressing up like a pirate with a plastic parrot on his shoulder, and shouting ‘Aaah, Jim lad.’
Not only was it desperately unfunny, but it was tragically similar to a dire routine that Tony Hancock used to perform in the Galton-and-Simpson-less twilight of his career. But at least he had the decency to commit suicide afterwards.
A spoof documentary about stately homes is a potential gold mine for a keen-eyed comic. The hilarious conflict raging within the soul of every aristo who opens his house to the public (hating the rabble, yet needing their money) could keep any half-decent writer busy for a lifetime, yet this was unobservant, badly-scripted, semi-improvised tosh.
That comic genius Peter Cook used to extemporize superbly on the topic (having wisely perfected his ad libs in advance), but sadly, like Johnny Morris, he’s no longer among us.
Indeed, with so many media deaths, and the plethora of respectful minute silences that have followed, perhaps Lucas and Walliams could learn a valuable lesson. Having died on our screens last night, why don’t they host a televisual first next week, by offering us a 10-minute silence during their next 10-minute show.
It actually took longer to read his review than watch the programme. Matt was becoming more and more famous for his work with Reeves and Mortimer, but I was almost unknown and quite taken aback that someone had written 1000 words about quite how appalling I was.
Years later, Rob Brydon showed how you could make a ten-minute programme a huge success with the sublime Marion and Geoff.
Amazingly, still more failure awaited Matt and me.
Gorgeous producer Nira Park, who went on to make Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, wanted to create a TV series with some of the biggest names in comedy at the time. Who wouldn’t? Nira had the connections. Keith Allen happened to be her fiancé, but she also knew John Thompson, Sally Philips, Peter Serafinowicz and Paul Kaye. The problem was Nira didn’t know what the programme should actually be. So it was up to us to suggest characters and then write a TV pilot in which they all meet. I brought in Matt, and we started writing a script with two very talented men who would both become lifelong friends. They were Robert Popper (who created Look Around You with Peter Serafinowicz and Friday Night Dinner) and Mark Freeland, now head of comedy at the BBC. A year later the four of us were still writing the pilot episode.
We wrote draft after draft, and after a while (like Scientology) we were so deep into it we couldn’t get out. The idea we had was the first idea that anybody who wants to do a sketch show without actually doing a sketch show has, that the characters all live in the same place. That is not to detract from The League of Gentlemen TV series, which was a work of utter brilliance. They had the good sense for their characters not to meet each other; unfortunately we did not.
Finally a script emerged, though after a year all four of us had become totally blind to what was good and what wasn’t. A childhood hero, Nigel Planer from The Young Ones, also joined the cast, as did Paul Putner and Kate Robbins. There were a few good ideas. Matt would play the part of Pat Magnet, the town’s unofficial ruler, who invented the magnet and was of indeterminate gender. Paul Putner and I were brothers. Our mother had died, and I hadn’t told him so I could manipulate him into doing things for me.
Matt didn’t turn up for the cast read-through. We waited and waited, but he didn’t arrive. As his comedy partner everyone looked to me for an answer.
‘David, where is he?’ asked Nira.
‘I don’t know.’
As it was the morning I thought Matt was probably still in bed, but I didn’t want to say. Unlike Morecambe and Wise we never shared a bed. Matt had indeed simply overslept. But by a few hours. So we reluctantly carried on with the read-through without our lead actor, which was not idea. Also, the script was overlong and overcomplicated, trying as it did to incorporate everyone’s disparate ideas.
We all decamped to a small rural village to film it. Matt, normally so brilliantly funny in every role he plays, made some very bizarre choices for Pat. He was strangely stiff as the genderless mayor, which meant his character was not as funny as it had promised to be while we were writing it together and he was acting it out in the office. A few scenes worked, one in particular when Paul Kaye’s character bought an iced bun from Nigel Planer’s, but mostly it was the worst thing comedy can be, boring. On the penultimate night …
Sunday 9/5
/1998
Keith Allen and Paul Kaye never went to bed. So there was much devilment this morning. They had amused themselves all night by phoning live sex lines from the hotel until 6 a.m. On whatever he was on Allen became a monster. We were all dressed in medieval costume for a flashback scene. Keith raced up and down the hills and dales in green velvet with a warlock hair-do exposing his genitalia like some demented gorgon.
With no promotion, You Are Here limped onto Channel 4 late on 30 December 1998, and was never seen again. Now the possibilty of Matt and I making our own series on terrestrial television was non-existent. Nobody wanted us.
23
Goblin or Hobgoblin?
So to make a living I accepted small parts in other people’s TV shows. They stopped me having to get a proper job.
I played Soft Alan: the Biggest Fruit in the World for ten seconds in Shooting Stars. ‘I didn’t want to do him,’ said the producer, Charlie Higson, when I arrived. ‘That’s why you’re here.’ Despite that inauspicious start to the day, I was dressed as Quentin Crisp and flown through the air into the arms of Scottish singer and actress Clare Grogan, so all was not lost. And I got paid fifty pounds.
That led to other supporting roles with Reeves and Mortimer. On their sketch show series Bang Bang, It’s Reeves & Mortimer I made up the numbers. If there were four or five people in a sketch, I would play the fourth or fifth person. We stayed in the sleepy seaside town of Eastbourne to film it. There I witnessed how weirdly some folk behave around famous people.
‘I’m good enough to sit here!’ said a drunken lady as she squeezed herself between Vic and Bob in the hotel bar. ‘I’m good enough to sit here!’ she repeated, as everyone had ignored her first time around.
‘You two! “Dizzy”! Now!’ shouted a man in an effort to cajole the two stars to reprise their number one single at the wedding next door.
‘I’m sorry, but we’ve been working all day,’ said Bob, ‘and we’re just having a quiet drink.’
‘I SAID, “DIZZY” NOW!’ repeated the man aggressively.
I also saw the upside of fame too. Vic arrived at the hotel in a beautiful 1960s E-type Jaguar and took one of the prettiest girls on the production up to Beachy Head to ‘look at the view’.
Wednesday 29/7/1998
Today we shot a sketch in Dungeness. I played Laurence Llewelyn Bowen (the flouncy one from Changing Rooms) – with my trousers round my ankles, a prisoner of Vic’s Hick. (Bob, Charlie and Matt were also prisoners as Jimmy Nail, and from EastEnders Pat Butcher and Mike Read.) I have yet to work out the rules of Vic and Bob’s writing. Maybe there aren’t any, the sketch was certainly bizarre. Little logic, even less reality but definitely funny. And what a joy not only to be in their work, but to watch them work and piss about with them in the recording breaks. And their humour is so generous. It’s not about putting people down or being witty or scoring points in a competition for who can be the funniest. Rather it’s another world they invite you to be a part of. The most magical part of today for me was being installed in the back bedroom of the house we were filming in with Vic. We were pretending we were at a car boot sale and picking up everything in the room – a barometer, a CD, a pair of shoes, and looking at their undersides and weighing them before making a decision whether to buy them or not. In the costume van afterwards Bob was whispering how Vic always forces him to visit museums and places of interest in the local area when really he would prefer to watch telly all day.
A few years later I would be invited back into their world to play Browning, a goth ghost hunter in an episode of their re-booted Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). Again the funniest moment would be off screen.
Monday 4/12/2000
In a break from filming today Vic enlisted my help in preparing a list of little fairy-tale people in order of goodness. We pondered whether the hobgoblin was worse than the goblin. Later I saw he’d prepared the following list, which I kept.
GOOD
Fairies
Sprites
Elves
Imps
Pixies
Goblins
Hobgoblins
Trolls
BAD
Amazingly I still have it.
One of my best friends at the time was the League of Gentlemen’s Mark Gatiss. We became inseparable for many years. He took me to see Eddie Izzard perform a stand-up show at Wembley Arena for the Prince’s Trust. We sat a few rows behind Prince Charles, and when he got up to leave I shouted, ‘GAWD BLESS YOU, SIR!’ in a mock cockney accent. Prince Charles turned around, nodded at me, smiled and straightened his tie, unsure whether I was an overenthusiastic subject or not. Mark and I laughed about it for weeks. This next diary entry is typical of how Mark and I would spend our days …
Saturday 26/07/1997
Mr Gatiss came round for lunch. He spent most of the afternoon jokingly scouring the personal ads in gay magazines Boyz and the Pink Paper for me. The only remotely suitable one we found read ‘Flatulent men wanted. Me: young, cute and slim gas lover – at the receiving end. You: outrageous, macho and raw with a lot of gas.’ It’s nice to know there’s someone for everybody! We sat on the sofa together and watched episode five of the Tom Baker Dr Who story ‘The Seeds of Doom’.
Yes, we were and are big Dr Who fans. Mark has of course been very much involved in ensuring the programme’s recent triumphant comeback, so when in 1999 the long-running sci-fi series had a night devoted to it on BBC2, he and I were asked to write and perform in a series of sketches. These would be interspersed between the documentaries and repeated episodes. We wrote three, one of which involved Mark playing the Doctor (a lifelong dream of his), another where we played two sexually confused fans who had kidnapped Peter Davison so we could molest him, and a final one in which we re-imagined the pitch from the producer at BBC to make the original series.
The sketches were very well received, but when I asked my dad whether he had seen them all he said was, ‘That Mark Gatiss is very talented.’
It was sad for me because all I ever wanted was to make my parents proud, but he always withheld praise, or in this case gave it to others. At this time we were clashing a lot. My father was right wing and could have pretty intolerant views.
Sunday 8/8/98
The death of Enoch Powell sparked a debate of sorts over lunch at my mum and dad’s house. I had to listen to a river of disgusting second-hand racist rhetoric from both Nannies and Dad. Just revolting. And heartbreaking. A few years ago I would have had to cry and scream and leave the table. Today I listened and chose my words. But I didn’t mince them. ‘You’re speaking from the point of view of racists,’ I concluded. They defended Enoch Powell, and could not even accept that history has proved him wrong. And on the subject of Asians I said, ‘You’re complaining about someone from India opening a shop when only a hundred years ago we as a nation were committing genocide in their country.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ said Dad.
Ultimately it’s no use arguing with him, but I couldn’t listen to him either. I was proud of Mum, who came down on my side in a quiet way. The worst of it all is that I am talked to as if I’m some kind of naïve innocent because I am not against ‘the blacks’.
‘I could never love a racist,’ I said, looking at my dad. And for a moment he fell silent.
As I matured I realized I could never change my father or his views, and I learned to love him as he was. Thank God we even hugged before he died of cancer in 2007.
I made a huge number of minor appearances in TV shows in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Most actors have either The Bill or Casualty or EastEnders on their CV; I have all three. I had two lines in the Dylan Moran sitcom Black Books. I appeared in an episode of a long-forgotten ITV sitcom entitled High Stakes. However, I was learning all the time and never more eager to learn than when in the presence of someone I really respected. The star of High Stakes was Richard Wilson. In rehearsals there was a scene where my character locked himself in a cupboard. To m
ake the other actors laugh I did a high-pitched voice from inside. In the tea break Richard Wilson gathered the cast.
‘Now the first rule of comedy is do not play for laughs. Play it for real, and the laughs will come. Everyone should be giving a completely real performance …’ I felt well and truly told off, before he added ‘… except me!’
That made us all laugh and put us at our ease. He was right of course. High Stakes was meant to be a two-hander between Richard and the great Jack Shepherd, best known as the TV detective Wycliffe. Richard was of course already greatly loved for playing Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave, and he went out and talked to the audience before the recording. As a result the audience laughed at every line he spoke. Jack Shepherd got very few laughs at all. I made a mental note to self: always talk to the audience before a recording.
Sunday 22/10/2000
At 7.30 p.m. we put our episode of High Stakes in front of the audience. They had come to see Richard, and it was Richard they laughed at. Sadly not Jack. They laughed enough at me, but it took the audience a while to work out I was supposed to be a funny character! Richard was a star after the recording too, pouring everyone champagne and introducing people to people. I held his hand and thanked him.
‘You were very good,’ he said.
‘Thank you. When I grow up I want to be you,’ I replied.
Now I am rarely embarrassed. However, I was when I landed a role in Rob Grant’s sci-fi sitcom The Strangerers. Rob was the co-creator of Red Dwarf but he had fallen out with his co-writer Doug Naylor over how they were going to buy houses near each other to make their writing more convenient. One of them didn’t. Unfortunately the break-up was so irreparable that Rob wrote a series on his own. It was on Sky at a time when no one watched Sky. The Strangerers was probably watched by two people, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor on the quiet. I have never ever seen it because at the time I didn’t have Sky. Mark Williams and Jack Docherty were the stars, playing two aliens who come to earth and try to pass themselves off as humans.
Camp David Page 18