by Alan Davies
It was the mischief and energy of Wolfie Smith that I enjoyed. He was childlike and cheeky and perhaps at eleven and twelve childlike and cheeky were attainable characteristics. Wolfie wasn’t macho and tough but those types always seemed one-dimensional and dismally humourless. I never aspired to be the man with no name who walks into town and shoots everyone who gets on his nerves. Some girls claim that a good sense of humour is what they look for in a man. I’ve always wondered why they have the monopoly on the humour hunt. A good sense of humour is exactly what I look for in a man too. My love of jokes, sitcoms and silly folk generally flourished throughout the ’70s. From Tom and Jerry to Paddington and Crackerjack, then from Sykes and Morecambe and Wise to It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and The Dick Emery Show, from Dad’s Army to The Two Ronnies and Dave Allen at Large, from Porridge, Rising Damp and Open All Hours to The Good Life, Fawlty Towers and Are You Being Served? Humour was the most important thing for me in front of the telly. I really liked funny people. I didn’t mind what they said, so long as they said it in a funny way. Hence my great affection for Robert Robinson on Ask the Family and, in recent years, William Hague. There’s nothing like a silly voice.
This was something the family did together. All families it seemed. Sitting and laughing at Windsor Davies and his ‘lovely boys’ or Molly Sugden and her ‘pussy’, John Inman being ‘free’, Granville ffffetching his cloth, Private Fraser being ‘doomed’ or Dick Emery’s ‘you are awful, but I like you’, which everyone in Britain must have said at one point or another in the ’70s.
Catchphrase comedy is derided by some as easy but it just looks that way. It’s thoughtless to assume that any audience rolling in the aisles or tuning in by the tens of millions is being entertained by actors who find it effortless or writers who are lazy. The skill and timing of a generation of comic turns was gratefully received via the box in the corner of the room. The performers themselves must go nearly mad with people in the street every day shouting: ‘He’s from Barcelona’ or ‘Miss Jones, Miss Jones’ at them, but the laughs were wonderful.
On top of all these sitcom stars there was the organized chaos of The Generation Game as well as a steady diet of Syd James, Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams in the Carry On films that the BBC ran and reran. The pleasure brought to me by all those people is inestimable. Were this a popular science book I’d quantify it by saying, ‘My pleasure could have covered an area the size of Wales.’ Everything always seems to be an area the size of Wales.
I laughed a lot growing up, to the point where I’d often be bought joke books for birthday presents as if I had a humour affliction. I may have been giggling hysterically out of anxiety half the time. To me a funny person was a good person. A warm, kind smiley person. I had no idea of the tantrums and tiaras of showbiz, never mind the rum and rent boys end of things beloved of BBC4 dramatists. It seemed that anyone who made people laugh for a living must be happier than the average bear.
Older actors reminisce happily about working days at the BBC rehearsal studios in Acton, with different casts from different sitcoms all convening in the canteen at lunchtime. BBC shows now often rehearse in a church hall under Hammersmith flyover since the BBC’s own rehearsal rooms became too expensive for BBC shows to hire. There are no lunchtime canteen conventions for the actors, just some queuing in a sandwich shop on the Fulham Palace Road. If the BBC didn’t exist today no one would invent it in its current form. But then the same is true of Christmas. And Manchester United.
So many of my favourite sitcoms featured ensembles of characters who interacted as if they were in a family. Everyone was there every week and there was no escaping their associates.
Usually there were generational differences in the cast too, so people took parental or child roles. Ronnie Barker and Richard Beckinsale, as Fletch and Godber in Porridge, were perhaps the best father and son double act of them all.
Often the senior parental figures are distinguished by class from their subordinates, a rich seam to mine for English comedy writers. In Are You Being Served?, the older floor manager, posh Captain Peacock, ran things like an exasperated father who is no longer in love with his snobby ‘wife’, Mrs Slocombe. The pair of them tried to manage the unruly Mr Lucas and Miss Brahms while John Inman’s Mr Humphreys skipped about like the irrepressible black sheep. Then there was the old granddad figure behind the counter.
It seems to be a model for a good sitcom. Create a dysfunctional group who adopt familial roles, don’t, whatever you do, try and create an actual family unless you have a comic genius like Bill Cosby or Roseanne Barr at the helm holding it together or they are animated like The Simpsons, with grown-ups playing the kids.
It’s possible I enjoyed those ensemble family shows like Are You Being Served?, Hi-de-hi, Dad’s Army and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum so much because it looked like it would be fun to be in those gangs. They never fell out irreparably, they couldn’t, they all had to be in the next episode. Family comedies work well when they’ve created enough variety in the behaviour of the characters for one of them to appeal to each member of an actual family. With the exception of Outnumbered (where the child actors are not, as far as possible, required to learn any line) it is best not to have children in a sitcom because children are not funny on telly, unless they are either talking to Michael Barrymore or falling off a trampoline on You’ve Been Framed.
By the age of twelve though, these family sitcoms were becoming less and less involving as I became more independent. How do you become independent when you spend very little time outside the house? Shut up in your bedroom is how, or occasionally by picking a TV show to watch that no one else wants to watch. In 1977–78 I became hooked on a WW1 Royal Flying Corps drama on the BBC called Wings. No one else in the family wanted to watch it and so I wasn’t able to until it happened to be my birthday and they were forced to concede. I watched it while they all feigned boredom. Or they may actually have been bored. It was brilliant, if you ask me.
In our house Citizen Smith became my show. Other people in the family may have watched it, I don’t remember, but I loved it right from the opening credits, with the whistling of ‘The Red Flag’ (I didn’t know what the song was or what it represented) played over shots of Wolfie walking the streets of Tooting, grinning at passers by, kicking a can along, marching out of Tooting Broadway tube station, before shouting, ‘Power to the people’ at the top of his voice with a half-smile on his face as if he was imagining being at the head of a vast rally, a feted revolutionary hero.
I had no idea, either, that Britain was struggling economically in the late ’70s, that long-haired work-shy busking layabouts like Wolfie caused middle England’s blood to boil. Middle England was represented by Wolfie’s girlfriend’s dad, Peter Vaughan (who also played Grouty in Porridge), a man enraged by the ‘yeti’ as he called Wolfie. Enraged that is, when he wasn’t laughing at him, as in the episode where Wolfie stands for the Tooting Popular Front in a bye-election and only receives six votes.
John Sullivan also created Del Boy, another bright aspirational spark surrounded by dimwits, in Only Fools and Horses but, while he was hilarious, there was only one character in sitcom land that I revered and that was Wolfie.
There were similarities with Starsky but Wolfie lacked Starsky’s courage and athleticism while Starsky lacked Wolfie’s vanity and ego. By 1978 I’d never met a man who I wanted to be like, so heroes came straight off the telly. It didn’t occur to me that Paul Michael Glaser and Robert Lindsay were charismatic actors using their talents to bring scripted dialogue to life. If I wanted to be like them, the best thing was to actually copy them. Being an actor never crossed my mind when being a cop or a revolutionary seemed so much fun.
1979
Margaret Thatcher
Sometimes a favourite person can retain that status for life, yours not theirs; at other times someone can come from nowhere to be the most important person in your world for just a few days.
On 3 May, the Conservatives, led by Mar
garet Thatcher, won the 1979 general election. I didn’t find out the result until the next day and I immediately phoned my dad at work to give him the good news.
I’m not sure why I was at home that day. Either the Easter holidays had stretched into May or I’d been feigning earache again. Dad had ear trouble as a boy, so when I had an earache it was an almost foolproof way to miss school. He nearly always believed me if I said my ears were hurting (sometimes they actually were) and he would put drops and cotton wool in my ear. In every other area of my life, it was much harder for him to believe me, as I was working hard on my fibbing. Previously I’d been a hopeless fibber. When I was four, having peed my pants in Mrs Gomer’s class while she was reading us a story, I was found some dry clothes by the headmistress. When my mum arrived to pick me up she asked:
‘Where did you get those shorts?’
I said: ‘They’re my PE shorts.’
She said: ‘You haven’t got any PE shorts.’
I made a mental note to improve my fibbing and by thirteen I was pretty good.
It was no fib, though, when I phoned dad’s office to tell him the election result. It was unusual to phone him at work but this was evidently very important. He’d be delighted not just that they’d won but that I’d taken the trouble to break the news. I was put through:
‘We’ve won!’ I said.
There was barely any reaction, he seemed to know the result already (how?) and appeared to be a little bit busy actually.
I suppose the news didn’t qualify as the emergency you’d expect when one of your children rings you at work out of the blue. I had hoped he’d be delighted, with both the message and, particularly, the messenger. I was as keen to please as most boys are with their fathers, hanging on every word and bending behaviour constantly in the hunt for praise, which could never be enough. Perhaps it’s all the more important when there is just the one parent to keep happy. Diminishing positive feedback for me at this time may have been due to an irritating tendency on my part to be thirteen. There were occasions when I delighted him, such as when I was silent and/or in another room.
I knew we wanted the Conservatives to win since I had checked: ‘Who do you want to win the election?’ I said and he’d said: ‘The Conservatives,’ with more than a hint of ‘Who else?’ in his voice. Previously I’d had no idea who could win or what anyone stood for, or what standing for something entailed, but from that moment, I knew who I supported. It was clear that there was a right and wrong:
Conservatives = right
Labour = wrong/absurd
Parenting is a difficult task. The people most confident in their parenting skills are generally those without children. How many could find the time to explain, so a thirteen-year-old could understand, what was happening in the general election? To lay out whose interests were best served by which candidates, what the possible outcomes may be and to provide a rudimentary guide to party policy and ideology (ideology! Those were the days). Far easier to break it all down into a simple subliminal mantra:
Conservatives = common sense
Labour = nonsense
A dictatorship of ‘the sensible’ was his preference, with sensible as an absolute not a variable.
On Saturday nights on BBC1, with an audience of millions, the impressionist Mike Yarwood could be seen mimicking the Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan: ‘Now I’m going to be perfectly blunt,’ he would say and the audience roared with laughter, as we all did at home. Dad often did an impression of Yarwood doing Callaghan, ‘Blunt’ was said bluntly while sticking out your chin. Yarwood also did the Labour chancellor, Denis Healey: ‘You silly billy,’ he would say. Healey had never actually said ‘silly billy’, but later adopted it, as Yarwood had made it popular on his behalf.
Many southerners found northern accents intrinsically amusing and some saw them as a reliable indicator of thinly concealed stupidity. All Mike Yarwood, a Lancastrian, had to do was sound northern and he was halfway to making the south laugh. This was a good idea, since it was in the south that BBC contracts were dished out. As Callaghan and Healey were both Yorkshiremen he was doubtless keeping his friends in Lancashire happy too.
I was picking up a few indicators that dad didn’t just find the jokes and silly voices funny, he really couldn’t stand the Labour Party. I had no idea why and didn’t ask. What would I ask anyway? It wasn’t long before then that I thought of a party as somewhere you passed parcels.
It’s easy to like things your parents like but not so easy to dislike the things they don’t like, particularly if you’re not sure why they don’t like them. It’s not in a child’s nature to dislike the new, other than new greens at teatime. Children are inherently trusting with people, they are prepared to like other children instinctively. Prejudice is not genetic. Although children will swap ‘best’ friends over night, it is the capacity to continually make new friends and to find common ground that is plainly innate. A distressing sight for adults is the child who cannot socialize. It appears both abnormal and irreparable. Only a damaged child could not make friends easily and damage done so early seems a curse on a young life.
Despite struggling to comprehend or share a dislike of the lampooned Labour leadership (in fact, Healey seemed nicely avuncular even as he was being ridiculed by Yarwood), I was nonetheless determined to like the Conservatives and not Labour.
There was a sense that Labour were somehow unpatriotic that was influential. The big word of the ’70s that I heard continually but didn’t understand was ‘strike’. Judging by television news reports, a strike seemed to consist of lots of men, usually from the north (of Watford), angrily refusing to go to work and consequently wrecking England. The people who did the striking were in unions and these were bad. People on strike were greedy, selfish and bone idle. There was that and something called ‘British Leyland’, which was evidently a disaster.
British Leyland, the nationalized car company, was, it turns out, a disaster. We had a variety of British-made cars growing up, a white Mk 1 Ford Cortina with groovy round rear lights, a big Morris that my mum hated driving because of its size (one time the passenger door opened by itself, as if the ghost of a stunt man had flung himself out). A Morris Traveller that Mum reversed into a ditch outside Staples Road School. I sat inside the car while lots of men pushed it out of the forest and back on to the road.
By 1979 we had a hideous Austin Princess; it was as ugly as a trodden beer can and the same excremental brown that Coventry City were using for an away kit. Could British Leyland survive, making ugly brown cars, with engines that had a reputation for not starting when you wanted them to, and stopping when you didn’t want them to, built by a strike-happy workforce?
No, they couldn’t.
Not to worry though. Maggie Thatcher was at hand and she was going to save Britain. She had posters put up everywhere, with the slogan ‘Labour isn’t Working’ and a photo of a dole queue on it. Much emphasis was placed on putting the great back in to Great Britain, waving the Union Jack and implying that Labour and its supporters were less British Socialists and more Russian Communists.
In a 1978 interview for Granada TV’s World in Action Thatcher had commented that:
‘… people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’
Her approval ratings went up, suggesting that people were really rather afraid. These political conflicts were lost on children. They were powered by the fears of adults.
Children aren’t generally ‘really rather afraid’ of other cultures, certainly not in Loughton at that time, when there were no other cultures. The only black people we saw were the little ones looked after by Mrs Curry who lived nearby. What sort of fostering programme she was involved with I don’t know but she always had different little black kids with her. Perhaps they were refugees from Uganda, who knows? After Mum died I remember being looked after by Mrs Curry sometimes but even then I didn’t meet any black kids.
I
didn’t meet a foreigner until 1971 when Dr Grunberger took my tonsils out. I’ve no idea where he was from but I suspect he’d been interned during the Second World War. He said my tonsils were going to go in the dustbin. I had to stay overnight in the hospital.
Early in the morning I was put on a trolley, taken into a room and gassed. When I woke up a big nurse was making me eat cornflakes. They were hard and jagged like a neckful of razors but she was unsympathetic and couldn’t go until I ate them. It wouldn’t happen now, fortified breakfast cereal? So twentieth century. My mum picked me up from the hospital and laughed in a slightly teary way when she saw I couldn’t lift my little bag.
That nurse was the first black person I ever spoke to and the only one until 1976, when I spent a year in the same class as the only black kid at the school, noisy Derek, who later unexpectedly became Derek B, the rapper.
Near to my old school, on Woodford Green, stands a statue of Winston Churchill, who had been MP for the old constituency of Wanstead and Woodford. We often drove past the statue and my dad, who was just six when the war broke out and who became enamoured of Churchill’s inspiring leadership as it progressed, would smile and say: ‘Good old Winnie.’ It was clear to me as a child that this was THE GREATEST MAN WHO EVER LIVED.
Maggie Thatcher was trying to channel Churchill by arousing a ‘pull in your belts, grow your own veg and melt down your gates for nuclear subs’ blitz spirit. This in a Britain that she maintained was going downhill after the notorious strike-ridden ’78–’79 ‘winter of discontent’. Her no-nonsense scary school matron approach appealed to enough voters (three out of ten is enough, when four out of ten don’t vote) and she was installed with a mandate to go after the unions, give tax cuts to high earners and indulge in populist fervent nationalism for the fearful.