by Alan Davies
Elected unnoticed to Parliament for the first time in 1983 were Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, beginning their fourteen years in opposition. Like the rest of the Labour party, they turned their backs on the 1983 manifesto, which had included plans to nationalize the banks, lest the forces of unrestrained capitalism were allowed to follow an inevitable path to excessive greed and profit, thereby putting the entire world economy at risk. It’s conceivable that more people have re-read that manifesto since than read it at the time.
The Tories, for their part, distracted the country from troubles at home by invoking Britain’s military history, with political broadcasts showing Spitfires taking off in the Battle of Britain, as if the Falklands conflict was connected somehow to the defeat of Nazism.
Back home, I suffered the fate of millions during Mrs Thatcher’s first term in office. I was laid off. After two weeks at the greengrocer’s, Doug took me to one side and said that his son Russell was coming back from his holiday, to take his job back. I hadn’t known that was the arrangement. Though I didn’t see myself in a greengrocer’s in the long term, it seemed early in my working life to be tossed on to the scrapheap. Now what would become of me? Cast out with nothing but two terrible shirts to show for it.
My dad told me there was a college in Loughton that offered a media studies course and perhaps I’d be more interested in that. My stepmum may have put him on to it as my stepbrother was attending the college, studying to be a mechanic. I had an interview and was admitted.
Immediately my life was turned upside down. My new classmates (bar one non-committal church-going one with thick glasses) hated Thatcher. Many of them loved dear old Michael Foot and admired his brave oratory in the face of vicious press attacks. Now we had two years of communications studies A Level to discuss the mass media and its portrayal of the left and the unions. We were to be thoroughly absorbed by a compelling Marxist reading of press and television influence, on both politics and the public.
On top of this we could make TV programmes in their little studio and take O Levels in film studies and drama. I took only two A Levels as I was unmotivated after school. Communications was one and I could choose between sociology and theatre studies for the other. I went to see the sociology teacher, a serious man called Dave, with a beard and an earring. The drama teacher, who was called Piers and had silver-painted boots with rainbow laces, said: ‘Try it for a week and if you don’t like it you can change.’ We spent a week playing juvenile but effective get-to-know-you theatre games like ‘stick in the mud’. I loved it and stayed on in his class. Within a few weeks I’d decided I wanted to be an actor. Or a Labour MP. But probably an actor.
Piers and Dave, it turned out, had formed a comedy double act and were trying out on the London comedy circuit.
Rik Mayall
Those shopping centre dispersal devices that emit an intolerable mosquito-like tone only young people can hear, thereby driving anti-social teenage urchins out, while tormenting babies and toddlers, have their polar opposite. It’s a pile of VHS cassettes with episode after episode of The Young Ones on them. Between 1982 and 1984 there was no more effective teenage boy magnet.
Hopeful youths would trek up the hill to our house for a Young Ones double bill. My dad memorably went out on to the front drive to shout ‘clear off ’ at a group of five friends who were mooching towards him, slowly and discontentedly, as if weighed down by acne and the continuous exhausting production of reproductive seed.
It was perhaps because me and my peers were slouching and sauntering our way into our late teens that a programme about four students living in a mouldy old house, constantly bickering and insulting each other, was appealing. At least they had their own place! They could do what they wanted! What set them apart from their directionless teenage audience was the spring-tight energy of Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall as Vyv and Rik.
Rik Mayall was known to us as Kevin Turvey, the Solihull-based ‘investigator’ whose monologues were the weekly highlight of BBC2’s A Kick Up the Eighties. In that show, though, he was seated, and meandered edgily through surreal tales. Now he was near-manic. A couple of years later I saw him on stage at the Dominion Theatre in a double bill with Ben Elton (with whom Rik and Lise Mayer had written The Young Ones). At the climax of the show his underwear exploded, while he was still wearing it. It looked painful but people laughed, as they had throughout his entire Tigger-style performance. He turned the tables and chastized us for laughing at someone blowing up.
With Nigel Planer as hippy Neil, the ultimate victim of bullying, and Christopher Ryan’s Mike, the business-minded mature student, the quartet was uniquely memorable.
Despite its teenage following the popularity of the show was achieved without sexual content. Unlike Animal House, with which The Young Ones had to compete for space in the VCR’s busy timetable, there was no nudity in The Young Ones.
That’s not to say the youth of Loughton were unmotivated by carnality. In fact, the most requested videotape I had was one I’d found in the gutter outside a house in Stratford, after me and my friends had been thrown out of a party being held by some people we’d met on holiday in Majorca that summer.
Three of us had shared one room in a cheap Palma Nova hotel, which was also home for two weeks to a group of nine predatory Geordie women in their early twenties. We had very little money, so we worked out which bars and discos (they weren’t called clubs in 1982 – clubbing hadn’t been invented yet) had free admission between certain times.
Armed with packets of condoms and convinced that sex was inevitable, we joined in the booze’n’snog culture that was being exported from the UK to all of Spain’s costas.
One of the Geordie girls decided I would do and we headed back to my shared room. At twenty-one, five years my senior, she would, I hoped, offer expertise and guidance, but in those days the nervous, incompetent boy still had to take the initiative in all aspects of the mating ritual (asking for a dance, buying drinks, asking for a date, asking for her hand in marriage, asking for forgiveness, asking for access to the children – actually much of that still applies in the twenty-first century). The role of the semi-inebriated girl was to offer neither resistance nor assistance in the removal of her underwear. If you couldn’t unclasp her bra while she was lying on your arm, causing numbness and the onset of pins and needles, then you weren’t to be trusted in other departments. A boy knew this was the first challenge of the game and success here was mandatory for progression to other levels. Eventually, both my room-mates returned to lie on their beds, either side of me and my Geordie amour. Unable to suppress their giggling, and refusing to sod off for a bit and leave us to it, they succeeded in spoiling the mood sufficiently for her to bolt back to her mates upstairs. That, it turned out, was to be my opportunity. Those condoms never did see the light of day.
Sitting down opposite some Mancunian girls in a burger bar one evening, me and a lad from Enfield we’d befriended began trying to chat them up. He was nineteen to my sixteen so he did all the talking but they were soon goading him about his diminutive stature and showing general disdain. They behaved as if we’d sat down at their table uninvited and butted in to their conversation without considering whether we were welcome. Which we had. One of the girls then squirted ketchup at us.
We were now engaged in a squeezy bottle battle with mustard and ketchup spraying everywhere. The girls ran off but the lad from Enfield was set upon by four Spanish burger chefs wielding the iron bars that they used to pull the shutters down at the end of the night. They were beating him on the back as he cowered beneath their blows. I tried to grab him so we could run and one of the Spaniards turned to me and raised his iron bar high in the air. I put my hands up to protect my head just in time as he brought the bar hard down across my fingers. That was enough of a diversion to break up the attack and we escaped, but there was no sign of my mate who had been at the counter ordering burgers.
We went back and snuck in to the gardens of a hotel opposite, t
o see if we could see our innocent accomplice. I was bleeding and the knuckle of the middle finger on my left hand had moved oddly out of place. The boy from Enfield had red welts all over his back. He was appalled that my mate had only spectated rather than helped, and had little sympathy when we saw him handcuffed and being loaded into a police car.
They returned him to our hotel later with instructions to pay a ‘fine’ for ‘damages’ to furniture. It was our last day and none of us had any money. I knew my mate’s dad had given him a £50 ‘emergency fund’ which would more than cover the fine. He said that this would not constitute an emergency in his father’s eyes. Wrongful arrest and a dodgy fine, dished out by a copper who issued dire warnings over non-payment, seemed an emergency to me. I suggested he tell his dad that I’d been arrested and that he’d used the money to help me. We made up any number of stories he could use but he was so scared of his father we ended up having to give him our few remaining pesetas and then go begging around the pool for more.
I was surprised how spineless and fearful he was. He was a big lad who played rugby and was forever posing by the pool, flexing his muscles and pouring oil on himself. He’d been especially scornful when I borrowed a big Geordie girl’s one-piece swimsuit and come down to the pool in it for a laugh.
We managed to raise the money, for which he didn’t thank us. Those girls with their ketchup had caused no end of trouble. My finger still has a scar, if you look closely, in a certain light.
We were chucked out of that party in Stratford because I’d taken a girl into the parents’ bedroom and pulled a plant in front of the door to stop anyone interrupting us. A minute later the door opened and the plant went over, spilling earth all over the carpet. Standing outside on the street I noticed, in the gutter, a VHS cassette with Mother’s Wish XXX on the label.
The plot of Mother’s Wish concerned the visit of a randy aunt who arrived to stay with a family and immediately coaxed them into incestuous acts played out to an unlistenable ’70s soundtrack. XXX was an understatement.
Once I’d shown this film to friends, the requests for another look were unending. No one else had any porn. Inconceivable as that must seem in the twenty-first century. It was necessary to turn to the underwear section of the Freeman’s catalogue to see any scantily clad models. Mysteriously, pages from soft porn titles would sometimes appear in hedgerows around Essex, a phenomenon every bit as interesting as crop circles and with little or no plausible explanation.
I tired of Mother’s Wish after repeated screenings but those who hadn’t seen it had real urgency in their requests to view. A college lecturer said he’d like to look at it for research. He handed it back with a remark about the soundtrack or camerawork but I suspect he may have just been watching it in his leisure time.
Despite the popularity of Mother’s Wish, it was never watched as much as those Young Ones episodes. Adrian Edmondson’s first entry as Vyvyan had him crashing through a wall, which was hilariously surprising and set the tone for the series.
Cartoon violence, infantile teasing and bullying between characters, talking inanimate objects, live appearances by bands like Madness and Motorhead, all seemed designed to appeal to us boys.
The continual references to the political climate of the time, including the peace movement, the police as the government’s private army, jokes on racial issues, and constant references to Thatcher and the ‘fascists’ gave the show a contemporary edge and made it incomprehensible to suburban parents or indeed almost anyone over thirty. In the same way as the shopping centre buzz can only be picked up by teens so could Rik and Vyvyan’s banter only be enjoyed by the young.
At parties, when we weren’t dancing to The Blues Brothers soundtrack we were doing impressions of Rik and Vyvyan and quoting lines from the show.
On 2 November 1982, those of us on the modern communications (with special emphasis on television) course at Loughton College of Futher Education sat in the small TV studio at the college (in between the vast cameras that had once been bolted on to Citroën estate cars and driven around race tracks alongside galloping horses) and waited for the historic opening of a new TV channel.
Channel 4 started with no fanfare or big budget event that presaged the huge impact the channel would have, particularly with regard to comedy, in the next few years. The animated logo and sting that were to become so familiar appeared and they opened with Countdown. That night they ran a spoof of the Famous Five novels I’d loved as a child, Five Go Mad in Dorset. Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders appeared with Adrian Edmondson.
It’s likely that without Channel 4’s imminent emergence the BBC would never have commissioned The Young Ones.
This new comedy was astute, vibrant and confident. It was an alternative to the offerings on the established channels, a wilfully politically correct strain that, with juvenile irreverence, mocked the race and gender stereotyping of the dominant comedy programming of the day. All other shows were ripe for attack and many were lampooned on The Young Ones. Also ridiculed, in Rik Mayall’s hilarious performance, was the posturing intolerance of ‘right-on’ types epitomized by his self-styled People’s Poet.
Not much was aimed at teenagers back then, since we had little or no disposable income. Even if we’d had the money to spend on magazines it’s doubtful that anything like Nuts or Zoo would have emerged. The campaign to ban the Page 3 girl in the Sun was in full swing and it was to be well over a decade before Loaded magazine rebranded the objectification of women and the PC storm of the ’80s died down. In 1982, though, it was just beginning. Political correctness invited you to approach women as if they were thinking creatures with a sense of humour. There was no fake tan, no fake breasts and everyone had full pubic hair.
1983
Antonin Artaud
There are only two sound effects, or SFX as we learnt to call them, in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, in which two hitmen await instructions for their next job. The first is of a toilet chain and flush, heard offstage left. The second is of a dumb waiter coming down.
In our O Level drama production of The Dumb Waiter, we had no set, just a curtain behind. There was a gap in the curtain through which me and the other actor, Guy, would reach into an imaginary dumb waiter to retrieve notes vital to the plot.
Unfortunately, our fellow drama student, Dean, who was operating the reel-to-reel tape machine that would play the two SFX, became confused and mixed them up.
The dumb waiter crashing down, with another message for the two hapless and baffled characters, is a charged dramatic moment in Pinter’s tense little tale. This tension can be undermined when the actors are anxiously drawn to the sound, not of a dumb waiter, but of a Victorian high-tank toilet cascading its two gallons upstage, before apparently issuing a memo.
Again and again poor Dean played the wrong sound. When one of us went into the wing (just to the side of the badminton court in the college main hall) ostensibly to use the lavatory, the sound of a dumb waiter would be heard, as if our personal waste was being delivered for service to a sewer bistro.
The audience found all this amusingly tolerable, Dean was mortified, but he had superb flammable 80s highlights in his hair, so was impossible to dislike. Me and Guy found it challenging to concentrate. Harold Pinter… wasn’t invited, which was a shame, he might have enjoyed it. He would surely have approved of my Methuen copy of his play, as the ‘o’ in Harold had been made into a CND symbol with a Biro. Piers the drama teacher was encouraging and asked us to write up notes on the assignment in which our group had split up, with one group putting on Pinter’s The Room, and ours The Dumb Waiter.
I concluded my notes enthusiastically in my new role as a motivated student:
I’d only read two plays before. Macbeth, the night before my English literature O Level, when much that Mr Giles had been talking about for two years fell into place. What a story! I managed a C. For the same O Level I’d also read Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, which was compelling, particularly if you:
/> a) Believed in the Devil
b) Had sold your soul to him and could therefore relate to the protagonist.
As it was, Faustus’ dilemma is a no-brainer for an adolescent. Twenty-four years of unparalleled pleasure in exchange for… it doesn’t matter what the exchange is, where do I sign?
Now Piers had introduced us to this Pinter play in which people spoke uncannily like people in actual life. Raised as I was on a culture-free diet of American cop shows, westerns and the parallel universe of the English sitcom, the notion of theatre like this was alien to me. Pinter immediately became My Favourite Playwright, which put him in front of Shakespeare and Marlowe in a list of three.
Meanwhile, in film studies O Level classes, we were watching Hitchcock films: The Birds, Marnie, Psycho, Spellbound and, my favourite, Strangers on a Train. These were our actual lessons, illuminated by our lecturer, Allan Rowe, who would twist and squirm on his chair, so unable was he to contain his fascination with his subject. When we watched Channel 4 start up, I thought Allan might faint with excitement as he peered at the screen waiting for action, leaning forwards, daring his chair to tip him out. At the end of the year, he threw a party for everyone at his house in Clapton, where he made lush Indian food and I had my first poppadum.
I was enjoying everything. In communications, we studied inter-personal communication with our psychologist teacher Andy (even his kids were to call him Andy – prescribed gender roles were a no-no), who had us unnervingly observing body language wherever we went, which probably gave other students the creeps.
For a general studies mock O Level we were asked to correctly lay out a letter. I wrote to my MP. My teacher’s comments follow:
Sir John Biggs-Davison MP
1 Whitehall Place