by Alan Davies
‘DON’T TOUCH ME!’ she yelled, recoiling violently to re-establish her personal space, her voice echoing around the rafters of the high-ceilinged hall.
‘I was just going to say can you not smoke…?’ My irritation was quickly subsiding into embarrassment.
‘DON’T YOU TOUCH ME!!’
‘I didn’t… I…’
‘DON’T TOUCH WOMEN!’
People were standing up to see what was going on, there were enough rape alarms and mace sprays in that place to dispel a riot, or start one. I turned back to my food, blushing. She smoked more fags.
New approaches to conversation with women, unheard of where I grew up, had to be developed, without the subject of football as an ice-breaker. Some of these people were livid. Which was a good lesson to learn.
When rehearsals for the play began, I became accustomed to the women’s tracky bottoms and loose fitting T-shirts, and developed a crush on all of them collectively. Every now and then a baggy, inside-out sweat shirt would slip, revealing a bare shoulder and, like the Victorians fixated by a flash of ankle, a boy could be momentarily grateful for small pleasures. Provided he wasn’t caught staring.
Being part of a cast especially appeals to the dysfunctional, providing, albeit temporarily, a new surrogate family. This family can absorb almost any eccentricity or idiosyncrasy since it is a temporary collective for the needy. Problems are now shared, and tackled, with mutual support. There is common anxiety and laughter, and the same unifying objective: avoiding humiliation in front of your peers.
The Boer believed he was successfully concealing his accent, thereby giving his golliwog with fine Received Pronunciation, but I told him that someone had asked me where he was from since his voice was so strange. He was very serious and had taken up rehearsal time with his golliwog-angst so I was slyly digging at him without the nerve to say it directly. Carol, our chirpy, and very funny, stage manager gave me a look and observed, with her customary perspicacity (and to let me know that she’d clocked what I was doing):
‘That’s a nice thing to repeat.’
My own performance was crippled by nervous inhibitions. Our director encouraged me to express myself more. I blushed whenever she spoke to me. She set up an improvisation where I was to come home and find my girlfriend with another man. I began quietly as ever but then flew into a rage in my role as the wronged man. When I’d finished I turned to the director who seemed taken aback but impressed. With all these emotions churning around, real or imagined, the rehearsal room was becoming my favourite place.
I was able to speak less and less frequently to Justine as I was rehearsing in the evening and she was at college during the day. She had been down to visit me but our summer together seemed a long time ago as my fixation on the women I was working with worsened. I spoke to my old friend from Loughton College, Gill, who told me that if nothing had happened with anyone, then I absolutely must not say anything to Justine, it would upset her and the play would be over soon. I said it was too late and I’d confessed to Justine that I fancied half the cast and especially the director. There was a silence on the other end of the phone.
Justine was prescribed anti-depressants and began seeing someone else. The play ended with a cast party in Whitstable. My crushes expired with no outcome, apart from the director snogging me briefly at the party, before laughing heartily and going to find the punch. Carol consoled me:
‘She probably enjoys the thrill of the chase.’
My principal tactic for winning Justine back was to stand, unseen, in her parents’ back garden, staring up at her bedroom window. It didn’t work.
Carol lived in Hackney, not that far from Loughton, and that summer we met up to see the National Theatre’s Mystery Plays at the Lyceum, which now was staging theatre for the first time in thirty years. The Mysteries, adapted from the Wakefield Cycle of medieval plays by Tony Harrison, were traditionally performed on the backs of carts by tradesmen, but were now thrillingly revived in a promenade production directed by Bill Bryden.
The move to the Lyceum came as the National Theatre’s Cottesloe was closed down due to underfunding. Only a special grant from the Ken Livingstone-led, soon-to-be-abolished GLC allowed it to reopen later that year, since the private funding the government insisted the National should find could not meet the shortfall.
During a House of Commons debate on the issue of arts funding, Michael Foot said:
‘What is the point of having a great and adventurous National Theatre and a cabinet of barbarians?’
The Mysteries were in three parts: Nativity, The Passion and Doomsday, telling the story of the Bible in three epic performances. Carol and I opted for seeing all three in one day, starting at 11 a.m.
I’ve never seen anything so memorable or remarkable in a theatre before or since. My personal highlight was Brian Glover as God, raised on a forklift, telling Noah to build an ark. Noah is resistant and God descends. When he stepped out of the forklift we could see he was wearing carpet slippers, as well as braces and a flat cap.
‘Who are you?’ he is asked and he answers softly, a little hurt, with a thick Yorkshire accent:
‘I am God.’
With actors amongst us and the action unfolding next to, behind, above, or all around, the experience was funny, moving and inspiring.
The National Theatre was a centre of theatrical excellence to aspire to. It staged David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross in a scintillating, emotionally charged evening (apart from anything I was astonished the cast were English, so convincing were their American accents). Rik Mayall dazzled hilariously in Gogol’s The Government Inspector and Anthony Hopkins terrorized menacingly in Howard Brenton and David Hare’s satire of the press, Pravda.
The following year, Hopkins was a potent and agonized King Lear. The blinding of Gloucester drew gasps from the audience as blood squirted across the stage. Even from the very back row it was a shock, especially to those, like me, who didn’t know the play (my Uncle George, who used to cheerfully recite Shakespeare’s sonnets to me, could never understand how I could be studying theatre and not Shakespeare).
On the same day I saw Lear, by contrast, I also saw an engrossing production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother.
Having witnessed all this excellence, finding something within our students’ scope was daunting but Brecht offered a solution. His Fear and Misery of the Third Reich was a series of scenes encapsulating life at home in the Germany of the 1930s. It was written specifically to provide material for amateur German theatre groups in exile, as Brecht himself was from 1933.
One of the fourth-year directing students at Kent was staging some of the scenes as his final degree project at the Gulbenkian Theatre on campus. This was a 350-seat auditorium popular with the best touring companies, like Cheek by Jowl, Howard Barker’s The Wrestling School and Red Ladder.
I was cast in a couple of small roles and appreciated the clarity and simplicity of the writing, though in one scene I had to clean a pair of shoes that were plainly spotless when I picked them up. I must have looked like the most fastidious shoe cleaner in the Reich.
This time, when I developed a crush on one of the cast, Jill, I was not tortured with guilt. I bonded with her as we painted bedsheets bright red to make giant swastika banners. We went out together for two years after that initial tête-à-tête over the supreme symbol of evil.
I’d been in two plays, one with a white South African golliwog and another where I had to paint swastikas. Political correctness came in many forms.
My dad and stepmum came, which signalled a softening of his opposition to my studying drama in the first place:
‘What sort of job is that going to get you?’
Drama students were second only to philosophy students in the ranks of graduate unemployment. I took a philosophy course that year, as part of Kent’s cross-faculty approach to first years. My highlight was a balding, angry mature student (who brought to mind the picture of Brecht on the back of my copy of The
Mother) shouting at me:
‘Is it ever right to kill, yes or no?’
‘Well…’
‘It’s a simple question!’
‘What’s the situation?’
‘YES OR NO!’
The teacher was smiling. I enjoyed philosophy. I could have studied that instead and then acted in plays in the evening. Brecht’s plays preferably, since they had a bombproof political message (social justice coupled with anti-fascism), and were written for amateurs. Perfect.
John Peel
Radio in the ’80s was unimaginably terrible. With the exception of Steve Wright, who hired comedians, like the brilliant Phil Cornwell, to generate funny original characters, Radio One employed a litany of unlistenable halfwits whose unremitting delight in the sound of their own torturous voices kept them blathering away in an apparent self-parody of disc jockey jocularity. Everyone was their ‘mate’ and everyone was a ‘great guy actually’ or a ‘really super lady’. Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield’s hilarious portrayal of spoof disc jockeys Smashie and Nicey is a work of acerbic observational comedy rather than cartoonish outlandishness, though it is that as well.
Everyone has their own worst Radio One DJ. For many it’s Noel Edmonds, but I didn’t know about him until I had to endure Swap Shop on BBC1 on Saturday mornings, because my sister liked it. Only if she was out could I watch Tiswas on ITV with Sally James showing off the garter of the week and Bob Carolgees with Spit the Dog.
Others will cite Dave Lee Travis or ‘DLT’, the self-styled Hairy Cornflake, but the most unpardonable villain of the ruinous ’80s radio landscape was Simon Bates and his intolerable ‘Our Tune’ slot, for which people would send in sob stories and Bates would read them out over a syrupy backing track. It’s only because I was a skint student that I didn’t hurl my radio out of the window every time that came on. It was an over-egged pudding of faux-emotion, oiled with false humility on Bates’s part, which usually culminated in a tiresome, sentimental power ballad, to remind the day’s subject of the time her two-timing boyfriend’s Doberman bit a leg off her long-haired Persian, or something similar.
The choice of listening was severely limited as there were so few commercial stations.
Radio Three was out because that played classical music which I’d had no introduction to and was left cold by.
Radio Four was absent at home so I never learned to listen to it. As with a foreign language, it’s important to be exposed to it at a young age or it becomes hard to pick up. Like cryptic crosswords and multi-syllable Scrabble play, it’s an acquired skill to enjoy Radio Four and it must be absorbed in the formative years. Try as I might to immerse myself in its improving tones late in life, I would soon tune out and start to wonder what Bruno Brookes was playing.
Radio Two was for old folks with its Terry Wogan and Jimmy Young double bill. There was no Radio Five or Six or Seven or XFM, Smooth, Heart, Kiss etc etc.
In London the best bet was LBC with its joyous phone-ins, or Capital Radio.
Capital was a relatively new station whose profile was raised by the distribution of car stickers, window stickers, stickers of all kinds to the general population. If you went along to Euston Tower, from where they broadcast for years, it was possible to see actual DJs emerging and to ask them for autographs as well as collect stickers from reception. I waited there for a couple of hours one day in about 1979 and came back with Dave ‘COD! Cash on Delivery’ Cash’s autograph as well as Desmond Hamil’s, who was an ITN reporter. He said: ‘You don’t want mine.’ I said: ‘Yes I do.’
The only place to turn, to avoid a world of grim commercial pop and egotistical loons burbling away, was Radio One between eight and midnight during the week when the Rhythm Pals would deliver two hours each of an eclectic mix of mainly new music that was superior to, and absent from, the hateful Radio One daytime playlist.
First of the Rhythm Pals up, at eight o’clock, was David ‘Kid’ Jensen, who had been a big-name young DJ, with an inspirational centre parting, on daytime radio. Now his true musical taste had made him surprisingly perfect for the evening listener. He was also allowed to be called David, since he was not a Kid any more.
Following Jensen was the greatest broadcaster that Radio One has had since its inception in 1967. One of the greatest broadcasters in the history of radio in Britain, perhaps anywhere.
John Peel, Peely or plain old Peel (as in ‘Did you listen to Peel last night?’) knew his musical trends and broke more bands than any other DJ. You heard it on Peel’s show before you heard it anywhere else. Sometimes it seemed as though he liked every single thing that was ever recorded. He certainly seemed to have heard it all. He received demo tapes by the sackful and reputedly listened to every one.
It’s difficult not to portray him as an obsessive enthusiast and perhaps he was, in the same way that John Motson is about football, but that would give an incomplete impression. His unruffled style and mellow warm delivery in his unhurried, restrained scouse tones were uniquely engaging. No one said they didn’t like him and he always seemed to have a good word for every track, even the oddest and most impenetrable stuff. He was broadcasting to the hippest, trendiest, too-cool-for-skool audience but never appeared to succumb, on air at least, to the ready cynicism so common in the lives of tens of thousands of everyday students and schoolkids.
Above all else he combined an absence of egotism with a sense of humour. His dry, self-deprecating remarks and his respect for his audience, who he allowed to think were as knowledgeable as he was by adding ‘of course’ at the end of each piece of factual information about an obscure guitarist’s band history, all these things set him apart. He was greatly loved by the listening public for whom he was a lighthouse in a sea of sad broadcasting.
As passionate as he was about music so he was about Liverpool FC. On a wonderful compilation CD he made for Fabric Records (FABRICLIVE. 07: John Peel ) in 2002, he opened with the great Peter Jones on BBC radio, commentating on Alan Kennedy’s winning goal for Liverpool v Real Madrid in the 1981 European Cup Final before mixing commentary on Kenny Dalglish’s winner in the 1978 European Cup Final into ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division. Liverpool were again European Cup holders in my first year at university, having beaten Roma, in Rome, on penalties in 1984. They reached the European Cup Final yet again in 1985 for the fifth time in nine seasons. Peely was delighted.
Students on campus at Kent in 1985 listened to a fair bit of radio since virtually no one had TVs in their rooms and there was only one TV room in each college. I was going back to Loughton and would have watched the final there but left it too late to leave and went to the packed TV room instead. I arrived at kick-off time only to find there hadn’t been one.
Liverpool and Juventus supporters were involved in the kind of terrace-clearing skirmishes that had become familiar to anyone who attended football over the previous decade. When the terraces are cleared as they were in this instance, at the Heysel stadium in Brussels, a large majority of the fans, who are trying to escape, have to head somewhere. Ideally, as at Highbury in 1982, when a combination of a smoke-bomb, fighting and the police led to a clearing of large areas of terrace, the fans spill on to the pitch.
At Heysel this couldn’t happen. There was no access to safe areas alongside the pitch either. The fans were squashed, trapped, many of them up against a wall.
A friend of mine, Keith, who I’ve been going to football with for over twenty years, was at the Heysel stadium when Arsenal played there in the Cup Winners’ Cup Final of 1980. He later told me that the stadium had been ‘falling down’ even then.
Five years later a wall collapsed at Heysel and thirty-nine terrified Juventus supporters died screaming.
Something like it was bound to happen. Stadia everywhere were old. Policing was disorganized and football fans, who were routinely herded like animals into pens, could always turn very nasty, very quickly, particularly when provoked.
From the Juventus side stories emerged of right
-wing ‘ultras’ with links to Italian fascist organizations wanting to attack Liverpool fans because the city itself was famously socialist, in their eyes a red city. Certainly, Italian fans played a full part: they could be seen on television, wearing masks over their faces and goading Liverpool supporters. It was Italians who died though, and it is Italians who mourn their loss on the anniversary each year.
For English football, already notorious for its hooligan problem, it was a catastrophic night of shame and disgrace. All English clubs were banned from playing in European competition and the ban was not lifted for five years. The first club denied an opportunity to compete for the European Cup, the greatest prize of all, decided by games between all the champions of the European leagues, were Liverpool’s great rivals Everton.
On television, there was little information about what was going to happen next, or whether the rioting was out of control. Was the game even going to go ahead? Presenter and ex-footballer, Jimmy Hill, was now in the unfortunate position of running a lengthy live football show with no football. He filled in anxiously as his studio full of bemused football pundits brought their extensive knowledge of the offside law to bear on a heated debate (actually only Jimmy Hill was heated) about the return of National Service. Jimmy was adamant it was the answer and with the fervour of a barrack room bully tried to make his fence-sitting panellists agree with him.
Eventually the match started, ostensibly to quell the possibility of further rioting. It should never have taken place but, at least, while the memory of their dead was instantly disrespected by the decision to play, Juventus won.
By chance, later that summer, I would be in Liverpool for their first game after Heysel.
I had been working on a children’s summer camp. It was non-residential so each day dozens of kids would be dropped off for a full programme of ‘events’. I was the ‘drama and video’ person. When they came to me we would have an hour to devise a story, which I’d then video them acting out, using a camera the size of a microwave oven.