by Alan Davies
Come the performances though, we thought Pete had pulled off something amazing. The best thing any of us had been involved in. Jason peeling away the layers of an onion as the elderly Peer was moving and the use of the studio to transport the audience around the world, following Peer’s adventures, was ingenious and showed remarkable invention on virtually no budget. We were hopeful that the invited selectors from the National Student Drama Festival would be impressed enough to invite us to take part in their annual event. We had a clue it may not have been as good as we’d hoped when a Radical Feminist lecturer damned us with the faintest praise:
‘You must have all worked very hard.’
We were turned down for the NSDF but Pete decided instead to go for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival that summer. We would all have to think of ways to raise money if we wanted to go, which we did.
There was to be a half-marathon held in Canterbury on 18 May and I entered. I went out training by myself. Running along the beach up to Tankerton slopes. I went five times and had managed nine miles on my last run. Having secured the life-altering sum of £70-worth of sponsorship, I set off in a hideous pale-blue and white candy-striped matching vest and shorts, with yellow-striped electric blue Adidas trainers.
It was a hot day. Starting near the back of the field I had a scare early on when the police, who had been holding traffic on the ring road for the runners, decided everyone had gone through and released some cars. Canterbury’s ring road can be hairy enough in a car but in a pastel jogging suit it was hazardous in the extreme.
‘Hey!’ I shouted, while sprinting across a roundabout, dodging irate drivers. I made it through unscathed and was coping until I reached nine miles when I hit ‘the wall’ at Iffin Lane. The dire warnings issued by Scottish Claire, from the theatre company (that made her sound like Fraser from Dad’s Army saying I was ‘doomed’), came back to haunt me:
‘People train for weeks for those things!’
‘I’ve been running a few times.’
‘How many times?’
‘Five.’
‘Five! You’re mad.’
I jogged at walking pace for the last four miles. Despite being only twenty, and looking the part in my outfit, in truth I was an undernourished smoker whose idea of complex carbohydrates was a packet of seafood Nik Naks. I was being passed by the elderly and the infirm.
The thirteen miles began and finished at the St Lawrence Cricket Ground. Jill met me, with Pete’s trusted stage manager John. It took me two and a half hours. Fortunately, Jill had a way of laughing at me without it feeling unkind. Poor John had obviously been waiting for ages.
‘Are you all right?’ he smiled.
‘Just about,’ I said.
‘We thought you’d died.’
Pete managed to persuade the student union to part with £2,000 to fund our Edinburgh trip. My £70 was also very useful, he assured me.
Edinburgh wasn’t until August though; before that we all had to be involved in productions at the Gulbenkian Theatre, staged by the fourth years specializing in directing. I played the father in Boris Vian’s The Empire Builders, in which a family flee a terrible noise by running upstairs. Each time they go up, they leave someone behind. In the corner of the room all the time is a schmurz, which the family assault when they can’t express their frustrations adequately to each other. I can’t remember who played the schmurz; he was mummified in bandages throughout. What a part.
I had to shoot him at the end. The schmurz, not the actor.
A few days later I went to a doctor, complaining of a loss of hearing. I told him all about the ear trouble I used to have as a boy, and how my dad had had the same thing, and how it felt like it used to back then but much worse. He examined me seriously for some time but couldn’t find anything and began to look quite concerned.
‘Have you been exposed to any loud bangs?’
‘I did have to fire a gun in a play,’ I said.
He looked at me across his desk.
‘Was it loud?’ he said.
‘Very,’ I said.
There was a silence as he wrote something on a pad.
‘Do you think that’s what caused it?’ I said.
He raised his eyes to mine and then looked down again. More silence followed. He carried on scribbling. I left feeling like I might be in trouble. My hearing came back soon afterwards.
My dad and stepmum came to see the play. As usual, when confronted with a character in middle age, I just did an impression of my dad. He didn’t seem to notice and they were kind enough not to mention my pulling the set over. To create the impression of rooms becoming smaller, the set was made with cardboard boxes which were pushed inwards each time the family went ‘upstairs’. The cast had to wear cardboard clothes too. As I bent down to crawl through the hole in to the smallest room, prior to my epic act three monologue, I snagged my cardboard costume on the wall of the cardboard box set, bringing boxes crashing down behind me. I was oblivious and carried on acting away, while student stage hands, all in black, were suddenly revealed, slouching, bored, and staring into space. The glare of the lights fell on them and they froze before hurriedly trying to build the boxes back up.
‘What a lot of lines you had,’ said my dad.
Now we could look forward to Edinburgh. Pete wanted to put on a musical version of an ancient Greek comedy, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and call it Lysistrata! as in Oklahoma!
Lysistrata is the famous tale in which the eponymous heroine persuades the women of Athens to deprive their men of their conjugal rights until they make peace not war. Early in the play she sums up her plan:
If Aphrodite of Cyprus and her sweet son Eros still breathe hot desire into our bosoms and our thighs, and if they still, as of old, afflict our men with that distressing ailment, club-prick – then I prophecy that before long we women will be known as the Peacemakers of Greece.
The thought of singing was appalling but it seemed there might be a chance for me and Andy to be funny. Andy made me laugh, usually with impressions. Walking down Whitstable High Street one day he waited for a car to go past before launching into motor racing commentator Murray Walker. Holding his nose he whined at high volume: ‘Annnddd therrreee is…’ I countered with what I thought was a decent David Coleman. Scanning through the Edinburgh Fringe programme, we saw Rory Bremner was on and decided that we’d go and see his show before trying to meet him afterwards to share our impressions with him.
For most of Lysistrata! all of the men in the company wore concealed false erections. We had wire coat hangers around our waists with a piece of wire protruding quite a long way forward. This was then wrapped in fabric and tape before being covered with a stocking. We should all have had tetanus jabs as a precaution.
Wielding these members, the men are tormented by the women. In one scene Pete had the four men in the cast sit down while the four women came up behind them and suggestively rubbed up against them whilst unbuttoning the men’s shirts and putting their hands inside. Eventually they retreat back into their barricaded haven, leaving the men at bursting point.
Rubbing up against me was the big-haired and big-breasted Sexiest Girl in the Company, who had allowed radical feminism to pass her by in favour of a first-class degree in ‘Flirtation and if-you’ve-got-it-flaunt-it-ness’.
As I was being molested by her, the other three boys were all writhing in pleasure as they were being teased to a near-climax so I sat still, looked terrified and kept my shirt done all the way up to the top. As those magnificent mammaries bounced around behind me and a spectacular mane of hair was tossed about my face, the little audience in the Old St Paul’s Church and Hall howled with laughter. Success! Laughs! From actual paying punters for the first time in my life! The scene ended and Andy winked at me as we went back to the wings. ‘Well done,’ he said conspiratorially.
Some of the cast weren’t happy, feeling upstaged. Pete told me they’d been asking what I was doing.
‘Nothing,’ said Pete. ‘It
’s just funny.’
He had wanted me to open up my shirt and writhe like the others but he let me have my funny moment. He also gave me the chance to rewrite part of the play into a more contemporary monologue. Creating a character called ‘Gary Bailiff’, I would enter to the strains of ‘ooh Gary Bailiff’ which we’d pinched from Radio One’s Gary Davies Show. The monologue, attempting to persuade the women to come out and relieve the men, wasn’t funny, but it was nice of Pete to let me try. He also allowed me and Andy to write a ‘funny’ blurb for the programme, which we ended with the line:
‘Pete Nettell is 97.’
This joke, lifted from Private Eye, was hilarious to us but no one else. All our attempts at humour were exciting for us, no matter how hopeless. We sold some tickets after a reasonable review in The Scotsman and everything was going well, though me and Andy hated being out every day singing songs and trying to give out flyers. We would skulk at the back while our female company members worked the crowd. We loved the city though, the Royal Mile, Princes Street Gardens, up Calton Hill to Edinburgh’s Disgrace. We climbed the Scott Monument from where you can see the Forth Bridge and staggered around The Meadows one night after too many pints of heavy. I’ve loved Edinburgh and the festival ever since and sometimes wish that I could experience it all again for the first time.
Some of the company were staying at Scottish Claire’s parents’ house. The rest of us had to share a tiny flat. Me, Andy, Pete and John shared a room with one double bed. We were there for two weeks so Pete and John had the bed for one week and me and Andy for the other. Lying on the floor one night, we struggled not to laugh as Pete and John bickered above us about whose toenails needed cutting.
Earlier that week we’d been north of Edinburgh to visit the family of the Sexiest Girl in the Company. We’d had a great time there and they’d shown us a video of An Audience with Billy Connolly. Me and Andy had never seen anything funnier. It was a packed hour of hilarious material, joyously delivered in front of a showbiz audience, many of whom were weeping with laughter throughout. We really wanted to see more comedy. One day at our venue, our song-writing pianist Kate arrived in a flush of excitement.
‘Oh my god,’ she gasped, ‘I have just seen the best thing ever, you have to go and see the Joan Collins Fan Club.’
Regretfully, me and Andy missed out on Julian Clary but we did manage to see Rory Bremner. My face was aching from laughing so much by the end. He was brilliant, his impressions of the sporting commentators I’d heard all my life, like Bill McLaren and Richie Benaud, were hilarious. Towards the end, his comedy partner joined him on stage and they held a conversation as Roger Moore talking to Sean Connery. The audience were overjoyed and both Bremner and his confrere corpsed throughout. It was the funniest show I’d ever seen and, like the Billy Connolly video we watched, the performers were enjoying it too.
We went into the foyer afterwards and saw Bremner smiling and chatting to people. He was tall and seemed to shine with some aura of comic brilliance still around him. Our plan to share our impressions with him seemed less of a good idea and we went quietly away, rubbing our aching faces.
Dennis Potter
The board game Trivial Pursuit was launched in the UK in the mid-’80s and quickly reached such a degree of popularity it could have been classed as an epidemic. A medical epidemic, in which the psychological health of the nation was at stake. The national love of the quiz, evident in the lasting popularity of television shows such as University Challenge, Mastermind and Ask the Family, was being exacerbated amongst fledgling quiz-heads by the success of Blockbusters, which gave school-age family members their own Q&A at 5.15 each afternoon with ‘Can-I-have-a-P-please-Bob’ Holness.
Trivial Pursuit gave us the chance for a quiz at home, with the opportunity to choose your area of expertise, or at least preference, since the board was divided up into subjects such as ‘History’ or ‘Science and Nature’.
In our house, playing the game at Christmas gave rise to an obsession with Sports and Leisure, since we were all comfortable with that area. However, a cultural desert was revealed and a collective groan would go up whenever Art and Literature was an option. ‘Boring!’ my dad would cry. Each roll of the dice afforded two squares to pick from so it was possible to avoid Art and Literature altogether, which was something we were generally well practised at. There were Entertainment squares and each time someone landed on one of these I would be summoned: ‘Come on, Alan!’ Studying for a degree in drama was perceived to give me the inside track on the work of Doris Day or Edward G. Robinson.
Trivial Pursuit rewarded those with a breadth of general knowledge and a good memory. Playing amongst students, however, it became a substitute for actual learning or ideas, a test of ego and intellectual vanity, since we had no other barometer by which to measure ourselves. Consequently it was no fun, since you only needed a couple of players who were convinced that winning at this board game denoted actual levels of intelligence, for the atmosphere to become so heightened that any enjoyment would evaporate, particularly if those people were losing.
This notion of the quick intellectual fix, giving a hint of what is possible in the world of knowledge, but in a palatable board game form that does not require any effort of learning, was a masterstroke.
Television audiences had a similar experience when watching the popular soap operas. An illusion of drama, an emotional fix, but without any need for effort on the part of the viewer with scripts that were anything but elusive or demanding, that required no knowledge beyond that which could be accrued from watching the programme itself. A pacifying, mollifying journey from nowhere, to somewhere next to nowhere.
These soaps, such as Crossroads, Emmerdale Farm, and the comedically superior Coronation Street, were the preserve of ITV, fulfilling its remit to provide accessible popular entertainment for a returning audience that advertisers wanted to pitch products to.
It was a cosy relationship that changed dramatically when the BBC decided it would enter the soap opera market, having had huge success with the weekly American soap Dallas.
Despite the classic American sitcom Soap brilliantly lampooning the whole genre only a few years previously (with an exceptionally talented cast of comic actors including a young Billy Crystal), the public appetite for soaps was perceived to be limitless. In 1985 EastEnders was launched in the UK and was immediately a huge success. Throughout 1986 the domestic warfare at the Queen Vic, between Den and Angie Watts, gripped the television audience and was a ratings triumph.
At the same time as EastEnders was being conceived and launched, the BBC was in the midst of an exceptional period of television drama. Yorkshire TV had made Willy Russell’s One Summer about two lads from Liverpool who go on the run to Wales, which touchingly portrayed the humour and hopelessness preoccupying school-leavers in England in 1983, but there were three BBC serials in particular that are commonly regarded as perhaps the three best in the history of British television. Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff, Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness, and Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective.
Boys from the Blackstuff came first. Bleasdale’s tale of a gang of Tarmac (the blackstuff ) layers who lose their jobs was originally a single play but was well received on transmission so further programmes were made, each featuring a different character from the gang. In between the shooting of the first episode and the eventual transmission of the rest, unemployment in Britain had dramatically risen and the relevance of Bleasdale’s work was greatly magnified.
Its depiction of life on the dole struck a chord with an audience delighted to see warm characters (played by much loved comic actors like Michael Angelis from The Liver Birds and Julie Walters) facing hardship, reflecting so well the lives of millions at that time. Yosser’s Story featuring Bernard Hill’s Yosser Hughes character, who undergoes a nervous breakdown as he tries to prevent his children being taken into care, was the most talked-about television programme of the year. Hill’s depiction
of a man on, and then over, the edge is menacing, sad, harrowing and distressing. This was acting of the highest calibre, portraying an emotional journey with little respite for the viewer other than the unwitting humour of Yosser’s staccato speech and Bleasdale’s black (as the blackstuff ) comedy. Yosser goes to see a priest and tells him he is desperate. The priest asks Yosser to call him by his first name, Dan. ‘I’m desperate, Dan,’ says Yosser. There is a memorable scene in which Yosser tells real-life Liverpool football player Graeme Souness that he looks like him. Yosser then moves in closer to tell him he looks like Magnum as well.
The show’s impact was enormous. Within a few weeks of it appearing on BBC2 it had earned a primetime repeat on BBC1.
With comedy and pathos blending, there was to be no quick emotional fix for an audience who would have to endure the suffering of entirely credible characters they’d grown to love. It was a drama that required you to meet it halfway and rewarded you with an emotional truth and a comment on the world you lived in that would resonate for years afterwards. Importantly for me it offered no succour to supporters of Margaret Thatcher and a great deal of irreverent humour. I loved it.
Meeting the writer halfway, by committing to giving the same attention to a television drama as you would a play in the theatre, finds its reward when a complex story demands the full attention of the viewer. Edge of Darkness was a compelling political thriller built around a bereaved father’s quest for the truth concerning his daughter’s murder. Bob Peck played Ronald Craven and his daughter was played by Joanne Whalley. After her death Craven discovers that some of his daughter’s belongings are radioactive and that she is involved with an anti-nuclear group who have been dying, one by one, in suspicious circumstances. As he probes further into her story, the frightening world of covert and international government operations is partially revealed. Throughout, the vision of his daughter returns to him, both tormenting and spurring him on.