by Alan Davies
When Kylie joined the cast as firecracker tomboy Charlene, it was unforeseen that she would rise to stardom and blossom into a sex symbol. In the early episodes the cameramen, working on a tight schedule, would often miss her as she passed beneath the lens, out of shot. For the first two months they could only pick her up on the low level camera used for Bouncer the dog’s close-ups.
Not really. When Kylie was on-screen the viewer’s eye was drawn to her tiny, scrawny frame.
Charlene was always under cars, fixing oil leaks and flying off the handle in grubby dungarees. Kids loved her and identified with her, largely because she was the size of the average ten-year-old.
I was taking a course in radio drama, with Gary and Richard, on which we quickly established that the majority of radio plays were not just written to be listened to while doing the washing-up, but were also, quite possibly, written while doing the washing-up.
Gary and Richard had aspirations to write comedy and Gary’s success in being given a First for an essay on his English course in which he argued that Shakespeare had written Macbeth as a comedy suggested he had an eye for humour.
While our love of Neighbours was all very ironic and considered, we did actually like the soap. Had we known how soaps were going to proliferate across the TV schedules over the next two decades, eliminating comedy slot after comedy slot, we may have been less enthusiastic, over pints of Flowers in the Neptune, about our daily fix of Aussie melodrama.
It was like a fix too. We hardly watched any other television and reverted to serious artsy undergraduates as soon as the theme tune died down, straight off to the Marlowe Theatre to see a touring version of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.
It was also possible to read plenty of books despite being skint; they were quite easy to steal from the campus bookshop. By now I was a devotee of Saul Bellow since I’d read the hilarious Herzog as well as Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King and The Dean’s December. Even though most of his books were about middle-aged men in the throes of mid-life crises, battered by relationships, disillusioned by the workplace, and not content to stay put any longer, there was enough humour and outlandish behaviour to appeal to an undergraduate too young to identify with the protagonist.
When up in London for demos, I would try to enhance my left-wing credentials by visiting leftie bookshops, like the now extinct Collets on Charing Cross Road, and the still-soldiering-on Housmans on Caledonian Road. I’d usually buy political postcards and a copy of Searchlight. The only book from those stores I read from cover to cover was Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which I loved. I tried to read about Karl Marx, and had a go at The Communist Manifesto, but there weren’t many jokes in there and, as it was humour that was my primary interest, I reverted to Groucho.
By now, I’d been in a production of Steven Berkoff’s two-hander Decadence with the only really talented student in the department, Jackie Clune. Our director robbed all his ideas from a recent revival of the play, starring Berkoff and Linda Marlowe, a brilliant production I’d seen at the Arts Theatre four years previously. It was fantastically good fun to perform. A series of rhyming monologues delivered alternately by two upper-class and two working-class characters. This meant breaking out the impression of my dad once again, alongside my best mockney, as used on the football terraces. We were well received. Even a drama lecturer was sincerely complimentary, and that never happened. Our friends loved it and it was very rewarding, with the packed drama studio rocking with laughter. A fix of that sort of adrenaline rush could become as addictive as Neighbours.
Soon after that, some comedians were booked to put on a show in the junior common room. There were about two hundred people in there on the night. It was all going well up until the last act, who took the whole gig up a level. His exhilarating, high-octane anecdotal rant, mainly about his schooldays in Liverpool, was perfectly pitched for students, whose memories of chopper bikes and the like were very recent, and who were wiping their eyes in recovery from their own laughter.
Considering myself, by now, a comedy aficionado (I had seen Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy videos after all), I approached him after the gig and asked him his name:
‘Simon, Simon Bligh.’
I told him that he was hilarious and should be on television. I said this seriously, as if I knew what I was talking about. He looked as though he’d heard it before but was good-natured and grateful for the compliments. If I hadn’t seen Simon Bligh I might never have thought it possible to try stand-up comedy.
Andy, who I’d been in several plays with, wanted to try some comedy, as did I, after seeing Rory Bremner and Simon Bligh and having the experience of Decadence. It was difficult to persuade Gary and Richard to put together some kind of revue though. Their stated aim was to write the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, without going to the trouble of working their way up to it, with some half-good, half-awful, comedy shows on campus. After three years or more of acting badly in student productions, I’d overcome the fear of being thought no good.
Most of my time was taken up rehearsing plays as I was now a fourth year specializing in directing. I’d chosen one of Barrie Keefe’s Barbarians trilogy, Abide With Me, about Manchester United fans outside Wembley, without tickets, at the 1976 FA Cup Final. One of the characters was black and since there were no black people in the drama department we decided to put, in small print at the bottom of the notices announcing auditions, the ugly phrase:
BLACK ACTORS NEEDED
Passing out these notices in the student bars, I was castigated, by white people, and accused of racism.
In the event two black students turned up who had never auditioned for a play before, and I ended up feeling bad about having to tell one of them he hadn’t made it. Then I had to negotiate with another director on the course (there were six of us), who insisted that if he wanted to use the two black men in his play then he should be allowed to, since it was racist to suggest that black men should only play black parts. He was directing a play with no specifically black characters. Eventually I was able to cast the one I wanted. I was looking forward to leaving that university.
I took my three cast members to Chelsea, because they were playing Man United. As we went into the away end, I was stopped by a constable to be searched. I looked at his smiling face and realized it was an old friend from school. We’d once been in a fight with two lads in Essex, outside a pub. The landlord’s son, who’d started it, slashed my mate with a chisel which cut his temple, missed his eye, and carried on across the bridge of his nose. We’d gone back to a girl’s house and he’d had to chat to her mum, while remaining in profile to hide the blood. We had a chat about old times before I went in. I didn’t bring up the time he’d asked my girlfriend whether she spat or swallowed.
My three student actors loved being on the terraces, and the experience helped them to act well in the play. I was proud of them.
After that I put on Christie in Love by Howard Brenton, a very dark tale about the real-life serial killer. I was bored in the rehearsal room now, so we played a fair bit of cricket with a stick and a juice carton. On the night they all did well, even the lad with the thankless task of portraying Christie himself. With my final year dissertation about Peter Brook finished, I was starting to wonder what I was going to do next when a friend of mine, Alistair, who was in a band, said that they were taking part in an Amnesty International benefit at the Whitstable Labour Club and would I like to MC the night. I could try some of the comedy I’d been talking about. I wasn’t sure but he put my name on the poster anyway so I had to.
I roped in two friends of mine, Steph and Mandy, to help with a spoof of a Cadbury’s Flake commercial on TV at the time. Set in the tropics, it featured a girl reclining in the heat, eating a Flake, while a lizard ran across a nearby telephone. We found an old phone and taped a toy lizard to a stick. One of them sang the Flake song about the crumbliest chocolate while the other one erotically rubbed the toy lizard over the phone. Meanw
hile, I unwrapped a Flake, very obviously a phallus in the commercial, to reveal it was wrapped in a condom, as everything had to be in those AIDS-conscious times. Eating a condom full of chocolate was no fun for me, and watching me spit out a condom full of chocolate was no fun for the audience, but, thankfully, they were laughing.
Steph and Mandy then exited to applause and I began my stand-up routine, with Alistair poised to come on with his band at any second, in case I bailed out. Rooted anxiously to the spot I talked, at high speed, about Whitstable and the fact there was no cashpoint there, about the campus bookshop and how they must copy the student shoplifting techniques when they go to the wholesalers, in order to pick up their stock for nothing to break even. I talked about the Channel tunnel, I think, I don’t remember clearly, it was an adrenaline-fuelled blur. I may have tried a David Coleman impression.
The audience members, standing in the dark, smoky back room of the Labour Club, which was under railway arches, were mostly students or people I’d seen in there every Saturday night. They were facing the right way and some of them were laughing. It seemed to be working. I finished what I’d prepared, introduced the band and came off. Everyone clapped, everyone was smiling, it was a thrill and an enormous relief, both for me and for my peers, who were terrified I would humiliate myself and they’d have to say something nice about it afterwards.
I had decided by the time I came offstage what I was going to pursue after graduation a few months later.
It was the support of friends like Alistair, Frances, Gary, Richard and Andy that gave me the confidence to have a go at stand-up. We laughed a lot together, often leaving the pub early to go back to watch The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross. That Christmas I’d had a dinner with Alistair and his housemates. Someone set light to the streamers they’d decorated the table with, and someone else threw a glass of brandy on it to try and put it out. Alistair put on ‘Burning Down the House’ by Talking Heads as we extinguished the flames in fits of laughter.
Laughing together was also the appeal of Neighbours. We were all young, with next to no life experience, no money and nothing in common other than having been seduced by the same university prospectus. It’s the things that are shared together that create real bonds between people and sharing jokes about the Ramsays and the Robinsons was our private world of fun. Since then, Gary Howe and Richard Preddy have made careers in comedy writing, Alistair Friend is a professional musician and Kylie Minogue has done quite well too.
Dolly Price
Reaching the top of the escalator, a group of Singaporean schoolchildren in uniforms were huddled together waiting. They were young, maybe twelve years old, in dark jackets and white shirts with their ties loosely done up. A mixture of boys and girls, about six of them altogether, hanging around the shopping centre after school. One of the girls was cowering behind the biggest one, a lad who may have been a year or two older than the others. He approached me and said:
‘You a boxer?’
I looked at my sister next to me, who didn’t say anything.
‘You a boxer? he repeated. The girl behind him was giggling now.
‘Boxer? You a boxer!’
I was struggling with his accent.
‘A boxer? No I’m not a boxer, I told him.
‘No, not boxer. Popstar!’ He laughed and turned to speak to his friends in their own language. They all laughed with him.
‘Oh. Popstar.’
‘Yes, you a popstar?’
‘No, no, I’m not a popstar.’
‘Yes, yes you lick ash tray.’
‘What?’
‘Lick ash tray! You lick ash tray!’
The accent was very strong but then the penny dropped.
‘Oh! Rick Astley?’
‘Yes, yes you lick ash tray!’
‘No, I’m not. Sorry. I’m not Rick Astley.’
He turned to the girl and said something. He’d apparently been enquiring on her behalf. She now plucked up the courage to speak.
‘You Rick Astley?’ she almost pleaded.
I should have just said I was Rick Astley, the young singer responsible for the biggest selling record of 1987, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, a number one in the UK, the US and apparently Singapore too. Would it have done any harm to sign an autograph and give them a little Astley arm shimmy by way of an exit? No, it wouldn’t, I could have made her happy but I trod on her dreams.
‘No. I’m not,’ I said. No one had ever remarked on any similarity between me and Rick before and no one has since.
Me and my sister went to the Raffles Hotel for a Singapore Sling. We had one night in Singapore but we really just wanted to head back to the airport and catch our onward flight to Adelaide. Still, the old colonial Raffles Hotel was very nice, much better than the seventy-storey modern monstrosity next door. Much of old Singapore had been flattened and replaced by gleaming new soulless buildings. Now tourists were turning up and asking for the old town, only to find it had largely gone. I asked the barman at the Raffles what was the greatest number of Singapore Slings he’d made in an evening? He said they once made 2,000 in one night when a US navy ship was in port.
The next day at Adelaide airport we looked out for our Auntie Hazel. We saw a white-haired lady who I thought must have been my gran but it turned out to be Hazel. I’d only met her once before, when she flew to England in 1972 after the death of her sister, my mum. She had darker hair then.
Emerging from behind Hazel was a little, round, suntanned older lady that I didn’t recognize. I was looking for someone pale, thin, drawn and anxious, but this buoyant, welcoming, smiley imposter was pretending to be the same person who had emigrated, from England to Australia, in 1979, after suffering a nervous breakdown in the years following the death of her eldest daughter and her husband.
Hazel greeted us and we headed outside to find their car. As we walked, both Hazel and this old woman who was masquerading as our grandmother continually remarked on my sister’s resemblance to her mother.
‘Ooh, doesn’t she look like Shirley?’
A few more steps and general chit-chat and then again:
‘Doesn’t she look like Shirley? Ever so. Ever so much.’
My sister, who had lost her mum at three years old and only had the one photo to remember her by, was smiling shyly. We hadn’t seen our gran for nine years, and when she left my sister was only ten. Now grown up at nineteen, maybe she did look like Shirley. It hadn’t come up before.
They took us to their house in Fullarton Road. We knew the address ‘off by heart’ since we used to write thank you letters every year for birthday and Christmas presents sent by Auntie Hazel.
Hazel asked whose idea had it been to finally come and visit after all these years? I told them it was mine. They were disbelieving and double-checked with my sister that I was telling the truth. My reputation, in my own family, was ruinously awful, even amongst people who didn’t know me. Later on, talking to my gran, since this happy tanned, relaxed old lady was indeed my gran, she said to me:
‘Ooh, you were a bugger.’
‘Was I?’ I said, a bit helplessly.
‘Ooh, you were a bugger.’
Gran was born in 1905. Her mum, Fanny Binks, was her father’s second wife. When Gran was five years old, she saw Fanny Binks looking through the railings at her, in the school playground. She never saw her mother again. From then my gran was raised by her half-sisters from her dad’s first marriage. She described them as cruel. She married Fred, who worked in the post office; they did their courting in Walthamstow. Sometimes she’d catch the bus with Fred down to Finsbury Town Hall for afternoon tea dances. They moved to Chingford and had two children. Hazel, the youngest, was married first, to Geoff, and had a son, who was eighteen months old when the family boarded a ship to Australia in 1963. Hazel said she walked to Australia since her little boy wouldn’t stay in one place for the entire six-week sailing. They settled in Mount Gambier and later moved to Adelaide. Soon after they emigrated, my mum
and dad were married, having delayed so long that Hazel missed her sister’s wedding, which was a terrible shame for her.
We spent ten days in Adelaide, getting to know the three of our four cousins who were living there at the time, and hearing stories from Hazel, Geoff and in particular my gran.
We heard how Hazel hadn’t been told that her only sister was terminally ill. How a letter had arrived saying she was dead, and how Hazel had sat on the bench in the back garden crying for three days. My cousins were told to leave her alone while Geoff cooked for them and waited for her to come back inside.
We heard how my gran and granddad agreed to leave their retirement home in Blackpool and move down to a flat in Loughton to help look after us. Then my granddad died and Gran was on her own, with her youngest the other side of the world. Both my dad’s parents passed away, leaving only my dad and my gran to look after us. Then she had a nervous breakdown, and then she was in Claybury, the mental hospital near where I grew up.
Claybury was an insult at primary school. ‘You’re from Claybury’ meant you were stupid, simple, an idiot. It didn’t mean you were ill, or desperate, lonely and sad beyond words. I went to Claybury with my dad but he didn’t take me in to see Gran. He left me in the car and told me not to unlock the doors. In case there were any dangerous nutters in the grounds was the implication.
My gran had always suffered from depression and mental health problems. They called it ‘milk madness’ when she was raising children. It was as if the intolerable strain, inflicted on her by the events of her life, was solely her responsibility to cope with.