In return, I started talking nonsensical persiflage about architectural language. We warily circled each other on the new roof terrace.
The rest of the faculty itself at last arrived and stood by, clutching glasses of warm wine and gawping at their new apricot terracotta building. A jazz band played in an improvised tent. These were ordinary men and women, who had other jobs to do, who undoubtedly felt obliged to turn up, just like me. They were curious, not judgemental; indifferent, not pompous; a little distracted, but a forgiving audience. One after another, we speakers stood on a coffee table and talked across a waste of beards and pale suits.
‘I suppose you fell on your bottom as a baby and have been making jokes ever since, said the professor wryly, as we went out for photographs.
As soon as I decently could, I trotted away from the new faculty building, past the Sidgwick site and across a de Chirico dreamscape. The building block lumpiness of Stirling’s library, where I had fumbled after history journals, still looked like an unused plastics factory. There were no Japanese students standing outside the famous sun trap waiting for bits to fall off it today, but I could see exactly the same rows of bent-wood blond armchairs, facing out now on to a new Law faculty, designed by Norman Foster. On the other side was a recent, round, multi-coloured blob, the faculty of Divinity and beyond them, the old Brutalist blocks, where a big sign baldly announced ‘Criminology’ like an unusually literate advertising hoarding. Despite these new additions, little monuments to architectural caprice, plonked-down pavilions of some forgotten twentieth-century international exhibition, it all felt far more familiar than I expected. I had clearly been here enough times to get by..
Next to the east entrance to the Sidgwick site is a curious keep-like building, the Lady Mitchell Hall. It is a lecture theatre. In the middle of my second term we ‘occupied’ it. The notorious ‘Garden House Riots’ had taken place in Cambridge three years before we arrived. Students were arrested for besieging a hotel which had organized a ‘Greek’ night. Greece was then controlled by the Colonels. ‘You couldn’t eat kebabs and dance to Zorba the Greek when that sort of thing was going on, man.
Was it too late for us, we wondered? Could we still get a taste of that sort of freaky student protest ourselves?
Up until then, I had been a little disappointed by the groovy side of Cambridge. Undergraduates in my college did not seem hugely ‘alternative’, certainly by the standards of the Third Ear Café up the end of the King’s Road in buzzing alternative London. Luckily, I had fallen in with a college group who thought themselves amongst the more forward-thinking in their year because of their shared interest in coloured trousers. ‘The occupation’, however, looked more like the ‘Societies Fair’ than the Sorbonne. There were just a few fewer Christian Union and Tiddly-wink clubs and more Anarchists and Workers’ Revolutionary stalls.
We all had enough A levels to recognize a futile cause. There were murmurings about college restrictions. This was the seventies. We were expected to be back inside our rooms by ten-thirty. The college gates were locked and visitors had to leave. But even by this second term we knew how to climb in over the walls, so we weren’t intending to lie down in front of any police cars for that.
Otherwise, ‘World Revolution’, an end to poverty, the recognition of trade unions in South America and free food for everybody were the vague themes of the protest; delivered in that hectoring way that helped to create pragmatic Conservatives or bossy Labour cabinet ministers, depending on which side of the microphone you sat.
By the evening of the first day, Friday, when I got there (it was a perfectly civilized occupation and coincided with the weekend), the sit-in had given way to country music and short films borrowed from college film clubs: now being shown back to back, or front to front if you included the flickering ‘Keystone Cops’ pornography.
‘Sexist!’ someone shouted from the darkened hail.
The film changed to some cartoons of early flight.
‘Balloonist!’ another voice added.
I arrived late, because I was now in my second play Written by Heathcote Williams, AC/DC was set in an amusement arcade and required almost continuous off-hand cynical abuse from the character I played. I had been auditioned by a bloke with shoulder-length hair and granny glasses who habitually wore a fur coat, which even by 1973 was slightly retrograde. Nobody dressed as mushrooms or harangued the audience. But my character pissed on a television set at one point, trepanned a friend using a Black and Decker drill and aggressively demolished the fluffy opinions of the other characters, who were all hippies. It was an early punk drama, I suppose, and when we mounted the play in a tiny theatre in the back of Christ’s College, a forbidding concrete oblong with the dimensions of a giant’s shoe box, and the only theatre designed by Denys Lasdun apart from the National, we attracted an audience of ten.
I was happy enough. I wasn’t doing any of this for anyone’s gratification but my own. But the night of the occupation the audience dwindled to two. It was difficult to persuade some of the other performers to turn up. They were itching to get off and play at being revolutionaries in the Lady Mitchell Hall instead. Scratching his ginger beard, and blinking behind his granny specs, the director wrestled with his dilemma.
‘Let’s take the play there!’ he announced.
Was a two-hour, self-indulgent gnomic diatribe on the counter-culture quite what the revolutionary student body wanted to interrupt their festival that evening? Of course it was.
Back once more, I wandered across the Sidgwick site again last year, during an alumni weekend I had been asked to address. ‘Come with me,’ I said to Jo. We had arrived with half an hour to spare. ‘Come and see the building I opened,’ and we walked back under the raised History faculty building and along past the Stirling library. It was out of term, and a Saturday The buildings were all shut. I took her up to the plate-glass door, and we peered inside. ‘Look, there’s something on the wall.’ The wall was at right angles to the door and across the entrance vestibule but we could just about make out the inscription. It said, ‘This building was opened by her Majesty the Queen.’
‘Oh yes.’ I remembered. The vice-chancellor, Alison Richard, had written, sweetly, and only a tiny bit circumspectly that since Her Majesty was to be in Cambridge it had been decided that she might as well visit the new English faculty while passing through. Alas, there was no diminutive plaque saying, ‘after a trial opening by Griff Rhys Jones’.
They let us in to the alumni weekend event at the Lady Mitchell Hall through an emergency exit round the back. Simon Singh and David Starkey were already waiting in an ante-chamber thronged with families and speakers; a dressing room for lecturers, I supposed. David Frost was tidying his shirt front and peering at his clipboard. He went on stage ahead of us and we heard him being introduced on a distant platform by Alison. We moved up to a space below the stage, Singh, Starkey and myself, half listening to Sir David’s practised jokes on the tannoy.
I had no recollection of the cream-painted concrete seventies interior. It was an interim space, neither a room nor a passage, half a platform, half a set of steps, a non-functional waiting room with no view of the outside world at all. It was the sort of place I had found myself in all my adult life, behind studio spaces or just off church halls, round the back of theatres or down beside huge speakers in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, cheerless limbos, where I waited to be ushered up, like a politician to the hustings, but with no constituency, or party, or platform to represent. The excitement of being out in front of lots of people was momentarily held in check. The slight tension expressed itself in listlessness. Like dogs waiting for a walk, we were all ready for hyperactivity but holding it back. ‘You never feel as tired and ready for nothing as just before that big speech or performance, someone once told me.
I must have felt that here, in 1973, in this place, when I went on stage at the demo. I can only recall that it was very dark, so perhaps that was why the layout of the rooms beneath the
lecture hall sparked no memories of any kind. But perhaps I was self-absorbed. I can remember the swagger out into the hot light and the ease with which I enjoyed it then. I liked the dark spaces of an offstage corner from the very beginning, but in Cambridge, doing boffo comedy, the transition to the stage became a defining excitement.
AC/DC made a thrillingly successful transfer. I couldn’t pee on the television for the excitement. I stalked the stage, waggled my curly locks and played up to the self-satisfied mood that overcomes students en masse, particularly ones occupied with the organization of anarchy. After a shaky start, we elicited indulgent laughs from our audience of six hundred undergraduates by shouting louder and swearing more. Here I was, the toast of alternative Cambridge, cheered to the concrete rafters, slapped on the back and offered drugs in a match-box by a passing stranger. In my naivety, I rattled it and threw it away The director dived after it into the crowd, never, to be seen again (by me, anyway).
The occupation of the Sidgwick site in 1972 changed nothing in Cambridge except me. ‘The happening’ had been witnessed by the vice-president of the Cambridge Footlights, Robert Benton.
Short, dapper and with a habitual slightly surprised manner, Robert, like Douglas, was part of the ‘old school tights’ network. My former prefect asked me to audition for the May Week revue. Footlights had been mounting revues since the late nineteenth century and during the 1960s had gone through a short period of brilliance, largely thanks to Peter Cook. It was considered utterly defunct by the cognoscenti, but it was always considered defunct by the cognoscenti. It is still considered defunct by the cognoscenti. It was certainly more fashionable to consider it defunct than to be in it. But everybody had heard of it. Even me.
‘I’m in the May Week revue,’ I explained to Gerard Evans, at the end of the summer term. He raised another eyebrow.
I think I wanted him to be impressed. It was rare for a first-year undergraduate to make it into the end—of-year revue, which played for two weeks at the proper professional Arts Theatre after the exams had finished. I had auditioned and been accepted, rather to the chagrin of some, like young Clive Anderson, who had worked their way through the termly ‘smokers’ but been put to one side for later.
‘It can vary a bit from year to year,’ he said, trying to appear interested, and rather presciently encapsulating the opinion of reviewers wherever we went.
‘Well, it does seem a bit more Dick Emery than Monty Python,’ I offered.
‘Oh dear,’ he murmured sympathetically.
It had shades of Jack Hulbert too. Stephen Wyatt, the director, was keen to put on a bit of a show, so we danced. I didn’t know what to make of this. It was meant to be ironic. We would dance, but not seriously The audience would work out the spoof element for themselves. I saw no evidence that they ever did, although they may have worked out that we couldn’t dance, but it was the most traditional and in consequence the most successful of any undergraduate revue I appeared in. (They became my regular summer employment for the next four years.) We began dressed as cigarette packets, twirling around the stage, and sang a reggae song — ‘Every Packet Carries a Government Health Warning’ — and then continued with sketch, blackout, sketch, blackout, a few more songs and a bit more dancing for two more hours. I have been in some sort of sketch show pretty much every year since.
The funniest person in it was a tall and intensely serious man called John Lloyd. (John went on to produce Not the Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image, Blackadder and latterly Q.I.) ‘I remember I was invited to an upstairs room in Trinity Lane for an early meeting with the rest of the cast and sat on a bed while they discussed what they might do. ‘Lloydie’ started improvising about badgers. A new boy to this sort of thing, I laughed, choked violently and snorted coffee through my nose over a purple Indian bed-throw. The others studied the carpet.
The Arts Theatre was sold out for two weeks. Everybody admired the ‘Oedipus rewritten by Oscar Wilde sketch’ — ‘to lose one mother may be considered a misfortune …’ I rather preferred the slow-motion slapstick where two elderly toffs at either end of an extremely long table took turns to order their doddery old butler, played by Lloyd, to plaster each other with food. A lanky north Londoner, Jon Canter, sang a song comprised of French clichés. Today he’s a successful comedy writer. Robert Benton performed a typical private-eye sketch. ‘The name’s Parker: Parker Fifty-one. It’s not my real name, it’s a nom de plume.’ Mary Allen sang a mawkish torch song. And the two musicians, Nick Rowley and Nigel Hess, demonstrated a staggering professional skill with a pastiche of Bach played at tremendous speed on joint pianos. We finished with a sort of pantomime set in the jungle with Jeremy Browne and Pam Scobie playing a pigmy king and queen. Now where are Jeremy and Pam? I don’t know, but have kept a sort of unbroken continuity with the rest.
The revues toured throughout the summer vacation. We went to Oxford, Southampton and the Robin Hood Theatre near Averham in Nottinghamshire before arriving at the Roundhouse in London for a savage mauling from Time Out. The rest of the vacation was spent preparing for and appearing at the Edinburgh Festival. I hardly went back to Epping at all. I don’t think I made any serious effort to go home again during the next four years. And I began to realign my connections.
Of the seven from my school who went up to Emmanuel that year, Andrew had been the closest. We spent a lot of time together. I can visualize him. He had a lick of greasy mouse-coloured hair, a grown-out style — a residue of a former parting, hanging down over one side of his forehead and his long face. He seemed to have no background. His parents were off in Ilford somewhere. We had no cause to visit them. Instead Andrew was there, clever and beady-eyed, perpetually thin and hunched. He adopted a Peter Cook voice, a distancing effect, a comic persona to hide his own detachment, a snort of derision, a sniff of disdain at the world. (‘He’s probably something in the City. That’s what her daddy is. Something. Nothing particular, just some thing in the City.’) And he slipped further into his adopted persona, wearing suits where the rest of us wore jeans, with a tight, double-breasted waistcoat, and self-conscious desire to be a journalistic bar-fly. He did Medieval History too, and English and possibly French at A level, and I grew close to him in the sixth form because, like me, he rejected the wave of muscular Christianity that suddenly seemed to engulf our friends. We sat together in our narrow classroom, the medieval set, lobbing cynical arguments at the earnest junior chaplain, not even agnostic but arrogantly certain. ‘Your superstitions seem to lead you to suppose …’ we might begin. ‘Why does your God, as you call him, require me to worship him? That’s very arrogant of him, isn’t it?’ As if we were some Chinese mandarins quizzing a Jesuit. Pretending we had never heard of God, the Church or Christian values. ‘And if I don’t then I am doomed for all eternity, for questioning this woolly authority figure.’
At one point the junior chaplain’s mask of synthetic indulgence fell away. ‘You are not going to worship God because you’re too busy worshipping yourself,’ he spat and we smiled. We had angered him, and now he was lashing out ad hominem. Yes, yes, we notched that up, or drew a little tick in the ceaseless map of doodles that we scribbled as we talked or listened.
I dropped Andrew, didn’t I? To begin with, in the alien environment of university I needed to hold his hand. We went to the lunchtime greeting parties together and sat around in each other’s rooms nursing the colossal waking hangover that five glasses of sherry delivers by three in the afternoon. We went down to attend a debate at the Union and watched the boys in waistcoats preen. He was reading English. I liked the people that he met and he settled in with them. I kept my distance from my own History set, but I found the English group congenial. I hung around with Andrew, hoping to hang around with them. It was easy to do. The rooms opened out on to a roof garden. On the other side was Charles Lambert’s room. If the light was on late at night I walked across and usually I found them talking about Bryan Ferry or Robert Palmer or David Bowie.
Thirty
-three years later, the current Master of Emmanuel told me he had just been up on that roof garden for the first time. I was taking tea before addressing the Emmanuel Society in 2005. Back yet again.
I always returned to my past through unexpected entrances, as if someone was protecting me from too much exposure, sliding into ponds of nostalgia slowly, a limb at a time. Did I recognize a single bit of the Master’s Lodge?
I had only been there once before. We had been ushered in to meet our Master in little groups in the first week, to drink tea. I went with Andrew We noticed the collection of Tang dynasty pottery horses in a glass case, implying some level of sophistication and money too, we supposed. But Sir Gordon Brims Black McIvor Sutherland had the dour distraction of a senior man. What did any of the senior politics of Cambridge have to do with our lives then? I had been brought up to be intimidated into excessive politeness by elderly figures of authority In Cambridge I was permitted, perhaps even expected, to ignore them, so I did.
Now Lord Wilson presented me with cake and Earl Grey tea. We talked about my son. He wasn’t going to be at my lecture. George was working in the architecture studio. ‘He looks quite an academic around the college,’ said the Master. That seemed a good if slightly surprising thing for George to be. But my wife and I nodded wordlessly.
Lord Wilson mentioned my vice-presidency of Footlights. He was thinking of the reason I had come. He was going to mention it again in his introduction. He’d looked me up on the internet, not something I would ever be able to do myself.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I was president of the Mummers and the ADC too and directed for the Marlowe. The Footlights was really a rather small part of my Cambridge life.’
What was I doing? Setting the record straight, then? There’s no point in being a golden boy, a great white hope, if when you come back they don’t realize that. ‘Nick Hytner and I divided up the world really …’ I was warbling on now ‘He directed half the productions, and I directed the other half …’ The Master was smiling encouragingly He told me about his own appearances with Richard Eyre. How ridiculous was I trying to be here? I was anxious to establish my Cambridge undergraduate amateur theatrical credentials with the man who had once been Secretary to the Cabinet.
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