Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  I can write all this with confidence because in 2005, after months of prevarication, it was time to open the last undisturbed research artefact of my past — a leather case I bought for a quid in an Oxfam shop in the Kite and into which I had shoved the residue of my life from the mid-seventies. I must have lugged it away when Charlotte finally kicked me out of her bedroom. The ‘time capsule’ was filled with genuine detritus — little tubs of powder paint, gum arabic and a squeegee for making screen prints. (I had designed my own posters. I had forgotten that I attempted to manufacture them too.) There was student flotsam: a bicycle bell (ah, how sweet) and one of those flat spanners for getting at wheels. There were two bow ties, one black, one white —postcards of Monets, still dotted with the Blu-Tack that had stuck them up behind my desk, and bank statements monitoring a permanent, fungoidly multiplying overdraft in increments of four pounds or ‘two pounds and three pence only’. There was even a curled whitish card congratulating me on my degree, from my college.

  There were also, however, running-orders scribbled on the backs of envelopes, a collection of hand-written sketches and two bundles of letters. The biggest was a sheaf of thirty-one rejections from theatres across Britain, brusquely setting me straight. There was no work available for me as a director, assistant or unpaid help, at all, ever, anywhere.

  The second bundle was smaller. First, a note from Margaret Windham, the president of the Marlowe Society She told me I had little chance of directing the society’s main production in Cambridge, but Commander Blackwood was meditating on employing me to do the Footlights. The others were all from Charlotte. They invited me to step gradually through the break-up of our relationship as if scripted by Charlie Kaufman for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. They went backwards. On the top was a poignant farewell, charged with all the awakening honesty that the end of a relationship engenders. At the bottom was an account of the joy of mixing paint for Hero’s front room, the horrors of a mutual friend’s motorbike which had dripped oil on a patio step, the dinner I had missed with her activist cousins and a paragraph begging me to ring — everything I wanted to run away from, in fact.

  She was tied to her unrewarding new job, living ‘with a canary with sinusitis’, but trying to find a flat for us to live in and informing me about dinner parties with distant relatives who were angling to inherit her father’s silver heirlooms. Mostly they were letters of heart-rending apology. She was sorry about her ‘bates’, guilty about her clinging, worried about her obvious frustration, about my lack of communication and her jealousy of my independence. They were only written because, despite Margaret Windham’s note, I had prevailed with the Marlowe Society They agreed to pay me two hundred pounds to direct at the Arts Theatre in the spring and the Footlights in the summer. Like a selfish junkie, leaving his girlfriend to go cold turkey, I had gone back to the party in Cambridge.

  Shortly after Christmas my first call was to the white house in the Madingley Road rented by Peter Bennett-Jones and Nick Hytner. As I poured myself a drink I felt the first pangs of uneasiness. These people were as busy as I had been a year before. They rushed in and out of their house between feverish assignations and snatched academic work. Having talked briefly about our plans I was left to feel … what? Free? How was I going to deal with this sense of displacement? I was just beginning to feel that maybe this wasn’t really my world any more when Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath arrived to borrow Nick Hytner’s car.

  It was rare to have a car as an undergraduate. I think it was actually illegal. McGrath couldn’t drive, so Mulville was going to get him to Ely, and I suggested I tag along. I was relieved. This was the sort of time-wasting I respected. Perhaps I could have a look at McGrath too.

  Rory tells me I had met him before he arrived at the house in the Madingley Road, but I didn’t remember this. I knew who he was. He was at the same college. He had been for two years by then. Some time in his first term he started stalking me. I would look up from shuffling along to some self-important meeting to see an Afro hairdo peering at me from behind a pillar. He was always staring at me and eventually came to see me.

  ‘I knew you were something to do with Footlights, so I wanted some advice.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘You told me not to step on the poster you were designing.’

  Jimmy Mulville I knew already but not well. As we slithered away in the borrowed car they talked up their ideas, and Jimmy kept turning round to make a point directly in my face, or he lifted both hands off the wheel to gesture, or buried his head on his chest and slewed over the road. He didn’t see very well when he laughed. He had ginger hair and a twelve-year-old’s mottled red face. His eyes filled with watery excitement when he had your attention. He usually had crusted eyelids.

  In Ely we drove to a suburban street. Rory had an appointment with a girl he’d met in a bookshop. Her husband was an optician. Jimmy and I made a cup of tea. She and Rory went upstairs.

  We left the house an hour or so later, but it had snowed while we were inside. Before we got back in the car, we had to search for long twigs and sweep our footprints off the drive, so that she wouldn’t have to explain to her husband that three men had called at her front door while he was away issuing spectacles. And then we skidded off.

  Jimmy was even more excitable on the way back. The road was covered with sleet. The windscreen wipers kept stopping. It was getting dark. We met the rush-hour traffic and almost slithered into a ditch. It was an ordinary day near the beginning of the Easter term. This was better. I felt more secure.

  I couldn’t stay in Madingley Road. There was no room. So I was put up for the next few months in the house of the highly ‘imitable’ Harry Porter, the senior treasurer of the Footlights (Harry had a fluting voice that everybody could impersonate). He lived in Warkworth Street behind the police station at the back of Parker’s Piece.

  My son lived in a house in the same terrace of Victorian villas in his second year. When I went to pick him up at the end of term I could stop to stare up at Harry’s first-floor sitting room. The gentlest of men, shy, impeccably polite and always slightly distant, the legend was that Harry had been a young fellow of enormous promise in Tudor history. One night in London he had picked up some rough trade who had chopped his face to pieces with a broken bottle. His red face still bore the scars. His college, just to be helpful, had promptly kicked him out, but Selwyn took him in. He never really ‘did History’ again. His job now was to coach people in ‘ordinary degrees’, that is people who had failed the system, and were considered too hopeless to manage a third.

  But Harry’s life’s work was to mentor the Footlights. If you appeared regularly in smokers you would inevitably find yourself invited back to his house. ‘I rather think you might like this …’ he would say as he wandered off to the shelves at one end of his womb-like sitting room and carefully put on one of his huge collection of Max Miller records. We drank his wine and prodded him.

  ‘Well, the funniest person I ever saw in Footlights …’ We would lean forward on the plush seats by the ivory-shaded lights hoping to learn. Was this Cleese? Or ‘Cleass’, as Harry liked to call him? ‘…was a man called Michael Roberts. And now of course … he’s a postman in New South Wales.’

  Harry was there to comfort. In the midst of gross failure, he could almost always remember a far worse disaster. ‘Of course, the longest revue ever …’ he might start with a serious look of alarm in his eye’… was mounted by John Bird. It was about the nuclear bomb. I think it was three hours long. Most of the audience had left before the end and they refused to cut a word despite the fact that Commander Blackwood was very upset, for some reason. I thought it was rather funny’ For Harry what mattered was the current lot. He was always perfectly happy to reassure them that legends were rubbish in their day.

  But when I lived in his house I existed in a sort of limbo. Directing Bartholomew Fair only took up a few hours of the day Rehearsals could only happen in the late afternoon or
evening. I spent an astonishing amount of time in bed, dozing until late in the morning, in a half-world between sleep and wakefulness, disturbed by vivid examination dreams, breaking the surface relieved that I wasn’t taking a French paper in the afternoon, tangled in bed sheets, trying to persuade my dreaming self that I wasn’t reading French anyway During the day I found myself becoming a townie. I would visit the municipal library to read the papers, or swim at the big glass-fronted city pool across Parker’s Piece.

  I might have been free to rehearse, but my cast weren’t. They were all still involved in their university life. I had to wait until after lunch. So I clambered into bed with an actress, and then later into a bath with a comedienne. Charlotte was writing me letters about her gardening and apologizing for being so demanding in our relationship.

  I loved Bartholomew Fair even if much of the demotic slang was largely incomprehensible. Jonson is to Shakespeare as Surtees is to Dickens, a celebrant of sex, swagger and the prosaic. The cast practised by swearing in their own language and then transferred the inflections to sixteenth—century blasphemies. We visited Petticoat Lane to watch traders run an illegal auction. Mike Arnold, the Arts Theatre stage manager, built a two-storey wooden scaffold. My enormous cast carried huge bundles of vegetables and bales of cloth on to the set during the first half and then carried them all off again during the second.

  Nobody is in charge of university theatre at Cambridge. No professor of drama chooses favourites, encourages the unworthy or boosts the unwilling. It is a naked fight amongst the totally unqualified. I recognize the glint in the eye of the Cambridge Mafia today. It is a political glint. Successful directors learned to play the game at Cambridge, while still in a small, unthreatening fish pond. Bartholomew Fair was my final stab at playing the game. Around this time BBC Radio Light Entertainment offered me a job, and I took it. It wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I decided to work in radio for a few years. I thought I would get back to directing later — probably.

  There was a party to celebrate the successful conclusion of Bartholomew Fair. I recall the huge numbers on somebody’s stairs, and the exquisite feeling that this experience would have to give over to some mundane reality In the event, it was nothing as predictable as work. Shortly afterwards a letter came from Charlotte. I have it here in the suitcase. It is a masterpiece of controlled anguish. It begins by telling me that my bank has been in contact. She has paid my outstanding rent. After dealing with these she almost casually mentions that she has crabs.

  It would be difficult to conceive of less appropriate visitors to the studied gentility of Park Village East. In a dignified tone she doubted that she had introduced them, but explained in some detail (knowing me well enough) how I could get rid of them using Prioderm shampoo. Only then did she break down and fall to recrimination and despair. I decided to come clean — well, as clean as possible in the distinctly grubby circumstances. I confessed. She told me how she’d taken comfort with some bloke called Stephen, riding bicycles near banks of primroses and listening to Monteverdi in the pouring rain. Naturally, I became furiously jealous and highly contemptuous at the same time. She kicked me out.

  During the Easter vacation, I joined Rory McGrath, jimmy Mulville and Martin Bergman in the ‘White House’, a grim motel just outside Cambridge, to write Tag and go off the rails by way of compensation. ‘One night we went looking for a jam factory,’ Rory told me. ‘All over north Cambridge-shire, looking for a jam factory in the middle of the night. And finally, after three hours, we found ourselves outside the biggest jam factory in the whole of Britain, Chivers’, a huge place, in the middle of the night. And you looked at it and said, “That’s not the one.

  The Footlights revue, Tag, was workmanlike. The staging was neat. I had a row of bathing huts, or changing cubicles, in and out of which, through swing doors, the cast popped to perform the sketches in quick succession.

  I refused to have any discussion of the title during rehearsals. Every Footlights revue wasted half its rehearsal period in the search for an amusing title. A Clump of Plinths, A Jug of Warm Water, A Big Hand on Your Opening. The Arts Theatre, a professional organization after all, had to produce advance publicity. Commander Blackwood, the general manager, dispatched his underling, the assistant manager called Melvyn, to the ‘Prompt Corner’, a tiny café in the passage round the back of the theatre. ‘We have to have a title now,’ Melvyn said.

  Jimmy stirred his coffee.

  ‘I know you haven’t been able to think of one. I have. How about Michael Foot Lights up the Room?’ Nobody even acknowledged that he had spoken.

  Rory finally nodded. ‘Melvyn, can you tell Commander Blackwood that we do have a title.’ Melvyn got out a notebook. ‘We want to call it Twelve Inches of Hairy Cock.’

  ‘It’s a pun,’ Jimmy explained. ‘The poster would have a pair of trousers with its fly open and a cockerel’s head sticking out.’

  ‘A hairy cockerel, though.’

  It was eventually called Tag because of the poster — a wrestling advertisement with pictures of the cast, including Robert Bathurst and Nick Hytner, in grunt-and-grapple leotards.

  A bust-up makes everybody conscientious. It certainly made me caring with Charlotte: attentive letters and frank confessions. I went on tour with Footlights as far as Oxford and sat in the pub opposite the stage door playing Leo Sayer’s ‘When I Need You’ on the juke box. It was that dismal.

  But I had an appointment of my own. I couldn’t continue. I had to start work at the BBC at the beginning of July I had to drag myself back to London. Where did I stay, though?

  ‘Oh, you went to live at home,’ Charlotte told me.

  Home? I went back to Epping? But I couldn’t have done. Did I really?

  I had seldom been back to Epping in those last three years.

  If I did, it was unexpected. I would return from a tour to find the house locked up and them away on holiday I would bring a pile of washing and a fellow member of cast to doss down and I encouraged them to bring their washing too.

  I had been happy to assume that my parents were there when and if I wanted something.

  I had taken this from my father, I suppose. In a sense, he was a hermit in his own household all his life: noisy at meal times, demanding and needy perhaps if he wanted attention but the rest of the time happy not to have a fuss (unless it was his own fuss)., following rituals which he had ordained, apparently heavily burdened with his ‘work’, whether that was work on his boat or the rather more mysterious dignified occupation that he undertook in the hospital.

  I took that from him — not, I fear, the necessity but the self-importance. Like a child lost in its own intense play it freed my father and me to assume that somebody else would take care of the lesser things in life, even the decisions about what to do next. I had got busy and preoccupied. Just like him.

  Had they missed me? There is no family as emotionally bound together as the family that takes that sort of thing for granted. If all we did, throughout my teenage years, was grunt at each other and get on with our lives then that was because we felt no need for comment. Nobody said ‘love you’ before they put the phone down. Nobody worried about their relationship and demanded kisses. We took it for granted that my father wouldn’t want to attend prize-givings or moments of personal triumph. (‘He works so hard, your father. You know he gets so little time to go on the boat.’) Arguing was as much part of the status quo as the meal times, but so was resigned acceptance. My father never really interfered in my life after I left school.

  The year before we separated, Charlotte and I had sat in the house in Epping on the blue fake-leather-covered sofa nursing a bottle of wine. It was one o’clock on New Year’s Day and my parents had gone to bed. I looked around and felt all the oppression of Hartland Road and the London suburbs in the yellow wallpaper and the black Welsh inherited furniture (‘the coffer’) and the fake gas log fire and the Dralon curtains. What were we doing there? What was this New Year, then? When I got my
own house, my parents could come to me, so I could open a second and third bottle of wine if I wanted, so I could switch the television off if I wanted, so that people could come and go as they wanted, so we could play loud music and dance until dawn if we wanted, not sneak around at midnight. I wasn’t going to do this again. So I didn’t. I live now in the middle of the West End. I have a house in the country. I avoid the suburbs and everything associated with them. But let’s face it. I go to bed at half past twelve on New Year’s Day. Some of us have work to do.

  Apparently I went back to Epping and lived at home when I started my first proper job. Quite probably I arrived by tube at Great Portland Street station, which is just opposite where I live now I haven’t travelled very far since.

  The revue I had directed went on to Edinburgh without me. Just before it arrived at the Festival someone unearthed a letter from some fringe organization, inviting the Footlights to take part in the inaugural Festival parade. This honour was passed out on a rota basis. It had no significance. Nobody had bothered to do anything as civilized as reply to it. But on the day, a spruced-up coal lorry arrived. Peter Fincham and his band were loaded on to the back of the truck. They lacked a festive touch. At the back of St Mary’s Hall, they found some bolts of silvery material. It was hauled outside, cut into pieces and draped on the lorry. Looking like a coal truck wrapped in Bacofoil, they joined the parade.

  After a morning playing the numbers from the revue often enough to finally learn them, the coal lorry wound back up the hill to St Mary’s Hall. Standing outside were Richard Curtis, Angus Deayton and their stage crew .When they saw the lorry they blanched.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the stage manager asked. He pointed to the shredded silvery material now dragging in the Edinburgh dust behind the lorry. ‘That’s our set!’

  According to Rory McGrath, Jimmy Mulville said something on the lines of ‘See that wall over there, if you come any closer I’ll paint it red with your blood.’ Then he walked away up the hill towards the pub.