The stage manager chased him. ‘Oh, go on then,’ he said. ‘Punch me, then!’
Jimmy punched him.
The stage manager apologized.
Although ‘the snake pit’, which emerged from ‘the Camden Town Boys’, provided a number of leading light-entertainment figures of the early eighties, including a cross-section of both Oxford and Cambridge; although it numbered people as diverse as Richard Curtis, Angus, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Rowan Atkinson, Helen Fielding, Douglas Adams, Clive Anderson, Philip Pope and Mel Smith, and writhed with producers Geoffrey Perkins, Peter Fincham, Jon Plowman, John Lloyd, Andre Ptaszynski and Peter Bennett-Jones; although the two sets which had first met or mingled at this grubby church hall were to go on holiday together, inter-marry, send their children to the same schools and meet frequently over the next thirty years, I never felt that the first sharp thwack of that initial meeting was ever forgotten.
The game was on. But as for me, by then I was just visiting. I waited about three months before summoning Rory and Jimmy to come and join me at the BBC.
Just before my father died he was brought home to his house in Woodbridge, and my mother made up a bed in a low-ceilinged den just off the kitchen. This was where he had made his cabinet for his hi-fl and his special boxes to hold all the classical music tapes. It was where he had painted his cartoons and drawn his garden plans, constructed more doll’s houses for his grandchildren, cranes, sand pits and cars and started writing scenarios for novels and sit-coms. He was quite content to organize a busy playtime for his retirement but he was diagnosed with cancer at the age of seventy and died of it two years later.
We gathered for his final moments. His breathing became more laboured. He was linked to an automatic morphine injector that clicked regularly, a low rhythm of efficiency ticking out the end. Only a week before, he had walked as usual to get his paper. A few days after that, as they increased the doses of painkillers, my mother told me how he suddenly got frisky and stood and held her, giggling and trying to dance. But when I got there he was drifting in and out of lucidity ‘Talk to him,’ the Macmillan nurse said. ‘The hearing is the last thing to go.’ She wasn’t to know that we never really chatted, this father and son. ‘What can I say that wouldn’t sound trite?’ he had written to his elder brother when Joan, his wife, died. I probably talked about jobs I was doing, just to reassure him that I was employed. And then I took his hand in mine. He was barely conscious but he withdrew it. I saw it as a last refusal to accept intimacy between us. My wife was rather more straightforward. ‘You exaggerate all these things,’ she told me, ‘he was probably just in pain.’
Yes, I do exaggerate all these things.
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