Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  When John Lloyd had come down from Cambridge, he had been promptly snapped up by the BBC which scouted the universities, especially Oxbridge, for graduate trainees. Nobody is as engaging as John Lloyd when he’s trying to exercise charm. John Hardress-Lloyd hails from a rather grand Anglo-Irish family, though he says that his branch was the poor one. He went to Kings School, Canterbury, dropping the hyphenated bit from his name—as was fashionable at the time.

  John’s career took off like an ICBM. (After his glittering start in radio, he went on to become the most significant TV comedy producer of his generation with Spitting Image, Not the Nine O’Clock News and Blackadder to his credit.) Soon he was producing Week Ending, and was involved with a host of other radio programmes, becoming frantically busy. A friend of John says that at the time, whenever two or more of his contemporaries were gathered together, they tended to practise a nice line in Lloydie parodies. They went along these lines: “I’m so, so jealous that you have time to offer me a beer. If only I could. Such an enviable quality of life—a moment to oneself to think. Oh God. I have at least a hundred programmes to produce, and three attractive women to juggle. Shit. Is that the time?” Somehow John was also able to direct the 1975 Footlights revue Paradise Mislaid.

  John and Douglas had been fairly close pals in Cambridge, but once established back in the big city, they became what John calls “utterly best friends.” Indeed, Douglas had a number of extraordinarily close friendships in which he often invested more than they could bear. Jane Belson reckons this was a recurring pattern in his life: intense friendships that sometimes died away or ended in hurtful schism. His friendship with John was like one of those deep best friend relationships that one has at school, founded not just on personal sympathy but as an alliance against the world, and thus in a sense it depended on the world treating them both equally. It was also made more complex by a needling bone-deep competitiveness, the suppressed premise of their friendship, and the mirror image of their great personal warmth. The tension of things left unsaid was to erupt eighteen months later over the writing of the first Hitchhiker’s novel.

  Douglas and John used to hang out together, particularly in Tootsie’s, a hamburger joint in Notting Hill Gate, witness to numerous long conversations about just about everything. Eventually too, Douglas moved from Kilburn, and shared with John a rather pokey flat owned by Bernard Mackenna, the actor and writer (whose name he almost appropriated in So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish), not far away in Greencroft Gardens—a location which in Real Estate Speak also purports, just about, to be in West Hampstead. This was the first of their various shared lodgings; Douglas would often squat in John’s tiny office at the BBC, and John would sometimes go up to Highgate to drink with Douglas and Graham Chapman in the pub. These marathon drinking sessions tended to begin the same way, with the three of them doing the crossword in every national paper within half an hour. This could have been just fun, a kind of intellectual limbering up, or a more self-conscious advertisement of cleverness.

  Sharing a flat with the awesomely successful John Lloyd must have induced moments of tristesse, especially when Douglas was trying to write and the fickle muse refused even to flirt. Consider this useful definition from The Deeper Meaning of Liff:

  Boinka (n)

  The noise through the wall which tells you that the people next door enjoy a better sex life than you do.

  Mary Allen describes an episode, in Corfu, of what she calls an all-time terrible holiday. Douglas and John planned to go out there and write, all on their own with no friends, visitors or other accretions. Nothing would distract them from the Zen purity of the beach and the discipline of the typewriter. But somehow, this was not to be. The rented villa filled up with mates. Douglas, far gone in love, made elaborate plans for a female friend to come and join them—and, without consulting her, to sleep with him. The trouble was, he set about it with the subtlety of a brick. There was much anticipatory juggling of the bedrooms.

  In time, blokes attain sufficient sophistication (please God) to know that women hate being taken for granted, but at twenty-three you are blinded by hormones. You are quite sure that if you don’t have sex soon, you will die. What’s more, many women—though they want chaps to care and try hard—find it unappealing if men come across as desperate. Their anxiety puts too much freight on a relationship too soon. The woman in question, who by all accounts was sensitive and quite lovely, ended up getting off not with Douglas, but with John Lloyd. Later she and Douglas did get together, but it ended unhappily. Thereafter Douglas was never entirely on an even keel on the subject of John Lloyd and women.

  In 1976, the collaboration with Graham Chapman was drawing to a close after eighteen months. He and Douglas had enjoyed themselves, and drunk prodigious quantities of alcohol, but their partnership had produced little of a concrete nature. Their relationship became strained when Douglas was drafted in to help with Graham’s autobiography, called, with disarming frankness, A Liar’s Autobiography (1980). There is no evidence that Douglas’s rôle was as big or as formal as that of a ghostwriter—indeed there were several co-writers on this book, so Douglas’s involvement seems to have been small. However, as any publisher can confirm, the relationship between biographical subject and ghostwriter is often horribly vexed. If there is one thing over which people are entitled to feel proprietorial, it’s their own life, and they hate describing it in somebody else’s words. The ghost wants the book to be a good book, but the subject wants to present a good life, however that may be construed. The two ambitions are not always compatible.

  Absurdly, both Graham and Douglas are now dead, so we may never know why their cooperation was not more fruitful. Dorothy Parker said that the world is stacked against comic writers because the rest of us—not excluding those who would rather be dipped in sump oil than risk literary judgement—exercise the right to say “that’s not funny.” By the time a writer has looked at a joke sixteen times, rotated it through ninety degrees, changed the context twice and tweaked the punchline, it is genuinely difficult to tell if it is funny. There are many reasons why so much comedy is written by teams (company, personal chemistry, complementary skills, live dialogue practice . . .), but certainly one of them is having somebody around to confirm that the gag actually works. However much Douglas and Graham must have felt they needed each other, with the clarity of retrospect two such distinct talents were never likely to be compatible.

  Later that year, Douglas was invited back to Cambridge to direct the annual Footlights revue, A Kick in the Stalls. But Footlights had changed, starting with the sale of the clubroom for redevelopment as a shopping centre. Instead of a queue of the brainiest young extroverts, poised on one foot, breath held, yearning to strut their stuff upon the stage, there was a feeling abroad that perhaps the club was a bit up itself, to use that useful idiom, and not entirely the thing to do in the grim mid-seventies. Douglas had to beat the bushes looking for talent. The show itself had a generally mixed reception* 78 until it was overhauled by Griff Rhys Jones, who took it to the Edinburgh Festival and made it work. John Lloyd remembers it as overly complicated and thinks it was a mistake to get Douglas to direct. “He didn’t have a single director or producer gene in his whole gigantic genome. Griff, on the other hand, is a born director.”

  John and Douglas also worked on another idea, Sno 7 and the White Dwarves. (A white dwarf is an astronomical term for a smallish star with a high surface temperature but low intrinsic brightness.) A superior intelligence was planning to use supernovae for advertising purposes, and mankind was doomed because our sun was destined to be the full stop under the exclamation mark of the slogan. John Lloyd was told by the BBC that SF was “very fifties” (this was the year before Star Wars) and that there was no market for it. It sounds as if it would have been a blast.

  Later that year Douglas had another rebuff when he and John prepared a film treatment based on The Guinness Book of Records. Mark Forstater had acquired the rights, and John and Dougl
as invented a race of maniacally competitive aliens (“not unlike the Vogons,” John points out) who threaten to destroy the Earth unless humanity could beat them in a kind of inter-galactic Olympics. The aliens were unassailable at anything that needed a talent for violence, but were not so hot at walking backwards and eating pickled eggs. John and Douglas were promised a trip to the West Indies to meet the mighty Robert Stigwood, he of the eponymous organization, to discuss this further, but at the last moment it all fell through.

  Douglas and John then moved again, this time to Roehampton, an affluent but somewhat inaccessible West London suburb famous for its estate of Le Corbusier-style blocks of flats that win prizes but are horrible to live in. John, his then girlfriend, Helen Rhys Jones, and Douglas moved into a house full of doilies and china knick-knacks (they were the landlord’s and they had a high mortality rate). After a while they were joined by a neurotic American who was prone to attack the garden vegetation on the grounds that it was untidy.

  Like the bear, Horace, in the kiddies’ story, every day Lloydie would go out hunting—or rather to the BBC—and Douglas would moon about in his room, which was full of wardrobes,* 79 and sleep. Andrew Marshall recalls David Renwick telling him that Douglas actually slept a hell of a lot, and, though we should be wary of glib judgements, this can signify a kind of chemical depression. He also took many baths, partly for pleasure and comfort. The baths helped him to think, and it was something to do. John reports that occasionally he would come home after a day forging and cleaving at the BBC and find Douglas exactly as he had left him that morning—in bed or taking another bath. He must have entered the bath like a plum, and emerged as a prune—a very clean prune.

  Douglas can’t have been a tremendously jolly flatmate for John Lloyd. Writing is a solitary craft, and writers are self-absorbed even at the best of times (just one of the many personality disorders to which they are prone, alas). Authors who know they have talent, but who are failing, are entitled to feel dark. Once John—out of exasperation and not cruelty—suggested to Douglas one evening that he really ought to go out. John was having friends round, and Douglas was so miserable that he would have cast an effluvium of gloom over the proceedings.

  Poor old Douglas must have been in a state. His self-esteem was always as fragile as a soap bubble. To pay his way he took a series of silly jobs, subsequently immortalized by anecdote. His favourite from this period was when he was single-handedly holding back the drilled hordes of terrorists, creditors, disgruntled bookmakers and general ne’er-do-wells from an inconceivably wealthy Arab family (not that a single miscreant turned up). After answering an ad in the London Evening Standard, he had been taken on as a bodyguard to a sheikh. He must have been employed on the grounds of size alone; many professional guards are wiry, quick and neat. Douglas would have been appalled by violence and would not have been much cop at dishing it out, but, in terms of pay per unit volume of guard, the clients got their money’s worth. Douglas had to sit for twelve hours at a time in the corridor of the Dorchester Hotel, just in case. According to myth, his employer had an income of £20,000,000 per day, a figure that seems improbable even by the standards of oil-rich sheikhs. Even divided by ten, however, this would still not have been a family on the edge of the abyss. Douglas used to tell the story of them going to the dining room and ordering from the stunned waiter everything on the menu—the whole lot à la carte—so as to ascertain if there was anything that piqued their jaded fancy. It was a thousand pounds’ worth. Nothing really did it for them, and they later sent out for hamburgers.

  Another pleasure available on a personal delivery basis also appeared while Douglas was keeping his vigil in the hotel corridor. One evening there stepped out from the lift a truly spiffing prostitute—a top-of-the-range model of such sexiness that strong men had to bite their knuckles to stop themselves whimpering. Douglas looked up from his book, and between the two of them a complicit look was exchanged, one that acknowledged the fundamental similarity of their position. “It seemed to say we’re both tarts,” said Douglas, “and she wasn’t wrong.” When she left an hour later, she looked down at Douglas sitting at his post and said in a pleasantly modulated voice: “At least you can read while you’re on the job . . .”

  Despite his low morale, he did get it together to go with some friends to that year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August with a show called The Unpleasantness at Brodie’s Close—a wry allusion to Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Brodie’s Close is the actual location of the venue in Edinburgh; it’s a Masonic hall. John Lloyd recalls that the lighting was a switch on the wall. (If you are unfamiliar with the Edinburgh Festival, it’s worth going at least once for a manic tour of the culture. The Festival was relatively sane in the 1970s, but it has got bigger and bigger ever since. Once a year it takes over that highly respectable albeit tourist-wracked city. The range covers everything from Wittgenstein’s doorknobs to installation art.)

  The show was a series of sketches written by David Renwick, Andrew Marshall, John Lloyd, John Mason and Douglas. John Mason, who oscillated between sketch-writing and the high-level teaching of mathematics, had organized the venue and kindly (recklessly?) underwritten the cost of hire. Typically, Douglas’s contribution was the last to arrive, and there was some doubt that he would make it at all, for guarding the sheikh paid £100 per week—even without occasional colossal tips, that was serious money if you were broke.

  What tied the show together, more or less, was the running gag of a couple in a railway station (akin to Brief Encounter) urgently trying to move their relationship forward, but being forever interrupted. The couple’s frustrations anticipated the touching scene in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish when Arthur Dent is hopelessly trying to convey his love to Fenchurch in the teeth of a relentlessly attentive lottery ticket seller. Like every writer, Douglas was wont to recycle good ideas. Does this detract from his creativity? Not a bit. It is worth printing this in bold and italics: execution is all.

  The revue starred the “Brodie’s Close Rollers” (the egregious Bay City Rollers were dominating the pop charts at the time). The Brodie’s Close Rollers were Douglas, John Lloyd, John Mason, Becky Fanner and Geoffrey Farrington (both performers rather than writers), and David Renwick. Andrew Marshall had been obliged to scuttle back home to a teaching job before he could get on stage. Douglas claimed him as the model for Marvin, the Paranoid Android,* 80 though Marvin, for reasons too involuted to be described here, was also the nickname of Martin Smith. From the literary point of view Marvin was closer to Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh. Douglas confessed that he found this melancholy animal inspirational. Years later, when he read Winnie the Pooh to his daughter, Polly, he was struck again by how very similar Marvin and Eeyore were in tone. Andrew is now a successful TV writer. David Renwick went on to become one of the country’s top screen writers with the likes of Jonathan Creek and the creation of One Foot in the Grave. Lloydie himself is no slouch, especially at crisp one-liners. It was a formidably talented team.

  They even produced a promotional T-shirt. Two in fact. One bore the enigmatic commercial message: “I have been Unpleasant at Brodie’s Close.” The other one carried the surreal legend: “So have I . . .” The plan was to walk around Edinburgh side by side. They must have attracted some attention either walking in formation, or singly.

  David Renwick, who had first met Douglas in the writers’ room at the BBC’s Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street, recalls:

  There was also an odd sketch of Douglas’s about a cereal manufacturer who put dead jellyfish in cereal packets as a giveaway, and was surprised when it didn’t help sell more cornflakes. The stage was so small that we had to hide behind the two curtains at the sides of the rostrum in order to change. I remember Douglas’s large bottom protruding from behind the curtain when he had to dress up as Long John Silver . . . Douglas and I had to share a room, too. He was reading Dombey and Son [Dickens was one of his favourite writers], and he used to talk in hi
s sleep sometimes. It’s a pity I cannot remember what he said.

  John Lloyd remembers those curtains behind which they had to change. “Just ordinary window curtains,” he says, “designed to prevent people on cherry pickers looking in on secret Masonic rituals.” He adds: “Douglas got terribly upset one night in a bar because he just wasn’t getting any laughs. Every time he spoke, the audience fell respectfully mute. At the time Douglas was sporting a huge, black, piratical beard, and after a few lagers we worked out that this was the problem. Enormous man with very loud voice in tiny cramped hall preceded by tenebrous efflorescence of follicles . . . He was simply terrifying the audience into silence. That night he shaved off the offending item, and after that everything was fine.” Andrew says that Douglas’s almost uncontainable joy in performing was quite infectious, and that made his occasional lapses in stagecraft forgivable.

  Brodie’s Close was a huge success. It filled the Masonic hall every night and the run was extended for another two days by popular demand. Unfortunately, the hall could only hold seventy-five people, though they squeezed in ninety, so the revue made no money—not that that’s the reason why people take shows to the Edinburgh Fringe. They hope not to lose too much, enjoy themselves and, perhaps, to garner enough smart attention to take their show on to a more commercial incarnation. The Brodie’s Close Rollers succeeded in two of these ambitions: they had enormous fun and did nothing to their bank balances.

  Mary Allen recalls Douglas as listless and broke at this time. She felt sorry for him, but she never went to bed with him. (“We once came very close in Cambridge,” she remembers, “but talked about Macbeth all night instead.”) Douglas was indeed broke by this time, and his overdraft was growing with the kind of inexorability that one hopes is too gradual for the bank manager to notice.