by John Cleese
With my American performing days behind me, Connie and I now had time in New York to make plans for our life together; and so we went to our favourite haunt, the Ginger Man on West 66th Street, where they made the best omelettes I’d ever tasted, and she told me that she didn’t feel that she was ready to get married. A few days later, she added she didn’t really feel she was up to coming to London with me either. It was all very civilised. Of course, we both expected that we would get together eventually, and that in the meantime we would visit each other regularly. But it was my first experience of disappointment of ‘real world’ romantic hopes, so I got very glum. I gallantly tried to hide my woe (though not so hard that it didn’t show just a bit) and became the star of my own B-movie, written, directed by and starring me, in which I exulted in my suffering, knowing it to be very, very special – and all because, at that time, I didn’t know any better. When I got back to London, I sent Connie a postcard wishing her ‘Happy Christmas’, signed it, added the afterthought ‘all alone in the London rain’, and posted it at the Trafalgar Square Post Office and then did my final close-up brilliantly.
Now I went down to Weston-super-Mare to spend Christmas with my parents and to catch up with them. And there was a lot of catching up to do, because since my arrival in New York I have to admit that I’d made no attempt to write or phone them. I know this sounds extraordinary, and it’s not that I ever took a decision to stop communicating: it’s just that the longer I didn’t, the easier it became not to do so. Obviously a psychiatrist could write several chapters on this, ‘the final severing of the umbilical cord’, but the odd thing was that I went from being quite dutiful, to American silence, and then back to being dutiful again as though I had never made my Unilateral Declaration of Independence. It must have been due to the sense of freedom I’d been experiencing in America.
I soon discovered that Mother’s interest in my life abroad was perfunctory: once she’d listened for a couple of minutes to my Broadway adventures she started asking me questions about when I would be able to come down to Weston again. This was her invariable modus operandi, but after an eighteen-month separation, I thought it funny: I envisaged a sketch where a young monopod returns home from war to be greeted by his mother, diary and pen in hand, eager to establish the exact date and duration of his next visit, and the one after that, too.
Dad listened to my adventures, but our conversations weren’t meshing as they used to: now he seemed to want to do most of the talking, and often gave me advice on matters about which I was better informed than he. This frustrated and puzzled me, until I realised that when I was younger he had loved his role as ‘Daddy’, the wise, all-knowing advisor; and he was now trying unconsciously to resurrect the relationship we’d had back then. When I finally figured this out, I felt rather sad that he couldn’t accept my growing up, and our moving to a relationship of equals, because it stymied any kind of deeper communication. Of course, being English, it never occurred to us to talk about it.
I was also a bit surprised that my parents showed so little interest in what I told them about Connie. Mother, I suspect, felt uneasy that she would have to compete with another woman for my attention, while Dad seemed almost relieved to hear of the hiatus in the relationship. He had always, in his heart of hearts, hoped that I would marry the daughter of a duke. This was not pure snobbery, by any means. As I’ve said before, Dad’s brush with the upper crust just after the Great War, both in London and in India, had convinced him that they were the most impressive and admirable of human beings. So if I had managed to get hitched to someone with blue blood, it would have been heaven for him. In fact so determined was he that I should make an advantageous match that when I told him, two years later, that Connie and I had finally decided to get married, he groaned out loud. Not the textbook reaction, I remember thinking. But I know he always loved me, and genuinely wanted me to be happy; he just didn’t know what made the adult me tick. Which made two of us, I suppose, though I had a clue or two, and Dad didn’t.
The days passed quite slowly when I was down in Weston. Breakfast and the newspapers dominated the morning. Around midday I would escape for a walk, if I could come up with an acceptable excuse. Then Mum would present a tasty lunch and, once that was out of the way, Dad would have an afternoon nap, and at about four o’clock we would settle down and wait for the evening. And it was worth waiting for, because in those days British television was so consistently good that every night there were programmes we really wanted to see. Dad and I would start watching, and Mother would soon join us and knit or stroke the cat or remove stains from a tea cosy, keeping an eye on what was happening on the screen, and occasionally commenting on the action. One night we were watching the final episode of a thriller serial, and at the particularly tense moment when the villain walked in holding a gun, Mother remarked, ‘Oh, look, he’s got a nose like Uncle Eric’s.’ She specialised in these off-the-wall remarks. If the Prime Minister had suddenly appeared on our screens to tell the nation that we were declaring war on Russia, she would have remarked upon the colour of his pullover.
One morning, in a desperate attempt to enliven the hours till television-time, I suggested that we might go and see a film that afternoon. It was fascinating to observe the alarm, verging on panic, that this caused; it was as though I had proposed that we invade Poland. Father was instantly at the window, peering towards the Quantock Hills, noting clouds, comparing his observations with the newspapers’ weather forecasts, remembering the car was low on petrol, checking that our raincoats had not been stolen overnight, and starting to make a list of things we would need to take with us. Mother, meanwhile, stood in the middle of the room, her eyes staring, repeating, ‘Well, will we go before tea, or after tea? Will we go before tea or after tea?’ I got them both seated again, but there was fear in their eyes and they could take nothing in. I tried to calm them by talking to them about the happy times we’d had at the cinema in the past, but when I ran out of these – after about twenty seconds – they were still looking as though they had seen a ghost. They had had a perfectly good, workable schedule for the day: not to do much until, at seven o’clock, we started to watch television, and then bed at ten. Now their plans lay in ruins.
I therefore agreed that it was a bit late to change everything, as we’d already finished breakfast, but that perhaps we could start thinking about going to the pictures on my next visit. Thus calm was restored. So much so that by lunchtime, Mother was asking me when I thought my next visit might be. There were times when ‘never’ would have felt too soon.
A rather revealing aspect of this moment of high drama is that the one question that was never addressed was, if we did decide to take the risk, what film were we actually going to see? The priorities of my parents’ generation defied comprehension, at least for someone who had just spent an extended period of time in the US. If, for example, we were going to have a meal ‘out’, then the main criteria for choosing our restaurant would be its state of cleanliness, the temperature of the plates and the food, and the size of the portions (not too big); but the taste of the food would play no part in the selection process. Thus my parents’ favourite restaurant was the Copper Kettle because here the napkins and tablecloths were ‘spotless’, the plates ‘lovely and warm’, and the food ‘sizzling hot’ and not ‘oily’ or ‘rich’ or ‘spicy’ (especially garlicky). The highest praise for food (other than hotness) was ‘plain’. There was a hint of xenophobia here: the unspoken purpose behind English cooking was that the results should not damage you. Vegetables had to be boiled to death, because goodness knows what could be hiding in there, ready to pounce on you; meat and fish were more demonstrably dead, and so safer, but they still required the coup de grâce. The sight of someone eating a steak tartare would have occasioned a call to the Samaritans.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Films. It is hard to believe that my parents’ generation would walk into a cinema when it suited them, without paying any attention to what film it was that
they were going to see. Indeed they weren’t even concerned whether the film had just started, or was halfway through, or was in the middle of the final chase sequence. They would just happily settle into their seats with their sweets and cigarettes and start trying to decipher the plot, and who was the villain, and why everybody was in Hamburg, and then the film would end, and they would sit patiently through the advertisements and newsreels, eat an ice cream, and then the film would begin again, and they would finally discover who everyone was, and why they had all gone to Hamburg, and at exactly the moment when they’d understood what the hell was going on, and could now enjoy the denouement, they’d all shout, ‘Oh! This is where we came in!’ – and leave. How are you supposed to write for an audience like that? The great farce-writer Ben Travers once told me that in the 30s, posh ‘country people’ would invariably arrive in their seats at the back of the stalls about twenty minutes late (to show that they were not bound by the trivial conventions of the proletariat) and that he therefore always added a brief summary of the plot at that point, so the toffs could get up to speed. But Ben at least knew roughly when they’d be arriving. Did the ‘Oh! This is where we came in!’ brigade ever consider why they liked watching a movie in the wrong order? Well, not my parents, anyway. ‘Theirs not to reason why . . .’
I eventually tore myself away from Weston, and raced joyfully to Notting Hill, where Tim Brooke-Taylor had offered me a bed in his place in Ledbury Road while I looked for somewhere more permanent. I learned that when he, David Hatch, Bill Oddie and Jo Kendall had got back to the UK from their stint at Square East, Humphrey Barclay, who had resumed his job in BBC Light Entertainment, had gathered them up and created a programme along the lines of the handful of radio shows we had done before we had all set off for New Zealand, which we’d called I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. In my place he had hired Graeme Garden, another Footlights stalwart we’d all known at Cambridge, who was a particularly good ‘voice man’ and mimic, as well as a witty and prolific writer; and he had then produced and directed a full series of thirteen shows, largely written by Graeme and Bill. It had been successful – or ‘promising’ as the powers that be put it – and so they were doing thirteen more and . . . they wanted me to join the cast. Another little apple had dropped in my lap.
I was so chuffed that, after I’d called David Frost and established that nothing was happening on his programme for a couple of weeks, I persuaded Tim to join me on a quick trip to the Canary Islands to get some sun. And in Tenerife I had a glorious experience, spread over several days: I read Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. In my entire life I have found only two novels which have consistently made me laugh out loud, to the point where it starts to hurt. Three Men in a Boat, so beloved by Dad and Captain Lancaster, was the first. Now I discovered in Lucky Jim’s hero, the academic manqué Jim Dixon, a character I could love and sympathise with because he reacted to the people and events around him a little as I did, but much more consciously and clearly and boldly than I would have ever dared. The scene where Jim’s lecture on ‘Merrie England’ goes wonky under the influence of alcohol, or where he takes a slow bus journey to the station, or where his cigarette burns a hole in his hostess’s blanket, are hilarious in an expertly sustained way that is rare – indeed, endangered.
When I got back to London I was contacted by my old Cambridge friend Alan Hutchison, who had just returned from a long trip abroad that had taken him to places as far-flung as Japan and South America. He was now about to take up a job as foreign correspondent with Reuters, and had found a very pretty little flat in Logan Mews, just off the Earls Court Road, which he suggested we might share for the next couple of years. I jumped at the offer. The flat was just big enough, with two small bedrooms and a living room and a tiny kitchen, and the mews was wonderfully quiet considering we were two minutes’ walk from the Cromwell Road, with its endless supply of taxis, and only five minutes from Earls Court tube station.
Alan’s travels had proved far more exotic than mine. At one point, after spending some time in Tokyo, he had decided to visit areas where Westerners had not yet trod. Realising that from now on his English was going to get him nowhere, he asked a fellow traveller to teach him the Japanese for ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but could you tell me where I could find accommodation?’ Then he set off. Immediately the weather turned against him: rain bucketing down, thunder and lightning, the full works. Fortunately, a few rather small dwellings came in sight, so he approached one, knocked, and when the door opened, repeated his Japanese phrase. The householder looked very surprised, gathered himself, smiled, bowed three times and closed the door. Mystified, Alan decided to try again at the next cottage, with the identical result. By now he was soaked to his skin but since he had no Plan B all he could do was to keep on and on, repeating the scenario, until at last he found a woodshed where he spent the night. The next day, to his relief, he stumbled on a Japanese-style youth hostel, where the owner spoke some English. Alan asked him if he would translate into English the phrase that he had so carefully learned. The owner agreed, listened and explained that it meant ‘May I take this opportunity to wish you goodnight?’
How dismaying it must have been for those poor people to have been roused from their beds, to find, standing at their front door, towering over them, the first non-Japanese being they had ever set eyes on, a creature probably of aquatic origin, and moreover one who had chosen to make a special excursion to their home in the midst of this torrential downpour, simply in order to wish them goodnight. In fact so implausible must this have seemed, that, as they lay tossing in bed, these Japanese can have only come to the conclusion that extraterrestrials were busy reconnoitring their neighbourhood, and, under the cover of offering blessings and asking, ‘May I take this opportunity to wish you goodnight?’, were estimating the strength of their defences. It says much for the legendary politeness of the Japanese that they did not band together to hunt Alan down with hoes and pitchforks.
I was now preparing to join David Frost in what was to become The Frost Report, and was also meeting all the key personnel. Thanks to David’s relaxed and cheerful manner, and because I knew no more about them than they did about me, we mingled easily without any jockeying for position. It never occurred to me that at least fifteen of this friendly, amusing, low-key group would become major professional collaborators over the next twenty years. I think our easy harmony was helped by the fact that it was effortlessly clear who was in charge: David, the director, and Jimmy Gilbert, the producer – a delightful Scot whose judgement we all instinctively respected, and whose calm confidence was infectious; his quick and clear thinking allowed us all to relax, knowing he was always on top of things.
When David had called me in New York, he had mentioned that he would be doing the show with two people I hadn’t come across before, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. Now I got to meet them. Ronnie Barker, I learned, was a top-class character actor: he could play anything from a general to a yokel, and he’d done a good deal of television, so audiences recognised his face even if they didn’t know his name. He was obviously going to be one of the principal performers and yet he was the least actorish actor I’d ever met; he seemed more like a jolly uncle, oozing with bonhomie and good jokes. Ronnie Corbett similarly had a real presence about him, even if he was only five feet tall; he’d done a lot of children’s television but his background was more in cabaret and some music hall. He could go out in front of an audience as himself, without needing to be in character. He was also a great raconteur, so there was always laughter around him. That said, he had a highly tuned bullshit detector, and behind some of his funny remarks there was often a wickedly accurate observation. Both Ronnies were some ten years older than the rest of the performing team, who were in their mid-to-late twenties and who included Sheila Steafel, Nicholas Smith and Nicky Henson.
My first day’s work for British television, at the end of January 1966, involved Nicky and me being driven off to a park in West London, where we dr
essed up as park attendants and were filmed as we stood, bewildered and powerless, watching Ronnie Corbett dancing around on the grass – the joke being that the signs read, ‘Do not walk on the grass’. It wasn’t exactly an inspired idea, and its execution wasn’t helped by the fact that I had no idea what I was doing and got my sight lines wrong; but fortunately it was saved by Ronnie’s performance. Nicky and I hit it off straight away and have been the closest of friends ever since. He tells the best actor stories I’ve ever heard, and also has a wonderful barking guffaw, which I constantly try to activate. I love the connection, too, that I feel through him and his actor and producer father, the great Leslie Henson, to the legendary Aldwych farces, starring Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn, and written (mostly) by Ben Travers, which were the funniest plays in England in the 20s and 30s. Dad saw several and he always told me he’d never heard laughter like it.
The cast and writers of The Frost Report. In the front row (left to right) Marty Feldman, Sheila Steafel, David Frost, Jimmy Gilbert, Julie Felix and Ronnie Barker, with five Pythons and assorted writers and dogsbodies behind.
The piece Ronnie and Nicky and I filmed was for a pilot that Jimmy Gilbert had arranged, so that he and David could see what a Frost Report would actually look like. The format was very simple: David introduced the show and then set up a series of ‘quickies’ and sketches; at the end of each item, we cut back to David for more of his CDM – Continuing Developing Monologue. Writers, being the sneakily subversive sarky bunch they always are, also called it Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, and OJATIL – Old Jokes and Totally Irrelevant Links.