So, Anyway...

by John Cleese

  In reality we saw surprisingly little of David during the rehearsal days before the pilot, partly because his material was quite separate from ours, partly because, after the initial selection of sketches, he was happy to leave everything in Jimmy’s hands while he just disappeared, as we used to say, ‘to continue running the world’. I wasn’t particularly nervous about the pilot: I knew that nobody outside the BBC would see it, and the rehearsal-room atmosphere always seemed friendly and relaxed.

  But on the day of the shooting, when I went on to the floor of a proper TV studio for the first time, things began to feel much odder. It bothered me, for example, that when we rehearsed sketches for the cameras, there was no laughter at all: I didn’t realise that the crew were so focused on learning to shoot this new show that the last thing they had time for was listening to the jokes. And when I came to do a monologue straight to camera, I got very spooked: talking to another actor while a camera is shooting you is pretty much like normal acting, but speaking straight at a camera for the first time felt so artificial, so weird, so utterly unnatural, that I immediately became very self-conscious and tightened up, losing my timing, and feeling rather rattled. Nobody seemed concerned, however, so I didn’t say anything, and I was relieved to find that people seemed pleased with the overall performance and clearly had no doubt that the format would work.

  There was a gap of a month between recording the Frost Report pilot and the evening when we transmitted the first show live, and it coincided perfectly with my reintegration in the cast of the I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again radio show. We began a new series in mid-February, and over the next eight years Tim, Bill, David, Jo, Graeme and I went on to make over a hundred more shows. Bill and Graeme were writing more and more of the scripts, although, to begin with, I wrote a little of the material, too.

  I have to confess, though, that my relationship with I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again was a complicated and conflicted one. The problem for me was not with the cast, but with the style of the programme itself. Radio shows in those days could be immensely popular. After lunch on Sundays, families would gather to listen to, say, Round the Horne, and laugh themselves silly. But the majority of radio shows were pretty uninspired, relying almost entirely on puns and catchphrases and stock characters and, worst of all, stock characters with catchphrases. When the writers of these dismal shows ran out of funny ideas, which was most of the time, there would be the sound of a door opening, followed by a sadly familiar ‘funny voice’ saying something like ‘I won’t take my coat off, I’m not stopping’ or ‘Hello everyone, I’m back!’ or ‘I still haven’t found that scarf I lost’ or ‘Anybody want a kipper?’ or (if it was a female voice) ‘Young Doctor Hardcastle? He’s lovely!’ or ‘I’m blushing on all my cheeks’ or ‘Those fucking rats have eaten my frock again’ (well, perhaps not ‘fucking’; in those days it would have been ‘bally’ or ‘flipping’ or ‘blooming’). And what passeth understanding is that these apparently factual statements would be greeted by the audience with a crack of laughter and whoops of joy, followed by interminable applause and a hint of cheering. What were they cheering? Why were they applauding? Had somebody done something clever? It defeated me as a teenager and still does. And I used to feel really annoyed that audiences were being fobbed off with this dross, and that writers would stoop to such easy and, indeed, despicable tricks. And yes, I was rather snotty and condescending and puritanical about what was, and what was not, good comedy, but to this day I still believe writers ought to work for their money. Quite recently I went to see a well-known American stand-up comedian at an arena in San Jose and the audience cheered every joke. They hardly laughed, they just cheered, and punched the air triumphantly. And it occurred to me what a clever young man he was. He had come up with comedy for people with no sense of humour.

  Back to British radio . . .

  My conflict over ISIRTA, then, was between the exceptional warmth I felt towards the rest of the cast and the production team and a certain disdain that I couldn’t quite hide for the material which they were performing with such enjoyment. After all, David Hatch and Tim Brooke-Taylor were among my closest friends, as were the producers, Humphrey Barclay and Peter Titheradge. Bill Oddie could be a bit obtuse sometimes, but I was genuinely fond of him. I didn’t know Graeme Garden so well at that point, but you couldn’t imagine a more agreeable, amusing and skilled colleague, and I’d always got on well with Jo Kendall. But when I suggested changes to the script, nobody else really shared my sensibilities (the aversion to puns, for example), so I found myself continually outvoted, and since I took the whole business far more seriously than I should have done, I’m sure I regularly came across as carping and elitist, since consistently criticising material that everyone else is happy with is implying that your artistic standards are higher than theirs. In addition I felt I was an ingrate, because Bill and Graeme wrote all the scripts, and there I was, moaning about doing them, while eagerly snaffling the £28 fee we got for each show (plus fifty per cent for repeats).

  I apologise for the offensive remark I am about to make.

  The audience was to blame.

  When we Cambridge Circus people did our first few radio shows, they were based on the stage-show script which was of quite a high standard, and the audiences were suitably responsive. By the time I returned from America they had become a football crowd. With their wild applause, thunderous laughter, cheering of catchphrases, groaning at puns, friendly booing and general OTT enthusiasm they had become part of the show – or rather, they had pretty much taken the show over and made it a mini-phenomenon in the radio world. And the audience at home loved it, too. So my attempt to move ISIRTA an inch or two back towards its earliest incarnation was Canute-like, and totally inappropriate.

  While all this was going on, David Frost proposed that I help him, as writer and performer, record a comedy album to be called Frost Over Britain. It was set up at great speed; David wanted to incorporate a few of my old sketches, which we performed together, as there was no one else from the Frost Report pilot involved; the other material was all David’s, though in the sense that he had gathered it rather than actually written it. It was to become a great joke among the Frost Report writers that in the final credits of the TV show every week the words ‘Written by’ were closely followed by the words ‘David Frost’ in large letters, and then, after a slight gap, by the word ‘and’ in smaller letters, and finally, in even smaller letters, the names of a couple of dozen writers (relative unknowns like Denis Norden, Marty Feldman, Tony Jay, Barry Cryer, Dick Vosburgh, John Law, Frank Muir, David Nobbs, Peter Tinniswood, Willis Hall, Barry Took and Keith Waterhouse).

  The general public must have wondered why so many of these so-called ‘writers’ were needed to fill in the occasional gaps in what David had crafted. Those closer to the programme would sometimes speculate whether there was any single word which David could have been said in any meaningful sense to have ‘written’. Dick Vosburgh summed up the general consensus when he pointed out how greatly David had always improved our punctuation.

  David was endearingly shameless in matters such as these, and the question therefore arises: why was he so little resented for it? After all, writers normally get rather touchy about matters of contribution.

  Part of the reason, I think, was that we all felt real affection for him, and were grateful to be part of the enjoyable groups and quasi-families he assembled. There’s no doubt, too, that we admired his strengths as a producer: he was brilliant at spotting talent and trusting it, and while he occasionally shaped a project in helpful ways he seldom interfered unnecessarily. But I think another major factor was that he was one of the few people I’ve known who was ‘pronoid’.

  I have borrowed this word from the late, great Rob Buckman. He explained to me that whereas a ‘paranoid’ person believes delusionally that people hate him and are out to get him, a pronoid person believes, on no reasonable grounds whatsoever, that people like him and want to help him (I
use ‘him’ rather than ‘her’ because the pronoid folk I am acquainted with are all male). There used to be a saying – ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA.’ Well, at some level, David had a similar deep faith that what was good for DF was good for the whole UK, and that everyone who could be helpful to him would want to be. And this belief of his, that everybody wished him well, was largely true of the people with whom he interacted all the time. The people who didn’t like him (and he did attract a lot of criticism – there’s no question about that) tended not to know him personally, and he had the happy knack of simply tuning their negativity out, so that he was never drawn into responding to it. It is an extraordinary thing to say, but in a fairly close friendship of fifty-three years I never heard him make a mean remark about anyone. Those who envied him so much should have envied his pronoia, too.

  What they actually envied was, of course, his success. England is quite an envious country: look at the tone of lofty, snide denigration that so often characterises media coverage, or consider how much people like to see others taken down a peg or two. But David was lucky enough to be immune to this. Moreover, as was said at the time, he was unusually extroverted in the sense that he took his values from the outside world to a much greater extent than the English normally do. He wanted to know whether one of his shows was ‘successful’ rather than whether it was ‘good’. He was simply not concerned with any of those internal qualms about quality that bothered most of the people I worked with. I remember him once attending a cabaret performance that I gave in a Chelsea restaurant over a bank holiday. It was not a success: the audience was rather drunk, and a bit noisy, led by a sozzled journalist who greeted my appearance by chanting ‘Cheese! Cheese! Cheese!’ for some time. I got a few laughs, but I allowed the shouters to unsettle my timing, some of the material was too gentle, and at least a couple of pieces laid complete eggs. At the end I felt embarrassed that I had done such a bad job, sought out the guy who’d hired me, apologised, and asked his opinion about what had worked, and why some things hadn’t. David intruded with great good humour, said how well it had all gone, and then took me aside to tell me off in the kindest and warmest way possible, asserting that I should never, under any circumstance, admit that anything was any kind of failure, but always claim how well it had all gone and how the audience had absolutely loved it. His advice, needless to say, came from his essential kindness. But . . . I just can’t do this, although I can see the advantages of such a strategy. And David couldn’t not do it. This essentially extroverted orientation on his part often got under the English skin; at the time someone remarked that if he’d had an American accent his success would have been more easily forgiven.

  One final thought. David was very intelligent, but not temperamentally intellectual. He was extremely well informed on anything to do with the world he inhabited as an interviewer or businessman: he knew everyone who was anyone and he absorbed what they told him; he took a briefing incredibly quickly, grasping the essentials and the overall picture, and then could use this knowledge, thinking very fast on his feet. Added to his social skills, which were considerable, this all made him a remarkably able man of affairs. But his skills and talent were not those taught or valued much by Oxbridge types, who felt their ability to write clever essays on Yeats or Walter Bagehot or ‘The Influence of E. M. Forster on Flemish Wardrobe Design’ should have earned them greater prestige and money and, let’s face it, fame than this transatlantic chancer deserved. Their cultural perspective prevented them from recognising David’s strengths. The idol of this snotty coterie, Malcolm Muggeridge (with whom I was to cross swords over his view that Life of Brian was blasphemous), once pronounced that ‘Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity’; and it was his wife Kitty who made the most celebrated anti-Frost jibe, that David ‘rose without a trace’. Well, if so, he nevertheless continued to leave more of one than she did. (Look her up online if you have a spare twenty seconds.)

  All that granted, though, David’s many admirers would never have accused him of a neurotic perfectionism; and the recording of the Frost Over Britain album was pretty slapdash. David did a number of monologues (some from That Was The Week That Was), and he and I performed three of my old sketches (the zookeeper who had lost all the animals, the interviewer of the non-deep-sea-diver, and a parody of an inter-school general knowledge competition) and one new sketch which Graham and I had written for the Frost Report pilot (a prep-school headmaster’s speech). But David was never a top-class performer of comedy and this time I wasn’t on form either, the audience seemed rather unresponsive, and the whole album sounded as though it had been recorded in a church hall by a couple of church wardens. I was embarrassed that it turned out so amateurishly, and I was genuinely grateful that it attracted no attention and soon sank, like Kitty Muggeridge, without trace.

  But I also regretted that it was not approached with more love and attention because in those far-off days, a really good comedy album (for the gramophone!) could almost reach the status – and the longevity – of a work of art. Records were, after all, along with books, the only form of comedy material that one could enjoy at will. As a schoolboy I had prized recordings of live performances of the likes of Flanders and Swann, Victor Borge and Noël Coward (at Las Vegas!). Then George Martin (of Beatles fame) started producing studio comedy albums which were superb, most of them featuring Peter Sellers and combining his extraordinary vocal prowess with top-class, specially commissioned scripts. Then I added albums by Peter Ustinov and the casts of Beyond the Fringe and That Was The Week That Was; and by this time I was also listening to some very clever material from America, where nightclub acts like Nichols and May, and Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart existed in record form. On my return to London I learned that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had just done a couple of wonderfully funny series called Not Only . . . But Also and I listened to their records over and over again, even setting myself exercises in which I tried to write their sketches out from memory, carefully checked what I had written against the recordings, and then tried to recall them again from scratch. I like to think I learned a lot about sketch construction from those two.

  I was always less interested in funny songs, but I did love Tom Lehrer, the Harvard mathematics teacher whose numbers sometimes contained much blacker humour than I’d heard before – about nuclear war, and venereal disease, and poisoning pigeons in the park. I was exhilarated by his stuff: I found it liberating, and very funny and oddly good-humoured, and I was excited by the prospect of meeting the man himself, because David Frost had the excellent idea of having one of his songs on each Frost Report we were about to transmit. Tom duly came over to London, sang a song in the pilot show and then taped another dozen songs. (Each of these was then played in a subsequent Frost Report, with David introducing him as though he were in the studio, live.) I had a few drinks with him and liked him hugely. He was very tickled by his ‘fame’; it literally never occurred to me that I would suffer a similar fate. But the beginnings of all that were only a few weeks away . . .

  The first stage of my new life, rehearsals in the church hall on Crawford Street, just off the top of Baker Street, was fine: basically a rerun of the material we’d used the month before in the pilot, along with my performance of a headmaster monologue that I knew backwards. My nerves seemed under control. But on the day of the show, when we went into the TV studio at Shepherd’s Bush to rehearse with the cameras, I sensed that tension was mounting. The show was due to be transmitted at half-past eight and by six o’clock I was feeling very tight and scared, though I was just about able to hide my alarm from the others, who, to add to my fright, seemed to be enjoying themselves. Then we broke for supper in the canteen, but I funked it and hurried to my dressing room where I sat and watched the second hand on the wall clock as it steadily ticked off the final moments before 8.30. And what I was now feeling was TOTAL DREAD. I started to wonder how on earth I could have got mysel
f into this horrific predicament when I could be working in a nice tea room somewhere in Somerset without a care in the world and living in a little flat in lovely Weston-super-Mare, with a dear little kitty cat, doing jigsaws and eating toasted crumpets . . . At which moment the door opened, a sweet production assistant smiled at me and announced, ‘Make-up!’

  I managed to stand and lurch down the corridor to the make-up room where everyone was cheery and excited and joking, and I began to think how lovely it would be to have a nice quick heart attack and be done with it all. No such luck, unfortunately, and I sat down while base and powder were applied. It struck me I could still make a run for it just before the opening music, take a taxi to King’s Cross and on to Holyhead, and catch the night ferry to the Isle of Man, with which I fancied the UK had no extradition treaty. News of this plan must have leaked, however, because now our floor manager was standing by me. He led me on to the set and showed me my mark on the floor – I think he may have offered me a blindfold – and then the music began, they ran the opening credits, I could see the studio audience watching on the monitors; and then David greeted the audience at home, and we were started, and I fainted. Metaphorically, that is, because at this point my mind stopped and I switched one hundred per cent on to automatic, as had happened before on opening nights: you do all the things you’ve practised, like soldiers attacking a machine-gun nest, you switch your mind off and something takes over and does it all for you, provided – PROVIDED – you don’t think. Or even think about thinking. So when I was cued for my first line, the something did it for me. I was then taken to stand on my next mark, and when it was time for me to speak, it did my line for me again. At which point I was taken and put in front of another camera, and told my headmaster monologue was coming up in ten seconds and ‘Just look into the lens,’ and I stared at the Cyclops-like eye of this weird pile of ironwork, and the first line popped into my head, and the floor manager waved to cue me, and whatever it was started doing my lines for me.