So, Anyway...

by John Cleese

  After this interruption, Graham and I continued work on the script. He had, it turned out later, just met the love of his life, a young fellow called David Sherlock, but he didn’t tell me this for another twelve months. When he did, I understood why he’d spent such a large proportion of our writing sessions sunbathing. I, for my part, also met a lifelong friend: a delightful tall blonde (surprise!) called Pippa of whom I became very fond.

  I have one last memory of Ibiza. There was a very pleasant and competent open-air restaurant an easy walk from our house. It became our default diner. But the service was slow. Usually it didn’t matter because we were happy to sit outside for hours in the balmy evenings sipping sangria, but one evening Alan Hutchison arrived late and hungry, ordered the rissoles (which were always delicious) and then sat at the table with his stomach rumbling, quivering in anticipation. Well, he quivered for a very long time; he politely asked every few minutes when his rissoles were coming, and was assured ‘dos minutos’. After an hour or so, the quivering increased, and was supplemented by suppressed rage, of a kind I had never before observed in this mild-mannered man. Finally, as I was becoming worried that bits of him might start shaking loose, or that, worse still, he might kill and eat our waiter, he stood up, announced, ‘Right!’ and strode off with great resolution into the indoor section of the restaurant. We sat, poised for the sound of shouts or blows, but . . . nothing. Ten minutes later, he reappeared, carrying a plate of his designated rissoles, and tucked into them. When it was safe to speak to him, I asked for details. Nobody, he informed me, had taken any notice of him when he stalked through the restaurant, nor when he arrived in the very busy kitchen. He was expecting to be challenged, so that he could air his grievance, but the various chefs ignored him. Then he saw a large plate of uncooked rissoles. He took down a frying pan, poured in some oil, added a lot of rissoles and started frying. Occasionally the other chefs glanced at him, but nobody seemed put out and so when the rissoles were cooked, he flipped them on to a plate and carried them back to his table. I loved Alan for this: he may be the only person in world history who has responded so effectively to slow service.

  Chapter 13

  I FLEW BACK to London a couple of days later, and handed in to David Frost the first draft of The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer. At that moment, however, he had a much bigger fish to fry: his new, three-times-a-week show The Frost Programme, which was due to start in less than a month. It was an attempt to create a new format with a much wider mix of ingredients than had ever been tried on British television before: serious political interviews mixed in with entertainment items, occasional sketches, light-hearted pieces which sometimes involved the guests (I remember ringing hand bells with Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party at that time); the odd singer; stunts (I once tried to see how much Mandarin I could learn in a week; answer: not a lot); very occasional film items; no show-business chit-chat that I can remember, but otherwise only the kitchen sink was omitted. Once when the singer Shirley Bassey was a guest, Terry Gilliam was invited to the studio to sketch her. David then panicked, racing into the wings during a commercial break to make sure Terry’s portrait was not too unflattering. Fortunately, it wasn’t. (Terry must have needed the work.)

  Once The Frost Programme had bedded down a little, it evolved into a very interesting hybrid and became the talk of London town. It did not, however, become the talk of the country, because it was only shown in certain regions. Its absence from television screens in Weston-super-Mare alarmed my parents (even though they could still hear me every week on I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again). Dad therefore wrote me a letter asking me if I had ever considered applying for a job in the personnel department of Marks & Spencer. I was able to reassure him I was not destitute, but I still treasure the moment when, after telling this story on the radio several years later, I opened a letter with Marks & Spencer on it, and found that someone there had sent me an application form.

  I took on various small roles in the programme. Occasionally I would write a short, generally slightly satirical duologue, which I would perform with David at the start of the show. From time to time I’d perform a short monologue. I might also join in a light-hearted group item with guests. If required I’d come up with something a bit more bizarre, like getting everyone to sing the Clifton College school song:

  . . . For working days or holidays,

  And glad or melancholy days,

  They were great days and jolly days

  At the Best School of All!

  My other function was to act as a ‘minder’ for one of that evening’s guests, making sure they were happy and were given a drink (just one) before a floor manager came to take them on set for their appearance. And it was while performing this rather easy job that I made my one near slip-up of that autumn.

  It was a particularly unfortunate cock-up because it came on the back of something of a breakthrough for the show. When The Frost Programme started, the one problem we had was that David found it impossible to secure ‘serious’ guests. Because he had presented the cutting-edge satirical shows That Was The Week That Was and Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life (which had achieved a pinnacle of irreverence never before reached by British entertainers), followed by a Frost Report series that was at least a bit cheeky now and again, the bigwigs (politicians, generals, ambassadors, top civil servants, professors, bishops, tycoons and suchlike) wouldn’t touch David with three bargepoles fastened together with something a lot stronger than Sellotape. So for the first few programmes David was unable to do any ‘serious’ interviews at all, and because he couldn’t do them he had no way to prove to VIPs that he was intending to do proper duologues with them (and not sit them on whoopee cushions or send them up rotten).

  And then . . . we hooked one. Not a big fish, but at least a hake: a former Cabinet Minister in the Macmillan government, called Ernest Marples, who had been Minister of Transport. There was great excitement; careful preparations were made; and we went out of our way to ensure that when Mr Marples arrived at the studio to talk to David about Japanese business methods, which he had been studying in Tokyo for a couple of months, he would be greeted in a suitably sober and respectful way by lots of fifty-and-over men in dark suits, nearly fawning on him. When he entered the green room, where I was sitting on the sofa, guarding the guest I had been allocated, everyone jumped to their feet and half-bowed, stood respectfully for a bit, and then, not wanting to bother the ex-Minister, sat down and made sure that they didn’t stare at him. And it was at that moment I realised my guest had disappeared. He had blindsided me and now there he was bearing down on Mr Ernest Marples (the ex-Cabinet Minister) with his hand outstretched, and beaming.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Marples!’

  ‘Oh! Good evening . . .’

  I was paralysed. I could see what was coming.

  ‘My name is Martin Braithewood. I’m on the show with you.’

  ‘Oh really . . . er . . . what are you doing, Martin?’

  ‘I’m playing the spoons.’

  I wish I had a sculpture of Marples’ expression: I would contemplate it whenever I felt melancholy. It was the look of a man who had prepared himself for the worst, and had badly underestimated. He, an ex-Cabinet Minister, was about to appear on national television with a spoon-player. So much for his chances as the next Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  Fortunately, he went on anyway, the interview turned out well, word went round, and within a couple of weeks the Pillars of Society were queuing up to talk to David Frost. And what a remarkably fine interviewer he was. Sharp, agile and yet empathetic, he could get people to say more than they had planned, which paradoxically often redounded to their credit, and he could also forensically take apart a weak case. His spontaneity proved far more effective with audiences than the usual clichéd current-affairs minuets; and some of his now largely forgotten interviews – for example, with Major Mike Hoare, the Congo mercenary, and Emil Savundra, the con-man – were (along with Melvy
n Bragg’s wonderful conversation with the dying playwright Dennis Potter) among the very best I’ve ever seen.

  As for me, although my contribution to the show was small, and sometimes absolutely minute, being involved in it proved an extraordinarily valuable experience. The three-times-a-week live performing of material, sometimes written only six hours before, forced upon me a different mindset from the one I’d had in The Frost Report. There I could aim to give ‘perfect’ performances, and the knowledge of this put extra pressure on me. Now I had to accept that everything I did was going to be a bit under-rehearsed, that perfection was way out of my reach, and that I should just go with the flow and not get uptight about the boo-boos. And I learned that when you stop concentrating on avoiding mistakes, you relax a bit, and consequently . . . you actually make fewer.

  Meanwhile, David had informed me at the end of the summer that he wanted to give me a show of my own. I was both flattered and very scared, but came to the conclusion that since I could surround myself with a team of hand-picked people, I wouldn’t have to carry too much responsibility myself and would therefore be able to cope. I always strongly believed in safety in numbers.

  So, it turned out, did Tim Brooke-Taylor. When David had earlier asked him to do a series, he too had said he wanted to work with others – and he had proposed that he and I team up (unfortunately I’d been too busy at the time on other projects). Now the two of us bowed to the obvious and proposed to David that we should work together. David sensed that even as a duo we were a little apprehensive about the new venture, but comforted his two scaredy-cats by explaining that we wouldn’t have to worry about a large audience because the show would go out late at night, and that, in any case, expectations were non-existent. Then he dangled what for me was the perfect carrot: he encouraged us to do the zanier, wilder, off-the-wall, madcap, out-of-left-field, oddball and wackier material that Gra and I used to suggest in the Frost Report script meetings, the material that had always met with the response: ‘Very funny, boys, but they won’t get it in Bradford.’ So we said, ‘Yes, please . . .’

  Involving Graham in the new venture was a no-brainer, but our other suggestion was, on the surface at least, rather bizarre:

  ‘David, you’ll be a bit surprised at this.’

  ‘Go on . . .’

  ‘Marty Feldman . . .’

  ‘Marty? But he’s not a performer!’

  And David was correct. Marty hadn’t performed since his arrow-firing days on Margate Pier. He was, first and foremost, a writer. But we wheedled away, telling David (who knew what fine scripts Marty would provide) that Marty was extraordinarily funny, not just when he was fooling around, but when he spontaneously went into character – as a cockney barrow-boy, or a Hollywood film producer, or an oleaginous men’s outfitter, or a wily Gypsy fortune teller – until David, almost convinced, finally raised his real objection.

  ‘But . . . what about the way he looks?’

  Having had his say, David let us get on with it. So Tim, Marty, Graham and I sat down to put together a pilot to convince a TV executive we all liked and trusted – Cyril Bennett of Rediffusion – to commission a short series, to be called At Last the 1948 Show.fn1 The four of us worked harmoniously: Gra and I still wrote mainly together, Tim therefore joined Marty, but the two writing teams spent a lot of time in the same room. We knew, of course, that we were going to do a show with zany sketches. The question that remained, though, was: how were we going to link the sketches? We were all tired of the musical numbers that punctuated That Was The Week That Was, and of the traditional linkman à la Frost programmes, and, of course, the Monty Python approach lay a little way in the future. What were we to do? Was there another method? And then we had a breakthrough: what about a link girl?

  What sort of a girl? Funny . . . dappy . . . pretty . . . bubbly . . . adorable . . . But who?

  You have to know that throughout my first few years in British television, there was a constant search among male comedians for girls who were funny (and, if possible, pretty, too). Our perception was that there weren’t many very funny women around: that somehow even talented comediennes didn’t ultimately want to make fools of themselves – they always seemed to be holding something back. It wasn’t until Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders came along in the 1980s that I saw female comedians on television who whole-heartedly ‘went for it’. It was wonderful that for the first time the best women were funnier than the best men. I was genuinely thrilled.

  As we planned our show, therefore, few if any names came immediately to mind. Then, out of the blue, someone said, ‘Oh, you should take a look at Aimi MacDonald.’ She had, apparently, done some very good stage work, and was currently appearing at a nightclub in Mayfair. Tim and I therefore secured the necessary funds from the Frost organisation to go along to watch her in action. We took our seats, the show started, a chorus line capered on to the stage, and right there on the end of the line was someone who we immediately decided would be perfect for the role we had in mind – we just prayed that she would turn out to be Aimi. Once the floorshow had come to an end, and the owner of the club, Davy Kaye, had done a really hilarious and rude half-hour routine, he joined us at our table, bringing with him our pick from the end of the line, the lovely Aimi MacDonald (as she was always henceforth known).

  We soon decided that we shouldn’t get Aimi to link the sketches; instead we would write her silly little quickies, at the end of which she would say, ‘And now . . .’ I suppose we were trying to send up the whole idea of ‘links’. Her delivery was perfect: a little high-pitched and pedantic (Pythonesque shades of Anne Elk) but wonderfully cute and happy with it.

  One of my favourite Aimi interludes started with her holding a newspaper.

  Hello! I’m the lovely Aimi MacDonald! Do you read your horoscope every day? I do! I’m Scorpio. That’s the same as Burt Lancaster. I wonder what it says today . . . (She consults the paper and reads, carefully) ‘Scorpio. Your name is Aimi MacDonald and you are reading your horoscope out on television . . .’ (After a moment, her face lights up) Ooooh! That’s really good, isn’t it? (Pause) It’s not so good for Burt Lancaster, though . . . And now . . .

  With Aimi in place, we wrote the pilot script and started rehearsals in early December. They were particularly enjoyable because Tim, Gra and I had performed together so often that we immediately fell into a shared style and working method. I’d always thought Gra a fine performer, but even so, when the two of us performed together, I never felt quite the connection with him that I had with Tim. We two watched and listened to each other like hawks, which sometimes led to felicities of timing that wouldn’t have happened with Gra and me. I suppose I always felt that Gra was ever so slightly away on his own. But then that was Gra.

  Marty was the unpredictable quantity. We all knew he had the potential to be hilarious, but because he hadn’t had the chance to pick up much in the way of acting technique he was erratic: in the early rehearsals he might do some lines or visual business wonderfully well, and then get it all wrong the next five times, or suddenly manage to perform brilliantly a part of the sketch he’d always flubbed before. He needed an immense amount of rehearsal, and this we were happy to give him until his performances were so ‘grooved’ that he could reproduce them reliably (I never forget that the French word for rehearsal is répétition). And Marty was up for it: he was excited he was at last going to be in front of the camera and worked away tirelessly, as we made him run some sequences seven or eight times in a row. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, we kept his roles fairly small in the pilot episode.

  The net result was that when the day for the recording came, and we were placed in front of a studio audience for the first time, we all produced quite polished turns and earned a decent amount of laughter. Given that the material was a bit, or a lot, wackier than people were used to seeing on television, we were more than satisfied with the reaction we received.

  A few days later we sat in a darkened room in the Rediffu
sion building on Kingsway and watched the tape of the show. Ten seconds after it finished, the door opened, and Cyril Bennett looked in. ‘Pure gold!’ he said. ‘A series of six, please.’ We were both elated and excited: we instinctively knew we were going to be producing something slightly different. So we started beavering away at the scripts that we would start recording in February, because the Christmas break was almost upon us.

  I’d suggested to Connie that we could see each other over the holidays, so we met in Barbados and stayed in the Blue Water Beach Hotel, just outside Bridgetown. We hadn’t spent any time together for about six months, and because in those days international phone calls seemed very expensive and oddly daunting, we had stayed in contact mainly by air-mail letters (printed on amazingly light paper, so they would not tax the plane’s engines too greatly). There was no question that we loved each other, but I think we both felt a little tentative about where the relationship was going. Being 3,000 miles apart, with our careers rooted in different countries, made the future very uncertain. But we enjoyed our beach holiday – I managed to avoid waterskiing – and were both stunned by seeing Dr Zhivago one evening; watching Geraldine Chaplin and Julie Christie, I seemed to receive some intuition of the deep importance of my relationship with Connie: I’d never before taken a message like that away from a cinema.

  On our last evening, God gave us a present: we were sitting under the stars when Harry Secombe sat down next to us. I’d never met him before, but had adored him in The Goon Show, and always sensed that he was, as we say in show business, wonderful. In the flesh, however, he scored comfortably higher in wonderfulness than I had ever expected. I think ‘warm’ is the best (if inadequate) word for the man. Connie and I sat chatting to Harry and his wife and we laughed and laughed and then I found myself in deep conversation (with a man best known for blowing raspberries and singing loudly) about theories of time, about which he knew an alarming amount. I came to the conclusion that although he was bonhomie personified, he had a very astute mind. (He told me once that at the Palladium he used to get a great reception with all the funny material, but when he sang a bit of opera at the end of the show, he could sense they were fidgeting, yet at the end of the aria, they went wild and clapped frantically. Then one day, he realised they were applauding themselves . . .) Finally, Connie and I went back to our hotel, both thinking that the world seemed a much better place than it had a few hours before. What a man!