You just sit there, citizen, and laugh yourself silly and scratch your beard, I was here before you were, me and the dawn, me and the bigwigs, me and the professors, me and the great British public at large. My show on television is called Opportunity Knocks. You all know it, I’m sure. We sit here and wait for talent to show up and you know why? It’s easy to know when you’ve sat waiting. For life. Waiting for something to remind us we’re all alive out here. Vocation is the heavenly thing on earth, not opportunity for Chrissakes. We wait here. We have always waited here. Somebody said it: vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. Goddamit. That’s what we believe around here. Listen. Do you want to know what vocation means? It means ‘addressed by a voice’. I learned that when I was in short pants. I Hughie Green believe talent will save us all. There. I’ve said it now.
I’ve spent my whole life loving talented people and waiting for talent and taking it like drink when it turns up. There’s always somebody new somewhere. There’s always that new constellation that makes the night. Napoleon once said he felt like he was going mad when he heard Crescentini sing. Good God. What a thing to say. The world has seen its share of men who love the larger-than-life more than they love life itself: I know that town, yes I do, and I know all the roads that lead there.
When I look down the years and think of all the stars we’ve made on this show I could cry – and I see them out making the decade fit to move in and the air fit to breathe. Good Lord, you wouldn’t stand in the way of goodness. Those people were fine. Those people woke up in the morning and they got out there and worked hard and when they saw the bright lights they knew they hadn’t bungled their lives. That is what they knew. And our ratings go up and up and people just love it on a Monday night. That’s what we’re here for. What talent is, how you find it, is what Opportunity Knocks is all about. I found the secret, I think, of making sure that we never made a mistake – by asking the public to make the decisions for us. Not just the folks in the studio, but the mums and dads sitting in front of their television sets at home. And believe me when I say the public is always right. They see talent coming: it might be a born star like my old friend Liz Taylor, it might be a Cockney with a personality as bouncy as a beach ball. But the public know. They always know. They won’t be fooled any more than they want to be. Talent is a demonstration of the fact that there are people in the world – special people, mind you, some of them dear, dear friends of mine – who really believe they are what they pretend to be. I used to say that to my old mother bless her heart. She’d say: ‘Stop talking rubbish, Hughie.’ But it ain’t rubbish. Talent is the heart’s bid for freedom my friends. And I mean that most sincerely, folks.
Stay in showbusiness long enough it begins to seem like philosophy. Who came up with that one? You scratch the silver on a little bit of talent and a whole world begins to show through. You take it from me. Growing up in Ottawa back then we wanted to be good, my friends. We wanted to be the best. Nowadays the kids don’t want to be good and they don’t care about being the best: they want fame. People nowdays don’t think they’re alive until they’re on the television screen. That’s true. There it is ladies and gents: the biggest known intimacy in the modern world, right there in your living-room. The true stars are out there for sure. They know who I am and I want to take their lives and make them personalities people will never forget. I’m telling you I want to take those kids and give them the world. When the sun climbs down at the end of the day, that is what they deserve, that is what the best deserve and what they will get from me and what they will find reasonable, and surely viewers, surely my good customers, this is what we all must enjoy if life is to be sincere.
*
My father was famous for a reason you know. Hugh Aitcheson Green. They called him the Fishmonger General of Canada. That man had a serious face for work I’m telling you. Sometimes when I’m presenting the show and I step up to the microphone my father’s seriousness comes and pats me on the shoulder. Still does. I’m not kidding, I feel him looking right down at me, but I just nod to him you know and go on as before and the old smile takes over.
‘You’re an educated man like your father,’ my mother said all those times, ‘you’ve read books, and I don’t know what you’re doing messing around in costumes and singing crazy songs. A man has to understand the world Hughie and go about his business there in an orderly fashion. But I suppose you’re a different story, Hughie Green.’
She came into the house when I was young with armfuls of flowers and my father with armfuls of cod. She would push her hair away from her face and smile over the petals as if she were already in an old photograph. She was a good one for whispering caution, my mother, but don’t you know she’d a great head for heights herself. She liked the ordinary hours of the day, and no one had a knowledge of how to live that was quite so certain as my mother’s. She was a middle-class Canadian in love with her married name and in thrall to a well-stocked kitchen closet. Look at our Hughie’s face when he sees us kissing. You’d think he was watching a picture show.
My parents knew how to make life float while it was happening. We used to go ice-skating on the Rideau Canal and I can still see that stretch downtown, in the iciest winter, right through the centre of Ottawa, the fairy-lights twinkling on the bank of the canal with all the skaters going round on a cold night like the last night on earth.
One time my mother and father stopped holding hands and watched me skating off on my own: looking back I could see the amazement on their faces as they tugged at their gloves and stood transfixed. I was twirling and dancing on the ice, miles away from the hockey boys chasing one another. The wind rushed round my ears as I spread my arms and glided over the frozen water and it all felt true. Under the lights on the Rideau Canal I saw the moment my parents recognised me at the centre of my own propulsion: I had a life of my own, friends who really knew me, evenings spent skating to music they knew nothing about, putting my tongue into girls’ mouths, yes indeed, and now, with my parents twenty yards away but dwindling there in front of my eyes, I had a place in this city, places to go, conversations, secrets, haircuts.
People stopped skating and stood together in a circle watching me as I danced on the ice. I remember the Rideau Canal. At the end of that night the three of us walked over the Pont Laurier Bridge and down O’Connor Street lined with trees and past those 1930s windows bright now in the dark when I think of them. My face was flushed and I could see the tears in my mother’s eyes as we walked and all our white breaths billowed in front of us. We walked right through the breaths in the cold night as if we couldn’t be moved by the miracle of expiration or the wonders of the weather and with every step I thought only of the breaths to come, the great gulps of air to be taken again and again out there in the world.
Oh, that night going home from the Rideau Canal was for me the very beginning of life. We walked past the houses in silence and I felt for the first time that silence with my parents was my best announcement. God yes. I was a good skater and I knew it then with all the bothersome things unsaid beneath the frozen trees on O’Connor Street. My heart drummed that night with those people applauding on the ice and traces coming from the lights on the bank. When I stopped skating I was panting there with my chest heaving and my parents across from me fixed to the spot.
My father loved to read old books when he’d had enough of the day. He read me parts of The Old Curiosity Shop and told me it was good to memorise the look of the rooms in the house you grew up in. ‘You have to belong somewhere,’ he said, ‘and you’ll see one day a happy home is a constant project.’
‘I guess so‚’ I said.
‘Yes, you would guess, Hugh,’ he said. ‘You don’t care about life the way we do,’ he said, ‘you’re only a show-off.’
There’s a certain passage from that Dickens book he copied out for me. ‘It always grieves me,’ the book said, ‘to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life, when they are scarcely more than infants. I
t checks their confidence and simplicity – two of the best qualities that Heaven gives them – and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.’
That was the thing with my old man: he read books, we read them together, philosophy, poetry, good God, the very best books you could lay your hands on, Plato for goodness sake, Walt Whitman, and we’d sit down at the card table and my father would mark the pages with a pencil he stored behind his ear for safety. Ha! The hours we spent with books. He loved the way they slowed life down to a heartbeat, and he’d say, ‘Hugh, whatever you put into these books you’ll get it right back a hundred to one. Here’s words to change the shape of your mouth.’ And we’d read about honour and duty, justice and freedom, the kind of stuff to set your hair on fire, and we were really by ourselves in those hours being curious and willing and uncertain, my God.
‘Here’s words to change the shape of your mouth.’
Trouble is my mouth was setting otherwise, into a perpetual smile, into a great big howdydoody for the audience. I wonder if he was ashamed. I guess people will always think of me as Hughie Green, television’s travelling salesman, the guy with the cheap showbusiness banter, and the rest has been closed down for good. But heavens above, if God should be my witness, my father and I read all the stuff. You have to make choices in this world. He’s dead now. Reading was our secret. And when I sit down like this to have a wee drink by myself, goodness, I remember the old conversation, his eyeglasses, the 40-watt bulb. ‘You’re a goddamn split personality,’ he would say. And that’s the way it goes. The books are up on the shelf sure enough, and I’ll take one down, but I’d say this to him, talent and entertainment are out there, making the world fit to live in, changing the lives of billions of people. You won’t find that in books. No sir.
My mother ran a wedding shop: she liked to be near impending domestic crises. Running in and out of living-rooms where young people were seated, foretelling bliss, bearing flowers and cloth samples and brochures, gave her a direct line to the wishes of others, just as it afforded her a constant reckoning of her own happiness. Her afternoons were spent with a teacup balanced on her knee, her painted fingernails pushing back her red hair, as she went on smiling to hide her thoughts, expressing surprise at previously hidden pasts, confirming suspicions about ‘bad husband material’. She was like an undertaker who took all the prizes for conviviality, my mother; every day she came home from her encounters with the nervous and the dreamy, and there we would be.
I got the OBE two months before my father died. By then all his stories were of how charming I had been as a boy. But don’t mind me about my father I’m telling you: I had a happy childhood; I only say my memory of the happy bits did not entirely coincide with his. My father understood the enactment of happy days as a matter of uniformity in the Green household. Like most mothers years ago, my mother liked me best when I was most dependent on her, and naturally, almost lightheartedly, she held my independence to be a filthy mark on a nice boy.
I wanted to dance and sing. I knew I would be a performer. I don’t recall a moment of the 1940s when I wasn’t laying plans for the most profound success in Light Entertainment. Yet the pressures of a good family can make mincemeat of the best intentions: I became a pilot first. The OBE came thirty years later and was nothing to my mother compared to me coming down the path in Rockingham with a crease all the way down my Air Force pants. The neighbours were beckoned from their high teas and a cine- camera was brought in: my mother drew her red hair out of her eyes and cried on the lawn out there, setting me up, with my cap under my arm and my borrowed smile, setting me up, high and sweet I’m telling you, at the top of a wedding cake she fashioned in secret for the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Royal Canadian Air Force. At seventeen I was one of the youngest pilots they ever had. At the same age my father had been in Ottawa pestering battalions of civil servants with his idea of ‘fish for the fighting forces’. I often returned to flying over the years; between dates in showbusiness, while other actors were tramping around Camden Town with nothing to do, I was up in the air, watching Great Britain below like an old song, all those fields and rivers and lochs and the little towns at the coast.
Those guys in the business who complain about bad notices: they ought to put their gas on a peep. Should try piloting a brand-new flying boat over 3,277 nautical miles from Bermuda to Largs on the Clyde. We did it in the most treacherous winter weather, storms over the North Atlantic, and it was the world’s longest hop back then for a twin-engined aircraft. With ice forming on the aeroplane I thought the weight would finish us; I remember thinking we were just about to drop into the drink, and I had to climb to 17,000 feet and we had one bottle of oxygen between three of us. Even a rough night at the Glasgow Empire is a cakewalk after a nightmare flight like that I’m telling you.
The British can’t tap-dance. They move on the balls of their feet and shuffle in that slightly elegant way, but they can’t use their heels like American tappers, and there’s no ease in the syncopation, and it’s all wrong. In the early Fifties I got some work flying commercial planes – London to Moscow, or the Atlantic run, and banking over the Isle of Man or the foothills of Galloway in Scotland you come to feel there’s a kind of loneliness that nearly counts as an accomplishment. I used to manipulate my feet in the cockpit until they were sore; tapping my feet, thinking of jobs that might come along. Was I free up there? Or was there never a moment in my life when my nerves didn’t scream out for the remedy of applause?
What is freedom in the end anyhow? You’re up in the sky and Britain down there is covered in ration books and flags and all those tiny towns full of houses and you see the clouds dissolving over the cockpit in front of you and your mother and father are somewhere behind the horizon, out there in back of all the quietness. You think you might just keep flying on and on and never see a crowd again. You think you might get up a head of steam and just keep going until you run out of gas or run out of sky. Up in the air you feel free for seconds at a time. Like standing in a line-up at the Royal Variety Performance and Her Majesty the Queen is coming down. ‘This is what life is all about,’ you say. I’m my own man for ever.’
Talent is the fight against quietness. And yet quietness is always waiting. It waits for each of us – the blood moves round, redder than claret, silent as the frozen air – and one day that quiet circulation gives way to the most perfect silence in the world. I’m telling you. You know it. You can weep for applause but silence is your destiny.
The ease of the ice on the Rideau Canal? Sugared almonds distributed at weddings and my mother floating between the tables and shuffling name-cards? And there I was crossing the miles of sky with a rush of clouds coming on and the blueness breaking up. I look back on everything and see that in my own head I was always moving and never arriving. Something inevitable checks your course. Always does and always will. I’m telling you. Freedom may turn out to be the flattest gag in the business. You die and then it’s somebody else’s turn.
Shall I tell you the best? Lassie. The popular Hollywood movie serial starring the dog of the same name? That was my first time in front of the camera and oh my God even today I can’t speak about the sickness I felt walking onto that set and totally blank. They were filming at Shepperton Studios and this big man somebody or other walks in and everybody freezes. The dog pees from one end of the soundstage to the other and the big man shouts what he wants. The boy beside me had been a child star called Baby Sunshine. We played a couple of young crofters who spend their time chasing that damn dog through the heather, later attesting to its intelligence and bravery in the High Court at Edinburgh. And it was of course Lassie that got the star treatment; Jim Copeland (Baby Sunshine) and I had to shine shoes and lick stamps between takes. They say Jim disappeared completely a few years later. He left for Southport and was never seen again. I can still see his eyes all eager for the cameras. Once upon a time his father and his grandfather did a show in So
uthend that involved Jim being a baby who lived in a bass drum. On the Lassie film Jim just chatted up the girls and cried on cue.
‘My father knew Pavlova,’ he would say, ‘and he knew Sarah Bernhardt and Stan Laurel and Sir Harry Lauder and … you know what? George Robey used to borrow his nail-clippers.’
Hughie Green, that’s me, came down out of the clouds and hit paydirt in the spring of 1956. That’s when I brought Opportunity Knocks to ITV. It quickly became the most popular TV show in the country and I guess I was what you call famous overnight. Like a lot of the old-time entertainers who ended up on the box, I never really danced again, though I have sung sometimes, and I found after a while I wasn’t looking out for acting parts. It was a new life. Suddenly I was spinning, popular, and taken everywhere, and in no time it was command performances, and the age of television, my God, and in the middle of all that, in the sweetness of England then, you got the feeling people were rushing at you with hopes. People want you to absorb them, to make them successful too, and in no time you see it, you see your public face emerging, you see it recognised everywhere, and there you are, a personality, smiling, waving, passing into the moment when the slickness of your public face dries into a mask.
Deep down, my father reckoned I was a phony, and in his last year, a long time ago now, the disdain he had nearly always felt for me softened into an admiring sort of pity. ‘You carry your own climate wherever you go, Sonny Jim. I’ll say that for you.’ And then he was gone, the old bastard. He was gone and the very next day it was the last in the series of Double Your Money, and who do you think was up and into the studio early, ironing his own tie, making up, rubbing chalk over his teeth and smiling like a skull? Well yes, the oldest clichés in showbusiness are like the oldest clichés in life, not only true, but truer by the day. The show must go on. Harry upstairs said it was the best Double Your Money I’d presented in the whole run.
Personality Page 13