THE SECRET POLICEMAN’S CAREER OPPORTUNITY
In the early 1980s a staple guest of TV chat shows was a drawling, affected, upper-class, corpse-like fop called Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge had in his youth been extremely left-wing, to the extent that when he was a newspaper correspondent in Moscow in the 1920s he had suppressed stories of the famine created by the Soviet government’s forced collectivisations. In later life he changed completely and became an extremely reactionary, religious ‘moral’ campaigner. Muggeridge was partly credited with turning super-Albanian nun Mother Teresa into a media superstar and was a leading figure in something called the Festival of Light, a hysterical Christian group that protested against sex on TV and more or less everywhere else. This was rank hypocrisy since in his youth Muggeridge had been a sexual libertine and only embraced abstinence once his own ravening libido began to diminish. To me there was something sad and tortured about this man, his sweaty self-loathing and religious mania part of an attempt to try and locate the certainties of his youth. I didn’t believe that his earlier left-wing conviction was any different to his later right-wing Christianity. He had simply gone from being one kind of bastard to being another kind of bastard.
One of the unexpected ways in which my upbringing as the son of Communists had helped prepare me for the challenges of celebrity, an advantage that my fellow comedians didn’t have, was in the matter of staying true to yourself. The idea of the traitor, the sell-out, the apostate was central to Joe and Molly’s state of mind. Even when I was quite small we would be out shopping in town and my mother or father would gesticulate towards some harmless-looking individual and say in a whisper, ‘See him over there trying on gloves, he left the Party over Hungary in 1956 and now he’s . . .’ Here they’d pause before revealing the full horror. ‘A Labour councillor!’ Or, ‘Don’t look, but that woman by the bacon counter, she used to be in CND but now she’s . . . joined the Air Force!’ At first I couldn’t see anything different about the people my parents pointed out but over time it did seem to me that they possessed a certain haunted quality, an air of sadness, and though their mood probably wasn’t helped by being whispered about in shops by a red-haired woman and a man in a trilby hat accompanied by a silent watchful boy I sensed that the main critical voice was within their heads, that they themselves were aware on some level of the abandonment of their younger more idealistic self and it corroded them from the inside.
I did not want to end up like that. The trick it seemed to me was to not be blind to the many faults of the left while at the same time to try and stay true to those core values of workers’ rights, social justice and equality.
Me doing fund-raising benefits for left-wing organisations was an attempt to stay connected with those ideals.
As a left-wing entertainer it was accepted that you would inevitably perform unpaid at concerts in aid of various radical causes – doing benefits had become a sort of national service for alternative comedians. There was very little pleasure in appearing at them though. I did a bit about benefit concerts in my act: how you told a joke, then there was a pause while the audience vetted the joke for its political content, possible sexism, any hints of neo-colonialism, adherence to the theory of dialectical and historical materialism, and only once it was cleared would they laugh – it was like doing your material over a faulty phone line.
I went up to Sheffield to appear in a show at the Crucible Theatre in support of Nicaragua’s revolutionary, anti-American, pro-moustache Sandinista government. Following the show the cast and their friends were introduced to the guest of honour – David Blunkett the radical left-wing leader of Sheffield City Council. After the line-up Linda said, ‘I don’t like that man, there’s something funny about his eyes.’
That same summer I agreed to appear at an open-air show in Hyde Park: speeches, music and comedians protesting at the Thatcher government’s assault on the GLC’s enlightened policy of subsidising bus and tube fares. On the same day, as part of a coordinated twenty-four hours of action, the transport unions mounted a well-supported strike, the efficiency of which meant that there were no buses or tubes running and therefore there was not one single person at the benefit.
But then in the time between the Comic Strip Club closing and the nationwide tour beginning I received a phone call offering me a spot on a fund-raising show which promised to be both an experience to perform at and potentially a massive boost to my career. The person on the other end of the phone said, ‘Cleese has given you the call.’ What they meant was that the man from Monty Python and Fawlty Towers was inviting me to take part in The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, the latest in a number of benefits in aid of Amnesty International he’d organised over the years. The show would take place at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on four nights starting on Wednesday 9 September 1981.
On the afternoon before the show there was a sort of press- conference-come-rehearsal at the Theatre Royal with most of the cast present. Apart from me, who was unknown outside Soho, everybody on the bill was a famous name. There was Sting, Bob Geldof, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Rowan Atkinson, Jeff Beck, Alan Bennett, John Bird, Donovan, Jasper Carrott, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Billy Connolly, Barry Humphries, Griff Rhys Jones, Pamela Stephenson, Pete Townshend and Victoria Wood. In my arrogance I felt sorry for all of them because they were the past and I was the future coming to wreck their cosy world. The previous Secret Policeman’s Ball had made a gigantic star out of Rowan Atkinson and I believed this one would do the same for me.
Stephen Pile the Sunday Times columnist who was there that afternoon described me as ‘eschewing the bourgeois comforts of a chair to squat on the floor’.
The only impediment to me smashing it on opening night was that I first had to have a row with Jasper Carrott over ownership of the word ‘Guildford’. Each of us knew that the other had a gag in his act which ended with the name of the town as the punchline and neither of us wanted to change it because we knew no other town would work as well, but we also knew that two comedians couldn’t both say ‘Guildford’ on one night.
After protracted negotiations I said to him, ‘Who’s on first?’
‘You are,’ he replied.
‘Well fuck you then,’ I said. ‘I’m using it.’
So I did. I said, ‘And people come from Guildford to see it!’ and it got a huge laugh while Jasper was forced to change his punchline to ‘Basingstoke’ which died a terrible, terrible death.
Danny Baker wrote in the New Musical Express that he found the first half of the show dull:
Except for Alexei Sayle who thundered through his slot like a train. Whereas what surrounded his spot came measured and perfunctory his punchy script boomed all over wherever it wanted. His rock-hard distaste for just about anything ‘went a little too far’ for more than one half-time bar dweller. He was great. For the first time that night, well, in years, I felt I was at a live concert.
This was my favourite kind of review: not only saying I was brilliant but that everybody else was shit.
But although I was the hit of the live show it was perplexing to discover that that achievement did not turn me into Rowan Atkinson.
Danny Baker also wrote that the music got in the way. It was certainly true of Bob Geldof. I quite liked The Boomtown Rats but my memory is that he turned up uninvited and insisted on performing ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’, and when he sang the line ‘I’m going to shoo-oo-oo-hoo-hoo-hoot . . .’ Geldof paused portentously, eyes jammed shut as if amazed at the depths of his own emotion, for such a long time that the audience began laughing at him.
Jasper Carrott didn’t hold a grudge. After we’d both been on we fancied a drink, so me and Linda took him during the show to a very seedy after-hours actors’ club called Macready’s that I was more or less a member of. It was only a short walk away but Jasper suggested we drive there in his Jaguar. ‘Don’t worry,’ his manager said. ‘Bob [which was Jasper’s real name] always finds a parking space. It’s his secret talent.’ (Just like Linda’s ability not to step in dog shit.)
And it was true. In the heart of busy Covent Garden magically a Jaguar-sized space appeared right outside the club and then, when we returned to the theatre, there was a space there too. To this day whenever a brilliant parking spot appears me and Linda say to each other ‘Jasper’s space’.
Apart from performing duties at The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, there was a life backstage, people I had been watching on the TV for a decade, musicians whose records I had bought, actors I’d seen in the theatre came and went. I could see what a powerful drug it was, the warm, narcotic embrace of celebrity, the cloud nine of limousine, manager, agent, entourage and being mates with big stars. I chatted to a few, John Bird and Graham Chapman, but the only one I was really interested in was Alan Bennett, so one night during the run I went over and sat down next to him and began talking but after I’d said a few sentences he just got up and ran away.
Pamela Stephenson’s interest in doing stand-up comedy had morphed into an interest in doing one particular stand-up comedian – Billy Connolly. They had recently begun an affair and when I left through the stage door with them one night it was the first time that I walked into that waterfall of clacking, blinding flashbulbs exploding in your face. I felt guilty because I’d got to know Pamela’s husband, the actor Nicholas Ball, who was then starring in the detective show Hazell. Sometimes he’d come down to the Comic Strip Club looking for his wife because she’d told him she’d been performing with us, but she was never there.
At the end of the show all the cast were supposed to troop on stage and sort of stand there looking soulful while the musicians played Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’. It felt awkward and self-congratulatory and I refused to take part, so instead I just sort of lurked in the wings, gawkily jigging about.
I could see the attraction of it all but I considered I was done for if I didn’t face the world clear-eyed and unencumbered by megastar friendships. A lot of my comedy came from pointing out the hypocrisies of other entertainers and if they were my mates I wouldn’t be able to do it so I resolved never again to appear in a celebrity benefit show and never to become close to any massive show business stars.
Except for Sting. Backstage he’d said to me, ‘You’re funny, aren’t you?’
And we became friends for a while before Linda could stop me. After all, I figured his background was quite similar to mine: he was a working-class grammar-school boy and an ex-teacher from the North who had raised himself by his own talent. Plus I thought if you’re going to be mates with a superstar it might as well be the biggest of them all.