Look, I wish I could tell you that when we were at school Joe and I were dreaming up ways to save the planet and cure society’s ills, but the truth is we were fantasising about running a giant media company called The JOEADZ Corporate.
I honestly can’t recall if it started ironically or not, but within a few months of becoming friends Joe and I had designed a corporate emblem in the style of the Thompson Twins logo that we agreed was futuristic and cool, and I’d drawn a picture showing us standing on top of our corporate headquarters: a giant industrial communications tower from which we could survey our vast media empire. It was a different time.
But let me tell you about the JOEADZ creative vision, and how Joe and I synergised within it.
‘Life is serious, but art is fun!’ Joe had scrawled on his school bag. I assumed Joe had coined the phrase himself and I was impressed, not realising it was a reference to the motto of a suicidal street clown in John Irving’s book The Hotel New Hampshire. I don’t know if Joe thought of himself as a suicidal street clown or not, but it occurs to me now that all our creative schemes were informed by that philosophy and what we convinced ourselves was a noble desire to escape serious things and have fun.
Joe was older than me by six months (in fact, he still is), and that age difference along with his confidence and imagination conferred on him a seniority that meant he was the one who decided what projects we should pursue, and whether we were making a video or a short film or putting on a play, Joe directed and I helped out. What I brought to the table, apart from contributing very good ideas and being great fun to have around, was an awesome versatility as a performer and a unique vision as a designer/producer of artwork and publicity material when it was time to unveil a new JOEADZ joint.
My drawing of the JOEADZ Corporate telecommunications tower from 1984. That platform Joe and I are standing on doesn’t seem safe at all.
You’d think this level of drive and self-belief would be met with nothing but respect and admiration from our fellow students, but surprisingly that wasn’t always the case. One day in the school yard, Louis, smirking, said that he and Zac were also forming a media company. ‘It’s going to be called “LOUZAC”,’ said Louis. ‘What do you think?’
‘It sounds like toilet cleaner,’ said Joe defensively, ‘so, yeah, probably about right.’ Ooh! Time to quit smirking, Theroux!
Before we started to collaborate on more ambitious projects, the first things Joe and I made together were sketches and parodies (which we shot on the big, clunky video camera my dad had been given) of the Gold Blend coffee adverts, the science and technology magazine show Tomorrow’s World and the children’s current affairs programme John Craven’s News-round. We also re-enacted half-remembered bits of Monty Python sketches and regurgitated jokes we’d heard on topical satire shows such as Spitting Image and Week Ending. Then we’d play the tape back and chuckle away, just excited to see ourselves on a TV.
Friends for Dinner
We used the Sharp video camera to film behind-the-scenes footage for our first official JOEADZ production towards the beginning of 1985: a short film called A Few Friends for Dinner. The film itself was shot on a Super 8 cine camera that Joe had bought with money he’d managed to wangle out of some sympathetic teachers when they agreed to revive the school’s defunct film club.
The story concerned a group of obnoxious toffs whose dinner party is interrupted by a hooded homeless man seeking shelter – a premise that perhaps owed a debt to Monty Python’s Meaning of Life when the Grim Reaper shows up at a dinner party at the end. In A Few Friends for Dinner the toffs rudely rebuff the visitor and pay a terrible price when (SPOILER ALERT!) a monster emerges from the homeless man’s robes and slaughters and consumes the toffs one by one (so you see the monster is ‘having a few friends for dinner’, i.e. eating them, whereas that phrase would normally indicate that you’ve invited some acquaintances to join you for a meal. The title works in more than one way).
Joe made the monster by customising a ventriloquist’s dummy, ending up with something that looked like an angry teddy bear with a row of nails for teeth held in place with Sellotape, like a kind of cuddly Alien. As we were too timid to ask any of the sixth-form girls to help us, Patrick and I played the female dinner-party guests and we very much enjoyed putting on dresses and make-up in order to look as pretty as possible.
We had permission to film in a smart section of the school library and were given access to lights, sound equipment and a small budget that we spent on cine film and After Eights for the posh dinner party, most of which I consumed before the camera had even started turning, to the irritation of J-Corn.
RAMBLE
After Eight mints are thin, roughly textured chocolate squares with a layer of fondant minty brilliance at their centre. Each one comes in its own little black paper envelope and they sit together, like a tiny chocolate record collection in a tasteful green box, from which they may be individually plucked by wealthy-looking people in evening dress shooting each other saucy looks as their candle-lit dinner party draws to a close. At least, that was the image that After Eight portrayed in their TV ads during the Seventies and on into the Eighties, and in purely aspirational terms it worked well.
I can recall my parents throwing a dinner party in Earl’s Court that looked exactly like an After Eight ad, with the men in dinner jackets and the women in nice dresses and sparkly jewellery, everyone smoking and laughing a lot, and at the end, out came the After Eights. I was supposed to be asleep, but the laughter woke me up and my mum, smelling sweetly of smoke and perfume, let me have one of the wafer-thin mints if I promised to go back to bed.
Whether that dinner-party memory is real or not, I grew up thinking After Eights were the most delicious and sophisticated thing you could possibly eat. Then, on my first trip abroad without my parents, I bought a box of them in duty free and a few minutes later I had munched every one and was vainly riffling through the empty paper sleeves hoping to discover one more that still contained its minty chocolate treasure. After Eights never seemed quite so alluring again.
Making A Few Friends for Dinner was the most fun I’d had since starting at Westminster, and though I had been the Andrew Ridgley to Joe’s George Michael, it felt as though we made a good team. As far as the finished film was concerned, I don’t recall anyone being particularly whelmed. Dad was worried that with only a few months to go before my O-level exams, I had been spending too much time ‘fooling about’ at the expense of my studies, though he did concede that Patrick and I made quite attractive young women.
Pvt Wars
The next JOEADZ production took place during our first term as sixth-formers. It was a three-man play called Pvt Wars (pronounced ‘Private Wars’) by American playwright James McLure, about three emotionally damaged Vietnam veterans who banter and bicker with one another while recuperating in an army hospital – perfect subject matter for three 16-year-old public-school boys of varying acting ability.
Joe played Natwick, a supercilious upper-class type from Long Island, Ben Walden was Silvio, a loudmouthed Italian-American given to exposing himself to the nurses despite having been rendered impotent by a war injury, and I played Gately, a hillbilly obsessed with fixing a broken radio. I didn’t know what a Southern accent sounded like, so I ended up doing a sort of generic East Coast drawl while Joe kept his accent clipped, rolling his ‘r’s now and then. Ben, a Rocky fan, went full Italian Stallion as Silvio.
One autumn weekend during a rare family supper, Dad asked what had been taking up so much of my time and I showed him my copy of Pvt Wars. After studying it for a few minutes he declared, ‘I would strongly advise you not to do this.’
‘Why?’ I laughed, not even considering taking him seriously.
‘I think the subject matter, the bad language and the accents are likely to make you all look very foolish.’
‘Screw you, old man!’ I shouted as I overturned the kitchen table and stormed out of the room. Or maybe I just said, ‘Oh, OK,’ and continued making gravy channels in my instant mash.
RAMBLE
Dad must have known that I’m the kind of person who finds it almost impossible to take advice – it’s a trait I probably got from him – and yet he felt compelled to dispense it. As I got older the advice transformed into critiques that were sometimes barbed.
In 2007 I phoned Dad to tell him I had been asked to appear on the topical TV panel show Have I Got News for You, thinking he’d be impressed. He responded, without a trace of malice, by saying, ‘I would have thought Have I Got News for You is exactly the kind of programme on which you are thoroughly ill suited to appear. It’s full of people being witty and telling jokes and that’s not at all what you’re good at.’
Now that I’m a parent I know it’s very hard to stand by and watch your children making choices they’ll probably regret. The instinct is to pull back the people most important to you from the cliff edge, but usually, as long as you think they’ll survive the fall, it’s best just to let them go over and to shout ‘Good luck! I love you!’ as they drop.
Dad was completely right about Have I Got News for You, though. It was a slow car crash and I wasn’t invited back.
Pvt Wars went ahead, announced weeks before the first performance by a giant poster that I made and hung on the main school noticeboard, a hand-painted logo at the bottom proclaiming that this was ‘A JOEADZ production’. At the top of the poster was the movie-style tagline we’d come up with: ‘Once they went over the top to kill people. Now they’re going over the top to kill time’. Some people missed the clever double meaning of ‘over the top’ and I had to explain on several occasions that the tagline referred to soldiers going ‘over the top’ of trenches into battle, as well as going ‘over the top’ in terms of the behaviour they displayed in the army hospital. I mean, who wouldn’t immediately get that?
RAMBLE
In the weeks running up to the UK release of the first Ghostbusters film just before Christmas 1984, posters appeared all over London that bore the now-iconic Ghostbusters logo, a date and nothing else. Being good film nerds, Joe and I knew what the posters were about, but we didn’t think of them as advertisements. To us, they seemed like the essence of something amazing punching through the dreary wall of phoney commercial imagery that characterises so much of the modern world. It was the first time we’d seen a ‘teaser campaign’. If Ghostbusters had been shit, we’d immediately have become cynical about such tactics, but Ghostbusters wasn’t shit.
Sub Ramble
Ghostbusters was one of a tiny handful of films (including Flash Gordon, The Killing Fields and Dances with Wolves) that I went to see with my whole family, even Dad. When we came out of the cinema after Ghostbusters I wanted to know if Dad had liked it as much as I had. He said he liked the bit with the smarmy, troublesome health-inspector character Walter Peck, who in one scene gets referred to as ‘Dickless’ by Ray Stantz. ‘One comes across that type so often. He played it perfectly,’ said Dad afterwards.
‘Didn’t you think Dr Venkman was funny, though?’ I asked Dad, smiling to myself as I recalled Bill Murray’s line: ‘It’s true – this man has no dick’ – a type of humour that was new to me.
‘He seemed rather too pleased with himself’ was Dad’s verdict on the comedy genius.
After the Ghostbusters teaser campaign, we were determined that when it came to JOEADZ productions we, too, would indulge in similar acts of poster foreplay, and a lot of time was spent inventing mysterious logos and taglines for our photocopied flyers.
In 1989 the teaser campaign for Tim Burton’s Batman attempted to reprise the glorious build-up to Ghostbusters by covering every inch of public space with shiny Bat-logos, but by that time the word ‘hype’ had entered the public’s consciousness and, as it turned out, Batman was no Ghostbusters.
The JOEADZ production of Pvt Wars turned out to be … A SENSATION. We received a rave review in the school magazine from a girl in the year above who didn’t even know us, and there was even some grudging praise from a few of the Lads, all of which immediately went to my head and I started believing I was Robert De Niro.
Bugsy Malone
One morning towards the beginning of 1986, Joe, Ben and I sneaked out of school during a private study period and over Cokes and crisps in our favourite café Cornballs suggested our next project should be a stage production of Bugsy Malone.
Alan Parker’s 1976 film musical in which children play Prohibition-era gangsters, drive pedal-powered sedan cars and battle each other with machine guns that shoot whipped cream was a thrilling, dreamlike experience when I saw it first aged nine. Star Wars was all well and good, but Bugsy Malone was the realisation of just about every childhood fantasy I’d ever had, so I was wary of taking a big 16-year-old crap on it.
The play programme from the 1986 JOEADZ production of Bugsy Malone with design and layout by A. Buckles and passive-aggressive thanks by J. Cornballs.
How could we get anywhere close to the film’s production values, I asked Joe? How would we do the sedan-car chases, the splurge-gun battles and, most important of all, how could we do justice to those amazing Paul Williams songs? I could see my dad shaking his head and saying (with lots of reverb), ‘You’ll make fools of yourselves …’ But J-Corn reasoned that there were workarounds for all these problems, some even outlined at the back of the playscript specifically for amateur productions, and as far as the songs went, we knew lots of school musicians and we liked singing, ‘So it’ll be good, man, fuck it!’
My next issue with the production was casting. Joe decided Ben should play Bugsy, as he was more of a leading man, and I would be perfect as the rotund mob boss Fat Sam. This was a blow.
After the success of Pvt Wars I was still pretty sure I was Robert De Niro, and suddenly I was being told I was actually the overweight sidekick. Apart from the insult to my performing skills that this represented, I’d been self-conscious about my body ever since a girl I fancied at boarding school had told me: ‘You’d be quite handsome if you lost some weight,’ and now here I was being Fat Sam-shamed. ‘Man, it’s the funniest part,’ said Joe when I failed to hide my disappointment. As soon as we began rehearsals I realised Joe was right, and once I’d relaxed, Big Boned Sam (as my character preferred to identify) gave me licence to go BIG in every way.
We wanted Louis to be involved with Bugsy Malone and cast him in one of the main parts as rival mob boss Dandy Dan. A few weeks into rehearsals, however, Louis baulked, claiming the size of the role was making him anxious. Joe gave Louis four small walk-on parts instead, but it was a drag having to recast at a time when we were scrambling to resolve problems with nearly every aspect of the overambitious production. In our paranoid moments we suspected that Louis was reluctant to be such a prominent part of a show he feared might be a spectacular turkey, though Louis has assured me over 46 times since then that this wasn’t the case. I think I believe him.
In the end Bugsy Malone, which we performed over three nights in early June 1986, was another SPECTACULAR SUCCESS. In fact, I hope you won’t mind if I just take this opportunity to say a few overdue thank-yous.
First of all, to our amazing cast – guys, you were great, and it was such a privilege to work with so many talented people who normally we would have completely ignored in Yard because you were in different years or social groups. It was so cool for us, and probably even more so for you, to get to come together and create such a special JOEADZ event. To our musical director and the wonderful Bugsy Malone band, I just want to say – wow. The music in this production could so easily have been a messy cacophony, and there were times when it looked as though it definitely would be, but when it came down to it you guys pulled it all the way out of the bag. Even the horn parts on ‘My Name Is Tallulah’ only made the audience wince a couple of times. As for our amazing production crew, and all the people – including the cool teachers – who worked so hard to help us bring this show together at a time when some uncool teachers and uptight parents were giving us a lot of shit about not revising for our exams, all I can say is: you were incredible and I hope you didn’t get too hung up on those occasions when Joe and I acted like appalling, spoiled arseholes. At least we didn’t sexually harass any of you. Finally, to the school, thank you for believing in us enough to let us use the special ancient hall where you would normally have been putting on earnest productions of Pinter, Beckett, Stoppard and all that other predictable shit so we could do our ground-breaking production of a children’s film from ten years previously. Sorry about the whipped cream messing up those seventeenth-century wooden carvings, but I think you’ll agree that the amount of fun Joe, Ben and I were clearly having during ‘You Give a Little Love’ more than made up for it. THANKS!
The first of our sixth-form exams happened just a few days after the final performance of Bugsy Malone, so our euphoria and the sense that we were more than just a little bit brilliant was short-lived. It took a further bashing when my parents received that term’s exam results and report cards, which predicted A-level catastrophe. ‘No more plays,’ announced Dad at another tense family supper.
Now that I know the extent of his financial difficulties at the time, I can understand why Dad wanted me to focus on getting the results that he believed would eventually insulate me from a life of similar financial worries. Even if he hadn’t had money problems, I dare say it was reasonable for Dad to be keen that I didn’t screw up my education, but at the time I felt like Billy Elliot, being forced to deny my true fabulousness because it didn’t fit in with my uptight dad’s boring view of the world.
Twitch
To get around the parental play embargo, Joe decided we should make another film. Over a series of damp weekends during winter term 1986 we filmed Twitch, a version of the Sweeny Todd story that Cornish had adapted himself. (The title was a nod to Twitch of the Death Nerve, a 1971 film by Italian slasher pioneer Mario Bava. No, I haven’t seen it either.)
Ben Walden starred once again, this time as psychotic café owner Maxwell Hitch, who along with his murdery wife (played by Susanna Kleeman, transcendent as Tallulah in Bugsy Malone) made meat pies out of their victims and enjoyed a huge upsurge in business subsequently.
My character was Donovan Spanner, a bad-tempered, no-nonsense cop on the trail of Maxwell Hitch. My work in Wars and Malone had showcased my mugging talents, but Twitch was a serious, gritty film drama, and if I was to do justice to the complexities of the part, I needed to step out of my comfort zone as an actor. I decided the best way to do this was to deliver all my lines as if I was absolutely furious, often emphasising the words by pointing aggressively. If even more depth was required, I would sigh, close my eyes and run a hand through my spiky hair.
To play the part of Detective Spanner’s assistant Harvey, a dim-witted and thuggish young policeman, we decided to give a still barely pubescent Louis Theroux one more try. Louis, pleased that the Bugsy Malone incident had been forgotten, was happy to be involved and insisted he was doing his best to be menacing, though Joe and I were concerned he was just playing his part for laughs and compromising the seriousness of the project. Perhaps the material was just beyond his grasp at that stage of his emotional development.
There are some clips of Twitch (as well some of that behind-the-scenes footage from A Few Friends for Dinner) on The Story of Adam and Joe, which can be found on the extras of The Adam and Joe DVD, which can be found in selected charity shops and extinct format museums. Joe’s also been posting a few of those clips on his Instagram page recently. Powerful as they are, I think I prefer Cornish’s more recent films.
At the end of our first sixth-form year our little gang was being compared by some people in school to the Hollywood ‘Brat Pack’, the posse of actors that appeared in films like Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, The Outsiders and The Breakfast Club, all of which we loved.
Unfortunately, the comparisons were heavily sarcastic, and one day I was handed an anonymously written, photocopied ‘Gossip Sheet’ that included a paragraph referring to us as ‘The Prat Pack’. ‘How much longer are they going to subject us to their tedious amateur theatrics?’ asked the author, before complaining that ‘they seem to believe Steven Spielberg will turn up at any moment and whisk them off to Hollywood on his magic carpet’.
Years later, Steven Spielberg did exactly that. At least, he whisked Joe off to Hollywood, along with Edgar Wright, to work with him on Tintin, but apparently there wasn’t enough room on the fucking magic carpet for the most talented, funny and handsome member of The Prat Pack (which was Buckles, in case that wasn’t clear). And by the way, if I had been invited, I wouldn’t have gone on my friend’s podcast and made an anecdote about Tom Cruise doodling on a notepad last over half a decade.