Although television programmes like the Johnny Carson Show were popular in the States, the chat show format was relatively new in this country when James Lloyd was signed up by ABC to host a live Saturday night show called Gazette. Among the day’s celebrities, who talked and walked were The Avengers’ Patrick Macnee, Barry Humphries looking like a young Charles Baudelaire, Spike Milligan and Jonathan Miller, and there was a music spot featuring one of the up-and-coming bands of the day: ‘Them’, fronted by a baby-faced Van Morrison, Lulu and the Lovers, the Kinks, Spencer Davis and Manfred Mann, many of whom were making their first appearance on television.
As were the Scaffold, of course. We had decided on the name at a time when we considered ourselves mainly satirists, with the idea of heads rolling and reputations left hanging. We dressed all in black, with cotton gloves, so that we wouldn’t be mistaken for guitarists. One of my favourite quotations, which I failed to work into our publicity material, was from the Victorian murderer Charlie Peace, whose last words with the rope round his neck were: ‘What is the scaffold but a short cut to paradise?’ As the act evolved we dropped the sinister gallows element to embrace the word’s more common usage, as in building construction, which gave rise to a glut of photographs of us draped around rusty pipes making jokes about scaffold erections.
Which segues neatly but coarsely into Sheila Fearn, a young actress in the Barbara Windsor mould whom the company brought in to add glamour, and some professionalism, to the resident ‘trio of lively wacker wits’. We were also assigned a director, Clive Goodwin, to work with us during the week, helping choose and rehearse material for the show. Clive was a left-wing, right-on Londoner, cultured, suave and handsome, obviously someone we just had to take the piss out of. He was wary of us, of course, as well as being outnumbered, and saddled initially with prejudices about life oop north, although after a few nights clubbing around Liverpool’s hotspots we unsaddled him and a strong friendship was forged on the anvil of improvisation.
‘Improv’, as it was to become known, arrived at ABC’s Didsbury studios via Chicago, where a group known as Second City performed improvised comedy on television. Obviously, charades and similar parlour games that involve people taking it in turns, most of them reluctantly, to make fools of themselves, were invented by show-offs, so I’ve never been a fan of actors or comics competing with each other on stage to grab the punchline, for not only does it encourage limelight theft, but it puts the writer out of a job. However, as the first comedy group in this country to improvise weekly on live television were the Scaffold, I may have to take some of the blame for its popularity twenty-odd years later.
What happened was this: on taking their seats in the studio, the audience would be given a selection of the week’s newspapers and asked to choose the headlines that caught their eye. Before the commercial break, James Lloyd would read out half a dozen of the most popular and say that we’d be back after the adverts to perform some improvised sketches based on those headlines. So while the nation was being sold the virtues of ‘Strand’ cigarettes or ‘Murraymints, Murraymints, the too good to hurry mints’, Clive would be sifting through the headlines in the hope of finding ones that we’d picked out during the week and rehearsed. Just as we did, the audience would pass over headlines such as HAROLD WILSON TO MEET BREZHNEV IN MOSCOW and HOTEL BURNED DOWN IN MANILA, MANY LIVES LOST in favour of LARGE DANES TOLD TO HAVE COATS TRIMMED and US FLIES IN HAMBURGERS, which we would improvise in the relative safety of ABC’s rehearsal rooms in Teddington, and perform live to camera on Saturday, punchlines guaranteed. With a couple of sure-fire sketches under our belt, we could then improvise around the unseen headline until time ran out. (And it’s no use all you purists out there muttering, ‘Hey, that’s cheating.’ Because it wasn’t. Not really. And anyway, we hadn’t been to drama college or anything. So there.)
As the average age of studio audiences tended to be in the lower seventies and the show went out well after their bedtime at 11.05 p.m., the producers came up with the idea of transporting our fans from Liverpool to Didsbury to laugh loudly and scream politely (thankfully, nobody whooped in those days). When the transmission was over they all piled into the coaches and the night swallowed them up. Meanwhile we all piled into the Hospitality Room and swallowed up the night.
These days, after a chat show, guests are encouraged to rush straight home or, on special occasions (like the producer’s just been sacked) they may be invited upstairs to toy with a crisp and a glass of wine. But this was the golden age of post-show bacchanalia, so imagine a bar on the Titanic when news got around that the ship was safe and it was the iceberg that had gone down. Nothing beats a pint of shandy in the cricket pavilion after a day in the out field, or the frosted flute of champagne that welcomes you into the reception, but nothing quite matches the first triple Scotch and Coke that winks at you from the bar when you’ve just come off the set after a live TV performance. Except, perhaps, the second. Or, possibly, the third.
‘A man is never happy for the present, but when he is drunk,’ Dr Johnson once dictated, and yesterday I was in Laugharne (pronounced ‘Larn’, as in ‘If you pass me the yaugharne, I’ll daugharne your socks after I’ve milked the cows in the baugharne’) recording Poetry Please, which we called Booze and the Muse, about poets and their relationship with alcohol. Brown’s Hotel on the high street of this lovely coastal village in south-west Wales is where Dylan Thomas drank, with or without Caitlin, and, according to legend, eavesdropped on bar room conversations to provide him with lines and characters for Under Milk Wood. Mind you, this seems a bit too good to be true unless you can imagine the scene in the snug on a wet Wednesday evening.
LANDLORD Well, here comes Dai the Fish. Had a good day, boyo?
DAI Aye, I’ve been out on the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea, and I’ve got a thirst like a dredger, so give me a pint of stout, will you. It’s quiet in here tonight.
LANDLORD Aye, you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. That will be one shilling and fourpence.
DAI I see Dylan the Eavesdrop is up to his old tricks, pretending to be so busy doing the crossword he can’t hear us. Watch this. Good evening, Mr Thomas, Caitlin still in London, is she?
DYLAN Yes, Dai, she’ll be back home tomorrow.
DAI I bet you can’t wait, eh? Whacking-thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-brass’d and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely hotwaterbottled body.
DYLAN That’s right, Dai, yes. ‘Barnacle-breasted’, that’s one word, is it?
LANDLORD And here comes Back-to-front Binyon. Good evening Back-to-front, and what have you been doing all day?
BINYON Me? Oh, Llareggub.
As part of the programme I talked to Tommy Watts, who had been the publican for over thirty-five years, and he reckoned that it was the morphine that doctors gave him in the New York hospital that did for Dylan, rather than the nineteen straight whiskeys. According to Tommy he was a diabetic, and in Brown’s he always drank halves and only pretended to be drunk because that’s what people expected of him. Personally, I think that only a drunk would pretend to be drunk, halves or no halves, but I agree that people’s misconceptions of ‘The Poet’ can lead to fiction skewing dangerously towards reality.
In February 1976 I was invited to launch a newly built library in south London, where I was to read my poems for thirty minutes before officially declaring the building open. The chief librarian proudly showed me around, then took me into his office where I could relax and prepare myself for the performance. ‘I know what you poets are like,’ he said, and opened a cupboard to reveal six crates of Guinness. As far as I know, the reading went OK but I don’t remember getting back to Liverpool.
One Saturday night after Gazette we were celebrating the sinking of yet another iceberg in the Hospitality Suite when three of the guests, Jonathan Miller, Willie Rushton – then starring in That Was the Week that Was – and ace war photographer and Steve McQueen lookalike Don McCullin, all expressed the desire to sample the delights of Liverpool’s clubland, so we quickly downed our drinks in time to catch the magical mystery fan-packed coach. On the East Lancs road on the outskirts of Liverpool we were forced to a halt by the flashing blue light of a police patrol car. From the vantage point of the high coach windows we could see a upturned Mini and a crowd of people on the grass verge beside the road. I was first off the bus, ‘Let me through, let me through,’ I cried, ‘I’m a poet.’ But as the onlookers stood back it was the qualified doctor, Jonathan Miller, who was first at the scene. Kneeling on the grass and sobbing hysterically was a young woman cradling to her breast a young man who appeared to be unconscious and bleeding from a head wound. Dr Miller knelt beside the couple and spoke softly. The girl looked at him, still dazed but comforted by his presence, then she looked over his shoulder and saw through her tears Mike standing there. She dropped the young man’s head into her lap as she brought her hands to her mouth: ‘Mike McCartney! Wake up, Jimmy, wake up. It’s Paul McCartney’s brother!’