What man wears beneath his trousers
Women confide, seldom arouses.
Silken briefs or satin thong
Will make her giggle loud and long
(Of course, you’ll never stand a chance
in saggy, Y-front underpants)
Wear boxer shorts, ideally plain
(Not Disney, cartoons are a pain
in the bum) Tartan only for the Scots
No Stars and Stripes, no polka dots
No Union Jacks or football logos
Phallic jokes? Definitely no-noes
Regard your underwear as a friendly go-between
So teach it manners, and above all, keep it clean.
I am just taking a break from transcribing the above on to a pair of boxer shorts using a laundry marker and wondering if I’m pushing the boundaries of poesy too far. At the beginning of the year, a couple of bright sparks at the Chelsea Arts Club came up with a wheeze to raise money for the Artists Benevolent Fund by inviting sixty artist members to decorate a pair of knickers, which would be modelled, cat-walked and auctioned at the Club on St Valentine’s night. The works of art to be tastefully framed.
I joined the CAC in the seventies, put up for membership by Jim Goddard, the television director. In those days the club wasn’t the trendy, vibrant place it is today, where there’s a two-year waiting list to join; in fact, it was on the bones of its arse. Women weren’t allowed into the main bar, the food was indifferent and the elderly members liked it that way, but on the plus side it had two snooker tables, a late, late licence, and huge leather sofas on which the tired and emotional could kip down for the night. After years of pretending to enjoy whooping it up in West End clubs like the Speakeasy and the Scotch of St James, I came to feel more at home in the bohemian ambience of the Chelsea, particularly when the women moved in, and in fact I became so much part of the place that in 1985 I was elected Club Chairman, the first poet to be so, and served on the Council for five years. (No badge, unfortunately.)
At the time I was working with a photographer friend of mine on an arts project to produce a series of typographical images and poster poems, one of which was:
Out of work, divorced,
Usually pissed.
He aimed low in life,
And my friend suggested the idea of photographing the poem as a piece of graffiti on a gents urinal. But which gents urinal to use? The one at King’s Cross Station? The one in the middle of Clapham Common? The one on Hampstead Heath? We didn’t think so. The one at the Chelsea Arts would be ideal, so we got in there one Thursday morning when the place was quiet, and I inscribed the verse on to the porcelain and he took the photograph. When we had finished he went to the bar to order coffee while I cleaned the graffito off the urinal. It was summer and I was wearing a white Levi’s denim jacket and jeans, and was still crouching, Windowlene and cloth in hand, when a portly gentleman came into the toilet, unzipped and let flow into the stall next to me. ‘Jolly good,’ he boomed. ‘You chaps do a fine job, this place is always spotless.’ I looked up embarrassed and opened my mouth to explain who I was and what I was doing, but too late, he had zipped up and swept out, pleased as punch with his good deed for the day.
In 1967 two television scriptwriters based in Manchester, Tom Brennand and Roy Bottomley, who knew me from my days on Gazette, invited me to audition for a part in a series they had written for ABC television. Sat’day While Sunday was a series that followed the lives of a group of teenagers over a weekend and was transmitted over the two nights. Sarah-Jane Gwillim played Charlotte, a well-todo student who had two boys in love with her, one the tough working-class son of a docker and the other a mill owner’s son. They were to be the first television roles for two young actors straight out of drama school, Tim Dalton and Malcolm McDowell. I’ll let you be the casting director and choose which one got to wear the most expensive clothes. Although the series was to be filmed on location in the north-west, the production office was at the studios in Teddington and that is exactly where I turned up for the audition.
The sign on the door said James Goddard so I knocked and, on hearing a growl, went in. Sitting behind a desk in front of a panoramic window, Jim blocked out most of the view. He bulged in a blue denim shirt, had a fierce crew cut and a Zapata moustache, but as far as I can recall he wasn’t flicking a bull-whip. Teaching suddenly seemed an attractive occupation. He sat me down, tried to put me at my ease and asked me to read the part of the Narrator. I did my best, but it didn’t go well and Jim stopped me: ‘It’s not you, is it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Narrator, he doesn’t sound real. Look, I’m going for lunch, so why don’t you stay here, sit at the desk and rewrite a couple of those speeches in your own voice?’ And so I did, and Jim was pleased, and Tom and Roy were happy for me to write my own scenes, and within a month I was rehearsing in Teddington with Tim, Malcolm, and up-and-coming actors such as Michael Pennington, Brian Marshall and David Yelland.
Before the series I would have taken money on the fact that McDowell, because of his Liverpool working-class roots, would be the one I’d pal up with, but it was Tim Dalton and I who pubbed and clubbed together, when we were both billeted at the Brown Bull near the Granada studios in Manchester. It was an infamous drop-in centre for drop-outs, sports journalists, footballers, actors and whoever happened to be passing through town and wasn’t in a hurry to go to bed. There’s Germaine Greer in the corner being outrageously sexy and loud with Kenny Everett and the team from Nice Time, whose young producer John Birt was at St Mary’s when I was there. And who’s that shy, good-looking feller besieged at the bar? Georgie Best, of course, and don’t the journos love him so much that they buy him drink after drink?
‘Could be one of the greats,’ says one to another, getting them in, ‘if he’d only stop drinking.’
Had this not been a true and honest account of my remembered life, I could have exaggerated my part in this ground-breaking drama. Claimed that I had played the leading role in it, that I had blown Tim and Malcolm off the screen, but I won’t, because this is a true and honest account. Common sense prevails, of course, but any false claims would be impossible to disprove because TV shows weren’t videoed in those days and all the tapes will have been destroyed. I do have a copy, though, of the TV Times for October 1967 with a moody picture of me on the front, and a quote from the Daily Express critic saying that I was ‘The most promising TV newcomer of the year’. And so ended my brief but most promising career in television.
But you want to hear more about those knickers, don’t you? I had decided early on to leave drawing, painting and design in the hands of Peter Blake, Patrick Hughes and other experts in the field. My left field would be a short poem, but the idea of knickers didn’t really appeal, too flimsy for a start, and the thought of a young lady’s mons Veneris cosying up to my words of genius put me into creative freeze-frame. Whenever I get a commission to write something that involves a deadline, I don’t usually become motivated until the death threats start coming in. Now this was a commitment rather than a commission, but even so, time was running out and I couldn’t crack the knicker problem. The answer, as it always does, lay close at hand.
A tip for the poet, painter, musician asked to create something new: re-create something old. Rummaging through my file of unpublished poems, odds and ends, bibs and bobs, I came across a verse I had written for a British Council touring exhibition in 2000 called ‘Inside Out, Underwear and Style in the UK’, which had been printed on a card and distributed to all the venues. Seemingly, there was an abundance, nay, a plethora, of hymns of praise in honour of ladies’ lingerie, so the curator had specifically requested something about men’s underwear, and here was a verse that cried out not for scanties, but for capacious white cotton boxer shorts. After various failed attempts with print and Letraset, I eventually wrote it out in my best joined-up writing using a laundry marker, and they were sold to the highest bidder on St Valentine’s night for six hundred knicker.