Discretion is the better part of Valerie
though all of her is nice
lips as warm as strawberries
eyes as cold as ice
the very best of everything
only will suffice
not for her potatoes
and puddings made of rice.
I remember half waking one morning in the sun-filled bedroom of a house in north London and listening to the first four lines of the poem ‘Discretion’ repeating in my head as clearly as if they were being broadcast on the radio. Having satisfied myself that there was no radio in the room and that I hadn’t overheard anybody else saying them, I got up, made coffee and wrote the first draft of the poem in one sitting. It’s a rare occurrence when a poem gifts itself to the brain in that way. Had it simply thrown up the reworking of ‘Discretion is the better part of valour’ that might have been the end of it, an amusing turn of cliché, but in this case Valerie appeared not only fully formed as a character, but humming a tune and carrying a rhyming scheme … ‘nice, ice, suffice, ice, vice, trice’ … all those ‘s’s, the serpent in the Garden of Eden. All I had to do was pick up a pen and follow instructions.
Valerie is corruptible
but known to be discreet
Valerie rides a silver cloud
Where once she walked the street.
runs the last verse, which I thought rounded off the portrait of a high-class hooker, until I had a letter from a writers’ group in Hampshire wondering if I could settle a little argument for them. Could I explain what the poet was getting at in the last verse, because half of the group believed that ‘Valerie rides a silver cloud’ suggested that she was in heaven and that ‘Discretion’ was, in fact, a love poem about necrophilia.
The house in Kilburn belonged to Anthony Smith, later President of Magdalen College, and head of the British Film Institute, but then the young producer of At the Eleventh Hour, the BBC’s satirical programme that went out live on Saturday nights beginning in January 1968. The cast included Richard Neville, one of the founders of Oz magazine, Miriam Margolyes, having stepped straight out of the Cambridge Footlights and still blinking, as well as a journalist who, despite his orientation, played the straight man. Ray Davies, loosening the ties that bound him to the Kinks, provided a topical song and I wrote a sketch each week for the Scaffold, becoming quickly aware of the limitations of having to include three male characters every time. (Unlike the Pythons, we wouldn’t be seen dead wearing women’s clothes.) I was also commissioned to write and perform a poem relating to the week’s events. By Tuesday I would have written a poem about the subject that Tony had chosen and sent it down from Liverpool. He was always enthusiastic about it, but when I arrived at the BBC’s Lime Grove Studios on Thursday he would have cooled: ‘Really fine piece of work, Roger, but … well, perhaps too personal … Too poetic. Besides, we’re not doing the devaluation of the pound this week; instead, we’ll be looking at student unrest in Poland.’
Tony had kindly invited me to stay over at his house while in London writing and rehearsing, but inevitably, whenever Saturday loomed large and threatening, I would not have written the dreaded poem and so would lock myself into a dressing room with my Muse (the one called ‘Panikos’) and would not emerge until I had the requisite number of verses. Tony’s assistant and the PA on the programme was a bright slip of a girl called Esther Rantzen who, despite being just down from Oxford (or because of it), had the Scaffold sitting up straight and minding their ‘p’s and ‘q’s in a way that grown men, looming large and threatening, had never managed to do. It was she who would come to my dressing room with a sandwich and a cup of tea at midday with instructions from the control box that after a timing of the first run-through, the programme was short by four minutes ten seconds, so that was how long the poem should be, only to return later in the afternoon with the news that Ray Davies would be repeating a chorus and so the poem should be cut to two minutes twenty.
I was never fazed by the discipline of writing to order under that sort of pressure and always managed to turn out verse that worked when performed live on camera, although I have to confess that the weaker the poem, the more time I’d spend in wardrobe picking out a natty outfit and the longer I’d spend in make-up. While some of my efforts written at the eleventh hour were never to see the printed page, others were to form the core of my first book to be published by Cape in 1969, Watchwords, which at my request they stopped reprinting in 1983 because the only poems that were still breathing were ones that had never seen the inside of a television studio.
Luckily the Scaffold were able to escape the confines of the studios for a few hours each week when the sketches were filmed on location, somewhere exotic like on the pavement in Lime Grove, or outside a pub in Shepherd’s Bush. Our director was a young man who always looked as if he’d been partying into the early hours and rushed to the set straight from the arms of a pouting Turkish belly dancer. No doubt totally unkind and untrue, and for all Stephen Frears’s rumpled wistfulness, we got along so well that he was later to be immortalised in the Scaffold’s most famous song:
Stephen Frears had sticky-out ears
And they made him awful shy.
So they gave him medicinal compound
Now he’s learning how to fly.
For the record (not the vinyl), Stephen’s ears were perfectly formed and much admired by those who worked with him on both sides of the camera. And while we’re being honest, I think that Mike, John and I couldn’t help but be disappointed in the years that followed that, having learned his trade with us on the streets of Shepherd’s Bush, he never offered us roles, even small cameo parts in any of the films he directed. High Fidelity might have been written for us and My Beautiful Laundrette would have provided just the challenge we enjoyed.
Ridley Scott is another famous film director who worked with us, and surprisingly failed to spot the Hollywood potential. We spent a couple of days together on the Thames near Maidenhead, filming a TV commercial for Watney’s Beer. It was in early March and the sun was as watery and pale as the ale whose virtues we extolled to the tune of ‘Lily the Pink’. We spent most of the time in our white suits, punting up and down the river through a fog of green smoke pumped out from the banks, lit from above by a lighting rig on loan from Wembley Stadium, and it felt most of the time as if we were crossing the Mekong Delta. Even though Watney’s Pale was perhaps the only beer we found undrinkable, we acted our little thermal socks off and the clients were duly pleased with the commercial. Moreover we three men in a boat, having got along famously with the young director, looked forward to working with him again. For some reason it was not to be. And although a great film, am I the only one who believes that Alien would have been even more successful had it included a couple of scenes in which three Scousers say funny things and perhaps sing a song or two?