3
LUCKY BASTARD
Emerging from twelve years underground as a chrysalis in Wolverhampton to three years as a butterfly in Cambridge, I was a lucky bastard. Didn’t Napoleon say it is better to be lucky than funny? (No, he didn’t, did he.) Still, I first began to perform comedy at Cambridge University, almost by accident. It was certainly good fortune that I found myself in Pembroke College, for the great Peter Cook had recently been there and people were still quoting him:
“Tragically, I was an only twin.”
“I’d like to invent something really important: like fire.”
It was fairly extraordinary that a lower-middle-class boy like me from a lowly Midlands charity school was accepted, but Cambridge was changing. My education was paid for by Warwickshire County Council, and my old school generously kicked in a decent scholarship, which meant I was better off than many of the public-school boys who had to try to shake down their parents for cash. Packing for Cambridge, I had included a condom I had been optimistically carrying around in my wallet for two years. But in 1962, Cambridge was still a monastic society. There were no females in the all-male Pembroke. Women had their own colleges. I was still going over the wall to meet girls. In order to increase my chances, I joined the Pembroke Players. At their Christmas party, I wrote and performed a cabaret, which was greeted so well I was told I should try out for the Pembroke Smoker, a three-night comedy revue held in the Old Reader underneath the Wren Library. I found myself auditioning for Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie. Isn’t it odd that two future Goodies, Tim and Bill, who would soon have their own BBC TV comedy series with Graeme Garden—who would himself spend two years doing Cambridge Cabaret with me—should be casting a future Python? Odder still was that on my debut they gave me a piece to perform written by John Cleese. John wasn’t at Pembroke, but he dined there every night. He couldn’t appear in the College Smoker because he was not a member of the college, but I could, and he was there at my first-ever public performance, watching me do a sketch he had written for himself. It was called “BBC BC,” about the biblical news. I played a weather forecaster.
Down in the south, well, Egypt has had a pretty nasty spell of it recently. Seventeen or eighteen days ago it was frogs followed by lice, flies, and last Tuesday, locusts, and now moving in from the SSE, boils. Further outlook for Egypt, well, two or three days of thick darkness lying over the face of the whole land, followed by the death of all the first born.
Sorry about that, Egypt.
After the show Humphrey Barclay, a highly talented Harrovian Head Boy who could act, direct, and draw cartoons, introduced me to John Cleese, a very tall man with black hair and piercing dark eyes. They were very complimentary and encouraged me to audition for the Footlights. I had never heard of this University Revue Club, founded in 1883 to perform sketches and comedy shows, but it seemed like a fun thing to do, and a month later Jonathan Lynn and I were voted in by the Committee, after performing to a packed crowd of comedy buffs in the Footlights’ Club Room. Jonathan, a talented actor, writer, and jazz drummer, would go on to direct Pass the Butler, my first play in the West End, and also write and direct Nuns on the Run, a movie with me and Robbie Coltrane. The audition sketch I had written for us played surprisingly well and, strange details, in the front row, lounging on a sofa, laughing with some Senior Fellows, was the author Kingsley Amis, next to the brother of the soon-to-be-infamous Guy Burgess, who would shortly flee the country, outed as perhaps the most flamboyant of all the Cambridge spies—for whenever he was outrageously drunk in Washington, which was every night, he would announce loudly to everybody that he was a KGB spy. Nobody believed him.
I soon adapted to Footlights Club life. We had our own bar, which opened at ten at night and stayed open as long as we wanted. Lunches were provided on the premises and twice a term there were “Smoking Concerts,” where you could try out material. I soon learned a very valuable lesson, for one day I picked up a headmaster sketch written by John and read it and didn’t find it very amusing. That night he performed it and absolutely killed. He brought the place to a standstill. So much is how you do it. That was the most valuable thing about the Footlights, learning the art of writing and performing by watching and doing. That year’s Annual Revue, which ran for two weeks at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, was the funniest thing I had seen since Beyond the Fringe. It was called A Clump of Plinths, a very Cleese kind of title, and John stood out head and shoulders amongst a great cast. Unlike the others, he never ever let on that he was being funny. He was always deadly serious, the deadest of deadpans. I watched in sheer joy. The show toured the U.K. and was then picked up by producer Michael White and put into the West End under the title Cambridge Circus. By that time a tall, gangly, pipe-smoking Graham Chapman had joined the cast. He had studied medicine at Cambridge and was now at St. Barts Hospital, where he was learning to become a fully qualified alcoholic. He also became a doctor, something he frequently warned us about. “Always remember doctors are just ex–medical students.” He was very funny, and odd in a deeply serious way.
Oh, and finally the condom got used, after a Pembroke Players party where a Belgian wardrobe mistress showed me how to wear it and kindly removed me of the burden of enforced chastity, showing me that so often show business is about sex. This was a double kindness, as I had been fending off an aggressive marital attack from a determined Northern Teachers Training College lass, who grudgingly gave up bases, each base surrendered after more compromising promises on my part. Luckily, I realized her game was to have sex only after marriage and she was planning to take me home to Blackpool to meet her mother. I fled. Overseas.
The previous year, in the summer of 1962, just before going up to Cambridge, I had set off hitchhiking through France and Germany with my friend Alan Sinfield. We carried rucksacks and slept in sleeping bags in fields and half-built houses on building sites, heading optimistically for Vienna. We’d been having pretty good fortune with rides when, on the Autobahn entrance just outside Stuttgart, we were picked up by a young German couple in a black Mercedes.
“Where are you heading?”
“Vienna.”
“How about Munich?”
“Wonderful.”
It was a great ride, though the man and his young, apple-cheeked girlfriend didn’t say very much. We stopped for lunch and he generously paid for everything.
“You’re heading for Vienna? Hey, why don’t we stay overnight in Munich and I’ll take you on to Vienna tomorrow? Tonight, we’ll dine at the Hofbrauhaus.”
“Sounds amazing. Gee, thanks.”
He checked us into a little pensione in Munich. Two twin rooms for the night. One for him and his girl, one for us. Fabulous.
“I’m just going to gas the car and then I’ll take you to dinner. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Too busy believing in our own good fortune, we hadn’t even brought the baggage out of the car yet, but his girlfriend was with us, so what could go wrong?
He didn’t return.
Two hours passed. Something was not right.
“Where the hell is he?” we finally demanded of his girlfriend.
She broke down in tears.
She didn’t know him. She wasn’t his girlfriend. He’d picked her up in Pforzheim just before Stuttgart, where he stopped to pick us up.
“What?”
“Shit.”
So, he’d gone, with our rucksacks and everything we owned in the world: passports, traveler’s checks, clothing, underwear, sleeping bags, the lot.
Shit, shit, shit.
The girl was in tears. We had no money. We had to go to the local police with the weeping Fräulein. They took notes and shrugged. We must go to the British Embassy. But it was Friday evening; it wouldn’t open again until Monday. What were we to do? They shrugged. Farewell to the nice pensione. Alan and I had only the clothes on our backs. We slept rough for three nights in the parks and the Munich train station. Finally, on Monday morning we were issued with temporary visas by the British Embassy and given a little cash to get home. We hitched back the way we came, telling our sad tale. The Germans who stopped were all embarrassed by what had happened to us. They went out of their way to be nice, paying for meals and even inviting us into their homes. Broke and baggageless, we slunk back to England. We never saw Vienna.
Still, “Schau immer auf die Sonnenseite des Lebens.”*
Interestingly, we got our rucksacks back. Turns out the man was a North German criminal on the run from Hamburg, wanted by the police. We were probably good cover for him. Eventually they caught him in Italy.
Undeterred by our first experience, we decided to try hitchhiking to Germany again the following year. This time we set out a little more prepared. Alan had some relatives in Berlin who offered us a room, so we hitched as far as Nuremberg, where we stood on the reviewing stand at the national parade grounds where Hitler had stood and did our Charlie Chaplin impersonations. This was as far as we could go. The only way to get to Berlin was through communist East Germany, so we booked ourselves a bus ride.
We should have wondered what was up when we were immediately pulled off the bus and roughly searched by the East German border guards, who interrogated us as to the point of our visit. Two English boys with nothing very much on them; why were they so interested? We had seen no newspapers in three weeks. We found ourselves the only people in Germany totally ignorant of the fact that U.S. president John F. Kennedy was paying a state visit to Berlin the very next day at the height of the Cold War. We were inadvertently at the center of the world.
Alan’s relatives greeted us warmly and we even had beds. Next day we lined the streets with thousands of Berliners to watch the cavalcade go by, sixteen limos of Secret Service followed by seventeen limos of press. Finally, they appeared: Konrad Adenauer, the West German chancellor, and Willy Brandt, the legendary mayor of West Berlin, standing up in the back of an open vehicle flanking the smiling JFK. I remember the shock of his hair, and how surprised I was by his very ruddy appearance. The Germans went nuts. We went home and watched the famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech live on TV. Within an hour, flyers and cards and posters with this slogan appeared on the streets. Turns out he had less than four months to live.
The next day, East German leader Walter Ulbricht visited East Berlin, and the day after that tensions were high as we slipped though Checkpoint Charlie on a closely guarded tour bus to visit the bleak industrial workers’ paradise, which did so much to make one grateful for the West, where you could be theoretically left-wing without having to suffer for it. We rode past a series of ugly 1950s flats. At a distance, Hitler’s bunker, and at the end of every street, always die Mauer: the Wall.
Safely back in West Berlin, we discovered that the Pembroke Players were in town, giving performances of Macbeth. We went along to say hello. Oddly, they had a telegram for me. In Berlin? It was from the Footlights, from Humphrey Barclay. Cambridge Circus was such a success in the West End that they weren’t going to be able to make their Edinburgh Festival booking, so Humphrey wanted me to do it with him and Graeme Garden. I was to report immediately to Cambridge for rehearsals!
* “Always look on the bright side of life.”