From the mid-1980s onwards I was kept busy with a more or less huge writing workload and, after attending to new Me and My Girl openings on Broadway and in Australia, I found myself in the grip of a persistent, ankle-nipping producer called Dan Patterson. This, you should know, was before the coke days. We’re looking at 1985 or ’6, I think.
Dan and I met when he shadowed Paul Mayhew-Archer, a BBC radio comedy producer later to find more acclaim as the man in charge of most of the numerous series of My Family featuring Me and My Girl’s star Robert Lindsay. Paul was directing me in a series called Delve Special, in which I played a hapless investigative journalist. The series was written by Tony Sarchet and recorded, unusually for radio, ‘on location’. Which is to say that, rather than using the standard sound effects gravel tray for walking and the three-textured staircase (wood, stone and carpet) and stand-alone car doors and front doors and bedroom doors with which studios were comically furnished, Paul decided for reasons of verisimilitude that we should take a Uher recording device up to the Broadcasting House roof, or on the street in Portland Place, or in some cupboard or busy Woman’s Hour or The World At One production office.
Dan Patterson arrived as a work-experience observer and within seconds was bombarding me with questions. In Oxford, where his father David was a pioneering professor of Hebrew studies, Dan had seen our 1981 Cambridge Footlights revue and could quote huge chunks of it by heart. He was recently back from a trip to America, where the new world of improvisation had opened up before him like some beautiful flower. Now he was back and keen to get going as a producer himself. I have never met anything that wasn’t a puppy so boisterously excitable, keen, persuasive and determined.
Before I knew what I was doing I had agreed to write six radio comedy programmes and to be in a new series featuring the kind of improvisation that Dan had seen and been so struck by in America. This latter was Whose Line Is It Anyway?, a jokey approximation of the title of the hit play and film Whose Life Is It Anyway? The show was hosted by Clive Anderson, who had been a coeval of Griff Rhys Jones and others at Cambridge, but taken a different course into law, where he had eaten his dinners, as their jargon has it, and been called to the Bar, or is it inducted? In other words, as any less magnificently potty country would put it, he had qualified as a legal advocate. He was a barrister.
The only other regular in the series was John Sessions, a phenomenally talented mimic (he had worked regularly on Spitting Image) whose one-man shows combined impersonation, deep learning and almost unbelievably vivid and poetical writing.
The show suited his talents perfectly. He could instantly tell the Red Riding Hood story in the style of Ernest Hemingway or D. H. Lawrence or whichever author, actor or indeed rock star was thrown at him by Clive or a frenetic studio audience. Anyone from Anthony Burgess to Keith Richards, by way of EastEnders stars and BBC weather reporters, was grist to his remarkable mimetic mill. From our Footlights days the ever-huggable Tony Slattery forged ahead on the show too, as did Josie Lawrence, who specialized in improvising song lyrics and tunes with astonishing rapidity and brilliance with the help of pianist Richard Vranch, who had been with us at Cambridge and whose remarkable ear and talent for impromptu accompaniment to this day regularly supports performers in London’s Comedy Store. As far as I can recall, and nothing would induce me to listen to a minute’s worth of tape to confirm this, I just stood there saying ‘botty’ or occasionally managing some kind of actual joke or apt remark.
It was a remarkable success, and, as did a lot of radio comedies (including Delve Special, which changed its name to This Is David Lander for reasons that I cannot recall), it soon transferred to television. I baulked, agreeing reluctantly to appear twice. It made household names of John, Tony, Clive and Josie – well, in the kinds of scrubbed-pine households that marked out the middle-class viewer in those days. I only consented to do a second appearance because Peter Cook was going to be on. We were both a little the worse for drink, and both deeply uncomfortable. The funniest man alive, the most brilliant extempore wit that ever breathed in my lifetime, was not suited in any way to the ordeal of the programme. Nor was he. Kidding.
I think it was the upstage stools that I could not abide. Having to dismount from them, as if summoned down to the play-mat by Miss Spanky at some frightful kindergarten. Dan has continued his stool obsession (that sounds so wrong) with his highly successful Mock the Week.
But the other programme Dan pushed me into – well, it was hardly pushing – was one which would be of my own devising. It was called Saturday Night Fry, it is still available online, and, though I shouldn’t say so, I really am very proud of it. I wrote all the episodes in one huge burst of energy over little more than a week and I think I was genuinely inspired. All my love of radio, a love that went back to my earliest memories, was poured into the construction of the scripts. I was helped knowing that Hugh and Emma and the matchless Jim Broadbent had already agreed to be a part of it.
At this time I was sharing a house in Dalston with Hugh, his girlfriend, Katie Kelly, and Nick Symonds, a mutual friend from Cambridge. I related in The Fry Chronicles how Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, our painter decorators recommended by new friend Harry Enfield, seemed unusually gifted and amusing.
This was, looking back, a very productive time for me. Aside from Saturday Night Fry, I produced occasional pieces for Arena magazine and every week an article for the Listener. One of these, called ‘Licking Thatcher’ (a feeble title playing on the title of the David Hare theatre work* Licking Hitler), was a more than faintly impertinent call for Neil Kinnock to be more assured, confident and self-possessed when facing Margaret Thatcher across the dispatch boxes in the then twice-weekly verbal fencing matches of parliamentary Prime Minister’s Question Time, popularly known as PMQs. ‘He should give the impression that being Leader of the Opposition is the best job in the world under this régime,’ I wrote, or some such twaddle. ‘He should smile not snarl, shake his head with laughter at her crudeness, philistinism and asininity rather than shouting his head off in a lather of righteous indignation.’
I was very delighted to receive a letter a few days later with an embossed portcullis on the back of the envelope declaring in green heraldic splendour its House of Commons origin. Neil Kinnock was inviting me to join his team of speech-writers. I thought it rather classy of him to read a pissy critique of his manner from some Oxbridge upstart and, rather than dismiss it, invite him on board. I cannot claim for a second that I actually wrote an entire speech for him or for the two subsequent Labour leaders, John Smith, loved by all who knew him and sadly wrenched away from the world by a heart attack well before his time, and his successor Tony Blair, loved by … well … Once Tony had won in 1997 let’s just say it stopped being fun. Writing for the underdog is infinitely more challenging and amusing.
Bit of gossip, though, which isn’t too mean. I’m holding back on cruel revelations until I’m dead. A few weeks after he had been elected Prime Minister in 1997, Tony and Cherie Blair sent me an invitation to dinner at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s ex officio country house. The invitation said ‘informal’, which in the strange British world of etiquette means, when referring to a dinner, ‘not black tie’. Similarly, the phrase ‘we don’t dress for dinner’ indicates that dark suits shall be worn, rather than dinner jackets. Well, so I understood, having grown up in this preposterous nobby British tradition. Yes, you are right: I secretly love it. Not so secretly.
As it fell out, I was the first to arrive at the grand Tudor mansion, ushered into the great hall by a pretty and slightly nervous blonde WAAF. Servicemen and -women customarily take turns to serve at such occasions. I sipped sherry and admired the furnishings and fitments for five minutes before Tony Blair, twenty days into his premiership, doe-eyed enough to have been nicknamed Bambi, pattered down the stairs before skidding to an abrupt halt at the sight of me. He was wearing a denim shirt and pale chinos.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘didn’t the invitation say “informal”?’
‘I took that to mean no dinner jacket,’ I said.
He looked aghast. ‘Do you think everyone else will think that?’
‘There’s a strong chance,’ I told him.
By this time Cherie had arrived, and there was much confabulation before the PM hared upstairs to change.
Everyone else did indeed arrive in dark lounge suits, as they are revoltingly called. I thought Tony’s (as one was always encouraged to call him) ignorance of these matters was rather touching. It is all absurd snobbery and unguessable usage after all.
I was impressed that the Blairs had invited Betty Boothroyd, the retired Speaker of the House, and Giles Wilson, mathematician son of Harold and Mary Wilson. Wilson Junior had never been back to the house he might have been said almost to have grown up in, and not once had Betty been asked to Chequers throughout her Speakership during the days of Thatcher and Major.
I recall getting rather drunk on a very fine cognac that was one of the gifts Jacques Chirac had brought the week before when he had been the first Chequers guest of the Blair premiership. Upstairs after dinner I found the red box that all government members are given by their civil servants at the end of the day. I knew they contained papers that our leaders had to work through. A scarlet leather case, stamped with the royal arms, the red box is one of the great mystical fetish objects in British politics. When no one was looking I committed the treasonable act of flicking the latches and lifting the lid. I was rather astonished, which I should not have been, to see that instead of papers, the box revealed the keyboard of a laptop computer. The astonishment came as much from my knowledge that Blair had no understanding of computers at all, despite his call of ‘a laptop for every child’ in the recent election. Still, it was a sign of the times.
My task for the Labour Party, from Neil Kinnock onwards, had been to write what I called ‘bolt-on modules’, paragraphs that addressed whatever it was that Jonathan Powell and others in Neil’s/Tony’s office thought needed addressing. I am pleased to say I had nothing to do with the disastrous Sheffield triumphalism that many believe dashed Kinnock’s chances of defeating John Major in 1992, but I cannot claim that a single paragraph, sentence, phrase or word of mine made the slightest impact on British politics. It probably only served to annoy more people who found ‘Labour luvvies’ instinctively repellent than it attracted to the party. The idea that I would vote Conservative because Kenny Everett or, heaven help us, Jimmy Savile encouraged us to do so is clearly nonsensical and insulting. I always wanted to keep my name out of the list of prominent Labour supporters for just that reason.
*
While we’re in gossipy mood, I suppose I might as well get His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales out of the way. It is fairly well known, amongst those who know these kinds of things fairly well, that I am an admirer of the PoW, and, I believe, vice versa. This puzzles, confuses, angers and distresses some who think that either I am blind to what they consider egregious faults in the Prince, or that I am sycophantic to, and glamourized by, an institution for which they have nothing but contempt. I don’t mean in this book to defend the monarchy, which institution must of course appear like an oddity to many. My own view is that, since we have it and since it gives such pleasure to so many, especially around the world, it would be folly to get rid of it. The backside of whom are we going to lick when we send a letter in the Republic of Britain? William Hague? Harriet Harman? An elected British President will not glamourize the heads of state of other countries when they come on a state visit. Compared to carriages, crowns, orbs and ermine, an entry-level Jaguar and Marks & Spencer suit offer no edge over other nations when vying for trade advantages. By definition half the country will despise a Labour President or a Conservative one, and you can bet your bottom dollar that politicians will ensure that, if we do become a republic, there will be little other choice than the major parties. Which, at the time of writing, might include UKIP. Lovely.
I also admire the tradition of the Prime Minister having to visit the monarch weekly and use him or her as an echo-chamber. I tell Americans that it is the equivalent of their President once a week being obliged to pay a call on Uncle Sam, assuming that that universally recognizable symbol of the nation were a real, bearded fellow in striped trousers and spangled coat. If a man as powerful as a President or a Prime Minister has to explain what he is doing, what he has enacted, how he has responded to this crisis or that, to someone who represents the nation in a way he or she cannot, I think it keeps them from going too power-crazy.
Many people, to return to the man in question, know more about military history than the Prince of Wales; many know more about architecture; many know more about agriculture; many know more about painting; many know more about flying; many know more about sailing; many know more about riding; many know more about horticulture, cheeses, geography, botany, environmental science and so on and so on and so on. You see where I am going. I can honestly say that I have never met anyone who knows more about all those things. This makes him, at least as far as I am concerned, good and interesting company. He was way ahead of the curve when it came to many environmental and agricultural issues, but there remain many things I fundamentally disagree with him about. Homoeopathy for one, and what seems to me his dangerous instinctive distrust of science and fondness for ‘faith’ for another. I am much more disposed to like some modern architecture than he seems to be. But if disagreements over such matters were causes for scourging and falling out, then who would ’scape whipping, as the man said?
I first got to know him quite well when I found myself at one of those line-ups after a comedy show of some kind in 1990 or thereabouts. He had heard, I think through Rowan Atkinson, that I had a house in the country not far from the royal residence at Sandringham in Norfolk.
‘I believe we’re neighbours,’ he said.
‘Indeed, sir,’ I said. (Oh! Remind me to tell you a story about Penn Jillette. You’ll love it.)
‘We absolutely adore Norfolk,’ the Prince said. Quite the right thing to say.
‘You must come and visit me over Christmas,’ I said, knowing that this was the season when the royal family spent most of their Sandringham time.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ he murmured as he moved on to the next bowing comic in the line.
I thought very little more about it. That Christmas in Norfolk I had a houseful. Something like fourteen people, I believe. I had somehow managed to provide stockings for them all on Christmas Eve (a fantastical effort of wrapping and Sellotaping on the snooker table, an ideal surface for Christmas) and made a chestnut soup, roasted a turkey and provided the approved pudding, bedight with Christmas holly on top, as Dickens phrases it. A week of game playing, film-watching, snoozing and light walking had followed. It was a period when I was off the powder and all the better for it.
One morning I was making hollandaise for Eggs Benedict, a breakfast dish I pride myself in having mastered to the point of professional excellence. Hollandaise, like mayonnaise or any emulsified sauce, takes concentration. The melted butter mustn’t be poured too quickly into the egg yolk or the mixture will split. A thin, steady stream is called for. This I was achieving when the phone went.
‘Someone answer it!’
Fourteen people slumbering, showering or shagging … not one of them, it seems, capable of answering the bloody telephone.
‘Will someone just … oh never mind!’ Abandoning that consignment of hollandaise to failure, I strode to the phone and yanked it from its bracket.
‘Yes,’ I barked testily.
‘Um, can I speak to Stephen Fry, please?’
‘This is he.’
‘Ah, it’s the Prince of Wales here.’
A moment. A heartbeat, no more. And in that short series of milliseconds my brain had instructed my mouth to say: ‘Oh fuck off, Rory.’
But somehow one always knows when one is listening to the real thing, not to Rory Bremner or any another impressionist, no matter how skillful. That same brain sent an even faster order to overtake and countermand the first.
‘Hello, sir!’ I managed to choke. ‘I’m afraid you caught me trying to make a hollandaise sauce …’
‘Ah. I’m so sorry. I was wondering, um, wondering about taking you up on that offer and, um, coming for tea?’
‘Of course. That would be marvellous. Absolutely splendid. When did you have in mind?’
‘How about New Year’s Day?’
‘Fabulous. I look forward to it.’
I replaced the phone carefully in its cradle. Hmmm.
I stood in the hallway of the house and, like Rik or Mike in The Young Ones, called ‘House meeting!’ at the top of my voice. Slowly people appeared at the heads of stairways and grumblingly made their way down, like the guests in the fire-alarm scene in Fawlty Towers. It was probably about eight in the morning, and I am long used to the dislike and annoyance my being a cheerful morning lark engenders. Most people are owls and take a lot of getting up.
‘Look, sorry everyone, but the day after tomorrow the Prince of Wales is coming for tea.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Ha fucking ha.’
‘You woke me up for this?’
I held up a hand. ‘Seriously. He really is.’
But I had lost my audience, who were already tightening their dressing-gown cords and trudging back up the stairs.
It was only when, on the following day, a dark green Range Rover appeared that I was finally truly believed. Two detectives and a dog got out, cordially welcomed a proffered tea and poked around … for what we were unable to ascertain. After this cursory security screening of the house and a multitude of chocolate Hobnobs they had gone. My house guests swarmed around me.
‘Well!’
‘Oh my lord!’
‘What on earth am I going to wear?’
All of us adults were traditionally and pleasingly left-leaning without being rude, yet now we found ourselves to be as flushed and excited as a kennelful of beagle puppies hearing the clink of the leash.
We all arose early the next morning. Why I didn’t photograph Hugh Laurie hoovering the drawing-room carpet I have no idea. It would be worth millions in blackmail money today. Ah well.*
Everything is polished, swept, cleaned, washed, waxed and prepared. Teapots are at the ready, kettles half on and half off the hottest ring of the Aga. Bread, crumpets and muffins piled up for toasting. Butter softened. Jars of homemade blackcurrant jam and lemon curd (two Christmases’ worth of presents from my brother’s sister-in-law). Sandwiches are cut. Honey! I know he likes honey in his tea! A pot of runny honey is found somewhere. Has it gone off? Honey can’t go off, I am assured, a fact that is many years later confirmed for me by a QI elf. A wooden honey spoon is discovered in a drawer. The drawer also reveals a better tea-strainer, a proper silver one, not the rather naff Present From Hunstanton which was all I thought I had. Another teapot and a big Dundee cake for his police security men, who will be able to eat in the kitchen. Oh God, have we overdone it? Battenberg cake … hell, he might think we’re taking the piss. Battenberg was his family name once.
We leave the kitchen and crowd into the drawing room, which has a view through the drawn curtains of the driveway. It is dark, of course, and has been since early afternoon. It is only a week and a few days since the shortest day of the year. Hugh, who is diligent at this kind of duty, takes the log basket out to reload it. The fire is roaring splendidly, but you cannot have too many logs. Jon Canter, writer and friend, checks the candles that are artfully disposed around the room. I am still twitching one curtain and looking out into the night. Kim and Alastair are twitching another curtain and giggling like Japanese schoolgirls.
Headlamps, as in Dornford Yates novels, stab the air and sweep the hedgerows. But they are bypassing the driveway. We all look at our watches. Was it after all some gigantic hoax?
Then, before we even seem to know what is upon us, the gravel is crunched alive with the sound of two cars skidding to a halt before the front door.
‘Right,’ I say, ‘let’s …’
They have all scrammed. Skedaddled. Vamoosed.
‘Cowards!’ I just have time to shout before gulping, breathing deeply and placing myself on the mat. The front doorbell is rung. If I open the door immediately it will look as if I have been waiting like an uncool cat, which I have been and am, but I count to fifteen to dispel the idea and, just as the second peal begins, swing open the door with a smile.
‘Your Royal Highness …’
‘Hullo. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve brought my wife.’
Out of the shadows steps Princess Diana. She lowers her head and looks up in that characteristic fashion, captured so many times by Mario Testino and a thousand other photographers, smiling from under her lashes. ‘Hello, Stephen,’ she sweetly murmurs.
I conduct them into the drawing room. They look around and say approving things about my house. It has six bedrooms and is by no means a cottage, but it would fit comfortably into a half of one Sandringham wing. Well, it is all mine, inasmuch as I earned it and didn’t inherit it, so I can’t be that ashamed. I am not sure ‘earned’ is the right word, but this isn’t the time to go into that.
Slowly the house guests emerge like shy, hungry zoo animals at feeding time. Introductions are effected, the policemen shown into the kitchen by the back door. Is that rude and disrespectful? They don’t show offence, but then they wouldn’t. Of the Dundee cake not a crumb was left behind, so I must assume they felt at home.
Back in the drawing room. Hugh and Jo’s first child, Charlie, is just at the toddling stage. He lurches zombie-like towards the television (yes, there is a television in my drawing room, which the Prince and you persons of tone and breeding must think grotesquely common, but there we are) and switches it on, a child entirely of his generation. Jo screams out ‘Charlie!’ and the Prince of Wales, one assumes unused to being addressed in this forceful, matronly manner, jumps sitting down, a clever trick. Meanwhile, to my mortification and that of his mother, EastEnders comes on to full blaring cockney life. She leaps to her feet to find the remote control. (That reminds me. Very funny Queen Mother story. Remind me to tell you.)
‘No, leave it on,’ says the Princess. ‘It’s the special New Year’s edition. I want to find out what happens to Ange.’
The Prince is relaxed and cheerful, the Princess charming and beguiling. She wears cowboy boots that suit her very well. The Prince does not wear cowboy boots, which suits him very well.
The honeyed tea and the buttered crumpets and the toast and the cakes last out until it is time for the royal pair to depart.
At the front door the Prince thanks me and bids everyone else farewell. Princess Diana holds in the threshold for a second longer, checks over her shoulder that her Prince is out of earshot and whispers softly in my ear, ‘Sorry to leave early, though secretly I’m quite glad. It’s Spitting Image tonight, and I want to watch it in my room. They hate it of course. I absolutely adore it.’
And there you have her in a nutshell. By telling me this she was putting me in her power. It was a statement then worth tens of thousands of pounds. ‘Princess Di Loves Anti-Royal Smut Puppets!’ All I had to do was pick up the phone to any tabloid. But by confiding in me she had made me in some measure her slave: to be trusted with such intelligence was to be appointed one of her special courtiers. Even as intellectual, sharp, brilliant, knowledgeable and impossibly well-read and sensible a man as Clive James was utterly devoted to her.
I closed the door and leaned back against it in that afraid-it-will-soon-be-opened-again-but-I’ll-defend-it-with-my-last-breath manner much noted in fast-paced Leonard Rossiter sitcoms.
‘Well!’ I said.
‘Well!’ said everyone else.
‘Awfully nice couple,’ said Jon Canter, ‘awfully nice. I didn’t get her name.’
For the post-mortem we opened a whisky bottle in the drawing room, caring nothing for clearing up the tea things.
‘Unbelievable,’ said one of the heterosexual male house guests, of which there were a more than ordinary percentage that Christmas. ‘Did you see how she looked at me? I was in there … she was practically looking up at the ceiling as if to suggest we go upstairs. Jesus!’
‘What are you talking about?’ another man interrupted. ‘That was me she was giving the eye to.’
‘No me!’
In the PR war the Prince of Wales never had a chance. His tireless work, his initiatives, the Prince’s Trust alone, none of these could compete with so perfect a piece of seductive nature.
For his fiftieth birthday (this is one of the stories I was going to tell you) I emceed an entertainment at the London Palladium. Afterwards I stood once more in the line-up. Next to me was Penn Jillette, one half of the brilliant Penn and Teller, American magicians, pro-science, sceptics of the highest rank.
Penn turned to me as he watched the Prince slowly coming down the line.
‘Do I have to call him “Your Majesty” or any of that shit?’
‘No, no. Not at all. If you were to use a title it would be “Your Royal Highness”, and from then on “sir”, but there’s no need. After all, I haven’t called you Penn once in this conversation until now, have I, Penn?’
‘Oh, OK, just so long as he understands that we don’t talk like that. And what about bowing? I have to bow? We don’t bow in America.’
‘No, no,’ I reassure him, ‘no bowing necessary.’
‘Cuz I’m an American, and we don’t bow.’
‘Yes, he knows you’re an American.’
‘I won’t get put in the Tower of London or anything?’
People always think that sojourns in the Tower of London, like knighthoods, are somehow in the gift of members of the royal family.
I reassured him on these points. No Highnessing, no kowtowing.
At last the Prince reaches Penn, who immediately falls almost prostrate to the floor. ‘Your Majesty Highness. Your Royal Sir …’ and so on and so forth, babbling like a gibbon on speed. The Prince passes on to me and whoever was the other side of me without turning a hair. Seen it all before.
After he had gone, I watched Penn, an enormous man, crouching on the floor, rolling about, beating the planks of the stage, sobbing, stuffing his fist into his mouth and moaning up to the fly-tower: ‘Why did I do that? What came over me? What power do they have? I betrayed my country!’
During the course of the early 1990s, I got to know Sir Martin Gilliat quite well. An extraordinary man. If you didn’t know him yourself I assure you you would have loved him. He was of a type that no longer exists and whose very background and manner would now, I suppose, be looked down upon very snootily. Ludgrove House, Eton and forty years Equerry and Private Secretary to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. ‘All Sir Martin’s geese are swans,’ was a popular saying in royal circles. Which, being interpreted, means that everyone was alike in splendour to him, low, high, of whatever background, breeding, race or gender. I never met a man of such natural charm, kindness and vivacity. He had had a ‘good war’, of which, naturally, he never spoke. He escaped the Nazis several times but was always recaptured. At last, like all serial escapers, he was sent to Colditz, the Eton of prison camps. I was told that he had never slept since. Not properly. Apparently doctors examined him until he got tired of it* and sent them packing. This made him ideal for the Queen Mother. She would dine festively, play amusing games and then go to bed round about one or two in the morning. He would sit up writing letters until she came down. They would walk the dogs together in the park. Ideal companions.
There is a story told in Hugo Vickers’s biography of Queen Elizabeth, as she was known in the Household. She liked pranks at parties. One evening after dinner at the Castle of Mey, her favourite residence, right up in the very north of Scotland in Caithness, she and the ladies, having retired to leave the men to their port, decided it would be a lark if they all hid behind the curtains to surprise the men when they came out after their port and cigars.
Sir Martin led the men out and said in his very loud voice, ‘Thank God for that, they’ve all fucked off to bed.’
I got to know him because he was an inveterate punter in the West End stage, what is known as an angel. He hit the motherlode with Me and My Girl and was forever grateful. He invited Rowan Atkinson (who also knew him) and me to Buck’s, his club, for lunch. Over the gulls’ eggs and asparagus he confessed that there was an ulterior motive for his invitation.
‘Marvellous to have you chaps to luncheon of course, but I have to ask you. Do you know the Dowager Duchess of Abercorn?’
We both regretfully disavowed ever having had that pleasure.
‘No? Well. She was a lady-in-waiting of Queen Elizabeth’s for many years. It is her eightieth birthday in July, and we, which is to say Queen Elizabeth, are going to throw her a birthday party at Claridge’s, and I thought perhaps you might provide a little light relief? We have a band, but comedy is always popular.’
Rowan and I digested this and exchanged speaking glances. The year before he and I had descended on the Middle East, a swoop known in Rowanese as a bank raid. Rowan and I performed in his amusingly entitled One Man Show in Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Oman, brightening the lives of expat oil executives with high-quality, high-priced comedic entertainment. So we did have a show.
Rowan expressed our reservations perfectly.
‘Well now,’ he said. ‘We do indeed have material, b-but if most of the audience is the same age as the Duchess and the Queen Mo … Queen Elizabeth, then some of it might seem a bit …’
‘A bit fast? A bit racy?’ boomed Sir Martin, his resonant voice echoing off every surface of the dining room and rattling the glassware. ‘Oh I wouldn’t worry about that. The royal family loves the lavatory. I mean obviously not yer fucks or yer cunts.’
‘Well quite,’ said Rowan, swallowing and looking down at his plate. ‘No indeed.’
Sir Martin, as a loyal servant, was not one prone to gossip but he could not help telling me this story of his employer. One morning in the upstairs drawing room of Clarence House she said to him, ‘Martin, I think our television is on the blink. Do you think we might need a new one?’
‘I shall have a look, ma’am.’
Sure enough the television – this was many years ago – was suffering from that annoying rolling horizontal bar affliction that was the bane of many an ageing cathode ray tube.
‘Ma’am, I shall be straight on the telephone to those nice people at Harrods, and while you’re at luncheon they will install a new one.’
‘Lovely, Martin. You’re an angel.’
This was, of course, before the days of the not-so-cold war between the royal households and Mohamed Al Fayed’s Harrods.
After her luncheon the Queen Mother – Queen Elizabeth, I beg her pardon – tottered upstairs to watch the three o’clock from Chepstow or whatever it may have been, and there was Sir Martin, standing proudly by a brand-new, very large television set.
‘Oh, how grand!’ said Queen Elizabeth.
‘Yes indeed, ma’am, and I’ll tell you something rather special.’
‘Oh do, do!’
‘You might notice that it has no buttons for changing the channels.’
‘Oh no,’ she squealed, ‘they’ve forgotten the buttons. How dreadful!’
‘Ah, but no, ma’am. Do you see that grey box next to your gin and Dubonnet on the side table there?’
‘Oh, now whatever can that be?’
‘Well that is what they call a “remote control”, ma’am. If you’ll allow me … I press the button marked 1, so, and up comes BBC 1. I press button 2 and up comes BBC 2. And then button 3 for ITV. You see?’
‘Oh, how clever!’ Queen Elizabeth beamed approvingly and then added, ‘I still think it’s easier to ring.’