Dear Fatty (30 page)

We were very much a team on that tour and my favourite memories are of the social time we spent together, after the shows, the picnic we had at Hanging Rock, the BBQs with giant prawns, burying each other in the sand on Bondi Beach and boozy trips to vineyards.

Alexei used to sing his weird hit ‘Pop-Up Toaster’ as the finale to the show, and it was the only time all of us were together onstage. Previously the boys had been the only ones to get together for this song but now we were invited and the finale became a girl-friendly zone. That small gesture marked a big
difference
in the dynamics of the group and gave us a strong springboard from which to launch into, first, the British tour and, second, the following twenty years’ worth of Comic Strip films together.

Those films are quite a body of work when I think about it now. I recently did some publicity for the big DVD box set of all things Comic Strip and I realised just what a huge and influential part of my life it had all been. Oh Dad, I wish you could have been around for that. Remember all the Enid Blyton books I read as a little kid and how much I loved them? Here I was years later taking the right royal piss out of them and being part of proper ground-breaking film-making at the launch of Channel 4. Our first film went out on the opening night alongside the very first
Countdown
and an advert for a Vauxhall Cavalier 1600. It was such fortuitous timing that a new, different kind of channel started and were looking for exactly the kind of programmes we wanted to make. There were plenty of rows about what we were making and complaints galore, but we were basically left to conceive, write and produce a series of films of our own choosing. Pete Richardson and his writing partner Pete Richens wrote most of them, but we all had a go somewhere along the line. We still had the old rep company attitude to making the films. We were paid equally and we were cast equally, which avoided any squabbling. You always knew that if you only had four lines in this film, you might have the lead in the next. We spent a lot of time away together making the Comic Strip films and came to know each other very well. I knew Fatty already of course, but it was great to get closer to Ade, who is quite a dark horse, a complex and profound person, as serious
as
he is funny. He is a shockingly bright chap, passionate about music and his family. Of all the Comic Strip boys he is the one I feel the most sisterly towards. I’m drawn to his shadows, to the hidden. He knows I love him and he loves me back in the most affectionate unlimited way. He is the most sincere supporter you could wish to have. He has come to see me in virtually every play I’ve ever done and has always been honest with me, for which I respect him very much. When he and Jen
eventually
got together (after no small amount of nudging, I hasten to add), I felt that they had found, in each other, a proper mate.

Rik I knew and know less. He was probably the person who made me laugh the most. I took any chance to watch him work onstage because he is a consummately funny man. There are rich comedy strata only Rik has access to and he is king of them to this day. He should be a stupendously mighty comedy star worldwide. He should be a brand called Rik. He should have shops called Rik where you can go to buy some funny. He should have an actual crown. That’s how funny he is. I don’t really know him, although I’ve known him for a very long time – y’know, that sort of person. He had a lot of attention, deservedly so, because he was not only hilarious, but also quite beautiful with the clearest, hugest eyes and the most expressive face. Other young comics copied him for a while, a bit like everyone copied Eddie Izzard later on. I also have Rik to thank for pointing out, at one particularly auspicious Comic Strip meeting, that Fatty and I were being paid half as much as the boys! He felt guilty about it and brought it up for discussion. We knew nothing of this and so were at once horrified and delighted to be awarded the pay rise. Rik is honourable in that way.

Pete Richardson, or ‘Mad Pete’, was our Clint Eastwood – sometimes literally. Brooding, lip-chewingly anxious and utterly committed to making films. Single-minded in the extreme. He was always astonished that anyone should want to do anything else. He had been making films with his friends and family at his mother’s farm on Dartmoor since he was 12 or something. Pete is an unusual man, whose otherness is the foundation on which everything good he does is built. He didn’t really seem to have watched telly, so he didn’t have the same references as the rest of us. His natural ability for parody was mainly film-based, or if there was a reference to TV, it would be to old soaps like
Compact
, or rare, strange TV. He liked to mix up ideas, like when we did a film called
Strike!
. It was about a writer, played by Lexei, being asked to write a movie for Hollywood about the miners’ strike. So, there were lots of levels – as much a comment on LA gloss as it was a chance to do impressions (Jen as Meryl Streep as Mrs Scargill, me as Cher playing Joan Ruddock, Pete as Al Pacino as Arthur Scargill, etc.), as it was a satirical, topical romp.

Pete was always prepared to push us as far as he could to get ‘the shot’. Both the crews and ourselves worked ridiculously long hours, sometimes sleeping on the set, sometimes for only six hours before we were back on again. I can’t imagine doing that now, or even asking a crew to do that, but we all loved it and loved him, so no one really minded. We were young, no one had kids or hatchback cars yet, and anyway, why would we want to go home or have days off when all our best mates were on the set?

A lean and handsome fellow, Pete was wound up as taut as a
coiled
spring and would lose his temper as quickly as he would become helpless with childish laughter. I was on the receiving end of his irritability once when I took against a last line he’d written to a film I was in, called
Susie
. My character, the eponymous teacher, was, not unusually, a bit of a nymphomaniac and had bonked virtually every guy in the story. In the last scene, after shooting with Ade in a wheat field, I was in an ambulance. The scene required Susie to flirt with the paramedic to prove how irrepressible she was, even in the face of death. It was very funny but the last line was awful and lame, and at the read-through weeks earlier we had all agreed (including Pete) that it needed a rewrite. The moment came to shoot it, the light was fading and it was the last shot of the day. I asked Pete for the rewrite. I had already asked that morning and again at lunchtime. Nothing. He didn’t have the rewrite because he had absolutely no intention of rewriting it. I realised this, so was a bit hesitant to insist. He ignored my further request for the new line by looking at me when I asked for it but pretending not to hear me, just looking straight through me. It was a very weird, defiantly stubborn thing to do. The atmosphere in the tiny ambulance with all of us crushed inside was electric. Everyone knew this was a stand-off. We were all in such close proximity, the tension was hard to ignore. On Pete’s command, the ambulance started to move, and he called for ‘Action!’ I did the scene exactly as written, until the very last line, whereupon I paused, looked at camera and smiled. All in character. But I did
not
say the awful line, whatever it was. Pete shouted, ‘Cut!’ and then said, ‘You seem to have left off the last line, Dawn’, in a strict geography-teacher sort of manner. I repeated that I was not going
to
say the line, that it was bad, and would let the whole film down, as we had
all
agreed. He studiously ignored me and called for the shot to commence again. ‘Action!’ Again, I stuck to the script till that last moment, then I said, ‘La la la la la la la.’ Pete shouted, ‘Cut!’ The ambulance stopped again and Pete asked me to step outside to ‘discuss’ it. The crew were silent. I climbed out of the ambulance onto the country road where Pete was waiting, red with rage about this mutiny. The veins on his neck were visibly pulsating his fury, and his eyes were blazing. The ‘discussion’ very quickly escalated from some pretty muscular accusations to full-on squaddie-style loud streams of obscenities (from both of us) until suddenly, Pete started to poke me hard in the shoulder screaming the repeated chant: ‘You will say it! You will say it!’ I replied, just as loudly: ‘No I won’t! No I won’t!’ The poking became pushing, pushing became shoving, shoving became tussling which took us off the side of the road into a field of corn where we had a proper wrestle (hilariously echoing the scene we had just shot in the wheat field), just like I used to do with Gary except without the laughing and the drool. A genuine fight, an actual ruck! Eventually we both stood up, brushed ourselves off and he hissed one final seething ‘You will say it!’ I so much wanted to stand firm and respond with an equally decisive ‘No I won’t’, but the spat had unnerved me, and woken up the latent girly girl inside me who decided it was a good time to cry. Bugger and bollocks! Just when I wanted to be tough. So the tears streamed down my face, while Pete had a quick drag on a roll-up and then went back to the ambulance. I composed myself as best I could, readjusted my wig and climbed back in. I sat in my place. There was no air, just tension, and I
said
, ‘I will say the appalling line, Pete, but then I will go back to the hotel and leave immediately.’ We still had four more days of shooting so I knew that would scupper the film. He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Action!’ I started the scene, but the lovely cameraman, my friend Peter Middleton, stopped the filming and told us that the light had gone, and on top of that, my face was too blotchy from the crying, that it wasn’t continuity and it wouldn’t cut together. Pete gave up with a groan, and we drove back to the unit base in a silent huffy huff. Once out of costume, I headed back to the hotel, hell-bent on packing and leaving. Of course, Pete came into my room to placate me and eventually we sat on the bed apologising to each other profusely for such revoltingly childish behaviour. We went to the bar for a drink and, naturally, continued the filming the next day. Incidentally, the last moment in
Susie
is the first take, the look to camera, the smile ...

The episode served to confirm to me Pete’s complete passion for our films. He is one of those people who is nine parts genius to one part knob, and he is one of my closest friends. I almost love the knobby part of him the most. Not his actual knob, you understand, just the part that is a bit of a knob.

Nigel Planer was always a really good actor. He is now also a poet and a writer, but back then I only knew him as an actor, and as a colleague of course. He was the most fastidious of us all, employing proper techniques to find his characters – like getting the shoes right and caring a lot about the costume, and learning the bloody lines! He is attentive to his health and wellbeing and he didn’t get drunk as often as many of us. Nige is kind and sensitive and willing to take a risk. He can play small
and
subtle and real as easily as he can choose bigger broader strokes, as he did in
The Young Ones
, which meant that he could play literally
any
part. And he did.

Alexei is a force of nature. I smile immediately when I think of him. Back then, he enjoyed his reputation as a larger-than-life, prickly firebrand. An angry political comedian. A spitting, shouting, foul-mouthed commie ranting on about evil social workers and the loathsome middle class. Oo-er, he was a bit scary. True, his stage persona, which was a heightened representation of his real self,
was
aggressive, but hey, this was the era of punk and retro-ska and two-tone and skinheads. Lexei was all of that and more. His physicality is the first thing you notice. Sort of angry panda. He is Russian in physique. Muscular and hairy and yet strangely light on his feet. He’s a good dancer, agile and very musical. He is highly intelligent, widely read, good at art, good at writing, good at jokes, good at driving. He is an intriguing mass of lovely contradictions; he seems to be a big sulky bear but actually he has great patience. He looks like a fighter but is in fact a peacekeeper. He appears to be angry when in fact he is often perfectly content. He is thought to be motivated mainly by politics, but actually he is just as comfortable with the silly and the surreal stuff of life. He looks like he wouldn’t give a toss when in truth he is a thoughtful and attentive friend. He is a tart for a laugh, and when he does laugh, it’s big and round and full. Consequently he’s the sort of person you
want
to make laugh. You want his approval, his generous warmth wrapped around you. He is quite shy at times and so it can take some trial and error to creep into his affections, but when you’re there, it’s grand. Lexei was to be the conduit through which I
was
to meet Len, although of course I couldn’t know that back then.

Ben Elton was unbelievably supportive to us, always encouraging us to try new material and to be brave. He was prolific, coming up with acres of his own new gear every night and absolutely no one matched his writerly ability. Passionate, determined and hardworking, he forged his own unique path with breathtaking force and commitment. He didn’t consider himself an actor, I don’t think, but he is certainly one of the most powerful stand ups I’ve ever witnessed. As for his writing, his huge successes both in print and on stage speak volumes about how popular his particular brand of incisive comedy is.

Robbie Coltrane joined us for the films and very quickly became a regular because we couldn’t face filming without him. He made us laugh like no one else on set. His big, chippy, Scottish style was so different to everyone else. He played around a lot on set and yet, on camera he is clearly in utter control. He was the one who had big feature film-sized presence. Shame he’s got such a small cock … in comparison to his magnificently impressive body I mean, of course.

Keith Allen was a reluctant member of our team. He was torn between enjoying the work and the company, and his ever-demanding need to appear cool. Being part of our group was so
not
cool. He was a solitary, renegade, lone wolf of a figure and the thought of an association with us was so obviously abhorrent. However, he was, I think, very fond of Pete and when he deigned to take a part, he was always very good because he is such a talented actor. Keith’s desire for a reputation as a bad boy was a key factor in his demeanour. He decided, somewhere along
the
line, to be a threat so that’s how he presented himself. He relished the disruptive power of turning up unannounced at the Comic Strip and setting up his band without so much as a by-your-leave while somebody was mid-act. It must have been exhausting to be so Keith Allen.