Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (12 page)

‘Do
you mind if I get in
there?’

I went into such a giggling fit at that mundane enquiry that I had to put my hand over my mouth while wheezing,
‘No
, not at
all.’

Still he didn’t sit. He turned to Jeff Pope, who was on the other side of the gap:
‘What
about you – do
you
mind?’

And then Jeff went as well. Now you may have heard the tired old tribute
‘He
just had to speak to make you
laugh’
applied to many half-talents and acquired tastes over the years, but here was the living proof that such a boast can be absolutely valid – and also a terrible curse. As he plonked himself down beside us, we were so desperate not to let him see we were helpless with laughter that everyone’s eyes were watering. It was just like being in a classroom directly after the teacher has said,
‘The
next boy who laughs will be
caned’
– which inevitably leaves you in the grip of a sort of mania.

Tom cleared his throat again. He gave a sort of half sigh. Then, turning to look right at me, he gave a short sniff and said,
‘I
ain’t half got a bad
back.’

Well, that did it. Every person in the room absolutely collapsed. The laugh was so loud it even made the producers outside what was supposed to be our sound-proofed booth look round.

Tommy Cooper, of course, looked entirely bemused. All he’d done was alert us to his physical pain and we had reacted as if it was the pay-off to some wonderful sketch. Realizing this was not a normal reaction, we struggled to gather our wits, but none of us
could control ourselves enough to offer the correct sympathetic rejoinder. And the second our giggling died down, he ignited the riot again.

‘No,
really. I
have!’
was all he said, but whoosh, we were away again.

Even as I engulfed myself in guffaws, a voice at the back of my head was saying,
‘God
, this must be absolutely awful for
him.’
He wasn’t trying to be funny but, then again, Tommy Cooper didn’t have to. He can’t have been offended, though, because what he did next was exquisite. He had been carrying with him a strange sort of bright yellow attaché case that now, when seated, he just held directly out at arm’s length. He began turning his head from left to right, as if searching for somewhere to set it down – again accompanied by the sniffs and throat clearing. Then, noticing the long shelf that ran beneath the viewing window upon which were various polystyrene cups, he said,
‘Is
that
safe?’

‘How
do you
mean?’
I managed to choke out.

‘Well,
this is very valuable, you see. And if I put that on there, I want to be sure it won’t fall
off.’

‘I
think it’s
fine,’
I found myself squeaking in a pitch several octaves higher than my usual voice.

He turned to Jeff.
‘Shall
we give it a
go?’
Jeff could only manage to nod vigorously.

‘You’ll
all be my witnesses if anything goes wrong, won’t
you?’
he boomed with gravity.

By this time we were all aware we were being given a private performance.

Raising the attaché case carefully, he set it down on the shelf two feet in front of him. As he let go of the handle, the entire thing collapsed into a tiny heap. It had been brilliantly, ridiculously, made from the flimsiest thin rubber, although this was undetectable until it was required to stand under its own weight. It was a tremendous effect and Tommy looked around as we bust a gut, clearly delighted.

‘That’s
good, isn’t
it?’
he beamed.
‘Smashing
prop, isn’t it, that? Just got it. I might use that on the
show!’

But he didn’t. Whether he forgot about it or changed his mind, I have no idea. It is entirely possible that he brought it along as a private gag to break the ice. In the event, he did that simply by entering the room.

A couple of other comedians now referred to as
‘legendary’
appeared on the show at various times. Ken Dodd surprised the hell out of us all by being among the more
‘clubbable’
attractions to bolster our on-screen sofa. By this I mean while most stars would have a few glasses of wine in our green room after the programme, Ken would loosen his tie and get stuck into the pints of lager, particularly if the conversation was about long-vanished music hall acts – a subject I could certainly hold my own in. Let me state that while his on-stage work speaks for itself, the record should also state that Ken Dodd is stupendously good company away from the spotlight.

I can remember his anxious assistant, who probably knew the signs of when Ken was up for the cup, coming over repeatedly to our little gathering in the bar:

‘Ken,
if we leave now we can get the seven thirty-eight from
Euston,’
she cajoled hopefully.

‘Oh,
not now, my
love,’
Doddy demurred.
‘The
lads here have just brought up the Great Frank Randle! We’ll get the one after
 . . .’

As it happened, I think he even missed the 12.20 and eventually took an ITV car all the way back to what I like to think was Knotty Ash.

Spike Milligan was something else again. The first time I worked with Spike was over at TV-AM, the station that had just been stopped from disappearing down the television toilet by Greg Dyke. Greg basically transformed the grim, ailing news outlet into an extended version of the
Six O’Clock Show
that he’d recently quit in order to take on the desperate task. Nobody believed he had a hope of pulling it off. Indeed, at his leaving do from the
SOCS
I stood on a chair and read out a poem I had specially composed for the occasion. It went:

There was a young fellow called Dyke
Who pretty much did as he liked
He went to TV-AM
And was never heard of again
Fucking well serves himself right.

Pretty soon after taking control of the moribund breakfast franchise, Greg asked me to begin fronting up the kind of preposterous light reports I had been already been knocking out for several years. I cannot recall a single one of them today, although I have a nagging recollection of standing in a diver’s wet suit somewhere with Ernie Wise. What I do recall clearly is the exhilarating rush I experienced when Greg asked me to sit on the settee with Spike Milligan. I just knew we would get on well – and we did. Aware that the old Goon had a deserved reputation for being
‘difficult’,
I figured the one thing Spike hated more than meeting new people was meeting new people who told him how great he was. Many years after our first encounter I was at the after-party for a BBC one-man show called
An Evening With Spike Milligan
. This was arranged to be nothing less than a full-tilt celebration of the man’s genius – a word that gets thrown about these days like a Frisbee and now carries about the same weight. Spike Milligan, however, was the genuine article. But on the night of this salute he thought he’d performed poorly. So much so that when the celebrity audience rose for the necessary standing ovation at the end of the show he bade them to sit straight back down. Asking for his mic to be turned up, he said to the crowd,
‘I
wasn’t any good tonight. So why are you doing
that?’
Everyone laughed uneasily because his face showed he wasn’t joking. A section started applauding again and he turned on them.
‘No
, stop it. It was no good. Don’t thank me for bloody crap,
man.’
And he walked off. At the rather muted affair afterwards I was sitting with him at his table. Because of the relationship I had with him, I told him he’d really soured the moment and been rude to people who just wanted to thank him for many other things. Rather admirably, he stuck to his guns.

‘Couldn’t
care less. I wasn’t going to stand there and be bloody
patronized, Danny. It was a bad show and they were a bunch of phoneys for lapping it
up.’

At this exact point, across to our table came a man who today is one of Britain’s best and most-loved performers. I dislike memoirs that play coy with their information, but in this one instance I am going to protect the victim because he didn’t deserve what happened and it was mortifyingly awful. The chap was just starting to gather a reputation at this stage in his career and we had met a few times before. Putting his hand on my shoulder, he asked quietly,
‘Dan
, do me a favour, introduce me to Spike
 . . .’

‘Spike,’
I said brightly, hoping he would trust me with the kind of interaction he loathed.
‘This
is —— and he is brilliant. You’d like him, Spike, he’s one of the good
ones!’

Milligan looked up at my pal like he had just come to repossess his teeth.

‘I
know you don’t like this sort of thing,
Spike,’
began the comic,
‘but
I couldn’t let this moment pass. You are my absolute hero and I just wanted to say
hello.’

With no attempt at a handshake, Milligan continued to grimace toward the hapless fan. Then he replied:

‘All
right. Now you’ve met me. Fuck
off.’

My chum puffed out his cheeks, clapped me on the shoulder and strode smartly away.

‘Why
did you do
that?’
I said to him.
‘He’s
a good bloke, he is. He only wanted to acknowledge what you’ve done for
him.’

Again, Spike would have none of it.
‘Danny
, man, don’t start all that. These people are pests. The next thing you know they’ll be calling me a fucking genius. It bores the piss out of me – if you want to talk, talk. Why do they debase themselves and crawl around my feet – who wants
that?’

It was an intuitive feeling I had about Milligan’s attitude to fame that obviously helped when we first met.

I had already done one spot on the programme and then made my way into the TV-AM green room where everyone was asked to wait before going on. Milligan was already there and sitting alone. I marched right across to him.

‘Spike
Milligan,’
I said with some surprise.
‘Still
alive?’

I knew it was a line he himself had used when greeting old friends on shows like
This Is Your Life
and, as with Kenneth Williams, it turned out I couldn’t have said a better thing.

He crumpled with laughter and rocked over to one side.

‘Yes,
man,’
he chortled,
‘still
here, but the suit gets cremated in the
morning.’

I introduced myself and said we would be on together later in the show.

‘Sit
down with
me,’
he said, banging the cushion beside him,
‘before
another bloody producer asks me if I’m OK. OK! It’s a TV show, for Christ’s sake, not bloody Anzio. Here, did you just say on there you’re from
Deptford?’

I had.

‘You
know I used to live in New Cross, don’t
you?’
he said chummily.

‘I
do, mate. And that’s why they had to close it
down.’

Boom. You have to concede – I was getting quite expert at this.

Possibly the most famous visit of the many Milligan made to the
Six O’Clock Show
was one that has now passed into backstage lore. Claiming a migraine on arrival, he made straight for his dressing room and asked not to be disturbed until it was absolutely necessary.
‘Don’t
bother me with bloody forms to sign or fucking make-
up,’
were his instructions as he disappeared inside his darkened sanctuary. What happened next almost took the entire network off the air.

Having apparently settled down to try combat the noise in his head with a period absolute silence, Spike gradually became aware of, and then totally enraged by, the constant ticking of the second hand on a clock on his dressing-room wall. With a momentous yell he stood on the provided couch and yanked the tormenting time-piece from its moorings, hurling it at the floor with such force that it shattered into its component parts.

Now then. This act of pique might ordinarily be overlooked in the highly strung world of show business. What gave it wider significance was that all the clocks in London Weekend Television at that time were connected and synchronized. When Spike Milligan tore
the fixture from the wall it immediately stopped every other clock in the circuit, including the ones in studios 1, 2 and 3. As you can imagine, if you are minutes away from broadcasting live, having no working clocks around you tends to make things a bit messy.

Nobody could understand why the failure had occurred and while frantic calls to engineers and electricians reverberated around the building Spike himself showed up in the gallery. Having either calmed down or possibly been struck with remorse, he asked the line of seated production crew who was in charge. The producer, Maeve Haran, made herself known.

‘Yeah,
well, I owe you for one clock. I just demolished it in my dressing room. Why do they have to tick so loud they keep you awake? It’s madness.
Madness!’

Of course when it came to a little madness, Spike was most decidedly your man.

Jesus Was A Cross Maker

L
ife, or at least my working life, had become, in the nicest way, routine and comfortable. To be honest, I did sometimes miss the zippy unpredictability of the punk and
NME
years, but thankfully I could also appreciate that as I approached thirty, it was perhaps for the best that I no longer lived for power chords, gigs and a life in the leather jacket. There were odd moments when the wilder ways returned, such as the time actor Christopher Walken came on the show and then afterwards asked if we could take him to some
‘real’
London pubs. In fact I took him around most of the better ones in Bermondsey that night and, in tribute to his Russian Roulette scene in
The Deer Hunter
, invented a game called The Beer Hunter where six cans of lager were purchased and then one of them would be vigorously shaken up in secret. The players then had to select a can each and open it right next to their face. The one who chose the shaken can – and thus got covered in boozy spray – was the loser. I had little inkling that in another decade I would professionally be coming up with lots of games like that, as well as being hurtled right back into the rock’n’roll maelstrom during the glorious years on
TFI Friday
.

Yet, despite the regularity of the work, in the mid-eighties I still felt as if it was all a larky distraction before I would return to writing of some sort. Or something. Fact was, I hoped I would never have to confront this dilemma – at least not in the next hundred and fifty years. This nebulous career plan was brought into clearer focus one day when I read a description of myself in a newspaper as
‘an
old person’s young person’. That’ll give you pause, I can tell you. Another phrase that seemed to routinely be tagged to any press I got was
‘professional
cockney’. I genuinely never understood what that
was supposed to mean. I might concede to it if I were, like so many in the media, hiding some kind of public school background or an upbringing in one of the leafier parts of Surrey, but that not being the case I recognized it for what it was: the superior sneering of a relentlessly privileged middle-class industry. It’s a form of control, pure and simple. What they meant by
‘professional
cockney’
was actually just
‘cockney’,
and they really didn’t like the uppity working classes anywhere in their game unless they were in the canteen, post rooms or maintenance. I’m not sure if it has changed that much today. Even the most liberal university types go on the back foot when they meet someone who has simply got by on their wits, and they tend to feel threatened if that person is actually brighter than they are. So they resort to suspicion and the curled lip, attempting to denigrate this intruder by suggesting the whole
‘working
class’
thing is an act and, really, all these
‘chavs’
have to offer is an accent. Thus even now you will read that someone is a
‘professional
Geordie’
or
‘professional
Scouser’; back in the eighties, you’d even come across a
‘professional
black person’. Nobody who has come through the correct middle-class upbringing with the benefit of a few quid in their family coffers will ever be so disparagingly described. No, you’ll find they will simply be
‘professionals’.

While we’re here, I may add that, far from being a typical working-class
‘bloke’,
I could never claim to be even marginally competent in the traditionally masculine field of home improvements. Away from a typewriter, latterly the computer keyboard, I am not only a disaster at DIY, I fancy I rather stand alone as the most clueless exponent of the handyman’s skills. This is another area where I am totally my father’s son. Though Dad was a terrifically hard worker, whether in the docks, clearing railway arches of rubble, or as part of an early morning office-cleaning gang, he could not for the life of him build, repair, install or decorate anything. Despite this, during the sixties he was given little choice in the matter, being required by Mum to wallpaper the front room in our maisonette roughly once a year. The rest of the family soon learned that it was absolutely essential for us to retire to another part of the house and cower in safety until it was all over. Like me, Dad had no finesse,
no patience and genuinely believed you could inflict pain on any particularly finicky inanimate object that pushed you too far. I’ve no idea how many rolls of wallpaper it took to cover our small living room. Let’s say it was six. Dad, knowing how these affairs went, would order ten. This was because when a patterned section he was holding folded in on itself or refused to match up with one already in position, he could only achieve catharsis by furiously mashing it up into a ball, screaming
‘You
dirty
bastard!’
at it and throwing it across the room. Sometimes Mum would hear this happen four times in as many minutes and call out from the other side of the door,
‘You
all right,
Fred?’
to which he would explode,
‘No
, I’m fucking
not!’

The rest of us would then have to make sure our inevitable giggling fit didn’t make a sound, which could really hurt your lungs sometimes. The worst rage he ever flew into was when he couldn’t get his plumb-line – those weights on strings that are supposed to show a decorator where a true straight line falls – to stop swaying back and forth.

‘This
is fucking
impossible!’
we heard him storming to himself.
‘Bastard
thing won’t keep still! How the fucking hell you supposed to do
this?’
A moment later we heard,
‘Oh
, this is just
BOLLOCKS!’
and then an almighty shattering of glass as he launched the plumb-line straight through the window out into our garden.

Mum, obviously alarmed at this devastation, then broke the unwritten rule by hurrying into the room.

‘Fred,
what the bleeding hell was
that?!’
she asked, not unreasonably.

‘Bet.
Just. Go. Out. Leave me alone when I’m doing
this!’
Spud bristled.

Mum saw the almost cartoonlike jagged hole in the glass pane.

‘My
God, Fred. Why have you smashed me
windas?’

‘I
did me nut, all right? It’s enough to drive you round the twist, having to do this. I wasn’t having
it.’

Mum decided to keep her own fury in check and just heave an exasperated growl as she made to leave the scene of the crime. Before she closed the door, though, Dad said with as much contrition as he could muster,

‘Bet. Just go out in the garden and make sure I didn’t hit Tom the Tortoise with the
fuckin’
plumb-line, will
ya?’

Fortunately no such tragedy had occurred.

Having inherited this same lack of practical expertise, the few times I did have a go at becoming master of my surroundings the resultant element of farce was actually heightened because Wendy, youngest of ten children, came from a background where all the boys and even the brothers-in-law could turn their hand to absolutely anything. They were effortlessly outstanding at every aspect of do-it-yourself from carpentry to brickwork, from installing white goods to finished decoration. Indeed, Wendy’s closest brother, Rod, was a pro at interiors and is still hired by stores like Fortnum & Mason to take care of their window dressing each Christmas. Me? Not a clue. Worse, my inability to do it myself was fatally combined with a total disinterest in learning how it was done.

I really believe there is something in the universe that controls these things. I remember trying to prise the lid off a tin of paint once. I had put newspaper down so as not to get any drips on the front-room floorboards but, try as I might, the screwdriver I had wedged under one edge of the lid would not free it from the glossy mother ship. So I thumped my fist down on the screwdriver handle and the lid promptly flipped off, sailing high in the air like a coin tossed to determine head or tails. Had it just gone up and down again, I think I could have contained the splatter. Instead – and I am pretty sure in defiance of all the laws of physics – it went up and out, coming to rest – paint side down, naturally – on our Liberty settee. Taking a leaf out of the old man’s manual here, I just stood there and shouted,
‘Oh
, for fuck’s
sake!’
And do you know what? Wendy blamed me anyway.

‘You’re
supposed to do that outside, THEN bring the paint in! That’s ruined that cushion. I’ll never be able to turn that over, will
I?’

On another occasion we bought a small bedside cupboard that
‘required
some assembly’.

‘Dan,
why don’t you just leave it until Bill can come round and put it
together?’
said Wendy wearily after I asked where the claw hammer was kept.

‘Wend,
mate,’
I shot back, a little tetchily,
‘I’m
not a complete washout. Look, there’s only five bits to
it!’

But I
am
a complete washout when it comes to these things. The sort of washout that even Noah might have deemed a corker. I won’t go into detail about my bedside cabinet fiasco, but I will say that I completed it in very smart time, had no bits left over and it looked exactly as it did on the box. Still seated beside my undoubted triumph on the floor of our bedroom, I called out to Wendy, and did so frankly in a tone that suggested here at last she would have to eat her words.

She came in, looked at it and gave a surprised hum of appreciation.
‘Blimey,’
she said.
‘I
take it all
back.’

As admissions go,
‘I
take it all
back’
is the one I find husbands most like to hear from their partners. But as I stood to put the brilliantly assembled piece of furniture into position, I noticed one of my legs wasn’t playing ball. This was because I had somehow screwed one of my socks to the bedroom floor. I promise you, that’s what I’d done and I fancy that’s a trick even Frank Spencer missed. I hadn’t felt a thing and it had gone straight through the wood, into the flappy bit of sock up by my toes and right down into the carpet. In my defence, let me say that the screws shouldn’t have been long enough to do that, should they? That’s a design fault, in my book. We were lucky I didn’t just plough on till I’d gone through a gas main or something.

This humbling moment was then made even worse by Wendy sprawling helpless on the bed while I, now in a terrible mood, had to sit there and unscrew my sock. Then I had to re-screw the fixture properly, sans my sock, although this time it simply wouldn’t anchor itself in the required hole and the entire cupboard developed a bit of a list. I insisted it was nevertheless fit for purpose and stuck it by the bed, where it remained for about a month. Every time Wendy placed so much as a magazine on it, it slumped over to the right.

My lowest moment as Man of the House happened when I said I would paint the ceiling in the little back bedroom. This was while we were in Maydew House and so it really was a little back bedroom.
Once again, Wendy implored me to let Rod or Bill or Brian do it, but this was early in our relationship and a chap has to try and keep the lustre of love and admiration at maximum levels during this honeymoon period. I said I would get it done while Wendy was out at her sister’s one afternoon. As soon as she had gone, I carried the paint tin down to the tiny room and had my usual difficulty prying off the lid. I managed it on this occasion without ruining a thousand-pound three-piece suite, but didn’t know what to do with the dripping tin Frisbee once I’d freed it up. Figuring I’d put it, for the time being, in the bathroom sink, I carried it back up the stairs – the flats were of a curious but wonderful design – and plonked it down beneath the taps. The paint on the lid seemed rather fluid and lush to me and I thought,
‘I
bet that will eventually run off there and on to the white porcelain of the
bowl.’
So, and I know you are going to think I must be several layers beyond moronic here, I turned on the tap to wash it off. I know. I can’t explain what made me do that. And it was so much worse than you can imagine, because I gave the tap handle a right good turn, causing the jet of water to spurt out at about ten thousand gallons an hour directly on to the slightly concave upturned lid. It went
everywhere
. I often marvel at how, even when you’ve only left the dregs of some wine in a glass, should you then go and kick it over it seems to issue forth like Lake Windermere bursting its banks. Well, this apparent smear of paint on the under-side of the lid appeared to multiply its mass until Wendy’s pristine bathroom looked like a troupe of old-fashioned clowns had been rehearsing in there. In case you’re interested, it was a small, classically white bathroom and the paint was a shade of blue that edged toward the turquoise. If we’d stuck with our original plan of doing the little room ceiling a delicate cream, I insist the splatter flecked across my wife’s tiles and towels would have been that much easier to disguise. But that’s Wendy for you – always changing her mind.

Swearing furiously, I stood stock-still for a few seconds. I was wringing wet from head to toe. When I took off my spattered glasses to wipe them on my sodden T-shirt, the paint spots simply smeared across my lenses and, even though I gave it a go, made even partial
vision impossible. This was not going brilliantly, I had to admit. Figuring I would now need to do some clearing up before I could even get down to the real task of the day, I went in search of the Flash or Ariel or Mr Sheen or whatever it was that Wend seemed to buy by the bushel and constantly clean things with. Ours wasn’t the biggest flat in the world. This stuff couldn’t be that hard to hunt down. I must have stood for about half an hour at the open doors of the food cupboard, straining my gaze beyond tins of beans and packets of pasta, hoping to catch a glimpse of something caustic. From there I began feeling round the back of the dinner plates stacked up alongside the cups and bowls. I mean, really, what was the point of secreting this stuff away? These are the sort of tools one needs in an emergency and they ought to be stored somewhere obvious. As it was, it struck me as akin to the boss of a fireworks factory just leaving a few hints as to where the fire extinguishers might be. After about ten minutes of cursing and carrying on a salty monologue at high volume, my eyes fell upon possibly the most secretive of all places in the modern home: the small door beneath the kitchen sink. I may have even said,
‘Aha!’
out loud. But after getting down and opening this mysterious portal all it revealed was a rubber plunger of the sort comedians used to get stuck on their face, a plastic washing-up bowl filled with parched J-Cloths, a small bottle off Zoflora disinfectant (hyacinth) and, right at the back under the pipes, a lone potato that in the darkness had sprouted some impressively curlicued tendrils.