Semi-Detached (32 page)

Next to
the east entrance to the Sidgwick site is a curious keep-like building, the
Lady Mitchell Hall. It is a lecture theatre. In the middle of my second term we
‘occupied’ it. The notorious ‘Garden House Riots’ had taken place in Cambridge
three years before we arrived. Students were arrested for besieging a hotel
which had organized a ‘Greek’ night. Greece was then controlled by the
Colonels. ‘You couldn’t eat kebabs and dance to Zorba the Greek when that sort
of thing was going on, man.

Was it
too late for us, we wondered? Could we still get a taste of that sort of freaky
student protest ourselves?

Up
until then, I had been a little disappointed by the groovy side of Cambridge.
Undergraduates in my college did not seem hugely ‘alternative’, certainly by
the standards of the Third Ear Café up the end of the King’s Road in buzzing
alternative London. Luckily, I had fallen in with a college group who thought
themselves amongst the more forward-thinking in their year because of their
shared interest in coloured trousers. ‘The occupation’, however, looked more
like the ‘Societies Fair’ than the Sorbonne. There were just a few fewer
Christian Union and Tiddly-wink clubs and more Anarchists and Workers’
Revolutionary stalls.

We all
had enough A levels to recognize a futile cause. There were murmurings about
college restrictions. This was the seventies. We were expected to be back inside
our rooms by ten-thirty. The college gates were locked and visitors had to
leave. But even by this second term we knew how to climb in over the walls, so
we weren’t intending to lie down in front of any police cars for that.

Otherwise,
‘World Revolution’, an end to poverty, the recognition of trade unions in South
America and free food for everybody were the vague themes of the protest; delivered
in that hectoring way that helped to create pragmatic Conservatives or bossy
Labour cabinet ministers, depending on which side of the microphone you sat.

By the
evening of the first day, Friday, when I got there (it was a perfectly
civilized occupation and coincided with the weekend), the sit-in had given way
to country music and short films borrowed from college film clubs: now being
shown back to back, or front to front if you included the flickering ‘Keystone
Cops’ pornography.

‘Sexist!’
someone shouted from the darkened hail.

The
film changed to some cartoons of early flight.

‘Balloonist!’
another voice added.

I
arrived late, because I was now in my second play Written by Heathcote
Williams,
AC/DC
was set in an amusement arcade and required almost
continuous off-hand cynical abuse from the character I played. I had been
auditioned by a bloke with shoulder-length hair and granny glasses who
habitually wore a fur coat, which even by 1973 was slightly retrograde. Nobody
dressed as mushrooms or harangued the audience. But my character pissed on a
television set at one point, trepanned a friend using a Black and Decker drill
and aggressively demolished the fluffy opinions of the other characters, who
were all hippies. It was an early punk drama, I suppose, and when we mounted
the play in a tiny theatre in the back of Christ’s College, a forbidding
concrete oblong with the dimensions of a giant’s shoe box, and the only theatre
designed by Denys Lasdun apart from the National, we attracted an audience of
ten.

I was
happy enough. I wasn’t doing any of this for anyone’s gratification but my own.
But the night of the occupation the audience dwindled to two. It was difficult
to persuade some of the other performers to turn up. They were itching to get
off and play at being revolutionaries in the Lady Mitchell Hall instead.
Scratching his ginger beard, and blinking behind his granny specs, the director
wrestled with his dilemma.

‘Let’s
take the play there!’ he announced.

Was a
two-hour, self-indulgent gnomic diatribe on the counter-culture quite what the
revolutionary student body wanted to interrupt their festival that evening? Of
course it was.

Back
once more, I wandered across the Sidgwick site again last year, during an
alumni weekend I had been asked to address. ‘Come with me,’ I said to Jo. We
had arrived with half an hour to spare. ‘Come and see the building I opened,’
and we walked back under the raised History faculty building and along past
the Stirling library. It was out of term, and a Saturday The buildings were all
shut. I took her up to the plate-glass door, and we peered inside. ‘Look, there’s
something on the wall.’ The wall was at right angles to the door and across the
entrance vestibule but we could just about make out the inscription. It said, ‘This
building was opened by her Majesty the Queen.’

‘Oh
yes.’ I remembered. The vice-chancellor, Alison Richard, had written, sweetly,
and only a tiny bit circumspectly that since Her Majesty was to be in
Cambridge it had been decided that she might as well visit the new English
faculty while passing through. Alas, there was no diminutive plaque saying, ‘after
a trial opening by Griff Rhys Jones’.

They
let us in to the alumni weekend event at the Lady Mitchell Hall through an
emergency exit round the back. Simon Singh and David Starkey were already
waiting in an ante-chamber thronged with families and speakers; a dressing
room for lecturers, I supposed. David Frost was tidying his shirt front and
peering at his clipboard. He went on stage ahead of us and we heard him being
introduced on a distant platform by Alison. We moved up to a space below the
stage, Singh, Starkey and myself, half listening to Sir David’s practised
jokes on the tannoy.

I had
no recollection of the cream-painted concrete seventies interior. It was an
interim space, neither a room nor a passage, half a platform, half a set of
steps, a non-functional waiting room with no view of the outside world at all.
It was the sort of place I had found myself in all my adult life, behind studio
spaces or just off church halls, round the back of theatres or down beside huge
speakers in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, cheerless limbos, where I waited to be
ushered up, like a politician to the hustings, but with no constituency, or
party, or platform to represent. The excitement of being out in front of lots
of people was momentarily held in check. The slight tension expressed itself in
listlessness. Like dogs waiting for a walk, we were all ready for
hyperactivity but holding it back. ‘You never feel as tired and ready for
nothing as just before that big speech or performance, someone once told me.

I must
have felt that here, in 1973, in this place, when I went on stage at the demo.
I can only recall that it was very dark, so perhaps that was why the layout of
the rooms beneath the lecture hall sparked no memories of any kind. But perhaps
I was self-absorbed. I can remember the swagger out into the hot light and the
ease with which I enjoyed it then. I liked the dark spaces of an offstage
corner from the very beginning, but in Cambridge, doing boffo comedy, the transition
to the stage became a defining excitement.

AC/DC
made a thrillingly successful transfer. I couldn’t
pee on the television for the excitement. I stalked the stage, waggled my curly
locks and played up to the self-satisfied mood that overcomes students en
masse, particularly ones occupied with the organization of anarchy. After a
shaky start, we elicited indulgent laughs from our audience of six hundred
undergraduates by shouting louder and swearing more. Here I was, the toast of
alternative Cambridge, cheered to the concrete rafters, slapped on the back and
offered drugs in a match-box by a passing stranger. In my naivety, I rattled it
and threw it away The director dived after it into the crowd, never, to be seen
again (by me, anyway).

The
occupation of the Sidgwick site in 1972 changed nothing in Cambridge except me.
‘The happening’ had been witnessed by the vice-president of the Cambridge
Footlights, Robert Benton.

Short,
dapper and with a habitual slightly surprised manner, Robert, like Douglas, was
part of the ‘old school tights’ network. My former prefect asked me to audition
for the May Week revue. Footlights had been mounting revues since the late
nineteenth century and during the 1960s had gone through a short period of
brilliance, largely thanks to Peter Cook. It was considered utterly defunct by
the cognoscenti, but it was always considered defunct by the cognoscenti. It is
still considered defunct by the cognoscenti. It was certainly more fashionable
to consider it defunct than to be in it. But everybody had heard of it. Even
me.

‘I’m in
the May Week revue,’ I explained to Gerard Evans, at the end of the summer
term. He raised another eyebrow.

I think
I wanted him to be impressed. It was rare for a first-year undergraduate to
make it into the end—of-year revue, which played for two weeks at the proper
professional Arts Theatre after the exams had finished. I had auditioned and
been accepted, rather to the chagrin of some, like young Clive Anderson, who
had worked their way through the termly ‘smokers’ but been put to one side for
later.

‘It can
vary a bit from year to year,’ he said, trying to appear interested, and rather
presciently encapsulating the opinion of reviewers wherever we went.

‘Well,
it does seem a bit more Dick Emery than Monty Python,’ I offered.

‘Oh
dear,’ he murmured sympathetically.

It had
shades of Jack Hulbert too. Stephen Wyatt, the director, was keen to put on a
bit of a show, so we danced. I didn’t know what to make of this. It was meant
to be ironic. We would dance, but not seriously The audience would work out the
spoof element for themselves. I saw no evidence that they ever did, although
they may have worked out that we couldn’t dance, but it was the most
traditional and in consequence the most successful of any undergraduate revue
I appeared in. (They became my regular summer employment for the next four
years.) We began dressed as cigarette packets, twirling around the stage, and
sang a reggae song — ‘Every Packet Carries a Government Health Warning’ — and
then continued with sketch, blackout, sketch, blackout, a few more songs and a
bit more dancing for two more hours. I have been in some sort of sketch show
pretty much every year since.

The
funniest person in it was a tall and intensely serious man called John Lloyd.
(John went on to produce
Not the Nine O’Clock News, Spitting Image,
Blackadder
and latterly
Q.I.)
‘I remember I was invited to an
upstairs room in Trinity Lane for an early meeting with the rest of the cast
and sat on a bed while they discussed what they might do. ‘Lloydie’ started
improvising about badgers. A new boy to this sort of thing, I laughed, choked
violently and snorted coffee through my nose over a purple Indian bed-throw.
The others studied the carpet.

The
Arts Theatre was sold out for two weeks. Everybody admired the ‘Oedipus rewritten
by Oscar Wilde sketch’ — ‘to lose one mother may be considered a misfortune …’
I rather preferred the slow-motion slapstick where two elderly toffs at either
end of an extremely long table took turns to order their doddery old butler,
played by Lloyd, to plaster each other with food. A lanky north Londoner, Jon
Canter, sang a song comprised of French clichés. Today he’s a successful comedy
writer. Robert Benton performed a typical private-eye sketch. ‘The name’s
Parker: Parker Fifty-one. It’s not my real name, it’s a nom de plume.’ Mary
Allen sang a mawkish torch song. And the two musicians, Nick Rowley and Nigel
Hess, demonstrated a staggering professional skill with a pastiche of Bach
played at tremendous speed on joint pianos. We finished with a sort of
pantomime set in the jungle with Jeremy Browne and Pam Scobie playing a pigmy
king and queen. Now where are Jeremy and Pam? I don’t know, but have kept a
sort of unbroken continuity with the rest.

The
revues toured throughout the summer vacation. We went to Oxford, Southampton
and the Robin Hood Theatre near Averham in Nottinghamshire before arriving at
the Roundhouse in London for a savage mauling from
Time Out.
The rest of
the vacation was spent preparing for and appearing at the Edinburgh Festival.
I hardly went back to Epping at all. I don’t think I made any serious effort to
go home again during the next four years. And I began to realign my
connections.

Of the
seven from my school who went up to Emmanuel that year, Andrew had been the
closest. We spent a lot of time together. I can visualize him. He had a lick of
greasy mouse-coloured hair, a grown-out style — a residue of a former parting,
hanging down over one side of his forehead and his long face. He seemed to have
no background. His parents were off in Ilford somewhere. We had no cause to visit
them. Instead Andrew was there, clever and beady-eyed, perpetually thin and
hunched. He adopted a Peter Cook voice, a distancing effect, a comic persona to
hide his own detachment, a snort of derision, a sniff of disdain at the world.
(‘He’s probably something in the City. That’s what her daddy is. Something. Nothing
particular, just some
thing
in the City.’) And he slipped further into
his adopted persona, wearing suits where the rest of us wore jeans, with a
tight, double-breasted waistcoat, and self-conscious desire to be a
journalistic bar-fly. He did Medieval History too, and English and possibly
French at A level, and I grew close to him in the sixth form because, like me,
he rejected the wave of muscular Christianity that suddenly seemed to engulf
our friends. We sat together in our narrow classroom, the medieval set, lobbing
cynical arguments at the earnest junior chaplain, not even agnostic but
arrogantly certain. ‘Your superstitions seem to lead you to suppose …’ we
might begin. ‘Why does your God, as you call him, require me to worship him?
That’s very arrogant of him, isn’t it?’ As if we were some Chinese mandarins
quizzing a Jesuit. Pretending we had never heard of God, the Church or Christian
values. ‘And if I don’t then I am doomed for all eternity, for
questioning
this
woolly authority figure.’