Semi-Detached (43 page)

The
revue I had directed went on to Edinburgh without me. Just before it arrived at
the Festival someone unearthed a letter from some fringe organization, inviting
the Footlights to take part in the inaugural Festival parade. This honour was
passed out on a rota basis. It had no significance. Nobody had bothered to do
anything as civilized as reply to it. But on the day, a spruced-up coal lorry
arrived. Peter Fincham and his band were loaded on to the back of the truck.
They lacked a festive touch. At the back of St Mary’s Hall, they found some
bolts of silvery material. It was hauled outside, cut into pieces and draped on
the lorry. Looking like a coal truck wrapped in Bacofoil, they joined the
parade.

After a
morning playing the numbers from the revue often enough to finally learn them,
the coal lorry wound back up the hill to St Mary’s Hall. Standing outside were
Richard Curtis, Angus Deayton and their stage crew .When they saw the lorry
they blanched.

‘What
the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the stage manager asked. He pointed to the
shredded silvery material now dragging in the Edinburgh dust behind the lorry. ‘That’s
our set!’

According
to Rory McGrath, Jimmy Mulville said something on the lines of ‘See that wall
over there, if you come any closer I’ll paint it red with your blood.’ Then he
walked away up the hill towards the pub.

The
stage manager chased him. ‘Oh, go on then,’ he said. ‘Punch me, then!’

Jimmy punched
him.

The
stage manager apologized.

Although
‘the snake pit’, which emerged from ‘the Camden Town Boys’, provided a number
of leading light-entertainment figures of the early eighties, including a
cross-section of both Oxford and Cambridge; although it numbered people as
diverse as Richard Curtis, Angus, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Rowan Atkinson,
Helen Fielding, Douglas Adams, Clive Anderson, Philip Pope and Mel Smith, and
writhed with producers Geoffrey Perkins, Peter Fincham, Jon Plowman, John Lloyd,
Andre Ptaszynski and Peter Bennett-Jones; although the two sets which had first
met or mingled at this grubby church hall were to go on holiday together,
inter-marry, send their children to the same schools and meet frequently over
the next thirty years, I never felt that the first sharp thwack of that initial
meeting was ever forgotten.

The
game was on. But as for me, by then I was just visiting. I waited about three
months before summoning Rory and Jimmy to come and join me at the BBC.

Just
before my father died he was brought home to his house in Woodbridge, and my
mother made up a bed in a low-ceilinged den just off the kitchen. This was
where he had made his cabinet for his hi-fl and his special boxes to hold all
the classical music tapes. It was where he had painted his cartoons and drawn
his garden plans, constructed more doll’s houses for his grandchildren, cranes,
sand pits and cars and started writing scenarios for novels and sit-coms. He
was quite content to organize a busy playtime for his retirement but he was
diagnosed with cancer at the age of seventy and died of it two years later.

We
gathered for his final moments. His breathing became more laboured. He was
linked to an automatic morphine injector that clicked regularly, a low rhythm
of efficiency ticking out the end. Only a week before, he had walked as usual
to get his paper. A few days after that, as they increased the doses of
painkillers, my mother told me how he suddenly got frisky and stood and held
her, giggling and trying to dance. But when I got there he was drifting in and
out of lucidity ‘Talk to him,’ the Macmillan nurse said. ‘The hearing is the
last thing to go.’ She wasn’t to know that we never really chatted, this father
and son. ‘What can I say that wouldn’t sound trite?’ he had written to his
elder brother when Joan, his wife, died. I probably talked about jobs I was
doing, just to reassure him that I was employed. And then I took his hand in
mine. He was barely conscious but he withdrew it. I saw it as a last refusal to
accept intimacy between us. My wife was rather more straightforward. ‘You
exaggerate all these things,’ she told me, ‘he was probably just in pain.’

Yes, I
do exaggerate all these things.