Still Standing: The Savage Years (40 page)

Standing alone in what was once the ballroom, I turned my iPod on and listened to Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, who were once resident here. I tried to picture this room in its heyday, in an era of tea dances when it was host to Shanghai society both high and low. Ignoring the jumble of tables covered in red-paper tablecloths and little vases that contained the type of plastic flowers you find in pound shops, I allowed my imagination to run riot and for a brief moment I was transported back to a sepia age of jazz and cocktails and opium and White Russian taxi dancers.

‘I’m definitely going to stay here one day,’ I said to André dramatically. ‘I’m going to soak up the atmosphere and write a novel about Shanghai.’

‘Don’t talk sheete,’ he responded in his Brazilian accent. ‘I give you one night in here.’

Lhasa in Tibet bore no resemblance to the city of
Lost Horizon
that I’d imagined. It was dirty, noisy and, if it hadn’t been for the presence of heavily armed Chinese military on every street corner and rooftop and of course the temples, Lhasa could’ve passed for the tallest and grittiest 1960s council estate in the world. It also seemed de rigueur in Lhasa for every motorist to sound their horn continuously day and night and I found it very disappointing.

As in Shanghai, we had a guide who picked us up each morning from the hotel and spent the day taking us around every temple in the Lhasa area. Apart from the street market, there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. Call me a philistine but unless you are a devoted Buddhist on a pilgrimage or have a keen interest in ancient Tibetan temples and all the paraphernalia that goes with them, I think you can
be excused if, like me, you begin to feel a little jaded at the sight of your seventy-ninth statue of Buddha, regardless of how mystical and ancient it is – especially if it involves a heart-attack-inducing climb up thousands of the steepest steps ever cut into the side of a building to see it. After a while they all began to look like Jim Broadbent and I was quite relieved when I came down with altitude sickness and was confined to my bed for the rest of my stay.

The altitude sickness miraculously vanished as soon as the plane took off for Hong Kong from Lhasa Airport, possibly the most chaotic in the world, and it was good to be able to breathe again instead of gasping for air like a goldfish out of its bowl. Hong Kong felt like a different planet after Lhasa and it was a relief to check into the familiar surroundings of the Mandarin Oriental, a hotel that I’ve stayed in many times before. (Sorry, here’s another book …) Apart from it being very lovely, it’s one of the few hotels in hermetically sealed Hong Kong to have a balcony and windows that open.

As I always do when I’m in HK, I took a day trip over to Kowloon on the Star Ferry. I like to sit on the top deck and remember all the different people I’ve taken this trip with over the years. The evocative smell of diesel mixed with the odours of the harbour awakens the parts of the memory that have become dulled over the years and allows me to recall conversations and those pressing concerns that seemed oh so important at the time but appear ridiculous and trivial in the cold light of the present day.

While I was waiting for a script for
Street of Dreams
to materialize I went off and did a play for ten dates in October 2011 at the Finborough, a fifty-seater fringe venue in Earls Court that I was informed is very prestigious, sort of the
Royal Court of fringe theatre, having won lots of awards for the work they produce there.

I remember back in the eighties when the Finborough was a gay bar with a bit of a racy reputation. It used to do ‘stay-behinds’ and consequently was popular with a lot of the drag acts who fancied a bevvy after work. I slipped in the toilets one night, somehow wedging myself between the wall and the toilet pan, unable to move as I’d twisted my dicky knee. Eventually one of the more mature drag queens, attired in a peach wig and a lurid tangerine kaftan with a cleavage that would put a well-upholstered prima donna to shame, came to my assistance.

The legendary Stanley Baxter had suggested to writer and actor Fidelis Morgan that it was about time a charming Irish comedy called
Drama at Inish
was revived in London and within months
Inish
was financed, cast and into rehearsal with Fidelis in the director’s chair. Actors, I’ve discovered, get things done: they don’t sit about wasting time, they make things happen.

I know Fidelis well, having been introduced to her by Celia Imrie who, like me, is a big fan of Fidelis’s brilliant Countess Ashby dela Zouche books. In fact we liked them so much we bought the rights between us, set up a company and are currently trying to get a series commissioned. It would make excellent Sunday night viewing (BBC take note). There was a tiny part for me in
Inish
, a character called Mr Slattery who lives with ‘an owld termagant of an aunt’ and is inspired, after witnessing a drama performed by a troupe of travelling players, to try to purchase weedkiller to hasten the demise of his penny-pinching relative.

The Finborough may have won countless awards but I bet there wasn’t one in there for the dressing room. Thirteen of
us were crammed into a not particularly large space we had to share with another show that appeared on alternate nights.

They’d stuck huge signs up over their props and costumes saying DO NOT TOUCH, which slightly rankled with us and lots of cries of ‘cheek’ and ‘as if’ echoed around the dressing room. We also got the impression that ‘the other lot’ considered us a bit Light Ent as their play was a heavy Irish drama and ours was a comedy, and apart from being polite on the stairs we didn’t mix.

I borrowed a shoulder-length ginger wig of rat’s tails off Vanessa, my make-up artist, and flung a suitable outfit together, complete with a pair of wire-rimmed specs with lenses as thick as beer-bottle bottoms off eBay that made me look like a sex offender. Greg, the wardrobe master, got me an overcoat and a pair of hobnail boots. Veronica, the assistant director, drilled me relentlessly until I had a passable Irish accent and off I went.

I can honestly say that I’ve never worked anywhere so small before or to such a tiny audience. It was comparable to performing in a large front room; the front row were almost on stage with us. You could not only see the whites of their eyes but the fillings in their back teeth as well and I found it claustrophobic at first.

But I really enjoyed my time with
Inish
. I earned bugger all but then you rarely earn anything in fringe theatre; you don’t go into the job with the intention of coming away with any money and I wasn’t disappointed. I had a wonderful time working with first-rate actors headed by Celia Imrie, who I’d crawl over a bed of broken glass for twice nightly with a matinee on Saturday if required to do so. As with any theatrical production I’ve been involved in, we availed ourselves of the bar downstairs after the show and on more than
the odd occasion at my instigation ventured ‘up west’. They were a great bunch of people and we’ve remained friends since.

The Christmas date for
Street of Dreams
was, to nobody’s surprise, postponed as the show ‘wasn’t quite ready’ and instead new dates were set for March. What show? Apart from the songs, we still didn’t have a show. Although more than a little relieved that we now had more time to get this epic together, I was also annoyed that we hadn’t been given more notice of this foreseeable cancellation as I and a lot of others had turned down lucrative offers of work over Christmas.

With time on my hands I prepared for Christmas with all the gusto of Santa’s elves, even though I err on the side of the Grinch. Plonking myself in front of the telly one evening, brain dead and numb from a laborious session of writing out hundreds of Christmas cards and then ringing round to try to find the addresses of the recipients of my seasonal sodding greetings, I found I was totally absorbed in what Kirsty Allsop was up to on the telly.

Instead of trying to find a suitable property for a couple who were incapable of making a decision as to whether they wanted tea or coffee, let alone if they wanted to live in a converted oasthouse in Kent or a loft apartment in Soho, she was doing something fascinating with twigs and pine cones. It would, she said, give your home an original festive feel and be the envy of your friends and neighbours and it wouldn’t cost very much, after the initial outlay for industrial staple guns, wire, glue, sequins, spray paint, etc.

Fired up by Kirsty’s passion and the relative ease with which she made these decorations, I spent a good deal of time
and money on Amazon gathering together the basics for the masterpiece I was about to create. A stream of parcels began to arrive daily and I set about decorating the banisters with artificial but highly realistic (or so the packaging claimed) pine garlands, endless strands of fairy lights and enough ornamentation, ranging from gingerbread men and striped candied canes to hundreds of glass balls and a goblin I’d bought in Venice, to make the Christmas electric parade at Disneyland look like a single torchlight in the dark. My banisters outshone the cheesiest of Norman Rockwell’s illustrations depicting the American Christmas Dream, and each time we went upstairs to fetch something we’d invariably forget what it was we were going up there for as we spent so much time oohing and ahhing at the display on the staircase.

Decorating the banisters took up all of November and most of December. It was high maintenance and I watched over my creation with a protective eye. God help any poor soul who used the banisters to haul their tired carcass up the stairs to bed. I’d go for the throat.

On the day I was recording my Radio 2 Christmas show I took a taxi bike over to Barnes to visit Sue Carroll, the columnist with the
Daily Mirror
, who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Refusing to let this terminal disease destroy her, she was still alive and kicking long after the life expectancy the doctors had given her. This gutsy woman, whom I’d known for some time and had enjoyed many a boozy night out with over the years, was now very seriously ill. Confined to a state-of-the-art bed in her comfortable sitting room, she was propped up on a multitude of pillows with an oxygen mask in one hand and a Benson and Hedges
in the other, taking intermittent whiffs from both of them as she greeted me.

It had been a while since I’d seen her and apart from her hair, still thick and glossy blonde, her appearance had seriously deteriorated. I wasn’t shocked, I’d seen so many friends in this emaciated condition down the years that I’d come to accept it, and we sat and chatted together openly and honestly for a short while as I drank my tea and we shared a ciggy. She was still interested to hear what was going on and I filled her in on the
Street of Dreams
saga.

‘I wouldn’t have anything to do with it,’ she said in between coughing fits, filling the oxygen mask with smoke in the process. ‘D’you want me to do a story on it? Ring me after Christmas with all the details.’ Typical Sue, always the journalist and optimistic till the bitter end. Her body might have given up on her but her resolve to survive was stronger than ever.

‘Are you doing anything about the hacking?’ she asked, referring to my discovery that my mobile had been hacked. ‘Or are you still going to let it go?’

When Scotland Yard had rung to advise me to make an appointment with the officers in charge of Operation Weeting and take a solicitor with me, my initial reaction was to panic and ask, ‘Why? What have I done?’

There was evidence that Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective working for the
News of the World
who had been arrested and imprisoned for hacking, had been a busy boy, as my name and mobile number as well as those of some of my friends and relatives had been found among his notes. There was also evidence that someone had been hacking into my phone.

I certainly didn’t feel ‘violated’ by this intrusion. Violation
is a word best applied to the suffering of a victim of a sexual assault. I felt disappointed.

I had always been as honest as I think is necessary with the press, sometimes to my own detriment, and I was usually happy to give interviews when asked, so I really felt cheated to think that someone wasn’t satisfied with this and was taking the liberty of listening to my voicemails in the vain hope that he’d discover some salacious news worthy of his mistress, the Witch of Wapping, and the rag that was the
News of the Screws
.

Despite pressure to sue, I chose to ignore the whole affair. I wasn’t interested in compensation and as no real harm was done apart from eavesdropping on messages left by Cilla Black – ‘It’s Cilla ’ere, d’ya want to go to Vera Lynn’s birthday party?’, a request I never thought I’d hear, or ‘It’s me, ring us’ from my Vera – I didn’t really feel I could enter the media circus and stand up alongside Milly Dowler’s parents, people who have a genuine reason to be taking the
NOTW
to task, and moan about something I considered extremely trivial in comparison.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Sue said after I’d explained this to her. ‘It’s certainly a more dignified response.’

Seeing that she was growing tired I said goodbye, promising to come and see her in the New Year.

‘Next time you come we’ll have a glass of champagne,’ she said as I was leaving.

‘Be careful on the back of that motorbike.’

Sue died as the credits rolled on the Christmas Day
Downton Abbey
. She was a big
Downton
fan while I sort of sit on the fence, undecided as to whether I am a fan or not. I’m mad for the devious Miss O’Brien, woefully underused in the last series, and I’m concerned about the cook who was, if
you recall – that’s assuming you watch the show, if not then disregard this bit – going slowly blind, groping around for her utensils and confusing salt for sugar and a well-hung haunch of venison for the chauffeur until the master sent her off to see someone high up in all things ocular.

This learned gentleman was obviously a genius, an early pioneer of the contact lens or perhaps even laser surgery, as come series two our cook is prancing around the kitchen, not a bother on her nor a pair of spectacles either as she reads the small print on packets and manages quite nicely to distinguish between a paring knife and a fish kettle. This poor half-blind woman who previously could only get about the kitchen by feeling her way along the walls was now delicately removing the tiny bones from a fresh salmon she was filleting. Incredible.