The Fry Chronicles (19 page)

We spent far more time travelling between European cities in a Wallace Arnold coach than we did on stage. Devising games and time-passing occupations became a major obsession. Most of us were reading for the English tripos, and one game we played required us to write down on a slip of paper the major works of literature we had never read. I collected the slips and called out the roster of titles
which included
Hamlet
,
Animal Farm
,
David Copperfield
,
Pride and Prejudice
,
The Great Gatsby
,
Waiting for Godot
… you name an obligatory must-read masterpiece and there was someone on the bus who had never read it. The wriggles of shame at the depths of our ignorance were as much pleasurable as mortifying. It is something of a relief to know that one is not alone in having a peculiar and inexplicable gap. You will want to know which title I submitted. It was D. H. Lawrence’s
Women in Love
, which, to my no doubt crippling disadvantage and discredit, I still have not read to this day. Nor have I read
Sons and Lovers
or
The Rainbow
. You can add all of Thomas Hardy’s novels to that list except
The Mayor of Casterbridge
(which I loathed). I passionately embrace Lawrence and Hardy as poets, but I find their novels unreadable. There. I feel as if I have emerged from a confessional. I hope you do not feel too let down.

My first television performance came around this time. It had nothing to do with acting, but sprang from that same annoying anxiety to show off and be admired that one day, perhaps in my dotage, I will succeed in shaking off. The word had gone around the college that Queens’ was entering a team for Granada Television’s student quiz show
University Challenge
. I had watched this religiously since I was a child and could hardly have been more desperate to be picked for the team. The captain had been chosen by some process that I never understood, but he fully justified the appointment. He was a brilliant student of Modern and Medieval Languages called Steven
Botterill, now a renowned Dante scholar and Professor at Berkeley, California. He had sensibly decided to pick the three other members of his team by compiling a list of questions and holding an open qualification test. I was infinitely more nervous and excited about sitting this little exam than the official tripos. I cannot remember the questions especially well … one was something to do with Natty Bumppo which I was relieved to be able to answer. When a handwritten note from Botterill arrived in my pigeonhole to tell me that I had been picked for the team I was almost as jubilant and irradiated with joy as the day in 1977 that my mother had telephoned Just John’s Delicatique in Norwich to break the news of my scholarship to Queens’.
^†
The other two undergraduates chosen were a scientist called Barber and a lawyer called Mark Lester – no, not the child star of
Oliver!
but another Mark Lester altogether. We travelled north to Granadaland for the first round.

It was my first visit to Manchester and my first close-up encounter with a television studio. In Norwich I had once sat in the audience for the taping of a largely forgotten Anglia TV sitcom called
Backs to the Land
but that was the extent of my penetration of the broadcasting world. Granada was a much more impressive outfit than dear, sweet, parochial Anglia. Their studios were the home of
Coronation Street
and
World in Action
. The corridors were lined with photographs of actors, film stars and nationally known television presenters like Brian Trueman and Michael Parkinson. We were shown down a labyrinth of these passageways to a large dressing-room, where we were asked to wait. We nibbled at crisps and fruit, sipped fizzy drinks and grew steadily more
and more nervous. If we won our first-round match we would have to play another team that same afternoon. If we won that, we would have to return to Manchester at a later date for quarter- and semi-finals matches. If we won those, well a third and final visit would be required. That was a lot of ifs, and suddenly I felt, and perhaps the other three did too, that I knew absolutely nothing. Every single fact I ever knew flew from me like pigeons from the sound of a gun. Humiliation awaited us. I banged the side of my head in a last-minute attempt to rewire the brain.

Universally Challenged.

The quizmaster was, of course, the marvellous
Bamber Gascoigne
, whose voice and features I knew as well as my parents’. He was one of those figures like the Queen and Robert Robinson: I could not remember a time when I wasn’t aware of him. A wise and kindly man, he seemed aware that other teams knew that he was a Cambridge graduate himself and therefore went out of his way to be scrupulously fair, without ever toppling over into self-conscious countercantabrigianism. He always appeared to delight in a correct answer whencesoever it came, and it was firmly believed by all that he set and researched every question himself. He was famous for his gently knowledgeable corrections – ‘Bad luck, you were thinking of Duns Scotus perhaps …’ or ‘Very close, he was of course a
friend
of Clausewitz …’ – an attitude at some remove from the blessed Jeremy Paxman’s scandalized shouts of ‘
What?
’ and expression of having bitten into a bad olive whenever an incorrect answer comes his way that offends his sense of what should be known.
Autre temps, autres mæurs
…

Botterill, Lester, Barber and I walked shyly on to the set, made the usual jokes about how the desks were actually side by side on the studio floor, not one on top of the other as they appeared to be on screen, and took our designated seats. I am afraid to say I cannot recall where the first-round opposition came from. Leeds University pops into my head, but I may be mistaken. No doubt they thought we were ghastly Oxbridge wankers. Looking at photographs of our team and its wild trichological variety, geeky earnestness and unhealthy complexions, we cannot be said to have been the prettiest quartet ever to greet a television audience.

‘We cannot be said to have been the prettiest quartet ever to greet a television audience.’
University Challenge.

We need not have been nervous. We were a good side and trounced all the opposition that was ranged against us right up to the final, which in those days was decided by a best-of-three encounter. For that match we found ourselves pitted against Merton, Oxford, my housemaster’s old college. They seemed a decent and bright enough bunch, but we brushed them aside in the first leg with a winning margin of over a hundred. In the second leg they won by ten points, which was maddening but set up one of the tensest finals on record. When the gong sounded for the end of the third and deciding leg the teams were exactly level. A sudden-death tie-break came into operation. Whoever got the next question would win the series. Merton buzzed in with the right answer. We were runners-up. I have rarely been so devastated or felt so cheated. It hurts even now that our team can have answered so many more questions correctly than the opposition and yet have lost. Infantile and pathetic, but even as I type these words thirty years later the blood surges in my ears and my whole being seethes with feelings of disgusted outrage, bitter resentment and maddened
disappointment at such shattering injustice. Nothing will ever put it right. Nothing, I tell you, nothing. Oh well.

Back at Cambridge as the Lent term came to a close I was approached by one Mark McCrum, now a well-known travel writer but in those days a larky, impish undergraduate with a flop of black hair and eyes like glistening currants. His father, Michael, was headmaster of Eton (though shortly to return to Cambridge to take up the mastership of Corpus Christi), and his older brother, Robert, was beginning to make a name for himself in publishing at Faber and Faber. Mark McCrum, with the initiative, enterprise and guileless chutzpah that were trademark characteristics, had taken charge of a small L-shaped space in St Edward’s Passage belonging to Corpus Christi College. He and his friend Caroline Oulton planned to turn it into ‘The Playroom’, a drama venue that would specialize in new writing. I knew Caroline Oulton and adored her. She had been one of the
Macbeth
cast, and I had always tried to sit next to her on the coach. She stirred surprising things in me.

She and Mark had a most unexpected request. They wanted me to write a play to christen the Playroom: not necessarily full length, perhaps it could be part of a double bill? They had asked a clever young undergraduate called Robert Farrar to provide the other half of the evening. What did I think?

I was flattered, excited and alarmed, keen to try, yet scared of failing. Why did they think I might be capable
of writing a
play
? I had never written anything close to such a thing in my life. Private poetry and the occasional article for
Broadsheet
were my whole writing career.

‘Go home for the vac, sit and concentrate. Write about what you know. It’ll be brilliant. But bear in mind it’s a really intimate space. Anything you can write that makes the audience feel part of things will be perfect.’

Term ended, and I returned to Norfolk. ‘Write about what you know’ is the maxim that I had most heard from writers dead and alive. In my William Morris wallpapered room at the top of the house I sat at my desk and wondered what I knew. Institutions. I knew schools and I knew prison. That was about it. ‘Involve the audience.’ Hm …

I started to write the opening of a lesson in which a prep school master harangues his Latin class, tossing back their exercise books with hyperbolic disdain: ‘Boys who rub me up the wrong way, Elwyn-Jones, come to a sticky end …’ that sort of thing. The audience are the class. There comes a sudden lighting change that alters the time scheme and the dramatic mode, bringing down the fourth wall with a crash. A knock at the door, an older master enters, a story unfolds. I wrote and wrote away, first in longhand on a pad, then typing up each scene on my treasured Hermes 3000 typewriter, a jade-green-keyed and battleship-grey-bodied machine of incomparable solidity and beauty.

I contrived a farcical plot incorporating pederasty, blackmail and romance which was interwoven with other classroom scenes involving the audience in such a way, I hoped, as to satisfy the requirements of Mark’s and Caroline’s commission.

I typed out the title page:

Sue Denim being ‘pseudonym’ of course. I cannot quite recall why I decided to present the play under a nom de plume – I think perhaps I had some hope that if the audience believed it to have been written by a woman they might forgive the piece its less than radical milieu.

Caroline and Mark seemed pleased with it, and a friend from Queens’, Simon Cherry, agreed to direct. A law undergraduate called John Davies played the older master Herbert Brookshaw, and I played Dominic Clarke, the young hero of the play, if hero is quite the word we want.

The production sold out the Playroom for its short run of three days and so, as there seemed to be a demand for more, we performed
Latin!
again for a week in the Trinity Hall lecture theatre.

I was a playwright! The peculiarly exultant joy that comes over you when you have written a piece of work is like no other. Admiration and acclaim for acting performances, rousing ovations and deafening applause do not come close to the special pride you feel in having made something that was not there before out of no more exotic a material than words.