Wish You Were Here (12 page)

Douglas and John then moved again, this time to Roehampton, an affluent but somewhat inaccessible West London suburb famous for its estate of Le Corbusier-style blocks of flats that win prizes but are horrible to live in. John, his then girlfriend, Helen Rhys Jones, and Douglas moved into a house full of doilies and china knick-knacks (they were the landlord’s and they had a high mortality rate). After a while they were joined by a neurotic American who was prone to attack the garden vegetation on the grounds that it was untidy.

Like the bear, Horace, in the kiddies’ story, every day Lloydie would go out hunting—or rather to the BBC—and Douglas would moon about in his room, which was full of wardrobes,*
 
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and sleep. Andrew Marshall recalls David Renwick telling him that Douglas actually slept a hell of a lot, and, though we should be wary of glib judgements, this can signify a kind of chemical depression. He also took many baths, partly for pleasure and comfort. The baths helped him to think, and it was something to do. John reports that occasionally he would come home after a day forging and cleaving at the BBC and find Douglas exactly as he had left him that morning—in bed or taking another bath. He must have entered the bath like a plum, and emerged as a prune—a very clean prune.

Douglas can’t have been a tremendously jolly flatmate for John Lloyd. Writing is a solitary craft, and writers are self-absorbed even at the best of times (just one of the many personality disorders to which they are prone, alas). Authors who know they have talent, but who are failing, are entitled to feel dark. Once John—out of exasperation and not cruelty—suggested to Douglas one evening that he really ought to go out. John was having friends round, and Douglas was so miserable that he would have cast an effluvium of gloom over the proceedings.

Poor old Douglas must have been in a state. His self-esteem was always as fragile as a soap bubble. To pay his way he took a series of silly jobs, subsequently immortalized by anecdote. His favourite from this period was when he was single-handedly holding back the drilled hordes of terrorists, creditors, disgruntled bookmakers and general ne’er-do-wells from an inconceivably wealthy Arab family (not that a single miscreant turned up). After answering an ad in the
London Evening Standard,
he had been taken on as a bodyguard to a sheikh. He must have been employed on the grounds of size alone; many professional guards are wiry, quick and neat. Douglas would have been appalled by violence and would not have been much cop at dishing it out, but, in terms of pay per unit volume of guard, the clients got their money’s worth. Douglas had to sit for twelve hours at a time in the corridor of the Dorchester Hotel, just in case. According to myth, his employer had an income of £20,000,000 per day, a figure that seems improbable even by the standards of oil-rich sheikhs. Even divided by ten, however, this would still not have been a family on the edge of the abyss. Douglas used to tell the story of them going to the dining room and ordering from the stunned waiter everything on the menu—the whole lot
à la carte—
so as to ascertain if there was anything that piqued their jaded fancy. It was a thousand pounds’ worth. Nothing really did it for them, and they later sent out for hamburgers.

Another pleasure available on a personal delivery basis also appeared while Douglas was keeping his vigil in the hotel corridor. One evening there stepped out from the lift a truly spiffing prostitute—a top-of-the-range model of such sexiness that strong men had to bite their knuckles to stop themselves whimpering. Douglas looked up from his book, and between the two of them a complicit look was exchanged, one that acknowledged the fundamental similarity of their position. “It seemed to say we’re both tarts,” said Douglas, “and she wasn’t wrong.” When she left an hour later, she looked down at Douglas sitting at his post and said in a pleasantly modulated voice: “At least you can read while you’re on the job . . .”

Despite his low morale, he did get it together to go with some friends to that year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August with a show called
The Unpleasantness at Brodie’s Close—
a wry allusion to Dorothy L. Sayers’s
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.
Brodie’s Close is the actual location of the venue in Edinburgh; it’s a Masonic hall. John Lloyd recalls that the lighting was a switch on the wall. (If you are unfamiliar with the Edinburgh Festival, it’s worth going at least once for a manic tour of the culture. The Festival was relatively sane in the 1970s, but it has got bigger and bigger ever since. Once a year it takes over that highly respectable albeit tourist-wracked city. The range covers everything from Wittgenstein’s doorknobs to installation art.)

The show was a series of sketches written by David Renwick, Andrew Marshall, John Lloyd, John Mason and Douglas. John Mason, who oscillated between sketch-writing and the high-level teaching of mathematics, had organized the venue and kindly (recklessly?) underwritten the cost of hire. Typically, Douglas’s contribution was the last to arrive, and there was some doubt that he would make it at all, for guarding the sheikh paid £100 per week—even without occasional colossal tips, that was serious money if you were broke.

What tied the show together, more or less, was the running gag of a couple in a railway station (akin to
Brief Encounter
) urgently trying to move their relationship forward, but being forever interrupted. The couple’s frustrations anticipated the touching scene in
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
when Arthur Dent is hopelessly trying to convey his love to Fenchurch in the teeth of a relentlessly attentive lottery ticket seller. Like every writer, Douglas was wont to recycle good ideas. Does this detract from his creativity? Not a bit. It is worth printing this in bold and italics:
execution is all.

The revue starred the “Brodie’s Close Rollers” (the egregious Bay City Rollers were dominating the pop charts at the time). The Brodie’s Close Rollers were Douglas, John Lloyd, John Mason, Becky Fanner and Geoffrey Farrington (both performers rather than writers), and David Renwick. Andrew Marshall had been obliged to scuttle back home to a teaching job before he could get on stage. Douglas claimed him as the model for Marvin, the Paranoid Android,*
 
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though Marvin, for reasons too involuted to be described here, was also the nickname of Martin Smith. From the literary point of view Marvin was closer to Eeyore in
Winnie the Pooh.
Douglas confessed that he found this melancholy animal inspirational. Years later, when he read
Winnie the Pooh
to his daughter, Polly, he was struck again by how very similar Marvin and Eeyore were in tone. Andrew is now a successful TV writer. David Renwick went on to become one of the country’s top screen writers with the likes of
Jonathan Creek
and the creation of
One Foot in the Grave.
Lloydie himself is no slouch, especially at crisp one-liners. It was a formidably talented team.

They even produced a promotional T-shirt. Two in fact. One bore the enigmatic commercial message: “I have been Unpleasant at Brodie’s Close.” The other one carried the surreal legend: “So have I . . .” The plan was to walk around Edinburgh side by side. They must have attracted some attention either walking in formation, or singly.

David Renwick, who had first met Douglas in the writers’ room at the BBC’s Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street, recalls:

There was also an odd sketch of Douglas’s about a cereal manufacturer who put dead jellyfish in cereal packets as a giveaway, and was surprised when it didn’t help sell more cornflakes. The stage was so small that we had to hide behind the two curtains at the sides of the rostrum in order to change. I remember Douglas’s large bottom protruding from behind the curtain when he had to dress up as Long John Silver . . . Douglas and I had to share a room, too. He was reading
Dombey and Son
[Dickens was one of his favourite writers], and he used to talk in his sleep sometimes. It’s a pity I cannot remember what he said.

John Lloyd remembers those curtains behind which they had to change. “Just ordinary window curtains,” he says, “designed to prevent people on cherry pickers looking in on secret Masonic rituals.” He adds: “Douglas got terribly upset one night in a bar because he just wasn’t getting any laughs. Every time he spoke, the audience fell respectfully mute. At the time Douglas was sporting a huge, black, piratical beard, and after a few lagers we worked out that this was the problem. Enormous man with very loud voice in tiny cramped hall preceded by tenebrous efflorescence of follicles . . . He was simply terrifying the audience into silence. That night he shaved off the offending item, and after that everything was fine.” Andrew says that Douglas’s almost uncontainable joy in performing was quite infectious, and that made his occasional lapses in stagecraft forgivable.

Brodie’s Close
was a huge success. It filled the Masonic hall every night and the run was extended for another two days by popular demand. Unfortunately, the hall could only hold seventy-five people, though they squeezed in ninety, so the revue made no money—not that that’s the reason why people take shows to the Edinburgh Fringe. They hope not to lose too much, enjoy themselves and, perhaps, to garner enough smart attention to take their show on to a more commercial incarnation. The Brodie’s Close Rollers succeeded in two of these ambitions: they had enormous fun and did nothing to their bank balances.

Mary Allen recalls Douglas as listless and broke at this time. She felt sorry for him, but she never went to bed with him. (“We once came very close in Cambridge,” she remembers, “but talked about
Macbeth
all night instead.”) Douglas was indeed broke by this time, and his overdraft was growing with the kind of inexorability that one hopes is too gradual for the bank manager to notice.

Andrew Marshall possesses an acute if slightly lugubrious sense of humour. He and Douglas got on very well. Andrew remembers going all the way out to Roehampton on one occasion and finding Douglas in poor spirits. He sat up all night with him while Douglas cheered up and they talked about Ideas. Douglas enjoyed ideas; he liked to sneak up on them, like a mugger, from unexpected directions. But he had little small talk, something that was both endearing and rude, for sometimes the small change of human discourse is as important as the big stuff. Andrew thinks that what came across as rudeness was sometimes fear. For all Douglas’s Cambridge dazzle, he could find confident, clever people a bit daunting. Andrew recalls that they talked hugely until the sun came up. They had both recently read Robert Sheckley’s classic of stoned, witty SF,
Dimension of Miracles,
and they were exhilarated by it.

Douglas’s writing career, despite
Brodie’s Close,
was still wretched. The opportunity of working with one of his heroes from
Monty Python
had dissipated in a cloud of gin. The script-writing was going nowhere, the sketches were inconsequential, his love life was non-existent, he was broke. What’s more, he shared a flat with a golden boy whose life on the sunlit pastures was a mocking reminder of his own lack of achievement. Despite knowing he had talent, he felt pretty washed up.

That summer, 1976, had been the second of the worst drought in living memory—the upper reaches of the Thames dried up completely, and there was even an unfortunate Minister of Drought. The countryside was parched brown and gasping for a drink of water. Finally, as autumn crept into winter, it started raining again—and more or less did not stop for a year. For Douglas it was the pathetic fallacy writ large. His spirits had been falling month by month; he was later to describe that year as the worst of his life.

In 1991, looking back at his misery with the perspective of one who knows he moved on, he gave an interview to Danny Danziger of the
Independent:

I totally lost confidence in my ability to write, or to perform, or to do anything at all . . . and went into a catatonic spiral of depression. I suppose because of my background, having grown up as the child of divorced parents, a typical sort of shuttlecock kid, when I get depressed I tend to feel superfluous, that the world is actually better off without me, and that the world is not interested in my welfare at any level. When I was in this state of depression, I kept trying to find activities that would stop my brain going round and round and round. One day I decided to learn German, and went and got myself a pile of Teach Yourself German books, and spent every single waking hour poring over those books. And by a strange coincidence, at the end of the month I happened to wander into the garden, and there was a woman looking for someone who used to be in the flat, and she was a German. So I sat and talked in German with her and discovered that I had done incredibly well. But since then I’ve never spoken German, and I don’t think I remember a word.*
 
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Despite the morale-lifting effect of learning German, by November he was close to nervous collapse. In a spasm of impatience and general misery, he decided that he was never going to succeed as a writer. A complete existential upheaval would pick him up and put him down again somewhere else—somewhere happier. He applied for a job, “a proper job,” with Jardines, the well-known finance and trading house in Hong Kong, and he was accepted. Fortunately for his millions of readers, he must have reconsidered.

His subsequent retirement to the countryside was very much a retreat, and one in which he felt a failure. Churchill’s “black dog” of depression may not have been a constant companion, but it was certainly sniffing around and looking for a good time with his trouser leg.

Meanwhile in Stalbridge, Dorset, his old room was waiting for him, rent-free. At any time his mum was glad to see him and extend the comforts of home-cooking and family life. Ron, Janet’s second husband, the vet, was kindly and always took an interest, and Douglas was fond of Little Jane and James, his half-siblings, then aged ten and eight. (Once, many years before, during the school hols, Douglas had been in the house working while infant James had been upstairs, asleep. Leaving Douglas in charge, Janet nipped out on an errand. When she returned, young James was sitting on the sofa looking at Douglas with wide-eyed fascination. “Oh dear,” she said, “did he disturb you?” “Not at all, Mum,” replied Douglas. “I thought he might be a bit lonely up there and brought him down.” It is debatable who needed whose company the more . . .)