Wish You Were Here (9 page)

This review was a typically polished Cambridge put-down, even though co-written by a mate, Keith Jeffery, and not intended to be read entirely seriously. Nevertheless, it reflected a preoccupation with class that was not only of its era but has never really gone away. The great John Cleese wrote and performed one of TV’s most enduring sketches around that time with his illustration of the class system in which the diminutive Ronnie Corbett played the token prole. Cleese’s Upper Class Twit of the Year has also lodged like a burr in the collective memory of the nation. Left-leaning public schoolboys are often guiltily hung-up about their privileged backgrounds, which may explain why there are so many of them in the media who dissemble about their origins and dress like undercover policemen. All societies have a class system, but perhaps it is only in Britain that we are, as Orwell said, branded on the tongue so that a single vowel sound is enough for the educated ear to place a speaker’s origins. This is preposterous, and thus endlessly funny. Adams, Smith, Adams were using staple ingredients by way of shorthand (the upper-class buffoon, the tea-making builders and so on). Admittedly these are comic stereotypes, but not portraits of individuals to be sneered at. Certainly Douglas cared not a whit about social credentials; creativity and brains were what he rated most highly. Adams, Smith, Adams’s biggest crime here was not snobbery, but cliché.

Adams, Smith, Adams had another outing with
The Patter of Tiny Minds
in January 1974, this time in the Bush Theatre, above a large pub in West London’s Shepherd’s Bush (an area well away from the bright lights of the West End). They added another Smith and another Adams, so the line up read Adams, Smith, Adams, Smith, Adams. In fact, the extra Adams was Mary Allen, who joined Equity (the actors’ union) as an Adams, and the additional Smith was John Lloyd. It was a hoot to do it in such an intimate and boozy venue. Martin remembers:

We were on as a late night show—we came down from Cambridge to do it. The main performance of the evening was Lindsey Kemp’s pantomime to the work of Jean Genet. We were sharing a room with Lindsey Kemp, who of course is as camp as a row of tents, and it was quite a laugh. One evening we went to the cinema and watched—in the days when you’d see two main movies together—
The Wicker Man
and
Don’t Look Now.
And in
The Wicker Man,
of course, Lindsey Kemp’s playing the publican. And so it was extraordinary, watching the film and seeing the man I’d been avoiding all week.

Sharing the minuscule changing rooms must have been the stuff of sitcoms, with the youngsters exquisitely anxious not to give out any of the wrong signals. Douglas was thrilled that the review made a profit of £25 for each of them.

For the second time in the history of comedy (and possibly for good reason, the last), the show introduced the odd notion of shaving a cat. This entailed no harm to any moggy; it was a thought experiment rather like Schrödinger’s unrealistically ambiguous cat of quantum mechanics fame. Both were used to suggest absurdity. In the surreal Adams, Smith, Adams, Smith, Adams version, shaving a cat weaves in and out of the programme—rather cat-like in fact. Does it mean anything? Does it stand for the impossibility of romantic yearning, hem hem? Is it just a daft idea that appealed to their undergraduate imaginations? Here are a few examples:*
 
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THE ROMANTIC TRADITION

Mike and John sitting, facing audience

John reading newspaper, or Freud, or
Usage and Abusage

[Lots of Pinteresque pinging words across the void in fraught but inconsequential fashion. Then:]

And so on . . . Or there’s this song:

SHEER ROMANCE

Well, babe, it often seems,

I’ve always known you in my dreams,

You came to me beneath the moon,

That starry night in early June.

Well, babe, I think I love you,

You make my heart go pitterpat,

Feeling so romantic,

Think I’ll go and shave the cat.

The final scene in the three-part sketch has a man and a woman talking with hopeless desire about doing it (no doubt in the audience’s mind that it equalled sex at this point) before dashing off stage in some excitement. Then there are sound effects of—you’ve guessed it—cat shaving. Describing this in prose is a vivid reminder about why you have to see sketches performed; yanked out of their natural medium they flop about like distressed goldfish.

Incidentally, about this time, in his second year at St. John’s, Douglas met Michael Bywater, who was in his first year at Corpus Christi. Michael, a dauntingly bright man, was studying English, having switched from Medicine, although he had originally planned to be there on an organ scholarship. His interest in the theatre was rather more conventional than the Footlights approach, but he sometimes contributed to their musical interludes. He recalls that what brought them together was that they both fancied (with that terrible urgency of nineteen-year-olds) a lovely woman called Isabel. Later she married Michael (and much later they divorced). He was destined to reappear in Douglas’s life in the early 1980s.

But for now, Douglas was seldom so happy as when he was on stage performing. He often remarked that he really wanted to be John Cleese—he was tall enough—but was disappointed to discover that the job had already been taken. This did not stop him from being in some ways a rather Pythonesque character—mercurial, funny and given to occasional attacks of ill-coordinated panic. Then Douglas actually met John Cleese. Douglas had come down to London to see a show at the Roundhouse and found himself in the interval standing in the bar, by happy coincidence, right next to John Cleese. Please, please, he said, for since he was seventeen he had been a fervid admirer of
Monty Python,
please could I interview you for
Varsity
magazine? Perhaps John was taken by surprise—or it was difficult to say no to someone so earnest who could look you straight in the eye—but he was kind enough to assent. Indeed, it was an exceptionally long interview with the kind of searching questions and intelligent dialogue that have now become alien to media complicit in the celebrity game.

Douglas treasured his interview with John Cleese and kept a bound copy in the great crates of stuff that biographers are pleased to call “archives.” He marked one passage in biro that is perhaps the bedrock of a lot of surreal humour. In response to a question about the development of his particular style, John Cleese said this:

Some people have said, like Marty Feldman, that it [a Cleese sketch] has got a very strong internal logic . . . That despite the fact that it’s mad, the rules are laid down at the very beginning and the rules of the madness are followed very carefully. It is not a conscious thing. I think it comes from the fact that I was a scientist and a lawyer by training . . . The nearest simile I can find to actually writing a sketch is that you dig around a bit in the top soil and all of a sudden you hit something, a vein of something, and you follow it, and sometimes you lose it, and you have to track your way back to where it last was.*
 
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Years later, Douglas was one of only two writers—other than the Pythons themselves—who ever got a writing credit on
Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
(Neil Innes was the other one.)

Monty Python
occupied a special place in Douglas’s affections, as it did for an entire generation of British students. It was a show that turned the map upside down, an anarchic convention-shatterer that was always stimulating even when the viewers winced rather than laughed. Blokes of a certain age can voice such classics as the dead parrot sketch with word perfect synchrony. For the students who were kids in the sixties,
Monty Python
had a place in our hearts rather like the one occupied by
The Goon Show
for those growing up in the fifties. You still come across men who only need put on an Eccles or Bluebottle voice to fall about pole-axed with mirth.*
 
⁶⁴
Decades later, Douglas provided the same service for his own fans. Douglas was in that great tradition of the
Goons
and
Monty Python—
he wrote something that became the special property of a generation.*
 
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Despite that tone of “we’re adults now, and damn hard to please” from Douglas’s college mates,
The Patter of Tiny Minds
had been greeted with delight. The three principals, according to John Lloyd, were “easily funnier than anything in Footlights.” They were in demand but like the three musketeers, so several informants have assured me, they had in a moment of passion formed a pact. According to this legend, they would all audition for Footlights, and it would have to take all of them or none of them. All for one, and one for all. This understanding was put to the test when Martin Smith was recruited by Crispin Thomas to perform in a Footlights May revue without the other two, though as a sop they were invited to be script consultants. For a while there were apparently some dislocated noses. Douglas could certainly sulk, though Will is recorded by all as being insanely good-natured. The only other trouble with this story is that neither Will nor Martin can remember their lives being blighted by any such incident. In any event, all ended well. By 1974, under the presidency of Jon Canter, Martin Smith was the secretary and Douglas and Will were both committee members, though they did not perform on stage.

As a performer Douglas was largely frustrated, but as part of Adams, Smith, Adams, he helped to write great chunks of
Chox,
the 1974 Footlights show. The intermission divided the show into the top layer and the bottom layer (chox = chocs). The production was a knock-out. The cast was particularly talented: Jon Canter, Sue Aldred, Jane Ellison, Griff Rhys Jones, Martin Smith, Crispin Thomas, an improbably hairy Clive Anderson and Geoff McGivern. (Geoff was later to become Ford Prefect in the radio version of
Hitchhiker’s,
and—to great effect—also did the voices of Deep Thought and the Frogstar Robot and Traffic Controller.)

But amid all that brilliance, there was still no spot on stage for Douglas. He was disgruntled about it at the time. There is a suggestion that the committee struck a deal with him whereby as compensation he could write, with Will and Martin, many of the sketches, so that the team almost became in effect the principal scriptwriter. Years later he was still a little bitter. “Footlights was becoming a producer’s show,” he said, “in which the producer calls the tune. I think it should be a writer-performer show.”

By the way, one sketch by the trio, “Beyond the Infinite,” prefigured some of the best-known lines of
Hitchhiker’s
by four years. Consider this from Adams, Smith, Adams (1974):

Far out in the depths of the cosmos, beyond the furthest reach of man’s perception, amidst the swirling mists of unknown Galaxies, where lost worlds roll eternally against the gateway of infinity, inexorably on through millions of light years of celestial darkness we call Space—Space—where man dares to brave indescribably elemental horrors, Space [there follows a Star Trek split infinitive joke now too familiar to be reproduced] . . . I can’t begin to tell you how far it is—I mean it is so far. You may think it’s a long way down the street to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to Space . . .

Why this unwillingness on behalf of his fellow thesps to let Douglas act? It wasn’t deliberate unkindness. Mary Allen, an actor with impeccable stagecraft,*
 
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thinks he tended to unbalance the general performance:

Douglas was never in a Footlights revue, and I think that was because he was such an idiosyncratic stage presence. In a group revue you have to have your own presence, but also be able to lose it. Sometimes you have to play second fiddle to other people so you have to be able to blend in with the group. You need a fluid stage presence that you can either crank up, to be someone wild and weird and eccentric—a character—or you can crank down, to get lost in a supporting role. Partly through physical size Douglas wasn’t able to do that. He wasn’t able to lose his identity . . .

He was huge, and he always looked as if he was about to burst into laughter. And you felt that was partly because what he was doing was extremely funny, but you also felt that it was a sort of cosmic laughter if you like—that the whole thing was absurd. It wasn’t that purely ironic, parodic approach to absurdity. It was an affectionate, comic approach to absurdity.

Douglas was a talented actor, but Mary’s comments chime with other sources. He was not good in ensemble pieces. His timing was not perfect, he was as conspicuous as a double-decker bus, and he could not do deadpan if you stood poised over him with red-hot scrotal shears. He was just too easily amused—especially, as one slightly envious friend remarked, by his own jokes. A 6’5" giant grinning wildly in anticipation of a line yet to be delivered is distracting for the other actors on the stage, and it telegraphs what is to come to the detriment of that notoriously tricky art of comic timing. The axiom of thesps is this: don’t act with animals or children—to which might have been added, nor Douglas Adams.