We rehearsed in the BBC block popularly known as the North Acton Hilton. Each floor in this dull, impersonal tower tucked away in a dull and impersonal suburb had two sets of purpose-built rehearsal rooms and production offices. Not that I knew it then, but this soulless, sick-building-syndrome structure with its dripping, flaking and crumbling exterior, flickering fluorescent strip-lighting and smelly lifts was to be my second home for the next eight years through successive series of Blackadder and A Bit of Fry and Laurie. I loved it. I loved the canteen, where you could nod hello to Nicholas Lyndhurst and David Jason, the kids from Grange Hill or the dancers from Top of the Pops. I loved the poles on plinths in the rehearsal rooms that could be moved around to stand in for doorways and entrances. I loved the tape on the floor that marked out rooms and camera positions in different colours, like sports-hall courts. I loved looking out across the dreary roofs of west London and knowing that I was here, working for the BBC with All Creatures Great and Small next door and Doctor Who the floor above.
As we rehearsed The Cellar Tapes I had no knowledge of the years and series to come, of course, and no idea that it was quite normal for technical runs to be played out in silence. Let me explain.
Multi-camera studio comedy performed in front of an audience has become rare since single-camera location shooting became the norm some years ago. Back then it was the usual mode. Outside scenes were shot on 16mm film, and everything else on those skirted rostrum studio cameras that wheel around on castors and which inspired Terry Nation to dream up the Daleks. If you watch Fawlty Towers or other comedies of the seventies and early eighties you can see the manifest, almost ludicrous difference between grainy exterior film and shiny interior video. No one seemed to mind then, perhaps because TV reception and resolution were poorer, perhaps because we accepted what we had always been given.
The schedule for recording went like this. You went out into the world and shot the exteriors that your script demanded and then you spent a week in North Acton rehearsing the rest, the studio element. It was traditional to tape the show on a Sunday, I suppose because busy actors often worked in the theatre on other nights. On Friday morning at Acton came the occasion of the Tech Run. The camera and sound crews, set, production, costume and make-up personnel would all troop into the rehearsal room and watch a run-through of the show. And this is where, in March 1982, we received the greatest blow to our comedy egos that we had yet experienced.
Silence.
Silence, the comedian's enemy.
We ran through sketch after sketch and song after song. Not a smile. Just folded arms, teeth-sucking and the occasional note scribbled on to a Xeroxed copy of the script.
When we had finished the last number and the room began to clear of technical people we went off into a corner and watched in a frightened huddle as the lighting director and number-one cameraman lingered to ask John Kilby, the director, one or two questions. When they had at last gone Dennis bounded up to us.
'Drink?'
'Oh, Dennis,' we said. 'Is it still going to happen?'
'What do you mean?'
'It was a disaster. A complete disaster. Not a smile, not a titter, nothing. They hated us.'
Dennis smiled a long, wide smile and the phlegm in the bottom of his lungs began to hiss, bubble and growl like a coffee-bar milk steamer as he wheezed out a great laugh.
'They have a job to do, my dears,' he said. 'No one, not even the sound crew, was listening. They are looking at where the cameras go, what the edge of frame is, a thousand different things. Ha ha! You thought they were making a judgement. That's very funny, ha!' Dennis's eyes ran as he laughed and choked and gasped to the bottom of his lungs.
On Sunday we performed the show in front of an audience. An audience that was warmed up by Clive Anderson, an ex-Footlights barrister who had yet to make the decision to become a performer in front of the cameras. The recording seemed to go well, but we were not making it for the studio audience, we were making it for television viewers, and whether they would like it we would not know for months.
In the meantime the Granada show demanded our attention.
Chelsea, Coleherne Clones and Conscience
Kim and I moved from Hadley Wood into a flat in Draycott Place, just off Sloane Square in Chelsea, where the newly enroyaled Lady Diana's friends flitted between the Peter Jones department store, the General Trading Company and Partridge's delicatessen, all rigged out in identical green quilted Husky jackets and high Laura Ashley collars. Their boyfriends drove Golf GTi cabriolets, so prevalent in SW3 that they were nicknamed haemorrhoids ('sooner or later every arsehole gets one'). Hooray Henries were getting proudly and hog-whimperingly drunk in the newly fashionable wine bars while their younger brothers wound silk scarves about their long pale necks and drooped like lilies, hoping to look as winning and doomed as Anthony Andrews in Brideshead Revisited. Pubs were beginning to ding and thrum to the sound of Space Invaders and from the open doors of the hairdressing salons and into the tumult of the King's Road pumped the sound of Adam and the Ants' 'Goody Two Shoes', Dexy's Midnight Runners' 'Come On Eileen' and Culture Club's 'Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?' Someone had found the knob marked 'eighties' and turned it up full.
Just around the corner from Draycott Place in Tryon Street stood, and still stands, a safe, twee and very Chelsea gay pub called the Queen's Head. It was in the snug there that I first heard about something called GRID. Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. It all sounded most peculiar. Gay people in America were dying and 'you mark my words, dear,' said the barman, 'it's coming over here.'
The gay world was expressing itself fiercely and freely at this time. Larry Kramer's Faggots was the book of the age, portraying a world of Fire Island excess where happy hedonists frothed, creamed and pumped away their endless weekends of drug-driven partying, succumbing (and indeed sucking cum) to intense physical gratification in eye-popping scenes of pitiless, guiltless detail. A lifestyle free from moral, personal or medical consequences. No restraint was shown, except perhaps a leather one swinging from the ceiling in which unimaginable acts would be perpetrated. I found it all about as arousing as a Tupperware party. It was a strange feeling to be in a minority within a minority. Most gay people aspired, or appeared to aspire, to that whole scene and to the Village People character types that defined it, especially the plaid-shirted, moustachioed look that was called the Clone. Squadrons of these tight-jeaned, heavy-booted individuals could be seen massed inside the Coleherne Arms in Earls Court. I found the manliness, humourlessness and physical urgency that emanated like cheap musk from such people and places alarming and depressing. Not that I was even faintly drawn to these preposterous Tom of Finland caricatures with their muscle vests, leather caps and joyless stares. My dream partner was a friendly, dreamy, funny young man with whom I could walk, talk, laugh, cuddle and play. Nonetheless I did go to places like the Coleherne and the newly opened Heaven, which proclaimed itself to be the largest disco in Europe. I went because ... well, because it was what you did in those days if you were gay and in your twenties. To feel a hundred eyes instantly scan and dismiss me was humiliating and shaming and reminded me of being checked out in the school showers. Rejection, contempt and lack of interest were all instant, careless and unequivocal. Thumping music, the sniffing of poppers, the thrashing on the dance-floor and those endless raking, questing, needy eyes prohibited any conversation or laughter. I was completely uninterested in picking anyone up or in being picked up myself and I certainly had no desire to dance but I suppose I thought that if I went often enough I would somehow break through and start to like it, in the same way I had broken through with unsugared tea. I never did break through with the gay scene. I learned to hate the discos and bars and everything they stood for. I am not sure that I can successfully claim that it was moral repugnance that fuelled my hate, I think it was the remorseless battering to my amour propre, my ego.
Problems with the physical self, you may have noticed by now, are central to my life
story. The reckless feeding of my physical appetites on the one hand and the miserable dislike and fear of my physical appearance on the other have all been overseen by a pathological personal theology that has for most of my life robbed me of any true ease. I do not wish to sound self-pitying or to privilege myself with unique sensitivity or susceptibility to distress in these matters, but there is almost no moment in the day when I do not feel myself to be intensely guilty of numberless trespasses. Drinking too much coffee, not concentrating sufficiently hard, not answering emails quickly enough. Not being in touch with people I have promised to be in touch with. Going to the gym too infrequently. Eating too much. Drinking too much. Declining invitations to speak at charity dinners. Being slow in reading and commenting on entirely unsolicited scripts. These are almost meaningless offences; they are pathetic little particles of plankton in the deep ocean of sin to be sure, but my feelings are as craven, cringing and confessional as the most self-abasing Calvinists in their most prostrate and abject furies of repentance. I do not believe there is a god or a judgement day or a redeeming saviour, but I go through all the shame, trembling and self-castigation of the most pious and hysterical ascetic without the cheap promise of forgiveness and a divine cuddle in recompense.
Good gracious, I know how this reads. To listen to the neuroses of a spoilt, over-paid, over-praised, over-pampered celebrity must be unendurable. For me to wallow in the luxury of being worried only by such insignificant piffle while so many in the world suffer the traumas, terrors and torments of poverty, hunger, disease and war. Even here in the developed world there are plenty who have financial and familial worries enough to be - to say the least - unsympathetic to my plight. I know. My God, do you think I do not know how monstrously self-indulgent, narcissistic and childish I must sound in so many ears? That is the point. My real dissatisfaction is with my dissatisfaction. How dare I be so discontent? How dare I? Or being discontent why cannot I shut up about it?
I know that money, power, prestige and fame do not bring happiness. If history teaches us anything it teaches us that. You know it. Everybody agrees this to be a manifest truth so self-evident as to need no repetition. What is strange to me is that, despite the fact that the world knows this, it does not want to know it and it chooses almost always to behave as if it were not true. It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life, an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be - given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise. And I am all for that. For the greater part of the time I will smile and agree that I am the luckiest devil alive and that I am as happy as a bee in pollen. Most of the time. But not when writing a book like this. Not when it is understood that I will attempt to be as honest with you as possible. About other people, as I have said, I may palter and pretend, but the business of autobiography is at least to strive for some element of self-revelation and candour. And so I have to confess that, foolish as I know it sounds, I spend much of my life imprisoned by a ruthless, unreasoning conscience that tortures me and denies me happiness. How much is Conscience and how much is Cyclothymia, the particular flavour of bipolarity with which I have been diagnosed and to which we will (hurray!) not return in this book, I cannot tell. I am content to shuttle between all available moral, psychological, mythical, spiritual, neural, hormonal, genetic, dietary and environmental explanations for unhappiness.
I hope then that you will excuse the unstartling revelation that I am often tortured and unhappy. Most of this unhappiness would appear to derive from my physical self being either disgusting in its lack of appeal or demanding in its requirements of calories and other damaging substances. In the light of this I will pursue further the point I was making about the Coleherne and related horrors of the eighties scene.
The gay identity, if I can be excused for so squirm-worthy a phrase, drew attention to the physical in those days more than I think it does now. Heaven (both of them: the address in the clouds and the club under the arches of Charing Cross) knows there is still plenty of body fascism about today, but I think it is being accurate rather than charitable to say that the community has grown up a little. Being gay thirty years ago, however, seemed overwhelmingly to be about dancing, cruising, narcissism and anonymous sex. I was gay and therefore I was supposed to care for and be capable of those things too. My problem was twofold. Firstly nobody seemed to be remotely attracted to me, and secondly I wasn't even interested anyway in all this heavy dance-floor heaving and casual erotic encountering.
Would it have been different if some of those harsh nighthawk glares had melted with desire when I came in through the door? Might I then have consented to dance the sexual dance? Did I hate my own face and body with such a hot hate only because I thought others did? Was I really doing no more than getting my retaliation in first, like children who decide that chess or history or tennis are boring, but only because they don't have an instant aptitude?
Blaise Pascal said that if Cleopatra's nose had been a little shorter, the whole history of the earth would have been different. If mine had been a little cuter then maybe I would have thrown myself into a life of carnal abandon at just that period in history when there were trillions of microscopic reasons for that being the most fatal game to play. So perhaps it is as well that I was unappealing.
If you are distressed or irritated to read me describe myself as such, then let it be understood that, while at that time I had no confidence in being anything else, I am fully aware that plenty of undeniably less good-looking men seemed to be getting all the sex they required. Self-image was a lot to do with it, but there can be no disputing the misery caused by those hard eyes running up and down my body for a scorchingly humiliating instant before flicking away with contempt towards the next person coming through the door. Of course I know those glaring gazing gays were just as, perhaps even more, insecure than me. They too were getting their retaliation in first. But to think such unsmiling coldness is sexy ... I am very proud and very happy to be gay, but I would be lying if I did not say that much about the world that gay people inhabited in those days sickened, repelled and frightened me.
As much as anything it was to be dismissed without being known that prickled so fiercely. Without labouring the point, it was behaviour that I thought not far from racism, sexism or any other kind of prejudice or snobbery. 'Because you are not cute I do not want to know you' was to me hardly different from suggesting, 'Because you are gay I dislike you' or 'Because you are Jewish, I dislike you' or, come to that, 'Because you went to Cambridge I dislike you.' Of course, anyone who believes themselves to be a victim of such discrimination ought to be sure. We first have to dismiss the worrying possibility that a true interpretation of another's antipathy might be 'Because you are a boring arsehole I dislike you', a judgement from which there is little hope of comfortable escape.
Kim enjoyed the gay world more than I did. He was not, of course, fooled by it, but I think he was more at ease in it than I could ever be. He also had more opportunity to experience it, for I was beginning to be so consumed by work that such things as clubs and pubs were receding into the background for me. This new Granada comedy series was going to take me away from London for long periods of time.
Colonel and Coltrane
It was hard not to like Manchester. Being called 'love', 'chuck' or a 'daft barmcake' can only delight a southerner used to the lonely and unsmiling lovelessness of London and the south-east. Granada lodged us at the grand and luxurious Midland Hotel and doled out to us the most unbelievably handsome per diem cash payments in little brown packets. I had never had so much ready money in my life. We had had three months to write material and now we were here to sift, select and record.
Hugh
and I had been - what is the word? Horror-struck? Staggered? Mortified? Shamed? Some mixture of all those perhaps - to discover that our slow, mournful and insecure rate of writing had been trumped and trampled on by the one-man whirlwind of industry, creativity and prodigality that was Benjamin Charles Elton. For every one page of uncertain and unfinished sketch comedy that we held apologetically up for judgement, Ben produced fifty. That is no exaggeration. Where our comedy was etiolated, buttoned-up and embarrassed, his was wild, energetic, colourful and confident to the point of cockiness. While we would read ours out with a sorrowful cough and somehow framed in self-deprecating inverted commas, Ben would perform his, playing every part, with undisguised pleasure and demented relish. Despite our complete sense of humiliation and defeat we did laugh and we did unreservedly admire his astonishing talent and the unabashed zest with which he threw himself into performance.