Ben had instantly spotted the performing genius of Emma Thompson and warmed to the big-eyed hopelessness that Hugh could project in characters as well as his authority and range. In me he saw a crusty relict of Empire and created a character called Colonel Sodom, who might, I suppose, be regarded as a rather coarsely sketched forerunner of Blackadder Goes Forth's General Melchett. Another aspect of my limited performance scope that appealed to him resulted in Doctor de Quincey, a casually peremptory and callous doctor who reappeared some years later in Ben's comedy drama series Happy Families.
Single-handedly Ben seemed to have written every episode of the series, which was called, after much disputation, There's Nothing to Worry About. We shot it in and around Manchester, the director, Stuart Orme, using state of the art Electronic News Gathering equipment, which is to say new lightweight video cameras whose flexibility allowed the production to save money on set building, but at the price of a substandard look and soundtrack. Hugh and I managed to write a few sketches that made it through to performance, as a sop to our pride we suspected, one being a long sequence that involved a pair of characters called Alan and Bernard, who had featured in the Footlights Charades sketch and who would pop up again as Gordon and Stewart in A Bit of Fry and Laurie. But all in all it was Ben's show, for good or ill.
It is no unfair criticism of anyone to say that the results were uneven. Richard Armitage, the agent who had taken me, Hugh and Emma under his wing, was loud in his dismay, disgust and disapproval. He was particularly revolted by Colonel Sodom's exploding bottom. The Colonel ate strong curries and in a series of shots I was seen striding through the streets of Didsbury all but propelled along the pavement by pyrotechnic special-effect farts. I think there was even a close-up of the seat of my pinstripe trousers bursting open with a smoking star-shaped bang. Richard muttered about this for weeks. He felt that the stylish, intelligent brand of graduate comedy for which he hoped we would be known, and on which he planned to build our careers, was being crippled at birth by a foul-mouthed Cockney street urchin with a sewer for a mind and he wanted none of it. Who knows what grumbling behind-the-scenes machinations took place. Richard may even have tried to get us out of our contract. Steve Morrison, the executive producer, and Sandy Ross stayed loyal to Ben, quite rightly recognizing his ferocious and fertile talent. They were aware nonetheless that There's Nothing to Worry About had flaws, and their solution was to bring in a new cast member. Paul Shearer, through no fault of his own, left the show. As one who wrote less material even than Hugh and me he was, I suppose, considered dispensable. Paul's place was taken by a Glasgow Art School graduate called Anthony McMillan, who had just changed his name to Robbie Coltrane.
Big, loud and hilarious, Robbie combined the style and manners of a Brooklyn bus-driver, a fifties rock and roller, a motor mechanic and a Gorbals gangster. Somehow they all fitted together perfectly into one consistent character. He terrified the life out of me, and the only way I could compensate for that was to pretend to find him impossibly attractive and to rub my legs up against him and moan with ecstasy.
'You cheeky wee fucker,' he would say and somehow tolerate me.
The only time in my life I ever wore a donkey jacket. Alfresco.
A twat in tweed and cravat: inexcusably slappable. Alfresco.
Robbie has since said in an interview that he found Hugh and me to be arrogant, off-puttingly over-confident Establishment figures who looked down our well-bred noses at his blowsy, vulgar intrusion like thoroughbred racehorses shivering their fastidious flanks at the presence in their stables of an unwelcome donkey. I am not quoting him exactly, but that is certainly the gist of what he said. Whether he made this up to pad out a boring interview session or whether he truly believes it and remembers it that way, I cannot say. I always get on amicably, indeed affectionately, with Robbie on the rare occasions that I see him these days, but I have never dared raise the subject of that interview. They bring us back to the endless, and perhaps arid, problem of affect and appearance, the question of the figures we cut with others despite what we may feel inside. We see everyone else socially armed with great clubs while all we have hidden behind our backs is a pitiful cotton bud. I know how much Hugh and I were suffering a tormented sense of inadequacy, how much we felt out of place and how much we were embarrassed by our damnable public-school and Cambridge backgrounds. I also know that we were too proud and too well-brought-up, or I was certainly, to go around slouching and mooching with hang-dog expressions that begged for petting and pity. It is, at some sort of stretch, possible that we hid our feelings of hopelessness so well that Robbie could, in all conscience, claim that we came over as poncey, preening pricks, but I honestly cannot believe it likely. Perhaps it suited Robbie to imagine himself as a lowborn grease-monkey endowed with natural, home-grown street talent, forced into a world of pale snobbery and mincing middle-class privilege. In fact, of course, Robbie is the son of a doctor and went to school at Glenalmond College, perhaps Scotland's most elite private seat of learning and subject of the excellent 2008 documentary Pride and Privilege. The 13th Duke of Argyll, the Marquess of Lothian, Prince Georg Friedrich of Prussia and the 9th Earl of Elgin, Viceroy of India, are numbered amongst its eximious alumni. That he managed to enter Glasgow School of Art as Anthony Robert McMillan with an accent like Prince Charles's and emerge the other end as Robbie Coltrane with an accent like Jimmy Boyle's is a fine achievement. I sometimes think I should have tried to do something similar.
There's Nothing to Worry About had emerged on screen, exploding bottoms and all, in June of 1982 in the Granada region only. We went back down to London to write in July, August and September for the new series which was to be called Alfresco.
Hugh, Emma, Ben, self, Siobhan and Paul: There's Nothing to Worry About, Granada TV, 1982. Oh, but there was...
Computer 1
One free afternoon in Manchester I had walked to the Arndale Centre and drifted from shop to shop. In a branch of Lasky's I found myself staring in perplexity at a group of teenagers clustered around a display stand. I approached and looked over their shoulders ...
Half an hour later I was fiddling with the back of the television in my Midland Hotel bedroom. After ten frustrating and confused minutes Ceefax-style text appeared on the screen.
BBC Computer 32K
BASIC
It was the beginning of a lifelong love affair, the details of which will bore you dreadfully. I shall try not to linger on the subject too long, but the relationship was and is too important to me for it to be consigned to a quick sentence. Most of my spare hours were now spent in front of this transcendently lovely (to me) machine, an Acorn BBC Micro B computer. At that time microcomputers relied on two household appliances to work properly: a television for display and a cassette tape-recorder for recording and loading programs. The Lasky's salesman had persuaded me to buy a program called Wordwise, which came on a ROM chip that you plugged into one of four slots on the circuit board. The other spaces were for the operating system and the BASIC programming language. With Wordwise plugged into the first slot the computer magically started up as a word-processor. I could attach it by a wide-ribboned parallel connector to a Brother electric typewriter which now became a slave printer. I cannot explain my fascination and delight. With exultation I would show my friends the computer, the programs I had written and the printer printing out. Everybody cooed and wowed obediently, but I could tell they were not moved in the same way that I was. It puzzled me that I should be so captivated by this new world when others were so relatively unengaged. Certainly the system was clever, one could do remarkable things with it, and most people were impressed - in the standard 'Tch, whatever will they think of next?' way - but for me the excitement was about so much more than function. I have long since given up trying to understand this undying obsession, which rapidly took on all the form, manner and behaviour of a classic addiction. I passed most of what spare time I had with my head buried in dedicated microcomputer magazines or haun
ting the Tottenham Court Road on the look-out for new peripherals. I would stay up at the keyboard until three, four or five in the morning writing pointless programs or attempting to master useless techniques. Within a very short time I had filled my corner of the Chelsea flat with a daisy-wheel printer, a plotter, a dedicated RGB monitor and an add-on for an extra processor and floppy disks. My lifelong battle to control cabling began at this time. All the cables I have ever owned would stretch to the moon and back. Except they would not be able to because they would fail to connect up with each other. Anyone can write a credible story in which humans can teleport, travel in time and make themselves invisible. A future in which there are cable compatibility standards, that would be real science fiction.
Cables, monitors, printers, books, magazines, disks - all these were costing me money. Money that I did not have.
Richard Armitage had told me with an expansive wave of a cigar-brandishing hand that if ever I was running low, his assistant, Lorraine Hamilton, would send me cheques to cover my expenses. These would count as advances against future earnings. Despite Kim's relative wealth and his easy generosity, I had run up a debt of several thousand pounds with Richard by the August of 1982 and was beginning to worry that I would never earn enough to be able to pay him back.
Commercial
One morning Lorraine called me up at the Chelsea flat. I know it was at the Chelsea flat because in those days when you rang someone you always knew where they were. The closest life came to a mobile phone was a handset with an extra-long flex. Lorraine told me to go to an office in Fitzrovia and meet a man called Paul Weiland, who was casting a beer commercial.
A beer commercial? Me? A low vulgar commercial, for a highly polished artist such as myself? How unbelievably insulting. I almost ran to the appointed place.
The golden age of British advertising was just coming to an end. The most prominent stars to have risen over the past decade had been Ridley and Tony Scott, Hugh Hudson, David Puttnam and Alan Parker, who now all devoted their time to feature films. Paul Weiland, a generation behind, had started his career as a tea boy at the production office where most of those big names had worked and was to become the leading commercials director of the eighties and nineties. Indeed he still reigns supreme.
He handed me a script that was really more of a photocopied storyboard. It showed a monocled Victorian aristocrat in a series of unlikely poses.
'There's no dialogue,' Paul said. 'The whole commercial is played out to a soundtrack. The song "Abdul Abulbul Amir". Do you know it?'
I had to confess that I did not.
'Never mind. Take this mug. You're drinking the beer. It's Whitbread Best Bitter. You're Count Ivan Skavinsky Skavar, and I'm Abdul. Just give me a really snooty look. Snootier! As if he's a caterpillar in your salad or shit on your shoe.'
For ten minutes I pretended to drink Whitbread snootily while a most peculiar song played in the background. I am not sure I have ever been more embarrassed and uncomfortable or felt more ill at ease, self-conscious and incompetent. When it was all over I left, blushing furiously.
'Well, Stephen,' I said to myself, 'that is the last you will ever hear of that. Perhaps it is as well. Perhaps I was so bad because my innermost soul was revolting at the mercenary grubbiness of the whole enterprise. Yes. That will be it.'
The next day Lorraine called up and asked me to come into the Noel Gay offices in Denmark Street. Richard was sitting behind his enormous desk, beaming behind a thick curtain of Villiger cigar smoke.
'They want you for the Whitbread commercial,' he said. 'But I'm afraid they're being irritatingly tough on the money.'
Oh well, I thought. Five or six hundred pounds would come in useful. It would be as much as that, surely.
'They offered twenty,' said Richard, 'and I can't seem to get them above twenty-five. If you find that insulting we can always walk away.'
'For how many hours' work?'
Richard looked down at his notes. 'Three days.'
'Blimey,' I said, trying not to look too disappointed. 'It isn't much.'
'No,' said Richard. 'It's just over eight thousand a day. Well, if you feel ...'
Thousand! I swallowed drily, pushing my Adam's apple past a throbbing constriction that was rising in my throat and threatening to cause me to choke. Twenty-five thousand pounds. For three days' work.
'No, no!' I faltered. 'I mean ... no. It's fine. I'll ...'
'They speak very highly of Paul Weiland. Good experience for you. Starts shooting in Shepperton on Monday. They'll want you at Bermans and Nathans for a costume fitting tomorrow at three. Excellent. I'll call the agency.'
I tottered about London for the rest of that morning in a dream.
I could pay back Noel Gay Artists everything I owed them and I would still be rich. Rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Well, not that, obviously. The dreams of avarice go well beyond twenty-five odd thousand pounds minus 15 per cent commission, minus tax and VAT, minus three and a half thousand already owing. But rich enough for me.
You would have just cause to hate me now, reader, when I tell you that from that day to this I have never had what one could seriously call money troubles. Not money troubles of the kind that cause so many people to wake up in the middle of the night with a ghastly feeling like molten lead leaking into their stomach as they contemplate mounting debt and the apparent impossibility of getting their finances in order. That tremble of panic and dread that so many feel in relation to money I have been spared. I feel it for other things but I know that many in the world would trade much for the kind of cushion of cash that has enveloped me for thirty years. I did not know, as I went about London window-shopping that day, that in two and a half years' time even more money would start pouring in.
The three days of the shoot in Shepperton Studios passed in a sweat of worry, embarrassment and confusion. I had no idea why everything took so long, what I was doing, who everyone was or what the commercial was about. Tim McInnerny, whom I was to get to know two years later when I joined the cast of Blackadder II, had been cast as a lute-wielding minstrel of some kind. The character of Abdul was played by an actor called Tony Cosmo, who was suitably swarthy and menacing. I, in my own estimation, failed to be suitably anything. Watching it today on YouTube (try searching for Whitbread Best Bitter 1982 Ad or similar) the film still appears to make very little sense, and I am sure that even now my discomfort in the role of Count Ivan transmits across the decades. I think I was cast on account of my pointy chin rather than because of any discernible skill or talent.
Paul Weiland was charming and easy-going. My memories of the exceptionally laid-back Hugh Hudson on the set of Chariots of Fire had prepared me to expect relaxation from the director and fiery shouting only from assistants, and this was exactly how it was. I spent most of the three days sitting in a canvas chair and drinking cups of tea while birds twitted and shitted in the gantry far above. There are generations of pigeon, sparrow and chaffinch that have lived out their lives in the roof spaces of the great sound stages of Pinewood and Shepperton. They have dumped their droppings on some of the immortal scenes of British cinema, and their screechings have interrupted dialogue from Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, Kenneth Williams, Roger Moore and a thousand others. Mostly, however, they have overseen the less glamorous business of commercial and pop video shoots that make up the bread-and-butter business for studio staff, film crews and happily overpaid actors. I know that I am supposed to be ashamed of advertising work and feel that it is either beneath me or some kind of sell-out, but I cannot bring myself to apologize or regret. Orson Welles always said with high-handed disdain, 'If it was good enough for Toulouse-Lautrec and John Everett Millais, then it is good enough for me,' but I don't really feel the need to adduce the names of great figures from the past, I just find it fun.
Create!
We were back in Manchester by October filming for Alfresco which, unlike There's Nothing to Worry About, was to be broadcast nationally. Ben had created for us
a fictional world which he called The Pretend Pub. The concept might kindly be described as playful meta-textual post-modernism. Most people, however, were not kind and seemed to regard it as incomprehensible self-indulgent twaddle, which I suppose is how most playful meta-textual post-modernism is received. We all portrayed heightened versions of ourselves in an obviously unreal studio pub. I was Stezzer, Hugh was Huzzer, Robbie Bobzer, Ben Bezzer, Emma Ezzer and Siobhan Shizzer. We still often call each other by those names to this day, although Ben, for reasons lost in time, usually calls me Bing.
Alfresco, series 2: The Pretend Pub.
In the first episode, I enter, covered in polystyrene flakes of stage snow, greeting Robbie with the words, 'My word, Pretend Landlord Bobzer, there's a hell of a theatrical effect going on out there ...' We performed these sketches in front of a mostly silent and bemused audience. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we were ahead of our time. I think a great deal of the problem came from self-consciousness. Ben knew very well (partly because he was directly involved) what his contemporaries were doing in the field of alternative comedy, and Hugh and I were painfully and acutely aware of what our tradition had done in the field of sketch comedy, from Pete and Dud through to Python and Not the Nine O'Clock News. As a result we were guilty, it is clear looking back, of over-complicating everything out of a fear of being perceived as imitative and unoriginal. We ruled out parodies and 'Ah, come in, Perkins, shut the door, do sit down,' sketches because Python and Not had done these. Surreality and anarchic weirdness were out too because Rik, Ade and Alexei had cornered that market. So we wallowed about sightlessly, guiltily and confusedly without the confidence to do what we did best. Audiences, I now realize (and frankly it should always have been blindingly obvious), do not think along such lines. Novelty and originality do not come from the invention of new milieus, new genres or new modalities. They come from the how and the who, not from the what. It hardly warrants pointing out, furthermore, that no one will get anywhere unless they do what they do best, and everyone, in their secret, secret heart, knows what they do best.