Though he phrased this as amiable banter, actually he was touching on a theme crucial to the whole field of comedy in whatever medium. But the theme is rarely mentioned, because the cult of celebrity gets in the way. It is really quite useless to talk about the career of Tony Hancock, for example, without taking notice of the fact that he did not write his own stuff. His talent was solely for delivery. Fatally for him, he grew much too fond of being called a genius, and much too reluctant to admit that a proper script was essential. Ego duly eroded judgement, and he got rid of his best writers, Galton and Simpson, hoping to prove thereby that he had never needed them. His subsequent decline proved that the need had been desperate. Morecambe and Wise, on the other hand, were always smart enough to admit that they relied on the writing of Eddie Braben. Trace back the tradition of television comedy and you arrive at the radio studios where a hidden elite of writers served nearly all the famous names. Within the business, the writers were famous names themselves. A comparable figure to Cryer was Barry Took, who had always done valuable work as a radio writer behind the scenes. But the moment came when he was offered executive power in television, and he saw the virtues of taking a rest from the hard graft of personally turning out the funny stuff. Instead, he would supervise other people while they did it. Unfortunately for me, this was the moment. Rupert Murdoch was on the point of taking over at LWT. Stella Richman was feeling the cold. What Are You Doing After the Show? was less than a triumph – the few people watching it were still waiting to find out what it was about – and Barry Took discovered, no doubt to his alarm, that one of his new executive duties was to make our bright idea look worth its budget.
He was in a difficult position, but it’s a rule of the game that if the man in charge of you is in a difficult position, it will never feel quite as difficult as yours. Barry Took had a lot of experience in script construction and unlike many weathered veterans he was not jealous of his turf. Later on, as a light-entertainment executive at the BBC, he helped the Monty Python crew when he could easily have hindered them. Showbiz journalists, who are always looking for an angle, often identify Took as the secret genius behind Monty Python: an opinion which, when it began to circulate, he was understandably slow to contradict. In cold fact, and in a far more complicated story than any journalist had the patience to unscramble, the Pythons, one and all, had climbed bloodily through a string of less original shows and had learned to look after themselves individually long before. But when they finally got together, undoubtedly it was Took who made sure that the door was held open while they trooped through it. He thus had some right to have his name embroidered on the nappy of their brainchild. He would probably have done the same for us if our brainchild was still in the womb. But it was already in the world, and it was ill. Took, therefore, was not just in the position of marshalling talent. He had to supply some talent of his own. Talent he unquestionably had, but he lacked the further talent of being tactful about it. He knew better than us. He might have been right about that, but by sending our stuff back for review after Paul Knight had already approved it he inevitably trod crushingly on our immediate mentor’s well-shod toes. The suave Paul was a hard man to ruffle, but when he emerged from his first one-on-one meeting with Took he had a disturbing new variation on his standard theme of despair. ‘We,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘are in deep Took.’
At one point Paul confided to me that any potential faith he might have had in his new commander evaporated when he ran into him in a lift. ‘He started imitating Skippy the Kangaroo.’ No doubt Took, for whom the aforesaid Skippy was an important item on his curriculum vitae, had merely been trying to establish an atmosphere of ebullience, but Paul wasn’t the ebullient type. Everyone who prattles would like to drawl, and Paul was a drawler. As a consequence he gave Took the jumps. With our two big wheels turning out of synch, the whole engine shook itself to bits. After a particularly disastrous script meeting at which Took informed me and the assembled company that our latest batch of scripts needed the kind of excellent jokes once so prevalent on Round the Horne – he recited several of these from memory – I told Paul that I saw no point in staying. Paul let me go with depressing ease. He was well aware that I had played a large part in creating the problem that Took was failing to solve. Deprived of my help, the show looked no worse than before. Though there were plays by Ibsen that were funnier, and several Noh dramas with more pace, very few of the people who continued to tune in actually sued for damages, and apparently a financial problem accounted for the family that committed suicide. But it was a mercy when the show was taken off in mid-series. When the Murdoch buy-in was a done deal, one of the first things he did was to pull the plugs on What Are You Doing After the Show?. It seems that his own answer to its interrogative title had been: ‘Not wasting my money.’ There is never any argument with that, and any young writer who thinks there is had better stick to poetry. I always have, by the way. Especially in bad times, it can help to be alone with the pen and paper, working on a self-contained creation that the money men can’t stop. But it might also be something that they will not publish. Best to have something in the bank, then, before you start feeling brave.
Unjustified self-righteousness helped to ease my retreat. I did some of my usual talking to the troops about how ‘the system’ had conspired to frustrate us. But experience was already playing its valuable role of chastening delusion, and this time I spoke less fluently. It might even have been that I spoke less. A help towards taciturnity, and perhaps towards heart’s ease, was the dreaded weed. Mike and Dave resembled the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers not only in their appearance but in their unlimited supply of high-octane dope. Either in Swiss Cottage or in Gibson Square – I forget which, and given the circumstances I would have forgotten the location even had it been Easter Island – they showed up one evening with what they called a baggy. The baggy turned out to be a sack of hash so thick and rich that you could have bitten into it like a bar of chocolate. Today a stash that size would get you executed in Singapore, and in Thailand they would want to execute your relatives as well. From then on, I and selected members of my squad got used to lighting up with Mike and Dave. I should hasten to say that Pete never touched the stuff, perhaps because he had noticed how it robbed me of my judgement. The lyrics I composed under its influence were the nearest I ever got to writing perfect nonsense, and after trying out a few chords he would wait for the sober version. Nevertheless he was tolerant, which he had to be, because the sweet smoke was everywhere, turning the house into one big tunnel for the Marrakesh Express. We would never have got away with it at the Wembley offices, which were open plan, but at home the very air was heavy with the perfume of burning angel’s wings. On the day I resigned from the show, Mike and Dave promised me a present for that evening. When they arrived at Gibson Square, they had the present in a flute case. Reverently they opened the lid. Inside, lying in a trough of worn blue velvet, was what they told me was the World’s Biggest Joint. The flute case could have been a suitcase and the super-joint would still have been prominent. In the context of its modest container, it looked majestic, like a zeppelin. Mike and Dave, guiding their creation out of its hangar, assured us that the calculations for building it had been precise: this was as long and fat as a joint could be without collapsing under its own weight. Much of the weight, it was explained, consisted of the active ingredient, sprinkled on the loose tobacco to a density never previously achieved by man. ‘You have to imagine,’ murmured Dave, ‘a car-park full of tumbleweed, and then there’s this rain of shit.’ They bent close over their masterpiece. Mike’s voice came, as always, from a distance. ‘We make these all the time,’ he mumbled. ‘But this is the biggest.’ Dave lit a match.
If this book were pure fiction, I could say that my encounter with the super-joint marked the end of my period of Experimenting With Drugs. (Nobody ever explained how stoking yourself with proven narcotics could plausibly be called ‘experimenting’, or why the expression ‘experimenting with alc
ohol’ had never been heard even from the kind of drinker who wakes up in the police station after driving his car through a bus queue.) In truth, however, the facts are seldom so tidy. My terminal experience didn’t take place until the next night. On the night of the super-joint, I deeply relished every drag. Hidden in the stereo system of the living room, Sandy Denny sang ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’. She could sing that again. Grouped around the dining table in the kitchen, we passed the super-joint around from hand to hand, or rather, in the early stages, from both hands to both hands. The quality was as outstanding as the quantity. After a few turns I was coining philosophical aphorisms, and after a few more turns I couldn’t understand them either. One of the dangerously charming effects of pot is that it lends your most banal comments an alluring depth in your own ears, which is probably the main reason you make exactly the same comments again. Drunks can usually tell that they are being boring but they can’t stop. Pot-heads really believe that they are Socrates or Dorothy Parker. At one point, offering unsolicited comments on Cocteau’s experience with opium, I attempted to quote his aphorism about the only useful help you can give to an aspiring young artist: open the door and show him the tightrope. ‘Open the door,’ I said very slowly, ‘and show him the tide.’ I had run out of energy, but Dave nodded in agreement. ‘That’s good. Room full of ocean. Who was that again?’ With a last burst of effort, I said the name again. ‘Cock. Toe. Cocteau.’ Mike said he had once worked with him at Thames Television.
Next morning I woke up in bed, but felt unusually hot. It was because I was still fully dressed, including shoes. My head felt clear, however: much more so than it would have done had I been drinking. After a hard day at the typewriter, carving into the first of the half dozen deadlines I needed to catch up on, I began to fancy that I had life well worked out. If I could just wean myself away from the sauce to the grass, I would have a dependable release from the anguish of writing that would not interfere with the brain that produced the words. Look at the piece I was writing now, for example: how vibrant in argument, how bold in its use of metaphor! I was alone with my inspiration. The boys were all off in Wembley for the studio day of the final show, and would not be back until late at night, after the inevitable wake. Tough on them. After dining on fish and chips – the fish identical in texture to the chips – I knocked out the final paragraph of the day. It seemed to me that Swift had seldom been so pungently clear, Burke so meticulous in his control of rhythm, Hazlitt so universal in his understanding. Then I settled down in front of the television with my notebook and the makings of a small joint. Compared with the super-joint, of course, all joints were small, but this one really was quite modest: no bigger than a gorilla’s little finger. In consideration of its diffident proportions, however, it seemed permissible, nay mandatory, to be generous with the magic sprinkle. I crop-dusted the tobacco with the prodigality of an American child decorating a scoop of ice-cream with uninhibited use of the toppings supplied. If these metaphors are mixed, they are no more so than the ones I had been concocting during the day, in the flow of a creative confidence I had thought uncommonly lucid. As you will have already guessed, I was still high from the previous night. But I had no means of knowing that, because even my movements in rolling this shyly harmless new spliff were of uncanny precision. The finished product was as tight and neat as a fresh tampon. Almost a pity, really, to set it on fire. At the time there was a catchy Californian expression: ‘Don’t Bogart that joint.’ I not only Bogarted that joint, I Lee Marvined it. In about ten minutes it was gone, and in about twelve minutes so was I.
As I recall, there was not even a brief period of tranquillity before the unpleasantness began. The wave of nausea came straight up the beach, flooded the highway, knocked down the motel, and washed me upside down into the trees. Ever since childhood, the moment I knew I was about to vomit had been a blessed relief from the agonizing hope that it wouldn’t happen. This time the moment of certainty never came. I just felt that the fish and chips were stuck between floors. Meanwhile I myself was steadily ascending, yet for some reason the ceiling got no closer. I was falling upwards, yet not moving. Once again, it would have been a relief if I had. I could nestle against that plaster rosette up there and wait until my stomach made up its mind. But I was pinned to the couch. After about the time it took to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge, I managed to manoeuvre through ninety degrees, hoping to feel better if I lay down.
I felt almost incomparably worse. It was like being taken out to sea by a rip tide. Theoretically you should go with the rip until it brings you back in further along the coast, but there are sharks out there, so you try to swim against it. You get very tired: too tired to lift an arm so that the lifesaver can see you. Lounging superbly in his elevated chair, the lifesaver is checking out the apricot bottoms of the bikini girls on the beach, choosing the one that he will peel and slowly suck the juice out of back in his room while the Great White is biting you in half. The thought that you will soon die is overwhelming. I was having exactly that thought on a ratty mock-leather couch in Islington. I was sweating peanut oil yet my hands were dry: how could that be? My sinuses were full of molten lead. Somehow I knew, without being able to reach down and verify the fact, that my genital area was being redeveloped as a shopping mall. The project would take years to complete, but I didn’t have that long. My life would end in another five minutes. And then another five. All right, another ten. The television screen said goodnight and shrank to a fizzing white dot, the universe ending with a small bang and a long whimper. Time must have a stop. But it doesn’t. We do. I do. What a way to spend eternity, with a growing but forever unconsummated belief that you are about to dump your guts. When the boys finally came rollicking home and asked me what was wrong, I had to answer them with the shortest words I could think of, the words widely spaced by long clenchings of the teeth, as though I were posing for a very old camera with a long exposure time. The clenched teeth held back a blob of ectoplasm the size of a water bed that I could feel occupying every cubic centimetre of my alimentary tract. ‘Joint,’ I said. ‘Too,’ I added. ‘Much.’ From far away there came a voice. ‘Christ, it’s an overdose.’ Then another voice. ‘Never. You can’t O.D. on pot.’ The first voice again: ‘He can.’
The first voice was right. People who say they have an addictive personality are usually just transferring the blame for their deficiency of resolve, but if there really is such a thing as an addictive personality, then I have one. The night of the killer joint was just further proof of a propensity that had been manifest since childhood. Partly as a result of my marijuana experiments, I was able to avoid the harder drugs that were soon to become fashionable. The mere thought of heroin made me remember what had happened to Frank Sinatra in The Man With The Golden Arm when I first saw the film at Ramsgate Odeon in the early 1950s. Actually I had quite liked the thought of being soothed against the luscious bosom of Kim Novak. Sexual experience looked like a good thing to have, even at the cost of sticking a needle in your arm. But the drastic result of the needle being withdrawn looked all too convincing, and from that time forward the cold-turkey episodes of my life – cutting out my daily packet of Jaffas, for example – had been accompanied in my mind by a Saul Bass title sequence and the music of Elmer Bernstein. As to cocaine, I could never see the point, because the people I knew who were burying their heads in heaps of white dynamite seemed to attain no higher state of mental alertness than the one that I was doomed to live in all the time. At one point a medical friend, kindly acting as an unpaid consultant in a period when I was actively shopping for some means of relief from my perennial melancholy, assured me that although it was unlikely that I was naturally secreting C17H21NO4, there is indeed such a thing as a constitutionally determined hyperaesthetic state. The idea checks out with my introspection, to the extent that I have time for it.
To put it in non-technical language, I have a metabolism like Colombia. Unfortunately it is no better governed, and will immediately
demand industrial amounts of anything it likes the taste of. In the first volume of this memoir I recorded how I had been the only infant in my district to overdose on marshmallows. In my early teens, down at the local shopping centre, I bought my mother a box of Winning Post chocolates for her birthday – if I have told you this before, it is because the shame has never left me – and ate nearly all of them before I got home. (Presenting her with the almost empty box, I said that there had been an accident. Her reception of the story armed me for life against any reliance on the classic excuse about the dog that ate my homework.) In late adolescence and early maturity, I quickly outstripped my contemporaries as a smoker, and would have done so as a drinker had I possessed a hollow leg to match my thirst. Even today, I can’t buy a roll of Extra Strong peppermints – indispensable equipment for the secret nicotine addict – without swallowing them all one after the other after chewing each no more than twice. Don’t Bogart those sweets? What else are they for? No use asking me to be moderate. Just steer me towards something safe that I can overdo. After a whole roll of instantly inhaled Extra Strong peppermints, for instance, the lips develop a chlorinated tingle, as if after drinking from a swimming pool. Nor does high expense temper the intake. A pot of caviar, no matter how big, rings empty in a few minutes, even though, absorbed at that rate, the soft black buckshot converts the interior of the mouth into a whaling station. Cursed with this tropism, I have never found anything strange about the more decadent Roman emperors and their raging quest for satiety. On the contrary, I marvel at Nero’s restraint.