Getting typecast as a heavy who beat up the helpless punters would have been a mistake, and the scale of the publicity would have made my position at the Observer untenable. There was neither typecasting nor publicity to be feared from Up Sunday. That was the whole idea. It was an off-trail variety show run by Will Wyatt, then an up-and-coming producer, and always my pick for the budding executive who would one day run the whole BBC. If only that prediction had come true. As things happened, he went all the way to second spot, which meant that he had the responsibility of carrying out every demented notion the latest bad-choice big-wig had, but never enough power to straighten out the madhouse. But all that lay in the far future. Up Sunday involved only a very small part of the corporation’s resources. Indeed it was put together in Television Centre’s very smallest studio, Presentation B, which was about the size of a squash court. On a single day of rehearsing and taping, the contributors did their various things while watching each other from the control gallery, because there was no space left to stand around in the studio: three cameras left barely enough room for the performer. Such Private Eye stalwarts as John Wells and William Rushton appeared in various personae while they bashed away at the Establishment of which they were transparently vintage products. The veteran journalist James Cameron held in his false teeth with his lips while he irascibly pitched the line that nowadays would be associated with John Pilger or Robert Fisk. It was subversive stuff from all concerned, but it was still all very British. My contribution to the supposedly iconoclastic concept was a series of impersonations, of which I suppose the best was my Henry Kissinger, and the worst my Lord Litchfield. (I could get Kissinger just by changing a few consonants, but to get Litchfield I would have had to change my entire past, repopulating it with pheasants, fallow deer, and Joanna Lumley, with whom Litchfield was at that time friendly: a sufficient motive for revenge.) It didn’t make much difference what I did, because whether on form or off I was hugely outclassed by Viv Stanshall, an alumnus of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band who did stuff that was from another planet. Clad in tie-dyed overalls a couple of sizes too short, wearing pop-eyed joke glasses that proved, on closer examination, to be his actual eyes, Stanshall, I suspected, was the kind of next-century anomaly that Will was really after. Living at his rate, Stanshall could last only so long, and I think that he eventually vanished in a sheet of flame after his breath caught fire while he was meditating in the lotus position, or it could have been when he was meditating in a Lotus sports car: I’m a bit hazy about the details, and so, I think was he. But I learned a lot from watching him. He did a thing where he misinterpreted bits of film. Most of the film was weird, so that he was only making something weird more weird; but it occurred to me that there might be some mileage in misinterpreting ordinary news footage. Over the next twenty-five years I would do a lot of that. Nowadays everybody does it, but I can honestly put my hand up and say that if I didn’t invent the idea, I was the first to steal it, and that I stole it from Viv Stanshall. That was the great thing about Up Sunday. You could stand around and watch the workings of each other’s box of tricks. And finally everyone watched Spike Milligan.
Spike didn’t do the show very often, but he left everybody breathless when he did. As a manic depressive, he came through with the goods only when he was up, but when he was up he was never off, so some of his best stuff happened in rehearsal, and I often moaned aloud if the tape wasn’t running to catch it. (In those days nobody could afford to run the tape all the time.) I remember him pretending to be a hotel reception desk in Scotland, complete with ringing bell. The number got started when he found the bell left over from somebody else’s sketch. By the time it finished he was the whole hotel. In the control gallery we were falling about to the full extent that space permitted. When the tape rolled Will asked him to do the number again but he had forgotten it. That was the way he was. You have to imagine an illuminated manuscript propagating itself at the speed of a ticker tape. You could hear the ideas bumping into each other, blending, rebounding, starting a new comic universe. Though he thought me timid, square, and uptight compared to himself – he was right on all counts – Spike took a shine to me and asked me out to dinner in South Kensington.
His Australian wife told me, on the way into the deeply fashionable restaurant, that Spike was currently on a plane of psychological equilibrium, held there by various carefully matched antidepressant pills. She thought she could promise me a relatively uneventful evening. ‘Just tell him your stories about Australia. He loves that.’ So I did my numbers about the snakes and spiders, and the great man did indeed seem to enjoy himself, effortlessly topping my yarns with his vivid memories of Woy Woy. But he tempered his laughter to the dignified ambience of the restaurant, and when he told stories of his own they were accompanied by only a small range of gesture, even when he was evoking a Messerschmitt 109 that had strafed him in North Africa. (‘Today, that pilot is one of Germany’s leading surrealist comedians.’) He drank water and made no fuss. Only the famous Italian actress, surrounded by her protective retinue at a corner table, needed to be told who he was. Everyone else including the Foreign Secretary knew that a giant was present, and behaving beautifully. It was only during the coffee that the subject of conversation turned to jazz. In answer to his question about who was my favourite trumpeter, I was in the middle of explaining why Bix Beiderbecke’s lyricism moved me whereas Dizzy Gillespie’s virtuosity did not. ‘Finally,’ I said, ‘feeling comes first.’ ‘Yes,’ said Spike intensely, ‘but there must be excitement first and foremost.’ And at that point he reached into a hold-all under the table, produced a trumpet, and began to play an ear-splitting chorus of ‘A Night in Tunisia’. The noise was shattering, and, it gradually emerged, continuous. People looked first worried, then indignant, then desperate. In the corner, the Italian actress clutched her pearls to her throat. Spike’s wife was talking into his ear but I don’t think he could hear a word.
He calmed down after a long while, put the trumpet away, and didn’t mention it again. Not for the first time, I wondered if I was making enough demands on the world. My family would probably have said that I was quite unreasonable enough, but even they would have had to admit that I was responsive to the opinion of others, even cravenly so. It mattered to me how I went over. When it seemed not to matter, it was only because I had made a mistake. Even my poetry is predicated, even at its most hermetic, on pleasing an audience of some kind. I have never been able just to pick a course of action and keep going with it whatever people think. This might be the secret of sanity but I feel it as a loss. My night out with Spike Milligan was a daunting reminder of my fundamental predictability. I began to be depressed about not being quite depressed enough. Melancholy was a useful thing to have, but mania, obviously an even more desirable condition, seemed tantalizingly out of reach. Still, there was obviously latitude available for bad behaviour from anyone who could be relied on to write the words coming out of his mouth while he was looking plausible on screen. What he did off-screen was likely to be forgiven, as long as it didn’t frighten any under-age horses.
I tried out some of that latitude when Up Sunday finally folded and noises were made about giving me a show of my own. Will Wyatt having moved up a notch, the project was deputed to a second team of producers whose judgement I didn’t trust. For one thing, they laughed at anything – always a fatal sign in a comedy producer. Also they had trouble getting organized, and the job of a producer is to organize people with that very characteristic. I had been here before: a bunch of people was assembling on the assumption that I would know where to lead them. How had I let that happen? We spent a lot of time having meetings to discuss when the next meeting would be, rather like the French Resistance cell that counted Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir among its members, and which never had time to do any resisting, because it was too busy having meetings. One of my proposed fellow cast members was the young actress Madeline Smith. Previously I had thought that the word ‘orchidaceous’
had been invented for orchids. Now I realized that it had been invented for Madeline. She was so beautiful that men otherwise ebullient would, after they had seen her, go away, lean against something, and look sad. But she was still an unknown. The show was thought to need a female headliner. Marianne Faithfull was supposed to be the one, but dithering months went by without them being able to get her signed. Eventually I remembered that they had not signed me either. So I walked away. There was no contract. But I was walking away from a verbal agreement, and although Sam Goldwyn’s classic formulation has its validity (‘A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on’), there is such a thing as honour, which I had violated. I felt bad about that, and when Private Eye got the story I was invited to feel even worse. But what really tore me up, after I had learned a lot more about the harsh realities of show business, was how I had helped to waste several precious months of the saintly Madeline’s time. The beautiful young actresses measure their careers against the lifespan of a butterfly, and to keep one of them waiting is the act of a vandal. Eventually the world was saved from yet another underpowered variety show, but I should have been more decisive at the start, and from then on I always tried to be, if only by being more careful to make clear that the word ‘maybe’ meant what it said. I can offer that as a valid general tip: be very careful that your hesitations are not construed by hopeful people as a licence to proceed. Among the clever young performers in the generation after mine, the one who got himself and others into most trouble was the cleverest of them all: but he kept saying ‘yes’ just to make people go away, so they went away to prepare some huge event for which he would fail to show up. Thus his brilliance and his sensitivity were at war, a paradox arising from that deadly characteristic I described earlier, by which one lacks the moral courage to tell people early enough what they don’t want to hear.
Up Sunday didn’t pay big money. No white Rolls-Royce with inbuilt blonde was in prospect. By that time my family was working its way through a succession of small cars that all shared the gift of breaking down on the way to Italy. Since I had no licence, they weren’t my concern and the white Roller wouldn’t have been either, although I suppose I could have sat beside the blonde while she drove it. But the show paid something, and we were now enjoying what it would be hypocritical not to call prosperity. The children were taken on a trip to Australia so that their grandmothers could go crazy about them in the open air. Their mother had already gone crazy on the flight, after they used up their colouring books before the aircraft had reached cruising altitude. In those days there was almost no entertainment available in economy class except to watch the break-dancing displays put on by people who had made the mistake of waiting until they wanted to go to the toilet before they started queuing for it. For those sitting down, there was scarcely room to have thrombosis. It was like the First Fleet in there. After that, it was held more feasible to take vacations less far-flung. Italy being short of the kind of beach life that doesn’t leave children crying because there isn’t enough sand to dig a hole, the choice fell on Biarritz, where our friend Michael Blakemore had a house. Though it rained often, a sunny day on the Côte des Basques could be lyrical, especially towards evening, when the water turned a soft silver to match the sheen of gold dust on the tamarisks that clothed the cliffs. Enviously watching Blakemore – a magnificent surfer – catching the last wave of the day from about half a mile out, I tried to copy his knack of putting aside the insanely complex problems of his professional life while he soaked up the shimmer of the sweet surroundings. I almost relaxed. Among the rocks when the tide was out, I built driftwood houses for the children. Typically I overdid it, so that the results could have been published in Architectural Digest. The point is still sore, so I won’t pursue it. Sufficient to say that when the rain released me from the obligation to lie idle I would sit at my favourite cafe with its instantly memorable Basque name – the Bar du Huahuahu, next to the Café Xerox – and I would start writing a new book. One of the new books I started writing was an autobiography.
The only general idea I had for an autobiography was that it would be the story of someone who hadn’t really done anything yet. There was truth to that. I had such a knack for avoiding the big time that it was starting to look wilful. In New York I wrote an Observer Postcard at the same time as the serial killer Son of Sam was on the loose. As far as I know I never met him, but I had an encounter in the same league for being hard on the nerves. William Shawn of the New Yorker had been reading my stuff and sent a message that he hoped I could spare him some time. I didn’t need telling that he rarely had to make such a formal request. He could safely assume that most people read his thoughts. Since I was staying at the Algonquin, there was no problem about a meeting place. All he had to do was cross the street from his office and occupy his regular table. The intermediary who told me this – I think it was the deputy editor’s deputy assistant secretary’s deputy – told me that Mr Shawn would be waiting for me after he had finished his lunch. Everybody I knew in New York told me that Shawn was so shy and polite that it would be impossible to tell when the meeting was over, so the best thing to do would be to assume, as with royalty, that an exit could not be made too early. Plead a heart attack if necessary, but leave. I was also told by everyone that Shawn would never raise the subject he wanted to talk about, so I should go on raising subjects myself until the one came up that he wanted to pursue. This last bit proved not to be true. Everything else was: he was so quiet and self-effacing that he was hard to detect against the red-plush banquette even though he was wearing a black suit. He was also quite small, so that he tended to disappear behind a salt cellar if you shifted position. He himself never moved. But after we had both quoted to each other our favourite bits from S. J. Perelman, Shawn raised the subject almost straight away. Or rather, he raised two subjects. Could American television be thought of as a fruitful object of criticism? And had I ever thought of coming to write regularly in New York for, say, a weekly magazine? Tentatively but inexorably, the two subjects grew closer together, until finally they were joined by an arc of light whose blinding significance not even I could miss. He was asking me if I would like to become the New Yorker’s TV critic. If I had said yes, my life would have changed right there. But I said no without having to think about it. My wife’s work was in Cambridge and London, my heart was with the old Empire, and America appealed too much to my sweet tooth.
Like the first, this last factor would have been decisive even without the others. In America I was too much at home. As Milos Forman once said, there are only two places in the world where we are truly at home: home, and in America. In Los Angeles, I had only to lie down beside the hotel pool and in half an hour I was dreaming of a screenplay. In Biarritz, a Hollywood producer called David Giler (the first Alien movie was among his credits) turned up to ask me if I would adapt Michael Frayn’s play Clouds into a screenplay for Twentieth Century Fox. Frayn’s play was set in Cuba, but the plot entirely depended, for its wit and point, on Cuba’s being represented theatrically by a few chairs and a table. Giler, a suave and knowledgeable Ivy League type, said quietly that Fox had secured permission for location shooting in the actual Cuba. This coup had removed the play’s raison d’être at a stroke, but I said yes because Giler had Camilla Sparv on his arm. In Downhill Racer her silk, suede, and cashmere appearance had induced in me the terrible suspicion that if America could take over the class and gloss of a Euro beauty like her then it would take over the world. I saw myself in Hollywood, growing young twice as fast as I grew old while I rescued troubled movies with a quick dialogue polish at a million dollars a pop. For a blessing, the Clouds screenplay got no further than the first draft before Sherry Lansing took over the studio and cancelled the project, leaving me with (a) a lot more money than I had ever earned in such a short time, and (b) a lasting realization that the merest taste of that way of life would turn my brains to blancmange. Nor was all the nonsense confined to Los Angeles. New York was dif
ferent but not different enough. In America, there would still be no way out of the life measured by success. I had, and still have, the instincts of someone born for that life. But I could never lead it any better than it would lead me. America would suck me in so thoroughly there would be nothing left to spit out. By the second week, I would have the third wife and the fourth car. Hear that whining sound? My Gulfstream IV, waiting on the tarmac. See you in Aspen.