Francis Bacon started to come into the Groucho too, overcoming whatever initial distrust of the place he may have had. Rather as email and then Twitter were to be met with howls of displeasure and sceptical derision when they arrived in the world, only to be embarrassedly embraced later, so it was amongst the founding fathers of SohoBoho degeneracy that the Groucho Club – sneered at and despised by right-thinking roués at first – came finally to be accepted and enjoyed in the evening of their years.
Heigh ho, twenty years have passed since those days. Jeffrey Bernard and Francis Bacon are dead. Charles Fontaine lives and works in the south of Spain. Alex James has moved from the Groucho Group to David Cameron’s Chipping Norton set and makes award-winning cheeses in Gloucestershire. Damien Hirst lives and works in the West Country too, as does Keith Allen. Tracey Emin is one of the few YBAs, it seems, to have kept the bohemian candle alight. Not that she ever sucked things up through her nose to my knowledge. But she can drink. Yes, she can do that.
People, groups, movements, energies gather themselves into a ball sometimes and hurl themselves into history. Then the time comes when the fire dies. The great mass deflates like Ida’s purple, spongy nose. Many will regard the Britpop and YBA movements as shallow and unimportant. But damn, it was fun to be caught up inside as an amused, amazed observer.
Today and for many years the Groucho Club has been as clean as clean can be. The surfaces in the bathrooms are free of white powder, and no one sits on the bar telling shocked arrivals frightful, yet appallingly funny, jokes. There has been no lock-in for a Turner Prize-winning artist there since 1995. But it remains a good place to eat and drink. It is ruled by Bernie Katz, the Prince of Soho. He stands four foot ten in elevated shoes, but he can throw out four unruly drunks without thinking. There is a yearly quiz (for which I have from time to time set questions), a staff party, at which favoured members serve the waiters, kitchen, management and bar staff, and a Gang Show, at which money is raised for the Soho homeless. The art on the walls betrays the long connection with Hirst and Emin and others. Securely screwed into the walls, they are worth a king’s ransom now. Some may regret the passing of the old days and the inevitable deflation of that pumped-up, alcoholic, coke-fuelled nose, but all things change. Another time of energy and innovation will come and then go too. A compensation of age is a realization of the cyclical nature of fashion, politics and art.
Notes from a Showbusiness Career
From the mid-1980s onwards I was kept busy with a more or less huge writing workload and, after attending to new Me and My Girl openings on Broadway and in Australia, I found myself in the grip of a persistent, ankle-nipping producer called Dan Patterson. This, you should know, was before the coke days. We’re looking at 1985 or ’6, I think.
Dan and I met when he shadowed Paul Mayhew-Archer, a BBC radio comedy producer later to find more acclaim as the man in charge of most of the numerous series of My Family featuring Me and My Girl’s star Robert Lindsay. Paul was directing me in a series called Delve Special, in which I played a hapless investigative journalist. The series was written by Tony Sarchet and recorded, unusually for radio, ‘on location’. Which is to say that, rather than using the standard sound effects gravel tray for walking and the three-textured staircase (wood, stone and carpet) and stand-alone car doors and front doors and bedroom doors with which studios were comically furnished, Paul decided for reasons of verisimilitude that we should take a Uher recording device up to the Broadcasting House roof, or on the street in Portland Place, or in some cupboard or busy Woman’s Hour or The World At One production office.
Dan Patterson arrived as a work-experience observer and within seconds was bombarding me with questions. In Oxford, where his father David was a pioneering professor of Hebrew studies, Dan had seen our 1981 Cambridge Footlights revue and could quote huge chunks of it by heart. He was recently back from a trip to America, where the new world of improvisation had opened up before him like some beautiful flower. Now he was back and keen to get going as a producer himself. I have never met anything that wasn’t a puppy so boisterously excitable, keen, persuasive and determined.
Before I knew what I was doing I had agreed to write six radio comedy programmes and to be in a new series featuring the kind of improvisation that Dan had seen and been so struck by in America. This latter was Whose Line Is It Anyway?, a jokey approximation of the title of the hit play and film Whose Life Is It Anyway? The show was hosted by Clive Anderson, who had been a coeval of Griff Rhys Jones and others at Cambridge, but taken a different course into law, where he had eaten his dinners, as their jargon has it, and been called to the Bar, or is it inducted? In other words, as any less magnificently potty country would put it, he had qualified as a legal advocate. He was a barrister.
The only other regular in the series was John Sessions, a phenomenally talented mimic (he had worked regularly on Spitting Image) whose one-man shows combined impersonation, deep learning and almost unbelievably vivid and poetical writing.
The show suited his talents perfectly. He could instantly tell the Red Riding Hood story in the style of Ernest Hemingway or D. H. Lawrence or whichever author, actor or indeed rock star was thrown at him by Clive or a frenetic studio audience. Anyone from Anthony Burgess to Keith Richards, by way of EastEnders stars and BBC weather reporters, was grist to his remarkable mimetic mill. From our Footlights days the ever-huggable Tony Slattery forged ahead on the show too, as did Josie Lawrence, who specialized in improvising song lyrics and tunes with astonishing rapidity and brilliance with the help of pianist Richard Vranch, who had been with us at Cambridge and whose remarkable ear and talent for impromptu accompaniment to this day regularly supports performers in London’s Comedy Store. As far as I can recall, and nothing would induce me to listen to a minute’s worth of tape to confirm this, I just stood there saying ‘botty’ or occasionally managing some kind of actual joke or apt remark.
It was a remarkable success, and, as did a lot of radio comedies (including Delve Special, which changed its name to This Is David Lander for reasons that I cannot recall), it soon transferred to television. I baulked, agreeing reluctantly to appear twice. It made household names of John, Tony, Clive and Josie – well, in the kinds of scrubbed-pine households that marked out the middle-class viewer in those days. I only consented to do a second appearance because Peter Cook was going to be on. We were both a little the worse for drink, and both deeply uncomfortable. The funniest man alive, the most brilliant extempore wit that ever breathed in my lifetime, was not suited in any way to the ordeal of the programme. Nor was he. Kidding.
I think it was the upstage stools that I could not abide. Having to dismount from them, as if summoned down to the play-mat by Miss Spanky at some frightful kindergarten. Dan has continued his stool obsession (that sounds so wrong) with his highly successful Mock the Week.
But the other programme Dan pushed me into – well, it was hardly pushing – was one which would be of my own devising. It was called Saturday Night Fry, it is still available online, and, though I shouldn’t say so, I really am very proud of it. I wrote all the episodes in one huge burst of energy over little more than a week and I think I was genuinely inspired. All my love of radio, a love that went back to my earliest memories, was poured into the construction of the scripts. I was helped knowing that Hugh and Emma and the matchless Jim Broadbent had already agreed to be a part of it.
At this time I was sharing a house in Dalston with Hugh, his girlfriend, Katie Kelly, and Nick Symonds, a mutual friend from Cambridge. I related in The Fry Chronicles how Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, our painter decorators recommended by new friend Harry Enfield, seemed unusually gifted and amusing.
This was, looking back, a very productive time for me. Aside from Saturday Night Fry, I produced occasional pieces for Arena magazine and every week an article for the Listener. One of these, called ‘Licking Thatcher’ (a feeble title playing on the title of the David Hare theatre work* Licking Hitler), was a more
than faintly impertinent call for Neil Kinnock to be more assured, confident and self-possessed when facing Margaret Thatcher across the dispatch boxes in the then twice-weekly verbal fencing matches of parliamentary Prime Minister’s Question Time, popularly known as PMQs. ‘He should give the impression that being Leader of the Opposition is the best job in the world under this régime,’ I wrote, or some such twaddle. ‘He should smile not snarl, shake his head with laughter at her crudeness, philistinism and asininity rather than shouting his head off in a lather of righteous indignation.’
I was very delighted to receive a letter a few days later with an embossed portcullis on the back of the envelope declaring in green heraldic splendour its House of Commons origin. Neil Kinnock was inviting me to join his team of speech-writers. I thought it rather classy of him to read a pissy critique of his manner from some Oxbridge upstart and, rather than dismiss it, invite him on board. I cannot claim for a second that I actually wrote an entire speech for him or for the two subsequent Labour leaders, John Smith, loved by all who knew him and sadly wrenched away from the world by a heart attack well before his time, and his successor Tony Blair, loved by … well … Once Tony had won in 1997 let’s just say it stopped being fun. Writing for the underdog is infinitely more challenging and amusing.
Bit of gossip, though, which isn’t too mean. I’m holding back on cruel revelations until I’m dead. A few weeks after he had been elected Prime Minister in 1997, Tony and Cherie Blair sent me an invitation to dinner at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s ex officio country house. The invitation said ‘informal’, which in the strange British world of etiquette means, when referring to a dinner, ‘not black tie’. Similarly, the phrase ‘we don’t dress for dinner’ indicates that dark suits shall be worn, rather than dinner jackets. Well, so I understood, having grown up in this preposterous nobby British tradition. Yes, you are right: I secretly love it. Not so secretly.
As it fell out, I was the first to arrive at the grand Tudor mansion, ushered into the great hall by a pretty and slightly nervous blonde WAAF. Servicemen and -women customarily take turns to serve at such occasions. I sipped sherry and admired the furnishings and fitments for five minutes before Tony Blair, twenty days into his premiership, doe-eyed enough to have been nicknamed Bambi, pattered down the stairs before skidding to an abrupt halt at the sight of me. He was wearing a denim shirt and pale chinos.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘didn’t the invitation say “informal”?’
‘I took that to mean no dinner jacket,’ I said.
He looked aghast. ‘Do you think everyone else will think that?’
‘There’s a strong chance,’ I told him.
By this time Cherie had arrived, and there was much confabulation before the PM hared upstairs to change.
Everyone else did indeed arrive in dark lounge suits, as they are revoltingly called. I thought Tony’s (as one was always encouraged to call him) ignorance of these matters was rather touching. It is all absurd snobbery and unguessable usage after all.
I was impressed that the Blairs had invited Betty Boothroyd, the retired Speaker of the House, and Giles Wilson, mathematician son of Harold and Mary Wilson. Wilson Junior had never been back to the house he might have been said almost to have grown up in, and not once had Betty been asked to Chequers throughout her Speakership during the days of Thatcher and Major.
I recall getting rather drunk on a very fine cognac that was one of the gifts Jacques Chirac had brought the week before when he had been the first Chequers guest of the Blair premiership. Upstairs after dinner I found the red box that all government members are given by their civil servants at the end of the day. I knew they contained papers that our leaders had to work through. A scarlet leather case, stamped with the royal arms, the red box is one of the great mystical fetish objects in British politics. When no one was looking I committed the treasonable act of flicking the latches and lifting the lid. I was rather astonished, which I should not have been, to see that instead of papers, the box revealed the keyboard of a laptop computer. The astonishment came as much from my knowledge that Blair had no understanding of computers at all, despite his call of ‘a laptop for every child’ in the recent election. Still, it was a sign of the times.
My task for the Labour Party, from Neil Kinnock onwards, had been to write what I called ‘bolt-on modules’, paragraphs that addressed whatever it was that Jonathan Powell and others in Neil’s/Tony’s office thought needed addressing. I am pleased to say I had nothing to do with the disastrous Sheffield triumphalism that many believe dashed Kinnock’s chances of defeating John Major in 1992, but I cannot claim that a single paragraph, sentence, phrase or word of mine made the slightest impact on British politics. It probably only served to annoy more people who found ‘Labour luvvies’ instinctively repellent than it attracted to the party. The idea that I would vote Conservative because Kenny Everett or, heaven help us, Jimmy Savile encouraged us to do so is clearly nonsensical and insulting. I always wanted to keep my name out of the list of prominent Labour supporters for just that reason.
While we’re in gossipy mood, I suppose I might as well get His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales out of the way. It is fairly well known, amongst those who know these kinds of things fairly well, that I am an admirer of the PoW, and, I believe, vice versa. This puzzles, confuses, angers and distresses some who think that either I am blind to what they consider egregious faults in the Prince, or that I am sycophantic to, and glamourized by, an institution for which they have nothing but contempt. I don’t mean in this book to defend the monarchy, which institution must of course appear like an oddity to many. My own view is that, since we have it and since it gives such pleasure to so many, especially around the world, it would be folly to get rid of it. The backside of whom are we going to lick when we send a letter in the Republic of Britain? William Hague? Harriet Harman? An elected British President will not glamourize the heads of state of other countries when they come on a state visit. Compared to carriages, crowns, orbs and ermine, an entry-level Jaguar and Marks & Spencer suit offer no edge over other nations when vying for trade advantages. By definition half the country will despise a Labour President or a Conservative one, and you can bet your bottom dollar that politicians will ensure that, if we do become a republic, there will be little other choice than the major parties. Which, at the time of writing, might include UKIP. Lovely.
I also admire the tradition of the Prime Minister having to visit the monarch weekly and use him or her as an echo-chamber. I tell Americans that it is the equivalent of their President once a week being obliged to pay a call on Uncle Sam, assuming that that universally recognizable symbol of the nation were a real, bearded fellow in striped trousers and spangled coat. If a man as powerful as a President or a Prime Minister has to explain what he is doing, what he has enacted, how he has responded to this crisis or that, to someone who represents the nation in a way he or she cannot, I think it keeps them from going too power-crazy.
Many people, to return to the man in question, know more about military history than the Prince of Wales; many know more about architecture; many know more about agriculture; many know more about painting; many know more about flying; many know more about sailing; many know more about riding; many know more about horticulture, cheeses, geography, botany, environmental science and so on and so on and so on. You see where I am going. I can honestly say that I have never met anyone who knows more about all those things. This makes him, at least as far as I am concerned, good and interesting company. He was way ahead of the curve when it came to many environmental and agricultural issues, but there remain many things I fundamentally disagree with him about. Homoeopathy for one, and what seems to me his dangerous instinctive distrust of science and fondness for ‘faith’ for another. I am much more disposed to like some modern architecture than he seems to be. But if disagreements over such matters were causes for scourging and falling out, then who would ’scape whipping, as the man said?
I first
got to know him quite well when I found myself at one of those line-ups after a comedy show of some kind in 1990 or thereabouts. He had heard, I think through Rowan Atkinson, that I had a house in the country not far from the royal residence at Sandringham in Norfolk.
‘I believe we’re neighbours,’ he said.
‘Indeed, sir,’ I said. (Oh! Remind me to tell you a story about Penn Jillette. You’ll love it.)
‘We absolutely adore Norfolk,’ the Prince said. Quite the right thing to say.
‘You must come and visit me over Christmas,’ I said, knowing that this was the season when the royal family spent most of their Sandringham time.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ he murmured as he moved on to the next bowing comic in the line.
I thought very little more about it. That Christmas in Norfolk I had a houseful. Something like fourteen people, I believe. I had somehow managed to provide stockings for them all on Christmas Eve (a fantastical effort of wrapping and Sellotaping on the snooker table, an ideal surface for Christmas) and made a chestnut soup, roasted a turkey and provided the approved pudding, bedight with Christmas holly on top, as Dickens phrases it. A week of game playing, film-watching, snoozing and light walking had followed. It was a period when I was off the powder and all the better for it.
One morning I was making hollandaise for Eggs Benedict, a breakfast dish I pride myself in having mastered to the point of professional excellence. Hollandaise, like mayonnaise or any emulsified sauce, takes concentration. The melted butter mustn’t be poured too quickly into the egg yolk or the mixture will split. A thin, steady stream is called for. This I was achieving when the phone went.