Work can be an addiction like any other. Love of it can be a home-wrecker, an obsession that bores, upsets, insults and worries those close to you. We all know that drugs, alcohol and tobacco are Bad, but work, we are brought up to believe, is Good. As a result the world is full of families who are angry at being abandoned and breadwinners who are even more angry because their hours of labour are not sufficiently appreciated. 'I do it for you!' they cry. While it may be true that work puts meat on the table, everyone around them knows that hard workers do it for themselves. Most children of workaholics would rather see less money and more of their parent.
Within a year of leaving Cambridge, friends and family were already referring to my apparent inability to use the word 'no'. I soon began to hear myself described as a workaholic. Kim preferred the word 'ergomaniac' partly because he was a classical scholar and partly I suspect because the 'maniac' part better expressed the absurd frenzy with which I was starting to throw myself into every offer that came my way. To this day I am often reminded by those about me that I don't have to say yes to everything and that there are such things as holidays. I don't believe them, of course, no matter how many times they assure me it is true.
The question that most troublingly refuses to go away is whether my productivity, ubiquity and well ... career harlotry ... have stopped me from realizing what, in the world of fathers, teachers and grown-ups in general, might be called My Full Potential. Hugh and Emma, to name the two most obvious of my contemporaries, have never been as recklessly carefree, prodigal and improvident with their talents as I have. I want to say that they have always had reason to believe in their talents more than I have in mine. But then I also want to say that I have had more fun than they have and that:
For when the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He marks - not that you won or lost,
But how you played the Game.
Which is all very well, but while I may want to say all kinds of things, I am not sure that they would necessarily be true. I will not go so far as to claim that, when falling asleep every night, I mourn lost opportunities. 'Every night' would be an exaggeration. There is a vision that comes to me often though.
I picture myself at the surface of an ocean: the course of my life is played out as a descent to the sea bed. As I drop down I clutch at and try to reach blurred but alluring images representing the vocation of writer, actor, comedian, film director, politician or academic, but they all writhe and ripple flirtatiously out of reach, or rather it would be truer to say that I am afraid to leap forward and hug one of them to me. By being afraid to commit to one I commit to none and arrive at the bottom empty and unfulfilled. This is a self-aggrandizing, pitiful and absurd fantasy of regret, I know, but it is a frequent one. I close whatever book I have been reading in bed, and that same film plays out again and again in my mind before I sleep. I know that I have a reputation for cleverness and articulacy, but I also know that people must wonder why I haven't quite done better with my life and talents. A jack of so many trades and manifestly a master of none. In my perkier moods I am entirely pleased with this outcome, for I refuse to stand on a carpet in a headmaster's study and endure wise shakings of the head and heavy school-report pronouncements about my shortcomings. Such attitudes are grotesque, impudent and irrelevant. 'Could do better' is a meaningless conclusion. 'Could be happier' is the only one that counts. I have had five times the opportunities and experiences accorded to most, and if the result is a disappointment to posterity, well prosperity can eat it. In less perky moods, of course, I entirely concur with the judgements of the head-shakers and school-report pronouncers. What a waste. What a fatuous, selfish, air-headed, indolent and insulting waste my life has been.
While it is not exactly counterintuitive it may perhaps be less than immediately obvious to point out that it is a great deal more conceited of me to bemoan my life as a waste than for me to be more or less satisfied at the way it has turned out. Any regret at my lack of achievement suggests that I really believe that I had in me the ability, should I have concentrated on any one thing, to have written a great novel or to have been a great actor, director, playwright, poet or statesman or whatever else I might delude myself I had the potential for. Whether or not I have the ability to be any of those things, I do know that I lack the ambition, concentration, focus and above all will without which such talents are as useless as an engine without fuel. Which is not to say that I am lazy or unambitious in the short term. You might say I am good at tactics but hopeless at strategy, happy to slog away at whatever is in front of me but unable to take a long view, plan ahead or imagine the future. A good golfer, they say, has to picture his swing before he addresses the ball in order to drive. My whole life has been an adventure in hit and hope.
But sex. Yes, we have to return, I fear, to sex. We were discussing that commission for the Tatler. I wrote the article for Jonathan Meades, outlining my distaste for being cursed by nature with an urgent instinct to rummage about in the 'damp, dark, foul-smelling and revoltingly tufted areas of the human body that constitute the main dishes in the banquet of love' and my sense that the whole business was humiliating, disgusting and irksome. I suggested that a life without sex and without the presence of a partner offered numerous benefits. The celibate life allowed productivity, independence and ease free from the pressures of placating and accommodating the will and desires of another: released from the degrading imperatives of erotic congress, a new and better kind of life could be lived. Sex was an overrated bore. 'Besides,' I confessed as I ended the article, 'I'm scared that I may not be very good at it.'
The piece was quoted and reproduced in whole or in part in several newspapers, and for the next twelve years it was rare for this particular C-word not to be attached to me much as macrobiotic is attached to Gwyneth Paltrow and tantric to Sting. I joined Cliff Richard and Morrissey as one of celibacy's peculiar poster children. Profilers, chat show hosts and interviewers in the years to come would regularly ask if I was still keeping it up, ho-ho, whether I would recommend sexual abstinence as a way of life and how I coped with the loneliness of the single state. I had created a rod for my own back with this article but have never regretted writing it. It was, more or less, inasmuch as these things ever are, true. I did find the business of eros a nuisance and an embarrassment. I did enjoy the independence and freedom afforded me by being unattached and I was afraid that I might not be very good at sex. Am I going to deny my terror of rejection, or my low sense of my own physical worth?
With the passing of each year the odds against me ever forging a full relationship lengthened as I felt myself less and less practised in the arts of love and less and less confident about how I would ever go about finding a partner, even supposing that I wanted one. There was just so much to do. I was rehearsing in London prior to going down to Chichester to start Forty Years On, I was working on Me and My Girl, chugging out journalism and taking enthusiastic steps in another medium: radio.
The Tatler celibacy article. Photo Tim Platt/Tatler (c)Conde Naste Publications Ltd. Words Stephen Fry/Tatler (c)Conde Naste Publications Ltd.
Characters and the Corporation
Ever since I can remember I have loved radio, especially the kind of talk radio that only the BBC Home Service, later Radio 4, provides. Throughout my insomniac youth I listened through the day right up to the national anthem, when I would retune to the BBC World Service. 'England made me,' Anthony Farrant says to himself in the Graham Greene novel of that title. England made me too, but it was an England broadcast on 1500 metres Long Wave.
I wrote this as the opening of an article on the World Service for Arena magazine.
BBC World Service. The News, read by Roger Collinge ... The warm brown tones trickle out of Bush House like honey from a jar: rich and resonant on the Long and Medium Waves for domestic listeners or bright and sibilant on the Short Wave for a hundred million Anglophone citizens of the world for whose benefit the precious
signal is bounced off the atmosphere from relay station to relay station, through ionospheric storms and the rude jostling traffic of a hundred thousand intrusive foreign transmissions, to arrive fresh and crackling on the veranda table. Oh, to be in England, now that England's gone. This World Service, this little Bakelite gateway into the world of Sidney Box, Charters and Caldicott, Mazawattee tea, Kennedy's Latin Primer and dark, glistening streets. An England that never was, conjured into the air by nothing more than accents, March tunes and a meiotic, self-deprecating style that in its dishonesty is brassier and brasher than Disneyland. A Mary Poppins service, glamorous in its drab severity, merry in its stern routine and inexhaustible resource: a twinkling authoritarian that fulfils our deepest fantasy by simply staying, even though the wind changed long ago. Ooh, I love it ...
I'm sure I knew what I meant at the time by the World Service's 'dishonesty', but the truth is I still adored and valued radio above television. Radio 4's mix of comedy, news, documentary, drama, magazine, panel game and quirky discussion is unique and was central to the fashioning of my outlook and manner. I grew up to the sound of warmly assured and calmly authoritative BBC voices vibrating the fabric speaker covers of valve wireless sets manufactured by Bush, Ferguson, Roberts and Pye. One of my first-ever memories is sitting under my mother's chair in our house in Chesham while she tapped away on her typewriter with characters from The Archers arguing about dairy cattle in the background. My Music, My Word!, A Word in Edgeways, Stop the Week, Start the Week, Any Answers, Any Questions, Twenty Questions, Many a Slip, Does the Team Think?, Brain of Britain, From Our Own Correspondent, The Petticoat Line, File on Four, Down Your Way, The World at One, Today, PM, You and Yours, Woman's Hour, Letter from America, Jack de Manio Precisely, The Men from the Ministry, Gardener's Question Time, The Burkiss Way, The Jason Explanation, Round Britain Quiz, Just a Minute, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, Desert Island Discs and a hundred other dramas, comedies, quizzes and features have amused, amazed, enriched, enraged, informed and inflamed me from the earliest age. My voice, I think, owes more to the BBC microphone and the dusty, slow-to-warm-up Mullard valve than to the accents and tones of my family, friends and school fellows. Just as there are the lazily sucked bones of Wodehouse, Wilde and Waugh in my writing style, if style is the right word for it, so the intonations of John Ebden, Robert Robinson, Franklin 'Jingle' Engelmann, Richard 'Stinker' Murdoch, Derek Guyler, Margaret Howard, David Jacobs, Kenneth Robinson, Richard Baker, Anthony Quinton, John Julius Norwich, Alistair Cooke, David Jason, Brian Johnston, John Timpson, Jack de Manio, Steve Race, Frank Muir, Dennis Norden, Nicholas Parsons, Kenneth Williams, Derek Nimmo, Peter Jones, Nelson Gabriel, Derek Cooper, Clive Jacobs, Martin Muncaster and Brian Perkins have penetrated my brain and being to the extent that - much as heavy-metal pollutants get into the hair and skin and nails and tissue - they have become a physical as well as an emotional and intellectual part of me. We are all the sum of countless influences. I like to believe that Shakespeare, Keats, Dickens, Austen, Joyce, Eliot, Auden and the great and noble grandees of literature have had their effect on me, but the truth is they were distant uncles and aunts, good for a fiver at Christmas and a book token on birthdays, while Radio 4 and the BBC World Service were my mother and father, a daily presence and constant example.
I believed from the earliest age that I would be quite content to work in radio all my life. If I could just be a continuity announcer or regular broadcaster of some kind, how happy I would be. My dislike of my facial features and physical form contributed to this ambition. I had, as the tired old joke goes, a good face for radio. Announcers and broadcasters have no need of make-up or costume. For one who believed that any attempt at prettification on my part would only draw attention to my cursed deficiencies, a life in front of the microphone seemed like the perfect career. How much more realistic for me a national radio station than irrational venustation.
My first visits to Broadcasting House, the home of BBC Radio in Portland Place, had been as early as 1982, when I played a fictional news reporter for a Radio 1 programme called, I think, B15. The basement studios in Broadcasting House were all Bx, and I honestly cannot remember the value of the x which gave this programme its name. In its short run B14 or B12 or whatever it may have called itself was presented by David 'Kid' Jensen, an amiable Canadian disc jockey best known, according to a friend of mine who is very keen on this kind of thing, for being the least objectionable presenter of Top of the Pops in all its long history. My character on Bwhatever, Bevis Marchant, had his own little slot called Beatnews, a rather obvious parody of Radio 1's ludicrously urgent, trivial and self-important Newsbeat. Within two weeks of me contributing to this programme Margaret Thatcher had dispatched a task force to recapture the Falkland Islands, and a week later I was taken off the air. My parody of Brian Hanrahan and others was deemed insensitive. I shouted over an electric egg beater in a bucket to recreate the sound of reporting live from a helicopter. I was in fact mocking the grandiose, faux-butch reporting style, not making light of the danger that the military were in, but that has always been too complicated a distinction for stupid people to understand. There was a war on, I was trying to be funny, therefore I had contempt for the sacrifice and bravery of the troops. My levity was tantamount to treason and must be stopped. I think I am angrier about that now than I ever was at the time. Pomposity and indignation grow in old age, like nostril hairs and earlobes.
Not long after Beatnews a BBC producer called Ian Gardhouse was in touch with me about contributing to a Radio 4 programme of his called Late Night Sherrin. Ned Sherrin was a well-known broadcaster who had started life as a television producer, first at Val Parnell's ATV and then at the BBC. His most famous achievement in that phase of his life had been That Was The Week That Was, usually referred to as TW3, the live comedy show that had launched the satire boom and David Frost. Since then Nedwin, as I liked to call him, had given the world Up Pompeii!, Side by Side by Sondheim and a slew of collaborations with Caryl Brahms and others. Trained as a lawyer, he was known for his love of Tin Pan Alley, rich gossip and comely young men. He received his education at Exeter College, Oxford, where he read law, but before that he had been a boy at the most excellently named educational establishment in the history of the world - Sexey's School in Somerset.
I took to Ned straight away. He was like a stern aunt who twinkled and giggled after a little too much gin. The idea behind Late Night Sherrin was to have a hero or heroine guest of the week who would be twitted and teased by Ned and an assortment of young witty types of which I was to be one. Ned called us his 'young turks'. Late Night Sherrin morphed, for reasons neither I nor Ian Gardhouse can remember, into And So to Ned. They were both live, late-night shows. The routine was for us all to meet for supper high up in the St George's Hotel just by Broadcasting House. The motive behind this, according to Ian, was so that he and Ned could keep an eye on the guests of the week and make sure they stayed relatively sober, a stratagem that failed riotously in the cases of Daniel Farson and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
After And So to Ned's short life came Extra Dry Sherrin, whose format I cannot remember as being any different from the others: possibly it had live music or no live music or three guests instead of two. Extra Dry Sherrin lasted one series before Ian welcomed me into a new Sherrin-free, live 100-minute programme called The Colour Supplement - as the name suggests this was a Sunday 'magazine' show comprising a variety of features, one of which would be a section I could create and shape for myself in any way I chose. Each week I performed a kind of monologue as a different character: an estate agent, an architect, a journalist - I cannot remember the whole gallery. Their surnames usually came from Norfolk villages, so I do recall a Simon Mulbarton, a Sandy Crimplesham and a Gerald Clenchwarton.
It was unfortunate that the pay packets offered proved that the rest of the world held radio in no real esteem. I had grown up hearing Kenneth Williams and others bemoaning in quavering comic tones the insultingly nugatory fees they had been
offered for their services and I soon found out that, compared to her brash younger brother, Television, Dame Wireless did indeed live the most frugal and threadbare existence. This never worried me: I would have done it for free, but it was sometimes hard to persuade Richard Armitage that hours composing broadcast monologues, taking parts in comedies and dramas and guesting on panel games were not a waste of time or beneath - as he seemed to think - my dignity. Radio is the poor relation of television insofar as monetary considerations go, but a rich one where it matters - in terms of depth and intimacy.
The writer Tony Sarchet and producer Paul Mayhew-Archer asked me to play an earnest investigative reporter called David Lander in Delve Special, a new comedy series they were creating. It was essentially a parody of Checkpoint, the very popular Radio 4 programme which featured doughty New Zealander Roger Cook inquiring into a different con, scam or swindle each week. The first part of the programme would catalogue the miseries of the unfortunates who had been exploited and ripped off: they might have had their house destroyed by expensive but incompetent pebble-dashing, been duped into buying a non-existent time-share villa, invested their savings in a - there were any number of ways that innocent lambs could be fleeced by rascally villains, the door-stepping confrontations with whom formed the second and most compulsively enjoyable part of the programme. Cook was famous for getting chi-iked, insulted, jostled, roughed up and even seriously assaulted by the angry subjects of his exposes. Delve Special barely had to exaggerate the stories that Checkpoint and its successor, John Waite's Face the Facts, already provided. Over the next three years we made four series and then, when Roger Cook jumped to television, we jumped with him, being screened for a run of six programmes on Channel 4 as This Is David Lander, for which I wore a quite monstrous blond wig. When my workload was simply too heavy to allow me to do a second series, Tony Slattery stepped in, and the show was retitled This Is David Harper.