People are strange about casting.
We hold a party at Southgate Road about this time. I go around with a Nebuchadnezzar of champagne topping up the guests and trying not to breathe in the fumes myself being well aware of what my allergy to champagne might bring on. As I pass by, an actor friend asks what I am up to and I mention The Good Father.
'What sort of role?'
'Oh, I play this rather defeated father and husband who's going through a divorce.'
'You!' the actor is unable or unwilling to hide the contempt, outrage and disapproval in his voice. 'What the hell would you know about that?'
I grin tightly and move on. So I should be playing nothing but celibate gay men? Is that how acting works? I suppose the actor, who is married, with a second child on the way and not very much in demand, is peeved that he should be out of work while juicy parts are going to lucky buggers like me: his savage titter of disbelief must be his way of coping. People who didn't go to drama school, have enormous holes in their Chekhov technique and are given parts that they cannot possibly play out of any true experience must be excessively aggravating to proper actors. I can see that, but I am still a little hurt.
We are rather excited tonight to have Kate Bush at the party. Hugh has just been in a video of her newest song. Two Nebuchadnezzars of champagne last the evening perfectly, and for those, like me, who don't drink it, we are all still of an age where guests bring bottles and there is enough red wine to keep us merry too. Talking of red wine, parked in the street outside the house is my new pride and joy, a claret-coloured Daimler Sovereign. How perfect is my life. I want to weep when I look back. Enough money to keep me in cigarettes, shirts and a nice new car, but not so much as to isolate me from this charmed studenty existence of Bohemian house-sharing and irresponsible fun. Experiences are still new and exciting, my palate is not jaded, life is not stale.
We were happy and lucky, but this was Thatcher's Britain, and we did not let a moment pass without giving Thatcher's Britain a searing indictment. Forgive the phrase. We were still children really and Thatcher's Britain seemed to us to be something that needed searingly to be indicted, the searinglier the better. You might imagine that it had treated us so well that we should be on our knees thanking it for the film roles, job opportunities, affordable property prices, Daimler Sovereigns and burgeoning prosperity that had come our way with a minimum of effort. We certainly did not see it that way. Firstly, our educations and upbringings had been received under Labour and Edward Heath's more liberal and consensus-based dispensations. The new callousness and combative certainty of Thatcher and her cabinet of vulgar curiosities were alien to the values we grew up with, and it smelt all wrong. I know that if you are flourishing in a regime you are supposed not to bellyache about it. Seems ungrateful. Cake and eat it. Biting the hand that feeds. The moral high ground is easy to perch on if you're in a cashmere sweater. Chattering classes. Trendy liberals. Bah. I do see that. Bad enough from someone in an ordinary job, but to hear searing indictments of Thatcher's Britain from an actor ...
The world finds it difficult to credit the breed with enough brains or the qualities of seriousness, understanding and worldly experience required for a political statement to which they can attach the slightest value. Daffy airheaded twazzocks, every one of them, is more or less the accepted view; one from which it is hard to dissent, and I speak as a fully paid-up member of Equity and the Screen Actors Guild myself. This is partly because, love them/us as I do - hard to find a kinder, funnier, more loyal bunch, etc., etc. - there are probably more embarrassing featherheads and ludicrous naifs in the acting profession than in any other. Perhaps because to penetrate a role properly you first have to empty the brain of all cynicism and self-awareness and such irrelevant impedimenta as logic, reason and empirical sense. Certainly some, but not all, of the very best actors I have known are innocent of any such encumbrances. I have noticed that, whenever I have made the mistake of getting myself embroiled in some public controversy or other, the side that holds the opposing view will always refer to me as an actor. It successfully devalues whatever it is I might have said. I have spent more time writing than acting, but 'After all, he's only a writer,' doesn't have quite the same sneering finality as 'Why should we pay any attention to the views of an actor?' I am not always such an imbecile as to be surprised by that, or even aggrieved. We all choose whatever weapons are at hand in a fight and when we get close in we jab and kick at the weakest and most vulnerable parts.
I mention all this because I am teeing up a section in which I have to take you through more sickening examples of my good fortune, dissipation, wanton wastefulness and sheer cheapness of spirit and lowness of social or moral tone.
Me and My Girl transferred to the Adelphi Theatre. Matthew Rice, David Linley and I made our way on foot from the stage door in Maiden Lane to the first-night party at Smith's in Covent Garden. As we walked, paparazzi closed in on David like wasps at a picnic. 'This way, Lord Linley.' Flash. 'Lord Linley, Lord Linley!' Flash, pop, flash. Every now and then he would bat them away with a growl. They would shrink back, mass and swarm again. This continued for the length of our walk.
'What can it be like?' I asked David.
'You'll know soon enough,' he said.
This was a charming remark, but not one I could set much store by. My name was beginning to mean a little more in the world, but there was still no danger of photographers shouting it out on the red carpet. As soon as I had understood that a few appearances on television, especially in a show like Alfresco which appealed to so few, would not generate instant fame, I had relaxed into life and work without troubling myself too much about the whole business. Letters had started to come in, a few from Alfresco ... watchers, I won't say fans, and some from Loose Ends listeners or readers of the magazines for which I wrote. Once or twice I would be stopped in the street.
'You're that ... that man ...' Fingers would be clicked and feet stamped at the effort of memory.
'I know I look like him, but I'm not,' I tried saying once or twice. I soon learnt that whether or not they knew my name or where they had seen me they knew perfectly well that I was not anybody's doppelganger. For good or ill my features are unmistakable, and since that time I have accepted that pretending not to be me is no good. Some can get away with it, but not I. Sunglasses, pulled-down beanies and muffled-up scarves make no difference. I might as well be carrying a sign with my name on.
As 1985 wore on, and Me and My Girl clearly established itself as a major hit, royalty statements from Noel Gay Music began to arrive. The 'backend' that Richard Armitage the agent had strong-armed Richard Armitage the producer into accepting was beginning to bear fruit.
Martin Bergman said to me with his usual assured omniscience, 'Oh yes, Stephen, you'll get at least a million out of it, no question.'
I didn't believe him for a second, but the weekly arrival of cheques was a delightful new feature of my life.
The first thing I did as soon as I fully understood that my 'net worth' was increasing was to sign up for every conceivable kind of plastic. When you applied for a Diner's Club card you could ask to be sent two, one for personal use and one for business. I needed no such distinction to be made in my life, but two cards, hurrah! I had a gold American Express Card, at that time the ultimate status symbol, as well as an ordinary green one. I had the usual bank card, two Mastercards (Access, your flexible friend, being one) and two Visa cards. Added to these were sundry store, subscription and membership cards. Do you remember Clifton James as Sheriff J.W. Pepper in Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun? Big, pot-bellied American in a Hawaiian shirt forever chewing and dabbing his brow with a bandana? There's a scene where he takes out his wallet, and its concertinaed compartments flip down almost to the ground exposing dozens of credit cards. That was my wallet.
Why? Well, I am distrustful of too much certainty in self-analysis, but I do not think this fatuous and infantile display of 'worth' can have been unconnecte
d to the crime that got me arrested. Aged seventeen, I had run riot around England with someone else's credit cards - a Diner's Club and an Access card. That is what had got me sent to Pucklechurch prison.+ I suppose eight years later I still found it hard to believe that I merited my own cards. I was now creditworthy. These cards were daily reminders that the long nightmare was over and that I was at last a proper, decent citizen solidly placed on the right side of the law. Not that this was to be anything like an endpoint for me. By no means. The same old self-destructive urges were only just below the surface. In all too short a time those same credit cards, symbols of legitimacy and respectability or not, would be chopping endless lines of far from legal and less than respectable cocaine.
For the meantime I clung to these tokens of worth, worthiness, credit and credibility. I spent PS7,000 on a laser printer for my Macintosh computer. It was a staggering sum and in the eyes of most people unjustifiable and absurd. No one had ever seen before such extraordinary print clarity and quality from a computer. The standard machines were the dot-matrix kind, usually taking special paper that had punched holes down the sides; they produced type that was composed, as the name suggests, of dots, resulting in a fuzzy, low resolution. In the radio studio I was now able to brandish Trefusis scripts that looked as if they had been professionally typeset. With great solemnity I would tell the guests and contributors around the Loose Ends table that I wrote my script in longhand and then dropped it off at the printer's who produced three copies, one for Ian Gardhouse, one for the sound engineer and one for me. I would be stared at as if I were tragically and perhaps dangerously insane, but the fact that they could swallow such a ludicrous story shows how rare laser-printed pages were back then.
I became the first non-businessperson I knew to have a carphone. I would sit in traffic, wallowing back against the Connollized leather of the Sovereign, and call people for the sheer pleasure of being able to say, 'Hang on, the lights are turning green,' and hearing my interlocutor turn green too, with envy. Of course, they probably just thought, 'What a wanker,' but I was too happy to care.
I decided that I should have a house in the country. Look, I can't keep apologizing, but I will say one more time, I know how horrible this must be to read. A cat that keeps falling on its feet, even one that had a rather problematic kittenhood, does not make a very interesting or admirable hero. I have to lay out the facts as I recall them in the full knowledge that they reflect little or no credit on me. The cash was flying in, and I was a victim of nothing but my own saucer-eyed cupidity and trashy delight in the riches the world seemed so keen to offer me.
Having run away as a child from what I could now see was a blissful country home, I wanted to make one of my own. The country meant only one thing to me, Norfolk. There was one small problem, however. I knew that my parents, particularly my father, hated display and swagger and swank. I was too embarrassed to let them know quite how much I was earning. It seemed obscene and unjustified. My father I associated with a crippling work ethic and a contempt for money, or at least a complete lack of interest in it. For me to be running about the garden of life with my pinny spread open to catch all the gold coins raining down on me would have struck him, I believed, as grotesque and disgusting. This would be income almost as dishonestly come by in his eyes, or so I told myself, as the money I used to steal in my badolescence.
Stephen's way with embarrassing problems has ever been either to run away or, as in this case, to lie his way out of trouble. You do not need to have lived many years on the planet to know that this means to lie your way into trouble. I decided to tell my parents that I wanted to buy a place in Norfolk which I would open as a restaurant. It seemed less sybaritic and self-indulgent than to buy one purely as a second home. My parents appeared to believe me, or at least were as usual kind enough to pretend to and not call the lie at once.
I am the world's quickest and least patient shopper. I pluck from shelves like a Supermarket Sweep contestant on crystal meth. I never try clothes on for size. Queues and waiting drive me insane with impatience. It turned out that I was like this with houses too. I contacted a Norfolk estate agent and bought the third house I looked at. The first two were tempting but needed too much work. The one I settled on was a solid six-bedroom farmhouse, originally sixteenth-century but mostly overclad with Victorian brick in the rather yellowy grey characteristic of that part of Norfolk. I showed my parents round. Restaurant tables were imagined in the large dining-room and drawing room, and there was talk of the knocking-through of hatches, the construction of a bar and cold room and the hiring of a chef and waiting staff. Tactfully this was never really mentioned again. It was obvious that the house was for me to live in, and that if I ever did entertain the notion of being a restaurateur it was no more than a passing fantasy. Embarrassed by how inappropriate the house was for my age and single state, I told people that I had a 'country cottage' in Norfolk. Just a little place for weekends.
So there I was, a celibate man with a ludicrously big house and a ludicrously big car. A ludicrously big car? It was surely time to put that right. I embarked upon what was to turn into a six- or seven-year classic-car spending spree, starting with an early seventies Aston Martin V8. It was a garish Yeoman Red when I bought it, so I had it resprayed a sleek and understated Midnight Blue. I cannot remember which I loved more, my little house in the country, my Aston Martin, my Apple computer or my gold AmEx card. What a styleless arsehole I was, what a prodigal tit, what a flash fuckhead. I look back and see only waste, vanity, emptiness and puerile conceit. That I was happy offers me no compensation now.
In the replay of regret that flickers through my mind I picture how I might have used the money that poured in so prodigiously. Wasn't I happy enough in London? Hugh, Katie, Nick and I loved Southgate Road and now we were ready to pool our resources and buy our own house together. Why did I need a large place in the country too? I loved my Daimler Sovereign, why should I need another car and another and another? A man can only drive one vehicle at a time, for heaven's sake. I loved my Macintosh, so why did I need to replace it every time Apple came up with a new model? Why did I need any of the baubles I spunked my money on? What the hell was I playing at? I could have saved the money, invested it, husbanded it. I might just as well tell myself that I could have sung Don Giovanni at Covent Garden or opened the batting at Lord's. As Dirty Harry tells Hal Holbrook in Magnum Force, 'A man's gotta know his limitations.' I will never be provident, prudent or prescient. Never. I do not have it in my genes to be so. I believe that change, improvement, heuristic development and the acquisition and advancement of learning and wisdom through experience are all possible and desirable. I also believe that leopards will always be spotty, skunks smelly and Stephens idiotically wasteful and extravagant. Some things are not susceptible to change.
'You'll never have to work again,' someone said to me at a party. To me this was like being congratulated on becoming tetraplegic - 'Hurrah! You'll never have to walk again! You can stay in bed all day.' Perhaps that is why I spent money so freely, so that I always had the incentive to work.
Another incentive to work was the example of Ben Elton. The second series was the last the world ever saw of Alfresco, but between putting the finishing touches to the final sketch of the hundred or so he wrote for it and completing his co-authorship of the second series of The Young Ones he had somehow contrived to write all six episodes of an entirely new comedy drama of his own invention which he called Happy Families. It starred Jennifer Saunders in the five roles of an old grandmother and her four lost granddaughters. Ade Edmondson, shortly to become Jennifer's real-life husband, played the hapless grandson who must search the world to reunite them all. I was cast as the same nonchalantly callous Dr de Quincy I had played in a few Alfresco sketches, with Hugh as Jim, my Kiplingesque friend and companion. The series was directed by The Young Ones producer-director, Paul Jackson. During the shoot, which took place in and around Denstone in Staffordshire, not five minutes from the
charms of Uttoxeter and the horrors of Alton Towers, Paul mentioned that next year he would be putting together a new live comedy show for Channel 4. He wondered if Hugh and I would be interested in contributing to it. We conferred nervously with each other in the bar that evening. The new world of youthful stand-up comedy was going to be represented on this 'edgy' 'alternative' and 'ground-breaking' show. Stand-up was another string to Ben Elton's bow: he appeared regularly compering at the Comedy Store and he was certainly going to do a session or two in the new series. Other comedy teams would be appearing, such as Mark Arden and Steve Frost, who performed as the Oblivion Boys, and Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, who had come together again, this time as the Dangerous Brothers. Hugh and I wondered if we would stick out like sore and inappropriately tweedy thumbs. Despite our characteristic fears and forebodings we decided that we should do the show. In the end, somewhere at the bottom of our churning wells of nonsense Hugh and I knew that we could and should do comedy together. It was a kind of destiny.
Back in London after filming, Hugh, Katie, Nick Symons and I each bought a share in a large house in St Mark's Rise, Dalston. Situated just off the Sandringham Road, which on account of its predominantly drug-dealing Yardie population was known as Da Front Line, the house was in need of some repair, and we set about improving it straight away. Which is to say we hired a team of perky young plasterers and decorators to do it for us. They were very good, and I should tell you about them.