He thought about it for a moment and glanced over to where she was standing by the buffet.
‘No.’
Enough said.
12
Who Put the Good in Goodbye?
THE PHONE RANG AND IT wasn’t Melanie. My mother went through her normal report of life in Bandon. Guttering had been power-hosed, lunches had been digested, traffic lights had been fixed. I listened in my usual slightly distracted manner as I paced around the kitchen, but I could tell that something was wrong. Finally she talked herself out of all other available news and had to tell me why she had really called.
‘Your father has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.’
Of course I didn’t know much about it, apart from the fact that it was degenerative, so for some weird reason I failed to understand the seriousness of the news. I simply thought that somewhere down the line in years to come my father might develop a bit of a shake. I failed to see that it was the end of the world.
What I did understand was that my mother was very upset, so I decided to go home for a visit. Walking in and seeing my father made me realise what an idiot I had been on the phone. Although my father was still walking and driving, it was clear that this disease had him in its grip. There was a lot of talk about medication and how it hadn’t started to work yet but that when it did he would get some of his strength back and of course exercise would help and how the husband of a friend of a friend had it and he was doing very well. A forced brightness filled the house while my father sat quietly with God knows what thoughts in his head.
I have no idea how I would react if I was given the news that I had something like Parkinson’s disease, but I like to think that I would fight it and continue to find a quality of life. It seemed my father decided quite early on that it was a fight he couldn’t win and so he declined with an alarming speed. I went back to work in London, but my mother kept me updated with his progress, or lack of it. He had been forced to give up driving and so my mother, in her mid-sixties, had taken driving lessons and passed her test first time. I was so proud of her and so scared for her at the same time. For a while things seemed to settle down, and we hoped that somehow it had got as bad as it would get for the moment. Perhaps the medication was starting to work?
Scott tried to help and encouraged me to talk about it, but I didn’t want to. Somehow seeing what my father was going through made me feel even more isolated from Scott. Things between us had gone from good to indifferent, and now they seemed almost permanently bad. There seemed to be no sign of Scott getting his passport back and no news about our application. Scott had a lot to be angry and resentful about. It didn’t help that professionally I seemed to be doing better and better.
A new series of So had been commissioned along with a Christmas special. But who would produce it? Peter had decided to leave the world of light entertainment and make documentaries. We were back on the hunt, and although I now had a moderate hit on my hands, the word was out that I was ‘difficult’ because I wanted to be involved in all aspects of the show. Graham Stuart arranged for a lunch with a man called Jon Magnusson. I knew that the name was familiar but I thought it was just because I’d heard people talking about him. He had started in radio, and then done a lot of work with Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones before moving on to work with Rory Bremner. Tall and Scottish and with an impressive CV, he was instantly intimidating to me. During lunch he reminded me when I had heard his name for the first time. He had been the man on the phone when Melanie called after the first show. I warmed to him. He had obviously watched quite a few of the shows and I agreed with nearly all of his criticisms. We decided to give each other a go, and nearly four hundred shows later we are still working together.
News from Ireland wasn’t good. My father had some infection and had been taken into hospital. I headed home. If I had got a shock the last time I had seen my dad, it was nothing compared to what I found this time. Parkinson’s wasn’t winning this fight on points – it was a knock-out. Pale, paperlike skin covered his wasted body. His mouth had become small and thin and his eyes seemed huge and frightened. I stood at the window pretending to study the view as I surreptitiously wiped away tears. This was my father. The man who had let me win races in the back garden in Waterford. He was the man who could lift anything, open anything, fix anything. Now he lay on a bed like a baby bird that had fallen from a nest. My mother, my sister and myself sat around the bed trying to chat. It was unbearable and it was going to get worse.
Parkinson’s disease is especially cruel. It doesn’t even do you the favour of killing you. It just moves in and with an awful efficiency simply packs up your quality of life. It was clear that things had reached the stage where it was no longer possible for my mother to care for him at home. While I went back to London to run up and down stairs in a shiny suit, my mother and sister started to look for a nursing home for my father.
The second series was an even bigger success than the first had been. Jon and I quickly stopped being nervous of each other and began to really enjoy working together. A viewer sent us a Doggy Phone and it slowly became part of the furniture. Phone calls to Miles O’Keefe, the actor who had played Tarzan opposite Bo Derek’s Jane, turned into a weekly feature and our guest booking moved up a notch with people like Joan Collins and Roger Moore coming on the show. That was also the series when the world first saw a little old lady in the audience called Betty.
I was thrilled when the letter arrived. ‘Perhaps you remember me?’ Of course I remembered Betty. For three years at drama school she had made me coffee, and now she wanted to get tickets to see the show. I arranged for her to come along and invited a bunch of friends from Central along too because we all remembered Betty really fondly. After the show I brought her into the green room and showed her the group from school. She looked at them.
‘Hello. Where’s Rufus Sewell? Is Saskia Wickham here?’
It turned out that Betty, as well as being a sweet little old lady from North London, was also obsessed by fame. She had volumes of photo albums of herself with famous people dating back years, and now that she had found her way to my show where she had access to at least two celebrities a week, there was no going back. Week after week I would see her beaming face in the audience, and I was genuinely pleased to see her. I started to do little jokes about her in the warm-up, and then the director started using shots of her laughing after a particularly rude joke.
The first time we actually used her in the show was on St Patrick’s Day. The guests were Carrie Fisher and Terry Wogan, and at the end of the show we were doing an item called ‘Lucky O’Dip’, which was essentially people from the audience pulling various items out of a sawdust-filled barrel. We had found an amazing vibrator that was in the shape of a tongue. The label proudly proclaimed that it was designed for women by women and when it was fully charged it went at a frightening lick. We thought it would be funny to see Betty pulling this out of the barrel, and sure enough it was. We liked the prop so much we got more in and gave them to various other guests, including Joan Collins, but forever after it was simply called Betty’s Tongue.
Over the years she has become more and more a part of the show. We’ve dressed her in a tutu, she has French-kissed strangers and even attended the MTV awards in Barcelona. Recently I was walking down a street in New York, and I could tell that a policeman on the other side of the street was looking at me. There are so many weird laws in the city that I immediately thought I must be doing something wrong, but just as I drew level to him, this big New York cop shouted ‘How’s Betty?’ This woman who for her whole life had been fascinated by fame had now in some quirk of fate ended up becoming famous herself.
Each week my mother would talk to me on the phone and tell me what she thought of the show and the guests. She taped them and then brought them to the nursing home to show my father. By now their lives had taken on a grim new routine. My father lived in a nursing home in Macroom, and each day my mother drove the thirty mile
s there and back through twisting country roads to spend time with him. I went home as often as I could, but it couldn’t be often enough. I saw the terrible toll it was all taking on my mother, but it seemed as if there was no alternative.
Writing about this now it seems incredible that I was able to keep going with the show, but at the time it seemed like life was just going on. There were bits of it that were good and bits of it that were bad. Scott and I were by now going to couple counselling. Why anyone goes to it is a mystery to me. If things have reached that stage, why not just admit that the relationship is over? Week after week I sat there not really saying very much while Scott moaned to the poor woman about me. I suppose he enjoyed it and I guess I owed him that much. I just wondered when it would end. When would the clever lady eventually tell us that it was officially hopeless and we should call it a day? Given that she was being paid by the hour, I guessed that would be never.
More shows were commissioned and then the Channel asked if we would like to do a live show to usher in the millennium. This seemed like a great honour, but more than that it solved the terrible problem of what to do on New Year’s Eve. I told Scott the good news. Apparently it wasn’t. Very reasonably he had imagined spending the night with family or at the very least just with me. The poor man was essentially going out with a junkie except that my drug of choice was work. For the umpteenth time in our relationship I chose work over him, but I told myself that since things were going so badly between us anyway, why would he want to spend time with me?
I had never done live television before and I’m not really in a rush to do it again. The good thing about working that night was just being in the centre of town. I stood on the roof of London Studios on the bank of the Thames and stared across the capital. This was quite simply a London I didn’t recognise. The city was transformed into one huge, good-humoured party and I was pleased and proud to be a part of it.
The show we did was more or less what people might have expected. We had a live link to a sex club in Amsterdam, some members of the audience ran naked across Westminster Bridge, and of course we had a celebrity presence in the shape of Raquel Welch via satellite from Los Angeles. I chatted to her a bit throughout the show, but just after midnight when I went back to her to say thank you and goodnight, her face said it all. She glowered into the camera and said, ‘I hope in the new year your level of taste improves.’ The audience hissed. We’d been having a great time, and some woman from Hollywood was trying to piss on our parade. It wasn’t professional and I’m not proud, but it was the first thing that came into my mind, so I said it: ‘Grumpy old bitch.’ The screen went blank. Later we discovered that she had misunderstood an item in the show because she could only hear it, and that was what had upset her so much. We had played a game called ‘drunks say the funniest things’ where drunk people had described a celebrity and we had to guess who it was. At some point someone in the audience mentioned Raquel Welch’s name, and somehow our long-distance diva had got it into her head that we were saying that she had slept with the drunk person. Still, it’s curious that over the years not one person has ever come up to me and said, ‘Oh, you got Raquel so wrong. She’s really a lovely person.’ Not one.
The climax of the evening was when a lovely lady named Helga started our fireworks for us by firing a ping-pong ball out of herself and hitting a target. In rehearsals we reassured her that so long as she managed to fire the ball, then it really didn’t matter about hitting the target because the fireworks would go off no matter what. Being the professional that she was, that ping-pong ball hit the target every time. It makes me proud to think that in years to come, when archivists are going through how the arrival of the new millennium was marked by TV stations around the globe, there on Channel 4 will be Helga with her legs in the air and feathers in her hair, firing out ping-pong balls.
A few months later we recreated the moment to mark the end of series three. Always conscious of taste and decency, we positioned Helga carefully so that her back was to the audience. Unfortunately we forgot that this meant the celebrity guests would get quite an eyeful. It was too late to do anything about it, and Joan Collins and Richard Wilson sat there and were able to enjoy the full depth of Helga’s talent.
Months went by, viewing figures went up and we even began to win some awards. The Comedy Awards acknowledged the show and we got a BAFTA nomination.
One Friday I was just leaving the Ivy where I had been having lunch with Kevin Lygo when my mobile phone rang. It was my sister Paula. I should come home. My father wasn’t dead, but the doctor had made it clear that the end was going to be sooner rather than later. I hung up. Walking down Long Acre towards Covent Garden, I called my travel agent and organised my flight for later that day. Then I went into a men’s shop and bought a plain black suit. The shop assistants joked with me about the show and all the outrageous things that we had done on it. I laughed and signed autographs as they packed up the suit I would wear to my father’s funeral.
It was dark when we got to the nursing home. We crept into my father’s room and the three of us gathered around the bed in the gloom. We sat and listened to him breathing. Every time he exhaled, we waited to see if there was going to be another breath. Occasionally his face flickered, but he seemed calm and peaceful. We stayed there by his side till late into the night, but eventually we decided to go home, get some sleep and come back in the morning. We each in turn held his hand and kissed his cool cheek goodnight.
The next morning as we were having breakfast, the phone rang. I happened to be nearest to it and so I answered it.
‘Is that Graham?’
‘Yes . . .’
It was the matron from the nursing home. I expected her to ask to speak to my mother, but she carried on.
‘Your father passed away a few minutes ago.’
‘OK. We’ll be there soon.’
My sister and mother were standing close to me looking at my face for news. I had no idea what to say or how to say it. I opened my mouth.
‘That’s it. He’s gone.’
As long as I live I never want to hear again the sound my mother made at that moment. A cry that made everything so clear. She hadn’t lost her husband, or the father of her children. She had lost her lover. She was no longer some grey-haired lady standing in her pristine kitchen, she was the embodiment of pure grief. She might have been seventeen hearing that her boyfriend had been killed in a motorcycle accident.
We sat in the car outside the nursing home for a while until we finally felt ready to venture inside. I don’t know what I expected to feel when I saw my father’s body lying there. I suppose I thought he would simply look the same as he had when we had left him the night before but without the slow unsteady breathing. But this was different. I’m so glad I did get to see my father’s body because it made it so clear to me that he was gone. The body on the bed looked like my father – but it wasn’t him. I’m sure you know by now that I’m not a very religious person, but there was no doubt that my father’s spirit had left this body that had failed him so badly.
The local rector arrived, and along with a few of the nurses we stood by the bed and said prayers. Obviously we were crying, but oddly what moved me most was seeing that the nurses too had tears streaming down their faces. It said so much about my father that even without his stories and sparkle, his profound sweetness had touched these strangers. Sad as we all were to have lost this man, some of the tears felt good too. He was free. Much as we would miss him, there was no one in that room who could have wished him alive again to continue having to deal with his disease.
Whenever people I knew had a death in the family I was always faintly embarrassed and gave them a wide berth, assuming that they would want to be left alone. In a small town in Ireland that isn’t an option. Almost as soon as we got back from the nursing home the doorbell started to ring. Neighbours who had heard the news came to pay their respects. They brought cakes, they brought bottles of whiskey, but mostly they brou
ght their memories of my father. Far from being intrusive or insensitive, as I thought such visits would be, they were wonderfully comforting. We realised that all we wanted to do was talk about the man who had left the room. Nearly every visit ended up with us all laughing at something my father had done or one of his stories being retold. That sense of community and support brought me a whole new respect and affection for Ireland. All the things that I had thought were there to hold me back I now found were there to hold me up.
The funeral was perfect. A hot sunny day in May and a church full of people from all over the country. I knew my father was well liked, but to see the people all standing in rows with their heads bowed made it so real. Afterwards we stood and people walked by, pausing to shake our hands. ‘Sorry for your loss’, ‘Sorry for your loss’. The words start to lose all meaning and yet they meant so much. All the rituals of death came together and made perfect sense. Of course not everything was perfect. The choir sang one hymn to the wrong tune – my mother quite liked that because it gave her something to criticise – and then the editor of the local paper asked me if I would consider doing an interview just as the hearse drove off taking my father to the crematorium. That took my breath away.
Back at the house we had the happiest, biggest party I can ever remember having there. I topped up glasses and chatted to people I hadn’t seen for years, and all the talk was of my father. A small army of ladies fell easily into separate troops of buttering and slicing and then later washing and drying.
After everyone was gone it was just Rhoda, Paula and Graham. I’m sure my father left many legacies, but the one that means most to me is how much closer I’ve become to my mother and sister. We had never been distant, but somehow sharing that time of raw grief helped us open ourselves up and see to the very core of each other.
Later that same week I stood on the stage at the Grosvenor House and held a BAFTA. I held it up and, looking into the camera, thought about my mother sitting in her bungalow watching the television.
So Me Page 18
