Mr Timms: (waking up) I went through Oxford once. Shocking traffic.
Significantly the only parents wholeheartedly in favour of their son going on to Oxford or Cambridge are the Asian Mr and Mrs Akhtar, though even there, not without reservations.
Mr Akhtar: I gather it is the centre court of English ideas.
Mrs A.: But we do not want a Mr Smart Arse.
Mr A.: Oh no, my love.
Mrs A.: We’ve got one of those already.
These scenes survived until the penultimate rewrite when they had to be cut on grounds of length. We get occasional glimpses (the Akhtars turning up in force for the posting of the A level results), but the film like the play is about school and the outside world scarcely figures.
24 July. Seeing Hector off on the bike for what turns out to be his last ride, the boys are not in school uniform but in their own clothes. It’s no fault of the designer but it’s curious how this blurs their characters. In school uniform, white shirts and ties, blazers and dark trousers, each character is clearly defined. Put into civvies they lose their edge and some of their attraction. James Corden in sweater and trousers looks, so he says, like White Van Man. Dominic, in white T-shirt and black leather jacket looks straight out of a sixties Cliff Richard movie and Posner, in sports coat and corduroys, seems to have been dressed like me … which I don’t mind, though I’m not sure it suits him or his character.
What is certain is that all of them look better and more interesting in uniform than in their own clothes.
I’ve come across this once or twice before with orchestras for instance (better in evening dress) and with waiters. The staff of the Odeon in New York were dashing and aloof in their restaurant rig but catch them going home at two in the morning and they had shrunk to the drab, the camp and the ordinary creatures the uniform disguised.
28 July. Watch the first love scene between Dakin and Fiona, the Headmaster’s secretary, shot in a suburban house just up the road from school. It is not especially intimate with no nudity at this stage, though I’d expected Dakin’s trousers to be open as, since they’re lying on the bed and it’s quite heavy snogging, they presumably would be. However I don’t suggest it as it seems prurient.
Later we film the second scene when Dakin, fully clothed, is talking about Irwin while Fiona waits for him to come to bed. This configuration came to me at a Sickert exhibition in the Abbot Hall Gallery in Kendal where there was a painting from the Camden Town murder series in which a clothed and threatening man, possibly a client, stands by the bed of a woman whom he is about to fuck or kill, or both.
Though hardly so dramatic our scene takes a long time to film but only because the sound of Dakin’s falling trousers keeps obscuring the lines. I suggest to John Midgley on sound that Dominic be asked to hold the line until he’s got his trousers off but John, who has obviously had some unfortunate experiences with actors, thinks this will only cause more problems. So we go to thirteen takes until the trousers just happen to come down before the line is said, the gate is checked and we go on to a scene on the football pitch. All rather wasted because the scene is eventually cut and with it the two lines which I like as, in half a dozen words, they wholly explain Dakin’s relation to Irwin.
Dakin: I want him to rate me.
Fiona: Rape you?
Dakin: Rate. Rate.
1 August. A change of location. We film the first of Hector’s classroom scenes at Watford Girls’ Grammar School, an older establishment than the boys’ equivalent and one more appropriate to the piece. There are parquet floors not unlike the corridors of my own school, Leeds Modern, fifty years ago; the walls are lined with team photographs dating back to the 1920s and it’s such a pleasingly old-fashioned place I imagine our set dressers must have been at work. In fact it’s all the genuine article with some of the fixtures and fittings (the brass and Bakelite door handles for instance) so antique as to make it surprising they have survived.
2 August. Film the French class. Always the funniest scene in the theatre, it’s hard to transfer its mischief to film. On stage one of the best moments is the arrival of Irwin and the Headmaster in the middle of Hector’s class acting out a scene in a brothel with Dakin standing there in his shirt tails. The audience sees Hector and Irwin waiting to come in, while at the same time not being sure this is what they are meant to see. It gives them a stolen foretaste of what is to come and they begin laughing even before the Headmaster has made his entrance. On film this can to some extent be achieved by cutting to the Headmaster and Irwin coming down the corridor, but what’s lost is the furtive sneak preview sense you get on stage.
The days get hotter and a species of air conditioning is rigged up consisting of a noisy pump connected to a long coiling silver-foil-covered pipe, the opening of which is so huge it looks likely to suck in the unwary.
Sam Anderson is probably the handsomest and the most physically perfect of all the boys and also the quietest, though without being the least bit shy or immune from the general piss taking. He came up to me today with a little screw he had found. ‘Alan. Are your hips all right?’
3 August. A difficult day. We are filming a long corridor scene in which Mrs Lintott comes up the stairs and encounters Irwin with whom she stops to chat about Hector. Boys run up the stairs, who she absent-mindedly slows down (a hand on the shoulder, a touch on the head … all things teachers are not supposed to do nowadays) and they walk on together, the scene ending at the door of Hector’s classroom with Mrs Lintott denouncing the Headmaster.
‘Twat, twat, twat,’ she says, the last ‘twat’ picked up by Timms (James Corden) who, taking it to refer to him, mumbles, ‘Yes Miss,’ and looks suitably sheepish.
With so many elements involved the shot takes most of the morning. Frances de la T. and Stephen C. M. sometimes get to the door too soon, the passing schoolboys are too animated or sometimes not animated enough. Made to troop up and down the corridor time and time again, they end up looking as grim as the creatures in Doré’s version of a prison yard.
Another difficulty is that today Archie Powell and his camera crew are here to pick up shots for my South Bank Show. Someone sensible and less self-conscious than I am would manufacture an opportunity to catch me in conversation with Nick H. over some point arising out of the shot. But nothing occurs so half the time they have nothing to film, or nothing to film involving me anyway.
Later on the boys are playing football and, the cameras nowhere in sight, I wander round the field, glad to be outside. By the time, though, I’ve got to the border of trees, the camera has materialised from nowhere, filming the football and me lonely as a cloud-ing in the background. And that will, I fear, be how the story will be told … solitary ageing author a spectator at the games of the young.
4 August. Today we film the heart of the play, the scene between Hector and Posner in which the boy recites Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’ and Hector talks about the poem. Richard Griffiths and Sam B. rehearse the scene for the benefit of Andrew Dunn and the camera crew but so quietly I can scarcely hear what they are saying. It is shorter than on the stage (all the references to Larkin, for instance, omitted) but uncut are the lines, ‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.’
This speech I only put in as an afterthought as I’d had it written for nearly thirty years, first delivering it one December night in 1977 as part of the radio programme With Great Pleasure. It was recorded at a parish hall somewhere in the depths of Somerset on a very foggy night and the audience so small that canned applause had to be added at the editing.
9 August. What music we should use is decided initially by Nick H. reading out a list of songs for the boys to approve. The Smiths they like (whom at least I have heard of) and anything by Kate B
ush; any songs that have been in Billy Elliot are automatically ruled out and Madness too (whom I also like). But whereas most of the songs I have never heard of, the boys have only to hear the title before they can reel off the words with an accompanying routine as it’s the music they’ve grown up with.
This morning Vogue comes to take a photograph of the cast and they pose, unnaturally still and stern with one shot on their own, another with Frances de la Tour and a final one with me.
I first had my photograph in Vogue in 1960 when Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore and I were put in a Daimler (the first I had ever been in) and taken out to Acton where we were pictured with our coat collars up against a power station in Park Royal … a fashionably gritty photograph that made us look more like a pop group than young men putting on a revue.
No better at having my picture taken now than I was then, and never having learned to put it on (as the boys do as a matter of course), instead I still endeavour to look like myself, whatever that is. Somehow sincere, I suppose.
As I sit outside the Arts block writing this the school groundsman brings me a bowl of mulberries from a two-hundred-year-old tree in the garden.
11 August. The car comes early so I’m in time to see Dom and Jamie doing the corridor scene in which Jamie tells Dom that just because he’s grateful to Irwin for getting him through the examination doesn’t mean he should offer Irwin unfettered access to his dick. Jamie is peaking too soon in the sequence ‘give him a subscription to the Spectator or a box of Black Magic’, both over-emphasised, with the dick a bit of an anticlimax. So I’m able to point this out and feel, as so seldom, that I’ve been of some use.
15 August. Hector’s memorial service with the boys singing ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ against a screen showing Hector at various stages of his life. I first saw this scene on stage at the play’s dress rehearsal when the conjunction of the song and the (unexpected) photographs brought me close to tears and whenever I saw it during the run it retained its pathos. On screen, though, this may be hard to recapture as it must depend on when the pictures of the young Hector are seen or cut to.
The memorial service is hard to shoot not least because the school hall is filled with schoolboy extras, who chatter and are soon bored and though Nick H. does his best to damp them down the boys’ natural exuberance, inappropriate in the circumstances, keeps breaking through.
The scene is tricky, too, in that it involves talking to the camera. This is easily done on the stage but much harder to bring off on film: sometimes it works, sometimes not, though without it always being obvious why. Nick shoots an alternative version in which most of the talking to camera (and the information thus conveyed) is done as dialogue and this seems to work better.
Still it’s a lengthy job and as we do more and more takes the schoolboys, not understanding why they are having to do it again, start groaning when another take is announced and applauding when it’s finished. The PAs are powerless to control them and what we need, I suppose, is a figure like that of the Headmaster in the film who can scare the shit out of them.
16 August. The actors are normally picked up first thing by car and taken out to Watford and then, when we have finished shooting, taken home. It’s easy enough in a morning but the journey home can be much slower and so some of them have taken to going by train, as I do, Watford to Euston only a twenty-minute ride.
Sacha Dhawan is an Asian actor from Manchester and Sam Anderson from London is of mixed race. Coming home together this last week they were both stopped and searched at Euston. Quite cool about it they also found it funny, though Sacha says that having to spread and be searched as commuters hurried by was a bit shy-making. Nor did the police seem to know what they were looking for. Sacha writes poetry and has kept a diary of the filming, and having been told that they were actors, the police went through his diary and questioned them about the film though less in the interests of counter-terrorism, Sacha felt, than as readers of Hello magazine.
Today I travelled to Euston with Sacha, rather hoping he would be stopped again so that I could see the process at first hand. But for the first time in a fortnight there were no policemen at the station.
On another day (and not with Sacha, fortunately) I overhear a genial looking middle-aged workman, a builder possibly, chatting on his mobile. ‘No, we’re moving, hadn’t you heard? Well, we’re getting outnumbered where we are, know what I mean?’
17 August. A scene in the school gymnasium, the girls’ gymnasium not the boys’, as, like the rest of the school, it’s more old-fashioned, so much so that even the equipment, ‘the apparatus’ as it was always called, has scarcely changed since I was a boy. It’s like revisiting the chamber in which one was tortured years ago: here are the long, brightly varnished forms, the ropes, the wall bars, the tiered box … always a bad moment when another tier was added … against the unyielding side of which I invariably thumped my crotch.
But of course it’s also toys, and before and between takes the boys swing on the ropes and vault over the horse though they can’t do what the script actually requires them to do, namely to hang upside down on the wall bars. So PE master Adrian Scarborough’s line, ‘They won’t want you at Oxford University if you can’t hang upside down on the wall bars,’ has to be cut. The boys get some teen-movie mileage out of being in a girls’ shower room, the changing rooms to me as a boy as much a place of torment as the gym itself.
The gym at my school was the province of an oldish master, Mr King, not quite a thorough-going sadist (he played the viola in the school orchestra) but an expert at catching you on the side of the head with a well-aimed gym shoe. Early in 1952 the rumour went round that Mr King had died very suddenly. Hope turned to exultation when the whole school was summoned to an extraordinary afternoon assembly. However hearts sank when there, large as life, at his music stand and sawing away at the National Anthem was Mr King. Whereupon the headmaster stood up to announce the death not of Mr King but, far less excitingly, of the King himself. I suppose we were sorry but George VI was always a shadowy figure and not much loved, though this at least could be said for His Majesty: he wasn’t wont to catch you unexpectedly on the side of the head with a well-aimed gym shoe.
18 August. En route through Wembley yesterday to the location at Harrow we kept passing schools and colleges with the pupils standing about waiting, or, in one case, just having received their A level results. Today we film the same scene for our own school, Cutlers’ Grammar School, Sheffield with the boys crowding round the noticeboard and exulting in their success.
No such scene occurred in my youth as the results came by post and were slightly mysterious when they did. Whereas I had done well in the earlier exam, School Certificate, in Higher School Certificate, the equivalent of A levels, I did well enough in History but indifferently in English and not at all well in Latin. They were just good enough, though, to get me a scholarship from Leeds City Council though not a State scholarship which was thought to be superior. There was none of the over-excitement that attends the posting of such results these days as it was easier to get to university (and to be paid for there), and so wasn’t made such a fuss of as nowadays (not that there isn’t anything that is not made a fuss of nowadays). I can’t imagine my fellow sixth-formers behaving like ours do on film, embracing one another, jumping on each other’s backs in the manner of goal-scoring footballers.
With us a gloomy satisfaction was more the order of the day; this was one examination, but there were going to be others and more hurdles to come. And before all that the worst hurdle of all, the army.
And, of course, what nobody tells you, then or now, is that it won’t matter. Nobody has ever asked me what my results were at school or since. I have never had to say what class of degree I got or even where I was educated. Did anybody go to university on the unit? Nick apart, I have no idea. But what examinations did procure was time. The vague promissory capabilities of A levels and degrees count for very little except that they give you a bre
athing space. Life can be put off.
19 August. Sacha Dhawan has been auditioning for one of the films being made about 9/11. He does the speech he’s been given very well only then the director says, ‘Now do it in Arabic.’ Sacha is English, born and bred in Manchester, and can no more speak Arabic than he can Serbo-Croat. He points this out whereupon an Arab speaker is procured whom Sacha is supposed to imitate. He does his best but ends up just making Arabic-type noises at which the director professes himself well satisfied. Luvvies nothing: actors are both saints and heroes.
22 August. When I ask myself why the filming has been so easy and good-tempered I think, well that’s how the whole play has been, right from the start. This is partly thanks to Nick H.’s temperament (or lack of it) and also to the fact that we get on well.
A film, though, is different. Schedules these days are horrendously tight, with an enormous amount crammed into each day. So that even when, as with us, lighting is kept to a minimum we’re always working against the clock.
That nobody feels this particularly or gets obviously ratty is, I suspect, more down to the cameraman, Andrew Dunn, than one realises. He’s quiet, shy and self-effacing and looks like a kindlier Wittgenstein. Good temper starts with him and spreads through the crew. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on an easier, more relaxed film than this … and obviously there are other factors (the cast knowing the play so well, for a start) … but Andrew is at the centre of it.
24 August. Fountains Abbey. Been here before, I keep thinking, though not just about Fountains which I’ve known all my life. No, it’s the filming that is the same. I first filmed here in 1972 with Stephen Frears when we were making A Day Out. Today we set up camp with our rugs and chairs on the same spot and at one point we are waiting for the sun for a shot identical with one we framed all of thirty years ago.
Keeping On Keeping On Page 42
