‘A comedian’s worst fear is being laughed at,’ he told me when were filming the Channel 4 comedy drama Coming Soon in Glasgow in1998.
‘Laughed at?’ I asked.
‘Yes, we all love being laughed with, but no one wants to be laughed at, and certainly not the comedian. He or she creates comedy to control the laughter at them, and turns it into being laughed with.’
His words resonated with me that day in Glasgow as they do now. Sometimes I read comments about myself complaining that my effeminacy is an act. It isn’t. I’m really camp, and I always have been. Hence the title of this book. Effeminacy is one of the characteristics of camp. The writer Susan Sontag sought to define it in her 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’. According to her, other characteristics of camp include theatricality and humour. ‘Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment,’ she wrote.
As a child, when you first enter the environment of a school or Scout group, there is pressure to conform to the behaviour of the other boys – what is considered ‘normal’. In an all-male environment especially, being effeminate marks you out for ridicule. When I played Wonder Woman in the playground it wasn’t for effect; I really loved the TV series and wanted to be her. When I realized that the other boys were laughing at me for this, instead of shying away from it I embraced it so I could be in on the joke.
That’s what I did at the army camp (!) that day in 1985, and that’s what I do on television programmes today.
If the other boys were going to call me Daphne, I was going to be the campest cadet of all time. I started wearing my beret at a jaunty angle, swinging my arm wildly as we marched, saluting with an extravagant wobble of my arm. It was a necessary technique for survival. However, on the Sunday afternoon the attempted humiliation reached its apotheosis as a few hundred cadets were gathered in a semicircle on a hill.
‘Right, Daphne,’ said one of the older boys who was playing at being an officer, ‘you have to get up now and tell us all about your sexual experiences!’
The boys all laughed in anticipation of seeing Daphne demeaned a little further. I rose to my feet and faced the toy soldiers.
‘My first sexual experience may surprise you actually. It wasn’t with a woman. Or a man …’
There were jeers of disbelief from the audience, but I didn’t feel this was the time to tell them about me holding another boy’s willy at Cub camp. ‘No, my first sexual experience was actually with a peanut!’
It wasn’t that funny, but they laughed nonetheless and I was told I could sit down. I had survived.
When reading a play out loud in our all-boy English class in the fifth form, I didn’t mind taking the female role. As my teacher Mr Bruce noted in my school report for February 1987, ‘His class portrayal of Lady Macbeth will never be forgotten!’
That same year there was a general election in the UK which gave Margaret Thatcher her third inexorable victory. The headmaster had the bright idea that Reigate Grammar School should have an election too, and debate the political issues of the day. Anyone could enter and represent any political party, just like in a real general election. Most participants wanted to represent the Conservatives; in our school Labour would not have stood a chance. I decided I would stand as a candidate for the ‘Navy Party’. My time in the CCF must have made me realize there was a rich vein of comedy there. So I registered myself as a candidate, and began campaigning. My policies were as follows:
The wearing of flares to be compulsory at all times.
The school hymn ‘To Be a Pilgrim’ to be replaced by the Village People’s hit song ‘In The Navy’.
All teachers to salute when passing each other in the corridor and say, ‘Hello, sailor.’
The list went on. All the candidates would have a few minutes to speak in assembly. The boy representing the Conservatives (think of that clip of William Hague addressing the Tory Party Conference as a teenager) took a deep and quite reasonable dislike to me.
‘And for Williams to denigrate this election with his so-called Navy Party …’
I took this as a cue to stand on my chair and wave to the boys behind me. The anarchy elicited a huge cheer.
‘It’s pathetic, the Navy Party …’
I was back on my chair. Another huge cheer.
‘That you might waste your vote on the Navy Party …’
Chair. Cheer. However, this was the last time as a teacher ejected me for being disruptive. I was taken outside, but having been in plays I knew the secret door that led to the stage.
‘He is making a mockery of this election …’ continued the young Tory.
At that point I burst through the curtain to wild applause.
I was banned from campaigning for a week.
A poll put me in the lead but my campery peaked too soon. An older boy with long hair who campaigned for the Psychedelic Lentil Alliance (presumably inspired by Neil the hippy in the wildly popular sitcom The Young Ones) ultimately came first, and I was a close second. The Conservatives came last. The winner unrolled a poster with the slogan TAKE THE LENTIL PSYCHEDELIC DECISION, highlighting the TAKE, the L, the S and the D.
That was surely not what the headmaster had envisaged when he let us boys have our own election …
7
The White Rabbit
Mr Louis was the flamboyant classics master of Reigate Grammar School. He was also the self-appointed director of all the school plays. He rushed around the school like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.
‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!’
He had long grey hair and wore light-coloured suits with paisley shirts and matching ties. If he saw a piece of litter in the playground he would order the nearest boy to pick it up. He had an interesting repertoire of plays, from Russian playwright Ivan Turgenev (Mr Louis’s production of A Month in the Country was popularly renamed a A Month in the Concert Hall due to its phenomenal length) to Roman ‘comedy’ by Plautus.
He cast me first as an illiterate servant in Romeo and Juliet. I only had a few lines, which were spoken to the audience:
I am sent to find those persons whose names are here writ, and can never find what names the writing
person hath here writ. I must to the learned. In good time.
It wasn’t much, but pretending to be thick always guarantees a titter or two. My parents had recently taken me to see Frankie Howerd in a revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1986. They took me to the theatre lots, which I remain thankful for, and my mum and I still go and see everything in London together. Frankie had yet to make his appearances on The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross or The Word and was not fashionable again, so was revisiting the role that he had such success with during the 1960s. I had seen him in his two Carry On films and some old episodes of Up Pompeii!, but live I was utterly enthralled. Frankie Howerd had funny bones. There was something absurd about him, as if he had no choice but to be a comedian – people would have laughed anyway. As soon as he came on stage in his Roman outfit and the most unconvincing toupee the world had ever seen, he had us all in the palm of his hand.
As a nation we have always preferred our comedians – Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe, Dawn French, Alan Carr – to invite laughter at their own absurdity rather than to say funny lines and provoke laughter at others. I was laughing as much as anyone else in the audience, but I was studying Frankie too. That night in Chichester he effortlessly shifted from being in a scene to talking to the audience. That was something I needed to do in my pivotal role as First Servant in Romeo and Juliet, so I turned my performance into a little impression of him. I shamelessly stole his withering looks to the audience and his ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ too. Every time I stand in front of an audience now I feel like I am channelling a little bit of Frankie.
A few years later I would wait outside the stage door a
t the Secombe Centre in Sutton to get his autograph, which he graciously gave me though I was too in awe to speak to him. A younger man with glasses led Frankie away, and they drove off in an old Jaguar. In 2008 I would play Frankie Howerd in a BBC drama about his tormented private life entitled Rather You Than Me. I travelled to his house in Waverly Down in Somerset, to speak to his life-long partner Dennis (who drove the Jag that night), now almost totally blind, to understand Frankie better.
‘He cried when he came,’ Dennis told me, which made me sad that someone could have that much self-loathing. Impressed by my knowledge and enthusiasm for his former lover (I even quoted some of Frankie’s lines from the relatively obscure film The House in Nightmare Park), Dennis gave me his blessing. By the end of the day at Waverly Down I was even cajoled into trying on the great comedian’s toupee. It was as if a circle that had taken twenty years to draw had been completed.
First Servant in Romeo and Juliet wasn’t the greatest part, but it was better than Second Servant and felt like another breakthrough for me.
Mr Louis was an incredibly prescriptive director. The process was not important; all that mattered was that the play would not be a disaster at the end of it. RGS was an achingly lower middle class school with aspirations of being upper middle class, so appearances were everything. Mr Louis would make you write down all your moves on your script before you had even stood up and rehearsed anything.
‘Williams, you move from stage right to centre stage to say your line and then exit back stage right.’
Mr Louis was a big player in his local amateur dramatics group and was not averse to getting up on the stage and performing the line exactly how he wanted it done. He also had very old-fashioned ideas about stage make-up. He would draw thick black lines on your forehead if you were playing anyone older than your actual age, which meant most characters in a school of eleven- to eighteen-year-olds performing Shakespeare, Molière and Turgenev.
I met my best friend Robin Dashwood through performing plays together, as we never shared a classroom. I had a few friends before Robin, but he was my first real kindred spirit. The previous friendships felt like affairs, this was marriage. Short, blond and well spoken, Robin is also fiercely intelligent. We have been friends for nearly thirty years, and although we have disagreed with each other, Robin and I have never ever had an argument.
Robin had sophisticated tastes. While all our contemporaries were getting drunk on snakebite down the local pubs, we would take walks in the park and then go for dinner. Instead of watching Swedish Erotica, a series of pornographic films that made the rounds of our school, we would watch the entire series of Brideshead Revisited on video.
One Sunday afternoon Robin and I went to Hampton Court Palace. In the blazing sunshine we saw a woman in the distance dressed in the style of a character from a 1940s film noir. In a wide-brimmed black hat complete with veil, floor-length black dress and high heels, she had the appearance of a woman whose husband had just been found dead, and in her widow’s dress was knocking on the door of private detective Sam Spade. Naturally Robin and I were intrigued.
‘Let’s walk over and get a closer look,’ I suggested excitedly. So as subtly as we could, we moved closer and closer to this mysterious lone figure. When we were near enough we both realized that the hands were large, there was an Adam’s apple and more than a hint of stubble. The figure fixed us with a withering look and flounced off behind a hedge. It was distinctly un-PC of us, but as soon as ‘she’ was far enough away, we burst out laughing. This vision stayed with me and ultimately gave birth to the Little Britain character Emily Howard. It was that ‘she’ was dressed in a style of women’s clothing not seen for forty years that stayed with me the most – the gloves, the hat, the veil even! For Emily I made the clothing from a hundred years before. The vision at Hampton Court had definitely gone out wanting to be looked at by strangers – perhaps that was part of the pleasure – and again Emily Howard was an exhibitionist at heart.
Ten years after we left school we often reminisced about our misspent youth.
Monday 19/1/1998
I invited Robin over for dinner and we had a very relaxing low-key time, eating, talking and watching Dr Who: State of Decay. We talked of our life as teenagers, how we were in watching Bergerac when everyone else was out drinking, smoking and groping. ‘Being an outsider is very useful,’ I said. ‘If I had been doing all of those things everyone else had been doing I don’t think I would have been bothered to become a comedian …’
Robin was a much better actor than I was as a teenager, certainly a lot subtler. However, he never had that need to push his sibling off the pouffe to recite nonsense, like I did, and is now a very successful documentary director for the BBC. Together we did a number of Mr Louis’s old-fashioned productions, most strangely An Evening of Chinese Drama, in which Robin narrated a story of a fisherwoman (me) who lost all her fish.
I have a strong sense of the gifts of others, and instead of pushing them away as some competitive performers do, I am drawn to talented people. As we sat together on the school coach one morning I announced, ‘You are funny, I am funny; we should form a comedy double act together.’
‘A comedy act?’
‘Yes, we don’t have to have a funny man and a straight man. We could both be funny, like Les Dennis and Dustin Gee.’
Of all the double acts I could have mentioned who are both funny, Cook and Moore, the Two Ronnies, French and Saunders, Smith and Jones, I chose Les Dennis and Dustin Gee!
Our friendship has survived the test of time. He is still my best friend and, with Matt, Robin was the best man at my wedding.
For all his eccentricities, I am grateful to Mr Louis for something. He was one of the first grown-ups to spot some potential in me. Perhaps I wasn’t just an irritating show-off. Before I left for the summer holidays after my O levels he gave me a play to read before starting the sixth form. It was Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.
‘Williams, I want you to familiarize yourself with the lead role.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘And pick up that Wotsit packet.’
‘I didn’t drop it, sir.’
‘I don’t care. Pick it up!’
‘Yes, sir.’
So I picked up the Wotsit packet, and in between clearing tables at Chessington World of Adventures I spent the summer reading and rereading the play.
I was about to play my first lead role …
8
Kenny Everett on a Monorail
Monsieur Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme is one of those roles where a good comic actor can utilize all the skills he has to make the audience laugh. The play tells the story of a middle class man who tries to be aristocratic, with hilarious consequences. Well, I assume the consequences were hilarious when the play was written in 1670, but in 1987 they were still mildly amusing. We actually performed a translation by the comic actor Miles Malleson entitled The Prodigious Snob.
My duties at Chessington World of Adventures (where Matt and I would later film an episode of our ill-fated first television series Sir Bernard’s Stately Homes) involved clearing tables at the Courtyard Café while wearing a stripy red shirt and a straw boater. I was paid £2.50 an hour, but at least I could arrive early and go on the log flume.
One day Kenny Everett came to the park to review it for Gloria Hunniford’s talk show Sunday Sunday. Kenny was one of the most popular comedians of the 1980s and sadly died in 1995. The best way I can describe him is that he was somehow mainstream but also utterly alternative.
All any of us staff could talk about that day was the fact that Kenny Everett, although by 1987 just past his peak in popularity, was coming to Chessington World of Adventures. It was beyond exciting. What’s more, he was going to eat in the Courtyard Café! I might even be allowed to clear his table! Imagine wiping away a splurge of ketchup Kenny Everett had left! As it happened, an area of the Courtyard Café was sectioned off for Kenny and only the permanent staff were
allowed to serve him or wipe his table. Still I spied him from afar eating some chicken nuggets.
My shift ended and I was dejected. I had missed my big chance to meet one of my favourite comedians. With a heavy heart I returned to the staff block to take off my stripy shirt and straw boater and change into my slightly less embarrassing normal clothes. Suddenly one of the litter collectors rushed into the changing room with some amazing news …
‘Kenny Everett is on the monorail and he’s heading this way!’
We all ran out onto the balcony of the staff block, which was adjacent to the monorail. In the distance I could see a very bored-looking Kenny Everett and a few other people approaching in one of the monorail carriages. He was too far away to shout anything out yet. What would endear me to him most? I wondered. Shouting one of his catchphrases surely? ‘Sid Snot here!’ ‘All done in the best possible taste!’ or perhaps ‘Round ’em up! Put ’em in a field! And bomb the bastards!’ This last one felt too long, as the monorail would pass quickly.
There was a general mood among all us summer job teenagers that we should play it cool. This is Kenny Everett after all. He’s bound to say something wacky and zany to us and have us all in stitches for the rest of our lives.
The monorail carriage was getting closer and closer … Kenny Everett was passing right by the balcony … We all watched expectantly … He merely looked the other way.
We watched the back of his head disappear into the distance as Johnny Morris of Animal Magic fame wittered along wistfully on the audio commentary.
‘Hi Kenny!’ I shouted quietly as the monorail carriage turned a corner. He was now too far away to hear. We were crushed.
These days when people approach me for an autograph or photograph I always oblige them, but as with my experience with Kenny Everett, I think meeting any famous person will always be a huge disappointment.
Back at school rehearsals for the play began. However, it wasn’t until the first night of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme that I realized how funny it could be.
Camp David: The Autobiography Page 6
