Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

‘MIND THE SIDES!’ shouted Mum. To herself.

  It was now 9.35 p.m.

  It’s around nine miles from South Croydon to Victoria. I have never known anyone drive it in less than fifty minutes. Ann Perkins had just twenty-five.

  ‘We’re never going to make it. Everything’s ruined,’ I whined.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘I’m concentrating.’ We sat in silence. I imagined her dinner guests trying to make the best of their uncooked prawns and unfilled meringue nests and felt bad.

  ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  She gritted her teeth, the walnut of muscle in her cheek hardening. Ann was ready for business. She was heading for Victoria come what may. My heart was in my mouth as we sped through the leafy paradise of Thornton Heath and along the boulevards of Brixton.

  Meanwhile, Mel had arrived on the bus station concourse and was waiting for me, oblivious to the drama taking place just a few miles south. She was loading her bin liner of props onto the coach when she heard the tannoy announcement.

  You’ve never known true pain until you’ve heard a disincentivized transportation worker try to pronounce a Polish surname (before Poles were familiar visitors to our shores) over a public address system late at night. It was like someone firing vowels at a wall.

  ‘Will Mel …

  [Her eyes taking it in] ‘Will Mel …

  [Plucking up courage] ‘Mel Gee …

  [Finally going for it] ‘Will Mel Gee-eye-ay-ee-dee-roo-ooo-eeck come to the information desk immediately.’

  [Pretty cocky now] ‘That’s Miss Mel Gee-ee-der-ee-ooky-ck to the information desk.’

  Finally, deducing that the only person on the concourse with a name even close to that being mangled was her, Mel approached the desk. The woman dutifully passed her a piece of paper with my succinct message on it. It read simply, ‘HOLD THE COACH, Perks x’.

  Back in south London, Mum was haring up the A23 in a trance state. It was as if fifty years of compliant behaviour was bubbling up inside her. Here was a woman whose entire life had consisted of behaving well, doing the right thing, doing what everyone else wanted. Here was a woman who could not and would not take it any more. Screw you, authority! This is the real me. I’ve gone rogue! I swear she ran a red light or two. She screeched into the coach station in what may or may not have been a handbrake turn. I kissed her on the cheek and flew out of the passenger door.

  10.03 p.m.

  Mel, meanwhile, was putting on one hell of a show, demonstrating pretty much all of the reasons she had been rejected from every drama school in Britain. She had assumed a starfish position in the doorway of the coach, effectively blocking it open, and was pretending to cry. The driver meanwhile was trying to close the pneumatic doors and get under way. I skidded across the concourse floor, heart in my mouth and yelled as I saw her. With that, I hurled myself, a squeaky chicken, Britt Ekland’s hair and a load of miscellaneous junk into the bus, and the doors hissed shut behind us.

  The coach was due to arrive at Edinburgh Waverley at 6 a.m. after an all-night potter up the M1. It transpired we were the only non-French-speaking people on the bus. Just Mel, myself and fifty-eight extremely shouty students from Paris. Our seats were in the shadow of the medicated toilet, which was continually in use – meaning that every time we tried to drift off, we’d be woken by a gust of something distinctly evocative of the second arrondissement.

  Eight nostril-challenging hours later, we arrived.

  There can be few less romantic starting points for any relationship than St Andrew’s Square bus depot in Edinburgh, yet it was there I first fell in love with Scotland. Since then I’ve slept on the warm beaches of Arran in November, I’ve underwhelmed audiences from Cumbernauld to Aberdeen and back again, I’ve cried at the immaculate stillness of loch and mountain in Torridon, and I’ve tried skiing in Aviemore and lived to tell the tale. Scotland has been the crucible for my double act, the site of myriad memorable holidays and the settling point for my wanderlust brother, who married a girl from Perth and together created my brilliant wee nieces.

  But it was the festival that started it all. I’ve spent every August since the age of fourteen at the foot of Edinburgh Castle, marching up and down the cobbles of the Royal Mile at festival time dressed as a milkmaid or bunny rabbit or zombie to advertise my latest hare-brained dramatic endeavour. It began when the Children’s Music Theatre came to Croydon auditioning for their touring show. I managed to get a bit part and headed north for the summer with my oldest mate Gemma, who’d also bagged a role. It was the first time I’d been away from my parents. They saw it as a great artistic opportunity for their daughter; I saw it as a magical teenage sex workshop.

  I went to the festival during my time at college too, taking part in execrable feminist reworkings and pretentious new writing. But it was that first show I did with Mel that truly sealed the city in my heart. The drunken ramblings on the cobbles of the Pleasance Courtyard. The late-night spicy haggis on the London Road. The thrill of seeing my peers Lee and Herring, Armstrong and Miller, the impeccable League of Gentlemen. My tribe, my new-found family. We lived on nothing but cold hot dogs and warm beer and the kindness of strangers chancing their hard-earned cash on our unique brand of utter silly. It’s perhaps the closest I’ve ever been to truly, completely happy.

  Our debut show at the Fringe, as I’ve already mentioned, was called The Naked Brunch – a little bit like a sketch show, a lot like being cornered by a couple of inmates from a psychiatric facility.

  We got off the coach with everything we thought we needed: bags and bags of props, interminable voice-overs lovingly recorded to DAT, play-in music, costumes and publicity posters. What we didn’t have, it turned out, was an end to the show. Somewhere along the line, due to laziness, forgetfulness or simple shame, we’d just not bothered to finish writing the thing.

  The room we’d been assigned was a hot black sweat box on the top floor of the C Venue on Princess Street. It looked like somewhere you’d conduct an extraordinary rendition rather than pay to watch comedy. The heat was so extreme that later in the run, after numerous complaints, an enormous silver coil was put through the door to vent the steam and sweat. If it was hot at

  10.05 a.m.

  then I dread to think of the ambient temperature at 4 p.m. when the experimental troupe from Godalming began performing their production of Equus.

  We treated the first show as a dress rehearsal. We hadn’t meant to. It was just that no one turned up – and after all surely a performance is only a performance if there is someone there to watch it. Without that, it’s just a thought experiment – or at best two nutters in a room shouting at each other in regional accents.

  The second show was different. This time we had an audience, although ‘audience’ is a slightly grandiose term for a single person. This person came into the room wearing a large rucksack. Rather unusually, she didn’t take it off as she sat down, and so sat perched forward at a forty-five-degree angle for the entirety of the show. At points during the performance she would take out a large street map of Edinburgh, which she would unfold and unfold and unfold until it covered almost her entire top half. Then, after examining it, she would fold and fold and fold it back into a neat concertina. At several points during the show I wondered if she’d perhaps mistaken the venue for Edinburgh Castle and found herself somewhat disappointed by the dimensions of the rooms.

  The initial idea behind The Naked Brunch was to showcase sketch characters within an overriding narrative. This ended up being a rather shoddy conceit involving them all being trapped inside a computer game. The result was that it was meta without in any way being good. The character
s included paramilitary Brown Owls, some Dutch VJs, a pair of US East Coast post-feminists and a couple of lovelorn Aussie PE teachers, who expressed their desire for one another exclusively through the medium of sport. That’s one hell of a computer game, right there.

  The problem was, the more we wrote, the bigger and more bizarre our characters became. And the bigger they became, the more constrictive and less credible the framework around them seemed. But, rather than ditching the whole thing and just delivering a simple sketch show, we persisted with the computer game theme, which petered out as the hour wore on. By the final sketch none of it, and I mean NONE OF IT, made any sense. So we did what so many young writers do when something isn’t working. Nothing. We just left it and hoped the problem would go away all by itself.

  It didn’t.

  Because there was no show-stopper ending, for some reason that has mercifully faded with time, we decided to end with our backs to the audience (singular) shining a torch on a croissant. Yep, shining a torch on a croissant. No dance numbers for us – no recapping, no show tunes – just a greasy baked semicircle caught in the thin beam of a cheap torch bought from Ali’s Cave on the Lothian Road.

  Don’t ask me why. Even twenty-one years on. Don’t ask me why.

  When the show finally ground to a halt, the voice-over stopped and silence again prevailed, we burst through the fourth wall to have a chat with our lone punter.

  Us:

  Hi!

  Her:

  [American] Hi! [Folding up her map again]

  Me:

  We’re really sorry about that.

  Her:

  About what?

  Mel:

  The accent.

  Her:

  What accent?

  Me:

  The American accent … the American post-feminists.

  Her:

  Oh. Really? American?

  Mel:

  Yes. We’re sorry.

  Her:

  They were Americans?

  Me:

  Yes.

  Her:

  Oh. Oh, I didn’t notice.

  The run lasted for another three weeks.

  Mel and I have been responsible for some truly disastrous performances over the years. Too many to mention. But let me give you my top four.

  1. STOCKTON

  In 1994/5 we embarked on a tour of small arts centres. If there was a tiny, dilapidated, endangered cultural space in the UK, we’d find it and half-fill it. One such space was in Stockton-on-Tees. Our manager, Ted, a fabulous pint-sized dynamo in double-denim, booked us in for a gig starting at 8 p.m. ‘It’ll be great,’ he said. ‘There’s a do in there first and then a disco after, so there’ll be a guaranteed crowd. It’s all part of a package. It’s going to be amazing. Amazing!’

  When we arrived, bags of props in hand, we became aware of a group of women in the theatre, sat on chairs in a semicircle. There seemed to be an awful lot of crying and hugging.

  Me:

  [nervously] What kind of ‘do’ is this?

  Ted:

  Well … it’s not so much a do … [Suddenly sounding evasive]

  Mel:

  Why is everyone sobbing?

  Ted:

  Well, the thing is …

  Now I know we’re in trouble – no sentence ends well that begins with ‘The thing is …’

  Ted:

  The thing is, it’s not so much a ‘do’ as a support group.

  Me:

  What do you mean ‘support group’? What support group?

  And then the truth emerged. We’d been booked to do our comedy show after a workshop for battered women organised by the charity Zero Tolerance. The audience was a mix of abused women and repentant, teary men. It couldn’t get any worse.

  It did.

  Because after the support group, and just before we were due onstage, the organizers decided to put on a film. This hard-hitting documentary charted the emotional journeys of both perpetrators and victims of domestic abuse, and was punctuated by deep sobs emanating from the audience.

  After a truly devastating thirty minutes, and just as a close-up of a bruised and swollen face faded into black, our cheesy 70s intro music began. As awkward emotional gear changes go, it was right up there with Phil and Holly on This Morning going from Syria to Towie and back again.

  Mel:

  Shit! That’s us!

  Me:

  [shouting to make myself heard over the keening] Oh God …

  And on we went, into the darkness. I never knew that bewilderment had a sound until that very moment. Now I know that it does.

  After we finished the show (an hour-long affair that, it transpired, ran at only forty-three minutes without laughs) the disco began. No sooner had the smattering of applause died away than Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ kicked in, and the crying started again.

  I ended up slow-dancing with a sixty-year-old woman from Macclesfield; Mel was locked into a deep sway with a former offender, and Ted, well Ted had been grabbed by a rather substantial woman and was now being rocked from side to side, his head trapped between her space-hopper breasts. We left him there, gently asphyxiating, as penance. He needed to know that when it came to being mis-sold a gig, we had zero tolerance.

  2. CAMBRIDGE

  Billed as a glorious homecoming by nobody except us, we returned to our old stomping ground, gigging at the Cambridge University Playhouse as part of our tour in the autumn of 1995. In true Mel/Sue fashion, we had failed to book a lighting and sound operator for the show, hoping that local techie stalwart Liam would be available. I loved Liam – he was the stuff of legend. He was fuelled by two things: prawn cocktail crisps and an abject hatred of all performers. He also had the largest set of keys in East Anglia, which he hung from his belt, giving him his trademark limp. Liam huffed and eye-rolled his way through every piss-poor production I ever did at that theatre – and there were an awful lot of piss-poor productions – yet for some unknown reason he simply wasn’t available when we came back that autumn.

  At that time my brother was working as a manager of a foreign language school near Cambridge. The night before the gig he came over to visit, which set Mel thinking.

  Mel:

  Maybe David could do the lights?

  Me:

  David? What, my brother, David?

  Mel:

  Yes. Why not?

  Me:

  Have you actually met him?

  Mel:

  Well of course I have …

  Me:

  Then why are you even asking? He is the only person on the planet who is as technologically illiterate as I am.

  Mel:

  He’ll be fine. Plus I’ve always had a slight crush on him.

  Me:

  He won’t be fine. He’s mildly dyspraxic and easily distracted, with a healthy dose of ‘couldn’t give a shit’ thrown in for good measure.

  Mel:

  I think it’ll b
e hilarious. He doesn’t even have to do much. Come on. It’ll be fun!

  The next night, the night of the performance, we received word from the front-of-house manager that the audience was seated and we were ready to go. Normally, when you get clearance, you make your way to the wings and get on with things as soon as possible, but our double act is a little different. It is exactly at that point, on the cusp of starting a show, that Mel’s bowels swing into action.

  Mel’s GI tract is a source of wonderment to all those who know and love her. Or have sat on a bus near her. Or been in a room with her. Or a room after her. There is not one single event, emotion or situation that Mel’s digestive system can’t translate into instant and devastating flatus. And so, for decades, in those precious seconds before a performance – where you’d normally be riding the adrenalin rush, pacing, going through lines and focusing – I have had to endure the sights, sounds and aromas of Mel’s malevolent wind. Or worse.

  At the Edinburgh Festival of 1998 we took part in a gang show called The Big Squeeze with the brilliant Geraldine McNulty and our mega-mucker Emma Kennedy. Straight after our slot a friend, Penny, was performing her one-woman show at the venue. It was getting near the end of the run and we felt it was the comradely thing to do to stay on afterwards to cheer her on. As we were called backstage for our opening sketch, Mel, as always, heard the distant call of nature.

  Mel:

  [whispering] I need a wee …

  Me:

  Well why didn’t you go thirty seconds ago? You remember thirty seconds ago? When we were downstairs? Next to a toilet.