Life and Laughing: My Story
Page 6
Next to the detector was a gentleman frisker who looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme in a muscle vest and tight white jeans. It seemed obvious that the queue would much rather be frisked than not. There was huge disappointment when there was no beep. I saw one man make his own beeping sound and then jump into the arms of the frisker. People were holding whatever metal they could get their hands on to guarantee the detector sounded. One guy wasn’t leaving anything to chance and had dressed as a knight.
The presence of Kenny and his television show dominated my early years. I visited the TV studio several times and watching the show was the highlight of the week. There would be various props, bits of wardrobe, posters and VHSs from the show knocking around our Hampstead flat. In among them were these postcards with an image of big red smiling sexy lips on them. I don’t remember what the reference was, perhaps something to do with Hot Gossip, the Arlene Phillips-choreographed dancers who appeared on the show. I was very familiar with these cards being used for scribbles around our home, shopping lists, phone messages, that kind of thing.
Here I am in my trademark suit with my mum and Kenny on her birthday.
After days of having a wobbly tooth, the landmark occasion of my first tooth falling out was approaching. Your teeth falling out is grim, it’s literally like a bad dream, but the carrot was, of course, the Tooth Fairy. When my tooth finally freed itself from my mouth, I was to leave it under my pillow, whereupon a fairy would, in effect, buy it from me. The going rate in 1982 was a pound. Strangely, I think it still is a pound. The Tooth Fairy has obviously never heard of inflation. In fact if milk tooth prices rose in line with, say, house prices, by 2007 the price would have reached £14 (although now it would have dropped to about £12.50). What I never understood about the Tooth Fairy is, what exactly is she doing with these teeth she’s collecting? She must have millions of children’s milk teeth. Sick. And where does she get the money from? I bet MI5 have a file on her.
Anyway, my tooth finally fell out and I placed it under my pillow. In the morning I was thrilled to find a crisp £1 note under my pillow and something else unexpected. The Tooth Fairy had also left a calling card. It was a card with a photo of a set of glistening perfect white teeth. I immediately recognized this card to be one of the many identical cards from The Kenny Everett Show that were scattered all over our flat. I was confused. Why would the Tooth Fairy have one? Could … my mum … be … the … Tooth Fairy? I ran into my mum’s bedroom. ‘Mum, are you the Tooth Fairy?’ I enquired.
‘Why would you say that, darling?’ she replied convincingly.
‘Because there was one of these cards under my pillow and even though it had an image of teeth, which one would associate with the Tooth Fairy, I know these are cards from Daddy’s show.’
It was at this point my mother cracked under surprisingly little pressure and gave up all her parenting secrets in one of the most shocking and devastating moments of my life. ‘You’ve got me, you worked it out,’ she confessed. ‘I am the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and Father Christmas, don’t tell your sister.’ Bang, bang, bang. Three in one go.
I can’t imagine that in the history of parenting a mother has ever delivered such damaging revelations in such quick succession. I may have been on to the Tooth Fairy, but not for a second had I doubted the authenticity of the Easter Bunny and certainly not Father Christmas. I was mute for three whole days. My parents and all parents for that matter are liars. Well, I wasn’t going to be part of their deceit, so I told my sister. Lucy said she already knew and was humouring our parents. Then she said, ‘Planes will strike towers in New York City.’ I didn’t realize at the time she was predicting the horrors of 9/11; I just thought, ‘She’s been watching The Towering Inferno again.’
Kenny’s merchandise may have shattered my childhood innocence, but Kenny the TV comic was going from strength to strength. He was tremendously talented and, as my mother fondly remembers, deeply funny all the time. But harnessing his talent for a half-hour television series still took some doing, and by all accounts it was my father who was mainly responsible. Barry Cryer remembers: ‘Ray was pretty much directing the show.’
Kenny’s co-star, Cleo Rocos, recalls, ‘Ray was the heartbeat of the show. Kenny wouldn’t be Kenny without him. He was the pioneer and driving force.’ Dad had become a major player in the comedy industry, unofficially writing, directing and producing one of the biggest shows on television, but officially he was just a co-writer. It was time to make a career move.
So my dad took a giant showbusiness leap. He made a film. The film was called Star Wars. If only. The film was called Bloodbath at the House of Death. He wrote, directed, produced, edited, appeared in and raised the finance for it, quite a step-up from television co-writer. If it came off, we’d be rich. The film starred Kenny Everett at the height of his powers, the legendary Vincent Price (‘Darkness falls across the land …’), Kenny’s TV sidekick Cleo Rocos and Billy Connolly’s wife, Pamela Stephenson.
Dad and the legendary actor Vincent Price on the set of Bloodbath at the House of Death. Known for his quirky unconventional directing style, my father insisted that his crew should be holding a polystyrene cup at all times.
Last week I met Billy Connolly, a hero of mine, at an awards ceremony. I was very nervous about introducing myself. I thought he may remember my father, as he appeared himself on The Kenny Everett Show and his missus starred in my dad’s movie, but not for a moment did I think he’d recognize me. I loitered near him while he was talking to the comedian Rob Brydon, and then he caught my eye. ‘Youu, it’s you!’ he hollered as only Billy Connolly can.
‘Hello, Billy Connolly,’ I said, more posh than usual (I always get posher when I’m nervous).
‘I was on the train last year,’ said The Big Yin, ‘and I saaw Time Out magazine. The headline was “King of Comedy”, big letters. And it was YOU. It was fuckin’ youu! King of Comedy? I’ve never fuckin’ heard of you. Who is this guy? I thought. I’m the King of Comedy. I spat out ma sandwich. I’m sittin’ there with bits of sandwich on my newspaper and in ma beard.’ Billy Connolly knew who I was because he didn’t know who I was. I was thrilled nevertheless.
Comedy legends Ronnie Corbett, Rob Brydon and Billy Connolly with ‘The King of Comedy’ himself.
We then had a photo taken, which consisted of, from left to right, Ronnie Corbett, Rob Brydon, myself and Billy Connolly. Referring to our heights, the photographer said, ‘Look, you’re getting bigger and bigger.’
To which I replied, ‘In talent.’ That’s another thing that happens when I’m nervous. I get a bit cheeky and arrogant.
‘Who said that? Who said that?’ cried Corbett.
‘The King of Comedy strikes again,’ sarcastically noted Connolly. We had a brief and nice chat, but I could sense he thought I was posh, cheeky and arrogant. He vaguely remembered my dad, but when I brought up Bloodbath at the House of Death, he simply said, ‘Pamela’s been in a lot of shit movies.’ I think that pretty much sums up how my dad’s film was received. For all the hope and hype, he may have bitten off more than he could chew.
The film was a horror spoof. The strap line was ‘The film it took a lot of guts to make’. I think that towards the end of filming the budget may have been a bit tight. The final scene of the film is an E.T. spoof: a spaceship departing and E.T. running through the woods. The spaceship leaves without him, and E.T. says, ‘Oh shit, not again!’
My reasoning for suggesting there may have been financial issues with the production is that the voice-over artist my dad hired to play E.T. was a six-year-old. Me. I had only recently been speaking in sentences that didn’t involve the words ‘Ma’, ‘Da’ and ‘Shums’, and here I was doing voice-overs. And swearing. I was a pretty cool six-year-old.
When people met me and asked, ‘Are you at school, little man?’ I would reply, ‘Yeah, but I’m mainly involved in the film industry. I do impressions, mainly extraterrestrial at the moment but I’m looking to diversify.’
My parents, however, were not getting on. I know they argued a great deal, but I only really remember one row in particular. It seemed so trivial. Lucy and I could hear the yelling from our respective flats and even as little people couldn’t understand why they would be arguing over such a thing. Grapefruit. My dad was livid over the fact that there was no grapefruit for breakfast. I suppose when two people reach a point when they can’t stand each other, they argue over everything. Although remembering the Florida Hilton coffee quarrel, maybe Dad was just very argumentative at breakfast-time. It got pretty heated – I think a La Sorpresa vase may have been smashed at some point. Looking back, the way Mum was shopping in Waitrose, Temple Fortune, it’s a wonder there was any food in the house at all, let alone grapefruit.
Parents try to protect their children, so I wasn’t fully aware of their problems. As a child, your parents are the two people you love most in the world. To hear them fighting is horribly confusing and upsetting. As I sat on the stairs listening to them arguing, I didn’t know that in just two school sports days’ time, I would have two dads in the fathers’ race (and still no Kenny Everett).
6
I am not superstitious in any way, I don’t believe in anything supernatural or paranormal. Fortune-tellers, mediums, psychics are all, in my opinion, nonsense. I’ve watched those ‘talking to the dead’ shows, and they just don’t make any sense to me. The medium calls out common letters, ‘I’m getting a G.’
Then several people in the audience start responding: ‘It’s Gary’, ‘It’s Gordon’, ‘It’s Grandma.’
If the medium could talk to the dead, why are the dead only giving him the first letter of their name? This is an amazing opportunity for the dead. They must have a lot to talk about, and some pretty major information like: what happens when you die? Is there a God? What’s the meaning of life? No, apparently they would rather play some kind of afterlife version of ‘Guess Who?’ Also, the letters the medium gets are always very common, to give himself the best chance of a response. You’ll never see one of these shows when the psychic says, ‘I’m getting an “X”’, to a silent audience.
Until a French widow stands up and says, ‘That must be Xavier!’
When my mother lived alone in Kensington Church Street, very soon after meeting my father at his auditions, she wandered into a psychic bookshop a few doors down from her. She’d walked past it almost every day, but today found herself browsing the occult. There were Tarot card readers in the back, and, with time to kill, she was enticed into a reading. She was young, impressionable and open-minded. Rather than a mystical woman in flowing robes leaning over a small candlelit table, her reader was a relatively normal-looking man. She turned the cards over, and the card reader was immediately shocked by what he saw. My mother was a little concerned by his reaction. ‘Is everything OK?’ she enquired.
‘Can you just wait there a second?’ Without waiting for a response, he left her sitting there alone. She started to panic, and by the time he returned had not only convinced herself she was dying, but had doodled a ‘Will’ on a receipt from her handbag.
The Tarot card reader had brought mystics who worked in the shop to view the cards. All four of them had similarly excitable reactions. ‘What is it?’ my mother asked.
Her original reader spoke: ‘You are pregnant.’
‘I’m not,’ insisted my mum. In actual fact, she was, but didn’t know it yet. Most people find out they’re pregnant from a missed period, a home pregnancy test or a big tummy. It’s rare to learn this from a Tarot card reader in the back of a psychic bookshop.
‘You will have a son,’ continued one of the other readers who had been summoned. ‘He will be world-famous, everybody will know his name, he will do wonderful things. He is special.’
The rest of her reading contained equally far-fetched information about her future. ‘You will have many children. You will live in an old house for five years, and then you and your husband will be separated by the seas and by death. That will be £6.50, please.’
My mother left the bookshop in a trance and went immediately to Boots the chemist just around the corner. It briefly crossed her mind that maybe the Tarot readers have a deal with Boots whereby they predict certain things that send people immediately to the chemist – ‘You are pregnant’, ‘You have a cold sore coming’, ‘Your hair will go grey’ – to boost sales of Clear Blue, Zovirax and Just For Men. My mum purchased the pregnancy test and rushed home. It was positive.
She was overcome with the romance of what had just occurred and clutched her stomach. She felt like the Virgin Mary. ‘I am carrying a special son,’ she thought to herself. If she gave birth to a baby girl, the whole thing would have been off. But I was born a boy (although slightly camp).
As more and more of the Tarot card reader’s predictions came true, my mother became convinced I was some special chosen child. It impacted a bit on my relationship with her when I was a child. Once at dinner I jokingly replaced my glass of water with a glass of Blue Nun, and she crossed herself, fell to the floor and started kissing my feet. At parent–teacher evenings when she was told that I wasn’t fulfilling my potential and that I was lazy, she wouldn’t really care, remembering Jesus was a carpenter until his thirties. As long as I was achieving in Woodwork, she wasn’t bothered about English and Maths. The Tarot card revelations certainly affected me. I was about five or six years old and was learning about the world around me. She had only recently delivered the Tooth Fairy/Easter Bunny/Father Christmas triple blow, when she told me I would grow up to be famous.
It gave me confidence when I was young. I felt that I had a magical secret and that I was special. My mother recently told me that she often thought of the mystical bookshop, which spookily closed down soon after her visit, and wondered as I grew up what path to fame I would take. When I became a successful comedian, I said to her, ‘I’m famous now, Mum, just like you said I would be. Are you proud?’
To which she said: ‘I was hoping you’d make some kind of medical breakthrough, a cure for a disease or something.’
It’s a shame the Tarot card reader couldn’t have been a bit more specific: ‘You are carrying a child, a son. He will become an observational comedian. I see great importance in the words “Man” and “Drawer’’.’
Whereas my mother is a believer, I am a sceptic. Every once in a while these psychics are going to get lucky. It’s statistics. Maybe the person who visited the bookshop immediately after my mother was also predicted fame and fortune and then got hit by a bus on Kensington High Street moments later. If I’m honest, I’d rather it wasn’t true anyway – I’m not a fan of destiny. What’s the point of living your life if it’s all mapped out ahead of you? And if these Tarot card readers were so accurate, why couldn’t they foresee their bookshop closing down? Anyway, if the Tarot reader’s prophecies were to come true, there was to be strife before my glittering future. If we were to ‘live in an old house for five years’, our time was nearly up, and the ‘separated by seas and death’ prediction was a bit of a worry.
It certainly didn’t seem like we were about to move from Hampstead. We were in the process of developing our three flats into one big house. I remember living with builders for some time. Our lives were dominated by workmen shouting, sledgeh
ammers smashing, skips loading, wheelbarrows wheeling and dust billowing. My sister, whose own oracle-like qualities seemed to be confined to the destruction of buildings, babbled constantly about walls and ceilings tumbling. The builders were fun and friendly, probably due to my mum. My mum was the type of lady at whom builders whistle. Builders’ whistles often fall on deaf ears, but now when they whistled, my mum would bring them tea. I remember one of them, Steve, inviting me to punch him in the stomach. This was wildly exciting for me. Steve was like a real live He-Man. ‘What? As hard as I can?’ I questioned, overestimating my own seven-year-old strength.
‘Sure,’ Steve confidently replied. So I swung with all my might and connected flush with Steve’s rock-like stomach. He didn’t even flinch. I couldn’t believe it. I hit him again, this time with a run-up, but he barely noticed. It was like living with the Incredible Hulk. My friends would come to my house just to punch him in the stomach.
One of my friends, Barnaby, accidentally punched the wrong builder in the stomach – ‘Oi! Fuck off, you little shit.’ Barnaby burst into tears and didn’t come round again.
The house itself soon started to take shape and began to be decorated. Because it was the mid-eighties, my mother settled upon a theme for her lovely new home. Hideous. An expression I heard a lot when growing up and, thankfully never again, was ‘rag-rolling’. ‘Rag-rolling’ is when you take a painted wall and ruin it. I can only imagine it was invented by mistake. Someone in the eighties must have leant on a wall without realizing it was newly painted and in the process not only invented ‘rag-rolling’, but also the equally tasteless paint splattered shirt which was all the rage at the time. What was wrong with people in the 1980s? I think the singer Sade was the only person who looked good.
My mother was looking less like Bananarama and more like Krystle Carrington every day. Her shoulder pads were so large she was once late picking me up from school because one of them wedged in the door of her new BMW 3-Series. The builders had to widen the doorways so she could get around her own home. She used every fad going to create what in the eighties was a dream home, but in hindsight was the stuff of nightmares. Looking back, I’d rather have lived in my father’s fictional ‘House of Death’. Loud bright colours were the order of the day. The out-of-bounds dark living room now had sky-blue rag-rolled walls and custard yellow carpets. Even though I was now allowed in, I banned myself from entering. The kitchen walls were Barbara Cartland pink with white stripes. Upstairs was worse. My mum employed more painting techniques of the era. There was a lot of ‘stencilling’ in the bedrooms and ‘marbling’ in the bathrooms. Marbling was painting made to look like marble. The results were criminal. A couple of the bedrooms were stencilled with swirls that were so disorientating it was difficult to keep your balance.