Camp David

by David Walliams

  To fill in the month before university started, I took a job as a kitchen porter at the Thorndike Theatre in Leatherhead. Being a kitchen porter, you do the washing-up, peel the potatoes, mop the floor – all the worst jobs. Of course this wasn’t any old job as a kitchen porter; it was at a theatre, and I thought somehow I was closer to being an actor by peeling potatoes within spitting distance of a stage. A show celebrating the music hall which starred Ruth Madoc played at the Thorndike for a week. Ruth had just had a huge success playing Gladys Pugh, the love-struck chief yellowcoat in the 1950s holiday camp sitcom Hi-de-Hi! I loved the series and knew Ruth Madoc was eating in the restaurant with the rest of the cast between the matinee and evening performance. We all did – the chef had been preparing for her arrival all day. He cooked appalling roast beef with even more appalling Yorkshire pudding, and I carried the potatoes out.

  There, in Victorian dress was TV’s Ruth Madoc, spooning some peas onto her plate. The chef could see me loitering and barked, ‘Get back in the kitchen now and mop the floor!’ However, for a few brief wondrous moments I saw Ruth Madoc spoon some overcooked vegetables onto her plate.

  In 2004 Matt and I asked her to play Daffyd’s mother in a couple of Little Britain sketches. The first of these, for which I had the idea that Daffyd should come out to his spectacularly unsurprised parents, remains one of the best sketches we ever recorded, and Ruth’s performance stole the show. The studio audience was so pleased to see her the night of the recording and clapped and cheered her, but no one was more pleased than me. Her performance in Hi-de-Hi! was beyond brilliant, and I was delighted that she was back on BBC1 making people laugh. Ruth had some outrageously rude lines in the sketch.

  ‘Auntie Sioned stays in on a Sunday and eats minge.’

  ‘I know who’s mad for cock … Gay Aled!’

  Like a naughty schoolboy, I would say in interviews while promoting series two of Little Britain that Matt and I had ‘put cock in Ruth Madoc’s mouth’.

  13

  The Bongos

  In September 1989 the family Vauxhall Cavalier was loaded up with my books, my clothes and some old pots and pans for the long drive to Bristol. A letter informed me I was not going to live in a hall of residence but a student house, and had to share a room with a total stranger. When we arrived, my mum tried to hide her shock at how squalid the house was. The kitchen walls were thick with grease; the bath looked like someone had died in it, and the bedroom was more like a prison cell.

  When my belongings had been unpacked, and it was time to say goodbye, my mum began to sob.

  ‘I don’t want to leave you here,’ she said.

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ said my dad, attempting to lead her out of the room. ‘He’s just got to get on with it.’

  ‘I’ll be all right, Mum. I promise.’

  ‘Will you call me tonight?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a payphone at the bottom of the stairs after all. I sat on the hard bed and watched as my dad took her out. The sprung door slammed shut and I listened as her sobs echoed through the corridor.

  After a few hours my room-mate arrived and took an instant dislike to me. He would rearrange the furniture to his advantage when I was out, played hip-hop music really loud when I was writing an essay and refused to put any money in the heater.

  At 9 a.m. the next day the new students had to report to the Drama Department. Even though I have an exhibitionist streak, I can be painfully shy – the exhibitionism masks the shyness – so I listened as others made jokes, in particular Jason Bradbury, who immediately made his presence felt (he would later find fame as a presenter on Channel 5’s The Gadget Show).

  I’m not the funny one any more, I noted to myself. Jason was not just funny, but confident and cool. He even played the bongos. I had lived such a conservative life I don’t think I had ever even seen bongos, and certainly couldn’t imagine striking them. Jason passed around a photograph of his pretty girlfriend, who had a quirky name, Twoo, and everyone felt compelled to comment on how attractive she was.

  Finally someone in charge appeared, his name was Martin White. (He is the Martin that Linda the un-PC university secretary in series two and three of Little Britain calls when she is confronted by a dwarf she describes as an oompah loompa.) Martin was tall and thin and dressed quite unlike a teacher, sporting jeans and a corduroy jacket. Of course we didn’t have teachers any more; we had lecturers. He led us into the department’s studio theatre, and he led us into some embarrassing bonding exercises, such as rolling around on top of each other. My biggest fear was an unwanted erection. There was after all an extremely pretty girl from Liverpool in our group, Katy Carmichael. Fortunately I did not have to roll on her.

  Thankfully the rolling-on-top-of-each-other business would never feature again in our three years of studies. The degree was mostly an academic course in theatre, film and television. We would study such diverse work as:

  cubist cartoons

  ‘Crocodile’ Dundee

  performance art

  medieval theatre

  Bertolt Brecht

  futurist* cabaret

  Michel Foucault

  Jacobean tragedies

  Anton Chekhov

  the avant-garde

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  vagina dentata (this is as crazy as it sounds)

  It was for the most part a pretentious course, even ‘Crocodile’ Dundee was deemed somehow not a straightforward fish-out-of-water comedy but actually a postmodern take on cultural identity. Alien was concerned with the ‘monstrous feminine’. One night I watched the film with my fellow student and friend Myfanwy Moore or Myf (pronounced ‘Miff’ though Jason liked to call her ‘Muff’)* so we could make notes for our essays.

  Myf and I sat on the sofa together and loaded a VHS of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece into the video player. The film started, and we watched as the camera tracked along the corridors of a spaceship. A door opened automatically. Even though the film had been playing for less than a minute, out of the corner of my eye I saw that Myf had already written something on her pad. What has she seen that I’ve missed? I thought. I peered over and she had written one word.

  Hymen.

  Hymen? That’s how brainwashed we had become. A door didn’t represent a door any more, it represented part of a woman’s vulva. Years later I had dinner with Sir Ridley Scott when we both happened to be on holiday in the Turks and Caicos Islands and I told him the story. He laughed uproariously. Everything on the course would be intellectualized into oblivion.

  One lecturer, Alison Butler, even asserted that Star Wars reflected the confusion of President Carter’s America after the Vietnam War as to who was good and who was bad. ‘Look at the storm troopers – they’re wearing white – and the rebels are wearing grey. George Lucas has swapped the colours to point up this confusion.’

  But Darth Vader is dressed all in black with a cape, wearing a mask that looks like a bloody terrifying skull so I think we know who the baddies are! I wished I had said.

  What’s worse, even though I am left wing and always have been, the department was so far to the left it was on the verge of being a totalitarian state. Any comment that in any way could be construed as sexist, racist or homophobic meant instant social banishment. This is where the idea for the Linda sketches from Little Britain came from.

  ‘Hello, Martin, it’s Linda …’

  Once a student was trying to identify a girl in her year who happened to have one arm. So scared to mention her most obvious distinguishing feature, she described everything else about her … ‘Shoulder-length brown hair, medium height, brown eyes.’ The other person was bemused as to who this girl might be, not thinking it could possibly be the girl with one arm or the student would have mentioned that! Similarly the only black male on the course was described as having ‘curly black hair’.

  Of course in Little Britain Linda finishes by insulting those students she is describing: ‘the big fat lesb
ian’, ‘the ching-chong Chinaman’, ‘fatty boom-boom’.

  I knew Jason and I would become friends when we were sitting together in the cinema watching a series of cubist cartoons. These consisted of black and white squares moving around the screen getting smaller and larger.

  ‘This is so sexist,’ I said, and he laughed.

  A few moments passed.

  ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler?’ sang Jason – the cartoons made you think of that giant arrow on the Dad’s Army title sequence. And I laughed.

  Soon we would form a comedy double act.

  Jason was a divisive figure in the department. He would upset people with his jokes. For example he said to a fat girl called Fatima on the course, ‘Wow! You’re fat and your name’s Fatima!’

  We had all thought it, but Jason said it.

  Another outsider of a different sort was Sarah Kane. She went on to write a series of brilliant but bleak plays and become one of the most celebrated playwrights in the world. Back then she asked us all to call her Wildhorse.

  ‘That’s my Sioux name,’ she would say.

  Myf, Sarah and I did our performance studies course together. Sarah, being a hugely sensitive soul, was very kind and gentle with me. And I latched on to her. One night I turned up at Goldney Hall, where she lived, to see her. Both of us carried sadness. I couldn’t express mine. Sarah was just starting to express hers with the stunning short plays she would write and perform at lunchtimes. That night I held her and didn’t want to leave, and she let me stay the night. During the following morning’s class she smiled at me, and I felt slightly better as I was worried I had done something wrong. We never mentioned my visit again. Nothing happened. We just stared at each other a lot into the early hours, silently trying to communicate something. I found out later that I had freaked Sarah out a bit, and the story had gone round he department. Getting worse every time, I imagine.

  In 1995 I was delighted to see the world premiere of Sarah’s play Blasted at the Royal Court Theatre in London. However, four years later I read on the front page of the Guardian that she had checked into London King’s College Hospital suffering from depression, and hanged herself with her shoelaces.

  In my first year at Bristol I auditioned for and was cast in the plum comic role of Bottom in the Drama Department’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This gave me confidence that the success I had had at school was not a fluke. In this much more competitive environment I was deemed talented enough to play the funniest role in Shakespeare’s least unfunny play. Dominik Diamond, who would later go on to present GamesMaster on Channel 4, played one of the lovers, Lysander. In the dressing room after the performance he would say loud enough so I could hear, ‘What I would do with a part like Bottom …’

  I realized I had very strong competition when I went to the first studiospace party at the end of term. This was an evening held in the studio space (wanky term for theatre) when all the students were allowed to get up and perform something if they wanted to without any interference from the lecturers. Simon Pegg took to the stage. He was in the year above and already had a comedy act that was original, charming and most of all funny. Simon would read poems to a carrot in a fishbowl he would claim was his pet goldfish, called Rover, and talk about his love for Woody Allen’s muse Diane Keaton, and all the girls would swoon.

  Most comedy has a victim, which is why it often courts controversy. Simon showed that the best joke is one played on oneself. I could tell instantly that Simon was going to have a huge career. From the first time I ever saw him perform to this day I remain a fan. Twenty years later he is of course a major film star, appearing in Star Trek, Tintin and the Mission Impossible films. Simon was so hilarious the first night I saw him on stage I am surprised it took so long for the rest of the world to recognize his genius.

  Less likeable but more ambitious was Dominik, also in the year above me. He was a conflicted character, a public schoolboy from a very poor Scottish working class family. He wanted to be an angry comedian like Bill Hicks. So Dominik’s stand-up act consisted of him pacing the stage smoking attempting to be polemical. Still for a student and not a real comedian his confidence was impressive, and I knew I would have to work hard to earn my place on stage alongside him and Simon.

  So for my first performance I borrowed my friend Graham Eatough’s acoustic guitar and performed a song. Despite not being able to sing or indeed play the guitar. I wrote the shortest song ever written called ‘Don’t Patronize me, Mrs Thatch’, Mrs Thatch being of course the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher. I walked earnestly onto the stage and unsmilingly announced that I was here tonight to sing a protest song. Then I proceeded to strum the strings and sing (in a northern accent),

  You can make me pay the poll tax,

  You can put me in prison,

  But don’t patronize me, Mrs Thatch,

  Everybody! Don’t patronize me, Mrs Thatch.

  And that was it. The students at the party that night liked it – well at least it was short. It was original too, and a little subversive to send up those who despised the deeply right wing prime minister in Bristol’s deeply left wing Drama Department.

  If this minor success brought me happiness, it was momentary. That Christmas I returned home to Banstead, and the depression that I have struggled with all my life swelled within me like a storm. Living without love or affection was becoming more and more unbearable. Every day the self-loathing would grow. Death seemed like the answer. I was eighteen and didn’t understand what depression was. All I knew was that there were times in my life when light became dark, colour faded, and all that was beautiful became ugly. What’s so pernicious about depression is that you lose all perspective, and all past happiness seems false.

  I decided that what I really wanted was to die.

  In early January 1990 I waited until my parents had left for work and then looked through the family home for ways to kill myself. First I experimented with putting my head in the oven, but didn’t want the house to explode when my mum came home from work and turned on the light. Then I thought about hanging myself – there were plenty of belts and ties and shoelaces in the house – but being unusually tall there was nowhere high enough. So I decided that I would take an overdose, and found some bottles of painkillers that my mum kept in the kitchen cupboard. In the dining room I discovered some Basildon Bond light blue writing paper that my sister and I had been forced to write thank you letters on to distant relatives. Retreating to my bedroom, I decided to write three notes: one to my mum and dad, one to Zoe and one to Robin. All apologizing for what I was about to do.

  I then took out my CD of the Beatles’ White Album and selected the penultimate track on disc two, ‘Goodnight’. It sounded like a song that you could say goodbye to. I put the track on repeat then sat on the end of my bed and looked at myself in the cupboard mirror. That’s the last time you’ll see yourself, I thought. With tears rolling down my cheeks I watched as I swallowed pill after pill. I looked at my watch: 10.15 a.m. I then lay on my bed and waited and waited as the song played and played.

  ‘What have you done? David? What have you done?!’

  My mum was crying so much she could hardly speak. It was 4 p.m. and she had returned from work.

  As a Brown Owl she was trained in first aid and knew exactly what to do. She hurtled down the stairs to fetch a glass of warm salty water. This was to make me throw up. In my semi-conscious state I couldn’t take much down, so my mum led me down the stairs into the car and drove me to the local hospital. There doctors and nurses took over, and, lying on a trolley, I was forced to drink something much more potent. And then the sickness started. I retched and retched into a yellow plastic bowl, seeing the remains of the partially digested pills splatter into it.

  I was taken up on a trolley to a private room.

  ‘Why?’ my mum implored. ‘Why?’

  I didn’t have an answer.

  Finally my dad arrived – he finished work later �
� and they sat and looked at me as the nurses came in and out every half an hour or so to check my pulse and blood pressure. It was decided I would stay in overnight for observation. My dad led my weeping mother out of the room, and I lay there looking at the ceiling trying to understand both why I had tried and why I had failed.

  In the morning I ate some Rice Krispies and a kindly-looking young doctor with shoulder-length hair came in and asked with a smile, ‘Now you’re never going to do that again, are you?’

  ‘No,’ I said after a pause. It would be thirteen years until I would try again.

  My mum assumed it was because Zoe had rejected me, though really it was because I had rejected life. However, it was easier to go along with what my mum thought, and my parents drove me back to Bristol a couple of weeks later.

  I didn’t tell anyone in Bristol what had taken place, but my mum called the university and I received a letter asking me to make an appointment with a psychiatrist. Thinking that my talent and my sadness were intertwined, I never called. No follow-up letter was sent.

  My poor mum would ask me on the phone, ‘And how do you feel in yourself?’

  ‘Fine’, I would answer. Lying. In truth I couldn’t put into words what was wrong.