Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2

by Danny Baker

  The real killer is that we have only a handful of real and satisfying jobs today – certainly for working-class children. All the traditional industries have vanished – steel, cars, coal, docks . . . right down to proper shops, chocolates, print and television – and all we are left with are millions of mimsy office jobs, each with some windy meaningless title invented by a team of real drags seeking to elevate their vacuous positions. They wasted their teens getting paper vouchers that say they listened well in class and now they insist you to go through that too. Everywhere you look it’s the choking revenge of the suited dullards on the carefree crowd, and nowhere is this con more visible than current TV. TV used to be fronted by popular entertainers happily giving away cash, caravans and white goods to ordinary folk, who by and large lived unexciting lives. Now somehow the star prize is a desk-bound job in Alan Sugar’s boring old office block. Boy, do they make the kids eat shit for that privilege! Dragon’s Den – suited money-men sit in grim judgement on those who actually create. Then there’s X-Factor – the biggest star in British TV is a fucking ‘music executive’ waving his hand like an emperor over desperate kids hoping he will run their entire lives! Rock’n’roll! When I was fourteen, Monty Python – indeed, all comedy shows – routinely portrayed bankers, businessmen and accountants as the cautious, office-bound bores they invariably are. Now the world has been turned on its head and we are led to believe that these are ‘playas’ who for some reason simply must have their own round-the-clock TV channels. (And if I didn’t have to haul this back to Peter King’s Maydew House lift fiasco, I’d also get right after the dozens of specious, solemn, puffed-up rolling news networks that exactly NO ONE asked for, yet are apparently above ever getting axed the way regular TV shows do – and being axed from the schedules is a subject I have about ten thousand A levels in, as you will eventually find out.)

  Pete and me, though we had enjoyed our time at the old alma mater, dropped out of school so fast that on our last day, like the Roadrunner, we both left behind a dust outline of where we’d previously been standing. I headed into the record shop that altered my whole life while Pete took a job with his dad’s mate on a local milk round. This was a sweet berth. Not only would he be finished by eleven every day, he also got to plug the line of idle milk floats into the mains socket at the end of each shift – a duty I imagined would be both satisfying and amusing. I saw them all being juiced up together once, a static parade of those funny little craft that at this particular dairy had coned frontages like sawn-off aeroplane heads. Each of them was connected to the electricity by a long thick cord as if they were busy sucking milk straight out the system.

  ‘How comes milk floats always have to be electric?’ I asked one old stager.

  ‘Because they just fuckin’ do,’ he helpfully explained.

  Pete had planned to be the sort of milkman that after twenty-five years of dedicated service is given his own cow. In the event, he lasted two days. Once again it was the treacherous lifts of me and Wendy’s future home in the sky that did for him. What happened was that, now his dad’s mate had a float co-pilot in young Pete, he assigned him the part of the round that he looked forward to least – the twenty-four storeys of Maydew House.

  ‘What you do,’ the veteran milkie said that breaking dawn in 1972 as an awestruck Pete gazed up at the never-ending edifice, ‘is get all your crates to the lift first. Then, when it comes, you load ’em all in and take it floor by floor. Now then, here’s the clever bit . . .’

  At this he held before Pete a single matchstick.

  ‘See this? You take that and jam it into the little gap around the “Open Door” button, got it? Wedge it right in there when the lift door opens on each landing and that will keep it open while you drop off yer bottles. Don’t just stick a crate down to block the door sliding shut, because that sets the alarm off and that WILL make you popular at this time of the day. Now, I’m warning ya, always use a new match for each floor, ’cos otherwise they get too squashed, fall out, and the lift will fuck off without ya. You got that? Good. Unload what you need and I’ll meet you again in Abbeyfield Road.’ With that he threw Pete a full box of matches.

  Well, what, as they say, could possibly go wrong? To be fair to Pete, anyone living on floors 1, 3 and 5 actually did get their daily pints as per usual. It was on floor 7 that his matchstick fell out. Why did it fall out? As he tells it, he clumsily dropped the prescribed Bryant & May matchbox down the side of his crates on the third floor, and after straining to reach it – followed by a failed struggle to manoeuvre the load over to one side – he settled for sticking with his existing wooden wedge. Apparently it did a hero’s job on the fifth. However, after about thirty seconds on the seventh it gave up the unequal struggle and plummeted to the floor. At least, Pete presumes it did, because at the awful moment he heard the distant sound of the lift door shuddering closed he was halfway down the landing, putting a couple of cold sterilized on to someone’s ragged old welcome mat.

  Frantically he raced back to the stairwell and began shoving at the call button like a madman, hoping that his load would be instantly revealed but all he was rewarded with was the little light inside the control dimly glowing to let him know that the car had departed and the next available one would be arriving soon. Of course, this being a council flats lift, ‘soon’ actually meant ‘some time before Christmas’.

  His brain whirling, Pete knew he had to make a vital decision. Did the lift containing his seven full crates of milk and orange juice go up or down when it left him?

  Deciding that the call had most likely come from somebody leaving for work as opposed to a night-shift bloke arriving home, Pete careened out on to the stairs and bounded up the four concrete flights to the ninth. Nothing. So off he went again, up to the eleventh; still no sign of milk. By the time he reached the seventeenth he was in such acute physical distress that he was sure his head was going to implode like one of those cooling towers you see being demolished. On the twenty-third he almost caught up with the tormenting carriage. Despite his exertions creating a din in his inner ear akin a raging Niagara, he could just hear above the torrent what sounded like an elevator full of milk bottles juddering to a halt. Unfortunately by this time he was gaining altitude at barely a shuffle, and with two entire flights to go all he could do was plaintively call: ‘Hold the lift! Please hold the lift!’ Although what actually came was something closer to a hoarse wheeze: ‘Hole a liff. . . psss . . . hole . . . a liff. . .’

  Broken, Pete arrived on the twenty-third minutes too late to arrest his roving cargo as it plunged, full throttle, back down the shaft.

  My friend Peter King never did catch up with his milk and orange juice. Every time he summoned the lift, the wrong one would arrive; every floor he looked in at he was merely taunted by the receding jangle of bottles in crates. Eventually he did what anybody would do in the circumstances and went and hid in the local park until it got dark.

  His dad later received an understandably irate call from Pete’s brief boss saying that he waited nearly an hour for ‘the little fucker’ before heading off to investigate. Naturally when he called the lift, the correct one showed up almost immediately – in a state that might best be described as ransacked. People had helped themselves. Whole crates had been liberated and the couple that remained contained nothing but a few empties – which at least shows a degree of social responsibility.

  ‘You wouldn’t think so many people would be up and about at that time,’ offered Pete’s dad lamely.

  ‘Don’t talk bollocks,’ came the unequivocal reply. ‘Soon as word gets out there’s freeman’s to be had it gets around this estate like fuckin’ measles. Eighty quid’s worth of stock gone in a fuckin’ flash! Didn’t even get the crates back!’

  For what it’s worth, I can still recite the number plate on the float Pete rode during his short and disastrous career. It was XMT 426. I know this because, to this day, whenever life deals Pete a raw hand, he will sigh and mutter, ‘This is XM
T 426 all over again.’

  I think the point I was hoping to make rather more crisply at the top of this chapter was that, despite my apparently glitzy job, we were still living on the Silwood Estate where I’d spent my entire life. Indeed, from our front room, I looked straight down on to my mum and dad’s flat in Debnams Road. But now Wendy and I wanted to start a family – couldn’t wait – and both of us realized that, lovely in design though our place in the sky was, losing crates of milk in those lifts would be as nothing to the thought of chasing up and down the stairs after a runaway baby in a pram. Therefore we decided to buy a house. The only problem was, we had not a single shekel in savings and neither of us – nor anyone in our extended families – had a clue how you went about implementing such a crackpot decision.

  Thank God then, for Carry On star Kenneth Williams.

  Veterans of these tales will know that the universe has been terrifically, almost perversely, kind in laying fate’s fast track before the locomotive of my life and, inevitably, here we go again. Because when I examine the extraordinary circumstances that led us to suddenly owning a beautiful Victorian house bordering on a lovely London park, it really is Kenneth Williams that I should thank first for making it possible. We will come to that fortuitous whim of the cosmos presently, but first here’s how I came to meet the brilliant public persona and private man of letters in the first place.

  A feature of the short filmed items that peppered the Six O’Clock Show was that they usually had a well-known face pop up at some point to give the package a bit of a boost. In the voice-over I would say something like:

  ‘Another person who remembers the war-time blackout beetroot thief of Balham is actor Donald Sinden. He recalls one night when he almost came face to face with the purple-fingered fiend . . .’

  Upon which Sinden, voice rich as a plum cake, would give us a juicy sound bite from his ‘childhood memories’.

  We found most celebrities would rattle off a bit of overheated hogwash for us, provided we sent a car and offered expenses – particularly if they were currently appearing in an underperforming farce at the Whitehall Theatre. We would show them walking past some obviously placed posters for this doomed production seconds before they coughed up the necessary light anecdote and thus show-business honour was satisfied all round. Nowadays every branch of the media is so stuffed with monotone-grey lunatics whose sole job is to make sure nobody is falsifying anything that even fanciful stories about wartime beetroot thieves would be decried as the greatest deception since Watergate. Consequently nobody in broadcasting has much fun any more and rotten plays featuring nudists in suburbia close months before they otherwise might have done.

  During the very first series of SOCS, the star-turn on a piece I was fronting was to be Kenneth Williams – a prospect that thrilled me even more than the thought of palling about with Frank Zappa. Some of my more hipster friends might find that hard to understand, so let me explain. One was Frank Zappa. The other was Kenneth Williams. And there you have it in a nutshell. Even in terms of songs listened to and LPs bought – a process by which I weigh most things in my life – I was a fan of Kenneth Williams long before the Mothers of Invention advised me that all the smart set were doing sardonic these days. His album On Pleasure Bent was a delight I had learned by heart since it first popped up in the Spa Road record library just a cat’s whisker before the summer of love changed my shirt colours from pale to neon, although rather presciently it did have a psychedelic cover. Two songs in particular on the album left their mark: ‘Above All Else’ – a yearning lilt worthy of Noël Coward that told the story of how a computer fell in love with a weighing machine – and the raucous rasp of ‘Boadicea’,

  So if you look around the place

  and see a Roman nose upon an English face

  Oh, Boadicea, she’s got a lot to answer for!

  I will to this day eagerly perform both tracks in full should anyone be good enough to drop a hat – so don’t talk to me about Hot Rats. And there was one other track, ‘Spa’s’, a monologue played by Williams as a spluttering hypochondriac crone, during which an endless stream of ailments were all followed by the phrase ‘My Iris will tell you . . .’ that I could also rattle off in character and verbatim. Almost beyond reason, it was to be this long-dormant and seemingly superfluous morsel of salted-away brain matter that was to see Carry On Kenneth Williams open the door to me and Wendy’s first married home. Here’s how.

  The item we were filming that day – let’s say it was about the sad disappearance of coal deliverymen from the London scene, it very often was – had not been going well. Interviewees delivered hesitantly, working horses refused to thoughtfully munch their nose-bags on cue, nostalgic mountains of coal adamantly declined to be photogenic and, most crucially of all, whoever had worked out the day’s timings and locations had obviously mistaken the map of London with one of Beccles, Norfolk. Consequently, as it stood, we were finishing one section of our opus in a coal yard in Stepney and then had then about ten minutes to get to our next set-up at somebody’s backyard in Hayes, Middlesex. For those of you who don’t know the distances involved, it is the equivalent of leaving yourself the duration of a Ramones record to get from your bedroom to the moon. Thus when we came to set off for out last rendezvous of the day, a meet with Kenneth Williams at the Albery Theatre, St Martin’s Lane, we were running approximately one hour late. Again, for those of you unaware of the geography, the Albery is in the heart of London’s West End. Or to give it it’s full and tremendously accurate title, London’s busy West End. We were slogging our way there from Poplar in East London. Even if there had been mobile phones then it is extremely unlikely Kenneth Williams would have had one. Besides, such was his reputation for insisting on punctuality that none of us would have had the guts to ring it if he had.

  Given the circumstances, we made pretty good time getting across town. When we arrived at the theatre – the staff had arranged for someone to open the doors for us late afternoon – we were only five minutes shy of being two hours tardy. The upside to this was that there wasn’t a chance Kenneth Williams would be there and so at least we would be spared the full-flared nostril wrath as we weakly explained ourselves. So as we bundled into the dim Albery foyer, the plan was to apologize to the few staff around and, simply by showing up, show that our nightmare tale was the truth. At first nobody could be found. It struck me that to leave a West End theatre entirely unguarded was a tad cavalier. In the days of strolling players it would have been an absolute gift of a squat.

  Eventually, after a wandering the deserted corridors and calling a few muted ‘Hello’s?’ a woman emerged from a small office at the rear of the deserted stalls. Before we could speak, she asked, ‘Oh God are you here for Kenneth Williams? He’s been sat downstairs alone in the bar for hours. I keep checking on him. He was in a filthy mood an hour back – Christ knows how he’ll be now. I pity you lot, that’s for sure . . .’

  I’ll be honest with you. Our crew that day included a hard-bitten, seen-it-all director, a cameraman who had covered football riots and a sound engineer who had been in Belfast for Bloody Sunday. And we all wanted to run away.

  Nobody said a word as we heavily descended to the gloomy half-light of the lower bar, which was of course closed. I remained at the back of the group because, as I say, I adored Kenneth Williams and I thought it would be a shame if he killed me before I could tell him how much I liked On Pleasure Bent. Just before the storm broke I glimpsed him about to explode, sitting cross-legged on a bar stool, his cream-coloured mackintosh belted, his face pinched and thunderous, his mouth tightened into a terrifying moue.

  Our researcher had barely set foot on the final step when Williams flew into a fury that had been stoked and carefully worded over the long wait. He began, wonderfully, incorporating a phrase that was almost a catchphrase:

  ‘Oh – now you fucking arrive! Well, it’s a dis-grace!’

  As he bellowed those last two syllables, I swear he sounded E
XACTLY like Kenneth Williams.

  ‘If you think I have nothing better to do than to sit here while you moronic Neanderthals sit in the pub counting your money and chucking it down, then you can stick it up your arse! I am not giving you a word, do you hear, a word! I only hung on and hung on so I could tell you straight that I will be making a serious complaint to whatever boss-eyed twerp runs your otiose little outfit and hopefully get the lot of you sacked! I came here on the bloody bus, through the rain, as a favour, because YOU asked me, and then you leave me here in this gloomy pisshole for TWO hours?! I won’t have it!’

  It was as he paused for breath – or dramatic effect – that I said something that was possibly the last thing Kenneth Williams was expecting:

  ‘My Iris will tell you,’ I piped up.

  I had not planned on saying anything. It had been reflex, pure nervous reaction to a horrible atmosphere, but man alive – talk about your silver bullets!

  Kenneth Williams’ expression went from the outer reaches of austerity to the warm core of elation in less than one second.

  ‘How do YOU know that!!?’ he bellowed through a smile as wide as the coal chutes we’d hoped he would wax nostalgic for. It was as if the very walls of the bar had suddenly exhaled. ‘You’re far too young to know anything about that!’

  ‘Not at all, Mr Williams – it was a staple in our house,’ I said, making my way over. ‘I know every word of that LP: “Pardon Me, Sir Francis”, “Boadicea”, “Above All Else” – it’s like Noël Coward for me.’

  I know, I know. Obsequious little runt. Note the ‘Mr Williams’ due deference too – but Jesus Christ did it do the trick. Returning to his former frostiness in instructing the crew they could ‘get set up now and be bloody quick with it’, Kenneth led me to a corner table and proceeded to tell me expansively all about the record and how he felt he never got the opportunity to break out into some of the personas it allowed him. Incredibly the one track he prized above all others was ‘Spa’s’, and though he hadn’t written it he had contributed the phrase ‘My Iris will tell you’, of which he was very proud. Of course, it probably didn’t hurt that I was a fairly good-looking bit of rough then too. When, eventually, I tried to explain why we were so late, he lowered his voice and with a conspiratorial smile said: