Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2

by Danny Baker

  ‘Oh, fuck that. It was a bit of a performance that. I’ve been shooting out, going round the bookshops – it’s been nice. Quite peaceful down here, actually. You know I’ve got bugger all else to do – but don’t tell this lot that – let ’em stew in it.’

  I rolled my eyes in sympathy. Yeah, bloody telly people. It was really quite frightening how readily I formed an instant artist’s bulwark against my still-cowed colleagues. To be fair to them, they knew that that one verbal punt had pulled everyone’s arses out the fire and understood all this haughty horseshit was absolutely essential, and of course I was revelling in every second of their agony.

  We got our Kenneth Williams remembers the coalman footage, complete with evocative anecdotes and funny voices. In the forty minutes or so it took, Kenneth never once spoke to or even acknowledged anyone else there beyond the most minimal of responses. It was as if these dreadful plebs were eavesdropping on a conversation Ken and I – as performers and fellow lovers of the arts – were enjoying and which they couldn’t possibly understand. When the PA flagged him down a cab, he only said goodbye to me.

  ‘I’ve seen you on that Aspel’s show,’ he said as we shook hands as warmly as Kenneth Williams ever did any physical attachment. ‘Can’t bear him, the dreary queen. Can’t you slip something in his Sanatogen and take over?’ Then almost seductively he purred, ‘Bring your LP next time we meet. I’ll sign it for you. Something filthy . . .’

  And with a salacious wink, off he went. I know many of you may now be flagging up a rampant narcissism here, similar to when I suspected Kate Bush of flirting with me in the previous book. In mitigation I would direct you to Kenneth Williams’ posthumous diaries. There you may note this entry for 21 February 1986, one of our many subsequent meetings:

  . . . left for LWT to do the Six O’Clock Show with Michael Aspel, Gary Wilmot and Danny. It went OK.

  No surname you’ll observe – just ‘Danny’. When I first read that, I confess I was thrilled at the affection such familiarity from so famously cold a figure implies. It may be that he didn’t recall my full name, but it’s unlikely given we had done quite a few TV shows together since that initial fraught encounter at the Albery. So affection I’ll take from it. And right back at you ‘Kenny’. On Pleasure Bent indeed.

  Walk Between The Raindrops

  My early encounters with the famous in TV, though usually effervescent and mildly bonding affairs, never evolved into anything approaching friendship. Once the light entertaining had been delivered and a few green-room cold drinks had been sluiced in high spirits, I hadn’t the faintest wish to belong to any social society of showbiz pals. I somehow doubt they were bursting to jot down my home number either. For example, in the six and a half years that I worked week in, week out with Michael Aspel, I never met him outside work other than a drink at his house once after he’d asked me to help him with an auction at his local school. I certainly knocked about with the noisy young gang of foot soldiers who created the programme each week, though I had no thought that they would ever go on to be famous names themselves. I have somewhere a wonderful piece of video where I am filming an idiotic sequence being ad-libbed by future media ever-present Paul Ross in the SOCS office. I was recording this shameless mugging on one of the earliest video cameras available to the public, a huge contraption that came in a massive steel suitcase hired from one of the high street electrical shops like Granada, DER or Radio Rentals. These were the days when even TV sets would be leased to you on monthly payments. Anyway, as Paul was hamming it up, most likely with lots of swearing which was still then a real thrill to do in front of a camera, some oaf walks right into shot, obscuring Paul’s uproarious mumming.

  ‘Excuse me, mate,’ you can hear me say, ‘we are trying to film something here, could you get out the way?’

  The interloper meekly does, with many apologies. Paul Ross raises his eyebrows at camera and asks if he should start again. Then he says to the scene-spoiler off camera, ‘You fucked that right up. Just sit over there for five minutes.’ Turning back to camera he sighs resignedly, ‘That was my brother Jonathan. College boy. Fucking nuisance.’

  Of course, cut to a few years later and I would be working for that same photo-bombing wonder-kid.

  The majority of my social hours were still spent with the same crowd I had always beetled about with in the countless pubs of Bermondsey. Never having just one regular hang-out we would usually visit two or three different boozers in a typical night and even this trio of venues would vary depending on mood, day of the week or things like local snooker tournaments. Arrangements were vague, mobile phones a future fantasy, and so the form was that you’d simply try to find each other. Quite a sizeable part of any evening would be taken up walking from pub to pub and sticking your head in the door to see if anyone you knew was inside. Most pubs would have at least a dozen people in and chances were, if you drew a blank and one of your lot wasn’t inside, somebody who knew one of your lot would be, even if it was only the barman.

  ‘Phil,’ you’d shout, half in, half out of the saloon, ‘any of our lot been in?’

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ might come the flat reply from some tubby host mid-pint-pull. ‘I think I heard Stevie Driscoll say he was meeting Lenny Windsor in the Red Cow later.’

  So off you’d ankle to the Red Cow, putting your head in at the Gregorian, the Rising Sun and the Lilliput Hall on the way. At the Red Cow it would be disco dark and packed even on a Tuesday and you would prise your way through the dense throng hoping to glimpse the top of a familiar head. Assuming there was still no luck, you might find a friend of a friend’s sister was working behind the jump that night so you could bellow at her above the sound of Tavares’ ‘Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel’:

  ‘Kim! Kim!! KIM! Where’s your Joey and that lot gone?’

  ‘Eh??’

  ‘Your JOEY? Where gone??’

  ‘They’re dunfla Hurrk Pakaver!’

  ‘WHAT?’

  ‘They’re down fuckin’ Southwark Park Tavern!’ The shriek causing her to fumble the glass she was holding under a gin optic.

  Forcing your passage back out again, away you would go at a quickening clip similar to Dick Emery’s Mandy character, on to the Southwark Park Tavern, while pausing to check The Horns, The Fort, the Colleen Bawn, the Blue Anchor, the Ancient Foresters, the Raymouth Tavern, the Stanley Arms and several other hostelries en route in case they had decided to nip in there for one. Quite often a mate would turn up, angry and partially collapsed, just as a pub was ringing last orders.

  ‘Here you are, you bunch of cunts!’ they’d yelp accusingly as though uncovering a plot. ‘Been looking for you lot all fuckin’ night!’

  With the tiny amount of pubs that live on in Bermondsey today, no such confusion could ever arise.

  It was while we were in a funny old boozer that was on the very outskirts of our regular circuit that one of the strangest events of not just the early eighties but of my entire life unfolded.

  The pub was called The Antigallican in Tooley Street near London Bridge. Never a popular place with the younger set, it was the kind of down-at-heel dockside dump that was left beached once industry on the Thames began to decline and then vanish. People like to romance these long gone quiet local inns and yet the truth is that for decades they were depressing little lounges whose chief problem was that they were so quiet they lapsed into torpidity. Heightening this state would be the frowsy threadbare décor, revolting toilets down steep stairways, sickly lighting and a strobing fruit machine whose cheerless electro-gurgle gave you a headache. A possible plus might be that they had a bookies or cab office next door, but actually the true attraction of these grim parlours was that you could invariably get ‘a late one’ from their indifferent, often alcoholic hosts. Because of this, a mournful premises such as The Antigallican – the name means ‘Down With France’, by the way, and was once one of the most popular pub names in London – would hardly take a ten-pence piece till about 10.30 p.m.
when groups of blokes began to pile in, well aware that the mandatory eleven o’clock curfew on selling alcohol would be allowed to sail by no questions asked. The landlord’s only concession to the law would be to turn out all but a few low lights behind the bar and request that any conversation be tuned down lest the police came knocking – and, hard as it is to conceive of this now, the Old Bill really did raid pubs that they believed might be dispensing beer at eleven fifteen or, surely even more remarkable to today’s drinkers, still taking orders at ten past three in the afternoon.

  Everyone knew the half-dozen or so pubs in the borough that would oblige with what later came to be called a lock-in, but sometimes you might just stumble across a place that, even though it had rung the last bell, had yet to put the tea towels over the pumps. (This last bit of semaphore was universally understood by all to mean ‘That’s your lot’.)

  One of your crowd might idly check their watch as the lights started going out and find that it was five past eleven. Scoping out the bar discreetly from beneath their eyebrows they would search for any signs of liquid movement. Having determined sufficient evidence, they’d then break into whatever burble the others were engaged in by quietly saying, ‘Keep it to yourself, but I think they’re still serving . . .’

  A genuine thrill would zip through the company at this. Regardless of whether or not you’d been gasping for another pint, your tongue would be hanging out. Next came what for me was the dreadful price to pay for this erstwhile bonus. One of you would be nominated to go to the bar and find out whether there was any truth to these suspicions about extended licence. I hated doing that. It was OK if you knew the pub, but in a strange venue, for me, this pleading enquiry always carried with it the humiliating whiff of Oliver asking for another scrape of gruel. Should it be decided it was my turn, up I’d reluctantly get, the scrape of my chair announcing my intention with a noise like an anvil being dragged over a tin bath, and with heavy legs I’d make my way toward the dim point of sale where it suddenly seemed the publican and his two best mates were simply enjoying a late but legal nightcap.

  There I’d stand. Perhaps more truthfully, there he’d make me stand. I mean, it was gone eleven now, what could this desperate wraith with his empty pint pot possibly want from a tapster at the end of his shift? This lonely agony, however, was all part of the required dance. Eventually he’d break off his quiet chat with the regulars and look across at my pitiful pleading stance.

  ‘Yes?’ he might bark, fully aware that the recently acknowledged customer–publican axis had now shifted entirely in his favour.

  ‘Erm . . .’ I would begin weakly, realizing that to embark on further syllables would mean no turning back. Then, after an agonizing pause during which he and his company eyed me as if they’d just caught me washing my pants in a barrel of bitter, I would grimly take the plunge: ‘Are you . . . still serving? At all?’

  Cue a draught of air sucked in over his teeth like a wave receding across the sand. Then a quick look down at his watch.

  ‘It’s ten past . . .’ he’d offer in a vacillating tone similar, I imagine, to that employed by Roman emperors deciding which thumb to give a floored gladiator.

  Nothing more to add, I would smile pathetically, my mouth closer to a cartoon wavy line instead of actual upturned lips. It was usually at this point, during the horrible hanging hiatus, that I would be most in awe of the way my father handled this most delicate of public negotiations.

  Though I’d never been around him at closing time, I can’t believe he varied the approach much. On the occasions I’d been with him during a midday session, even on unfamiliar ground, the instant the pub clock registered the first seconds beyond the legal close of business at three he would, while remaining seated at the table, boom across the boozer, ‘Chas! Don’t pull the plug on us now for fuck’s sake – we’re all gasping over here!’ Far from prompting a sharp intake of breath followed by a lecture about the law, this had the landlord scurrying to remove the tea towel from the pumps. I’ve even seen publicans bring the drinks across to him.

  Anyway, back at the Antigallican, pantomime performed and loss of status granted, the pissed old alehouse governor had his moment then grunted, ‘Go on then . . . wotcha want?’ and we all settled in for what my friend Johnny Summer used to refer to as ‘a sensible drink’ – a term that meant just the opposite, of course.

  Wendy was staying over at her sister Carol’s that night and so I had no reason to get home at a reasonable hour. Against this, I have always had a sort of inner regulator that flags up the very moment to stop drinking and I rarely pick up a glass again once I’ve noticed the first creak of crumbling motor skills, though happily, an inherited capacity for alcohol means it can be many hours before I do pull stumps on a thundering good night out. Even so, I was the first to quit the session that night and to the usual jeers of ‘lightweight’ I announced I was heading out into the damp dockside shadows for the thirty-minute walk home.

  ‘Sit down! Give it one more and we’re all going,’ was the general consensus from the table. I knew this to be hogwash of the highest order, given that once you enter a pub the number ‘one’ takes on an almost infinite quality. So I began walking toward the door. The landlord and his two, by now, sensationally sozzled companions bade me a short fractured noise that I took to mean ‘goodnight’. Then our host said something else, quite clearly, and with a mischievous smile:

  ‘Careful you don’t run into Davey.’

  ‘Davey who?’ I answered brightly, as though his warning had been the set-up for a knock-knock joke.

  ‘Davey the dwarf,’ one of his wretched chums managed to articulate, completely without humour.

  With no further punchline forthcoming I reacted to this fantastical non sequitur as might anyone – with a simple baffled grin and a wave of the hand. On the whole, I’m all for private jokes and will happily play the stooge for one if it helps a party go with a bang. But then my friend Paul Baldock chipped in from across the darkened bar:

  ‘Davey the dwarf? Blimey, is he still about? Oh fuckin’ hell, I will have one more then . . .’

  My friends all groaned comically then started to low-talk again with renewed animation. Now I had two choices before me. One: I could go back to the table and see why the mention of this alliterative little person had set them chattering so, or Two: open the door and just go home.

  I chose to head home.

  Tooley Street, on which our tale is set, runs down from London Bridge to Tower Bridge Road and has, like all the sprawling square miles around it, been transformed beyond recognition over the last thirty years. During those early hours when I set out in the drizzle to tramp along its broken pavements after departing the Antigallican, Tooley Street was a poorly lit thoroughfare hemmed in by the railway arches on one side and abandoned warehouses on the other. Even when it wasn’t past midnight and raining, the looming Victorian brickwork about you would be dark and damp, seeping fusty reminders of the thousands of cargoes the walls had stowed or the countless railway carriages the arches had borne. Today the location is as good, or bad, a testament to the power of capitalist investment as you will find anywhere in Europe. And yet one feature of the area hasn’t changed. Indeed, can’t be changed. The arches that lie beneath London Bridge Station and that connect Tooley Street to the rest of Bermondsey are long and narrow, and no matter how many light bulbs the authorities place along their snaking length, they will always appear dim and ominous for pedestrians. Any modern business high-flyers that, as night falls, choose to haul their own suitcases from the river jetty toward the famous gleaming Shard would certainly think twice about the shortcut these tunnels offer before opting to walk the longer way around instead. Not for nothing was the original London Dungeon horror museum built within the neglected empty vaults these subways cut through.

  Crossing the road, I entered the longest tunnel at a brisk pace, hands in pockets and head down, inwardly wishing, as I invariably do, that I had left much earlier and so
might be in bed asleep at that moment. I had gone only a hundred yards into the cavern when I heard a pained exhalation as if somebody had been punched in the gut. At first I looked behind me, because it had seemed to come from close by. Then peering ahead I saw through the pools of weak yellow light falling from the intermittent lamps a sight that immediately reduced my clattering gait to an almost complete halt.

  On the other side of the narrow road that ran through this subterranean hollow, some distance ahead, was a figure so tall he had to lower his head lest it scrape along the arched ceiling. Delivery vans passed through here so I assessed that he stood, or rather lurched, at well over eight feet in height. With every strange, stiff-legged step he made the giant would groan and then stand still, seemingly gathering his strength while leaning heavily against the damp, soot-encrusted walls. As he rested he formed low and grievous half-sentences like someone who had just received the most awful news. I had never seen anything like this in all my life and there was no one else around, no passing traffic as his sobs and moans echoed down the tunnel. You don’t run away at times like this as you might see in a creepy film, which of course I’m aware this entire implausible incident must read like. I found myself almost involuntarily walking at a casual pace toward the figure, as if by carrying on reasonably the whole outlandish event would root itself in normality. I didn’t stare at him continuously but checked on his progress toward me with frantic turns of my head in his direction. With quickening breath I could hear myself whispering, ‘Fucking hell . . . fucking hell’ over and over. I was absolutely terrified.