by Danny Baker
‘Spike,’ I said brightly, hoping he would trust me with the kind of interaction he loathed. ‘This is —— and he is brilliant. You’d like him, Spike, he’s one of the good ones!’
Milligan looked up at my pal like he had just come to repossess his teeth.
‘I know you don’t like this sort of thing, Spike,’ began the comic, ‘but I couldn’t let this moment pass. You are my absolute hero and I just wanted to say hello.’
With no attempt at a handshake, Milligan continued to grimace toward the hapless fan. Then he replied:
‘All right. Now you’ve met me. Fuck off.’
My chum puffed out his cheeks, clapped me on the shoulder and strode smartly away.
‘Why did you do that?’ I said to him. ‘He’s a good bloke, he is. He only wanted to acknowledge what you’ve done for him.’
Again, Spike would have none of it. ‘Danny, man, don’t start all that. These people are pests. The next thing you know they’ll be calling me a fucking genius. It bores the piss out of me – if you want to talk, talk. Why do they debase themselves and crawl around my feet – who wants that?’
It was an intuitive feeling I had about Milligan’s attitude to fame that obviously helped when we first met.
I had already done one spot on the programme and then made my way into the TV-AM green room where everyone was asked to wait before going on. Milligan was already there and sitting alone. I marched right across to him.
‘Spike Milligan,’ I said with some surprise. ‘Still alive?’
I knew it was a line he himself had used when greeting old friends on shows like This Is Your Life and, as with Kenneth Williams, it turned out I couldn’t have said a better thing.
He crumpled with laughter and rocked over to one side.
‘Yes, man,’ he chortled, ‘still here, but the suit gets cremated in the morning.’
I introduced myself and said we would be on together later in the show.
‘Sit down with me,’ he said, banging the cushion beside him, ‘before another bloody producer asks me if I’m OK. OK! It’s a TV show, for Christ’s sake, not bloody Anzio. Here, did you just say on there you’re from Deptford?’
I had.
‘You know I used to live in New Cross, don’t you?’ he said chummily.
‘I do, mate. And that’s why they had to close it down.’
Boom. You have to concede – I was getting quite expert at this.
Possibly the most famous visit of the many Milligan made to the Six O’Clock Show was one that has now passed into backstage lore. Claiming a migraine on arrival, he made straight for his dressing room and asked not to be disturbed until it was absolutely necessary. ‘Don’t bother me with bloody forms to sign or fucking make-up,’ were his instructions as he disappeared inside his darkened sanctuary. What happened next almost took the entire network off the air.
Having apparently settled down to try combat the noise in his head with a period absolute silence, Spike gradually became aware of, and then totally enraged by, the constant ticking of the second hand on a clock on his dressing-room wall. With a momentous yell he stood on the provided couch and yanked the tormenting time-piece from its moorings, hurling it at the floor with such force that it shattered into its component parts.
Now then. This act of pique might ordinarily be overlooked in the highly strung world of show business. What gave it wider significance was that all the clocks in London Weekend Television at that time were connected and synchronized. When Spike Milligan tore the fixture from the wall it immediately stopped every other clock in the circuit, including the ones in studios 1, 2 and 3. As you can imagine, if you are minutes away from broadcasting live, having no working clocks around you tends to make things a bit messy.
Nobody could understand why the failure had occurred and while frantic calls to engineers and electricians reverberated around the building Spike himself showed up in the gallery. Having either calmed down or possibly been struck with remorse, he asked the line of seated production crew who was in charge. The producer, Maeve Haran, made herself known.
‘Yeah, well, I owe you for one clock. I just demolished it in my dressing room. Why do they have to tick so loud they keep you awake? It’s madness. Madness!’
Of course when it came to a little madness, Spike was most decidedly your man.
Jesus Was A Cross Maker
Life, or at least my working life, had become, in the nicest way, routine and comfortable. To be honest, I did sometimes miss the zippy unpredictability of the punk and NME years, but thankfully I could also appreciate that as I approached thirty, it was perhaps for the best that I no longer lived for power chords, gigs and a life in the leather jacket. There were odd moments when the wilder ways returned, such as the time actor Christopher Walken came on the show and then afterwards asked if we could take him to some ‘real’ London pubs. In fact I took him around most of the better ones in Bermondsey that night and, in tribute to his Russian Roulette scene in The Deer Hunter, invented a game called The Beer Hunter where six cans of lager were purchased and then one of them would be vigorously shaken up in secret. The players then had to select a can each and open it right next to their face. The one who chose the shaken can – and thus got covered in boozy spray – was the loser. I had little inkling that in another decade I would professionally be coming up with lots of games like that, as well as being hurtled right back into the rock’n’roll maelstrom during the glorious years on TFI Friday.
Yet, despite the regularity of the work, in the mid-eighties I still felt as if it was all a larky distraction before I would return to writing of some sort. Or something. Fact was, I hoped I would never have to confront this dilemma – at least not in the next hundred and fifty years. This nebulous career plan was brought into clearer focus one day when I read a description of myself in a newspaper as ‘an old person’s young person’. That’ll give you pause, I can tell you. Another phrase that seemed to routinely be tagged to any press I got was ‘professional cockney’. I genuinely never understood what that was supposed to mean. I might concede to it if I were, like so many in the media, hiding some kind of public school background or an upbringing in one of the leafier parts of Surrey, but that not being the case I recognized it for what it was: the superior sneering of a relentlessly privileged middle-class industry. It’s a form of control, pure and simple. What they meant by ‘professional cockney’ was actually just ‘cockney’, and they really didn’t like the uppity working classes anywhere in their game unless they were in the canteen, post rooms or maintenance. I’m not sure if it has changed that much today. Even the most liberal university types go on the back foot when they meet someone who has simply got by on their wits, and they tend to feel threatened if that person is actually brighter than they are. So they resort to suspicion and the curled lip, attempting to denigrate this intruder by suggesting the whole ‘working class’ thing is an act and, really, all these ‘chavs’ have to offer is an accent. Thus even now you will read that someone is a ‘professional Geordie’ or ‘professional Scouser’; back in the eighties, you’d even come across a ‘professional black person’. Nobody who has come through the correct middle-class upbringing with the benefit of a few quid in their family coffers will ever be so disparagingly described. No, you’ll find they will simply be ‘professionals’.
While we’re here, I may add that, far from being a typical working-class ‘bloke’, I could never claim to be even marginally competent in the traditionally masculine field of home improvements. Away from a typewriter, latterly the computer keyboard, I am not only a disaster at DIY, I fancy I rather stand alone as the most clueless exponent of the handyman’s skills. This is another area where I am totally my father’s son. Though Dad was a terrifically hard worker, whether in the docks, clearing railway arches of rubble, or as part of an early morning office-cleaning gang, he could not for the life of him build, repair, install or decorate anything. Despite this, during the sixties he was given little choic
e in the matter, being required by Mum to wallpaper the front room in our maisonette roughly once a year. The rest of the family soon learned that it was absolutely essential for us to retire to another part of the house and cower in safety until it was all over. Like me, Dad had no finesse, no patience and genuinely believed you could inflict pain on any particularly finicky inanimate object that pushed you too far. I’ve no idea how many rolls of wallpaper it took to cover our small living room. Let’s say it was six. Dad, knowing how these affairs went, would order ten. This was because when a patterned section he was holding folded in on itself or refused to match up with one already in position, he could only achieve catharsis by furiously mashing it up into a ball, screaming ‘You dirty bastard!’ at it and throwing it across the room. Sometimes Mum would hear this happen four times in as many minutes and call out from the other side of the door, ‘You all right, Fred?’ to which he would explode, ‘No, I’m fucking not!’
The rest of us would then have to make sure our inevitable giggling fit didn’t make a sound, which could really hurt your lungs sometimes. The worst rage he ever flew into was when he couldn’t get his plumb-line – those weights on strings that are supposed to show a decorator where a true straight line falls – to stop swaying back and forth.
‘This is fucking impossible!’ we heard him storming to himself. ‘Bastard thing won’t keep still! How the fucking hell you supposed to do this?’ A moment later we heard, ‘Oh, this is just BOLLOCKS!’ and then an almighty shattering of glass as he launched the plumb-line straight through the window out into our garden.
Mum, obviously alarmed at this devastation, then broke the unwritten rule by hurrying into the room.
‘Fred, what the bleeding hell was that?!’ she asked, not unreasonably.
‘Bet. Just. Go. Out. Leave me alone when I’m doing this!’ Spud bristled.
Mum saw the almost cartoonlike jagged hole in the glass pane.
‘My God, Fred. Why have you smashed me windas?’
‘I did me nut, all right? It’s enough to drive you round the twist, having to do this. I wasn’t having it.’
Mum decided to keep her own fury in check and just heave an exasperated growl as she made to leave the scene of the crime. Before she closed the door, though, Dad said with as much contrition as he could muster,
‘Bet. Just go out in the garden and make sure I didn’t hit Tom the Tortoise with the fuckin’ plumb-line, will ya?’
Fortunately no such tragedy had occurred.
Having inherited this same lack of practical expertise, the few times I did have a go at becoming master of my surroundings the resultant element of farce was actually heightened because Wendy, youngest of ten children, came from a background where all the boys and even the brothers-in-law could turn their hand to absolutely anything. They were effortlessly outstanding at every aspect of do-it-yourself from carpentry to brickwork, from installing white goods to finished decoration. Indeed, Wendy’s closest brother, Rod, was a pro at interiors and is still hired by stores like Fortnum & Mason to take care of their window dressing each Christmas. Me? Not a clue. Worse, my inability to do it myself was fatally combined with a total disinterest in learning how it was done.
I really believe there is something in the universe that controls these things. I remember trying to prise the lid off a tin of paint once. I had put newspaper down so as not to get any drips on the front-room floorboards but, try as I might, the screwdriver I had wedged under one edge of the lid would not free it from the glossy mother ship. So I thumped my fist down on the screwdriver handle and the lid promptly flipped off, sailing high in the air like a coin tossed to determine head or tails. Had it just gone up and down again, I think I could have contained the splatter. Instead – and I am pretty sure in defiance of all the laws of physics – it went up and out, coming to rest – paint side down, naturally – on our Liberty settee. Taking a leaf out of the old man’s manual here, I just stood there and shouted, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ And do you know what? Wendy blamed me anyway.
‘You’re supposed to do that outside, THEN bring the paint in! That’s ruined that cushion. I’ll never be able to turn that over, will I?’
On another occasion we bought a small bedside cupboard that ‘required some assembly’.
‘Dan, why don’t you just leave it until Bill can come round and put it together?’ said Wendy wearily after I asked where the claw hammer was kept.
‘Wend, mate,’ I shot back, a little tetchily, ‘I’m not a complete washout. Look, there’s only five bits to it!’
But I am a complete washout when it comes to these things. The sort of washout that even Noah might have deemed a corker. I won’t go into detail about my bedside cabinet fiasco, but I will say that I completed it in very smart time, had no bits left over and it looked exactly as it did on the box. Still seated beside my undoubted triumph on the floor of our bedroom, I called out to Wendy, and did so frankly in a tone that suggested here at last she would have to eat her words.
She came in, looked at it and gave a surprised hum of appreciation. ‘Blimey,’ she said. ‘I take it all back.’
As admissions go, ‘I take it all back’ is the one I find husbands most like to hear from their partners. But as I stood to put the brilliantly assembled piece of furniture into position, I noticed one of my legs wasn’t playing ball. This was because I had somehow screwed one of my socks to the bedroom floor. I promise you, that’s what I’d done and I fancy that’s a trick even Frank Spencer missed. I hadn’t felt a thing and it had gone straight through the wood, into the flappy bit of sock up by my toes and right down into the carpet. In my defence, let me say that the screws shouldn’t have been long enough to do that, should they? That’s a design fault, in my book. We were lucky I didn’t just plough on till I’d gone through a gas main or something.
This humbling moment was then made even worse by Wendy sprawling helpless on the bed while I, now in a terrible mood, had to sit there and unscrew my sock. Then I had to re-screw the fixture properly, sans my sock, although this time it simply wouldn’t anchor itself in the required hole and the entire cupboard developed a bit of a list. I insisted it was nevertheless fit for purpose and stuck it by the bed, where it remained for about a month. Every time Wendy placed so much as a magazine on it, it slumped over to the right.
My lowest moment as Man of the House happened when I said I would paint the ceiling in the little back bedroom. This was while we were in Maydew House and so it really was a little back bedroom. Once again, Wendy implored me to let Rod or Bill or Brian do it, but this was early in our relationship and a chap has to try and keep the lustre of love and admiration at maximum levels during this honeymoon period. I said I would get it done while Wendy was out at her sister’s one afternoon. As soon as she had gone, I carried the paint tin down to the tiny room and had my usual difficulty prying off the lid. I managed it on this occasion without ruining a thousand-pound three-piece suite, but didn’t know what to do with the dripping tin Frisbee once I’d freed it up. Figuring I’d put it, for the time being, in the bathroom sink, I carried it back up the stairs – the flats were of a curious but wonderful design – and plonked it down beneath the taps. The paint on the lid seemed rather fluid and lush to me and I thought, ‘I bet that will eventually run off there and on to the white porcelain of the bowl.’ So, and I know you are going to think I must be several layers beyond moronic here, I turned on the tap to wash it off. I know. I can’t explain what made me do that. And it was so much worse than you can imagine, because I gave the tap handle a right good turn, causing the jet of water to spurt out at about ten thousand gallons an hour directly on to the slightly concave upturned lid. It went everywhere. I often marvel at how, even when you’ve only left the dregs of some wine in a glass, should you then go and kick it over it seems to issue forth like Lake Windermere bursting its banks. Well, this apparent smear of paint on the under-side of the lid appeared to multiply its mass until Wendy’s pristine bathroom looked l
ike a troupe of old-fashioned clowns had been rehearsing in there. In case you’re interested, it was a small, classically white bathroom and the paint was a shade of blue that edged toward the turquoise. If we’d stuck with our original plan of doing the little room ceiling a delicate cream, I insist the splatter flecked across my wife’s tiles and towels would have been that much easier to disguise. But that’s Wendy for you – always changing her mind.
Swearing furiously, I stood stock-still for a few seconds. I was wringing wet from head to toe. When I took off my spattered glasses to wipe them on my sodden T-shirt, the paint spots simply smeared across my lenses and, even though I gave it a go, made even partial vision impossible. This was not going brilliantly, I had to admit. Figuring I would now need to do some clearing up before I could even get down to the real task of the day, I went in search of the Flash or Ariel or Mr Sheen or whatever it was that Wend seemed to buy by the bushel and constantly clean things with. Ours wasn’t the biggest flat in the world. This stuff couldn’t be that hard to hunt down. I must have stood for about half an hour at the open doors of the food cupboard, straining my gaze beyond tins of beans and packets of pasta, hoping to catch a glimpse of something caustic. From there I began feeling round the back of the dinner plates stacked up alongside the cups and bowls. I mean, really, what was the point of secreting this stuff away? These are the sort of tools one needs in an emergency and they ought to be stored somewhere obvious. As it was, it struck me as akin to the boss of a fireworks factory just leaving a few hints as to where the fire extinguishers might be. After about ten minutes of cursing and carrying on a salty monologue at high volume, my eyes fell upon possibly the most secretive of all places in the modern home: the small door beneath the kitchen sink. I may have even said, ‘Aha!’ out loud. But after getting down and opening this mysterious portal all it revealed was a rubber plunger of the sort comedians used to get stuck on their face, a plastic washing-up bowl filled with parched J-Cloths, a small bottle off Zoflora disinfectant (hyacinth) and, right at the back under the pipes, a lone potato that in the darkness had sprouted some impressively curlicued tendrils.
