Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  Years later, when Python became popular again, the BBC asked if they could broadcast the tapes.

  The BBC may have had an element of left-wing bohemia about it, but it was shockingly short-sighted at times.

  *

  In the sixties, the BBC was committed to commissioning political drama for television in a way that is all too rare now. It offered, for me at least, a different way of looking at the world. I wasn’t exactly drowning in Middleton, but those plays gave me a lifeline of sorts. Because my parents lived a modest life, there were limits on what we thought we ought to expect from life. Ambition certainly wasn’t encouraged.

  I was aware of ‘important’ television, which included work by directors like Ken Loach. Cathy Come Home was broadcast in 1966 to over 12 million people as part of the BBC’s influential Wednesday Play series, and though I was too young to watch it, Mum told me the story: a young mother loses her home, husband and children because of the failings of the welfare state. Mum talked about how important Cathy Come Home was because it changed things; it led to Shelter, the homeless charity that was set up around the same time, being given massive support.

  Kes, the film Loach made in 1969 about a boy and his kestrel, was a wonderful film that somehow managed to avoid the type of sentimentality I despise.

  In my house the working-class experience was to be respected and not sugar-coated or denigrated. Which was just as well because the Wednesday Plays were radical and often wilfully controversial. I watched Dennis Potter’s Stand Up, Nigel Barton, in which a coal miner’s son wins an Oxford scholarship, Loach’s Up the Junction and Jim Allen’s doggedly socialist dramas. The Big Flame, about Liverpool dockers on strike, was also directed by Loach.

  Allen was born into a Catholic family in Manchester and he worked on the docks and down the mines before he became a writer. His 1978 television play The Spongers was shot in Middleton, and I remember the excitement rippling through town when the cast and crew turned up. It is sadly as relevant now as it was then: a single mother on welfare is affected by local authority and government cuts until, in desperation, she kills her children and then herself.

  With its echoes of Cathy Come Home, it was an attack on poverty in modern Britain, about the failure of the post-war vision that Labour had for this new world. It was very powerful, but also disturbing and unsettling. I recognised the world Allen was portraying: my grandmother lived on the housing estate on which he filmed. Tragic though The Spongers was, it was thrilling to be connected by geography and background to something that was a pivotal piece of national television.

  I was, like most teenagers, a series of contradictions. I was becoming politically aware and didactic television fascinated me. I understood that it had a place. And yet I was desperate above all for glimpses of nudity. Even if it was only in black and white on a small fuzzy screen.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE MORNING AFTER Nic Roeg’s Walkabout was screened on the BBC, everyone in the playground was talking about Jenny Agutter’s pubic hair. Twelve-year-old boys were absolutely thrilled to see a fully naked girl on the BBC. You could enjoy seeing a naked Jenny Agutter and at the same time be aware that the film had an idiosyncratic style.

  Walkabout was exotic, arty and slightly forbidden, but also legitimate because it was on the BBC.

  As an adolescent I developed a sonar for finding glimpses of female nudity. Often when my mum, Clare and Martin were watching something ‘forbidden’ on TV, I would sneak out of bed, crawl under the sofa on my belly, commando style, and pray that no one would notice me. The sofa had its back to the door, so no one could see me come in and I quickly learned how to enter the room with stealth.

  It wasn’t the most comfortable way to watch TV. I had to watch the screen sideways through someone’s legs, but I didn’t care.

  Someone would inevitably ask, ‘Is Stephen under the sofa? Stephen! Go to bed!’

  If there wasn’t any nudity or violence on the screen, they’d think, ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’

  I was always worried my cover would be blown, but it was worth it to watch those grown-up programmes.

  In 1976, Harold Wilson resigned. There were riots in Soweto that led to the demise of apartheid. Concorde entered service, and Britain was experiencing the worst drought on record. It was the summer that never ended.

  But for me, it was the summer of trying to see Susan Penhaligan’s breasts in Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Albeit sideways, underneath the sofa.

  The series was risqué for its time. The boyfriend was sleeping with the mother-in-law … in fact, every possible permutation of family members sleeping with each other was explored, including a slightly incestuous father-and-daughter relationship that would cause an uproar now.

  We might have been slow to catch on to the hedonism of sixties London, but by the seventies sex was reaching suburbia via TV sets. Television became a Pandora’s box of sexuality. The Hammer Horror films always managed to incorporate sexual titillation against their Shepperton Studios Gothic backdrop. And of course if you watched a foreign film on BBC2 late at night, there was a fair chance you would see a woman not wearing a bra at some point. Particularly if the film was French. It was worth sitting through subtitles just to see a pair of breasts.

  Television was where sexual liberation and feminism met misogyny in a perfect storm of toplessness. The symbolism of women burning their bras as an act of liberation was lost on me in my prepubescence. It simply meant that women would literally no longer be wearing bras, which seemed like a reckless idea but, on balance, a good one.

  Later, I used to pretend to be looking at regular cinema listings in the local newspaper while scanning for inch-cubed adverts promoting a double bill of X-certificate films such as Emmanuelle.

  I would stare at the ad, hard. ‘That’s got naked women in it. It’s definitely not the sort of film my parents approve of.’

  Emmanuelle at least seemed exotic because it was French. Soft porn films made in Britain in the seventies did huge business and yet most of them were rubbish. Confessions of a Window Cleaner. Confessions of a Pop Performer. Confessions of a Driving Instructor. A man glimpses a woman getting out of a bath. He sees her boobs before she sees him looking and, giggling coquettishly, covers herself with a towel. Bizarre.

  It’s even odder that fairly respectable middle-ranking actors such as Windsor Davies were prepared to appear in those films. But there wasn’t much of a British film industry, so I suppose they had to go where the work was.

  While I lived at home, I never snuck into the cinema to watch soft porn. As a student I might once have stuck my head round the door of the Cameo cinema in Manchester to watch a minute or two of a rude film. I didn’t go in, partly because the place was full of the Dirty Mac Brigade, but also because I felt guilty. Part of me was still trying to be a good Catholic boy.

  *

  Mum and Dad would never have embraced my prurience. They had very specific ideas about things. They didn’t like Benny Hill – not because he was sexist, but because, like Bernard Manning, they considered him to be rude and vulgar.

  My early crushes were, somewhat inevitably, on female teachers. Brendan Tierney and I used to like Miss Beasley, who was like a dark-haired Diana Dors, with huge boobs and a big bum. She wore very heavy make-up, had an air of the dominatrix about her and looked wanton. She was very, very strict, but with a twinkle in her eye. Even at the age of seven, Brendan and I were excited by her.

  We didn’t quite know why.

  ‘Would you like Miss Beasley to sit you on her knee?’ Brendan once asked.

  ‘Yes!’ I didn’t even have to think about an answer. I sensed it would be a thrill, but beyond that of course I didn’t have a clue. I just knew she was unlike my mum.

  Around the same time, I had a teacher called Miss Webster, who was also strict, but who had the same twinkle in her eye. She had ringlets that dropped past her ears and two pairs of glasses: hexagon-shaped ones with a purple tint and square ones with a green tint.
Predictably seventies.

  Miss Webster used to take us for PE as well. Next to her desk were white plimsolls with rolled-up socks stuffed into them, which she would wear in our PE lessons, with a whistle round her neck. I remember thinking she really ought to wash her socks occasionally.

  I once watched her go out of a side door to say goodbye to a supply teacher with long hair. He picked her up and twirled her around and it dawned on me that she was a woman as well as a teacher. I tried to paint a picture of The Rolling Stones for her, but in reality it was just some men with drums and guitars and I had to write ‘The Rolling Stones’ at the top to explain who they were. My attempts to impress her were pathetic really.

  For a shy seven-year-old, I was inexplicably bold. There was a really pretty eleven-year-old girl at school called Theresa. I had to know more.

  ‘What’s your second name?’ I asked.

  ‘Green. Theresa Green.’

  All her friends were laughing, but I didn’t know why. It didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t chat up a girl four years my senior.

  *

  When I was thirteen, a lad at school got hold of one of Paul Raymond’s soft porn mags, removed the staples and gave a page to every boy in the class. I took the page home and hid it under my pillow. The content was pretty mild, but it was beyond exciting. And, of course, strictly proscribed.

  I spent the next day at school thinking, ‘I hope my mum doesn’t change the bed sheets today. Please, God.’

  The thought of my mum finding the magazine haunted me all day. All I could think about were the sheets. I thought about them every moment of every lesson. I tried to listen to the chemistry teacher talking about molecules, but I could only see the page of porn.

  As soon as school was over, I went home and raced up to my room. The bed was perfectly made. The sheets were crisp and clean. I lifted up the pillow. The page was gone. I tried to convince myself that I hadn’t left it there. But I knew I had. I felt sick with nerves. It was like waiting for a bomb to explode.

  Mum was normal with me.

  And then Dad came home and they both went upstairs.

  A few moments later, one of them shouted down, ‘Stephen, could you come up, please.’

  My throat constricted. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, delaying the inevitable by desperately trying to sound casual. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Just come upstairs. We want a word.’

  They insisted I went upstairs. There was Dad, holding the page of the soft porn magazine by a corner.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, unnecessarily.

  Mum looked at me. She was both angry and disappointed. ‘Can you imagine how I felt when I found that under your pillow?’

  I spluttered something about looking after it for a friend.

  ‘You’re supposed to be a Christian,’ Dad continued, in a horribly disparaging voice. ‘This woman is being displayed like a piece of meat. Go to the toilet and flush this down to the sewer where it belongs.’

  It was a clumsy response to an adolescent’s perfectly natural sexual curiosity.

  My head hanging in shame, I ripped the page up and dropped it into the toilet. To this day I remember looking down at fragments of porn swirling round and round in the bowl. There goes half a leg. A bottom. A vagina.

  Incidentally, Mum and Dad insist this didn’t happen. Dad points out that he would never have told me to flush a glossy sheet down the toilet, as it would have seriously risked a blockage.

  *

  The seventies was also the era of Mary Whitehouse – the queen of the philistines. But someone to whom my parents nevertheless gave some credence. ‘She’s a bit over the top, but she’s got a point.’

  The seventies was an altogether more conservative era. When I tried to take L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between out of the school library at the age of thirteen, I was stopped by the librarian.

  ‘I don’t think this book is suitable for you.’

  The fact that it’s a good book was irrelevant, because there was sex in it. The subtext was clear: don’t give a teenage boy a novel with sex scenes in it because God knows what it might do to him.

  Pretending sex didn’t exist made it even more exciting. Michelle Eddisford, who lived next door and whose father, Maurice, used to wander into our house occasionally to play pinball, had a book called The Girl Growing Up. She asked if I wanted to look at it. Of course I did. We’d never have a book like that in our house. I was, ultimately, disappointed: it was full of black-and-white ink drawings of penises and vaginas, and offered the most clinical, diagrammatic, unsexy, joyless explanation of intercourse. It read like a Haynes car maintenance manual. The last thing it was going to do was make you feel precoital.

  The truth is that although I liked girls, I was intimidated by them. When I was around nine, I scrambled over quite a high fence to get away from a girl who was determined to kiss me.

  Everything about sex was awkward back then. When I was eleven, nearly twelve, I couldn’t believe it when Mum said, ‘Are you doing sex education at school? Is there anything you want to know about? Is there anything you don’t know about that I can tell you?’

  I was mortified. It was bad enough having to learn about it at school in a class full of giggling boys. Mum was only half offering, and I quickly squeaked, ‘No. I’m fine, thanks.’

  I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, what a horrific conversation. I only just managed to avoid talking to my mum about sex!’

  As my parents didn’t allow us to watch sex on television, so they restricted the amount of violence we saw. I wasn’t allowed to watch The Sweeney because it showed people with stockings on their heads wielding shotguns. Any kind of stockings were out of bounds in our house, whether they were on legs or heads. And of course anything taboo becomes more attractive.

  As I’ve said, I longed to have a colour television, but it was ruled out for a long time. People in council houses rented everything without batting an eyelid. At least my maternal grandmother had a colour TV from Radio Rentals, and I was surprised to discover that a car I had admired on some show or another was bright red and not grey as I’d assumed.

  In December 1975, I watched Dr No, the first Bond film to be shown on television, at my grandmother’s house. I virtually wet my pants with excitement. At school I played in defence in football just so I could chat to the goalkeeper about James Bond and Bruce Lee. Instead of chasing after the ball, I’d hoof it down the other end so we could spend more time chatting.

  My goalkeeper friend, Anthony Dixon, came round to my house with a View-Master and let me look at 3D slides of Roger Moore in Live and Let Die. We were beside ourselves. The glamour! The suits! The cars!

  And of course I had a poster of Roger Moore (we share a birthday; but then I also share one with Cliff Richard, so it doesn’t mean anything). It was probably an uncool thing for a boy to have on his wall, but to me, with his tan, open-necked shirt and safari suit, he oozed sophistication.

  But then I was an unusual boy. Shortly after watching Dr No in all its Technicolor glory, I began to tape-record TV shows at home. I was a human video recorder in the days before they existed. I would borrow my older brother’s cassette player, balance the microphone on a cushion in front of the TV and record my favourite shows. I then had the audio track of that show for ever. It was a serious business. If anyone started talking while I was recording, I’d get all shirty and pompous and growl at them, ‘Ssshh! Stop talking!’

  I recorded Fawlty Towers in this way, and Ripping Yarns, the BBC comedy series written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones.

  I would listen back to the cassettes time and again. It was like capturing lightning in a bottle. Slowly and meticulously, I learned to do all the voices.

  People were impressed and often said, ‘You should be on the telly.’

  I was called upon regularly to bring to life some aspect of the previous night’s TV for a friend of my mum’s or sister’s. They’d be trying to describe the TV show but the effect would
be lost.

  ‘Stephen, did you see the show?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh good,’ they’d say, relieved. ‘Do it for us.’

  They knew they could rely on me to capture the essence of what it was that had made them laugh.

  I would subliminally pick up voices. I had a voice stuck in my head for hours one night. And a phrase. ‘The first man to swim the channel …’

  I woke up my younger brother Kevin and whispered to him, ‘Who’s this?’

  He mumbled groggily through his stupor, ‘Ross McWhirter.’ And then he turned over and went back to sleep.

  Of course it was. I must have been watching him on Record Breakers and his voice had stuck in my head.

  From a very early age, I had a photographic memory for voices. I had what is called ‘a good ear’. I don’t ever remember not being able to do it.

  I used to bring friends home, sit them down and make them listen to my cassette recordings.

  As they sat there patiently, I would describe the action: ‘He’s walking up a hill now. He’s going through a door. He’s just got into his car. He’s driving …’

  The bus from school went past my house, which made it easier to lure my friends back. I think, otherwise, they might have found excuses to give my mimicry a miss.

  I used to get the Monty Python records out to play to my friends too. I cherished vinyl comedy records because you could play them as many times as you liked, then analyse them and learn the lines off by heart.

  We were incredibly careful when handling vinyl: we held each record at the edges with the palms of our hands and always replaced it carefully in its inner paper sleeve, turned the inner sleeve sideways and slid it slowly back inside the outer sleeve. Vinyl deserved reverential treatment.

  CHAPTER 26

  I WAS ABOUT ten when I discovered Monty Python. It was the comedy of anarchy. It was like punk: new and exciting and the kind of thing parents didn’t understand. The Pythons were rude about Catholics and they parodied the Spanish Inquisition. It was the first time I’d ever heard about Catholics doing bad things; it made me start to question the idea that all Catholics were holy and wonderful.