Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  As soon as I became aware of Python, I thought to myself, ‘I want to make my living from this.’

  But it was an unfocused ambition. I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t well read, I didn’t yet have a burning desire to write. It all struck me as scarily grown up and too much like hard work. I was lazy, a daydreamer, distracted, a bit feckless. But good at voices.

  When I learned the sketches by heart, I had little or no idea of the significance or nuance of some of the references. Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, Jean de La Fontaine … they all went over my ten-year-old head.

  I just knew it was different and odd and exciting. I’d watch my friends starting to laugh as I recited excerpts. It was a fantastic feeling.

  I remember a particular sketch where the mother of the John Cleese character had just died and Michael Palin was playing the undertaker. What I loved so much about it was that it was pushing the boundaries of decency. The sketch ended with Michael Palin talking about vomiting the mother up into a grave, which is a really terrible image. My parents would have been horrified.

  I know people tended to have favourite Pythons, much as they had a favourite Beatle. But I liked each Python for different reasons: Michael Palin made you laugh when you weren’t quite sure why, and I enjoyed the acidity of John Cleese.

  My parents liked more orthodox comedy, such as Fawlty Towers, which started on BBC2 in September 1975. The very idea of it was intriguing – John Cleese had a new sitcom in which he played a boorish hotel owner.

  My brother David talked about it before it was broadcast; he always tipped me off about new shows. In 1979 he told me about a new BBC2 show called Not the Nine O’Clock News, rightly predicting that everyone would be talking about it. I owe him a debt.

  I bought the scripts for Fawlty Towers and, later, Ripping Yarns. It was easy to get hold of them then. The Fawlty Towers script had a photo of Basil Fawlty’s hotel on the front cover and was full of dialogue to covet.

  I remember certain scenes from it even now.

  The two old ladies saying, ‘Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do, Mr Fawlty.’

  And Basil saying, under his breath, ‘Just a little breathing, surely.’

  It was full of really fantastic, bleak humour.

  ‘The Germans’ episode – which is very funny, outrageous and rude – is a favourite.

  BASIL: ‘Now, would you like something to eat or drink before the war … ning that trespassers will be tied up with piano wire?’

  He can’t stop mentioning the war and has to quickly change ‘war’ into ‘warning’, but then makes it worse by mentioning an appalling act for which the Nazis were infamous.

  ‘The Germans’ episode was only thirty years after the war, and yet here I am, misty-eyed about an episode that was broadcast over forty years ago.

  There was an edginess to the comedy which I loved because you never knew what was coming next.

  When I see those episodes now by chance on TV, there’s a wonderful joie de vivre about them. It’s fantastic to see John Cleese in his thirties, his talent maturing at the right moment.

  Of course, Fawlty Towers is now cloaked in a haze of nostalgia, but it works on so many levels for me: Alan Partridge owes so much to Basil Fawlty; it’s the BBC at its best; it’s familiar and comforting.

  Watching Fawlty Towers or The Good Life is the closest I can get to touching the past. When I catch glimpses of those programmes on TV, I can see myself watching them in the living room in Middleton as a child; us all sitting around, laughing; the safe, comfortable place I grew up in.

  It’s incredibly evocative. It reflects back the world I lived in, because the world I lived in loved those programmes too.

  *

  The next time a TV show really hooked me was in 1982, when I was in the lower sixth. The Young Ones, which launched Ben Elton’s career as an alternative comedy writer, felt more relevant to me than Not the Nine O’Clock News; I was studying A-level Government and Politics, and the references in The Young Ones were really current. I liked the fact that I got those references as well as the fact that I got the humour.

  I probably felt a little smug.

  I was surrounded by students who were into mainstream television, film and music, and here was a series that made me realise I wasn’t alone. I felt like one of those people who have an illness and when they discover it’s a condition that lots of other people have, they can suddenly deal with it because they are not on their own.

  I remember waking up the morning after the first episode of The Young Ones and thinking, ‘These people speak the same language as me. They are talking about the stuff I’m thinking about!’ It’s dated now, of course, but at the time it felt very punk rock in its mocking not only of the establishment in general and Thatcher in particular, but also those who opposed it.

  Political polarisation in comedy is always fruitful.

  Unlike the Pythons, none of the actors – Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer, Christopher Ryan and Alexei Sayle – had been to Oxford or Cambridge. If Python was posh punk, then The Young Ones embraced anarchy and was as silly as it was funny.

  I did an impression of Kevin Turvey in A Kick Up the Eighties before I really knew who Rik Mayall was. Then I found out that not only had he been to Manchester University, but he also used to do stand-up comedy in the foyer of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. He was a brilliant, exciting, talented young comedian who had spent some of his formative years in my city.

  When I was young, being a comic wasn’t the career option it is now. It’s what old blokes like Les Dawson did. Nobody of my generation thought, ‘I want to get into comedy.’ But knowing that Rik had spent time in my city made me feel that there might just be a way into his world.

  *

  Dad had a traditional sense of humour that involved terrible puns, and often he would tell a funny story that just didn’t land. When Martin was seventeen and I was twelve, we started to mock the clean, traditional sense of humour that Dad embraced, in which there were no dirty jokes and no swearing, sometimes even sniggering as he was telling some unhip joke.

  Yet Dad had real soft spots for Hancock’s Half Hour and The Goon Show, which really were the last hurrah for radio comedy. He would play them on vinyl, his enthusiasm drawing me in until I too became a fan.

  Tony Hancock plays a version of himself in Hancock’s Half Hour, which is something I have done a number of times.

  Hancock had that discontentedness that comics tend to have. A disquiet. Feeling at odds with the world. Frustrated. That feeling that you could have been a contender and that it’s other people’s fault you’re not. Feeling that the world owes you a living. Aspiring to have a greater intellect – that is Hancock to a tee. Wanting to be more noble, civilised, learned.

  There are things about me that are both ridiculous and simultaneously quite noble. I can be both those things at the same time. Alan Partridge is one manifestation of that and I am another.

  Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, the scriptwriters who worked with Hancock between 1954 and 1961, were such wonderful writers, as were Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who wrote The Likely Lads and Porridge. Jeff Pope and I share an affection for those comedies, which I hope is evident in Philomena.

  Anyway, Galton and Simpson went on to write Steptoe and Son, a gritty black-and-white sitcom about two working-class rag-and-bone men. Wilfrid Brambell played the dirty old Tory father, Albert Edward Ladysmith Steptoe, and Harry H. Corbett played the lefty son, Harold Albert Kitchener Steptoe.

  We used to do that kind of television so well; I miss it. Galton and Simpson’s comedy was so sad, poignant and full of pathos that it often pushed me to tears. The pilot episode in particular stands out. ‘The Offer’ was a two-hander set in one room. Harold threatens to leave; he wants his own shop with his own name above the door. Albert argues that he already has his name above the door: ‘… and son’.

  Steptoe senior says that if his son leaves he can’t have the horse, so Harold tries t
o take the cart. But he can’t move it; he can’t physically leave. He bursts into tears.

  Albert comforts him. ‘Go in the morning. I’ll make you a nice cup of cocoa.’

  Harold agrees, but you know he’s never going to leave.

  It’s heartbreaking and funny at the same time.

  I met Galton and Simpson about twenty years ago, at the Sony Radio Awards. They said Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge on Radio 4 was as good as anything they’d ever done.

  I was quite young to hear that kind of compliment from writers I respected so much. I was firing on all cylinders and had very little introspection or self-doubt; I was like a hyperactive child, wanting to consume work, sex and life voraciously.

  But I wasn’t stupid. I was speechless after talking to Galton and Simpson. It remains one of the best compliments I’ve ever been paid.

  CHAPTER 27

  ALTHOUGH, BY ELEVEN, I was becoming aware of a world beyond Middleton, I wasn’t yet ready for secondary school. I was still wetting the bed. I still wanted my mum all to myself when I ran home from school at lunchtime.

  I was so petrified of starting grammar school that I skipped the first few days. I was worried about the new subjects I’d be learning. I was worried I’d get lost. I was daunted by all the big, smelly teenagers in uniform, who looked like apes. I had to talk myself into going. At least I could catch the bus with friends from primary school. And I had my new, cool Terylene blazer from a shop in the Arndale Centre.

  Most kids who went to Cardinal Langley Roman Catholic High School in Middleton had black wool blazers that smelled of damp dog when they got wet. Some kids had blazers with red braiding sewn on by their mothers that looked home-made and cheap. It was easy to spot those who had home-made blazers and those who had the real thing. The wool blazer boys always had ink on their fingers. They were Just William, Billy Bunter types. Old-fashioned.

  I spurned a wool blazer in favour of this sharp-looking blazer that you could roll into a ball and watch spring back into shape. Terylene was a wonder material; housewives loved it because it was so easy to wash, dried quickly and never creased. Although if you had put a match anywhere near my blazer, it would no doubt have melted.

  I’m surprised Dad didn’t make me wear a DIY blazer; I must have talked Mum into splashing out £13.50 for the synthetic one.

  I often wore hand-me-downs from my brothers, but on this occasion I was allowed a new blazer, a new tie and a proper school sweater. It must have cost my parents a small fortune.

  The Terylene blazer boys could afford a slight swagger. I certainly felt a bit James Bond in mine. I wore nine-hole Dr Marten boots; nine holes were just the right measure of rebellion, they were ever so slightly punky. Boys with eleven holes were taking it too far.

  Cardinal Langley was a prestigious grammar school, and it sometimes felt like it secretly wanted to be a private school. Or Hogwarts. The boys were separated into six houses. I was in Rigby, like my two older brothers before me. You had to earn points for your house by doing well at sport and generally excelling and, at the end of the year, the winning house was awarded a shield. I was so proud when we won. There was a slight kinship with other people in your house, even if you weren’t best friends.

  The school was run by De La Salle Brothers. The first De La Salle Foundation in England opened in 1855, five years after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in Britain. The Brothers are, generally speaking, in favour of teaching the poor; when comprehensive education came along, my school had the option to assume private status, but it was against the ethos of the Brothers. So, in September 1979, when my younger brother Kevin joined the school, the school turned from a single-sex grammar school into a co-ed comprehensive.

  And yet, when I started in 1977, Cardinal Langley was still old-fashioned and patriarchal in so many ways, and my first two years felt very Tom Brown’s School Days. It was run by Brother Thomas, a headmaster with a soothing Irish voice who commanded everybody’s respect. He gave us a welcome talk on the first day and addressed us all as ‘gentlemen’.

  His nickname was ‘The Boss’, but he never raised his voice and preferred to punish the boys by giving them chores like cleaning windows rather than the strap or the slipper. He was humane.

  In the few decades since the late seventies and early eighties, education has changed virtually beyond recognition. What would seem barbaric now – namely, corporal punishment – was the norm then. And a strict Catholic boys’ school was at the extreme end of eighties education. Even when I started, Cardinal Langley still hadn’t quite left the Victorian era behind. It was a gloomy building, with wooden benches and Bunsen burners and cross-country runs in all weather.

  I was lucky to have two older brothers in the school. People knew I was one of the Coogans and it offered some insurance. But it didn’t stop a boy in the fourth year from punching me in the face just because I answered him back. My lip was bleeding and I burst into tears. When I told the teacher he admonished the boy lightly, but nothing more. Generally, however, the teachers didn’t hold back when it came to punishment.

  *

  My generation was the last to experience corporal punishment, which was outlawed by Parliament in 1987 but slowly fell out of fashion before then. I lost count of the number of times I was slippered. And by ‘slipper’ I mean a plimsoll with a hard sole. We used to be given on-the-spot geography tests and if we got less than three out of five, the slipper would appear. Each time, a line would form of around ten kids, waiting to be whacked. If you forgot your PE kit, you’d get the slipper. If you forgot your biology homework, you’d get the slipper, twice. One teacher drew a chalk cross on the bottom of the slipper so that everyone knew you’d been punished. I was often to be seen walking around with a white chalk cross on my backside.

  Only the strap had to be signed for and a reason given for its use; the slipper could be used arbitrarily.

  I had a fight once with a tough kid from Langley council estate. The kids from the estates were tougher than us, but clever too – we all had to pass the 11-plus to get into the grammar school. This lad was a boxer and he punched me, perhaps because he didn’t like the look of me or maybe because I’d made a smart comment. Bravely – stupidly – I grabbed him by the hair, pulled his head down and kneed him in the face. He was smaller than me, so he got slippered once and I got slippered twice.

  In the first year – now known as year seven – our form teacher used to drag us around the classroom by our hair. But that was nothing compared to the strap. It was made from weighted leather and was so potentially brutal the teachers weren’t allowed to raise it above their heads. It was designed to cause pain but not injury, to leave a red mark but not a welt.

  Sometimes you had to hold your hand out for the strap. Other times you had to bend over, holding your breath and clenching your buttocks as you anticipated the thwack. Then you would blink really hard and bite your lip to stop the tears. Sometimes I cried. Not because I was upset, but because it really bloody hurt. I can vividly recall the pain now and it still makes me wince.

  My dad’s cousin’s husband worked at the school and he strapped me once. I was on the field when I shouldn’t have been, but I think he did it to show no favour. And then I saw him over Christmas, acting as though nothing untoward had happened.

  Dad used to say the slipper was character-building. Perhaps it was, for some people. For the emotionally vulnerable I imagine it was soul-destroying. I found it a bit of both. There’s no doubt some teachers got off on it. Since the guidelines for the use of the slipper were non-existent, it’s fair to say that those who employed it regularly for minor misdemeanours were suspect.

  Clearly my home life wasn’t like Billy Casper’s in Kes, but my school wasn’t a million miles away from his in many ways. We were expected to be tough. In my first year we had to do six-mile runs. Mostly I came in the top ten of the hundred boys who took part in the run, simply because I had stamina and refused to give up. We went along dirt tr
acks, across the canal, up to Tandle Hill Country Park, then we had to run up to the monument on the hill, kiss it and run down the other side. Once I lagged behind and found myself on the wrong side of the canal. I couldn’t find the bridge; I was stranded. I burst into tears. I walked and walked in one direction until eventually I found a bridge.

  For the last stretch we’d be running like zombies, splashing through puddles, covered in dirt, snot streaming down our chins. Always thinking, ‘Keep going. Just keep going …’

  When we got back to the games area, we would collapse on the tarmac floor of the indoor court. We’d lie there, exhausted, our slender bodies throbbing and steam rising off us like racehorses. And then for the communal showers. Some boys were already hairy and man-like, others smooth as an eel. I was somewhere in the middle. And yet there was no embarrassment about nudity; we just jumped in the showers.

  If you forgot your PE kit, you would have to borrow a rugby shirt that stank of another boy’s sweat. And you got the slipper. Unless you paid a fifteen-pence fine, in which case you would be let off. When it was my birthday one year I came to school with some of the money I’d been given and I paid the fine for all the boys who had forgotten their PE kit. I was a hero that day. All the boys kept saying, ‘Thanks, Coogan!’

  It wasn’t only about a need to be liked. I liked to put a stick in the teacher’s spokes, to deny him the pleasure of giving the boys the slipper.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to pay for friendship. I was friends with a flashy kid who lived on the council estate. His dad was a scrap metal dealer and they lived in the best house on the estate. This boy was smart, confident and cool. I was neither smart nor cool. I wasn’t into hanging around with the sporty, popular types, who were too pleasant and polite. I wanted to be cool and interesting, in a kind of unconventional way. Much as I hoped the flashy kid might improve my image, he proved a transient friend.