1 American readers may wish to skip this part. I just felt the need to name some unsung heroes.
2 The weirdest (and saddest) of all the Carry On characters. The book is called The Man Who Was Private Widdle.
3 His sister-in-law was Celia Johnson. She didn’t get offered the part of Pussy Galore.
4 Villainous Auric Goldfinger was named after Erno Goldfinger, designer of the unloved Elephant and Castle development and London’s Trellick Tower. He was very upset with Ian Fleming, apparently.
5 The only alcoholic drink it was impossible to get pissed on. Women were encouraged to say ‘I’d love a Babycham’ after the War, because they hadn’t been in pubs for five years and had forgotten what to order.
6 A female bagpipe marching band that formed the butt of a thousand sixties jokes. They’re still going strong.
20
Still No News from Michael Winner
‘ANY NEWS FROM Michael Winner yet, then?’ asked my mother, on her hands and knees as she tackled the dog’s hairs with her new ‘Static Wonder Brush’. The house was freezing cold because Bill had accidentally put the end of a pickaxe through a boiler pipe.
‘Nothing so far,’ I told her, returning to my notebook critiques of movies. It was the end of term, and my English teacher had asked for an essay on any aspect of being English, a subject that was deemed very important at the time. My classmates were writing about a seaside weekend, a trip to the funfair, meeting a girl at the school sports day, a country holiday. I concluded a lengthy dissection of English fiction with:
I think there is something in our national character that makes us admire authors like Evelyn Waugh, whose heroes never get anywhere, always ending up back at the point where they started, or far worse off. Our novels are peppered with weak men who observe the action of their lives from a distance. Our nature seems drawn to these types of stories. We admire plucky losers and anti-heroes, boffins in tatty jumpers, chaps on the sidelines, headachy women who apologize about their nerves while arranging daffodils, men who never loosen their ties. As a race, we’ve completely dried up. We’re emotionally dead. I think this is very useful to know, in order to be prepared for adult life. One day I hope to travel and see if it is the same in other countries.
I headed the essay with a quote from Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
Howe’er it be, it seems to me, ’tis only noble to be good;
Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood.
The quote had been used for a famous Ealing comedy, but the point was lost on Mr Piper, my teacher, who stamped the page with the following note:
Marks: 2/10
English Teacher: Mr Piper
Comments: Well, I really don’t know what to make of this, Christopher. You start with Tennyson and end up with Evelyn Waugh, but you are discussing low art. More worryingly, nowhere do I find any sign of who you really are. I would say that you are a chameleon, but I don’t know what you are supposed to be blending in with. There’s no doubt that you have strong opinions, but the peculiar disarray of your mind leaves me completely flummoxed.
‘What did your teacher think of the essay?’ asked Kath.
‘He says I’m probably not a chameleon,’ I said unhelpfully.
What did Mr Piper know? He was stuck in a minor grammar school, teaching Anthony Trollope to kids who preferred masturbation and Thunderbirds. I skipped his final English lesson and went to the Woolwich Odeon instead.
My introduction to sex was via Carry On films, matrices of suggestive codewords layered over tissue-thin plots. The most important words in any Carry On film were ‘it’ and ‘one’, as in ‘She wants it’ and ‘Can you give her one?’ – the entire lexicon of sexual tomfoolery was buried within such phrases. The director evidently thought Barbara Windsor was sexy if she took tiny steps with her arms held back, like a duckling learning to walk. But if the girls were in need of a month on a Stairmaster before donning unflatteringly tight pink hotpants and white patent-leather boots, the middle-aged men who lusted after them were quite astonishingly ugly, sporting what was eventually to become the defining look of the seventies: the beer-gutted, sideburned, bulbous-nosed, queer-baiting, fashion-impaired, leering ‘lady’s man’. I watched in amazement as a gallimaufry of Hogarthian grotesques chased wobbly dolly birds across the screen.
The tragic and frequently grotesque clowns of the Carry On films reflected sexual insecurity, shame and embarrassment, just as Brief Encounter had done a generation earlier. That film, after all, wasn’t about love at all, but about guilt, loss, repression and humiliation. I tried to watch it every time it was on television. At one point Celia Johnson was treated like a common prostitute for daring to fall in love. Her emotions ranged from fruitless yearning to feeling cheap. Her attempts to define the sensation of falling in love were undercut by the men around her. Even her faithful husband couldn’t think of the word ‘romance’ when filling in a crossword clue, and Trevor Howard’s seduction technique involved describing the symptoms of black lung disease in a husky voice.
Between Brief Encounter and the Carry On films were the St Trinians films. Ronald Searle’s wartime drawings of horned and horny schoolgirls inspired a series of family farces in which sexually aggressive pupils seduced older men. I could not help feeling that there was something very peculiar at work here. Cynicism at the inefficiency of bureaucratic England seeped through the series like damp. The men from the Ministry of Education sang ‘The Red Flag’ on election night, praying that Labour would win and abolish private schools because they themselves were too ineffectual to act, and had to be reminded by a passing charlady that, as civil servants, they were not expected to have political affiliations. Shiftless workmen repairing a hole in the Ministry floor became long-term fixtures accepted by everyone. Seduced civil servants hid in the school greenhouse for months on end rather than returning to work. Councillors took their lift-man (played by Michael Ripper, naturally) along on a European fact-finding mission. The English attitude to Europe was summed up in Naples by Ripper, who tapped the barometer and complained, ‘If it gets any hotter, I shall have to take my pullover off.’ This was the English character actor at work – mundane, earth-bound, dry, bemused. Ultimately, the school – financed on stolen money and immoral earnings – was seen as a more decent institution than the inert, corrupt and powerless state. A story was just a story, but was I also meant to read this as a reflection of my country? More importantly, was there some lesson to be learned here about the act of writing?
Norman Wisdom was even stranger. Strip away the sentiment and you arrived at the surreal, whether Norman was imagining his landlady with a horse’s head, singing an eye-chart off-key, turning a police pursuit into a back-garden steeplechase, playing golf upside-down in the top of a tree, being induced with pneumonia or seduced in weirdly convincing drag. Male comedy stars spent so much of their time dressed as ladies that it seemed an entirely natural occurrence.
It took me years to work out why I enjoyed these films. I knew that admitting to my classmates that I liked Norman Wisdom would make them treat me even more like a leper, because in my year you were only allowed to like Steve McQueen. But they were missing the point. The shrill, inarticulate little comic had his roots in the class war. In One Good Turn he made straight for the first-class train carriage for no other reason than to disturb its occupants, and this was a trend that continued throughout his films until it became open anarchy. He destroyed posh buildings, wrecked institutions, smashed up expensive cars and gleefully encouraged others to be drawn into fights; this was a schoolboy’s anarchist manifesto, a reaction against the ration-book restrictions of post-war England that consistently attacked authority figures, including mayors, corporate executives, government officials, police sergeants and politicians, and only caused destruction to status symbols – Rolls Royces, country mansions, gala dinners and State visits. I could see that – why couldn’t they? And why did they run off to play football whenever I enthusiastical
ly broached the subject?
I started taking my notebook to the pictures, and perfected the art of writing in the dark. I noticed that a large number of English films featured American actors whose careers were on the skids, and that Get Carter was the closest England got to producing anything cool, mainly because Michael Caine owned a coffee grinder.
I paid my money, watched them all and continued making crabbed, obsessive notes.
Many English comedies pitched a small, crankily run private business against a faceless modern conglomerate, and foolishly suggested that old-fashioned commerce with the personal touch would always defeat slick efficient enterprise. True to form, the English had nailed their colours to the wrong mast. These wish-fulfilment fantasies became increasingly harder to swallow as the nation was overtaken by huge supermarket chains. There was nowhere left for the self-effacing cardigan-clad hero to go. He was as out of date as Colonel Blimp, the old soldier left behind with his morals and charm intact, but without a pot to piss in. No wonder Bill spent so much of his time in a bad mood.
During my very many trips to the Odeon, I discovered one English director in a class of his own. To my highly critical mind, he was the worst English director of them all, and from 1960 to 1998 he silted up cinemas with some thirty-four films, most of which I found unwatchable. It seemed to me that Michael Winner, bon viveur, director, producer, writer, editor, actor and casting director, never knew when he was making a horrible mistake.
His casts seemed to be stuffed into the kind of clothes that could become collectable costumes for bad-taste parties. It was probably just the fashion of the times, but everyone was badly dressed. The men wore wide-lapel suits of the kind once found in Mister Byrite.1 The women all looked like hookers, or rather how a man would imagine hookers should look, with tight blouses, shiny boots and big hair.
Most outrageous of all was The Cool Mikado, which united the terpsichorean talents of Stubby Kaye, DJ Pete Murray and lip-pursing comic Frankie Howerd. Although it only ran for just over eighty minutes, it felt like the longest film ever made. The production employed the John Barry Seven to re-work the songs of Gilbert & Sullivan, setting them against the dancing of Lionel Blair,2 with eye-rolling, end-of-the-pier jokes from Mike and Bernie Winters and Tommy Cooper.
The Cool Mikado had the kind of cinematography associated with lower-end porn films: everything looked cheap and cramped, everyone looked sweaty, the crimson and green sets were emetic, the dialogue and dancing were worse than on a drunken stag night. Even to my untrained eye it looked technically inept, with bizarrely delivered dialogue lines, crossed camera lines, wrong angles, misfiring jokes, and everyone jostling for camera attention except the extras, who were chatting among themselves, waiting for direction or possibly nodding off. There appeared to be little trace of Gilbert’s original plot, although it might have been there – it was hard to tell, because one scene had very little connection with the next. After a while the film became a Dadaist artefact with the power to hypnotize the hardest-hearted critic.
One day, I knew, this film would be recognized as a thrilling, visionary work of art.
I realized what I had to do. Rushing home, I dug out my notebooks and began storyboarding the entire screenplay from memory. It was time to use my imagination to produce something worthwhile and meaningful. Where better to start than by re-writing Gilbert & Sullivan via Michael Winner and Tommy Cooper? I could correct all the mistakes, right all the wrongs, and turn what I saw as a fat, smelly old sow’s ear into a beautiful silk purse.
Over the next few weeks I worked feverishly on the script, often including my plasticine-model Polaroids of particular scenes. Then it was simply a matter of tracking down Mr Winner’s swanky Holland Park address and mailing off my masterwork. I felt sure that the director would be thrilled to have all his continuity errors, poor characterization, weak plotting and tenth-rate overdubbing pointed out to him. Thrilled by my initiative, he would commission me to make a new version, putting everything right. Together we could save a masterpiece.
The only thing was, I hadn’t thought to make a copy of the script before I asked my father to post it.
After waiting patiently for about a year, I realized there was a good chance that the director might never get in touch with me. The truth was that Bill had completely forgotten to mail the package and had left it in a motorcycle repair shop somewhere.
1 A super-cheap clothing store that seemed to have a permanent sale on elephant-cord flares and Budgie jackets.
2 Twinkling, perma-tanned choreographer who defined variety-show camp.
21
Hard House
THE MOVE TO Cyril Villa had coincided with me sitting the eleven-plus, an examination which took place in the gymnasium at school and featured what I considered to be a series of totally irrelevant problems.
A train with nine carriages takes 75 seconds to pass through a station at 40 mph. How long is the station platform?
Who knew? How on earth could I be expected to know about the design of the station from the mechanical efficiency of its rolling stock? And what about the people who were waiting to get on the train – would they now all be late for work?
What is a levee?
Something you waited on, surely? Didn’t the Black and White Minstrels sing about this? Could be a trick question. It was the geography section, after all, not musical comedy.
What have been the reasons for the United Kingdom’s balance-of-payments difficulties on both current and capital accounts over the last ten years?
Hang on, I was eleven years old, not the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and besides, wasn’t that a bit politically loaded? Talk about giving ammunition to the Shadow Cabinet. Pass on that one.
Who do you think was the ‘Dark Lady’ of William Shakespeare’s sonnets?
Now I knew it was all a wind-up. Scholars had been arguing about this for centuries and now they expected some spotty schoolboy to figure it out for them? A bunch of examiners were having a laugh somewhere. Better wing this by making up some fantastical travesty of my own.
A particle travels 2 × 108 centimetres per second in a straight line for 7 × 10–6 seconds. How many centimetres has it travelled?
I’m sorry, I felt like writing, your call did not go through. Kindly replace the handset and dial again. The question appears to be broken, or you are speaking in French, or are quite possibly mad.
I put down my pen before anyone else. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?
Good, it transpired, because somehow, by some mysterious process, I appeared to have sailed through the exam. I could only think that there were bonus points awarded for surrealist answers.
My score qualified me to go to Colfe’s Grammar School, the Royal Leathersellers College, one of London’s oldest guild schools. There would be posh boys there. Parents with money would be dropping off their darlings in Rollers – the cars, not the hair-care equipment. In fact, there was a very good chance that I would be the poorest pupil in the entire school. When everyone else went off on the school skiing trip I’d be the one left at home. A whole new world of humiliation was about to open up before me.
I was reading Gormenghast at the time, and living in it, too. In my mind, the towering edifice in Peake’s book became synonymous with Cyril Villa. The vast crumbling castle sinking under the weight of its history and traditions, a gloomy labyrinth of corridors and chambers so knuckle-scrapingly real that I felt trapped inside them, was a fractured mirror of England, frozen in time and smothered by centuries of conservatism, suffocating in meaningless rituals, doomed to disappear from the moment the youthful kitchen underling Steerpike climbed from a window to view his home from the outside. Death stalked those pages: the death of tradition and the end of all things, as well as human destruction. I carried the book everywhere I went, because it deserved to be revered, its heart-rending language and images remembered as long as there were books left to treasure. Plus, reading was more interesting than staring at the dark, damp
-patched walls of our TV-less lounge, listening to my dad’s rivet gun.
The house did have beautiful Edwardian mirrors over marble fireplaces with twisted pilasters and golden statues of chariot racers, but Bill ripped all of these out and replaced them with iridescent metallic log-flame-effect gas fireplaces, which he got cheap from his Elephant and Castle gas showroom.
Cyril Villa also had a view, down Knee Hill (why did we have to live in a part of the body? Why couldn’t we have moved to a place with a normal address?) and out on to the misted grey marshlands that lay between the Woolwich armoury and Erith, where London’s last wild horses had cantered. Bill would jingle the change in his pockets while he watched brown-sailed barges heading up and down the Thames. ‘I should think that’s probably carrying jute to Southend,’ he would announce knowledgeably, as if anyone was going to argue with him.
But times were changing. Work had nearly finished on a new estate which the local paper held a competition to name. It was christened Thamesmead, and was going to be a cross between Metropolis and Shangri-La, but for the first decade of its life it became a watchword for shoddy British workmanship. Bill reckoned that some of the houses were starting to sink into the marshes because the land had not been properly drained, but the final nail in the coffin came when A Clockwork Orange was filmed on one completed section of the estate. Nobody wanted to live there after that, my father told me, not even displaced gypsies.
I found the film version of Anthony Burgess’s novel too close for comfort, because when I walked home past gangs of kids behaving like Droogs, it felt as though fiction had crossed over into fact. Strewn with chip paper and fag cartons, Abbey Wood was designed for insolent loitering, the gateway to teen delinquency. The neighbourhood kids were neurotic, doped-up, walking scar tissue, groomed for early failure. Hanging out with them was not an option, so I stayed at home.
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