Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (20 page)

Again,
I tend not to stay at Hay as my mum lives quite near by so I go to her place
and she comes with me to whatever sort of show I’m doing. At the moment I alternate
every year between doing a Q and A about my latest book and performing
stand-up. It’s quite strange having your own mum in the audience and I suppose
to some extent it could be quite limiting. But I have to keep remembering that
my mum is in her seventies and I am in my fifties and she won’t get up and tell
me I’m not allowed out for a week if I swear.

I love driving, and during
one tour with my tour manager John, after one particularly long and
hair-raising journey from Devon across to Surrey when we were late and John did
rather too much driving in the middle of the road to get us there in time, we
mooted the idea of having a crack at rally driving. On our travels, we had met
a lovely guy called Gary whose son worked at a rally school so we arranged to
go down there and have a go.

It was
really exciting being given permission to put your foot down on a muddy track
that wound round sharp corners and up over bumps, and I was bitten by the bug
almost immediately.

Things
moved on apace and we found ourselves with our own rally car (a used Peugeot,
cheap and little). I had also managed to get Channel Four to agree to us making
a documentary about getting my international licence which would lead up to the
Rally of Great Britain.

We
tried a few rally race days and I suppose we were unusual, because we both
wanted to have a go at the driving, rather than one of us always being the
navigator and the other always driving. Navigating is a stressful job in a
different way; you have a very detailed set of instructions in front of you
describing the exact layout of the course. Bends are divided into different
categories so that in theory you can tell your driving partner how much he has
to slow down, but we weren’t very good at it and much of the time whoever was
navigating was slightly behind the driver and would shout out, ‘Sharp bend
coming up!’ just as we were going round it, or veering off the road.

Our
first rally was on a race-track down in Sussex. By this time we had been kitted
out in rally-driving suits which I have to tell you are not the most flattering
outfits even if you look like a twig, which I don’t; you feel as if you are in
your own personal sauna. Add to this a helmet with an inbuilt microphone ‘cause
you can’t hear a bloody thing once the helmet’s on and the total effect is
claustrophobic. And that’s
before
you even get in the bleeding car.

Once
you’re in the car, it gets worse. You are strapped in with a four-way seat belt
and surrounded by the internal cage-like structure of the car, which is
designed to stop you being killed if the car rolls. Quite useful, then.

However,
it does mean you feel trapped once you’re in there; your movements are severely
restricted and if you want to go for a piss, forget it. As a woman you have to
peel the whole bloody thing down to your ankles. Once, however, I was so
desperate, I legged it off into the woods at the start of a rally took a quick
look round to make sure I was alone, did the business and then as I was hauling
it all up, realised I was being observed from some distance away by a large
group of spectators — there to watch the rally not me having a wee.

One
very special feature of the rallies that we took part in was an excess of
mooning. Word had gone out at some of the rallies that I was competing and on
more than one occasion I would round a corner, concentrating like mad, to be
presented with a delightful bare white arse that obviously hadn’t seen the sun since
its nappy was left off. Once there was even a row of about five. This
brightened up my rallies and I almost began to expect it after a while.

It has
to be said that John and I were pretty shit rally drivers and even worse
navigators. Although we enjoyed it, we were glorious amateurs really and
nowhere near the class of the professionals. As the training rallies went on,
we started to get a better feel for it, although we got lost quite a lot and
grew used to driving up to ramblers and walkers and asking, ‘Have you seen a
lot of rally cars go past?’ If they hadn’t we knew we were well off-piste.

At one
rally in which I was navigating we drove off the start ramp and as I hadn’t
really been concentrating on the cars that went before us, I said to turn left
— whereas they had all apparently turned right. We found ourselves down a cul
de sac after five minutes and had to go back to the start so I could follow the
map again.

Our
final rally before commencing the Rally of Great Britain was in Wales, and the
start was very high up, nearly in the mountains. The run-up to the start was
absolutely terrifying and ran alongside a sheer drop of hundreds of feet.
Although we were only doing about three miles an hour I experienced something
approaching a panic attack — not terribly impressive before the race had even
begun!

Things
went from bad to worse … we nearly crashed on a hairpin bend above a huge
drop, and by the time we got to the end of the stage I staggered out of the car
and vowed that I would never get in a rally car again. This somewhat messed up
the whole point of our documentary, but we carried on with John agreeing to
drive it, and taking on a new navigator; I, meanwhile, in a girly way, waited
at the end of stages, interviewing spectators and drivers.

In
fact, I interviewed the very talented driver, Richard Burns who sadly died far
too young of a brain tumour. He informed me that women were rubbish rally
drivers because they had no bollocks. In my case, he was absolutely correct —
physically
and
metaphorically.

Rather bizarrely in 2008 I
was asked whether I would like to perform in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta,
The Pirates of Penzance,
in a West End theatre.

Gilbert
and Sullivan are quite old-fashioned in the sense that people who like them
tend to be about 140 years old. But one of those people is my dad, who used to
play quite a lot of the stuff when I was a child so I had many of the tunes in
my head. Also, I thought it might give him an opportunity to actually come to
something he might enjoy rather than pretending to.

The
company who wanted to put the show on were called Carl Rosa; they perform
exclusively Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and they thought that if they bunged
a few so-called celebs into the mix, it might open G&S up to a whole new
audience.

The
Pirates of Penzance
is a reasonably straightforward
tale of love and intrigue. I was asked to play the part of the Police Sergeant,
which had never been played by a woman before. The role suited me as my voice
is quite low and I am elderly so I would hardly be in line to play the heroine
Mabel, who wears nice dresses and warbles up to unfeasibly high notes. Also,
not much is called for on the acting front: a fair bit of striding about,
barking orders and looking strict. I also thought it might be a nice
opportunity to wear a Victorian policewoman’s costume. Not that there was such
a thing, because in Victorian times, policewomen did not exist.

The
last and only time I had worn a policewoman’s costume was for a sketch show,
and I found myself wearing a costume with the name
Joan Sims
sewn into
it. Joan was, of course, a luminary of the
Carry On
films and I felt
like I was wearing comedy history.

To get
in some practice, I wandered out on the street for a bit and pretended to be a
proper policewoman. I told a few people off for parking offences, and it was
amazing to discover how much deference people have towards the police.

In
order to start the process off, I had to learn the songs … two of them: ‘When
the Foeman Bares His Steel’ (yes, I’m none the wiser, sounds a bit pervy
though, doesn’t it?), and ‘The Policeman’s Song’, a well-known ditty that most
people have heard at one time or another. I went to a studio in Central London
where a lovely man called Duncan put me through my paces. I don’t have a good
voice but managed to growl along to it on the lower register. He gave me the OK
and said he thought it was unlikely people would throw things as soon as I
opened my mouth.

It was
then on to rehearsals in a room down the road. I found the whole thing daunting
as all the other performers were regular G&S aficionados. Still, I had to
bite the bullet and be prepared to look like a twat in front of them. So I
jumped in with both feet.

I had
my own little gang of policemen, bless ‘em, hardly a heterosexual among them,
and when we first practised our march onto the stage, the choreographer Steve
said something like, ‘For fuck’s sake, you’re supposed to be marching, not
carrying baskets of flowers.’

It was
such a good laugh and I could have just done rehearsals for ever, but in what
seemed like a very short time, round came the actual show at the Apollo in
Shaftesbury Avenue. I had already been to see
The Mikado
which starred
Alistair McGowan, who was so good in it that I began to worry I would cock
things up really badly I tried not to do that comparing thing, because down
that road lurks depression. There is always going to be someone better than
you.

On the
first night I was all but paralysed with fear, terrified that a tiny squeak
would come out of my mouth, followed by me running off stage, simultaneously
wetting myself and crying. I must have gone to the lay seven or eight times in
the last ten minutes, and then I was pushed towards back stage, given my
truncheon … and then I heard the opening notes to our march and suddenly I
was on the stage waving my truncheon like a good ‘un and doing an approximation
of singing.

For the
first few nights I hit a note an octave above what I was supposed to be singing
and I could see the appealingly strict conductor Richard looking at me like I
was mental. It hardly seemed to matter though and we comedied it up as much as
possible before marching off to laughs and applause. I then had quite a bit of
time to go out through the stage door and have a fag before I was back on to do
‘The Policeman’s Song’ and deliver the few lines I had.

There
is a big closing number and I was dressed up in some sort of wedding dress for
a laugh and had to enter under a garland of flowers with Bev, who played Ruth.
We spent the time waiting to go on chatting about a number of varied subjects,
and during one particularly interesting discussion about the menopause, missed
our cue completely and had to run on at a pace slightly too demanding for two
middle-aged ladies.

I did
the show for two weeks and managed to get away with it. On one occasion I was
slightly stressed out as I had to get to the Saturday matinée and had not
realised what the time was. Glancing up at the clock I saw I was late, got my
stuff together and ran out to the car. I slung open the boot, threw a bag in
and bent down to check it was properly in. At this point the boot sprang back
unexpectedly and whacked me on the top of the head. It hurt like hell and blood
started gushing from the wound. Shit, what to do? Casualty? Lie down? Ignore
it?

I went
back in the house, got an enormous wodge of kitchen towel, bunched it up and
held it on top of my head. I then drove up to the West End with one hand, using
the other to keep the blood-soaked wodge of kitchen towel on my head. When I
arrived, I had the mother of all headaches, but at least it seemed to have
stopped bleeding, and as far as I could see, none of my brains were coming out.
The make-up lady very delicately positioned my wig and helmet on top of a
fresh wodge and onto the stage I sauntered, feeling like shit.