Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (32 page)

Well, I
thought at least they might shut the café to make filming a bit easier, but oh
no, they didn’t bother.

So
there I am sat on a stool, dressed as a fairy, looking like a twat, and just to
add that extra frisson of joy, building workers are tramping in and out to get
their bacon butties and making their feelings about the way I look perfectly
clear. Christ, the humiliation. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I had assumed
that the piece would be buried in the schedules around about teatime as it was
a children’s show and no comics would ever see it as they don’t tend to get up
till the news.

However,
almost as soon as it had been transmitted, I got a call of the piss-taking
variety from my friend Mark Lamarr, and realised I hadn’t got away with it. I
allowed him his victorious phone call and then thankfully it was never
mentioned again.

I did
quite a bit of TV with Mark, as I suppose at the time we were part of a group
considered the hot young things. It has to be said he was much hotter than me
as he was so young, barely twenty, whereas I was a bit lukewarm, being the
grand old age of thirty.

At the
time there was much socialising and staying up late, taking part in titanic
drinking and card sessions. For a long time our card game of choice was called
Black Maria, a very nasty affair which involved dumping the person next to you
right in it. Of course, fuelled by drink, this was cause for much falling-out
and rowing, but it all added to the fun of it.

I
remember once when we had stayed up all night and Mark and I were due in
Manchester early afternoon to do a TV show that night, which was a showcase for
stand-ups. We realised we weren’t going to be able to get any kip at all so,
fuelled with a packet of ProPlus, the students’ friend, we drove up to
Manchester with the increasing ingestion of the aforementioned stimulant
making us ever more wired and ever more grumpy. This may be the reason that I
can’t actually remember anything about the show at all, apart from the fact
that Steve Coogan, John Hegley and Hattie Hayridge were in it. Not exactly the
height of showbiz dissipation is it, ProPlus? At the time it was our only
option apart from fifteen espressos.

These
first TV appearances were a real learning curve. First of all, they were not
like doing stand-up in a club. The audiences were more distracted because there
was so much going on in the studio: cameras and cameramen! women moving about,
the floor manager exhorting people to laugh/clap/cheer louder, and make-up
people coming on constantly to add a layer of powder to the more sweaty ones
amongst us. This made it difficult for the acts and the audience to really ‘gel’
and so a lot of the time one tended to feel one only had 70 per cent of their
attention.

I found
this difficult to get used to at the beginning, because it is easy to forget
that actually your performance is for the
viewers,
so how you are doing
with the audience is in many ways irrelevant. It’s important to look straight
down the barrel of the camera and give it everything you’ve got, regardless of
the fact that the studio audience may be looking at you like they want you
hung, drawn and quartered.

On these early occasions I
came up against wardrobe people who wanted to change me from a lifelong scruffbag
into a middle-aged Tory matron. It was hard for me to be dressed up like a
Christmas tree and decked out with sparkly accessories because I felt utterly
ridiculous.

As a
woman who spends roughly 0.003 of a second on my hair and make-up in the
morning, the idea of sitting in front of a mirror for up to half an hour while
someone slapped God knows what on my face and hair was anathema to me. I just
wanted to wear my scruffy black clothes and a slash of red lippie and go into
battle with that, but instead I was battered, pummelled, waxed, had my hair
pulled about, curled, straightened, moussed and sprayed — and by the time I
tottered on stage I felt like a chubby tower of chemicals.

I
eventually got used to this and have tried over the years to claw back a little
bit of my own taste from the unrecognisable person who used to emerge from the
make-up and wardrobe rooms. To be honest, if I ever catch a glimpse of my old
TV appearances, I simply don’t know myself.

One
thing which was a help to me in my early telly career was being recalled to do
more of
Friday Night Live.
(If I may blow my own trumpet very briefly
here for one second, I was the only one.) This was a huge boost to my
confidence and, I think, probably resulted in extra work starting to come in on
TV and radio.

Other
comedy and cabaret series I did at the time were
Up the Junction,
filmed
at the Junction Folk Club in Cambridge and compered by Will Durst, a good solid
political American comic who I liked, apart from the fact that at the end of
the show he would say, ‘You’ve been great, I’ve been Durst!’ which made me very
embarrassed for him because English audiences much preferred their comedy down-to-earth
and non-showbizzy.

Also, I
did a show in Soho a couple of times called
Paramount City
which was a
straightforward stand-up show compered by the delightful Arthur Smith. I have
always thought of Arthur as the Sid James of alternative comedy owing to his
rich London accent and craggy features.

In the
early days I also did
Saturday Zoo,
on which Jonathan Ross was the
presenter. Originally a researcher, he had been pushed forward from the bowels
of the production office and he ran
Saturday Zoo
as if he was a natural.

I have
always admired Jonathan Ross, given that again, like Russell Brand and Ricky
Gervais, he came from an ordinary working-class background and didn’t have an
Oxbridge badge to smooth his passage into TV He is very bright, has an eclectic
knowledge and is charming and friendly. There is really only one thing about
him that irritates me — and plenty of other people — and that is his attitude
towards attractive women on his radio and television show, which can be
patronising beyond belief!

When
I’m watching or listening, I see it as an unavoidable trial to get through, as
he regales each female guest with honeyed words about how gorgeous they look —
at which a sizeable proportion of the female population, judging from the straw
poll I’ve done, feel like they want to vomit and consider reaching for the off
button. I can’t think why, but he doesn’t do this to me and treats me as an
equal. I know some women are flattered by this kind of quasi-pervy admiration,
but I bet there are a few who smile and accept his compliments through gritted
teeth and wish he’d move on from treating them like they’re a tasty morsel to
be eaten with the eyes.

Over
the years, women who resent being assessed on their appearance have been
categorised as unattractive, resentful old harridans who are envious of other
women’s beauty. To anyone who thinks this, I would say, ‘Grow up,’ and
incidentally I have the same attitude towards women who like certain
footballers because they look nice or have sexy legs. I find this equally
patronising and this attempt by women to equal the score by objectifying men
strikes me as silly.

This was the point in my
career when I began to meet proper grown-up stars. I remember having a coffee
outside the production office once and wondering what a little girl was doing
there. The little girl in question was facing away from me and appeared to be
wearing quite adult clothes. Then she turned round and it was Kylie Minogue. I
could not believe what a tiny little perfectly formed person she was, and being
introduced to her I felt like a giantess with sausagey fingers and a socially
unacceptable bulk — which is exactly the line many of the tabloids took when I
started to appear on telly.

One of
my less happy memories of TV was
The James Whale Show.
James Whale was a
controversialist whose raison d’etre appeared to be to slag everyone off. His
show was a mix of interviews, chat and music with regular guests. Jim Miller
and I were booked to do a song, so we did a pastiche of a song called ‘Summer
the First Time’, a romantic song about the first sexual encounter between a
young man and an older woman. Of course we had comedied it up and filthied it
up. One of the guests on the show was DJ Mike Read, who had been responsible
for banning Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s slightly rude single ‘Relax’ from the
airwaves, so he sat through our song with a stony expression on his face
looking like he’d sucked a lemon. And at the end of the song, just to land
ourselves in it even more, I announced, ‘Oh, look! There’s James Whale’s wife
over there grazing.’

I
hadn’t realised that James’s wife really
was
at the show and probably
wouldn’t have done it if I’d known. James Whale was furious, but it was not an
attack on his wife — it was an attack on
him.
I have always felt that if
you dish it out big time, you have certainly got to be able to take it.

I found
myself in a similar position when I was on
Wogan,
the telly show, with
David Sullivan, the newspaper porny man. As is so often the case when one
meets people of his nature — well, what do I mean by that? What I mean is that
he seemed like a perfectly pleasant bloke.

But I
have a problem with the porn industry, and however much people may argue that
…

·
It’s just a bit of fun.

·
The women in it earn a
packet (as opposed to putting their mouths round one).

·
The women have control.

… none of this balances
the fact that …

·
The image projected of
women in porn is not a ‘bit of fun’ for the readers who absorb it and use it to
justify treating women with contempt.

·
Only the top porn stars
earn a packet’. The rest are exploited and desperate, and if you have ever
watched cheap porn, you can see that. They are either thin as sticks, look
stoned or look like robots.

·
Again, only the elite few
have control; the rest grin and ‘bare’ it.

So despite Mr Sullivan’s
surface charm, I felt I could not just sit back on a sofa with him and nod
sagely as if I agreed with his existence. So, I felt it my duty to have a go
and banged out some jokes about the size of his tackle and generally tried to
take the piss out of him. All right, I accept it wasn’t the most sophisticated
attack, but I was obviously not there to outline the academic feminist argument
in its fullest sense, I was there to do comedy and that’s what I tried to do.

Sister Frances

Sister Frances
is a sitcom that never was, a funny (I thought) show about nuns that
sadly didn’t ever make it past the pilot.

As I
mentioned earlier, pilots demonstrate the approach TV companies take to new
comedy. They are able to get an idea of how the show will be without having to
actually commit themselves to a series. They make pilot shows basically because
they like the idea but are a bit worried that the transition from the initial
idea and script will result in the programme being crap — and fair dos, it can
happen.

I wrote
Sister Frances
with a comedy writer called Sue Teddern who was coming at
it from a very different angle to me. Her approach was more traditional, I
suppose, whereas I constantly have to rein myself in or else the result would
be so dark, people probably couldn’t cope with it. This was before
Nighty
Night
and the like.

We
negotiated with ITV who said they wanted something for the late evening, post
watershed. So that was what we did — quite rude, quite dark. Having produced
this, they then changed their minds and said it should be more whimsical and
quirky and suitable for 7.30. So out came a fair bit of filth and some of the
darker moments, which was a shame as my comedy is much more suited to late
night.

I find writing
stuff and the process of refining it pretty exhausting. Once I’ve written
something, I can’t see the point of constantly going back to it because I
always think that makes it worse. Still, we hacked away at it, Sue saying
things to me like, ‘You can’t have a dead nun in a cupboard,’ and me saying
things to her like, ‘Why do Terry and June have to come in at this point?’ For
all our differences, we got on well and finally came up with something we were
happy with.

We got
a cast together including my lovely friend Morwenna Banks who is very funny
indeed, and Honor Blackman who used to be in
The Avengers
and agreed to
be the Mother Superior.
Sister Frances
was filmed in a studio with an
audience and of course, although you have rehearsed it endlessly, it’s always
quite a scary experience to get your first audience sitting in front of it.

Sadly,
it didn’t go brilliantly — I thought because we’d had to cut some of the more
grown-up stuff. I found myself at one point, dressed as a nun, in Mother
Superior’s office with some exercise equipment, thinking, Oh bollocks, this
isn’t working at all.