Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (33 page)

Sister
Frances
was not commissioned in the end because the
channel felt it was too tame for a time slot of 110.30 p.m. Well, that was the
first we’d heard of it going back to its original late slot, and I was bloody
frustrated about this because I would have beefed it up big time, had I thought
we could get away with a lot more.

So, we
all moved on, but I was well pissed off about it because it seems we couldn’t
even communicate between ourselves what time of night the bloody thing should
be on.

Oh
well, thank the Lord for
Through the Cakehole.

Through the Cakehole
was a comedy series with sketches and stand-up that I did for
Channel Four, and which I think I got on the strength of me staggering onto the
stage at Edinburgh a couple of times. I did the show through a production
company called Channel X which was part-owned by Jonathan Ross and a couple of
other telly types (who were very normal and nice for telly types) called Katie
Lander and Mike Bolland.

I wrote
the series with my friend Jim Miller and the enormity of it only struck us when
we started doing it. Filling six half-hours of comedy is not easy. We wanted to
have a long-running serial within it, so we came up with
Drudge Squad,
which
to this day is my favourite thing I’ve done on telly.

Drudge
Squad
was supposed to portray the life of a woman
with a slightly useless husband as she attempted to juggle her job as a police
detective and her role as a mother. My sidekick was played by my friend Maria
McErlane.

Drudge
Squad
centred round the minutiae of a mother’s
life, like nappies hanging up to dry in the back of police cars, the main
characters turning up late owing to crises at home, and various items of domestic
apparatus being used to handcuff prisoners.

We
managed to get a few car chases in, which I’d really wanted to do, and did a
lot of the filming on a rather scary estate in Acton, just hoping we wouldn’t
be surrounded by a gang who nicked our cameras and all our worldly goods.

I think
my favourite day on
Drudge Squad
was the day we managed to drive a car
into the sea. I have no idea why the production team agreed to fork out the
money for this, as it must have cost a bloody fortune. In the car were myself,
Maria and Simon Clayton who played my husband Dave. We were in a battered Ford
which had a chain attached to the back of it to drag us out in case it all went
horribly wrong and we all started drowning. Maria and I were extremely excited
and looking forward to it, whereas poor old Simon obviously thought it was all
going to go pear-shaped and looked slightly sweaty and terrified.

We
drove down a sort of concrete ramp and in we went to a pretty millpond-ish sea.
We got in pretty deep and the car began to sink as we desperately tried to
deliver our lines in a reasonably professional way. Before we could actually
drown we managed to get out of the car and wade back chest-deep in waves, still
delivering lines. The car was dragged out by the chain and back onto the
slipway. There had been some camera or sound problem so the director asked for
another take. Mmm — wet car, no chance. Amazingly, the car started first time
when I turned the key in the ignition and in we went again, Simon not best
pleased at having to reprise his performance.

The
rest of the show was a collection of higgledy-piggledy sketches. Among my
favourites were:

The Bernard Manning
Sketch

In this sketch we
populated an entire country village with black people and I, as the only white
person, drove through it as a series of black faces looked with shock at me.
Being a typical English village it looked completely surreal. The punch line to
the sketch occurred when I walked into the local pub, again populated only by
black people, and marched up to the bar taking down the hood on my coat as I
did so. The barman looked at me and said, ‘Oh thank God, we thought you were
Bernard Manning.’ Tense atmosphere then changes into a party one.

Fat People Sketch

Four of us, me, Ricky
Grover, JoJo Smith and ‘The Man with the Beard’, stand-up Kevin McCarthy, were
stuffed into the tiniest Fiat imaginable and just drove round looking for
eating opportunities. We took over an ice-cream van and were just allowed to do
what we wanted. I’m not sure the sketch came out particularly funny, but the
four of us had such a good laugh doing it, and I would like to thank Channel X
for their indulgence in allowing us to get away with it.

The Gold Blend Coffee
Couple Piss-Take

This was a sketch I did
with actor Kevin McNally who went on to greater things like
The Pirates of
the Caribbean.
This was the slobs’ version of the romance between the
golden pair via instant coffee.

I
knocked on a door looking shit wanting to borrow some coffee and it was
answered by Kevin, unshaven, in his pants and looking god-awful. At this point
an exchange followed between us which mined the depths of filth and double
entendre around the topic of tea bags and coffee.

This
was perhaps the most difficult sketch I’ve done in terms of trying to keep a
straight face. Kevin looked so brilliantly awful and pervy that every time I
opened the door, I just could not hold back my laughter. After several takes I
realised I was really irritating everyone, but unfortunately that only made me
worse. Suffice to say it went on for ever and I did eventually get bored with
laughing.

Other
sketches included actors Helena Bonham Carter, Craig Ferguson, Gary Webster off
Minder
and Martin Kemp, former heart-throb from Spandau Ballet. I was
very impressed that any of these guys were happy to do a daft sketch show with
an unknown comedian in it, and I found them all charming, unstarry and easy to
work with. I know you’d like me to say they were a pain in the arse and
demanding. But they weren’t.

We did two series of
Through
the Cakehole
and I found it very hard. The main problem being that by the
time a channel has decided that they actually want a series, the time available
to write it has shrunk to virtually nothing — maybe a few weeks. At one point
Jim and I rented a house in Suffolk for a week to force ourselves away from the
local joys of pub quizzes, friends and general entertainment. But there is
something about being holed up together when you have to write comedy under
duress that makes any potential comedy ideas just leak out of your head. It was
a fractious time and after a few days we were both on the point of what your
tabloid newspaper would call ‘a breakdown’. We had cabin fever, couldn’t think
of anything funny, rowed and felt a bit helpless.

Rescue
came in the shape of our mate Jeff Green who came for a visit and lifted the
highly charged atmosphere. Everyone calmed down and the work started again,
although we did stop in the evening to have drinks and play Scrabble. There
had, I felt, been a slightly weird atmosphere in the cottage where we were
staying, and one night as Jeff and I picked out letters for Scrabble, I got
consecutively E V I L. Well, it was shaping up to be the opening of a horror
film. I then picked three anonymous vowels. Jeff picked his letters. The first
three were E V I … My heart skipped a beat and I held my breath … An M
appeared. We all had a good laugh and told ourselves retrospectively that we
knew we were being ridiculous.

The
series got written, as did the next one, in a completely random and chaotic
way. I suspect the general public may have visions of comedians sitting in some
luxurious office surrounded by lackeys supplying coffees and any other
requirements, but in my case it was late-night sessions with a notebook, a bottle
of brandy, smoking my head off and watching some crappy late-night programme
about students trying to cook.

Getting On
is a series about nurses looking after the elderly in the NHS. I
have already written a little about it in the chapter called
A Day in My
Life.
I had always wanted to do a comedy that could also make people sad as
well as laugh, and as there are so few programmes with old people and
middle-aged women in them, I really wanted to go down that road.

My
friend Vicki Pepperdine lives just down the road from me and had done some
great comedy stuff like
The Hudson and Pepperdine Show
on Radio 4. In
fact, I met her because she used to live next door to my best friend Betty and
we’d chatted over the wall a few times. We punted some ideas to the BBC, none
of which were received with anything other than indifference, so one day we sat
around brainstorming ideas for shows which would contain a few old bags (ourselves)
and we also got Jo Scanlan in too. She was a friend of Vicki’s and they worked
together on a fantastic comedy called
Coming Soon
on Channel Four, which
was about a theatre group touring Scotland. It also starred David Walliams and
Ben Miller, and was so funny I couldn’t believe it when it finished prematurely
and didn’t appear again. Jo is also in
The Thick of It,
the incomparable
political comedy from Armando Iannucci.

We felt
that although the NHS had been done to death in comedy form, there was still
room for a realistic, downbeat comedy which tried to remain faithful to the way
the Health Service is these days, so we got together a proposal for the series
and contacted a production company called Vera, with whom I’d made
Through
the Cakehole
800 years ago. We had one of those lunchtime meetings that
people in telly have and which in some ways is just an excuse to have lunch and
one wonders if anything is really going to come out of it. However, the MD
Geoff Atkinson, who is a lovely person, was very keen and so we thought we’d
move it on to the next stage.

A
meeting was arranged with Janice Hadlow, who at the time was the Controller of
BBC4. (Have I said I love that word ‘controller’ — it’s so
1984,
isn’t
it, and makes me think of Thomas the Tank Engine’s Fat Controller. Before I
read the books to my daughters, I always had the emphasis wrong and thought he
controlled fat, rather than being a Controller who happened to be fat.)

As luck
would have it, BBC4 were doing a season on the elderly and Janice thought that
Getting
On
would fit very well into that season. After some discussion, they
finally let us know that they were happy to commission three episodes and see
how it went. I was ecstatic. This was something I really wanted to do, so we
set about getting a loose script together, around which we could improvise and
see how it went.

I have
to apologise to Jo and Vicki at this point, but I had so much other work on, I
left them to do a fair bit of the donkey work sketching the ideas into script
form. Many of the areas we covered were things that had happened to me as a
nurse or in hospitals, and so we decided to kick off the series with having an
unidentified poo on a chair and the rigmarole that now surrounds sorting it
out bureaucratically.