Small Man in a Book (15 page)

It was Hawaiian Night at the Troubadour, an exciting prospect for staff and locals alike. I remember arriving for work in an optimistic pair of colourful shorts and a suitably Hawaiian shirt, to be met by a wolf whistle from Barbara. Ironic, I’ve no doubt. Julie would have treated me to a sympathetic ‘aww …’ and Sandy probably joined the chorus with a giggle.

There were two bars at the Troubadour: the big main bar, which would be staffed throughout the night by three of us and, around twenty-five feet away to the left, in the darkness on the edge of town, a smaller facility, which would be manned solo. For this reason I always referred to it (rather wittily, I thought) as the Millennium Falcon. It would not be the last time I would find myself explaining a joke. On the night in question, after a period on the big bar with my colleagues, I was sent over to man the Millennium Falcon. This gave me a great sense of pride, to be handed such responsibility so soon into my tenure at the club, and as my short white legs crossed the floor space, clad only in my colourful tropics-suggesting shorts, I was determined not to abuse the trust that had been placed on my young shoulders.

The thing to remember about the smaller bar was that you were on your own, and the till was your sole responsibility; if there were any mistakes or discrepancies at the end of the evening, they were down to you and you alone. It was expected that you would make good any shortfall, a serious proposition given the modest wages that the job provided. With this in mind I was extra careful to give the correct change and to always keep an eye on the till, which was positioned behind and to the right of me, lest someone attempt to dip their fingers therein. With hindsight, this overly cautious approach cost me an evening of delights which would, I’ve no doubt, have altered the course of my future relationships with women. At the very least, I would have started the race at the same time as the other runners, rather than chasing desperately behind them, baton in hand. It’s fair to say I handed over my baton much later than my friends …

But back to the little bar. There I was, working away diligently in a Hawaiian style when at some point I found myself talking to two girls as they leaned against the bar. I can remember absolutely nothing about their appearance. I remember a great deal about their actions. As the conversation progressed (what were we talking about? I have no idea …), it occurred to me that the girls, and certainly one of them in particular, were becoming increasingly fruity, the one leaning in ever closer as her friend looked on approvingly. I remember them urging me to come out from behind the bar and join them so that we could familiarize our young selves. I was hesitant, my lack of success with girls at this point leading me to believe the only rational explanation for such interest on their part was their being involved in an elaborately planned sting, the design of which was to separate me from my beloved till. At which point their stripy-shirted accomplices would drop from the ceiling, SWAT-style, and empty the till of all the carefully counted money I had collected thus far.

To encourage a positive response on my part, the more forward of the two, while her helper looked on offering encouraging glances, began to suck my finger.
She was sucking my finger!
It may have been two fingers; it may even have been three. It was all I could do to stand upright and not pass out. In between slurps she would keep imploring me to come out from behind the bar. I wanted to. God knows, I wanted to. I think it’s fair to say that I had never wanted anything more in my entire life. She had managed to wangle out of me the fact that my mother’s red Datsun Cherry was parked outside, and suggested it would be the perfect vehicle for the three of us to drive off in towards her warm and cosy flat on the nearby Sandfields Estate. I pictured this beautiful abode as she sucked and licked my fingers ever more salaciously, while simultaneously glancing nervously over my shoulder to check on the till.

By now, there were two things stopping me from leaving the safety of my post. One was the till, the other was the risk that my flimsy shorts, robbed of the shielding properties of the bar, might give too clear an indication of my conflicted state. I have to say that nowadays in such circumstances I would probably leap up onto the bar and demand a spotlight, but in those long-gone times of fantastically frequent and often unaccountable downstairs developments, I usually found myself reacting with great self-consciousness. And so it went on, the freshest stalemate known to man, until, bewildered and defeated, the two of them sloped off in a highly aroused state of defeat and I was left, standing proudly next to the till – still intact.

On many occasions since that day I have played out in my mind the events of that most anti-climactic of evenings, struggling to remain true to the details as they unfolded. Rather like a screenwriter adapting and altering a much-loved book for the cinema, the only thing I change is the ending. In all my nights at the Troubadour, this was the one and only time that sex – or, at least, the faint possibility of sex – reared its head. This and the ever present, ‘can’t rule it out’ scenario lurking in my overdeveloped adolescent imagination that one evening, quite without warning, Barbara, in the manner of a short, Welsh and slightly aggressive Mrs Robinson, would take me in hand and teach me the ways of the world.

She never did.

The Troubadour was the first job I ever had, unless you count washing cars for Dad’s sideline, a car valeting business in a lock-up in Port Talbot. There’s not a great deal to report about my time with the sponge – in fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that my only memory is of washing away one day and hearing the DJ on the radio announce that the new single from Shakin’ Stevens was entitled ‘Green Door’. I can remember that with sparkling, high-definition Blu-ray clarity. I must have spent hours there, washing, polishing and buffing; yet that’s all I can remember. Perhaps it’s Shaky that makes it memorable. I was a huge fan, with an exhaustive collection of his record-breaking singles, stored neatly and safely in one of those little plastic carrying cases that we all had in those days. I would cycle to Port Talbot and purchase the discs on the day of release, at Derrick’s, the record shop favoured by Port Talbot’s more discerning young hipsters.

I eventually met Shaky many years later, when he came on
The Keith Barret Show Christmas Special
and we sang together. Almost. He had a throat infection, so we ended up doing a peculiar version of his big festive hit, ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’, where we’d sing a couple of lines each, he miming and me singing live. It hadn’t been easy, booking him; I had to call him personally and reassure him that we weren’t going to take the mickey. We weren’t. I couldn’t have been more excited than at the prospect of singing with my childhood hero. When I finally got to speak to him on the phone and make my pitch, I probably scared him a little with my knowledge of his back catalogue, listing obscure album tracks and ‘B’ sides to convince him of my sincerity.

I wasn’t the only one excited at the prospect of Shaky’s appearance. I remember singing away on the night of the recording, as the fake snow fell all around us, and seeing that most edgy of actors, the King of Credibility, John Simm, who was standing on the studio floor behind the cameras, jigging around and singing along. I’d met John while filming
24 Hour Party People
, Michael Winterbottom’s retelling of the Factory Records story, all about Joy Division, Happy Mondays and New Order. Here he was now, dancing along to Shaky and me.

If someone had told me when I was back at school, or sitting up in my bedroom playing Shaky’s records, that he’d one day be standing next to me on my TV show miming his heart out, I wouldn’t have believed them. As it turned out, I would go on to meet and often work with many of my heroes in the years that followed – but of course I didn’t know this at the time.

As a result of the school shows, I had a quiet confidence that I would go on to find success as an actor or a performer of one sort or another; it was a confidence that would be put to the test, but for now it was intact. With that in mind, the first step was to find a place at drama school.

PART TWO

‘Working on a Dream’

8

In my final year at school, assuming that I’d somehow manage to pass the five O level exams necessary for a grant, I began filling out the forms required to apply for auditions at drama school. I chose the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (or RADA, as it is famously known), the Central School of Speech and Drama, both in London, and finally, closer to home, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, in Cardiff. As far as I can recall, applicants were told to prepare a piece of Shakespeare and something modern. Something modern tended to mean Pinter, and so I set about learning a piece from
The Homecoming
. It was the bit where Lenny is talking to Teddy about his misappropriated cheese roll, and it’s full of unpleasant undertones. I’m not sure that I managed to convey the darkness and unbearable menace that is so obviously there; I suspect I came across more as David Jason’s Del Boy in a bit of a bad mood.

Many, many, many years later I would meet Harold Pinter at a restaurant in London. My wife and I had been for dinner with friends, one of whom was on good terms with Harold and his wife Lady Antonia Fraser who, we discovered, were seated two tables away. At the end of the meal our companions went across to say hello, and so I drifted over to join them, admittedly a little intimidated by the thought of the great playwright whose words I had failed to do justice to, twenty-three years previously.

To my surprise, he recognized me as I approached. ‘Ah, you’ll know … We’re talking about laughter, different forms of laughter.’

I affected a look of confidence, as though casually chatting with Harold Pinter in a West End restaurant (it was the Ivy – there, I’ve said it) was something I took in my stride, an occurrence of almost monotonous regularity. Meanwhile I was searching for something to say that would show me to be a bit of a thinker.

He was looking up at me, and waiting for my response.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘there’s a great difference between the laughter you hear from the studio audience on an old
Morecambe & Wise Show
and the laughter you hear from the audience at a modern television recording,’ and I made a face to indicate that in my opinion things were better in the days of Eric and Ernie.

‘Oh yes,’ he replied. ‘Yes!’

Emboldened by Harold Pinter agreeing with me in the Ivy, I went further. ‘Harold,’ I said, ‘I’m glad to have met you. In 1984 I auditioned for RADA with a piece from
The Homecoming
. I didn’t get in …’

He waited.

I debated whether to carry on along my intended path – I could, after all, fall flat on my face. Then I remembered something Anthony Hopkins had once said when interviewed by the remarkable James Lipton on
Inside the Actors Studio
. He had been asked if he had any advice for young actors, and replied that all actors should leap into the abyss and trust their talent. I decided to chance it.

I continued, ‘I can’t help thinking that if you’d tried a little bit harder with the writing, things might have been different.’

Silence.

He looked at me quizzically and an eternity passed as a chill wind blew through the Ivy.

Then he laughed, long and hard. Without pausing.

I breathed out.

So, as I was saying to Harold Pinter at the Ivy, I failed to get into RADA. I had found the whole experience of auditioning there to be pretty intimidating; it was as if I knew in my heart that I wasn’t good enough, or what they were looking for. Or maybe I just wasn’t ready. I like to think that if I auditioned now I’d get in. But then – no chance. The whole place spooked me; the other kids who were there to audition on the same day all seemed so much older than me, so much more mature. They all seemed to be wearing long flowing coats and had wild Byronic hair, which danced on their heads like a shampoo commercial as they strolled confidently along the corridor outside the audition room, text in hand.

These auditions at the London drama schools were hugely significant staging posts in my life and yet I only have the vaguest of memories of the actual RADA audition itself, a hazy image of a panel of judges united in their cosmopolitan disappointment at what had just been presented to them in such a provincial manner. I slunk away from the imposing building on Gower Street and walked, defeated, along the London roads, sure that I wouldn’t need to be looking for digs in the capital any time soon.

The audition for Central was a similar experience, and the whole business of coming to London in the hope that the schools would recognize they had the next Richard Burton on their doorstep was destined to be a failure. With hindsight, I was never going to be accepted at either of these prestigious establishments; on the wall at RADA is a beautiful wooden board listing the school’s medal winners through the years, including Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh, Albert Finney, John Hurt. These are serious actors, and the would-be students waiting in the corridor with me seemed serious also; they looked to me as if they were concerned with acting as an art form that could explore the human condition. I wasn’t.

I was always looking for the laugh; there was no place in my mind for subtext or layers, beyond classic misdirection in the setting up of a joke. It amuses me, on reflection, to think that when I finally did break through with
Marion and Geoff
and
Human Remains
, I was very much involved with examining the human condition. That’s really what the shows were all about.

I travelled up to London twice for the separate auditions, and the intervening years have meant that I can’t really differentiate between the two trips much beyond a hazy memory of an abundance of glass at Central. But I do know that my chosen treats while up in London were hardly those of the serious drama student.

For one of the stays I went to see
Run for Your Wife
, the Ray Cooney farce, in its original West End production. I had a last-minute seat in the Gods and laughed till I cried at James Bolam dashing between his two wives. On the other visit I went and watched
Live from Her Majesty’s
, the ITV variety show hosted by Jimmy Tarbuck. If I had been there a week later, I would have witnessed the death of Tommy Cooper. I’m glad I wasn’t.
Run for Your Wife
was excellent, the timing of the ensemble cast was perfect (as it has to be, for a farce to work).