Untold Stories (57 page)

Brought up during the Second War I am a child of the BBC Home Service, listened to, at the beginning of the war anyway, on a wireless that still requires an accumulator. This is a heavy glass battery, the shape not unlike that of a miniature police box as was, though that too has long since disappeared and is remembered now only as the original of the Tardis in
Doctor Who
.

The accumulator has to be regularly recharged, a process that involves me or my brother lugging it (the metal handle cutting into one's fingers) along the path by the Recreation Ground and across Moorfield Road to an electrician's grimy workshop somewhere in the perilous Edinburghs, which are poorer streets than ours and infested with wild boys and slum-my girls and urchins with a permanent rivulet of snot running from their noses.

With the accumulator the wireless takes a long time to warm up, a phrase that later becomes one of the standard jokes in the wartime comedy show
Much Binding in the Marsh
, with Kenneth Horne and Richard Murdoch. We blame it, too, for our often poor reception so it's a relief when Dad invests in another wireless, a Philco, bought second-hand through the Miscellaneous column of the
Yorkshire Evening Post
. Domed and in brown Bakelite, according to Dad this is a better set than our previous one not only because it runs off the mains but because it lights up.

Television had briefly begun in the 1930s before the war put paid to it,
but though I must have heard of it, it was one of those many things that happened Down South and certainly not in Leeds, and none of us had ever seen it. Still, the notion of it must have been there because Dad having promised us a wireless that will light up, it is a disappointment to find that that is all it does … no faces, no figures, just an illuminated dial and a knob with which to scan Hilversum, Droitwich, Dortmund and all the other faraway places of which we know nothing, the only two stations we ever tune in to the Home Service and the Light Programme.

In common with virtually every family in the country at that time we settle down every week to listen to
ITMA – It's That Man Again
– a title which I take to refer to Hitler, about whom there are constant jokes, but is more likely to be the show's compère and anchorman (and the most popular comedian of the day) Tommy Handley. Relentlessly cheerful and with an unstoppable flow of wisecracks and repartee, Tommy Handley presides over a regular cast of characters, Mrs Mopp, the charwoman, Colonel Chinstrap, the drunk, Funf, the German spy, and half a dozen others, all kitted out with their particular catchphrases. With Mrs Mopp it's ‘Can I do you now, sir?', for Colonel Chinstrap ‘I don't mind if I do', the mere repetition of which is enough to have the audience and the nation in stitches. But not me.

Tommy Handley's unquenchable high spirits come to stand for the spirit of the Blitz and in his time (and for long afterwards) he is an iconic figure who is beyond criticism. But as a child I know that he is not funny, ranking in my book with those equally unfunny uncles whose idea of humour is to throw you up in the air, hard-hearted mirthless jokers on the family stage.

I see Tommy Handley as the essential cheeky chappie, a type I have disliked ever since. There is Tommy Trinder too, who also shelters under the banner of the Blitz, harsh, male and, one suspects, not very nice and never raising a smile with me the whole of his long life. There is Ted Ray and Arthur Askey, both from the north it's true but like Dickie Henderson, unmistakeable cheeky chappies. A child of the north, I don't care for cockneys or their much-advertised Blitz-defeating cheerfulness: all that
knees-up, thumbs in the lapels down at the old Bull and Bush cockney sparrerdom has always left me cold.

Even Max Miller, though regarded by some writers (notably John Osborne) as a secular saint and reverenced for his anarchic spirit and the subversiveness of his sexual innuendo, still has too much of a permanent grin on his face for me. Besides, those violent check suits he goes in for seem to me quite definitely common. Like the fox in Pinocchio, he is plainly up to no good.

Cheeky chappies are not gender-specific: Two Ton Tessie O'Shea is a cheeky chappie, for instance (and massively unfunny). So to a lesser extent are Elsie and Doris Waters, sisters to Jack Warner, who started off as a cheeky chappie before ending up as the respected desk sergeant of television's
Dixon of Dock Green
. Generally, though, cheeky chappieness was overwhelmingly male and there is not a breath of camp to it. It's perky, aggressive, wisecracking and a routine. It's seldom subversive and it caters to prejudice rather than running counter to it, its current exponents Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson.

Happily, though, there aren't as many cheeky chappies now as there once were; they began to peter out in the wastes of Dickie Henderson and
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, where, once the native supply of cheeky chappies began to dry up they could be imported from America. Sammy Davis Jr was a cheeky chappie and Bob Hope, too, gag merchants whose art cost them only what they paid their gag-writers.

Because cheeky chappies are practitioners and professionals. There's no mining of their own lives and no undermining of them either. They do not put themselves down, make themselves the butt of their own jokes, as, say, Jack Benny used to do or Frankie Howerd. They are not their own subjects and comedy costs them nothing. And above all, of course, they are cheerful, repellently so, so that even as a child what I feel these comedians lack is a sense of humour.

Having disparaged
ITMA
, it's only fair to add that if I have a preference for the lugubrious in comedy that may be due to
ITMA
, too, as one of the regular characters was Mona Lott (catchphrase: ‘It's being so
cheerful as keeps me going'). She was certainly more up my street, more up our actual social street in fact, than Tommy Handley; more, too, than Jack Train's Colonel Chinstrap, the programme's resident drunk, whose jokes often meant nothing to me, brought up in a teetotal family with never a drink in the house. Mona Lott, though, was not too distantly related to those headscarved women who, though seldom so determinedly morose, populated my wartime childhood.

Familiar too were the characters I saw portrayed on the stage in our annual visit to the theatre to see the pantomime at the Theatre Royal in Leeds. Here comedians like Norman Evans, Frank Randle and Albert Modley would play the dame in
Mother Goose or Babes in the Wood
though they could hardly be said to be in drag. A skirt, a wig, a battered straw hat were about as far as cross-dressing was allowed to go with any implication of effeminacy countered by a defiant pair of hobnailed boots.

These comedians generally incorporated into the proceedings a version of their regular music-hall act. In Norman Evans's case this was
Over the
Garden Wall
(an act later revivified on television by Les Dawson). It may seem fanciful to claim that remarks like ‘Leave that cat alone! Do you know, I could taste it in t'custard' were closer to real life than the gags purveyed by Tommy Handley, but so it was and I thought the Dame hilarious. And though
Cinderella
was hardly social realism it came much closer to my life than ever
ITMA
did, particularly as every pantomime would include a slapstick routine based on some household chore… wallpapering, say, or making pastry or doing the washing, procedures with which I was familiar and so found very funny. It was a lesson, though I didn't realise it at the time, that comedy and real life were in some relation.

Norman Evans (always minus his teeth) talked as northern women talked and, I fancy, carried over his act into a brief radio series in the late forties. Then came Al Read (catchphrase: ‘I thought, Right monkey!'), whose humour was even more rooted in everyday life, this development in radio comedy preceding by several years and without credit a similar revolution in the theatre. Radio was at the kitchen sink long before Arnold Wesker.

Then there was Hylda Baker, who presented a different sort of northern woman, Edith Piaf without the voice or the love life, a little sparrow of a thing with a six-foot straight man (Eli Woods in drag). Again it may seem perverse to maintain that Hylda Baker and the lofty Cynthia were in any sense a representation of ordinary life but they certainly rang familiar bells with me. Hylda Baker and Wittgenstein can seldom have been mentioned in the same breath but certainly she was closer to everything that is the case than Tommy Trinder ever was.

Life apart, the other thing that has always made me laugh is sheer silliness. Silly daftness is what my father called it. It was what was funny about George Formby, the only comedian who has ever made me fall off my seat laughing (at the Palace, Stanningley Road, it would have been). Arthur Askey was undoubtedly a cheeky chappie but he was redeemed by a streak of inspired daftness, as when he was doing his bumblebee routine; Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe and Ken Dodd were all silly as cheeky chappies seldom are. Silliness is surreal and without reason and to indulge in it is not without risk, a kind of balancing act, and risk is something cheeky chappies don't like, hence their reliance on gags.

In the forties, radio comedians lived on long after the programmes that had brought them fame went off the air. This was on account of
Radio
Fun
, a children's comic the cartoon characters in which had all figured on the wireless. But when I must have started reading it in 1940 I had never heard of any of them. Who was Lupino Lane, for instance? Or Revnell and West (‘The Long and the Short of It') and if there had ever been a radio series featuring Jack Warner saying ‘Mind my bike', as he did in
Radio Fun
, it had long since passed from memory.

The fame of all these comedians had to be taken on trust and no one seemed ever to make it to the pages of the comic until long after their heyday was over. I doubt if the editors of
Radio Fun
had heard of Hegel but if one wanted proof of Hegel's dictum that ‘The owl of Minerva takes her flight only when the shades of light are already failing' the pages of
Radio
Fun
would provide it.

Comedians are supposed to have sad lives, though this isn't a cliché I
entirely endorse, the sad clown not a type I've ever come across whereas the mean clown, the selfish clown and the downright unpleasant clown are commonplace. Northern comedians were sad only in the sense that they generally ended up at Morecambe or the better end of Blackpool, retired to seafront homes presided over by wives every bit as formidable as the battleaxes they were wont to complain of in their acts, George Formby and his prison wardress of a wife, Beryl, the most famous example.

Equally daunting, if only in appearance, was Mrs Albert Modley. Albert Modley was a northern comic who, unlike Norman Evans, had never quite acquired a national reputation but was well liked around the music halls of the north and never out of work in the pantomime season. I came across him only after his retirement when in 1974 we were making
Sunset Across the Bay
, a BBC TV film set in Morecambe, where he now lived.

Included in the script was a scene in which two old men chat outside the hut on the Leeds allotment which one of them is having to abandon before retiring to the seaside. It was a nice scene and the director, Stephen Frears, thought to cast Albert Modley, though he'd never seen him on the stage as I had.

When it came to the shot Albert turned out to be none too sure of the words, covering up his uncertainty just as he'd done all those years ago on the stage of the Theatre Royal with a good deal of laughing and stock phrases like, ‘By! It's a beggar is this,' or ‘By shots, this is a funny do. Hee hee.'

Still, hesitant though he was, it seemed entirely authentic. He certainly sounded like the genuine article and looked it, too, in an old raincoat and cap, and we were all ready to shoot when Mrs Modley, who had been hovering in the background, suddenly came forward with a large hatbox.

‘He's never wearing that old cap,' said Mrs Modley. ‘Folks won't recognise him in that fiddling thing,' and she opened the hatbox to reveal a cap of truly epic proportions. It was the cap he had worn on the halls.

‘He has to wear his own cap,' insisted Mrs Modley. ‘They won't recognise him without The Cap.'

It was a difficult moment, with Mrs Modley insisting and even threatening and Albert in no mood to resist her. It was solved by the cameraman, who suggested that Albert should save The Cap for the shot and that Mrs Modley should take charge of it while he supposedly rehearsed with headgear of normal dimensions.

When, having done several takes, The Cap came out of its hatbox and was put on Albert's head (‘By shots, that feels better. This is more like it, hee hee') and he proceeded to act his socks off, there was actually no film in the camera.

At Thora Hird's Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey, a joyous occasion which unaccountably went unrecorded by the BBC, I began by saying how scrupulous she was about the text and instanced her performance in
A Kind of Loving
made in 1962. Forty years later when we recorded
The Last of the Sun
and the last work she did, any diversion from the text was still making her distressed and unhappy.

‘No, I said that wrong,' she would say, though by now she was sometimes so frail and breathless the wonder was that she could say anything at all.

Age and incapacity had also robbed her of any notion of recording technique so that when she did get it wrong, or didn't say a line to her own satisfaction, she didn't wait for another cue but simply gave the line again, until eventually the producer, Colin Smith, found it easier to keep the tape running without interruption.

Fortunately with us in the studio was Thora's daughter, Janette Scott-Rademakers, who was licensed to be more brusque with her mother than either Colin or I would have dared or wanted to be and so managed to cajole and bully and sometimes laugh her into something like her old self and a recollection of her abilities. I think amanuensis would be the word to describe it; certainly Thora could not have done it without her.

It's true that Thora is sometimes almost inaudible and finds, for instance, passages of description hard to put over. But once she gets into
her ‘I said to her … she said to me' mode she hits her stride. This, after all, had been the structure of her normal discourse for most of her life and it did not fail her now.

Tears, though, were never far away, though it wasn't always clear what Thora was weeping for. Sometimes it was the character she was playing; sometimes it was for herself playing the character; and sometimes, I'm sure, without it ever being specifically acknowledged, she wept because she knew she had come to the end of her work and was coming to the end of her life.

The play was recorded in the BBC7 Studio at Broadcasting House, the only studio which at that time had proper and indeed somewhat ceremonial wheelchair access. No stranger to chairlifts on this, her last ride, Thora achieved something of an apotheosis. Wheeled onto the upper level of the apparatus, she was then borne slowly and serenely downwards to studio level. Done up to the nines and every inch a star, she looked like Katharine Hepburn descending in the lift in the film of
Suddenly Last
Summer
and as regal and commanding as a woman should whose career had begun ninety years before when she was brought onto stage as a two-month-old baby at the Royalty Theatre, Morecambe.

Her elegance, though, was characteristic. Few actors these days would dress up for a rehearsal, let alone a rehearsal on radio. But Thora belonged to a generation where to be seen at all in public was a performance in itself and part of the job.

I had caught what I thought was the tail end of this tradition in 1978 when working with Jill Bennett and Rachel Roberts who came to rehearsals in competing mink coats. Then in 1982 I went with Coral Browne for a fitting at Nathan's and saw all the dressers come out and watch in acknowledgement that such unashamed glamour was now almost an anachronism.

Thora was of the same generation even though glamour to her was a white trouser suit and a bright yellow beret, an outfit that she claimed made her look like a poached egg. Still, her smartness was somewhat unexpected, as so thoroughly did she inhabit her roles her public was
mildly surprised that she didn't turn up dressed in her natural rig-out of headscarf and wrap-around pinny.

For all her frailty in gaps in the recording Thora keeps up an unstoppable flow of anecdote about her life in the theatre and her childhood in Morecambe.

The figure that most vividly emerges from these tales is always her father, the manager of the Royalty Theatre and director of many of the shows put on there. Today in the studio she remembers how she was sacked from Brundreth's, a posh drapers in Morecambe where she worked as an assistant and was sent home having been wrongly accused of stealing sixpence.

Mrs Hird senior embraces her wronged child, playing the scene for all its worth, and when Mr Hird returns home later there is a second performance with him slipping naturally into his role of the stern but righteous father determined to clear his daughter's name. Thora's family sound like a scaled-down version of the family of Judith Bliss in Coward's
Hay
Fever
, reaching for any excuse to play out one of the melodramas they have all in their time acted in and now can get their teeth into in real life.

She said of the second monologue that I wrote for her,
Waiting for the
Telegram
, that she would never have got past the first paragraph if it had-n't have been mine and that she'd never have said a swear word for anyone else. I took this as the compliment it was meant to be, though this was in 1999 and since the word in question was ‘penis' the percentage of the population regarding it as a swear word must have been small, but still it seemed so to Thora. She had her audience on
Songs of Praise
to think about.

It was a delicate issue in the play as Violet, the character she played, didn't actually have to say the word herself but since this was a monologue she had to report other people – the matron, the social worker – saying it, which they persisted in doing with some relish. But I was the author and she had given me her trust and I count it not the least of my accomplishments that I got Dame Thora Hird, aged eighty-seven, to say penis with pride.

Still, it was one of her strengths that she believed, along with so many of the characters she played, that there were appearances to be kept up, susceptibilities to be considered and a line to be drawn if not in art then certainly in life.

I once saw her on
Parkinson
when she was the second guest. The first was Jim Davidson. It seemed an unlikely pairing and certainly the conversation between Parky and Davidson was, as Thora would have put it, quite suggestive. When she came on they both looked suitably shamefaced: it was as if an aunt had unexpectedly arrived from Lytham and they hastily put away the stout and brought out the lemonade.

Considerations of taste came up again when I was writing
The Last of
the Sun
. Despite the title I didn't want this to be yet another heart-rending account of a woman descending into forgetfulness and dementia so I did deliberately endeavour to think the unthinkable and imagine what the public would least expect (or even want) Thora to be doing, with a spot of geriatric heavy petting coming out top.

Even so, the saga of Dolly and Mr Pilling isn't all that far from some of the scenarios dreamed up for Thora and myself by the genial myth-makers of
Dead Ringers
. While these always made me laugh I never found the dialogue attributed to me quite as witty as I'd have liked, nor was our association ever as close and continuous as the parody demanded.
Spitting
Image
had once had us tucked up in bed together and in
Dead Ringers
we were always in one another's pockets: as the brains behind an international drugs ring was one I particularly liked.

The truth, unsurprisingly, was more ordinary. Thora and I worked together only half a dozen times in thirty years. Though each collaboration was memorable, it never seemed to me that I wrote a great deal for Thora; rather I feel now I didn't write nearly enough. Nor did we see each other socially. We were always going to have lunch but never did, which is another regret, and though we'd occasionally chat on the phone, if I ever walked over the awkward cobbles to her crowded flat in Leinster Mews it would be to talk about work.

The myth, of course, is funnier but it did present a real dilemma
when I started to think about writing what turned out to be our final fling. Is there any point, I wondered, now that we're both such a joke? If we bring an indulgent smile so readily to the face of the public why not just leave it there? The sight of Thora helpless in her wheelchair, still very much herself but rusting away for want of employment made these considerations seem trivial and self-serving so I put together this short final piece.

The Last of the Sun
could be said to be about the persistence of desire, which isn't an entirely respectable subject and not something the young or even the middle-aged are prepared to contemplate, let alone acknowledge, still wanting it at eighty the stuff of seaside postcards.

Dignify such longings with the word ‘needs' and they would these day be more acceptable, ‘sexual needs' just another earnest box to be ticked off on a social services list. But ‘needs' hasn't ever quite made it into my vocabulary and I am happy still to think of them as wants, desires or even cravings.

Maybe all that can be said for Mr Pilling's fumblings with his old ladies is that they make a change and that, as the shadows lengthen, to be mildly interfered with might occasionally be preferable to
Countdown
. But that the old ladies should allow such liberties on a weekly (and eventually twice-weekly) basis might stretch credulity. Or it may shock; it may hearten. And at least Mr Pilling has found his niche. The monologue might even be thought to be about tolerance.

Originally I thought of the story concluding with the disgraced Mr Pilling banished from the home and even imprisoned, with Dolly and her friend Blanche left to contemplate what future there was unenlivened by his furtive attentions. Deprived of these ancient heavy pettings what did life have in store for either of these ladies except a straight run to the grave? Another dying fall, in fact.

And that would have been the approved way to end it and – though I'm not keen on the phrase (or what it describes) – the politically correct way.

In the meantime I wasn't sure the plot I was constructing might not be beyond Thora. It hinges on the current law that a house left by a parent to
his or her children seven years or more before the parent's death thereby escapes estate duty.

I need not have worried. Thora had made just such an arrangement herself, as indeed had that other old lady, Thora's only rival in the public's affections, the Queen Mother. Neither arrangement had resulted in the bitterness and recrimination that occur in the play where Vera, the daughter, is concerned only that her mother stay alive long enough to save them the tax. It works. Vera (and indeed the Queen) are the lucky ones, their parent having successfully disencumbered themselves (or been disencumbered) of a substantial asset, thus saving the children a packet when death duties have to be paid.

Others less canny face a situation in which the family home the children might justifiably see as their nest egg has to be sold in order to finance the upkeep of the aged parent now living in a home. The parent lives on, the capital from the sale dwindles, the children's future narrows in consequence. In such circumstances, and particularly when the old person has lost touch with reality and may not even know them, it must be hard for the offspring (themselves in their sixties already) not to long for their parent's speedy departure.

The law, so sedulous in its protection of children at the beginning of life, in their second childhood abandons them to the harsh disciplines of the market. So much for caring, so called.

‘We would like closure,' say the children, their language fashionable even when the bedspread is not.

It's difficult to end a play set in an old people's home on an upbeat note and, as I say, to begin with I went along with the convention. Mr Pilling was duly disgraced and banned from the premises, and Dolly and Blanche were left to face their shortening days deprived of his attentions. The triumph of Vera, in fact. A candlewick farewell.

But knowing this was likely to be the last work that Thora would do, I wanted her to go out with a bang and certainly with a laugh, even if it was a dirty one. The Veras of this world must not be allowed to get their own way. Dolly should triumph. And so, though it perhaps makes the play
more of a fable than a story, I let Mr Pilling off the hook, doubled his fiddling time and installed Dolly and Blanche in a room of their own where they can really enjoy it.

And so at the finish Thora goes down with all her flags flying, game to the last.

The song she then sings was a song she sang when she was in
Our Miss
Gibbs
at the Royalty Theatre, Morecambe. She was sixteen then but more than seventy years later she was still word perfect.