Why Chris Tarrant’s TV show OTT was taken off air – a naked Malcolm Hardee

Partial Tiswas singing reunion in Birmingham yesterday

I went to a Tiswas reunion in Birmingham yesterday, organised by the Tiswas Online website (who are currently offline, in a suitably anarchic way)

I was told four completely unpublishable TV sex stories (none involving Tiswas but three involving BBC Television Centre).

Buy me a tea and a muffin and I’ll tell you.

The most interesting anecdote, though, was told to me by one of the Tiswas Online stalwarts, Peter Thomas.

He told me why Chris Tarrant’s attempt at a late-night ‘adult’ version of Tiswas – OTT – was taken off-air.

Tiswas was originally produced by ATV but then ATV lost its broadcast franchise partially because it was seen as a London-based TV company not a Midlands company (it had the ITV Midland franchise) but also largely, it was said, because the regulatory body was embarrassed by the low standard of its Crossroads soap opera, which had become the butt of comedians’ jokes.

The company which took over – Central Independent Television – was, in effect, the same as ATV – it had much the same staff, premises and programmes (even Crossroads). But it had new shareholders.

One of these was Boots, the chemist company.

Peter Thomas told me: “The wife of a director at Boots was appalled when she saw The Greatest Show of Legs perform the naked balloon dance at the end of the first OTT show.”

The Greatest Show on Legs, at that time, were Martin Soan, Malcolm Hardee and ‘Sir Ralph’.

“She found the whole thing to be immoral and perverse,” Peter told me. “So pressure was put on the Central board to tone down the show.”

The writing was on the wall, despite the fact the Greatest Show on Legs were invited back again.

“Chris Tarrant & co had expected a second series,” said Peter, “but Central would not let them do it live – It would all have to be pre-recorded so Central could vet everything… and Central would not give them a studio. So OTT became Saturday Stayback, an alternative comedy sketch show filmed in a pub.”

This terrible dog’s dinner of an idea, of course, did not succeed.

Peter tells me this story of the decease of OTT was recounted by Wendy Nelson, former newsreader for ATV Today and Central News in the documentary ATVLand In Colour, in which he and other Tiswas Online people were involved.

The Greatest Show on Legs’ OTT appearance is on YouTube:

UK comedian Lou Sanders has three moments of madness and Sanderson Jones finally proves he is an android

Lou Sanders starts her act last night seemingly quite calm

Last night, I went to Sanderson Jones’ regular new monthly comedy night All Your Internet Are Belong to Us.

It was billed as “a night of digital comedy – a night of comedy that is either about the web or is tech-enabled”.

And, indeed, the audience seemed to include an unusually high proportion of computer programmers, GIF-creators and the like.

One of the acts had had to bow out due to other commitments and had been replaced by Lou Sanders.

She had not had time to prepare a suitably geeky routine so decided, in an utterly incomprehensible moment of insanity to go completely OTT.

There was quite a lot of thrashing around and some vomiting

She started – started, mark you – by eating a capful of ground cinnamon. As she pointed out, this Cinnamon Challenge has reportedly killed some teenagers who tried it. The result on Lou was almost instantaneous, involved a lot of falling on the floor and, good as my iPhone is and not being in the front row, I was unable to catch one of the exact moments when Lou, on all-fours, puked up some foul brown concoction.

She followed this by reminding the audience that, if you mix Mentos and Diet Coca Cola in a bottle, the result is said to be an explosion.

Lou Sanders ill-advisedly starts to drink some Coca Cola

So she was going to see what happened if she put Mentos in her mouth and drank Coca Cola from a bottle.

The result was not quite an explosion.

But was not something you should try at home.

“What am I doing with my life?” Lou then asked the audience, adding: “My mum must be so proud I’m in showbusiness.”

The explosive result of drinking Diet Coke with Mentos sweets

Following the comedic rule of three, she then decided on a third ‘challenge’.

“Does anybody know about the Cracker Challenge?” she asked.

“Usually, I don’t eat wheat or gluten or sugar. I can’t eat wheat, so I’ve just got rice cakes. I’ve a feeling I should have done this one first because, well, you’ve had the explosions. So this will just be a woman of a certain age eating crackers on the stage and passing it off as entertainment…

Lou Sanders starts a perhaps misbegotten rice cake challenge

“I’ve got a degree, you know…” she said as she started to stuff ten large, disc-like rice cakes into her mouth without any water. The result was not pleasant for her; you couldn’t really say it was pleasant for the audience; but you could certainly say it was entertaining.

She continued to speak throughout. What she was saying, I suspect not even she knew.

Lunacy of this high an anarchic level is exactly what is missing from the currently rather tame British comedy circuit and may, with luck, be catching.

Tom Rosenthal regrets following Lou Sanders’ act

Top-of-the-bill comedian Tom Rosenthal somehow successfully managed to follow Lou Sanders’ act, but then gave in and also tried eating cinnamon. The result was much the same as before though without, as far as I could see amid the writhing and falling, any actual vomiting.

The evening was rounded off by Sanderson Jones who, whether intentionally or accidentally, managed to talk himself into a logical corner in which he, too, had to eat a capful of cinnamon.

Inexplicably, Despite a short period of bulging eyes and a somewhat surprised look on his face (his beard may also have had an erection) it seemed to have little effect on him.

Sanderson Jones proves he is an android

I am rather concerned that the rather scary, inhuman picture of him on his Facebook page may – just as the cover of Abbey Road revealed that Paul McCartney had died - be a subtle message to comedy fans and his family that Sanderson Jones is, in fact, an android.

When I was a researcher on the children’s TV show Tiswas, I twice booked on the show a man who ate worms. He was not a professional act, just a man who liked the limelight and, I presume to a certain extent, liked eating worms. The third time I tried to book him for the show, the person who answered the phone told me he had died.

The three main lessons of yesterday evening are simple.

See Lou Sanders before she dies.

Never get involved in a gross-out contest with her.

And Sanderson Jones is an android.

The last day of Tiswas, the custard-pie-filled anarchic UK children’s TV series

T-I-S-W-A-S – This Is Saturday Watch And Smile 1974-1982

Today was the day – in 1982 – that ITV transmitted the last edition of Tiswas, the anarchic Saturday morning children’s TV show.

I worked as a researcher on the last series of the show. It is a series that people tend to have forgotten, because it was not presented by Chris Tarrant.

He was preparing and producing his late-night ‘adult’ version of Tiswas – OTT, now mainly remembered for the Greatest Show On Legs’ naked balloon dance.

Central Television, being slightly incompetent, had failed to arrange a production office for Tarrant and his team so, for the first few weeks of pre-production on his show, they squatted in our office (which we were happy with), refusing to leave in a successful effort to force the Central bureaucracy into giving him an office.

The script for the last edition of Tiswas

In the middle of our series of Tiswas, the ITV franchise-holder who produced the series changed from ATV to Central Television. In fact, this was a cosmetic change.

It was the same company – same building, same people, same executives and mostly the same programmes – but theoretically it was a different company.

Tiswas started each show with clips from the previous week’s show. On the Saturday after the change-over, the accountants at ATV told the show’s producer, Glyn Edwards, that he would have to pay hundreds of pounds to buy the rights to screen clips from his own previous week’s ATV show at the start of this week’s Central show.

I do not know exactly what happened, but I think he told them to fuck off and, if they didn’t like it, to sue themselves.

Tiswas was an interesting introduction to TV research for me. The show was live and the series lasted 39 weeks. It varied in length but, from memory, it was often up to three hours long comprising (as it was for kids with short attention spans) items that sometimes only lasted 20 seconds.

It was somewhat hectic during the live transmissions, the only respite coming during 7-minute cartoons or 3-minute rock band performances.

After this, my Saturday mornings never smelled the same.

On a Saturday morning, the Tiswas studio smelled sweet: a combination of the shaving foam used in the ‘custard’ pies and the talcum-powder-like smell of the little ‘explosions’ that were set off.

After all the colour and the sound. I used to come home, dead tired on the mid-afternoon train from Birmingham to London and just plonk myself down on my sofa and mindlessly watch Game For a Laugh on ITV. I later worked on that show, too. The production of Game For a Laugh was surprisingly more hectic and pressurised than Tiswas because Tiswas had been running for about seven years and was a very smooth operation.

A floor pass for children and adults taking part in the show

The trick was, in the week leading up to transmission, to have two large production meetings which the lighting, sound supervisors, floor managers etc attended.

The producer ran through what was intended and any obvious major problems were ironed-out or allowed-for with contingency plans. Because everyone knew what might go wrong, it seldom did… to such an extent that the producer Glyn Edwards once discussed how to add more chaos into the show because almost nothing went wrong.

This, he felt, was not in the spirit of Tiswas.

It was a big lesson I learnt: to stage anarchy effectively, you have to be very organised in your preparations.

Of course, things did go wrong.

I remember a child writing in saying he wanted to sit between the two humps of a camel. I phoned up a circus owner, explained this and booked a camel. When the beast arrived, about half an hour before the show started, it only had one hump.

“I paid for two humps,” I told the circus owner.

“It’s got two humps,” said the circus owner.

“It clearly has one hump,” I said. “I can see it only has one hump.”

He then tried to argue that the dromedary was, in fact, a Bactrian and that sometimes a camel’s two humps looked as if they were one hump. I think the phrase “think of saggy tits” came into his argument at one point.

We never booked an animal from his circus again. But the child was happy just to sit on a camel and may have had mathematical problems.

I think I must have encountered the comedian Charlie Chuck in a previous incarnation on Tiswas.

Director Bob Cousins (left) with producer Glyn Edwards

The producer, Glyn Edwards, wanted a German ‘oompah band’.

I found The Amazing Bavarian Stompers for him and booked them but, while they were performing in the studio, I was off somewhere setting-up the next item on the show. In the canteen afterwards, I remember hearing people talk about the ‘mad drummer’ leaping over his drum kit and being generally anarchic – a good thing on Tiswas.

Charlie Chuck, at that time, was drummer for The Amazing Bavarian Stompers and, when I became chummy with him a decade or so later, he mentioned having been on Tiswas. So we probably met in passing. One of the strangenesses of TV.

I also distantly remember some Tiswas party in a Birmingham restaurant.

It had been difficult to book the party, because Birmingham restaurants were wary of Tiswas parties. On a previous occasion, a fire extinguisher had been let off during a Chris Tarrant celebration and word had got round the restaurant trade.

On this occasion, everyone was well-behaved… though, halfway through, I looked up from my meal and presenter Den Hegarty decided, at that moment, to start eating the flowers decorating the middle of the table.

It did not seem odd at the time.

On Tiswas, few things did.

YouTube has a clip of the last two minutes of the final Tiswas show.

I may well have talked trite gibberish in an Irish comedy podcast. Who knows?

I am not one of Life’s natural interviewees

I am not one of Life’s better interviewees.

Today, the Irish website Seven 2 Ten has released as a podcast a one-hour interview with me which comedian Christian Talbot recorded in London three weeks ago.

Considering my inclination to ramble and talk gibberish, I think it is fairly interesting. Here are two linked extracts from the podcast. The link between the two is jigsaws.

When you directly transcribe what anyone says exactly, it can tend towards gibberish. In this case, of course, that might be because it is. When I transcribe interviews with people I talk to, I normally tidy up little bits of grammar etc; in this case I have not. This is what I said, referring to my two erstwhile  TV careers – as a trailermaker and as a researcher on shows including Tiswas, Game For a Laugh and The Last Resort With Jonathan Ross:

____________________________________________________________

I‘ve never had any interest in becoming a comedian, but I think I’m quite good editorially. When I was doing television stuff, it was mostly to do with editing, so I’d see the two-and-a-half hour film and decide how to edit it down to 20 seconds or 30 seconds for a trailer and what music to put on and what voices to put on and what words to put in. And so, in the same way as I’ve always edited those sorts of visual things… I’m not a writer, in fact… I’m not a writer, I’m a re-writer.

I’ve interviewed people like Brian Clemens who did The Avengers and Nigel Kneale who did Quatermass and they’re utterly brilliant, in my opinion, because you talked to them and they were spewing out plotlines – original plotlines – like ten-to-the-minute. Extraordinary, amazing, fertile imaginations. I don’t have that. I can’t think of plotlines but, given material, I can do it as a jigsaw and make it interesting.

When I was a child, what really fascinated me was jigsaws. I loved jigsaws. You can only put a 1,000 piece jigsaw together in one way. But, if you’re editing a film or editing TV, then you’ve got 10 million pieces, 10 million elements and you can put them together in all sorts of different ways to create a variety of different good effects. There is no right or wrong way. There’s just a variety of possible ways through which you can get to a good result. And the same thing with performing, possibly.

It’s not a science; it’s an art. You can’t say, “The way to be a comedian is to do X, Y and Z” and “Structure a joke with these words X, Y and Z,” because it may not work. There is that X factor.

I was watching a programme on Tommy Cooper last night and Tommy Cooper was basically telling rather bad jokes or rather silly, childish jokes. But he was absolutely brilliant. And Barry Cryer was saying on this programme that no-one could explain why Tommy Cooper was funny. You knew he was funny. With just a blink of the eye or a look at the camera or an intonation he was funny. But you couldn’t really explain why. Comedy is an art not a science.

I can perhaps be objective with comedians and say to them, “This isn’t quite working,” and almost academically explain to them why I think it’s not working, but I couldn’t do it myself.

____________________________________________________________

I had a reputation for finding bizarre acts, which wasn’t altogether justified. Anyone can find bizarre acts. You just take out an ad in The Stage for three weeks in a row and they come out of the woodwork. The thing is to know how to use them.

A producer on Game For a Laugh decided he was going to go with me to see various acts and we saw a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant slackwire act – absolutely, utterly brilliant… Slackwire instead of a tightrope… So, instead of a tightrope or a tight wire, this was a slackwire which sags in the middle and he swings all over the place. Utterly brilliant. And I said to the producer: “It won’t work on television,” and he said, “Yes it will,” and he had him on the show.

I said, “It won’t work on television because we’re watching it live in a 3D environment and it feels dangerous – you can see what’s going on, you can FEEL what’s going on and how dangerous it is. But, if you put it on television, it’s a two-dimensional image and it will just look like a man walking along a line.”

And it didn’t work and the producer admitted it didn’t work.

What I was good at wasn’t finding bizarre acts – because anyone can find bizarre acts – it was actually manipulating bizarre acts. So I could see someone perform something that wasn’t very good live, but I could see that it would work on television if you made a few changes. Or I could see that someone was utterly brilliant live, but the act wouldn’t work on television. I could manipulate the component parts of a performance in that way – I think – I think – and therefore, with comedians, I can say to them without being too offensive why I think that bit works or that other bit doesn’t work. Or that bit, if you tweaked it, might work. In that sense, I can sort of direct or produce comedians, but I’m not myself a comedian at all. I’m not funny at all.

____________________________________________________________

YOU CAN LISTEN TO THE PODCAST BY CLICKING HERE.

World Egg Throwing Championships: cheaper and funnier than the Olympics

(Versions of this piece were published by the Huffington Post) and on the Indian WeSpeakNews website.

Consequences of failing to catch

I woke up this morning in the middle of a dream about comedian Helen Keen riding at breakneck speed atop a camel racing along Old Compton Street in Soho while her writing partner Miriam Underhill kept pace by calmly walking with a large brown bird (not a falcon) on her ungloved hand.

I used to regret that I could never remember my dreams. Now I should perhaps be concerned that yesterday was almost as surreal as my dream.

I went to the World Egg Throwing Championships in a very large field at Swaton in Lincolnshire. There were teams from Germany, Greece, Holland, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the UK and the USA

John Ward with his grate egg Olympic torch

Events included long-distance egg throwing, the egg throwing static relay, the World Egg Trebuchet Challenge and, terrifyingly for me, the World Russian Egg Roulette championship. Why the Russian Roulette event was personally terrifying I will explain later but, initially, I was there to support my chum, mad inventor John Ward, who turned up wearing a Mat Hatter’s top hat and holding what he called an Olympic Egg Torch. This appeared to be a gold-painted cheese-grater on top of a gold-pained cracked wooden egg on top of a silver bicycle horn.

“I thought other people would be dressed up too,” he told me in a vain attempt to explain the hat. “Egg throwing is the People’s sport,” he added. “It’s cheaper than the Olympics.”

John Ward and others catapulting eggs

John Ward also came with a nine feet high wooden catapult, because the World Egg Trebuchet Challenge not surprisingly involves trebuchets which are, according to my dictionary, “machines used in medieval siege warfare for hurling large stones or other missiles”. There were five in the contest. John Ward had only had time to spend three days building his and competed valiantly for Queen and country but, maintaining an age-old British tradition in field sports, failed.

Which brings us to the Russian Egg Roulette event in which John Ward was also competing.

This involves two seated people facing each other across a table – as in The Deer Hunter, but with a box of six eggs instead of a revolver with one single deadly bullet. The twist is that five of the six eggs are boiled and one is raw.

An Irish competitor comes to a not very unusually sticky end

Each competitor then takes it in turns to smash an egg of their choice onto their forehead. If the egg is boiled, it does not explode into sticky gunge all over their forehead. If it is the raw egg, then… erm… it does. Obviously, the person who smashes the raw egg onto his or her forehead loses. And gets sticky.

Imagine my surprise, dear reader, when I heard my name called for this event.

This is one of the downsides of having worked on the slapstick children’s TV show Tiswas. When I was a researcher on the show, people I met (for research purposes) felt duty-bound to ram a custard pie in my face to show they had a sense of humour. Oh my! How I laughed.

Organiser Andy Dunlop provides ammunition

At the World Egg Throwing Championships, very highly efficient organiser Andy Dunlop thought he would surprise me by putting me in the Russian Egg Roulette event and announcing me as “former Tiswas wordsmith John Fleming”.

In fact, I was never a Tiswas scriptwriter. In my day, that considerable honour was held by David McKellar, a man eternally worshipped by me for having previously written the weather forecaster line: “And now, bad news for 4-foot dwarfs… 5-foot snowdrifts.”

Aaaannnny-way……

One of the other Russian Egg Roulette contestants was one of the two identical twins representing Greece, but the organisers were unsure which one it was.

World Gravy Wrestling Champion fails in Russian Roulette

Another was handsome hunk Joel Hicks, male model and World Gravy Wrestling Champion, who had come stripped to the waist and dressed in shorts and boxing gloves as Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky. Earlier, he had been the human target in a rather random Target Egg Throwing event and, as a result, spent the whole afternoon covered in dried egg yolk with fragments of embedded eggshell sticking out of his face.

I triumphed in the Russian Egg Roulette heats in face-offs with two small children – who seemed to be the only children in the contest, the others being egg-hardened professionals. As my second tiny opponent smashed the raw egg against her forehead, the crowd roared and I heard event organiser Andy Dunlop yell out: “Now that’s fun! THIS is entertainment!”

I fail to mask my gloating at the sticky shame of a Dutch girl

I was equally successful against a very attractive Dutch girl. I suspect Dutch girls smashing eggs on their foreheads commands a very high price in some quarters.

I had decided to represent Scotland in this contest, as I had been wantonly and incorrectly introduced as: “John Fleming representing England” and so I started singing Flower of Scotland, which was an unfortunate choice, as I discovered I only knew the first four words – Oh flower of Scotland… No-one was impressed.

John Ward smashes the thankfully losing egg on his forehead

Bizarrely (as, by its nature, it is not possible to ‘fix’ a Russian Egg Roulette contest) I faced John Ward in the semi-final. I triumphed again. He had the minor consolation of an in-depth interview (I kid you not) by an unsmiling film crew from some Russian television station and he later told me: “The interviewer guy said It will not be transmitted until July – I imagine they must be vetting the footage for any coded messages.”

My nemesis: clearly a man of extreme brutality

In the grand final, I then unfortunately faced a large man called Jerry Cullen dressed in black wearing sunglasses. Very intimidating he was. Hard-boiled, some might say, but not me. Oh no, not me.

The first four of the six eggs we smashed on our foreheads were, indeed, hard-boiled, leaving only two more eggs – one for each of us.

At this point, a lesser egg contestant might have cracked and, admittedly, I resorted to saying, “I’m doomed, I’m doomed,” in the best John Laurie (from Dad’s Army) accent I could muster.

It was like a penalty shoot-out in a football match, so I was relieved not to be representing England.

The man in black went first… smashed the egg against his forehead… and it was hard boiled. He had won the contest.

Cameraman + small child gloat over my ignominious defeat

But this meant I had to smash the final egg against my forehead knowing it was raw and would explode into yellow gunge. I thought of bravely saying something like, “The yolk is on me,” but even I baulked that. So I just smashed the egg onto my forehead as the – I felt somewhat unsympathetic – onlookers rhythmically chanted “Splat! Splat! Splat! Splat! Splat!” until the deed was done.

A broken man with mangled egg and a medal

The good news was that I got an unexpected runners-up medal – a silver star with a picture of a hen on it – with a red-white-and-blue ribbon to go round my neck. My chest swelled with patriotic pride. I felt I had not totally let down the nation of my birth.

Though, unlike the Olympic Games, there is no xenophobia at the World Egg Throwing Championships. The static relay event was won by a team of Germans, Greeks, Irish and English. I chatted to two of these fine athletes: Reg Marchant from Catford and his partner Sandy Winterton from Dagenham.

“I understand this is your first time being a tosser in public,” I said to Reg.

Reg and Sandy: two triumphant tossers amid trebuchets

“Yes,” Reg answered, “but I do actually practise tossing every other day. Sandy does it for me quite a lot. Sandy said to me Do you want to toss in public at the World Championships, so we came and it’s been great.”

“It’s been wonderful,” agreed Sandy.

“We’ll be back next year,” Reg told me, “to try to reduce the time it takes. Sandy and I have to fine-tune our tossing technique over the next year.”

At this point, John Ward wandered across to join us.

“It’s been an interesting afternoon,” he said.

(There are video news clips – with me briefly at the very end – on the ITN site here, the International Business Times TV site here and I actually get to speak in the middle of the report on the Chinese 7M Sports website here)

How to write a daily blog? Easy. Incest, grumpy camel stories and nude women

If desperate, use a nude, copyright-free Wikipedia photograph

I can’t remember why I was being interviewed last night by Ian Fox, comedian, photographer and online omni-presence.

It is for some online jollity he is planning and he did mention it to me before I went to North Korea (did I mention I went to North Korea?). In fact, I think he suggested it to me almost two years ago. I have a notoriously bad memory and can’t remember why he was asking me questions.

But one was: You write a daily blog. Is it difficult to keep coming up with stuff each day?

My answer was: “It’s not that difficult.”

Ironically, I then woke up this morning with no obvious subject for a blog.

But incest can be a fruitful thing.

If Ian Fox interviews me for some online project he’s doing, then I can blog about him interviewing me. On this basis, British-based American comedian Lewis Schaffer and I have built up a fruitful cyber-incestuous relationship by occasionally blogging about each other. I quote him in my blog, which he then mentions in his blog, which I then comment on and on and on…

When short of a blog idea, I highly recommend going along to one of Lewis Schaffer’s free shows and then letting him buy you a Chinese meal and/or an expensive ice cream afterwards. It costs you nothing and New York Jewish comedians’ neuroses are always a bottomless pit to excavate. It also makes you feel better. You think: At least my life is not THAT shit…

Also useful is recycling your as-yet unprinted interview answers.

Last night, Ian Fox asked me about the lowlights of my career.

I told him about the occasion when I was working for the children’s TV series Tiswas and a circus provided me with a one-humped Bactrian camel. I was not well-pleased. A child had written-in saying he wanted to ride between the humps of a camel. This requires a minimum of two humps. The circus guy swore blind to me that this clearly uni-humped creature was actually a two-humped Bactrian camel and it was just the way the humps were lying that morning. The camel appeared to be as grumpy as I was; I think it had expected to be on a better class of TV show. The child was, fortunately, just happy to be on any camel.

The camel farted.

That’s the way to fill up a blog when you have nothing specific in your mind.

Tomorrow, though, I should be OK for a blog subject.

Because today I am having a ‘death lunch’ with Lynn, my friend of 37 years. We are executors of each others wills and occasionally meet to update where we keep our money, our knowledge of Kyrgyzstan and other goodies.

After that, I am eating with miniature comedienne Laura Lexx, then comedy scriptwriter Mark Kelly, then street sensation Paolo Ferrari, then doyenne of comedy critics Kate Copstick… and then I am seeing Lewis Schaffer’s ongoing twice-weekly comedy show Free Until Famous in Soho. And possibly getting a free curry or ice cream out of him afterwards.

Surely one of those people has some bloggable story I can steal. My motto is: Get someone else to write your blog for you. If all else fails, Lewis Schaffer’s neuroses can be excavated.

The downside is that, with all those meals and muffins and sitting around, I get ever fatter.

Writing a daily blog?

It’s a piece of piss.

Which is possibly what a reviewer would say.

* * *

The interview by Ian Fox appears HERE.

The death of comedians Frank Carson and secret transsexual Gregg Jevin

On the studio floor at TV show Tiswas, 1981: Den Hegarty, Frank Carson & associate producer David McKellar

I was sad to hear today about the death of comedian Gregg Jevin. I met him around five years ago and I was going to write his autobiography. Eventually, it fell through because I could not get through to the real person.

With Gregg, you could never ‘find’ the real person; he always hid behind that facade of being the ‘Gregg Jevin’ on-stage character.

I only ever encountered that a couple of other times. Once was with Matthew Kelly and the other was with the late Frank Carson, who also sadly died this week.

When I was at Granada Television, we once went to Blackpool to film a series of on-screen promotions for the TV station. The promos featured stars of the legendary series The Comedians and we, of course, gave them a complimentary lunch in the upstairs room of an off-season Blackpool pub.

It was quite an exhausting lunch, because there were about eight comics sitting round a table all trying to out-do each other on jokes and jollity. I have a feeling Bernard Manning opted out and ate separately, probably wisely. The loudest and most overwhelming of those present was Frank Carson. He never switched off. I talked to him a little bit over the course of that afternoon – and he also appeared in various episodes of the children’s TV series Tiswas on which I worked.

But I never felt I was ever talking to the real person. He was always being the ‘Frank Carson’ character.

TV scriptwriter Nigel Crowle agreed when I asked him about Frank: “He never seemed to switch off,” Nigel told me.

I also asked comic and actor Matt Roper (son of George Roper, who also appeared on The Comedians) if he had any memories of Frank Carson.

“My main memory,” Matt told me, “was his ability to talk non-stop for hours. “There was no ‘off’ button. I remember my mum telling me how my parents had had a huge housewarming party in the 1970s and Frank was last person to sleep at night sitting in an armchair, still muttering away, and the first person up in the morning, at full-power over breakfast.

“I really was a baby in the 1980s even; I knew a few of the old school but not all of them too well. Just my dad’s mates. When I started getting into comedy myself I began to get a bit more interested in it all but, by that point, most of these boys (they were all boys, notably) were off the telly and back in what was left of a dying carcass of a club scene or, if they were lucky, summer seasons and panto.”

Gregg Jevin, of course, was from a later generation. But, like Frank Carson, I could never find the switch to turn off the stage character and turn on the ‘real’ person.

I was on a Storywarp panel last year which discussed storytelling and the subject of how to present real people’s stories came up – and the fact that it is not only the subject of the interview who is presenting a version of themselves but also the interviewer.

Helen Lewis-Hasteley, assistant editor at the New Statesman said:

“There’s an element when you’re interviewing somebody that you have to present the version of yourself to them that you think they will respond to. Which is really bad if you talk to somebody for so long that you start falling into their cadences of speech. One of the many things you do when you’re interviewing someone is that you’re constantly monitoring their responses, thinking Can I push them further? I need to get a quote from them on this subject. It’s incredibly difficult nowadays when you’re interviewing celebrities and there’s a PR handler and they’re aware they want to give you the blandest interview possible but they want to get a huge plug for the film.

“You want to trick them into saying something of vague interest to somebody other than The director was great!  and I love acting. So that becomes a kind of negotiation and you have to be the kind of person they will respond to. Every writer thinks that they themselves are the most interesting person in the world and actually the interview would be much better if they were answering the questions. You have to remove yourself from the process. I hate interviews where it’s all about the interviewer.”

I agreed. “About five years ago,” I explained, “I almost wrote the ghosted autobiography of a stand-up comedian called Gregg Jevin and the sub-story to that was that he was actually a transsexual; he had actually been born a woman but had the operation and became a male stand-up. So there was an interesting secondary story, which no-one knew about. It all fell through, tragically, because there were so many lies and half-truths involved in what he was telling me. I could never ‘find’ the real person.

“But Gregg, interestingly, said to me that he thought the process of writing a biography was the same as being an archaeologist or a stand-up comedian building fake comic stories on a bedrock of truth.

“In the case of an archaeologist, you are carefully excavating and uncovering the past, but you haven’t really any idea what the hell actually went on. You might uncover a slab of stone and think it was used for a particular purpose, but you could be wrong. If you are a comedian, then you go so far with the bedrock of truth but then start embellishing the details. Equally, if you’re writing a biography of someone then, if they’re dead, you’re probably guessing quite a lot – even if you have a lot of sources, you’re still guessing. And, if they’re alive, you’re still vaguely guessing that they’re telling the truth or that your guess of what they’re telling you is what they’re actually telling you.”

TV scriptwriter Ivor Baddiel, who was also on the Storywarp panel, added: “In Stephen King’s book On Writing, he describes exactly that. He thinks stories are like archaeological finds. You unearth them and then you chip away at them until you get them back to their perfect state. And there is something in that. Sometimes, when you’re writing, you know that you’ve found what’s right. If I’m writing a gag or a line or whatever, I’m scrabbling around for it in my head. And, more recently, I’ve learned to listen to my gut feeling more and sometimes it just pops out of the ether. It might not be completely, fully formed but that’s as right as it’s going to get, maybe.”

“But that,” suggested Helen Lewis-Hasteley, “is also dangerous, because that’s terribly seductive. It’s often pattern recognition. You think I’ve heard this story before and what happens with biographies is that it strips away any nuance. It’s like a politician in a sex scandal. It’s perfectly possible for someone to be a wonderful, reforming politician but also to be an absolute shit. But no-one can hold those contradictions in their heads any more. This is the danger of telling a story: it’s one story or the other.

“Newspapers and magazines rely very heavily on archetypes: you need a baddie and a goodie in a story. Most forms of journalism are so short and it very much helps to have archetypes. It’s all about shorthand.”

“Well,” I said. “with comedian Janey Godley’s book Handstand in the Dark… I allegedly edited that and she had never written before for print at all. At that point, she was a stand-up comedian not a writer. So I was shepherding her. I never actually wrote it. I advised her without ever suggesting any specific words at all. At first, she did what I think a lot of people do when they write their autobiography: she wrote facts – and autobiographies are not about facts. She wrote I did this, I did that, I did the other in a long list of things she did. So I told her Don’t do that, because it can be dull. People are not interested in facts; they’re interested in people. So what you want to write is that, if you were doing lots of things at this time, figure out one episode that epitomises what you felt and what was going through your mind – what your emotions were – and then expand on that one element. That will cover over 15 uninteresting facts.

“If you’re writing a biography or autobiography, it’s the emotional journey, it’s the mental journey you’re interested in, not the facts. No-one cares if you went to Swindon for a day; you want to know what they felt and why. It’s like the American election philosophy: It’s about the Economy, stupid. In autobiographies: It’s about the emotions, stupid. It’s about people.”

And so, when I heard about the death of Gregg Jevin today, I thought to myself: What was the one key emotional centre-point of Gregg Jevin’s character that epitomised him?

And I could not think of a single thing. My mind went blank. It was as if he had never existed.

A sad comment on a life.

(There is more about Gregg Jevin HERE.)

Nina Conti’s amazingly intelligent new film on Ken Campbell and on herself

(This blog was later published on the Chortle comedy industry website and by the Huffington Post)

I have always been a bit wary of ventriloquists. What’s with the talking-to-yourself bit? Ventriloquists are a bit like glove puppet performers. They are surely self-obsessed loonies.

But, then, maybe all performers are.

My wariness of glove puppet performers was never helped by stories of Basil Brush‘s drinking habits and Rod Hull and Emu’s antics off-stage… nor by the wonderful Muppet Show performers staying in character when they walked around ATV’s Elstree building. You would get into a lift to find two grown men with puppets on their arms, conversing to each other through the puppets and in the puppets’ voices.

Always a tad unsettling.

But I like eccentric and interesting people. And self-obsession, though it can sometimes be wearisome to sit through, can be fascinating.

Ventriloquist Nina Conti‘s documentary Her Master’s Voice - she wrote, produced and directed it – mentions Friedrich Schiller, who referred to the “watcher at the gates of the mind”, which can stifle creativity.

To be unconventional – to be creatively original - often means being criticised, which no-one much likes. So, in most people, Schiller’s ‘watcher’ tends to dismiss original creative ideas out of hand to avoid rejection.

The people who can ignore their ‘watcher’, though, can be genuinely original creatives.

I only encountered that extraordinarily influential connoisseur of eccentricity and ringmaster of alternative theatrical eventism Ken Campbell a few times. He was around the TV series Tiswas when I worked on it; he attended a movie scriptwriting talk I attended; and I once went with comedian Malcolm Hardee to see one of Ken’s fascinatingly rambling shows at the National Theatre in London. Malcolm admired Ken greatly, but found the show too rambling for his taste and he needed a cigarette, so we left during the interval and never came back. I would have stayed.

As its climax, the recent Fortean Times UnConvention screened Her Master’s Voice, Nina Conti’s wonderfully quirky new love-letter documentary to Ken Campbell.

Films are, by their nature, superficial.

In a novel, you can get inside someone’s mind.

In a film, you only see the externals of a person and you can only get some semblance of psychological depth and what someone thinks if they actually spell it out in words. One of the few films to get round this problem was Klute, in which the central character talked, at key points, to a psychiatrist.

Another way of pulling the same trick, of course, would be to have as the central character a ventriloquist who talks to their doll.

That is what Nina Conti very successfully does in this film.

Ken Campbell inspired Nina to become a vent by simply giving her a Teach Yourself Ventriloquism kit and, as he did with so many other performers, continued to inspire and advise her throughout his life.

Ken’s life was, it is said in the film, about “playing God with other people” – a phrase that might also be used to describe the mentality of a ventriloquist.

But, after ten years as a successful comedian/vent, Nina decided to give up ventriloquism and was summoning up the courage to tell Ken about this when she heard of his death via Facebook. She inherited his vent dolls and, with her own Monkey doll and six of Ken’s “bereaved puppets” she went to the Vent Haven International Ventriloquist Convention in Kentucky – bizarrely held in a fairly dreary model by a freeway.

The result is an absolutely amazingly insightful, highly intelligent and surprisingly emotional look at ventriloquists and at Nina herself. She is able to externalise her thoughts by talking to the vent dolls on screen… there is a genuinely shocking and insightful revelation in the movie about the ‘birth’ of her doll Monkey.

Ken Campbell believed that “creativity and insanity are almost the same thing” and the doll “gives us access to the insanity of the ventriloquator” while Nina says she thought she was bland as a person but the birth of Monkey gave her “an extra dimension”.

When psychologists and psychoanalysts meet vents, they must feel as if Christmas has come early and, interestingly, the book which Nina takes to read while on her trip to the Convention is Problems of the Self by Bernard Williams.

This is an astonishingly successful film with three possible endings, all of them on-screen. Nina manages to turn the ultimate ending into a happy one but, before that there is another possible ‘out’. When I left the screening, three people were still crying and highly emotionally upset over (I presume) that earlier ending.

Which well they might be.

This is an extraordinarily successful documentary.

Her Master’s Voice.

Watching someone talk to themselves has never been so interesting.

A small incident, soon forgotten… but it scarred another person for life.

I think the American comic Lewis Schaffer may have taken leave of his senses.

Last night he said to me:

“You should do something with your blog. People have book tours. You should have a blog tour. Go round the country telling stories from your blog.”

Lewis grabbed my attention by saying this – not because it was a good idea but because I was taken aback by the fact he was not talking about himself.

“Lewis,” I told him in the patient tone I reserve only for small children, drunks and people from the Colonies, “I am not in any way a performer; I have no charisma; no-one has ever heard of me in Leamington Spa (my eternal benchmark for middle England); and I have a shit memory.”

I have mentioned in these blogs before – but I cannot remember when – that I may be the ideal comedy audience because I can sit through a superb show with great gags rolling on like overlapping waves for an hour and yet, two minutes after leaving the venue, I cannot remember any of the jokes at all.

I once mentioned to someone with whom I have been friends for 36 years that, although I had worked briefly and peripherally with Sylvester McCoy on the TV series Tiswas, I had never actually seen him perform on stage.

“Yes you have,” my long-term friend told me. “You and I saw him on stage in Accidental Death of an Anarchist!”

“We did?” I asked, astonished. “I can’t remember ever going to a theatre with you.”

She then reeled off about five occasions when we had been to the theatre together. And another occasion when we had both gone to see Sylvester McCoy perform on stage. (Obviously, at the time of writing this blog, I cannot remember what that second play was.)

Fortunately, my friend knew me well enough not to be insulted.

Ironically, people who do not know me as well as she does think I have a very good memory because I always remember their birthdays. But this is because I write everything which seems likely to be important down in a diary which I always carry around with me. I once lost it for two days and virtually needed psychological counselling.

Sometimes, when transferring birthday dates into a new diary, I can barely remember who some of the people are but, if I were ever to meet them again, I would be able to impressively know when their birthdays are.

It is a minor compulsion and I control it. It does not control me.

This same friend (the one with whom I apparently saw Sylvester McCoy in Accidental Death of an Anarchist) told me, knowing I never wanted to live beyond my 18th birthday:

“The irony is you are liable to live into your nineties because you don’t worry very much and people who don’t get worried are supposed to live longer… You worry-away at things but not about things – and you tend to look forward not back.”

Readers of this blog may disagree.

But she knows me quite well… although one reason I do not look back too much is that I have mostly forgotten what happened.

Life just stretches apparently endlessly onwards but occasionally people remind me of something I did or saw and I think: “Ooh. Perhaps I have had a more interesting life than I thought I had.”

I am quite a good editor and perhaps I edit my memory too tightly. Perhaps I too quickly discard into the forgotten recesses of my mind’s filing cabinet seemingly irrelevant things which I think will be of no practical use to me in the future and I only keep in my immediate frontal memory things which I think may have some relevant cross-referencing value later on.

My blog a couple of days ago was about a road accident in Greenwich.

In it, I wrote:

“By the weekend, I will have forgotten any of this ever happened. It is not relevant to my life”

This was read by the retired senior fire officer whom I mentioned in yesterday’s blog,

After he read it, the retired senior fire officer sent me an e-mail in which he said:

“It is strange how apparently irrelevant events can become relevant later. Doing my old job consisted of lots of events that weren’t really relevant to my own life, only to others…  or so I thought.

“But I received a phone call out of the blue last year from a young lady. She asked me if I remembered a road accident on an obscure B road about 20 years previously.

“Until her call, all I had remembered about that accident was that the passenger in the other car had been reading a novel called Dead On Arrival. The book was open, in the footwell, as we removed her body.

“Talking to the lady on the phone brought the accident back to me and I was able to remember in detail the two-car double-fatal event which also left three badly injured. This included the recovery of two seriously injured little girls trapped in an upside-down car pinned into a ditch full of water. I gave one of the little girls a teddy bear which I carried around – to comfort her and to stop her unnerving screaming.

“She was the girl talking on the phone and she had been looking for me since she was able. Despite her brain damage and crippled body she had survived, grown up, married and had children. She wanted to say “thanks” and to tell me how she had got on… about her home, her children and husband.

“Because of that one phone call, she is now no longer an irrelevant part of my past and I think all the perceived irrelevant things we see, do or sometimes think have some sort of impact, even if its just…..  ‘just’….. on our character.”

The retired senior fire officer is, of course, right. And the same incident one person forgets can be the very incident that scars – literally or figuratively – another person for life.

My mother, a very sensitive woman, was Christened with the name Agnes but was never called that, even by her parents – she was always called Nan.

When she was a young girl at school, her English teacher told her, “Oh, Agnes. You have no soul for poetry.”

As a result, after that, she took no interest in reading books.

A few seconds after that schoolteacher had said the words, I am sure he would have forgotten that he had ever said them.

But they scarred her for life.

She was born with only one hand. She had no left hand. As a child, she was brought up to always hide her hand in public.

In her late twenties, when she became engaged to my father, a member of his family said to her:

“I wish Harry could marry a whole woman.”

Obviously, she never forgot. She had been brought up to be ashamed of her missing hand. She never told my father about his relative’s comment. She lived until she was 86.

Digressions in British comedy and acting and a sad death in Los Angeles

I went to Hastings on Friday for the first of Vivienne and Martin Soan’s monthly Pull the Other One comedy shows there. They now have monthly Pull The Other One shows in Peckham, Herne Hill and Hastings. One laughing audience member came out at the end saying:

“I haven’t seen so many naked men since… well, I don’t think I ever have…”

I guess that will inevitably happen when you have Martin Soan, Bob Slayer and Dr Brown in among fully-clothed Simon Munnery, Sol Bernstein and Charmian Hughes, who tells me she is not (as I thought) giving up her sand dance just at the very point when she is thinking of performing next year in Australia – a land not short of sand.

Australia has sand the way my blogs can sometimes have digressions.

Nay. Nay. Thrice nay. Charmian tells me she is not giving up her sand dance but will be “rationing it due to the erotic pandemonium in unleashes on unsuspecting audience ‘members’.”

She will instead occasionally replace it in her stage routine with the ‘dance of the seven cardigans’.

The real highlight for me of trekking through Friday night traffic to get to Pull The Other One, though, was chatting off-stage to actor and now film-maker Robin Hayter, a man of inexhaustible and fascinating anecdotes.

His ubiquitous father James Hayter starred in BBC TV’s first ever sitcom Pinwright’s Progress in 1946-1947, seemed to be in every British feature film of my childhood and is perhaps most fondly remembered as the definitive on-screen Mr Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers and as the original actor who declared in TV ad voice-overs that “Mr Kipling make exceedingly fine cakes”.

I had not known that James Hayter appeared in a regular role in BBC TV sitcom Are You Being Served? nor that the Mr Kipling cake people paid him a very large sum of money indeed to drop out of the show because they felt it was too down-market a series and his appearances in it might devalue his dignified voice-overs in what they saw as their up-market cakes’ ads.

It also turned out that Robin Hayter and I had both worked with the wonderful David Rappaport. Robin was a fan of ‘Green Nigel’, the character David performed as a piss-take of children’s TV show Blue Peter when I worked on the final series of anarchic TV show Tiswas.

David Rappaport was a very highly intelligent man; a friendly, kind person and a charismatic actor who appeared in Time Bandits and many other movies. I never saw his appearances in his own US TV series The Wizard but, apparently, he was wonderful.

Like Robin Hayter, I was very shocked and very sad, when I heard that he had shot himself, depressed, in Los Angeles in 1990.

Very sad.

_____________________________________________

Robin Hayter’s video ‘pitch’ for a proposed documentary movie is HERE.