Cabinet minister Chris Huhne and the convent-raised comedian

I mentioned in a recent blog that comedian Charmian Hughes was one of the first small intake of six girls at Westminster Boys’ School. The person who suggested she go there was her childhood chum Chris Huhne now (well, at the time of writing he still is) a Government Cabinet Minister. He is currently having a spot of bother over claims by his furious estranged-wife that he got her to accept penalty points for speeding when, in fact, it was (reportedly) he who was driving the car.

“I was driven in a car by him,” Charmian tells me. “He used to have a London taxi in his gap year before university. He must have been 18 and drove it to Turkey. But, alas, he didn’t take me to Turkey… Alas.”

He did give Charmian her first snog though and, back when Charmian first knew him, his preferred mode of transport was pedal-powered. She was about 10 when the two of them used to ride their bikes through a South Kensington mews. “It was such a genteel area,” she tells me. “The neighbours shouted at us because they found it a bit threatening and noisy.”

“His family were always extremely kind to me,” she says. “His mother – an actress – was the first person ever to take me to the theatre. It was The Mermaid Theatre. I think Marcel Marceau was miming something or other. Chris’ family were nice to me when I was persecuted by my own family. His mother said I was very artistic and special whereas my own family said I was twisted and strange because I wrote poems.

“When he was in the Sixth Form, he started a school paper called The Free Press for London-wide free distribution and didn’t have enough paid adverts for the first one, so the first edition was in danger of looking very bare and amateur. His friends were all making up ads he could stick in. I was about 14 or 15 and I wanted to impress him like mad and I remember we were sitting in a tube train on the Circle line when I suggested: How about an advert for Madame Hughes, Maison de Plaisir with my mother’s phone number? That would be good!…

“I didn’t really think he would do it, but he did. I forgot all about it until one day the phone rang. I picked it up and a husky male voice said: Is that Madame Hughes? My blood ran cold, my stomach sank. I was terrified my mother would hear me talking to the man on the phone and I whispered: It’s all a ghastly mistake. A joke. I’m a school girl. The man was very understanding and rang off. My mother was and is a terrifying person with a terrible raging temper.

“The next phone call was from a tabloid newspaper reporter investigating ‘the schoolgirl brothel’. My mother answered. I heard her Medusa-like voice shrieking and threatening and the reporter scampered away never to ring again. When I told her what we’d done, she summoned Chris round.

“Are you going to sue me? he asked in his most sophisticated timbre. Sue you? my mother sneered, A silly stupid little arrogant schoolboy like you? You must be joking, but I’m going to speak to your parents…”

Charmian’s first snog was with Chris Huhne when she was around 15 and he was around 17.

“I was at a convent boarding school,” Charmian tells me, “so it was hard to cop off.

“Later it was Chris who suggested I went to Westminster Boys’ School, but,” she adds dolefully, “by the time I’d got there, he’d left. Once he was at Oxford I hardly saw him. He was a very glamorous and sexy figure. We all adored him. He was brainy and cool and sophisticated. I think he only snogged me to put me out of my misery.”

Then she adds mysteriously:

“I also gave Frank Skinner his first avocado.”

Jeremy Beadle, little pricks and cruel TV shows

I saw part of a TV show about the series Candid Camera last night, which brought to mind memories of the late, extremely talented, much underestimated and very amiable Jeremy Beadle.

I encountered him when he appeared as a guest a couple of times on the last series of the ITV kids’ show Tiswas and then worked with him as a researcher when he presented the hidden camera stunts on peaktime Saturday night ITV series Game For a Laugh. I was asked to work on his subsequent Beadle’s About series but turned it down because, much as I liked and greatly admired Jeremy, his new producer on Beadle’s About (now dead and extremely unlamented) was a devious little shit with a track record for stealing ideas and taking the credit for himself – a prime example of the old saying “Television is like a porcupine – full of little pricks”.

Alright, I made up that old saying and it has only ever been true a couple of times in my experience (I guess I’ve been lucky). But, in the case of this dead producer, it was true. (My parenthetic advice: never give cunts a namecheck.)

Anyway, Beadle’s About got big ratings, just as Game For a Laugh had, but in the course of its run it unjustly turned Beadle’s image from populist prankster to nasty practical joker. Beadle’s About was a cruel show. The public perception of him changed from smart-arse to out-and-out arse, the man you love to hate. I always thought this was probably the fault of the producer, but I never understood why Jeremy went along with the prick’s ideas; by this time, Jeremy had a lot of creative production clout.

While we were working on Game For a Laugh, Beadle once explained to me what he believed the perfect Candid Camera style stunt was: that you put someone in an extraordinary and embarrassing situation apparently of their own making (though set up by us) and they then have to try to dig themselves out of that embarrassing hole which they cannot explain. There is no cruelty. The audience knows it is a set-up and, when the punter realises a joke has been played on them, there is the laughter of relief. You laugh at the situation and with the punter; you do not laugh at the punter.

The epitome of this, to me, seems to be a stunt which copied a scene from the movie The Graduate.

In one scene, Dustin Hoffman takes his girlfriend Katharine Ross to a hotel in which he has previously had secret sexual assignations with her mother Mrs Robinson (played by Anne Bancroft). All the hotel staff recognise him and talk to him. It is obvious that he has been there before on more than one occasion despite the fact he claims he hasn’t. He has to try to dig himself out of the hole.

On Game For a Laugh, London Weekend Television had bought rights to some US Candid Camera type shows (though not Candid Camera itself). We rarely copied their stunts but we considered recreating one involving an engaged couple.

In the US TV version of the stunt, the woman knows about the gag and the man is the guy on whom the joke is played. Under some pretence, the couple have to go to a hotel for an event and, as in The Graduate, the staff seem to all know the guy, despite the fact he has never been there before. This makes it look like he has been secretly staying at the hotel with another woman, but the audience and his fiancee know it is a set-up. He has to explain to his seemingly worried/upset fiancee why everyone seems to know him, despite the fact he does not himself understand how they can… He has to dig himself out of an embarrassing hole not of his own making but, of course, it is an impossible hole which he cannot ever dig himself out of because it does not exist. When the stunt is revealed to be a hoax, there are laughs and great relief all round.

We did not copy this stunt on Game For a Laugh because, as far as I remember, we could not find the right couple to make it work. However Beadle’s About did later copy the same stunt. But they crucially changed the details.

In their version, it was the guy who knew about the set-up and it was the fiancee on whom the ‘joke’ was played. The result was that – as the stunt progressed and as it became more and more obvious that her lover had been unfaithful to her in this very hotel with another woman – you could see the anguish get worse and worse on her face, because she realised that her life had been destroyed, her relationship was a sham and was breaking up, her beloved was a shit and her marriage would have to be cancelled.

On Game For a Laugh, we would have played the joke on the poor man who had to explain an impossible situation to his knowing fiancee. Funny.

On Beadle’s About, the ‘joke’ was to pretend to the fiancee that her relationship was disintegrating. Not funny. Cruel.

It is the difference between aiming your camera at the face of a man who is apparently seeing his own car being destroyed (which Beadle’s About did) and aiming your camera (as Game For a Laugh did) at the face of a man who appears to have destroyed someone else’s car (which had been set up by us) and then has to explain to the apparently irate owner of the car (a Game For a Laugh performer) how and why he destroyed the car.

Game For a Laugh laughed at the situations and with the punters; Beadle’s About laughed at the punters. The result was the destruction of Jeremy Beadle’s public image.