Nerd Do Well (5 page)

The realisation of my error came a few years later when I started my comprehensive education and my form teacher, Mr Calway, the first
Guardian
reader I ever met, quickly gathered that if he let me stand in front of the class and tell a joke every Monday morning, I would be easier to control, having vented my nervous energy through the catharsis of performance. He was a smart guy.

When I pulled out an old Chalky gag one Monday, Mr Calway (Gareth as I now call him, although still not entirely comfortably) explained exactly why the joke I had told was unacceptable. I listened very carefully, taking in everything he said. Five years later, for my English oral exam, I gave a five-minute oration on subliminal racial prejudice and got an A. So I guess some good can come of telling racist jokes, stolen from the telly. If I had relied on my dentist gag at the Salvation Army, I might never have learned such a valuable lesson or indeed got such a big laugh. Know your audience, I say – Jim Davidson certainly does.

There is no danger of me forgetting the process of writing and performing my first comedy sketch because it is forever etched in my memory in blood and brick dust. It happened in 1978 at the age of eight as part of an assembly presentation at Castle Hill Primary School in Brockworth, Gloucester. Every so often one of the seven year-groups would host an assembly in front of the other six, mixing education and entertainment and giving the rest of the school a break from the classroom.

On one such memorable occasion, we put on a short play about the cathedral visit during which I had flirted with Meredith Catsanus and her mum. This involved me dressing like a punk (which was current at the time) and repeatedly kicking a papiermâché model of St Peter’s bell, which resides in the cathedral’s belfry. It got such a big laugh the first time I did it, I did it again several times as part of an increasingly self-serving improvisation, which was eventually curtailed by our form tutor, Mr Godwin, an awkward bearded man whom we nicknamed Flash, on account of his moped. He leaned forward from his chair and hissed, ‘Simon, stop it,’ much to my disappointment and vague shame. This was two years after I had debuted my first written sketch and my comedy chops were already clacking. Two years before, I was altogether less experienced at performing my own material but no less enthusiastic.

Mr Miller, our avuncular and hugely likeable teacher, a man who walked with a significant limp and read stories with unparalleled skill, had been charged with organising an assembly project about journalism. My task was to write a short news piece that I would read to the class from behind a desk, as if I were Richard Baker or Angela Rippon or, my personal favourite at the time,
Midlands Today
’s Tom Coyne.

I immediately created the persona of Dicky Bird (I was unaware of the cricket commentator of the same name and thought I had invented the most hilarious comedy name ever) and wrote a story about a mysterious gas leak that was causing people across the country to spontaneously pass out. All spelling and (lack of) punctuation have been retained.

NEWSFLASH

With Dicky Bird

Here is the news hellow there has been Series of Spreading gas it has made its way up the west region and it is thought to be coming up to Belfast. A young lady by the age of seventy was walking up the road and she met her friend her friend said how are you and the lady said I feel abit and she fainted it was thouht to be the gas. The gas starded over in America when Lee magors alias Steve astin fainted during a bionic Jump he landed in a small allie nearby luckly he survied the producer said it was a narrow escape. A lady who own a purshen cat said her cat was chaseing a mouse its deadly claws were Just going to sink mousse inard body and then it fainted and that’s all we have time for good night err.

The ‘err’ at the end was Dicky Bird succumbing to the mysterious toxin himself. I wasn’t writing on Final Draft in those days and was unable to use parentheses or stage directions, nor was I aware of the signifying power of quotation marks, or commas for that matter; in fact, punctuation wasn’t a concept I was familiar with at all at this point.

I was particularly pleased with the ‘narrow escape’ gag. I think it was my first encounter with a pun. I distinctly remember finding it funny but not being entirely sure why. I just knew it made me feel sort of clever and I wanted to discover if the rest of the school would feel the same. The assembly was set for the end of the day on Friday so I knew morale would be high. The show would effectively be starting the weekend; the kids would be running on the excitement of all their impending recreational time, so the chances of choking were pretty slim. I felt confident, determined and beyond excited.

That Friday morning I had a terrible accident.

The playground always seemed like a busier place on Fridays. Everyone was slightly more excitable than the mini zombies that wandered the concrete on Mondays. Another week had passed, an entire weekend was stretching out before us, and spirits were always high. Specific time frames feel longer when you are younger because they represent a greater portion of your life. At eight years old, a single year amounts to an eighth of your entire life; which is a heck of a long time. It follows that weekends felt like a huge, sprawling holiday and what’s not to love about that?

I was particularly giddy, knowing that even before the weekend started, in five hours or so, I would be reading out my one hundred per cent guaranteed hilarious comedy news piece to a hundred or so other children. This was my big day.

A few months earlier, a new girl had arrived in class from another school. Her name was Denise Miller and she seemed slightly batty, or most likely, looking back, had a big personality and a great sense of humour – two things boys find threatening in girls and thus are more likely to dismiss as chronic mental illness. Denise had developed something of a crush on me, or so she said. Believe it or not, I was much prettier as a little boy with my mop of blond hair and big blue eyes. It was a face that made aesthetic sense as opposed to the frustrating Picasso that adulthood has seen fit to furnish me with.

Denise would often tease me with the threat of kisses, something I pretended to be disgusted by but actually encouraged because I was extremely flattered and relished the attention. That morning Denise was doing her ‘isn’t Simon dreamy’ routine and declared that if she caught me, she was going to kiss me on the lips. I immediately took off at high speed, combining playing hard to get with a demonstration of my higher than average running speed. I think the accepted term is ‘protesting too much’.

I sprinted down to the other end of the playground, through the melee of a football match towards a low wall that marked the beginning of the playing fields. I managed to dodge the midfield, sidestepped the defenders but fared less well with a striker from the opposing team who had made a similarly dazzling dash up the left wing. The boy, whose name was appropriately Simon Killen, ran in front of me, instinctively ducking down as he did so. My hips hit his flank at maximum velocity – catapulting me over his back, face first on to the wall.

I lay there for a second before hearing myself utter the words ‘Oh God’ in a way I had never uttered them before. I sounded serious, like a grown-up. I knew something very bad had happened. I have no memory of being picked up; the next thing I recall is seeing my reflection in the window of my classroom as I left the now silent playground. The bridge of my nose and my right cheek were covered in blood and my right eye was ballooning so fast I could see the swelling gathering beneath my eye.

It occurred to me, as I was led to the toilets by Mr Skinner, that I was not crying. Instead I was making an odd whimpering sound like a dog. Crying somehow felt inadequate at this moment, like I needed a new mode of expression to communicate the fear and surprise and, also, the odd sense of survivor excitement, although the last was probably just the confusion of shock.

In the toilets, I turned the sinks pink and red with my blood as I applied numerous paper towels to my face. Mr Skinner encouraged me to do impressions to prevent me from going into full shock. ‘What would Margaret Thatcher say about this?’ he enquired. ‘This is very, very unfortunate,’ I replied. It worked, I started laughing, I could see, nothing was broken. Miraculously, the angle of impact had been just right so as to avoid permanent damage or disfigurement. The brickwork had cut a line across the top of my nose to just beneath my right eye and gravity had dragged a deep graze down my right cheek. It looked absolutely horrendous but my skull and eyes remained intact and it left no scars when it healed.

Later, as I was being attended to by the school nurse, the most pressing issue remained: whether or not it would still be possible for me to read out my comedy news report at that afternoon’s assembly; so much so that when I returned to class, a battered hero, receiving a worried look from Denise and a demure smile from Meredith Catsanus, and Mr Miller asked me if I wanted to go home, or at least sit out of the presentation, I declined emphatically. I sat down at my desk, my mind racing to come up with lines to comically explain away my injury.

That afternoon, with my right eye almost entirely closed and the graze on my cheek a suppurating badge of glistening gore, I sat down at my fake news desk, shuffled my papers and said, ‘Good afternoon, I’m Dicky Bird and I have recently been in a fight with a cat.’ The comic logic of it made sense to me: my name made me sound like a small bird and small birds get into fights with cats. I’d seen enough bird carcasses on our front lawn courtesy of Bonnie and Clyde, our two sealpoint Siamese, to know this was the case. Whether it was funny or the other children were just happy to see me making light of my hideous wound, it got a laugh and I carried on with my piece, which went down pretty well.

I went home in a great mood and when my mum returned from work, I covered my face with my hand and implored her not to be alarmed, like some sympathetic monstrosity, desperate for acceptance by the object of his affection, whipping my hand away and brandishing the damage with a face full of faux suffering. My flair for the dramatic had manifested itself quite clearly that day, not least in my dogged insistence to Mr Miller that the show simply must go on.

Who Do I Think I Am (Part 1)?

I
p.

wasn’t born in a trunk at the side of a stage – that would be foolish and unhygienic. I was a full month old before I found myself backstage at a theatre and this fact is thanks pretty much entirely to my mother. She developed a love of amateur dramatics in her early twenties and imprinted a similar enthusiasm upon me as I grew up, never once giving me less than total support in my efforts to develop this hobby into a professional career, not just as an actor but as a writer, despite my tendency to indulge in long, rambling sentences that seemed as though they might go on forever (like this one).

Gillian Rosemary Smith was born in May 1947, to Albert and Emma Smith, the youngest of a gaggle of six sisters, kicked off by Doreen in 1927 and swelled at varying intervals by Margaret, Audrey, Marion, Jacqueline and finally Gill. The age gap between oldest and youngest sisters meant my mother became an auntie at the age of three, an achievement I always regarded as being extremely cool.

Growing up, Mum recalls developing a love of words and poetry, instilled in her by her mother, who I knew as Nan and who possessed a similar passion for verse, not entirely usual for a working-class girl from Gloucester. Nan was able to recite Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ from memory, as well as Longfellow’s
Hiawatha
and passages from Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
. Her bookshelves were filled with poetry books and also included a
Complete Works of Shakespeare
, inscribed by my grandfather:
To My Beloved Pem – 1st May 1926.

With six children and a household to run, Nan’s love of poetry never extended beyond the bookshelves but she passed it on to her daughters, particularly Marion who demonstrated a talent for acting and joined a renowned local drama group in Quedgley, Gloucestershire, run by the
RAF
for whom she worked. Mum would go to see Marion perform in various plays as well as sit and listen to her read poetry at home. Marion may have even harboured a desire to attend drama school herself and probably would have done so had life not taken her elsewhere. Still, her influence on her youngest sister was powerful. To this day, Mum can remember the words to various Kipling poems favoured by the young Marion, and recalls being inspired to follow in her footsteps by participating in devised pantomimes at Sunday school and musical numbers at her school concert.

However, when Marion married, her dramatic activities ceased and twelve-year-old Gill’s main influence disappeared. It was not until after she had met my father that she found herself being drawn back towards the theatre, or at least a large ice-cream and sausage manufacturing facility on Gloucester’s Eastern Avenue. For reasons now forgotten, although presumably because of Dad’s involvement in the local music scene (which I’ll come to in a bit), my soon-to-be parents got involved with a production staged by a drama group at the local Wall’s factory. Here, Mum discovered she had an aptitude for dance and was encouraged by a professional choreographer who had been hired to work on the show. She threw herself into things with a boundless enthusiasm that would one day result in her breaking both her elbows while executing a crazy dance move that nobody else in her drama group would try. That wouldn’t happen for sixteen years though, and at this point, no amount of plaster of Paris would have held her back.

By 1968, John and Gill had married and moved into a bungalow in Churchdown, Gloucester, where they befriended Jim and Jackie Rendell, the couple who lived opposite. Jim and Jackie were members of a well-known local drama group called the Gloucester Operatic and Dramatic Society, or
GODS
(a far more austere abbreviation than their neighbour, Cheltenham’s
CODS
, and infinitely preferable to the Stroud Operatic and Dramatic Society, who decided not to go with an acronym). As well as various smaller productions at their home theatre, aptly named Olympus, the
GODS
would mount an annual large-scale musical production, which would be performed at the
ABC
theatre on St Aldate Street in Gloucester, some five or so doors down from the music shop my parents would buy a few years later.