Small Man in a Book (21 page)

Our publicity card.

We were to stop. Immediately. No ifs, no buts. And, more importantly, no more songs.

This was embarrassing on many levels, not least because a small group of friends from the college had gamely come along to support us, amongst them a very young Hugo Blick (with whom, fifteen years later, I would go on to make
Marion and Geoff
). Sadly, my lack of fortune-telling abilities meant that the prospect of awards and plaudits fifteen years down the road was of little comfort. So, with no other option open to us, we did as instructed and left the building, our metaphorical tails tucked metaphorically between our very real legs. The evening ended with James and I sitting on a bench on Cardiff’s Queen Street, contemplating our inability to entertain. It was dark now and the gloom of the night was easily matched, if not outdone, by the gloom we felt at another failure.

As has been the case on so many occasions, the start of a new day brought renewed hope. And so we trudged on undeterred and determined to prove the naysayers wrong. We had a few successes; a gig at a golf club on the outskirts of Cardiff went very well, as did a twenty-first birthday party in Hampshire. At both of these outings we performed under a new name, as Tony Casino and the Roulette Wheels (the wheels in question being our backing singers). One of the Roulette Wheels was a girl named Jacqueline Gilbride.

Jacque was from Glasgow, the daughter of a pharmacist; she was taking a one-year postgrad acting course, and had recently been awarded the title of My First Girlfriend. My initial sighting of her was in a student production of Alan Bennett’s
Habeas Corpus
. I felt she was the most naturally funny member of the cast and thought it would be nice to tell her so, which I did when we met in the bar later that evening.

That was all.

Most people, when writing of their formative college years, particularly with reference to their early romantic endeavours, often explain things away by reminding the reader that the events being recalled occurred during ‘my drinking years’. With me, the opposite is true. I didn’t begin to drink alcohol until my early to mid-thirties, so all these episodes came to pass without the liberating assistance of a drink. I take an odd pride in that now. Anyone can walk up to a girl and begin chatting her up if they’ve had a drink; I was going into battle, not without a sword – if you’d said I was entering the fray without a sword, I would have taken great offence – but certainly without a shield. The mind-boggling thing for me now is to think that, at the time, I was entirely unaware of the difference this would have made to my prospects. How could I not have realized? Well, sober as the chair of a judicial review I made my first faltering steps on the road to romance – a road which, let us not forget, is often described as ‘rocky’.

I would not rush to oppose that view.

It was during the winter of 1984, my first winter away from home, that I had taken a job at the New Theatre in Cardiff, selling programmes and ice creams during the run of that year’s pantomime.
Robin Hood
starred Ruth Madoc and
Crackerjack
’s Stu Francis (at that time on top of the world with his uncompromising catchphrase, ‘Ooh, I could crush a grape!’) alongside a still relatively unknown double act from Rotherham, the Chuckle Brothers. I was not toiling alone; both Dougray and Dave also had jobs there. The three of us would stand in the foyer of the theatre wearing our Robin Hood hats and holding little wooden toy bows and arrows above our heads as we sang our own little ditty, to the tune of the kids’ TV show
Robin Hood
.

Bows and arrows, bows and arrows, only 90p,

Bows and arrows, bows and arrows, buy them all from me.

They’re made of wood,

They fire really good,

Bows and arrows, bows and arrows, bows and arrows …

Anyone who works front of house in the theatre will tell you that it’s the best way to see beyond the supposed glitz and glamour of show business as you watch the same performance night after night after matinee. For an actor, it’s an invaluable education.

The New Theatre was a receiving house and played host to dozens of touring productions which Dave, Dougray and I would watch, often standing high up at the back of the gods, sometimes weighed down with trays full of ice creams, drinks and chocolates. No greater incentive was needed to shift these overpriced refreshments than the fact that the more you sold, the lighter the tray became. Having shifted the programmes, we would head back to the office and hand over the cash, carefully counting out the remaining unsold items to ensure fair play, before loading up again for the interval. In between these duties you could just stand and watch.

I saw Tom Baker, Tony Haygarth and Dora Bryan in the National Theatre’s tour of
She Stoops to Conquer
, was put off opera by the rudeness of the audience at an interminably long production of Wagner’s
Ring Cycle
and also watched Ayckbourn’s
Way Upstream
, which featured in its cast Norman Rossington, an actor of great interest to me as he had appeared alongside not only The Beatles in
A Hard Day’s Night
, but also Elvis in
Double Trouble
. One afternoon, between the matinee and evening performances, I cornered him in the corridor and asked him the question he must by then have been well and truly sick of: ‘What was he like?’

Solo acts came too. I remember yawing at the prospect of two nights of Max Boyce. I couldn’t have been more wrong; he was astonishing, putting on a show somewhere between stand-up and a rock concert, on both nights performing as though it was the last show of his life. After one performance I happened to pass him on the stairs as he came off the stage and made his way to his dressing room. He looked like a man possessed, drenched in sweat, staring straight ahead. It was a glimpse into a distant world I would inhabit one day. But not yet.

The Cardiff pantomime had an annual tradition it shared with its neighbours at the Grand Theatre in Swansea and across the River Severn at the Hippodrome in Bristol. Each year the three casts, crews and front-of-house staff would hold a huge party in one of those cities. As that year’s productions drew to a close, it was the turn of Cardiff to host, and so Dave and I made preparations for the big bash. Unbeknown to me, Dave had his eye on Jacque and had invited her as his guest, telling me that she would be bringing her friend Lisa. Lisa enjoyed some celebrity status within the college, having already appeared in a film with no less a person than Richard Gere. If you watch his Second World War movie,
Yanks
, towards the end as the aforementioned Americans begin to leave the Yorkshire town and travel home, a girl is seen crying and waving from a railway bridge. That was Lisa.

The four of us poured into Dave’s tinny little black Fiat Panda and crossed our fingers that we would make the journey unscathed. We headed across Cardiff and arrived at the hotel, quickly and effortlessly mingling with Ruth Madoc, Stu Francis, Barry and Paul Chuckle and even Alfred Marks, recently arrived from Bristol, before getting some drinks and finding a table. I was seated next to Jacque and we began to talk. We talked and we talked and we talked. We really did talk a great deal; we got on like a house ablaze, its occupants running screaming out on to the street. I thought I might have noticed a few disgruntled looks from Dave, but couldn’t be sure. He seemed happy enough, chatting to Lisa, and even happier when, towards the end of the evening, the DJ called out the number of the winning raffle ticket as Jacque and I made our way to the dance floor. Lucky Dave was sole winner of a beautiful, extremely limited-edition plate, celebrating another successful year for the triumvirate of pantomimes. As he carried his commemorative crockery proudly back to our table, he looked across the room to the dance floor, to see Jacque and me entwined in each other’s arms, kissing. He wasn’t happy, even with his plate – which, in light of recent events, had taken on the role of consolation prize.

We left the do in Dave’s car with the placatory plate and, if I’m being honest, a bit of an atmosphere. It would have made sense, geographically speaking, to drop Jacque off last. I was against this as it would have meant leaving her alone in the car with Dave once Lisa and I had been jettisoned. I somehow managed to convince our hard-done-by driver that it would make much more sense to drop her off first. In so doing, I ensured that she remained beyond the clutches of my dear friend. And so it was that Jacque and I began to see each other. Tentatively, at first.

It was a week or so later that we went back to her place, a room in a shared house on the prophetically named Colum Road. I stayed the night – rather nervously at first, although I got the hang of things after a while. Jacque’s room was at the back of the ground floor; at the front was a room taken by her friend Tracey and her boyfriend Gary. If either of them wished to use the loo during the night they had to come through Jacque’s room; this gave the proceedings a bit of an edge (and, I suppose, must at times have resulted in what can only be described as an early form of dogging).

As I’ve said, I was tentative. With the light turned off we slipped out of our clothes – quite quickly, I recall – and jumped into bed, where Jacque soon discovered that I’d kept my trousers on, just to be sure. She expressed her surprise at this, and I reacted as though it was something of a shock to me too: ‘Where did they come from?’ I got out of bed in the dark and returned, trouser-less.

As the situation developed, Jacque was surprised once more to discover that, while my trousers were now languishing in a crumpled heap on the floor, I nonetheless still had my pants on.

I explained that I was just being careful, before submitting to full disclosure …

The following morning I borrowed her bike and cycled back across town, along the pedestrianized Queen Street and down on to Newport Road, a huge smile on my face as I pedalled. I looked at the people as I rode by and laughed out loud at the thought of them having no idea where I’d just come from or what a momentous night I’d enjoyed. When I play the moment back now, it has a joyous, filmic quality to it; the sun is shining, birds are singing and music fills the air. I think I knew then, in a rare case of self-awareness, that a milestone had been reached – one which I would never forget.

A trip to Bute Park with Jacque.

In the fullness of time Jacque was enticed up to my top-floor sub-zero love nest and managed, with admirable foresight, to see past the cold-water kitchen and its collection of empty milk bottles, the damp-stained walls and the tinned-food diet to the handsome young man beyond. The house had a strict ‘no girlfriends’ policy, which Mrs Williams made no secret of. I’d already got on the wrong side of my perfectly reasonable landlady earlier that week when I openly flouted her hot-water rota by turning on the immersion heater one afternoon for an impromptu bath. I further angered her one morning when Jacque, having stayed over the night before, was sneaking down the stairs and out of the house. She quietly slipped through the front door, closing it carefully behind her before silently turning the handle on the door of the porch. It wouldn’t budge. Mrs Williams had cunningly locked the porch and hidden the key, leaving any unwelcome sex maniacs trapped in the tiny glass cell with only a local property paper for comfort until it pleased her to release them. Nothing was ever said regarding this breaking of the rules, although I did suffer an icy stare as I returned home that evening.

This whole wonderful ‘having a girlfriend’ experience was all new to me. Most of my fellow students had had girlfriends prior to coming away to college, and some of them were already working their way towards personal bests when it came to bedposts and notches. I, on the other hand, slipped happily into a new world of doing things together and having someone else to share thoughts and experiences with.