The Revolt of the Pendulum (43 page)

the path of adventure. I wish I was going with them, but I was there to see them off, and half the trick of life is to be as glad for the lives of those who will outlive you as you are for the
lives of those you have outlived.

JONATHAN JAMES-MOORE

Upon the untimely death of our old Footlights colleague Jonathan James-Moore, Pete Atkin wrote the
Guardian
’s principal obituary, and I wrote a supplementary piece
that was published next day.

In his obituary for Jonathan James-Moore, Pete Atkin was right to stress the ability of the young Jonathan, amiable colossus of the Footlights in our late-sixties era, to
perform a script at a level beyond the dreams of its writer. Since his performer’s understanding of a written line was at the heart of the judgment he brought to his influential career as a
BBC radio producer, it might be worth recalling just how good he could be at what we used to call ‘doubling the laugh’. The laugh can’t be doubled unless the performer understands
exactly how the joke works, and there was nobody quite like Jonathan for wanting to know what every comma in the script was up to. One of my own Footlights scripts, called ‘Hell Below
Zero’, was a monologue for an all-purpose BBC winter sports commentator whom we called Alexander Palace. Suitably dressed in a white roll-neck sweater with Olympic rings, Jonathan would get
his first laughs as soon as the spotlight came on. The bobble-topped beanie probably helped.

But as the disaster of Alexander Palace’s jingoistic commentary developed like a fatuous avalanche, what helped most was Jonathan’s capacity to pause after the latest solecism and
let the audience enjoy the implications. At one point he had to express his doubts that the British ski champion, who had done a personal best in the downhill, would do quite so well over the same
course (‘I, for one, would be extremely surprised . . .’) in the next day’s twin event of the downhill, the uphill. The line got a solid laugh, which pleased me very much. But the
laugh doubled when Jonathan’s face registered the helpless defiance of a patriotic bone-head who knows that he has got something wrong yet takes pride in his determination to press on
regardless. It was a character study, and an object lesson in how to let a line breathe. From then on, I always tried to give the performer time, after getting a laugh with his voice, to get
another with his face. In later years the performer was usually me, but I learned how to write it that way from watching Jonathan perform. I could never have learned how to perform from watching
him perform: he was just too good.

He had everything as a stage performer except eyesight. Despite those heavy-duty spectacles of his, the world was a bit of a blur even in daylight, and in sudden darkness he was slow to adjust.
One night on the Edinburgh Fringe, where his routines were helping to sell out the late-night Footlights revue in the Lauriston Hall (we had to put on extra performances), the lights went out on
Alexander Palace’s final verbal catastrophe and the black-clad assistant stage manager who had been assigned to go out and get him forgot to do so. A physical catastrophe duly followed. All
too aware that the lights would soon be coming up again, Jonathan tried to get off stage by himself. He did, but instead of going off through the door at the side, he went off over the front of the
stage and five feet straight down into the audience, where he landed beanie-first. By the time the lights went up again he had included himself in the front row. The two people who made room for
him thought it was part of the show, and they were right. Where Jonathan James-Moore was, it was always part of the show, and largely because of his penetrating respect for comic writing, the gift
he wasn’t given but was born to help bring alive – and that, of course, was his gift.

Guardian
, December 2, 2005

IAN ADAM

Ian Adam was the ideal singing teacher. The proof lay in the fact that he could teach a block of wood to sing. I was the block of wood. Around about the turn of the millennium,
in the last flickerings of my career on main-channel television, I was running short of puff. Nothing serious, but after a two-day rehearsal for a big show I would sometimes need to breathe again
before the end of a long sentence. I was advised that this crimp in the fluency could be taken care of by singing training.

When I pointed out that I couldn’t sing even ‘Happy Birthday’, I was advised that the singing training was meant to help the speaking, not to turn me into Caruso, and that
there was a man famous for being able to sort anybody out. I turned up at Ian Adam’s door in Chelsea to be greeted by a slightly built, cherubically smiling man who was already flattering me
before the door had shut behind me. Showing me into his charming parlour, he told me that as a devotee of radio and television he has been in a state of amazement for years about the richness of my
speaking voice. ‘Of course all you Australians are natural singers because your voices are placed so far forward,’ he said, ‘but
your
voice is something special. That
lovely deep baritone, but I think you’re really a tenor.’

When I assured him that I was neither baritone nor tenor, but fell into a special category that couldn’t sing even ‘Happy Birthday’, he shook his head decisively. ‘Well,
“Happy Birthday” is actually quite hard,’ he said, ‘and anyway we’re talking about the qualities in your voice that are waiting to be brought out.’ By this time
he was sitting at the baby grand piano and shaping up to play a few notes that he wanted me to copy. I copied them to the best of my ability, or perhaps not even that. He professed to be delighted.
He explained that although the majority of my lower notes were naturally ravishing beyond the dreams of Lauritz Melchior, those higher notes that I couldn’t hold had been ruined after my
voice broke, and the way to fix them would be to add more notes on top so as to clarify the notes left below. In brief, turning me into a tenor would revive my career as a baritone.

When I said that I had understood the intention was merely to fix my speaking voice, and that I wasn’t expecting to be turned into Caruso, he assured me that Caruso, Gigli and Pavarotti
had all required training and that in my voice, as in theirs, there would be undiscovered glories that only the correct discipline would reveal, starting now.

Within seconds I was matching him puff for puff in his famous opening exercise, the steam-train chuff. The first part of the steam-train chuff was done with mouth open and the second part
– seemingly calculated to shift the contents of the sinuses up into the brain – was done with mouth closed. The stream-train chuff was followed by the airless clack. In the airless
clack, the air in the diaphragm was suddenly expelled and the vocal cords were required to make a clucking noise
in vacuo
. Often, sapped by the pressure to perform, they refused to make any
noise at all. Ian always confidently announced that they would next time.

Other pupils doubtless had their own private names for these exercises, of which there were about a dozen, all of them dedicated to shifting the centre of breathing downwards and the centre of
singing forwards, into the ‘mask’ of the face. Ian’s devoted assistant, Kate Hughes, who filled in for him when he was away, imposed the same regime of disciplinary warm-up, so we
all got to reproduce these strange sets of sounds week by week, forever. Before they got to work on that week’s song or an aria, everybody had to go through the same preparation.

And everybody meant everybody. If you arrived five minutes early, you could sit in the downstairs kitchen with a cup of tea and guess who was yodelling up there in the parlour at the end of the
lesson before the start of yours. If you couldn’t guess, you would bump into them on the stairs. At one time or another, they all came through: Michael Crawford, Anthony Andrews, Kenneth
Branagh, Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson, Ron Moody, Patricia Hodge, Maureen Lipman, Terence Stamp, Helena Bonham Carter. Especially among the men, anyone who stunned a West End audience by suddenly
revealing a previously unsuspected competence in singing had usually picked up an extra octave from Ian’s little academy.

People already famous for singing would drop in to brush up. You just had to get used to the traffic. At one time, waiting outside the parlour, I heard a voice coming from inside that was so
beautiful I was already paralysed when the door opened and I was faced with the mind-bending presence of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who had come in for a pit-stop before she opened a new show on
Broadway. Ian never stopped working with real singers. He had known them all personally, all the way back to Maggie Teyte, who had been his own teacher. In the French repertoire that he himself
would later favour for teaching, she would make him repeat a phrase until he wept. (He would tell me this story while I was fighting back tears after once again making a shambles of the song by
Faure´ that he kept me working on for two solid years.)

It was knowing all about the real singers that made him so good with those of us who were only aspiring to that condition. And I was only one of those who never stopped aspiring: long after my
breathing had been corrected, I went on turning up for lessons, still battling to get on top of that fiendish long aria in
A Little Night Music
that Sondheim might have designed specifically
to drive the star to drink. (‘Yes, dear,’ Ian would say, ‘it is a bit of cow. Even Jeremy took a while to learn this one. Now let’s try it again. From the start, I think,
don’t you? And this time
try not to make it up
.’)

Ian was a thrilling teacher because he himself never ceased to be thrilled by the whole business, even at the level where somebody like me was struggling to make the middle section of ‘So
in Love’ sound a bit less like a cat drowning. And the great thing about his method was that it worked. As you added notes at the top, your voice really did start to clarify lower down, and
gradually you acquired the ability to do that thing for so long only dreamed of: hold a tune. It took time, but who cared, when going to see him was so much fun, and he would always be there? Now
that he isn’t, there will be a lot of us, for a long while ahead, who will think of him as we do our exercises, or sing anything, or, indeed, hear anything sung.

Guardian
, June 4, 2007

RICHARD DREWETT

Surely destined to be remembered as one of the most inventive television producers of his time, Richard Drewett always had the admiration of his colleagues, but would have been
a legend far beyond the borders of the television industry if only the public was able to tell what a producer does. Unfortunately, in the eyes of the general viewer, the competence of a television
producer is never visible except when it is absent.

Richard Drewett’s competence determined the tone and intelligence of every programme he put to air, so he barely left a trace. He just brought the best out of everyone involved, and they
got the credit. Since I was one of them, let me speak briefly for all the others, the hundreds of people who worked with him during a tireless career that never faltered until the day his illness
kept him out of the office.

It’s in the office, not in the studio or on location, that even the most hands-on producer does the work that makes the difference. Richard was the executive producer for every programme
with my name in the title between 1982, when I left Fleet Street to go into television, and the turn of the millennium, when I left television for a retirement which is proving quite busy, but
which would be a lot harder for me to make sense of if he had not taught me so much about the fruitful use of time. On top of his charm and good manners, that was the thing he was best at, the
thing that ruled all the other things he could do. He was mad about his family and fast cars, but when he was working he was perfectly sane: far too sane to be interested in power, which he could
have had, but didn’t care about.

He cared only about getting good programmes made. For doing that, his first rule for business was to prepare thoroughly in the office so as to save time in the studio or on location, and thus
earn the capacity to pack the air-time tight. Securing the essential early so as to leave room for exploiting the unexpected, he was always able cram the screen with value. A performer like myself,
by nature prone to enthusiasm and thus to impatience, could only benefit from his strict sense of priority.

In my raw and uninstructed state, I could hardly have been an enticing prospect when he first took me on. He was in charge of Special Programmes at LWT and I was hanging around the building
while various attempts were being made to get me on camera so that I could work off a salary which continued to drop out of the sky because the company still had to pay me even though
Saturday
Night People
, for reasons too complicated to go into, was off the air. Though the studio producers were encasing me in several different examples of the classic three-piece suit by that stage,
I still looked pretty scruffy, whereas Richard looked dapper and well groomed, with overtones of a military background.

Rendered permanently thin by the kind of metabolism which apparently imposed no necessity to eat anything at all, he looked neatly correct from his fine-drawn features all the way down to his
ankles, after which a strange thing happened. He wore white plimsolls, one of which had the top cut away. He never apologised for the odd effect of his footwear and quite a lot of people knew him
for years without ever finding out the reason. In my role as brash colonial, I asked him, and was told that the foot in the skeletal plimsoll had been smashed up, the operation on it had been
bungled, and any vertical pressure put on it would cause so much pain that he couldn’t work.

Work came first. Kindly he listened to my plans for being a literary man and just walking into the studio a couple of times a week to go on air. Kindly but firmly he insisted that it
couldn’t be like that. If I wanted to do this stuff properly, I would have to work a full week. He set the example by being first into the office every day and the last to leave. From early
on, I got a close-up of what it meant to prepare properly. It was the secret of his authority. Since he knew everybody else’s job as well, he couldn’t be buffaloed by expertise. On the
first documentary special we did,
The Clive James Paris Fashion Show
, he could tell from the rushes that Terence Donovan, our director, was skimping on the bread-and-butter coverage.