Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (11 page)

I told him I was born just a few streets away and he smiled broadly.

‘Well,
that’s nice to know – and isn’t this
funny,’
he went on.
‘I
wasn’t even going to come up here today, but then I thought I should pop in and collect any mail and so forth that’s gathering behind the
door. I’ve only let myself in ten minutes ago and I was just leaving again when I heard you at the letter box! I thought it might be the estate agent. I think the board goes up outside
tomorrow.’

At this I started to panic slightly.
‘I’ll
be honest, I’ve never bought a house before. I’m not sure what’s
next.’

Mr Reynolds carried on smiling.
‘Well
, I’ve never sold a house before, so we’ve got that in common too. I suppose I tell you the price and then you beat me down and we shake hands from there is the
form!’

Wendy squeezed my hand even tighter. This was starting to become dreamlike.

‘How
much is
it?’
I managed to gasp. At that exact moment I had approximately ninety pounds in my bank account.

‘Don’t
you want to look
around?’
he said. I said we didn’t. This was it.

‘Well,’
he went on,
‘there’s
three bedrooms upstairs. The big one looks right into the park. But there’s no bathroom and only really a scullery out there. Oh, and an outside how’s-your-father in the garden. I’m afraid Mum and Dad rather resisted modernization. There’s a few old gas lamps here and there too! Anyway, they have instructed me to ask for twenty-nine
thousand.’

This meant absolutely nothing to me. All I could say was,
‘So
 . . . 
what’s
that?’

He shrugged.
‘Well
, I suppose that means I should accept twenty-
eight!’

And I just said OK. And that was it. We bought the wonderful house off him there and then, less than ten minutes after turning into the street with our hopeful little note in my pocket. Exactly as had happened in the case of moving into Maydew House, against all odds, Wendy and I were home.

Walking around it with him afterwards, it seemed to us an enormous old place but absolutely calm and welcoming in every room we arrived at. There were curious old alcoves and wonderful aged but robust cupboards everywhere. The ceilings were moulded and edged with sculpting. As we walked, he told us that his mother had died at the age of ninety-nine and her husband, at one hundred and
one, had followed just a few weeks later. They had been married for eighty-two years.

So now I feel I must address a question you are no doubt very keen to hear answered. How on earth, if I had less than one hundred pounds in the bank, was I going to give the fantastic Mr Reynolds his twenty-eight grand? Well, as Wendy and I walked out into the charming little back garden of the premises and Mr Reynolds momentarily left our side, that was the very first thing my wife put to me.

‘Ne’mind
about
that,’
I said, putting my arm around her, reeling with giddiness at the thought of the coming years.
‘I’ll
sort this out. It can’t be hard. It’s gonna be wonderful – you
watch.’
And I wasn’t lying. I knew it
was
all going to be totally 100 per cent wonderful. As usual, I hadn’t the faintest idea of how it could actually happen. I just had total conviction that happen it would. And, of course, it did.

‘You
have to go to a building society, or a bank, and ask them for a mortgage and then they see how much money they’ll lend you to buy a house, once you’ve found the right
one.’
This was my sister explaining to me, patiently, later that day what I now needed to do.
‘But
they don’t just dish them
out,’
she went on, sensing I wasn’t grasping the overall gravity of what is for many people A Big Step.
‘Don’t
be like Dad, who thinks you can give a bank manager a drink then ignore any other
payments.’

Apparently, he really did this once. Needing a grand in a hurry, whether for a family wedding or a certainty in the Cheltenham Gold Cup, a friend of his had recommended that Spud open a bank account for the first time in his life and then, after securing a loan,
‘just
knock ’em for it’.

This made exciting sense to Dad, who had no fear whatsoever of any subsequent
bailiffs’
visits or county court judgements against him. During the interview he was granted with the branch manager at Barclays, Dad apparently interpreted what the official outlined as interest due on a one-thousand-pound loan as a coded message to bung him a
‘drink’.
I understand their final exchanges went like this:

Spud:
‘So
if you give me the grand, what are you, y’know, like
YOU
, looking for on
top?’

Manager:
‘You
mean the
interest?’

Spud:
‘Interest
– call it what you
like.’

‘Well,
I’m not sure, but let’s say eighty pounds
 . . .’

Spud:
‘Eighty
quid, eh? All right, say I can lay me hands on eighty quid this afternoon – I slip you that, then we say no more about the other
bit.’

Manager:
‘Other
bit?’

Spud:
‘The
grand. We can just drop that out then,
eh?’

My mum told me that Spud arrived home furious, tearing off the tie he had donned especially for the meeting, shouting,
‘Fucking
waste of time! Different breed, that mob – he didn’t seem to know what I was talking
about!’

I too had never had a single meaningful conversation with anyone in the banking business. The huge cheques that I was paid by LWT went into a joint account that Wendy and I had opened with the minimum of fuss and contact a year previously. All I did was thoroughly knock out what was deposited via a series of cheque books that seemed to require constant replenishing. For the house money we set up an appointment at the nearest building society to where we lived and went in literally hoping for the best. Even before we had sat down it went well.

‘Oh,
I wondered if it was
you!’
said the chap, clearly thrilled that Danny Baker Off The Telly was here for a chat.
‘We
love your programme in our house. I was watching that thing you did with Kenneth Williams last week. Oh, he’s funny, isn’t he? I would LOVE to meet Kenneth Williams – what’s he
like?’

Well, I ask you. On another day I might have been allocated some sour old gherkin who never watched TV and kept a special tin of fleas to put in the ears of presumptuous oiks who didn’t show due respect. Instead I had chanced upon the financial sphere’s equivalent of a stage-door Johnny. Immediately truncating
Williams’
name to Ken for added familiarity, I confirmed what a true waspish genius he was, who, despite his reputation, actually loved meeting all sorts of people. In fact, now that I think of it, next time
Ken was on the show, why didn’t my new chum from the building society come along for a few drinks and lots of laughs in the green room?

The mortgage man lit up with delight.
‘Are
you
serious?’
he said.
‘God
, I’d LOVE to do
that.’

Ladies and gentlemen. Let me say I entirely understand if the bumptious good fortune that has been continuously heaped upon my life is starting to make you feel a bit sick. Even when we got off the subject of Kenneth Williams and on to the matter in hand, my new friend acted as though we were just nattering on the back seat of a charabanc to Margate. When he asked what amount of mortgage I required, I misunderstood what this meant, and said,
‘Twenty
-eight thousand
pounds’
– the price of the house.

Without undue surprise he clarified for me.
‘So
you want a 100 per cent
mortgage?’
This was said in a tone signifying such a trifling request was just about the very least he could do for me.

I was a little fuzzy as to what a
‘100
per cent
mortgage’
might betoken, so I just yelled at him,
‘Yes
, that’s it – 100 per cent! Or 200 per cent if you
like!’
It was as though we were now partners in an up-and-coming new double act.

At one point, almost with embarrassment, he did enquire if I had brought along any contracts I could show him as a security. Trying to hide my distaste that he had sadly introduced so unworthy a note to our hitherto sparkling tête-a-tête, I told him I would post him something later that, though it only covered the next few months, was simply the latest in a blizzard of such cast-iron documents that would undoubtedly keep piling up as the years went by. He said he didn’t doubt that and swiftly moved on to ask who was going to be on the show this week. This was extremely decent of him because the truth was I had no real clue as to whether LWT would keep paying me beyond that coming July. I mean, the show was doing well and I
presumed
they would have me back, but even I suspected building societies don’t just dish out houses to people simply because a chap likes to look on the Sunny Side.

Anyway, never was a 100 per cent mortgage more happily dispensed and – despite a flurry of phone calls from the estate agents,
who were livid we had, albeit unconsciously, short-circuited their system – 46 Scawen Road was very swiftly all ours, lock, stock and outside how’s-your-father.

About a year later, old Mr Reynolds called by to see how we were doing. He seemed to rejoice in finding the place alive with noise and babies again.

‘Did
those people that I approached to sell this house bother
you?’
he asked. I told him they had, at one point even telling Wendy and I angrily that we shouldn’t
‘get
our hopes up just yet’.

‘Yes,’
he went on,
‘they
called me too. Said they had a long list of people who were promised first dibs on anything in this street – including a barrister and some high-ups over at Goldsmith College! Already had ’em lined up to view. Insisted I could get up to five grand more if I reneged on you. I let them speak, and then quietly told them,
“My
new friends are a young local couple, they are having a baby, I like them very much and we have agreed a price –
goodbye.”
Then I put the phone down. Furious, they were, absolutely
furious.’
And he chuckled and sipped his tea.

They Might Be Giants

B
onnie Rae Alice Baker was born in Guy’s Hospital – right at the heart of Davey the Dwarf’s beat – not long before three in the afternoon on Halloween 1983 – a Monday. I was present at the birth, of course, dressed up in the required theatre greens like Jack Klugman in an episode of
Quincy
. Handed my daughter for the first time, I naturally felt obliged to say a few words and I managed a teary,
‘Hello
,
mate’
– an introduction that I have found to be the mot juste whenever I am first introduced to my children.

The
Six O’Clock Show
ran on like a bullet train through the majority of that decade, hundreds of shows with just about every major British star spending at least one of those happy hours with us; plus a handful of truly global stars too. I had actually met Mel Brooks before, when I was at the
NME
and had become fed up with talking to rock’n’rollers. Though we had only spent half a day together in 1981, I had every reason to think he would remember me when he came on to the show several years later. When we had first been introduced at Claridge’s Hotel, he spun round in exaggerated shock – or at least what I supposed was exaggerated shock.

‘Wow!
You’re kidding! YOU’RE Danny
Baker?!’
he boomed, now gripping my arms as if I were a long-lost son.
‘Seriously
, DANNY BAKER – that’s
you?’
Notorious for being
‘always
on’
I figured this was a bit of explosive business he routinely employed just to get a laugh from all the raw chumps a little over-awed to be in his company.

‘I
cannot tell you how THRILLED I am to meet
you!’
he chuckled, looking genuinely excited I had walked into his life.
‘Danny
Baker! Do you have any idea why this is such a blast for me right
now?’

I momentarily thought that he might have really enjoyed my recent
NME
cover story on the Village People, but surely the chances of that were remote.

‘OK,
come and sit down. This is amazing to
me.’
And arm around my shoulder, Mel Brooks, who I’d hoped I would catch in a good mood, marched me into the hotel’s ultra-fancy restaurant. We sat down and he pointed straight at my face.

‘The
very first thing I ever wrote for TV wasn’t a hit, but I loved it. Do you know what that
was?’

I knew he’d created the spoof spy series
Get Smart
quite early in his career and it was one of my favourite American shows as a youngster. But Get Smart
had
been a hit, so I just shook my head.

‘It
was called
Inside Danny Baker
! Aired in 1963. It was about a dentist and everyone hated it, nobody picked it up, never been seen. And do you know why I chose the name Danny Baker, Danny
Baker?’

It takes a lot to shut me up, but I was being magnificently stunned here so I simply registered incomprehension.

‘I
chose that name because it was THE MOST GENTILE NAME I COULD EVER CONCEIVE OF! There has never been a Jew called Danny Baker, I stake my life on that! So now – if you tell me you’re Jewish I’m gonna have to kill you with this bread
knife!’

Cupping his hands together, he exploded with laughter and rocked back and forth in his plush dining chair. Across the tablecloth, I did too. Indeed, we got along tremendously all day. I eventually tagged along to Harrods and several art galleries with Mel and his manager, Jo Lustig, until the early evening. Every time someone approached him, he would immediately tell them the story of who I was and how it struck him as incredible that we should meet. It must have been five years later that I walked into the make-up department at LWT and there he was, getting prepared for the show, issuing specific instructions on how to apply the items he’d brought in his own personal kit.

‘Hello,
Mr
Brooks,’
I said, while a woman layered his famous old hooter.
‘We
have met
before.’

Now I am well aware that
‘We
have met
before’
are four of the most chilling words in the English language, but seeing the momentary confusion on his face as he struggled to place me, I knew I had a knockout punchline to banish his discomfort.

‘I
am Danny
Baker,’
I said.

Mel Brooks rose smartly from his chair, the protective make-up gown still tucked in at his neck.

‘YES!
You are! Danny Baker. Everyone THIS is Danny Baker. Let me tell you all something
 . . .’

And Mel Brooks once again loudly regaled everybody in the room – and quite possibly people in the corridor outside – to what I fancy might even be one of his favourite stories.

It was in that same make-up room that I witnessed a very different kind of celebrity explosion. Frankie Howerd was the kind of comedian who, certainly at that stage of his career, tied himself in nervous knots before any performance. In the run of the
SOCS
we had done a few of the filmed items, but he had never been the studio guest before and clearly the sound of our four-hundred-strong audience filing in was adding to his apprehension. Looking into the makeup mirror he was ostensibly addressing the woman dabbing at him with powder but, sitting alongside him in the next chair, I could see that his monologue was chiefly for his own benefit.
‘Don’t
know what I’m doing here, honestly. I’ve got nothing to sell! I could be at home, but no. Why I’m putting myself through this, I can’t think. Nobody’s told me when I’m on or what they expect me to say. I don’t know where the man who brought me in has gone – he seems to have deserted a sinking ship
 . . .’
And on it went, punctuated by tuts, heavy sighs and periods where he shut his eyes tightly at the horror of it all.

I had seen this same self-lacerating routine at a previous meeting with Frankie. It had been an item we were doing about the boom in 0898 numbers – a novelty then, where you might ring up the advertised connection and hear all manner of recorded nonsense from
songs to recipes and, yes, even sex chat, although this was well before the entire racket became synonymous with such greasy fare. The latest innovation was that for a pound a pop you could now call one such number and hear Frankie Howerd tell you a joke. On the day he was he was due to lay down his various
‘oohs’,
‘ahs’
and
‘no
don’t,
missus’
for the service, we went along to the studios. Frankie was already extremely gloomy when we arrived. Arms folded, perched on the edge of a desk, he hardly bothered with any hellos.
‘Come
to film the execution, have
you?’
he flatly joked. As the crew set up to record a short interview between the two of us, he began rolling out the dozens of reasons why he shouldn’t even be there at all. Then he turned to the interview itself:

‘I
mean, what are they expecting me to say to
you?’
he pleaded, eyebrows raised in alarm.
‘I’ve
got no interest in selling this. I get paid and it’s over for me. I haven’t got a piece of this, they don’t give you a piece. I can’t pretend it’s the bloody Palladium, can I? So what the hell can I say to you now? I’m so glad to be here? Because I’m bloody well not
 . . .’

I listened with lots of sympathetic nodding and then, as if the thought had only been born because of Frankie’s reasonable doubts, said,
‘You
know what could be an idea? What if you say,
“You
might think it’s all a recording, but I actually have to sit here all day and night answering the bloody
phone.”
Something like
that.’

Frank furrowed his brow and put his hand to his chin.
‘No
, no, not
that,’
he said pensively, then, after mulling things over for a few seconds:
‘How
about,
“You
might think it’s all a recording, but I actually have to sit here all day and night answering the bloody
phone.”’

‘Even
better!’
I beamed, and he seemed quite bolstered by this line he had just come up with.

Before long though he was back to the muttered gripes and I thought the recording was going to be quite hellish. But man alive, literally as soon as the director said,
‘We’re
rolling, in your own time, guys
 . . .’
Boom! He became Frankie Howerd. Once that red light sparked up, he was magnificent. I had hardly got the first few words of my initial question out before he was turning full on to camera and saying,
‘Ooh
, doesn’t he go on? I can’t make head or tail of any
of this, can you? We could have got Robin Day for the same
money!’
He did
‘his
line’
magnificently, and lots more business besides – mainly on how low Francis had fallen to be doing such a ridiculous job. It was pretty much verbatim what he’d been saying so funereally only a few minutes beforehand, but in full-on Frankie mode he was every bit the comic giant in full flood. As soon as we stopped the tape his sparkle vanished again and back came the worry-worn pessimist, now greatly concerned that his driver would have gone without him.

So as I sat alongside Frankie Howerd in the make-up room that evening I searched my brain for a similar gambit to the phone gag that might ease his thrashing nerves. But before I could offer even the mildest titbit, the poor woman attending to him made one of the biggest gaffes of her life.

First let us establish this. Frankie Howerd was bald, probably balder than I am now. We will never truly know, because Frankie hid his hairless crown under possibly the worst toupee in show business – a field where the competition for that title is at its fiercest. Quite why he persevered with what looked like an abandoned seagull’s nest up top I cannot fathom, but then again why anyone does it is beyond me. If a bald man walks into a pub, nobody bats an eyelid. If a man in a wig enters right after him, people nudge each other and say,
‘Don’t
make it obvious, but have a look at the syrup that just blew
in.’
I’ve long held that if even Frank Sinatra couldn’t get a decent rug, what chance have the rest of us got? I understand that Frankie Howerd purchased his faithful old Irish in 1956, so as I tried not to stare at it in make-up I was silently awestruck that it was older than I was. In the fleeting moments I did dare snatch a peek at it
‘head
on’, so to speak, I couldn’t help but notice it was more pissed than usual. Frankie’s wig always listed a little, but on this night it was looking like the
Titanic
after all the rockets had been launched. The make-up woman couldn’t possibly send him out to face an audience like that and so she leaned close in and said, discreetly:

‘Do
you want me to tease the wig out a little, Mr
Howerd?’

Frankie Howerd tore the tissues away from his collar where they’d been protecting his shirt from any fallout and shot to his feet.

‘WIG!?’
he bellowed.
‘WIG
!? What are you talking about, you blessed creature? Wig? I’ve never had that from a make-up person in thirty years. How dare you! I’ve got a good mind to go straight
home!’
And he stormed out of make-up, fuming and threatening all kinds of retribution.

The poor young woman who had made the enquiry stood shaking and confused.
‘But
it
is
a wig, isn’t
it?’
A more senior colleague pulled a face and said gently,
‘I
think it’s always safer to refer it as
“hair”
, June
 . . .’

Of course, Frankie betrayed no sign of the eruption on the show, and as usual brought the house down. He didn’t stay for a drink in the bar afterwards but went off home, where he undoubtedly removed his battered old toupee and lay dejectedly on the bed wondering what it all meant.

Another towering comedy colossus, Tommy Cooper, appeared on the show only once. Tom was due in the building at four that Friday and I grabbed a seat in the narrow gallery directly behind where the production team directed the show. Like 90 per cent of the people there that afternoon, I was simply hanging about waiting to meet the genius in the famous fez. At exactly four o’clock the phone in the gallery rang, which usually meant one of our guests was in reception waiting to be shown where to go. My good friend Jim Allen – then just a researcher on the show but now apparently in control of most of the world’s TV output – answered it. After a brief exchange he replaced the receiver and, nodding toward me with a huge smile, announced,
‘It’s
Tommy
Cooper!’
Off he went to fetch him.

Of the countless encounters I’ve had with famous names over the years I don’t think I was ever as excited as I was while waiting those few minutes for Tommy Cooper to join us in our snug retreat. When he finally arrived in the doorframe I was astounded to discover how big a man he was. He had his jacket over his arm and, in shirt and braces, his shoulders seemed to be roughly the size of the Cotswolds. Into the room he came, and all of us there, roughly ten people, tried to remain professional by mouthing a short hello before pretending to take a keen interest in what shots were being lined up on the other
side of the large window overlooking the technical team. There were one or two spaces on the bench seat that ran along the length of the space, but Tommy seemed unable to make up his mind which one to occupy. So far he hadn’t said a word and the mounting tension as we waited to hear that gravelly calling card was acute. Seconds passed. He sniffed and looked from one gap on the velveteen pew to another. Still looming over us, he cleared his throat a couple of times. This may not sound like much but it was exactly the sort of non-verbal punctuation we had heard hundreds of times as he pondered which bit of a lousy magic trick should come next, and the anticipation was by this time choking us all. Then, pointing to an opening next to me, he said,