Life and Laughing: My Story (9 page)

Dad and the legendary actor Vincent Price on the set of
Bloodbath at the House of Death
. Known for his quirky unconventional directing style, my father insisted that his crew should be holding a polystyrene cup at all times.

Last week I met Billy Connolly, a hero of mine, at an awards ceremony. I was very nervous about introducing myself. I thought he may remember my father, as he appeared himself on
The Kenny Everett Show
and his missus starred in my dad’s movie, but not for a moment did I think he’d recognize me. I loitered near him while he was talking to the comedian Rob Brydon, and then he caught my eye. ‘Youu, it’s you!’ he hollered as only Billy Connolly can.

‘Hello, Billy Connolly,’ I said, more posh than usual (I always get posher when I’m nervous).

‘I was on the train last year,’ said The Big Yin, ‘and I saaw
Time Out
magazine. The headline was “King of Comedy”, big letters. And it was YOU. It was fuckin’ youu! King of Comedy? I’ve never fuckin’ heard of you. Who is this guy? I thought. I’m the King of Comedy. I spat out ma sandwich. I’m sittin’ there with bits of sandwich on my newspaper and in ma beard.’ Billy Connolly knew who I was because he didn’t know who I was. I was thrilled nevertheless.

Comedy legends Ronnie Corbett, Rob Brydon and Billy Connolly with ‘The King of Comedy’ himself.

We then had a photo taken, which consisted of, from left to right, Ronnie Corbett, Rob Brydon, myself and Billy Connolly. Referring to our heights, the photographer said, ‘Look, you’re getting bigger and bigger.’

To which I replied, ‘In talent.’ That’s another thing that happens when I’m nervous. I get a bit cheeky and arrogant.

‘Who said that? Who said that?’ cried Corbett.

‘The King of Comedy strikes again,’ sarcastically noted Connolly. We had a brief and nice chat, but I could sense he thought I was posh, cheeky and arrogant. He vaguely remembered my dad, but when I brought up
Bloodbath at the House of Death
, he simply said, ‘Pamela’s been in a lot of shit movies.’ I think that pretty much sums up how my dad’s film was received. For all the hope and hype, he may have bitten off more than he could chew.

The film was a horror spoof. The strap line was ‘The film it took a lot of guts to make’. I think that towards the end of filming the budget may have been a bit tight. The
final scene
of the film is an
E.T.
spoof: a spaceship departing and E.T. running through the woods. The spaceship leaves without him, and E.T. says, ‘Oh shit, not again!’

My reasoning for suggesting there may have been financial issues with the production is that the voice-over artist my dad hired to play E.T. was a six-year-old. Me. I had only recently been speaking in sentences that didn’t involve the words ‘Ma’, ‘Da’ and ‘Shums’, and here I was doing voice-overs. And swearing. I was a pretty cool six-year-old.

When people met me and asked, ‘Are you at school, little man?’ I would reply, ‘Yeah, but I’m mainly involved in the film industry. I do impressions, mainly extraterrestrial at the moment but I’m looking to diversify.’

Prior to the film’s release, everything seemed to be on the up. My parents’ Capris were replaced by BMWs, and when the Junkins moved out of London, we bought their flat and also convinced the owner of the remaining flat in the building to sell. We suddenly owned this massive Hampstead house. Well, we actually owned three flats in a massive Hampstead house. We had three kitchens and a million bedrooms, and my sister and I had unimaginable amounts of fun running around it. Kids love to play house – well, until the renovations started, we each had our own apartment. Suddenly I was a voice-over artist with my own place in Hampstead. I was a great catch when I was six. I didn’t know at the time that it would take me over twenty-five years to be doing so well again.

My parents, however, were not getting on. I know they argued a great deal, but I only really remember one row in particular. It seemed so trivial. Lucy and I could hear the yelling from our respective flats and even as little people couldn’t understand why they would be arguing over such a thing. Grapefruit. My dad was livid over the fact that there was no grapefruit for breakfast. I suppose when two people reach a point when they can’t stand each other, they argue over everything. Although remembering the Florida Hilton coffee quarrel, maybe Dad was just very argumentative at breakfast-time. It got pretty heated – I think a La Sorpresa vase may have been smashed at some point. Looking back, the way Mum was shopping in Waitrose, Temple Fortune, it’s a wonder there was any food in the house at all, let alone grapefruit.

Parents try to protect their children, so I wasn’t fully aware of their problems. As a child, your parents are the two people you love most in the world. To hear them fighting is horribly confusing and upsetting. As I sat on the stairs listening to them arguing, I didn’t know that in just two school sports days’ time, I would have two dads in the fathers’ race (and still no Kenny Everett).

6

I am not superstitious in any way, I don’t believe in anything supernatural or paranormal. Fortune-tellers, mediums, psychics are all, in my opinion, nonsense. I’ve watched those ‘talking to the dead’ shows, and they just don’t make any sense to me. The medium calls out common letters, ‘I’m getting a G.’

Then several people in the audience start responding: ‘It’s Gary’, ‘It’s Gordon’, ‘It’s Grandma.’

If the medium could talk to the dead, why are the dead only giving him the first letter of their name? This is an amazing opportunity for the dead. They must have a lot to talk about, and some pretty major information like: what happens when you die? Is there a God? What’s the meaning of life? No, apparently they would rather play some kind of afterlife version of ‘Guess Who?’ Also, the letters the medium gets are always very common, to give himself the best chance of a response. You’ll never see one of these shows when the psychic says, ‘I’m getting an “X”’, to a silent audience.

Until a French widow stands up and says, ‘That must be Xavier!’

When my mother lived alone in Kensington Church Street, very soon after meeting my father at his auditions, she wandered into a psychic bookshop a few doors down from her. She’d walked past it almost every day, but today found herself browsing the occult. There were Tarot card readers in the back, and, with time to kill, she was enticed into a reading. She was young, impressionable and open-minded. Rather than a mystical woman in flowing robes leaning over a small candlelit table, her reader was a relatively normal-looking man. She turned the cards over, and the card reader was immediately shocked by what he saw. My mother was a little concerned by his reaction. ‘Is everything OK?’ she enquired.

‘Can you just wait there a second?’ Without waiting for a response, he left her sitting there alone. She started to panic, and by the time he returned had not only convinced herself she was dying, but had doodled a ‘Will’ on a receipt from her handbag.

The Tarot card reader had brought mystics who worked in the shop to view the cards. All four of them had similarly excitable reactions. ‘What is it?’ my mother asked.

Her original reader spoke: ‘You are pregnant.’

‘I’m not,’ insisted my mum. In actual fact, she was, but didn’t know it yet. Most people find out they’re pregnant from a missed period, a home pregnancy test or a big tummy. It’s rare to learn this from a Tarot card reader in the back of a psychic bookshop.

‘You will have a son,’ continued one of the other readers who had been summoned. ‘He will be world-famous, everybody will know his name, he will do wonderful things. He is special.’

The rest of her reading contained equally far-fetched information about her future. ‘You will have many children. You will live in an old house for five years, and then you and your husband will be separated by the seas and by death. That will be £6.50, please.’

My mother left the bookshop in a trance and went immediately to Boots the chemist just around the corner. It briefly crossed her mind that maybe the Tarot readers have a deal with Boots whereby they predict certain things that send people immediately to the chemist – ‘You are pregnant’, ‘You have a cold sore coming’, ‘Your hair will go grey’ – to boost sales of Clear Blue, Zovirax and Just For Men. My mum purchased the pregnancy test and rushed home. It was positive.

She was overcome with the romance of what had just occurred and clutched her stomach. She felt like the Virgin Mary. ‘I am carrying a special son,’ she thought to herself. If she gave birth to a baby girl, the whole thing would have been off. But I was born a boy (although slightly camp).

As more and more of the Tarot card reader’s predictions came true, my mother became convinced I was some special chosen child. It impacted a bit on my relationship with her when I was a child. Once at dinner I jokingly replaced my glass of water with a glass of Blue Nun, and she crossed herself, fell to the floor and started kissing my feet. At parent–teacher evenings when she was told that I wasn’t fulfilling my potential and that I was lazy, she wouldn’t really care, remembering Jesus was a carpenter until his thirties. As long as I was achieving in Woodwork, she wasn’t bothered about English and Maths. The Tarot card revelations certainly affected me. I was about five or six years old and was learning about the world around me. She had only recently delivered the Tooth Fairy/Easter Bunny/Father Christmas triple blow, when she told me I would grow up to be famous.

It gave me confidence when I was young. I felt that I had a magical secret and that I was special. My mother recently told me that she often thought of the mystical bookshop, which spookily closed down soon after her visit, and wondered as I grew up what path to fame I would take. When I became a successful comedian, I said to her, ‘I’m famous now, Mum, just like you said I would be. Are you proud?’

To which she said: ‘I was hoping you’d make some kind of medical breakthrough, a cure for a disease or something.’

It’s a shame the Tarot card reader couldn’t have been a bit more specific: ‘You are carrying a child, a son. He will become an observational comedian. I see great importance in the words “Man” and “Drawer’’.’

Whereas my mother is a believer, I am a sceptic. Every once in a while these psychics are going to get lucky. It’s statistics. Maybe the person who visited the bookshop immediately after my mother was also predicted fame and fortune and then got hit by a bus on Kensington High Street moments later. If I’m honest, I’d rather it wasn’t true anyway – I’m not a fan of destiny. What’s the point of living your life if it’s all mapped out ahead of you? And if these Tarot card readers were so accurate, why couldn’t they foresee their bookshop closing down? Anyway, if the Tarot reader’s prophecies were to come true, there was to be strife before my glittering future. If we were to ‘live in an old house for five years’, our time was nearly up, and the ‘separated by seas and death’ prediction was a bit of a worry.

It certainly didn’t seem like we were about to move from Hampstead. We were in the process of developing our three flats into one big house. I remember living with builders for some time. Our lives were dominated by workmen shouting, sledgehammers smashing, skips loading, wheelbarrows wheeling and dust billowing. My sister, whose own oracle-like qualities seemed to be confined to the destruction of buildings, babbled constantly about walls and ceilings tumbling. The builders were fun and friendly, probably due to my mum. My mum was the type of lady at whom builders whistle. Builders’ whistles often fall on deaf ears, but now when they whistled, my mum would bring them tea. I remember one of them, Steve, inviting me to punch him in the stomach. This was wildly exciting for me. Steve was like a real live He-Man. ‘What? As hard as I can?’ I questioned, overestimating my own seven-year-old strength.

‘Sure,’ Steve confidently replied. So I swung with all my might and connected flush with Steve’s rock-like stomach. He didn’t even flinch. I couldn’t believe it. I hit him again, this time with a run-up, but he barely noticed. It was like living with the Incredible Hulk. My friends would come to my house just to punch him in the stomach.