The Fry Chronicles (32 page)

Cables, monitors, printers, books, magazines, disks –
all these were costing me money. Money that I did not have.

Richard Armitage had told me with an expansive wave of a cigar-brandishing hand that if ever I was running low, his assistant, Lorraine Hamilton, would send me cheques to cover my expenses. These would count as advances against future earnings. Despite Kim’s relative wealth and his easy generosity, I had run up a debt of several thousand pounds with Richard by the August of 1982 and was beginning to worry that I would never earn enough to be able to pay him back.

One morning Lorraine called me up at the Chelsea flat. I know it was at the Chelsea flat because in those days when you rang someone you always knew where they were. The closest life came to a mobile phone was a handset with an extra-long flex. Lorraine told me to go to an office in Fitzrovia and meet a man called Paul Weiland, who was casting a beer commercial.

A beer commercial? Me? A low vulgar commercial, for a highly polished artist such as myself? How unbelievably insulting. I almost ran to the appointed place.

The golden age of British advertising was just coming to an end. The most prominent stars to have risen over the past decade had been Ridley and Tony Scott, Hugh Hudson, David Puttnam and Alan Parker, who now all devoted their time to feature films. Paul Weiland, a generation behind, had started his career as a tea boy at the production office where most of those big names had worked and was
to become the leading commercials director of the eighties and nineties. Indeed he still reigns supreme.

He handed me a script that was really more of a photocopied storyboard. It showed a monocled Victorian aristocrat in a series of unlikely poses.

‘There’s no dialogue,’ Paul said. ‘The whole commercial is played out to a soundtrack. The song “Abdul Abulbul Amir”. Do you know it?’

I had to confess that I did not.

‘Never mind. Take this mug. You’re drinking the beer. It’s
Whitbread Best Bitter
. You’re Count Ivan Skavinsky Skavar, and I’m Abdul. Just give me a really snooty look. Snootier! As if he’s a caterpillar in your salad or shit on your shoe.’

For ten minutes I pretended to drink Whitbread snootily while a most peculiar song played in the background. I am not sure I have ever been more embarrassed and uncomfortable or felt more ill at ease, self-conscious and incompetent. When it was all over I left, blushing furiously.

‘Well, Stephen,’ I said to myself, ‘that is the last you will ever hear of
that
. Perhaps it is as well. Perhaps I was so bad because my innermost soul was revolting at the mercenary grubbiness of the whole enterprise. Yes. That will be it.’

The next day Lorraine called up and asked me to come into the Noel Gay offices in Denmark Street. Richard was sitting behind his enormous desk, beaming behind a thick curtain of Villiger cigar smoke.

‘They want you for the Whitbread commercial,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid they’re being irritatingly tough on the money.’

Oh well, I thought. Five or six hundred pounds would come in useful. It would be as much as that, surely.

‘They offered twenty,’ said Richard, ‘and I can’t seem to get them above twenty-five. If you find that insulting we can always walk away.’

‘For how many hours’ work?’

Richard looked down at his notes. ‘Three days.’

‘Blimey,’ I said, trying not to look too disappointed. ‘It isn’t much.’

‘No,’ said Richard. ‘It’s just over eight thousand a day. Well, if you feel …’

Thousand!
I swallowed drily, pushing my Adam’s apple past a throbbing constriction that was rising in my throat and threatening to cause me to choke.
Twenty-five thousand pounds
. For three days’ work.

‘No, no!’ I faltered. ‘I mean … no. It’s fine. I’ll …’

‘They speak very highly of Paul Weiland. Good experience for you. Starts shooting in Shepperton on Monday. They’ll want you at Bermans and Nathans for a costume fitting tomorrow at three. Excellent. I’ll call the agency.’

I tottered about London for the rest of that morning in a dream.

I could pay back Noel Gay Artists everything I owed them and I would still be rich. Rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Well, not that, obviously. The dreams of avarice go well beyond twenty-five odd thousand pounds minus 15 per cent commission, minus tax and VAT, minus three and a half thousand already owing. But rich enough for me.

You would have just cause to hate me now, reader, when I tell you that from that day to this I have never had what one could seriously call money troubles. Not money
troubles of the kind that cause so many people to wake up in the middle of the night with a ghastly feeling like molten lead leaking into their stomach as they contemplate mounting debt and the apparent impossibility of getting their finances in order. That tremble of panic and dread that so many feel in relation to money I have been spared. I feel it for other things but I know that many in the world would trade much for the kind of cushion of cash that has enveloped me for thirty years. I did not know, as I went about London window-shopping that day, that in two and a half years’ time even more money would start pouring in.

The three days of the shoot in Shepperton Studios passed in a sweat of worry, embarrassment and confusion. I had no idea why everything took so long, what I was doing, who everyone was or what the commercial was about. Tim McInnerny, whom I was to get to know two years later when I joined the cast of
Blackadder II
, had been cast as a lute-wielding minstrel of some kind. The character of Abdul was played by an actor called Tony Cosmo, who was suitably swarthy and menacing. I, in my own estimation, failed to be suitably anything. Watching it today on YouTube (try searching for Whitbread Best Bitter 1982 Ad or similar) the film still appears to make very little sense, and I am sure that even now my discomfort in the role of Count Ivan transmits across the decades. I think I was cast on account of my pointy chin rather than because of any discernible skill or talent.

Paul Weiland was charming and easy-going. My memories of the exceptionally laid-back Hugh Hudson on the set of
Chariots of Fire
had prepared me to expect relaxation from the director and fiery shouting only from assistants, and this was exactly how it was. I spent most
of the three days sitting in a canvas chair and drinking cups of tea while birds twitted and shitted in the gantry far above. There are generations of pigeon, sparrow and chaffinch that have lived out their lives in the roof spaces of the great sound stages of Pinewood and Shepperton. They have dumped their droppings on some of the immortal scenes of British cinema, and their screechings have interrupted dialogue from Dirk Bogarde, John Mills, Kenneth Williams, Roger Moore and a thousand others. Mostly, however, they have overseen the less glamorous business of commercial and pop video shoots that make up the bread-and-butter business for studio staff, film crews and happily overpaid actors. I know that I am supposed to be ashamed of advertising work and feel that it is either beneath me or some kind of sell-out, but I cannot bring myself to apologize or regret. Orson Welles always said with high-handed disdain, ‘If it was good enough for Toulouse-Lautrec and John Everett Millais, then it is good enough for me,’ but I don’t really feel the need to adduce the names of great figures from the past, I just find it fun.

We were back in Manchester by October filming for
Alfresco
which, unlike
There’s Nothing to Worry About
, was to be broadcast nationally. Ben had created for us a fictional world which he called The Pretend Pub. The concept might kindly be described as playful meta-textual
post-modernism. Most people, however, were not kind and seemed to regard it as incomprehensible self-indulgent twaddle, which I suppose is how most playful meta-textual post-modernism is received. We all portrayed heightened versions of ourselves in an obviously unreal studio pub. I was Stezzer, Hugh was Huzzer, Robbie Bobzer, Ben Bezzer, Emma Ezzer and Siobhan Shizzer. We still often call each other by those names to this day, although Ben, for reasons lost in time, usually calls me Bing.

Alfresco
, series 2: The Pretend Pub.

In the first episode, I enter, covered in polystyrene flakes of stage snow, greeting Robbie with the words, ‘My word, Pretend Landlord Bobzer, there’s a hell of a theatrical effect going on out there …’ We performed these sketches in front of a mostly silent and bemused audience. We consoled ourselves with the thought that we were ahead of our time. I think a great deal of the problem came from self-consciousness. Ben knew very well (partly because he was directly involved) what his contemporaries were doing in the field of alternative comedy, and Hugh and I were painfully and acutely aware of what our tradition had done in the field of sketch comedy, from Pete and Dud through to Python and
Not the Nine O’Clock News
. As a result we were guilty, it is clear looking back, of over-complicating everything out of a fear of being perceived as imitative and unoriginal. We ruled out parodies and ‘Ah, come in, Perkins, shut the door, do sit down,’ sketches because Python and
Not
had done these. Surreality and anarchic weirdness were out too because Rik, Ade and Alexei had cornered that market. So we wallowed about sightlessly, guiltily and confusedly without the confidence to do what we did best. Audiences, I now realize (and frankly it should always have been blindingly obvious), do not think along such lines. Novelty and originality do not come from the invention of new milieus, new genres or new modalities.
They come from the
how
and the
who
, not from the
what
. It hardly warrants pointing out, furthermore, that no one will get anywhere unless they do what they do best, and everyone, in their secret, secret heart, knows what they do best.

An
Alfresco
sketch that a merciful providence has erased from my memory.

Meanwhile Steve Morrison, our Scottish executive producer, pleaded with us to stop bellyaching. ‘Go out and create, man!’ he yelled at me across a table one stormy afternoon, when I was behaving more than usually pedantically or sceptically or in some other manner guaranteed to annoy. He stood and pointed at the door. ‘I want Ayckbourn with edge,’ he screamed. ‘Go out and bring me Ayckbourn with edge!’ Well, quite.

It was made obvious to us that high up in Granada a problem with our writing had been identified. In the case of Ben it might have been over-productivity and a lack of self-censorship; in the case of Hugh and me it was exactly the opposite – crippling constipation and a kind of apologetic, high-toned embarrassment that must have been excessively irritating. For one excruciating week we all had to undergo a kind of comedy-writing masterclass with Bernie Sahlins, one of the producers of the Second City revue group and television show. Bernie, brother of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, was from a tradition of improvisation that he helped create back in the days of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, a tradition that had burst into television and more recently film with the
Saturday Night Live
generation of Aykroyd, Chase, Murray, Belushi and Radner. Ben wrote alone and wasn’t faintly interested in the styles and techniques of Chicago improv. Hugh and I were pretty appalled too at the idea of ‘building a scene’ through improvisational dialogue in the approved
American way. When we wrote together we sometimes did improvise, inasmuch as we made a sketch up out loud as we went along before committing it to paper. I suspect that if we had been accused of improvising we would have frozen in horror midway and would never have been able to continue. The cultural gulf between our way and Bernie Sahlins’s way must have perplexed and even offended him, but it was an unbridgeable one and he left Manchester after five days without having made a dent in us. He did teach us that if we had been born American we would never ever have made it in the comedy business and we perhaps taught him that the British people are stubborn, shy and entirely dominated by their single predominant emotion, affect, vice, characteristic, disease … whatever one might call it: embarrassment. Ben carried on pouring out script after script in his way, and we carried on not pouring out anything much in ours.