The Fry Chronicles (53 page)

I am not able, as I have discussed before, to sing. By which I mean I am
really
not able to sing, much as I am not able to fly through the air by flapping my arms.
Not
.
Able
. It is not a question of me doing it
badly
but a question of me not being able to do it
at all
. I have told you what my singing voice does to those cocky and wrong-headed fools who have skipped about the place proclaiming, ‘Why, that’s nonsense!
Everyone
can sing …’ Hugh, as we know, sings marvellously, as he does most things marvellously, but Stephen just plain doesn’t. I
think
I can sing when I’m on my own, in the shower for instance, but there is no way of testing it. If I imagine for a second that there is anybody in the house, or in the garden, or within a hundred yards of me, I freeze up. And that would include a microphone, so my singing is like a physicist’s quantum event: any observation fatally alters its outcome.

Well, came the day in the middle of the second series of
Saturday Live
that I found that Hugh had painted me, or I had painted myself, into a dreadful corner. Somehow a routine had been written in which it was essential for me to sing. Hugh was performing some other crucial function in the sketch, and I could not but accept that I was going to have to sing. Live. On television.

For three days I was in a complete panic, trembling, sweating, moaning, yawning, needing a pee every ten minutes – all the symptoms of extreme nervous tension. At last Hugh could take it no more.

‘All right then. We’ll just have to write another sketch.’

‘No, no! I’ll be fine.’ Annoyingly it was a good sketch.
Much as I dreaded the prospect of its approach, I knew that we
should
do it. ‘Really. I’ll be fine.’

Hugh took in my quaking knees, ashen complexion and terrified countenance. ‘You won’t be fine,’ he said. ‘I can see that. Look, it’s obviously psychological. You can hammer out a tune on a piano, you can tell one song from another. You’re obviously not tone deaf.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘the problem is I am tone
dumb.
’

‘Psychological. What you should do is see a hypnotist.’

At three o’clock next afternoon I rang the doorbell of the Maddox Street consulting rooms of one Michael Joseph, Clinical Hypnotist.

He turned out to be Hungarian by birth. Hungarian, I suppose because of my grandfather, is my favourite accent in all the world. I shan’t attempt to write ‘Vot’ for ‘What’ and ‘deh’ for ‘the’, you will just have to imagine a voice like George Solti’s weaving its way into my brain.

‘Tell me the issue that brings you here,’ he asked, expecting, I imagine, smoking or weight control or something along those lines.

‘I have to sing tomorrow night.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Tomorrow night I have to sing. Live on television.’

I outlined the nature of the problem. ‘You say you can never sing, you have never sung?’

‘Well, I think it must be a mental block. I have a good enough ear to be able usually to recognize some keys. E flat major, C minor and D major, for instance. But the moment I have to sing in front of anybody else I just get a hammering in my ears, my throat constricts, my mouth goes dry and the most tuneless, arrhythmic horror comes out.’

‘I see, I see. Perhaps you should put the palms of your
hands on your knees, that would be pleasantly comfortable, I think. You know, if you feel your hands on your legs, it is amazing how they seem almost to melt into the flesh, is it not? Soon it is hard to tell which is your hands and which is your legs, don’t they? They are as one. And as this is happening it now feels as if you are being lowered down a well, haven’t you? Down into the dark. But my voice is like the rope that keeps you confident that you will not be lost. My voice will be able to pull you back up, but for the moment it is dropping you down and down and until you are in the warm and in the dark. Yes? No?’

‘Mm …’ I felt myself slipping into a state – not of unconsciousness, for I was fully awake and aware – of willing relaxation and contented stupor. Light closed around me until I was snug and securely held in the well of darkness and warmth that he had described.

‘Tell me when it was that you decided that you could not sing?’

And now, quite unexpectedly, there popped fully formed into my head a perfectly clear memory of cong. prac.

Congregational practice is held every Saturday morning in the prep school gym/chapel/assembly hall. The music master, Mr Hemuss, takes us through the hymns that will be sung in tomorrow’s service. It is my first term. I am seven years old and just getting used to boarding 200 miles from home. I stand at the end of a row with a hymnbook in my hand joining in as the school sings its way through the first verse of ‘Jerusalem the Golden’. Kirk, the duty prefect, saunters up and down the aisles, making sure everyone is behaving. Suddenly he stops right next to me and holds up his hand.

‘Sir, sir … Fry is singing flat!’

There is tittering. Mr Hemuss calls for hush. ‘On your own then, Fry.’

I don’t know what singing flat means, but I know it must be terrible.

‘Come on,’ Hemuss strikes his hand down on the keyboard to sound a chord and belts out the opening line in a strong tenor, ‘Jerusalem the golden …’

I try to pick it up from there. ‘With milk and honey blest …’ The school erupts with hoots of derisive laughter as a husky tuneless squeak emerges from me.

‘Yes, well. In future I think it would be better if you mimed,’ says Mr Hemuss. Kirk grins triumphantly and moves on, and I am left alone, hot, pink and quaking with humiliation, shame and terror.

The memory shrinks and moves away as Michael Joseph’s reassuring Magyar tones continue to solace me. ‘It has been a painful memory, but now it is one that makes you smile. For you can see that this is what has been locking up the music inside you all these years. Tomorrow evening you have to sing, yes?’

‘Yes.’ My voice seeming to come from a long way away.

‘When you have to sing, is there a … how you say … a
cue
? Is there some cue for you to sing?’

‘Yes. My friend Hugh turns to me and says, “Hit it, bitch.”’

‘“Hit it, bitch?”’

‘“Hit it, bitch.”’

‘Very good. “Hit it, bitch.” So. Tomorrow, when you stand before the audience you will feel confident, happy and filled with belief in your ability to triumph in this moment. And when you hear the words “Hit it, bitch” all tensions and fears will melt away. This is the signal for you
to be able easily to sing the song you need to sing. No fear, no tightness in the throat. Ease, confidence, assurance. Repeat that to me.’

‘When I hear the words “Hit it, bitch” all tensions and fears will melt away. It is the signal for me to be able to sing the song I need to sing. No fear. No tightness in the throat. Ease. Confidence. Assurance.’

‘Excellent. And now I shall pull on the rope and bring you up to the surface. As I pull I count down from twenty. When I reach “ten” you will begin to awaken, refreshed and happy, quite able to remember our conversation and all its details. At “five” your eyes will begin to open. So. Twenty, nineteen …’

I stumbled away, rather amazed that this memory of cong. prac. had been revealed and fully confident that I would indeed be able to sing when the moment came. I believe I even hummed to myself as I walked from Maddox Street to the Oxford Street tube station.

The following evening I told Hugh that, if he muffed his cue and said ‘Hit it, baby,’ or ‘Cue it, bitch,’ or anything like that, then our whole enterprise would fail. All was well, the moment came, Hugh delivered the line correctly, and sounds came out of my mouth in more or less the right order and employing more or less the correct musical pitches.

Did the experience unlock singing for me? Absolutely not. I am as hopeless as ever I was. At weddings and funerals I still prefer to mime. At John Schlesinger’s funeral at a synagogue in St John’s Wood some years ago the person I stood next to said to me encouragingly, ‘Come on, Stephen – you’re not singing. Have a go!’

‘Believe me, Paul, you don’t want me to,’ I said. Besides, I was having a much better time listening to
him
.

‘No. Go on!’

So I joined in the chorus.

‘You’re right,’ Paul McCartney conceded. ‘You can’t sing.’

I suppose, in career terms,
Saturday Live
was a good move. It was watched by a large audience and generally went down well. It was especially successful for Ben, who moved from being a regular contributor to permanent host. His sign-off, ‘My name’s Ben Elton, good night!’, became the catchphrase of the show until Harry and Paul, tiring of the very successful Stavros, devised a new character for Harry to play. They came up with a loud-mouthed Sarf London plasterer who fanned his wad of dosh at the audience and shouted ‘Loadsamoney!’ with gleeful, exultant braggadocio. He seemed to symbolize the second act of the Thatcher play, an era of materialism, greed and contempt for those left behind. As with Johnny Speight and Warren Mitchell’s Alf Garnett, much of the audience seemed either to be deaf to or chose to disregard Paul and Harry’s satirical intent, raising Loadsamoney to almost folk-heroic status.

Ben, Harry, Hugh and I fell into the habit of winding down, after the recordings, in a Covent Garden club called the Zanzibar, usually bringing with us the guest comedians or musicians of the week.

Wedged in a semicircle of banquette one night, I had the opportunity of observing Robbie Coltrane’s romantic and poetic seduction technique. He picked up the hand of the girl sitting next to him.

‘What fine, delicate hands you have,’ he said.

‘Why thank you,’ said the girl.

‘I love women with small hands.’

‘You do?’

‘I do. They make my cock look so much bigger.’

The Zanzibar swarmed with media people. Jimmy Mulville was often there. This sharp, witty, fast-brained Liverpudlian had been something of a legend in Cambridge, having left the year I arrived. He had gone up to read Latin and Ancient Greek, and a less likely Cambridge classicist you could never hope to meet. The rumour was that his father, a docker from Walton, had come home one night when Jimmy was seventeen and said, ‘You’d better do well in your A levels and that, son, because I’ve just been to the bookies and put down a bet on you getting all A grades and a scholarship to Cambridge. Got a good price too.’

‘Christ, Dad!’ Jimmy is reported to have said in shock. ‘How much did you bet?’

‘Everything,’ came the reply. ‘So get studying.’

They say that today’s schoolchildren now suffer more exam pressure than my generation ever did, and generally I have no doubt that this is true, but I don’t suppose many have had to endure pressure of the kind Jimmy did that year. He duly obliged with the straight As and the scholarship.

It is too good a story for me to check up and risk the disappointment of it being proved a distortion or exaggeration. What is certainly true is that, when Jimmy arrived at Jesus in 1975, he brought a wife with him. It is not uncommon for people of a working-class background to wed before they are twenty, but it is very uncommon for students to be married, and how the young Mrs Mulville coped at Cambridge I do not know. Jimmy became President of the Footlights in 1977 and by the time I am writing about he was starring in and writing the Channel 4 comedy
Who Dares Wins
with his Cambridge contemporary Rory McGrath. He would go on to found Hat Trick, one
of the first independent television production companies, famous for bringing shows like
Have I Got News for You
to television and slightly less famous for giving shows like my own
This Is David Lander
an airing.

Who Dares Wins
had established itself as something of a cult, singled out as being responsible for the post-closing-time scheduling slot that Channel 4 made its own. Its beery style was not very close to the kind of thing Hugh and I did, but for me the flashes of brilliance in the writing more than made up for its laddish manner. It gave the world one of my favourite jokes. There is something very pleasing about one-word punchlines.

The show nearly always ended with a long, complex party scene, shot in a one-camera single take. In one of these episodes Jimmy approaches Rory and picks up a can of beer. Just as he’s bringing it up to his lips, Rory warns him, ‘Um, I’ve been using that as an ashtray actually.’ Jimmy gives him a hard look, says, ‘Tough,’ and swigs.

Another occasional habitué of the Zanzibar was the remarkable Peter Bennett-Jones, also a Cambridge graduate, and now one of the most powerful managers, agents and producers in British television and film. I remember helping to give him the bumps outside the club at half past two on the morning of his thirtieth birthday and watching in alarm as he dropped to the pavement and announced that he would now do thirty press-ups.

‘You’re an old man!’ I said. ‘You’ll give yourself a heart attack.’

P B-J, as he is universally known, did the thirty and then another twenty, just because.

A friend of mine claims that he was at a loose end in
Hong Kong years ago. A hotel concierge recommended a restaurant.