This Much Is True

Of course, the architecture of the tunnel helped to prolong and amplify my wind break. The entire queue gasped and shook; Graham, a slight figure, trembled and nearly fell; I was in a paroxysm both of embarrassment and relief. It was a long fart, joyous and unafraid, it must have lasted about four seconds — that’s long for a fart. Finally, it ended — there was complete silence. And then laughter rolled along the tunnel.

Thankfully it wasn’t smelly, just deafening. Meeting Dolly eventually proved almost an anticlimax, it was so short and sweet. Queen Elizabeth I said to the Earl of Oxford, when he returned to court after his seven-year banishment following an inadvertent breaking of wind, ‘My Lord, we had forgot the fart’. I don’t think I ever will, not least because Graham reminds me of it frequently.

Let’s scroll back to a sweeter smelling time in my comic career. I had assumed comedy wasn’t for me after the nastiness of Footlights had revealed the boys’ club that controlled it. I knew I wasn’t likely to get any work from them. But then in 1968, I was asked to join a satirical BBC TV programme called At the Eleventh Hour. The cast included Roger McGough, Richard Neville (notorious from the Oz trial) and Ray Davies of The Kinks. I remember laughing a lot but sadly at none of the actual jokes. My best sketches were a series of five-minute monologues as ‘Valerie’s Mother’ written by Esther Rantzen. She had based the character on her own mother. I wore a fur hat and a crimplene dress and used the voice and mannerisms I knew well from my visits to North London. Valerie’s Mother was definitely larger than life: pushy, noisy and sometimes insensitive. When both Marty Feldman and Larry Adler took offence at my portrayal, calling it ‘antisemitic’, we were invited on to a TV news programme called Talkback, to debate whether my character was indeed a ‘stereotype which encouraged a kind of potted thinking’ about Jews. At the end of the debate the studio audience were asked to vote and in the words of no less an authority than the Jewish Chronicle: ‘Less than 10 per cent thought that such characters helped to spread antisemitism — which is hardly surprising with people like Miriam Margolyes and Esther Rantzen responsible for it.’ (Phew!)

At a wedding I went to at the time, a fellow guest started by praising my acting and then went on to say ‘I do love that Valerie’s Mother sketch you do on TV. But why do you have to put on that silly voice?’ I had to bite my lip; she was speaking to me in identical tones but clearly didn’t recognise herself. And that proved my vision of comedy to me. Comedy is life, built big perhaps, but always built true. Anthony Smith, our director, believed in the show, but sadly it was judged ‘too rude’ and it never even made it to the end of its first series. As Esther said, ‘That’s life!’ And I’ve been doing comedy on and off ever since.

Radio comedy is kinder than TV but I had to go through the archives to recall these long-forgotten series: Oh Get On With It with Kenneth Williams and Lance Percival and Things Could Be Worse were both aired in 1976. I took part in one episode of Just a Minute, which I didn’t enjoy at all because Clement Freud was so desperate to win.

The greatest radio comedy series in my opinion was Round the Horne in the late 1960s; there were 67 episodes and Kenneths Horne and Williams were the stars. Ever after, the BBC has tried to find a replacement — I don’t think they ever have. But Kenneth Williams consequently became the master of radio and I was delighted to work with him and Ted Ray in The Betty Witherspoon Show in 1974. Ted was wonderful before lunch; afterwards his timing slipped a bit. He had been a great star and perhaps radio felt a little too small for him. Kenny became a dear friend. He was a complex personality, both enjoying his power to evoke laughter and yet filled with a deep melancholy nothing could assuage. He was the cleverest and funniest man I had ever met, fiercely opinionated about everything from the agonising dullness of his fellow Carry On actors to why Doctor Zhivago was ‘a pain in the arse as a film’.

When I had supper with him and his mother, Louie, to whom he was devoted, he often told vivid stories about his friend Joe Orton, who had been murdered just down the road from where he lived. Orton had written the character of Inspector Truscott in his 1966 play Loot for him.

The hugely successful Carry On films that made him famous were packed with innuendo and smut. Yet when Kenny told me he was celibate, I believed him. He pretended to be very shocked when I talked about sex. ‘OOOooooh Stooopp!’ he would say with that famous snigger when it was plain that he was loving every salacious second.