The Fry Chronicles (20 page)

As a writer, I was approached by Emma Thompson and asked if I might contribute some comedy sketches for a show she was putting on at the ADC theatre with a group of friends. It was to showcase all-female comic talent and would be called
Woman’s Hour
. I swallowed an inclination
to suggest that if it bore that title and had only women performing in it, then surely it should also be
written
exclusively by women. But it was enough of a step that women were at least putting on their own comedy show – fifty years earlier they were forbidden to act in plays in Cambridge. Indeed they were only admitted as full members of the university as recently as ten years before I was born. Alongside Emma in
Woman’s Hour
was the Footlights’ first-ever female President, Jan Ravens, and a young Danish-born performer called Sandi Toksvig. I wrote a few of the sketches, the only two I can remember being a parody of a book review programme and a monologue for Emma in which she played a tweedy horsey woman at a Pony Club gymkhana bellowing encouragement at her daughter. Ground-breaking, revolutionary material. The show was considered a great success, and certainly the talent of Emma, Jan and Sandi was plain for all to see.

A friend of Mark McCrum’s called Ben Blackshaw now came to me with a play he had written called
Have You Seen the Yellow Book?
It documented in vivid little scenes the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde. Ben wanted me for the part of Oscar. Ben directed, and we went on in the Playroom. Through this play I received my first review in a national newspaper. The
Gay News
critic wrote that I ‘carried the lilt of Irish without the brogue’. I kept the tiny scrap of paper that formed the entirety of his review in my wallet for years afterwards.

The word went round Cambridge that a film company was looking for extras amongst the student body. They
had been in touch with the presidents of the ADC, the Mummers and the Marlowe Society, who in turn had contacted the acting world. Kim and I hurried to sign our names up for international stardom.

I had a friend at Oxford who had written to me proudly to say the great Michael Cimino was directing a major picture there called
Heaven’s Gate
and that he had a walk-on part in it. I now called him to let him know that we had filming in our midst too.

‘Oh yes?’ he said. ‘Which studio? We’re United Artists.’

‘Oh. I don’t think ours is exactly an American studio-type film,’ I had to confess. ‘Apparently it’s about a group of British athletes in the 1924 Olympics. One of them is Jewish and the other one is a devout Presbyterian who won’t run on Sundays or something. Colin Welland has written the screenplay. It’s … well … anyway.’

As I put the phone down I could hear my friend’s snorts of derisive Oxonian laughter. There was something rather humiliating about Cambridge being chosen for such a small parochial film while Oxford got a big-budget major motion picture. Neither of us were to know that
Heaven’s Gate
would all but destroy United Artists and be for ever listed as one of the greatest financial disasters in Hollywood history while our little film …

It was called
Chariots of Fire
, and I spent a number of bemusedly excited days as an extra. The first was in the Senate House for a Freshers’ Fair scene in which the lead actors get recruited by the University Athletics Club and Gilbert and Sullivan Society. All light-headed from a free but fierce haircut, I had earned myself an extra two pounds even before the filming began by bringing my own striped college blazer and flannels as costume. I looked the most
dreadful arse as I manned a tennis club stall, bouncing a ball on a racket and trying to give the impression that I might be hearty. With the more important role of Captain of the Cambridge University Athletics Team, one of Cambridge’s sporting heroes was just along from me: Derek Pringle, who went on to play cricket for Essex and England.

I was most astonished when a props man, just before the camera rolled, came up and gave me a collection of small visiting cards on which were printed ‘Cambridge University Tennis Club’ below an image of crossed tennis rackets. I had to peer closely to decipher the sloping New Palace print – the likelihood of the camera capturing this seemed absurdly remote. It struck me as the most astounding waste of time and money, but of course I knew nothing about filming or the necessity of being prepared for any eventuality. No matter how detailed the pre-production planning and preparation, circumstances like weather, light, noise, the failure of a crane or the indisposition of an actor or crew member can alter everything. It was quite possible that the director may have decided that the scene that day needed to open with a close shot of someone taking a tennis club card and if it hadn’t been there ready, waiting and perfectly printed, filming would have been delayed, and much more money would have been lost than the price of producing a few visiting cards. None of that occurred to me, of course; I just leapt to the conclusion, as people always do, that film-makers were imbecile profligates. I now know, being one, that they are imbecile misers.

For the whole of the first day I assumed that the crew member positioning us all, telling us where and when to move and yelling for silence and calling for the camera to
‘turn over’ must be the director, whose name I knew to be Hugh Hudson. At one point, needing clarification, I started a question with, ‘Excuse me, Mr Hudson …’, and he laughed and pointed to a languid man sitting in a chair reading a newspaper. ‘I’m just the first assistant,’ he said, ‘
that’s
the director.’

If a director didn’t shout and tell people when to move and how to hold their props and where to look then what, I wondered,
did
he do? It all seemed most mysterious.

The rumour went round Cambridge, after only three or four days’ ‘shooting’ as we pros now called it, that certain university authorities had read the script, disapproved of its implications and summarily withdrawn from the production company all permissions to film. It seems that the story portrayed the Masters of Trinity and Gonville and Caius Colleges, played by John Gielgud and Lindsay Anderson, as anti-Semitic snobs. Their present-day descendants had decided that this was not to be countenanced.

Oh well, we thought. That was that. Fun while it lasted. But the film’s producer, David Puttnam, either out of loyalty or for more practical reasons of financial economy, did not fire us. He quickly acquired Eton College as an alternative location, and we were all bussed out to Berkshire, using the nearby Bray Studios as a base. At Eton they shot one of the most memorable scenes in the film, the Great Court Run in which Harold Abrahams and Lord Lindsay, played by Ben Cross and Nigel Havers, run a complete circuit of the outer perimeter of Trinity Great Court in the forty-three seconds or so (depending on the clock’s last winding) that it takes for the chimes to strike twelve, a feat that Sebastian Coe just failed to emulate in 1988. School Yard at Eton is probably a
quarter the size of Trinity Great Court, but camera angles managed to disguise the fact that even I could probably have run round it in forty-three seconds. My role in this scene, along with just about everyone else’s, was to cheer and throw my boater wildly in the air.

Filming the scene seemed to take an extraordinarily long time. I could not believe how long: it occurred to me that everyone must be extremely incompetent and that it could surely all have been done so much more quickly and efficiently. I now know that the days were all managed with exemplary order and speed. To an outsider, filming always appears both intolerably boring and horribly disorganized. When you do not understand how something works it is perhaps natural to question and to doubt. In later years, when – as so often might happen – a passer-by on a street shoot I was involved with expostulated at ‘all those people’ and how ‘most of them are just hanging around doing nothing’ and then offered the suggestion that ‘I suppose it’s all under the control of the unions’, I would, to tamp down my indignation at such rudeness, force myself to remember my own scepticism when an extra on
Chariots of Fire.
That scepticism was shared by many, and so bored did the majority become and so ill-used did they feel themselves to be that they staged a mini-strike. They all sat down in School Yard and chanted for more pay. It staggers me how greedy and rude we could have been, and I am pleased to say that Kim and I were not among the bolshie faction. Puttnam appeared before us and sportingly and without the least sign of annoyance or disappointment agreed to pay us all an extra two pounds each. We cheered him louder than we had been asked to cheer the race.

If you happen one day to be watching
Chariots of Fire
and want to spot me for reasons into which I will not inquire, then the Gilbert and Sullivan entertainment that takes place after the matriculation dinner is the scene to find. I’m lurking and smirking in the background. It is one of nature’s cruellest curses on me. No matter how soulful, sweet and unselfconscious I try to appear, my features always arrange themselves into an expression of utmost self-satisfaction, self-awareness and self-love. So unfair.

Back in Cambridge, life continued its jolly round. Simon Cherry, who had directed
Latin!
, was chosen by BATS to direct the 1980 May Week production. He cast me as the warty old king in
All’s Well That Ends Well
. Emma Thompson played Helena, Kim had a variety of parts, and Barry Taylor played Parolles.

Playing the King in
All’s Well That Ends Well
, BATS May Week production 1980, in Queens’ Cloister Court.

Barry, whose Macbeth had so impressed me, was an extraordinary man and one who made me, without meaning to, feel very guilty and ashamed. He was as genuinely intelligent, perceptive, wise, learned, skilled at writing and academically gifted as anyone I had ever met, but as far as Cambridge and life in the world outside was concerned he had one huge defect, one appalling flaw. He was honest. He had integrity. Honesty and integrity are fine virtues in so far as they go, but they are fatal when it comes to sitting exams. He was in the year above me, so this was his last term at Cambridge, and finals beckoned. If anyone should have got a First and stayed on to research and become a valued teacher and academic it should have been Barry. But his fatal flaw meant that when he sat in the examination hall and turned over the paper he would
try to answer the question
. He would sit and think about it. He would ponder avenues of approach. He would start,
cross out what he had written, have another think and only commit to paper his most considered judgements, appraisals and conclusions. By the time the whistle blew for the end of the three hours, during which time three questions should have been addressed and three essays completed, Barry would hand in one perfect essay and half of a very good one, leaving the third question entirely unanswered. He had done this in Part Ones the year before and he himself knew that he would probably do it in the Finals of the English tripos that were rapidly approaching. He wrote with delicacy and style, and his literary insights and moral, social and aesthetic perceptions were of far more value and depth than mine, but he simply could not master the art of time-keeping or manage the compromise of giving examiners what they wanted. He came from a working-class family who lived south-east of London. He told me that on the rare occasions that public-school boys had got on to the bus in Southend or the Isle of Dogs and asked for a ticket in their posh accents, he and his friends at the back would do cawing, honking, drawling impersonations of them. Not threateningly or violently, but because the sounds were so peculiar to their ears. It was hard for them to believe that anyone, especially anyone their age, really spoke like that. Then Barry arrived in Cambridge and found that
he
was the one with the unusual accent, and suddenly ra-ra public-school speech was the norm. It took him some time to believe that anyone with such an accent could be anything other than a dim chinless wonder.

How Barry must have regarded a man like me, slick and deceitful enough to answer exam questions in just the way that achieved the best results with the least effort yet gifted with enough of a memory and knowledge to disguise it as authentic academic achievement, I don’t know. Add to that my public-school manner and apparent confidence and I cannot but think that I made up just the kind of package that anyone with spirit would be most likely to despise.

Cambridge might have argued, should they have been moved to do so, that their examination system is perfectly suited to the real world. Success in politics, journalism, the Civil Service, advertising, the Foreign Office, the City and so many of the grander fields of professional endeavour rely on the ability quickly to master the essentials of a brief, to subdue material to one’s will, to present, promote and pimp, to massage facts and figures and to do all with speed, polish, ease and confidence. The tripos weeds out the slow, the honest, the careful, the considered and the excessively truthful – all of whom would be grossly unsuited to public life or high-profile careers.