Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (66 page)

Sandy is a great supporter. I tell him that I want to direct. He seems to think this is a very good idea, but suggests I should do some small film or at least some directing exercise before taking on a major film. He will put me in contact with Colin Young at the National Film School.

Cast around for a 46th birthday present for John. But the magic shop’s closed, so I give him a bottle of ’61 Lynch Bages and a copy of
Rogue Herrie
s in memory of the ‘Cheese Shop’.
¹²⁰

At 7.30 to Rue St Jacques in Charlotte Street. JC, looking as relaxed and expansive in company as I’ve ever seen him, greets me. He’s tieless and this is the first time I’ve out-formalised him!

About 20 guests. Peter Cook is not drinking and very funny, but still
one of those people who like to take the floor when they talk. His eyes have a way of moving fractionally slower than his head.

We are invited to a party before the Primrose Hill firework display. We cram into Clare’s shop and drink the first mulled wine of the winter, then up to Primrose Hill, where there is a spectacular gathering – reminiscent, in heads silhouetted against bright light, of the closing scenes of
Close Encounters
.

At the top of the hill is a bonfire which sends huge sheets of flame swirling upwards. As that begins to die down, heads turn to the bottom of the hill where the firework display begins. The Telecom Tower winks in the background, like a giant firework which won’t go off. ‘Oohs’ and ‘Ahhs’ and orgasmic shrieks of delight fill the air.

Everyone in very good spirits, hot dogs are sold, but it’s the sheer size of the crowd which is impressive – 20,000 at least, I should imagine.

Back to Clare’s shop, where Mary and myself fall into conversation with the cookery editor of
Options
, who happens to be one of James Ferman’s team of film assessors (she won’t use the word ‘censor’). She says that they have had to enrol new staff to deal with all the videos – especially the Indian videos, which cannot show a kiss, but are incredibly violent. I ask her why Python TV shows and
Ripping Yarns
are both ‘15’. She promises to find out. ‘Is there a “fuck”?’ she asks.

The sun, low, clear and brilliant, encourages me out of the house again, this time to take Rachel to the zoo. The tigers pace disturbingly and continually. The ostriches and emus and cassowaries are in poor housing and look rather seedy. The penguins remain my favourite entertainment.

Then we walk up Primrose Hill together. Though it is very cold, the leaves are still on the trees and the great glowing gold sun picks out the fading colours with breathtaking richness. We pause at the top of the hill and marvel. With Rachel beside me, in her fashionable and elegant navy blue coat, it’s one of those moments when you wish you could freeze time.

Read Malcolm Mowbray’s long synopsis of ‘Watching the Detectives’ – a very ‘Private Functionesque’ tale set in ’30’s Exeter. Small-town hypocrisy and deceit, but this time for sex rather than meat.

Mowbray, rather like Terry G, counsels me against trying to ‘learn directing’. He says Colin Young will not be able to give much help and that the best preparation for directing is just the ‘burning desire’ to direct. A good lighting cameraman will do the rest.

Sleep fitfully. Apprehensive on waking of how I will cope with a foodless day. [A 24-hour fast for an Oxfam publicity campaign.] Answer is to get to work and a brisk morning follows of Belfast [Festival] preparation.

To the Old Hall at one to borrow some moustaches from Maggie. At the moment the interior puts me in mind of some mediaeval ducal palace with a half-dozen workmen (at least) going about their business – carpenting, sawing, joining, painting. The top floor is beginning to take impressive shape. Terry G has such flair for design and an enviable knowledge of how to achieve the effects he’s after. It’s all quality stuff, too, and must be costing a fortune. I could never spend money this way. Not that I wouldn’t want to, but I just wouldn’t know how to. I would have panicked long ago.

Lunch and its temptations past, I drive to Bedford Square for a meeting at Jonathan Cape. Present are Richard Seymour, ‘Gauleiter’ of the project, Alan Lee, quiet, intense illustrator, and four people from Cape. Maschler apparently threw a wobbly some weeks ago and has been ‘resting’.

On the table is a typed schedule which tells me the book is called ‘Toby’ and that I have to have the finished text by the 29th of November. As this is the first positive information about the project I’ve had since early September, I’m not immediately helpful. But am disarmed by Alan Lee’s gentleness, enthusiasm and the beauty of his drawings and the first of the holograms (of the boy looking in the mirror), which is exciting.

Try to avoid the kitchen. Drive up to the Everyman and a new print of Clouzot’s
Wages of Fear
gets me through the evening. By the time I’m home it’s 11.15. No visions, no heightened senses, just weakness.

At two minutes past twelve I tuck into broccoli and cheese. The whole
exercise a bit of a fraud. I think that to know real hunger is to not know where your next meal might come from.

Had forgotten how far Gate 47 – the Belfast gate at Heathrow – is from everything else. Sort of symbolic of the UK’s arm’s-length attitude to the ‘province’. The Hillsborough Agreement between Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald [the Irish Prime Minister], signed last Friday, has resulted in cries of outrage from the Prots and much-increased security at Gate 47. Intensive searches, unpacking my bag item by item. Clusters of police behind uniformed security staff and, even after one’s been through this, I notice a parked car at the bottom of the aircraft steps, watching us all as we embark.

An ‘Ulster breakfast’ in the Carriage Room. Can’t quite see what is so quintessentially Ulsterish about bacon, egg and sausage, but there is some fried soda bread lurking. Break all my dietary rules and tuck into the lot.

At 6.15 we begin a run-through. Topping and tailing and only just time to try the changes. We don’t finish until a quarter to eight.

By 8.05 I am ready for action. But news gradually filters backstage that there are problems. In fact the sound system has completely broken down. There’s no sound ‘box’ at the Arts. It’s all done from an old-fashioned tape-recorder on some packing crates. Someone in the audience complained that they couldn’t see for the tape-recorder, and nice, helpful David took one of the packing crates away.

We have to take quick, alternative action and I decide to do the second half (Q and A), first. At least I have something to talk to the audience about. So I go out 15 minutes late and the audience response is so immediate, responsive and fulsome that I really begin to enjoy myself. From somewhere come a host of ideas, improvisations, one-liners, bits of repartee, that I’m sure I should never think of in ‘real life’.

Wake feeling quite pleased with myself after last night. Take my time and get to breakfast just after ten. The Ulster breakfast, I am informed, stopped
at ten. But I could have an Ulster grill. This turns out to be exactly the same as the Ulster breakfast.

Bobby Charlton is sat at one of the tables at breakfast. Freddie Starr at another. Freddie asks me to join him, but I’ve just scanned through an irritating review in the
Irish News
and want to have another look at it.

‘Frequently not funny’ is the phrase that really sticks. There is lots of credit for the way I carried on on Wednesday, but he makes it sound as if the material was weak. Funny how stupid things like that can cut through – despite the raves in the
Telegraph
and in the
Newsletter
.

I’m rung just before I leave for the theatre by the BBC to ask if I’ll appear as a ‘guest celebrity’ on a Children in Need appeal which is to be done as an inter-Britain link-up.

So I find myself at midnight, halfway through my first square meal of the day, locked in interview with Sean Rafferty and a man who calls himself Fearless Frank (though Sean calls him Fearless Fred for a while), who once hung upside down for a record time to raise money for charity.

To a book-signing at eleven. The shop looks as dead as the city centre. Not my fault – it’s all because of the rally called by Paisley and Co to protest against the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Within two or three days of the Agreement being signed, the city was covered with ‘Ulster Says No’ stickers. Still, our cultural oasis – the University Bookshop – moves about 100 books of
Limericks
in one and a half hours.

Then I’m whisked away to a school fund-raising to present prizes. But this again is in the centre and is half-empty. The master in charge is very sad. They’ve made several thousand pounds less because of Paisley’s action and he thinks the Unionists should make up the difference! But the children who are there are the usual bright, lively, cheeky alert kids who give the lie to the idea of a city gripped by depression and apathy. I enjoy meeting them. Sign autographs.

On my way back to the Forum I find my path blocked. The police don’t recommend me trying to get through. An army of marchers is heading straight for me. Group after group, band after band, fifes, drums (struck very loudly), red and white and blue uniforms, bowler hats, sashes. A
solemn and quite impressive sight, until you look at the faces. Unattractive most of them – hard, blotchily red, unsmiling.

Wait for a while, then notice some children joining the procession and nip smartly in amongst them. A few steps later, having been briefly part of the biggest Protestant rally in Belfast since 1912, I’m across the road and into the Forum.

At last, a completely selfish journey.

Rush around getting my things together. Can’t decide between Proust and
La Regenta
, so take both. These two, plus a
Good Food
,
Good Hotel
and
AA Road Guide
make the case weigh a ton.

At Paddington board what they call ‘The Torbay Express’. It’s full of South-woldy people. Well spoken, elderly and quite eccentric. ‘They used to start the train with a great whistle from the engine and now they just glide orf without you hardly knowing,’ says a very old, white-bearded character behind me, ruminatively.

We leave late, but catch up time and as we reach Taunton the sun comes out. Collect my car.

Drive to Dulverton, which is a neat, quite charming little village of no great architectural merit, enclosed by steep, wooded slopes. The Ashwick Country House Hotel is a couple of miles outside the town, almost on the edge of the moor.

Lots of calligraphed signs around. One says that the wallpaper in the hall is a 1901 William Morris original. Another announces, as I enter my large bedroom, ‘Complimentary drink’. I sip it, it’s French vermouth. A card reads ‘Welcome to Ashwick House – Mr Pabin’.

Inside, the hotel is almost as silent as outside. As I go down to dinner I notice for the first time that my room is called ‘Larch’! The other two guests are in Chestnut.

Eat sausage and bacon in solitary splendour looking out at the lawn, the tall fir trees and the ponds.

Into Dulverton to buy a newspaper and a waterproof. Then, rather than drive a long way, I go as far as Tam Steps and head off up the valley of the River Barle.

The path is difficult. Slippery, muddy and winding a contorted route through woods and over roots ready to take advantage of any lapse of concentration. So it’s a bit of a scramble, beside a river alternately calm, clear and stately and then rushing over stones. The clouds thicken and I’m caught in a couple of hail showers.

All goes well for a while, but with hills to climb and rivers to ford and bog to extricate myself from, I’m still walking as darkness is falling. As I wait on the Dulverton Road for a flock of sheep to pass by, a motorist offers me a lift. Takes me to the Tam Steps turn-off, so I’ve another 25 minutes’ half-running, half-walking, past a group of farmers outside an EHS – an Experimental Husbandry Station. Men in paramilitary green jackets and Land Rovers – snorting with laughter at something.

Very relieved to be back at Ashwick. Estimate I must have covered 16 miles or thereabouts today. That’s about 20 with yesterday. One other couple at dinner.

They take some pride in what’s called their ‘Presidential Suite’, which can be completely separate from the rest of the hotel – own cooking, own bar, own entrance. Mr S [the proprietor], a gentle, kindly man, says there
are
people who want this service – but not what sort of people they are. The mystery thickens – especially as in amongst all the delightfully calligraphed notes on the hotel is one reading ‘We regret we are unable to accommodate armed security guards on the premises’!

Waiting for the hologram story, which I’ve decided to call
The Mirrorstone
, to come back from Alison.

She likes it more than the first draft, which is always a good sign. Feels it’s more direct, less obscure, aimed more clearly at a younger age group. I check it through and make various alterations and edits, which Alison puts onto the processor, and copies should reach Alan L and Richard S by the weekend.

About five, as I have just finished the story, Michael Owen from the
Standard
rings and, in his flat, almost sinister, tones tells me that the judging panel for the ’85 awards have given me the Peter Sellers Comedy Award for
Private Function
. Now there’s a nice thing. The awards will be doled out, at the Savoy, on the 26th of January, which is the date I’ve held in my diary for more than a year as the New York Critics’ Circle awards.
I’d promised to present. But in this case, as I say to Michael O, it’s better to receive than to give.