Nerd Do Well (6 page)

This particular production, to be performed in early 1969 (amateur drama requires a far lengthier rehearsal process than professional theatre since the participants all have proper jobs), was
My Fair Lady
. The
GODS
were an extremely respected organisation and their annual production would inevitably play to sell-out crowds and always make the front pages of local newspapers, The
Gloucester Journal
and the
Citizen
. (The latter would eventually receive a nod in our cop comedy
Hot Fuzz
, renamed the
Sandford Citizen
for the film’s fictional Gloucestershire village setting.) There was, however, a slight deficit of male society members at the time, so Jim and Jackie cajoled my father into coming along and bolstering the ranks of men in the chorus. The ladies’ chorus quotient was perfectly acceptable, and since my mother’s participation would have effectively cancelled out my father’s, she decided to assist backstage, dressing the actress playing Eliza Doolittle, with whom she became lifelong friends. Mum immediately fell in love with amateur theatre and decided she wanted to become an active member of the
GODS
. The following year, the annual musical production was to be Lionel Bart’s classic,
Oliver!
. I’m sure Mum would have made a wonderful Nancy, had she not been heavily pregnant with me.

By the time the production went on, I was a month old and no doubt enjoyed the quiet excitement one always feels backstage at an active theatre on a matinee afternoon. I can’t help thinking this would be a great
ESTB
moment, if not for me, then for my mother. It would be cool to step out of a crackle of fizzing electricity and point to the bundle in her arms, proclaiming that that baby was in fact me and would grow up to be a successful actor (and time traveller), although I fear with that proclamation, I might only serve to confirm the fears of Marty McFly: that in the future, we all turn into assholes.

Later that year and with me being a helpful baby and sleeping through the night, Mum was able to participate in her first play, Anthony Kimmins’s
The Amorous Prawn
. It was a perfect hobby for her as a young mum, since she was able to put me to bed and then head out to the theatre, without me even realising she was gone. In this respect she was able to have her baby-cake and eat it: balancing her social and domestic lives. She appeared in many productions over the years. My first memory of seeing her onstage was in a 1976 production of
Brigadoon
, the musical about a magical Scottish village that appears every two hundred years. By the mid-seventies, the
ABC
theatre had been converted into a three-screen cinema and the annual
GODS
musical had been transferred to the Cambridge Theatre, a large auditorium at the Gloucester Leisure Centre. It was here that I stood on my seat as the actors took their bows and shouted ‘That’s my mum’ at the crowd of pensioners surrounding me, including my grandfather’s beloved Pem, who chuckled next to me, glowing with pride for her daughter and to a lesser extent her hysterical grandson.

Mum went on to become a leading light at the
GODS
, receiving rave reviews for her performances from the local papers, describing her ‘marvellous timing and use of facial expression’ and labelling her ‘an undoubted show-stealer’. I have little doubt that had she been afforded the same opportunities, encouragement and dumb luck as me, she might have found herself working as a professional actress. In her more reflective moments, she will say as much. Never in such a way as to convey regret or resentment but more assurance to herself that though she did not choose to follow that path, it was a path she was more than capable of taking. Whether she followed her dream or not, I still have the same feelings of childish pride when I consider her achievements, not just theatrically but as a mother and a human being. ‘Without you, I wouldn’t be here’ doesn’t really cover it.

Who Do I Think I Am (Part 2)?

A
p.

s well as Mum successfully infiltrating the local am-dram society, Dad was also a keen musician, having played the piano and guitar in bands since he was sixteen. (As an actress/musician pairing, they were in many ways a precursor to Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, but without the home-made nautical porn – as far as I know . . .)

John met Gillian at a concert at the Guildhall in Gloucester, at which his first band, the Beathovens, were performing. By the time I became sensible of the world at large (that is, when my own memories take over from details I know about myself from other people), we were living over the aforementioned music shop, a short walk from the Guildhall, and Dad was playing keyboards in a show band called Pendulum.

They were well known locally, and became even more so for a short while after they appeared on
Opportunity Knocks
, the 1970s precursor to
Britain’s Got Talent
, presented by popular eyebrow wiggler, Hughie Green. We tend to regard the TV talent show as a modern phenomenon but it’s been around a long time. It’s only recently, however, that we’ve begun to relish the failure of the contestants as much as the success.

Back in the day, the audition process was an unseen filter specifically designed to sort the talented from the not so talented, and was done and dusted before the show was aired. Either we didn’t care about seeing people desperate for external validation, brutally humiliated in public, or we didn’t know we wanted it, the urge lying dormant within the human genome, like herpes. I’d like to believe it was the former. I’m not suggesting we were somehow nobler, or better human beings back then (let’s not forget,
The Black and White Minstrel Show
was enjoying huge audiences around the same time), I just think the culture of hate and humiliation associated with contemporary talent shows is a product of an age in which television has become a demythologised free-for-all.

The idea of actually being on television was entirely different in the 1970s. In those days, the ‘box’ was as enigmatic as its nickname suggested; a far more mysterious object, it was a conduit through which we were given passive access to a faraway world. It was magical and inaccessible, a means of happily observing a party to which we were not invited and that we didn’t necessarily want to be at.

In the early eighties, everything began to change on a grand scale. The advent of home video gave us dominion over television, shaking us from its thrall. We could decide what to watch and when. We could record programmes and films and hold them captive, watching them multiple times then discarding them by erasing them from existence. We puffed out our collective chests at that once inscrutable piece of tech in the corner and said: ‘Who’s the daddy now?’

Video cameras became readily available in the high street, further eroding the mystique, not only of TV and TV production but of the very idea of actually being on TV. With a modicum of head-scratching and a few leads we could see ourselves on the small screen every night, so what was the big deal? This, coupled with the evolution of reality television, as we know it today, has arguably engendered a sense of entitlement among certain sections of the viewing public, who have morphed from happy observers into rabid participants in the scrum for media exposure.

Consequently, there seems to be a large amount of bitterness levelled at those who manage to get their faces among the pixels. For instance, the depth of bile levelled at contestants on Channel 4’s
Big Brother
has markedly increased since the programme’s first airing in 2000. The public interest began as fascination, even admiration, and transformed over successive series into a dedicated hatred for all but the final few and even then the admiration is somewhat short-lived and begrudging.

Similarly, the entertainment value of shows like
The X Factor
and
Britain’s Got Talent
is, at least in the initial stages, about seeing hapless wannabes parade themselves before a panel of unforgiving ‘judges’ and cataclysmically fail for our pleasure, providing instant
Schadenfreude
. What else is the emotion behind the laughter? I always feel an enormous amount of sadness when I see people’s self-belief shattered by these sneering ‘determinators’ with their corporate agendas defining what constitutes talent and art. Isn’t self-delusion better than desolation?

Of course, it’s eternally defendable by way of the argument that nobody is forcing these people to sacrifice their dignity to the masses, but that’s not really the point, is it?
The X Factor
isn’t a million miles from Channel 4’s nineties car-crash magazine show
The Word
, presented by Terry Christian, in which people desperate to appear on television would eat bulls’ testicles and lick pensioners’ armpits as part of a segment poignantly entitled ‘The Hopefuls’. The makers of contemporary talent shows know there will always be a supply of hopefuls, whose need for facile validation far outweighs their fear of public failure, or, worse, who are happy to settle for public failure as a means of attaining the moment of exposure they feel entitled to. In light of this conveyor belt of catastrophe, Warhol’s famous prediction seems overly generous. Ironically, ten years after the show was axed, Terry Christian appeared as a contestant on
Celebrity Big Brother
. Talk about pap will eat itself.

Anyway, back in 1975, Pendulum’s audition took place in Bristol and was presided over by the show’s producer, Doris Barry, and Hughie Green himself. The band knocked out a version of Jimmy Webb’s ‘MacArthur Park’ but were asked to perform something a little more poppy and so launched into an impromptu rendition of ‘That’s the Way (I Like It)’ by KC & The Sunshine Band, impressing the judges enough to secure a place in the finals.

Sponsored by Iona Robbins, wife of the then Mayor of Gloucester, the band travelled to London to record the show. There they met the other contestants, the usual array of jugglers, magicians and ventriloquists, as well as a fellow West Country girl who wrote comic poetry, with whom the band struck up an immediate bond. They recorded their spot as live on the Saturday night and comfortably won the studio audience’s vote on a sophisticated appreciation-measuring device called the ‘Clap-o-meter’.

Dad returned from London on the Sunday, buzzing with success, and the whole family gathered the following night to watch the show air. It was all extremely exciting, staying up past my bedtime to see my dad on television (actually
on
the television!) was beyond amazing. At one point I fell over and got a cocktail stick stuck in my hand and yet even this momentarily worrying impalement failed to dampen my ardour at the wonder of it all.

I can still see him singing into the microphone, and if I really concentrate I can feel my grandparents’ house unfold around me, filled with excitement and finger food. All the contestants are gathered together at the end of the show, waving and smiling at the camera as the credits roll. The only face I can recall is Dad’s; he was, after all, the only one I was watching. Years later he told me that during the goodbye shot, Pendulum’s drummer, Paul Holder, had placed his penis into my dad’s hand, which was resting behind his back. I often lament the fact that there is no record of the show; it would be worth watching if only for the expression of surprise, which apparently exploded out of my father’s cheesy goodbye grin as he realised that Paul’s knob was lolling in his palm.

In the end, despite the ‘Clap-o-meter’ triumph, the definitive decision came from the viewing public. There was no phone voting in those days; public opinion was a strictly postal affair. Votes would be written on a blank postcard and mailed to Thames Television, then counted up to determine the victor. The result was announced on the subsequent show before the whole process kicked off again. Much to our collective disappointment, Pendulum didn’t quite capture the public imagination as much as the talented young West Country poetess, who won the viewers’ votes with a genuinely funny poem called ‘I Wish I’d Looked After My Teeth’. Her name was Pam Ayres. The fact that Pam is still writing and performing to this day and often crops up on the television actually makes me very happy. It’s a testament to her talent that she remains successful, and somehow makes her triumph over Dad’s show band less disappointing.

Pendulum were approached by the Joe Loss talent agency and got a few high-profile gigs as a result, including the National Television Advertising Awards. However, Loss’s desire for the band to work aboard cruise ships led to tensions, which eventually resulted in a split. Half the band had mortgages and children and couldn’t really take off around the world at a moment’s notice. I have a very vague recollection of Dad telling me about a possible trip but it never happened.

It’s interesting that I have never heard Dad talk about his experience on
Opportunity Knocks
as an opportunity missed; the big break that could have propelled him to stardom. He is an extremely talented pianist and I have never known him not to be in some band or other. You can currently catch him performing in various venues in and around the South-West as part of a delightfully tight outfit called JB Jazz & Blues. The JB stands for John Beckingham, which are my father’s first and second names respectively. Beckingham was my second name too until 1977 but we’ll get to that later, maybe . . . Have I told you my dog likes eating socks?

An earlier incarnation of JB Jazz & Blues can actually be seen in
Spaced
. The band perform Louis Jordan’s ‘Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby’ behind Tim and Daisy as they dance themselves closer into one another’s affections at the bitter-sweet conclusion to series one. It’s a lovely moment and I was so proud and happy to have Dad be part of the show. The whole family didn’t all gather in one place to watch that though. There was no sense of occasion or cocktail sticks. Everyone just watched in their own home or else taped it. Funny that.

Having been exposed to theatre at a very early age, I was keen to participate in drama as soon as the opportunity presented itself. The first major role I recall taking on was the young Francis of Assisi, in a play about his life staged in the Lady chapel at Gloucester Cathedral. I must have been extremely young, since the boy playing Francis in his dotage can only have been about ten, and the boy playing Francis’s father was even younger at eight!