This Is Your Life (18 page)

‘Hello again. Jimmy Conway – we met at Billy's funeral.' It wasn't the best opener for someone who needed cheering up. But the dogs gave me an excuse to walk alongside her for a while and she commented on how much coverage I suddenly seemed to be getting.

‘I see you did “What's In My Fridge?”,' she remarked as she threw a stick that was grabbed by both our dogs. ‘Billy agreed to do that once. When the photographer opened the fridge door he was confronted by a midget dressed as an Eskimo sitting there reading the paper. He shouted, “Get out of my house!” and the photographer apologized and shut the door again. Then he realized he was the victim of a
Gotcha!
and the Eskimo midget came out and turned to the hidden TV camera to tell children watching at home never to hide in fridges.'

‘Yeah, I remember watching that, it was a great one,' I said, admiring the way she was still able to talk about her husband's career with a smile.

There was a pause while I wondered if it was acceptable to carry on talking about Billy's show now that she had raised the subject.

‘Did you ever worry that any of the
Gotchas
went too far?' I asked.

‘Oh yes, all the time. I mean that famous one of the old lady on the Portaloo. She was furious at first.'

This particular stunt was the stuff of television legend. An unsuspecting old lady entered a temporary toilet in the middle of Trafalgar Square. But once she was sitting down, all four walls were whipped away by an overhead crane, revealing her to everyone with her knickers and tights around her ankles.

It turned out to be a pivotal moment in the story of British television. A row about ‘dumbing down' ensued in which the infamous prank was criticized by the culture secretary in the House of Commons. However, the look of indignant shock on the old lady's face, followed by the hopeless action of reaching for a toilet-roll dispenser that was no longer there, had made this scene an incredibly popular TV moment, a national family joke that was on the front page of every tabloid. Downing Street were apparently furious that a minister had criticized the toilet lady stunt without first clearing this with Number 10 and the culture secretary ended up having to do a complete U-turn, saying it represented the best in ground-breaking and innovative programme-making.

‘Nobody
has
to sign the consent form so it's always up to them,' said Stella in defence of Billy's show. ‘But you're always going to upset somebody when you try to push back the boundaries. But that's what Billy was all about – he was always searching for the next television first.' And then she paused and did her brave face and I wanted to give her a consoling hug but I stopped myself because I knew my kindly motives of caring sympathy were mingled with rampant lust and desire. My dog brought back the stick so I threw it over the fields once more.

It was good to talk to someone about celebrity and show business who knew a great deal more about them than I did. I felt celebrity was something Stella and I had in common. My friends didn't react as well as I had hoped to hearing about my latest radio interview or newspaper feature, but to Stella it was perfectly normal, it didn't seem like showing off. She talked about the strange customs of the Planet Fame and I nodded and agreed while taking careful mental note of everything she said. Sometimes I wondered if I was struck by Stella because she fitted this new image I had of myself: the flashy comic with the exciting career who should have a beautiful model on his arm. A lot of today's male celebrities had once had longstanding girlfriends whom they'd dumped the moment they started to get well known. It wasn't that these men were shallow; it's just that they didn't feel comfortable speeding along in their new red sports car beside a woman who worked in the public sector. I felt sure that I could never be so callous, so vain and calculating. The fact that I didn't have a longstanding girlfriend to dump in the first place was nothing to do with it. There was still Betty, my Border collie, of course. Maybe she worried that I was planning to swap her for the Scrivenses' showbiz Labrador.

‘I read an interview with that old woman from Trafalgar Square the other day,' I continued. ‘It was for a “Where Are They Now?” slot in some TV listings magazine. They called her “Toilet Lady”.'

‘She did very well out of it. Became a bit of a minor celebrity herself after the clip went into the opening titles of Billy's show. For a while she made a living opening supermarkets and doing adverts for toilet paper.' Stella asserted that being on Billy's show was the probably the highlight of this old lady's life. That most people's lives were quite mundane
and meaningless, with every evening spent slumped in a chair staring at a television. So for an ordinary person to be transported to the magical world on the other side of the screen gave them status and kudos of which they could previously have only ever dreamt.

‘Actually, the article said that she'd had quite an interesting life. She worked as a midwife in India in the 1950s and had campaigned for the rights of low caste pregnant women or something.'

‘Who, Toilet Lady?'

‘Yeah, what was her real name? Began with a T.'

‘Toilet Lady,' confirmed Stella.

Max snapped aggressively at Betty and wrestled the stick away from her. Stella made a token attempt at telling her dog off. I knew there was some truth in what she had said. That you could discover a cure for cancer or bring peace to the Middle East but you were never really anybody until you had appeared on television. That was the modern definition of status.

‘Is that right, though? Is that what we want?' I said.

‘Says the man who's not on television yet,' she smiled.

Was my unease prompted by a concern about the values of our society or vain indignation that all my publicity so far counted for so little?

‘Yeah, but what about all the other media?' I said. ‘Things definitely changed for me after that feature in the
Sunday Times
.'

‘Well, they all contribute a little bit, obviously,' she conceded. ‘But without wishing to demean your standing, Jimmy, no one ever got mobbed by fans because of a particularly interesting discussion on Radio Four. Your name is known in certain circles, but that doesn't make you famous.
You're not on television. People don't see your face and think, Oh look, there goes Jimmy Conway.'

This presented a problem for me. I'd only got as far as I had by apparently being the one performer who wouldn't do television. This had been my Unique Selling Point, the thing that marked me out from the crowd. So to go to the next level of fame, to go on telly to do my ‘I won't do telly' line, might arguably be seen as a little bit hypocritical by one or two eagle-eyed pedants. As I wandered home towards Seaford I thought about what Stella had said. Down in the town below me, every chimney had a television aerial or satellite dish. Every home was endlessly consuming TV; thoughtlessly breathing it in and exhaling it just as quickly. My one appearance on the TV news was already forgotten. It wasn't just a case of appearing once on the telly. You had to be on that screen over and over again for it to count for anything. Deep down I knew that Stella was completely right about my own status. Before I talked to her I'd thought that I must seem quite important, that everyone else had been just as aware as me of this supposed new comedian's arrival on the scene. On reflection it was a fairly safe bet that the rest of the British population was not endlessly re-reading each newspaper feature about me or listening to my every minor radio appearance. Billy Scrivens had been a supernova, but I was barely visible with a telescope. And without the means to keep shining brightly, I'd never count for very much. One brief artificial glimmer of light in my mid-thirties and that would be it. I'd be famous for fifteen minutes like that bloke said, oh, what's his name? I can't remember. He's not famous enough any more.

27 Elms Crescent,
East Grinstead,
West Sussex,
England

Dear James,

Well, who would have thought it!! You were hoping for an MBE, but you got a knighthood as well! Congratulations – and you can take it from me as a semi-neutral outsider that it was most definitely deserved. Obviously these little accolades don't really mean anything to you, it's all rather embarrassing, but it might seem rude to refuse them and anyway if you turned them down you might not be offered any more. Although John Lennon gave back his MBE, but you don't have to worry about that because the Vietnam war is over now and so you shouldn't feel like it's selling out if you accept it. Anyway, Jimmy Savile has OBE on the end of his name after his programme and
that looks very impressive indeed. I don't think it would look like you were copying if you did that when you get yours.

Of course, these honours don't just belong to you. They are also for all the ordinary people behind the scenes who have worked so very hard on your behalf and have been paid much less. How nice it must be for them that all their hard work has now been recognized with your knighthood. Perhaps it would be a nice gesture to send some of them a little present as a thankyou. Nothing too flash, but not too cheap either. A box of Matchmakers, or a Chocolate Orange maybe.

At this time it is important that Nicholas is not made to feel inferior by all your success. Hard to imagine that he was once the high achiever of the family! You should be sensitive about how you break this happy news to your sadly rather embittered and jealous older brother. Perhaps it would be better coming from someone else and they could sort of just mention it in passing – e.g. your secretary could ring him up and say, ‘Could you hold, please? I have your younger brother, Sir James Conway MBE, on the line for you.' Though if you wanted to hear his reaction you'd have to listen on the extension.

I hope you enjoyed meeting the Queen. Some people criticize the royal family, which isn't fair because they can't answer back. In any case they do a lot of work for charity and it's much better than having a dictator like Adolf Hitler. You are now the second person in your family to meet the Queen; a few years before you were born, Mum handed her a posy of flowers from the other side of the railings when she did a walkabout in Royal Tunbridge Wells. But I think you were right not to mention it. Her Majesty meets a lot of people like that and she probably wouldn't have remembered it even if you'd shown her the photo from on top of the telly. Congratulations once again, and it just goes to show
that if you really work at something, you'll get there in the end.

Mine sincerely,
Jimmy

When I was a child an MBE must have still meant something. I suppose I had regarded those awards as the ultimate accolades because they were given out by the Queen. I was now struggling to imagine exactly what benefits you got from being a Member of the British Empire when that particular club had been closed down some years earlier.

The reason all those old-fashioned awards have lost their appeal is they are no longer marketed correctly. They're still handed over at a stuffy private ceremony at Buckingham Palace, with maybe one quick snapshot afterwards for the
Daily Telegraph.
No wonder the public has lost interest. Who's going to get excited by a photo of some anonymous civil servant holding up his medal and being completely upstaged by his wife's enormous hat? As Stella said, if it isn't on television it hasn't happened. If the British establishment wanted people to care about the official honours system they should do a proper glitzy awards bash and put it out on ITV after
Coronation Street.
Five minutes of funny topical stand-up from Her Majesty before she introduced her first guest to read the nominations for the opening award of the night: ‘A big hand for His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh!' And the band would play a couple of jazzy bars of the national anthem as Prince Philip skipped jauntily down the steps clutching a gold envelope. A little bit of scripted light-hearted banter between the Queen and her husband for good measure: ‘Phil, I like your medals . . .'

‘Thank you. This one here is for outstanding courage when confronted by the enemy.'

‘Yes, though to be fair, not many pheasants ever fired back at you!'

And the laughter of the studio audiences would provide a little break in the tension over who'd won the phone vote
for the coveted title of Commander of the Order of the Bath.

In the twenty years since I had imagined that the ultimate prize was a medal from the Queen, a whole new royal family had emerged, bringing its own new honours system with it. A few letters after your name counted for nothing compared to the glamour and kudos attached to the glittering prizes regularly dished out on national television by the new kings and queens of British celebrity: the rulers of the House of
Hello!

I could never resist the drama and excitement of a televised awards ceremony. My attitude towards them always followed the same pattern. I would begin by attempting to appear cynical and knowing. ‘The Soap Awards!' I'd exclaim in appalled disbelief. ‘What will they think of next? I'm not watching this. It's just an extended trailer; an excuse to show a load of old soap-opera clips!' An hour later I was still shouting at the screen: ‘How can you give “Soap of the Year” to
Emmerdale
?! Oh come on; it's got to be between
Corrie
and
EastEnders
, surely?'

I always ended up caring because I could not help but identify myself with one programme over another, with this actor rather than that one. That is how celebrity works, I suppose. It's a process of associating yourself with various stars and then vicariously enjoying their successes and lifestyle.

All these thoughts had been prompted by one small rectangle of cardboard that had landed on my doormat before being half destroyed by Betty. In the grandest of loopy royal writing it informed me that the pleasure of my company was requested at the British ‘Biz Awards. And at the bottom of the gold-edged card, just above the teeth marks and doggy saliva, a solitary word proclaimed the grounds on which I had qualified for this invitation: