Writing Home (8 page)

My telephone went one morning in 1972. Never having written a television film before, I’d cobbled some scenes together about a group of cyclists before the First World War who go on a day out to Fountains Abbey from Hebden Bridge. Then just embarking on his film career, Stephen Frears had hawked it round the BBC with no success and I’d stopped thinking about it and got on with something else until that morning when the phone went. The voice was lazy, genial and utterly untinged by art. ‘I gather the Head of Plays has turned it down. Well, that seems a pretty good recommendation to me. The report says it doesn’t really go anywhere. Well, it goes to Fountains Abbey and back, and I think that’s quite far enough.’

Thereafter we did nearly a score of films and plays together – the last one this summer, in the final months of Innes’s life.

To begin with I was surprised how well we got on. The sort of character he seemed to be – conservative, clubbable, at ease with himself and the world – often makes me uneasy and aware of my own social inadequacies. It was only gradually that I came to appreciate how tolerant he was, and gentle, and lacking in any respect for the forms of things.

His appearance too was deceptive. Though it was the navy that Innes had served in, he always looked to me vaguely military: one could imagine him a slightly eccentric colonel in the North Africa campaign, swanning about the desert in
battledress top, cravat and a pair of old corduroy trousers. Instead of that it was the fifth floor of TV Centre. But maybe it was a sense of just having missed his time that made him in so much of his work celebrate heroes – Orde Wingate, Donald Campbell, Amy Johnson, Bomber Harris and the troops at Arnhem.

It was a side of him that my stuff didn’t cater for – to say the least – but with which Innes was in his element. Stephen Frears had been drawn to him because Innes had come to Drama via Outside Broadcasting and so had no particular aesthetic or political axe to grind. And indeed, shivering in a bitter spring on the Yorkshire wolds or on the sands at Morecambe, my first films with Innes just seemed to be Outside Broadcasting carried on by other means.

Though I knew him for twenty years, I have found it hard to write about him. This is not the place to catalogue someone’s faults, but the odd shortcoming or two does make things easier. With Innes I find it hard to name one. In all the time we worked together I cannot remember him even once getting cross. I mentioned this to John Schlesinger, who’s something of a connoisseur in this department, but he could only recall one occasion. It was when we were filming
An Englishman Abroad
and had one short afternoon to do, I think, four set-ups at Lobb’s, the smart bootmakers in St James’s. For some reason the scenes hadn’t been rehearsed, and time that should have been spent setting up the shot had to be taken up rehearsing the actors. This apparently made Innes annoyed with John, but his bad temper must soon have blown over because it never got as far as me. All I remember of that afternoon was Innes sidling up to me and telling me to take a good look at the solitary customer in the shop, who, amid all the fret and upset of filming, was waiting impatiently for his shoes. He was a tall and elegant black gentleman with a silver-topped cane who treated our frenzied
activity with obvious disdain. Innes whispered that the cobblers downstairs had warned the make-up department to keep out of this gentleman’s way lest he eat them. ‘That’s a deplorable thing to say,’ I said. ‘I agree,’ said Innes. ‘Except that it’s true. It’s the ex-Emperor Bokassa.’

There is always a temptation on occasions such as this to talk less about the dead than about oneself, to see their lives as refracted through one’s own, so that even as one celebrates a life one appropriates it. This is hard to avoid with Innes because we didn’t mix socially. I think I went to his house once, and I’m not sure that he ever came to mine. Then when we did work together he made himself so totally available to me and to the job in hand that he might not have had any other life at all. And so every couple of years on average I’d have a play to do and I would send him the script, and the familiar process would begin again. It was like putting on the same pair of worn and comfortable shoes – suede shoes probably, as there was a hint of raffishness about him: shoes that had been kept for you between whiles ready for another stroll together. And it was a stroll. You knew you would have a good time, that there would be a lot of laughs, and that the drama would be confined to the script, not to the filming of it. Or, if there were dramas behind the scenes, behind the scenes they would stay; you would know nothing about it, because that was his responsibility not yours.

It was perhaps a stratagem, a useful fiction we both conspired in, but it was usual to pretend that we were engaged in a conspiracy to smuggle whatever production we were doing past the bureaucracy, which was never as keen on having it as we were on doing it. This was frequently no more than the truth, and however successful Innes’s productions were they were seldom the favoured ones, still less the flagship – which only added to his satisfaction when they were eventually well
received. I’m not sure if this was a stratagem he practised with his other writers, but it always worked with me.

Certainly we were always pretty far down the line when production money was handed out, however good our track record. Hence the Moscow scenes in
An Englishman Abroad
had to be filmed in Dundee, which turned out to be a blessing, and the Paris scenes in
102 Boulevard Haussmann
were filmed in Perth, which was … well, less so. Other productions with foreign settings somehow wangled weeks of exotic location filming even when they largely consisted of interiors, but that we never managed it was a joke, never a grumble. I always put it down to Innes being too nice, not a wheeler-dealer, and so a small price to pay. And besides he loved a studio and, though he enjoyed a production jaunt, he was never happier than when he was in the gallery at TC3 or on the stage at Ealing, where we were this last summer, Innes sitting beside the camera with his stick between his knees still with all his fun and zest, surveying the gallery at Buckingham Palace.

He was of course by this time desperately ill, but, just as he never passed on his worries about the production, so he would not burden you with problems he did not think were yours, dismissing his operation after Christmas as ‘just a spot of plumbing. Nothing to worry about.’ When Coral Browne had been ill during
An Englishman Abroad
she too had been very brave without, as must often be the temptation, letting you know she was being ‘brave’ about it. And so it was with Innes – no indication in his talk or his demeanour of the burden he was carrying, and no hint that there was anything else he would rather be doing at this moment in his life than the film. He even wondered about future projects, one on the Orgreave Riots with Don Shaw, and he asked me whether I thought there was a film to be made of A. J. P. Taylor’s letters to his Hungarian wife. ‘A lot of it takes place in Budapest,’
said Innes, ‘so at least we might get to Aberdeen.’

Some odd thoughts about him:

In all the years we worked together he never once told me what my viewing figures were or even mentioned them; to have done so would have been a concession to a view of television for which he had no time.

Though conservative by temperament, he hated Mrs Thatcher, ‘Do you see what she’s done now?’ the initial topic at many a production meeting. That apart, his strongest condemnation of anyone was ‘Bloody man’ or ‘Frightful person’.

Unstinting in his appreciation of others, he was pleased if you liked one of his productions but rarely complained if it had been badly received – just got on with the next job in hand.

For many years he shared a suite of offices on the fifth floor with a producer of a more radical stamp, Kenith Trodd. It was an unlikely pairing, and Trodd’s doings often filled Innes with childlike amazement, but for all their disparity they were closer to each other than they were to many of their colleagues. ‘He’s all right is old Trodd,’ Innes would say, one enthusiast recognizing another. And because he was laconic and unassuming – laid-back would be the current phrase – it wasn’t immediately obvious that an enthusiast was what Innes was – and, though cast in a different mould, as much an enthusiast as that other BBC Welshman, Huw Wheldon.

He always had his priorities right. When things went wrong he was more concerned that no one should be hurt or treated unfairly than that his own reputation should be kept intact. On one film of mine, through no fault of his own, the director lost his nerve. We got behind, deadlines began to loom and the production to fall apart. In all this Innes’s first concern was that this young man should recover his nerve and suffer no damage, and, though eventually another director had to take over, Innes straightaway made plans that once the opportunity arose the
young man would get another production in less exacting circumstances.

Innes pretended to be an amateur while in truth being the supreme professional. It’s a very English approach, and his preferences were very English. But he went his own way, and there are many writers besides myself who count themselves lucky that that way coincided with theirs – Don Shaw, Reg Gadney, Roger Milner, Andrew Davies, Richard Gordon, Robin Chapman, Michael Palin all have cause to be grateful to him. The greatest compliment he paid you was that he trusted you. He let you go your own way even though that might be well off the beaten track. I can’t believe that Proust was quite his cup of tea, and it is surely only in remembering this lovely man that you would ever find Kafka even in the same sentence as Bomber Harris.

We all of us, I suppose, add up to, come down to, a jumble of attitudes, and Innes’s, a code if not quite a creed, has taken something of a battering in recent years, both in the country and in the Corporation. It was no accident that he should have detested Mrs Thatcher to the comic extent that he did, because she stood for a single-mindedness, a want of magnanimity and an exclusiveness that challenged all the variety of qualities and attributes Innes celebrated in his work. They were, I suppose, the qualities of the old BBC, and in retrospect one can see how fitting it was that it should have been Innes who produced Roger Milner’s play about Reith.

Liberal, magnanimous, indifferent to criticism, Innes Lloyd was in the best sense old-fashioned. But, tolerant, various, prodigal, fearless and passionate, his standards are – or were – those of the BBC he served so faithfully for twenty-six years, and to see those values fought for, reinstated and celebrated again would be the best memorial to this steadfast, gentle, generous man.

It is thirty-five years, almost to the day, since I first set eyes on Peter, at lunch in a restaurant, I think on Goodge Street, with Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, the meeting arranged by John Bassett, whose idea it was that we should all work together writing the review that turned into
Beyond the Fringe
.

Having already written while still an undergraduate a large slice of the two West End shows
Pieces of Eight and One Over the
Eight
, Peter was quite prosperous and it showed. He dressed out of Sportique, an establishment – gents’ outfitters wouldn’t really describe it – at the west end of Old Compton Street, the premises I think now occupied by the Café España.

There hadn’t really been any men’s fashions before 1960 – most of the people I knew dressed in sports coat and flannels, as some of us still do – but when I saw Peter he was wearing a shortie overcoat, a not quite bum-freezer jacket, narrow trousers, winkle-picker shoes and a silk tie with horizontal bars across it. But what was most characteristic of him, and which remained constant throughout his life, regardless of the sometimes quite dramatic changes in his physical appearance, was that he was carrying, as he always seemed to be carrying, a large armful of newspapers. He had besides a book on racing form, and I remember being impressed not merely that this was someone who bet on horses but that here was someone who knew how to bet on horses, and indeed had an account at a bookmaker’s.

But it was the newspapers that were the clue to him. He was nurtured by newspapers, and there’s a sense that whatever he wrote or extemporized, which he could at that time with a fluency so effortless as to make us all feel in differing degrees costive, was a kind of mould or fungus that grew out of the literally yards of newsprint that he daily digested. Newspapers mulched his talents, and he remained loyal to them all his life; and when he died they repaid some of that loyalty.

In those days I never saw him reading a book. I think he thought that most books were a con or at any rate a waste of time. He caught the drift of books though, sufficient for his own purposes, namely jokes, picking up enough about Proust, for instance, to know that he suffered from asthma and couldn’t breathe very well; he decided in the finish, according to Peter, that if he couldn’t do it well he wouldn’t do it at all, and so died – this one of the gems from the monologue in
Beyond the Fringe
about the miner who wanted to be a judge but didn’t have the Latin. How Proust had managed to work his way into the sketch I can’t now remember, because it was less of a sketch than a continuing saga which each night developed new extravagances and surrealist turns, the mine at one point invaded by droves of Proust-lovers, headed by the scantily clad Beryl Jarvis. Why the name Beryl Jarvis should be funny I can’t think. But it was and plainly is.

In those days Peter could tap a flow of mad verbal inventiveness that nothing could stem: not nerves, not drink, not embarrassment, not even the very occasional lack of response from the audience. He would sit there in his old raincoat and brown trilby, rocking slightly as he wove his ever more exuberant fantasies, on which, I have to admit, I looked less admiringly then than I do in retrospect. I had the spot in the show immediately following Peter’s monologue, which was scheduled to last five minutes or so but would often last for
fifteen, when I would be handed an audience so weak from laughter I could do nothing with them.

Slim and elegant in those days, he was also quite vain, sensing instinctively as soon as he came into a room where the mirror was and casting pensive sidelong glances at it while stroking his chin, as if checking up on his own beauty. He also knew which was his best side for photographers.

There were limits to his talents; one or two things he thought he could do well he actually couldn’t do for toffee. One was an imitation of Elvis and another was to ad lib Shakespeare. Both were deeply embarrassing, though of course Peter was immune to embarrassment – that was one of his great strengths.

What makes speaking about him a delicate task is that he was intolerant of humbug: detecting it (and quite often mistakenly), he would fly into a huge self-fuelling rage which propelled him into yet more fantasy and even funnier jokes. So it’s hard to praise him to his face – even his dead face – that quizzical smile, never very far away, making a mockery of the sincerest sentiments. So he would be surprised, I think, to be praised for his strength of character, but in his later years when some of his talent for exuberant invention deserted him I never heard him complain. It must have been some consolation that the younger generation of comic writers and performers drew inspiration from him, but he never bragged about that either. Nor did he resent that Dudley had gone on to success in Hollywood and he hadn’t. The only regret he regularly voiced was that at the house we rented in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1963 he had saved David Frost from drowning.

In later years I saw him quite seldom, though if he’d seen something you’d done on television he’d generally telephone, ostensibly to congratulate you, but actually to congratulate you on having got away with it yet again. There’s a scene in
Brideshead Revisited
where Charles Ryder has an exhibition of
his worthy but uninspired paintings which is a great success. Then Anthony Blanche turns up, who knows exactly what’s what: ‘My dear,’ he says, ‘let us not expose your little imposture before these good, plain people; let us not spoil their moment of pleasure. But we know, you and I, that this is all t-terrible t-tripe.’ And sometimes what Peter was telephoning about had been tripe and sometimes it hadn’t, but you didn’t mind because there’s always a bit of you thinks it is anyway, and it was to that part of you that Peter spoke. And since he did it without rancour or envy it was a great relief. I suppose it was partly this that made him in his latter days such an unlikely father-figure for younger performers.

In the press coverage of his death one could detect a certain satisfaction, the feeling being that he had paid some sort of price for his gifts, had died in the way the press prefer funny men to die, like Hancock and Peter Sellers, sad and disappointed. I don’t know that that was true, and it certainly wouldn’t have found much favour with Peter.

Trying to sum him up in his latter years – the television in the afternoon, the chat shows, the golf in Bermuda – one thinks of one of the stock characters in an old-fashioned Western: Thomas Mitchell, say, in John Ford’s
Stagecoach
, the doctor who’s always to be found in the saloon and whose allegiance is never quite plain. Seldom sober, he is cleverer than most of the people he associates with, spending his time playing cards with the baddies but taking no sides. Still, when the chips are down, and slightly to his own surprise, he does the right thing. But there is never any suggestion that, having risen to the occasion, he is going to mend his ways in any permanent fashion. He goes on much as ever down the path to self-destruction, knowing that redemption is not for him – and it is this that redeems him.

As for us, his audience, we are comforted by the assurance that there is a truer morality than the demands of convention,
that this is a figure from the parables, a publican, a sinner, but never a Pharisee. In him morality is discovered far from its official haunts, the message of a character like Peter’s being that a life of complete self-indulgence, if led with the whole heart, may also bring wisdom.