Читать книгу Memories of Milligan - Norma Farnes - Страница 8

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson

On my way to meet Ray and Alan, I reflected on the early days at Orme Court. The building pulsated with talent: Spike, Eric Sykes, Johnny Speight, Terry Nation, Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock and his two scriptwriters – Ray and Alan – who played such an important part in making him the nation’s favourite comedian. At six foot four, Alan topped Ray by an inch. Not much else separated them.

The year was 1966, only a few months into my induction, and Milligan was having what I later termed a mini-tantrum. I hadn’t quite got used to ‘the wild Milligan’, in his own words. He had been working all day on a television script. After several re-writes and accompanying outbursts, heard by everyone in the building, the day’s work was thrown into the wastepaper basket. I heard him shout, ‘I’m gone. I’ve binned it. I didn’t realise I could be that unfunny.’ Over the years to come I must have heard that a thousand times.

The door banged as he charged out of No. 9. I retrieved his ‘unfunny’ efforts, as I would do many times, and tried to make sense of what he had written. It was late and I thought I was alone in the building when the door opened. Alan, who had obviously heard the outbursts, poked his head round the door. ‘Why don’t you go and work in a bank?’ After the tension of the day I burst out laughing. It was pure Hancock from The Blood Donor – that famous line, ‘I’ll do something else. I’ll be a traffic warden.’

A few days after Spike’s outburst he had another one. This time I was better prepared. There was the usual shouting and ranting. ‘Right,’ I told him. ‘I’m going home. I’ll deal with it all tomorrow.’ Unknown to me, Ray was in the hall and had heard what I said. He looked at me. ‘I think you’ll stay. You have that Scarlett O’Hara attitude.’

All the writers in Orme Court at that time had different methods of working. Ray and Alan were very disciplined. They would arrive every day about ten, have tea or coffee and start writing. Eric didn’t come to the office every day, mainly because he was appearing in theatre or filming. Johnny mostly wrote at home. He didn’t have an office in Orme Court but would visit Eric once or twice a week.

Spike wrote when he felt like writing. He was in the office every day. From the late Sixties right up until the early Eighties he had a bedroom in Orme Court and he would sleep there Monday to Friday. So if he felt like writing late into the afternoon this is what he would do, and work into the early hours of the morning.

I knew that meeting Ray and Alan again would be a pleasure. They’re both oenophiles and lovers of fine food, and I was so looking forward to seeing them. Then an embarrassing memory flashed through my mind. After Spike introduced me to Ray I said to him, ‘Isn’t he gorgeous? So beautifully dressed and so sophisticated.’ (Back in the Sixties I’d never heard of anyone having their shirts handmade by Turnbull & Asser.)

Spike wasn’t interested and I thought he hadn’t taken any notice of what I had said until later that evening, in a crowded hall when everyone was going home, he shouted, ‘Ray! She’s got hot pants for you!’ I could have killed him. I was young and naïve and I thought I would die of embarrassment.

I met Ray and Alan together at Ray’s beautiful Queen Anne house where he has collected one of the most extensive private libraries in the country. Peter Eton, a producer of The Goon Show, told me many years ago, ‘It’s one thing having a fine library, but unlike most people Ray has read every book in it.’ As the car turned into the drive Ray appeared in the doorway, a slight stoop now, but as charming as ever, and Alan with that wide, kind but knowing smile that always makes me feel he knows exactly what’s going on in my mind before I realise it myself. He has filled out over the years. Ray is as slim and gangly as ever – still beautifully dressed.

Equally well read, Alan is enormously knowledgeable on almost every subject. He is philosophical about most things, having suffered tuberculosis that after the war put him in a sanatorium, where he met another patient, Ray. Their sense of humour sparked a relationship that has survived the years and brought laughter to a nation, first with their memorable scripts for Tony Hancock and later with Steptoe and Son. It was after their enormous success that Alan decided he would retire – and did. Ray was disappointed, but this decision never impaired their friendship which, to me, seemed to strengthen after they both tragically became widowers.

Ray showed me into the drawing room. There was a beautiful Christmas tree fully decorated. It was late February! ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘is the Christmas tree still here?’ Ray’s reply: ‘It’s so lovely, I didn’t want to take it down.’ Alan didn’t seem to think there was anything extraordinary about this. Enter the world of Galton and Simpson. And believe me you have to be sharp to live in it. Alan has a phenomenal memory and was in no doubt when they had first met Spike.

ALAN: We hadn’t been in the business very long when we went to a Goon Show recording, about 1953. We would be in our early twenties and like almost everyone else in that age group we were great fans. Someone introduced us to him and we were really thrilled. We thought no more about it. At the time we were working from my mother’s house in Mitcham. Months later, probably in 1954, the phone rang.

‘Spike Milligan here.’ Christ! Spike Milligan! What’s he want with us? What he wanted was to find out whether we had an agent. No, we hadn’t. ‘Well then,’ said Spike, ‘Eric Sykes and I haven’t got one either and we are being picked on by an agency called Kavanagh’s.’ That was the big showbusiness scriptwriting agency.

Spike said he and Eric were looking around to find writers who were still free from agents so they could team up and form a group as a bulwark against being picked off. We were obviously flattered that they had even considered us. We went to meet them at this really dreadful office above a greengrocer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush. We were the new boys on the block so we listened and then said, ‘Yeah. We’ll come in with you.’

Finally, after a couple more meetings we had a main meeting to decide on the set-up. It was agreed we needed a secretary, someone to organise the office. We said we knew a girl who was doing our typing – very efficient. Beryl Vertue. It was agreed we should approach her. Well, she said, she had a good job in advertising and to leave she’d need twelve pounds a week. ‘Gawd Almighty!’ said Spike. ‘Twelve pounds a week!’ Wait a minute, we pointed out, that’s only three pounds a week each. ‘That’s true,’ they agreed. So Beryl came on board.

[Beryl Vertue later formed her own company producing successful films and television series, including Men Behaving Badly.]

What were we going to call ourselves? I suggested Associated British Scripts. Fine! But the Board of Trade said we couldn’t have that name. What about Associated London Scripts? Yeah. We could have that. And that’s how it all started. I think our first client was a man called Lew Schwartz, sent by Dennis Main Wilson or somebody like that from the BBC. Frankie Howerd got a script from someone called Johnny Speight and suggested he should go and meet the lads above the greengrocer’s shop. He was the next one in. Then there were lots of others – Terry Nation who invented the Daleks, and his mate from Wales, Dick Barry. It gradually filled up from there. Ray can add to that I’m sure.

RAY: Well, I don’t know about adding to it. I agree with most of it, but I don’t think we were as unknown as you have said. I don’t think Spike would have bothered with us if we had been that unknown. But that wasn’t the first time we met Spike. I think it was at his house. He called us and we went to meet him. That lovely man Larry Stephens was there [he wrote some of the Goon Shows with Spike]. They were obviously sending us up like mad because they both pretended to be drug addicts. Do you remember this, Alan?

ALAN: No, I don’t.

RAY: I think the real reason Spike invited us over was to see whether we would contribute or write one of the Arthur’s Inn scripts [a successful radio series].

ALAN: You’re going to get this all the time, Norma. In fact Gail Frederick [BBC] commissioned us to do two things. One was to write Arthur’s Inn and the other was to write a pilot for Wilfred Pickles. We found out afterwards that there was never going to be a pilot for a Wilfred Pickles sitcom. Gail was just giving us a chance to earn some money.

[They wrote an episode for Arthur’s Inn and had Graham Stark playing Sir Humphrey Planner, a Shakespearean actor.]

RAY: But Spike must have been writing it.

ALAN: Maybe. I don’t know. I know Sid Colin, a radio scriptwriter, was involved with it. [Colin co-wrote some of the Educating Archie scripts with Eric Sykes. He was also a brilliant jazz guitarist and composer.] That was long before we had the meeting above the greengrocer’s shop. We started in the business at the end of 1951, so it must have been just before Hancock’s Half Hour started. And we wrote at my mother’s place, but after the meeting we travelled to the greengrocer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush every day. We had a room on the fourth floor. Spike and Eric worked on the floor above us and Beryl had a room to herself. We stayed there until 1957. We needed to move to more salubrious offices and I think it was Stanley Dale who found a block on the ground floor of Cumberland House in Kensington High Street.

RAY: They were really prestigious. And we occupied a large part of the ground floor. Two property dealers, Jack Rose and his brother, bought the property then discovered that we were on the ground floor and paying only eight quid a week rent. Jack didn’t like that. He was living with his wife and children in a beautiful flat on the fourth floor. He used to bash into our office unannounced and say, ‘You’d better get used to the idea. I’m going to get all of you out of here.’ We became quite friendly with the guy. I used to go up to his flat – really beautiful – and have a drink with him. He never mentioned getting us out of the building then. He wanted to talk about laughter, but his wife only wanted to talk about somebody’s barmitzvah she was arranging and whether she should put so and so next to Charlie Clore or whoever, or perhaps on second thoughts it would be better to keep them apart, so on and so on. He ignored her and kept on talking to me about humour. He and his brother wrote a book about how to be property dealers.

Then one day he came into our office and said, ‘Right! Come along! Put your coats on. I’m going to show you something.’ We asked, ‘What’s all this about?’ ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’m going to show you something.’ We followed him up Millionaires’ Row, across the Bayswater Road and into Orme Court. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘Number 9. It’s the only one that’s got planning permission for business use. During the Blitz everybody got bombed out of London and the City so this house is the only one along here that has got planning permission.’

He already had the key and took us all over the building. We could see it was a wonderful place. But how much? £26,000, he said. God Almighty! Where were we going to get £26,000? Don’t worry, he told us. He would get us a mortgage. And he did. So he had his wish – getting us out of Cumberland House – and the four of us owned No. 9. It was a great office. Still is.

NORMA: About early 1968 there was a problem when you, Johnny Speight and some others agreed to a deal, negotiated by Beryl, to join the Stigwood organisation. [Robert Stigwood was an enormously successful international impresario.]

RAY: We thought about buying Spike and Eric out, but what was the point? It would just be a drag so we sold out to Spike and Eric.

ALAN: They made an offer to us and we made a bigger counter-offer to them. But we realised it would be too much hassle, and they were staying in the building so we sold out to them. We’d bought it in 1961 for £26,000, between the four of us, and we sold our half for £52,000 in 1968.

RAY: I believe Eric owns the whole bloody lot now.

NORMA: He does. Spike decided to sell because he thought the place was filthy. He was having one of his bad times and had spent the weekend scouring the basement floor with Brillo pads . . .

RAY: . . . and on the Monday he told me he wanted to sell his half of the building. He said to me, ‘I’m nothing more than a fucking janitor.’

NORMA: Spike’s accountant and solicitor told him not to be a bloody fool, but he wouldn’t listen. He insisted on selling his half. I asked him plaintively, ‘But where will you go?’ He replied, ‘Go? What do you mean where will I go?’ I told him, ‘You’re selling the building. Where are you going to go?’ To which he replied, ‘Fucking marvellous! I bring you in and now you want to get rid of me!’ I told him, ‘Well, I wasn’t exactly in the gutter.’ [Ray and Alan laughed.] Spike asked, ‘Why would I want to move from here? As from today I’ll pay rent.’ He scowled at me and then said in exasperation, ‘Well, fuck off, all of you!’ So he stayed, and paid rent.

RAY: I’d like to explain about going to Stigwood. Beryl had overtures from him and most of us saw the sense of going with him. He wanted half the company, that’s all, but in return we would get very good offices at his place and benefit from all his connections. All the writers, with the exception of Eric and Spike, could see the sense in it. We took a poll and every one of them decided to go with Beryl to join Stigwood. We put it to Eric and Spike, but they said they weren’t interested. We knew that what Beryl was doing was the right thing because Stigwood had the money and the contacts to get our work sold to America.

[Beryl successfully negotiated the sale of Johnny Speight’s scripts of Till Death Us Do Part, and Galton and Simpson’s scripts of Steptoe and Son, to an American television network. Till Death became All in the Family and Steptoe became Sanford and Son.]

ALAN: I don’t think Spike was interested in the business side.

RAY: And he didn’t want to move out of the building. I remember a meeting of the writers’ co-operative. One day I said, ‘We haven’t had any meetings.’ So we looked at Spike and said, ‘We’d better have a workers’ meeting,’ and all the chairs were put out and all the writers came into our office. Spike was there but I don’t know if Eric was. The first question came from John Antrobus who was provoked by Johnny Speight. He wanted to know why we two, and Eric and Spike, didn’t pay rent while the other writers did. Spike walked out, slammed the door, went to his room and started to play his trumpet. That was really the end of the workers’ co-operative.

ALAN: First and only meeting.

NORMA: Why did he walk out?

ALAN: He was outraged at the effrontery and attitude. It’s the same attitude he adopted to you when you asked, ‘Where are you going to go?’ The cheek of it. Basically, his motives or morals were being questioned by a lot of idiots. We never had a row with Spike but I think we were very unsympathetic about his mental problems. We ignored them. When he threw a tantrum we’d tell him to fuck off. I suppose they were bipolar problems.

RAY: We didn’t really understand. My missus had clinical depression and I don’t think we had any sympathy for that sort of thing until then. Alan and I had spent three years in a bloody sanatorium with tuberculosis [that’s where they met Beryl]. People with colds and things – it was a case of ‘Piss off.’ We weren’t au fait with mental problems in those days.

ALAN: Spike used to lock himself away in his office and we let him get on with it.

RAY: Tantrums.

ALAN: We took the view that when he was ready he would come out. And, of course, that’s what happened. After two or three days he would come out as if nothing had happened. Others in the office would run round him like blue-arsed flies, kowtowing to him. Ray hit the nail on the head. After three years in a sanatorium we didn’t have much sympathy for that sort of thing.

RAY: Having said that, we used to watch his eyes. You’d be talking to him and somebody would bring him a piece of bad news – well, bad news to him. The wife had left the tap on and he had to call the plumber.

ALAN: His eyes would go – dah! That was it.

RAY: He’d lock himself in his office and that would be it. He’d stay there for days sometimes. People would walk around on tiptoe so as not to upset him. We used to think that was showbusiness taking over. I don’t think we understood. We just got on with the job.

ALAN: Having said all that, we both had great admiration for him because of his talent. And when he was in a good mood we got on extremely well. He was great company.

RAY: While we were unsympathetic, we admired his work. Wonderful! We used to go to the recordings of the Goon Shows. Lots of laughs. And we would have lunch with him at Bertorelli’s in Queensway. More laughs! I don’t know how we managed to get away from lunch to get back to work. We should have been on the floor pissed out of our heads. Here was a guy who wrote on his own – used to come into our office and ask, ‘What do you think of this?’ We never asked anybody what they thought of our work.

NORMA: As a person, do you think he was reliable?

ALAN: Well, we didn’t have to rely on him. We all did our own work and Beryl and others looked after the business side. The thing that kept us together was that we were a mutual admiration society. Spike was very generous about our work, more so than Eric. She was a great fan of Tony [Hancock] and I think he appreciated what we were doing for him.

NORMA: He called it ‘a perfect marriage’.

ALAN: That’s the right word for it . . .

There was a junk shop nearby run by an old man, decrepit, wore terrible clothes, and Spike and I would look in to see what we could pick up. Sometimes the shop seemed empty and then we would hear a rumbling and out of a cupboard would pop the proprietor. We loved to drop in there.

RAY: I remember when Spike was restoring the Elfin Oak. He was carving cherubs and elves and things. You don’t often come across blokes carving things like that, but Spike was different from anybody in show business. [The Elfin Oak, an 800-year-old tree stump, had originally grown in Richmond Park. It was uprooted and moved to Kensington Gardens in 1928 where the illustrator Ivor Innes carved fairies, elves and animals on the trunk. Innes maintained the tree until he died in the Fifties. It was neglected until Spike led a campaign to restore it. With his team of helpers the beautiful fairies and goblins became as new, and in 1997 the oak was granted Grade II listed status.]

He was always getting involved in something or other. Mind you, his public persona was rather different from his private one. There was that kid he shot with an air rifle because he had ventured into his garden. He was taken to court. And then we would hear he wasn’t speaking to his wife. If he was going upstairs and she was coming down he would turn his back on her and look at the wall until she had passed. Mad!

ALAN: I have memories of Spike’s laughter. He was a great audience when he was in a good mood. He’d fall about laughing. Very much like Hancock. We only worked with him once, a four-week series called Milligan’s Wake, fifteen-minute shows for ITV. Spike never attempted to re-write anything. He just did it as an actor and performer and did it beautifully. When something tickled him he was a wonderful audience. It was a shame we did only four shows with him. We did bits and pieces for A Show Called Fred. I remember we did a sketch where he was reading the football results, but with a different inflection. When an announcer reads the results you know from how he says ‘Arsenal 2’, in a certain way, that it’s going to be ‘Chelsea 2’. But when Spike read them he got all the inflections wrong. It was hysterical. There was another, again when he was reading the football results, when he realised the results were as he forecast them in his own coupon. He got more and more excited until he got to the last, which was correct and he realised he was a rich man.

RAY: Subsequently, that’s been used by other people.

ALAN: Like the bingo sketch we wrote.

RAY: I remember that raspberry routine. I think it started over lunch. It was all about blowing raspberries. It got very silly. When we got back to the office the telephone rang and out came a really ripe raspberry. We had to go one better than this.

ALAN: We sent a telegram, didn’t we? ‘Dennis Main Wilson from the BBC says Hello, and then a raspberry!’ It got absolutely mad. To cap it all Spike and Co. were in an office a floor above us and Harry Secombe was there. They lowered Harry out of the bloody window, hanging on to him by the ankles. He had a vacuum hose and they lowered him down to our window, which was open. He poked the hose through and blew a really fruity raspberry. If they’d let go of him it would have been the end of Harry. I mean, it was the top floor! We gave up after that. You couldn’t top that.

And I’ll always remember Spike for what I thought was the funniest gag I’d heard in years. It was in his live act. He brought out his trumpet and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen. I was going to play Chopin’s Etude in B minor. Then I thought, why should I? He never plays anything of mine.’ I thought it was hysterical. I’ll always remember him for that.

RAY: I remember another side of Spike. I was very moved because when my wife died in 1995 Spike came to see me. It was a tiring trip for him to come from his house in Rye because he was quite frail by then. He was very comforting and friendly, absolutely wonderful. I knew he liked Alsace wine so I went to my cellar and brought up a bottle of a very good vintage. He never touched it. That was the last time I saw him.

ALAN: Yet he loved his wine. We used to go together to wine auctions at Beaver House in the City. Spike became very interested. We’d buy these very old wines, a case, and split them up, four each. I’d been introduced to these auctions by a publican in Sunbury. Spike was a great wine drinker.

RAY: Fantastic stuff!

ALAN: 1874 Chateau Lafite – things like that. Dirt cheap in those days.

RAY: We got some amazing bargains, including three bottles of genuine 1812 cognac. Absolutely gorgeous! Someone nicked a bottle from my cellar and the third one leaked through the cork.

ALAN: It was like caramelised treacle.

RAY: Good days. I remember when we were all having lunch at Bertorelli’s on the particular morning Spike had received an income tax demand. He suddenly got up from the table and sat on the pavement outside with his cap turned upside down, asking the public for donations to help him pay his tax.

ALAN: He fancied himself as a trumpet player. I don’t think he was very good, but Larry Stephens was a brilliant modern jazz pianist. Up in Spike’s office there was a piano and Larry would strum away with beautiful little riffs and then break into ‘Once in a While’ . . .

RAY: We’d be enthralled . . .

ALAN: . . . then Spike would join in on his trumpet. Compared with Larry he was an amateur. The only thing that used to drive me up the wall was that he never finished anything. It was very sad that Larry died when he was in his thirties. He was very talented. He wrote Hancock’s stage act. One thing I always feel is that Spike was unkind in his treatment of Larry Stephens because he used to call him ‘the highest paid typist in the business’. Very unfair, because I think Larry contributed quite a lot. He certainly contributed a lot to Hancock’s stage act and I think he contributed a lot to the Goon Shows. But the thing that used to amuse me was that Spike fancied himself as a trumpet player but he wasn’t very good, whereas Larry was a brilliant modern jazz pianist.

RAY: I remember when Spike and Eric appeared with Tony on stage. It was at the time when the Russian Army Choir used to tour the world. So Tony was the conductor of the British Army Choir and Spike and Eric were in it. Well, you can imagine what chaos they caused, singing terrible songs badly – the pathetic British Army Choir as opposed to the wonderful, very professional Russian Army Choir.

ALAN: We had a lot of laughs in Orme Court. There would be a knock on the door and on answering it you would expect to come face to face with someone. But, no. There was this dwarflike figure with his head on the floor. ‘Telegram from Lilliput.’ That’s one of my memories of Spike. [He chuckled.]

We had one similarity. We both typed the same way – thumpers, with two or three fingers and a thumb for the space bar. But the similarity ended there. We could hear him thumping away on his portable. He was very noisy. We never got into electric type-writers.

RAY: We were quite concerned about the waste of paper. His bin would overflow and the floor was a sea of discarded, screwed up bits of paper. When he didn’t like what he had written, instead of crossing it out, he simply pulled the paper out of the typewriter and chucked it.

ALAN: Absolutely right. Ray and I were meticulous and took time over everything. Spike rattled away and when he couldn’t think of a line he’d just put ‘Eccles: fuck!’ Then later he’d go back and re-do the ‘fuck’. Sometimes he would do seven or eight drafts before he would be satisfied with a script. Eric used to write by hand, enormous great writing, and he’d finish up with a huge pile. When it was typed out it would be no more than two or three pages. He’d say, ‘I’ll sort it out when I get to the studio.’ We all had our different ways of working.

When I think about it, all my memories of Spike are good. And there’s one other – he was fiendishly good-looking.

RAY: Very handsome.

ALAN: And talented.

RAY: Definitely.