So, Anyway...: The Autobiography

Exam panic now peaked. One evening I was looking so depressed that Martin Davies-Jones picked up the old-fashioned gas ring on which we could boil a saucepan, and offered it to me. I didn’t even smile. In the event, though, my fears turned out to have been misplaced. The exam papers were not bad, and all the

untrammelled money-grubbing was a way of life – nay, a raison d’être. Furthermore it didn’t matter how the rich made their pile: waste disposal, trailer parks, sex toys, plastic forks, rubber doorstops, pornographic magazines, torture equipment, edible goldfish, mines, contraceptive sheaths, trading in widows and orphans, it . . . just . . . didn’t

used to think that the world was basically sane with patches of madness here and there which would recede as rationality and good jokes pushed their boundaries ever inwards. Now I have the opposite view entirely. But one of the patches of sanity that I treasure is my memory of St Peter’s, where people seemed to be doing a useful job in a conscienti

And this is why Peter Titheradge suddenly became such an important influence. In his time he’d been a distinguished writer of West End revue material, and he was able to calm my incipient

Marty, who was always amused by my painful

voluntarily, when there was absolutely no kind of geographical loyalty involved, was an act of such utter pointlessness that I felt rather in awe of Nick. I had been reading about existentialism; here was someone living it, someone who accepted the concept of an act of Free Will in a Meaningless Universe, and was taking it to a new level. Given Nic

When you encounter a culture totally uncontaminated by logic, it eventually undermines your reliance on reason. For example, Johnny Lynn walked into a department store in search of cufflinks. ‘Where do I find cufflinks?’ he asked. ‘Try the tobacco counter.’ ‘No,’ said Johnny, indicating the cuffs on his shirt, ‘cufflinks.’ ‘Yis. Try the tobacco cou

For the first time in my comedy-writing life I now had to produce scripts on a regular basis, and this brought with it a simple problem: I would start the morning with a blank sheet of paper, and I might well finish the day with a blank sheet of paper (and an overflowing waste-paper basket). There are not many jobs where you can produce absolutely

As for the rest of us, our anxieties were almost entirely script-related and arose because our pattern of rehearsal was as follows: First day: Read-through. Everything looks fine, so afterwards write for next week’s show. Second day: Rehearsal. On second thoughts, two sketches feel a bit weak, so the evening is spent rewriting them. One of them now