Camp David Page 7

  Despite Sarah Smith, who was playing my wife, forgetting her lines and saying ‘Oh shit!’ very loudly on stage, it was a huge success. I remember coming off at the end exhausted and lying on the table of the classroom that was also our dressing room as the audience filed past. A few of the parents tapped on the window and said ‘Well done’ as their offspring gave me the thumbs up. I was thrilled.

  As the four-night run continued, I gained in confidence, and by the third night I had shamefully added in some business we never rehearsed, such as falling asleep during the scene when a girl came on to sing a song to me. However, on the final night, the night when my parents were coming, I disastrously lost my way in the first half. The pressure of wanting to impress them, and in particular my father, made me screw things up.

  I forgot to come on in the first scene wearing my coat.

  It doesn’t sound important, but in this play to enter not wearing my coat was a disaster. A whole section of comic business followed in which Monsieur Jourdain kept on asking for his manservants to take off his coat and put it back on him again. So with no coat this was not going to work. At all.

  Realizing my mistake I improvised a few lines of Molière … ‘Manservant, fetch my coat! At once!’ … but I was really thrown. My mouth was dry, my timing was off, and the first half of the performance was a shambles. I left the stage utterly dejected. I was sure I didn’t have the strength to be an actor, if my nerves were going to get the better of me like that. And of course my mum and dad were watching. After all those hours I had spent practising my funny faces and voices in the bathroom mirror, I was desperate for them to see me make everyone laugh.

  I wandered off in my tights and wig and found a long, dark empty corridor. Then I gave myself a good talking-to, like a manager might at half-time to a footballer. ‘David, you have got to go out there in the second half and turn it around. You have to be the funniest you have ever been to turn this night into a triumph.’

  So I stepped back onto the stage, and attacked my role with renewed vigour. Now instead of just falling asleep during the song, I was snoring loudly. What’s more, I rested my head on my hand, and improvised some business where with each snore I leaned further and further over until I fell off my chair. Utterly shameless upstaging, but the audience loved it. At the end of the night the audience were all cheering and applauding; it was only a school play but they had had their £2’s worth, in fact I had probably given them a £2.50 show.

  I was delighted with my review at the end of the school year in The Pilgrim:

  THE PRODIGIOUS SNOB

  The production was carried firmly on the ample shoulders of David Williams, whose Jourdain was a comic delight. From an initial entry which immediately injected the piece with energy and pace, he proceeded to give us a splendidly uncouth, social-climbing buffoon, and had a flexibility of facial expression that reminded me of Charles Laughton. The scene with the batty and pretentious philosopher (exuberantly portrayed by Robert Shearman) and the dinner at which he drooled sycophantically over the Marchioness (Lara Lass-Burch/Helen Squire) and then fell asleep during the song, were joyful moments, and exhibited a level of visual humour and snappy timing that made them the comic high-points of the piece. The singing of Belinda Teale and Vicky Shearman was impressive, especially since they were ruthlessly (and hilariously) upstaged by the antics of David Williams.

  Now there was just one thing that could distract me from my pursuit of being a comedian.

  A girl.

  9

  ‘Age cannot wither her’

  According to the ancient Greeks, to be truly perfect you have to have an imperfection.

  Zoe Shorey had a scar on her forehead.

  Other than that she was perfect. Flawless. Complete. Nothing needed to be added or taken away from her.

  In the late 1980s girls could only join Reigate Grammar School in the sixth form, so after years of having no female contact at school, aged sixteen you were pushed into a classroom with a gaggle of teenage girls. I remember my first English literature class as a sixth former and becoming absolutely tongue-tied.

  Mr Paxton announced, ‘This year we are studying Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Have any of you seen the play?’

  I put my hand up.

  ‘Where did you see it, Williams?’

  ‘Erm, um, the er … National Theatre.’

  I could sense all these girls looking at me as I spoke, and I became increasingly panicked.

  ‘And who was in it, Williams?’

  ‘Erm, um, Judi Dench and erm …’

  How could I forget Anthony Hopkins at a time like this!

  ‘Erm, oh a man, really famous actor, oh erm …’

  He even had the same first name as the character he was playing! But I couldn’t remember. I could hear a few giggles and stared at my mock-wood desk in embarrassment.

  ‘Thank you, Williams. Antony is normally played by a man.’

  Mr Paxton put us all at ease with that joke. He was the most entertaining teacher I ever had. He looked a little like Eric Morecambe, with a bald head and glasses but big Dickensian sideburns. We used to watch Antony and Cleopatra on video. He found the BBC adaptation so boring that he would take off his glasses, put his handkerchief over his face and put the glasses back on. Then he would sit there and pretend to snore, blowing the handkerchief into the air as he did so.

  Then we moved on to ITV’s RSC version, which starred Janet Suzman as Cleopatra. Anyone who has read Antony and Cleopatra or seen the far superior Carry on Cleo will know that Cleopatra is so sexy she brings down the Roman Empire. Janet Suzman purred through her mesmerizing performance, as well as appearing in a number of revealing outfits. Every time she appeared on screen Mr Paxman would moan with desire …

  ‘Phowoar! Janet Suzman.’

  It was utterly hilarious. It’s a miracle any of us passed our A level as he was making us laugh most of the time.

  The term started with Zoe Shorey being a distant figure, although I had noticed her in the playground and assemblies. Everyone had noticed her. She was so beautiful I could barely look at her. Zoe and I didn’t share lessons until a couple of months into the first term when one day as if by magic she arrived in Mr Paxton’s class.

  ‘This is Zoe, everyone,’ he announced. For some reason the girls were all referred to by their first names, whereas the boys by their surnames. ‘She has just changed from business studies. Now I need someone to help Zoe go through all the coursework we have done up to now …’

  His eyes scoured the room as my heart beat faster and faster.

  ‘Williams! Will you help Zoe?’ asked Mr Paxton. He had selected me because I was the class swot, not because he knew I was already deliriously in love, even though I had never even spoken to her.

  ‘Erm, yes, um, OK …’ I said, acting as nonchalantly as I could.

  Zoe smiled over at me, and I could have happily drowned in that smile.

  When the bell rang to signal the end of the class, Zoe walked over to me. Even though she was stunningly beautiful with her long blonde hair and perfect features, she underplayed her looks, wearing no make-up, a big baggy school jumper, and covering her long legs in an even longer skirt.

  ‘Thanks, William,’ she said. Even her voice was lovely. She purred.

  ‘It’s David.’

  ‘I thought he called you William?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s David Williams.’

  She laughed. I wasn’t making a joke but I didn’t mind. Her laugh was even lovelier than her smile.

  ‘What are you doing on Sunday afternoon?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied a little too quickly. ‘Absolutely nothing. Completely free.’

  ‘Well, if you want I can come over to your house and we can go through the coursework?’

  Oh. My. God. We were going to be alone in a room together, but I didn’t want it to be at my house. I knew my mother would be crouched spying through the keyhole, or worse coming in and asking me for
my pants and socks to put in the wash, as she did most days.

  ‘How about I come to you?’

  ‘Great,’ she said. ‘It’s the big house on Garratt’s Lane. See you at three.’

  That Saturday night I couldn’t sleep and on Sunday got up early and looked through my wardrobe options. I had recently been shopping at Next and bought a pair of grey trousers and a stripy red shirt. I hadn’t worn them yet and was waiting to be invited to a party, though I never was. I sprayed every inch of my body with Sure deodorant, dabbed some of my dad’s Old Spice on my face and put on my Next clothes, which made me look like a child stockbroker. Then I waited and waited until it was late enough to avoid arriving any more than an hour early, and stepped out into the autumn afternoon.

  Marching up the close I saw my neighbour Mrs Shilito, who had been out walking her red setter. I patted the dog, which leaped up as dogs do and put its muddy paws all over my best new shirt and trousers.

  ‘Oh sorry,’ said Mrs Shilito. ‘Not going anywhere special, are you?’

  ‘Oh no, not at all.’

  In the alleyway I frantically tried to rub the mud off my clothes. Then I walked the short distance to Zoe’s house just the other side of the Reigate Road, arriving a mere twenty minutes early.

  Her father answered the door. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Oh hello, I’m Williams, David Williams, and I’m here to help Zoe with her coursework,’ I said. And marry your daughter, I added, but not out loud.

  ‘Come in, come in …’ he said beckoning me inside with a smile.

  ‘Zo? There’s a young man here come to help you with your coursework.’

  ‘He’s early,’ she said from upstairs.

  I smiled awkwardly at her father.

  Then Zoe sailed down the stairs in a baggy T-shirt and shorts, looking unutterably gorgeous.

  ‘Hello, David. Thanks for coming. Would you like a drink of something?’

  Dom Perignon. Slightly chilled. Two glasses is what James Bond might have answered. ‘Some orange squash, please’ is what I actually said – I was still too immature to drink tea.

  Zoe led me into the dining room; we sat down and went through some of the main themes of Shakespeare’s play, love being the principal one.

  Our legs and elbows nearly touching, which alone made my heart sing, I looked into Zoe’s eyes and read Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra:

  Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

  Her infinite variety …

  ‘What on earth does that mean?’ asked Zoe.

  ‘That Cleopatra is the most beautiful woman in the world, and she will never ever be boring,’ I replied as I looked into her deep blue eyes.

  ‘Oh right. It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Yes, you a— I mean, it is.’

  ‘More squash?’

  For the next two years I pursued Zoe, not physically but romantically. I had this very old-fashioned sense of chivalry, which I still have. So I sent her a dozen red roses on her birthday; I wrote her little love notes with quotes from romantic poems; I took her to the cinema to see Angel Heart, even up to London to the theatre. I never tried to kiss her, though my heart ached to do so. The truth is, I didn’t know how to get our lips to meet, let alone actually kiss. And I couldn’t stand being rejected and losing everything we had. At sixteen she was very mature and I was painfully immature. However, spending time with her made me at last grow into being a man. I was in love.

  First I fell in love with Zoe’s beauty – I couldn’t imagine there being a more beautiful girl anywhere in the world ever – then as we spent more and more time together I loved Zoe for her kindness and intelligence and humour. She never made me feel like a fool for loving her. Zoe certainly never encouraged it – in fact she had boyfriends for most of the two years we were at school together. However, there was an unspoken agreement between us that however much I loved her we would never be more than friends. She loved being my friend. My love for Zoe will always be perfect, as it was never requited.

  From that first time I saw her at school, for the next twenty years I thought about her every single day. My heart still longed for her. When Little Britain took off on television, I registered myself on the website Friends Reunited. With fame and success came a new-found confidence. I posted a message asking if anyone was still in touch with Zoe. Little did I know what consternation it would cause her family, with journalists from tabloid newspapers knocking on their door and photographers waiting outside their house for days, desperate to run a story about my great unrequited love. Eventually a friend of hers put me in touch, and I finally saw Zoe again.

  I went round to her parents’ house on Christmas night in 2005 and my eyes fell upon her for the first time in nearly fifteen years. She hadn’t changed. Still incandescently beautiful. Age could not wither her. Next I met her Austrian husband and her three lovely daughters. Zoe now lived in Vienna. We went off into the kitchen to catch up alone.

  ‘You know, Zoe, I have to tell you. When we were at school, I loved you so much.’

  ‘You should have told me how you felt,’ she said as her daughters screamed with delight as they opened another present in the next room.

  ‘I didn’t really know how to then …’ I said.

  Now I did. But it was a thousand years too late.

  10

  ‘A couple of queers’

  My other great love was my best friend Robin. Despite him wanting to take Querelle (a Jean Genet story about a sailor, turned into a film in 1982) out of the video shop on a Saturday evening, I never thought to ask him if he was gay. It didn’t matter, and I suppose he didn’t tell me because being gay didn’t seem like a possibility in Surrey in the 1980s. There were camp men on the television when we were growing up, from John Inman’s Mr Humphries in Are You Being Served? to Larry Grayson presenting The Generation Game with his catchphrase, ‘He seems like a nice boy,’ which never failed to create explosions of laughter. It seems strange now, but you didn’t really think they were homosexual, just camp.

  One night my dad decided to give me a warning about ‘queers’. His word.

  ‘Now if you go to the toilet and stand at the urinal,’ began my dad, ‘and you see a man moving towards you and trying to look at your thing …’

  ‘Yes, Dad?’ I was intrigued.

  ‘… shout at the top of your voice, “GET LOST, YOU QUEER!”’

  ‘Get lost, you queer?’

  ‘Yes, they’re in all the toilets these days.’ Well he did work for London Underground, with its abundance of public conveniences.

  ‘A friend at work said they found a group of queers in a circle,’ he continued. He shuddered as the image he was painting filled the canvas in his mind. ‘They all had an arse each.’

  ‘Thanks for the advice, Dad.’

  ‘Any time, son.’

  That was the only piece of sex education either of my parents gave me.

  The early 1980s was when the hysteria around the Aids epidemic reached its apotheosis. An advert featuring a giant black tombstone falling to the ground with ‘AIDS’ chiselled on it as discordant music played was shown repeatedly on TV, with John Hurt’s voice warning, ‘There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all. It’s a deadly disease and there is no known cure. The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an infected person. Anyone can get it.’

  Sex = Death. That was what we thought. Our religious education teacher Mr Manfield cranked up the terror even further, telling us in class, ‘Aids can get through condoms. When you grow up none of you will be able to have sex.’ The disease destroyed the monolithically handsome Rock Hudson’s looks, and he died in 1985. I remember there being serious speculation at the time that his Dynasty co-star Linda Evans might have contracted Aids by sharing the briefest on-screen kiss.

  So despite Robin and I being interested in sex (though not with each other), we both felt too scared to act upon our impulses. Instead we spent the late 1980s tottering around like an old married co
uple. When I finally passed my driving test and my mum and dad helped me buy a sky-blue Ford Fiesta, we played the Cabaret soundtrack on the stereo. When the stereo broke, we sang the songs instead.

  Zoe received some tickets to be in the audience for Top of the Pops, but it was half-term and she was going on holiday with her family. So she gave me the tickets, and Robin and I took a number of trains up to BBC TV Centre. Top of the Pops counted down the top forty best-selling songs of the week, interspersed with performances and by this time videos. If you were a teenager, being in the audience was about the coolest thing you could imagine. You were filmed dancing as the acts sang, and you might even end up on TV! Even more exciting was the fact that this week our favourite band in the world, the Pet Shop Boys, were still in their imperial phase, and thus number one in the charts with ‘Heart’. We were going to be in the same room as our idols.

  As we queued outside the studio with other much cooler teenagers with spiky hair and leather trousers (I was sticking to my stripy red shirt and grey trouser ensemble) a joke of mine went embarrassingly wrong. The first of many.

  I turned to my diminutive friend and said, ‘Well, here’s to show business!’

  Robin looked a little ashamed as the cool kids who overheard me groaned at what an absolute tosspot I was.

  Inside there was a DJ spinning records to get everyone warmed up for the show. This involved a dancing competition. Whoever was the coolest dancer won all the top forty singles on seven-inch discs. Having no one else to dance with, Robin and I danced together, me moving my heavy frame around the studio with no concession to rhythm or beat whatsoever. Unsurprisingly we didn’t impress the DJ and found ourselves placed behind the scaffolding that made up the set when the programme was recorded.

  One artist who performed that night was Patsy Kensit, who as part of Eighth Wonder had a hit with the Pet Shop Boys-written song ‘I’m Not Scared’. She was the absolute girl of the moment, an actress turned singer who was mind-blowingly beautiful, sexy and cool. Kensit didn’t know it then, but the big ungainly teenager in the red stripy shirt peering out at her from behind the set as she sang would one day share her bed.