Back Story Page 0,100

beer and sick off the cobbles of the Pleasance courtyard. At the Edinburgh Fringe, 11am is like dawn. The early birds might see it as they’re brushing their teeth but they’re not out doing anything yet. Our venue seated up to 100. On the night – sorry, force of habit, morning – when the all-important Scotsman reviewer came, the audience numbered only two. And he was one of them.

Well, just like a Hollywood film, from the jaws of misery, failure and disappointment, through hard work alone, we were able to snatch a small, muted success. You’ve seen Hollywood films like that, yeah? Imagine the strapline: ‘It could have been a disaster, but in fact it went okay.’ The Scotsman review was a warm three-starrer, Rob’s agent Michele Milburn liked my performance in the show and asked me to come in for a meeting in London after the Fringe, and two influential men came and saw the show.

Yes, it was Bernard Ingham and Gore Vidal! No. Perhaps ‘influential men’ is the wrong way of putting it. They were influential on our lives and they had a small measure of influence in the world that could help us. The first was Nick Jones, a TV director who ‘was putting together a sketch show for the BBC’. It’s a measure of how little we knew that we didn’t know how little that meant. But he had some business cards with ‘BBC’ written on them. Unfortunately they didn’t also have ‘Nick Jones’ written on them, which was disappointing. He was still waiting for his cards to be printed up, he explained, as he scribbled his name and number on one of the nameless ones.

Sounds like a confidence trickster, you’re probably thinking. Our reasoning at the time was that a confidence trickster would have got cards properly printed up. But we couldn’t deny the possibility that he was an inept confidence trickster. Still, since no one who had both the BBC’s name and their own on a piece of card was showing any interest in conversing with us, we decided to send him some material and hope something came of it.

The other man was Gareth Edwards, who may have scored 20 fewer international tries than his rugby-playing namesake but was considerably better thought-of by the comedy department of London Weekend Television. Gareth’s card had both ‘LWT’ and his name on it and he left it in our pigeon-hole at the Pleasance with a note on the back saying: ‘I saw your show and laughed. Do give me a ring when you’re back in London,’ or something equally British and understated.

I’m glad that one of the first producers to show interest in our work was from LWT – it’s like a link to the history of television. It was such a big and successful company for so many decades and now there’s no trace of it. It’s been absorbed into the shrinking giant that is ITV. But I’m glad to have been given a business card embossed and glinting with those three friendly letters, which for years used to assemble themselves from striped lines crawling across the TV screen. It felt proper, in a way a card from something like ‘Lucky Vampire Productions’ or ‘Depressed Spaniel Pictures’ would not have done.

In those days there were still only five TV channels in Britain. Counting the BBC as two, we’d now made contact with three of them. That was more than half! Surely our big TV breakthrough could only be months away? Just think how that would help with the rent.

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Going Fishing

The most evil dog I’ve ever known is my friend Ed’s mother’s dachshund, Brock. He once savaged Ed’s brother and lost his testicles. I should clarify: the dog lost his testicles, not Ed’s brother. To clarify further: the testicles weren’t lost in the skirmish but in a subsequent medico-punitive procedure. I don’t want you to run away with the idea that Ed’s brother is the sort of guy who, in extremis, could bite the balls off a dog. He isn’t like that at all. He worked for the Financial Times for many years.

Continuing west through Kensington Gardens, I’m reminded of the canine down side to walking through a park. I don’t hate dogs – I’ve encountered several good-natured examples in my time, which have given me some sense of the emotional upside there must be, to compensate for having to feel the warmth of another organism’s excrement through a thin film of plastic every day.