the Footlights pantomime, Cinderella. As a comedy-obsessed teenager, I’d obviously heard of Footlights. It was the club of which so many of the comedians I admired seemed to have been members: Peter Cook, John Cleese, Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry – these were the brightest stars in the firmament but, like a night sky in the countryside, the more you looked, the more stars you saw: writers like Michael Frayn and Clive James; producers like David Hatch, John Lloyd and Jonathan James Moore; directors like Jonathan Miller and Trevor Nunn; actors like Eleanor Bron, Miriam Margolyes and Simon Jones; Cecil Beaton, Germaine Greer, Bill Oddie, Julian Slade. The more you found out, the more Footlights seemed to be behind about half of the stuff worth paying attention to.
And there was something intriguing about that clubroom. I mean, it was horrible. It stank of stale beer. It was unpleasantly dark, but it would have been worse if you could see into the corners. Getting in involved a long walk through the union cellars, down a corridor so narrow it felt like it had been hewn out of the earth by Morlocks and as weirdly, frighteningly and garishly painted as a punk’s squat. But I’d noticed there were posters on the wall of shows that looked old and significant, and photographs of famous people sporting haircuts from the era preceding that of their breakthrough.
The director of the pantomime wasn’t present at the first-round audition – it was left to Footlights committee members to separate the wheat from the chaff. I auditioned in front of the two vice-presidents, Dan Mazer and James Bachman. I read out an Alan Bennett monologue in which a man is speaking on the phone, trying to arrange for a saucy telegram to be sent to his girlfriend. What James told me later is that, just before I came in, Dan had groaned, ‘Oh no, here comes that keen one.’
That interests me. First because it gives an insight into my own uncool naïvety – that in one conversation with Dan at the squash, in which I was just attempting to be appropriately enthusiastic and upbeat as minor public schoolboys are trained to do, I’d transmitted a desperate and unattractive keenness. They were looking for people who were keen, presumably. But I had obviously seemed keen in a way that, in Dan’s view, almost precluded my also being funny.
And it also interests me that such a category of people exists at all – that we go beyond the insight that enthusiasm is no guarantee of talent to the conclusion that it actually makes talent less likely, and indeed that a snooty take-it-or-leave-it standoffishness suggests you’re likely to be hot stuff. It’s a sort of Groucho Marx perversity: like the club who’ll accept him as a member, my enthusiasm was somehow repellent. If Dan had felt he had to court my enthusiasm for Footlights, he’d probably have found it easier to believe I might show promise.
I don’t mean to criticise the 21-year-old Mazer here. I’m just using him as an example of how pervasive is our culture’s attraction to cool and sangfroid. I was guilty of it myself when I found the unfriendly Footlights squash more attractive than the more open ADC one – I was almost directly conforming to the Groucho quote there. But, for all that I’m susceptible to it, it’s a phenomenon I hate. I hate cool. I’m impatient with disingenuous affectations of having better things to do, being untroubled, being an unflappable presence disdainfully moving through the world. What’s particularly daft is that people who affect such an attitude are often incredibly fashionably dressed, giving the lie to their claims of immunity to a desire to be included. I prefer less hypocritical expressions of human frailty, where saying things like ‘Yes I’d be really keen to get involved in your comedy club’ doesn’t immediately get you marked down as a cunt.
I’m really not as bitter as this makes me sound, or at least not in the case of the Cinderella audition. They thought I was funny and gave me a recall for the show, which I was hugely excited about, a feeling I didn’t yet know I was supposed to conceal. Like a goth looking at a winkle-picker, all my desire was flaming in contemplation of Cambridge, acting, the theatre and, most of all, Footlights.
- 19 -
God Is Love
I’m passing a round church: All Souls’, at the top of Regent Street, next to Broadcasting House. It’s only really