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house. He considered this beyond the call of duty and created the archivist job for himself, leaving the accountancy to others.
He’d retired from teaching by the time I knew him but remained an active link with Footlights’ famous past. As president, I found him a tremendous support and a good friend. And he did me a very good turn by inviting my director of studies, no longer Dr Lovatt but a friend of Harry’s and a very nice man called Dr Shepard, to come and see me play Jeffrey Bernard in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell at the ADC.
Playing this part was an act of arrogant bravado similar to that of Ellis in accepting the role of Willy Loman two and a half years earlier. It’s a very funny play but all it really consists of is the central character, Jeff, talking to the audience about his exciting, glamorous, romantic and pitiful life. A few other people wander in and out but it’s very nearly a monologue. In deciding to play that part, I was conscious that it was the sort of ridiculous opportunity that would probably never be repeated, certainly not for decades.
I think I did a better job than most 21-year-olds would, which is not to say that I was any good, but it was the right sort of bittersweet show for Dr Shepard to come to – much better that than a revue full of Day Today rip-offs and swearing. Better still, after the show when I was having a drink with him and Harry, and he was saying he’d enjoyed it, a panic went round the bar because Dylan Moran, who had been booked to do an hour’s stand-up as that evening’s late show, failed to turn up. These late shows starring established comedians were organised by Footlights – they were part of the new money-making drive – so when Moran failed to arrive, with the auditorium full, it was the club’s responsibility. We had to put on a smoker at ten minutes’ notice and, as president, I was expected to compere it.
In truth, this was quite easy. There were plenty of performers around that evening, we all knew a few sketches and we could fill an hour’s show without breaking sweat. But, to Dr Shepard, I think this looked quite impressive. It was like there’d been a fire and I’d put on a helmet and walked into the inferno. Thanks to Harry and Dylan Moran, he left feeling that, even if I ended up getting a poor class of degree, I hadn’t entirely wasted my time at university. My last few months were spent largely unharassed by the college’s academic authorities.
This felt more and more like an eerie silence as finals approached. The fact that I’d managed a 2:2 the previous year was ever scanter consolation as I reflected on how much less work I’d done this year, now that it mattered even more. So I tried not to think about it and to keep myself busy at the ADC and with Footlights. But gradually, distractions from study fell away. In the weeks leading up to university exams, no plays are put on and Footlights takes a break in the writing and rehearsing of the tour show. As even the most feckless of my fellow finalists started to buckle down, it became harder and harder for me to ignore reality and avoid getting started on what I was still calling ‘revision’. But it wasn’t revision because I’d hardly done any work all year so there was nothing for me to revise – no notes or essays for me to read through. The task ahead of me was to fake a year’s worth of study in about four weeks. And I wasted most of the first week in the pub.
On the day of my last exam, I sat desperately reading in the rooms I shared at Peterhouse with my friend Paul Keane (who’s now a Catholic priest, like Daniel Seward from my group at Abingdon – but I tell myself that’s not a statistically significant enough sample from which to infer anything about me). I was urgently trying to cram information into my head in exactly the way that people who have properly prepared for an exam – and I knew this because I had once been such a person – pretend is useless.
‘If you don’t know it by now, you’ll never know it’ is what they say.
But no, I could still learn it. If I don’t