On my first day at university I’m puffing away on a fag on the top deck of a bus heading down the Oxford Road in Manchester when I see a young bloke sitting in the seat in front of me. He’s wearing a dirty denim jacket and has greasy shoulder-length hair, and he’s constantly flicking his head to get this hair out of his eyes – like he’s trying to be The Fonz in Happy Days but has forgotten his comb. His hair’s so greasy it falls back over his spotty forehead almost as soon as he’s swept it back.
Art Garfunkel’s ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ is creeping up towards the number one spot, and whilst I don’t exactly fancy this grebo there’s something about him that demands attention.
His every move is considered, as if to say, ‘Look at me, look how great I am.’ He pulls a cigarette from a packet of No.6 and ostentatiously taps both ends against the box – it’s something you only need to do with the unfiltered end, the whole purpose being to crimp the paper around any loose tobacco to stop it falling out. This is how I know this bloke is an idiot. He lights it, inhales deeply, and blows six perfect smoke rings – thick circles of rippling, tightly configured smoke, all perfectly equidistant from each other. This doesn’t endear him to me either, because I’ve never been able to do that, so I’m jealous.
He gets off at the same stop as me, and he’s not following me, because he’s in front – well, he is to begin with, but we swap places several times as we negotiate crowds of new students and numerous fire doors – but in single file we both make our way to the Drama Department and I discover that his name is Rik Mayall.
I don’t see much of him during the first year, which is odd because it’s a small department. Of course I’m aware of him – we have lectures together, and do movement classes together, and do the department production of Bartholomew Fair together – but we’re in different social groups. Well, he’s in a group, I’m the sad wanker who’s struggling to find his place.
He’s only seventeen when he arrives, the youngest in the year, and he’s a bit over excited: it’s his first time away from home, he’s living in halls with lots of similarly hyperactive new chums, there’s cheap booze in the Student Union, he can smoke without having to suck a polo mint on the way home so his parents don’t find out, and he can stay out all night if he wants to.
Having been to boarding school I’ve already experienced communal living, not giving a fuck, and no longer being under parental control, but for Rik, who comes from a very loving but responsible home life, it must be quite a thrill.
He does a lot of shagging by all accounts. Though this is nothing new if his tales of schoolboy conquests are to be believed. And who wouldn’t believe them – he’s a shockingly handsome boy, and he carries himself with such easy confidence. He manages to be amiably available to everyone without ever coming across as unpleasantly pushy, or arrogant.
I don’t know what it is that makes him so beautiful. Is it something to do with the width of his forehead? His cheekbones? The angular nature of his jaw? His smile? The way his hair almost stands up at the front?
The older I get the more I realize that beauty mostly comes from within, and with Rik, especially in the early student days, he’s just remarkably uncomplicated, and I think that’s what people find attractive. You get what you see – a fun-loving charmer, someone who’s easy to be around, someone who wants to laugh and to make other people laugh, a bit of a show-off but someone who just wants the night to go well.
A few years later when we’re doing the Edinburgh Fringe Festival I watch a girl fall in love with him, right in front of me. We’re at the Fringe Club, a performers-only bar, like a student union, where the drinks are cheap, and there’s a small stage where people can show off or try out new stuff. It’s very much an amateur/student festival at the time, not the showcase for established comics it is today.
Our fringe show is a lunchtime event in a church hall around the corner, so we’re often to be found in the Fringe Club in the afternoon and evening. One night we’re doing a new sketch about two Yorkshiremen on deckchairs trying to explain why American cars are so big and Japanese cars are so small (something to do with perspective and the earth’s rotation), and as we blunder through it a girl walks by close to the front of the stage. Nothing unusual in that, it’s a casual performance space, people are free to move about – it’s a bar with a stage in it. But, when she sees Rik she just stops in her tracks right in front of the stage, and stares at him. She never looks at me, only at him, but I’m there and I’ve got a ringside seat. She’s only about three feet away from me. It’s quite an illuminating experience for me. I watch her fall for him, from very close quarters. Watch her gape in wonder. I see her smile grow into a beam. I see her eyes transfixed. It’s like she’s been injected with a wonder drug that makes her glow from within. This is his power.
We finish our little sketch, clear away our deckchairs, and the compère announces the next act: it is the girl. She sings ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ – a teasing, sexually charged song made famous by Marilyn Monroe in the musical Let’s Make Love. She sings it directly at Rik. There are an awful lot of signals in it and he responds to every single one. As I said, he’s very uncomplicated. I don’t see him again until we do our show the following lunchtime. He’s quite tired.
He’s a performer in more ways than one.
I’m not sure how many students come to the university wanting to be actors when they leave, but those of us that do are terrified of one thing: Equity cards. Or more specifically, the lack of one.
There are only three recognized routes into the union: getting offered a job with a repertory company (these jobs generally go to people from proper drama schools), T.I.E. (Theatre in Education – a slog round the schools doing scenes from Macbeth in matching T-shirts to children that look on you with a mixture of pity and loathing), or Variety contracts. Variety contracts are a loophole – they can be handed out by clubs to any acts that perform there, and if you provide Equity with enough of them, they will apparently give you a card.
As we start the second year, two of Rik’s friends from his school in Worcester – Mike Redfearn and Mark Dewison – enter the first year. The three of them were close at school, the bond is still strong, and they’ve hit upon a plan to get Equity cards.
There’s a jazz club on Swan Street in Manchester called The Band on the Wall. It’s now a swanky arts centre but at the time it’s a magnificent Victorian pub, the kind George Orwell would have liked – dark wood, long bar, nooks and crannies, lots of mirrors, a nicotine-coloured ceiling. It has glorious stained-glass windows that alter the light so much you lose track of time. The licensing laws in the seventies mean we get chucked out at three in the afternoon, and when we are, the sunlight – what am I saying, this is Manchester – the ‘bright drizzle’ catches us by surprise, blinding us, and reminding us, especially if we are feeling a little unsteady, that we’ve been naughty. It’s a delicious feeling and the thing I miss most about the old opening hours.
The proprietor is a bit of a jazzer with an artistic temperament. In the evenings the place is packed with people listening to jazz bands, but at lunchtime trade is a bit thin, so he comes up with the idea of ‘Lunchtime Theatre’ to act as a draw. He can’t afford to pay anyone and thinks students will do it for free and the promise of some rather dubious Variety contracts.
He’s right.
The idea Rik, Mike and Mark have is to do improvised shows, partly because this is a novel and daring artistic form, but mostly because they haven’t got time to learn loads of lines every fortnight. Then it occurs to them that doing an hour’s improvisation with three people is quite a big ask, especially as they haven’t done it before, and they decide to enlarge the group to five. Rik asks me to join the group, possibly because I’ve been in a lot of productions during the first year; he also asks Lloyd Peters, possibly because he has a car.
We are drama students so we know all about the pub theatre movement that was born in the 1960s in London, and we imagine this lends the project an air of intellectual respectability. There will be no sets, no lights, no tech of any sort, just a bare stage, and we will get changed in the toilets – we interpret this not as a lack of resources, but as a positive aesthetic decision. We offer to do a three-day run every fortnight: Thursday, Friday and Saturday lunchtimes.