It’s often said that a double act is ‘like a marriage’ – it’s an effort to explain the closeness of the partnership; the abiding love and affection; the living in each other’s pockets; the telepathic anticipation of what the other might be thinking. But it also acknowledges that, like in many marriages, the love and affection can be taken for granted; that people can feel suffocated; and that they can sometimes yearn for divorce.
After Oliver Hardy died in 1957, Stan Laurel lived on for a further eight years, but refused to perform in any other films because he thought it would be a betrayal of their relationship.
The 1975 film The Sunshine Boys, written by Neil Simon, has George Burns and Walter Matthau play a vaudevillian double act asked out of retirement to resurrect their famous ‘Doctor Sketch’ for a TV special. They haven’t seen each other for eleven years, the resentment that caused their break-up festers like an open wound, they bicker and fight, and the Walter Matthau character ends up having a heart attack.
The double act Rik and I share for thirty odd years lies somewhere between these two stools. To carry the marriage analogy further – our courting days are really good fun.
You can’t really make comedy as a double act without learning a lot about each other, because creating together is more or less a sharing of everything you know, and the more you share already, the easier it is.
Rik and I learn the following: our mothers sent us to university with exactly the same dressing gown – a paisley-patterned job from C&A; we both own a treasured copy of Gorilla by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and think Vivian Stanshall is the funniest human alive – he’s anarchic and unpredictable, and has a dangerously cavalier attitude to his art which we want to emulate. I spent my last two years at school doing a more-or-less permanent impression of Viv, which is why I talk the way I do whilst the rest of my family have broad Yorkshire accents. It’s also the reason Vyvyan in The Young Ones is called Vyvyan.
We love Spike Milligan’s novel Puckoon, and are both obsessed with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. We are the only people we know who think it is an out-and-out comedy. We find the bleakness hysterical. We’ve both been in productions of it with Rik playing Vladimir and me playing Estragon, and we can recite whole chunks of it at will.
We think the Road Runner cartoons are better than Shakespeare.
We realize that we held very similar positions at our separate schools; that we were the ones who did all the plays; that we both had a healthy disregard for authority; that neither of us made prefect; that we both failed to get the A-level grades predicted for us because we were too cocky to work hard; and that we both have a similar idea of what happiness looks like – playing pool in the backroom of a cosy boozer, with a good seventies jukebox, a packet of fags, and a pint of lager.
We share a love of other playwrights too: Eugène Ionesco, Alfred Jarry and Harold Pinter. We’ve watched and enjoyed Bob Monkhouse’s programmes on silent comedies; Rolf Harris’s Cartoon Time; Morecambe & Wise; Tommy Cooper; The Goodies; It Ain’t Half Hot Mum; Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em; Monty Python; Max Wall; even Freddy ‘Parrot Face’ Davies.
Whilst we’re at university we gobble up the new comedies that emerge: Fawlty Towers; Ripping Yarns; Spike Milligan, again, being occasionally brilliant, often appallingly bad in the Q series; What the Papers Say; Peter Cook’s short-lived Revolver; and The Muppet Show. God, we love The Muppet Show – we will ask to stop rehearsals early in order to get back in time to see the Muppets, often to the bewilderment of our fellow students.
We are always desperate to laugh. Desperate in the proper sense of the word. Frantic, despairing, distracted. It’s like a disease. Constantly hunting for amusement, though ‘amusement’ is too weak a word. We want it hard, we want to mainline it, we want to laugh our bollocks off – we want to go berserk.
Rik and I become a fixture at the weekly Studio Night. There’s a nominal budget of ten quid per show to help ‘realize’ your ideas. One week we spend the cash on two pink duvet covers from Brentford Nylons – our idea is to get into them, suspend ourselves from the ceiling, and pretend to be God’s testicles (which will talk, obviously). In the technical rehearsal we find that the nylon – famous mostly for causing a sweaty night’s sleep and excessive static – won’t hold the weight of a grown student. I get a bruised arse, but our creativity is undimmed, and with the remaining, unshredded duvet cover, we instantly create another short piece entitled ‘How to get a man out of a bag’. We have no fear.
We find that improv isn’t really about trying to make an audience laugh, it’s about trying to make each other laugh, and Rik and I make each other laugh. We have a shared set of references, as wide and disparate as Tingha & Tucker, the Boer War, and where Monsieur and Madame Dupont went on their holidays in early French lessons (à la plage, as some of you probably know). These give us a shorthand way of knowing where the other might be going in any improvisation.
This simpatico relationship develops into us hanging out together. We go to lots of gigs. We like a particular kind of gig: it’s not about a particular style of music, we just like bands that aren’t particularly popular so that it’s easy to get to the bar. And we like the stage to be within sight of the bar. We like watching a blues band called Gags who have a residency in the upstairs room at the Cavalcade pub in Didsbury.
The Bonzos have a photo in one of their album inner sleeves which features one of them looking suitably wacky with a speech bubble that reads ‘Wow, he’s really expressing himself!’ Our last two years at Manchester see the spread of punk and we watch a lot of people trying to ‘really express’ themselves, and not just the bands, the punters too. In fact the punters are often funnier.
There’s a venue belonging to the Student Union on Devas Street called The Squat. This is where the people dressed in bin bags like to hang out, and we like to go and watch them. The Squat is a ramshackle building, more church hall than historic rock venue, but it features future stars like The Fall and The Buzzcocks in its time.
On one occasion Lloyd Peters is acting as the DJ before a performance by Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias. They’re a comedy rock band – closer to The Barron Knights than The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, but their song about drinking too much Windolene is one of our favourites.
We get there pretty early to watch Lloyd’s antics and the place is quite empty as he puts on ‘New Rose’ by The Damned. It’s a fast song. In fact it’s 173 beats per minute, which is going some when the average bpm of stuff in the charts at the time is around 120. It’s the kind of speed that defies disco dancing and is why pogo dancing is born: just jumping up and down as fast as you can.
The handful of us that are there at this point are leaning against the walls, dutifully nodding our heads in time to the music, when in walks someone who looks exactly like Neil from The Young Ones (who we are yet to meet). He has the trademark long hair, sad face, and flared trousers, but is also wearing a thick tweed jacket with leather buttons that he must have got from his dad. He walks into the centre of the room, studies the people around the edge, thinks for a moment, and then begins to pogo.
He gives it a really good go. In fact he goes berserk. He jumps up and down as fast and as high as he can go. As he does so things start to fall out of his pockets: pens, pencils, a protractor, his wallet, a hanky, loose coins, a spare leather button, lentils. Mercifully punk songs are fairly short, and two minutes later his exertions come to an abrupt stop. He’s very sweaty, and his possessions are scattered all around him, like in a satanic ritual from some Dennis Wheatley book. He looks thoughtful for a moment, perhaps processing the experience, then nods as if to say ‘the experiment is complete’. He picks up his things and stuffs them back into his pockets, and walks straight back out again. It is the best part of the evening.
We laugh a lot. We drink a lot. We drive around together on my motorbike a lot. By the time we leave university we are proper best friends.