Double acts work on trust. The trust that if one tries a gag that doesn’t work the other will never belittle it, or scoff, or say it’s crap, but will just let it pass by and wait for the next one to come along, which by the law of averages will be better.
Your partner is the first audience, the test audience, and the best audience in the world: it will never boo, it will never get restless and start coughing, it will never heckle, or leave.
You have an unspoken agreement that you will not let the other fail. Under any circumstance. This starts in the writing room, or during improvisations. The more you can offer your partner unwavering support, the more daring they will be and the better the act will become. You have to feel safe enough to try.
Like with panning for gold, you simply cheer louder when the nuggets appear. Getting the odd pan with no gold at all is just part of the process. You have to accept it. You can’t get gold without occasionally getting no gold.
It’s a beautiful feeling. Many’s the time I’ve sat with Rik as we struggle with a scene. We’ll have the bare bones of the idea, the set-up, and we’ll have some of the dialogue, but then we’ll try and develop it. We each offer up potential lines. None of these lines will be bad lines, because even the lines we don’t use help us find the line we do use. The key thing is not to rubbish each other’s suggestions. We’ll grin or nod at each suggestion, an acknowledgement that it’s a good idea, a potential idea, but perhaps not the best idea. Until eventually one of us will say something that makes the other really laugh, and that line will go in.
That’s not to say these moments aren’t without tension. We sometimes sit for a whole morning trying to resolve a scene or find the right line. On one of these days when we’re really struggling, and starting to feel frustrated, as if we’re under siege from our own work, the phone rings, I pick it up and say:
‘Mafeking.’
And we both laugh for nearly ten minutes.
For those of you who don’t recognize the reference, the Siege of Mafeking was a moment in the Second Boer War in South Africa in 1899–1900. The siege lasted more than seven months and made a hero of Baden-Powell (the founder of the Scouts) for his heroic defence under such continual attack. It’s a marker of how Rik and I share such a shorthand of references: did we know about it through Look & Learn magazine, or through some story in The Victor or The Hornet comics? Perhaps our laughter is fuelled by this extra realization of how close we are. It’s the same joy people feel when they reminisce about things from their childhood – when they remember dandelion and burdock, or Noggin the Nog, or chopper bikes – and the more obscure it gets, the better it feels.
You can only create in an atmosphere where failure is accepted and doesn’t hurt.
I realize that Dad never accepted that failure was a thing. And this is peculiar, because some years after he died Mum tells me that he failed his Higher School Certificate when he was eighteen and didn’t get into teacher training college as he’d planned.
He failed!
It was only through the intervention of a friend of a friend in the church that he managed to get an interview at a college in Chalfont St Giles. I’ve looked it up – Newland Park Training College – and it was described as an ‘emergency teacher training college’ when it opened in 1946. I imagine the lack of teachers after the war was the emergency, rather than Dad’s predicament, but either way they let him in.
DAD! You never told me that you failed. You never told me that you too were vulnerable. That you were as fallible as the next man. That you were as human as everyone else. I spent my entire life hiding my failures from you because it seemed you expected perfection in all things.
If I have any talent as a creative writer I owe some of it to those sessions trying to explain my school report to my dad:
REPORT
Even Adrian will admit that his term in charge of a dormitory was a minor disaster.
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
Couldn’t be arsed imposing the stupid school rules. Let people listen to Radio Luxembourg after lights out. Encouraged midnight feasts as long as they gave me some.
AS EXPLAINED TO DAD
I tried to run the dorm as an Athenian Democracy with everyone having a say, but a small group of citizens became unruly and spoiled it for everyone else – listening to the radio when they shouldn’t and having illegal midnight feasts.
The crimes are all written in such obscure, obfuscating language. They never talk directly about anything. I am constantly beaten and the report will merely say ‘some disciplinary problems this term’. Maybe they don’t want to admit how often they hit me with sticks? It’s Catch 22 – do I tell Dad how much I get beaten? Or does that mean I have to admit my crimes? And you’d think Dad, as a teacher, would understand the code the teachers are using? Maybe this is why he failed his Higher Educational Certificate.
REPORT
He must learn to understand that school rules are there for a reason.
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
I find the school environs stultifyingly dull so I go into town at every opportunity to smoke fags and drink coffee.
AS EXPLAINED TO DAD
Well, Dad, you see the thing is they don’t serve enough food, and certainly not enough fresh food, so I was found outside the school grounds during school hours because I needed to buy some fruit – it was either that or get scurvy.
Failure’s important. Failure is part of success. They’re flip sides of the same coin. Imagining constant success is like spinning a coin one hundred times and it coming down heads every time. Like in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. It’s impossible. But the modern world of social media only expects heads, only expects continual success, and wants it to appear effortless.
After recognizing Dad’s problem with accepting failure I start telling my children every time I don’t get a job, so that at moments when they’re not feeling particularly successful they might take some comfort in knowing we’re all in the same boat. Everybody in the world is in the same boat. Even apparently successful people. I do a lot of auditions, and I fail 90 per cent of them. People might imagine I have a level of notoriety whereby I just sit back and read through offers, casually turning them down until the right one comes along . . . This certainly seems to be the idea most actors try to sell:
‘And then this script popped through my letterbox and I just had to do it.’
When perhaps they should be saying:
‘At last someone offered me a job, I’d have accepted it no matter how crap it was.’
It’s normal not to be successful; I am unsuccessful more of the time than I am successful. Writing this book I can spend hours staring at a blank screen being unsuccessful, getting up from my desk, making coffee, looking at my Fantasy Football team, arranging the piles of detritus on my desk into slightly different piles of detritus, fiddling about on my mandolin, looking out of the window, lying down, standing up, rummaging through the kitchen for a snack. Then I write stuff that is unsuccessful, stuff that I will cut later, but that might be the nub of an idea. And then occasionally I might write a sentence I’m almost pleased with.
Maybe you’re surprised at that last paragraph getting through the net but that’s how low the bar is sometimes. Failure is a part of it. The main part of writing is keeping your bum on the seat.
Rik and I always referred to writing as ‘mining’. I still say today: I’m off back down the word mine. Like gold miners identifying a seam of shiny-looking metal, we’d recognize a seam of possible jokes; we’d take something as mundane as a pair of tights and dig out every joke we could about them, chipping away in the metaphorical darkness with metaphorical pickaxes until there was nothing left. We’d then bring these jokes to the metaphorical surface and see if there were any nuggets, probably throwing out 90 per cent of them.
You can see the tights jokes in a finished show; an episode of Bottom called ‘Bottom Finger’. Richie and Eddie need to hide their identities as they steal a car. Normal villains wear a stocking over their heads, but we only have a pair of tights, so we cram our heads into a leg each and are then hampered by having to go everywhere with our heads tied together. It might look easy, it might look successful, but it’s the product of a 90 per cent failure rate.
There’s a lot of shit around. There always has been, and always will be.
Theodore Sturgeon – no relation – was a popular American science fiction writer of the 1950s. In a talk to New York University in 1951 he was asked to defend science fiction as a genre, the public perception being that it was all a bit trashy. He admitted that a lot of it was trash, but suggested that the best was as good as the best fiction in any field, and went on to state that 90 per cent of EVERYTHING is crap.
This became known as Sturgeon’s Law: 90 per cent of everything is crap – books, TV, film, pop music, hairstyles, breakfast cereals, other people. And this is a subjective exercise, so your 90 per cent might not match my 90 per cent – it is in the eye of the beholder.
George Orwell wrote in ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’: ‘In more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be “This book is worthless”.’
And Rudyard Kipling said something similar in The Light That Failed: ‘Four-fifths of everybody’s work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake.’ So he’s gone for 80 per cent there, the romantic fool!
Failure and your approach to it are fundamental parts of creativity.