Filming is new. Filming is exciting. We’re all learning the craft off each other. It’s the days before video playback – the director has to watch from behind the camera and at the end of every take he has to ask the cameraman what he saw in the viewfinder.
That sounds ridiculous.
It is.
The beautiful thing is we get ‘rushes’ – the day’s filming is quickly developed and ‘rushed’ back to wherever we’re based. During the early days, because of Pete’s connection with Devon, we film a lot of the episodes in and around the small seaside village of Hope Cove in the South Hams.
We’ll all cram into the cottage that’s been set up as a makeshift editing suite and watch the rushes every evening. It’s a completely joyous experience. And it’s where we all learn our basic craft as actors. It’s like a party every time. There’s beer and wine and gin. We watch each other. We laugh at each other. We hear what works. We see what doesn’t. It’s an incredibly supportive group, no one’s trying to carve out a career solely for themselves – we’re all in it together.
And there’re so many styles on show – Pete’s intensity; Dawn’s clowning; Jennifer’s distillation of attitude; Nigel’s craft; Robbie’s sheer presence; me giving it 150 per cent . . . And we’re all borrowing bits from each other.
And then we all tumble into the Hope & Anchor, play pool and stick Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ on the jukebox.
And on top of this we get paid.
But we’re so wet behind the ears that we mistake the envelope of cash we’re given every week for our wages, and can’t believe it when we discover these are our per diems – our expenses for living away from home. Free money.
Weeks later our wages arrive in the form of cheques. None of us have earned this kind of money before. We’re earning £1,500 a show. Admittedly we only make six shows a year, but as someone who’s never earned more than £100 in a week this is boom time. I splash out and buy Dawn’s old Mk2 Cortina from her, mostly so I can listen to the Tom Robinson Band sing ‘Grey Cortina’ and feel like I’m in with the in crowd. Her Cortina is also grey! Yes! That’s just how cool I am! ‘Cortina owner, no one meaner, wish that I could be like him.’
Each episode is different, and in many of the episodes like ‘The Strike’ or ‘War’ or ‘Gino’ we play several parts each. The range of parts is extraordinary: In ‘A Fistful of Travellers’ Cheques’ I play Billy Belfont, ‘The Man with No Name’ – a sociopath from Bradford who has ended up as an unemployed bullfighter in Spain; in the next I’m Dick, a pompous young prick from The Famous Five; in ‘GLC’ I play a loopy Prince Charles talking to his plums.
And we play a variety of styles: something like ‘Bad News Tour’, a spoof documentary, requires a commitment to some form of realism; ‘Five Go Mad’, in which we are adults playing children, is a more heightened form of parody; The Supergrass is pitched somewhere between the two.
It’s like a return to the days of the Stephen Joseph Studio at university. Everyone’s creating something. Everyone’s writing. Everyone’s thinking.
When we turn up to film, our costume designer Frances Haggett will emerge from a cloud of her own cigarette smoke. She’ll have unloaded her car into whatever space she can find – sometimes a room in whatever building we’re using as a location, sometimes a pop-up tent, sometimes simply on the roadside. These are the days before trailers and costume vans – we all hang about the set all day watching each other, making suggestions, egging each other on.
Frances will invite us to pick a costume from the rail. It’s the epitome of playing. It’s dressing up for fun. Frances is brilliant at her job and lays on a curated selection of garments, a kind of palette, and we invent characters at will.
The same is true in the make-up department, where Naomi Donne and Sally Sutton will willingly black your teeth for you, or give you a scar, or make you look like you’re on the point of death. Although, depending on the night before, this is sometimes unnecessary.
And I’m not just learning how to write and act, I’m also learning to direct.
Sandy Johnson is a slightly eccentric Scotsman with an enormous handlebar moustache who can whistle more tunefully than anyone I know. He’s also a Laurel & Hardy fan, which is always a plus in my book. When I first meet him – he comes backstage at the Comic Strip Club – he’s just left the National Film and Television School, and he casts me as the lead in his very first film, a short for TV called The Magnificent One: a quirky take on The Seven Samurai, set in London, with only one samurai, a young man (my character), who takes it upon himself to stop the Japanese owners of a corner shop being bullied. It’s my first paid acting job.
We get on well and I invite him to direct the scripts that I write for The Comic Strip Presents and he very magnanimously lets me into the edit room. I go all day, every day, watching how he and his editor, Rob Wright, put things together.
It’s the days before computers, everything’s shot on 16mm film, and editing is quite physical. We’re using a Steenbeck editing table – a massive piece of machinery that looks like it comes from a very early episode of Doctor Who. It has four spools that allow you to load a reel of film and a reel of sound at the same time; once you sync the clapperboard to the sound of the clap you can play both together and watch a dimly lit monitor.
Each edit involves: rolling the film back and forth and choosing the edit point; marking the film frame and the sound tape with a chinagraph pencil; taking those film and sound reels off the machine; loading up the film and sound reels of the picture you’re cutting to; choosing the edit point; cutting the film (straight cut) and the sound (diagonal cut); then splicing the ends together with what are effectively pieces of Sellotape.
This laborious process means that each edit is chosen very carefully. Re-editing can be fiddly and end up with single frames hanging about which invariably get lost. So every edit is discussed at length, and being party to these discussions is my education. I learn the reasoning, the grammar – I’m learning grammar! – and the aesthetics of film. Whilst editing ‘Bad News Tour’, ‘Dirty Movie’ and ‘Eddie Monsoon – A Life?’ I spend months in the edit suite and learn every day.
I also watch in wonder when Rob the editor gets bored and suddenly disappears up onto the roof of the building to lob water bombs at unsuspecting passers-by outside the YMCA opposite. Rob is a Jekyll and Hyde of a man depending on whether he’s had a drink or not, but he also tells me the best limerick I’ve ever heard (delivered in his inimitable Welsh accent):
Come down to Llanelli my boy
For a fuck that you’ll really enjoy
At the height of catharsis
What you’ll feel up your arse is
The tongue of a corgi called Roy
When Stephen Frears directs ‘Mr Jolly Lives Next Door’ – about a seedy escort agency that mistakenly gets a job meant for the contract killer whose office is next door – he has some personal issues to deal with and asks me to direct the action sequences. And when it comes to the editing Rob and I do the bulk of it and Stephen pops in occasionally to see how it’s progressing. I love it, and by the time we make ‘More Bad News’ in 1987 I’ve taken on the role of director. Sorry, Sandy, you taught yourself out of a job . . .
‘More Bad News’, about the continuing travails of an unsuccessful and largely untalented heavy metal band, includes a promo video for their first single ‘Warriors of Genghis Khan’. It’s suitably over-the-top and features a post-apocalyptical future of fires, flags, motorbikes, and a maiden in distress. It also snags the interest of a band called Zodiac Mindwarp & the Love Reaction, and they ask me to make a promo video for their new single ‘Prime Mover’. This has a bigger budget, and therefore features a spaceship, a tank crashing into a nunnery, novices that turn into leather-clad groupies, and a mother superior whose head explodes. Come on, it was the eighties.
There’s a near fatal accident when the man driving the tank through the polystyrene wall into the nuns’ dormitory takes the wrong cue and smashes through too early. Dick Pope, the cinematographer who goes on to shoot all of Mike Leigh’s films from 1990 onwards, is on the other side of the wall with his light meter. He is saved only by a large chunk of polystyrene which gets trapped in front of the tank and pushes him along the floor like a snow plough.
I make one for Squeeze’s single ‘Hourglass’ that is full of optical illusions shot on a Dali-esque set – melting guitars, trick perspectives, trompe l’oeil – it gets a lot of airplay on MTV, gets a couple of MTV awards, and helps make it their best-selling single in the US. This kind of success – increased revenue – makes a lot of record companies take notice and I become in demand. Over the next few years I make around thirty videos for the likes of Elvis Costello, 10,000 Maniacs, The Pogues, Sandie Shaw, Fuzzbox and bands whose names I can no longer remember.
This is the art O-level I never did. My ‘style’ is heavy on visual concepts – a four-poster bed covered in chickens, a sixties nightclub, the inside of a telephone answering machine – and relies on a relationship I develop with the art directors Nick Edwards and Clive Crotty. The beauty of the system is that these things are generally shot in a day and because time is tight the people from the record companies don’t get much of a chance to interfere – it’s like playing in the biggest art room you can imagine. Every day feels like a play day.