Wish you were here

The line between holidays and work is blurred even further as we shoot episodes of The Comic Strip Presents in rural Norfolk for ‘Susie’, and near Almeria in southern Spain for ‘A Fistful of Travellers’ Cheques’. But we keep returning to Devon, which is more like a proper British holiday – each day can encompass hours of rain and cold interspersed with five minutes of instant sunstroke. Many of the picnics in ‘Five Go Mad in Dorset’ are shot in farm gateways and look idyllic – gingham tablecloth, ham sandwiches, cake and lashings of ginger beer – but pull back and you’ll see the huge tarpaulin keeping out the driving rain and the enormous lamp standing in for the sun.

Pete was born and bred in Devon and no matter where a film might be set he thinks he can find the equivalent location in Devon. Both his mother and his in-laws live up on Dartmoor and they’re such welcoming people – sometimes we stay with Pete’s mum, crammed into the makeshift dormitories she used to use for a summer school.

Dawn also has a connection with the area, having been brought up in Saltash just across the Tamar.

We all develop a deep affinity with the place and in time Jennifer and I relocate to Dartmoor as well. Even Rik, who’s more of a part-timer where The Comic Strip Presents is concerned, moves in close to where Pete lives in the South Hams.

But in the end the output of The Comic Strip Presents is a bit hit and miss. Sturgeon’s Law might be invoked here. The nature of the beast is that they’re all stand-alone episodes, albeit with the same repertory of actors, so it’s hard to build up a head of steam. One idea can be so different in style and subject to the one that’s gone before, that people find it difficult to latch onto it as a series.

This is compounded by the shows never being the same length or in the same place. We start off doing half hours. Then we do some hour-long episodes. Then we switch from Channel 4 to BBC2, and the BBC hour is longer than the Channel 4 hour – because it doesn’t have to accommodate commercials. Then we move back to Channel 4. Then to Gold. And in between times we make the odd feature film when Pete can stop laughing long enough to persuade someone to stump up the money. And on top of all this, after the first ten years, the core cast changes as I get busy with Bottom and Dawn and Jennifer get busy with French & Saunders, The Vicar of Dibley and Absolutely Fabulous.

It’s never entirely cohesive, and it can be a bit confusing, but I’m very proud of the endeavour and I’d say the best TV episodes hold their own in the world of comedy: ‘Five Go Mad in Dorset’, ‘Bad News Tour’, ‘A Fistful of Travellers’ Cheques’, ‘Mr Jolly Lives Next Door’, ‘The Strike’, ‘Gregory: Diary of a Nutcase’. That’s six good episodes out of forty-two – roughly 15 per cent. Eighty-five per cent of everything is crap? That’s bang in the middle of Orwell and Kipling’s predictions.

And yet we get to work with some of our heroes. We can’t believe that we get Peter Cook to play Mr Jolly in ‘Mr Jolly Lives Next Door’. This man is such an icon, he’s the man from Beyond the Fringe, from Not only . . . But also . . ., from Derek and Clive (Live) and here he is saying lines that we have written.

We’re in absolute awe. Perhaps in too much awe. We’re almost speechless in front of him. At one point, as the contract killer Mr Jolly, Peter is guiding one of his victims down a steep concrete staircase when he slips and falls all the way to the bottom and we briefly think we might have killed him. He gets up swiftly and carries on, and that take is in the finished film, but watching it live as it happened it felt like time had stopped.

Of course he more or less kills himself in the end. A year later in 1989 Robbie and I are doing a sketch together for the Amnesty International fundraiser The Secret Policeman’s Biggest Ball at the Cambridge Theatre. I get into a lift backstage and who should be in it but Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. They are each holding heavy carrier bags. The ancient lift takes us to the second floor and judders to an abrupt stop. There is the tell-tale sound of bottles clinking in their carrier bags. Peter looks at me and bursts out laughing. At least he enjoyed his drink.

In a feature film we make called The Pope Must Die I get to work with another hero, Herbert Lom – the man from The Ladykillers, and the much-put-upon police inspector of the Pink Panther films. He’s playing Vittorio Corelli, the Mafia boss. I’m playing Father Rookie, the deaf priest who writes down the wrong name when the cardinals are voting for a new pope.

There’s a scene where my character is called to the Mafia boss’s house, in which Herbert Lom pours a bottle of brandy onto the hat I’m wearing and sets fire to it.

I’m a berserker, I’m very comfortable with stunts and flames, in fact, I don’t think it’s too boastful to say that I’m actually quite good at this sort of thing. It may be stupidity, it may be a mild death wish, but I’ve made it into a career of sorts – I’m not afraid of potential danger, especially if I think I might get a good laugh. Berserker.

It’s one of those little four-cornered priest’s hats, a biretta, and under this hat I have a flameproof skull cap. The special effects team smear a good dollop of glue onto the back of the hat. When Herbert sets fire to it with a lighter it instantly ignites into a sizeable flame and I look like a human candle.

The idea is that my character is so stupid he doesn’t realize he’s been set on fire. He sniffs the air. Is something burning? He looks from side to side – he can’t see that anything’s on fire.

It’s counter-intuitive not to express alarm when your head is on fire – this is where the joke is – but even when you know it’s been organized by a special effects team, and that they’re standing by just out of shot with fire extinguishers, it takes a modicum of bravery, or premeditated foolhardiness at the least, to act as if it is nothing at all.

I have to blow my own trumpet here and say I do it very well. In the finished film there is a single shot that lasts about twenty seconds of me sitting there with a small inferno atop my head.

At the end of the take Pete calls ‘cut’ and the SFX team spray me with CO₂ to extinguish the flames. There’s a round of applause from everyone in the room, but then, as the room breaks up and the crew move on to organizing the next set-up, Herbert Lom sidles up to me and says, out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Very good.’

Herbert Lom!

Herbert Lom is a master of this kind of thing. In the Pink Panther films I’ve seen him fall repeatedly into ponds and off balconies, stand on rakes, chop off his thumb with a cigar cutter, and even shoot himself in the face with a gun that he’s mistaken for a novelty cigarette lighter. He knows his onions where physical comedy is concerned. And he says: ‘Very good.’ It’s the best review I ever get.

The Pope Must Die is shot in Yugoslavia in 1990. Timmy Mallet is top of the charts with ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ – but thankfully this has no impact on the film. Or maybe it does. Maybe that’s what the Yugoslavian police are so cross about?

Yugoslavia is standing in for Italy. Some of the architecture is quite similar, and it’s a lot cheaper. It’s been an independent communist state since the late 1940s and was ruled by General Tito, a strong-arm dictator, until his death in 1980. We shoot the burning hat scene in one of Tito’s modernist villas.

In 1990, the cracks between the various republics within the country are beginning to show, people are getting jumpy, and it has a heavily authoritarian feel. The joke amongst the crew is to ask any new arrival: ‘What’s Yugoslavian for excuse me?’; and when no answer comes, to push them violently out of the way. It seems like everyone over the age of five chain smokes.

I don’t know whether it’s Herbert Lom’s praise or the local plum brandy, šljivovica, that goes to my head, but the evening after the hat scene a group of us have a very jolly time in a restaurant in Zagreb. It’s a traditional establishment in a cellar and when we emerge back onto the street we see that something magical has happened – it has snowed.

The Americans amongst us aren’t particularly impressed, they’re quite used to snow, but we English, particularly the producer Stephen Woolley and I, get over excited.

‘Look. It’s sticking!’ we cry.

Memories of childhood winters in Bradford flood my mind. Memories of me and my sister rushing to the window whenever it began to snow.

‘Is it sticking?’ would be the perennial cry.

‘No, it’s not,’ would come the perennial reply, as we’d watch each sad snowflake melt and die as it hit the ground.

Steve, who’s the same age as me, was brought up in Islington and has also obviously known the disappointment of snow not surviving long in the British urban environment. But here in Zagreb this foreign snow is doing what it’s supposed to do – it’s sticking.

Like giggling children we start scraping it off the roofs of parked cars, making snowballs, and throwing them at each other.

Suddenly two policemen appear.

I say policemen, but they could be soldiers. Or paramilitaries. They bristle with weapons – ammunition belts, pistols, long sticks – and they each hold a stubby machine gun. They shout in Croatian and point their stubby machine guns at us, right into our faces.

Bloody hell. This has escalated quickly.

Steve’s wife, Elizabeth, is American. She’s lovely, but she is American, and to put it politely she has that American sense of entitlement on the world stage that can rub foreigners up the wrong way. As Steve and I are pushed against the wall, hands high, legs spread, and frisked by one of the gun-toting policemen she begins to scream: ‘I am an American citizen! You are infringing our human rights! I’ll make sure you get fired for this, you stupid bastards! You’ll get twenty years in a Siberian gulag!’

Well . . . something like that.

I can’t remember her exact words, but I do remember the policemen becoming even more pissed off. No matter what’s being said I think that’s what they hear. So, whilst I think they might have been about to let us go, now they seem intent on taking us away. We are frogmarched, hands on heads, at gun point, half a mile to a police station. Elizabeth runs along beside us, keeping up a tirade of abuse, and it’s not until they slam the door of the police station in her face and lead us down to a bare cell in the basement, that we can no longer hear her.

The Berlin Wall only came down the year before, and though it feels like the Cold War is coming to an end, there is still something chilling about being in a basement prison cell in a communist country, even if it is non-aligned. We’ve both read Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we know tales of the grim Lubyanka prison run by the KGB in Moscow, and we know that people, dissidents, westerners and troublemakers can disappear.

It’s fair to say the šljivovica has worn off by now. Essentially we’ve been arrested for throwing snowballs, but we can’t see the humour in this yet.

After a couple of hours, we’re taken to a room where a gruff-looking bloke tries to interview us. He can’t speak English and we can’t speak Croatian so things don’t progress very far and we’re taken back to the cell. After another couple of hours this routine is repeated but this time with a policeman who has a small amount of English.

We deduce that our crime is to make a noise under the apartment where the president lives. Apparently we’ve kept him awake. This seems unlikely: there has only been one ‘president’ of Yugoslavia, General Tito, and he died in 1980; and it seems weird that any head of state after him should live in a backstreet of Zagreb. Perhaps he means the police chief? Or the police sergeant? Or just a chum who’s a bit pissed off? No matter, it seems to be a fairly heinous offence, and some kind of punishment is due, perhaps without trial.

At this point of the proceedings he gets out pen and paper and begins to write down our details. We give him our names. He writes them down. Then he asks for our addresses. We say: ‘Hotel Intercontinental’. The pen moves towards the paper, as if he is about to write it down, then stops. He looks up at us.

‘Hotel Intercontinental?’

‘Yes,’ we say.

He looks at the form again, then back at us.

‘Hotel Intercontinental?’

‘Yes,’ we reply. Again.

He lays down the pen, scrapes back his chair, and disappears from the interview room.

Moments later he reappears with two of the other policemen. They are all smiles now, though their smiles seem rather forced, as if they’re not used to smiling. One of them tries a chuckle. He shouldn’t – it comes out as creepy rather than charming, which I think is what he’s going for. The one with the faltering English says: ‘Good evening, good evening, good evening,’ while motioning for us to rise, and the other two open the door wide and show us the way out. Not just out of the interview room, but out of the police station.

It’s 4 a.m. in the morning, the street is dead and thick with snow.

We have to resist the urge to start chucking snowballs about.

We’re not sure where we are.

We’re pretty sure we’ve been released, but don’t know where to go, or how to get there.

The policemen suddenly seem to understand this. Instructions are shouted to someone inside (I hope they don’t wake the president), and moments later a police car swings round to the front and they invite us to get in, and we’re driven back to the hotel.

Once Steve has made Elizabeth aware of our safe return we order a couple of šljivovica from the night porter to celebrate our release, and to give us time to process what has just happened. It feels decidedly odd to have two loaded machine guns pointed at you for real, especially when you’re not a soldier, just a poncy actor and a poncy producer. We feel quite giddy, though it occurs to us that if we’d been two backpackers instead of two people staying at the Hotel Intercontinental we might never have been seen again.

A year later Yugoslavia erupts into a bloody civil war that lasts several years. I think we were lucky. But ever since then I’ve always asked to be booked into the most prestigious hotel when travelling to foreign locations. That’s my excuse anyway.