Another double act

And much as Elizabeth’s shouting may have helped to escalate the situation, it’s good to know when someone is whole-heartedly on your side.

Jennifer and I have always been very careful not to talk about each other in public. Partly because our public personas are different from our private ones, so it would be confusing at best, and partly because of the curse of Hello! magazine: wherein people who talk about their partners generally end up getting divorced in the next edition.

However, I recognize that she is the most significant person in my life, and I recognize that you might recognize that also, so I will tell you these three things:

1) She is an exceptional snogger. In our early courting days, when she lived with Jobo in a house opposite The Surprise pub in Chelsea, I used to turn up on an almost daily basis. She would open the door and we would snog for ten minutes before saying anything. It’s the most ridiculously sensual and loving thing that has ever happened to me.

2) On one occasion she defended me by punching a man’s lights out. I was at some charitable awards ceremony when I was suddenly called upon to ‘fill in’ during a gap. I’m not a comedian who tells ‘jokes’ – I work with scripts and character. But some kind of emotional pressure was applied and I found myself at the podium.

Caught in the headlights I told the only ‘joke’ I know. It’s a shaggy-dog story but the bare bones of it are as follows: two women are looking out of the living room window; one of them sees her husband coming home early with a bunch of flowers in his hand. ‘Oh no,’ she says, ‘that means I’ll have to lie on my back all afternoon with my legs wide open.’ ‘Why?’ asks the other one. ‘Haven’t you got a vase?’

I stretched it out to fill the hiatus, and it went down well, but as I left the stage a man who had taken offence at the ‘blue’ nature of the joke strode forward and punched me in the face. From out of nowhere Jennifer was suddenly at my side and decked the man with a left hook.

That’s my girl.

‘Jokes’ are weird. I can only remember writing one actual ‘joke’ in my entire life. Rik and I were in Shepperton doing a test commercial for Hoffmeister beer. We had a swell time, and drank lots of actual beer during the filming, but despite our energetic gurning the campaign was eventually given to a Cockney bear. ‘Heyyyy – follow the bear.’

But I’m on the set of the Hoffmeister pitch, slightly the worse for wear, when a ‘joke’ comes to me – the watch gag. It’s in the age of wristwatches, before mobile phones, when to know what time it is you have to wear an actual watch on your actual wrist. I hear one of the sparks, a Cockerney, say to his mate, in the kind of broad patois they employ to give themselves an air of mystery, ‘Have you got the time on yer cock?’ And I think – well that’s a punchline if ever I heard one, so I invent the first part of the gag: ‘What do you say to a man who’s got no arms and no legs if your watch is broken?’ Quite a lot of people write to me asking about the ‘classic’ watch gag that Rik refers to several times over the course of five live shows. Well that’s it. I hope you’re not too disappointed.

3) Try to get round it by veering off the subject.

You already have.

Oh, well done me.

All right, let’s have another go:

Why do I do it? I don’t know. But, in 1970, at the age of thirteen, I go into the small Co-op at the end of Market Place, pick up a bar of chocolate and place it nervously on the counter.

‘And a packet of cigarettes, please,’ I say, hoping the cashier won’t notice the slight wobble in my voice.

‘Which ones?’ she asks.

My mind’s a blur – I barely have time to get over the shock of getting through the age test – of course, there’s a choice. Why didn’t I plan a choice before I got to the till? A seasoned smoker would have his regular brand.

‘Er, those ones,’ I point. ‘Park Drive.’

‘Tipped or untipped?’

Will this inquisition never end? Er . . . surely only a child would opt for tipped, a proper adult smoker would have to have untipped?

‘Untipped,’ I reply.

‘Ten or twenty?’

Oh God.

Of course, I’m lying when I say I don’t know why I do it. I do it because I want to be hard slash cool and hang out with the bad boys at school. Having joined a year later than most, I’m having trouble fitting in, so I’m making a conscious effort to join the boys who don’t care. The great news is that I don’t actually care, about anything, because I feel abandoned and I’m practically dead emotionally, so I’m perfect material.

Later, back at school, I realize I’ve forgotten to buy matches. Then it occurs to me that this might help my cause. I’ll have to ask someone for a light, which will prove that I’m a smoker and that I’m hard slash cool, so I ask JB who’s on the edge of the hard slash cool set.

A few minutes later we find ourselves in the spinney of trees beyond the sports field and I ‘flash the ash’ in exchange for a light.

Christ, they’re strong!

It’s like someone has collected all the smoke from a forest fire and channelled it down my throat in one hit. I cough and splutter and make some excuse about having a cold, and to my relief JB coughs and splutters too and says they’re ‘not his usual brand’. We have a surreal conversation about all the different brands we’ve ever tried and soon it’s pretty obvious that neither of us has ever smoked a cigarette before.

Nevertheless, at break time, JB and I go along together to the back of the bike shed where the boys who don’t care hang out. I give JB another of my fags in exchange for a match – financially this is a ruinous arrangement – and we hang out on the edge of the set. They’re actually quite a bonhomous bunch, much less intimidating than I thought, and over time they get over my outsider weirdness and actually laugh at some of the things I say. I watch every TV comedy I can: Harry Worth, Dad’s Army, Dick Emery, Dave Allen, Up Pompeii!, Robin’s Nest, Father Dear Father, and I’m able to bend the shape of the jokes I already know into jokes about teachers and other boys.

There’s a particularly rough boy who doesn’t trust me. He looks on me like I’m a spy for the teachers – to be fair, I look like a spy for the teachers, a nerd with bad hair and glasses – but luckily the rough boy is even thicker than me and gets asked to leave at the end of the fourth form. Soon afterwards I’m pretty much king of the bike shed. We take a parody photo of ‘The Smoking Team’ to match the rugby and cricket team photos: three serried ranks, each with a fag on, and who’s in the middle at the front? It’s me! I’m the captain!

Excuse me, how does this relate to Jennifer?

Please bear with me . . .

The thing about smoking as a schoolboy in the seventies is that the teachers’ noses are so full of smoke from the staffroom they can’t smell it on you. Anyone told to report to the staffroom during break would turn into the corridor and see smoke literally billowing out of the door. It’s as if special effects were in there. I’m surprised they can see. Cheap fags, expensive fags, the art teacher with his cigars, the English teacher with his pipe – the air was blue, thick and cancerous.

So you can smoke all you like, as long as no one sees you. We smoke Embassy and Players No.6, the richer boys smoke JPS and Rothmans, and the weirdos smoke ‘flaring’ Marlboros – is it saltpetre or ammonia? We don’t know, and we can’t google it for another thirty-five years. And we collect the tokens: I get my first espresso machine courtesy of the fags, one of those aluminium stovetop percolators – it’s just a shame I can’t get proper espresso coffee for it in this tiny little market town.

This tiny town with its collective tiny mind is so tedious. Perhaps it’s the reason we keep on smoking – because there’s nothing else to do. We sit in Jasper’s Folly, a cafe at the end of Market Place, thinking up new words for ennui and seeing how long we can burn our fingers with a lighter, before we can’t stand it any more. Bob is the winner and still has a deformed knuckle. This is twenty-five years before Trent Reznor’s song ‘Hurt’ is released. ‘I hurt myself today, to see if I’d still feel.’

By the time we reach the sixth form one of the window seats of Jasper’s Cafe is where everyone wants to be. Which is odd, because the cafe is end-on to the whole of Market Place, so anyone walking down the main thoroughfare can see you, especially if you’re in the window. But this is the thrill of it. You brazenly puff away until someone shouts ‘Cave!’ (the Latin for ‘beware’ – it’s the only Latin I really know), and then you simply hold your cigarette under the table. Whichever teacher is walking by looks in and sees a room full of smoke and a party of faux innocent faces at the window table. I can’t believe they don’t know. They must know. They probably hope we’ll get cancer and die quickly so they won’t have to teach us any more.

Even when our intellectual curiosity is piqued – as we start reading Sam Beckett or thinking we might copy George Orwell and piss off to France and wash dishes and have arty adventures amongst prostitutes with hearts of gold who’ll love us dearly – the reverie simply becomes an excuse to smoke Gitanes and Gauloise.

Still no Jennifer . . .

Your call is important to us, please hold.

I get to uni and the first lecture is on Greek tragedy. It’s a room full of school kids really, mostly keen to be hard slash cool, and all impressed by the fact that we’re allowed to smoke in lectures. So impressed we all light up at once. It’s a modern lecture room with a low ceiling, and we’re all young enough, and enthusiastic enough, to chain smoke. By the time we all light up our third fag, we can’t really see the lecturer at all. I think he says something about a goat.

University is a time for experimentation and some of us experiment with small cigars and cigarillos. There’s a particular brand called Café Crème – they come in a very pleasing tin which is slim enough to slide into your pocket. With five of us crammed into a tiny tutorial room all sucking away on mini cigars, and the tutor puffing on his pipe, we have to disable the fire alarm in order to continue.

At the beginning of the second year when Rik invites me to join his pub theatre group he writes me a joke ‘contract’ on the inside of a dismantled fag packet, it says: ‘I promise there will never be any money in it, but it might be a bit of a laugh.’

To be honest I could do with the money. My education is paid for by the state, which is brilliant, but my living allowance is means tested and my dad won’t pay his share, which means I work every holiday. One summer I work in the John Player’s factory in Nottingham. The machinery is phenomenal but when it goes wrong they end up with cigarettes that are ten foot long, and my job is to collect all these mistakes and take them to the ‘splitter’, where we recover the tobacco. We’re allowed to smoke fags from the production line in our breaks, but not the ones that are ten foot long.

We also get a generous weekly allowance of cigarettes to take home and by the time I get to London and the new ‘alternative’ comedy scene I’m a forty-a-day man. I sometimes reach for a fag as soon as I wake up. In the future people will be fixated by their mobile phones. In the early eighties we’re fixated by our fags and all the accoutrements.

I have a lighter made from a First World War bullet casing. It looks pretty hard slash cool but it’s a bugger to fill. On one occasion I hold it between my slippered feet while I charge it with lighter fluid, it’s a messy job and there’s significant spillage. Job done, I strike it up and the whole thing becomes a ball of flame. I drop it, and my slippers, covered in excess fuel, also catch fire. I kick them off and suddenly the curtains are ablaze. Only judicious beating with an atlas nips the inferno in the bud. It’s not just cancer that can kill you.

And Jennifer?

Nearly there.

In the mid-eighties, when I’m making Honest, Decent & True, a film for the BBC, I get the first inkling that all is not well. I play an anarchic young copywriter and Derrick O’Connor plays the world-weary head of the agency. It’s an improvised piece about the advertising industry and at one point my character challenges Derrick’s character to a race around Lincoln’s Inn Fields. ‘Non-character’ me thinks this is a foregone conclusion – I’m twenty-eight and sprightly, and Derrick is forty-four and looks like a cigarette that’s already been smoked and stubbed out – but in the end we have to rig the race because halfway through the first take I get tunnel vision and have to stop. I’m really quite unwell. I don’t have a disease as such, I just can’t breathe.

I’m still emotionally nuts when I first meet Jennifer. We are both with other people at the time but I’m besotted with her. It takes three or four years of us each having overlapping relationships with other people for her to recognize that I am in love with her, but eventually she does. We’ve known each other for so long before we get together that she seems to have already accepted my idiosyncrasies.

Our relationship is confirmed when she leaves an empty Silk Cut packet under the windscreen wiper of my car on which she’s written ‘I Love You’. We decide to get married and have children. And it’s whilst she’s pregnant with the first of three that she develops a fierce aversion to cigarette smoke, and I just stop. I stop. In one day. In one moment. It’s remarkably easy.

Because, I think, cigarettes were just a replacement for everything that was missing in my life. And I no longer feel like an outsider, no longer feel the need to be hard slash cool, I’m no longer bored, and no longer feel abandoned.

And I haven’t had a cigarette since.

You see, I got to her in the end.

I’ll get to everything in the end . . .