The Fry Chronicles Part 7

'Exactly. Well he's the President of Footlights this year.'

'Coo.'

'Yes, and he needs someone to write sketches with. He wants me to bring you over to his rooms at Selwyn.'

'Me? But I don't know him ... how ... what?'

'Yes you do!' She flung two cus.h.i.+ons in succession. 'I introduced you at Edinburgh.'

'You did?'

There were no cus.h.i.+ons left so she flung me a speaking glance instead. Possibly the speakingest glance that had been flung in Cambridge that year. 'For someone with such a good memory,' she said, 'you have a terrible memory.'

Kim, Emma and I walked up Sidgwick Avenue towards Selwyn College. It was a cold November night, and the air held a smell of gunpowder from a Bonfire Night party being held somewhere near the Fen Causeway. We came to a Victorian building on the rugby-ground side of Grange Road, not far from Cambridge's newest college, Robinson.

Emma led us through the open street door and up some stairs. She knocked on a door at the end of the corridor. A voice grunted for us to enter.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed, a guitar on his knee. At the other side of the room was his girlfriend, Katie Kelly, whom I knew slightly. Like Emma, she read English at Newnham. She was very pretty and had long blonde hair and a ravis.h.i.+ng smile.

He stood awkwardly, the red flags of his cheeks more p.r.o.nounced than ever. 'Hullo,' he said.

'Hullo,' I said.

We were both people who said 'hullo' rather than 'h.e.l.lo'.

'Red wine or white?' said Katie.

'I've been writing a song,' he said and started to strum on his guitar. The song was a kind of ballad sung in the character of an American IRA supporter.

Give money to an IRA bomber?

Why, yessir, I'd consider it an honour, Everybody must have a cause.

The accent was flawless and the singing superb. It seemed to me a perfect song.

'Woolworths,' he said as he laid the instrument down. 'I borrow guitars that cost ten times as much, but they just don't do it for me.'

Katie approached with the wine. 'Well, are you going to tell him?'

'Ah. Yes. Well, thing is. Footlights. I'm the President, you see.'

'I saw you in Nightcap Nightcap you were magnificent it was brilliant,' I said in a rush. you were magnificent it was brilliant,' I said in a rush.

'Oh. Gosh. Well. No. Really? Well, er ... Latin! Latin! Top. Absolutely top.' Top. Absolutely top.'

'Nonsense, oh shush.'

'Completely.'

The excruciating horror of mutual admiration out of the way, we both paused, unsure of how to continue.

'Well, go on,' said Emma.

'Yes. So. There are two Smokers left this term, but most importantly there's the panto.'

'The panto?'

'Yup. The Footlights pantomime. Two years ago we did Aladdin Aladdin.'

'Hugh was the Emperor of China,' Katie said.

'I missed that, I'm afraid,' I said.

'Quite right. I would have too. If I hadn't been in it. Anyway, this year we're doing The Snow Queen The Snow Queen.'

'Hans Christian Andersen?'

'Yup. Katie and I have been writing it. We've got this ...' he showed me some script.

Five minutes later Hugh and I were writing a scene together as if we had been doing it all our lives.

You read about people falling suddenly in love, about romantic thunderbolts that go with clas.h.i.+ng cymbals, high quivering strings and resounding chords and you read about eyes that meet across the room to the thudding tw.a.n.g of Cupid's bow, but it is less often that you read about collaborative love at first sight, about people who instantly discover that they were born to work together or born to be natural and perfect friends.

The moment Hugh Laurie and I started to exchange ideas it was starkly and most wonderfully clear that we shared absolutely the same sense of what was funny and the same scruples, tastes and sensitivities as to what we found derivative, cheap, obvious or stylistically unacceptable. Which is not to say that we were similar. If the world is full of plugs looking for sockets and sockets looking for plugs, as roughly speaking the Platonic allegory of love suggests, then there is no doubt we did seem each to possess precisely the qualities and deficiencies the other most lacked. Hugh had music where I had none. He had an ability to be likeably daft and clownish. He moved, tumbled and leapt like an athlete. He had authority, presence and dignity. I had ... hang on, what did did I have? Patter and fluency, I suppose. Verbal dexterity. Learning. Hugh always said that I also added what he called I have? Patter and fluency, I suppose. Verbal dexterity. Learning. Hugh always said that I also added what he called gravitas gravitas to the proceedings. Although he had great authority himself on stage I suppose I had the edge on playing older authority figures. I wrote too. I mean I actually physically wrote lines down with pen and paper or typewriter. Hugh kept the phrases and shapes of the monologues and songs he was working on in his head and only wrote them down or dictated them when a script was needed for stage-management or administrative purposes. to the proceedings. Although he had great authority himself on stage I suppose I had the edge on playing older authority figures. I wrote too. I mean I actually physically wrote lines down with pen and paper or typewriter. Hugh kept the phrases and shapes of the monologues and songs he was working on in his head and only wrote them down or dictated them when a script was needed for stage-management or administrative purposes.

Hugh was determined that the Footlights should look grown-up but never pleased with itself or, G.o.d forbid, cool. We both shared a horror of cool. To wear sungla.s.ses when it wasn't sunny, to look pained and troubled and emotionally raw, to pull that sneery snorty 'Er?!! What What?!' face at things that you didn't understand or from which you thought it stylish to distance yourself. Any such arid, self-regarding stylistic narcissism we detested. Better to look a naive simpleton than jaded, tired or world-weary, we felt. 'We're students students, for f.u.c.k's sake,' was our credo. 'We have people making our beds and tidying our rooms for us. We live in panelled medieval rooms. We have theatres, printing presses, first-cla.s.s cricket pitches, a river, boats, libraries and all the time in the world for contentment, pleasure and fun. What right have we got to moan and moon and mooch about the place looking tortured?'

We were fortunate that the age of young people doing stand-up comedy hadn't yet arrived. The idea, and I am afraid it has since become a reality, of pained emo students leaning listless and misunderstood on a mike-stand railing against the burden of life would be more than either of us would have been able to bear. We were exceptionally attuned to pretension, aesthetic discord and hypocrisy. The young are so priggish. I hope we are much more tolerant now.

Almost no one we ever worked with either at Cambridge or afterwards quite seemed to share or even understand our aesthetic, if I can dignify it with such a word. It is probable that our fear of being unoriginal, of looking c.o.c.ky, of being obvious or of being seen ever to have chosen the line of least resistance caused us difficulty in our comedy careers. The same fears might also have pushed us to some of our best endeavours too, so there is no real reason to regret the sensitivity and fastidiousness that only we appeared to share. We soon became familiar with the expressions of bewilderment that might flicker over the faces of those who suggested something that inadvertently trespa.s.sed against our instinctive sense of what could or could not be funny, right or fit. I don't think we were ever aggressive or unkind, certainly not deliberately, but when two people are absolutely in harness with regard to matters of principle and outlook it must be very alienating to outsiders, and I expect two tall public-school figures like us must have seemed forbidding and aloof. Inside, of course, we felt anything but. I would not want to paint a picture of us as earnest, dogmatic ideologues, the Frank and Queenie Leavis of Comedy. We spent most of our time laughing. The smallest things would set us off like teenagers, which of course we had only just stopped being.

Hugh had come up to Cambridge from Eton College as a successful international youth oarsman, having pulled himself through the water to gold with his schoolfriend James Palmer in the c.o.xless pairs event in the Junior Olympics and at Henley. Back in the thirties his father had been in a winning Cambridge Blue boat for each of his three years and went on to row in the British eight at the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and again in the c.o.xless pairs in the 1948 London games, where he and his partner Jack Wilson won gold. Had glandular fever not struck, Hugh would certainly have rowed for the university straight away but, denied by his illness a seat in the Blue boat for his first year, he looked about for something else to do and found himself cast in Aladdin Aladdin and then, two terms later, and then, two terms later, Nightcap Nightcap. In his second year he abandoned the Footlights and did what he had come to Cambridge to do, pull that rowing-boat through the water. On the river by five or six in the morning, hours of backbreaking rowing, then road work, gym work and more time on the river. He got his Blue in the 1980 boat race, which Oxford won by a canvas, the closest result there had ever been. You can imagine the disappointment. How many times he must have revisited every yard of that race in his head. Upping the stroke rate by one beat a minute, just one neater piece of steering on the bend, 2 per cent more effort at Hammersmith ... it must have been heartbreaking to have come so close. I tried to tell him that my own experience of losing to Merton in the final of University Challenge University Challenge meant that I knew exactly how he felt. The look he gave me could have stripped the flesh from a rhinoceros. meant that I knew exactly how he felt. The look he gave me could have stripped the flesh from a rhinoceros.

Unable to afford an outboard motor, Hugh Laurie and his poor dear friends are having to propel themselves through the water.

The following year, his last, he could either stay with rowing or return to the Footlights, but he could not do both. President of the Cambridge University Rowing Club, or President of the Cambridge Footlights? He claims that he tossed a coin and it came down Footlights. He had gone to Edinburgh and seen Latin! Latin! and decided that perhaps I might be a useful new recruit to his Footlights. Only he and Emma were left from the first year and he needed fresh blood. Kim was co-opted on to the committee as Junior Treasurer, Katie was Secretary, Emma Vice-President and a computer scientist from St John's called Paul Shearer, a funny, lugubrious performer with eyes almost as big as Hugh's, was already on board as Club Falconer. This strange office went back to the days when the Footlights were quartered in Falcon Yard. I don't believe there were any duties attached to being Falconer, but it looked good, and I envied Paul's t.i.tle sorely and reprehensibly. and decided that perhaps I might be a useful new recruit to his Footlights. Only he and Emma were left from the first year and he needed fresh blood. Kim was co-opted on to the committee as Junior Treasurer, Katie was Secretary, Emma Vice-President and a computer scientist from St John's called Paul Shearer, a funny, lugubrious performer with eyes almost as big as Hugh's, was already on board as Club Falconer. This strange office went back to the days when the Footlights were quartered in Falcon Yard. I don't believe there were any duties attached to being Falconer, but it looked good, and I envied Paul's t.i.tle sorely and reprehensibly.

Continuity and Clubroom There is perhaps one overriding reason why the Footlights has produced such an astonis.h.i.+ng number of figures who have gone on to make their mark in the world, and that reason is continuity. The Footlights has a tradition which goes back over a hundred years. That tradition inspires many with a comic itch to choose Cambridge as their university. The Footlights has a regular schedule: a pantomime in the Michaelmas Term, a Late Night Revue at the ADC in the Lent Term and the May Week Revue at the Arts Theatre, which then goes on to tour Oxford and other towns before arriving in Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival in August. And throughout that year are peppered Smokers. The word is an abbreviation of Smoking Concert. I dare say smoking is no longer permitted at these public events, but the name has stayed. In our time Smokers took place in the clubroom. The fact that the club had its own little venue was another of the inestimable advantages held by the Footlights over comedy groups in other universities.

The closest equivalent to a Smoker in the outside world is an open-mike evening I suppose, although in our day there was a small filtration system in place, so 'open' isn't quite the word. Anyone from any college with hopeful sketches, quickies, songs or monologues would come to the clubroom the day before the Smoker and exhibit their material on the stage. Whichever committee member was running that Smoker would yay or nay them. If a yay, their piece would be added to the running order: the auditions would go on until there was enough there for an evening's entertainment. The huge advantage of this system was that by the time the May Week Revue came around there was a lot of material to choose from and plenty of performers to pick, all of them having been tried out in front of an audience. In most other universities they don't have that kind of feeder system. Josh and Mary at Warwick or Suss.e.x might say, 'Hey, we're funny, let's write a show and take it to Edinburgh! We'll put Nick and Simon and Bernice and Louisa in it, and Baz can write the songs.' They are probably all very funny and talented people, but they won't have the year's worth of practice and experience and the cupboard full of proven material that a Footlights show can call upon. That in essence, I believe, is why year after year the club continues to do so well. It is why their tours always sell out and why young people with a feel for comedy are so often disposed to put a tick next to Cambridge in the university application form.

The Footlights clubroom was a long, low room under the Union chamber and had a small stage with a lighting rig and a piano at one end and a sort of bar at the other. All along the walls hung framed posters of past revues and photographs of past Footlighters. In their duffel coats, black polo necks, tweed jackets or wind-cheaters, with studious black-rimmed spectacles perched on their noses and untipped cigarettes between their lips, they all seemed so much older than we were, so much cleverer, so much more talented and a world more sophisticated. They looked more like French left-bank intellectuals or avant-garde jazz musicians than members of a student comedy troupe. Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden, John Cleese, David Frost, John Bird, John Fortune, Eleanor Bron, Miriam Margolyes, Douglas Adams, Germaine Greer, Clive James, Jonathan Lynn, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Griff Rhys Jones, Clive Anderson ...

'The tradition stops here,' Hugh and I would mutter as we looked up for inspiration and found our gaze meeting theirs. Such a tradition, such a rich history as the Footlights', was in part inspiration and encouragement but in part insurmountable obstacle and impossible burden.

Neither Hugh nor I seriously thought for a moment that we would have a career in comedy or drama or any other branch of s...o...b..siness. I would, if I sc.r.a.ped a First in my Finals, probably stay on at Cambridge, prepare a doctoral thesis and see what I could offer the academic world. I hoped, in my innermost secret places, that I might be able to write plays and books on top, under, or to one side of, whatever tenured university post might come my way. Hugh claimed that he had set his eyes on the Hong Kong police force. There had been one or two corruption scandals in the Crown Colony, and I think he rather fancied the image of himself as a kind of Serpico figure in sharply creased white shorts, a lone honest cop doing a dirty, dirty job ... Emma, none of us doubted, would go out and achieve her destiny in world stardom. She already had an agent. A forbiddingly impressive figure called Richard Armitage, who drove a Bentley, smoked cigars and sported an old Etonian tie, had signed her on to the books of his company, Noel Gay Artists. He also represented Rowan Atkinson. Emma's future was certain.

None of which is to say that Hugh and I lacked ambition. We were ambitious in the peculiar negative mode in which we specialized: ambitious not to make fools of ourselves. Ambitious not to be called the worst Footlights show for years. Ambitious not to be mocked or traduced in the college and university newspapers. Ambitious not to look as if we thought ourselves pro-ey s...o...b..zzy stars. Ambitious not to fail.

Within two weeks of meeting we finished the Snow Queen Snow Queen script. I also wrote a monologue with Emma for her appearance as a mad, unpleasant and foul-smelling Wise Old Woman. Katie was cast as the heroine, Gerda, while Kim, ascending to the role of Pantomime Dame as if born to it, played her strikingly Les Dawson-like mother. I was a silly-a.s.s Englishman called Montmorency Fotherington-Fitzwell, Ninth Earl of Doubtful, who by happy chance never sang. Australian-born Adam Stone from St Catharine's played Kay, Gerda's boyfriend, Annabelle Arden had the t.i.tle role of the Snow Queen herself and an extremely funny first-year called Paul Simpkin played a kind of dumpling-faced jester. There was a talented young man called Charles Hart, whom we put in the chorus. He later came to fame and frankly not inconsiderable fortune as the lyricist for Andrew Lloyd-Webber's script. I also wrote a monologue with Emma for her appearance as a mad, unpleasant and foul-smelling Wise Old Woman. Katie was cast as the heroine, Gerda, while Kim, ascending to the role of Pantomime Dame as if born to it, played her strikingly Les Dawson-like mother. I was a silly-a.s.s Englishman called Montmorency Fotherington-Fitzwell, Ninth Earl of Doubtful, who by happy chance never sang. Australian-born Adam Stone from St Catharine's played Kay, Gerda's boyfriend, Annabelle Arden had the t.i.tle role of the Snow Queen herself and an extremely funny first-year called Paul Simpkin played a kind of dumpling-faced jester. There was a talented young man called Charles Hart, whom we put in the chorus. He later came to fame and frankly not inconsiderable fortune as the lyricist for Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Phantom of the Opera Phantom of the Opera and and Aspects of Love Aspects of Love. Greg Snow, a howlingly funny friend from Corpus Christi, was in the chorus too, alternately amusing and exasperating Hugh with his astounding camp and a talent for b.i.t.c.hery that approached high art.

Hugh had a hand in the music, and I had a finger or two in the lyrics but most of the composition and arrangements were the work of an undergraduate called Steve Edis, whose girlfriend, Cathie Bell, danced and sang in the chorus like a demented can-can girl, despite her devastating susceptibility to severe asthma attacks.

The Snow Queen, 1980. My first Footlights appearance.

The pantomime seemed to go well, and by the time the Lent term came Hugh and I were already starting to write material for the Late Night Review, to which Hugh had given the t.i.tle Memoirs of a Fox Memoirs of a Fox. It irked him that no one seemed to get the reference, but it was a fine enough t.i.tle without having to know Siegfried Sa.s.soon. t.i.tles, you soon discover, are fantastically irrelevant. You could call it, as American Indians were said to do of their babies, the first thing you see out of the window: Running Bull, Long Cloud or Parked Cars. You could even call it 'The First Thing You See Out of the Window'. Actually, I quite like that. One afternoon I found a tattered old exercise book in the Footlights Clubroom. Scrawled on the cover were the words: 'May Week Revue t.i.tle Suggestions'. Over generations members had written down ideas for t.i.tles for shows. My favourite was Captain f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o Hornblower. I always suspected this to be the handiwork of a young Eric Idle. Many years later I asked him; he had no memory of it but agreed that it sounded pretty much his style and was willing to take the credit especially if there was a royalty in it for him.

More or less opposite Caius College stood a restaurant called the Whim. For generations this friendly, un-pretentious establishment had been a favourite student haunt for good cheap suppers and long, lazy Sunday brunches. One day, quite unexpectedly, it closed down and covered itself in scaffolding. Two weeks later it reopened as something I had never seen or experienced before: a fast-food burger bar. Still called the Whim, it was now the home of the new Whimbo Burger, two beef patties smothered in a slightly tangy, slightly sweet creamy sauce, topped with slices of gherkin, slapped into a triple decking of sesame seed bunnage and presented on a styrofoam tray to the accompaniment of chips called 'fries' and whipped-up ice-cream called 'milkshakes'. The tills had pre-set b.u.t.tons on them that allowed the perkily paper-capped a.s.sistants to press a b.u.t.ton for Whimbo, say, and another for milkshake or fries, and all the prices would be automatically registered and calculated. It was like entering an alien s.p.a.ce-s.h.i.+p, and I am sorry to say that I loved it to distraction.

A ritual was established. Hugh, Katie, Kim and I, after spending much of the afternoon in A2 playing chess, talking and smoking, would leave Queens', walk along King's Parade to Trinity Street and into the Whim, then on to the Footlights clubroom, cheerfully swinging our catch, two carrier bags crammed with steaming Whimmery. I could happily manage two Whimbos, a regular order of fries and a banana milkshake. Hugh's standard intake was three Whimbos, two large orders of fries, a chocolate milkshake and whatever Katie and Kim, who were more delicate, had failed to finish. His years of rowing and the enormously high calorific output they had demanded of him had given Hugh a colossal appet.i.te and a speed of ingestion that to this day stagger all who witness them. I do not exaggerate when I say that he can eat a whole 24-ounce steak in the time it would take me, a much faster than average eater myself, to cut and swallow two mouthfuls. When he returned from his daily river work during his Boat Race year, Katie would cook just for him a cottage pie to a recipe for six people on which she would place four fried eggs. He would polish this off before she had a chance to make a dent in her own soup and salad.

I was rather fascinated by the levels of fitness Hugh had attained for the Boat Race. It is much, much longer than a standard regatta course and requires enormous stamina, strength and will to complete.

'At least while you were regularly rehearsing for it,' I remember saying to him once, 'you must have gloried in the feeling of being so fit.'

'Mm,' said Hugh, 'pausing only to point out that we prefer the word "training" to "rehearsing", I have to tell you that the fact is you never really feel fit at all. You train so hard you are constantly in a dopey state of numb torpor. On the river you slap and sting yourself into action and heave to, but when that's over you're torpid again. In fact the whole thing's pointless b.l.o.o.d.y agony.'

'Which is why,' I said, 'it is best left to convicts and galley slaves.'

For all that, how proud I would be if I had ever done something so extraordinarily demanding, so appallingly hard, so wildly extreme as train and row in the Boat Race.

In the clubroom, after the last traces of Whimbo and milkshake had been dealt with, Hugh would play at the piano, and I would watch him, with a further mixture of admiration and envy. He is one of those people with the kind of faultless ear for music that allows him to play anything, fully and properly harmonized, without sight of a score. In fact he cannot really read music. The guitar, the piano, the mouth organ, the saxophone, the drums I have heard him play them all and I have heard him singing with a blues voice that I would sacrifice my legs to have. It ought to be most annoying, but in fact I am insanely proud.

It is a matter of extreme good fortune that, handsome as Hugh is, prodigiously gifted as he is, funny and charming and clever as he is, I have never felt an erotic stirring for him. How catastrophic, how painfully embarra.s.sing that would have been, how disastrous for my happiness, his comfort and any future we might have had together as comedy collaborators. Instead our instant regard and liking for each other developed into a deep, rich and perfect mutual love that the past thirty years has only strengthened. The best and wisest man I have ever known, as Watson writes of Holmes. I shall stop before I get all teary and stupid.

Hugh in Crete. We rented a villa for the purposes of writing comedy.

A cretin in a Cretan setting.

Hugh prepares to demolish me at backgammon. The retsina was satisfyingly disgusting.

Comedy Credits In the clubroom I ran my first Smoker, furiously writing much of the material for it myself, terrified that the evening would run short. The Anthony Blunt Cambridge Spies scandal was still being talked of at the time so amongst other pieces I wrote a sketch about a don, me, recruiting an undergraduate, Kim, for the secret service. I also wrote a series of quickies, mostly in the form of physical sight gags. Everything seemed to go magically well that night, and I was deliciously pleased and filled with a powerful new sense of confidence, as if I had discovered a whole new set of muscles I never knew I had.

A few days later I received a letter in the post from an a.s.sistant on the BBC's successful new sketch show Not the Nine O'Clock News Not the Nine O'Clock News, which was in the process of making household names of Rowan Atkinson and his co-stars. One of the show's producers, an ex-Footlighter called John Lloyd, had been in the audience of my Smoker and seen a quickie which he thought would work well on Not Not. Could they buy it?

In a fever of excitement I typed it out: A man finishes a pee in a urinal. He goes to the sink, washes himself and looks for a towel. There isn't one. He looks for anything he might dry his hands on. Nothing. He sees a man standing by the wall. He approaches him and knees him in the groin. The man doubles up with a huge exhalation of pain in the hot blast of which our hero happily dries his hands.

Yes, I know. On paper it is pretty lame, but it had worked OK that evening in front of the Smoker audience and it worked OK when Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones performed it on Not the Nine O'Clock News Not the Nine O'Clock News a month or so later. Over the years it was repeated many times and included in various Best Of compilations. I got used to receiving, right up to the end of the decade, cheques from the BBC for randomly absurd sums. 'Pay Stephen Fry the sum of 1.07' and so on. The lowest was 14 pence, for sales to Romania and Bulgaria. a month or so later. Over the years it was repeated many times and included in various Best Of compilations. I got used to receiving, right up to the end of the decade, cheques from the BBC for randomly absurd sums. 'Pay Stephen Fry the sum of 1.07' and so on. The lowest was 14 pence, for sales to Romania and Bulgaria.

Just after I had sent off that written version of the quickie Hugh arrived in A2 for his usual chess, chat and coffee. I proudly told him the news that I was now a television writer. His face fell.

'Well, that means we we can't do it now,' he said, his eyes supplying the phrase that his mouth was too polite to add: 'You daft t.i.t.' can't do it now,' he said, his eyes supplying the phrase that his mouth was too polite to add: 'You daft t.i.t.'

'Oh. Oh I hadn't thought of that. Of course. d.a.m.n. Bother. a.r.s.e.'

I had been so excited about selling material to television that it had never occurred to me that it meant we would now not be able to use it ourselves. Not thinking is one of the things I'm best at. All the same, when I saw my name included in the end credits of the episode in which my quickie appeared I did feel huggingly happy.

When the time came for the Late Night Memoirs of a Fox Memoirs of a Fox to go on at the ADC, Emma, Kim, Paul, Hugh and I were in the show and Hugh added to the cast a tall, blonde, slender and extraordinarily talented girl called Tilda Swinton. She was not a part of Cambridge's comedy world, such as it was, but she was a magnificent actress, and her poise and presence made her the perfect judge in an American-courtroom sketch that Hugh had devised with some very slight a.s.sistance from me. to go on at the ADC, Emma, Kim, Paul, Hugh and I were in the show and Hugh added to the cast a tall, blonde, slender and extraordinarily talented girl called Tilda Swinton. She was not a part of Cambridge's comedy world, such as it was, but she was a magnificent actress, and her poise and presence made her the perfect judge in an American-courtroom sketch that Hugh had devised with some very slight a.s.sistance from me.

It is rather perfect to think of the pair of them playing American characters as students on the stage of the ADC. We would have called you mad if you had suggested that one day Hugh would go on to win Golden Globes for playing an American in a television series and that Tilda would win an Oscar for playing an American in a feature film.

Cooke The previous term Jo Wade, who was Secretary of the Mummers, had drawn my attention to the fact that the Lent term would see the fiftieth anniversary of the club, which had been founded in 1931 by a young Alistair Cooke.

'We should have a party,' said Jo. 'And we should invite him.'

Alistair Cooke was known for his thirteen-part doc.u.mentary and book, A Personal History of the United States A Personal History of the United States, and his long-running and greatly loved radio series, Letter From America Letter From America. We wrote to him care of the BBC, New York City, USA, wondering if he had any plans to be in Britain in the next few months and if so whether he might be amenable to being persuaded to be our guest of honour at a dinner for the semi-centennial celebrations of the drama club he may remember founding. A drama club, we added, that was stronger and healthier than ever, having picked up more Fringe Firsts in Edinburgh than any other university drama society in the land.

He wrote back with the news that he had no plans to be in Britain. 'However, plans can be changed. Your letter has so delighted me that I shall fly myself over to be with you.'

In the dining hall of Trinity Hall he sat between me and Jo and talked wonderfully of his time at Jesus College in the late twenties and early thirties. He spoke of Jacob Bronowski, who had the rooms above him: 'He invited me to a game of chess and as we sat down asked me, "Do you play cla.s.sical chess or hypermodern?"' He spoke of his friends.h.i.+p with Michael Redgrave, who succeeded Cooke as editor of Granta Granta, Cambridge's most intelligent student publication. As he spoke, he noted down a few words on his napkin. When it was time to propose the toast to Mummers and its next fifty years, he rose to his feet and, on the basis of those three or four scribbled words, delivered a thirty-five-minute speech in perfect Letter From America Letter From America style. style.

Michael Redgrave and I were most annoyed that women were not allowed to act in plays in Cambridge. We were tired of those pretty Etonians from King's playing Ophelia. We thought the time had come to change all that. I went to the Mistresses of Girton and Newnham and proposed the formation of a serious new drama club in which women might be allowed to take on women's roles. The Mistress of Girton was P. G. Wodehouse's aunt, or cousin or something, I seem to remember, and she was terrifying but kind. Once she and the Newnham Mistress had satisfied themselves that our motives were pure, aesthetic and honourable, which of course they only partly were, they consented to allow their undergraduates to appear in drama, and that is how the Mummers came about. Once the word got out that there was a new club which allowed women to act, hundreds of male undergraduates besieged me, begging to be cast in our first production. I remember holding auditions. One undergraduate from Peterhouse came to see me and recited a speech from Julius Caesar Julius Caesar. 'Tell me,' I said to him as kindly as I could, 'what subject are you reading?' 'Architecture,' he replied. 'Well, you carry on with that,' I said, 'I'm sure you'll be an excellent architect.' He did indeed get a First in Architecture, but whenever I see James Mason now he says to me, 'd.a.m.n. I should have taken your advice and stayed with architecture.'

The fluency, charm and ease with which Cooke spoke held the entire hall completely spellbound. He was one of those people who seemed to have been born to bear witness. Famously he had been in the Amba.s.sador Hotel in Los Angeles in 1968, only yards from Robert F. Kennedy when he was shot down and killed. He told us a story of another brush with political destiny that had taken place during the long vac that followed his setting up of the Mummers.

I went with a friend on a walking tour of Germany. It was the kind of thing one did then. Books strapped up in an arrangement of leather belts and slung over the shoulder as one tramped the meadows of Franconia, stopping off at taverns and guesthouses. We arrived in a small Bavarian valley late one morning and found a perfect beer garden, overlooked by a pretty old inn which tumbled with geraniums and lobelias. As we sat sipping our Steins of lager, chairs were being arranged in rows in the garden. It seemed that some sort of concert was in the offing. By and by two ambulances drew up. The drivers and stretcher-bearers got out, yawned, lit cigarettes and stood by the open tailgates of their vehicles as if it were the most normal thing in the world. People began to arrive, and soon every chair in the beer garden was taken and the dozens who couldn't get a seat stood at the back or sat cross-legged on the gra.s.s in front of the small temporary stage. We simply could not imagine what was going to happen. An enthusiastic crowd, but no musicians and, most strangely of all, those ambulance drivers and stretcher-bearers. At last a pair of huge open-topped Mercedes tourers arrived, crammed like a Keystone Kop car with more uniformed figures than they could comfortably hold. They all leapt out, and one of them, a short man in a long leather coat, marched to the stage and began to speak. Not speaking German at all well, I could not understand much of what he said, but I could make out the repeated phrase "Funf Minuten bis Mitternacht! Funf Minuten bis Mitternacht! Five minutes to midnight! Five minutes to midnight!" It was all most strange. Before long, women in the crowd would swoon and faint, and the stretcher-bearers would start forward to collect them. What kind of speaker was it who could be so Five minutes to midnight! Five minutes to midnight!" It was all most strange. Before long, women in the crowd would swoon and faint, and the stretcher-bearers would start forward to collect them. What kind of speaker was it who could be so guaranteed guaranteed to cause people to faint with his words that ambulances came along beforehand? When the man had finished speaking he strode up the aisle, and his elbow barged against my shoulder as I leant out to see him go, and he backed into me, turned away as he was to take the ovation of the crowd. He immediately grabbed my shoulder to stop me from falling, ' to cause people to faint with his words that ambulances came along beforehand? When the man had finished speaking he strode up the aisle, and his elbow barged against my shoulder as I leant out to see him go, and he backed into me, turned away as he was to take the ovation of the crowd. He immediately grabbed my shoulder to stop me from falling, 'Entschuldigen Sie, mein Herr!' he said. 'Excuse me, sir!' For some years afterwards, whenever he came on in the cinema newsreels as his fame spread, I would say to the girl next to me. 'Hitler once apologized to me and called me sir.'

When the evening was over Alistair Cooke shook my hand goodbye and held it firmly, saying, 'This hand you are shaking once shook the hand of Bertrand Russell.'

'Wow!' I said, duly impressed.

'No, no,' said Cooke. 'It goes further than that. Bertrand Russell knew Robert Browning. Bertrand Russell's aunt danced with Napoleon. That's how close we all are to history. Just a few handshakes away. Never forget that.'

As he left he tucked an envelope in my pocket. It was a cheque for 2,000 made out to the Cambridge Mummers. On a compliment slip with it he had written, 'A small proportion to be spent on production, the rest for wine and senseless riot.'

Chariots 2 One morning in February Hugh came into A2, waving a letter.