Only When I Laugh: My Autobiography by Paul Merton

Author:Paul Merton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781448146307
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2014-09-24T23:00:00+00:00

COCKLES: We settled down in a rude hut. I spent my time thinking up innuendos while Ted went out catching crabs. Of course, children were out of the question because I don’t have a womb.

PAUL: I have.

COCKLES: But you’re not normal.

PAUL: At least I’m not married to a man.

NEIL: Are you telling me that my father batted for the other side?

COCKLES: Not only that, but he used to open the bowling.

PAUL: (Pause) I heard a whisper he took the stumps home as well.

On radio it’s very straightforward to conjure up some atmosphere with a few well-chosen sound effects. An eighteenth-century pirate galleon is firmly fixed in the mind’s eye with judicious use of a seagull’s cry, a ship’s bell and the sound of wind in the rigging.

One particular sound effect I was extremely pleased with took place in a late Victorian music hall. It was a speciality act that exploded poodles to music. The description sounds cruel but the sound effect didn’t. Some pleasant fairground music was interrupted by the sound of a dog bark, followed rapidly by an explosion. It’s a gag very much in the style of The Goon Show and the technical team put together a funny sequence of noises. La, La, La, La, Woof, Woof, Boom.

Radio can magic up anything, and having the script in front of you takes away a whole level of worrying about memorising the words. We entered each show with quiet confidence and the reaction was deeply gratifying.

To continue my convalescence at the end of the year, Julie and I planned to go to Australia where her mother still lived. Julie would travel there before me and I would arrive three days later, just before Christmas Eve.

By this point I had long left the full-length plaster behind, although the removal of that heavy object proved to be a traumatic affair. It happened at St George’s, Tooting. The procedure was carried out with brutal indifference by a young man wearing a white coat and armed with a mini buzz saw. I don’t know whether he was being paid by the leg, but he certainly wasn’t hanging about. Without any consideration for my sensitivities, he tore into the cast with his trusty revolving blades as if he was an expert sheep shearer going for the world speed record. I cried out because I thought the buzzing blade could so easily tear into my flesh, but what my tormentor knew and I didn’t was that my right leg had atrophied considerably in the weeks while I was in plaster, and there was a huge gap between me and the cast.

This horrendous experience neatly bookended the whole broken leg episode for me. The application of the plaster had also proved to be an endurance test back in Edinburgh, when it had first slapped on to the leg with some vigour. But now, that was all behind me. I still needed a stick to get about, but undoubtedly a few weeks in the Australian sun would boost my recovery.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.