My Name is Daphne Fairfax by Arthur Smith

Author:Arthur Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409061892
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER 16. WHEN I WAS THIRTY-FIVE IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR …

STAND-UP COMEDY CAN be the world’s most sociable work. Few workplaces are filled with so many people drinking heavily (although this was not true of the Arsenal changing rooms at the time) and in most jobs when you knock off you are not clapped loudly, nor approached by people who want to be your friend or have sex with you. There is no doubt that an ugly bloke (i.e. me) is more attractive to women after he’s been dazzling the multitudes on stage than when he is sidling up to them from shifty obscurity. There weren’t groupies on the comedy circuit in the rock-cliché style but there were, and are, sexy, suggestible women who like to hang round comedians – hardly surprising given the female preference for a man with a GSOH.1 When Janet Street-Porter declared that ‘Comedy is the new rock and roll’ stand-ups became cooler and sexier. A whole industry was growing around the scene – bookers, agents, drug dealers, production companies – and ‘gag hags’. The gag hags were not often, alas, gagging for me, but for younger, fresher comic blood – acts like Sean Hughes, clever double act Lee and Herring and poor Robert (then Rob) Newman, a sensitive and brilliant man who was almost embarrassed to be so handsome.2

Sarah appeared at a gig in Brentford. Opinionated, funny, and pleasingly bossy, she was new to London and had fallen for the comedy circuit like a teenage girl swooning over a boy band (which in the era of the Bay City Rollers she had also been). Much later, she told me how excited – ‘made up’ – she had been to be invited to the Comedy Store the following night. ‘The Comedy Store! I’d only read about it.’ As a gag hag she was a pitiful failure; it took six months of ardent wooing, a holiday in Tenerife, anguished letters delivered late at night and straightforward begging before she finally joined me between the sheets (sheets, she felt, which could do with a wash). Sarah, from Cardiff via Cornwall, with fashionable big hair and an infectious laugh was a secretary at BBC Radio News, where she bullied reporters and curtsied to guests. To ring her at work I had to say to the BBC switchboard, ‘Could I have The World Tonight, please?’ Not much to ask. Since I was a regular at Broadcasting House in the Light Entertainment department, ‘the corridor of mirth’, we would meet for a smoke and a chat on the roof terrace, with its capacious views across London. Sarah was in permanent pursuit of a tan and if there were any suggestion of sun, her eyes closed and her face, like a flower, turned up to catch every available ray – as if the world was an hour away from eternal darkness.

She came to Edinburgh for Arthur Smith Compères Himself, in which I played a selection of acts. The quietest of

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.