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The RHLSTP kickstarter got off to possibly the best start we’ve ever had, heading towards £10,000 in the first 24 hours! Still some distance to go and not taking anything for granted, but thanks to those of you who’ve joined in already.
I haven’t seen it yet, but I was delighted to hear about Emma Kennedy coming face to face with Keith Allen, thirty years on from the occasion where he turned up to review our student comedy show for TV, heckled from the start, moved some crash mats, left after one sketch and punched our theatre manager (before reviewing the show with a one word expletive).
I am still trying to process what effects that turbulent Fringe had on my career and my confidence. I think my self-esteem was a ridiculous combination of too high and too low already, but at this sensitive stage, the opprobrium of what seemed like everyone in the profession I wanted to be a part of had a huge impact. And certainly helped make me resistance to stand up and assumption that stand ups held me in low regard. Stewart co-wrote that show, but did not come to the Fringe and so missed this shit storm. For the next ten years we pulled in different directions, him seeing stand up as the better art form and me championing sketch comedy. Stewart was right as it turned out, but you can understand why I might feel less welcome. And why he didn’t feel like part of the battle. Though subconsciously I am sure I saw his desire to get in with the stand ups was a betrayal of what we’d been through that year.
Maybe that’s overblown, maybe we’d have had the division anyway and maybe that tension and pulling in different directions is what made us an effective partnership, until it all spiralled apart.
Certainly though up to that point I had been playing high status characters and was renowned for my sarcastic, but enjoyable rudeness and afterwards I began to be more low status (on and off stage). Maybe again, this would be a good thing for the future double act and though it didn’t deaden my ambition to be a comedian, certainly I lost confidence in my performing abilities. I wouldn’t go back to the Fringe for four years and started to be seen as more of a writer and less of an actor and performer. This was all probably cemented by what happened during the dum show in 92, where again strong personalities undermined me. Perhaps it was just in me.
But Keith Allen’s bullying of some 19 and 20 year old children (at the age of 34) and then his subsequent further bullying of me on TV when we had a right to reply. I recall the general consensus of the stand ups on there was that as public school toffs we would all have guaranteed careers in comedy. I pointed out that only our pianist had gone to public school, but no one was listening to me and my voice had gone so high that only bats could hear me and my face so red that 1980s television cameras were unable to capture my image. Anyway, it’s only recently that I discovered that Allen went to public school himself. The circuit was full of middle-class people pretending to be working class, public schoolboys pretending they went to comps and Oxbridge graduates trying to hide this fact. I was hardly a working class hero myself, but I never pretended to be anything I wasn’t. I am actually quite angry to discover that Allen was such a cunt about this. Maybe he didn’t like public school, but that’s still no reason to behave in this duplicitous manner.
And whilst I understood why the alternative comedians of the 80s railed against Oxbridge (even if they went there), by 1988, stand up had won the battle, Allen was a successful TV star and student revue was unfashionable and in itself did not offer much help in making a career in comedy. So this successful comedian and public schoolboy decided to take out his frustrations against ancient educational institutions (that he’d been a part of) and the TV comedy departments of the 1970s (though he’d had no problems getting on TV himself). In a business where many people view being cool as more important than being honest, he won’t be the last one to twist himself in these kind of knots or use the Donald Trump technique of criticising others for the thing you're guilty of, in the hope that people are stupid enough to be taken in by this schoolboy level act of deflection (I was). But he’d successfully obfuscated all this. I had always assumed he was a genuine punk, fighting his way up from nowhere. I had actually quite admired him for that in spite of everything.
I thought I was over this, but I may not quite be. Someone even approached me about having him on RHLSTP and I was sort of up for it. And maybe it’d be interesting. But I think probably not psychologically a good idea.
Anyway, if Allen had truly believed that the teenagers in front of him were going to head straight into important jobs then I don’t think he would have done what he did. He was safe in the knowledge that the tide had turned and that in all likelihood, like the casts of innumerable Oxford Revues before us, we would disappear from sight, maybe become radio producers, but not be in a position to affect his ascendant career. I would occasionally daydream that I became successful in film and would call him in for an amazing part, before telling him that I was that child that he had bullied and pull the glittering prize away from him.
It was obviously never going to happen and even if it had, he was unlikely to care. And he'd probably just pull the face he'd pulled at me on TV back in 1988 when I'd accused him of being drunk or maybe on drugs.
But after just three short decades one of the cast of that show has risen to a position where they were very briefly Allen’s superior and Emma, it seems, had the pleasure of being called upon to pass judgement on some food Keith Allen had made and maybe even hasten his departure from a reality TV cooking programme. I am not sure she did very much other than pull a disdainful face. And that probably won’t have the emotional impact on Allen that he had on us. But it’s a small victory.
Funnily enough a few days ago, one of the directorial team behind our Oxford Revue had emailed us to point out that Allen was in a play and wondered if we wanted to go along, move some crash mats and try and spoil it. I couldn’t believe that this thought had never crossed my mind before. I’ve actually seen Keith Allen in a play and not even thought to heckle him. If we had had any nouse the cast and crew of that Oxford Revue would have dedicated the rest of our destroyed lives to following Allen around and sabotaging any live performance (or private sexual one, by knocking on his window - we might have been able to prevent the existence of Lily and Alfie Allen - I haven’t done the maths). Why did we just let it go?
And once I had my little nerd army of fans I could have encouraged them to join in the take down of the bully and make his whole life a living Hell.
But we didn't because even when we were 20 we were still mature enough to know that wrecking a performance is a selfish and pathetic thing to do. Even in a one man show you’d be inconveniencing the audience.
What a fucking coward he is. Bad luck mate. Because of that (and in all likelihood you being a shit cook) someone has pulled an aggrieved face about some liver you cooked.
Revenge is a dish best served by the person who you are seeking revenge on, and then you saying it’s not very good.
