Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘Could I?’

He passed Jeeves in the Offing over to me. I am looking at that very copy now, it is on the desk next to my keyboard. On the front we see a photograph of a beautifully dressed Ian Carmichael wearing a monocle (a source of much debate amongst Wodehousians -there is only one actual reference to Bertie wearing an eye-glass, and that was in a painting of him which became a poster, but you really don’t want to know that) a red carnation is in his buttonhole and a wonderfully dim good-natured look of startlement beams though his exceptionally blue eyes. Above the tubby Penguin that stands next to the title is printed ‘3/6’ (which was shortly to become known as seventeen and a half pence) and on the back we read:

The cover shows Ian Carmichael as Bertie Wooster in the B.B.C. series ‘The World of Wooster’ (Producer: Michael Mills, by arrangement with Peter Cotes.

Photographer Nicholas Acraman)

Many years later I worked for Michael Mills, who was a formidably shrewish and frightening man. There was very little he had not done in the world of Light Entertainment and he did not take kindly to unpunctual actors. I was booked for a part, very early on in my ‘career’ on a half-hour comedy called Chance in a Million which starred Simon Callow, whom I was desperate to meet, since his book Being an Actor had been a huge inspiration at university. I had not known that Teddington Lock, where Thames TV studios had their being, took well over an hour to get to from Islington, where I was living at the time, and had arrived at least half an hour late. Michael Mills, who was the kind of man who wore spacious cardigans and half-moon spectacles that dangled on black string, gave me a withering look and told me that he would be writing to my agent about the unprofessional hour at which I had arrived. He has died since I believe and I never got a chance to talk to him about the making of that 1960s ‘World of Wooster’ series.

It is strange to touch this book now and know that it was handed to me, lazily and charmingly, by Rick Carmichael more than a quarter of a century ago. Stranger still, I suppose, in the light of the fact that I was to spend four years myself playing Jeeves in another television adaptation of those same stories.

‘Anything else?’ Rick said.

‘Oh!’ I jerked up from my reverent gaze at the book. ‘Oh, yes. The Unbelievable String Band is better than Jethro Tull.’

Carmichael smiled, ‘Er, I think you mean “The Incredible String Band”, don’t you?’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Damn. Yes.’

‘Right,’ said Carmichael. ‘You tell Guy that Carol King is better than Fairport Convention.'

I can’t remember how many times I shuttled between Carmichael and Caswell delivering insulting messages on the subject of their favourite music, but it meant that somehow I became more or less accepted early on by these two and by Rick’s best friend, Martin Swindells, who was known as Mart and sometimes as Dog. They were also friendly with a boy called Roger Eaton, who was red-haired and called Roo. They were cool, this group, Guy, Rick, Mart and Roo. They knew more about rock music than I thought I could ever, ever learn. They were cool and they were amiable. They were not interested in status, ambition, gossip about the staff or schooly, status-bound things. They didn’t take joy in teasing the weak or sucking up to the strong. They liked music and they liked fun. One of them, I won’t say which in case their parents are reading this, showed me the first ever joint I had ever seen. He didn’t let me smoke it, but he showed it to me. For all I know it wasn’t a joint at all, just a cigarette rolled up to look like one.

Rock music, of course, was not the same as rock and roll. Nor was it the same as pop. Since the demise of The Beatles, pop and the single-play record had become singularly unhip, at public schools at any rate. Albums were where it was at. Albums meant Pink Floyd, Van de Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Genesis (nice Charterhouse boys with a cockney drummer) and – at the folksy end – Jethro Tull, Procul Harum, Steeleye Span and, bless them, The Incredible String Band.

A lot of that rock would now be called Heavy Metal: Uriah Heep, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath were, unless I’ve leapt ahead of myself, already going, and cool people already knew about David Bowie whose ‘Major Tom’ had flopped the year before but was a coming man. There was a rumour too that Long John Baldry’s old keyboard player, Elton John, had produced an album that was so far out it was far in.

These were things I did not know.

There was one band, however, that I soon came to know everything about. About halfway through my first term, Rick Carmichael ran out of cash and decided to hold a Study Sale, an auction in which all the stuff, gear and rig he could do without became available to the highest bidder. I came away from this sale with the complete set of BBC tie-in Jeeves Penguins and an LP, the very album whose first track ‘Hunting Tigers Out in India’ had been playing when I had first knocked on Rick’s door. It was called Tadpoles and was the work of The Bonzo Dog DooDah Band.

I had heard of them because they had enjoyed their one and only Number One hit with ‘The Urban Spaceman’ while I was still at Stouts Hill. This album was most strange and wonderful to look upon. It had holes pierced in the eyes of the band members on the front and, inside, a card which you could slide backwards and forwards, which made all kinds of shapes pass in and out of the blank eye sockets. Below the title Tadpoles was the phrase…

Tackle the toons you tapped your tootsies to in Thames TV’s Do Not Adjust Your Set

… which, it grieves me to say, meant nothing whatever to me, our house not being an ITV house. I am not even sure if my parents’ television could get ITV at this stage. I remember, to divert for a moment, that when we had moved up to Norfolk, aged nine and seven, Roger and I had been desperate to watch television that first evening because the week before, in Chesham, we had seen the first ever episode of

Doctor Who and were already hopelessly hooked. Something had happened in transit to the mahogany Pye television with its tiny grey screen and it wouldn’t work. We missed that second episode and I grieve still at the loss.

Do Not Adjust Your Set, I now know was an early evening comedy show which had featured Michael Palm, Terry Jones and Eric Idle, who had by this time already gone on to join John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which was just beginning to seep into our consciousnesses. The music for Do Not Adjust Your Set was provided by a very strange collection of art-students and musicians who called themselves The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. By the time I began seriously to get into them, they had dropped their Doo-Dah and were just The Bonzo Dog Band. The two leading lights of the band were the immensely skilled musical pasticheur Neil Innes (who continued his association with the Python people by writing the songs for and appearing in The Rutles and The Holy Grail and so on), and the late, majestic and remarkable Vivian Stanshall, one of the most talented, profligate, bizarre, absurd, infuriating, unfathomable and magnificent Englishmen ever to have drawn breath.

Stanshall (Sir Viv to his worshippers) died in a fire a few years ago and I felt terrible because I hadn’t been in touch with him for years – ever since I had helped him out a little by investing in a musical he had written called Stinkfoot which played, to generally uncomprehending silence, in the Shaw Theatre, London some ten or so years ago.