Roger Law - Still Spitting at Sixty - From the 60s to My Sixties, A Sort of Autobiography

Dedication DEDICATION Dedication Epigraph Chapter One: The Lizard of Oz Chapter Two: Fen Boy Chapter Three: University Challenged Chapter Four: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Yob Chapter Five: The Sixties Chapter Six: Stars and Bars Chapter Seven: The Cosmic Couch Chapter Eight: Luck and Flaw Chapter Nine: Here’s One I Made Earlier Chapter Ten: Hit and Miss Chapter Eleven: Spitting Imperialism Chapter Twelve: Trash for Cash Chapter Thirteen: Not Quite Dead Yet Chapter Fourteen: The Blue Beyond Chapter Fifteen: Change of Life Chapter Sixteen: Chinese Takeaway Chapter Seventeen: Berk and Wimp Chapter Eighteen: Walkabout Chapter Nineteen: Home and Away Chapter Twenty: No Worries Acknowledgements Bibliography About the Author About the Publisher This book is dedicated to Richard Bennett, who is as essential to this sorry tale as Jiminy Cricket is to Pinocchio. Why didn’t I listen?

Epigraph EPIGRAPH Epigraph Chapter One: The Lizard of Oz Chapter Two: Fen Boy Chapter Three: University Challenged Chapter Four: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Yob Chapter Five: The Sixties Chapter Six: Stars and Bars Chapter Seven: The Cosmic Couch Chapter Eight: Luck and Flaw Chapter Nine: Here’s One I Made Earlier Chapter Ten: Hit and Miss Chapter Eleven: Spitting Imperialism Chapter Twelve: Trash for Cash Chapter Thirteen: Not Quite Dead Yet Chapter Fourteen: The Blue Beyond Chapter Fifteen: Change of Life Chapter Sixteen: Chinese Takeaway Chapter Seventeen: Berk and Wimp Chapter Eighteen: Walkabout Chapter Nineteen: Home and Away Chapter Twenty: No Worries Acknowledgements Bibliography About the Author About the Publisher ‘I can only see it going one way, that’s my way. How it’s actually going I have no idea.’ With apologies to Nick Wilshire (boxer)

Chapter One: The Lizard of Oz

Chapter Two: Fen Boy

Chapter Three: University Challenged

Chapter Four: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Yob

Chapter Five: The Sixties

Chapter Six: Stars and Bars

Chapter Seven: The Cosmic Couch

Chapter Eight: Luck and Flaw

Chapter Nine: Here’s One I Made Earlier

Chapter Ten: Hit and Miss

Chapter Eleven: Spitting Imperialism

Chapter Twelve: Trash for Cash

Chapter Thirteen: Not Quite Dead Yet

Chapter Fourteen: The Blue Beyond

Chapter Fifteen: Change of Life

Chapter Sixteen: Chinese Takeaway

Chapter Seventeen: Berk and Wimp

Chapter Eighteen: Walkabout

Chapter Nineteen: Home and Away

Chapter Twenty: No Worries

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the Author

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

THE LIZARD OF OZ

I put my money on a blue-tongued lizard called Eternal Youth, and lost a packet. To be fair, it had legged it bravely in the early stages of the race, but seemed to lose its way around the halfway stage before completely running out of puff. It eventually came in a distant, and dismal, fifth.

My instinctive first thought was that my lizard had been drugged or ‘nobbled’. Such practices were not unheard of in Eulo near Cunnamulla, Queensland, where the Lizard Race ranks as one of the highest events in the annual sporting calendar. But, on reflection, I think that Eternal Youth simply buckled under the weight of my expectations.

It was perhaps not eternal youth I was after (well, too late for that), but it was true that I had come to Australia in a quest for a new lease of life.

A few months earlier I had joined the ranks of the functionally obsolete – a fast-expanding tribe, composed of people whose main purpose in life has expired through such mechanisms as redundancy, forced early retirement or just sheer bad luck. Yet these are people who still, if the actuarial tables are to be believed, have a lot of existence in prospect. And no clear idea of what to do with it.

I found myself very thoroughly washed up when the satire bubble burst and I was obliged to dismantle the engine of public mockery called Spitting Image which I had spent most of the previous twenty years carefully assembling. For all its faults, some of which I am now ready to admit, and even elaborate upon, Spitting Image was an engrossing way of life. The business of squeezing anarchic, disrespectful humour into a series of high-pressure deadlines meant that I was rarely afflicted with the problem of leisure. If I ever had a day off I can’t remember it because I was either asleep or seeking refuge in tired and emotional behaviour.

The end was not exactly of my choosing, though I always knew there had to be one. Fashions in satire, like anything else, come and go, and ours could be no exception. But when our satirical fad was over it exposed an unusually large number of rudderless satirists with a tendency to live on. Fortunately, most of those who worked for me churning out the puppets and other grotesques in the Spitting Image workshop were lucky enough to be exploited child labourers, fresh out of art school in many cases. When our show was done they were able to go on and find new, and usually more profitable, avenues for their talents in showbiz or the arts. Youth was on their side. But the way ahead for the boss, poor soul, was not so evident. Nobody’s heart bled for him, of course. After all I’d had what is called ‘a bloody good run’. But there I was, jobless at 56, too young to retire and too old to be retrained, and without any discernible talent for domesticity or addressing a golf ball.

As the business wound down, I had naturally explored other options. I did not feel quite ready for the job of marshalling the supermarket trolleys outside my local Safeway (though I have it in mind for later on), so I looked around in what might be called my field of art education. A couple of art college interviews convinced me, and my interviewers, that I could never achieve the level of bureaucratic expertise required these days to bring on the young. I was nonetheless attracted by the Royal College of Art’s suggestion that I might set up a new animation course for advanced students. But developments in animation are now incredibly fast and this, combined with problems of establishing a new set-up, would, I realized, make for a job as taxing as Spitting Image had been. I was just not ready for another ordeal.

I felt fit enough, but mentally I was knackered. It was slowly dawning on me that what I wanted was not so much a specific job but a rekindled enthusiasm. The stuff I had before Spitting Image inexorably turned me into a harassed, ‘kick-ass’ capitalist. The trouble was that I had become way too business-wise for my own good. There were, I felt, artistic sides of me virtually neglected since my art school days which I would really like to develop now that I had the time and opportunity. But the business side of me said, ‘Forget it. There’s no market.’ And was I really prepared to go traipsing round the galleries and art establishments with my folder of fledgling menopausal artwork trying to drum up commissions from people whose fathers might have worked for me, or even been fired by me? The mere prospect seemed fraught with possibilities of satire at my expense. Perish the thought.

To begin again, it seemed I really needed a place or circumstance where I had no reputation and effectively no past to live down or up to. Hence my decision to transport myself to Australia.

As it happened, my day in Eulo was anything but blighted by the poor performance of Eternal Youth. Among those who commiserated with me about my lizard’s lack of staying power was a tall, elderly man wearing a hat festooned with crocodile teeth, who turned out to be the town’s most famous citizen, the Aboriginal writer Herb Wharton.