The Times Magazine – 1996

By Richard E Grant.

REVIEWS: To read or not to read? The problem is: if you don’t, you are guaranteed to get the following call: “WHATEVER you do, DON’T worry about that trash in The Guardian, and fancy taking objection to using capitals and exclamation marks!!!?” Well, until the call came, I was totally unaware that my book had been so critically annihilated in one corner, while being given “life off” most everywhere else. How galling it must be to that scribbler that it should be in the charts.

If you kid yourself that they don’t matter, or that nobody reads them or cares anyway, or that they will be classically “soaked in vinegar and loaded up with chips by dusk”, you are made of sterner stuff than I. Short of sticking your head down the nearest volcanic plug-hole, you get to hear, either way.

The last pit-stop for performing and book-signing was held in a large tent in Hay-on-Wye. Interviewed by my mentor Bruce Robinson, whose usual modus vivendi of insult and subterfuge was flummoxed by having to praise me in front of 400 strangers. Not accustomed to such uncharacteristic droolings, he attempted to work himself up into a “rant” only to find himself quagmired in praise for Roy Hattersley, whom he’d witnessed on the same podium the day before. Clearly, his unusually low bile-level had had enough and, upon seeing the numbers of people lined up to get a signature, he topped-up with: “JEEZUS! It’s like a queue to get out of POLAND.”

QUEUES I HAVE KNOWN.

Half-term, in a Provencal bank in a remote village, sotto voce voices up front at the counter. Ruptured by the entry of two “Anglais”. First heard yelling in the interim glassed “holding-zone” that is part of banking security procedure. You buzz the entry button, then momentarily become a live mannequin in the secure glass box before being bleeped through and into the queue. Only these fellow country persons have never been quarantined like this before and are now in a aquarium of panic.

Once released, the middle-aged siblings are huffing and puffing trying to locate a lone traveller’s cheque. My daughter asks me something and before I can answer, two faces are nostril-hair-close: “ARE YOU ENGLISH?” they bleat, as if I was deaf. Followed by a garbled double-act of “drove down all the way, never been to France, got an address of a distant cousin, radiator’s blown, you see, can’t speak the lingo, just a bit of wee-wee.”

Absolutely barking. When they finally make it to the front, the French notes are counted out once by the cat hair-covered sister, shuffled over to the bewildered brother, who licks, thumbs and slows his way through the pile, returns them to sis, who gives them their third rifling. By which stage the line has lengthened and les Francais all sport abattoir expressions appropriate to an imminent mad-cow culling. Collective French lip-pursing and puffing all round, in that idiosyncratic baby-fart way, as the couple “MERCI MERCI” their way to their steaming heap.

I ASSUMED THAT, as Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon 27 years ago, it wouldn’t be too much to expect banks and post offices to have come up with a solution to the customer “problem”. See if this correlates with your time in there. Between noon and three, when business stampedes in, why is it that eight cashier windows are peopled, but only two are in operation? Meanwhile, the drone in Foreign Exchange balefully stares into the middle distance.

This time I stupidly broke rank with the snake of pensioners, suits and pie-shop owners standing in line to ask “WHY?” Jolted from comatosia, a pair of eyeballs swiveled in disbelief at this insurrection. The explanation was a verbal hieroglyph. “So there’s no way you might help quench this queue then, Sir?” “Uh, you could speak to the manager, only he’s on his lunch break, but if you came back in an hour…..”, by which time gaskets have blown somewhere and my legs have Colonel Bogey-ed me home. To discover a glossy stash of junk mail extolling the joys of mortgage, overdraft, double loan and triplicate non-interest info, accompanied by pictures of smiley couples holidaying, DIY-ing and stroking their new hatchbacks.

“NO FOREPLAY IN PUBLIC PLACES.” God forbid this sign should ever politically correct itself alongside “Keep off the grass, please”. ‘Tis the season for’t, man! As is our wont, the merest glimmer of summer and every lunch-hour scrap of green, common and garden is a flesh-feast, as bodies are offered up like it was National Barbecue Day. At this time of the month, though, the exposed acres of marshmellowey flesh are still dough-coloured and pre-boiled. The notion that we are a nation in “reserve” is confounded by the multiple Last Tango in Paris posters cloned around any park. (That pic of Marlon and Maria, face to face, legs to legs.) Although it has to be said that the butter remains firmly slapped between the curling sarnies rather than anyone’s crevices.

Stopped and gaped at a man who, having just fed the ducks, gripped his partner’s face and proceeded to suck and munch back and forth across it, as if she were a corn on the cob. Surrounded by pigeons and transfixed toddlers.

A Greek holiday was once indelibly inked by the nightly mantra extolled by a newly released Mancunian woman (trussed in an overripe combo of lace, Lycra and scuffed high-heelery): “Aave koom a long, long way fur this gluss of Bor-tar-ree Row-zay, Stavros!”

“DADDY, YOU KNOW that song ‘Scaramooch, scaramooch, fandango’ – What does it mean?”

“Not a clue. Where did you hear it?”
“I saw it on TV sung by that funny-looking man with a little beard.”
“How old was he?”
“Very, very old.”

Rapido mental shifty through the just-and-over-fifties, as Elton, Mick, Keith, Roger and co blip beardlessly by. Stumped, she then thrilled forth a semblance of the tune and Freddie Mercury’s name synapsed back. And I was instantly driving down the 20-year memory motorway between Swaziland and Cape Town, where I was heading to start university, with Bohemian Rhapsody, the number one song beamed around the planet.

“Freddy Mercury had a moustache – is that what you mean?”
“NO!” she snorts, her seven-year-old’s worth of irritation showing at the blatant stupidity of her ignorant adult. “I told you, it was a little BEARD.”
“What was he wearing?”

“A safari-suit, standing around a camp-fire and jigging.”
This incarnation of the late Mr Mercury struck me as truly surreal, for he was forever spangling about in Lurex and Lycra, but his brand of “camp” bore little relation to a night out with the Scouts.
“What kind of jigging?”

Her patience with this Sherlocking was spent. “It doesn’t matter….”
Fast forward to a jaw-slackening gape when I heard the familiar strains emanating from the late-night box, and seeing “an old guy with a little beard round the camp fire” scaramooshing his way through every boundary of the unacceptable, as the left side of my brain went elementary. “My dear, it’s Rolf Harris.”

Now, were this a paradigm of how history was writ, whose version is valid? An iconic moment for me, a decrepit nonsense to her. Freddie IS dead.

LEST I CURMUDGEON myself into a corner, let me tell you about a half-hour sitcom that impromptu’d forth in the Hertz hire shop at Nice airport. The chief pleasure derived from witnessing someone else getting publicly roasted. You wait in an un-airconditioned Portakabin that is a human microwave. Staffed by six legs, four of which belong to trainees who constantly have to refer every customer request to the two legs in charge. With the result that you get this bizarre relay of conversation that suggests we are all separated by continents rather than by a narrow counter.

In stomps a Jiminy Cricket lookalike whose nostrils are flared at roughly the same angle as his pants. “I TOLD you, I DEMAND a BIG CAR. I have travelled all over the world and NEVER had to drive a small car, so I want to know where my big car is”, shoving his shrunken-self to the front of the line.

Now, it does not take a rocket scientist to notice that there is nothing larger than a Lada in the fleet outside, but he is having none of it. My wife enlarges an eyeball in the direction of his head, and for the first time I notice the savagery of his toupee. A concrete-coloured cowpat which, in the heat of his fury, has clearly broken loose of its moorings.

He has court-martialled them all into the equatorial forecourt and is pointing and “voila-ing” at any four-wheeler larger than a Mini Metro. He Rumpelstiltskins himself into one and can barely see over the dashboard, and catapults out. What ensues looks like seriously threatening Anglo-French relations – which, in the light of vache-folle disease, is risking it.

Everything is now in fast French, until finally Yvonne secures keys to “somezing biggar” in a last-gasp attempt to restore that long-forgotten notion that “Zer customer eez alwayz right”.

MOTHER ASKS HER two-year-old what he would like to wear today. “Ice-cream” is his emphatic reply, as if hoping it might just slip her notice.

I AM OFF TO IRELAND to start filming and require a couple of wigs. Stevie, the wig-mistress, arrives with plastic bags full of hair. In order to get a mould of my skull, she wraps my head up in clingfilm, Sellotapes back and forth, felt-pens on the hairline and, having made a sort of giant condom of me, pulls it off, shows me a picture of what the finished effect ought to look like, packs up and says: “See you over a pint of Guinness.” When I tell her I am incapable of keeping down a teaspoon’s-worth, the depth of her expression has me worrying. “That’s like going to Vegas and declaring you don’t gamble.”

“PLEASE WRITE a quote next to your name in the book, please.” Oblige with “Chin-chin”, causing instant blush and bewilderment.
“Why did you write that?”
“It’s another way of saying cheers.”
“Oh! Well, it means ‘Penis-penis’ in Japanese.”
Sayonara.