Ralph Oswick: We took a mad idea - and ran with it!

AMinister for Common Sense? It sounds like something from Monty Python or a Roald Dahl book.

The Minister for Common Sense meets the Oompa Loompas. Or more likely, a stony-faced official in a labyrinthine novel by Kafka. The words scraping and barrel come to mind.

We felt equally flabbergasted many decades ago when the government merged two seemingly disparate activities by their announcing the appointment of a Minister for Sport and the Arts.

Why, we declared, the only similarity between sport and art was that they both did something that people looked at.

Of course, there is artistry in a goal by Pele. And physical activity in creating a giant painting of a tree by Hockney. But we couldn’t see how the twain would meet. And we suspected impending financial cuts.

That very week the Natural Theatre, of which I was a leading light, had been invited to undertake a residency in the garden of the salubrious Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens.

The weirdly inappropriate ministerial appointment was too good a chance to miss. Practically overnight (we were young, keen and radical) we devised a series of performances that did indeed merge sport with art.

Every morning, dressed in immaculate white coats, we slowly and silently criss-crossed the lawn at the front of the gallery with an old-fashioned white line machine.

The public watched from over the neat hedge that surrounded the space.

It was performance art personified. The mundane placed on a pedestal, inscrutable and unapproachable.

In the afternoon, the gates were thrown open and we organised an interactive sports day utilising the artsy grid we had created in the morning. The public were invited to join in a plethora of competitive activities, which they did with great gusto.

All the usual sports were there, high jump, three-legged race, sack race and so on. Every so often the event would be stopped to allow the Minister for Sport and the Arts (moi, naturellement) to indulge in a posed photo call showing him winning with the aid of certain specialist equipment.

A stepladder for the high jump. An egg glued to a spoon for the egg and spoon race. A lookalike stunt stand-in for the sack race, it being deemed by the minister’s fawning aides to be far too dangerous for ministerial interaction. An early form of wokery? Where was the Minister for Common Sense when you needed her/him/them?

In true Naturals style, the occasion was augmented by a bevy of related comic characters.

There were vicars’ wives serving teas, ladies in big hats, clipboard toting adjudicators, bowler-hatted umpires and seedy gutter press paparazzi.

When the minister tried to claim victory in the under 10s race, some of the (real) dads staged an uprising. Said minister was thoroughly scragged!

It being a satire on parliamentary shenanigans, one of the highlights was the Brown Finger Race.

Competitors had to run a hundred yards, thrust their index finger into a giant jar of Marmite and then run back, slurping on the pungent yeast extract as they did so.

First over the line with a clean finger was the winner.

Ralph Oswick was artistic director of Natural Theatre for 45 years and is now an active patron of Bath Comedy Festival