Home Front Alice Pitman
‘I wish Larry Grayson could have been my friend,’ I found myself saying out loud during a recent TV documentary about the late comedian’s life. Mr Home Front rolled his eyes. The old clips, especially from The Generation Game, brought back my childhood far more vividly than those I Love 1970s shows, spoilt for me by the too-young contributors and their manufactured nostalgia for Space Hoppers.
Larry Grayson, though – what a great loss to comedy. A naturally funny, warm-hearted man, he had the Aged P and me in stitches with his innuendos and anecdotes about make-believe friends. His gift was to make everyone feel as though they belonged in his friendly club of neighbours gossiping over the garden fence. The camp asides were as hilarious to behold as Oliver Hardy’s exasperated glance into the camera.
The documentary ignited my fascination with all things Grayson and I found myself looking up old footage on Youtube. Here he is as the subject of This Is Your Life in 1972, overcome when the giants of British Light Entertainment came on to pay their respects: Dora Bryan, Rod Hull and Emu, Danny La Rue, Mike and Bernie Winters…
For a blissful moment, I was seven again, sitting on the immersion heater in my childhood kitchen, watching telly while drinking hot chocolate my brother and I had foamed with a whisk.
Fast forward to Pebble Mill in 1992. His unique style of camp music hall humour having been supplanted by alternative comedy, Larry now cuts a sad figure. Elderly and frail following a bad fall, depression is lightly alluded to. But
he manages to make even that funny. So Larry Grayson would be my fantasy best friend. In my pointless but enjoyable fantasy-best-friend game you can resurrect anyone who has died in the past fifty years. The Aged P and I sometimes play it at the care home. Like me, she tends to favour deceased homosexuals (as well as one or two living ones).
A few years ago it was all Paul O’grady this, Paul O’grady that. But since she started re-reading James Lees-milne’s diaries, the popular comedian and lover of dogs doesn’t get a look in. Lees-milne has even managed to knock Gore Vidal off the Number 1 spot (‘His diaries have kept me sane!’). Somewhere in her top five is always the late writer Arthur Marshall whom she has loved ever since I can remember. And then there is Harold Nicolson, whose diaries have also been a constant companion. The Aged P recalls passing him on the stairs at a party in Chelsea towards the end of his life: ‘He stopped, smiled at me and said, “Funny old world, isn’t it?” ’
My living fantasy best friend would be American essayist David Sedaris. When he is not writing or touring, he obsessively picks up litter thrown from passing cars near his home in Sussex. Once asked by Clare Balding on Radio 4’s Ramblings if there was anything he was desperate to find on his litter-picking forays, he said, ‘A dead body.’ This, combined with Balding’s dismay – ‘Really? Gosh Why?’ ‘Well, it would just be really rewarding’ – had me laughing so much I had to use my asthma inhaler.
The last time Mr H F and I were at a loose end, I suggested that we drive over to Pulborough to see if we could see Sedaris in his high-visibility jacket. ‘Are you mad?’ he said. Even Betty considered this borderline stalkerish. So we went up Box Hill instead and had an argument about where Michael Caine’s house was.
When I asked Mr H F who his fantasy best friend was, he offered up the recently departed Bullseye host Jim Bowen.
‘Oh,’ I said, strangely disappointed by his choice when he could have had anyone. How funny, I told him, that we should both choose dead entertainers from our youth.
‘That’s because they understood their audience,’ he said. ‘Television’s mostly rubbish now. It’s all made by middleclass university graduates.’
‘Like you, you mean?’ (Mr H F is a TV editor). Ignoring my quip, he announced he was off to the Co-op to get a Euromillions ticket: ‘Any requests?’
‘Yes,’ I said, on a comic roll. ‘Shut that door!’