Authors: Dawn French
Or so I thought. Cut to about three years later. I was in a queue at the bank in Swiss Cottage. I was still banking there
although
I had long since left the area. I was inching my way slowly towards the front of the queue when out of the blue I heard my name pierce the stuffy quiet. ‘Dawn! God, darling, how great to see you!’ I turned round and it was him, the Golden One, advancing upon me with his arms wide open, gathering me up like a precious thing and giving me a huge, effusive, loving bear hug. I found myself in a situation I would have given good money to be in just a few years earlier. Now I’m not saying that things changed so completely and so utterly because I was by then working with the Comic Strip making eight films a year and we were always casting. No, I’m not saying that. But. It was odd.
And here’s
another
odd thing. The same man, who had spurned me, was, shockingly, struck by lightning. Actual, real lightning. On his head. From God. Y’know, God, who I would later come to be the first female showbiz representative of on earth? Now, Dad, I’m not saying that it’s
very
unwise for any man to ever actively resist my charms. But it
is
weird, isn’t it?!
HOW THE KNOB
did we get away with calling ourselves teachers? I still see people now, grown women with children, especially in the Camden Town area, who shout after me, ‘Miss French!’ A clanking reminder of an extraordinary year you and I spent teaching at Parliament Hill School for Girls. 1980/81, wasn’t it? Dear Lord, we were both just out of ‘school’ ourselves.
Parliament Hill. A big girls’ comprehensive between Camden and Highgate, set in beautiful grounds backing on to fields, with William Ellis boys’ school right next door. Huge and well equipped, (Parliament Hill that is, not the boys), it was a massive education machine stuffed with boisterous, confident kids and dedicated staff. I was a bit intimidated by how sprawling it was, but it helped that I’d had my final teaching practice there, so it was more of a natural progression than getting a new job in an entirely unfamiliar school. My teaching practice before that had been up the road at a big co-ed comp called Ackland Burley which had one of the most inspirational dance/drama departments in the country, so I had hoped Parly would be the same.
Well, it wasn’t quite, was it? There
was
a small basement studio – that bit was good – but the staffroom for our department was in the old toilets next door. Our cupboards were toilet stalls, with toilets still there. We balanced files on washbasins and we made a little seating area under the mirrors at the end. This attempt at cosiness was sort of futile since every uttered word
pinged
back at us from the mostly cracked tiles on the walls and floor. It was a cold, damp, smelly, depressing place wasn’t it? I think the atmosphere had slowly eroded the head of the drama department’s enthusiasm for the subject and she wasn’t coping so well. She had some ill health and I was quite often thrust into her position. Me, the rookie newby twit, in charge of all the O-level, CSE and A-level drama courses, about which I knew nada. Thank God you came in part-time, to help with this frightening situation. You really helped me out Babe, and into the bargain we had an opportunity to spend more time together, cementing our friendship even further, united in fear and confusion. Quite often, I would spend the evening learning the theory I was teaching the next day from the course textbooks. I was about two pages ahead of my students at any one time. And what students! The older A-level kids were bright and inquisitive and quite a challenge – after all, I was only four or five years older than them. I spent the entire time bluffing that I was dead assured and supremely in control. For most of the time I worked with them, I was really wishing we could abandon the studying and gossip about telly and boyfriends. The O-level and CSE groups were the main ones we taught together. What a hoot! Once we could get them
into
the studio we could have great sessions. But getting them there wasn’t so easy. Parly had a culture of repeated truancy among certain groups of students. It wasn’t unusual for me to go scouting about in the fields or the shops or even to their homes to herd them in like a sheepdog. I felt that if I could just gather them up, I would at least have a fair chance of persuading them to stay. I had to throw in the towel eventually when it turned out I was spending more time on the
prowl
than in the studio teaching. Of course, what I later realised was that if the classes could be fun, or interesting enough, word would spread and the attendance figures would rise anyway. I learned this from the completely fab PE department where I found two mad but inspirational teachers, Rosie and Gill, employing this technique: Connect with the kids properly and they will slowly come to respect you and turn up regularly. For drama classes, like PE, teamwork is crucial – there’s no production if there’s no cast, there are no exam pieces without groups working together, and there’s no ‘group’ without people. Many would fail if a few let them down, so it was my dearest wish to get the full complement of kids into the studio as often as possible, and enable them to feel a sense of achievement when their group pieces were well received.
I know we both found that the actual work, when they turned up, was mindblowing. I very quickly had to put all my middle-class ideas of what would make a good dilemma for a drama group to tackle away in the bottom drawer marked ‘shit ideas’. These kids had real-life dilemmas to draw upon, the likes of which I couldn’t begin to imagine. Issues to do with race, religion, weapons, drugs, bullying and abuse were way out of my experience, and yours. We stood agog while a kaleidoscope of their real lives was revealed to us. They put my lesson plans to shame. The biggest ‘dilemma’ I had written on my teaching suggestion cards was: ‘The council is planning on putting a motorway through our village. What are we going to do?’ What village? What motorway? Everything we planned was utter bollocks, and pretty much irrelevant. Some of the kids suggested their own dilemmas, like, ‘How do you stop your mother shooting
up
in front of your younger brother and sister?’ or, ‘My dad beat me up till I passed out, but I don’t want him to be taken away otherwise me and my sister will go into care.’ The classes often turned into a kind of group therapy where the kids gave each other advice, and they were the ones who really knew
what
advice, much better than us. So it was proper drama, real-life drama, being talked about and acted upon right there in front of us. Slowly the drama space became a place where kids would come to hang out at lunchtime and after school; they would offer to help clear away or whatever, just as a chance to talk a bit more. It was then that I realised they were using it as a sanctuary and that we could sometimes be more useful to them as a safe place than as a drama studio. Not all the kids did this of course, but the few who needed to are the ones I remember so clearly.
The younger classes, the 11- and 12-year-olds, were my absolute favourites. They had only recently arrived at ‘big’ school and hadn’t learned yet to be ‘cool’ and suppress their excitement for the subject. Their imaginations were bursting, and since there were no awful exams to stunt their enjoyment, they would trip down the stairs like a herd of happy gazelles with their new shoes clacking like hooves on the stone steps. They found it hard to keep still or listen, but when they did we had fantastic adventures, didn’t we? I don’t think either of us needs much encouragement to play, and in these early school years, before the tyranny of the constant assessment begins, the play aspect is what’s important.
I do remember getting it wrong a couple of times, though. Once, we were doing a big improvisation about Captain Cook discovering Australia, a voyage of adventure on the high seas, on
a
big old ship built from chairs and tables in the studio. We had lookouts, and someone at the helm (a plastic hula hoop) and tots of rum (Vimto) and sailors cooking (chopped lettuce) in the galley and sails (sheets) being hoisted and pirates and all sorts. It was quite a project and took me some effort to keep my eye on everything that was happening. One particular kid was selected to be keel-hauled as punishment by her bosun for not coiling the ropes properly. We had talked before about what this involved, dropping her over the side and dragging her under the hull (canteen tables) at the widest part of the ship, where she could scrape off the barnacles on the way. So, we tied a rope round her middle and put her over the side, which, in effect, meant jumping off a chair and then scrabbling under the tables. I was distracted at that point by someone in the crow’s nest shouting out she’d seen land ahoy! We all busied ourselves getting our galleon into port where I noticed our keel-haul victim sitting, arms and legs crossed, very cross indeed, under the table. I realised we had abandoned her at a crucial moment and tried to encourage my deckhands to ‘Quick, pull her up, pull her up, me hearties!’ But she sat resolutely still. ‘No point,’ she said glumly. ‘I’ve drowned. And you’ll have to tell my mum.’
Another time we did a term-long project about space travel, working out what we would need to bring, how long we were to be away, what our mission would be, what our spacesuits would look like, what we’d write in our farewell letters to our families, how we’d build our rocket, and so on. The last lesson of term was our lift-off day, signifying the end of the project. The kids had worked really hard on it, making costumes, painting the set, etc. The class was due after lunch and during the
break
I was summoned to the staffroom door where a little 11-year-old was in floods of tears. ‘What’s up?’ I asked. ‘I can’t go. I just can’t. I don’t want to leave my mummy and daddy and my newts. Someone else can have my spacesuit. Take someone else instead …’ It was a good lesson for me. Kids develop their imaginary awareness at different ages. The whole class understood that what we were doing was pretend, except one little mite who was a tiny bit less mature than the others, and who had spent the whole term dreading this moment and felt guilty about bottling out of genuine space travel … What a bloody coward.
Another enjoyable idea that backfired on me was when I implemented the ‘rule’ that all students should bow to me at the start of class and repeat the following: ‘We beg you, Your Majesty, to teach us, and teach us … NOW!’ The kids loved it, and we always had a laugh doing it, it helped to focus them at the beginning of the lesson and it was a kind of unsubtle comedy message that I was in charge. The kids got it, but some of the parents didn’t. I was hauled in front of the head for that when one of the parents complained that her daughter was being forced to be my ‘subject’. As I say, people develop at different times and some parents’ comedy development was severely stunted. Luckily the head had a twinkle in her eye when she reprimanded me.
The head was wonderful, wasn’t she? You and I always had a laugh with her. Mrs McKeown. Is that the right spelling? She was a relatively new head but very popular, as I remember. She was very helpful to me when I had to make a crucial decision, and actually, on reflection, her shrewd judgement was the deciding factor in my choosing to pursue a career in comedy.
About halfway through that first teaching year, Jennifer called me up and said she had seen an advert in the
Stage
looking for women to perform at a new comedy/cabaret venue called the Comic Strip inside a strip club at the Boulevard Theatre in Soho. The audition was hilarious, mainly because we only had a couple of seconds of material, from the silly sketches we’d done at college. It wasn’t as if we’d honed it into a perfect showpiece, because neither of us had intended to take it any further. I was teaching daily with you; Fatty was living on the dole and spending most of her day drinking and doing crosswords and having a lovely lazy bohemian time in shabby old Chelsea with Jobo. Her attitude to the advert was, ‘Hey, why not?’ So we shuffled along to the tiny red theatre in Soho, to find the auditions in progress, with a man on the stage juggling lobster pots in a comedy way. We did our Americans sketch, not very well, and lo and behold we were in! Only later did we realise that
any
women who had walked in the door on that day would have got the job. They were desperate for women in the line-up of an all-male comedy group, which consisted of Alexei Sayle, Ade Edmondson, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson, Arnold Brown and occasional others like Keith Allen and Chris Langham. So our qualification for the job on that auspicious audition day was, basically, breasts. We had those in plentiful supply between the two of us, so – result. This meant I was teaching during the day, covering for the head of department who was ill, then moonlighting onstage in Soho,
every
night of the week, meeting a whole new gang of people and, by sheer luck, becoming part of a group at the forefront of what was mistakenly, to my mind, labelled ‘alternative’ comedy. The Comic Strip show gathered
momentum
and popularity, and became the place to be if you liked comedy. Robin Williams performed with us, and people like Jack Nicholson and Bianca Jagger were in the audience. It was sort of bonkers and I kept praying that no member of staff or parent of a kid at Parly came to see the show. I don’t know now how I found the energy but then I loved being so busy with two very different jobs.
My first priority though, as you know, was the school and getting the kids I taught through their exams. It was while I was focused on this that two opportunities arose simultaneously and sent me into a maelstrom of indecision. Mrs McKeown offered me the chance to take up the post of head of department officially because the present one was leaving. I was only in my probationary year, and this kind of stroke of luck hardly EVER came along. It would mean skipping eight years of hard upward slog, and nearly doubling my salary to about £8,000 a year! Plus, I would be in control of my own little universe doing the job I’d always wanted, and had trained for. At the same time, the Comic Strip, as a group, was offered the chance to go on tour around the UK and to the Adelaide Festival in Australia. If I didn’t go, Fatty probably couldn’t go – we were a double act after all. Teaching or tour? Career or bit of a lark? That’s how I saw it then. I discussed it with you and with my family and with Keith Allen, who I was doing a bit of jig and poke with around that time. His solemn advice was to stay with teaching 100 per cent. Twat.