It kick started the careers of John Cleese, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and
Asked what advice he’d give to a youngster wishing to be a comedian, Robert Webb announced, ‘Go to Cambridge!’
He wasn’t being glib. It’s no more than the truth. If a bomb went off periodically at the university, there’d have been fewer Pythons, zero Goodies, no Peter Cook or Jonathan Miller. Stephen Fry would not have met Hugh Laurie, nor David Mitchell his Peep Show compadre Robert Webb.
The list goes on and on: Douglas Adams, David Baddiel, Emma Thompson – who on her return visits to Cambridge might leave a note backstage: ‘Darlings, I’ve left two crates of beer for you in Oddbins!’
In Character: Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry in a sketch from the BBC television show ‘The Cambridge Footlights Review’, February 6th 1982
The Footlights is a self-electing society, which puts on ‘smokers’ (concerts) twice a term, an annual revue, which usually goes to the Edinburgh Festival, and a pantomime. When they did Snow White, Robert Bathurst, 6ft 2in, was a dwarf called Shorty. In a revival some years later, David Mitchell created a dwarf called Pervy.
The society began in Victorian days as a rival to the more serious drama clubs, which mounted Shakespeare. Audiences ‘liked seeing undergraduates dressed up as girls’, and the Footlights was famous for its transvestism. Cecil Beaton, later the society photographer, was ‘one of the best leading ladies the Footlights ever had’.
It took Peter Cook, who arrived in 1957, to turn the Footlights from a bunch of drag acts into a training ground for mainstream light entertainment.
Seemingly without effort, Cook improvised the classic sketch about the one-legged Tarzan. Footlights audiences also saw the development of the bore on the park bench, intoning his ‘interesting facts’ about tadpoles, newts, and ‘peace through nudism’.
Cook performed all this material for the rest of his life, and even in his undergraduate days he was selling jokes to London shows. With Jonathan Miller he joined Oxford men Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett to put on Beyond The Fringe. Miller, on stage, was earning ten times what he’d made as a junior doctor and Bennett 15 times what a medieval historian could expect.
Comedy Club: Robert Webb and David Mitchel have dinner with other members of the Footlights
Early days: Miriam Margoyles in a Footlights Review
When President Kennedy came to the production, the emergency red nuclear telephone was installed in the theatre box office. Footlights evenings had a way of being gently ‘disrespectful’, mocking stiff-upper-lip heroics, the Second World War being fresh in everyone’s memory. Come the Sixties, ‘it was a strange mixture of sophistication and childishness’ which prevailed in the revues, with the likes of John Cleese, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman already presaging the style of Monty Python.
‘They took a kind of Goons absurdity and placed it within a mad intellectual framework’, with clever-clever references to Proust. I suppose it was funny, getting Eva Braun to sing As Long As He Needs Me, the big ballad from Oliver!, to a smitten Hitler, but of the material quoted in this book, I prefer the old music hall gag: ‘What’s the difference between an egg, a carpet and a piece of crumpet? You can beat an egg, you can beat a carpet, but you can’t beat a nice piece of crumpet.’ That was banned as too risqué. They had to substitute ‘crackling’, which is hopeless.
Bill Oddie said the Footlights was ‘a portal to fame’, which it was – for the boys. Miriam Margolyes, who, along with Eleanor Bron, was one of the first women to be elected to membership, had a wretched time. She was excluded, ignored, not invited to cast parties. ‘They treated me as if I were invisible and did not speak to me at all.’
None dared behave towards Germaine Greer in such a fashion – there were many requests for her to bring her wimple and do her stripping nun routine.
The club room, with its broken sofas, bar and cheap meals, does sound like a lads’ hang-out, however, and the Footlights was the opposite of inclusive and diverse, ‘a fairly exclusive, privileged group’, who on special occasions wore dinner jackets.
Members unfailingly went on to become, if not household names, then influential media executives. Footlights revues and smokers were routinely attended by agents, talent spotters, Radio 4 administrators and BBC directors, who’d tip people the wink and invite them to join much-sought-after trainee producer schemes.
Norman Hartnell in drag: Audiences ‘liked seeing undergraduates dressed up as girls’, and the Footlights was famous for its transvestism
Talent would out immediately. ‘Everyone expected that Griff Rhys Jones would become famous’, which he did. ‘He was so good, we all thought Griff would be the guy who’d end up running the National Theatre,’ though that job went to another Footlights character, Nicholas Hytner.
Another star was Tony Slattery, ‘who was such a live wire on stage’, where he did a one-man version of Star Trek. Perhaps Slattery never recovered from his early acclaim, nothing in later life coming close. He died last year aged 65 from the effects of alcohol and a £4,000-a-week drug habit.
I also felt sorry for Prince Edward. ‘I think probably Prince Edward would have liked to have been in the Footlights, but like many members of the Royal Family he had no actual talent,’ David Baddiel is quoted as saying. No knighthood for him.
When Princess Margaret visited, ‘She needed to go to the loo and we all listened to the Princess’s tinkle.’ Sad that that was the highlight of some people’s university career.
By the end of this well-researched book, I rather admired Sacha Baron Cohen for not having been chosen for membership of the Footlights. He was ‘too much of a maverick’, and so is possibly the best comedian of his generation.
There’s an air of smugness in Robert Sellers’ book. The Footlights was a confidence builder for chaps who were already confident.
My sympathies are rather with a professor who ticked off a student for spending all their time larking about. Spare a thought (the student was told) for the ‘extraordinary number’ of hard-working people who never get the chance of a Cambridge place.
Indeed, why didn’t all these show-offs – Clive James, John Fortune, John Bird – go to drama school instead, leaving their college places free for undergraduates actually interested in law, languages, literature, history, philosophy and the rest?
No wonder northern working-class comics, like Victoria Wood or Caroline Aherne, had chips on their shoulder, when having to compete with this engrained and entitled tradition. Peter Kay, Les Dawson, the League of Gentlemen fellas and Morecambe and Wise: you appreciate their achievement even more.