could only gaze in fascination. This was 1945, remember, and we had not seen as much as a teaspoonful of cream since 1939.
‘The middle-size one, I think, gentleman,’ Bill said, to break the spell. When we each had one sitting on the table in front of us, we could still only stare at it, unwilling to disturb its creamy lusciousness. Bill stood up. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said and motioned all of us to be upstanding. ‘Under the circumstances, there is only one thing to do.’
With which, he placed his hand underneath his plate and balanced it on his palm while he waited for us to do the same. Then, as one, the twelve of us raised our hands and sploshed a plateful of cream flan full in our faces.
As we stood stock-still, cream dripping from our eyebrows, noses and cheeks down on to our blue uniforms, we heard a sudden little spattering of applause. Those good Danish burghers were thanking us for allowing them to witness what was surely some traditional old English ritual.
The three Bags of Panic shows I wrote in the RAF, to star Bill Fraser and Eric Sykes, with Corporal Ron Rich, later to become the Reverend Ronald Rich, supplying the music, were all in the nature of what were then known as ‘revues’. They consisted of sketches, songs, ‘point numbers’ and ‘quickies’.
Each show ran for upwards of two and a half hours, making it all the more odd that when I consider the stack of material required to fill the three of them, I can now recall no more than two items. One was a song Ron and I sang called ‘After I’ve Liberated Europe’ (‘Who’s going to liberate me?’) and even there Eric can remember more of the words than I can.
The other half-forgotten unforgettable was a joke Bill was so fond of he referred to it as his ‘all-time top Service gag’, insisting that, in one form or another, it be included in every edition. This was not easy as, unlikely as it may seem today, none of the revues incorporated what is now known as a ‘standup’. So the joke had to be either enacted by two performers as a quickie or sneaked in somewhere during the course of a sketch.
Fortunately, it dealt with a situation which, for Service audiences, worked even better when acted out than narrated. So, in three different versions, they saw a Cockney airman arrive back at barracks after a forty-eight-hour leave, dripping wet from head to foot. ‘Blimey,’ says one of his mates. ‘Is it still raining in London?’ ‘No,’ the airman replies. ‘When I got home, the wife was in the bath.’
Eric Sykes and I lived in the same tent during one of the Bags of Panic revues. When we returned to it after the opening night, Eric was still in a state of elation. Lying on his straw palliasse in the dark, he ad-libbed a fifteen-minute speeded-up version of the entire two-hour show, songs, dances and all.
It was the most glorious piece of sustained comic improvisation I have ever witnessed and nothing since has left me so exhausted with laughter.
Nineteen forty-five. We were under canvas in some meadows outside Brussels and eager to get away from camp and sample the city’s fleshpots, I took a short cut across the area designated as our parade ground. I was chancing my luck because this was prohibited territory unless one was on duty and, sure enough, halfway across I was halted by a familiar roar. ‘Airman!’
It was the Station Warrant Officer, a bristling little man and a stickler for the niceties. Marching up to me, he said, ‘And just where do you think you’re going?’
‘Sorry, sir. I was in a hurry to get on the transport for Brussels.’
He looked me up and down. ‘With a dirty cap-badge?’ As I winced, he passed sentence. ‘Crossing the parade ground and dirty badge? You are confined to camp, my son.’
With which he stumped off. I wandered back to my tent and found I was the only one there. Everyone else was on their way to Brussels. On an impulse, I went round the back of the tent and cut across the field to the perimeter hedge. I made my way along it till I found a hole through which I could squeeze. On the other side was a narrow country road and I started to walk along it in the direction of Brussels, hoping to hitch a lift.
After no more than a couple of minutes, I heard the sound of an engine approaching from behind me and when I turned, there was an RAF 15-hundredweight truck. I stuck out my thumb and it pulled up. Gratefully, I went to climb in and only then noticed who the driver was. It was the Station Warrant Officer.
We gazed at each other. Then very deliberately, he said, ‘You done it all wrong, aincha.’
The remark struck me as so apt that, quite involuntarily, I found myself smiling. He bristled. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘What you just said, sir. It’s so spot-on.’
‘It is indeed,’ he said. Then, ‘Jump in.’ And we were off to Brussels.
Since that day, ‘You done it all wrong, aincha’ has headed my list of benign reproaches.
Contrary to the present-day belief, implanted by a regrettable number of popular films, World War Two did not occur as a series of zooming headlines. It dragged on for year after wearisome year.
My own generation, whose early years were spent in a confused synthesis of Hollywood and reality, was left with a similar set of misconceptions. Thanks to the films of the thirties and forties, I grew up firmly believing that:
Driving a car entails continuously half-turning the steering wheel from one side to another.
Shaving consists of two vertical strokes of the razor down each cheek, followed by patting the face with a towel.
Girls close their eyes when kissing, lifting their heels and occasionally kicking one shoe off behind them.
Childbirth requires lots of hot water.
There was a spell after the War when I was employed by the Hyman Zahl Variety Agency as a trainee agent and writer-in-residence. The latter duty entailed writing any scripts the comedians on his books needed for their ‘spot’ broadcasts. There were any number of those one-off radio spots available in programmes such as Variety Bandbox, Workers’ Playtime, Henry Hall’s Guest Night, Music Hall, Northern Music Hall, etc., and as Hymie represented some sixty-three comedians at that time, I did very little agenting.
To be fair, the writing chores were not quite as onerous as they first seemed. This was partly because most of the comedians arrived with a selection of jokes they refused to be parted from, which saved me a fair amount of work. But mainly it was because, in those days, every comedian was expected to finish his act with a song, which carved another helpful chunk out of his allotted seven or eight minutes. These songs were generally of a sentimental nature, giving rise to the axiom that the perfect solo broadcast spot was ‘Five minutes of gags about mother-in-law followed by two minutes of song about mother.’
As payment for supplying the script for such occasions, I would be given whatever ‘plug’ money the comedian would (illicitly) receive from the song’s publisher for performing
