First Theme - Where Next?

From School to University - but which University?

My last few years at Hove County Grammar School for Boys, with my added piano-based confidence, had seen me become more and more captivated with Drama, as an art form and as a subject for serious study. Not that I had any real experience of it, apart from a well-received Pooh-Bah in The Mikado, and several theatre trips that had brought home what real theatre was. A visionary English teacher at Hove, John Reynolds, supported me and friends in organising coach trips up to London to see Gielgud and Richardson in Pinter’s No Man’s Land (“…you will never see actors of that stature on a stage again…” – he was right!) and Rick Wakeman recording his new album Journey to the Centre of the Earth at the Royal Festival Hall.

Rick was my hero, having made both piano and keyboards super-sexy with Yes, then gone solo and painted musical portraits of the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth in which the keyboards did all the work. He was making albums that were film scores, and Journey would prove extraordinarily prescient for my future work – firstly because he had David Hemmings as his narrator for the story, prefiguring in my head my future compositions for radio and the birth of the Concert Dramas, and secondly because in the first half he alternated between his Six Wives pieces and daft stuff he wanted to try out. To everybody’s surprise he sat down at a jangle piano, a load of silent comedy clips appeared onscreen and off he went, doing fantastic fast stride accompaniment to them. (We’ll draw a veil over the dancers who then came on in blackface to dance the Charleston.) That was the first time I saw live silent film accompaniment, and, as with grand piano and synths, if Rick Wakeman did it, it was OK!

But by now, thanks to trips to the Theatre Royal Brighton, and the odd West End show, theatre held such a thrall over me. The shows I saw in my mid-to-late teens were nothing if not eclectic – the Dads Army touring show, in which the cast recreated 1940s radio stars, Michael Crawford in the musical Billy, Timothy West and June Richie touring a double-bill of Macbeth and Stoppard’s Jumpers (which completely rewrote my head about sex, intelligence and what could and couldn’t be said on a stage). I was in a band (playing bass, not yet able to bring a keyboard to the table) but even music took a back seat to what was possible on a stage. With the same friends that got us to Pinter and Wakeman, I organised our own school performance of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and I made my ‘adult’ debut as The Player. Once again, the school got us up to the Young Vic where Christopher Timothy and Graham Crowden showed us how it should be done.

I had somehow been made deputy Head Boy in my final year, I think because I was supposed to keep an eye on the Train boys who came in with me from up-country - I have to say I did no such thing. But even I would never have considered Drama as an academic University subject had not all of us sixth-formers had to take a meeting in the careers caravan (recently parked in the playground) with a Maths teacher who wasn’t best pleased at doubling as careers master. He hurried me through my university options, then fired off the question, “what subject do you enjoy most?” With Richardson’s deathless line from No Man’s Land still ringing in my ears (“You were no farmer, Sir! A weekend wanker!”) I unsteadily said “Well, I rather like Drama…”

“Fine”, came the riposte, “here are the Universities that offer Drama as a joint degree, gotta do it with something, English probably your best bet, bye!!”

And the die was very nearly cast…

Three of my five choices turned me down, but I went to Manchester for an interview, which scared the pants off me, being conducted by people who knew their Drama business. I had to spread my theatre experience as broadly and thinly as possible whilst showing maximum enthusiasm, and for the first time I had to justify a held position – I must have got away with it as they did subsequently offer me a place. (Ironically, had I accepted it, I would have been there with Ade Edmonson, Rick Mayall, Ben Elton and Lise Mayer, but one can age very quickly staring glumly back down the road not taken…)

That left me one final University visit on the slate, and in mid-February I got on a train for the six-hour, three change journey to the legendary land of Aberystwyth…

Aberystwyth. Perched in the centre of Cardigan Bay, surrounded on three sides by mountains and the fourth side by the sea. Optimistically named ‘the Biarritz of the West’ by the Aberystwyth and Welsh Coast railway company who took over a massive, stately castle-like building on the seafront to run as a hotel, but the hotel went bust in 1865, and seven years later it was bought by the embryonic Aberystwyth University.

To be frank, I’d never heard of the place, and neither had my bank manager who got me to spell it for him before he would allow me to access my student grant. One Thursday in February 1976 I took the train from Wivelsfield to begin the trek to look over Aber…

Euston to Wolverhampton was fine, albeit long – into a tiny four-coach train to Aber from there, supposed to take another two hours except we all got kicked out after nightfall into the rain at an unpronounceable place called Machynlleth where a bus replacement service awaited, the railway having been washed into the River Dovey the previous Winter. A storm reminiscent of Will Hay’s Oh Mr Porter hit as we crawled nearer to the coast, then a freezing, rain-soaked walk in the dark to a seafront guest house. I was given a meal and invited to join the other guests in the lounge who were grouped around the TV watching the BBC adaptation of How Green Was My Valley with Stanley Baker and Sian Phillips (I’m not making this up!!)

The waves were crashing over the promenade, despite the height of its sea wall, and I went to bed with the rain lashing my bedroom window, vowing that no way on earth would I be coming anywhere near this Godforsaken dump.

The following morning the sun shone brightly from a cloudless sky, I took myself to the Drama Department in Alexandra Road where the Head of Drama, Professor John Edmunds, who I recognised as an ex-TV newscaster, welcomed me, showed me the facilities (studio theatre, rehearsal and lecture spaces) and then drove me up the hill to the mighty Arts Centre, with its National Theatre-like Theatr Y Werin, complete with hi-tech sound and lighting, huge (for me) auditorium, dressing rooms, green room (a what now?), fly tower, pit area, you name it. By the end of that day, Aberystwyth was the only place I wanted to go. It was 214 miles from home. Couldn’t be better.

I don’t want to suggest I had an unhappy upbringing – I just knew before I left for Aber that my parents’ lives weren’t for me. Even the Methodist Church couldn’t measure up to the theatre, with its similar rituals, its preparations, its communal experience and sense of occasion. Above all, I was very short on life experience, having been through an all-boys school and a largely Christian social circle. At Aber, responsible entirely for myself for the first time in my life, I might possibly find out who I was. That was worth doing.