Smarter Than The Average!

Following the stupendous success of Amnesty International’s fourth benefit gala The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball in 1981, other extremely specialised charities started to jump on the comedy benefits bandwagon, raising money for what seemed like every worthy cause in the country – from enormous campaigns to help human rights in El Salvador (Benefit Concert For Human Rights In El Salvador, held on Sunday the 21st of February 1982 at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, and An Evening For El Salvador, held Sunday the 4th of December 1983 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank) or women financially affected by the miners’ strike (Here We Go: A Benefit For Women In Mining Communities, held Sunday the 25th of November 1984 at the Piccadilly Theatre), to much smaller niche charities like the Knockabout Comics Defence Fund (for which there were two benefits, both called Right To Read, the first held Friday the 27th of January 1984 at the LSE Old Theatre, the second held Sunday the 18th of March 1984 at the Donmar Warehouse) or the Puppet Centre Trust (The Art Of The Puppet, held Sunday the 3rd of August 1986 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall – certainly the only place you would have seen Michael Bentine and the puppets of Spitting Image on the same bill). These smaller yet still star-packed benefit gigs carried on through the eighties and nineties to the present day, and have one major advantage over the original Amnesty gigs of the seventies – whereas in the seventies, the unlucky thousands who could not attend the shows live had to rely on an scrambled assortment of books, records, film releases and one-off television transmissions to get a flavour of what they were like, since the early eighties the benefits have often ended up available to own on VHS – indeed, material from the second benefit for the Terrence Higgins Trust, Hysteria 2 (held Monday the 18th of September 1989 at Sadler’s Wells), was released on no less than two video tapes. At the start of the new millennium such shows started taking full advantage of the changes in technology, being released on DVD and, in the case of Amnesty’s 2006 and 2008 shows, as a selection of online clips, podcasts, real-time blogging from the theatre’s backstage and nationwide cinematic feeds of the whole show live and uncut. Thanks to the necessity of Amnesty releasing their shows on so many formats in the seventies, these days every major charity gig is expected to be recorded and released in as thorough a way as possible.

One of the most illustrious of these post-Amnesty events was An Evening At Court, which was performed on Sunday the 23rd of January 1983 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (and not on the 21st, as is claimed in Robert Ross’ increasingly inaccurate bookThe Complete Goodies). It was put on to raise money for The Adrian Slade Legal Costs Appeal – Slade, elected as first Liberal member of the Greater London Council in 1981, was taken to court by Conservative councillors after an accounting error made it look like he had misappropriated a tiny amount of money. The case was dismissed but Slade was left with legal costs approximating £40,000, which he simply didn’t have. It was hoped this charity benefit would help considerably, if not wipe out the debt entirely. (Coincidentally, 1983 was also the GLC’s “Peace Year”, which they marked with a series of free concerts, live events, cabaret nights and an exhibition of Gerald Scarfe art at the Royal Festival Hall.)

Adrian Slade was no stranger to the world of comedy – he was a writer and performer in the Cambridge Footlights in 1958 and 1959, being made President for his second year. He was also the brother of Julian Slade, Footlights member in the early fifties and creator of the highly-successful musical Salad Days, and cousin of Humphrey Barclay, who at the time of An Evening At Court was Head of Comedy at LWT (although a week later he would resign this post to go freelance) and member of the Footlights from 1961 to 1963, where he produced the 1963 Footlights production, Cambridge Circus (previously known as A Clump Of Plinths). So it is no surprise that Barclay was the one to devise, produce and direct this charity gala in aid of his cousin’s legal problems.

As it was to take place in 1983, Barclay decided that this benefit show should not only raise money for Slade’s appeal, but should also act as a tribute show to mark the twentieth anniversary of Cambridge Circus, and therefore he tried to cast the show with as many notable ex-members of the Footlights as possible. Julian Slade, of course, also made an appearance; not only was he the older brother of the benefit’s benefited, but also, by early 1983, he was somewhat back in the limelight as he had just adapted Salad Days into an ITV play, broadcast on Sunday the 2nd of January that year. Also on the bill were Eleanor Bron, who had performed with Slade’s in the 1959 revue The Last Laugh, and John Fortune, who, as John Wood, had directed the following year’s show, Pop Goes Mrs Jessop. Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor also performed, not only reuniting them as a trio of writers from 1963’sCambridge Circus, but also reuniting them as The Goodies, their last episode on television being nearly a year ago. Graham Chapman, Footlights member in 1962, made an appearance, as did David Frost, writer and performer in Pop Goes Mrs Jessop. Frost’s contribution to the proceedings was to appear in a sketch in which he interviewed Mrs Thatcher, portrayed by Angela Thorne. Thorne, most famous for playing Marjory Frobisher in To The Manor Born, had spent most of the previous year on the West End stage playing Margaret Thatcher to John Wells’ Denis Thatcher in Wells’ satirical play based on his Private Eye writings, Anyone For Denis? – less than a month before the benefit show, on Tuesday the 28th December 1982, the pair appeared in a Thames Television adaptation of the same name. (In addition Wells had appeared as Denis T at a charity benefit sixteen months earlier, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball.) An Evening At The Court was promoted as being Thorne’s last outing in the guise of Mrs T, not least in Rosemary Say’s column in the Sunday the 16th of January 1983 edition of the Sunday Telegraph. In the same article Thorne discussed the topicality of the sketch: “We had the script all ready, but now it has to be changed since Mrs Thatcher went off to the Falklands”. John Wells did not appear at An Evening At Court, but showed his support for the GLC three years later when he made an appearance at the We’ll Be GLCing You Erection Night Party, marking the return of the Eros statue to Piccadilly Circus, held on Sunday the 23rd March 1986 at the Piccadilly Theatre.

The show’s non-Footlights cast included such comedic personalities as Willie Rushton, Barry Took, Neil Innes, Rowan Atkinson (whose first major television appearance,Rowan Atkinson Presents… Canned Laughter, Barclay had produced for LWT in 1979; two weeks exactly after An Evening At Court Atkinson would start location filming for the series The Black Adder) and Alan Bennett, who was actually a member of the Footlights’ opposition, the Oxford Revue. William Cook, in his book Tragically I Was An Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook (Random House, 2002), claims that Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders made an appearance at the show, which would be possible but surprising as they were advertised as appearing at the Comedy & Lunacy Night at Dingwalls Rhythm ‘N’ Booze in Camden Lock that night, on a bill with Chris Langham and Ronnie Golden. One place French and Saunders could definitely be seen, however, was on television the following night in Channel 4’s The Comic Strip Presents… Bad News Tour.

But the stand-outs on the night’s bill were the two unadulterated comedy megastars to have emerged from the Footlights: Peter Cook and John Cleese. Cook had a long history with Slade; Slade, famously, was the person to induct Cook into the Footlights, and they both wrote and appeared in Pop Goes Mrs Jessop. After Cook’s death, Slade was happy to talk about the impact Cook had had on his life in both the Channel 4 documentary Heroes Of Comedy: Peter Cook, broadcast Sunday the 18th of January 1998, and BBC2’s Peter Cook: At A Slight Angle To The Universe, broadcast on Saturday the 28th of December 2002. Cook was also on good terms with Humphrey Barclay, Barclay having in recent years produced the LWT special Peter Cook & Co, broadcast on Sunday the 14th of September 1980.

Cleese joined the show because of his long association with Humphrey Barclay, who had been Cleese’s friend since performing his words in the 1961 Footlights revue I Thought I Saw It Move. Three years later Barclay was producing John Cleese in the long-running BBC Radio series I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, and since then Cleese had appeared in three of Barclay’s LWT productions: The Strange Case Of The End Of Civilisation As We Know It (which Cleese also conceived and co-wrote), Peter Cook & Co and Whoops Apocalypse. Cleese also wrote a number of the Barclay-producedDoctor… series.

Cook and Cleese, along with Angela Thorne and the scales of justice, posed for publicity photographs outside the Theatre Royal on Sunday the 16th of January 1983. Cook was dressed as a judge and Cleese as a barrister. Both were familiar being photographed in their respective outfits – Cleese, who had trained as a barrister, portrayed one in the Judge Not sketch he’d performed at Footlights, and also in other courtroom-based sketches for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which were later amalgamated into one long sketch for the first Amnesty show A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick). Cook had, too, dressed this way at an Amnesty benefit, namely his satirical summing-up of the Jeremy Thorpe trial from 1979’s The Secret Policeman’s Ball. He’d also donned the robes to promote his Here Comes The Judge EP the same year, an audio release of said monologue since named Entirely A Matter For You.

Promotional pictures for An Evening At Court, as printed on page 12 and 51 of the 21st to 27th of January 1983 edition of City Limits.

Cleese inadvertently helped promote the show during this photo session when the barrister’s wig Cleese was wearing slipped to reveal his recent hair transplant. Pictures of the embarrassing revelation were printed the following day on page 3 of the Daily Mirror, but Cleese took full advantage of this unwarranted outing by getting the first-hand ‘scoop’ on his new head of hair printed in the Sunday Times on the day of the benefit.

From page 3 of the Monday the 17th of January 1983 issue of the Daily Mirror.

Peter Cook and John Cleese became very much the double-act of An Evening At Court, and performed a hilarious follow-up to their Interesting Facts sketch from The Secret Policeman’s Ball four years earlier (which evolved from a sketch from Pop Goes Mrs Jessop before that). This new sketch was co-written by Cook, Cleese and Bernard McKenna, who was also assistant producer and director of this stage show. A transcription of the dialogue appeared in both issue 15 of Cook ‘fagazine’ Publish And Bedazzled in 1998 and Tragically I Was An Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook.

The sketch was set to be reperformed on tape the following year for a HBO television special called Cook For An Hour, which was never produced. This shouldn’t matter as, what with An Evening At The Court being a star-packed charity event, such exclusive performances should have been filmed on the night, broadcast on television and released on record, VHS and DVD many times over. Except for one problem: despite such an distinguished and celebratory line-up, An Evening At Court went unrecorded.

The man entirely to blame for keeping this benefit out of the archives is John Cleese, who utterly refused to have the show filmed. “They wanted to film it,” said Bernard McKenna in an interview printed in issue 14 of Publish And Bedazzled and reprinted inHow Very Interesting!: Peter Cook’s Universe And All That Surrounds It (published by Snowbooks in 2006), “but Cleese felt he’d been ripped off with The Secret Policeman’s Ball and so wouldn’t allow it”.

So why did Cleese refuse? How did he feel “ripped off” by the seemingly altruistic Amnesty benefits? To see what his mindset was like with regard to such shows in the early eighties we have to follow his life in charity galas right from the start.

In 1976 John Cleese joined Amnesty International when, as he wrote in the theatre programme for the 2008 Amnesty benefit, he “suddenly realized how nice it was to live in a country where people didn’t come to your front door at 2am in the morning, and take you away and hand you over to people who’ve been specially trained to hurt you as much as possible”. He further explained in the 28th of October to the 3rd of November 1989 issue of the TV Times that “what has long impressed me about Amnesty is their intelligence in establishing who’s telling them the truth and who’s lying. It’s why their reports have such real authority, and why governments all over the world are so scared of them”. Amnesty’s Assistant Director Peter Luff, then compiling a list of potential performers for a one-off benefit show to mark Amnesty’s fifteenth anniversary, spots the famous name on the cheque and, obtaining the number through a mutual friend, telephones Cleese to ask if he’d like to participate in the event. Cleese agrees to let his picture be used on the poster, but sadly says he is too busy at that time. He later finds the time to appear, adding that he will try and “round up a few friends” to perform at the show. The friends he rounds up are the other Pythons (minus Eric Idle, who has never performed at any charity benefit – although his specially-written biography still appeared in the first event’s theatre programme), The Goodies (who would perform the first ever live performance of their top ten hit Funky Gibbon) and three-quarters of Beyond The Fringe, one of whom, Jonathan Miller, agrees to direct the stage show. Miller would go on to refer to Cleese in the Wednesday the 16th of March 1977 issue of the Guardian as “that embalmed marvellous creature”. Judith Holder, producer of the 1989 Amnesty comedy benefit, later explained how Cleese achieved such a spectacular cast in the 25th of October to the 1st of November 1989 edition of Time Out: “When you get a letter from John Cleese asking you to perform, you perform. It’s like a three-line whip”. Tickets for the show, advertised exclusively inPrivate Eye, sold out within four days, and suddenly what started as a small one-off gig had become a three-night spectacular (the three nights being the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of April 1976) to be held at Her Majesty’s Theatre named A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick), and John Cleese, now appointed the Artistic Director of Amnesty International, without even knowing it has single-handedly invented the concept of an all-star charity comedy gala.

Reuniting three-quarters of the Beyond The Fringe team was a huge coup for the people putting together the show, and the show’s performers were slightly in awe of them according to an article on page 7 of the Wednesday the 16th of March 1977 issue of the Guardian. “These were our heroes,” said Terry Jones, “We knew all their material and hero-worshipped them while we were still at school. I think we were amazed to find ourselves performing with them”. John Cleese noted that “The Fringe people were better informed and more plugged into social matters, though they didn’t at first think of it as satire. What there is in common, I think, is that the sketches are about something. In the next film we’re doing [Monty Python’s Life Of Brian], that’s the criterion we use: are the sketches about something?”. Director of the film version of the show Roger Graef, an American who had been living in London for fifteen years by this time, in the same article astutely noted that: “Before Beyond The Fringe satire belonged either to the Americans who would use reality to make cruel points and then say ‘But I’m only kidding’; or to the camp tradition of Noel Coward. The Fringe had a cutting edge, and they used it as individual performers against each other. Monty Python comes out of the Goon Show tradition, with a cumulative group madness in which they work together. But the line of their satire is all apolitical – they are liberals, vaguely against authority. The edge was noticeably more cutting in the days of prosperity, confidence and Macmillan. Now the humour sends us up in a safe, rather comforting way. There’s a celebration of Englishness, a congratulary aspect of English oneupmanship that has great appeal in these hard times”. By comparison the Beyond The Fringe team were rather terrified of working with their fans; in the same article Peter Cook reveals that before the show he had “vague feelings of enmity towards these new young people, but it was a reviving, strangely enjoyable event”, while Jonathan Miller said: “I must admit there was a moment in that chilly theatre on the first, cold Sunday morning when I felt the idea had no justification and it might well be a disaster. But people were greeting each other, getting together again, it was very companionable. In some way, reviving the Fringe seemed like archaeology, like finding the bodies of dead partisans long after the war. Some things felt awkward. These were the activities of nimble young men, and we are a bit stiff now around the knees”.

Jonathan Miller and John Bird converse outside Her Majesty’s Theatre, from page 60 of Time Out, 24th December 1976 to 6th January 1977.

Another act on the bill, John Bird, decided to perform one of his monologues in the guise of Idi Amin, having just released an entire album of such, The Collected Broadcasts of Idi Amin. Wanting to sell the LP in the foyer of the show – with profits going to Amnesty, of course – he asked the album’s producer, Martin Lewis, if this would be okay. Lewis, upon hearing the cast list of the show, immediately demanded to record this event and its rehearsals. An LP of sketches is released, and the film footage is compiled in a 105-minute movie, named Pleasure At Her Majesty’s, screened at the National Film Theatre on Sunday the 28th of November 1976 as part of the twentieth London Film Festival. The finished feature film is a milestone in comedy thanks to director Roger Graef and his regular film-making team of Charles Stewart on camera and Iain Bruce on sound. They, with the addition of cameraman Ernest Vincze and editor Thomas Schnab, recorded and edited the event as per Graef’s manifesto formed earlier the same year; Graef’s plan was to create in his documentaries, regardless of subject, a “film of record – unstaged. Filmed without lights or interviews and using a minimum amount of apparatus”. (A few years later, Films Of Record would become the name of Graef’s production company.) This approach was common for concert films like Montery Pop, Woodstock or Don’t Look Back, to name some of the more well-known ones of the time, but Pleasure At Her Majesty’s was the first feature film of a live comedy show shot as if it were just such a pop concert. Although this method may have caused worries for the more conventional of film-makers (at 15:58pm on Tuesday the 26th of June 1979 Graef had to send an explanatory teletype to calm the Chairman of Granada Television David Plowright with regard to the filming the third Amnesty benefit: “Gather there are anxieties about lights and possible repeat of backstage scenes as in first film. Neither points are valid, as we have maximum lighting available through kindness of electricians – our cameraman says there’s plenty of light. We have no plans to shoot backstage this time”), the Pythons, especially John Cleese, adored this unobtrusive way of shooting; when they were asked the following year to turn their Monty Python live show, then running at New York City Centre, into a television special for American television, shot in a specially-lit studio set-up, the Pythons urged that the production be shot by Graef and his team in the theatre, unlit and recorded live as it happened – a film of record. Only contractual difficulties with the City Centre itself prevented this.

Specially created and never reprinted artwork by Terry Gilliam printed on the back of the theatre programme for A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick).

A month later, on Wednesday the 29th of December 1976, the film was shown on BBC1 in their Omnibus slot, though not without a fight – its 100-minute length was not guaranteed a complete airing in Omnibus’ usual fifty-minute slot, despite Roger Graef receiving a letter dated Friday the 10th of September 1976 from Omnibus Executive Producer Barrie Gavin stating it was. The BBC’s Head of Music and Arts Humphrey Burton was, fortunately, on Graef’s side and convinced the then-controller of BBC1 Bryan Cowgill to run the show in full, yet with one minor change – in a letter dated Monday the 27th of September 1976 Burton, mistakenly calling the show “Comedy At Her Majesty’s”, asked Graef if he’d be kind enough to “blip out the four-letter word? A lot of kids will be staying up late in the Christmas holiday period to watch the ‘Goodies’ and the other popular entertainers, and I do not think they should be exposed to bad language in an entertainment context”. The letter then finishes in a typical BBC manner: “That is the end of heavy stuff. I would really like to see you very much indeed. What about some tennis one evening. Please ring”.

The four- (actually seven-) letter word in question was Neil Innes saying he’ll “have me a fucking good time” during his Protest Song. (The song, incidentally, was not on the original Poke In The Eye album, but was released as a single on the Warner Bros. label in 1978; its b-side was the Poke In The Eye… performance of his Rutland Weekend Television song The Hard To Get, which was not in film and has never been released elsewhere.) For the TV broadcast the offending word was removed, but the 100-minute running time remained. Unfortunately, the long length of the broadcast, and in particular the half-hour or so of rehearsal footage before the viewer sees any of the stage performances, were the source of some criticism. It would be a redundancy to quote all of these reviews, but this quote by Patrick Gibbs, from his review in the Friday the 18th of March 1977 issue of the Daily Telegraph, summed up most people’s objections: “The introduction, showing the comedians discussing the programme and rehearsing some of the acts, is pretty disastrous in itself, as being neither informative nor funny, with the exception of Jonathan Miller’s remark, ‘I must be off now to do the Three Sisters’; and doubly disastrous for the time this wastes, taking about thirty minutes which might have been devoted to the comic turns themselves, which are pure gold”. Private Eye, a publication to which Peter Cook frequently contributed, shared the same objections, and mercilessly parodied the film in their Monday the 10th of January 1977 edition as “The Grafest [sic] Show On Earth”. The parody fails, however – what was intended as an attack on the film’s makers and their cinéma vérité style of documentary-filming actually comes across as unpleasant and unwarranted attack on the show’s performers, ending with a witless credit crawl of puns on their names. “John Cleasedwithhimself” indeed.

“Has anyone written anything yet?”: The Grafest Show On Earth, from page 10 of the Monday the 10th of January 1977 edition of Private Eye.

At the start of 1977 the film received a wide theatrical release, but not before the swearword was again ordered removed. This time it was by James Ferman, Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors (since renamed the British Board of Film Classification), who withheld an ‘A’ certificate unless the word was bleeped, and this act did not go unnoticed by Ferman’s long-time adversary Alexander Walker, who declared in his review of the film in the Thursday the 17th of March 1977 issue of theEvening Standard that: “Truly, the Lord Chamberlain isn’t dead; his soul has simply migrated. Keep your rag handy, Jim – there are lots of rude words around London that you could be getting on with”. Walker also mistakenly stated that the omitted word came from a Goodies sketch. Ferman, taking the bait, responded with a barbed letter printed in the Thursday the 24th of March 1977 edition of the Evening Standard. The letter ended: “Roger Graef could have had an ‘AA’ uncut for his very funny film. He chose instead, understandably, to make it available for a wider and younger audience by the simplest possible expedient. For the record, however, the word in question wasn’t in a Goodies sketch, it was in a Neil Innes song. Is Mr Walker’s obsession with censorship beginning to cloud his memory?”.

At various times from Saturday the 5th to Sunday the 20th of March 1977 depending on which State you were in, PBS aired the show across America as part of their Festival 77 celebrations. It was renamed in all publicity as Pleasure At Her Majesty’s: Python & Friends Comedy Special and was a shorter seventy-minute version omitting the half-hour of rehearsal footage. Sadly, this is the version available to buy on DVD today, a tragic omission as, despite what some reviewers said at the time, the rehearsal footage is a unique glimpse into how some of the finest artists to have ever worked in comedy wrote and performed their material. The following year saw a US theatrical release of the film under the misleading title Monty Python Meets Beyond The Fringe. It was longer than the PBS broadcast, but still removed around fifteen minutes of rehearsal footage from its original UK version. Complaints from the Python team followed regarding the title, and so for the video release in 1982 the title was shortened to the even more deceitful Beyond The Fringe. By this time Dudley Moore’s stardom had grown so much in the States that he was given a big credit on the video sleeve despite never actually being in vision during the film.

On Sunday the 8th of May 1977, a second Amnesty gig took place. Held at Sir Bernard Miles’s Mermaid Theatre, An Evening Without Sir Bernard Miles was a quiet two-and-a-half-hour one-nighter, with a combination of Peter Ustinov, half of Beyond The Fringe and two Pythons. Neil Innes was meant to perform at the show but couldn’t due to laryngitis. Dudley Moore was also supposed to perform in sketches with Peter Cook, but he couldn’t leave New York due to arguable reasons – Roger Graef (who videotaped the event for ITV) thought it was for tax purposes, Martyn Lewis (again producing) thought it was on account of a woman, and Peter Cook thought the non-appearance was due to Moore’s sheer arrogance. Terry Jones ended up taking Moore’s place in two-hander sketches opposite a very irritated – and very drunk – Peter Cook, including the never-released and highly blasphemous Bishop Of The World interview (it was set to be on the LP but record company Polydor got cold feet and hurriedly replaced it with Cook’s Sitting On The Bench monologue from the previous Amnesty event). Jonathan Miller appears in the stage show (and also the following month on Thames TV’s Good Afternoon on Wednesday the 22nd of June 1977 promoting the charity with Amnesty’s David Simpson and Chilean actress and former political prisoner Coca Rudolphy) but does not direct this time, his place being taken by aspiring director Terry Jones. Cleese and his wife Connie Booth, separated but not yet divorced, appear in a mixture of old and new sketches which are warmly received by Fawlty Towers fans. There was music provided by Julie Covington (fresh from LWT’s Rock Follies), The Bowles Brothers Band (featuring Sue Jones-Davies, married to Cleese’s friend Chris Langham and soon to play Judith in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian) and Cleese’s guitar-playing acquaintance John Williams. An LP and television broadcast (on ITV on Saturday the 10th of September 1977) followed, both under the new name Mermaid Frolics. Martin Lewis had toyed with the idea of calling it Puddledock Follies as The Mermaid Theatre was in Puddledock and Julie Covington had been on ITV earlier that month with a starring role in Rock Follies Of ’77 – the name was passed over but still made it into the odd bit of official documentation, such as a memorandum from Tony Dalton to Roger Graef dated Thursday the 3rd of August 1978 requesting the show’s outstanding music cue sheets on behalf of the Performing Rights Society.

1978 saw no comedy benefits in aid of Amnesty, but the charity had been heavily bitten by the showbiz bug and this year organised such events as a concert with John Williams and Ralph McTell, and the British premiere of Midnight Express. 1978 was also the year Amnesty International was awarded a Nobel Prize, and no wonder – recently Amnesty estimated that between A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick) in 1976 and their Nobel Prize win in 1978, awareness of Amnesty International increased by 700%.

1979 was the landmark year in the history of Amnesty benefits as it contained the first one to go by the title The Secret Policeman’s Ball, a title conceived by co-producer Martin Lewis with inspiration from John Cleese. (A short history of the title, according to Martin Lewis interviewed in issue 18, the October 1999 edition, of Publish And Bedazzled and reprinted in How Very Interesting!: Peter Cook’s Universe And All That Surrounds It [this interview, to give it its credit, is the source of a plethora of exclusive information retold here]: Cleese had wanted to call the first benefit An Evening Without David Frost, as it seemed like he was the only ex-Footlights member not involved. The follow-up show was named An Evening Without Sir Bernard Miles because it took place at Sir Bernard’s theatre The Mermaid, hence the name change of Mermaid Frolics for record and TV. Cleese, wondering out loud who the 1979 “Evening” should be “Without” suggested, in reference to Amnesty’s human rights record, An Evening Without The Secret Police to which Martin Lewis immediately shouted “The Secret Policeman’s Ball!”. Cleese is said to have replied, “That’s it, that’s the title”. It was for this show that cartoonist Colin Wheeler designed the unmistakable poster image of the Secret Policeman himself.) Peter Luff had left Amnesty the previous year, so its new fundraising officer Peter Walker, along with the returning Martin Lewis, was in charge of organising the show. One of his first acts is to ask John Cleese to direct the stage show this time; Cleese hesitantly accepts, and all credits for the show read “Stage Show Slightly Directed by John Cleese”. Martin Lewis suggests that the show, which took place on the 27th, 28th, 29th and 30th of June 1979 at Her Majesty’s Theatre, should feature pop and rock musicians; Cleese agrees but, completely uninterested in that side of things, leaves Lewis in charge of that aspect of the production. Lewis recruits two singers – Tom Robinson and The Who’s Pete Townshend – to do acoustic sets. They prove a huge hit, the latter in particular. This was also the first Amnesty benefit to recruit a non-Oxbridge stand-up, Billy Connolly, and an alternative comedian, Rowan Atkinson, whose Schoolmaster monologue here made him a star practically overnight. And since Peter Sellers was in attendance of one of the nights of The Secret Policeman’s Ball, this means that uniquely four generations of comedy’s brightest stars were in the same auditorium at the same time.

Roger Graef’s original sketch detailing lighting and camera positions for the Interesting Facts sketch at The Secret Policeman’s Ball.

The show goes on to spawn two hit records of comedy and music (the comedy one helped by a television commercial officially titled Damage Your Health?! in which Cleese and Cook perform an exclusive new version of Interesting Facts, with Billy Connolly giggling on the end of the bench), a hit film and one of LWT’s major broadcasts over the Christmas period. The longer theatrical version of The Secret Policeman’s Ball ran ninety-five minutes, despite omitting Neil Innes’ songSpontaneous, which opened the live show’s second half – according to the film’s review in the Wednesday the 5th of December 1979 issue of Variety it was dropped due to “a Musicians’ Union wrinkle over fee-waivers”. The film was shown to a specially-invited audience of cast and crew on Monday the 12th of November 1979 on the fourth floor of Amnesty’s London headquarters at Tower House, and first shown to the public at the National Film Theatre as part of the London Film Festival during the morning and evening on Wednesday the 28th of November 1979, followed by a question and answer session with Roger Graef. But when the show aired on LWT on Saturday the 22nd of December 1979, the ninety-five-minute film ran in a mere sixty-minute slot, including adverts.

“Why did you do that?” “To bring pleasure to millions”: The television advert for The Secret Policeman’s Ball – The Comedy LP, featuring Billy Connolly, John Cleese and Peter Cook, directed by Martin Lewis.

The tortuous struggle of how the show finally made it to air is too expansive to explain adequately here (you’d be better off reading the mammoth five-page document Roger Graef sent to Peter Walker) but, in short, the film was hated by the bosses at ITV, who demanded that Roger Graef and Martin Lewis remove some of the more controversial sections of the film, amongst them: Billy Connolly’s more offensive swearing; theCheese Shop sketch with its cry of “I don’t care how fucking runny it is”; The Ken Campbell Roadshow hammering nails into Sylvester McCoy’s nose (“A little of Ken Campbell goes a long way,” is how ended a page of “Random Thoughts About The Secret Policeman’s Ball” written for Graef by someone high up at LWT); Tom Robinson’s extra-angry (due to Amnesty’s since-rectified lack of policy regarding those imprisoned solely for being homosexual) acoustic version of Glad To Be Gay, a song already banned from appearing on the BBC’s Top Of The Pops, its omission unfathomable here considering that LWT had happily aired the song in a slot usually reserved for Celebrity Squares, 6:45pm on Saturday the 20th of May 1978, in the pilot episode of Revolver, an ATV punk programme presented, coincidentally, by Peter Cook; and Cook’s Entirely A Matter For You monologue, which, like Ken Campbell’s appearance, was specifically mentioned in the show’s TV Times listing despite its removal. “You might say,” stated Cook at a press conference held in the Liberal Club at the start of December 1979 (and quoted in the Saturday the 15th of December 1979 edition of the New Musical Express), “that my official position is ‘pissed off’”. He also complained around this time to Tony Purnell of the Sunday People, and is printed in the Sunday the 9th of December 1979 issue as saying “I don’t know why ITV are being so sensitive. I’m sure when the programme is sold to other countries they won’t worry about anything because it is certainly not legally dangerous”. On the day of the show’s broadcast Cook’s moans were again printed in a couple of tabloids – he told Ken Irwin of the Daily Mirror that “I don’t know who exactly was responsible for cutting out this piece. I wasn’t consulted at all about it”, while in the Daily Express he complained to James Murray that “I really don’t know why it has been dropped. We haven’t been given a reason. It leaves me vaguely uneasy. Maybe they were frightened of offending people. I’m a bit depressed about it”. This censorship frustrated Cleese too, especially as it was he that offered to the show to LWT in the first place (LWT’s Head of Comedy at the time was Cleese’s old friend Humphrey Barclay), but he was more logical about the cuts; “It’s annoying when things get cut out,” Cleese told the Daily Mirror the day of the broadcast, “But it doesn’t really surprise me at all that Peter’s sketch has been chopped. The TV people are always frightened of offending viewers”. To make LWT’s decision even more ludicrous, the offending monologue had already been broadcast with none of the expected legal repercussions the previous week on LWT in exactly the same time slot (and without Amnesty’s permission, incidentally) as part of the Saturday the 15th of December 1979 edition of late night live gossip show Saturday Night People. Either way, no matter who spoke up against the removal LWT spokesmen always claimed that, to quote the Sunday the 9th of December 1979 issue of theSunday People, “the cuts were made not only for taste but because the show was far too long”.

Over six months later in mid-July 1980 the feature film version of The Secret Policeman’s Ball received a nationwide cinema release and was, as per its London Film Festival screenings, completely uncut – indeed, James Ferman boasted about the lack of censorship imposed by the British Board of Film Censors in the November/December 1982 issue of Screen (incorporating Screen Education): “I think we’re more relaxed about homosexuality than we were ten years ago, as society is. Tom Robinson’s ‘Glad To Be Gay’ was in The Secret Policeman’s Ball (AA)”. During this theatrical run Martin Lewis, as he is printed as saying in the Friday the 28th of May 1982 edition of the New York Times, “spent my days promoting it, my nights looking for a new comedy acts, and I’d wind up at two o’clock in the morning outside the theater where Ball was playing so I could see the demographic breakdown of the audience coming out.” The strain was unsurprisingly too much for the overweight producer, and during The Secret Policeman’s Ball’s UK theatrical run Lewis suffered a heart attack. “I was twenty-eight,” he told the New York Times, “That’s too young to have a heart attack. So I lost fifty-five pounds, and I slowed down”.

Cleese, Cook and Anna Ford promote The Secret Policeman’s Ball, as printed on page 13 of the Saturday the 22nd of December 1979 issue of the Daily Express.

So ends the first part of John Cleese’s life with Amnesty. Join us soon for Part Two to learn how rock music, alternative comedy and moral corruption convinced John Cleese to pull out of future Amnesty benefits, and almost out of showbusiness altogether.

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