John Sergeant’s emergence in his sixties as one of Britain’s favour-ite funny
men, capped by his exploits on Strictly Come Dancing, is generally seen as a
remarkable turn of fortune, for most television viewers were long familiar
with him as the solemn face of political reporting, first on BBC and then on
ITN. But for those who’ve known John longer, the real surprise is that this
has only happened now.
John was already regarded as one of the funniest men in Oxford when we met at
Magdalen college in 1964. It was an era greatly influenced by the enormous
success of Beyond the Fringe, the satirical revue, and the consequent satire
boom. The complete irreverence of this new era shook all British
institutions and stirred a growing sense of rebellion which unfolded ever
more strongly in the 1960s.
The echoes of this new wave were particularly strong at Magdalen, where Dudley
Moore had been an organ scholar and Alan Bennett was a young history
lecturer. When I met John, he was already prominent in the world of Oxford
revue and theatre alongside Michael Palin, Diana Quick, Tammy Ustinov, Simon
Brett and, the funniest man of all, Mike Sadler (who, sadly, gave up comedy
for academic life in Glasgow).
Magdalen was the perfect place for theatre. Kenneth Tynan, the flamboyant
critic, had been an undergraduate not long before and the story was still
told of how, arriving on his first day, he had a porter carry his trunk to
his room, saying, “Have a care, my good man! That trunk is f-f-f-freighted
with silk shirts.”
We were on the cusp of change, for while the wonderful world of Sixties
Britain – the Beatles, Stones, miniskirts and all the rest – was opening up,
the more conservative world we had left behind was still present in
Magdalen, where you could find tweedy men with double-barrelled names hoping
to follow in their father’s footsteps as military officers. In summer the
incomparably beautiful college would resemble an upper-middle-class holiday
camp.
Most of John’s sketches were written together with his two close friends,
Michael Deeny and Walter Merricks. Magdalen had been Oscar Wilde’s college
and Michael, rather in that tradition, was a wild Irishman who dressed in an
opera cloak, sported a silver cane and smoked Turkish cigarettes. Although
extremely amusing, Michael had a speech impediment that prevented him from
acting; but Walter, a gentle character rather like Ian Carmichael, the comic
actor, often played alongside John.
The three were pretty much inseparable and to share lunch with them meant
sharing in a constant stream of jokes and impersonations. John was
fascinated by the rise of Harold Wilson – whom he could impersonate quite as
well as John Bird later did – and the way Wilson sought to exude an image of
tough intellectualism while also being the down-to-earth Huddersfield man.
“Labour has some of the best minds working on the gritty realities of our
time,” John’s Wilson would say. “Nothing could be grittier. And let me tell
you, each of these men has a mind like a steel trap.” Another scene had John
standing in Wilson’s Gannex raincoat in Downing Street in the rain: “As you
can see, I’m getting wet. But Labour believes in equal shares for all. In
the new socialist Britain we shall all get wet.”
There was much mocking of upper-class types, generally called Carruthers. In
one sketch John, as Carruthers, said, “You are speaking of the woman I love.
I always carry her picture with me”, slowly taking out of his pocket a £5
note and staring passionately at the portrait of the Queen.
John was fascinated by the techniques and lore of stage humour. There was much
talk about “the boffo”. Comedians, he would explain, rated jokes. Some
merely produced a smile. A step up was the titter, followed by the genuine
laugh. This was followed by the deep belly-laugh, denoting really serious
amusement (John would imitate each of these stages). But then came the
boffo. What exactly, we’d ask, was the boffo? “The boffo,” John would
answer, looking grave, “is the joke that kills.”
His sometimes almost frantic cascade of jokes may have derived originally from
a sense of insecurity. He had not had an easy time in his teens due to his
parents’ divorce, particularly since he’d been at school at Millfield, where
his father, a clergyman, was a classics teacher. It thus seemed doubly
unfair that John’s life at Magdalen was overshadowed by the fact that his
stepfather, Tom Brown Stevens, was a Magdalen classics tutor and one of the
best loved and most notoriously eccentric dons in Oxford.
Tom had a huge shock of white hair, rather like Einstein, and a pipe
permanently clenched between his teeth. He was in such great demand as a
tutor that one term he set the Oxford record of 40 tutorials a week,
sustained for eight weeks (the norm was 12). His teaching schedule, now
framed, still hangs on the wall of the college’s tutorial office.
Tom could only sustain such a pace thanks to copious amounts of sherry, which
he would share with all and sundry including Bill, the cleaner on the
staircase, whom Tom would attempt to persuade to take over some of his
tutorials with dimmer students. Bill, who was often tipsy himself, would
decline and there would be much hilarious falling about.
Tom was an unashamed romantic who frequently fell in love with his women
students. When I had become a Magdalen don myself, Tom came into lunch one
day dressed as a finals examiner and asked me what I would think if, in the
classics paper that morning, one of the questions had been so composed as to
constitute a proposal of marriage to one of the more beauteous girls writing
the exam.
I said I thought this would not be a problem provided her answer, if decoded
to mean No, did not in any way penalise her. Tom hurriedly said, “Well of
course, no such thing could ever happen. I mean it didn’t. I don’t know why
I brought it up. Of course it doesn’t matter that she said No.”
Tom was fiercely proud of John, but there must have been times when John found
it a little difficult that his stepfather was the college’s most famous
character. He was fond of Tom but sometimes seemed to have an almost
paternal regard for him. There were evenings when John and Michael Deeny
would saunter into east Oxford only to find Tom ensconced in some greasy
spoon cafe.
Tom, as usual, had told his wife – John’s mother – that he would dine in
college, but had forgotten to sign in and, rather than return home to admit
he had blundered yet again, would sit having his fish and chips off
newspaper, reading Livy or Horace amid the general sleaze. John would laugh
but also sigh: there was no changing Tom.
Although there was no doubting John’s comic talent, Deeny often seemed to be
the dominant figure because of his sheer outrageousness. Single-handed, he
later kidnapped the entire Springbok rugby team as an antiapartheid protest
by the simple ruse of climbing into the coach that was to take them to
Twickenham, saying he was the driver, chaining himself to the wheel and
driving off in the wrong direction. He was lucky to avoid retribution at the
hands of several enormous Springbok forwards, although in the tussle he
crashed the coach. (John and I helped to pay his bail on that occasion.)
Michael was a friend of leading figures in the civil rights movement in
Northern Ireland such as Bernadette Devlin. These civil rights friends would
visit him at Magdalen, leading on one occasion to a celebrated burglary of
the college wine cellar’s most famous claret, a Château Lafite Rothschild
1952. Although full amends were made, there was a lot of angry talk about
“18th-century behaviour”.
When, in 1966, Walter Merricks and John decided to fly to Italy where Walter
was to take delivery of a new sports car, they decided not to tell Michael.
It was, after all, finals year and Michael was already hideously in debt.
Inevitably, Michael heard of the plan and insisted not only that he join them
but that they make a detour to Le Mans to see the great 24-hour race. In the
end Michael, a poor sleeper, was put on a cross-Channel train dosed with
Mandrax and was so comatose thereafter that he only made his connection
because railway porters carried his sleeping form from one train to the next.
They duly made it to Le Mans where, in the Place de la République, some time
after midnight, John decided to give an oration in the style of de Gaulle,
informing his no doubt puzzled listeners that he was now president and would
be a ruler of a new type – “votre dictateur transvestite”.
In the end all three got their degrees. Walter, somewhat wistfully, told me
that the things he would like to have done in theatre had already been done
by Ian Carmichael. He set up Britain’s first community law centre and is
today the financial services ombudsman.
Michael had a colourful career in which he several times had to rescue triumph
from disaster. He became a pop music promoter, his clients including U2 and
Bruce Springsteen, and then used the money he made to become a member of
Lloyd’s, only to find that the Gooda Walker syndicate of which he was part
was the chief victim of the great Lloyd’s crash of the early 1990s, losing
hundreds of millions of pounds.
While other members of the syndicate were throwing themselves out of 10th
floor windows, Michael set up the Gooda Walker Action Group and won back
about £500m for it in the biggest civil action in British history, with the
ironic result that many syndicate members who had greatly disapproved of him
became his warm admirers. Michael is today the chairman of the Association
of Lloyd’s Members. He and John remain great friends.
John’s own career beginnings were difficult. His friends all felt he should
pursue comedy but he had seen how his elder brother Peter, though a talented
actor, had struggled to make a living on stage. John thought journalism a
safer option.
In his final year he landed a much-prized traineeship with Reuters and was all
set to take this when Alan Bennett, who had seen his work in the Oxford
revue, offered him a part in his new TV series, On the Margin. It was an
irresistible opportunity, so John turned down Reuters and worked with
Bennett instead.
The series was a success and was repeated twice, but it was a disaster for
John. Naturally enough, Alan had given himself the funny lines and John
appeared mainly as a straight man and foil, so the audience got no
impression of him as a comic actor.
He and Michael were then sharing a house in Finchley, north London. “The
trouble was we were naive,” Michael says. “John should have hired an agent
and promoted himself. Instead he decided to stay home and write comedy
scripts.”
Which meant John sitting on his own writing a script intended to entice Tony
Hancock back for another series. But this was a loser: Hancock was sunk in
alcoholic depression and wasn’t coming back for love or money.
It was only many years later that I got to know Bennett and spoke to him about
John. Alan is a kind soul, had no idea that On the Margin had turned out
badly for John and was distressed to hear it.
John thus found himself in queer street, a long way out of university and no
job. He began to feel that turning down Reuters had been a terrible mistake
and was glad to get a job on the Liverpool Daily Post. This was a very hard
time in his life relieved only by the fact that he met his wife, Mary,
there. It was to prove a hugely successful and happy marriage.
“You know the nicest thing,” Michael says, “is that Mary was so shy. For years
I didn’t realise what a terrific sense of humour she has. She can be as
funny as John.”
John then moved to the BBC and became a political correspondent. For those of
us who knew him it was life mocking art. Many of John’s satirical sketches
had featured him as a TV interviewer in Downing Street, microphone in hand,
ready for some hilarious encounter with the PM. Now you turned on the TV and
saw John playing the same role – straight. No more jokes. It was sad.
His friends would be glad that John was getting on well in his career, but
they all worried about the lack of jokes. When you met up with him he would,
naturally, be full of Beeb talk, which was often quite solemn and ponderous
stuff. He and Mary lived a very domestic life bringing up their sons,
Michael – who has followed in John’s footsteps as a BBC political reporter –
and Will, a TV producer.
If, however, you got some private time with John, the jokes would flow and
you’d realise he was just as funny as ever. When in 1995 I left Magdalen and
held a goodbye party, John kept the entire company in stitches with quite
spontaneous humour. It was the old John. Indeed, you realised that now that
he had succeeded in his career and put aside any early insecurities, he was
able to relax and just be himself, hilariously.
This was why it was so serendipitous for Ian Hislop to invite John onto Have I
Got News for You, where the great British public at last got a chance to
realise that the reporter they’d seen solemnly giving them the news all
these years was actually a wonderfully funny man.
Everything took off from there. He wrote two successful books, appeared on a
lot more TV and Hislop happily agreed that in the 18 years he’d done Have I
Got News for You with Paul Merton, John had been by far the funniest person
on the show. Now we’ve had the wonderful saga of Strictly Come Dancing –
enjoyed by those of us who know John mainly for the (almost) straight face
that he maintained through the most improbable dance routines.
He doesn’t seem to have got enough credit for the sheer boldness of entering
this pantomime. In all the many parties I went to back at Finchley, I can’t
recall John doing any dancing. It is all very well cheering on a Mark
Ramprakash who turns out to be a wonderful dancer, but most people, starting
with myself, are dreadful dancers and would be scared stiff at the thought
of exposing themselves to the stern pomposities of the sequins and paso
doble crowd, let alone in front of 10m people.
As for John resigning from the show, I not only thought this was a clever
ending but I also believe what he said about not carrying a joke too far.
In his memoirs, Give Me Ten Seconds, published by Macmillan, he gives a hint
of what he may privately be feeling now. “When I accepted Alan Bennett’s
offer [to appear in On the Margin] I had visions of the best part of student
life, the silliest part, being carried on effortlessly in the outside
world,” he wrote. “What could be better than being paid for making people
laugh?” It was a shock to discover that for the “toilers in the BBC joke
factory”, comedy was a serious business. Frivolity was frowned upon: “I
longed to remain an amateur, a free spirit, making jokes to amuse myself as
much as other people.”
On Strictly Come Dancing he has again been a free spirit, having fun and
making everyone laugh; but another clutch of television “toilers” has
insisted on taking the show seriously. At least his comic genius has been
set free and we won’t have to wait another 40 years to enjoy this delightful
man as he really is.
RW Johnson was a politics don at Magdalen College and is now the South
Africa correspondent of The Sunday Times
Maybe Mr R.W. Johnson can write an article on the chaos in South Africa where the local Strictly Come Dancing was in array this week as the computer got the scores wrong and the wrong couple we thrown off.
John Baster, Crowthorne, Berks