Who am I, again?

A good passage

If you were black and on TV in the 1970s, you were expected to tell jokes against yourself and maybe do gags about other races. This was all about playing to people’s fear, but also disengaging any aggro while you were on stage. The reason Charlie Williams self-deprecated in a broad Yorkshire accent was to stop the audience getting their digs in first: ’Ey up, old flower, stop laughin’ – ooh, she’s cryin’. ’Ey, old love, don’t rub your mascara, you’ll be darker than me!’ Jos White would say, ‘I’m browned off, I’m browned off.’ I was subconsciously being schooled in what it might take to get over to a predominantly white audience. Rule number one seemed to be: get all the dodgy racist jokes in before they did.

But I didn’t begin like that. I had no plan at first. My sole joy was simply to make my friends, and whoever else was around, squirt milk or lager from either nostril. There were many ways to do this: I might impersonate someone nearby, the way they stood or talked; I might do an impromptu impression from the cartoons – a Jamaican Scooby-Doo, Barney Rubble swearing, Deputy Dawg from Dudley; or I’d walk behind someone very quietly for a while and suddenly make a big noise – ‘BOH!’ Simplistic routes to laughter, certainly, but my friends seemed to like them.

I’d dance, sing – anything to get a reaction. I could do Elvis, Noddy Holder, Chuck Berry, Tommy Cooper, Max Bygraves, Frank Spencer, Muhammad Ali, Batman, Robin, Clement Freud, Dave Allen. Some of them sounded quite good. When my voice broke, only a few of the voices were affected, although when I sang everything had to be lowered several tones to accommodate the dropping of my meat and two veg.

I was on the highway to fame, with no GPS and absolutely no clue to where I was heading.