Frankie Vaughan Ate My Hamster

  For Lucy and Joshua

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  FOREWORD BY IAN PATTISON

  PREFACE

  1 GROWING UP IS HARD TO DO

  2 A NEW LIFE

  3 GOODBYE TO SHORT TROUSERS

  4 DANGER, DANGER, DANGER

  5 LEADER OF THE PAK

  6 INTO THE SEVENTIES

  7 FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS PRESTWICK

  8 HUSH HUSH

  9 ASPIRIN AND COKE

  10 SINGLE AND A MATCH

  11 SOCKS AND DUGS AND ROCK’N’ROLL

  12 LEAD ON MACDUFF

  13 SO WHERE DO YOU HANG A WET CROMBIE?

  14 WELL NOBODY’S PREFECT ARE THEY?

  15 FORTY-FIVE AND A QUARTER DEGREES

  16 LOST

  17 A HIGHER CALLING

  EPILOGUE

  COPYRIGHT

  FOREWORD

  BY IAN PATTISON

  Frankie Vaughan never ate Rikki Brown’s hamster. To even suggest such a thing, let alone to assert it as an incontrovertible fact, is a grotesque, despicable outrage of the most contemptible order. Mr Vaughan was, over many decades, an illustrious pillar of the British entertainment establishment. I am proud to say I knew Frankie personally and very seldom did I ever see him eat a hamster. And even then never before a performance. True, once the hits had dried up, he turned to consuming small rodents – voles, squirrels (grey, never red), white mice and guinea pigs – but this was purely comfort eating and must be viewed compassionately, in the forgiving context of an extended career lull. After all, who among us has not treated a small animal inappropriately during a time of acute personal crisis?

  I knew Rikki Brown and I knew his hamster. In truth, I preferred the hamster. Rikki Brown and the bewitching ‘Hammie’ first came to my attention when I was working at the BBC Scotland Entertainment Department, which was located then in the crypt of Glasgow Cathedral. When Hammie hopped onto my desk and started using my pencil sharpener as an exercise wheel, it was evident, straight away, which of the two had the charisma.

  Rikki worked his gifted hamster pitilessly. It was Colonel Parker and Elvis all over again, except that Elvis, to our knowledge, never played St Mary’s Borstal.

  As the money rolled in, so Rikki indulged his taste for exquisite artworks and added to his glittering collection of satellite dishes. The walls of his home were adorned with original works by his favourite artists, Burberry, Kappa and B&Q. But it was never enough and Rikki, as the creative engine room of the double act, felt horribly overshadowed …

  How Hammie the hamster died will remain forever a showbiz mystery. Some say drug overdose and others millet overdose. It is known she suffered recurring weight problems and by her demise had ballooned to a curvaceous fourteen ounces. At her funeral, Rikki Brown’s grief was ostentatious. Wearing a white tuxedo, he threw a single lettuce leaf into her coffin before disappearing to Polmont to mourn his loss with two vivacious young pole-dancing twins, Arthur and Tommy Cheeves. For some, the finger of suspicion remains pointing inexorably in his direction.

  And now, at last, Rikki Brown has written his early memoirs. Will he speak truthfully of the murky events surrounding the death of his beloved hamster? My advice is simple: Read the lines; then read between the lines; finally, dig up the lines and peer under them using a strong torch. Beneath the dusty litter of Rikki Brown’s discarded jokes, lies the truth. ‘Lies the truth.’ See what I did there?

  Here’s Frankie Vaughan with ‘Mr Moonlight’.

  PREFACE

  People often ask me if I ended up working in comedy because at school I used humour as a defence against bullying. The answer is an emphatic ‘no’. For me humour was the worst defence against being bullied because whenever I made a comment that I thought would defuse a situation it was met with a ‘so you think you’re funny do you?’ and I’d get beaten up. I’d like to add that I still hate bullies and bullying is never, ever an acceptable practice. Unless, of course, you went to school with Jedward.

  RB

  1

  GROWING UP IS HARD TO DO

  The thing I remember most about my preschool years is that I was always heavily armed. Every birthday and Christmas I received a toy gun because all previous generations of my family had been to war. So the earlier I learned to handle a firearm, the better chance I had of survival when it came to handling the real thing for Queen and Country.

  In the final scene of Al Pacino’s movie Scarface, a team of hit men from a Columbian drugs cartel are invading his estate and to defend himself he opens up a cupboard to reveal an array of assault rifles, hand guns, rocket launchers and machine guns. My reaction to the scene was: ‘Call that a weapons cupboard? When I was four my toy cupboard was twice that size.’ Pacino’s character, Tony Montana, waved his assault rifle about menacingly with the line, ‘Say hello to my little friend.’ When I waved my rifle about, my line was, ‘Say hello to just a very small sample from my very vast arsenal.’

  However, as I was four during the Cuban missile crisis none of the arms I possessed would have been much good against the threat at that time, which wasn’t Columbian drugs cartels but the Russians and their intercontinental ballistic missiles. A toy Winchester rifle versus nuclear oblivion. The Russkies would probably have had the upper hand in that little skirmish.

  Not that being targeted by a nuclear missile would have bothered Glaswegians much because their reaction would have been, ‘I’ve had worse burns affa sitting too close to a three bar electric fire,’ and, ‘Radiation poisoning? Naw I think it was the donner kebab I had on top of sixteen pints.’

  Evidently being nuked was a real worry back then, so much so that the government produced a leaflet called Protect and Survive that was delivered to every household. It was full of handy hints on how to survive the nuclear Armageddon. Basically, take a door off its hinges, lay it against a wall, pile furniture against it and hide behind the door with a radio, a torch and a bucket for a toilet. I suppose the government had to do something, so Protect and Survive was the something they did. Seems they realised that a more honest and truthful publication called You’re Fucked might have induced panic.

  As it transpired my generation didn’t have to go to war unless we wanted to because the days of getting a letter saying, ‘Dear Cannon Fodder, you have won the opportunity to get shot at, love, The Government,’ were over. This meant the long, long tradition of members of my family fighting in Korea, World War Two, World War One, the Boer War, the Zulu War, etc, etc, ended with me. I say me, but I did have one uncle who was a conscientious objector and the closest he ever got to serving in the military was when he worked as John Mills’s lighting stand-in in The Colditz Story. My granny on my father’s side lost three brothers in World War One, so as far as I was concerned if there was a war I wasn’t going because my family had more than done their bit.

  Up until the age of four I was brought up in Corkerhill in a village that had been purpose built at the back of Pollok Park by British Rail to house railway workers and their families. Most of the families who inhabited the village moved up to Glasgow from Carlisle just after World War One, my grandparents on my mother’s side amongst them.

  After World War Two there were a few families with Italian fathers because during that war Pollok Park contained an Italian POW camp to house the prisoners who were made to work on the railway. Many of them remained after the war, married local girls and swapped forced labour with British Rail for paid labour with British Rail. Not a bad deal.

  Corkerhill was row after row of quaint red brick houses with indoor toilets. I mention the indoor toilets because this was a big deal back in the 1920s and anyone who had an indoor la
vatory was considered posh, much in the same way today that anyone who mentions they’ve got a bidet is considered posh. Having no inside toilet must have been a nuisance; this modern generation can say, ‘I’m off to the bog, back in a minute,’ while in the twenties they said, ‘I’m off to the bog, where’s my coat, shoes and the stick for wedging against the lavvie door to keep it shut, back in half an hour, because it is a two mile walk after all.’

  I don’t remember much about my Papa (Papa is an English thing for grandfather) other than he drove a steam train and hated Winston Churchill because he thought he was a war-monger. It’s funny because you’d think everyone of that generation would have loved him because he saw off Hitler. But they didn’t.

  I don’t actually have that many memories of my time in Corkerhill because I was obviously very young but the ones I do have are of feeding chickens and being perpetually covered in soot because it was the age of coal-powered steam locomotives and our house was about forty yards from the railway sheds. But the one memory I recall the most is of two dogs going at it in the street, and when I say going at it I mean they were doing ‘it’, in fact they were so busy doing ‘it’ that they didn’t notice that a crowd had gathered to cheer them on. My mother told me they were dancing. At four you’ll believe anything. But the main reason this stuck in my head was that they were separated by a neighbour throwing a bucket of water over them. I thought, ‘Wow, they’re tough on dancing round these here parts.’ Corkerhill, I wrongly assumed, was the Scottish equivalent of the Midwest-USA, bible-bashing small town that Kevin Bacon moved to in Footloose.

  Corkerhill was indeed quaint and also very charming in a ye-old-worlde-model-village kind of a way. It had greenhouses, wash houses and its own town hall, and if Glasgow Corporation, as was, hadn’t bulldozed it flat in the 1960s, it would now be one of the city’s main tourist attractions. I don’t know what Glasgow Corporation were up to but they practically levelled the city. You do hear about local government corruption, which begs the question: just how many shares in bulldozer companies did the councillors actually have? It must have been millions.

  My parents and I lived in one room in my grandparent’s house, which wasn’t ideal but houses were at a premium in the fifties and sixties and my parents were on a long list for their own house. The one room scenario wasn’t helped much by the fact that my parents had the first TV in Corkerhill and, small though it was, it took up most of the room. The lack of space was made even worse by the constant stream of visitors who came to gawk in awe at whatever was on. Gawk in awe? Wasn’t that the tactics the Americans adopted in the Gulf War?

  The TV wasn’t bought but rented from Radio Rentals. No one bought a TV as they were so expensive, and being under a rental contract meant that when it broke down Radio Rentals sent a man to repair it. TVs broke down frequently, so much so that I ended up calling the man who came to replace the valves every other week Uncle Frank. The only kids programming available was on the BBC’s Watch With Mother series, which was on at 1.30pm every weekday for fifteen minutes.

  My favourite was The Woodentops, according to my Mother anyway. I recall Spotty Dog, but that’s it. Thinking back I’m pretty sure my favourite wasn’t The Woodentops but Tales from the Riverbank with live Hammy the Hamster and Roderick the Rat who travelled around the waterways of Britain on a small toy boat. I suspect that they didn’t really travel willingly and their feet were glued to the deck of the boat because the director didn’t want them to escape or fall off the boat and drown.

  The other options were Bill and Ben of The Flower Pot Men, Rag, Tag and Bobtail and Andy Pandy. I may have been four at the time, but even at the age of four I thought Andy Pandy was a dick. We did have Sooty, too, I suppose but he was just as annoying as you couldn’t understand a word he was saying. In his defence, who would be articulate with Harry Corbett’s hand stuck up their backside?

  In 1961 my parents’ dreams finally came true and they received a letter offering them a house in the newly built scheme of Easterhouse. Okay, perhaps dream is maybe the wrong word for it considering what was to come, because who knew in 1961 that a few years later Easterhouse would have become the bench mark for utterly incompetent social planning? The social planners must have been off Social Planning College the day they covered providing even the most basic facilities.

  The home we were offered was at 45 Wardie Road. It was a bright red sandstone close of six flats but the council didn’t allocate any particular flat and the one you ended up in was decided by a council housing officer with a cloth bag containing six sets of keys. Lots were drawn to see whose hand went into the bag first and the set you picked decided the house you’d get. As I recall, my Dad was the third chooser and he picked top right, which was considered a premium pick. You didn’t want the bottom flat because bottom flats are easy to break into and you had someone above you and that could be noisy, and you didn’t want the middle flat for the latter reason, but the top, that was burglar proof and with no one above you, you were the ones who could be noisy for the tenants below.

  We moved in to the house in January after my last Christmas in Corkerhill. A Christmas I remember in great detail because every previous Christmas I woke up to two pillow cases full of weapons, but at Christmas 1961 I woke up to just one. ‘Hey, excuse me, I think there’s been some sort of mix up here.’ It was no mix up. On 19 December my brother Martin had been born and my arsenal allowance had been halved, forever. To say I was pissed off was probably an understatement and I couldn’t have been hiding it very well because my Nana (calling your Granny a Nana is also an English thing) tried to soften my disappointment by telling me that all she ever got for Christmas was an apple, an orange and a penny. I don’t recall my reaction to that but it was more than likely a sarcastic, ‘Aye, so ye pure did.’

  I also remember that year because my Nana took me to see Santa in Lewis’s department store in Argyle Street and I had my photograph taken sitting on Muffin the Mule. I came across this photograph again when I was twelve and I showed it to my mates, a couple of whom were older at about fifteen and one of them said, ‘Muffin the Mule, that’s a sexual offence.’ Being twelve and naive I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. When I was nineteen I was less naive and it was a case of, ‘Aw, right, I get the Muffin the Mule joke now, that’s quite funny.’ Seven years to get a joke leads me to believe that I’m the last person a stand up comedian would want in his audience.

  Every year Santa would arrive at Lewis’s in a big Christmas parade along Argyle Street and there would be a huge throng of parents and kids, and drunks. Most of them were still drunk from the Orange parade six months previously. The parade was led by a marching band who ignored the occasional shouts of, ‘Gies ‘“The Sash”,’ which were usually followed by, ‘Naw, well, get it right up yeez then,’ when they continued to play ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’. I think I was taken to see Santa up until I was maybe eight or nine because somewhere in between I stopped believing he was real since he didn’t bring the Scalextric set I’d asked him for. I did eventually get Scalextric, from my parents, but it was rubbish and nowhere near as exciting as it was portrayed in the adverts. At every bend the car flew off the track. Total rubbish, and in my opinion it’s not too late for the Advertising Standards Authority to launch a full and thorough investigation into the claims of the ‘ultimate in excitement’. Santa-wise the early sixties were a different time because most parents now wouldn’t pay for their kids to sit on a man’s knee unless the department store erected a certificate behind Santa assuring them that he wasn’t on the sex offenders register. Back then it was, ‘On you go, you’ll be fine, he’s not really that drunk.’

  2

  A NEW LIFE

  So, there we were in 1962 as we flitted and began our new life in Easterhouse in a close that comprised of the Hairs, the McDonalds, the McPhersons, the Davidsons, the Connors and the Browns. The McPhersons were only there for six months before emigrating to Australia for £10 with an assisted
passage and they were replaced by the Petersons. The mother was a bit strange because she never opened her door and would talk to any callers through the letterbox. Every time anyone went to their door it was like trying to get into a Speakeasy.

  We hadn’t been there very long when Mormon missionaries started appearing in the area. The fact that the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City deemed Easterhouse an area in need of missionaries was surely a bad omen but no one put two and two together at the time. They were very clean cut and immaculately dressed, and were also willing to answer questions. In the early sixties the questions were along the lines of, ‘Are youse mental?’ and in the early seventies the questions were always along the lines of, ‘Do you know the Osmonds?’ Who knows, maybe some of them were the Osmonds. Given how many Osmonds there are, there was every likelihood that their number did indeed include the toothy ones. It must have been a pretty pointless exercise for them because everyone in Easterhouse was either a Protestant or a Catholic and had no intention of ever becoming anything else.

  The close itself was always kept spotless because, as this was every family in the close’s first home, they were proud of it and every mother took their turn of the stairs and the windows. The proud first homeowner thing was one reason it was kept spotless, the other reason was that the biggest insult you could give to a Glasgow woman was to tell her, ‘See you, you keep a dirty hoose.’

  In the summer of 1962 I was taken into town and kitted out with a school uniform for the start of my education at Wellhouse School. I was bought a blazer that was about seven sizes too big. The shop didn’t sell blazers for five-year-olds. There was no point, as they’d never have sold any because to save money most parents, like mine, bought blazers for twelve-year-olds that you’d ‘grow into’. Wellhouse was quite far away but a new school was planned and I was only to attend Wellhouse until the new school, Easthall, was built. However, I didn’t get to go to school that August, or September or even October. As it turned out I was going to be very late indeed for my first day at school.