Mel Smith: I've Sort of Done Things

All right, shut up! Now, listen to me.

In 1979, a charismatic young actor sauntered onto our TV screens.

Rotund, long-haired, he seemed to specialise in down-trodden,

seedy lowlifes.

All right. I never forget a face.

Look at me.

Mel's face has that... Even though there's something which can be

quite pompous about it and quite sort of haughty,

you know, bombastic, he, er...it's a downtrodden face.

But it was in the ground-breaking sketch show Not The Nine O'Clock News

that Mel Smith emerged as one of TV's most unique comic talents.

Game on.

'So it's Fat Belly to go first. And it's a good start.

'Double vodka.'

He found a very normal, relaxed thing in the biggest of characters.

OPERATIC SINGING

Wank.

Mel, who died aged 60 earlier this year, was many things.

He was a theatre and film director, a businessman,

an obsessive gambler, a racehorse owner and a bon viveur.

Mel always looked famous and rich and successful long before he was.

But most of all, Mel was the face that changed comic acting

for a generation.

Air safety. In new regulations put into force today,

the Federal Aviation Authority have withdrawn 20% of all aeroplanes

and put them out to stud.

Not The Nine O'Clock News was the brainchild of

current-affairs producer Sean Hardie and comedy producer John Lloyd.

Just two inside, please.

I set out with Sean to go and cast the thing and then I

found Mel in a pub in Chiswick. I said, "I've got this show,

"it's six shows, it's a blank canvas, do you want to be in it?"

And, um, we had a couple of pints, got on rather well.

He said, "Well, I can't do it actually, I'm busy at the moment."

So he wasn't in what would have been the first series,

and became known as the pilot, cos it was... Not The Nine O'Clock News

was cancelled because of the general election of 1979.

Eyes down for a full house.

On its own, number 1.

Two fat antelopes, 22.

Mel eventually signed up for the first series proper

of Not The Nine O'Clock News.

Two rather plump antelopes, nine.

By the second series,

the familiar award-winning line-up had been established.

I used to write all the billings for the Radio Times and we tried

to break all the rules with the billings as much as anything else.

My favourite one was the cast of it, Not The Nine O'Clock News,

and it said, um, "The rubbery one - Rowan Atkinson,

"the fat one - Mel Smith,

"the girl - Pamela Stephenson, and the other one - Griff Rhys Jones."

It sort of went into a niche, very difficult to imagine

when we look at comedy now,

but most of the practitioners of comedy at that time were over 50.

The Two Ronnies and Morecambe and Wise felt like another generation,

like another world,

and certainly we weren't going into that world,

we weren't part of that generation.

-# With a bum...

-Tit.

# How's your father, tiddly-eye.

# ..All day just crawling up through the grass

# Thistles in my hair and bracken up me anus

# I'm thrilled to bits if I see a pair of tits

# And I love to watch the sun go down

# Over China, over China over China town. #

In Not The Nine O'clock News we wanted to reflect

the landscape of the street and the world in which we actually lived.

Come on, there's people waiting.

Not The Nine O'Clock News was in a sense the comedy equivalent of punk.

It was roughly the same era so it was saying, you know, goodbye

to all that and here's something new and right for a modern generation.

# I go up west every night

# Go down to the pub and look for a fight

# I have ten lagers then I have ten more

# Then I jump up and down and I'm sick on the floor. #

# Come on, you

# Cos your hands are cold

# Come on, you

# Cos you're far too old

# Come on, you

# Cos you're a stupid old straight

# Go, go, go, go hate, hate, hate, hate. #

We were really on the bounce from Monty Python.

I mean, they were the heroes of everybody in my generation,

and we didn't think we could do what they did, so we decided to do

something completely different,

which was to do something very low-key, something realistic,

and Mel was the perfect person to do low-key.

I'm sorry, John, I'm sorry, whatever you say,

this film is a highly distasteful one.

-Have people forgotten how Monty Python suffered for us?

-I know.

How often the sketches failed? I mean, these men died for us.

-Frequently.

-I know.

He brought such a self-confidence that he didn't have to act up,

he wanted to act out.

Everything was... Everything was casual.

I think modern Christians should have a bit less of the, "Get thee behind me, Satan,"

and more of the, "Come in, me old mate, and have a cup of tea."

Hello, John.

Because he came from a straight acting, serious directing

background, that's where you get that amazing flat acting style

that started really with Not The Nine O'Clock News and goes

all the way through modern alternative comedy of that...

If you turn the sound down you can't tell somebody's trying to be funny, you know.

That's Mel's idea. Nobody else's.

He was always a very relaxed, capable, good,

believable, unshowy actor.

We're going to take a look at origami, aren't we, Rowan?

That's right, Mel,

which is the ancient Japanese art of paper folding.

His style is so simple and so sort of unpretentious

and so effortless, really.

Mel's performance tone and style. And it was something that

I suppose I tried to emulate a little.

And actually found very interesting and very engaging.

And I remember a lot of the sketches that we did together,

like the origami sketch, in which we were being very flat

and very sort of naturalistic to camera, which is something

that I'd never done,

because even then I tended to do characters that were rather extreme.

You can do this on your own

but if there are two of you then it will probably help.

And we just have a pull there.

That's it, that's it. Now...

And you see, now there we have a very nice hat.

Here's a...

Here's a little bracelet.

And here we have a nice pair of earrings.

-And of course the moustache.

-The moustache.

He's sort of daring you to say, "Yeah, you're not funny, you're

"being completely silly." "No, I really mean this, I'm a proper

"children's television presenter and this hat is really good."

He dares you to contradict him.

Twins, doubles, lookalikes.

In the studio now are two men who will tell us what it is like

to suffer the pain and heartache of being identical twins.

The thing about Mel is that

he found a very normal, relaxed thing in the biggest of characters.

So if he was playing a vicar or a bishop or a man who lives with

a gorilla, you would have all the little sort of tensions of normal

conversation and normal behaviour, and that's what made it so funny.

Professor, can Gerald really speak as we would understand it?

Oh, yes, he can speak a few actual words.

Of course, it was extremely difficult to get him even to this stage.

When I first... When I first captured Gerald in the Congo, I...

'67, I think it was.

'68.

'68.

With Mel, I felt this wonderful sort of peace in performance,

where you didn't have to do much and you could just be very flat

and tonal in his way. And it was something that I really enjoyed.

I had to do a lot of work with him on a one-to-one basis.

If I might just butt in at this point,

I think I should point out that I have done a considerable

amount of work on this project myself, and if I may say so,

your teaching methods do leave a bit to be desired.

-That's a bit ungrateful, isn't it?

-And your diction, for instance...

I'm sorry, can I put this into some sort of perspective?

When I caught Gerald in '68, he was completely wild.

Wild? I was absolutely livid.

I think I wrote a sketch about a man and a talking gorilla, and a lot of

the deep, um, er, homosexual subtext was added by Mel and Rowan and John.

How has Gerald reacted to being separated from his family?

Well, to begin with, Gerald did make various attempts

to contact his old flange of gorillas.

It is a whoop, Professor, it is a whoop of gorillas.

It is a flange of baboons, for God's sake.

He sent them the occasional letter but I couldn't really see the point.

I mean, they either ate them or wiped their bottoms on them.

Look, look, I know you've never got on with my mother.

Well, she didn't exactly like me, did she?

-She got on perfectly well with David Attenborough.

-David Attenborough!

All I ever hear is David bloody Attenborough.

-Let's leave Dave out of this, shall we?

-Oh, shut up and have a banana.

You could cast Mel in anything,

you know, high comedy, serious drama.

In 1982, Mel was cast in his first lead role in a TV drama,

as ruthless property developer Tom Craig in Muck And Brass.

There's a lot of people owe me in this town, Cyril,

and you're one of them.

I'm telling you. I don't give fair dos. I'm going to start digging.

You're an old man.

If you want to go out with the brass bands playing,

and a plaque to your memory in the town-hall toilets,

you'd better make sure one of those tenders I've got in there gets accepted.

Do I make myself plain?

While Mel was filming Muck And Brass,

Not The Nine O'Clock News suddenly ended,

leaving him and Griff to partner up or face unemployment.

# Kinda lingers...#

Kinda lingers, me old mate.

# Kinda lingers...#

-Kinda lingers, Pam.

-Oh, Griff.

Mel and Griff were the two people who

looked like mates and they clearly weren't a woman,

as Pamela Stephenson was.

I think that was fairly obvious from the get-go.

And they weren't Rowan, who was sort of his own, you know, mimetic genius.

They became partners cos Rowan sacked us all.

Simple as that. You know, they thought they were out of a job.

They definitely thought, the game's up, we'll never work again.

After Not The Nine O'Clock News finished,

Mel and Griff pitched an idea for a two-man show.

Their audition piece was featured in a BBC Christmas Special.

I wrote a sketch about a hospital visitor.

-I expect you've heard of me.

-No.

-Trevor?

-What do you want, Trevor?

I want for nothing, save your comfort.

Thank you.

We of the Brotherhood of St Vitus bring succour to the sick.

-Are you sick, my friend?

-I am, yes.

-What's wrong with you?

'And they said, "Yeah, make a pilot,'

"off you go."

So we made a pilot. There were a number of really great sketches

in it, one of which was two guys on a polar expedition.

Oh, John, John. Oh, this is it. We are in luck.

Of course the crevasse is deep to the east.

If you head west about half a mile over the ridge,

there's a crossing point.

We can be at the South Pole in 36 hours. 36 hours, I'm so excited!

You said you'd be back at 6.30.

I got caught in a blizzard, John.

-Caught in a blizzard?

-John, we are 17 miles from the South Pole.

I don't think we need to worry about the niceties of punctuality.

I'm not worried about the niceties of punctuality.

I just don't think you should say 6.30

if you don't mean it, that's all.

That went quite well, and then we were off.

And we made the first series of Smith & Jones in about 1983.

Something around that time.

-I went down to Harley Street yesterday.

-Oh, yeah.

-Yeah, down where all the clinics are.

-Oh.

-I go down there quite often, actually.

-Do you?

Oh, yeah, to the...you know, the artificial inseminatory.

LAUGHTER

Sperm bank, you know.

Cos they've actually got the biggest collection of sperms

in the country down there.

You go down there and have a look at them, do you?

LAUGHTER

No, no.

-I mean, I go to stick some in.

-Oh.

-I'm a donator.

-Oh, oh.

How do you do that, then?

Right from the first episode of Alas Smith And Jones, Mel and Griff

performed what would become their signature sketch -

the head-to-head.

They were based on work we'd already been doing, funnily enough,

in advertising, as we set up a radio advertising company called Talkback.

It was an extremely useful tool for corporate work with the, er...

you'd drop in the name of the client somewhere,

and the very fact that these were two slightly ill-informed,

rather...you know, you could say thick characters,

meant it was an extremely useful way of conveying information.

And when we came to do the television show I thought, er,

let's try this structure.

Two close-ups of two profiles,

you know, almost touching each other,

black background, white shirts.

It was... It was as radio as you could possibly get on television.

-I mean, there's a lot of women in the world.

-Yeah, right.

-And a lot of them, for various reasons, they can't get pregnant.

-No.

Because their husbands haven't got it in 'em, see.

What, not at all?

-Well, not as much as I have.

-No.

When they stared reading it,

it became obvious that there were two sorts of stupidity.

You know, Griff playing a stupid person is very different

from Mel playing a stupid person.

And, er, there's something sort of... Even though Griff

sort of struggles with concepts in his head,

he actually questions Mel, who's all sort of full of bullshit about blah-blah.

Do you know it is over 20 years since Sergeant Pepper came out?

-Is it really?

-20 years.

-Dear, oh, dear.

-Makes you think, doesn't it?

-It does.

Makes me think I ought to buy it some time.

You never heard...

-Oh, it's only the best record ever made.

-Is it?

# It was 20 years ago today

# Sergeant Pepper taught the band how to play

# It's going out of date... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. #

-Sounds marvellous.

-Oh, it's brilliant. Brilliant.

It was necessary for the two characters to sit there

in sort of blank incomprehension for as long as

effectively I decided that we could...we could wait,

and to know that Mel would just go with it and vice versa

was an absolutely essential quality.

I was one of the beautiful people.

LAUGHTER

-Were you really?

-I was, yes. It was a bit before I met you, of course.

Yeah, I think it must have been.

LAUGHTER

I think you believe those guys.

I think you believe that somewhere in some pub somewhere...

obviously a very dark, black pub, there are two people,

who sit down over a pint and talk like that.

There was an element of the fact

that Mel did play the, um...

..the sort of straightforward, you know,

er, Sun reading, beer swilling,

easy-going bloke and I played the more...

..stretched, sort of stressed-out, neurotic character,

which we did a lot, and that worked quite well for us,

and it was pretty well true as well.

We gave you this project, you see, because you had given us

the impression that you had a major record of construction

engineering work throughout the world.

I mean, didn't you get the contract for the Aswan Dam?

Yeah, we did, yeah. We were all set, raring to go,

bloody van broke down, didn't it?

So you've never actually built anything at all, have you?

-Hold on a minute. We refurbished the entire Taj Mahal.

-The Taj Mahal?

Well, it WAS the Taj Mahal. It's the Laughing Poppadom now, I think.

Mel could do sort of authority figures

and the very opposite of authority figures, you know. As you say,

he could do a police inspector, he could do, you know, a tramp.

Er, but...but to me it always came across as Mel doing it.

Gentlemen of the press, I would like to brief you as to the latest

developments, which are considerable,

in the hunt for the killer at large in the Suffolk region.

In the Sussex region.

Rory had a sort of bead on the way Mel could play

that Inspector Bribeasy character very well, very well.

That was a classic sort of Mel... sort of in control of his, er...

..his...inner stupidity.

One of the most important clues so far received

was yesterday at operational headquarters,

a cassette tape with this letter.

"Dear, Mr Clever Copper..."

I think he's referring to me there.

The idea of a policeman on the beat, or...you know, or a flustered,

thick copper, that doesn't happen any more.

I think the police are into PR enough to know that they don't have,

er, Mel Smith lookalike officers making mistakes in front of the press.

Sam Block, The Times. >

Is it true that some of your offices have had a close encounter

with the Hedgehog?

Yes.

Is it in fact true that a senior police officer has spoken

-to him face-to-face?

-Yes.

-Then why hasn't he been caught?

ALL ASK QUESTIONS

-Look, we couldn't nab him.

-Why not?

Because he's a Mason!

'I played to the idea that I was the uptight,'

neurotic one, and Mel was the easy-going, um, er, slob.

It was very Odd Couple.

Is the soap up your end, by the way?

-Pardon.

-Is the soap up your end?

No, I don't think so.

You see, I know that Mel always wanted to go off and play

and do the Odd Couple.

And I resisted it, because I thought it was a bit of a cliche, almost,

for us to do it. I imagined at some point we'd do it later

but I don't suppose we ever will do it now.

What is it, then? I mean, what, what...

you just don't like touching other men?

-No, it's not that.

-What is it, then?

-I just don't like touching you.

We did the kiss originally as a piece in TV.

GRIFF GRUNTS

Everywhere I went people would say how horrible it must have been

for me kissing Mel, but I... I'm not quite sure why they

thought it was horrible for me but not horrible for him to kiss me!

You have got to open up, Griff, open up!

GRIFF PROTESTS

So...

But it was horrible for me to kiss Mel because he ate a lot of curry,

smoked cigars and drank quite a lot

and he was quite an aggressive kisser.

He never held himself back.

-What did you think?

-Taramasalata, wasn't it?

-It was.

We both like the same jokes, we both roar with laughter at the same jokes.

-Did you have a look at the portfolio?

-I had a look at the portfolio.

-And...

Well, I'm obviously very interested.

It's going to be...

a very, very interesting new departure for us.

Do you think we're going to find the money?

I don't think the finance is any problem in itself

but I'm just little bit...

-Would you like to see the menu, sir?

-I think Chef knows our order, Henry, thank you.

-Wine list?

-Er, yes.

'So however different we were, all our interests were different,'

but nonetheless if push came to shove, if somebody stuck a fairly

straightforward joke in front of us, we would find that pretty hilarious.

HE MURMURS

-No, no, no!

-Just one, just one.

-No, no.

AEROPLANE NOISE

Will there be anything else, gentlemen?

-Just the bill, I think, Henry.

-Just the bill, sir.

We must have done about 60 hours, of course that's far too much.

You know, you are...Marmite.

You're spreading yourself fairly thin

but when it worked, and it was there, it was terrific.

The most extraordinary thing about Britain today is how quickly it's

-moving towards the classless society.

-Yah, because here at the BBC

it's actually a positive advantage to be working-class,

-as Mel has found out. Because he is...

-I beg your pardon?

Because he's a working-class man, the salt of the earth, who's...

Sorry, excuse me just for a second. I'm not working-class.

-I'm middle-class.

-OK, fine.

Well, if you say so, fine.

No, it's not...

nothing to do with "if I say so", Griff. I come from a perfectly...

-ordinary middle-class family.

-Fine, OK, middle-class.

With the accent on ordinary, I should think.

Mel Smith was born in London, in 1952.

His father Ken, who was originally from Country Durham,

married Mel's mother, Vera,

and took over her family greengrocer's in West London.

Mel and his younger sister, Lesley,

lived with their parents above the family shop in Chiswick.

When they married,

Ken had convinced Vera that the way to go forward was to

change from being a greengrocer to a bookmaker's.

They started in a modest flat

then moved up to a nice semidetached house.

And did very well for themselves.

His father was quite quiet.

He wouldn't say anything unless it was worth saying.

Mum was much more gregarious.

I never met Mel's dad, who I think died before we really got together,

but Mel's mum, I knew Vera, I knew her very well.

She was, er...she was fantastic.

Hugely supportive of Mel, great fun, and liked to laugh.

-Hold on!

-You like this, The Only Way Is Up?

-I love it.

LAUGHTER

Up, up, up.

MEL LAUGHS

Look at your mother, Lesley.

-Terrible.

-She's old.

-It's sad, sad to watch.

It is sad, sad to watch. But she loves it!

I remember him telling about... him telling me about his mother.

He'd been very amused by this.

He'd been round to see her the day before, I think, and she had

been reading in the Daily Mail about the Loony Left in Lambeth.

And she said, "Apparently, Mel, if you're a lesbian amputee

"you can have free hang-gliding lessons.

She absolutely believed every word of the Daily Mail.

In 1964, the academically bright Mel

got into Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith.

This is the original hall of Latymer Upper.

And it's used for assemblies and in Mel's time the stage behind us was

vastly expanded by groups of boys with lights and curtains

and so it's a much bigger stage, slightly ramshackle.

His enthusiasm for theatre and acting seemed to...

spring fully formed from nowhere.

He showed an absolute remarkable maturity,

and as a 17-year-old gave a marvellous portrayal

as Falstaff.

Mel had the audience eating out of his hand really

in the way he spoke his lines.

And how he was calm and gentle and then bashing away, shouting

and screaming and doing all sorts of Nine O'Clock News type things

at times. It's a very moving play, that,

and people said, "That's the making of an actor."

Every year he was the captain of the year's team,

all the way from the second form right up to the sixth form, and

at the sixth-form level he was the captain of the school First XV.

He formed odd quirky clubs. He formed the Latymer Walking Society.

That was a group that, at lunchtime, walked around the school

very, very quickly, for no other reason

than it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Latymer meant a great deal to Mel.

It allowed him to expand, it allowed him in a sense to be naughty,

perhaps sometimes encouraged him to be naughty.

It made him work very hard.

In 1971, Mel won a place to study experimental psychology

at New College, Oxford.

# All right, everybody

# Let your hair down

# Want to see everybody get up off their seat

# Clap your hands, stamp your feet

# Get down, get with it

# I said get down, get with it... #

For a lot of people, including me,

you go to university and it's the first time you're

sort of independent, when you're finding your way around the world.

And Mel looked like a man who absolutely knew his way around the world and back again.

# I said get down and get with it

# It's been a long, long time... #

We're in the King's Arms, which is a stone's throw

from where Mel and I used to live, and it's where we came

most mornings if we weren't off to the races.

He was a hugely prodigious drinker.

People who were interested in the theatre used to come in here

and Mel would just basically hold court.

He was a man who did lots of productions.

He also appeared in quite a few things.

He was a man who rose very quickly within the ranks.

MUSIC: "I'm Free" by The Who

Numbers 6 and 7 New College Lane.

As you can see, it's where Edmund Halley had his observatory.

And I used to have the rooms on this side,

going in this entrance, and Mel had the rooms on this side.

I came back one night and there was a party going on next door,

and they were playing Tommy.

I pretty soon realised it was actually my copy of Tommy.

They'd broken into my rooms and pinched my record

so I stormed round next door in a high state of pique,

and hammered on the door, and Mel opened the door,

thrust a large gin and tonic into my hand, and that was it.

Friends for life, really.

Right, so this was Mel's room.

My room was behind dividing doors here, which have since been plastered over.

Bed in the same position. Can't remember where the desk was.

Nice to see a bottle of Pimm's on the mantelpiece.

We used to spend most of our time in my room because it's rather bigger than this room.

I think he liked to make a mess in my patch rather than his own.

We're talking about 41 years ago, 42 years ago I met Mel.

A huge sense of sadness that I'm not going to see him any more.

Huge.

I think his attendance record was appalling.

I don't think the experimental psychology labs had seen much of him.

And they asked him if he was going to...

put his head down and work for his finals,

or whether he was going to spend all his time directing and acting.

And I think he chose the latter.

In 1973, having decided not to complete his degree at Oxford,

Mel returned to London to take up a job

as assistant director at the Royal Court Theatre.

I actually worked on Not I here,

which is a 20-minute monologue written by Samuel Beckett,

coming from a mouth very, very tightly lit, stage left.

Stage right, there's this cloaked figure, so dimly lit

that people often didn't notice he was there.

Cloak and cowl, who at about three occasions during the play

had to go like this, you see.

Two or three times in the show, like this.

I was assistant director on the show and we spent the whole day auditioning people

for the part of the guy in the cloak. It was unbelievable.

On the audition, we had a queue of really quite good actors coming in,

and I used to sit stage left doing the whole monologue.

SHOUTS UNINTELLIGIBLY

Like that, while these actors used to stand there going...

It was the most embarrassing thing I'd ever done in my whole life.

During the mid-'70s, Mel continued to take assistant directing jobs

in theatres around the country until he met up with actor Bob Goody.

For the next few years, they wrote and performed several productions together,

including 'Ave You 'Eard The One About Joey Baker

and The Gambler, which was later revived in the West End.

By 1979, they'd attracted the attention of TV.

# Wotcha, Bob.

# Wotcha, Mel

# Wotcha been up to?

# Can't you tell? #

We came up with this sort of strange sketch show

where we played Mel and Bob and, um, Mel was the slightly serious one.

The sort of round, serious one.

I was the tall, crazy one who was desperate about books,

a bit like a grown-up child, and we lived in a television studio

and we shared a big double bed, a bit like Morecambe and Wise.

Got some dodgy mail but we got away with it.

Bob! Get back in the bed!

We did a Blue Peter send-up every week,

which I think was called Let's Look At A Book.

What you were about to witness was television at its most terrifying.

Note the sickly grin, the glazed expression and the cuddly stuffed Labrador.

-Don't go on at me, Fatso!

-Oh, come on, Bob.

Mel, you're rotten, you are! It's a popular bit of the programme.

I've been flooded with letters saying how exciting and informative

and clever I am.

Bob, 17 postcards from your Auntie Dot all saying,

"keep up the good work" hardly puts you in the superstar bracket.

And we also did a Christmas special.

Smith And Goody On Ice, which was...

which was hysterical.

-Hi, Merry Christmas!

-Merry Christmas!

To all of those of you watching,

all those in France and certain bits of Canada, Bon Noel!

I could have done more stuff with Mel, and I'd love to have done,

but sketch comedy wasn't... I did it with Smith and Goody,

but it wasn't my great forte. I'm more of an actor...

Sort of a comic actor but not a sketch comedian.

But once Not The Nine O'Clock News took off,

Mel could do it all, really.

So, yeah, it was a shame, but, never...

That's the way it goes.

Thanks, mate. Thanks, pal. See you, all right?

Extraordinary.

I wrote a play around the same time, called American Days,

which needed the part of an ageing rock star.

On the last night of the play, he said he was about

to do this show called Not The Nine O'Clock News.

He said, "I have no idea if it's going to last but I do know,"

he said, "Stephen, that I'm going to be world famous."

And I looked at him somewhat doubtfully,

cos there was this large man that was basically a character actor

and sometime theatre director, and said, "But of course, Mel."

Um, and then within a year or so he was very, very famous.

In 1979, Mel put theatre and children's television to one side

and began his rise to stardom in Not The Nine O'Clock News.

-SWEDISH ACCENTS: Good afternoon.

-Can I help you, sir?

I would like some deodorant, please.

Ball or aerosol?

Neither, I want it for my armpits.

During the '80s, Not The Nine O'Clock News and then Alas Smith And Jones

projected Mel to the top of the comedy A-list.

At the same time, behind the camera, he and Griff started

what was to become the blueprint for independent television production companies, Talkback.

Mel and Griff started Talkback with a lot of foresight, really.

They saw that by taking their destiny into their own hands

and creating a production company they could, you know,

control their future and not just, as it were,

be working for the broadcasters.

So we had a pinball machine, we had a pool table,

and gradually we would then start to be successful,

and the first thing that happened when we got successful was somebody would arrive

and say we've got to get rid of the pool table,

because we need to put a desk in there for somebody to work,

so we'd say goodbye. And then we'd move to bigger offices

and we'd buy another pool table,

and a jukebox and a couple of pinball tables,

and they'd last for about six months and then Peter Fincham would say,

"I don't think we can have all this stuff around the office.

"We've got to get rid of it." So it would all go.

Their level of involvement fluctuated.

Griff's was greater than Mel's. Griff was a great one for bounding

into the office at nine o'clock on a Monday morning,

and saying we need to do this and we must to that,

and he had a grand plan, as it were, to take over the world.

And Mel was terribly happy to sit in the background, kind of.

My image of him, he would always be puffing on a cigar.

So whatever he said, you could see through a kind of...

or hear through a haze of cigar smoke.

Mel kept meeting people in pubs, that was one thing he'd do.

He'd come back and say, "I've met this guy in a pub

"and he's got a great idea," and we'd sit down

and find ourselves having to be in bed slightly with this man in a pub.

Time now, ladies and gentlemen.

Time now, drink up, would you please?

Let's have your glasses.

-George.

-Yes.

I'm letting a few of the regulars stay behind for an after-hours session. Know what I mean?

-Yeah, right.

-Yeah.

So would you mind drinking up and pissing off?

The spirit of Talkback and what led Talkback to making lots

of great comedy programmes through the '90s for the likes of, you know,

Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris,

people like that, it all comes from Mel and Griff.

And it all comes from "Let's create a company

"that's a little bit of an anti-company."

Mel and I had a sort of idea that what you did was you had

a lot of lunch. Lot of lunch.

Lunch was very, very important in our day.

We'd arrive just before lunch and then we'd go for lunch.

I think it's fair to say that Griff and Mel had very differing...

leisure pursuits, extracurricular activities.

Griff would put in a very hard day's work,

and his way to relax was immediately go and do another hard day's work,

straightaway, on something different.

Whereas Mel, I think, used his leisure time very, very productively.

I think he put a lot of energy into relaxing.

And that's one of his great joys.

I'd bring along a bottle of vodka or something and we'd sit

and play poker, one on one.

And I remember this one night we really got into playing poker

one on one and about £150 was going back and forth between us.

And about five in the morning he went, "Oh."

He said, "I've just remembered." I said, "What?"

Absolutely paralytic by this point,

he said, "I'm on breakfast television this morning."

I said, "You're kidding me!"

He looked out the window and said, "There's the car waiting for me."

I said, "You can't go on breakfast television in this state!"

He said, "You're absolutely right, can I borrow your shirt?"

Our guest reviewer of the papers

is Mel Smith of Not The Nine O'Clock News fame,

who's just taken over the part of Charley's Aunt from Griff Rhys Jones

-and at short notice, I hear.

-Yeah, two days.

How's it going?

Er, fine, actually.

I remember lying on the sofa

watching him being interviewed by Selena Scott, knowing

he was as drunk as I was, and he was witty, intelligent, funny, coherent.

Well, this man was an ox. I tell you, he was made of sterner stuff.

Everyone used to use this expression, getting Smithed.

"I was badly Smithed last night,"

because if you went out for a drink it would turn into a very long night

always ending up back at Mel's.

Mel introduced me to many things. The great drink the Greyhound,

Mel's favourite drink, which was a measure of vodka -

I won't tell you how big the measure was -

and fresh grapefruit juice, which is actually a very nice drink.

And you know, by today's standard, it's quite healthy as well.

It would have been one of his five a day, definitely.

This has never, ever happened to me before.

I think it's cos I must have had much too much to drink.

I'm really sorry.

The staff knew them as Fatty and Grumpy

and that was all you needed to know.

Mel, convivial, jolly, you know,

very rare to see Mel lose his temper.

I don't think I've ever seen it.

Griff is constantly cross, constantly wired, very tense.

We were making quite a lot of training films, things like that.

And Mel, who had always wanted to direct movies,

started to take over the direction of some of these things,

did a few of those.

And so...then started to direct commercials.

We had a commercials company.

On with the quick-fire section, fingers on the buzzers.

Who was Britain's last coalition Prime Minister?

-Winston Churchill.

-Correct.

-Gozzers, pinkies and...

-Types of fishing bait.

Correct. Who discovered...?

-Louis Pasteur.

-Correct. Where might...?

-In your ear.

-Correct. What...?

-Seven.

-How...?

-Runner beans.

-What...?

H2O.

-'Ere, I bet he drinks...

-Carling Black Label.

And then he moved from there to... to making films,

because it was his great passion.

The solid truth about The Tall Guy is that at the end of

Not The Nine O'Clock News Mel said to me,

"If ever you write a film and don't ask me to direct it, I'll kill you."

And I remembered that when I wrote a film.

LOUD SNEEZING

-Good evening, Mr Morrow.

-Good evening, Dexter.

What a life. Blind and allergic to his guide dog.

The best bit by far in The Tall Guy

is the spoof musical, The Elephant Man,

and that's Mel's love/hate of musicals.

Mel really wanted to do that

because he didn't like Andrew Lloyd Webber's stuff any more than I did,

but he did love Sondheim, as do I.

So it's a kind of hybrid, actually. It's a send-up of both of them

but it's most venomous, I think, ABOUT Andrew Lloyd Webber.

There's one song that's terribly like him.

# I don't know how to reach him

# He's so distant, like a priest or a monk

# And just when I think he's staying

# I find out he's packing his trunk. #

We did a poster for Elephant.

And Mel said, "We want something that looks as though

"the RSC has put on a serious production of The Elephant Man

"as a musical called Elephant, and it needs to be pretentious."

And I said, "I can do pretentious no problem whatsoever."

I remember doing it and thinking,

'Yeah, no, no, this is exactly what the RSC would do

"for The Elephant Man Musical, especially directed by Trevor Nunn.'

Excuse me, you were brilliant.

-You were just brilliant.

-Thank you very much.

Lovely.

The thing you have to remember

about Mel is that he wanted to be a commercial film director,

and so he was aware that you had to make commercially accessible movies.

He liked Hollywood. He wasn't averse to the kind of Hollywood machine.

In fact, he very much wanted to be a part of it in reality.

In the early '90s, on the back of the success of The Tall Guy

and his work in commercials, Mel and his wife Pam moved to Los Angeles.

The thing about Mel was he kind of looked the part.

He had enormous presence. If he got the meetings,

he invariably impressed the people out there.

Mel's first Hollywood film was Radioland Murders.

Produced by George Lucas,

it paid homage to the screwball comedies of the 1930s.

But the film flopped.

There's nothing like a film tanking to take the wind out your sails.

I mean, it was a really ghastly experience, you know,

cos these things just take so long to make.

He so wanted to be a successful movie director.

That's what he wanted.

In 1997, three years after the difficult experience

of Radioland Murders, Mel did direct

what was to become by far his most successful film.

There were quite high hopes for Bean because the TV show

had already internationally been such a big deal and so it was

definitely a way of Mel, you know, kind of trying to guarantee a hit.

Bean went on to make over £150 million at the box office.

Back in Britain, Alas Smith And Jones

and Mel and Griff's company were going from strength to strength.

Ladies and customers,

tonight we have a very important announcement to make to you all.

Yes, we have been in consultation with members of the government

at the very lowest level, and we are here to tell you

it's been decided to sell us off to the country.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the privatisation of Smith and Jones.

In 2000, Mel, Griff and fellow company director Peter Fincham

sold Talkback Productions for £62 million.

When Mel and Griff and Peter sold Talkback for ganillions...

..you sort of thought, well, that's...

that's made Mel into what he was already.

He was very comfortable with money, he always, I think...

There was always a certain amount of cash from the word go.

I think his granny... He would go up to London and his granny

would sort of sort him out with a few quid if he was a bit skint.

It's true that while we were in the business of selling Talkback

and before the deal was done and the ink was dry,

he went out and bought himself a new Rolls-Royce, which caused me

and Griff considerable consternation because we were very nervous that

the deal would go wrong, and we were, in a typical British way,

a bit embarrassed about the fact that we were making a lot of money.

And the last thing that we wanted to do was to kind of flash the cash.

But Mel had absolutely no compunctions about flashing the cash at all.

Once he made a lot of money, he sort of invited

everybody to have huge lunches or whatever.

Or he'd invite us to a box at the races.

He was very generous with it.

I suspect that took away a bit of the edge that was,

"I'm going to go to Hollywood and make it big,"

because he'd sort of...made it big, without trying, really.

And so I suspect that he thought "I'll go and have..."

You know, "I'll pop down the racecourse."

I used to come racing all the time with Mel

and then about 12 years ago, something like that,

Mel said, "Let's do it together."

And so we started buying horses.

Mel and he arrived and Mel liked a large vodka, so he had one.

I was very modest myself. Of course, yeah.

Anthony didn't have quite such a large one.

But anyway, they liked the set-up

and let me go and buy them a horse.

Many a lunch one would have and on the drive home...

being driven, I hasten to add...

we would... one would say to the other,

"Did we just buy a horse?" "I don't know, did we?"

And this is our star, called the Cheka, and he's by Xaar,

and Mel named him after the Cheka, which was the secret service police

under Lenin, which he knew and not very many other people knew,

but this boy has earned more money than all of the others.

Well, actually, come to think of it, all the others put together.

We went back by train with the cup, and this huge cup,

and we were sitting in the carriage on the train,

and Mel said, "Well, you take care of the cup,

"I'll just go and get a drink."

And he came back three or four minutes later

and he had bought the whole trolley.

Um, and people would come up and go...

and he'd just give them drinks and he would...

But we drank the whole train dry on the way back from that victory.

Fundamentally he was a very bright guy.

He was a big intellect, but at the same time

he was obviously a famously big bon viveur,

and there was a point in the '80s where those two things could quite happily coexist,

but inevitably, as everything has become more corporate, you know,

certainly in Hollywood, it becomes a lot harder to be that person.

I can remember him describing that when he went out to dinner one day

and ordered a large vodka and tonic, that everyone looked at him askance,

that this obviously wasn't the way to get films.

You know, you had to pretend to be sort of teetotal.

Sober and not interested in alcohol.

In 2001, Mel directed the film High Heels And Low Lifes

and then Blackball two years later.

Both low-budget British comedies,

neither reached the box-office heights of Bean

and Mel's film directing career began to tail off.

To the astonishments of all his mates,

he said, "I'm going back in the theatre." And off he went.

His whole life was about... this leads to the next bit

and this gives me the opportunity to do the next bit.

And then it's interesting that after the film directing,

where did he end up back again but the theatre?

He was in...Hairspray and he was great in that

and did a dance, and it was a great thing.

He came back after the first night, and I went to see him,

and he said what he was most pleased with was the dance,

because he knew that I would not be able to do the dance that he did.

And he was quite right.

# Cos the world keeps spinning round and round

# My heart's keeping time to the speed of sound

# I was lost till I heard the drums, then I found my way

# Cos you can't stop the beat

# Ever since this old world began

# A woman found out if she shook it she could shake up a man

# So I'm gonna shake and shimmy it the best that I can today

# You can't stop the motion of the ocean... #

Mel loved musicals. He absolutely adored them. Yeah.

Well, we did the Nancy Boys all those years ago

and the...choreographer was Bruno...

Bruno Tonioli? What's it...? Bruno, Bruno... anyway, yeah.

So, um, we worked with the best.

MUSIC: "Atomic" by Blondie

Theatre was always very important to Mel, and when he did stuff

he did it because he wanted to rather than, as it were,

because he had to or he felt it would push him further up

some imaginary ladder, you know.

He played Churchill in Edinburgh because he liked the script.

He was passionate about Allegiance.

He was very proud of what he did with that.

And the Stephen Poliakoff play that he did on television,

I thought he was terribly good in that.

I met Harold Voight from the Cecil the other day.

He couldn't believe - could absolutely not believe -

that I had coloured musicians staying in this hotel.

Just down the road at the Savoy Theatre,

people are walking out of Othello even as we speak,

because the coloured actor... what's his name...Robeson... is kissing his Desdemona.

And yet I give you four months' work in this hotel!

People are amazed at what I've done!

Even though for somebody who was well known for not having

the longest attention span, I found as an actor, and especially

on Dancing On The Edge, that he was very rigorous

and he really, really wanted...

He would ask for more takes and say, "I can do it better."

I think it was a shock for people to see him

having changed so much, because he'd been in hospital on and off

for quite a while and he had really bad throat operations and things,

so he wasn't, you know...

his effervescent bubbling self,

but in a way I think that was rather wonderful.

I spent a lot of time with him at Christmas when he was in hospital.

He was ill over Christmas,

and he was in hospital for quite a long time and, um...

It was interesting actually,

cos he did resolve while he was in there to get really properly fit.

I think unfortunately he'd had enough of being unwell, really.

He was even thinking about cutting down on the cigars

and maybe the whiskies, as it were.

And actually, last time I saw him he wasn't even drinking.

So, you know, he really... he still had a zest for life.

He was... On the set of Dancing On The Edge,

there was a serenity... Well, certainly he may have been...

he may have been concealing things from me,

but there was a serenity as he sat there reading books

and he was very happy to be part of this show with this music

and this creation of the 1930s and...

He seemed to be at peace with that stage of his life,

of being on a set and acting this part.

Good evening. Tributes have been paid to the comedian Mel Smith,

who's died suddenly at his home in London

after suffering a heart attack. He was 60.

I have to say...

..that it hasn't really...

..sunk in, in a funny way.

I spoke to him on the night...on the night he died!

He was checking with me the time of the race

that we had a horse running the next day,

and had we picked a jockey, and which was that jockey,

and he was absolutely 100% on the ball,

and he didn't wake up.

In the early days, we would say, well, we're not going to make 30.

And then I got married and settled down and the rest of it.

And everyone would say, well, Mel's not going to make 40.

Then he's not going to make 50 and, you know,

the fact that he was still going strong at that age was a miracle.

He would be furious if we all sat here being maudlin about him.

He'd be absolutely livid.

So in a way you're not, do you know what I mean?

Hang on!

What the...? What the hell's this caption doing here?

They're just testing it, they've got to test it.

Why can't they test it some other bloody time?! For God's sake, Griff!

-Watch the blood pressure!

-There's nothing wrong with me,

-I'm fine!

-I think you'd just better sit down.

For Christ's sake!

I'd keep that caption if I were you, I think you might need it.

I did spend an awfully long time, part of my life working with Mel.

And it's only, strangely, when I sit down and rationally think...

..oh, gosh, you know, like, he was in that coffin and he's

actually sort of not around any more, that some of the things that,

um, that you had sort of imagined, this is the most terrible cliche,

but you had imagined that you might do, or get together, or things...

and it doesn't occur to you until somebody says, "Will you do this?"

And you go, "Well, I can't really do that any more

"because that's what I used to do with Mel."

And, er, in absolute truth, the thing that I will,

know I will never be able to do again

is sit on stage with Mel

and make an audience laugh to the degree

that we could on a good night with the right audience,

probably having drunk enough.

But sometimes it was like...

It was pure, it was a very pure experience.

Isn't it lovely to see the old place full again?

Oh, yeah, isn't it marvellous?

Look at that! They've even put some people up there in the dangerous bit!

The gods, they call that.

Do they? Why do they call them that?

They tear up your ticket, you walk in and you say, "Oh, God, we're not up here again."

# I've drunk my fill

# Of love's sweet fountain

# And I've savoured each bittersweet thrill

# Unfurled my flag

# On life's high mountain

# And I've assailed the unassailable hill

# Yes, I have trekked

# To the back of beyond

# And I have swum

# The unswimmable pond

# With each new day

# The rising sun brings

# I've sort of done things. #

APPLAUSE