He is his own shadow man, embarrassed to stand on the ground and make an imprint. When he walks for the last time into the television studio his body is a reluctant guest, shirking from its duty to move him, it hunches and sidles along. The features on his face aren’t quite defined on the screen, the thin crease of an apologetic smile barely visible: ‘I’m boring but it’s okay: I know it’s not me you want, it’s them, the voices you’ve all come for . . .’
The voices, faces and gestures belong to others, to the stars and their characteristics he’s absorbed and mimicked all through his life. Mum spotted them first and had loved them. She wanted him to spread the joy: ‘Oh, do George Formby for Mrs Rosen, please!’
He didn’t want to.
‘Cleaning Windows? Or Elvis, he does a wonderful Elvis, Doreen, almost better than the real thing!’
And so he let out a little of his Elvis: a sudden hip wiggle, shoulder turn and lip quiver: ‘ah, ah, ah! Ah, ah, ah! Oh yeah!’
Mum and Mrs Rosen were off their chairs, clapping.
‘He was even better yesterday, Doreen.’
‘It’s amazing, Brenda, he’s normally so shy.’
‘Not when he’s doing the voices!’
At his peak he was Liberace, Frank Spencer, Bruce Forsyth, Jeremy Thorpe (difficult that one), Danny La Rue, Tommy Cooper, Brian Clough and Hudson, the butler from Upstairs Downstairs. Las Vegas had Sinatra ‘The Voice’, and each summer he headlined Blackpool as ‘The Voices’. But when Thatcher won the election in 1979, it spelled the beginning of the end: ‘I’m not doing drag, I’m not a pantomime dame.’
‘You do La Rue,’ said Sid, his agent.
‘That’s me doing a pantomime dame, not me pretending to be a woman and looking and sounding like a pantomime dame.’
‘It’s a thin line, surely’
‘And not one I wish to cross.’
‘The lady’s not for turning?’
‘Bugger off, Sid.’
His showbiz glory days, along with several marriages, were well behind him when salacious stories about nineteen-seventies celebrities began to surface, bringing with them You Tube clips of his impersonations of the diabolical quartet: Saville, Glitter, Harris and Hall. His fan club gets an unexpected call: ‘Get your Dad to ring me if he’s sober, there’s an exciting offer on the table he might be interested in!’
When they met again, Sid had aged as much as he had, but he’d kept up with things and still had an eye for a deal: ‘they want you to share some voices with the new voice man, Ben Gould. You’ve heard of him, right? Ben Gould has edge, he’s down with the youth market!’
‘I don’t do edge, Sid, and I don’t go down for anyone, you know that.’
‘Saucy, I like it: your new style? Just remember one thing, my friend, you didn’t do Thatcher and look where that got you. So, are you interested or not?’
‘I’m interested but I’ve lost faith. The problem isn’t the voices, it’s the scripts mimics have to use: we can’t help but be a pale imitation of the real thing. And if I don’t do voices, say ‘this is me’ and start to sing, people don’t like it.’
‘You should never spoken as yourself or sang, it took the energy out of things.’
‘Now you tell me.’
‘This is your chance, don’t be stupid.’
‘You sound like Captain Mainwaring: “Stupid boy”. “I’m not a stupid boy, tell him uncle Arthur.” “Oh dear, you see, Captain Mainwaring, I’m not at all sure young Pike can handle being spoken to like that.” “Captain Mainwaring, there’s a black cloud hovering yonder, and we’re all doomed. Doomed!” “I’ll sort it, Captain Mainwaring, when those fuzzy wuzzies came at me with their whirling dervishes, I fixed my bayonet and –“ “Sorry to interrupt, Jones but I need the, mmm, mmm, rather quickly.” Six voices in one, there you go!’
‘Very impressive, but you’ll have to find some new ones, it’s not 1975. I’ve booked you a month of Saga cruises to Ostend to warm you up.’
‘Death by ferry! Do I have a choice?’
‘Does the Pope wear Speedos?’
‘Dad! Pack three jumpers, it’ll be cold on deck. And don’t be nervous, there’s been more interest in the fan club: three messages yesterday, two of them positive. Get through the ferry gigs and the show with Ben Gould will break you again.’
‘I hope you mean ‘break’ in a good way, Suzie. Thing is I’ve watched Ben Gould and I just don’t get it. He announces who he’s doing before each voice, then purposely does someone else and then comments on the mistake.’
‘It’s deconstruction, Dad, it’s popular now.’
‘But it’s not funny.’
‘It’s clever, people like clever.’
‘I can’t tell whether it’s clever or stupid. I’ve never liked people talking about what they’re doing, magicians giving away their tricks. Just do the act, get on, get off.’
‘It’s okay, Dad, your old school, they’ll love you on the “Ostend Pride”.’
‘I think you’ll find it’s “Pride of Ostend”, Mrs Thatcher’: There, Robin Day, one of my best. Will I have to explain that too?’
‘No, not for the Saga crowd, they’ll know who Robin Day is. Just be positive.’
He started to sing: ‘”Always look on the bright side of life.” I think I’ll end the act with it.‘
‘Dad, not that kind of positive: don’t sing, don’t drink, and you’ll be fine.’
In the good days he drove to Southampton docks in a Silver Rolls he’d brought from Engelbert Humperdinck. He, Suzie and her Mum, his first wife, always went First Class on the QE2.
He met Liz Taylor and Richard Burton at the Dorchester. Liz called him over to their table: ‘Richard and I loved you on TV last night; you were so goddamn funny! Your Liberace, what a hoot! He talks just like that, you know, and you got him, you got him!’
‘I’m a fan of both of yours, Cleopatra and VIP’s are two of my favourite –‘
‘Yeah, yeah. Now a little bird tells me you sometimes do Richard reading Dylan Thomas. Will you do it for us, please?’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, but it better be good or we’ll have you thrown out.’
‘To begin at the beginning: it is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black –‘
‘Jesus, Richard, he’s got you, he’s got you!’
‘Elizabeth, keep the noise down, you sound like a braying donkey.’
‘Stop! Stop! It’s uncanny; he’s doing your George talking to my Martha. Oh, Richard, this is just brilliant!’
The real Richard held up a glass filled with Jonny Walker Black. ‘Yours, I think,’ he said, handing it over to him.
He kept up the voices for hours. They were spellbound and by the end of the night two bottles had been emptied.
He left as Dean Martin with a stagey, drunken flourish and bow. He knew not to sing, just whisper ‘That’s amore.’
In the taxi home he reached into his jacket pocket and found a white napkin with ‘thank you’ written in red lipstick on it. Wrapped inside were a pair of diamond cufflinks. It had been his finest hour.
The cabaret on the ferry went better than he’d thought. His Sylvester Stallone even got a laugh but he was out of practice and it made his jaw hurt – ‘you do Stallone by pretending your tongue is swollen and your chin is frozen. Too little and you just sound drunk; too much and you sound like you’ve had a stroke’ he’d once explained to Michael Parkinson on TV but Parkinson hadn’t got it. His Al Pacino was wildly unrecognisable so he reverted to an old favourite: ‘Slack Alice said the exit was over there. Oh, shut that door!’ and that got a big belly laugh.
He’d always stayed clear of doing impressions of black celebrities apart from a blacked-up Al Jolson, which had been wrong for all sorts of reasons. It didn’t feel right to attempt Obama but his Trevor McDonald interviewing prisoners on Indiana Death Row was an unexpected success: ‘Because of the terrible nature of your crimes, you are hated by society and the other inmates. You will never see your wife or children again. You will either be killed by lethal injection or spend the rest of your life in solitary confinement. Do you ever feel sad?’
‘No more McDonald, leave Gould to do new voices and be the daring one,’ advised Sid on his return from Ostend.
‘You wanted edge, new voices!’
‘The brief has changed, he wants the old voices: Forsyth, Cooper, Emu.’
‘I thought Gould was “down with the youth”.’
‘Have you seen “The Trip”’?’
‘Too much Connery and I didn’t like it.’
‘It won’t be Capri or anything, it’ll be one hour in a studio with a live audience and he wants you chatting naturally with him, slipping in voices like Rob and Steve do. He’ll handle the new voices, the risky or ironic ones, you’ll do the old ones.’
‘I could do Pacino –’
Sid raised his eyebrows.
‘You do Forsyth, Cooper, but ditch Emu if you like. He just wants you doing your voices and he’ll come back at you with his. He’s a fan, he’s not out to destroy you.’
‘When do I get to see the script?’
‘There isn’t one, there’s a through line, a story arc. The door is open, you just have to go through it.’
‘What’s this disaster going to be called?’
‘Chatting naturally’ was the problem.’ It would mean he’d have to be himself when not doing the voices. Over the next weeks he talked to Gould twice on the phone but they never met. Gould wanted to keep it real, sparky, spontaneous but told him he’d grown up watching his programmes and loved them still.
The programme was billed as two heavyweight champions from different eras meeting for the first time in the ring: the old pro coming out of retirement to take on the new pretender.
In his dressing room before going on, he thinks of “Raging Bull” with Robert De Niro as a washed up Jake La Motta rehearsing his tired nightclub routine: Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront”: “I could have been somebody – “
He wonders about rebelling and slipping the line in, him doing De Niro doing La Motta doing Brando.
Walking out onto the studio stage to meet Gould, he remembers what Suzie had said. Too late to heed her advice not to drink: he moves uncertainly, as if his legs don’t quite belong. But when he senses the audience close, his indistinct apologetic features take form and he adopts a well-known pose: knee up, bent elbow, and right fist to the forehead. A quick head tilt, slight mince and run, and he’s off: ‘Nice to see you, to see you nice!’
Gould lies in wait, and then spins his chair round to greet him, chomping on a cigar, revealing a long white wig and familiar gold tracksuit: ‘Now then, now then, what have we here?’
When he hears the devil’s voice, Forsyth suddenly departs and he speaks as himself: ‘Sorry, I’m not going there!’
Gould is flummoxed, and continues as Saville: ‘Now young man, why don’t you sit here?’
‘I’m seventy-bloody-five and I’m not sitting anywhere near you. Now just fuck off.’
The audience murmur, and a few clap.
‘Ooh, lively. Now then, now then.’
‘And your impression is rubbish. Or is that the point?’
Some in the audience laugh, which spreads to others, and he unclips his microphone and walks off the stage.
For a moment Gould looks lost, even hurt, but then turns to the audience with a long leer. Nervous audience titters respond, and a single long ‘boo’.
In the wings, Sid is beside himself: ‘what do you think you’re doing? It’s an hour special!’
‘Nothing special, Sid.’
‘Get back out there, you drunk!’
‘Cheers!’
Suzie is crying and holds out her arms to greet him: ‘Dad, I’m so proud of you!’
‘Why? I’ve just thrown away your inheritance.’
‘You were yourself!’
‘I did it ‘My Way’?’
‘Ha, if you break into Sinatra now, I’ll leave you here.’
‘Don’t worry, I never did him very well anyway.’
*
An early version of this story was published in Lakeview International Journal of the Arts. Vol4, No.2
Alan McCormick Writing 