|
On the Saturday, after a relaxed evening at a Babbacombe restaurant catching up with my friends Andy and Sue, I walked out to jump into the back of a taxi and slipped off the kerbstone landing in a broken heap in the gutter. The pain was agonising and I didn’t need the doctor at the nearby Torbay Hospital to confirm what I already knew - I had broken my ankle.
Back in London, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to be able to carry on with my usual job of tour guiding. In those days you had to do the job standing up and four two hour tours a day on a crutch looking like Long John Silver with a plaster-cast that went up to my knee would have been almost impossible. My doctor advised me that in his opinion I wouldn’t be properly mobile again for at least six weeks. This presented me with a problem. What was I going to do with all that spare time?
Well the obvious answer was write. After all I was a writer and what better way could there be than to be restricted to quarters with nothing better to do than hit the old laptop keyboard?
Easier said than done. Writer’s block set in like quick setting cement. I spent the first week imprisoned in my flat on the Isle of Dogs wondering what to write? A new play? A novel? I hadn’t actually written a word since being on the team of the TV show Birds of a Feather a few years before. To put it simply, my PC screen was a canvas as blank as my mind.
So what do you do when you have plenty of time on your hands and nothing to do? You start ringing friends up and bothering them. “Any idea what I can write about?” was my constant moan. And it was Robert Goodman, my friend and colleague at the Big Bus (and the man who had trained me as a guide) who suggested that I should write about something I knew about.
I gave this serious thought. What did I know about? Writer’s block, that was for sure. But you can’t write a play about that. Not unless you’re Neil Simon. And then it came to me that one thing I did know inside-out and had an expert knowledge of, was being a London tour guide. After all I had been doing it five days a week for the previous four years. I rested my plastered leg up on a stool, switched on my trusty Dell and started tapping away. Within two weeks I had a first draft of a comedy stage play called Topless.
I decided early on not to write directly about myself giving a tour on a bus. After all, who would want to read that? I had a stage set of the open-top deck of a sightseeing bus. I already knew that it was going to be a monologue with the theatre audience acting as the tourists on the bus. I decided to make the tour guide a woman – Sandie, a bubbly, cheerful thirtysomething from Dagenham in east London.
I constructed the play as an actual tour of London. Having been a tour guide myself, I had the whole thing in my head. That part of it didn’t take much writing to be honest, the sightseeing facts were pretty straightforward; it was Sandie’s character that I had to give depth to and make multi-layered.
I decided to make her story a domestic tale, something that everyone could identify with. And why not make it simple? I made her madly in love with her husband Duncan, a photo-lab technician who does the dirty on her and has an affair with his female assistant. And we get to hear all about it because nearly everything on Sandie’s tour of London seems to remind her of something to do with her straying husband.
My intention was to make the play airy, light and fun when the tour begins and then make it slowly slide into a dark, sinister ending with Sandie revealing how she may or may not have murdered her husband as revenge for his philandering. The latter being revealed as her bus drove past the atmospheric Tower of London.
It was like Shirley Valentine meets On the Buses. Only with a Hitchcock edge.
The play written, my next job was to find a director to bring it to life. Martin Bailey was also a tour guide for the Big Bus Company but he had trained as an actor and was keen to get into the directing side of the business. I sent him a copy of Topless to read.
Twenty-four hours later he called me up to tell me he loved it and definitely wanted to direct it.
Over the next few weeks, we started making plans for an autumn production. We began looking for the right kind of venue. We felt that this sort of show would be ideal in a small setting. We must have checked out almost every fringe theatre in London. We were astounded just how much some of these places were charging in rent. Many of them were nothing more than a damp room above a pub, yet they were demanding thousands of pounds a week rent and a share of the box-office. It was hopeless.
Despondent, one afternoon Martin and I met up in a bar off Shaftesbury Avenue and over a few beers decided to axe the whole idea. Maybe it was just beyond our capabilities and budget. It was then that Martin suggested “Why don’t we do it on the bus itself? Perform the play for real so that when Sandie points out Piccadilly Circus on your right, there it is for real on your right.”
It was total virtual reality and it was a brilliant idea.
The next day Robert Goodman got us a meeting with Richard and Eleanor Maybury, the owners of The Big Bus Company, and we pitched the “play on a bus” idea. Always receptive to any new thinking they were immediately enthusiastic and an opening night was penciled in for early September. We would run the show six nights a week. They would supply the bus and a driver every night and all Martin and I had to do was produce the play on the top-deck!
|
