A Father and Son Remember It All Differently
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Jack & Michael Whitehall HIM & ME With illustrations by Jack Whitehall Contents Prologue by Nick Hewer Introduction by Jack Whitehall Part I First Memories CHAPTER 1 A Black-Tie Affair CHAPTER 2 The Curse of Timmy Twinkle Part II School’s Out CHAPTER 3 Fathers’ Race CHAPTER 4 The Reluctant Dragon CHAPTER 5 Touchline Tantrums CHAPTER 6 School Scandals Part III Going Wild in the Country CHAPTER 7 Invite at Your Peril CHAPTER 8 High Jinks CHAPTER 9 Camping It Up Part IV A Matter Of Life And Death CHAPTER 10 Man and Beast CHAPTER 11 Clipper Rash CHAPTER 12 In Sickness and in Health Part V Stars in His Eyes CHAPTER 13 Dressed to Kill CHAPTER 14 Running Away Part VI ’Tis the Season to be Jolly CHAPTER 15 His Christmas CHAPTER 16 My Christmas Part VII Hapless House Guests CHAPTER 17 Nannies CHAPTER 18 Sacha’s Laundry CHAPTER 19 Dirty Den Part VIII Holiday Hell CHAPTER 20 The Tom Cruise Ship CHAPTER 21 Welcome to Disney World CHAPTER 22 Four Weeks in Provence Part IX A State of Undress CHAPTER 23 The Naked Truth CHAPTER 24 Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans Part X The Family Disappointment CHAPTER 25 Acting Up CHAPTER 26 Ungainful Employment CHAPTER 27 Art Part XI All Growed Up CHAPTER 28 Voting Rights CHAPTER 29 Cock Blocking Glossary Afterword by Michael Whitehall Ten Things I Wish to Correct in This Book by Hilary Whitehall Acknowledgements Follow Penguin For Hilary Prologue I was pleased to hear from Michael Whitehall on that Thursday morning. He had been a guest at a successful Good Companions lunch at the Reform Club two days previously and here was his call to thank me. ‘Lovely lunch. By the way, I’ve written a book, of course. Now are you listening because we don’t have much time? Jack and I think that we need an outsider who knows us well to write an introduction to our book Him & Me. And we’ve alighted on you. The problem is that we’ve run out of time. I’ll email the book to you and if you could craft a 750-word masterpiece – warm and insightful – by the weekend, that would be just dandy. Talk later. Bye.’ I switched on my computer and with a sickening thud realized that, following the removal of a cataract the previous Saturday and the insertion of a long-range lens, I was unable to focus on anything under forty-six point. Distance – perfect. Everything close-up – pea soup. This infirmity, added to my inexperience of literary criticism, was going to make for a tricky day. I first ran into Jack on the set of Would I Lie to You?, where we were both guest panelists. He was fast becoming nationally known as a wit, performer and actor; it was easy to see why. A charming young man, taught from time to time at Marlborough College, as it happens, by my no-nonsense daughter-in-law, Liz. Later, I mentioned having met him and she remarked, ‘A very naughty boy – spent a good deal of time doodling in the margins.’ So whilst I met Jack on the set of WILTY, I was introduced to Father Whitehall, his éminence grise, in the Green Room after the show. ‘Daddy, this is Nick. You’ll have a lot in common. You can talk about the Blitz.’ As soon as I heard the first long, drawling vowel from Michael, I knew I was in good company. And when I turned to confront the voice, and Daddy’s twinkling eye, I knew Jack came from good comic genes. I half closed my eyes. Was I listening to Rex Harrison? I decided not. It was an edgy George Sanders, whose urbane suicide note, ‘Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored’, would please Michael in the unlikely event that he ever feels low. So the septuagenarian Daddy and the not yet mid-twenties darling of the girls’ upper sixth have set about a book together. And what a joy it is. Stories from their joint lives, told from their own viewpoints, each writing as well as the other. Daddy, with the driest of wits, ironic with nuggets of cruelty tossed in, to Jack’s more urban vocab. The stories pile one on top of the other, peopled by wonderful characters – the theatrical brigade from Michael’s days as the most successful agent in London, and Jack’s collection of increasingly bizarre pals as he enters his teenage years. Up pops Nigel Havers in a dinner jacket right at the start of the book, calling in to the Portland Hospital within minutes of Jack’s birth to claim a role as a godfather with the exclusive right to be the boy’s moral guardian, while Richard Griffiths would immediately start a running-away fund. We travel through Jack’s childhood and his prep school days, starting with his bravura performance to be refused admission to the Dragon School; the sports fields at Marlborough; his short-lived career as a nude life model there, part of a plan concocted to lure a dishy girl pupil to disrobe too. So the names and anecdotes from both come pouring in, each writing lengthily on the same events, fiercely contesting the other’s version. A nineteen-year tour of the Whitehall family, including the beautiful Hilary, mother to Molly and Barnaby, as well as naughty Jack. What captivated me, apart from the arch humour and scintillating wit, was the deep affection that ran from page one between father and son. However hard they try to send one another up, it’s clear that Michael and Jack have a special and unbreakable filial bond. Oh, Michael, why couldst thou not have been my father, and if I had had a second son, Jack, would you have …? Nick Hewer Introduction January 2011, my good friend and long-time producer Ben Cavey suggests to me that it might be ‘fun’ to do a chat show complete with guests at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with my father, Michael Whitehall. My father is a very amusing man. He was an agent to some of the country’s finest actors but has never appeared on stage himself, but in a moment of weakness I mention the idea to him and he says as long as he can stay in a hotel that’s separate from whatever ‘squalid bedsit’ I’m renting for the month, he will do it. Oh, and then sends a very long email to Ben about the terms of the deal he’d be getting. Agents, eh? In the run-up to the Festival, booking the show becomes a nightmare. Every guest I suggest is vetoed by my father on account of them being either ‘low grade’ or too ‘downmarket’. When I mention Jimmy Carr he simply roars with laughter, then says no. He eventually insists that he will only travel up to the Festival if we book Simon Cowell. I tell him that I think it’s highly unlikely that we’d get him as he’s busy doing The X Factor. A lengthy rant about the death of culture in this country follows and I am asked whether I have even heard of the RSC. I realize that I have misheard him and that he actually said Simon Callow, who is up at the Fringe doing some random play. Simon Callow agrees to do it, so the show goes ahead. (Basically, if you think this book’s shit you can blame Simon Callow.) Backchat opens and is pretty well received although it is not quite as ‘fun’ for me as my producer made out. A long two weeks of my father telling me off for being unprofessional, accusing me every day of having a hangover and constantly reminding me that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be as good an interviewer as Michael Aspel. He also spends a lot of the show trying to flog a memoir he has written (I’m not going to mention the title here as it will only give him the publicity he so desperately craved). When I ask him to stop promoting it, he claims I am jealous as I’m ‘illiterate and wouldn’t have been able to write a book as good as his’. One night I let slip that I’ve actually been asked to write a book myself. It is a revelation that is met with utter derision. Penguin are accused of having let their standards slip and I am told that it is my duty to literature to turn the offer down. By the way, we’re still on stage when all of this is going on, the poor audience stuck in what is fast becoming a sort of middle- class Jeremy Kyle Show. Even our guest Miranda Hart was a little perplexed, but that was mainly because my father had spent most of the interview prior to this asking her if she was related to Tony Hart. I must make clear the sole purpose of writing this book was not to show my father that all the money he’d, quote, ‘wasted on my education to travel up and down the country telling jokes about my penis’ was not frittered away and that I could achieve something, but it certainly was a factor. I then had to decide what type of book to write. A novel seemed way beyond my abilities and the notion of anything autobiographical was ridiculous at twenty-four years old.