Christopher Gray At Oxford’s New Theatre over the years I ‘saw or met’ - as the late Betty Kenward always said in her unintentionally hilarious Jennifer’s Diary gossip column - the likes of George Harrison, Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen and Roy Orbison.
None of these was so memorable, so impressive, as the great Barry Humphries.
He arrived in town some 40 years ago as mentor - ‘manager’ as he styled it - to the ‘housewife and superstar’ Edna Everage, then only recently damed and still some way short of her ‘gigastar’ status to come.
She was with us to give a challenging week-long series of shows at the New. That she was prepared to grace Oxford with her presence was, in her opinion, not being sufficiently appreciated. Heading for a luxurious suite at the Randolph Hotel, she was dismayed to see en route the theatre’s pitiful attempts at publicity - scarcely a billboard and definitely no flashing lights. Later it emerged that this lack of attention was reflected in box office receipts.
Prompt action was clearly needed and the dame’s solution, on the morning of the show’s opening, was to summon a representative of the local press to a personal audience at her hotel. At the offices of the Oxford Mail and Times I was a shoo-in for the gig. A long-time fan of Humphries, I had enlivened many a hacks’ gathering with Dame Edna impersonations and lusty renditions of songs from the Aussie’s comic cartoon creation Barry McKenzie.
A verse of Old Pacific Sea suggests their ribald flavour: ‘I’ve had liquid laughs in bars and I’ve hurled from moving cars/ I’ve chuckled when and where it suited me/But if I could choose a spot to regurgitate my lot/Then I’d chunder in the old Pacific Sea.’
Nothing so gross was in store when I met Barry at the Randolph on that long-ago Monday morning. The summons was for breakfast with Dame Edna, already dressed to the nines and ‘a vision in turquoise’, as she put it. Or was it ‘a rhapsody in blue’? The latter, I think. Over coffee and croissants I learned details of her week of shows, with the likely appearance of her ever-silent bridesmaid Madge Allsop and the certainty that the Australian cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson would be on stage too.
The sales talk was followed by the suggestion that we should go walkabout through Oxford in order that she could meet her public. Shortly before, Dame Edna had starred in a television show in which she ‘did’ Stratford-upon-Avon. Her sighting there of a passing Morris Minor Traveller prompted the observation that in a town of such antique beauty ‘even the cars are half-timbered’.
Walking arm-in-arm with her through central Oxford, I was treated to my own live version of the programme. Eyeing the statue of a bearded Elizabethan at the entrance to the Bodleian Library, she offered: ‘Ah, the immortal Bard of Avon. Or is it James Robertson Justice? Just look at that wonderful pantyhose.’ Actually, the featured figure was the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, a former Chancellor of Oxford University.
Pausing outside the Radcliffe Camera she pointed out, to a growing crowd assembled, its obvious unsuitability for any serious role in photography. Our eventual destination was one of the New Theatre’s dressing rooms. Disappearing through its doors Dame Edna emerged ten minutes later transformed into the lecherous, snaggle-toothed Sir Les Patterson.
The stained and crumpled beige nylon suit and garish, food-spattered kipper tie were present and correct. So too - rather less correct - was the foot-long stuffed stocking which, when carefully positioned inside his tight flared trousers, would produce the obvious outline of Sir Les’s ‘one-eyed trouser snake’, later the object of much scratching and other revealing adjustments on the stage. All this, of course, made for entertaining, if coyly edited, copy for the Oxford Mail whose readers were offered the story some hours before the curtain rose on the first-night show.
My reward from Barry was a front-row seat which, as fans of Dame Edna will know, was a dangerous place to be. Though terrified of being picked on, I was mercifully spared. So I watched with relief as others were put through the mill, gleefully savouring their suffering. Hauled on to the stage at one point was a rather large lady whose dress was of particular interest to the dame.
‘What gorgeous material, possum. And how lucky you were to get so much of it.’
And how lucky we were to get so much, and for so long, of Barry Humphries and his many comic creations.
