The curse of the Keiths has struck again. Less than a week after
the death of Keith Waterhouse another bon viveur Keith (and another cool one that I had forgotten about) breathes his last. The marvelous Keith Floyd has joined his equally boozy namesake. These things happen in threes and I fear for all the famous Keiths out there. Keith Richards must be bricking it right now because God seems to be taking all the hard-living Keiths from us.
With luck the Keith he will take will be Keith Allen, who I have never particularly liked, ever since he came to "review" the Oxford Revue in 1987, turned up pissed and moved a crash mat that was required for the first scene about a suicide attempt shouting "Jump now, you fucker!" Ever the professional and with only a little extra push from me Ben Moor did still jump despite the danger - take that Keith Allen. Who's the fucker now?
Allen then walked out of the show and punched the theatre manager and despite having only seen one sketch which he had attempted to sabotage reviewed the show on TV saying , "The Oxford Revue, as you'd expect was awful!"
The next week we were invited on for a right to reply and made to look stupid a second time as Allen dismissed us as public school tossers. I told him that four of the five cast were educated at comprehensive school and chastised his behaviour and he pulled his stupid naughty boy face. My voice was quavering as I spoke and I was shaking with embarrassment and anger. But then that's the kind of man Keith Allen is. He gets his kicks from bullying 19 year olds.
I had taped the show that was on last night where Keith Allen met Keith Floyd, ostensibly to celebrate his life, but it turned into, I thought, a rather nasty and self-aggrandising programme in which Allen exploited an ill and unhappy old man, clearly slightly befuddled and unhappy for his own ends. Yes he said he was great and showed lots of clips of him on top form, but it was really about examining the effects of post-celebrity and Allen dared to criticise Floyd for having a reunion with his estranged daughter on camera, when he himself was the one sitting there and filming it and having a camera zooming in on a crushed old man confronting his demons.
It was sarcastic and narcissistic and nasty and seemingly cobbled together as it went along (a really odd little "sketch" with Allen on a plane during a faked emergency announcement, saying if that if he could put his head between his legs he wouldn't leave home. Was that worth including in this show? One feels that Allen probably ad-libbed that amazing joke on the plane over and then felt he'd been such a genius that he'd have to recreate it for the show) and quite typical of what the once ground-breaking Channel 4 considers entertainment.
I am sure Allen would argue that he was celebrating Floyd in the manner that Floyd had lived his life, but it seemed mean and exploitative to me, all coming from the perspective of a man who should probably examine his own personal life before criticising anyone else. But much better to have a programme about Floyd in his heyday rather than this rather sad (as it turned out) obituary.
Clearly though Allen's 1987 twatdom is somewhat informing this sudden diatribe.
Funnily enough the pair had a discussion about the name Keith, with Floyd saying he found it embarrassing and Allen saying that most Keiths were cool - "Moon, Richards, Allen and Floyd" but arguing that Chegwin fucks it all up. How lovely that Allen thinks he is one of the cool Keiths. How disillusioned he is. Please God, if you're taking Keiths at the moment, take him.
So Floyd is certainly added to my list of cool Keiths (along with
Kool Keith who many of you drew my attention to, who is a rapper and is so cool that he spells cool with a K - you can't get Kooler than that), but Allen joins Chegwin and Harris in what might actually be a grouping of tragically immortal Keiths.
Amazingly Keith Floyd was only 65. Not only did he look much older than that (God knows why - he drank so much that you'd think he would be preserved forever - indeed the show revealed that his liver was in perfect condition. Hooray for that!), but he seems to have been around for so long that I assumed he must have been much older. He was first a star in the South West and so I've been aware of him since I was 8 and he seemed (to me) like he was an old man then, though would have been in his early 30s.
Allen was right to want to venerate the man, he was an original and an incredible broadcaster, but perhaps because I watched the show after the death had been announced the whole timbre of the thing seemed inappropriate and unpleasant.
You know and I clearly still harbour resentment against the self-aggrandising host. Ah well.
I didn't mean that to turn into such a long entry and had planned to write about the man who used to work in Rymans on Great Portland Street. I'll see if I have time to do so.
I had been at a meeting near Broadcasting House about a radio show that I will be involved with dealing with David Hasselhoff's part in the fall of the Berlin Wall (I think it's going to be excellent!) As I headed back to the tube I was being soaked in the second downpour of the day (already one set of clothing was drying on my radiators after I'd cycled back from the gym in the first one). I nipped into Rymans to take shelter.
Back in the early 90s when we'd first been working at the BBC we had often visited the Rymans on Great Portland St. Partly to buy pens and pads and printer ribbons, but mainly because we became a bit obsessed with one of the men who worked in there. He wasn't the usual young and brash Rymans employee, but a tall, thin and pale man in his forties or fifties, with a very nervous demeanour. He was utterly sweet and lovely, but shy and self-conscious and polite to a comical degree. He clearly found it an effort to deal with people and was slightly overwhelmed by even the simplest tasks in his not overly complicated job. But we loved him for it. He'd be on the till and you'd present him with your purchase and he'd um and ah a little as he looked at it and smile nervously and try to make small talk in a voice as quavery as mine had been when confronted by unKool Keith (or should that be unCool Ceith) and almost imperceptibly quiet. "Ah, hello, yes, so what have we got here?" he'd warble, almost to himself. He looked and acted like a Dickensian shopkeeper, like he'd been transported forwards in time, still using the archaic and polite language you'd expect from such a character. And yet he worked in Rymans.
We were a little bit obsessed by him. If you ever heard Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World (and if not,
why not try listening to it here) then you might remember the character of Ian Cyclops. My portrayal of this well-meaning and misunderstood monster was based entirely on the man from Rymans.
All this took place about eighteen years ago now and goodness knows where the Rymans man is. He found it quite difficult to operate in the world he was in, but I hope he is still around somewhere. If everyone was like him then the world would be a better, if somewhat more befuddled and quieter place. I think Jesus was thinking of him when he mentioned the whole meek inheriting the earth thing. I hope Jesus was right.
I actually hoped against hope that the Cycloptic shopkeeper would still be working in the same Rymans after all this time, but alas he was nowhere to be seen. The staff were young and brash and confident, not a single "Ah, helllloooo" from any of them.
But, I realised that this wasn't even the same shop. In the past two decades Rymans has moved to a new and slightly smaller premises just up the street from the old one. The original Rymans is now a Maplins. Perhaps the Maplins store had inherited the Rymans man. Perhaps he'd be there, now white haired, shaking as much from age as fear, even more bamboozled by the electronic items he now had to sell than he had been about the paper and ink based ones that he'd kindly bagged up for me.
I went to have a look, more out of futile hope than genuine expectation. But of course he wasn't there.
Even in 1992 he had been an anachronism, but there was no room for a 19th Century shopkeep in 21st Century London. I wonder where he is and I wish him well and remember him fondly.
Of course if I was Ceith Allen I'd track him down to his retirement home and stick a camera in his face and make a mockery of all that was great about him - maybe it was good that I didn't see him again.
But I missed him today and thought of him fondly and wished I could have told him how amazing I thought he was and what a small but profound influence he had had on my life. Or maybe he is just representative of an incredible and terrible time for me. He means a surprising amount to me, given he just sold me stationery. And languorously at that.
Good luck Rymans man, wherever you may be. I know you're not on the internet. If you tried to use a computer I think your head would explode.
