One of the unexpected ways in which my upbringing as the son of Communists had helped prepare me for the challenges of celebrity, an advantage that my fellow comedians didn’t have, was in the matter of staying true to yourself. The idea of the traitor, the sell-out, the apostate was central to Joe and Molly’s state of mind. Even when I was quite small we would be out shopping in town and my mother or father would gesticulate towards some harmless-looking individual and say in a whisper, ‘See him over there trying on gloves, he left the Party over Hungary in 1956 and now he’s . . .’ Here they’d pause before revealing the full horror. ‘A Labour councillor!’ Or, ‘Don’t look, but that woman by the bacon counter, she used to be in CND but now she’s . . . joined the Air Force!’ At first I couldn’t see anything different about the people my parents pointed out but over time it did seem to me that they possessed a certain haunted quality, an air of sadness, and though their mood probably wasn’t helped by being whispered about in shops by a red-haired woman and a man in a trilby hat accompanied by a silent watchful boy I sensed that the main critical voice was within their heads, that they themselves were aware on some level of the abandonment of their younger more idealistic self and it corroded them from the inside.
I did not want to end up like that. The trick it seemed to me was to not be blind to the many faults of the left while at the same time to try and stay true to those core values of workers’ rights, social justice and equality.
Me doing fund-raising benefits for left-wing organisations was an attempt to stay connected with those ideals.
As a left-wing entertainer it was accepted that you would inevitably perform unpaid at concerts in aid of various radical causes – doing benefits had become a sort of national service for alternative comedians. There was very little pleasure in appearing at them though. I did a bit about benefit concerts in my act: how you told a joke, then there was a pause while the audience vetted the joke for its political content, possible sexism, any hints of neo-colonialism, adherence to the theory of dialectical and historical materialism, and only once it was cleared would they laugh – it was like doing your material over a faulty phone line.
I went up to Sheffield to appear in a show at the Crucible Theatre in support of Nicaragua’s revolutionary, anti-American, pro-moustache Sandinista government. Following the show the cast and their friends were introduced to the guest of honour – David Blunkett the radical left-wing leader of Sheffield City Council. After the line-up Linda said, ‘I don’t like that man, there’s something funny about his eyes.'
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