I had the fun of finishing off a bit of the show and then heading out to a gig and trying it out on an audience under 2 hours after I had finished writing it. It was a proposed opening to the new show. I think it reads quite well on the page, though it felt a bit long reading it all out. But I am sure such problems will be ironed out over the course of the next two months and it will become both funnier and shorter. And I won't have to read it, which is always a drawback. It feels like things are moving in the right direction though. It's the exciting and yet sick making period of a new show, where nothing is ready and yet potential is apparent. The point where I don't know if the show will work, if anyone will laugh or what will become of it. And the painful part for an audience that has to be the first to hear a half formulated idea.
Anyway, what follows is the script, much of which was written today. I thought it was an incident that I had written about on here before, but I can't find it anywhere. It will probably be appearing in the show, so if you are going to come and don't want any surprised spoiled then stop reading now. I imagine that the final version will be pretty different though. This is way too long.
It was Ascension Day 1983. All the staff and pupils of the Kings of Wessex Upper School, Cheddar, were gathered in the vicarage garden of nearby St Andrew’s Church to celebrate one of the less popular Christian feast days - though why Christ's ascension to Heaven is given such low prominence in the liturgical calendar I don't know. For me it's probably the most impressive thing he did. Anyone can get crucified, loads of people did, yet they never ended up on a necklace, which might have been some kind of consolation - I know this hurts now….. Other people have come back from the dead - just recently that bloke with the canoe. And no one is suggesting we start giving each other chocolate in the shape of a rabbit or an egg to celebrate that. Walking on water was pretty cool, but David Copperfield walked through the Great Wall of China - for my money cleverer to pass through a solid, rather than stand on a liquid. I have made a stone skim across water. Do Christians really think that Jesus is only as good as a stone? Talk him up a bit, come on. Don't be embarrassed about him. Go on about the stuff that made him unique. No one but Jesus, as far as I am aware, has propelled themselves bodily off the ground unassisted by wings or rockets or hot air, then shot off into outer space and entered Heaven in corporeal form. He didn't burn up in the atmosphere, he managed to breathe in the vacuum of space, without his eyes going all bulgy and him exploding. He didn't just go to the moon and play some golf. He located Heaven and went into it victorious, still with his actual body attached. All the other people up there must have felt right chumps, having only their naked souls on display - “Oh didn't you want to bring your body then? You felt your soul was the best thing about being alive did you? Didn't like eating, or having sex or the visceral excitement of adrenalin rushing through your veins. You didn't want to just fly up to Heaven with your body attached like me. Oh well. Looks like I am the only one who is going to spend the rest of eternity with a cock! Shaaah! But wait, there will be nowhere for me to put it! Aaaah!â€Â
It doesn't say anything about this in the Bible, but I hope he left a coloured trail of smoke behind him, like he was one of the Red Arrows, preferably billowing out of his Holy Anus. Maybe sky writing as he went - Jesus Saves! Thomas is a doubter. Deny this thrice Peter. Hey Pontius, call yourself a Pilate? Look at me!… though it doesn’t work as well written down, so he might have had to put pilot in brackets after Pilate to clarify the pun. Also the job of pilot did not exist at that time and would also have not been a pun in either Latin or Hebrew, so he might have had to add an asterisk at the end and then some small print saying this would make sense to future generations. I don't know how much bum smoke an ascending Jesus would be able to generate, but this might have been beyond even Him.
My point is the Church don't make a big enough deal about Ascension Day, as is demonstrated by the fact that we were at school at all. If it was such a trivial occasion as his birth or death we'd have been at home having a holiday, but his amazing gravity defying launch into Heaven apparently only justifies a morning in a churchyard. What I am saying is that everything that follows is really the fault of the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury or whoever ranked the importance of religious happenings. And not me.
Anyway, in the pastoral idyll that my memory has created for my entire childhood, it was a beautiful spring morning, the sky was blue, the sun shone on my face, I fancy the smell of blossoming flowers hung in the air - though I was 15 and would never have been interested in noticing that, which proves how much of the following is unreliable and fictional. I do recall anticipating the sticky bun that was the reward for having to stand through this dull religious ceremony, which sounds like me. My friends and me, were gathered together in the middle of the thronging crowd of bored school pupils, whilst the headmaster conducted the tedious celebration of something that never happened. Well, to everyone else he was the headmaster but to me he was something more. I would be having dinner with him tonight. I would be staying overnight in his house. He would buy me clothes and presents and sometimes just give me money. This whole story could be going in a different and more unsettling direction if the headmaster was not called TK Herring. He was my father. I was his son. Yet somehow I managed not to think of him that way between the hours of 9am and 3.45pm, through some supreme act of mental displacement and borderline schizophrenia. I successfully compartmentalised him as two different people. Like Clark Kent and Superman, they might look almost exactly the same, but I managed to convince myself they were two different people. Dad wore glasses both as my dad and my head, but as the latter he sometimes wore his academic robe which was a kind of cape, so the metaphor holds good.
The headmaster finished his preaching and then said, “And before we enjoy some music from the String Quartet, let us all have a minute of silent prayer and contemplation.†Heads were bowed, silence fell over the churchyard. I was unable to resist this opportunity to prick the pomposity of the occasion and to create low humour and after a perfectly timed pause, when all rustling and shuffling was over and perfect quiet had descended, I opened my mouth to release a belch. Perhaps I intended it to be a mere gulp of a burp, a quiet stacatto punch that would amuse my friends and the few people around me. But this was no mundane discharge, as my throat constricted I sensed something unGodly was about to be released, as if the gates of Hell themselves had opened. I fancy that there was a low rumble as my mouth opened, that dogs in the neighbourhood started yelping in a frenzy, sensing the danger that was to come, that dark clouds skidded across the sky and blacked out the sun. Because the eructation that emerged from my teenage gut was an inhuman wail, a basso profundo, so low and rasping and long that it would surely have made the record books if only Ross Mcwhirter had been present. And not dead. It was the sound of a toad the size of a cow, waking from a coma of forty years and letting out all its stored up croaks at once. It was like a gaseous fanfare, reverberating off the walls, like I had been possessed by the some kind of bean fuelled foghorn. It was the low deep sound of continental plates grinding slowly against each other, it was reminiscent of the earthquake that had rent the temple in twain at Christ’s crucifixion, but somehow St Andrew’s tower remained resolutely in one place.
It was a really big burp.
Satirists could work for a thousand life times trying to come up with a witticism that would both prick the pomposity of religion and dent the fragile veneer of adult authority and yet nothing they could write or say would have the impact of that simple, cacophonous bolk.
As the clarion call ended and the final echo eddied into the distance, the silence returned, more gaping and hollow than before, and then came the laughter. It was an audacious affront to the string quartet, to the school, to Jesus and his smoke filled rectum, but worse still to TK Herring. My friends and I convulsed into helpless laughter. I looked up and caught the eye of the headmaster, who was about to explode in fury at the aural affront. Our eyes locked for the tiniest of moments and he realised that I might well have been the transgressor. He had to instantaneously decide how to respond. Should he act as headmaster or father? Should he haul me out in front of the school and publicly punish me or consider the the psychological traumas that such a humiliation might result in for his son. Would it in fact prove too embarrassing for him as headmaster and challenge his authority even more to have to chastise his own child in front of the whole school? And could he let me off merely because I had sprung from his loins, or should he punish me more to make an example? The lines between pupil and son, between father and headmaster were blurred in a way that they had never been before and would never be again. He has less than a second to make a decision that could echo like an ostentatious belch through the rest of our lives. What would he do?
To find out you'll have to come and see the show.
