He hit me, kissed me - and drank me under the table. My magical, mad friend Mel: A moving yet joyously funny tribute by his comic co-star GRIFF RHYS JONES

GRIFF RHYS JONES

PUBLISHED: 22:19, 26 July 2013 | UPDATED: 22:19, 26 July 2013

Mel Smith's reputation reached me long before I ever met him face to face. 

For years, while I was at Cambridge, I’d heard stories about this legendary undergraduate, the acting, writing, directing renaissance man of Oxford University theatre.

Then, one day in the late Seventies, I went for a drink with a friend at a pub in London. He pointed to a figure sitting in the corner. ‘Do you know who that is?’ he asked.

Comedy big shot: Mel Smith with Griff Rhys Jones in their 1985 series Alas Smith and Jones

‘The slob in the corner?’ I replied.

‘Yeah, him. That’s Mel Smith.’

I looked at him in disbelief. I’d imagined an Oscar Wilde figure, theatrical and intense, yet here was a cuddly, roly-poly, happy-go-lucky man with — as I later discovered — a fondness for curry house biryanis.

 

We didn’t talk then. I just observed him from a distance: the hairy beast at his waterhole. Just two wannabe comics across a sticky carpet. 

I was drinking a bit myself when I first got to really know him a few years later, and one night, after an awards ceremony, I decided to ‘swim’ across the blue carpet of The Dorchester hotel lobby. 

I threw myself down on the floor to demonstrate my prowess, and eventually reached the other side with what I thought was a convincing crawl. But in my enthusiasm — and having over-indulged a little — I had ‘burned’ the side of my face on the carpet and was bleeding everywhere.

Mel happened to be standing there, observing my efforts, and when he saw the state I was in, put his hand in his pockets to find some tissues. He took out the only paper he had, a roll of £20 notes, and gently stuck some of them on me.

Iconic: Griff Rhys Jones with Mel in their classic sketch series sitting across a table from each other

That stemmed the flow — and later provided the taxi fare: the roll of notes was very Mel Smith. 

I remember very little else about that evening — but I remember his amused relish at the state I was in.

We were in fact celebrating a BAFTA for Not The Nine O’Clock News, the early Eighties comedy phenomenon with Pamela Stephenson, Rowan Atkinson and Mel and I, which attracted 18 million viewers a week.

It was where Mel and I met and bonded. It was a marriage made in BBC rehearsal rooms in West London. 

And it lasted 35 years. We lived in taxis in those days. 

In the naughty Eighties, those years of plenty, Mel owned a beat-up Rolls-Royce, but they took away his licence after a night of excess when he offered to sign a policeman’s notebook, mistaking it for an autograph book.

Once I was in the back of a cab on my own, and the driver started up. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this ...’ I knew I was certainly going to. ‘But I don’t like that comedy you do. I hate that alternative stuff.’

‘Well, never mind,’ I replied.

Iconoclastic comedy: Griff and Mel with Pamela Stephenson and Rowan Atkinson starring in Not The Nine O'Clock News in 1980

‘Not my humour.’

He then rattled off a list of famous names from the early Eighties — each of them, he insisted, as unfunny as the next. 

He had watched a surprising amount of their comedy for someone who disliked the stuff. But after a while he grew ruminative. Perhaps he felt he had been unfair. 

‘I tell you who I do like, though,’ he continued.

I grunted.

‘That Mel Smith.’ He chortled.  ‘Now he is a funny man.’ He started cackling. ‘Yes, he makes me laugh. Very, very funny.’ And he nearly rolled off his wooden-beaded car seat cover with mirth.

I was tempted to ask whether he thought my own straight-man role in our double act had ever contributed to the great Mel’s comic genius, but I paid silently and hurried off to a meeting instead.

Bon viveur: Griff says that Mel Smith found it very easy to engage with all sorts of people

In fact, it was the kind of meeting where Mel would arrive late, doodle on the corner of a script and say little — but instantly win everybody’s approval and loyalty. Mel was a man of the people. 

He was the one the public loved. ‘Where’s your mate?’ they always shouted at me in the street. What they really meant was ‘Where’s my mate?’ Because that’s how everyone felt about Mel.

And funnily enough, they were right.

He had no side or pomposity about him at all. Mel was always ready to take a risk, or bet on the horses, or fight a good fight. He had the loyalty of a water buffalo, and if you were in his herd he was with you. 

He was always anxious to allow everybody their say, and was generous with writers, however bad the sketch. He was companionable with actors, however many times they forgot the words. 

He never stole lines or ideas. He knew what made him laugh and wrote his jokes accordingly.

No wonder the public saw him as an affable, everyman ‘bloke’. Unfortunately, that meant on stage I got to be the stiff, unyielding, neurotic nincompoop. 

In one skit, I had to kiss him full on the lips — and I had to do that every night for weeks. It was a sketch about my personal uptightness and his easy-going nature, and we took it on tour.

People used to say ‘How can you do it?’ I don’t know why they assumed that it was particularly disgusting for me, but fun for him. Except that,  yes, it was, particularly disgusting for me.

Mel smoked short, stubby Dutch cigars. He ate curry. He shaved in a perfunctory manner, leaving grizzled stubble. He used a bear hug and tongues. And he loved to snog me. 

We always assumed that as a male double act we would end up doing The Odd Couple in a provincial theatre. 

We certainly spent enough time sharing rooms and getting on each other’s nerves to do justice to the plot: neurotic, neat-freak divorcé Felix moves in with care-free, domestic slob Oscar. I can guess who would have played which part.

Success: Mel directed the global hit Mr Bean, The Ultimate Disaster wit his long-time friend Rowan Atkinson

But perhaps The Sunshine Boys — the story of an ageing vaudeville duo who, after 40 years on the road, have come to know each other too well — would have been more appropriate. 

In the 1975 film adaptation, Walter Matthau and George Burns laid bare the rivalry — even to a small degree — in any double act.

‘He’s spitting on me again!’ yells Burns. That was nothing. If Mel spat an insult, I spat back. 

But in any double act, you are bound together by chains of fear. Fear of a joke falling flat. Of a stony-faced audience. A silent theatre. You are not rivals: you are tied to the same runaway train. 

A solo stand-up comedian can edit material as they go, in comedy partnerships you go down together, down into the valley of death; down still mouthing those jokes that you had thought were going to be so good. 

Good time guy: Mel loved parties, nights out and horse racing

Down rolling your eyes in the hope that your mate may be able to think of a ready line that will offer you a way out so you don’t have to do the whole damned sinking routine in front of 3,000 people.

The secret of a double act is faith in your partner: you work together or not at all. It reportedly took Morecambe and Wise a month to write a new five-minute section of material for their live act. We were not Morecambe and Wise, but we knew the horror of being tied to a script come what may. 

I have worked with a lot of actors, but Mel knew the game better than anyone. ‘What if we did this? ... Let’s cut that bit ... I’ll pause there ...’ But mostly, totally unspoken, he just instinctively played the shot.

As well as those endless rehearsals, for years, Mel and I wrote together, too.

In the early Eighties, we went to Tuscany to write a film, Morons From Outer Space, in a castle. It seemed remote and isolated enough to stop us wandering too far off the point.

But it was also a wine estate.

After we had consumed what felt like most of the previous year’s vintage, Mel decided he wanted to go to Grosseto in Tuscany for the races. I had no interest in horses, but Mel gambled on everything. He gambled on life.

So we had to travel three hours across central Italy in our new rental car. Halfway there, we remembered we had no money. We went looking for cash in a hilltop town.

After a quick tour around the place, we realised there was one way in and then one way out, through a gatehouse at the end of a square.

The Opel hire car edged towards it. ‘Are we going to get through here?’ asked Mel from the driver’s seat. 

I leaned out of the passenger side. ‘I’m not sure.’

Suddenly, there was a noise like a sardine tin being rammed into a small stone niche. The men in the cafe under the tree shot to their feet, scattering chairs. ‘Maybe not.’ 

Mel pursed his lips — a Mel gesture signifying a sort of redoubtable Churchillian resolve. After further metallic screaming, we popped out of the other side.

There was certainly no destructive vandalistic streak in Mel, but he was unwilling to accept defeat. He shrugged. No harm done — except that in the end we discovered there was no bank there anyway.

He drove the wreck to the racecourse (we eventually found a bank along the way), and spent the evening placing bets after studying the form in Italian — a language he didn’t understand. I read a book. He won quite a lot of money ...

Apart from our snog, the other question I was most often asked was how I managed to keep a straight face working that close to Mel — especially in those famous sketches when we would sit facing each across a table, our faces just a few inches apart.

In truth, I didn’t always manage it. I would stare straight at those watery eyes, that Rembrandt nose and those crumbling teeth and try very, very hard not to smile.

Mel played the big puns like a tennis pro, and lobbed the smashes at me with aplomb.

‘I once went with this woman called Miss Whiplash ... I think she’d been in a car accident or something.’

In one memorable sketch, which used to open our act, I would join him on stage from the audience, pretending to be late and flustered. After commiserating, Mel would calm me down — but then immediately ‘whack’ me out flat on the boards. 

During rehearsals, he had scrupulously worked out how to pull the punch. He could appear to hit me a heavy blow, but hold back his arm — which was ‘upstage’ of my head — so that he barely made contact with my face.

But in every one of the 60 or so performances in front of an audience, he never once missed. He’d be just a little bit over-excited, you see. 

Sometimes the force of his slap meant that when I fell down my head bounced off the stage with an audible ‘donk’ that would drive the audience wild with laughter.

We really did have a gas together.

Now that Mel has gone, I sincerely hope they don’t take a picture of me standing alone at the funeral. I can see the headline now: ‘The loneliness of a sad clown.’

They wouldn’t be so far wrong, though: I am bereft. Somehow I assumed there would always be Smith and Jones.

It’s ironic, really. Mel was never one to leave a party early. And it will never be quite the same without him.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2379416/Mel-Smith-A-moving-joyously-funny-tribute-comic-star-GRIFF-RHYS-JONES.html#ixzz2aH4o8MtA
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