By Gillian Garnham

'Happiness. Happiness. The greatest gift that I possess…’ Celia sang.
    ‘Ken Dodd,’ the two women opposite her shouted in unison.
    ‘You can have one point each. It was an easy one.’
    ‘You need hands…'
    ‘Max Bygraves!’ Both together again.
    ‘Good idea, son! That’s a supplementary point.’
    ‘Well, if you’re going to have additions like that, I can add a few for Ken Dodd. What about Diddy men; jam butty mines; tickling sticks. That’s at least three extras for a start.’
    ‘This is getting silly. How can I keep track?’ Celia, the elected chairperson, screwed up her score sheet and tossed it into the bushes. ‘We’re supposed to be brain training. Warding off the inevitable. The brain’s a muscle, you know.’

Three well-upholstered women of more than mature years were sitting in the warm autumn sunshine in leafy Hertfordshire. Leaves on garden trees and bushes were just beginning to turn and fall. The afternoon had started with a game of Trivial Pursuit, brought along by Pauline, but after an hour with no one gaining a single piece of pie, they’d packed it in, never having heard of the winner of X Factor 2008 and caring little for Madonna’s latest exploits. Deciding that the questions were altogether too trivial, they had opted for a quiz of their own, based upon catchphrases and songs associated with radio comic entertainers from earlier years: “Ray’s a Laugh” – Ted Ray; “Shut that Door” – Larry Grayson; “Where’s me shirt?”
‘God knows who said that,’ Mavis, the youngest of the three (by a squeak), spread her hands in a gesture of despair.
    ‘Was it Al Read?’
    ‘Wasn’t he “Any more tea in that pot?”’
    ‘Did we really laugh at those tags?’ Pauline, the oldest in the group, and certainly the largest, was putting her game back in its box, disappointed that it had been such a washout.
‘Well, I didn’t,’ Mavis lied. ‘Isn’t it strange how many comics, having given their lives over to making others laugh, often turn out to have had less than a happy life of their own?’ She glanced over at the other two, in what Celia interpreted as a meaningful way.
    The three mused over this for a few minutes, the warmth of the sun on their upturned faces not conducive to serious thought. ‘That’s true,’ Celia finally said, but failed to come up with the sort of insider revelations Mavis had been hoping for. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew that Celia’s ex had been a seaside comic turn, and that fact itself had turned her into a bit of a comedy for this middle-class community. ‘Did you know that her husband trod the boards? Widow Twankey rather than RSC! A bit of a wag!’
    ‘Didn’t your Gerard end his acts with a song?’ Mavis dared to ask, dying to rake up a bit more muck if she could. ‘Didn’t he do a double act?’
    Celia wasn’t listening, or affected not to have heard. She was thinking of Ken Dodd’s teeth and regretting that Gerard had had his uppers capped early in his career. She was also profoundly regretting that she had ever had to admit that she’d been married to a pantomime dame.
Mavis repeated her question.
‘Yes,’ said Celia. ‘Gerard and Raymond.’ There! She’d done it now. It had never sounded right, and she’d always told him so. She could see that Mavis was trying not to laugh.
‘What fun!’ said Pauline, levering herself out of the plastic garden chair.

When the two of them had gone, Celia stayed in the garden. The sun was still bright and quite warm. The double act had never worked; Gerard and Raymond had not exactly tripped off the tongue: it wasn’t Laurel and Hardy, not even Little and Large, certainly not Morecambe and Wise. The two of them had been far too much alike, she supposed, both wanting to be the one getting the laughs and the audience’s sympathy. Each had objected to being cast as the straight man, a feeder to the other. In the end, Gerard had had to continue on his own, with holiday resorts and Christmas pantos, all over the country. Babbacombe was a regular in summer, as was the season at the Morecambe Winter Gardens. She remembered him there in Happy Mount Park, helping kids sail their boats, signing autographs, drumming up support for the early evening show. He had never made the big time, never done Torquay or Scarborough, got nowhere with Blackpool. Whitley Bay was summer 1979. He wasn’t asked back.
    But it hadn’t always been like that, not in the old days, when they had first met. She had been a dancer in the chorus at variety theatres up and down the land. He had been the dependable comic, with a good line in slightly off-colour jokes, but only slightly, so that all the audience could laugh without been tainted with obscenities. He’d been good: the Max Miller of his time, they said, only cleaner. He could have been another Ken Dodd. When she had first met him he’d had the teeth; that was before he’d had them capped. The trouble was that Gerard wouldn’t leave well alone. He was always after improvements. Always hoping to get a higher billing. He watched newer comics, ever anxious that they’d get one over on him. He fiddled with the best of jokes. ‘Don’t mess,’ she’d said. ‘If it ain’t broke…’ But he’d never listen to reason. ‘Gotta keep up with the times. You can’t stand still in this business.’
    First, he added a little tap routine to his finale, and that was when he had introduced his theme tune: “Spread a little happiness as you go by”. Well, she hadn’t minded that; it made the audience join in and go home with a smile on their faces, and that was what it was all about, they both knew that. But, although his head might be keeping up with the times, his feet were less ready to move.
    Magic was the next thing. He had seen the early Paul Daniels. ‘I could do that!’ he said, only he couldn’t. His fingers were all over the place. When he suggested sawing her in half, that did it, and she left, taking with her a nice old gentleman who had fancied her legs from his seat in the centre of the front row of one of the seaside shows. It had been Morecambe – again – the Central Pier. Morecambe with its grey monotony, the tide never seeming to turn. The tide had certainly turned for her that summer, and she had walked along the pier with her new-found friend, then right out of Gerard’s life and all that he represented. Married again and settled in Hertfordshire, she was soon left a wealthy widow. As for Gerard, he was left to cut another lady in half.

Celia sat on in her leafy arbour. The drifts of Michaelmas daisies and the last of the roses and chrysanths should have created for her a pleasant evening contentment, but Mavis’s words still niggled. It was beginning to grow chilly and the sun would soon flicker behind the aspens in her neighbour’s garden. Well, Mavis, she thought, Gerard did have a signature tune, and you could have had a supplementary point if you’d got it, but you wouldn’t have done because Gerard’s not much remembered now. Spread a Little Happiness was his before Sting got hold of it and gave it new fame in the Eighties. (Now, there’s a fairly up-to-date piece of trivia, well worth a piece of pie!) Gerard would still sing it as the curtain came down on his one-man shows, which, to be honest, had become barely coherent monologues. He’d sing the first three lines of the chorus and the rest was just whistling (when he had the puff), because he couldn’t remember what came next. He did even have a catchphrase, of sorts: “Are you listening? I’m talking to you!”
    For a while, she had continued to keep track of him, if she knew he was performing anywhere near, which was pretty rare. In this corner of Hertfordshire they were all Gilbert and Sullivan and easy simple-scene plays: Priestley, Ayckbourn. They didn’t go much for variety. Just occasionally there would be a re-enactment of the old-style performances, with a continuation of Those Were the Days, when the audience was encouraged to dress up in Victorian and Edwardian clothes: ‘Just the top half,’ said the theatre director. ‘You don’t have to go the whole hog.’
    It was after one such performance that Celia’s past life caught up with her. She had been in the audience, on the second row, which is always a mistake. A number of years had passed since she’d seen him. He had changed his name to Happy Harry: “A laugh a minute” it said on the billing. She was taken aback at finding this to be Gerard; Gerard, who could have been another Ken Dodd; Gerard, who was never smutty; Gerard, who was always well-turned-out, had become a puce-faced, overweight man, telling jokes that were downright rude. “Brown,” her mother would have said, which made them sound worse than “blue” and more lavatorial. He had seen her there in row B, and the rest was history. Mavis and Pauline had been behind in row F.

She stayed out late into the evening and thought that if she were in a story she’d probably peg out now, as the sun went down in the west and the sky turned pink, all those sorts of clichés. But life isn’t like that, things always take you unexpectedly. It isn’t the fat lady’s singing, it’s the ex with the big belly and the foulest of jokes which finishes you off. She laughed loudly, and the cat on the wall looked startled.

It could all have been different. He could have made it on the telly; another Bruce Forsyth, but he hadn’t got the legs, or the chin. Definitely, another Ken Dodd. He’d once had the teeth. But even she had to admit that he had never quite had the hair.

© Gillian Garnham

Trivial Pursuits was first published in The Journal, 12 November 2011