Tony Holmes and Bill Gardiner met in a holding cell in a police station in Aldershot the week before Christmas in 1959. The local police wanted the military police to take them back to the barracks; the military police didn’t want anything to do with them. While the two sets of authorities wrangled, they sat there for twenty-four hours, talking, smoking and not sleeping, both of them feeling stupid and very afraid. They ascertained that they had both been arrested in the same place in the same street, two hours apart; they didn’t even tell each other what they had been doing wrong, or where precisely they had been doing it. They didn’t need to. They just knew.
Neither of them had ever been caught back at home, in London, but for different reasons. Bill hadn’t been caught because he was smart, and knew the places to go, the clubs and the bars and even the public conveniences, although he didn’t use them very often. The evening’s events had reminded him why. The policeman who’d arrested him in Aldershot may well have been an agent provocateur, one of those officers who hated his kind with such a peculiar and obsessive passion that they were prepared to spend entire evenings trying to catch them. There were plenty of them in London too. Tony had never been caught in London because he’d never tried anything in London, or anywhere else for that matter. He wasn’t sure about a lot of things, including who and what he was, but he had no clear idea why he’d decided to try and find the answers to these questions right before the end of his National Service. Loneliness, certainly, and boredom, and the sudden desperate need for the touch of a fellow human being, of any gender, though admittedly he was only likely to find one of the two in the gents’ conveniences in Tennyson Street.
In the end, nobody had the stomach to prosecute them, and the following day they returned to the barracks to complete the rest of their National Service. Whenever they looked back on that evening – which they did frequently, although never together, and never out loud – there wasn’t much they recognized about the circumstances of their arrest. Had they really been desperate enough to get so near to humiliation and possible ruin? But the content of their twenty-four-hour conversation stayed reassuring and familiar, even years later: they talked about comedy. They discovered their mutual passion for Ray Galton and Alan Simpson within minutes of meeting, they could quote whole chunks of Hancock’s Half Hour at each other, and they tried to remember as much as they could of ‘The Blood Donor’ so that they could perform it. They were pretty sure they were word perfect on the hospital scene, with Bill playing Hancock and Tony, with the higher, more nasal voice, taking on the Hugh Lloyd part.
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson
They kept in touch when they were demobbed. Tony lived in east London and Bill was up in Barnet, so they used to meet in town, in a Soho coffee bar – once a week, at first, when they were both still working in the jobs they were trying to escape. (Tony was helping his father in the newsagent’s he owned, Bill was a pen-pusher at the Department of Transport.) They spent the first few months talking, and then eventually overcame their embarrassment and started trying to write together, on two notepads. Later, when they took the leap into unemployment, they met every day, in the same coffee bar, and would continue to do so until they could afford an office.
They never talked about the other thing they may or may not have had in common, but Bill was still shocked when Tony got married. He’d never even mentioned seeing someone. Bill went to the wedding, and Tony’s bride, a sweet, quiet, clever brunette called June who worked at the BBC, seemed to know all about her husband’s partner, or as much as she would have wanted to know anyway. And maybe there wasn’t anything else to find out. Bill and Tony wrote comedy scripts together; that was who they were, and Aldershot Police Station had nothing to do with anything.
They did much better than they had dared to hope. They sold a few one-liners to some of the older radio comedians almost immediately. They were employed full-time to provide material for Albert Bridges, whose only remaining listeners were still grateful to him for his company and good humour during the Blitz. When first the people of Britain and then, eventually, the BBC came to the conclusion that Bridges was past his best, Bill and Tony sold The Awkward Squad, a comedy series inspired by their National Service experience – or the parts of it they felt they could draw on, anyway.
And now they had been invited to write for Comedy Playhouse. They had been itching to try their hand at TV, but when Dennis took them for a drink in Great Portland Street one evening and told them that he wanted a breezy, light-hearted look at contemporary marriage, they were a little cowed by the brief. After Dennis had gone home, neither of them said anything for a while.
‘Well,’ said Bill, ‘you’re married.’
‘I don’t know if my marriage is going to help us very much. It’s quite, you know. Particular.’
‘Can I ask you something about your marriage?’
‘What about it?’
‘Did June know when she married you?’
‘I don’t know what there was to know.’
‘You got nicked for importuning in a men’s lavatory. She might want to know that.’
‘I was released without charge. And I didn’t importune anybody, if you remember.’
‘So you didn’t think that was information worth passing on?’
‘No.’