ARTHUR SMITH SAID HE'D NEVER write a showbiz autobiography. He said this right up until he started writing a showbiz autobiography. He still says it, even though the book (My Name is Daphne Fairfax) is now published. But you're allowed a change of perspective when you've nearly died.
Eight years ago, the veteran stand-up comic and stalwart of shows such as Grumpy Old Men and Radio 4's Loose Ends was admitted to hospital with severe stomach pains. He was told he had acute necrotysing pancreatitis and could die. A succession of doc
tors told him he must never drink again.
"Yes, it was certainly partly a result of that," says Smith, 54. "I've got diabetes as well, I had cancer scares, I was thinking, 'Blimey, the way it's going, I'll be dead in a couple of weeks. I thought about my imminent death and thought 'F*** it,' I'll write it.'
"I could be dead ten seconds after the end of this sentence," he continues, in a morose Sarf London drawl. "We both could. Maybe there's an aeroplane up there that has a fault, the engine's blown out …" Yet as we both cast a speculative glance towards the grey London sky – mercifully empty of faltering planes – all this talk of death seems unconvincing. Smith – teetotal, happily settled with his fiancée "the beautiful Beth" – strikes me as a man more interested in life.
We're sitting at a pavement table outside Bar Italia, the Soho night haunt much frequented by the London light entertainment world. Fellow comic Arnold Brown swings by to say hello, as does Ash Atalla, producer of The Office. Smith seems energised by the hubbub, raising his voice to be heard as delivery vans drone past.
He's surprised at how warmly his book has been received. "The whole thing has been a rather heart-warming thing in a way I didn't expect. I had a book launch, there were loads of people, it was a really good atmosphere. It's funny how people have got excited about it on my behalf. My brother (a former editor of the British Medical Journal and CBE] has been like a teenager telling everyone about it."
In many ways My Name is Daphne Fairfax is a love letter to his family, particularly his father Syd, a policeman and wartime survivor of Colditz (no, he didn't escape) and his quiet, clever mother Hazel. Their stable presence runs through his whole life. "I was very lucky, I had a wonderful childhood, and I realise more and more how lucky I was. My mum and dad genuinely were a great couple (Syd died in 2004], so much so that my old girlfriends kept in touch with them when we split up."
Precocious young Brian Smith (even then known to his friends as "Arfur") played Captain Hook in the school Christmas play and tasted the uncanny power of being able to make an audience laugh. He went to the University of East Anglia in the mid-1970s to study Comparative Literature, gave poetry readings in the campus pond and took his first show to the Edinburgh Fringe.
Graduation brought a bed in a squalid flat and a job as a street sweeper, interspersed with singing in a band and writing sketches for Edinburgh revues. Smith was putting off getting a real job, while not really believing he could make a living as an entertainer.
There was an epiphany in 1981 when he saw Alexei Sayle play one of London's fledgling comedy clubs. Comedy at the time was little more than a throwback to variety, older men with end-of-the-pier repertoires of racist, sexist gags. Here was something younger, angrier, springing out of a punk aesthetic, fuelled by anti-Thatcherite rage. Smith tasted the future.
Soon he was working his way to becoming a sought-after performer and compère. The book's title comes from the traditional opening line of his act: "My name is Arthur Smith, unless there's anybody here from Streatham Tax Office, in which case I'm Daphne Fairfax."
"You can think of comedians as inadequates – why do they crave the love of 300 people they've never met? I was always a show off, I had a genuine joy in performance. I imagine there is some strange anarchist world where we all live in tribes in the forest and every tribe would have a clown, a jester, that is a role that any society needs." It is also, he adds, a great way to meet women.
Smith is resolutely unpretentious. He doesn't do trendy, doesn't sign with the biggest bookers or the pushiest promoters. One senses he is happiest when he can do his own thing. His Edinburgh shows – he has rarely missed a year since 1977 – have included late-night tours of the Royal Mile (one ending briefly in his arrest), a promenade version of Swan Lake and his takes on Hamlet and the songs of Leonard Cohen. Last year he opened his own contemporary art gallery, Arturart, which made some prescient points about the art world, while still being funny. His is a clever, thoughtful take on comedy which flourishes when freed from limitations.
Fronting Paramount City, BBC2's late-night comedy flagship, launched in 1990, should have been his big break. He was London's "compere beyond compare"; few doubted that he was the right man for the job. Yet, sweating in a three-piece designer suit, he seemed ersatz and so did everything else about the show. After one series his confidence was wrecked, and Paramount City was dead. He clawed his way back through Radio 4's Loose Ends, later fronting his own series, Sentimental Journey (Johannesburg with Barry Norman, Havana with Arthur Scargill and so on) and made his name as a playwright with Fringe smashes The Live Bed Show and An Evening with Gary Lineker.
Yet his 40th birthday found him sinking into the depths of drink-addled depression. "At the time, sitting round here at 4am with a couple of members of Bananarama on my arm, I would not have conceded I was in any way unhappy. But looking back on it, I realise I was. And I was in denial a bit about drinking. I realised that when I was writing the book. It was a learning process. I was writing the book and in some senses the book was writing me."
It wasn't easy to relive those days. "But on the other hand, it was more than mitigated by the fact that here I am sober, with a gorgeous girl, living the life of Riley. I'm interested in the whole idea of what memory means. If you're lying on your deathbed, is it any consolation in the end, the memory of good times, or does it make it even worse?"
It's this kind of thoughtfulness which makes My Name is Daphne Fairfax an untypical showbiz memoir. Certainly, some names are dropped, small amounts of dirt are dished, there may be a surprise or two (the Whose Line Is It Anyway? team find out who nicked their BAFTA trophy on p.262). But the presiding tone is one of unpretentious honesty.
Is it as simple as finding a new joy in life after facing down the Grim Reaper? "There's no doubt that for a few months after (being hospitalised] I had a 'Wow, I'm alive!' feeling every morning. That does tend to wear off a bit, but inevitably it becomes a significant point in your life. You can't help but define things against it."
There's no doubt that the man before me, chain-smoking the healthiest cigarettes he can find, is a man more at ease with the world, and with himself. Ironically, by the time he was getting invited on to Grumpy Old Men he was getting mellower by the day. "When you're young and hungry to be successful, you lose perspective. In my experience, people have a terrible time in their twenties, usually. It's a consolation to the rest of us that they may be young and fit and beautiful but they're having a shit time.
"But in your fifties, with a bit of luck, you've got some idea who you are, you've come to terms with your limitations a bit. You've still got the energy. I feel more creative in a way than I used to because I know what I'm good at. Your fifties are pretty good, actually."
• My Name is Daphne Fairfax, by Arthur Smith, is published by Hutchinson, priced £18.99.
Arthur Smith on comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe Arthur Smith made his Fringe debut in 1977 when he appeared in a revue show called SwingalongaDante.
Over the years, Edinburgh has been integral to his career, and in 2007 he won the Spirit of the Fringe Award.
Smith has watched the development of comedy at the Fringe from its infancy. "When I first came here, stand-up as we know it did not exist. Comedy was part of revue, with dancing and close harmony singing."
Unrecognisable, then, from the industry it is today, but has it lost something?
"Yeah, I think the motive for a lot of people in comedy now is money and fame. I think it's lost its heart a little bit, but it had to. It's like when a guy with a market stall goes on and starts a chain of department stores.
"I recognise in older comics bitterness about the generation beneath, but that's the way the world goes, it's only right and proper, we all have our afternoon in the sun. And there's nothing worse than some old comic sitting in a bar droning on about the good old days and how s*** everyone is now.
"The fact is, there are always going to be funny people, there are different ways of doing it. Someone like Russell Brand is a really talented man, but it's disappointing that his only real subject is himself."
