TV review
Hooked, line and sinker
by Diana Wichtel
If fame is the disease of the modern age, as Ruby Wax maintains, then she has been one of the plague’s most remorseless pathologists. Indelible acts of train-wreck television that Wax has perpetrated over the years in the name of the gonzo celebrity interview include: having O J Simpson, in ill-advised Norman Bates mode, stab at her with a banana; rifling through the drawers of an anxious Duchess of York before locking the renegade royal out of her own home; asking Imelda Marcos: “Where did all the billions go, honey?”
So it was always going to be messy when the increasingly camera-hungry Wax got together with a couple of serial attention-seekers like Liza Minnelli and David Gest. That’s Liza with a “Z”, for zany or zonked or the zoo she surrounds herself with. And David with a nose only slightly less convincing than Michael Jackson’s.
Liza is at least deservedly famous for her Oscar-winning turn as Sally Bowles in Cabaret (the best film musical since her sublime, doomed mother, Judy Garland, starred in The Wizard of Oz). David is, apparently, an event and concert producer.
Gest was also, at the time of the interview, what passed for Minnelli’s latest husband. With that CV, it was no surprise that, in the game of who could suck the most dignity out of any situation, he gave even the compulsively brazen Wax a run for her money.
In no time, and with scant regard for the gastro-intestinal wellbeing of viewers, Gest was demonstrating the firmness of Liza’s left breast. It was, I’m sorry to have to report, his favourite. Apparently, he liked to fall asleep on it, Wax shared, as Minnelli assumed the expression of resigned humiliation that would stay with her for most of the interview. He would wake up with a nipple dent in his cheek, suggested Wax. “I’d wake up with my mouth on the nipple,” said Gest, proving just how hard Wax was going to have to work to keep ahead in the bad-taste stakes.
The encounter began with what looked like out-takes from Night of the Living Dead. It was, in fact, footage from the couple’s wedding. Gest, taking “You may now kiss the bride” as an invitation to use his tongue to perform a root canal on his clearly reluctant bride while best man Michael Jackson looked blankly on, has to count as the most grotesque sight of the television year. Any television year.
Wax told him that he looked as though he was trying to blow Minnelli up. “I looked like a fish going in to take out her whole intestines,” demurred Gest romantically.
Sweet. The trio tore all over London, searching for people who might recognise them. They took over a fish and chip shop, where they mugged and capered while the locals waited long-sufferingly for their grub. “I love people, the way they look at you like you’re a dead animal,” Wax told Minnelli.
They went to tea. Gest wouldn’t let Liza eat a cake because it might be bad for her, so she smoked, instead. He was an increasingly nasty-looking customer, especially when Wax made him take off the dark glasses, revealing hard little button eyes, as flat and dull as those of a rag doll or a shark. Even Wax’s mask slipped a little when, trying to get his own back, Gest informed her, and an appalled world, that she had two big brown hairs sticking out of her nose. For a long second she looked at him with frank disgust. Is the money, you imagined her thinking, worth it? I guess it is, because the next minute Wax was letting Gest pluck out her nose hairs over the tea and cakes.
What larks. Fortunately, a less gruelling blast from the past followed immediately, as Kim Hill interviewed John Clarke on Face to Face. After Wax buzzing around like a chipmunk on crack, Hill’s little tics and affectations seemed positively soothing. Either that red top was a straitjacket in disguise or she was unusually relaxed. For once, her hands were as immobile as David Gest’s face.
And Clarke, of course, made his name with Fred Dagg, a character who appeared unperturbed to the point of coma. In the early 70s, around the time Liza was urging us to put down the knitting, the book and the broom and live a short but happy life of unbridled hedonism, Clarke’s laconically rural Fred Dagg was more concerned with the life-affirming qualities of protective rubber footwear. “Now there’s rugby boots and racing boots, and boots for drinkin’ rum. But the only boots I’m never without are the ones that start with ‘gum’.”
He was always onto something hilarious, endearing and slightly depressing about his place of birth. “Nothing Without Labour” was the character-building motto of his primary school, recalled Clarke. “Like ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’,” observed Hill. “Exactly,” said Clarke. “You can’t have any fun without working your ring off.”
Clarke talked about his laconic, elliptical brand of humour, inspired by early exposure to the likes of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, who trusted the audience to do some of the work. “Part of the funniness was in you as you were watching – the business of getting it.” Clarke left the country and ended up making The Games, that wonderful Aussie precursor to The Office, while we got Melody Rules.
Page 1 2 
