Robert Webb - How Not to Be a Boy

Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books

Copyright Robert Webb, 2017

Extract from Peep Show, season 4.
Copyright Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong.
Reprinted by permission of Objective Media Group.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78689 008 5
Export ISBN 978 1 78689 009 2
eISBN 978 1 78689 010 8

Typeset in Sabon by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire

For Abigail

Contents

Overture

I f I get this right, Tess Rampling will definitely want to have sex with me. The idea slouches through my fifteen-year-old brain and disappears before Ive had time to ask it exactly why a sixth-former of Ramplings cosmic beauty would want to have sex with a GCSE pit-sniffer like me.

I take Rick Astleys Never Gonna Give You Up out of its paper bag and gaze at his pink face. Oh dear, Rick Astley, youre not gonna like this. You really have no idea whats about to happen to you. Gently, I lift the lid of Great-Auntie Trudys wooden gramophone to reveal the record turntable within.

The gramophone used to be in Trudys bedroom, and when I was chin-high to its wooden lid (about four years old) we would happily listen to Terry Wogan on Radio 2 while she brushed her hair and put her face on. Or sometimes, shed play a favourite LP like the soundtrack to The King and I. The first track of that record was called Overture and seemed to be a non-singing medley of some of the other songs. I liked the Overture: a friendly invitation and a promise of what was to come. Some of the best tunes were missing, but I guessed that was to keep them as a surprise.

*

Its not big, my room. The gramophone is among the wooden hand-me-downs that sprout from the walls and nearly meet in the middle. Heres a chest of drawers and a little bookshelf that Mum gave me recently. Heres the wardrobe that never yielded to Narnia no matter how faithfully I reached for the cold air.

The bedroom walls are pale green: pock-marked with Blu-Tack scars from sci-fi posters now replaced with Van Gogh prints from Woolworths. They have Vincent written under them in swirly writing. Recently, and with great solemnity, I took down the huge Empire Strikes Back poster the picture of Darth Vader offering his hand to Luke. Come with me, he says to his defeated son.

Theres a Greenpeace picture of a boat cleaning a polluted sea by magically drawing a rainbow in its wake. I get the point its trying to make, but even I can see the thing has all the truth and beauty of Lester Piggott narrating his tax return. Anyway, its there to show that I mind about the ozone layer or something. Similarly, theres a line drawing of a defiant-looking African boy against a horizontal tricolour which I vaguely associate with the ANC. In the impossible event that Tess Rampling ever sets foot in this room, she will instantly see that a) I disapprove of apartheid; b) I disapprove of pollution; and c) I now prefer post-impressionists to Star Wars. The first two parts are even true.

We live next door to RAF Coningsby. Theyve finally supplied us with double glazing to make up for the familiar scream of the Tornados. The condensation I used to draw pictures in now occurs between the panes rather than on the inside, like an itch you cant scratch. Thanks, lads. Still, the room retains its own unique and homely smell which I really like. It will be many years before someone points out that this smell has a name: damp. Occasionally my step-dad Derek loses an argument about turning on the central heating and the smell turns into what I would call the equally comforting grilled dust.

Here, in 1987, it feels wrong to be using the gramophone in an enterprise even vaguely connected with sex, like trying to make erotic art out of Fuzzy-Felt. But then, extreme measures are sometimes necessary when it comes to the sublime person of Tess Rampling. Apart from being the Most Beautiful Girl Who Ever Smiled and Frowned at the Same Time and Tossed Her Auburn Hair Out of Her All-Forgiving, World-Comprehending Eyes, Tess is also two years above me at school and therefore a figure of demoralising maturity. I see her walking between classes, having intellectual-sounding conversations with male teachers who look very pleased to be able to help. I want to help her too. My God, I want to help her brains out. I want to help her like we just invented helping.

I take the shiny record from its sleeve and savour the smell of the vinyl even though I dislike this song with some energy. There was a nervous moment in Woolworths when I picked it up for the first time to check the back of the sleeve: Please let the B-side be just an instrumental. Surely its just an instrumental! And lo Stock, Aitken & Waterman did not let me down. I impale Never Gonna Give You Up on the central upright of the record player and the B-side wobbles down onto the turntable. This is sweet. Tess Rampling is surely going to want to have sex with me when she sees the way I stick it to Rick Astley.

What Im doing here in my teenage bedroom is planning an end-of-term, school-hall sketch show. My form teacher, Mrs Slater, says that the correct term is revue, but I dont much like the word: it sounds square and not something you would see on the telly. I cant imagine Rik Mayall saying revue. At a pinch, Stephen Fry might say it, but there are limits to how much I get to copy Stephen Fry without attracting peer group ridicule. Bad enough that Ive started to pronounce grass to rhyme like a southern arse rather than a native Lincolnshire lass. No, its a sketch show. I write a dozen sketches, cast myself in all the best parts, with friends taking up the feed-line slack, and then put on a show in the main hall at lunchtime. The ostensible value of this is to encourage team-spiritedness and raise money for charity. The actual reason, of course, is to get Tess Rampling to want to have sex with me.

The sketches this time include The Price is Slight (TV game-show parody), Glue Peter (childrens TV show parody), The GAY-Team (parody of childrens TV action drama, also apparently watched by American adults) and, of course, my lethal take on Never Gonna Give You Up in which I will mock Rick Astleys dancing while lip-synching to rewritten lyrics of the song which Im about to pre-record over the instrumental.

Some of these sketches are less than fully formed, both technically and morally. The GAY-Team, for example, is currently no more than the desire for four of us to jump out in front of the curtain in Hawaiian shirts, brandishing hairdryers. What happens after that is currently anyones guess, but Im pretty sure Im going to draw the line at doing the gay voice. I suspect the other boys in the team will want to do the gay voice, but in my sophisticated opinion, doing the gay voice has no place in the comedy of 1987, even in Lincolnshire where literally no one is meant to be gay.

Obviously I will get Matthew Finney to black up to play B. A. Baracus. Thats different. Finney is very short and even weedier than me. So he really only has to stand there wearing dark-brown make-up and say Murdoch, you crazy fool or possibly Murdoch, you crazy homosexual and were on to a winner. I see no reason why this might cause offence: although its possible that there are gay people in Lincolnshire, it is not possible that anyone is black. Apart from my brothers friend, black Steve. (I mean, there are a lot of Steves so what