From the archive, 17 October 1980: Pamela Stephenson's biting wit | Pamela Stephenson Connolly
From the Guardian archivePamela Stephenson Connolly This article is more than 9 years oldFrom the archive, 17 October 1980: Pamela Stephenson's biting wit
This article is more than 9 years oldThe crazy world of the Not the Nine O’Clock News star and Comic Strip standup performer
Anna Ford complains that only women have to look good to cast news. Jan Leeming tells the Glasgow Herald that carping viewers cause her to burst into tears as soon as she closes her front door. Angela Rippon tells Woman that when she can no longer hide the hurt of being compared with a meringue, “they’ll have to take me off to the funny farm.”
Pamela Stephenson, who can be all three in the space of a minute, doesn’t mind looking good on a visual medium, or like a meringue if the shot calls for it. But she does feel sorry for them, their lives not their own, when they’re glossy and articulate compared with the men.
“Where do they find these guys? Do they run around the streets of Soho after midnight, saying ‘Come on, old-timer, we’re from ITN, we’d like you to read the news and we’ll give you a nice bowl of soup’?”
She’s been working in the usual frenzied way of her team, in Brighton and a safari park and West End hot-dog stands, for the next series of Not the Nine O’Clock News. After failing to keep a tryst at a disappointing motel in Seaford, after 12 frenzied hours of filming on some excited bypass in Bucks, we got together. The light was exhausted before they were and she turned up, with three bags of gear, punk fingernails and not a hair in place, soon after at my favourite drinking club.
She wouldn’t take a drink, though, except a gallon of diluted pineapple juice. Apparently after two light ales, she pours the third down her shell-like lughole, and she’s an Aussie. Well, Kiwi by birth actually, but Aussie by training.
That was in her salad days - she’s 30 now - though it’s hard to believe she was ever green in entertainment. Except don’t ask her about Brighton; that’s too freaky a secret even to tell a newspaper. Like there was this car, full of flowers, and someone got the idea they were destined for Margaret Thatcher…
How did she feel about her showing at the Comic Strip?
Nightmare, is the short answer. She’d worked though; literally she’d worked her tits off (a giant plastic pair, presented as bionic at the start of her routine, pulled out of her jumpsuit and settled on her head like a couple of titfers). I thought this idea capable of refinement - she could adopt the Chinese box principle and discard a series of diminishing bubs until her own authentic set was in doubt.
She promises to consider this suggestion. But her head droops at the thought that I’ve caught this performance and her face is obscured by a curtain of hair. She reappears dry and lustrous as Dorothy Lamour, but more self-critical.
“In Edinburgh I had a whole hour and amazingly it worked. And 500 at the LSE were a terrific audience. That 20-minute set was too subtle and I took it too fast. I’ve got an easier set all about Soho and sex-aids. And you’ve got to be so confident! I’m very much a beginner, yet because I’m a bit known from telly they advertise me as a guest star, and that wasn’t right - I have terrific respect for the other comedians there.”
She’s more in charge when the audience is rowdy. If they shout “Take ‘em off!” or “Give us a laugh, show us your tits,” she can handle it - “Have that boy washed and brought to my tent.” That evening at the Comic Strip she’d bitten a man in the front row but, alas, he’d failed to bite her back.
Some of the glamour roles she fell for now haunt her, specially a film where they stripped her not merely of her clothes but the comedy lines that would have made it honest. “I can’t be a prude. If the standard’s good you can’t quibble. I like best to work up material from my own experience. Like, going to Scotland I was chosen at the airport for a body search, and I built that into a sketch where I can say, ‘She had a kind of interesting look in her eye. When it was all over I murmured a question - had it been good for her too?’...
“Not the Nine O’Clock News is the first television I’ve really liked. Because it’s nearly instant.
“It’s a help not being English because I can take a fresh look, though I don’t know as much about the background to politics as I should. And if a degraded exposure scene doesn’t work I can trust them to snip round the edges.”
In the American Express sketch, where she unbuttons as a perk for the card-holder, they’d first thought she should show all: “I said that if they were going to show bosoms they wouldn’t be mine; I thought a bra would be funnier, and I’d do that.”
Yes, I said, that was right. I thought I’d recognised a Gossard. In fact, she says, a Gossard Wonderbra.
And Wonderbra - in terms of comedy - had proved to be wunderbar.
This is an edited extract, click to read on
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