I don’t remember eating with Mum or Dad. Dad wasn’t around in Croydon, then Mum died while I was evacuated out in Maidford. Afterwards Gran managed to bring us up on her £2 and 15 shillings pension and still found spare coins for seats at the Croydon Empire every Tuesday evening. I remember seeing Dick Whittington there and then impersonating a cat for the next fortnight – lapping my milk from a saucer, taking my meals under the kitchen table, on all fours. And Gran never batted an eyelid. People would say “Roy’s half daft” and she’d say “Well, I like him”.
The ingredients of the firm yet gooey slosh which the great clown Charlie Cairoli used in “the messiest kitchen scene in history of panto” was top secret. When I was on the bill with him at Leeds Empire, he’d have it made each day in a locked basement room. But I managed to collect a sample and take it to my brother, an analytical chemist. Yet when he opened the box it had evaporated completely. So I spent a lot of time mixing and cooking up my own perfect slosh and then dyed it brown because when two gallons are tipped down my trousers and it trickles out at the ankles the kids especially appreciate the colour. Nowadays, I do a kitchen scene even messier than Cairoli’s, I promise you.
I adored condensed milk as a kid. I’d knock back a whole tin in one, if I could get my hands on it. Years later, when I was doing national service, I was “on jankers” [restricted privileges because of a military offence] one Christmas and the guys in the guard room brought me a present in lovely wrapping and bound with holly. When I opened it, I discovered a tin of condensed milk. I think that was the nicest present I’ve ever received.
I’ve got thousands of books about music hall and tons of old lyrics and sheet music. A favourite composer-comedian is Harry Champion, who’s best known for Any Old Iron but wrote many great songs about food, includingLet’s Have a Basin of Soup, A Little Bit of Cucumber, Baked Sheep’s Hearts Stuffed With Sage and Onion, Standard Bread, Toasted Cheese on Toast, Hot Meat Pies, Saveloys & Trotters, Oh! That Gorgonzola Cheese and Put a Bit of Treacle on my Pudding, Mary Anne. Lovely.
When I was courting my wife Debbie, I’d often say: “Come back with me and I’ll make you something to eat.” It was always the same meal – a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pudding and Angel Delight. When we had a big wedding anniversary this year, I phoned the hotel restaurant and arranged for them to ignore her order and serve Fray Bentos and Angel Delight instead. Debbie thought it was great.
My weight went up to 20 stone, partly because of diabetes, and my doctor said: “You’ll never lose enough unless you have a gastric sleeve fitted.” So I did. And with a smaller stomach I didn’t have much appetite any more and I got down to 13 stone. Now I feel like a million dollars. Seafood, in small portions, is my thing. I love prawns, shrimps, cockles and everything except snot-like winkles and – oh gawd – jellied eels. I call jellied eels “the Battenberg cake of the fish world”, because I once ate Battenberg in a cafe on a day trip to Margate and was so ill afterwards that I’ve never been near a slice since without feeling bilious.
It’s off-beat lines I’ve liked the most. Bob Nelson from Burnley, who could catch a cannonball on his back, would ask the audience “Aren’t plums cheap?” out of nowhere. Slapstick-wise, I got on like a house on fire with Mr Pastry, a children’s entertainer and acrobat who taught me to fall backwards off a dining chair without killing myself. He gave me a Parker pen inscribed with “Thank you for a great performance – Mr Pastry”. Which some bastard stole when I was doing the clubs.
In a boy’s club, doing Aladdin in 1952, I got the idea of boring a hole in the bottom of a teacup and attaching a drainage tube, so I could pour tea endlessly into it from a giant teapot. It was a huge thrill, to find a mechanical piece of business that got such a laugh. Later I got asked to do Quick Brew’s commercials. They went on for some years and paid for my house. When I lost the job I told the wife: “We’re drinking Twinings from now on.”
I had one theatrical landlady who served beans and toast, every bloody night. Come Christmas Eve, after staying at the theatre until 2am, I got back, incredibly hungry and exhausted, and I heard the landlady’s slippers padding up the corridor and sure enough she was carrying beans on toast. I felt a bad red mist come over me. But I picked at the beans andunderneath the beans I found one chipolata sausage. I said, “Hold on there, I think you’ve made a mistake. There’s one small chipolata here”, and she said, “Yes, happy Christmas!”
Roy Hudd is in Mother Goose until 31 December, Wilton’s Music Hall, Graces Alley, London E1 8JB
