The Devil Rides Out by Paul O'Grady Page B

the women’s parts and also appeared as the Ghost. She was tall and wan, slightly old-fashioned and prim in appearance with her cardigans and pale pink lipstick, and we were surprised to hear that on the nights this shy creature wasn’t rehearsing for Punch and Judy! she was a hostess at the Vernon Johnson School of Dance in Bold Street, substituting as a dancing partner for those lonely souls who’d arrived at the studio unaccompanied.
Christine was an excellent ballroom dancer who completely transformed herself when she entered the doors of Vernon Johnson’s. With her sensible little hairdo teased into a coif of mightier dimensions and her shimmering ballgown with yards and yards of peach tulle underskirt to make it stick out, Christine was a knockout. She had a fabulous figure and was a real marvel when it came to dealing with her shy and clumsy protégés, who looked upon her as a goddess. She encouraged me and Angela to join up. We did, and for ten bob a lesson we learned how to samba, tango and do the American jive.
    Our director at the Unity was an excitable and slightly hysterical fellow with a bright orange tongue that flicked in and out of the side of his mouth like a nervous lizard with a tic. However, he allowed us to improvise and include songs and sketches in this otherwise dreary production. Christine and Flom wrote a song called ‘Did Somebody Call For A Doctor’ and, surprise, surprise, I managed to get something from Gypsy in – ‘May We Entertain You’ as an opening number for Joey the Clown and Lola. We were in our element.
    To prepare us for this epic the cast were treated to a private viewing of a real Punch and Judy show by the maestro himself, Professor Codman, a showman whose family had been presenting Punch and Judy shows on Merseyside since the late 1800s. I remember his booth outside St George’s Hall and no, before you start, it wasn’t in the 1800s, it was the late sixties. Punch and Judy fascinated me when I was a little kid and I’d have hung around the booth in the gardens of the Floral Pavilion Theatre, New Brighton, all day if I’d been allowed. In the end my dad made me my own miniature booth, complete with puppets. He even fashioned a link of sausages out of one of my ma’s old stockings stuffed with cotton wool and tied up with pink wool at regular intervals to form the links, and I performed shows for my mate Steve Davies, who lived at the top of the Grove.
Most of the costumes for Punch and Judy! were borrowed from Unity’s wardrobe store. Angela and I wore tatty old Pierrot and Pierrette costumes for the clowns, which she tarted up with a bit of sequin trim she’d bought in Blackler’s, but for the Hangman I had other ideas. A guy I was having a fling with made leather trousers for a shop in Church Street and he gave me a brown leather pair with matching waistcoat. They were a bit on the large size and what with me not having much in the way of a bum they hung in folds behind me like a pair of Odeon curtains, but I didn’t care. I thought I was the dog’s bollocks up there on that stage, head to toe in saggy brown leather, my chin smeared with black greasepaint to represent stubble, a veritable testosterone-fuelled killing machine.
    In the Policeman’s number, three of us acted as chorus, dressed as coppers in ill-fitting uniforms poncing up and down behind Deputy Dawg, who was executing (literally) a shambolic dance routine while he tried to remember the words to ‘A Policeman’s Lot Is Not A Happy One’. I had a flash of what I considered comedy genius, fleshing out my part by doing it in drag. Just before I went on I quickly shoved one of the doctor’s coats down my tunic as a makeshift bosom, gave my already enormous barnet a quick backcomb, rolled my trousers up and smeared my gob with red carmine, not subtle but surprisingly effective. I drew on the dancer I’d seen playing a wonderfully deadpan tart in Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers for inspiration and went