The brief sadness of neither having my cake nor eating it
So. Aware of my fondness for a mid-show snack, my dresser, a nubile young filly with a glint in her eye, whom I shall call Anne, confessed to being in a cake-baking mood. What took my fancy? “Profiteroles,” said I.
I thought I saw a fleeting shadow of panic cross her face, but thought nothing of it.
Both Anne and I have the hots for the new rugby ace Danny Cipriani. We have a shrine in my dressing room - press photos of him on the field looking swarthy and fit, and snaps of our boy emerging from Mayfair nightclubs looking sexy and dishevelled.
The next day the dog and I hurried in to work, mouths understandably watering (thinking of the profiteroles and, as it happens, Danny). Anne tottered in five minutes late and, I could not help but notice, without a Tupperware container or any other receptacle suitable for an indulgent treat. She attempted a cheery hello, but her eyes were glazed, her demeanour uncomfortable. Was I imagining it, or was there a whiff of stale red wine in the air? Surely she hadn't gone on the lash the night before and spent the day in bed with a hangover and a chorus boy, instead of wrestling with choux pastry in her south London kitchenette? I dismissed such negative suspicions.
I couldn't be so vulgar as to ask outright where the promised profiteroles were. No doubt they would just appear prior to my ten-minute break towards the end of Act I. I sang my songs lustily, sure of the reward that awaited me, then hurried upstairs and flung open the door. The dog was sound asleep on her cushion and there on my dressing table was . . . nothing. Not a crumb. I made do with an extra-strong mint and spent the interval coming to terms with my disappointment.
When I next encountered Anne in the wings, I said: "Can you believe it? Valerie must have leapt on to my chair and helped herself to the profiteroles that you spent all afternoon making!" There was a significant pause. "What a naughty dog!" she said, colouring. "Don't worry," I reassured her. "She shall be soundly punished." Anne looked shifty. "And if she does it again tomorrow," I added meaningfully, "there will be nothing for it but to have her put down."
A day late though they were, the profiteroles were delicious, and remarkably fresh.
I'm all for tolerating human weaknesses and indiscretions. I celebrate them, in fact. Dear Anne excelled herself after her night of indulgence, and her efforts were all the more triumphant for it. And anyway, she has always been a dresser par excellence. Her consumption of red wine is, frankly, none of my business.
Michael Todd, chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, may have committed suicide because he feared his extramarital affairs were about to be exposed by a Sunday newspaper, and the firm-jawed New York governor Eliot Spitzer has fallen on his sword because his dalliances with a high-priced prostitute make a nonsense of his preaching about moral rectitude.
Yet I doubt the importance of moral lapses. Should they cause such a fuss? Given my experiences with Anne this week, I wonder whatever happened to giving people a second chance. Lord knows I've had a few. There was a time, following a certain joke I made at the 1993 Comedy Awards, when I was told I'd never work again. But I've scratched a living since and more or less managed to shake off the shroud of disgrace. As have Bill Clinton, Prince Charles, Ken Dodd, Chris Tarrant, Kate Moss, Charles Kennedy, Delia Smith and sundry others. Scandal has humanised us, made us one of the boys. We're the richer for it.
Suicide, it has been said, is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Resignation, abdication and retreat may well be, too. Have a mouthful of Anne's profiteroles, and all seems well with the world.
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