The funny thing about Pam Ayres is that, at 71, she cuts a far younger, trendier figure than the woman who won Opportunity Knocks more than four decades ago. That Pam Ayres looked ancient already, wearing a prim, frill-necked frock and perched in a dun-coloured wing-back armchair. The teapot in a Seventies-chic brown and caramel knitted cosy on an occasional table next to her knees didn’t help.
Actually it was all an act – which dismayed her – designed to set the tone for the comedy that has been her trademark ever since. Her poetry is homely, relatable, acutely observed and almost always about the quotidian: the hunt for the perfect swimming costume, the bosom-hoiking qualities of the Wonderbra, bad teeth, dogs, toasters, allotments or the particular terror of being out somewhere special and fretting that you haven’t unplugged your hair tongs.
‘A lot of hurtful things have been written about me,’ says Pam Ayres. ‘The vitriol I’ve faced has been out of all proportion’
She does poignant and melancholic too – rather well, in fact – but she definitely doesn’t do existential. And that has earned her more criticism than applause from the arts establishment over the years. Fans have bought her books, CDs and DVDs in their millions, they make her one-woman, two-hour shows a sellout and tune in to hear her regular Radio 4 appearances. (She’s often on Just A Minute with Paul Merton – ‘kill or be killed, that’s the only way to survive.’) She’s made the Queen rock with laughter trading jokes about Prince William and Prince Harry raiding the Royal fridge in a fit of the munchies, but she’s never been fashionable.
‘A lot of hurtful things have been written about me,’ says Ayres. ‘The vitriol I’ve faced has been out of all proportion. I still think there is a preposterous snobbery about poetry, that it is OK to like this kind of poetry because it presents you as an intelligent, cerebral person, but you must not like this kind of poetry because it says something else about you. It’s ludicrous. I always seemed to be rubbished because I had written something funny, not on a “higher plane”. But my work made people fall about laughing and go home feeling better.
Pam with husband Dudley Russell, son William and newborn baby James, 1984
‘I was talking once at an Arts Council event in Australia and an academic, some cloistered university type, walked out of my show saying, “That’s not an Oxford accent and this is not poetry…” It is sad that snobbery around poetry puts people off investigating it. There are many different kinds of poetry. They all have value.’
She does feel far more accepted and respected now and, in terms of longevity, popularity and wealth – let’s face it, unusual in a poet – she’s definitely had the last laugh. Her home today is a sunny, sprawling pale-stone villa in a Cotswold village to which she has downsized after almost 30 years in a whopping West Country mansion set amid 20 prime acres.
That was the house in which she and her husband, theatre producer Dudley Russell – ‘We met on Broadway, Lewisham Broadway,’ she deadpans – raised their two sons, now 36 and 34, who live nearby. It’s also the place that inspired her latest book, a tiny, funny, but ultimately sad ode to the last hedgehog in Britain. Ayres was permitted to release hedgehogs back into the wild at her last home and has written about them to mark National Hedgehog Awareness Week. The book recounts all the ways hedgehogs die: pronged in the compost heap, incinerated in a lazily laid bonfire, trapped in the plastic rings from a six-pack of beer, drowned in a garden pond or – ugh – strimmed. And it’s classic Ayres: ‘If in your fence you’d made a space, we could have moved from place to place, have found a gal, paid our respects, had some cautious hedgehog sex…’
Even back in 1975, Pam Ayres looked ancient already, wearing a prim, frill-necked frock and perched in a dun-coloured wing-back armchair
Next up will be a new collection of her own, which will include a poem about kiwi fruits ripening and the gastro-pub habit of serving food in a fancy-pants way. ‘It’s not rocket science but perhaps things occur to me a bit more loudly than they occur to other people,’ she observes.
This ability to megaphone what everyone else is thinking, but has not quite yet articulated, first became apparent in the Far East. Ayres, born into a rural working-class background, dumped a straight-out-of-school Civil Service post (a ‘sit-down’ job that had delighted her mother) to follow her brothers into the military. She found herself in Singapore with the WRAF, smoking, drinking, flirting and sprinting competitively for the Far East Air Force. Pictures from the time show her as a total fox. It was there she first got up on stage to perform sketches for her comrades.
‘People fell about laughing, and I felt I had arrived where I needed to be. I started writing for myself because everything available – all that Noël Coward drawing-room stuff – was too posh for my voice. I was lauded for being funny, I loved it, I was ecstatic.’
She writes with huge verve about that life-changing year in her autobiography, The Necessary Aptitude. In one chapter, she recalls running up a silvery pelmet-length kaftan to go to dinner on board a ship that had arrived in port. She was out of her depth socially in the mess but busked it until one of the young officers recognised her last name and asked if her mother had been his cleaner. Ayres denied it – although it was true.
‘What a snob, eh? It just felt like I was a somebody that night. I had a new dress, a lovely dinner and nice naval officer to talk to. When he said “Is your mum a cleaner?” it shot me down in flames. It showed great insecurity. Now I wouldn’t care who knew.’
The episode was a lesson in authenticity, and since then she has not stopped being determinedly herself. In 1975 she was picked up by Opportunity Knocks, which then had the same star-making clout as today’s The X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent. ‘I loved Laura Ashley dresses, but that stupid set they gave me – I nearly died when I saw it. My heart sank. I was being pigeon-holed because of how I spoke. My accent seemed to mesmerise people, but after a time I wished they would look at what I had written instead of listening to my voice,’ she says.
‘My accent seemed to mesmerise people, but after a time I wished they would look at what I had written instead of listening to my voice,’ Ayres says
Victory launched her popular career but introduced her to the kind of criticism that has hurt her so much. Her trajectory wasn’t helped when TV over-commitment left her exposed and using sub-standard material written by others. ‘After that the public went off me with a vengeance. I was like Victoria Wood – chewed up by the machine and chucked on the scrap heap. Once the hysteria over Opportunity Knocks was gone, I got a Radio 2 series on Sunday afternoons and I could be myself. The funny thing is, I never set out to be a poet. I just wanted to perform. I don’t mind what people call my work as long as it brings about the right response.’
She means laughter and an ‘Arrrgh, me too!’ recognition. ‘I have always used my writing as a diary. When I first came on the scene, it was about pets and boyfriends. Then it was pregnancy and family life. In my 40s and 50s I wrote about losing your lustre, and now it’s about the feeling of growing older, being loved, but not being essential any more.’
Except that she is. Pam Ayres is absolutely essential to British humour, reminding us all to be tickled by the small joys and ridiculousness of everyday life. It’s not something poets often do – they’re usually too deep in love, death and angst. Ask Ayres how she’d like to be remembered and she says: ‘Well, I think as someone who was a bit different but who was good at it.’
Pam Ayres’ latest book is ‘The Last Hedgehog’, illustrated by Alice Tait and published by Picador. For her remaining 2018 performance dates, visit pamayres.com