Sarah Kendall: My comic inspiration? Judy Blume, John Hughes – and my intense teenage years
|
Version 0 of 1. My last two comedy shows were set during my adolescence, and it looks like my new show will be too. I say “looks like”, because I’m still writing it. And by “writing it”, I mean procrastinating, hating myself and blaming my husband for the fact that I am essentially quite lazy and dreadful at time management. But enough about the sunshine I bring into my husband’s life. When I was growing up, I devoured anything and everything to do with American teenagers. I read all of Judy Blume’s books – in particular, the one copy of Forever that did the rounds of my class. Before passing the book on to the next eager recipient, you were obliged to warn them at length about how disgusting sex sounds. Which, to be fair, it kind of does. I couldn’t get enough of John Hughes’s movies. They were one of my earliest comic inspirations. His films trod a fine line between presenting an authentic world that teenagers recognised and pure fantasy fulfilment. I found them hilarious and touching, and they never felt false. All the girls wanted to be Molly Ringwald and all the boys wanted to be Ferris Bueller. And why wouldn’t they? Everybody loved him. They thought he was a righteous dude. I love writing characters who are experiencing everything for the first time – the first kiss, the first date, the first alcohol-induced vomit, the first heartbreak, the first realisation that adults don’t have all the answers. Commonplace experiences become extraordinary. I remember bunking off school with my best mate at the age of 14, the dizzy feeling of standing together at the bus stop as the school bus roared off into the distance without us on it. It was 8.30am and we had altered our fate by not getting on the bus. Very little actually happened that day: we smoked some cigarettes, shared a bottle of beer and rode a bicycle into a hedge. By midday I think we wished we’d just gone to school. But it all still felt a bit magical. I remember laughing a lot in the sunshine and feeling sorry for those poor bastards sitting in class. Writing about adolescence is a gift because that world is such a pressure cooker. There is no sense of perspective for a teenager. There are really only two arenas for their dramas to play out: school and home. You couldn’t just head off to Vienna for the weekend to get your head straight. (Not that I have ever done that as an adult. But, you know, I could.) You were trapped and cashless. Fortunately, I had plenty of disposable income owing to my part-time job at McDonalds. Spending my weekends dressed in polyester and scraping gherkins off the window would have been quite unfulfilling if it weren’t for the mountains of cash they were paying me. The fact that my skin also broke out into a rich carpet of acne as a result of deep frying french fries was just the icing on the sesame-seed bun. Adolescence is hardly a new topic in comedy. But for me, it’s the type of teenager I was that makes it such a rich seam. I was so intense. I didn’t just have a crush on someone; I was tortured by the sheer volume and power of love that I felt for James or Ben or Julian or Andrew or whoever the hell it was that particular week. I cared so much about my grades, I bollocked Sean McGilvray during modern history because he was talking while I was trying to learn. I had a go at my English teacher for giving my parents some negative feedback on parent-teacher night. In short, my emotions were completely out of control. I think that’s true of most teenagers, and why they are such amusing and adorable knobheads. There’s also a level of escapism involved. The world of adolescence is the antithesis of my world now. At the moment, my days are filled with the care of my two young children – I’m on a constant treadmill of looking after coughs and colds and middle ear infections, with just a two-hour break between shoving one meal down their throats and thinking about the next meal. When I get that precious window of time in the day to write, I disappear into this lost world where my only care was myself. A time when my day was occupied with feelings. All my needs were being magically met – food appeared when I was hungry, clean clothes appeared in my drawers, there was a roof over my head. It freed me up to be a self-obsessed turd. Just the memory of that time is energising. When I emerge from writing, I feel like my brain has been hosed down. And then it’s dinner and bath time and the nightly fight about going to bed because it’s waaaay past your bedtime, you should have been in bed an hour ago, why am I still having this conversation at 9pm, dear God when will this day end? • Sarah Kendall is at Soho theatre, London, 24-28 February |