My father, David Garnham, passed away twenty four hours ago. It’s probably too early to process this just yet, but there is a strange urge within me to explain what he meant to me and now he influenced my work as a comedic spoken word artist.
Dad was a man overwhelmingly of immense humour. He could always see the funny side of any situation and had a great knack of summing up a situation or a person in a very short sentence. His humour was gentle and never cruel. He would always comment on the people we saw whenever driving. Indeed, he could have made a career as a driving seat comedian, if such an art form ever existed. If we were passing a bus stop and someone put out their arm for the bus behind us, he would say, ‘Put your glasses on, does this look like a bus?’ Whenever the traffic lights were changing he would put down his foot and shout, ‘I’m going!’, which were Donald Campbell’s last words before he lost control of the Bluebird speedboat.
The thing with Dad was that he was a great raconteur. He would find the humour in all kinds of situations and craft stories about things that had happened to him or that he had seen with all the skill of a storyteller or a comedian. He would tell us stories about the time he used to work in the Australian outback, where everyone lived in cabins which had their names stencilled on the outside, but whoever had done it had misread the piece of paper and stencilled his name as Doctor Gamban, mistaking his initials for Dr and completely misreading his surname. He would talk about working in the frozen wilds of Canada, driving an army truck and accidentally driving it straight into the back of a tank. And as an older man, he would describe the various clack trips he went on with Mum with the National Trust, or as he called them, the Twin Set And Pearls Brigrade. In fact, any time he went anywhere, even if it was just a trip to the supermarket, he would come back and describe something funny that he had seen.
My friend Anne says that this is a trait I’ve inherited. She says that weird things always happen around me, but I think it’s just that I see them with a comedian’s eyes, something that my Dad taught me from an early age. Without my Dad realising it, he was using the methods and skills of observational comedy, (which, ironically, he was never a fan of), and this is one of the reasons which I’ve always loved Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Dad was often a bizarre mix of Larry David and Victor Meldrew. And the world he lived in was like an endless episode of Last of the Summer Wine, a programme he loved.
So my dad’s method of dealing with people was simple. Distill a person down to their immediate characteristics, turn them into a character and then deal with them as such. Then everything that they do just adds to the narrative of who they are. In such a way, for example, all of his neighbours had nicknames that he gave them. Some of these were quite rude, some of them were downright funny. Musical Cars, for example, because they kept moving their cars around in their drive way. Ay Op, who lived across the road, was from up north and said Ay Op a lot. Dogs Head Stuck In Gate Woman, because she stopped to chat once and her dog got its head stuck in the gate. Backpack Man, because he wore a backpack. The fun just never ended.
I can’t imagine my Dad ever hating someone. By turning people into affectionate caricatures, it was impossible to take them seriously enough to hate them. He would describe a person he knew who ran a hotel with an iron fist, who he nicknamed Wiggy, for obvious reasons. And then describe Wiggy’s attempts to put on a community coffee morning, in which people were only allowed a coffee once they had a biscuit, and if you ate your biscuit before the coffee arrived, then you didn’t get a coffee. Only he would tell this story in such a funny way that I’d be laughing about it days afterwards and telling everyone I met. In fact there are so many of these stories, I’ll have to write them down.
Naturally, my humour is different, and the things I find funny are every so slightly different, but there’s always a sense whenever I write something humorous that this might be the sort of thing that Dad would like. He also loved music, aircraft and motor racing, two things which I also love, and he was a very, very clever man with a mind that could solve all kinds of logical, spatial or engineering problems. One of the biggest things I learned from him was that there’s always a solution to every problem.
I shall miss him greatly, of course, but I’m immensely thankful for the humour. He was not a fan of mawkish sentimentality and for this reason I probably won’t be writing a slew of dead dad poems. He always wanted people to be happy, or at the very least, contented, and for obvious reasons right now I’m not exactly happy, but I am very grateful.
Robert Garnham 