Spot-Peter

In my second year at Uni I acquired my first boyfriend, Dan. He was a sweet, smart, funny boy, quite short with brown curly hair and a permanent grin stamped on his face, as if his school years had been an absolute ‘gas’ and his mater and pater had always made him feel like a little prince. 

I dropped him fairly quickly when it became clear he was showing an unhealthy interest in Daddy. 

To be fair, I think he was rather excitable generally about managing to get a girlfriend with a vaguely famous parent. His father was the managing director of a regional manufacturer (of metal grilles). His mother was a volunteer at the local hospital. By comparison, my parents must have come across as Burton and Taylor. 

Dan’s favourite post-coital conversation was to ask searching questions about what it was like having a famous actor as a parent, and then he’d start to suggest movies, TV shows and even adverts he might have seen Daddy in.

“Was he in the Terry’s Chocolate Orange ad? It looked like him.” (No)

“Was he that man sleeping at the beginning of ‘The Dambusters’? (Yes)

“Did he ever play a Spanish gangster in ‘Minder’? There’s an episode where they get involved with the Spanish mafia and one of the heavies is always sleeping in every scene.” (Possibly yes, although I didn’t know this at the time)

I think Dan thought he was being amusing and that I’d appreciate him all the more for being playful and vaguely disrespectful in a jaunty kind of way. This was 1979 after all and we were all rehearsing for the ironic Eighties by talking in air-quotes and referencing second-rate movies every other sentence. A life in a TV indy or a hip ad agency surely beckoned for Dan. 

Annoyingly, after I dumped him we remained friends. It was hard to avoid anyone in Oxford to be fair, so it was best not to fall out too viciously. It was also advisable not to be seen to be caring too much. About anything.

Dan, decided he still wanted to hurt me for chucking  him, in the most painfully indirect and I’m-not-hurt-really way he could think of. Or perhaps he was still genuinely obsessed with Daddy. Either way, his regular source of joy, whenever friends gathered in a room to drink and smoke weed and listen to ‘Regatta de Blanc’ by The Police (endlessly), was to instigate a game of what he liked to call ‘Spot-Peter’.

It was a simple game at first. All one had to do was think of any scene in any film with someone either asleep or dead in it, and then ask me: ‘Was that your Dad?’. 

It was a game that very much appealed to the boys in the room, who prided themselves on their encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema. In their early teens it had been music - “name all the guitarists who ever played for the Yardbirds” - but at university it was film. And it wasn’t just high-minded arthouse film, although I recall both ‘Nosferatu’ and ‘Jubilee’ had only recently come out that year and had made them all cream their jeans. 

They prided themselves on wittily blending the low with the high, quoting lines from films like ‘Escape From Athena’ (“Telling bad jokes doesn't make a man a collaborator”) or ‘Avalanche Express (“He’s a monster - with feelings”) and then hooting with laughter, as if they had discerned something in the film other lesser beings (the women in the room) could not see or hear.

'Spot-Peter' allowed them both to display their knowledge of obscure film whilst seeming to laugh at what they knew. Most of them also enjoyed the kind of mean thrill young men can get from making a young woman feel uncomfortable.  

“Is he the killer that lies under the bedsheet in the girls dormitory in ‘Festa Fatale?”

They already knew Daddy had been making a slew of trashy slasher movies in Italy. They were just the right kind of film for showy humanities students to be in the know about - foreign, violent, garishly stylish, with a  satisfying stream of nubile teenage girls in distress.

“Is he the security guard with his feet up in the guardhouse in ‘Valley of Eagles’? One of Terence Young’s early movies, I might add..." 

Daddy was useful to them, in that he had made any number of cameo appearances in a lot of post-war British movies. Some of them I didn’t even know about until this game was invented.

"Did your dad ever work with Terence Young on a Bond movie?”

How easily they could use 'Spot-Peter' to jump off into their other favourite game of movie connections - from Peter Shure to Terence Young to Sean Connery to… ?

I kept very quiet about Daddy’s connections in real-life. If I told them about hanging around with Ursula Andress at the Battersea Funfair, her heavily disguised in headscarf, sunglasses and one of Daddy's ghastly blazers, I’d never have heard the end of it. I never even told Mother about that. Besides, it was not my style to show off. I preferred seething in silence. 

After a few weeks, the game widened to spotting Daddy in and around the town. Anyone who dressed oddly or had an eccentric way with them was immediately claimed as Peter Shure. 

“Was that your Dad pretending to be a tramp on that bench?”

“Was that your Dad who was standing in front of us in the tobacconists sampling a Sobranie?”

This part of the game I preferred. I could lead some of the more gullible stupid boys into believing Daddy did indeed like to rehearse his characters and try them out on me in the wild, to see if I would recognise him. As far as I am aware this never happened, although Christopher, my brother, once claimed he’d seen him out the back of one of the dingy venues his band always played in, pretending to be passed out in an alley. I choose not to believe that story. 

I suppose there was the benefit in ‘Spot-Peter’ of learning things about Daddy’s career that he’d never bothered to share with me. A flirtation with Claudette Colbert, for example, whilst playing a narcoleptic bandit in a tepid Malaya-based thriller. Or his role as Jacob in the second part of John Huston’s ‘The Bible’ that never actually saw the light of day. 

The top know-it-alls of the Spot-Peter clan loved to trump their rivals with films that were never released, or legendary ‘lost projects’ by cult directors. For all I know they made many of them up. Did Daddy spend a lost six months developing a movie with Polanski? Not that I knew of. But this was all part of the escalating arms race that the game became.

It felt like it lasted half a lifetime, but when I look back with a bit more calm than I could muster then, I realise it can only have lasted half a term. By the time Lent Term started and the new decade had dawned , the caravan of primping media cognoscenti had moved on. I had acquired a new beau from the law faculty, a boy who gave not two hoots about films but preferred to talk about politics and Charles Dickens. I was of no further interest to Dan and his cronies.

And yet I still find myself after all these years playing ‘Spot-Peter’ in my head. The man lying in the corridor, overcome with smoke fumes in 'The Towering Inferno’  - was that my father? The old man whose fallen asleep on the bus and missed his stop. Is that him? In a funny way, the game that was designed to torment me, now gives me comfort. Daddy can still be with me. Each time I see a sleeping man on screen, or a marginally odd character in the street, there he is. Whenever I want or need him, all I have to do is play Spot-Peter.

Years later I bumped into Dan at a book festival. He was with a boyfriend.

Dan, it turned out, had always been bisexual with a strong preference for men. His boyfriend was a well-dressed wealthy lawyer who spent far too long in the pub trying to convince us that ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’ was an underrated work. Dan raised his eyebrows at me and smiled. The grin had become kindly, soft and tired, betraying the kind of humiliation and hurt the world imposed on all of us in our twenties. I waited for him to ask after Daddy. He didn’t. We have been friends ever since.