UR TV CAST

The ANC’s black candidates won five out of the nine council seats and the right to elect the mayor, while the whites, now a minority voice, held all the key jobs that made sure the grass was cut, the water and electricity flowed, and the rubbish was picked up.Thus, erstwhile adversaries have been for-ced to sit down together and work things out. Under a complicated national formula, whites were guaranteed representation. It was a matter of simple arithmetic: there are about 2,000 whites in Ventersdorp and 15,000 blacks in Tshing This did not mean the end of white power, though. It was a system of the whites, for the whites and by the whites. Townships rotted from neglect.The 1 November local elections were intended to sweep all that away and to make government more representative of and responsive to the majority of South Africans. The new mayors and town councils would be at the sharp end of the machinery breaking down the last vestiges of apartheid.That Ventersdorp was going to get a black majority council and a black mayor was beyond question.

In the past, white-only electors cast their ballots for white councils which in turn appointed white officers for all but the most menial tasks The council provided services exclusively for whites. Like town and township throughout the country, Ventersdorp and Tshing were yoked together as one municipality, and the electorate was voting for a single, unified council. In Swindon he played in a skiffle band; in London he wallowed in music. His knowledge is encyclopaedic: he now owns some 10,000 tapes, records and CDs, though for many years he listened only to Fifties records (he plays mostly Sixties songs on his radio show). He was going out buying as soon as the interview was over.His parents are proud of what’s happened to him since he left Swindon – “But if I was on television as Fred West, they’d be like, ‘Oh, Mark’s on television again.’ My mum talks about Shooting Stars at the furniture showroom place where she works, and peo- ple say, ‘Oh, your son’s famous, isn’t he?’ and she says: ‘No, it just happens to be his job.’ So every time I ring her up there’s this bit of crowing, but she makes out, ‘No, my attitude is, you’re my son, and anything you did I’d be proud of.’ I say, when I was on the dole, you weren’t telling them: ‘He signed on last week, you know.’ “IN SEPTEMBER 1992, Lamarr was propelled from the relative obscurity of the stand-up comedy circuit – poems, originally, after the Royal Court debut, then chat between the poems, then just chat – to help launch The Big Breakfast. It was all that kind of mentality.”He left Swindon at 17 with five O-levels, having started A-levels but dropped out in favour of moving to London, or at least – “This is really sad: I thought it was London” – Harrow.

He spent a year on the dole “hanging out, going to gigs and picking up the odd fifty quid roadying for a DJ”.He plays harmonica and guitar, and began reading the music press when he was 11 “because there was all this swearing on the letters page”. You know when you’re 16 you have to go through these ‘What do you want to do with the rest of your life’ meetings? I said I wanted to be a journalist, because I can string two words together, and they said, ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit unreasonable? Maybe you should think along more feasible lines: I could definitely get you a job at the local car factory.’ That’s a true incident. “Coming from that background, you don’t even imagine you could be a comedian – not only a working-class background, but so far from London: there was no life to it. His father was an odd-job man in a cake factory, his mother a cleaner.

I don’t want to be all London, London, aren’t I brilliant for living here, but, in a sense, I do think you end up where you deserve or where you want to be. I think people who live in Swindon probably haven’t got that much enthusiasm for life generally.”The Joneses – Mark has four older sisters – lived on a council estate. “I think a lot of my worst attitudes and opinions have come from that place. It’s a very, very narrow-minded and bitter little town, I think.