‘Dick Emery, driving instructor’ may sound more like something out of a Half Man Half Biscuit song than a cover story of the Observer Magazine (29 April 1973), but the much-loved comedian did indeed speak to Anthony Peagam about his former life in Swiss Cottage, London, before he emerged as a TV star.
There was a nod to what was then a large part of his cross-dressing shtick – a split-screen picture of Emery as a driving instructor and also dressed as a woman learner driver. But, despite that, the interview was curiously sober (Emery also had a weekly motoring column in Reveille newspaper, a popular tabloid at the time).
Emery became a driving instructor after a spell as a chauffeur. ‘That didn’t last long,’ he said, referring to when he used to drive the wife of a Conservative MP around. ‘I couldn’t stand it, cleaning the silver and washing the car. She used to direct me from the back seat. She’d shout, “Stop!” and I’d clap the brakes on the old Austin 16 and have her crashing off the seat on to the floor.’
But he said he was very gentle with his driving pupils, even though he admitted to being ‘a sharp-voiced man’, and was clearly alert to any potential problems. ‘You always watched their necks,’ he said. ‘If you saw the redness there, you knew the old nerves were going and they were getting all het up.’
He remembered one woman who never used the brakes. ‘She used to rap on the windscreen and shout at people to get out the way.’ She took her test seven times. Some pupils were downright terrifying. There was a chap who would ‘yank the steering wheel over to the left for no reason at all and we’d fly off the road – whooomph.’ It was an urge the man couldn’t explain.
It’s a shame Emery couldn’t have kept this sideline going while doing his TV show, then when one of his pupils failed he could have said, ‘Ooh, you are awful.’