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said to me, he said: ‘Browes, you priceless ass! Don’t you know that the brontosaur was
herbivorous
?’”
    After a moment Rottenburg smiled, and snorted, relieved: “My dear chap, so we got the name wrong. We’ll just call her ‘Herbie’ instead. Problem solved…”
    “No, no, no!
Herbivorous
! It only ate plants! It couldn’t possibly eat a chap! The whole ending’s ruined!”
    There was a grim silence. The Rotter shook his head slowly from side to side, much like Brontie herself. Did I mention, by the way, that Brontie was female? She had to be, do you see, because of a truly awful line in the closing number about her being one of the Brontie sisters.
    “I’ll have to give this some thought,” The Rotter declared suddenly, then strode urgently out of the theatre. “Some serious thought!”

    Next evening we all gathered again, desperately worried that the whole show had been fatally undermined. Cigarettes were smoked, carpets were paced. Everyone was convinced that the show was done for, but we reckoned without the never-say-die spirit of our president. He burst in with a big grin on his face, flourishing a drawing he himself had done.
    “I’ve added a small scene, solves the whole thing. The chap, do you see, Dandoe here, has to spy on the other cavemen to find out what they are up to. Do you follow me? So he dresses himself up as a tree, ergo, dear Brontie can chomp him up with a clear conscience.
Voilà
!”
    A resounding cheer went up at this elegant solution, and I doubt whether the man who discovered the actual brontosaurus ever had acclaim to match it.
    And as fellows like the Rotter and Browes and Lord Peter Bradshaw thumped me genially on the back it really felt like we were all in this great enterprise together, as equals.
    As the opening night approached, however, I began to wonder just how equal we all were. Because when the two technicians from the engineering department, Rottenburg’s assistants, Mr Ernest and Mr Kenyon, began supervising the installation of the monster, it became dazzlingly clear to me that the reason why I, of all people, had been selected to be Caveman 4 was that being eaten by the mechanical dinosaur was actually going to be pretty bloody dangerous.
    The beast weighed a ton for a start. It consisted of a solid wooden framework, strong enough to hold three men inside, covered with canvas which was painted to look like the giant reptile’s skin. Then there were – I don’t know how many. Seven? Eight? – huge blocks with pulleys on, any one of which could have killed a man on its own if it came loose and fell on him, not to mention the further tons of scaffolding which Mr Ernest was reckoning on using to attach the whole contraption to the ceiling. As the man who’d be standing on the spot marked with an X, I quickly saw that if the slightest thing went wrong I was the one for the chop.
    The only way they could make a victim – me – disappear whole into Brontie’s mouth was by positioning Mr Ernest inside the neck to haul me in bodily, with Mr Kenyon further up holding onto Ernest’s ankles. No fewer than eight others were concealed in the wings, yanking on ropes, pulling levers, throwing sandbags on and off, and they just couldn’t seem to get it right.
    I was watching from the wings with my heart in my mouth the first time they tried to lower the head to the stage and smashed the chair they were using for target practice into matchwood.
    On another occasion the neck started careering up and down uncontrollably. The stagehands were trying to grab hold of a counterweight which would have brought Brontie under control, but it kept bobbing out of their reach. Finally three of them caught the creature’s head as it smashed heavily into the stage for the umpteenth time, and Mr Ernest and Mr Kenyon slithered shakily out onto the floor.
    “Most invigorating,” Mr Ernest said, an idiotic grin on his face.
    Finally, well after midnight on the day before the opening