‘Maybe it’s lead poisoning? Or lupus?’
Ah ha! A pattern was emerging. I sat up and turned on the light on my nightstand. Lyme disease, lead poisoning, and lupus. Scott had been wandering around the online medical encyclopaedia in the ‘L’s. The weird clicking sound I’d been hearing was the computer keys, with his moaning coming through the wall from his office.
Scott was like the main character in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat,12 who walks into the British Library to check on some mild symptoms he’s experiencing. He makes the mistake of flipping forward in the medical dictionary, and discovers that his symptoms are multiplying with each page he turns. He walked into the library ‘a happy healthy man’ and, hours later, he walks outside a ‘decrepit wreck’. The only thing he doesn’t have is ‘housemaid’s knee’.13 I was pretty sure Scott didn’t have that either. The last time he was on his hands and knees … well, none of your business.
I grabbed my extra pillows, stacked them behind my head, and punched them a few times while glaring at Scott.
‘What exactly is wrong with you? And don’t describe what you’ve just read on WebMD.’
‘I feel like I’ve been beaten with a cricket bat. Even my hair hurts.’
‘Seriously?’
He nodded.
I placed the back of my hand against his forehead to see if he had a fever. I couldn’t tell, so I kissed the top of his head instead. It’s not a foolproof method, but it has the credibility of generations of mothers and grandmothers behind it.
‘Maybe it’s something you ate? Did you throw out the sausages that’ve been in the fridge since Easter?’
It was August. Scott holds the culinary misconception that if food has been refrigerated, even for long stretches of time (like years), it’s fine to eat the said food as long as you cook it on a really, really hot flame … and add fish sticks.
‘It wasn’t the sausages. It’s not that kind of pain. It’s more inside my muscles.’
I leaned over and kissed his head again.
‘Ow.’
By this time, our three dogs, currently Charlie, Harris and Jack, were thinking it was morning and they were scratching and whining to go outside.
I reached for the phone. ‘Do you want me to call someone?’
‘Yes.’
A few minutes later, Carole answered her phone in Milwaukee.
‘What are the symptoms for Lyme disease?’
As you know, Carole and I are close, but that wasn’t the primary reason I called her first. She lives in Wisconsin, a state with high instances of Lyme disease. I knew she would know the symptoms. Without so much as a ‘do you even know what time it is over here?’ or ‘my God, don’t you have doctors in England?’14 she told me: severe muscle aches, slight fever and, the most important one, a target rash somewhere on the body.
So, we looked for the target – very slowly and carefully. This distracted us for quite a while. Scott eventually forgot he was dying and fell asleep. Later, the next morning, I solved his medical mystery, and I have to tell you I’m including it here because the causes of Scott’s ailment are related to another essential element about being in a committed gay relationship that may interest you.
Gay men love to flirt, and we love to do it in the company of our significant others. To us, a nod’s as good as a wink and it’s as natural as smiling. We pass a hot male on the street, we do a double take, and then after the hottie has passed, we whisper to our partner that he missed something special. He, then, will insist on turning round and trying to see what he did indeed miss, usually just at the moment the hottie is turning to see who’s staring at him. At a party, if we see a hot male, we chat him up … together. We flirt with temptation because our intentions are generally pure. In fact, we have no intentions at all. We like to window-shop. While in a non-gay relationship, regular flirting with members of the opposite sex may result in sleeping on the couch – or worse – with Scott and me there’s no jealousy, no awkwardness, and especially no harsh recriminations when we get home.
This is not to say that gay men are less inclined to succumb to casual sexual encounters than straight men because I think the opposite is probably true; however, I do think that in a committed gay relationship, flirting is a behaviour that is assumed to be healthy and even stimulating to the relationship.
The morning after the ‘Lyme disease’ night, while Scott was enjoying his Weetabix, I spotted a phone number and a name on a scrap of paper on his desk. I picked it up and went upstairs to the kitchen, stopping Scott on his way out.
‘Hold on a minute!’
I passed him the slip of paper. He looked at it sheepishly.
‘You’re not suffering from any strange disease,’ I laughed, ‘you just couldn’t let a couple of hot young soldiers get one up on you.’
Under the pressure of my hilarity, Scott then admitted his aches and pains were a result of shameless flirting. Two days before, he’d run into an acquaintance, a twenty-something soldier with whom he’d worked when he was volunteering in Cambodia for the UK charity Cam’s Kids. Scott had been chatting with the ex-soldier when, out of the blue, he invited Scott to join him and some friends for a hike at a park the next day.
Scott naturally felt obliged to say ‘yes’. He is, after all, a man, and like all males, gay or not, he is prone to macho posturing every now and then.
It turned out that the park was not so much a place of picnics, ponds, trees and swings as it was an outdoor military obstacle course, with zip lines and rock walls; and the hike was not so much a brisk walk as it was frantic scrambles up ropes and competitive sprints in and out of paths made of tyres.
Turned out, Gillus hypochondriacus was suffering from Middle-Aged Musclitus. I kissed him on the mouth and gave his bum a love tap as I left the kitchen, because I knew how he felt. On occasion, I suffer from a similar ailment.
TABLE TALK #3
‘Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang!’
‘Blat! Blat, blat, blat, blat! Blat!’
During the first two seasons of Torchwood, Burn Gorman and I had this game we’d play whenever we were rehearsing a scene involving guns or weapons, and, on occasion, we’d play it in the parking area between our trailers at the BBC studios in Treforest, Wales.
Before ‘places, everyone’ and ‘action’ are called, the actors and the crew do what’s known as a ‘crew’ or a ‘camera’ rehearsal. This allows the director to be sure everyone knows where he or she is supposed to be during the scene,1 so that the boom-mic operator isn’t suddenly tripping over the camera-dolly operator because the sound guy didn’t know the camera was heading his way. Obviously, this ‘crew rehearsal’ also gives those of us acting in the scene a chance to rehearse our lines one more time.
When we’re filming Torchwood, as I leave the BBC lot at the day’s end, one of the producers gives me what’s called the script ‘sides’ for the following day. The ‘sides’ have the next day’s schedule attached to the front, and they also list my individual scenes, with my lines separated out from the script as a whole.
The last thing I do before going to sleep2 on the nights before filming is to learn my lines for the next day. In the morning, when I get to my trailer and before I’m called into make-up, I run through my lines again. This is one of the few times in my day when I’m on set that I really insist on not being disturbed.
Some directors, like Euros Lyn, who directed ‘Children of Earth’, will call for an ‘artists’ rehearsal’ first, which allows those of us in the scene to run through the script without the clutter of cameras, cables and all the crew.3
Sets can be crowded at the best of times and when I’m in a big studio, I don’t always notice how crowded. For example, when rehearsing or taping Tonight’s the Night, sometimes close to sixty crew people could be working around me and in the close vicinity. Imagine similar numbers in a space like the set of the Hub, which was easily half the size of a BBC entertainment studio, and, as I’ve mentioned, far more complicated and l
ayered in its design.
Whenever Burn and I were given our guns for a scene – in my case, Jack’s Webley – and we’d run through the script for the artists’ or the crew’s rehearsal, Burn and I always did the guns’ sound effects.
When weapons or explosives are used in a scene, the set-up is complex and time-consuming because of the obvious safety concerns, the noise levels, and the fact that gunfire and explosions are expensive to create. Burn and I were always happy to substitute our man-made sound effects during these rehearsals. We were like little boys with big toys. We’d charge into the scene, point our weapons and in unison yell, ‘Blat! Blat, blat, blat, blat! Blat!’
As we were filming one particular scene, after Burn and I had done a number of rehearsals with our guns, the director was ready for the real action.
I ran into the scene, pointed my gun, and then I did all the gun’s sound effects with great expression: ‘Blat! Blat, blat, blat, blat! Blat!’ At the same time, the real sound effects and squibs were fired.
‘Cut! Erm, John, everything okay?’
‘Fuck!’ I realized what I’d done. I’d ruined the take with my sound-effect ‘blats’. Can you imagine watching that scene? How stupid would Jack have looked catching up to an alien and making his own gun noises as he shoots him? I’m sure my sound effects made our end-of-season blooper reel.
Another shoot that may have made a few contributions to that reel was the filming of the episode ‘Adam’, which I’ve always thought was one of the better written in the Torchwood canon. Catherine Tregenna penned the script.
Since so much of this episode was in flashbacks, with Adam in Jack’s childhood memories, the cast and crew had to be mobile. I spent a significant part of my days on location in the sand dunes at Merthyr Mawr; I then came home and spent a significant part of my nights finding sand in every nook and cranny of my body.4
If you remember the episode, at one point Jack screams for his brother during a windstorm, which was created on the sand dune, with me standing in front of a huge green screen with an industrial-sized fan blowing sand directly at me. The intensity of the sand swirling around me would be added later with CGI, but I still had to have my eyes rinsed out after each take. I went through a couple of pairs of contact lenses that day.
My memories of the ‘Adam’ episode are of a number of things going wrong. The first scenes we shot were filmed in tunnels created on the set to look like the sewers of Cardiff. Captain Jack is searching for a Weevil when his father appears to him. The set was dark and dank and really did look like a sewer. The problem was that the prop crew had run too much scummy water on the ground – so two things happened. The first was that the water running into the tunnel was dripping onto a couple of the fake pipes, which were, in fact, made of styrofoam. Andy Goddard, who was directing this episode, along with Jeff Matthews, the sound recordist, could hear that they sounded like styrofoam when the drips hit them. The crew had to figure out a way to stop the dripping. The second thing that happened as a result of too much groundwater was that when I climbed down into the sewer, too much water splashed up on my trousers and on the cameras. Solution? Everyone on crew grabbed a bucket and hauled water out to the real sewers.
One of the things I learned quickly when working on a television drama is that you have to have a lot of professional patience.5 After a scene is filmed from one angle, the director then asks for a ‘turnaround’, which means, funnily enough, that the cameras are all turned round and the scene is filmed from another angle; and, if necessary, another after that. In the sewer scene, the director needed a close-up of my face when Jack realizes the figure in the sewer is his father, so we had to do several turnarounds on this shoot.
After the crew had completed their impersonations of Mickey from Fantasia, the filming shifted to Captain Jack’s office, where Jack has to interrogate Ianto, who, thanks to Adam, Jack thinks has committed murder. The challenge of this scene was that the green lights from the lie detector that Jack is using were creating a distracting glare on my cheek. The scene had to be reshot several times with the lie detector in a variety of different angles. Ordinarily, a scene like this should take an hour and a half at the most, but this took close to three.
Then, just when we thought it was safe to go back into the Hub, the light shorted out on the lie detector gizmo, suggesting that Ianto was only intermittently telling the truth. Solution? A young woman from the prop department had to crawl under Jack’s desk, out of sight of the camera, and every time the light needed to flash, she controlled it manually from a crouched position between my legs.6
During the filming of ‘Children of Earth’, our bloopers or blunders were not as memorable. The shoot didn’t lack significance, though. So on the day we were filming in the Hub for the last time, I made sure Jack did two things.
First, I stole7 a souvenir from the props spread across Jack’s desk. I took a pulp sci-fi paperback from the forties that sat on his desktop. Every time I’d been in Jack’s office, waiting for a take, I’d picked it up and read a few words.
The second thing I did was to make sure that the passionate kiss between Jack and Ianto that takes place moments before Jack and the Hub are destroyed was a kiss to die for. It certainly was.
CHAPTER SIX
‘I’D DO ANYTHING’
★
‘Respect my authori-TEY.’
Eric Cartman, South Park
Five more things I’ve learned from being a talent-show judge
1 Trust your judging panel has your back
(unless one of them doesn’t).
2 Trust your opinions even when they’re not popular
(with the other judges).
3 Beware of pissed-off parents of performers.
4 A sense of humour makes a good first impression
(especially on me).
5 Coordinate your outfit with the beautiful woman to your left
(not Barry Humphries).
I may have already helped to pick the right Maria and the best Joseph, but when it came to choosing a Nancy,1 when I joined the panel on BBC1’s I’d Do Anything, the expertise I’d developed as a judge was really put to the test.
I found my feet as a judge in the early stages of the Maria show. During the panel auditions for How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, David Ian wore the earpiece and I went to school on him.2 I listened, I watched and I learned. If the producers saw something on their monitors from the other room that they wanted to see again or that they wanted highlighted in a particular way, they talked to David through this earpiece.
Meanwhile, I discovered that if I asked the performers questions and established a bit of a rapport with them as soon as they came in front of me, they relaxed a little and this helped them to get their breathing calmed before they actually performed. So, with all this knowledge at my fingertips by the time I’d Do Anything began, I was more than ready for the challenges … or so I thought.
Zoë Tyler was not on the panel this time. The other judges were Denise Van Outen, the Lord and Barry Humphries. As I did in Any Dream, during the panel auditions, when the contestants are performing for only the judges and the producers, I wore the earpiece. I was the judge with the voices in my head.3
I’d never worked with Barry before, but we got along really well. I’ve always admired and enjoyed his work. There’s a whole group of performers from those early days of British theatre and television that I think contributed to the definition of what it means to be an entertainer, one that in my own twenty-first-century-when-everything-changes way I’m trying to shape, too. Angus Lennie, Rikki Fulton, Bruce Forsyth, The Two Ronnies, Danny La Rue and, of course, Stanley Baxter were all in that same category.
Little-known fact about the Barrowmans.4 My mum grew up across the street from Angus Lennie and she remembers that when he was a teenager, he’d leave his house every afternoon for his violin lessons and the other kids would taunt him, yelling, ‘Go on yer own, Hal the Fiddler.’5
You may remem
ber Lennie from Crossroads, or more recently Monarch of the Glen, but, as far as my dad’s concerned, Lennie will always be Flying Officer Archie Ives, aka The Mole, in one of my dad’s favourite movies of all time, The Great Escape with Steve McQueen. His other favourite is Von Ryan’s Express with Frank Sinatra fighting Nazis. Why Sinatra, you may ask? Well, because he could. When my mum catches my dad sneaking another viewing of the film late at night on some obscure US cable channel, he’ll tell her he’s watching it because he ‘keeps hoping this time he’ll catch the bloody train’.6
Don’t tell my mum, but I keep a DVD set of these two movies, plus The Guns of Navarone as a bonus, hidden among my collection at the house in Sully – in case my dad ever needs a hit while he’s staying with me.
Unfortunately, despite Barry Humphries’s talents and versatility, and his undoubted place in the entertainment hall of fame, some of the Nancy contestants thought he came across as a bit of a ‘dirty old man’ on camera. Here’s why. Imagine one of the Nancys has just performed, then read this dialogue in a low-pitched, not-quite-Dame-Edna-ish voice:
‘You don’t look so much like a milkmaid –’ (pause for slightly heavy breathing) ‘– but you look very much like the milker.’
How do you respond to that? ‘Hmm, thanks, Barry. I’ll take that on board. Let me just dart out and get a breast reduction.’
Here was another one: ‘Please, Samantha, I want some more!’ And then there was: ‘You were gorgeous! You had a touch of the guttersnipe, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.’
Sometimes, his comments could be a bit irrelevant, with little constructive purpose, especially when he was commenting on Jodie Prenger.
During the auditions, when I first met Jodie, she said something sassy and she made me laugh. A sense of humour makes good television, so I knew she had to be involved in the programme. I also knew the audience would like her because she was very down to earth and honest in her presentation of herself. She came across as your sister, your co-worker, or the girl you’d want to talk to if your boyfriend dumped you.
I Am What I Am Page 7