Seize the Day

by Mike Read

  Somewhere around 2006 I was cast in the film Inside Out, which was being shot at Pinewood. Henry Hadaway, who’d had the idea and had co-written the script, had suggested me. Henry was the sagacious record company boss who’d once signed me to his label Satril. The suggestion came out of the blue, as I hadn’t seen him for some while. After some post-production legal wrangles, I think I’m safe to say that it was an HHO/Palm Tree Productions film, with various credits being shared and meted out here and there. I’m told that it was released abroad. Probably just as well.

  This time I do remember the story. It is a romantic thriller, filmed in London and Cannes, and centres on the tempestuous relationship between a student doctor, James Silverdale, played by Tony Streeter, and a girl from Prague called Christabel, played by Charlotte Radford. Christabel is ambitious; she wants her own nightclub and gets involved with a couple of wealthy guys including East End record producer Mickey Taylor, skilfully, powerfully and meaningfully acted if any directors are reading this. If they’re not, then I guess I was passable. Mickey appeared to be rather partial to the ‘F’ word, so I spread it around with large helpings of vitriol and menace, in equal measure. The part called for me, in one scene, to push a musician into a swimming pool in Cannes. I pushed, accompanied by a liberal sprinkling of ‘F’ words and a modicum of venom. Robbie Moffat, the director, exploded. Really? I thought I’d pushed and sworn jolly well. It transpired that he hadn’t shouted ‘Action’ so the cameras hadn’t been rolling. We had to wait half an hour for the actor and his clothes to be dried sufficiently for me to push him in again. ‘Who cares?’ you’re thinking. ‘You were in Cannes and you were getting well paid.’ Don’t be silly, the scene was shot in Hertfordshire and I got paid something.

  My role must have been fairly substantial as the publicity proclaimed, ‘The cast includes Tony Streeter, Charlotte Radford, Saeed Jaffrey and Mike Read!’ Charlotte and I ran around a lot together during the filming, were mischievous and a more than a little irreverent, but it was fun. We had one torrid scene which we played more to shock the crew and director than as serious drama. If you can’t be bothered to watch the whole 95-minute saga to check out my East End accent and my Anglo-Saxon language, you can enjoy two small clips of my contribution on YouTube. If you can’t even be fagged to click the YouTube button, you’ll just have to take my word for it that I was perplexed, nay mortified, that I wasn’t nominated for Best Supporting Actor. The question continues to baffle critics south of Bognor Regis.

  All I can say is thank goodness I’m not an actor, for the call didn’t come again until the tail end of 2013. Even the most rejected thespian can’t rest for that long and live with themselves. It was my one-time co-star, albeit my role was as nothing compared to hers, Charlotte Radford, who called me while I was on my way back from attending some shindig in London with Vanessa to ask if I could film the following day. Despite the aeon between engagements and the desire to leap at another triumph on the silver screen, I kept my powder dry. Clearly this was either a hastily written part or somebody had let the film makers down. After several discussions with La Radford I was given to understand that an actor of major importance had been unable to fly in for the occasion. The part was so small that, whoever it was, he could have got it in the can as the wheels touched the runway and taken off again without actually troubling customs.

  The American Banker was directed by the ebullient Jeff Espanol, complete with giant unlit cigar and headgear purloined from an unwary and vodka-soaked Cossack. We filmed my scene in London at Brown’s Hotel. I was a Liverpudlian banker. Jeff, his millinery appendage shaking like a great furry Yorkshire pudding, put me through my paces. He got me to slow my delivery right down. ‘Slower … Slower still … Even more, Mike … You can still take it down a notch.’ The more observant among you will have noticed that in this exchange of creative ideas, I failed to exchange. I felt it more prudent to listen. I slowed. I menaced. I whispered. I had lunch and off I went, creatively if not exactly financially richer.

  Looking at the powerful cast list has provided me with a few silver screen aces to play when needed. They’ll be handy when interviewed by the critics.

  ‘When was your last film?’

  ‘This year, actually.’ It’s always good to throw in the odd ‘actually’.

  ‘And who else was in it, anyone we’ve heard of?’

  ‘Oh, you know … the usual crowd, Faye Dunaway, David Carradine…’

  Best to leave it at that point, although I did have an email from Jeff ‘The Hat’ Espanol in Hollywood, which said, ‘See your face each day for the editing and I want to tell you thanks for being so humble on the set of my film. You are great in the film.’ Listen, I don’t care if it is showbiz director-speak, I can live with it. He ended, ‘See you in Cannes.’ Now I have no idea whether that means he flies me down in a Lear Jet or I fork out myself for the Eurostar. In May 2014 he called again to ask if I could do another scene. I checked my filming commitments. I appeared to be surprisingly free. We shot the scene in Dover Street, in Mayfair, with Japanese tourists banging off rapid-fire snaps imagining they had captured a British film star or two. Again. I had to be menacing, only more of the smiling assassin this time, who, rather bizarrely, ends up playing blues guitar. I’m forbidden to say more as Jeff has promised me a river scene with concrete shoes if I say too much. I realised how long this film has taken to make when someone pointed out that one of its star names, David Carradine, died in 2009.

  In 1991 I wrote the music for the film How’s Business, starring Ron Moody and Brett Fancy and with Ben Brazier in the lead role, who later went on to star in Layer Cake with Daniel Craig. I recorded the score at the University of Surrey in the John Lennon Studio, which I’d opened with Nigel Kennedy a year or two earlier. Bizarrely the film hasn’t yet emerged on DVD and I was unable to go to the premiere, so I still haven’t seen the finished version.

  On the film script front, the colossal amount of writing time has been rewarded with not one jot. Several have been acclaimed, but acclaiming doesn’t buy the cheese and chutney on granary. They sit on my laptop straining to get out and do their stuff, but money seems to be the main stumbling block. We once did a read-through of my Rupert Brooke film, Forever England, based on my book of the same name, and even started some auditions when we thought the backing looked good. Hundreds of hours writing, re-writing, sitting in meetings, getting money, losing money, getting director, losing director have resulted in no film having been made as yet, but as weary souls of the celluloid will tell you at length, it is a tedious process that can take years. I did have a long chat with actor Paul Bettany about possibly playing the lead role, but I fear we weren’t ready financially at the time.

  The director that was attached for a good while was the highly experienced Bryan Forbes, a formidable screenwriter, actor, and director for both film and TV who became MD of Associated British, which became EMI Films. When we had lunch at Pinewood to discuss the project, the whole place was buzzing. The word had gone round that ‘Bryan was back!’ Many an afternoon we went through my script, cutting this section, expanding that scene, examining the characters and often touching on the raison d’être. As well as working with one of the greats of the film industry, there was a culinary bonus in that Bryan’s wife, Nanette Newman, would prepare a banquet for our lunch where lesser mortals would have had us make do with a ham sandwich. Brian and I grafted during the mornings, but the afternoons became more convivial as we’d flick through some of Bryan’s amazing memorabilia, especially a plethora of royal correspondence in tandem with the relevant stories. We went different routes in the afternoons, Bryan down the scotch and cigarette road and me down the tea and biscuits avenue.

  The producers at some length announced, ‘Now let Bryan write his director’s script.’ He did, but it was a totally different take to the actual story and took place on a film set, from the actor’s perspective. An interesting idea, but not for me. We still haven’t made the film, so maybe he wa
s right and I was wrong, but we agreed that one had to be firm in the pursuance of perfection. With the 100th anniversary of Rupert Brooke’s death looming in 2015, and all the World War One commemorations, I’m having yet another crack at breathing life into it.

  With the millennium looming, I began to work on a major project that would hopefully see a combination of history, the arts and more performed at a dozen castles around the UK, with a cast of thousands and some great effects. The basic idea was a thousand years of history, with a character from each century telling the story of their 100 years through the music, dance, conflicts, inventions, art, sculpture, fashion and more. I had a couple of very positive meetings with Prince Edward and his company, Ardent, but the year 2000 arrived faster than we could fund or organise it.

  The battle of good and evil in Wenceslas: King of Bohemia, set in Prague in the early 900s, also languishes expectantly on SkyDrive awaiting its moment, alongside The Greatest Game. I was initially slated to be a consultant on the latter film which was to be written by Julian Fellowes, a capital chap with whom I chatted about the project on several occasions, but he was busy with a new series of Downton Abbey so, not surprisingly, he had no time to attend to the likes of Old Etonians v. Blackburn Olympic. I was commissioned to write the script and was delighted with the result. I got an extremely good response to the story, which was essentially one of the old school versus the new school and the struggle of professional football to be born. The trouble is, the longer you pass a good idea round the more chance there is of it being filched by some knave keen to get on the red carpet for their hour of glory.

  Two versions of Great Expectations are juxtaposed with these other scripts-in-waiting. Both musical films, one is traditional and the other an early ’50s US version with a black Magwitch and a Pip whose expectation is to be a singer in New York. The latter works so well I’m convinced that I’ll get it away. Well, you have to remain positive and upbeat. If you don’t have the passion yourself, the piece will never take root. There are others, but there seems no point in dwelling more on greyhounds that are still in the traps.

  I did make it to the Cannes Film Festival on three occasions, with three or four of us taking a house for a fortnight. This worked out cheaper, so I was told, than booking hotels. It was also more fun. Diaries note meetings with such glorious names as Matador Films, Azure Films, a meeting on the African Queen and a party at Villa Estella, of which I remember little.

  I was informed that it would be useful to get a meeting in with Steven Paul, Jon Voight’s partner in the film production company Crystal Sky. If I was lucky enough to get a one-to-one, the covert voice told me, I would have to pitch my script in double-quick time. The tip came with an attention span warning: ‘If you don’t get him in two minutes he’ll be off.’ I wasn’t sure I could sell an entire film in the time it takes to announce and play the Beatles’ ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, but at least I was given an appointment. This, said my informant, was a good start.

  Ten minutes before the scheduled meet at the Majestic came the call. ‘Steven can’t make today, can we re-arrange for tomorrow?’ We re-arranged. The re-arranging went on for three days. Miraculously, and against all filmic odds, it happened on the fifth day. Seated opposite him with a glass of something unmemorable, I launched into my two-minute pitch at roughly the pace of Plastic Bertrand attacking a live version of his 1978 classic ‘Ça plane pour moi’. I must have impressed him as I ran well over the two-minute mark. He showed no signs of being distracted by passing actresses or nodding off in the eighty-degree heat that surrounded us. We spent an hour chatting about this and that before retreating to his business suite to meet the rest of the team. I was in. No question. I got a call on my return home and we subsequently had several dinners in London, including one with the Crystal Sky lawyer. All terrific. Camaraderie, bonhomie, fine wines, part of the gang, being talked up, I was the ‘golden boy’, or so it seemed, but hey, that’s the US film industry. They love you and they keep on loving you, but not much happens.

  Another cove was so enamoured of my creative writing that he asked me to look at doing a script based on a book he had the rights to. What I should have said was, ‘Show me the contract and the advance and we can talk.’ What I actually said was, ‘Great, OK,’ and got on with it. The gentlemanly way. Several months later, having put in more ‘Hard Work’ than American jazz saxophonist John Handy, I accidently discovered that he’d asked somebody else to do it. Now I try not to sally forth without putting on a stout pair of shoes.

  My old friend Lisa Voice (great dinner parties and a good heart) was in Cannes with a film script so we hooked up and had supper. She insisted that I went with her to a hotel, where she was looking to buy something. Security seemed unnecessarily tight around the suite where she was doing the deal. Having been scrutinised, checked and frisked I was allowed in. It was the only time that I’ve even seen a £7 million diamond, let alone held one. Was it possible to scrape some off under the fingernails? I doubted it.

  Small screen appearances might not carry the kudos of a cinema release, but blimey guv’nor, do they get repeated. My fleeting, but crucial, role in Only Fools and Horses still comes around with incredible regularity, for which, I presume, a small postal order wings its way to someone, if not with equal regularity, at least occasionally. For a rather grand third billing in that august journal Radio Times, I did very little. The episode ‘It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll’ centred on Rodney’s group A Bunch of Wallies. Initially Del mocks them but he soon changes his tune when he smells money and becomes their manager, taking them to ever greater depths. It wasn’t a demanding role for me as I simply had to introduce them on Top of the Pops. However, being in formidable company, I didn’t hold back. I gave it my all … whatever that was. I read recently that David Jason would consider re-visiting Only Fools and Horses if the right scriptwriter could be found. Ahem…

  I was let loose on the set of Midsomer Murders for the episode ‘The Axeman Cometh’. I played myself, which is always a tricky call. Getting into a role is far more rewarding (fill in your own cheese and ham gags here). The gist of the story was that Badgers Drift was playing host to the Midsomer Rock Festival, with an old local rock group, Hired Gun, re-forming for the occasion. The episode featured great actors including James Cosmo, Philip Davis and Rupert Vansittart, so clearly I had to step up to the mark. Wandering past John Nettles’s Winnebago, I poked my head in (why not? I was part of the gang now) as I’d heard the sound of a guitar. Was it Suzi Quatro, who was also a member of Hired Gun? I peered in. No leather-clad lady, but in her stead, John Nettles coming on like Jimi Hendrix. On his invitation I went in, hung out, strummed a bit and discussed a mutual love of John Betjeman’s poetry. His sidekick Jason Hughes joined us and I now felt that I would be slated for every episode. We were a trio now, surely? I could berate sinister vicars, unmask wicker men, break up an ancient cult or spot the odd village psychopath with the best of them.

  I fear, though, I’m getting ahead of myself. There I was backstage at the rock festival, the cameras were rolling. Allowed free rein on the script, I was issuing last-minute instructions punctuated by such deep and soul-searching comments to Hired Gun as ‘have a good one’, and then I bounded onto the stage to announce the group that the Midsomer area had been waiting years for. John Nettles and Jason Hughes were at the front by the crush barriers, with John, as Barnaby of course, about to re-live his youth. After my big moment, I was to join Laura Howard (Cully Barnaby) at the side of the stage to watch the band in action. No sooner had we passed a few pleasantries than Suzi Quatro was electrocuted. Well, her character, Mimi Clifton, was. I’m sure it’s easier for an actor or actress to die than to react. Does one throw one’s hands up as if in a Victorian am-dram melodrama, stagger a little, like someone at turning-out time at the Dog and Duck or underplay it? I underplayed. The episode also featured snatches of other acts on stage, to give it that sense of authenticity, including former Family frontman Roger Chapman and m
y old pal Geno Washington, with his Ram Jam Band.

  That day’s shoot was at Twinwood Arena in Bedfordshire, the airfield from which Glenn Miller had taken off back in December 1944, so naturally it was worth exploring. The control tower still stands, and there are three typewriters from the era, clothes from the period hanging up, a board marking planes that have or haven’t returned and a wealth of photographs. Down the cold, stone steps you go to the side door where Miller’s UC-64 Norseman would have been waiting, and imagine the decision being made that the fog wasn’t too bad and they would make it to Paris. A pity Chief Inspector Barnaby wasn’t around then; he’d have solved the mystery.

  CHAPTER 18

  POLITICAL MAN

  THIS ISN’T THE RIGHT TOME in which to expound one’s theories and beliefs in detail, but here’s an overview. Despite the snappy chapter headline, I am not actually a political man; I am just one of some sixty-three million people with a view. It goes without saying that not all sixty-three million will agree with each other. That doesn’t mean one can’t be civilised and allow other people their points of view. I thank God we are a democracy and enjoy freedom of speech, which also means that everyone is entitled to an opinion, be it right or wrong. If we didn’t have different views, the world would be a rather bland place.

  I’ve spoken at four Conservative Party conferences in support of William Hague, sometimes adding a song with political lyrics to the event. Satire, if indeed it is perceived as such, is not always construed in the way it was intended. One such ditty, in 2007, brought forth two entirely different results. The lyric, not exactly biting, but with enough thrust to make it work, included the line ‘turning the country Brown’, which was erroneously bandied about in the following day’s nationals as a blatant piece of racism that caused many angry folk to storm out of the room in disgust. Confronted by one dogged and determine journalist on the phone, I explained that is was ‘Brown’ with a capital ‘B’, in other words Gordon Brown, who was poised to become Tony Blair’s successor. If any humble pie was eaten by the press, it was an exceedingly small slice.