No bear, only a couple of loony uncles.
‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’
When visitors first walk on to the site in Cardiff where Torchwood, Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures are filmed,1 the first thing they notice is how crowded the lot is. Each of us on Torchwood has our own trailer and each one is lined up side by side with the names of our characters taped to the door. There’s a catering trailer, a production trailer, a hair and make-up trailer, a wardrobe trailer, and then a host of trailers for men and women working on things like lighting, special effects and set design, who occasionally bustle in and out of said trailers when they’re not leaning up against them drinking tea and smoking. Oh, I’m going to pay for that remark.
My trailer has a bedroom, a fully kitted-out kitchen – supplied with bottled water every day2 – a bathroom, a shower, and a living area with a couch (where I spend most of my time), and a recliner (which is Eve’s favourite spot in her trailer). When we move to a location, the transportation crew haul the entire lot full of trailers to that remote site. It’s not an exaggeration to describe these moves as similar to shifting a small city from place to place.
In the hair and make-up trailer, a bulletin board located directly inside the door is covered with pictures of the main cast of Torchwood, and also any supporting actors who’ll be in the episode that’s on the filming schedule for the day. The snaps display each of the cast in samples of the make-up that’s needed for the episode, as well as the way our characters look on a regular basis. If Captain Jack needs to have blood on his cheek or a cut on his lip, days before the episode will actually be filmed, Claire or Marie Doris create the scar or mix the blood that will be used for the wound, and an image of it is put on the board for reference. Eve, Burn, Gareth, Naoko and I are listed on this board as numbers one through five. I’m number one, Eve is two, Burn is three, Naoko is four and Gareth is five. When I sit in my make-up chair at the beginning of each day, I still get a rush when I read that number under my name.
My first job in television was on Live and Kicking, a BBC variety show for children broadcast live on Saturday mornings in the early nineties. The programme was successful because of its format and the variety of guests that were booked. In 1993, my agent at the time, Janet Glass, who helped steer my early career, heard that the show was hiring presenters. So one afternoon, I took my video camera and walked around Oxford Street with a friend. We taped a segment of ‘What’s Hot and What’s Not’. I hung out at Hamleys toy store for an afternoon, where I chatted with children, played with toys and generally entertained shoppers until the store manager kicked me out, politely but firmly. I sent the tape to the BBC and within days of receiving it, they called me in for a screen test with Andi Peters and Emma Forbes, who were already signed up as the show’s main anchors.
The Live and Kicking producers offered me the role right away, but as is often the case in these situations, I was not allowed to tell anyone I had the job. Over the years, I’ve gotten much better at keeping a lock on my lips in those circumstances. My cheeks, all four of them, ached from keeping the Live and Kicking news to myself.
Hours after accepting the position as a presenter of the show, I was in a production studio recording an album of the musical Godspell. The album’s producer, John Yap, had brought together a number of musical theatre performers to make the record. Yap heard from someone that one of the other artists involved in the project, Darren Day, had been offered a job on Live and Kicking. To cash in on this news, John asked Darren to sing the part of Jesus, an irony of casting that was not lost on any who knew of Darren’s personal proclivities.3
My old friend Ruthie Henshall was also on the record, and we were both present in the studio when John Yap brought in a photographer to shoot the album’s cover and its publicity photos. The poor guy thought putting Darren on the sleeve would boost his sales. While the photographer was snapping pics of Darren, I sat at the back of the studio with Ruthie, eating chocolate and having a cuppa.
Finally, I couldn’t take John Yap’s fawning over Darren anymore. I leaned over to Ruthie and whispered, ‘Darren’s not going to be on Live and Kicking.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because it’s going to be me,’ I grinned, with a piece of warm chocolate smooched across my front teeth as if I’d been eating dirt … or worse.
‘You’re evil,’ she laughed.
My introduction to live television quickly became a classic blooper clip. I jumped enthusiastically on to the back of the golf-cart-like vehicle behind Andi and Emma to introduce myself – and my momentum carried me right off the cart and on to the ground.
As a presenter of Live and Kicking, the experience I gained in front of the cameras was fantastic, but not so much from behind them. Emma and Andi were terrific and they have remained good friends, but this was my first foray into television – not just live television, but television in general – and given my, erm, slight stubborn streak, my sense of humour, and my love of improvisation and creating characters, working with the producers of Live and Kicking was a bit like working for a bunch of Captain von Trapps before Maria came into their lives. There was little room for any creative deviation and I had to do exactly as I was told exactly when I was told, whether or not it made any artistic sense.
Despite all this, I had a great time on the programme. It was my introduction to British TV and gave me an opportunity to extend my visibility beyond the world of the West End. I also interviewed some great guests. My first one was Lulu, whose family lived in Mount Vernon, not far from my mum and dad’s old haunts. In fact, back in the day, my dad drew the plans for an extension to their bungalow, and my brother Andrew was a mate of her brother. This was one of the first public interviews where I used my Scottish accent. Funnily enough, another early interview was with Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, who later coached my ice dancing for Dancing on Ice.
My work on Live and Kicking was one of the reasons Cameron Mackintosh put me back into Miss Saigon for another short run in 1993 – my second time playing Chris after I’d first taken on the role in 1990. As I’d now become more recognizable, my increased profile brought a younger audience to the theatre to see the show.
The experience also led to some ‘pin-up boy’ work for me because Live and Kicking had its own teen magazine.4 As a result of this adulation, I was invited to lip-sync – I know, gasp, the horror – a song called ‘Bare Naked’ at a Smash Hits concert. I was wearing a Nicole Farhi scarf I’d been given on loan. In the middle of the song, I leaned into the audience to shake some of the outstretched hands. Suddenly, four girls in the front row grabbed my scarf. I knew if these ladies succeeded in yanking it from my neck it would cost me about £600 to replace. Plus, they were trying to separate a gay man from his accessories.5
There I was: hanging off the stage, no longer in sync with the song, fighting with four teenage girls for the fucking scarf. Of course, I got it back, but I think that was the moment when I realized I didn’t want to be a pop idol. My album Another Side, which SonyBMG released in November 2007, was my chance to embrace that side of me again – only this time I personally picked all the songs and I’ve bought extra scarves for the tour.
Live and Kicking whet my appetite for children’s television, for which I have a real fondness. Not only because I’m a big kid at heart, but also because I love acting and interacting with children, and I hope that my career continues to present me with opportunities to do this.
My exposure on Live and Kicking also led to me securing another kids’ TV programme to present, The Movie Game. Although the show had been on the air with two other hosts before me, this was a coup given my limited experience on television. I loved doing this programme. It was mostly a game show, with three teams of children competing. The game was very active for the kids and for me, involving lots of costumes, props and opportunities for skits and slapstick here and there. Signing up to present The Movie Game, though, meant my schedule was now packed to the
rafters. A typical weekend meant rolling out of bed at 5.30 a.m. on Saturday to be driven to the BBC studios in Shepherd’s Bush for 6 a.m. We’d rehearse Live and Kicking until the show went on the air at 9ish and ran live until noon. I’d then head back into the West End to perform two shows as Chris in Miss Saigon. On Sundays, I’d get up before dawn. Viv Rosenbaum, the wife of my driver at the time, Dave, would make sandwiches for us to eat on our drive north to Birmingham, where I’d tape two shows of The Movie Game, and then return to London in time for a Monday production meeting for Live and Kicking. All week, of course, I’d perform a daily production of the musical, too.
In the spring of 2007, my schedule looked a lot like this one from 1994, only substitute filming Torchwood in Cardiff for Miss Saigon, and replace my drive back and forth to Birmingham to shoot The Movie Game with motoring to London for the live TV finals of Any Dream Will Do.
Don’t take this litany of commitments as a complaint, however. I’ve always been busy and I always want to be busy. I like to keep my schedule packed because, honestly, I’m a nightmare to be around when I’m doing nothing or when I don’t get to do all the things I want to. Just ask a certain bear with a cracked jaw from Oswego, Illinois.6
Unbeknownst to me, though, something was about to happen to ease some of the pressure on my schedule. Over the course of my two years on Live and Kicking, my role grew smaller and smaller. I was more and more the roving reporter, and less and less involved in developed segments on the set. The proverbial last straw for me was when we were in a production team meeting for about three hours, and by the end of the meeting I’d been assigned three small segments. I pushed my chair away from the table and stood up to address the team.
‘Listen, there’s no point me being here anymore if all I’m getting is one or two segments. But you could at least have had the balls to tell me you don’t want to use me anymore. I’m an adult and a professional. Treat me like one.’ The following season, I was gone.
I later heard from a friend on the production staff that the show’s producers essentially had no clue what to do with me. They didn’t know what I was able to give and no one took the time to take me under their wing to give me any kind of training or help. I thought I did okay under the circumstances, but the producers were certainly not much help in that area.
What I disliked most about the experience was that the producers didn’t respect me enough to be honest with me. Thankfully, on The Movie Game, which I continued presenting after I left Live and Kicking, the production team recognized my potential and gave me more artistic freedom.
The Movie Game treated its audience as smart, interesting and funny individuals without condescension or pandering. Once, though, we almost credited the teams of children with just a bit too much maturity. A skit we were about to shoot required me and the children to dress up as shepherds and herd inflatable sheep into a pen. What the folks in the props department didn’t realize was that the sheep had been ordered from an adult shop – and they all had anatomically correct arseholes and vaginas. Needless to say, those all had to be taped up completely before we could film.
The Movie Game ran right before Blue Peter and, like Live and Kicking, got great viewing figures. Even today, I get a kick from their popularity as grown-ups regularly stop me in the street because they remember me from one or other of the shows. In 1995, I left The Movie Game to film the drama Central Park West for American television.
Both Central Park West and Titans, my two US TV shows, were dramas about rich and powerful families, and I played a son in each family. Both programmes were clones of the Dallas prototype, by which I mean they centred on beautiful people conniving, manipulating and back-stabbing their friends, family and, well, pretty much everyone else. The variations on the theme were that Titans was about a fabulously rich and incredibly dysfunctional family in the aviation business in California, while Central Park West was about a fabulously rich and incredibly dysfunctional family in the publishing business in New York City.
Another element both of these shows had in common was that in each one I had a terrific TV mother. In Central Park West, my mother was played by Lauren Hutton, and in Titans, as I’ve mentioned, it was Victoria Principal. Lauren was a bit of a loony7 and she confirmed a conclusion that I was already formulating at that point in my career, which was that all leading ladies are mildly off-kilter.8 From Elaine Paige to Betty Buckley, Lauren to Victoria, they were all tough, quirky broads and I think that’s why I’ve always got along with my leading ladies so well.
I did have one weird experience while working on the set of Central Park West, though, and that was the producers kept telling me not to smile on camera. You’ve seen me on television. Why would you not want me to smile? I thought about this edict a lot and could never figure out the reason, until one day when I was called into the production office for a chat.
I must add here that producers rarely ask you into their office for something good. In fact, it’s one of the most irritating things about producers because, as my mum always told me, you get so much more out of people when you praise rather than disparage. However, no matter how many things an actor may do well on set, or out in public with fans, or even schmoozing with network execs, a producer only ever invites an actor into his or her office to chide or berate.
So there I was sitting in the production office of Central Park West. Although the producers didn’t say it quite this bluntly, the message was loud and clear: do not let the public know that you’re gay and stop being seen in public with your partner.
I suddenly thought, ‘Was that why they didn’t want me to smile? Because only gay men smile and look happy, and since my character was straight, he couldn’t smile?’
Who knew? Regardless, the request was outrageous and pissed me off.
As it turned out, it wasn’t something I had to worry about for very long, which was just as well. The series was cancelled after a brief half-season run, by which time my character had already been shipped off to South America for reconstructive surgery after a terrible accident.9 As you can probably judge from that plot twist alone, the scripts had gone from okay to pretty weak to utter shite: thus the cancellation.
And speaking of shite, as I’ve told you once before, ‘everything comes down to poo.’ In television in particular and in show business in general, sometimes a performance is reduced to the most base of our human instincts. Think about this. A scene in Doctor Who opens with Captain Jack, Martha and the Doctor stepping out of the TARDIS. To achieve this, all three actors are crammed inside a prop box like sardines for what can be some of the longest minutes of the day, because I have to tell you, between David Tennant and I, we can create an enormous amount of methane from our arses. Freema Agyeman,10 like Naoko on Torchwood, never farts. Naoko claims that folks of Japanese heritage take pills so they don’t fart.11 I’ve never asked Freema her excuse.
After Central Park West, my next series television show was Aaron Spelling’s night-time soap Titans. As much as I adored working with Victoria and the rest of the Titans’ cast, Yasmine Bleeth’s drug addiction marred the entire experience. Yasmine played my character’s stepmother Heather, who was secretly in love with my character’s brother Chandler, played by Casper Van Dien, and if I remember correctly, she was pregnant with Chandler’s baby: you know, typical family dynamics.
In the end, the family dynamics weren’t enough to save the show: Titans was cancelled in early 2001 after eleven episodes had aired.
It has been a pattern in my life, one for which I’m always thankful, that new friends arrive with each new stage of my life and they stay with me for the long road. As I adjusted to a schedule without a regular gig, my West Hollywood friends Javier Ramos and Bret Vinovich took care of me while I got back on my feet.
I’d met Bret and Javier the day I moved into my West Hollywood condo. They lived in the apartment next door. After I’d tired of unpacking boxes on that first night, I’d knocked on their door and introduced myself. Altho
ugh they thought their new neighbour was good-looking (and when they realized he was the ‘hot one’ from Titans, one of their favourite shows, they were thrilled), they also thought he might be a bit of a nutcase, because no one in California introduces themselves directly to their neighbours in such an upfront way. They were right, of course, I was a nutcase. Regardless, Bret, Javier and I spent many a night in each other’s company, eating Mexican food, drinking margaritas and becoming fast friends while admiring the West Hollywood view from our balcony.12
After the cancellation of Titans, I admit my professional ego was wounded. Now two TV shows I’d been in had been shelved. But closings, cancellations and rejection are part of this business. You just have to move on. However, at that time, in 2001, my professional horizon seemed a bit too vast and empty for my bank account, so I began working with Bev to create my own cabaret show. Since 2002, I’ve performed that cabaret at Arci’s Place in New York; the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; Stackner Cabaret in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; the Lincoln Center, New York; the Feestzaal Stadhuis in Aalst, Belgium; and Pizza on the Park in London.
Sometimes, when life hands you lemons, you put a few in a vodka tonic.
‘Putting It Together’
Ernest Hemingway wrote that ‘[I]f you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.’ In 1995, when I was playing Peter Fairchild in Darren Starr’s Central Park West, Hemingway’s granddaughter Mariel was my co-star, so I picked up a few of her grandfather’s books to read. If I remember correctly, Hemingway’s memories and tales from Paris in the 1920s were tinged with cynicism, regret, a great deal of homophobia and a lot of booze, but at the heart of Hemingway’s Moveable Feast was a memoir about friendships, good and bad, and inspirations for his writing. From the moment I debuted on the West End stage in Anything Goes in 1989, London became my ‘moveable feast’ and since then, no matter where I’ve performed, I carry with me all that I’ve learned from the directors and producers I’ve worked with in London over the years.
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