I went for about four different auditions in total. With each one I was feeling a little bit more positive, but trying so hard not to get my hopes up. I didn’t tell anyone, either – I didn’t want to jinx it! After each one, I’d come home and wait for a phone call from a guy called Nick Simmonds. The suspense was almost unbearable! In the end, fate worked in my favour in the shape of Darren Boyd. He changed the role that he had auditioned for so much that our characters worked better with him, as he was younger than the role was initially written for, and I got the part! I’ll never forget the day I got the phone call. We were at home in Highgate with Andy Grainger and his new wife Ruby. It was a huge thing, and we had a champagne barbecue to celebrate. It was major – absolutely a dream come true.
All of the three series were filmed at Carlton Studios in Nottingham. We rehearsed all week, had the dress rehearsal on a Thursday and filmed on the Friday in front of a live audience before driving back to our hotel. Caroline had a posh suite, so I’d go round to hers in my PJs for pasta nights, to drink wine and watch telly. It was fun, but also reassuring to know I had someone like her as a friend and support.
Caroline wasn’t just a good friend, she became a huge inspiration for me. She’s so professional: she’s never late, knows everybody’s names on set and always chats with all the crew. She showed me how empowering women could be without being intimidating – when she was working on Men Behaving Badly, she refused point-blank to carry on unless they paid her and Leslie Ash the same as her male co-stars. When I first met her she was reeling from her divorce from comedian Paul Merton but still seemed like she wasn’t frightened of anything. (On the first day she told me to shut up when I was chatting away to someone in the background. I didn’t do that again!)
By the second series of Kiss Me Kate, Caroline was seeing Sam, a runner on another show she was in called Jonathan Creek, and one day she swore me to secrecy and told me she thought she was pregnant. Conspiratorially, we got her a test and I was the first to know when it came up positive. It was a very special moment – she was so happy. She couldn’t stop telling everyone, but then wondered how everyone knew. It was all her and her excitement!
Things were looking up for Les workwise too, when he got his first dramatic stage role in the David Hare play Skylight at The Watermill Theatre in Newbury. No one was more delighted than me, and he was brilliant in it. He’d never been taken seriously as an actor before and I was thrilled someone had finally given him a chance. When our schedules didn’t clash, he and I began to be invited out to events and photographed as a ‘showbiz couple’.
We loved our Highgate home but we decided it was time to upgrade and we found a property in a tree-lined square in my old stomping ground of Primrose Hill. It had six floors and took what seemed like forever to renovate. We had a great offer on our previous house, so we sold and rented a little furnished one-bedroom basement flat while the work was being done. It turned out to be one of the nicest things we ever did. We put all our furniture in storage and lived really simply again, with throws on the rented sofas, TV dinners and students living above us. It was a complete contrast to what was going on in our careers, and those were some of the happiest months of our whole marriage.
When the house was finished, though, the tempo went up again and our home became the central party destination for our family and friends. Les really got into cooking in his brand-new kitchen and I was feeling more confident and loved my role as his party co-host. We threw dinners around our massive Victorian dining table (until one night when Vic Reeves danced on it and broke it . . .!) and had all-night parties almost every week. It was always an eclectic crowd – at any one time we might have TV execs sharing pudding with a make-up artist, colleagues from my latest productions or friends from my drama school days plus random neighbours and relatives. Andy Grainger and his new wife Ruby came round for their tea most nights and we had daft, lovely times with them both. We were incredibly sociable and suddenly were hardly ever on our own.
Les had always been prone to mood swings and moments of intense introspection, but I’d been able to gently coax him out of them, or find a way to cheer him up. Now, these moments seemed more frequent – or maybe I was just noticing them more – and I was shocked not only by how often he had them, but by the depth of the dark side of Les’s personality that was starting to appear. In the mornings, I would wake up before him and watch him sleeping. Seeing him so peaceful, I’d wonder where these lows came from, and what kind of day we’d have. It all depended on his frame of mind, and although I’m not confrontational and will do anything to avoid an argument, I became less inclined to put up with his anger management issues. Anyway, he was a master of making something out of nothing to pick a fight.
So we began to row, until it seemed he felt more comfortable being in an argument than when everything was normal. Whenever we fell out, he’d get very melodramatic and tell me to leave. He’d say I was ‘too good’ for him, or ‘too young’. He was like a stuck record. He’d flare up over something insignificant and then bait me with, ‘Go on, leave me! You will anyway!’ For me, this was more than unsettling. I was just finding my feet in one area of my life and the rug was being pulled from under them in another. It seemed that he was trying to wear me down and giving me a licence to go.
When the rows got out of hand, though, I would take on the role of pacifier again and try to diffuse the situation by making him laugh, which wasn’t easy – when Les lost his temper, his blood pressure would rise and he’d get pinker and pinker in the face until he looked like Piglet from Winnie the Pooh, which became his nickname. One day he lost his temper over nothing and hurled his cup of coffee at the ceiling. We both sat in stunned silence, watching it drip down. As usual, I tried a one-liner. ‘I think I can see the face of Jesus appearing up there.’
It takes a lot for me to snap and generally I would keep calm, but one evening I really lost it. It must have been summer, as Les had shorts on. During dinner, he tipped a full bowl of soup upside down on the table, then picked up an umbrella and smashed a beautiful dried-flower arrangement that framed an archway in one of the doors. I went into the kitchen to calm down, picked up a saucepan lid and said, ‘I have had enough!’ I got the lid, chased him out of the room and panned him all the way up the stairs. With every step, I’d whack him on the leg. By the time he got to the top he was laughing, but later that night when he was cleaning his teeth he had half moons all the way up his leg!
I’d passed my driving test the week before our wedding and after a lot of our rows (as soon as I could escape) I would drive up the A1 to Scratchwood services to have a cup of tea and calm down before I went back. I always did go back, though – I really wanted our marriage to work. I’d have put up with any amount of crap to make that happen (and I did!). He’d always make it up to me the next day – usually with a meal out or a huge bunch of flowers – but the self-pity that had first made me want to mother him now sometimes threatened to overwhelm us both.
If Les wanted a row, he’d have it, no matter where we were, or who we were with. Mum and Dad came to stay with us during the summer and Mum and I went out shopping. We were only about ten minutes late coming home, but Les just lost it. He started taking all the pictures off the wall and hurling them across the room. I was confused, and embarrassed. This wasn’t how wedded bliss was meant to be and I would never have wanted Mum to see that.
But as it turned out, it was not the only occasion. Les and I spent a lot of time with Mum and Dad – he was a real family man – and so they got to know this side of him very well. Mum and Dad moved to Devon and during our first visit Les, predictably, started a row. Mum, as she always would do, must have taken my side over whatever it was about, and as she and Nan walked off down the lane on their way to church, Les opened a window and shouted, ‘Fuck off! Fuck off, then!’ (Mum was devastated – she’d really wanted to make a good impression on the neighbours, and there was TV’s Les Dennis screaming obscenities out the window.)
The worst row, though, was in a restaurant in Soho with friends one night when he kicked me under the table and called me a ‘cunt’. I told him I was leaving him and went outside, where he tried to stop me. A group of men on the other side of the road came rushing over to rescue me because they thought I was in danger. Then I got in the car anyway and drove all the way back to Bournemouth with my mum and my nan. He turned up at their house the next day, crying in my mum’s lap and saying he was sorry and had no idea why he’d lost it.
I can honestly say I found it heartbreaking. I was bereft, it was killing me. When I look back, it seems clear to me that Les – consciously or subconsciously – was intent on sabotaging our marriage through his volatile behaviour. By his own admission, Les has now said he has struggled with depression. During our relationship I was blissfully unaware of this. It was only as time went on that I began to realise just now hard that is – both for the person suffering and the people around them. But at the time I was very much in love with the ‘normal’ side of him (as my mum says, ‘He was a good chap really’), and it all happened so gradually that it took a long time to see how this other side was making our lives together a misery. We had so much going for us, after all, that in my role as marriage peacemaker and Les-‘fixer’, it was easier to focus on the positives – I threw myself into my work.
And there was so much else going on to keep me positive. I was offered one of my best ever parts – Miss Titley the teacher in the new sitcom The Grimleys. It was set in Dudley in the Seventies and shot in a real school, during the summer holidays.
It was in Manchester that I first met make-up artist Jess Taylor – she’s become one of my closest friends and I’ve taken her with me to almost every job since. I call her ‘Spirit Level’ because she’s the most grounded person I know. Before the first script readthrough, she had no idea who I was (one of the crew told her I was ‘that bird who’s married to Les Dennis’), but she said I was so vulgar that she knew we’d be friends straight away. When Les came to visit me on set with Nobbie, she was surprised by how quiet and shy he was – she says now he was ‘always on the back foot’.
On and off, I had three years up there in Manchester staying at the Victoria & Albert Hotel opposite Granada TV studios and partying with the Grimleys crew. Cracker, Coronation Street and Loose Women were all filming at the studios at the same time and every night the bar would be full of people I knew. If you weren’t in your room learning your lines for the next day, there’d always be someone to have a drink with.
Scripts were sent direct to the hotel by producer Spencer Campbell and one night I read to the end of the script and saw that my character got hit and killed by an ambulance. I couldn’t believe it. In fact, I think I actually cried! No one had warned me that was going to happen, and I was totally gutted. I was straight on the phone – I rang my agent, the producers, the writer, everyone! – saying, ‘What’s going on, I am contracted until blah, they can’t do this to me!’ Several calls later, there was, it turned out, no need to panic. It was their sick idea of a joke! (But I got my own back via a newspaper column I was writing at the time, standing in for someone in the holidays, and put a ‘before’ and ‘after’ picture of Spencer in the paper. His ‘before’ pic was from the Seventies and his hair inspiration I can only assume came from Brian May. He opened a national newspaper and his embarrassing photo was there for all the world to see. Ha!)
Things were going better than I could have hoped in my career, but I couldn’t let myself relax about it. Nor did I lose my drive to do more, be better, go further. I kept plugging away for new parts and pushing for more work. I was asked to be a guest on Goodness Gracious Me and I appeared in early episodes of cult show Smack the Pony for Channel 4. I helped write some of it too and they wanted me to do the whole series, but it wasn’t really me. (I’m a traditionalist. I like a punchline!) Of course, it then went on to win an Emmy – what did I know.
The only downside of all this work was all the travelling it involved. In fact, I was away so much that coming home started to feel odd. It began to dawn on me that maybe it wasn’t the place that was wrong, but the person. Home is where the heart is, after all – and although I was still very much in love with Les, home wasn’t the nurturing, calm, loving place I wanted it to be.
Les would come and visit me between his own gigs, often with Andy and Ruby. In fact, Ruby and Les were both in an episode of The Grimleys! Ruby then appeared in several more as Miss Thing. The most time that Les and I spent alone together were on holidays abroad or weekends in Norfolk, and I was finding new ways to handle Les’s tantrums – or avoid them altogether. One way to cheer him up was to take him shopping for the house – he was never happier than when he was buying things for it. But where I tried to manage his moods, Mum had no such patience and he and she still clashed frequently because she didn’t like his ‘petulance’. Whenever the two of them were in the same room they’d both vie for my attention – it was exhausting. I constantly had to tell him to not be so clingy with me when Mum was around.
Not only that, but the age difference was actually beginning to affect our relationship for the first time, rather than just in Les’s head. Where he’d once been really spirited and full of fun, now he became a miserable old heavyweight. No amount of joy, money, friends or even me seemed to be able to pull him out of it. He was still hosting Family Fortunes, doing the odd play and filling his summers with end-of-the pier shows as well as pantos, but when he saw the variety of the work that I was getting, he became obsessed about his own acting career to the point that it was all he ever talked about.
Les’s agent Mike was the only person other than me who could snap Les out of the darkness, usually by telling him how much money he was earning and reminding him he had nothing to worry about. He used to jokingly call Les and me ‘Burton and Taylor’, because he thought Les was deluded in wanting to become a serious actor. When Les was in one of his black moods, I’d call Mike up and plead with him to get him out of the house and give him a pep talk.
Noddy Holder, who played music teacher Neville Holder, was another amazing sounding board for me. He was so kind and sweet – he frequently gave me a shoulder to moan on, although he eventually told me I should leave Les if neither of us was happy. That was the last thing I wanted to hear right then. I couldn’t – I loved him, and I knew a part of me always would. We were good together; we were a team. And anyway, I am a fighter!
After seven years together, Les was a good husband and we still had some great times, even if I felt as if I was walking on eggshells much of the time. We had our beloved Nobbie dog. We had beautiful homes and great friends with whom we’d have hilarious times if Les was happy.
So, I tried even harder to fix things. We added a second dog, Fudge, to our little pack. He was mixed race, part Jack Russell and part Yorkshire Terrier. Les spotted him tied up in the basement of a house and rescued him, and little Fudge arrived to terrorise Nobbie, to destroy my sunglasses and bite the noses off my teddy bears. In my head I was determined to work at my marriage like I’d worked at my career. That had paid off, after all. Luck had undoubtedly played a part in my success, but it was more down to my sheer bloody-minded determination. I resolved to apply the same approach to my marriage.
What could possibly go wrong?
Chapter 10
Me Behaving Badly
When the first episode of Kiss Me Kate went out on the telly, Caroline Quentin told me that she had held a party in her Soho
flat for her friends and invited her Men Behaving Badly costar Neil Morrissey over to see it. She told me afterwards that when I came on the screen he said, ‘Who’s that?’ She replied, ‘That’s married.’
A few months later, I was asked to audition for a two-part comedy drama for the BBC called Happy Birthday Shakespeare. Produced by Gareth Neame, who went on to win numerous Emmys and Golden Globes (and to produce Downton Abbey), it was a bittersweet story about unhappily married coach driver Will Green. Over the course of a coach tour around Britain, Will gradually fell for his tour guide Alice. It was a black comedy, so I was thrilled when I got the part of Alice. The part of Will went to Neil Morrissey, which didn’t really mean an awful lot to me. Neil and I had never met, and Caroline’s story was the only thing I knew about him other than his previous roles.
We got on very well from the start. During filming, I was just one of the lads. During lunch breaks, rather than sit in the van with the other actors, I’d go down to the pub with the sparks, the crew and Neil. Neil was ten years older than me and was dating Rachel Weisz. He was funny and incredibly easy to talk to – very charming, lovely and not initially flirtatious. But there was a dark side to him, too: he thinks he’s an intellectual with quite a militant streak and could be a bit chippy. (He never did anything a minute before his union-regulated break was over!) He had a very unsettling upbringing which makes him vulnerable and childlike. A new set of problems to solve . . .
One of my earliest scenes with Neil involved some filming at Stonehenge. We were allowed to get close to the stones, so it felt very special, if cold! It was a bitter November day and I was wearing really flimsy clothes. I was bloody freezing! While I stood there, teeth chattering, Neil was to one side waiting for his cue, all wrapped up in a big Puffa jacket. When he saw me shivering he shouted my name and opened up his coat, as if to invite me in. It was totally innocent – or so I thought. He was almost a foot taller than me and it was toasty in there! But it was undoubtedly then that things changed. That’s when a spark happened. Suddenly there was a tension. (I remember saying to Neil, ‘There’s something between us’ – and it wasn’t his loose change!) After that, I didn’t stand a chance, and he totally went after me.
No Holding Back Page 10