Boycie & Beyond

by John Challis

  An unexpected member of the team was Bob Peck, taciturn northerner, regular RSC player and star of Edge of Darkness, the hugely successful British TV drama which was running at the time.

  Less widely seen, he played Amos, the twins’ father in the beautiful and moving film of Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, set in the Welsh Marches, which I came to know and love when I moved there in the late ’90s.

  Despite the inevitable backbiting and bitching that goes on among any group of assorted actors, these cricket matches were memorable for the particular quality of quaint Englishness that the game can evoke. I remember especially idyllic days spent in the wonderfully picturesque surroundings of the cricket ground at Nettlebed in the Chilterns – a setting no film designer could ever have created – along with the distinctive soft clunk of hard leather sweetly struck by willow, and the smattering of applause over the insect hum and the breeze in the beeches, as the ball rolled on to pass through and demolish a carefully prepared picnic of egg-and-cress sandwiches. And a later batsman, having sought to put out his cigarette before walking out to the crease, calls out his guard to the umpire, only to find smoke spiralling up from his now smouldering pads, and a moment later he is hopping around frantically trying to put out the flames licking up towards his groin, while the umpire calls to the scorer in the pavilion: ‘Batsman out. Caught fire!’

  On another Sunday, on another pitch, a ball was hit for six, and landed in the back of a passing lorry, not to be seen again until the driver found it back at his depot, sixty miles away. But he remembered where he’d been and returned it – the longest hit in the history of cricket, we guessed.

  Another of our better batsmen was Jonathan Kydd, a versatile and ubiquitous actor, an acapella singer and voice-over artist of distinctive dressing habits. If and when he turned up (which tended to depend on the quality of tea likely to be on offer) he would be wearing a striped cricket blazer of ancient provenance and a Harlequin’s cap, while carrying a battered old leather cricket bag, and looking like someone from Douglas Jardine’s famous ’30s England cricket side.

  There was a palpable tension between him and Bill Franklyn. The old actor obviously felt that Jonathan should show more respect for his captain and senior, while Jonathan made it clear he didn’t think much of Bill’s autocratic style and insistence on bowling too many overs from an increasingly arthritic run up.

  The trouble for Bill was that Jonathan, for all his cavalier disdain for a captain’s authority, was a class act, quite capable of winning a game on his own by his maverick batting.

  More in harmony with Franklyn was his great old chum, Francis Matthews, who sometimes came to watch our matches. A quality actor and old-school charmer, Francis was well known in the business for his Cary Grant impressions, while I, as I may have told you before, fancied my own James Stewart. On occasion, sitting outside the pavilion, we would pass a very enjoyable half hour creating conversations between our two heroes, while Bill Franklyn looked on with a cocked eyebrow, trying not to laugh.

  I soon learned that Bill was very competitive on and off the cricket pitch. It happened that I was still doing a lot of useful work in the voice-over studios, which he considered very much his own territory, not without justification. His voice had a wonderful, distinct fruity timbre, blended with a hint of sophisticated irony, that was always a pleasure to hear. However, by way of conversation and unaware of his strong territorial instincts, I would sometimes attempt to compare notes with him. He was unforthcoming and evidently sceptical. He asked Sabina when I wasn’t with them if she was sure I wasn’t making it all up, because, he said: ‘I’ve never heard him.’

  Sabina assured him that I was often busy doing voice-overs.

  ‘Is he?’ Bill asked doubtfully. ‘How many does he do a week? I never see him waiting in the studios.’

  The following winter, I thought of him sitting comfortably ensconced in a warm London studio, smoothly purveying encouragement about ‘Schh... YouKnow Who’, as I walked up a bleak hillside in the Pennines above Burnley. I was there as a nasty, long-haired villain for an episode of Juliet Bravo, in which Simon Williams, a long way from Eaton Place and his usual comfort zone, played a slippery and nefarious Mr Big.

  The scene was given an extra chill by a north wind howling across the moor, so cold that the diesel in the coach had frozen.

  My character was posted as a lookout, while plans were hatched for a hostage-taking robbery. At the appropriate moment, I was to walk about fifty yards and deliver a few pearls of wisdom about the feasibility of the scheme. I arrived at my mark in time and opened my mouth to speak. With a shock, I found that one side of my face had completely frozen, as if in preparation for a painful molar extraction.

  The only sounds that emerged, ‘Erurrfblair I greffur’, seeped into the polar atmosphere and seemed to drop and shatter in a million pieces at my feet.

  Opposite me, Simon, with pointed features pinched tight by the frost, looked even more uncomfortable.

  Why, I thought, did we take these jobs?

  After two appearances as a rotter in very early episodes of Howard’s Way, which went on to fill the BBC’s Sunday night schedule for the next five years, I was back with Ray Butt, John Sullivan and the gang, making the 1985 Only Fools Christmas special and first feature- length episode, To Hull & Back. Coincidentally my main co-player in this, Tony Anholt, had come in to Howard’s Way a few episodes after mine, as Charles Frere, lover to Lynne Howard, played by Tracey Childs.

  To Hull and Back, like all subsequent Only Fools Christmas shows, was more lavish in production terms than a normal episode. It was filmed entirely on location, with even a bit of foreign travel – if you call Holland foreign – though Boycie never got to go there. It was also one of the few episodes with no studio work, therefore with no live audience, with the result that at 90 minutes, it looks more like a movie than a TV episode.

  It worked very well, with a broadcast audience on Christmas Day of nearly 17 million, and subsequently became one of the show’s all-time favourites. It was one of John Sullivan’s great stories: complex, convoluted, and self-parodying.

  Boycie has a dodgy chum, with whom he does a few deals, but who hasn’t appeared before. He is an urbane villain of vaguely ‘Arab’ origins called Abdul, played, with his matinée idol good looks slightly darkened, by Tony Anholt. Tony had a number of issues to deal with. He was having great success as in Howard’s Way, perhaps in part due to his embarking almost immediately on an affair with Tracey Childs.

  He’d been married to Sheila Willet for over twenty years and she wasn’t taking her husband’s all too obvious public romance at all well and was, he said, throwing the furniture around at home. On top of that, Tony wasn’t too happy about being darkened up for his part as Abdul, apparently anxious not to look too ethnic, although I tried to help by suggesting to him that this only heightened his appeal. I also had the impression that he thought the whole ‘sitcom’ thing was rather beneath an actor of his provenance. He considered himself a serious actor and wanted this acknowledged, which he encouraged by picking holes in John Sullivan’s wonderfully crafted scripts, and sighing in a supercilious way at some of the more overtly comic moments, which unsubtle as they may have been, were viscerally funny. For all that, he was a perfect foil for Boycie’smore extravagant persona, and I was sorry that he never featured in the series again.

  In Sullivan’s script, Abdul and Boycie plan to have some diamonds smuggled from Amsterdam to London. They don’t want to do the dirty work themselves so they need someone to go over, with the money, to get them. They find Del Boy and drag him out of the Nag’s Head to a secret meeting where they offer him £10,000 to act as courier from Holland to England. Del Boy winces and demurs, until the offer is upped to £15,000 – a 10 per cent cut of the £150K they expect to get for the stones in London.

  Naturally, Del goes straight back to Rodders to persuade him to help, then hears that his old nemesis, Chief Inspector Slater thinks Boycie and Abd
ul are dealing drugs, and is keeping a sharp eye on them. The next morning, as they arrive at the market, Rodney is very windy about the job and believes the trip will be very dangerous; Del managed to convince him that everything will be OK and they’ll earn their £15,000 for very little effort.

  When Denzil turns up, driving his lorry, he makes a point of asking Del to stay out of his life, as his wife, Corrine thinks he’s an evil influence on him. Having got that off his chest, Denzil drives off.

  The Trotter brothers get on with their day’s activity, flogging dodgy watches with the Unique Selling Point of being able to play thirty-six different national anthems. When they find the police are on their heels, they scarper, but with their usual bad luck, they run straight into DCI Roy Slater. Slater was played, incidentally, by Jim Broadbent, a fine actor, who loved the series, and had been mooted, before Sullivan picked David Jason, as a possible Del Boy.

  Slater is with his right-hand man, Terry Hoskins. At Sid’s Café, Slater tells Del and Rodney that he’s already onto Boycie and Abdul’s latest drug deal, but admits that he doesn’t know who’s going to act as courier. He goes on to tell the Trotters that once he’s dealt with this case, he’ll be retiring from the police force. When the coppers have gone, Del phones Boycie and tells him Slater’s onto him.

  The chaos and disasters that follow are classic Sullivan, and with several sub plots unravelling at the same time, the episode easily fills the allotted 90 minutes.

  Del having ended up in Hull by accident, and ever the opportunist, thinks it a great idea if he and Rodney sail to Holland in a hired boat instead of going through the airports being watched by Slater.

  Albert, who’s always claimed to be an experienced sea dog, is summoned up to Hull to skipper the boat. It’s soon obvious that he doesn’t have a clue how to navigate and he admits that he spent most of his time with the Royal Navy in the boiler room.

  Their sea-voyage includes possibly the most expensive sitcom joke the BBC ever commissioned. As Uncle Albert, Rodney and Del are standing on deck, passing a North Sea Oil rig, an incredulous oil worker spots Albert waving up from the small boat and shouts down to ask what their problem is.

  ‘Which way’s Holland?’ Del calls back.

  The disbelieving rigger points eastwards, and Del wishes him a cheery: ‘Bonjour.’

  It was a great show to make. Part of it, in which Boycie wasn’t involved, was shot on location in Amsterdam and the rest was shot in Hull. For convenience, the BBC had built sets of the Nag’s Headin an old warehouse up there, and it felt strange not to be in our regular studio with an audience boosting us with their enthusiastic response.

  The film unit had a great time in the hotel in Hull. With the whole team there, this was probably the first time we saw just how huge Only Fools was becoming.On the second day, I found Nicholas Lyndhurst in the middle of a beastly concrete shopping mall being besieged by adoring women of a certain age. Later, when we went out to find somewhere to play pool, every time we found a possible venue, the crowds would gather – and this was long before mobile phones and Twitter had entered our collective consciousness. Quite often from the hotel windows we’d see gatherings of scantily- dressed women waving up at us, and we noticed a slight genuflection in the attitude of the staff.

  A film crew away from home is always inclined to behave badly and this adulation encouraged us to think we could get away with anything.

  One memorable night, with only David, Nick and Buster being called next day, several of us decided to stay up drinking all night. We’d been joined by a few local doxies, as well as our indomitable production manager, Sue Longstaff, a tall, rangy, strong-minded character, who had a penchant for cameramen and took no prisoners. Quite late on, when I made the mistake of questioning how much booze she could hold, she grabbed me by the wrist, gazed blearily into my eyes and spoke in a husky passionate voice. ‘I bet I can drink more tequila slammers than you, Challis.’

  I shrugged, as if engaging in any such contest would be a mere formality, and ordered up the first few salted glasses, feeling as if I was going out to bat against a team of ten year olds. At the back of my befuddled mind, I was aware that I hadn’t engaged in a serious tequila slamming contest for a long time but I wasn’t discouraged.

  I got as far as ten salt-edged glasses of the fiery lighter fuel before my shoulders hunched, my eyes filled and my head sank in submission onto the table between us.

  Sue looked at me with a mad glare of determination in her squiggly eyes, downed one more, raised her arms in triumph and promptly collapsed.

  As we came to, we decide to help our recuperation with a hopelessly drunken soda-siphon fight until breakfast time, when we ordered champagne and felt very pleased with ourselves. A sober member of the unit who had just come in, scrubbed, shaven and with eight good hours sleep behind him, sat on our euphoria and flattened it like an elephant on a whoopee cushion, when he told us the weather had changed so we had to report for duty for a full day’s shooting at 9am.

  It was a hard day. We staggered, stumbled, and mumbled, desperately stifling yawns and hopelessly trying to remember lines. I found myself cursing all Mexicans, especially those responsible for making the hideous brew that was burning my brains up from the inside, while I tried to assume the calm air of self-confidence which characterised Boycie’s manoeuvres.

  Ray Butt, our director, although an enthusiastic boozer himself, wasn’t amused – especially with his production manager, the still almost legless Sue Longstaff. But he must eventually have forgiven her, because she became an essential member of the team and stayed for five or six years.

  Seeing the degree of public recognition to which the stars of the show had risen, Ray was quick to remind us how tenuous was our hold on this celebrity. He was good at putting us down. ‘You may not be the best actor we’ve got,’ he would say, ‘but you’re certainly the cheapest!’

  Another time, when Roger Lloyd Pack was trying to show me a card trick he’d just learned, and we’d missed our call to stand by, Ray had crept up behind us.

  ‘If you two have got a moment,’ he said, ‘perhaps you’d like to join us? I can make you disappear, you know.’

  We had seen evidence of this, over the years of the show, when favourite little scenes we’d made never appeared in the finished version – usually a result of John Sullivan’s habit of writing about ten minutes more than we needed. This practice of his made sure that if a scene hadn’t really worked or was little substandard, he wasn’t forced to use it. But sometimes we couldn’t help thinking that one of our scenes might be cut, simply as a punishment for bad behaviour.

  After a few weeks of rattling up and down to Hull, I was glad to have a little more time to spend with Sabina. She was always surprising and stimulating; her normal attitude to life was rather like a naughty child’s: there were always boundaries to be crossed – though never so far as to cause serious trouble. Everything had to be funny, and a challenge. Soon after we’d first met and were touring the National’s production of TheRivals, we were in Plymouth with an eclectic and rousing company. There was Edward Petherbridge, a fey, hypertheatrical virtuoso actor, who almost smelled of stage curtains; an Irish actor, Niall Buggy; Fiona Shaw; the beautiful Anne-Louise Lambert; Sabina, Barry Rutter, Patrick Ryecart and me.

  One night after a wonderful, booze’n’mirth-filled evening in a Plymouth restaurant, Niall, Anne-Lousie and Fiona – egged on by a mischievous Sabina – decided they’d like to go skinny dipping. We left the restaurant and all trooped round to a spot on Plymouth harbour where the swimmers stripped off on the shingle and rushed into the sea; I could feel Sabina tense with high excitement at this unruly behaviour as they emerged naked and glistening in the moonlight.

  I enjoyed a little unruliness myself and loved taking things to the limit, and I was aware that we were both of us fairly dangerous people to be with; we were pathological flirts, and recognized this in each other, which tended to add a frisson to any group encounters. In a p
erverse way, one thing that held us together was our mutual distrust, especially when one of us had been working away from London.

  Chapter 2

  From Prussia with Love

  In the spring of 1986 Sabina was cast in a fresh production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, for the New Theatre, or Theatr Newydd as they call it in Cardiff. The play had been produced in London for the first time in 1982, when it won the Evening Standard Best Play award. It is still recognised as one of Stoppard’s major works

  It is his exploration of the meaning of love, in which the mainprotagonist is a writer – very likely Stoppard himself – who, by flaunting his superior intellect and a kind of charisma that only great success can bring, seduces a young actress, Annie (played by Sabina) away from her husband, affable but dim actor Max. The cuckolded man struggles against the tide, rails against the unfairness of what has happened but in the end submits and sinks into a puddle of self-denigration and inadequacy. The actress has been tempted away in part, of course, by the perceived promise of future prestigious work, although, as is turns out, this is never realized. Stoppard himself, as was well aired at the time, had done a bit to wreck the life of one of the National’s top directors, Michael Rudman, when he spirited away Felicity Kendal from him (they have since been reunited) to create the role of Annie in the original production of The Real Thing.

  In his incisive examination of love, Stoppard aims to find how it most truly manifests itself. Is it that lurch of the heart at first sight, the thrill of the chase, a tantalising glimpse of greener grass?

  Or is it the long-term, shared trials and experiences – ‘Been through it all together, and come out the other end as best mates and comforters’?