by John Challis
She was my former agent, Caroline Dawson, who’d found me all my earliest television work back in the ’60s. She had also become my lover and I’d bought my first dog, the Prune, with her. In another ironic twist of fate, she was now Roy Marsden’s agent and must have been responsible for negotiating the secret deal on his salary that had been made with management at the Mermaid and which had upset the rest of the company so much. But it was fun to see her again and she agreed to have lunch with me in a few days’ time, on the strict condition that I did not ask her to become my agent again.
She brought her old friend and our former flatmate, Doreen Jones with her to lunch and we chattered away as if we were back in 1968.
I’d had a great time when I lived in their flat – the first time I’d lived in London – when I used to occupy my ‘resting’ time between acting jobs with working around the antique dealers of Portobello Road, where I got my first taste for the trade.
The two women were sympathetic about the recent hurt and humiliation I’d been though with Roy and Sabina. ‘What a bastard!’
Caroline exclaimed, even though he was her client.
I left lunch feeling fairly drunk and a lot better about myself.
Caroline didn’t take the house but she did buy one almost opposite and moved in a few months later.
After that, Sabina’s influence began slowly to ebb from my life. It had been a pretty horrible time, but, although we never think we’ll mend after these things happen, most of us have enough survival instinct and personal resilience in the end to be able to look back and say – what the heck, these things happen and life goes on.
Afterwards, Sabina herself didn’t fare perhaps as well as she might have hoped. She and Roy split up, she never remarried and, sadly, never had the children she was hoping for. Her career, too, seemed on the downhill side of its parabola, although she continued to put in appearances in East Enders and Coronation Street.
Mike Slater came round to see me at Number 8 while I was packing up and getting ready to let the house. It seemed quite strange that I hadn’t seen him for so long, considering Mike had been quite a big part of my life for some years. I guess our paths had diverged and I’d had less spare time to keep in touch.
He and Alison could see that I was still sore over Sabina; they were supportive and sympathetic, and I found I was glad to see something of them. In a way, Mike, who really knew very little about my world and the personalities involved, was the right person for me to be talking to. I was glad, too, to let go of my own problems for a bit and ask him to tell me everything he’d been doing.
Mike said that he’d done fantastically well (as usual) in the appropriately vague field of Public Relations. PR has always been a catch-all term for a variety of nebulous functions related to sales, presentation, schmoozing and so on. I couldn’t elicit from him any precision about his function, although Alison volunteered loyally that he had been ‘headhunted’ by some impressive outfit I’d never heard of.
However, perhaps things were going less well now, or Mike was becoming more idle, because they told me with great excitement that they were planning to move to Portugal.
Mike had a wheeze he was very anxious to tell me about. They were going to sell up in London and buy a bodega, near Lagoa, apparently a charming old Portuguese town in the foothills of the Monchique in the Algarve.
‘But what are you going to do there, or don’t you need the money?’
He glanced at me as if I were mad, for thinking he would do nothing and perhaps for thinking that he might need the money, while I knew that he was by nature idle, and, by habit, skint.
He touched the side of his nose in a continental gesture. ‘I’ve hit on a fantastic way of making money out there, from the soil.’
‘What – gardening?’ I asked with disbelief.
‘No, no...’ he said testily. ‘Aloe vera.’
At this stage, the plant with a name like a bad British sitcom was becoming more recognised for its curative properties and often cropped up in articles about health and wellbeing, so I was vaguely familiar with it. Although the Romans had known and made use if its qualities, it was only recently that it had excited the interest of the mainstream western world.
Mike banged on. ‘The market for it is enormous – for potions, lotions, sun cream, shampoo, cuts, grazes, as a soothing ointment – probably as a sex aid of some sort, too, I wouldn’t be surprised.’
Despite my instinct to distrust any claims made by Slater for anything and although normally cynical about wonder cures and their true efficacy, I could see that growing the stuff might well have commercial possibilities.
Michael, maybe taking advantage of my vulnerability, was full of it and when we went out for an extended drink afterwards, I was so relieved to get away from the Roy/Sabina saga that I sat and let him bang on about his new project, embellished by a large helping of his usual old bullshit. It soon became clear that it wasn’t only my jovial company and a renewal of our friendship he was after but also some money to put into the aloe vera plantation he was buying.
I suppose he thought my regular appearance in Only Fools meant I had accumulated large piles of wonga. He was wrong about that but, as it happened, I was still sitting on several tens of thousands of pounds, the residue of what my mother had left me. I had retained my interest in growing things and it occurred to me that investing in a plantation on the sunny southern slopes of Portugal might provide a handy income at times of future scarcity, as well as a warm bolt-hole when not much else was going on. Besides, my trust in the workings of ‘fate’ – as close as I got to any ‘religious’ beliefs – urged me to feel that Slater turning up with this proposition, when my life was crying out for a new direction, when my mother had left me an entirely unexpected sum of money, was obviously pre-ordained and couldn’t be ignored. I was quite drunk by then and I told him that, absurd as it might seem, I could be interested in going into business with him again. By the time we parted, he was quite high and very optimistic, while I went home wondering what on earth I had committed myself to.
Chapter 6
Little Problems
By the time I came to work with Roy on the episode of Only Fools that I’d engineered for him, my anger with the man had relented a little and he and I seemed to have reached a kind of truce, if not a very cosy one. He was obviously still feeling guilty as hell and made a point of telling me again how much he admired my comedy skills and how lucky he felt to be involved in our little sitcom.
In Little Problems, Roy played a Peckham villain called Danny Driscoll. Although, in the circumstances, I could probably have persuaded John Sullivan and Ray Butt to write the part out – they always had too much good stuff in the can anyway – I wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me cave in to my emotions like that. Besides, it did the show good to have a few better-known actors coming in from time to time; and if it did the show good, it did me good, I told myself pragmatically.
In fact, the first choice for the role of Danny Driscoll had been Anthony Hopkins – not only a great actor, but also a big fan of Only Fools. He rated John’s writing very highly, along with the strength of the ensemble performances it produced. Sadly, he couldn’t do it: he was otherwise occupied in some little horror film about lambs.
In what turned out to be a brilliant fifty-minute episode, Danny turns up to collect a debt from Del Boy with his little brother, Tony, played by Chris Ryan (best known for his stint in The Young Ones).
John Sullivan gave them some memorable lines:
Tony: I hear Marlene’s up the spout.
Boycie: Yeah...
Danny: When you find out who done it, let us know and we’ll sort him out.
And later, to Mike landlord of the Nag’s Head:
Danny: OK, Guv’nor. I wanna buy everyone in this pub a drink. Here’s a pound… and I want change.’
Boycie: Large Cognac, please, Michael.
There was an additional element of authenticity
to this episode, supplied by Patrick Murray. Patrick played a nice dodgy character called Mickey Pearce, who appeared from time to time. Between filming the location shots and finishing off the studio stuff in front of a live audience, Patrick had arrived home with several bags of shopping. He’d opened his front door, tripped over the doorstep and fallen headlong into the hall, breaking his arm on the way and getting a great gash in it too. We’d been told before he came into the studio that his arm was heavily plastered. After a quick raid in the BBC props department, we all put plaster casts on various limbs and sat around waiting for Patrick to arrive for rehearsal. We hadn’t done it to hurt him but to take the sting out of the situation for him with laughter and a show of sympathy. But this presented John Sullivan with a problem.Mickey couldn’t suddenly appear in the Nag’s Headwith an arm in plaster without an explanation. John, as usual, turned it to his advantage. The Driscolls were already the main protagonists in the plot, so it was no stretch that he and his friend Jevon (played by Stephen Woodcock) had somehow crossed Danny and Tony Driscoll and had been punished for it – hence Mickey’s arm in plaster, and Jevon appearing in a rather fetching neck brace.
In an ironic twist, the Driscoll Brothers’ appearance in the series gave John Sullivan a link that led, fifteen years on, to Boycie and Marlene’s spin-off series, The Green, Green Grass – but that’s a later story.
Shortly after working together on Little Problems, Roy rang me and suggested we meet up for a drink on neutral ground, an anonymous little café in Covent Garden to have a chat, mano a mano. I agreed but I didn’t feel forgiving. When we met, I told him bluntly that I felt cheated and humiliated by his behaviour with Sabina and that he’d shown no sensitivity or civilised restraint. Like the father of an errant daughter, I asked him what his intentions were.
‘John, I promise you, it’s serious,’ he said, gravely nodding his head. ‘I really love her. I’m sorry you’re hurt, of course, but it has been a joy to work with you.’
I got up and left him to pay for our drinks.
The next time I saw Jonny Coy, I told him about my chat with Roy.
‘But weren’t you bloody angry with him?’ he asked.
I realized then that I’d reached a turning point when I answered, quite truthfully, that I wasn’t angry anymore. Although the humiliation of it still stung, that was just about male pride, which was more than compensated for by a sense of relief that I had discovered relatively early in our marriage the true nature of a woman in whom I had placed my complete trust. She had been quite prepared to carry on with Roy, bigger stag as she saw him, without any consideration for me.
Little Problems had been the last of four Only Fools episodes I was in, where production partially overlapped the last couple of weeks of The Relapse. Before it we’d done Danger UXD, Chain Gang and Sickness and Wealth.
Danger UXD demonstrated wonderfully John Sullivan’s ability to handle the grubbiest material and make it work without resorting to outright crudity. The stars of that episode were a group of blow-up dolls, which Del had bought from Denzil – very cheap, of course – to help him out of a hole, under the impression that they were toy dolls, not adult sex objects.
It turns out that they are factory rejects because they had been sent out ready-inflated with propane, and were potentially lethal fire-hazards.
It was a great script but, off camera, most of the laughs came from the trouble the props people had moving the dolls around. After filming one scene, the dolls couldn’t be deflated and had to be transported by two of the lads back to the unit hotel, still in all their grotesque, fully-inflated glory. They managed to get them into the lift without being spotted and headed up to store them in their rooms for the night.
Halfway up, the lift stopped and a respectable-looking couple got in. Their jaws dropped in horror at the sight of two young men taking these open-mouthed, shell-shocked looking plastic women to their rooms.
‘It’s OK. We’re doing a film,’ one of the lads tried to explain, digging himself deeper.
The horrified couple said nothing and got out at the next floor. Chain Gang emerged as one of the favourite episodes. It’s a beautifully plotted story of Del and Boycie being out-conned by a superior practitioner of the art, although, in the end, they get their own back – and their money. Boycie has a wonderful and much loved scene in a restaurant, when the con man pretends to choke and keel over with a heart attack.
Boycie, with magisterial self-regard, declares. ‘I am a doctor. Stand aside; let the dog see the rabbit!’ – a line which I am frequently asked to reproduce, even now, twenty years later.
By this stage, now into its sixth season, Only Fools was achieving unbelievable viewing figures – nearly 19 million for Little Problems – and we were all feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. Inevitably with a show like ours which heavily featured two principal characters, there had developed a bit of a ‘them and us’ atmosphere on set. David and Nicholas had most of the plot to deliver and most of the lines, so they’d got into the habit of rehearsing on their own at one end of the rehearsal room, in their set, depicting the flat in Nelson MandelaMansions.
Buster, as Uncle Albert, was part of those rehearsals but not part of the very close empathy that existed between the other two, which left him slightly out on a limb. We satellite characters, Boycie, Trigger, Denzil, Marlene, Mike the barman and, to a lesser extent, Mickey Pearce, usually revolving around Del and Rodney in the Nag’s Head,made up the next tier in the show’s hierarchy, followed by the guest stars, like Roy Marsden or Jim Broadbent, followed by the one-off, bit part players. Reigning supreme at the top of the stack, of course, was John Sullivan, the show’s creator, who fiercely guarded his fiefdom.
As the importance of our own characters within the ensemble had grown, we’d begun to feel a little neglected and taken for granted by our producers, who seemed to spend most of their time with the top two. As David used to say: ‘If in doubt, follow the money.’
Tony Dow, who had now come in to direct, was aware of this divide and did his best to bridge it by involving the satellite characters as much as possible. In one episode, I was wearing a sweater that I thought was dead right for Boycie – smoky grey with a linked, crenellated motif across the torso.
David was full of ridicule. ‘He looks like the Mayor of Casterbridge, for Gawd’s sake!’ he exclaimed sourly.
His own sweater, featuring a large fluffy black and white cat, was even sillier.
‘I don’t think you can talk about sweaters,’ I responded.
‘At least mine says something!’ David retorted.
‘Yeah, Pussy!’ Tony Dow chipped in, just like that.
It was like a piece of Sullivan’s script – a perfect set-up with a great tag.
Tony Dow needed this kind of tact to keep things on an even keel, especially as most of us (though not Buster) had already been on the show for eight years. Tony had been AFM (assistant floor manager) for much of that time too, and, it seemed, groomed by the ‘management’ for the director’s job. He had got his chance when our original producer/director, Ray Butt had to leave in the middle of a show to look after his sick father. Tony had held the reins ever since, with the help of Gareth Gwenlan, one time Head of Comedy at the BBC, and now a freelance producer. He and Tony Dow remained with the show in tandem until 2001.
The success we were having with Only Fools to some extent made up for the shock and potential misery caused by the sudden and unexpected meltdown of my marriage. I was pleased, too, that despite the collateral damage it had caused, my last effort on stage in The Relapse had done so well. I felt like a grown-up actor as well as a successful comedy turn.
My stock among the Only Fools cast went up considerably when Kate O’Mara turned up at the North Acton rehearsal rooms (know to us telly actors as the Acton Hilton). Kate was rehearsing something quite different but we met up for lunch and I was able to introduce her to David Jason, who was a great fan and had always wanted to meet her. She was a true star,
and responded to him at her slightly wicked, vampy best, which delighted David.
Later, when we were alone, she was very solicitous about what had happened at the Mermaid. ‘You must keep yourself nice and busy and make lots of plans to take your mind off what’s happened and put it all behind you.’
I had plans, all right. I’d let Observatory Road very easily to a Japanese family, who treated the place with great deference. When I want back to check a detail on the lease, I was asked to remove my shoes before entering my own house.
I had gone to live with my old friend, Keith Washington and his partner, Madeleine Howard in a two-up two-down terrace house in Thornton Road, Mortlake, a part of South West London now very much on the ascendant. Luckily they had a spare room.
Keith was still wrangling with his ex-wife over access to their son, Tom, who was living with his mother, but at least Keith and Madeleine were settled and he was a lot happier than when I’d seen a lot of him, ten years before.
At the blessing of my marriage to Sabina, Keith had read a John Donne poem about the wonders of love, which he had done movingly and with great panache. This seemed now to make him an appropriate person to help pick up the pieces after the failure of the marriage.
I was living in what felt like a state of suspended animation. Despite the success I was having, I really had no clear idea of where my own career was going: in fact, very few actors, in the unlikely event that they were being honest, would say otherwise. It is true to say that in popular television you are as desirable as your last set of ratings, while in the other more esoteric areas of acting, luck, serendipity and hard graft in the networking department all play a part.
I was entirely aware by then that Boycie had become an immutable presence in my life (although I would never have predicted that twenty-five years on, in restaurants and other public places, I would still encounter nasal cries of ‘Where’s Marlene?’)