by John Challis
While The Relapse had been running at the Mermaid, I’d had a taste of this. A steady stream of Only Fools fans were waiting for me outside the stage door each night for an autograph, including one man, who, when I asked him if he’d enjoyed the show, seemed unhappy.
He spoke with a strong Birmingham accent. ‘It was all roight, I s’pose,’ he said unconvincingly, ‘but we were a bit disappointed, reelly.’
I was mortified. ‘I’m sorry to hear it; why was that?’ I asked, well aware that some parts of the show even now weren’t quite hanging together.
‘Well, you wasn’t like him at all! The only reason we came down from Solihull was because we saw you were in it. They should have told us!’
‘Oh dear, I am sorry,’ I said, relieved in some respects. ‘But the trouble is there weren’t many second-hand car salesmen around in seventeenth-century London,’ I said, probably more flippantly than I should have.
‘I know you think we’re all stupid,’ my fan went on, ‘but it’s this sort of lack of information that’s driving people away from the theatres.’
I simply couldn’t think of a suitable answer and busied myself scribbling on his programme. I almost felt guilty that people were coming here to see me as Boycie, and were finding something so far removed from the character and his metier, that they were positively resentful.
Peter Adamson, known as he was for years for his Corrie persona of Len Fairclough, must also have disappointed a few fans. He was giving a great, rumbustious performance as Sir Tunbelly Clumsy when his agent told him one night that an important casting director was coming along to see him. He warmed up beforehand with so much falling-down water that by the end of the show he’d completely forgotten that he was supposed to meet the Big Cheese in the bar after the curtain and he never showed up, leaving us to explain his absence. ‘He’s very ill, I’m afraid. It’s a miracle he got through the show tonight,’ the casting director was told. ‘Oh, thank you, yes, I’d love a drink.’
We guessed, good actor though he was, that Peter was still terrified of being put under the microscope and having his talent examined too closely. We knew it wasn’t lack of talent that was the problem but excess of booze and it didn’t look as if that was going to change.
Once I’d put Observatory Road and its memories of life with Sabina behind me and I’d moved into Keith and Madeleine’s house, I became obsessed with the idea that Mike Slater’s proposition had turned up in response to the demands of fate, specifically to show me a new direction to take after Sabina had put an end to the last phase of my life. Slater had a Dutch partner in his proposed aloe-vera growing enterprise and they were looking for investors.
‘We’ve already raised all we can ourselves,’ he explained, ‘but we need a little more to clinch it. It’s a bloody nuisance we have to bring in partners at all. Once it’s up and running, it can’t fail. It’ll be a licence to print money.’
I managed in my excitement to forget entirely that every time I’d heard that phrase used to describe a proposition, it had always turned out to be a licence either to flush money down the lavatory, or to make a big bonfire out of it. Fate, I was convinced, had decreed that I should take this gamble – if indeed it was a gamble – and besides, Mike was a very old chum who’d seen me through some of the leaner periods of my life. He wouldn’t let me down...
I’d coughed up the money I’d promised Slater, and he had shot off with Alison to set up home and consolidate the purchase of the plantation with his mystery partner. With no immediate job in hand, I was anxious to get out to the Algarve as soon as possible to see what was happening to my investment.
I flew to Faro, hired a car and found my way through the small hills to Lagoa, which, as Mike had described it, was a charming town of well-worn stone with a fine patina and ancient vines clambering up the walls. I found Mike’s house on the edge of the town. The entrance was a small postern, set in a much larger pair of carriage doors. The door creaked open and there were Mike and Alison in the beautiful, flower-filled courtyard of an old stone bodega, with breakfast still on the table, and a lunchtime bottle already open. A run of stables and an old winery occupied three sides of the flagstoned yard, while on the fourth, beside a high retaining wall was a dark swimming pool, shaded by eucalyptus trees and a large bougainvillea.
After all the hassles and gloom of dealing with my former life with Sabina, this looked more or less like paradise.
Mike and Alison welcomed me fulsomely and clearly saw my arrival as an excuse for an extended bout of carousing. We seemed to spend the next few days on a continuous binge around the bars and cafés in the ‘talking squares’ of Lagoa, Portimao and Lagos.
I’d seen Sabina just a few days before I’d left to sort out our proposal for the eventual sale of the house at Observatory Road. Now, over endless cups of coffee with the Slaters in the mornings, wine and brandy into the afternoons and evenings, I took the opportunity to get a lot of bad stuff out of my system by talking about it and they were happy to let me ramble on.
‘She had the gall to ask me if I thought maybe we should get back together,’ I expostulated, ‘after all the shit she’d put me through! She said we could get some focus on our lives. I thought we’d had plenty of bloody focus before, until she took her eye off the ball and kicked it into touch. I suppose Roy’s been backtracking – not delivering on his original promises. Maybe she’s discovered that the biggest stag in the herd is made of straw, with feet of clay,’ I droned on, happily mashing my metaphors. ‘Mind you, the last thing I heard she was still with him.
I bumped into Bill Franklyn, her father, at a voice-over studio, and he was quite apologetic – blamed her entirely for always trying to create new crises in her life, to give her a foothold up to the next level. He said he’d love me to come and play cricket with the Sargentmen again this summer but there’s no way I will, not with her swanning about and Roy bloody Marsden lurking there.’
I suppose Mike was listening, although, in truth, the ability to listen wasn’t one of his strong points. One never knew quite what he was thinking about – if anything. He was one of those people who turn out to exist only on the surface and appeared to want an easy, uncomplicated sybaritic life, without having to give too much thought to how it was going to be paid for, while Alison tried to plug the gaps by running a fairly chaotic B&B at the bodega.
Around the bars, Slater introduced me to dozens of other expats, most of whom were running restaurants and bars, all of whom appeared to be great Only Fools fans, wanting signed photos of me. We were offered in return any number of free drinks, free meals, even a free hour each on a jet ski, which was a very uncomfortable experience for me, with my marked lack of aquatic skills. While I could manage driving off in a straight line at great speed, the minute I tried to turn, I seemed to be leaning the wrong way and I’d go off in one direction while the wretched little thing shot off across the water in the other. I found it very difficult to remount without immediately tumbling over the other side.
We ate out all the time, sampling seafood in Portimao (great), paella in Lagoa (so-so) and ‘All you can eat’ Argentinean beefsteak somewhere in between. It was hectic, non-stop and easy to forget the gloom of the last few months. But when there were down moments, I would go up on to the flat roof of the bodega and reflect on the shambles I’d made of my personal life so far, and what, at the age of forty-six, I should do next.
I persuaded myself that it would be therapeutic to walk, and set off on the five-mile path across the hills to Silves. I loved it. The journey gave me a lot to think about and the satisfaction of arriving at the unspoiled medieval town, founded by the Romans when they’d built their beautiful (and strategic) bridge across the River Arade. After the Romans, the Moors had occupied it, to be turfed out again by Christians in the El Cid era.
Although Michael was very unconcerned – or just uninterested – in the technical and financial side of the aloe-vera venture, he did show me all around the plantation, which, to
my untutored eye, looked very pretty and full of potential. The plantations lay on the lower slopes of the Monchique in crescent rows of young aloe plants and above them, a newly-dug reservoir, which would irrigate them through a pumping system that was being installed. There were a few employees in evidence and it all looked surprisingly organized for an enterprise run by Michael Slater.
The key to it all would lie in their first harvest that autumn, when the fat, juicy leaves of the aloe would be gathered and stored down in the docks at Portimao until a buyer could be found at the best price.
After that, Mike said with a worrying gleam in his eye, dividends would be paid to shareholders. It all sounded much more predictable than my usual precarious livelihoodand in my current unstable condition, I felt very optimistic about earning a nice little income from my investment over the years to come.
We went off on a few excursions up the mountains, for which I volunteered to drive, as Michael was more or less permanently drunk.
He had always claimed to have been some kind of racing driver in his younger days and he backed up this claim by being the most appalling back-seat driver, sporadically clutching his head, pumping his heels into the footwell, gasping loudly every time we went near a cliff edge and constantly trying to tell me how I should be driving. In the end I got so sick of his relentless barking of absurd instructions that I stopped, got out and told him he could take over. This was a mistake, because he was so pissed that he often bumped into things and would spend a lot of time explaining how a stationary truck was to blame for a collision, while we came quite close to death on several occasions.
On my second weekend at the Slaters’ Alison had to fly back to England and Mike announced that he had committed us to looking after two female Danish friends of an acquaintance of his. They were, he explained, on holiday from Spain, where they worked as physiotherapists in one of the Costa resorts.
Margaretta and Inge turned out to be a great double act and it was clear from the minute we shook their warm brown hands that they were going to provide a lot of entertainment. Inge, the younger of the two, was a sassy, blue-eyed, rangy blonde, who looked a man straight in the eye and gave him as good as she got in a lovely, sexy Scandinavian accent. I had the impression that neither of them was in the habit of taking prisoners. We spent the first day on the lash, with the occasional break for food or sleep and arranged to meet them the following morning on the beach.
As we approached, Inge unfolded her long slender legs and rose from the sand to greet us. Apart from not having a dagger strapped to the waistband of her bikini, it could have been Ursula Andress heading up the beach to grapple with Sean Connery.
I felt myself shiver with arousal and gulped involuntarily, already sensing that this was going to be a very exciting day.And so it was, cruising the bars, dancing on the beach, lying semi-naked on the roof of Mike’s bodega... it was like a teenage boy’s dream sequence. Inge smoked incessantly and with vigorous intensity, while she hurled back the local Portuguese plonk at least as fast as me. The more she drank, the more she developed a fascinating, wild, angry air, which the masochist male in me found very appealing. The banter, the flirting, the sexual tension didn’t flag all day until we had to put them on a train at Lagoa for their journey back to Benalmadena, near Fuengirola, on the Costa del Sol.
Astonishingly enough, Inge and I hadn’t been to bed together but from the rudimentary animal communication that had gone on between us, I knew that Inge was interested in seeing me again. And I was sure I felt the same.
She gave me her address – apparently a remedial centre for sports injuries, as well as geriatric limb conditions, (of which, I guessed, there were plenty on that coast).
Shortly after that, with my mind refreshed, my body exhausted and half-poisoned with alcohol, I had to get back to England for the summer filming of the next Only Fools Christmas special, The Jolly Boys’ Outing.
It certainly was a jolly outing, on and off screen. The whole gang was in top form and it became more of a holiday, with most of the shooting in Margate. Around the town, at the fairground, by the seaside, we threw ourselves into the challenges.
Winston Churchill would have been impressed. ‘We will film them on the beaches, in the fields, on the streets and in the fairground. We will never go back to the hotel,’ he would probably have observed.
Most of the time, we didn’t get to bed when we were supposed to (in anticipation of the next day’s filming), and once I stayed up all night with Nick Lyndhurst and Ken MacDonaldin the jacuzzi, taking it in turns to be drinks waiter. We were joined for a time by two ladies, although my recollection of what happened and when they left is inevitably hazy.
This episode, The Jolly Boys’ Outing,was incredibly good fun to make and, perhaps as a result of this, the favourite of a large number of Only Fools fans.
John Sullivan had based the idea on similar trips undertaken by an ex-servicemen’s outfit from his part of London. They got together every year for their coach trip to the seaside and always came back as if it had been the highlight of their year. That was how it felt for us – dancing around to the music – and there’s a great shot of Roger Lloyd Pack, Ken Macdonald and me, all hammering away on our air guitars to Clapton’s Lay Down Sally as it blasted from a fairground speaker.
Between shoots we were daring one another to go on the hairiest rides in the fair. Some, whom out of kindness I shan’t name, were as windy as bean curry and wouldn’t go on anything. Ken as usual overdid it, full of booze, with the inevitable consequence. We behaved like children on the beach, all rushing down to the sea together, squealing like schoolgirls as the six-inch surf rolled in.
As always on location work, we had to endure an awful lot of hanging around and surrounding our locations was a permanent ring of onlookers, camped there all day with their primus stoves and teapots, ogling everything we did – eating at the chuck wagon, taking a trip to the Honey Wagon (upmarket Portaloo), traipsing in and out of make-up or wardrobe. I was regularly being hailed with cries from the multitude –‘Come on Boycie, give us a wave!’ or worse, ‘Give us a laugh!’
At Margate, we were in the proverbial goldfish bowl but, for myself, I never resented it, nor ever have since. It was these enthusiastic fans who had given us the joy of being a part of what was already one of the most popular sitcoms in the history of television.
Sometimes, though, the onlookers almost overwhelmed the location and would get mingled with the crew. As a result, the producers hired a security firm to guard the perimeters of the locations.
During one long boring gap between filming, I turned to the bulky geezer standing beside me. ‘I’ve got to have a stretch and get some fags,’ I said.
He nodded co-operatively. ‘I’ll come with you.’
I was grateful for the security. I cleared it with the director’s assistant and we pushed our way through the crowds to the promenade where the shops were.
I bought my cigarettes (it wasn’t a crime to smoke in public then) and offered one to my burly minder.
‘Do you do a lot of this kind of work,’ I asked, by way of polite conversation.
‘What sort work?’ he asked,
‘You know – security and that.’
‘No, never, really, mate. I’m a supermarket manager. I’m on me lunch break. Could I have your autograph?’
Looking back over twenty-five years of Only Fools, I guess that The Jolly Boys’ Outing was as good as it got. I still have a wonderful photograph of us all in front of the Halfway House pub on the road to Margate, in beautiful sunshine, all looking happy and proud – and, of course, twenty years younger. The whole gang is there, with Ken MacDonald and Buster Merryfield – now, sadly, no longer with us. I think it must have been a happy time for all of us.
Filming that episode certainly helped me to forget the pain of everything that had been going on a few months before. I was still very conscious that my third marriage was over, through no fault (or not much) of my own. I still felt v
ulnerable and inadequate but the defences I’d raised had worked to some extentand most people mistook this protection for an inner strength I didn’t really possess.
Still, as long as it was working, I was content to live that lie.
After filming in Margate, I was booked for another voice-over at Angell Sound. I arrived to find Roy Marsden was doing the other voice part with me. I wanted to turn around and walk out but I deliberately drained any expression from my face and carried on. Roy’s demeanour was surprising. He was obviously nervous at seeing me and, it seemed, still quite guilty about how he’d behaved. He was deferential, almost unctuous, calling me ‘Guv’nor’, for some reason.
I seldom saw him after that, although when he took over as artistic director of the Mermaid Theatre in 2003, just before it closed, he offered me a couple of jobs there. Despite the fact that he and his wife, Polly, had divorced as a result of his liaison with Sabina, that affair hadn’t outlasted the year. I think he must have had a taste of how Sabina could be, for he’d made no move to marry her. In the summer, she’d taken him to one of her father’s Sargentmen cricket matches, where she’d flirted extravagantly with a number of the other men she knew there. She’d always been one of those women who got a charge out of seeing two men wanting her at the same time. I guess Roy must have recognized then, if he hadn’t already, what he was dealing with.
Although I’d turned down any more invitations to play cricket in Bill Franklyn’s team, Bill himself continued to be quite sympathetic towards me about what had happened.
While I was busy and Only Fools was getting more and more viewers with each episode, I was able to put on a fairly convincing face. Inside, though, I was wobbling and making erratic, knee-jerk decisions – like my aloe vera investment – to take my mind off the failure I was feeling.
Another knee-jerk, random decision was to ring Inge and fly out to see her in Spain. I guess I thought it would help me to escape – to ‘move on’, as everyone kept telling me to do.