by John Challis
Or, if he was, either my mother’s pregnancy was terminated or she’d had the child, given it away and I had a half-sibling somewhere.
These were possibilities but nevertheless, suddenly everything was making sense to me. My father’s persistent hostility towards me could simply be due to the fact that I was not his son.
This startling revelation was knocked on the head, however, when I found my parents’ marriage certificate and, as they say over the pond, did the math. They had been married in October, 1941, in plenty of time for me to have been conceived and born by August the following year.
After running a gamut of emotions in a very short time while I sat on the spare bed, clutching and rereading the salient documents, I finally convinced myself that I was indeed my father’s son, and my mother’s escapade must have happened before I was conceived. What had come of the earlier pregnancy and any resulting child, I had no idea and never discovered.
Chapter 8
Miami Twice
I was still shaking off the trauma of Dad’s death when I had to fly off to work in the States – not to make a movie in Hollywood, but to film a two-part Only Fools Christmas special in Miami.
Miami Twice – The American Dream and Oh to be in England – was by far the most ambitious project Sullivan and Gareth Gwenlan had undertaken.
John Sullivan had decided that Boycie and Marlene would go to Miami on holiday. There, after a chapter of accidents, they would bump into Del and Rodney being chased by a posse of Mafia goons in the Everglades.
Sue and I thought ourselves very lucky, being the only members of the cast to go to the States along with David and Nick. We promised all the other seething members of the cast that we’d send them a card when we got there. We flew out to be greeted in Miami by David and Nick, Gareth Gwenlan and Tony Dow, as well as quite a few familiar members of the crew, especially the doughty Sue Longstaff.
The whole wheeze looked a lot more fun than we expected, when were told there were union problems relating to the shoot, and we might have to stay in Miami for more than the three days scheduled. Oh no!
It turned out that the BBC, in a fit of economizing, had decided to use key staff of their own while filming in Miami, hiring locals only for the more menial functions. The Teamsters’ Union of America were not happy about this. ‘This is the US of A, buddy, and we do things big out here.’
Gareth tried to explain to a Jimmy Hoffa look-alike that this was the BBC and we had a limited budget.
‘Well, buddy, this is the Teamsters and unless you employ more of our people, you don’t do the movie at all... Period.’
It seemed they had the power to institute a heavy picket around the unit, although they were only concerned about our unit’s drivers.
Delicate negotiations dragged on while Gareth grew more pallid and hollow-eyed by the hour. In the end, half a dozen Teamsters were taken on to replace some of the owner-drivers the BBC had hired. On the whole, they sat around all day doing nothing but making a dent in the BBC’s already strained budget – although John Sullivan assigned one of them to himself and spent a lot of time picking over US labour laws as he was driven around Miami.
I would be lying if I said I minded the forced delay. Sue and I ended up staying in Coconut Grove for a week more than we’d expected. We didn’t think it too awful to go up to the Grove each morning to have our all-American breakfasts, flirting with the tide on Biscayne Bay, or plunging into an empty hotel pool. Evenings offered the option of drinking a skinful of margaritas in downtown Miami, or having a little something to eat on the waterfront, before returning to the all expenses paid hotel for a well earned rest after an exhausting day doing nothing. This of course is the upside of the business, when you feel the luckiest people on the planet, and you make the most of it while it lasts, albeit at the BBC’s expense.
Finding unexpected time on my hands I looked up an old acquaintance, whom I might otherwise have overlooked – a Scotsman whom I only ever knew as Jimmy. He harked back to the time when I’d been with my second wife, Debbie Arnold. She’d had a great friend at the time called Leanne Robinson – daughter of Cardew (The Cad) Robinson, a radio and variety turn I remembered from my youth. Jimmy had been Leanne’s man.
Jimmy had always had a harsh, brooding side to him and here in Florida he’d gone native – inasmuch as he was heavily into guns. He told me with great gusto that although he didn’t have a licence to carry, he could keep a weapon at home and so he could keep one in the car.
He took me to a shooting range, where he checked out a mean and ugly pistol with which he blazed away at targets in the form of cardboard cut-outs of enemies of Uncle Sam – the Ayatollah Khomeini, Fidel Castro, and bizarrely, Charles Manson. Jimmy who’d always been a fan of the martial arts and other aggressive ‘sports’, used his weapon with disturbing relish. I had a go, too. Strangely, I was deemed quite a good shot, although I was frankly uncomfortable toting a 9mm Glock in my hand and feeling the thing buck as I loosed off.
Jimmy also liked the girlie joints and took me to one on the appropriately named ‘Strip’ one lunchtime, for God’s sake! I hadn’t seen a lunchtime stripper for years, not since I’d once been hauled off to a pub in Battersea which fielded a few not very sophisticated striptease artistes during the Friday lunch hour in order to build up a base for the weekend trade. There, on a small, rickety stage and a carpet sticky with spilt beer, an unwholesome, bored-looking girl waggled her ample buttocks at a largely unresponsive crowd in the bar. Looking for a laugh, a punter yelled out, ‘What’s them spots on her bum?’
Another wag picked up the challenge. ‘That’s not spots,’ he shouted back. ‘That’s her price in Braille.’
It didn’t make my pint taste any better.
The Miami girls writhed around with extravagant lasciviousness, taking their tops off and winking at the ogling audience with unsubtle suggestiveness. It didn’t do much for me but Jimmy loved it and eagerly thrust small wads of dollar bills into any adjacent G-strings. He seemed to know one of the girls and she came and sat with us.
‘I... er... Do you do this sort of thing often?’ I spluttered primly.
‘As often as you like, honey,’ she pouted beneath eyelashes like a pair of yard brooms.
She did a dance especially for us, which had me crawling with embarrassment and Jimmy howling with raucous laughter.
When at last Gareth had settled terms with the Teamsters, shooting started for us up in the Everglades National Park, a swampy wilderness in which I would never choose to get lost.
Boycie and Marlene were assigned an Everglades airboat – one of those huge floating skidoos, with a socking great propeller on the back.
Our driver, Wayne, was a very obliging fellow who wore a red bandana over a mop of dark blond curls and loved his work. He flew a Confederate flag from the mast beside the propeller as he powered us across the water, through the beds of reed and water hyacinth.
With a lot of ‘Yee-haws’ going on and Wayne thinking his job was solely to entertain us, riding the thing didn’t feel at all like any work I’d ever done.
Eventually, as part of Sullivan’s surreal plot Del Boy and Rodney appear, crawling from warm soupy water draped in dripping vegetation and Boycie observes at his most supercilious, ‘Good God, Del Boy – you smell like a vegetarian’s fart!’ – a line which I was sure would become a classic, if only John had kept it in the final cut!
It’s worth interrupting the narrative flow here to mention again that John Sullivan consistently wrote and shot more material than an episode ever had time for, and some scenes, however good, had to go.
The scenes that stayed were selected on their relevance: what was most germane to the plot survived while anything ancillary was cut until the show fitted the time slot assigned to it. In fact, throughout the whole run of the show there were stacks of out-takes and sometimes whole finished scenes that were made but never shown. This sort of extravagance can be helpful, as many authors know – the more you can cut out any extran
eous or weaker material you may have written, the tighter and more focussed the finished product article will be. There just aren’t so many serial TV directors who have that luxury. John was a perfectionist and he demanded this latitude, with the result that there are very few, if any, dull, lifeless or pointless padding scenes throughout all the episodes of Only Fools.
The frustrating result of this was that scenes which had been fun to make and certainly worked in their own right and of which an actor might be quite proud, often ended up on the cutting-room floor and in the case of our show, securely chucked away in a bin to be disposed of permanently, never to see the light of day in Auntie’s Greatest Bloomers.
John didn’t want his out-takes seen because he didn’t want his actors to look stupid, or make fools of themselves. A pity really – given that there were probably enough rejected footage to make half a dozen more episodes.
In Miami some classic bloomer footage was shot of one of the animal stars employed for a scene, an angry amphibian with the moniker Al the Gator.
It was supposed to come rushing up a bank at Del Boy and Rodney as they tried to find their way out of the swamp while escaping from a Mafia gang. This unlikely scenario had come about because Del Boy evidently looked very like the local Mafia Don. The gang had concluded that if Del was caught, killed off and found dead, the cops would stop looking for his doppelganger...
The alligator came with a ‘wrangler’ – a hard-looking nut called Sean. He had set things up so that on the call of ‘Action’ the beast would be released and scuttle up towards a large bowl of food (invisible to the audience, of course) laid out for it fifteen feet in front of the camera, where Sean the wrangler would leap on top of it and subdue it.
Sue and I watched, intrigued, from the sidelines and at a safe distance and as far as we could see, rehearsals went well and according to the script. However, when it came to the take, Al the Gator was evidently bored, hadn’t read the script and was no longer so peckish.
On ‘Action!’ he rushed off in the right direction but, completely ignoring the food, hurtled straight on towards the cameraman, his crew and the sound and lighting men, who all legged it like Usain Bolt on amphetamines as soon as the rampant reptile by-passed the food.
The camera was left running and caught the real action when Sean with a superb swallow dive, landed on the alligator and amazingly managed to wrap duct tape around its snapping jaws and a blindfold over its eyes – I say ‘its’ because I had no idea what gender this beast was, and I’ve seen human beings of both sexes behave in a similar way from time to time.
Sue Holderness had already got her video-cam out to film the action but in her terror, when the ‘gator charged, she lost control and only got shots of upper branches of trees and a deep blue sky.
In making Miami Twice, John Sullivan also indulged his penchant for putting celebrities on the show. Only Fools had a wide range of fans and there was no shortage of willing victims. As Del and Rodney set off from Gatwick, they had an encounter with a grinning Richard Branson, who kept corpsing and required several takes to get his lines out. In Miami, Barry Gibb, who had a home there, was easily talked into making a brief, slightly self-conscious appearance. John used to love this and when it happened, it probably did help to bring an extra fizz to the show. Tony Dow, our director, was less keen. He thought it cheapening.
There were several others over the years – Jonathan Ross playing himself in one of the last episodes of Only Fools, If They Could See Us Now, and much later, in The Green, Green Grass, Ricky Hatton, the boxer appears, shaking his head in disgust when a fight breaks out in the local pub, while Fiona Bruce was persuaded to appear in a story that involved the Antiques Road Show.
I said goodbye to Florida at the end of our wrap party somewhere on Miami Beach, where, I have been told, I danced with a palm tree and with Sue Longstaff, although I couldn’t have told the difference, they were both such good dancers. I finished up standing in the back of a stretch limo with Nicholas Lyndhurst, both our heads poking through the roof, raising several glasses to the United States in general, Coconut Grove and, in particular, Hooters, the famous bar where the waitresses’ skirts were short and the cocktails were long.
Back in cold grey London, as the Christmas Special was finished off in the studio, I started rehearsals for my first pantomime. If you can brace yourself for the rigours of a panto season and generally deprive yourself of booze over the festive period, you soon become convinced that panto is such a quirky, British tradition it can be a lot of fun.
There’s nothing quite like being in a good, slick production, with a great script, fresh jokes (rare) and wonderful, over-the-top costumes, playing to full houses of genuinely appreciative audiences.
However, this first one, Cinderella, nearly put me off for life. It was a ramshackle extravaganza put on at Guildford Civic Hall by Tony Cartwright, a Liverpudlian who thought a producer’s job was to wander around backstage, drinking champagne and spending a lot of time in the dancers’ dressing-room.
The stars of the show included Maggie Moone, a chanteuse who had made her name as resident singer on Name That Tune and Bob Carolgees. Bob had a brilliant act with his hand puppet, Spit the Dog, which was clever, anarchic and horribly funny, although it was clear that Bob was bored with the dog he’d created and was beginning to hate it. He also hated being ‘down South’; he felt that his patter, designed for the Northern club circuit where he’d been born and bred, meant nothing in the cosy Surrey countryside. Maggie was a magnificent Dandini, with great legs, lavish boots and a glint in her eye but the show was a shambles from the start. The wardrobe department was in chaos because the costumes had arrived late and fitted nobody. The set looked as if it had been put up by Harold Steptoe and there was no script – just a few lines of rambling guidance between the songs, like ‘John Challis (Boycie) enters and does his thing for five or ten minutes.’
When I first saw it I was appalled. Did they think I was a stand-up comedian or what? Didn’t they know that actors liked to work with a script? I was almost ready to abandon the show but the money wasn’t bad and my name and mugshot were already out there, writ large over the theatre entrance, so I couldn’t walk out on it.
I thought I’d better stay and see what happened. Astonishingly, although we had strong competition from a much classier production at the town’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, our Cinderella did tremendous business, beating the Arnaud hands down. I guess we had names that were better known to a panto audience, and there was a certain amount of flash and glitter to our cobbled togethereffort. In the end I enjoyed myself, and this turned out to be the first of twenty-one consecutive pantomimes for me.
For the run of Cinderella, I’d been commuting to Guildford from my flat in Sheen Lane. Since I’d got back from Boycie’s outing to the Everglades, I’d seen more of Carol and I was relieved to find how much I’d missed her and how I enjoyed being with her after this short time apart. In fact, we spent Christmas day together at Peter and Myra Egans’ and found we were getting on better than ever. But I was still reluctant to accept that I was back in a full-blown relationship. I suppose that I was finally learning to be a little more circumspect in the way I approached these things.
At the end of an uproarious and inebriated Christmas Day party, I found around my neck a string of pearls, which carried a lingering scent I recognized as Carol’s and a pile of walnut shells around my plate, all cracked open by her, just for me!
Chapter 9
Hawaii Five O
By the time 1992 arrived, Carol and I were practically sharing my flat in Sheen Lane. While I’d been in Miami, I had commissioned her to make some cushion covers and curtains for me, which we installed together. She showed me what she was made of, too, when she had to perform a feeding of the five thousand: not my disciples, but a large gang of my tennis friends, whom I’d asked round for a party without checking that I had any food to give them. All I had in my fridge was a chicken that looked like it had just been
kidnapped from someone’s back yard and a few bits of elderly salad.
I called on Carol for her help and from these unpromising ingredients she managed to produce an astonishing chicken salad that satisfied the whole gang. It was little short of a miracle and an achievement that made a lasting impression on me.
Even so, I was still dragging my heels in accepting that I was in a relationship again. I had no confidence in my ability to survive it. There was, I knew, nothing I could find wrong with Carol – quite the opposite, in fact. As far as I could see, she was everything a man like me could have asked for.
She was funny and beautiful, a brilliant needlewoman, an excellent, resourceful cook and the chemistry between us was magical. Despite all this, I was still reluctant to embark on yet another path that might go nowhere and I resisted all the voices inside me urging me to ask her to move in with me permanently.
To take my mind off this conundrum, I agreed to take part in what looked like another shambolic, out-of- control show, Noel Edmonds’ House Party.
Noel, his show and his compadre, Mr Blobby, had come in for quite a bit of stick and generally hostile criticism but I rather enjoyed them. It was one of the first truly populist shows in which the public, who came to see it recorded, were fully engaged.
Contestants were involved in some remarkably silly competitions, and paid the price of losing with a nasty soaking with some beastly-looking liquid. Most of the jokes were at the expense of someone’s dignity but I guessed if you didn’t take yourself too seriously, you should be able to live with that. All this silliness took place in a bogus medieval manor house in a make-believe folksy village called Crinkly Bottom. Most serious actors would have had major misgivings before agreeing to appear in it.
I overcame my misgivings. I thought it might be fun and, in any case, I was going to look after Boycie, so I insisted that he would only appear at the door and be involved in a formalized sketch.