by John Challis
When I was first on the show, I’d forgotten about Mr Blobby – a large, round, pink cartoon character, who would appear unexpectedly from anywhere, to barge around anarchically and usually finish up sitting on top of Noel. I found him hilarious. Was there something wrong with me?
I ended up doing four of Noel’s shows and met an eclectic bunch of people– Frank Carson, David Seaman (the Gunners’ goalkeeper), Joan Collins and Spike Milligan.
David ‘Safe Hands’ Seaman reckoned that the goals he saved in the European Championships were nothing compared to being on Noel’s show. ‘I’ve never been so nervous in my life,’ he told me.
Joan Collins walked in like the Queen Mother. Everyone duly genuflected slightly when they spoke to her. She sat in the middle of the BBC make-up room, beneath signs warning of dire retribution for anyone caught smoking and lit up a king-size Marlboro Light, in an elegant cigarette holder, without a flicker of regard for the rules.
Nobody said a word. I was impressed.
She gave it her all on the show and I ended up dancing with her at the end, which made it worth the visit.
Spike Milligan had been a hero of mine since I used to listen to the Goon Show with my Dad as a teenager in the ’50s. I loved it that his anarchic and surreal meeting with Noel on the show bore no relation whatsoever to the rehearsal script. I had to tell him afterwards what a pleasure it was to be in the same show as him and how he’d had me glued to the radio as a kid and ever since.
‘Oh, you poor fool,’ he quavered and to the room in general: ‘This man needs treatment!’
It was part of the show’s energy that the audience never knew who was going to come in through the front door. I couldn’t believe the deafening reception I got when Noel opened it to me. I felt as if I’d just hammered the ball into the roof of the net for the Arsenal winner against Spurs in the Cup Final!
It was fun but four shows were enough. I was asked to do more with Neil Morrissey, perhaps because they found actors better at sticking to the script, but I didn’t want to get too identified with the show.
By way of contrast, in February I was back at the Mill in Sonning, for my third appearance there, in a serious Ira Levin play called Veronica’s Room, directed, once again, by Myra Egan. Levin was already deservedly famous for his story, Rosemary’s Baby, a movie starring John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow. Veronica’s Room was another dark piece that blurred reality with fantasy, leading to obsession and murder.
Two middle-aged retainers of a great plantation house in the Southern States lure a young couple into the spooky old place because the girl looks very like Veronica, the deceased daughter of the last owner of the house. One of the retainers turns out to be Veronica’s sister and persuades the girl to pay the role of her dead sibling.
She has no idea how to reproduce the woman’s fantasy version of Veronica and can’t do it. As a result she is smothered on stage.
In our production, the pathological sister was played by Mary Peach, a ’60s screen star, whom I had admired a lot, particularly in No Love for Johnnie. It seemed that Myra was deliberately reawakening my past with her choice of leading ladies.
I fell back into the stagecraft of role playing with great relish – it took me back once more to my early days in repertory, where I loved escaping into my character and being someone else for a while. However, I was brought down to earth with a rude thump one night in Veronica’s Room.
The play opens in a fusty old nineteenth-century attic, with dust covers draped over the furniture. Everything you could discern through the gloom was from a past time – no one has been up in the attic for years.
A sliver of light shows under the door; muffled voices are heard, the door creaks open, two dimly-lit characters appear. Mary Peach and I, the middle-aged retainers, shuffle on, wearing shabby old clothes.
I uttered the first line of the play in a well-rehearsed Southern drawl. ‘We should never have come up here.’
In the silence that followed, you could have cut the tension with a knife.
After a few moments, a woman in the front row leaned in to her neighbour.
‘That’s him!’ she said in a clearly audible whisper. ‘That’s Boycie!’
I guessed she had been studying her programme, which gave the cast in order of appearance. The curse of episodic television had struck again.
Veronica’s Room had not been an easy play for the cast. For one thing, the girl’s murder on stage was quite harrowing for us and there were no laughs to counteract the gloom. Tom Hughes, who ran the theatre, was also concerned that it played to only 85 per cent capacity. A West End theatre would have killed for that sort of figure but Tom was used to closer to 100 per cent. ‘That’s why we don’t do this sort of play very often,’ he said. ‘Bloody good acting, though!’ he added tactfully.
While Veronica’s Room was going on I could work in London during the day and had an enjoyable session appearing as a voice-over the phone in one of my favourite TV comedies at the time, One Foot in the Grave, with Richard Wilson as Victor Meldrew. I was playing a burglar who had broken into the Meldrews’ house and stolen a video recorder, which, once he’d got it home, he couldn’t operate and he was ringing Victor to ask him how it worked. A nice little scene, which evoked, inevitably, the famous Meldrew cry – ‘I don’t beleeve it!’
I had to admire the way Richard had been able to endow the grumpy old Victor Meldrew with such a strong, inimitable personality.
When Veronica’s Room was finished, they must have liked something about my performance as I was asked back to do a fourth play at the Mill within a year – a record, I was told. Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings was being put on a month or two later, directed by Ted Craig (who ran the Warehouse Theatre in Croydon).
My part was that of Bernard, a limp, ineffectual doctor, who has devised his own puppet show. He is asked round each year at Christmas by the same family to give a performance of, in this case, The Three Little Pigs for the unseen children in the play.
His show is beset by a string of cocks-ups and misfortunes. Bernard is bullied by the grandfather of the family and the show falls to pieces as a result of the barracking and an incompetent assistant. It is heart-rending, typical Ayckbourn, as he strips his characters bare for us to laugh at, then reveals all their weaknesses and insecurities, making us feel guilty about laughing – bittersweet, middle-class English comedy at its finest.
Whether one likes it or not, one’s fiftieth birthday marks a key stage in life. After that point has been reached, others only refer to you as ‘Young Man’ in a spirit of irony. As a twenty year old, I perceived people over fifty as past their sell-by date, committed only to a downward slope and definitely ‘old’. But when I reached my half-century,I found it almost impossible to grasp that it was over thirty years since I’d set off at the wheel of the Argyle Theatre for Youth’s Commer van, to play twenty shows of Pinocchio each week all over the country.
In gloomier moments I asked myself what I had learned since then – how much had I progressed? The answers I gave myself weren’t encouraging... but at least I could now risk a few optimistic thoughts about my love life.
So far, in the months since I’d met Carol, it looked faintly possible that I might one day find myself in a satisfactory relationship that didn’t involve a neurotic, a psychopath or an egomaniac (apart from myself). And I certainly didn’t feel old.
Being fifty didn’t seem to me like a reason for celebrating on a lavish scale, especially as it was an event which I was in half a mind to ignore, so I compromised by marking the occasion with a party for a dozen close friends at The Depot, a terrific restaurant at the bottom of White Hart Lane in Barnes.
Carol was there, to be at my side, with Keith and Madeleine (who had been so loyal during my mad Inge phase), Bob Hankinson and other members of the Coach & Horses community. Terry Booth, who was in Season’s Greetings at the Mill, came with Carla Wansey Jackson.
After that, and once Season’s Greetings ha
d ended its run, Carol and I seemed to have reached a tipping point in our relationship. I was beginning to realize it was time to get off the fence, or lose the impetus of where we’d got to by then, and I was ready to be receptive, when she subtly hinted that we might go halfway round the world together to visit the Hawaiian Islands.
Carol had told me a lot about Hawaii and how she’d found her spiritual home there. She’d first been ten years before, after reading about the place and being strongly attracted by what she’d learned.
On her first visit she’d met Tom Selleck and his cronies, while he was there making his TV series, Magnum PI. She had fallen in love with the islands and the kind of life they offered and was determined to go back as often as possible. By seriously concentrating her resources, she’d managed to go back no less than eight times since her first visit. I was impressed by her enthusiasm and the pictures she showed me, shots of her looking bronzed, fit and magnificent on the beach at Waikiki, surrounded usually by suitably handsome men and resplendent in front of the Outrigger Canoe Club, with her Canadian friend, Dorothy, a dolly-drop, trolley-dolly who looked like a girl in a 1940s ice-cream ad.
I’d never been anywhere like these Pacific islands and, just as Carol had been, I felt drawn to them. And although she and I still didn’t know each other well, we felt, ‘What the hell! Let’s go for it and see where it leads.’
We flew via Los Angeles, where the riots were in full flow, even producing threats to shoot down 747s landing at LAX. Unscathed we carried on and touched down in the tropical heat of Honolulu, where I had to adjust to the alarming idea that we were adrift on a few small blobs of volcanic outcrop in the middle of the Pacific, two thousand miles from the nearest continental land mass.
Carol took me everywhere she knew, from island to island – finding the spot where Captain James Cook was murdered by disgruntled natives in 1779, seeing the sun rise on the volcanic moonscape of Haleakala on Maui, exploring the sulphurous crater of Kilauea on the Big Island and sitting on the beach for sunset at the Colony Surf Hotel in Honolulu.
Carol captured a part of each place we went with dozens of photographs... of me. In every single one, I appear to be in some kind of Victorian photographic pose – sitting with elbow on knee, looking into the middle distance, or shading my eyes with one hand, and the other curled on my hip, or lying on my side with my chin leaning on my hand. It was as if I had some kind of affliction that made it impossible for me simply to stand there and look normal, as if I were just enjoying myself.
It was something that I did instinctively. It certainly wasn’t part of a plan to have me photographed like a nineteenth-century cricket player all over the Hawaiian Islands. It was, I guess, the old actor’s defence of simply covering up and becoming someone else when not so sure of my position with the other party.
Beside us on the Colony Surf beach were the Outrigger Canoe Club and the Hau Tree Restaurant, on whose wall was posted a notice: ‘In case of Tsunami, keep calm, pay your bill, then run like hell!’
On this beach, Carol introduced me to Tom Selleck. Magnum PI was over, after a long run, but Tom had grown to love the islands so much that he’d bought a place up the coast from Diamond Head on Oahu and still liked to come down to the exclusive Outrigger Club.
Tom was lounging on the beach, looking like a god, and holding forth in a curious, high-pitched voice. He was a charming man and, it seemed, bewilderingly attractive to almost everyone he came across. He was keen to hear about my work in England and sympathized when I told him I had no idea if Only Fools would continue into the ’90s or would just run out of steam.
‘Tell me about it!’ he said. ‘It’s hell! I have no idea what I’m gonna do next.’
It was hard to believe. Here I was sitting in paradise, talking to a major American TV star about being out of work. He seemed to be coping, though. When he was ready to go, he leaped to his feet with a friendly wave, ‘Later, John,’ and ran down the beach to hurl himself into the ocean. He swam in a strong, steady crawl for at least a mile before emerging to run back up the beach to change for the evening.
I shook my head. Did that really happen?
Our three weeks in paradise were cut short by a summons to London to feature in Marks and Gran’s The New Statesman with Rick Mayall. I played a grenade-festooned Che-Guevara type whom Alan B’Stard had to bring to the table with his tribal enemy (played by Don Henderson) to be manipulated for his own b’stardly ends. Apart from the sheer wonder of being introduced to the islands of Hawaii, I was reeling from the joy of spending so much time with a woman who seemed so close to me in spirit. I had never met anyone with whom I had so much in common – so much that it almost overwhelmed us both and seemed almost too good to be true.
We soon realized, though, that it was true. It was inevitable that, when we arrived back in London, we decided to live together. Carol sold her basement in Chiswick and squeezed, with all her paraphernalia, into my flat in Sheen Lane.
As we were both six-footers and needed a lot of space, it was pretty obvious that this place wasn’t big enough for the both of us and we started looking for somewhere more spacious.
Before that could happen, I was in rehearsals for a stage play, Jack’s Out at the Bush Theatre in West London. Whenever I’m in that part of London, I think of the Evening Standard headline: MURDER HUNT IN WEST LONDON: POLICE COMB SHEPHERD’S BUSH– or was it a spoof?
The Bush Theatre at the time was run by Dominic Dromgoole, son of Patrick, who later went on to be artistic director at the Globe Theatre on the South Bank. Jack’s Out was written by a promising young writer, Danny Miller, and directed by Ken McClymont. Like Brighton Rock, it was based around the Brighton underworld, and my character, Frankie, was a gay Catholic psychopath, who is reacting to the news that Jack – a big cheese in the local gangland – has been released from jail eight years earlier than expected, seeking retribution against those who have transgressed in his absence.
Frankie was a fascinating and complex role, which aims to convey the man’s deeply embedded sense of accountability, set against his own self-righteousness and close ‘personal’ relationship with God.
The play worked, but only in parts, and in some ways Frankie was just too dominant a character. There were also a number of practical difficulties in the production. At a point in the action, my character has to exit at the back of the set, to re-enter later through the audience entrance at the front. In the Bush Theatre, the only way to do this was to go out through the emergency exit into the street and walk round the corner to the front of the theatre.
There was usually a fairly motley selection of characters lurking around Shepherd’s Bush of an evening and invariably as I made my exit in full make-up from the building to the street, I would be accosted by members of the public for one reason or another – a light, the price of a cup of tea, to see if I required any ganja.
One night a small Cockney geezer stood his ground in front of me and grabbed his mate. ‘’Ere, look – it’s old Charlie! ’Allo, mate, how yer doin’? Let’s ‘ave a drink.’
‘No, no,’ I muttered, trying step past him and anxious to get round for my re-entrance. ‘I’m not who you think I am. I’m in the middle of a show. I’m an actor,’ I added, perhaps a little unconvincingly.
The little feller looked at me quizzically for a moment. ‘Well, we’re all actors, ain’t we? You wanna see me how much acting I ’as to do to sell me cucumbers in the mornin’!’
After that, my entrance as the revengeful killer with missionary zeal whom I was supposed to be portraying wasn’t easy, as I couldn’t stop giggling.
On another occasion, one of my tennis-playing mates, Peter Jones, had come to see the play. A big bluff Welshman, he arrived late having booked a seat in the front row. Owing to the extremely intimate nature of the Bush Theatre he was crouching low so as not to be noticed as he scrambled along between the front row and the stage to reach his seat, until he found himself face to face with me during one of my soliloqu
ies to the Almighty, begging forgiveness for my mortal sins. It was a tricky moment for both of us. Peter spent the rest of the show with his head down, hardly daring to look up at me. He’s still a good friend, though.
We had some positive reviews for the play but as usual they came too late. The Independent loved it and the Evening Standard thought it powerful, with a ‘stand-out performance’ from John Challis, who came over as a ‘sort of low-grade Robert de Niro’, which I took as a compliment.
Towards the end of the two-week run, I was handed a note backstage from someone called Christina Shepherd, who had recently started up a new agency and was looking for clients. If I were interested, would I get in touch?
At the time, Tim Combe was my agent, which he’d been almost since the start of Only Fools. Being an ex-BBC man, he knew all the ins and outs of Auntie’s labyrinthine methods and had done a fine job negotiating all my contracts over that time. He had also looked after Buster Merryfield for some years, so he was almost part of the team. But the world and the business were changing. Tim had started to downsize and his partnership with Carey Ellison, who’d started the actor’s directory Spotlight, belonged to a gentler age.
Christina was from a new generation, with a thrusting attitude, which I thought suited the times, so I signed up with her. Later I introduced her to Ken Macdonald, who was unsettled at his agency and he joined her too. I stayed with her for the next few years and through several Only Fools specials.
After Jack’s Out, I had the next Only Fools Christmas special looming. There had been no regular series during 1992 but the feeling seemed to be that there was still life in Nelson Mandela House and I was very happy to be back with the team again. It was a year on since the Trotters’ brush with the Miami mafia and Del seemed temporarily to have run out of motivation.
While he’s clearing out his grandad’s allotment (at the orders of the council) he digs out a couple of old chemical drums which, with help from Trigger and Denzil, are disposed of during the night.