by John Challis
Brooke and Mattingly also offered Carol the job of wardrobe mistress, which was a good move and very much in her comfort zone. She had run her own costume business in the ’80s that supplied mostly amateur companies with costumes for Gilbert & Sullivan shows – the same period as Maria Marten.
They explained that the writer, Trevor Pilling, was still developing the script and the final product would be something very special. They also had on board my old friend Jean Fergusson (now established in Last of the Summer Wine) and Nuala Conwell who’d made a name for herself in The Bill. David Kelsey was to direct.
We both signed up to work together for the first (and by no means the last) time and drove up to Lincoln for the start of a six-to-eight week tour.
I was mildly alarmed to find that not a lot had happened to improve the script or the construction of the narrative of the show and we could see that David Kelsey was struggling with the material. He wasn’t well either and was having trouble trailing up and down the hills of Lincoln, from where he was staying up near the cathedral to where we were rehearsing at the bottom of the hill by the river.
Carol, trouper that she soon showed herself to be, did what she could to help him, doing his washing and feeding him.
The first sign that Baroque Productions was not a fit and proper organisation cropped up when, halfway through rehearsals, two thirds of the cast didn’t get paid. For a number of the younger actors, this was their first venture after drama school and a rough introduction to the notoriously unstable world of the theatre. The problem was quickly resolved but it was an early- warning sign that the mechanism of the show was not running smoothly.
It was then that Martyn Rose, part lawyer, part fixer, part Rottweiler and part of the production team, appeared on the scene.
Like his partners, he could talk the talk and said he was big fan of Only Fools.
‘Don’t worry, my son,’ he quelled my suspicions. ‘Everything’s in place; all the theatres in the tour have guaranteed us our money.’
I relaxed. With guarantees in place, we couldn’t run into too much trouble.
Shortly after we had opened in Lincoln, I was strongly reminded of how much Only Fools had become embedded in my life. Carol and I were having a final drink in a big pub after the show one evening, when an excited young man came up to us.
‘This must be my lucky day!’ he gulped breathlessly. ‘I’ve just got hitched; this is the end of the party – we always finish up in the pub. Anyway my girlfriend – errr – sorry – my wife, she’d never forgive me if she heard that! – She loves Boycie. Would you creep up behind her and say her favourite line? ‘Stand aside, I am a doctor.Let the dog see the rabbit!’ If you did, she’d be made up!’
He was so animated, I couldn’t turn him down. I raised an eyebrow at Carol and wandered over to deliver the line from a favourite episode, The Chain Gang.
I stood behind her, and as I got to ‘...see the rabbit,’ she stood up, looked around, saw me and collapsed in a total faint. Unfortunately, on the way down, she hit her head on the table.
‘Christ!’ I thought. ‘This only happens with people like Elvis!’
In fact, she was probably already quite drunk, and after much confusion and consternation, the poor girl was carried out, muttering incoherently.
A couple of days later, I saw the young man in the same pub and solicitously asked after his wife.
‘She’s fine, mate. Thanks for ruining my wedding night!’
Maria Marten, having got off to a shaky start in Lincoln, went downhill in the next leg of the tour at Southsea, in the King’s, once a fine old Matcham Variety Theatre, now a sad reflection on the decline of live theatre over the previous 30 years. The King’s Theatre was a magnificent, indulgent Victorian structure, with some handsome Edwardian embellishments. It was full of corridors, balconies, faded plush and peeling murals and could seat over two thousand people. However, the Gods had been closed for years and the place was only ever full for acts like Ken Dodd and then for one night only.
Our mish-mash of a musical with a few names off the telly arrived there and tried to fill it for a week and failed hopelessly, which was when the money ran out.
Nick Brooke and Martyn Rose came to me cap in hand and said we’d have to close unless somebody stumped up some cash to keep it going.
There is a golden rule in investment, which is never to put your money into failing ventures. In fact after my experience with the aloe vera farm, I should have adjusted that to never put your money into any kind of venture.
But I couldn’t bear the thought of the show closing and putting all the young hopefuls out of work in their first job. With a firm promise that I would be paid back, with interest, Frank Jarvis – another member of the company – and I came up with the wonga.
It probably goes without saying that I never saw any of the money again, let alone interest.
I did wonder at the time why Martyn Rose, who was keen to tell anyone how much money he had made as a lawyer, hadn’t come up with the money himself. I guessed he’d had other things to spend it on since when I heard he’d bought himself one of those ‘Lordships of the Manor’ you can buy on eBay, and styled himself Lord Rose of Asheldham.
We struggled on until the show breathed its last and was laid to rest in Poole, Dorset, where Matthew Kelly came along to see us and confirmed what we were no longer in doubt over – that the show just didn’t work, and was probably beyond repair.
It was a shame because it had been the germ of a very good idea and, properly nurtured, it could have turned into something special. But that’s often the way with rare orchids and theatrical musicals.
At least the absence of a show, or anything much else for the next few months, gave Carol and me a chance to bed ourselves in, as it were, in Deanhill Road, while I wondered what was going on with Only Fools. People were constantly asking me what was going to happen next. Was there another series?
I simply didn’t know. There were rumours leaking from John Sullivan’s camp and the BBC that it was going to end with Del and Rodney becoming millionaires and sailing off into the sunset but we were sworn to secrecy.
By this stage, anyway, Sullivan was busy writing a new series, Roger, Roger, about a minicab firm, which eventually went to pilot a couple of years later. David Jason was at Yorkshire TV having great success with Frost, a gruff, old-school detective, with just enough of David’s personal idiosyncrasies to delight his many fans.
Nick Lyndhurst was involved with Marks and Gran’s Goodnight Sweetheart, which was also a great success and ran to six series.
The general feeling was that Only Fools had reached its apogee in the late eighties and the world had moved on, and so had we. We weren’t, after all, getting any younger.
In 1995, before spring had arrived, Carol and I agreed we’d had enough of the English winter and we both wanted to get away for a while. I suggested we kill two birds by flying to Portugal, already warming up, to see what had happened to my aloe vera investment.
This, of course, didn’t really offer the right ingredients for a happy carefree holiday but at least it provided some justification for the trip. I’d had several phone conversations with Michael Slater, which hadn’t encouraged much optimism. He had sounded shifty and nervous, and let slip that he and his wife Alison had split up. That didn’t surprise me. I’d always thought Alison far too much of a ‘good egg’ and genuine person for a devious philanderer like Slater. As a man, I’d usually found Slater good company, until you needed to rely on him for anything, when exchanges would be accompanied by the sound of scurrying feet and hastily closed doors.
Carol and I arrived in Portugal to find he’d been shacked up with a rich ex-pat in Lagoa, who’d soon rumbled him and thrown him out. He was clearly on his uppers and didn’t look as if he were in a position to write a cheque for a tenner, let alone all the money he owed me.
After trying to winkle the truth from all his obfuscation and convoluted bullshit, I gathered that he had built up his ow
n little consortium, with money from several of his mates, including poor Alison’s father, and used that to buy his partnership with the Dutchman. Since then no divis had been paid to him or anyone else, and he’d been conned along with his investors. I soon learned that the others had backed out and written off their money, while, according to Slater, the Dutchman had organized the whole thing so that only he knew where the money was. I went to see the Dutchman myself. He shrugged his shoulders quite a lot, while shaking his head with regret. He said he had no idea Slater had borrowed all the money he had put in. I wondered what difference that made.
Slater claimed that he had started legal proceedings against his ‘partner’, but was looking at years of frustrating litigation, Portuguese law being a notoriously lethargic beast.
It was some measure of his own desperate straits that he was seriously trying to become an actor. To this end, he told me, he had joined a local amateur drama group. I went to see him in a show and suggested afterwards that a thespian career might not be the quickest way out of his hole. In the meantime, although very wary about being sued by anyone himself, he agreed to let me have a legal confirmation of the amount I had invested through him. I didn’t think it would help much. I never received it anyway.
We saw him a couple more times, at a distance in Lagoa but he ran away before we could catch him.
I shrugged my shoulders. While we’re in Portugal, I thought, I may as well show Carol around some of the quaint and beautiful places I got to know on my previous visits, and, as always, we got the most out of our time together there, although the trip won’t go down as the jolliest we’ve ever had. Back in England, snippets of unhopeful information continued to dribble back from Portugal.
Slater was under suspicion of being involved in an art theft; he’d had his passport confiscated. After the trip, I’d bitten the bullet and mentally written off the money I’d given him and put it down to a little life education.
My sense of loss, anyway, was diminished by the early summer, when I found myself doing two jobs at the same time. The first one came about through Nick Angell, who ran Angell Sound where I’d been doing voice-overs for years. He and a BBC producer had heard that Auntie was looking for presenters to fill the well-named graveyard slot – 4.00 to 6.00 am – on BBC Radio Two. Nick immediately thought of me, he said, although that was probably because I was the next person to walk through the door.
He put it to me. Idler that I am, I loved the idea of sitting in a studio for maybe two hours a day, playing all the music I liked, chatting to interesting hand-picked guests and generally offering my thoughts and views on anything I liked to millions of enthralled listeners.
Nick and the producer put together a short demo of me doing the job, JC - DJ. We cobbled together a few ideas, with a bit of Boycie, a call on the appropriate music sources and produced a ten-minute sampler. We sent it off, without any great hopes – at least on my part – and didn’t hear anything until a month or so later, when we got a call. ‘Yes, we like it. When can you start?’
That was a shock. I hadn’t thought at all how I was going to fill two whole hours – even at that ungodly hour of the morning.
For a start, although I’d gamely volunteered to choose all the music for the show, I soon realized that most of the stuff I wanted to play was miles from Radio Two’s play-list. Besides, I was a technical moron and hadn’t a clue how to deal with all the knobs, faders, dials, woofers and tweeters. I’d no idea what I was going to talk about but the next thing I knew, we were on. Luckily, Nick Angell was as excited – more so, in fact – as I was. It would be, after all, an Angell Sound production. We got down to work, with Nick picking me up at three in the morning in his Porsche Carrera and we hurtled through the deserted London streets like a couple of late-night hellraisers, to arrive at Broadcasting House, nodded in by surprisingly alert commissionaires – old soldiers mostly, I was told – even before the rosy-fingered dawn had got a grip on Upper Regent Street.
I wasn’t a natural, though. At first I was terrible; being an actor I tended to ‘act’ what I thought a real DJ would say and do – like Tony Blackburn with added syrup – and was hopelessly naff. When I came ‘off script’ and started improvising, I found myself rambling around in circles, which drove the producers mad as they waited vainly for their cues. But quite quickly, I sort of got the hang of it.
The Boycie bits worked well enough and some of the features we’d invented zipped along – an up-the-garden-path competition, a tongue-in-cheek sports feature, and a slot in which I talked to other people who were up and about at that time of the ‘morning’.
The trouble was that it wasn’t really working in conjunction with the other job I’d landed, appearing in two plays running in tandem at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre – a summer festival always including a Shakespeare play and usually a musical of some sort. I was to play Lord Stanley in Richard III, directed by Brian Cox, a well-regarded Scottish actor who was also starring as Harold Hill, the main role in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, directed by Ian Talbot.
It was hard enough during preparation, working at the Beeb from sparrow-fart to six, then rehearsing all day and worse during the performances, doing the shows at night then getting up a few hours later to go back to work as a DJ.
Theatre in the open air can be wonderful, and I expect it was in ancient Greece and Rome where they went in for this a lot, but, of course, they had the weather for it.
In England, it’s wonderful too, when conditions are right – mainly because that’s so bloody rare. Working in Ludlow Castle, for example, when nothing is stirring inside the vast stone walls and the swifts are sporting across a cerulean, then rosy sky, is utterly magical: when it rains, it’s hell.
The same applies to Regent’s Park, with the added sporadic irritation of extraneous sounds of helicopters, lawnmowers and motorbikes revving around the Inner Circle, as well as occasional animal noises drifting in the wind from the Zoo. And in one instance, as we fifteenth- century barons stood in a group, planning our next coup, while the rain trickled down our necks, under our costumes into our boots, a trio of ducks waddled across the stage, quacking furiously.
Seasoned sado-masochistic watchers of open-air theatre would naturally come prepared with waxed ponchos and hats or – less elegantly – black plastic rubbish bags with Tesco bags for hats and would sit there steadfastly in a steady downpour, daring us to leave the stage. We would continue until a sepulchral voice from behind the audience intoned: ‘Would the actors kindly leave the stage?’
‘No love, not you. He said actors,’ giggled the mischievous Harriet Thorpe, playing Elizabeth Woodville.
It was a good cast, with Lady Anne played by the very lovely Natascha McElhone, who went on to star in Hollywood movies and a major US networked sitcom, Californication while Jasper Britton (son of Tony, brother of Fern) brilliantly played the eponymous Dick, with the help of a useful limp he’d acquired in a road accident a few years before. It says something for Carol’s trust in me that she had (at least, expressed) no objections when I got into the routine of dropping Natascha off every night after the show. Carol was right, of course. I was untouchable, refusing any offers of coffee on delivery.
Alongside Brian Cox in The Music Man, the part of Marian Paroo was played by the classy Liz Robertson, who had starred in many West End Musicals. I played Mayor Shinn, a dyed-in-the-wool martinet who wouldn’t allow anything remotely anarchic to interfere with his idea of how a respectable Iowa community should be run. The production was a great success and we took it on to Edinburgh and the Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford, while it transpired that my career as a BBC disc jockey had run its course after just eight weekly sessionss, never to be repeated (although naturally, I live in hope – not!)
In June 1995, the Government had recently announced that marriages could now take place in venues other than churches or register offices. One of the first places to apply and be granted a licence for holding weddings was the wonderful Rege
ncy fantasy of Brighton Pavilion. The fourth wedding to take place there, on 2 June was between one John Spurley Challis and his bride, Carol Ann Davies, née Palmer.
It was, unlike my previous three marriages, a quiet, unrowdy event, witnessed only by my good friends Keith Washington and Madeleine Howard. They were almost as happy as me to see me married again.
Carol looked truly magnificent in a cream suit and whacking great hat that made her six inches taller than me. I was dark-suited, and bearded, due to being Lord Stanley in Regent’s Park. There was another show that evening, so after a good lunch at Pinnochio’s, an Italian restaurant near the theatre we all drove back to London.
Despite the understated nature of our wedding day, it has turned out to be, without doubt, the most significant day of my life, which had been completely changed for ever after by my own unconditional commitment to Carol and hers to me.
Remarriage is often referred to as the triumph of hope over experience and in my case, with three failures behind me, that hope had to be pretty strong – much stronger than I could have imagined possible four years earlier, when my life was running on empty and booze was filling the void.
Although, in theory, I’d always thought I valued the feeling of being alone and free of relationships and commitment, I simply wasn’t good at it. Besides I also needed a chum, a mate to share my experiences. Up until now, though, I’d been very inept in selecting those with whom to do my sharing. Although it is often said that an actor without a wife or a mortgage is best placed to take advantage of all the opportunities that come his (or her) way, in my view, that actor would also miss out on a lot of real life.
For the first time in a long time, I could stand back, look at myself objectively and say I was happy. Of course, there are always things that actors think they should be doing and jobs they should be getting when they’re not but I also knew that life couldn’t have been better for me at this stage. Being with Carol had successfully hauled me right out of the doldrums in which I’d been floating for two or three catastrophic years. I’d enjoyed doubling up as a Beeb DJ while playing in Regent’s Park and then at the Yvonne Arnaud, and, although Only Fools had been shoved onto the back burner, it was still on the stove and the rumours of a return and the eventual resolution to the Trotter brothers’ perpetual frustration were stronger than ever.