by John Challis
I was sanguine about it. Being with Carol had made me more relaxed and circumspect. As far as I was concerned, marriage to her was an unqualified success. ‘At last!’ I sometimes said to myself, looking back on the three previous failures. Carol and I had so much in common and, very importantly, the same sense of humour. Once we had moved into Deanhill Road, we spent half our time happily beavering away tarting up the house and sorting out the overgrown garden. The other half of the time was spent working, for me, with voices (as usual) and a new production of Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle which, those of you who have read Being Boycie, the first half of this little memoir, will know, I’d appeared in when it was first produced at the National.
This time it was to be at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton and I was playing the lead, Herr Zangler (which Dinsdale Landen had played in the original show.) I was chuffed to be asked for my suggestions for some of the casting. I managed to find roles for Madeleine Howard (Keith Washington’s partner) and Beverley Francis. I could just see Madeleine in the elegant Viennese fashion of the period. Beverley Walden, as she was known, was married to Richard Francis, a silver dealer I’d got to know during the period when I was messing about with antiques with Sabina and her mother and she revelled as I did in Stoppard’s lyrical joke fest. I also managed to wangle parts for quite a few of the cast from the distressingly flopped Maria Marten.
Doing Razzle was a joy, as it had been at the National but this time I had the part that drove the show. I made the most of it and it went very well.
Tom Stoppard’s secretary came to see it. Stoppard himself followed this up with a letter, saying he’d heard great reports of Patrick Sandford’s production and he was delighted to think of ‘Zangler and co whooping it up at the Nuffield.’
I’d run into Stoppard earlier in the year in bizarre circumstances, which showed me how the few instances of closeness that he and I had shared at a critical time in his life in New York, (just before Night and Day arrived there for the first time and raised his stock to giddy heights), had subsequently dissipated.
Carol and I were waiting with a few rowdy friends in the foyer of the Hammersmith Odeon to see Bob Dylan in concert. I spotted Tom, in ‘I’m not really here’ mode, lurking by the box office. The concert was a sell-out, and Tom evidently had some tickets he didn’t need and was trying to dispose of them. This was a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do, especially with tickets going at a heavy premium but he looked very put out to have been found doing it himself.
I was certainly very surprised and reacted clumsily, saying something crass like, ‘So, this is what you’re up to now.’
One of my friends, already drunk, lurched over to us. ‘Well look who we’ve got here,’ he bellowed. ‘Amazing who you find at a Dylan gig!’
I tried to introduce them but Stoppard had fled. It was an embarrassing encounter all round and I was sad that the strong connection I thought we’d made when we’d been working together ten years before seemed to have had no real basis.
Bob Dylan, by the way, whom I’d never really liked, was a big disappointment. Even after all these years of practice, he still can’t play the mouth-organ.
Chapter 12
Swan Song?
Part of 1996 was taken up with making two musicals for the BBC, a job which I got through David Kelsey who’d come in to try to sort out Maria Marten a couple of years before. First I did Guys & Dolls with Mandy Patinkin, Anita Dobson and Claire Brown. Mandy is often cited as the greatest interpreter ever of Sondheim. He asked me if I was happy with his acting.
‘You’re acting’s fine,’ I assured him. ‘It’s your singing I’m worried about.’
Luckily, he laughed. It was so great to be doing this show with Mandy, I could hardly believe I was doing it.
Then Brian Pringle and I played the two hoodlums in Kiss Me Kate and sang ‘Brush up your Shakespeare’ together. Sadly, although I was really enjoying myself with this kind of work and I was in no doubt that I’d done the right thing in marrying Carol, I was still drinking too much. Maybe I just thought it was all too good to last. It was as if I were deliberately clinging on to the Old Me, the former philanderer, the actor who could go out and meet his friends for a binge whenever he felt like it, the free agent who needed no one’s permission to be where he wanted to be. It seemed there was an old devil inside me which I thought had been exorcized when I’d married Carol but was still hanging on in there, demanding attention.
Now I found myself pouring a few stiff whiskies long before the sun was over the yard-arm, followed by a trip to the CD player for a few favourite rowdy tracks – The Stones’ ‘Honky Tonk Women’, Ian Hunter’s ‘Once Bitten Twice Shy’, or Three Dog Night’s ‘Mama Told Me Not To Come’, always at full blast. I would stagger back to the kitchen in Deanhill Road to find Carol.
‘Come on darling,’ I’d burble. ‘Lez dance!’
Carol wasn’t impressed. ‘You only ever ask me to dance when you’re pissed.’
‘Pissed? Me, pissed?’ Don’t be ridiculous! If you don’t want to dance, I’ll find someone who will! I’m going out...’ I lifted an unsteady eyebrow... ‘and I may be some time.’ …followed by exit through back door, trip over cat and flowerpots, blunder round garden, stagger back to door, slump inside and collapse on chair at kitchen table in state of gloomy self-loathing as I wondered why anyone would put up with this kind of behaviour and for how long. Thank God these last convulsions of my departing inner devil didn’t last forever and became rarer, especially as the happy reality of life with Carol sank in.
Towards the end of 1996, Tony Dow and Gareth Gwenlam assembled the whole team to record what we assumed would be the last ever three specials of Only Fools & Horses, to be run on three separate nights over the Christmas holiday. It felt quite strange to be preparing a swan song, although we’d all accepted that the show had to come to an end some time and that it would be better to finish on a high, rather than let it trickle away into oblivion as our hair became more silver and our teeth less abundant. But it was damned hard to let go.
The show had come to mean so much to so many people and all the main characters had become household names. We’d all been part of making it what it was and wondered if ending it now would consign us all to the scrap heap.
‘Sorry, love, the show’s over. So is your career, by the way.’
It didn’t feel like that, though. David and Nick, obviously, had had plenty of other starring roles during the fifteen-year run of the series, while Roger Lloyd Pack had had great success with his part in Dawn French’s Vicar of Dibley, as well as innumerable acclaimed stage appearances. Ken, Paul and I all had other avenues opening up.
Besides, as Kenny Macdonald optimistically declared: ‘Anyway, we’ll never be off, son. They’ll open a new channel called BBC No Choice and we’ll be on non-stop – trust me! I’m an actor.’ How prescient this turned out to be. Since the BBC’s UK Gold arrived, we’ve been on practically every day of the year.The three 60-minute specials, comprising a continuous story, were to be shown on 25, 27 and 29 December. The first of them, Heroes and Villains contains one of the great set pieces of the series, when Del and Rodney, dressed as Batman and Robin, run down the street, late for a party, and accidentally stop a mugging that’s in progress.
When they reach the party, they’re greeted by a smirking Boycie who has ‘forgotten’ to tell them that the host had died that morning and the party has become a wake.
‘Must have completely slipped my mind,’ Boycie says, as Del, in shock, presses the button on his aerosol fun-foam can.
It was a sensational piece of comedy drama and John Sullivan reluctantly confessed afterwards that he thought he would never write anything as good again.
He may have been right. This was the episode in which everything came together – his hero, Del was a universal character with whom all but the most smug and self-righteous could in some part identify, with his struggle to be somebody, a winner, a significant man of affairs. He
was a contender, not a bum, like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, and every time he got knocked down, he got up again and was in there, pitching away, never giving up. Heroes and Villains shown at 9pm on Christmas Day pulled 21.3 million viewers, the best we had ever scored.
The story continues with Modern Men, in which Rodney’s wife Cassandra miscarries their longed-for baby. There’s a much-loved scene in the hospital, in which Del tells Rodney to ‘stand up, be a man and take it on the chin,’ before bursting into tears himself.
Two days later the third and final part was shown. Everyone knew the series was going to end but no one knew how. The bookies, nearly always reliable in these things, made the favourite option that of Del and Rodney finally becoming millionaires, as Del had so often predicted.
But they didn’t know how that was going to happen.
Naturally, everyone on the show knew but had been sworn to the strictest secrecy, as, indeed, we had been for the Batman and Robin sequence in the first of the three.
The press have their ways of discovering people’s secrets (as Lord Leveson has discovered) but John Sullivan was taking no chances. He was desperate to keep everything a surprise for the viewers. Look-outs were posted and decoys deployed. While filming the scene in Boycie’s showroom in Bristol, where Rodney buys a Roller for Del, the production team were worried about a sudden increase in helicopter flights. We all assumed that they were press, as they must have known we were filming something, somewhere.
John, as always, came up with a great, unexpected twist to bring the thing to a climax. He produces Raquel’s dad, James Turner, played by Michael Jayston (whom I’d met at the RSC years before and subsequently played cricket with).
Mr and Mrs Turner come to dinner at Nelson Mandela House. It is not a great success, but the next day, when James comes back to collect his car, he finds Del and Rodney rummaging around in their lock up. Mr T is an antique dealer, programmed to seek and find hidden bargains and he is very impressed to find an unusual watch that the brothers had acquired in a house clearance some 16 years before. He realizes that it may well be the long-lost, incredibly valuable Harrison Marine Watch. Del and Rodney take it off to Sotheby’s who authenticate it and auction it for £6.2 million.
Once the extraordinary truth has sunk in, the Trotters go straight round to Boycie’s garage to buy a Rolls Royce and then to the Nag’s Head. As they make their entrance into the bar, they are greeted by a moment’s silence, until Denzil starts clapping, followed swiftly by everyone else, except Boycie. Eventually, even Boycie joins in and there is a wonderful moment as Del looks up at Boycie, who murmurs through gritted teeth, ‘Well done, Trotter,’ while Mike, behind the bar yells, ‘Drinks on the house!’ followed by a great scramble for the free drinks.
The brothers are ecstatic for a few weeks, but having got themselves big, plush houses and posh cars, they are soon bored, with nothing to strive and duck and dive for, until Del decides that with their new-found wealth, they can take on the big boys in the financial-futures market.
As they walk off into the sunset, Del is back to his old, optimistic self.
‘This time next year, Rodney, we’ll be billionaires!’
John Sullivan had made a grand job of this final episode, carried off with his customary ability to stay true to the characters, even in this fantasy sequence and everyone was left feeling very emotional.
We finished the studio scenes at the point where Mike has announced drinks on the house, after which, the audience rose to their feet and gave us a standing ovation... the only time this has been heard of at the BBC. We were overcome, and stood there awkwardly, not knowing what to do, whether to embrace or cry. We men were disinclined to do either (this was, after all, back in the ’90s) but there were plenty of damp cheeks among our female colleagues.
Time on Our Hands pulled in an audience of 24.3 million – a new record for a comedy programme on British TV.
The evening of transmission, I was rung by several showbiz hacks for my reaction to this amazing statistic. I hadn’t seen it go out, because I was otherwise engaged in another pantomime at Redhill in Surrey. This show featured Christopher Beeny, the original footman in Upstairs Downstairs, as director and Sarah the Cook, along with Christopher Timothy, best known as James Herriot. My role was King Rat, another romantic lead in the popular Dick Whittington. Dick himself was played by Mark Speight, who couldn’t sing, so had to have his numbers sung by another member of cast off-stage, as he mimed his intention of getting down to London with his cat.
It wasn’t his fault – just a matter of lack of communication in the heat of the moment, when his agent had told the producer that Mark could probably sing, if pushed, but would rather not. This evidently got lost in translation and came out, ‘Oh yes, he can sing!’
But in any case, Mark was very popular with the kids for his extraordinary talent for producing instant pictures with whatever was at hand – paintbrush, charcoal, or just pieces of material. I noticed that he seemed quite tense during the whole run of the show and didn’t seem to be enjoying it at all. I was very sad, a few years later, to hear confirmation of his unhappiness at that time, and his eventual suicide.
The fifth ‘name’ on the Dick Whittington bill was Nightshade from the show Gladiators. This was, in theory, an interesting addition. However, it soon became clear that Ms Nightshade had the greatest of difficulty adhering to the simplest of theatre disciplines, like – for example – arriving on time. Traditionally the cast always turn up to a show at least half an hour before curtain up in case some glitch has cropped up – like the Principal Boy drowning – and alternative plans have to be made. Nightshade often arrived five minutes before the show started, however much she was begged to come earlier. By way of explanation, she said she was ‘trying to have a baby,’ which invited some vivid speculation.
My first reaction on hearing we were being joined by Gladiator Nightshade was that at least she would know how to fight. But no. She couldn’t, as they say, have hit a barn door with a Howitzer. In a carefully-choreographed fight between King Rat and the avenging Nightshade, a battle using king-sized cotton buds, I had to improvise every performance as she always forgot the routine and exposed herself to serious injury – from me?
‘What’s it like battling with Nightshade?’ a punter asked me after the show one night. ‘Deadly,’ I quipped in a fit of honesty.
Nightshade may not have been enjoying the show, but plenty of the punters were – one gang especially, the Boycie Appreciation Society, whose members had come from as far as Scotland and Swansea, all moustachioed and dressed in shiny suits with loud tasteless ties. They all held between thumb and forefinger an unlit slim panatella and carried an empty plastic brandy glass. They sat in the second row, cheering uproariously when King Rat appeared and booing vigorously at the Good Fairy. Apart from that, they behaved impeccably and when I met them afterwards they were tremendously polite, even deferential, promising not to bother me again. I was flattered that they had gone to so much trouble.
I told the story of the Boycie Appreciation Society to a hack from one of the tabloids who had come round seeking a quote about the Only Fools final viewing figures. It was met with open-mouthed disbelief. Now this kind of thing is quite common at big events – a gang of robed and bearded Osama bin Ladens showed up at an Arsenal game, after a rumour had taken hold that Al Qaeda’s dear leader was a Gooner and had been spotted at Highbury’s Clock End.
And I was amused to see on TV a few years later at Glastonbury festival a large cohort of men wearing beards and cork-dangling hats mustering to mob up their hero, Rolf Harris.
Chapter 13
Fresh Fields
After the exertions of King Rat in Dick Whittington and trying to fight with Nightshade, Carol agreed that a change of scene, an easy time and a dose of Mr Sun would do us both good. Taking advantage of the fact that we always seemed to enjoy the same things, we booked ourselves a Swann Hellenic cruise on the Minerva, a rather beautiful ship
which was sailing from Singapore to Colombo, taking in the surrounding islands and countries of the eastern Indian Ocean. After a cultural feast in exotic places previously unknown to either of us, and almost overstuffed with fresh knowledge, we returned happy but a little reluctantly to our home in the suburbs.
In contrast to the wide-open views of the Far East, our own surroundings in Richmond, although comfortable and convenient, seemed to be closing in on us. It had been announced that the parking in our bijou cul-de-sac was to be controlled, the Upper Richmond Road was made a ‘Red Route’ and the graffiti that had first started appearing at Mortlake Station was creeping down the District Line towards us. We recognized that the writing was, so to speak, on the walls, which seemed to be closing in on us. It was then that we began to feel twitchy and the idea of moving out of London first took root.
In the meantime, though, I had more work to do. As I may have remarked earlier in these memoirs, one of the undeniable advantages of being in one of the most popular TV shows of all time is that quite a few doors are opened to one – at least, one tends to be closer to the thinking part of a producer’s mind – in this case, early in 1997, in the active little bonce of producer/impresario, Paddy Wilson.
Paddy was putting together an interesting cast to tour Neil Simon’s excellent play, Laughter on the 23rd Floor which had just finished a good run in the West End with Gene Wilder in the lead role. The play was a partly autobiographical piece by Simon, loosely based on his own experiences of being in a group of writers working for the American comic, Sid Caesar.