by John Challis
Helen admitted that until then, she’d never seen a pantomime but seemed genuinely to enjoy it, as she’d enjoyed the undemanding dramas of Alan Ayckbourn when she’d come to see me in them. She happily discussed these plays and why they had worked for her, giving them credit for making their point with a useful helping of humour, although she was, after all, from the heavier side of the business, a serious theatre and book critic of some reputation who had lived for a long time with one of our major playwrights. I think that now she enjoyed a little exposure to the kind of popular culture for which I was best known, and unstuffily was prepared to see the value in it. She would even watch the odd episode of Only Fools and tell me what she’d liked about it.
I guess it was precisely for this aspect of my career that she included me in a group of people she’d been asked to get together for a TV programme. The premise of the feature was the fact that The Hurst was to become a centre for new, aspiring writers, a boarding school for scribblers, as someone elegantly put it, and over lunch Helen’s guests – all arts related – would talk about the motivation and
impetus to write.
‘Please come and help me out, darling,’ she almost pleaded. ‘I’ve got Maggie Smith and John Mortimer coming but the idea of the programme is so boring I need someone to liven it up a bit and nudge the conversation along. And have some fun, for God’s sake!’
When it came to it, sitting in the vast Victorian dining room at The Hurst, surrounded by arts heavyweights was a fairly daunting experience. The room itself had become a kind of shrine to John Osborne; the walls were covered with playbills, posters and shots of Osborne with assorted luminaries – Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, with whom Osborne had played the arch-villain in the great revenge thriller, Get Carter. Unflattering caricatures hung alongside unfriendly reviews, perversely enlarged and framed.
Somewhat to my surprise, the discussion went rather well. My presence seemed to provoke a debate about the validity of popular culture, in its broadest sense, as it related to writing. At some levels in the artistic world, ‘popular’ is still a dirty word. But among the more intellectually robust, the popular is not always dismissed with the same elitist flip of a hand. The embedded notion among less imaginative, less creative thinkers that greater ‘accessibility’ is always an indication of lesser artistic value tried to rear its head, with even the clever John Mortimer finding it hard not to sneer at anything which appealed to large numbers of the working class – an odd stance for a prominent Labour supporter.
Specifically, we were asking: if you aspire to write, what should you write about? Should you aim at achieving the widest possible audience and couch whatever you want to say in the most easily absorbed medium – a musical, say, a Whitehall farce, a good, tense thriller? Would this devalue any observations about the human condition that might be found within it? Or was it more honest and valid to pare these observations back, in an intellectually challenging treatise to which only a small minority of readers would be able to relate?
Mortimer became quite sniffy about situation comedy in general, saying it was generally aimed at the lowest common denominator – in other words, it was widely ‘accessible’ – another dirty word, evidently. But he wouldn’t accept that it was possible to write worthwhile drama in that way and at the same time put over new ideas and perspectives, as well as useful observations about human relationships and realities.
He himself had had a long-running TV success (and a good earner), with the help of Leo McKern, in his much-loved (and presumably intellectually justifiable) Rumpole of the Bailey, which made good use of a number of solid old sitcom tricks.
Maggie Smith on the other hand, was more laissez-faire. ‘Look, darling, as long as it has some quality, I don’t give a monkey’s what it is. I’ve spent too much of my life wondering where the next job was coming from to be too picky.’
Helen told us that John Osborne suffered from severe writer’s block over the years because he couldn’t bear to write anything he didn’t feel passionate about. Whether it was commercial or not was irrelevant.
It was a bizarre but stimulating session, which left me wondering if I’d really been there, like doing Guys & Dolls with Mandy Patinkin. It had been made special by Helen, who was one of those people you wish you’d met earlier in life but at least we did meet, and to this day, I can see her diminutive, spiky persona, in her little Lionel Bart cap, cigarette in one hand, drink in the other, flinging out the challenge – ‘Isn’t this what life’s about?’
The TV discussion, as finally edited, worked pretty well, and generally left me with food for further thought, on which I’ve ruminated much in recent years, especially now as I try honestly, constructively – and accessibly – to write this account of my own chaotic existence.
After the pleasure of touring a good Ayckbourn play with a fine actress earlier in the year, pantomime 2003 was a bit of a come down. I was playing Captain Hook again, which I looked forward to, but it was in Croydon, at the Ashcroft Theatre, not my favourite venue. Named after the illustrious actress, Dame Peggy – a local lass, I was told – the theatre was part of an ‘Arts Complex’, the Fairfield Halls, an unattractive concrete construction of the early ’60s Brutalist school and a council initiative which had deteriorated into more of a leisure centre – an unlovely venue for fading rock stars and tribute bands. The staff were well-intentioned but they were council employees, not theatre people and had no real concept of the priorities. It took two weeks to get the dressing rooms cleaned from the show that had preceded ours and this shambolic approach reflected the style of the production in general. It was cobbled together within just ten days. Little groups of performers rehearsed separately, the dancers doing their sweaty routines in one place and the principals in small private groups. Barnaby, the main comic, as Smee, and his pirates seemed to be in a completely different show.
Kirsten O’Brien looked as if she would make an engaging Peter Pan. She was spirited away to rehearse with the children, which left me to rehearse with Julian Clary’s sister, Frankie, who was cast as Mrs Darling, the children’s mother. Frankie was an attractive and likeable woman, but she was basically a dancer, not an actress or a singer, both of which were required for the important role of Mrs Darling. I guess she had been cast in this arbitrary way simply as a means of getting bums on seats, without any consideration for her suitability.
It never fails to puzzle me when producers take these risks. Sue Holderness came across a similar piece of miscasting some years later, when she was touring a successful production of Calendar Girls, and Charlie Dimmock was cast as one of the key characters. Charlie Dimmock is a very nice person, and she’s kind to animals, but she’s a gardener, and not an actress.
This Peter Pan was full of these strange anomalies. The choreographer had decided that the girl pirates should behave like maritime pole dancers, which lent an inevitable air of vulgarity to the production. J M Barrie must have been spinning in his six-foot plot at this complete lack of respect for his original. Conceivably, as a chunk of the profits from any production is required to go to the Great Ormond Street hospital under the terms of Barrie’s will, producers feel they can do what they want with the story, provided it pulls in the punters, and the wonga.
We also had to contend with the unsympathetic nature of the hideous building, which resembled an underground car park with an accidental theatre on top.
But despite all these drawbacks, the show did extraordinary business, so much so that we were asked to fit in extra performances in order to accommodate everyone who wanted to come. It was, at least, good to feel wanted, and Captain Hook got an especially warm welcome after Boycie had appeared in the very last of the Only Fools Christmas Specials, Sleepless in Peckham. Boycie had featured in an engaging little sub-plot, in which it was thought by Del and his other chums that he had done away with Marlene, as no one had seen her for a couple of weeks. When he produces her at the Nag’s Head, it is revealed that she has been
away having her breasts surgically enhanced. The show ends with Rodney accepting that he is the son of Freddie ‘the Frog’ Robdal, and Cassandra finally having a baby, a girl named Joan, after the Trotters’ mother.
Once again, Only Fools & Horses topped the Christmas-Day ratings, with 15½ million viewers.
The following morning, on Boxing Day, when the news of the horrific Asian tsunami came through, it had the effect of unifying the company in the grief we all felt for the hundreds of thousands of people believed dead. I was asked to make short speech after each performance, appealing for money to help the devastated populations of Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, to which the Croydon audiences responded with remarkable generosity.
Closer to home, we experienced a more personal sadness when we heard that Helen Osborne had died. I wasn’t surprised; it had often seemed to me that, unlike most people, she didn’t have that obsessive urge to hang on to life at the expense of all personal enjoyment, and had been quite prepared to die since John, her husband had predeceased her. I wasn’t surprised but I was very sad about it; Helen was one of the warmest most engaging people I had ever met, and had helped very much to affirm our lives out in the sticks and we were both grateful for the friendship she’d shown us. She had been such an enlivening figure so funny, so unstuffy and brave.
Chapter 15
The Green, Green Grass
In the spring of 2004 Bill Kenwright once again dispatched Sue and me on tour, this time with a great (but riskier) play, London Suite by Neil Simon.
The play depicts a series of events that take place in one particular hotel suite, each as a separate stand-alone drama, linked only by the room in which they take place. We had the stimulating task of playing three entirely different parts each night – just the kind of challenge and test of versatility I loved. Appearing with Sue and me were Sarah Crowe, a funny, striking woman, and the wonderfully t tiggerish Mark Curry, famous for his innings as Blue Peter presenter.
We did a happy eight-week tour through most of the stronger provincial theatres. As we passed through Malvern, the nearest venue to home, I had a good show of local support. We also did good business with the play at the Theatre Royal in Brighton and were delighted to hear from John Sullivan (a big Neil Simon fan) that for once he was coming to see us.
John was not alone among TV writer/producers in holding the view that theatre was a lot of actors shouting in long shot. I had once tried desperately to get Douglas Camfield, whom I’d done a few things for, to come and see me in a play where I was playing a sensitive dad with serious emotional problems.
‘I know you’ll be very good,’ Camfield said, ‘but on camera, when we spend so much time in close, we have to go with what you’ve got in your face – and yours is a dark face, however sensitive you might be feeling.’
This had become a familiar problem for me. As long as I was far enough away from the audience, it seemed, I could deal with most roles but close up on TV, it had to be hard-nosed coppers or hardarsed crooks.
John Sullivan, though, saw me as neither of these. He had produced the bones and I had put the flesh on this creature from Peckham, who had bizarrely become an iconic character, celebrated in men’s magazines, chanted about on football terraces and the toast of the second-hand motor trade.
As John had said, ‘We’ve created this monster, and now it’s got out of the cage.’
He had created another monster, of course, in Marlene. Once again, he’d had help through his own casting. His choice of Sue Holderness had been inspired. From what he’d given her, she’d been able to create in Marlene a wonderfully gross character, who could run rings around the pompous, self-inflated Boycie.
As a couple they were vulgar and tasteless but John had given them and their marriage an inherent warmth, with a firm sense of loyalty knitting them together. With these two strong characters, John had developed a relationship between the Boyces that had immediate resonance with a large number of people and had made Boycie and Marlene one of the most popular couples in British sit com. John Sullivan had an apartment on Brighton front and he asked us over for tea – tiffin, as he put it – one afternoon during our run there.
Once we’d arrived, he came quickly to the point. ‘If I was to tell you I’m thinking of a spin-off from Only Fools & Horses, featuring Boycie and Marlene, could you bear it?’
I felt my heart lurch and I stifled a gasp.
A spin off? From one of the most successful British comedy series of all time? With us in the lead?
I quickly got a grip on myself, sucked noisily through my teeth. ‘I don’t know John.’ I shook my head. ‘I’d have to look at my diary – I’m not sure about availability.’
I could see Sue on the edge of her chair, with her eyes popping out, not absolutely certain if I was having a laugh. She followed my lead; we kept it up for about ten seconds.
Then I burst. ‘Are you kidding?’ I gabbled, then more cautiously, ‘or is this a wind up?’
‘No, no, look. I’m sorry it’s taken so long, but I couldn’t think why Boycie and Marlene would want to leave Peckham. It was up at your party a couple of years ago, I got the idea of Boycie deciding to sell up and going to live in the sticks – a Peckham boy in the country – gave me loads of ideas. And it wasn’t until I was watching some reruns and the Driscoll Brothers came on that I had the answer...’ He paused. ‘Boycie’s grassed them up... and he’s on the run!’
I sat back slowly to absorb the idea. ‘I think I’d have to see the script first, John,’ I said.
‘I haven’t written the fucking thing yet,’ John answered gently.
We were so excited we could hardly do our show that evening. To be offered this when we thought we’d said our very final ‘goodbye’ to Boycie and Marlene with the airing of Sleepless in Peckham at Christmas.
It was as if Boycie, like Lazarus, had been awakened from the dead with a touch from Sullivan. Writers often boast that they give birth to characters in their shows; it seemed they could bring them back to life, too. I reflected that it was lucky that the last episode hadn’t seen the Trotters, Boycie, Marlene and the gang going up in a gas explosion in Nelson Mandela House, which Sullivan might have thought was the only way to finish off the series for good.
Probably, he’d deliberately left a few doors open, and here was one through which Boycie and Marlene were being allowed to escape into a new life.
We realized a few years down the line that he’d left another door open in Sleepless in Peckham, which allowed him to bring back Nicholas as Rodney’s dad, Fred Robdal in the 2010 Only Fools prequel, Rock & Chips.
When Sue and I had calmed down a bit after John’s amazing announcement, we started to wonder how the hell would we do a spin-off and make a show of our own after a phenomenon like Only Fools & Horses. Spin-offs from big sit coms were notoriously unpredictable beasts – Frazier, from Cheers worked fantastically; Joey, from Friends didn’t.
But the idea gathered momentum. First, as is normal with these things, we had to make a pilot episode for the big wigs at the BBC to decide whether or not they wanted us. Sue and I were pretty committed for the rest of the year with tour dates and pantomimes for the 2004-2005 season, but we managed to schedule it for early autumn, in six months’ time.
As the time got nearer, Sue and I became a little apprehensive that we would always be overshadowed by our mighty predecessor and the initial euphoria wore off a little. There was inevitably some reaction to the rumours now flying around about an Only Fools spin-off – some positive, some not.
But the script came, and we loved it. Denzil turns up at Boycie’s bogus Tudor mansion in Peckham and tells him the Driscoll Brothers have been released from three life jail sentences. The police have relied on a supergrass to convict them but all the other witnesses have suddenly retracted their evidence, and it looks as if Boycie was the supergrass. He isn’t, but he doesn’t feel he’ll be able to explain the misunderstanding. He’s no hero and when he starts seeing a big black car c
ruising the road outside his house, filled with men in dark suits, he panics and goes out to buy himself an unseen pile in Shropshire, where he thinks the Driscolls will never find him. He breaks the news to a startled Marlene.
‘What is Shropshire?’ Marlene asks.
‘Good question,’ Boycie answers, ‘but that’s where we’re going.’
They pack up and leave Peckham in a moonlight flit, to arrive on a dark, stormy night at a rambling, creepy house hundreds of miles away in the middle of nowhere. Although Boycie has been told that the place had been empty for some time, they find various retainers already living on the property.
In the meantime we’d been asked by John and the producer, Julian Meers to look for a suitable house for Boycie and Marlene to escape to. We sent them photos of lots of local houses belonging to friends and acquaintances who weren’t averse to having their places ravaged by a film crew. The location team came down to Wigmore to look at a few of the possibilities we had found – Paytoe, Wigmore Hall, Downton. We were excited that the production team were keen to film in our area, and we hoped fervently that they would find what they wanted.
Eventually the location people came back to the Abbey and told us they had found the ideal place – a rambling, run-down, spooky old dump.
‘Great!’ I exclaimed. ‘Where is it?’