by Sue Johnston
Pete Postlethwaite had already signed up to be in the film and I was tremendously excited about having the opportunity to meet him and work with him. Pete and I had been born a few streets apart in Warrington but until now our paths had never crossed. This was amazing really, seeing as our families knew one another – Pete’s niece lived next door to my cousin – and they would meet at events held at St Oswald’s club in Padgate Lane where my aunty Jean used to go to play bingo. Aunty Jean would let them know what I was up to and they in turn would say what Pete was working on. The fact that we were both actors didn’t concern them a jot. They’d have had the same conversation if we both worked on the bins.
On the first day of filming I walked into the foyer of the hotel in Doncaster where we would be staying for the next few weeks, ready to introduce myself to everyone. Pete Poss, Phil Jackson, Jim Carter and Stephen Tompkinson were all sitting there.
‘Hi!’ I said cheerfully.
‘Hi, Sue,’ they all said in unison.
I sat down.
‘We’re just talking about the rugby,’ Pete said.
There had been a big England game that day. I’d just seen the result. Great, I thought, smashing icebreaker. ‘We did well to win, didn’t we?’
There was a collective groan.
‘Bloody hell, Sue!’ Pete said, laughing.
I looked around, perplexed. What had I done?
They had all been holding off finding out the score and had wanted to watch the match on the TV later.
‘Oh no! I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Shall I just go back out, come back in and start again?’
So much for my icebreaker! I thought I might have ostracised myself with my big gob. It wasn’t the case, we soon all became firm friends and had a great time making the film.
We became regulars at the local pub and formed our own quiz team. Ewan McGregor had been in the huge hit Trainspotting the year before and had a gaggle of teenage admirers wherever we went. The fire alarm for the hotel would often be set off in the middle of the night and young girls would be hanging around, waiting to get a glimpse of Ewan, freezing in his pyjamas on the street.
We filmed in Grimethorpe near Doncaster, although in the film the place was called Grimley. On the first day of filming we went into a room where the real colliery band were all waiting for us. We all gathered around and then they played for us: the music was magical. There is something especially rousing and proud about a brass band. Especially when it is a community group.
When they had finished, the band leader turned to us and said, ‘Right, your turn.’
We all looked at one another and I took a step to one side, I wasn’t in the band in the film so thankfully I was off the hook. The men who were in the band, and Tara Fitzgerald who was to play the only woman member, sat down and tried to play. It wasn’t the most harmonious brass band you’ve ever heard but for a first attempt it wasn’t bad!
As filming progressed everyone in the band got better and better at playing their instruments, which I thought was a testimony to the importance of the band in the film and what it meant to the actors to do justice to their parts. Pete played Danny, the conductor. Having never conducted so much as a bus, Pete took up the baton like he’d been doing it all his life. In the film he totally embodies the part, the music takes him over, the pit and the band mean so much to him.
We spent a lot of time in Grimethorpe and met lots of families who had lived through the strikes and the pit closures. There was still deep resentment for Margaret Thatcher. It was felt that the government had closed the pits but hadn’t offered any alternative. I was seeing first-hand the effects of the Tory policy of mine closures that had been so hard fought over in the eighties. These towns that had only one major industry to support them now had nothing. With their industry crushed, people had no alternative but to sign on the dole. In Grimethorpe, a little over ten years on from the first of the eighties miners’ strikes, the fallout was clear. Unemployment was high; there were drug and drink problems among the youth; buildings that had once thrived with life were derelict, their windows smashed, the land they stood on overgrown with weeds. There was a shiny new uninhabited community centre but it felt like too little too late.
At the end of Brassed Off, the Colliery Band go to the Royal Albert Hall to be in the Band of the Year competition. When it is announced that they have won, Pete’s character, Danny, stands up and makes an impassioned speech declining the award. This has gone on to be one of the most memorable speeches in British cinema. Before it was filmed Mark the director gathered us all round and said that he wasn’t going to do a run-through. Pete was going to do one speech and that was the one he would use in the film.
Pete took to the rostrum, looked out at the audience and began speaking. A silence fell across the room, everyone felt the words. It encapsulated everything I felt about the miners’ strike.
In the last ten years this bloody government has systematically destroyed an entire industry. Our industry. And not just our industry: our communities, our homes, our lives. All in the name of progress and for a few lousy bob.
Danny’s anger, Pete’s anger, was palpable. The Grimethorpe band were in the background as extras, I saw their heads bow, it was such a powerful, heart-breaking speech, and I can’t think of another actor who could have made it with such force and passion.
We finished filming and all said our goodbyes, off to work on other projects. I never know if something I have been in will be a success, I have no barometer for that sort of thing. I just knew that I’d really enjoyed myself and hoped that it would be well received when it eventually saw the light of day.
Brassed Off was released in cinemas and was a huge hit. It is great to have been part of such a fabulous project with such a wonderful cast and crew and I feel it was not only an uplifting film but also an accurate depiction of the effects of Mrs Thatcher’s brutal policy and the miners’ strike.
When Pete died earlier this year I was terribly sad. He was such a lovely man and it was a great loss to not only his friends and family but to the world of theatre and film when he passed away. I went to his memorial service at St Leonard’s church in Shoreditch. The Grimethorpe Colliery band were there, and when they played ‘Danny Boy’ it was especially poignant. Pete had never stopped supporting them and always went to see them when he was up north. At the end of the service Pete’s voice boomed out over the speakers, he was reading the poem ‘A Shropshire Lad’, the poem that had been my dad’s favourite and was read at his funeral. It made me very sad to think again of my father and those verses that he loved so much. And to think of Pete. The service was a beautiful and moving tribute to a truly great man.
Chapter Seventeen
WHEN JOEL WAS eighteen he got a place at college studying graphic design. Having always been sure that when he left home I would not behave the way my own mother had, and declare that my life was over, I was shocked to find how upset I was.
I drove him to Wrexham, which would be his new home, and helped him unpack his belongings. As we sorted out his room, some of the other lads who Joel would share the house with, and who would become his great friends, came in and introduced themselves. I was happy that he was about to embark on a new adventure but I have to admit I was bereft. I drove home in tears.
Once home I took the dogs out for a walk but felt totally despondent. Without Joel to go home to I couldn’t help thinking, ‘What’s the point?’
I thought things might improve the next day but I awoke still feeling desolate. I passed a young woman pushing a pram and I began to cry. I was a wreck. Susie called in and seeing my face all puffed up asked quite reasonably, ‘What are you crying for?’
‘It’s Joel…’ I said, descending into tears again before I could finish my sentence.
‘What’s happened?’ Susie asked, looking alarmed.
‘Nothing, it’s just he’s gone, hasn’t he?’ I sobbed.
Susie was trying to be as diplomatic as possible but I think she
thought I’d gone mad. After a few moments of obviously thinking, how do I put this?, she said, ‘He’s back on Friday, isn’t he?’
I nodded, still crying. Yes, he was back on Friday, in three days’ time! I knew I was being ridiculous but I missed him. He might only be in Wrexham and only away during the week but he wasn’t living with me now and even though he hadn’t been a little boy for a long time he wasn’t my little boy any more. It wasn’t the first stage of letting go, I felt that I’d been building to this from the first time he hadn’t wanted to hold my hand as a little boy but still, I felt it deeply.
I soon got used to the fact that Joel was at college and would look forward to the times he was home, hearing about his course and his new friends, but I threw myself into work again and was very glad that I had my career to take my mind off how much I missed my son.
Suddenly, I began to understand what my mother had gone through. When she was raising me, I was her life. Joel is the most important person to me in the world, but I had a career that I’d maintained throughout his childhood, so when he left home I had something else to be getting on with. And there was also the fact that I didn’t tell Joel how I was feeling, whereas my mother had no qualms about telling me!
It was around this time that I was asked by Ron Rose, a northern writer who had worked at the Bolton Octagon, if I would play Pat Phoenix in The Things You Do For Love. Having met – and been overawed by – the woman herself I readily agreed.
I had never taken on the role of someone real before, and I certainly wasn’t an impersonator, so I sat down and watched hours of footage of her, trying to get her manner and her character right. I learned a lot about her that I hadn’t known. She had had a tempestuous relationship with Tony Booth, Cherie Blair’s father, an actor famous for his role as the ‘Scouse Git’ in Till Death Us Do Part.
Tony was involved in a terrible accident where he was horribly burned and scarred, and returned to Pat on his uppers. She took him in and looked after him. After this, she herself contracted lung cancer and we filmed at the hospital where she had been nursed.
She had been a lifelong heavy smoker and even in her hospital bed she had an ashtray. She would puff on her cigarettes and then drag on her ventilator.
I met one of the nurses who had looked after her in her final weeks. ‘Why did you allow her to smoke when she was so ill?’ I asked. I wasn’t being facetious, I was genuinely interested.
‘It was her only pleasure,’ she admitted. ‘We just thought there was no point in denying her something she enjoyed so much in her final days.’
Pat married Tony Booth on her deathbed. She lasted another eight days and died in her sleep. She had been such a vibrant, strong woman and her love for this man had spanned her life. I thought it was a very moving story.
Early one Sunday morning I was getting ready to go to set when I heard the news reporter talking about a princess who had been seriously injured in a car crash. They were reporting from Paris and I assumed that it was a European princess they were talking about. When I got in the car to go to work the driver informed me that the princess they had been referring to was Diana. I was horrified and listened transfixed to the radio.
On set, one of the crew set up a portable TV in the corner of one of the bedrooms and we all gathered around. The next news flash told us that she had died. It was the most terrible shock, and people all over the country felt the same. We filmed our scenes and everyone went away in stunned silence. I went to Susie’s house that afternoon. She had planned a barbecue but everyone stood around the TV looking to see if the newsreaders could give some answers as to why this horrific tragedy had happened. It was such a terribly sad time.
*
Later that year Ricky Tomlinson was at the regional Royal Television Awards in Manchester when he was approached by Caroline Aherne at the bar. Caroline was already well known from her roles in The Fast Show and her own show Mrs Merton, which had been a huge success. She told Ricky that she was writing a comedy.
‘You’re going to be my dad, and Sue Johnston’s going to be my mum,’ she said matter-of-factly.
For a few years after Brookside finished Ricky and I hadn’t seen each other but we were reunited in a small film, Preaching to the Perverted. It was after this that Ricky called me to tell me about his encounter with Caroline. The idea of playing husband and wife again might seem a strange thing to do after being such wellestablished characters for years, but the Royles were very different to the Grants so we both agreed to do it.
The scripts arrived and were brilliantly funny but so sparse and nothing really seemed to happen – it wasn’t like any other TV script I’d seen before. I rang Ricky to see what he thought.
‘It’ll either be a cult hit or they’ll be showing it on the graveyard slot because no one gets it. I don’t think there’ll be an in between,’ he said frankly.
We went to the read-through at Granada. There were heads of production from Granada Studios and from the BBC in London, along with the writing team consisting of Caroline, Craig Cash and Henry Normal. There was a definite feeling of trepidation about the project. Even though everyone seemed to want the next ‘original’ comedy I think there was an uncertainty about whether this might be a bit too ‘original’.
I was very excited when I saw the other actors in the room. There was, of course, Liz Smith who I loved, a very young Ralf Little, Ricky, Caroline, and Craig who played Dave. Also in the cast was Geoff Hughes who played Twiggy but had been known to millions as Eddie Yeats from Coronation Street. Kathy Burke was also there reading the part of Cheryl the constantly dieting next-doorneighbour, who was later played by Jessica (Stevenson) Hynes. I was quite star struck by Doreen Keogh who was to play Mary, as she had played Concepta Hewitt in Coronation Street when I was younger. We all read the scripts and laughed a lot – a good start for a comedy!
Afterwards, the Granada and BBC heads took the writers to one side and they had a heated discussion while we all sat there wondering what on earth was going on. Eventually Caroline told us to go across to the V&A Hotel over the road from Granada and said she would join us as soon as possible.
She and Craig came over a little later and told us why everything seemed to have ground to a halt. The heads of production were worried that without an audience or music or canned laughter – which had been the norm in comedy – then it would just feel too strange. It hadn’t been done before and they were concerned. Caroline said that she and Craig were adamant that it should be very naturalistic, as if we were just watching a family in their living room. They came to an uneasy compromise. We filmed the pilot in a studio as if we were performing in front of an audience.
When it was shot it wasn’t at all what Caroline or Craig had wanted. Caroline was so embarrassed by the tape that she buried it in her brother’s garden and told me that she would dig it up one day and let us watch it. She never has! Then we waited. The writers reconvened and hurriedly rewrote the episodes, they brought in a new director and we reshot it.
Now it was filmed like a fly-on-the-wall documentary as Caroline had wanted. It felt so completely different to any comedy I could think of. There were no obvious gags, no clever put downs, the pauses were long and natural and the characters were all sitting watching the telly! I remember one direction that specifically jumped out at me when I first read the script: ‘They all suck a mint.’ Imagine a minute of TV time taken up by a family all sucking on a mint! I loved it, but I had no idea if anyone else would.
I had been a smoker on and off all my life. When we started to film The Royle Family I hadn’t smoked for years and was very proud of myself for the fact. But Denise and Barbara both smoke like chimneys. At first I did my best to get round it. I would have a cigarette in my hand or put one in my mouth but not light it. Then a little later you would see me stubbing one out in the huge, rarely emptied, ashtray. As the filming wore on I found myself more and more tempted to have a cigarette until eventually I caved in and lit one. That was it – I could
never be a casual smoker and I was hooked again!
Caroline really knew how to throw a party. She was very generous and would buy beer and champagne for everyone – and mild for Ricky – on Friday afternoons as the week’s filming drew to a close. At the wrap party Caroline and Craig gave out awards to the cast and crew as we all got increasingly sozzled. I was excited to see what my ‘Oscar’ would be.
Caroline looked at the cast with mock gravitas. ‘And the award for the Best Legs in Leggings goes to Sue Johnston!’
I wobbled up to receive my award. I’ve never been so proud, or so drunk! I’d like to think that I made a fantastic acceptance speech, but I really can’t remember.
*
I was given a tape when we finished filming the series. At the time I was staying with Margot and her husband David as I was working in London. I handed it to them and asked them to watch the first episode and then made myself scarce for the evening. I really respected their opinion and so what they thought was very important to me. I returned later, nervous as to what they would say.
Margot opened the door. ‘We loved it.’
‘Really?’ I asked.
‘We watched the whole series!’ I breathed a sigh of relief. If they liked it then there was every chance that other people would.
The Royle Family aired for the first time on 14 September 1998. No one anticipated the reaction that we received. Overnight it seemed people took the show to their hearts. My family were very impressed. My mother had never been very complimentary about any of the roles I’d played in the past but she loved The Royle Family. She called me to tell me the good news. ‘I don’t care what anyone says, Susan, I think it’s good.’ A backhanded compliment was better than nothing!
I think for her it was the same as with most working-class people, she could totally relate to it.