by Sue Johnston
My aunty Jean was around at my mum’s just after it aired. They had been discussing it and she said, ‘I think it’s very good but I really don’t understand why you have to say “fart”, Susan. Can’t you have a word with someone about that?’
My mum did take issue with some of the storylines.
‘Have you been telling them about my cataracts?’ she asked when Norma appeared with a patch on her eye after having her cataracts removed.
‘No!’ I said honestly. ‘I haven’t said a word.’
‘Well, someone’s said something because it was on the programme!’
Mum didn’t realise that there were thousands of old ladies going through the same thing as her every week.
Then she called me up to say, ‘Nana’s got a china cup, I drink out of a china cup!’
Again, I told Mum that other people up and down the country drink out of a china cup; she wasn’t unique.
The final straw came when she called and said, ‘She was making gravy this week. You’ve been telling them about me making gravy, haven’t you?’
‘Mother,’ I said, ‘you’ll be complaining that Nana is breathing just like you next!’
I think she thought I was taking notes when I was with her and feeding them back to Caroline and Craig.
Soon I was being stopped in the street and asked to say, ‘What have you had for your tea?’ I was interviewed in the Australian press where The Royle Family had become a huge hit. Just as the interviewer was about to sign off she said, ‘One more thing Sue, can you say “Ahhh” for me?’
So in my best Barbara voice I said ‘Ahhh’.
The woman went away delighted.
Caroline was being stopped to say, ‘Hiya, Mam!’ and Ricky was inundated with requests for a shout of, ‘My arse!’
We were on our way to becoming the cult hit that had been fifty per cent of Ricky’s prediction. The only person I remember saying they didn’t understand what all the fuss was about was David Threlfall, a friend of mine and the actor who would go on to play Frank Gallagher in Shameless. I was filming Sex, Chips and Rock n’ Roll with him when The Royle Family came out.
‘I’m sorry, Sue,’ he said to me one day, ‘but I just don’t get it.’
‘Fair enough,’ I thought, ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time.’
Very soon a second series was commissioned, but instead of filming in Manchester we were asked to go to Ealing Studios in London. It was great to be back together and to have a hit series under our belts.
The cast all got along brilliantly. The director would stop filming yet we’d all stay on the sofa chatting. Geoff Hughes and Ricky would go off together at lunch time and come back armed with ridiculous power tools that they had no intention of using but that they’d egged each other on to buy. Geoff and Ricky’s sense of humour really clicked. Throughout filming The Royle Family I felt like I was surrounded by so many funny people that I daren’t crack a joke. I felt more comfortable sitting and laughing at their jokes than trying to make them.
There was a really fun and relaxed atmosphere on set. The crew would join in the fun and there was one time when the Royles sang a song with the line, ‘she flies like a bird’, which was from the theme tune to the Nimble ad. One of the crew had found a loaf of Nimble bread from somewhere and attached it to a boom mike and flew it over our heads as we all tried to concentrate on singing the song without laughing.
The crew also built a naughty corner for us. It started off as just a corner of the set where we would have to stand if we laughed when we shouldn’t or forgot our lines but as the series progressed the naughty corner became more and more elaborate until it was an actual prison cell. By the end of the second series we all ended up in it behind bars!
Halfway through the airing of series two I got a call.
‘Sue, it’s David.’ It was David Threlfall. ‘I just want to say, I get it now!’
He had watched the second series and enjoyed it so much he had gone back and watched the first. My one dissenter had been won over!
Filming at Ealing studios was something of an honour. Ealing is steeped in TV and film history, and I remember watching the Ealing comedies at home when I was younger.
While we were there I met Michael Barrymore who was working on a series called Bob Martin alongside Keith Allen. It was just before the whole scandal broke but I found Michael to be such a warm, funny and lovely man.
You would see a lot of famous faces around the studio, it was great for star spotting. I remember walking to set one day. I had my regulation bobbly jumper and leggings on and my Barbara hair extensions and walking down the stairs in the opposite direction was Patsy Kensit, looking super-glamorous. I said hello to her and scurried off feeling in desperate need of some lipstick and a brush.
Seeing other projects being filmed around you made you feel like you were really part of the wider industry and there was a buzz about the place.
My feet certainly hadn’t improved with age and were still a sight of ugliness to behold. They are bent out of shape from constantly shoving them in stilettos when I was younger, scarred from the hot water incident as a child and generally best kept in a darkened shoe. For years I never allowed them to see the light of day. Then I looked at the script one day and the direction said: Barbara takes her slipper off. And I had to say, ‘Dave, look at my feet. They’re buggered!’
I ran over to Caroline. ‘I can’t say this!’ I said horrified.
‘Why, what’s up?’ she asked.
‘My feet. I can’t say they’re buggered because…well, they are!’
I pulled off my sock to show her what I meant. Surely when she saw the actual state of my feet she wouldn’t want them airing on set, never mind going out on national TV.
‘They’re perfect!’ Caroline said.
And so my poor feet made their TV debut without so much as a bit of powder to touch them up.
*
At the end of filming each of the three series we would return home having had a wonderful time together and, without sounding too over the top about it, the love for the show would follow us home. It was great that it chimed with so many people. But The Royle Family was not only something that ordinary people enjoyed, critics loved it too, and the show was winning awards left, right and centre. Ricky and I won best performance at the Comedy awards, the show won the comedy BAFTA a number of times, I also was nominated for a BAFTA, and we picked up gongs at nearly every other TV award show there was. It was quite unbelievable and very exciting to go along to these award ceremonies. I would take Joel with me and we’d hobnob with other actors.
On one occasion I had put some ‘chicken fillets’ into my bra because they were all the rage and I had decided to see what I was missing. I was about to step into a roomful of press after picking up an award when there was a sudden thud at my feet. I looked down to see the offending chicken fillet. I wavered for a few moments, should I bend down and get it and stuff it back in? I checked that no one had seen it was me and then stepped over the offending article and out in front of the press, one boob bigger than the other!
I also worked on other projects in between The Royle Family. One was a series called Duck Patrol about the Thames river police. It starred among others Richard Wilson and David Tennant. I’d met Richard before at Labour Party events and I had asked him for his autograph for Joel, who was a huge fan of One Foot in the Grave.
My character was the landlady of a pub on the Thames. This was a great role for me and of course I had plenty of experience to draw on having been a barmaid at a pub on the Thames when I was younger. We filmed near Hampton Court, which is one of my favourite places in London, but more personally it is near Shepperton where I had lived a lifetime ago with Neil’s mother Peggy. I felt very nostalgic revisiting these old haunts. I went to the Red Lion pub where I had worked and been advised about the nose job. The place had changed so much. I couldn’t help but think about my life back then and how things had turned out for m
e. I had been such a lost soul when I had lived with Peggy and now here I was doing the job I had hoped I would be doing, with my son off at college. I felt that I had come quite some way.
Richard Wilson had played Victor Meldrew brilliantly, and the character’s name had become a byword for late middle-aged grumpiness. But more than that, the expression ‘I don’t believe it’ had become so synonymous with Meldrew that Richard was to be for ever associated with it. I quickly grew to recognise the signs that he was about to be asked for his favourite line. You would see that someone had spotted him. They would then head over and say, ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’
Richard would politely nod and confirm that yes, it was him.
‘Go on then, say it,’ they would demand, waiting for Richard to say his infamous line. Poor Richard.
One day Richard and David, who both were playing river policemen, were filming a scene in a speedboat on the Thames. Richard had a police uniform on with a peaked police cap pulled down over his eyes. He was sitting down low in the boat behind the windscreen. How anyone could have recognised him without actually sitting next to him I have no idea. The director shouted ‘action’ and as the camera rolled a barge passed in the background. On board was a group of men who were clearly on a stag do. Just as Richard was about to begin speaking his lines, the lads on the boat shouted in unison, ‘I don’t believe it!’ Poor Richard, how on earth they knew it was him I have no idea!
*
In 2000 we filmed the third and final series of The Royle Family. The final episode was the Christmas special where it’s Baby David’s first birthday and we all sit down to Christmas dinner together. Jim gets the best Christmas present anyone could ever have bought him: Sky TV!
After The Royle Family ended, Craig went on to make Early Doors and Caroline moved to Australia for a time. But we all stayed in touch and any time I meet up with any of them it really does feel like I’m meeting up with family. In fact, Caroline calls me her second mum. They say all good things must come to an end but on this occasion I wished it didn’t have to. I genuinely loved being Barbara Royle.
Chapter Eighteen
I WAS AT the National Theatre performing in The Mysteries and staying with my friend Anna Keaveney and her partner Mark when I was offered a pilot in a new TV drama. It followed a police team who investigate murders that had been closed years before, or ‘cold cases’. They were charged with using the latest advances in DNA and criminal profiling to reopen these cases and solve the crime. At that time, the police had only been using these new scientific advances on cold cases for a few years so to see it on TV was something very new.
The character I was to play was called Grace Foley and the new show was Waking the Dead. I was very excited because Trevor Eve was to star in the main role of Peter Boyd. I had never met him, but I knew him to be a wonderful actor. Holly Aird, Will Johnson and Claire Goose were all in the cast too. I was drawn to the part because the concept was so interesting and new.
I met the woman whom my character was based on. She was a psychological profiler for the Metropolitan Police, and the minute I met her I knew how to play this character. She was warm and friendly and extremely down to earth. She was also very unruffled. I wanted to bring this calmness and confidence to Grace. I also wanted her to appear as if she had a life outside of work, and that she had lived an interesting life.
In the pilot a lot of the action took place in the less than glamorous location of a landfill site in South-East London. It was pretty grim and stank to high heaven, and we were all given protective clothing to wear. When it was time to film the actors were told to hand over their protective clothing and we disrobed and stood knee deep in muck while the crew all looked on through their white paper suits.
One of the first scenes I filmed with Trevor was of us driving over the site in a 4x4. As we had only just met we were still very much at the pleasantries stage. But as soon as Trevor put his foot on the pedal the pleasantries went out of the window. He shot off at a hundred miles an hour while I clung on like grim death. He drove like a lunatic! When we finished the scene I said, ‘Did you think you were on Top Gear?’ to which he just shrugged, suggesting that it might be something I’d just have to get used to. A few years later Trevor would go on Top Gear and fly round the track, swearing and destroying a wheel into the bargain: he clocked a great time though. Looking back I think I got off quite lightly!
A few days later we were filming a scene on the South Bank in London. I had to run across the concourse in heels. As I set off running one leg went one way and the other went the other. I heard a pop and then suddenly was in absolute agony. I was taken to hospital and informed that I had snapped my hamstring. I was bandaged up and had to stay in overnight.
But not only did I have to finish off filming the pilot for Waking the Dead, I had to continue performing in The Mysteries. In that role I had to sing and dance and generally jig around on an out-of-action leg. The director at the National decided to work around my damaged leg and so I was able to be onstage, and someone else danced for me. Back on Waking the Dead, because of some insurance clause, I had to be chaperoned. I was literally lifted from a wheelchair to wherever the action was taking place and I went from being very animated to sitting behind a desk for the last days of filming.
During the pilot we really gelled as a team and there was such enthusiasm and passion from Trevor for the role which the rest of us found terribly infectious. When we were told that the BBC wanted to make the series I was really happy to be going to work with this great bunch of people.
From the beginning I realised that working on Waking the Dead wasn’t going to be an easy ride but it was all the better for being challenging. Trevor is a perfectionist and he would go over the scripts time and again, asking that things be changed if he thought they could be improved. My natural inclination is to not cause a fuss but Trevor was constantly striving to make the show the best that it could be. It took time to have the confidence to do this but I quickly learned to be confident about my character Grace.
One thing that never seemed to get any easier was managing to say the psychology terms that Grace had to pronounce. I would sit in her office and look around at these huge tomes and think, Grace has read all of these books!
One day I stared at the script – ‘countertransference’, ‘diathesis stress hypothesis’ and ‘Electra complex’ all stared back at me. I stumbled across the lines like a child trying to get out a particularly difficult tongue twister.
‘Come on, Sue!’ the director David Thacker said. ‘It’s got to trip off the tongue! Grace says these things every day.’
‘Diathesis stress hypothesis,’ I stuttered. I really wasn’t sounding particularly confident.
‘Trip it off the tongue, trip, trip, trip!’
I stuttered a couple more times and then just started laughing and had to start again.
In the end I went away and learned the lines, and eventually I managed to trip them off the tongue for the camera but I needed a large glass of wine when I was finished. I would get the scripts and begin learning the lines straight away, scared to death that I was going to come unstuck with the unfamiliar terms.
Having said that I didn’t have it as tough as poor old Tara Fitzgerald. When she joined the show in 2006, I was delighted to be working with Tara again. We had worked together on Brassed Off and now she came in to play Eve Lockhart the forensic pathologist. Tara would have reams of medical terms to recite and any time she stumbled over the lines we would all stand around off camera, giggling, while she stood trying to remain composed but wanting to throttle us all!
Having played Barbara Royle for three years, to play a role like Grace was a big change and a challenge which I relished. I was always very proud to be able to play Grace and people were always very complimentary. I was fifty-six when I was first cast as Grace and it could quite easily have gone to a younger woman or even a man. But Barbara Machin who created the series was adamant that she should be a mature w
oman. All of the female characters in Waking the Dead were strong and brilliantly drawn.
I always loved the relationship between Boyd and Grace. There was never any element of romance but they were very close and knew one another extremely well. They often fell out and he could be dismissive and disrespectful to some of her ideas, but on the whole they were a team. The antagonism between the two was a great way of creating drama and helped to lift the facts off the page.
We would perform scenes where Trevor and I would chat in the office together. Over time the writers allowed us to ad-lib them as they trusted us to know what the two characters would talk about. One scene I remember well was when Trevor and I were talking. Trevor suggested to the director that he should be doing something in the scene so he suggested he wash his feet. There is something quite personal about someone getting their size tens out and scrubbing them in front of a colleague and I think it said a huge amount about how relaxed the two characters were with each other without any words being exchanged.
I was so pleased that Waking the Dead went on to run for ten series. All of the crew who worked on it were absolutely fantastic. We all had a great time working together. I think that the success of the show was down to the chemistry of the team, and that the scripts were brilliant and credited the audience with the intelligence they deserved.
*
During one of the breaks in filming Waking the Dead I was in The Play What I Wrote, a comical look at the comedy duo Morecambe and Wise and the relationship between comedy duos in general. We started at the Liverpool Playhouse and went on to Wyndham’s Theatre in London. In the second half of the play a guest artist would appear to star in ‘the play what I wrote’.
We did a special performance for the Prince’s Trust and I was delighted when Kylie Minogue agreed to be the guest star. She was great fun, very down to earth and sweet. Afterwards I arrived at the party to see her sitting with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. It was before Jam and Jerusalem, which I would work with them on. Dawn’s face dropped when she saw me. She looked horrified; I wondered what I had done.