Biggins

by Christopher Biggins

  I didn’t need to be asked twice. So, on the night, myself, Una Stubbs, Julia McKenzie and my great friend Paul Macbeth were all present and correct nice and early, awaiting the arrival of the star. We got a shock.

  When Bea finally arrived she was slightly inebriated. She had been indulging in a spot of vodka. She was quite cutting to me, and sharp with Julia and her own American friend, whose name I’m afraid I can’t remember. Una was only saved because she was too smart to say much and remained out of the line of fire. It was a bit like Tennessee Williams all over again, but nowhere near as bad. Though at least tonight we didn’t get robbed, I thought afterwards. But it wasn’t quite over.

  ‘Is that Christopher Biggins?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘This is Bea Arthur. I must apologise for my behaviour last night. But my friend says that you are quite adorable, so I would like to see you again.’

  The second time around we hit it off. Bea was charming and we have been having fun and sharing good conversation ever since. Once, when we went out for dinner in LA, I was the designated driver charged with getting her home. I wasn’t drinking because I was driving but we had a wild time and Bea ended up drinking a bit too much wine. The end result was a bit like that first night in London.

  ‘Where do I go?’ I asked as I pulled away from the restaurant.

  ‘Whad-daya-mean?’ she drawled.

  ‘I don’t know the way.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  Tension mounted as I drove aimlessly round the Hollywood Hills hoping something would remind my companion of where she lived. In the meantime I decided to try some light conversation.

  ‘What was it like making Golden Girls?’ I asked.

  ‘Betty White’s a c**t,’ she said, with a mischeivous smile on her face. I nearly crashed her car.

  Somehow, in the midst of this wild, global socialising, I did manage to do some work as the 1990s got under way. Too little, as it turned out, but every little helped. I did Country Cousins in a club in the West End – a step up from the Maximus disco, but only just. Then Marilyn Johnson and our old pal Bryn Lloyd put together a spoof show called Mr Warren’s Profession. Linda Bellingham, Linda Marchal (soon to re-emerge as Linda La Plante), Jackie Anne Carr, Tudor Davies and I were all signed up. It was dinner theatre and at one point I was on a huge swing, sailing over the audience while singing ‘Keep Young and Beautiful’.

  One time I got a really fantastic reception. The whole place was a riot: everyone cheered, no one ate a thing. And why? Because my voice was so mesmerising? My characterisation so spot on? No, because my flies were open. When the swing swung back everyone could see everything. Just everything.

  My short but sweet return to prime-time television was in Cluedo, where I was once again playing a vicar. Surely the oddest piece of typecasting ever. My dear pal Peter, the true vicar in my life, reckons I will have a head start on other applicants if I ever decide to take the hints and join the church properly. In Cluedo, I was the Reverend Green and played alongside the booming Tom Baker as Professor Plum. Our season also had Pam Ferris as a comely Mrs White and the glamorous Susan George as Mrs Peacock. We had fun, but not for long. We were contracted to do just half a dozen programmes, with a whole new cast called in for the following year. Cluedo certainly didn’t make any of the performers rich. But because it was a prime-time ITV show the ratings were pretty good. My phone didn’t ring off the hook afterwards, but hopefully it reminded a few people that I was still alive. If they were casting another dodgy vicar they could always count on me.

  More seriously, I was well aware of the importance of getting back on TV as often as possible. The entertainment industry has the memory of a goldfish. You can blaze your way across theatre stages and win every Olivier Award going (unaccountably I have won none) but if you’re not on the telly every now and then you struggle to pay the bills. In the 1990s one great way for actors to earn big money was to get into the soaps – as dear Babs would soon do in seemingly effortless style. But that wasn’t the way I wanted to go. I wanted to be me. I wanted people to know Christopher Biggins, not to shout out some soap character’s name when they saw me in the street. I also knew how hard my dear friend Helen Worth worked on Coronation Street. In the years ahead I would see how hard Babs worked in EastEnders. Never say never.

  But I didn’t feel ready for all that in the 1990s. I had a few nice cameo roles in shows like Minder and Shoestring. But then I started to relax even more. For a while I even considered giving up my life’s one big anchor. For the first time in so many years I said no to my next panto.

  It was 1993 and I was feeling exhausted. Can one man drink too much bubbly and go to too many parties? I was testing the theory to the limit.

  The bookings for pantos tend to be done, and the contracts signed, in April. That April Billy Differ had called as usual to try to book me for a season at one of my favourite theatres up in Glasgow. Billy was such a dear friend and had booked me for so many shows – including that Guys and Dolls tour with Babs. He was just like Peter Todd, a great theatre manager with a real instinct for knowing what audiences wanted to see.

  I don’t think he could believe it when I turned him down.

  ‘But you always do panto. You are pantomime,’ he said.

  ‘Billy, I need a break. It’s time I branched out into something else. I’m sure that if I keep my diary free something even better is going to come up.’

  But of course it didn’t. April turned to May and May turned to June. My diary remained stubbornly empty. By July I was twiddling my thumbs and worrying about the bills. In August I rang Billy for a chat and a gossip and he seemed distracted and depressed. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘The headline in today’s paper is what’s wrong,’ he told me. It seemed that his lead for Dick Whittington was in the news. He had been arrested on child pornography charges and his career was over. Billy, meanwhile, was left with a gaping hole in his panto cast.

  ‘Well, I’d better come up and take over,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t mean it?’

  ‘I absolutely do.’

  ‘Then you’re booked.’ And I was saved.

  The money, of course, was desperately needed. But the performances themselves gave me just the boost I was looking for. Panto in Glasgow is like panto nowhere else in Britain. The audiences are wild and wonderful. The atmosphere is raw and it’s like being on stage for a pop concert every night. And that year’s Dick Whittington was the best ever. I was the only non-Scot in the cast, which brought plenty of extra laughs at my expense. All of which I milked shamelessly. I also hammed up the famous sketch often attributed to Morecambe and Wise. Allan Stewart was Dick, his wife Jane played Alice Fitzwarren. ‘I love you,’ I tell Alice at one point.

  ‘I love you too. But I love you like a brother.’

  We get a chorus of ‘ahhhs’ from the audience. Which I again milk for all they are worth. Then Dick and Alice sit on a wall and sing a love song. I come up behind, pull Dick off and sing his part. Then he comes back, pulls me off and repeats the trick. And so it goes on, until at the end we’re both on the wall, him on one side of Alice, me on the other – and we both push her off and sing to each other. The audience goes hysterical. Glasgow is my favourite city in Scotland, and pretty much my favourite in Britain for panto.

  The best thing about that year’s production was that it had cemented my already solid friendship with Billy. We had enjoyed some real laughs that season. And it had been nice to do each other a favour: I had filled the gap in his cast, and he had filled a gap in my bank balance. The season ended in the third week of January in 1994 and I headed back south feeling full of optimism about the year ahead. If only I had known that I was about to get a visit from the VAT man.

  16

  The VAT Man – and Neil

  He came to my house in Hackney. My accountant was with us and I fussed around getting the tea, coffee and biscuits ready as they spread all sorts of files and papers around the room
. Pages of figures all over my lovely books on theatre and Hollywood stars. Piles of receipts and returns covering up all my framed photographs and little ornaments.

  Amazingly, at that first visit, everything was in order. Crisis postponed, if not entirely averted. My real financial nightmare would come later. ‘OK, we’re fine.’ Getting three words like that from the VAT man had to be good news, I felt. But then there was something else. ‘Mr Biggins, can I ask you a personal question?’ he said as he packed his case and prepared to leave.

  Blimey, was I going to get asked on a date?

  ‘You sometimes have a lot of money and sometimes you don’t. How do you survive?’

  ‘On the kindness of strangers,’ I said, misquoting Oscar Wilde. And I never said a truer word. My VAT man had got to the heart of the highs and lows of my financial life. As an actor it really is feast or famine most of the time. That’s why so many actors have second or third jobs to fall back on when times are hard. We need to. Or at least they do. I break ranks with many of my peers in several unusual ways. One is that I have always loved being out of work – just as well, my critics might say. But it’s true. When I didn’t have a tour or a panto season or a television show to worry about I could get on with my life. More importantly, I could socialise. There are always parties to go to and people to meet. There are first nights to see, new restaurants to try. Champagne doesn’t drink itself, as one dear friend often points out. And I have never worried about the future. I never sat and watched what jobs my contemporaries were getting and spat blood because I was jealous. I was too busy getting ready for a party.

  In theory, the only problem was that when I was out of work I would carry on spending as if I was working. But for a long time even this didn’t seem to matter either. For years I seemed to get one fantastic bank manager after another. If things got a bit dicey I could just take them out to lunch and they would agree to let me have even more lovely money. Why on earth, I used to ask myself, do so many people moan about their bank? Don’t they know how easy it is to play them for a little extra?

  I valiantly ignored them all. After all, less than 12 months earlier the VAT man had said everything was in order. Surely it couldn’t all have gone pear-shaped so soon.

  It had, of course. And one day I sat down in my living room to work out just how badly awry it was. I added everything up and slumped back in my chair. The figure was shocking. How could it all have got so out of hand? I needed £50,000 just to stay afloat. It’s a lot of money now. It felt an awful lot worse 15 years ago. How the hell had I allowed things to slip so far? And, more importantly, what could I do about it?

  I gave my new bank manager one more lunch invitation. I was rebuffed again. The man must be a computer. More seriously, it was clear that overdrafts and loans were no longer being thrown around like pantomime candy, at least not to me. Beg, borrow or steal. If I couldn’t borrow and as I wouldn’t steal, I knew I had to beg. ‘The kindness of my friends.’ I’d been laughing when I had made that comment to the VAT man the previous year. I wasn’t laughing now.

  There was one dear friend, whom I will not name, who I knew would be able to help me. But how could I ask? I was on my way down to see him, out in the country, as I tortured myself over the conversation. I can’t do it, I decided at the last moment. But then I thought of the consequences if I didn’t have the money. I had to go through with this.

  When I arrived, we gossiped and we laughed, as we always did. But there was something different in the air. I think we both knew why I was there. We both knew what was coming. And he didn’t make it easy for me. Rightly so.

  ‘I need to borrow some money.’ It was probably the hardest line I have delivered in my whole career. But it was the right thing to say. A cheque was written. An excruciatingly embarrassing situation did ultimately pass. And my worst fear wasn’t realised: a friendship did not end. ‘I will pay you back,’ I said at the end of that awful afternoon.

  And a few years later, when I was struggling again and was unable to clear the debt, I renewed that vow. ‘I’ll make it a gift,’ my dear friend said. ‘But with one proviso. You have to be a friend for the rest of our lives.’

  ‘Of course we will always be friends. But I will pay you back. One day I will pay you back.’ I meant that statement then, and I mean it now. I just wish I’d known that my financial crisis was very far from over.

  I’m in a fat, Club-class British Airways seat on my way out to the Caribbean. I’m pushing my money worries aside and going on another big theatrical adventure. The cast of characters here includes the fabulous interior designer and old pal Richard Hanlon, and Johnny and Wendy Kidd, parents of Jodie, Jemma and Jack. The family had a vast, stunning garden at their old plantation house in Barbados, as you do, but they had been using another garden, at JCB millionaire Sir Anthony Bamford’s Heron Bay, for an annual operatic evening.

  It was a magical event, in a magical place. But the Kidds decided they should do a Shakespeare and opera season in their own home, Holders House. The Holders Season was to be born. But who should put it together?

  Richard had seen the Midsummer Night’s Dream I had directed at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park the previous season. It had been a good one. ‘And it was all due to my Bottom,’ I liked to say, the old jokes being the best.

  ‘Would you like to go to Barbados to direct the show there? You can pick your own actors and…’

  I had said yes pretty much the moment Richard got to the word ‘Barbados’. Who cared what the rest of the pitch was all about?

  ‘Barbados?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Simple as that.

  I took Berwick Kaler in that first year; he was a dear friend and a spectacular pantomime dame who I had worked with in Regent’s Park. This was the start of a truly wonderful new phase of my life. It was quite wonderful for all my colleagues as well. We all got put up in hotels on the seafront. Some got very lucky with the most marvellous suites. Others just got lucky with magnificent rooms.

  I, of course, went one step further. In my first year I stayed with the Kidds themselves. And one evening we had drinks with a beachside neighbour, a lovely Italian countess called Carla Cavalli. I was finding out, once again, that the rich are so very different.

  ‘Your house is absolutely beautiful,’ I said. ‘Do you live here full-time or do you have another house elsewhere?’

  ‘Oh no, darling, it’s a holiday home. I also have a house in New York, an apartment in New York, a place in…’ and the list went on. And on. I think in total there were ten or maybe a dozen properties.

  Tao Rossi, of the drinks company, was an equally gracious and generous host. In my second year I was offered her guesthouse – a three-bed, three-bath property with maids and other assorted servants. The fridges were stocked with a dozen bottles of wonderful champagne. And after a couple of days Carla accosted me to see why they hadn’t been touched.

  ‘Why do you not drink it? You drink it up and I fill it up again,’ she promised. And she was as good as her word. And so a picture of Barbados emerges. One of luxury.

  The key hotel is the Sandy Lane. Renowned visitors from yesteryear include Maria Callas, Aristotle Onassis and the Kennedys. There’s Platinum Mile and billionaires galore. I loved it. One day I walked along that unique, white sand beach with Joan’s boyfriend Robin. We were walking along the beach towards, as I now know, Heron Bay. We stormed the castle – or at least we climbed over the wall and joined the Bamford family around their pool. Robin’s connections and easy charm made that sort of thing so simple. I was blissfully happy in his wake.

  I was introduced to the matriarch of the Bamford family, and oh how I love a good matriarch. Her name was Meggi and I fell in love with her that first day. She had split from her husband but she had remained the lady of the family. We often had tea together over so many years. She had an amazing doll collection and made ornately decorated boxes as gifts for her confidantes. I treasure mine. I also love the fact that with Meggi,
as with so many people in my life, I don’t just make one friend, I make a whole family of friends.

  One time back in London Anthony and Carole Bamford arranged for eight of us to be flown to Paris for lunch in a private plane. I was so stupid, thinking that because we were only going for lunch I wouldn’t need a passport. So for a while it looked as if the table for eight would need to have one place setting removed. I waved everyone else off in the chauffeur-driven cars and sat in the sad little hut on the wrong side of the immigration line at a tiny French airstrip. At best all I could hope for at lunchtime was a baguette. But fortunately Anthony could pull strings. He found someone who could produce a form that would allow me the freedom of France for the rest of the day. So a car came to whisk me to the Paris Ritz and join the others just after their starters had been served.

  On another occasion we were put up at the Paris Ritz overnight. It is the most exquisite hotel in the world – and Carole had made it even more so. She had put special flower arrangements in all our rooms for a more personal greeting. So classy – unlike me. I took the flowers with me when I checked out the next day, and persuaded the others to do so as well. ‘Common as muck,’ my dear mother would have said had she seen me sneaking out of the Ritz with my booty. But at least, for once, I was economising. Surely even my increasingly grim-faced accountant would approve of that.

  The only downside to that first glorious season in Barbados was that it hadn’t paid very much money. And I didn’t have any hugely well-paid jobs lined up for my return in 1994 either. More sobering still was the fact that the £50,000 I had begged for the previous year hadn’t been enough to clear more than my most urgent debts.