So after my one-year gap, Biggins was back. And he wasn’t going away.
For in that first year I had as reigning King of the Jungle I realised that the role, and the title itself, really did change everything for me.
It’s hard to explain now just how important that reality show title meant. It’s hard to say what it did for this 60-year-old man. It opened so many silly and fun new doors. So many doors I thought would be closed to me, an oldie and a pantomime dame in a world where the young take all.
And what do I do when I see an open door? I rush right through it. I’m the fool that rushes in. So I was there, on Pointless Celebrities, having a hoot. I was there, on Loose Women again and again – how I love those lovely ladies. How great that such a mix of people put on such a fantastic show.
I did so many other shows that year and in the years that followed. I love The Wright Stuff – because Matthew is a great host and because I don’t just enjoy it: I always seem to learn things. I get a buzz from the banter and the mix of news and entertainment that we get to talk about and comment on.
I did plenty more as well.
I had a hoot on Come Dine With Me the following year – though I will officially confirm my naughty little secret. Because of technical reasons – the size of the lights and the cameras and so on – I couldn’t use my own lovely house to cook my dinner. So the house you saw wasn’t where I live. But I felt at home there, funnily enough. I was cooking for Edwina Currie, Julia Bradbury and the man always described as ‘Hollyoaks hunk’, Philip Oliver who is, I’m very pleased to say, a hunk and a half in real life. We all had our ups and downs in all the kitchens and dining rooms. But guess who won? I did, I’m thrilled to say, getting to earn £1,000 for charity and to laugh my head off for hours on end as one culinary disaster followed another.
Would I have had this fun, and worthwhile gigs a few years ago? Probably not. Nor, I think, would have I got to play the voice of a plane in a kids’ cartoon – a job that was even more enjoyable as my lovely partner Neil flew as cabin crew for years. Now I was the voice of a plane. It’s like I was following him to work and haunting him, the poor lamb.
Then, in a typical jumble and in no particular order, there is all the other fun I’ve had of late. Starting with Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two. I’d be on every episode of that show if they wanted me. So do just call. But seriously, it’s a fun and fast slice of quality TV – don’t let the ‘takes two’ label put you off. The team behind it work like mad to make it. But Strictly itself? I get asked, I’m flattered to say. But to appear on it? I couldn’t. I don’t want to be the next fat fool stumbling around the dance floor. I want people to laugh with me, not at me. Plus, I’m not sure I’ve got the stamina or the memory for all the steps. So many dear pals have been on the show. I’ve seen them get worked ragged. I’ve seen how much weight they lose – which is one advantage of going on, I suppose. But I’ve seen the worry lines on their faces. I’ve seen how distracted they are in the week before each live show. I’ve seen them desperately trying to remember everything they’re taught. I’ve also seen that the contestants mean it when they say they don’t want to let anyone down by messing up. There’s a very peculiar pressure on that show. It’s a huge team effort – and I’d never want to let that team down. Besides, who’d really want to dance with me? What would those lovely lithe ladies really think if my name came out of the hat next to theirs? They’re an incredibly talented bunch. They deserve to dance with someone a little more graceful than me.
Anyway, my dance card was getting full even without Strictly.
As I say, these last few years it’s all been a long whirl of fun, frothy stuff. It’s been marvellous. I did The Chase with Bradley Walsh, which was mildly terrifying. I went for £70,000 for my charity. I didn’t get everything right – that’s an understatement. But how lucky to be the person who can have some fun, can laugh like a drain, can hopefully entertain people – and can see a good cause get some cash at the end.
Moving on from Mr Walsh, I’m on and off the Alan Titchmarsh sofa as often as I can. I love chat shows, because I love to chat. So if I get a call for one of those then I’ll probably take it.
But what calls me most, year after year, is good old panto.
That lovely first year back on the boards in Southampton was only the start. The next season saw me head to Plymouth to wear a ridiculous number of even more ridiculous frocks as Widow Twankey in Aladdin. The producers had something extra up their sleeves that year – we had 3D special effects so the audience had to put those big ugly glasses on that always remind me of – well, the big ugly glasses I used to wear way back, that I thought were so fashionable at the time. But how great to offer 3D at a panto. How great to be doing more, offering more and finding new ways to entertain. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it to the end – but panto is vital. It is so often the very first show young kids ever see. It is the first time they ever go into what they probably think of as a stuffy old theatre. If we can keep it alive, if we can inspire and entertain those kids, then they’ll come back. And theatre stays alive. So a 3D genie of the lamp? Bring it on.
We sold a lorra lorra tickets in Plymouth. And we sold a lorra lorra lot when I got back on stage the following year to play the narrator in a travelling performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We started off in Belfast and went who knows where. What a great show that one is as well. Another ‘entry’ show that can get people into theatres for the first time and show them that us old thesps know how to have a good time.
Aladdin was back later that year in Wolverhampton where I decided to channel my inner Ann Widdecombe as Ms Twankey. My abiding memory of Wolverhampton that year? Some 1,200 people screaming: ‘Don’t touch the prawn balls! Leave the prawn balls alone!’ at every performance. If you were there, you’ll know how much fun that was!
Move forward a little bit and I was back as Mrs Crusoe in Robinson Crusoe in Cardiff in 2011. I got some more fabulous frocks to play Sarah the Cook alongside Basil Brush in Dick Whittington in Plymouth in 2012. Then the merry-go-round continued as I joined Bob Carolgees in Jack and the Beanstalk in Hull the following Christmas and New Year. And every time it still felt great to be back in that saddle. Because for all my jokes and jollity I was taught and brought up to be professional about work. If I make a commitment I stick to it. And it’s clear I’m committed to being in panto.
And you know what? You never know what else might crop up along the way. Such as the film version of Ray Cooney’s Run for your Wife – where I played a gay fashion designer with Lionel Blair as my boyfriend. That old farce (the play, not Lionel) is a hoot of course. Filming it wasn’t always easy. But we got and give a lot of laughs.
So through all of these post-I’m A Celebrity years there was so much to enjoy. So many good times to be had. So much of life to grab. I’d thought, as this second wave of my life’s madness started to build, that the joy would last forever. I’d thought that the good times were here to stay. I’d thought that I would carry on laughing for the rest of my time.
But it turned out that in very many ways I was wrong. For throughout these otherwise joyous years, life was going to get in the way. It seemed that a new world of sadness was always waiting in the wings. There were dark clouds on the horizon and so many tears to be shed. So many lives were going to get colder in these sad, sad years. For so many of us, everything was about to change.
22
Sad Days
It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly it began. It’s hard to say when I first felt it and knew it. But somehow, sometime, it was clear that the shadow of death was being cast over some of the most wonderful people in my life. So many of the men and women I loved and admired and respected were to be taken from us all. Too many of them. And they were being taken far, far too soon.
One of the first was a great girlfriend of mine, Pam. She died at just 52, of cancer. She had been an actress, a voice teacher, a therapist and a dear, dear pal. She was so young. It w
as such a shock to lose her. So hard to be without her in the years ahead. And her loss was only the start.
For with Pam’s passing it felt as if the call was out for Neil and me to attend so many funerals. I have had the grim task of trying to add it up. And I found that in the next few months and years more than 60 of my friends were to die. More than 60. It was frightening. Sobering. Terrible.
Of course I could explain some of it. I could put some of it down to my age – as I got older so too did many of my friends. So departures from the stage were inevitable. I could also put some of it down to my large circle of friends. When you know and love so many people it will again be inevitable that a certain number will leave you. But 60 people? In such fast succession, in really such a short period of time?
Anna Nicholas was one of the next to leave our stage. She too had been such a firm friend. She had been beautiful. She had everything. She had a wonderful husband, two beautiful children, grandchildren, friends, money, all the things we should need. We’d met so long ago. We’d played together in Connecticut Yankee in Regent’s Park Theatre. We’d connected and never lost our connection.
Her passing was somehow slow and sudden at the same time. As well as all the other times we’d meet up we had a tradition. We would always meet at New Year, at panto. Wherever I was, whatever role I was playing, Anna and her husband Graham would always come.
But that one year they didn’t come. I played that full season in Hull without seeing her. She told me the family had bought a new dog that couldn’t be left. I was furious. Because of course I hadn’t known that the dog wasn’t the reason. The dog was an excuse. Anna used it to cover up how fast her health was declining. She didn’t want people to know. And she wanted to try and shield us all for a little bit longer.
As I’d not seen her in Hull we arranged to meet for lunch in London when Jack and the Beanstalk’s run was over. We booked a table at the glorious Delaunay restaurant on London’s Aldwych, where we planned to exchange presents.
Anna cancelled. She told her husband: ‘Biggins won’t like this.’ And then, so very soon afterwards, she died. That simple, funny phrase was one of the last things she said.
A few painful years have passed now. I have still got Anna’s husband and her children as my friends. But oh how I miss the lady herself.
And oh how I miss Lynda Bellingham. We had been friends for more than forty years. We had been so close. She had been so brave. It’s not for me to repeat the story of her terrible battle with colorectal cancer. Her marvellous book, There’s Something I’ve Been Dying to Tell You, does that better than I ever can. Her decision to walk away from some of treatment to spare her family the pain of seeing her suffer is one I can’t forget and can only admire. Her loss, so soon, was so awful.
I was proud to be part of her funeral, as well as of her subsequent memorial service in London. And I tried to bring something I knew Lynda would have wanted to both occasions – a bit of laughter.
My dear old 90-year-old mother had given me just the line to use at the funeral. We had been speaking on the phone just beforehand. My mum had asked me what I was up to. I told her I was going to Lynda Bellingham’s funeral.
‘Oh the poor girl. Where is it?’ she had asked.
‘Crewkerne.’
‘Oh it’s lovely,’ my mum had replied. ‘I was stationed there in the war. She’ll love it there.’
I told the story at the funeral. It got a big laugh. It was what we all needed in our grief that day. And a big fat round of laughter was what Lynda would have wanted.
I tried to help strike the same note at the memorial that was held later, in London. I was asked to speak just before her dear husband Michael Pattermore. I tried to lighten the mood, to disperse some of the clouds. ‘Every actor longs for a full house,’ I said, to that very full house. Then I turned to her two sons, Robbie and Michael, boys who had grown up to be fine young men. Fine young men who I wanted to see smile, on this saddest of days.
I turned to them. ‘I was there the night she met your father. He was the most handsome man in the room. It was a toss-up which of us was going to ask him for his phone number. So think about it, boys. If Lynda hadn’t got in first I could have been your mother,’ I said. I saw their smiles then. We all cry, still, about Lynda’s loss. But we smiled too, which is what she wanted us to do.
There was more of the same as the guests talked and remembered Lynda afterwards. I was talking to another Lynda, the author Lynda la Plante. ’She’s out-sold you,’ I told her, as the sales figures for that most moving book, There’s Something I’m Dying to Tell You, were quite rightly going through the roof. All our tears turned, somehow, to laughter. Again, it was just what the Lynda I had loved would have asked for.
But what is so truly sad is that these first few funerals were only the beginning. I say I added up 60 of them. But in truth I think begin to lose count now of all the sadnesses in those years.
There was another of my very dear girlfriends, Jeannie, who walked into the shadows in these months. Her son-in-law had a massive stroke at just 52. He was paralysed, brought to hospital in an air ambulance – another extraordinary charity, by the way. And in the awful aftermath the other terrible lesson is how far tragedy spreads, how many people it can affect – and of course how quickly all our lives can be changed.
In what felt like a series of grim, sad times, it seemed as if everything was there to remind me of the people I had lost. It couldn’t be avoided, even at work. I found that out in a big blast from the past when the 40th anniversary of Porridge approached. Forty years! Can it be that long, I asked? Yes it could. Forty years. Gold, the lovely retro channel beloved by old timers like me, decided to do a three-part documentary about it. It was lovely to catch up with old faces and to remember good, old times. But, of course, very few of the original cast are still around, so there were still more shadows of the past to stride through. Ronnie Barker and Richard Beckinsale were gone, of course. And so were so many more. But the work – our work – lived on. Porridge had been voted one of the greatest sit coms of all time. I’d been in it. And I was still there to tell the tale.
Of course I don’t want to dwell too much on these gloomy thoughts. Sadness can be the stuff of life, after all. All of this is bound to happen, as the years pass. All you can do is hope that when your number is called you will have lived the life you wanted, loved the people you could and left the world with more than you took from it. And, of course, to have laughed as much as you can. So I’ll move on now with one last story of a funeral service where I did, again, try to bring memories of joy to all the tears.
It was the memorial for Jimmy, the pianist at Joe Allen restaurant in London’s theatre land. He had been there since day one. Everyone knew and loved Jimmy. We gave him a wonderful memorial in St Paul’s Church, the actors’ church in Covent Garden. I’d reminded us all of the fact that Joe Allen’s owner at the time, Richard Polo, never really liked it when people sang over their supper.
‘You have to tell people not to sing. It’s policy,’ he’d told Jimmy. But that had been easier said than done.
So at Jimmy’s memorial I reminded everyone of the night the much-missed Elaine Stritch had been in for a late-night supper. She had got up from her table, gone to the piano and begun to sing.
Dear Jimmy had asked her to stop. He’d told her to stop. He’d said she had to stop. But she didn’t stop. So he got desperate. He played his final card. ‘The only people who can sing are the ones who’ve shagged Joe Allen,’ he declared.
‘I have. Play on,’ this very grand dame had declared in that legendary, raspy voice.
23
Saying No!
In showbusiness we say the show has to go on. I say something a little different. I say the panto has to go on. And so it does. After Jack and the Beanstalk in Hull Neil and I took our usual holiday to recharge our batteries and prepare for the year ahead. Neil still flies the flag, with British Airways, and it is nice to fly in style. I’
m torn, sometimes, between an urge to explore, and a need to lie flat on a sun lounger doing nothing after a long run in panto. But we normally get a bit of both. We love grand old cruise ships as well. I’m lucky enough to be invited to give talks on many of them – and what a wild and fun bunch some of the passengers can be. Talking about old times and old shows while the oceans glide by is quite wonderful.
And sitting back a little, while life glides by, is just as nice. I realise that at my grand old age I’ve learned to say an important new word. It’s the word ‘no’. It’s actually a great word. You don’t use it when you’re young. When you’re starting out in your career – in any career – you can never say ‘no’ to any job. You never know if it will be the one – the one that changes everything and propels you where you really want to go. And you never say ‘no’ because you’re terrified that every offer of work might prove to be your last. So you swallow your pride, your reservations, your doubts and you say ‘yes’. That’s why I’ve said ‘yes’ so often and to so many jobs that might have inadvertently taken me in the wrong direction or pushed me on to a road I didn’t want to follow.
But today I have the courage to use the other word. ‘No,’ I’ll say. It’s vital to learn that word as you get older. I often look around when Neil and I are together. We’ve got a wonderful home, a wonderful life and we know wonderful people. We should live in it, really live in it. We should enjoy it. And we should enjoy all the others pieces of good fortune we get. Which of course includes our chance to travel. One last word on that. If we’re not flying far then I’m not proud. I’ll sit at the back of the plane if I have to. But if it’s long haul then I’m not as keen on the cheap seats. I’ve seen plenty of flying carpets in panto. And I do like a flying bed when I travel!
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