After a long, exciting day, Team Barrowman finally piled into the large limo. I gave the driver our hotel information, but as we began to pull out into the road that ran behind the convention centre, I looked to my left and saw someone who, in a flash, flooded my head with television memories from my high-school years.
‘Stop the car!’ I yelled, leaping out of the door without closing it – and leaving everyone inside convinced that this time I’d really lost the few marbles I had left. I darted between the limousines loading and unloading other celebrities for events later in the evening, and I charged across the street towards the vision from my past.
‘Where the hell are you going?’ someone inside the car yelled.
‘It’s the Bionic Woman!’
To understand the full impact of this encounter, I have to explain here that once I’d been safely ensconced in my private car with Team Barrowman, my security guards had immediately moved over to the loading dock and gathered around the very person I was now charging excitedly towards. This meant that the security detail knew I was not a threat, but poor Lindsay Wagner had no clue.
She looked up and spotted this man charging through traffic, yelling, ‘I’m a huge fan! Hello! Lindsay!’ and, naturally, she turned to her security detail for some help – but they were all acting completely nonchalantly and ignoring this clearly demented man in a Captain America T-shirt who was about to pounce on her. By the time I got to Lindsay Wagner, the poor woman was attempting to move behind one of the security guys and she was looking more than a bit terrified.
Did I care? Are you kidding? Well, maybe a little. But come on, it was the Bionic Woman. Alongside Space 1999 and Thunderbirds, The Bionic Woman was one of my three favourite sci-fi shows in my youth.
When I reached her, she was finally figuring out that while this fan might be a nutcase, he wasn’t a threat. I introduced myself. I’ve no idea what I said to her after that; I’m sure I sounded completely incoherent.
Then I strolled back across the street to the waiting limo.
‘It was the Bionic Woman!’ I exclaimed.
‘That’s a first,’ Scott said.
‘What do you mean?
‘I don’t think you’ve ever cut through traffic that fast for a woman in all the years I’ve known you.’8
When I was at university, I lived in a condo that my parents owned in La Jolla, a city close to San Diego. In recent years, when I’ve returned to the area, the district known as the Gaslight has been completely reborn. It’s now full of good restaurants, clubs, saloons, ice-cream parlours and lots of shops – yet in a style that’s preserved the area’s nineteenth-century traditions, including the gas lamps (thus its name). Getting around is done mostly on foot or by hiring a young man or woman in a bicycle rickshaw to use pedal power to get from A to B. Vehicle traffic is heavy, and pretty slow moving because of lots of one-way streets and pedestrian zones.
That evening, we went to dinner at a restaurant in the Gaslight District. It was one that a friend who was a regular at Comic-Con had recommended to me. After a wonderful meal and, admittedly, a couple or three bottles of wine,9 I let my dad savour the last morsel of his cream-laden dessert, paid the bill and then stood up. As is usually the case at a Barrowman family dinner, there’d been lots of terrific table talk, so we’d been having a good laugh throughout most of the evening. I had the perfect way to close out our night, but I wasn’t going to tell anyone until I had a head start.
We were nearing the front door of the restaurant when I suddenly grabbed my mum and dad and shoved them out the door in front of me. I whistled for a rickshaw, pushed them on and jumped up next to them, just as Carole, Clare and Scott were emerging from the restaurant.10 They figured out quickly what I was going to do because I could see their eyes darting around looking for another rickshaw.
‘I’ll race you,’ I yelled. ‘Round the block. Winner gets twenty bucks!’
Carole and Clare were now clambering on a second rickshaw and screaming at Scott to hurry up. The drivers soon realized what was up, and that there was extra money involved in this for them, too.
‘Go!’
Our driver took off like his rickshaw had wings. I’ve never seen anyone pedal so fast in my entire life. He could have generated electricity. Both bikes took the turn faster than was probably legal and suddenly we were in slow-moving traffic, trickling through the main streets of the Gaslight District. Think of it like duelling rickshaws along Old Compton Street in central London on a Saturday night. Our driver cut in front of two cabs and almost took out a group of Japanese tourists. My mum called back to them, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ as the rickshaw darted in and out of traffic like a pinball.
I hope, readers, you can appreciate how hard this was for the poor driver: hauling three adults, one of them me, at rubber-burning speed, while another rickshaw was chasing his tail – and gaining on him all the time.
At the second turn, before heading into the home stretch, the rickshaw carrying Carole, Scott and Clare got caught at a pedestrian crossing. They had to stop. I could hear the words ‘no fair’ echoing behind me when my rickshaw driver risked life and limb and jumped us onto the pavement, avoiding the next crowded intersection.
From the beginning, Carole, Scott and Clare’s rickshaw driver was at a bit of a disadvantage because they’d been slower off the mark,11 but I could see their driver had calf muscles that suggested he did more than pedal rickshaws during the tourist season. By the time we were all headed down the home stretch, weaving in and out of traffic, they’d almost caught up with us.
Something had to be done.
Up ahead and to my right, I could see a public parking lot. I told my driver to cut through the lot, missing the next block of traffic and, I hoped, bringing us back out in front of the restaurant where this Grand Prix had begun. Luckily for me, he was willing to take the risk. Once again, he shot the bike up on the pavement, and pedalled madly through the lot.
Carole’s driver saw what had happened, but he figured he had strength on his side. He stayed on the street. My dad, meanwhile, was bobbing forward and back next to me in the rickshaw, as if his momentum would somehow help our pace.
Readers, my tactic paid off. Amid a cacophony of partying pedestrians, honking cars really annoyed with us, and blaring music from nearby clubs, I let out a cheer that rose above all of this when my rickshaw got to the restaurant inches before the other one.
I paid for the rides, tipped both drivers really well, and gave the prize money to the driver of my rickshaw. While we were all laughing and catching our breath, a group of Comic-Con fans came running up to us.
‘I knew it! I knew that was Captain Jack I saw in a rickshaw.’
Needless to say, when Team Barrowman returned to the hotel, we all needed some refreshments. And then, after I’d made sure my parents were safely in their room, Carole, Clare, Scott and I ended up playing an unintentional game of ‘Ding Dong Ditch’.
For those of you who may not know what this is, it’s essentially the game that every child – no matter where he or she grew up – has played at some point in his or her childhood. You chase around your neighbourhood, ringing doorbells and running away.12
Gav, who had accompanied me on this trip, hadn’t joined us for dinner that night because he had an early flight back to the UK the next morning. So, I decided to play the game on him. In my version of the prank, I didn’t plan to ‘ditch’ after he answered; I planned to moon him when he opened his door.
By this time, Scott had given up on the three of us and he’d headed to our room. With Carole and Clare watching the hallway behind me for other guests or, God forbid, security, I loosened my belt and my jeans, ready to drop them when Gav came to his door.
I banged on room 316.13 Nothing happened. I banged again. This time, in the spirit of the evening’s events, I began singing Gav’s name to the tune of ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’.
‘Gavin, Gavin, give me your answer do.’
Suddenly, Clare hissed
,14 ‘Security!’
I started to run, forgetting that I’d loosened my belt. While I was at full sprint, my jeans locked around my knees and down I went, sliding face first across the carpet at maximum speed.
Clare and Carole leapt over me, laughing hysterically and calling out, ‘Payback!’ as they ran down the hallway towards their room.
I later learned from Gavin that he was in room 416.
CHAPTER TEN
‘O CANADA’
★
‘How do you solve a problem like a judge in jail?’
John Barrowman
Five things you should know about Toronto
1 You can take a ferry to an island and sunbathe nude (Canadians will sunbathe in snow flurries).
2 It’s not like America or the UK (it’s Canadaland!).
3 Safeguards and trust are important (especially when someone escapes via a hotel balcony).
4 When in Toronto, eat! (Food! Glorious food!)
5 I’ve looked at Falls from both sides now (the Canadian side is better).
In June and July 2008, I travelled back and forth between Canada, the US and the UK to be a judge on the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) version of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? (I was working concurrently on a number of other commitments in Britain and the States.) Sometimes I flew weekly to Toronto and stayed – Thursday to Monday – in a condo in Yorkville.
On every trip across the Atlantic that summer, the plane hit some of the most violent thunderstorms I’ve ever experienced. I fly frequently. I know the signs. When the flight attendants buckle up, hold hands and begin to sing ‘Kumbaya’, the turbulence is going to be bad.
I loved everything about Toronto: the CN Tower, the great restaurants and, of course, the shopping.1 However, I found that very little of my previous work on the BBC talent-search shows prepared me for the high drama and outrageous behaviour2 that came with judging the Canadian Maria – especially when a Toronto jail ended up being alive with ‘The Sound of Music’.
To begin with, the Maria who was the favourite of the other judges was not my favourite. I thought she was too vanilla; too bland for the role. The young woman who eventually won, Elicia MacKenzie, was one of my choices because she had energy and passion, and she sang from her heart.
As I did in the BBC version of the Maria show, I went to Maria School to work with and to meet the contestants. Many of the hopefuls knew me from my musical-theatre work, but more of them were familiar with me from Torchwood and Doctor Who.3
During one of my first days on set, I was working on a theatrical exercise with the contestants, and I said something silly about being gay.4 Thanks to Clare, my niece, who was with me at the time,5 an off-the-cuff expression from that day became the Barrowman phrase of the summer. Clare, I might add here, can spread family gossip or stir up drama faster than Perez Hilton and TMZ combined. There’s some sentiment among my immediate family that she learned this trait from me. Never.
Anyway, I said something like: ‘I’m just as much a gay man in Canadaland as I am in England.’ And that was certainly true – I was on a CBC How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? float for the city’s gay-pride parade one week (can’t let a parade pass me by), and I discovered after only a few weekends in the city that Toronto is an open and very gay-friendly city.
Thanks to Clare, whenever anyone asked what John was doing that summer, the response was always, ‘He’s being gay in Canadaland.’
Unlike on the BBC talent shows, at the CBC, the panel of judges watched the Maria hopefuls on DVD in dress rehearsal before the live shows. This was not to pre-judge them, but to help the writers and the other judges – who had very little experience in this area – to craft a broad range of responses to each of the contestants’ performances. It also meant the production team could time out the various sections of the script with more accuracy.
In these script meetings, each of us would suggest the kinds of things we might say if the performance that evening was a strong or a weak one. Given this was now my fourth time on a judging panel, I was never at a loss for something constructive and TV-friendly to say. There was one particular judge, though, who, when it was her turn to comment, would hem and haw and then finally say something like, ‘Oh, I’ll probably just tell her she’s good,’ or ‘I’ll probably say I liked what she did.’
Every time. When the show was down to its last six or so contestants, I couldn’t help myself. On behalf of all talent-show judges everywhere, I gently lost it.
‘Stop being so nice. Stop being so Canadian. This is a contest. If she’s rubbish, then tell her she’s rubbish.’
One night during the live show, she made a comment suggesting a particular contestant, Donna Lajeunesse, had too much of an ‘attitude’. I thought this was wrong of her. It’s one thing to comment on a person’s performance; yet another to comment on their personality.
First of all, if Donna did have some kind of ‘attitude’, if she was causing some discontent among the other contestants, then that conflict should have been worked out when she was at Maria School. The judge didn’t need to humiliate her on live TV and perhaps bias the audience towards her. Donna looked perfect as an Austrian Fräulein, and she belted out her numbers with spirit and style. Anyway, the judge ragged on her attitude, calling her a ‘diva’, and commenting how she was badly behaved and how this kind of behaviour can’t be tolerated in theatre … blah, blah, blah.
Originally, the producers had decided they weren’t going to come back to me for my comments after this judge had shared her opinion, but I planned to cut in quickly at a moment when she took a breath. During Barrowman family dinners, sometimes the only way you can get your say is to leap into the fray of the conversation when someone breathed. So I was ready when I heard this judge inhale.
‘Sometimes when you’re a diva,’ I said, ‘you’re perceived as a bitch, but over the course of my career in theatre, every leading lady I’ve worked with has been a diva in some way and they’ve all been very successful, so … well done, Donna.’
‘Where’s John this summer?’
‘He’s being gay and blunt in Canadaland.’
Despite some of the differences in our judging styles, the show’s producers didn’t have to do much work with me because I knew how to produce myself.6 However, the same couldn’t be said about Simon Lee, a fellow judge and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s proxy during the early stages of the elimination process, when Simon had the final say on who should be saved in the sing-offs. Andrew only joined us later in the series as one of the judges.
For years, Simon has been Andrew’s musical supervisor for shows like Jesus Christ Superstar and The Phantom of the Opera, and he was also involved in the initial stages of the BBC’s How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? However, I believed from the beginning that Simon was not a good choice as a judge, and in this venture he didn’t represent Andrew’s interests well at all. Early on, I mentioned to the series producer that she shouldn’t put too much of the show on Simon’s shoulders because I feared he might let the programme down.
For despite Simon’s many talents, as a judge he was a stuttering, twitching mess most of the time. Unfortunately, his influence with the producers continued right up until his arrest. I don’t claim to be prescient or perfect, but I knew many people who’d worked with Simon in the past, and, from the beginning of the production, I was worried about his professionalism. I was also aware of his personal struggles and how they might interfere with the show.
Sadly, it didn’t take long for Simon’s dramatics to go from petty to outrageous, and on the day after the show’s semi-final, Toronto headlines read: ‘Judge for CBC’s Maria arrested after alleged assault, confinement at posh Yorkville hotel’ and ‘Maria judge charged with assault’.
I didn’t need anything nearly as histrionic for Simon to wear thin on me. The little things he did were quite enough. For example, I did most of the pre-air publicity for the show, and in return for my work, I was hoping I’d ge
t to sing ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’ with the contestants, and have the opportunity to plug my album, Another Side, to the Canadian market.7 This never happened. Instead, in rehearsals that week, the producers informed me that Simon was going to accompany the remaining Marias on the piano during the upcoming show. This didn’t seem fair. Not only because I’d clearly been bumped, but also because Simon had to read his music during the accompaniment. As I said to the producers: if Simon had to read music while he played, how could he fairly judge the Marias’ performances?
‘Do you think the audience will notice that, John?’ asked one of the producers.
Oh, yeah. Viewers are not stupid. They notice everything.
When I was a contestant on Dancing on Ice, I remember one week Phillip Schofield called out the final voting without a note card in front of him. Viewers wrote in and complained because they thought he was being told the answers in his ear. It didn’t look kosher, even though it was, and the following week Phillip had the results on a card. This format has subsequently changed as viewers have become used to earpieces.
As we discussed Simon’s planned performance, he piped up in the meeting – in a voice that sounded as if he was parodying a foppish Englishman – and explained he was a professional and would handle the situation appropriately. I let it go. Ultimately, the TV audience saw a few shots of Simon’s hands that particular episode, and no shots of his music. Only the studio audience saw him for the entire number.
Normally, this kind of stuff wouldn’t rile me, but on this occasion I thought that a great deal of the focus on Simon was at the expense of the Maria hopefuls. When I participate in shows like this, I always remind myself that as a judge I can be funny, sassy, maybe even a little in-your-face, but in the end the show is all about the contestants. I’ll get another chance to perform, but these young men and women may not. Unfortunately, Simon’s star turn was yet to come.
I Am What I Am Page 14
