What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  By far the most controversial and celebrated of all Ollie’s chat show appearances occurred when he agreed to appear on Aspel & Company, which regularly pulled in eight million viewers a week. Graham Stuart, now a top television executive, was then a researcher on the show and a crucial eyewitness to what happened both in front of and off camera. Ollie was booked to promote Castaway and it was agreed that a car would be sent to pick him up at his hotel. ‘And obviously that car had strict instructions not to stop anywhere. The car was sent but Ollie didn’t get in it. Immediately we think we’ve lost him. Then we hear he’s in another car with his brother David, but a car that he’s chosen, and that car stops at every pub on the way. So there’s mistake number one. The control’s lost.’

  Anxiety spread around the studio, when was Ollie going to arrive, if at all? The show wasn’t going out live, but already the audience had begun to gather for the recording. Finally he showed up, and staff could hear him ranting and raving one floor above. As he appeared to be drunk, discussions took place between the production staff as to whether or not to let him go on. In the end the thought was, well, that’s what you expect from Oliver Reed.

  Ollie’s fellow guests were comedy actress Sue Pollard and TV presenter and writer Clive James. Along with their individual researcher, the guests were led to a little green-room area just behind the set to wait for their cue to go on. ‘And that’s when it kicked off,’ recalls Stuart. ‘Ollie goes from being merry drunk to being agitated drunk. He wants a gin and tonic. Now in the backstage area the only instruction that was given to us was, don’t give him a drink. So I go off to pretend to get a drink and now it’s getting near to show time.’ All the while Ollie was getting more and more angry and frustrated. ‘Where’s my fucking drink? Give me my fucking drink.’ Stuart returned empty-handed and tried to avoid Ollie’s gaze, but he’d spotted the subterfuge and was furious. ‘Where’s my fucking drink?’ Nearby on a table was a large jug of orange juice. Still shouting and swearing – and by now his shirt had come out of his trousers and his hair was disarranged – Ollie picked up the jug just as he heard his cue to go on. Out he walked and bang, the audience reaction was predictably raucous. Taking in the huge response, Ollie must have thought, right, let’s give them a show. Hijacking the band to play the sixties hit ‘Wild Thing’, Ollie belted out the lyrics like a Neanderthal Elvis and danced like the uncle from hell at a Christmas party. It was a performance that few who watched it have ever forgotten.

  Backstage Stuart was watching the horror show unfurl on a TV monitor, and could see that the host, Michael Aspel, was unsettled, that he didn’t feel comfortable in the situation. It was left to Clive James to ask the interview’s only real probing question, ‘Why do you drink?’ To which Oliver replied, ‘Because the finest people I’ve ever met in my life are in pubs.’ It sounded glib on television, but in reality, from Mick Fryer to Michael Christensen, Ollie’s most loyal friendships were indeed hatched over a pint in the bar. As Stuart continued to watch he feared the thing would spiral out of control. He also to this day thinks that Ollie was faking part of it. ‘He was not as drunk as that. I think as an actor he’d got to that point and he was going to go with it. And he did.’ Afterwards in the hospitality room Oliver was conspicuously sober and behaving in that very English kind of way of pretending nothing had happened. ‘Michael Aspel was not happy,’ says Stuart. ‘He felt the show had been damaged. The producers were also in a bit of a state. And there was Ollie trying to be normal. Afterwards I think there was a feeling of almost regret with him. But, looking back, it was amazing to be part of something like that, to feel the tension and the electricity of something major happening.’

  Just how major became clear when ITV aired the show two days later. Switchboards were jammed with angry viewers and the incident made front-page headlines. No one had appeared on television that drunk before. One critic pointed out that it would have been more extraordinary if Oliver had behaved like a bank manager. While Clive James wrote: ‘It was one of the most exciting evenings since World War 2, when I was much further from the front line.’ But the television authorities took a less flippant view. ‘The Independent Broadcasting Authority, who were the regulatory body in the United Kingdom for commercial television, went nuts, as you can probably imagine,’ says Greg Dyke, then Director of Programming at ITV. ‘Their view was that if he was drunk he shouldn’t have been allowed on. I don’t think they realized it was recorded, and that we could have edited it out. Now, when you look back, should we have taken it out? No, of course not. You look back now and you say it was a significant moment in the history of British television, not one that you can be proud of, but it was a moment that mattered. It also captured something about Oliver, which is what most of us already knew, that actually a lot of the time he was paralytic.’

  Unfortunately it was a view that not only reinforced the public’s image of Ollie as a loose cannon but also scared off a lot of potential employers. Producers were just too afraid to work with him and what should have been a revival thanks to Castaway ended up another barren wasteland. One wonders if he was aware that he was cutting his own throat with these pantomimic and self-destructive performances. Mark isn’t too sure. ‘I don’t think he was a fool, but he would come away from something where he had behaved badly and think that that was good fun and good television. I’m sure somewhere in the back of his mind he must have thought, hang on, this is all really contributing to my downfall. And yet there was another part of him that didn’t care. I don’t think he necessarily recognized the full extent of the damage that these little appearances probably did. Great for telly, not great for his film career.’

  Nor did Ollie do himself any favours on his next chat show appearance: with Des O’Connor. Again he was clearly not compos mentis here, though Des was his own worst enemy by asking him, ‘I understand you have a tattoo in a very unusual place.’ Without skipping a beat Oliver replied, ‘Yes, on my cock.’ The audience burst into hysterical laughter. Again the TV authorities weren’t chuffed, for this was live, prime-time television.

  It was quite a lively show, that one, because besides Oliver it featured comedian Stan Boardman telling his infamous Focke-Wulf joke, and Freddie Starr. Just before the show Ollie burst into the make-up room brandishing a bottle of whisky and poured some of it into a half-pint tumbler and gave it to Boardman. ‘Get that down you.’ He then turned to Starr – ‘Here you are, Freddie’ – but Starr waved the whisky away. ‘Oh no,’ he said, holding up a large bottle of pills. ‘I don’t drink, Ollie.’

  Not long afterwards Boardman was playing a gig in Guernsey and invited Ollie to come along. On stage Boardman was midway through his act when someone started heckling him. ‘I love hecklers, but Ollie didn’t understand that comedy and heckling go together. He thought the fella was showing disrespect. So he stretched over the table and grabbed hold of him and gave him a big bear hug, lifted him up on to his feet, dragged him out on to the dance floor, and they collapsed together in front of about three hundred people.’

  After the show Ollie invited Boardman and a friend of his, the actor Tony Barton, back to his house. When they arrived, Ollie asked them to join him for a drink in the Garage Club. ‘But I’ve got to initiate you first. You have to wear a tie – and nothing else.’ Boardman and Barton stood there thinking, are we going to go along with this? ‘Come on, get your clothes off,’ Ollie insisted, already stripping. After a couple of minutes all three men stood there completely naked, except for a tie. ‘You’ve never seen anything so ridiculous in your life,’ says Boardman. ‘We all march up the stairs, and I’ve got Tony Barton’s big fat arse in front of me, and Ollie’s behind, probably the worst view in the bloody world. So there I am following these two arseholes. We get into the bar and he’d made a great job of the place: it looked like a small pub. He must have had thirty bottles on the optics.’

  Ollie went behind the bar while Boardman and Barton got comfortable on stools. ‘For the initiation ceremony you’ve
got to have a drink,’ said Ollie and took a half-pint glass and went down every optic, whisky, brandy, vodka, the lot, until it was practically full. He did the same with another one and placed the two glasses in front of his guests. Ollie had one for himself and took a giant gulp. Boardman, a beer man by nature, took a swig. ‘It nearly killed me. I managed to get down to about half and he starts filling it up again along the optics. The rest of the night was quite a blur, really.’ That’s not surprising, but Boardman does remember a bunch of builders arriving, wearing trousers, so they must have already been members, and then the arm-wrestling started, and press-ups. ‘All sorts of little games and tests of strength to see if you could beat Ollie.’ There was also the singing box, an antique ottoman that you got in, and while Ollie sat on top you weren’t allowed out until you’d sung a complete song to his satisfaction.

  After the drinking, everybody, now fully clothed again, went into the house, where Boardman noticed in one of the rooms an elaborate chair, almost like a throne, on a raised platform. Ollie sat on it and at once began reciting Shakespeare’s Richard III but all jumbled up in his own style, ad lib. ‘It was absolutely brilliant.’ This is something that he often liked to do. He did have his favourite pieces of Shakespeare that he liked to quote or play around with. ‘Oliver had a terrific memory,’ says Christensen. ‘He’d come out with poetry sometimes in the pub, spout something beautiful. Or if you talked about some of the films he’d done, he’d take a speech out of it and deliver it word perfect. Even years later he could do Father Grandier’s speeches from The Devils. Unbelievable. To have all that rattling round in your head.’

  They ate some toast, then Ollie announced that tomorrow he was taking everyone for lunch at a restaurant owned by one of his friends. ‘I can’t go,’ said Barton. ‘I’m doing a TV commercial tomorrow in London. I’ve got to get the first plane out of Guernsey, six-thirty in the morning.’ Ollie said, ‘No, no, you’re not going. You’re my guest. Nobody leaves here until I say. We are going to my favourite restaurant.’

  As everyone made their way to bed, Barton whispered to Boardman, ‘I’ll just sneak out at five or something. Ollie will be well out of it.’ The following morning Boardman came downstairs and there was Josephine. He asked her, ‘Tony Barton, did he manage to go?’ Josephine shrugged her shoulders. Boardman guessed he must have gone, as it was past nine o’clock. ‘So I go back upstairs and I pass Tony’s bedroom and there’s Tony on the fucking bed fucking handcuffed. Ollie had gone in during the night and handcuffed him to the rail.’

  Bypassing breakfast, everyone headed for the restaurant. When Boardman walked in he couldn’t believe it: sitting in the corner was the guy who’d heckled him at the gig the night before. ‘Ollie went, “Aarrgghh” and dived over the table and grabbed him, and this guy’s fucking terrified, and they rolled around the floor again, the plates and glasses are bouncing off the walls. Ollie then picked him up, straightened the fella’s tie and sat him back down and said, “The dinner’s on me, but don’t ever do that to my friend again.”’ Ollie returned to his table and sat back down. Clutching a bottle of wine, he continued to watch this guy intently, all the while growling, ‘Grrrrrr.’ The poor guy tried to carry on with his meal but was visibly shaking. ‘Suddenly Ollie threw this bottle against the wall behind him,’ says Boardman. ‘And the fella put his knife and fork down and fucked off out the door. Well, I couldn’t stop laughing. And the bloke who owned the restaurant poked his head out. “Ollie, will you stop doing that!” Knowing Ollie, he would have done that as a trick, he liked to shock people. Me, I was doubled up.’

  It had certainly been an eventful weekend, and when Boardman left he suggested that since Ollie had looked after him so grandly he’d like to return the favour with an invitation to his home city of Liverpool. Ollie said he’d love to come and after landing at Liverpool airport did his usual trick of falling down the steps of the plane. As a treat Boardman took Ollie to Anfield to watch a match and introduced him to Kenny Dalglish, manager of Liverpool. Ollie was wearing a beautiful red silk jacket from a Who tour, a gift most likely from Moonie. When he saw Kenny, Oliver shook hands and took off his jacket and gave it to Dalglish. ‘We had a great time,’ says Boardman. ‘Ollie met Ian Rush and the team and we watched the match in the directors’ box. The Kop were singing, “There’s only one Ollie Reed, one Ollie Reed, there’s only one Ollie Reed”, and he stood up and acknowledged them. He got a standing ovation from the Kop.’ In the bar afterwards they were having a drink when Dalglish walked up. ‘I’ve got something for you, Ollie.’ One of his assistants ran down to the dugout and came back with a Liverpool tracksuit top. ‘You can’t give him a crappy Adidas top,’ said Stan. ‘He’s just given you a million-pound fucking Who jacket.’ Ollie took it, saying, ‘No, I want it,’ and insisted on wearing it as they went back to his hotel.

  The next day Boardman arrived to pick Ollie up and got landed with a bill by the hotel management for a broken door. In the night Ollie’s mate, tired of always being dragged out of bed to go drinking, had gone down to reception and changed rooms. Of course, Ollie had knocked on his door and when he couldn’t get a reply smashed the thing off its hinges. Another day of sightseeing and drinking followed. In one restaurant Oliver insisted they swap jackets. ‘So I’m now wearing Ollie’s coat,’ says Boardman. ‘And in the top pocket there was a wad of twenties and fifties sticking out. There’s £100 in another pocket, £300 in that one. Every fucking pocket I opened, there was cash everywhere. I said, “I want to fucking buy a coat like that. Where do you get them coats, Ollie?”’

  Later that day Ollie went off to meet a friend in Halifax to watch a rugby match. Boardman asked the driver who took him if he got there all right. ‘It was a nightmare,’ was the reply. ‘Ollie was wearing that Liverpool tracksuit top and on the dual carriageway he told me to stop the car and he got out and rolled around for ten minutes in the mud to make it look authentic. He said he couldn’t go to a rugby match with a new top that wasn’t covered in shit.’ And when Ollie got there he gave that top to some other guy and took his coat. ‘He swapped coats with everybody,’ says Boardman. ‘When he got on the plane back to Guernsey he had different clothes on to what he started with. I asked him what had happened to the coat with all the money in it. He said, “I don’t know.”’

  Slumming It

  In 1987 doctors warned Ollie to ease back considerably on his alcoholic intake or face the consequences of possible kidney damage, coronary disease and ultimately heart failure. But did he care? Not really, brazenly announcing, ‘I’d like to think I would be brave enough to drink myself into the grave.’

  By now a life on the piss had taken its toll on his appearance. He was pot-bellied, grey-haired, lined and slightly stooping. It was a long way from the brooding sex symbol of the early seventies. His face was now ‘a sad reflection of a dissolute life’, as one journalist put it, and ‘a Hogarthian example of debauchery’s perils’.

  Of course, growing old is an inevitability, but for someone who set great store by his masculinity it is perhaps surprising to learn that it was something that Ollie had few hang-ups about. ‘So long as he had his garden and his Radio 4 and his sport and could walk the dogs, I think he was quite happy and content about getting older,’ says Josephine. ‘He was perhaps looking forward to the chance of playing different characters. He always laughed that he wanted to be the man who came into the pub and somebody would say, get off that stool, it’s his stool, for God’s sake, move now. Also that I’d push him everywhere in a wicker Bath chair and he’d have a stick to poke people.’

  What did frighten Ollie was the thought of a long, lingering death, of getting some nasty disease and slowly wasting away. ‘He didn’t want to be in a hospital,’ says Josephine. ‘He wanted to enjoy his old age disgracefully or however, but he didn’t want to be in a hospital or ill.’ It was such a morbid fear that Mark was made to swear that he would carry out his father’s wish that, ‘If I’m there with nurses wiping my nose and
my arse, if I’m in that situation, get a shotgun and shoot me. Don’t give me one barrel, give me two, make sure you do a proper job.’

  Something Ollie did take great pride in was the fact that he was quite indefatigably the last of a dying breed, the last hell-raiser. Burton was dead and Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole had both had to reform to stay alive. Not Ollie, and while most critics in the media looked down on his infantile rabble-rousing, one scribe from the Mail on Sunday surely expressed what the majority of the nation thought: ‘The world needs Oliver Reed. He’s the last great bad boy, a lone, shining beacon in the long dark night of political correctness.’

  But after his behaviour on those chat shows producers were by and large afraid to employ him. ‘To some degree he chose lifestyle over professional advantage,’ says Michael Winner. David, as his manager, did his best to convince people to take him on, telling them, ‘You don’t have to worry about Oliver. Whatever happens the night before, he’ll be there, he’ll be on set on time. You’ve got no fears about losing time or money.’ But it had now got to the point where Ollie was accepting almost anything going to pay the bills, even television commercials. In the past David had always advised against doing them, since it smacked of desperation, but now Ollie had no choice. The first had him walking into an off-licence, pointing at the shelves, and saying, ‘I’ll have one of those, one of those, one of those, and give me half a dozen of those,’ and as the camera pulls away he is holding armfuls of potato crisps. ‘As a result of that, Ollie got into the idea that maybe commercials were a good idea,’ says David.