by Matt Lucas
I also befriended Betty, an elderly no-nonsense Scot who sat in a tiny kiosk at the stage door. She’d worked at the Playhouse for years, knew everyone and everything that went on there. She smoked like a chimney and consequently had a voice so deep that whenever she answered the phone you would hear her berating whoever was on the other end for calling her ‘sir’.
The dramatic high point of the play was a brutal onstage fight between the two rival brothers. They pushed, pulled, slammed and hurled each other all over the place. It seemed inconceivable to me that they didn’t get hurt, but one of the actors told me that there had been an hour of rehearsal for every second of the fight. Nothing was left to chance. It was precisely choreographed. I saw it from close up every night and to this day I’ve never seen anything as visceral and intense.
In other parts of the show, many of us were more relaxed. There was a lengthy scene that took place on market day, with stalls all over the stage. The principal cast members were at the front of the stage delivering their lines, while the rest of us swanned around in the background. It’s not uncommon for some actors to play pranks and games to keep themselves from being bored as the run goes on and at this point one of the cast had taken to surreptitiously balancing small props on the shoulders of other actors. I could often be found hiding at the back of the stage, doubled over in hysterics at the sight of one of the other actors discovering an entire slice of bread on their shoulder.
Our cast had only been in the show for a handful of performances when we were suddenly given our notice. The show was to close at the end of the month. I was disappointed but immediately philosophical. I wasn’t a professional actor and yet in the space of a year I had performed at the Edinburgh Festival and in the West End. It was the stuff of dreams.
And now, every few years, I like to return to the stage.
I had a great time originating the role of Leigh Bowery in Boy George’s musical Taboo in 2002, but my favourite experience came some years later in Les Misérables. I adored the show as a child and listened to the tape in the car repeatedly with my mum. I went to see it for my thirteenth birthday and several times more over the years.
When David and I were on our Little Britain Live tour, we heard that the producer of Les Mis, Cameron Mackintosh, was in the audience. He came backstage afterwards and – in a brave move for him considering he had just heard me attempt to sing in the show’s finale – took me at face value when I told him I’d love to play the innkeeper Thénardier one day. Over the next few years there were sporadic conversations about the possibility. Because of my schedule with David, the idea of going into the show in London wasn’t realistic at that time, but there was talk of a big one-off concert to celebrate its twentieth anniversary in Hyde Park or even at Wembley Stadium.
First, however, I had to go to Cameron’s office in Bedford Square and sing for him. He seemed happy enough with what he heard. I also mentioned that I would love to play Javert one day, but he quickly nipped that one in the bud!
Sometime later I learned that there was to be a twenty-fifth anniversary concert at the O2 in London. I was to be the only person onstage who had not yet been in the show. Cameron was very keen for me to appear for a few weeks in the London production – as Alfie Boe and Nick Jonas would do – but I was busy with David, writing and filming Come Fly with Me.
I was, however, able to spend three days working on the stage at the Queen’s Theatre with the musical director, who taught me my part. I then had another rehearsal at the Welsh Centre in London, where we sometimes rehearsed Little Britain and later on had Doctor Who script read-throughs. There I met Jenny Galloway (who was playing Madame Thénardier) and Alfie Boe for the first time. I had seen Jenny’s performance on TV in the tenth anniversary show, but I only knew Alfie Boe from a brief appearance in an episode of The Apprentice, when he sang at an ice skating rink!
I was expecting a grand, towering, stuck-up tenor – but instead, waiting patiently in the corner in jeans and T-shirt, was this quiet, unassuming, humble man. And what a voice! I had never heard Valjean performed in a purely operatic style before. When he sang ‘Who Am I?’ at the piano that day, it was clear that he was going to reinvent the role.
Come Fly with Me wrapped on the Friday night and the following morning I arrived at the O2 in Greenwich for my first rehearsal with the cast of the concert. The week that followed was one of the most exciting of my life, as the show came together.
Whenever I wasn’t rehearsing, I would sit and watch the others. I was tense and nervous because we only had a week before we were going to be onstage at the O2, but also because two days after the concert would be the first anniversary of Kevin’s death. On the second day of rehearsals, when the students sang ‘Do You Hear The People Sing?’ I broke down in tears. I don’t think anyone saw, other than Emily, my assistant. Kevin and I had been to see Les Misérables together and he’d shared my love of it. I was heartbroken that he wouldn’t be there with me.
On the Friday afternoon we assembled for the first time with the full orchestra. The sound was magical. It started to hit me that, in fortyeight hours’ time, I would be onstage in Les Misérables – not in my bedroom singing it in front of the mirror, but at the O2 in front of nearly 20,000 people.
On the Saturday night, as we were rehearsing on the stage, Cameron decided that the wigs and make-up looked too theatrical on the big screens. He scrapped the lot. On the Sunday morning, during the dress rehearsal, he decided that the parts of the show that were being performed on the balcony at the back didn’t feel connected to the rest of the performance. Much of what had been rehearsed was hastily discarded.
Tickets had sold out so quickly for the evening performance that Cameron had added a matinee in the afternoon. Those who were unable to come along could go to a local cinema and watch the evening show beamed live.
The matinee was a bit of a mess. Because of Cameron’s changes we were still rehearsing until a few moments before the doors opened. He thought that I would – or should – receive a big round of applause on my entrance and so he called for four additional bars of intro music as I came on, to cover this.
We rehearsed it once hurriedly amidst a number of other changes and then I went to get into costume and make-up, but as soon as I walked out in front of the audience, I immediately panicked and reverted back to what I had been practising all week. If you know the show, then just imagine me singing the ‘My band of soaks, my den of dissolutes’ segment to the wrong music. It was excruciating and there was no way of communicating with the conductor or the orchestra without stopping – which I didn’t dare do.
As I sang the right words to the wrong tune in front of the audience – including the poor writers of the piece Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Herbert Kretzmer – I hurriedly tried to calculate what the ongoing consequences might be of this error. Would I now be four bars ahead for the entirety of ‘Master Of The House’? Would the whole show now be out of sync?!
I reached the end of the ballsed-up intro and waited – and the orchestra caught up with me. I took a deep breath and launched into the song.
Welcome, monsieur, sit yourself down
And meet the best innkeeper in town …
I was back where I was supposed to be. Phew. But I had freaked myself out and struggled to focus for the remainder of the song. Now suffering stage fright, I fluffed a few words here and there, but smiled my best smile and I like to tell myself that no one will ever know. Oh, hang on, I’ve just told you. Well, anyway, please don’t mention it to anyone else. Thank you.
When I spoke with Alfie at the interval he too was kicking himself over a missed cue or two. It seems a few of us had been a bit wobbly. Between the two shows I apologised to Alain and Claude-Michel (not least because they had initially tried to cut the intro to the song for the concert and I had begged them not to) and resolved not to let nerves get the better of me in the evening show.
I managed to keep my head and I’m proud of how it turne
d out that night. I’m also relieved that that is the performance that people have watched on TV and DVD and not the one from the afternoon!
Alfie Boe stole the show. His rendition of ‘Bring Him Home’ brought the house down. The audience applauded for several minutes. Backstage we watched the screens in awe and pride.
The experience was so enjoyable, so rewarding, truly the realisation of a dream that, when I heard that Alfie Boe was going back into the West End production, I just knew I had to join him. Alfie and I had become close. He’d even been staying at my house for a while. We’d had so much fun singing together in my kitchen, I was not going to miss the chance to hear him at full blast every night.
I later learned that, because Alfie and I are both quite short, the rest of the cast had to be too. Craig Mather, Liam Tamne, Hadley Fraser – none of us are giants. We called ourselves ‘Les Minirables’. In the West End Madame Thénardier was played by Katy Secombe – daughter of Harry – and we instantly had a great chemistry. In fact I still have many friends from the West End run.
One of the joys of playing Thénardier is that, because he doesn’t appear in the first forty-five minutes of the show, whoever plays him is also in the chorus for the opening scenes. That meant that I was a convict singing ‘Look Down’ and the podgiest wretch you’ll ever see belting out ‘At The End Of The Day’, joining the others at the back of the stage and edging forward in that iconic stagger. I worked in the factory and in the fields, and joined the other villagers in scorn when naughty Valjean swiped that candlestick.
The way Les Misérables is staged – in the original London production, with the revolving set – is that, unless you are in the spotlight, you’re pretty much in shadow. Once I spent the whole of the show chastising myself because I’d got the giggles during ‘At The End Of The Day’, but when I went to see the show again recently I was reminded that you can’t really see anyone’s faces anyway. I always gave my best onstage, but – knowing that most of us were barely visible at times – I could be mischievous too, as I had been nearly twenty-five years earlier in The Fifteen Streets. Oddly enough, when making comedy with David, we hardly ever mucked about – it was too serious a business – and yet here we all were, in this musical tragedy, with everyone dying everywhere, having the time of our lives.
One night I decided to paint a large black moustache on my face and thick, dark eyebrows. I looked like one of the Super Mario Bros. I went on in the factory scene as normal and the absurdity of my appearance reduced the rest of the cast to tears. However, one of the principals remained alone onstage singing and was understandably distracted by the raucous laughter in the wings. I got a big bollocking and apologised profusely to everyone, especially the performer who had been directly affected. What no one knew was that that morning had been my very last at the house in Marylebone where I’d lived with Kevin. It had been sold, so a few hours earlier I had said goodbye to it, grabbed a case, walked out the door and checked into a hotel. I was emotionally drained and had painted the moustache on in the evening in an attempt to cheer myself up.
After that, I did my best to behave, but it wasn’t long before I was fooling around again. In the factory scene I was in a line of workers queuing up to receive a sou for a day’s work. I usually liked to entertain the others (and poor Carl Mullaney, who had the onstage job of paying us) by either refusing to accept the coin or grabbing the whole pile and making off with it. One night I handed out coins backstage to everyone else in the factory beforehand and we all paid a stunned Carl instead.
In Les Misérables, whoever is playing Thénardier shares a dressing room with the actor playing Javert. I was lucky enough to be with Hadley Fraser, one of the few people I have ever met who can claim to be even sillier than me. We’d often challenge each other when it came to the bows to see who could do the grandest, the longest, the shortest or the lowest. Gradually the challenges became more esoteric and oblique – who could do the most gracious, the least grateful, the angriest, the haughtiest. At the end of one matinee I scampered around backstage handing out multiple packets of Fizz Wiz. That afternoon we took our bows with frothing mouths.
Some of the cast liked to join in my antics, while others were naturally more serious (okay then, professional), but there’s a theatrical tradition that all of the actors and even the crew muck about a bit on the final matinee of their run. Usually there’s a note given at the company warm-up session an hour before the show that there is still a paying audience out there and that everyone must behave, but that soon gets forgotten. The unwritten rule is that, as long as the audience doesn’t know what’s going on and the show isn’t affected, you can pretty much do what you like.
I set myself a challenge in my final matinee to discreetly eat as many bananas as possible onstage during the show. I planned carefully how and where to secrete them, and while Valjean was being given his yellow ticket of leave and the rest of the convicts were bashing rocks with their picks, I reasoned that my character had earned a tea break. I sat down on the stage and tucked into my first banana. The fact that there were almost certainly no bananas in France during that period wasn’t going to stop me. Throughout the performance I produced banana after banana and, because of the way the show is lit, none of the audience members were any the wiser. Well, I say that – one or two might have spotted me chomping on one alongside Madame Thénardier when we popped up through the trapdoor during ‘One Day More’.
Due to other work commitments I left the show before the rest of the cast and I was very touched that they all made such a fuss of me on my final weekend. Alfie Boe gave a speech onstage in front of the audience. Afterwards a party was thrown and I was presented with a book that the rest of the cast had put together. Alongside some lovely messages there were photos of the cast and crew – each sporting a large black moustache in my honour.
One of my remaining ambitions is to perform on Broadway. Cameron asked me on a couple of occasions to join the production of Les Misérables there. Maybe I was crazy to say no, but when it came to it, I had such a wonderful time in London doing it, with the most brilliant, talented, warm group of people, that I figured I should probably quit while I was ahead. Maybe one day I’ll change my mind and do the role again somewhere – I do love that show – but for now I am happy to cherish the memories.
V – Various Other Things I’ve Been In
In the interests of housekeeping and making sure everything is in order before I go, the purpose of this chapter is to talk about various other things I’ve been in.
Yes. We’re approaching the end now. How will you cope when I’m gone? Will you sit in the corner of the room, rocking silently, waiting for me to pen a sequel to this opus? Or will you just move coolly on to the next sleb? Will you buy John Barrowman’s tome, in which he reveals why he sounds all Canadian when he does Loose Women and like a Govanhill tough guy when he’s on Scotland Today, or Katie Price’s latest book, in which she finally explains the difference between Katie Price and Jordan? (Spoiler: Jordan wears slightly cheaper foundation.)
Anyway, aside from when I was in the audience on Jim’ll Fix It and in the coffee shop on Saturday Superstore (I asked Owen Paul a question), my first TV appearance was in Minder.
Don’t believe me? Okay then, check my IMDb page.
Actually, don’t – you won’t find it on there.
I was in Minder but I wasn’t credited or paid. In fact, I’ll go one step further. I wasn’t even supposed to be there. One day my friend Nick came into college and told me that his grandfather – who was a bookmaker – had heard that George Cole and co. were going to be filming some scenes on a race day at Hackney Wick. Nick and I both loved Minder and took the afternoon off lessons to go and have a gander.
On the way there we talked about the likelihood of meeting Arthur Daley himself (small, we decided, but worth a try). This then developed into a challenge – not just to talk to the actors but to share the screen with them.
We turned up at the track and, su
re enough, we found out where production was shooting. We casually mingled with some of the background artistes – or ‘extras’, as they used to be called – and joined them in the line-up. As we waited we talked to Gary Webster (who had recently replaced Dennis Waterman in the show) about Arsenal. We also chatted to some of the other background artistes, one of whom we had spotted in a Kellogg’s Fruit ’n Fibre advert and another whom Nick had recognised from one of the Indiana Jones movies. One elderly man kept himself apart from the group. He was ill-tempered and extremely anxious in case his face appeared on camera. He told us that he would never get ‘proper acting work’ if he became known as an extra. The others told us he was deluding himself.
No one in the production team seemed to notice that these two seventeen-year-old boys had suddenly appeared, and so we helped ourselves to tea and biscuits and simply dotted ourselves along the filming route. Although we never summoned up the courage to speak to George Cole, as the camera tracks along, you can see the two of us walking behind him. Check out the screenshot. We’re keeping straight faces, but inside we’re jubilant.
My first proper TV acting job was in 1994 and was a line in The Imaginatively Titled Punt & Dennis Show. On the day, Steve Punt had a lot of dialogue and kept himself to himself, while Hugh Dennis just had the punchline in the sketch and was relaxed and larking about. The thing I remember most is that there was a joke in the scene about ‘Big Ron’ Tarr, a non-speaking background artiste who, over time, had become one of EastEnders’ most popular and recognisable characters. On the day we filmed, Ron himself wasn’t available, so instead a ‘Big Ron’ lookalike was hired to do the job. To my surprise, he told us this wasn’t his first booking. It has always struck me as about the most niche job there could be.
