by John Challis
Boycie &
Beyond
Part Two of
An Autobiography
by
John Challis
First published in Great Britain in September 2012
By Wigmore Books Ltd
Copyright © 2012 John Challis
The right of John Challis to be identified as the author
of the work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
ISBN 978-0-95659061-1-3
Wigmore Books Ltd
Wigmore Abbey
Leintwardine
SY7 oNB
This book is dedicated to the men and
women of the RNLI at the Lizard
Lifeboat Station, the volunteers and crew
of ‘the most southerly’.
*****
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank the usual gang for their
help in getting this book to the press:
My (quite) patient wife Carol, Peter
Burden, Damian Russell, Celestria Noel
and Martin Ellis.
****
FOREWORD
By Sue Holderness
I read Being Boycie eagerly, from cover to cover. Having now spent nearly thirty years on and off working with John, I was rather surprised that I didn’t enter his 210 page autobiography until page 210. Well it just goes to show what a rich and varied life he has led. All those wives! Still I am proud to say that my marriage to John – strictly professional and on stage – has lasted longer than any of the others. We hit it off from day one and fifty or so episodes later, I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. Our first episode together was entitled Sleeping Dogs Lie.
Well, John has bravely decided to wake the dogs up and reveal much of his extraordinary life. In this second part of his autobiography you will learn more about Only Fools & Horses which was a joy from start to finish, but the biggest thrill for me and John was when John Sullivan decided to write the spin-off The Green, Green Grass. What fun we had! We discovered that we enjoy working together as much on the stage as on screen and I hope our professional paths will cross frequently in the future. Of one thing I am confident, our friendship is here to stay.
The Story So Far...
In the previous volume of my memoirs, Being Boycie, I charted the choppy seas of the first forty-two years of my life – my happy, if lonely childhood, an iffy academic career, an almost accidental introduction to the actor’s life and my early experiences on stage. By 1966 I was married for the first time and working with the Royal Shakepeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon. By 1976, I was no longer married, I had toured an English farce across South Africa, fallen in love half a dozen times and played Scorby in a six-part Dr Who story with Tom Baker.
In 1979, I went to the US to tour two plays with the great British playwright Tom Stoppard, fell in love with America and two American+- women, and came back to London to play a short role in the second episode of a new English sitcom, Only Fools & Horses, and to marry for the second time.
By 1985, Only Fools & Horses was established as a major British sitcom, and Boycie as a key character in it. Lennard Pearce, who played Grandad,had sadly died and Buster Merryfield had entered the cast as Uncle Albert.
Another new member joined the cast in March 1985, Boycie’s wife, Marlene...
Chapter 1
A New Wife for Boycie
In March, 1985, watched by 18.7 million viewers, Marlene Boyce, played by Sue Holderness, was introduced to the cast of Only Fools &Horses. An episode in the fourth season, Sleeping Dogs Lie, showed Boycie and Marlene together for the first time in a television marriage that was to last an astonishing twenty-four years. It became one of the classic shows of all the series. Although Marlene had often been referred to in earlier episodes – usually with a dirty wink from Del Boy – as someone who’d spread her favours around, this was the first time John Sullivan had given her flesh.
Sue Holderness slotted into the part of Marlene as if she’d been in our show from the start. She was an experienced and versatile actress (or actor, as the Guardian would call her) who’d been seen in a lot of popular TV series, in The Avengers and an early Rowan Atkinson show.
Sue was feisty, funny and very quick to establish her character. I soon found we had a good chemistry on set and I was delighted when I discovered she was married to a friend of mine, Mark Piper, whom I hadn’t seen since we’d worked together twenty years before at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. His mother, the famously forthright Joan Riley, had been directing for a season while my first wife, Carol Robertson, was stage-managing there. Now Mark himself was directing plays, as well as running the Windsor theatre.
In fact Boycie and Marlene appear only briefly in their first episode together, when, at the beginning of the show, Del Boy persuades them that he can look after their new Great Dane puppy, Duke, while they are away on holiday.
When Rodney’s trying to get the dog out of the van to take him for a walk, he sees that Duke is behaving very dozily. He finds Del, and they decide to take the animal to the vet. They are worried the dog may have eaten some reheated pork leftovers for breakfast; the vet concludes that the dog has probably got salmonella poisoning.
Back home, they discover that Uncle Albert had eaten the other half of the pork joint, so they race off to hospital with him. After a few nasty tests, Albert turns out to be fine, but Del Boy discovers that
Rodney has been giving Albert’s sleeping pills to Duke, and the dog’s vitamin supplements to Albert – all great Sullivan material, with Del’s line at the end: ‘Albert’s been on the Bob Martins.’
After that, I had a short appearance in the next episode, Watching the Girls Go By, without Marlene. I guessed John Sullivan (the writer) and Ray Butt (producer) were going to mull over her appearance and decide whether or not to ask her back. This must have depended to some extent on how important they planned to make Boycie in the show, especially as, by now, Only Fools was getting such impressive viewing numbers and looked set for a long life, in TV terms. The show had already run for four years, and frankly I really doubt that even John and Ray dreamed that fresh episodes would still be appearing – albeit as Christmas Specials – in 2003, which was still eighteen years away. In the meantime, I had a nine-month break from the show before making the 1985 Christmas special, To Hull and Back.
Between acting jobs I couldn’t resist a little tinkering on the fringes of the antique trade, as I’d done some years before when I’d worked in Portobello Road. This time I was helping my girlfriend, the actress Sabina Franklyn, and her mama, Margo, or ‘Moo Moo’, as we affectionately knew her. By the time I met her Margo Johns was a delicate little thing. She had been quite beautiful in her day and a talented actress. But Sabina’s father, Bill ‘Schh... You Know Who’ Franklyn, had left her thirteen years before, when Sabina was only eight, and she’d not been persuaded back into marriage with anyone else. She’d never found anyone to replace Bill, she said, and her acting career had dwindled with her confidence. She had a pretty little two-up two-down terrace house in Westfields Avenue, in that picturesque part of Barnes known as Little Chelsea, from where she eked out a living by using her fine eye for antique porcelain and bric-a-brac.
She lived there like a small, eccentric bird in her tiny home, which was cluttered to the brim. Every possible space was filled with small items of taste that she’d bought but failed to sell because she’d paid just a little too much. Antiques or bric-a-brac seem to be as price sensitive to the punters as a litre of diesel.
There’s little room for sentiment in the antiques trade, which was really too tough and grubby for her. I found it quite heart-rending sometimes to see M
argo scuttling into the lion’s den of Covent Garden market at the crack of dawn with battered cardboard boxes full of newspaper-wrapped stock, which she’d spent hours finding, choosing and ineptly haggling over. Every weekend or so we would help her hump a car-full of objets to an antiques fair somewhere in the home counties, where we would often hang around to help chivvy the punters and keep her spirits up when the dealers came round, picking up pieces of precious porcelain or silver, peering at them, fingering them like spuds on a costermonger’s barrow, and sniggering nastily when told the price. If Margo had inadvertently underpriced something good, it would be snatched up immediately by some rapacious dealer for the Bond Street trade, or re-surface on another stall a few minutes later at twice the price; indeed it could change hands a few times among other traders before it left the building in the grasp of a genuine punter at five or six times Margo’s original price.
Sabina had inherited her mother’s eye but she was much tougher and harder at buying and selling. I would do a little dealing myself from time to time, pottering around at the fairs trying to indentify stuff that looked underpriced, which I’d then sell for more at another, better-located fair. On one occasion, I spotted a handsome Georgian mahogany writing-box that looked cheap. I’d learned that there were a lot of collectors for these potentially decorative objects, which needed only to be placed on a guest-room side table to suggest life in an era of Bennets and Darcys.
After it had been displayed at a few fairs, and dismissed roundly by a number of hard-nosed, impolite dealers (wearing bowties/fake tans/half-moon spectacles) whom I wouldn’t have trusted with my last biro, as being neither Georgian nor mahogany, but a twentieth century fake in some Indonesian hardwood, I pounced on the next interested punter. ‘Is it eighteenth century?’ he asked, looking a little uncertainly at the ticket that said so.
‘Oh yes, indeed,’ I said, in my most authoritative manner, hoping desperately that he wouldn’t recognise my Only Fools persona.
As he walked away clutching the thing, having purchased it at slightly less than I’d paid, I added under my breath, to satisfy my conscience, ‘At least... the tree it’s made from was eighteenth century, or even older.’
Sabina and I had met working at the National Theatre at the Olivier, in my second outing with the company. This wasn’t an entirely wonderful experience, although, of course, I’d loved the first time I’d been with the NT, a few years earlier in Stoppard’s On the Razzle. But I couldn’t deny that it had been terrific once again to be in a piece by one of our greatest writers and there was nothing wrong with being asked back after that by the director, Peter Wood, to be in his production of The Rivals in the nation’s premier theatre company.
But I would have felt I was making more progress if I’d been given a nice meaty leading role in a contemporary blockbuster, rather than a minor part in a classic play, which must have been produced several hundred times since Sheridan wrote it in 1775, and while I was glad to be back, I admit to being disappointed not to have ratcheted myself a few rungs further up the ladder. I’d heard – and, while it may not be true, it was still discouraging – that the casting director, Gillian Diamond, had expressed a thought in an unguarded moment in front of people who shouldn’t have been present: ‘Darling, there are three categories of actor at the National – stars, TV names, and shit.’
I wasn’t a star and I wasn’t a TV name, so I knew where this left me in her eyes. Not surprisingly, after the Rivals, I turned down the next job I was offered by Michael Rudman, an important director, in The Last of Mrs Cheyney, in which I was asked to play the butler. ‘The sort of character that vanishes into the wallpaper,’ was how Michael described it. That didn’t sound much fun, after all the hilarity and energy of Razzle and The Rivals. I felt, rather as I had fifteen years before at the RSC, that they’d like me to stick around, they could use me, but without guaranteeing me any chunky parts. So, trying to keep my tail up and proud, I took my leave. Of course, from a public perspective, I suppose my career looked on a good course: Only Fools was unquestionably doing well; all the doubts after Series 1 had been swept away by subsequent ratings, and I felt pretty bullish about Boycie becoming bigger in the show, but by instinct and in essence, I was a live performance actor, and this was what I always wanted to do. It was very tantalizing to have been on the fringes of theatrical glory with the National without really drinking from the cup myself.
Within the confines of the television world Sabina was pretty successful. The show she’d been in, Keep it in the Family, with Robert Glenister and Stacy Dorning, had done well. She and Stacy had become friends and they kept in touch. Stacy’s father, Robert Dorning, was a good old actor, whom I admired as a great character man. It’s sad but, I suppose, inevitable, that as most actors age – unless they are very special indeed – they become what are known in the trade as ‘character bags’... or they stop working altogether.
This was a fate to which Sabina’s father, Bill Franklyn, refused to submit. He was a well-established and popular actor, who still insisted on playing dashing boulevardiers, leading men, who appeared implausibly with a succession of younger women in a weary cycle of drawing-room comedies and edgeless thrillers. Other well-known cads and seducers have recognised the inevitable and adopted a strategy, like moustachioed Leslie Phillips. He had goosed, winked at and drawled ‘Hello...’ to a hundred screen bimbos, but he’d reached a point where he decided to turn down all the caddish roles while he waited (a long time) for a real part to turn up. When it did (in The Cherry Orchard in the West End), he was able to reinvent himself as a character actor and this gave his career a new lease of life. Bill Franklyn, on the other hand, had decided that the character bag was not for him – possibly because he knew it was outside his range – and the jobs melted away.
I well remembered Oliver Fisher, an old trouper I’d worked with when I was twenty and in the Penguin Players in Bexhill, telling me, ‘You’ll have to wait at least until you’re forty before you get the sort of recognition you deserve.’
I was forty-three, and I reflected ruefully that most of the recognition I was getting was in the saloon bar of the Coach & Horses in Barnes High Street.
Sabina, on the other hand, was getting a lot of recognition, at least from Jo Public, when she starred in another very popular sitcom, Full House, with Christopher Strauli, Brian Capron and Natalie Forbes.
By the time the cherry trees were blossoming along the avenues in spring 1985, I had my feet well under Sabina’s table in Barnes quite contentedly, as far as that’s possible for two people in our profession. I was keeping fairly busy with several TV jobs besides my Only Fools activity. These weren’t just your derisory ‘coughs and spits’, although they weren’t major roles, either.
In Irish stand-up Jimmy Cricket’s And There’s More, for instance, I was a psychopathic Mexican bandit, and in a Storyboard pilot, King & Castle I played a rather pathetic villain called Billy Cato. I had a shock – and a good laugh – when I saw myself for the first time running on screen. Being fairly knocked-kneed, my calves were splayed out like a lizard’s on hot rocks; it seemed only right that Billy Cato should have been caught, tortured and embedded forever in the concrete piles of the Hammersmith flyover.
I also had a brief reunion with Warren Mitchell, with whom I’d worked in my first ever feature movie, Where Has Poor Mickey Gone, over twenty years before. In this particular episode of In Sickness and in Health, I was a copper trying to keep Alf Garnett under control after a perceived slight to his beloved West Ham United. The scene was filmed, curiously enough, at QPR’s ground at Loftus Road, just around the corner from the BBC’s Wood Lane Television Centre – excusable parsimony, I thought.
I reflected ruefully that my career in feature films since that first outing could not be said to have blossomed. Apart from a few odd bit parts (and a brief meeting with Jack Palance) there had been nothing and no siren calls from Hollywood.
However, I was becoming aware that Boycie was being notic
ed in the streets more often, with all the benefits and perils that can bring.
As a result of this minor fame, I suspect, I was asked by Sabina’s father to turn out regularly for a charity cricket team he captained – these days it would be known as a ‘celebrity’ team. I didn’t mind as loved cricket, although opportunities to play had been sporadic over the years. As it turned out, I could still connect with the ball – quite vigorously sometimes – and race up and down the wicket with my knock knees or snaffle the odd catch in the deep. Pure enjoyment of the game was a little marred by ever knowing if we were trying to win, lose or draw. Quite often we would find ourselves in a good position to win, only to be deterred by frantic (and ill-disguised) signals from the pavilion to, ‘Slow it down’ and ‘Give ‘em a chance,’ with the result that we usually ended up achieving a tactful loss.
The team, the Sargentmen, had been formed to honour the memory of orchestral conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent and support the Malcolm Sargent Cancer Carefor Children, which had been founded in his name a year after his own death from pancreatic cancer in 1967.
A number of actors have made good use of their celebrity to promote charities, most notably, that grand farceur, Brian Rix, who was a leading supporter and chairman of Mencap. His daughter, Louisa was married to another member of the Sargentmen, Jonathan Coy, a well-thought of actor with a waspish sense of humour and perhaps best known for his long-running parts in Rumpole and Hornblower.
Brian Rix had often employed Sabina’s grandfather, Leo Franklyn, in the nonstop string of farces he produced at the Whitehall Theatre – legendary home of English Farce, with all its trouser-dropping, arch suggestiveness and double-entendres. As a result, Sabina and Louisa had been friends since they were toddlers, while Jonathan was a regular big hitter on our team.
