by John Challis
Does love exist at all? Or is it a mere construct that we must sustain to justify our own existence and procreative urges?
Stoppard’s exploration of these themes against a backdrop of the vain uncertainties of writing and acting, plus his own personal history make the play especially potent. I don’t know when he and Felicity Kendal started their affair but she had been in the first production (with me) of Stoppard’s uproarious On the Razzle, so he certainly saw a lot of her then. But it can have been no coincidence that when he and the director were casting The Real Thing for the first time, he announced that what he was looking for was a ‘bossy blonde’.
While Felicity was with Michael Rudman, Stoppard was married to Miriam. I had met Miriam when I’d been up to Cambridge a few years before to help Stoppard illustrate a talk he was giving about his work. And I had warmed to her very much; I found her a clever and engaging woman, who made a genuine effort to connect with people she met.
Stoppard’s own apparently supercilious remoteness, and what I can only – and reluctantly – describe as his intellectual arrogance, are evident in the character of Henry in The Real Thing, for instance in a speech about perfect writing, where he uses the effective metaphor of a batsman, possessing a fine bat, who perfectly judges the timing of a stroke from which the ball is hit away to the boundary without any sound or apparent effort, compared with the player wielding a mere bat-shaped plank of wood and the random unsatisfactory results that provides.
There is no escaping the autobiographical self-knowledge that informs the character. Although not a weakness in Stoppard as an artist, this sense of superiority can be, as I’m sure he knows, a disability in dealing with his fellow men.
I recalled how when I was working on Razzle, he appeared on the South Bank Show with Melvyn Bragg, whom he managed to tie in knots, by simply not answering the question and offering nothing instead. I asked him afterwards why he hadn’t wanted to be interviewed by someone who could handle what he was trying to say.
He looked back at me quizzically. ‘If he’d been clever, I wouldn’t have done the show.’
I found this almost sociopathic attitude in him irreconcilable with the man who, just eight years before, had sat in my room in a rundown New York hotel to thank me with some humility for holding together his play, Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoots Macbeth, which he was sure he hadn’t yet got right.
When I took the rattler down the Brunel Highway to South Wales to see The Real Thing for the first time, I wasn’t surprised to find that Sabina had formed a cosy, flirtatious relationship with her leading man. This situation, in a dash of deja vu, seemed eerily familiar. I managed to brush it aside at the time, which I think kept it in check, although I recognized its echo later on in our relationship.
With no stage production of my own to get on with and a break in shooting Only Fools, I had a few more TV parts – in Lenny Henry’s show, as a manic Mexican, again (perhaps someone had spotted me in Jimmy Cricket’s And There’s More), and an episode of a series, Chance in a Million, with Simon Callow and Brenda Blethyn, where, in the familiar surroundings of a pub, I was cast as a seedy, lascivious drunk.
These were not memorable experiences but I’ve always taken the view that work iswork, and that it was preferable to take most of what was offered (within reason) than to wait around for better offers. In any case I was firmly established in my career path now as Aubrey Boyce, whom I was booked to play in five more episodes in 1986, starting with a favourite of mine, From Prussia with Love, which we filmed in June.
I was delighted when I heard that Sue Holderness had been called back again to play Marlene for a second time. I’d heard that John and Ray had been very happy with her first appearance a year before and were expecting to include her more in the sixth series.
John established that one source of conflict and bicker between Boycie and his spouse would be their difficulty in conceiving children. At one point, Del accuses Boycie of ‘firing more blanks than the Territorials.’ The irony of this hit me hard. I tried to think back to any time when I might inadvertently have referred to my own problems in procreation: if I hadn’t, it was a bizarre and slightly painful coincidence.
In From Prussia with Love, John took on this very personal and tricky issue and, through laughter, managed to remove the pain a little and leave people shrugging philosophically and smiling over it. Working his way with skill and sensitivity through a minefield of potential political incorrectness, Sullivan has Del Boy telling Boycie and Marlene that he thinks he can help them ‘have a baby’.
‘I know where there’s one going,’ he offers.
Boycie gives him a sharp sideways glance. ‘What? Knocked off?’
‘No, no; it’s all pukka,’ Del protests.
In fact, he’s come across a German au pair girl who has ‘fallen pregnant’ but doesn’t want to keep the child.
Rodney of course assumes that Del intends to sell the baby to Boycie and is outraged by his brother’s callousness.
Del denies this and proceeds to make arrangements to produce thebaby for Boycie and Marlene’s approval when it arrives.
The au pair gives birth to a fine healthy child. As Del is well aware that Boycie is dead anxious to have a boy, presumably for some kind of dynastic reasons, he’s very put out when the baby turns out to be a girl.
Nevertheless the presentation goes ahead. Boycie’s reaction to the child’s gender is classic. ‘It’s amazing! Everything you buy off him has got something missing!’
When the problem is apparently compounded by the baby girl being brown, Marlene coos over her with delight and Sullivan takes more risks with political correctness in Boycie’s reaction. ‘Good God, Marlene! I might be able to convince people into buying my cars; I might be able to convince them that you conceived and gave birth in ten minutes flat, but how the hell am I going to convince them that my grandad was Louis Armstrong?’
By having Marlene fall in love with the little brown baby and wanting her to become part of the family, Sullivan removes any racial undertones from the scene. The episode ends with the au pair changing her mind and deciding that she wants to keep her baby after all, while Boycie and Marlene are left to carry on trying.
Marlene was in my next episode, too, Video Nasty, in which Rodney innocently becomes involved in the making of a soft-porn flick by his one-time chum, Mickey Pearce. I was delighted that the Boyces who, as a couple, had greater scope for providing plot lines, were now becoming well and truly ensconced in the series. By the following year they were appearing in almost every episode that was made.
Against this background of growing confidence and security in both our careers, Sabina and I were managing to find a level between our two potentially self-destructive natures, which suited us both. Sabina, to her credit, still spent a lot of time on her mother, Margo, who had somehow been tossed rather helplessly onto the shore of a sea of tribulations.
Her former husband, Bill Franklyn, a man who liked to be in control of as much as possible of his life and of those around him, to some extent took responsibility for her – at least to the extent of coming round to remind her to send a birthday card to his new wife and interfering with her financial arrangements.
Margo was partially to be blamed for allowing him to get away with it. Although since his departure from her, she had, as a beautiful and potentially engaging woman, been pursued by plenty of suitors, she’d always declared that Bill was a hard act to follow and none of them were up to it. Although Bill’s undeniable qualities weren’t especially profound, this may have been true; in any event, she had never formed any kind of long-term liaison with anyone, and as prospects became more distant, had got into the habit of spending a lot of the time on her own feeling sorry for herself.
Once when we rushed round to Westfields Avenue to answer a piteous panic call, we found her sitting helplessly in her shambolic front room, surrounded by a clutter of unsold objets and chunks of nineteenth- century lath and plaster, and soaking wetfrom
a deluge that had caused the collapse of the ceiling above her as a result of a leaky bath tap.
Within minutes Bill, also summoned, had arrived and immediately got on the phone to berate her insurance company and anyone else he felt he could effectively harangue on her behalf, pulling celebrity rank wherever possible.
By that stage in my life I was getting better at accepting that other people did things differently and there was little to be gained by getting annoyed with them or trying to change their outlook, however irrational it may have appeared. And this applied to my own parents, too. One could only stand by and watch, I concluded, as they allowed themselves to descend into a downward spiral of uncompromising mutual reproach and unhappiness.
My mother’s health was going downhill, in direct response, I suspected, to her own dissatisfaction with life. On the whole she liked Sabina, or, at least, appreciated that there was a bit of ‘class’ about her and, still unaware of my infertility, hinted about it being time I settled down and had a family. But Mum didn’t entirely trust Sabina. She resented her tendency to be a little supercilious around her, and wasn’t slow to remind me of the mess I’d made of my first two attempts at marriage. Besides, I was aware by then that there’d always been something of a power struggle between my mother and whatever woman I was involved with.
My father always liked seeing Sabina when I took her down there for birthdays and high days. He seemed to welcome the presence of another female within the family circle and he would take her hand, looking meaningfully into her eyes.
‘And how is John?’ he would ask, although he never asked me. For the most part, however, he was becoming increasingly intolerant of anyone who didn’t agree with his own bitter views on life, the government, God, and the human race in general... and was suspicious of those who did agree with him! He was clearly drinking a lot – more than he openly admitted to – and I had to resort to spying on him to discover just how much he was consuming.
On one occasion when he suggested we went out, ostensibly to walk my mother’s dogs, when we’d driven up to park by a parade of shops off Ashtead Common, just around the corner from where I’d been incarcerated as an estate agent twenty-five years before, Dad declared that he was going to pop in and buy a bottle of R. White’s Lemonade – ‘A lovely drink, that!’ – while he attempted to slip a half bottle of Booth’s gin into his coat pocket without my seeing it.
He made some lame excuse for staying in the car while I took the dogs off onto the common and when I returned there was a heavy aroma of gin on his breath.
My mother had told me that she kept finding bottles, empty or partially depleted, all over the house and garden – even in the cistern of the downstairs lavatory. She was clearly suffering from the effects of this, and cast herself as a collateral victim of alcoholism by joining a support outfit she called Al Anon, where she was encouraged to write about her experiences, and met other people with whom she could air the problems of living alongside an alcoholic.
I later learned that my father’s half-hearted, almost deliberately botched attempts to conceal his alcohol purchase from me were classic symptoms of a distinct stage in the inevitable, slippery descent into Alzheimer’s.
I was very sad when my mother told me it had all become too much for her and she was going to move out. She had sold her old family home in Bath after her father’s death and bought another, more modern house up towards Lansdown on the edge of the small city.
Now, after torturing herself with doubts and guilt about abandoning my father, she announced that she was going to move permanently down to the West Country and leave him to his own devices.
She justified this, too, by its closeness to a hospital that had the facilities to deal with a virulent skin condition from which she was suffering.
I offered to take her and a carload of her possessions down there, and as we set off in my trusty Honda Accord from the house in Sunnybank, Epsom, I caught sight of Dad in my rear-view mirror. He was rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of spending an uninterrupted spell with his mistress – a bottle of Gordon’s Dry Gin.
As Mum and I set off to take the old A4 through Reading, Newbury and Chippenham, past the prehistoric tump of Silbury Hill, she didn’t look back once. This has always seemed to me a desperately sad way to end a marriage that had already lasted over four decades, when just a little compromise might have averted it and given them a few happy last years.
I know I’ve referred more than once in these memoirs to some aspects of my demeanour and, I suppose, my height, which have caused me very regularly to be cast as a policeman on television.
One of the strangest and, I guess, the apex of my career playing plod occurred in mid 1986, when I was summoned to play a copper opposite a small piece of grey felt rag known as Roland Rat – the same celebrity rodent who’d been invited in by Greg Dyke in 1983 to put TV-am more soundly on the map, which-h he did with great success.
Now he’d been elevated to a more prestigious time slot and was as popular as ever. I enjoyed him a lot; he was brilliantly operated and very funny. Before the show had started we’d sit either side of a table, in character, and discuss how we should do the show. It was quite bizarre to work with a character with whom one carried on quite erudite conversations without ever seeing the man who spent these encounters invisibly, beneath the table with his hand up the witty rat’s jacksie.
I enjoyed it, but after just the one appearance, when I was asked if I would come back, I felt that one could spend only so much time in the company of a rat before one developed a bit of ratitude. Besides I was sick of being a policeman, and I declined the offer.
Soon after that, on a characteristic whim and the spur of the moment, Sabina and I set off in my trusty Honda to drive down to Italy. Bill Franklyn was a great fan of all things Italian and the glamorous Amalfi coast and Sabina had often travelled there with him; she was anxious to share her affection for the place with me.
Before we went, Bill took it on himself, in his usual didactic way, to give me a crash course on Italy and Italian driving habits.
Nothing, he said, could be worse than dealing with Latin drivers, their lack of skill and excess of histrionics, as well as the dangers of driving on the wrong side of the road.
It didn’t do any good to tell Bill that I’d been through all this before, knew it and experienced it probably as much as he had. After all, anyone who had tackled the rond-point around the Arc de Triomphe as I had during the Paris rush hour should be prepared for pretty much any kind of traffic madness. In that particular death trap I’ve actually found myself facing cars head on!
We ferried across the Manche, put the car on the train to Evian, from where we drove past the lake up into the Alps. On the way up through the dramatic mountainous approach to the Brenner Pass, after a longish pit stop in a bar, I found I’d left the car headlights on; the battery was flat and the car had to be bump-started. Sabina was highly unamused and chilly about it. Actresses don’t on the whole like to be seen pushing cars – especially Hondas – in public.
Naturally, when we got there, I could see and feel at once why Sabina loved Amalfi and Positano so much. This beautiful coast appealed strongly to a dangerous, romantic side of my nature but as usual, in my effort to blend in with the locals, I couldn’t control my urge to imitate the voice and extravagant gestures of the native Italiansand had to stop myself from breaking out into lusty renditions of O Sole Mio (the Elvis version).
Walking through the pine and lemon-scented lanes that straggle and zigzag up some of the most picturesque cliffs in Europe, Sabina and I talked of marriage. We boldly addressed the issue of no possible issue and the irreversible damage done to my procreative equipment when I was a child. She accepted it and we started making plans for a wedding. I wasn’t drifting into it with my eyes shut, like I had with Carol Robertson twenty years before and I hadn’t been bounced into the idea, as I had been by Debbie Arnold, my second wife, but I can’t deny that there were questions n
agging at me. I was still doubtful that both our own, quite distinctive and – it had to be admitted – self-centred personae could settle down and make the required compromises with our vanity. Nevertheless, by the time we’d driven back to England, the idea had firmly taken root and started to grow.
That autumn, October 1986, we were happy to sign up to a joint gig, in a new production of the play in which we’d first met, Sheridan’s The Rivals. This time it wasn’t a National Theatre production and we both had bigger roles when the show opened at the Theatre Royal, Windsor.
I enjoyed being back in Windsor, well-stocked as it was with memories, occupying a goodish chunk of my own personal history. I recalled with pleasure my time working in that theatre as a dresser with Mark Piper, when he was still a teenager. Every time I saw the mighty Copper Horse at the end of the Long Walk in the Great Park, I remembered my walks up there with Carol, or, on the way to Ascot, the field where we’d pulled in to canoodle in the car and I had, with youthful romanticism and regrettable naivety, proposed to her – memories which led to the occasional stab of guilt for having left her there in the thoughtless, scatty way I had.
It was great to be back on stage again after a run of TV work. Although this was a straightforward, provincial production of Sheridan’s classic, it was very well directed by Stephen Barry and cleverly designed by Lee Dean, who was to feature in my career quite a few times in the future. Sabina and I had a great time renewing our relationship with Sheridan’s brilliant writing in the different roles in which we’d been cast. This time I played a diffident, irresolute
Falkland, while Sabina was a lovely, saucy Lydia Languish, paramour to Jack Absolute. The show was made special by the presence of June Whitfield, whom I’d always loved, as Mrs Malaprop. With her bright little blue eyes, hers was a more glamorous and blousy version of Sheridan’s famous creation than Geraldine MacEwan’s had been for the National.
Twenty years after this, when she had become famous all over again as Eddy’s mother in Ab Fab, it was lovely to see June when she turned up in Boycie’s life as Marlene’smother. Also in the cast of The Rivals were her daughter, Suzy Aitchison, and Christopher Strauli, who’d been in Keep it in the Family with Sabina, all adding a nice homely feel to the show.
