by John Challis
Chapter 4
Assorted Villains
Sabina and I had loved living in the little house in Trehern Road but there was no doubt that is was just too bloody small and by 1988 we were both working fairly consistently (for actors). As my mother had left me a bit of money, it felt like time to trade up. After a little searching, we found a house we both liked in the snootier environs of Sheen Lane. It was a distinct step up the housing ladder – certainly up the hill, towards the park, for despite its nearness to Trehern Road, the south side of the Upper Richmond Road was altogether more salubrious.
Number 8 was near the top of Observatory Road, a good-sized terraced house, on which someone had spent a few quid in the recent past. The floors were Swedish timber – in a good way. We had three bedrooms, a study on the first floor and a garden in which you could have swung several cats. The front was well planted with a few alpines, aubretia, arabis, campanula and bluebells. The rear garden wasn’t so tidy. It supported a sizeable magnolia, a few gloomy shrubs and a neglected, weed-strewn patio area. I set to work on sorting out the paved section, anxiously trying to recall all the cock-ups we’d perpetrated on behalf of clients with our attempts at paving ten years earlier in the days of Churchill, Challis and Slater – by now fondly remembered through the distorting mist of time.
Settling in to Number 8, we both felt we were going in the right direction. Sabina certainly aspired to a bigger dose of glitz in our lives and she loved being in a distinctly smarter house – it was certainly the poshest house I’d ever lived in. We could just about afford it; we were both working a lot, with the added interest of the antiques trade with Margo. I particularly enjoyed being in a house in a leafy suburb with the park on our doorstep. It felt to me like living half in town and half in the country.
We hadn’t been in the house long when our neighbour paid us a call. I opened the door to a potty-looking female who seemed determined to tell me her life story and several additional tales of woe.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘my children have robbed me – every penny, dear, and now I’ve barely enough to feed myself.’
She looked quite fit and well and her clothes had certainly been expensive.
‘I can’t even afford my cigarettes,’ she said, ‘and, d’you know, they’re the only pleasure I get these days. I should love a packet of Players Navy Cut,’ she went on wistfully. ‘I can’t bear those horrid little cigarettes with tips, can you?’ she challenged.
‘Oh, no. Absolutely,’ I agreed, hastily stubbing out my pathetic Silk Cut.
She was warming to her theme. ‘Tips, spats, whatever you call them, they’re just for perverts. I don’t mind Balkan Sobranie – those gold tips aren’t tips at all, they’re just for decoration – to show you which end to put in your mouth – though of course it doesn’t matter, because it’s only tobacco either end. Anyway, they’re too expensive. I think it’s disgusting! Just because they’re coloured pink or blue, I mean that doesn’t make any difference to the taste, does it?’
I tried discretely to rummage through my pockets and wallet, without producing any evidence of great wealth. I found a small fistful of change and gave it to her. She looked down at the coins in her hand with a peremptory sniff and scuttled off down the road, I presumed to the tobacconist.
After a few enquiries among our other neighbours I discovered that the little woman did a regular begging run, up and down the road, although, curiously, only on our side. I wondered vaguely if that was reflected in the relative value of the houses. It seemed she was making quite a living by begging, although she was in any case a very rich woman, with a large family, who simply viewed her eccentric habits as a source of amusement.
On Christmas Day, 1987, The Frog’s Legacy had been watched by 14.5 million and there was little doubt that, after five seasons, there was still a lot of life in Only Fools. However, there were no plans to make any more until the next Christmas special, so I was glad to have been offered a good run in five episodes of a new television drama, Wish Me Luck. I’d got the job through one of those benign accidents of fate that (although we are loth to admit it) are so crucial to an actor’s career.
Among the assorted thespians, TV and film folk who played for Bill Franklyn’s cricket team was a TV producer called Colin Shindler.
Despite being a famously ardent Manchester City supporter, he wasn’t a bad bat, though he once fell foul of a rather strange aspect of our matches.
When we played against village teams in the bucolic backwaters of Hampshire or Wiltshire, we would sometimes encounter a tendency in the more rustic elements of the village side to show a bunch of fairies from Lunn’on how real men played. More than once, massive, blacksmith-style characters with sideboards like legs of mutton and biceps as thick as a ship’s hawser would hurl the ball down the wicket at us in a way the Australians facing Harold Larwood would have recognized, with the missile pitching short and bouncing straight up at our unprotected heads.
One of these evil balls caught Colin Shindler on his forehead with a loud, wince-inducing smack. He collapsed, shrieking like a girl on a roller coaster, and fell to the ground clutching his head, convinced (he excused himself afterwards) that he would suffer serious brain damage and would have to spend the rest of his life as garden veg. As it happened, he was barely hurt at all because the ball had only glanced off his skull.
He survived and it was soon afterwards that he introduced me to Gordon Flemyng. Gordon was directing a series for ITV called Wish Me Luck, about undercover agents in contact with the French Resistance during World War II. As Victor Travussini, I was a Frenchman whose cover had been blown in France, and had come to England to help direct operations across the channel. Warren Clarke – one of Dennis Waterman’s hard-man chums – was typecast as a horrid, podgy German person and the lovely, demure Jane Asher was a female agent handler. It was good to be playing a more romantic role for once and I enjoyed my wartime canoodling with Jane Asher. I liked her and got to meet her husband, the extraordinary cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, whom I’d always admired for his political stuff and his work with Pink Floyd.
Through Jane Asher and Gerald, I met Terry Jones – a former Python – and subsequently worked with him on a series of spoofy satirical vignettes for a pilot he was making. I loved doing this and was grateful for the opportunities I’d had over that year of playing a great variety of characters on TV, just as I had in my early days in repertory theatre.
I also did some work in the very popular Ever Decreasing Circles, a cosy, enjoyable production starring Richard Briers and Peter Egan, who had directed the Aldertons and me in Rattle of a Simple Man a few years before. Also in it was Penelope Wilton, who was married to a colleague from my far away RSC days, Ian Holm. I’d worked with our ‘esteemed director’ Harold Snoad, too, on a few occasions, although on this show, Peter Egan seemed to be doing most of the directing, while Harold just pointed the cameras, sometimes through specially-made flaps in the scenery – a technique for which he was justly famous.
It was a very jolly show to be on. Richard Briers, egged on by Peter Egan, enjoyed a giggle, which led to some hilarious sessions on the set. After the show, it was great to meet up with connections who had come to watch the filming, like Ian Holm, who’d come to see Penelope, and Peter’s wife, Myra, whom I knew from Rattle days. On one occasion Myra brought along a tall, striking female friend called Carol Davies, to whom I managed to say a fleeting ‘hello’ before being whisked smartly through the stage door by Sabina, who’d also come to watch.
It’s extraordinary, with hindsight, what that fleeting ‘hello’ led to and how it was to change my life – albeit a few years later. However, I was back on the familiar trail with my next role, playing an unappetising character, the natural father to a truculent youth (played by Mark Farmer) whose stepfather was Mathew Kelly, in Relative Strangers.
The show was written by an interesting up-and-coming duo, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, both intensely interested in comedy writing and com
mitted Arsenal supporters. They sat me down to grill me about John Sullivan’s methods, while they clinically dissected the plots of all the Only Fools shows they’d ever seen.
I felt a tad disloyal, sensing that they considered themselves in direct competition with John. They went on to become very successful, with several popular series – Goodnight Sweetheart, with Nicholas Lyndhurst, Shine on Harvey Moon, with Kenneth Cranham and two that I was involved in – The New Statesman, with Rik Mayall and Get Back, with Ray Winstone.
I enjoyed their company, as well as sharing the highs and lows of supporting the Gunners. We watched a few games at Highbury and had a few meals together and played a bit of Trivial Pursuit, before they went off to America, where they became very big for a while.
When I met them, there was no doubt that they were vying with John Sullivan to be the most successful comedy writers of the ’80s but I always felt that John had the edge – the magic touch when it came to everyday relationships and characters that the public saw in themselves. For a while he had Only Fools, Just Good Friends, and Dear John all running at the same time. It wasn’t surprising then that he, like Marks and Gran, was being courted by the Americans, who have rated British writing talent very highly for a long time.
The Sullivan format they liked best was Dear John, a sitcom about a Lonely Hearts Club for divorced folk, featuring the amiable Ralph Bates as John Lacey, but John wanted them to consider Only Fools.
‘It’s the most watched of all the shows I’ve done,’ he said. The American producers shook their heads. ‘We can’t put a character like Del Boy on network TV over here – people might get ideas!’
It seems that they saw Del as a totally dishonest character and a negative role model. They completely missed the subtle point that he was a loser with a big heart and recognizable moral values – a man who did all he could to keep his family together, took a beating for his brother, stopped a riot and interrupted a mugging while wearing his Batman outfit. Indeed, whatever scams he got up to, he always failed to pull them off. And to think, the Americans rejecting these sound values belong to a nation that chose Richard Nixon for president!
Life in our new house in Observatory Road was working well. We had much more room to entertain than we’d had in Trehern Road and it was just few minutes walk from the big open spaces of Richmond Park.
It was handy for the shops, too and even handier for a good, smart pub, the Plough in Christchurch Road. I still enjoyed pub life (although Sabina didn’t), for the wonderful levelling effect it produces and the sense of brotherhood among the regulars, although I’ve found this is less marked in the smarter pubs; for a more down-to-earth experience I would sometimes wander down to the scruffier establishments I’d frequented in the more banausic quarters by the river in Mortlake. Inevitably, life had also become, by degrees, more expensive and it was as well that Sabina and I were both keeping steadily employed.
Although there’s always a danger of being typecast when you’ve been in a big show like Only Fools for a long time, the exposure certainly helps and, luckily for me, there were producers around who were prepared to let me loose in other roles. Given that there were no outings for Boycie until the next Christmas special at the end of the year, I was very grateful for the work.
But most of the parts coming my way continued to be of a certain, sinister type. The next was in another Harold Snoad production, Don’t Wait Up, starring Nigel Havers, where I was a shady con man, flogging dodgy watches. I did ask myself why I was offered so many of these parts on TV. After all, on stage I’d been in anything from Noel Coward, Restoration comedyand even the Bard himself but as soon as the cameras came up close and personal on my face, it seemed I was scuppered.
In The Bill, for instance, I played a bus driver who’d gone tonto because his wife had left him. He’d smashed up his bus with a sledgehammer, then driven it at high speed (for a bus) around the neighbourhood, before landing up in someone’s neat little front garden. Rather sensibly, in the circumstances, he’d done a runner and led the police a merry dance until he was caught, banged up and questioned before being severely reprimanded with a mallet and told not to do it again.
My next director was Keith Washington, with whom I’d worked at the Mermaid and in rep at Harrogate in the early ’70s. I’d acted under his direction in Lovers there and subsequently at the Orange Tree.
After that he’d gone on to direct at the Royal Court with some success. In the episode of Casualty he directed, I was cast as a man who had gone to a party dressed as a rabbit, got very inebriated and, together with another yuppy dressed as a chicken, had exited the party through a plate-glass window a few storeys up. The injuries this caused triggered a trip to A&E and earned a serious ticking off for getting slaughtered and wasting valuable hospital time and space. This was a subplot to the main story about the reluctance of a father to allow his dying son’s organs be used for transplants. He wouldn’t let his son’s body be used for what he described as ‘vivisection’.
However, his mother believed the boy would have wanted to help. A patient in desperate need of a donor was wheeled in, a meeting was arranged, the father’s wishes almost prevailed but in the end a life was saved.
This strongly emotional, finely balanced argument was treated with such sensitivity by Keith that the programme won an award for Outstanding Social Drama.
I’d also been in a play by Howard Brenton, which he’d directed, Christie in Love,focussing on the reviled multiple-murderer, John Reginald Christie. It was not a pretty play, so much so that when I invited a casting director to come and see me in it, he declined. ‘Please don’t ask me to come and see that revolting play at lunchtime! I’m sure you’ll be lovely.’
It may not have been a pretty play, but it was very powerful, depicting both the depth of Christie’s depravity and society’s ambivalence towards it, seen through the eyes of two very different policemen – one an old-school, authoritarian type, the other, a younger, more questioning junior, eager to understand what had happened and why. Keith had worked with Mike Leigh and had adopted some of the idiosyncratic director’s free-form techniques, which made it an exciting and demanding style of direction. From there Keith went on to direct a lot of drama for the BBC. During this busy year I tried to find time to run an allotment down by North Sheen Railway Station, which I loved, although I soon discovered the true cost of growing your own vegetables – if you factored in your time. I worked out that it would have been cheaper to have them delivered in one of Mohammed Al Fayed’s vans, though, naturally, one would have missed out on the therapeutic value of delving your hands into clods of earth, and would have had to fork out, as it were, the cost of a few sessions with a shrink instead. In any case, it seemed that every time I got stuck into some serious work with the spade and hoe, I would get a call from my agent and the whole thing would go backwards again.
At weekends we still enjoyed helping Margo with her stalls at Covent Garden and Beaconsfield Antiques Fair when we could. This meant early starts and fending off gangs of voracious dealers who appeared as soon as you got the gear onto the trestle table. They would be on it like a flock of vultures dropping on a carcass in the Serengeti, and you needed a skin like a Serengeti rhino to deal with the snarls of ridicule and derision at the descriptions on the labels, and the prices, of course.
When the early birds had dispersed, clutching their cut-price worms, the stall would be overrun by what Margo called the PPPs –Pick up, Put down and Piss off.
One of our friends, the silver dealer Richard Francis, would sit and grin benignly while punters would come up to his stall, pick up a pieces of obvious silver plate, priced at a fiver, and ask if they were solid silver (as if!) then try to haggle down to 50p, having already been told by Richard what his best price was.
Richard allowed them to faff around for a bit until he’d had enough and spoke to them in level, honeyed tones. ‘Now, you’ve had a good look, why don’t you just fuck off?’
I couldn’t
do that, but I realized it would have been a great way of releasing the frustration these people caused.
It was a good summer, light years away from where I’d been (just over the river in Twickenham) in the hot, dry summer of 1976, when I’d seriously considered leaving the acting profession for good to become a professional gardener. Luckily, I was saved from that fate when my business went bust. Now I was making a few quid to spend on our leisure time. Sabina and I had a lot of friends to party with, I played tennis and cricket as much as I could, and we had a regular dose of short trips, often to Cornwall, sometimes to more exotic destinations in France and Italy.
My mother’s legacy, from the sale of the house in Bath that had such mournful memories for me, had helped fill our house in Observatory Road with the frilly curtains and white-painted furniture that was the prevailing look Sabina most admired. She seemed happy.
I thought I was happy.
We were both chuffed to be booked for a run in John Vanburgh’s Restoration comedy, The Relapse. It was being put on by Peter Woodward (son of Edward) and Kate O’Mara, with the company they had formed, the British Actors’ Theatre Company, known, quite appropriately as BATCO.
This unusual company had no director – everybody was free to direct everybody else – and it was intended to be an egalitarian set up where everyone was on equal footing, regardless of the part they were playing. I didn’t know if Kate had formed this company because she wanted to cast herself in all the juiciest female roles or because she knew she was undirectable – either reason was plausible!
The result of this official lack of direction, as one might have predicted, was chaos. There was great deal of disagreement among the actors in the company over direction and the urgent need to have one’s views heard encouraged a lot of shouting – sometimes quite loud.
