Boycie & Beyond

by John Challis

  Carol and I were so elated by our success that we immediately signed up for more adventures on the Zambezi, hiring two kayaks with pilots for the trip upriver from the Falls. I suffered yet another dunking and near-death experience when my pilot and I capsized and instead of wriggling out in the way I’d been told, I found my legs stuck inside the little, upturned craft. Fatalistic once more, I contemplated a hippo ambling up the river bed and finding me hanging upside down like a pheasant on a butcher’s hook.

  It was the thought of not seeing Carol again that prompted me to another massive effort in which at last I yanked my legs free and I struggled to the surface with a gut full of finest Zambezi.

  Recovering over a fitful night, we decided that this was enough excitement and it was time to go home. The trip had been a big decider for me. It had confirmed to me how happy I was to be with Carol – we’d shared and enjoyed so much together.

  It had also persuaded me that I wanted to do all I could to help Tusk. I was mightily impressed with the practical, pragmatic way they went about their aims. They knew that a lot of the poaching of these seriously endangered species was possible only through the bribery and corruption that reached right up into Robert Mugabe’s government. As one of the Tusk guys put it, ‘What we’re dealing with here is state-sponsored poaching.’

  Shortly after Carol and I had got back to London, a herd of forty young bull elephants broke out of the reservation and, following a natural instinct to roam all over the country, eating as they went, they had completely destroyed and munched their way through several thousand hectares of tobacco (which must have produced one of the most gargantuan nicotine hits in history).

  The farmer whose land it was couldn’t shift them, and seeing his whole year’s income ending up as large piles of steaming dung (with or without butterflies) he issued an ultimatum – either somebody moved them, or he would shoot them.

  A herd of young bulls like this was essential to the health of the elephant population in Zimbabwe and Tusk had to respond. They needed aircraft, earth movers to herd the great animals, Land Rovers – a lot of tackle to persuade the unruly elephant youths to move back towards the safety of the reservation. And this would need a lot of money.

  I was anxious to do what I could to help raise funds and awareness of the bigger picture regarding the loss of these wonderful creatures. I was very happy to find that I could deploy the huge and growing popularity of Only Fools & Horses to great effect.

  By ‘lending’ Boycie’s character to the cause I was able to find plenty of platforms from which to get the message across and journalists like Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail were hugely supportive, giving me a lot of space. Richard was kind of enough to say that although he’d seen plenty of ‘celebrities’ fronting up charity appeals, he thought I showed a true missionary zeal, which I certainly felt, about my tusked and trumpeting nicotine munchers.

  I was immensely impressed by the way Tusk had responded and solved the problem. From then on, I became a committed supporter and I still am. As a charity they had been cleverly proactive by creating the individual sponsorship of particular animals, like mine of Edo the Elephant in Tsavo. Once people have been told what huge problems have been created by the reduction by human agricultural activity of the elephants’ formerly vast territorial range, they are eager to respond, and helping to achieve this became and remains a part of my life, attracting several dodgy headlines over the years:

  BOYCIE’S OUT OF AFRICA, ELEPHANT BOYCIE and WHAT WOULD DEL AND RODDERS SAY ABOUT THIS DOWN THE NAG’S HEAD?

  In fact, Mike, the landlord (Ken MacDonald) and Trigger (Roger Lloyd Pack) helped me out on several occasions, once, memorably, at London Zoo – which produced the headline – ONLY FOOLS AND TUSKERS.

  Later that year, my agent had a call from Lee Dean, who’d been involved in the production of The Rivals when Sabina and I had appeared in it at Windsor. I was excited to be offered the chance to get back on the stage, this time in one of the great plays of the ’60s – Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane. I loved the arch, sexual ambiguity of Orton’s writing. I knew the part was right up my alley and something I’d always thought I’d like to do. I’d admired Harry Andrews’ brilliant playing of it in the film version, with Beryl Reid and Peter McEnery. For this production, Kath (the Beryl Reid part) was to be played by none other than the legendary and much loved Barbara Windsor.

  Before it was confirmed, I had to meet Lee Dean with Barbara and the director, John David at Joe Allen’s in Covent Garden.

  I hadn’t met Barbara before but I found her very easy to get on with, as well as John David, and I went back to East Sheen to wait impatiently for my agent to call and say I had the part. Nothing happened.

  I was astonished and a little devastated. Usually I’m philosophical about these things. I just shrug my shoulders, and try to move my focus on to the next prospect. This time I didn’t. I really wanted the part; I was sure it was something I could do well. I rang my agent to ask her what had happened.

  The response was deeply frustrating. She said they’d felt I was absolutely right for the part but thought an actor from East Enders would get more bums on seats.

  I was mortified that the decision should be made like that. Besides – Only Fools v. East Enders? No contest, I thought. On the other hand, East Enders was on all year round, six days a week and had massive viewing figures, against maybe six or seven outings a year for our show (albeit sometimes with even bigger viewing figures.)

  I gritted my teeth and tried hard to shrug my shoulders – a bit like trying to pat your head and rub your tummy in a circle. Quite apart from the acting required to play the part, it seemed a pretty tacky way to cast a show.

  ‘But, hey! Gotta be a mango tree around here somewhere!’ as they said in Apocalypse Now.

  I was sitting with Carol in a fashionable coffee house in Covent Garden when I had an urgent call from my agent. How soon could I get to Bromley Theatre, she wanted to know. There had been a crisis with Sloane. The East Enders actor had had ‘artistic differences’ with the director and had left the production. Could I take over?

  Could I? I was in Bromley by lunchtime!

  Barbara looked mightily relieved. She said I had been her first choice all along.

  ‘But you know,’ she went on, ‘It’s all run by accountants these days.’

  ‘More’s the pity,’ I agreed.

  But the accountants needn’t have worried. Barbara was such a national treasure in her own right that she packed them in – everyone, not just the chaps who remembered her bra flying off during PT sessions in Carry on Camping.

  With Christopher Villiers as the wicked Sloane and Kenneth Waller who had been in the hit series Bread, as Grandad, we had a great cast and it remains one of the happiest jobs I’ve ever done. Although throughout the run of the show Barbara was going through a dire emotional crisis at home, we swept ’em away, from Crewe to Brighton and back.

  Reviewing the play in Brighton, Jack Tinker, well respected critic of the Daily Mail, described me as ‘the most Ortonesque of all the characters’, an ambiguous comment which I was happy to take as a compliment.

  I received another compliment from an unlikely source when we played Croydon. After the show Barbara told me she wanted to meet a friend of hers in the bar afterwards. When I got there, she was talking to a short, stocky man with a pony tail and a bit of the gypsy about him. It was Charlie Kray, the only one of the three brothers still at large. It would have been a little unfair if he hadn’t been at large, since, at that stage he hadn’t been accused of anything. Barbara, I gathered, went back a long way with the Krays. They loved being around show-biz and she, being from their bit of London, was considered almost one of their own.

  Charlie looked up at me. ‘’Ere, you’re a tall lad, aincher?’ He looked as if he were measuring me for a coffin. ‘We all love yer show, y’know. I’d like to buy you a drink.’

  Although Charlie was generally considered to be the nicest
, at any rate, the least evil of the three infamous brothers, I thought it probably not wise to refuse, although I found it a tad unsettling to picture him, Reggie and Ronnie with their mum, sitting around having a cup of tea and chortling away at Only Fools & Horses.

  Our Sloane had been a good production with a great tour and now – the icing on the cake – it looked like transferring to the West End, just in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Joe Orton’s death.

  However, before that could happen, with unkind irony, Barbara was offered the part of the landlady of the Queen Vic in East Enders. And I understood that for her, this trumped even a good play in the West End. I can’t say I wasn’t frustrated that one of the most satisfying shows I’d ever done should have been bracketed by disappoinment.

  Still, as ever when Christmas was on the horizon, there was another Only Fools special to look forward to. Although we hadn’t done a regular series for nearly two years and I had the feeling the Peckham saga was winding down, it seemed that John Sullivan was happy to concentrate on writing only the bigger shows that had become established in a regular Christmas slot. It gave him more scope to develop a plot, which he liked, but it could also lead to themes of a potentially dangerous complexity. Fatal Extraction, for example, strayed into the area of emotional domestic upheaval, with Del Boy and Raquel’s relationship showing signs of cracking but somehow, John managed to keep all the threads together.

  At the same time, David Jason wasn’t so readily available. Not surprisingly, he had been poached by ITV, notably to play Pop Larkin in The Darling Buds of May, with Catherine Zeta Jones and Pam Ferris. The Darling Buds, based on H E Bates’ hugely popular novels, was another big hit for David. With BAFTAS clogging up his mantelpiece, he had become the undeniable King of Comedy.

  Reflecting on this, I was reminded of making an episode of Only Fools called The Sky’s the Limit. Boycie had just acquired a new satellite dish, which he had installed in the back garden of his ersatz Georgian mansion in Peckham. In this scenario I not only had to deal with the dish, which was working independently of the remote, but also Duke, the Great Dane, who the script required to be galumphing all over the garden, while in fact he was completely comatose and could only be roused with the help of the furry microphone cover carried by the sound man. Marlene was there, of course, dressed in some animal print, pushing a pram in which sat the newly arrived Tyler, dressed in a miniature version of Marlene’s outfit.

  We had a lot of dialogue that had to be synched to the erratic movements of the satellite dish. It was going to be a tricky, nerve-wracking scene to do.

  David, who always enjoyed a bit of a tease, drew up a chair beside the camera, rubbing his hands together in exaggerated expectation of a treat. ‘This’ll be good,’ he announced with a smug chortle. ‘I’m looking forward to this.’

  ‘Thanks David,’ I yelped, already pretty apprehensive, making it obvious, I thought, that I’d rather not have an audience at this moment. ‘That’ll be a great help.’

  ‘No, no. I’ve got to be here. The John Challis School of Comedy – I might learn something!’

  As we worked, I could see David looking at the monitors and making iffy hand gestures between takes. It was funny, sort of, and it was wicked – pure David.

  By battening down our sensitivity hatches, Sue and I got through it. Now, looking back, I’m delighted he learned so much at the Challis School of Comedy and went on to such great success. It’s always gratifying to see one’s ex-pupils do well.

  Fatal Extraction drew only 19.6 million, half a million down on the previous Christmas’s Mother Nature’s Son, which some might have construed as slippage. In fact, it was still a monster figure and I was finding public recognition ever on the increase. I had by then become almost oblivious to the cries of ‘Oi, Boycie! Where’s Marlene?’ from random members of the public. More challenging to deal with were persistent requests for Boycie’s laugh, and I almost began to rue the day I’d invented it. It usually occurred in the show after one of Boycie’s own jokes, like a short burst of machine gun fire with overtones of sheep in distress.

  If I wasn’t asked to do it, I often heard a version of it emanating from somewhere in the crowd at a football match or in a busy restaurant.

  Most of the cast suffered from this kind of intrusion, but on the whole we took it light-heartedly – I certainly did, with an added sense of gratification.

  Nicholas Lyndhurst told me once how he was walking down the High Street when a dodgy looking white-and-rust truck with a builder’s stiff broom sticking up behind the cab had driven by, with the three lads in it hanging out of the windows, yelling, ‘Oi, Rodney, you plonkah!’ Next moment the truck ran straight into the back of a police car. That was fair enough, he thought.

  After we had come back from our wonderful African trip, Carol and I had set about looking seriously for somewhere bigger to live. We soon found a semi-detached Edwardian villa in Deanhill Road, East Sheen that we both liked very much, while I sold the flat in Sheen Lane quite quickly and happily said goodbye to the remnants of my short-lived bachelor existence.

  I needed to see the back of that period. Until Carol had become fully ensconced in my life I had been moving in bad areas after everything that had happened –divorce from Sabina, the stresses of life with Inge, the aloe-vera fiasco and my father’s painful passing. I knew I’d been living badly but it took Carol’s warm, steadying influence on me to find some kind of equilibrium again.

  Carol didn’t drink, for a start, which changed the shape of pub hours and my drinking habits completely. As someone once said: ‘Pubs are full of women with a past and men with no future.’

  The Coach & Horses, by far my most regular watering hole at the time, was usually full of seriously competitive drinkers. They might have come in for a couple with the boys before they staggered back to the wife and kids. Inevitably it was often more than a couple and the announcement of an early departure would provoke howls of laughter and unattractive renditions of the Stones’ Under My Thumb. It wasn’t healthy or, as Carol would say, a ‘good look’, and I was beginning to realize that I would have to excise this part of my life routine.

  It didn’t happen overnight and during the first couple of years of our relationship, I was guilty of some spectacular back-sliding in the booze department as the old habits found it hard to die.

  After one particularly good tennis morning, to which I’d ridden on my bike from Deanhill Road, I went with my opponents to slake our thirst at the Bull, overlooking the Boat Race course at Barnes.

  The Bull was a jazz pub where I’d spent a lot of time in the old trad jazz days. On this occasion they were showing an England v South Africa rugby international that was being played a few miles up river at Twickenham. After a tough match, England won. There was dancing in the pub, in Barnes High Street, all the way back to the Coach & Horses, which invited more celebration and the party carried on to a point where time had become meaningless.

  Through a euphoric haze, I became dimly aware that I should have gone home for some reason – perhaps dinner – I couldn’t recall. I did manage, though, to ring Carol on the pub pay-phone and say I’d be back in fifteen minutes – after all, I blathered, I wouldn’t have to drive because, with astute foresight, I’d come on my bike. I extracted a fellow tennis player, Jim, who had also come by bike and we tried to mount up. Neither of us could stay upright on our bikes and after falling off a few times, we gave up and wheeled them in the direction of Jim’s house, which, it turned out, he had lost.

  Luckily he recognized a pub near where he lived and we went in to ask directions to his home. It seemed impolite not to have a nightcap with him, especially as it turned out to be only seven o’clock. When I left him there twenty minutes or so later, I set off with my bike for home, not entirely certain of where I was. By nine o’clock, I learned later, I had made thirteen phone calls home, offering profuse apologies, undying love, proposals of marriage and an account of an attack with my umbrella on so
meone whose views I had challenged.

  Although Carol welcomed me back and laughed hysterically while she watched me trying to put my bike back in its shed, I knew that things would have to change. I was slowly coming to realize that there was something worth saving and looking after here. I didn’t stop playing tennis but I slowly managed to wean myself from the craic that followed and from a series of ancillary tennis, snooker and drinking trips to Dorset that one of my fellow players liked to arrange.

  The great sober – or, at least, not entirely drunk – period of my life had begun.

  Chapter 11

  The Triumph of Hope

  Just after New Year 1994, Carol and I were visited in Deanhill Road by two Nicks, Brooke and Mattingly, who had formed Baroque Productions, to put on theatrical shows. Brooke was a producer; Nick Mattingly I knew as the lighting designer at Sonning Mill, and he spoke very passionately of their plans for Baroque. Their first project was a musical called Maria Marten, a reworking of the Victorian melodrama, Murder in the Red Barn. In a glossy brochure they had included the outline and a few of the musical numbers. The story explored the possibility that the infamous William Corder had not murdered the breathless innocent Maria, but was, in fact, a scapegoat. It was mooted that the real villain of the piece was the local squire, who had much to lose in the awful scandal that followed.

  They made me an attractive offer to play Beauty Smith, a rumbustious, larger-than-life character at the centre of the action. Although I would have liked to have seen more of the finished product, the producers evidently knew what they were doing, and I was interested. I’d done the original play over 25 years before in Chesterfield with Jon Finch playing Corder. (I recalled him making an entrance at a tense and crucial moment in the story, when he announced: ‘My name is William Corder, and what’s more – I’m pissed.’ But I digress.)