by John Challis
They flew away in a chopper to somewhere exotic (Luton Airport, maybe) and I won’t forget Nick’s excited boyish grin, waving to us all as they lifted off. In contrast to the last time we’d all been gathered a couple of months earlier for Buster’s funeral, this was an event brimming with optimism, a new start full of hope and anticipation.
Chapter 14
House and Garden
Whether or not the dawn of new millennium was as full of new hope as Nick’s wedding is a moot point. While I don’t subscribe to the gloomiest prognosticators who are convinced the world is going to hell in a handcart, there’s no doubt that the human race has exerted a lot of pressure on the world we inhabit, and a lot of altruistic thinking needs to take place before we can safely say we have a sound future.
On the other hand, wearing my optimist’s hat, it seemed to me that the departing century had seen the last of intra-European wars, and for the time being, a US-USSR conflict.
My strongest personal emotion on 1 January 2000 was relief. I had always wondered whether I would make it to that critical date; I shouldn’t have doubted, I was only 57 after all, but I’d always had a sense that I wouldn’t. Neither Carol nor I were keen on New Year’s Eve parties – parties for the sake of it, in my view, with no real point behind them – and though the invitations were there, we decided instead simply to plant an oak tree and have a quiet night in. Next day felt the same as any other winter’s morning but our oak tree is still there, taller and standing proudly in the corner of our orchard, twelve years on.
When I’d bought OK! magazine for Carol to see the pictures of Nick and Lucy Lyndhurst’s wedding, I leafed through the other articles about people’s houses. On a whim, I contacted my agent to put out feelers to see if there’d be any interest among the glossy mags in featuring Wigmore Abbey. I didn’t imagine it would bring in a fortune but it would cheer me if the house were to earn a little something towards its own keep.
We had a very quick response from Hello! who, in their breathless, gushy way told me they were ‘over the moon’ at being invited into our ‘lovely home’. I’d been aware for some time of Hello!’s great success in terms of sales and guessed that their principle of not printing anything to upset or damage their subjects still paid off. In a sense, although always at the soft, cuddly end of the business, they were the trailblazers for the vast celebrity gossip industry that grew steadily during the ’90s until in the new millennium, vicious gossip, with pictures to match, became an internationally traded commodity. It was, I suppose, no coincidence that as early as 1995, Rupert Murdoch must have seen value in this growth in intrusive journalism and appointed Piers Morgan – a mere gossip hack – as editor of the News of the World.
When they came, the writer and photographer for Hello! couldn’t have been more agreeable. They took some great shots and the accompanying interview, we saw thankfully, looked at other aspects of our lives, besides the Boycie persona.
Perhaps the Hello! piece prompted someone’s memory, because shortly after it appeared, out of the blue I was asked if I’d like to play Malvolio in a production of Twelfth Night for the Stafford Shakespeare festival. It was to be staged in the open air, among the ruins of Stafford Castle, hard by the M6 motorway.
Since I’d been in the play in Stratford with the RSC in 1966, I’d always wanted the chance to play Malvolio, one of Shakespeare’s great comic creations and this seemed like a perfect opportunity. For this show I could commute (and I always prefer to come home after a gig if I can), it wasn’t going to run for too long and it was quite well paid. I said yes.
Playing Maria was Jean Boht, who had first pointed us in the direction of Wigmore Abbey, and was, I think, partly instrumental in my being offered Malvolio. It was a terrific, very English set-up around the castle. Rather like a county show or equestrian event, there were canvas stands on all sides of a central stage and tents for dressing-rooms, wardrobe and facilities.
The good old English summer let us down, though, once again – it was cold, it rained pretty consistently, the west wind blew and the motorway hissed. However, the punters weren’t deterred; six hundred at a time turned up. They’d paid, and they were bloody well going to enjoy it. The atmosphere was terrific, which relayed itself, as these things do, straight to the cast on stage, and a real company spirit developed.
After the show we would roll back down the hill with the audience, who were clearly delighted that we hadn’t let them down. This reminded me of my earliest touring theatre days, when the fusion between players and audience could make them so much a part of the play.
Pantomime, too, was about audiences including themselves in the spirit of a show, which was essential to the experience. That was why I’d always loved it and was (by choice and not just for the wonga) still involved in pantomime at the end of every year, where it was as much part of Christmas for me as hearing Slade singing ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ in the supermarket, Christmas pudding and slabs of turkey breast.
I had enjoyed playing a string of juicy, villainous roles – Abanazar, King Rat, Fleshcreep and the occasional Ugly Sister – although as soon as I was told I reminded someone of my mother, I abandoned the frocks.
Malvolio at Stafford had been great fun and a lovely challenge but without the security of Only Fools lurking in the wings and turning 58 that summer, I still felt very vulnerable about work. My agent, Christina Shepherd, who had been ‘looking after’ me since 1992 had found me a few odd parts in movies – the ghost of a dead train driver in Subterrain; a strangely obsessive bingo hall manager in Five Seconds to Spare, with Max Beesley and Ray Winstone and a sleazy beauty pageant promoter in Dream with Brian Conley. Most notably, I had a decent part in The Tichborne Claimant, which featured many of the cream of British character actors – Robert Pugh, Charles Gray, James Villiers, Stephen Fry, Sir John Geilgud, Robert Hardy and so on. I was the only one I hadn’t heard of. But by the time I did Twelfth Night in Stafford, this sporadic work was beginning to dry up. Christina had sent someone up to look at the show. It was dismissed as ‘just a pantomime’, which rankled. However, shortly after that, Christina was joined in the agency by a former actress, Lesley Duff, with whom I’d worked on Get Back, for Thames TV and also in Season’s Greetings at Sonning.
She soon made her mark at the agency and I found myself travelling up to Yorkshire to appear in an episode of Heartbeat, with the inimitable Derek Fowlds. But Lesley did confess to me that she had never dealt with an actor so closely identified with a role, as I was with Boycie and she was finding it difficult.
She soon left, in any case, to set up her own agency, and I was finding it hard to talk to Christina without an appointment and encountering a certain amount of indifference when I did. My thespian instincts (a type of paranoia) told me it was time to look for a new stable.
Barry Burnett had been Barbara Windsor’s agent when she and I had worked together so harmoniously on Entertaining Mr Sloane. I was still in touch with Barbara and she suggested that I contact him. The list of artistes represented by Barry Burnett was a roll-call of well-known names from all parts of the business. He was an ‘oldschool’ agent; he had seen all sorts of changes in the way things worked and he had a realistic approach to the job. Early in 2001, I rang him, murmuring Barbara Windsor’s name and we arranged a meeting.
Barry agreed to take me on. ‘Your greatest asset is your availability,’ he said. This was, I thought, a double- edged advantage. He added that he couldn’t promise anything but he had a good feeling about our prospective relationship.
‘Just get me some bloody work!’ I wailed.
‘How do you expect me to succeed where everyone else has failed?’ he replied.
We have, I think, been friends ever since. Barbara Windsor was not the only actress I knew on Barry’s books. He was also agent to Sue Holderness, who’d played Marlene to my Boycie since 1985. Working for both of us now, he soon came up with the obvious suggestion that she and I could work together on stage, which we’d n
ever done before.
Ever since I’d first worked with Sue in Only Fools, we’d liked one another and had developed a useful shorthand which allowed us to work together extremely well. The way we could dovetail our scenes in the Nag’s Head had often been commented on. We luckily had a natural rapport, like David and Nick had in Del and Rodney, which made our scenes together very comfortable. It followed, although we hadn’t thought of it before, that we could play husband and wife in other milieus. Barry quickly found a play for us, Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking, which we had both admired for a long time.
After two weeks rehearsal in London, we opened at the Devonshire Park Theatre in Eastbourne, where I’d last appeared with the Penguin Players in 1963! The play was a delight. Ayckbourn’s dialogue, clever plot and beautifully crafted characters made the kind of thing you wanted to be doing all the time. The public quite rightly loved his work and it wasn’t hard to fill the theatre.
We were having a great time, and I was as happy to be back on stage every night, as I had been ten years before in Sonning. We were still in Eastbourne when my birthday came round in August and I came into my dressing room to find it decked out with balloons and ribbons and flowers. I thought back to the time when I’d celebrated my twenty-first, as the youngest member of the Penguin Players with a party at my landlady’s in Bexhill-on-Sea, just down the coast.
What a lot had happened in the 38 years in between, and yet here I was, back on the stage, doing what I’d always loved, but now with a wonderful wife and none of the hideous uncertainties and vagaries that had dogged my love life for so long.
Carol went back to Herefordshire, from where she would call me every day to keep me up to date with what was going on at Wigmore.
I’d finished the show one night and I was just getting changed when she called. I knew at once that something wrong. Kenny Macdonald had died of a heart attack.
As Carol told me tears welled up in my eyes and I sat back down on the chair in front of my table, staring into the mirror without seeing anything.
Kenny had died on holiday in Hawaii. He was there with his wife, Sheila and their two children, Charlotte and Will. He was just fifty years old.
I’d worked with Ken since 1983 on Only Fools, and he’d become one of my greatest friends in the cast. Now I felt almost responsible for what had happened. Carol and I had set up the holiday for him and his family. Kenny had always told me how fascinated he was by the idea of Hawaii, mainly through watching the Jack Lord TV series, Hawaii Five-O. I’d whetted his appetite more with my own graphic descriptions of the beautiful islands and tales of meeting people like Tom Selleck on the beach at the Outrigger Club.
Carol, who knew the islands intimately, had insisted that a first visit should always be made to Oahu, with its twin delights of Honolulu and Waikiki. We had stayed at the Colony Surf Apartments there and suggested that Kenny’s family stay at the Kaimama Beach Hotel, next door. We’d arranged to have a big bunch of flowers delivered there with a note, ‘Welcome to paradise!’
They’d been there only a few days when Kenny went to Waikiki for breakfast. When he came back, he said he felt a bit strange, and suddenly collapsed.
Carol had phoned just after that, to make sure that they were happy with everything, only to be told the terrible news. She had, very considerately, held back from phoning to tell me until after our show.
When I told Sue, she and I just sat together in stunned silence. At first it was impossible to believe that we would never see Kenny again.
Inevitably, memories of him crowded into our heads, he’d always been such a presence in the show, especially off-camera. I thought of him sitting in the Nag’s Head set before a take, having wedged a beer mat on his nose, shouting, ‘’Ere! Who threw that?’ and the time when we were told before a show that our usual warm-up man had been taken ill. Kenny cocked his head like a war horse to a bugle. ‘I’ll do it!’ he called out. And he did – at least, he tried, but he soon had to call for all of us to come out and tell our best jokes to keep the audience happy.
‘I thought it went quite well, son,’ he told me afterwards. ‘I died a death!’
He had been a big fan of the quirky music-hall comic, Max Miller, and had put together a one-man show based on Miller, which he did whenever and wherever he could. John Sullivan went to see him do it. ‘Bloody hell, he’s got more front than Brighton,’ he said afterwards.
During the ’70s Kenny had tasted success in It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. He’d recently shown me a picture of the cast and had pointed out that at least half of them were no longer with us.
‘See him,’ he’d said stabbing a finger at one of them, ‘brown bread, son! And him, he’s been brown bread for years. Him? Next time I see him, he’ll be toast.’
He followed this with a wheezy rat-a-tat laugh, which didn’t stop before you were laughing with him.
He’d always been a big fan of the Kinks, too, and when he’d met Ray Davies had tried very hard to persuade him to cast him in his new musical. He told me next time he saw me, ‘Well that’s it; I’m going in the West End, son.’
Nothing happened that time but he had been in the West End in the very successful, My Night with Reg, which had led to the National Theatre and a part in Guys & Dolls. Earlier in his career he’d been cast in Animal Farm at the National, directed by the then head of the company, the very eminent Sir Peter Hall.
Aware of Ken’s habit of dispensing with all normal protocol and approaching anyone and everyone with ‘Hello, son, my name’s Ken,’ someone warned him of Sir Peter’s imminent arrival at the start of rehearsals.
The assembled cast waited nervously as the great director made his entrance – all except Ken, who walked straight up to him. ‘Hello, Sir Son; my name’s Ken.’
This story was told at Ken’s memorial held at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly. The place was packed with people who’d worked with him, or who’d just known him from a pub somewhere, or whose lives had been touched and brightened by him in some way. I was glad to be asked to get up and say something and, I hope, offer a little light relief by pretending that I’d never liked Ken and was somewhat embarrassed by his constant clinging on to me as a friend, as well as his annoying habit of ringing up to tell me what he was doing. ‘Nothing much going on here, son. I’m going in the West End again; I don’t know how I’m going to fit it in with the 12 part mini-series I’ve been offered in Paraguay. I’ve got so much money, I don’t know what to do with it! Quiet for you as well, is it, son?’
He often rang up and said, ‘I’ve heard we’re on again, son.’
Somehow, he always knew before anyone else if Only Fools was about to be repeated again somewhere in the tellysphere.
At the end of my eulogy I looked up at the seats in the gods.
‘Wherever you are, son, we’re still on!’
He would have been proud of that, and it’s been pretty much true ever since.
Ken had been such a part of my life since he’d first appeared on Only Fools eighteen years earlier, it took me quite a time to get over losing him. It was going to be very strange to be in the Nag’s Head without him, if the rumours of an absolutely final splurge of Only Fools turned out to be true.
But life, as it does, slowly got back to normal, and there was plenty to do at the Abbey to take our minds off Kenny’s going. A TV documentary series, The House Detectives at Large, wanted to make a programme about the house, how it had been built, its history and setting. Carol and I were thrilled; we’d both become enthusiastic amateur historians – it was hard not to be when you lived all the time in such an atmospheric, ancient dump.
The programme brought together experts in archaeology, architecture and mediaeval history. The producers also liked to find a little mystery on to which they could hang a narrative – in this case, the whereabouts of the mortal remains of Roger de Mortimer.
Roger was the infamous Marcher baron who went off with Edward II’s wife, Queen Isabella, put the king himsel
f under house arrest and ruled England as regent from 1327. However, he got his comeuppance; he was apprehended by supporters of Edward III and hanged at Tyburn on 29 November 1330. The site of his burial, though, remains unknown. Was his body, as has often been surmised, buried in a field that we owned, alongside the great abbey, and was his head still with his body? One theory is that Isabella took his body away and had it buried under what is now a supermarket car-park in Coventry.
Dan Cruickshank and Carenza Lewis who were presenting, had the task of telling the tangled history of the building and its connection with the Mortimer family, who ruled this part of England for four hundred years following the Norman Conquest.
They studied chunks of carved stone from the abbey which still lay all around; they were allowed to dig two small excavation trenches under the beady eye of Paul Stamper, the English Heritage chief for our area. At the end of our lawn, about seven feet down, they uncovered three different floor levels of the abbey complex, and sensationally, only seven inches below the surface of a field of ancient pasture, beyond the great stone finger that remained, they found the mediaeval tiled floor of a lady chapel.
I was given a role too, besides that of astonished, accidental owner of an ancient monument. I was cast as a thirteenth-century monk and dressed in coarse black habit, to illustrate the Seven Deadly Sins – I recall Lust and Gluttony with particular relish.
One evening, during a break in filming around dusk, I strolled out onto a long flight of stone steps on the outside of the building. A lone ploughman was driving his weary way homeward in his tractor. He saw me and seemed to stall. I waved. He did a rapid double take and his tractor dropped straight into a ditch. He struggled frantically to back his way out, drove out of the field, on to the lane and headed off towards Wigmore as fast as his tractor would go (28 mph, they tell me). I thought it odd that he hadn’t waved back as he usually did – until I remembered I was still wearing my monk’s habit, with the cowl over my head. I heard afterwards that he had reached the village, jumped off his vehicle and rushed breathlessly into the pub, gabbling uncontrollably that he’d just seen the ghost of Wigmore Abbey.
