Boycie & Beyond

by John Challis

  But I did become excited when we were down to the last three – Lavender, Joseph and Challis. At the end of the round, Lavender and I both voted off Lesley Joseph.

  Anne looked at me with a raised eyebrow and an off-theshoulder smile. ‘Why Lesley, John?’ she asked sweetly.

  All joked out, I could only think of, ‘Because she’s a woman,’ but I knew that wouldn’t do.

  After a short pause I had an idea. ‘I’ve never really liked her,’ I said, deadpan.

  Anne got it, and laughed.

  Lesley didn’t see the joke; she gave me a chilling look and wouldn’t speak to me for about two years. My over-developed sense of irony had dropped me in it, again.

  Lavender and I went head to head, to finish with a sudden-death round, when I got a question about show-jumping. I can’t remember if I refused, fell off or knocked a pole down. Serves me right. Ian Lavender won. The money went off to his nominated charity and at least the taxman didn’t get his claws into it.

  Back at the Abbey, although we had used my birthday party in the summer as an incentive to finish off most of the lingering repairs to the house, the process of generally putting details right and adding stuff for reasons of both comfort and aesthetics was more or less ongoing and we seemed constantly to be setting ourselves new tasks. This was particularly difficult in a listed house like ours, as we had to get permssion from Herefordshire council practically to change a light bulb, and that permission could be withheld for the most specious of reasons. We had for instance, a brutal and entirely inappropriate lump of a stone fireplace that had been installed during the ’70s in the most important room in the house, the abbot’s parlour. The listed building people bizarrely considered it part of the ‘history of the house’ and it had to stay, although we soon had it dressed in a good thick coat of plaster and an ochre lime wash.

  The fireplace took its revenge, though, a few weeks later, when Bonham’s, the antique auctioneers, held a promotional jolly at the Abbey. Tim Hales, who with his wife Celestria had become good friends since soon after our arrival at Wigmore, was then the Bonham’s local business drummer-up and he’d asked if he could use the house as a venue for the function.

  We hadn’t had a big party like this inside the house, and we thought it would be a good opportunity to see how it dealt with a large number of visitors. The centre of the reception was the parlour, and on a damp autumnal day, the great gaping hearth semed to be crying out to be filled up, to give a bit of live warmth to the high-ceilinged room.

  I made a hefty tump of kindling and big split oak logs, put a match to it and waited until it started to burn. I noticed a little smoke seeping back into the room but I guessed it would be fine once the chimney had warmed up. Just then the phone rang and somebody turned up to deliver the drink for the evening’s hooley. I was downstairs dealing with this for a while and forgot all about the fire. When I went back the great room was full of smoke, right up to its cruck-beamed roof.

  Angry with the fire and myself for letting it get away with it, I opened all the windows and started frantically trying to bat the smoke out with a large piece of cardboard. As it started to thin I grabbed the large wrought-iron fire basket that held the glowing logs, managed to pick it up and rush out with it and hurl the logs into a skip that was semi-permanently parked outside. Luckily there was nothing inflammable in the skip. I rushed back to the room and looked at my watch; there was an hour to go before people would start arriving for the party. I arranged a new, unlit pile of logs in the iron basket as artistically as possible and carried on batting the smoke out of the window.

  When the first guests arrived and came into the room, they asked me how I had managed to produce such a wonderfully authentic mediaeval aroma of woodsmoke. The house seemed to puff out its chest with pride and looked wonderful with all the candles lit. The sight and sound of people enjoying themselves gave us great encouragement for future activities there.

  My sixty-first year was marked, at least, by the achievement of one small personal ambition. Over fifty years after I’d first set eyes on Douglas Wilmer playing Captain Hook in Peter Pan in London’s West End, I was invited to play the part myself at the Grand Theatre in Swansea. I’d been playing a series of ogres and baddies in pantomime for several years and always enjoyed it, but I was more chuffed than I’d expected to be playing Hook.

  I’d always guessed what a treat it would be to stride across the stage in a crimson frock coat with black lace trimmings, with a jaunty tri-corn in my head, boots up to my armpits and my sword flashing from its diamanté-encrusted scabbard at the drop of a titfer.

  Apart from the novel experience of seeing Boycie bearded, bewigged and playing Captain Hook, the Swansea punters also got Mrs Darling played by the inimitable Dora Bryan, although for her fellow players, working with Dora was the stuff of bad dreams.

  Despite Dora being naturally a very funny woman and a great comic actress, you could never rely on her to enter at the right time, or the right place, which some actors can get disproportionately angry about. In fact, it occurred to me that perhaps she used her own vagueness as an excuse for generating a little extra audience sympathy.

  During one performance, I was on stage, standing in the wings and keeping an eye on her before our next entrance together, which was due in a couple of minutes. She was standing about chatting animatedly to a couple of stagehands, when I whispered loudly, ‘Dora!’

  She looked round, eyes wide with panic, and rushed past me, straight out on to the stage. She realized at once that she’d arrived too early. She wasn’t fazed; she was too experienced a trouper. She turned to the audience. ‘Oh dear,’ she said in her cuddly northern accent, ‘I’ve come out to too early, haven’t I?’

  The punters shrieked with laughter and she left the stage to a great round of applause. She was chatting about it to the stagehands again, when she glanced at me and I nodded. She panicked again and rushed out a second time, about half a minute too soon.

  She stopped and dropped her shoulders, turning to the audience once more. ‘Oh Lor’! I’ve done it again!’ She got a bigger applause this time, and scuttled off.

  By almost physically hanging onto her, I managed to bring her on with me, this time, on cue. At her third appearance, the audience cheered and clapped even more.

  Good old Dora, I thought, three rounds of applause in as many minutes, and all unscripted.

  One night the punters had an extra thrill when Peter Pan got well and truly stuck on her flying wire for five minutes, which felt like half an hour, dangling thirty -five feet above the audience. Captain Hook and his Pirates swiftly became brilliant improvisers, though unheard by the punters who were gazing up in grisly fascination at the struggling Peter Pan all tangled in her wire.

  Although Swansea lacks a reputation for elegant beauty and demonstrates a distinct lack of civic pride (pax, Swansea-ites, you probably love the place), it produced some fine audiences – and what more can one ask of a town?

  I loved being Hook and have played the part no less than six more times since then.

  The year ended on a high for me when the second of the very last three Only Fools specials, Strangers on the Shore was shown at prime time on Christmas Day and drew an audience of over 16million.

  The following year, 2003, I set off on a fresh theatrical venture with Sue Holderness, another play by Alan Ayckbourn. How the Other Half Loves was produced, once again, by Bill Kenwright. Although I’d never appeared in it, I’d seen it in its first West End showing at the Phoenix in 1970, with Robert Morley in the lead role.

  I recalled that the production been fairly contentious, in as much as Ayckbourn had asked for his name to be taken off the bill because he didn’t like the direction in which it had been taken. It had effectively become the Robert Morley Show, simply because Morley was such a big personality that his presence completely overbalanced the play.

  At the Library Theatre in Scarborough, where, like all his other plays, Ayckbourn had first shown i
t, it had been an entirely ensemble production. But its values had been substantially changed when Michael Codron brought it to London and wanted a cast of bigger names in order to attract bums on seats in sufficient numbers.

  Robert Morley was big in every sense of the word and, in Ayckbourn’s view, utterly unsuitable for the part. Now Sue and I had the task of turning Boycie and Marlene into a scatty middle-aged, middle-class couple, with all the wicked observations of the type for which the author was best known.

  The tour started well enough, taking in the usual venues – Windsor, Bromley, Malvern and so on, with the addition this time of Belfast, which was the first time either of us had appeared on stage there. We arrived towards the end of August to stay at the Europa Hotel, which had the dubious reputation for having been, back in the 1970s, the most bombed hotel in Europe. Thank God, with the Good-Friday agreement and the burgeoning dialogue between the two sides to that awful conflict, it was as safe as anywhere now

  We were playing at the Opera House, one of Belfast’s largest theatres (which had also come close to being demolished by a car bomb – accidentally, we were told), and somewhat to our surprise, we were doing goodish business. Not long into the run there, we heard that a local ‘Mr Big’, an ‘entrepreneur’ identified only as ‘Sean’, was coming in to see the show and had invited us to dinner afterwards at a new night club he owned, part of a recentlydeveloped leisure and entertainment area down by the waterfront on the River Lagan.

  The show went well and we were met at the stage door by yer man’s ‘representative’, who showed us and the rest of the cast to three gleaming black Mercedes waiting in line on the street. The doors were opened for us by a trio chunky-looking chaps in dark suits and shades.

  Once in, we were whisked away at great speed, as if the vehicle we were in was immune from chastisement for traffic violations.

  Just as I had when sitting with Sabina in a restaurant in Syracuse, Sicily, I found my imagination, driven by my ever-vigilant paranoia, reating ways in which we might be in jeopardy. We weren’t these people’s enemy, as far as I knew, but I guess we were worth something on the ransom market. Trying to lean back nonchalantly into the leather upholstery of the limo, I began to speculate about the size of ransom they might demand for us, and whether or not there was anyone in the world who would cough up more than a few grand for me.

  And we all knew what had happened to Shergar when his owner didn’t pay! At least, we think we do.

  The cars pulled up outside an awning that looked more like LA’s Sunset Strip than downtown Belfast. We were ushered out of the cars into a swish modern building – no doubt a kind of holding pen before we were taken to our next – final? – holding place.

  Once we were sitting in what I suppose was a designated VIP area (also a possible holding pen?) with champagne bottles open, it seemed we were being treated with some deference. It seemed these kidnappers knew the value of looking after their hostages. When Sean and his wife sat down beside Sue and me, and told us what great Only Fools fans they were, I started to consider that we might not in fact be a source of revenue to a gang of post-troubles Belfast hoodlums.

  Over dinner, with the compliments flying about our show that night, I relaxed, and began to believe that I would probably sleep in my room at the Europa that night. There was though, a tricky moment when I suggested that we actors were entirely outside any aspect of what had happened here in Northern Ireland and we were well placed to play the part of some kind of ambassador for our country.

  The suggestion that Brits should be ambassadors for anything didn’t go down well with our host, because, he said, the Brits had killed his brother, and he didn’t sound ready to be forgiving about it. The atmosphere was distinctly chillier and we were regaled with stories about the wicked anti-Catholic stance of the British occupying forces.

  However hard we tried to see his point of view, he wasn’t having it. None of us felt like dancing. We couldn’t wait to get back to our hotel.

  We did in the end, and were never ransomed, then or at any later stage in our visit to the province. I wondered if I should see a shrink about my rampant paranoia. I wondered if there were any shrinks in Herefordshire; I thought not.

  Another minor adventure that befell me in Belfast to some extent redressed the discomfort of our session in the night club. Taking the rather bizarre ‘Black Taxi’ guided tour of the former trouble spots of Belfast (in what was still a segregated city) I ended up outside the Sinn Fein office deep down the Falls Road. The taxi driver beckoned us in; we weren’t keen. I had no idea what we would find inside.

  Eventually, reining in the paranoia, I reluctantly agreed and pushed the door open, fully expecting to find Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness standing there. ‘Hello, Challis; we’ve been expecting ye.’

  In fact, I found I was in a Sinn Fein souvenir shop, the part of the ‘Troubles Tour’ where this side of the former conflict got its cut. I doubt if many people refused the chance of buying a little memento.

  Like any pilgrimage destination gift shop, there were icons – statues of Gerry and Martin, rosaries, books about how to deal with Protestantism (Protestantism – it’s not Going Away) and temptation (Sin, Mortal and Imagined.)

  As I peered uncertainly at this merchandise I had the feeling I was being watched, perhaps on hidden cameras by people wondering what the hell I was doing here. I felt I must buy something to show my bona fides. I made my way towards the back of the shop where two middle-aged ladies sat behind a showcase counter. I tried a smile.

  They beamed back. ‘Well, now you’re here, you’d better sign an autograph,’ one said.

  The other nodded. ‘And can you sign one for my daughter; she’s your biggest fan; she’s got every single episode.’

  In a daze of relief, I happily signed a few autographs, and left the shop unscathed, thinking it wasn’t such a wicked old world after all.

  Our production of How the Other Half Loves arrived safely back in England, having done well – well enough, at least, for Bill Kenwright to ask us to go out touring with another play the following year. In the meantime, it was wonderful to get back to spend early autumn pottering about the gardens at Wigmore Abbey, which, after all, had been our main purpose in buying the place. The gardens by then were beginning to look like something to be proud of. The stone paths and terracing we’d started laying on the south side of the house two years before had settled beneath the pergola and rose-decked trellis tunnels we’d put up. In the centre we had placed a wonderful terracotta statue Carol and I had bought even before we’d left London, an elegant, beautifully proportioned figure, known as ‘Joan’ – after Roger de Mortimer’s loyal wife and my late mother.

  One visitor who came to cast her eye and some encouraging approval over the garden was the lovely horticultural writer, Mirabel Osler. She lives in Ludlow and came with her friend, Prue Bellak, who had also lived in the town for several years with the late, entertaining and controversial MP, Julian Critchley. We often met Mirabel with another redoubtable Marches resident Helen Osborne, widow of John.

  John Osborne in the ’50s and ’60s was the enfant terrible who changed the face of English theatre, the Angry Young Man who had introduced the public to what became known as ‘kitchen-sink’ drama. With the encouragement of George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, Osborne had been reacting to the cosy, waspish, upper-middle-class comfort zone of the plays of Terence Rattigan and his ilk, which had dominated the London stage since the war.

  In the drawing-room comedies and dramas of that time, the audience never saw a bedroom, let alone a kitchen, and especially not a sink. In Osborne’s first play, Look Back in Anger, you could see the sink, the dirty dishes, the washing and the ironing board in a play that dealt directly with the seamier side of modern life, in which the embittered, cynical anti-hero Jimmy Porter railed against the iniquities of a decaying society. The play spearheaded a critical new direction for drama, and like most groundbreakers, was greeted
with equal measures of adulation and opprobrium.

  In later life, despite his colossal early success with other plays, The

  Entertainer and A Patriot for Me, Osborne had not been able to sustain his career and, after some marital disasters, had retreated, perhaps to lick his wounds, to more or less the back end of nowhere with Helen, his fifth wife, whom he’d married in 1978. Since 1985 they had lived in a Victorian pile called The Hurst, near Clun, where Shropshire pokes a westward finger deep into the belly of mid-Wales. In 1994, John had died there and Helen had chosen to stay and make the most of her time.

  Among the people who welcomed us into their homes after we had arrived and settled ourselves in Herefordshire was a well-known artist, Jonathan Heale, and his wife, Mary, who lived a few miles down the road in the valley of the River Lugg at Aymestrey. It was at dinner with them that we first met Helen Osborne. I had the impression that since John had died Helen was still coming to terms with her loss. She was, though, a wonderfully erudite, clever, warm witty woman, and we loved her from the start. Luckily for us, she reciprocated and became a good friend and regular visitor to Wigmore Abbey.

  She particularly liked Carol for being a strong, direct sort of woman and would often take her off to lunch with Mirabel Osler and Prue Bellak, on what they liked to call their ‘Sketchleys Lunches’ – to be enjoyed once clothes had been delivered to the cleaners and the rest of the day was free. These expeditions went far and wide, and might even involve train journeys to Abergavenny and a taxi out to the famous Walnut Tree. As the only husband extant, I was even invited to join them a few times, and for the only man at the table, they were a formidable gang.

  Rather surprisingly, Helen, who was a former arts editor of the Observer, also became a loyal follower of my dramatic peregrinations. She would often come over to the Festival Theatre in Malvern if I was in a touring production there and she even came once to Wolverhampton to see me in Aladdin. This pantomime involved, as they often do, an eclectic mix of faces that would have meant nothing to her – Bobby Davro, as Aladdin, Amanda Barrie from Coronation Street and Bad Girls, and Melinda Messenger as The Princess, thoroughly professional and an impressive revelation for an actress who’d started as a Page Three Girl from Swindon (not to suggest there’s anything wrong with Swindon.)