by John Challis
I worked outside The Green, Green Grass with Sue, too, which we were very used to doing after all our theatrical touring together. But that year, for the first (and, as it happens, last) time we were asked to appear in pantomime together.
In fact, the promoters of Jack and the Beanstalk at the lovely Richmond Theatre, didn’t really want us – Boycie and Marlene, despite leading their very own show, were deemed altogether too common for the respectable burghers of leafy Richmond. But the casting person, Scott Mitchell, was Barbara Windsor’s husband and a thoroughly decent bloke. He had suggested us, and Kevin Wood, directing, had thought we would work brilliantly alongside his other star, Aled Jones, famed for his angelic recording of ‘Walking in the Air’. These sorts of bizarre pantomime couplings crop up every year. (Can I remind you of my bizarre fights with Nightshade in Redhill in 1996?)
Scottie was pretty miffed when the theatre questioned his inspired casting choices. After much argie, and a fair bit of bargie, it was eventually accepted. ‘OK, then – if we must,’ was how it was tactfully relayed to us.
This may have been because we had already been booked by Scott, and the council would have had to pay us anyway, come what may. In the end, it was all agreed that the burghers of Richmond would have to put up with Boycie and Marlene, and Mrs Challis would take on the job of wardrobe supervisor – an arrangement we had often made which meant that we got to spend our Christmases together. We perhaps should have guessed that the little streak of grumpiness shown by the management was a harbinger of further disasters in the show.
It all started well, though. Aled as Jack was perfect casting. He was very masculine, had a wonderfully determined air about him, and, of course, could sing like a linnet. I was to play the revolting Figure of Hate, Fleshcreep, the Giant’s henchman. Sue was cast as the Good Fairy, although she complained that she was very bad at being good.
From the lonely perspective of the pantomime villain, she was far too good and sweet, like Tim Vine was annoyingly good and funny as Simple Simon. The villain can never be sweet, or funny, or popular; it is his job just to be hated and booed.
Aled, on the other hand, never got to do the show at all. He had been given a spoof dancing scene, derived from the great success he’d recently had on Strictly Come Dancing. Rehearsals were going well, but close to the opening, he had slipped and torn his Achilles tendon. He was carried off the stage, ashen faced, and from the theatre, never to return.
Poor Carol, as wardrobe supervisor for the show, found herself at the centre of a fuss. As supervisor you tend to cop all the flak for naturally occurring problems arising from trying to get a big show on in too short a time. The hunt was on for someone to blame for Aled’s accident and injury; the management stood to lose most, if not all their projected profits if Aled should decide to seek compensation for loss of earnings.
Aled had been wearing shoes one size too big during the rehearsal when he’d fallen. Carol had his correct size on order, promised to arrive shortly and had let Aled choose whether or not to wear the
larger size.
After the accident, Aled still wanted to do the show, and a compromise was sought in which he would add a new twist to the traditional plot by playing Jack in plaster and crutches, with a kind of Stena beanstalk lift. But when he also developed DVT, any ideas like this had to be abandoned, and his place was taken by his understudy, Andrew Derbyshire, who in any case was already booked to do a few shows when Aled had other, older commitments.
The show went ahead with Andrew, whom the children adored and few of the people who had booked because Aled was on the original cast asked for their money back. All this hassle hadn’t kicked the show off in the best of spirits but these were lifted when quite a few friends and colleagues, historic and current turned up to see us.
My old mucker, Chris Lewis with whom I’d shared a house not far from the theatre, back in the early 1970s, came with his daughter. Tim Rice came. I’d met him at lunch at Oakly Park, Lord Windsor’s pile near Ludlow, and he had subsequently invited me to his box at Lords to see the Australians thrashing our boys in the first test match of the wonderful 2005 Ashes series.
Tony Dow and several other members of our production team on GGG came as well as Sheila Macdonald, Ken’s widow. An unlikely visitor was Christopher Campbell, political mover and shaker and opera buff supreme, who had been on a cruise on the Seine with us, learning about Impressionists. (He wasn’t too impressed with my James Stewart impersonation in Monet’s garden.) He admitted to me that, unable to stand the noise of seven hundred screaming children, he had left Jack and the B at half time, though not before I’d extracted a good laugh from him when as Fleshcreep I scowled nastily, ‘You’ve heard of this charity, Children in Need? Well I’ve got a new charity: it’s called Who Needs Children!’ and was answered with a storm of boos and threats to my personal safety.
Over Christmas during the Richmond pantomime, a second Special episode of The Green, Green Grass, From Here to Paternity, was shown on Christmas Day and, as had happened before, it seemed to show in our audiences’ reactions in the days that followed. I couldn’t have been happier that Boycie’s own sitcom still seemed to have legs. As 2007 opened, the feeling in our little GGG company was that we were here to stay and there was a lot of life in this particular dog.
Audience reaction had been almost universally good, although one or two of the TV critics didn’t get it, and weren’t always kind to us. We accepted that we were never going to be Only Fools & Horses, but we were very happy with what we’d achieved so far. We had at least gathered enough of a following and sufficient status that all the outside actors we asked to come in and make guest appearances, if they were available, had agreed to take part.
June Whitfield, for instance, came in to play Marlene’s Mum, Dora, four times and did it always with her customary panache – a worthy foil to Boycie’s barbed criticisms. John Sullivan loved being in a position where he could get his favourite actors in to his shows.
Sadly my own relationship with John became a little strained for a while later on in the year when I was booked for a one-off appearance in another popular sitcom, My Family.
This show featured Robert Lindsay and Zoe Wanamaker and had managed seven or eight series since it was launched in 2000. It had American money behind it and was expensively shot, entirely on film, at Pinewood Studios. Like Friends and most of the American mega-shows, it was staffed with an army of writers who followed the action around, clutching clip-boards and constantly tweaking the script as the actors rehearsed.
I had a few second thoughts about taking the job; it was after all, on a rival series, although in my view, too American in style (and not especially funny). However, I was to play the Ghost of Jacob Marley, which was the sort of thing I enjoyed, and I wouldn’t be recognizable, so I agreed. When I mentioned it to John Sullivan, he seemed unconcerned. Maybe he just hadn’t taken in what I’d said, because when he was told about my appearance in My Family by a third party, he was very upset that a leading man in his show had taken a role in a rival comedy and, in particular, a show starring Robert Lindsay. Lindsay had starred in Citizen Smith, which had launched both John’s career and his own twenty-five years earlier.
John had wanted to do more Citizen Smith but for some reason, Lindsay hadn’t, and they had never worked together again. John, who was proud of his body of work and guarded it jealously, felt I was being disloyal, where I saw it as just another job for a working actor, in a role where I was heavily disguised anyway. Despite the slight spat this prompted, we made up and I lived to fight again another day and did another series of The Green, Green Grass the following year. After that, we got chopped, while My Family went on for another two series.
In the meantime, I staggered up to one of those regrettable milestones in my life that summer, when on 16 August 2007, I became an OAP! If I came round now to thinking: ‘Hope I die before I get old,’ it was too bloody late!
I may have been ‘old’, but at lea
st I wasn’t dead, and now I could reap the reasonable rewards of all the gentle bullying I’d been receiving for years from my friendly accountant, Alex Johnson. He had always reminded me that I should put something aside, keep up my NI contributions and not fritter everything away as soon as I got it. That advice now looked very sound. I had a decent state pension and a little pot I could draw on if necessary. It felt really grown up, even if the long white beard and zimmer frame were still some way round the corner.
But that didn’t mean I was going to stop working, and after my efforts as the Ghost of Jacob Marley, I had a chance to frighten the kids again with a reprise of my Captain Hook in an independent production at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham. This Peter Pan was directed by the brilliant Nick Pegg, a multi-faceted thesp among whose more bizarre and continuing roles was that of a Dalek in the mighty Dr Who. Serendipitously – or perhaps as a result of meeting in a parallel universe, being thwarted by the Doctor, and deciding to cut their losses to cause mayhem in our galaxy – the second Dalek was played by his partner, Barnaby Edwards.
The Nottingham show also starred Debra Stephenson, who’d had great success as Shell Dockley in Bad Girls, among other things. Debra, I discovered, was also a brilliant impressionist, which was useful when she had to pretend to do Captain Hook’s voice on board the Jolly Roger.
The only discomfort I felt doing the show was as a result of the posters outside the theatre advertising a forthcoming attraction: The Vagina Monologues.
Beneath this rather unappetising title was the bright smiling face of my beloved screen wife, no less than Marlene herself, Sue Holderness. I could only hope that the hordes of kids pouring in to be terrified by Capt Hook, weren’t tugging at their grannies’ sleeves asking what a monologue was.
We were struck every evening as we left the theatre by the extraordinary liveliness of Nottingham nightlife. We had to pick our way from the stage door back to our hotel through streets that seethed with gangs of pickled yooves and short-skirted, high-heeled teetering girls.
Back at our hotel we would watch from above as the bouncers and occasional bouncerettes tried to keep the young punters in order, with sporadic eruptions and interventions by the constabulary. Looking down on it, fascinated, I was put in mind of Fred Trueman, the famous Yorkshire fast bowler from another era, commentating on a pathetic display of batting by an England team. ‘I don’t know what’s going off out there. Boot it’d never ‘ave ‘appened in my day.’
We ended the third series of The Green, Green Grass on 30 December 2007 with a Christmas Special and one of my favourite episodes, The Special Relationship.
I was thrilled when George Wendt, for years Norm who sat at the end of the Boston bar in the great American sitcom Cheers, agreed to come and star as Cliff Cooper, an American ex-serviceman who had been billeted in the farmhouse some thirty years earlier. While he had been there, he’d had a relationship with a local girl who turned out to be Mrs Cakeworthy’s mother. As he had also become a billionaire from manufacturing cookies, there is huge excitement when he announces that Mrs C is his daughter. Of course, it turns out that she’s not but as he is driven away it dawns on him that Bocyie’s dopey farmhand, Jed, might be his son. He decides to drive on.
George was a joy to work with, coming from the do- nothing-sayeverything school of American acting. It worked perfectly, his phlegmatic economy contrasting with what he must have thought our larger-than-life way of doing it. I was delighted that an actor of his reknown had wanted to come over and work on our show. He had been a great fan of Only Fools, which helped, and John decided to make a bit of a fuss of him. It was arranged for us all to go up to the new Wembley to watch an international match between England and Germany. As George was of German extraction, John and I put ourselves under strict instructions to avoid any mention of 1966, or the war.
All was going well when Frank Lampard rifled one into the net in the first half but Germany came back and turned us over, 2-1. ‘OK, let’s mention the war,’ John rasped.
George took it all in good part. In any case, he said, he didn’t care much for what he called soccer. It had, of course, been John Sullivan’s initiative to get George. He’d always liked asking favourite stars and celebrities to appear on his shows. One of them, Jonathan Ross who’d been the quizmaster in If They Could See us Now, cropped up again in my life several years afterwards, when Sue Holderness and I were presenting at an awards ceremony that he was hosting. He told us what a fan he was and how much he’d enjoyed being on the show, although he didn’t think he’d been much good.
‘I’ve had that feeling for years,’ I admitted.
‘What! That you’re not very good?’ Jonathan asked, incredulous.
Quick as a flash, I replied, ‘No, that you weren’t much good.’
You don’t often get handed chances for a moment like that and you have to take them.
I had an even better moment at that same awards ceremony. Across the not very edifying spectacle of my profession patting itself on the back, I saw Robert Vaughn, representing the cast of Hustle which was doing very well at the time, wending his way towards me.
As I waited, transfixed, he said: ‘I love your show, The Green, Green Grass, especially that Mrs Cakeworthy. I hope you’ll be doing some more.’ He shook my hand warmly. ‘Pleasure to meet you.’
He wandered off.
I was speechless. The only surviving member of The Magnificent Seven liked my show!
After Christmas, we were slightly on tenterhooks. Another series, the fourth, had been discussed and in principle agreed with the BBC, but dotted lines on which to sign hadn’t appeared yet. We were aware that some of our show’s strongest supporters had moved on. From the start, The Green, Green Grass had had a firm champion in BBC Controller, Peter Fincham. The previous year, while we were making the third series, he’d thought enough of the show to invite Sue Holderness and me to dinner in a Notting Hill restaurant to be part of a typically eclectic mix of the ‘talent’, as they liked to call anyone currently featured on their channels.
That evening Peter was joined by Gary Lineker, who seemed bored by the whole thing, Andrew Neil, as voluble as ever, Alan Yentob, an ex-controller and suitably enigmatic, Trevor Eve with a slightly superior air, Julia Bradbury, dark-eyed, intense, with a hint of the hockey-stick about her and Boycie & Marlene.
We felt, honestly, quite flattered to be in such company. We had a great evening and we left feeling confident that we had Peter Fincham’s continuing support.
Unfortunately, a few months later a filmmaker in his department made a cock-up by cobbling together an edited misrepresentation of Her Majesty storming out of a photographic session. It had been done crassly – and dishonestly – to give a little edge to a documentary series they were doing. Peter hadn’t been involved in any of the decisions leading to this but it had happened in his department and he was forced to fall on his sword.
Evidently, as a result, The Green, Green Grass wasn’t viewed with so much warmth. John Sullivan, wearing his producer’s hat, announced to us, somewhat grumpily that the BBC were looking to slice his budget, which meant that he in turn would have to slice our wages.
However laid back one is about these things, it’s always disappointing to be told, effectively, that you’re worth less than you used to be. And it’s not just about the money. But in the end, with our agent, Barry Burnett tearing his hair out, a compromise was reached and a contract drawn up for a further eight episodes, to be made in the second half of 2008 and broadcast the following year.
With no major commitments in the first half of the year, Carol and I were able to concentrate on things – the seemingly endless list of things – that still needed doing at the house. Most importantly, after a long period of discussion, consideration and negotiation, English Heritage agreed to help with the fabric of the original abbey church.
The Heart of England English Heritage supremo arrived with an architect and an engineer to discuss the best way to shore up the
one remaining crumbling arch of the transept, to ensure that it too, didn’t end up as just another pile of rocks and rubble, to be raided for any local new build like the rest of the old monastery.
Their first suggestion was that a huge stainless-steel prop should be erected, to make it clear that this repair had been done in the twenty-first century. I was, frankly, not keen on a gaunt piece of steel jutting out of the earth and pointed out that as the shape of the original arch of which it had been a part was still detectable, perhaps we could simply rebuild the other side of it and avoid confusion among archaeologists in another thousand years, put up a little plaque pointing out which side was thirteenth century and which side twenty first.
They went away and produced some fine drawings which we loved. It was going to cost money, of course, but at least they would chip in a good whack of it and encourage any other grant-giving parties to do the same.
English Heritage in the end came up trumps and a piece of arch was rebuilt which acted as a kind of flying buttress, just as we’d envisaged.
The completion of the arch coincided with another notch in the tree of life, and for my sixty-seventh birthday, Carol suggested we take a gentle trip down to Cornwall to celebrate. Luckily, and not entirely coincidentally, we had some friends, Rob and Ros Woodard, who lived on the Helston River. In a previous life, Rob had been commander of the Royal Yacht Britannia. As a result, he’d been granted a property near Restormel Castle, where Sue Holderness and I had stayed there during our London Suite tour five years before.
The night before we were to see the Woodards, we checked into the Budock Vean Hotel by the Helston River. I began to suspect that Carol was up to her tricks again when Richard Heffer and Belinda Rush Jansen ‘happened’ to turn up. Soon after that Rob Woodard walked in and insisted we all went back to his perch overlooking the river, further downstream.
