by Ray Winstone
Not all of my early brushes with the film and TV industries were quite as disastrous as the Mrs Ken Russell and Get Some In incidents. Occasionally my ebullient approach to the kind of small parts I was getting offered at that time paid off. At the age of eighteen, I was cast in an episode of The Sweeney called ‘Loving Arms’. It was meant to be a non-speaking role where I was at a table in the pub with a guy who was buying a gun, but I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) stop myself improvising dialogue with him.
The director kept saying, ‘Excuse me, quiet, please. You’re not meant to talk in this scene.’ Now I didn’t know they had to pay you an extra £30 for talking – that’s why they want you to keep schtum – but John Thaw and Dennis Waterman obviously did, because they were standing at the bar laughing while I was arguing the toss. They weren’t being horrible, they could just see how green I was. My point of view was: ‘It just seems silly that I’d be sitting here not saying anything when we’re doing something as important as buying a gun’, but the director still insisted I keep quiet, so I ended up taking the gun off the guy and having a look at it.
The director was climbing the walls at this point, telling me to put the gun down, but I was getting pissed off now. ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ I asked him, ‘Just sit here and play with my cock?’ I suppose it was good of him not to just send me home after that, but this was one of my first-ever paid jobs so I didn’t know any better. And I got the last laugh at the end, because for the next scene we had to go out in the street where me and the guy with the gun had to run away. I was supposed to get caught, but instinct took over and I jumped over a fence and escaped. They didn’t have time to reshoot the scene so it had to stay in done my way. I’ve seen the episode quite recently – I think it’s out there on the internet somewhere – and it’s quite funny. One minute I’m running alongside the other guy, the next I’m gone.
Another of my first paid outings in front of the cameras brought me into contact with someone who’s still one of my best friends now. I’d got a day’s work as an extra on the David Essex film Stardust, down by the Thames at the Prospect of Whitby pub in Wapping. It’s one of the oldest – if not the oldest – riverside pubs in London, and Captain Cook lodged just around the corner for a while, so he probably would’ve had a drink in there at some point.
This was in 1974, so it was still all old warehouses down that way then. The cobbled streets are still the same forty years later, but all the warehouses have been turned into flats now.
Karl was in one of the bands in the film (with Keith Moon, who was his great mate at the time). I’d never met Mr Howman before, and when I got my lunch and went upstairs with it on one of the double-decker buses they do the catering on, I didn’t see him sitting up the back. Then he said, ‘Alright?’ and asked me to join him, which was a nice thing to do because I was only an extra and he had a much bigger part. He’s a South London boy, which is unusual for me in friendship terms, but I’m not prejudiced. I think his dad was a colour sergeant in the band at the Woolwich Arsenal.
Anyway, we started talking and became mates – not close mates who keep in touch and everything, but mates. Then a few years later, in the late seventies he played my brother’s friend in the ITV series Fox, we remembered each other and it went from there. I think Karl was playing the young copper in The Long Good Friday around that time, and I was just about to get married. Once our wives palled up too that was it, and we’ve been going on holiday together with the kids ever since. We’ve got in a few scrapes together too, over the years, but they might have to wait for volume two.
In the meantime I’d still – as my old mate Bob Hoskins used to say – ‘got overheads’, and one way of dealing with them was to get a bit of work doing adverts so people could dig them up to put on TV shows and embarrass me years later. My sister Laura did a bit of modelling in her teenage years, and through her I ended up signing with a place called the Norrie Carr Agency.
It was thanks to them that I ended up doing a low-calorie bread commercial where I had a cap on and I followed the Slimcea bird down the road before she went off in a balloon. Then there was one for Pot Noodle where I had to climb up and down some ladders. As you might have noticed, it was only the most high-end products that wanted to use me.
The most painful one of all was the ad for Double Diamond pale ale (apparently it’s still Prince Philip’s favourite beer, which just goes to show money can’t buy you good taste). It had all these old Carry On actors and people you knew in it – Liz Fraser, she was one of them – then at the end the camera settled on me and this other kid holding pint glasses, and the slogan said: ‘And here’s another two mugs you might recognise.’ Not only were we nobodies, we were nobodies selling Double Diamond – we had literally mugged ourselves off.
CHAPTER 16
NASHVILLE’S, WHITECHAPEL
I was lucky to be starting out as an actor at a time when people in the TV and film industries had just about got used to the idea of casting real kids from real areas. The BBC’s Play for Today slot had a lot to do with it – take that out of the equation and it might still all be ‘Gorblimey, guv’nor, can I doff my cap for you, sir?’ And you’d have probably ended up with Hugh Grant in Sexy Beast instead of me. His head would have wobbled a lot in that role. Especially once Gandhi got hold of him.
A few years back when I was doing a film called Macbeth on the Estate, I had a conversation with some of the West Indian geezers who were in it about how the black actors they saw on TV didn’t seem to represent them. These kids didn’t feel like they were allowed in the game. It occurred to me that they were facing exactly the same problems that white working-class actors used to have. It’s probably the writers and directors who are the key: the more people who come from where you come from and know what they’re talking about start to make inroads into the business, the more chance you’ve got of telling your own stories.
By the mid-seventies, more than a decade had passed since the kitchen-sink dramas brought Richard Harris and Albert Finney and that whole generation through. When characters that you’d consider to be normal working people turned up on TV or in film roles, you didn’t expect them to be some posh bloke putting on an accent any more. It was the time just before punk, and it was almost becoming fashionable to talk like me or the dowager Phyllis Daniels. What opened so many doors for us was the fact that directors like Ken Loach and Alan Clarke and Frank Roddam were starting to have enough clout to get the kind of films made that would need actors like us to be in them.
I was the token working-class kid at Corona, but there were already a couple of others there who were making themselves out to be that too (admittedly on slightly shakier credentials). The school acted as our agency, but without the kind of philanthropic intentions that guided Anna Scher. Basically it was a money-making machine, whereas Anna’s was all about encouraging kids who might need a bit of help to come out of their shell. That was a fantastic thing, but I’ve got no regrets about not going there. I didn’t know it existed at that time, anyway, and going to Corona was the kind of chapter in your life that makes you what you are. There I was a minority of one. If I’d gone to Anna Scher’s, I’d have been just like everyone else.
Les Blair was another one of those directors who wanted to put actual working-class people on the screen, rather than the cardboard cut-out variety. Another of my first proper pieces of TV work was a thing for him called Sunshine in Brixton. It was about a school football team, and doing that was when I met all the boys from Anna Scher: Tony London, who was a really good actor and became a close mate of mine for a while, Ray Burdis and Elvis Payne among others.
I enjoyed meeting them all, but that didn’t necessarily mean I wanted to join their gang. It was a funny old film, that. One of the main characters in it was this black guy with dyed blond hair who was called ‘The Negative’. For me, the experience was all positives. Although this was my first time being in front of the cameras for extended periods and I could tell that I had a l
ot to learn, I definitely felt like I was getting somewhere.
I still have much to thank Bill Happer and Vernon Morris for, because I wouldn’t have lasted nearly as long as I did at drama college without them nurturing and protecting me a little bit. I think those two must have thought I at least had something – not that they ever told me – because I was such a monumental pain in the arse at the time, why would they have bothered with me otherwise?
To say that other people in the Corona hierarchy viewed me with less enthusiasm would be putting it mildly. By the time I’d been there a couple of years, things were coming to a head. They’d fitted me up for the angry young man role and I was kind of acting up to it. I probably was a bit like that inside, anyway, but when you know that’s all people are expecting of you, sometimes you mask your disappointment with an extra layer of bravado. That’s probably how the Get Some In and Lizstomania incidents came about – because I felt like a fish out of water, I was more likely to behave like one.
In the autumn of 1976, which should have been the start of my last year, Corona didn’t just stop sending me out for auditions, they started actively trying to keep the other kids away from me. They said it was because I was ‘a bad influence, language-wise’, which I can understand now, but at the time it made me feel like a nonce. I thought they were being snobby about the way I spoke, and they probably were. I don’t think the big news about the increasing fashionability of working-class accents had quite got through to them yet.
Either way, at the end of that term there was a Christmas party at the college which I specifically wasn’t invited to. Everyone else was, but not me. When I asked about it they didn’t even have the decency to pretend my invitation got lost in the post. I was fuming, and as a result I did something really pathetic which might have been designed to confirm their worse assumptions about me. I got a lolly stick, glued some tacks on it and put it under one of the tyres on the headmistress’s car.
Thinking about that now, it was fucking dangerous – she could have been on the motorway or something when the tyre went. Luckily for me, she didn’t make it out of her official parking space. One of the other kids was summoned into her office and threatened with expulsion unless they turned in the culprit, so they lollied me right up – which I couldn’t really blame them for, as they didn’t come from where I came from – and I was expelled on the spot. To be honest, all concerned probably breathed a sigh of relief when that happened, not least my mum and dad, who wouldn’t have to find the £900 a term any more.
The day I was expelled, some of the other boys were going out to audition for a BBC TV play called Scum. Obviously, I wasn’t because I was considered too badly behaved to be trusted as an ambassador for Corona’s reputation. But I went along with them, anyway, so we could all go out for a beer together afterwards to say goodbye.
I’ve told this story a lot of times over the years but I’m not going to add any dramatic embellishments about statues being seen crying in the foyer of the BBC or my mum making me a piece of toast for breakfast in the morning that had John Blundell’s face on it. While I was waiting outside for the others to do their auditions I got talking to the receptionist, who was a lovely girl and just the sort of person any red-blooded young man would want to be whiling away the hours with. After I’d been chatting her up for a while she asked me, ‘Do you wanna go in and meet the director?’ I said, ‘No, thanks, not really, darling – that ain’t really my scene no more.’
She persisted: ‘Go on, he’s really nice.’ So on her advice I went in and met Alan Clarke, who obviously I’d never heard of at that point, and we had a laugh together. I didn’t know what the part was and I didn’t really care when he said it was originally written for a Glaswegian. Alan told me afterwards that it was only because I was the last one in that he watched me walk out of the door and down the corridor afterwards. But that was why he gave me the job, because I walked down the corridor like a fighter, which of course is what I was. If that’s not fate, I don’t know what is. If there’d been one more person coming in after me, you wouldn’t be reading this book now, and God knows what I’d be doing.
It wasn’t just through divine intervention from a BBC receptionist that the stars had aligned for me to play Carlin in Scum. A couple of the kind of incidents which no drama college would workshop had also helped prepare the ground. Both of them involved the iron bar we used to stop the front gate in Enfield hitting the flowers behind it being employed for another purpose.
The first time had been when I was still in my early teens. I was playing football with some of the other local kids in the alleyway that ran up the side of our house in Enfield. We used to put jumpers down to make one goal at our end of the alleyway, and a wall at the far end, which was the back of the maisonettes’ garages, served as the other.
In the end house, two along from where I lived, there was a couple who had a great big lump of a son. I suppose he must’ve been in his mid-thirties. Remember we’re just kids, and we’re probably making a bit of a noise, but there’s no history of that being a problem. I suppose the geezer must’ve had a bad day or something, because instead of him just coming out and telling us to turn it down a bit, he’s come running straight towards me.
In my innocence I thought he was wanting to join in the game and have a bit of a kickabout, so I dropped my shoulder to take the ball around him. The next thing I knew he’d grabbed me by the throat and slammed me up against the fence of the cemetery we used to play about in trying to scare people.
At this moment, it just so happens that my dad is looking out of the window and sees what’s going on. So he appears from nowhere, grabs the iron bar from behind the front gate and, in a single graceful movement, vaults over the wall. He’s got this move down to a tee. You’d think he’d practised it (and who knows, perhaps he had done). Either way, he runs up to the guy who’s got me by the throat and tells him to put me down.
Now this geezer is a big unit and for whatever reason he’s pretty angry, so as he puts me down he steps towards my dad, which is a big mistake. Because my dad leaps up in the air and hits him straight across the top of the head with the iron bar. He could’ve killed him, and to be honest at that moment I think he might’ve meant to, because he’d seen what the guy was doing to me, and my dad’s instinct to protect his family was very strong.
I’ll never forget what happened in the next few seconds. The fella did the splits as the weight of the bar forced him to the ground. Then he was instantly, violently sick from the clump on the head, before going out like a light – sparko – on the pavement. It scared the life out of me, but the additional anxiety that my dad might go to prison for what he’d just done didn’t come to me till a bit later on.
It didn’t seem to bother my dad, though. He just turned round, put the iron bar back in the flowerbed, and went back to whatever he was doing. I’d like to say that we went back to our game of football as well, but of course we didn’t. And not long after we’d all melted away a bit lively an ambulance came, and my dad was charged with causing grievous bodily harm. He was lucky they didn’t try to do him for attempted murder, to be honest.
We always say don’t get the police involved, but if someone else does and you’ve got an out, then it’s best to counter-nick ’em. This was a lesson that would come in handy for me later in life, and it was exactly what my dad did – he counter-nicked the other guy for assaulting me. Not only was this an effective tactic, it was also fair enough, because the geezer did have me round the Gregory, and I was only a kid. In the end they both went to court, although I don’t remember having to give evidence, and the judge bound the two of them over to keep the peace for a year.
They managed it for longer than that, because we never saw the other guy again. Apparently he did recover from the attack physically, but if he ever came round to see his mum and dad after that, he did so at night. Even I’m a bit shocked by how brutal that looks written down, but in this book violent incidents are like London buses �
� you wait sixteen chapters for them and then two come along at once.
The iron bar’s second appearance was on the night of the ABA finals. These always used to take place on the eve of the Cup Final at the old Empire Pool, Wembley (now spruced up a bit as the Wembley Arena). There must’ve been a kid from the Repton on the bill that night as our seats were more or less ringside, and there was an East End fight promoter sitting in front of us who my dad hated for some reason. He was bald on top with ginger hair at the sides and I’m sure his name will come to me in a moment . . . Mickey Duff, that was him, though I don’t think that was his real name as he was from Polish stock originally.
Anyway, Duff was talking to a black boxer called Billy Knight and another promoter we didn’t know, and he was ‘giving it the big I am’ in the way some promoters will. Then my dad overheard him saying, ‘My meat will fight your body any time’ – meaning that some bout or other was on. Now my dad loved boxers, really respected them, and he wasn’t going to have them talked about in such a disrespectful way. So he piped up from the row behind: ‘What did you say? What did you just fucking say? Is that how you talk about the fighters who get you a living?’
At that point my dad completely lost the plot and really gave it to this guy with both barrels while Billy Knight stood there listening, open-mouthed. By the end of the exchange it was clear that someone was going to have to move. We stayed, they went . . . but don’t worry, the iron bar isn’t coming into this for a while yet. I’m just establishing the atmosphere of the evening.
All the way home in the car, my dad was still bubbling with anger: ‘That’s the kind of slags fight promoters are,’ he kept saying, ‘that’s how they use people.’ I don’t know if he’d had bad experiences with them himself when he was younger, because it’s not the kind of thing we would have talked about, but I don’t suppose you can rule out that possibility.
