Lost and Found

by Lynda Bellingham

  A very unique kind of acting is required for this sort of commercial, and not everyone can do it. I was very proud of the fact that in forty or sixty seconds we managed to tell a story, with real emotions portrayed. They were like mini soaps and the public really enjoyed the on-going saga of the family. We would all throw in our ideas for the script and often when we were all round the kitchen table, we would ad lib. Some of the improvised dialogue got very raunchy, and I often wished we could have made an X-rated Oxo commercial!

  When we first started filming, the Powers That Be had decided I did not look old enough to have three children, so my make-up and hair were designed to make me look more mumsy. Then, over time, as women, in general, got much trendier, I was allowed to look less middle aged – they even had me doing aerobics in one advert. And I was always very miffed I was not allowed to benefit from the lighting cameraman’s amazing talent. Gerry Dunkley was very talented and did all the Gold Blend commercials, as well as our Oxo ones. Sadly, he died very young from cancer. He was always allowed to go to town on Sharon and Anthony and they looked gorgeous, but he had to tone his skill down for me and used to apologise that he could not make me look more glamorous as that was not in the remit. Just my luck! I also had a wonderful man to do my hair, called Pedro. He is still working in TV and film and we often bump into each other. He used to keep me in stitches, and whenever I complained that I looked too dowdy he would scream, ‘Don’t be so silly!’ in his Spanish accent, and threaten me with the hairspray. Sue and Mary, make-up and costume respectively, had the same problem. I had to look ordinary. So I had very little make-up and nice, sensible clothes. Mary was the most incredible costume designer and sometimes she would take me shopping if I had to go to a premiere or something. We would go to town and she would introduce me to all her contacts and find me the most beautiful evening dresses.

  The Oxo series of ads started in a very low-key way. They were very realistic and, at first, I don’t think people quite knew what to make of them. But as each story unfolded and the audience got to know the characters, they gained in popularity. We won Best Commercial three years in a row in the TV Times awards and, in the end, they changed the category to Best Character in a Commercial so other people got a chance. Over the sixteen years it ran, the adverts were incredibly successful and won all kinds of industry awards.

  I still have mixed feelings about being involved. In many ways I was very proud of what we did, but there is no doubt that my credibility as an actress was knocked. Certain people in the industry would never employ me as a serious actress after it. On the other hand, it gave me the financial security to go off and work in theatre for very little money, and I was able to be around for my Michael, and help Nunzio financially. Maybe if my private life had been happier I would have enjoyed the whole thing much more. As it was, I felt I was living a lie. Playing the nation’s favourite mum on screen and going home to an unhappy and abusive relationship was extremely stressful.

  Nowadays, the attitude to commercials is completely different, of course. It is all about profile now, and most actors do adverts or sponsor campaigns. So now I can look back fondly on my days as the Oxo mum and even feel a twinge of regret that the company did not consider bringing us back as a family of the new millennium. I could have been divorced, with a toy boy, of course, and Michael could have a younger model in tow and be ringing me for hints on how to cook a good casserole!

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  KEEPING ALL THE BALLS IN THE AIR

  WE HAD BEEN in our house in Holloway for three years and had been thinking about moving up to Muswell Hill. We found the perfect house there in Woodberry Crescent, just as Nunzio found a restaurant he wanted to buy.

  We needed lots of dough, of course, and good old Mr Wyatt – the bank manager of the Aylesbury branch of Lloyds TSB – had been supporting me for years! I can’t remember all the figures but we managed to raise the money, with a loan for the restaurant from my dear old dad. Suddenly, Nunzio was a different man. He was all up and at ’em, and for the next three or four years we really were a team. I had a new home to furnish and run, and a restaurant to get shipshape. God, we worked hard.

  I was also about to do nine months in the West End in Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. A brilliantly funny play, but unbelievably hard work. I needed a hand to help me cope, so I advertised for live-in help. I had now experienced the good, the bad and the ugly as far as home help and nannies were concerned, and I realised that even if I paid for a proper nannie it did not mean I was going to get the right sort of support. I still wanted to be a hands-on mum, but with Michael being so young I needed someone with experience, or at least someone I could trust.

  The trouble was that life in our household was never easy. There was a lot of shouting and I needed a girl with a bit of life experience and a healthy dose of commonsense. Cue Alena Steele. She had no experience whatsoever with babies, but after spending an hour or so with her, I knew she was the one. She was so calm and practical. She loved Michael straight away. We had a lovely room to give her in our new house, right at the top under the eaves, with Michael in his room next door. Perfect. I have to say that although I was lucky to be able to afford to have Alena, I did all the night shifts myself and the early-morning feeds. This was quite tough when you remember I was doing a show in the West End every night, going to bed at past midnight and then getting up at five to feed Michael. I tried to have a sleep sometimes in the afternoon but it was not always possible. I was completely exhausted for two years.

  I was also helping Nunzio in the restaurant. We had a good deal to do before we could open. I scrubbed floors and cleaned toilets and ran around like a blue-arsed fly. The opening day finally arrived. Nunzio had invited all his old friends from Torre del Greco. They had all done well and were quite wealthy. Nunzio said that when he had been a young lad he had always been made to feel inferior to them all, so this was his chance to show them he could be a success as well. There was more hard work for me, though, because there were two couples staying with us, so I had all that to deal with, plus cleaning the restaurant. Typically, his friends’ wives were immaculately dressed women who did not do much housework. So when they arrived at the restaurant there I was, on my hands and knees, with my head down the toilet trying to clean it. Whatever they thought about actresses, they did not expect this! Actually, I knew what they thought about actresses. They had about as much respect for my profession as my husband had. For them, actresses were second only to sluts – how many times was I told this during my sixteen-year marriage? Anyway, I think they were pleasantly surprised by my industriousness and quite impressed.

  We opened to a packed restaurant. It was exciting but scary. So many things went wrong. There was a waiter’s station with a little sink where glasses could be washed and bottles of wine and stuff was kept. It had a glass screen so the diners were able to see the waiters at work. I spent most of the night and subsequent nights in there washing glasses furiously, while Nunzio passed through and complained to me and at me, and generally took his bad temper out on me. I was pathetic. A dogsbody. But I was too tired to fight back. I would just cry. Somebody once said to me later that they came for dinner to try the food and get a glimpse of me; they were amazed and dismayed to see Mrs Oxo crying in the corner.

  But I have to say Nunzio was brilliant at his job. He really knew how to make people feel at ease. He was flirty with the female customers without being threatening to their partners and he was also quite eccentric, which people liked. He loved to tell people what to eat and educate them. Never mind Gordon Ramsay; Nunzio was much scarier. He would go to take an order and some poor woman would order a starter and then her main course. If Nunzio didn’t think they should be eaten together he would go off on one, telling her what she should have. Woe betide you if you did not do as you were told. At other times, too, customers would try it on, as in, ‘My-wife-can’t-possibly-eat-this-rubbish-I-think-you-had-better-give-us-a-bottle-of-wine-on-the-house,’ sort of thing. One
man tried it on even though his wife’s plate was empty. He was very loudly asked to leave and then Nunzio addressed the rest of the diners with, ‘This restaurant is like my house. If you behave badly, I will throw you out. You don’t like my food or my service? Then you can fuck off!’ Everyone applauded!

  I always helped when I could. My sister, Jean, and I would make trays of chocolate mousse for desserts. At Christmas I went to town and did table decorations for each table and put fairy lights up, with a white Christmas tree in the centre of the room. I had to put the decorations up in the afternoon, as it was the only time I was free. As some regulars often liked to sit all afternoon drinking, I had to work round them and listen to all the jokes about gravy and stock cubes. People always think they are being so original, but I’ve heard them all before.

  Over the first three years the menu changed dramatically. We started out with the classic, rather old-fashioned Italian cuisine of prawn cocktails and pasta, but then we had a chef who was so useless, Nunzio had to take over the cooking himself, and he became very good. It was kind of international cuisine; mostly Italian-based, but more subtle. Nunzio then tried an up-and-coming chef called Anthony Tobin but they fell out. It was really popular and every Saturday night we did over a hundred covers and the diners always wanted it fast and furious, even though to cook fresh food takes a little time. It was not a fast-food diner, as Nunzio never tired of telling people.

  For the time being, things were going relatively well from the business side of things and this should have helped Nunzio’s and my emotional relationship. Unfortunately, the relentless stream of put-downs and bad temper were beginning to take effect, after three years of marriage. As long as I did not step out of line all was well. And what constituted stepping out of line? Well, that was the trouble. I never knew until it was too late. The problem was that because I had been made afraid of Nunzio so early on in our marriage, I could never get past that fear. He wasn’t an on-going bastard, by any means. He could be wonderful sometimes, and I would look at him and think how much I loved him. But when he turned, and shouted and screamed, I just withdrew into myself.

  All through these times I kept most of the goings-on to myself. Pat and Catharine knew because I had to talk to someone, and dear Alena was always there for me. In order to keep working I had to compromise a good deal. Maybe I could, and should, have stood up for myself more, and then the pattern would not have been set. But it was so hard to keep strong. I so wanted to be the perfect housewife and mother, but I just wasn’t tough enough to take the bad tempers and the criticism. Then when I turned to my own profession for support or comfort, Nunzio felt threatened and would make it impossible for me to work.

  It is easy now to look back and say, ‘Oh well, it was all about control.’ Yes, of course it was, I knew that. But it was also about trying to survive and keep my children happy and my family together. We all fall back on what we know under pressure. Nunzio became more and more a victim of his own culture and wanted me to fall into line with this. But much as I wanted to keep him happy that was not how I saw my life progressing. I needed to work, to be out there. He could understand that because he loved the attention as well, believe me. All our friends had told him what a star he was and how brilliant he was at his job. And he was, but it did not stop him accusing me endlessly of being a slut and wanting to screw people behind his back. It is exhausting, believe me, to live your life defending every move you make. Every innocent comment, even made when watching TV, was a minefield. If I remarked on an actor, for example, it would be: ‘Do you fancy him, then? God, Lynda, you’re sex mad!’

  There was rarely any let-up, and never any humour. Everything I did, I had to think first, or pay the price. Even our sex life, which had always been so wonderful and spontaneous, was now tarred by his suspicious mind. If I tried to be inventive in bed, he would now hold me at arm’s length, stare into my eyes, and then suggest I had got the idea from someone else. This, in turn, made me very inhibited about our lovemaking. I would never have dared to refuse his advances. If I even hinted that maybe I wasn’t in the mood, it would produce a list of accusations about how I must be getting it elsewhere. Threats of violence are as bad as actual violence, and plain old-fashioned bullying was my daily deal. I tried to talk to him but was brushed aside. I tried to ignore it, and concentrate on Michael, but even with our child he managed to make me feel I was somehow leaving him out. That I was ganging up on him.

  I also avoided any kind of major confrontation because I was so worried that the press would get hold of a story from it. My contract with Oxo stated that I must never act in a way that would bring the brand into disrepute, and if the press found out that my own life was as diametrically opposed to my image as the lovely Mum with her happy Oxo family, they would have a field day. I used to dread doing interviews because I felt such a fraud. I always had to talk about being a mum, and family life, and me and Nunzio in our restaurant, living the dream. The irony was horrific. Here I was, the nation’s favourite mum, hiding behind closed doors and becoming more and more isolated from her friends and family.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL

  IN 1984, I began a one-woman show called Catherine of Sienna. Catherine had lived about fifty years before St Joan and been involved in much the same sort of problems with the Church and the Pope. She was an amazing woman and died in her thirties of cancer. I performed the play at The King’s Head, a famous small theatre in Islington run by Dan Crawford, who sadly is no longer with us.

  It is quite a feat to be onstage alone for an hour and a half. The challenge for me was to convince a modern audience that someone could believe so strongly in God without looking like a complete nutter. Our society is so often without any spiritual guidelines, let alone religious convictions, that many people have no time for a woman who heard voices. I got wonderful reviews.

  The director was a lady called Joan Kemp-Welch, who was a very successful TV and theatre director. While I was doing the play, her husband, Peter Moffat, another well-known TV director, suggested me to take over the role of Helen Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small. The producer, Bill Sellars, wasn’t keen due to my role as the Oxo mum. However, he saw me and we got on especially well when he asked me about myself and I explained I was a farmer’s daughter and had probably had my arm up more sheep’s arses than James Herriot. To my amazement I got the job.

  It was fantastic because it was the perfect foil to the commercials. I would be on ITV making gravy, and on BBC1 pouring it over the Sunday roast for the famous vet! The only obstacle in my way was my husband. Would he let me go up to Yorkshire for filming? Thankfully, I had a trump card I could play.

  A few weeks earlier I had been asked to take over for a week at GMTV from Jeni Barnett. It was all signed and sealed, and the Friday before I started I had been sent a list of guests that I would be interviewing, which included Eddie Kidd, the stunt rider. In the late seventies, before I met Nunzio, I had made a film with Eddie called Riding High. It was pretty awful but it was a film. Eddie Kidd and his mates asked me out with them a few times, and we had had a good time. I never heard from them again until just after I had met Nunzio. Typical of my luck, Eddie must have been going through his old numbers and rang me. Nunzio answered and … need I say more? We had a terrible row about it. So, here we were, six years later, and I was faced with the prospect of telling Nunzio that I was going to have to do an interview with Eddie Kidd. He went ballistic and refused, point blank, to let me go to work. I can remember standing by the phone in the hall, begging and pleading with him on the morning I was due to go to work at GMTV. I had to ring Sara Randall, my agent, and ask her to somehow get me out of my contract. Thank God, she knew all about my domestic problems and worked a miracle and got me off.

  After he had calmed down Nunzio was very ashamed. He knew he had crossed the line. Work was work. He was also very aware that other people, like my agent, knew about his controlling nature and temper tant
rums, which was not a good thing for someone who needed to isolate their loved ones in order to wield their control. So now there was a chance for him to make amends – to let me take the All Creatures job and go to Yorkshire. He also knew it was a fantastic opportunity for me, and I would be earning good money. Nunzio did not like to turn down money. So he agreed. I was back up to speed. I had a fantastic job to go to and my career looked like it could move forward again.

  All Creatures Great and Small was a phenomenon. A vet called Alf Wight had written a book about his experiences as a vet up in the dales of Yorkshire and spawned an industry. A series of books, several television series and a film. The original Helen Herriot, wife of James, had been played by Carol Drinkwater. Christopher Timothy played James; Robert Hardy, Siegfried; and Peter Davison was Tristan. There had been a gap of a few years before the BBC decided to do a new series, and Carol was off doing other things so they had to recast.