So the tour finished in Rotherham. For reasons I cannot recall, the Friday night's performance was recorded. I chose this night to have my first ever professional 'dry'. Forgetting the lines is, I suppose, the main reason why performing on stage is so nerve-wracking. I heard somewhere that some well-known actor would 'dry' intentionally, near the beginning of his performance, to put the audience at their ease. He reasoned that, if they could see that it wasn't the end of the world for either him or them, they could both get on with enjoying the rest of the evening.
You can always tell when the actor in front of you gets lost. A look of blankness and terror shoots across his or her face as their minds freeze in utter panic. Ok, a look of blankness and terror shot across my face as my mind froze in utter panic. Listening back to it, the tape doesn't do it justice. You can hear me stuttering mildly and repeating myself once or twice. Another actor, the 'spokesman' actually, tries to help by saying his next line regardless of any logic, and it's all over in seconds. Strange, really, how such mental torture can sound so brief and painless.
I have always relied on my rock-sold memory to get me through performances. It had never deserted me before and hasn't since (touch wood, salute magpies, walk around the ladder). Forgetting the words is merely a sign of lack of concentration or preparation. I fight for the first and make sure I've done more than enough of the second. It has to be said, though, that audiences need that tension in the air or else they may as well go to the cinema.
The tour finished in February, without me getting beaten up by the rest of the cast, and Maid Marian ("She's back. And...this time..she's wearing a hat!") began rehearsals in April. We had a couple of new members of the cast: Ramsey Gilderdale and Siobhan Fogarty. It must have been hard for them on the first day as the rest of us finished off the jokes we'd been telling each other the summer before and laughed about "Do you remember when...?"
There's nothing more alienating than a bunch of actors talking between themselves about the show they're in. I have spent many evenings in Stratford seeing old friends, who have been in the company that year, sniggering and colluding. "Oh, God! Do you remember when I came on in Act three and said 'thee' instead of 'thou'?" Cue tumultuous laughter from everyone. "Oh, yes, and what about Arthur! He walked on bold as brass with a bit of cotton stuck to his cod-piece and announced the Lord of Walsingham was at the door!" "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...! Bloody actors...
We were just as bad. It was so brilliant to see everyone again, there wasn't much room for social smoothing. Ramsey, though, had seen it all before and wasn't too scarred by it. Unlike the first year, this time, everyone had sussed out the best places to stay and had booked up sweet holiday cottages and pleasant self-contained homes to stay in for the shoot. The Kildare Lodge thought the recession had come early as the entire cast set themselves up in self-catering houses, short lets and well-equipped holiday villages. No-one considered the Butlins down the road except Forbes, who seemed to revel in the self-inflicted seediness of the place. We went there for a night out once and, at the end of the evening of stage shows and karaoke, had to explain to the security guards at the gate why we were leaving. At Butlins, it's harder to get out than to get in. Mike went down a storm in "Bonkers", the holiday camp night club. We lost him in the crowd of girls all desperate for a piece of his little action and didn't see him again until the next morning, on set, with red rings round his eyes and a smile on his face.
That reminds me of a fantastic Butlins story told to me by Kate's boyf, Steve. He'd got himself a job there when he was younger and he and his mates watched as this girl from Birmingham, who had a hair lip, let herself be chatted up by every bloke in the bar. At the end of the night, they went back to their chalet for some kip and were kept awake all night by this girl, who'd gone into the next-door chalet with a bunch of these blokes and proceeded to be shown a very good time indeed. The highlight was when, through the paper-thin walls, Steve and his mates heard the girl shout out nasally, "Ooo, thtop him! thtop him thomeone, he'th up me shitter!" Makes you shudder, doesn't it?
I actually went to Butlins once as a kid. It was the very same 'Butlins' in Minehead, now renamed "SomerWestWorld" in some attempt to make the place sound exciting. I have two memories of the place. One was that I was so thrilled that all the rides on the fair were free, I stayed there for hours until my bladder was brimming. I made it to the door of our chalet and weed all over the mat. Happy times!
The other wonderful memory I have is sitting down to eat in the 'banqueting' hall and finding a bogie smeared on the side of my soup plate. As you can see from the photograph, my joy was unconfined. I don't know why we never went back!
Fast forward thirty years and the hall has gone. It's replaced by a row of Indian, Chinese and pizza take-aways and a betting shop...."Book early!".
As I said, only Forbes went for the full holiday-camp experience. The rest of us stayed in very pleasant holiday lets. I again stayed in Dunster, only this time in a huge rambling house owned by a lady who didn't mind having bloody actors hanging around. I shared the place with Ramsey and Siobhan, although we weren't there very much as the BBC had decided we'd had far too nice a time of it the previous year and had taken a week off the filming schedule to ensure we didn't have as many opportunities to take it easy.
The result was that we began shooting at 9am every morning and worked solidly till 6pm five days a week with a couple of night shoots thrown in for good measure. It doesn't sound particularly gruelling I must admit, and there's nothing I could add to make it sound more demanding. I could say that we were stuck in woodland for eight hours every day in vaguely uncomfortable clothes and wigs, but that would apply to many other professions - bald, forest rangers for instance - but, for a bunch of poncy actors used to nice hotels and time off to sight-see, it was quite draining. The cameras may have rolled at nine, but we had to be on set a couple of hours earlier to get into the aforementioned wigs and prickly costumes, so the day was a ten-hour one really. Having said that, we still managed to find time for cast barbeques and pool-side parties during the shoot.
As a reversal of the previous year's hysteria in the acting department, I felt everyone relaxed a little too much and, as a consequence, some of the results were a little flabby. My contribution certainly became flabby due in no small part to the fact that I determined to put as much weight on as I could during the eight weeks we were there.
On the first series, the catering was nothing short of magnificent. The woman who ran it was rumoured to have an eating disorder and she redirected her obsession towards cooking food that was delicious in the extreme. From her catering van, she and her team created roast meats and detailed delicacies that would have made Loyd Grossman dribble. Every lunchtime felt like a wedding reception as we worked our way through the vol-au-vents and fresh pastry snacky-bits through to the main courses of butter-soft meat and al-dente vegetables.
Despite the BBC cut-backs reaching through to the standard of the catering, the meals during the second series were almost as nice, definitely as filling, and I used the opportunity to regularly piss off the cooks by always asking for seconds. Basically, I ate two lunches every day and then had a main meal in the pub at night. By the end of the shoot, my arse was the size of a small county and my cheeks erring on the chubby side. There's a myth put around in the acting profession that the screen puts ten pounds on you. I would suggest that it's not the screen that's the problem, it's the catering van and the constant supply of food throughout the working day. Catering supplies a fry up for breakfast, coffee and biscuits at 11am, lunch, and coffee and sandwiches at 3. The evening tends to be yours to spend your expenses cheque on however much food and fine wine you want.
Why was I on such a mission to gain weight? I suppose I had gathered an eating disorder of my own during the previous year or so. My experiences during the "Cabaret" tour had left me with a warped belief that I was unable to eat enough food to maintain my body-weight. I'm sure that the fact I was under so much stress was a significant factor, but add an unhealthy dose of hypochondria and the misinformed picture was complete. My hypochondria convinced me that I had AIDS. I was losing weight. I felt tired. If you read any newspaper at the time, you were led to believe if you'd ever brushed up against a woman by accident on a crowded pavement, you were at risk. The medical definition of promiscuity was five partners. Five partners! I was petrified. My conclusion was that putting on weight was good, losing weight meant you were about to die. It sounds ridiculous, but such are the directions an over-active imagination can take you.
The summer before, between the end of the first series of "Maid Marian" and "Irma La Douce", I went into hospital (again) to have the metal taken out of my left leg. While I was there, I thought I'd take advantage of being in a private hospital (the insurance company was paying) and avail myself of their AIDS testing facilities. In private hospitals, test results were given in a couple of hours.
My operation was scheduled for the Wednesday. I was nervous. "Uncle" Martin - my step-father's brother - drove me in. I met the nurses and eventually plucked up the courage to ask for the test. Just asking seemed to solidify a fear that had been nagging me for months. The nurses were fairly matter-of-fact about it all. I was lucky, Wednesdays were the AIDS testing day at the hospital. They left me in my private room and, an hour or so later, came to take a syringe-full of blood, labelling it HIV. I was catatonic with fear.
I lay on my bed and tried to not dwell on anything too scary. My operation was scheduled for two o'clock, but I didn't give a damn about that any more. The premed would be administered in due course. An hour after my blood had been sent off to be tested, there was a knock on the door. I sat up and a nurse came in.
"Are you, Mr. Morris?"
"Yes..." (I was beside myself)
"I'm afraid I have some very bad news for you."
My life flashed before me in that second. Panic paralysed me.
"What?...what?"
"I'm afraid your operation has had to be cancelled"
The relief, although extreme, was short-lived. It only served to delay the moment my blood was sure to be condemned and returned to me by a man in a protective suit and tongs. It was God's little joke, a dry run before the main moment I would be told I was under a death sentence and that I wouldn't be able to lead a normal life again. "Oh, thank fuck! Thank FUCK!"
"Oh! Sorry! Are you the one who's having the AIDS test today?"
I was too relieved at that moment to say, "Yes, you stupid bitch!" before she had run off again. Just because you're in a hospital where you can have mange-tout with your salmon and a TV in the room doesn't mean the care is proportionally better than the NHS.
So, my surgeon had a migraine and my operation had been cancelled. Big deal. However, this now meant that I had to wait in my room solely to hear the test results and the wait was excruciating. Wimbledon was on and I tried to concentrate on that, but it was very difficult. I spoke to Jo, who was still ignorant of my Marion-fixation, and told her to call later. The hours passed. I paced the room. This was turning out to be the longest day of my life. I ran through the two scenarios constantly in my head. In one, I was fine. In the other, more insistent one, I was condemned. At four o'clock, the nurse came in and told me the result was negative. Saying 'yes' to a job immediately came second in the life-elation stakes as I literally jumped around the room with all-consuming joy. The long wait had given my mind enough time to throw probability to the wind and I was convinced I was ill. When I spoke to Jo, she told me that she had called the hospital an hour or so before and been told that I didn't want to speak to anyone. Where that little nugget came from, I have no idea. She had spent sixty minutes at home convinced she had been sleeping with someone with AIDS. I was furious.
Seven days later, I was back in there for my operation. My surgeon came in after I'd had the mind-numbing, mouth-drying premed and I was lying there feeling doped and vulnerable. He looked at my notes and said, "Ah, so your the one who had the AIDS test last week. Well, I don't know what you've been doing, but it doesn't give you the right to kill people, you know." and left the room to sharpen his knives.
So I was left with a desire to be over-weight at all costs. By the time "Maid Marian" was finished I had managed to put on a stone and a half, most of which seemed concentrated, as I said, on my face and arse.
Despite the tight scheduling, the shoot of Maid Marian 2 ("In Sherwood, no-one can hear you scream") was as fun as the first. Danny had had to dip his hand into his pocket and buy himself another car as someone had dumped a skip-load of sand into his buggy as it was parked in Ladbroke Grove. That sounds like a strange thing to happen, if you ask me. I mean, it could hardly have been accidental. Danny got to his car and discovered it completely filled up with half a ton of gravel!
His new motor was a black Suzuki Vitara with wide wheels and a sound system that blew your ears off. We were following him one night and he flicked a switch and the underside of the car lit up with a purple fluorescent glow! Perfect. Pure Danny John-Jules. Love him.
We spent a large part of the shoot sitting in Ken's Range Rover - Ken was the first AD and, as such, got the nicest car, nicer, in fact, than the director's. We would really piss him off by altering all the channels on his radio and switching it from Classical FM to Kiss or some other equally loud station. There was nothing much he could say really as the car actually belonged to the BBC, but you wouldn't have known it. He hated it, and did his best to keep us away from his leased pride and joy. "America's Most Wanted" would blast away inside and we sat there for hours, kipping and laughing and waiting for lunch.
We all had a day off one week as we had been filming through the night. Kate, Lew, Danny, Mike and myself went on a trip into Bristol. We parked up in the multi-story and got in the lift. When we got to the ground floor, the lift doors opened and a woman was standing outside with her shopping. Her mouth dropped open as she came face to face with a young girl accompanied by a really tall bloke, a really fat bloke, a Rastafarian and a dwarf. I bet she didn't see that very often.