Being in a successful children's TV series, I suddenly found myself qualified to appear in panto!
Pantomime is a discipline that has no equivalent in any other form of theatre today. It exists in its own vacuum with its own set of rules and its own set of values and is run by people with very fixed ideas on how it should be done.
There are two ways to approach being in Panto. The first is to take the money and do the bare minimum. For economic reasons, the main parts are usually given to the famous. These celebrities can have gained their fame through any means whatsoever, so you can find yourself on stage surrounded by disc-jockies, journalists from the local paper, rugby players, athletes, news readers and body-builders. This in itself adds an anarchic edge to things. You're working with people who generally have had absolutely nothing asked of them except to turn up, their presence on stage is enough. Anything else is a bonus, so they don't have the usual anxiety of an actor who feels he has to put in the best performance he can to justify himself as an artist and as an employee.
The second approach is the most rewarding. The director told me during rehearsals for my first pantomime in Basilidon that, if I had any energy left after the show, I hadn't given enough. She suggested that you should "crawl out of stage door every night". A little exaggeration perhaps, but she had a point. Every single show, the theatre is full of people who've paid forty or fifty quid to take their kids out for a treat, probably in a theatre for the first time. I made sure I worked hard and gave as much as I could. After the run had finished, I was invited by Mike Edmonds from "Maid Marian" to see the panto crème de la crème perform "Jack and the Beanstalk" in the West End. Cilla Black and Bob Carolgees were starring and Mike was playing King Apricot. I shouldn't have bothered. It stank. The energy levels of the performers were so low, scene after scene died on its arse. I left the theatre in a rage and couldn't hide my frustration in front of little Mike.
Over the course of my panto experience, I have worked with Ian Botham, John Virgo and 'Wolf' as well as Robin Askwith (the master), Britt Ekland, June Brown, Carmen Silvera, Buster Merryfield, Geoffrey Davies (consummate), Michelle Hatch (Who? She was in a ground-breaking sitcom at the time playing a dizzy blonde with a silly voice), Chris Ellison (Inspector Burnside from "The Bill"), Andrea Boardman and, the children's favourite, rubber-faced, personal trainer cum artist, Mark Speight.
Of all the non-actors, Ian Botham was the most keen to do well as a performer. He really wanted to do his best and was polite and considerate. At the end of the run of the panto we'd both been in, I had to work hard to fix my expression when he came to me and told me that the theatre board were considering casting him in an Ayckbourn play in the forthcoming season. He had genuinely enjoyed himself in the pantomime and somewhat innocently felt that, possibly, he could cut it as an actor. What was more surprising to me was that the board felt so too. Having been in Ayckbourn before, I know that it's a completely different kettle of fish being 'Silly Mid-Off' in Dick Whittington. He was great at that, but Ayckbourn? I think Ian knew in his heart of hearts he would be pushing it a bit, but, hey, the theatre felt he could do it. Why not?
Why not? Because acting is a skill. Good acting looks easy. That's the point of it. This can lend people to assume that it is easy, but it's not - and pantomime is also physically tough with two performances six, sometimes seven, days a week. You therefore get a rugby player during an interview confessing how his panto run was the hardest thing he's ever done and he's now exhausted and needs a month off to recover. When Ian hit bread rolls into the audience with a cricket bat, the talent he had was mind-stoppingly awesome. He had that lazily perfect timing with a ball only the most gifted have. I wouldn't consider attempting to emulate that, so it shouldn't work the other way round. The depressing thing is that, if someone is prepared to pay, he would be plonked up there on stage and asked to try. Luckily, nothing came of it.
Britt was fantastically Swedish, June Brown fantastically eccentric. John Virgo took the money and Chris Ellison couldn't wait to get out of the building. Mark Speight knew he was basically a graphic designer on a lucky streak, and Andrea Boardman was hilarious as the 'Genie of the Ring' in Croydon's "Aladdin".
The Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, where we were putting on "Aladdin", shares its building with the Fairfield Halls next door. The Fairfield Halls is a venue for wrestling and ice shows and, this particular Sunday, the Rotherham Wind Band Association. I was halfway through our matinee performance, where Aladdin marries the princess. In this production, all the camp stops were pulled out and I had to sing Diana Ross' "When you Tell me that you Love Me" surrounded by local kids holding tea lights and throwing rose petals. The wardrobe department had also excelled itself for this number and dressed me in flouncy shirt, little silver waistcoat, silver knickerbockers and silver boots, topping the whole thing off with a silver turban with a huge jewel in its centre. On my index finger of my left hand was an enormous ruby ring. ( "What shall I do, kids? What shall I do?" "RUB YOUR RING!!!!!!" ) Although the two theatres are separate, they share a communal staircase up to the dressing rooms and it was up this staircase I bumped into Rotherham's finest after this wedding scene had finished. We all walked up the stairs, me and twenty blazered butch boys, saying nothing. We climbed floor after floor in silence, me dressed in silver from head to toe with a silly turban on, them throwing me the odd glance and looking resolutely masculine. When I got to the door to my dressing room, I felt I had to say something, just to break the ice. As I pushed open my door, I turned to them and said, slightly camply as a joke "I feel a little over-dressed!" As the door swung to, I heard one of them say to their mate under his breath, "Tosser."
Buster Merryfield was an actor's nightmare. Lovely man, and a sad loss to his family and friends, but, on stage, he was a liability. Buster was a bank manager who loved amateur dramatics and had decided to retire at fifty on a fat pension and try to be an actor. A year later, he found himself in the country's most popular TV comedy show and fame followed fast. He was cast with the rest of us to appear in Bath in their Christmas show, "Dick Whittington". His basic lack of professional experience made for a hair-raising prospect. For a start, he could never remember where to come on from. He'd get lost in the darkness of the wings and end up in the local Sainsburys dressed as Alderman Fitzwarren. When he'd managed to find his way back to the stage, he was merciless in his up-staging. He'd twitch, cough and generally ruin everyone else's punch-lines while walking down to the front of the stage and mucking up his own. I remember one evening, he and Robin and Ian had been 'captured' by the Sultan of Morocco, who announces that they had a choice: to be burned at the stake or have their heads cut off, to which Buster was to reply, "So, lads, what's it to be? Chop or steak? This particular performance, the audience - and indeed we - were slightly confused to hear him come out with, "So, lads, what's it to be? Steak and chips?"
The audiences loved him. He bumbled around and gave a very good impression of a man with Alzeimer's. Geoffrey Davies had many of his scenes with Buster, and despaired at the extra effort involved. Robin Askwith would have us all in stitches in the wings by miming pushing down an imaginary plunger on a detonator and wafting his hand down to imitate Buster's beard as it floated back down to earth, the only thing left of him. Geoffrey, who played Sarah the Cook, overheard Robin calling Buster a "bearded clam" during one of these afternoon giggles in the wings, and decided to make us all laugh by using it on stage, completely unaware of what it meant. During that performance, we were all having a laugh, when Geoffrey came out with, " Oo, come here, you bearded clam" We stopped dead in our tracks, mouths open. You could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium.
I have to say I had one scene with Buster which involved a list of numbers and dates that had to be in the right order for the joke to work. Once I'd seen him in the wings facing the right direction, I could relax...and, once on stage, he never put a foot wrong.
Bath Theatre Royal was the beginning of a three year association with E&B Productions, performing in Bath, Croydon and Cardiff giving my 'Dick' twice and getting 'Aladdin' once... Despite having had a fair amount of success as Buttons the previous two years in Basildon and Cambridge, E&B felt I was more suited to not being funny and saw me as more of the romantic straight man, so I spent my time with them having to wear very girly costumes and looking earnest while singing songs of lurve to a procession of continuity announcers and Australians.
Most panto celebrities simply have to stand there in costume and let everyone else around them carry the scene while they giggle inanely at the absurdity of it all. Despite being a drummer, despite having appeared in two musicals, despite the three years' training at drama school, and despite moving like a panther on the squash court, I can't dance to save my life. Panto rehearsals each year became a regular battleground between myself and whichever choreographer was working on it. They simply didn't - or wouldn't - understand that I just can't do it. The first panto I appeared in, in Basildon, the choreographer wanted me to perform a routine during my "Spread a Little Happiness" song. I explained the problem, but he persisted and we spent three days of the week's rehearsal working on the little skips, hops and ball-changes involved.
Yes, that's another little panto nugget of information. There is always only one week to rehearse the show before it opens, complete with songs, routines, and sketches. The producers don't earn any money, you see, when the show isn't actually on, so why waste time? This produces another panto phenomenon: at points in the script, we would come across a blank page with the words, "Haunted House" written in the middle. This is, in fact, an entire twenty minute scene involving wardrobes, doors and flying spiders. Seasoned performers will arrive at the first day of rehearsal knowing this scene and, during rehearsal, simply stop and say, "OK, haunted house...da da da" and carry on as if the rest of us knew what the hell they meant. Comics will arrive and stop during the read-through to say, "This is where we'll do our ten minutes" and continue as if it were the most normal thing in the world! The actors in the circle will look at each other as if everyone's gone mad - and, in a sense, I suppose they have.
Anyway, dancing in Basildon. On the Saturday of the rehearsal week, the cast performs a producer's run and I gave it my all, skipping and making like a sailor as if my life depended on it. At the end, the choreographer smiled and said, "OK, cut the dance" and crossed me out in his notes. So I knew that, even if I practised for a month, the final results would make a plank look groovy, and yet, year after year, choreographers would insist I attempted their routines despite my protestations. It made things quite tense and I would always fall out with them eventually. Panto's need dancers though, and the cast is always augmented by at least six, nineteen year old girls who can twist themselves into a pretzel and get dressed up in corsets and bodices.This brings problems of its own. Many a solid relationship back home has hit stormy waters after a panto season. But as the little yellow sticker on the back of my car proclaims, "A Dancer is for Life, Not just for Christmas".
So then, after Basildon in December 1991, I remounted my 'Dick' in Cambridge the following year. Between these two Dicks, I filmed "Maid Marian 3" and appeared in "Men Behaving Badly" with an obscene hair-cut. Seeing as I wore a wig to play Robin, I could let my own hair do what it wanted underneath and, this particular year, I had let it grow. Maid Marian fans may be interested to know that the only time I appeared in the series without a wig was for the song, "Only Child", where my own, ridiculously long, hair fitted perfectly with the character. By September, the hair was very long indeed and, when it came to shooting the "Men Behaving Badly" episode, the make-up department decided that Neil Morrisey and I looked too alike and so took a pair of shears to me with the words, "Trust me." on their lips...They removed the bottom half of my hair and simply left the top alone, making me look like a member of Spandau Ballet circa 1983.
This particular page has been very difficult to get moving. All the others wrote themselves with very little effort, but, this one has been very stubborn. Basically, life settled into a rhythm. I suddenly found myself concerned with bringing up my new little family - Ollie was born in 1993 - and the social variety of the previous ten years shrank into new confines. I was suddenly no longer a free agent able to flit from one disaster to another without any consequence. I started to look longingly at Volvos in the newspaper and spend more time in mother and toddler groups with my babies than down the pub trying to make girls like me. In short, I had to grow up... and being grown up isn't that funny.
I take my hat off to all those mums out there looking after their little angels. It's gruelling and not much fun. It's hard work. It would be easier to work down a mine for eight hours than entertain, clean and feed an eighteen month old baby - at least down the mine you get some time to yourself as you chisel. Awake babies demand your attention every single solitary minute of the day. If they decide they've had enough of tormenting you for a while and drift off to sleep, you'd better make damn sure you get some kip too, because it's the only time they'll let you. Many was the time I would drive to the supermarket, find that my two little beauties had fallen asleep during the journey, and join them as soon as possible. Mothers would give our car knowing looks as they passed the three of us, mouths open in sleep, in Tesco's car-park.
One morning, a week or so after Eddie was born, I timed how long it took me to be able to switch on the kettle for my morning coffee after waking up: forty minutes! Forty minutes of nappies, bottles, baby-grows and washing machines before I had the chance to get my morning hit of caffeine. "Big deal!" I hear you shout. "Big deal" indeed. But for anyone used to living solely for the purpose of their own gratification, it's a shock, and most of us do live that way before our little ones arrive, screaming the place down. Having children does indeed change your life, as the old saying goes. Despite everything, though, it changes your life for the better. At the end of a day of baby-induced slavery, they look into your eyes and the love pours into you.
I find it hard to believe in love between adults. It's not 'love', it's a compromised arrangement. It's a necessary agreement or contract to create the social structure we all feel we need to get along in this world. Grown-ups are big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves and the motives they have for attaching themselves to another grown-up are varied and flawed.
The reasons I've come to this extreme position are also very varied and very flawed and based in the past. It would be handy to pass the buck, but I won't. This is my belief system for better or worse, and this is how I live my life...We are what we are. Who gives a shit "how"?
Parents love their children with a depth that simply cannot be translated to their partner-in-parenthood. At best, a healthy respect is all that can be achieved. But the love I have discovered in me for my children blows my socks off. It's the love that brings a father to shield his son with his own body when the bullets are flying. It's the love that wakes you in the darkness worrying for their welfare. It's the love that puts your life and safety second in line. In the eighties when we were all bombarded with images of starving children on the news, I admit I felt nothing more than distant sympathy. A friend once told me that after having children of your own you become father to the whole world. I know what he means. The poor bloated youngsters on the screen suddenly look exactly like your own. They stumble and wobble just as yours did when they were the same age, and it engenders a gut-wrenching upset that tears you apart. The photographs of the Palestinian father pushing his dying son behind his back as they were shot at is just too disturbing to contemplate. It's odd that, were he protecting his wife, I'd experience nothing like as much strength of feeling...