Whether we are aware of it or not, up until our first child is born we all carry an image in our heads of what his or her face might look like. When my moment came, I was dumb-struck. Afterwards, my partner told me that the look on my face was wonderful to see. It was one of the most moving and heart-felt things she ever said to me. I still, of course, stupidly continued the banter and, when the nurses asked me if we had thought of a name for him, I said, "Jahangir" as a joke. They stopped sewing up my partner and looked at me as if I were mad. I was. I suddenly realised that this was real. That this was something I couldn't dismiss publicly. That this was shockingly momentous. There had been two people in the room that morning, and now there were three...
My addiction to squash at this point was such that during the filming of "Growing Rich", I used a day off to drive the one hundred and ninety six mile round trip from Norwich purely to play someone at 1pm at my local gym, the Lingfield, in Belsize Park.
I'd joined the Lingfield at the beginning of the year. Up until then, my squash partner, Michael, and I used municipal facilities to get our 'hit'. We'd been playing at Swiss Cottage Pools and Vale Farm, Wembley for two or three years on and off. I would pick him up three times a week and we'd run ourselves ragged for an hour or two. What Michael lacked in shots he made up for in retrieving. He turned me into the player I am today... unwilling to run too much and unable to finish off a rally. We must have looked pretty terrible on court, thrashing about and swinging wildly at the ball to try and get it to the back of the court. This swinging was instrumental in sending him to hospital one afternoon after I'd 'cleverly' decided to change what looked like a drop shot into a full thwacking drive. Unfortunately, Michael was already running under my right armpit to reach the drop, and got caught full in the forehead by my racquet. He groaned and bent over double as a gallon of ruby fell from his eye area.
I have to thank Michael for reminding me what happened immediately after I'd hit him. I'd run to get help, feeling completely bloody terrible. By the time I got back, a crowd of well-wishers and the morbidly curious had gathered around him. Some idiot had asked to look at his head and, not thinking about the effect it would have on Michael, had stupidly panicked in front of him and called the manager. Michael had no access to a mirror and I suspect wouldn't have wanted to look even if he had. The crowd around him was now quite large and the manager officiously pushed his way through to sort things out. He obviously felt he was the only man there qualified to keep his head in any crisis. He got to Michael, sitting in the middle of the scrum, barked at everyone to give him room and ordered Michael to move his hand so he could fully assess the situation. Michael obliged and the manager's face fell. He staggered back and shouted, "Oh. my God!" and immediately pushed his way out of the crowd to call for the professionals, leaving Michael convinced his eye was halfway down his cheek. The ambulance arrived and the medic took a look and straightaway said the one thing Michael needed to hear. "Well, firstly, your eye is fine..."
One particular session, I pulled a tricep during the knock up! If there ever was a case for being coached during the early stages of learning a sport, we were it.
Michael and I were of pretty much the same standard - crap - but, we loved it! One week, I would be the champ; the next he would be. Things went on this way for ages until he had to go off for six weeks to be in a play. He had by this point joined me at the Lingfield and we revelled in the limitless time allowed on the almost always empty courts during the day to members. While he was away, I would go on court alone three or four times a week and hit ball after ball up and down the wall, up and down, up and down...and then get into the jacuzzi. By the time Michael got back, I was a changed player. I think Michael beat me once, or maybe twice, in the following eleven years, although he's apparently just biding his time until we're both in our sixties and I have to play using a zimmer...
It's hard to explain the way some sports can take over your life. Golf is one of them. Many are the stories of grown men getting on the links at five in the morning to get a round in or spending weekends away from their families to hit a little white ball into a hole four hundred yards away.
I think the clue is that excellence always seems tantalisingly close. 'Seems' is the important word here. In squash, the box you play in is the same for everyone, from the total beginner to Jansher Khan. The walls are never that far away. The ball never more than three or so feet from your racquet. The more you practise, the better you get. If you don't practise, you slowly lose the gains you've made. Result? You find yourself driving from Norwich to try and work out how you keep getting beaten by the same guy again and again.
Playing Michael for so long gave me a false sense of my ability. Against him, I could pretend I was gifted. I must admit that, during those first few months at the Lingfield, I thought I had the potential to become World Champion! It's a young man's game and I'm now just happy to still have both knees...
"Growing Rich" starred Martin Kemp. Being a pop star and used to a certain level of attention, Anglia TV said they'd provide him with his own trailer for the shoot. Very amusingly, the 'trailer' was, in fact, a fairly shitty caravan, and a small one at that. Martin, because he's a really down-to-earth bloke, confided in me that, although he felt a little starry asking, he really did need to get it sorted. After all, his contract had stipulated a Winnebago, and here he was, in Norwich, sitting in a spectacularly unglamorous hut on wheels feeling rather silly.
So Martin got his 'Winny', complete with fruit bowl, fridge and bottled water. The rest of the cast had to make do with an old bus. The men had the top deck and the ladies the bottom. There was no extra perk for the other stars in the show. Even John Stride, an actor of immense pedigree and stature, had to put his strides on up there with everyone else. Martin would occasionally invite me in to his luxury mobile home for a coffee through his innate sense of fairness, but the separation was set in stone by this mobile monument to status and I always felt I was intruding.
They say "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys". Well, if you lead an actor to believe he is relatively insignificant to the whole by dishing out privileges to a chosen few, you'll get the bare minimum from him in return.
Of course, there are situations where to have a place to rest and learn lines is essential and Martin's winny fell into this catagory. There were, however, three other actors who had just as many pressures on them, and they weren't given a place to kip off. It was blatent toadying by the producers and effective blagging by Martin's agent to get a bit of pampering to maintain a sense of importance to his contribution to the programme.
My contribution was needed for the most part at week-ends as many of my scenes were shot in a supermarket and, as such, had to be done when it was shut. Supermarkets in Norwich obviously hadn't grasped the concept of week-end opening or indeed the current 24 hour shopping-trolley orgies that we have in London nowadays.
The cast was indeed 'stella' - not in the tinned sense but in the amount of star-quality - and I got to meet many interesting and accomplished actors and actresses. One old guy had actually been to Laurence Olivier's first wedding to Jill Esmond and had many stories about Charles Laughton and how he hadn't been invited. Us youngsters just sat and tried to take all this living theatrical history in. Not all the older members of the cast were as willing to chat. One morning, I came down to breakfast in the cast hotel and went to join John Stride at his table. We'd had quite a few conversations during the filming and, as I said, had to change together in the bus. The place was empty and I felt it would be unthinkable to not eat with him. As I got to the table with my tray of cereal and coffee, he looked up and said, "Go and sit somewhere else." I laughed at his incredibly dry sense of humour and continued to sit. "No. Go and sit somewhere else!" I looked at him with disbelief...and went and sat somewhere else. So there we were, sitting at separate tables in a completely empty breakfast room, in silence. I was livid. The rest of the day, he tried to engage eye-contact now and again, but I was having none of it. I'm all for honesty, but his rudeness astounded me. Not that it bears any relevance to this, but I don't think he's worked as an actor since then.
In one of the more bizarre moments, I found myself spending an entire afternoon with all these established actors in a Portakabin, empty but for ten or twelve plastic chairs, in the middle of a vast quarrey. The final scenes were being shot and most of us weren't that involved so we had to wait for hours, in costume, sitting on these chairs, half a mile from the set, with a view outside of nothing but wind brush and sand. Playing eye-spy with your childhood heroes in this strange non-place of a waiting room, with no references to modern life at all, made me guess that this was probably what Equity Hell might be like. It was a shame Mr. Stride wasn't there at the time. He would have seen what possibly lay in store...
My son was born in the last week of filming. I was called for a rehearsal in Norwich that night for a scene that was to be shot the following day. We arrived at the hospital in the morning and, by late afternoon, he still hadn't made an appearance. I had a word in a nurse's ear and they slammed an injection into my partner's leg to get things moving along so I could get back to rehearse. By five, nothing had happened, so I suggested they either sat on her to get him out or brought out the big guns, the Ventouse, a gynaechological plunger that clamps onto the baby's head and pulls him out.
I joke, of course... I called the director in the afternoon and he had no hesitation in telling me to bin any idea of coming up to Norwich and just get on with the job in hand. I spent most of the labour outside of the labour-room as my partner had told me to 'get out' earlier in the day after I'd made one too many ridiculous jokes. The jokes were obviously my attempt to deal with a total inability to cope with this emotional rollercoaster being thrown at me. But, who cares about that when your hips are having to disclocate to try and expel a bowling ball through an aperture the size of an egg? I certainly wouldn't give a shit. At six o'clock, I was grabbed and pushed back into the room where there seemed to be an entire rugby team scrumming down around my partner's bottom. I peered through and saw my boy's face for the first time.
Whether we are aware of it or not, up until our first child is born we all carry an image in our heads of what his or her face might look like. When my moment came, I was dumb-struck. Afterwards, my partner told me that the look on my face was wonderful to see. It was one of the most moving and heart-felt things she ever said to me. I still, of course, stupidly continued the banter and, when the nurses asked me if we had thought of a name for him, I said, "Jahangir" as a joke. They stopped sewing up my partner and looked at me as if I were mad. I was. I suddenly realised that this was real. That this was something I couldn't dismiss publicly. That this was shockingly momentous. There had been two people in the room that morning, and now there were three...
I drove up to Norwich that night and tried to sleep. I woke at six in the morning and went for a walk, seeing the world in a completely different way. I rang the hospital and my partner told me that our son had had his first meal. It was hard to imagine, stuck back in Norwich, in the same hotel I'd been in a week before, that I now had a son and it hadn't been some sort of dream. I wanted to be with them so badly. I had to shoot my scene first, however. It was a sort of "bedroom-scene" I suppose. My character had had dinner with the girl he'd been kept from seeing by the nasty Kemp-devil and found himself in her bedroom with it all possibly kicking off. So there I was, a new father, lying on a bed with Ros Bennett in a neglige, pretending to be in love with her...it's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad world, my friends.
The following morning, I snuck into the hospital ward before official visiting hours to see them both. I walked up to what I remembered to be their bed. My partner wasn't there. I leaned over the plastic cot they put new-born babies in and went to kiss my son. I recoiled in horror as I saw a Chinese baby in there! I was at the wrong bed! I shouldn't have been in there anyway and now I looked like some kind of baby stalker! I moved swiftly away and saw my partner walking towards me and plonking herself on the very same bed. I tried to tell her that the bed was someone else's but she didn't seem to know what I was talking about.
It could be said that I have quite narrow eyes. Add a touch of jaundice into the mix and you get the idea what had happened. From that day, our baby was nick-named 'Charlie Chan - Number One Son'. Ahhhhhhh........
The reality of what had happened over the previous 36 hours hit me later that afternoon. I was driving to the local shopping centre to buy some new baby clothes when I just burst into tears at the wheel.
Just burst into tears, and couldn't stop...