Only Fools and Stories: From Del Boy to Granville, Pop Larkin to Frost Read online

  Eventually we got around to filming. I interviewed Lt Col. Mark Davis who was in charge of the Counter IED Task Force and who very smoothly explained the work of his unit. I was taken to see the mocked-up village where they do their training, and shown the dogs and the robots that help them with their work, and given the chance to pull myself into the gunner’s seat on an armoured vehicle, which I accepted with glee, mostly for the opportunity to point the gun in the direction of the producer. At the end of the day, in a huge circle of servicemen and -women, I handed over the Pride of Britain’s silver winged figurine which had travelled out in the producer’s kitbag, and then, in perhaps the most surreal moment of them all, I looked into the camera with my best broadcaster’s face on and handed back to Carol Vorderman, presenting the show three and a half thousand miles away (and a number of days later) in London. Ah, television.

  That evening, after supper and sunset, we were out of there on board another Hercules, heading back to Cyprus. It might have been something to do with the relief of turning for home, and the particular relief when the lights in the cabin went back on at 30,000 feet. But the sight of the sky above us as we took off has remained printed on my memory to this day. It was a blanket of silver – the starriest night sky I have ever seen outside of the movies.

  At the time of writing, and subject to further unforeseen developments, this remains the only occasion when what I do for a living has caused me to descend into a war zone. However, it’s by no means the only time that what I do for a living has had completely surprising, totally unlooked-for consequences, utterly unimagined by me. That’s pretty much the theme of the book you’re holding.

  In my previous volume of memoirs, My Life (still available from reputable booksellers, the publishers have asked me to point out, and possibly from one or two disreputable ones as well), I told the story of my journey from north London electrician with his own van, to television actor with his own car. In this volume, I intend to dwell largely on a bunch of other people whose life stories I think I know pretty well – the characters I’ve played during that journey. The chances are you know some of these characters, too. Derek Edward Trotter, maybe. Or William Edward Frost. (Funny how those two shared a middle name. They didn’t share an awful lot else.) Or Sidney Larkin, perhaps. Or the lad Granville, who, it pains me to say, is not so much of a lad any longer – and possibly wasn’t much of a lad to begin with, if we’re being honest. I’ve been fortunate enough to get some parts which seem to have gone over quite well, and to have been in some television shows which have proved to be quite popular – to a degree which none of us involved in them remotely expected or even dared to dream about. A few of those parts, it’s fair to say, took on a life of their own, to my delight at times, and much to my alarm at others. That’s the story I’m going to tell.

  So, in these pages, I’ll write about creating the characters I was lucky enough to be introduced to in my career, and about fleshing those characters out – their voices, their clothes, their walks, their mannerisms, the things that made them who they were. I’ll go into detail about life on the set during the making of the programmes those characters appeared in. I’ll talk about the reactions people had to those characters when they were broadcast. I’ll try and explain, for instance, what it was like to make a Christmas special edition of a certain comedy show and discover that more than 24 million people watched it, putting the nation’s electricity grid under threat. And I’ll talk about what it was like for me to play the people who, ironically, made my name, and about the things, both good and bad – and sometimes plain ridiculous – that happened in my life as a consequence of playing them. Like flying to Afghanistan on a mission for the Pride of Britain Awards, for instance.

  Also, because I always find it endearing when people make the effort to share the wisdom and expertise that they have gleaned down the years, and because I would like this book to have, if nothing else, a small practical application, you will learn along the way how to fall sideways through the hole where a pub’s bar hatch used to be. Apparently I’m quite renowned for that. There may be a few other tricks of the trade thrown in as well, depending how we go.

  Strap yourself in, then, as our second journey begins. There are, to the best of my knowledge, no torpedo-touting rebels in the surrounding hillsides. At the same time, it might be wise to keep a watchful eye out at all times.

  But first, take, if you will, a look at the photograph on the next page. It may hold the key to everything.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Just getting away from it all

  WHAT A PICTURE. This beautifully composed and subtly lit piece of photographic art is an out-take from an award-winning session that I did with Annie Leibovitz for a cover story in Vanity Fair magazine at the point where my career was really beginning to take off in America.

  Oh, all right, then: no it isn’t. It’s a blurry snap taken in the late 1970s by hands unknown, with a Kodak Instamatic most probably, and then delivered, in all likelihood, to the local chemist’s for processing, prior to collection from that chemist’s in a glossy folder a fortnight later, if you were lucky. (Kids: there’s simply too much out-of-date stuff to explain here. Ask an adult who has got a free hour or seven.)

  However, since then, this photograph has lived with me in various boxes and trays and drawers, growing no sharper or better lit with the passing years, but somehow accumulating meaning, at least from my personal point of view. Every time I come across it, it seems to strike me anew. It’s just a quick picture, grabbed behind the scenes in a theatre. Yet there’s something about it which seems to get to the heart of the matter and sum a few things up.

  A few details about this noble image. We are backstage at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge, a decent, 600-seater provincial venue, and the date would have to be at some point in October 1978. That makes me a willowy thirty-eight years of age – a veritable infant, I would argue, in thespian terms. Certainly the most prominent points of my life in the business are all ahead of me.

  The play I am appearing in is called The Relapse – or, Virtue in Danger – a Restoration comedy, written in the late seventeenth century by Sir John Vanbrugh. This was only my second appearance in a piece from that period; as a member of the Bromley Theatre repertory company, in my first proper job as an actor, I appeared as Bob Acres in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals. These were perhaps not the kinds of roles you would expect an actor with my background to land. I had come out of amateur dramatics and hadn’t been to drama school or done a course in acting in which Restoration plays and their customs and techniques might have been part of your studies. So I was going on intuition, direction and what I could pick up from reading a bit around the subject. Which is why I’m in a position to tell you that, when he wasn’t busy writing plays, John Vanbrugh practised as an architect, during the course of which work (on, I like to think, an idle Sunday), he designed Blenheim Palace, the massive pad in Oxfordshire which has provided a stately home down the years to various Dukes of Marlborough. So Vanbrugh was no slouch, clearly. And on the subject of people who aren’t slouches, the director of this 1978 production of The Relapse was Jonathan Lynn, who was the artistic director of the Cambridge Theatre Company at this point in his career, but who is probably better known to you as the co-creator of the comedy series Yes, Minister and, later, Yes, Prime Minister. OK, Yes, Minister wasn’t exactly Blenheim Palace but it was pretty good, too, and for a decent portion of the 1980s, it was getting many more viewers than Blenheim Palace on a weekly basis.

  I know that Jonathan Lynn directed The Relapse because, as well as the photograph reproduced above, I also have to hand a programme from the production – one of quite a number of programmes that I seem to have tucked away over the course of time, because a blend of sentiment and pride stopped me from parting with them. That said, it’s always a bitter-sweet experience to look back at the programme from a show that you were in and run your eye down the cast list. On the one hand, there are the actors who wen
t on to have careers and whose names remain familiar to you. For example, in the case of this 1978 production of The Relapse, there’s Louise Jameson, who was very famously Doctor Who’s leather-wearing assistant during the 1970s, had big roles in Tenko and Bergerac, and later spent two and a half years playing Rosa di Marco in EastEnders. And there’s also Guy Siner, the comic actor who landed the nice part of Lieutenant Hubert Gruber in ’Allo ’Allo!.

  But then there are the names that you never saw again. What happened to those people? They seemed so talented and capable at the time – as talented and capable as anybody else in the cast. Why didn’t it work out for them? Did they mind that it didn’t? Did they get happy doing something else? It’s a very fine line, is the sobering lesson here.

  On a slightly less melancholy note, there’s another vivid memory which, for some reason, rises unbidden with great clarity as I gaze at the pages of this ancient theatre programme: namely, that someone at some stage threw the cast and crew a candlelit party, at somebody or other’s abode in Cambridge. And at this candlelit party in all of our honours, a stage assistant, perhaps in search of attention that wasn’t otherwise coming his way, devoted himself to going round the room eating all the candles.

  Now, it’s beholden upon me at this point in the narrative to issue a brief but important lesson in human biology: candle wax does not sit terribly well in the digestive system. Moreover, I must stress that, if you are looking for something to ease the passage of candle wax through said digestive system, alcohol, in the form of beers, wines and spirits, will be of precious little use to you as a solvent. As a matter of fact – and as was amply proven that night – your predicament will only worsen. Indeed, there was a moment in the evening where, with the wax and the alcohol in this bloke’s body reaching saturation point, he would probably have burned at both ends. Which would have redefined the term ‘lit up’.

  Nobody tried, fortunately. Suffice it to say, though, that I have never seen anybody so ill, who was still standing up and breathing unassisted, as that stage assistant the following day. But at least he survived. More or less.

  Anyway, to return to the play: my part in The Relapse was Lord Foppington, who was (and you may be ahead of me here) a fop – a trivial dandy, all manners and affectations. Names that functioned as large-scale clues about the sort of people you were dealing with were always a big number for these Restoration comedy writers. Also in The Relapse are characters called Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, Sir John Friendly and Serringe, a surgeon. Lord Foppington, it turns out in the course of the play, was formerly known as Sir Novelty Fashion but then managed to buy himself a title. Scandalous. Would never happen nowadays, of course.

  In the photograph, I’m not yet in costume, but I’m presumably just about to climb into it. I have just had my make-up done. It has been applied using a version of the Japanese kabuki method, where you slather the face completely in a thick white undercoat and then paint in the features over the top. It’s a bit like decorating a sitting room, I suppose, except on a slightly smaller scale and with less furniture to shift. On top of the white face mask, I have been given thickly blackened eyes and brows, and heart-shaped, ruby-red, permanently puckered lips. My hair, you will observe – which was still capable of providing an all-over covering for my head in those wondrous but, alas, far-off days – has been carefully trapped and flattened inside a net, from which there will be no escape for it, barring an explosion in the vicinity large enough to blow the pins out.

  This use of a hairnet is in order to provide a suitably flat platform for Lord Foppington’s wigs which, in this production, were absolute works of art. The production was rather lavish altogether, as I recall. The Relapse was the last play in that year’s season at the Arts Theatre and there seemed to be money in the kitty – money which needed spending, or else the theatre would simply have its Arts Council budget cut the following year. So the production was an extremely well-furnished one, with Lord Foppington’s wigs in particular feeling the benefit. There were three of these in total, each more elaborate and foppish and ridiculous than the last, and culminating in a long, flowing cloud of ginger curls, which resembled nothing so much as a skinned and blow-dried poodle, or possibly two skinned and blow-dried poodles, glued together. When I say long, I mean long – and when I say flowing, I also mean flowing. When not in use, this big, final wig had to be hung up to stop it getting tangled, and when it was suspended from its hanger in the dressing room it was as tall as I am. Which – before you make the point yourself – is not all that tall.

  But this wig was almost big enough, and agile enough, to have its own part in the play. I only had to walk on in it to bring the house down, and I don’t mind confessing that I used to milk the moment mercilessly, taking a moment or two to give the audience an affronted eye, as if to ask them what, exactly, they thought they were laughing at. As far as I could tell from my research, contemporary Restoration players were perfectly willing to involve and interact with their audiences, who were very vocal in those days. So I wasn’t being hammy, you understand; I was being authentic. Well, that’s my story.

  Anyway, look at me in this picture, thrusting upward from the hips, cocking my head for the camera. I stare at this photo now and I’m thinking: ‘Who is this bloke? Where has he come from and what does he want? What is that pose he is already unthinkingly striking?’ Even before strapping on the absurd buckled orange boots, shaped like twin gondolas, and climbing into the orange brocaded frock coat with its floppy lace cuffs and equally floppy lace neck-piece, and then clambering underneath that ridiculous pile of wig, I seem to have turned into Lord Foppington – albeit Lord Foppington in his underwear. The truth is, when I look at the person in this photo, I don’t see myself at all, or anything that I think of as resembling myself. That bloke – the bloke that I’m obliged to live with the rest of the time, when I am not, as rule, wearing Japanese kabuki-style face paint – has gone. He has already done a runner. He has vanished under the make-up. He has disappeared through a side door and into the theatre.

  That, I reckon, is why this arbitrary, casual snapshot is such a weirdly compelling image for me, why it exercises such a lasting fascination. It seems somehow to contain the essence of the thing that drew me in the first place – the thing that lured me into amateur dramatics as a shy teenager from a terraced house in north London, that persuaded me to dump the work as an electrician that I had trained for and which seemed to be my destined course in life, and, instead, give myself five years to try and make the grade as a repertory actor. That thing was the chance acting offered to be other people, people who weren’t me or anything like me – the possibility, however momentary, of absolute escape into other characters and other lives, of absolute escape from yourself, which sometimes, looking back now, the job has delivered, and in spades, and which sometimes it hasn’t.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The things some people keep

  IT’S AN EARLY spring afternoon in March 2017, and I am in a lock-up unit in a storage depot on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, staring in wonderment at a life-size ceramic statue of a collie dog.

  ‘Blimey, is that the actual one?’

  It is, indeed, the actual one – the actual mock-porcelain mutt that, for many episodes of Only Fools and Horses in the 1980s, sat looking a bit gormless in the sitting room of the Trotters’ flat on the twelfth floor of the Nelson Mandela House tower block in Peckham, which was, of course, a set in a BBC studio, but you know what I mean. That ceramic dog wasn’t the only thing that sat looking a bit gormless in that flat, it has to be said, because Rodney and Grandad also had their moments. But, unlike them, perhaps, the dog had a decent excuse.

  And now here I am, three decades and more later, in this chilly storage depot, eye to eye with that extraordinary beast again, this absurd, ornamental Lassie lookalike – man’s best friend, only in very shiny and very still form. Who seems to be in quite good shape, I am pleased to see, after all this time: bright-eyed, no mo
re chipped than he was back when the two of us enjoyed each other’s company on a regular basis. OK, he’s not much livelier than he was back then, either; he’s still just sitting there, just as gormless, and not saying much. Probably just as cheap to feed, too. And as I reach forward and run my hand over the smooth, cold surface of this ridiculously naff, waist-high piece of sitting-room statuary, memories, as absurd as it may seem, come flooding back that are almost painful in their poignancy.

  But before we get into all that, perhaps I should explain why, in the seventy-seventh year of my life, I am spending a midweek afternoon stroking a pottery dog in a Milton Keynes storage facility. Not for an episode of Antiques Roadshow, let me immediately tell you – although no doubt you and me both would be surprised, and possibly even stunned, to learn how much a mock-china collie that had regularly appeared in Only Fools and Horses would be worth these days, were those numbers available to us.

  But I’m not here to get anything valued by Fiona Bruce. I’m here because I’ve agreed to film a sequence for a documentary programme that UKTV is doing about the making of Only Fools. UKTV is a cable channel that devotes a lot of its airtime to reruns of Only Fools and has, in a sense, become the show’s second home during its prolonged and seemingly ceaseless afterlife. Now they want to make six one-hour programmes about the series, going back to the locations where the show was shot and talking to the key people – the ones of us who are still alive, at any rate. Those members of our family who have sadly passed since the making of the programme get a free pass. And, on the grounds that this sounds like it isn’t going to turn into one of those cheap and cheerful ‘tribute’ shows, where they show you clips from the programme in question and then get a familiar-looking talking head (who is frequently a comedian, for some reason) to say something about the clip that is less funny than the clip was, I’m on board.