Being Boycie, page 22
I was attracted to Debbie, for sure, and loved her in a protective way; she had a good heart and I felt I might be able to help her to become an altogether superior kind of actress – like Higgins and Eliza in My Fair Lady – and perhaps a more circumspect sort of woman. By then I certainly felt responsible for her, though she was well able to manage her life in the way she wanted.
In any event, it seemed that somehow an unstoppable momentum had built up, pushing me with frightening inevitability towards a second unsuitable marriage, and I simply didn’t know how to deal with it.
My own friends were bemused. Of course, they could see that Debbie was fun and attractive – but to marry? Her mother, Mary, was pretty suspicious, too; for one thing, I was a goy, and for another I already had one failed (if distant) marriage behind me. As our proposed wedding drew nearer, I grew more certain that I was making a mistake. But I’ve always hated causing awkwardness and hurting people – whether out of cowardice or gallantry I can’t say – and despite being beset by strong feelings of doubt and guilt, I went through with it.
I was still appearing nightly in Rattle of a Simple Man at The Savoy when, on March 16th 1981, Debbie Arnold (‘formerly known as Jeannette Deborah Koffer’, it says on the certificate) and I were married at Richmond Register Office. It was a short, unconvincing ceremony, compared with all the Roman Catholic elaborations of my first marriage. It was followed by a reception which Debbie had arranged at an Italian restaurant in Sheen. The entertainment was provided by Toni Dalli, a sub-Mario Lanza crooner, accompanied by an old accordionist who could have walked straight off Montmartre. It was an eclectic gathering, with my parents, Debbie’s family ‘doon from Soonderland’ and the Alderton Brothers, all rubbing shoulders.
The whole tenor of the event did nothing to quieten my misgivings. As I delivered an inept and frankly disingenuous wedding speech, I heard the continuous hiss of air rushing between my mother’s teeth, while the crackle of tension between her and
Mary Arnold was palpable; neither of them was happy and nor, absurdly, was I.
My father looked as if he were present under sufferance. As it happens, he looked as if he was suffering most of the time now. My mother told me he spent more time than usual staying on up at the office.The Department of Energy, for whom he worked, had rooms to put up people whose work had caused them to stay late. He had also routinely been arriving home late and drunk, and my mother told me she was beginning to feel something of a victim. He announced shortly after the wedding that he would be taking early retirement that summer.
Once the wedding was over, I did my best to settle into our marriage. I’d always been comfortable about moving from one environment to another, which perhaps is why I’ve always been happy acting – being in someone else’s world – and I didn’t have any great problem with married life as such. To begin with I thought maybe it would turn into something more real than it was feeling then. At the same time, I needed to be with someone I admired, and I did at least admire Debbie for her obvious talent, and her sparkling good looks. She had inherited her father’s ability to impersonate – had learned the techniques either through example, by osmosis or through her genes. She knew how to do a recognisable Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield, using all the raw drive she reckoned it took to be a star, while I continued to encourage her, no doubt with a little wishful thinking, to direct her talents in a more serious direction.
My own career, in a stop-start, feast-famine sort of way, had moved up several notches since Stoppard had approached me in The Orange Tree after the Memorandum, and the low point of 1976.
The tour and West End run of Rattle of a Simple Man had gone well, and I’d even earned a couple of decent notices. The voice-overs were still coming in, and I had to admit – a little reluctantly – that returning to England had been the right thing to do (notwithstanding my continuing unease over my marriage, and sporadic memories of the whacky, carefree life I imagined I’d been leading in New York).
Less than a month after we were married, I was sitting in the drawing room of our house in sleepy Alexandra Road, moodily drinking coffee, wishing I felt happier now I was married and thinking about what I would do when Rattle of a Simple Man came to an end, as it shortly would. It had run for over six months, but although it was a good production, the play was evidently not strong enough to maintain the momentum needed to carry it on much longer.
The phone on the floor beside me rang. I answered, and perked up like one of Pavlov’s dogs at the sound of my agent’s voice. Marina Martin, who’d been handling me for the last year or so, seldom wasted time in ringing unless she had something useful to say, which meant that a month or two could go by without my hearing so much as a small white lie from her.
‘I’ve got a nice little job for you. Remember that Citizen Smith job you did for Ray Butt and John Sullivan last year? They want you for a new show.’
I wondered what for; I hoped it wasn’t another ruddy policeman. Citizen Smith had run for four series and finally come to an end the previous summer, having clearly established the duo’s reputation and that of its lead, Robert Lindsay.
‘It’s called Only Fools and Horses,’ Marina went on.
The title didn’t mean a thing to me, although I recalled later that it had been used before for an episode of Citizen Smith. It was, I gathered, a cynical old cockney axiom suggesting that only half-wits or dumb animals would actually graft for a living.
I knew that Butt and Sullivan were good at their job; and Sullivan had promised me the previous year that if he could use my Inspector Humphreys again, he would. Another copper, after all? I thought. Oh well – what the hell.
‘I’ll tell Ray to send you the script,’ Marina was saying.
As soon as I’d torn the wrapping off the bundle of text that arrived and read the part they wanted me for, I was very happy; the character, Boycie, suggested a lot more scope than the copper I’d last done for them.
I was in just one scene in Episode Two of the first series. It was a short appearance, but from the start, I tried to make Boycie distinct from any other comedy character on British TV. Sullivan had written him, and I played him, a long way from the nation’s most recent comedic car dealer, George Cole’s inimitable Arthur Daly, who had launched some memorable phrases into the English consciousness – ‘’Er indoors’, ‘The world’s your lobster’.
Sullivan had been careful in his drawing of Boycie not to rush to occupy that ground. In time I came to realise that I had to develop a persona that would make the most of the dry aphorisms Sullivan could put in his mouth. In his first outing, discussing the qualities of the car he’d bought for his ‘bit on the side’, Boycie pontificates, ‘It’s only Sebastian Coe and E-type Jags make me feel proud to be British these days.’
This is a deliberate counterpoint to Del Boy’s equally distinctive (and even more inexplicable) misuse of French sayings – ‘Son et Lumiere, wouldn’t you say?’ for instance, expressing his admiration for something.
I enjoyed filming my scene. John Sullivan was such a fun-lover that David Jason, Nick Lyndhurst and I were having a great time and squeezing everything we could from it. The crew had been highly entertained by Nick’s performance with a terrible tatty old rag-top Cortina they’d brought from Boycie. It was spewing smoke, roaring, banging and skidding wildly over an area of ground between a few rows of lock-up garages, made extra real by the fact that Nick in real life hadn’t yet passed his driving test.
Although the opening episode wasn’t due to be aired until the following September, the live audience reaction to the studio sequences had been terrific, and there was already a bit of a buzz about the show.
When Debbie asked me how the shoot had gone, I tried to curb my enthusiasm. Often shoots that look very funny at the time don’t seem to work out that way on screen. Nevertheless, although nothing had been even hinted at about a second outing for Boycie, and I was cynical enough not to hold my breath, I did have some hope that it might lead to more. In the meantime, my episode wasn’t due to be aired until the autumn, so I was just going to have to wait until then to see what the public thought of it.
Casting around for a fresh project, I’d heard about a new Stoppard play in the offing – his translation and reworking of Austrian playwright, Johann Nestroy’s nineteenth century farce, Einen Jux will er sich machen. It had also been the source of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker and, from that, Hello, Dolly! Tom Stoppard, with his love of English at its most expressive, had titled his version On the Razzle! It was to be directed by Peter Wood at the National Theatre.
Having already worked in two Stoppard plays I was a big fan and I wanted very much to be in another, especially as Night & Day which had followed Dogg’s Hamlet into new York had heaved Stoppard right onto the top tier of the world’s dramatists. I hadn’t seen much of him for the last couple of years, but I still had his number and I thought that with the ideas we’d shared when we’d been in New York he wouldn’t object if I gave him a ring.
‘So, you’d like me to put in a word for you with Peter Wood about On the Razzle?’
‘Well, no, not if you don’t want to....’ I protested as weakly as I decently could, not wanting to appear a brazen self-promoter.
‘So you don’t want me to put a word in for you then?’ he asked.
I wanted to kick myself. ‘Well, no, well, not exactly....’ I blathered in a way I hoped he would understand to mean that I did want him to.
In any event, he did and I went to The National to see Peter Wood, whom I’d never met before.
Peter looked at me speculatively. ‘Mmm. I’ve heard a lot about you; I’ve been told you’re very versatile. The trouble is – I’m not sure I’ve got anything for you. Would you care to understudy anything?’
‘I’d rather not.’
There were a couple of small but enjoyable parts unfilled.
‘Would you consider playing these and understudy one other?’
‘For an extra consideration,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ Peter arched an eyebrow and turned to his assistants. ‘I think he wants more money!’
I had my two small but enjoyable roles – Hupfer, the tailor and a rather slovenly old Italian waiter. Peter Wood said my Hupfer reminded him of ‘the darker corners of Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel’. Sadly, though, I never did get to play my understudy part, that of the Coachman – a robustly enjoyable role which was being played for some complicated internal reason by Harold Innocent, a sweet man who had been promised a series of roles at The National but really wasn’t butch enough for this one.
Stoppard, who was often at rehearsals, said to me once, ‘You know, you really ought to be playing this part.’
I agreed, but there it was. In any case, it was a joyous, hilarious play to be in and I loved working at the National.
On the Razzle was launched at the Edinburgh Festival – which tends to produce fun-loving audiences – on September 1st 1981.
A week later, at 8.30 pm on September 8th, the catchy strains of the title song.... Stick a pony in me pocket,
I’ll fetch the suitcase from the van
announced the first airing of Only Fools and Horses on BBC 1.
The thirty-minute episode, Big Brother, introduced three characters, Del, Rodney and Grandad. Just half an hour long, it was filmed largely in studio and had the look and feel of a small scale comedy drama where the characters were still feeling their way around each other. Nevertheless, the dialogue was robust and confident, and knew exactly where it was going; in addition, there was an obvious, strong chemistry between Nick Lyndhurst and David Jason.
With the characters now so firmly fixed in the public consciousness, it’s impossible to consider anyone else playing the key roles. Nevertheless, it’s rumoured that nobody wanted David Jason for Del Boy except the director, and even then he’d been third choice for the role. Ray and John had already tried to get Enn Reitel - long-faced, then little known but brilliant impressionist. Then they tried Jim Broadbent, but neither he nor Reitel could commit to a series of six at the time.
It’s quite possible that either of them could have delivered Sullivan’s fast, witty lines just as well as Jason. However, that’s hypothetical now, and perhaps the physical contrast and the instant interaction between the two stars has been the key element in the success of the series. We’ll never know otherwise.
The first episode attracted 9.2 million viewers – very respectable at the time – although it was almost completely ignored by the critics. In theory that shouldn’t have mattered, and in the end it didn’t much, as a large proportion of the audience were viewers who didn’t rely on reviews to choose what they were going to watch.
John Sullivan had been a brewery worker when he saw a story in the Sun about Johnny Speight earning £1,000 an episode for writing Till Death Us Do Part. He showed a friend, who laughed. ‘We’re funny guys. We should do that.’
Sullivan looked for the quickest way into the television end of the BBC, and got a job as a scene shifter. He was told that on no account must he harass the stars. But he did, at every chance, and managed to show some of his writing to Ronnie Barker, who liked his ideas and encouraged him.
Sullivan moved into the job with no formal education and no training of any kind, but he was able to extract from his own memory vivid pictures of mates who tried, but never made it.
By the time he started work on Only Fools, he had written thirty episodes over four seasons of Citizen Smith, and some sketches (with writers like David Nobbs and Barry Cryer) for the Two Ronnies. Both Ronnies famously demanded very high standards.
Sullivan started by basing his Only Fools characters on his own youthful friends who had the confidence and ambition to make something of themselves, but neither the education nor the nous to do it. However, they usually had an overwhelming self-belief. They were like an awful lot of ordinary guys going about their lives in the certainty that with just the tiniest helping of luck, they too could have become millionaires.
In the early series, Sullivan created the classic comedy trio of the old fool, the young fool and the fool in charge; but, as he said himself, it became a community rather than a mere family with an almost Dickensian breadth in the later, bigger episodes.
The following week, as the Razzle tour hit the Bristol Hippodrome, Boycie made his debut TV appearance. I was quietly pleased with his all too brief appearance as one of Peckham’s leading pre-used car dealers, but the viewing figures dropped to 6.1m and some witty BBC executive remarked that the show was doing about as well as Trotters Independent Trading. The head of comedy was heard to describe the figure as ‘rather disastrous’, though luckily, I didn’t hear that until many years later; otherwise I’d have convinced myself it was all my fault.
As it was, and not just with hindsight, I felt that the cleverness of Sullivan’s writing was obvious. It showed his ability to establish Boycie’s personality in just a few lines, and I was confident the character had worked and wouldn’t be just a one-off. The plot in Go West, Young Man had shown Del Trotter’s principal defining characteristics and his relationship with the world around him, and I could see that my character would serve a very useful function as a ‘role model’ for Del. I guess, without realising it, I’d entered a new phase of my life and I was delighted, though not entirely surprised, that as OFAH ran on to a second, third and eventually seventh series, Boycie’s appearances became increasingly regular. In the early days he’s a tricky, sneering, unsympathetic sort of a chap, but he mellows as he ages.
On September 22nd On the Razzle opened its major run at The Lyttleton. It was a relentless cavalcade of high and low Stoppardian wordplay. While some of his verbal gymnastics might have benefited from a little restraint, this piece represents Stoppard just having fun: no philosophy, no intellectual undercurrent, not even any literary references. The audience is kept laughing through two hours of shenanigans, mistaken identities, malapropisms and romances.
The play required a lot of controlled energy, prompting Stoppard to say, ‘One false move and we could have a farce on our hands.’
We had a great cast, with Felicity Kendal playing Christopher, one of the young rakes. Dinsdale Landen was Zangler, with Ray Brooks, and the wonderful Michael Kitchen as Melchior.
Michael was going through a patch of vagueness and confusion at the time over his relationship with Joanna Lumley. He loved her, he said, but he didn’t know how to deal with it. This confusion manifested itself in a strange indecisiveness. He came in one day having swapped his lovely elegant old Mercedes for a tinny little new BMW.
‘Why on earth did you do that?’ I asked, astonished.
He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘I don’t know.’
One evening he asked me back to his flat, where he told me that I was the first person he’d asked into his flat for years, and we talked over a bottle or two. I’d told him I was not a good person to advise over personal relationships. I was an expert only in how not to handle women!
I liked him, though, and maybe the talking helped. We became good friends for the length of the run of our play.
Joanna came to see the show one night when Debbie was there. I introduced them and Debbie couldn’t resist telling her about the last time Joanna and I had met.
‘My husband did a scene with you in the New Avengers,’ she said, ‘and he remembers looking right up your skirt.’
