Biggins (10 page)

‘Follow me,’ he yelled at the group in a sexy foreign accent.

‘No, no, no!’ I yelled. ‘I can’t start because I don’t know how to stop. None of us does. We’re not following anyone, anywhere. You need to teach us here.’ A mini-rebellion began. And by the time I met Richard at lunchtime I’d handed back my skis, cashed in all my lift passes and was preparing for a different challenge. I wanted to master the art of après-ski. Shopping, saunas, steaming hot drinks. Turns out I’m world-class at all of that. All these years on and Richard is still a good pal. His wife, Tricia, is the creative genius behind the Designers Guild empire and made the vast curtains in my double-height living room at home. Her brother and his wife, Simon and Alison, have also become great pals and I’m godfather to their two boys, Sebastian and George. So many good people – all because I fell in love with dinner in Covent Garden.

In the first few glory years of Joe Allen the bar would be full of everyone in theatreland, all desperate for a table. They’ll kill me for writing this, but here are a few secrets. The rows of tables are all numbered. The 50s are furthest away from the door as you arrive and 52 is one of the best
in the house. You can see everyone arrive from there. I saw it as my home from home.

Table 40, meanwhile, is in chilly social Siberia. Tucked away in a corner I chose to ignore. Until one particular day.

‘Oh, Chris, would you mind sitting on 40 today?’ I was asked at the desk.

I was appalled. ‘Well, yes, I would mind actually. Why?’

‘There is a reason but we can’t say. Would you mind please just trusting us?’

So I agreed. Though walking through the restaurant to my social-death corner was mortifying. Forget the rope bridge on
I’m A Celebrity
. Walking across that was a breeze compared to my humiliating trudge across Joe Allen’s that day. I ordered soup – perfect food for a social outcast. And as I waited for it to arrive I was fuming even more. What I couldn’t understand was that table 52 –
my
table 52 – remained empty. It sat there, inviting, alluring, teasing. ‘Why can’t I sit there? Why?’ I was screaming in my head like a sulky teenager. Then I found out.

In walked Elizabeth Taylor.

Everything in the restaurant seemed to freeze. You think time can’t stand still? It can when Ms Taylor is in the room.

I found out later that the manager had wanted me at table 40 because they wanted the closest people to Miss Taylor to be the kind of guests who wouldn’t spend the whole meal gawping. Bad call. Gawp I did. Some men, in the presence of those extraordinary lavender eyes, would have dribbled soup down their chin. I was one of those men. My friend Jeremy Swan and I had half risen from our seats as the great lady had arrived. We felt the least we
could do was to welcome her to our little corner of the restaurant. When she and her companion left (there was no way on earth I was leaving before her and missing a single second of the show) we half rose again.

‘Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure,’ she said.

Pure class. And those eyes. Oh, those eyes.

‘A decaff cappuccino, please.’ Apparently, that was my catchphrase at Joe Allen. Back then it wasn’t as common or as easy a drink to make as it is today. And at one year’s staff Christmas party I had agreed to supply a bunch of pals to turn the tables on the staff by waiting at the tables for a change. The wonderful Patricia Hodge was one of the many who answered my call, as was my then agent, Jonathan Altaras. And how we all worked. We were all dripping with sweat by the time the desserts were served – even the famously cool-as-ice Patricia.

‘Can I get anyone a coffee?’ I asked one table of four at the end of service.

‘Yes – a decaff cappuccino,’ yelled 80 people in perfect unison.

I love that place.

Must all good things come to an end? They haven’t at Joe Allen, but they have certainly changed. The restaurant world has been in a state of flux for some time now, probably since Jeremy King, Joe Allen’s beloved maitre d’, and Christopher Corbin, the extraordinarily tall manager at Langan’s Brasserie, joined forces to start building their marvellous new restaurant empire. The boys took over the Caprice when its old chef left but they had some very tricky times.

Business was slow and the bills were adding up. So enter, stage left, Mr Biggins. They asked me to organise some Sunday-night cabaret. What an absolute hoot. I was in my element. We had a piano and I brought in drag acts from all sorts of dodgy East End pubs. It was a riot from start to finish. I can’t claim that my Sunday nights were why the Caprice did ultimately offer the hottest tables in town. But it did certainly heat up.

The boys are now at the Wolseley, the former bank turned Wolseley car showroom near the Ritz on Piccadilly. Breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, late dinner. I’ve enjoyed them all there. Their newer place, St Alban in Regent Street, is just as good. As someone who adores New York, I have to say that London is still so far ahead in the glamour restaurant stakes. It’s equally far ahead in the glamorous restaurateur stakes. Jeremy, Chris, Richard Polo, Richard Caring and all the others. I love them all. And I particularly love that they always give me a table.

After three seasons doing panto in Darlington, Peter Todd moved down to Brighton – and I moved down with him. We did three seasons at the Theatre Royal, starting with
Aladdin
with dear Dora Bryan. As a boy I had seen Dora dominate the stage in
Hello Dolly
, and now it seemed so amazing that all these years later I wasn’t just sharing a stage with her, but also had top billing over her. It was actually slightly embarrassing, though very, very wonderful. How extraordinarily the world can turn.

My Brighton years ended with
Dick Whittington
with Sheila Burnet and the underrated cabaret performers Kit
and the Widow. I’m glad to say love was still in the air in theatreland that year. Kit met the model Katie Rabett and I was thrilled to see them marry shortly afterwards. They’re a lovely couple and fabulous friends of mine.

I’d been happy on the south coast because I like doing several years in the same place. Every year you seem to get better reactions. The audiences seem to like to see familiar faces in the casts. Coming back adds to the sense of occasion. The local papers and radio stations like it and you can earn a little extra cash doing some openings and personal appearances around the towns. When you don’t have much other work lined up for the year ahead, that kind of thing is a useful bonus.

Just along the coast I had a good and bad experience in Eastbourne. I had agreed to do
Nosferatu
– with just one week to rehearse, learn the lines and get ready for the opening. I had one particularly complicated big number but as we used taped music rather than an orchestra I thought I had a way to make life easier. I wrote out my lyrics on huge cue cards and put them in the orchestra pit so I could read them in an emergency.

Then the audience arrived. Every old lady in Eastbourne seemed to be in the house. All of them had big coats. And all the coats in the front row were draped carefully over the edge of the pit, obscuring all my vital cue cards. The moment I saw what was happening from the wings I started to laugh so much that I forgot my first-night nerves – and I did the show without getting a single line wrong. But would my pal Peter Straker, playing the vampire, be as lucky? He had a big number in a bed scene with one of his victims – and he had put pages of sheet music all over the sheets.
Luckily for him, even Eastbourne’s redoubtable old dears couldn’t scupper that plan. He was word-perfect as well. Cambridge is another city where I put down some strong panto roots. I did five years there in the late 1980s and early 1990s and all this time on people still ask me when I might be taking a show back there. My answer is always the same: ‘As soon as someone gets the right budget and makes me a good enough offer.’ The Cambridge Arts Theatre is a beautiful place to perform – and the city is a wonderful place to live for a few months. It was also where I learned a big new part of my craft.

‘Do you want to do several seasons with us?’ producer and pal Ian Ross asked me when I first got the booking there. He too knew the value of having familiar names back year after year and wanted a way to tie me down. ‘You can have a completely free hand. You can cast, write and direct as well as star.’

How could I say no?

We started with
Jack and the Beanstalk
and I was on cloud nine to be in control. I’m at my happiest when I’m in charge of a whole production. And that has to be good for everyone concerned. If the man at the top is on good form the whole company does well. I was on good form in Cambridge. I had the marvellous Michael Kirk as my co-writer – and he was my clear first choice for each year’s new villain. His Abanazah in
Aladdin
was particularly good, though my Widow Twankey wasn’t too shabby either.

But now we’re back to all the swings and roundabouts of my life. The good times in Cambridge became a memory when I moved on and locked myself into a new two-year panto contract to perform with Cannon and
Ball. It was at the height of their fame, but it’s hard to realise now just how popular they were. They were box-office gold. Audiences went crazy for them. On stage they were hilarious and could do no wrong. But off stage it was all a little bit different.

After seasons in Birmingham, I joined the boys at the Mayflower in Southampton, a lovely theatre where I’m opening again in
Cinderella
in December 2008. Book now to avoid disappointment. I’m hoping for fewer crises this time. With Cannon and Ball I was Nurse Tickle in
Babes in the Wood
. I had a short ra-ra skirt for one scene, and when I bounced on to the stage wearing it I always got one of the loudest laughs of the night. Maybe that was the problem. One night, halfway through the first act, I was in the quick-change room and found that the skirt had been lengthened so it fell well below the knee. I couldn’t believe it. But there was nothing I could do. I only had seconds to change before heading back on stage. My entrance had no impact at all. It got precious few laughs and my whole first scene went flat.

Now I very rarely get angry. I very rarely lose my temper. But, when I do, be very afraid. I got angry after that performance. I tore into the two stars so ferociously that little Bobby Ball ran from the theatre to get away. ‘Why are you spoiling things for the audience? Why don’t you want them to have something to laugh at? Why does it all have to be about you?’ I’d shouted.

Years later Bobby wrote to me saying it had been a misunderstanding. He said the skirt hadn’t been changed because they wanted to stop me from overshadowing them. It was because they hadn’t thought it appropriate
that the kids in the audience should see my knees. If that was their opinion, then they were wrong. Not only were my costumes perfectly acceptable for kids, many of them had actually been designed by them. ‘Design a dress for Biggins in panto’ or some such phrase had been a
Blue Peter
challenge earlier in the year. At this point I’d had a close and happy relationship with
Blue Peter
for some time. They’d suggested the costume competition when the theatre first said I was going to be Nurse Tickle. Thousands upon thousands of entries came in – I still have them in a book at home and they’re extraordinary. So there was no question that kids – or their parents – wouldn’t approve of my ra-ra skirt. It was panto, for God’s sake. That’s what we do.

Funnily enough, the boys were very nice socially. The skirt aside, we always got on well backstage, just as I have got on well with almost everyone else I have worked with. It was on stage that they seemed different – and that’s a pattern you see repeated time and again with comedians. It’s incredibly hard to find generous comics. The stress of making people laugh does terrible things to people – that’s why so many comedians get divorced, turn to drink or die young. That’s why a lot of them do all three.

F
or far too long I felt I was always fighting against the snobbery about panto – and I couldn’t get too angry about it because I suppose I had felt it myself when I’d first been approached for the gig. The gentle mockery has come and gone in waves. There were years when I heard people in box offices talk about ‘has-beens’ in the casts. ‘But these are the same has-beens you need to win your biggest audiences of the year. And win them we do,’ I wanted to scream. In fact, I probably did scream it on several occasions. So, to whoever it was whose ear I bent, I apologise.

I got irate because box-office staff of all people should know the industry a bit better. In the lean years – lean decades even – panto money saw me through many bad times. For some theatres panto money keeps their lights on when all their other worthy productions play to half-empty houses. So don’t knock it or mock it. Admit that you need it.

Also, I know it sounds a bit of a cliché, but panto really is a breeding ground for new audiences. We bring in first-timers as kids. We let them get comfortable with the inside of a theatre and we show them true magic. We only need to get a few of them hooked to secure our futures. I’m sure Ian McKellen got new bums on seats when he first did panto at the Old Vic in London in 2004. I didn’t really like that production. But Sir Ian did make a most sensational Widow Twankey.

And don’t knock panto performers either. Panto is the hardest work I do all year. It is relentless. My dear pal Paul O’Grady had something like 19 costume changes when he did
Snow White
at the Victoria Palace in London in 2005. He says he used to thank God for good old hook-and-loop fasteners every night and I know just how he feels. You need flu jabs and you need to be fit and fast to survive. Forget matinées on Wednesdays and Saturdays. With panto we do two shows a day, six days a week. I sleep in my dressing gown with my make-up on between them. Then I wake up, try to eat something, touch up my face and it’s show time all over again. I’m savagely anti-social. Even if I’m near home I like to stay in a hotel so I can know the towels on the bathroom floor will all be picked up and replaced for me and for a few brief weeks I won’t have to worry about running my house.

If you’re going to make it in panto, you need to have quick wits as well. At best we have two weeks of rehearsals. Sometimes it’s just a week of technicals, then you open. And the big shows are mini-musicals. If the money is there we can have a cast of 20, a full band if not an orchestra. We have dancers, lavish sets and, yes, a seemingly endless series
of costume changes. And, oh yes, we have some of the most challenging audiences in the business.

‘There’s a bit of a lull here. The kids all talk through this bit,’ one producer said to me during a run-through years ago.

I was immediately at my imperious best. ‘My dear, no one talks through my songs,’ I declared. And no one did.

It’s harder to achieve this effect now, as kids’ attention spans get ever shorter. As performers we either give in to all this and go on to autopilot or we fight back. I fight back. I think laterally, come up with ideas, devices, movements, visual jokes, anything at all to keep the kids’ eyes on stage and on me. Talk through my songs indeed. But while the challenge of panto is to win over a new audience, the reward is to see it in their eyes when you succeed.

It’s worth it when you do. Richard Briers wrote me a lovely note four years ago after a show in Richmond which his family had loved. Other letters have meant just as much. Here’s one I’ve treasured for years.

‘I would like to make a strong complaint about your pantomime and would be grateful for a refund for 14 tickets in the upper balcony. We came in a gang of 14 and among us was my elderly mother who unfortunately gets a big confused occasionally. She is a lady who had a protected upbringing but has had great experience of the world having been a General Practitioner in Airedale, Castleford, for 40 years before her retirement. She has experienced many strange things in her life as you may now realise, since Yorkshire people are a little odd. However, I do not think she ever expected that she would experience the strange sensation of some chocolate fudge
being fired up her skirt from a catapult by a woman wearing a hat containing a dozen eggs and a chicken. She has never been the same since.’

Fortunately my correspondent, a Dr R Sloan, added a postscript. ‘Seriously, we enjoyed the pantomime very much indeed and wish you all success.’

What I also love is to see the faces in the front rows to gauge whether or not they’ve got it. Catchphrases always help with this. How I love them.

‘Now, you’ll probably have noticed I’m a little on the plump side,’ my Mother Goose said in one of the early Darlington years. ‘I’ve always got a carrier bag full of sweeties ready in case I feel a bit peckish. But I’ve got to stop eating them all the time, so if you see me reach for the bag can you all shout out, “Naughty, naughty” to stop me? Will you do that, boys and girls? Will you?’

Will they ever.

The kids deafened us throughout all the years I used that line. And they never missed a thing. If all I did was move my hand to my side, even in a moment when I wasn’t the centre of attention (and I hated not being centre of attention), at least one set of kids would scream out their warning.

But for all that hullabaloo I sometimes think I like it even more when the kids go completely silent. When they’re captivated and transported by the story or the spectacle. I respond to the kids who are feeling it. Back in Darlington in the early years, one little boy was certainly doing that. His hair was perfectly combed and he was all smartly dressed in his Sunday best – a blue sweater with a shirt and tie. He was only about seven and he seemed
adorable – something about him told me he was proud to be looking all grown up, but still nervous about the whole occasion. I responded to that.

The only odd thing was that, every time I looked over, his mum seemed to be talking to him. And, as I say, no one talks through my numbers. I redoubled my efforts to draw everyone’s eyes to me. I got my reward when we got to the song sheet. The little lad from the front row was first to rush up on to the stage, pushed around a bit by some of the older, bigger kids but determined not to get left behind. I picked him to talk to and was blown away. He was so confident, so thrilled to be there and he helped me win so many extra laughs. At one point I looked down at his mum to check she was enjoying it – and saw her dissolve into tears. Odd.

At the end of that number I would dash into the wings for my final, and fastest, costume change of the night. I had a whole new outfit for the finale. But my usual helpers were, frankly, useless. They were all crying too. What the hell was going on? ‘Tell you later, Chris. Do us proud.’ And I was pushed back on stage.

My little friend was beaming with pride in the front row as I did the curtain calls. His mum, meanwhile, was still wiping away tears.

‘He’s blind, Christopher,’ the director told me when the curtain finally fell.

I’m not sure, really, why that story means so much to me. I never saw that little lad or his mum ever again, though his mum did write me a lovely thank-you note for taking him up on the stage. I so hope he never lost the magic of that night. It would be wonderful if he’s working
in the theatre in some way. It would prove that fairytales don’t always end.

I got my next big job offer in 1975 and I was determined to resist it – just as I had been determined to resist the call to do panto. So much for my so-called professional judgement.

Jeremy Swan made the call. He was in charge of a new children’s show about a group of ghosts trying to become millionaires. To be honest, it did sound like a bit of a hoot. But I didn’t want to know. ‘I’m a serious ac-tor,’ I declared, yet again. Sure, I had enjoyed my various guest appearances on
Blue Peter
and the show even gave me a special silver
Blue Peter
badge for a lifetime of services rendered. It may well be the closest thing I’ll ever get to a knighthood from the Queen, especially bearing in mind my excruciating ‘Puck, Philip’ incident, which I will also get to later.

Anyway, back in 1975 I turned
Rentaghost
down. Then, just like panto, I was asked a few more times and eventually caved in. Thank God. All my years on
Rentaghost
were extraordinarily happy times – which I think shines through on the screen. Jeremy, a mad Irishman and one of the funniest men I know, helped create that perfect atmosphere. In the past I’d done a few
Jackanory Playhouse
shows with him and Willie Rushton and had a feeling it would be good to be back in company. I was oh so right. In my
Rentaghost
days, we had Michael Staniforth, already a big West End star, playing the lead. Another great pal was Anne Emery, one of the maddest and most talented women you will ever meet. It was Anne who taught Wayne Sleep how to tap dance and I saw her
recently giving a tour-de-force performance as the grandmother in
Billy Elliot
in London.

Back to
Rentaghost
. The show wasn’t just camp. It was way beyond camp. It was actually surreal, which is quite an achievement for what people constantly denigrate as ‘just’ kids’ TV. The show was also stuffed with a roster of wonderful performers and over-the-top performances. I was Adam Painting, the department-store owner who was always being plagued by the ghosts’ failed ventures.

All the episodes were bizarre and kitsch and hilarious, but our first totally surreal Christmas special still stands out in my mind. I come down a flight of steps singing ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ as the whole set around me vanishes in a whirl of glitter, lights and totally fake snow. It was really an MGM-style fantasy sequence, though it was all done on a budget of, well, almost nothing. BBC penny-pinching at its best – but we made something wonderful out of it, just the way professional entertainers always do. If you’ve got enough talented people around you, and if everyone thinks laterally and goes the extra mile, the cheapest sets can still look fantastic. And the show will be great. The
Rentaghost
era turned out to be a hugely important part of my life. Kids loved the show – and today those kids are 30- or, more likely, 40-something people who haven’t quite forgotten it. I’m sure it could stand a revival and, yes, I’m available.

What else do I love about kids’ TV? The things that go wrong that only the adults spot. On another
Jackanory Playhouse
, we were once filming a scene where six beautiful princesses sleepwalk into a fantasy world where they dance with six handsome princes. I’m one of the
princes, believe it or not, and one of my favourite ladies, Edward Fox’s wife, Joanna David, was one of the princesses. Now Joanna likes a laugh as much as me. Embarrassingly enough, it proved to be her downfall.

‘Now you have to do this in a single shot because we can’t go into overtime,’ came the call from the directors. In those union days overtime was the producer’s biggest fear. This sequence was particularly important – we had to get it right first time.

The main camera was at the centre of the set and the 12 of us were to dance fast and furiously around it. Just before we got the call for ‘Action’ I told a joke. The good thing was that everyone laughed and as we were supposed to be having fun it made it all look good when the camera did roll. The bad news for poor Joanna was that she laughed so much that she peed herself. The worse news for everyone was that the mini centrifugal force we set up in our circular dance meant that the effects of her little lapse spread far and wide.

Then there was the
Rentaghost
episode with Sue Nicholls when I unaccountably farted at the end of the scene. We both fell about laughing and Sue, understandably thinking we would have a break and then do a retake, signalled past the cameras for someone to get her a cup of tea. What she didn’t know was what a slave-driver Jeremy was. Retake? Just because someone farted and someone else made a ‘T’ sign to her colleagues behind the cameras? No way. ‘Let the audience see what amateurs you are,’ was Jeremy’s verdict. So we just carried on with the next scene. It’s something else I’ve not seen (or, more accurately in my case, heard) in a blooper show. Or at least not yet.

Shows like
Rentaghost
bring one big benefit to a social butterfly like myself. You do a lot of filming in a very short time. Then you get plenty of time to do other jobs, spend all your money and have fun. I did all three.

On the work front I’m proud to say that I was in one of Cameron Mackintosh’s last straight plays,
Touch of Spring
, and in one of his first hit musicals,
Side by Side by Sondheim
. His is another friendship that I treasure. He is someone else I think was born laughing.

The Sondheim musical review was the brainchild of dear old Ned Sherrin. Ned was the ultimate theatrical raconteur. He was one of the funniest men I had ever known – and I’ve known a hell of a lot of them. I always hoped he would do me the honour of reading the eulogy at my funeral. How awful, in October 2007, to have to go to his. He was loved, and he is missed. Maybe that’s the best eulogy any of us can wish for.

Anyway, back in 1977 Ned was my idol. He loved Sondheim’s musicals and created
Side by Side
himself with Julia McKenzie, Millicent Martin and David Kernan at his side. The show opened in the most unlikely of places – a theatre at Guy’s Hospital near London Bridge. The story behind the venue makes me laugh to this day. Apparently, a Shakespeare-loving, theatre-mad doctor is behind it all. When he died, leaving a large bequest to the hospital, his eccentric explorer of a wife was asked what should be done with his money.

‘Build a new theatre in his memory,’ she said, before setting off on her travels.

So the trustees found the land, got the builders in, created the auditorium and when she got back from her
latest journey they invited the doctor’s widow to the gala opening.

She walked through the doors and stopped in horror.