Biggins (9 page)

After the first series Ronnie gave all the regulars an engraved silver tankard as a thank-you gift. It read: ‘Slade Prison: 1974’ above our characters’ names. Ronnie had given me an initial, so I was Lukewarm P. I think I can safely say that no one has ever drunk out of that mug without checking the contents with care.

When the show aired, I think we all knew it was going to be good. But at the time you can never quite know how much impact it might make. We could hardly have made more.
Porridge
was prime-time television. More than 16 million watched us every Thursday night; nearly 18 million watched the Christmas special. Our scripts became catchphrases. I might only have had a recurring role, but I was still recognised in the street. This truly felt like the big time.

What’s interesting about being in a hit show is that you never know if you’re simply riding a zeitgeist or if your show will stand the test of time. Three decades later and it’s clear that
Porridge
has done that. Fletcher is one of the most popular characters in comedy history – and deservedly so. And financially speaking I’ve certainly enjoyed the benefit of this timeless popularity. I got £90 an episode when I was on the series in the 1970s. If they repeat the show now, I get something like £1,000. What a bizarre industry this is. How I wish they would repeat it more often.

Just before I’d got the job on
Porridge
I’d been moaning about the lack of really imaginative new characters. They don’t write them like they used to, I would say. But it turned out that they did.

One hot June night in the early 1970s I went to the Royal Court Theatre on Sloane Square in London. To the Royal Court’s very hot, and very small, studio theatre upstairs, to be exact. It was opening night of a bizarrely named show – with an equally bizarre plot. Ladies and gentlemen (and everybody in between), I give you
The Rocky Horror Show
. It was the most extraordinary, exhilarating evening. What an amazing show – and to see it in such a tiny, intimate theatre was mind-blowing. Tim Curry was magnificent. The whole performance was overwhelming and because I knew a lot of the production staff I was able to party away with them afterwards.

I wanted to be in that production more than anything – but its short run soon ended, so I never had the chance. A year later, towards the end of 1974, I heard they were going to make the show into a film. Twentieth Century Fox, if you please, and with big names like Susan Sarandon and Meatloaf on board. Dammit, Janet, I was determined to be in it too.

I got my wish. We had a two-month shoot (in Berkshire, not Hollywood) for which I earned the princely sum of £100 a week. I bought a sofa bed with my payments. Who says there’s no glamour in the film business? But, as usual, the money wasn’t the point. I think some of those involved spent part of the shoot stoned – and what a cast of characters we were. I met Gaye Brown and Annabel Leventon on
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
and they are still wonderful friends to this day. Then there was tiny Sadie Corre, whom I agreed to pick up and drive to work each morning. Was that a mistake? She talked so fast and was relentlessly chirpy. Lovely girl, but enough of the tiny
details of life chez Sadie. Especially at dawn, when I’m never at my best.

The rest of us encompassed every shape and size you could imagine. One new pal was Fran Fullenwider, who did lots of shows in mainland Europe, where men apparently love big women. Poor Fran had a bad night at dinner with me back then. I was flat-sitting for some friends who lived on the fourth floor of a flash Mayfair block where the only downside was the lack of a lift. Poor Fran looked like she had run a marathon when she finally arrived. But this wasn’t the end of it. She had to leave early and after saying our goodbyes the rest of us carried on partying upstairs.

Three hours later I headed down to nip to the corner shop for some tonics and there was Fran, sitting all alone on the scuffed carpet of the communal hallway. The door to the street was locked and the poor girl simply couldn’t face going back up four flights of stairs to tell us she was trapped. Fran’s no longer with us. But if she was I’d never let her out of my sight again without checking she had a mobile phone.

Going to the
Rocky Horror
premiere was a huge thrill. It wasn’t Polanski, but I was still convinced it could be the start of something big. It seemed I was wrong. This was the year that the only film anyone seemed to want to see was
Jaws
. The critics hated us. We were slammed and we flopped. The so-called experts didn’t understand this mad cross-dressing, pan-sexual plot line, and as the film was soon pulled from the cinemas the audiences didn’t get much chance to enjoy it either. Try as you do not to take
critics personally, it was deflating, to say the least. I’d loved that film. I was certain it deserved better.

But then something magical happened – just as in my life something magical very often does. We had a limited release in America and it seemed that little patches of the country fell in love with us. We were as camp as hell and we soon had a cult following. People began dressing up for midnight screenings. Word of mouth made us a hit. It’s funny now but looking at the film it’s obvious it would be a classic. But just like
Porridge
, like
I Claudius
and like several other shows I’ve been in, it’s touch-and-go if others will see it that way. I was thrilled that
Rocky Horror
made some kind of history.

In 2006, so many years later, I was back on the live show as the narrator. We went on tour – over a year or so I dipped in and out and did gigs everywhere from Truro to York. It was an absolute blast – on weekends in particular the audiences were wild. So many people dressed up. So many knew every word. And because I’d been in the film I seemed to get extra attention from the real fans. Most nights I had a three-minute ovation just for walking on to the stage. How many people get that? Sometimes it seemed amazing that I was being paid for all this. Thank God, the producers didn’t know I was so happy I would almost (but only almost) have done it all for free.

But I do have one admission to make. One night on that tour I did something I’d not done since
London Assurance
back with Dame Judi and the RSC. I fell asleep during the show. As the narrator I had a lovely comfortable armchair to sit in at the side of the stage. Too comfortable. One night I nodded off and missed all my cues. The cast
apparently thought I was joking. Eagle-eyed people in the audience thought I was dead. Sadly, my performance in
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
didn’t really trouble the judges of that year’s Academy Awards. But shortly afterwards I did still get a Hollywood moment of sorts. Lauren Bacall was in town, slated to do a film version of the play
Applause Applause
, in which she was performing in the West End. My agent got the call. Would I like to be a partygoer in a scene with the great lady?

I think that would be a ‘yes’.

I was thrilled to get close to blue-chip, cut-glass, rat-pack glamour. All I could think about was Bogie and Bacall and the golden age of Hollywood. This could be the start of something huge.

When my big day came I was on set at 9am for my 10am call. At 10am we heard on the grapevine that Ms Bacall had just got up. At 11am I was in full make-up. At 12 noon we heard Ms Bacall was on her way. At 1pm we were told she was in a foul mood. At 2pm we finally met her. Everyone was terrified, literally terrified of putting a foot wrong and facing the wrath of this wild woman. I was first to be introduced. And guess what? She was utterly charming.

My part was hardly extensive. I had one line: ‘Margo, you were divine.’

Fortunately I delivered it to everyone’s satisfaction. Then the fun began.

‘Do you want to see something very sexy, Christopher?’ the great lady breathed, that famously raspy voice everything I had hoped it would be.

‘I’d love to!’

So she whipped back her dressing gown to display a huge bruise on her thigh.

We spent the next half-hour laughing about her ups and downs on stage. I told her about my opening night in
Toad of Toad Hall
in Worthing, where there was a hole in the middle of the stage from which Ratty would arrive in the first scene. It was covered with a blanket and, of course, none of us other actors was due to go anywhere near it. I forgot, walked right on to the blanket and disappeared from view. ‘Fortunately I was so relaxed I didn’t break a single bone,’ I told my new Hollywood best friend. And we had a high old time sharing tales of other scrapes.

Afterwards, I kept thinking of all those hangers-on who had said she was in a foul mood, would eat our heads off and required totally obsequious behaviour from everyone on set. What rot. And in all my years I’ve found that it almost always is rot. People around the great stars conjure up these terrible atmospheres to try to make everything seem more exciting. But what a disservice to the stars. Maybe I’ve walked some gilded path. But in all my years I’ve hardly ever seen any nastiness.

Hugh Grant looked at me as if I was dirt once, or so I felt – or perhaps he just didn’t hear me when I said hello to him and mentioned a few mutual friends while we were standing next to each other at some event in LA. But no one I have worked with has treated anyone badly. Even the famous perfectionists, people like Michael Crawford – I worked with him on those two riotous episodes of
Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em
in the 1970s – are tougher on themselves than on anyone around them. And when the going does get tough I just think back to my training. Oliver Gordon’s
words from Salisbury Rep normally do the trick. ‘Don’t muck about. Go on stage left, say your lines, then piss off stage right.’ That normally sees me through.

Another instruction from Oliver was never to break your co-star’s concentration. But couldn’t that sometimes be great fun? I couldn’t resist in my next role, a short season in Julian Slade’s musical version of
Vanity Fair
in Guildford. I had a big number with
Grab Me A Gondolier
star Joan Heal – and I gave her a lift to work every day in my van. I seem to remember I bought a sofa from her as well, and a few years later I sold it to another old pal, the casting director Marilyn Johnson. Who says theatre is a closed shop?

Anyway, June Richie from London’s original
Gone with the Wind
a quarter of a century ago was my Becky. It was her concentration I was determined to break. On our final day we did our matinee and then got ready for the evening performance. Just before the curtain fell on the two of us the broken Becky had to look me in the eye and accept my proposal. It was a sad, emotional and moving close to the play. Or it would have been if I hadn’t decided to have the word ‘Fuck’ written under my left eye and ‘Off’ under my right. June was trying so hard to stop laughing that she couldn’t say her final line. And without the final line the crew couldn’t lower the curtain. We’re lucky we got out of Guildford alive.

When I did need to escape from real life I always went to Shrublands Health Farm in Suffolk. Marilyn Johnson introduced me to it, and while it was in a beautiful setting it was all very serious. We had three days of hot water,
honey and lemon. And every second on the television there seemed to be adverts for lovely sausages sizzling in pans and crying out to be eaten. One day on a walk around the grounds I saw half of an old banana lying in a flowerbed. How I stopped myself from picking it up and eating it I’ll never know.

Back in the main building, Marilyn and I did have some distractions. I was sitting reading the papers in the conservatory one morning when another guest walked in wearing the regulation white fluffy dressing gown. ‘Good morning,’ I said cheerily as she sat down opposite me. She smiled back and I carried on reading. Then I looked up. Did she know her gown had fallen open at her waist and I could see everything? And I mean everything. I went back to my paper. And when I looked up I realised I had been wrong. There was more to see. My companion’s gown had opened above the waist as well. Now I could almost see her breasts. Another attempt to focus on the crossword. Another look up. Hello. There they are. Two breasts and, basically, a naked woman.

That afternoon I mentioned it to Lady Julia de Saumarez, who ran Shrublands. It turned out the lady was a prostitute from Ipswich who came over for regular rest breaks but couldn’t seem to stop touting for business. So was anyone at the health farm quite what they seemed?Marilyn met a man one weekend and stayed up until 4am playing backgammon with him – and I don’t think that’s a euphemism. The next day one of the other guests approached us. ‘I saw the police came to collect your friend this morning,’ she said. The backgammon man
had been a criminal on the run. He’d thought a health farm was the perfect place to lie low.

Still laughing about our strange new friends, Marilyn and I began the usual torture sessions. I lay naked in a bath while a lady with a hosepipe shot warm water at every inch (almost every inch) of my body. Then I had to stand, still naked, in a corridor when she did the same with ice-cold water. It tones you up, we were told. The inches certainly fell off me.

I
’m six foot one and, despite the best efforts of the Shrublands team, I’ve never exactly been thin. And fortunately thin wasn’t always required in the early 1970s. My fuller figure would ensure I played the role of Emperor Nero – twice. The first occasion was in a commercial. I was called in to audition for Bob Brooks, a famously talented advertising director. My call was for a bank holiday Monday and my brief was mysterious.

‘You will need to entertain the director for five minutes,’ I was told.

‘Doing what?’

‘That’s up to you. Just entertain him.’ That was all I needed to hear – because no one entertains like Biggins. Stephanie Cole was the first person I called. Then I rang around 20 other old pals. We hatched our plot.

Bob was sitting behind a desk in a tiny rehearsal room
when my five-minute slot came up. I shuffled into the room with a dirty old coat buttoned right up to the neck. Without looking at my host I picked up a broom and began sweeping the floor. Then, after a few sweeps, I pulled off my coat and I was there, in black tie at 10am on a bank holiday morning. From inside the litter bin I picked out a big red book. ‘Bob Brooks, this is your life,’ I boomed.

Then I called them in. All my pals, all taking on ever more ridiculous roles and all wearing ever more ridiculous costumes – including some of my old kaftans. Stephanie played one of Bob’s old school teachers complete with embarrassing stories of his youth. ‘And these are your three triplet sisters who were separated from you at birth and who you have never seen before,’ I announced towards the end of our skit when things were really getting out of hand.

It could have fallen totally flat and been a disaster. It wasn’t. Bob roared with laughter and there were tears running down his cheeks as we all applauded at the end and opened a couple of bottles of cheap pomagne. My 20-plus pals then left the room.

‘Hello, I’m Christopher,’ I said, sober as a judge and finally sitting down opposite him at the stroke of five minutes.

‘You’ve got the job,’ Bob said. Just four wonderful words. It had all been worthwhile.

And after doing that first small commercial for Bob he called me back about his next production. This was the big one. It was for Heineken, part of the classic ‘Heineken refreshes the parts other beers can’t reach’ series.

The advert was also one of the biggest commercials ever filmed – it was an MGM-style production and I think we
really may have had a cast of thousands as this was long before special effects could magic these things up on a computer screen. I was Nero, sitting commandingly on my dais at the Colosseum while two young gladiators fought for my pleasure down in the arena. Then they froze, one with the blade at the other’s throat, waiting for my decree. If I give the thumbs up the loser lives. Thumbs down and he dies.

But the joke of the advert is that my thumb is all languid and limp. The crowds grow restless while I fail to summon up a signal. So, amid much fanfare, a cool glass of lager is brought in by some over-the-top serving girl. I sip some lager. My thumb starts to twitch. Another sip. More twitches, more lager – then I give the definitive thumbs up. The gladiator is saved. But in the final frame I change my mind, stand up and give a big thumbs down.

By the time filming began I had heard the rumour that Peter Ustinov had turned the role down – despite being offered a staggering £250,000 fee. They had got me for £2,500. But they had promised me repeat fees – and I was convinced that these would make me rich. The advert was so good, so funny. It would never be off the screens, right?

Wrong. Complaints came in after our first broadcast. ‘It is blasphemy,’ said the first of them. ‘How dare you try to sell beer by joking about the death of Christians?’ The papers picked up the story and the commercial was pulled within a week – proof that religious censorship isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. My hopes of sudden fame and fortune disappeared overnight. But blow me if I wasn’t about to play Nero all over again – and this time I even got to fiddle.

The BBC had commissioned an extraordinary new series,
I Claudius
, adapted by Jack Pulman from Robert Graves’s book. Like so many of my favourite jobs it was something of a family affair. Jack’s wife, Barbara Young, played my mother and we had several old faces from Salisbury, Bristol and other places alongside us as well.

I thought the script was marvellous. I love good writing. I also love good company. And on
I Claudius
it was the best of the best. Our stellar cast included the likes of John Hurt, Sian Phillips, Brian Blessed, Patrick Stewart – the list could go on.

We filmed at the BBC’s studios in the Television Centre – not as glamorous as I’d hoped but at least we got to star-spot in the canteen.

But none of us got an easy ride. We were still making the final episodes of the series when the first set started to be broadcast. Our early reviews were quite dreadful.

‘It’s cheap and nasty. It’s like
Coronation Street
with togas,’ complained one critic.

But that’s the point! I wanted to tell him. We didn’t want to do worthy but dull. We wanted to make this wild part of history come alive for the viewers. We wanted to show that life and humanity doesn’t ever really change. We’re all still flawed, all still making mistakes, all still human beings.

Other reviewers attacked the show on different fronts. They didn’t like how it was shot, how it was edited or presented. The critical consensus was that everything was a vast creative misjudgement.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the forum, so to speak. Our audience figures defied the critical mauling. People started writing to the papers saying how
much they liked the show. And the critics changed their minds. More surprisingly still, they admitted they had been wrong. That had to be a first.

The new conclusion was that
I Claudius
was great television. The show went out on BBC1 on Thursday nights and we were watched by millions. We had gone from being hated to being loved in a matter of weeks. And everyone was talking about us. There were only the three main channels then, so if you were a hit on prime-time BBC you were a hit, full stop.

Little wonder that we were all on such a high as we reached our final scenes of series one. All of the big stars, John, Sian, Brian, Patrick and the others, were back to film a dream sequence – and I admit I was nervous about the run-through that Barbara and I had to perform in front of them all. Just before the director called, ‘Action,’ I turned to Barbara. ‘It’s like ice-skating. Any minute now they’re going to judge us and hold up our scores on cards,’ I whispered.

But I needn’t have worried. We all wrapped up the shoot and everyone was mixing and mingling and getting on like a house on fire. The good chemistry was all part of the joy of
I Claudius
. I think it showed through and it’s a shame so few people today have seen it. People tell me it’s been a big seller on DVD, but the vast cast and sky-high repeat fees mean it’s hardly ever shown on television. Once more I had enjoyed myself immensely – I had also shared the glory of being in an epic, Bafta-winning show. But once more the financial rewards weren’t coming my way.

Now, not everyone would relish going from playing Emperor Nero to Widow Twankey. And I have to admit
that I agreed with them. I was offered my first panto about a million years ago – well, 34 to be exact. Jamie Phillips made the call, a marvellous man who, with his partner, the director Dougie Squires of
The Young Generation
fame, was by now a dear pal. They wanted me to go up to Darlington’s Civic Theatre, where I would be under the wing of the manager Peter Todd, one of the most wonderful men I’ve worked with. Peter was able to take a failing theatre, build it up, find it a local audience and make it thrive. That’s what he had done in Darlington, where panto was big business and had big budgets to match.

I was asked to join their next production because, after
Porridge
in particular, I was a ‘name’ who could draw audiences into the theatre. Working with a trio like Jamie, Dougie and Peter would have been extraordinary. But I was insulted and horrified by the request. So I turned it down flat.

‘Darling, I am a serious actor,’ I said. ‘I have done
I Claudius
. I have been on the stage at the RSC with dames of the British Empire. Panto indeed.’ And there was more. All the pantomimes I had seen as a boy had been stuffed with old men – with has-beens. I was 26. Jamie and Peter could hardly have offended me more by wanting me to join their company. I told my agent, in no uncertain terms, that I was not, repeat not, doing panto.

I did panto. I did panto in 1974 and I did it every season for the next 33 straight years, missing out only in 2007, when I was in the jungle with Janice. In 2008, I couldn’t get back fast enough. So what changed my mind? First, there was the simple fact that Jamie and Peter wore me down by keeping on asking me. They must
have known somehow that I would look good in a dress. The other reason was financial. They kept on offering me more money and I’d long since developed very expensive tastes. When the figure got to £1,000 a week, an extraordinary figure in 1974, I knew I had to say yes. And thank God I did.

My first panto was
Mother Goose
, alongside Stephanie Lawrence and Frank Williams from
Dad’s Army
. The top-price ticket might have been just £1.90 but the production values put Las Vegas to shame. That’s why I fell for it. We had a sensational season at the Civic Theatre. The costumes and sets were so over the top that they made you laugh. And the audience reaction was just incredible. Forget polite applause in the classics. Soaking up the ovations in panto was like being a pop star. I was high as a kite on the buzz of it. Why on earth had no one ever told me about panto before?

‘Will you come back again next season, Christopher?’

‘One hundred per cent yes.’

And so I did. That year we did
Dick Whittington
alongside Eve Adam and my love affair with the genre grew. I was also introduced to one of Britain’s most underrated theatrical dynasties – and a set of friends I am to proud to have in my back pocket to this day. The first of them was Cherida Langford, whose very little sister is of course Bonnie – who was a terrifyingly talented, terrifyingly precocious but terrifically nice little girl. She is one of our most underrated talents and a dear friend. But in the Langford family she wasn’t alone. Cherida’s daughter Scarlett Strallen is my god-daughter, and then I’m adopted godfather to Summer Strallen. Years later I 
would be the Baron in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
– Scarlett was Truly Scrumptious – and it felt like a real family affair. Years after that I was applauding like a man possessed at the London Palladium on the night Summer took over as Maria in
The Sound of Music
. Summer, you were great, just the way I knew you’d be.

I did three years of pantos in Darlington.
Dick Whittington
was followed by
Jack and the Beanstalk
and I ended each season desperately looking forward to the next. As a postscript, I met the brother of one of my early panto stars in London one summer. He had been married and might even have had children. But something told me to invite him back to my flat for a drink. Suffice it to say that he was a dear friend and he lit up my life for the best part of a year.

One other thing happened when I was doing those first few pantos in Darlington. I got a frantic phone call from Jack Tinker. ‘It’s opened!’ he screeched. ‘It’ being a new Covent Garden restaurant called Joe Allen – a legendary theatrical haunt for Broadway stars in New York that we had all been desperately hoping to see open over here.

‘What’s it like?’

‘It’s perfect. You’re going to love it. I’ll take you, the moment you get back to London,’ Jack said. He was as good as his word. And from then on we were never out of the place.

‘Our bank managers will think we’re being blackmailed by an ex-lover called Joe Allen,’ I told Jack. Every cheque I wrote seemed to be to that name.

The room is an old fruit warehouse – and it’s wonderful
that it’s still so often full of old fruits to this day. Old fruits all gazing at London’s most handsome waiting staff. Jack and I felt that the only bad thing was that the menu hadn’t quite been adapted well enough for London. At the start there were still grits on it – my claim to restaurant fame is that I persuaded them to be taken off. Grits indeed. In Covent Garden.

Jack and I also had fun with the rest of the menu. We would have tapioca puddings sent around the room to other diners, in the way old rich men sent drinks to beautiful girls. One wild night we had literally dozens of puddings being passed around, often to people who were still on their starters. The cheque we wrote that night was particularly large, I seem to remember. But since when did I worry about spending money?

Joe Allen had wonderful staff – many of whom lit up my life, for a while, along the way. Tim Clarke was one who lit things up the brightest. He was one of the maitre d’s and our really important relationship turned into a strong friendship.

What a lot of people don’t know is that Joe Allen himself does exist, though he spent most of his time looking after the restaurants in the States. In London the new restaurant was run by Joe’s right-hand man, Richard Polo. For the manager of such a marvellous, theatrical restaurant, Richard is a surprisingly quiet man. But when he does talk he is very funny, very dry and very good company. In rare quiet moments he would join Jack and I at our table. I said once that I had never quite got into opera. So he asked me to join him there one night to see if I got the bug. He enjoyed introducing people to new areas
of life, though this didn’t always go to plan. A good example was when he decided I should join him on a ski trip to St Anton.

‘See you at lunch. Good luck!’ he called out as he headed up to the top of the mountain on day one. I was off to ski school, where my instructor was about to learn that I wasn’t a model pupil.