I Am What I Am (11 page)

On this evening, in week four, I congratulated Ashley, offered my heartfelt condolences to Francesca and stepped off set, where I
immediately ran into Cameron. He was furious. He’d thought that he and Andrew had agreed on the matter of Ashley, and he was astonished that this turnabout had occurred. When I defended Ashley, and Andrew for having saved her – after all, it was only the fourth week, and, had Ashley improved, she could even have won the competition – Cameron lashed out at me.

‘I’m a bit worried about your judgement and taste now,’ he yelled, ‘because what you’ve just done has shown me that you don’t have any taste. I’m the one producing this fucking show, not you!’

Of course, I continued to defend my opinion – and he continued to yell at me, in front of all the BBC runners, some of the staff and crew, and Denise. I think Andrew may have been in earshot, too.

I was stunned into silence.
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After a few beats, I caught my breath and I thought, ‘I don’t need to take this from him.’ Cameron is a friend, I respect him immensely, and we have a long history together.
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I leaned towards him and said, ‘If you feel that strongly about these performers, then why aren’t you on the panel? I’m up there to be a judge. I’m not a casting director.’ I paused and then added, ‘The viewers will cast this and there’s a good chance they’re not going to cast who you want.’ I avoided him for the rest of the night.

Later, when the show was over and I thought about all that had happened, I think this incident may have been a defining moment for me in that series. The confrontation showed me that when Cameron felt strongly about a particular performer, he would communicate his views passionately. I realized that when the show reached the finals, I might have to balance Cameron’s (and Andrew’s) push for Jessie. From that moment, I decided I was going to stick up for the performers whom I thought could carry a West End show; performers I thought had the temperament and the talent to be in the West End.

A couple of days after this incident, Gavin received a call from Trevor Jackson, Cameron’s casting director, asking if I was okay
because he’d heard about the blow-up. He wanted to know if I was angry with Cameron. I said I wasn’t and I meant it. Yeah, Cameron was out of line and behaved badly, but I think he was caught up in the adrenalin of the moment – and the casting of the show – and, well, we’ve all been there.

There’s a pace and a rhythm to these talent shows. At about show six, the crescendo begins, the momentum picks up and the pressure builds. Weaker performers slipped away, but Jodie was getting stronger, and, in her performance of ‘Send in the Clowns’ in week three, I thought I might well, at some point in the contest, see her pulling away from the competition. When the final arrived, as I’d expected, Jessie and Jodie were the two left in the contest for the very last sing-off.

Here was where I believe my experience allowed me to make a judgement call. I realized that after Jessie and Jodie performed in the finale, we would be expected to give our opinion and to offer our advice, but I knew from experience that I could trust the British viewing public to make the right choice and to pick a Nancy they’d fork out to see. In many ways, with these programmes, it almost doesn’t matter what the West End show is, as the public are voting for the performer and they’re going to sell out the production because of that performer.

Denise and I decided that we’d give our opinions strongly in the first show,
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and then we would back off during the second one and let the viewers make their own decisions. In the second programme, we decided to give positive feedback to both Jessie and Jodie.

Honestly, this final contest was one of the best I’ve participated in since
Maria
. Both Jessie and Jodie sang really well. Their performances made for incredibly competitive and compelling TV.

When Graham Norton, the show’s presenter, asked us for our comments after the contestants’ final songs, both Denise and I praised them equally. Barry knocked Jodie and boosted Jessie. Cameron cut down Jodie and boosted Jessie. Andrew did the same. I looked at Den
and shrugged, because we knew that it was out of their hands and maybe, just maybe, they had hurt Jessie’s cause.

After the phone lines closed and before the winner was announced, Graham asked us to make our choice.

‘John, who is your Nancy?’

‘Jodie.’

‘Denise?’

‘Jodie.’

Barry, the Lord and Cameron all picked Jessie.

‘The winning Nancy is …’ – twenty-minute-long dramatic pause – ‘… Jodie!’

Denise and I jumped up so fast, I felt dizzy. We threw ourselves into each other’s arms. I was in tears and was punching the air like a madman.

After the excitement calmed, and the show ended, I did what I’d done every week in every one of the shows on which I’d been judging: I went over to the family and the supporters of the performer who had lost and I told them that I thought their daughter or son was talented and would go far. I did this to every Maria and to every Joseph and to every Nancy who lost.

Only twice have my condolences gone badly. Once, I had a parent lash out at me. You know what? I’d likely behave in the same way if it were my son or daughter. It was always a hugely emotional moment for everyone involved.

What’s really important for all of us to remember about these particular talent shows is that they put bums on theatre seats and 90 per cent of the finalists find work in musical theatre. Jessie was no exception. She was not Nancy, but she was good enough to perform in Stephen Sondheim’s
A Little Night Music
in the West End, and she was wonderful.

Ever since one of the first family Christmas shows starring yours truly, Clare and Turner, when they played two of the von Trapp children and Turner belted out, ‘So long, farewell, my feet are saying goodbye’ instead of ‘
Auf wiedersehen
, goodbye,’
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I’ve loved working with children. And I’m especially thrilled when children recognize me and ask me for my autograph – or, more accurately, when they ask to have a picture taken with Captain Jack.

One day, when I was in Costco, a young boy and his mother came up to me as I was finishing paying for my industrial cartload at the checkout. She said her son had been watching me going up and down the aisles, and finally he’d asked her why Captain Jack was shopping in Costco.

Why, indeed.

For younger children who are
Doctor Who
fans (and who are too young to watch
Torchwood
), when they see me in a store, on the street, or at the movies, it’s Captain Jack they see, and not John Barrowman. I took the mum’s lead and said to her son that Jack was undercover. I’d heard from the Doctor that there’d been a possible sighting of a Cyberman in Costco. I asked him if he’d noticed anything unusual while he was shopping with his mum. He shook his head in all seriousness and said no, he had not. I shook his hand and as he headed out of the store, he turned and said, ‘Bye, Captain Jack, but I’ll keep watching.’

And he did. He watched all the way to his car, when he gave me a little wave as his mum fastened him into his booster seat. I gave him a quick salute. He was beaming as the car disappeared out of the parking lot.

Two summers ago, I opened a summer country fete in the south of England and agreed to set up a table and sign autographs, with donations for them going to a local charity. I didn’t have a great deal of time open in my schedule, and, naturally, it was pouring rain and there were only so many pairs of welly boots to go around.
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The line was very long, so I asked if everyone would be okay with allowing the children to come up and be first in line. No one argued at all and, in the end, I was able to sign an autograph for everyone who waited.

One of the last children to step up was a boy of about eight or nine. He handed me his Captain Jack action figure and asked if I’d sign it. He and I took a few minutes to decide where exactly was the best place to have the autograph
³
because this was clearly a well-played-with figure. While I was signing the toy, he leaned in really close to my ear and said, ‘I don’t care if Jack likes a man or likes a woman, he’s still my favourite hero.’ I was so chuffed. I gave him a really big hug.

During the summer of 2008, I filmed a number of segment links for my show on CBBC,
Animals at Work
. The show is made up of clips of animals doing really cool and amazing things, like an elephant in Thailand that cleans toilets.
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The shoot for
Animals at Work
took place at a rural zoo that I’m convinced was run by Basil Fawlty. I arrived very early in the morning and after a quick wander round – noting the overgrown vegetation, the stinking cages, the swarms of flies everywhere, and the sign that read ‘WARNING: Lions Roaming the Premises’
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– I began to wonder exactly what I was doing there. I mean, I’m a proper celebrity. I get recognized in M&S.

The zoo’s outbuildings consisted of a large bungalow, where Basil and Sybil Fawlty lived; a faux Swiss chalet that housed the zoo’s office; and a floor of dormitories for children who were participating in the Fawltys’ ‘summer camp for kids whose parents don’t have a clue’. Behind all of these buildings there was acreage dotted with cages overgrown with brush (thankfully, the animals inside looked healthy), gravel walking trails, and a large pond with wild peacocks, ducks, geese and a few llamas lurking nearby.

The producer for the segment met me at the parking lot and introduced me to some of the zoo’s staff; many of them appeared to be young enough to be avid viewers of CBBC themselves. The guy who was the keeper and main animal wrangler had to have been all of twenty-two. After enquiring about his training, I learned it consisted of a certificate programme in animal training and having a ‘great passion’ for animals, which he clearly had. But so do I, and you don’t want me taking care of your tigers. Trust me, you don’t. He was a nice enough young man, but I have to admit he didn’t inspire great confidence in me, especially when I learned that the director was planning to put me inside a cage with either a lion or a tiger cub for one of the segment links.

While the producer continued to review the day’s shoot with me, a number of children – ranging in age from about seven up to early teens – straggled out of one of the buildings and headed to a Quonset hut for breakfast. I didn’t want to ask what was on the menu in case I was sent out into the far fields and asked to hunt and skin it.

Before I headed to make-up, which had been set up in one of the Quonset hut classrooms, I asked to use the bathroom – and that’s when I realized I’d need to keep my wits and my hand sanitizer about me during this shoot if I wanted to get back to civilization a) with all my body parts intact, and b) without some rare animal disease.

The toilet I was directed to use was in one of the main buildings, next to the zoo’s administrative office. This consisted of three desks set in a row, each one stacked ridiculously high with paper and files. Behind one of the desks sat Sybil Fawlty, with her beehive hair
⁶
stacked
just as high, answering calls and giving orders to campers and staff who were wandering in and out.

I stepped into the toilet – and froze. The room looked as if it had last seen Dettol a few days before the First World War and it smelled as if the entire Foreign Legion had taken a piss in it. The toilet paper was non-existent; and if all that wasn’t bad enough, someone had had the nerve to stick an incense stick in a glass jar on the cistern. As if lighting it would have done anything more than add to the odour that was so thick and putrid I could taste it. But, and bear with me here, none of those things was the worst part of this toilet. This was. Instead of where a bathtub or shower should have been, there was a huge, glass reptile cage with one of the biggest iguanas I’ve ever seen inside.
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Two things struck me as being creepy and weird about having this reptile cage in the toilet at this zoo.
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First of all – and I know this is completely irrational – I didn’t want to pee in front of this reptile. He looked big enough to be able to get up on his four stumpy legs and climb out of the cage. When I was in middle school, one of my science teachers kept a variety of reptiles in her classroom and one day, when we all sat down, she had one dangling from the tip of her finger. While she’d been feeding it, Dr Pepper (I think its name was
⁹
) had latched itself onto the end of her finger. She told the class not to pay any attention to Dr Pepper hanging there and eventually he’d get bored and drop off. She told the class that the more she tried to force Dr Pepper to release her finger, the tighter he pinched. I was never a very strong student in the sciences, but if I’d been taught more often by teachers who had reptiles hanging from their body parts, I may have been a better one. In the end, she had to leave the classroom before the bell rang because she noticed her finger was swelling and turning blue. I stepped into that bathroom and had a sudden flash of that teacher’s finger when I started to unzip my fly. Can you blame me for not wanting to pee anymore
?

Secondly, when families paid their admission fee to the zoo, did they all have to crowd into this smelly space if they wanted to see the iguana?

Back outside, while I was looking for someone from the crew, wanting to ask if there was a toilet more acceptable for human use available – like in one of the other cages – I noticed a restaurant across the street. For the rest of that day and the morning of the next, any time I wanted to pee, I’d get in my car and drive across the freeway to the diner.
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I was given the script to review for a few minutes before beginning. Since I was mostly filming intro links, most of what had been written was puns and animal jokes. Given the state of the place, I wanted to write my own introduction.