I Am What I Am (24 page)

Radio shows are very passive to perform. I had to stand in a room with a microphone, a music stand and my script. The space is dead space; its only ambience the layer of soundproof tiles.
²²
I was in the
studio most of the time with Eve and Gareth, and, even with the three of us and our history together, we had a hard time getting anything beyond a little mild banter going among us between our takes.

It turned out that
Torchwood ‘
Lost Souls’ was the most downloaded radio programme on the BBC iPlayer and the most listened-to radio show in the history of BBC Radio 4 – which is why they came back to us and asked if we’d do three more. Of course! It’s at times like this that I realize
Torchwood
has become this amazing, worldwide phenomenon. Because it’s such an international hit, I don’t think Russell and Julie will ever disconnect completely from their
Torchwood
family.

Russell and Julie are now based in Los Angeles, and so their move does, of course, raise the question of who will head up
Torchwood
on the production side. However, given that the show is as big a success in America as it is in the UK, I think that Russell and Julie will continue to be a part of
Torchwood
’s future on both sides of the Atlantic.

The more I get to know Jack’s character, and the deeper Russell and his fellow writers for series three (John Fay and James Moran) delved into Jack’s psyche and his personal history, the more Jack’s relationship to humanity keeps evolving. For me, this depth makes Jack more and more interesting to play, and I think it’s one of the reasons why Jack has become so iconic in popular culture. He’s not afraid to challenge authority in all of its guises – alien and human – and he’s demonstrated over and over again with Torchwood, and as a companion to the Doctor, that he will endure anything to protect and serve humanity. Like Prometheus, Jack is
with
the human race but not
of
the human race.

Do I think about this stuff when I’m playing Jack? Sometimes. Other times, I see these things in Jack’s character when I’m watching the completed shows (which I do, the same as all of you), or when I’m reading emails from fans who have been affected in some way by a gesture, a comment, or a story arc involving Jack. For me, Jack has done much more than touch my life; he’s changed it completely.

Playing Captain Jack has given me a freedom of choice and a level of clout and credibility in the entertainment business. Let me say it: playing Captain Jack has made me a celebrity. I’m noticed whether I’m
running in for dog food to Costco in Cardiff or getting off the plane in South Africa, and I’m embracing and loving every minute of this fame. I have to say here that I have a difficult time listening to famous people,
²³
many whose work I admire, whining about being a celebrity, or refusing to acknowledge that they are one, or even suggesting that being a celebrity is some kind of burden they have to bear so that they can continue to perform.

I once heard a famous actor
²⁴
say that being a celebrity is the worst thing that can happen to an actor. First of all, I’m not sure what that means exactly. Was he suggesting that his ability to perform, to be the best he could be in a role, was hampered somehow by his celebrity status? Or was he suggesting that celebrities can’t be serious actors? Either way, his statement says more to me about the actor himself than about the challenges of being a celebrity.

Years ago, when I first broke into television, there was a teeny, tiny part of me that said to the other voices in my head that, if I really made it, I might have to deal with the trappings of being famous. It’s the nature of popular culture that celebrity status can come with entertainment success. For me, it’s one of the possible by-products of being an entertainer, and, because of that, my attitude has been to embrace it, when necessary manage and control it, but above all else not to let it change who I am at my core.

Granted, there are certain things I can’t do anymore. Riding public transportation can be difficult, so I have cars.
²⁵
But as far as I’m concerned, being a celebrity has not only provided me with financial and creative freedom, but it’s also given me the ability to open up opportunities for my family, friends, strangers and important causes, which might not have been possible before.

All thanks to my hero, Captain Jack Harkness.

Most of my knowledge about multiple-personality disorder comes from movies like
Sybil
,
Primal Fear
and
The Incredible Hulk
(which is technically about a double-personality disorder, but you get my point). My pop-culture understanding of what I’m sure in reality is a terrible thing
¹
is that the personalities are entirely separate from one another, and usually one is more dominant than the other.

Given that, I’ve decided my manager, my friend, my co-executive producer of
Tonight’s the Night
, and the man who helped map my career with me, Gav Barker, has an alternate-personality disorder. Alternate not multiple because multiple suggests the whole ‘look away from the camera, look back, and suddenly – yikes! – it’s a different person’ disorder. Not the case with Gav. His main personality shares space with all his alternate ones.

His first alternate is Olivia Obvious. She makes me laugh so she’s one of my favourites. If I’m out somewhere with Gav – at a restaurant, say, or just walking along the streets of London or LA – and I say to him, ‘Check out that hot guy over there,’ Gav cannot check out that hot guy over there the way most of us could, should and would.
²
Gav can’t give the time-honoured surreptitious glance, or the coy look over the shoulder, or even the peek from behind a magazine. Not if his life depended on it.

Instead, Gav Barker becomes Olivia Obvious. He might as well get up, walk across the room and eyeball the hottie at a three-inch distance from head to toe, including all the fun parts in between, for
all the subtlety he has in these situations. Olivia’s tongue might as well hang out as she pants. When Olivia raises her head, I put mine in my hands.

Then there’s the personality that appears most often with me on the phone or via email. Gav will say: ‘You have got to give me an answer to this email right now!’ or ‘This question needs answering immediately because we need to move on this,’ or ‘You must correct this in that statement you made!’ Let me introduce you to Patricia Pedantic. Patricia raises her head an awful lot when I have two or three significant projects running at the same time.

Patricia’s close friend and confidante is Betty Bitchy, who tends to show her side most when Gav’s driving. When someone cuts him up in traffic, Betty Bitchy appears. When someone is moving too slow, Betty takes over. Betty is a machine gun: her words fast and furious, her tongue a lethal weapon.

Alison Angry doesn’t make an appearance very often, which is a good thing, but I can tell when Gav’s about to lose it, and, in my own helpful way, I’ll say, ‘I see Alison’s coming out?’ Calms her down right away. Sometimes, when Gav gets too dogmatic about something and I see Alison in the wings, I’ll say, ‘Why don’t you invite Patricia Pedantic to come out instead?’

This tendency of mine to give nicknames is one that was nurtured when I was growing up in the States, where everyone had one. There was BJ from
BJ and the Bear
, the Fonz in
Happy Days
, Bo in
The Dukes of Hazzard
, Mork
³
in
Mork and Mindy
, Gopher on
The Love Boat
, Ponch in
CHiPs
and, by far the father of them all, J. R. in
Dallas
.

In my family, none of us had a nickname. We weren’t allowed. In fact, my parents were not afraid to chastise anyone who shortened any one of our names: ‘That’s not what we christened him,’ they’d say, and then they’d demand a retraction. This whole purity-of-name notion changed when we stepped off the plane in Chicago. Suddenly, my brother Andrew was Andy to most of his friends and ‘Wee John’ stuck to me.

For different reasons, my gran, Murn, who’d had at least one stroke by the time she first met Kevin, my brother-in-law, in 1980, always called him Gavin.
⁴
She couldn’t get her tongue to say what I’m sure she knew in her head was Kevin. It always came out as ‘Gavin’.

I thought this was hysterical. Remember, I was thirteen. I had a time-honoured duty to fulfil as a younger brother, plus a fascination with nicknames. I called him Gavin too. This, of course, has stuck, and every now and then, in memory of Murn,
⁵
I’ll address Kevin as Gavin. I’m the only one who does, and he always answers.

I give nicknames to everyone I work with and those names often stick well beyond the duration of our working relationship. I labelled one of my J8 dancers from
Tonight’s the Night
‘Jennie Fabulous’, and that’s what everyone called her on set. When she joined me on tour, I overheard someone introduce her to the tour crew as ‘Jennie Fabulous’.

On
Torchwood
, we all had nicknames for each other; I was ‘Jinny Baza’.
⁶
This past summer, I covered for Zoë Ball on her Saturday-morning show on BBC Radio 2 when she was on vacation, and I introduced myself as ‘the Baza’ a couple of times. ‘Jinny’ received a lot of listener texts too.

I have nicknames for my mum and dad now as well. My mum is known fondly around the house as ‘Miriam’. This nickname came about after the first few months of our living in the States. My parents often had a hard time getting people to listen to exactly what they were saying, for their new neighbours were often distracted by their, at that time, very thick Scottish accents. For some reason, whenever my mum would introduce herself as ‘Marion Barrowman’, the person she was meeting always thought she was saying ‘Miriam Barrowman’. The name stuck. She’s ‘Miriam’, and my dad is ‘Faither’ (to be said with aforementioned Glasgow accent) or ‘Big John’, which my mum calls him frequently if both he and I are in the vicinity. This way, she
can distinguish who she’s calling for and avoid saying, ‘Wee John’, which I hate.
⁷

One of my favourite nicknames of all time is Carole’s, mainly because it came to her inadvertently through my misbehaviour. The name has stuck to her not only with me, but also with every member of the extended Barrowman and Casey clans. I suppose it’s not really a nickname since, by definition, it’s longer than her given name, but – oh, who cares, here’s the story.

The night before Carole’s wedding in the August of 1982, her soon-to-be in-laws, Bud
⁸
and Lois Casey, held the groom’s dinner
⁹
at Joliet Country Club, one of my infamous teenage haunts. I was a groomsman at the wedding, and I was also set to play my flute while guests were seated in the church. I had responsibilities.

Kevin, the groom, is from a large family, including two brothers (Kerry and Kelley) and three sisters (Kim, Kristi and Kolleen) and a busload, literally, of cousins, who all travelled down to the wedding from Minnesota. Many of them were invited to the groom’s dinner. Needless to say, it was a terrific party, especially because Kelley, Kevin’s youngest brother, and I turned out to be the same age – read underage back then – and the bar was an open one. Plus, I had the advantage of knowing the guys serving the drinks (from my occasional vodka-tonic charges on my dad’s country-club tab,
¹⁰
when I hung out at the swimming pool on summer vacation), so the booze was flowing freely.

At some point, after dinner but before speeches started, Carole noticed that her youngest brother was nowhere in the dining room. When she found Kelley and me in the bar, let’s just say, a little lubricated, she lost it. ‘
You
have responsibilities,’ she hissed at me, oh so delicately.

My response – which is the one that everyone loves to remind her
about – was yelled across the bar in pure brilliant Scottish, so practise rolling your ‘r’s before you say it. ‘Carole, you’re not my mother!’

My nicknames for Scott are Scottie – used mostly at home when I want him to fold the washing, empty the dishwasher or bring me some crisps – and Tottie, when I want … never mind.

The family member with whom I share the most nicknames, though, is Clare.
¹¹
She and I, in fact, have a kind of secret language with each other.
¹²
All our nicknames have something to do with what we’re currently listening to, or are watching on television, or have seen at the theatre.

The most recent names that have lasted the longest with us are Elphaba, which we use to address each other, and which started minutes after seeing
Wicked
together in the West End; and, for me, Tracy Turnblad (from
Hairspray
, which Clare and I both love; we know the lyrics to
every
song).

One of the performance wishes that I granted on
Tonight’s the Night
belonged to a young woman – a hairdresser whose mum had died of cancer when she was quite little – who wanted to sing ‘Good Morning Baltimore’ with the cast of
Hairspray
. On the Sunday night when we taped the performance, it was all I could do to keep myself from jumping onstage with them.

Finally, the newest additions to my personal nickname repertoire are ‘Zaza’ and ‘Crystal’
¹³
. These relate to the persona of my latest role, Albin, and were created when I stepped into his stilettos in
La Cage aux Folles
in the West End in September 2009 (check out the last page of the picture section to see a photo of me in costume).

Zaza is a red-headed Ann-Margret lookalike with a set of gams that could stop traffic … and they did. When Zaza was introduced to the public at a press photo shoot at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in July 2009, she felt restricted by the photographer’s forties-style calendar-girl poses. Zaza was not to be contained. She strutted the
whole entourage outside, took her ‘bootay’ onto the streets of London, and proceeded not so much to hail a couple of cabs as seduce them to stop.