I Am What I Am (4 page)

‘The hills are alive –’

Carole cut me off. ‘Sssh! Listen. Can you hear that?’

It wasn’t an order of nuns calling from over the hill. It was a college choir rehearsing Handel’s
Messiah
. For a beat, I thought this was part of the Oxford tourist experience and that pretty soon I’d see a riot of robed graduates, preferably hot and male, swooping across the courtyard, or Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews climbing from a second-floor window carrying bottles of champagne.
⁴

I snuck into the chapel with Carole close behind me, and we stood at the rear of the building and listened to the choir rehearse for a few minutes. They sounded amazing, but once one or two of them began to recognize who was watching from the back, I became a distraction, and so I left. Plus, I was bored. We’d been wandering for close to an hour now and the only things I’d bought were a couple of posters and a pack of Post-it Notes for Carole that said: ‘I’m the Queen of Fucking Everything.’
⁵

Before heading back to the centre of town and returning to the bookstore, Carole insisted
⁶
that I take a picture of her in front of the historic Radcliffe Library. Of course, asking me to take a quick snapshot is like asking Cole Porter to hum only a few bars, or Madonna not to call attention to herself, or Jensen Button to drive under the speed limit.

I suggested three scholarly positions for the picture.
⁷
The first was a typical pose, as in Rodin’s
The Thinker
; the second a more reverential one, as in gazing up at the library in awe; and the third a traditional Barrowman pose, as in dropping your trousers and mooning. Carole’s no fun and she refused to flash her bum outside the Radcliffe Library, so I had to settle for a lame number-two pose.

Not surprisingly, the process of picture-taking took a while, and involved a lot of laughter and general silliness. I’d just snapped some shots when this sturdily built woman in tweeds, brogues and a bad perm marched up to us, a book bag over her shoulder and a bicycle by her side. She didn’t even wait to chain up her bike. She started to berate us immediately.

‘You people can’t go in there. This is a private library. Move along.’

I handed Carole the camera. ‘Excuse me?’ I said calmly. ‘What “people” would that be, exactly?’

I’m not sure what I expected her to say. You tourists? You famous people? You siblings? Oh, it was none of the above.

‘You, you Americans,’ she blustered, ‘are everywhere and you don’t seem to respect the privacy of our historic institutions.’

Well, that was all I needed.

‘Listen to me, you auld woman,
⁸
if it wasn’t for a few brave Americans, this place might be run by Nazis and you’d be reading a few lines scribbled on toilet paper instead of yer books.’

I was just warming up, but luckily Carole was watching the time and pulled me away. We had to get back to the bookstore.

The woman’s mouth had dropped open and it stayed open. She stared at us for the longest time as we walked off across the courtyard and back out into the main streets.

‘Why is that woman still watching us?’

‘Maybe she recognized you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

Before Carole could come up with the answer, I knew why. Because I was hanging out with my sister, I had let the ‘auld woman’ have a tongue-lashing in my Scottish accent, and I had completely upset her perceptions. We looked like Americans to her, I guess, but we sounded like we were Scottish.
⁹

When we finally made it back to the square of shops across from the bookstore, I realized I’d made a bit of a tactical blunder. By now, it was mid afternoon and the streets were filling up with schoolchildren. One, and then two, and then three and then more began to recognize me. When I counted a posse of seven of them following close at our heels, I stopped, turned and faced them, raising my umbrella out in front as if it were my lightsaber.
¹⁰

‘I feel a tremor in the Force.’

The boys behind us were as into the whole lightsaber routine as I was, and pretty soon the crowd had grown considerably and we were all brandishing pointy things at each other.

‘Run!’ I yelled to Carole, who by this time was laughing so hard she could barely keep up.

We sprinted across the street and into the bookstore, with the Stormtroopers fast on our tails. I rushed us upstairs, spotted the back of a big cardboard display, and darted in front of it to block the view from the stairs as our enemy closed in on us.

After we’d caught our breath and stopped laughing, I turned to see what we were hiding behind.

‘We are so busted,’ I laughed.

It must have been instinctive, a different kind of force that drew me to this hiding place.

I had ducked under the protection of a giant cardboard display of the TARDIS.

★

‘Since we’re telling stories, there’s something I haven’t told you.’

Captain Jack Harkness ‘The Sound of Drums’,
Doctor Who

1 His loyalty to his friends.

2 His friends.

3 His bravery.

4 His coat (I own an original bought from BBC wardrobe
¹
).

5 His unwavering humanity, despite all he’s witnessed.

6 His ability to find humour (and aliens) in almost every situation (me too – except for the aliens).

7 His bold and honest sexuality.

8 His appreciation of Ianto’s knowledge of things to do with stopwatches.

9 His adoration of Ianto.

10 His love for the Doctor (duh! Me too).

11 His ability to make impossible decisions under terrible pressure.

12 His ability to breathe underwater (forget I ever mentioned this).

D
uring the filming of
Torchwood
‘Children of Earth’, I experienced something I’ve been immune to for most of my career – paranoia. I felt this way because of a number of major and minor events surrounding that third season. First of all, early in the filming, the Hub quite literally came crashing down around me. The underground tunnels collapsed, the massive security door imploded, the autopsy room was buried under rubble, and the tower that reached up under the Millennium Centre sparked and shook and erupted into flares of flame and light.

The destruction of the Hub may have been called for in the script, but given my state of mind, I thought everything the
Torchwood
team – cast and crew – had worked to achieve since our first episodes had been obliterated with the trigger of some well-placed explosive squibs
²
and a burst of brilliant pyrotechnics.
³

Add to the annihilation of the Hub the fact that the number of episodes was reduced from thirteen to five for series three; the loss of Jack’s Vortex Manipulator, his Webley gun – oh, and the Range Rover; and the gradual shrinking of the
Torchwood
core cast from five to three to two; and what would you think if you were me? I believed I was witnessing the fall of the house that Jack built.

Torchwood
series one first aired in October 2006 on BBC3. Burn Gorman, Eve Myles, Naoko Mori and I all had strong television credentials – Gareth David-Lloyd was our television virgin
⁴
– but for each of us the fact that we were about to become part of a sibling of
Doctor Who
made us feel a bit like we were back at the beginning of our careers. There was a kind of giddy excitement about this new show and about the adventure we were now embarking upon.

When I first walked into the conference room at the BBC studios in Treforest – where
Doctor Who
was, and
Torchwood
was soon to be, filmed – I was a bit gaga. Everyone was packed around the table: the director of the first three episodes, Brian Kelly; the head make-up artist, Marie Doris (The Doris); Ray Holman, the costume designer; the assistant directors (ADs); the forty-two producers;
⁵
and just about everyone from BBC Wales it was going to take to get this thrilling new show up and running.

Funny story
⁶
about our first director, Brian ‘the smelly’ Kelly (aka Boabie Stroaker
⁷
). At the end of a long day’s shooting of one of the first ever episodes, he and I let the other actors go home; we decided we could finish off the scene with just him and me and a small crew. It was a scene inside the Range Rover. Sometimes, when there’s a lot of dialogue in a driving sequence, the car is put on a trailer to create movement and the crew essentially work from the outside of the trailer – hanging on for their lives. For this final shot, Brian sat in the back of the Range Rover and he started to feed me the lines. My line in reply was, ‘Simple clean-up operation.’

However, because Brian is Scottish, every time he fed me the cue – and he was rubbish at it, by the way – I kept saying my line in a corresponding Scottish accent. In the end, we’d have been much faster asking everyone to stay because things, I’m afraid, went downhill from there … with the crew clinging onto the trailer for dear life with every take.
⁸

At the threshold of the conference room, I paused for a beat, taking in who was there, and then I stepped through the doorway. I was Captain Jack, this show’s number one, and although I was far from
being a father figure to anyone around the table, I knew playing the lead in a BBC show of this calibre came with certain responsibilities. In fact, throughout each series since then, I’ve continued to take my leadership role seriously. If another cast member or someone on the crew has had an issue that needed to be raised with the producers, and he or she was not comfortable mentioning it him or herself, I’d always take it on and do my best to represent the person and his or her concern to the appropriate producer.

On the morning of that first read-through, Gareth was filling his plate at the small buffet with fruit, cheese and pastries. Eve, as my new leading lady, was introducing herself to some of the guest actors for that episode. She was beaming and when she spotted me, she waved me to the seat closest to her, Burn and Naoko. The atmosphere in the room was lively and energized. Although we were untested as an ensemble, the scripts were strong and we were all good at our jobs. However, we were very aware of the fact that not only would we have to prove ourselves with an audience, but also we’d need to prove ourselves with the BBC if we wanted to return for a second season.

We took our seats. Scripts were distributed. Gareth was dragged away from the snacks. Until a few minutes before we began, the two seats at the front of the room remained empty. Over the course of the next two series, and the many, many read-throughs in which I’ve participated since then, the final pair to take their seats became known fondly as ‘our
Torchwood
mum and dad’: Julie Gardner,
Torchwood
Executive Producer and, at that time, Head of BBC Wales Drama, and Russell T. Davies, Executive Producer and
Torchwood
’s creator (God, actually). Once they were seated, we’d begin reading through the scripts.
⁹

Read-throughs are critical for actors because episodes are filmed in twos or threes and they are shot out of sequence. The read-throughs familiarize each of us with the story arcs, so we know what came before and what comes after a particular moment of a specific scene.

There is much about those first few weeks on
Torchwood
that is a blur, but I do remember the few days I worked closely with Ray,
Torchwood
’s
costume designer, as he fitted me for Jack’s iconic RAF coat, his braces and his CAT boots. Russell’s clear vision of ‘
Torchwood
Jack’ influenced the decision that Jack would wear a belt and braces. This was a fashion trend in the thirties and forties, and it projected an image of Jack as a kind of Midwestern farm boy. During this costuming and design process, we were re-envisioning and repositioning Jack as
Torchwood
’s leader, as opposed to Captain Jack, the rogue Time Agent and follower in
Doctor Who
.

Everything I did during series one was with the intention of helping the show to find its audience and to forge an identity that was separate from our established BBC sibling. To achieve the former, I went on any TV talk show or radio programme that asked me to. I did guest appearances on
This Morning
,
BBC Breakfast
,
Loose Women
,
Angry Women
,
Women On the Verge of Nervous Breakdowns
, and
Women Who Knit
. I even stopped random women in the street, just to plug the series. One of the most fun highlights for me once the first season was up and running was finding out that
Torchwood
regularly beat out the football match on the other channel.

Hand-me-downs happen in every family, and the younger sibling,
Torchwood
, was no exception. We inherited some of the crew and materials from
Doctor Who
during series one because this kind of ‘double dipping’
¹⁰
was less expensive, more efficient, and it ensured that each drama would have the best in the business working on it. The process made a lot of sense.

What bugged me, however, was when I’d be filming a scene and I’d overhear a crew member say, ‘I’m going back to the mother ship next week,’ or ‘I’m back on the Big Show next episode.’ This happened a few times as we were finding our feet, and I felt the same way about it as I did when I inherited a sweater, shirt or even a uniform from Andrew.

When I was about seven or so, my dad thought he’d give me a chance to play football, to be part of a team, and to see if I had any of the talents with a ball that Andrew had.
¹¹
My parents must have been hedging their bets that I didn’t because instead of buying me a new
uniform, they gave me one of Andrew’s old strips and a pair of football boots he’d outgrown. Off I went with some of my pals to play a game with the local Boys’ Brigade team. Oh, joy.