Still Standing: The Savage Years (2 page)

Typically, the landlord turned up unexpectedly the next morning to find the front door wide open and a hopeful Buster wagging his tail at him in the hall, despite the contract firmly stating that pets were not allowed. Neither was smoking, yet here he was, surrounded by overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles and bodies sprawled across the living-room floor. To make matters worse, Buster took this opportunity to express his displeasure at our landlord’s attitude towards all things canine by contemptuously cocking his leg and weeing up the leg of the coffee table. On reflection I’m not surprised I lost my deposit.

That’s panto. You work hard and play hard, or at least for every production I’ve ever appeared in we have. I’m usually the instigator of any outside-work activities, quick to winkle out the cast, crew and band members who enjoy a good time.

I’m not suggesting for one minute that panto is an excuse to party, because it isn’t. I take it very seriously, giving it one hundred and ten per cent at every performance regardless, whether I’ve been tucked up in bed at midnight or out on the razz until 2 a.m. the night before. The same can be said for every other cast member I’ve ever worked with – it’s a matter of pride and a respect for your audience that when you’re out there on stage you give it your all however you may be
feeling. There’s a myth that in panto you make the script up as you go along and can do and say any old thing that takes your fancy. Nothing could be further from the truth. A certain amount of ad-libbing is expected, of course, but for the best part I always try not to stray too far from the script. Pantos are long enough as it is without a self-indulgent performer hogging the stage and putting extra time on the show instead of getting on with it and moving the story along.

I had naively assumed that after having two heart attacks and years working solely in the cosseted world of television, I’d have found a stint back in panto completely exhausting. However, from the first day of rehearsal it was as if I’d never given it up and I took to being Lily again with gusto. Even after two shows I still had enough energy to go out with members of the cast and didn’t, as I’d anticipated, find myself wearily dragging my poor worn-out carcass back to the digs to an early night.

I rarely drink these days (I’ve got witnesses) and surprisingly I found getting back into the saddle on the tipsy pony remarkably easy, just as it was equally painless to slip out of it once the panto season was over and return to my mostly abstemious ways again.

I didn’t give up drinking for health reasons, I simply went off it. My village pub is sadly neglected, as are, apart from the odd occasion, the West End clubs and bars that I used to live in.

The hangover is an effective deterrent. I’ve found as I’ve got older that hangovers can no longer be shaken off by partaking of that age-old restorative, a healthy serving of chips smothered in gravy and washed down with a nice big bottle of Lucozade. Now, at the ripe old age of fifty-five, a decent hangover feels akin to a near-death experience and requires a couple of days lying prostrate in a darkened room with a bucket by the bed, just in case, and a label on my toe saying ‘Do not attempt life-sustaining measures.’

My dad always used to say that if you wanted a drink then you went out for one to the pub; drinking was all about socializing. Sitting at home boozing on your own was frowned upon, an anti-social habit only an alcoholic would indulge in. Consequently I’ve never enjoyed drinking at home, though parties and Christmas are different, naturally. Then the booze flows, and at a do or an evening in a pub with a group of lively companions I can sink it with the best of them, even though these days I’m a bit of a part-timer as it only takes a couple of glasses of wine or a pint or two of cider and I’m well on my way.

At home I drink tea and I’d never consider opening a bottle of wine to accompany a meal. My parents, even if they could’ve afforded it, never drank wine with a meal at home, and as far as I know nor did anybody else. Mary next door would often have a bottle of Mackeson with her dinner but then she was known to have one with her breakfast as well so she doesn’t count, but nobody drank wine. According to my mother, people who drank wine were winos, miserable drunks who haunted Yates’s Wine Lodge getting paralytic on tumblers of Aussie white.

It was a different matter, however, if you happened to be my mother’s idea of posh. Then it was perfectly acceptable to drink as much wine as you liked, as that was the sort of behaviour she expected of toffs, but it was not something us working classes did.

On the very rare occasions when we went posh and my dad treated us to a meal at the Berni Inn in New Brighton, my mother and my aunty Annie would have a glass of the house white, the only time I ever saw them drinking wine, followed by an Irish coffee each after their dessert of Black Forest gateau. My dad would stick to his pint and I’d drink pop and read the I-Spy book that they gave away to children to keep them quiet.

Anyway, as my creed is now more or less ‘abstinence makes
the heart grow stronger’, I naturally assumed that this season at the Mayflower would be a more genteel affair with less inclination on my part to party. However, I hadn’t reckoned on the dark magic of panto to weave its spell and awaken like the Sleeping Beauty the dormant hell-raiser inside me. I started off with good intentions: a quiet drink after the show and then home to cheese on toast, a bit of telly and early to bed. I’d even bought a blender online from Amazon so I could set myself up for the day with a vitamin-rich smoothie, but after two days I rinsed the glass jug out with boiling water and the damn thing cracked, putting paid to my healthy aspirations.

Vera, a person you’ll already be aware of if you’ve read
The Devil Rides Out
(if you haven’t, then in a nutshell Vera is a lifelong friend whose real name is Alan and who I’ve shared many scrapes and misadventures with along life’s highway), anyway Vera insisted I send it back, but I’d thrown the box out and couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of finding a replacement, wrapping it up, etc., so it was consigned to the back of a kitchen cupboard and for all I know it’s still there, keeping the half-moon in the bathroom company.

Nutrition can be a problem when you’re doing two shows a day. After the matinee you ask yourself, is it worth taking all the make-up off, getting dressed and then going out in lousy weather to find somewhere half decent to eat? It isn’t, it’s far simpler to stay in your dressing room and rely on your dresser or a member of the cast or crew who are going out to bring you back something to eat, after which if you’re sensible you’ll get your head down and try to catch some sleep. If you’re lucky enough to have a dressing room with a decent-sized sofa or, in rare cases – the ultimate luxury – a bed, then you can have quite a good sleep. If not, then you make the best of the floor with your coat or sports bag acting as a pillow. Luckily
I can sleep on either, although I prefer the bed. I can sleep anywhere, any time and have frequently done so. On tour with
Annie
the musical I used to push the orphans’ beds together on stage and catch half an hour’s solid kip. I should mention I only did this between shows and not during a performance – well, hardly ever – and one wet December afternoon in the dressing room of the Victoria Palace in London I once lay scrunched up on a tiny two-seater sofa in full Wicked Queen slap watching three mice on the floor fight over a Malteser.

The Mayflower is fortunate in having a very good restaurant and, even though I’m not very good at eating when I’m working, I’d order some food which the staff would obligingly bring to the dressing room. Then I’d eat a proper meal with fresh veg and fruit instead of the usual diet of sarnies, crisps and pasties. I was very happy with myself, eating properly, getting enough sleep, not finding the schedule tiring – until I was unexpectedly felled, bloody unfairly as well in my opinion, by the flu. No, not what you women mockingly refer to as man flu: this, in spite of taking the precaution of having a flu jab, was the real McCoy. I’d had a slight cold to begin with, nothing bad, but by the time I got home to Kent after the second show on Christmas Eve I was feeling dog rough. Christmas Day and Boxing Day I spent in bed, unable to move apart from the violent tremors that occurred intermittently as I alternated between freezing cold and hotter than walking through hell in a pair of gasoline drawers, if I can quote my aunty Chris. On the 27th I dragged myself out of bed into the car and back to Southampton in time for the 1.30 matinee. I went on and got through it but was sent home for the second show.

Quite rightly a lot of the audience were more than a little pissed off at my absence, despite being offered a refund or the
option to come back when I was better. The front-of-house staff unfairly received the brunt of all the abuse. One woman said that the only reason she’d accept for my no-show was if I was dead, which I thought was a bit extreme. Another, who claimed she was a psychic, threatened the woman behind the merchandise counter with all manner of vile retributions, screaming that she’d come all the way from Shirley, a distance of a few miles. Had I been the member of staff she was abusing, I’d have had trouble resisting the urge to snap back that if she was as psychic as she claimed then she should’ve seen this coming in her soddin’ crystal ball, thus saving herself the bus fare from Shirley.

I hate having to miss a show, it’s so bloody depressing lying ill in a strange bed, fretting because you know you should be on stage yet are unable to do anything about it. Although my understudy, Rob, one of the young dancers, did an admirable job in my absence and even though the doctor blithely told me to take a week off, I only missed two shows. Despite a cough that shook the foundations of the theatre I soon felt a lot better and, having missed out on the Christmas celebrations, for the rest of the run I resumed my rightful title as party animal of panto and had a bloody good time.

We had a couple of days off but none of the cast, myself and Vera included, could get home due to a heavy fall of snow. (‘The worst weather since records began’, the papers delighted in telling us, as they are wont to do every time it snows.) I now live in a village in a rural part of Kent that was completely cut off; getting to Siberia would’ve been easier than trying to get home to the Romney Marshes. When the weather is as bad as this I worry for my animals: Blanche the pig, Billy and Olive the goats, Minerva the owl, my flock of sheep and assorted chickens and ducks. The poor old ducks I worry about the most as
a frozen pond allows easy access to their island home for any hungry fox who might happen to be on the prowl. Thankfully my concerns were unfounded as Sean, Bob and his son Tim who work for me had somehow managed to get in, despite six-foot snowdrifts, and seen to the needs of my menagerie.

The show came down at seven o’clock and the majority of the cast gathered in the Encore, the pub next to the theatre, for a ‘quick one’. By midnight quite a few of us were in the pub over the road and at 2 a.m. the musical director, Vera and I were flat on our backs in the lane that led to the flat.

Vera started it. He’d no sooner set an unsteady foot down in the lane than the next moment he’s shooting across it with all the speed of the puck in a vigorous game of all-girls’ ice hockey on the thick layer of ice and snow that had transformed the lane into a picturesque but deadly winter landscape. The amount that Vera had consumed in lager and vodka and tonics in the course of the evening had nothing to do with his loss of balance, of course. He lay on his back waving one arm, shouting that he thought he’d broken a hip. I tottered back to help him and being, as the Irish like to call it, ‘with drink’ myself I fell on top of him and lay there helpless with laughter amid screams of ‘Gerrof me.’ It was Adrian the musical director’s turn next. Coming to our aid, he also hit the deck and as we lay there in a heap I was suddenly aware that a small group had gathered at the end of the lane, watching us with some amusement as we writhed around on the ice like the Human Centipede.

‘That’s Paul O’Grady,’ one of them said and proceeded to film us on his mobile. I believe the result is or was somewhere on YouTube.

I’m smiling as I remember that night days later as I totter down the lane towards the theatre, avoiding the hard rocks of
impacted snow and trails of ice, laughing to myself as I picture Vera flat on his back waving one arm with all the gusto of one of the Railway Children. It really is cold, the wind feels like shards of glass as it attacks my nostrils, red raw and sore to the touch – not from the ravages of cocaine, I hasten to add, but from the continuous nasal drip I’ve been cursed with as an aftermath of the flu.

Surely there’ll be nobody waiting for a picture or an autograph in this weather, I silently hope as I approach the theatre, but already I can see a couple waiting for me under the awning. They turn out to be mother and son and they both look as if they’re freezing to death, the son in particular. His only protection from the weather is the short biker’s jacket he’s wearing.

‘Where’ve you been?’ he asks accusingly, standing on the theatre steps close to the wall in a vain attempt to escape the elements, his shoulders hunched with his blue hands half wedged into the pockets of his overtight jeans. ‘We’ve been waiting here for bloody ages. This is me mother.’

Me mother seems blissfully unaware of the arctic elements that whip around her sensible fur-lined bootees and play havoc with the voluminous pink plastic rain mac she’s wearing over her big brown coat. She is happily showing me creased photographs of her two cats, explaining their quirky nature, sleeping habits and dietary needs as she tries to hang on to this clutch of photos in the gale-force wind. I’m paralysed with the cold and I’m really in no mood for this but even so I smile and make appreciative noises as I gaze adoringly at the photo of Sonny stretched across a windowsill against a background of net curtains and geraniums.

‘D’ya want a picture, Mother?’ The son scowls as he pulls his mobile phone out of his jacket packet. ‘Put your arm
around her,’ he orders, ‘and pose for a photo with her, she’s one of your biggest fans.’