There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You (4 page)

Our company manager, Ian Sandy, was a truly extraordinary man and basically he held everything together. In any profession there are individuals who just stand out as shining examples of people who know their job. Ian was one such man. He listened to everyone’s problems. He was the conduit between management and cast. This is always a tricky thing to do, as one has to earn the trust of the actors, while having a management take on things. Ian was perfect at everything. He died very young and very suddenly after I worked with him, and not only me but anyone who had known him or worked with him felt the loss. We did a tribute show for him at Birmingham in May 2013 and I was honoured to be asked to take part. Brian Conley, Joe Pasquale and Lesley Joseph and many more came together to present a great night’s entertainment in Ian’s memory.

I will never forget at the end of our season, like every year, Ian organised an awards show for the cast and crew. Nominations included Best Animal Performance, Best Newcomer, Most Embarrassing Moment: you get the kind of thing. It was a great night and the food and wine flowed. We all took the awards very seriously, and I was thrilled to be given Best Newcomer! I have the award on my dressing table as I write this. It is about the only award I have ever received as a matter of fact. But I promise you I am not bitter!

I seemed to have made a good account of myself because Qdos, the company owned by Michael Harrison and Nick Thomas, asked me to repeat my Fairy Godmother at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford, with Billy Pearce as Buttons. Billy had played this theatre for fifteen years and is a legend in Bradford. I went up to promote the pantomime before we started rehearsing and met Billy and another new name to TV at the time, Brendan Sheerin, who presented a show on Channel Four called
Coach Trip
. I have to admit I was a little taken aback by the fact that Brendan was not an actor and I had never heard of him. Apologies Brendan. However, we had to ride round the centre of Bradford in a silver coach, and everywhere we turned people were calling his name and shaking his hand and I soon realised he was obviously very popular.

Pantoland is renowned for using TV names to win audiences and it does gall some of us who feel that it should be left to the professionals and not abused by sports stars and more recently reality show ‘celebs’. It is hard enough for many actors to get work these days without having to deal with their jobs going to amateurs. In fact, during the seventies and early eighties, pantomime became just about the lowest form of entertainment you could get. Then thanks to people like Michael Harrison and Paul Elliott, who recognised the advantage of using professionals and keeping the tradition of panto going, things have slowly improved, and now (with the exception of a few, unmentionable productions) most pantos have managed to create a wonderful form of live entertainment again with a mixture of some ‘celebs’ but also professional entertainers like Brian Conley, Joe Pasquale and Billy Pearce.

As far as I was concerned I had to accept that producers needed to use current popular faces. In all fairness, Brendan proved a worthy contender for a regular place in the cast. He was terrific as Baron Hardup, and a genuinely decent bloke. God bless him!

It was strange playing the same part in a different place with a different cast. I was still on my moon and had my spot in the corner in the wings. In this production I had two lovely ugly sisters, Ben Stock and Brian Godfrey. Ooh did we laugh, my dears! In this production things were very much the same, but different, if you know what I mean. There were little Shetland ponies that still poohed all over the place, but no big horse as we had had with Brian. This time we had a huge dragon at one point, and one of the highlights of the show was Billy and myself and Brendan and Dandini, doing ridiculous things with props while singing the twelve days of Christmas. I will let you into a little secret here folks, with apologies to Billy, but the only trouble working with comics like Billy is they can be rather undisciplined. If the audience is laughing it is like watching an addict smoking or a gambler rolling the dice, they just can’t stop. All well and good, but when one has done two shows in a day and your feet are killing you and you want to go to bed, you just don’t need that person doing yet another funny gag. I sometimes felt like taking my wand and banging him over the head with it. What a horrible Fairy Godmother I am!

All in all it was fun and I managed, yet again, to avoid most disasters, except for one night in the forest. In one of the scenes the Fairy Godmother meets Cinderella in the forest and sets her a test to see if she is as lovely as everyone says she is. So I dress up in a ragged old cloak with my face hidden under the hood and presented myself as a poor old woman. Buttons, aka Billy, would also join us in the scene and spend the entire time taking the mickey out of me and making me laugh, which was all fine, and I could hide under my enormous cloak. I would enter the forest over a little bridge and there was always lots of dry ice, the stuff that makes the white mist, swirling around me. Well, I say swirling, but some nights the machine seemed to go off duty and hardly produce a puff never mind a swirl.

Then other nights, like this particular night, the stage was lost in a fog of thick white smoke. Nobody could see anything, least of all me who was trying to negotiate the steps of the little bridge while holding my cloak off the floor and handling my basket. Needless to say I missed the last step and fell arse over tit, which got a huge laugh so that was OK, and I recovered enough to finish the scene, but when I came off the stage it was clear I had twisted my ankle badly. By the second show I could not fit into my dainty fairy shoes. Talk about life mirroring art. Suddenly I was the ugly sister trying desperately to get my foot in the golden slipper.

But folks, all was not lost because I had another sort of golden slipper in my dressing room. Just before we had opened the show I had gone on one of my usual jaunts looking for festive material for my dressing room. I still had my deer and my stick tree, but I needed some more fairy lights and, as it happened, a pair of slippers to wear in the dressing room when I was pottering around, etc. I have to say Bradford is not overloaded with shoe shops, or indeed any kind of fashionable shops to be honest, but I came across a lovely old-fashioned shoe shop up a side street and in the window were a pair of gold mule-style slippers. They were perfect! So cut back to the dressing room the night of the sprained ankle, and there I was with my poor swollen foot but able to fit it into my golden mule. What a delight. They were quite fetching and rather added something to my performance making me a more dainty, old lady Fairy Godmother than the headmistress Fairy Godmother who sometimes crept out in my performance.

Michael and I spent a lovely Christmas in Bradford, which might sound odd, but we had a lovely time in our hotel The Great Victoria. Just like Birmingham, I had bought all sorts of delicious goodies for us to eat, including caviar and champagne. We had been very virtuous since a trip in October to Majorca to do a juicing course with an amazing lady called Deborah Morgan, who has written a great book called
Cut the Crap
. Every morning I used to juice fresh vegetables and fruit. But because I worked such odd hours it was difficult to know when to eat, so we would often just go back to the hotel and have a salad and a sandwich. We did make friends with the local Italian restaurant and on my days off we would eat lovely pasta and drink beautiful red wine. But I could never do that after a show late at night because it just gave me indigestion. We would also go to the cinema which was only across the way from the hotel and then to Frankie and Benny’s.

New Year’s Day we met up with Tony Priestley, the wonderful wardrobe master from Birmingham, Ann Smith, an actress who I worked with the year before in panto, and her husband Steve, and the ever lovely Brian Godfrey, and we had an enormous fry up. It was wonderful. Sometimes there is nothing better than a good old fry up.

So yes, despite the juicing, I was eating all the wrong things. Not my usual practice, but sometimes one has to adapt to one’s surroundings and because I had such awkward hours it wasn’t easy to eat at the right times. I had been quite ill on Christmas Eve, and Michael had taken me to A&E after our second show, which finished early, so we were able to drive straight to the hospital. I had been having really bad indigestion and then diarrhoea quite badly, and I was short of breath. We sat in casualty feeling very depressed. What a way to spend Christmas Eve, and I was exhausted as well, which didn’t help matters. We finally saw a doctor who said it was probably nothing and to take Omeprazole for a couple of weeks. I did and everything seemed to clear up.

Except it wasn’t just indigestion or a bit of a funny tummy, was it? When I was diagnosed with cancer Professor Justin Stebbing thought I had probably had the tumour for eighteen months. How strange it is now to know that it was growing in me then, and I had no idea. Ignorance is certainly not bliss and I want to weep as I write this now.

3

COUNTRY HOUSE SUNDAY

March 2013

When we returned from Bradford at the beginning of February, I went to the doctor immediately and arranged to have a stool test. That came back negative, so I popped more indigestion pills and thought no more about it. We had so much going on with a court case regarding Michael’s business (of which more later), the Darren Richards’ case, that it took all our time and attention. However, I was suddenly offered another unusual job, for me, in the shape of a new series about country homes.

It was to be called
Country House Sunday
and would feature some of Britain’s stately piles. I jumped at the chance naturally. I have always loved going round stately houses, thanks to my mother’s love of antiques and all things old and beautiful. Now I would get the chance not only to poke around but to meet the owners. I found this aspect a little daunting if I am completely honest. Would my Isme wardrobe match up to the job? How posh should my wellingtons be?!

Our British class system has confounded many a foreigner and one can see why, especially nowadays. Let’s be honest, in the 1940s and 1950s, when one talked about the working classes there really was a working class. Nowadays we are nearly all working class, with a few very, very rich people at the top of the tree, and they are usually from another country. Our aristocracy still has the land but they don’t have any cash – inheritance tax takes care of that! My dad used to say that an aristocrat and a peasant had no problem communicating, it was the man in the middle who caused the grief. I should just make it clear he was nearer the peasant end of the spectrum rather than the other way round! Once the Victorians came along and aspired to wealth and gentility, all hell broke loose in the social order of things.

I have met so many different people in my lifetime from so many different schools of life and believe me the most important things that count, in my opinion, are respect for another person and manners; just everyday thought for other people and the art of being courteous. There were many so called ‘poor people’ in society after the Second World War, but they still had manners. They didn’t go round pinching things from each other, or fighting, or being generally angry that society owed them in some way. I am only mentioning all of this because, sadly, I think the aristocracy takes a good deal of flak from the rest of us and unfairly so. Their world has changed and gone, just the same as things have changed so much for everyone else. I was to find that meeting some of these families and learning about their history, which spans hundreds of years and is rich with the bravery of their ancestors who fought for our freedom, and then also seeing the struggle they face nowadays to hang on to their inheritance, made them very human and approachable.

So armed with thoughts like these, and with a great desire to see how the other half live, I set off with my crew to the deepest depths of Derbyshire to visit Renishaw Hall. As usual the weather decided to play dirty and, instead of the beginnings of spring and the odd hint of sunshine, on a March day it snowed! It was freezing and I had not brought any really cold weather clothing. I had a jacket or two, and a rain coat, but no scarves or gloves. Needless to say, my opening shots were in the garden knee deep in fresh white snow.

It looked absolutely gorgeous but after a couple of hours I was nearly in tears, I was so cold. We walked into the main entrance and there before me was a huge log fire and I ran towards it, and plonked myself down in front of it, while the crew set up the next shot. I was cold to my very bones and in no mood to make polite conversation with anyone, but suddenly I was introduced to the lady of the manor. Alexandra Hayward is the daughter of the late Sir Reresby and Lady Sitwell, of the famous Sitwell family. Sir Reresby was the nephew of Sir Osbert Sitwell, who was Edith Sitwell’s brother. Alexandra takes her inheritance very seriously and is passionate about keeping the house and gardens up to scratch.

The Italianate gardens are just amazing and when we first encountered them covered in snow it was a bit like being in
The Shining
, getting stuck behind the long box hedges! Everywhere you go in the gardens there is something beautiful to look at, whether it is a statue or a pond full of frogs, or a secret fountain. When I was first introduced to Alexandra she was very polite, but cool, and kept her distance, but by the time we left a week later we were firm friends. She wrote me a beautiful letter when the news broke about my diagnosis which touched me deeply. I met Lady Sitwell, her mother, who though in the twilight of her years was still immaculately dressed, and I could tell by the cheek bones she must have been incredibly beautiful when she was young. Later in the week I found a painting of her and she looked amazing, and then one day Alexandra showed me some photos of her and she really did look like a Norman Parkinson model. Mother and daughter love dachshunds and when I had left I found a china mug with one on the front, and sent it to Alexandra saying ‘Saw this and thought of you’.