There's Something I've Been Dying to Tell You Read online

  Everyone was lovely and very friendly and I soon began to feel at ease and Brian, who I knew a little, was very welcoming and we were soon making awful jokes and getting on with the job in hand. I was taken aside at one point for a costume fitting and a wonderful wardrobe master called Tony Priestley took me in hand, literally, as I was measured for my harness to fly into the show. In the end, though, that all changed and I was instead placed on a huge moon covered in lots of sparkle which flew way above the audience and was very dramatic, but because I was seated I did not wear a harness. I held on for dear life with one hand with a safety strap round my wrist, and in the other I carried the biggest wand you could ever imagine. It was huge. Oh yes it was! It had hidden batteries inside the handle, and every time I went onstage I would switch it on and it would shine like a beacon. I loved it! I had a long white dress edged with ostrich feathers and a lot of sparkle sewn on the material. Tony was a master of sparkle and had worked with them all, from Mr Danny La Rue down.

  We laughed so much during that show it was wonderful. Sat in the wings, surrounded by half-naked dancers, I would watch as the ugly sisters rushed off to do a quick change and I was at just the right height – or wrong height depending on your point of view – to watch the rubber falsies come on and off, and the jock straps, high heels and the harness they had to wear when they were flown in for the ballroom scene be put on. There was a lot of screaming in high voices I can tell you. It was magical and bizarre to see dancers bending down and doing ridiculously unnatural things with their legs while standing next to a Shetland pony, a real pony, who decided to have a pooh! Happy days.

  The wings, essentially the sides of the stage, at the Birmingham Hippodrome are huge. It is like being in an aerodrome, but then they need to be to accommodate all that madness. The show opened with me flying through the air on my moon and introducing myself. There is always a technical rehearsal for whatever play or show one is doing, but for a show like this, with so much going on, it is probably the most important rehearsal ever. Needless to say it goes on for hours and, in this case, for at least two days.

  Unfortunately some people take it less seriously than they should, and sneak off to the pub. Naming no names, but one of the men in charge of pulling the ropes to get me on must have had a few one night. It was very funny in some ways, but scary in others because I was a hundred feet up in the air. He pulled so hard on the ropes I was taken by surprise, and was only just able to grab the handle on the moon in time to stop me tipping off as I whizzed onto the stage, then stopped abruptly, then whizzed half way off again, then continued to the other side of the stage and then seemed to dive bomb down to the floor! I couldn’t get off fast enough and spent the next twenty minutes trying to stop my legs from shaking. Still, all’s well that ends well, and nothing happened again through all the eight weeks, and all those twice daily performances we did.

  There was never any time for me to go back to my dressing room during a performance so I did sit in the corner every night. When I had accepted the job I had envisioned rather a cushy little number where I popped on at the beginning, the middle and end and spent the rest of the night eating chocolates and watching TV in my dressing room. No such luck, I was on and off the stage like a lady in those cuckoo clocks, which was a shame because I had worked hard to turn my dressing room into a Christmas grotto.

  I always love to make my dressing room a home from home. I developed this habit while on tour with Calendar Girls. Wherever I was, in whatever town, I always liked to be within spitting distance of the theatre because it made me feel secure knowing I would always be able to make the show on time. There were times when we had to stay in hotels that were further away and then I would get very jittery, so I would often go into the theatre an hour or so earlier than I needed to and sit in my dressing room. You have no idea just how bad a state some of these dressing rooms are in, absolutely disgusting. Some theatre owners spend thousands on the front of house and never bother to make the dressing rooms habitable, so I always carried throws, cushions and table lamps and such to hide some of the more unseemly and grubby aspects of my living quarters. In the old days before ‘’elf and safety’ we were allowed to burn candles, but that is all forbidden now of course. But I did buy a wonderful little fridge shaped like an egg and that just about held a bottle of wine and had room for my nibbles.

  So I arrived in Birmingham with my usual paraphernalia and set up shop. However, being the festive season I needed a few extras. Straight to the font of all things useful, I went to John Lewis and bought a free-standing little deer that lit up and a very minimalist Christmas tree, which was a sort of twig with lights. I could not really have a real tree as it would be dead by the time we had got started. But this little twig was magic by the time I had hung it with chocolates and baubles. I popped out to the market in the Bullring whenever I had to fill in the time spent hanging around during rehearsals and I bought more and more rubbish! But I did create a wonderful grotto and all the dancers and the ugly sisters would come to me for a sweetie and a little Christmas cheer. The dressing rooms in Birmingham were a bit like offices, very grey and functional, so it was good to add the odd fairy light. I did have a TV which was great, though I never managed to watch anything all the way through as I was onstage half the time, but I got the gist!

  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.