Biggins (8 page)

Georgina soon turned into the sister I never had. We met through Jonathan and Vivien in Fulham. They had been invited to a ‘society’ party at some country pile and I was determined to come too. So determined that I offered to do the driving. Even though my dad had offered me plenty of flash, refurbished cars over the years I always stuck with something a lot less glamorous. A white van. I’d needed it when I was propping and had to help move the sets around on various tours. So I still drove it. And it certainly set us apart from the other guests out in the country. We pulled into a vast driveway, past Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and Maseratis. ‘They’ll think we’re the hired help,’ I screeched.

The three of us were laughing so much as we parked that I nearly hit one of the fancy cars. And that of course made
us laugh even more. As soon as we got inside I nipped to the loo to try to calm down. But I couldn’t. And because I couldn’t stop laughing I peed all the way down my left leg – leaving a huge wet stain on my light-brown suit.

‘Got to hide it, got to hide it.’ But how?

I’m dancing around, as if movement will make a difference. ‘Dry, dammit, dry.’

‘Sorry, I’ll be just a moment.’

Damn. Someone was knocking on the door. I imagined a long queue forming outside. Disaster. Then salvation. There was a beautifully patterned silk scarf hanging behind the loo door. I picked it up, did a bit more mopping and headed out into the vast hallway using the scarf as cover. But who should I see first but the lady of the house, Georgina’s formidable mother, Heddy Simpson. I soon realised she was a woman who doesn’t mince her words and doesn’t hide her feelings. She was also a woman who owned a beautifully patterned silk scarf.

I’m not sure I’ll ever forget how Heddy looked me up and down that evening. And my humiliation wasn’t quite complete. As I tried to scarper a waiter bumped into me and spilled a tray of champagne down my right leg. It was a near-perfect match for the stain on my left leg. ‘So sod it.’ I left the scarf on a hall table and headed off to find Jonathan and Vivien.

It was quite a party. The rich are different – as I’ve been constantly reminded, all around the world, ever since. ‘Time to go swimming!’ The cry went up sometime around midnight. I was handed a pair of trunks, which I had to stretch almost to breaking point to fit my frame. I put my clothes in a neat little pile behind a tree in the garden. I
might have just peed on the lavatory floor and tried to steal a scarf from the lady of the house. But I was still too well brought up to fling my clothes around.

We all splashed around wildly for a while – Christine Keeler, eat your heart out – and then everyone got dressed again. Everyone except me. Try as I might, I couldn’t find my tree, or my clothes. So I spent far more time than I wanted (and probably more time than anyone else wanted) walking around half-naked that night. But by then I was feeling pretty comfortable at the party. I had been introduced to Georgina, the daughter of the house. We clicked straight away. I had made a friend for life.

Back at the Phoenix, the theatre itself was booming. Veronica had signed up a season of huge American stars for a series of very high-profile plays. Not surprisingly, the box-office managers were making the most of the stars’ potential. Their names – from Rock Hudson to Charlton Heston – were all up in big letters outside the theatre, just below my bedroom window. I was ill with jealousy.

‘Could you put my name there instead, just for a joke?’ I asked Veronica one day. She set it up. So for a few blissful hours ‘Christopher Biggins’ got top billing, in big capitals. Rock, Charlton and the others were all relegated to lower-case letters below.

By now I had upgraded myself from my studio room – I was renting the flat next door as well. So for £28 a week I had ‘rooms’ in Covent Garden, right in the heart of theatreland. It was practically a ‘salon’ and I lived there for five very happy years.

When I did decide to leave I had one lovely moment with dear Lily, the lady who ‘did’ for me every week. Lily was always a gem – and a chancer. She was supposed to do two or three hours, but if I popped out just after she arrived and needed to dash back for something I had forgotten I almost always found she was long gone herself. But still, she was always ready for a laugh and a gossip and I would miss her. ‘Lily, I need to tell you that I’m leaving at the end of the month. I’m moving out.’

She started to cry. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do without you,’ she said.

‘Oh, you’ll be fine, I’m sure,’ I said, flattering myself that it was my winning personality that she would miss.

‘No, I can’t do without you. I don’t know how I’ll pay the electricity bill,’ she said through her tears.

Now I got it. ‘How much do you owe, Lily?’

‘A hundred and eighty-four pounds and seventy pence.’

I wrote a cheque for £184.70.

‘And I just don’t know how I’ll pay my gas bill.’

‘How much is that, Lily?’

‘Seventy-two pounds and fifty pence.’

I wrote a second cheque.

‘Christopher, I will miss you. Would it be possible to have a memento of you?’

‘What would you like?’ I asked, looking at all my signed playbills, photographs and theatrical memorabilia on the walls.

‘Can I have your Kenwood mixer?’ she asked. That’s when I finally learned to say no.

Of course, Lily wasn’t the only person I was going to miss at the Phoenix – the building was stuffed with racy neighbours and great pals. The
Daily Mail
’s legendary theatre critic Jack Tinker was another resident – I had helped him get the flat there after telling him about the building at some first night or other.

He was one of my finest friends. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much as I did back then. He was so small, so bright, so quick. And his reviews were brilliant.

The two of us were forever in and out of each other’s flat, having coffee, gossiping and getting into scrapes and confessing all if we had been naughty boys the night before. Jack’s lover Adrian Morris had a house in Brighton where Jack’s three great daughters lived, and they were all like an extended family to me. As if I didn’t already have enough wonderful people around me as it was.

But there was some tension – from some of my colleagues in the industry. People said I shouldn’t spend time with Jack, not because he was older and not because he had a lover but because he was a critic. It was a bit like Bristol, when some people thought it odd that I spent so much time with Joan, the wife of our principal. But, just like Bristol, I carried on regardless. People are people. Who cares what jobs people do?

And I didn’t want to lose Jack’s friendship because, as I said, we shared so many laughs. The time we went to see a production in Stratford-upon-Avon was a key example. We had booked into a local hotel and arrived to find that all they had was a tiny room with a big double bed. ‘Ah, so that’s your game, Jack. You get young, impressionable actors out of London on false pretences and then play
innocent about sharing a bed,’ I joked. We laughed at that. We laughed even more after the play when it was finally time for bed. Jack was first into the bathroom, and while he was cleaning his teeth I got every piece of furniture in the room – including lamps, occasional tables, chairs and a chest of drawers – and lined them up down the middle of the bed as a sort of buffer zone.

We laughed so much we cried. We could hardly have made more noise. Then we had to move the furniture all back. God knows what the people in the next room thought was going on.

B
y the time I met Jack Tinker I was wonderfully comfortable with who I was. I don’t have some angst-ridden tale of sexual awakening, nor do I have any terrible stories of prejudice or discrimination. But that’s not to say it’s all been easy. I look back on a world where attitudes to sexuality have changed dramatically. There have been times when things got much better, and times when they got much, much worse.

I grew up in a different age. Being gay wasn’t thought of, let alone discussed. There were no role models, no good examples and no road map to follow. Yes, I mucked around just a little bit with a couple of other boys at school. I think on a hugely exciting school trip to Paris there were some rustles with none other than our head boy one night – I always did set my sights high. But even that wasn’t really about sex, it was about boys being boys, I
thought. Like I say, I always had this feeling of being different. And the other boys, the sporty boys and, yes, the head boys, all recognised it as well. But it wasn’t discussed. The word ‘gay’ hadn’t really been used in this context, still less as a term of abuse.

At Salisbury Rep I still didn’t really understand what was going on in my head, or all around me. Though I can’t exactly say I didn’t have plenty of clues. I barged in one door backstage carrying an armful of props and found two men having sex in front of me. And being brought up as I had been, I simply apologised for not knocking, put the props down and said I would come back later.

I certainly wasn’t troubled. I didn’t agonise over my sexuality. I simply never gave it any thought. I saw how easily Raymond and Geoffrey fitted into the Rep’s social scene in Salisbury and by the time I got to Bristol I had plenty of other friends who were gay. No one batted an eyelid about them, so I didn’t worry about it myself.

Of course, one reason why I coasted through life so calmly was that I hadn’t actually suffered in love myself. I’d been married and I had seen my short marriage end. But, like a Jane Austin heroine, I hadn’t met the right man to make me really feel things. Well, I hadn’t until Penelope Keith introduced me to him.

Penny and I had met back in my
London Assurance
days, well before her big television roles in
The Good Life
and
To The Manor Born
. She was so special and so sophisticated and we had a great chemistry – from the start we would talk ten times a day and meet up four or five times a week. She’s a wonderful cook and had a lovely home in Putney where I spent a huge amount of time. It
was there that she introduced me to another theatrical pal of hers: a fascinating, talented box-office manager called Robert Burns. Every successful theatre needs a brilliant box-office manager. So every producer in London wanted Robert to work for them. He could make money out of nothing. He would move seats and whole rows of bookings to squeeze in extra paying punters and keep his productions in the black.

I admired Robert’s skills and I loved how passionate he was about his work. And I loved the man as well. He was a real cockney East End boy with a huge, warm and wonderful family. We laughed so much. I was 25 and in love, fully in love, for the first time in my life. We were together for a year. A year that gave me so much confidence and joy. But after we had gone our separate ways he decided he wanted to move on in his career as well. He wanted to produce. But, for all the fun and frivolity, theatre is a cutthroat business – as Robert knew only too well. Sadly, things didn’t work out for him on the other side of the box-office counter. He lost a lot of money. Then he disappeared. He vanished off the face of the earth. He was such a special man, adored and loved by so many people.

But now an awful lot of years have passed. To this day none of us knows where Robert is or whether he is alive or dead. For someone like me, a man who values friendships above all else, that’s one of the hardest admissions I have to make.

After Robert and I said goodbye I was never lonely. Many dear friends have lit up my life for a while – some for months and years, some for just one night.

In the theatre you’re always going to have plenty of opportunities to meet dear friends such as these. Simply because they were the only places open late enough to serve us, back in the 1970s we would all troop down to some very gay bars in Soho after a performance. But the whole bar scene never really worked for me. I was never an obvious leading man on stage, nor was I an obvious person to pick up some stranger in a bar. I never liked the games people played, the attitudes, the poses, the ‘don’t even think of approaching me’ confidence that clearly hides some sort of insecurity. Staying away from bars probably helped me when I was doing so much work on children’s television. In the 1970s and early 1980s, some parts of the press still hinted at some awful link between homosexuality and paedophilia. So at least I didn’t need to worry about being photographed coming out of the wrong door in the wrong part of town.

Anyway, I have always met dear friends in far lighter, nicer places. Waiters in wonderful restaurants. People who smile as they serve the drinks or meals. Many is the time that they lit up my life.

I enjoyed it all, on a very uncomplicated level. I’ve enjoyed sex all my life and I’ve never seen why we need to be so prudish about it – though I know this probably has more to do with selling those tabloid newspapers than people’s real attitudes. And in the 1970s and early 1980s it wasn’t as if gay people were the only ones having fun. Everyone was having a party in my world. Single, straight, gay, married. None of it seemed to matter and, if you’ll excuse the pun, everyone was having a ball. How quickly everything changed.

I remember the first time I saw the word ‘Aids’ in a newspaper, sometime around 1980. Then you saw it almost every day. It always chilled me. Somehow I knew very early that everything was about to change. The spectre of that disease hung over everyone – and the theatrical world was hit harder than most. No one knew what the illness really was in the early days. The theories, and the fears, ran out of control. Tabloids took the line that all homosexuals were killers. No one saw us as victims. But I saw so many people waste away and die. Those first deaths were terrible and terrifying in equal measure. With no treatments and so little medical knowledge, strong men did simply fade into themselves. I lost so many fine friends, we all did. We sat at so many bedsides, went to so many funerals. And you never knew who might be next.

I look back on my life and I’ve seen homosexuality go from being invisible to being fully accepted, to being cast into the dark ages, and now, back to respectability again. When I became King of the Jungle and ran over that rope bridge towards the cameras, it wouldn’t have occurred to me for a second that I shouldn’t kiss Neil. To the whole crew’s credit, it didn’t occur to them either. It was only months later when I was chatting to a fan in the street that they said I had made a little bit of television – and perhaps social – history. It had been ITV’s first live prime-time kiss between two gay men. I’m as proud of that as I am of winning the show. If it has made life easier for even one other young gay man, I’m thrilled. I will tell the story of Neil and I later in the book. But knowing that he would be waiting for me outside the jungle made
I’m A Celebrity
bearable.

It took me many years to learn how to make relationships work – and maybe you never quite crack it. I’ve had phases of being possessive and jealous. I fought that. I’ve struggled with rejection. It’s tough if someone leaves you. But that’s life. You have to move on, to get on with it. That’s been true in every aspect of my life. Move on, get on with it. I’m like that when jobs pass me by. I force myself to be the same with lovers.

I know I’m not necessarily an easy person to live with. I’m selfish, though I’m always trying to be better. But I’ve always liked being in a relationship. I like having a partner, someone who’s there for the highs and the lows and will talk about all the minutiae of the day. That’s what Neil has been to me for 14 wonderful years. Two years ago we signed our civil partnership in Hackney Town Hall before heading off to a party at Joe Allen, where, as dear Barbara Windsor pointed out, we celebrated with everyone from Joan Collins to my cleaning lady. Don’t ever let it be said that I’ve forgotten my roots.

Neil and I don’t describe our commitment as a marriage. I’m not political about these things and I actually like the word ‘partnership’. That sums it all up to me – the highs and lows and the mutual support of a proper, grown-up relationship. What I have with Neil is so important. It will need some pretty impressive developments in medical science for us to beat the 63 years my parents have already clocked up as a married couple. But if I am to go the distance with anyone it will be with Neil.

Anyway, long before I met Neil one of my performances was making waves in the gay community – and I was making
enemies. In the early 1970s Gillian had found me that first job in LWT’s comedy series
Doctor at Large
. My memory of all this isn’t what it should be. But I think I played a mildly effeminate intern in that. A few years later I was asked back for
Doctor at Sea
. This time my character could hardly be forgotten. I played an outrageous, flamboyant, bitchy and bouffant-haired old queen. I thought it was absolutely fabulous. But I was pretty much alone.

The attacks began immediately. I came in for a lot of stick from the gay community for perpetuating outdated stereotypes. People wrote critical letters to the papers about it and I had some heated ‘discussions’ with friend and stranger alike on the issue. ‘Why are you doing this?’ people asked. ‘Why are you feeding people’s prejudices about homosexuals?’

My answer was always simple. Outrageous queens did exist – a quick look around the BBC canteen proved that. So why shouldn’t they get reflected on screen? Why should I hide the kind of people who made life more fun? I didn’t win all of these arguments. But they were the least of my worries. In career terms I was being warned that playing that role in
Doctor at Sea
could have had me typecast – not just as a gay man but also as a light-entertainment figure. I had won some decent cameo roles in mainstream dramas such as
Upstairs Downstairs
and
The Duchess of Duke Street
in the early 1970s (
Upstairs Downstairs
was great fun – my car-dealing father loved that I was cast as a dodgy car salesman in an episode about the advent of the motor car). But I knew that my frothy performance in the
Doctor at Sea
series could have stopped me getting considered for bigger, meatier roles elsewhere.

For a while my time with the RSC helped me through. Because I’d acted in the RSC, and trodden the boards alongside the likes of Judi, Donald and Dame Peggy Ashcroft, people took a little bit more notice of me. I had a hefty supply of professional credibility back in the mid-1970s. But I knew it wouldn’t last for ever. And heaven knows where it all is now.

Anyway, I wasn’t perhaps as bothered by the light-entertainment tag as I could have been. What’s wrong with popular, frothy programmes anyway? I’d seen first-hand how hard it is to make good television comedy when I’d been cast in my first of two episodes of
Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em
back in 1973. The first was the one where Frank Spencer was trying to become a pilot – a very scary prospect for all concerned. I was a student at the flight school and a witness to most of his navigational errors. In the second episode, a few years later, I was a student in a canteen and after all the usual disasters I ended up covered in baked beans and gravy. It was great fun – and a step up the food chain from my first TV role with that chicken leg. Between those two episodes I was to have another master class in television sitcoms.

Gillian set up a meeting for me with Sid Lotterby, the director and producer of a new BBC show to be called
Porridge
. With that show almost everything about my career would change.

I won the part of Lukewarm, a cleverly drawn character who was gay, but not too gay. I toned down my
Doctor at Sea
act, though I didn’t want Lukewarm’s sexuality to disappear altogether. I thought it was really important that
they kept in all the references to his love life on the other side of the prison walls. That was a pretty big deal in 1974. Don’t ask why, but it was my idea to make Lukewarm knit. I had a feeling this might help get the message about him across. Perhaps I did that to take my mind off the way my character was described in the script. ‘A rotund young man,’ it said. ‘Young’ I liked. ‘Rotund’ I could have done without.

Being in
Porridge
was an incredible experience – to this day it makes me smile to think of it. And playing such a fun part, with such a classic Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais script, was only one great piece of the
Porridge
adventure. Working with Ronnie Barker and the dear Richard Beckinsale was the other true joy. What a lovely man Richard would have grown to be, had the fates allowed.

Ronnie, meanwhile, was a revelation. He was a huge star and could have been a nightmare to work with. He wasn’t. And while most comics want everything to be about
them
, Ronnie was the true exception. Of course, his wonderful Fletcher dominated every minute of the show. But he was a truly generous man, always happy to give away part of a scene and let others soak up the applause for a while. He gave me and my character a lot more space than most other comics would have done. That’s class.

We filmed
Porridge
in the BBC’s East Acton studios and, despite how high-profile and important the show was, everyone had a ball. It was one of the easiest and most relaxed shooting schedules I remember. My favourite episode was the one where Ronnie wrote the same letter for all the lags to send to their wives and girlfriends – and for Lukewarm to send to his young man. The ruse is
discovered when the partners all travel on the same bus to visit on the same day.