Over the Moon (11 page)

My backroom team had a bit of a reshuffle, with Leslie Grade delegating his son, Michael, to be my agent. Michael Grade, of course, was to go on to become chairman of the BBC thirty years later, but as my agent at the dog-end of the sixties he was – as he freely admits himself – bloody useless.

Michael only ever secured me two jobs and the first was to be the walk-on understudy for Tommy Steele, the veteran British singer and light entertainer, in the London Palladium’s 1969 Christmas panto,
Dick Whittington
. Prior to this, I had never heard the phrase ‘walk-on understudy’, but it transpired to mean that I would learn the role but only play it if Steele were ill or indisposed.

The upside to this was that I would have regular money coming in for the three months that the production ran. The downside was that it was monumentally, insufferably boring. I realised I would prefer to have the most minor, inconsequential extra role imaginable in a drama, and actually have something to do, than this sorry, shadowy existence of interminably waiting around for … nothing.

The understudies would rehearse two mornings each week and then vanish back into the void. Tommy Steele appeared in rude health, yet every day I had to go through the meaningless ritual of turning up at the stage door thirty-five minutes before curtain to report to the stage manager just in case of any mishap.

I tried to fill the dead time constructively: watching and re-watching the show, intensely observing Tommy’s part, hanging out in the Palladium dressing room with a couple of old lag actors who regaled me with tales of music hall, variety and days gone by. I even took judo lessons at a polytechnic over the road. But lethargy set in, and eventually I wasn’t even bothering to shave before I ambled into the theatre.

This all changed on 19 March 1970. Sauntering down Oxford Street before the matinee performance ten minutes late
and
turning into Argyll Street, the home of the Palladium, I saw a gaggle of wardrobe and production people frantically waving at me. ‘Tommy Steele is sick!’ said the stage manager as he shoved me into the theatre and through to dressing room number one. So this was it! My moment had come.

It was hard to catch my thoughts as people swarmed around me, dressing me in Dick Whittington’s costume and micro-phones, and co-stars such as Kenneth Connor put their heads around the door to wish me luck. But it was not exactly confidence building to hear a Tannoy announcement – ‘Due to Tommy Steele being unwell, the part of Dick Whittington will be played by David Essex’ – being followed by a huge groan of disappointment in the auditorium.

The dressing room emptied and I had a few precious moments to stare at myself in the mirror surrounded by light bulbs. ‘You can do this,’ I told myself. ‘This is why you’ve been wasting your time here every day for weeks.’ Yet I felt as if I couldn’t remember a single thing about the part, until the sound of the overture jolted me into action.

The half-hearted understudy rehearsals to rows of empty seats suddenly seemed hopelessly inadequate as I took the stage to a begrudging round of applause. The spotlights beaming down on me felt as bright as the sun, the orchestra blasted from the monitors and everything was overwhelming. My knees knocked and my mind froze. Could I do this?

Somehow I got my first line out, and grew in confidence as the opening scene unfolded perfectly. This is all going to be fine, I thought, as I exited and headed back to my dressing room for
a
costume change – en route passing three giant brown bears that were crashing their way to the stage through a specially built tunnel cage, their German trainers prodding them along.

Now, I knew that Dick kissed one of the bears before going into a song, but the bruins had not attended understudy rehearsal so I had no idea how this worked. What was their motivation in the scene? I soon found out. As I returned to the stage, one of the Germans slipped a Polo mint into my mouth just as the largest of the bears waddled towards me.

The trick, apparently, was to grip the mint firmly at the front of your mouth between your teeth so the bear could easily remove it, but nobody had told me. The Polo was right at the back of my throat, so as the bear slipped the longest tongue I had ever seen through its muzzle and deep into my mouth, I endured the most obnoxious French kiss imaginable in front of 2,000 people in a sold-out Palladium.

The reek of the bear’s breath was revolting, and with its saliva plastered all over my face, I was sure I was about to throw up as it lumbered off with its prized mint. Meanwhile the orchestra struck up ‘There’s Gotta Be Something Better Than This’. You could say that again! The only plus point to this ordeal was that after that, anything else the performance could throw at me was a doddle.

By the interval I was enjoying myself, and the matinee audience seemed to appreciate me belting out Tommy Steele hits such as ‘Little White Bull’, ‘Flash Bang Wallop’ and ‘What a Mouth’ (which I first sang to my nan, aged five). By the curtain call, I was delighted to find that their disappointed groans had been replaced by enthusiastic cheering, and shouts of ‘Bravo!’

After this triumph, I felt elated. It had made up for the weeks of kicking my heels that had preceded it. The next three days’ performances went from strength to strength, partly because I knew to grasp the Polo between my teeth, and Tommy Steele rose from his sick bed to return earlier than his doctor advised, possibly because he heard I was going down rather well.

Michael Grade then produced his sole other booking for me as my agent: another pantomime, in Manchester. I was less than thrilled, and it reflects well on Michael that forty years on, when I occasionally bump into him, he still apologises and tells me: ‘I’m so glad you left me. I would have ruined your career.’

However, Derek talked me into taking the part by telling me the Manchester producer had seen my Dick Whittington and been impressed, and at least I wasn’t an understudy this time: I was to play Dandini in
Cinderella
, alongside music-hall legend Arthur Askey and singers Lonnie Donegan and Mary Hopkin.

I decamped to Manchester for a few weeks, renting a bedsit just outside the city. It was a rudimentary, student-digs sort of place, and so cold that when I took a bath, the steam in the bath-room was so thick that I couldn’t see myself in the mirror.

Cinderella
was a bit of a bore. Dandini was a wet character who didn’t do a fat lot except carry round a glass slipper and sing the occasional duet with the prince, Tony Adams, a friendly guy who later went on to play Adam Chance in
Crossroads
.

I might not have been going to the ball on stage but I had a good time in Manchester. I befriended two fellow cast members and northern comics, Dailey and Wayne, who both had superhuman capacities for alcohol, and our nights off frequently seemed to descend into a drunken stupor.

One evening they invited me with them to watch the opening night on tour of legendary British rocker Billy Fury. The nightclub was pretty packed but we had places reserved at a table with one of their mates, a livewire that I had not met before called Freddie Starr.

Freddie seemed fairly manic but Dailey and Wayne were more interested in pointing out the people sitting at the table in front of us, who they said were feared local gangsters known as the Quality Street Gang. As a man who had hobnobbed with the Krays, I was hardly likely to be impressed by hoodlums named after a box of chocolates, but I kept an eye on them as the lights dimmed and Billy Fury appeared.

Billy was doing fine until his third song when a familiar-looking figure materialised uninvited on stage next to him, a cushion rammed up the back of his jumper like Quasimodo, and began a very decent impression of the perplexed singer. Bored of sitting at our table, Freddie Starr had decided to make himself part of the entertainment.

Freddie’s appearance intrigued the Quality Street Gang and a couple of them jumped up to take a closer look, obstructing their boss’s view. Grunting ‘I can’t bloody see!’, he grabbed a candle from their table and set fire to his sidekick’s Afro hairdo. It was quite an inferno, and his mates all started smacking him around the head to try to put it out.

A proper trouper, Billy Fury soldiered on through ‘Halfway to Paradise’, but with Freddie Starr capering alongside him and gangsters knocking hell out of each other in the audience, he was forced to beat a tactical retreat. Watching him go, I got flash-backs to Shipman County, Daddy Dines and his massacred bees.

On a similar note, as
Cinderella
limped to the end of its run, I also decided to liven up proceedings. The highlight of my role as Dandini was the panto’s final scene, when I marched onstage with the glass slipper, slipped it on the delicate foot of Cinders, played by Mary Hopkin, and uttered the immortal words: ‘It fits!’

Mary was taken aback one night to see me appear bearing not the slipper but a Wellington boot, which I gently eased on to her foot. The audience roared with laughter as Cinderella and her handsome prince sang their love duet with Cinders clumping around the stage in a huge welly.

Mary Hopkin, who was a good laugh, took the jape in her (Wellington-booted) stride and even thanked me afterwards for livening up the evening’s finale, but Big-Hearted Arthur Askey was disapproving. I guess that I shouldn’t have been surprised. As I had learned from Tommy Steele, sometimes the biggest stars like to keep all the laughs for themselves.

DANDINI MIGHT HAVE
been a bit of a drip but at least he helped to put a roof over my head. Despite my alcoholic excursions with Dailey and Wayne, I had managed to save some money from my stint in
Cinderella
in Manchester, and when the panto ended and I got back down south, Maureen and I decided to buy a house.

It was a big decision, but also an easy one to make. Maureen and I were in love and getting on great. We had been together for nearly two years, and our relationship had survived all of my absences in shows or on tour. It felt like the real deal.

It was March 1971. Like most parents, my mum and dad and Maureen’s would have preferred us to get married before we moved in together, but they approved of us as a couple and agreed it made better economic sense for us to buy a place than to rent. Maureen’s dad, Alfie, was doing well with his car dealership and chipped in towards the deposit.

We settled on a Victorian terrace house in Vicarage Lane, Seven Kings, near Ilford in Essex. It cost £3,950, it had three bedrooms and a small garden, and we loved it. Figuring we needed some help with the mortgage, we invited Maureen’s inseparable mate Kath and her boyfriend, Mike, to live with us.

We all got on well and the arrangement worked nicely, although the house got a lot smaller when Mike made the decision to get an enormous Pyrenean mountain dog, Hector. Mike thought it hilarious occasionally to give Hector a saucer of brandy and milk, after which his mutt would slobber all over us and carouse and crash around the house.

Domestically everything was hunky-dory but my career remained a serious worry. Derek had now been guiding my solo fortunes for five years and the big breakthrough simply hadn’t come. All we had to show for our efforts were a string of flop or near-miss singles, a handful of film cameos, theatre understudy roles and provincial pantos.

After
Cinderella
finished, I had been forced to sign on, and was still unemployed as we moved into Seven Kings. Derek was still trying to find auditions and would lend me a fiver so I could get into town to attend them, but he was feeling the pressure too and began suggesting things I didn’t fancy, like cheesy cabaret club gigs.

He could not have tried harder to make things happen for me but failure was driving a wedge between us and my relationship with Derek began to cool. I never asked to be this ‘David Essex’ character, I reflected daily as I kicked my heels waiting for Maureen to come home from her latest job, delivering flowers. It wasn’t my idea. It had been a mistake. I just wanted to be a jazz drummer.

Which was when Maureen told me that she was pregnant.

It came as quite a shock. Maureen and I had not been trying for a baby but I guess, thinking back, we had not been trying
not
to have one, either. The news was a bolt from the blue and made me decide two things: I had to get a steady, proper job, and we should get married.

Maureen and I had never really discussed marriage before then but we were young and in love with a baby on the way so it was clearly the thing to do: we didn’t want our son or daughter being called a bastard in the school playground. But we had no money so we decided to keep the day as simple as possible.

Maureen can have been no more than ten weeks pregnant when we tied the knot at Seven Kings Registry Office. The day’s sole extravagance was that Alfie was determined to lend us a white Rolls-Royce so he borrowed one from one of his car-dealer mates. It turned up outside our gaff and my blushing bride headed off in it, followed by Frank, my best man, and me in Frank’s Mini.

After the ceremony, our handful of guests followed the skint but happy couple in their Roller back to our place for sandwiches and a cuppa. There was no reception, no speeches and, it goes without saying, no honeymoon. It was a lovely day but could hardly have been more low-key.

So suddenly I was married, a father-to-be … and unemployed! Full of resolve and driven by panic, I began to scour the local rag’s small ads for options. My gypsy soul has always rebelled against the idea of a nine-to-five, but I figured there must be plenty of jobs that would allow me to earn a living while also giving me some freedom: long-distance lorry driving? Back to mini cabs?

In the meantime, I threw myself into doing up the house, which I painted and decorated from top to bottom ready for the
baby’s
arrival. I even replaced the windows, which is what I was doing the afternoon that the phone rang. It was Derek. Again.

My manner was curt and brusque as he explained that he had an audition he wanted me to go to. Psychologically, I had given up on the whole process, but I decided to hear Derek out even as I thought, ‘This is the very last time.’