Over the Moon (32 page)

‘I’d like you to play George in
Aspects of Love
,’ he told me.

Flattered to be asked I promised him I would read the script as soon as I returned to England. It seemed a little straight for my tastes, but when I met with director Nikolai Foster I warmed to him straight away and agreed to be involved.

My semi-retirement was clearly over, and as 2007 dawned I felt that my career was getting back on track and everything was reasonably rosy in my garden. However, something was about to happen that would absolutely knock me sideways.

DOLLY HAD ALWAYS
been in rude health. My mother might have been eighty-two in early 2007 but she was still sprightly, active and never needed to see a doctor. So when Carlotta called me while I was on tour to say Mum had gone into hospital for a minor operation on a badly swollen knee, initially I wasn’t worried.

I spoke to her at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, where she sounded fine, and arranged to go and see her the next day. Arriving at the Royal Surrey, I made my way to her ward, but when I scanned the room, I couldn’t see her anywhere.

‘Where is Mrs Cook?’ I asked a nurse.

‘Oh, she has got MRSA,’ I was told.

‘That’s bad, isn’t it?’ I asked, shocked.

‘Well, we have antibiotics for it.’

Having gone in for a routine knee operation that should have seen her discharged the following day, Mum had picked up one of the deadly MRSA bugs that haunt hospitals, which always strikes me as bitterly ironic as they are the places that people go to in order to get better. She had been quarantined in her own room, and when I saw her I was shocked by how ill she looked.

Mum had always been a fighter, just like Dad, and managed to beat the MRSA, but then she contracted another awful strain of hospital-related infection. When she was still there after two weeks and getting no better, I confronted one of her consultants.

‘This is terrible,’ I told him. ‘This lady has never taken as much as a Lemsip in her life. She came in here for a simple operation and basically you are killing her.’

‘Mr Essex, hospitals are
very
dangerous places,’ the consult-ant informed me, in an unpleasantly patronising and supercilious manner. I am not a violent man, but it took all of my control not to knock him out.

I became a regular at the Royal Surrey County Hospital over the ensuing days, during which time Mum steadily became worse and worse. She was transferred to a hospital in Sutton and after two further months of ineffective treatment she was put on a kidney machine. By this point she could hardly communicate. She died on 10 May 2007.

It is hard enough to bear the loss of a beloved parent without also knowing that it should never have happened. Apart from a couple of minor falls, my mum had been in great shape when she was admitted to hospital. I think the NHS is one of Britain’s great institutions but it badly let my mum down. In fact, if I am being brutally honest, it killed her.

The burial service was as moving as saying goodbye to your wonderful mum who should still be with you could be, and she was buried next to my dad in East London Cemetery, reunited in death with the man who had been her life. I wondered about taking action against the NHS but in the end decided there was nothing I could do. It was best to draw a line under the tragedy.

Carlotta was hugely supportive as I grieved for my mum, which says so much about her as a person because we had recently decided to split.

The two of us had now been together for more than twenty years and while we were still incredibly close, the spark of romance had died. With a sense of sadness but knowing it was the right thing to do, we began divorce proceedings and Carlotta returned to America. Kit went with her; Bill stayed in the UK.

With such intense upheaval in my personal life, it was a relief to have
Aspects of Love
to throw myself into. As he had at our initial meeting, Nikolai Foster hugely impressed me. Precise, imaginative and hugely dedicated, he was one of the best directors I had ever worked with.

Aspects of Love
is quite risqué by Andrew Lloyd Webber standards, with everybody making love to everybody else. My character, George, was married and also had a mistress, but what I liked most about the production was playing somebody my age and being the drama’s elderly statesman figure rather than running around still trying to be a juvenile lead like mutton dressed as lamb. It was something new for me and as we toured the length of Britain for more than six months, I enjoyed it.

As the run came to an end, I realised that
Boogie Nights 2
and
Aspects
had whetted my appetite for musical theatre again. Now, though, I wanted to do something with depth that had more meaning for me personally.

There are certain themes that have reappeared throughout my career and the singular allure of fairgrounds, with their juxtaposition of fun and imminent violence, is one of them. An idea
took
root: why not write a musical using my own songs that was rooted in this fertile ground?

After all, I already had a perfectly good title:
All the Fun of the Fair
. It had been ideal for my concept album back in 1975 and it worked just as well now. Gripped by the heady excitement of a compelling, self-generated new project, I set to work.

Boogie Nights
writer Jon Conway shared my enthusiasm for the idea and quickly came on board as my co-writer. As we plotted out a storyline, I realised how adroitly my songs could weave into the narrative, and a script came together remarkably quickly.

I knew that
All the Fun of the Fair
would stand or fall on the strength of this script. I was fairly confident that people would relate to the songs, as they had done previously when they had made them hits, but we needed a strong backdrop and a good reason to sing them.

It was also important that the storyline was not horribly corny. I knew the pitfalls of the musical genre and how awful they can be when not done well. Abba’s
Mamma Mia!
has run forever in the West End and you can’t argue with success but the script is just a way of getting from hit to hit. We wanted to integrate the songs and story into one coherent, dramatic whole.

I decided to play the musical’s patriarch, a strong but stubborn fairground owner and widower whose wife had died in tragic circumstances. His tight-knit family of workers include his own headstrong son and a sexy fortune-telling gypsy, and while I will not spoil
All the Fun of the Fair
for anyone who still wants to see it, let’s just say it does not take the easy, fairytale-ending option. There is something dark at its core.

The first travelling man who had ever seized my imagination was my mum’s Uncle Levi, the twinkling-eyed gypsy and romantic philosopher who had transfixed me as a boy picking hops in Kent. I named my character Levi Lee in his honour.

Alan Darlow, a very good friend for nearly twenty years, agreed to be the producer and proved incredibly understanding. I had only one director in mind and once Jon and I were happy with the script, I showed it to Nikolai Foster. He loved it, and my
All the Fun of the Fair
dream team was in place. Now it was time to cast it.

Jon and I sat in on the auditions, although Nikolai made the final decisions. The wonderful Louise English blew us all away and was clearly perfect for the hot-blooded, Tarot-reading Gypsy Rosa. After beginning her career as a member of Pan’s People on
Top of the Pops
, Louise had since become a very renowned and respected West End leading lady.

I also took note of a very attractive Welsh actress called Susan Hallam-Wright who auditioned well and ended up playing the part of Sally.

Under Nikolai’s strong tutelage, the production came together quickly and excitingly, on a great dynamic fairground set that featured dodgem cars and even a wall of death. The dramatic plot worked, and Jon and I were relieved that the songs seemed to merge into the storyline naturally and organically.

We opened in September 2008 with a week at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley. The first-night nerves were jangling, as they should be, but the audience were hugely appreciative and I felt proud to see my conceptual vision become reality.

Queen guitarist Brian May came to the first night and was very complimentary afterwards. I was grateful, especially as I had seen their band musical,
We Will Rock You
, and while the music was unquestionably wonderful, I’d found the story a bit daft. There again, it has now been running for ten years, so what do I know?

We took
All the Fun of the Fair
out on tour and as we rolled through Darlington, Brighton and Manchester, the reviews were great everywhere we went as critics appreciated we were trying to do something different with the often-corny musical format.

Susan and I started as a friendship and fairly quickly became something more. I found Susan a caring and loving person who shares my opinion on the importance of friends and family in life. We hung out more and more and very soon became inseparable.

Of course, there is a big age difference between us – but that didn’t bother us, and never has. Age really is just a number and luckily Susan is wise and mature beyond her years. On most issues, I generally find she has an older head on her shoulders than I do.

Being together made touring
All the Fun of the Fair
even more enjoyable and we rolled on into summer 2009. I must have got a taste for life on the road again, because after it finished I went almost straight into a series of rock shows that we called
The Secret Tour
.

This led up to Christmas, which had even greater cause for celebration than usual as Susan and I got engaged. It’s true what they say: when you know, you know.

Spring 2010 saw the start of a six-month run of
All the Fun of the Fair
at the Garrick Theatre in the West End. With Nikolai Foster unavailable, a new director took over in David Gilmore, and the cast also underwent a bit of a reshuffle.

Susan auditioned before David for a bigger role in the production. I stayed well out of it because it was his decision and not really my business, but even so I was delighted and very proud when she got the part of Mary, the lovelorn daughter of Louise English’s fiery Gypsy Rosa.

The notoriously hard-to-please London theatre critics are often very hard on musicals as a genre, but their pens left
All the Fun of the Fair
relatively unscathed, with the
Daily Telegraph
’s write-up being typical:

The show has that essential but often elusive quality for any musical – heart … it becomes genuinely touching, and it is a pleasure to watch a West End production that puts its faith in its performers rather than hi-tech special effects
.

There is often a sense of anti-climax when a major show comes to an end but there was no danger of that when we reached the end of our Garrick run. I had plenty to look forward to. On 20 September 2010, Susan and I got married.

We did so in style and it was an absolutely wonderful day. We went up to Susan’s home area and held the wedding in a nineteenth-century Church of Wales church called St Cross in the tiny village of Tal-y-bont near Bangor. Susan’s
Taid
(grandfather) was once the Archdeacon of Bangor.

We had an evening reception at a hotel on Anglesey and while the setting was impressive, the event certainly wasn’t stuffy: our first dance as a married couple was a Hokey-Cokey. My best man and best friend Mick the Greek’s wedding speech was hilarious. Occasionally, it was even funny when he meant it to be.

Our honeymoon in the Seychelles was everything we could have hoped for and as 2011 dawned we seemed set fair for a nicely enjoyable and undemanding year. I felt there was scope to make
All the Fun of the Fair
better still and decided to take it out on another regional tour, with Nikolai Foster back in the director’s chair. And work-wise, that would be pretty much all that the year held for me. I could take it easy.

Or so I thought.

NOTHING GOES ON
for ever and in 2011 one of my longest working relationships came to an end as Mel Bush and I went our separate ways. It had been thirty-seven years since he had promoted my first live tour but things had changed and I simply felt that I didn’t need a manager any more. It was purely a business decision: I still love Mel like a brother, and always will.

I also hired a new agent, a lovely woman named Maxine Hoffman at Curtis Brown, who soon called me with an intriguing proposition. The producers of
EastEnders
had been in touch: would I be interested in discussing a hefty new role?

One of my first thoughts was that Derek would have certainly advised me against it. He would have regarded a soap as very lowest-common-denominator TV, but I watched
East-Enders
every now and then and it appeared to me these days to be an extremely viable and credible continuing drama with a terrific pool of actors.

In any case, what harm could a meeting do? I warily agreed to an exploratory chat.

I went into the meeting with a completely open mind. It was obviously flattering to be considered for such a major series that
plays
such a big role in so many people’s lives but also I knew there would be a price to pay. I would be going into a main role in an incredibly high-profile show, with all that that entailed. In all honesty, I was happy with my life of semi-anonymity and my comfortable existence. It would take a lot for me to agree to jolt myself out of it.

The
EastEnders
producers came up with a lot. As we settled down to the first of a string of meetings, they told me their ideas for the character of Eddie Moon, the father figure of one of those extended East End families that tend to populate Albert Square. The uncle of Walford mainstay Alfie Moon, played by Shane Richie, Eddie would arrive in the square and cause emotional mayhem.