Just Biggins. Christopher Biggins
our end-of-term shows we got to tread the boards on the Bristol Old Vic’s stage itself. These performances were the ultimate showcases. You never knew who might be watching. As news got around about the depth of young talent in Bristol in both our years, we attracted a lot of agents, casting directors and other powerful industry figures.
I can see now that I should probably have taken more advantage of all that. Trouble was, I never felt the competition or the rivalry that ran to the core of some of my fellow students. Maybe I should have done. Some of my peers fought for every role. They schmoozed people to within an inch of their lives. They were desperate to get the big parts. They talked constantly of all the roles they thought they had been born to play. I didn’t. I just waited for life to happen to me. Maybe it’s because I was never an easy actor to categorise. I was never a classically handsome leading man – so how odd that I ended up a leading woman in panto. And, while I wanted to be in Hamlet, I never saw the need to actually be Hamlet. I was in my element in the minor roles. I just wanted to be in the company. I could have made a lot more money and enjoyed a lot more respect if I’d had that killer instinct. But maybe I wouldn’t have had so much fun. Besides, my strange belief that life would happen to me anyway seemed to be coming true. I did get good roles. And they got noticed.
My first big break came in a play I can barely remember today. I’ve had to struggle even to track down its title. I think it was The Life of Tom Paine. But it could well have been The Rights of Man by Tom Paine. Or possibly something else altogether. What I do remember is that it was a marvellous role. British-born Tom Paine was a hero in 18th-century America, an Everyman figure who took part in the country’s Revolution. The play was a modern take on life in the USA and it was a huge coup for me to be offered the lead.
Throughout our course, Nat brought in a stream of talented directors to work with us on different performances. For Tom Paine, we had David Benedictus and we performed the play as a showcase in one of the studios in Clifton. An invited audience from the industry was watching, and among them was David Jones, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It seems that he saw something good in either my performance or my personality, or both. It would be quite a few months before I found out what it was.
The tears when I left Salisbury Rep were nothing compared with those we all cried when our Bristol years ended. Breaking up our little gang seemed almost criminal. We were so close. And for me there was one extra thing to worry about as reality beckoned.
‘Come on, Christopher, enough’s enough,’ my father said to me after I had moved back from Bristol to Salisbury and was planning my theatrical takeover of the world. ‘You’ve got the theatre out of your system now. You should come and work in the business with me. You can make £100 a week.’ And Dad, ever the gentlemen, was prepared to change the business to suit me. I was passionate about antiques and bric-a-brac – not least because I had spent so long in antique shops when I was propping in Salisbury. I had become a regular face in most of the local shops, always trying to do a deal and borrow some furniture or fittings for our next production. Two years on and most of those shopkeepers still remembered me, which may or may not be a good thing.
‘Let’s open a bric-a-brac shop of our own,’ my father said. And we did – I seem to think that we called it ‘Biggins’. It was a lovely shop, I’ll admit that straight away. But working there was just as dull as I had expected. We were bang in the middle of Salisbury but some days several hours would go by before I saw a single person. And when that sole customer did come in I could hardly follow them around the shop and pepper them with questions just to get a conversation started.
Always leave a tip. Going back to my mum’s old rule, my tip would be that, if you love people and you’re always up for a laugh and a gossip, don’t work in an antique shop.
‘Sorry, Dad, but I can’t stay. Will you be able to run it without me?’ I’d been in our new shop for less than six weeks. It felt like six years. And by now I had an escape route.
Roger Clissold had been one of my early heroes at Salisbury Rep – not least because he hadn’t shouted at me too much when I ruined one of his performances.
Disaster had struck in the middle of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
‘Yup, it was a real smart farm,’ was the line Roger should have delivered in the cemetery scene. I was one of the 12 extras on stage holding umbrellas painted with headstones and instructed to be as still as the grave. ‘Yup, it was a real fart smarm,’ was what I swear Roger said one fateful performance.
My umbrella was the first to start shaking. Then the one next to me began to shake, and the next. Soon all 12 of us were laughing out loud and rolling around the stage. I suppose if you’re going to corpse on stage you might as well do it in a cemetery scene. But at the end of the night I was ready for a bollocking for my bad example. Roger, to his credit, had seen the funny side. And our friendship grew from there. Today I’m godfather to his son and I’ve been with him through a lot of the ups and downs of his life.
By 1969, Roger had moved on from Salisbury and become artistic director of a new company he had formed in Derby. He asked me to join the cast in Lysistrata and then join his Rep full-time. He said he could afford to pay me something like £30 a week – so much less than I could have got if I’d stuck with my dad’s antique shop. But I could just about survive, so I said yes without a second thought. At least in the theatre I had people to talk to pretty much 24 hours a day.
In Derby I moved into a classic theatrical digs. I had a tiny single bed in a boxroom, shared the family bathroom and had to be up and out just after breakfast each morning. As soon as I shut the front door I would head off to meet a fellow company member who lodged nearby. We would gossip away as we headed to the theatre together. But our journey didn’t always go smoothly. Does anything?
One morning an old female tramp leaped out at us as we turned a corner. I nearly had a heart attack with fright. ‘Can you spare something for some food, sir?’ she asked me as I tried to breathe normally. I found a few coins.
‘Ow, Gawd bless you, sir. You’re a true gentleman. I won’t forget you,’ she squawked. ‘Your lady friend is blessed to have you.’
One week later the same grubby little lady popped up again. ‘Sorry, love, I don’t have any change today,’ I said, with a relaxed smile.
‘You shit. You horrible fat man. You’re a disgrace, you should rot in hell,’ she spat out in fury as we scuttled away.
It was a good lesson for the rest of my professional career. You can be hot one week, ice-cold the next. No one remembers your last review. You truly are only as good as your last performance.
In Derby I met another set of marvellous people, and worked on ever more powerful plays. I also learned another life lesson, this time without the aid of abuse in the street. I learned the old chestnut that it’s not what you know but who you know – and most importantly of all it’s who knows you.
Another old pal from Salisbury knew me. He was the actor and writer David Wood and he asked me to come to London to do a musical play he had written. The Owl and the Pussycat Went to See… was based on Edward Lear’s poem and was moving to London after a tryout in Worcester. It was a wonderful opportunity and Roger Clissold agreed that I should take it. So two weeks later I moved out of my digs, left Derby Rep and headed south. It was 1969 and The Owl and the Pussycat was opening at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in the strange no man’s land of Holborn. Our audiences were vast, noisy crowds of school kids. I played Head Jumbly and a bluebird. No, it wasn’t King Lear. But it was London. It was bliss.
I celebrated my 21st birthday in that company. Patsy Rowlands, the wife of our musical director, made me laugh, and nearly made me cry, when she presented me with a cake.