Just Biggins. Christopher Biggins
We thought of it as utter sophistication. By now I knew a lot about the way you were supposed to behave in hotels. I had my mum’s example, of course. But I had also lapped up all the glamorous stories from my grandmother. She had been a silver service waitress in the Red Lion back at a time when you had to pay the head waiter to get a shift.
‘Always leave a tip,’ she would tell me, remembering how tough it had been when others hadn’t.
‘Always leave a tip,’ my mum would repeat when she knew I was off out with John. But I didn’t always take it seriously. One afternoon, when we really couldn’t make our scones and coffee last any longer, I got a piece of paper and a pen out of my pocket.
‘Tip: Back the first horse at Aintree,’ I wrote, thinking I was hilarious and the first person to come up with a line like that. And if I was wrong on those points I was certainly wrong to think I would get away with it. The waitressing scene in Salisbury was as tight as the acting profession. Mum found out what I had done straight away and I got the biggest bollocking and the hardest slap of my life.
I left school at 16 without, I’m a little embarrassed to say, a single O Level. I’ve no regrets at all in my life. But if I was pushed I’d say I do almost regret not going on to some kind of college. I’d perhaps like to have seen how much more there was to know. I’d like to have learned more, though I don’t know about what. Today I swear that if I won the Lottery and never needed to work again I would fill at least part of my time with study. I’d soak it up in my sixties. All the opportunities I let slip in my teens.
So what would I do for a living?
‘I think I might want to be a vicar.’
That was a bit of a conversation-stopper back at home. My parents took it well and would have helped make it happen if I’d been serious. But I think I was just casting around for something that involved dressing up in costumes and reading things out in front of people.
Before I hit upon the other, blindingly obvious way to make a career out of those activities, I carried on doing odd jobs for my father. I’d always loved watching him work just as much as I loved watching my mother. He was at the top of his game in the mid-1960s – making money right and left, buying, selling, driving and even racing flash cars. He inspired me because it was so clear that he didn’t just do the selling because of the money. It was also for the challenge and the thrill of the game. He always liked to see just how much he could get away with.
He taught me that you don’t get much if you don’t gamble and you don’t get anything if you don’t ask. Throughout my school days my father and I were a great combination at work. No, I wasn’t exactly cut out to be a mechanic in his garage. But I happily tried to drum up extra business elsewhere.
‘Don’t drink and drive. But take a drink home from us.’ That was the snappy advertising slogan I came up with for the local paper when we offered a free bottle of champagne on every car we sold for more than £150. And because our lodger Jock was still working in his wine shop I got a deal on the bubbly as well.
The wheeler-dealer in me was out. I’ve loved a bargain ever since. And I’ve never lost my taste for champagne. The tragedy for my poor father was that, like so many small businesses, his was killed off when VAT was introduced in the 1970s. Funny how life goes. My career was just about taking off at that point. My father was on the edge of bankruptcy. After so many years of being lent and given cars by him, I had just bought one of my own. I remember driving down to Salisbury to show it off. ‘Dad, it’s yours,’ I said, handing over the keys and taking the train back to town.
It was Mrs Christian who pointed me in the right direction when I left school. Over the years we had read so many play texts in our elocution, drama and English lessons. We had talked so much about all the great actors and the wonders of the stage. She gave me the confidence to believe that I too could become a professional actor.
So after one final chat with her I went to the only place I could think of to look for work: the Salisbury Playhouse.
It wasn’t an easy visit.
I had been to see plays there many times with the school and my family. And every time the lady in the box office had terrified me. Her name was Pauline Aston and she was a big, imposing lady, with heavily dyed hair piled up high on top of her head. To me she was a dragon, though like most people who have scared me throughout my life she ended up a close friend and a wonderful person. Her husband, Stan, the cantankerous but wonderful electrician, handyman and stage manager, scared me too – but we ended up getting on like a house on fire.
‘Please don’t let the dragon be there. Please don’t let the dragon be there,’ I mumbled to myself as I walked up to the theatre. The dragon was there.
‘Can I see Mr Salzberk,’ I said, mispronouncing the theatre manager Mr Salsberg’s name because I was so nervous.
‘Wait over there,’ the dragon said, clearly unimpressed, and pointed to a bench on the other side of the theatre foyer.
But for some reason I hadn’t understood exactly where she meant. And I was too scared to risk her wrath by asking again. So I waited, for more than an hour, on the other side of a wall in completely the wrong place. When I ventured out, who should I find but Mr Salsberg, who, bless him, was still looking for me.
‘I want to be an actor,’ I blurted out. Six incoherent words. Not even a ‘hello’ or a ‘how do you do?’ I was the nervous little boy from nowhere. The boy who knew no one and nothing. Mr Salsberg should have laughed me out of town. Instead he looked me up and down and gave me my in.
‘Well, I’m doing She Stoops To Conquer. You can come to that.’ Two sentences in the man’s lovely, low nasal voice. It was enough. It proved that if you don’t ask you don’t get. As usual, I thank my wheeler-dealer father for giving me the confidence to learn that lesson.
As I left the theatre I wasn’t quite sure what the manager had meant. Was this a part in a play? Was I just being asked along to watch? Or was it a job? When I turned up at the theatre the next day I found it was the latter. I was in. There is a small comedy role as a servant in She Stoops To Conquer. It was mine. In truth, it was just a glorified walk-on part. But it did have a few lines. And that was enough. I was on my way. Within a few weeks I had signed a proper contract with the Playhouse. I started out on £2 a week as a student assistant stage manager. I would stay there for two years. It was just the most wonderful period of my life.
The theatre was on Fisherton Street near the river and the railway station. In truth, it wasn’t a real theatre at all. The building used to be a Methodist hall, then something else, until finally it was turned into a theatre with a proper stage and seating. I’d been in the audience a few times with my parents and on school trips. I’d always adored the glamour of the lights, the thick velvet curtains, the plush carpets and all the trappings of theatre. I had also always dreamed that to go backstage would be like going to some kind of Narnia. And so it was – only in reverse.
‘Mind that!’
‘Careful!’
‘Coming through!’
It was chaos. Backstage certainly wasn’t quite the magical world of glamour and beauty that I had imagined. Salisbury Rep was falling apart. There was a tiny set of different stairs and rooms and corridors but there was nowhere to pick up a cat, let alone swing one. And yes, there was the high, intoxicatingly rich scent of make-up and hair spray. But there was also the smell of mould, mildew and damp. The roof leaked all over and most of the buckets were used to protect the seats in the auditorium. Backstage water just drained away wherever it could. Water soaked into almost everything and, however much heat our big old radiators banged out, it was never enough to dry it all out. Backstage the light bulbs died and weren’t always replaced. Old sets, old costumes, long-forgotten props piled up in corridors and corners. Who knows what crawled among them. But who cared?
I always thought of that recruitment scene in Oh! What A Lovely War when the prospective soldiers are mesmerised by the radiant image of Maggie