In comparison to Pru’s 1975, my own pales into insignificance with regards to how iconic and influential the programme that eventually turned me into a leading actor on television became. That programme, which is called Edward the Seventh, has, for reasons which are unknown to me, never been repeated and has only quite recently been released on DVD. Each episode contains quite a lot of music, and music is expensive.
The initial approach about the series was made via my agent in 1974 and the reason I remember it is because me and Pru had finally figured out a way of stopping our two boys fighting and squabbling. Or rather, Pru had. They were at an age when it was beginning to happen a little too frequently, and sometimes interfered with our already erratic sleep patterns. If Pru and I were at home at the same time, which wasn’t often, one or both of us might be performing in a play in the West End and, if that were the case, we wouldn’t arrive back until the early hours. Being woken up just a few hours later by two boys fighting wasn’t ideal, but no matter how many different threats we administered – and believe me, we tried everything – nothing seemed to work.
One morning – I believe it was a Thursday, as the previous day I’d played two shows of something – the hullabaloo started bright and early at 6.45 a.m. Due to reasons I forget, my head hadn’t touched the pillow until about 2 a.m. I was just about to haul myself out of bed to remonstrate with the two miniature tyrants when I heard Pru’s voice.
‘Listen, you two. Daddy was up very late last night and has got to go to work later so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to lock you in a room together and you can fight as much as you like. If you hurt each other of course I’ll take you to hospital, but I want you to know that I am very bored of this. Right, in you go.’ I then heard Pru marching the boys into a spare room and locking the door.
Should I try to go back to sleep? I asked myself. No, this was far too exciting.
The only sounds I heard coming from the room were a couple of squeals and when Pru went to open the door there was silence. ‘Sit down and have your breakfast,’ she said. ‘I’m going to see Daddy.’
I was sitting up in bed by the time she entered the bedroom. ‘All quiet on the western front?’ I asked, as she perched herself on the end of the bed.
‘At the moment. Let’s listen.’
Silence.
‘All I can hear is two boys eating cereal,’ I said.
‘Me too,’ said Pru.
‘How on earth did you do it?’
‘Well, I read this book a while ago – I think I may have borrowed it from somebody – that suggested half the rows siblings have are for attention, so if you make them realize you’re not interested, they won’t bother.’
We learned very quickly that it’s not an exact science, but it certainly made a big difference.
A second reason why I am able to pinpoint the date of the approach about Edward the Seventh, which was made by ATV Television Company, is because I had also been asked to take charge for a second season of plays at the Billingham Forum on Teeside as their Artistic Director. I shan’t attempt to burden you with the details of that particular appointment (which was a challenging but ultimately rewarding experience) but when the offer asking me if I would like to appear as Edward VII in a sumptuous new thirteen-part series about his life that would be sold the world over was made, all thoughts of Billingham and the Forum vanished in a trice. Had I not already completed a season there I might have thought differently, but as a jobbing actor who obviously wished to further his career and who (together with his jobbing actor wife, who spent a good deal of her life worrying about money) had certain financial responsibilities, it was an offer I could ill afford to refuse.
‘It’s incredibly exciting, Tim,’ said Pru after we first discussed it. ‘How long did you say you’d be filming?’
‘I’m not sure. Front to back it’ll take just over a year, but I won’t be in the first few episodes.’
‘Whyever not?’
‘Because they cover Edward’s childhood. As much as I like to believe that I am not aging quickly, the process is yet to go into reverse. A succession of younger actors will play him for the first four episodes, and I appear in episode five.’
If truth be known, Charles Sturridge, who played Edward in the pre-pubertal episodes and was in his mid-twenties, could have remained in the role for several more episodes as when I took over, Edward was just twenty-three and I was over forty. Also, the lovely actress playing Alexandra alongside me in my first few episodes, Deborah Grant, had played my daughter in a play called The Italian Girl and was thirteen years my junior. I felt a bit embarrassed in the first couple of episodes, but as the king got older, I got better, and towards the end I think I may have been OK.
The schedule for recording Edward the Seventh would be unthinkable today and wildly different to Fawlty Towers. Each hourly episode was given two weeks of rehearsal, with a full week allowed for recording because some of the palace sets were so huge (there was, for instance, always a ballroom) that they couldn’t fit them all in the studio at one time. Consequently, some of the sets were erected on Sunday, and those scenes were rehearsed on Monday and shot on Tuesday. On Wednesday there was a changeover, on Thursday we rehearsed the scenes with the new sets and recorded them on a Friday. The cast had Saturday and Sunday off. Interspersed with this routine were batches of outside filming, according to season. Senior management threw their hands up in despair at what it was all costing, but in the end, the quality of the programme earned back at least four times its initial cost in immediate foreign sales.
All twelve episodes of Fawlty Towers, including rehearsals, took less than three months in total. It also cost next to nothing to make, had only four main characters, a small supporting cast and just the odd guest or two. Edward the Seventh, on the other hand, cost an absolute fortune and had no fewer than 187 speaking parts. For a television series at the time, that was almost unheard of.
One of the biggest differences for us between the two shows was that Pru had absolutely no idea that Fawlty Towers was going to be either popular or successful here in Britain, let alone overseas. In fact, because the style of humour was so different to anything that had been seen before in a British sitcom, she half expected it to fail. ‘I think it’s marvellous,’ she once said. ‘I just have an awful feeling that it might be a little too much for people. It’s almost as exhausting to watch as it is to make.’ With Edward the Seventh there were no guarantees in that department either. However, the format, which was tried and tested – historical British costume drama, yes please – the scripts, production values and cast and crew who had been assembled for the series guaranteed, at the very least, a sizeable initial audience, not to mention an inordinate amount of publicity.
I remember one day Pru asking me who else was starring in the series. We’d just started rehearsing in St John’s Wood and it was all going swimmingly.
‘Who’s playing your mum?’ Pru asked.
‘Who, Queen Vic? Annette Crosbie.’
‘Really? Oh, marvellous. I adore Annette. And your dad?’
‘Robert Hardy.’
‘Super! How’s his German accent?’
‘Faultless.’
‘You haven’t told me who’s playing Disraeli?’
‘John Gielgud.’
‘Oh, you must be thrilled!’
‘I am.’
Sir John Gielgud had been a hero of mine since childhood and when I was persuaded to play King Lear aged just thirty-seven in 1971, he’d had several words of advice for me. ‘Get a light Cordelia,’ he said, referring to the final scene of the play where Lear has to carry his daughter’s dead body.
‘What else happened today?’ Pru asked after I’d finished reeling off rest of the cast, which, while we’re here, included Charles Dance, Michael Hordern, Helen Ryan, Felicity Kendal, Edward Hardwicke, Richard Vernon and Jane Lapotaire. Not bad.
‘Well,’ I began, ‘I was stopped by two members of the public on my way to the rehearsal room this morning who each asked me what I was working on now.’
‘That was kind of them. And what did they say when you told them? I hope they were impressed.’
‘Not really. One of them commented, “Oh, I can’t stand Shakespeare,” before walking off, and the other asked, “Who’s playing Mrs Simpson?”’
Funnily enough, those who still recollect the series are often convinced that it was about Henry VIII. ‘I saw you as Henry VIII,’ they say resolutely. I suppose there are certain superficial similarities between the two monarchs, but you’d think they’d notice that over the 294 years separating them the royal barge had been replaced by a motorcar. Or perhaps not?
Seven-year-old Sam and four-year-old Joe were in one episode of Edward the Seventh playing the two sons, Prince Albert Victor and Prince George.
‘Where will we be filming, Daddy?’ Sam asked me.
‘Well, we’ll be filming the exterior scenes at Sandringham House,’ I informed him, ‘which is where the Queen lives sometimes, and the interior scenes in a studio, where they’ll be filming you and Joe having a tea party.’ That went down rather well if I remember.
Other estimable locations we used for Edward the Seventh included Windsor Castle, St Paul’s Cathedral, Wilton’s Music Hall in East London and Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. The tea-party scene, which was by far the longest featuring the boys, took an absolute age to film, partly due to the fact that young Joe had three words of dialogue to deliver – ‘So do I’ – which took most of the afternoon to get him to say. We all had great fun, however, and one of my favourite photographs was of the boys and me, taken in costume on the steps outside Sandringham House during a break in filming.
As we’d hoped, Edward the Seventh was received very well on its release. In the United States, they changed the name of the series to simply Edward the King, as it was feared that Edward the Seventh would lead viewers to believe that they may have missed Edward the Fifth and Edward the Sixth a couple of weeks back. They don’t like programmes with numbers in over there. It won four awards at the 1976 BAFTA Television Awards, including for Best Actress, which was won deservedly by Annette Crosbie.
I have nothing but fond memories of making the show and have always felt rather sorry for the somewhat marginalized monarch. He had a pretty awful life, really: disapproved of by his mother; an unhappy childhood leading to a furtive adolescence; a long period of frustration as the ageing heir to the throne, finally to become king at fifty-nine, when he had rather run out of energy. In the TV series we had hoped to perhaps rectify the popular image of him as simply a womanizing, race-going hedonist. But to some people, it seems, he will always be Henry VIII in different trousers.
One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1982, Pru came into my study after she’d been pottering in the garden and caught me guffawing rather loudly.
‘What’s so funny?’ she asked.
‘It’s this,’ I said, waving the script I was holding. ‘I haven’t read anything so amusing in years.’
‘Let me have a look.’
‘No! I haven’t finished yet.’
The script was for a new television series called Brass and had arrived the previous Friday, but because I’d been doing other things, my agent had had to prompt me to take a look at it.
‘You’ll love it,’ he said. ‘It’s a pastiche, really, of soap operas and all those big expensive American TV dramas like Dallas and Dynasty.’
I must admit I was more bemused by his description than anything else and had no idea what to expect. But from the very first page of the script I was hooked, and while I totally understood my agent’s references to Dallas and Dynasty, I saw it more as a pastiche of the north of England. J.B. Priestly, L.S. Lowry, Love on the Dole, Coronation Street – nothing was sacred. Indeed, just a few years previously I had had the pleasure of playing the successful but interminably uncouth northern factory owner Josiah Bounderby in a television adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. He and the super-capitalist mill owner Bradley Hardacre, the character I had been asked to play in Brass, were like two peas in a pod.
‘Do you really like it?’ I asked Pru after she’d read the first script.
‘Oh, I do, Tim,’ she said. ‘You must do it.’
The series had been written by two men who couldn’t have been less alike – an acerbic Mancunian called John Stevenson and an eccentric Shropshire landowner called Julian Roach – and after I had accepted the role we began to meet once a week in an abandoned office equidistant from their respective homes to plan Bradley Hardacre’s next adventure.
The cast that Granada ended up assembling for Brass was top drawer and included Caroline Blakiston as my dipsomaniac wife, Barbara Ewing as my mistress, and Geoffrey Hinsliff as her husband, who also happened to be my faithful cap-doffing foreman.
I accepted the part of Bradley Hardacre on the understanding that the recordings would take place without a studio audience and that no laughter track would be used. ‘A spoof,’ I argued, as did John and Julian, ‘must be as authentic as possible.’ Granada didn’t agree at first and fought back but the writers and I were resolute. ‘If half the studio is taken up by an audience,’ we argued, ‘it will limit what we can do. Also, if people are laughing every two minutes we’ll have to stop, which again will frustrate the realism.’
Fortunately, the director, Gareth Jones, and producer, Bill Podmore, agreed with us, although for quite some time Granada continued to argue their case. There was almost an unwritten law in television at the time that comedy shows should either have audiences and/or a laughter track, and if that wasn’t the case they should be re-written if necessary and made as a drama. What we were suggesting, then, was the creation of a new production ethos. Unthinkable!
I don’t know how we did it but in the end we managed to persuade our paymasters that this was the way to go and so without any further ado we decamped to the town of Ramsbottom in Lancashire and started filming.
Even God seemed to be delighted that Brass had gone into production. It rained appropriately when filming in and around the rows of terraced houses in Ramsbottom, which served well as the humble dwellings of my poor downtrodden workforce, whereas at nearby Holcombe House, which served as the opulent domain of the Hardacre family, the sun would shine almost constantly.
The reason I decided to mention Brass wasn’t so I could give you chapter and verse about how we made it, which would no doubt send you to sleep. No, the reason I wanted to include it (in addition to being rather proud of it) is because it is one of the most enjoyable things I have ever had the pleasure of doing as an actor and I remember making it with great affection. Simple as that, really.
I asked Pru if she had her own version of this and at first she couldn’t bring anything to mind.
‘How about Mapp & Lucia,’ I suggested. ‘You had a marvellous time making that.’
Suddenly Pru’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘With Nigel Hawthorne and dear Geraldine McEwan. Are they still with us?’
‘I’m afraid they aren’t.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Pru, sitting back in her chair. ‘That is sad.’
Not everyone will agree with this, but I always tell Pru the truth in these situations, out of respect more than anything. She may not have much of a short-term memory but although she needs protecting I don’t hold with lying to her, not unless it’s absolutely necessary.
We spent the next hour or so reminiscing about Mapp & Lucia, and to help jog Pru’s memory I played her part of an episode. Just in case you aren’t familiar with the show, Mapp & Lucia was based on a series of comic novels by E.F. Benson that were written in the 1920s about two women – Mrs Mapp, played by Pru, and Lucia, played by Geraldine – and their struggle for social dominance in their local community.
The show became enormously popular in America, apparently, and especially with the gay community. Indeed, I remember Geraldine McEwan once telling Pru and me that after its release in the United States the gay community of New York started holding gossipy English tea parties based on those that were given by Mrs Mapp.
I used to visit Pru a great deal while she was filming Mapp & Lucia, and for the very simple reason that I found the town in which it was filmed, which was Rye in East Sussex, absolutely fascinating. It appeared to be stuck in the 1920s. While obviously being an ideal location for the show, you couldn’t actually tell the actors from the residents.
‘I went to buy some crochet wool in full costume the other day,’ Pru told me one day, ‘and no one took a blind bit of notice!’