Simon Fanshawe Blog

John Inman is dead. But Mr Humphries is alive and well in a number of surprising hearts. Mine included. “Are You being Served?” ran for a gratifyingly suggestive 69 episodes between 1972 and 1985. And many gay men hated it. We protested against it. But in the last ten years or so, reassured by retro and equipped with a political and social confidence we never had before, we embraced the mince and took John Inman to our hearts. One gay friend claims he has never shrieked “I’m free!” – even in his weakest moments. But he’s the only one. What changed? Society changed.

He’s a Home Counties boy who flays the middle-classes from his base in Yorkshire, a shy man whose inner turmoil comes out in his plays, a comic writer of world renown - yet the critics are divided about his reputation. Simon Fanshawe on a very modern Molière

Alan Ayckbourn was explaining how his plays become hits to a man who runs amusement arcade slot machines in Scarborough . First, they’re tried out in the resort’s theatre, next they transfer to the West End, “then, if I’m lucky, they go to America or Holland or wherever. And each place they go, I get paid.”

“More Vodka, please” goes up the shout. The shoes have come off. The feet are tucked under the star on the sofa in the press office of the National Theatre. The umpteenth liquorice roll-up has been smoked and as it’s a Friday evening a second double seems entirely reasonable after a long week and only the second complete run-through of her new play, Battle Royal about the marriage between George IVth and Caroline of Brunswick which opens on December 9th. The PR obliges and the conversation about Greek tragedy, because of her huge success on Broadway earlier this year with Sophocles’ Elektra, and Caroline continues, punctuated by much amusement and the throatiest of laughs, somewhere between Tallulah Bankhead and a much rougher sandpaper.

The first fifteen minutes of Victoria Wood’s first ever sit com, the self-explanatory ‘dinner ladies’ seems a terrible disappointment. You’ve been here before. You know what a Victoria Wood joke sounds like. Sex, net curtains and a Gypsy Cream.
Two minutes in and the randy factory canteen manager says to his deputy Bren, Wood’s own salt-of the-earther,
“Get any at the weekend?”
“Sex? No I had to go to the launderette”
Collapse of studio audience.
Later
“Are you too busy to have an orgasm?”
”Orgasm? I haven’t blown my nose since Wednesday.”
Hysterical roars from the women in the studio and what sounds like some of them making up for lost time. In ‘dinner ladies’ the deliveryman has “fallen off diving boards in Guernsey” and consequently is “unable to stand on coconut matting” and the poignant middle-aged handyman asserts his authority via old-fashioned values and the Dunkirk spirit of lower middle England. “My father was a desert rat, he shaved in the sand. So that toaster stays put.” It’s bungalow, semi-detached comedy of working class domestic detail. What makes you laugh is ‘Guernsey’ and ‘coconut matting’, the juxtaposition of a World War against the Nazis and where the toaster goes in the kitchen. It’s a way of elevating normal language so that it’s almost naturalistic, but not quite. Joe Orton knew how to do it, Alan Bennett still does and Victoria Wood is now a past mistress. She’s been at it for fourteen years since Victoria Wood… was first ‘Seen On TV’ in 1984. And it’s beginning to feel like a formula.

When Saturday Night Fever became a global epidemic in the late seventies it gave fat office workers, thin shop assistants, in fact wage slaves the world over a path to stardom in their own heads. White flares were their flight path to fantasy. Bouffant and blow drys were their halos of self-confidence. Couples pranced to the beat like ridiculous Lipizzaner horses owning the world if only for a night. And Travolta was King. The story of Tony Manero, the boy from a Brooklyn paint store made Divine by the flashing chequerboard of the neon dance floor, at last gave a dramatic thrust to the frustration of millions of blue collar workers whose window of freedom lasted only from six on Friday to clocking on again on Monday. Dancing was the elixir of lives lived only at the weekend. Disco was the Ecstasy of the Seventies. And before anyone else realised it, the producer Robert Stigwood did. He understood people who lived to blow it all on a Saturday night, because that’s how he lived. Only he did it every day.

Simon Russell Beale took up embroidery, he once told me, because everyone else at the RSC seemed to have a hobby and he thought he’d better get one too. It was a typical Russell Beale thing to do. A Clifton boy, he has a public school enthusiasm for joining in. But it also shows just how shrewd a man he is. Why choose a hobby like rowing, painting or bridge and disappear into the crowd, when you can sit in note sessions after rehearsals silently stitching your Kafe Fassett embroidery hoop being rather deliberately, yet also naively, rather eccentric?

“Where’s the car?” said Shirley Bassey. “The car should be here. You shouldn’t have sent it away.” We have to walk from the Langham Hilton in Portland Place to the BBC, which is also in Portland Place. In fact if it wasn’t for the pedestrian crossing that separates the two buildings, they’d be on the same side of the road as each other. But for a moment Shirley Bassey is being “Ladies and Gentlemen… Miss Shirley Bassey”. She is accompanied by a small posse of men - me, her manager, her assistant, her PR - and also a light drizzle. But they tell her not to worry. They sent the car away because it’s only a short walk. In fact it’s much further than they thought because the reception has temporarily been moved. But with no wailing, whingeing or stamping of celebrity foot, she just gets on with it. And through the wet we walk to the BBC.

Raid your memories of Ronnie Barker and characters will tumble through your mind as if you were rifling through the picture archive at a casting agent. Butlers, businessmen, blusterers and stammerers, lags and lushes, old farts, young letches, tramps and viscounts, lecturers on every subject from basic Swedish to milk, and spokesmen for clubs and societies that had previously lurked only in a seldom dusted corner of the civic realm of Britain like the Loyal Society for the Relief of Sufferers from Pismonunciation to the Getting your Wrongs in the Word Order Society. His hallmark was accuracy. His craft mattered more to him than anything else in his life.

Nick Park has to think how old he is. “I’m thirteeee…..um……eight. Thirty nine soon.” He started making movies when he was “Twelve…….um no…..thirteen.” He says ‘um’ and ‘er’ and ‘kind of’ quite a lot. And for a while when you first meet him, he gives the best possible impression of still being 13 going on 39, a grown-up schoolboy. He laughs nervously never mind how deftly you try to sidle up to personal questions without frightening him, he uses words like “scary” and when he sits on the big sofa in the hotel in Bristol just down the road from Aardman studios he looks like one of the Borrowers who’s ventured above the floorboards into the human’s house. Even when he received the Freedom of the City of Preston, his birthplace, last month (under section 249 (5) of the Local Government Act 1972, if you want to suggest someone you know) he stood up in the Council Chamber to make a speech, smiled apprehensively and began “Gosh…” Oh no, we thought, there must be stink bombs in the Town Hall and a frog in his pocket. He looked like a messy and not so promising pupil sheepishly accepting a tidiness award.

Matt Damon smokes. A lot. And he drinks proper coffee. He’s a movie star but caffeine and Marlboro lights are not very LA. But then Damon isn’t. He is an East Coast boy, born in Cambridge Massachusetts, he studied English at Harvard (although he dropped out to become an actor) and now lives in New York. And it shows. It shows in the kind of people he hangs out with in the movie world - more with Soderberg than Spielberg. It shows in the kind of movies he chooses to do - recently The Bourne Identity directed by the indy award winner Doug Liman rather than Planet of the Apes. In fact it shows in all his movies from Good Will Hunting through Rounders to the Talented Mr Ripley, Damon always plays smart.