For fifteen weeks’ work The Young Ones packs a big punch.
The zenith of my cult notoriety comes somewhere during the broadcasting of the second series. I still have Vyvyan’s orange hair (it takes a while for the dye to wash out) and I’m walking along Shaftesbury Avenue thinking about – I dunno – wah wah pedals, or lunch, when I hear a teenage girl’s voice proclaim: ‘It’s him!’ I look round with mild interest to see who she’s talking about, there must be someone famous in the vicinity, and immediately deduce it is me. She is looking at me, and I am ‘him’.
She’s with a group of friends and they suddenly start running across the busy road towards me, a couple of them let out little squeals of delight and these sounds alert other teenagers who, like hyenas, take up the clarion call and join in. It isn’t quite The Beatles at Paddington Station, I’m talking around a dozen people, mostly girls, running towards me. But they run pell-mell. And I have to tell you, it’s not a nice feeling. It makes you quite panicky. I imagine it’s how the fox feels. My instinct, like his, is to run. And that’s what I do.
I dart into Soho, where I figure my superior knowledge of the back alleys will give me an advantage, and the fact that they reek so strongly of urine will surely help put them off the scent: up Dean Street I shoot, down Bourchier Street, which looks like a dead end but isn’t, a quick right onto Wardour, down Meard, left back onto Dean, sneaky left into Richmond Mews and then into the multi-storey car park where the current Soho Hotel now stands and hide behind a Ford Cortina. And I lose them. Gone to ground.
I can hear ‘Two Tribes’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood playing on some car radio, and whilst my situation isn’t quite Reagan v Chernenko, I’m glad to have escaped.
And that’s my one brush with ‘screamers’. I don’t envy The Beatles, or The Bay City Rollers or David Cassidy.
A few years later I’m cast in a four-part series called If You See God Tell Him with Richard Briers and Imelda Staunton.
Richard Briers is a witty and self-deprecating bloke who likes to remind everyone that he won the silver medal at RADA in his year. He does this not to brag, but because he likes pretending to be bitter about not winning gold. Or is he pretending? Whichever, he likes the joke of casting himself as second rate.
‘I could probably do this scene better if I wasn’t just a simple silver medal winner.’
He treats me with suspicion when I turn up. And quite rightly. Anyone watching series two of The Young Ones will have seen Vyvyan’s rant about The Good Life:
‘NO, NO, NO, NO! WE ARE NOT WATCHING THE BLOODY GOOD LIFE! BLOODY, BLOODY, BLOODY! I HATE IT! IT’S SO BLOODY NICE! FELICITY “TREACLE” KENDAL, AND RICHARD “SUGAR-FLAVOURED SNOT” BRIERS! WHAT DO THEY DO KNOW? CHOCOLATE BLOODY BUTTON ADS, THAT’S WHAT! THEY’RE NOTHING BUT A COUPLE OF REACTIONARY STEREOTYPES, CONFIRMING THE MYTH THAT EVERYONE IN BRITAIN IS A LOVABLE MIDDLE-CLASS ECCENTRIC, AND I! HATE! THEM!’
On our first meeting Richard quotes it to me more or less verbatim.
It takes quite a lot of reversing out of. I tell him I wasn’t the writer, I was just the actor – but that sounds a bit like the Nazi guard saying he was ‘only following orders’. I tell him that The Good Life has stood the test of time much better than The Young Ones which is already looking a bit dated, and that the scene on the raft wasn’t funny, and the puppets were a bit crap. He likes that.
But mostly I get through because it’s the very early days of ‘trailers’ on film sets. Indeed our ‘trailer’ – and it’s just the one trailer for the three of us – is just a small touring caravan, the type an elderly couple might tow to Bridlington for the weekend. Richard, myself and Imelda are wedged in around the tiny dining table. There’s nowhere to escape to.
This is one of the most delightful parts of being an actor – the way you suddenly find yourself living cheek by jowl with other people for as much as twelve hours a day. There’s nowhere to hide, and you either bond or fall out big time. Luckily with Richard, I bond. Mostly because we have something in common – like me he’s famous for sitcom, but talking to him it becomes clear he often feels like an actor stuck in a comedian’s body.
The most bizarre Young Ones-related event takes place in Los Angeles in 1989. I’m out there working as a director, shooting a video for a band called The Innocence Mission, for a song called ‘Black Sheep Wall’. It’s their debut album and the record company have thrown a lot of money at the first single: they want a video, a posh video, and my posh video for ‘Hourglass’ by Squeeze has just won two MTV awards, so I get the call. Hollywood here I come.
Never been asked back . . .
We’re filming away on the Chaplin stage – to be honest it’s not my best work, the singer plays a child’s piano as she remembers scenes from her childhood – when there’s a kerfuffle in the far corner of the studio. Though kerfuffle is perhaps the wrong word. There’s no noise, it’s just a kind of psychic wave. Perhaps this is what communication between trees feels like – because without anything being said, without any pointing or gesticulating, everyone in the vast studio is suddenly aware that someone unexpected has come in, and what’s more, everyone is in awe of this person. And the person is Joni Mitchell. I know it’s her, a) because I know it’s her, and b) because my wife absolutely bloody loves Joni Mitchell. If Jennifer had been there instead of me she might have had an attack of the vapours. And it’s not that I don’t like Joni Mitchell. I love Joni Mitchell, I’m just not as obsessive a fan as my wife; I regard Joni as a Naiad or a Muse rather than an Olympian, and these very different levels of worship make what happens next all the more surprising.
Because, as I’m looking over to see who it is, and I see it’s Joni Mitchell, she catches me looking at her. We’re about fifty yards apart and, to be fair, everyone in the studio is looking at her, however surreptitiously, but our eyes seem to have locked onto each other. Like a tractor beam in Star Trek. And I don’t know what the etiquette is here – how did I get caught up in this? Should I break eye contact first, or would that be rude? Would that be dismissing her, dishonouring her? Would that be ranking the icon who’s sold 15 million albums below the young ingenue currently playing a kid’s piano in front of me?
But while I’m trying to work this out, I am of course still staring at her, and she, whilst maintaining her gaze, begins to stride towards me, a stride that breaks into a run. It’s quite a big studio, the Charlie Chaplin stage. And I’m thinking, this is an alarming turn of events, I’ve obviously broken some unspoken law and she’s gonna hit me!
And she’s closing in. And I’m bracing myself. But when she reaches me she throws her arms around me and hugs me. So tightly. And then – this is true – she pulls back and kisses me. On the lips. A platonic kiss, no tongues, she’s not a sex pest or anything, an affectionate kiss. And I’m thinking, she’s got the wrong bloke, this could go to court when she finds out. And then she holds me at arm’s length, so she can get a good look at me, and she says, ‘Adrian [Adrian! I’m suddenly thinking maybe it’s not such a bad name after all], Adrian, I’m so happy to meet you, whenever we have Young Ones parties I always play Vyvyan.’
That is the exact sentence. ‘Whenever we have Young Ones parties I always play Vyvyan.’ Which means that Young Ones parties in the Mitchell household have happened more than two or three times, don’t you think? So they have regular Young Ones parties, AND they all dress up, and Joni Mitchell, well-known hippy and wearer of floaty dresses – she dresses up as the punk Vyvyan. I’m imagining Dave Crosby as Rik, Steve Stills as Mike, and Neil Young as Neil.
My feelings about being recognized in the street are different to Rik’s. They’re not better or worse – this isn’t a value judgement – they’re just different. To be blunt, I don’t enjoy it, it makes me uncomfortable. I find it awkward, and it’s generally such a one-sided transaction.
And once you get sucked into believing you’re ‘famous’ you can be instantly disappointed because, of course, most people don’t know who you are.
In the early eighties I do a charity gala at the Victoria Palace Theatre and The Police – the band, not the rozzers – are on the same bill. It’s during a time when I’ve allowed my hair to return to its natural blond, and when I come to leave the theatre after the show the stage door swings open to an alarming shriek of excitement, and a frightening surge forward. A large throng of teenage girls see my shock of blond hair as the door opens and mistake me, however briefly (stop laughing), for Sting or Stewart Copeland or Andy Summers. They all have blond hair. We all have blond hair. Then they see my stupid glasses and spotty face and the surge recedes as if from a medieval leper ringing a bell, the crowd opens like the Red Sea and I walk the gauntlet of disappointment. I can hear them tutting. To be mis-recognized is almost more embarrassing than being recognized. It’s as if I’ve broken their trust.
Conversely, when you mix with the incredibly famous you sometimes get the ability to go incognito, it’s like wearing an invisibility cloak.
By the late nineties Jennifer’s show Absolutely Fabulous is in its pomp and plans are afoot to remake it in America for an American audience. The British version is already very popular in America, so why anyone thinks this is a good idea is beyond nearly everyone involved, but Jerry Hall gets wind of it, and as our children go to the same school she buttonholes Jennifer at the school gate and declares her interest in playing Patsy. Jennifer is non-committal but Jerry invites us round to dinner to ‘talk further’ about it.
I want to go, and I don’t want to go. It will involve meeting Mick Jagger. I loved Mick Jagger as a teenager. I loved The Rolling Stones. As you know, Gimme Shelter was the first album I ever bought – the way I chose to define myself at school. To be honest, I stopped listening after Exile on Main Street, but I know the early albums inside out – they were a significant part of my early teenage rebellion. As far as I’m concerned, now that Presley is dead, Mick is the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, and I fear this might be a hard standard to live up to. I am not wrong.
Turning up at the Jagger/Hall house Jerry opens the door dressed as Patsy from AbFab. She’s basically auditioning, so it’s awkward from the start. She tells us Mick is upstairs having his eyebrows dyed because he’s about to go on tour, and we sit making stuttering small talk until a Filipino maid calls us for dinner.
We sit down in a dingy basement dining area and Mick deigns to join us. His eyebrows look fabulous, if slightly incongruous on his wrinkly old face. I don’t think he’s seen AbFab but he seems aware that Jennifer is a writer or something, and that Jerry wants to impress her, though it’s obvious he’d rather be somewhere else, that this is a duty, and his behaviour borders on sulky teenager. I really enjoy this about him – this is the surly revolutionary I was hoping for.
He thinks I’m Jennifer’s manager and calls me Andrew. Jerry corrects him, saying my name is Adam. I roll with it – perhaps this is going to be more fun if I don’t have to explain myself. The maid serves what looks like a school dinner. And at this point Mick notices there is no wine on the table. Now, you don’t get to be a knight of the realm without understanding some basic dinner party etiquette so he says he doesn’t drink wine but asks Jennifer if she would like some. Jennifer, a keen imbiber, says ‘yes’, and Jerry looks worried and leaves the room. She comes back a couple of minutes later with a bottle of plonk; it’s half full and has a wrap of clingfilm around the top.
‘Does wine like kinda go off?’ she asks.
It becomes evident that this is the only bottle of wine in the King of Rock ’n’ Roll’s house. The man was a byword for debauchery in the sixties but there is no booze. We assure Jerry that good wine has a shelf life of hundreds of years and eagerly drink a glass each of cooking sherry. And that is the end of the ‘wine’. And more or less the end of the evening. And the end of my absolute hero worship. Come on, Mick, there are standards.
Jerry doesn’t get the part. Acting is a tough business.