Authors: David Essex
We shot our guns at the enemy and the director raised himself from his torpor to request another take. The battered-looking FX man refilled my musket but was clearly a little generous with the proportions because when the order to fire came, my gun went off like a cannon, blowing back and shooting gunpowder and flint into my eye.
The pain was excruciating but being both a trouper and a bloke, I declared that I was OK and indicated I would carry on filming. The film crew seemed perfectly satisfied with this, but Christopher Lee stepped in and insisted that I should go to hospital. With a look of inconvenience, the director reluctantly agreed and packed me off with an interpreter.
The first hospital we visited was closed for a holiday, which seemed unorthodox, but at the second one a white-coated doctor examined me pretty quickly. He clearly didn’t like what he found because the interpreter informed me: ‘The doctor says he must operate immediately.’
The doc led me to a basic operating room with a bed and various bits of surgical equipment littered around, and then vanished. As I sat on the bed, a middle-aged nurse appeared and washed some of the gear in a sink, which would have been very hygienic and laudable were it not for the fag hanging off her bottom lip.
So I was in a second-choice hospital in a close-on third world country, a nurse was smoking in the surgical room and a doctor who didn’t speak my language was about to operate on my badly burned eye. What could possibly go wrong?
If I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I soon learned that I was mistaken, as the doctor returned and it became evident that he was to perform the operation without anything as tiresome as an anaesthetic. Grasping a giant scalpel that looked to me more like a broadsword, he began to scrape and dig about in my eye.
It hurt, a lot, but after a few minutes of apparently productive excavation, the doctor nodded with satisfaction and smiled, at which point the nurse put out her fag to administer the stitches with what looked like the kind of rope you would use to tie up a fishing boat. I thanked them, but as I drove back to my hotel, my eye ached like crazy.
The next morning it was just as sore, not to mention extremely red and swollen, and filming was clearly out of the question for me for a few days. The director suggested that I took a week off and went home to have it checked out so the next morning I boarded a plane to London.
As I have learned, bad news travels fast in media circles and I was met at Heathrow by scores of Fleet Street’s finest jostling to get pictures of the wounded pop star. Even some TV news
cameras
were there, which surprised me as I had no idea how they had gotten wind of my mishap.
The following morning I travelled to Harley Street to see (well, as well as I could) a bow-tied eminent eye specialist named Eric Arnott who had done a lot of work with cataract sufferers in the developing world. I was braced for bad news, but Eric surprised me: ‘Whoever did this did a brilliant job,’ he said. ‘I guarantee when the stitches are out, the scar will be almost invisible.’
Eric explained that the Yugoslav doctor had done the right thing to operate immediately as gunpowder is highly corrosive and would have eaten my eye away in a matter of hours, leaving me blind on that side. I gratefully decided that on my return to Belgrade I would take the doctor a bottle of whisky to thank him – and, of course, a packet of fags for the nurse.
After a week or so I was once again ‘Ka-boom!’-ing and ‘Whoosh!’-ing on the
Shogun Mayeda
set. As a baddie, Don Pedro was inevitably to meet a sticky end, and eventually the time came to film the climax that involved Sho slicing me in two with a Samurai sword in a fight to the death in fast-moving rapids.
I clearly had some kind of death wish making that film because I decided to do the stunt myself. Wearing a suit of armour, I had to clunk around in a rapidly flowing river, bouncing off rocks as I battled Sho, before being swept away. Thankfully, the special effect splitting me in half would be added later.
The Japanese fight trainers had slung ropes over the riverbanks for me to grab on to and after Sho had finally vanquished me in a flurry of ka-booms and whooshes, I fell backwards like a discarded tin can. The powerful rapids carried me downstream,
crashing
off the rocks, and I missed a lot of the strategically placed ropes before finally grasping the very last one.
Wet and probably rusting, I was hauled in to land with my heart pounding to be greeted by a round of applause from the smiling Japanese. I am led to believe – as you would hope – that
Shogun Mayeda
was very big in Japan.
Nearer to home, Derek and Mel were normally besieged before each Christmas with requests for me to appear in pantomimes but we had always turned them down. Even two decades on, the memories of lizard-tongued brown bears and Dandini were still painful, and more importantly the vast majority of the scripts that we got sent were cheesy rubbish.
Nevertheless, I have no snobbery towards the art form and I think pantos are very important. Normally they are a child’s first initiation into theatre and if the production is not only bright and colourful but also has depth and intelligence, who is to say they won’t be hooked and return in later years to see Shakespeare or Chekhov?
Driven by these noble ideals, I decided to write my own panto and to base it around
Robinson Crusoe
. I dutifully read the classic Daniel Defoe novel but have to confess that I found it rather heavy-going and didn’t draw too deeply upon it.
It seemed highly ironic to me that after
Mutiny!
I was willingly undertaking another project based around boats and sailing. A psychiatrist may even detect a degree of masochism there, because boats and I have never got on.
Over the years I have suffered a few red-faced sailing-related moments, not least a holiday in Florida when a company let me
take
out a turbo-charged powerboat, figuring it would be safe as I was a trained helicopter pilot. With Verity and Dan on board, I immediately went the wrong way around a buoy and smashed the propeller on some rocks. We had to call out the US Coastguard to rescue us.
Verity and Dan were also with me on a boat on the Thames when I decided to circumvent the tiresome lock system by sailing around them. It took an astonished fisherman to warn me to turn back before I reached a concrete weir that we would have had no chance of avoiding.
Despite this, I seem destined to tackle nautical subjects and so began work on
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
. Together with friend and writer David Joss Buckley and a great director, Robin Midgley, we took fairly large liberties with Defoe’s now outdated plot and came up with a storyline full of magic, hexes and that staple panto theme, the battle of good versus evil.
We were also mindful to ensure that Robinson Crusoe’s friend and sidekick, Man Friday, was treated in an enlightened and respectful manner. Pantos did not use to be the most PC of productions, and I still cringe at the memory of one
Crusoe
I saw where Man Friday did nothing except jump up and down in a monkey suit.
I approached the show as I would any musical, writing original songs for it and also recycling some of the score from
Mutiny!
We eschewed women dressed as men but had a tremendous pantomime dame, and Robin cast Verity, who was by now a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, as my daughter.
We did a run of
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford and to my surprise and delight it broke their box-office records. It was such a special experience for me to act with Verity, especially as it was so obvious from her voice and presence that her casting was down to talent, not nepotism.
At subsequent Christmases, we transferred
Crusoe
to Liver-pool, Bournemouth, Southampton, Edinburgh and Cardiff and it was always a great experience. Robin always directed and the main cast members of Micky O’Donoughue, John Labanowski and Bobby Bennett remained largely unchanged, which gave the company a real family feel.
Musically, I have always sweated over my albums, writing long and hard into the wee small hours of the night as I strive to touch that ghost and perfect the orchestration and arrangements. It therefore made a pleasant change in 1993 when I went into the studio with Mike Batt and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to record an album of cover versions.
Cover Shot
saw me re-interpret songs I had loved over the years by a host of artists, including the Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’, Cat Stevens’ ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest’, America’s ‘A Horse With No Name’, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Summer in the City’ and a new take on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It Black’ that I was particularly pleased with.
Cover Shot
was primarily a labour of love and I had no idea at all what people would make of it, but it must have touched a nerve because it peaked in the album chart at number three – my first Top Ten album in eighteen years.
Meanwhile, the constant flights to Connecticut and back were draining and time-consuming and so I was delighted when Carlotta, Kit and Bill moved over to live with me. Time had flown and the twins were ready to go to school, and we decided to start their education in England. I just loved having the family together again and we moved to St John’s Wood, north London.
My TV sitcoms, ninja movies, pantomimes and covers albums of recent years had not necessarily all been to Derek’s taste but he could not have been more elated by the next work offer that came my way in 1993. Sir Peter Hall, the Royal Shakespeare Company founder and former director of the National Theatre, asked me to appear in Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy of manners
She Stoops to Conquer
.
I almost felt like I owed it to Derek to do it but in truth I was very wary. While I was sure the experience of working with Sir Peter would be invaluable, I had never attempted any of the classics before, the quality of the cast was daunting, and all in all it seemed a little too far out of my comfort zone, even for me.
Even so, I agreed to take on the part of the scheming Tony Lumpkin and rehearsals began in mid-summer ’93. The august Sir Donald Sinden played Mr Hardcastle, my stepfather, while national treasure Miriam Margoyles was my mother. Virtually the whole of the rest of the cast were classically trained actors. No pressure, then.
Even after all those years treading the boards, the world of high theatre was new to me and I found the rehearsals nerve-wracking. It was all very thespian and I didn’t really care for the play, which seemed to be two hours of gobbledegook. The days
dragged,
with the high point being the ride home through the warm summer evenings on my Triumph Bonneville.
Donald, Miriam and the rest of the cast were tremendous and very supportive but I still felt like an outsider and Sir Peter’s directing style didn’t help. He was the first director that I had ever worked with who spent rehearsals with his nose in the text and hardly watched the performances in front of him. It could be frustrating, but I just told myself, ‘Look, this is Sir Peter Hall! He knows exactly what he is doing.’
She Stoops to Conquer
opened with a week in Leatherhead in Surrey and then embarked on a tour of Britain. The audiences and reviews were good wherever we went, and Sir Donald and Miriam had an excellent understanding and rapport that won them a lot of laughs.
The lovely Miriam is larger-than-life in more ways than one and we had a bit of a mishap at the Festival Theatre in Chichester. One scene required me to hoist her over my shoulder and exit stage left, but I took a tumble and dropped her roughly on to a flight of stairs. Miriam was unhurt, but I tore the ligaments in my ankle.
The accident had happened just before the play transferred to its West End run at the Queen’s Theatre, which meant I would have to appear with a walking stick. We also hit a few problems as Sir Peter decided to revamp the production, strip away some of the niceties we had developed in the provinces, and get back to his beloved text in a more purist fashion.
Sir Peter also wanted to rethink my character in a way that I didn’t really agree with. He decided to play Tony Lumpkin as
more
of a country bumpkin, with a lot more ‘Ooh aah!’ going on, which for me turned my role from two hours of talking gobbledegook into two hours of talking gobbledegook in a funny accent. There was even talk for a while of me wearing a ginger wig and a fat suit. I thankfully persuaded him out of that one but I didn’t see the need for all the changes. Was it just panic, and fear of the London critics?
To cap it all, when the London opening night rolled around I got food poisoning. The stage crew thoughtfully positioned buckets at strategic points in the wings but I could hardly get through my performance and in retrospect I certainly shouldn’t have gone on. It was an awful night, the reviews were poor and mine were particularly dreadful: again, it seemed, I was the pop star who was refusing to stay in his box, and getting ideas above his station.
The play limped into the New Year, quite literally in my case. Things were better at home, where Carlotta, Kit and Bill were happy in London. My parents were still out in the wilds of deepest Essex, and we began looking at finding them a place closer to us so they could see more of their grandkids. That was before I received a phone call from a hospital in Essex in my dressing room during the matinee of
She Stoops to Conquer
on Wednesday 24 January 1994.
My dad had died.
The world stopped. He had done what? How? Why? I asked to speak to my mum but as she took the phone she was clearly still in a state of shock. She told me that my dad had decided to have a short nap after his lunch. When she went to wake him, he had gone. A heart attack, apparently. It was that simple.
My mind was racing. What should I do? Dash from the theatre to the hospital? Finish the matinee? I tried to think what Dad would have wanted me to do. Surely he would have said that the show must go on? After all, he had never given up on anything in his entire life.