Authors: Mike Read
The first time I was written into a Dennis the Menace strip where his dog Gnasher has gone missing and Dennis pops into my studio to ask if I can help. Top stuff. My second
Beano
appearance was in a Biffo the Bear story, with, rather bizarrely, a woodpecker carving my face in a tree in the final frame. The trio of appearances was rounded off by being the subject of a whole Billy Whizz page, with the speedy schoolboy hero desperate to hear the show and hoping that his uncle is going to buy him a mug that we were giving away on Radio One at the time, Mike Read’s Tee Hee Mug. There were also appearances in lesser organs, such as
Oink!
, where I had my guitar stuffed down my throat, much to the consternation of a brace of perplexed doctors. I was featured in my
Saturday Superstore
persona in
Whizzer and Chips
and as one of Roy Race’s mates in
Roy of the Rovers
. I popped up again in a 1981 issue after Roy had been shot (shades of JR in
Dallas
) and a few of his friends were asked to send ‘get well’ messages. Cripes, I was in esteemed company on that double-page spread, alongside Morecambe & Wise, Alf Ramsey, Kevin Keegan, Trevor Francis, Malcolm McLaren and Lawrie McMenemy.
As was alluded to in the Preface, even the cobbling together of this book was not without some excitement. By the end of 2012 I had written just short of 100,000 words. Whether any of it made any sense I can no longer judge, as some lazy bastard who couldn’t be bothered to work broke in and, stole my car, my laptop and my cards. The car and the cards were sortable of course, but the laptop contained the second novel, the autobiography, the history of the FA Cup Final and hundreds more literary gems. I know, I know, I should have backed it up. You’re right, of course, and I do now. Horse, stable, door, bolted. Got it. I’ll never write the novel again, but with this weighty tome I had to start from scratch. If you don’t like it, I can always claim the original to be superior.
F
ILMS? INDEED, SAY
I, films. Not blockbusters, I grant you, but certainly the silver screen. No Baftas or Golden Globes, but every iceberg with its glittering peak has nine-tenths submerged. My film career so far is the submerged part.
Where to begin? Well, to be frank, the distance between the start and the finish is not all that great. In the late ’80s, I was asked to be in a film about rock & roll. I have no recollection of the title, so for all you know I could be lying through my teeth and to be honest it’s of little consequence as it was never made. I did attend a couple of meetings, was given a script and, I confess, got mildly anticipatory.
A few years later I actually made it to the shooting stages of a film. My scenes were to be on the Isle of Man in a two-hander with Simon Callow. One of my waggish pals bade me farewell saying, ‘Norman Wisdom lives on the island, say hello from me.’ Right. As if I was bound to bump into him. It’s similar to ‘Oh, you’re going to San Francisco; if you see a bloke called Simon who has a dry-cleaning company give him my best’. Life’s not like that. And yet … as I parked my car on the ferry, the motor that pulled in behind me decanted none other than N. Wisdom. I fought hard against
launching into a ‘Mr Grimsdale’ voice and just managed to restrain myself as he came up and said hello.
‘Hello, Norman,’ I replied, as you do, and without a trace of a comic trip.
‘Going to the Isle of Man then?’
With anyone else I might have responded with ‘No, Newfoundland actually’, but this man was a legend, so I nodded eagerly.
We ascended from the car deck together. I say
we
as if it were simply a brace of bonding males, but there were three of us in this temporary relationship. The lady looking after him said nothing, but her face and demeanour gave away her inner thoughts. ‘Come away, Norman.’ ‘Don’t talk to him, Norman.’ ‘Make him go away, Norman.’ Norman, however, was happy to talk. In the end she carted him off physically. I was delighted and privileged a few years later to be at Norman’s ninetieth birthday party, especially when he sang ‘Don’t Laugh at Me’.
Norm – you can tell how familiar we’d become – having been swiftly extricated from my presence, I was able to settle down to studying my script. I was to play a public schoolmaster, which sounds above board, but I seem to remember an element of skulduggery in the plot. I wish I could recall what the heck it was about, but I’d be making it up, much like I did with the script. I remember doing the scenes with the lovely Simon Callow and having supper with him on the two nights I was on the island, but beyond that is a veil of mist such as hangs over Ramsey on a November morning. Was I paid? Probably not. Was the film released? No, they ran out of dosh.
Somewhere around 2006 I was cast in the film
Inside Out
, which was being shot at Pinewood. Henry Hadaway, who’d had the idea and had co-written the script, had suggested me. Henry was the sagacious record company boss who’d once signed me to his label Satril. The suggestion came out of the blue, as I hadn’t seen him for some while. After some post-production legal wrangles, I think I’m safe to say that it was an HHO/Palm Tree Productions film, with various
credits being shared and meted out here and there. I’m told that it was released abroad. Probably just as well.
This time I do remember the story. It is a romantic thriller, filmed in London and Cannes, and centres on the tempestuous relationship between a student doctor, James Silverdale, played by Tony Streeter, and a girl from Prague called Christabel, played by Charlotte Radford. Christabel is ambitious; she wants her own nightclub and gets involved with a couple of wealthy guys including East End record producer Mickey Taylor, skilfully, powerfully and meaningfully acted if any directors are reading this. If they’re not, then I guess I was passable. Mickey appeared to be rather partial to the ‘F’ word, so I spread it around with large helpings of vitriol and menace, in equal measure. The part called for me, in one scene, to push a musician into a swimming pool in Cannes. I pushed, accompanied by a liberal sprinkling of ‘F’ words and a modicum of venom. Robbie Moffat, the director, exploded. Really? I thought I’d pushed and sworn jolly well. It transpired that he hadn’t shouted ‘Action’ so the cameras hadn’t been rolling. We had to wait half an hour for the actor and his clothes to be dried sufficiently for me to push him in again. ‘Who cares?’ you’re thinking. ‘You were in Cannes and you were getting well paid.’ Don’t be silly, the scene was shot in Hertfordshire and I got paid something.
My role must have been fairly substantial as the publicity proclaimed, ‘The cast includes Tony Streeter, Charlotte Radford, Saeed Jaffrey and Mike Read!’ Charlotte and I ran around a lot together during the filming, were mischievous and a more than a little irreverent, but it was fun. We had one torrid scene which we played more to shock the crew and director than as serious drama. If you can’t be bothered to watch the whole 95-minute saga to check out my East End accent and my Anglo-Saxon language, you can enjoy two small clips of my contribution on YouTube. If you can’t even be fagged to click the YouTube button, you’ll just have to take my word for it that I was perplexed, nay mortified, that I wasn’t nominated for Best Supporting Actor. The question continues to baffle critics south of Bognor Regis.
All I can say is thank goodness I’m not an actor, for the call didn’t come again until the tail end of 2013. Even the most rejected thespian can’t rest for that long and live with themselves. It was my one-time co-star, albeit my role was as nothing compared to hers, Charlotte Radford, who called me while I was on my way back from attending some shindig in London with Vanessa to ask if I could film the following day. Despite the aeon between engagements and the desire to leap at another triumph on the silver screen, I kept my powder dry. Clearly this was either a hastily written part or somebody had let the film makers down. After several discussions with La Radford I was given to understand that an actor of major importance had been unable to fly in for the occasion. The part was so small that, whoever it was, he could have got it in the can as the wheels touched the runway and taken off again without actually troubling customs.
The American Banker
was directed by the ebullient Jeff Espanol, complete with giant unlit cigar and headgear purloined from an unwary and vodka-soaked Cossack. We filmed my scene in London at Brown’s Hotel. I was a Liverpudlian banker. Jeff, his millinery appendage shaking like a great furry Yorkshire pudding, put me through my paces. He got me to slow my delivery right down. ‘Slower … Slower still … Even more, Mike … You can still take it down a notch.’ The more observant among you will have noticed that in this exchange of creative ideas, I failed to exchange. I felt it more prudent to listen. I slowed. I menaced. I whispered. I had lunch and off I went, creatively if not exactly financially richer.
Looking at the powerful cast list has provided me with a few silver screen aces to play when needed. They’ll be handy when interviewed by the critics.
‘When was your last film?’
‘This year, actually.’ It’s always good to throw in the odd ‘actually’.
‘And who else was in it, anyone we’ve heard of?’
‘Oh, you know … the usual crowd, Faye Dunaway, David Carradine…’
Best to leave it at that point, although I did have an email from Jeff ‘The Hat’ Espanol in Hollywood, which said, ‘See your face each day for the editing and I want to tell you thanks for being so humble on the set of my film. You are great in the film.’ Listen, I don’t care if it is showbiz director-speak, I can live with it. He ended, ‘See you in Cannes.’ Now I have no idea whether that means he flies me down in a Lear Jet or I fork out myself for the Eurostar. In May 2014 he called again to ask if I could do another scene. I checked my filming commitments. I appeared to be surprisingly free. We shot the scene in Dover Street, in Mayfair, with Japanese tourists banging off rapid-fire snaps imagining they had captured a British film star or two. Again. I had to be menacing, only more of the smiling assassin this time, who, rather bizarrely, ends up playing blues guitar. I’m forbidden to say more as Jeff has promised me a river scene with concrete shoes if I say too much. I realised how long this film has taken to make when someone pointed out that one of its star names, David Carradine, died in 2009.
In 1991 I wrote the music for the film
How’s Business
, starring Ron Moody and Brett Fancy and with Ben Brazier in the lead role, who later went on to star in
Layer Cake
with Daniel Craig. I recorded the score at the University of Surrey in the John Lennon Studio, which I’d opened with Nigel Kennedy a year or two earlier. Bizarrely the film hasn’t yet emerged on DVD and I was unable to go to the premiere, so I still haven’t seen the finished version.
On the film script front, the colossal amount of writing time has been rewarded with not one jot. Several have been acclaimed, but acclaiming doesn’t buy the cheese and chutney on granary. They sit on my laptop straining to get out and do their stuff, but money seems to be the main stumbling block. We once did a read-through of my Rupert Brooke film,
Forever England
, based on my book of the same name, and even started some auditions when we thought the backing looked good. Hundreds of hours writing, re-writing, sitting in meetings, getting money, losing money, getting director, losing director have resulted in no film having been made as yet, but as weary souls of the
celluloid will tell you at length, it is a tedious process that can take years. I did have a long chat with actor Paul Bettany about possibly playing the lead role, but I fear we weren’t ready financially at the time.
The director that was attached for a good while was the highly experienced Bryan Forbes, a formidable screenwriter, actor, and director for both film and TV who became MD of Associated British, which became EMI Films. When we had lunch at Pinewood to discuss the project, the whole place was buzzing. The word had gone round that ‘Bryan was back!’ Many an afternoon we went through my script, cutting this section, expanding that scene, examining the characters and often touching on the
raison d’être
. As well as working with one of the greats of the film industry, there was a culinary bonus in that Bryan’s wife, Nanette Newman, would prepare a banquet for our lunch where lesser mortals would have had us make do with a ham sandwich. Brian and I grafted during the mornings, but the afternoons became more convivial as we’d flick through some of Bryan’s amazing memorabilia, especially a plethora of royal correspondence in tandem with the relevant stories. We went different routes in the afternoons, Bryan down the scotch and cigarette road and me down the tea and biscuits avenue.
The producers at some length announced, ‘Now let Bryan write his director’s script.’ He did, but it was a totally different take to the actual story and took place on a film set, from the actor’s perspective. An interesting idea, but not for me. We still haven’t made the film, so maybe he was right and I was wrong, but we agreed that one had to be firm in the pursuance of perfection. With the 100th anniversary of Rupert Brooke’s death looming in 2015, and all the World War One commemorations, I’m having yet another crack at breathing life into it.
With the millennium looming, I began to work on a major project that would hopefully see a combination of history, the arts and more performed at a dozen castles around the UK, with a cast of thousands and some great effects. The basic idea was a thousand years of history, with a character from each century telling the story of their 100 years through the music, dance, conflicts, inventions, art, sculpture, fashion and
more. I had a couple of very positive meetings with Prince Edward and his company, Ardent, but the year 2000 arrived faster than we could fund or organise it.
The battle of good and evil in
Wenceslas: King of Bohemia
, set in Prague in the early 900s, also languishes expectantly on SkyDrive awaiting its moment, alongside
The Greatest Game
. I was initially slated to be a consultant on the latter film which was to be written by Julian Fellowes, a capital chap with whom I chatted about the project on several occasions, but he was busy with a new series of
Downton Abbey
so, not surprisingly, he had no time to attend to the likes of Old Etonians v. Blackburn Olympic. I was commissioned to write the script and was delighted with the result. I got an extremely good response to the story, which was essentially one of the old school versus the new school and the struggle of professional football to be born. The trouble is, the longer you pass a good idea round the more chance there is of it being filched by some knave keen to get on the red carpet for their hour of glory.
Two versions of
Great Expectations
are juxtaposed with these other scripts-in-waiting. Both musical films, one is traditional and the other an early ’50s US version with a black Magwitch and a Pip whose expectation is to be a singer in New York. The latter works so well I’m convinced that I’ll get it away. Well, you have to remain positive and upbeat. If you don’t have the passion yourself, the piece will never take root. There are others, but there seems no point in dwelling more on greyhounds that are still in the traps.
I did make it to the Cannes Film Festival on three occasions, with three or four of us taking a house for a fortnight. This worked out cheaper, so I was told, than booking hotels. It was also more fun. Diaries note meetings with such glorious names as Matador Films, Azure Films, a meeting on the
African Queen
and a party at Villa Estella, of which I remember little.
I was informed that it would be useful to get a meeting in with Steven Paul, Jon Voight’s partner in the film production company
Crystal Sky. If I was lucky enough to get a one-to-one, the covert voice told me, I would have to pitch my script in double-quick time. The tip came with an attention span warning: ‘If you don’t get him in two minutes he’ll be off.’ I wasn’t sure I could sell an entire film in the time it takes to announce and play the Beatles’ ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’, but at least I was given an appointment. This, said my informant, was a good start.