Food Glorious Food.

There I am stuffing my face – I like that photo taken by the famous Nobby Clark.
This is an edit: after I wrote this I opened the newspaper and coincidence has it that it is Nobby Clark's birthday today.

I haven't eaten meat for quite some time; this will be my second Christmas without it. I don't call myself a vegetarian I just don't eat meat and only a little fish once in a while – the difference between vegetarians and vegans is that vegans don't eat animal products (anything with a face) at all; I wonder if they like eels?

Last Christmas I sat with the family and just ate the lovely vegetables but didn't have that ugly thing on my plate, which everybody fusses over, called meat. I don't have anything against meat but there's always a load of fuss over it and the last turkey we bought cost more than £70.

The reason I am talking about this is that the other day someone on the radio mentioned the BBC canteen and what the bill of fare was, and it all came back to when I worked at the BBC on a fairly regular basis. We would rehearse in a high rise building which was nick-named The Acton Hilton. It was maybe eleven floors or even nine – who knows? – and on the top floor was the canteen. As soon as the lift landed there you could smell the enticing appetite inducing fodder.

All self service – piles of newly cooked bacon, sausages galore with eggs, eggs and eggs. Of course there would be other stuff which I think is called fruit and they also served porridge, corn flakes and the like – even bubble and squeak - and we would pile the food on our readily warmed plates, with fresh coffee and maybe some toast.

All this for the price of a newspaper – unbelievable! I would often think that most of the people in that canteen – whoever was playing Dr Who, the cast of Z Cars, Softly Softly and the beautiful female dancers Pan People – were earning a lot of money and it seemed funny, to me, that they needed subsidizing.

I thought to myself, when listening to the article on the radio, that I wonder if I would be tempted now if I was faced with all that food.

I did a job a year or two ago in Harlesdon – or near there – where there was a canteen at the studios with the same kind of food and it was all free; so it still goes on.

But I have never been tempted ever since as egg, bacon and sausage have been cooked in our kitchen lately and it doesn't tempt me at all in fact I had stopped eating bacon since the last time I was in Dublin when my cousin cooked a full Irish breakfast – black and white pudding, bacon, sausages and eggs etc. The bacon in Dublin would melt in your mouth and the reason I haven't eaten any ever since is that when I bought some in London it was ropey, full of water, preservative and urghh!!

And then I thought of the time we came back from America on the Queen Mary 2 with the most wonderful food in the world: Beef Wellington, Sea Bass, Caviar for dinner and equal luxury during the day.

Have a Good Christmas.

Family at War

This is a kind of mish mash of stories about disappointments – not to me as I have rarely been disappointed. I've always prepared myself for one. I remember I was with a casting director in Los Angeles who actually did some casting – most of them just suggest you to a director and then you have to meet/audition. This was for a voice for a movie of which I did loads when living there – still receiving residuals even now. I voiced David Bowie, Bill Hunter, Jason Statham, a voice in Cat Woman (when I met Sharon Stone) a load of voices in Time Line and Kangaroo Jack.

The first time I met the casting director she said 'ok you got it; Thursday and Friday and maybe a day next week.'

I said 'great.'

'Is that all?' she said.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, people usually – well, usually looked pleased!'

I said 'Well I am.'

She would have seen the same reaction if she had told me that out of the hundred people they'd seen for the leading role it was between me and the other guy but the other guy got it. I always thought of it like making a sales call and being told no – try somewhere else.

You will gather, by now, that I didn't really start out to write that lot – it just came to me.

Look at that man above in the poster for Family at War! That's Colin Campbell. Family at War was a wonderful TV series made by one of the greatest television companies; Granada Television. It was, as it implies, about a family: three brothers, two sisters, mother and father, close relatives and friends. It was first shown in 1970 and is now being shown on the TV channel Talking Pictures.

I was at drama school, when they were making it, and sometimes I would travel all the way to Manchester to do a walk on for £6 per day. After a few walk ons they gave me three lines for which I got more money.

Colin Campbell played one of the sons, David, which was the best role and he was the best actor in it of his age. There are other fine performances too but he was the chap.

A few years later – 1991 – I did one of the Ruth Rendall Mysteries (Inspector Wexford with George Baker) and Colin Campbell was in it. He played a very small part as a cop in the office. I didn't see any of the episodes so I don't know if he was a uniform cop or what, but he did quite a few episodes.

The first thing I noticed about him was that he was quite tiny – even smaller than me! He also had a limp. I remember saying to Wexford's partner (his cop partner) 'you do know who he is, don't you?' and he shrugged his shoulders no. It wasn't as flippant as it might sound as he was interested – now who was he I have forgotten even though he did 50 episodes of Wexford.

I met Colin later through a mutual friend later, as we would go to our pal's plays, premiere's etc and he was a nice bloke. He still had some kind of limp, which I think I read about and it may have affected him somewhat; I said he was tiny but in Family at War he fills the screen. He has been giving a stellar performance as David Ashton most weekday afternoons in Britain lately and it has sent his STARmeter on the Internet Movie Date Base up to the 27,000s – that might not seem important to some actors but you won't get an agent in LA if you are not in the top 100,000. Colin was down in the 200,000 not that long ago. He is now quite famous which is a shame as he died on March 1^st this year aged 81.

From next week Family at War is on Wednesday evenings at 9.00 pm on Talking Pictures.

It is a funny old business when casting directors can dismiss actors like Colin Campbell and leave him to his few lines in Wexford once in a while – the other actors in Wexford hadn't heard of him either and when I watch him I often wonder if he knew the series, Family at War, was coming on; RIP.

But there are loads of disappointments – I went to Dublin many years ago to do a Guinness commercial. I particularly remember it for a couple of reasons one the song they used, which was recorded by the pop group Blue Mink famous for their song Melting Pot – in our case it was Get Together With a Guinness Right Now.

We worked in a pub in Baggot Street, Dublin. I went in to the loo and someone had written on the wall Sometimes I think I'd like to be the Saddle on a Bike. I remember thinking how wonderful that scanned.

The other thing I remember it for was the girl who was in it; we'll call her Mavis. Before filming starts the artists, the actors, the talent, or whatever you want to call us, gather on the set, which in this case was the customer side of the bar, and rehearse the scene for the camera. Three blokes and an attractive girl. The girl had been in make up and was wearing rollers. The three guys included me, and two other well known actors of the day; we were cast in London and flown over that morning. The director was an Englishman and most of the crew were from Dublin.

After we ran through the scene the girl had to go back to make up – she was a local Dublin girl. The director asked for one of the girl extras to take the girl's place whilst she was in make up. The 'stand in' was very nice and we all got on well together and then it became obvious that the director preferred the stand in as opposed to the girl who was being made up, quaffed and dressed.

'Get rid of Mavis' he suddenly said to his assistant.

“What?' said the assistant.

'Get rid of her – Mavis'

Of course her name wasn't Mavis – but what an arsehole aye.

The death of The King.

Here we have a little story set in 1952 – and it's true! A little eight year old boy with the name of Christopher Thomas Joseph Owen Sullivan was sitting in class at school. Christopher was his Christian name, being a Christian but not the kind of Christian as the school he was attending - as from an Irish immigrant family he was a Catholic – was being the operative word these days in any case.

Thomas was the second name on the birth certificate and Joseph the name on the Baptism certificate. Owen came later, when he was confirmed, and when the teacher asked for full names, in the senior school, he gave him all the names, and was known as that to that teacher forever; especially when he pulled the little side burns of the little boy and said 'so what's your answer to that, Christopher Thomas Joseph Owen Sullivan? Something Irish? Something witty?'

But enough of that let's go back to 1952.

February 6^th 1952 little Christopher was sitting in class wanting a wee wee; the teacher on this occasion said it was OK for him to go and off he went.

On that same day, Raymond Simmonds was playing the wag from school; playing the wag being the vernacular for playing truant, although playing truant is usually knocking time off from school without your parents' permission. In Raymond's case I think his mother kept him from school that day.

So when I came out of the boys' lavatory – me being Christopher Thomas Joseph Owen Sullivan - there was Raymond sitting on the school steps. 
Now if I had been playing truant, which I only did once, one afternoon, and which I have been sorry for ever since as that was, apparently, a great science lesson when Mister Edmunds, the science teacher, very bluntly told the class of fourteen year old boys the facts of life.
But back to 1952.
On that day, the first thing Raymond Simmonds said to me was 'The King is dead.'

We knew, even at my tender age of eight, that the king had been ill and in fact he had died in his sleep that morning.

There are two things I remember about the King: one was that he had the same birthday as me – December 14^th – and the other was that I thought he looked like Gary Cooper.

So now (or then) I knew what the teacher didn't know, nor the rest of the class or any of the other teachers. 
But if I went in to class and said something I would be asked how I knew and would get Raymond Simmonds into trouble.

I went back in class and kept it to myself for a while.

Sitting in front of me was Gillian Balmond and next to her was Winifred Bryant; even at that age I was deeply in love with both of them. They would turn around to chat and I would flirt in my little baby ways and eventually I had to tell one of them about the King.

I can't remember which one I told but when I did, she told the other and the other answered back 'Now Princess Elizabeth will be Queen.'

We went home for lunch and of course it was all true. 
There were no cell phones in those days, no Internet and no social media. 
Everything seemed safe and at eight I would walk home by myself; with maybe other kids; maybe a half mile walk and sometimes even raining or in the snow. 
Mothers were at home to feed and love us and the 50s never seemed dismal to me or in black and white. 
It's great me being able to publish this on the Internet and the 191,000 hits from people who read it but look what it has done and the number of zombies it has produced – millennials don't even know how to use a can opener.

On that day mothers outside the school told their children the bad news; the King is dead. Some kids would cry; some of those kids wouldn't even know who the King was as they were too young but the grown ups certainly did. 
The King's wife, Queen Elizabeth, who then became The Queen Mother, short for the Queen's Mother, always, till the end of her long life, blamed the late King's brother David (Edward VIII) who abdicated because of his involvement with Mrs Simpson. A lot of people said Mrs Simpson did a great service to Britain by taking such a dangerous and naïve man out of the running.

The public liked him even though he abandoned Britain during the war, leaving his younger brother and his wife, as The King and Queen, in Britain. During some of the war, David (Edward VIII) lived in America and whilst Churchill was trying to persuade Roosevelt to enter America into the war David, who sympathised with the Nazis together with the air pioneer Charles Lindbergh, tried to get America on the German side; now if you don't believe this look it up. In fact at one point Lindbergh was considering running for President – if you think Trump is bad just ponder on that for a moment.

I don't know who the guy on the left is but there they are: two good looking men, Lindbergh in the middle and David (Edward VIII) on the right.

Times changed a couple of years after the King died. James Dean became the first American teenager and when the draft finished – the call up – it produced plays like Look Back in Anger, music like the blues and Rock'n'Roll and, eventually, The Beatles.

I loved the influx of Jamaicans into our neighbourhood with their great double breasted suits – I remember light blue suits – with their casual walks and great music and their laughter. Even today they are still laughing even though they were treated terribly for many years and even now when some who have been here ever since then found they couldn't get passports to get back in to the country when visiting their homeland.