Tim Bannerman's Theatre Chronicles – Part Five: Labyrinth I

“OK, let’s make a start!” she said, and tossed the keys of the minibus in my direction.

In a flash, Zak, the brightest, wiriest, sharpest of the Mohicans – the only one in that small group of variously hip young folk as it happened – stretched out an elastic arm between us, grabbed the keys in mid-flight and set off at speed for the minibus, parked on the far side of the car park.

It was my first day with Troubadour and I had seconds to decide. 

I knew that if he got there first, in tribal terms, it would confirm his status as the Leader of the Pack. Which was fine but would give me “nul points” in the “who is this posh git ac-tor come to join our group when we’ve been quite happy without him all this time, thank you very much” stakes.  It might make it a longer haul to gain their respect. More urgently, he could take off in the minibus or at least demand a tricky negotiation for the driver’s seat.

So I set off after him.

I ran as I had not run since that day I beat Poynton in the 220 yards aged 12 when he’d beaten me every time up to then. 19 years later, I was still only 31, not much more than Sebastian Coe when he got all those medals and records, but a smidgin lacking in the fitness stakes, I admit, let alone talent. A smoker more on than off, enjoyed a drink, or three – that’s me, not Seb, by the way – but a good walker with a baby on the back and fit enough, given all those fish suppers along the way. If Alf Tupper could do it, then…

The Mohican, on the other hand, was 17 and built like a whippet.

In horse racing, they would call it “by a nose”. But I beat him. Trying not to be sick, l leant against the driver’s door and held out my hand.

“Mine, I think, Zak,” I gasped.

He looked at me speculatively, thinking, perhaps, a heart attack would be interesting. Meanwhile as my breathing steadied, I put on what I hoped looked like a friendly smile on my face. When it seemed that I would live and my hand was still out there, with a slow, sheepish grin, he handed over the keys. 

And off we went.

Troubadour was a Youth Opportunity Scheme or YOP Drama Group, founded in the New Forest by a force of politics and nature called Linda Fredericks in the early ‘80s. She acted as a magnet for a disparate group of young, local tyre kickers and made best use of Labour’s 1978 initiative in the face of dire unemployment that, for once, included the Arts, until Maggie killed it later in 1983, the year I started.

I’d been working in a variety of ways since leaving the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in 1980, not least with HTV Bristol who had given me a lifeline, thanks to Peter Graham Scott, best known for “The Onedin Line” and “The Prisoner”.

The first time you step into a television studio, or the one on Bath Road in 1981 at least, you think – no, they can’t get away with that! Mind you, if “Into the Labyrinth” was a kind of Doctor Who in polystyrene set and wiggly blue screen effects to denote magical transformations, etc., it was a bit more advanced in other ways. It had a young black actor, Simon Beal, now known as Charlie Caine, in a lead role as one of the three baddie-busting kids, alongside Ron Moody, of Fagin fame, and the glamorous Pamela Salem, as the warring wizards, good and bad respectively.

I was the French revolutionary Pierre in my initial episode, cast after trying to impress producer-director Peter with my French accent and amazingly finding myself in front of a camera for the first time as a professional actor, fresh out of drama school.

Filming being the expensive business it is, the fewer “takes” you cost a director the better, hence the importance of knowing your lines long before you arrive for your pre-shoot rehearsal. Tick. Plus it helps to remember – or be tactfully reminded by a friendly wizard – that you don’t have to reach the back row of the Upper Circle when you have a camera inches from your face and that eyes convey as much as any number of heightened vocal inflexions, let alone exaggerated facial expressions. Semi-tick.

It must have worked sufficiently well, however, for Peter to have me back a few months later for another episode, this time as a hapless Cockney villain Long Tom, blacked out teeth ‘n all, presumably hoping that our young audience would have not made the connection between a dashing, ‘ow-you-say Revolutionary and a gor-blimey-missus East Ender.

Starting with “Into the Labrinth”, Peter loyally kept me going with a series of small yet punchy little parts, varying from pirates to toffs, which helped bulk up the CV over those early years. But it was Nick Barter with the Unicorn Theatre who gave me a grounding in producing the goods on a daily basis which is what theatre is all about.

Doubling up as the Arts Theatre in the evening for grown-ups (Unicorn being primarily for a daytime children’s audience), this lovely old costume jewel of a theatre sits smack bang in the centre of the West End in Great Newport Street, between Leicester Square and Haymarket, just round the corner from my agents in Monmouth Street. 

Unless you’ve worked there, you will never know the delights of going up and down those steep little backstage stairs to get from the dressing-rooms to the stage. I still enjoy the odd “actor’s dream” where I’m panicking, having missed my cue, trying to get on stage before discovering I’m going down instead of up, let alone finding myself in the wrong part in the wrong play, etc., etc.

My first ever professional appearance was in a little rehearsal room upstairs at the Arts in 1981 where I was in a one-man show called “Who’s the King of the Castle” in which I played Sir Jolly Something-or-other for 4-6 year olds. Perfect casting, all in all, for a sandcastle obsessive with a childish sense of humour. 

What really brought it all home to me though, this strange way of trying to earn a living, was making my very first entrance as Sir Jolly to see my little audience all sitting cross-legged in front of me – with one giant, cross-legged exception. This was the only adult in the room who happened to be, I realised instantly, the late, lovely, Diana Rigg. Somehow I managed to hold it all together, despite visions of Emma Peel in her famously clinging catsuit of Avenger’s fame, sitting right there  with sparkling eyes and a broad and generous smile to greet my professional debut.

Tim the Tiger in Meg and Mog

This was followed by working with Maureen Lipman who played the central role in the first production of David Wood’s “The Meg and Mog Show”, a magical dramatisation of the well-known children’s books by Helen Nichol, illustrated by Jan Pienkowski in his instantly recognisable, bold, primary coloured style. It remains one of my few claims to dubious posterity in this ephemeral life of ours that my Tiger song is still there somewhere in the bowels of iTunes, I believe, 40 years on from that first production. The Rigg-esque Tiger costume, however, I still have closer to home and has been known to be pulled from the dressing-up box on occasions best left in the alcoholic haze in which it was extracted.

But although there were other theatre productions and bits of TV, our main source of income in those precarious early years, was with Dot McCree’s Young National Trust Theatre, of which much more in a future chronicle, involving a great deal of time spent away from home, far and wide around some of the most beautiful parts of the British Isles.

So when I spotted an advert in The Guardian Creative and Arts Appointments for a Drama Assistant-cum-Temporary NTI Supervisor on the NTI Drama Pilot Scheme for four months, starting on 6 June 1983 at New Milton Arts Centre, in the heart of the New Forest in Hampshire, I thought – why not?

Travelling down on the train for my interview, I spotted the first Southern Marsh orchids in the flat sphagnum bogs either side of the carriage, as we rattled through the lower reaches of the New Forest towards New Milton on the coast. “A good omen,” I said to myself, even if any hopes of spotting the great prize, Spiranthes aestivalis, or the Summer Lady’s Tresses orchid, were faint indeed. It had not been seen here, it’s last known British outpost, since the year of my birth in 1952.

Having made my way from the station to the New Milton Arts Centre, I was greeted by a fizzing, wiry, blazing-eyed woman who dragged me inside and threw me into a group of variously sleepy, stylish, sloppy, friendly, bolshy girls and boys, all around a similar age between 16-18. After brief introductions, I joined in their theatre games, many of which I knew from my theatre school days and then chatted about theatre and the work they’d done and what I might be able to bring to the group.

It felt like a long time since I had had any direct dealings with young people of that age, even though the youngest at the Bristol Old Vic School had been a similar age to the oldest here. My eldest son was 10 or thereabouts, youngest only 2 ½ and although my work with the Young National Trust Theatre involved an age range from 7 or 8 all the way up to early teens, it was rare to broach the Sixth Form strata. And the New Milton group were very definitely not “Sixth Form strata” in anything other than age.

Young Zak and his gang were people who, by their own admission, had partly rejected, partly been rejected by, the mainstream academic world, if not mainstream society as a whole.

“We were a motley crew… an eclectic mix from a diversity of backgrounds… all young kids with different life experiences, emerging from puberty, full of angst and emotion,” wrote one, looking back many years later.

“After a few years of not really enjoying school and unsuccessfully trying to redo my ‘O’ levels, I ended up trying to sign on. I couldn’t even do that right. I was put on a Youth Training Scheme for a year. Back then I was nervous soul. Not much confidence. Things were going on at home that didn’t help my lack of focus,” wrote another.

“I left school aged 15 for letting off fire alarms during exams. When I joined Troubadour, I was in a punk band. I was determined not to work. I wanted as little as possible contact with the establishment. The Tories were pushing Youth Opportunity Programmes; forcing young people to work for £17.50 a week. I wasn’t keen, and desperately wanted to avoid, what I assumed, was exploitation. Someone who was just finishing his Y.O.P. time at the local drama centre said, ‘Hey, come work here. It’s easy. No work, drink beer, smoke fags all day!’ It sounded amazing.”

“I can remember my first morning feeling very shy and not knowing what to expect,” wrote a third – not far from what I felt that day, meeting them all for the first time like that.

On my way back in the train, I reflected on the fact that here was I, a product from birth of the so-called “privileged classes”, protected and cushioned by a loving home before being shoved into the variously sadistic underworld of the British private-public school system where they beat you into a suitable subject to serve an empire that no longer existed – until, that was, at the very last minute, I had escaped into the local comprehensive school, only to find myself back in the bastion of privilege at Cambridge. Here was I, despite not exactly conforming  to the tweed-jacketed, cavalry-twilled – some pals might say indeed that they’d never seen my usually dishevelled, relatively long-haired frame neatly compressed in suit and tie – variety of toff, yet profoundly marked in voice, mannerisms and psyche by all the above, about to throw myself into the dangerously seductive snake pit of nihilistic anarchy, should they accept me, that is.

Which they did. And for the princely sum of £112.32p per week, starting 6 June 1983, “for the duration of the current NTI Drama Pilot Scheme or 30th September 1983, whichever is the sooner”, I was expected to work 40 hours a week and, somehow, get myself there and back from the grace-and-favour, or near enough, farmhouse where we lived at The Golden Pot, above Alton in Hampshire, down to New Milton on the New Forest coast, via Basingstoke railway station, without, by and large, the use of a car.