The First Rule of Comedy..!

THE FIRST RULE OF COMEDY.

YOU MUST HAVE INTEGRITY

'Hi-de-Hi!' (pause for audience reply, 'Ho-de-Ho!') 'Jeffrey can't hear you . Hi-de-Hi!' (audience reply again, 'Ho-de-Ho!') 'Thank you!' As my old mate Paul Shane used to say, 'There's a few more years left in that yet!'

You know, it's been well over forty years now since we filmed the pilot show for Hi-de-Hi! and I have counted my blessings every single day since. I'm very proud to have had a long and diverse career on stage, screen and radio . and it's not over yet. Still, that idiot character, hapless holiday camp comic Spike Dixon, is the one that everybody seems to love. He's certainly the one everybody seems to remember me for!

I've honestly lost count of how many people have shouted 'Hi-de-Hi!' at me in the street, and it still happens. Not to mention the thousands of people who have asked me, 'How many times were you thrown into that Olympic-sized swimming pool?' My answer is invariably, 'Too many times!' To be honest, I don't remember. If anybody wants to watch all the episodes again and jot down the number, I'd be fascinated to know. Mind you, that wouldn't include the retakes and dry runs. Dry runs? What am I saying? There were none - once I was wet, that was it!

For me, Hi-de-Hi! remains a special, nay crucial, part of my life. I forged many important, lasting friendships during the making of that show. The most important, of course, was with Paul Shane.

I can remember our first meeting as if it were yesterday. I was called to the read-through for that Hi-de-Hi! pilot show, as was Shaney, who was cast as the camp host and top comedian Ted Bovis. The truth is, Ted wasn't that good a comedian at all. Like all of the entertainment staff at Maplin's, he was a failure. Still, he was a big fish in the tiny pond of the holiday camp. So big, in fact, that he didn't even wear the soon-to-be-iconic yellow coat. He wore his civilian clothes: a very loud, checked suit. A proper working men's club comedian!

Not only was Ted Bovis vital to the running of the camp, the character was vital to the success of Hi-de-Hi! He could be a deeply furtive and shady bloke, and he was always on the fiddle. The writers knew that they needed someone brilliant and extremely likeable to play the part. You had to love this rogue.

Jimmy Perry, who had been a Redcoat at Butlins and put all his personal experiences into the scripts, was co-writing with that sublime director, producer and unstoppable star-maker David Croft. Both knew that the casting of Ted Bovis was key.

Paul Shane was a stand-up comedian from Rotherham and had worked those self-same working men's clubs for over twenty years, winning the Club Comic of the Year award on many occasions. He had started to get some extra work on TV, filling in with the odd line or two, most notably in a play by Alan Bennett in 1972 called A Day Out about a Halifax cycling club. He was given a kind of catchphrase in this and kept saying, 'Me bum's numb!' at every available opportunity. It must have worked as he eventually found himself in Coronation Street playing the part of Alf Roberts' boss. This was when Jimmy Perry happened to be watching one night and, during the commercial break, rang David Croft and said, 'David, are you watching Corrie?' David replied in the negative and Jimmy said, 'Well, put it on. I think we've found our Ted Bovis!'

That's why, in the pilot show, in that first scene with me and Paul in the train compartment, Ted is going on about this TV series he's going up for, all about 'this mucky street'. 'Apparently I'm dead right for it!' He was dead right for it. Our show, of course, was set in 1959. Coronation Street started in 1960. A lovely homage from our fantastic writers.

Anyway, I digress. I do that sometimes. You must try to stop me!

Back to the rehearsal rooms and my first meeting with Paul Shane. When they called me in, I walked into the room and there was Paul, standing in the middle of the floor looking rather overwhelmed, so I walked over to him and introduced myself. We shook hands and as we did so he gave me a very strange look. He said, 'Have we met before?'

I said, 'Oh no. Never. I would have remembered!'

Paul said, 'I have this really odd feeling that we have worked together before.'

We really hadn't, but I could feel the same immediate chemistry between us, which was to manifest itself so obviously in all the work we did together.

That was the beginning of almost twenty years of blissful comedy together, and a friendship that lasted for the rest of Paul's life. It was an uncanny bonding. A short-hand, if you like, for how to play these hilariously funny scenes together. It never left us. It was magic. Alchemy. 'The First Rule of Comedy'!

I may not have met Paul Shane before that first Hi-de-Hi! read-through, but I had certainly met and worked for Jimmy Perry and David Croft before. Many, many times .

The Day I Met Croft and Perry

To my shame, looking back on that first, monumental meeting with David Croft and Jimmy Perry, not only was I not interested in the potential job - a life-changing one, as it turned out - but I was also in the foulest of moods. I've never been a poker-faced sort of bloke, so I'm sure it must have showed.

Allow me to set the scene. It was on a day in mid-June 1975 that I got the call to go to London. It was a call that should have filled me with excitement . but it didn't. The call was to audition for the Dad's Army stage show.

Now, I had been a huge fan of Dad's Army since it was first on TV in 1968. It was a wonderful show and hugely popular. So popular that it was being adapted as a musical show for the stage. What's more, Roger Redfarn, the director, with whom I had worked in repertory theatre at Coventry, was staging the show and had asked for me particularly as he knew I could be very useful to them. He knew me and my work, as did the choreographer Sheila O'Neil, but everyone had to be approved by Jimmy Perry and David Croft. As I said, at the time Dad's Army was one of my all-time favourite TV shows - but I was not a happy man! Let me explain.

You see, I was working at Chichester at the time, doing the first half of the Festival season. I was playing parts in only the first two plays of a four-play season, as there was nothing for me to play in the second two. That's the way it was and I knew that from the outset.

I was sharing a house, though, with two other actors at the time, and these two were staying on as they had been cast in the other two plays of the season. It was a beautiful summer and we were all having a very happy time, but I had to leave and I simply didn't want to. My mood could not have been blacker. I was preparing myself to leave the company and, when that happens, your mind races about whether you are ever going to get another job. Frankly, I got very down in the dumps about it and became quite morose.

The day came for my trip to London and I was still in denial about my future in showbusiness. Even having this audition for Dad's Army didn't raise my spirits. Lord alone knows why not! I was so despondent that I had nothing at all prepared and certainly no song ready to offer them. I didn't care. I thought, 'Well if they want me to sing, I could always sing "Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line". Everybody knows that. What the hell?' I just didn't want to go. I did go though, of course, and I duly caught the train to London. I should have been thrilled, but I couldn't have cared less. I was stuck in permanent doldrums. What an idiot I was! I didn't even wear anything decent, like I would have usually. I was wearing just a shirt without a jacket as it was such a lovely day and the view from the train of the Sussex countryside was gorgeous, but I didn't care a jot. It was just one of those days when I had to go somewhere I didn't want to be and, as I said, I had nothing prepared at all.

I arrived at Waterloo Station and rather sluggishly made my way to the Mermaid Theatre, where the auditions were being held. I was still in a foul mood when I got there.

I went rather unenthusiastically to the stage door, where I was given a piece of the script to look at while I waited to be called in to see the producers. I skimmed through it with very little enthusiasm and then something caught my eye. It was a song that looked quite promising. It was a parody of that old wartime favourite 'Yes, We Have No Bananas', which was to be sung by Private Walker, the spiv. The show was to be quite a musical extravaganza and Walker had this very funny routine in which to promote all his black-market goods - you know, the sort of thing that dear old Jimmy Beck used to hawk around Walmington-on-Sea: knicker elastic, nylons, watches all up his arm and inside his big overcoat. He had the lot - all the nigh-on impossible stuff to get hold of. With one exception: he had no bananas! So I decided to do that song if required, as I was sure the pianist would know it and I could read it from the script. I could get some laughs out of it too. Anything to relieve this depression I was...