Oh No, It’s The Neighbours!
From page 29 of the Evening Standard, 22nd November 1990:
Dramatis Personified
The thespian’s lot is not a happy one-or so Nicholas Craig would have you believe. His creator Nigel Planer talks to FRANCIS WHEEN about the agonies and the agonising of the actor
NICHOLAS Craig is an actor, with the emphasis strongly on the second syllable. Whatever part he is rendering – Lord Foppishness in School for Fops, or (on all fours) Towzha in Hovel’s brilliant satire Dogs of Tblonsk at the Cottesloe Theatre, or even the punk rock son Gob in the TV sitcom Oh No, It’s The Neighbours! – this disciple of Thepis takes his craft seriously.
“The actor,” he once wrote, “must know what it’s like to be everything from a Mongol Emperor to an Elderly Passer-by, he must know how the Frenchman feels when the alarm clock goes off, he must know how the alarm clock feels, he must experience the pain of the carrot on the chopping board, or how is he to tell the Truth?” In a new television series starting tonight, Nicholas Craig – The Naked Actor (BBC2, 10.10), Craig aims to share that truth, and indeed that pain, with us.
Nigel Planer, the man who begat Nicholas Craig, is also an actor. Though many people still think of him merely as Neil, the Hippy from The Young Ones, he has been quietly extending his repertoire in the past two couple of years – a leading role in Dennis Potter’s Blackeyes, for instance, and a part as a pregnant man in Emma Tennant’s recent television drama Frankenstein’s Baby. Now he is treading the boards at the Globe Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, in Alan Ayckbourn’s Man of the Moment which has just been named Comedy of the Year in the Evening Standard Drama Awards.
In the awards game, however, poor Planer still hasn’t caught up with his alter ego Craig, who won “Best Actor in a Hitherto Unperformed Late-Jacobean Tragedy” for his performance as Truepate in The Cuckolde of Leicester a few years ago – though he modestly dismissed the trophy as an invidious gewgaw.
“Art is not competitive,” Craig nobly pointed out at the time. “There should be no prizes. So, to see it engraved on a bronze statuette that one is a better actor than Jeremy Irons (it doesn’t actually say that, but that, effectively, is what it means), is simply embarrassing for both of us.
“It’s absurd. I’ve seen Jeremy be bloody good in some shows. I’m sure we all have.” For the benefit of other thesps who find themselves in this position, he has devoted a whole episode of his new series to Awards Technique – with particular reference to the acceptance speech, including obligatory mentions of one’s agent, the rainforests, the Rose Theatre and VAT on theatre seats.
The character of Nicholas Craig was conceived four years ago by Planer and the playwright Christopher Douglas. His first public appearance was the book, I, An Actor (1988), a brilliant satire on dramatic affectations, which – much to Planer’s delight – was taken seriously by at least one reader. “It could almost be a send-up of a theatrical autobiography,” a baffled reviewer wrote in the Yorkshire Post. The verdict in the trade journal, The Stage, was blunter: “Ha, bloody ha.”
Craig’s television debut was an “Interview Masterclass” on the Late Show last year in which – using clips from Wogan – he coached his fellow actors in Chat-Show Skills. (Which uproarious anecdotes about Johnny Gielgud should one tell? Are blue blazer and Garrick Club ties de rigueur, even for actresses?)
The new series follows this model. Tonight’s episode, on “Actorship”, has a glorious montage of chat-show veterans – Anthony Sher, Maureen Lipman, Anthony Andrews, Jane Asher, Peter Barkworth – all furrowing their brows and telling us what sheer bloody agonies they endure for their art. Like a stuck record, a grim-faced Anna Massey turns up every so often to repeat that acting is “torture”.
Meeting Nigel Planer in a Soho café last week, I was disconcerted to discover that he sometimes slips into the sort of portentous talk that is mocked in the Nicholas Craig programmes. “We are talking about levity and giving gravity,” he said with a frown when I asked about the new series – though he did then add “it’s bloody funny as well”, which it certainly is. The same thing happened when I asked Planer whether, as an actor, he might find himself turning into Nicholas Craig. No, he said, because he already is Nicholas Craig in many ways. “His attitudes, the way his mind works, are very much an exorcism of one’s own way of thinking.” Heavy, as Neil the Hippy might say. But then came the deflating coda again. “It’s a funny old business,” he mused. It sure is. Whereas Nicholas Craig’s TV series may look like a pretty sharp put-down of grease-painted luvvies and darlings, Nigel Planer seems desperate to assure is that it is all done with tremendous respect. “It’s not the backbiting jealousy that passes for satire these days. There’s a lot of crap that’s just bitching at each other, slagging each other off. I’m too soppy for that.”
Oh yeah? What about the review of Kenneth Branagh’s autobiography which Planer – in his Nicholas Craig persona – wrote for The Sunday Correspondent? It seems that Planer was guilt-stricken immediately afterwards. I had to leave a message on Branagh’s answering machine, saying I’m sorry. He rang back and said don’t worry.” Besides, Planer added, although he had been willing to criticise the Branagh book, “I wouldn’t attack his film of Henry V.” Soppy is the word.
The Naked Actor, then is wholesome entertainment, with no slagging or bitching, but with plenty of useful and indeed nourishing hints on theatrical moustaches, vintage cars (essential in TV drama) and the use of waistcoats as props. Back to Nicholas Craig for a final, and typically modest, comment: “I hope viewers have as much fun watching The Naked Actor as I had making it. It really is much too early for all this premature prattle about nominations and awards and so on. The Naked Actor is just a simple statement about actors, for actors, by an actor.” The Golden Rose of Montreux may soon join The Cuckolde of Leicester trophy on his mantelpiece.
