Читать книгу A Life in Time and Space - The Biography of David Tennant - Nigel Goodall - Страница 14

‘I did a TV series for BBC Scotland. It was seen in England, too, and probably every job since then has been either directly or indirectly because of that.’

(David talking about Takin’ Over The Asylum – 2003)

David had not worked in television since the ‘Dramarama’ episode, and certainly never under his new name of David Tennant, so when the BBC called him up five years later, in which time he had been treading the boards in Scottish repertory, to ask if he would like to play a transsexual barmaid named Davina in an episode of the hit comedy series, Rab C. Nesbitt, he was over the moon.

The show, which ran on BBC from the late eighties until the end of the nineties, was one of the most underrated series of its time, but as most critics agree, it still stands up as being one of the most popular, funny and daring sitcoms of the 1990s. To all intents and purposes, this was one of the key Scottish programmes being made at the time.

In the episode in which David appeared, Rab C. (played by Gregor Fisher) and his friend Jamesie Cotter (Tony Roper) are left wide-eyed and wondering when David, as Davina, pulls pints in their local. They spend the rest of the show trying to figure out whether Davina, with her long, curly, brown locks and scarlet lips, is a man or a woman until a sleazy boss, played by Andy Gray, learns the truth when he makes a pass at her.

David was only twenty-one when he filmed the episode and, undeniably, it was his first real breakthrough into television. If nothing else, it showed that he was willing to turn his hand to any kind of role in his bid for fame and fortune. Even though, as one critic pointed out, he ‘scrubbed up not too badly as a woman’, one cannot help wondering whether he would prefer his appearance and overall performance to be best left forgotten.

At first glance, it is probably one of the most unlikely parts that anyone would expect him to play. Much the same, perhaps, as his role as a manic depressive in the six-part Scottish TV drama, Takin’ Over The Asylum (1994), which has now surfaced, not unexpectedly, on DVD, with David’s original, previously unseen audition tape and commentary.

In a way, it was down to luck that he was cast at all. Although the show’s production team auditioned actors to play the role, they still hadn’t found the right person. Director David Blair, who had recently cast David in a small part in Strathblair soon after he had left drama school, suggested they give him a chance to audition for the part, but the casting director was unsure. After all, it was a pivotal role and there was a sense that a more experienced actor was needed to carry it off. Nevertheless the team went up to Glasgow to meet him.

The reason why the audition tape still exists to this day is down to the fact that there was no budget to fly the writer of the show, Donna Franceschild, up to Scotland with the programme-makers, so instead Blair arranged for the audition to be videotaped for her. As soon as she saw the tape, she was blown away, just as the casting director had been. David, it seemed, was on his way.

Described by Scotland on Sunday as ‘superb, brilliantly filmed without being intrusive writing that makes you chuckle and gulp in the same sentence, and tour de force performances’ it was, according to most critics and viewers, an engrossing comedy drama that explored the issues surrounding mental health with sensitivity and black humour. So applauded was the series that it won a BAFTA for Best Serial and an RTS Award for Best Writer.

The show centred on Eddie McKenna, played by Ken Stott, a double-glazing salesman, who moonlights as a DJ for hospital radio in St Judes, a Scottish mental asylum. He nurtures close friendships with the patients there, including Francine, a self-harmer, a schizophrenic played by Kate Murphy, Fergus, an electrical engineer, who has schizophrenia and later commits suicide by jumping off the hospital roof, Rosalie, an OCD sufferer for cleanliness whose son died of leukemia, for which she blames herself for not killing all the germs, and Campbell, a manic depressive played by David, with whom he shares a dream to make it onto the commercial radio scene. As Campbell’s inspired antics seem to bring the pair closer to their goal, the pressures of work, relationships and family begin to get to Eddie. With his life threatening to spin out of control, now it’s his turn to look for help.

It was while David was filming the latter stages of the series in the autumn of 1993, exactly a year after he appeared in Rab C. Nesbitt, that he met Arabella Weir, who had gone to Scotland for a week to film three episodes. Her arrival on set coincided with costar Ken Stott’s suggestion that David should move South to make a name for himself. Stott, who is today best known for his roles in ITV’s The Vice and Rebus, gave him the contact details for his London agent and, after filming on Asylum wrapped, sent him on his way. As luck would have it, Arabella was looking for a lodger. ‘So,’ says David, ‘I packed up my little Ford Fiesta and drove my entire life down the M6. I was terrified for the whole six-hour drive, thinking, what am I doing? It was terrifying.’

Arabella, best known as a comic performer and writer, was born in San Francisco in 1957, but she grew up in London and attended Camden School for Girls, where she says she became the class show-off. After attending drama college in the mid-1970s, she did a variety of acting jobs and was later commissioned to write for The Fast Show, but when she first met David in 1993, she wasn’t the star-studded celebrity she is now. As he recalls, ‘She seemed so laid-back and au fait with the whole thing of being on a film set. She has a very forceful personality and for a wee skinny bloke from Bathgate it was, “Oh my word, who’s this?” I was scared of her, but it’s all front. Once you get past that, you find she’s just as insecure and nervous as everybody else, but she does have a very urbane and witty exterior.

‘On set there’s lots of sitting about, so you get to know people easily, and her irreverent sense of humour appealed to me. She was good fun, so I moved in [with her] for what was going to be a short time and ended up staying for five years. There’s more than ten years between us now, but that never seems to have affected our relationship. When I moved down I was a young twenty-two and Arabella used to shock me with the things she would say, but she finds it harder to shock me now. She probably corrupted me, but I probably needed corrupting a little bit.’

Arabella was not an easy person to live with, it transpired, and there were times when the two ‘nearly murdered each other’, continued David, ‘I’m sure she’ll say the same about me. She has “areas of issue”, rules about what goes where, which knife you use for cutting the bread and which you don’t. She will freely admit that she’s anally retentive to the point of bonkersdom. There was a dishwasher that we were never allowed to use, goodness knows why, and she used to have a thing about never putting the heating on. She has eased up over the years, but we used to live in nearfreezing temperatures. Of course, the fact that I was from Scotland delighted her because she thought, Oh well, you’re used to it, you’ll be fine, so that was a particular point of conflict.

‘There were other lodgers who passed through and Arabella’s boyfriend eventually moved in, but I was the only constant one. I did stick with it for quite a long time, but then the rent was cheap. When I first moved in, Arry was great about introducing me to people. She was sweet, a great ally to have in a new, scary city. These days she’s got children [to whose youngest he became a godfather], so there’s less opportunity to see her. Her boyfriend isn’t keen on the showbizzy events that she gets invited to, so occasionally I’m her date for things like that. She’s generous, supportive and she’s good at giving advice, particularly on relationships. She can pretty much tell you what another person is thinking. She’s a loyal, warm and open person.’

But according to Arabella, when she first met David, she was on her last proper acting job while the young actor was on his first big one: ‘I was completely blown away by how mesmerically talented he was. I remember thinking, Blimey, this boy’s brilliant. We were shooting in Glasgow and David said, “Let’s go out for a pizza tonight,” and we did, and got on brilliantly. I was coming out of a not-very nice relationship and was landed with a big house in London. David was going to move to London, so I asked him to be my lodger. He did, and it was fantastic. He was a proper friend first, so there was never that “I’m his landlady and he’s my serf ” stuff.

‘Maybe it’s to do with the age difference, but it was one of those weird relationships where there was no sexual tension. He stayed on here after I met my boyfriend, Jeremy [Norton], and that was all fine. There were a few teething problems – he’s not at all tidy and I’m very tidy. I’m kind of, “You’re cutting the garlic with the wrong knife and don’t ever cut the plastic with that Sabatier”. He’s kind of, “Don’t stir that pasta sauce with the spoon you’ve just licked”. And I’m more, “Don’t be stupid, you kiss people you barely know”.

‘Even though, he thinks I’m finicky,’ she says, ‘so is he. He has to have his kiwi and his bowl of cereal in the morning. And he drove me nuts with his washing, which he’d leave in the machine for about a year. Also, I could never get him to believe that no matter how he shut the front door, to anybody inside the house it was a slam, although once Jeremy and I had babies he did get better. Ours was quite a luvvies relationship – I’d take the piss out of him for reading books about the character he was about to do, and he’d take the piss out of me for not caring about what I was doing.

‘It was a very supportive relationship, though. David could, in all seriousness, stand in the kitchen and do his next big speech to me. He trusted me enough as a performer, and also as a friend. He could get quite wound-up and angsty about a part. In that situation, I’d remind him that no one actually cared about what he was doing.

‘He says I’ve corrupted him. He was telling me a story about one of the RSC actors and I said, “David, it’s not like you to laugh at that.” And he said, “Yes, but you’ve made it impossible for me to take this sort of thing seriously.” So I think, I’ve probably injected a good note of irreverence. David is astonishingly focused for his age, he’s amazingly honest and straightforward. He’s one of the handful of people I would tell a secret to and know that he wouldn’t tell anybody; he’s trustworthy and he’s honourable. He’s lovely.’

Once David had settled into Arabella’s house and London itself, he very quickly became ‘ridiculously fortunate’ as he puts it and started to develop a career in the theatre, frequently performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company for whom, over the years, he has specialised in comic roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It, Antipholus of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors (a role he recorded for the 1998 Arkangel Complete Shakespeare production of the play), Captain Jack Absolute in The Rivals and more serious parts, such as the tragic role of Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, Hamilton in The General From America and as Jack Lane in The Herbal Bed.

‘After Takin’ Over the Asylum, I didn’t want to hang around waiting for a part in East Enders,’ he would smile later, remembering what his first London agent told him. ‘The way to build a long career was in the theatre, and when I got into the RSC and climbed the ladder to play Romeo and such-like, I was thrilled. It was more than I could ever want, and no matter what happens to me now, I’ll never regard theatre as the poor relation.’

In the same year that he moved to London, he also returned to Scotland to play with the Dundee Repertory Theatre in The Glass Menagerie, Long Day’s Journey into Night and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which he found to be a remarkable training ground for what he wanted to do: ‘I did a whole season, three plays, one after the other, rehearsing one during the day and performing in another that evening. It was great because I got to play parts that I might not naturally have been cast in.’ But it was, he continues, ‘when I got my first job at the National that I was over the moon. That was further than I ever thought I’d get.’

The bad news for David, however, being at the Royal National Theatre in London and playing the role of Nicholas Beckett in Joe Orton’s What The Butlar Saw was that he would have to appear near-naked on stage. It was something that he had not done before, not that he seemed worried: as far as he was concerned, it was simply part of the job.

The play consisted of two acts and revolved around Dr Prentice, a psychiatrist attempting to seduce his attractive prospective secretary, Geraldine Barclay. It opens with the doctor examining Miss Barclay in a job interview. As part of the process, he convinces her to undress. The situation becomes more intense during Dr Prentice’s supposed ‘interview’ when Mrs Prentice enters, and he attempts to cover up his activity by hiding the girl behind a curtain.

His wife, however, is also being seduced and blackmailed by Nicholas Beckett, played by David. She therefore promises him the post as secretary, which adds further confusion. Soon, Geraldine is dressed like a boy and Nicholas is dressed as a girl, Winston Churchill is missing body parts and the doctor digs himself further and further into trouble by piling up more and more ridiculous lies. Dr Prentice’s clinic is then faced with a government inspection. Led by Dr Rance, the inspection reveals the chaos in the clinic and Rance, who talks about how he will use the situation to develop a new book, which he says will bring together incest, buggery, outrageous women and strange love-cults.

When the original production of the play was staged at the Queens Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue, London in March 1969, almost two years after Orton was brutally bludgeoned to death by his ex-lover Kenneth Halliwell, with nine hammer blows to the head, there were some cries of ‘Filth!’ from the gallery, but the work was still considered enjoyable, even if it was, as some critics noted, a somewhat staid revival and survived as a largely shock-free Swinging Sixties period piece.

If David never thought he would get so far as to walk the boards at the National, perhaps he was equally surprised that year when he also landed a bit part and shared a scene with Christopher Eccleston in Michael Winterbottom’s big-screen adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s tragic Jude, a profoundly moving drama unrelentingly bleak in its depiction of love and poverty in the late-nineteenth century. Although it was the only time that he would share any on-screen time with Eccleston, it was, of course, from him that, nine years later, he would take over his childhood fantasy role of playing the key role in Doctor Who.

When he wasn’t working in theatre or film, David filled his schedule with bit parts on television. He appeared in such popular shows as The Bill, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and Foyle’s War. Appearing so much on television in those days, even if it was only small parts, probably helped him to familiarise himself with the technical side of film-making because it hadn’t been part of his drama school training. Filming was not like acting, so yes, he admits, ‘I had to [learn] because it wasn’t part of my course then. There are all sorts of terms [like rolling, speed, slate, action] that can throw you if you don’t know them when you start out, but I found that film crews were always happy to help. You learn a bit about editing too, along the way, learning to save your best performance for a close-up and not a wide shot, that kind of thing. It’s about getting the right emotional state as raw as you can make it on the right take, which is just something you get right with experience.’

Part of that experience is learning how to get into character and becoming thoroughly acquainted with the story, something that’s hard for anyone when the tale keeps shifting, when the plot, continuous on paper, suddenly flies to all points of the compass, only to be reassembled much later on the cutting-room table. Even if it’s all part of the process, it must sometimes become tedious: from the early hours of the morning till late at night, watching scenes laboriously set up over hours of preparation, only to have them cut short or cut with barely a word spoken.

David also had his own technique for reaching an emotional point in a scene: ‘You need to take yourself by surprise a little bit. If you need to listen to a certain piece of music, for example, as a trigger, I think your reaction stops being potent. I personally just need a bit of quiet. But you know, there are no rules. If it works for you, then you should do it.’

But there is also a need, he admitted, to find time to wind down in between takes: ‘You need to be able to relax as filming days are long, often starting at six in the morning and going on until eight at night. You can’t be primed every second, you’d kill yourself by week three. You need to chill out, but be ready to take the time you need to prepare for a challenging scene. It’s all about choosing your moment: knowing when to get a bit of space to prepare and knowing when you can just have a chat or read the paper.’