My Life in Films

If ever you take part in the BBC2 quiz show Only Connect, the ineffable Victoria Coren-Mitchell will introduce you with a tiny factoid about yourself that you have supplied to the producers beforehand. When I appeared on it in 2013, one of mine was that I had once been in a film with Helen Mirren. We didn’t share any scenes – I did not get the chance to go on to explain – but it was undoubtedly true that I appeared in a scene in the film White Nights (1985). Starring alongside of me were the Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and American actor and choreographer Gregory Hines. It even won a Best Song Oscar, for Lionel Richie’s ‘Say You, Say Me’.

Helen Mirren, every inch a dame

Not that this was by any means the first time I had appeared on film. Oh no. The first occasion had come about a few years before, when I’d been cast in a couple of productions put together by the students at the film department of Bristol University. They needed bodies to move around in front of their cameras as they got to grips with the complexities of organising a complicated shoot. First of all, I played the eponymous lead in an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s most complex novel, Jude the Obscure. Robert Powell had given us his Jude in a TV mini-series a decade before, and I remember the unusual nudity – unusual for the time, I mean; they didn’t strip off and hang upside down from the ceiling or anything like that – causing a bit of a stir. (Michael Winterbottom’s 1996 film version starred Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet and, given the casting, the amount of nudity on show came as somewhat less of a surprise.) The BBC version ran to six 45-minute episodes. Ours, I think, came in at just under ten minutes, and there wasn’t a square inch of controversial bare flesh to be seen, least of all mine, thank God.

The bit I enjoyed most was piling into vans and driving off to various locations. There was a farm for the pig-slaughtering scene (no pigs were actually harmed; the farmer just got one to squeal a lot by wrestling it into the air off camera while someone spilled a symbolic bucket of blood across the ground); there was the scene in Bristol Cathedral, which just a few years before had stood in for Minster Cathedral in the Richard Burton/Lee Remick thriller The Medusa Touch; and our final scene was shot in pouring rain in some stone mason’s yard, though for the life of me I can no longer remember where that might have been.

My two strongest memories of this particular shoot are of a dead rabbit and a rotten kid.

The rabbit was handed to me, stiff and cold and hanging from a wire, so I could carry it along a cottage path up to some back door. The wire was very thin and the moribund lapine was very heavy, so by the time the actress playing Sue Bridehead, or was it Arabella Donn, and I had finally fumbled through our lines, the wire had practically severed two of my favourite fingers which I would have preferred to keep in order to form guitar chords. (At one point I asked if I could carry it over my shoulder and amazingly, to my chagrin, all that did was form an extra painful crease in my trapezius muscle directly at the point where I hung my guitar strap.)

The rotten kid was simultaneously a source of shame and fury. My confidence had taken a knock since I’d recently lost the only job I’d been able to find since leaving university, so maybe I was feeling more in need of nurturing than I knew. Anyway, in this one scene towards the end, where Jude’s son hangs himself and his two half siblings in the attic, Jude discovers their bodies and ‘a look of agonised horror convulses his features’. Easy for the script to say. Of course, I was far too self-conscious a person and far too crap an actor to do anything like that, but I gave it a go and between takes I heard this boy whisper to our director, ‘Why does that man keep making funny faces at me? I thought this was meant to be a serious scene.’ Hardy called him ‘Little Father Time’ in the book, due to his old soul and lack of humour. I called him ‘Little Piece of Shit’.

But at least he was taking the thing seriously. Another of the roles I played for the film school, I could hardly keep a straight face. I was cast as, of all things, an eminent gynaecologist. I momentarily cheered up on the first morning when the director said to me, “You know you’re brilliant don’t you?” and I muttered, blushing, “Thanks very much.” “No,” he replied acidly, “your character. He’s got to be brilliant to have become so renowned in his field at your age. So for Christ’s sake try and make me believe that, will you?” (I exaggerate for comic effect, of course, but not much. Not enough.)

The film had, I believe, been commissioned by some proper healthcare body and was meant to be an informal but informative documentary about the various kinds of birth control available to women… and I was meant to know all about it, so… I know, right?

But there was a bed scene, and I perforce had to break the no-nudity clause in my contract. Because it was such an important project the director was actually one of the film school’s tutors, and for this one scene we moved into his own bedroom at home. I remember him saying exasperatedly at one point, “Darlings, if you want to smoke, please do it in the garden,” and I don’t blame him in the slightest. The problem was, I couldn’t smoke outside because I was already in my jimjams and I’d have frozen my socks off out there. My character was married, you see, and at this point in the plot the wife suspects she is pregnant and while she sits up in bed with her nightie and a book, I have to get changed off camera and then slide in beside her.

It’s true what they say, of course, it’s not erotic in the slightest, and any half-formed worries I might have had that I might lose control of my questing groin were soundly crushed by the tension of remembering lines, all those lights, and the crowd of people looking down at you, yawning and eating sandwiches. Of course I wore underpants, which only made the situation even more ludicrous.

One take, I was lying propped up on my elbows, like they had told me to do, but I hadn’t had time to do up my top, so I looked a bit like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, that shot where he’s lounging back with an injured leg resembling Michelangelo’s Adam off the Sistine Chapel ceiling. I say ‘a bit’. I mean you could see my nipples too.

My interactions with Ms Mirren (as she then was) a few years later were obviously a lot more modest than that. As I say, we never shared any actual screen time. So who exactly was I? Well Matthew, that night I played Enthusiastic Audience Member in Seat 12, Row E applauding Mr Baryshnikov’s curtain calls at the end of a successful ‘performance’ in a packed theatre. The packed theatre was the Hippodrome, Bristol, standing in for some plush venue beyond the Iron Curtain, we were all there for the day simply to let them capture this one shot, and any one of the other 1,950 audience members could have made the same proud boast to Ms Coren-Mitchell had they ever got their act together to apply to go on Only Connect.

This was, in fact, to be my final outing in the medium – so far. I still foster fond hopes that one day, if my premium bond ever comes up, I can quit the proofreading business altogether and seek an audition with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School as their oldest living student. It’s almost forty years since I last had to learn any lines, and I might not be quite so limber as I once might have been in the fencing classes, but unlike women, men’s parts, as it were, don’t dry up quite so completely once they pass the age of 40, so I still nurture fond fantasies that one day, with a bit of luck and a following wind, I might, even at my age, still get to play a kindly caretaker, or the crusty old neighbour, or some crumbling grandfather in any daytime hospital soap.

Not that that my co-star in White Nights, Dame Helen Mirren, is showing any signs of early onset desiccation now, any more than she was back then. She actually met her husband-to-be, Taylor Hackford, on the set of our film (I still like to call it ‘our film’), and I imagine he must have been the bearded American who poked his head round the curtain occasionally, muttered a few words to someone who might have been the lighting cameraman, and then spent the rest of the time cosying up to Mischa. (We extras called him Mischa, though the assistant director who rehearsed us in our standing ovation referred to him as Mr Baryshnikov throughout. He hadn’t been down in the trenches acting with him the way we had, you see, obviously didn’t have the same battle-honed rapport, nevertheless we tolerated his contribution to the enterprise as a whole.)

On the day, in fact, we had rather more to do than our Mischa did. The cameras were on the stage behind the closed curtain, facing towards the auditorium, and on the call of ‘Action’ all he had to do was step through the curtains as they parted (did they part or go up? I can’t remember now) and bow exhaustedly to us as we rose as one and roared our fake approval. They had to do it a few times because there were several amateurs down the front who liked to stand up too soon, and at one point we ended up clapping in unison, like a football terrace, which probably didn’t sound very Cold War.

In fact, the day dragged on so long that there was talk at one point of us extras downing tools (or, in our case, fake programmes) and walking out. It was the height of summer, we had all arrived trussed up in smart jackets and bow ties, and as a small sop to delaying our lunch they had opened the dome in the roof to let in some fresh air. In the event, this hardly made any difference because the air outside was no cooler or fresher than the air within, so this did little to soothe our revolutionary fervour. In the end, though, they did end up paying us all a few quid more than the daily rate we had each been promised, so I suppose that was something.

You never see the film these days. I think I caught it once and looked eagerly for my own performance in the relevant scene, but I couldn’t make myself out in that sea of madly clapping extras. All I know is, I must have been somewhere in that clamorous throng – unless they decided we hadn’t come up to snuff and decided to restage the whole thing elsewhere at another time. In which case, if they did, I find myself in the insidious position of having lied to the producers of BBC2’s Only Connect. Sorry about that, guys. But my agent never told me I had ended up on the cutting room floor…

On the other hand, I know for a fact that my pajama’d turn as a brilliant, and probably award-winning boy gynaecologist, made it through to the final film. And even if it hadn’t I would have been well pleased, because it turned out the girl they had cast as my wife was the daughter of a TV scriptwriter whose name I recognised from series like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — the good one with Jeremy Brett — so my fatal weakness for buddying up to the relatives of people I’d heard of had been as amply satisfied that afternoon as it was to be several decades later in the Only Connect studio when the brilliant Alan Coren’s beautiful daughter told a bemused nation that I had once starred in an Oscar-winning film with Helen Mirren… Maybe I could use the other moment of filmic exposure if they ever had me back on? “…and Robin Seavill, who once showed his nipples to the daughter of a famous TV scriptwriter.” And then again, perhaps not.

My friend Mischa flashing his own nipples on the poster. Sadly, there wasn’t enough room for my name