By 1980, on the verge of his twenties, he had impressed plenty of critics with the breadth of his portrayals, which had stretched all the way from patted and powdered posh fops to gruff and grungy rough scruffs, but he was, in truth, still in danger of being stereotyped – as far as most of the programme makers were concerned – as the short-shelf-life ‘youth’ type. He had reached that point in his career where, even if an ‘older’ role was not yet available, he hoped that at least a better youthful role was open to him that would allow him to settle into the part and start to grow. The range of options, however, seemed slim. All that he could do was wait, and hope, for his best chance to arrive.
The veteran Lennard Pearce, meanwhile, had started 1980 with a nagging feeling of professional ennui. He had been through it all – the highs, the lows, the generosity, the pettiness, the pleasure and the pain, the drama and the dullness of the acting business – and he was finally getting tired of it all. He still loved his profession, he still relished the best roles, but, after several years of being obliged to do little more but go through the motions, he was, by 1980, beginning to feel like calling it quits.
Pearce was born in Paddington, London, in 1915. He was a rather dapper and diligent RADA-trained actor who had also experienced the more fluid and informal atmosphere of the wartime show business community as a member first of ENSA and then of the Combined Services Entertainment touring companies. He followed this in peacetime first with a couple of seasons at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Sheffield, and then a fairly lengthy period based at the Empire Theatre in Peterborough as a member of Harry Hanson’s Court Players (writing a few plays there himself).
A fairly familiar minor figure in West End plays from the early 1960s onwards, he appeared as the Hungarian phonetician Zoltan Karpathy, as well as understudied the role of Alfred P. Doolittle (played by Stanley Holloway), in the original London production of My Fair Lady, before moving on to have spells at the National Theatre under Sir Laurence Olivier and the Royal Shakespeare Company under Trevor Nunn, as well as shorter and less glamorous stints in various repertory companies (where, amongst many other encounters, he met David Jason at Bromley Rep, appearing with him briefly during the mid-1960s in a production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals).
Mixing with the likes of such up-and-coming talents as Albert Finney, Derek Jacobi, Maggie Smith and Anthony Hopkins, he contributed – albeit most often in minor roles – to numerous theatrical successes during the best years of his stage career. Pearce never really established himself on television, however, but did appear in the odd minor role in such notable productions as the BBC’s groundbreaking docu-drama Cathy Come Home (1966), as well as one-off episodes of Crown Court, Dixon of Dock Green, Dr Finlay’s Casebook, Play for Today, Coronation Street and Sykes.
Always a heavy smoker, and – as a consequence – having struggled for many years with a weakened voice, he had also started to experience problems relating to balance and concentration while appearing mainly in stage plays during the 1970s, thus shaking his confidence in playing in front of an audience. Over-worked, increasingly worried about how he could make ends meet and now drinking rather heavily, he was at a very low ebb in his life. ‘I hadn’t had a break from acting for 35 years,’ he would later explain. ‘People were trying to evict me from my flat, and I drank a bottle of whisky every night. I looked gaunt – a skeleton, absolutely ghastly.’25 In 1980, after being diagnosed with critical hypertension and put on seven different types of medication for the rest of his life, he turned teetotal and contemplated, at the age of sixty-five, retiring from the profession and leading a much more leisurely existence.
This, then, was where the relevant figures were at the start of the new decade: Sullivan and Butt reeling from the cancellation of their new project, and Jason, Lyndhurst and Pearce dissatisfied, to varying degrees, with the current state of their acting careers. None of them knew it, in the autumn of 1980, but, this time next year, each one of their professional lives would seem much more exciting – and the British sitcom would start seeming genuinely relevant once again.
CHAPTER TWO
He Who Dares
’Cos where it all comes from is a mystery . . .
Early in 1981, John Sullivan and Ray Butt sat in a London pub and wondered what they should do next. Their new sitcom had been aborted. Time was running out. Something had to be done. Quickly.
The pub in question was The Famous Three Kings, on the corner of North End Road and Talgarth Road – a place where Butt often liked to go for a quiet drink and a think. After the pair had sat there for a while and moaned about the decision to axe Over the Moon, they tried to distract each other by moving on to other, less troubling, matters, exchanging anecdotes about the many things that they had in common in their backgrounds. Both of them, for example, came from working-class families in London (Sullivan’s in the south, Butt’s in the east), and had grown up in a similar kind of milieu, so they talked about some of the places and people that had made a mark on their memory.
As they flitted from one colourful story to the next, something came up that struck the two of them as, just possibly, the seed of another sitcom. It centred on that traditional laissez-faire location, the local market.
As a teenager, Sullivan had worked for a brief time informally on a Saturday stall in the small but busy Hildreth Street Market in Balham, and had been fascinated by all of the ‘characters’ there who competed for the customers’ cash. It had seemed like a modern-day version of a street scene from Dickens: a busy, colourful, richly diverse array of individuals, each one with his or her own personal style and strategy. Some were loudmouthed bullies, others were artful charmers and a few were engaging or hapless amateurs, but all of them contributed to the powerful theatricality of the social event.
Butt knew exactly what Sullivan was discussing, because he had similar memories: his father, for example, had returned from serving in the Second World War, pooled what money he had with that of a friend to buy an old NAAFI wagon and then started a small business selling ice-creams on Roman Road Market in Bow. Butt himself had spent some time there as a youth working alongside a very memorable street market trader: none other than the future comic icon Tommy Cooper.1
As they compared and contrasted experiences, they found one figure in particular loomed large in both of their memories. ‘We discovered that our favourite character was the fly-pitcher,’ Sullivan later explained. ‘He’s always funny, always a lad, and he was only there for half an hour, because he had to get away quickly before the market inspector came. You can have a good laugh with them, then they’re gone. You barely knew their names but they seemed like friends.’ The air of casual mystery that surrounded them had always struck Sullivan as particularly intriguing: ‘You never seemed to see them anywhere: where do they come from, where do they go?’2
The fly-pitcher seemed like the most audacious natural performer: either working with one or two Jimmy James-style sidekicks, or, more bravely, on his own, this figure went out into the street each morning ready to take on the world, no matter how much ammunition, or brummagem merchandise, was currently at his disposal. Living on his wits, the al fresco entertainer treated the market place as his stage, the standing crowd as his audience, and the act of selling as an art. Words washed over those who watched and listened like great tidal waves, drowning out any critical thoughts before they could bob up and catch their first breath. Like the British equivalent of America’s old lapel-grabbing huckster, the fly-pitcher simply would not let you go until you had bought what he sold.
They grew into their game. Some came to rely on a ‘shill’ (a collaborator who poses as a customer in order to dupe innocent bystanders into participating) and others remained honourably solo, but all had to learn how people reacted to different phrases, gestures, gags and gimmicks. If he did well, he would return the following day, and maybe even stay on for a fairly regular run, but if he did badly he would slip away to find another unofficial venue. The overlap with show business was obvious; the fly-pitcher was the open-air echo of the doughty old Variety star. Max Miller sold gags; his modern day equivalents sold cheap pairs of tights, portable