From Coal Dust to Stardust

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The Lynn Selby and Phil Winston School of Dance and Drama was located in Doncaster town centre, about five miles from our home in Armthorpe. It was an offshoot of the prestigious Sylvia Young school in London, offering classes in drama, mime, tap, ballet, modern jazz and singing to 6-16 year olds, and had a great track record in getting local kids into the entertainment industry.

I spotted an advert for the school in the paper and after weeks of begging my resolutely untheatrical parents to let me attend, I started going to classes every Thursday after school and on Saturday mornings, although pretty soon I’d be making excuses to be there as much as possible.

The school was run by a professional couple in their late twenties, actress Lynn Selby and Phil Winston, a dancer and choreographer. It was Lynn I really looked up to. She was successful and sexy, all black hair, voluptuous curves and violet eyes – for a time I thought she actually was Elizabeth Taylor.

Inspired by Lynn, I quickly became a regular on the local speech and drama festival circuit, blossoming from a shy little boy into a regular Laurence Olivier. The Barnsley Music Festival, Worksop and Pontefract Speech and Drama Festival – there wasn’t a competition in the greater Doncaster area where nine-year-old Gary Cockerill didn’t turn up to dazzle ’em with a poetry reading or mime solo and leave clutching a medal.

My festival crowd-pleasers included a poem called ‘Colonel Fazackerley Butterworth-Toast’ by Charles Causley:

‘Colonel Fazackerley Butterworth-Toast

Bought an old castle complete with a ghost

But someone or other forgot to declare

To Colonel Fazak that the spectre was there.’

and a reading from My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. I also did well with a group mime called ‘Fickle-Hearted Sally’ with my best friend at drama school, Gavin Morley – a stocky little bruiser with an angelic face and a halo of golden hair – and his girlfriend Nicola Simpson. But it was my performance of ‘I’ve Got an Apple Ready’ by John Walsh at the Barnsley Festival that really caused a stir and is possibly still talked about to this day. At this particular festival there was a choice of two poems for the age group I was in, and the one that I set my heart on started like this:

‘My hair is tightly plaited, I’ve a bright blue bow.

I don’t want my breakfast and now I must go.

My satchel’s on my shoulder, nothing’s out of place,

And I’ve got an apple ready just in case.’

It’s basically about how a little girl gives this bully her apple to stop him chucking her beret up in a tree on her way to school.

When I told Lynn Selby I wanted to do this particular poem for the festival she said gently, ‘Gary, you realise that this poem is actually meant for a little girl …?’

My parents were even more tactful: ‘Are you sure you don’t want to try the other poem, love? You might find it a little bit … easier.’

But I was determined. I knew I could ace ‘I’ve Got an Apple Ready’ and I didn’t care what anyone else thought.

I clearly remember the festival adjudicator’s expression as I climbed up on to the stage and announced which poem I would be performing. I can still see the other parents in the audience looking embarrassed and shaking their heads at this strange little boy as the other kids sniggered at me. But I didn’t care. I was that coy little girl with the blue bow and beret, goddammit! I’d show them. Ninety-eight points and a gold medal later and my cockiness levels had shot through the roof.

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When I started at Lynn Selby’s, I absolutely idolised two of the eldest students. Carl Gumsley and Gracinda Southernby were good-looking, bubbly, confident – your archetypical stage school kids. He was as dark and handsome as she was blonde and pretty. The pair of them were more than just an inspiration to me, I wanted to be them – well, more Gracinda if I’m honest. Even her name was fantastic. So when I turned on the telly one night and saw Gracinda pop up in an episode of top police show Juliet Bravo my mind was made up. Cleaning up at the local speech and drama festivals had been fun for a while, but I fancied getting my face on the telly.

I’d been going to stage school for a year when I had my first professional audition – a TV ad campaign for English Apples. Lynn took a group of eight of us from the school down to London on the train. The tickets weren’t cheap, and I remember my parents had to dip into their savings to pay for them, but they knew how badly I wanted to go. It was my first visit to London and by the time the train finally pulled into Kings Cross I was buzzing (and quite possibly flapping) with excitement.

The auditions were being held at an advertising agency on Charlotte Street where our little group queued up behind a line of dozens of kids that was already stretching up the stairs. As I waited, I thought again about my audition piece. In the circumstances, what else could it really be but ‘I’ve Got an Apple Ready’? I was bursting with confidence.

Then suddenly it was my turn and I was ushered into a small room. There was a man standing in the corner behind a camera and another couple with clipboards and a box of apples.

‘Right, Gary,’ said one of the clipboard carriers. ‘What we need you to do is stand over there’ – I was directed to a cross on the floor – ‘take a bite out of this apple, chew and then turn and give a really big smile into the camera, like it’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten. Okay?’

‘Um, don’t you want me to say anything?’ I asked, my heart sinking. ‘I’ve prepared a poem. It’s about apples.’

‘No, just the bite and then the smile, thanks. Right – let’s go, give it all you’ve got!’

It was a green apple, sour and a bit woolly, but I did as they asked and was then shown to a large meeting room filled with a group of other kids.

Over the next few hours, I would go back into that little room and do the whole bite-turn-smile thing several more times until Lynn appeared, gave me a big hug and said, ‘Gary, you got the job!’

On the way back to the station, my head spinning with dreams of TV fame and fortune, I popped into one of the tourist shops on Oxford Street to buy Mum a thank-you present. For some reason I ignored the London-branded trinkets and picked out a decorative plate covered with spriggy little flowers and the words ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. The only money I had on me was the emergency couple of quid Mum had given me in case I got lost, but I figured I could pay her back out of my advert earnings. The plate is still hanging on our kitchen wall to this day, a slightly kitsch monument to my first ever pay cheque.

Well, after that there was no stopping me. Blond, cute and cocky, I became a regular fixture in the nation’s TV ad breaks. I was the voice of the Batchelors Mushy Peas commercial (‘Who’s the champion mushy peas? Batch-batch-batch-batch-batchelor! Champion mushy peas that please, Batch-batch-batch-batch-batchelor!’) and one of the sailor-suited kids in a Birds Eye Fish Fingers ad. I popped up in kids TV shows like Emu’s World and Mini Pops, the cult series in which pre-teens dressed up as famous pop acts to belt out their latest hits. I was in Showaddywaddy – or Showeenyweeny as we were known – and had to sing ‘Under the Moon of Love’ with a fake guitar, shiny purple suit and crepe-soled shoes.

I had been bitten by the fame bug and wanted more. I wanted to be Gracinda starring in Juliet Bravo. But even more than that, I wanted to be Andrew Summers. Ah, Andrew Summers: my nine-year-old nemesis. Andrew was a child star who found fame as the little boy alongside his granddad in a cult tomato soup advert of the late Seventies and at one time was virtually a household name. He was about the same age as me. ‘Ooh, that Andrew Summers is a really cracking little actor …’ people would say. I can remember being incredibly jealous of his success.

He’s not that special, I’d sulk silently to myself, he just gets all the adverts because he lives in London.

It was a desperately sore point for me that I missed out on castings because I lived up North. My parents were amazing, but there was no way they could pay for me to travel down to London for auditions every week – even with the help of the money that I earned.

By this time, I was turning into quite the little performer. As well as acting, I was really getting into my tap-dancing (although I would never quite get to grips with ballet) and I had always had a strong singing voice. Before my voice broke I could belt out a Barbra Streisand or Julie Andrews number and sound exactly like my idols.

A few years ago I went to New York with Barbara Windsor to help get her ready for some personal appearances and one night we went along to hear the famous jazz singer Diahann Carroll in cabaret. During ‘The Age of Aquarius’ she handed the microphone around for a bit of audience participation and when I started singing I can remember Barbara turning to me, open-mouthed, and muttering, ‘Where the bleedin’ hell did that voice come from?’

With a few adverts under my belt, at the age of ten I appeared in the chorus of a stage show called The Marti Caine Christmas Cracker at Sheffield City Hall. It was a proper old-fashioned variety show – lots of big musical numbers, comedy skits, a bit of audience participation – fronted by the comedienne and singer Marti Caine, who had shot to fame winning the TV talent show New Faces a few years earlier. Marti was this incredibly thin woman with a tumbling mass of deep red, almost purple, curls and a broad Sheffield accent. She wore slinky jewel-hued gowns that emphasised her pipe-cleaner figure.

Ever the sucker for ballsy, glamorous women, I worshipped her. She was so lovely and warm, plus she had a mouth on her like you wouldn’t believe which made me love her even more. My parents never swore in front of us when we were growing up, so to hear someone so famous and fabulous effing and blinding just added to Marti’s exotic glamour. (The one and only time I swore at my mum in my life – telling her to ‘fuck off’ in a rare moment of early teenage rebellion – she grabbed me by the hair, dragged me to the bathroom and literally washed my mouth out with soap. I never did it again.)

* * *

Occasionally Sylvia Young would come up to our stage school in Doncaster to scout for talent, and it was on one of these visits that she put me forward for an audition for another stage show. Once in a Lifetime was billed as ‘The brightest musical evening in the country’ and was to be a vehicle for the talents of singer, dancer and all-round small-screen superstar Lionel Blair, who at this time was wowing TV audiences on the hugely popular charades gameshow Give Us a Clue, alongside fellow team captain (and star of Worzel Gummidge) Una Stubbs. This magnificent stage spectacular was set to go on a nationwide tour, from Bournemouth to Sheffield and everywhere in between, and they were looking for 20 talented youngsters – ‘The Kids’ – to star alongside Lionel.

For my audition I performed a song and tap-dance routine from 42nd Street and did my Noah (of Bible fame) solo dramatic piece, which always used to go down well at the speech and drama festivals. Well, I tapped my little heart out and I got the gig, along with three girls – including my mate Gavin’s girlfriend Nicola Simpson and my first-ever girlfriend, Kerry Geddes – and one other boy from Lynn’s school. It was all over the Doncaster papers that these local stage school pupils were to be in Lionel Blair’s new show, even making it into the Yorkshire Post. Move over Andrew Summers, Gary Cockerill had hit the big-time.

Rehearsals started in earnest just before the school summer holidays. The show was to open with ‘The Kids’ belting out the Anthony Newley number ‘Once in A Lifetime’ and as we launched into the final chorus a beaming Lionel would make his entrance through our carefully choreographed ranks, wiry arms flung wide, to rapturous applause. Then it was onto a Fred and Ginger number, something from Cats, a routine from Bugsy Malone: in short, an evening of back-to-back crowd-pleasers. Or, as the show’s programme described it: ‘a rollicking, rumbustious night, Gay Nineties style’. (I should probably point out that ‘Gay Nineties’ is a nostalgic term that refers to America in the 1890s, a period known for its decadence, rather than anything to do with Lionel’s passion for tap-dancing and improvisation.)

There were other acts too, including a pair of incredibly beautiful Italian acrobats called Angelo and Erica. Every night I would watch mesmerised from the wings as they ran through their routine, with the lovely blonde Erica balancing on the Adonis-bodied Angelo’s upstretched hand, always thinking that this would be the night when he dropped her – although he never did. At the time I assumed they were married, but looking back, it’s now obvious to me that no straight man has eyebrows that perfectly groomed …

It was during rehearsals for ‘Once in a Lifetime’ that a chink started to appear in my otherwise armour-like confidence. One of the song and dance numbers we were doing was ‘Matchstick Men’, in which we were dressed in caps and braces like the little stick figures from the famous L. S. Lowry paintings. For some reason, I just couldn’t get the hang of this one dance move. It wasn’t even particularly difficult. Thumbs hooked in braces, I had to kick up my left heel behind me to touch the right heel of the girl next to me, but I always ended up kicking the wrong foot, which meant I ended up standing out like a sore thumb amongst the ranks of perfectly drilled little stick figures.

On the day of the final dress rehearsal we were running through the number with the choreographer on stage, while Lionel and the producers sat watching in the auditorium. It came to the chorus -‘And he painted matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs … – and, regular as clockwork, I kicked up to the wrong side. Suddenly there was a yelp from the auditorium, the orchestra stopped playing and then Lionel was bounding up on stage, this incredibly wiry streak of energy. I remember being very much in awe of him because he was on television every week. I also remember him having the most terrible breath. I have no idea whether it was garlic or cigarettes, but these are the sorts of things that stick with you when you’re a kid. (I should say that I’ve met Lionel a few times since and his breath has been absolutely fine.)

All the kids waited nervously as he strode along our ranks before coming to a halt in front of me. He was almost always smiling, which made it all the more terrifying now that he had a face like thunder. He pointed straight at me.

‘This boy’ – he said to the choreographer – ‘is getting the step wrong every time. You’ll have to move him to the back of the chorus.’

‘Of course, Lionel.’ The choreographer turned to me, furious that this little brat was making him look bad in front of the talent. ‘You, Gary – swap with Mark.’

And with that I was shuffled to the back, my cheeks burning with shame at my public humiliation.