Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (34 page)

We were
so pleased that Peter Capaldi had agreed to direct it because we thought he
would give it that realistic feel that we were after. If I’d been after
glamour, I wasn’t going to find it on
Getting On.
I played Kim Wilde, a
put-upon, knackered, slap-dash middle-aged nurse returning to nursing after
having had children. Incidentally I realised this is the name of a well-known
pop singer. I mentioned it to her when we worked on a Christmas show. She said
she’d be happy to appear as a patient! Vicki played Dr Moore, a snooty,
hypocritical and ambitious doctor, stuck in a backwater hospital and desperate
to progress in her career. Jo was Sister Den Flixter, capricious, lazy and
longing for love. And of course we had the gorgeous Ricky Grover playing Hilary
Loftus the nurse manager — pompous, spouting psychobabble and unsure of his
sexuality.

Having
got loose scripts together, we finally moved towards filming. We had hired a
hospital ward in the Bolingbrooke in Wandsworth and all met at seven on a
Monday morning, cold and shattered, ready for filming.

The
cliché that filming is glamorous is completely wrong. Mostly you have to start
so early that you’ve had no sleep the night before and you look and feel shit.
As we were actually in a hospital there was none of the Winnebago bollocks for
us; we were in a small office with some nice hospital armchairs. In fact, the
only thing that was perfect was the food. Breakfasts totalling roughly 115,000
calories were provided so that by the end of a three-week shoot it was
perfectly feasible that you would have put on 27 stone. Added to this, at
lunchtimes there were real proper puddings like treacle tart and jam roly-poly,
and it’s always bloody difficult to run away from them. Add on top sweets-a-go-go
available all over the set, and bugger the Winnebago, we had everything we
needed.

We got
our uniforms on and I looked in the mirror with the bare minimum of make-up on
and thought, God, that’s horrendous. However, I was supposed to be a
middle-aged, exhausted nurse in the NHS so I could hardly justify having a
make-up person attempt to help me look my best. (Although this doesn’t seem to
stop them in
Holby City.)

On the
set we also had lots of what I used to call extras, but are now called
supporting artistes — which sounds a bit posher. They were the most delightful
group of women in their sixties and seventies, of whom I became incredibly fond
over the three weeks we filmed. Their job would normally be to wander past in
the background on
EastEnders
or
Harry Potter,
but we asked a
little bit more of them — and that was to improvise with us in scenes. They
didn’t actually have to learn lines but just throw out the odd sentence which
matched their character and illness — and they were brilliant at it. It looked
very natural and non-forced, and the lucky buggers got to lie in bed all day.

We
would film the same scene three or four times based round the script and plot,
and as we refilmed we would add ideas as they came to us and so build on what
we had already filmed. This meant that when it came to the editing process
there was bloody loads of stuff for Peter and the others to wade through. I was
just glad it wasn’t down to me to decide.

I got
so used to the ward and became very happy with parking my arse at the nurses’
station and ‘looking at the computer’. What was actually happening was that I
had found a game of Solitaire on the computer and became slightly obsessed with
it, to the detriment of my concentration.

We did
have a huge laugh. Ricky particularly has a talent for making you helpless with
laughter during a scene, and being the most unprofessional of the three of us,
I’m sure there were a few scenes where I look like I’m going to explode, given
that I’m trying so hard not to laugh.

The
three weeks passed very quickly and then the three episodes were edited. We
used a lovely song by the Sheffield singer Richard Hawley as the theme tune. It
is called ‘Roll River Roll’, and it created the perfect atmosphere for the
show.

When
Getting
On
was broadcast we all held our breath. I never have any confidence in my
own performance and wondered whether critics would say Jo and Vicki were great
but I was complete shite.

To our
delight, the critics were universally positive and well over the top in some
cases. The viewing figures were fantastic and I remember getting a text from
Ricky Grover (expletives deleted) remarking on how weird it felt to be in
something successful.

I felt
this strongly too. Over the years, I have clung on by my fingertips, presuming
that at some point I would go right off the radar, return to touring and then
disappear from view. So to be involved in a series like this which has sent my
career in another direction is very gratifying.

Jo and
I were nominated for a BAFTA for our performances in
Getting On,
and
were miffed that Vicki didn’t get a nod too. As it panned out, the BAFTA was
won by Rebecca Front from
The Thick of It.
I was just pleased to even be
nominated in the area of acting. It still makes me laugh when I think of it.
What a hoot!

Trinny and Susannah’s show
What Not To Wear
was a popular programme on the BBC in which they grabbed
members of the public, had a right go at them about the way they were dressed,
pummelled them emotionally and physically, humiliated them by making them take
off most of their clothes and then stand in front of a 365-degree mirror, and
then set about turning them into a new person.

There
were a couple of specials made and I was invited to do a show called
Trinny
and Susannah on the Red Carpet.
The purpose of this was to do what they
did, except with celebrities, and the finite point of the show was then to push
us up the red carpet in front of the paparazzi to present an award at the
BAFTAs, done up in our finery.

I and
Sophie Raworth, a BBC news presenter, were called upon to do the honours.

Our
initial contact involved a meeting at some rich bloke’s penthouse in Battersea
that he let out for filming purposes. I was sat down between Trinny and
Susannah on a luxurious sofa, at which point they turned on the telly and
showed me a DVD of my fashion faux pas. To be honest, I wasn’t that bothered by
what they said. I thought I looked OK in all my so-called hideous incarnations,
which is obviously my problem! OK, my hair looked bloody ridiculous in the
eighties, but whose didn’t? They also commented that I looked and dressed like
a man. So what? Couldn’t give a toss, quite honestly. Yes, I wore black baggy
clothes, but that was down to laziness and shunning white for fear of looking
like a marquee. I am and always have been a closet Goth, and also black has the
advantage of shaving off a couple of pounds —and I’m not going to pass up that
opportunity.

They
stuck me in front of the infamous mirror, luckily not just in my bra and pants
but with some tight black things on. But I wasn’t even bothered about that
really. It wasn’t a surprise for me nor, I would imagine, for the viewers
either.

We then
set about finding something for me to wear and so I was taken shopping to fat
lady departments in posh stores round London. Trinny had a good old go (when I
came out of a changing room), at pulling my knickers down, I can’t really
remember why now, but a small battle developed, which I easily won because even
though she’s tough as old boots, it appears I’m tougher.

I was
also dragged to the office of a designer — a woman called Anna Scholz. She has
tried to make clothes for big women which are a little more imaginative and
glamorous. That’s fine for the big women who want to be glamorous, but I
don’t. However, I went along with it because I was interested in which role
model they would cast me as. Would it be Widdecombe? I feared the worst.

On the
whole I quite enjoyed myself, had a pop at them when I could, and steeled
myself for what I assumed would be some sort of unexpected, further attempt at
humiliation. It eventually arrived one morning in the Battersea penthouse when
the production team informed me they just wanted to ‘do something’ and sat me
in a sort of dentist’s chair under a very bright light, with a camera running,
but refused to say why.

At this
point, Susannah, who seemed to have been cast as the good copper (i.e. to
persuade the criminal — me — to do or say something I didn’t want to), appeared
with a pair of tweezers and announced to the camera that she was going to deal
with the hair-growth on my chin. The moment had come, then. I felt this was a
deliberate attempt to humiliate me over something which isn’t a big deal (I
hardly had a Brian Blessed beard at the time), but which women are made to feel
embarrassed about — excess hair-growth. I was particularly pissed off, because
they hadn’t checked it out with me first —presumably because they thought,
quite correctly, that I wouldn’t agree to it.

I began
to get angry, at which point Susannah panicked a bit and said, ‘It’s a problem
we’ve all got, you know, Jo,’ and attempted to turn the tweezers on herself. I
bundled her out of the way and launched into a speech right down the barrel of
the camera, about how the subtext of their show was about making women feel bad
— and embarrassing and humiliating them. I stated that I didn’t care, because I
could stand up for myself and I knew all about attempts of producers to make
‘good telly’ and I wasn’t having it — but, I went on to say, most women on that
show weren’t as experienced as I was and under the glare of the camera, nervous
and malleable, they agreed to things that I thought were exploitative and
unkind.

I
continued with my rhetoric, at which point they wheeled out the producer, who
asked the most brilliant question a producer has ever asked me. She said,
‘Would you like to have a lie-down?’

My
answer was something along the lines of, ‘Are you having a laugh? No, I
don’t
want a lie-down. I am not tired, elderly, disabled or ill. And of course
you’re implying that I am somehow being histrionic, because I’m what you
sneeringly call “The Talent”. I DO NOT WANT A LIE-DOWN!’

I
peppered all this with a few more expletives and there was a bit of a
stand-off. It took a while for the atmosphere to cool back down to normal and
then we carried on. However, this is a very good example of how some
television-makers handle people really badly.

We then
continued as if nothing had happened, although they seemed a bit wary from that
point on. Fine by me. As for the director who’d said earlier on, ‘We need a bit
more conflict,’ he certainly got what he wanted.

Eventually,
T and S got an outfit together for me which included their requirements of a
bit of cleavage (yuk) and emphasising a waist, which in all honesty I didn’t
really possess, particularly as I’d had a baby relatively recently. On the
night of the BAFTAs, I was put into the outfit, a brown Anna Scholz two-piece
consisting of a long skirt, top and velvet coat with leopard-skin lining, which
was perfectly all right but not really me. I was made up to within an inch of
my life and then driven to the bottom of the red carpet to face the phalanx of
paps waiting for blood.

God, it
was hideous, the worst bit of the whole show, and I was so relieved when I got
inside. I then had to present an award, can’t even remember what for now, with
the athlete Denise Lewis. (Yes, a comedy Laurel and Hardy thing going on there,
I’m sure.)

I was
so happy to get home that night, peel off my grown-up lady outfit and put on
the familiar, black baggy, food-stained clothes in which I felt like myself.
That outfit was given to me as a present at the end of filming and I haven’t
worn it since.

I have
seen Trinny and Susannah a few times over the years and they are actually all
right, although you may not be surprised to learn that we’re not new best
friends. They, like everyone else, just got sucked into the maelstrom of the
ever voracious God of Good Telly.