Biggins by Christopher Biggins Page B

said.
    ‘Oh, you’ll be fine, I’m sure,’ I said, flattering myself that it was my winning personality that she would miss.
    ‘No, I can’t do without you. I don’t know how I’ll pay the electricity bill,’ she said through her tears.
    Now I got it. ‘How much do you owe, Lily?’
    ‘A hundred and eighty-four pounds and seventy pence.’
    I wrote a cheque for £184.70.
    ‘And I just don’t know how I’ll pay my gas bill.’
    ‘How much is that, Lily?’
    ‘Seventy-two pounds and fifty pence.’
    I wrote a second cheque.
    ‘Christopher, I will miss you. Would it be possible to have a memento of you?’
    ‘What would you like?’ I asked, looking at all my signed playbills, photographs and theatrical memorabilia on the walls.
    ‘Can I have your Kenwood mixer?’ she asked. That’s when I finally learned to say no.
     
    Of course, Lily wasn’t the only person I was going to miss at the Phoenix – the building was stuffed with racy neighbours and great pals. The Daily Mail ’s legendary theatre critic Jack Tinker was another resident – I had helped him get the flat there after telling him about the building at some first night or other.
    He was one of my finest friends. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much as I did back then. He was so small, so bright, so quick. And his reviews were brilliant.
    The two of us were forever in and out of each other’s flat, having coffee, gossiping and getting into scrapes and confessing all if we had been naughty boys the night before. Jack’s lover Adrian Morris had a house in Brighton where Jack’s three great daughters lived, and they were all like an extended family to me. As if I didn’t already have enough wonderful people around me as it was.
    But there was some tension – from some of my colleagues in the industry. People said I shouldn’t spend time with Jack, not because he was older and not because he had a lover but because he was a critic. It was a bit like Bristol, when some people thought it odd that I spent so much time with Joan, the wife of our principal. But, just like Bristol, I carried on regardless. People are people. Who cares what jobs people do?
    And I didn’t want to lose Jack’s friendship because, as I said, we shared so many laughs. The time we went to see a production in Stratford-upon-Avon was a key example. We had booked into a local hotel and arrived to find that all they had was a tiny room with a big double bed. ‘Ah, so that’s your game, Jack. You get young, impressionable actors out of London on false pretences and then playinnocent about sharing a bed,’ I joked. We laughed at that. We laughed even more after the play when it was finally time for bed. Jack was first into the bathroom, and while he was cleaning his teeth I got every piece of furniture in the room – including lamps, occasional tables, chairs and a chest of drawers – and lined them up down the middle of the bed as a sort of buffer zone.
    We laughed so much we cried. We could hardly have made more noise. Then we had to move the furniture all back. God knows what the people in the next room thought was going on.

8
The Real Me
    B y the time I met Jack Tinker I was wonderfully comfortable with who I was. I don’t have some angst-ridden tale of sexual awakening, nor do I have any terrible stories of prejudice or discrimination. But that’s not to say it’s all been easy. I look back on a world where attitudes to sexuality have changed dramatically. There have been times when things got much better, and times when they got much, much worse.
    I grew up in a different age. Being gay wasn’t thought of, let alone discussed. There were no role models, no good examples and no road map to follow. Yes, I mucked around just a little bit with a couple of other boys at school. I think on a hugely exciting school trip to Paris there were some rustles with none other than our head boy one night – I always did set my sights high. But even that wasn’t really