Oh, it’s nice to be told.
Unusually, JNT had come with us to Gloucestershire for the location work. As far as rallying the troops went, he was a great person to have around; always energetic and busy, busy, busy! I’m not sure it worked so well for the director. Sometimes you need a stronger man in charge but John Black was a bit intimidated by his boss’s presence. So when JNT said, ‘I want the opening credits to be like Hart to Hart’ – all zooming cars and glamorous locations – Black should have told him to clear off. But he didn’t. That’s why I found myself sitting outside a country pub one minute waving a glass of wine, then posing on a rock with a newspaper, then leaning moodily in my Mac against my Mini Metro. It was already ridiculous before they asked me to jog along the country road.
OK, I thought, it’s day one, keep smiling, it will get better from here.
They set the camera up, gave me a mark and then off I set along the road.
‘That’s nice, Lis,’ the director said. ‘But it was a bit fast for the camera.’
So I did it again and John Black said, ‘Nice, but maybe a bit more slowly next time.’
‘Do you have any idea how hard it is to jog slowly and not look like you’re suffering from muscular dystrophy?’ I said, ‘Can’t you move the bloody cameras back instead?’ Would it have killed them to use a longshot instead of a close-up?
My favourite part of the intro was whizzing up and down the country lane in my car. I tend not to drive outside of filming requirement so it’s always an adventure when I get behind the wheel. Forwards I can do – anything else takes a bit more time – and John wanted me to zoom along this road. I thought, I can do that – just clear the road, for God’s sake! Actually I believed it would be a dynamic start to the programme so I was disappointed to see they didn’t use it in the end.
John Black didn’t have the best of luck. As we’d discovered on The Seeds of Doom, filming outdoors in November gives you the shortest possible amount of daylight to cram everything in. A few days before we set off, a second week was pulled from the schedule so that led to frantic re-jigging, which only piled on the pressure. Any hopes I had of reworking my lines while we were out there seemed to be vanishing in the rush.
The weather didn’t exactly help, either. We always seemed to be waiting for a shower to pass. For the night shoots it wasn’t the rain but the unbearable temperatures that were the killer. One of the things I think John and everyone got spot-on was the eerie satanic festival filmed outside a church in North Woodchester. The worshippers wore amazing goat-head masks and the whole scene really captured a bit of tension and energy, which I think was largely missing in the rest of the programme. Of course, by the time we’d been there setting up and then rehearsing and then going for takes from different angles it was two or three in the morning and absolutely freezing. Poor Ian Sears who played the sacrificial Brendan was only wearing the flimsiest of robes. In between takes his dresser would rush over with blankets, hot socks and scarves.
However bad it gets you can always rely on actors to find the black humour. There was one brilliant moment while the ring of pagans were dancing around in sub-zero temperatures calling ‘Hecate! Hecate! Hecate!’ when we realised it had suddenly changed to ‘Equity! Equity! Equity!’ – the name of the actors’ union!
My only contribution to the black-magic scenes was a spot of Kung Fu, meted out to a couple of the villains. When you see something like that in a script you think, Well, I suppose I’ll be all right with training. I got about five seconds’ tuition before John called ‘Action!’ Let’s just say I don’t think I’ll be getting my Black Belt in Venusian aikido any time soon.
That wasn’t the only time the script promised something we couldn’t deliver. There’s an attempt on Sarah’s life when a tractor pulls out in front of her car. I didn’t even bother marking it in my script, I just assumed a stuntman would be doing it.
I remember sitting on the coach with a cup of tea when someone came on to fetch me.
‘It’s time to do your car crash, Lis.’
I said, ‘Pardon? I’m not in this scene – it’s a stuntman.’
‘Oh,’ he told me. ‘John apologises but …’
It was another decision that had come down to money. Why pay a professional when you can ask your actors to risk their lives?
‘We just want you to swerve the tractor, mount the embankment, then bring the car down the other side,’ John explained.
‘You have got to be kidding – I struggle to go in a straight line!’ As far as I could see, one wrong turn of the steering wheel and that car would just flip over.
If I hadn’t nearly drowned at Wookey Hole, I probably would have attempted it but it wouldn’t have made the shot any better. They just wanted to economise, whether I was up to the job or not. You have to draw the line somewhere. In the end they found a stuntwoman to do the dangerous bit.
I do wonder how JNT’s presence affected things. I think the director was especially cowed because the producer controls the purse strings. Nathan-Turner became a true friend over the years but we did have one spectacular falling out on set. One of the crew had been told off for something. I found John and said, ‘I think you’ve made a mistake. I was there, that’s not what happened.’
He went ballistic, storming around, throwing his arms in the air, shouting, ‘Why aren’t you standing up for me? It’s your job to stand up for me!’
Well, no it’s not, actually. I’m probably closer to the crew than I am the producer, I thought, but maybe it wasn’t a good move tactically.
The atmosphere the next morning was frostier than usual – and it had nothing to do with the weather. Nathan-Turner needed to check something with me, but instead of coming over, I heard him say to his partner, Gary: ‘Would you ask Elisabeth …?’
My God, it was so bloody childish. He was pretending I wasn’t even there. Pathetic and unprofessional – and not what I needed on what was already a problematic shoot for me.
I think I got the cold shoulder for a couple of days. Then Gary sidled up to me one evening and said, ‘Look, John is really upset about what’s happening. Would you go and apologise to him?’
‘No, I won’t. I have nothing to apologise for,’ I said. But I wasn’t going to stand for this petty behaviour either, so I did go over and said, bullish as you like, ‘Hello, John.’
‘Oh, Lis!’ he gushed, ‘thank goodness you’ve come over. Let’s just be professional, shall we?’
I said, ‘Well, I thought I was being.’
That just kicked things off again! We made up later and, as I said, we were very close until he died. What a drain when you’re already against the clock, though.
Hindsight’s a terrible tease because so much of K-9 and Company seems wrong to me. In fact, it’s probably just a few tweaks away from being rather good. As Eric Saward told me, ‘I think if it had gone to series then all those problems would have been ironed out and we would have had a hit on our hands.’
Some of the snags just came down to bad communication. You have to bear in mind I’d never seen K-9 before, so one day in Gloucestershire I was introduced to this boxy-looking mutt and two men. Mat Irvine is K-9’s operator and John Leeson supplies the voice – the team behind the dog.
Mat ran over what K-9 could do and we walked our first scene, getting our bearings. Then the director called ‘Action!’ and I delivered my line.
Nothing.
Have I forgotten a cue? Why isn’t K-9 speaking? I wondered.
So we went again and the same thing happened. Nothing.
I looked at John Black, then John Leeson. They stared back at me expectantly.