Clive Merrison is fucking hilarious
Transcript under cut:
Toby Hadoke: Well, this is as showbiz as it gets. I'm in Joe Allen's, with an actor whose work I've always admired. So I'm delighted to be joined by him for this edition of Who's Round. So I'm going to ask him who he is, and why I'm talking to him about Doctor Who ~
Clive Merrison: Well, I'm Clive Merrison and I presume you're talking to me about Doctor Who because I've been in it twice.
Hadoke: You started off in Tomb of the Cybermen.
Merrison: Yes. I was a - a child. It was my first ever TV. I didn't know anything. And I see it now - I mean, there was the shock of not seeing it for so long and then it being discovered in a skip in Hong Kong? Something like that, and then seeing it in the Princess Anne theatre, BAFTA, with 800,000 people? And all that. And seeing me, 21 years old, doing this terrible American accent, looking completely lost, just a totally embarrassing experience. My performance is [enunciates] Jim Callum.
Hadoke: Well, I wrote a book with a writer of Doctor Who called Rob Shearman, who's written some fine instalments of Doctor Who and other things, and we spend - the whole thing of the book was even in the episodes that we struggled to find anything good to say, we had to accentuate the positives.
Merrison: Yeah
Hadoke: And there's a whole, a whole entry about you as Jim Callum
Merrison: Pfffftt!
Hadoke: Because --
Merrison: How could there possibly be?
Hadoke: Because it's such a lovely - I think you do quite a lot
Merrison: I'd never been on television before! I didn't know what I was doing. I was a lost boy. And there was this horrible director called Morris Barry, who treated me like a whipping boy. And I was to blame for everything! I didn't know what I was doing. He was a horrible man. And you know, revenge is a dish taken - best taken cold? ha! I thought, I'll get him back eventually. And if we fast forward about 15 years and he was appointed Head of Drama at BBC Wales, and I was down there just before he was appointed, and I poisoned every well he went to. He lasted three months.
Hadoke: [Laughs]
Merrison: Got my own back on the [bleeped] bastard. I hope - is he dead?
Hadoke: He is, long dead.
Clive: Oh thank god for that. I mean, not because I wish him dead, but because he can't sue me.
Hadoke: Yeah so how - how did that manifest? Cos it's not an uncommon story.
Merrison: Oh dear a very common story. I've worked with people that were - people that liked a whipping boy. I mean, John Dexter I worked with and he famously did, but he never treated me like that. But, you know, it's one of those guys that spot the weakest and then go for them, and I was very very weak cos I'd never been on television before, and I think I was palmed off on him in some deal with my agent, I don't know what it was. But there we are. And you know, I didn't know anybody. I knew Michael Kilgarriff, the um
Hadoke: Cybercontroller!
Merrison: Yeah. Yeah. I knew him cos I'd worked on radio, a lot. Cos I got the radio drama rep award at drama school, so I went straight from drama school to the BBC Radio Rep which was an extraordinary thing, really, and I met Michael there. And then afterwards I think I did Oxford Playhouse and then my first TV was Doctor Who. Ha. And it was so exciting of course, because I was a fan of Doctor Who in those days. And you know.. In Lime Grove, and you did it all in one go! And they played in the music. So you're standing there, and they go '10, 9, 8…' [imitates theme] diddle di dum diddle di dum and you're thinking [bleeped] 'Fuck! I'm in Doctor Who!' It was marvellous.
Hadoke: Great feeling. And I saw you interviewed at the time that it came back and -- you said you liked Patrick Troughton but you also thought --
Merrison: -- I loved Patrick Troughton --
Hadoke: -- he was very sexy.
Merrison: Yeah I thought that.
Hadoke: Can you qualify that for me? [laughs]
Merrison: Well! Well it was a bromance between an older actor and - yeah he was just um I think he was just a sexy actor. I mean, all good actors, read actors, you've got to be sexy. Doesn’t matter how ugly you are you have to be sexy. Charles Laughton: sexy. Spencer Tracy was sexy. It’s an odd thing. It’s a kind of chemical thing you know, and um Patrick had that. He was naughty. He was cheeky, you know. Not in the kind of outré way that Tom Baker did but you know he was subversively sexy, and I know everybody loved him, ha ha ha! He was a wonderful actor, and of course he invented the phrase, ‘I don’t do theatre acting, I can't do any more of that shouting in the evenings’. That was Patrick. Something I’ve always borne in mind. You can have too much of shouting in the evenings, that’s for sure. But I mean I loved those days. I loved the North Acton Hilton that we all rehearsed at, you know? It was marvellous. All these tables and the All Creatures Great and Small and the Doctor Who and Howards Way and everybody got matey and went to the pub and everything, stayed far too late with Norman Rodway getting us drunk and all that stuff, and all the older actors used to creak down the offices and ask all the PAs ‘What’s going on, darling? Do you think there’s anything suitable for me coming up in the Palaces??’ and they’d all work like that. It was an extraordinary thing, doesn’t really go on anymore. And! Of course, in those days, we rehearsed! You know, we used to meet in church halls with terrible acoustics and actually rehearse the [bleeped] shit. You know.
