Paul’s the World’s a Stage
The producer Paul Elliott celebrated fifty years in showbusiness — to the very day — by throwing a great party in the Prince of Wales Theatre last night. And, as he was paying, he was fully entitled to regale us with memories for nigh on fifty minutes.
I thought he only spoke for thirty minutes. But his long standing producing partner, Duncan Weldon, was timing him. “It was fifty,” he said grimly, stroking his beard. Paul had described Duncan as the only man he knew who could make good news sound like bad news.
And what a cast turned up. One table alone was host to Eric Sykes, Russ Abbot, Leslie Phillips, Michael Barrymore, Donald Sinden and producers Bill Kenwright and Nica Burns.
Danny La Rue, very frail now, sat opposite the lustrous Rula Lenska, Lionel Blair sat nearest the stage (surprise, surprise), Barbara Windsor chirruped away at the back, John Barrowman cheered from the sidelines, and the room glittered with the light entertainment aristocracy ousted from national television by the talent and reality shows: Brian Conley, Lesley Joseph, Rolf Harris, Jeffrey Holland, Matthew Kelly.
But where the devil was Biggins? Thank heavens I found him just as the do was breaking up. No real showbiz party is complete without him, even though his best friend, top agent Barry Burnett (with partner Richard and his dear old mum), was keeping bubbly Babs company.
Paul made his professional debut on 8 June 1958 in Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage at the Palace Court Theatre, “Bournemouth’s intimate playhouse.” Two of his fellow cast members, Anthea Morris and Anthony Peck, were on hand to bear witness.
And he appeared for a year on television in Dixon of Dock Green alongside Jack Warner and Peter Byrne; Byrne remains one of his closest friends (and frequent employee) and his co-partner in E&B Productions before he set up shop with Duncan in Triumph Theatre Productions. Triumph’s first London presentation was J B Priestley’s When We Are Married at the Strand featuring two real greats in the cast: Peggy Mount as a fearsome Clara Soppitt and Fred Emney as a hilariously bumbling photographer.
In those early days Paul was married to the actress Jenny Logan; Duncan, who had been previously married to Helen (”Walking Back to Happiness”) Shapiro, was married to another blonde actress, Janet Mahoney. They made a splendid West End quartet.
Duncan’s partner these days is former Miss World Ann Sidney, while Paul recounted how he stole Linda Hayden away from straw-haired roisterer Robin Askwith when they all worked on the same production (Underground, starring an immobile, deadly dull Raymond Burr of Perry Mason and Ironside fame). “I vowed to give up drinking until I married her,” he said. “It took four and a half years.”
Any grudge has long since evaporated if Robin’s jolliness at the bar was anything to go by. Elliott had evoked not only past loves, but a vanished age of old style producers and gentlemen’s agreements. When he sat down with Eric Sykes –whom he described, unequivocally, as one of the great geniuses of comic acting — and Jimmy Edwards to sign them up for Big Bad Mouse, the deal was done on a full glass of whisky all around, and that was that.
So we charged our glasses and toasted Eric, the long gone Jimmy, Paul, Duncan and other titans of his era — playwright Ray Cooney, still looking slim, trim and spry at seventy-eight and relishing his current smash hit success with Caught in the Net in Paris;”I stand at the back and hear them laughing their heads off but as I don’t understand a word of French I don’t know what they’re laughing at,” Ray confesses with a twinkle — the late Peter Bridge, whom Paul described as his main producing mentor, lyricist Don Black and his lovely wife Shirley, designer Hugh Durrant (whose career has gone steadily downhill since he designed my fairy costume in a student production of The Dream, a production lit, incidentally, by Paul’s fellow producer Nick Salmon, also in attendance), Canadian theatre chief David Mirvish, and long lost and much missed backstage belles Sheila Fermoy and Sally Flemington. A famous night for a lovely man.
