A shorter version of this article appeared in
The Daily Telegraph
​on 27 December 2024
© Christopher Luscombe
​

With Terry Scott in Jack and the Beanstalk at the Theatre Royal Bath, Christmas 1985

What makes anyone want to be an actor? In my case it was a trip to the pantomime - Aladdin at the London Palladium. I was seven years old and apparently I didn’t utter a word all the way home. My fate was sealed. All I could think of was Cilla Black, Leslie Crowther and, above all, Terry Scott, the rotund comedian who made such an unforgettable Widow Twankey.

Aladdin at the London Palladium, 1970

Scott is somewhat forgotten now, but throughout my childhood he was rarely off the screen in a series of sitcoms and sketch shows. These culminated in a long partnership with June Whitfield, usually cast as his long-suffering spouse.
 
He prided himself on his work in farce, mostly of the type that’s unrevivable now - Run For Your Wife and A Bedfull of Foreigners being two of his biggest West End hits. But it was in pantomime that his particular qualities – high energy, infectious twinkle and spluttering indignation - shone the brightest.
 
Following that theatre trip, I never lost the acting bug. After various school plays I found myself in the Cambridge Footlights, performing at the Edinburgh Fringe, where I did a comic monologue on Russell Harty’s late-night chat show. The other guest was an unknown but hilarious Hugh Grant, in a sketch from a rival revue - the Nativity reimagined as an Ealing Comedy.
 
As luck would have it, watching television that very night in deepest Godalming was none other than Terry Scott. The next day I was summoned to meet him at his agent’s office just off the Strand. He must have ejected the agent as he was in pride of place behind the desk, hair smarmed down, pastel blazer and slacks to the fore.
 
‘I’m doing panto in Bath this year with June. D’you want to be my feed?’
 
‘Your feed?’
 
‘It’s Jack and the Beanstalk, so you’ll be Simple Simon. You set ’em up, I knock ’em down. Any gag’s 90 per cent about the feed, so you better get it right.’
 
‘What about June Whitfield?’
 
‘Oh, she’s just the Fairy. All her stuff’s with Honor.’
 
‘Honor?’
 
‘You know, the blonde from The Avengers.’ He clicked his fingers impatiently. ‘The Bond girl.‘
 
‘Honor Blackman?’
 
‘Yes, she’s Fleshcreep, the Giant’s Henchwoman.’
 
‘Gosh. Well, Mr Scott - ’
 
‘Call me Terry. You’ll have to do everything I say. Everything. But I’ll teach you how pantomime works.’
 
‘Thanks, Terry.’
 
‘You can understudy me too if you like,’ he said, getting up. ‘I never miss a show so you won’t go on, but you’ll learn a lot.’

Despite this parting shot, he didn’t actually make the first day of rehearsal, as he was in bed with a cold. So at the read-through, my first day in the business, I played the Dame alongside June, Pussy Galore, a pop singer from the 60s, a soap actor and all the others who would become my family that Christmas. It felt like I’d joined the circus.
 
Terry appeared the next day and the mood changed. The serious business of comedy had begun. He didn’t really rehearse, he just watched me and criticised. ‘Why are you doing it like that? No! Turn this way! What’s that? It’s meaningless! You’re not ponging [stressing] the right word, you fool! That won’t get a laugh. You might have got away with it in the “Footlights” [the word uttered with withering disdain], but not in my show, mate.’
 
A lot of pantomimes rehearse for a week - some even less. We had the luxury of ten days, but that didn’t compare to the three or four weeks he’d have had at the Palladium. And he was quick to point out that our small band and chorus didn’t compare to the mighty orchestra and vast ensemble of his heyday. But I was working with old-school pros, and I have an abiding memory of Terry and June singing lustily into a microphone in the wings to add weight to the chorus numbers. These days off-stage singing is pre-recorded, but Terry would have taken a dim view of that. ‘It’s got to be live!’
 
He was a complicated man: instinctively liberal with reactionary tendencies, anti-intellectual with a reverence for opera and ballet, a debunker of pretension in others yet often seen with a coat draped over his shoulders, cane in hand and gold medallion adorning his barrel chest.
 
During the run, we were all invited to Bath’s Guildhall for drinks with the Mayor. Signing the visitors’ book, I noticed a florid autograph above mine: ‘Terry Scott, Actor and Philosopher’.
 
And in some ways he lived up to this boast. One rainy afternoon I bumped into him at the stage door, sifting through his fan mail. ‘What a rotten day,’ I grumbled. He thought for a moment. ‘You see, that’s the difference between us. Yes, the sky is grey. But to me, grey’s a beautiful colour.’ I went straight to June’s dressing room. ‘You’ll never guess what he’s just said!’ I recounted the story and she rolled her eyes. ‘He wouldn’t try that with me because I’d just say, “No Terry, it’s a bloody awful day.”’
 
I was the panto apprentice who couldn’t answer back, of course, whereas both leading ladies viewed him with the same weary resignation. I remember chatting to Honor in the wings one night, telling her about a book that Terry had lent me. ‘What’s the title?’ she drawled, ‘The Art of Comedy by Terry Scott?’
 
But he was a great Dame. Why? His timing was immaculate, his rapport with the audience instant. And then there was his striptease - a masterclass in physical buffoonery. This was his signature routine, and I watched it from the wings every night, as fascinated as I’d been all those years before at the Palladium.
 
It started with Dame Trot getting ready for some shut-eye and putting a bottle (of Scotch) in her bed. She then started to undress, but, realising that the audience was watching, she stopped in her tracks, coquettishly flicking back her long, blonde tresses, Diana Dors in a Hall of Mirrors. The band struck up ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’ and slowly the strip began - bashful at first, but growing in confidence until, as the pace built and the melody shifted into ‘The Stripper’, the clothes came off, eagerly, wantonly, layer after improbable layer peeled back and chucked recklessly in all directions. Dame Trot, prim and proper only minutes before, was now a capering, leering bundle of sexual liberation. As the music peaked, she disappeared behind a screen, emerging seconds later, wrapped in a baby doll négligée. With a lubricious wink, and a final toss of those golden curls, she was gone - her audience begging for more.

Terry's striptease, Aladdin, Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1978. Credit: Jeff Overs

But it wasn’t all comedy - Terry liked to tug at the heartstrings too. After a knockabout farmyard scene, Dame Trot prepared Daisy the Cow for market, all the while singing the Charlie Chaplin ballad ‘Smile’. This climaxed in Terry pinning a straw hat on Daisy’s head, the excruciating pain causing the cow to stagger a little. In a curious mix of laughter and tears, an overweight man in a frilly pinafore somehow made us care about an old woman and her bovine best friend. The spotlight faded, Terry’s voice cracked and, in the audience, the tissues came out.
 
This ability to switch between comedy and tragedy came easily to Scott. He maintained that every panto storyline affords two or three opportunities for heartbreak, and he certainly knew how to exploit them. I can still feel his stomach-churning dismay as a bag of gold is revealed to be nothing more than a handful of beans - he captured bewildered despair in a way that made you long to see his Malvolio, his Dogberry or even his Falstaff. And it was obvious that his personal tragedies - the loss of an only brother when he was six, a catalogue of ill-health (he often wore a neck brace to rehearsals), his deafness, his marital complications - all this was mined and unexpectedly glimpsed on stage.
 
We took the show to Guildford the following year. I hadn’t ever gone on for him as the Dame, but in the penultimate week of the run he had a bad cold and was losing his voice. After the Saturday matinée I went to find the Musical Director in the band room. ‘Could we possibly sing through Terry’s songs, just in case?’ He continued reading his newspaper. ‘I wouldn’t bother.’ ‘Yes, but - ’ He lowered the paper. ‘Listen son, this show doesn’t happen without Terry Scott.’
 
As the half hour call sounded over the tannoy, my dressing room door flew open and the Company Manager charged in. ‘You’re on!’

Understudying the Dame, Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, January 1987

Needless to say, I had no dame costumes of my own, and I was considerably slimmer than Terry. So the wardrobe mistress wrapped a roll of foam rubber round me and, miraculously, everything fitted - all fourteen frocks. A wig was clamped on my head and I was standing in the wings about to enter when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned round and there was Terry. ‘Just be full of fun,’ he whispered, ‘and you’ll be all right.’ The band played, the follow spot kicked in and the Musical Director looked up at me from the pit with more than a hint of panic in his eyes.
 
Terry returned the following week, but he became increasingly irritated by everyone telling him how proud he must be of me. I wasn’t in his league of course, but I’d done my best and everyone assumed he’d be pleased. It was much more complex than that.
 
At the cast party a few days later we were all celebrating after the final show. I’d always got on well with Terry’s wife but that night she was cool with me. ‘I hear you were very . . . efficient the other evening,’ she said. The room went silent. ‘Gosh,’ I said, taken aback. ‘“Efficient”.’ Terry’s eyes flashed with rage. ‘Well? What’s the matter?’ he blurted out. ‘A star wasn’t born overnight, you know.’
 
I’m now the same age as Terry was when we worked together, and I still remember his instructions - ‘Don’t pong that word! Drive to the end of the sentence! Just play the truth!’ - all the things that I bang on about in shows I direct.
 
I can see that he was, in effect, the drama school training I never had, and a valuable antidote to the rarified world of Cambridge theatre. I once suggested that he should write a book about pantomime, but he said he didn’t have the patience - ‘I’m not educated, I wouldn’t know where to start.’ All of which made the crash course I received seem even more of a gift.
 
He died a few years later. He wasn’t one to keep in touch anyway, but it was clear after I stood in for him that a line had been drawn. He had given me an opportunity and yet somehow he resented me - perhaps that’s an occupational hazard for teachers. Nowadays aspects of his behaviour wouldn’t be tolerated, quite rightly. But even so there was something heroic in his battles - with his demons, with his audience and with me, and I count myself fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time.

June Whitfield and Terry Scott, Jack and the Beanstalk, Theatre Royal Bath, 1985