George Cole - The World Was My Lobster: The Autobiography by Cole George

Author:Cole, George [George Cole and Brian Hawkins]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782198185
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2013-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

Looking back, I realise how fortunate I was to have done some of the excellent stage plays I worked on during the 1970s. My last play of the decade was a hugely demanding one. It was Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle in 1979 at the Open Space Theatre in London, in which I played a character whose daughter has been severely injured in a hit-and-run accident. It was extremely harsh. I used to get ready to go out in the evening and say to Penny, ‘Well, I’m off to London now to spend two hours arguing with my wife.’ It really was extremely harrowing. The theme of the play was depressing as it involved the rape of the handicapped daughter by a stranger who appears unexpectedly and announces that he is her fiancé. The play was originally written and made for BBC Television but was withdrawn shortly before it was due to be broadcast because of the disturbing storyline. It did not go out on television until several years later and, even then, it had a content warning before the programme started.

Over the course of the decade I performed in many one-off television plays and appeared in episodes of several different series. These are listed chronologically in Table I on page 283. My two favourites were Don’t Forget to Write! and Losing Her.

Don’t Forget to Write! was a lovely series written by Charles Wood for BBC Two and produced by Joe Waters. We did 12 episodes spread over 2 series – the first in 1977 and the second in 1979. I played a playwright named Gordon Maple who was once successful but is now on the decline, having constantly to deal with the trivial irritations of his family, his profession and the people in it. To make matters worse, he was suffering from writer’s block and was finding it impossible to get anything down on paper. He hated writing and preferred gardening but, because his wife (played by Gwen Watford) didn’t approve of the gardening, he would put on a cassette tape of typewriter sounds, lock the door of his office, and sneak out of the house at every opportunity to get back to his garden. He was a lovely character. Francis Matthews played my friend Tom Lawrence – he is also a playwright but rather more successful than I am.

The series evolved from a situation comedy by Charles Wood called A Bit of a Holiday, produced by Yorkshire Television in 1969 in a series named The Root of All Evil? Gwen Watford and I both appeared and introduced the characters of Gordon Maple and his wife. That first story was set in Rome, where one of my character’s stories is being filmed. Two years later I appeared as a similar character in another play by Charles Wood for Yorkshire Television in an episode of a series called The Ten Commandments. The series was spread over ten weeks with each week focusing on a different one of the ten commandments in a contemporary setting.

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