First of the Summer Wine
– a gentle diversion!
With both “Summer” and “Wine” in the title of this blog, and coming from your resident Riviera Woman Wine Expert, you may be fooled into thinking this article is about the best tipple for a beach picnic? But no, this is a rather silly (well, it is nearly August!) trip down memory lane for said Wine Expert. Although I have enjoyed alcoholic beverages since I was of legal age to consume them (probably a bit before, if truth be known!), a previous career completely unrelated to Bacchanalian pleasures, lead me down a very different path: I trained at the Central School of Speech & Drama in the early 80’s (all lycra and legwarmers) before embarking on a wild and exciting 11 year career as a professional Actress. A full CV of telly, theatre, adverts, touring, singing and even a film for Channel 4 was liberally sprinkled with time spent “resting” – pulling pints, taking in ironing, working as a chef and then finding that the hobby, wine was turning into a real passion…. I jump too far, too quickly!
What has brought on this little meander down memory lane is that a series I did for the BBC, and which I believed to be lying in some dusty box in the bowels of the archive department at TV centre, has surfaced on Sky G.O.L.D. this last week!
In 1988 & 1989 we filmed a “prequel” to the famous and long running sit-com, “Last of the Summer Wine”, called “First of the Summer Wine” – the same well loved characters but aged 18 in 1939 on the eve of the outbreak of War. I had the amusing challenge of playing the young “Nora Batty” – no jokes about wrinkled stockings – she was a shy, innocent teenager in this series, with only glimpses of the battleaxe she was later to become! We had a riot of a time filming on location in Yorkshire, Peter Sallis (the well known voice of Wallace in “Wallace & Gromit”), played his own father in our series and was a great steadying influence on us mad-cap youngsters fresh out of drama school. The writer, Roy Clarke, had decided, even then, that he’d had enough of “Last of…” and planned that our series would take over: he had planned each character’s “life” as it would have evolved through the war and beyond to bring them back full circle to the current day and their “old” versions. Alas, the series was as expensive to produce as a full costume drama, and each camera shot of a tram and a 1930’s motor car with clog wearing costumed “extras” cost an absolute fortune to shoot. Series 2 was shown in 1989 and as Nora, I attracted a huge amount of media and press attention – telly interviews with Jeremy Paxman, endless magazine covers with the original Nora, Kathy Staff, now sadly dead, plus a Stockings fashion shoot for the Sunday Telegraph and even an appearance on BBC Children in Need with my Band showing me off as “Nora Batty – Rock Chick” (mind you, whilst singing live on telly, we did have Rolf Harris in the background painting a kangaroo and rather stealing our limelight!) Yes folks, I really though I had made it to Stardom!
One salutary lesson learned on a tube ride home one day when the publicity about us was at its peak: sitting on the train next to a chap reading the Daily Mirror, he turned the page and there was a huge picture and article about ME – the centre pages, no less! I braced myself for the surely inevitable slow realisation that he was actually sitting next to this glamorous actress in the flesh. Surely he was going to turn his head and exclaim “my God – it’s YOU!”? A skip of a heartbeat – and he then turned the page without even looking up! Fame is really as fleeting, momentary and brief as that, and there are so many more important things in life!
So here I am, after a career change in 1997 lead me to “drink” – and an amazingly vivid and challenging career in the Wine Trade, all the way to the Riviera and now our very own Wine Events and Training company: “FineWineWorks”. Enjoying Wine in the blissful warmth that is Summer on the Côte d’Azur. Life ain’t so bad, even though I never made it to the Cannes Film Festival as a Star!
Helen Brotherton
29.07.09
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