I Am What I Am John Barrowman (books that read to you txt) 📖

detector that Jack is using were creating a distracting glare on my cheek. The scene had to be reshot several times with the lie detector in a variety of different angles. Ordinarily, a scene like this should take an hour and a half at the most, but this took close to three.

Then, just when we thought it was safe to go back into the Hub, the light shorted out on the lie detector gizmo, suggesting that Ianto was only intermittently telling the truth. Solution? A young woman from the prop department had to crawl under Jack’s desk, out of sight of the camera, and every time the light needed to flash, she controlled it manually from a crouched position between my legs.6

During the filming of ‘Children of Earth’, our bloopers or blunders were not as memorable. The shoot didn’t lack significance, though. So on the day we were filming in the Hub for the last time, I made sure Jack did two things.

First, I stole7 a souvenir from the props spread across Jack’s desk. I took a pulp sci-fi paperback from the forties that sat on his desktop. Every time I’d been in Jack’s office, waiting for a take, I’d picked it up and read a few words.

The second thing I did was to make sure that the passionate kiss between Jack and Ianto that takes place moments before Jack and the Hub are destroyed was a kiss to die for. It certainly was.

CHAPTER SIX

‘I’D DO ANYTHING’

★

‘Respect my authori-TEY.’

Eric Cartman, South Park

Five more things I’ve learned from being a talent-show judge

1 Trust your judging panel has your back

(unless one of them doesn’t).

2 Trust your opinions even when they’re not popular

(with the other judges).

3 Beware of pissed-off parents of performers.

4 A sense of humour makes a good first impression

(especially on me).

5 Coordinate your outfit with the beautiful woman to your left

(not Barry Humphries).

I may have already helped to pick the right Maria and the best Joseph, but when it came to choosing a Nancy,1 when I joined the panel on BBC1’s I’d Do Anything, the expertise I’d developed as a judge was really put to the test.

I found my feet as a judge in the early stages of the Maria show. During the panel auditions for How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, David Ian wore the earpiece and I went to school on him.2 I listened, I watched and I learned. If the producers saw something on their monitors from the other room that they wanted to see again or that they wanted highlighted in a particular way, they talked to David through this earpiece.

Meanwhile, I discovered that if I asked the performers questions and established a bit of a rapport with them as soon as they came in front of me, they relaxed a little and this helped them to get their breathing calmed before they actually performed. So, with all this knowledge at my fingertips by the time I’d Do Anything began, I was more than ready for the challenges … or so I thought.

Zoë Tyler was not on the panel this time. The other judges were Denise Van Outen, the Lord and Barry Humphries. As I did in Any Dream, during the panel auditions, when the contestants are performing for only the judges and the producers, I wore the earpiece. I was the judge with the voices in my head.3

I’d never worked with Barry before, but we got along really well. I’ve always admired and enjoyed his work. There’s a whole group of performers from those early days of British theatre and television that I think contributed to the definition of what it means to be an entertainer, one that in my own twenty-first-century-when-everything-changes way I’m trying to shape, too. Angus Lennie, Rikki Fulton, Bruce Forsyth, The Two Ronnies, Danny La Rue and, of course, Stanley Baxter were all in that same category.

Little-known fact about the Barrowmans.4 My mum grew up across the street from Angus Lennie and she remembers that when he was a teenager, he’d leave his house every afternoon for his violin lessons and the other kids would taunt him, yelling, ‘Go on yer own, Hal the Fiddler.’5

You may remember Lennie from Crossroads, or more recently Monarch of the Glen, but, as far as my dad’s concerned, Lennie will always be Flying Officer Archie Ives, aka The Mole, in one of my dad’s favourite movies of all time, The Great Escape with Steve McQueen. His other favourite is Von Ryan’s Express with Frank Sinatra fighting Nazis. Why Sinatra, you may ask? Well, because he could. When my mum catches my dad sneaking another viewing of the film late at night on some obscure US cable channel, he’ll tell her he’s watching it because he ‘keeps hoping this time he’ll catch the bloody train’.6

Don’t tell my mum, but I keep a DVD set of these two movies, plus The Guns of Navarone as a bonus, hidden among my collection at the house in Sully – in case my dad ever needs a hit while he’s staying with me.

Unfortunately, despite Barry Humphries’s talents and versatility, and his undoubted place in the entertainment hall of fame, some of the Nancy contestants thought he came across as a bit of a ‘dirty old man’ on camera. Here’s why. Imagine one of the Nancys has just performed, then read this dialogue in a low-pitched, not-quite-Dame-Edna-ish voice:

‘You don’t look so much like a milkmaid –’ (pause for slightly heavy breathing) ‘– but you look very much like the milker.’

How do you respond to that? ‘Hmm, thanks, Barry. I’ll take that on board. Let me just dart out and get a breast reduction.’

Here was another one: ‘Please, Samantha, I want some more!’ And then there was: ‘You were gorgeous! You had a touch of the guttersnipe, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.’

Sometimes, his comments could be a bit irrelevant, with little constructive purpose, especially when he was commenting on Jodie Prenger.

During the auditions, when I