Geoffrey Palmer ex-Royal Marine and spectacularly unsuccessful salesman, had no worries about his future prospects when he decided to have a go at becoming an actor. He didn’t actually have any future prospects.
“I had spent a year with a food and drugs import firm and in all that time I had managed to sell just one case of Dutch baked beans in Birmingham and some Swedish salad cream in the West Country,” he recalls, with that rather forlorn half- smile that has become something of a trademark. “And when they asked me to try to off-load another obscure brand of beans on Joe Lyons, I decided that it was time to try something else.”
It sounds like the beginning of yet another overnight rags- to-riches story, but nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout the next two decades Geoffrey Palmer was almost as unnoticed a thespian as he had been as a sales rep. But then, to his undisguised astonishment, came a string of major roles in such memorable comedy series as Butterflies, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Fairly Secret Army and Executive Stress — and suddenly his face became as familiar as any on television.
Yet the suggestion that his engagingly bejowled features are known and loved by arm- chair audiences throughout the land is countered by the kind of comic self-effacement you come to expect from the screen’s most reluctant star. “Being recognised can make things a bit difficult at times,” Palmer admits. “I’m very apprehensive on tubes and buses and at airports, because people will insist on slapping me on the back and telling me how much they enjoy Yes, Minister. I’ve never been in Yes,Minister, of course, but they think I’m Paul Eddington. That’s fame for you!”
Such modesty is not to be taken seriously, however. And if the back-slapping is not to reach epidemic proportions he will have to hide away still deeper into his beloved Chiltern Hills home this week when he teams up with Judi Dench in the first of a new BBC1 six-part comedy series, As Time Goes By.
The idea behind the series was first submitted back in 1989 to the Theatre of Comedy, to which both Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer belong, and Bob Larbey — writing without his partner on such hits as The Good Life and Ever Decreasing Circles, John Esmonde — got some scripts together.
The story revolves around Jean, the widowed boss of a secretarial agency (Judi Dench), and the unexpected arrival on the scene of her former lover, the irascible Lionel, a divorced ex-army officer and Kenya coffee planter. Back in England to write a very dull antobiography, imaginatively entitled MyLjfe in Kenya, Lionel seeks out the services of a temporary secretary to help out with the typing. This, of course, proves.to be Jean’s daughter, to whom he is sufficiently attracted to invite out to dinner. As mother and daughter share the same house, the inevitable reunion of the former lovers takes place.
“We haven’t met since I was a young second lieutenant and was posted to Korea,” says Palmer, “so we immediately get into a postmortem on who should have written to whom, after which it is really a case of ‘will they or won’t they?’ But it’s a super situation, marvellously well written, and it never sinks to the desperate nudge-nudge- wink-wink, every-line-a-laugh kind of comedy which I really can’t stand. Judi wouldn’t do that sort of thing anyway -- she simply plays the truth and just lets the laughs spring from the situation.”
Despite his phenomenal demand on both stage and screen, would-be interviewers will find Geoffrey Palmer’s library cuttings folder suprisingly slim. A few minutes in his company and the reasons are not hard to come by. Courteous to a fault he ascribes his success to “good luck and good writers” and appears totally bemused as to why anyone should wish to interview him at all.
"I used to think actors were frightfully competitive, always back-biting and bitchy,” he says, “but I find I like them more and more as life goes by.”
He still admits that he is happier when he is back in his Buckinghamshire village, with his wife Sally, local friends and “the sound of cows in the next-door field”. And he is happiest of all on a river bank with a rod in his hand. “I started trout fishing about four years ago and I’m abso- lutely potty on it,” he says. “Sally started me off by persuading a friend of mine to give me some casting lessons and I now have a rod one day a week on the Kennet and a half-rod on the Test. This series made a bit of a mess of the end of the season, but I won’t let that happen again!”
And his future? Has heat last stopped crossing his fingers and wondering when the balloon will burst? “Well, yes, I suppose one can relax a bit. Our two sons [sic] are well on their way — neither has become an actor I’m pleased to say, far too risky — and there may well be another series of As Time Goes By. So financial pressures are not what they used to be and I’m getting a few advertising voice-overs, which all help.”
The wheel has turned full circle and the delicious irony is inescapable. Geoffrey Palmer is back where he started — selling products to the populace — and if any company needs someone to launch a new brand of baked beans on to the supermarket shelves, then it would be hard to imagine a better man for the job.
Thanks to Maree Wilson for sending this article which appeared in the January 11, 1992 issue of Radio Times.