Come on then, Geoffrey. Give us a smile...
Geoffrey Pa1mer’s hang-dog face drops another couple of notches.
“I can smile, you know,” says the star of the BBC comedy hit As Time Goes By.
“It’s you journalist chaps who have this thing about me never smiling. Look at your files. I bet you’ll find a shot of me smiling.”
He had something to smile about, back then. In the Carla Lane comedy, Geoffrey played surgeon Leo Bannister, who left his wife and children after 23 years of marriage for a woman almost half his age.
But in hit shows like Butterflies (as Wendy Craig’s morose husband), Fairly Secret Army (a retired major planning a military coup) and As Time Goes By (a pompous author, trying to rekindle a long-lost love with Judi Dench), viewers have seen Geoffrey smile about as often as Bernard Manning doing handstands.
“I can’t help it,” he sighs. “I have these great Bloodhound jowls which get bigger as I get older. You could say my face is my fortune. And I’m not knocking it.
“I accepted a long time that I wasn’t going to play the
handsome romantic lead. Even as a young actor over 40 years ago. I was always the ‘character’ juvenile, never the lead.
“People say I always play pompous or priggish twits.
Well, I am a middle class, former public schoolboy.
“And probably a bit pompous. It’s my background, I can’t help it. But I have tried to vary my roles.
“Actually, I love playing out-and-out s**ts. They’re much more fun.”
Geoffrey. 66. who lives in Aylesbury, Bucks, with wife Sally and has two grownup children, drifted into acting after leaving the Army. It was a long, hard struggle, starting at an amateur theatre group in Finchley, North London.
For a while, he dabbled in writing—”I wrote a play, but it was just a string of gags which I’d stolen from other people, and I couldn’t work out how to end it.”
And he was 50 before his first starring TV roles—like Leonard Rossiter’s (dare I say it?) pompous brother- in-law in The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin.
For that reason, Geoffrey wears his fairly new-found fame lightly.
“I’ve been incredibly lucky,” he says, with the hint of a smile. “I’ve never
been out of work more’ than a few months. Not many actors can say that.
“Of course, there were hundreds of repertory companies then, and you had to be really hopeless not to get a job.
Geoffrey is bemused by the reaction to his role as grumpy Lionel—described as an ageing sex symbol— in the third series of As Time Goes By.
“Sex symbol?” he snorts. “Don’t make me laugh! If Lionel is a sex symbol, all I can say is his lady-love must have missed a father figure.
“Mind you, there is a serious romantic interest this time. In the new series, Judi and I go on holiday toget.her, and end up under the same roof.
“Nude scenes? Heaven forbid! I don’t think early evening viewers are ready
for my sagging flesh. But you might glimpse the odd silvery hair on my chest, peeping out from under the duvet...“
At this, Geoffrey Palmer almost laughed.
Thanks to Maree Wilson for sending this article which appeared in the January 2, 1994 issue of News of the World (UK).