Geoffrey Palmer is one of the key faces of British Sitcom, best known for classics like Butterflies and As Time Goes By. His latesy is The Savages but, as he tells Jennifer Selway, his true passion these days is salmon fishing.
Yes, agrees Geoffrey Palmer, a glass of wine would be nice with lunch. But he looks slightly disippointcd, as though in the best of all possible worlds ... "We might get a bottle," I suggest, and he brightens up no end, like a schoolboy who has been given a fiver for his birthday.
"Ooh yes, let's do that. That will help us through this potentially, er, awkward, er ..." he tails off, not wishing to imply anything impolite, but you know, when all's said and done, there is something about being interviewed which just sets a chap's teeth on edge. He won't watch TV chat shows, let alone appear on them. "My idea of hell," he declares, "is watching Parkinson."
lt's a huge relief to find that the real Geoffrey Palmer looks exactly the same as the Geoffrey Palmer who appeared in Butterflies with Wendy Craig and in As Time Goes By with Dame Judi Dench. We're having lunch at the Groucho Club, which is buzzing with the sort of men who wear sunglasses indoors and T-shirts with suits. Happily, Geoffrey looks sublimely out of place in a collar, tie and grey tweed jacket. You can bet your boots he wouldn't wear sunglasses if there was an R.. in the month and I'd be surprised if he has any sportswear or anything with a logo.
He looks as if he's been kitted out by his wife, given a clean hanky, patted on the shoulder and sent out for the day. And that's fairly close to the truth: "I hate buying clothes. I wouldnt have this," he indicates his tweedy lapels, "if Sally hadn't told me I needed a new jacket."
There's the gentlemanly appearance, and of course the jowls ("I don't mind you mentioning the jowls. Everyone does. They're not pretty, but they're mine"). But most instantly recognisable is the voice, the timbre of middle England, the voice that enjoined us to "slam in the lamb" in the famous TV ad. It's the voice of the decent man, plagued with minor irritations -- a little testy, dry as excellent sherry, and faintly Eeyore-ish. He was the natural choice for the voice-overs for the BBC's The Middle Classes and Channel 4's The 1940s House. But his success in sitcom was almost accidental and unexpected.
"When I was starting out in the 1950s I met Leslie Phillips, who was already a very well-known actor and a wonderfully accomplished comedian. I remember him turning to me once and he said, 'You're very good Geoffrey, but you'll never he any good at comedy because your voice isn't light enough.' I remind him of that every now and then."
Events quickly proved Leslie Phillips wrong. Palmer became a regular in TV light entertainment shows, working with comedy legends like Charlie Drake, Arthur Askey and Harry Secombe.
His first major sitcom was The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin in 1976, in which he played Reggie's "cock-up-on-the-catering-front" brother-in-law Jimmy. But it was Carla Lane's bittersweet 1978 series Butterflies, playing the mild- mannered husband Ben to Wendy Craig's restless wife Ria, which made him a household name.
"Carla always used to say she wrote 'situation tragedy'. I can remember the first read-through, and Wendy saying, 'How can I possibly play this appalling woman? She's got a perfectly reasonable husband, reasonable teenage children and a reasonable standard of living, and all she does is whinge."
Palmer also played the barmy, blimpish Harry Truscott in Fairly Secret Army, but for the past decade he has been associated with that perfect Sunday evening sitcom, As Time Goes By, starring with Judi Dench in the story of two old-flames who meet up again and marry in late middle-age.
You know that the presence of Geoffrey Palmer in a sitcom is a guarantee that the characters will know how to use a knife and fork, won't have tattoos or spit on the pavement. So what is he doing in Simon Nye's new comedy, The Savages? Nye created Men Behaving Badly. Surely he wont have Palmer drinking lager from a can or being sick in the fridge?
"I've always loved Men Behaving Badly," says Palmer, "so I'm terribly pleased to he doing this new series. When Simon wrote Men Behaving Badly he was still single. But now he's got three children, so he has moved on from being a lager lout and this time he's written about a couple with two small children (they're the Savages) and I'm the rather eccentric grandpa."
In real life Palmer, married fir 37 years to Sally, is father to Charles, a cameraman, and Harriet, a teacher. Charles's son Billy is 17 months old. "He's very dear," says Grandpa. "It was such an emotional experience seeing him when he was just a few hours old. Somehow, when my own children were born it was more a matter of fear and panic." Was he present at their births? "No, thank God. I wasn't of that generation that had to be there. I always think the chap should be upstairs, or in the pub, or somewhere out of the way.
Palmer is 73. He was brought up in North Finchley, in London, the son of a chartered surveyor, and attended Highgate School. His career began in the austere post-ware era: "Things were pretty bleak for a long while. But I'd grown up with rationing, so it seemed the norm. I didn't have any burning ambition. I just thought it might be fun to be an actor. There was quite a lot of work around because there were a lot of theatres in those days."
Early on, Palmer abandoned any hopes of being a romantic lead:
"I was cast in this terribly boring JB Priestley play called Eden End. It was a pipe-smoking part, playing a suitor who got nowhere with Joan Plowright. And when I read the script I said to my agent that I thought it was a terribly dull part. I said it was like the Cyril Raymond part in Brief Encounter -- you know, the dreary husband. And my agent said, 'Geoffrey, Cyril Raymond is dead and there are lots of those parts about. Just do it.' So I did it, and I've been playing dull husbands ever since."
He seems content with this state of affairs. But it's important that the work doesn't interfere with his fishing. He started fishing for trout and salmon a decade ago and has landed some major catches in his time. "A 28 1/2 pound salmon," he says, of his finest moment. "Catching it was a big drama but I wont bore you with the details. We had it smoked. It was delicious."
What worries him is that if "Mr Blair has his way", all shooting, fishing and hunting may soon he banned. "I've never gone on a protest march in my life, but if the Countryside March had gone ahead, I would certainly have been there."
He hasn't had any time for foxes since he kept hens as a teenage boy: "I had registered customers for the eggs. I remember one Sunday morning my father woke me, and when I looked out of the window there were all my hens laid out on the lawn, killed by the fox. What is worse is that they hadn't even been eaten. The fox had just killed them and taken their heads off. Lovely little furry animals my foot!"
He's a member of the Garrick Club and thinks The Guardian is a "terrible girlie paper", but there is something awfully sweet about his old fogeyism.
"I can he pretty moody," he says, "which I'm not very proud of. I'm not keen on temperament among actors: it's very boring. When you come down to it, it's fear of getting the sack which makes me deliver."
He thinks that as a family, the Palmers are a quiet and retiring bunch. "I know that coming from an actor that sounds bloody stupid. But I don't want to talk about what holds my marriage together and all that sort of rubbish."
For the record, he says that he's pretty poor at romantic stuff and when he recently happened to take his wife a bunch of red roses she wondered what he was up to.
"Probably thought I was having an affair."
Are you?
"No, no dark secrets I'm afraid."
He has no plans to retire: "I would hate not to be asked to work. I expect I'll always be able to work. Far more important," he leans forward confidingly (a dark secret after all?), "far, far more important is how many more years I can go on salmon fishing. How many more years will I be able to stand in a river?"
The true passion of Geoffrey Palmer. Bet you never thought you'd see those two words in close proxiniity.You read it here first.
Thanks to Maree Wilson for sending me this article which appeared in the Daily Express (UK) in the April 28 - May 4, 2001 edition of Saturday.