Geoffrey Palmer is more than the glum of his parts
The evening of the day we meet, Geoffrey Palmer is to make his debut in the village panto, as a rabbit. It’s just a hop-on part, the real star is his neighbour John Craven, of Newsround fame, who’s playing Wishee-Washee. ‘I think he was in the pub at the wrong time,’ says Palmer, who shows me a brown paper bag given to him that morning by his co-star in As Time Goes By, Dame Judi Dench. It is full of carrots.
Dame Judi, according to Palmer, is just about the nicest, most considerate person in the whole of showbusiness. ‘Before As Time Goes By, I was told that everybody loves Judi. I thought, “Christ, I’ll find something wrong with her.” But I couldn’t. She has this incredible goodness, which makes her sound boring, but she’s not. Judi has a tremendous sense of fun, yet if anyone has a problem, they are taken very discreetly under a wing. And when you think of what she has achieved, that her first job out of drama school was Ophelia at the Old Vic...the thing is, she doesn’t trail all that around with her.’
Palmer’s own rise to fame, or at least to the point where his wonderful chipmunk-with-toothache features are familiar in most living-rooms, was somewhat less meteoric. He started in the early Fifties as an unpaid assistant stage manager, and the highlight of his early career was standing in as juvenile lead for Nicholas Parsons. ‘I was the sort of actor I abhor now,’ he says. ‘I kept doing double-takes.’
He did lots of telly in the Fifties and Sixties — ‘usually in shows starring the Lionel Blair Dancers’ — and then landed the part of Leonard Rossiter’s dotty brother-in-law in The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin. By this time, television had cured his tendency to over-act. ‘It’s something to do with the smallness of the camera, the embarrassment of seeing yourself doing too much.’ Palmer is shortly to start work on The Legacy Of Perrin, a sequel featuring most of the original cast except, of course, Rossiter.
What, I ask, was the great man like to work with? A long pause. ‘Len wasn’t easy in any way at all, though I think he quite liked me by the end of the series. He had no social graces, wasn’t at all bothered about being charming, and he certainly didn’t suffer fools gladly. If you were rehearsing a scene with him, he’d say, “Is that how you’re going to do it? Well, it won’t work. And, of course, he was always right.
‘I liked Len very much. He was an amazing squash-player, you know, and he’d once nearly signed for some football club. He was a great sportsman and walked in that hunched-up way that sportsmen do. I remember four of us playing squash with him in turn, and we put the young lad, who was about 23, and pretty good, in last. Len murdered him.’
After Reggie Perrin came Butterflies, a Bigger Showcase for Palmer’s talents, for he was able to crank up his lugubriousness as Wendy Craig’s long-suffering husband. ‘Butterflies was very good for me,’ he says. it was also good for the actor playing one of his rebellious teenage sons — and Palmer realised that Nick Lyndhurst was a dead cert for future success. ‘If ever I laughed out loud at Butterflies, the chances were I was laughing at him.’
Like Ben in Butterflies, Lionel in As ‘Time Goes By can be decidedly crotchety. ‘It came up at an early script conference. Syd Lotterby, the producer-director, said he couldn’t be the guy next door, he needed to be a bit bad-tempered.’ Palmer, who in real life is geniality itself, says he doesn’t worry about being typecast as a grump. After all, he has plenty of other credits to his name, including four of Derek Nimmo's celebrated theatrical tours for expatriates.
‘I’d love to do another. We leave in January, come back in April, and it’s very civilised. We do dinner theatre, light comedies, and people come to see them because they want to, not because they have to take out the visiting buyer from Wolverhampton or whatever. They have no parking problems, they’re all being paid tax-free and they’re very well disposed towards us. And we stay in the hotels we perform in, in Bangkok or Jakarta or Hong Kong or wherever, so you can be lying in a hot bath when you get your call.’
Nimmo, he says, is in his element on these trips. ‘We once went up the Nile and Derek and I had our own guide in the Valley of the Queens. Derek was wearing his safari suit, and he had a fly whisk and a monocle. Our guide took us into a cave, literally a cave, where a man gave us some tea. His daughter, who spoke a little English, asked us whether we were sisters.’ Palmer roars with laughter. ‘It’s true that Derek was looking very camp at the time.’ Palmer is an extremely fit-looking 68, married with two grown-up children. His main weakness, he says, is a ‘frightful obsession’ with fly-fishing. Suddenly it’s clear where he gets his grumpy look from: a brown trout on the end of his line.
Thanks to Maree Wilson for sending this article which appeared in The Sunday Mail (UK) on January 1, 1996