Paul Nicholas: We've kept the goose stepping in Fawlty Towers – I don't think that's wrong

Telegraph

3 days ago

Paul Nicholas is trying to pinpoint precisely what it is about Fawlty Towers that makes it so British. He settles on the setting – the slightly drab boarding house common to many a British seaside town. 'I stayed in plenty of them as a kid, although perhaps never with such an extreme landlord as Basil,' he says. 'I suppose you get them in other countries too, but they feel very particular to the English from way back.' Not the humour then? 'Well, yes, of course, the humour. That's very British. All those jokes about the Germans. We are laughing at our isolation to some extent.'
Nicholas didn't watch John Cleese's epochal sitcom during the 1970s – he was too busy being a pop pin-up. He's fully immersed in the mayhem of Basil's world now though – he was cast as the addled Major for Cleese's West End adaptation, which received rave reviews last year and is back for another run ahead of a UK tour. The stage show essentially combines three TV scripts spliced together with barely any changes, although mercifully, the racial slurs aired by the Major in the original have been cut. 'People are sensitive to those things and quite rightly, you can't go around calling people w--- and the N-word,' says Nicholas.
Cleese maintained in a piece for The Telegraph last year that those lines were written at the Major's expense, but Nicolas argues the only thing that matters is that they are no longer there. 'Because then the comedy comes about one thing, which is the Major being a racist. Of course, there is a willingness to be offended among some people, and they do seem to have a very loud voice. But taking the piss out of someone because they are a different skin colour is the lowest form of humour. We've kept the goose stepping though. The goose-stepping is OK.'
I tell him the TV episode featuring this particular scene was briefly removed in 2020 by the BBC from their catch-up service UKTV. A UKTV spokesperson later confirmed this was because of the Major's comments, which appear in the same episode, although at the time, the Guardian pointed out that most broadcasters had long edited out these comments anyway. Nicolas shakes his head at this. 'The Germans did goose step. They were our enemy. If you have a German guest in your hotel and they are pissing you off, you can imitate the ridiculous nature of what they were doing at that time. I don't think that's wrong.'
We've met during a lunch break for rehearsals for Fawlty Towers at an east London studio. Nicholas is hurriedly consuming a burger and chips. He is 80, but there is still a clear trace of the pretty boy jaw line and twinkly eyes that made him a favourite among women of a certain age during the 1970s and 1980s, like a blond equivalent of David Essex. He looks a bit embarrassed when I bring this up. 'I wouldn't say I was a star,' he says. 'I had a bit of that, but I was never comfortable with it. I'm relatively shy when I am being me. When I am on stage, I could be anything or anyone.'
All the same, Nicholas has had an extraordinary career. He's known most of all as the rascally Vince in the 1980s sitcom Just Good Friends, but his unthreatening boy-next-door sex appeal belies a CV studded with the counterculture rebellion. He's had songs written for him by David Bowie and Pete Townshend and starred as the narrator Claude in the first UK production of the antiwar musical Hair (known in simple terms as the musical in which nearly all the cast take their clothes off).
He was Jesus Christ in the original West End production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's flamboyant rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar which was met with protests when it premiered on the West End in 1972, and collaborated with Richard O' Brien on a few early songs for The Rocky Horror Show. His very first act was as the piano player with Screaming Lord Sutch's backing band the Savages, which mixed the French theatre of Grand Guignol with gothic high camp. 'It was the smashing of boundaries which made the 60s exciting,' says Nicholas. 'But today we've been there and done that. We've gone the other way a bit now.'
Nicholas, who is now a great-grandfather, is still smooth and still charming, but he is disarmingly unaffected. He comes across as a most unlikely cultural anarchist. A child of the 1950s, he remembers a childhood defined by 'rationing and powdered egg'. His father was the showbiz lawyer Oscar Beuselinck. As Beuselinck was still trying to establish his career, Nicholas barely saw him when he was younger. 'We weren't very well off, we lived on a council estate in my nan's flat in north London. Everything closed on a Sunday. England always seemed to be grey and drab.'
The only splash of colour came from the musicals his mother would take him to see at the local cinema. 'I wasn't very bright. I couldn't spell or add up. Life was quite hard going and movies, music and dance were an escape. I was always attracted to Singin' In The Rain because it looked warm, there was sunshine.'
His home life was tough in other ways. The three-times-married Beuselinck would become a lawyer to stars including Sean Connery and Richard Harris, and was known throughout London as both a fabulous raconteur and an appalling womaniser. When he died in 1997, the Guardian obituary described him as a 'randy, abusive, brilliant tyrant who made most people laugh and some cry'. He often made jokes about how much he paid out in alimony and is said to have sacked a secretary caught with another man in his office for fear she might become a rival to his reputation. Nicholas, though, is fairly forgiving of a man who, in later life, admitted he regretted not being a better father to Nicholas and Nicholas' younger step-brother Richard.
'He came from quite a poor background. His father was a chef on a ship. So he didn't have it easy,' he says. 'He left school to work for a law firm as a 14-year-old boy and qualified in the end as a lawyer. He didn't have much time for me and my mother because he was trying to create a path for himself. But their relationship was not good. They were not at all well suited, and there was a lot of shouting. When I was about 12, they split up. I thought: thank God for that.'
Either way, Nicholas certainly possessed his father's same drive and desire for reinvention. Desperate to become a performer, he sent off for piano lessons because his mother couldn't afford a teacher, 'although when I got them in the post I couldn't understand them. And also, we didn't have a piano'. He formed a band at school and, after leaving school in 1962, joined The Savages as a keyboard player. One of Screaming Lord Sutch's more famous acts was a Jack the Ripper sketch, and Nicolas would put on a frock and play the female victims. 'It was the high point of his show. He'd stab me, then pull out a rubber heart and rubber lung. Later, he went to the butcher and got the proper stuff.' He is surprised when I point out that this act would not go down well today. 'You don't think it would? It's factual, though isn't it? It happened.'
In the mid-1960s, he started branching out as a pop singer. In 1967, Bowie, who at the time was still known as Davy Jones, wrote for him the jail break single Over The Wall We Go, which was promptly banned by the BBC for fear it would inspire copycat prison breakouts. 'I didn't mind at all,' says Nicholas. 'It gave me good bragging rights.' Nicholas soaked it all up, joining the Aldermaston 'ban the bomb' marches, and with Sutch, played at the Star Club in Hamburg, where the Beatles would later play. 'England was opening up. The 50s had been very tight arsed; people had been recovering from the war. But in the 1960s, people were restarting their lives.'
In 1967, he won the role of the narrator Claude in Hair. The production had to wait until the abolishment of theatre censorship in 1968 before it could open because it contained scenes of nudity and the F-word, but as soon as it premiered, it became a sensation. Part of the show includes a scene where the audience joined the cast onstage. One night, Nicolas noticed Princess Anne was standing right next to him. 'She came a few times actually. It's funny because we are supposed to be very reserved in this country but inviting people up on stage only happened in London. It didn't happen in New York. You probably couldn't do it now because of health and safety. '
Then came Jesus Christ Superstar, in 1972, in which Nicolas played Jesus himself. The show was met with protests on opening night because of its perceived blasphemous nature, but Nicolas argues the production was never intended to shock. 'To call Jesus Christ a superstar was a bit transgressive and we did have people protesting. But when he was crucified, audiences were moved by the whole thing. It wasn't a cheap stunt. It was a pretty honest portrayal – there was nothing deliberately offensive about the production.'
It's quite a CV. Did the 1960s and 1970s feel freer than today? 'Probably. You didn't have people watching you. The fact we could say f--k on stage and stand there with no clothes on, particularly in this country, would indicate that anything could go. Today, you can't say certain things, and that's fine, particularly if you are denigrating people for their race.'
All the same, he broadly dislikes today's more morally censorious climate. 'People always go too far. People should feel freer to say what they feel without someone snitching on them and ruining their career. It is sad when people lose their livelihood because they've said the wrong thing; it's ridiculous. People should be a bit more forgiving.' He's currently got two sitcoms of his own in development and admits he's had a pause for thought himself. 'I did remove a couple of things. My wife [Linzi, his second] said you won't get away with that. So yes, you are always aware of that. But you want a project to succeed. You don't want it to fall at the first hurdle.'
Did he ever behave back then in a way that shocks him now? 'At the start, I wasn't very clever in terms of the ladies,' he says. 'Women had just got the pill and I was a little bit free and easy, to be honest with you, so I'm not particularly proud of how I behaved. Although I should point out this was prior to being married [he married his first wife, Susan Gee in 1966 and they had two children]. If you were in a band, your encounters tended to be one-night stands. And girls used to wait, although not necessarily for me. I always resented the bass player; he always seemed to do quite well. But the odd girl did seem interested.'
He's being a bit disingenuous: his personal life was complicated. He had already had two children by different women when he married Gee. That marriage then ended when Nicolas met the actress Linzi Jennings – they married in 1984, and have two children together; they now live in Highgate and Nicholas proudly shows me a photograph of his two-year-old grandson – he has 12 altogether and three great grandchildren.
Yet in 1977, his first wife died aged 38 in a car crash. 'That was utterly horrible. Initially, my mother helped out with the children. But they already knew Linzi, so eventually we all moved in together. It was pretty dreadful to lose someone like that so suddenly. You pick up the phone and you hear. It was as devastating as one can imagine.' He is wary about quantifying the impact on the children he had shared with Gee, who were eight and 10. 'All I know is that we did what we could to get them through.'
After Superstar, Nicolas worked in both theatre and film and resurrected his pop career. He had three UK top 20 hits, including Reggae Like It Used To Be, Grandma's Party and Dancing With The Captain, while his 1977 single Heaven on the 7th Floor reached the US Billboard top 10. The videos on YouTube are extraordinary.
He embodies the sort of squeaky clean, nudge nudge wink wink charisma much more likely to appeal to the mothers of teenage girls rather than the girls themselves. 'I got a bit of fan mail but not like the Beatles,' he says. 'I certainly didn't get women throwing themselves at my feet.'
Still, he had enough female fans to win him the role of Vince in the 1983 John Sullivan sitcom Just Good Friends. The show focused on Vince and Penny (Jan Francis) who meet five years after Vince jilted her at the altar. He got the part only because the women in the typing pool at the BBC lobbied the sceptical casting director; he also sang the theme tune. He's remained a jobbing actor ever since, starring in numerous West End musicals and plays, appearing as Gavin Sullivan in EastEnders and in 2017, The Real Marigold Hotel. In 2021, he released a rap single Bad Bad Rapper. It's curiously quite good.
All the same, it's hard to square the man in front of me with that of the man who once delivered leaflets for Lord Sutch when Sutch stood against Harold Wilson in the 1966 election while wearing leopard skin pants. Has he always been politically active? 'Actually I don't really have any politics. In fact I've never voted. I did vote for the Greens once.
'But I've never really felt passionate enough about any one party to say, 'I'm for you'.' He is certainly no fan of the outsized personality politics of someone like Sutch, however much on the fringe Sutch remained. 'I was very disappointed when Trump got in. I honestly didn't think he would.' What does he think of Nigel Farage? 'I don't pay attention to Farage and Reform. Although I can understand it. I've got a friend who was a Thatcherite, and he is now voting Reform. Farage speaks to that kind of old Conservative who misses whatever it is that they want.'
I suspect Nicholas is an old hippy at heart, although he protests that's not the case either. 'I don't live for the 60s. A lot of it was people sitting around smoking dope and falling asleep. We had more energy in the 1970s. There was Thatcher. People thought: 'I've got to get on with things.' There wasn't so much sitting around hoping things would happen because they never do.' Given that he is now entering his seventh decade as a performer, not sitting around could be his personal philosophy. 'I'm just a guy who likes to work.'