TRYING TO MAKE AN AMERICAN VERSION... WE REALLY WERE ON THE ROCKS
SPEAKING of Bond girls, Jane Seymour, 68, is at pains to claim her latest screen role – complete with grey hair – was considered a stretch on her part.
Starring opposite 85-year-old movie veteran Alan Arkin in TV comedy The Kominsky Method, Jane insists bosses were “worried she wouldn’t look old enough,” to be his former love interest.The glamorous actress pointedly adds: “I said, ‘with a grey wig, and because I’m not Botoxed, I can definitely play that!’”
Naturally, there’s never a hint of grey in Jane’s own meticulously preserved locks.
STAYING with the passage of time, Hollywood actress Jane Fonda, 81, laughs: “I’ve got fake knees, fake hips, this thumb is a cadaver... I’m ****** .”
Listing some hazards of octogenarian life, thrice-divorced Fonda includes: “Turning round when you’re driving to look over your shoulder; getting in and out of an SUV... not to mention making love.” IT WAS 1974 and we were going to do a US version of Porridge – retitled On The Rocks. In hindsight we were incredibly naive to assume this meant it would make it on air.
We rented houses, leased cars, sent out change-of-address cards without realising the American TV business is a graveyard of unmade pilots. Plenty are commissioned. Some actually get made. A tiny proportion become a series. The odds are a bit like the chances of newly hatched baby turtles making it to the ocean across the sand before seagulls gobble them. Slade, our old Victorian nick, realistic thing was the pre-filming in a real hard-core prison called Chino. We sweated over every line to ensure they were “American”. It’s easy enough changing ‘boot’ into ‘trunk’ and ‘bonnet’ into ‘hood’, but inevitably we started losing it when challenged about yet another “British construction”. At one point, one of us answered back: “So is London Bridge and that’s in the middle of f ***** g Arizona!”
But our leading man just didn’t have Ronnie Barker’s comic charisma. Ratings for the first series were good enough. But alarm bells were clanging. So they sent us to meet Rita Moreno. She’d been in West Side Story and is Puerto Rican, so a suit suggested she played Hector Fuentes’s cousin.
The network asked how we felt about a second season. With Rita in the lead! It was like suggesting Porridge with Barbara Windsor taking over from Ronnie Barker. No one had given a thought about what Rita was doing in a men’s prison. A lot of money was at stake, but we turned it down.