I PUT ON A BRAVE FACE WHEN I SEE BATTLING BABS
CHRISTOPHER Biggins has to call on his acting ability at his regular lunches with close friend Dame Barbara Windsor.
To mask his heartbreak at the dementia that is stealing the 82-year-old’s memory, he ensures his beaming smile does not slip and not a flicker of sorrow shows in his eyes – even when she repeats a question time and again.
TV favourite Biggins says: “When I’m with Barbara, I don’t have sadness or tears because she would see that and I don’t want her to. So I’m always upbeat with her.
“The last time I had lunch with her three weeks ago, she was fantastic. She looked wonderful, she had tremendous energy and we laughed a lot. But she asked me: ‘What are you doing?’ eight or nine times because she’s forgotten my answer. It’s such an open, caring question and typical of her.
“Forgetting my answers each time was very sad. But I‘d only show that sadness after I’d left her.”
It’s a sign of the selfless devotion 70-yearold Biggins has for the friend of 30 years he first met when they were touring in a production of the musical Guys And Dolls. He often pops by her London home for a cuppa and notices the signs of gradual decline.
“I’m lucky because, being such a strong character, she always knows who I am,” he says. “Her husband Scott [Mitchell], who is the most amazing man ever, writes down people’s names and a little list of what they’ve done before they visit so she remembers.
“Although her short-term memory is not so good and she might forget what she did earlier in the day, her longterm memory is fantastic. So she’s really entertaining when we talk about the old days – she can remember what I’d forgotten a long time ago. She’s fabulous.”
Biggins backs Barbara’s call last week for better social care for dementia patients and believes the Government relies too much on families to care for elderly relatives.
He lost his mother last year at the age of 93 and, at the very end of her life, she also showed signs of dementia.
“My mother had it slightly. When my brother and I saw her the last time she didn’t know who we were. I went home to God and prayed that he’d take her. And he did, two days later.
BIGGINS adds: “The week before, I sat with her for three hours and she lay in the bed with her eyes closed. Eventually, I said, ‘Mum, I’ve got to go now. Can you see me?’ She opened her eyes and said, ‘Of course I can see you – you’re so bloody big!’”
It is with this dark humour that Biggins copes with life – and death – and believes that sometimes it can be a blessing, as when in 2015, his other close friend Cilla Black died after a stroke.
“I miss Cilla,” says Biggins. “There are lots of times I think, ‘I must tell Cilla that’. Then of course, I realise she’s not there any more.
“It was tragic but she wasn’t well and
would have become a very bad patient. She was a person who loved life and really went for it, and not going for it 100 per cent would have upset her. I don’t think she’d have liked to have been looked after by people because she was fiercely independent. So I think she probably did us all a favour by going.”
Biggins brims with positivity and always seems a breath away from laughter, which could be one of the reasons he is so well liked in showbiz circles and by audiences.
In the 1970s he won plaudits for acting roles in I, Claudius, Poldark and comedy Porridge, which gave him treasured memories of working with the late Ronnie Barker.
“Ronnie was very generous – and brilliant. That stayed with me for ever,” says Biggins.
“We used to film Porridge in front of an audience. To relax the audience and the rest of the cast, he would dry up first. Everyone would laugh, he made a joke about it and we all felt better. And of course he was pretending to dry up. After filming, we’d all go to the pub next door and when Ronnie came I often felt he was there because he felt he should. But really he was a family man and liked to go home to his wife and kids.”
Playing camp inmate Lukewarm, Biggins also acted alongside Richard Beckinsale, father of Hollywood actress Kate. Richard died of a heart defect in 1979 aged just 31.
Biggins says: “He was just brilliant. He was taken far too soon – he was so young, so talented and it just wasn’t fair he was taken.
“I know Richard’s widow well and saw Kate recently. She’s so caring and lovely about the fact I worked with her father, I think, because so few people did. Kate’s very keen to keep that alive and she’s always so nice and huggable.”
Biggins became known to a new and much younger audience when he won I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of
Here! in 2007 which he sees as the highlight of his 54-year showbiz career.
“I didn’t think I was going to win, even right to the end when I was up against the awful Janice Dickinson. I thought she was going to win and she certainly thought she was going to win. It was a great shock to both of us when I won.
She wasn’t pleased at all, but I was delighted,” he says. He is winning glowing reviews and scoring sell-outs with his Edinburgh Fringe Festival show, Late Lunch With Biggins at the Pleasance Dome, where he interviews guests.
Does he feel exposed in front of a live audience? “Not at all because I have absolutely nothing to hide,” he says. “Once someone asked, ‘Have you ever slept with a woman?’ The audience went completely silent, but when I laughed they went bananas. My answer was, ‘Yes, I have. But I don’t do that any more’.”
Biggins has been with his partner Neil Sinclair for 25 years but kept his sexuality a secret for decades. “I did a lot of children’s television and unfortunately, a lot of people put together homosexuality and paedophiles. And of course, people now know it’s incomparable.
“Then Aids came along and suddenly all gay people were murderers and it was horrible. I lost a lot of friends within that period.
“And of course now everyone seems to have come out as gay. And it’s great – you don’t have to worry any more.”
HE HAS no regrets over his career except for one salacious scene when he was playing sex-crazed Reverend Osborne Whitworth in the original 1970s Poldark series. He is thankful it ended up on the cutting room floor.
“My character’s wife was heavily pregnant so he turned his attentions to her sister and was going to make love to her feet. The actress playing the sister visited Dr Scholl to look after her feet all week, and was carried on set and placed on the bed so her feet looked immaculate. The cameras panned down to see my tongue between her toes. But when the head of the BBC saw it he said, ‘There is no way I can put that on TV on a Saturday night after Dad’s Army’. So it was never shown, after all that.”
●●Late LunchWith Biggins is at the Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, tonight, and then from Thursday until August 25