Is it a bird, is it a plane… no, it’s ★ CAPTAIN ★ MAPLIN
As he stars in a new stage tribute to the best of British sitcoms, Hi-de-Hi! legend Jeffrey Holland reveals a surprising ambition… to join the cast of a Marvel comics on-screen epic
HE’S played a hapless comic, a footman and a soldier but, at the age of 75, Jeffrey Holland has superhero ambitions. “I’d die for a part in a Marvel movie,” admits the Hi-de-Hi! and You Rang, M’Lord? star with a chuckle, before admitting ruefully: “But it’s unlikely to happen to me.”
It transpires that Jeffrey, who remains best known as Hi-de-Hi!’s Yellowcoat Spike Dixon, is a Marvel megafan who passed the pandemic’s lockdowns enjoying the exploits of Captain America and Iron Man.
“I can’t wait for the new Doctor Strange film,” he says. “People do knock Marvel films and I wish they wouldn’t. It’s such clever stuff.
“I love CGI, I’m a huge fan of it. They create things now that you wouldn’t believe.”
It’s a shame CGI (computer-generated imagery) wasn’t around in October 1987 when Hi-de-Hi!’s fictional holiday camp Maplins, filmed at Warner’s Holiday Centre at Dovercourt Bay, Essex, was ripped to shreds in the Great Storm, just a few days shy of filming the series finale.
“Some 58 poplar trees came down that night,” Jeffrey recalls.
“We had one scene left to shoot – but when we got to the camp it was decimated. Trees were down around the pool, the chalets were crushed like matchboxes and people’s cars were crushed.
“We had to take half a day off while they got the generator wagon working.”
Chirpy and affable, Jeffrey is in fine form as he reminisces about his incredible seven decades in showbusiness. He’s honing his storytelling ahead of his new stage show, Best Of British TV Comedy, which opened last Sunday and is touring the UK.
Strolling down the sunny memory lane of British classic comedies alongside Jeffrey are ‘Allo ‘Allo! star Sue Hodge, Man About
The House’s Sally Thomsett, and Jeffrey’s wife, Judy Buxton, who starred in Rising Damp and The Likely Lads. There’s even a little razzmatazz thrown in.
“Sue Hodge is starting off the show with a big musical number,” Jeffrey reveals. “She’s calling it the ‘Allo ‘Allo! can-can. I’ve seen it and it’s worth the ticket money alone.”
It’s clear he’s not a world away from Spike, whom he played for eight years in Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s hit series based on the Butlins seaside resorts.
AND he admits as much. “There’s a lot of the early me in Spike. His enthusiasm endeared him to me. He wanted to please everybody, to be good and funny. “But the sad thing was that he made all these silly costumes yet had no talent whatsoever. He couldn’t be funny if his life depended on it. But he just got on with it and was keen to impress – a bit like me.”
Hi-de-Hi! drew audiences of more than 20 million at its peak and won a BAFTA award for Best Comedy Series in 1984. It featured the talents of Paul Shane, Su Pollard, Simon Cadell and Ruth Madoc.
Jeffrey, Paul and Su formed an irrepressible on-screen trio and later starred in You Rang, M’Lord? and Oh, Doctor Beeching! together.
“There was an instant click there, something went ping,” says Jeffrey of Paul, who died in 2013 following a short illness.
“David and Jimmy liked us all together. They could trust us as actors and we were totally different as human beings. I was tall. Paul was short and squat, and Su was eccentric.There was nobody like her.”
He catches up with Su when he can and misses Paul terribly. And he insists the onscreen camaraderie that ensued from the chaos was real.
“We all got on enormously,” he says. “We were lucky in that respect.”
Spike, the honest but desperately naive sidekick to Paul’s swindling camp host Ted Bovis, told dud jokes and dressed in outrageous costumes to make the campers laugh. Which was the worst one?
“I had to wrestle a crocodile and had next to nothing on, just some sort of Tarzan loincloth,” Jeffrey says. “It was a bit embarrassing. I had to wrestle with this rubber crocodile and roll about on the floor. I was black and blue when I finished.”
Then there were the countless times Spike was thrown into the swimming pool after a one-off joke became a running gag. Poor Jeffrey was under strict instructions to do as he was told – there were no chances for improvisation or saying no to comedy skits in those days.
He wore a wetsuit most of the time as filming was out of season but nearly ended up in hospital on the one occasion he didn’t.
“I was dressed as Miss Maplin in a woman’s bathing costume with high heel shoes, fishnet tights and a long blonde wig,” he smiles.
“My legs were going numb and hypothermia was setting in while I was treading water waiting for my next turn. I had to shout, ‘David, I’ve got to get out.’ I knew if I didn’t get out they would have to pull me out.”
Growing up in theWest Midlands, he started his career aged 15. “It was due to my raging hormones,” he laughs.
Jeffrey and a friend, Peter, were bored stiff at their local youth club when they heard about a local under-21s amateur dramatic club looking for members.
Jeffrey was initially unconvinced. “The last thing on God’s earth I wanted to do was stand up in front of people and try to be funny,” he says.
“But then Peter said the magic words: ‘Well, some of the girls are very pretty.’ I replied, ‘What time do you want me?’ And that was that.” Although he’s appeared on the same stage as Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir John Gielgud, he most enjoyed working on You Rang, M’Lord? in the early 1990s because he got to play a supercilious footman strolling around lavish sets. “James Twelvetrees was the biggest snob in the
house,” he says. “He knew his place and expected everyone to know theirs and it couldn’t have been more different for me than playing Spike in Hi-de-Hi!.”
Jimmy Perry and David Croft were of course the geniuses behind the lens.
Jeffrey says they had a gift for casting and pairing polar-opposite characters for comedic effect.
“Dad’s Army had a clever premise with all these businessmen in (the fictional town of) Walmington-on-Sea who would never have socialised together were it not under the umbrella of the Home Guard and that’s where the comedy came from,” he says.
He successfully auditioned for a part in the Dad’s Army six-month stage show at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, in 1975, as the understudy for Private Walker when luck intervened.
John Bardon, who later played Jim Branning in EastEnders, enrolled as Private Walker after the original TV actor James Beck died in 1973 but when he pulled out of the nationwide tour, Jeffrey took his place.
“I was 29 years of age and a member of Captain Mainwaring’s platoon,” Jeffrey remembers. “I couldn’t believe it. It was so emotional to be on the first night standing with my rifle and uniform.
“When the curtain went up and we were all standing together, pride was oozing out of me. I was a member of the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard.”
Perry and Croft liked him and gave him a guest slot on the real Dad’s Army, eventually leading to the role of Spike.
Some actors are notoriously prickly about being associated with one part but not Jeffrey. “Whatever else I do, I’ll always be ‘that bloke from Hi-de-Hi!’ and I’m proud of that,” he says.
Just three weeks ago, he met a seven-yearold fan called Tia at a Hi-de-Hi! convention in Harwich, Essex, close to where the original series was filmed.
“She was with her mum who brought her to see us and meet me. She knows every word of every script.
“It means so much to me as her mother wasn’t even born when we made that show.”
He jokes that the little girl must have wondered why she was meeting an old man instead of the Spike she had seen on screen. But he was clearly delighted.
It’s the show’s universal appeal that keeps it popular with audiences today – it’s especially huge in Hungary, apparently.
“Hi-de-Hi! always appealed across the board to families of multiple generations because of its colourfulness and silly characters. It’s as alive and funny today as it was when we made it.”
YET he thinks it lacks one vital ingredient to be remade today: a live studio audience. “Audiences laugh and their laughter projects through the TV into the living room,” Jeffrey explains. “It tells people what’s funny and when to laugh.”
He doesn’t bemoan the situation but he does miss watching variety, a form of entertainment now practically disappeared from British culture.
“It only exists on the cruise ships, where they’re glad of variety acts, or on Britain’s Got Talent on the television,” he says.
And yes, he’s a big fan. As to his lengthy career, he considers himself lucky.
“I’ve done a job that I adored and am still doing it,” he adds.
“A lot of people have to do jobs they don’t particularly like to pay the bills. If I don’t do any more, I will look back with a smile on my face at what I have done.”
No more than the rest of us.
● Best Of British TV Comedy starring Jeffrey Holland and Sue Hodge is currently touring. For more details, visit thatsentertainmentproductions.co.uk