The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘I had to tweak Bond so he didn’t seem like a rapist’
Martin Jarvis is a household name on television, but he’s most admired for recording audiobooks and making them his own – especially the Just William stories – and now even 007. By Claire Allfree
Within seconds of beginning our interview, Martin Jarvis has abandoned his trademark molten liquorice vowels for a half-bitten cockney dialect by way of genteel Surrey. “Doin’ good, ritin’ rongs an’ pursuin’ happiness,” he says, reciting the philosophy of a certain incorrigible 11-year-old boy in a voice that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has listened to his regular recordings of Richmal Crompton’s beloved Just William stories that have been broadcast on Radio 4 since 1973.
He’s at it again this Christmas, with a new story, William’s Truthful Christmas, broadcast on Christmas Eve. Unruly, romantic, perpetually misunderstood, William Brown, says Jarvis, is one of the great comic creations in English literature. “In my view, he’s a genius. In this particular story he is very taken by the vicar’s suggestion that one ought to always speak the truth. So when Aunt Ethel asks if he likes the geometry set she has given him for Christmas, well, you can imagine.” Indeed you can. Mayhem inevitably ensures, as William’s well-intentioned big plans come up once again against the placid hypocrisy of the English suburban middle classes.
Jarvis and I are talking over Zoom from his house in Los Angeles where he spends part of each year, and where he and his wife actress Rosalind Ayres, whom he married in 1974 (he has two sons, Oliver and Toby, from a previous marriage) regularly perform audio drama with the company LA Theatre Works. The actor Nathaniel Parker often drops in; Jared Harris lives across the road. During lockdown he and Harris would meet for socially distanced cocktails like something out of PG Wodehouse – another author immortalised by Jarvis’s plum jam vocals in several of the countless audiobooks he has recorded over the years.
“It’s quite a little community we’ve got here,” he says, gesturing airily at a room that, to my nosy eyes, is plush and spacious in a low-key LA kind of way. By rights he should be back in the UK but the actors’ strike means a Warner Brothers project that he is involved in has been delayed. But come the weekend he’ll be in front of an audience at the Riverside Barn in Walton-on-Thames, performing William’s Truthful Christmas for the Radio 4 broadcast.
“The stories might have been written nearly a hundred years ago [in fact Crompton produced them over a 50-year period, from 1922 to 1970], but people still find them funny. She had an understanding of human behaviour that supersedes the period. People recognise themselves.”
He invariably edits the stories before he records them. Usually for brevity but sometimes for taste. “One of William’s most enjoyable games with the Outlaws, Douglas and Ginger, is Red Indians. I can remember playing Red Indians myself. But you can’t do that now. So in my adaptations they play cops and robbers.”
In another story William needs to lay his hands on a white cat and, unable to find one, paints one white instead. “People may have thought that sort of thing was OK in 1923. But it isn’t now. It’s perfectly reasonable to adjust the odd thing here or there that might otherwise worry listeners. Like Crompton, my purpose is to entertain.”
Jarvis, 82, one of our most recognisable and reliable actors, part of the furniture rather in the way of a handsomely upholstered, immensely comfortable armchair. He’s indelibly associated with the golden age of English television, his memorable appearances in the 1960s and 1970s including The Forsyte Saga, Nicholas Nickleby and
David Copperfield and, alongside Diane Keen, the late 1970s sitcom
Rings on Their Fingers. For 20 years until 2008 he regularly appeared on Countdown.
He also occasionally pops up on stage, most recently in The Importance of Being Earnest in the West End in 2014. But it’s his audio work for which he is most known. He’s narrated Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Terry Pratchett, Dick Francis, Kenneth Grahame. His audiobooks listing on Amazon runs to nine pages. “It’s not that I gave up TV or the stage. But there’s something distinct about the way audio appeals to the audience’s imagination.”
Early next year he is recording a new adaptation of Casino Royale featuring Toby Stephens as 007. Does he find himself tweaking Fleming’s original novels, too? “Oh goodness, yes. Bond’s attitude to women in some of those novels is slightly creepy crawly. There are one or two when, not to put too fine a point on it, he’s virtually raping women. So I have to slice away some of the things he says.”
Who does he think should be the next Bond? “Gosh, that’s a difficult question. But Ed McVey [who plays Prince William in the final season of The Crown] would be very good.” What about those who argue it’s time for Bond to be played by a woman? “Well, Judi [Dench] played M very well for years. And we’ve had female King Lears. So to say it has to be a man feels wrong. On the other hand, I’d be sorry to lose the Bondness of Bond. And if you cast a woman, you’ve got to create a different psychological background.”
Jarvis was born in Cheltenham in 1941 and grew up in South Norwood. His father worked in insurance while his mother stayed at home to bring up him and his sister Angela. “My mum could have run a company but like so many women of that generation she looked after the family. It wasn’t always easy: I can remember, for instance, when we got our first fridge. William’s family always had a fridge of course. [In a neat twist, Crompton lived only a few miles away, in Bromley, although Jarvis never met her]. The Browns were definitely a bit posher than us.”
His father served in the war and although still very young, Jarvis remembers him coming home on leave. “I remember saying to my mum ‘Must I do what that man tells me?’ Because I hadn’t seen much of him at all.” Did his father ever speak about the war? “Not really. I believe that was the case for quite a lot of dads who came back from the war. But when I was doing my geography homework he’d look at my atlas and say ‘Oh, we did so and so there’ – and suddenly I could catch a tiny glimpse of a whole other life.”
Next year Jarvis is directing for the LA Theatre Works a production of R C Sherriff ’s exquisite First World War play
Journey’s End – in which he starred in 1970 as Captain Stanhope in a BBC audio production. “It’s an extraordinary play, I choke up just thinking about it. It was a different war, of course, but having performed it one certainly became aware of the heroism of so many of the men who lived in our cul-desac.” His own memories of the war are rather more childlike. “Whenever the bombing started my mother would usher us into the cupboard under the stairs. I found it rather exciting. I said to my mum: ‘If I’m good will they make that big bang again?’ I didn’t get it, of course.”
He got the acting bug from his mother, who each year would take him and his sister to the pantomime. He starred in a couple of school productions at Whitgift School in Croydon, and then won a place at Rada, paid for by a grant from Surrey County Council. He was far from the only gifted actor there on a scholarship: his contemporaries John Hurt and Ian McShane were also on local authority grants. Jarvis counts himself lucky: those grants no longer exist. “Although mine didn’t cover the cost of a flat, so I had to come home each night. I missed out on an awful lot of parties.”
He excelled at Rada, winning several awards. “Rada gave you a spurious confidence. Then, when you left and came up against real life, it rather deflated a bit.”
All the same, he found work easily. Initially he cast in several West End plays, in “juvenile” parts as he puts it – “I had a lot of lines like ‘Hello Mother, anyone for tennis?’.” Then, still only 25, he found critical acclaim as the callow Jon Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga. That led, in 1968, to the star role in
Nicholas Nickleby. It also led to Jarvis being typecast. At Rada one tutor had told him, “You’ll never make it as actor. But you might do OK as a photographic model,” which made him feel “terrible”. Mindful he might find himself only being offered pretty-boy roles, he asked to play the slimy, scheming Uriah Heep in David Copperfield. “The director Joan Craft said, ‘Oh, you can’t play that, you’ve been Nicholas Nickleby’. But I insisted on showing her my Uriah [Jarvis goes into Heep’s ‘I am very umble’ speech] and I got the part.”
He went out to LA in the mid-1990s “because that’s where
‘There’s something distinct about the way audio appeals to the audience’s imagination’
the work was”, having appeared in a couple of American films. “The director Walter Grauman [with whom Jarvis had previously worked with on The Last Escape] said ‘If you move to LA I’ll make you a household name’. That didn’t quite happen.” Instead Jarvis made himself a household name, moving between both countries, setting up a radio production company with Ayres in 2001 and establishing himself as a fixture on Radio 4.
What does he think of the BBC today? Without prompting he brings up Gary Lineker. “I don’t know what to say about Gary – do you think that Gary doesn’t really want to carry on with the BBC? Is he just saying what he wants to now so that they chuck him out? People of my generation know how fortunate we were to be able to do our work with the masters [who worked at the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s]. Now it’s very different. I’m not sure how best to preserve it.”
Yet he’s not a nostalgic by nature. I ask him if he feels fondly towards the well-ordered, long vanished England of Crompton’s comic world. “No, not at all. What I do feel nostalgic about is watching Surrey play cricket. Because one of my most treasured memories is reading her stories on the bus when I was 10 or 11 on the way to the Oval with my granddad.”
William’s Truthful Christmas is on Radio 4 at 7.15pm on Christmas Eve