Divorce, porn and panto... the very revealing story AFTER Balamory
For some of the cast, the hit children’s TV show was a gateway to fame and fortune – but for others, a life of obscurity beckoned
WHAT’S the story in Balamory? It is now a decade since the most successful children’s TV show of the past 30 years was cancelled after four series and 254 episodes.
A ‘soap opera’ for toddlers with infuriatingly catchy songs, the Bafta- winning show counted a whopping 15million devotees worldwide and attracted two million viewers a week in Britain at its height. Even the Vatican received it on the BBC Prime channel. But behind the brightly coloured walls of the fictional town of Balamory, filmed in Tobermory, Mull, lay a hotbed of scandal and controversy.
Ten years after the show’s famous residents waved goodbye, we ask what became of the cast.
THE HARBOUR HEIGHTS CONTROVERSY
JOSIE Jump’s famous yellow house in Balamory was actually a hotel in Tobermory named Harbour Heights. But in 2004, at the peak of the show’s popularity, Josie was forced to ‘move’ after a fallout between Balamory’s BBC production team and the hotel’s owner, richard Stojak.
Mr Stojak claimed that the upheaval of the show’s filming, and the volume of visitors coming to the hotel, which at one point was booked a year in advance, had wrecked his 27-year marriage.
‘If the show had not been made, I think my wife and I would still be together,’ he said at the time. ‘You would have thought that, with the show, positive things would have happened for us.
‘Toddler tourism has taken over the island. Since the programme started there have been 30 visitors to the hotel every hour.
‘You have to dedicate yourself to your guests and it is very, very tiring working from 6am until midnight. I just didn’t foresee the impact on my personal life and my marriage suffered greatly.’
Matters reached a head when BBC staff claimed that Mr Stojak had become so fed up, he told some young visitors he had murdered Josie Jump and buried her under the hotel patio.
Mr Stojak denied the claim but the BBC moved anyway, recreating Josie’s famous yellow balcony elsewhere in the town. Since the filming of the show Mr Stojak has left Mull, the establishment has changed hands and it has since been renamed the Park Lodge Hotel.
ARCHIE THE INVENTOR
ACTOR and stand-up comedian Miles Jupp played Archie the Inventor, clocking up more television hours in a purple kilt than anyone before or since. Despite his popularity, he found the role got in his way when he tried to forge a stand-up career.
recalling an incident during the Edinburgh Festival he said: ‘I went on stage and there were ten children in the front row. Nightmare. The show was only 40 minutes long, and I had to keep cutting huge chunks of filth.’
Mr Jupp has since had further success, from a blink-and-you’ll-missit role in Harry Potter and the order of the Phoenix to the affable Nigel in the BBC sitcom rev. Mr Jupp has also become a perennial on television panel shows including Have I Got News For You, Mock the Week and Never Mind the Buzzcocks and has carved out a successful stand-up career.
Earlier this year it was announced that he would take over from Sandi Toksvig as host of the BBC radio 4 comedy show The News Quiz. No word on whether he still wears the kilt, though.
THE TWO JOSIE JUMPS IN SERIES 3
THE show’s makers attempted to insert a new actress into the role of Josie Jump, Balamory’s effervescent personal trainer, after original actress Buki Akib left the show.
While Kasia Haddad made a convincing replacement, the move caused much consternation to young viewers, who couldn’t understand why Josie’s voice had changed and she suddenly looked different.
Parents bombarded chatrooms and websites demanding to know what had happened to the original Josie and if she was ever coming back.
Miss Akib was pursuing an arts degree at the time, which clashed with her filming commitments, so she was forced to quit the show.
She went on to become a stylist and fashion designer and never returned to acting. Miss Haddad fared little better in the trade and has since sunk into obscurity.
SPENCER
RODD Christensen first came to Scotland in 1992 t o work f or a Christian charity. A deeply religious man, he settled his family here and spent more than a decade working with Scripture Union in Fife, before landing the role as painter Spencer.
After the show, his acting work dried up and Mr Christensen took a job with Stagecoach as a bus driver, before finally returning to the US.
But in 2011 his family found themselves in the headlines when it was revealed that his daughter raylin, who was brought up in Dunfermline, had moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the adult film industry under the name Skin Diamond.
‘My upbringing was pretty strict,’ she said. ‘ Sex was always this big thing I wasn’t supposed to pay attention to. But what happens when you tell a child not to do something? It makes it more intriguing. I couldn’t wait.’
Goodness. The residents of Balamory would be shocked.
PC PLUM
A LWAYS nice, if occasionally dim, PC Plum kept the streets of Balamory safe with his s mart bicycle and perfectly plucked eyebrows.
But in 2004, at the height of the show’s success, actor Andrew Agnew was involved in a real life crime when he was attacked by a man with a snooker cue. The
perpetrator, John Watson, was the brother of his downstairs neighbour, with whom Agnew and his partner Robert Telford had been involved in a long-running dispute.
The neighbour’s list of complaints i ncluded accusations that the couple regularly kept their television blaring and had a noisy tumble drier. Watson was given 150 hours community service.
These days you will find Mr Agnew singing – he recently took to the stage with boy band Union J during a gay Pride event – and doing panto. This year he will be starring in a production of Peter Pan at Malvern, Worcestershire.
SUSIE SWEET
LONG time High Road stalwart Mary Riggans was familiar to generations of Scottish families thanks to her role on Balamory as shopkeeper and feather duster afficionado Susie Sweet.
Once a child actress herself (she was doing radio voiceovers by the age of ten), Miss Riggans had a long and illustrious career before Balamory, starring in almost every TV show produced north of the Border, from Taggart to Rab C Nesbitt. In 1993 she won a Sony award for her performance as Jean Armour in the radio play Till A’ The Seas Run Dry.
But it was as High Road’s Effie Macinnes, Glendarroch’s gossip-in -chief, that she was immortalised.
She suffered a stroke in 2012 and passed away in December 2013, holding her daughter’s hand.
MISS HOOLIE
THE ever- s miling Miss Hoolie, played by Julie Wilson Nimmo, was t he show’s sweet-natured nursery teacher with a touch of mystery (unlike the other characters, we only saw inside her house once).
But it was thanks to Miss Nimmo that the show came to an end after less than three years on the air, despite the endless money-spinning opportunities for the BBC. Not long before the end of the show, she said: ‘There are so many people in the cast, and I won’t name names, who would l i ke Balamory to go on forever. I don’t think it should.’
After Balamory she turned to the theatre, playing Miss Toner in the stage version of John Byrne’s Tutti Frutti and then touring in a National Theatre of Scotland production, The House of Bernarda Alba.
She is married to Greg Hemphill, of Still Game fame, and they have two sons. The couple were fervent Yes backers during l ast year’s independence referendum and she is a supporter of the SNP.
THE TOWN OF BALAMORY
BALAMORY’S real-life counterpart, Tobermory, experienced a huge rise in tourism.
Families flooded on to the CalMac ferry to Mull in their thousands to visit the site of PC Plum’s rounds, and the tourist office was swamped with calls.
Tourism rose by half and even property prices benefited – the three-bedroom terraced house next to PC Plum’s home sold for £180,000 – something of an advance on the £140,000 that it would once have sold for.
Not everyone was happy though. Some residents expressed irritation at having their peace and quiet ruined by hordes of excitable children.
Today, ten years after the end of the show, the tourism boom has j ust about dropped off and Tobermory is back to its sleepy old self.
Just like Balamory…