‘We actors know better than BBC executives’
Stephanie Cole’s new BBC One sitcom launches this week, but she is pulling no punches about the corporation. She talks to Benji Wilson
Stephanie Cole has made a career out of not acting her age. In her first role, while still studying at Bristol Old Vic, she was asked to play a 90-year-old.
“It was in the most frightful play with Leonard Rossiter. All I had to do was totter on dressed entirely in black and shriek ‘Papist, papist, papist!’ and go off again. I was 17.”
When she was cast as Diana, an irascible former photojournalist stuck in a retirement home in Waiting for
God, she was 48. Her character was supposed to be 70. Whereas her co-star, Graham Crowden, was 67.
“When we did it, I said to the lovely producer-director, [Gareth Gwenlan]: ‘Why did you cast a man of the right age but a woman 20 years younger?’ This was in the early Nineties and I promise you, he said: ‘Because no woman would have the energy at that age to do what we’re asking you to do.’ I was appalled.”
Twenty years later, Cole still undoubtedly has the energy to do whatever you ask her to do. She has recently been filming a new series of
Still Open All Hours with David Jason, who is 80 next year.
“David and I both love physical comedy. In one episode, David is teaching me to ride a bicycle, which involved a lot of getting on and falling off and being stupid and having crash mats and so on and so forth. But because [writer] Roy Clarke is 90 [in January], he knows what we’re capable of. He knows that David and I can throw ourselves off a bicycle and not worry. Everyone on set was standing there with tears of laughter.”
We meet at Cole’s London flat, where she appears in a loose blouse and a pair of shop-fresh white Air Max trainers. She is a torrent of anecdotes, pockmarked with some weaponsgrade swearing. Our interview is in conjunction with another new role in Scarborough, a BBC sitcom from Derren Litten, the creator of
Benidorm, in which she plays the bad-tempered mother of the lovelorn female lead (Catherine Tyldesley, the former Coronation Street star). It was filmed up in Scarborough itself and Cole loved every minute of it.
“I have to say that the whole thing was a total joy. There was never any grumbling – even on the day when we were inside the pub and [the] poor make-up [department] had to be outside in the pouring rain because the BBC hadn’t actually given us quite enough money to make it. So if it is a success, then f--- them. Excuse me.”
Whatever Cole’s feelings towards the national broadcaster, one of the
reasons she warmed to Scarborough was because it is a comedy that gives as many jokes and lines to its older characters as it does its younger. Cole appears alongside such character stalwarts as Maggie Ollerenshaw and Veronica Roberts, yet all of them get plenty of screen time and what Cole calls “robust”, meaning rude, jokes.
“One of the problems as far as older women are concerned,” says Cole, “and I don’t mean women of 55 – they’re still young, so let’s get that straight – is that the writers are often young.” She pauses for a second and then adds that this is a problem for older men as well, “but it is worse for older women because it’s always worse for women”.
Writers, she says, tend to write about what they know, and there aren’t many writers over the age of 60.
“What you know of old people if you’re 30 is someone like your gran, and you know them as someone people make jokes about. But young writers don’t really get the fact that whatever age you are – and you only learn this as you get older – your feelings are exactly the same.
“So if you fall in love late in life it is no different from falling in love when you’re 17, except that you have a little bit more nous about it. The way that you cope with joy or with grief tends to be deeper, quieter, slightly different… but the feelings are exactly the same.”
Cole has made bringing those feelings to life her stock in trade. She has always played people older than herself, including in her breakout role in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues on BBC One in 1988. In the episode titled “Soldiering On” she played Muriel, a charity worker with a mentally ill daughter who tries to remain stoic after her husband dies [Coles’s second husband, Peter Birrel, died in 2004]. She recalls a preliminary lunch with Alan Bennett, during which, she says, “I was so nervous, I hardly ate a single mouthful – which is unlike me”.
But when it came to commanding the screen for 30 minutes on her own, she says the format suited her personality.
“I love being on my own talking to an audience. I’m very happy talking about anything and everything – as you might have guessed. So in a way Talking Heads was just one step on from those after-theatre shows or Q&AS we used to do when you would chat to the audience. Just one person talking to another and telling their story. There was an ease about it, I found.”
Cole says that when she was young she wanted to be a stand-up comedian, but aside from Beryl Reid and a few variety performers “there weren’t such things” as female stand-ups. Now she looks on at female comics and writers with admiration, name-checking Phoebe Wallerbridge’s Fleabag as a particular, recent favourite.
“Me, I would love to do something very up-to-the-moment like Fleabag. But there’s room for everything: Fleabag is a different type of comedy to Scarborough, but in Britain we’ve got an audience as wide as you like. For example, the fact that Still Open gets seven million [viewers], particularly above Birmingham, means that there is a tranche of people who love to watch that.”
Still Open All Hours is a perfect example of why Cole remains relevant and working. It began as a gloopily nostalgic remake of the Ronnie Barker classic but, through Jason and Cole’s input in part, it has sharpened its teeth over five years and 34 episodes.
“We stopped doing it in front of a live audience about three or four years ago,” she says. “Personally, I hugely dislike the canned laughter. It’s not necessary, it’s a cop out, it’s oldfashioned and it’s stupid. I would also like to push for a single camera [as opposed to the traditional five-camera sitcom format]. I mean, five cameras, what do you gain? You gain nothing.”
She says, however, that pushing for these changes has been a struggle.
“Unfortunately, at the BBC, we do have people who are rather oldfashioned in their ways. They don’t listen to me – I’m neither here nor there. But David, at the end of each series, has a bit of a tussle [with executives and producers] and then he gets the next step. He knows better than any of them what works. That’s the thing that really f---- me off – as far as the acting and timing is concerned, we know how to do it – we’ve spent 60 f------ years doing it! We do not have to have some t--- going, ‘Could you leave a little pause after that joke because people will be laughing at home?’”
As that suggests, Cole is a wonderfully brassy 77-year-old, and her recent work is far from confined to softer comedies and dramas. Last year she appeared in the live Hallowe’en edition of Inside No. 9, the dark comedy by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. The ground-breaking half-hour show appeared to go wrong a few minutes in, with the picture replaced by a “Normal Service Will Be Resumed” card and a hurried showing of a repeat. In fact, it was all choreographed to the second.
“There was only one moment. I was sitting there about to slit my own throat [her character killed herself in the show], and suddenly the floor manager said, ‘Stef, we’ve lost five seconds, can you gain them?’ So I just spoke a little bit faster. It was that precise.”
She found the experience of avant-garde television energising.
“At the end of filming that show, I suddenly realised that we have not even broken the egg as far television is concerned. We’ve not really thought out what it’s possible to do,” she says. “It all started with pointing a camera at a play, and then we had the great lumbering camera, and now we’ve got the ducking and diving cameras… I just think that we’ve not begun. I find that immeasurably exciting.”
As that suggests, Stephanie Cole is precisely one of the older people she describes when talking about how we need to stop using age as a label.
“It isn’t to do with how old you are, it’s what you can do physically and mentally, and that’s different with everybody. I’ve got several friends who are in their nineties and are as spry as anything. It’s time we realised that.”
And then, catching herself, she says: “This is like a f------ lecture, isn’t it? Sorry.”
Scarborough starts on BBC One on Friday at 9.30pm
‘One of the problems as far as older women are concerned is that the writers are often young’
‘At the BBC, we do have people who are rather oldfashioned. They don’t listen to me, but David, at the end of each series, has a bit of a tussle’