Richard Briers

[faceless]

Comedy king Richard
18th July 2009
thenorthernecho.co.uk

Richard Briers reveals his favourite TV sitcom to Viv Hardwick as he discusses his love of Newcastle Theatre Royal. "I THINK it’s one of the greatest theatres in the world,” is the verdict of legend of acting Richard Briers’ on Newcastle Theatre Royal as he celebrated the venue’s latest £3.5m restoration programme.

“I’m very fond of it and it was 1959 (in the play Gilt and Gingerbread) when I first appeared there. I did a couple of other shows, then I was in Uncle Vanya. I played Richard III there and 20 years ago I was King Lear, which was kind of my swansong for Newcastle. I’ve always loved this theatre and I’m delighted to be part of it,” explains the 75-year-old this week. “Where the theatre is, is so wonderful, and I don’t have to tell you that when Victorians built a theatre, they built a bloody theatre. They didn’t hang about with frills. So this incredible monolith, this huge 1,300-seat building, shoved right at the top of marvellous Grey Street, was extraordinary in 1832,” adds Briers, who also paid tribute to architect Frank Matcham’s restoration of 1900 after the theatre’s historic fire.

“It makes the building special for anyone interested in the theatre, especially actors. You don’t get much better than this,” he adds. Briers admits that he’s intrigued to have been invited to join 89 other guests in dining on the stage at Newcastle to celebrate work starting to protect the building’s famous portico; provide new seating, carpets, paintwork, lighting and ventilation, plus reinstating the original gold-leaf work in time for the Theatre Royal’s 175th birthday in 2012.

“It’s wonderful to dine on the stage and I managed a few cheap laughs with a speech. It’s a nice big stage, so you can’t fall off it, which is the most important thing,” Briers adds. Although much is made of his role of Tom Good in TV’s The Good Life in the Seventies, even more millions – when the only channels were BBC and ITV – would have watched him play newly-married George Starling, alongside Prunella Scales as his wife, Kate, in 1963 sitcom Marriage Lines.

“I was very lucky to have this series written for me (by Richard Waring) and there were only two channels, so the two of us became very famous. It was very special in those long-distant days to be on television, so the reaction was extraordinary. People said ‘blimey, you’re on television’, while today everyone’s on television. It doesn’t mean a bloody thing,” he says.

Briers achieved the remarkable feat of starring in a further three major TV sitcoms during a career involving stage, TV drama and screen roles. He is particularly fond of The Good Life, which still runs on cable and satellite channels, because his co-stars were respected theatre actors, but not known to a wider audience.

“I was glad to be still tottering about and was fortunate to catch the writers, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, at exactly the right time. They were so dedicated. That’s why we didn’t do more than 30 because they didn’t want to drop their standards,” he says modestly about his part in the BBC series which inspired couples all over the UK to go green.

His favourite sitcom turns out to be Ever Decreasing Circles, also by Esmonde and Larbey, which ran 1984-89. “Peter Egan (who played singleton Peter Egan to neighbour and do-gooder Martin Brice played by Briers) is still a great friend and Penelope Wilton (who played his long-suffering screen wife Ann) is a wonderful actress. It was a good character part and not just me showing off. My character was impossible, quite a charmless man and one of the writers said ‘the only person who might get away with doing him is Dickie’,” he says.

His curtain call in sitcoms was Monarch Of The Glen, created by North-East writer Michael Chaplin, and ran from 2000-05 “I was totally eccentric… in fact, mad, by the time I got to Monarch Of The Glen. I think I had to push the material a bit,” he says. “I got out after three years because I couldn’t take the travelling any more. I can say there are no Everests left for me… and none wanted. Fifty-two years is enough,” he says.

In recent years, Briers has popped up as a cameo in the odd radio and TV series. “I’m usually a villain who gets killed off,” he jokes. “The trouble is that these days there aren’t many people writing really funny shows. I’m waiting for a cantankerous old grandpa who sits in the corner and has a few scenes, but there’s nothing like that coming my way, because I don’t want the big parts any more. Sitcoms today are either bizarre, freakish or unfunny, sometimes all three,” says Briers who occasionally watches his old work on TV. "I don’t think I’d have altered anything I did back then. I’m just pleased to have had the good fortune to be in them.”

His next theatre date is going to see his friend Sheila Hancock in movie-turned-musical Sister Act in the West End. “My wife (Ann Davies) really wants to go and it seems to be a ladies’ thing. It’s going to be very noisy. That’s what I’m frightened of,” Briers jokes.