Richard Briers

Ten years ago, I spent a cheery couple of weeks working with Richard Briers on a movie. It turned out to be his last.

Too often one meets people one has admired, or held in esteem, only for them to turn out to be rude or nincompoops.

Richard Briers was lovely.

I remember when the Rolling Stones produced a film to commemorate their twenty-fifth anniversary and Charlie Watts said it had been twenty years of hanging about and five years of work.

A similar description fits the process of making a movie — maybe a twelve hour day, but consisting of an hour having irritating make up applied, then ten hours of sitting around, and an hour of filming with the hope of creating one minute of film.

So on movie sets and locations there is a lot of lolling about on those canvas chairs with people’s names on the back; just waiting… and waiting.

One day, on location filming for Cockneys vs. Zombies (in exotic Sutton), I found myself sitting alone with Richard Briers for several hours. He was clearly not well and was having trouble breathing but he was in the mood to talk.

It’s unusual to find a leading actor in such a frame of mind on a film set. Understandably, they are often to be found in their trailers running through their next block of lines, or avoiding people like me who are all too willing to chat and distract them.

But it was a sunny late spring day, and we were sitting in the shade of the catering van, whilst camera crew and assistant directors scurried about around us.

There is always a danger when chatting with someone very famous that one runs the conversation in the manner of an interview. “So Richard… your first major television breakthrough came in the 1960s with Marriage Lines…?”

I managed to avoid that.

I mentioned that I had seen him as King Lear over twenty years before, at the hideous Hexagon Theatre in Reading (“Did you really? How splendid of you to come! Do you remember the stage was full of coiled rope?”) and that set us off on a conversation about how so many post war theatres are so comfortable inside yet so unappealing from outside. We mused upon how the opposite rules apply to theatres from the Victorian era, where the architecture is delightful but the seating is arranged for people no taller than five feet.

From time to time, we fell into a comfortable silence and he closed his eyes. As he was in pyjamas and dressing gown, as part of his character in the movie, this felt like a rather surreal moment — snoozing with Richard Briers. He opened his eyes after a few minutes and continued where he had paused.

He told me showbusiness anecdotes he must have recounted hundreds of times before, but not one of them was at the expense of anyone else. He spoke about actors and directors he had worked with and the only put downs were at his own expense. He told me about a time when he was in a farce in the West End and simply couldn’t get his entrances timed correctly, to the extent that he memorised a whole series of ad libs to cover his sudden appearances on stage which caused much surprise to his fellow actors.

“I had to work out how to get off again without anyone realising I wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.”

I imagine that when most people think of Richard Briers they recall him as Tom Good in ‘The Good Life’, but as we chatted it became clear that he had a very strong affection for the later series, ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’ in which he was reunited with the writing team of John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, and played the socially awkward Martin Bryce, almost a mirror opposite of Tom Good.

He told me that (unlike The Good Life) he had remained great friends with the leading cast members and met up with Penelope Wilton and Peter Egan on a regular basis.

The shadows were growing longer in Sutton and were getting close to the wrap for the day, and indeed, the whole movie. I went to fetch Richard a cup of tea. “How extraordinarily kind,” he said, in that very Richard Briers voice.

I meandered away to have the zombie make up scraped off and I never saw him again.

Richard Briers died eighteen months later in February 2013, aged seventy-nine.