FADING INTO THE LIMELIGHT
by Peter Sallis
Orion, £18.99; 336ppSINCE ACTORS CAN SPEND their lives effacing themselves for the benefit of a borrowed character, the notion of an autobiography by someone in the profession comes close to a contradiction in terms. Unproofed by the clothing of another, they are known to experience a painful absence of many essentials such as words, purpose, money, confidence and identity. No wonder they can’t wait to work again. Here’s 85-year-old Peter Sallis taking us through more than half a century of a rest-free career and retaining an almost heroic anonymity. From these 250 pages he seems happy to see himself as no more than the sum of his parts.
To meet him is to have the impression reinforced. It is hard to think of a famous actor of his generation or subsequent ones who has better chested his personal cards. In speech as in print his sentences are apt to start with constructions like “I shan’t go into the details of this”. He acknowledges, though not in print, the existence of a son, now in his forties, but not the actress to whom he was married from 1957 to 1965. These are personal things, he says, and not the concern of anyone else, no matter how voracious the media appetite has become. He says this politely and robustly, in the manner of a country solicitor declaring that there are certain papers that cannot be disclosed.
Fair enough, but take a closer look at the book and it seems to have identity issues of its own. The publishers call it the long-awaited autobiography of the brilliant actor best known for his roles as the voice of Wallace in Aardman Animations’s Wallace and Gromit films and as Clegg in Last of the Summer Wine. But even before Sallis has got started on chapter one with the words “First a dip into the war years,” he has used the deflationary word “memoirs” in the second line of the preface: “If you have ever been in any doubt as to whether or not you should publish your memoirs, I suppose you could do worse than go to John Lewis’s.”
Cue for a story about a man coming up to him in the department store and asking him whether he would be prepared to read some comedy scripts. Sallis kindly agrees, though the scripts fail to make him laugh once. He suggests that the aspiring author should find himself a collaborator. A few days later he gets a phone call from the stranger’s literary agent, who tells him that he has, presumptuously, included Sallis on his client list, and what’s more, has already received an approach from a publisher.
“The thing is,” Sallis says, drawing a moral from the episode, “you should never force yourself on them. If you have received x degrees of publicity, then don’t worry, because they will come to you.” Which is very much the position he has achieved in his acting life as a result of being in the most successful sitcom in British television history for an astonishing 34 years.
Through this he has become, with Clegg, the pillar of a contemporary national monument, a listed person. Fading into the Limelight is a good title; you only have to tamper slightly with the image to get the sense of someone very gradually melting into the foreground. As in his other continuing triumph, Wallace’s voice in the Oscar-winning animations by Nick Park, Summer Wine fixes him into a world that is as far removed from the one we consider real as is infancy from adulthood.
Sallis blossoms in these discrete micro-climates, and his writing is touched with apprehension whenever he is faced with the tension of controversy or finds himself in the middle of a political disagreement between colleagues.
How does he explain the long life and popularity of the two shows that have made his pension plans superfluous? “I can answer that more easily when it comes to Summer Wine,” he replies. “It’s basically Wind in the Willows, isn’t it? It’s like Badger, Ratty and Mole messing about in boats and passing the time of day. I don’t think for a moment that Roy Clarke was thinking about that when he wrote it, but there it is, and it has a timeless quality. And there we were, in Holmfirth, all retired, all filling in the time and, because we were led by a child, namely Compo, all getting up to childish things. And that same spirit still exists, despite the enormous loss of Bill Owen.
“As for Wallace and Gromit, well, there can’t have been anything since Mickey Mouse that was more immediately audience-grabbing than this character and his dog; the fact that they live like a married couple, and that the dog can’t speak, hasn’t even got a mouth, and the fact that they live, how can I put it, very simply. There’s no complicated plot, it’s all dead easy. Them versus the villain, whoever the villain might be. And just the idea that they can build a space craft in a weekend and fly to the moon. Then ideas like the penguin with the red rubber glove on his head are strokes of genius.” Still, he won’t wear the notion that these little worlds usurp the place of the larger one in his own life. “I’d turn it round the other way,” he says. “I think, when I go up to the Pennines and stand there, what a lucky sod I am to be doing this after such a long time. I don’t intend a criticism of soap operas, but I can’t imagine myself spending 34 years in Coronation Street.
“No, every time we cross the borderline, so to speak, and we are in Holmfirth, I just look around me and marvel. Mind you, I wouldn’t want to live there. Once, when we first started filming, Bill was going round the town in his Compo clothes, and when we came out of the Barclays Bank there were these three old geezers sitting on the bench and one of them called out ‘Las’ of the Summer Wine!’ and Bill turned round and waved at him and the man said ‘Rubbish!’ ” He’s a survivor, is Sallis, all but blind these days after years of a degenerative eye condition and doing his Wallace lines by copying what the directors shout at him. He also has a classy stock of recollections from the days before Summer Wine. Big beasts pass through his earlier pages — unreachable ones such as Olivier and vast presences like Orson Welles, with whom Sallis appeared in a strange West End venture called Moby Dick Rehearsed in 1955. Sallis hung out with Welles during that time, content to sit and listen for hours, and regretful now that he didn’t record these sessions.
Once in a while something sharp and strange rises to disrupt the gentle pool of anecdotage. It is sex, both the presence of it and the absence.
Try the paragraph indexed as “romantic episode”, or else listen to him talk with brief abandon about the time he nearly got into bed with a man. “The moment just passed. I suppose it happens to most chaps. The real joke, although that’s not quite the right word, is that I was totally conscious that what I was thinking of was unnatural. A little birdie told me that, I think. No, the real joke is what would have happened if I had dived into bed with him, in the sense of: what would he have done, which was more to the point. We might have been happily married now. You never know, do you?” No.
The genius of Peter — by NICK PARK
Peter was the obvious choice for Wallace from the very beginning of the project — he was my only choice, really. Back then I was an avid watcher of Last of the Summer Wine, but I also remember seeing him in a couple of film roles as well.
I was a student at the National Film and TV School in 1982, and I spoke to Peter Sallis’s agent about casting Peter in the role of Wallace. I think he agreed to do it out of kindness. I sent him the script and he did a test of it on his own cassette player at home, in Wallace’s voice.
With animation you record the voice first, so you have something to use to get your lip-sync right. The whole character and the way it is animated is very much about getting a feel for the voice. Peter helped us model Wallace by the way he pronounced his words, like “Grom-mit!”, with every syllable separate and over the top, and the way he said “cheeeeeeeese!”. In fact I hadn’t expected Wallace to have such a wide mouth, but it was Peter’s pronunciation of “cheese” that did that.
Peter’s so hardworking and incredibly amenable. It’s difficult to act in those circumstances, because you don’t have anything to react to, you don’t have an environment or a costume that helps you be in that role. He’s consistent and he always comes up with the goods in his own way.
Peter’s also great fun. He’s very cheeky and, at 85, he’s so sharp, and his sense of humour is so dry that you can’t take yourself seriously with him. If I would like him to say something slightly differently, he would just turn to me and say: “You mean, ‘act better’, don’t you Nick.” At college you’re told that you should never tell an actor too directly what you want because you have to let them discover the character, but he always said: “Forget that rubbish and just tell me what you want.”
Peter is very old school: that’s what’s lovely about him. He always comes to a recording smartly dressed, in collar and tie and a suit. There’s something that you don’t get much these days.
I think Peter’s a real gem, a real one-off. There is something about the whole persona and warmth that he brings to his work that is very special. Someone once said that Peter Sallis’s voice as Wallace is like a pair of warm slippers in an uncertain world. I think that really sums it up.
Interview by James Charles
