Geoffrey Palmer tells Paul Hoggart about a happy return
Christmas would not be Christmas without sitcom revivals, and this year’s vintage cracker is As Time Goes By, the gentle comedy of elderly love, starring Dame Judi Dench as Jean and that master of well-mannered crotchetiness, Geoffrey Palmer, as her old flame, now husband, Lionel. It ran for nine series, over ten years up to 2002. Palmer, 79, says that while it was “a happy ship”, he was surprised to be doing it again.
“We’d agree we’d finished it. Judi had to be persuaded mostly, but they kept pushing her, and in the end she said, ‘What about a Christmas special?’ So we did two episodes, which seems rather silly to me. I mean what do you do with two episodes?’” In fact you re-introduce the old ensemble, tackle prospective grandchildren, male fertility problems and throw in a surprise from Lionel’s past as a coffee planter in Kenya.
The pressure for the revival came from America, he says. “It is ludicrously popular over there. I think it’s because it’s rather understated, English and well-mannered, and nobody is seen in full-frontal nudity.
“There’s something incredible about Americans,” he says. “Judi and I do an evening called Fond and Familiar. It’s rather wonderful Victoriana — funny, sentimental, touching and patriotic. The other night an American woman came up to me and told me she had got tickets for next year’s performance. Absolutely nobody knows that it’s on yet!”
The show occupies “one of the most special places” in his career, he says, along with Reggie Perrin and Fairly Secret Army. “Though Butterflies probably did more for my career. It sounds cheesy to say, but it has been a privilege to work with Judi Dench. She’s just another actress when you’re working, but one inevitably gets dragged along in her wake.”
And how does he account for the show’s success? “It’s true to life, and we don’t scream that we’re being funny. Most of all with the rise of shows like Bottom — the broad, vulgar shows — this is good family entertainment. Jean and Lionel love each other, but they’re set in their ways, and their prickliness is recognisable. And it’s not just OAPs. Quite a lot of younger people like it.”
Among his guest appearances, Palmer played an admiral disapproving of Judi Dench as M in Tomorrow Never Dies (“Pierce Brosnan was a honey”), a doctor desperate to get his sausages in Fawlty Towers and Douglas Haig in Blackadder Goes Forth. The ending, in which the cast go over the top to certain death, was “mind-boggling”, he says. “The last shot of the last episode of the last series of a funny programme, it was incredibly brave.”
With his air of irritated resignation and bloodhound jowls (“There’s slightly too much flesh for the bone structure so it flaps about”), he was the natural narrator for Grumpy Old Men. If he had been asked to contribute, he says, he’d have sounded off about the plague of bossy and pointless road signs in his corner of rural Buckinghamshire. Yet despite the image he is a charming man who loves his grandsons and adores fishing. “I’m very happy,” he says. Time, all in all, seems to have gone by rather pleasantly.
Thanks to Phil Watson for sending me this article which appeared in The Times (UK) on December 24, 2005.