Ian Carmichael

Ian Carmichael.

Ian Carmichael was interviewed at the National Film Theatre on 8 December 2002.

Ian Carmichael was a respected stage actor in the early 50s but by the end of the decade, thanks to performances in the films of the Boulting Brothers, he was a major star. In the 1960s he triumphed in TV, as Bertie Wooster in the BBC's The World of Wooster, before going on in the 1970s to become Dorothy L Sayers' aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey.

Interview © BFI 2003

Frankie Howerd was death-defyingly unfunny

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Hilary Smith, the Deputy Head of the NFT and I'm here to welcome you to this very special event, the interview with Ian Carmichael. This forms the centrepiece of our celebration of Ian Carmichael's rich and diverse career in film and television. He's given us many hours of pleasure, as I'm sure those of you who have just watched School for Scoundrels would testify to. I was here last night watching the Lord Peter Wimsey series and his performance is so delicious in that as well. I was absolutely thrilled to hear his wonderful and distinctly resonant tones ringing up in response to my letter, kindly accepting to come and take part in this interview.

Ian Carmichael, of course, came to the fore in a series of films for the Boulting Brothers, who we also pay tribute to this month in a season of films, so it's a wonderful celebration of British cinema. Now without further ado, I'd like to hand you over to our host for this evening's event, Clyde Jeavons.

Clyde Jeavons: Thank you Hilary and good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This evening we celebrate the career of one of Britain's most enduring, most versatile and best loved actors, Ian Carmichael. It's a career which has so far reached 63 years and still counting. Many of you will have seen Ian Carmichael this afternoon on the crest of his career in School for Scoundrels and most of us think of him, depending on our generation, as either the innocent, dithering buffoon of the Boulting Brothers' great comedies of the late 1950s and 60s, or later as Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey on television. But this is a career which has ranged in equal measure and with equal success over all the modern disciplines of acting - theatre, film, television and radio. Not for nothing did this man call his autobiography, 'Will the Real Ian Carmichael...' In a few minutes, it will be my pleasure, as an unashamed and long-serving fan, to explore this career with the 'real' Ian Carmichael. But first, a few reminders of some of the highlights we shall be talking about later, a few extracts from Trottie True, an early film appearance - please don't blink -, from Private's Progress, I'm All Right Jack, Lucky Jim, The World of Wooster, and Murder Must Advertise in the Peter Wimsey series. Enjoy this brief show and we'll be back with you shortly.

[film clips follow]

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our very special guest this evening, Mr Ian Carmichael. [hearty round of applause]

Ian Carmichael: This will go to my head, you know.

CJ: John Mills is very fond of boasting that he still has the same figure he had when he was 20 and can still get into the same pair of trousers. I think you can probably make the same claim, watching you bound up those stairs.

IC: Well, this is quite a late suit. This is 1979, actually. I have earlier ones. [audience laughter]

CJ: Ian, you've been acting now virtually non-stop for over 60 years and there are no signs of you giving up. It's an extraordinarily varied career, ranging over all the media. So perhaps we can go back to the beginning to see how it all started. Your family background is Yorkshire middle-class. You were born in Hull in 1920. Your father ran a successful retail jewellery and silverware business. You had a conventional, albeit private, education. You play cricket well and the drums badly, but there is no apparent hint of any showbiz background, no theatrical blood in the family. So where did the urge to act come from?

IC: I don't know, really. Whether it was an urge to show off or not, I don't know. I just always had a bit of a buzz to do some performing. For a long time I thought I wanted to be a musician and run a dance band. But then I realised I didn't know anything about music and I thought it would be easier to become an actor.

CJ: As I said, you come from a Yorkshire background and you weren't at all posh, so presumably you once had a regional accent. Where did that go and is it still there if you care to resurrect it?

IC: Well, I lived up there for 25 years, I might still have it for all I know. I was educated for five years in Scarborough and I had lived in the Hull area, so I had lived in Yorkshire until I was 13. Then I was moved to a school near Birmingham - Bromsgrove - where I spent another five years. When I got there, my leg was pulled mercilessly because all the boys said I had an appalling Yorkshire accent. After my period at Bromsgrove I was sent to the RADA [Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts] and my elocution master there said, 'Where did you get that terrible Birmingham accent from?' [audience laughter] So I only assume I pick up accents that are around me.

CJ: I think you said ironically you never actually get Yorkshire roles or regional roles, probably because of the way you've been stereotyped.

IC: Yes, I haven't really.

CJ: So you studied at RADA and I think you even got a few embryonic stage roles. There was one as a robot in a play called RUR.

IC: [laughing] That was a repertory company on the Mile End road. They wanted six extras as robots, so they rang up the RADA and we went down there and played the week for 10 shillings. When I left on Saturday night I had to change trains at Charing Cross. I then went into the Strand Cornerhouse and ate a knickerbocker glory and my entire salary went. [audience laughter]

CJ: They weren't that expensive were they surely..?

IC: They were. Ten and six, I think they were.

CJ: Half a guinea. Then the war interrupted almost immediately. You went to Sandhurst and you were commissioned in a tank regiment, the 22nd dragoons. Later you saw service after D-Day in Europe. All useful background for Private's Progress I should imagine...

IC: Yes, it was. Private's Progress was '55 and the war finished in '45 - pretty close.

CJ: Presumably though, there was some dabbling in theatricals and troop entertainment - ENSA [Entertainments' National Service Association] and so forth?

IC: No, not ENSA. There was a branch of the army called the Army Welfare Services. In the last year I seemed to get mixed up in that a bit. I didn't see any point as a soldier in guarding a bridge for a year until my demob came up, so I got mixed up with these concert parties. My chum - he was the brains - and I started with nothing, and we finished with about 23 to 25 shows on the road in an area about the size of Ireland. And they were all troop concerts in as much as the entertainers were all soldiers or RAF, all military personnel. But that wasn't ENSA - that was a civilian organisation.

CJ: But I guess you came across some future colleagues among these young soldiers. Nigel Patrick was someone you knew...

IC: Yes, Nigel Patrick I knew well.

CJ: And Frankie Howerd.

IC: The cross I had to bear was Frankie Howerd [audience laughter]. We were taking auditions in the theatre in a little town called Niemberg. We'd got through quite a number of these soldiers and we were breaking for lunch. And as we were going out there was a corporal who stopped us at the door and asked if he could have a go after lunch. So we said, 'Are you on the list?' and he said 'No, I'm a corporal in charge of three men I brought up.' So we said, 'What do you do?' He said, 'Well, I entertain them a bit in the barracks room and make them laugh.' So we told him, 'Right, come back after lunch and we'll have a look at you.' So he came back after lunch and sang 'A tisket-a-tasket, I've lost my yellow basket' with a few intermingled jokes and a fag which he kept laying down on the end of a chair. And I thought he was death-defyingly unfunny. [audience laughter] And my chum Richard Stone said, 'You're quite wrong. I'm going to book him and put him into such-and-such a concert spot as principal comedian.' And indeed that's what we did. And, as I say, it's the cross I have to bear. [audience laughter]

CJ: Did you ever play with or opposite Howerd in anything subsequently?

IC: No, I don't think I did. He gave me a terrible job to do just before he was demobbed. By that time I was his commanding officer, as it were. He said, 'Look, I've been playing these shows for a year, 18 months. I want to continue with this on Civvy Street when I get out. I'm really at a quandary knowing what to do because I've no money apart from what I've got as a soldier. I've got an invalid mother dependent on me. I've no experience. I just don't know what to do. Should I get out and try to swim in the big pond of Civvy Street or should I stay on for another few months and get more experience here? 'He was asking me - I was only about 23 myself at this time - but I did say I thought he should go because he'd get more experience out in the big world than staying in the army.

CJ: and then you met your wife...

IC: My wife - my then-wife who died in 1983. Yes, I met her when we were stationed in Whitby. And she was married to me for 40 years, the mother of my two children.

CJ: I hasten to say there is a great deal of the Carmichael family in the audience. I'm not going to pick them out but I'd just like you to know there is a loyal following here tonight. RADA presumably gave you some of the accent you now have and have used during most of your acting career. One of your first parts was in an intimate revue, Nine Sharp, and others followed. You were convinced that this was your ideal scene at the time, that your forte was as a revue artist, a song and dance man - a bit like your hero Jack Buchanan, I imagine. Did you have any sort of training for that kind of genre or did you simply have a talent for it?

IC: I think I had a talent for it. I ran this small juvenile dance band in Hull when I was around 17 and I did a bit of singing in that. I was always thought I was Fred Astaire - but I wasn't - and it seemed to be a mettier that was right for me. Incidentally, what fascinates me today is that in the late '40s and well into the 50s, this 'intimate revue' business in London was a big thing. There were about five of them running all the time. Now nobody does it anymore. And what fascinates me is when people write about it and you give an interview to the paper, and tell them about this revue and that revue that you did - how would you spell revue? Well, they all spell it 'r-e-v-i-e-w' which is totally incorrect. It's r-e-v-u-e.

Pioneer of early television

CJ: 1947 saw your first appearance in a movie, Bond Street - you play a hotel receptionist or something, but more importantly, on television you were in a revue with Bill Fraser, called New Faces, at Alexandra Palace where, of course, BBC TV began its transmissions. And so there began an early and, as it turned out, long association with television. In effect, you might say you were one of the pioneers of early television.

IC: [laughs] I wouldn't go as far as that. But certainly when I came out of the army I earned a living largely on television from Alexandra Palace, doing musicals, revues, that sort of thing, musical and comedy work and sketches.

CJ: But you were a staff producer as well at the time?

IC: I did a bit of producing and directing. But the extraordinary thing really was this was all my early work after the war and I did a lot of it. But my parents lived up in Hull and they couldn't see any of it at all because you could only get the television in the London area and certain of the Home Counties. I believe they could get it occasionally with a bit of luck in Brighton but that's as far as it could go. So all that early work of mine, nobody saw really.

CJ: But you were responsible for some quite important early moments. You produced Richard Hearne's early work, Mr. Pastry's Progress. Richard Hearne became a huge star in early television terms as a slapstick comedian.

IC: Oh yes, it was insolent of me really. I was asked to do it and I did. It was the corporal teaching the general really. I mean, he was a big star long before I happened along. I just sort of presented his sketches on the television.

CJ: But it was all live and seat-of-the-pants then as well. wasn't it?

IC: All live, all live. The musical shows we used to do from 'Ally Pally' were nearly all pre-war musical comedies, full-length musical comedies from the West End theatre. We used to do them in these small studios in Alexandra Palace, very small studios indeed, and you got your artists in there, the dancing girls, the orchestra. It was all live and you never saw a camera until about 10.30 in the morning when you were going out live at 8 o'clock in the evening. It was breathtaking stuff.

CJ: But a great benefactor and influence on you at this time was a man called Michael Mills, who was a legendary BBC light entertainment producer. How exactly did he help your career?

IC: A great deal by keeping me in work for five or six years solid, if not more, when other people really weren't terribly interested in me. I did a lot of work at the Players Theatre. Maybe he saw me there, I don't know, but he put me into one of these early revues and he kept me in work pretty solidly from there on.

CJ: There was a whole flurry of shows at that time, like Give My Regards to Leicester Square, and you had some rather wonderful associations with Desmond Walter-Ellis I remember.

IC: Yes, I did a lot with Desmond.

CJ: And with Charles Hawtrey.

IC: Yes, he was with them too.

CJ: There were some very promising comedians around at the time that you bumped into, people like Tony Hancock and Terry Scott. But I am told you claim to have discovered one of the future great favourites, Tommy Cooper. Is that true?

IC: Well, people say that. I was asked to direct or stage a concert party for the troops - this was after the war but CSEU [Combined Services Entertainment Unit] was still providing entertainment - but my boss couldn't find a principal comedian. I went out one night with some chums and we went to a club on Regents St. called, I think, the Windermere Club, and I saw this man who I thought was absolutely hysterical. Well, you all know Tommy Cooper. Everything went wrong, he was hysterical. So I rang my boss the next day and I said, 'You needn't look any further, go and get Tommy Cooper - and he got Tommy Cooper. That's as far as discovery is concerned. But there was a bit of a problem with him actually in that he was so good at his own act that he wasn't really a production comedian. You couldn't put him into other sketches or anything like that. But that's as far as my discovery is concerned.

CJ: You say also that this period was a turning point in your career. It came with another theatre piece - we shouldn't forget that you were constantly working in theatre, as well as television, at this time - and this was a show called The Lilac Domino, co-starring with another major influence and future friend, Leo Franklyn, the father of Bill Franklyn. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about him. People obviously began to notice you at this time and you describe it as the emergence of 'Ian Carmichael, light comedian'. Was that an important time?

IC: Yes, it was. This was toward the late '40s. I'd been doing all this television work and I'd been doing club theatres in London but I hadn't had a big showpiece on the stage. The Lilac Domino was a beautiful operetta that, during the war, was put on at Her Majesty's in London, and Leo Franklyn was the principal comedian. After the war a man who bought the rights off Jack Hilton decided he would put on a tour of this. Leo was going to do his piece and the chap who did 'my' part didn't want to do it, so it was offered to me. I was with Leo on stage all the time - when he was on I was on. We played theatres all over the country and he really taught me my ABC of comedy. He taught me all the groundwork, all the tricks of the trade, all the things to avoid, the things to pick up. He was absolutely wonderful, the most unselfish comedian, and he helped me tremendously. Yes, he was a big peg in my life.

CJ: I don't think you worked with him again though.

IC: No, I didn't. I only worked with his son.

CJ: The Lilac Domino was followed by The Lyric Revue.

IC: There was Wild Violets in between. This is an interesting point. I finished The Lilac Domino, which was a very big success for me. It was a lovely showy part and everything. Now Wild Violets was a big musical that had been on in the mid-'30s at Drury Lane. It had a revolving stage, hundreds of girls and was about two Swiss schools - it was very spectacular. The love interest was three boys at the boys' school and three girls at the girls' school. Now, I didn't want to do this because there wasn't the part there - it was a miserable part. I'd done terribly well with The Lilac Domino, got lots of laughs, and this part was, in my eyes, inferior. I'll tell you the money situation. I think they offered me 25 quid a week to do this. I said 'Look, I'm sorry. I don't want to do this, that's all there is to it.' So they came back and said, 'Alright, we'll make it 30 quid.' So I said, 'Look, please stop this. I don't want to do it. Really, I'm not trying to push my salary up. I don't want to.' He said, 'Alright then, 35.' It went up as far as 40 and then I felt I couldn't say no any longer. [audience laughter]

CJ: It's just like a sketch in a movie.

IC: It is really. Well, I had to bring up my two daughters, you know. So I had to earn the money.

CJ: Everyone has their price. [IC laughs]. Then you did the Hammersmith Lyric Revue with Dora Bryan and others and that was a huge hit, transferring to the West End as The Globe Revue -

IC: - No, transferring to the West End as The Lyric Revue. When we went into the Lyric Hammersmith, we were told it was Festival of Britain year and that we were only going to run for four weeks with no chance of transfer to the West End. Well, it was a huge success and they did transfer it to the Globe Theatre but it was still The Lyric Revue, which caused a bit of a problem when people were booking tickets as the Lyric was next door to the Globe.

CJ: The Lyric Theatre was next door to the Globe?

IC: Yes. We did a run for nearly a year, and then we did a second edition and that was The Globe Revue in the same theatre.

CJ: It was in this that you did your famous 'undressing on the beach' sketch which was immortalised by the cartoonist Giles in The Sunday Express. How did that sketch come about? Was it your idea?

IC: No it wasn't my idea. The actual sketch, it was a mime really. It was an insignificant little gentleman in a bowler hat trying to undress with decorum under a mackintosh on a crowded beach to go for a swim. In revue, you always had to have a number of your own if you wanted to make a mark. When they came to do The Globe there wasn't one for me, and the director came up to me and said, 'Look I've been given this idea. What do you think?' I said, 'Well, it sounds an awful lot of work. I like a few nice lines and some jokes.' He said, 'Well, I think we can have fun with this. I think we can do it well. So I put myself in his hands and he asked Donald Swann to write some music and we did it. And it was, I'm delighted to say, successful.

CJ: Have you done it since?

IC: No, it was hard work, I can tell you. In the heat of the summer all the clothes underneath your mackintosh stuck to you.

CJ: We were going to ask you to do it now...

IC: No, no! [audience laughter]

The film offers roll in

CJ: At this time, you were forging a very respectable stage career, and the film offers began. You had a small part in MGM's Betrayed, alongside Clark Gable, Victor Mature, Lana Turner. That's not a bad cast, actually.

IC: No, not a bad cast.

CJ: And you weren't totally on the cutting room floor.

IC: Not totally, but mostly. [audience laughter]

CJ: Then you were one of a pair of laid-back guard officers with your friend Richard Wattis in The Colditz Story. You did a remake of The Four Feathers, Storm over the Nile and then, rather importantly I think, a reprise on film of Alan Melville's hit comedy about television, Simon and Laura. I think you did it three times?

IC: I've done Simon and Laura in every medium. There are four principal characters: Simon and Laura, who are big star actors in this play, a young television producer, which was myself, and a young television writer, which was Dora Bryan. And we did that on the London stage. I was asked to reproduce my part in the film, which I did, and then several years later I did it on television - but I moved up to play Simon to Moira Lister's Laura.

CJ: But real movie stardom was waiting just around the corner at this time in the shape of the beguiling Boulting Brothers. They wanted you for at least two films and possibly five, starting with Private's Progress and Brothers in Law. And you say in your autobiography that it was your 'undressing on the beach' sketch that made them want you unconditionally. Is that true?

IC: At that time casting directors for films really never considered artists in revue. [They'd say,] 'Oh no, you're a revue artist, you're song and dance - we're not interested in you.' And they never looked at revue artists for their films. Now, I had just moved from revue and done this play, Simon and Laura, and as soon as I opened in that I got this offer from the Boulting Brothers. And when I went to see them, I said, 'I told you, the moment you get into a play, people see you and they offer you a part. And they said, 'Absolute nonsense, dear boy. We booked you because we saw your 'undressing on the beach' in The Globe Revue. [audience laughter]

CJ: Were they absolutely serious about that? They must have seen some other qualities in you that led to the creation of all these wonderful characters.

IC: I think it was the little man [undressing on the beach], yes. They offered me two films to start with which was very good, Privates Progress and Brothers in Law.

CJ: And then the contract for the others came as a result of that?

IC: Yes. I wasn't under sole contract to John and Roy. I was under contract to do a certain number of films at prearranged prices.

CJ: Because you did a film at Rank that bombed and one or two others.

IC: Yes, that was a nasty experience. We won't talk about that one.

CJ: So here began this series of now legendary screen comedies with the Boultings - Privates Progress, Brothers in Law, Lucky Jim, I'm All Right Jack and, later on, Heavens Above! - films which presaged the satire boom of the 1960s. And they were all produced and directed by these extraordinary twins. There aren't many examples - Powell and Pressburger, later on the Coen Brothers - but I think the Boultings were unique, first of all in being twins, but also in being totally interchangeable in what they did. How exactly did they go about this?

IC: One is often asked, which one did you prefer to direct you, John or Roy? It happens a lot. I found that people that had worked for John or Roy, when they were asked that question they nearly always answered by naming the first one that had directed them. They were both absolutely ace. One was not better than the other. I worked first with John and I was terribly inexperienced in the film industry. And John was my guru. He was absolutely superb. He took me through with great tenderness and care and sensitivity. And so John was my favourite, always. But that is not to decry Roy. They were both very good.

CJ: John did most of yours, I think.

IC: Yes, John did Privates Progress, I'm All Right Jack and the tiny bit I did in Heavens Above!.

CJ: What was it like being directed by them? Did they interfere with each other's direction?

IC: No. If one was directing, the other was producing. If they had a disagreement it was in the office afterwards. They never brought it on the stage. But I think they were just in so much accord.

CJ: And you obviously got on well.

IC: Oh, terribly well. They loved cricket too. That helped a great deal.

CJ: Lucky Jim at the time came in for a bit of stick from the critics for not being true Amis and so on. Would you go along with that or is there anything to the fact that it had a difficult directing history?

IC: The Boultings wanted to do it but they didn't have the rights. The rights were owned by a triumvirate: Patrick Campbell and his wife or girlfriend, Vivienne Knight, and Charlie Crichton the director. They had the rights and they were trying to set it up. They went to British Lion to get the backing and distribution. And at that time John and Roy were also directors at British Lion. Well, after the first fortnight's shooting, John and Roy were not happy with the rushes. They were not happy with what they saw at all. So we finished with Charlie Crichton and the triumvirate on the Friday and we opened with John Boulting on the Monday. They just vanished and John took over. John did a jolly good job but I think he started off with a script he wasn't totally happy with. He'd have liked to have done the script himself. There were certain things he didn't agree with. I knew Kingsley Amis well and I was always told, although not to my face, that Kingsley wasn't really happy with the way Lucky Jim had been performed and presented.

CJ: He didn't express this to you directly?

IC: No, he didn't. Looking back, analysing and being self critical, I think possibly I was miscast. I think someone like John Alderton, who I don't think was around at the time, would have been perfect casting.

CJ: He followed you later with a version of Wodehouse. Perhaps the best remembered and most enduring of [your] films [with the Boultings] was I'm All Right Jack in which, as Stanley Windrush, you played against Peter Sellers' immortal trade union leader, Fred Kite, which many think was his best role. There's no doubt that you hold your own in this and the other films, but how was it playing alongside such a unique talent?

IC: It was fine. You see, he was very, very good in the role. They had a lot of trouble with him to start off with because he didn't want to do it. He said, 'Where are the laughs? There's no laughs in this part.' So they had a lot of persuading to do to get him to do it. Now one is led to believe that he did become a very difficult man later on but Kite was the first big part, well directed, that he had in a movie. He had a real plum there. And he was very good, very well behaved, and that's really the part that pumped him right up to the stratosphere. After that I believe he got very difficult but he certainly wasn't when we did I'm All Right Jack.

CJ: It's funny because he doesn't go for the laughs, does he? He plays it absolutely straight.

IC: Yes, that's right.

CJ: So you kind of became Stanley Windrush, and probably got a bit sick of being this archetype that had been created for you.

IC: Yes. I didn't enjoy I'm All Right Jack as much as Private's Progress because I was simply repeating the part. I'd liked to have gone on to pastures new, but that set a stamp on what everybody thought I could do for a very long time, and I was only offered buffoons really.

CJ: But you were on a roll...

IC: Yes, I was on a roll, and I turned down far more than I actually did.

CJ: After your fifth film for the Boultings, which was the end of your contract with them, you went on to make the evergreen favourite we've been watching today, School for Scoundrels, based on Stephen Potter's Lifemanship and Gamesmanship books. With an absolutely marvellous cast, even in the small roles - Janette Scott, Alastair Sim, Terry-Thomas, Dennis Price, Peter Jones, and tiny parts with Irene Handl and Hattie Jacques and so on. And this had a once brilliant director, Robert Hamer. There are a lot of touches of Hamer in this. But was Hamer at this time going to the dogs with his alcoholism and so on?

IC: Well, you're all film buffs here so you'll know Hamer's record - Kind Hearts and Coronets and so on - so we were very lucky to get him. But Hamer was an alcoholic. And Hal Chester, the little volatile American producer of School for Scoundrels, looked after him like a child. He picked him up in the morning and took him to the studio, he looked after him at lunchtime, he took him home at night. And everything was hunky dory. He was compos mentis and played well [until] the last fortnight of shooting. It was a night shoot outside the Camelia room, as you'll probably remember from tonight. And I got down there and he was stoned out of his mind. He was absolutely rolling around, couldn't do a thing. So I'm afraid he had to be removed, and the producer directed that night. Then after that, for the last three weeks, another director came in who never got a credit, a man called Cyril Frankel, who I was in the army with, strangely. He directed the last three weeks. Of course, you've always got to remember that everything is shot out of sequence so the last three weeks doesn't necessarily mean the last fifteen minutes of the film. You can't see the join.

CJ: But the producer who was an out and out American, Hal Chester. What on earth was he doing with a subject matter like this?

IC: I have not the remotest idea. I saw tonight on the credits, one of the screenwriters...

CJ: There was Frank Tarloff, who was a blacklisted Hollywood writer.

IC: Yes, he was an American - Hal brought him in. And Hal Chester was down as writing it. Hal Chester did not write a single perishing line. All he did was grumble about Peter Ustinov's work and try to alter it and bring in American gags for the American market. So there was a bit of a problem.

CJ: Was his problem with Ustinov or just the script?

IC: Well, he tried to put in American gags on a very English subject. None of them remain, I might say.

CJ: As a film archivist, which is my training, I find this film not only very enjoyable but also fascinating for the amount of location work and shooting actually done in suburban streets and blocks of flats which Betjeman would probably approve of. Can you recall?

IC: Yes, they were all vaguely in the area of the Borehamwood studios. The flats were in Brent. Edgwarebury Club, which is where the tennis match was, which is in Elstree. The gas works were also in Borehamwood. It was all mostly around there. The station was in Hertford. We never went far afield.

CJ: Tell us more about the 'Swiftmobile' [in School for Scoundrels]. Whatever happened to that?

IC: Well, I can't remember a thing, but this was in all the motor trade magazines about a year ago. If my son-in-law had access here he'd give me the price. They refurbished it - it was an old Bentley. It resurfaced and was sold for about 35 thousand pounds within the last year to 18 months.

CJ: You could get a Bond car for that, I should think. Extraordinary. Lets have a look at a few more clips. The first is a cunningly chosen extract - from Happy Is the Bride with Janette Scott, whom you played opposite a number of times - to illustrate one of your main interests outside acting. And the other is a very rare example on film of Ian Carmichael, the song and dance man.

[run clips]

IC: Well that's the first time that I've seen that.

CJ: You were good [at cricket]. And you were quite good as a song and dance man.

IC: Thank you very much. It was out of a show called Ninety Years On. It was a special show with everyone under the sun in it, got together for Winston Churchill's ninetieth birthday. Everyone was in there.

CJ: Margot Fonteyn...

IC: ...Arthur Askey, ridiculous to the sublime.

CJ: And Noel Coward...

IC: Noel Coward did the presentation to a script written by Terence Rattigan.

CJ: It is on as part of this season. And a very early television recording, of course.

IC: Yes, the sound's not good too.

CJ: It's good that we have it. And cricket was the obvious connection with Happy Is the Bride from 1957, and you were quite good at cricket judging by that.

IC: I don't know if I was good. I enjoyed it.

CJ: One of the great problems of cricket in films is just how badly the actors usually are, but you look pretty good at it. I mention your passion for the game but also your long association with the Lord's Taverners which is the game's big charity organisation. You've been strongly associated with that over the years. I think it's fair to say that around this time, after the Boultings' comedies, the good film parts began to dry up. That was because the Stanley Windrush archetype you'd so successfully created was wearing thin through overexposure. So you'd agree that the film career was beginning to wind down. But you're also very tired of revues by now. You're quoted as saying that you were running out of moustaches as well as ideas. But you had a number of huge successes on the stage at this time, such as The Gazebo, Critic's Choice and The Tunnel of Love. How good a period was that for you?

IC: It was a very exhausting period but I was a young man. In those days, ladies and gentlemen, actors could play in the West End and do their films in the daytime. Nearly all the films were made in the studios around London. If you were really wanted they would book you, and your agent would say he must be away by half-past-five because his curtain goes up at seven at St. Martins or whatever. So I made lots of these movies while I was appearing in leading roles in the West End. It was a bit tiring but, as I said, I was a very young man.

Wooster & Wimsey

CJ: It was during the making of Ninety Years On that the great Michael Mills suggested the Bertie Wooster idea for television. You are on the record as saying you were absolutely sick of being seen as the eternal 'silly ass', and here was the biggest silly ass of them all...

IC: ...So I turned it down.

CJ: So you must have had some mixed feelings about this?

IC: My agent, during this slough of despond period, had tried to get me to do a series about Bertie. I said that to go back to that would be retracing myself but he said I was totally wrong. And after we'd shot the last day of Ninety Years On Michael Mills came up to me in the bar and said 'I'm doing a series on Bertie Wooster and I'd love you to play Bertie. So I told him exactly what I've just told you. He said, 'You're wrong, you know. Totally wrong.' I said, 'It's academic anyway, Michael, as I've got to go to New York. I'm appearing in a play in New York and I leave these shores in another ten days. And if it's successful I've got to stay there for a year. This was Boeing Boeing. He said, 'Okay, I'll hold the part open for you as long as I can. Just let me know what's going on. So I went over there and, I'm delighted to say, the play flopped [audience laughter]. I hated New York, I loathed it. I sent Michael a telegram after the notice went up at the end of the first week. It said 'Boeing Boeing coming off next week. Am at your full disposal.' He told me later that telegram arrived on his desk at Television Centre while he was holding a conference as to who should play Bertie as I wasn't available.

CJ: So who might have got it if you hadn't?

IC: I have no idea.

CJ: But I think if you asked anyone in this audience at the time who should play Bertie Wooster, your name would come up first.

IC: Well, wise after the event, maybe.

CJ: They cast Dennis Price as Jeeves, which again seemed to be perfect casting. You had a long relationship with Dennis Price, but was it totally happy?

IC: I had a totally happy relationship with Dennis because he always asked me what he should do. When we were rehearsing the Woosters, a lot of two-handed stuff went on with him. And when I was talking to Michael Mills, the director, he'd go and sit down. And I'd say, 'Come over here, Dennis, you're in this scene too, you know.' And he'd say, 'No, no, no. You arrange it and tell me what I've got to do.' [audience laughter]

CJ: And, of course, he had to do these quite long monologues at the end..

IC: Oh yes, he called them his 'Gethsemanes'. He had a terrible job in getting through those. And, of course, it was all live.

CJ: Yes, it must have been pretty scary. Wooster was first transmitted in 1965 and it was a huge success. I think we should mention that only one complete episode from the series - Jeeves and the Delayed Exit of Claude - is known to have survived, which makes it very difficult to reappraise after all this time. After all, Wooster and Jeeves seem much more mature than Wodehouse envisaged them in the books, but it's beautifully played and the chemistry between yourself and Dennis Price is very apparent.

IC: Well, lets face it, if I wasn't forty I was very nearly forty, and Bertie was a young man in his twenties. So there was a bit of a problem.

CJ: But you could play very young.

IC: I could fortunately.

CJ: Probably still can, actually. [IC laughs] As I mention the sad loss of this really very important television material, there is a kind of running campaign here at the bfi called Missing Believed Wiped, which is a bid to try and find lost television programmes from a period when they could still be recorded, or were, but the recordings were often wiped. So please go home, look under the bed, ask your friends. It's amazing where these things turn up. And if anyone has a Bertie Wooster episode hidden away somewhere, please let us know. Wooster was followed by a pet project of your own, based on a true story which became a television comedy series, Bachelor Father, in which you played a man called Peter Lamb, who brings up twelve adopted children. What on earth attracted you to that?

IC: Well, again, Michael Mills. It wasn't my idea. He'd found this story [of] an ex-RAF gentleman, a bachelor, and quite rich, who wanted to spread the happy childhood he'd had with kids who'd never had it. So he started to try and adopt young children. Now, as you will imagine, there was a bit of a problem with a bachelor gentleman adopting. This was a heck of a job but somehow or other he won them over and got permission to do this. The only children he took were from broken homes and he did this very successfully. He learned to cook and he learned to darn, he learned everything. He was a very fine fellow.

CJ: It must have been quite tricky turning a subject like that, which must be full of sensitivities and drama, into what effectively became a sitcom.

IC: I kept saying this to Richard Waring and he said, 'Don't worry, there'll be plenty of moving moments!'

CJ: And already during Wooster you were hatching plans to bring Dorothy Sayers' aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, to the small screen. But it took a long time to realise - 6 years?

IC: Oh, that was agony. This was my idea and I wanted to do Peter Wimsey very much. I took it to the BBC and they didn't want to know. Then I took it around all the other stations you can think of and nobody wanted to know. They put up a lot of excuses like we have no risk capital, or that the Americans would never go for an effete Englishman. Tank traps were thrown all over it and I could never get it through. Eventually, when they did agree they said they would try one, so they picked one from the middle of the canon. They wanted to start off with Murder Must Advertise. I said, 'You can't do that! There's a chronology that runs the whole way through the Wimsey series. Characters build and build. You can't do that because if it's successful and you want to go back to the beginning, it's not on at all'. Well, they argued and argued and eventually they settled by doing the second novel. So we started with the second one. From then on - we did five all in all - I never ever knew whether I was going to do another. Never. It was like a poor relation. I always like to think back to that stage when they said Americans would never go for an effete Englishman because when they are now shown on American television, the royalties that come in! They are played on every flipping station you can find in America these days! [audience laughter]

CJ: Unlike Wooster.

IC: Well, it never made it over there.

CJ: No, it didn't play at all, did it? I think black and white was a problem as well at that time. Many would say that Wimsey is your best and possibly most satisfying role on television. Would you agree with that?

IC: I think possibly. It's the one I wanted to do very much because I wanted to get away from the stupidity. Remarkably, the first director who was eventually assigned to do the first Wimsey didn't want me to do it. So it went on and on. I wanted to do it so much because I felt that I could do Wimsey. They all felt that I was going to turn him into another Wooster, you see, purely because he wore a monocle every now and again.

CJ: But it's a much straighter role.

IC: Oh yes, it gave me a lot of meat.

CJ: In the last two decades you've slowed down a little but not too much, mainly getting good television roles, including co-starring opposite Jean Simmons in Down at the Hydro in 1983.

IC: That was lovely. She was a darling woman. I had just been widowed at the time and I played the part of a man who had just been widowed. It was a very touching and very moving thing for me.

CJ: Then you did two series of the Scottish-set Strathblair in the early '90s and a BBC classic serial, Wives and Daughters. Are there any other highlights that you can recall from this later period?

IC: I don't think so. I've just done this series for Yorkshire Television which doesn't come out until next year, called The Royal. It's a spin-off from Heartbeat. It's another hospital drama, a cottage hospital on the east coast of Yorkshire at that period, 1969. At that time, cottage hospitals were all run by the local GP's practice, but it was the time when the NHS was trying to get rid of all those little hospitals, so that gives it something different. In the first series a lot of the Heartbeat characters come into the hospital, so it's been very much dove-tailed. But I don't know when it's going out. I asked the producer the other day and he said, 'If you hear about it can you let me know?' [audience laughter]

School for Scoundrels

CJ: I'm going to open this out a little now and take some questions.

Q: Was Lord Peter Wimsey also done for radio?

IC: Yes, I've done it in every media now. We did the television series first and when it was successful they wanted to do a dramatised version for radio. I've also recorded every single book unabridged on audio tapes so I've pretty well broken the back of him one way or another.

CJ: Can you buy the tapes?

IC: I wouldn't advise you to buy them. The BBC tapes are all right but the novels I've recorded are jolly expensive! But you can draw them out of libraries. [audience laughter]

Q: Do you consider yourself to have been lucky in your career?

IC: Yes, I was.

Q: What is your favourite memory of working on School for Scoundrels?

IC: Well, it was a lovely summer when we were working on the tennis matches! And working with Alastair Sim was great fun. I'd always been warned that Alastair Sim was a very difficult man to get on with, so I was a little sceptical when I first started. But I found him marvellous, absolutely wonderful. The only thing is, he never wanted to touch a prop. When I got to the Yeovil school in one of the early scenes and he gave me tea and a muffin. It was all put in front of him, as he was the host. The director said, 'Hand the muffins to Ian.' And he said, 'No, no, no, let him help himself. I don't want to handle anything.' So there was I, the guest, having to help myself to the muffins and pour my own tea practically!

CJ: The film is full of props. How on earth could he avoid handling cans and everything else? And you were in another film with him, Left Right and Centre. And Terry-Thomas - wonderful in School for Scoundrels. He must have been wonderful to work with.

IC: Great. Marvellous.

CJ: And did he have any special technique that you became aware of?

IC: The Boultings had a terrible job with Terry in making him lay down his cigarette holder. He said, 'It's part of me!' But they were very persuasive people, the Boulting brothers, and they persuaded him it wasn't necessary.

CJ: it was like his security blanket.

IC: Yes, it was a sort of life belt he wanted to hold on to.

CJ: Because his was another sort of working class background who developed into this extraordinary character.

IC: Oh yes.

Q: How did you get involved in the horror film, From Beyond the Grave?

IC: It was one of those episodic pictures with five stories and I was in one with Nyree Dawn Porter and Margaret Leighton.

CJ: And did you enjoy the experience?

IC: Oh yes, anything to get away from the buffoon [roles]. [audience laughter]

Q: I believe you worked with Robertson Hare?

IC: Well, that was my first play out of the army in 1946. I did a farce with him and then we came to the Apollo theatre for a while. But I only did the one play with him. He was another very engaging and charming man. I've been fortunate to work with a lot of charming people in my life. If I wanted to count the bastards, I could do it on one hand. [audience laughter]

Q: What are your recollections of the ill-fated film, The Big Money?

IC: Rank offered me a contract after I'd made one picture with the Boulting Brothers. It was The Big Money. I'd just done Private's Progress with John, for which everything was superb and well-directed. This was appalling. It was really the most awful farce I'd ever read, but they didn't listen to me. John Paddy Carstairs directed it. I loathed it all the time. At one stage I managed to persuade them that it wanted some doctoring. Bryan Forbes rang me up one morning and said, 'I've been sent your script of The Big Money. They want me to do some doctoring and tidying up. Will you come and see me this weekend?' So I went and spent the weekend with him and we knocked out something which was very much of an improvement. But Earl St. John, the executive producer at Rank rang [Forbes] and said, 'I gather you've been speaking to Ian Carmichael over the weekend.' When [Forbes] said yes, [St. John] said 'Right, I'm taking you off it, send the script back.' So the script went back and I had to start work on it.

The producer was the most unlikely man to do a comedy farce. He did Cry the Beloved Country, which is a far cry from this. I had to shoot [The Big Money] and I wasn't happy with it at all. But in the end they thought it was dreadful and they shelved it for five years. Then Hugh Stewart, who did the Norman Wisdom films, went to the front office and said, 'I've got an Ascot scene in the present film with Norman and I don't want to go on location. I gather there's some scenes in The Big Money that were 'at Ascot' and they were shot in the studio. Can I see it?' So they gave him the key and he got it out from the end of the corridor and saw it. He persuaded them that it was not all that bad. He said, 'Give me a budget, I'll put some music on that and it can go out.' That's what they did. And they should have left it at the end of the corridor... [audience laughter]

Q: Is there any actor or actress you would have liked to have worked with but never got the chance?

IC: I would love to have worked with many important people but nobody comes to mind immediately.

Q: Who were your comedic or revue influences?

IC: I adored Jack Buchanan and Fred Astaire. Cary Grant roles are ones I would love to have played but I was never given any. I was given one and it was mucked up by Hal E. Chester. He did another picture called Hide and Seek. It was a wonderful story and a wonderful script. I thought this was my North by Northwest. But Hal E. Chester kept interfering and we got behind with the schedule. He was warned but we got further behind schedule until one day they told him to finish at the end of this week. And we had three weeks left to shoot. So for the last two days he put bits of set all around the studio and we just swapped bits so that it would stick together. And, of course, it was absolutely no good and I don't think anybody ever saw it. I was very sad about that because it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to do. But if you speak to practically any light comedian, they'll all say they would like to do a Cary Grant film.

Q: Tell us about the Victorian music hall numbers you used to do at the Players' Theatre and others?

IC: They were wonderful for us up-and-coming young people. They did a different bill every fortnight and if you were going to be out of work for a bit, you only had to ring them up and ask to be put on their bill and they always bent over backwards to do so. I did 'Put Me Amongst the Girls', 'There Are Nice Girls Everywhere', 'I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside', 'I Must Go Home Tonight'.

Q: Where were the exterior shots done for School for Scoundrels? Were they done in the West Country?

IC: No, they were done all around the Middlesex area. The Yeovil scene over the gasworks, that was a process shot. The station was Hertford but it stood in for Yeovil.

CJ: We are very thankful for your successful and varied career, but do have a preference for any one medium?

IC: There's nothing like the two or three hours in a theatre with a live audience. There's nothing to beat that. But in my early days in the studios there was much more discipline. Everybody worked to rule, you only did a five-day week and you knocked off at 5.30 or whenever. You didn't work bank holidays. It was a much more ordered life so you were able to see your chums at the weekend or evening if you wanted to. With the theatre you've got to be there every night and keep yourself in check the whole perishing day for that two or three hours in the evening. You must watch you don't get tired, watch you don't have an extra drink. It's very restricting. So I think the answer is, nothing beats the live audience of the stage but for the life that went with it, I prefer the films. But all that's changed now. The unions have gone, the strict controls have gone. So I'm talking about the past.

CJ: You wrote your autobiography nearly 25 years ago so we haven't had the full story. Are there any plans to update that?

IC: [quickly] No! [audience laughter] There are reasons why I didn't want to continue. First of all, I had retired then and I wasn't doing much work. If you haven't got a lot of work to tell anecdotes and stories about, people aren't interested. You can say, 'I went down to Tescos and I bought...' People aren't interested in that. [audience laughter] The other thing is, I would have to go into my second marriage and I didn't particularly want to open that up. My second wife, who is here, is a darling but I didn't want to open that side. Those two things together is why I didn't go on [with the autobiography].

Q: I recall seeing you in a film with Clark Gable [called Betrayed]. Do you have any memories of it?

IC: He was a very professional gentleman. He was always first on the set in the morning and he always knew every line of his part. He was very taciturn. He was such a big star that everybody wanted to touch him and talk to him so he had to be a little bit aloof when he was around. I understood why he was aloof but that didn't mean he was an unpleasant man. He was a very pleasant fellow. I was terrified working with him, of course.

Q: Who was the most rewarding actor to have worked with?

IC: I got on very well with Richard Wattis when I did a lot of films with him. Patrick Cargill I got on well with. I always liked to work with actors rather than comedians, because they played the part for what it was worth and reality came into the piece. It wasn't just going out to try and get laughs. I wasn't jealous of laughs. I wanted them to get [laughs] when they were in the script, but you wanted somebody to give a true performance. If there were laughs in the script they would get them.

CJ: What about actresses? Moira Lister for example?

IC: I did The Tunnel of Love with Barbara Murray and she was going to come to The Gazebo with me. But she got pregnant so we got Moira Lister. I got on very well with Moira. Then there was a second play coming up, Critics' Choice, and Moira was going to do that with me. Then a week before the rehearsals she announced she was pregnant. It's getting to be a habit! [audience laughter] But I've worked with a lot of lovely actresses.

Q: How about shooting nudist scenes with Miles Malleson?

IC: Ha ha! That was a bit of a lark, wasn't it? I don't think I can comment on it really. [audience laughter]. They'd have done it properly if it had been shot today.

Q: You did a play with Stewart Granger, who had a reputation for being an awkward actor to work with. Was it true?

IC: I got on well with him but there was a problem. We did a revival of a Somerset Maugham play - I suppose it was about ten years ago now - which had been on Broadway. The two actors in it were Rex Harrison and Granger. Rex Harrison didn't want to come to London so I took his part on. I don't particularly like following in anybody else's footsteps but there we were. The new director was altering things all over the place, which was fine for me but Granger got worried. 'I wasn't here in New York, I was standing over there in New York. No, I crossed over there later.' A lot of this went on. But he was...malleable.

CJ: Before we reluctantly bring this to a close, may I first thank your present wife, Kate Fenton, for giving us a huge amount of help with your life story. We've been very dependent on her to get the dirt on you for this interview! [audience laughter] Ian Carmichael, it's been an honour and a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us here.

IC: It's been a great honour for me, I can tell you.

Last Updated: 10 Oct 2007