Gary Cockerill - From Coal Dust to Stardust

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When I started at Lynn Selby’s, I absolutely idolised two of the eldest students. Carl Gumsley and Gracinda Southernby were good-looking, bubbly, confident – your archetypical stage school kids. He was as dark and handsome as she was blonde and pretty. The pair of them were more than just an inspiration to me, I wanted to be them – well, more Gracinda if I’m honest. Even her name was fantastic. So when I turned on the telly one night and saw Gracinda pop up in an episode of top police show Juliet Bravo my mind was made up. Cleaning up at the local speech and drama festivals had been fun for a while, but I fancied getting my face on the telly.

I’d been going to stage school for a year when I had my first professional audition – a TV ad campaign for English Apples. Lynn took a group of eight of us from the school down to London on the train. The tickets weren’t cheap, and I remember my parents had to dip into their savings to pay for them, but they knew how badly I wanted to go. It was my first visit to London and by the time the train finally pulled into Kings Cross I was buzzing (and quite possibly flapping) with excitement.

The auditions were being held at an advertising agency on Charlotte Street where our little group queued up behind a line of dozens of kids that was already stretching up the stairs. As I waited, I thought again about my audition piece. In the circumstances, what else could it really be but ‘I’ve Got an Apple Ready’? I was bursting with confidence.

Then suddenly it was my turn and I was ushered into a small room. There was a man standing in the corner behind a camera and another couple with clipboards and a box of apples.

‘Right, Gary,’ said one of the clipboard carriers. ‘What we need you to do is stand over there’ – I was directed to a cross on the floor – ‘take a bite out of this apple, chew and then turn and give a really big smile into the camera, like it’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten. Okay?’

‘Um, don’t you want me to say anything?’ I asked, my heart sinking. ‘I’ve prepared a poem. It’s about apples.’

‘No, just the bite and then the smile, thanks. Right – let’s go, give it all you’ve got!’

It was a green apple, sour and a bit woolly, but I did as they asked and was then shown to a large meeting room filled with a group of other kids.

Over the next few hours, I would go back into that little room and do the whole bite-turn-smile thing several more times until Lynn appeared, gave me a big hug and said, ‘Gary, you got the job!’

On the way back to the station, my head spinning with dreams of TV fame and fortune, I popped into one of the tourist shops on Oxford Street to buy Mum a thank-you present. For some reason I ignored the London-branded trinkets and picked out a decorative plate covered with spriggy little flowers and the words ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. The only money I had on me was the emergency couple of quid Mum had given me in case I got lost, but I figured I could pay her back out of my advert earnings. The plate is still hanging on our kitchen wall to this day, a slightly kitsch monument to my first ever pay cheque.

Well, after that there was no stopping me. Blond, cute and cocky, I became a regular fixture in the nation’s TV ad breaks. I was the voice of the Batchelors Mushy Peas commercial (‘Who’s the champion mushy peas? Batch-batch-batch-batch-batchelor! Champion mushy peas that please, Batch-batch-batch-batch-batchelor!’) and one of the sailor-suited kids in a Birds Eye Fish Fingers ad. I popped up in kids TV shows like Emu’s World and Mini Pops , the cult series in which pre-teens dressed up as famous pop acts to belt out their latest hits. I was in Showaddywaddy – or Showeenyweeny as we were known – and had to sing ‘Under the Moon of Love’ with a fake guitar, shiny purple suit and crepe-soled shoes.

I had been bitten by the fame bug and wanted more. I wanted to be Gracinda starring in Juliet Bravo. But even more than that, I wanted to be Andrew Summers. Ah, Andrew Summers: my nine-year-old nemesis. Andrew was a child star who found fame as the little boy alongside his granddad in a cult tomato soup advert of the late Seventies and at one time was virtually a household name. He was about the same age as me. ‘Ooh, that Andrew Summers is a really cracking little actor …’ people would say. I can remember being incredibly jealous of his success.

He’s not that special , I’d sulk silently to myself, he just gets all the adverts because he lives in London.

It was a desperately sore point for me that I missed out on castings because I lived up North. My parents were amazing, but there was no way they could pay for me to travel down to London for auditions every week – even with the help of the money that I earned.

By this time, I was turning into quite the little performer. As well as acting, I was really getting into my tap-dancing (although I would never quite get to grips with ballet) and I had always had a strong singing voice. Before my voice broke I could belt out a Barbra Streisand or Julie Andrews number and sound exactly like my idols.

A few years ago I went to New York with Barbara Windsor to help get her ready for some personal appearances and one night we went along to hear the famous jazz singer Diahann Carroll in cabaret. During ‘The Age of Aquarius’ she handed the microphone around for a bit of audience participation and when I started singing I can remember Barbara turning to me, open-mouthed, and muttering, ‘Where the bleedin’ hell did that voice come from?’

With a few adverts under my belt, at the age of ten I appeared in the chorus of a stage show called The Marti Caine Christmas Cracker at Sheffield City Hall. It was a proper old-fashioned variety show – lots of big musical numbers, comedy skits, a bit of audience participation – fronted by the comedienne and singer Marti Caine, who had shot to fame winning the TV talent show New Faces a few years earlier. Marti was this incredibly thin woman with a tumbling mass of deep red, almost purple, curls and a broad Sheffield accent. She wore slinky jewel-hued gowns that emphasised her pipe-cleaner figure.

Ever the sucker for ballsy, glamorous women, I worshipped her. She was so lovely and warm, plus she had a mouth on her like you wouldn’t believe which made me love her even more. My parents never swore in front of us when we were growing up, so to hear someone so famous and fabulous effing and blinding just added to Marti’s exotic glamour. (The one and only time I swore at my mum in my life – telling her to ‘fuck off’ in a rare moment of early teenage rebellion – she grabbed me by the hair, dragged me to the bathroom and literally washed my mouth out with soap. I never did it again.)

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Occasionally Sylvia Young would come up to our stage school in Doncaster to scout for talent, and it was on one of these visits that she put me forward for an audition for another stage show. Once in a Lifetime was billed as ‘The brightest musical evening in the country’ and was to be a vehicle for the talents of singer, dancer and all-round small-screen superstar Lionel Blair, who at this time was wowing TV audiences on the hugely popular charades gameshow Give Us a Clue , alongside fellow team captain (and star of Worzel Gummidge) Una Stubbs. This magnificent stage spectacular was set to go on a nationwide tour, from Bournemouth to Sheffield and everywhere in between, and they were looking for 20 talented youngsters – ‘The Kids’ – to star alongside Lionel.

For my audition I performed a song and tap-dance routine from 42nd Street and did my Noah (of Bible fame) solo dramatic piece, which always used to go down well at the speech and drama festivals. Well, I tapped my little heart out and I got the gig, along with three girls – including my mate Gavin’s girlfriend Nicola Simpson and my first-ever girlfriend, Kerry Geddes – and one other boy from Lynn’s school. It was all over the Doncaster papers that these local stage school pupils were to be in Lionel Blair’s new show, even making it into the Yorkshire Post. Move over Andrew Summers, Gary Cockerill had hit the big-time.