Gary Cockerill - From Coal Dust to Stardust

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13 February 1983. I still remember the exact date to this day. It was 10 a.m. and I was at London’s Olympia for the biggest audition of my life. Just me and 10,000 other kids going for 46 parts in the debut West End production of Bugsy Malone. Every corner of the cavernous space was filled with wannabe Bugsys, Fat Sams and Tallulahs. It was exactly the sort of scenes you see at the audition stage of The X Factor , except with shrill-voiced pre-teens and pushy parents.

By the end of the day I was covered with a mass of the little coloured stickers they gave you when you successfully completed each round of auditions. I was recalled again the next day, and the following day I found out that I had got one of the parts. It was like finding one of Wonka’s golden tickets. A role in a West End musical! I was ecstatic, telling anyone who would listen that I was going to London to be a star.

When you’re 13 you think the world revolves around you – well, I know that I did. But while I was busy dreaming about seeing my name up in lights on Broadway, the rest of my family were falling apart.

My sister, by then 17 and working for a local knitwear manufacturer, had been seeing a boy called Simon whose parents ran our village off-licence. He was a bit of a lad and my parents were adamant that he wasn’t good enough; they wanted a doctor or a lawyer for their cherished only daughter. So when the relationship started to get more serious, Mum put her foot down and gave Lynne an ultimatum: either you stop seeing this boy or you leave home.

We’d always been really good kids and had never rebelled, so it must have been a huge shock to my mum when Lynne suddenly turned around and snapped: ‘Fine – I’ll move out.’ And the next day she was gone. Without much money to find a decent place to live, she ended up in Hyde Park, the red light area of Doncaster, sharing a shabby bedsit with a prostitute and a scarily butch lesbian.

Devastated that her daughter had gone, but too stubborn to change her mind about Simon, Mum stuck her head in the sand. Lynne wasn’t coping well either; each time I went to visit her she looked thinner, paler and more miserable. In the end she moved back home after four months, but although she gradually rebuilt her relationship with Mum, my sister stuck to her guns and refused to stop seeing Simon. And now, after more than 20 years of marriage and two beautiful sons, my parents realise that Lynne couldn’t have made a better choice for a husband.

This emotional chaos was all going on when I landed the role in Bugsy Malone , so you can imagine that when my parents found out I would have to move to London for the show they weren’t entirely enthusiastic. A few days after I’d heard I had got the part, Mum came into my bedroom and sat me down on the bed. It was immediately obvious we were going to be having A Serious Chat.

‘Gary, your dad and I have been having a talk.’ From her expression I knew this was going to be bad. ‘I’m sorry, love, but I’m afraid we both feel that it isn’t a good idea for you to do Bugsy Malone.’

She went on to explain that they were worried about me having to live so far away in London on my own and missing so much school. She told me that she knew how important the show was to me, but that my education was ultimately the most important thing and I would understand this in the future. I think she even said something about the fact that I would miss my friends. But I’d stopped listening at the point when my world had collapsed on hearing: ‘It isn’t a good idea for you to do Bugsy Malone.’

As you can imagine I was devastated. I cried, I screamed, I banged doors, I sulked for a week, but their minds were made up. To make matters worse, there was so much hype around the production that it seemed like every time I opened the papers or turned on the television there was some mention of the show. And looking back, I realise that it was the Bugsy Malone fiasco that marked the beginning of the end of my performing career.

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A few months later I auditioned for Rotherham Operatic Society’s production of Carousel on the urging of my form teacher, a lovely lady called Mrs Empson who had always been a huge supporter of my passion for performing. I landed the role of Enoch Snow Junior, quite a principal part, but it was a disaster. For the first time ever I suffered from crippling stage fright, exacerbated by the fact that I fluffed my lines on the opening night.

Overnight my confidence and self-belief literally vanished. It didn’t help that adolescence was kicking in; I had turned from this cute blond kid to – well, a bit of a geek. My hormones were all over the place, my hair was going from angelic golden to plain old mousy, I was getting a few teenage spots. I went from desperately needing to be the centre of attention 24/7 to not being able to bear the thought of people even looking at me. Almost overnight I realised that I wasn’t going to be a child star after all; I wasn’t going to be famous and live in London like Andrew bloody Summers. At the age of 13, I faced up to the prospect that I was probably going to have to find myself a proper job, one that involved neither tap shoes nor TV cameras, and later that year I left Lynn Selby and Phil Winston’s, never to return.

Thankfully I still had my love of art to fill the void left by performing. At school I would find any excuse to liven up classes with a bit of drawing: my French vocabulary exercises were carefully illustrated with mini French loaves and bottles of wine and my geography books were filled with intricate sketches of volcanoes and fossils. I would often get my schoolbooks back from the teacher with a big red ‘This is not an art class, Gary!’ scrawled down the margin. But a career as a designer or illustrator seemed like a far more realistic goal than acting, and my parents were thrilled that I was focusing on what they had always considered to be my real talent. Without drama to distract me, I knuckled down and became a model student – until I found something else to distract me. And that new obsession was girls.

In my teens my future seemed all mapped out. I was going to meet and fall in love with a girl, get married and have kids; just like everyone else in Armthorpe. Having a girlfriend was the normal thing to do for lads my age – and after the drama (both on and off stage) of the past few years, all I craved right now was a bit of normality. So from the age of nine and those first shy, secret kisses with Kerry Geddes I was never without a girlfriend until I was into my twenties.

When that first romance with Kerry fizzled out I started going out with a girl who lived round the corner, Michelle Chappell. Again, the relationship was predictably sweet and naive (a bit of kissing, some hand-holding, the odd fumble – real puppy love stuff) and my fledgling love life would have probably continued in the same innocent fashion if, at the tender age of 13, fate hadn’t intervened in the form of my 15-year-old babysitter.

I had gone for a sleepover with my mate Scott Phillips, who lived at the other end of my village from me. His parents had gone out for the night and left Jennifer, a friend of Scott’s older sister Mandy, in charge of us two boys. Jennifer was 15, extremely skinny and as far as I remember pretty average looking. I’d met her once or twice before this particular night but hadn’t given her a second thought. Anyway, by about 9 p.m. Scott had already sloped off to bed, leaving Jennifer and me sitting alone together watching the end of a film. I was just thinking about going up to Scott’s room when I became aware of Jennifer shuffling a bit closer to my side of the sofa.