SnogBlogy

1 June 1979: Franklyn returns to straight television work after spending years making TV commercials for Schweppes tonic water

Schh ... It’s a great life if you won’t weaken. William Franklyn schh... ould know. And William Franklyn has weakened. He’s going straight. That is, if we are talking about acting. When it comes to cricket, he’s decided to revive the leg break, and claims 18 wickets so far on this season’s rain-affected pitches.

He’s a voluble man, happy to drive off in any fresh direction you give the conversation without changing down. I went a total stranger to his house in Putney – an 1820s creation with French windows that give on to 22 yards of lawn, gazebo, preservation order walnut tree, trampoline and about where long on would field, a cluster of chickens ruled by a vast cock who’s entitled to think he’s a condor – and came away in jig time with a very fair framework for his autobiography.

In his basement den, with the log-fire and cartoons and theatrical relics and mounted photographs of his shapely wife Suzy with nothing on, he can fantasise that he’s Stanley Gibbons or Arthur Negus or Jonah Barrington or D. W. Griffith. Actors have to be idle sometimes, which he can’t bear, and then it’s stamps or antiques or squash or splicing 8mm film. He talks about a time when he couldn’t get acting parts and totted for an antiques business, and I’ll bet he pushed the barrow on the run.

Over his desk hangs a Rome theatre bill, from 1969, announcing him as director of M’è caduta una ragazza nel piatto (There’s a Girl in my Soup). It was his first chance to direct, and he accepted the offer without mentioning that he couldn’t speak Italian. He had it in his water that he wanted to direct. Then he trotted off to the Berlitz School and had the language blown through his brain like a wind tunnel.

After six weeks of this, he recalls, even his English was tacky and suspect, and he went to Rome unable to speak a word of everything. But they gave him a pretty university bird for mouthpiece and anyway, he says, the Italians are undirectable, because they’re too busy talking among themselves to hear what language is being used.

So they gave him a gold whistle, which proved as effective in rehearsal as on a football pitch or a traffic jam, and he would then speak pianissimo so they would all crane forward to hear. But they’d heard it was a light comedy, and light is “luce,” meaning dazzle and bravura, and it was quite a task putting over the Shaftesbury Avenue style, which he eventually did by playing all the parts and letting them imitate him.

Franklyn’s first language was Strine. His father Leo, who handed his cards in at the Savoy at 79, ending 51 years in the theatre playing in No Sex Please, We’re British, took him as a baby to Australia, and while Leo was domiciled in a Pullman car, playing towns along the Barrier Reef, William was schooled at Haileybury, Melbourne, founded by an Old Haileyburian.

Men love Australia, he says, and women can’t wait to get away. His mother always supposed he would one day get back to “How d’ye do” in the elegance of Bayswater, and practised him to speak Hownowbrowncow-ish. And sure enough, as the war rolled up, he was playing in London, in My Sister Eileen, as one of 10 Panamanian sailors in a conga line. And with a five-year break paratrooping, he played mostly theatre, with some film, as a straight actor, which he calls “my own area,” until 1962.

He is not going to say that it was a mistake to go outside his own area. He is a boulevardier, street-bright, not an intellectual, with no hankerings for Hamlet. Well, perhaps, the Moor. But he has been, he recognises, a very lucky boy. It is in his genes to take the work that comes, genes descending not only from Leo, but Arthur Rigby Jr. and Arthur Rigby who worked with George Robey. Altogether, with his daughter Sabina and his second wife Susannah Carroll, the family have amassed a score in acting years of 264 not out.

His forebears used any ruse to attract an audience. Rigby and Robey would ride elephants into town to collect the mail, or take down their trousers and read the Manchester Guardian in the shop window of Thomas Crapper the sanitary engineer. And if they wanted to be alone, in a railway compartment, they ate soap and frothed at the mouth, or stuck half a dozen winkles on their cheeks with spirit gum.

But William Franklyn has lived in the era of the captive audience of television. He moved into the personality area. There comes a time when an actor gets older, he says, and has responsibilities, and may become identified with detective series and schhh... atteringly strong advertising images. These may take him to Marbella and Jamaica and fascinating spots on the edge of Bolivia, like Huanaco but don’t take him so far along the acting path. The Schhh...weppes thing lasted nine years. They made 50 commercials, giving him 31 days’ work a year, meaning that he had plenty of time to run his cricket team, The Sargent Men, for charity because no one else wanted to employ him. They were stylish and witty and involving – his wife wrote the line “Who’s for tonic?” when Rod Laver was hired to play opposite him in one – but her suave husband was out in the early morning with his totting barrow, giving the old calls and clearing Chelsea houses of their davenports and Sèvres.

However, all soft drinks go flat in the end, and Schweppes began to wonder whether they were selling bubbles or Franklyn. They were indivisible. In the last five years he’s had plenty of work and cricket, and he’s much in favour of exotic backgrounds for thrillers. As long as the dramaturgy is not too strong, he says, the public really enjoys a travelogue.

It should now be clear why he’s excited about Saturday night on ITV, when a play with strong dramaturgy called The Purple Twilight goes out. It’s the story of a man with fantasy in his being, he says. Poetry! Flair! Different! He plays a man with three elements in his psyche. He hopes young directors who were eating Marmite sandwiches at school when he schhh... lepped through personality roles will catch it. The title conies from Tennyson. With his heart full he exuberantly starts reciting Locksley Hall at me.

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