This Much Is True

Often it was just me, Stanley Baxter and Bernie Stringle together in the studio. It was difficult doing lip sync for a chimp, because the mouth of a chimp doesn’t move in the same way as a human mouth. They had somehow made the chimps’ mouths go up and down, open and close, open and close, and we had to synchronise our voices to that. So, we had to make sure that the words opened and closed, exactly in time with their mouths. Normally, how it works — and this is the same for doing lip sync for a chimp, or dubbing a foreign language film — is that they run the bit of film which you are to voice, and something called a ‘wipe’ goes across the screen. It’s like a finger, and when this finger hits a certain point, in the middle of the screen, that’s your cue to start to say your lines. But Bernie didn’t depend on that: the moment you had to start to speak, he used to touch you on the shoulder. He told me once how an anxious actor had worried about getting the sync right. Bernie had said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you a tap on your shoulder when you need to start.’ The moment came, Bernie tapped his shoulder — and the actor fainted dead away.

We also had the beeps: three beeps — beep, beep, beep: start. That’s how you knew when to begin, because otherwise it’s quite tricky.

It was great fun and the adverts were extremely popular — probably the most popular and successful TV commercials ever made, until the BT ones with Maureen Lipman. In those days we were good friends and she recommended me for a part in the ‘ology’ series with Beattie, playing another Jewish housewife.

As well as regions and class, I can do sexy. Although I don’t have a sexy voice normally, I can imbue it — to me, a sexy voice is an exhausted voice, of somebody who’s had so many orgasms they’ve hardly got the strength to speak. So, I would breathe through my lines and I got known for being sexy. Although, of course, as a person, sex is not the thing I project. I project energy. I don’t project cunt, but exhausted cunt I can offer, vocally, when required.

That’s how I got the job to do the Manikin cigar advert, which was a very sexy ad. The director of those ads was a wonderful character called Terence Donovan, who was also a famous photographer, noted for his iconic fashion photography in publications like Town and Nova magazine in the sixties. (He also had a building firm and would later become my builder when I was doing up my house in Clapham.) I loved him. He was a great big fellow from a poor background in Stepney. His father, Daniel, was a lorry driver and Constance Violet, his mother, was a cook. Even when he became famous, he never changed from being a down-to-earth, friendly, unassuming, pragmatic, entrepreneurial East End lad.

Terence had branched out into film direction and television commercials in the seventies, and I was the voice for the beautiful, sexy girl with a sublime body, played by Carole Augustine, a young British model and actress (who had made a brief appearance in Confessions of a Window Cleaner). She tragically died soon after in 1975 of a drug overdose, aged twenty-one. In the ad she stood beside a tropical waterfall, all in white, revealing a gorgeous tanned midriff and cleavage. She was dipping a tobacco leaf in the water of a rock pool and stretching it lasciviously across her lips, and I had to say, ‘I come to show why Manikin flavour plenty enjoyable. I need water, see? Water make leaf stretch. Wrap cigar well. Mouth enjoy flavour, yes? Manikin flavour special.’

I did a whole string of these ads, several with Carole — presumably all the different films shot on that one same trip to Antigua — with the lines: ‘Manikin bring you best tobacco. Tobacco plant tall. Manikin wrapped only with tobacco picked from middle. Middle leaf best, make manikin cigar special.’

For the next campaign, there was a new stunning beauty in her place, but I still voiced the ads in the same sultry tones: ‘Manikin tobacco fermented… Make cigar smooth and mellow, so Manikin flavour pleasing to man. Manikin flavour special.’ All ending with the words ‘Sheer enjoyment’ sung to the familiar tune. It was one of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time; look it up on YouTube.