Friends

We spent a brilliant weekend in Sussex with our friends Jamie and Gina, and their two gorgeous girls Lily and Gracie.

I first met Jamie over 16 years ago when he came into audition for the role of the Sgt major in my production of “Privates on Parade" which was starring Tony Slattery and was going to play the Christmas period at Greenwich Theatre. We were looking for somebody to play a character who was mean, sadistic, unfeeling and pretty vicious. From where we were sitting in our seats Jamie seemed to fulfil all of the above qualities and after he had gone out of the room Tony turned to me and said “well he scares the shift out of me".  He did me too, but with my theatre directors hat on that was single reason enough to hire him.

All of the above could not be further from the truth. Jamie is the sweetest most sensitive man with a heart of gold and which his swaggering south London exterior often belies. In “Privates" he was killed just before the interval and on matinee days he would spend the second half of the Saturday matinee making a huge stir fry or chilli for the whole of the cast to eat between shows. He had a deal on his mobile phone in those days that allowed him totally free calls after 7 PM at night, and he was quite happy to place his phone at the disposal of everybody in his dressing room for them to make calls on during the evening.

Despite all this charm and being a pretty original character the work didn't come running in for Jamie. He had a very early success scripting the film “ID" which was based on his previous life as a young constable who went undercover in a gang of football hooligans. After that experience he left the police force but thought that if I can act that 24 hours a day in those conditions I'm sure I can manage it for a few hours a night on stage and so retrain as an actor. He scripted the film ID and at first his career flourished. But Jamie is no fool, and he saw that as soon as things were not keeping him as busy as he'd like he moved into something else. This was property and after working their way through a series of flats in Brighton, which at one point saw him and his beautiful wife Gina sleeping on the floor of derelict buildings, he now has a property empire and this forms the core of his working life down in the depths of Sussex.

Gina his wife, an actress  who has since put her career on hold to raise two beautiful daughters, is now dipping her toe back into the water. She went out on a corporate gig for me last year and I'm hoping that something else might come up this year that she will be suitable for. The daughters in question have been well worth the investment. Lily and Gracie are absolutely charming. Animated, clever, inquisitive, characterful, and simply delightful to spend time with. A credit to both Jamie and Gina, and well worth the time they have taken away from doing other things to raise them.

Things are coming full circle with Jamie now stepping back into the world of stand-up comedy, something I both admire him for and know I could never do myself. He showed me footage of an early gig at Brighton, and, I'm relieved to say, he's funny. Jamie is funny in real life, but to get that down and put it on the stage into a three-minute comic set is difficult and he is managing it, he's applying himself to it. Just as I suspect is applied himself to everything else he's made a success of in life.

There are some people one feels privileged to call friends and for me, Jamie and Gina rank among that number