‘They now put trigger warnings on Hi-de-Hi!’ Jeffrey Holland on starring in British comedy classics | Stage

To the general showbiz warning about never acting with animals, Jeffrey Holland has a specific footnote to add about equine erections. While filming Hi-de-Hi!, the 1980s BBC sitcom set in a holiday camp, Holland one day found himself playing the front half of a pantomime horse, with co-star Su Pollard in the rear. The visual gag was that the rag nag ends up riding a real one. “So the horse had to be in the scene,” recalls Holland. “But it took rather an interest in the pantomime one and started sniffing around its hindquarters. Su said words to the effect of, ‘Oh, eck!’ and asked for help. But I’m afraid all I could say was, ‘You’d better brace yourself, Su. I’m going to eat some grass!’”

A horseman on set diverted the randy stallion, but the incident triggered a flashback for Holland. A panto he once appeared in included a Coventry production with real horses. One would become aroused as soon as it walked on stage, forcing the director to place an actor with a large flag between it and the audience. “Apparently, it was responding to a perfume an actress was wearing,” Holland recalls – and being careful with scent around mounts is one of the many useful tips for younger performers contained in Holland’s new memoir, The First Rule of Comedy ..!

The title comes from the “professional” advice that Paul Shane, as campsite entertainment host Ted Bovis, would give to Holland, playing younger comedian Spike, in Hi-de-Hi! That show dominates the book, but Holland’s involvement in it was the result of sheer chance. In 1975, dismayed at not being cast in two plays at Chichester, the then 29-year-old went grumpily and reluctantly to audition for a London stage show of Dad’s Army. “I was furious when I arrived. But David Croft, the director, cast me and that was the day that changed my life. It’s better not to think about it having gone the other way, really. It’s terrifying.”

In this theatrical spin-off from the Home Guard sitcom, Holland had “five or six costumes, and it was 78 steps from the stage to my dressing room so I was up and down them all night. I think that may have stuck in David’s mind: Jeff Holland likes silly costumes! So Spike, who was always appearing in outrageous get-ups, was written with me in mind.”

Holland became a member of Croft’s TV repertory company. As well as Hi-de-Hi! he appeared in two other shows Croft co-wrote with Jimmy Perry (Dad’s Army, You Rang M’Lord?), one collaboration with Jeremy Lloyd (Are You Being Served?) and one with Richard Spendlove (Oh, Doctor Beeching!) He missed out on Croft and Lloyd’s ’Allo ’Allo! on TV but got the full set by appearing in a stage version.

’Allo ’Allo! was a parody of Secret Army, a serious BBC drama set in occupied Belgium. It is thought that Holland is the only actor to have been in both franchises, although his first performance in Secret Army offered a clue to where his career was headed: “I played a French resistance fighter called Michel. Wearing a beret, doing comedy eye acting, I looked a complete tit. When my then wife saw it, she thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen. Maybe that’s why I’ve mainly done comedy.”

Croft’s successes were, unusually for sitcoms, often set in the past, whether the second world war home front, the 1920s stately home of You Rang, M’Lord?, the 1950s holiday camp of Hi-de-Hi!, or the 1960s branch railway station of Oh, Doctor Beeching! This, Holland believes, was key: “David always said that if you set them in the past, they wouldn’t date. He also disliked doing Christmas specials because those could only be repeated once a year. That was his producer’s brain at work.

“The knack David and his co-writers had is that they were wonderful at creating situations in which people who would otherwise never have met were forced to be together. Those businessmen in Dad’s Army would never have socialised but, under the umbrella of the Home Guard, they had to. And in Hi-de-Hi!, they were all failures who would have given anything not to be stuck with those other flops. Spike Dixon was desperate to be a comedian but had no hope whatsoever.”

Croft’s theories of comedy worked to the extent that, 37 years after its final episode aired, Hi-de-Hi! is still streaming on multiple platforms including ITVX, while Holland attends regular fan days in Harwich, where it was filmed. He also goes to Dad’s Army events in Thetford, Norfolk, although he only played the small part of a truck-driver who mud-splatters Captain Mainwaring. He is one of the last surviving actors from the show, so feels it is his duty to attend.

“It’s extraordinary how the shows live on. At the last Hi-de-Hi! event, there was a six-year-old who knew all the episodes by heart and really loved Spike, who she wanted to meet. Her mum tactfully warned her that Spike would look very different today – which obviously I do! – but she didn’t seem to care. Her mum wasn’t even born when we made the show. I don’t think I’m recognisable now but, just the other day in the street, someone shouted out, ‘Hi-De-Hi Mr Holland!’”

In fact, he’s Jeffrey Parkes, the name of the family into which he was born in 1946 in Walsall, the West Midlands still audible in his speech. As with many actors, he was forced to change his surname under Equity rules because a soundalike already had it. “I only use Holland in the business. I couldn’t bring myself to change my first name – though I know actors who have – because I’ve been Jeff all my life. Holland was my grandma’s maiden name and it’s suited me well.

He has Parkes and Holland bank accounts, the latter for acting fees. He is from the generation that still get “residuals” (repeat fees) rather than “buyouts” (a single payment). A comedy rerun channel, That’s TV 2, shows You Rang M’Lord at 8pm every evening. Holland’s role as James Twelvetrees (“almost a straight role in a comedy”) is his favourite TV character and he was astonished to discover that “it’s shown in Hungary every day in either English or Hungarian. They just love it. It’s because they recognise that two-tier system, the unfairness of it, from having been under the communists for decades.”

Another recent residual payment was £140 for a recent BBC Four repeat of the 1978 Thomas Hardy serial The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which he played a cart-driver. Holland rewatched not from vanity but morbid curiosity. When filming, he was still heavily stitched from a vasectomy the previous day, and a scene in which he jumps down from the cart sent shockwaves through his penis. “I still remember the pain. But, watching it, you really couldn’t tell. Which gives me a certain professional pride. I played through it.”

He has generational regrets about the way he feels the profession has changed, finding many young stage actors inaudible: “They’re not taught voice projection like I was. The college I went to in Birmingham was known for vocal training. Young actors aren’t taught how to produce the voice from the diaphragm. I’ve sat in the third row of the stalls and not been able to hear what’s being said. You want to shout, ‘Speak up!’”

His speech teacher would be pleased that, even at 78, his impression of an irritated theatregoer hits the back wall of the living room, threatening to tremble the Pointless Celebrities trophy that he recently won with Su Pollard.

And, having spent much of his career in the TV genre of “Mrs Slocombe’s pussy”, pantomime and Ray Cooney stage sex farces, Holland also regrets the contemporary crackdown on innuendo and sexual slapstick. He is careful to draw a distinction between sexualised behaviour in workplaces or in public – “that’s clearly wrong” – and the policing of lines in old shows: “David [Croft] and Jimmy [Perry] would turn in their graves. They put a trigger warning on Hi-de-Hi! on BritBox to say these are dated opinions and some people might be offended. The fact that they think Hi-de-Hi! might offend is beyond me. But there you go. People are just over-sensitive about everything now. They’re looking for trouble.”

His memoir reveals that a “very big” publisher turned down The First Rule of Comedy..!, after initially expressing interest, because of rumours that Holland had worn blackface makeup in an edition of Are You Being Served? He is indignant about this: the character was white and what was then called a “hippy” with what was known at the time as an “afro” hairdo.

But, although this isn’t mentioned in the book, Holland admits that he did once wear blackface. On ITV’s Russ Abbot’s Madhouse, he, Abbot, Les Dennis and Michael Barrymore played a soul quartet group called The Four Bottoms, a spoof of Motown quartet the Four Tops. “You couldn’t do it now,” he admits. But does he wish he hadn’t done it then? “No. Because in the 80s, it got no letters from anyone at all. It was the lyrics that were funny and to sing them we had to dress accordingly. That was then, this is now.”

A longtime career ambition was a one-man show about comedian Stan Laurel, which he has performed four times at the Edinburgh festival and toured around the UK. In the book, though, Holland says he will be happy to be remembered as “that bloke from Hi-de-Hi!” But is that just memoir bravado? “No! I’ve never understood those actors – I could name them but I won’t – who become known for a series and, when it’s over, they don’t want to know any more. I’m thrilled to have played Spike in the success that Hi-de-Hi! was and still is.”

He is excited to be published, although suffers the irritation of many modern autobiographers: “There are three other books on Amazon claiming to be the story of Jeffrey Holland. But it’s just internet shit.”

On the retail site, “Lawrence Hardison” is offering 58 pages for £15.99, “Elliot Lewis” 44 pages for £15.50 and “Jack Astley” 93 pages for £14.99. Readers may suspect that a more honest nom de plume for the authors would have the initials AI.

“We put up a tweet straight away with me holding the real book. The problem is it’s not actually illegal. Although we’re looking at taking action at the the one who claims ‘Jeffrey Holland takes you through the highs and lows of his life’ because obviously I don’t.”

True admirers should pay for the 256 pages of The First Rule of Comedy..!, in which you also get Su Pollard’s comment about sex workers to Prince Andrew.