Being Boycie

by John Challis

John Challis knew he wanted to be an actor from the moment he saw Peter Pan live on stage, aged eight. By the time he was nineteen, he was on the road with a troupe of travelling actors, taking plays to schools all over the country. His father wasn’t impressed, but John was determined to follow his instincts, and nor did he ever lose his interest in sport, or Rock’n’Roll or, frankly, the opposite sex. His career and colourful private life seemed permanently poised between crises and highs, until by 1984, in his forties and with two marriages behind him, he had emerged as a leading character in Britain’s most successful ever TV comedy series, Only Fools & Horses.Being Boycie is the story of a born actor who embraced the idea of role-play as a child and matured into a character actor of great originality and distinctiveness. John Challis has worked in everything from the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, to touring Tom Stoppard’s plays in America, while in television he’s appeared in Z-Cars, Coronation Street and Doctor Who and a host of other popular series. In Being Boycie, John tells us frankly and affectionately how he lived and thrived as a young man on the ups and downs of provincial repertory theatre, the mad hustle of early television drama in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the stages of London’s West End. He describes the pressures, the longing for his father’s approval, a massive zest for life and his chronic inability to settle down to a stable married existence. "Being Boycie" charts John's life up to the point in 1985, when Only Fools and Horses has become established as a national favourite, and Boycie's wife, Marlene, is about to appear. It’s a story that is above all honest, touching and very funny.

Genres: Biography

250 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 14, 2011

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charting the early career of actor John Challis, those that are expecting tales of filming Only Fools and Horses might be disappointed. But the book does cover he’s time as a guest star on Doctor Who.

He brilliantly portrays the character Scorby in the 1976 adventure The Seeds of Doom.

[Mark Pemberton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title is a little misleading - Boycie finally makes an appearance around 90% of the way through the book, but a nice easy read gets us there. I think as members of the viewing public we generally don't see, hear or know of many actors until viewed on television, giving us a somewhat limited idea of who or what they are. This book puts a nice amount of easy to read background to one of our best loved characters in one of the most popular BBC programs ever to air. His shambolic love life overlapping with various overseas work and the obvious disappointment and distress he struggled with from his father.
Overall I enjoyed this, having met the author and enjoyed his brief chats a couple of times, it was easy to see the book really is about him.