When you enter 10 Downing Street, what sort of reaction would you expect from security? A hard, appraising stare? A no-holds-barred pat-down? Not if you’re the actor Larry Lamb. “I was there last week and even the security guys — people with bloody machineguns — were giving me the thumbs up, going, ‘Nice one, Mick.’ ”
Last Christmas, the Gavin & Stacey finale was watched by more than 19 million people, making it one of the most viewed TV programmes this century, according to the BBC. And within the much loved show there was a standout scene that people cannot stop asking Lamb about. Smithy (James Corden) is at the altar with fiancée Sonia. Friends and family are worried that he is still in love with Nessa (Ruth Jones) and tell him so, but he’s too scared to naysay the nuptials. That is until Smithy’s surrogate dad, Lamb’s character, Mick Shipman, stands up to signify that he agrees with the others. He doesn’t even need to say anything. Mick is a decent “good bloke” archetype, the moral centre of Gavin & Stacey’s world.
“I’ve been in this business 50 years and I’ve had more feedback over one scene in which I don’t say a word than the half-century where I’ve been banging on in everything from Hamlet to Triangle [the Eighties BBC drama set on a North Sea ferry],” Lamb says. “There’s a lesson there, isn’t there? Wanna make an impact? Keep your gob shut.”
Such is the power of the show that Lamb was in No 10 to mark St David’s Day even though there’s not a Welsh bone in him.
“Yeah, but if you’re doing anything to represent Wales [the show is partially set on Barry Island, south Wales], you’d better get someone from Gavin & Stacey because it’s part of the cultural fabric now,” he says, beaming.
• Yes, Gavin & Stacey is now up there with Only Fools and The Office
Lamb made his visit after the prime minister’s inaugural meeting with President Trump and while he was dealing with the latter’s historic fallout with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Pretty amazing to be hosting members of the Gavin & Stacey cast while trying to avert the Third World War, no?
“Too right,” Lamb says. “Sir Keir is so solid, not at all impressed by celebrities, which unfortunately some of them are. And to step away from what’s happening in the world with such grace, aplomb and humour, I was so impressed. He’s for real, that guy. And the PM’s wife is so lovely too. She said to me, ‘We had the entire No 10 staff in to watch the Christmas special together. We love Mick and Pam [Lamb’s on-screen wife, played by Alison Steadman],’ so it’s wonderful to be remembered for something as real and built on love as that.”
James Corden and Ruth Jones wrote the part of Mick Shipman with Lamb in mind, but he almost didn’t get it. When he auditioned for the role way back in 2006, the director, Christine Gernon, had doubts. Lamb’s partner at the time, the actress Clare Burt, gave him some advice.
“She said, ‘Play it like you and Pam have loads of great sex together.’ I went back for a second audition and nailed it.”
‘People say, “Were you Dirty Den in EastEnders?” ’
Lamb is enjoying himself. Tall, lean and attractively lined, he turns heads during his visit to the Times offices. He’s more luxuriantly silver-maned in real life than when sporting Mick’s functional suburban haircut, and some folk in the lifts struggle to place him.
“Some people still ask me, ‘Were you Dirty Den in EastEnders?’ ” he says. “I say, ‘You’ve got the wrong villain.’ ”
Ah yes. Between 2008 and 2009 Lamb was being nice guy Mick at the same time as playing arch-baddie Archie Mitchell in the BBC soap. In the latter role he became a byword for bad Cockney parenting. When his teenage daughter Ronnie gave birth to Danielle, Archie put up the baby for adoption and told Ronnie she was dead. He was also horrible to Peggy and burnt down the Queen Vic pub. His death on Christmas Day 2009 (he was hit over the head with a bust of Queen Victoria) was something of a relief.
“The weeks alternating Archie and Mick were some of the hardest of my acting career,” Lamb says.
It’s Gavin & Stacey that still looms large, though. Not only was it a touching, beautifully observed portrait of provincial families, the fact that there were only 19 episodes and 3 specials in 17 years also feels very British. In America, such a landmark programme would have run for multiple seasons and the best characters would have had spin-off shows.
“I know,” Lamb says. “I’d love to do more but… You tell me. I said to the bloke downstairs in the lobby, ‘I don’t know why you don’t take the show, reorganise all the contracts and put it in the cinema. You’d have 35 million people going to see it. You’d make all the money over again.’ ”
The “bloke downstairs in the lobby” was BBC boss Tim Davie, who just happened to be visiting. Lamb says he first met Davie last autumn at a preview of the Christmas special.
“We were sitting in the cinema of some fancy hotel watching a preview with Charlotte Moore [the outgoing BBC chief content officer]. This guy with her says hello and I go, ‘So what do you do, then?’ and he says, ‘I run the BBC.’ He’s so not what you would think of as the head of the BBC. Very stiff. But then I saw him again today and we had a bit of banter. Not so stiff.”
So will there be a Gavin & Stacey film?
“Well, he’s the boss of the BBC. You don’t give the game away, do you? From the look on his face it was either, ‘That’s not a bad idea,’ or, ‘I wish these people would stop trying to do my job for me. They can barely do their own.’ ”
But you’d be up for it?
“Yeah, of course. It’s about the only thing I can do now. Grandads and dads, that’s it.”
‘Everyone wants a dad like Mick, don’t they?’
That’s not quite the case. We are meeting to talk about Lamb’s role in a new Channel 5 drama, The Feud. On sleepy suburban Shelbury Drive in the northeast of England, a young couple decide to build a kitchen extension. Somehow their plans for a new breakfast bar trigger roiling sexual tensions leading to murder. Lamb plays Terry, a wheeler dealer who swaggers about in a dark overcoat owing money. From the preview I’ve seen, I’d say his character is positioned roughly midway between nice guy Mick and wrong ’un Archie.
“He’s trying to be Mick, but then everyone wants a dad like Mick, don’t they? He’s the dream, but Archie, he’s the dad everyone wants to push off a cliff.”
Lamb knows all about wayward patriarchs. Archie Mitchell was partly inspired by his own father, Ron, a troubled figure who emotionally abused his wife, Jessie, to such an extent she left the family. One time, when Lamb was about seven years old, Ron wrenched the carpet off the stairs in a rage while completely naked. Another time he poured a pot of tea Jessie had made for him over her head because, he claimed, it was stewed. Lamb also once stopped his father’s pursuit of a local builder he thought was flirting with his wife. His father was carrying a knife.
“He was badly treated by his own father and then had a terrible time with the things he saw flying with the RAF in the Second World War,” Lamb explains. “As a kid, though, you don’t know any of that. There’s no context. It’s just pure fear.”
Just before his tenth birthday, Lamb’s mother walked out of the family home in Edmonton, Middlesex. Lamb and his younger brother, Wes, were left alone with Ron. Larry in particular became the focus of his father’s rage.
Lamb’s 2012 memoir, Mummy’s Boy, plots his dramatic life. For years he didn’t even know where his mother lived and by the time he left school he just wanted to get as far away from home as possible. After answering a newspaper ad, he took a job selling encyclopedias to US airmen in Wiesbaden, Germany. There he met a woman on a US airbase who, noting his looks and charm, remarked, “You ought to be an actor.” There was a bit of am-dram on the base; his first role was Henry VIII.
“I had so many jobs apart from selling encyclopedias — I sold cars, correspondence courses and then I was working on oil and gas pipelines — but I absolutely loved everything about acting.”
A long and turbulent love life
There were many extraordinary twists and turns before he finally made it, but Lamb also cast himself as the love interest in a real-life romantic epic. For the next five decades he was barely able to walk into a club, bar or hotel without falling into bed with a beautiful woman (in one case it was someone he met on a train).
“I was a slow starter, a fat boy with acne till I was 17, 18,” he says. “I’d missed out on the Sixties so when the Seventies came along, I was going to make the most of it.”
Aged 21, he’d already married Anita in London (he was visiting the UK on leave; they had a daughter, Vanessa). When that didn’t work out he married Jacquie, an American nurse whom he met in Germany (“Funny, sexy, a great cook and most importantly to me, she was a real mother,” he writes). But after he moved to America with her, the marriage broke up and he got involved with a former nun, Therese, who was keen to make up for not having had sex for 18 years.
“I think I might have helped her with about nine of them,” he notes wryly.
After Therese, he fell in love with Linda and they married after knowing each other for 11 weeks. Eleven months after that they had a baby boy, George Lamb, but when that relationship imploded there were dalliances with Lady Colin Campbell, an Iberia airline stewardess and two Spanish sisters (they lived together and Lamb moved in, having sex with both in their separate rooms).
Throughout it all there’s a sense that Lamb was a bit lost.
“Yeah, I was desperate to be in love, but when you go deep into it I was obviously trying to replace my mother,” he says. “She was the centre of my universe and then she just disappeared.”
What’s extraordinary is that with each lover, he truly believes he has found the One.
“Yeah, but it’s not them; it’s me,” he insists. “Going through that abandonment was such a profound loss, there was always an element of making sure that could never happen again. And how do you do that? You back off; you have a hand in the relationship failing in some way.”
In the bad old days, Lamb could find almost any pretext to scupper things. He would be jealous around other men. He would be a stickler for punctuality. He would even get cross if asked to put milk in a jug rather than pouring it straight from a bottle.
“There was a very argumentative, bitter side to me earlier on,” he says. “There were elements of my dad and my uncle in there [Lamb lived with his Uncle Terry for a while after the family break-up]. They were both poorly fathered and if you’re poorly fathered you’re going to pass that on to your kids, that’s all there is to it. So I could be picky about anything. And then you have to factor in the vicissitudes of being an actor, always thinking, ‘Will I ever work again?’ I was not an easy person to be around at all.”
One time, just a couple of months after he and Linda were married, Lamb lost it on the platform at Southampton train station because she was late. He was wearing a hat. He took it off and jumped up and down on it.
“Jesus, yeah, that guy,” he recalls almost as though we are discussing someone else. “I was jumping up and down, both feet off the ground, on my own hat. Linda’s standing there looking at me like, ‘What have I got myself involved with?’ Just extraordinary. But I still consider myself so lucky to have been with all these amazing women and to have learnt big lessons from each of them.”
‘I have to face the fact it hasn’t worked because I don’t let it work’
As well as Vanessa and his son, George, 45 (he gave up a TV and radio career to become a regenerative farmer with Andy Cato, former member of the pop group Groove Armada), Lamb has two daughters, Eloise and Eva-Mathilde, from his relationship with Clare Burt.
To be honest, I found it hard to keep up with his relationship history. When the story of Mummy’s Boy ends he’s with Burt, but by the time he appeared on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2016 (he came seventh), he crossed the famous rope bridge to be greeted by a new flame, the French artist Marie Hugo, the great-granddaughter of the Les Misérables novelist Victor Hugo.
Things with Burt didn’t work out because of the age gap between them, he says.
“A 20-year age difference is a big thing,” he says. “Your lives run in tandem but you’re in different gears. When you’re the older person, you’re encouraging them not to reinvent the wheel but they’ve got to. Each generation has their own take on things. We had so many rucks and fights and it became too much. It was a case of, ‘We can’t do this any more,’ but gradually we’ve come back together as mates and we have a lovely friendship now.”
Shortly after splitting from Burt, he met Hugo at a party in Marseilles. Profiles of Lamb published around the time of the most recent Gavin & Stacey Christmas special cite her as his partner. But that relationship ended six years ago, he informs me. Lamb, the man who couldn’t stop falling in love, is now alone.
“And I will be alone for the rest of my life now, I reckon,” he says.
Is he happy about that?
“Oh yeah. Definitely. After all the things with all these amazing women, I’m much happier having my own life and not sharing it with someone I’m almost certainly going to disappoint. I have to face the fact it hasn’t worked because I don’t let it work, so I finish up walking away. So I walked away and… it’s lovely.”
Lamb’s a little unsteady on his feet following a back operation that left him with nerve damage affecting his left leg. He’s also partially deaf in his right ear. He will be 78 this year. Won’t he get lonely?
“Of course I get lonely sometimes. But you can get very lonely living with someone and you don’t want to be with them any more. That’s real loneliness.”
Since the late Eighties Lamb has been based in Normandy, France. He renovated an old cheese creamery near Caen (ten rooms, two kitchens, set in three acres, bought for £30,000) and calls it his spiritual home. With the help of neighbours he even dug out and dammed an oily swamp where he can swim daily.
And during Covid he began writing a novel that is about to be published. All Wrapped Up tells the story of Killy Wilde, “sexy bastard” and first assistant director on a film being made on a Caribbean island undergoing a coup. The romp clearly draws on Lamb’s 50-year thespian adventure.
“It depicts what I really love about this job, which is being part of a team, a crew. I am almost always the oldest guy on set these days, but that’s what I love and what I need: the camaraderie, the craic.”
Aren’t you ready to retire?
“I haven’t been very clever with money,” he says. “So I do need to earn.”
What do you get up to in Normandy?
“That’s where I am the real me. I read, I write, I see a few friends, but it’s a very quiet life. I keep fit. I go swimming in the pool every morning. I ride my bike. Fifteen years ago I stopped drinking. The hangovers got so unbearable there was only one thing to do — I quit. I love a glass of beer, but I find the non-alcoholic ones get better and better.”
‘Silver fox? More of a battered old wolf’
There are now no rings on either hand. It’s rather a poignant outcome for a renowned silver fox, I say.
“More of a battered old wolf.” He laughs.
Well, some men do say that with age and a fading libido there comes a certain relief; one is “unchained from the gorilla”.
“Exactly. You really calm down. You know what, when I was 65 I really wanted to be 70 and now I really want to be 80.”
What’s going to happen at 80?
“Life is precious. I wanna live and live and live and be exposed to what’s going on and talk to people. My philosophy has always been: kick the bush, see what comes out. But the important thing is I’m at peace with myself and the world. It’s lovely.”
It’s been quite a journey. Most actors I’ve met have come up through drama school or youth theatre. I’ve never met one who started as a salesman doing am-dram then finally turned pro after getting bored of a job applying anti-corrosion chemicals to pipelines in Libya and Canada.
But after years of amateur dramatics, Lamb did his pro audition while still working on a pipeline in Nova Scotia during the mid-Seventies. He succeeded and after a couple of seasons touring Shakespeare around Canada he found himself on Broadway. He subsequently acted opposite the likes of Lauren Bacall and Bob Dylan and socialised with such legends as Ingrid Bergman, Muhammad Ali and George Harrison.
“I was so naive. I played Bob Dylan’s manager in a film called Hearts of Fire and one evening when Bob asked what I was doing after work I said, ‘I’m going home.’ I missed out on the chance to hang out with Bob bloody Dylan!”
Never mind — he did once enjoy a beer in a New York bar with the legendary playwright Arthur Miller. However, I’m not sure that counts because Lamb had no idea who he was.
“A friend had to tell me who he was afterwards,” he says. “But that’s me. I’ll talk to anyone.”
Lamb believes he will mostly be remembered as peacemaker Mick Shipman. When Pam, his wife in Gavin & Stacey, denounces Welsh Gwen (Melanie Walters) as a “leek-munching sheep shagger”, it’s Mick who calms the situation.
“In that first audition I’m not sure I totally got who Mick was, but over the years I like to think I’ve become him,” he says. “Isn’t that amazing? James and Ruth saw him in me, but it took a while for me to find him inside myself. I’ve taken on board his way of dealing with things. I’m able to accept how other people think even if I don’t agree with it. Isn’t that a brilliant gift to get from a role?”
Lamb says it’s never too late to find your inner Mick. In fact he only really began to see the light when he turned 60.
“I wasn’t always easy to be around, but yeah, I got to 60 and started to let all that inner unhappiness go,” he says.
How does that work day to day? He gives me an example. Back in 1983 he was cast in an Italian TV drama and filming took place in a concert hall in Verona. The opera legend Luciano Pavarotti happened to be performing that evening and the stage manager offered Lamb the opportunity to meet him.
“And I didn’t go because I was too busy chasing this bit of skirt.” He shrugs in disbelief. “Think about it. I missed the chance to meet the genius Pavarotti. What the hell was I thinking? Life is so exhausting when you’re searching for something you’re never going to find. I would definitely go and meet Pavarotti now.”
The Feud begins at 9pm on April 14 on Channel 5
Picture 1 Suit, richard-james.com. Shirt, marksandspencer.com. Sunglasses, valleyeyewear.com. Picture 2 Jacket and jeans, andsons.co.uk. Sunglasses, as before
