Feats of Daring
From Spitting Image to Dead Ringers, the late Bill Dare’s instinct for comedy will inspire those he helped on the road to success
Steve Ullathorne
- Bill Borrows
Add Bill Dare: Comedy Alchemist to your collections.
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In January this year, a few weeks before 64-year-old comedy producer Bill Dare died in a road accident, I interviewed the actor Steven Mangan about his starring role in the forthcoming Radio 4 show, The Island. The conceit was that certain celebrities who had appeared on Desert Island Discs subsequently ended up on the eponymous desert island with only each other and their luxury items (usually a coffee machine) for company.
“An email came to my agent [from Bill Dare],” Mangan explained. “I’d never met Bill but obviously I know the name because it’s said in that Tom Baker voice at the end of Dead Ringers. I don’t think we had any scripts at that point but it was a very funny, clever idea and I thought if Bill Dare is involved, it sounds good.”
“I’m not surprised,” nods Jon Culshaw, the man behind the Tom Baker-voiced credit for the man who created the beloved Dead Ringers comedy impressions show. “Once you heard that name you wouldn’t hesitate. He would command that kind of trust and confidence.”
Culshaw has been synonymous with Dead Ringers since Dare asked him to appear in the pilot show in 2000 but the two had known each other long before. “I was a DJ at Viking Radio and interviewed Lenny Henry in about 1989, we hit it off doing different voices and he said, ‘You should send the tape to Spitting Image.’ So I did. Bill Dare was the one who received it and he said, ‘Yes, we could probably do something with you here.’” Dare was just about to leave the Emmy-Award winning satirical puppet TV show but not before the producer had given Culshaw the break he still acknowledges today as “making my whole career work”.
At Broadcasting House a decade later, young comedy writer Jon Holmes (The Skewer) had just landed a job with the BBC and was sitting in a basement waiting to be told what to do. “A head appeared round the door and this weird guy just said, ‘Are you the new writer? We’re doing a Spitting Image-type show for the radio, make it funny.’ It was Bill Dare.”
Bill commanded respect because he was so good
Jan Ravens
Jan Ravens, another strand of the Dead Ringers DNA, also knew Dare from Spitting Image. “I think I covered for Kate Robbins when it started in the mid 80s,” she says. “Then I met him again doing a Radio 4 series called Life, Death and Sex with Mike and Sue, which he also created. We’re almost the same age but I’ve always considered him my comedy dad. There are very few comedy producers that you just trust implicitly. He commanded respect because he was so good at what he did.”
Culshaw was due on stage in Hull with his Imposter Syndrome show when he heard that Dare had been involved in an accident. “The first thing I heard in the back of my mind was Bill saying, ‘Well, anyway, gotta get on with it.’” He then called Ravens to break the dreadful news before, having worked in the same theatre with Dare a few years ago, he “went to where I had stood on the stage and looked at the area where Bill had been sitting, urging him to pull through…
“It was the next night when I’d just come off stage at the Buxton Opera House that I heard he’d gone. The following day you think, ‘How can I possibly go on and do a funny show tonight when I’ve just been handed this?’ but once I got backstage again the vivid memories of when Bill and I had been in the same environment together brought the essence of him nearer somehow. So it was, ‘Right. Yes, Bill, I’m not going to crumble here. I’m going to remember your great motivating strength and keep the show tight and bang on track. Let’s do this now.’”
Ravens declares Dare’s passing, “Beyond shocking and unbelievable. Surreal.” Both performers are visibly emotional but happy to recall Dare’s no-nonsense style of putting the show together (Culshaw calls him “an alchemist”, Ravens marvels at his instinctive ability to “know what would work, what wouldn’t and act decisively”) and his delight in a character done well. “I know he liked my Ed Miliband, John Craven and Michael Gove,” smiles Culshaw. “Tom Baker, obviously, and we had fun with George Bush and Tony Blair. He once sent me an email saying, ‘Your Nick Robinson is fantastic, we take it for granted’ and that meant such a lot.’”
Theresa May was one of his favourite Jan Ravens characters, but the impressionist also remembers his “great excitement when someone new like Liz Truss arrived.” And, for Bill probably, she drops briefly into Truss saying, “I know”.
He had an almost childlike joy for a voice that just captured the person perfectly,” she says. “Dead Ringers happened because he really wanted to do a show on the radio that was all about the impressions, about putting them front and centre.” Poignantly perhaps, the new series marks the 25-year anniversary of the show and a UK tour that Dare pushed to make happen will celebrate that landmark in autumn. “The tour will be a kind of greatest hits,” says Ravens. “Bill had moved away to write a novel – he was always doing new things, like The Island, which he edited despite not having done it before and loved it – but he would have helped to choose the scripts and characters that we will perform on tour and been at rehearsals and the first few venues to make sure it was as good as it could be, so his presence will be missed.”
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Holmes, who also worked with Dare on shows including The Now Show and The Island will be the man to fill his mentor’s large brogues. “I’m doing it really because I know it would annoy him,” he laughs, “But he’s left such a fantastic legacy it’s really just a question of keeping a hand on the tiller.”
Authors
Bill Borrows
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