Paul Nicholas on his Major role at the Liverpool Empire

When Fawlty Towers was first broadcast in the 1970s, the series attracted millions of TV viewers. But it turns out Paul Nicholas wasn’t one of them.

Because 50 years ago, the actor and singer was busy building a career on stage and screen and tended to find himself otherwise occupied at night.

“I caught bits of it,” he explains, “but I was working a lot of the time, and it was pre being able to record programmes.”

So when the he was asked if he was interested in playing the Major in a new stage play based on the original series, he made sure he acquainted himself with the character’s appearances before he found himself in front of a big screen in a London studio where “up popped John Cleese from 5,000 miles away in Los Angeles” to see if he cut the mustard.

Evidently he did (Cleese, he recalls, “giggled a bit” which encouraged him), and after a hugely successful stint in the West End, the 80-year-old is now part of the touring cast who bring the show to the Liverpool Empire next week.

“It’s a great part for me,” he explains on the phone backstage at the Manchester Opera House where the show has been playing this week. “Because having done Barnum and all those kinds of things in the past, I don’t have to walk on a wire or juggle, I just have to come on as an old man and say the lines.”

Ah yes, Barnum. Nicholas played the showman at the Liverpool Empire back in 1992, although that wasn’t his first time in the capacious Lime Street auditorium, or indeed the last during a career that has spanned well over half-a-century since he made his stage debut in Hair. More of that anon.

But it might all have been very different if Nicholas had enjoyed major chart success as a young singer (in 1966, under his middle name Oscar, he released an up-tempo stomper titled Club of Lights), sometime keyboardist for Screaming Lord Sutch, songwriter (he penned numbers like Lovely Loretta that was a hit in Holland for The Merseys), or in a short-lived stint in music publishing where he came up with a novel way of publicising one band he discovered.

“The were called Wainwright’s Gentlemen and I got them a recording deal,” he recalls.

Above: The cast of Fawlty Towers - the Play. Top: Paul Nicholas as the Major with Joanne Clifton as Polly. Photos by Hugo Glendinning.

“They changed their name to Sweetshop and part of the promotion for this record was to sell them and I thought, well why don’t we get a giant-sized jelly baby? Because the Beatles, as you may know, were very into jelly babies at one point, although by the time I’d got round to this idea they’d gone on to slightly harder substances!

“So I phoned up the company that made jelly babies and said ‘look, I’ve got a band called Sweetshop, and could you make me a giant jelly baby?’ And indeed they did. I also thought ‘I need it look like someone’, and the very famous DJ at the time was Simon Dee. So I phoned his agent who said he’d be happy.”

The band duly turned up at Guy’s Hospital in London with the giant jelly Simon Dee, but the PR stunt failed to get any meaningful publicity.

“I didn’t really know much about PR, but I told the record company, and I don’t think the PR man at the record company did his job. It’s never too late to shift the blame, and I’m doing it now!” Nicholas laughs.

Happily, it all ended well for Sweetshop who changed their name to The Sweet and went on to have several huge hits in the 1970s, including Blockbuster.

Meanwhile Nicholas switched tack again when he answered a casting call for counterculture rock musical Hair, subsequently appearing on stage alongside people like Floella Benjamin and a teenage Liverpudlian called Paul Barber.

Above: Hair the musical came to the Liverpool Empire twice in 1970 including for Christmas.

“Paul and I used to share digs, and we were in an upstairs flat, I think we might have been in Manchester, mucking about and broke a chair or something," he says.

“There was a very pretty girl downstairs called Linzi Jennings, who was also in the show, and I’d always had my eye on Linzi. I went downstairs and said to her ‘have you got any glue?’ A great opening line!

“And anyway, we’ve been together ever since. Fifty-five years.”

After Hair, Nicholas became the first Jesus in Rice and Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar in the West End and followed that by playing Danny Zuko in Grease opposite Elaine Paige as Sandy. He was also in the original cast of Cats.

Of course, when many people think of the actor, it's in the TV sitcom Just Good Friends in which he played the feckless charmer Vince to Jan Francis’s uptight Penny.

But he’s had a much wider screen career, with a variety of roles from the 1970 ‘Wednesday Play’ Season of the Witch (with Julie Driscoll and Robert Powell) to Ken Russell’s Tommy and Lisztomania – in the latter he played the composer Richard Wagner, Stardust alongside David Essex, and a seedy manager in Robert Stigwood’s 1978 film Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

He’s continued to run stage and screen careers together, his most recent stage appearance in Liverpool being at the Playhouse two years ago as henpecked husband Douglas in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Now he’s back, this time up the road at the Empire, for a week of (hopefully) big laughs as part of a major tour which runs until next summer.

Famously, only 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers were ever made, and three of them – The Hotel Inspectors, The Germans and Communication Problems – are rolled into one evening here, with the addition of a new ending.

“It’s absurd and it’s out there and Basil completely insane,” Nicholas says. “And the audience get it. It’s a farce and there aren’t that many of those these days.

“There are a lot of people who obviously love the original, and when they come, they’re not disappointed because they’re getting the TV show in three helpings. It’s seamless.”

Fawlty Towers the Play is at the Liverpool Empire from November 11-15. Tickets HERE