All Balls and Glitter (29 page)

Tina Turner was our special guest and she belted out a few of her famous numbers. It was fabulous having her on board, but trying to tie in why she was there, and what she had to do with Hans Christian Andersen, was tricky. Ultimately, we came up with this mirrored swan idea, inspired by the Ugly Duckling story, and she burst through that set piece for her grand entrance, singing ‘Simply the Best’. It was truly phenomenal.

Tina is absolutely lovely, a real star, funny, and not precious at all. I expected her to whirl in with an entourage and say, ‘Oh darling, I’m not doing that!’ but she was really nice.

We had only a day to rehearse with her, but that was more for the dancers’ sake than hers. You don’t direct Tina Turner. She does her own thing and she came with her own dancers. She has her own, very famous, strut, which all the dancers emulate. You don’t mess around with a legend.

The autumn saw season three of
Strictly
hit the small screen. I particularly remember that series for Darren Gough’s freestyle dance, which is one of the all-time highlights of
SCD
.

We were all dab hands at the programme come the third season – so polished, in fact, that ever since we judges have often been accused of being scripted, but we genuinely aren’t. Everything that the audience sees is completely improvised.

By that stage in the show’s history, it was clear that all the judges had very different opinions. I think that’s what makes the panel so interesting. The dynamic between the four of us works really well. If we tried to be anyone that we’re not, it wouldn’t be a success. Consequently, none of us ever makes comments solely for effect because, in order to have an effective argument, you
have to believe in it and be able to qualify it. On some other shows it’s just argument for argument’s sake, which is silly. I won’t enter into a row unless I have a valid point to make. Given that, I find it astonishing how often people come up to me and enquire whether or not I’m asked to be nasty. I wouldn’t do the job if that were the case. I simply tell it as I see it.

Honesty is a key part of my nature, and the very reason the BBC chose me as a judge. However, my gob can get me into trouble. The third season of
Strictly
became infamous, at least as far as I was concerned, for the Patsy Palmer incident.

Patsy questioned my credentials as a judge, which infuriated me. So I said, in a moment of temporary insanity and fury, ‘That’s rich coming from a two-bit actress in a second-rate soap, in a puffa jacket who cries all the time.’ It was quite vile of me, I admit. But at the time I was angry.

When my retort was printed in the press, one of the papers changed my phrasing to ‘a scrubber in a puffa jacket’, while another claimed I had called her ‘a chav in a puffa’, which I would never have said because I’ve never used the expression ‘chav’ in my life; it’s a British thing. In fact, I’d never even heard of the word until I apparently said it. I read the article and was outraged. I was saying to anyone who’d listen, ‘I didn’t call her a chav!’

In my riposte, I’d only used the words that she herself had employed about her character in
EastEnders
when being interviewed by Brucie on the very first programme, so I thought I’d be OK. Apparently not. Patsy was understandably unhappy because of the comments I’d made so I got my wrist slapped, deservedly, and I had to make a national apology. It was a much more formal affair than when I’d retracted my comments about Julian Clary. I truly did regret what I’d said about Patsy.

She and I did eventually ‘kiss’ and make up; it was put behind us and laid to rest very quickly. The incident actually brought us closer. Patsy is an extremely lovely person. She did warn me you have to be very careful with the press and how you phrase things,
as it can be taken out of context. She has probably had to put up with that sort of thing most of her working life. Anyone in the public eye does.

In the midst of that third series of
Strictly
, I learned, with heartbreaking clarity, that all good things come to an end. Lloyd and I had met when we were both relatively young; we’d grown up together as a couple; we’d shared some amazing times and experiences; we loved each other deeply. Then thirteen years of bliss came crashing down around our ears.

Lloyd, I think, hit some sort of mid-life crisis. It proved to be the end for us. He said that I went away too much and he was lonely, but when he was here by himself, well, it transpired that he wasn’t alone after all.

In late 2005, a rogue jar of peanut butter finally gave the game away. I’d been working away a lot over the past couple of years, and every time I came home, I’d find a jar of peanut butter in the kitchen cupboard. Lloyd hates peanut butter, as do I, so several times I just chucked it out and didn’t think anything of it.

But on one occasion, I came back and was struck by its oddity. This time, I looked at the sell-by date, which I’d never thought to do before. It was obviously a recent jar. I thought, ‘This is really strange. Why do all these jars keep appearing?’ Then I figured Lloyd must have taken a fancy to it. When he came home from work, I asked him about it.

‘Who eats peanut butter?’ I said. ‘Every time I come back, there’s peanut butter in the pantry. Have you started eating it?’

‘You know I hate peanut butter,’ he replied.

‘Then why is there peanut butter in the pantry?’ I persisted.

‘It must be Abi’s,’ he answered. ‘Abi’s been staying here.’

Abi is Lloyd’s nephew, who stayed at our place occasionally.

I accepted the answer and put the jar back in the cupboard.

That night, we attended a play in Islington. By coincidence, Abi came with us. During the interval, I said, ‘Abi, this may sound weird, but do you like peanut butter?’ He responded, ‘No,
not really.’ Then I asked him if he’d ever bought it and whether, when he’d been staying at the house, he had left some in our kitchen. He said, ‘No.’

At that moment, I was hit by the horrible realization that Lloyd had lied to me. I didn’t know what he was covering up, but I knew he was hiding something. When you trust someone for thirteen years, with your life, you don’t expect them to lie to you, so I was understandably in a bit of a state.

I started necking drinks in the interval, and after the play, and I got horribly drunk because I was determined to confront Lloyd. I think I was in shock. I knew that our sex life hadn’t been great for a couple of years; it had lost its intensity and become rather routine. Yet Lloyd always blamed the lacklustre display on other things so, until that night, I hadn’t suspected anything was wrong between us.

When we came back from the theatre, I walked into the kitchen. Lloyd had done what he always did when he got home: taken off his trousers, opened the fridge and started munching away at a snack. I got the suspect jar out of the cupboard and said, ‘Lloyd, I have to ask you one last time. Whose peanut butter is this? You must know. You live in the house.’

He didn’t say anything, so I carried on.

‘I know it’s not Abi’s and that he hasn’t been staying here. Half a jar has been used and you don’t use that in one morning, so who has been staying here while I’ve been away?’

Silence.

You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Absolute silence – and guilt written all over his face.

My heart was in my mouth, but I carried on. I had to know.

‘Are you having an affair?’ I asked.

Silence and guilt.

‘I just have to know. Are you having an affair?’

Didn’t speak. Couldn’t speak. So I kept on fishing.

Then I remembered that the only person I’d captured on film
with Lloyd, looking all boyfriendish, was Michael, the delivery boy from the shop. I thought back to three years earlier, when I’d taken a photo of them on the roof terrace at the house. They’d come home together on a Saturday afternoon, not knowing that I was on the terrace with my friend Margie and her new baby. Looking back, it struck me as odd that they were at the house when they should have been on deliveries together, so Michael was the first name that I came up with.

‘Are you having an affair with Michael?’ I asked.

As soon as I mentioned Michael’s name, his face dropped, his eyes started welling up and he slowly nodded his head and said, ‘Yes.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

Lloyd started spluttering, ‘It’s over, it’s over. It doesn’t exist any more. It’s finished. It was just five weeks.’

I believed him. Every word.

‘I always knew this would happen,’ I told him. ‘Over thirteen years, I knew you’d sleep with someone else.’

Lloyd broke down and cried, sobbing, ‘Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me,’ over and over again, like a broken record. I calmed him down and told him I wasn’t going to leave him, but we needed to talk about it.

Then I said, ‘So all the time I’ve been away, he’s been living here?’

‘Yes, but I told you, it’s over. He’s gone. He’s gone back to New Zealand.’

It was a mess, but I said, ‘We’ll get through this. We’ll be fine.’

Of course, I started questioning everything then. He really hadn’t told me anything. He wouldn’t open up about it, or talk about it at all. He just kept saying, ‘It’s over.’ We tried to work things out, but I kept discovering more and more secrets. I logged on to my computer and looked up that photograph of Michael and Lloyd, and I started thinking about dates.

Then I went through the phone bills, which is something I would never have dreamed of doing before, but I needed confirmation of what was going on.

Lloyd kept insisting it was finished, so we started getting through it and I was more relaxed and calm, but he still wouldn’t discuss it. I wanted to know about their relationship, when it had started and how. I wanted the gory details and, above all, I wanted him to be honest with me and tell me the truth. But I knew it was going to take a bit of time for him to open up, so I let it lie.

A few days later, Lloyd’s friend James came round. I didn’t know him very well because Lloyd tended to see his friends while I was away, but it was through them that I began to discover what had really gone on. Lloyd left the room for some reason and James sighed, ‘Phew, I’m really glad you know about that thing with Michael.’

Then he confided that he had tried to pick up Michael two years before, but Michael had knocked him back, saying, ‘No, I can’t. Lloyd will kill me.’

James said cheerfully, ‘I’m glad you know about it all now,’ but I thought, ‘I didn’t know any of that!’ So I said, ‘Keep talking.’

That’s the sort of thing I kept hearing all the time. First, Lloyd had told me it went on for five weeks, and then two years, and I think in fact it was nearer three. I’m still not sure of the truth.

Soon after James’s visit, Lloyd’s phone beeped and I happened to glance at the text message, which said: ‘Missing you. The farmer’s wife. Pudsey.’ They even had cute little names for each other. Lloyd called him Pudsey Bear and Michael called Lloyd Yogi.

I stood and stared at the message and I felt sick. Lloyd had promised me that he had finished it and this was proof he had done no such thing. It was getting uglier and uglier. I knew there was only one thing I could do, so I left the house. I had to get away. I packed my bags and went to stay with my close friend Christopher Woods.

After a week, I came to my senses. Why was I moving out of the house when he was the one who had been sleeping with his boyfriend in our bed for two or three years?

Enough was enough. I went home and told him, ‘This is not fair. You move out. I don’t see why I should have to.’ I said we needed to talk because we had the jointly owned house and shops to consider. We agreed not to spend Christmas together, so Lloyd went to his family and I went to Paris. We planned to reconvene in London on 6 January to sort things out.

That was the last I saw of him until Valentine’s Day. He just disappeared. The only communication I received was a text message on Christmas Eve, which read: ‘I’m on a flight to finish it. I have to tell him face to face.’ Then nothing.

All the time I was in Paris over Christmas, I was sending texts to him, asking, ‘Where are you?’ and ‘What’s going on?’ but I got no reply.

It turned out that the reason I couldn’t get hold of him was because he was on a farm in New Zealand with Michael and his family; mobile phones didn’t work in the area.

Before the break-up, we had scheduled a trip to Australia in the new year to visit my family. Eventually, he did get in touch by text to ask, ‘What’s your arrival date?’ I told him I wasn’t coming any more and asked him where he was. He just said, ‘I’ll meet you in Australia.’ He turned up at my sister Susan’s house in Melbourne and acted like nothing was going on; Susan had no idea what to do.

He told me he’d spent New Year’s Eve just sat in a hotel alone. Doubtful, I rang two friends in Sydney and asked them if they’d happened to see Lloyd out and about during the festivities. One of them told me that Lloyd had paid for Michael to fly to Sydney and spend New Year with him. He hadn’t gone out there to finish it at all.

By the time I came back from Paris, I had had enough. I thought, ‘Fuck this!’ and I decided to book the whole year out of
London. My beautiful sister Diane flew over and came to my rescue. That meant so much to me, to have family around when I was feeling lost and alone. She helped me to pack up the house. I rented it out, then went up to Leeds to work on the Kurt Weill operetta
Arms and the Cow
(
Der Kuhhandel
) for the whole of February.

On Valentine’s Day, Lloyd turned up at Leeds train station with a bunch of flowers and a bottle of vodka, begging for forgiveness. I said, ‘Where have you been?’

‘I had to finish it with Michael,’ he said. ‘I told you that.’

‘But Lloyd, we were supposed to meet on 6 January,’ I replied. ‘It’s now 14 February!’

He tried to kiss me, but I said no. Then he started to cry. He wanted to stay in the flat I was renting, but I wouldn’t let him, so he had nowhere to live. I made him stay in a hotel down the road. It was killing me to send him away, absolute torture, but I had to.

I told him we needed a year apart and then we could talk about it. Lloyd said, ‘I want you back.’ And I replied, ‘But you keep lying to me.’ I told him I knew about New Year’s Eve. The trust was gone.