Bob Hoskins, Cher and the Trading Places Challenge
With Bob Hoskins, dressed as Cher, Trading Places Day, 1992
Photo by Terry O’Neill
Back in the summer of ‘91, I started work on a new charity event called ‘Trading Places’, set up by a theatrical agent’s family - who had just had a tragic loss from the disease - to raise money for Breakthrough Breast Cancer. My role was as the event’s Celebrity Manager and, as I’d just done five years as a researcher, presenter and producer/director for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, MTV, Super Channel and BSB, I had a pretty good black book and knew my way around the world of agents. The event was a new direction for me, but one I hoped might prove fun….
The big idea behind it, riffing on the hugely-popular Eddie Murphy / Dan Ackroyd movie of the same name, was to be someone else for the day. The concept was already firmly established when I joined, though nothing beyond that, and I think I must have been the first proper employee, joining the event’s three female founders: one related to the founding family; another from a major ad agency background, and the third, Wendy, a former Red Nose Day hotshot and the real creative driving force. Wendy was behind most of the delightfully-deranged ideas we ended up bringing to life. Certain other events happened completely organically too, which was part of the fun – including dressing Bob Hoskins up as Cher.
‘Trading Places’ seemed to grow in ambition and prospects week by week. We kept having to move offices, with some generous property agent re-locating us each time, rent free, into empty West End office stock. Everything was done on a wing and a prayer. Designer Michael Johnson, later of multi-award-winning agency Johnson Banks, dropped in almost every day as more free graphic collateral was needed – ie: whenever Wendy had another crazy idea. The event secured a first telethon slot on ITV and a second on Channel 4. After a successful lunchtime pitch at a posh fish restaurant in Victoria, we also signed up Cilla – very sweet and also surprisingly shy offstage - to front the whole thing.
To encourage people to get involved, free starter packs were devised, based on well-known personalities of the day. The choice came from Wendy in the main – though it was my team’s job to reel them in, from Dame Edna Everage and Gazza to MC Hammer, Nora Batty, Rab C Nesbitt, Michael Fish the Weatherman, Cilla herself and Cher. Everyone we went for, we seemed to get. I then had the very enjoyable task of interviewing each one to sketch out what a typical ‘day in the life’ might look like for each one to go into the packs for supporters to re-enact.
Famous Faces in Mask Form
I remember MC Hammer ringing me at home one evening in the middle of his Latin American tour, sounding slightly baffled but proving very helpful. Wendy and I flew up to Scotland and had a lovely cup of tea with Rab C Nesbitt actor Gregor Fisher in his sunny back garden to draft ideas for Rab. Pinning Gazza down for any part of his obligation was an uphill struggle (nothing was more important, it transpired, than a post-training swim with Chrissy Waddle), though he did come good in the end, whilst Barry Humphries was particularly discombobulating to deal with, switching between his own voice and Edna’s at will.
Another ‘Trading Places’ idea was to challenge a friend, colleague or family member to become someone else for the day. Cher particularly liked this concept and, within days of coming on board, sent us a letter with a silver embossed ‘Cher’ at the top, challenging Bob Hoskins to become her. The pair had co-starred in the movie ‘Mermaids’ not long before and Cher obviously knew not only the fun we’d have if Bob said yes but also, somehow, that he’d agree.
I was much less sure, never having met Bob, and approached a meeting with his agent with some trepidation, Cher’s letter firmly in hand. She couldn’t have been nicer. We quickly got word back that Bob would love to do it and set a date for the transformational photo shoot. Bob’s agent, whose name sadly escapes me now, pulled on her Rolodex of film industry hair, make-up and wardrobe specialists and assembled a crack team. Most thrillingly of all, legendary photographer Terry O’Neill agreed to do the shoot for free.
On the big day, I took a chauffeured car to pick Bob up from a tall grey house on a wide street in North London. We chatted with ease from the second I arrived at his door. He was unbelievably down-to-earth and friendly with no airs or graces. Bob was an actor I’d adored for years for his extraordinary heart-on-sleeve immediacy and, in real life, he seemed no different at all. He really was everything you could have hoped for.
Our first stop that day was Champneys on Piccadilly, where the fun really started. Off came the beard and on went the make-up, wig and false nails, against a background of continual laughter and wise cracks. When it came to the leg-waxing, Bob, who, it’s fair to say, was pretty hirsute, screeched in pain as the first strip tore off his shin hair. He immediately declared that if he was a woman, he’d be a dyke, because no woman should have to go through that to please a man! We all went along with the pretence for the press later on that his legs had been fully waxed, with the wardrobe mistress applying the drag queen trick of thick, flesh-coloured tights with fishnets over the top to get the look.
Bob and Cher – spot the difference
The finished work of art was sweetly hilarious; more trucker’s moll than Cher, but done with such good grace and cheery bravado that everyone was charmed. It was still the era of analogue photography and, as Terry O’Neill discarded his set-up polaroids, I asked if I might keep them. He said it was no problem and, just before Bob returned to civvies, he sweetly took one of the two of us for me to keep.
My Collection of Terry O’Neill Polaroids
As the shots went off to the newspaper picture editors, Terry and the film ladies took their leave and Bob and I headed further up Piccadilly for lunch at The Athenaeum, the famously-discreet hotel beloved of stars and still run at the time by the late, great Sally Bulloch, sister of ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ producer Robert Watts.
First though, Bob had another charity meet in the hotel bar with some London cabbies who were planning to take a number of disabled children on an outing to the seaside. He had all the time in the world for these guys and I thought again how marvellous he was, leaving the morning’s luvviedom behind in an instant to be accessible to his new audience. The same tone of voice, the same time taken to listen and the same even-handed respect for everyone. I was struck by his graciousness and very real humility. Maybe it came from a perspective of feeling lucky, having genuinely become an actor completely by accident in 1966, after being handed an audition script whilst waiting for a friend in the bar of a North London amateur theatre. He’d previously been a Covent Garden porter, a circus worker and a deckhand in the Norwegian Merchant Navy. From day one, his talent was in no doubt, however, and, at this point in his career, he evidently knew exactly who he was, was totally happy in his skin and had no need to be anyone else at all – off-screen at least.
Around the table that day were Bob, his agent, Sally Bulloch and myself – plus one other: my then boyfriend David. During my many chats with Bob’s lovely agent, I’d mentioned that Bob was David’s all-time acting hero and that ‘The Long Good Friday’ was his all-time favourite film. She also knew that David and I were just a few months into our relationship, but that all the signs were there that he was ‘the one’. With proper old-school grace, she suggested David should also join us for lunch.
I’ll never forget the expression on my future husband’s face as I met his cab in outside the Piccadilly hotel. He’d just flown in from a business meeting in New York and was jetlagged and more than a little shell-shocked, not quite able to believe that he was about to meet his movie hero. Of course, he and Bob clicked instantly and joshed their way swimmingly through lunch, with a little help from several large glasses of red wine. Bob kept saying ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’. David said later it was a wonderful way of making him feel at ease.
At some point Bob wrote out some lines for me he’d written as a young man and signed it ‘To C from B’. He quoted the lines in a profile piece in one of the weekend magazine supplements a couple of years later and I now keep the cutting with the poem - the perfect identification of the mysterious ‘B’.
To C from B – from the day and again in weekend supplement profile
After lunch, it was time go up to a quieter room to conduct the press interviews. As we said goodbye to the lunch party, Bob grabbed David’s arm and whispered loudly ‘Marry her, she’s a diamond’. He must have been ‘in’ on our story. Unsurprisingly, for the whole of our married life, David has delighted in telling people he only married me because Bob Hoskins told him to.
Before the press interviews started – during which Bob was funnier than ever, his showboating tendencies intensified by the lunchtime shandies – there was a scheduled call with Cher to see how the day had gone. I made myself invisible as I listened to them chatting away, the conversation laced with laughter and obvious affection. Bob was beaming as he got off the call. ‘What that girl needs is a real down-to-earth bloke’ he said. ‘You know, an Arthur Mullard-type’. The inference was very sweet – ‘Someone like me’.
The following morning, we were blown away by the press coverage of Bob-as-Cher: two pages in the Sun and the Mirror and one each in the Mail, Express and Star. Not even Nora Batty dressing as Cher held a candle to that. It was the biggest print coup of the whole event.
On Trading Places Day itself, the country went crazy for the idea. Even Prime Minister John Major was snapped turning the cameras on news photographers during a press trip in South Wales, with Norma at his side getting her Olympus Trip out to do the same.
John and Norma get with the programme
Cilla hosted the telethon on ITV and Channel 4 took over the late shift, with Hale and Pace presenting. A number of players from the England rugby team took part too after I’d been to Twickenham on a recruiting mission. Sadly, I failed to persuade Will Carling to dress up as Madonna, but you can’t win ‘em all.
A huge number of well-known faces took part in publicity events in print and onscreen. I was amazed how many actors were willing to give up their time, though I suppose, thinking about it now, it wasn’t too far away from the day job, whilst the founding family were also very well known and liked in the industry – a considerable advange. I particularly remember how nice David Suchet was, dropping in for a coffee and a long chat, whilst Babs Windsor was also fantastic – ‘No need for a cab babe. I’ll walk’ – after I met her inside an empty cinema screening room in Soho to talk through a publicity idea. Two other outstanding contributors were Anneka Rice, who turned up every day behind the scenes in the final weeks to encourage the volunteers, and the blissful Joanna Lumley – also as wonderful as you’d hope - who wrote a beautiful response letter to our call-out and chatted away to me, full of ideas, over the phone. Her eventual turn as a bin-collector on the TV special was a corker.
Before we all drown in luvviedom, I have to add that there were exceptions. Not everything went to plan for a start. There was a slightly tragic take-over of the announcement system at Waterloo Station by one poor celebrity, who I won’t embarrass by naming, which no one seemed to understand (including myself – one of Wendy’s crazier ideas no one else quite ‘got’). I still remember the unimpressed look on the real announcers’ faces as they stepped away from their desks to allow the poor celebrity to bomb in silence. Then, there was the sportsman who didn’t seem to understand the basic concept of charity, and kept asking to be paid – and the comedienne who was never there when you rang but who rang in when she fancied, every few days, to see who else had signed up, as she assessed their status to see whether or not she should get involved (she didn’t, though she did waste a lot of my time).
Sadly, I didn’t get time to oversee every publicity stunt. Someone else got to go to Nottingham to see another of my heroes, Stuart Pearce, trade places with BBC Radio Nottingham’s resident DJ to play his all-time punk top ten. There’s a conversation I’d definitely have enjoyed!
The NME played their part too, with Kevin Cummins creating two special-occasion photos to raise funds. I wonder if anyone still has a copy of Lush-as-the Liver-Birds or Blur-as-Blondie?
Trading Places was a huge success, though it never got a re-run. I’m not sure I could have gone through the whole whirlwind one more time even it had. It couldn’t ever have matched year one’s creative anarchy. I look back at the manic fun and the satisfaction of seeing it go from a wild-eyed concept to a national ‘thing’ in a matter of months with great fondness. There are many good associated memories, but none will ever come close to the day I spent hanging out in the laughter-filled world of Bob Hoskins - one long and one very good Friday.