The series that surprised Ray Winstone: “It’s a tragic show, but you laugh at it”
When Ray Winstone emerged as the lead in the controversial Alan Clarke television play Scum, his career was instantly complicated when the production was banned by the BBC, leading his hard work to go unseen. Luckily, Clarke remade Scum as a feature film, allowing Winstone’s terrific portrayal as a young borstal inmate to be seen widely, with the TV version eventually getting a release in 1991. Still, by this point, Winstone’s acting career had largely been defined by television and theatre roles, having only appeared in two movies during the entire 1980s.
Winstone wasn’t sure if being an actor was the right decision, once telling the Guardian, “After a while I thought I was probably wasting my time, and I should go out and get a proper job. I couldn’t really see myself as an actor. I don’t know, I just thought it’s not really for me, this.”
During this time, he starred in a play, Mr Thomas, written and directed by British comedian and actor Kathy Burke. The pair struck up a close friendship, and as Winstone’s tenure as an actor developed in the ‘90s with a string of movies that would help him elevate his career further, he found himself reunited with Burke. After a role in 1993’s Ladybird, Ladybird, directed by Ken Loach, he starred in two gritty dramas that proved his prowess – Gary Oldman’s directorial debut Nil By Mouth and Antonia Bird’s Face.
It was Nil By Mouth that gave Winstone and Burke the chance to play a married couple, although the intense movie sees Winstone play a wife-beater who attacks Burke’s character with ruthless brutality. It was certainly not an easy thing for the actors to film, but they had each other, and they’ve since remained close friends, with Winstone telling the Guardian in 2002, “I’d see her every day of my life if I could.”
Winstone and Burke, being the good friends they are, have been supportive of the other’s projects, with the former even giving titles a go that he would never usually gravitate towards. This was the case with a certain sitcom that Burke developed and starred in during the late ‘90s and early 2000s, which Winstone found himself unexpectedly loving.
In that same Guardian interview, Winstone admitted, “I love Kath in Gimme Gimme Gimme. And I never thought I would.” The series, which stars Burke as the gobby Linda LaHughes, a woman with a very high opinion of herself, was hugely popular, earning the actor two Bafta nominations. She co-starred alongside James Dreyfuss, who plays her gay flatmate Tom, a terrible actor with overly ambitious dreams.
Continuing, Winstone revealed, rather plainly: “When I first saw it, I thought, ‘This is not for me.’ I’d watch it because Kath was in it, but I expected to switch off after 10 minutes. I mean, I’m not listening to some little poof running about giving it large, and her giving it the tart thing, orange hair, big nuts, glasses. I thought, ‘Fucking hell, Kath, what are you doing?’”
Yet, once he gave in to the chaos of Gimme Gimme Gimme, he was hooked. “And then I was in there, in hysterics. God, it’s a tragic show, but you laugh at it. It’s in your face, in the same way that Nil By Mouth is in your face.”
