1/10/2024 0 Comments Roger allam![]() I ask him if he was surprised by the convictions – between 20 – of six former Christ’s Hospital teachers for historic indecent assault against pupils from the 1960s to the early 1990s after complaints from 22 former students. “We used to get caned by the teachers as punishment your housemaster could make you change into your pyjamas so that it hurt more.” Yet such corporal punishment was rife in many, if not most, boarding and day schools then, memorably captured in Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If. I was terrified when one boy got hit on the head with a wooden boot brush by another. But if you didn’t address a senior boy as Sir, they hit you – that was the punishment. And the atmosphere seemed to relax and change in the 1960s. There were, he recalls, “good sides as well as bad sides to the school, like everywhere. From 1970, he started going to see Laurence Olivier at London’s Old Vic in the school holidays for 15p – “the price of a Tube ticket,” recalls Allam, who himself has now won three Olivier Awards. “The play seemed just like the school itself then: strange rules and always the potential for violence, so it made perfect sense to me,” as he puts it. He first fell in love with theatre, he says, when he saw a Christ’s Hospital house production of Pinter’s The Birthday Party. ![]() There he enjoyed “a great tradition of music – I was in the choir - and remarkable facilities”, though the events of the world outside only seeped through in newspapers in the school library, with no television allowed. His parents were “education-obsessed”, seeing it as the way to better yourself. Born in the East End of London, where his father was vicar of the Hawksmoor church St Mary Woolnoth in Bow, Allam would play on bomb sites before becoming a scholarship boy at 10, thanks to its charitable foundation. At that time, Allam was in his last year at school, Christ’s Hospital in Horsham, West Sussex, which he has described as “strange” and “odd” and an “Eton for paupers” where the pupils wore (and still wear) Tudor uniforms. The eighth and latest season of Endeavour begins on Sunday September 12 and is set in 1971 to a soundtrack of Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who, which ushers in a subversive new decade. And Allam sees Thursday, the seen-it-all-before mentor to the young Endeavour Morse in this Inspector Morse prequel, as a homage to his parents’ hard-pressed, hard-working generation that had been through immense poverty and two world wars. Actors can relish playing detectives, those hawk-like observers of human nature – as thespians themselves have to be. “You could live cheaply in London then.” The grit of that experience seems to have given him the necessary ballast to survive all the celebrity hoopla and to travel below the radar (including on public transport whenever he can).īut it’s the essential decency of the battle-hardened, trilby-wearing detective chief inspector Fred Thursday in ITV’s Endeavour that has finally made Allam a household name and which seems to resonate with him most of all. Now 67, he started his career in the 1970s, after Manchester University, as one of the few men in the radical feminist theatre troupe Monstrous Regiment, named for John Knox’s notorious denunciation of uppity women their office and rehearsal rooms were based in a London squat. Like Thaw and Rickman, he also seems uncomfortable with adulation and sets out to live as normal a life as possible. Like John Thaw and Alan Rickman before him, Allam has become the discerning woman’s crush with that youthful mane of hair and a distinctively silky baritone that makes him recognisable even under a ton of make-up. The consummate chameleon, he has also bedded Gillian Anderson six times a week in one West End play, played a vicious, fork-tongued politician alongside Peter Capaldi’s foul-mouthed spin doctor in The Thick Of It and earned a whole new female following for his womanising author in the film of Posy Simmonds’ Tamara Drewe. The actor has played every villain from Adolf Hitler and Javert – nemesis of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables – to Robert Maxwell in the forthcoming film Tetris. Roger Allam has looked into the heart of darkness many times during his 46-year career.
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