Celebrity Interview – Pam Ayres
by Steve Orme
“…the loss of control was heartbreaking. I was very naïve. I was signed up to London agents and they put me on stage in great big theatres for which I was ill-equipped.”
She’s been described as a “poet for the people” with a wicked sense of humour who deals with subjects not normally thought to be worthy of poetry. Now, 50 years after winning the television talent show Opportunity Knocks, Pam Ayres is on the road with her show Doggedly Onward in which she presents poems and anecdotes from her life.
Speaking to me from her home in Gloucestershire, Pam is totally forthright and open about her fascinating career. She explains the downside of fame, how she never set out to be a poet and the surreal experience of playing Glastonbury, “the largest greenfield music and performing arts festival in the world”.
She confessed that although Opportunity Knocks was “fantastic”, it was also a nightmare.
“At the age of 28 I suddenly started earning money. I was able to buy a house and it cost £11,500. The idea of me ever having a house was ludicrous.”
She stretches out that last word to give it emphasis. “It was extraordinary. But the loss of control was heartbreaking. I was very naïve. I was signed up to London agents and they put me on stage in great big theatres for which I was ill-equipped.
“I was given a television series which I shouldn’t have touched with a barge pole because I didn’t have the ability to produce enormous amounts of material. They brought in all these tired old scriptwriters to write the series for me and I hated it.
“On the one hand I had money. I was able to help my family and I bought myself a house and a car. It was amazing. But as a writer and as somebody who had done so well on my own, although in a small way, it was heartbreaking really.”
The turning point for Pam came when she met a theatre producer, Dudley Russell. He not only enabled Pam to take back control of her work, he became her husband and they’ve been together for more than 40 years.
Pam describes herself as a “village girl” who just wanted to succeed. After Opportunity Knocks “you sign everything they give you to sign and I didn’t have any legal advice.
“I’m not giving you a hard-luck story. Everyone was patting me on the back and saying ‘you’ve made it’. Yet I lost control of my copyright, everything I’d written, everything I was going to write.
“Dudley was lovely. He’s from my part of the world and he was savvy. He knew his way around the business. He looked at the various things I’d signed and took me off to a QC for legal advice. I got my copyright back at huge cost.
“If it hadn’t been for my husband I would have just floundered endlessly. It was awful. But there wasn’t much protection for people on Opportunity Knocks – no legal advice or anything. I hope it’s not the case nowadays.”
Pam says her television debut seems a lifetime ago because since then she’s had children and grandchildren. But she can still recall how she felt.
“I can remember how scared I was. I can remember the talcum powder smell of the dressing room at Thames Television, and the fact that it was a proper dressing room with lights around the mirror and it just seemed so glamorous.”
She points out that the purpose of going on Opportunity Knocks was to find out whether her act would appeal to a wider audience.
“I’d found that reciting my poems which I’d written in my own style had made people laugh locally. I wanted to see if it would work on a larger canvas. It suddenly got enormous.”
Pamela Ayres was born on 14th March 1947 at Stanford-in-the-Vale, Berkshire. She was the youngest of six children.
She left school at 15 and got a job as a secretary. She couldn’t stand it, so she joined the Women’s Royal Air Force. A few years later she started reciting her poems in her rural Berkshire accent in folk clubs. But she admits she was never drawn to poetry.
“I was interested in writing from the time I was able to write at school. I loved writing stories because of the power. You can invent people, you can make them do things – you can make them be horrible, you can make them fall in love. I adored it.”
She joined the likes of Billy Connolly, Max Boyce and Jasper Carrott who were working at that time in folk clubs: “I’d written a few poems that I hoped would make people laugh and they did. They were falling about laughing. But I never set out to be a poet. I’m certainly not knowledgeable about poetry. I look at my stuff more as comedy that rhymes.”
You may remember one of Pam’s more popular poems, Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth. She says that will probably be carved on her gravestone.
Another favourite is They Should Have Asked My Husband – about a man who knows absolutely everything – and she’s currently working on one called The Bank Of Mum And Dad.
“I try to write about things that people will recognise. I don’t want to write about anything too rarified. I like to write about ordinary things but come at them from a surprising angle.”
Pam accepts she was a trailblazer because the only person doing performance poetry when she came on the scene was Cyril Fletcher.
“He used to sit in an armchair and recite what he called his odd odes. There certainly weren’t any women doing it but now there’s a whole range of good women who are performance poets.”
Pam’s popularity has continued and she is one of the few authors who has had books in the Sunday Times bestseller charts in almost every decade since the 1970s.
But she’s not just a trailblazer in comedy. She’s also written a series of children’s books which started in 2018 with The Last Hedgehog.
“It’s a long poem beautifully illustrated. The hedgehog was the last one because nobody had checked bonfires on Bonfire Night to make sure there weren’t any hedgehogs there.
“As a result of that I was contacted by Macmillan Children’s Books who asked me if I would write a series of four books about our wildlife in its naked habitat. That was just up my street.”
Pam wrote books about an otter, a hare, a barn owl and a dormouse. “They’re nice little stories and they rhyme. People seem to like the books which is great.”
Pam who used to have a smallholding loves animals. She is patron of an animal shelter near her home and has a dog which she took in after it was dumped as a 16-week-old puppy.
Pam is now writing a musical with Oscar-nominated composer George Fenton. It’s an old-style revue which has already gone down well.
“George has written the most wonderful music to my words and we did three performances at the end of last year. People really seemed to like it.
“It was thrilling for me because usually I’m on stage on my own and I’m talking for two hours. The success of the evening is entirely on my shoulders. But to be part of a team and have three professional singers and four or five musicians – that was magical, one of the high spots of my career.”
As a result of that she has started to learn how to play the piano: “It seemed arrogant to try to write a musical when you have no grasp of music. You want to hear me play Bobby Shafto – it’s pretty primitive stuff!”
Pam entertained Queen Elizabeth II three times and was appointed an MBE for services to literature and entertainment in the Queens’ Birthday Honours in 2004.
Pam has also numerous television appearances to her name. In 2022 she interviewed HRH The Prince of Wales before he became king about their shared love of wildlife and natural history for her Channel 5 series The Cotswolds and Beyond.
On radio she had her own show on Radio 4, used to be a regular on the panel game Just A Minute and she’s one of a small number of people who’ve appeared twice on Desert Island Discs.
She has no more radio or television lined up because writing and performing are her first loves: “Hearing an audience laugh is your reward. I realise how lucky I am that I just walk out on stage and basically chat to the audience for a couple of hours and then go home. It’s that simple. So I’m very lucky. That’s what I love doing and always have.”
Pam never wanted to go to Glastonbury – “you only ever see the mud and the squalor on the telly” but she was delighted to be asked to play there twice, the last time in 2022 when she was 75.
“It was quite difficult because it’s a very noisy environment and you’re in a marquee. You’ve got to keep your concentration going but it’s wonderful. I had good audiences, with everybody up on their feet at the end. I’ve been very well received at Glastonbury but I couldn’t say it’s as easy as talking in a quiet theatre when everybody is in the dark!”
Finally, the question everyone wants answered: has she still got all her own teeth?
“I had an abscess under one of my back teeth and I had it extracted. So I’ve got all me own teeth apart from one which luckily is at the back so people can’t see it and it hasn’t harmed my radiant smile!”
She laughs as she adds: “They’re not in bad nick considering my advanced age.”
Great to see that Pam Ayres still has her sense of humour after all these years. She’s taken the knocks that show business has thrown at her and become an all-round entertainer. If she’s good enough for the Royal Family, she should be good enough for anyone.
Pam Ayes – Doggedly Onward will be at Nottingham Playhouse on Thursday 24th April
