The Scarecrow and the Rook
- Publication: Daily Express
- Date: 1980-01-25
- Author: Jean Rook
- Page: 15
- Language: English
JEAN ROOK talking to WORZEL GUMMIDGE
No cracks please, that's me
HIS EYES are close set as an old potato's. His furrowed face is ploughed deep, and the parsnip nose sprouts above a half melon mouth.
He's thin as a hay rake, with a stack of silver hair, and looks so like a 6ft 2in dandelion clock you hold your breath, for fear of scattering him all over the carpet.
Even before the make-up department starts slinging mud at him, Jon Pertwee is Worzel Gummidge. A living mangle. A talking turnip Scraped and mashed, you could eat him for dinner.
Pathetic
At 60, Mr Pertwee used to be just a well-rooted character actor. Never huge or showy, even as Dr Who." No gold medals. But, year in year out, always in steady, earthy work,
Now he has blossomed into a cult figure. His Sunday teatime TV series about the living Scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, is peak viewing.
Gummidge is ever greedy, petulant. loving, pathetic. sulky, cunning, brainless, disappointed, ever hopeful man of straw. The Crow Man, who breathed life into his twigs, is God. All life is there. And we're all twined round the telly, sucking it up like the dew.
For Pertwee, suddenly on top of a heap of fan-mail, Worzel Gummidge is the blooming of a seed he planted 30 years ago. And has secretly been trying to rear in the dark ever since.
"You won't remember me in the post-war radio show, Waterlogged Spa'?" wheedled and ogled me, like Worzel having a go at Aunnt Sally, "Yes, I do." I said, feeling like an immemorial elm.
Then you'll remember the postman whose catch-phrase was: 'What's it phrase matter what you do. m'dear, So long as you tear 'em up." I've been searching for a Spin off from him since 1947. Worzel's it."
Walked
The postman's and Worzel's voice was nicked by Pertwee, as a child, from a real Devonshire village postman.
"He was the only man who must have walked three times round the world in gum boots," he said.
"Ours was the last house on his round, at the top of a steep hill, and since he'd stopped for sustinence every five minutes before he reached us, he was too full of serumpy to get up it."
"We could hear him muttering: 'bugger it, I be'nt going up there, they buggers I have to come down for un' as he dropped about 50 letters in a cow That damned man's done it again! my father used to yell, and my brother Michael (Pertwee the playwright), and I would dash down the hill. We got a penny each for picking the post out of the cow muck.
Later the postman got a bike. But his eyebrows were 80 bushy that, every time he leaned forward at 45 degrees for a shot at our hill. we reckon he got them tangled in the spokes.
The way he spoke was pure Mummerzet-sort of Dev-Corn-Dors-Som-Wilts and I've loved doing it since I was a kid. Nobody from the West Country's written in to complain about Worzel's dialect, so it must be all right."
Mr Pertwee lives in, among, and sometimes under hoard 1 piles of antique pictures and books in a huge converted stable near Hammersmith Bridge.
In the scrubbed, mudless flesh, his own voice is a terrible shock. You'd hoped for Worzeleeze, and that he'd sound like mashed swede in clotted cream. When he speaks in his highly polished Pertweeze, it hits you in the ear like a silver salver.
The son of the famous 'thirties author, Roland Pertwee. his Huguenot family name is Perthuis de Laillavault.
"Just the name for a variety act, isn't it?" he said. "Imagine it ... 'here he comes, folks, your Own Happy Perthius de Laillavault. So we all changed to Pertwee. I get Peewit or Pee Wee, and a New York stagedoorman on e told me seriously, There's an urgent message for you, Mr Putrid '."
Mr Pertwee waded through RADA, the Navy, rep, variety, 18 years of radio's "The Navy Lark," and quite a heap of to reach this manure fertile season in his career.
"RADA said I was thoroughly incompetent with no future. I was chucked out of rep for playing the fool -one time when Lord Peter Wimsey was showing them how it was done by cracking a chap's skull with a swinging plant pot, I'd raised the rope before the show, and the plant pot missed by a mile and swung through a window.
Thumped
"The who only thought I was any good was Noël Coward, but I never got on with the Coward set. I didn't get on well with my father, but thank God he was very straight-all his friends were heterosexual barristers.
"So the only time I was approached by a man-he was the producer I thumped him and got thrown out of the company."
Mr Pertwee's first marriage to Jean ("Upstairs, Downstairs") Marsh lasted only a year- "a mistake, but nobody's fault." His second, to Ingeborg, the daughter of a German politician-he fell heavily for her on a skiing holiday-took months to arrange.
"I'd nothing going for me," said Mr Pertwee. "First, I was The Enemy, second, I was separated but still married to Jean, third, I was old enough to be Inge's father, fourth, I was actor, and I can't remember the fifth objection, but there was one. In the end, I grew to love her family more than I ever loved my own."
They've now been married and have years, daughter Daniel, 17, and Sean, their 14-year-old son, a budding actor who speaks fluent Worzeleeze and plans to "keep the family name going on telly."
At 43, Ingeborg still looks as fresh as a newly-opened eidelweiss. How does react to Worzel Gummidge. and does the muck come off on her chair covers ?
"Jon swears he doesn't bring Worzel home, but he does," she said. "He's got very shifty and wheedling lately, he sidles up and gets round me. I fall for it. too I think the series is terribly sad inparts-I cry a lot so when he comes home at weekends I rush round him with the tea and cakes.
I like Worzel a lot better than Dr Who. You couldn't make love to Dr Who, could you? He was so weird, even I couldn't touch him.
Frightened
Pertwee enjoyed his five years in the Tardis, because Dr Who was my first chance to be myself. I'd always fancied myself as one of those tall, silverhaired, very British Wilfred Hyde White types who crack American movies, but I never made it.
"I was proud of my work on Who. keeping him down to earth. I made the Daleks cross Westminster Bridge. I've this theory that people get a big buzz from being frightened in their own surroundings.
"There's nothing more alarming than seeing something big and slimey down the Underground, of finding a Yetti sitting on your loo in Tooting Bec.
"Doctor Who was my only big step out of a character part. The only time I hadn't been in virtual disguise, or on radio where nobody could see me. What I call hiding under my green umbrella." Did he mind creeping back under Worzel Gummidge's battered brolly? "I love it," he said. "It's my own child, that part. a bit of me I've always wanted to bring out."
Getting Worzel off, and out of the ground was a wrench. Several TV companies wrinkled their noses at this 1930 tale of an animated turnip on a stick. Southern TV took Pertwee on, but felt he could be building his hopes on straw.
Now that his sensational performance has film companies flocking round like crows, everyone want to jump on the hay waggon. "Love or hate him, I knew Worzel would do something to viewers," Pertwee said.
Even he didn't realise the size to which his scarecrow would grow. Or what he'd have to go through-fire, water, corn, pig swill and compost to ripen the part.
"I spend a lot of time in a caravan in the middle of a field near Winchester, but it's centrally heated in winter, and I've got my typewriter and tapes."
Changed
Physically how painful is the part? "Worzel's nose isn't so bad. I've got a head start with my own-what the family calls the Pertwee Beezer-but the pointed false bit has to be changed a lot. It fills up with water.
"The corn husk eyebrows are rubber backed and quite comfy, and I'm getting good with the twig hands. They fit like gloves, and you can even smoke a cigarette so long as you don't set fire to your straw wrists.
"Usually I don't alter a performance I much if haven't got it by the third go, I never will but Worzel does naturally evolve."
Mr Pertwee admits to being emotionally twined with the primeval. cult figure which attracts as many adult corn and sun worshippers as it does child viewers.
"In the scene where the Crow Man explains to the poor straw creature without a brain why his marriage to a woman-size wooden doll won't work, Geoffrey Baildon and I just stood. looking at each other, with the tears washing the mud off our faces," he said. "The part does grow on you."
Like bindweed ? And isn't there a danger of becoming too entangled ? And eventually buried?
What if there is?" said Mr Pertwee, turning into a turnip and snapping at me like a twig. "Tis a good part, m'dear, and, at my age I'll be bumswizzled if I can think of what more I could possibly want."
I left. Any minute, he was going to put on his Scaring Head and start stamping at the rooks.
Caption: Well I'll be bumswizzled! Can this be wrinkled Worzel marrying his Aunt Sally?
Disclaimer: These citations are created on-the-fly using primitive parsing techniques. You should double-check all citations. Send feedback to whovian@cuttingsarchive.org
- APA 6th ed.: Rook, Jean (1980-01-25). The Scarecrow and the Rook. Daily Express p. 15.
- MLA 7th ed.: Rook, Jean. "The Scarecrow and the Rook." Daily Express [add city] 1980-01-25, 15. Print.
- Chicago 15th ed.: Rook, Jean. "The Scarecrow and the Rook." Daily Express, edition, sec., 1980-01-25
- Turabian: Rook, Jean. "The Scarecrow and the Rook." Daily Express, 1980-01-25, section, 15 edition.
- Wikipedia (this article): <ref>{{cite news| title=The Scarecrow and the Rook | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/The_Scarecrow_and_the_Rook | work=Daily Express | pages=15 | date=1980-01-25 | via=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=29 March 2025 }}</ref>
- Wikipedia (this page): <ref>{{cite web | title=The Scarecrow and the Rook | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/The_Scarecrow_and_the_Rook | work=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=29 March 2025}}</ref>
