Even after half a century in the limelight, the actor can still surprise. Who’d have guessed she went clubbing with Freddie Mercury? Or that she watched Blair and Brown strike their fateful deal at Granita?
A quick run-through of some of the 20th-century icons that Su Pollard has met. Paul McCartney? “Absolutely fabulous,” Pollard says. “He was sat leaning against a wall, next to Linda.” She does a great impression of McCartney’s accent. “‘Hey Su, how are you? Love the show. Can I have your autograph? For my mother.’” The show was, of course, the hugely successful BBC sitcom Hi-de-Hi!, set on an Essex holiday camp and for which Pollard, playing chalet maid Peggy, will for ever be best known.
Queen Elizabeth, after a Royal Variety Performance? “She was absolutely marvellous. What struck me – I’ve always said this – was her skin. I was drawn to her skin. It was all peachified. And beautiful smile, her own teeth. Very regal, very straight-backed, not very tall, and quite a voluptuous bosom.”
Diana, Princess of Wales, did a little tap-dance with Pollard at a function. “I found her very charming. Although she was classed as quite shy, I don’t think she was. She was very open to meeting people, but perhaps it was a slow burn with her.”
At a club in Earl’s Court in London, Pollard was “having it large”, she says, when a man approached her and asked if he could join in. “I went: ‘Stop! It’s never you, is it?’” It was – Queen singer Freddie Mercury. She does an impression of him too, overbite protruding. “He went: ‘I could be anybody, dear.’ His teeth were fantastic. Another wonderful smile. His friend took a picture of us.”
At various Downing Street functions, Pollard met Margaret Thatcher – “marvellous, but it was very fleeting” – and Theresa May. “She went: ‘Hi de hi.’ I said: ‘Ho de ho.’ She was fabulous – I liked her. She was very warm. Getting on with the job the best she could.” Tony Blair? Gordon Brown? No, she says. “But I did see Tony and Gordon in … what’s that lovely restaurant?” Might it have been Granita? (Blair was a near-neighbour at the time in north London.) Pollard looks astonished. “That’s it! How do you know that?”
Granita was, you may remember, the venue of the 1994 pact, where Brown agreed Blair would run for the Labour leadership. “That’s the first I’ve heard of that,” says Pollard. “God, I feel a shiver. That’s what they were talking about!” I mean, we don’t know that’s what they were discussing at that precise moment, but let’s go with it. “I gawked at them through the window and waved.”
Much has been written about that fateful night, and to it we can perhaps now add the mental image of Pollard – wearing, I like to think, bright owlish glasses, maybe a feather boa, and manic grin – excitedly waving at the two serious men, history in their hands, through the window. “They just kind of went” – she gives a harassed smile – “and then hurried back to talking. I bet they thought: ‘It’s that Hi-de-Hi! person.’”
We meet in London at the Club for Acts and Actors, the social and support organisation of which Pollard is president, in a room surrounded by old portraits of stars and posters for shows. Pollard, 76, has just written her memoir, Fully Charged, hoofing through her 52-year career, which has spanned theatre, musicals and TV. She is such funny company, and her book – which one can’t help reading in her throaty Nottingham accent – has some gems. On changing her name from Sue to Su: “I can’t prove it, but I maintain that losing that vowel gave me some kind of momentum.” And on spotting a pop superstar, not known for his sense of humour, at the infamous 1987 It’s a Royal Knockout TV event, which she co-hosted: “I saw a sight I never expected to witness – Cliff Richard dressed as a leek.”
It was “lovely”, she says, to write the book (with her friend and collaborator Paul Boyd), “because it reminded me, and gave me time to reflect, going: ‘God, that was funny.’ Then it makes you think, ‘I’ve had far more ups than downs’, and that’s what you’ve got to be in life, I think – positive.”
It has been an extraordinary life. Pollard grew up in Nottingham, an only child until she was eight. Her parents both worked in a cigarette factory, but Pollard discovered an interest in the stage while taking part in her school nativity. She was playing an “assistant” angel and when she stood to deliver her lines, on a cardboard box that had been taped together, she fell through it. The audience laughed and Pollard was hooked. When she was about 14, writing a school essay about where she hoped to be in 10 years, “I wrote: ‘I see myself at the Palladium.’ And funnily enough, I was.”
What did her parents make of her? She laughs and does an impression of her mother, Hilda (she started calling her by her name as a teenager, “because I was a hippy” and she thought her mother deserved more than to be identified only as “Mum”). “Su, if you don’t mind, do you think you could walk behind me?”
She thinks she was wearing a full-length fur coat that day, but it could have been any number of outlandish outfits. Clothes had become her costume, and gave her a sense of permission to be bold, visible and fun (today she’s wearing a black sequined dress, sparkly red waistcoat, maroon specs, beads and a portrait of Frida Kahlo around her neck, with a pair of miniature Ferrero Rocher chocolate packets for earrings). “I was creating my own style, albeit I looked like a morris dancer at one point because I had scarves round my knees and ankles. No wonder my poor mother …” She laughs. “It was fabulous. What I’m saying is, just be yourself in life.”
Sometimes people would stare at her so hard and so long they’d walk into a lamp-post. People would comment but it never bothered her. “You think: ‘Why are you so pathetically feeble-minded? Just because you’ve seen something different.’ And then you think: ‘Oh, it’s not their fault – forget it.’” Her headteacher reprimanded her for wearing her school coat “like an opera cape” but also, recognising her “theatrical leanings”, as Pollard puts it, introduced her to a friend who ran the local amateur dramatic group.
Pollard was off – in am-dram roles, and performing in local working men’s clubs. In 1974, she appeared on the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks, but came second to a “singing” jack russell (she alleges the owner would insert a finger into its bottom to make it howl on cue). “I’ve never liked jack russells ever since,” she says with a laugh. “I cross the road to avoid them.”
