Radio Times – 30th January to 5th February 1999

We Seek him here, there and everywhere. Nick Griffiths, on location in Prague, struggles to pin down the elusive Richard E Grant to ask him how he enjoys playing the swashbuckling Scarlet
Pimpernel.

It seemed a simple assignment – fly to Prague to recount the production of BBC1’s Scarlet Pimpernel and pin down its star Richard E Grant for an interview. At least, it seemed simple on paper. The Pimpernel is, by design,however, damned elusive.

Hungarian Baroness Orczy wrote 15 books featuring the character. As producer Julian Murphy would later put I, “Without being rude, we are not dealing with Janet Austen. These were the airport novels of their day, hugely successful. While the characters and situations she created were wonderful and romantic, no one would say that her plotting or writing were first-rate.”

Her Sir Percy Blakeney, aka the Pimpernel, who saves French aristocrats from the guillotine, appears to be a blithering fool. The foppish behaviour is a cover, though, to deter enemies from twigging his alter ego, so he peppers his speech with “La!”, “Zooks!”, “Lud!” and “Odd’s fish!”.

Grant will be toning down the Pimpernel’s camper traits, just as Leslie Howard did in the definitive 1935 film version, co-starring Merle Oberon as Blakeney’s wife, Marguerite. Grant’s Pimpernel is to be a latter-day James Bond.

At Prague airport we are met by a Czech production driver, Karel. Perhaps he can give us some background. Had he driven Richard E Grant around? “Yes”. What’s he like? Karel doesn’t reply. Perhaps the crew have taken a vow of enigmatic silence to help characterisation.

Prague is the city pictured on jigsaw boxes. Spilt in two by the Moldau river, Gothic towers pop up nonchalantly from its forested hills, the streets remain cobbled and there’s an air of erstwhile decadence. The Pimpernel cast and crew are into their fourth month here. Only three days of filming remain and they are champing to return home. Every second is precious. The first two episodes are in the can and this third (to be shown next week), on which they are working, finds our hero pitted against the Chevalier D’Orly (Suzanne Bertishe). This transvestite villain is based on a real person. Only after his/her death did a cursory autopsy confirm the character to be male.

The location today is a smallish chateau in Mnisek, 40km south of Prague. It was once used by the secret police and reeks of decline. Here, Sir Percy challenges the chevalier to a game of dice, watched by sycophantic French aristos who have failed to embrace the Revolution. Between takes we are led into a side room, when Grant himself appears. After a swift greeting – an expressive grin topped by those icy eyes – the actor is ushered back before his lens.

This remake had been planned a decade ago but was on indefinite hold, says producer Julian Murphy as we wait. When he became involved, he commissioned new scripts that used Baroness Orczy’s characters within new, more sophisticated stories, and gathered funding (£5.5 million) from the BBC and from TV companies abroad.

Richard E Grant was always first choice to play the Pimpernel. “You have two lists,” says Murphy. “One with the people you’d love but don’t expect to get, and a more realistic list. Richard was top of the former. He has a flamboyance and humour as an actor that make him ideally suited tot he role. He also has that tall, aristocratic look, and an intelligence which we wanted for the character.”

The star of Withnail and I, LA Story, even SpiceWorld: The Movie, but never of a TV series, happened to be available and keen. The Czech Republic was chosen because filming would be cheaper than in England or France, plus the country is littered with the requisite baronial castles and chateaux. Equally, the Czech film industry is awash with talent – many of the 80-odd indigenous crew (bolstered by 23 Brits) had worked on Kolya, the Oscar-winning Czech movie.

There are downsides. Besides the personnel, six juggernauts full of 18th-centruy French props had to be shipped in. Costume designer Howard Burden freighted 1,000 costumes to kit out, over three episodes, 4,000 Czech extras. Most would exude the faded opulence of 1798, shortly before Napolean threw out the frilly niceties. For Richard E Grant’s outfits, Burden took the prevalent dandyish British fashion “and pared it down to suit him. He’s very tall and thin and if the costume was too over the top it would have distracted from the character. We tried very hard to make the Pimpernel believable, not the camp dandy.” The greatest disadvantage to filming abroad, though, is the language barrier. “The Czechs seem to use a lot more words,” says Burden. “You ask, ‘What time shall we meet?’ and (via an interpreter) the dialogue goes on for minutes before they say ‘8.30’. You can go for a beer waiting for a punchline.”

On the following, far sunnier morning, the production debunks to another, oddly Oriental-looking, chateau, in Lochovice (dressed to look like Calais). Here, the setting is a steamy washhouse staffed by besmocked women with sweating bosoms. The Pimpernel seeks out Mme Jouvin (Sarah Berger), who has been sheltering a young aristocrat from the chevalier. By the time we arrive, Grant is busy filming.

So production designer Tim Hutchinson explains guillotines. “They were actually quite small, not much over six feet high,” he says. Film-makers built them grander for effect and we have been collectively duped. “The blade itself was only wide enough to accommodate someone’s neck.but we’ve increased it slightly.”

I find a Czech-English dictionary. The Czech for Scarlet Pimpernel is Sarlatovy Bedrnik.

Grant is still filming. Or is he? It turns out he’s not the only one in disguise. “We’ve got a stunt double from England, Paul Jennings. He’s actually fair-haired but in the wig and everything he’s exactly the same body shape as Grant, “says Steve Dent, in charge of stunts and horses. “There was another lad who did some of the riding for him. Height doesn’t matter so much on a horse. Then we had another fella, George, from England – he was good. Richard’s tall and hard to double, but I think we’ve got away with it.”

This is ridiculous. Should we ever pin down the damned elusive Pimpernel for an interview, he might be one of four people!

It’s lunchtime and Grant disappears into his trailer, understandably needing a break. The bath-house was sweltering and the filming laborious. At one stage a wall had to be repainted and people literally watched it dry.

Actress Sarah Berger, who will be “drowned” later in a vat of water, worries about the canteen’s onions giving her wind. One’s dying gasp, we agree, should always come from one’s mouth.

It is this afternoon, in the awesome grounds of Castle Horovice, that Grant finally gets some free time. The opportunity is seized. He sounds initially glum. “Telling your family that you’re going away for four months is grim,” he says. “I missed my daughter’s (Olivia, then aged nine) sports day, her gala, her school exhibition – all those, and you can’t really explain that to a child. She did say to me last week, ‘Why can’t they just fire you?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I know what you mean.'”

Prague, he says, cheering somewhat, is gorgeous. In his first week he attended the opera, the ballet and the theatre, followed the Franz Kafka trail, visited the Jewish cemetery and walked the medieval Charles Bridge.

These days “I go out to eat every night. Otherwise you’re going back to a hotel room and it feels like an incarceration of sorts, luxurious though it may be.”

Happily, he has relished the role. (Happily because he’s contracted for another series, should the occasion arise.) “It’s a fantastic part. I get to save people from being beheaded, kill baddies, be heroic, be duplicitous. Sir Percy is like an 18th-century Batman or Clark Kent, with a beautiful wife. You ride horses, sword-fight” It’s his bag, really: the flailing gestures and practised buffoonery of Sir Percy, then the furtive, intense pacing of the Pimpernel, capped with ostentatious displays of bravado. Only yesterday’s dice game cause him concern. “I write numbers, but not words, down back to front. I was hopeless at maths and tortured at school for that. So five (scripts) pages of throwing dice and having to get numbers and words in the right order, I found far harder than almost anything. If they had changed a number or word, my brain would have combusted.” With that, he’s called away for the scene that will close the series: a triumphant kiss with wife Marguerite.

The following October, while promoting his novel at the Cheltenham Literacy Festival, Grant is asked about The Scarlet Pimpernel. He recalls how, on returning to England, he and the crew knelt and gratefully kissed the airport tarmac.

If anyone wants to buy the making of the book, it’s £9.99 full price. From: Scarlet Pimpernel Book Offer, JEM House, Little Mead, Cranleigh, GU6 8TT. Or call, Tel: 01483 204488. Cheques made payable to: “RT Offers”.

You can also get it for the same price from book stores though.