Articles/Interviews

Though it might be hard to credit these days, Oliver Reed was once England's great white hope, the most promising actor of his generation, In the best of his '60s films (The Shuttered Room, Oliver! and Women In Love), he offered a scowling magnificence that marked him out as a talent likely to endure and prosper.

Somewhere along the line though, it all went awry and Oliver Reed the esteemed actor slowly metamorphosed into Ollie the notorious hellraiser. Through the 70s and '80s, his film career was a series of dropped catches. During this period, he was involved in more turkeys than you could chase out of a packed farmyard. As his professional reputation staggered downhill, his hellraising image grew to monstrous proportions. By the mid-'80s, Ollie was more famous for his drinking exploits and his uproarious appearances on chat shows where he could invariably be found effing and blinding whilst removing his trousers.

On January 28,1991, when the Gulf War was in full swing, he was invited to appear on Channel 4's late night discussion show, After Dark, to address the question "do men need to be violent?". Rising to the challenge, Ollie gave a performance that put all his previous public indiscretions firmly in the shade.

The evening started ominously enough when, prior to the show going on the air, Ollie burst into the dressing room of a fellow guest, writer Neil Lyndon, and challenged him to a fist-fight. Apparently, he was under the impression that Lyndon was a member of the SAS. When Lyndon finally convinced him otherwise, Ollie responded by flushing his own head in the lavatory bowl.

From the outset of the show itself, it was clear that Ollie was in feisty form, opening the discussion with the immortal line: "I'll put my plonker on the table if you don't give me my mushy peas." Around the table, the other guests were quickly reduced to quivering jellies. Slumped on the sofa, his gargantuan belly bulging through his shirt buttons, Ollie cradled his half-pint glass of wine and left the other guests open-mouthed as he endeavoured to make Georgie Best on Wogan look like a vicar's tea party. Offered the opportunity to discuss male violence towards the fairer sex, he roared: "No bullshit. It's all down to whether she wants to get shafted." When asked for his insights into the female psychology, he replied, "A woman will never ever forgive a man if he fucks her."

The night was still young and Ollie was only just warming up. When not interrupting the guests with four-letter outbursts that bordered on the surreal, he could be found lurching drunkenly towards the studio drinks trolley before returning with an armful of bottles. While presenter Helena Kennedy desperately attempted to maintain control, Ollie's state of mind grew more and more turbulent. After needling sociologist Elliot Leyton for some minutes, Ollie leaned forward and asked him, "Are you a Jew by any chance?" When Leyton politely replied that he was not, Ollie scowled, "Well, you sound Jewish," drawing outraged gasps from around the table.

Most of Ollie's bile was reserved for Kate Millet, the human juggernaut responsible for the groundbreaking feminist text, Sexual Politics. Insisting on referring to her as 'Big Tits' at every available opportunity, he patted her hand in a deliberately provocative manner and continuously interrupted her arguments with a seemingly random string of four-letter words.

One moustachioed guest tried to parry Ollie's challenge to look him eye to eye by venturing "tash to tash, eh, Ollie?" Ollie's reply was brief: "cunt to cunt more like."

Around 1.30am, the plug was temporarily pulled in an attempt to cool things down. The programme was replaced by a short documentary film about the coal industry. Twenty minutes later we were back in the thick of the action and, clearly, the interlude had done little to pacify Ollie. Continuing to knock back the plonk at a startling pace, his behaviour grew more and more erratic, suggesting that his piece de resistance was close at hand. With some difficulty, he clambered off the sofa and announced that he was off to empty his over-full bladder. On his return, he clumsily vaulted over the sofa, held Millet's face in both hands and planted a slobbering kiss on her cheek. The comic possibilities of the moment were somewhat tempered by the pathos of her reaction. Throwing her arms up in horror, she turned helplessly to Helena Kennedy, pleading, "Is this the sort of thing you want to visit upon someone you've invited on your programme?" Then, close to tears, she turned to Ollie and said, "You are an awful bully and I think you should go." With the air of a schoolboy caught with a packet of Woodbines behind the bike-shed, he trailed away into the darkness surrounding the set and promptly collapsed.

In the aftermath of the show, Channel 4 received a record number of complaints and the tabloids had a field day. True to form, Ollie himself was unrepentant. "It was just a bunch of bloody idiots making a lot of fuss because I kissed an ugly old bat," he said.

More recently, he has claimed that his After Dark performance, along with his bizarre appearance on The Word (complete with a couple of rare outings for the C-word), was nothing more than a contrived, headline-grabbing stunt. "If you'd smelt my breath afterwards," he has said about the former, "you'd have known I wasn't really drunk - I knew exactly what I was doing." Whatever the truth of the matter, Ollie's After Dark exploits would ensure that he would always be remembered for something more than shagging Glenda Jackson in the movies.