The actor and comedian, the late Stanley Baxter, is hailed as a “legendary” and “groundbreaking” entertainer “years ahead of his time” in a landmark BBC Scotland documentary celebrating his life, to be screened on Hogmanay.
The Glasgow-born actor, comedian and impressionist became a star of stage and screen, with a list of credits from leading man in romantic movies to playing the Dame in pantomimes.
He became one of the UK’s biggest stars in the 1970s and 80s when his TV shows attracted audiences of millions for his hilarious sketches and impersonations of famous people including the Queen.
But behind the scenes Baxter kept his private life secret, saying one “should not know too much about the man behind the mask”.
Being Stanley Baxter offers an “intimate portrait of a beloved television star” who died on December 11 aged 99, just a few months before he would have celebrated his centenary in May.
The hour-long documentary draws on rare archive footage and interviews with showbiz figures he inspired as well as previously unheard recordings by Baxter for the 2020 authorised biography in which he finally came out as gay at the age of 94.
Among those who appear in the tribute is Baxter’s sister Alice Dale, 95, who reveals how he discovered his unique talents as a child growing up in Glasgow’s leafy Kelvinside.
She says: “I always remember him doing voices. We both developed a terrific love of cinema. He liked the ones with characters like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and people like that, and he’d come home and sometimes mum would say ‘so what did you see’, and he would start doing the characters.
“It was entirely mum’s doing that Stanley was performing from the age of seven. She saw he had an ability that was unusual for a child of his age and she fed it.
“She taught him how to impersonate well known characters that were on the go in those days.
“I think mum taught him, whatever he did, to do it right. She would watch him rehearsing and say ‘no no no, don’t do that, do it this way’.”
She added: “I think the people he really adored were his audiences. I think he saw them as his friends, the minute he got a laugh that was it, he loved them.”
Elaine C Smith tells the programme: “I first came across Stanley Baxter in our living room in Newarthill in Lanarkshire, intrigued at my mother laughing so much. It was special.”
She adds: “Within theatre he had this legendary status. the Dame is the person that comes out and says come on with me, we’re going to have a good time.”
Smith’s fellow Two Doors Down star Alex Norton says: “Everybody talked about the Stanley Baxter Show, there was nothing like it.
“Stanley was the one that stood out head and shoulders above everybody. His shows were consistently funny, consistently inventive.
“How would I describe Stanley Baxter? ‘Lightning in a bottle’. It’s one thing being talented but the real skill is knowing what to do with it.”
TV executive Michael Grade, who was Director of Programmes for LWT from 1977-81, claims Baxter’s TV shows, in which he often played every character in a sketch, were groundbreaking.
He says: “Before I was in television I remember seeing this black and white sketch show from Scotland with this guy called Stanley Baxter and I became a massive fan because it was not like anything else on television, something you’d never seen before.
“Comedy on television at that time – variety and the comedians – it was music hall jokes translated to television. This was completely groundbreaking. He was making comedy sketches out of real people and impersonating people. He was years ahead of his time. He broke the mold.”
Lord Grade added: “There’s no question that Stanely and his production team pioneered how to use the technology in a way that nobody else had done, to create this magic of Stanley playing every character in a scene.
“In the end, all the trickery, all the cleverness, doesn’t come to anything if the sketch isn’t funny. The audience don’t sit at home and say ‘it wasn’t very funny but it was brilliant how they did it’. And he was very funny in a way that nobody else is today.”
The documentary also reflects the complex aspects of Baxter’s long and distinguished life as well as celebrating his comedic genius.
The entertainer married Scots actress Moira Robertson when he was 26 years old, at a time when it was illegal to be gay in the UK. He told her he was gay, which she accepted.
Alice says: “Stanley met Moira Robertson when he was in the Citizen’s Theatre and they were both acting together. You couldn’t dislike Moira, she was such a sweet person.
“Moira wanted to marry Stanley from the minute she met him I think. She said ‘I don’t care, I want to be with you’.
“Being gay at that time he perhaps felt it gave him some stability as it were, but he also was genuinely fond of her, as all gay men who marry think, ‘well nobody will know I’m gay now.”
Just as his star was rising with leading film and television roles, he was arrested in 1962, on a cottaging charge after visiting a public lavatory frequented by the gay community.
Baxter feared his career was over as he spent nearly three months in and out of court until he was finally acquitted. No crime had been committed.
In a recording, Baxter recalls: “I went in and there was nobody there. What I didn’t know was that somebody had been arrested for being at it in the public lavatory and every gay in the area knew to stay away from it except me.
“Two detectives rushed in with a torch and started grabbing me. I said ‘what are you doing’? – ‘You’re under arrest’ and I said to the men ‘is this a homosexual charge because there’s nothing homosexual about me’.”
He added: “I remember going around Piccadilly Circus with those boards out ‘TV star on morals charge’.”
Baxter’s TV co-star Amanda Barrie tells the programme: “He had success on television and on stage and he was in films, and all that success was coming to its head and that’s when he got arrested, which could have just blown everything away like that.
“I don’t think anybody realises in this day and age what it was like at that time for people. It was as if you were some diseased creature, some lower than the low. Men did live in terror.”
The episode made Baxter even more protective of his privacy and, after playing hundreds of different characters in his entertainment career, the documentary reveals he often didn’t know how to be himself.
Fellow Scots TV impressionist Rory Bremner says: “There’s a cliche about impressionists, that like most cliches of course happens to be true, that you enjoy being other people and the hardest thing for an impressionist is to be yourself.
“So he loved being other characters because it gave him a freedom and it gave him a joy which maybe he didn’t have in his own life being Stanley Baxter.”
* Being Stanley Baxter is on BBC Scotland, on 31 December at 10pm.
