I grew up surrounded by Dad’s pictures on our walls at home and he influenced me profoundly. We might have failed to bond over Doncaster Rovers and DIY, but we shared a real love of art and he did everything to encourage my passion, buying me an easel, paints and art books. I would sit for hours alone in my bedroom with my sketchbook, usually drawing women’s faces – whoever was famous and fabulous at the time, be it Joan Collins as Alexis in Dynasty, Lady Di, Barbra Streisand or Madonna.
At the age of eight I won a Blue Peter competition with one of these paintings, and Dad was bursting with pride when I had to go on the show to collect my badge from Peter Purves. (This wasn’t my first taste of TV fame. That was on Calendar News, our local teatime bulletin. The Queen had come up to Doncaster for the Silver Jubilee and as the camera panned over the crowd it stopped on a group of little kids waving flags and there was me in the middle, grinning like an idiot. I remember everyone making a fuss – ‘Ooh, our Gary’s on telly!’ – and I remember how good it felt …)
To this day, Dad is a massive inspiration to me. He’s a real Mr Nice Guy: sensitive, kind and very laidback. He rarely loses his temper or raises his voice. Without a doubt, it’s Mum who rules the roost. She’s a calm, quiet, almost shy person most of the time, but boy can she lose her temper quickly – and God help you when she does. Although discipline was usually of the verbal variety in the Cockerill household, I remember her grabbing a tea towel and giving my bum a good slap on more than a few occasions when I was growing up.
I once brought our class stick insects home from school and hid them in my bedroom, as I knew Mum wouldn’t be keen on having a tank full of creepy-crawlies in her pristine house. Well, I can’t have secured the lid properly and while I was at school they escaped all over the house and got busy breeding in the comfort of our soft furnishings. We were still picking stick insects out of the curtains weeks later; I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from the ear-bashing I got from Mum for that particular little episode.
If I get my artistic talent from Dad, I get my determination and strength from Mum – and also my addictive personality. She smoked like a trooper when I was little – despite the heart attack – eventually quitting when I was in primary school. But she quickly found something else to replace her nicotine addiction …
When I was nine, my family went on our first holiday abroad: two blissful, sun-soaked weeks in the South of France. We stayed in a campsite just outside Antibes and went on a coach trip to Monte Carlo for the day, visiting the famous casinos and drinking ice-cold citron pressé with little jugs of sugar syrup in the lobby of the famous Hotel de Paris.
‘One day I’m going to come back and stay here,’ I told my parents. For a little boy fascinated with glitz, glamour and fairytale it was heaven on earth.
Mum, too, was very taken with the French lifestyle – especially their love of wine. At this time in the late Seventies us Brits hadn’t yet taken to vino in the same way as our Gallic neighbours, and the French habit of sharing a bottle over the evening meal proved a revelation for Mum and was one she kept up with enthusiasm long after our holiday tans had faded. She started making her own wine with kits from Argos and very soon was polishing off a couple of bottles of Chateau de Cockerill every single night.
After the first glass she’d be nicely merry, but as the evening wore on and the bottle emptied, her personality would suddenly change. I know she would be horrified at the suggestion that she had a drink problem; after all, she never drank during the day, she didn’t touch hard spirits and she never went boozing down the pub. But even today, Mum can’t leave a bottle unfinished. So whereas most kids grow up thinking of alcohol as something exciting and glamorous, to me it was the stuff that turned my mother into a totally different person – someone who I didn’t want to be around. As a result of her drinking, I’ve been a lightweight all my life.
Mum never used to wear much make-up. Just a touch of lipstick, a bit of rouge and that would be it; not even any mascara. Her two sisters, however, were a very different story. While Mum was the academic one, my Auntie Maureen – or Mo – and Auntie Janice were beauty queens in their youth and even today, Janice treats every day like it’s the grand finals of Miss Doncaster. They wouldn’t be seen dead without full-on make-up and perfectly styled hair and were always disappearing off to the plastic surgeon for sneaky nips and tucks. The pair of them were having Botox before anyone else had even heard of it. I thought they were impossibly glamorous. Auntie Janice wouldn’t think twice about spending a fortune on a designer outfit, whereas Auntie Mo might wear a six-quid outfit from down Doncaster market but, honest to God, she would work it like it was Chanel couture.
Mo was known as The Big Red because of her shock of dyed scarlet hair, fiery temperament and huge boobs. Her signature look was orange-toned lipstick and a slick of eye shadow in iridescent blue or purple, but somehow it all worked. Her sister Janice – the much doted-on baby of the family – had platinum blonde hair and a deep perma-tan that she set off with frilly white dresses, pink frosted lipstick and long nails that were always painted glossy red. When Dynasty first appeared on TV in the Eighties I was instantly smitten, immediately recognising Alexis Colby and Crystal Carrington as a slightly more polished version of Mo and Janice.
But it wasn’t just their flamboyant appearance that made such an impression on me. They were both truly strong women, real survivors who suffered a lot of tragedy and ended up carrying the men in their lives but never losing their fighting spirit.
‘Whatever you want in life, Gary, you go get it,’ Mo would tell me, eyes blazing.
Both Janice and Mo were pub landladies, a real couple of Bet Gilroys, each running a succession of establishments in the Yorkshire area. Their lives seemed full of drama and mystery – especially compared to my humdrum upbringing in Armthorpe.
I actually think one of the reasons my cousins, especially Lorraine and Julie, spent so much time at our house was because it gave them a bit of normality after the craziness of their own lives, but for me hanging out at Janice and Mo’s pubs gave me my first taste of the world of showbiz. Okay, so the Bluebell in Gringley-on-Hill probably wasn’t the most glamorous place on earth, but once I was through those doors it might as well have been Las Vegas.
My aunties would never come down to the bar at the start of the evening. Like the stars of the show they truly were, they timed their entrance for maximum impact – which was when the pub was full and they’d had enough time to make themselves look fabulous. At around 8.30 they would suddenly appear behind the bar, all sequins, big hair and even bigger cleavage, smiling and waving at the punters like they were strutting on stage at the London Palladium.
Once on the floor they’d pull the odd pint, but mostly it was just lots of chit-chat with the regulars, a bit of flirty banter here and there, and then, after just a couple of hours of razzle-dazzle, they’d disappear upstairs again. Although I was obviously too young to be drinking in the bar, during the evening I would always sneak downstairs to get a bag of crisps so I could have a peek at everyone and bask in my aunties’ reflected glory.
Even at that age I gravitated towards the limelight. ‘I’m on this side of the bar with my glamorous Auntie Janice and you lot are stuck on the other side,’ I would think, feeling special and, yes, probably more than a little bit smug. It was the same feeling I got years later the first time I was ushered into the VIP section at some fabulous celebrity party or other.
Sadly Mo passed away a few years ago, although she was so larger than life I still find it hard to accept that she’s gone, but Janice is still with us and just as glamorous as ever, bleaching her hair and dressing half her age (and carrying it off) despite being well into her late sixties. Janice and Mo taught me the power of make-up to transform and seduce – and instilled in me a lifelong love of strong, glamorous women.