Honest John

SINGER, musician, actor, comic, radio and TV star and now budding film-maker. There's not a lot that Graham Fellows hasn't achieved in a 27-year career, apart from having much success under his own name. He started out as a young drama student with a runaway hit song called Gordon Is A Moron back in 1978 using the title Jilted John. But as his acting career stalled in the early 1990s, Fellows invented frustrated middle-aged pop wannabe John Shuttleworth and took the Edinburgh Festival by storm in 1992.

He says: "For years I was making Shuttleworth tapes to amuse friends and it was only when I got a comedy agent who said 'oy you could be doing this for a living' that things changed."

Radio 4, BBC2's 500 Bus Stops and TV guest appearances and theatre tours ensured that Fiftysomething Shuttleworth's Northern home-spun hilarity, family and friends - all played by him - captured a cult audience.

Now "heroic" John - as Fellows sees him - is touring again in Fawn Again and opens his offbeat account in the North-East at Middlesbrough Theatre on June 8 and Durham's Gala on June 16 before swinging back later to take in Newcastle and York in September and October.

Fellows, 45, talks with remarkable honesty about creating John Shuttleworth to the point where he admits he'll have to kill this "father figure" off before their ages converge.

"I will stop before I catch him up, I promise that. I have made him get a little older. On the tour, he says his children (Darren and Karen) have left home and wife Mary is on the point of retirement. So he is around 60 now and explains that he doesn't punch the air now because he might sprain his arm," he jokes.

But Shuttleworth has now reached the point of having dressing rooms booked in his own name.

"No, I don't regret inventing all these characters because I wouldn't have any money or a job. Someone like me wouldn't do something as stupid as sending tapes in under my own name," Fellows says about the early Shuttleworth collection which caught the attention of BBC producers.

"This was a spur of the moment decision, probably a drunken decision, like most of my lasting ideas. Jilted John was created on the spur of the moment and came after I found a discarded guitar in the canteen at drama school," he adds.

"Right through my teenage years I was in Shakespeare productions and youth theatre and I thought I was going to be in tights for the rest of my life, but I've been in fawn slacks instead. I wish I could do a bit more music and work on a CD and go on Radio 3 late at night because I've got a lot or organic music in me based on natural sounds."

This appears unlikely because Fellows says he has a zealous agent who is already planning next year, quite unlike Shuttleworth's Saga pensioner tour manager Ken Worthington,.

The Manchester-raised actor, who admits he once turned down a chance to appear in Godspell, is now a Louth-based father of three with a partner called Kathryn.

"All my children say about John is 'daddy with glasses'," he reveals.

He's also gone on to invent a music-obsessed nerd called Brian Appleton and his latest creation, the wealth-crazed Goole concreter Dave Tordoff, is making an appearance on the Fawn Again tour. Eagle-eyed Jonathan Ross Show fans on BBC1 may well have spotted a recent appearance by Fellows as Tordoff.

On tour there will also be a sneak preview of Fellows' film It's Nice Up North which he shot in the Shetland Isles with international stills photographer Martin Parr - although dubbed by John as "not that good because he's not got a shop". Fellows ages himself once more to appear on camera as Shuttleworth - "a name that smacks of tea rooms and Harrogate" - and claims that John needed to go to Britain's most Northerly place because "by rights, he feels they should be the nicest".

He's spent £10,000 on the project and entered it for the Edinburgh Film Festival having mastered the art of editing by buying a laptop and learning how to use film-making software.

"I think this is the way that the film industry is going to go and you're going to get far more interesting films than these Bond blockbusters," claims Fellows, who confesses that the current tour was the result of hardly working for a year while making It's Nice Up North. And such is the success of Shuttleworth that Fellows was recently invited to become characters in BBC1's Bad Penny and ITV1's Dangerville, both made for children.

"Both of them were very good, but they died, so I'm very suspicious and wary of TV now because, as a medium, I think it's a little screwed, but that's maybe because I haven't had a massive success on television," he says. Even if his film doesn't make it as far as TV, Graham Fellows will be happy to see the project become a DVD sold during the tour. "I'll have made my money back and I'll be happy because the fans will be seeing it," he says.

* Fawn Again plays Middlesbrough Theatre on June 8, (01642) 815 181; Durham's Gala Theatre, June 16, 0191-332 4041; Tyne Theatre Newcastle, September 23, 0870 145 1200 and York Opera House, October 2, 0870 606 3595

* John Shuttleworth will be appearing at this year's Edinburgh Festival and is set to return next year on Radio 4 in a series called John Shuttleworth's Open Mind. Brian Appleton's Unofficial Multimedia Lecture runs on Radio 4 at 11.15pm on Wednesdays.

www.shuttleworths.co.uk

Published: 02/06/2005