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~ARTICLES~

	Dancing Fool		Crocodile Shoes still fit after walk with Evita
	SPENDER SPENT		New Series Attracts Spender Fans
	HARD AS NAILS

[The following article appeared in THE LISTENER (weekly New Zealand TV 
magazine), August 14, 1993]

Jimmy Nail fans will be disappointed to learn that he's giving up his role 
as the tough, introverted cop in SPENDER. He's even thinking of giving
up acting altogether. As he told the British TV TIMES, "I find it very hard
to play a part, then take it off like a cheap suit and become Mr Normal,
Mr Nice Guy. I haven't got the kInd of discipline where I can turn my 
emotion inside out and then just switch off. It affects me fairly profoundly
and I don't like putting myself through that kind of mincer every day."

Nail would like to develop a career as a director and writer. As well as 
starring in SPENDER, he was the writer and sometimes executive producer. 
In his next project, a musical drama series called CROCODILES SHOES,
he also as the multiple roles of star, writer and producer.

Though he hasn't lived in the north-east of England for years, Nail remains
a Geordie at heart. SPENDER, he says, "was created with one eye
on taking as much revenue and work to the north-east as I could. Over the
three seasons we did 20 episodes at an average cost of something like
500,000 pounds each, so indirectly we took about 10 million pounds to the 
north-east. That's what I'm proud of." Not that the locals were grateful. 
Nail had his car nicked during the last series.

[Am quoting this material from the incomplete episode guide prepared
 by KerrinJones@comp.uvw.ac.nz]. 

Go to top

[Credits: By John McKay, Canadian Press. Appeared in the Winnipeg 
Free Press, Monday, October 16 , 1995]

TORONTO - IT'S a face that looks, well, lived in. A lumpy nose pushed
way over here. Droopy eyes. Shaggy, greasy hair. And my, that blue-collar
Newcastle accent!
   Then there's the reputation for being a bit of a hard-drinking brute in
his younger days. Even the name sounds tough, Jimmy Nail.
   Is this a TV hero?
   Well, apparently in the U.k. it is. And in the past year this gritty hit
cop series Spender has developed something of a cult following on the
Canadian cable channel Showcase.
   And for Spender fans, good news. Nail's new seven-part series, 
Crocodile Shoes, premieres Wednesday night on Showcase.

 Unorthodox

  "Well, beauty's in the eye of the beholder."  Nail suggests, when asked
about his unorthodox looks.
  "Thankfully in Britain you get the gig on what you can do, not on how you
look."
  One U.K. critic sail Nail's is a face that would look more handsome if 
viewed in the back of a spoon. Another said that the dialect was one you
could file your fingernails on.
   But Nail dismisses Hollywood's penchant for casting beautiful people 
in starring roles, proposing that the "android" look is often a guise for
troubles and imperfection underneath.
   "I'd like to think I'm more together on the inside."
   Together hardly describes it. Nail is being called England's new 
Renaissance Man. This for his ability to create, write, star in, and
even sing the music for his projects.
   A soundtrack album of songs he wrote and recorded for Crocodile 
Shoes topped the U.K. charts.
   Crocodile Shoes tells the story of Jed Sheppard, a northeast 
working-class Geordie who operates a factory lathe. On the side, he 
writes and records hurtin' songs and dreams of being a star.
   When one of his home-made cassettes falls into the hands of an
impressed London talent scout, Jed finds himself exposed to the 
sleaze and corruption of the big-city music industry.
   Will he make it to Nashville before his new agent self-destructs 
on cocaine, crime and sex?
   That agent, Adrian Lynn, is played to perfection by James Wilby,
despite Wilby's genteel reputation in Merchant-Ivory-type costume 
dramas like Howard's End. His blond Edwardian elegance has had 
a grunge overhaul with the addition of rumpled sleepover suits and 
a three-day growth of beard.
   Audrey Cole, programming vice-president for Showcase, says their
audience fully embraced Nail as Spender.
   "We got tremendous amount of mail and viewer inquires about... 
"there must be  more, why aren't you showing the rest of it?" she 
says.
   Nail, 41, doesn't plan to produce new instalments of the 1992 series,
but Showcase does plan to re-run the original 20 episodes later in the 
season.
   Like Spender, Crocodile Shoes is a warts-and-all look at the common
man and at some of the seamier back-alley of life.
   Nail is cautious when asked if, like his Crocodile Shoes character, he 
has ambitions to crack the American entertainment market in a big way. 
He is, after all, now  involved in his first major motion-picture role, 
co-starring with Madonna and Antonio Banderas in the musical Evita.
   "Hopefully it offers a very large window internationally." he says 
quietly.

Go to top         

[The following article appeared in the March 1996 edition of Scanorama,
the SAS inflight magazine, pages 22-26. Author: Harold Von Kursk.]


Jimmy Nail put violence and alcohol behind him to become a self-made star
of television drama and music. Cinema could be next; he recently won a part
in the movie project on the life of Eva Peron. Harold von Kursk gets to
grips with Newcastle's second-best export after its famous Brown Ale.



JIMMY NAIL WAS, in his teens, a wayward youth engaged in a life
of petty crime and football hooliganism. In his twenties, alcholol
transformed him into a menacing figure whose violent tendencies resulted
in a six-month sentence in Strangeways Priosn (conviced of grievous bodily
harm after a post-football match fight).
   "I was racing through life, utterly confused and angry," he expains. "I
don't know if I was out of control; it was more like I felt frustrated with
myself and everything I saw happening around me. I couldn't make sense of
things. But then I began the process of civilizing myself and trying to
become a decent human being. I'm still working on it." 
 
Nail has just finished recording a new album and is in the midst of writing
the set set of episodes for this Crocodile Shoes TV series. Crocodile Shoes
is a stylish, if slightly overcooked, seven-part drama about a Newcastle-
born lathe-operator, Jed (Nail), bent on finding fame and fortune as a
country-and-western singer. Fate intercedes when Jed is discovered by Ade
(James Wiby), a seedy record-company executive with a heavy cocaine habit.
Oscillating between Newcastle and London, Crocodile Shoes explores the
underbelly of the music industry as Ade, his life collapsing around him,
gives Jed a makeover and pushes him up the recording ladder.  "A lot of
my own character is filtered into Jed," says Nail. "But I think what really
attracts people to him is that he projects a kind of working-class integrity
in the way he tries to live. There's an honesty about him and an ability to
distinguish what's real and what's artificial in life. The music business
was a way to mirror these issues." 
         The series draws heavily on Nail's own experiences as a struggling
musician in the late 1970s.
         "Names were changed to protect the guitly, "laughs Nail. "All the 
characters are a potpourri of people I've known and there a lot of anecdotal references
to things I actually witnessed. But what I wanted to show is how disillusioning the
music industry, just like life, can be. The problem with the record business is
that you have creative artists who don't have a clue about how the business
is run - this makes it easy for them to be manipulated and robbed. Jed is
a witness to the process."
 
Nail's native Newcastle looms large in the series. It is a former mining, 
steel-making and shipbuilding city, located on England's north-east coast.
"I'm very keen to keep Newcastle on the map, because there are too many
people who have come out of there and owe the region something but who
have decided for one reason or another to disown it. I'll always remain true
to who I am and where I come from."
     Nail has come a long way since his days as the gruff Geordie (the 
British nickname for Newcastle natives) bricklayer in Auf Wiedersehen Pet
a hugely successful BBC series from the early 1980s. When Nail's wife, 
Miriam, told him about an audition for a series about a gang of ex-patriate
British construction workers in Germany, he showed up for him interview
with a bad attitude, introducing himself with the legendary line: "Get your
skates on because my car is double-parked on the yellow and I don't want
to be here anyway." The producers immediately knew that this was the man
they needed for their boorish brickie. 
    The nation fell in love with Nail's character Oz, making it practically
impossible for him to walk down the street without being mobbed. "I went
from being totally unknown to getting stopped everytime I went out," recalls
Nail. "I always wanted to be successful, but I have never wanted to become
a celebrity. I never, ever, craved that. Even now I can't stand being 
recognized in the street. I just hate it when strangers come up and try
to talk to me. I'm pathologically shy."
    But as much as Nail was unprepared for being thrust into the limelight, 
Pet was merely the first step. Over the course  of the last ten years, Nail
has emerged as a Geordie Renaissance man who has written, directed,
produced and starred in two hit television series, the first being Spender
(a highly inventive detective drama), followed by Crocodile Shoes.
As a child, Nail had always nursed writing ambitions and wanted to teach
English literature before the pressures of growing up in a tough Newcastle
neighbourhood sidetracked him. "It's so odd. But it took me 15 years to
finally figure out who I was. It's as if there was this huge gap in my life
before I got involved with music and writing." 
    Nail has what one might call a reputation in British media circles. He
certainly looks like trouble with his melancholy expression and grim
features. At 1.92 centimeters and 82 kilos, with dishevelled brown hair
and a boxer's nose (broken five times), Nail has been know to vent his
wrath on journalists who tread too harshly. Even his surname -- it was
changed from Bradford after he stepped onto a 15-centimetre spike in 
a glass factory - suggests a violent persona. 
    But growing up in the working-class community of Longbrenton, Jimmy
Bradford, as he was then known, was forced to be tough. At school he
quickly learned to counter violence with violence, which , coupled with a 
distinctly anti-authoritarian streak, turned him into a fearsome figure.
He was disruptive, disobedient and frequently punished. He was expelled
after setting fire to curtains in the main auditorium, became a leading 
member of a football supporters' gang called The Benders, and had a 
habit of  "picking fights in bars with the nastist blokes I could find."
 
His mother, Laura, was "brilliant, a salt-of -the-earth type", who read
extensively and introduced Nail to literature. His father, also named
Jimmy, had been a boxer and professional footballer until a second
world war shrapnel wound hobbled him. As a child, Nail didn't get to 
know his father well  as he would leave the house at 6:30 am for work
and return at 9pm. "All I can remember about my dad is how he would 
sit up on the bed every morning and cough up phlegm for 15 minutes. 
That why I detest smoking so much."
    Nail worked first as a welder, then at a glass factory, and reached his
lowest ebb when he was sent to prison. Upon his release, he was determined
never to lose control of his life again. He understood his tough-guy behaviour
was stupid and self-destructive, and it was around this time that he fell in 
love with his wife-to-be, Miriam, a student at Newcastle University. Nail and
Miriam moved to London, where Nail went into property speculation. "My
partner and I made a fortune renovating old properties and selling them on,"
recalls Nail. "Miriam and I must have moved 17 times in the space of two
years. Of course, we had to bring builders down from the north-east as 
London ones are notoriously unreliable," says Nail, winking. But as fate 
would have it, Nail gave up on the property market to consummate his long-
frustrated artistic aspirations.  
The Jimmy Nail I spoke to was the perfect gentleman, speaking calmly,
and responding to every question frankly. Has the Nail gone soft? "I think 
people who know me will have noticed that ever since I stopped drinking 
eight years ago I've become less confrontational," he says. "That's been
the greatest revolution in my life.  Alcholol did wicked things to me, it 
made me mean and miserable. One morning I woke up with a deadly 
hangover and I said 'That's enough of that.' I wanted to progress my TV
delevopment company which meant sitting down at a table with TV executives
discussing million pound deals. You don't want to go to those meetings 
with a buzz in your head." 
    It took eight years for Nail to get the BBC to front the $4.7 m needed
to bring Crocodile Shoes to life. Music has always been an improtant 
part of his life. At 16, he began gigging with a variety of rhythm and blues 
bands and would even show up on stage wearing his sister's frock and 
Doc Marten boots as a frontman for the King Crabs, a punk group. "I was 
incredibly bad," Nail recalls.  No one expected Nail's musical career would
ever take off, until Auf Wiedersehen Pet gave him the recognition
he needed. 
But acting wasn't enough to satisfy him. He began learning the technical 
side of the British televison industry and was determined to write and produce
his own series. That led to Spender, where  he played a dour undercover
cop returning to his native Newcastle from London. "Spender" not only showed that 
Nail had a keen sense for dialogue and gritty realism, but his down-to-earth manner 
and eccentric looks turned him into a rough-hewn sex symbol. The serial would
play for three seasons until Nail decided to retire the role in 1993 "before the
concept became stale. Television tends to gobble you up and you've got only
so many tricks in your bag before it spits you out." 
 
During the last ten years, Nail has recorded several hit singles, culminating
with last year's million-seeling sountrack album from Crocodile Shoes. 
"I like the fact that there's an organic link between the show and the music," says
Nail. "I've written nine of the songs and was given two by Paddy McAloon of 
(British pop band) Prefab Sprout." 
    Considering British music is in the middle of a spectacular pop revival,
the phenomenal appeal of Nail's Netcastle-meets-Nashville sound, with a voice
that is part Kenny Rogers, part Rob Stewart, makes his success all the more
impressive. At age 41, Nail is old enough to have fathered members of groups
like Blur and Oasis. Yet last summer he toured Britain, playing to capacity 
houses and climaxing with a wild performance for 10,000 fans at London's 
Wembley Arena. "It was very moving for me to walk out on stage at Wembley,"
he explains, "because of all the heavy football history the place represents."
Fortunately, he didn't beat anybody up after the gig. 
    Refocusing on the present, he remembers he's got things to do. "Right now I've
got to keep writing and working on the next Crocodile Shoes. When it 
comes down to it, writing is the thing that puts me in touch with myself and how
I feel about life. It's all part of my civilizing process." 


[Harold Von Kursk: is a German-Canadian film-writer. He covers the American 
and European cinema and recently directed his first feature. He lives in Munich.]