‘I wasn’t ambitious until I was 60!’ Gary Wilmot on comedy, panto, musicals – and his Beckett-style new play

He left school at 15 and worked as a scaffolder. Then success on New Faces launched him to stardom – and he’s been a panto and musicals sensation ever since. So what made him write a comedy about two men waiting?

Gary Wilmot has had many lives. A children’s TV presenter turned variety show host turned panto marvel turned musicals sensation, Wilmot has now turned his hand back to playwriting. His London debut is a comedy about two men, waiting. One is chill, the other restless; both become bonded by the wait. Very Samuel Beckett, isn’t it? The men could be Vladimir and Estragon, no?

“Funny you should say that,” Wilmot says, sitting at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, the theatre above a pub in London that is staging While They Were Waiting, in which he also stars, opposite Steve Furst. Soon after the play was commissioned, he was asked if he had been influenced by Beckett’s existential play Waiting for Godot. He’d never seen it but it just so happened there was a production in the West End starring Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati. Wilmot went, saw it and left nonplussed. “I thought, ‘There’s a reason I’ve never seen this. I haven’t got a clue what’s going on.’”

That’s an admission not every actor would dare make. “Well, I am honest about things,” he says, and it’s true – Wilmot is full of refreshing candour that sounds like comic self-deprecation at times, perhaps with a calculation to disarm and entertain. Instantly likable, he is measured in tone and, aged 71, still bearing a kind of ageless bounce.

“I sat in a workshop of Paddington the Musical a few years ago,” he says, following up on the Beckett story. Does he mean the theatrical juggernaut currently in the West End? “Yes, it was being workshopped and I was playing [the equivalent of] Hugh Grant’s character from the film. This character had been crowbarred in … so at the end of the workshop, when we were sitting chatting with the producers and director, I said: ‘I’m going to do myself out of a job here but why is my character in this? He’s just so disjointed from everything else.’”

He did indeed do himself out of a job, and that character vanished from the script. Wilmot has no regrets. It’s about entertainment, he says, not ego.

That motto’s clearly worked for Wilmot, whose career has stretched across more than half a century. For a certain generation, he is a household name. A finalist in TV reality contest New Faces in the late 1970s, and the boundlessly energetic presenter of 80s children’s shows such as So You Want to Be Top?, he graduated to hosting his own variety series and became a staple on primetime TV for years. But younger generations, he points out with no hint of offence, have never heard of him.

Still he has never been short of work, thanks to some canny repurposing of his skill-set. When TV variety hit obsolescence he went into musical theatre, excelling as the cockney gent Bill Snibson in Me and My Girl, and shining as Yale man Elisha J Whitney in the Olivier-winning Anything Goes, among others. There’s a tenacity to Wilmot that seems admirably old-school, a will to get out on the road, to push himself on, no matter what size the venue or audience. He has written two plays before now which were staged at his village hall in Tring in Hertfordshire, including one called Horse which, he explains, is about a man who thinks he’s a horse (I hold back on comparisons with Peter Shaffer’s Equus after the Beckett misfire). So a quiet king of reinvention, then, it would seem? No, he says, none of these gyrations have been premeditated. “I wasn’t ambitious until about 10 years ago,” he says, but he is a natural shapeshifter: “I’ve always been one for looking for new things.”

He left school when he was 15, barely able to read and write. “It was comprehensive school education [in south London] which comprehensively failed me. I couldn’t wait to get out.” He didn’t think of showbusiness as a career for himself, even for a minute, but his friends did. “They thought I was funny, they decided to push me, one guy in particular. It’s funny how some people come into your life for a brief moment and affect it for ever. He said he’d met a theatrical agent. He gave me his business card and said, ‘I’ve told him you’re brilliant.’”

Wilmot was 21, working as a scaffolder and forklift driver. The agent put him in touch with an impressionist giving tuition to young performers. For £5 an hour, he learned the basics and began gigging. “I found something that everyone else thought I was good at, so I carried on doing it. But I think I knew from day one that it was a good feeling to make people laugh. I remember as a six-year-old dancing around, wiggling my bum and miming to My Boy Lollipop.”

As someone who began his career on a TV talent show, he thinks the format back then was first and foremost about finding new talent. “Now it seems to me to be about maintaining the profile of the panellists rather than finding new talent that’s going to have longevity. If you ask someone who won X Factor last year they wouldn’t have a clue, but 10 years after [Wilmot’s professional partner] Judy and I won New Faces, people were saying ‘Oh, you’re the guy from New Faces.’”

Although he was given few leg-ups, Wilmot did have entertaining in his blood; his father was a professional singer in a group called the Soundlanders. The song they were known for was I Am a Mole and I Live in a Hole, says Wilmot, singing it in a baritone. “My dad was the bass voice.” Jamaican-born and raised, Harry Wilmot came to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948, and fell in love with Wilmot’s white British mother. They would have been a very visible anomaly as a mixed-raced couple in postwar Britain.

“It’s only when I had kids of my own that I realised how difficult it must have been for her,” he reflects. “She was a dancer, and her dance partner was her brother. When my dad came along he disowned her, completely and utterly.” She died in 1978, just as Wilmot was on the brink of his TV breakthrough. “She didn’t see New Faces. It would have been nice for her to see it,” he says, and his understated tone is all the more moving.

He speaks in the same tender tones about his father, who died when Wilmot was just seven. It sounds, from his stories, as if he has been searching for him in adult life. “One time, I was rehearsing a musical in south London and I’d seen posters for a Windrush exhibition at the Imperial War Museum.” He went along and saw footage of a BBC report from the deck of the Windrush, in which he recognised his father being interviewed. “I said to a stranger, ‘That’s my dad!’”

Then there is the famous Windrush photo that features his father: “It’s two guys standing and in the middle is a guy sitting on a crate. My dad’s the one in the middle. They are all very dapper. I met one of the guys recently at an exhibition at the British Library. He was in a wheelchair and I said, ‘You were in that photograph with my dad. What was he was like?’ He told me he didn’t know him. The photographer had said, ‘You, you and you, come here’, which is what photographers do.”

Did Wilmot feel anger when the Windrush scandal broke? “No I just felt like everybody. Any sane person would have gone, ‘This guy’s 60, he’s been working in this country …”

If 1960s Britain was hard on his mother, it wasn’t exactly easy for him or his brother either. “We were two Black boys in a predominantly white community with a white mother.” Then again, he says, there was a fierce sense of neighbourliness on his Lambeth estate. “Everyone in my block was [called] auntie or uncle. If I came home and my mum was at an appointment at the hospital, my aunt Lou next door would say, ‘Come and have some tea with me.’ That’s what you did.”

He and his brother had a reunion about 25 years ago with all the boys they grew up with on the estate, and 54 men turned up, he says. “Not only did I know all 54 blokes, I knew their brothers and sisters, I knew their parents. We were in the banqueting room of a hotel and had a wonderful time. There was still this feeling of community, but of those 54 blokes, only one still lived on the estate. We were all encouraged to go out.”

What about racism as a child? Whatever he got, he gave back tenfold, he answers. “If a guy had acne, or big ears, or was lanky or short and he had a go at me, I would give it back.” Maybe it’s how his humour developed, he thinks. But the first time he felt being Black affected him was when he started doing theatre in the 90s, “when the colour of your skin meant you couldn’t play certain roles”.

It was pointed out to him, he says. “When I went into Me and My Girl, I was nobody’s idea of an archetypal cockney character from 1930s. But I was more like him than any of the guys who had played it before because I knew that character. I’m delighted to say they recognised that in me and gave me the role.”

Now things may have swung too much the other way, he feels. “If there are two actors auditioning for Martin Luther King and one of them looks like him, and when he reads the ‘I have a dream’ speech you think ‘strong contender’ … but then in comes a guy who is a much, much better actor. Just because the first guy is Black, doesn’t mean he understands what was going on with Martin Luther King and what America and the world were going through. So on comes the actor who really gets to the root of the character, and when he gives you that speech you think, ‘I never knew what that speech meant until he told me.’”

But the white actor hasn’t had racial abuse shouted at him on the street. “No,” says Wilmot, “but he’s touched your emotion.” So the discourse on authenticity is misguided? “I do think there’s a certain amount of box-ticking going on, but in a funny way I’m quite pleased with that because it means Black and Brown performers get an opportunity to improve, to work with the best.

“But the overriding point is that this isn’t the real world. It’s a made-up world and it’s up to us to get the audience to believe the lies we’re telling.”

• While They Were Waiting is at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, in London, from 26 February until 22 March