CHANNEL-HOPPING: Lisa Climie as Wendy in the TV drama Bergerac

She sang with Mari Wilson, was packaged as a 1980s popette called Tootsie Roll and appeared in The Bill and Bergerac. Later, Lisa Climie co-founded a Suffolk drugs and alcohol treatment centre. STEVEN RUSSELL meets a woman whose life hasn’t followed a straight path

THOSE LOVELY 1980s: Lisa Climie iin 1984, as a member of and indians

WE’VE got about 2,500 words to play with here and it’s going to be a struggle doing justice to the colour and breadth of Lisa Climie’s life thus far. Here’s a quick gallop, to prove the point:

n Her father was comedy writer David Climie, whose writing credits included The Harry Secombe Show, Oh Brother! and Oh, Father! (the monastic sitcom with Derek Nimmo), and Backs to the Land

n One of her babysitters was Annie Nightingale, who earned a place in history as the first female DJ on Radio 1

n Lisa was pictured at the age of 19 by near-neighbour Roger Daltrey, of the band The Who and a keen photographer, who told her “You ought to become an actress”

THE WILSATIONS: Lisa Climie, left, singing in 1982 with Mari Wilson and Michael Collins

n As a singer, she was chosen to tour with Mari Wilson (the soulstress with a beehive hair-do). A fellow member of The Wilsations was Michelle Collins, who’d become Cindy Beale in EastEnders and last summer take over as the landlady of the Rovers Return in Coronation Street

n Lisa issued a single in the poptastic 1980s as Tootsie Roll

n She also appeared on TV in The Bill and Bergerac

n Brother Simon was the lead singer of 1980s pop duo Climie Fisher [Love Changes (Everything) was one of their hits], co-wrote the huge George Michael and Aretha Franklin blockbuster I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me) and produced a number of albums for Eric Clapton

EXTRA INTEREST: Lisa Climie as a punkish bank customer in a cinema advertisement that starred Adrian Edmondson - the anarchic Vyvyan in The Young Ones

n Lisa co-founded the Bury St Edmunds-based charity Focus12, which specialises in treatment for substance misuse and helped TV presenter and actor Russell Brand.

Not your average life, then.

It started in Brighton, with a move after three years to rural Sussex and an isolated spot called Burwash Common.

Lisa’s mother (who had a modelling background) and father were a bohemian couple who attracted a theatrical crowd. Childhood ran in parallel with a party lifestyle. Mealtimes revolved around pub opening hours and the household was often supplemented by colourful guests.

COVER STORY: Lisa Climie with the anthology produced by the group Write Now!of which she is a member

It wasn’t always easy for a reticent girl to cope with. The children would be called upon to do party pieces, “which I hated. You’ve got a room full of big drunken people and you’re a very small person. I was very shy and used to hide under tables and glare at people. They called me The Witch, because I had these dark beady eyes that would check people out,” she smiles.

Lisa remembers a song she was obliged to sing when she was about seven. The Irish Ballad was a darkly-comic piece by American Tom Lehrer, about a maid who drowned her father, bumped off her mother with cyanide soup, set fire to her sister’s hair, fatally weighed down her brother with stones and cut her baby brother in two before serving him up as Irish stew.

“A bit odd – but they all thought it was a great laugh.”

Her father was cerebral but charismatic – “a real ladies’ man. Very charming and funny, which is a fatal combination. He said to me once that, pre-war, he was engaged to about six women at the same time. I said ‘What do you mean?’ He said ‘Well, I’d run out of things to say, so I’d just ask them to marry me!’”

HOME AND HEARTH: Lisa Climie, who sang with Mari Wilson in the 1980s and is the co-founder of drug treatment centre Focus 12

David Climie instilled a love of music in his children. He adored the Beatles, “because they wrote properly”, and played the youngsters records by the likes of jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong and comedian Lenny Bruce.

Lisa’s mother was beautiful and sparky – “quite women’s lib but feminine with it. She could drink any man under the table. She was very rebellious. When we moved to the middle of nowhere, she said ‘I’m not going to join the Women’s Institute . . .’ I think she joined the Young Farmers or something – just to be different.

“I think her motto was ‘If a man can do it, I can do it too – and maybe I can do it better.’ When many women were in twin-sets and pearls, she was in slacks and colourful shirts.

“I think my mother only just managed to nip off to the hospital between parties when we were born,” says Lisa, who understands why folk like her parents seemed to relish a 20-year celebration after the war. “They were alive, rationing was over and colour was coming back into life. Why wouldn’t you?”

POPTASTIC! Lisa Climie as Tootsie Roll in 1983

There was, she concedes, an element of parental neglect. “Two strong personalities tended to put themselves first, and we were characters in the play.”

That said, her love for them is deep and enduring.

“The things my parents taught me that I cherish are things like being able to fit in anywhere, with anybody – which is what they did. They had very liberal views and were very accepting. Always at Christmas lunch – whatever time it was! – there would be a seat for anyone who was otherwise on their own.

“For the time when it worked, they were the golden couple. And then whenever they fell out, it was World War Three.” They’d split up when she was 12.

Earlier, when Lisa was nine years old, her father was taken ill at BBC Television Centre and the family moved to London virtually overnight.

Later, she went to Holland Park School – a comprehensive beacon dubbed the “socialist Eton” and popular with politicians and actors. Tony Benn’s children went there.

It was big and lively – chaotic, she remembers – with about 2,500 pupils. “I think that toughened me up quite a bit. I went, if you like, from a dysfunctional family to a dysfunctional school.”

On the positive side, Lisa became interested in drama. On the negative, she was an undiagnosed dyslexic – “bright but lazy”, many people reckoned. She truanted a fair bit, and lost a lot of interest – not surprising, perhaps, as she attended four primary schools and three secondaries in all.

After a decade in London came a move to a school back in Sussex, at Heathfield, “where I didn’t fit in at all”. Half-punk, wearing Biba make-up and headscarves, she felt like an alien.

Rural Sussex became popular with musicians after Roger Daltrey bought a manor house. Lisa got to know people such as drummer Mitch Mitchell, part of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and she and her brother grew a circle of music-oriented friends.

She did some recording for local songwriters and then successfully auditioned for the Mari Wilson gig: a six-month tour in 1982. It got her an Equity card – sponsored by actors John and Pauline Collins, who had appeared in a PG Wodehouse adaptation written by her dad.

On the strength of that she was approached about a music project, given her first set of dreadlock hair extensions and re-cast as Tootsie Roll. There was a single, Perfect Lovers – a bouncy, Europoppy, “why won’t he marry me?” kind of tune. How did it do? “Terribly!”

Tootsie did get on the BBC talent programme The David Essex Showcase in the early 1980s, though didn’t top the audience vote.

There was a role in an advert for a bank that starred Adrian Edmondson, from the anarchic TV comedy The Young Ones, playing a punky girl.

Tootsie, meanwhile, morphed into a member of a “slung together” and shortlived duo called and indians (sic), which put out a record called Opera of Love in 1984. Lisa remembers the B-side, Life in Luton, as being pretty good.

Her heart lay in acting, however, and she did some theatre work with singer-songwriter John Otway. He’d co-written a musical play called Verbal Diary that was staged in London before going to the Edinburgh Fringe and then returning to the capital for another six months or so.

During her acting career, Lisa worked around, or covered up, her dyslexia. “I would learn the lines and then [at early rehearsals and read-throughs] pretend I was reading.” When she came unstuck at a Shakespeare workshop, it was the supportive director who suggested she might be dyslexic. She was 25 by that stage.

Then came the lead role in a short film, playing a punky teenager from London who distracts a schoolboy chess champion during a tournament. Queen Sacrifice earned a string of accolades.

Lisa’s mother died around that time and on New Year’s Eve, 1987, the actress flew to Australia – partly to help get over her loss and also to see if acting opportunities were more plentiful down-under.

Her time away was curtailed because the BBC bought the film and there was a viewing at the British Film Institute. Lisa landed a part in the ITV police drama The Bill as a result.

Her character, an ex-girlfriend of one of the detectives, arrived with a baby – which she abandoned at the police station. It turned out not to be the officer’s child.

That job led to a handful of episodes in the eighth series of Bergerac, screened early in 1990.

Lisa nicknamed her character One-line Wendy. “It was probably the best-paid job I ever had, but I did the least in it.” She played the Jersey detective’s secretary – a possible love interest who wasn’t to be.

A good time, though. “It was like a holiday. I’d be flown out to Jersey. John Nettles and the guys who played the detectives were great fun. I had so little to do – literally go ‘Huh?’ or ‘Excuse me, Jim.’ I used to go out there and put my feet up; go on the beach; ride around on a scooter; watch them all filming and think ‘Hey; I’m being paid to do this!’”

All a bit frustrating, though, because she dreamed of meaty roles.

After 10 years of auditions, waitressing jobs and not enough acting work, Lisa decided she ought to get an education. Following two years of soul-searching – and realising that, however hard one worked, an actor or actress wasn’t guaranteed another role – she told her agent she was stopping “temporarily”.

Lisa committed to a two-year diploma course in counselling and psychotherapy in the early 1990s. “Actually, it wasn’t dissimilar to acting, because it was about studying characters, people’s motivations and how their past affected their present.”

She’d had a part-time job in a hostel for the homeless, and worked there during the course. In fact, it was a busy few years, for Lisa married Chip Somers in 1993 and had son Seth in 1994.

Chip’s background involved co-managing a home in London for men recovering from addiction and alcohol problems. He later became treatment director for the Priory hospital in Chelmsford. Lisa also worked for the organisation for a while.

Next stop for them was Jersey – the land of Bergerac – for about nine months, where the clinic planned to start a day programme. It didn’t really work, though, and the couple wondered what to do next.

They had dreams of starting their own counselling service for drug and alcohol misusers and talked about their hopes while visiting friends in Suffolk. “Fantastic!” reckoned their hosts. “Why don’t you do it here?”

“We were very impetuous and went ‘Ooh . . .’” remembers Lisa. They rented a cottage, found a little office in Abbeygate Street, Bury St Edmunds, and Focus12 was born in 1997.

“We thought the money we had would last a really long time; and actually it lasted about four months . . .” Lisa sought other work to bolster their finances, with the drug and alcohol unit at Norwich Prison.

Each month, she says, brought worries about possible closure, but that didn’t happen. Things developed, too; what started as a one-to-one counselling service then offered group therapy and art therapy.

In 1999 the organisation became a charity, which meant it could apply for different streams of funding.

Today, the foundation-stone of its work is a residential set-up aiming to get people off drink and drugs. There are other strands, such as a family programme that’s been running for a good 12 years and is over-subscribed. People with a family member who has a drug or drink problem can talk to Focus12 about it, free of charge.

The charity has also secured some funding to pay for a part-time liaison worker to assist families: helping former users integrate back into domestic life and sorting out other issues.

Financially, life for the charity will always be hand to mouth, says Lisa, but it has wonderful supporters and patrons. TV presenter Davina McCall, who has tackled her own drugs issues, is one. The charity says her donations were “absolutely fundamental” in ensuring it survived its tricky early stages.

Comedian/actor/presenter Russell Brand was actually treated by the charity and has supported it since. He wrote about his experience in one of his books and Focus12 has actually been sought out by people who read about it and hoped it could help them.

Singer and DJ Boy George became a patron in the summer.

Lest anyone believes that problems are exclusively the torments of celebrities, a look at the video-testimonies of Focus12 clients will put them right. People with substance-abuse issues look . . . well, “normal”.

“They look just like anyone you’d see at work or in street,” confirms Lisa, no longer married to Chip but still a committed trustee of the charity.

There is always going to be an urgent need to raise money, then – and it’s likely more people are going to need help during economic turmoil. Not that it’s easy . . .

“What we always find difficult is that if you’re out on the street with a tin, and you’re standing near someone collecting for an old people’s charity or a children’s charity, you’re going to get no money. ‘Scummy junkies . . .’ Who’s going to give them money?

“If you ask people to draw a picture of a drug addict, they’ll draw someone with long, greasy hair and dirty clothes, and needles. But they look like you and me.”

Lisa’s post-acting career has involved roles such as setting up a drug action team in Richmond; training people such as magistrates and nurses likely to come into contact with addicts; commissioning services to help users, and working in the field of adult social care.

She took ill health-related retirement in the autumn after being off work for about a year with back problems that required spinal surgery.

One positive consequence is that it’s given her the time for another creative passion: writing. Lisa, who lives in the Stowmarket area, is working on a book about her family – a kind of memoir mixed with a degree of fiction, in the form of linked short stories or episodes.

She never heard the “real” stories of her father’s life – after he died, for instance, Lisa found some medals she never knew he’d received – only the “small, funny stories”. She’s sought information from people who knew her parents, and has done some digging of her own, too.

Dyslexia means writing is still hard work, but she’s making good progress. “It’s been a great experience to ‘meet’ my parents as people, rather than as my parents, because I’m going back to before I was born.”

n Lisa Climie has a short story in the anthology My Daughter Was An Astronaut, published by Suffolk writing group Write Now! – the organisation she joined a year or so ago. Details of the anthology are at www.writenowgroup.co.uk