When You Want Quality Acting, Only Simon Johns Delivers on Time and on Budget

The winter is drawing in, and it's as crappy and grey as the Old Country, even more so since the apartments are so tall they block out the sunlight. I didn't move here for weather like this. I moved here for cheap liquor and fatty food. But the saving grace is the daily doses of odd things to see and do.

Tuesday's grip-and-grin on board the HMS Exeter ended in a cold terrace bar, severely drunk after many cans of Her Majesty's John Smiths. The Consulate invited us to help a shipful of seamen weigh anchor after their manoeuvres with Turkish tars in the Mediterranean. The last landlubbers standing, Mrs Johns and I were cordially invited to go ashore with three servicemen. Drunk and wrapped in my peacoat, I bade farewell to our matelots in their shirt sleeves and left them to go to the karaoke bar to sing shanties and pitch woo.

Keeping with the theme, on Wednesday I spent a few hours dressed as World War One sergeant in the new Turkish historical soap opera Karayilan, roughly translated as Blackadder. (Mondays at 8pm on ATV, for local fans.) A friend of a friend working on the set called to say the show needed a honky, and, as we all know, there is none more honky than I.

I thought they needed me to stand around in a muddy field shooting withering glances at the natives. I got the distinct impression something else was intended when the production staff referred to me as "Simon Bey", the very formal and polite address in Turkish. I was ushered away from the rest of the extras, given my own dressing room, sent to hair and costume in a warm Portakabin. Stripped of my sideburns and dressed in an obviously inauthentic uniform with a plastic helmet and puttees made of old curtains, a piece of paper was thrust into my hands with pidgin English on it. "Your dialog, Simon Bey", the extra wrangler said. "You can fuck off if you think I'm saying anything", I thought.

But I did. I acted, I mugged, I considered correcting the grammar. And my suggestion that an Edwardian soldier wouldn't have said "meat head" fell on deaf ears. A troupe of local farm folk was shipped in to play the oppressed masses (oppressed by me, by the way). When these extras weren't cooing over the star of the show, they went to great lengths to tell me how pleased they were to meet me. They knew a star when they saw one, even if I did look like Martin Cloons with a healing herpes scab. My star quality was slightly diminished, however, when they saw me shoveling my payment of rice and peas into my gaping maw.

Watch it here.

The producer called me a few days later to ask if I would do a voice-over for the show. "Para var mi?", I asked. "Para yok." "Simon yok!" (You get the idea: No money, no acty). My career as a thesp came to an abrupt end, cut short by greed. Yet I now have a new and in-depth understanding of The Craft: It's fucking easy! I am a ham, but with minimal instruction I know I could play a monocle-popping toff, a sneering Brit baddie or a shivering junkie in any low-budget soap throughout the length and breadth of Europe. (You can run Simon Callow, but you can't hide.) As long as the carbs are forthcoming, I can act all day long. Problem var mi? Problem yok!