From crime fighter to crime writer

From the Krays to The Bill: the extraordinary life of Paphos expat Barry AppletonDid he ever see anything, I ask Barry Appleton – cop, TV writer, long-time expat – that shocked even him, with all his police experience? He mulls the question over, sat at the computer in his home in Tala beside his daughter Sacha, with two dogs named Luna and Hugo prowling the room behind them. “Not that I really remember…” he mutters. “Head in the bag?” prompts Sacha gently. Barry brightens, nodding happily. “Oh yeah, the head in the bag! Yeah, never thought about the head in the bag…” The ‘head in the bag’ doesn’t really count, strictly speaking, since Barry didn’t see that himself. It was actually an informant who told him about it, speaking of a third party whom he (the informant) was asking a villain about, asking if he knew of Mr. X’s whereabouts. (Why yes, replied the villain, X is right here, and produced… well, you know.) Still, it goes to show how much crazy stuff he’s experienced – much of it now collected in a new memoir, Twentieth Century Cop, subtitled ‘The Flying Squad Detective Who Wrote “The Bill”’. Undercover among the suspects Barry was indeed a Flying Squad detective, serving in the elite branch of the Metropolitan Police for about 20 years – he left the force in 1977 – and did indeed write The Bill, 50 episodes of the long-running cop show including most of the first season. The two careers didn’t overlap – yet it’s tempting to take them together, trying to find commonalities in what were, after all, two aspects of the same person. Thus, for instance, undercover work sounds a lot like writing a character – except that you play the part yourself and don’t really write so much as improvise, with more than just bad reviews at stake if the character isn’t convincing. “My most prominent piece of undercover work actually came shortly after I had joined the Sweeney,” writes Barry in the book, using the term from cockney rhyming slang (‘Sweeney Todd’, rhymes with ‘Squad’). That was in 1968, when a certain James Earl Ray was arrested at Heathrow airport, a few months after shooting Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee. Ray was remanded for questioning at Canon Row police station – and there, in the adjoining cell, was a fellow inmate being detained in connection with a robbery. “I was a bank robber,” recalls Barry with a dry chuckle. “And we used to exercise together, and I used to talk to him and try to find out if anybody else was involved in the shooting.” Ray never spilled any secrets – though not, it seems, because he didn’t trust his new chum. By the end, “we got quite friendly,” says Barry. “Eventually, when he left” – extradited back to the US – “I said, ‘Send me a card from Alcatraz!’.” Ray “had the eyes of a killer,” he writes in his book (“I remember going home that night and telling Pam [his wife], ‘If ever there was a killer, this guy is it’”) – though it seems he was also slapdash and disorganised, strongly implying that he didn’t act alone in assassinating King. The whole story raises quite an intriguing question, however. What was there about him, Barry Appleton, that persuaded such an obviously bad man to accept him as one of his own kind? A tough copper in a tougher time Barry is beloved now, of course, something of a legend in Paphos (where he’s lived for three decades), a spry 87-year-old with a host of wonderful stories. But there’s also a moment while we’re struggling with technology – it’s supposed to be a Zoom call, but the audio refuses to work; we end up on WhatsApp – and he’s getting a little frustrated. He stares at the camera with hard, narrowed eyes – and it seems, for a moment, like a glimpse of the man he must’ve been in his 30s, the ‘hard look’ he used on villains and ruffians. He was, after all, a very fine cop (“I got a lot of commendations,” he admits. “Probably more than most cops”) – and, despite Britain in general being a better, more community-minded place in those days (“like Cyprus now, actually”), fighting crime was no picnic. This was the heyday of the Krays – whom he knew personally – and also a time when a cop in trouble couldn’t call for backup, “you just hoped somebody would dial 999 and get you help. And sometimes you were in ‘bandit country’ – we called it that, in the East End – and no-one would help you”. Barry was tough, he had to be. Looking back, he seems to have been the kind of youth who (like many cops) could easily have ended up on the wrong side of the law. In trouble at school, “usually for fighting”. A loner in childhood, much of which he spent “kicking a football up against a garage door”. For his first six years – the formative years – Barry didn’t even know his parents at all. He was born in March 1939, a few months before an even more momentous event (viz. the start of WWII); his dad was in the army, his mother worked in a munitions factory. He was raised by his grandparents – and, though he loved them, and though (as he says in the book) many kids were in a similar situation, that early void must’ve left a mark. His sister was born after the war, after their parents returned – and, for that reason, “I suspect Susan probably had a much happier childhood than I did”. All this surely went into making him an effective cop – and indeed he later seems to have approached TV writing in the style of a cop, that’s to say aggressively. Writing at full throttle “If I got commissioned to do a script,” he recalls, “I’d start writing straight away, going all through the day and night – I get up at four o’clock in the morning,” he explains parenthetically, “I always did, I still do now – and I’d keep going, nothing else mattered, until I finished. “I’d always finish at least a week before the deadline, so that gave me a chance to go back and see if I could make things better.” Writers typically got about three weeks to craft an episode of The Bill (it was similar with Taggart, which he wrote in the 90s). Barry usually did it in two. His style was terse, “cutting dialogue down to a minimum” (his favourite film is Bullitt, starring the laconic Steve McQueen) – though his dialogue, when it came, was memorable. His hobbies also sound quite McQueen-ish: motorbikes, Formula One, football (“Chelsea,” prompts Sacha; “Oh Chelsea, don’t talk about Chelsea now…” he laments dramatically) – albeit also gardening, a concession to old age. His forehead is bruised as we talk, the result of a recent spill in the garden. He also takes a couple of bathroom breaks, muttering wryly about “an old man’s problem”. Generally, though, he seems in robust good health. “I’ve been very lucky,” he says more than once – and, when you hear the whole story, you can see why he says it. From police station to television studio The first chapter in his life ended, as already mentioned, in 1977, and in quite dramatic fashion – getting kicked to the floor during an investigation that degenerated into a brawl, following which he suffered a slipped disc and spent months in hospital. The Met wanted to keep him on, despite the injury, but Barry had already decided to quit: “I was getting in at two o’clock in the morning, leaving at five… 20 years was enough”. Even now, says Sacha, he’ll often brush his teeth while in the shower – a remnant of his days as a cop, when he had to be out of the house as quickly as possible. Not yet 40, he opened a pub with his wife Pam – “Because we’d been separated so much,” he explains, “we decided we must do something together” – though without any firm plan. Later, a friend suggested using his police experience to become a writer or technical advisor for TV programmes. Barry wrote to TV companies, including Thames Television where a producer for the new Storyboard show (this was in 1983) wasn’t happy with the script of a police-themed pilot called ‘Woodentop’. “And my letter was on his desk, and he rang me up.” The producer liked Barry’s ideas, and commissioned him to write more. ‘Woodentop’ was developed and expanded – and became The Bill, an instant hit. ‘This is my life’ That was his second chapter – and the third came equally randomly, about a decade later when Sacha, then at university, was rooming with three Cypriot girls. Her parents decided to visit Cyprus and Maria, one of the flatmates, put them in touch with her own parents in Paphos. The hospitality they encountered was overwhelming – and the Appletons decided to move here. Had they been looking to retire abroad, at that point? “I just do things,” shrugs Barry. “I’m spontaneous, I do things – and I said ‘Let’s do it’… Within two days [of moving], I was out on a boat with four or five Cypriots,” all of them diving and speargun-fishing while Barry manned the boat. “It was a bit different to driving down the M25,” he notes lightly. “So I thought, ‘This is my life’.” At the time, there was one petrol station in Paphos (“and if you didn’t fill up on Saturday morning that was it, you’d had it”) and he could see trees and fields all the way down to the sea from his window in Tala. A lot has changed since the 90s – but he hasn’t been back to Britain since his mother’s funeral 20 years ago, and has no interest in going. “I love living in Cyprus,” he says simply, “it’s my adopted country. I’m an honorary citizen.” Three chapters in Barry Appleton’s life: cop, TV writer and expat – but in fact there’s a fourth, the one he’s living now. A fourth chapter “I had cancer,” he explains, “which spread to my bones.” This was an intensely dark period, the darkest of his life. Among other things, he and Pam discovered that their offshore account in the Isle of Man had been taken over by a foreign bank – then the British government froze the funds, or “slapped an anti-terrorism order” on them. Either way, “we lost all our money. All my savings, all the money that I had”. Meanwhile, Barry was sick. His wife was going to look after him – but then Pam got sick too, diagnosed with ALS (motor neuron disease) which took her in 2014, after 49 years of marriage. “She went very quickly,” he recalls. “And that’s when I gave up my treatment and everything.” “This will take some believing, but it’s true. I was put on palliative care, because I didn’t want any more treatment – my wife had died, I didn’t want more treatment – and I went on palliative care, and…” he hesitates, as if unable to believe it himself, “I got better”. How? “I just got better.” Some might talk of a miracle – and indeed Barry might be one of those people, being a Christian who believes in “the power of prayer”. It’s unclear if his faith was always strong, or if his various experiences brought him closer to God – but I ask what view of human nature he’s formed over the years and his answer, from a former cop, is surprising. “I think love conquers everything,” he replies. “For everybody, everything. Animals, creatures…” But he’s seen so many terrible things – even a head in a bag (even if he didn’t actually see it). Hasn’t it made him pessimistic about people’s capacity for evil? Barry nods, trying to disentangle his feelings. On the one hand, he loved being a cop – the thrill of danger, the unpredictability, working with colleagues who’d “lay their life down for you… We thought of ourselves as knights on white chargers, y’know?”. But it was a dark chapter too, that first chapter, steeped in violence and cruelty – and he’s better now, more mature, happier. “I just enjoy life,” he says of himself now, at 87. “I just love people… There’s so many good people out there now. Before, I didn’t see these good people. I always saw bad people.” “As I get older, I get more and more surprised,” admits Barry Appleton softly. “I’ve been wrong about things. I see good in everybody.”