Pauline Collins: "Sometimes you’re chosen for your flaws"
In 1996 the late Pauline Collins hosted RT's Andrew Duncan in her home in Hampstead, north London, for an interview.
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in October 1996 to promote Screen Two drama Flowers of the Forest. She is indelibly "mumsy" and probably always has been, a robust woman even though only 5ft 2in, slightly wary and a bit defensive at times, so it was no surprise when she wagged a finger at me and warned, "If you use the words ‘nutty’ or ‘wacky’ I shall be very cross." We had escaped temporarily from the rigorous subject of her first television performance for four years — as an expert in the satanic ritual abuse of children — to a more comforting although abstruse discussion of radionics, a form of healing based on the theory that every organ of the body gives out vibrations that can be diagnosed. Ho hum, I think, as she says sternly, "I have found that it works. It’s been used on horses for years. It used to be called ‘putting your horse on the box’. They take a piece of hair, or clipping from a hoof, put it in a box and send it to the practitioner who ‘douses’ it to find out what’s wrong. The same process works with humans. If you go to a practitioner in person, he puts a metal plate on the stomach and uses a machine in order to get vibrations through his fingertips." It sounds very "alternative", I suggest. "You are scoffing, Sir," she replies. "I knew you would. Why are you scoffing?" We are at her home in Hampstead, the notorious north London epicentre of nutty… sorry, avant garde ideas. "There are lots of alternative things," she continues. "Chinese medicine has been going for a million years and now they agree it works. Why are people so suspicious? Most men have a sceptical nature. John [Alderton, her husband] has. I think we should be far more sceptical about putting all those chemicals and antibiotics into our bodies. I’ve used homeopathy since I was 40. Nothing specific was wrong, but I felt tired, like a car that needed a good service." She hoped to keep her mind in equal trim by studying physics, but this was doomed. "It was hard for me to get my brain around it." Recently, though, she dipped into one of her son’s science books and learnt about Erwin Schrödinger’s cat, an experiment to do with observation. "Does the cat exist inside a box when we’re not looking at it? Does matter exist at all, or is it only in our minds? I came to the conclusion, on my own, that time goes in little peaks and troughs. My son told me if I’d been born 100 years ago I’d have been a genius for working it out. I’m a bit late for that and I can’t understand what I’m saying — I can only picture it in my mind — so you won’t understand either. You’ll have to read the book." Before that enthralling experience there is this interview to conduct in real time and real space, and she is helpful and giggly, although never flamboyant. She puts herself down a lot, particularly her looks: "You have to be realistic about yourself. I have limitations which would prevent me playing Helen of Troy. Most people don’t think they’re beautiful, including some of the most stunning women in the world, like Michelle Pfeiffer. Do you think you are beautiful?" Now it is her turn to scoff, albeit without hauteur. "You notice your faults rather than strong points, which makes it particularly difficult to be an actor, except sometimes you’re chosen for your flaws. I’m sure I’ve been hired for being round with short legs. All my reviews say ‘cuddly’, ‘plump’ or ‘cosy’. I was perfect for Shirley Valentine, my favourite part. It’s a hard act to follow." She was nominated for an Oscar for the 1989 film. "Lots of actors are extremely normal. Who have you met who isn’t?" I mention a few names but she dismisses them as being foreign. "I suppose it’s something to do with the nature of England that we are not encouraged to be over-theatrical. This country likes its actors to be low key. Most of our lives are rejection. We get a few wonderful bouquets, but it’s an odd profession that bases itself on people saying ‘no’ to you. I take reviews with a pinch of salt. If you believe the bad ones you have to believe the good ones as well. I like applause — it’s our way of finding out whether we’re successful — but you’re never quite so amazingly fantastic as some people say, or quite so terribly bad as others think." She and John, whom she met when they were both in Emergency Ward 10, a sixties soap, and married in 1969, are so "normal" she became irritated by their image as "that sweet couple who never fight. Sickening, isn’t it?" she says. There’s been less of that since they stopped working together after their last series, Evergreen. "I’m sure we’ll find something in the future that we’d both love to do. The good thing about being married to an actor," she adds, "is he understands — and forgives — your problems." But sometimes, perhaps, two competing egos may become too oppressive even for a large Hampstead house? She looks disdainful. "Who have you found like that? Journalists love to think all actors are bitchy and jealous. Name me one who is." I suggest several but they don’t count, she says, because they’re American. Even if there were such a thing, it seems unwise to suggest an English actor who might suffer the teeniest pangs of envy. "We’re all supportive and spend so much time touching because we have to get to know each other in ten minutes. You can meet an actor in the morning and be in bed with him in the afternoon, professionally speaking. And then there’s that ‘luvvie’ word. We’re so bored with it. You’ve got to find another one to describe actors." In the last few years she has turned down many parts. "It’s not difficult to get good work," she explains. "But it’s hard to get magic work. I’m a bit off the theatre at the moment. It requires a huge investment of energy and, unless it’s perfect, you’re stuck with it night after night. It’s sad there aren’t that many new plays. I’m not very drawn to the classics or revivals. There should be a moratorium placed on Shakespeare for ten years because he’s been done to death. There’s an awful lot spent on a playwright who’s been dead 500 years when young writers could do with the money. I know Shakespeare’s our heritage and tourist industry, but he plays too large a part." Flowers of the Forest was the first TV script she’d been shown for a long time that she felt impelled to do. She plays a Welsh child abuse expert, Aileen Matthews, trained by an evangelical American organisation called the New Morning Trust, which believes there is a worldwide conspiracy of SRA — satanic ritual abuse. It is based in part on real-life cases in which children have been removed forcibly from their parents after similar suspicions had been aroused, and shows how easy it is for doubters to be convinced by a fervent conspiracy theorist like Aileen. "Her training is based on therapy sessions that include regression. It’s a difficult subject, and dangerous to assume people are not telling the truth — especially children — but I suppose really anyone can be made to ‘remember’ anything. Obviously abuse has gone on for years and years. There is collusion within families and the child feels guilty. Equally, though, it is possible to create situations in the mind that haven’t happened. I would never say someone is not telling the truth, but if you’re faced with the abuser and the abused you can usually tell by instinct whether the person has perpetrated the crime or not. True innocence shines out of someone." Zealous social workers don’t always see it that way, particularly in child abuse cases, which are the most tricky to handle. Occasionally paranoia creeps in: there is a scene in the film of a father innocently drying his daughter after swimming that could be open to misinterpretation by a suspicious social worker. "There are times when fathers can’t even put their arms around their daughters without worrying," she says. "It’s sad that the relationship between parent and child, or teacher and child, should become suspect. Perhaps these days we just have to be careful. "I had a wonderful childhood myself and was never abused. Perhaps I’m in the minority. I haven’t had counselling, although friends have. At times everyone needs help. In the old days it came from the priest but as society becomes less religious we look for different helpers. I was raised a Catholic but I’m not a good example. I believe it would be best if all religions joined together rather than remained separate. I probably used to have Catholic guilt [she once said she’d felt guilty all her life], particularly about working when the children were young, but I don’t any more. I decided it wasn’t a good thing." Following in the family tradition — her father was head of a junior school and both her mother and sister taught — she trained as a teacher, even though she’d wanted to be an actress since she was eight, after her mother put her in a school play. "I suppose I always thought that if I needed money I could be a supply teacher, and I was on many occasions. But it’s terrible to teach for money. You should have a real love. I was a good teacher but not one with heart. I decided that if I couldn’t earn a teacher’s wage within five years I’d give up acting. I just about made it but didn’t really have any success until I was 30, in Upstairs, Downstairs [where she played Sarah the maid, after Eileen Atkins had to withdraw for another commitment], which isn’t that young. I’ve always been a slow starter. Films came to my life very late and now I’m 56 there aren’t that many leading roles. Lately I’ve been offered parts in some extremely violent films which I don’t belong in. I’m not a Pollyanna character but I don’t think certain types of violence are good for us. Still, there’s violence in life, so is it reflecting art or is art reflecting life? Who knows? "I persevere and would like to continue but, as you grow older, there’s a natural falling off of your desire to work so much. My ambition is to be the female version of Denholm Elliot. He found himself a wonderful niche. I also want to smell the roses and travel. I went to Indonesia earlier this year with my youngest son, Richard, who’s 19. He was doing his round-the-world gap year and didn’t have a companion for the first bit so asked me to go with him. I was surprised, but we get on tremendously well." Their daughter Kate is an actress and their other son, Nick, is a writer and director — "much more difficult than acting". She should know. She has written a book, the story of a daughter she had at 23 ("Don’t let’s discuss that. It will only be a rehash"), and now plans a novel. "I have three mapped out in my head but I’m a terrible procrastinator." I find that difficult to believe. She seems very organised, happy and content. "Not too content, I hope. I like a bit of discontent. You need something you haven’t achieved to stop you becoming complacent. But it’s also nice to have a few highs amid the load of lows." Add Shirley Valentine to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Pauline Collins: 'Sometimes you’re chosen for your flaws'
In 1996 the late Pauline Collins hosted RT's Andrew Duncan in her home in Hampstead, north London, for an interview. The subheading read: "Nice, normal and happily married for nearly 30 years, Pauline Collins was made for the role of Shirley Valentine. But her career takes a sombre turn when she plays a child abuse expert in this week's Screen Two"
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in October 1996 to promote Screen Two drama Flowers of the Forest. Add Shirley Valentine to your watchlist She is indelibly "mumsy" and probably always has been, a robust woman even though only 5ft 2in, slightly wary and a bit defensive at times, so it was no surprise when she wagged a finger at me and warned, "If you use the words ‘nutty’ or ‘wacky’ I shall be very cross." We had escaped temporarily from the rigorous subject of her first television performance for four years — as an expert in the satanic ritual abuse of children — to a more comforting although abstruse discussion of radionics, a form of healing based on the theory that every organ of the body gives out vibrations that can be diagnosed. Ho hum, I think, as she says sternly, "I have found that it works. It’s been used on horses for years. It used to be called ‘putting your horse on the box’. They take a piece of hair, or clipping from a hoof, put it in a box and send it to the practitioner who ‘douses’ it to find out what’s wrong. The same process works with humans. If you go to a practitioner in person, he puts a metal plate on the stomach and uses a machine in order to get vibrations through his fingertips." It sounds very "alternative", I suggest. "You are scoffing, Sir," she replies. "I knew you would. Why are you scoffing?" We are at her home in Hampstead, the notorious north London epicentre of nutty… sorry, avant garde ideas. "There are lots of alternative things," she continues. "Chinese medicine has been going for a million years and now they agree it works. Why are people so suspicious? Most men have a sceptical nature. John [Alderton, her husband] has. I think we should be far more sceptical about putting all those chemicals and antibiotics into our bodies. I’ve used homeopathy since I was 40. Nothing specific was wrong, but I felt tired, like a car that needed a good service." She hoped to keep her mind in equal trim by studying physics, but this was doomed. "It was hard for me to get my brain around it." Recently, though, she dipped into one of her son’s science books and learnt about Erwin Schrödinger’s cat, an experiment to do with observation. "Does the cat exist inside a box when we’re not looking at it? Does matter exist at all, or is it only in our minds? I came to the conclusion, on my own, that time goes in little peaks and troughs. My son told me if I’d been born 100 years ago I’d have been a genius for working it out. I’m a bit late for that and I can’t understand what I’m saying — I can only picture it in my mind — so you won’t understand either. You’ll have to read the book." Before that enthralling experience there is this interview to conduct in real time and real space, and she is helpful and giggly, although never flamboyant. She puts herself down a lot, particularly her looks: "You have to be realistic about yourself. I have limitations which would prevent me playing Helen of Troy. Most people don’t think they’re beautiful, including some of the most stunning women in the world, like Michelle Pfeiffer. Do you think you are beautiful?" Now it is her turn to scoff, albeit without hauteur. "You notice your faults rather than strong points, which makes it particularly difficult to be an actor, except sometimes you’re chosen for your flaws. I’m sure I’ve been hired for being round with short legs. All my reviews say ‘cuddly’, ‘plump’ or ‘cosy’. I was perfect for Shirley Valentine, my favourite part. It’s a hard act to follow." She was nominated for an Oscar for the 1989 film. "Lots of actors are extremely normal. Who have you met who isn’t?" I mention a few names but she dismisses them as being foreign. "I suppose it’s something to do with the nature of England that we are not encouraged to be over-theatrical. This country likes its actors to be low key. Most of our lives are rejection. We get a few wonderful bouquets, but it’s an odd profession that bases itself on people saying ‘no’ to you. I take reviews with a pinch of salt. If you believe the bad ones you have to believe the good ones as well. I like applause — it’s our way of finding out whether we’re successful — but you’re never quite so amazingly fantastic as some people say, or quite so terribly bad as others think." She and John, whom she met when they were both in Emergency Ward 10, a sixties soap, and married in 1969, are so "normal" she became irritated by their image as "that sweet couple who never fight. Sickening, isn’t it?" she says. There’s been less of that since they stopped working together after their last series, Evergreen. "I’m sure we’ll find something in the future that we’d both love to do. The good thing about being married to an actor," she adds, "is he understands — and forgives — your problems." But sometimes, perhaps, two competing egos may become too oppressive even for a large Hampstead house? She looks disdainful. "Who have you found like that? Journalists love to think all actors are bitchy and jealous. Name me one who is." I suggest several but they don’t count, she says, because they’re American. Even if there were such a thing, it seems unwise to suggest an English actor who might suffer the teeniest pangs of envy. "We’re all supportive and spend so much time touching because we have to get to know each other in ten minutes. You can meet an actor in the morning and be in bed with him in the afternoon, professionally speaking. And then there’s that ‘luvvie’ word. We’re so bored with it. You’ve got to find another one to describe actors." In the last few years she has turned down many parts. "It’s not difficult to get good work," she explains. "But it’s hard to get magic work. I’m a bit off the theatre at the moment. It requires a huge investment of energy and, unless it’s perfect, you’re stuck with it night after night. It’s sad there aren’t that many new plays. I’m not very drawn to the classics or revivals. There should be a moratorium placed on Shakespeare for ten years because he’s been done to death. There’s an awful lot spent on a playwright who’s been dead 500 years when young writers could do with the money. I know Shakespeare’s our heritage and tourist industry, but he plays too large a part." Flowers of the Forest was the first TV script she’d been shown for a long time that she felt impelled to do. She plays a Welsh child abuse expert, Aileen Matthews, trained by an evangelical American organisation called the New Morning Trust, which believes there is a worldwide conspiracy of SRA — satanic ritual abuse. It is based in part on real-life cases in which children have been removed forcibly from their parents after similar suspicions had been aroused, and shows how easy it is for doubters to be convinced by a fervent conspiracy theorist like Aileen. "Her training is based on therapy sessions that include regression. It’s a difficult subject, and dangerous to assume people are not telling the truth — especially children — but I suppose really anyone can be made to ‘remember’ anything. Obviously abuse has gone on for years and years. There is collusion within families and the child feels guilty. Equally, though, it is possible to create situations in the mind that haven’t happened. I would never say someone is not telling the truth, but if you’re faced with the abuser and the abused you can usually tell by instinct whether the person has perpetrated the crime or not. True innocence shines out of someone." Zealous social workers don’t always see it that way, particularly in child abuse cases, which are the most tricky to handle. Occasionally paranoia creeps in: there is a scene in the film of a father innocently drying his daughter after swimming that could be open to misinterpretation by a suspicious social worker. "There are times when fathers can’t even put their arms around their daughters without worrying," she says. "It’s sad that the relationship between parent and child, or teacher and child, should become suspect. Perhaps these days we just have to be careful. "I had a wonderful childhood myself and was never abused. Perhaps I’m in the minority. I haven’t had counselling, although friends have. At times everyone needs help. In the old days it came from the priest but as society becomes less religious we look for different helpers. I was raised a Catholic but I’m not a good example. I believe it would be best if all religions joined together rather than remained separate. I probably used to have Catholic guilt [she once said she’d felt guilty all her life], particularly about working when the children were young, but I don’t any more. I decided it wasn’t a good thing." Following in the family tradition — her father was head of a junior school and both her mother and sister taught — she trained as a teacher, even though she’d wanted to be an actress since she was eight, after her mother put her in a school play. "I suppose I always thought that if I needed money I could be a supply teacher, and I was on many occasions. But it’s terrible to teach for money. You should have a real love. I was a good teacher but not one with heart. I decided that if I couldn’t earn a teacher’s wage within five years I’d give up acting. I just about made it but didn’t really have any success until I was 30, in Upstairs, Downstairs [where she played Sarah the maid, after Eileen Atkins had to withdraw for another commitment], which isn’t that young. I’ve always been a slow starter. Films came to my life very late and now I’m 56 there aren’t that many leading roles. Lately I’ve been offered parts in some extremely violent films which I don’t belong in. I’m not a Pollyanna character but I don’t think certain types of violence are good for us. Still, there’s violence in life, so is it reflecting art or is art reflecting life? Who knows? "I persevere and would like to continue but, as you grow older, there’s a natural falling off of your desire to work so much. My ambition is to be the female version of Denholm Elliot. He found himself a wonderful niche. I also want to smell the roses and travel. I went to Indonesia earlier this year with my youngest son, Richard, who’s 19. He was doing his round-the-world gap year and didn’t have a companion for the first bit so asked me to go with him. I was surprised, but we get on tremendously well." Their daughter Kate is an actress and their other son, Nick, is a writer and director — "much more difficult than acting". She should know. She has written a book, the story of a daughter she had at 23 ("Don’t let’s discuss that. It will only be a rehash"), and now plans a novel. "I have three mapped out in my head but I’m a terrible procrastinator." I find that difficult to believe. She seems very organised, happy and content. "Not too content, I hope. I like a bit of discontent. You need something you haven’t achieved to stop you becoming complacent. But it’s also nice to have a few highs amid the load of lows."
Prunella Scales: 'I'm terrified of everyone – well, a bit'
In January 1995 the late Prunella Scales met RT's Andrew Duncan at the Savoy Hotel in London to talk about her marriage to Timothy West, Fawlty Towers and why TV sitcoms were her "least favourite form of work". The subheading read: "Quite unlike the acerbic Sybil Fawlty, Prunella Scales is modest, self-critical and rarely given to passionate outbursts. Just don't call her a 'luvvie'…"
This interview was originally published in January 1995 to promote BBC Two series Signs and Wonders. Add Fawlty Towers to your watchlist She appears apprehensive as she walks into the River Restaurant at the Savoy Hotel. There is not a hint of the regal hauteur or shrewish snobbery she brought to her two most well-known roles - the Queen in Alan Bennett's Single Spies, and Sybil, which still resonates 20 years after Fawlty Towers. There is no reason why there should be. She has played innumerable characters (in the four-part thriller Signs and Wonders she is the anguished mother of a girl who is seduced by a mind-bending cult) and is one of Britain's most versatile and best-loved actresses. "Being a character actress means you're not very pretty really," she says softly, smiling. She and her husband, actor Timothy West, envy their 28-year-old son Sam, also a successful actor, because, she adds, "he'll never lose a part through not looking good enough, which has happened to both of us. A blow to the ego? Yes, but you tend to think, 'Here we go again.' There's a wonderful line by Thornton Wilder: a 12-year-old girl is rubbing her cheeks to make them look attractively pink and her mother tells her, 'Stop that. You're quite pretty enough for all normal purposes.' I think I'm quite pretty enough for all normal purposes." As she sips champagne, she seems ill at ease and asks, "Does this make everyone terribly indiscreet by the time pudding arrives?" I hope so, I reply. She is introspective and shy, but given to bursts of good humour which light up her whole face. "I'm terrified of everyone. Well, a bit," she insists. "Most actors I know are deeply unsure of themselves. Vulnerability is more important to us than confidence." Surely not, when she's had a career as successful as hers? "Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish," she says quickly, raising her voice. "We're slaves to opportunity. It's very much a matter of luck. Tim and I are extraordinarily lucky, but there have been many disappointments - shows failing, not getting parts, being very short of money and out of work." They come from thespian backgrounds. Tim's parents were both actors, and so was her mother, but she "retired" when she married - "she had very strong ideas about children and all that." Her father was a cotton salesman, "a sweet man," who didn't mind his only daughter being called Prunella after a play of that name her mother was performing in Harrogate when she was 17 - and fell in love with the leading man. They seem to have been eccentric in the most gentle, British way, living in a rented farmhouse in Surrey without running water or electricity. Imbued with a puritan work ethic - or maybe it's just good taste - she thinks watching breakfast TV is the epitome of sin and feels guilty reading a book before lunch. Her crocheting is a constant companion to while away idle moments and, although she served on the council of Equity, the actors' union, for two years, she says, "I soft-pedal my politics. It's rather brave for actors to express opinions in public, almost a professional hazard. If people think I'm a raving pinko it might mitigate any effect I could have on a cause. There is this pernicious word which can completely negate any opinion." She pauses before building to a modest crescendo of indignation: "'Luvvie'. It is a word never, ever heard within the profession. It is an iniquitous invention of the press, a hysterical term used to devalue something which is true and they are thus afraid of. One worries when one reads it in the Guardian because they are supposed to be on my side. 'Luvvies'," she announces with passion, "do not exist." Let's talk about the Queen, I suggest. She gazes across the Thames to the monolithic concrete brutalism that is the Royal National Theatre. "It was such a joy playing her there," she recalls. "It was the first time a reigning monarch had been portrayed on the stage and when I came on - I had a very good wig and costume - there was a frisson which was absolutely physical. It wasn't, 'My God, that woman looks so much like the Queen.' It was, 'How cheeky.' It was very strong blasphemy, and good news. "I had a sweet letter from her private detective or someone who said he had to stop himself from standing up. That was the most wonderful, lovely compliment. I didn't enjoy doing it on television at all. It was bliss to be allowed to have a corgi, even though she was a frightful 'star' - it would have been too expensive to have one on stage - but because the Queen is often seen on television it wasn't a first, and it became perfectly obvious in close-up that this wasn't HMQ herself. It was P Scales in a wig, and that's not so much fun. I was very disappointed in myself. Maybe that's actors' paranoia or, as Tim says, 'galloping sensitivity'." It was sensitivity that persuaded her to have bags removed from under her eyes in 1978. "They're still quite bad, but not so bad as they would be. It was an excellent idea and not terribly expensive. It's not so much that you look better; it avoids the audience being distracted by thoughts of, 'Goodness, how old is this woman?'" For the same reason, although she is open about her age, she doesn't really want it mentioned, so I won't, although a dedicated ageist could deduce it by reading on. "I've never lied about my age, but it's irrelevant. I do a one-woman show on Queen Victoria and the day there's a howl of derisive laughter when I play her as a young woman I'll give up. But audiences like to make an imaginative leap, and I don't want them thinking, 'She looks good for her age.' It's the least significant thing about you, don't you think?" Earlier this year she had a small part in her first Hollywood film, Wolf, with Jack Nicholson. "It was very jolly and I loved it. When I became an actress Hollywood was nothing to do with anything I wanted to do. It was like going to Timbuktu. I thought acting was about trying to be as good as you can in stage plays. I enjoyed radio, and broadcasting is still a great joy to me. The scenery is so much more expansive - you have to imagine it yourself, and there are no limits - and you can do boring jobs like ironing while you listen. "It's a dreadful thing to say - because I suppose I earn the bulk of my living from them - but TV sitcoms are my least favourite form of work. I don't mind situation comedy in the theatre, where you do it night after night and can learn from the audience. I love long runs because I'm a slow worker. But on TV it's a horrendous schedule. I never really felt ready to go on Fawlty Towers. Do you think I'm still lumbered with that show? People need a peg to hang you on and I'm grateful to it on the whole. It opened, rather than closed, doors for me. I enjoyed After Henry enormously and was quite proud of it." "Usually I absolutely hate watching myself, but have an irresistible urge to fast-forward to my next bit to see if I was OK. That's vanity, of course. Perhaps it's self-obsession. I challenge anyone to watch themselves with detachment. I find television soporific. It sends me to sleep, even when I'm on, and especially when Tim is. It's a source of great domestic strife. He says I was sitting there one evening with my crocheting watching some performance of his and when it ended I said, 'Jolly good, darling.' But as the next programme started I said, 'Oh, it's darling Peter Barkworth. Where are my glasses?'" "I hope I'm not competitive - we both desire each other's good - but I was often envious of him when he played leading parts in the theatre, and I think he was envious of me being quite well paid in sitcoms. It's difficult being married to an actor, but it would be absolutely impossible to be married to anyone else. Our most frequent row when young, and both working, was who needed cherishing most. Guess who won?" "You," I say. She gives a mock imperious glare and screeches, "Nooooooarrrrr. After the children were born [their second son, Joseph, 25, is studying to become a teacher] I was reluctant to work, but Tim kicked me back and I'm grateful. It was quite painful but I think ultimately it made me a better mum. We spent virtually all our money taking them with us wherever we went. I felt it was my duty when we hit a new town to dangle babies at six o'clock on a Sunday evening so the local paper could carry a picture and perhaps entice a few people into the theatre. It's a professional obligation, not something I personally relish, but it's no good acting your knickers off if no one knows what you're doing and where. "I suspect that publicity does not enhance your professional life in any way. I'm not going to say 'career'. I don't like that word. Acting is a business, a working life." She married Timothy West in 1963 when she was 30 ("My mother thought I'd be left on the shelf. I didn't") and they have lived in the same house near Wandsworth Common for 26 years. They also own a 60ft narrowboat, on which she relaxes - sometimes causing herself embarrassment. After one day's mooching on the river she went into a pub for a snack, looking scruffy and a bit butch in trousers and pullover. "There was this awful piped music, so I strode to the bar and said to this very pretty blonde barmaid, 'I say, darling, what about having it off?' She was startled and said, 'What!' I repeated, 'Could we have it off, my love.' After a stunned pause, she said, 'Oh. You mean the music?'" She'll be living on the boat again next month while she directs Tim in Alan Bennett's Getting On, at the Quarry Theatre in the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds. "I haven't directed him since 1982, when we did Uncle Vanya in Perth. It was one of the happiest jobs we've done, contrary to all expectations. I enjoy directing. It makes you a better and more compliant actor because you understand the problems better. Why should anyone be surprised if an actor turns out to be a good director? We work with several of them every year, so we know what doesn't work - to put it no higher than that." Money seems genuinely to be of secondary importance to her. "I didn't become an actress to get rich. One wants merely to remain solvent. When I was young, waiting for buses, my dream was to afford a cab. Now I can - and that's as rich as I want to be. I don't understand anyone wanting to be famous - all that business of people recognising you in Marks and Spencer with unwashed hair, being perfectly foul to your children. Ugh." She has cheese to finish her claret, and then looks at her watch. "Golly," she says, "I must totter off," and she exits through the still crowded dining room, nibbling at brie - radiant, reliable and even a touch regal.
Prunella Scales on her marriage to Timothy West, Fawlty Towers and why TV sitcoms were her "least favourite form of work"
First published in the 1990s, this archive interview sees the late Prunella Scales reflecting on Fawlty Towers, family life and fame.
This interview was originally published in January 1995 to promote BBC Two series Signs and Wonders. She appears apprehensive as she walks into the River Restaurant at the Savoy Hotel. There is not a hint of the regal hauteur or shrewish snobbery she brought to her two most well-known roles - the Queen in Alan Bennett's Single Spies, and Sybil, which still resonates 20 years after Fawlty Towers. There is no reason why there should be. She has played innumerable characters (in the four-part thriller Signs and Wonders she is the anguished mother of a girl who is seduced by a mind-bending cult) and is one of Britain's most versatile and best-loved actresses. "Being a character actress means you're not very pretty really," she says softly, smiling. She and her husband, actor Timothy West, envy their 28-year-old son Sam, also a successful actor, because, she adds, "he'll never lose a part through not looking good enough, which has happened to both of us. A blow to the ego? Yes, but you tend to think, 'Here we go again.' There's a wonderful line by Thornton Wilder: a 12-year-old girl is rubbing her cheeks to make them look attractively pink and her mother tells her, 'Stop that. You're quite pretty enough for all normal purposes.' I think I'm quite pretty enough for all normal purposes." As she sips champagne, she seems ill at ease and asks, "Does this make everyone terribly indiscreet by the time pudding arrives?" I hope so, I reply. She is introspective and shy, but given to bursts of good humour which light up her whole face. "I'm terrified of everyone. Well, a bit," she insists. "Most actors I know are deeply unsure of themselves. Vulnerability is more important to us than confidence." Surely not, when she's had a career as successful as hers? "Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish," she says quickly, raising her voice. "We're slaves to opportunity. It's very much a matter of luck. Tim and I are extraordinarily lucky, but there have been many disappointments - shows failing, not getting parts, being very short of money and out of work." They come from thespian backgrounds. Tim's parents were both actors, and so was her mother, but she "retired" when she married - "she had very strong ideas about children and all that." Her father was a cotton salesman, "a sweet man," who didn't mind his only daughter being called Prunella after a play of that name her mother was performing in Harrogate when she was 17 - and fell in love with the leading man. They seem to have been eccentric in the most gentle, British way, living in a rented farmhouse in Surrey without running water or electricity. Imbued with a puritan work ethic - or maybe it's just good taste - she thinks watching breakfast TV is the epitome of sin and feels guilty reading a book before lunch. Her crocheting is a constant companion to while away idle moments and, although she served on the council of Equity, the actors' union, for two years, she says, "I soft-pedal my politics. It's rather brave for actors to express opinions in public, almost a professional hazard. If people think I'm a raving pinko it might mitigate any effect I could have on a cause. There is this pernicious word which can completely negate any opinion." She pauses before building to a modest crescendo of indignation: "'Luvvie'. It is a word never, ever heard within the profession. It is an iniquitous invention of the press, a hysterical term used to devalue something which is true and they are thus afraid of. One worries when one reads it in the Guardian because they are supposed to be on my side. 'Luvvies'," she announces with passion, "do not exist." Let's talk about the Queen, I suggest. She gazes across the Thames to the monolithic concrete brutalism that is the Royal National Theatre. "It was such a joy playing her there," she recalls. "It was the first time a reigning monarch had been portrayed on the stage and when I came on - I had a very good wig and costume - there was a frisson which was absolutely physical. It wasn't, 'My God, that woman looks so much like the Queen.' It was, 'How cheeky.' It was very strong blasphemy, and good news. "I had a sweet letter from her private detective or someone who said he had to stop himself from standing up. That was the most wonderful, lovely compliment. I didn't enjoy doing it on television at all. It was bliss to be allowed to have a corgi, even though she was a frightful 'star' - it would have been too expensive to have one on stage - but because the Queen is often seen on television it wasn't a first, and it became perfectly obvious in close-up that this wasn't HMQ herself. It was P Scales in a wig, and that's not so much fun. I was very disappointed in myself. Maybe that's actors' paranoia or, as Tim says, 'galloping sensitivity'." It was sensitivity that persuaded her to have bags removed from under her eyes in 1978. "They're still quite bad, but not so bad as they would be. It was an excellent idea and not terribly expensive. It's not so much that you look better; it avoids the audience being distracted by thoughts of, 'Goodness, how old is this woman?'" For the same reason, although she is open about her age, she doesn't really want it mentioned, so I won't, although a dedicated ageist could deduce it by reading on. "I've never lied about my age, but it's irrelevant. I do a one-woman show on Queen Victoria and the day there's a howl of derisive laughter when I play her as a young woman I'll give up. But audiences like to make an imaginative leap, and I don't want them thinking, 'She looks good for her age.' It's the least significant thing about you, don't you think?" Earlier this year she had a small part in her first Hollywood film, Wolf, with Jack Nicholson. "It was very jolly and I loved it. When I became an actress Hollywood was nothing to do with anything I wanted to do. It was like going to Timbuktu. I thought acting was about trying to be as good as you can in stage plays. I enjoyed radio, and broadcasting is still a great joy to me. The scenery is so much more expansive - you have to imagine it yourself, and there are no limits - and you can do boring jobs like ironing while you listen. "It's a dreadful thing to say - because I suppose I earn the bulk of my living from them - but TV sitcoms are my least favourite form of work. I don't mind situation comedy in the theatre, where you do it night after night and can learn from the audience. I love long runs because I'm a slow worker. But on TV it's a horrendous schedule. I never really felt ready to go on Fawlty Towers. Do you think I'm still lumbered with that show? People need a peg to hang you on and I'm grateful to it on the whole. It opened, rather than closed, doors for me. I enjoyed After Henry enormously and was quite proud of it." "Usually I absolutely hate watching myself, but have an irresistible urge to fast-forward to my next bit to see if I was OK. That's vanity, of course. Perhaps it's self-obsession. I challenge anyone to watch themselves with detachment. I find television soporific. It sends me to sleep, even when I'm on, and especially when Tim is. It's a source of great domestic strife. He says I was sitting there one evening with my crocheting watching some performance of his and when it ended I said, 'Jolly good, darling.' But as the next programme started I said, 'Oh, it's darling Peter Barkworth. Where are my glasses?'" "I hope I'm not competitive - we both desire each other's good - but I was often envious of him when he played leading parts in the theatre, and I think he was envious of me being quite well paid in sitcoms. It's difficult being married to an actor, but it would be absolutely impossible to be married to anyone else. Our most frequent row when young, and both working, was who needed cherishing most. Guess who won?" "You," I say. She gives a mock imperious glare and screeches, "Nooooooarrrrr. After the children were born [their second son, Joseph, 25, is studying to become a teacher] I was reluctant to work, but Tim kicked me back and I'm grateful. It was quite painful but I think ultimately it made me a better mum. We spent virtually all our money taking them with us wherever we went. I felt it was my duty when we hit a new town to dangle babies at six o'clock on a Sunday evening so the local paper could carry a picture and perhaps entice a few people into the theatre. It's a professional obligation, not something I personally relish, but it's no good acting your knickers off if no one knows what you're doing and where. "I suspect that publicity does not enhance your professional life in any way. I'm not going to say 'career'. I don't like that word. Acting is a business, a working life." She married Timothy West in 1963 when she was 30 ("My mother thought I'd be left on the shelf. I didn't") and they have lived in the same house near Wandsworth Common for 26 years. They also own a 60ft narrowboat, on which she relaxes - sometimes causing herself embarrassment. After one day's mooching on the river she went into a pub for a snack, looking scruffy and a bit butch in trousers and pullover. "There was this awful piped music, so I strode to the bar and said to this very pretty blonde barmaid, 'I say, darling, what about having it off?' She was startled and said, 'What!' I repeated, 'Could we have it off, my love.' After a stunned pause, she said, 'Oh. You mean the music?'" She'll be living on the boat again next month while she directs Tim in Alan Bennett's Getting On, at the Quarry Theatre in the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds. "I haven't directed him since 1982, when we did Uncle Vanya in Perth. It was one of the happiest jobs we've done, contrary to all expectations. I enjoy directing. It makes you a better and more compliant actor because you understand the problems better. Why should anyone be surprised if an actor turns out to be a good director? We work with several of them every year, so we know what doesn't work - to put it no higher than that." Money seems genuinely to be of secondary importance to her. "I didn't become an actress to get rich. One wants merely to remain solvent. When I was young, waiting for buses, my dream was to afford a cab. Now I can - and that's as rich as I want to be. I don't understand anyone wanting to be famous - all that business of people recognising you in Marks and Spencer with unwashed hair, being perfectly foul to your children. Ugh." She has cheese to finish her claret, and then looks at her watch. "Golly," she says, "I must totter off," and she exits through the still crowded dining room, nibbling at brie - radiant, reliable and even a touch regal. Visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Jilly Cooper: "I just think I'm a drip with no confidence"
In 1996 the late Jilly Cooper welcomed RT's Andrew Duncan into her Gloucestershire home for a memorable interview over lunch.
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in April 1996, when Jilly Cooper featured on Radio 3's Private Passions as her novel Appassionata was being released. What more is there to say about Jolly Jilly, the everlasting Essex girl [born in Hornchurch, but brought up in Yorkshire], gap-toothed and voluble, batty about animals who she claims love her more than people, flattering as only the deeply insecure can be? It takes a heart of stone not to preen at all those, "Gosh, you are brilliants", even though you realise she says it to every boy, girl, dog, cat, and cockatoo for all I know. She has enough compassion to fuel a nunnery and enough sexual imagination to empty it in a hurry. Her latest bonkbuster, Appassionata, does for the world of orchestras what her previous four have done for showjumping, polo, television and toyboys in her fictional county of Rutshire, and includes many of her familiar heroes such as dastardly Rupert Campbell-Black. It is a world of divinely masterful men, women who worry about their breast size, characters twee at times and robustly sexual [there’s a coupling on the glockenspiel] at others. Her husband Leo, a publisher of military history who spends a few days each week at his London office, says her own life is entwined in her fiction (her sadly departed dog Barbara is forever immortalised as the mongrel "Gertrude"), and although he skims the books – he is only human – he coined the pun "sex and Chopin" for Appassionata. Her mother adds that she was always attracted to preppy, blond, upper-class cads. Certainly, her own life is a sitcom, only more amusing and, sometimes sadly, over the top. It would be tempting, in this cynical age, to believe it is all a good marketing ploy, but the glorious thing about her is that she is genuine. No one could pretend to be that seriously dippy. On the other hand, could anyone that seriously dippy spend three years writing such long books? Real life is a mystery, so we might as well relax at the wooden kitchen table in her Gloucestershire home for a delicious lunch cooked by her assistant, Pippa. Buzzing from one topic to another, she says it’s too boring to talk about the book. "I just want to gossip, but I have to be so careful. In the old days you could come down here and we could get pissed and talk our heads off, but the hoo-hah changed the goalposts and one couldn’t say what one wanted." The "hoo-hah" was the lurid publicity in 1990 when, after years of writing about her thrillingly satisfactory home life, it was revealed that Leo, whom she married in 1961, having first met him at 14, had been having an affair for years. All that seems over. Only the other day a TV producer was anxious to film them à deux. "He assumed we had hobbies, but I told him the only thing we do together is make love occasionally, and the BBC wouldn’t let him film that. He was frightfully embarrassed. More wine?" She is 59 but could pass for a decade younger. "One worries about decay. I looked at myself this morning, when I was washing my hair for you, and the bright light hit me and I thought, ‘Pleated skin – not very attractive,' but if you’re busy you’re much more worried about finishing things. Are you all right, darling?" This remark is addressed to her dog, Hero, who I am trying surreptitiously to kick – he seems in a persistent sniffing state. Glaring at me, from his perch near the breadboard on the table, is Simon Rattle, a furry black and white feline concoction with mean eyes, named after the conductor. "Isn’t he sweet?" says Jilly. "He likes you, so he’s going to do his number. He’s a bit mad, with a habit of jumping on your shoulders and clinging tight. It’s all right – except when you’re naked answering the telephone." Not an activity I was contemplating, I mutter, but Jilly is all compassion again, this time clucking to the photographer about his assistant. "Will you feed your little girl? She looks so hungry. Would you like some potatoes to take away?" It is time to ask questions. She interrupts. "When I wrote interviews I spent weeks trying to get them right. I’d love to teach journalists how to do it. Rule one – arrive looking absolutely sweet and friendly. It was so kind of you to bring me champagne. Rule two, cherchez les minicab drivers. They know about everyone. "You should hear them on Mrs Mellor. They’d go to the stake for her because they think she’s beautiful, sweet and a bit wronged. I had one the other day who’d just driven Virginia Bottomley. She’s gorgeous, he said, even in a green track suit with no make-up after jogging. I’ve got a good new pun – the Arts Council [Mrs Bottomley’s responsibility] doesn’t have a Bottomley’s pit. "Why don’t you write something lovely about her? The trouble is these days readers would think you’re a drooling thing. Someone ought to write a nice piece about Camilla Parker-Bowles too, who is absolutely divine. I love her dearly." She is a neighbour, as is Ronnie Ferguson ("a wonderful man"), George Milford Haven ("a fantastically handsome polo player") and "Mickey Suffolk – the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire – a lovely man. Everyone thinks he’s a bit like Rupert Campbell-Black, but Rupert isn’t any one person." She enjoys living in the country, having moved from south London 15 years ago. "The awful thing about life is that nothing is ever quite perfect, is it? If you’re a writer, and you’re stupid, you have to go into this awful self imposed exile. I have Pippa and others who work for me, and Leo for four days a week. "But I’m completely one track and can only write if I’m not surrounded by jolly, laughing friends pouring a drink down me. I have lots of mates here, but don’t see them, which is boring. Now I’ve decided I’m going to fool around a bit. It’s silly to say ‘no’ all the time." Some sort of social round begins this week as she publicises Appassionata as well as a CD of music from the book – "the selection of someone who listened to Classic FM for a couple of years," sniffed one critic, but which Jilly describes as "faintmakingly beautiful. I listened to it in the bath and cried so much the water went cold with my tears." The only disappointment is the postponement – for financial reasons – of a TV adaptation of The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous. "It’s maddening, a real tragedy for the actors who were expecting a break." Not that she was too keen on the Riders dramatisation, where the only resemblance to the book was the title. "It irritates me when they completely re-write it. All they really want is the name, but I know nothing about screenplays. It’s probably very difficult. I’ve seen a bit of The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous. There are some good dogs in it. Excellent casting of a Jack Russell." Her research is phenomenal, judging by the seven pages of acknowledgments – oh, yes, "dear, gallant" Barbara is there too – for Appassionata. "I wanted to write something accurate. I think it’s quite jolly, but it was a sod to write – how do you make 86 characters in an orchestra? I kept losing them. Someone would have red hair in the first chapter and be totally different later. I never thought I’d finish it, but then my mind was concentrated enormously by the fact that my darling housekeeper announced last August that she was leaving [for marital reasons] on 1 October, so I finished in six weeks. It was sheer fear." Fear, she adds, can be the parent of cruelty. "I think it applies to women bosses particularly. They are often unnecessarily cruel, and to their own sex, because they have to establish themselves. I’ve seen men bullies, but women are worse. The terrifying atmosphere you get in some womens’ magazines when they’re beastly to each other. I suppose it’s sacrilege to say women are shrill, but the decibel level of their voices when they’re together makes them that way." Read more: Jilly Cooper - legendary author of Rivals - dies, aged 88 Jilly Cooper's Rutshire Chronicles books in order: How to read inspiration of Rivals Through the French windows she watches Pippa hunting for Jeff the gardener – there are 14 acres. She giggles and says, "Leo’s worst thing - I love this - is having to wander around looking for the gardeners. That’s a terrible remark. How lucky to have a big enough garden to spend hours finding the gardeners." She works in a cluttered gazebo at an ancient, second-hand typewriter, called Monica, bought in Cirencester in 1984 - "I’m superstitious. I think when Monica goes, I will" – and planned to learn the pieces performed in the book by concert pianist Marcus, son of Rupert. As a child she played piano in duets with her father on the violin – "the only time I saw him cry. I’m trying to work out why everyone thinks music is so wonderful. Samuel Johnson said it was the only sensual pleasure without vice. Of course there’s snobbishness. One was brought up thinking Rachmaninov and Chopin were junk and Liszt was beyond the pale, but he is frightfully ‘in’ now. "I’m not keen on modem composers. Some are good, but a lot are complete phonies. I don’t understand why they’d want to be phonies for so little money. At least I’m a phoney for a lot of money," she guffaws. "Have some cheese." She must be wealthy now, but she denies it vehemently. True, she bailed out Leo’s business on a couple of occasions, is generous to her two children, now in their twenties, but four number one bestsellers provide a good income. She calls for Pippa. "I need the money, don’t I?" "Yes, because she’s skint," agrees Pippa, a trifle hyperbolically. Jilly adds, still managing to smile, "I’m not being aggressive or paranoid, well not much, but it’s the one thing that makes me cross. Polly Toynbee wrote a vicious piece in The Times asking why I write such rubbish when I don’t need the money. That hurts. All I’ve done for the last three years is this book. "Everyone says I must be worth about five million. I have a big family, children, a large house, masses of tax, animals, and I’m such a flake I’m not very good at hanging on to it. Don’t laugh. I promise this is true. People don’t see either the inside of your bedroom or your bank statement. No one has any idea whether you have ancient aunts or a cat with a cocaine habit..." I glare triumphantly at Simon Rattle, who slinks quietly away. "I’m sorry to go on about money. It’s all relative. I’ll get myself together one day. I just think I’m a drip with no confidence. My insecurities must be so dreary for everyone else." Don’t worry, I say, sensitively, although with a certain hardening of the lips. Insecurity is the well spring of talent. "All right," she whoops. "I’m very insecure. Would you like cream with your strawberries?" She hunts in the fridge, finds none, and calls for Pippa who points out it is in a jug on the table. "Oh, that sums me up. I don’t recognise it when it’s decanted. I’m a mess in the kitchen." She is now planning a thriller in which she kills off another brute, Rannaldini, even though her agent advised, "Oh, darling, it’s out of genre," and then she hopes to write a novel about golf. "One gets the background right, and then turns them into the same larky characters. Appassionata isn’t a bad book, is it? I hope it cheers up a lot of people, and that’s no bad thing. I would love to write a serious, good novel. I probably couldn’t, but I think one ought to try. ‘Bottomley’s pit’ is such a good pun, isn’t it?" Check out more of our Books coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Dame Jilly Cooper: 'I just think I'm a drip with no confidence'
In 1996 the late Jilly Cooper welcomed RT's Andrew Duncan into her Gloucestershire home for an interview over lunch. The subheading read: "Jilly Cooper, like a character in one of her novels, mixes in circles where everyone is wealthy, famous or aristocratic. But what lies beneath that jolly, dotty veneer?"
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in April 1996, when Jilly Cooper featured on Radio 3's Private Passions as her novel Appassionata was being released. Add Rivals to your watchlist What more is there to say about Jolly Jilly, the everlasting Essex girl [born in Hornchurch, but brought up in Yorkshire], gap-toothed and voluble, batty about animals who she claims love her more than people, flattering as only the deeply insecure can be? It takes a heart of stone not to preen at all those, "Gosh, you are brilliants", even though you realise she says it to every boy, girl, dog, cat, and cockatoo for all I know. She has enough compassion to fuel a nunnery and enough sexual imagination to empty it in a hurry. Her latest bonkbuster, Appassionata, does for the world of orchestras what her previous four have done for showjumping, polo, television and toyboys in her fictional county of Rutshire, and includes many of her familiar heroes such as dastardly Rupert Campbell-Black. It is a world of divinely masterful men, women who worry about their breast size, characters twee at times and robustly sexual [there’s a coupling on the glockenspiel] at others. Her husband Leo, a publisher of military history who spends a few days each week at his London office, says her own life is entwined in her fiction (her sadly departed dog Barbara is forever immortalised as the mongrel "Gertrude"), and although he skims the books – he is only human – he coined the pun "sex and Chopin" for Appassionata. Her mother adds that she was always attracted to preppy, blond, upper-class cads. Certainly, her own life is a sitcom, only more amusing and, sometimes sadly, over the top. It would be tempting, in this cynical age, to believe it is all a good marketing ploy, but the glorious thing about her is that she is genuine. No one could pretend to be that seriously dippy. On the other hand, could anyone that seriously dippy spend three years writing such long books? Real life is a mystery, so we might as well relax at the wooden kitchen table in her Gloucestershire home for a delicious lunch cooked by her assistant, Pippa. Buzzing from one topic to another, she says it’s too boring to talk about the book. "I just want to gossip, but I have to be so careful. In the old days you could come down here and we could get pissed and talk our heads off, but the hoo-hah changed the goalposts and one couldn’t say what one wanted." The "hoo-hah" was the lurid publicity in 1990 when, after years of writing about her thrillingly satisfactory home life, it was revealed that Leo, whom she married in 1961, having first met him at 14, had been having an affair for years. All that seems over. Only the other day a TV producer was anxious to film them à deux. "He assumed we had hobbies, but I told him the only thing we do together is make love occasionally, and the BBC wouldn’t let him film that. He was frightfully embarrassed. More wine?" She is 59 but could pass for a decade younger. "One worries about decay. I looked at myself this morning, when I was washing my hair for you, and the bright light hit me and I thought, ‘Pleated skin – not very attractive,' but if you’re busy you’re much more worried about finishing things. Are you all right, darling?" This remark is addressed to her dog, Hero, who I am trying surreptitiously to kick – he seems in a persistent sniffing state. Glaring at me, from his perch near the breadboard on the table, is Simon Rattle, a furry black and white feline concoction with mean eyes, named after the conductor. "Isn’t he sweet?" says Jilly. "He likes you, so he’s going to do his number. He’s a bit mad, with a habit of jumping on your shoulders and clinging tight. It’s all right – except when you’re naked answering the telephone." Not an activity I was contemplating, I mutter, but Jilly is all compassion again, this time clucking to the photographer about his assistant. "Will you feed your little girl? She looks so hungry. Would you like some potatoes to take away?" It is time to ask questions. She interrupts. "When I wrote interviews I spent weeks trying to get them right. I’d love to teach journalists how to do it. Rule one – arrive looking absolutely sweet and friendly. It was so kind of you to bring me champagne. Rule two, cherchez les minicab drivers. They know about everyone. You should hear them on Mrs Mellor. They’d go to the stake for her because they think she’s beautiful, sweet and a bit wronged. I had one the other day who’d just driven Virginia Bottomley. She’s gorgeous, he said, even in a green track suit with no make-up after jogging. I’ve got a good new pun – the Arts Council [Mrs Bottomley’s responsibility] doesn’t have a Bottomley’s pit. "Why don’t you write something lovely about her? The trouble is these days readers would think you’re a drooling thing. Someone ought to write a nice piece about Camilla Parker-Bowles too, who is absolutely divine. I love her dearly." She is a neighbour, as is Ronnie Ferguson ("a wonderful man"), George Milford Haven ("a fantastically handsome polo player") and "Mickey Suffolk – the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire – a lovely man. Everyone thinks he’s a bit like Rupert Campbell-Black, but Rupert isn’t any one person." She enjoys living in the country, having moved from south London 15 years ago. "The awful thing about life is that nothing is ever quite perfect, is it? If you’re a writer, and you’re stupid, you have to go into this awful self imposed exile. I have Pippa and others who work for me, and Leo for four days a week. But I’m completely one track and can only write if I’m not surrounded by jolly, laughing friends pouring a drink down me. I have lots of mates here, but don’t see them, which is boring. Now I’ve decided I’m going to fool around a bit. It’s silly to say ‘no’ all the time." Some sort of social round begins this week as she publicises Appassionata as well as a CD of music from the book – "the selection of someone who listened to Classic FM for a couple of years," sniffed one critic, but which Jilly describes as "faintmakingly beautiful. I listened to it in the bath and cried so much the water went cold with my tears." The only disappointment is the postponement – for financial reasons – of a TV adaptation of The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous. "It’s maddening, a real tragedy for the actors who were expecting a break." Not that she was too keen on the Riders dramatisation, where the only resemblance to the book was the title. "It irritates me when they completely re-write it. All they really want is the name, but I know nothing about screenplays. It’s probably very difficult. I’ve seen a bit of The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous. There are some good dogs in it. Excellent casting of a Jack Russell." Her research is phenomenal, judging by the seven pages of acknowledgments – oh, yes, "dear, gallant" Barbara is there too – for Appassionata. "I wanted to write something accurate. I think it’s quite jolly, but it was a sod to write – how do you make 86 characters in an orchestra? I kept losing them. Someone would have red hair in the first chapter and be totally different later. I never thought I’d finish it, but then my mind was concentrated enormously by the fact that my darling housekeeper announced last August that she was leaving [for marital reasons] on 1 October, so I finished in six weeks. It was sheer fear." Fear, she adds, can be the parent of cruelty. "I think it applies to women bosses particularly. They are often unnecessarily cruel, and to their own sex, because they have to establish themselves. I’ve seen men bullies, but women are worse. The terrifying atmosphere you get in some womens’ magazines when they’re beastly to each other. I suppose it’s sacrilege to say women are shrill, but the decibel level of their voices when they’re i together makes them that way." Through the French windows she watches Pippa hunting for Jeff the gardener – there are 14 acres. She giggles and says, "Leo’s worst thing - I love this - is having to wander around looking for the gardeners. That’s a terrible remark. How lucky to have a big enough garden to spend hours finding the gardeners." She works in a i cluttered gazebo at an ancient, second-hand typewriter, called Monica, bought in Cirencester in 1984 - "I’m superstitious. I think when Monica goes, I will" – and planned to learn the pieces performed in the book by concert pianist Marcus, son of Rupert. As a child she played piano in duets with her father on the violin – "the only time I saw him cry. I’m trying to work out why everyone thinks music is so wonderful. Samuel Johnson said it was the only sensual pleasure without vice. Of course there’s snobbishness. One was brought up thinking Rachmaninov and Chopin were junk and Liszt was beyond the pale, but he is frightfully ‘in’ now. I’m not keen on modem composers. Some are good, but a lot are complete phonies. I don’t understand why they’d want to be phonies for so little money. At least I’m a phoney for a lot of money," she guffaws. "Have some cheese." She must be wealthy now, but she denies it vehemently. True, she bailed out Leo’s business on a couple of occasions, is generous to her two children, now in their twenties, but four number one bestsellers provide a good income. She calls for Pippa. "I need the money, don’t I?" "Yes, because she’s skint." agrees Pippa, a trifle hyperbolically. Jilly adds, still managing to smile, "I’m not being aggressive or paranoid, well not much, but it’s the one thing that makes me cross. Polly Toynbee wrote a vicious piece in The Times asking why I write such rubbish when I don’t need the money. That hurts. All I’ve done for the last three years is this book. Everyone says I must be worth about five million. I have a big family, children, a large house, masses of tax, animals, and I’m such a flake I’m not very good at hanging on to it. Don’t laugh. I promise this is true. People don’t see either the inside of your bedroom or your bank statement. No one has any idea whether you have ancient aunts or a cat with a cocaine habit..." I glare triumphantly at Simon Rattle, who slinks quietly away. "I’m sorry to go on about money. It’s all relative. I’ll get myself together one day. I just think I’m a drip with no confidence. My insecurities must be so dreary for everyone else." Don’t worry, I say, sensitively, although with a certain hardening of the lips. Insecurity is the well spring of talent. "All right," she whoops. "I’m very insecure. Would you like cream with your strawberries?" She hunts in the fridge, finds none, and calls for Pippa who points out it is in a jug on the table. "Oh, that sums me up. I don’t recognise it when it’s decanted. I’m a mess in the kitchen." She is now planning a thriller in which she kills off another brute, Rannaldini, even though her agent advised, "Oh, darling, it’s out of genre," and then she hopes to write a novel about golf. "One gets the background right, and then turns them into the same larky characters. Appassionata isn’t a bad book, is it? I hope it cheers up a lot of people, and that’s no bad thing. I would love to write a serious, good novel. I probably couldn’t, but I think one ought to try. ‘Bottomley’s pit’ is such a good pun, isn’t it?"
Patricia Routledge: 'I'm a cynical realist - I can't stand all the luvvie stuff'
In 1994 the beloved star of stage and screen sat down with Radio Times ahead of playing a medieval abbess for the BBC.
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in March 1994, to promote the BBC programme Omnibus: Hildegard. She sips champagne (“I began to go on the wagon, but it’s so boring”), and insists on photographs being taken before lunch because, she explains with a most un-Hyacinth Bucket lack of social awareness, “I won’t need to worry about getting gravy on my chin. Why am I being interviewed? I don’t enjoy talking about myself and I don’t want to discuss ‘it’. If I find you putting words into my mouth, I’ll have your guts for garters,” she laughs. “But don’t worry. I’m a cynical realist. Scepticism keeps everything toned up, don’t you think?” Putting on glasses to read the menu, she adds, “Let us see what is afoot.” She uses a lot of quaint expressions, and there is humour behind her formidable pose. “Heavens,” she shrieks – well, almost – “Sauce diable. I won’t walk out because I want a good lunch, but it’s not appropriate when I’m working on it.” ‘It’ is at first sight, Patricia Routledge admits, an unlikely subject for a TV drama documentary – St Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century German abbess, no less. It would be a mistake, but yawn if you must. Indeed, when she mentioned the idea to producer James Runcie, with whom she’d worked on a programme about Barbara Pym, he asked, “Who the hell is she?” Her reply was direct: “Ask your dad” (James’s father is Robert Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury). “I didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously, but six months later he said, ‘I know you’re busy with Keeping Up Appearances being a big success, but what about this Hildegard?’” So it comes to pass that this Tuesday there will be an Omnibus programme, Hildegard, about one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages, a scholar, composer, sainted exorcist, preacher, ecologist, writer, musician, and poet. “I’d never heard of her until 1986, when someone gave me a cassette of her music and I became absolutely hooked on its purity,” she says. Hildegard, the tenth of ten children, was sent by her parents to a monastery when she was eight as a gift to God. “It was a good way for a woman to get an education,” she says. “The alternative was pretty bleak – to be a chattel of a husband. She became an early feminist and marched away from the monks, saying ‘We girls can set up on our own’. She was aware of the gifts women have, which have been kept under quite a lot.” Hildegard founded convents at Rupertsberg, on the Rhine near Bingen, and at Eibingen on the opposite bank before she died at the age of 81. Her heart and tongue are preserved in a golden reliquary in the parish church at Rüdesheim. So why is filming taking place here in Canterbury? The reasons are prosaic and earthly. Hildegard’s shrines have become a crowded tourist attraction, so Runcie planned to film in Poland. When that became too expensive “he did the only thing any self-respecting son of a recent archbishop would do: he rang his father. That’s how we come to be here, using the crypt.” In preparation for the part, she went on a 24-hour retreat to a Benedictine nunnery. “It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life, and I shall go again. You might think it’s a cocooned world, but when you hear the nuns praying for the world you realise they’ve hit the bull’s-eye because of their ‘direct line’ to the Almighty. “Hildegard had that as well, and it brings great simplicity because you’re able to cut away the dross and go for what is essential. All visionaries are single-minded. It goes both ways – Hitler was single-minded, too. Sauce diable to you. I ought to ask for a side order, to see if I get indigestion! I didn’t believe in the devil, but now I think he stalks. Evil is a positive force. I’m sure we all agree with that. You’ve only got to pick up a newspaper...” Does she have a “direct line”, I wonder? “Oh, dear. I'd prefer not to answer. Occasionally you’re in a receptive mood, with your antennae out, tuned to the right hi-fi indicator. I’m a believer, a bit of a searcher. I sloughed off as a student because I wanted to rid myself of cosy props – Methodist Sunday school and the church choir — and start with a clean piece of paper. “It sounds so frightfully ‘pi’ to say I’ve always had dedication, but another reason Hildegard is of such interest today is that there is a reaching out for things in heaven and earth that are not dreamed of in our philosophy. Even the drug scene began, and continues, as a search for inspired experience. We need leaders who will organise and throw up — sorry for such an expression over lunch — those we deserve.” Her down-to-earth personality was developed during a happy childhood in Birkenhead, where her father was a gentlemen’s outfitter and mother was proud of being a full-time mum. At 9 she decided to become a English teacher, and she still has a bit of the schoolmarm in her. “I wanted to impart my enthusiasm, and it’s quite a surprise to me that I’m not a teacher.” She remembers walking once night at university and thinking with horror that out of a class of 20 pupils only one could be as passionate about Shakespeare as she was. “I couldn’t bear it. At the same time I began to get that ‘tug’ during plays at university, the realisation that on stage I was making use of my intense intelligence. "I was frightened to death of becoming an actress because I thought it was a wicked world where talent didn't matter, and the only way to success was the casting couch. I didn't find any truth in that. For your own safety you close your eyes to what you don't want to know. God gave me an acute imagination, and acting brings that make- believe into reality. That's why actors are still children. We're very lucky because our work allows us to do our own therapy, to get rid of anger and emotional rubbish. That doesn't mean to say you indulge." Her early mentors were a couple of excellent teachers, her mother (“it broke her heart when I left at 23, but she knew I had to go, and instigated it”), and an Irish grandmother “full of drama”. She practised her death for us so brilliantly we were in tears. She suffered from pernicious anaemia and had to eat raw liver sandwiches, and would make sure we were round the bed to let us know what agony it was. She took out her teeth to make herself look even more ill. Come the moment she was sailing through the pearly gates, she was magnificent because she’d rehearsed so much. I think she influenced me a lot — the imagination, humour, a little touch of anarchy...” Sixty-five this year, she has only really been out of work for two months, in 1963. “I’d made up my mind that I’d get out if I couldn’t make a living. I thought the end of the world had come. I know people who call themselves actors who haven't worked in years. You have to be practical and strong-minded. I got a job in the records department of St Mary Abbots Hospital, donned my white coat and had the most wonderful time. My God, I could have turned them round. “Actors miss out on real life if we’re not careful, travelling by taxi instead of bus. At least my north-country puritanism won’t let me spend too much, although I'm getting better. I buy Clarins skin care and look back to the day when I wondered if I could afford Ponds vanishing cream.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/10/keeping-up-appearances-9eba144.jpg" width="3951" height="2619" alt="Three women from Keeping Up Appearances — Hyacinth Bucket stands in the centre with a confident smile, flanked by her sisters Rose and Daisy, all dressed in bright 1990s outfits, posing cheerfully in front of a wall covered with green ivy and flowers." title="Photocall for new BBC production 'Keeping up Appearances'" /> At first she wanted to be a singer but she turned down offers from Sadlers Wells and the D’Oyly Carte opera company. “Music has made my life much more interesting, but I don’t think I was good enough to be at the top. I’d hate to have been an ensemble player.” Leonard Bernstein chose her to star in his musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Broadway in 1976, and during Darling of the Day (for which she won a Tony award), Richard Rodgers sent her a note on the back of an envelope saying he would like to write a musical for her. “But we never found the right subject.” More recently she played Netty Fowler in the RSC version of Carousel. “That was thrilling. The well-sung musical went out with Hair. Since then you've had to bash your way through the sound barrier.” Her versatility led her from musicals, to Shakespeare, to parts written for her by Alan Bennett (Talking Heads) and Victoria Wood, as well as Keeping Up Appearances and a British Comedy Award for Best Actress in 1991. But she is refreshingly realistic view of her profession. "I can't stand all the 'luvvie' stuff. It's a great danger. When you're dealing in vulnerable emotions that you can't switch on and off and are bunched up with others, you have to find a means of communication. Some find the 'luvvie' formula helps." A spinster, she admits she wouldn’t have had children unless she could have been with them full-time, as her mother was with her. “There’s both something wrong if one hasn’t fulfilled the biological necessities, although I never think there is. It’s just something I didn’t do, a sin of omission. Suddenly you look round, and think, 'I must have been having such a good time’. Making a good marriage and being a mother is a vocation. I think perhaps our mother gave both me and my brother — who also didn’t have children — too strong a sense of our own value.” View oEmbed on the source website This summer she is acting at Chichester, where she has a home, and another series of Keeping Up Appearances is planned for next year. “I’m amazed and astonished by the way it has touched a pulse. I make myself watch it because I think I ought to know what I’m perpetrating…” She pauses, watching for a reaction, before bustling on. “You sound doubtful I should enjoy doing a sitcom, but it gives people an enormous amount of pleasure, makes them laugh – sometimes it makes me laugh, too – and they know no one is going to be steaming in a double bed. "And the letters I get - one recently from an old lady who'd been to hospital for a check-up and the news was bad. She wrote saying her husband had died several years earlier, and she returned to her empty home feeling very low. In the evening she turned on the telly - and she wrote, 'There you were. It made me happy'. That is worth everything." Add Keeping Up Appearances to your watchlist on the <a id="OWA8b702c45-bee9-94e4-f018-57518e78041b" class="x_OWAAutoLink" title="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" href="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-outlook-id="449c28d9-909e-4aab-b6b8-153454f55d5e" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="0">Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Dame Patricia Routledge: 'I'm a cynical realist. I can't stand all the luvvie stuff'
In 1994 the beloved star of stage and screen sat down with Andrew Duncan of RT ahead of playing a medieval abbess for the BBC. The subheading read: "Hyacinth would approve: here's Patricia Routledge sipping champagne after a day's filming in Canterbury Cathedral. But the actress is far less interested in keeping up appearances…"
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in March 1994, to promote the BBC programme Omnibus: Hildegard. Add Keeping Up Appearances to your watchlist She sips champagne (“I began to go on the wagon, but it’s so boring”), and insists on photographs being taken before lunch because, she explains with a most un-Hyacinth Bucket lack of social awareness, “I won’t need to worry about getting gravy on my chin. Why am I being interviewed? I don’t enjoy talking about myself and I don’t want to discuss ‘it’. If I find you putting words into my mouth, I’ll have your guts for garters,” she laughs. “But don’t worry. I’m a cynical realist. Scepticism keeps everything toned up, don’t you think?” Putting on glasses to read the menu, she adds, “Let us see what is afoot.” She uses a lot of quaint expressions, and there is humour behind her formidable pose. “Heavens,” she shrieks – well, almost – “Sauce diable. I won’t walk out because I want a good lunch, but it’s not appropriate when I’m working on it.” ‘It’ is at first sight, Patricia Routledge admits, an unlikely subject for a TV drama documentary – St Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century German abbess, no less. It would be a mistake, but yawn if you must. Indeed, when she mentioned the idea to producer James Runcie, with whom she’d worked on a programme about Barbara Pym, he asked, “Who the hell is she?” Her reply was direct: “Ask your dad” (James’s father is Robert Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury). “I didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously, but six months later he said, ‘I know you’re busy with Keeping Up Appearances being a big success, but what about this Hildegard?’.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/10/keeping-up-appearances-9eba144.jpg" width="3951" height="2619" alt="Three women from Keeping Up Appearances — Hyacinth Bucket stands in the centre with a confident smile, flanked by her sisters Rose and Daisy, all dressed in bright 1990s outfits, posing cheerfully in front of a wall covered with green ivy and flowers." title="Photocall for new BBC production 'Keeping up Appearances'" /> So it comes to pass that this Tuesday there will be an Omnibus programme, Hildegard, about one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages, a scholar, composer, sainted exorcist, preacher, ecologist, writer, musician, and poet. “I’d never heard of her until 1986, when someone gave me a cassette of her music and I became absolutely hooked on its purity,” she says. Hildegard, the tenth of ten children, was sent by her parents to a monastery when she was eight as a gift to God. “It was a good way for a woman to get an education,” she says. “The alternative was pretty bleak – to be a chattel of a husband. She became an early feminist and marched away from the monks, saying ‘We girls can set up on our own’. She was aware of the gifts women have, which have been kept under quite a lot.” Hildegard founded convents at Rupertsberg, on the Rhine near Bingen, and at Eibingen on the opposite bank before she died at the age of 81. Her heart and tongue are preserved in a golden reliquary in the parish church at Rüdesheim. So why is filming taking place here in Canterbury? The reasons are prosaic and earthly. Hildegard’s shrines have become a crowded tourist attraction, so Runcie planned to film in Poland. When that became too expensive “he did the only thing any self-respecting son of a recent archbishop would do: he rang his father. That’s how we come to be here, using the crypt.” In preparation for the part, she went on a 24-hour retreat to a Benedictine nunnery. “It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life, and I shall go again. You might think it’s a cocooned world, but when you hear the nuns praying for the world you realise they’ve hit the bull’s-eye because of their ‘direct line’ to the Almighty. “Hildegard had that as well, and it brings great simplicity because you’re able to cut away the dross and go for what is essential. All visionaries are single-minded. It goes both ways – Hitler was single-minded, too. Sauce diable to you. I ought to ask for a side order, to see if I get indigestion! I didn’t believe in the devil, but now I think he stalks. Evil is a positive force. I’m sure we all agree with that. You’ve only got to pick up a newspaper …” Does she have a “direct line”, I wonder? “Oh, dear. I'd prefer not to answer. Occasionally you’re in a receptive mood, with your antennae out, tuned to the right hi-fi indicator. I’m a believer, a bit of a searcher. I sloughed off as a student because I wanted to rid myself of cosy props – Methodist Sunday school and the church choir — and start with a clean piece of paper. It sounds so frightfully ‘pi’ to say I’ve always had dedication, but another reason Hildegard is of such interest today is that there is a reaching out for things in heaven and earth that are not dreamed of in our philosophy. Even the drug scene began, and continues, as a search for inspired experience. We need leaders who will organise and throw up — sorry for such an expression over lunch — those we deserve.” Her down-to-earth personality was developed during a happy childhood in Birkenhead, where her father was a gentlemen’s outfitter and mother was proud of being a full-time mum. At 9 she decided to become a English teacher, and she still has a bit of the schoolmarm in her. “I wanted to impart my enthusiasm, and it’s quite a surprise to me that I’m not a teacher.” She remembers walking once night at university and thinking with horror that out of a class of 20 pupils only one could be as passionate about Shakespeare as she was. “I couldn’t bear it. At the same time I began to get that ‘tug’ during plays at university, the realisation that on stage I was making use of my intense intelligence. "I was frightened to death of becoming an actress because I thought it was a wicked world where talent didn't matter, and the only way to success was the casting couch. I didn't find any truth in that. For your own safety you close your eyes to what you don't want to know. God gave me an acute imagination, and acting brings that make- believe into reality. That's why actors are still children. We're very lucky because our work allows us to do our own therapy, to get rid of anger and emotional rubbish. That doesn't mean to say you indulge." Her early mentors were a couple of excellent teachers, her mother (“it broke her heart when I left at 23, but she knew I had to go, and instigated it”), and an Irish grandmother “full of drama”. She practised her death for us so brilliantly we were in tears. She suffered from pernicious anaemia and had to eat raw liver sandwiches, and would make sure we were round the bed to let us know what agony it was. She took out her teeth to make herself look even more ill. Come the moment she was sailing through the pearly gates, she was magnificent because she’d rehearsed so much. I think she influenced me a lot — the imagination, humour, a little touch of anarchy …” Sixty-five this year, she has only really been out of work for two months, in 1963. “I’d made up my mind that I’d get out if I couldn’t make a living. I thought the end of the world had come. I know people who call themselves actors who haven't worked in years. You have to be practical and strong-minded. I got a job in the records department of St Mary Abbots Hospital, donned my white coat and had the most wonderful time. My God, I could have turned them round. “Actors miss out on real life if we’re not careful, travelling by taxi instead of bus. At least my north-country puritanism won’t let me spend too much, although I'm getting better. I buy Clarins skin care and look back to the day when I wondered if I could afford Ponds vanishing cream.” At first she wanted to be a singer but she turned down offers from Sadlers Wells and the D’Oyly Carte opera company. “Music has made my life much more interesting, but I don’t think I was good enough to be at the top. I’d hate to have been an ensemble player.” Leonard Bernstein chose her to star in his musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Broadway in 1976, and during Darling of the Day (for which she won a Tony award), Richard Rodgers sent her a note on the back of an envelope saying he would like to write a musical for her. “But we never found the right subject.” More recently she played Netty Fowler in the RSC version of Carousel. “That was thrilling. The well-sung musical went out with Hair. Since then you've had to bash your way through the sound barrier.” Her versatility led her from musicals, to Shakespeare, to parts written for her by Alan Bennett (Talking Heads) and Victoria Wood, as well as Keeping Up Appearances and a British Comedy Award for Best Actress in 1991. But she is refreshingly realistic view of her profession. "I can't stand all the 'luvvie' stuff. It's a great danger. When you're dealing in vulnerable emotions that you can't switch on and off and are bunched up with others, you have to find a means of communication. Some find the 'luvvie' formula helps." A spinster, she admits she wouldn’t have had children unless she could have been with them full-time, as her mother was with her. “There’s both something wrong if one hasn’t fulfilled the biological necessities, although I never think there is. It’s just something I didn’t do, a sin of omission. Suddenly you look round, and think, 'I must have been having such a good time’. Making a good marriage and being a mother is a vocation. I think perhaps our mother gave both me and my brother — who also didn’t have children — too strong a sense of our own value.” This summer she is acting at Chichester, where she has a home, and other series of Keeping Up Appearances is planned for next year. “I’m amazed and astonished by the way it has touched a pulse. I make myself watch it because I think I ought to know what I’m perpetrating…” She pauses, watching for a reaction, before bustling on. “You soon doubtfulI should enjoy doing a sitcom, but it gives people an enormous amount of pleasure, makes them laugh — sometimes it makes me laugh, too – and they know no one is going to be steaming in a double bed. "And the letters I get – one recently from an old lady who'd been to hospital for a check-up and the news was bad. She wrote saying her husband had died several years earlier, and she returned to her empty home feeling very low. In the evening she turned on the telly - and she wrote, 'There you were. It made me happy'. That is worth everything."
Ozzy Osbourne in 2002: "I'm the working-class hero – not bad for a guy from Aston"
In light of the news of Ozzy Osbourne passing away at the age of 76, revisit this interview from when RT met the Prince of Darkness in LA in 2002 – after The Osbournes had made Ozzy a TV star.
This article was first published in Radio Times in October 2002. I arrive early, park outside the gates, notice two crosses carved into the front door and a bronze plaque that says, "Never mind the dogs. Beware of the owner." A police car pulls up and two men come out of the house to ask what I’m doing. Security is strict in the Beverly Hills street, off Sunset Boulevard, since the bizarre inhabitants of number 513 became the most sensational family on American television, outperforming Sex and the City in the ratings and winning an Emmy last month for outstanding reality series. The unlikely focus of The Osbournes is the family of a Birmingham-born heavy-metal star, the self-styled "Prince of Darkness", lead singer with Black Sabbath until he was fired and went solo in 1978, amassing an alleged £40 million fortune. Now Ozzy Osbourne's a shuffling testament to the ravages of alcoholism, drug addiction and indiscriminate sexual adventures. The interior of his house is mock Gothic – cherubs, stained-glass windows, crucifixes. Pictures of the family – wife Sharon (his manager), daughters Aimee, 18 (who declined to appear in the first series: Sharon says, "She’s the only sane member"), and Kelly, 17, and son Jack, 16, are arranged on a hall table. Photographs of dogs and cats line the circular staircase, with crosses on them. Such an animal lover, you might think, particularly when you watch him on TV stumble around trying to save a herpes-ridden cat from coyotes. Perhaps it’s an attempt at redemption – he once shot 17 of his cats in a drunken rage. He greets me wearing black tracksuit bottoms, T-shirt, crosses on gold chains round his neck, rings, including one with a Union Jack motif, and OZZY carved with a needle and lead from a pencil on to the fingers of his left hand when he was jailed for theft in his adolescence. His arms dangle by his side, fingers trembling, voice slurred and stuttering, myopic behind his round blue sunglasses, hearing impaired by years of decibel excess. His white hair is dyed shimmering black, pulled into a ponytail with auburn ends drifting on to his stooped shoulders. "I have attention deficit disorder," he warns. "I’m on medication, which helps. Without it, you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. It’s difficult for me to stay in one place." I have omitted eight obscenities from those 28 words. The family uses variations of the "f" word every 19 seconds, a relentless repetition that shocks at first, but soon dulls the impact. "Jesus," says Sharon, "we never realised how much we swore." Such is Ozzy’s popularity that President Bush invited him to dine at the White House last year, and he was introduced to the Queen after performing at July’s Golden Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace. "I was freaked out. I assumed I was the in-house joke. I’m my own worst critic. I don’t think I’m good enough for them, for you, for anyone. The Queen spoke to me, but I haven’t a clue what she said. Look at photographs – I’m in shock. I hyperventilate opening a box of chocolates. I’m the most nervous guy in the world, a frightened little man, on red alert from when I wake until I go to sleep. I was born with fear." What of? "If! I could answer that, I’d save a fortune on therapy. Sharon says, ‘You’ve got the number-one TV show, a sell-out Ozzfest summer tour [which she started in 1996 and made one of the world’s most successful touring rock shows], everyone loves you – and you walk out into a blue sky and aren’t happy until you find a cloud.' "It’s true. I want to lock myself in a room. I don’t go out much. People have a mental picture of me because this whole business is run on rumours – Ozzy eats bats, Ozzy drinks urine. They read I’m crazy, a drug addict, alcoholic and don’t give a f*** for anyone." He pauses. "That’s true, but I don’t take myself seriously. Performing is like being schizophrenic. On stage sometimes I’m out of control." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/07/GettyImages-109533768-195f23e.jpg" width="3000" height="2057" alt="Kelly, Ozzy, Sharon and Jack Osbourne post against a brick wall. Kelly has a grey beret on and has cropped spiky orange hair wearing a white top and grey trousers. Ozzy has a wide grin with his arms around Kelly and Sharon, and is wearing all black with a collection of long gold necklaces. Sharon, who has deep purple hair, is also dressed in black and is smiling. Jack on the far right, is wearing a t-shirt, jeans and a jacket, and has his hands in his pockets" title="Ozzfest 2002 and WWF Entertainment Press Conference" /> Poignantly, Sharon was diagnosed with colon cancer in July, a few days before she negotiated a £13 million deal for a second series of The Osbournes. The cameras will film her progress, although she jokes, "How many chemo sessions can you show on TV? I think it will help women. I had no idea we got this form of cancer, so there must be a s***load of others who don’t realise. I had my 50th birthday recently, and I love my age. I fear death terribly at the moment because my babies are not settled. I want to see them married before I go. I’ll be there with my borrowed diamonds." Unkind souls suggest the show is less the lurid voyeurism of a real-life Addams Family, Munsters and Simpsons rolled into one, and more a shrewdly marketed pension plan for an over-the-hill celebrity, whose family play to the camera, with Sharon, as co-producer, influencing the content. But Ozzy’s so spaced out it’s impossible to believe his portrayal is anything but natural. Sharon says that it’s "an understatement" to say they’re surprised by the programme’s success. "We didn’t know it would change our lives. It’s caused my kids a lot of problems. Jack was tearful every day. He didn’t like being recognised with his mates, read unpleasant things on the internet, and thought he’d never be taken seriously, but the good outweighs the bad." She kisses him goodbye. "He’s going for an interview for a Ben Affleck movie. Kelly made a record [a cover of Papa Don’t Preach] and now she’s like, ‘Mum, I don’t know if I can handle this. I want to hang out with my girlfriends.' Unfortunately, she’s committed to deliver." Ozzy’s watched less than half of one episode, he says. He doesn’t need to see more. He was there when 50 cameras around the house filmed 24 hours a day for months, capturing, for instance, his astonishment when Sharon hires a pet therapist after one of her numerous small dogs pees on the furniture. "I don’t think we’re ‘normal’," she says, "although no family is what they pretend to be. There’s always stuff under the carpet, but we all love each other very much, are tolerant, know our faults and get on with it. Ozzy is funny and so honest, I don’t know anyone in the public eye who’d allow themselves to be filmed in underpants, half-pissed, with his belly hanging out. Today’s stars have no character, and put on this false front of being perfect." They can’t be accused of that. Kelly discusses the hygienic aspect of thongs. They throw a ham and stink bombs over a neighbour’s hedge because they’re making too much noise singing folk songs. "Ozzy Osbourne with his tattoos, scars and long hair is not your typical Beverly Hills person," Ozzy explains to me, straight-faced. "They don’t invite me to Christmas parties, but I wouldn’t want to go. They’re pompous dickheads." A main attraction is his sweet-natured bewilderment at normal family life writ large. At its heart it has honesty and mutual affection. "I love you all," he exclaims. "But you’re f***ing mad." He tells me, "The kids use bad language, but so does the rest of the world. They’ve been with us on the road, and in rock ‘n’ and roll swearing is the language. Sharon and I have never been parents to go ‘coochy coochy coo’." The only time he shows petulance is when discussing the bat incident, which took place 20 years ago in Des Moines, Iowa, at a time when he and his audience threw offal at each other and he bit the head off a bat, thinking it was rubber – two weeks of painful rabies injections followed. "My epitaph won’t be Ozzy Osbourne, the man who sold X million records. It will be the man who bit the head off a bat. It’s, like, get over it, man." The day we meet he’s been told he’s a grandfather. His estranged daughter, Jessica Sunshine, 30, has given birth to a girl Isobel. "Me, a grandfather. Hah!" he grunts. He and his first wife, Thelma, also have a son, Louis, 26. They divorced in 1979. "Divorce knocked the s*** out of me for years because I can’t stand rejection. I felt like a failure," he says. "I don’t go to England often. I have properties there [a home and 188 acres in Buckinghamshire]. Huh! That makes me sound a big-headed dickhead. I love England – if only you didn’t wake to that drizzle. I came to America in 1976 because there’s hereditary dyslexia in my family and not many English schools cope with that. One thing success has enabled me to do is give my kids a good education." The fourth of six children born in Aston, Birmingham, Ozzy was always a little eccentric – he stabbed his aunt’s cat at the age of 11 and tried to set fire to his sister. After leaving school at 15, he worked in an abattoir, became a petty thief and was jailed when his father, a night worker in a tool factory, refused to pay his fine. He was "saved" when he co-founded Black Sabbath in 1968, beginning a decade of addictions – four bottles of brandy a day, and so much cocaine that when it ran out he snorted a line of ants by mistake. He was arrested, and banned from Texas (President Bush’s home state) for urinating on the Alamo while wearing a woman’s dress. In 1978 he was kicked out of Black Sabbath as a washed-up druggie, and spent six months in a hotel room drinking, snorting and, if he could, copulating. He was rescued by Sharon, whose father, Don Arden, had managed Black Sabbath. She pulled him from the gutter, never tried to change him. "I was an old tart. I’d drink and take drugs with the best of them," she says, although she says she stopped when she realised one of them would have to settle down. They married in 1982, and it can’t have been easy. Seven years later he was arrested for trying to strangle her. Once, forgetting she was on tour with him, he returned to his Tokyo hotel room with a groupie. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/07/GettyImages-158962076-64a615d.jpg" width="3528" height="2352" alt="Ozzy, Kelly, Sharon and Jack Osbourne appear on stage at the Brit awards. All four are wearing black outfits, with Ozzy wearing glasses and Kelly having a black bob and wearing red lipstick. Kelly and Sharon are holding silver microphones, with Sharon talking when the picture was taken. Jack is in a black suit with a white shirt, with the collar button undone" title="Brit Awards 2008 - Show - London" /> "I was out of control and didn’t give a s*** whether I lived or died," he says. "I’m 54 this year and don’t know why I’m still around. I haven’t got away with it, though. I’m insane. If I’m not, why am I taking so many psychiatric medications, antidepressants and seeing a therapist once a month? I’ve been in rehab 14 times, and still drink, but I try to keep it down to a glass of wine or a few beers." He became addicted to Viagra, which he calls "a great sleeping pill for the wife. By the time it worked she was snoring." He pauses longer than usual, and adds bleakly, "I thought I’d work and put some money away so my wife can live well when she’s an old lady, because I’ll die first. That plan’s been wrecked, although I could drop dead this minute. "You know what happened with Sharon? I’m a hypochondriac, so when the medical world has some new gizmo, I want to have a go. I heard about this body scanner which detects cancer, so I had it done, and at the same time they shoved a telescope up my butt and found a tiny polyp, which is how cancer starts, but it was benign. I told Sharon, ‘Maybe you should have it done.' So she went and they found a malignant tumour up her. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/07/GettyImages-86109506-4b01b2f-e1753275022839.jpg" width="4445" height="2963" alt="Ozzy Osbourne sings on stage in a white tight-fitting fringed shirt. He has his long brown hair loose and is wide-eyed. He is clutching the microphone stand with one hand and the microphone itself with the other." title="Photo of Ozzy OSBOURNE and BLACK SABBATH" /> "It hit me like a freight train. I went on tour the following week, but can’t remember being on the road. You find yourself pissed off with God. I’m still in a state of ‘Is it really happening?' "Chemotherapy knocks the crap out of her, but she’s going to recover. It might be a lot worse. I could be on the minimum wage with no health insurance. I can afford the best doctors. When you have cancer in the family, nothing else matters. It’s taught me that every day you lose is another page gone, so don’t sit there like a vegetable. "I never realised TV is the most powerful form of entertainment on the planet. I still wonder what it all means. I was in Boston, where I’ve performed thousands of times, and this respectable middle-aged woman comes up to me and says, 'What the hell are you doing here?' I tell her I’m here to perform, and she goes, 'F***. You do that as well?' I’ve reached an audience with no idea I’m a rock ‘n’ roller. I’m pleased about that. I’m the working-class hero. Not bad for a guy from Aston. "Of course, I’m ashamed of some things, but I believe life is planned before you’re born. I don’t take the TV series seriously. You wake in the morning and there’s a camera crew up your butt. It’s like having a fly in your eye that won’t go away. It plays havoc on the nervous system, you know, but so long as I’m making people laugh – at me, or with me – I don’t give a s***. "I’m flavour of the month, the hottest ticket in town, but eventually we’ll be yesterday’s news. Then I’ll have serenity again. I hope." Read more: Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath bandmates lead tributes to star after death, aged 76 Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath play epic final show - and bring out fellow rock legends Did you know you can now order a previous edition of Radio Times magazine with our new back issues service? Check out more of our Audio coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
From the archive: 'Mad and Bad in Beverly Hills'
In light of the news of Ozzy Osbourne passing away at the age of 76, revisit this interview from when RT sent Andrew Duncan to meet the Prince of Darkness in LA in 2002 — when The Osbournes had made Ozzy a TV star. The subheading read: "Outrageous, exhibitionist, very rude… and a 'frightened little man'. Is there even more to the reality TV sensation than meets the eye?"
The Osbournes is on Amazon Prime Video. Add it to your watchlist This article was first published in RT in October 2002. I arrive early, park outside the gates, notice two crosses carved into the front door and a bronze plaque that says, "Never mind the dogs. Beware of the owner." A police car pulls up and two men come out of the house to ask what I’m doing. Security is strict in the Beverly Hills street, off Sunset Boulevard, since the bizarre inhabitants of number 513 became the most sensational family on American television, outperforming Sex and the City in the ratings and winning an Emmy last month for outstanding reality series. The unlikely focus of The Osbournes (already on MTV and beginning this week on Channel 4) is the family of a Birmingham-born heavy-metal star, the self-styled "Prince of Darkness", lead singer with Black Sabbath until he was fired and went solo in 1978, amassing an alleged £40 million fortune. Now Ozzy Osbourne's a shuffling testament to the ravages of alcoholism, drug addiction and indiscriminate sexual adventures. The interior of his house is mock Gothic — cherubs, stained-glass windows, crucifixes. Pictures of the family — wife Sharon (his manager), daughters Aimee, 18 (who declined to appear in the first series: Sharon says, "She’s the only sane member"), and Kelly, 17, and son Jack, 16, are arranged on a hall table. Photographs of dogs and cats line the circular staircase, with crosses on them. Such an animal lover, you might think, particularly when you watch him on TV stumble around trying to save a herpes-ridden cat from coyotes. Perhaps it’s an attempt at redemption — he once shot 17 of his cats in a drunken rage. He greets me wearing black tracksuit bottoms, T-shirt, crosses on gold chains round his neck, rings, including one with a Union Jack motif, and OZZY carved with a needle and lead from a pencil on to the fingers of his left hand when he was jailed for theft in his adolescence. His arms dangle by his side, fingers trembling, voice slurred and stuttering, myopic behind his round blue sunglasses, hearing impaired by years of decibel excess. His white hair is dyed shimmering black, pulled into a ponytail with auburn ends drifting on to his stooped shoulders. "I have attention deficit disorder," he warns. "I’m on medication, which helps. Without it, you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. It’s difficult for me to stay in one place." I have omitted eight obscenities from those 28 words. The family uses variations of the "f" word every 19 seconds, a relentless repetition that shocks at first, but soon dulls the impact. "Jesus," says Sharon, "we never realised how much we swore." Such is Ozzy’s popularity that President Bush invited him to dine at the White House last year, and he was introduced to the Queen after performing at July’s Golden Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace. "I was freaked out. I assumed I was the in-house joke. I’m my own worst critic. I don’t think I’m good enough for them, for you, for anyone. The Queen spoke to me, but I haven’t a clue what she said. Look at photographs — I’m in shock. I hyperventilate opening a box of chocolates. I’m the most nervous guy in the world, a frightened little man, on red alert from when I wake until I go to sleep. I was born with fear." What of? "If! I could answer that, I’d save a fortune on therapy. Sharon says, ‘You’ve got the number-one TV show, a sell-out Ozzfest summer tour [which she started in 1996 and made one of the world’s most successful touring rock shows], everyone loves you — and you walk out into a blue sky and aren’t happy until you find a cloud.' <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/07/GettyImages-109533768-195f23e.jpg" width="3000" height="2057" alt="Kelly, Ozzy, Sharon and Jack Osbourne post against a brick wall. Kelly has a grey beret on and has cropped spiky orange hair wearing a white top and grey trousers. Ozzy has a wide grin with his arms around Kelly and Sharon, and is wearing all black with a collection of long gold necklaces. Sharon, who has deep purple hair, is also dressed in black and is smiling. Jack on the far right, is wearing a t-shirt, jeans and a jacket, and has his hands in his pockets" title="Ozzfest 2002 and WWF Entertainment Press Conference" /> "It’s true. I want to lock myself in a room. I don’t go out much. People have a mental picture of me because this whole business is run on rumours — Ozzy eats bats, Ozzy drinks urine. They read I’m crazy, a drug addict, alcoholic and don’t give a f*** for anyone." He pauses. "That’s true, but I don’t take myself seriously. Performing is like being schizophrenic. On stage sometimes I’m out of control." Poignantly, Sharon was diagnosed with colon cancer in July, a few days before she negotiated a £13 million deal for a second series of The Osbournes. The cameras will film her progress, although she jokes, "How many chemo sessions can you show on TV? I think it will help women. I had no idea we got this form of cancer, so there must be a shitload of others who don’t realise. I had my 50th birthday recently, and I love my age. I fear death terribly at the moment because my babies are not settled. I want to see them married before I go. I’ll be there with my borrowed diamonds." Unkind souls suggest the show is less the lurid voyeurism of a real-life Addams Family, Munsters and Simpsons rolled into one, and more a shrewdly marketed pension plan for an over-the-hill celebrity, whose family play to the camera, with Sharon, as co-producer, influencing the content. But Ozzy’s so spaced out it’s impossible to believe his portrayal is anything but natural. Sharon says that it’s "an understatement" to say they’re surprised by the programme’s success. "We didn’t know it would change our lives. It’s caused my kids a lot of problems. Jack was tearful every day. He didn’t like being recognised with his mates, read unpleasant things on the internet, and thought he’d never be taken seriously, but the good outweighs the bad." She kisses him goodbye. "He’s going for an interview for a Ben Affleck movie. Kelly made a record [a cover of Papa Don’t Preach] and now she’s like, ‘Mum, I don’t know if I can handle this. I want to hang out with my girlfriends.' Unfortunately, she’s committed to deliver." Ozzy’s watched less than half of one episode, he says. He doesn’t need to see more. He was there when 50 cameras around the house filmed 24 hours a day for months, capturing, for instance, his astonishment when Sharon hires a pet therapist after one of her numerous small dogs pees on the furniture. "I don’t think we’re ‘normal’," she says, "although no family is what they pretend to be. There’s always stuff under the carpet, but we all love each other very much, are tolerant, know our faults and get on with it. Ozzy is funny and so honest, I don’t know anyone in the public eye who’d allow themselves to be filmed in underpants, half-pissed, with his belly hanging out. Today’s stars have no character, and put on this false front of being perfect." They can’t be accused of that. Kelly discusses the hygienic aspect of thongs. They throw a ham and stink bombs over a neighbour’s hedge because they’re making too much noise singing folk songs. "Ozzy Osbourne with his tattoos, scars and long hair is not your typical Beverly Hills person," Ozzy explains to me, straight-faced. "They don’t invite me to Christmas parties, but I wouldn’t want to go. They’re pompous dickheads." A main attraction is his sweet-natured bewilderment at normal family life writ large. At its heart it has honesty and mutual affection. "I love you all," he exclaims. "But you’re f***ing mad." He tells me, "The kids use bad language, but so does the rest of the world. They’ve been with us on the road, and in rock ‘n’ and roll swearing is the language. Sharon and I have never been parents to go ‘coochy coochy coo’." The only time he shows petulance is when discussing the bat incident, which took place 20 years ago in Des Moines, Iowa, at a time when he and his audience threw offal at each other and he bit the head off a bat, thinking it was rubber — two weeks of painful rabies injections followed. "My epitaph won’t be Ozzy Osbourne, the man who sold X million records. It will be the man who bit the head off a bat. It’s, like, get over it, man." The day we meet he’s been told he’s a grandfather. His estranged daughter, Jessica Sunshine, 30, has given birth to a girl Isobel. "Me, a grandfather. Hah!" he grunts. He and his first wife, Thelma, also have a son, Louis, 26. They divorced in 1979. "Divorce knocked the shit out of me for years because I can’t stand rejection. I felt like a failure," he says. "I don’t go to England often. I have properties there [a home and 188 acres in Buckinghamshire]. Huh! That makes me sound a big-headed dickhead. I love England — if only you didn’t wake to that drizzle. I came to America in 1976 because there’s hereditary dyslexia in my family and not many English schools cope with that. One thing success has enabled me to do is give my kids a good education." The fourth of six children born in Aston, Birmingham, Ozzy was always a little eccentric — he stabbed his aunt’s cat at the age of 11 and tried to set fire to his sister. After leaving school at 15, he worked in an abattoir, became a petty thief and was jailed when his father, a night worker in a tool factory, refused to pay his fine. He was "saved" when he co-founded Black Sabbath in 1968, beginning a decade of heroic addictions — four bottles of brandy a day, and so much cocaine that when it ran out he snorted a line of ants by mistake. He was arrested, and banned from Texas (President Bush’s home state) for urinating on the Alamo while wearing a woman’s dress. In 1978 he was kicked out of Black Sabbath as a washed-up druggie, and spent six months in a hotel room drinking, snorting and, if he could, copulating. He was rescued by Sharon, whose father, Don Arden, had managed Black Sabbath. She pulled him from the gutter, never tried to change him. "I was an old tart. I’d drink and take drugs with the best of them," she says, although she says she stopped when she realised one of them would have to settle down. They married in 1982, and it can’t have been easy. Seven years later he was arrested for trying to strangle her. Once, forgetting she was on tour with him, he returned to his Tokyo hotel room with a groupie. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/07/GettyImages-158962076-64a615d.jpg" width="3528" height="2352" alt="Ozzy, Kelly, Sharon and Jack Osbourne appear on stage at the Brit awards. All four are wearing black outfits, with Ozzy wearing glasses and Kelly having a black bob and wearing red lipstick. Kelly and Sharon are holding silver microphones, with Sharon talking when the picture was taken. Jack is in a black suit with a white shirt, with the collar button undone" title="Brit Awards 2008 - Show - London" /> "I was out of control and didn’t give a shit whether I lived or died," he says. "I’m 54 this year and don’t know why I’m still around. I haven’t got away with it, though. I’m insane. If I’m not, why am I taking so many psychiatric medications, antidepressants and seeing a therapist once a month? I’ve been in rehab 14 times, and still drink, but I try to keep it down to a glass of wine or a few beers." He became addicted to Viagra, which he calls "a great sleeping pill for the wife. By the time it worked she was snoring." He pauses longer than usual, and adds bleakly, "I thought I’d work and put some money away so my wife can live well when she’s an old lady, because I’ll die first. That plan’s been wrecked, although I could drop dead this minute. "You know what happened with Sharon? I’m a hypochondriac, so when the medical world has some new gizmo, I want to have a go. I heard about this body scanner which detects cancer, so I had it done, and at the same time they shoved a telescope up my butt and found a tiny polyp, which is how cancer starts, but it was benign. I told Sharon, ‘Maybe you should have it done.' So she went and they found a malignant tumour up her. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/07/GettyImages-86109506-4b01b2f-e1753275022839.jpg" width="4445" height="2963" alt="Ozzy Osbourne sings on stage in a white tight-fitting fringed shirt. He has his long brown hair loose and is wide-eyed. He is clutching the microphone stand with one hand and the microphone itself with the other." title="Photo of Ozzy OSBOURNE and BLACK SABBATH" /> "It hit me like a freight train. I went on tour the following week, but can’t remember being on the road. You find yourself pissed off with God. I’m still in a state of ‘Is it really happening?' "Chemotherapy knocks the crap out of her, but she’s going to recover. It might be a lot worse. I could be on the minimum wage with no health insurance. I can afford the best doctors. When you have cancer in the family, nothing else matters. It’s taught me that every day you lose is another page gone, so don’t sit there like a vegetable. "I never realised TV is the most powerful form of entertainment on the planet. I still wonder what it all means. I was in Boston, where I’ve performed thousands of times, and this respectable middle-aged woman comes up to me and says, 'What the hell are you doing here?' I tell her I’m here to perform, and she goes, 'F***. You do that as well?' I’ve reached an audience with no idea I’m a rock ‘n’ roller. I’m pleased about that. I’m the working-class hero. Not bad for a guy from Aston. "Of course, I’m ashamed of some things, but I believe life is planned before you’re born. I don’t take the TV series seriously. You wake in the morning and there’s a camera crew up your butt. It’s like having a fly in your eye that won’t go away. It plays havoc on the nervous system, you know, but so long as I’m making people laugh — at me, or with me — I don’t give a shit. "I’m flavour of the month, the hottest ticket in town, but eventually we’ll be yesterday’s news. Then I’ll have serenity again. I hope."
'The press tried to say I was wicked': Behind the real Princess Margaret
Author Andrew Duncan recalls his 1969 meeting with the Queen's sister – and what her thoughts were on the future of the monarchy
I first met Princess Margaret nearly 50 years ago, when I wrote to her asking to meet in connection with a book I was researching, perhaps optimistically and arrogantly called The Reality of Monarchy. I’d travelled with the Queen and Prince Philip to various parts of the world, talked to them at functions and interviewed several members of the family. She agreed immediately. I found her then, and in subsequent meetings, amusing, relaxed and helpful, not at all the allegedly imperious, controversial and mocked royal figure of popular imagination. She was 39, in a difficult marriage to photographer Lord [Tony] Snowdon. The pair were the “black sheep” of the family, a prominent, elderly royal told me. Another senior royal added, “God’s tooth, what a narrow squeak Margaret wasn’t the older daughter. A catastrophe. How long would the monarchy have lasted if Snowdon had been consort? Dreadful, dreadful.” When is The Crown season 3 on Netflix? Who is in the cast, and what is going to happen? The true story of Princess Margaret’s ‘forbidden love’ for Peter Townsend Netflix teases a first look at Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret in The Crown series 3 Apartment 1a Kensington Palace, where she and Snowdon lived, was not lavish, although £85,000 [nearly £2 million today, a quarter of which was paid by the Queen] was spent on refurbishing it before they moved in. Princess Margaret rented four rooms to her husband for his work. There was just one spare bedroom. The drawing room looked out onto the garden. There were two large sofas with a drinks trolley behind one and a desk jumbled with papers. Underneath the desk was a shopping basket and a handbag. Objets d’art were cluttered around the room and the focal point was a black grand piano, where Margaret would sing of an evening to the delight of some and the anguish of others. It was covered in photographs of the family. “Hello, waiting for Princess Margaret? I’m sorry she’s keeping you waiting.” It was Viscount Linley, then eight years old, who helped himself to a Coca-Cola. View oEmbed on the source website Princess Margaret entered wearing an inexpensive orange dress, greeted me warmly – although we’d never met – poured herself a gin and tonic, lit a cigarette in a black holder, and turned on the television. She and the Queen Mother had been up most of the previous night watching American astronauts land on the Moon for the first time. “Sit down,” she said, patting the sofa next to her. Her aquamarine blue eyes had frozen many an aspiring or overfamiliar friend or obsequious acquaintance, of which there were too many. But her haughtiness, even when tipsy, was a bit of a pose, perhaps to enliven boredom. Today there was no formality. I didn’t call her “Ma’am”, as she’s said to have required, and she had no factotums or PRs padding around, as there would be today. “I have never been imperious, and it’s part of my job not to be,” she said. “But everyone has a right to stick up for themselves. My friends used to tease me and call it my ‘acid-drop’ expression. That doesn’t happen a lot now. I’m much nicer in old age,” she smiled. She had a voluptuous sexiness that could be turned instantly to a withering put-down. Her attention returned to the TV. “Isn’t this [the Apollo 11 landing] the most incredible thing?” Lord Snowdon entered, wearing blackand-white striped slacks and no shirt. “Turn it up a bit, ducky,” she said. “You can’t tell the repercussions of this. Who knows what will happen?” I wondered what she thought her role in life was. “In my own humble way I’ve always tried to take some of the burden off my sister. She can’t do it all, you know, and I leap at the opportunity to help. Sometimes it can be very formal and boring, but I’ve got a reflex against that now. It’s very much up to one not to be bored.” She knew, obviously, she’d become a focus for critics of the family. “When my sister and I were growing up, she was made out to be the goody goody one. That wasn’t interesting, so the press tried to say I was wicked as hell. It didn’t always work. I got letters, mainly from America, which said, ‘How marvellous of you to do that’, because they thought we were terribly stuffy and Victorian. Then there were critical letters accusing me of things I hadn’t done, mostly anonymous and from England. I minded those very much. “I was told [within the family], ‘No, darling, I wouldn’t do that. People won’t understand.’ In the past 20 years there have been enormous changes. Now I could do pretty well anything, apart from tearing one’s clothes off and jumping into the fountains at Trafalgar Square – which I don’t want to do. In those days, one never gave interviews, so I got appallingly upset with no way of hitting back. I was an absolute wreck after some of the publicity, but luckily that’s all over.” Of course it wasn’t. Pouring herself another gin and tonic, she added, “I’ve been lucky with Tony because I’ve had fairly good contact with newspaper people and know the ones to trust. I wouldn’t speak to a gossip column, but I don’t suppose anyone would, would they?” One well known “royal” reporter at the time, who admitted earning £5,000 a year [over £100,000 today] making up stories about her and her husband and then selling them to foreign magazines, told me, “Of course I exaggerate. What are they going to do? Sue me?” Throughout Margaret’s life she was compared unfavourably to the Queen. “My sister has an aura,” she told me. “I’m enormously impressed when she walks into a room. It’s a kind of magic. She’s a pretty young woman and the longer she’s sovereign the more her experience will affect decisions by Prime Ministers. She’ll have an influence and be the great hope of the country in the future. “So long as our family can produce nicely brought up young people it will be all right. Queen Victoria got wildly out of date by retiring from public life. King George V and Queen Mary were out of date in the 20s, but were a stabilising influence in those days of change. My father [George VI] led us so magnificently through the war and brought the monarchy nearer to life as it was lived then. It’s lucky we’ve always been a little flexible. We can fit in with life as it is lived in our country at any given moment.” Perhaps. Perhaps not. Rumours about the royal family will continue to be discussed behind closed doors. The one certainty is that any member who flies free, as she did, from the constraints imposed by public perception, will have a tough time. And it will probably be unfair. Princess Margaret: the Rebel Royal airs Tuesday 11th September at 9.00pm on BBC2
John Hurt's last interview with Radio Times
Speaking to Radio Times after first being diagnosed with cancer in 2015, an upbeat Hurt discussed his life, career, recent knighthood and current work
This morning brought the sad news that legendary British actor Sir John Hurt has died, aged 77. Hurt starred in over 100 films during his career, notably The Elephant Man and Midnight Express, which garnered him Oscar nominations, Alien, 1984 and The Harry Potter movies, as well as TV including Doctor Who. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 2015. In August of that year, an upbeat Hurt discussed his life, career, recent knighthood and current work on Radio 4’s Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell with Radio Times. Read the full interview below... "Insane?” asks the newly ennobled actor, Sir John Hurt. “I know I’ve gone mad at times. Of course I have. There’s a thin dividing line between that and sanity and you don’t know where you are a lot of the time. The line is fictitious, and alterable. You can move around within it.” Thus begins another rollicking conversation with one of our most distinguished actors, twice nominated for an Oscar (Midnight Express and The Elephant Man), winner of four Baftas (including for The Naked Civil Servant), an incarnation of Doctor Who in 2013, and wand merchant Mr Ollivander in several Harry Potter films. He admits some of his 200-plus credits have been “stinkers” for money to finance a hell-raising life, now curtailed, with mates like Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. He was surprised to be knighted by the Queen last month. “I did nothing to encourage it,” he says, and after a pause adds mischievously, “Some people do, you know.” It would be indelicate to discuss names, but we know those who have turned it down. “Albert [Finney] refused because he says he’s only just got used to being called ‘Mr’. And so did Paul [Scofield]. They’re not agin’ it, but didn’t want it for themselves. “I like being Sir John – it works, doesn’t it? Or John. The only thing that sticks in my craw is when people say ‘Mr Hurt’. I tell them it’s no longer correct.” Yet, vanity seems alien to him. For years he refused to have a mirror in his house. “Acting isn’t about looking at yourself, and I never thought I was good-looking.” We speak at his home in Norfolk where he’s having treatment for early-stage pancreatic cancer diagnosed in June. Now 75, he once told me he didn’t think he’d live beyond 30. “That’s a generation thing. We were crawling away from the war and the world was a different place. Electronics has brought it down to size, one of the biggest revolutions in human history. I can’t say I worry about mortality, but it’s impossible to get to my age and not have a little contemplation of it. We’re all just passing time, and occupy our chair very briefly. But my treatment is going terrifically well, so I’m optimistic.” View oEmbed on the source website John Hurt in Doctor Who His elder brother, Michael, is staying with him. He’s called Brother Anselm, a Catholic monk, who left the church to marry and divorce, twice, and is now visiting his daughter. “She and her family have a caravan nearby.” Hurt’s – Sir John’s – father was a peripatetic high-church priest “who chose gruesome places to work – Grimsby and the Midlands – because he believed working-class areas were more truthful. I thought of going into the church – I loved the ritual – when I was young, but reacted against it as a teenager.” Today he stars in Radio 4’s Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell as the eponymous writer, roué and drunk whose acerbic Spectator Low Life column is immortalised in the play by Keith Waterhouse. It takes place in the Coach & Horses pub in London’s Soho, where Bernard is locked in overnight, having fallen asleep in the toilet. He muses on his friends and his “wretched” life, which saw him discharged from the Army, working as a stagehand and being sacked from Sporting Life after he’d been advised to take up journalism because he couldn’t hold down a proper job. He died aged 65 in 1997. Sir John was offered the stage production in 1989, but turned it down. “I’d like to keep that quiet because it could be considered a mistake, but I had specific reasons: I thought Keith wrote something too comic. Jeffrey was a very funny man, but his life was not entirely so. He was good at taking the piss out of himself, and us, and adept at turning sadness into amusement, but there was something underlying it that was not entirely come dic. I met him first in the early 60s, and always liked him. I took him to the races a lot – and back again, which was quite a feat. “He always had money problems but paid his way and was stroppy if others didn’t. I felt I knew him so well that my approach would have been a version of him, but Peter O’Toole was perfect. He told Jeffrey, ‘Don’t think this is about you. It’s all about me and my entrance to Soho.’ I saw it twice and thought it was brilliant.” He recorded the radio play over three days in a London club, Gerry’s, a favourite haunt of Waterhouse, where Bernard worked as a barman during the six months he gave up alcohol. “I remember him complaining how bored he was.” It is a brilliant tour de force. “The nice thing about radio is you can make it so personal, which you can’t on stage, and the sound is different to that in a studio.” Even though it can’t be seen, he performed the Waterhouse “egg trick”, where a biscuit tin lid is placed over a pint glass of water, an egg is balanced on the sleeve of a matchbox, and the lid is hit with a shoe so it slides away and the egg plops into the water – or soaks onlookers in yolk. “I did it twice at the recording and it worked both times. You could have knocked me over with a feather, I tell you. I thought there might be a hell of a mess. “Jeffrey made a life choice and was very much a character of his period. Now it would not be acceptable. No one drinks so much. People don’t give in to temptation and everything is controlled.” He mourns today’s lack of adventure, reliance on market research, petty bureaucracy, timidity, and he’s surprised actors employ publicists to sanitise their image. View oEmbed on the source website Peter O'Toole in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell “Society is much more homogenised, and we’re all supposed to conform. People are censorious but the pendulum will swing back, as it always does. There were difficulties in those days, obviously, but life was more fun. We’ve become obsessed with the dangers of alcohol – you get newspaper articles that are entirely over the top. There’s political correctness as well. I wonder who instigated that. Where does it come from, and who says what is or is not politically correct? And as for the way you have to treat women these days…” You can’t make a pass in case it’s harassment? “Yes indeed. I don’t know how you ever make a date. On the internet? Oh my God, I’d be sunk. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘The only thing to do with temptation is give in to it.’ I’ve been known to do that, and at times I drank too much.” He was married first at 22 to an actress who claimed, inaccurately, that she was pregnant; then a Texan barmaid with whom he built a mansion in Kenya too optimistically called “Wingu Kenda”, Swahili for “Cloud Nine”. He left her for a production assistant on the 1988 movie Scandal, with whom he had two sons, Alexander and Nicolas, before she went off with the gardener in 1994. For the past ten years he’s been married to actress turned-TV producer Anwen Rees-Myers, aged 59. “I’ve had a lively life,” he says wryly. “That’s a very good way of putting it.” Bernard also married four times, and claimed, “God is a woman, probably a Guardian reader. They should all have a government warning on their head.” “Is there a man alive who hasn’t thought that?” asks Hurt. He didn’t live quite so dangerously as Bernard, who recalled one woman throwing him out with just a suitcase and three carrier bags. “I don’t think that happened to me,” Sir John mutters. “Well, I don’t remember it.” Bernard first went to Soho in 1946, where he said he encountered a life of sloth, envy and self-pity. “I know what he means; his life was dependent on being self-derogatory. You can’t analyse it because it’s all in the language. You either get it or you don’t. There were moments when he was a curmudgeonly drunk, really unpleasant, but lots of times when he danced with amusement. He was very witty – ‘Never trust people who mean well,’ he said. Oh, that’s so true. And, ‘We all know reliable pipe-smoking men’ – don’t we indeed! “There used to be an enormous camaraderie in Soho, encouraged by licensing laws, which restricted opening times, so various drinking clubs sprang up. They attracted louche, creative people. Our present-day, moralistic thinkers assume everyone was rolling around drunk, but that wasn’t the case. “I had endless conversations with Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Jeff and others. People go out today with the intention of getting smashed. We never had that intention, although it might happen. We hated binge drinkers. They were boring and if you slipped into it, you’d be told to pull yourself together. We wanted to seek, to find, to be interested, heighten awareness, talk.” Yet, he told me once, Bacon only worked when hung over. “That’s true, and I don’t understand how he did it. I can’t think of anything less pleasant.” Sir John went to art school before Rada and still paints. “I don’t treat it as relaxation nor a hobby – I’m not a hobby man. I should paint every day but I’m not at the moment.” He leaves the reason hanging. “The danger for Soho today is that corporations are buying up everything, but it’s a strange old place, a red-light area, which tends to look after itself and won’t accept middle-class changes imposed on it. London alters: Bloomsbury still houses a lot of writers, but they’re not a movement as they were. Hampstead [where he lived for 15 years with French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, who died in a horse riding accident in 1983] used to be artistic, but I’m not sure it is now. The problem is no one can afford the prices, and if that happens to Soho it will be disastrous.” The old world is gone. Listen to Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell and decide if the new one is any better. Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell is on Radio 4 today (Saturday 15th August) at 2.30pmThis morning brought the sad news that legendary British actor Sir John Hurt has died, aged 77. Hurt starred in over 100 films during his career, notably The Elephant Man and Midnight Express, which garnered him Oscar nominations, Alien, 1984 and The Harry Potter movies, as well as TV including Doctor Who. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 2015. In August of that year, an upbeat Hurt discussed his life, career, recent knighthood and current work on Radio 4’s Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell with Radio Times. Read the full interview below... "Insane?” asks the newly ennobled actor, Sir John Hurt. “I know I’ve gone mad at times. Of course I have. There’s a thin dividing line between that and sanity and you don’t know where you are a lot of the time. The line is fictitious, and alterable. You can move around within it.” Thus begins another rollicking conversation with one of our most distinguished actors, twice nominated for an Oscar (Midnight Express and The Elephant Man), winner of four Baftas (including for The Naked Civil Servant), an incarnation of Doctor Who in 2013, and wand merchant Mr Ollivander in several Harry Potter films. He admits some of his 200-plus credits have been “stinkers” for money to finance a hell-raising life, now curtailed, with mates like Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. He was surprised to be knighted by the Queen last month. “I did nothing to encourage it,” he says, and after a pause adds mischievously, “Some people do, you know.” It would be indelicate to discuss names, but we know those who have turned it down. “Albert [Finney] refused because he says he’s only just got used to being called ‘Mr’. And so did Paul [Scofield]. They’re not agin’ it, but didn’t want it for themselves. “I like being Sir John – it works, doesn’t it? Or John. The only thing that sticks in my craw is when people say ‘Mr Hurt’. I tell them it’s no longer correct.” Yet, vanity seems alien to him. For years he refused to have a mirror in his house. “Acting isn’t about looking at yourself, and I never thought I was good-looking.” We speak at his home in Norfolk where he’s having treatment for early-stage pancreatic cancer diagnosed in June. Now 75, he once told me he didn’t think he’d live beyond 30. “That’s a generation thing. We were crawling away from the war and the world was a different place. Electronics has brought it down to size, one of the biggest revolutions in human history. I can’t say I worry about mortality, but it’s impossible to get to my age and not have a little contemplation of it. We’re all just passing time, and occupy our chair very briefly. But my treatment is going terrifically well, so I’m optimistic.” View oEmbed on the source website John Hurt in Doctor Who His elder brother, Michael, is staying with him. He’s called Brother Anselm, a Catholic monk, who left the church to marry and divorce, twice, and is now visiting his daughter. “She and her family have a caravan nearby.” Hurt’s – Sir John’s – father was a peripatetic high-church priest “who chose gruesome places to work – Grimsby and the Midlands – because he believed working-class areas were more truthful. I thought of going into the church – I loved the ritual – when I was young, but reacted against it as a teenager.” Today he stars in Radio 4’s Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell as the eponymous writer, roué and drunk whose acerbic Spectator Low Life column is immortalised in the play by Keith Waterhouse. It takes place in the Coach & Horses pub in London’s Soho, where Bernard is locked in overnight, having fallen asleep in the toilet. He muses on his friends and his “wretched” life, which saw him discharged from the Army, working as a stagehand and being sacked from Sporting Life after he’d been advised to take up journalism because he couldn’t hold down a proper job. He died aged 65 in 1997. Sir John was offered the stage production in 1989, but turned it down. “I’d like to keep that quiet because it could be considered a mistake, but I had specific reasons: I thought Keith wrote something too comic. Jeffrey was a very funny man, but his life was not entirely so. He was good at taking the piss out of himself, and us, and adept at turning sadness into amusement, but there was something underlying it that was not entirely come dic. I met him first in the early 60s, and always liked him. I took him to the races a lot – and back again, which was quite a feat. “He always had money problems but paid his way and was stroppy if others didn’t. I felt I knew him so well that my approach would have been a version of him, but Peter O’Toole was perfect. He told Jeffrey, ‘Don’t think this is about you. It’s all about me and my entrance to Soho.’ I saw it twice and thought it was brilliant.” He recorded the radio play over three days in a London club, Gerry’s, a favourite haunt of Waterhouse, where Bernard worked as a barman during the six months he gave up alcohol. “I remember him complaining how bored he was.” It is a brilliant tour de force. “The nice thing about radio is you can make it so personal, which you can’t on stage, and the sound is different to that in a studio.” Even though it can’t be seen, he performed the Waterhouse “egg trick”, where a biscuit tin lid is placed over a pint glass of water, an egg is balanced on the sleeve of a matchbox, and the lid is hit with a shoe so it slides away and the egg plops into the water – or soaks onlookers in yolk. “I did it twice at the recording and it worked both times. You could have knocked me over with a feather, I tell you. I thought there might be a hell of a mess. “Jeffrey made a life choice and was very much a character of his period. Now it would not be acceptable. No one drinks so much. People don’t give in to temptation and everything is controlled.” He mourns today’s lack of adventure, reliance on market research, petty bureaucracy, timidity, and he’s surprised actors employ publicists to sanitise their image. View oEmbed on the source website Peter O'Toole in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell “Society is much more homogenised, and we’re all supposed to conform. People are censorious but the pendulum will swing back, as it always does. There were difficulties in those days, obviously, but life was more fun. We’ve become obsessed with the dangers of alcohol – you get newspaper articles that are entirely over the top. There’s political correctness as well. I wonder who instigated that. Where does it come from, and who says what is or is not politically correct? And as for the way you have to treat women these days…” You can’t make a pass in case it’s harassment? “Yes indeed. I don’t know how you ever make a date. On the internet? Oh my God, I’d be sunk. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘The only thing to do with temptation is give in to it.’ I’ve been known to do that, and at times I drank too much.” He was married first at 22 to an actress who claimed, inaccurately, that she was pregnant; then a Texan barmaid with whom he built a mansion in Kenya too optimistically called “Wingu Kenda”, Swahili for “Cloud Nine”. He left her for a production assistant on the 1988 movie Scandal, with whom he had two sons, Alexander and Nicolas, before she went off with the gardener in 1994. For the past ten years he’s been married to actress turned-TV producer Anwen Rees-Myers, aged 59. “I’ve had a lively life,” he says wryly. “That’s a very good way of putting it.” Bernard also married four times, and claimed, “God is a woman, probably a Guardian reader. They should all have a government warning on their head.” “Is there a man alive who hasn’t thought that?” asks Hurt. He didn’t live quite so dangerously as Bernard, who recalled one woman throwing him out with just a suitcase and three carrier bags. “I don’t think that happened to me,” Sir John mutters. “Well, I don’t remember it.” Bernard first went to Soho in 1946, where he said he encountered a life of sloth, envy and self-pity. “I know what he means; his life was dependent on being self-derogatory. You can’t analyse it because it’s all in the language. You either get it or you don’t. There were moments when he was a curmudgeonly drunk, really unpleasant, but lots of times when he danced with amusement. He was very witty – ‘Never trust people who mean well,’ he said. Oh, that’s so true. And, ‘We all know reliable pipe-smoking men’ – don’t we indeed! “There used to be an enormous camaraderie in Soho, encouraged by licensing laws, which restricted opening times, so various drinking clubs sprang up. They attracted louche, creative people. Our present-day, moralistic thinkers assume everyone was rolling around drunk, but that wasn’t the case. “I had endless conversations with Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Jeff and others. People go out today with the intention of getting smashed. We never had that intention, although it might happen. We hated binge drinkers. They were boring and if you slipped into it, you’d be told to pull yourself together. We wanted to seek, to find, to be interested, heighten awareness, talk.” Yet, he told me once, Bacon only worked when hung over. “That’s true, and I don’t understand how he did it. I can’t think of anything less pleasant.” Sir John went to art school before Rada and still paints. “I don’t treat it as relaxation nor a hobby – I’m not a hobby man. I should paint every day but I’m not at the moment.” He leaves the reason hanging. “The danger for Soho today is that corporations are buying up everything, but it’s a strange old place, a red-light area, which tends to look after itself and won’t accept middle-class changes imposed on it. London alters: Bloomsbury still houses a lot of writers, but they’re not a movement as they were. Hampstead [where he lived for 15 years with French model Marie-Lise Volpeliere-Pierrot, who died in a horse riding accident in 1983] used to be artistic, but I’m not sure it is now. The problem is no one can afford the prices, and if that happens to Soho it will be disastrous.” The old world is gone. Listen to Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell and decide if the new one is any better. Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell is on Radio 4 today (Saturday 15th August) at 2.30pm
Life on the Road: is Ricky Gervais "milking" David Brent?
The creator of The Office admits he'll "have to kill off Brent soon" – but not quite yet
Ricky Gervais, control freak, failed pop star, astute businessman, multimillionaire comedian, seems the perfect interviewee – unprotected by aides – answering every question with wit and a few giggles. He says he doesn’t care what people think. “I know that sounds arrogant, but it’s the opposite. There’s nothing I can alter if someone doesn’t like me.” Nevertheless, the façade slips as he launches into a foul-mouthed tirade against critics. “I know I’m a grumpy old man. Maybe it’s genetics and we’re programmed to get grumpy at 55.” He warns he’ll tweet this interview “as a marketing tool, if you haven’t slagged me off”. He is frequently trolled on Twitter, which is some sort of accolade. “Twitter can also be used as an awareness campaign for the few things that make my blood boil – animal cruelty, injustice and religious intolerance. “Twenty years ago, it would have taken ten years standing outside Tesco to get 100,000 signatures. Now you do it in a few days. That’s social media at its best – people caring and making a difference. “Sometimes, though, when I’m bored I take a picture of myself in the bath, so I can’t get on my high horse and claim I always try to change the world.” View oEmbed on the source website There are scribbled notes on the inside of his left wrist – prompts from the previous evening when he tried out a 30-minute routine in a 400-seat theatre for a proposed tour later this year. “If Hollywood never called again, or TV dried up, I’d do stand-up, which I love,” he says. “I don’t know if I’m sane or not. I think I am, but then so do insane people. “The truth is, I don’t care. I’m happy. Even if I hadn’t won awards and made money, I couldn’t have spent my life better, playing at what I love, writing and directing. I even feel good paying tax. “That doesn’t mean I like it, but if I earn a million I should share it with the government. As a working class kid, I got free schooling, university and healthcare.” The council house boy from Reading, whose father was a labourer, was told by his housewife mother that he was a “mistake” because he’s 11 years younger than the rest of his siblings. “She was being honest – no reflection on me. It could have been a different sperm. Who cares? Life is a mistake anyway.” And although his partner, Jane Fallon, whom he met at 21, writes books, he hasn’t read one since JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye aged 28. Yet his speech is littered with quotations. View oEmbed on the source website After working in an office for seven years, he was inspired to write The Office with its antihero David Brent. “I see a lot of him in me, but also in others over the years. We all want to be loved, to think we’re popular and respected, to be thought of as interesting. “And we’re all prats sometimes, with egos we have to curb. I say if you don’t know who the David Brent is in your office, it’s you.” One of the first reviews in 2001 in the Daily Mail said it was a “summer stinker”. Gervais smiles. “I love that. I assumed no one would watch and it was joint bottom in the ratings with women’s bowls. “But we didn’t change a thing and it grew by word of mouth. That taught me a lesson – don’t panic, or do things by committee. “In those days I believed getting a good review was important, but it makes no difference now. The only thing I worry about is having final edit because I write for me and like-minded people. “I don’t try to second-guess an audience or wonder what demographic will enjoy it. Then move on to the next thing.” This month he resurrects the character in David Brent: Life on the Road (in cinemas from Friday 19 August). “I missed him and the world has changed. He’s the underdog in a dead-end job [selling women’s hygiene products] and still dreaming of fame.” View oEmbed on the source website So he cashes in his pension for a last-chance tour as a singer with his pop band, Foregone Conclusion (there’s a Life on the Road album by David Brent & Foregone Conclusion that’s also out on 19 August). “Brent can’t compete in the dog-eat-dog world, but doesn’t realise it because he sees people on The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent make it for a while after three judges vote for them. I don’t want to be part of that. “Simon Cowell? He hasn’t killed anyone, and it’s entertainment. What’s the worst he’s done? Made lots of money out of us, and who can blame him? But if you’re impressionable, these shows can have a bad effect, and it’s getting worse. “A survey of ten-year-olds found most want to be famous when they grow up. We’ll run out of doctors because they’ll all be aspiring singers. A working class kid sees people become rich by letting cameras into their home to show terrible things – infamy is as good as fame today – and it seems more attractive than doing a five-year apprenticeship to become an electrician. “The Kardashians are paid £20,000 by manufacturers to tweet, ‘I’m enjoying this chocolate bar.’ We’re all responsible because we partake. There’s nothing you could spoof about what they’ll do to get on telly. Celebrity Enema? I don’t know what’s going on.” The film reflects a moment in Gervais’s own career in the 1980s when he had a group called Seona Dancing. They were popular in the Philippines with single More to Lose. “I got it wrong, but I didn’t want to be famous. I feared it – the press going through my bins. Now I have to remember I’m famous so I’m not cornered by a load of drunks in a pub, but the worst that happens is someone being nasty about you on Twitter. What’s that to worry about? “Who said, ‘All you have to do to never be criticised is do nothing.’ Great, isn’t it? I didn’t become famous until I was 39 and won’t forget what it’s like to be poor. I haven’t changed – except I’m older. Muhammad Ali said that if you’re the same person at 50 as you were at 20, you’ve wasted 30 years of your life.” View oEmbed on the source website Transferring a much-loved TV programme to film is strewn with calamity. “Some will expect The Office and hate it. Others will say it’s better. You mustn’t care.” He dismisses criticism he’s “milking” a well-worn theme. “The show was 12 episodes – seven-and-a-half hours – and the film is 90 minutes – nine hours in 15 years. How is that milking it? Joseph Heller was told he’d never written anything as good as Catch-22, and he replied, ‘Yeah, but neither has anyone else.’ Lovely, isn’t it? It’s a bit of an analogy for The Office.” Will Brent now die? “I don’t know. Never say never, but I’ll have to kill him off soon.” Earlier this year he wrote, directed and starred in Special Correspondents, which was released by Netflix. In it, he plays a sound engineer for an arrogant radio correspondent with whom he fakes reports about a war in Ecuador from New York. “It was going to be a Hollywood studio film but Netflix offered the same budget so it was win-win. “I didn’t have the trauma of trying to make a successful cinema film, yet they paid me well and didn’t interfere. Perfect.” He says the lukewarm reviews don’t bother him. “I was never a comedy snob. I love Laurel and Hardy because they fall down and pick themselves up for our pleasure, which is what I try to do with Brent. Character is much more important than plot in a sitcom. “Even one great character makes it good. More than one, you’re flying. Someone said that comedy is a normal guy trying to do something he’s not equipped to do, and Brent is the epitome of that.” Although he’s brilliant at puncturing self-importance in others – especially during the four times he has hosted the Golden Globes – he’s also adept at mocking himself. There’s a brilliant excerpt in Extras where David Bowie sings he’s “a little fat man” who “sold his soul”. He insists, “I like people insulting me, which is quite odd. I laugh and think, ‘You can’t hurt my feelings. I’m too happy.’ I’d like everyone to be like that and not be upset by idiots. “I am neurotic, but in a different way. If I have a cold, or find a lump, it’s definitely terminal. One day I’ll be right, which is a terrible thought. “While you’re alive you’re in charge of your destiny. If you’re nice and try your hardest, you’ll probably have a better life. I’m quite chilled and try to rule out stress. Even when I had no money I was never dissatisfied and didn’t care about material things. “I thought the point of life was to have a roof over your head and a drink with friends. I want to go to bed thinking I didn’t do anything bad today and maybe even did some good.”
As the celebrated comedian passes away aged 85, here's a classic 2011 interview from the Radio Times archive
With the sad news that Ronnie Corbett has passed away aged 85, we're taking a look back at the comedy icon through this wide-ranging interview from 2011, where Corbett discusses his early days, struggles with ageing and impressions of modern comedy. I’m in a dismal, carpet-stained conference centre in East Croydon on a wet weekday afternoon about to meet a hard-of-hearing 80-year-old comedian. Life doesn’t get much more exciting than this. Ronnie Corbett, national treasure with a tinkling cackle and a jaunty skip that belies his age, explains he wants to meet here because it’s near his home, easy parking, and without the bustle of strangers who might accost him, forcing him to whip out his mobile phone and pretend to talk portentously on it to avoid contact. Not that he’s unfriendly – far from it – but time is limited and he wants to concentrate. The Two Ronnies… Although The Two Ronnies ended in 1987 after 16 years, he’s had a renaissance since a 2006 appearance in Extras with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. “I was caught snorting cocaine in a toilet,” he laughs. “Anne [his wife of 46 years] wasn’t sure. It could have gone the wrong way, but the saving grace was Moira Stuart being my supplier. Last December the BBC spent a lot of money celebrating my 80th birthday, which was nice, and then I did The One Ronnie, a Christmas Day special. Now ITV have snatched me from the jaws of the BBC. That wasn’t difficult. I’m up for anything if it’s interesting and attracts me.” One recent venture is a sitcom When the Dog Dies [the second series is currently on Radio 4 Extra]. “I love radio and have done a little bit for years – since Workers’ Playtime in the 1950s. It’s also a good springboard for comedians.” He’s garrulous, a rare entertainer more interested in others than himself, and keeps asking questions: have you been on holiday? Where do you live? How did you get here? A master of non sequiturs, he meanders into riffs that have nothing to do with our conversation. This was part of the charm of his soliloquies on The Two Ronnies. “As you get older you worry about your memory. I have lists and mnemonics to help. Part of my style was getting into a muddle. Audiences think that’s part of the act. Sometimes it might be – but you have to guess which bits.” Ronnie Corbett’s Comedy Britain… In the two-part series Ronnie Corbett’s Comedy Britain [“I needed a new challenge at 80”] he meets comedians whose work he admires, including John Cleese, whom he met on The Frost Report in the 1960s. In those days Cleese was terrified of performing, and he credits Corbett with teaching him how to hold a pause. “It was lovely to spend time with John and those I didn’t know so well, like David Mitchell, Michael McIntyre and Miranda Hart – a really funny lady who, with Harry Hill, is one of my favourites.” She says she was inspired by the slapstick of The Two Ronnies and seems in awe of him. “Does she?” He’s genuinely surprised. “I didn’t notice.” During the programme Matt Lucas tells him his clothes make him look like a rainbow. Today he’s more understated but still dapper: light brown corduroys, suede shoes, blue open-necked shirt, light-blue waistcoat and tartan jacket accessorised with a vivid blue handkerchief. “I had the jacket made in Lochiel.” He pulls a piece of paper from his pocket. “It’s a Stewart of Appin Hunting Ancient.” So he’s a bit of a dandy as well as meticulous, even fussy. He washes his own trademark Lyle & Scott cashmere sweaters. “It’s not a fetish,” he insists. “Someone told me if you add a dash of vinegar to fresh soapy suds and steam them with an iron they come up brilliantly. I like to take trouble. It upsets me if I meet someone before a show wearing jeans and a jersey who goes on stage in the same clothes. You have to dress up and present yourself as a ‘turn’.” He takes a scruffy Stephen Merchant to an up-market Savile Row tailor to smarten him up. “I feel Corbett-ised,” wails Merchant. Filmed sharing a punt in Cambridge, David Mitchell mentions that, with comedians, self-doubt can turn quickly to megalomania. “Some are like that. Me? I’m always nervous. A classy comedian is full of self-doubt disguised with an air of false confidence. If there isn’t self-doubt you seem aggressive.” The road to comedy fame… He and Ronnie Barker toiled for many years before becoming famous on The Frost Report in 1966. He was 36 and ready to give up when he was thrust, virtually unknown, into the midst of ambitious, mostly Oxbridge, performers. “There wasn’t snobbery. I’d done National Service in the Air Force, which was immensely helpful to me, like going to university. Ron and I were family men with children, lucky with our wives, quite educated in our own way. “I think the university boys were frightened of us because of our theatrical know-how, rather than the reverse. We were pretty complete performers by then with a lot of inbuilt skills, and a sort of stillness. All those I admired as a young performer had a calmness to their comedy – Max Wall and Jack Benny. It wasn’t frenetic, as it is often today. I was also influenced by Scottish comedians [he was brought up in Edinburgh] Dave Willis and Jack Radcliffe. I’d watch them, borrowing a little bit here and a little bit there. “Today it’s easier to become a comedian because there are more venues. Although you work for very little money at least you can practise saying a few words. It’s never easy to make people laugh, but nowadays more comedians are bold enough to burst into full bloom prematurely. We made our mistakes in obscurity – Ronnie in repertory and me in revues and pantomime. “Comedy today is grosser. We did Donald McGill, seaside-postcard stuff – middle of the road. We knew what mums, dads, and children would understand and enjoy without resentment. I don’t see the requirement to upset people. You’re there to entertain and please. We’d never do anything tasteless. There’s enough to make fun of without offending. Our comedy was light-hearted amusement that seemingly tripped naturally off the tongue. That’s why I don’t think it will date.” On Frankie Boyle… Frankie Boyle? “Oh my gosh. Yes. It’s not for me to say, but being outrageous is his territory. I’d be interested to chat to him to see why he wants to upset people. I don’t understand it. There are also a superfluous amount of stand-up programmes. You long to have them talk to each other or do a little sketch. I watch the wonderful Dara O Briain refereeing Mock the Week where they all compete with each other. I wouldn’t be on that. It frightens the life out of me.” There’s a Two Ronnies sketch about an optician and his patient, both virtually blind, with the patient “reading” the furniture. “Would that be regarded as insulting to the visually impaired? I don’t know. We did it on stage at the London Palladium in 1983 at a time I was suffering from labyrinthitis [an inner-ear disorder, with anxiety a possible contributory factor] so balance was a problem. But I watched it yesterday and found it hysterically funny. We also did The Short and Fat Minstrel Show, but that was all right because it was us, so we could only offend each other. In those days there was The Black and White Minstrel Show – how out of date that seems.” On Little Britain… He admires Little Britain and saw it live in Brighton. “David Walliams showed the audience his naked bottom, quickly and carefully with no additions. In the interval, his mum said to Anne, ‘Oh gosh, where has he learnt this?’ I wouldn’t have done it myself, although I was romanced by Bubbles Devere in Little Britain Abroad: she took off her clothes and thrust her body at me. “David and Matt [Lucas] are bold, funny, and imaginative, but I thought some of their characters wee’d [Mrs Emery] or were sick [Maggie Blackamoor] too much.” He discusses comedy with Lucas in a studio and is challenged to play a pregnant Vicky Pollard. “He flung it at me at the last moment, in the sweetest possible way. I’d have done it better if I’d known beforehand.” He’s competing for career longevity with 83-year-old Bruce Forsyth. “He’s amazing, but was always pestered about a knighthood. It’s true they’ve rarely knighted comedians, although now Bruce has it they may have softened up. I’d be very honoured, of course. I was doing cabaret in the Gulf one New Year’s Eve many years ago in front of a lot of Arabians who didn’t understand a word of English. So I boiled my 45 minutes down to 20. At the back of my mind I knew the next day Ron and I were going to get OBEs, so I didn’t care.” He chuckles again, one of the least maudlin of comedians. “The sad clown? An operatic cliché. It’s not true.” COMICS ON CORBETT: Matt Lucas: “One of the best comic actors of his generation. He absolutely nails it. A giant.” Stephen Merchant: “He makes comedy look easy and is part of comic history. I looked religiously at The Two Ronnies books. It was a way of teaching myself how it was done. He was a huge inspiration to me.” David Walliams: “A brilliantly fun man, universally loved.” John Cleese: “Ronnie C and Ronnie B were always going to be immensely popular because they were both hugely likeable, which matters for comedians. I never used to believe that. I used to quite like it if the audience didn’t like me very much but I could make them laugh anyway. It was a sort of slight… I don’t know… up yours.” Miranda Hart: “A national treasure. Absolutely brilliant, a real inspiration, one of my comedy heroes.”
Dad's Army is back – but does it work on the big screen?
Toby Jones, Bill Nighy and Catherine Zeta-Jones talk about living up to the expectations of fans around the world.
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time – take some of Britain’s best-loved actors, including the expatriate Catherine Zeta-Jones, and make a feature film based on the iconic half-hour television sitcom, Dad’s Army, which ran for 80 episodes from 1968 to 1977, watched by up to 18 million viewers, with two million still enjoying repeats. How could it fail? Jimmy Perry, now 92, who devised and co-wrote the TV series with David Croft, as well as It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and Hi-de-Hi!, says, “When I heard they were going to make a film I thought, ‘Oh dear’. They are very brave. We had several meetings and I thought I should step back and let them get on with it. I’m a television person. Film is not my cup of tea. The 1971 film version didn’t work somehow. David said he missed the live audience. It’s marvellous, though, that people want to do stuff.” Steady chaps. Don’t panic. First they recruited the actors. “I was impressed with the excellent cast”, says Perry. Toby Jones, 49, and 5ft 5in [The Hunger Games, Captain America, an investment banker in last year’s Capital on BBC1], originally turned down the part of pompous Captain Mainwaring. “You have to be cautious taking on such a project, because there’s an enormous fondness for the show. We all thought it was mad to try to re-create it. Then I saw the script and cast and it became a selfish decision of mine to accept: there are some very funny situations, and I assumed the other actors would help me look good.” Bill Nighy [Sergeant Wilson] was swayed by the chance to work with “the brilliant” Jones and Michael Gambon [Private Godfrey]. “He’s so amusing. We’d sit on the beach at Bridlington, east Yorkshire, [where filming took place], and he’d make me laugh until I couldn’t speak.” Catherine Zeta-Jones had a nostalgic motive for playing a glamorous journalist, Rose Winters, allegedly sent by The Lady magazine to report on the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard patrolling the Dover coast to thwart a beach invasion from the Germans in 1944. “My family were fans and can recite some of the lines from the TV series verbatim. People ask, ‘Why remake a classic?’ Well, because it’s jolly good fun and introduces it to a different generation. The TV series stands on its own – the scenery wobbles, which is part of the fun – so we’re not trying to top it. It’s a real romp. “The big attraction for me was working with great actors." Tom Courtenay is Jones, Blake Harrison [The Inbetweeners] plays Pike, and Sherlock co-creator Mark Gatiss is a colonel who warns the platoon there is a German spy in town. “I loved the make-up sessions with all those guys bantering, cracking jokes, flirting. You don’t know whether an ensemble will get on, but this was everything I wanted. It threw me back 20 years to The Darling Buds of May, working with people who just get it, know their lines and have no bulls**t. They don’t need deep therapy sessions before walking into a room. I’m not dissing American actors, but it was a blast, coming home, remembering what fun it was.” It wasn’t all fun for Toby Jones. The plot meant he had to swim in the North Sea last November. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I had to wear a fat suit, which gave me too much buoyancy so it was weighed down with weights. You suffer for your art." Neither he nor Nighy, 66, based their performances on the original cast. “When you play a character for a half-hour show like Arthur Lowe did, it’s always funny,” says Jones, “but when you extend it to a movie the character has a certain nobility, which is endearing. He’s like someone who’s given up his time to run the local cricket club: everyone takes the mickey, yet they all depend on him. I worried about how to do the part – it can’t be an impersonation – but when we started the chaotic film schedule I became this character from a certain class with his foibles.” Nighy concurs: “I can’t mimic anyone, so I just did it my way.” He met John Le Mesurier, the original Wilson, at the start of his career in 1981 when he and Le Mesurier were in Radio 4’s The Lord of the Rings. Nighy, who shares a sardonic view of the world with the fictitious Wilson, reminisces, “Le Mesurier always wore red socks. I’ve sat in shops trying to buy patterned or coloured ones. But I can only wear dark grey.” He explains this is due to his “sartorial fetishism”. He’s always elegant, languorous and, like Jones, charmingly self-deprecating and lacking in confidence. He won’t ever see the film because he has a horror of watching himself. They both had late-flowering careers – Nighy gave up acting in the 1970s and worked on a market stall in Croydon selling womens’ clothes before he auditioned at the Everyman, Liverpool, then a socialist hothouse with resident writers Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell. He went from there to the National Theatre where insecurity led to dependence on alcohol. He tells me, ironically, that Le Mesurier met Rod Stewart in Los Angeles when his son was in the band. “I asked him how it was. He said, ‘We do the work and get drunk. They do it the opposite way round’.” Nighy had to wait until 53 for success when he won Baftas for State of Play and Love Actually, since then he has worked continuously on TV, film and theatre – last year winning plaudits on Broadway in David Hare’s Skylight. He had a 27-year relationship and a daughter (Mary) with actress Diana Quick, which ended in 2008. Now he prefers his own company, but says he thinks about death “12 times a day”. Jones turned the disadvantage of his small part in 1998 as Julia Robert’s stalker in Notting Hill into a modest triumph when he wrote and acted in a well-received play, Missing Reel, fictionalising his disappointment that his scenes were cut. “I made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” he says. “I’d like to write but it’s hard to dip in and out and I’m lucky enough not to have the time.” He’s philosophical that two of his ‘breakthrough’ films were ill-timed – Infamous, in which he played a lisping Truman Capote, was released after what many considered an inferior film, Capote, on the same subject but which won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar. And The Girl, in which he played Alfred Hitchcock was sidelined by Anthony Hopkins in Hitchcock. It’s not even as if acting was his first choice of career. He rebelled against it as both his parents were in the business – his father, Freddie, still appears in Emmerdale, aged 88 – “when his knees allow. The great thing is he’s forced to spend time with young people, which keeps him young. It’s his absolute life blood. I can’t see myself doing it at that age, but we have the luxury of not being able to predict the future. I’m a lot less insecure than I used to be but I’m never sure I can do the job. Any actor would be mad not to be surprised by success: there are so many brilliant ones and the statistics of sustaining a career are totally against you.” With such a huge melange of successful ones in Dad’s Army, egos must have been involved. “Of course,” says Jones, “but all of us are so well established we know that supporting the others is in our best interest. Comedy depends on where the joke is and it would be crazy to try to take it for oneself. A lot of traditional comedy results from hierarchies – like those in the Army – being debunked whereas contemporary comedy is more self-referential.” Perry quotes George Bernard Shaw, invoking an Irish accent: “The first thing about comedy is you must have reality.” Up to a point. Zeta-Jones, 46, who won an Oscar for best supporting actress in Chicago in 2003, and married Michael Douglas in 2000, was enlisted to provide glamour, as well as a new character, journalist Rose Winters, who mesmerises Mainwaring, Wilson, and the others. “We also get to see their wives [Felicity Montagu plays Mrs Mainwaring, who was never seen in the TV series], so it gives a broader aspect.” She returned to work in England in a much less stressful way than she left for America in the mid-90s when success proved elusive after Darling Buds and she became better known for her private than professional life. “I could foresee a career in England being put in a box where I didn’t belong. Whenever I stepped out of my terraced house in Fulham there was a blitz of photographers.” She married Michael Douglas and put her career on hold to bring up their children, Dylan, 15, and 12-year-old Carys. “I wanted them to be in a very close-knit family, living in the country outside New York. We can’t forecast what will happen, but at least we’ve protected them from the craziness that goes around famous people. For sure they want to act. It’s hard for me to say no because I was in Annie at nine years old and their parents and grandparents are actors. I explain to my daughter what beauty is and, yes, we all ask if our bum looks big, but today there is extreme scrutiny. You have to deal with mean people hiding behind social media. I tell them that fame isn’t having eight million followers on Instagram. It’s hard work.” Douglas had throat cancer diagnosed in 2010, she was treated for bipolar disorder in 2013, and they separated temporarily. “I didn’t want any of that to come out, but ironically it was the best thing that ever happened. I can now put it to one side and say, ‘Yeah, me too. Big deal’, facing up to it rather than pretending. I’m not interested in being ‘tortured for my art’. I’m probably the lowest-maintenance actress you’ ll ever meet, though we have to be barmy to go into this profession. I have many ambitions left. I’d like to do a one-woman show in Las Vegas, write, direct. I feel great now, enjoying doing what I want.” Will the film work? Jimmy Perry is one of a very select few who have seen it on DVD. “It will either be terrific, or whatever. I liked what I saw, and won’t criticise anyone.” Toby Jones says, “I’m interested in how it’s received but I don’t worry. Hopefully we’ve honoured the original and moved it on a bit. Watching the other actors I often thought, ‘That makes me laugh’. You join a project, it goes out into the world, and you have no control.” Are they doomed? “We did our best,” adds Nighy.
Miriam Margolyes loves retirement in India, hates being called a celebrity
The actress talks about her new series The Real Marigold Hotel and life in India
Miriam Margolyes, her irrepressibility covering up for shyness, doesn’t allow political correctness, career prospects or tact to inhibit her. She’s an overweight, rip-roaring blast of good humour, sense, and explicit language, which sounds innocent coming from her girlish voice, who spent three weeks in Jaipur, India, with seven other over-60s, for a three-part series to test the opportunities for retirement there. She arrives for lunch at a fashionable London restaurant hugging a two-litre bottle of sparkling water, and orders smoked salmon and fish of the day from waiters who are instantly attentive to her. “We all worried about how we’ll come over because we work in television, but I didn’t modify my behaviour. Now...” she says, clipping a napkin holder round her neck, “so I don’t spill food on my breasts. They’re 44G. Or even F. Huge.” She has no inhibitions, was once a life model at an art school, and the voice of Sexy Sonia in a soft-core audio production. But we digress, as is often the case with her. “Please don’t call us celebrities,” she continues. “I detest the word. I worried because all except me have been in some ‘celebrity’ programme. I’d never do that, even though I’ve been offered a very great deal of money [she earned £10,000 for this show]. I don’t like the title. It’s stupid to be associated with the Marigold films [The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and last year’s sequel, about a group of ageing expatriates in India] because it leads to false expectations. I wanted ‘Eight Old Farts in India’. We might get a pasting from the critics. They’ll say, ‘Who do these people think they are?’ I won’t watch because it will annoy me and I can’t deal with looking at myself on television. It’s a supreme horror.” She loved the experience, however. “I accepted because I wanted to visit India again. We all ended up with a profound admiration for the country, its wonderful people, and felt privileged. Of course we were apprehensive in the beginning. The group are not who I’d normally mix with, and at our age you don’t want to be bunged up with a lot of people you don’t know. I worried I wouldn’t find a toilet when I needed one. I had to warn the others that I fart. That’s only polite.” They lodged in a 150-year-old haveli, the ancestral home of a brigadier and his wife, built around a courtyard, which cost the celebrities £20 each a day. At first they had to fend for themselves, shopping, cooking and housework. “I don’t do any of that,” she admits. “On the second day we decided it would be sensible to pay the servants who were already there [another £20 each per week]. That’s one reason India is an attractive proposition for retiring. Servants are much more reasonable than in England. It’s not exploitation so long as you pay a proper salary.” Radio Times Travel offer: Explore India's Golden Triangle, the sights of Old and New Delhi, the pink city of Jaipur and much more She became an Australian citizen in 2013, like her partner of 46 years, Heather, an academic who works in Amsterdam. “I feel lonely when she’s not with me. I love to have a nice talk when I wake up, so I looked forward to breakfast with everyone.” Her fellow travellers didn’t realise she had a stash of Vegemite with her, which she declined to share. “Patti [Boulaye] looked gorgeous every morning and amazed us with her costumes. She wanted us to say grace, but I refused.” She initated more earthy communication over the naan. “What’s the difference between herpes and love?” she asked. “Herpes is forever… “I think the production company hoped I’d make people laugh and defuse any difficulties – but there weren’t any. They wanted conflicts, or a couple falling in love. They knew I wouldn’t have a romance, but they hoped it could be Jan [Leeming] and Roy [Walker], but that wasn’t going to happen.” Leeming visits a “psychic guru” and marvels at his accuracy when he tells her she’s been in love with six men but hasn’t found peace of mind. She’s lived for the past 20 years with a cat, and says, “My life has been messed up with men.” Margolyes adds, “Jan is lovely, but fragile, so I was careful what I said. She packed my suitcase when we left because I’m no good at that. She’d brought her own tissue paper to wrap clothes in. The only time that’s happened to me before was when I was invited to Sandringham.” The group made trips to the Taj Mahal in Agra and the Ganges, practiced hog — although Margolyes managed one session — and went shopping for clothes. She bought a couple of pairs of prescription glasses. “Much cheaper than in England. The optician recognised me as Professor Sprout [from the Harry Potter films] – wherever you go it has an impact.” They also had comprehensive check-ups at the local hospital [£130 compared to £1,600 privately in the UK]. “It was clinically excellent and I wouldn’t worry about being ill in India. I have to go into hospital soon, but I’d prefer to be at home with friends and family.” The hospital was the scene of a rare contretemps. “I refused to be filmed getting off a bus twice. The director said, ‘I’m an award-winning director. Please do it’, and I said, ‘I never thought I’d say this, but I’m an award- winning actress with a bad leg and if your film depends on seeing me get in and out of a bus we’re in trouble.’ “You must have some mashed potato,” she admonishes, before emptying the dish on to her plate. Any regrets? I ask. “I should have got thin, but I eat too much. I hate the word ‘moderation’. I’d like to have done the RSC.” Last time we met she said she was disappointed she hadn’t been more successful. In 2014 she toured Australia with I’ll Eat You Last about American talent agent Sue Mengers, a role played on Broadway by Bette Midler. She wanted to bring it to London, “but I couldn’t find a theatre. I’m just not important enough. Radio Times Travel offer: Explore India's Golden Triangle, the sights of Old and New Delhi, the pink city of Jaipur and much more “I feel I’ve been rumbled if I’m not working. I was terribly upset not to be in Dickensian, so I pretend to look down on it. The part I should have played, Mrs Gamp, is done brilliantly by Pauline Collins, but I entered this world for no other reason than to play that part. Maybe it’s for the best, though. As Wilde says: ‘When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.’ “I wouldn’t consider retiring to India: there are too many people and it’s difficult walking along the pavements. I’d love to spend two or three months a year there. I want a comfortable old age, and to be looked after – I have arthritis – and money is a factor. You could live well with pots of it, but you’d be with others who were the same and I don’t like that. I have a class prejudice – against the upper class, which is foolish. “We met the local maharajah and his family – I put on lipstick specially – and they were wonderful, with the same grace and dignity as those in the slums who we saw making puppets. They were real artists and not bitter – you don’t see that in India, unlike in England.” She orders chocolate truffles infused with cognac. “Do I come out of the documentary all right? You can tell me the truth.” I’d heard the others called her Führer. “I don’t remember that, but I am very bossy so it would be fitting. In fact we’ve all become friends and meet up. People become more their true selves as they age. I’d like to be a nicer person but I’ve become less tolerant because I don’t have much time left. I’m lucky to have lasted this long – I didn’t expect to. “Old people have a much better time in India because they’re respected. Here we can’t bear them. But, tough, I demand it. I was waiting for a train at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. My knee was hurting so I asked a young man for his seat. He replied, ‘There’s one over there.’ I said, ‘Please,’ and when he refused I poured my water over him. He swore and another lady said, ‘You assaulted him. I’m reporting you to the police.’ She did. Nothing happened.” She finishes her truffles. The waiters fuss around her, and give us an Equity discount. “I love it here, but I’m aching to return to India.” The Real Marigold Hotel begins tonight at 9pm on BBC2 Radio Times Travel offer: Explore India's Golden Triangle, the sights of Old and New Delhi, the pink city of Jaipur and much more from £1,349pp
Robert Lindsay and Maureen Lipman reflect on the fickle fortunes of television fame
As the pair return to comedy for new series Bull, they take a look back over their storied careers
The cordial political tussle starts sooner than I imagined. Two articulate, outspoken, good-humoured, Labour-supporting actors, Robert Lindsay and Maureen Lipman, are watching the lunchtime television news at Pinewood studios when Tony Blair is interviewed. "Your hero," Lindsay mutters, with some disapproval. "I wouldn't go that far," says Lipman. "That's not what you said to me the other day..." he replies. They leave it there, for a while. They're filming a three-episode sitcom, Bull, in which Lindsay plays the eponymous owner of a dysfunctional antiques shop and Lipman is his sister and incompetent assistant, Beverley. All morning she's been reshooting a scene where she sits in a chair, smoking herbal cigarettes incessantly ("probably half of 30 this morning"), pretending to be knocked forward by a cuckoo clock and telling a potential employee, "We'll let you know." "I can take it. I'm a masochist," she says, adding ironically, "I'm glad I did all that work on Shakespeare at drama school." She and Lindsay are perfect foils at 69 and 65 respetively, old enough to be honest and admit unexpected fame made them both insufferable for a while, and also to discuss how therapy helped. He is reserved, watchful at first; she is immediately lively and irreverent. View oEmbed on the source website He told a Hay Festival audience in 2013 that he had little respect for his profession, apologised for being an actor, and says he'd like to give it up. "Actors always say that, especially as we get older. What is it with us? There's that awful realisation, 'What else could I do?' Look at Angela Lansbury, still touring at 89. She's probably gone, 'I'm no good at DIY, can't cook very well...'" "Bob and I are old technicians," Lipman says, "but we tempt fate and it's our defence to say we're doing no more, but there's not an actor alive who doesn't want the phone to ring with a nice – or even a rotten – job. We don't know what to be when we're not acting, even though it's sometimes not very satisfying. TV hasn't been brilliant for me recently and if I were to rely on it there would be slim pickings." She's also a wickedly funny writer, but says, "Nobody pays writers any more. A friend was offered £50 for a book review. I've had a column in a magazine for 13 months and have yet to be paid. I have no complaints, though. I have a lovely man [Italian businessman Guido Castro], my kids [Amy and Adam by her late husband, playwright Jack Rosenthal], thank God, are thriving and I have two grandchildren. "My fear now is 'How long have I got?' - the normal neurosis. There's always something in the theatre" - Daytona in the West End last year ("the best work I've done") and Harvey this year -"although salaries are down 70 per cent since the 1980s and it drives you nuts because it's never what you imagine it will be. At my age - I must stop using that phrase - it becomes harder and harder to keep my mouth shut." "I hadn't noticed," says Lindsay. "You have to find a way to disagree pleasantly," she explains. "Misunderstandings happen when you step on eggshells to avoid hurting someone's feelings. Women, particularly, are taught to manipulate rather than argue back." View oEmbed on the source website Lindsay has a spiky reputation, and has Seasonal Affective Disorder, which can lead to depression. He snubbed a dinner invitation with Margaret Thatcher because he didn't like her politics ("one of my greatest regrets"), disagreed with Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein over a film adaptation of Graham Greene's Loser Takes All, and again last year when he played Aristotle Onassis in Grace of Monaco with Nicole Kidman. "I haven't watched it," he says. Lipman comments, "If you start with the premise of Nicole Kidman playing Grace Kelly you're up s**t creek – of course, she's a good actress, but she ain't Grace Kelly." "Movies are such a lottery," Lindsay continues. "I had a really good part until Weinstein changed things. What's so hurtful is you've given a piece of yourself, so just take the money and run." The pair are both long-standing Labour supporters, with passionate views on the party's future. Lindsay says he comes from a very outspoken family. "My dad [a carpenter] was a trade unionist, a real northerner who didn't take crap from anyone. That's why I get so angry about New Labour – it's not what it was meant to be. Jeremy Corbyn is a wonderful politician who will take the Labour party back to what it should be. Life changes, though. We've all become more middle class." Lipman responds, “Everyone aspires to be middle class. That’s why old Labour doesn’t work.” Earlier this year Lindsay finished a run of 15 months in the musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and is now working on “about the tenth re-write” of a musical of Wind in the Willows. “It’s a modern version without animals. Mole is an Underground worker on the Metropolitan line, we collect rubbish on the river with a boatman called Bill Tarbrush and meet Toad, a Boris Johnson figure, in Henley- on-Thames. I have a production company and we’ll do something in the theatre. View oEmbed on the source website “I want to keep away from making television programmes. It’s too expensive. Theatre is more fun anyway because you have control. I suppose we all had working-class chips as we grew up, but with theatre you have a common aim and accept every background, age, and race. I’m very lucky I’m still working in this silly business after 50 years. I come from a small mining town [Ilkeston, Derbyshire] where many people are unemployed. My teacher said I’d never work – or could become a hairdresser.” When I interviewed Lipman 20 years ago, she told me she feared TV was going downmarket. “It was always for the people, but now it’s by the people. With smaller channels you’ll make TV from your own house or community. No one writes plays any more and there’s no watercooler discussion the next day. “It always was a young person’s game. The difficulty is staying the course. There’s a moment when you are bigger than you thought you would be and that’s when your character comes out. When I did the Beattie ads for BT [from 1989 to 1992] I considered myself a serious actress, so it was a shock when people in restaurants greeted me with ‘Brr, brr’. It went to my head a bit. I was really impressed when James Fox told his son, who wants to act, ‘You have a year to be an arsehole – and then it has to stop.’” When she was offered Bull she says, “I immediately assumed someone had dropped out, but I read the first page of the scene we’re doing now and thought, ‘That’s funny.’ I’ve been in and out of that thought ever since,” she adds wryly. “Rob’s done shows with an audience so right away you know if you’re onto a winner or not.” View oEmbed on the source website Robert Lindsay in My Family “Not true,” he says. “My Family [in which he starred for 11 years] had nine million viewers, but the press loathed it. I suppose popularity breeds contempt. The irony is the BBC shelved it saying they didn’t want any more middle-class comedies – and then put on Miranda. I assume I’ve lost the plot.” They have both been in therapy. Lindsay married actress Rosie Ford in 2006 and they have three children – Sam, nearly 16, Jamie, 12, and three-year-old John. He also has a 25-year-old actress daughter Sydney Stevenson from a relationship with actress Diana Weston. But in 1980 he went through a “terrible” divorce from actress Cheryl Hall. “I started using Prozac. A doctor in Ireland told me to chuck it in the Liffey. He put me in touch with a counsellor who released a lot of the rubbish and illusions I had about myself.” After success as the revolutionary Wolfie in the BBC’s Citizen Smith from 1977 to 1980 (below), he won an Olivier in London and a Tony on Broadway in the mid-80s for Me and My Girl, and auditioned for James Bond in The Living Daylights [the part went to Timothy Dalton]. View oEmbed on the source website “I was flavour of the month, storming Broadway, and started to believe my own publicity. I assumed I’d be a big film star, but even then there was a little voice inside going, ‘You’re not really like this. Stop it.’ The downfall was immediate. I did three films in Hollywood back-to- back, which were disasters. A lot of people tried to get me to stay – Mel Brooks, [Steven] Spielberg, [Barbra] Streisand all took me out to dinner and offered things. I know I’m dropping names like mad, but Dustin Hoffman told me, ‘Look at all the crap I’ve done. Stay here.’ But I was so homesick I hightailed it back to England and made GBH [for which he won a Bafta]. That restored my confidence.” You went well over the year for being an arsehole,” remarks Lipman. “Absolutely. Rosie has re-recorded all our VHS tapes and I watched myself on Parkinson when I returned from New York and thought, ‘You arrogant young man. Who do you think you are?’ But you need a certain ambition and arrogance in this business.” “Robert and I are very ambitious; we wouldn’t be here otherwise. And when I started working it was still frowned upon because a girl should marry and have children. If you can juggle it like I did – just – it takes its toll, like any work where you constantly have to prove yourself.” She had a difficult time in the 80s, when she was in Martin Sherman play Messiah. “Someone got up one night and screamed at me. It was as if all the voices of disapproval came at me at once. I was moving house, had two children under five, couldn’t sleep and lost it for a while. I saw this very lovely old Jungian for 15 months, and having made him laugh throughout each session I’d leave, dress up as a chicken in a sitcom and realise, ‘This is my therapy.’” A production assistant apologises, but says they have to be on set now as the schedule has changed – again. But Lindsay and Lipman are relaxed and accommodating. They’ve been here many times before. And will certainly be so again. Bull begins on Gold tonight (Wednesday 21st October) at 10.00pm
Denis Healey: "I rather regret I never tried but I didn’t want to be prime minister"
"I went into politics because I wanted to stop a third world war, and you have to be a politician to do that"
Denis Healey died on 3rd October 2015 aged 98. This interview was first published in Radio Times in May 2015 Baron Healey of Riddlesden [“Call me Denis”] opens the door of his large home in East Sussex and, leaning on a stick, the 97-year-old former defence secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and deputy leader of the Labour Party, leads me into his conservatory. “What’s all this about?” he asks, as he shuffles along. I explain it’s a four-part BBC2 documentary commemorating the 70th anniversary of VE Day and a tribute to men and women, like him, born in the First World War who lived through the Depression, fought in the Second World War and whose stoic achievements helped create modern Britain. He stops, turns to stare at me beadily through large bifocals, smiles, and asks, “What’s the French for ‘balls’? Oh, I know – couilles.” It’s a splendid summing-up of his personality – humorous, learned, self-mocking and pithy – harking back to a time before spin doctors extracted the personality from politicians. "I never worried about dignity – ever." He was on The Morecambe and Wise Show, "made a fool of myself" with Dame Edna Everage and Mike Yarwood, and appeared in a Sainsbury’s ad for smoked salmon and champagne. "They paid me £30,000. Obviously that’s why I did it. I was called a champagne socialist because I’ve a nice house but I’m not a great drinker of champagne." We sit in two comfortable, but very low, armchairs and I begin to shout at him. Even so, I’ll have to repeat questions 27 times in 45 minutes although, when he does hear, he bats back answers with alacrity. His memory is sharp and he gives a number of responses identical to those I’ve heard before. He even vaguely remembers a lunch we had 26 years ago when he introduced me to porcini mushrooms – exotic in those days – and said he would buy some the following month in Florence. He’s frail, as to be expected, and mostly toothless. "I have dentures, but don’t wear them. I have enough teeth for my purposes." He wears a fawn corduroy jacket and dark trousers, and we look out to his pool and the five-acre garden beyond. "Lovely, isn’t it? I swim every day from May to September. We’re lucky here with the sea nearby and beautiful countryside. I visit London several times a year. It’s changed, but not for the worse." He lives alone but insists he isn’t lonely. His wife of 64 years, Edna, died in 2010, aged 92. "She was a wonderful woman, beautiful, understanding, and it was a terrible loss, but I have a loving family who I see a great deal of. Jenny [his oldest child, aged 64] comes down almost every other weekend and Cressida was over from San Francisco, where she lives, for a fortnight last month. I have five grandchildren, one great-grandchild who I see quite a lot, and friends all over the country. It’s been a full life, and I’m generally an optimist. I haven’t made any enemies for some time." He has a reputation as a jolly flirt, joking to a woman journalist two years ago that whisky and rumpy pumpy were the secrets of a happy old age and asking her to take off her knickers. Now he laughs and adds, "It’s largely a question of physical accident. I’ll probably reach 100 before I pass away. I don’t fear death at all. You’re gone and that’s it." Far from being the bruiser of legend during his 40 years as an MP for Leeds East [he retired in 1992], he insists he was really the Miss Lonely Hearts of the party – "and a psychiatric wet nurse. I had to help them through problems. Politicians are much more professional now. In my day very few went into it until their 30s and had experience of the world. Today they tend to go straight from university, not a good thing, but the world has changed. The strange thing is that differences are inside the parties rather than between them. There’s not so much passion. People care more about whales than the world – quite a good phrase, but it’s true – up to a point, Lord Gnome." He mistakes, by design or not, Lord Copper, the newspaper magnate in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, for Lord Gnome, the "proprietor" of Private Eye. He won a double first at Balliol, Oxford, in Mods and Greats. "I was enormously influenced by the Master, Sandy Lindsay, who got me to read writers like Kierkegaard, Shestov and Ouspensky, Christian philosophers." He became a Communist but didn’t join the Union, breeding ground of so many politicians. Instead, he set up the New Oxford Arts Society and held an exhibition of Picasso paintings. "I often wonder if I wouldn’t have done better to become a lecturer in aesthetics." He was proud to be called “the last Renaissance figure”, but I suspect that he was au fond (bursting into French is catching) an aesthete of clay? "I went into politics because I wanted to stop a third world war, and you have to be a politician to do that. The risk today is enormously reduced. I don’t feel strongly one way or another about nuclear weapons, although we should have them if others do. Whether it’s a submarine [Trident] or not, I don’t know." There have been many wars since. "They have divided people with whom I agreed on most things. Iraq was the best example. I disagreed with it entirely, but you can never really be quite sure because you don’t know what would have happened otherwise." His generation went through many sacrifices for what they thought would be the new Jerusalem. "To an extent we’ve done it. We supervised a transformation of society, the world and Britain for the better. So many issues that divided the country have disappeared completely, like class. When I grew up you could tell which class people belonged to by what they wore, how they behaved and what they said. It’s still a factor, but much less important." He’s proud of the welfare state, "although people are fed up with the nannying. The unions had too much power, but they don’t now, which is a good thing. It’s easily forgotten that we got rid of the Empire very successfully, whereas the Americans buggered things up in Vietnam with millions killed. My proudest achievement is winning the war of Confrontation with only 114 British killed." In the four-year "confrontation" between Indonesia and Singapore, which ended in 1966, Healey refused permission for the RAF to bomb ports of entry in Eastern Borneo. "I wouldn’t allow it because bombs make more enemies than friends. That has always been the case." During his time at the Treasury he raised the top rate of tax on unearned income to 98 per cent – "a mistake," he says now. "I made a lot of those. Politicians do. I was a little upset by personal attacks but never by being misquoted. I didn’t say I’d tax the rich until the pips squeak [it was just property speculators] but I’m remembered by that. It doesn’t matter. I have a thick skin." Perhaps it’s true that all political careers end in failure? "I don’t know. I enjoyed my time. I tried twice [unsuccessfully] to become leader of the party because I wanted to keep control of it and at the time there was a great problem with the Left and Tony Benn." He was often described as the best PM we never had, but his son, Tim, a broadcaster, says he would have been "rubbish". He laughs. "I rather regret I never tried but I didn’t want to be prime minister. I preferred to have specific obligations but I realise now it’s the most important job. You decide what line to take when there are disagreements in Cabinet. The job I really wanted, which I never had, was foreign secretary." He preferred family life to politics and says the most dangerous are those who use politics as a surrogate for domestic failure: Eden – "a mess"; Gaitskell – "a confused domestic life". He recalls other prime ministers and battles. "Harold Wilson was an opportunist, which he didn’t have to be. Tony Blair was good to start with but then everything went wrong – cash for peerages and stuff like that. Cherie was a great friend of my wife. She’s a very nice woman." Some papers, like the Daily Mail, aren’t kind to her. "Really? I didn’t know that. I read The Guardian and Financial Times, which is the only one you need – good on the arts as well as politics. "Nice people can go into politics. Sometimes it’s knocked out of you, but I haven’t noticed it much. Some of my best friends have been Tory like Geoffrey Howe." He famously compared being attacked by him as like being savaged by a dead sheep. Now he claims that was a joke. "Tony Benn and I were very hostile at first, but our attitude changed in later life, especially after our wives died.” In his autobiography, The Time of My Life, he writes little about his wartime exploits, which included being British landing officer for the assault on Anzio. "There’s a chapter or so," he says laconically. He recalls meeting General Montgomery, whom he disliked. "He was so vain and wore it like a foulard [a scarf]. Maybe he had to be like that to do the job." In Healey’s hallway are framed tributes to him – honorary member of the Italy Star Association, certificate of honour from the city of Anzio. "I speak Italian quite well. I learnt it there when I had a girlfriend, Theresa." He pauses. "I wasn’t married at the time of course." He’s not quite sure where he was on VE Day – “Florence, I think. I don’t remem- ber anything in particular, although it was an exciting time. I drove to Austria and Yugoslavia. I knew Tito through a good friend, [diplomat] Fitzroy Maclean." After the war, the country rejected Winston Churchill as prime minister. "He had no understanding of ordinary people. I remember a broadcast in which he said, ‘And you, who listen to me in your cottages...’ Absolute balls. There was a lot of that sort of thing around in those days." Ironically, Healey’s middle name is Winston because his father, an engineer, was an admirer (his mother wanted a girl and had already named him Pamela). Today Britain is unrecognisable from the country in which he was brought up. We discuss a couple of points: gay marriage? "I don’t mind that. Homosexuality was taken for granted in the Greek world and nothing was thought about it. It was only after Christianity came along that opinion changed. Now most people believe it should be accepted if it’s there." Immigration? “"e probably let in too many people because it was a way of getting cheap labour. You could reduce the amount by putting a cap on it. Ukip is dangerous because it’s limited in its views and a little bit racist. But I’m not very interested in the election, partly because I’ve had my day and partly because my main interest is music. It’s amazing everything is now available on CD, and I can see all the opera I like on TV." "But the election is open. Miliband could become PM, although he doesn’t have any charisma. His brother David had lots but didn’t have the support of the unions, which is why Ed overtook him. Attlee didn’t have charisma either, but he attracted a great deal of respect." And he didn’t have to submit himself to daily TV performances or intense exposure sometimes leading to humiliation. "They have to put up with it today. It doesn’t lead to good politics, but it doesn’t necessarily destroy the possibility. I do think the demand for nationalism in Scotland is a potential problem: it produced division in Ireland, although there was a religious dimension there, which makes it different." He’s tiring and it’s time to go. I struggle to get out of the chair. He blinks in the sunlight, alone again with his memories. Denis Healey: The Best Prime Minister Labour Never Had? is on BBC2 at 8pm on Wednesday 7th October
Jenna Coleman: "You're in Doctor Who knowing it will never last"
Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman reveal the secrets of their successful partnership as Doctor Who returns to BBC1
Note: This interview took place before the announcement of Jenna Coleman's departure from Doctor Who They're an incongruous couple, perhaps one of the most unlikely pairings on television: he's 6ft: she's 5ft 2 and sometimes has to stand on an apple box when they're filming together. He's 57, cadaverous, an Oscar winner and a bit battered by life; she’s 29, fresh-faced, cherubic. He was the foul- mouthed enforcer Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It (2005–12) and lead singer in a punk band the B*****ds from Hell; she was a demure acquaintance of Prince Harry last summer (they had tea at a polo match), and was in Emmerdale for four years. This week, the 12th Time Lord, Peter Capaldi, and his companion Clara Oswald, played by Jenna Coleman, begin the ninth series of Doctor Who since its 2005 revival. Their relationship is at the heart of the show and, he explains, "It has no equivalent in TV or fiction, a friendship between an alien creature and an extremely bright, clever and brave young woman. It's unusual for a man of my age to be friendly with such a youthful lady. She wants to go out into the universe and enjoy herself, happy to be reckless and in danger. I was so lucky it was Jenna because it might not have worked with anyone else. It's tricky to come into a long-established show, especially as the lead, and Jenna has proved to be a wonderful actress and friend." She recalls they had lunch together after the hype and secrecy surrounding his role. “I’d no idea who would take over from Matt Smith, and when I was told it was Peter, it was one of those ‘aha, that makes sense – genius’ kind of moments. But the first thing he said to me was, ‘There will be no romance in the Tardis.’” He smiles. They spark off each other in an easy way. He’s self-effacing and seems curiously vulnerable; she’s lively and confident. “I was keen there shouldn’t be a romantic element,” he says. “It would have been completely creepy. It’s fine if you have handsome young men like Matt and David Tennant, but as a father [he’s been married to actress and TV producer Elaine Collins since 1991 and they have a teenage daughter, Cecily], I felt it would be inappropriate. And it’s forged a huge bond between us. There’s no romance, but there’s deep love.” View oEmbed on the source website She knew Smith was leaving when she joined the cast three years ago. “I was really excited to start a new relationship with Peter although it was scary. The Doctor, who is my best friend, is not only in a different body, but he’s also getting to know himself. Age made no difference. He’s an alien. We’re not lovey-dovey. Everything is more about what is unsaid, rather than said. Clara may seem like a control freak, but she’s trying to control the uncontrollable.” “It’s a difficult show to act,” he says. “It goes from B-movie sci-fi to Freudian drama and tragedy. There’s romance, pantomime, humour and sadness, so you’re kept on your toes. I try not to be too romantic or sentimental. Sometimes Jenna will run down a corridor shouting, ‘Doctor, there’s a monster,’ and stuff. Part of the tradition is that sets wobble and you have to fight a giant spider made of rubber. I enjoy that. It’s not so well budgeted as viewers might think [each episode takes 12 days to produce] but it looks great because of the talent of the people working on it.” Earlier this year they did a worldwide promotional tour. “We spend nine months filming in Cardiff [at Roath Lock, BBC Wales’s 170,000 square ft facility], talking to aliens, in our own little world,” she says, “and then go somewhere like South Korea and we’re greeted with such enthusiasm at the airport. It’s a surprise to see how far-reaching the show is.” “I’m amazed at the audience reaction and don’t really know why it is,” he says. “It has monsters, which people like, and there are hardly any other shows with them. It’s an established part of family-oriented TV here. I’ve been a fan since childhood and have a personal relationship with this mysterious alien and his companion rambling through time and space confronted by monsters yet holding at its heart a sort of melancholy that is never quite addressed. Unlike other sci-fi, Doctor Who has a domestic element – the Tardis could turn up in the Mall or a coffee shop – but it catches fire abroad, in culturally different places, particularly with students and young adults. I suppose it offers escapism.” They’ve both had interesting careers. He was brought up in Glasgow where his parents, of Italian extraction, were in the ice-cream business. At school he was mocked and called “Moon Man”, which still seems to rankle. “It was the Apollo landings and I spent my entire life writ- ing letters to Nasa who sent pictures to me. I was a geek before the word was invented.” He wrote to Radio Times aged 15, in 1974, praising the magazine for its coverage of Doctor Who before he developed less cerebral interests two years later and became lead singer in a punk band, the Dreamboys, originally the B*****ds from Hell. “I was at arts school. Everyone picked up guitars and we had a lot of fun playing gigs.” Craig Ferguson, now a leading US talk show host, was their drummer. He introduced Capaldi earlier this year as the only guest “I’ve taken acid with”. Capaldi smiles sheepishly. “Craig is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, a natural comedian. Coleman veers the conversation onto a safer topic. “You’re in a museum in Paisley. I have pictures of you, with the band.” He looks at once mortified, surprised and pleased. He’s also become a sex symbol. “Unbelievable,” he says. “When you’re famous, people say things about you. I’m the same person I was when I wasn’t a sex symbol. Fame is such a privilege and any downside is a small price to pay. It’s slightly different, though, because people think they’re meeting Doctor Who, an icon, and not me.” “I get that directed at me, too,” she says. “It’s recognition associated with a show that people like, which is nice.” View oEmbed on the source website He failed his first interview for drama school. “I was dreadful, but then I got lucky. I knew nothing about acting – my family went to pantomime at Christmas, and that was it – but I thought it would be good fun because I liked watching telly. I came to London at 17 and the whole thing was terrifying. I moved into a world that was utterly different.” At 25 he returned to his flat “a wee bit drunk”, where his landlady, a costume designer, was talking to film director Bill Forsyth, who cast him as an amiable geek in the highly successful Local Hero. A few years later Capaldi directed a comic film for BBC Scotland, Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which won a Bafta and an Oscar for best live action short film in 1995. “I only did it to explore my creativity, then everyone said, ‘Are you going to be a film director?’ which I didn’t want to be. I have an arts school background, so my ethos is: you have a go at everything and if you keep your eyes open and are lucky, you learn. Sometimes you’re good, sometimes not. I shiver when I recall how arrogantly I behaved, but I was probably just stupid. When you’re young, you are stupid – apart from you, Jenna.” “Thank you,” she smiles. After success, failure – a few weeks after winning his Oscar he was back directing a dog-food commercial in a Rickmansworth field. “All actors go through ups and downs and walk in the deep shadow of failure. I like to talk about it, unlike most who think it somehow means you’re not successful. My failures taught me more than any success and made me wise. There are profound things I won’t go into. Working with others, I learnt to rely on myself. There are a lot of high priests, Aztecs, in this business, who profess to have the answers. When you realise they don’t, it’s a remarkable feeling.” He was on the verge of packing up acting and selling the family home in north London after being out of work for a year before The Thick of It came along in 2005. He used to draw every day, but has no time with the Doctor Who schedule. “I miss it because I know it’s atrophying. It’s not something I do as a pastime. It’s part of me. I’d like to have been an artist but think I’m too gregarious – well, not really – and when I look at painters like John Byrne [who also wrote the 1987 BBC series Tutti Frutti starring Robbie Coltrane], I think there’s no point in having a go.” Coleman was brought up in Blackpool, where her father and brother run a shop-fitting business. She was a bridesmaid in Summer Holiday with Darren Day at 11, and turned down a place to study English at York University when offered a part in Emmerdale as Jasmine Thomas at 19. She found her character boring and decided to leave – just before Jasmine had a lesbian affair with her best pal Debbie, became pregnant by Debbie’s father, had an abortion, and clubbed her policeman boyfriend to death with a chair leg, as happens in soaps. “A good exit story,” she says wryly. She went to LA at 22. “I’d lived in Leeds for four years, didn’t have a gap year. I wanted a change, to flex different muscles. It was really brave. I arrived at the airport having never driven on the other side of the road, and had my car towed [for a parking violation] on the first day. I enjoyed auditions – they keep you active, creative and busy while you’re unemployed. I returned after four months feeling great and fearless.” View oEmbed on the source website Capaldi has no idea how long he’ll play the part. “It depends whether viewers like me, and you never know. We’re conscious of the fact the show will go on without any of us. Life is full of surprises, and there is a cosmic sledgehammer.” “You never feel you’ve arrived,” she adds, “which is a good thing. It would be quite scary to feel safe. You’re in Doctor Who knowing it will never last. It’s constantly regenerating, so you want to make your time count and enjoy the adventure for the fleeting time you’re here.” Controversy is always close, though. In Capaldi’s first episode, last year, there was a shared on-screen kiss between lizard woman Madame Vastra and her human wife Jenny Flint even though they’d been together three years. There were complaints that the BBC was promoting a gay agenda. They both laugh. “I think it was good,” he says, and then looks mock serious. “Actually it’s not just lesbian. It’s across species, which is even worse, presumably. It’s crazy if people get up in arms about it. There should be lots more kissing in Doctor Who. So long as it’s not the Doctor and Clara.” Doctor Who series 9 begins on BBC1 tomorrow (Saturday 19th September) at 7.40pm
Call the Midwife's Jenny Agutter: "I do love playing a nun"
“Downton isn’t something I’ve watched much. It’s a wonderful fantasy of English life, but we [at Midwife] are reality, albeit a bit removed"
Jenny Agutter invites me to a gastropub in Camberwell, an outpost of south London, near to where she and her Swedish property developer husband, Johan Tham, have lived for 14 years. “People think Camberwell doesn’t exist because it’s not on the Underground. I nearly wore my ‘Bring the Tube to Camberwell’ campaign T-shirt. It’s a wonder- fully culturally mixed area, with every part of the world represented, and only 30 minutes from the West End. The vegetable store round the corner, run by a Greek Cypriot, even sells breadfruit, which used to be transported from the South Seas to feed Caribbean slaves because it’s high in carbohydrates.” Fascinating, I say, and she smiles. Now 62, slim and looking at least ten years younger, she’s been working since she was 11 years old, most famously as Roberta in The Railway Children at 17, and remains easy-going and gentle. “I’ve satisfied a lot of ambitions, but never wanted to be a big star. I wouldn’t have been good at it. For the Oscars you’re meant to walk down the red carpet, but I snuck in the back door. Not the thing to do!” She’s had long experience of interviews. Richard Harris, with whom she starred in The Snow Goose in 1971, advised her never to become bogged down with the truth (“It’s only entertainment”), but she has no artifice and denies her painful breakup with the late Patrick Garland, who directed the film and was 17 years her senior, precipitated her move to the US when she was 21. “People like to think you have to be kicked up the butt to do something different. I just felt like a new start.” But, first, more mundane considerations. She admits to a slight problem in her role as Sister Julienne (below) in Call the Midwife, which begins its fourth series today. “I keep asking if I can sneak in a pair of silk pyjamas to wear, but they’re very strict in the lingerie department so it’s just white winceyette and wimples for me.” Midwife, with its brutish sentimentality, nostalgia for the 50s and homilies (“Certainty is fleeting – that’s why we must have faith,” says Sister Julienne) had more viewers than Downton Abbey during its first series in 2012. That doesn’t surprise her. “Downton isn’t something I’ve watched much. It’s a wonderful fantasy of English life, but we [at Midwife] are reality, albeit a bit removed. Today everyone is so concerned with ‘rights’ and what we imagine we’re owed. In those days the attitude was more what we could do to help others. Viewers enjoy that sense of community. And at the centre of it all, babies are born, which gives us hope.” Not for the squeamish, though: blood-soaked births are wincingly realistic. “It’s carefully shot – the actual birth is prosthetic and then a new baby is held in arms. Very clever and emotional.” Most of the cast cry on set now and again. The new series is set in the 1960s. “Suddenly this exciting world bursts open. The Pill completely changed things. Poplar [where the series is set] didn’t have so many babies and that reduced a lot of pressure on families. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” she announces happily. For the nuns? “My goodness, no. It hasn’t quite got to that. I do love playing a nun. You’d think it would be easy, but it’s one of my more difficult roles. It’s so far from anything I can imagine – that dedication, tolerance and faith – which is very different to ‘religion’. I like it when I have a chance early in the day’s filming to be in the chapel. It must be marvellous to have the contemplative psalms and plainsong chant- ing as part of one’s life. It puts you in such a good mood. If I do anything surprising – like swear – when I’m in costume, I get strange looks.” She was brought up as a Roman Catholic, but rebelled at 16. “There are some wonderful things about all religions, but they’ve gone awry over hundreds of years by being politically manipulative. Religion often uses faith as a blindfold, saying anyone who doesn’t believe the same as us must be wiped out. It’s not God saying that. It’s people, which is so dangerous. “My mother was very much a believer and she always felt guilt – Catholics are good at that. She lost two children to cystic fibrosis and must have felt deep pain throughout her life. She was supportive and uncritical of me and my brother, but not an easy person. I wish I’d had closer conversations with her. Ironically, she spoke to my son freely about everything, including the war, which she never did to me or my brother. Both parents wanted us to have a comfortable life, with everything perfect.” As her father was in the Army the family travelled extensively and when she was eight she was sent to Elmhurst ballet school, then in Camberley, Surrey, as a boarder. “I didn’t question it, but it’s peculiar and made a difference in my life.” She was nicknamed Piglet because she was small and ate a lot. The school sent her for screen tests and she had her first part in East of Sudan in 1964. “My parents weren’t impressed. My father was entertainments manager in Cyprus, but my mother didn’t think showbusiness people were quite ‘right’. I have to say that everyone I came across as a child actor was entirely delightful and took care of me.” View oEmbed on the source website The Railway Children (above), for which she was paid less than £10,000 (about £160,000 today), was pivotal. “I stopped school, which was foolish and I wouldn’t advocate it for anyone, but never mind. We had a wonderful royal premiere, were on the front page of the newspapers for a short time, and that was it. I was out of school, with no training, little education and not much happening in films. I did a lot of television and went to the National Theatre, where everyone had a theatrical background and knowledge I lacked. Peter Hall urged me to go into rep, but that’s not where my heart lay and I’ve only ever been able to follow what I feel. So I went to America, where no one had heard of The Railway Children. “It wasn’t entirely foolish. I had an American agent whose guesthouse I stayed in. And I’d won an Emmy for The Snow Goose. But for six months I thought nothing would happen – I was going up for adverts, and then Logan’s Run came along [in 1976]. Many people go to LA and hate it. I didn’t. I like the openness and the ‘can do’ attitude. In America it’s ‘can do’ – until it fails. In England it fails – until you ‘can do’. There were disappointments – parts that went to someone else, bad reviews – but you push them away. Friends help me get it in proportion." "I avoided pitfalls by realising it’s no good looking for gold unless you dig. I joined a little ballet company and made sure I didn’t wander around vaguely. I was also never comfortable with hire purchase. I got my first car from Rent-a-Wreck, and felt extremely privileged to enjoy life in my little rented flat. As soonasImademoneyIputitdownonan investment house in West Hollywood. At one point I thought of going into the property market, which is much more simple in America.” Single in Los Angeles for 15 years, presumably she had a few unsuitable boyfriends? “Not many. LA is never-never land and there are few mature men in the film industry. They’re not required to be.” She also, she says, put up invisible barriers, making sure no one came close enough to her to ruin an enviable life. “Living alone I made every decision and did things my way. I was never lonely. I don’t think I ever have been. The only loneliness is being at a party where you don’t know anyone. I was self- centred, and it took me a long time to grow up because I didn’t do it with my peers. Working with older people I had a sense of being smarter and wiser than I was, even though I knew zilch. I faked it in order to fit in and not feel insecure.” She even tried to smoke – unsuccessfully. She wasn’t really mature, she says, until she was in her 30s, after meeting Johan at an arts festival in Bristol in 1989. They married a year later and had their son Jonathan, who is now 24 and studying medicine at Cambridge. “You grow up when you let someone else into your life in marriage. It’s a hard adjustment, coming to terms with other people’s realities and the fact that you’re not going to do everything your way, although it’s wonderful to have someone else there. At least you know, sort of, who you are by then." “In my 20s I felt much more maternal than in my 30s, but there was no one around to have a child with. I thought about having one on my own, but knew I wouldn’t cope. I needed support. I was less broody when I was in a posi- tion to have a child, but thrilled when I became pregnant. However, they don’t tell you that, the moment you’re pregnant, your life is taken over. Everything you do, think and feel is affected.” She returned to live in London with Johan and cut down on work: “I didn’t want to compromise the family so that had to take precedence.” Now, though, she thinks there’s something of a renaissance for older women. “There’s a more mature audience to be catered for and great stories are being writ- ten. You no longer have to be young for ever, which is terrific. Men can be attractive at any age, but for women it’s still associated with childbearing and sexuality. It has to change. Maybe I’m more hopeful than I should be, but look at Miranda [Hart, who plays midwife Chummy] – so attractive, and although she goes on about being ungainly, she’s really very secure. She grew up tall and gangly and had the strength of personality to overcome it. “When I was in Hollywood a producer told me I should have the bags under my eyes done. I was very British and said no. I know a couple of people who’ve had face lifts and it was terrifying – black and blue and swollen. It doesn’t do it for me. But men are conned into it, too. There’s an industry and it doesn’t end with women. “I did worry about being 60, didn’t like it at all. It was nothing to do with the age – more my own attitude in the past, thinking how old it made other people seem. Are you seen in a different light because it’s the retirement age? I had a nice party and now have free travel and freedom in my mind. We all worry about death, which our society doesn’t accept very easily. I’d like to just pop off.” Call the Midwife returns to BBC1 tonight (Sunday the 18th of January) at 8.00pm
Miranda Richardson on her role in BBC1's period comedy Mapp and Lucia
“The trouble is I haven’t obeyed the rules or done things I’m supposed to do. I don’t like to repeat myself. No one was tough enough to say to me, ‘Shut up, calm down, this part will do you good, blah blah blah’"
Miranda Richardson and I have an afternoon rendezvous in a downstairs room (number 2; cost, around £400 a night) at a boutique hotel in west London with a king-size bed, walls prettily painted in historic green and Thai white, and a roll-topped Victorian bath with a rainfall shower. It’s the hotel where, in room 16, Kate Moss and Johnny Depp are said to have filled their bath with champagne. Perhaps Miranda, 56, and I could use it for a similar activity, although I’m not sure the BBC – whose PR rep sits guard on the bed – could stretch that far to publicise a three-part series based on EF Benson’s comic novels about cultural snobbery and English silliness in the 1930s. Indeed, such frivolity would be spectacularly out of place with Richardson, who is thankfully unpredictable, scorns celebrity, is personally and professionally independent and once warned me, “I don’t suffer fools gladly.” Today she promises that “This interview could go off in any direction,” as well she might, considering the weirdly inappropriate location. Richardson plays Miss Elizabeth Mapp, a cornucopia of middle-class gossip and envy, who rents her house, with its “library” of fake books, for the summer to the widowed Mrs Emmeline “Lucia” Lucas – played by an equally brilliant Anna Chancellor. The series, which captures the gentility and curtain twitching of the fictional seaside town of Tilling, is from a bygone age. No sex. No violence. “There’s an undertow,” says Richardson, smiling. “Do you mean it’s not like Hnormal telly? The writing is better?” Her face is transformed in the series by a set of protuberant false teeth that gives her fixed smiles a saccharine duplicity. “I kept breaking them when I took them out. Fortunately they are mendable and easy to talk with after you’ve let them settle for ten minutes. I’d put them in after make-up, wriggle them around my mouth, and there she blows. They put me in character.” The series, scripted by Steve Pemberton, was filmed mostly in the Citadel area of Rye, East Sussex, home town of EF Benson. “The house is in the street where one is supposed to live if one is anyone. Jolly pretty it is, too, and although we were invading them, the residents were charming and marvellously well behaved. I had such a nice time. I hope the series might be good. There were moments of such deliciousness – I’m not talking about what I was doing – that you think, ‘Golly, this has got to communicate itself.’ ” Her phone rings. “Sorry, my architect is trying to contact me.” She has recently moved to a new home. “I’m nesting at the moment, which I enjoy. I like the nomadic aspect of my work, but if you do it for too long you want to decompress.” She’s never married, although she hopes she’s been in love “several times”, which she considers an “illness”. “And I may not marry. People I know do it as much for tax reasons as security.” The younger daughter of a marketing executive and a housewife, she was born in Southport, Lancashire, and spent five years in rep before making her acclaimed film debut as Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, in 1984’s Dance with a Stranger, followed in 1986 by Queenie (Elizabeth I) in Blackadder II. She was described in the US as “the hot new bundle from Britain”, but the promise hasn’t been lavishly fulfilled, in spite of two Academy Award nominations (for Damage in 1992 and Tom & Viv, as TS Eliot’s first wife, two years later). “The trouble is I haven’t obeyed the rules or done things I’m supposed to do. I don’t like to repeat myself. No one was tough enough to say to me, ‘Shut up, calm down, this part will do you good, blah blah blah.’ I haven’t done classics because I’m a scaredy-cat and I need someone to tell me, ‘You’re just the person for the job.’ ” She famously turned down the Glenn Close role in Fatal Attraction, calling the film “crap”. “Let’s not talk about that,” she pleads. She worked with Steven Spielberg on Empire of the Sun and Robert Altman on Kansas City, but doesn’t regret that she hasn’t had a Hollywood career. “Why are you putting it in the past? I had a go in America [playing a New York socialite in TV conspiracy thriller series Rubicon, which was shown on BBC4 in 2011], but unfortunately there was a shift in management just before we started filming and they didn’t then know what to do with me.” On Christmas Eve she stars with Harry Hill in BBC1’s The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm, which is also set in the 1930s. “British TV has got better and I’m sure if I tweeted I’d find a lot of enthusiastic viewers, but I don’t. Twitter is cheap therapy: people have their say without it being a criminal offence, unless they’re trolls. “I’m still around and hungry for work, but it can be frustrating finding a role that feels right. Mapp and Lucia is something that, if you’ll pardon the pun, I could get my teeth into.” Calling her an “actress” used to make her wince. “You don’t say ‘doctoress’. It had connotations – actress/model, or someone with a lot of hair and a breathy voice. I don’t let things get to me so much now – only when I think it’s necessary, which isn’t often.” In order to keep calm she’s taken up the cello and is working towards grade three. “Never too late is my motto.” She’s also a keen falconer and has a bird, Cassiopeia. “They’re fascinating, essentially wild so you never get to know them, although you kind of do. When I was 12 I sat with an injured kestrel all day, comforting it, and in the evening she flew to join her mate on the church tower. It was incredibly romantic. I became obsessed after that.“I constantly want to give up acting. It can be frustrating and annoying, but I don’t know what else I’d do. I’m always saying ‘I don’t know’. I’m no less clueless now than I’ve always been. But there are worse things in life than making people smile and happy.” Mapp and Lucia Monday 29th December 9.05pm, Tuesday 30the December 9.00pm, New Year's Eve 9.00pm, BBC1 (8.30pm New Year's Eve in Scotland)
Miriam Margolyes on success, sexuality – and meeting will.i.am
"I’m surprised I haven’t been more successful," says the Trollied star
Meeting Miriam Margolyes is always a joyous, outspoken occasion and now she’s 73 she says she has nothing to lose. “I’m here to answer any questions. I’ve burnt my boats and there they are – smouldering in public view.” We’re in the kitchen of her home in Clapham, south London, which she bought for £21,500 in 1973, and is now worth more than a million. It’s a patriotic road with plaques commemorating street parties for the birth of Prince George and a royal wedding. “I have the good fortune to get Christmas cards from Prince Charles and the organisers asked if they could exhibit one of them on a table. Certainly not! I do not put my Christmas cards out for public viewing.” She pours me a glass of tap water, rustles in the fridge for ice and lemon. “My cleaning lady has gone to Lourdes, so everything is a bit of a mess.” Like many voluble extroverts, Margolyes cowers under self-doubt, desperately wants to be liked, but is scared a lot of the time. She says she’s “appallingly selfish” and likes to shock, but is deeply sensitive. A mass of contradictions. “You’re not expecting consistency?” she chides, laughing. She’s a virtuoso of voices and her conversation is punctuated with accents. “I don’t practise them. It’s a gift.” Once the Queen asked her what she did and she replied, “I’m the best reader of stories in the world.” After the Queen had moved on, Margolyes kept talking. “Be quiet,” said the Queen, who’s possibly the only person who’s been able to silence her. Margolyes also owns a flat next door, a clifftop house on St Margaret’s Bay, Kent, two houses in Australia, one in Italy – “That’s five and a half,” she says, adding on her fingers. “I have to keep working because, although I have land, I’m not cash rich and don’t have the wealth of high- profile actresses – don’t say I’m an ‘actor’. That’s a bit too modern. I wish I had a million in the bank. I like round figures. I am a round figure. But I’m not eating my heart out. “I’m grateful to be working at my age, genuinely humble I’m still someone people want to watch, although I’m surprised I haven’t been more successful. I’d have thought my particular brand of quirkiness, combined with sharp intelligence and a fine voice, would have yielded more. But it hasn’t. Yet! Maybe it’s because I’m fat. It’s jolly hard to lose weight. I’m peeved, but it would be stupid to feel bitter. I don’t know why they don’t ask me to do things, but since they don’t, I’m not waiting, darling. Haven’t got time for that. Tick, tick, tick.” She was Professor Sprout in a couple of Harry Potter films (above), and has done many stage and TV plays in Australia, of which she became a citizen in 2013. She pauses, takes off her sunglasses, blinks. “Gosh, I didn’t realise I was wearing them. Now,” she jokes, “you can see the beauty of my eyes. I had the supreme horror of seeing myself on television recently. Now I could never watch again. Far too upsetting.” Before becoming an actress she sold encyclopaedias door to door, voiced the role of “Sexy Sonia” in a porn film, and wrote to the then 80-year-old artist Augustus John asking if he wanted a fat girl to pose naked for him, which she did. She’s never been shy of showing her 44EE breasts, exposing them to the cast of the 1993 Daniel Day-Lewis/Michelle Pfeiffer film The Age of Innocence “to cheer them up”, and was a life model at an art school. At 17 she had a relationship with a man called Anton (“I suspect he was a real s***, but young women are vulnerable to that”) and nearly married another man, with whom she stayed in contact. Twenty years ago, when we met for lunch at a nearby Indian restaurant, she asked me not to reveal she lived with an Australian woman. This now retired academic has been her partner for 45 years, and today her only request is not to mention her name. Margolyes was initially embarrassed about being gay, and regrets coming out to her mother, which she believes caused her to have a stroke three days later. “I really loved my parents [father a GP, mother a property developer]. But Mummy never wanted to have me. She asked her doctor for an abortion and he said, ‘I don’t do that’, so she was forced to carry me to term. But then I fulfilled her life, as she fulfilled mine. I was loved, and that is the basis of my success. I still lead my life according to what I think they would like. It was a major disappointment to them that I never married and had children because that’s what every Jewish parent wants.” Her strong personality triumphed and she joined “Gay Yids”, lecturing about her sexuality in synagogues. During last year’s Australian citizenship ceremony, she told the country’s then Prime Minister Julia Gillard, “I’m a dyke.” When her partner’s family gave a party for her – “very middle-class, conservative, decent, and I love them” – she said, “I can imagine the very last thing you want is a fat lesbian Jew.” But she believes now that “Things have changed enormously for the better over the years. People won’t judge me on being a lesbian, it’s whether I can do the work. But there’s still prejudice, so young actors should protect themselves by refusing to discuss who they go to bed with. Everyone should be able to do what they damned well like – find God, and love, wherever they want to, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.” I wonder if she’d like to have had children. She glares beadily, then shouts, “No! I have never liked children, even when I was one. It’s probably a dislike of people in competition with me. My partner says actors are talented toddlers and that’s true.” This week she joins the fourth series of Sky 1 sitcom Trollied (above), which is set in a Warrington supermarket and previously starred Stephanie Beacham as the store manager and Jane Horrocks as her deputy. “I loved the scripts because they made me laugh, which a lot of stuff doesn’t. I could identify with these people. It isn’t pretentious, and I don’t think anyone wouldn’t be able to understand it.” Too true, I say, and she booms, “You think it’s beneath me, do you? On the contrary, I’m rising to it.” Because of her outspokenness she is chat show gold. “Actually I don’t like chat shows,” she says. “I only go on them when I have something to sell. They’re so trivial: too much chat and not enough thought. But I enjoy Graham Norton – he’s quick, funny.” She was particularly amusing when she appeared on his show with The Voice UK coach Will.i.am (below). “I was told he was a rapper, but had no idea what that was. I explained it was nice to meet a black man, and people said I was racist – but I’m contrite I don’t know more black people. I ticked him off because he kept saying ‘like’, as in ‘I was talking, like, and...’ I’m incensed when people don’t use our language properly. It’s the greatest gift we’ve given to the world.” She worries she’s not clever enough, merely seen as a figure of fun, but has strong views, particularly about Israel. “I loathe Hamas, but they were democratically elected and Israel’s behaviour is not acceptable. There’s been a troubling backlash. I don’t think people like Jews. They never have. English literature, my great love, is full of greasy and treacherous Jews. I’m lucky they like me, and one always needs a Jewish accountant. Anti-semitism is horrible and can’t be defended, but Israel is stupidfor allowing people to vent it.” At Cambridge, she was in Newnham College’s team on University Challenge, losing in the second round. She smoked a pipe: “I wanted to make an impression. I hate to be unnoticed.” As the only woman in Footlights, with John Cleese, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman, she wasn’t happy. “I don’t like comedy.” On Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2008 she claimed she’d never had sex when she was at Cambridge, but in fact she was promiscuous, which led later to several years in therapy. “I was an ugly, fat little woman, needing to prove myself. I suppose [on Desert Island Discs] I was using the President Clinton meaning – ‘I did not have sex with that woman’. You’ll have to use your judgement, but I didn’t have penetrative sex or sleep with anyone in the fullest sense of the word, though I had oral sex, often and splendidly, and with a boyfriend. I became renowned for it. Can you deal with that? Or will the editor take it out, as the actress ordered the bishop?” She collapses in giggles. Up next is a one-woman show, called The Importance of Being Miriam, which will tour Australia next spring. “It’s not my title, because it sounds conceited. I’m scared, because I always am, but there’s a lot to be sad about and all I want to do is bring a smile to the face. I don’t mind laughing at myself. Bloody good job because I can’t believe what I do or say at times.” Trollied is on Sky1 tonight (Monday 3rd November) at 8:30pm
Anna Chancellor: Who cares about rejection? Your mistakes make you
Prim and posh in Four Weddings, Anna Chancellor is passionate, outrageous and a breath of fresh air...
It’s the tea-time rush hour in west London and Anna Chancellor can’t find a parking place for “my crappy old Audi”, so she dashes into the restaurant and asks me to order sausages while she resumes her search. Alas, they only have hot dogs and I don’t reckon the stylish Ms Chancellor is a hot dog person. “You’re right,” she says when she returns. “I couldn’t take the sausage out of a hot dog because it would be floppy.” She smiles. “I want a normal one. I’m married to a Muslim and he doesn’t like pork. Is the overall impression that I’m a mad woman?” I resist replying, “No, just quackers” as she’s too often associated with her part as Duckface, the jilted bride in the 1994 film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. She is marvellously outspoken and vibrantly indiscreet (qualities slightly countered by requests of “Please don’t quote that”), but nevertheless delectable company, open and trusting. “I’m nearly 50, you know,” she says, proudly. She’s 48 and could pass for a decade younger. She scans the menu, can’t find her glasses, asks me to read it and orders steak and chips with a cup of black tea. “How sweet of you. I haven’t eaten yet today.” She has an aristocratic and moneyed pedigree. One of her ancestors was the brother of Jane Austen, her mother’s great-grandfather was Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and her second cousin six times removed was Lord Byron. “My generation was at the end of an era. There had been money and titles, but there was none left, nothing to inherit, so we just bounced around with an open heart and a wonderful naivety. If I’d said I wanted to be an actress – and I am an actress, not an actor, ‘vive la différence’ – it would have seemed as unlikely as wanting to be an astronaut. I’ve always been a people pleaser although I hate that term. I’m mostly sunny, but there’s the other side to my optimistic and positive character. My grandmother [Lady Perdita Hylton] nearly killed herself with depression, which made Mum withheld and proud. I irritate myself when I get depressed and think I should snap out of it. What really matters in life?” Family, perhaps? Her parents divorced when she was two (there were two older sisters and a brother). “Most actors are the youngest – have you noticed? There’s not so much expectation, which gives you freedom, and you show off to get attention.” They lived with her stepfather in a large house in Somerset. She became estranged for a while from her father, John, 87, but there’s a rapprochement. “I’m going to pick him up and bring him home for the weekend. Human beings are addicted to their parents. There wasn’t much physical contact but you want peace and everyone to be unified before they die. There’s no joy in blame. “He wasn’t a conventional father, but he is rather wonderful. He drove us across Europe – or ‘the Continent’ as he called it – and we’d be feral, swearing, burning cigarette holes in the back seat. I think my wonderful parents just didn’t instil discipline. He’d have been a good actor – very handsome and terribly funny – but he started as a publisher and ended up as an antiquarian bookseller in the Caribbean. Now he lives with his brother [journalist Alexander Chancellor]. He was surprised I acted. In Puerto Rico once he went to see a film he was told was about England and said, ‘That girl looks remarkably like my daughter’. It was Four Weddings. He said, ‘People tell me they saw you on television. I wish you’d let me know. I feel out of the loop.’ He’d probably watch dutifully.” Interesting to know what he’d make of the second series of BBC3’s Pramface. She plays Janet, the mother of a teenage daughter, Laura, who has a baby by her young boyfriend, and herself has a difficult relationship with her husband (Angus Deayton). It’s just one of a number of varied parts she’s played in recent years – from Amanda in Private Lives on the West End stage to BBC2’s The Hour, in which she played gutsy foreign correspondent Lix Storm. “It suited me, and I loved the language. I can be jealous of rival actresses. We’re like siblings saying, ‘What about me?’ “I’ve trained myself to believe other people’s success is also mine. Cate Blanchett is the most ravishing and talented actress of our time, and somehow her success seeps through our pores. She’s not a lone person achieving because we’re all connected. It’s wonderful to be part of a world where that’s a possibility.” She never thought it would be like that. She left home for London at 17 after getting two O-levels at the perhaps inappropriately named Institute of the Blessed Virgin. “I followed my siblings slavishly, but I wasn’t going to stay in west Somerset. Not lively enough. I lived with a great aunt in Holland Park and was enrolled in a sixth form college but never went. My report said, ‘Anna who?’ I’d get up late, smoke joints, waitress, and earn a lot of money as an artist’s model. I took my clothes off, naturally, because I thought I looked better naked. We were so innocent. I was a bit wild, went to all sorts of places – hitch-hiked, got into strange cars. I was incredibly lucky. I can’t say it was always easy but I’ve never been hurt physically by anyone. Do you mind if I take my jumper off. You’ll be able to see my bra – it’s black under a white T-shirt. Anne Robinson chastised me for this, but I told her that’s the way it is. She’s so funny – she sold herself short on that programme [The Weakest Link], which made her so rich.” She enrolled at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. “I never imagined I’d get a job. It was thought of as unfashionable to be posh. They said I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I don’t come from an easy background.” She left in her third year after becoming pregnant, aged 21, with her daughter Poppy by a skinhead punk poet, Jock Scot, who was working with singer Ian Dury and was 13 years older than her. They separated when Poppy was four – and trouble. “She was beyond badly behaved, which was my fault. I was a challenging mother.” They lived in an untidy basement flat in west London in the same building as her sister, Kate, who was married at the time to writer Will Self. She had Poppy’s ears pierced at three months old and took her everywhere – gigs, clubs until the early hours. “Even at the age of four she’d terrify grown-ups. I’d drag her aside and say ‘Why don’t you want to be liked?’ She told a friend who asked me if I had work, ‘She’ll never get a f*****g job’ because she’d heard me say it.” Then, at about 12, Poppy discovered art and metamorphosed. “She’d come home, rush by me and say, ‘I’ve got to do my homework’. I couldn’t believe it. I’m a poacher turned gamekeeper. She used to follow the Libertines with Pete Doherty – charming and talented – and when she didn’t come home by the time I specified I’d leap out of bed in a fury, put clothes over my pyjamas and charge past bouncers with my face on fire to grab her. She was horrified. It was so hypocritical of me. Now she’s well turned out, funny, with a very nice boyfriend.” Anna married a cameraman, Nigel Willoughby, but that ended in divorce. “I can’t have been a good wife.” Meanwhile, work was going badly. “I began to think I wasn’t meant to be an actress. I loved acting so even if I didn’t get a proper job I’d put on a play in someone’s living room. Then I auditioned for Bill Smethurst – ‘Butcher Bill’ – who was blamed for killing off Crossroads. His next project was a 1990s sci-fi soap, Jupiter Moon. I thought he was wonderful because – oh, this is all about oneself – he loved my short skirt and flirting. He was my biggest fan. It’s wonderful if someone likes you – and I earned money for the first time.” Success in Four Weddings didn’t lead to as many parts as she hoped. “It could have done if I was more organised. But I had a child.” She adds, “I should have told you I’m meeting an old boyfriend [Tom] I haven’t seen for years. He might turn up at any moment. You can ask what I was like and see what he says. Or maybe not. I told him not to worry because I haven’t changed.” She’s now married to an Algerian, Redha Debbah, seven years her junior, who drove her when she appeared in The Real Inspector Hound in the West End. He was working temporarily as a minicab driver and is now a computer technician. “I chose him and he resisted at first.” They lived together for 14 years until marrying in 2010 after she’d become ill with meningitis in New York and couldn’t name him as her next of kin. “It made me wonder who would get me from the morgue. Poppy would have had to but you don’t want to tear your children away from their life to look after you. “How can I admit I chased him, you might wonder. Perhaps I should be more circumspect, but what can you say except the truth? I do feel if girls are ashamed to admit their desire it comes out in ways which are duplicitous, cunning and full of anger. I’m not saying if you fancy someone you should tear down their front door – but why not? We should be passionate. Who cares about rejection? Your mistakes make you. If someone doesn’t want you, move on. There’s such pressure on young girls these days to look amazing and as if they’re having the time of their life on Facebook. Truth has gone. Now they are so glamorous, but they can’t get boyfriends. We had hairy armpits and got them... Do you regret you haven’t had more sex in your life?” Do you? “No. I feel I’ve had enough. At 50 I’m told it gets better. I’m looking forward to the hidden secret of old age sex. I heard a man on the radio say it was like putting a plug into an electric socket. He was 85. You might need Viagra, but if science has made something to help us enjoy ourselves – great. We don’t want to take headache pills for the rest of our lives.” She finishes her steak – “delicious” – and looks at her watch. “Maybe he’s stood me up. I hope so. I’m addicted to The Bridge and want to get home to finish it. Let’s not worry. If he comes, he comes.” He arrives a few minutes later. “This is Tom,” she says. “He works for the BBC. We lived together when we were... how old?” “We didn’t live together,” he says, seeming slightly nervous. “Yes we did. I was in your basement.” “I was 19,” he says. “Were you? It was so long ago, and over so quickly.” So, alas, is my time with her. Pramface starts tonight at 10:00pm on BBC3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRaJRz0KCn0 Follow @RadioTimes
Jean-Jacques Burnel on why the Stranglers are playing at the BBC Proms
"Isn’t it ironic that the iconic BBC, which people call the Establishment, can be more adventurous than any other broadcaster? They take risks and that’s pretty cool"
He’s been jailed for three weeks in Nice for affray, spent a year experimenting with Class A drugs, delighted in bashing audiences with his Fender Precision bass guitar (“If gigs didn’t end in a riot, or we weren’t booed off stage, it wasn’t good”), punched an English journalist and debagged a disrespectful French one before gaffer taping him to the Eiffel Tower (“I only took him up to the first floor, though,” he explains later, as if in mitigation), so I’m a little wary of meeting Jean-Jacques Burnel, co-founder of punk group the Stranglers, though our encounter is less surprising than his upcoming performance with the band beneath the bust of Sir Henry Wood at the Proms, the first “alternative” group to appear there since Soft Machine in 1970. “JJ” cancels a first meeting near his holiday home in Montauroux, south of France (he has another house in Chiswick, west London) because he doesn’t want to risk riding his Triumph motorbike in a predicted storm. Next day, a smiling, polite, grey-haired man drives up in a Volvo with a copy of the Telegraph on the front seat. Heavens, JJ’s become a monarchist. In the 1980s he wrote Garden of Eden, about the Queen and her “useless children”. “Now,” he says, “I argue the case for constitutional monarchy, which I never thought I’d do. Take the p***s out of me as much as you like,” he adds, laughing. “It’s no longer the Stranglers against the world. It’s the Stranglers with a few friends.” Time (he’s 61) is the great mellower, and the Stranglers have morphed from being disreputable, aggressive and uncompromising, through a variety of musical styles, to become – almost – pop classics in the 39 years since they formed in 1974, as the Guildford Stranglers. He knows he’s lucky to be alive. “I’ve seen quite a few fall by the wayside and die... At uni [Bradford] I discovered karate and when I indulged in heroin and cocaine I reached rock bottom – everyone does. Fortunately I went back to karate and decided to clean up. I’m a six dan in Shidokan – the highest ranked in the UK – and I teach it. So I have a responsibility. Also when you have kids [a son of 25 and daughter of 22 by his ex-wife], it changes your life. “I’m flattered, but not really surprised we’re at the Proms [with the London Sinfonietta] because we’re the last man standing from our generation. Isn’t it ironic, though, that the iconic BBC, which people call the Establishment, can be more adventurous than any other broadcaster? They take risks and that’s pretty cool. Some people say they’re dumbing down by inviting us, but I hate all this PC b******s and being afraid to cause controversy. “When we started, I thought we’d last a few years, although we were so skint I took it day by day. I lived off tomatoes, walking seven miles to get them from a farm outside Guildford. Mind you, a girl lived nearby. A lot of blokes were envious because I had a different one every night. As Lenin said [actually, Karl Marx], ‘From each according to his needs, to each according to his ability’. I had the need and ability. But most people loathed us, so we developed a ghetto mentality... Our motto was ‘truth through provocation’. “At first punk was liberating, but when we tried to experiment and not play up to its Stalinist fundamentalism – you weren’t allowed to use synthesizers – I found it suffocating. We thrived on being disliked, but you can’t make a profession out of rebellion. You need something to kick against.” The band was accused of being sexist and racist. “I wrote I Feel Like a Wog which was meant to be ironic not racist.” Peaches is about men ogling bikini-clad girls; Golden Brown, their most successful single, released in 1982, is melodic and repetitive about heroin, a girl, or what? “I won’t tell anyone. I don’t need to.” No More Heroes has lyrics naming Trotsky, Shakespeare and Sancho Panza. Intellectual? “Some might say ‘pretentious,’ but am I meant to be a thicko, or monosyllabic like a footballer, just because I beat people up? I’m from a generation which thinks musicians have an influence on the zeitgeist.” JJ was born in Notting Hill, London, to French parents, who later moved to Godalming in Surrey, where he trained as a classical guitarist. “I’m good enough to con people with my repertoire, but any real classical guitarist would see right through me.” Nevertheless, the Stranglers were one of the few punk bands who could play. They had 24 top 40 singles, 17 top 40 albums, sold about 40 million records, “more than the Clash or the Sex Pistols, which is respectable for an edgy band. It’s less than U2, but they’re boring and smug. The Rolling Stones were fantastic for their first ten years, but haven’t done much since... They’ve made a lot of money because people still go to see them – so who’s to blame? I’m trying to be sentient and valid, not living in the past. Bands are so sterile now because there’s too much of a commercial imperative. Artists shouldn’t play safe.” But reading the Telegraph every day? “I started when they had the b******s to expose MPs expenses. That hit a chord because they disrupted their own natural electorate. I’m not anti-Establishment per se. That’s a cliché. I’m anti a few things, like trying to impose democracy on the rest of the world. It’s not always about sex or taking drugs in hotel rooms. We’ve been written off a few times, but talent will out. I have a thick skin.” He pauses, and adds smiling, “And now my girlfriend has saved me from being an old roué, which would not have been a pretty sight.” Back to the Volvo and safety. BBC Proms is on Radio 3 and 6 Music tonight at 10:15pm
Gregg Wallace and John Torode on the enduring success of MasterChef... and their relationship
"We have our own lives, otherwise we’d morph into each other. I don’t want his personality, and he doesn’t want mine"
Gregg Wallace and John Torode start their ninth series of MasterChef this week, two unlikely celebrities hitched to a juggernaut television series broadcast several nights a week for the next two months. Ebullient Londoner Gregg, a loquacious connoisseur of the world’s worst jokes, and cerebral Australian (if that’s not an oxymoron) John, do not seem immediately compatible. John, 47, is tall and quiet. Gregg, 48, is not. Gregg’s tumultuous life includes being abused by a babysitter’s husband when he was eight, discovering at 14 that his real father was a work colleague of his mother, not the alcoholic husband with whom she lived. He left school at 15 with no qualifications, started a fruit and veg business that went bust for £7 million in 2004. John, brought up in suburban tranquillity in New South Wales by his grandmother when his mother died aged 31 from cardiomyopathy, came to England with his first wife when he was 25, and worked in various restaurants before opening his own, Smiths, in London in 2000. Perhaps the only similarity, apart from a love of food, is they’ve both had difficult personal lives recently. Gregg separated from his third wife Heidi last year after 18 months and a subsequent brief relationship with a glamour model, Cara Franco, ended after a few months. John and his second wife Jessica parted after four years. He has two children with each wife; Gregg has custody of two teenagers from his second wife, Denise (his first ran off with a flower market salesman after six weeks). Their partnership is strong, says John, because they never socialise together and haven’t visited each other’s homes. “We have our own lives, otherwise we’d morph into each other. I don’t want his personality, and he doesn’t want mine. We share a dressing room and are so close in the studio I can see inside his ears, smell his breath and know which aftershave he’s wearing. We have respect bordering on affection and hardly ever fall out. The longest debate we’ve had over contestants is an hour and a half.” Gregg adds, “We both work with others (he with Michel Roux Jr in MasterChef: The Professionals and John with Donal Skehan in Junior MasterChef) but he’s the one and only for me – otherwise we wouldn’t have lasted this long.” Indeed, their engaging banter and the heatrical nature of the competition may attract nearly five million viewers, but it’s difficult to keep the format fresh, although John insists, “We could do another 2,742 shows. So long as people want to watch, I don’t see why not. It’s about success, contestants attaining their dreams.” Gregg adds, “I’ll continue until they have to purée the food for me to suck through a straw. I don’t know much about television but we’ve set up the premier food competition in the country and it’s hugely addictive.” They’re sometimes accused of being too kind, unlike the judge of Australian MasterChef, Matt Preston, who hurls dishes he doesn’t like on to the floor. “You should see how devastated some contestants are when they’re thrown out,” says John. “But we’re respectful. Contestants are there to learn, get better, or put their face on telly. If you’re there to put your face on telly you ain’t going to last long. We’re critiquing someone’s plate, not them personally. I don’t want to humiliate anyone, but remember we have to eat what they cook: it’s not the best thing in the world to be faced with something ghastly, or a sack of cat as I call it. Being kind means you let things slip apparently unnoticed. That’s not in anyone’s interest. If you put someone through who can’t cope it will be a disaster. “When they walk in with food they think is amazing and our comments are pretty awful, the reality hits home. Some bounce back. Others don’t. With pressure and upset comes innovation. MasterChef may change their career so it shakes them to the core, or causes emotional and mental upset. Our job is to push the good ones forward. Those who leave aren’t important any more. We don’t say goodbye to them.” Gregg adds, “I worried we wouldn’t keep getting the right calibre but I realised it’s the combination of us and MasterChef that’s turning them into exceptional cooks. I do look at some contestants and wonder why they’re here, but if they’re sobbing and really upset we turn off the cameras. In the early rounds I’d like to chat and make them feel more comfortable, but I never do in case we’re accused of favouritism. There are some we warm to and it’s upsetting to see them mess up.” “Aaaah,” says John in mock sympathy. “You’re the bigger softie,” Gregg retorts. “We were both single men last year and John is much more likely to write a poem or send flowers. I have an outward look of romance and my taste in music and films is slushy. John has a slushy middle and tough exterior. He has romance running through his soul.” John admits he’s an “Aussie who doesn’t drink beer or play rugby, so I’d like to be more butch. I’ve always wanted a tattoo, but never dared.” Gregg, in contrast, has the Millwall lion tattooed on his left breast, which he shows off at the slightest provocation. Now he’s lost two and a half stone and become svelte he’ll also bare most parts of his body with awe and an admiration he assumes will be reciprocated. It’s thanks to Heidi. “Before she left she said my lifestyle was really unhealthy. The doctor told me I’d have a massive coronary if I didn’t do something. My cholesterol was 13.5 from eating loads of butter and ice cream. So I reduced the carbs – pizzas are the devil’s food – and alcohol and this morning I was down to 11 stone 13 ounces.” He explains, cheerfully, that he has obsessive compulsive disorder. “I’m also a workaholic. I’ve got to learn a new skill: how to say no.” It’s a talent John has acquired. He has sold his restaurant. “It was ground-breaking when it opened and I’m very proud of it. Now I’m taking life easier.” He has a girlfriend, Lisa Faulkner, 41, a former Holby City star who won Celebrity MasterChef in 2010. “I’m having a very nice time, thank you. I’m fit, healthy and fortunate, which is all I’m saying. Be patient. Gregg’s been through this before, but things that made my life difficult over the last ten years are slowly disappearing and I’m happier for it. I’m returning to my dream of travelling the world and learning about food. I might bicycle around Vietnam this year because at last I have time for myself. Then I’ll come back to London and be innovative again. It’s the next chapter.” There was heartache when Heidi left – and therapy to help overcome it – but Gregg still hasn’t given up on romance, he says. “I’ve had women turn me down saying, ‘Gregg, you’re a lovely man but I don’t want to be the next story in The Sun.’ Others might like to be, which is another problem. How do you work out if they genuinely like you? There is someone special now. Early days...” “Don’t say anything. I don’t want you to jinx it,” says John, but Gregg is in full flow. “I love celebrity. Love it. No more dodgy restaurant tables by the gents’, no more snobby sommeliers. Last month my son and I were invited into the Munster rugby club dressing room after the match when the players were stark naked, being patched up.” John is appalled: “I can think of nothing worse than a rugby-club changing room ten minutes after a match.” Gregg ignores him. “The only downside to my job is lack of privacy. I’m glad we became well known in our 40s. We’re household names but not big movie stars. I’m a south-east London blue-collar boy, so sometimes people are rude, thinking I won’t react because I’m on television. My natural inclination is to clump them – and I have. If that was known I’d be arrested and it would end my career.” He ponders what he’s said and retracts. “OK, I haven’t done it. But here’s a plea: could viewers stop sending me pictures of their dinner on Twitter – I get about 30 a day. And also photographs of their friends who are bald and have glasses, telling me they’re my double. They’re not my double – just a bald bloke with glasses.” He spends three hours a day replying. “I believe in old-fashioned manners. I rise when a lady comes to the table, and the older I get the more I realise they appreciate it. The problem is they’re not used to it. The number of times I’ve opened a car door for a lady, gone to the other side and found she’s shifted over to give me room. And when I walk on the outside of the pavement they get confused.” “The only reason you’d do that is to catch road-kill and pick up a nice pheasant for dinner after it’s been run over,” John remarks. Meanwhile, they add, there’s snobbery about cooking. “People are disappointed when I say I’ve just had a Big Mac,” says Gregg. “They expect me to have fine food constantly. What they really mean is they don’t like me eating where the poor eat. We were in Newport in Wales recently and had a curry half and half – chips and rice with curry sauce. And in Manchester they have ‘babies and bastard’ – pie and gravy. Good on them.” John adds, “We put Kentucky Fried Chicken on a plate with couscous and a rocket salad and gave it to people in the street in Kensington. To a man they loved it, although they all said they’d never eat fast food. In Australia I ate ‘burger with the lot’ – burger, bacon, cheese, raw tomato, fried egg, pineapple, mayonnaise, lettuce. It made me really happy.” Try that on MasterChef and see where you get. MasterChef is on BBC1 on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8pm and Fridays at 8:30pm The new cookbook, MasterChef Cookery Course, is out now, priced £18.20 (RRP £26) from DK
Helen Hunt on getting naked in The Sessions as a sex surrogate
"It's a special movie and the shock [of her being naked] is part of it. I never thought, 'My God, I can't do this'"
Helen Hunt sits in a hotel room, her back to sunshine flooding through the window, so it’s hard to see her face properly. “How would you feel if I knit while we talk?” she asks, taking needles and wool from her lap. “I might seem like a crazy lady, but it’s a present for my daughter.” (Eight-year-old Makena’lei, which means “many flowers of heaven” in Hawaiian.) It seems incongruous to watch her knitting away while we discuss how she feels, aged 49, about spending most of her latest film stark naked, as a sexologist altruistically bringing a paralysed polio sufferer to sexual fulfilment. A last taboo – sex and disability? “I guess so,” she says. “Stupidly.” The Sessions, which has garnered Hunt both Bafta and Oscar nominations as supporting actress, is based on a 1990 article On Seeing a Sex Surrogate by the late poet and journalist Mark O’Brien (played in the film by John Hawkes). O’Brien was paralysed from the neck down after contracting polio when he was six. He hired a certified sex surrogate, Cheryl Cohen Greene, a married mum and now grandmother who is still working, to relieve him of his virginity at the age of 38. The sex scenes are leavened by a surprising amount of humour, particularly when O’Brien discusses his predicament with a Roman Catholic priest (William H Macy). Hunt was nervous, “but not so much that I didn’t show up. It’s a special movie and the shock [of her being naked] is part of it. I never thought, ‘My God, I can’t do this.’ I was so moved by the script. My partner [producer/director Matthew Carnahan, father of Makena’lei] read it and wept because he thought it was so beautiful. One obstacle was my self-consciousness but I had lunch with Cheryl, and she was very extrovert, so that’s how I play her. “I’d never heard of surrogates so I had no pre-judgement but I realised it’s serious work, which was a foot on the gas to get me through any nerves. Sex makes us nervous. We joke about it, have shame. They give this film an R-rating yet provide violent movies for 13-year-olds. I’d heard Americans are weird about sex, and you really see it when you offer up a piece of work like this. You’d really have to work to make it into something perverted. It’s so pure.” She says she’d like 16-year-olds to watch it as a sex education tool – except her own. “I have a stepson and it would be bizarre for him to see me naked.” It would be churlish to doubt her good intentions and the film is too matter-of-fact to ever be accused of voyeurism. There are other films that depict sex with disability (Rust and Bone) or without commitment (Friends with Benefits) but The Sessions is the most vivid and, I suggest, the most sexist. Cheryl takes a full-length mirror into one session to let O’Brien see his own aroused body – but nothing is shown on screen. Hunt admits, “That’s a good point. But I’m naked five minutes after the opening scene, and the mirror comes at the end. It wouldn’t have worked.” Hunt has had a diverse career, starting at ten, encouraged by her father, Gordon, a film director and acting coach. “I feel I was designed to go into the theatre, but then a left-turn happened – I was in an acting class with my aunt and an agent came along.” She’s quoted as saying movies are great in your twenties – “You go places, have affairs” – and that sometimes she felt too grown up for it. She bristles. “None of that’s true. In my twenties I was a journeyman actor who took the parts I was given. Now it’s different. To say ‘yes’ means not picking up my daughter from school, and that matters to me.” Indeed, she’s been out of the limelight since What Women Want in 2000. “I slowed down in terms of mainstream, but did plays, made a movie and had a baby which is fantastic, like winning the lottery. I have a lot of interests.” She directed, co-wrote and starred in Then She Found Me in 2007, with Colin Firth, Bette Midler and author Salman Rushdie as her (miscast) gynaecologist. It took ten years to complete. “When financing fell apart for the fourth time, I wondered who gets any movie made, and was told, ‘The one who doesn’t give up.’ There’s no other secret. You have to be tough, and I’m not. Eventually it was bought by a wonderful company – and they went bankrupt just before it opened worldwide. Crushing. I enjoy writing – except for the days when it’s horrible: you know something is missing and aren’t smart enough to work out what it is. You write until they give you money. “I’ve acted in films where I only used five per cent of myself. I tend to turn them down – unless I’m being paid, which is a rare pleasure.” But she’s an Oscar winner, for As Good as It Gets in 1997 with Jack Nicholson. “I’ve made very few big-budget movies. The Sessions [out on Friday 18 January] was tiny and we were paid next to nothing. The whole thing cost less than the salary of many actors.” That must be upsetting. “I don’t spend time being upset about what I can’t control. I’m not in it for the money. If I was, I’d go crazy. I love movies. I pay to see them, with popcorn. OK, my looks could go, but I don’t focus on it. I try to keep despair for real problems. I’m lucky to live in a time when people get to forge their own paths.” And she’ll continue to do that, whatever the hurdles. The Sessions is released in UK cinemas nationwide on Friday 18 January