John Mortimer

Presenter0:00

This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:09

Uh

John Mortimer0:09

John, where were you born? I was born in London, in Hampstead.

Presenter0:12

What was your first ambition as a boy?

John Mortimer0:14

Well, I wanted to be a star of musical comedy. I wanted to be a kind of Noah Card and sit down at a big white piano and play sophisticated songs. But as I couldn't sing a note at all, um

Presenter0:24

And couldn't play the piano.

John Mortimer0:25

Anne couldn't play the piano. I must say that didn't deter me in my childhood when I entertained my parents with the

John Mortimer0:31

Snatches of Ginger Rogers and Fred Arstaire are numbers, but it must have been agony for all concerned.

Presenter0:36

Yeah.

John Mortimer0:36

Uh

Presenter0:36

At Harrow

John Mortimer0:37

Uh Did you

Presenter0:37

Play in the school.

John Mortimer0:38

No, I did at a school called the Dragon School, which I went to before, and I gave my Richard the Second, and I was very happy. At Harrow I found rather a boring school, where no one really realized I was there.

John Mortimer0:48

And so I left as soon as possible.

Presenter0:50

Yeah.

John Mortimer0:51

Well then I went to Oxford for a very short while and then I went into a thing called the Crown Film Unit. It was during the war. Hmm. How did you get in there?

John Mortimer0:59

Well, uh there was a gentleman who ran it at that time, who in fact when I was a child had seen me do a Punch and Judy show, so he thought I was just the man to write um some epic film about the Western Desert, which is how Impresario's minds work.

Speaker 21:11

Mm-hmm. Were all the films you did about the Western Desert?

John Mortimer1:14

Oh, no, they were just in general about the war. But I started off with a very high sounding title, which was an Assistant Director, which I thought was going to be very important.

John Mortimer1:23

But in fact, all it entailed was making tea for the director and saying quiet, please, at the beginning of every shot.

John Mortimer1:29

And when I said quiet please I said it in a very modest tone, with the result that everybody started to play poker and shout and go on strike. So I was a total fiasco as an assistant director.

John Mortimer1:40

So they drew me aside, and they said, Well, you're such a nuisance as an assistant director. Would you like to be the scriptwriter? they said.

John Mortimer1:46

because at that time the scriptwriter was Laurie Lee, and they said, Well, Laurie had been very interested in the Spanish Civil War, which meant a lot to him, but he couldn't he was really rather bored with the present conflict and he couldn't rouse any enthusiasm about it.

Presenter1:56

And he couldn't

John Mortimer1:58

Uh

Presenter1:58

This

John Mortimer1:59

So he told me how to write film scripts and I became the scriptwriter.

Presenter2:03

And you went on doing this till the end of the war.

Presenter2:06

And after that?

John Mortimer2:07

Well then after that I got a job teaching English to the models in Christian Dio in Paris and the first book, the first novel I wrote, which was about the Crown film unit, a comic novel called Sherade, came out. Mhm. And it was rather it it it was rather successful. One of the reviewers said it was the best comic novel for eighteen years and I could never work out to this day what had happened eighteen years before that.

Presenter2:28

What about your part exam?

John Mortimer2:31

Well, and then I did those and uh and became a barrister. I'd met my wife by that time. And so we got married about the time I got called to the bar. Did things happen fairly quickly? You got some briefs?

John Mortimer2:43

Well, uh in a way, because my father was a lawyer, so he helped me, but also it was difficult to start with, very worrying. I used to go down to the East End and hang about in the free legal aid bureaus in the hope that a murderer dripping with blood would come running off the street and ask me to defend him.

John Mortimer2:58

But no murderers ever came, mainly

John Mortimer3:01

Puzzled Greek ladies who didn't know how to cope with the rent acts came and people who wished to get rid of their elderly wives and I was able to help them and it it did accumulate.

Presenter3:07

Yeah.

Presenter3:10

Now you had written your first novel, so this was the pattern for some time at novels and legal work. When did you switch to writing plays?

John Mortimer3:18

Well, there was a actually it all happened through the BBC. There was a lady called Nesta Payne, who was a BBC. There is a lady.

Presenter3:23

There is a lady.

John Mortimer3:26

A highly talented lady who asked me to write a radio play.

John Mortimer3:30

And I thought of the old barristers, seedy old barristers I saw at the London Sessions, who hang about longing for likely criminals to pick them out.

John Mortimer3:39

and I decided to write a little two handed play about them for the radio, which was Dock Brief. And that was rather successful um on the radio, and it won the Italia Prize and so on. So Michael Codron, who had a season starting at the Lyr Lyric Hammersmith,

John Mortimer3:54

asked me to write another play to go with it, and he said if I didn't he'd put on a play by UNESCO.

John Mortimer3:59

Well now at that time I thought UNESCO was something for educating children in Europe. I didn't know what it was, and I didn't want anything to do with that.

John Mortimer4:06

In my theatre.

John Mortimer4:08

So I wrote another play to go with it called What Should We Tell Caroline.

John Mortimer4:12

And they were done together in a season which in fact included Harold Pinter's first play. So that really I I went into the theatre not only with a theatre waiting, but a date and uh actors and everything.

Presenter4:23

Those two short plays that with which you started your dramatic career must have been real money spinners, John. I mean the dock brief in particular, how many countries has it been played in now?

John Mortimer4:32

Well, I think it's been played in every country, um, really in the in the Communist world and in the allegedly free world. I heard last that it was done by two murderers real murderers in Saint Quentin prison, which I was quite pleased by.

John Mortimer4:45

Um, but it is the sort of play which has a long life. I think because it's a very cheap play to put on, only two characters in one set.

Presenter4:52

And of course it's been done on television everywhere and it's been filmed.

Presenter4:55

It was the first of a number of radio and and and television plays. What was your first full-length play for the theatre?

John Mortimer5:01

It was a play called The Wrong Side of the Park, which Margaret Leighton was in, which Peter Hall directed.

Presenter5:07

Mhm. Things must be easier now, because some of them have grown up. But I know at this time you had six children and and stepchildren about the house. How did you manage to get any work writing down at all?

John Mortimer5:17

Well, it was quite extraordinary because Penelope also wrote a lot at that time. She wrote novels and a lot of short stories.

John Mortimer5:24

I think the kind of desperation is a very good atmosphere for writers to live in. I mean we really needed to pay the grocer and also I think living with young children gives you a kind of substance and basis to your life which is very good for a writer.

Presenter5:38

Are you methodical? Do you work certain hours every day?

John Mortimer5:40

Well, when I'm working I'm very hysterical, and I will get up very, very early, say four o'clock in the morning, so

Presenter5:45

Mm

John Mortimer5:45

Um

John Mortimer5:47

And that's when I work, when everybody else is asleep.

Presenter5:49

Yeah.

Presenter5:50

You produced yourself a film version of one of your short plays, Lunch Hour.

John Mortimer5:53

Yeah.

Presenter5:54

And I know you had a number of trips to Hollywood to work on other people's scripts.

John Mortimer5:59

Yes. Uh curiously enough, if you do a little tiny English play about um schoolmasters in Norfolk, as what we tell Caroline is, you're immediately selected as just the right chap to write an enormous wide screen epic about the life and loves of William the Conqueror. And so I found myself, to my amazement, for the first time taken over the pole and taken to California.

John Mortimer6:22

which is really a depressing town in that it looks very much like Slough or the Western Avenue. And I worked first of all on a Susan Hayward movie, which I don't

John Mortimer6:32

care to chat too much about it.

John Mortimer6:34

But um since then Hollywood has improved enormously, I think.

John Mortimer6:37

and they have a greater consciousness of the importance of scripts, and recently I've enjoyed being there very much.

John Mortimer6:43

What was your next Uh

Presenter6:44

Full length Uh

John Mortimer6:45

Play

Presenter6:45

Yeah.

John Mortimer6:46

Well, I wrote of a play called Two Stars for Comfort with Trevor Howard. I was young in a town called Henley on Thames, which is to me a great kind of pleasure resort. I think Henley on Thames and Brighton are my two favourite towns.

John Mortimer6:59

And there's a great feeling of the river and pleasure and and nostalgia for the thirties, and that's what I tried to get in the play.

Presenter7:05

You went over to the enemy for a while and were a drama critic.

John Mortimer7:09

Yes, I I like very much first nights. I think there's a marvellous feeling of disaster. It's like a road accident or an execution or evolution. Anything can happen.

John Mortimer7:19

And uh so I enjoyed that. I don't know whether I'd do it now. I think there really are two sides. And uh

John Mortimer7:26

You really end up being beastie to all your friends.

John Mortimer7:31

Yes, I have. Um I've written all sorts of weird things, like Soy Lumier. I think I'm the only person to get royalties out of a cathedral. And uh when I was doing this the publicity lady said, Um is there anything you haven't written? so I said well I've never written a ballet. So she said well I work for the Western Theatre Ballet and they invited me to do one and I enjoyed doing it very much.

Presenter7:49

Mm-hmm.

Presenter7:50

And you've done an adaptation from the French Flea in Her Ear, which has been a great success. You did the screenplay of that as well.

John Mortimer7:55

Yes, I did.

Presenter7:57

and recently another full-length play, The Judge.

John Mortimer8:01

Well, The Judge was a difficult play. I think I was trying to write a kind of Shakespearean play which went on in numerous different localities, with very short scenes, and I'm not sure that I solved the problem of that. But it was an important play to me, because it it went back to my father and to this strange sort of

John Mortimer8:19

authoritarian figure who is sorry for himself more than anybody else.

Presenter8:23

Most modern playwrights with any serious intent are given labels by the critics and so-and-so writes plays about the difficulties of human communication and so-and-so is obviously a crypto Marxist and so forth. But uh what label have you been given?

John Mortimer8:36

Oh, well, all sorts of labels. I think they're totally false and purely the inventions of critics. For instance, when I read What Should We Tell Caroline because I didn't want a play by UNESCO, which I thought was to do with the United Nations, I was immediately told that I was obviously a close disciple of UNESCO, which came as a complete surprise to me.

Speaker 28:52

Game is a

John Mortimer8:54

I think the great fallacy is that there are a large selection of sort of plays that people can choose to write, so that I could set to sit down to morrow and write a kind of Brechtian.

John Mortimer9:03

Social parabelle

John Mortimer9:05

I can only write as a result of my childhood and the sort of person I am, and the things that are important to me which are very few, and I think you have no choice.

Presenter9:13

True.

Presenter9:15

Now in the legal field you recently become a Q C. Does this mean more legal work for you or less?

John Mortimer9:20

Well, it means more in the sense that each case is more difficult to do, but they're they're m more spaced out. It's really rather like being a an actor. You you you take on the part and then after that you're resting for a greater or longer period. But I think it's been very important to me as a writer to have another world to live in. I think writers can become

John Mortimer9:41

immured in a very small writer's world and

John Mortimer9:46

See little of the world outside. And I do think also that the way people talk at moments of stress, which you discover in courts, and you also discover they don't talk simply, they talk in extraordinary sort of cliches which come off bottles of sauce and out of the news of the world and so on. That's been very interesting to me and I think helped a lot in the way I write.

Presenter10:04

As a writer, is there any one subject that you want to write about?

John Mortimer10:08

Well, I very much want to write a book, a non fiction book, about my father and about my childhood, because that curious life I was brought up in just before the war, of my father who was not only in solitary and that he was in the middle classes, but solitary because he was blind

John Mortimer10:26

and which really has now quite ended. I feel like in a way a kind of last relic of it, but perhaps in a way a bridge between it and what is going on now, and I'd like to examine that.