Eve Stewart

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Presenter0:35

My castaway this week is the production designer Eve Stewart. On the big screen, some of her many credits include Les Miserable, The King's Speech, and Vera Drake, and for T V, The Hour, Upstairs, Downstairs, and Call the Midwife. Responsible for locations, scenery, and all the props, she's renowned for creating entirely convincing, cohesive worlds that capture a beguiling sense of time, place, and spirit. If it's nine tons of Scottish seaweed you need, or noiseless rubber rosary beads, she is most certainly your woman.

Presenter1:08

BAFTA award winning and Oscar nominated, her trademark is her relentless attention to detail, and she slavishly traws the archives for visual clues and references.

Presenter1:18

It would seem that the bug bit her early. Of growing up in Camden Town, in London, she says When I was a little girl I used to have lots of dolls' houses now I have lots of big ones, and get to do it on a bigger scale. And it, Eve Stewart then, is creating these entirely

Presenter1:33

Believable, authentic little bubbles of apparent reality. Um do you still get a kick when you see your work on screen?

Eve Stewart1:39

Um I never really get a kick'cause I'm always so nervous. I kind of I watch it without actually looking at any of the actors or really concentrating on the story for at least five times. And I squirm constantly going, Oh my god, that rock lock's in the wrong place. Look at the vase. Oh god, I got that wrong. So I am a perfectionist really, hopefully, and all I see is the flaws.

Presenter2:01

As I introduced you there, I just gave people a very uh brief uh synopsis of a few of your credits. Interesting to me that you still choose to do work in T V, because T V is often regarded as the sort of poor cousin of movies. Wh why do you still bother, given that I'm sure you have your pick of the jobs these days?

Eve Stewart2:18

I bother because I don't really think it is the poor cousin, especially not now. And do you know what? I could have done fifty lay mizes and some ginormous films, but everybody I know goes, Oh, God, call the midwife, and that's all I'm known for. And it's not a sort of ego trip, it's genuinely, I think, if you can design, you should be open to designing everything and anything at a certain stage. But I just love telling stories, be they on film, theatre, television, or even I illustrate a lot, even if they're in a book.

Presenter2:48

What about those very, very big sets? I'm thinking now instantly of something like Le Miz that you did very recently. It was sixty odd million dollars in budget. How big was your team working on that?

Eve Stewart2:58

I certainly didn't get the sixty odd million dollars. And that's why I think it is good that I work in T V because I'm used to spreading a small amount of cash a really long way. My team was big on that. Don't get me wrong, it was big. So at one stage we had about 200 people building that street scene, riggers, scaffolders, painters, plasterers, carpenters. But having worked with them so long now, they're brilliant, brilliant friends. And also they're extremely camp, even the butchest ones. So we used to put the tape of Le Miz on. I've never heard them all, hairy asses, everything hanging out. They'd all sing I Dream to Dream at the top of their voices.

Presenter3:40

Let's have some music, Eve Stewart. Tell me about your first one this morning. What are we gonna hear?

Eve Stewart3:44

Oh well the first one is a Goldfinger. James Bond films were an enormous, enormous event when I was a kid. I was well known in my family for making them dress up as characters in the films. My early foray into costumes I move and this one made me laugh my head off because my mum dressed as pussy galore, myself as a rather unattractive white cap and then my stepdad he dressed in the most extraordinary Austin power suit with a big blue roll on his finger painted gold thinking that was Goldfinger and it looked really I took loads of photos. It looks really sleazy now but God it was fun.

Speaker 44:22

Gold finger.

Speaker 44:27

He's the man, the man with the mightest tact

Speaker 44:35

A spider's task

Speaker 44:40

Such a cold finger!

Speaker 14:42

Blood.

Speaker 44:46

Second zone.

Speaker 44:48

To enter his web of sin.

Speaker 44:53

What don't go in

Presenter4:56

Shirley Bassey singing Gold Finger. John Barry wrote the music. The lyrics were by Leslie Bercuse and Anthony Newley. So, Eve Stewart, um you say everybody asks you now about Call the Midwife. I'm about to do exactly the same. Um just explain to me how much research goes into making something that beautiful and apparently accurate.

Eve Stewart5:15

Well, it was actually tons. I mean, given that people know that period and are still alive and would tell me a lot about it, I still had to do an enormous amount. So that was an added pressure in the fact that if you got it wrong, they'd all write reams and reams of letters telling you you had got it wrong. Obviously, there's the detailed research about wallpapers and original paint colours. So I'll go to the VA where you can open these amazing flat drawers full of fragments of wallpapers from bygone eras, from everything from the Georgian period up to now. The paint colours, you can still get original paint charts where you see all the colours on. There was all the East End research about the docks in particular, but also the medical stuff.

Presenter5:59

Do you worry about people picking you up on mistakes? Indeed, do people pick you up on your mistakes?

Eve Stewart6:04

People pick you up in all sorts of mistakes.

Presenter6:06

What's your worst?

Eve Stewart6:07

Well, recently on Call the Midwife a lining to a cot had slipped through and wasn't the right period. It was ten years too late. And the amount of really aggressive letters that myself and the VBC had about this lining was really shocking. So, I mean, I try so hard not to make a mistake, but obviously a few things are going to slip through, and in the end, you are a human being.

Presenter6:32

Just clear one thing up for me, costume. That doesn't come within your remit, does it? Or do you work with costume designers?

Eve Stewart6:38

I work very closely with costume designers because nothing would be worse than doing a very subtle, dusty, light beamed filled old room and in bounces someone in a bright lime cardigan. So we do work together to make sure we pull it together.

Presenter6:54

I'm glad you brought up Cardigans there, because in Call the Midwife there's so much beautiful hand knitting, little bed jackets, little baby gros, all sorts of glorious things, throws even on the ends of beds. Where do you get all those nineteen fifties hand knitted things from?

Eve Stewart7:08

Well, I've been really lucky. I'm I'm a real forager. Everywhere I go I seem to find the exact thing I want. I'll go to a giant boot cell up in Newark, and I'll end up with a gas and air machine. It's it's like I have some kind of prop god shining down on me.

Presenter7:22

Time for some music. It's your second of the morning. Tell us about this.

Eve Stewart7:25

Well, I went to school in Camden, a a girls' school that was founded by suffragettes, and we have this amazing English teacher. And I think, you know, we grew up in quite a little basement flat. And although my mum would read a lot, we were she was very busy and we were all really kind of running round like feral kids on the street. And so what was brilliant was going to this school and this amazing woman reading this poem and I was instantly transported. It just makes it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Speaker 17:55

To begin

Speaker 17:57

At the beginning.

Speaker 17:59

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and Bible black.

Speaker 18:05

The cobble streets silent and the hunched Corters and Rabbits' Wood limping invisible down to the slow black

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Slow, black, crow, black

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Fishing boat bobbing sea

Speaker 18:19

The houses are blind as moles, though moles see fine to night in the snouting velvet dingles, or blind as Captain Cat, there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the welfare hall in widows' weeds, and all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town.

Speaker 18:40

are sleeping now.

Presenter8:44

Richard Burton was part of Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. So, Eve Stewart, you worked recently on the BBC remake of Upstairs, Downstairs, and I found out that your grandmother, in fact, used to work in service in London. What did she do?

Eve Stewart8:57

Well, it was my great grandmother came over from uh County Cork and they all I think they did things like scrub steps. I don't think it was much more glamorous than that and all lived together in a flat in Lever Street, just off Old Street and right in the city of London, and just got by really. And I think, you know, lost husbands along the way. And I think maybe that kind of information came flooding down to me and has helped me along the way with things like call the midwife and upstairs, downstairs. That kind of eye for detail and eye for history passed on by the matriarchs of my family.

Presenter9:32

You were born in the early sixties in in Campden Town, as I said in the introduction in London. What are your earliest memories?

Eve Stewart9:38

Well, one of them is walking along a very bright shiny corridor, which apparently was Hamstead nursing home, and seeing my sister for the first time having been born, and apparently being appalled that she looked really ape like. And this this

Eve Stewart9:54

This at the end of a very long corridor was obviously a big cinematic moment for me.

Presenter9:58

Yet you make it sound such. How old were you at the time?

Eve Stewart10:01

Three very little, but I've always been completely captivated by things like that, and have drawn constantly. I've drawn since a very young age. I'd fill up every piece of paper until the end my mum was really brilliant and let me draw up all the walls of the stairs,'cause I just felt the urge to draw.

Presenter10:18

Your mum was left on her own with three young kids. She was only twenty-one when that happened. But did she have the support of a wider family?

Eve Stewart10:26

She didn't really, and I I'm so amazed and impressed. I mean, can you imagine being twenty one with three kids under five teething? Plus I had really bad asthma. You know, you think of the film Cathy Come Home and stuff, where kids were being wrenched off mums. I think she did brilliantly.

Presenter10:42

And what about your relationship with um your father, your actual father? Did di did you ever trace him? Did you see him? Did he come and find you?

Eve Stewart10:49

Yeah.

Eve Stewart10:50

Absolutely disappeared, don't know where, went to a party and never came back.

Presenter10:50

I'll see you.

Presenter10:54

Really?

Eve Stewart10:55

So the tale goes, yes.

Presenter10:57

Okay. And I know you well, there you are having a laugh about it and sort of you've got to laugh, but did it ever give you pause for thought at any point?

Eve Stewart11:05

Like any teenager, you go a bit wonky at a certain stage looking for.

Eve Stewart11:10

I don't know whether it's reasons to be melancholy or you are melancholy. I could never really work that out. Where actually it didn't impact on my life in any way. And uh my mum got together with an a remarkable man who they've been married an incredibly long time now, and he was a great figure in our lives.

Presenter11:29

You were saying your mother let you draw on the walls going up the stairs. Do you think that that really helped to foster your creativity as a little child, that your mother just said, I'll go on, do it?

Eve Stewart11:37

Yes, I do, enormously. I remember doing things like when she got together with my stepfather, they were really swanky, they were really posh, and they had a grand piano, and of course I didn't really get it. And I made an Easter nest in this grand piano and had all the other kids get in it to make an Easter pageant. Didn't go down well.

Presenter11:56

Time for some music, Hugh Stewart. Let's see. We're we're on your third. Tell me about this.

Eve Stewart12:00

The third one is really for my Grand Jessie Berry. And as I said when I was little, I did have quite bad asthma and I think it was tricky. I was in hospital a lot. And my Grand did swoop in and swoop out and do stuff. And I remember this one time, she just suddenly told me that I was going on a cruise. And the next minute I was in Dickens and Jones getting a tangerine, incredibly now ghastly, but I thought it was absolutely amazing, princess dress, and being whisked off to Tangiers. And not only that, she then decided that I had to learn to dance, but I had to learn to dance backwards. She would just pretend to be the man as a lady, and I would be the lady in my princess dress, dance backwards to this tune.

Presenter13:49

That was Mantovani and his orchestra with Charmagne, written by Erno Rappay. You were telling me during that, Eve, Stewart, that your well, you called her your pushy cockney nan did get you on the Captain's table.

Eve Stewart13:59

Oh, she was driven. She would she would accept nothing less than being the best person in the ballroom with her Eve. So she'd yeah, every night we'd be virt either on the Captain's table or near it, in the most glittering light she could find.

Presenter14:14

So you'd been exposed to all this colour and exoticism relatively in tangiers. To come back to smoggy old London, did did you feel as though your eyes had been opened to the world and its possibilities?

Eve Stewart14:22

Yes, my eyes were incredibly open. I mean,'cause we not only went to Tangiers, we went to Gibraltar where someone tried to

Eve Stewart14:31

Pinch my nan's bottom so she whacked him with a hand bag in front of all the gibbons on the wall and they made this amazing noise. And uh I think there's l so many images like that. We went to Pompeii, we looked down in the mouth of Vesuvius, but I remember seeing all these old biscuit wrappers in there and being rather disappointed.

Presenter14:49

Um I mentioned the dolls' houses that you said you played with uh as a little girl. What appealed to you? Was it the the sort of tininess of things, or was it the order, or was it being in control of an environment? What did you like?

Eve Stewart14:59

Dolls' houses sound really grand, because we weren't really that rich, but um I think they were more shoe boxes that I would make hundreds of little scenes in. And I think there's a great escapism that I enjoy. I am slightly otherworldly in my head, and I do constantly like to imagine certain scenes, certain worlds, certain lives. I remember trying to make a block of flats out of loads of shoe boxes, and everybody had their different flat. So it's storytelling really. It's a complete love of stories.

Presenter15:30

What about your home environment now then? If if I were to look in in your cupboards, Eve Stewart, go into your kitchen and look in your cupboards. Is everything just so?

Eve Stewart15:38

No. I'm too busy at work making everything mad just so. We have the cupboard of hell, we call it. When people come round, I'm really anxious that they'll see my mess. That's my London upbringing. That they'll they'll judge me. So I throw everything in this cupboard. So it's full of clothes, coats, shoes, boxes, everything. But uh it is quite ordered outside the cupboard of hell, but I am a terrible collector of strange little dollies and toys hang over from my shoe boxes, which my children hate. They hate every single one of them, all their little teeth, but they have to put up with it.

Presenter16:10

Um we tend to hark back to a sort of golden age of Telly, and I do still have this very strong image, as you described it, of you making your your mum and your step dad dress up for uh goldfinger as as you all watched that. What what were you watching sort of nightly when it wasn't Christmas or Easter time? What did you like?

Eve Stewart16:25

Well, every Friday night my mum and her friends up the road would go to Sainsbury's on Holloway Road and they'd bring back these amazing you've got those coconut great big marshmallows. They'd bring those back and then they'd turn on Hawaii Five O and I just remember it's almost a sense of elation. I was absolutely overwhelmed to the point of near tears of joy.

Presenter17:14

That was the theme tune to the original nineteen seventies series of Hawaii Five O. So, Eve Stewart, w we've sort of danced quickly through your childhood with lots of childhood memories, but not much about school and art and how you progressed. Did you begin to think, as you went through school and you got better and better at art, that you wanted to have something to do with design?

Eve Stewart17:31

Design didn't really occur to me. I was still drawing all the time. I mean, I would create books, comics, everything. And so, yes, slowly people began to sort of see a talent and push me in that direction. I started to win prizes, things like I sent a poster off to B T for their World Poster competition and won. And drawing pictures really seemed to equate to something brilliant.

Presenter17:56

But it wasn't going to be ever fine art, was it? It was always going to be practically based.

Eve Stewart18:00

I started off thinking it would be fine. I was quite good at painting and still am. But then the other painters in the room were very philosophical and very quiet, and would stand for hours looking at these canvases with roll up cigarettes. It used to drive me absolutely crazy. And so I think I was too frenetic and encouraged to leave the room.

Presenter18:19

So what was your first professional engagement then?

Eve Stewart18:21

I did theatre design at Central School in London, and I was lucky enough to win a bursary at the end of it, which meant that you got one year's work being paid to be a designer or an assistant designer, as they put it. So I got on the train up to Nottingham Theatre, and really lucky for me, within a week,

Eve Stewart18:41

The main designer had fallen down the stairs and broken his leg. And now everyone says I pushed him by.

Presenter18:47

Unless I was raising a quizzical live right there.

Eve Stewart18:50

And so, instantly, I got to design.

Presenter18:53

And you uh worked quite early on in your career, and you've subsequent gone on to collaborate on many, many projects, especially movies, with Mike Lee. When was the first time that you worked with Mike Lee?

Eve Stewart19:03

Well, having worked in theatre, I'd done quite a lot. And suddenly he was looking for a theatre designer, and I was suggested by th this great designer who'd been a tutor of mine. So I went to do a play for him called Smelling a Rat and was just blown away by how he worked. The storytelling device of kind of making it up as you went along just appealed to everything in me.

Presenter19:25

And how yes, I was going to ask that. If somebody doesn't have a script to begin with, then how do you, as somebody who needs a plan, how do you develop things like room scenes and costume and all that stuff?

Eve Stewart19:37

What worked for me was that childhood way of imagining everything. So the actors do this thing called characterization. They'll tell you what their character's like, and then you start to imagine the entire history.

Presenter19:49

So you would literally sit with them and say, Tell me about who you are.

Eve Stewart19:52

Yes, you would say, tell me about who you are, and they would tell you everything about whether they had a wedding present from their Auntie L Isle that lived on the mantel shelf, the kind of colours they liked, the kind of textures that they liked, whether they were conservative or flamboyant, and that way you got such a clear image of the sort of people they were

Presenter20:11

That you couldn't go wrong. Your first Academy Award nomination then was for Mike Lee's Topsy Turvy. That first time, what was the evening like? What can you remember?

Eve Stewart20:19

Well, it's very surreal really. And for somebody very normal who likes to go down the pub with their mates, it was a shocker. So one minute you're kind of just chatting away with your normal friends, and the next minute you're shaking hands with Clint Eastwood. It's just amazing.

Presenter20:34

What did you say to Clint?

Eve Stewart20:35

Oh, it is an easy to me great work.

Eve Stewart20:38

The first time I went, I don't know that I enjoyed it that much. But by this year, I'm quite good at it and I just enjoy it for what it is, and laugh when I'm in the queue for the ladies with Jennifer Annerson and Jane Vonder.

Presenter20:51

Let's have your next piece of music then. Um this is your fifth.

Eve Stewart20:54

This one is from Topsy Turvy, and without sounding really slushy, I was brought to tears when Shirley Henderson, an actor, brought out this voice and there was this amazing camera move that swept back from her on a stage which I felt I'd created in that I did a lot of the painting myself on the scenery and it felt like one of those beautiful heavenly moments I'll never forget.

Speaker 421:21

Mean to rule the oath as he the sky We really know and die

Speaker 421:37

I mean to rule the earth and see the sky

Speaker 421:41

We really know of the sun and all.

Speaker 421:55

Observe his flame, that less ade, the moon celestial heartless.

Speaker 422:03

As not a trace upon her face Of diffidence or shines To borrow us might play through the night Mankind may all acclaim her and truth

Presenter22:21

Shirley Henderson singing their Moon and I, also known as The Sun whose rays are all ablaze, from the Mike Lee musical Topsy Turvy. The music there was conducted and arranged by Carl Davis, originally, of course, from the Gilbert and Sullivan musical The Mikado. Um your partner, Eve Stewart, Leon McCarthy, he's in the same field of work as you. Do you work together?

Eve Stewart22:39

We do wherever possible. Otherwise, I think we'd never see each other. And uh I've learnt to my cost in this business that if you don't work with someone, it's very hard to sustain a long term relationship. Just the the perils of doing a twelve hour, six day a week

Presenter22:55

Hmm.

Eve Stewart22:55

Working schedule.

Presenter22:56

Some people might think it's hard to maintain a long-term relationship if you do work with your partner. Are you in charge of him, as it were?

Eve Stewart23:03

Well, on top of that. I don't think he'd like to hear that, but yes, I think I well, I am, yes. He has to do what I say, which is very interesting.

Presenter23:03

On setting.

Presenter23:07

Right, see

Eve Stewart23:11

I think we do support each other incredibly and uh it's like finding your soulmate at last. It he's just such a strong rock behind me and we just have a laugh.

Presenter23:21

Um given that you're the mother of two daughters, and these incredibly long days, and often I imagine, I mean, almost all the time, being on location.

Presenter23:29

How did you manage all that in the early days? I mean they're they're a bit older now, of course.

Eve Stewart23:32

Yes. And what I've done is refused to go away anywhere long term. I've done one job where I went to Europe because I knew I could get back quite quickly, but it didn't really work and I sobbed myself to sleep most nights. And so that's why you asked me about television and film. I've had to duck and dive and take work where I can get it and have made sure that I've stayed close to home.

Presenter23:56

You turned up at the BAFTAs this year wearing um sort of these leopard print fake fur cats were they cat ears? They were cat's ears. They were cat's ears. They were magnificent. What did your two daughters make of that? Did they I I was looking at at the picture and I thought either they asked you to put them on or they said, Mum, why did you put those on?

Eve Stewart24:13

They're twenty and seventeen now and Angel and Alice are very glamorous and uh I don't know where they get all that grooming from'cause I'm really not good at all that. So they do help me with things like rubbing on a fake tan and point out where my eyebrows are almost reaching my ears. So they are very good at coiffuring and and uh preening of their mother, but I think they're always slightly amazed by the weird clothes I wear.

Presenter24:36

I I was saying you went to the BAFTAs. I mean, you won a Blinking BAFTA. It was for Les Maiserable. And of course the sets and that were in the introduction I was talking about this. Was it nine tons of seaweed? That was for a seaweed.

Eve Stewart24:45

That was seaweed, but on this famous seaweed set, the singers had come from the theatre, and of course they'd been used to working in a rather nice, dark, warm box in the West End. And Tom and I, Tom Hooper, decided that to get them into the character and the misery of Fonteen's demise, that they really should be freezing and imagine that they are in the worst place on earth. So we had loads and loads of stinking seaweed, proper dead, rotting fish, and we left the dock doors open to the studio. So it was probably minus one by the time they came to do that scene. Where did the seaweed come from? It came from Scotland. And how many.

Presenter25:22

And how do you get nine tons of seaweed from Scotland? Were you in chat about that for a few minutes?

Eve Stewart25:25

Were you in chat about that for a while?

Eve Stewart25:27

No, we were in Pinewood and we had to you literally just have to have a man go and collect it and shovel it in. That it's not very glamorous, my line of work. It looked really brilliant. It looked like the guts of old

Presenter25:28

We have

Eve Stewart25:39

Prostitutes left to rot on the beach.

Presenter25:43

On that note, uh let's have some more music. Tell me about your sixth piece this morning. What are we gonna hear?

Eve Stewart25:48

I just love Jarvis Cocker, I just think he's a genius. But also this tune really sums up the love affair of myself and Leon McCarthy.

Speaker 425:57

Why don't you shut the door?

Speaker 426:01

Unclose the curtains.

Speaker 426:04

Cause you're not going anywhere.

Speaker 426:08

He's coming up the stairs and in a moment

Speaker 426:14

He'll want to see you

Speaker 426:18

I couldn't stop it now, there's no way to get out It's standing for too near How the hell did you get here?

Presenter26:29

That was pulp and underwear. I wonder, Eve Stewart, is it harder to create sets that are full of squalor and misery than it is to create things that are beautiful and glitzy and shiny and spangly?

Eve Stewart26:42

I love a bit of squalor, and I think they're both difficult in their own ways, but I would always prefer to reflect the dark side of humanity.

Presenter26:51

Le Miserable, you've talked about working with the director, Tom Hooper. Another movie of his that you worked on previously was The King's Speech. How much detail did you have to go into? I'm thinking now of historical detail, and understanding actually the personal circumstances, in so far as one ever can, of the royals at that time to to do your job.

Eve Stewart27:08

Well, immensely. You've got to really understand it and get it right. A. The Queen might be really cross, but it was, again, a labour of love, going around and meeting people. We found an original, well, Leon found it actually, an original notebook of Lionel Logue, which helped describe his rooms in infinite detail. And this is one of those lucky, and again, lucky breaks, where we just contacted the British Speech Therapy Association, and they just said, Oh, well, you should speak to Mark Logue. His grandfather was Lionel Logue. It was amazing. And so we got an incredible insight into how he lived that way.

Presenter27:48

Tom Hooper, when he began shooting Les Miserable, he didn't intend in the beginning to have his stars singing live and recorded as live on set. Once he decided that, how far into the production were you, and what sort of practical problems did it give you doing your job?

Eve Stewart28:03

Well, we'd already prepped quite a lot and built most of it, and then suddenly they were doing the live scene, which was so brave. But what it meant was that even the horses' carriages and their hooves were annoying to the sound designer. So we were there literally with my friend the horseman, Gerard, sticking on rubber hooves and putting rubber bands round carriage wheels. And then when the girls were meant to be making bead necklaces and rosaries in the factory, apparently these even clack too much. So we had to go overnight and find non-clacking beads. Where do you get rubberised rosary beads? Well, these came from Dublin. I don't know why they make non-clacky rosary beads in Dublin, but they do. Behind me, there's three people there's Anna and James who just go crazy finding things all over the world. And you just have to constantly charm people and be nice to people, and it leads somewhere, always.

Presenter28:37

Yeah.

Presenter28:54

Time for some music. We're on your seventh. Tell me about this.

Eve Stewart28:57

Now, little known fact about designers. You know, given when people film near or in London or any of the studios in London, you spend probably about four hours a day on the M twenty five. And Danny Baker's show on Radio London used to be my absolute favourite. And he introduced me to this LP called Music to Suffer By, which I thought was really apt. And this song, particular song, it made me laugh my head off.

Speaker 429:24

That's in my room.

Speaker 429:27

I am bothered by those rats in my room.

Speaker 429:31

I would have rather have some nets in my room.

Speaker 429:36

Instead of another polygraph in my wound

Speaker 429:43

Rats in my room Every day I've got more rats in my room

Speaker 129:46

I've got home.

Speaker 429:50

Guess I'd better get some cats in my room.

Presenter29:54

Leona Anderson and Ratz in my room from the album Music to Suffer By. Eve Stewart, I wonder if you're still doing what you were doing when you were a little girl, which is sort of drinking in the detail of the world. If you're in any given situation, whether it is an Oscar Award ceremony or a radio studio, are you looking at the fine detail that most of the rest of us are missing?

Eve Stewart30:14

I am and that in some ways that's been a bit of a

Eve Stewart30:18

Odd point and I always feel slightly on the outside. And I think that is driven by the fact that I'm still looking at those boxes. I'm still creating little worlds. I think a lot of it came from and I was very wheezy as a child and I didn't used to have asthma inhalers and stuff. And I did spend a lot of time having to sit rather still and watching other people play. And I wonder if some of it was that.

Presenter30:41

Um you've been Oscar nominated three times. You're not yet an Oscar winner. You've been nominated for BAFTAs numerous times. Does that public professional recognition matter to you?

Eve Stewart30:51

It doesn't matter, but it's always really nice. But I put it into perspective because most of my friends are nurses and kind of mental health workers and things like that, and they don't get prizes and it just seems rather unfair. We all play this game where you say, Oh, you've been dropped into a disaster village, what would you do? And all of them are busy setting up clinics and building a bridge, and then they all look at me and laugh and go, Well, you just paint it blue.

Eve Stewart31:15

Well, I get at least I get a price.

Presenter31:18

Um you made it clear that you've made decisions based on the fact that you're a mother as well as being the person that you are professionally. Is there a type of production that you'd like to work on that you haven't yet that sort of you've been precluded from working on because you thought, well, I've got to be home at nine to make supper or whatever?

Eve Stewart31:33

Um

Eve Stewart31:35

I can probably go further afield now that they're much older, although I so enjoy their company and they they're still at home that I I would find it quite difficult. Oh, I you know, it's got to be a James Bond, really. But I'm a girl.

Presenter31:48

What do you mean you're a girl? Do they normally call it?

Eve Stewart31:50

I don't know. It's quite a boys' world at the moment still. Is it? Well, I think so.

Eve Stewart31:55

But it's something to be challenged.

Presenter31:57

Uh

Eve Stewart31:57

In

Presenter31:57

So I I'm going to land you on a desert island at the end of all of this. How would you art direct the desert island? What what would you do to make it look the way a desert island should look?

Eve Stewart32:07

Well do you know, I thought about this a lot, and I'm sure it would look very much like Hawaii of the nineteen seventies.

Presenter32:14

It's time now for your final track, then, Eve Stewart. Tell me about this. What are we going to hear?

Eve Stewart32:18

Well, when I first got my as I said, I went to Nottingham and there was a Panto on at the time and I remember just being overcome with excitement as a row of tap dancing dogs, all dressed as English sheepdogs, came down these glittery stairs to this particular tune and I thought it summed up my vision of life.

Speaker 432:40

Free things coming up, sunshine and Santa Claus.

Speaker 432:47

Everything's got army, bright lights and lollipops.

Presenter33:13

Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and music by Julie Stein. That was Ethel Merman singing Everything's Coming Up, Roses. It's time for the books then, Eve Stewart. I'm going to give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. What'll your other book be?

Eve Stewart33:25

Well, I have thought really long and hard about that. I have lots of favourite books, but then I'm an incredibly fast reader, so I thought the the collection of full works of Charles Dickens would be the only thing with small enough writing, enough pages to keep me busy.

Presenter33:40

Right, you may have that then. And you're allowed a luxury. What will your luxury be?

Eve Stewart33:44

Well, again, I think I would like a lifetime supply of self firing clay, because I would probably try and attempt to make a really great cathedral and find God to get me through the next few months.

Presenter33:58

You say self-firing clay, does that exist?

Eve Stewart34:00

Yes.

Presenter34:01

Right. Well, we'll give you it then. And and and if you had to save just one of these disks from the waves, which one would it be?

Eve Stewart34:07

Pulp Underwear.

Presenter34:08

It's yours. Eve Stewart, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Eve Stewart34:12

My absolute pleasure.

Presenter34:31

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio4.