Peter Nichols

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty one.

Presenter0:12

Desert Island is

Speaker 30:30

As usual, the castaway is introduced by Roy Flamley.

Presenter0:33

Yeah.

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This week, our castaway is the playwright Peter Nichols.

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How big a thing is music in your life? It's always been a very important part of my life.

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I suppose I became a jazz fan as a result of reacting against my father, who...

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enjoyed classical music more, orchestral music, and was one of those armchair conductors who used to wave a baton to his

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large collection of seventy eights, you know. He was the sort of

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Bristol version of Toscanini. And I, like any young man, I suppose, reacted against that and became a jazz fan. And now I've come full circle, and I hope I enjoy most kinds of music equally. Do you make music? Do you do you play an instrument? No, I tried to play the piano, but I never succeeded. I couldn't read.

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You sing? No, I don't sing.

Peter Nichols1:18

You sing

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Just eight records are choosed that

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Mayhaps last you a long, long time. Did you find that very hard?

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Nearly impossible. I have succeeded, but how

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You choose one Mozart or Beethoven or one from the whole range of jazz of Duke Kennington.

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It's very nearly impossible, but I've managed. What's the first one? The first one is the Benny Goodman Quartet playing, I'm a ding-dong daddy from Duma.

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Why do you choose that one in particular?

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Because it's always been a great favourite of mine. I admire the musicianship of the four people playing and it's a very lively piece that would cheer me up a lot on the island.

Presenter2:55

I'm a Ding Dong Daddy by the Benny Goodman Quartet.

Presenter2:59

Now, Peter, you're a Somerset man. Bristol. Yes. One of a large family? No, one brother. Do you look back on a happier childhood on on the whole?

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Tense, I'd say. Really? Yes, rather tense.

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Uh I mean, actually my childhood has somewhat disappeared. I'm one of those people who can't remember my childhood very well. I remember my adolescence more. I suppose partly because one can always date

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the forties, I find those ten years from nineteen forty to

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Fifty. Very specific years. Nothing since or before has quite that definition, because I suppose of the war.

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Can you remember the time of your first inclination towards imaginative writing?

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No, I can't really. I always wanted to

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act or to be in the theater in some way or another. I used to

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Go to the pantomime at Christmas at the Princess Theatre.

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In Bristol, and then in the summer there was the circus, and they were the two pivotal events of the year, the Panto and the Circus. You did a little entertaining yourself when you were very young. Yes. My mother and I used to go out entertaining the troops in something called the Bristol Wartime Entertainers. We used to take out a little bus with a mini piano and go to very remote wireless units in North Somerset and inflict our entertainments on these poor conscripts.

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When you left school, what did you do?

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Straightaway I w I I was in the Board of Trade, but almost immediately I I went into the uh Air Force. Uh it was just at the end of the war. In fact, I think I went in the day after the war ended. Yes. Then I was posted pretty quickly to Malaya.

Presenter4:36

For a year in India?

Presenter4:38

In Calcutta, and then for another year and a bit in Malaya and Hong Kong and all around there. So I was there for about two and a half years or so. And when you came back, back into the Board of Trade? No, back to the Bristol Old Rick School, because by that time I decided I certainly was going to go into the theatre and now I knew how to do it and I got a government grant and became an acting student. In one of the most beautiful theatres in Britain. When you graduated did you stay in Bristol with the company?

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No, I went off into repertory from

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Falmouth to Aberdeen, playing everything from

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Men in dinner jackets to the back legs of a horse in a panto, you know, the usual range of stuff. But occasionally I did go back and play at Bristol and that was a special treat. Did you find that you worked fairly steadily or were you out of a job? No.

Peter Nichols5:23

Yeah.

Presenter5:24

Resting most of the time really for the five years. I I did a fair amount of good work, but most of the time I was writing plays, which I'd started doing when I was in India, oddly enough. I used to go along in the orderly room in the afternoon and type out these imitation West End comedies, you know, strange place to be doing that. Did you send them round to manager? Never. No, I never sent

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Any plays in at all. I didn't think they were.

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Anything like good enough.

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Now let's get on to your second record. What's that we? Um this is from a Noel Coward show called Sail Away.

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I admire, of course, the way he.

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Wrote these neatly turned lyrics. This show was not in itself successful. There was one very good number which is sung.

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By lane stretch

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Beautifully sung, I think, and it's called

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Why do the worst people travel?

Peter Nichols6:13

Deep Pompeii on the only day when it's up to its ass in molten lava.

Peter Nichols6:20

It was like it.

Peter Nichols6:22

To unravel, ravel, rattle every impulse that makes them wanna roar

Speaker 26:24

Right.

Peter Nichols6:34

Oh, one to the wrong people and

Peter Nichols6:39

Right people stay back home.

Presenter6:43

Elaine Stritch singing Why Do the Worst People Travel from Noel Card's Sail Away.

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As a sort of safety net.

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You began to take a teaching course, didn't you?

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Yes, I ev eventually decided that I was resting too much and working too little, so it seemed sensible to try something else. And I went to a training college for two years and then became a teacher.

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In London School Secondary Schools.

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You kept going with the writing.

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Yes, I was still writing, and I wrote in the evenings.

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And then I saw that they were

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beginning to advertise and try and get people to write for television.

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Television was well established by this time, but I just happened never to have seen a television play when I wrote my first one.

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which I wrote in the evenings after school, and uh sent it in.

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And it won this competition.

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And that began me on my writing career, which is fortunately still going on. You gave up teaching? Hmm that must have been a big decision to say I'm going to be a full-time writer.

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Yes, I didn't need much persuasion'cause I was a terrible teacher and I really didn't enjoy it at all and I went on to part-time.

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and taught illiterate children who couldn't manage their reading and writing very well and and I helped them for a while and gradually eased my way out of teaching'cause I was just simply never very good at it. I couldn't control the children. You did get a very small Arts Council bursary, I believe.

Presenter8:09

That was a bit later on, yes. I got a a bursary and that helped us through a dark patch because by that time I'd got married.

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And, um, we'd started having a family, and we were living in the country in Dartmouth, in Devon.

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And I was writing television plays and having quite a few of them turned down, but we just survived. You got a a television reputation for writing rather anarchic plays.

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Comedy. You had a character called Sam Spray, you wrote. Ben Spray. Ben Spray, I'm sorry. Yes.

Peter Nichols8:36

Sorry.

Presenter8:37

You wrote two or three plays about him. Yes, a couple of plays about him. And he he was a, I suppose, a sort of lucky gym-ish character at the time. It was a.

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fashionable view of life. I mean r really quite

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A presentable play, I think.

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When was the point when you said you were going to escape from the the salt mines of of television and and

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And and write for the theater? Well, I was trying all the time, really.

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But it's always seemed to me that there's got to be some sort of very special reason for writing a stage play, to persuade people to get up out of their cosy rooms and

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go in in the rain possibly and pay a lot of money to sit in a theatre in comparative discomfort.

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Um, it seems to me you've got to say something special. This is something that can't be done any other way. This I'm going to tell this story in a way that you can't see it on the films or television. And that's what I was waiting for, the the idea that

Presenter9:29

that would actually lift me into that

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Position.

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Right. Well, before you tell us about that idea, let's have your third record, which is

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which is the Mozart Horn Concerto, number three.

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And I'd like this on the island because I think it would it it's got this hunting horn effect, which I think would help me uh when I had to go off hunting. I don't know whether I'd ever manage actually to kill o anything. I think I'd probably be a vegetarian on the island. But if I did set off hunting I think this would get me off to a good start.

Presenter10:57

Part of the third movement of the Mozart Horn Concerto number three, Alan Siville with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klempere. Now you got your idea for a stage play that you thought you were going to work.

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That was

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The day and the death of Joe Egg. Yes. That was written from life, wasn't it? Yes, because we'd had.

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By that time I think

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Three children and our first child, a daughter, had been born very severely handicapped.

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It had been a very difficult best.

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And by the time we realized she was ill,

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It was six weeks after she was born.

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She was epileptic.

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very severely m mentally handicapped, which meant that really she wa she couldn't do anything all her life. We had to feed her, sit her up. She she had absolutely no control over herself at all. That's why the play is called A Day in the Death of Joey, because it seemed to me that her life was a a sort of living death.

Presenter11:53

And so obviously one didn't readily come on the idea of how to how to put that on the stage and it wasn't a a thing that immediately sprang to mind.

Presenter12:03

But I thought about it and eventually wrote it in a way which perhaps was rather unexpected. How many managements did you send that play to when you finished the script?

Peter Nichols12:11

We know where to

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It went to most of the London managements who all said, oh no, I don't think so, really. One said.

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Um I was forty by this time, and uh one of them said, I do wish these young writers would learn to construct.

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But then I it went to the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre, where my friend Michael Blakemore was the director, and he immediately said, Look, we must get this on, and he pushed it through the board, some opposition, and fair amount of opposition from the Lord Chamberlain, who was still then

Presenter12:40

the licensee of plays. I mean, he you still had to get his permission to put the play on.

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But anyway, we did get it through with one or two little provisos and

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Of course it's never caused any offence to those people that he thought would most be offended by it. In fact, although it was a big success, it only played four months in the west end of London.

Peter Nichols12:58

When the

Peter Nichols12:59

But

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People don't really believe it. They think, you know, it must have played longer than that.

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But it won awards all over the place. I suppose it's been produced pretty well all over the Western world, has it not? Yes, it has, yes, yes. And filmed.

Peter Nichols13:11

And so

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Yes, I'm filmed and.

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Dropped from airplanes and T C Now how did you follow it? Had you worked on other ideas?

Peter Nichols13:19

What I did.

Presenter13:20

No, I hadn't really and the interesting thing was that the plane nearly fizzled out in Glasgow. I mean, it was nearly three weeks in Glasgow and that's it. But by a series of

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Amazing flukes, partly carried out by the director Michael Blakemore.

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We did get a transfer to London and one of the offers we got was from the National Theatre.

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Ken Tynan was the literary manager at that time.

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And he said we'd like to do it, but we wanted our own company to come in in it because they'd done it in Glasgow and that's what we wanted.

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So we said, no, thank you very much.

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We wa we came in with Albert Finney's management.

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And then Kenneth Tynan and Lawrence Olivia said, Well, we'd like you to do something else for us, you know, do another play for us anyway.

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So that's when I wrote the National Health.

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Once again, based on personal experience. Yes, but a very much more objective play in the sense that I am not in any sense depicted in it.

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And uh it was really made up of objective observations of hospital life and of people I met when I was in hospital with a collapsed lung.

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I've been in few hospitals with this spontaneous pneumothorax as it's known.

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And uh I made a few notes and kept the diary and um

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I've written this television play.

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called The End Beds, which again had been turned down by every television company in the country. And when Tynan asked for this play, I dragged it out of the drawer, rewrote it, made it longer, and that became the National Health. And this was another success and another film and what is

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Record number four appears beautiful.

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Well, this is to make me laugh on the island. It's my friend Barry Humphreys.

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Doing his Dame Edna Everage.

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and it's part of a live performance given at the Globe Theatre, London.

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And that's another plus because two of my own plays have been done at The Globe, so it will remind me of that theater and the sound of a live audience as they laugh at Dame Edna Everidge in concert.

Peter Nichols15:19

Oh, I can see you in the what's your name?

Peter Nichols15:22

Hello, Mary?

Peter Nichols15:23

Mary, what a pretty night. Can you see Mary in the shadows there last time?

Peter Nichols15:27

Can you?

Peter Nichols15:29

Can you? Isn't she lovely? She's a credit to the younger generation, I think. And she's wearing glasses. Are they uh optical, darling, or are they just worn for their lovely appearance? Aren't they they're optical, are they, darling? Oh, what a gorgeous little creature you are.

Speaker 215:40

They're off to Galilee.

Peter Nichols15:44

Did you go to the hairdresser this morning, Mary? Didn't think so.

Presenter15:49

Betty Humphreys.

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Your next player, you say, is your favorite.

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The next one you read? Yes, Forget Me Not Lame.

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It's

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I suppose the most personal in that the day and the death of Joe Egg.

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was personal in its subject matter, but actually w did not depict my life or our life exactly as it happened.

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Forget Me Not Lane was an attempt to do that, and it's frankly autobiographical, and it does depict my family life.

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The family life that I told you earlier was rather tense.

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And certainly if when one sees the play one realizes that's true.

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But it was also, I hope, very funny. It was a a little

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tribute perhaps a little um

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rather belated love letter to my father, who by this time was dead.

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And it depicts his death, it depicts his determination not to die, his constant return to the stage. He was a he was a comedian who never found a stage, and so I gave him one for his play.

Presenter16:51

As Shaneux, your fourth play, was also about.

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Well, people that you knew. It it was about a holiday home in the Do Doin. You happened to have one there yourself. Yes. So I presume that was to a large extent autobiographical. Well, it was in the sense that the background was uh our house.

Peter Nichols17:03

So I presume that

Peter Nichols17:06

Yeah.

Presenter17:10

which was actually called Shea Man New, so there was a pun in the title as well.

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But um otherwise it was totally unlike uh anything that was a complete fabrication. But the background was certainly based entirely and the the designer came down and photographed the barn of our house and reconstructed it on the stage with a globe.

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Record number 5 piece.

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Well, this is Fatz Waller, and I've partly chosen it because I saw him on the stage at the Hoban Empire in nineteen thirty nine. I was taken by my uncle to see a musical Bill. Fats Waller was touring England. Um I can remember him sitting there

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Fat Man

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Um

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pulling the grand piano towards himself instead of pulling the stool up to the piano, and putting on a Scots hat and singing Loch Lomond.

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Well, it's not Loch Lomond we've got today. It's a

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Piano solo

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And I think it reminds us what a very marvellous stride pianist he was, in the stride piano tradition.

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And this one's Carolina Shout.

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Pats Waller, Catalina Sharks.

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Peter, you mentioned briefly that you had served in the army at the end of the war.

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Now, that experience was to be very useful to you. Can we go into a bit more detail about that? They sent you to India. What did you do there?

Presenter19:24

In India, for the most part I made out railway warrants.

Presenter19:27

When I wasn't writing mock West End plays. And then you left India in the Exodus, more or less, feet first.

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Uh where did you go then? Uh Singapore.

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And I stayed in Singapore for

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fifteen months or so. Yeah. And I joined

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This organization called CSE, Combined Services Entertainment, which was what came after ANSA, and um there I

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I hung on grimly by the skin of my teeth, in constant dread of R T U which was returned to unit.

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It hung over us like a sword of Damocles.

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All the time. And we toured with these terrible shows. What sort of shows?

Presenter20:06

Well, they were concert parties, really. I mean, I suppose something between a concert party and a review.

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They had all-star casts very often and the one I was in had uh Kenneth Williams and Stanley Baxter.

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John Schlesinger, the film director, was in another one as a conjurer. He wasn't in my troop, but they were pretty terrible shows. Well, this experience, of course, was was saved up for your for your musical Privates on Parade. How accurate was your stage picture?

Presenter20:33

In some places very accurate, in other places not at all. Some of the least convincing and plausible scenes were in fact based

Presenter20:42

Absolutely, with great fidelity on life, and some of the more convincing scenes were invented by me.

Presenter20:51

Right, let's skip briefly over your your last play, Born in the Gardens, which had a very successful run, and and and come to your new one, Passion Play. How do you describe that, Peter?

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As a passion play, play about passion.

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in its several manifestations, passion meaning suffering,

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and love and intense feeling.

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A play with an unusual method of presentation insofar that as two of the main characters are played by two actors each.

Presenter21:23

Yes. That's how I prefer to describe it. I mean, I think

Presenter21:27

Often people have given the impression they just convey the thoughts. Two of the actors convey the thoughts of the other two actors. But in fact, I like to think that there are two actors playing each part because they do serve several different functions throughout the play. And if you

Presenter21:40

settle down to watch it thinking, I see, one actor is going to speak the thoughts of the other actor, that actress is going to speak the thoughts of that other actress. Then I think you will be stuck rather when it when it starts to change, which it does.

Presenter21:53

Oh, the staging, apart from that, is very ingenious with with the setting being broken up into a a number of small sets. You must have enjoyed the planning of that as well as the writing.

Peter Nichols21:59

Yeah.

Peter Nichols22:01

Yes

Presenter22:02

Yes, well I'm I'm rather specific about that. I mean I was shocked to see a director saying in an interview in the paper this morning that he thinks authors' stage directions are not worth listening to. And um I resist that strongly because I write stage directions to be performed and to be taken notice of and the play is on sale in the bookshops now and one can easily verify it by seeing that the script obviously went in before we started rehearsing it and yet what's on the stage is pretty much what I said. You're not giving the actors a chance, are you? Ah, well the actors that's another thing.

Peter Nichols22:33

Yeah.

Presenter22:36

Yeah, they're they're doing marvelously inventive things.

Peter Nichols22:36

Yeah.

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But the actual staging is very very clearly described in the script.

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Record number six.

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Well, here we go back to Privates on Parade now.

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Which I would like to have a little reminder of because it was a very happy experience.

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I enjoyed writing it and I enjoyed the new

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Experience of writing

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Lyrics

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which was set to music by Dennis King.

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and sung particularly brilliantly by Dennis Quilley.

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And this

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Scene, he is doing his Carma Miranda bit.

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And it's a number called the Latin American Way.

Speaker 223:17

Have you ever been down in Argentina? Have you ever known that special thrill?

Speaker 223:25

How would you like to mail A card from Venezuela? You could find romance in all Brazil.

Speaker 223:33

And in Valparaiso, girls would roll their eyes so that you could not tear yourself away.

Speaker 223:41

Come and have a gala down in Guatemala, Belladina Meri.

Presenter23:47

Dennis Quille doing his common miranda bit from

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Privates on parade.

Presenter23:53

As a playwright, Peter, you are not easy to categorize. No play is like the preceding play. Does that make managers a little wary, a little cautious?

Presenter24:03

I think it makes me a little

Presenter24:07

bit evasive in people's minds. I think they

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They had for uh a while a little hook to hang me on, which was oh, I see, he writes about sickness. That lasted for two players, you know.

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The fact that I'd never written about sickness in all the twenty television plays I'd written didn't seem to occur to anyone. And then O I see he writes about family. And then O I see he writes about

Presenter24:30

You know, his army experiences and so on, and and you eventually feel like saying, Well, look, just accept what I write and it's going to be different each time. What's on the stocks?

Presenter24:39

I'm doing two plays that might turn out to be musicals, I hope.

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The next one is about the Opium Wars in eighteen forty.

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In China is.

Peter Nichols24:51

Yeah.

Presenter24:52

Which I've cast in a traditional.

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Pantomime form.

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Well, I'm also uh tinkering around with the idea of the

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Maxim gun, the machine gun that uh was so

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disastrous a machine in the First World War, you know, that so that probably was responsible for more deaths than any other single invention. And this I'm thinking of doing as a musical as well.

Presenter25:17

Well, they sound two very original ideas. What's your writing discipline? Do you write regular hours every day?

Presenter25:24

Yes, I do when I'm writing. Um sometimes I mean plays are should be written quickly, I think, and are best written quickly, as quickly as we can. I used to take much longer, I used to take about nine months with it. Now I I tend to knock them off much faster, and I think it's better.

Peter Nichols25:34

Now

Presenter25:38

And so after a couple of months, when one's finished the play, then one has to stop.

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There's really nothing else to do. Perhaps one turns to something else.

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But the discipline is there, yes. I now work

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Longer hours starting

Presenter25:53

In the morning, working through until mid-afternoon, or until I get tired. After a certain time, I think you might as well not bother. You just get tired. Yeah, surely.

Presenter26:01

Let's get back to music, what have we got next?

Presenter26:04

This is a chorus from the Messiah.

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I've chosen because I love choral music.

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Um the Messiah particularly.

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And also because choral music plays quite a large part in passion play, the the title also referring to the Matthew Passion.

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And this is one of the choruses which is played during the action.

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Partly because the wife

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In the play Sings in a Choir.

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And this is he trusted in God.

Peter Nichols27:02

We are

Presenter27:33

He trusted in God from Handel's Messiah, the London Symphony Orchestra and chorus conducted by Colin Davis.

Presenter27:41

Have you ever imagined yourself as a Robinson Crusoe?

Presenter27:45

Yes, it used to be a dream of mine as a child. I haven't recently. Of course, I did go to.

Presenter27:51

the tropics and spent quite a long time there. So I suppose when one thinks of desert island I one does think of the tropics rather than being caught on a desert island in the North Sea. Oh yeah.

Peter Nichols27:58

Oh yeah.

Presenter28:00

So, from your knowledge of the tropics, you'd know how to put up some kind of a shelter?

Presenter28:04

I might do, yes, I think so. I've had a little bit of experience of

Presenter28:08

managing, not very much, but when we first started to go to our farm in a fairly remote bit of countryside in France, we

Presenter28:17

had to manage with well water and, you know, chopping the logs and all that sort of thing. So I wouldn't be entirely incompetent, but not very competent, I think. Would you try to escape?

Peter Nichols28:26

Very.

Peter Nichols28:27

What do you think

Presenter28:28

Oh yes, yes, I think so.

Presenter28:31

I I suppose I'm used to solitude in a way.

Presenter28:34

Being a writer, one spends a lot of one's time alone. On the other hand, when I've stopped writing, I mean whenever I've emerged from the room, then I want company, I'm very g gregarious, so I'd get very miserable alone.

Presenter28:45

Your last record.

Presenter28:47

Well, that's solitude.

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I mentioned it, and here it is.

Presenter28:50

partly because I would always want something by Duke Ellington.

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And

Presenter28:56

It seems that it's a particularly melancholy, sad piece that would suit those moods when you were

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Sitting there looking over the sea and

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Thinking about your own solitude, perhaps feeling a bit self-piteous.

Presenter29:08

So here is Duke Ellington and his orchestra plays solitude.

Speaker 329:37

Um

Speaker 329:46

I've been selling the language and family and family.

Speaker 329:53

There are no other neighbors on this.

Presenter30:13

Duke Ellington, his orchestra, his own composition Solitude recorded in 1934, If You Could Take Only One Discar to the Aid.

Presenter30:22

Oh, that would be from the Messiah, the chorus from the Messiah. Because of the richness of that polyphonic music, it would be something one could listen to for a very long time, I think. And you're allowed to have one luxury with you.

Presenter30:32

Of no practical use.

Presenter30:34

I thought about this a great deal.

Presenter30:36

Um

Presenter30:38

We are are we allowed to have power, electric power on it? There is yes, there is solar power. Solar power.

Peter Nichols30:40

There are

Presenter30:43

In that case I think I'll have a Vibra fan.

Presenter30:46

A biblophone driven by electricity, which I could learn to play.

Peter Nichols30:46

A virus

Presenter30:49

That Lionel Hampton vibraphone on the Benny Goodman quartet. I can just see myself standing on the island playing that. Coming back.

Peter Nichols30:55

We have

Presenter30:56

A virtuoso.

Presenter30:57

And one book, The Bible and Shakespeare, already there.

Presenter31:02

Yes, I think

Presenter31:03

Partly to counteract the uh monarchical, perhaps

Presenter31:07

Establishment Views of Shakespeare

Presenter31:10

That'll cause a few quarrels. I'd like the collected essays of George Orwell. Mm-hmm. The.

Presenter31:16

radical, inquiring, intelligent, clear spirit of that man has been

Presenter31:22

Something I've always treasured and would continue to do so, I think. The collected essays of George Orwell. And thank you, Peter Nichols, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Great pleasure.

Presenter31:34

Goodbye, everyone.

Presenter31:43

Desert Island Discs was introduced by Roy Plumby, the producer was Derek Drescher.

Presenter31:49

Tomorrow evening at 6.15, Desert Island Discs will be broadcast live from the Ideal Home exhibition, when the castaway will be Russell Harty.

Presenter31:57

And you can hear a recording of that event next Friday at the usual time.

Speaker 332:10

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.