Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Actor, playwright, and former professional wrestler.
On the island
Eight records
National Philharmonic Orchestra
It's it's so sad. It's wonderful to play when you just arrive on your desert island. I mean, you feel I'd be crying.
Like a Rolling StoneFavourite
He's what we used to play on the road when we were wrestling.
I'm very fond of this record. It was one of my initiations into the acting game.
A MEMOIR OF THOSE FRENCH DAYS EDITH PIAF ... I heard this at the Olympia.
Because I was at Stratford and I was in Romeo and Juliet and it was just a wonderful experience and it's a little memory of Stratford.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048
A play I was in was called Life Class and there was a piece of music in that that I grew to really enjoy.
The record of my teenage years, and oh prophetic soul
And of course John Tams and the Albion Band are playing with you in The Passion. Yes, and we'll be playing again because we are coming back to Cottish Lowe for Christmas.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:50How do you remember [Michael Parkinson]?
He was a very good cricketer and a rotten footballer. I was a very good footballer and a rotten cricketer.
Presenter asks
4:02You'd taken up wrestling on the side. Why was that?
My dad was a wrestler. He was a wrestler as the Red Devil. And he ran a gymnasium in Barnesley and I was always there and it was amateur boxing and then it was natural progression to wrestling'cause I was the wrong shape for a boxer. Short, round guy, much better wrestler.
Presenter asks
5:20Was it because of wrestling that you quit university after the first year?
Yes, I did actually a year and a half there. And then I mean, I was just earning so much kind of money and ... quite dissolute really. I just didn't go. And that was it.
Presenter asks
13:28How did acting come into it?
I was teaching at Longca Central School, and a fellow called Barry Hines was teaching games there. And Barry Hines wrote a book called A Kestrel for a Knave, and he arrived one day and said, They're making a film of my ... novel. And I said, try and get me a part. ... I got the part of the games master in Kez ... And it was really the start of it for me because I was very it was a respectable debut in the West End of London.
The keepsakes
The book
John Scarne
I'd take a book by John Scarn. It's a book about card games. And I'd make myself a set of cards from palm leaves and I'd be the best card player in the world by the time I came back.
The luxury
I've owned two in my life and the wonderful things is to look at. [And] no petrol. I don't care. I'll invent something.
Presenter asks
18:19How did you get the idea [for the play Thicker Than Water]?
I read a local newspaper about some local butcher having won the Prix D'Or, the Golden Prize, at the Black Pudding Festival. I thought that can't be true, because Albert Hurst of Barnsley wins it all the time. ... So I did a little bit research and I found out that these local butchers all win the Prix D'Or, in fact they all get a prize. So I told David Rose ... and he sent me off to France to attend a Black Pudding Festival.
“Initially I was Erik Tamberg, the blonde bomber from Sweden. Then that I became Leonares from Paris, France, by a sheer fluke that I substituted for a Frenchman one night at Wimslow.”
“I did become a schoolmaster to try and appease her slightly and and worked a lot of part-time teaching, a lot of wrestling, and sometimes having terms off to just wrestle and concentrate and go literally all over the world as wrestler.”
“I've a little office in Shepherd's Bush where I write, and it's a rather nice little tatty flat, and I just sit there, and there's no radio, there's no television, and there's no bows in the cupboard, and it's just nothing else to do but write.”