Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Actor best known as Lord Grantham in 'Downton Abbey', Mr. Brown in 'Paddington', and Ian Fletcher in 'W1A'.
On the island
Eight records
O mio babbino caro (from Gianni Schicchi)
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir John Pritchard
In one episode, we had Dame Kiri Takanawa come and visit our humble twenty up, twenty down house. She was playing dame Nellie Melbourne and she sang this song to us in the hall and I will never forget it. She was three feet away from me singing this wonderful song.
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
In thinking about me on my island, I'm not entirely sure I'd be brilliant at staying there doing twiddling my thumbs, doing nothing. So the movie that came out in the year of my birth, actually, has got me thinking that I could possibly tunnel out.
It's Been a Hard Day's Night (Peter Sellers version)
It's Peter Sellers impersonating Laurence Olivier, doing It's a Hard Day's Night.
This particular song was released in the month that I got my equity card, my first job, which was at Regents Park … I was an acting ASM. I had no lines in that first play. But I helped to set out the props every night and I remember playing this every single day as I drove into work thinking I'm the luckiest man on the planet to be paid to do what I love.
I've been thinking about my island, and there's a good strong chance I may be there at Christmas … the soundtrack of much of my second year at university … was the Eurythmics and Annie Lennox. And I was completely besotted with her and her voice. And I met her recently and became besotted all over again. So, Annie Lennox singing me a Christmas carol would be very cheering.
December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)
Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons
This was playing in the delivery room when my son was born.
Damien Montagu (piano: Robert's Sword, strings: Tippett Quartet)
I've lived most of my adult life in a part of the world that I think is God's own county. I'm on the border of West Sussex and Hampshire and a stone's throw from the South Downs. And it's magical up there … this is a track from that [In a South Downs Way], and it reminds me of the place I am lucky enough to call home.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:12After six hugely successful seasons, the last episode of Downton Abbey aired here in Britain just at Christmas. Honestly, is there a sense of wistfulness or a sense of relief as an actor that after six seasons you are free?
I think I'm already sort of nostalgic about it. It was an extraordinary roller coaster of a show to be involved with, something that you thought was going to last, you know, six or seven episodes as we did in the first series. And then fifty-two episodes later we say goodbye … It does become a second family. So the final farewells were sad, but obviously, yes, the freedom … it's a strange feeling not to be doing that, but happiness tinged with fond memories.
Presenter asks
14:27A child, you would often write, perform, and even create the tickets for your very own little plays, with family and friends dragooned into watching. That sounds like quite an earnest little fellow.
I was quite, I wasn't lonely, but I was alone. My brother and sister are six and eight years older than me … When I was alone at home, as I often was, and I wasn't really into football … I really got inspired by the dressing up box, and I dragged them. I'd say, Look, I'll come and play half an hour football with you, but then you're going to come and spend three hours in my play. And they'd stand there being lords or knights, and I'd sit on the throne in my granny's fur stole that we'd found in the dressing-up box … I've written the tickets … I was quite a diva.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Lego bricks with instruction booklets
I think I'd like to take the enormous pile of Lego that has been accumulating in the den over the last ten, twelve years. … I thought I could take this vast box and sort it out and rebuild these models. And if I couldn't quite do that, I could always build them into struts for my tunnels.
Presenter asks
17:07At your boarding school, you wrote letters home to your parents thanking them for the job they were doing. I have never heard of a teenager doing that. What were you thanking them for?
The opportunity. There were kids in my part of Blackheath where I first grew up who didn't have those opportunities … my first real thank you letter was after I joined the National Youth Theatre when I was about 16, 17. And that was the first time … of meeting kids from all over the country, kids who were miners' children from Newcastle, a bank clerk's daughter from Belfast. And we were all got together in this common enterprise of putting on plays … It was a big shift for me to really understand what was out there outside the walls of my idyllic little life. And I think that's when the realization of what my parents were doing for us kids really kicked in.
Presenter asks
22:43You gave yourself three years to get an equity card, five years to get to Chichester Theatre, ten years for the RSC — when you were starting out and nobody knew what your capabilities were, how good were you at blowing your own trumpet?
I went to drama school for about five minutes. I went to Weber Douglas for a term and a half. And the day I arrived, I thought in the summer there's going to be several thousand young students leaving drama school, all looking for equity cards. And so I started writing letters immediately and I wrote two hundred letters … Of those two hundred letters maybe a hundred replied and probably ninety of those were photocopied saying you're on file, I eat you're in the bin. Of those I got two auditions and one of them got me Regents Park.
Presenter asks
26:35The dramatic community being populated by privileged people — is that something that strikes a chord with you, or do you just think, oh, shut up and get on with it like the rest of us?
I am very aware of that perception … The arts in general are such a fundamental part of our existence or should be and to see them being sidelined through education cuts hurts, hurts the next generation and hurts me as someone who was lucky enough to be exposed to all those opportunities early on … That sort of opportunity, again, I keep coming back to this word opportunity, is not given as broadly as it perhaps could be … you can't quantify that. And nor can you extrapolate that to use of funds or how funds are used, you know, because you don't know if that memory, that experience will have an impact in in two years' time, in twenty years' time when they're either running a company or whatever they're doing in life.
Presenter asks
30:57You said you hoped to reassure your parents that they haven't wasted their efforts on you. I'm assuming you've convinced yourself of that?
Not no, I … I don't know. I mean, they I know they've been proud of all of us kids … I had an email last night from a girl I was at school with telling me about the work she was doing last year with Save the Children in Sierra Leone, supplying the medical teams. During the Ebola crisis, she was also telling me about the work she'd been doing in Lesbos with the refugees. I prance around in tights. Go figure.
“I have a nutty Tibetan Terrier. But no, I I certainly didn't take the job [as Lord Grantham] home with me.”
“I can remember the very first scene I did with [Dame Maggie Smith], and I was absolutely terrified. And I think I can remember the last scene with her, and I was absolutely terrified.”
“I opened the newspaper one day and it said Century House, MI6 building to be sold. And I looked at the photograph and I said, Mum, that's your office. And she said, Mm, yes, dear. And I said, You're a spy and she said, No, I'm not a spy, dear … after she died I asked my father if she'd ever said anything about her work, and he said never … I'm extremely proud not only that she found fulfilment in that work as well as bringing up us kids, but that she never spoke about it.”
“My former drama club teacher just would not give me decent parts, and I credit him with my drive and ambition. I to this day feel that he knew my hunger to be in plays and my love for it, and he was damned if he was going to let me succeed.”
“I had a very strict time limit on myself. I said if I don't get an equity card in three years then I'll go and do law. If I don't get to Chichester Theatre, my local theatre in five years, or the RSC in ten, these are my big ambitions, and if I don't do those I'll give up.”