Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Director, producer and writer of comedy hits Spitting Image, Not the Nine O'Clock News, Black Adder, QI; multiple BAFTA, Grammy, Emmy winner
On the island
Eight records
Bright Side of the RoadFavourite
this is the song that Sean Hardy, my co producer on Not the Nine O'Clock News, used to play when things were going really badly, which was quite often.
I come from an Anglo Irish background, at least on my father's side... and so as children we were shipped all over the world, and so the gipsy side is that sort of wandering sailor's son thing.
reminds me of the innocent optimism of the early sixties.
reminds me of being a young radio producer in the mid seventies and I used to play this song as often as I could on a show called Late Night Extra on Radio 2 where we normally had to do sing something simple and lots of sort of BBC ooh wop boo wop very old fashioned music and I was allowed occasionally to play the Beatles or songs like this.
it was I think the almost the first musical number we did at Splitting Image with Ronnie Reagan who was kind of the hero of the programme along with Mrs. T and Nancy on Nancy doing the singing and we changed all the words to make them funny but it always makes me think of that time.
The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
this music is the music that my wife, To Be, came down the aisle to.
the one that reminds me of driving in our Landro we we moved to the country and so often I'd be driving the kids Harry, Coco and Boosie in this Land Rover with this song playing an absolute full blast.
this is a wonderful song by my friend Mark Frye, and this is from his second album, Shooting the Moon, and it's a song called Regrets.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:16Would you say your role in comedy is like being the midwife at a difficult birth?
That's a very good line. Um, yeah, I I think a lot of stuff that I do in retrospect it all looks, you know, great and lovely and easy, and I passionately believe that nothing great is achieved without difficulty. Not exclusively true, but the Navajo have a proverb which is... Everything easy is evil, everything difficult is good. I sort of live by that really.
Presenter asks
2:17Are you a tricky character, or is it all the rest of them?
It's all my fault, Kirsty. Yes, I want a bit of a confessional. Well, I struggled for a long time, particularly I got a bit lost in my forties. I struggled to think why I was continually, serially being fired, particularly by people I was very close to. But I'm over that stage now. And one of my little mantras is disaster is a gift. Because when you look back on your life, the disaster, you know, being sacked by your girlfriend or your head of department or best friend as a co-writer... You look back and you think, Thank goodness that happened because if I hadn't been sacked, I would still be there.
Presenter asks
9:51What do you remember of your father as a father?
Well, he was, you know, he was um terribly genial, you know, very decent, genial fellow. But he was kind of in a way always at sea, do you know what I mean? In the nicest way. He had very, very blue eyes, and he'd be off even when he was at home, thinking of being at sea. 'Cause he was the youngest captain in the navy, oddly, so I don't remember him as anything other than this commanding, cheerful figure and um particularly when I first went to prep school aged nine or ten, and he would sweep in in the Royal Naval limo with the you know, the sailor driver and all that, and get out and the great big, you know, four bars of gold on red on his Hello, old horse Hullo Pop in the car... No, he was terrific.
The keepsakes
The book
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Alan Watts
it is the best book I've ever read on the nature of what actually is, what the world is about, and how you should behave.
The luxury
A big whirligig festooned with hundreds of packets of seeds
I just plant, you know, one a day and just see'cause I used to love gardening when I was kid and I haven't had any time for like about fifty years to do gardening.
Presenter asks
13:26Did your time at King's School, Canterbury, mark you?
Actually, no, I don't really feel that. I mean, it's left me with a real resentment of authority wielded unfairly or wrongly. I really that's the thing that gets me really cross. Because of the days when you're fifteen and you're told, you know... Go to your room, Lord, I'm going to beat the backside off you. And one guy actually took a run-up. He stood on the sofa and jumped down onto the sofa and gave me six, you know, in my pajama bottoms. You know, you think that's not right. But at the time you're so used you're inured to it because of the years in prep school where, for example, all our letters were censored... So you get used to that. You get used to the idea that there's nothing to be done. You've just got to sort of sit it out somehow and hope it will eventually come to an end. Which of course, you know, eventually it did. And I got to Cambridge and I honestly thought that I had died and gone to heaven. I mean you just thought this is this can't be right. Everyone you meet is nice. There's no physical punishment. You can stay out till one o'clock in the morning and it's fine.
Presenter asks
25:45What happened when you hit a wall in your early 40s?
We did, and that was the odd thing. After we'd been married for about three years, I just woke up one Christmas Eve and I thought, I can't see the point of anything at all. It was the most alarming thing, and particularly alarming because I had everything. I'm happily married at that point, I think, two children. We had a lovely flat in Fulham, and we had a little cottage in the country, and a couple of cars, and I, as you know, a ridiculous number of BAFTA awards. I couldn't fit all the awards into my study. We had so many. And then one day I thought, I don't know what I'm supposed to be aiming at. And I went right down to the bottom. I was... Depressed doesn't you know, depressed is a word that people say, oh yeah, I get depressed. Well, you if you haven't you just can't see the point of anything. And I used to sit under my desk crying for no reason. It was quite extraordinary. And what was particularly annoying for somebody like me who always likes a reason for things, I'm logical, I like a if there's a good reason, fine, and there wasn't a reason. It put me into a fantastic tailspin and I'd had this kind of almost perfect career for 15 years... And I used to think as because of me, because I'm very determined, I work hard, I won't give up, and I used to take credit for it to some extent, and then I had ten years of complete disaster. Nothing that I did worked. I tried to set a radio station in 1992, that took a year. We raised four million pounds, we had a brilliant board, a hundred comedians signed up, radio authority wouldn't give us a licence. I got a job writing a film for Paramount, finished the first draft, and the head of Paramount threw it in the swimming pool because it was late and no movie. And it was just this went on, it got ridiculous, like one felt one was being shot at for something one hadn't done.
Presenter asks
32:03Do you look at your working life with a sense of achievement and contentment?
I do have a tremendous sense of contentment. It's been hard earned some of the time, but I can truthfully say I wake up every day and I say I'm so grateful to be alive, and I'm so grateful that I've still got things to say and to do, you know, and there's a lot more to do, I think.
“I passionately believe that nothing great is achieved without difficulty. Not exclusively true, but the Navajo have a proverb which is... Everything easy is evil, everything difficult is good. I sort of live by that really.”
“one of my little mantras is disaster is a gift. Because when you look back on your life, the disaster, you know, being sacked by your girlfriend or your head of department or best friend as a co-writer... You look back and you think, Thank goodness that happened because if I hadn't been sacked, I would still be there.”
“anyone who's been through the English public school system never really feels ill at ease in prison.”
“I got to Cambridge and I honestly thought that I had died and gone to heaven. I mean you just thought this is this can't be right. Everyone you meet is nice. There's no physical punishment. You can stay out till one o'clock in the morning and it's fine.”
“I just woke up one Christmas Eve and I thought, I can't see the point of anything at all... I used to sit under my desk crying for no reason.”