Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Actor and activist, best known for playing Clarissa Mullery in Silent Witness and winning an Olivier Award for The Normal Heart.
On the island
Eight records
it reminds me of a lot of family parties. Piano in the house. Always playing. My dad played the piano. He would play this, absolutely. But I used to sing it. You had to have a party piece. Plus I just think the film is fantastic. And I played The Cowardly Lion years ago. At school, in infant school. I think I was about six.
a song about my parents, really, very connected with them. … it's their song because I mentioned about big family do's. So when my mum met my dad … she couldn't put it off any more. So my dad said, Look, let's go into the front room where the piano is, of course, and you just sing for me. So we started to play Beautiful Dreamer and she's like, Beautiful Dreamer! … And my dad apparently just closed the piano lid. And stood up. and said, This will never be discussed again.
Sit DownFavourite
If anything, I want to just take James with me, the band, because they have been the band that's followed me as an adult. So when I go to uni, I really discover myself. It's 1990, it's indie, I loved it. … I learnt how to be free, I think, and sit down, felt like a protest song.
When I was nineteen. I got very, very involved in what's known as the disabled people's movement. … We have a three day action in Nottingham, partly against the MP Ken Clark … After the second night of protest we have a cabaret. And this song was sung by Ian and Caro Parker is a deaf woman who does sign song and I can't hear it without being present that night and … At the end of the song, Imagine just on and on and on, the words proud, angry and strong. … It was a real homecoming and a real sense of community and power and pride.
Lots of reasons, but a big reason is. It's the year that I meet my wife, Jo. And a bunch of us, we are gonna see what happens when wheelchair using women want to learn how to strip and do burlesque. And my act began with me dressed in kind of office wear. to playing to nine to five. … Nine to five makes me think of that summer and whipping the clothes off.
It's from The Sound of Music. And it's a song that It's Me and Joe, my wife.
I believe that Palliative Clare is one of my favourite songs. I would say that because I wrote it. In musical theatre, when you can't speak anymore, your emotions are so heightened, you've got so much you want to say, you're so desperate and urgent and all those things, you take to song. … This was my attempt to make over palliative care.
It was the song that opened the normal heart. So when I hear it, I absolutely feel the nerves inside me and then I feel the joy. … The best thing I have ever done. It's changed my life. I felt like I belonged. … So every time I hear I feel love, it fills me with terror, nervous anxiety and joy. Much like life.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:02You've got so many strings to your voice, stand up comedy, TV, film, theatre — to which discipline is closest to your heart? And do you get the urge to scratch the opposite creative itch if you've been in one lane for too long?
I think partly I have done so many things because I think I'm in an industry where they don't really know what to do with disabled people. … The rehearsal for theatre is a proper in-depth working with other people, creating a character. … And then I'm also a massive show-off and exhibitionist. So going out in front of an audience and getting that feedback, I mean, it's devastating when it's not the feedback that you want, but you can play the same role, tell the same jokes, whatever it is, and get such a different reaction each night. But the buzz, the high when you realize that you're communicating with people. And they're hearing you, and they're either finding you funny, or they're touched, or they're enlightened, or they're entertained. When you make that connection. I think that it's there's nothing like it.
Presenter asks
3:39What's the dream part?
The dream part doesn't yet exist because there's such a lack of imagination around disability as well. That usually the things that we are cast in are autobiographical because they have happened, so we don't have to imagine them. I would like to open a script and go, Oh my god, this is amazing. This is better than I could think of. This is not something I've seen before. And of course, I do want to be a bond villain.
The keepsakes
The book
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The book I'm gonna choose to take is kind of considered a children's book, The Little Prince. He ends up in the desert and talks about all the different kind of worlds that he's visited. When I read it, the first thing that grasped from it was that, you know, it's only with the heart that you really see. You don't see with your eyes properly, you know, through love and through feelings. That's how you make connections with people.
The luxury
Because I am going to put them on. Click my heels together three times, say there's no place like home, and just as in The Wizard of Oz, hopefully get back to my wife and my cats.
Presenter asks
5:13Do you remember the kind of love and appreciation of the crowd [when you played the Cowardly Lion at school]? Were you hooked back then?
I was hooked, but I was also filled with envy because my best friend at the time, Helen, she got to play Dorothy.
Presenter asks
11:34Going back to when you were a little girl, I know that you've said that you were told then, when you were very small, that you weren't going to live very long. I mean, I can't imagine what it's like to hear that as a child.
So I was in my early teens and I used to be a patient of a very fearful doctor. … We don't know. But you won't live to be old. … How it affected me is every night before I went to bed, when my mum was tucking me up, I'd go, will I die tonight? And she'd say no. And I'd go, yeah, but you don't know that. I need realism. And when you're told that by a doctor. And of course we believe doctors. And now to this day, I don't think there's a day goes by when I don't think about that. I have huge anxiety a lot of the time. But I have lived so far with that. I've got to do it now because who knows.
Presenter asks
13:51You got your first power chair when you were eighteen, in the school sixth form. What difference did that make to you and how did you feel about it at the time?
When you think about what not having a power chair means, it shocks me and it was my life. So it means I can't get from A to B. … In the end, I have a manual chair that I can't self-propel. I had a gang of friends by then, and I say gang, that suggests we're really cool. We were like the oddbods from school, really wonderful, wonderful friends. They were horrified that I didn't have a wheelchair. … They were raising money for me, the entire school. … And they wheel in a chair. And I was thrilled and Mortified in equal measure. … My friends, the whole school was doing this because of the injustice. But I now felt really different. I was the object of charity. But that's confusing and I feel different and I don't really want to feel that. And the local paper, again, the Wirral Globe, wanted to do the story. And all they wanted was to talk about me and what was wrong with me. And all I wanted to do was to talk about what my friends had done and the whole school, which was amazing.
Presenter asks
26:22Alongside your happy personal life and your very successful career as an actor, you've also been a campaigner and one of your campaigns is against attempts to introduce an assisted dying bill in Parliament. … It is a hugely controversial debate and definitely not an easy thing to campaign on. What made you want to put your head above the parapet in the way that you have?
I felt I had no choice. There's a whole group of us called Not Dead Yet who are disabled people who I think believe there's such a fine line between illness and disability that often we feel very much as stakeholders. … And often I might be accused, well, why don't you want my loved one to have this opportunity? And I'm kind of, I actually want everyone to have a good end of life. I have concerns that once we introduce assisted suicide, that things will change, that it changes our NHS, it changes our relationship with the medical profession. … A lot of people when they become ill or disabled, and I completely understand this, feel like their burdens feel hopeless. … I don't even know how many years it took me to be okay with being who I am. … On the night that I met Joe … a homeless woman … comes up to me, and she puts a pound coin on the arm of my chair. … a woman with no home, in a beautiful act of generosity, thinks I'm more needy than her. … So I kind of feel that while we have such an inequality, we have an inequality in how we view certain lives, we have an inequality in healthcare and provision. We don't support people. We don't have enough palliative care. that I think I will keep speaking out.
“And of course, I do want to be a bond villain. I say that.”
“I remember crying my eyes out and not wanting to go. But then we had this new adventure. Children that, you know. They bounce back, resilient.”
“Ask me the right questions and I'm a fairly interesting person.”
“How it affected me is every night before I went to bed, when my mum was tucking me up, I'd go, will I die tonight? And she'd say no. And I'd go, yeah, but you don't know that.”
“It was a real homecoming and a real sense of community and power and pride.”
“The best thing I have ever done. It's changed my life. I felt like I belonged. I really did. I was coming up to 50 and I didn't feel like I didn't deserve to be there. I felt absolutely that it was the right time and I was the right person. So I had the time of my life.”