Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Actress best known for playing Nana in The Royal Family, a career-defining role as an idiosyncratic old bat that won a British Comedy Award.
On the island
Eight records
This is what I used to play on the grammar phone when I was waiting for the um postman to come up the ... Front pas ... with my father's letter which never came, yes.
Diving in big uh aircraft hangars. That was our main source of uh enjoyment really, having the dancers.
I think one of the most beautiful. Pieces of music that blended in with the night, that blended in with the big moon and the smell of the jasmine and And romance was Jerusalem.
This is the wind up grammar phone and the old records I bought from the jumble sales.'Cause I think uh on a Desert Island, you see, it'd be very nice not only to hear singing voices, but to hear uh speech. And here is um a voice of speech that I like very much, and it's so English.
I remember I was projected. Into the audience. By a piece of music, and I found it so thrilling that it inspired me. Even as I was speaking. It's just one long stream of Beautiful music.
A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture
This takes me back to my l student days in the Little Theatre in Westbourne Grove and when I went as a student and I was doing a um stage management and I was dragging a curtain made of red felt up and down ... And I had to drop the uh needle onto on to the uh music at precise moment, and I never got it quite on the right moment.
Grandad's choice of Peter Dawson singing one of his lovely songs.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:37If you're a method actor, is dying on screen a traumatic process?
Uh well, it is, but then it's been a long life and You kind of see it coming.
Presenter asks
4:41Do you have any memories of your mother?
N no, but I'm very conscious of her. I I've haven't wanted to let her go, you see, because I felt uh very often uh uh she was all I had to lean on and and I have done.
Presenter asks
6:53What happened to your father?
And then then he he just came uh to me outside Sunday school and he s and he said to me, um, I'm going away, kid. I I'll uh write and I said, All right, Daddy and that was the last thing I ever saw of him. I wait for the postman to bring me a letter from him. And um I wa waited in this window with this grammophone waiting for him for years. Anyway, the the letter never came.
Presenter asks
21:04How did you manage for money [after your husband left]?
The keepsakes
The book
I'd go through it and choose something different every day to order as soon as I got back.
The luxury
I've neglected my painting. Dreadfully, for years and years. I'd like everything paints, pencils, paper, everything.
very, very badly, uh had very very small amount of money. I did all kinds of um Awful jobs I was a a postman. And uh I worked in a plastic bag factory looking for holes in plastic bags.
Presenter asks
26:44How much did the public recognition of winning a BAFTA mean to you?
Everything. Well, after all those years of just being rejected and the poverty and uh you know, scratching around for threatens It was just simply wonderful, wonderful.
Presenter asks
30:35Did you have a profound belief in your own talent?
Yes. I I did. That's what drove me on. It really drove me on. All I wanted was the chance, and if the chance I'd got the thumbs down, I think I'd have accepted it. But I didn't get the thumbs down.
“I think I've had to be a little bit batty in order to stay sane. And and manage,'cause uh life's knocked me around, and uh if I wasn't a little bit batty, I couldn't cope.”
“The laughter was so wonderful, I thought, This is what I want to do all my life. And that fixed it, really. To go out and play to people, and there was all the light and laughter. That was wonderful.”
“I never went back to Grotty jobs again and I I was aware that after all that time this was the magic thing that I was waiting for happen.”