Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Comedy writer behind Black Adder, Mr. Bean, The Vicar of Dibley, and Four Weddings and a Funeral; also founded Comic Relief.
On the island
Eight records
It is the record I would most need on the Desert Island, um because the Beach Boys always make me happy. I remember when I got my A level results going upstairs on my own into a room with the envelope and putting this record on while I opened the record in case things turned out badly.
My dad had a small but very select record collection which had a lot of Rogers and Hammerstein records in it and I considered that a great gift because Rogers and Hammerstein were, as it were, the Beatles of the years before.
And I Love HerFavourite
the Beatles were were and have always been my greatest uh greatest passion.
I wrote a song when I was very young called Meaningless Songs in Very High Voices about the Bee Gees, which was uh a mistake. The title should have been Fantastic, Long Lasting Pop Songs by the greatest songwriting duo since Leonard and McCartney and I want to apologize now because I love the Bee Gees and all that they do and this is a song they wrote for Diana Ross.
we do sometimes have fun in rehearsals and you know you got it right when you start to laugh. And this is a record of Elaine May and Mike Nichols ... trying to rehearse a sketch about a mother and a son.
from my perfect parents to my perfect children I've had a life that's rolled easy and this song is a good reminder that for all people it is not always so.
I do feel as though um I've received my emotional education throughout my life from a series of extraordinary female singers ... and this is my latest obsession. She's a sort of country and western singer who is an angel.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:31Does it go further than just finding them funny, Richard? Isn't it also to do with their having to be of you, as it were, come from the heart?
Well, I do yes, I do leave my ideas to stew for years and years to find out whether or not they actually mean something to me. I remember once thinking of a fantastic idea for a film at a petrol station and writing it for the next eight weeks and printing it out and then throwing it away the next day because it actually was, you know, a clever thought, but it meant nothing to me.
Presenter asks
1:37What about the Vicar of Dibley, for example? Do you care a lot about the ordination of women?
I I felt very passionate about it for a while. ... I went to a wedding of some friends of mine and a woman was doing the service and it just seemed so right that a woman would be taking care of such a personal and intimate thing in your lives ... That I felt that it would be fantastic to have an image of a good female priest in front of the public so that all the foolish objections would evaporate.
Presenter asks
4:05Did you always know [Four Weddings and a Funeral] was going to be a success? Did you know when you wrote it, This is the one?
The keepsakes
The book
Guinness Book of British Hit Singles
Tim Rice
every day I could open it and be reminded of a pop song I'd forgotten. So I'd say, Oh, look, Love Grows Where Rosemary Goes, I'll sing that all day today and that would keep me keep me happy for ten years.
The luxury
I think I would take the um Pizza Express in Notting Hill. I could then have both rest you know, eat in and take away.
No, absolutely not. And nor did anyone else. Polygram, who released it in America, had on their schedule that it would make naught dollars in America because they had no confidence in it. And the director ... said please make sure they watch it again and that they're not buying a pig and a poke ... So no, it it took us all by surprise.
Presenter asks
14:03How did it work, writing [Blackadder] together [with Ben Elton]?
Well, we had for it's remained a solitary business. Um it was just when computers had been invented and we just swapped discs. I'd write an episode or he'd write a first episode and then we'd hand it to the other person and they'd rewrite it with the one single rule that we weren't allowed to reinsert any jokes of ours that the other person had cut.
Presenter asks
28:24What for you in terms of helping people has been the greatest achievement of Comic Relief?
there's not a single greatest achievement. We work in lots of important areas supporting lots of small projects. It's the fact that as we you know, when you read the newspapers and you read about something like child prostitution, you know that comic relief is part of that battle. And when the dreadful things happened in Miranda, you could be sure that comic relief would eventually be there doing something, which we are.
“you really are have to go on writing for your friends because if you don't think something's funny, then you'll never convince the public that they are.”
“I think that trying to write comedy is a bit like just trying to remember get yourself in the sort of mood you are in with your friends at the end of a dinner party, cheerful. And the only way I can artificially bolster myself is to put on uh happy pop music.”
“film is a very, very slow process and you are eventually stuck spending an entire day filming thirty-five seconds and then you have to edit those thirty-five seconds for you know five days and then you show it in front of an audience and so any weaknesses are eventually revealed because you go into such detail. You can't just get through it on the sort of swing of live performance.”