Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Actor best known for playing Uncle Monty in 'Withnail and I', Uncle Vernon in 'Harry Potter', and the English master in 'The History Boys'.
On the island
Eight records
I I was um sort of unemployed teenager when I first heard this, the Beatles, Please Please Me and though I say so myself, I had a sense from the second I heard it, this was a whole new thing.
This is just a a song written by a great friend of mine who I I first met in seventy six. Dear Lord, I've known this man for nearly thirty years. And I think it's a marvellous song. And I I just, you know, I just like more and more people to hear it,'cause I I adore it.
Vltava (The Moldau) from Má vlast
I'd never heard, you understand, any classical music whatsoever. And a massive number of musicians came out and I said, Who who's this like? I can't even pronounce it. You do German, you you read it And I was doing German and I said, Oh yes they're called the Leipzig German Haus Orchestra. Oh well, let's see what they're up to. And they came out with this.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048: III. Allegro
I bought this disc for 99p and I put the r this record on, and then I heard this extraordinary piece from one of the Brandenburg concertos. And. It's w it's it's just one of the most delightful moments of my entire life.
One of the best friends I had there was Ian Charlson, who, alas, died on twelfth night, nineteen ninety. He was about forty. AIDS swept him off, and God help us, it was a terrible thing to behold. And I bitterly regret the fact that we weren't allowed to see him have another three or four years for him to stun the world with some fantastic performance power. But uh here is a piece uh of natural gold from somebody who was the real deal.
In that amazing decade at the RSC, I just think things were good, life was good, it was a great time to be alive. And London suddenly turned into a sophisticated chic capital city. And in that glorious summer time, you could be stuck in traffic in London, as I was once in my brand new MGB DT. It was mid-blue and it had a great sound system. And I'm sitting at the Maryburn Road underpass, and this came on the air.
This piece of music is from the card scene, which was largely one of the the only bit of the film that was improvised. Uh in the background is the scratchy recording on a wind-up record uh machine of the glorious Al Boli and the stars fell down one into the other.
TräumereiFavourite
And I'd not wept unlike the 2,000 people in the audience who'd sat in floods of tears through the whole extraordinary beautiful concert. I'd been unmoved by that until this point in the concert when he played this encore, which was Schumann's Treumerai. And it's a piece of limpet majesty in your ears, and it will take you back to your childhood. And if it doesn't break your heart, well, then I'm sorry, I can't help.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:30Which one [of your famous roles] offers you greatest recognition when people see you in the street?
Amongst the kids it has to be Uncle Vernon.
Presenter asks
10:29How could two people who didn't have any language argue?
Oh, that that's pretty scary. I mean, when they sort of lost the plot with each other and then it was just very big raw noises and and they would end up sort of mm pounding at each other, you know, and it was just With him he he wasn't hitting her, he was keeping her he was trying to stop her and she was the one who was throwing herself at him, she was the one who would lose her temper.
Presenter asks
22:38What do you think [the sun lamp treatment] did to you?
Well, I just I just think it interfered with my system in such a way that I've been I've al from the age of nine I've had a problem with um excessive weight.
The keepsakes
The luxury
The original Velasquez painting of Las Meninas
I would sit there and just look at this exquisite, devastating piece of painterly invention.
Presenter asks
What does [stepping out of character to tell the audience off about mobile phones] do to you as an actor on the stage and to your fellow actors?
It it not really it destroys concentration, it just breaks it and and ruins the whole thing. And it's a massive undertaking putting a play on, so it's it's you know, if the audience is not going to respect any of that, I I I don't see any any possibility of going forward.
“I'm sort of hostile to this thing of trying to make it real. It's not.”
“I think it it's almost nothing to do with education, to my mind. It is entirely to do with love. And he says on two or three occasions in the play, he has one or other of the characters saying, Love apart. It's the only education worth having. That's what teaches you about yourself. That's what teaches you about loyalty, about truth, about falsehood, about treachery.”
“I never knew it was only after he died that pals of his would come up and say, Do you know, he used to be so chuffed when you were on the telly. He'd come in and tell everybody in the pup and say, That's my son up there and oh, it burned me because I I I I just wish he'd have let me know that he was pleased with something I'd done, um, instead of being a disappointment to him as I often was.”