Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Comedian and actor who rose to fame at the Edinburgh Festival, best known for Not the Nine O'Clock News and Black Adder.
On the island
Eight records
I just remember one particular occasion testing the sound system in the Memorial Hall with this record, which was uh very, very current and very popular at the time, which is Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin.
MiserereFavourite
King's College Choir, Cambridge
And this is The Miserary by Allegri, sung by the King's College Choir from Cambridge, and it is just the most fabulous and moving piece.
Before my finals exams at Oxford University, every night for some reason I had this kind of tradition that I would play this next record just before I went to bed. Why, I don't know. It was just I j I I just found it inspiring and restful and kind of flushed out of me all the all the all the academic thoughts and all the revision that I'd been cramming my head with during the day so that at least I could sleep.
Still Crazy After All These Years
This reminds me very much of my time at Oxford and of the first steps into review and sketch writing, and is devoted really to the person with whom I've worked most, Richard Curtis, and he was infatuated with two singers at the time. One was Linda Ronstadt and the other was Paul Simon.
This is a singer that I discovered relatively late on when I was starting to live in London at the end of the seventies. And it's L. Fitzgerald, and I discovered two records of hers, the Cole Porter song book and the Rogers and Hart song book, and I'm afraid it's another very, very sad song, which is I believe is about a woman who's been hanged, but I'm not sure. It's called Miss Otis Regrets.
Nocturne in C sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 1
I would dearly, dearly love to play the piano. I would like to play like anyone who can play Chopin really well.
About a year and a half ago I bought an album by a contemporary rock band called Simply Red. And on it I discovered this extraordinary version of Cole Porter's Every Time We Say Goodbye, which for all those who believe that contemporary rock vocalists have not the skill or the emotion to sing like they used to in the old days, I think this is a song and a track which should dispel any of those thoughts.
This reminds me of my first date with my girlfriend and we went to see Diastraites at Wembley Arena. And I think Mark Knopfler is a tremendously good writer of music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:19Do you fear that you will wake up one morning and simply not be funny anymore?
Well, f five or six five or six years ago I think I did used to fear that. But increasingly I don't. Ma maybe I'm mad. I mean maybe my my optimism is totally unjustified. But increasingly I suppose I've I've come to realize that perhaps I can do it and can do things.
Presenter asks
3:50Your public school headmaster said you were the most bloody-minded boy he'd ever met. Was that fair comment, do you think?
It was an extraordinary comment, wasn't it? I mean, when I look back and how basically conventional a bloke I feel as though I am, but for some reason I I had a fairly traumatic time at school, certainly in the last two years, I suppose when I was going through my rebellious period.
Presenter asks
5:34What does your mother now think of you? Having brought you up to be a proper chap with a good solid education, now she's got a chap who makes his money out of making funny faces and saying naughty words on the telly.
I think she'd prefer not to hear the naughty words, and she'd probably prefer me not to pull too many faces. But she, like a lot of parents, I suppose, was quite concerned about show business as a career, and imagined it to be peopled by a lot of, you know, rather plump people with those moustaches that droop round the side of their mouths and huge purple velvet bow ties who hand you grubby fibers at stage doors.
The keepsakes
The book
P. G. Wodehouse
I think I'd have to take a funny book in an attempt to offset the sadness that the music will will bring me. I'm not very well read at all. I I'm a terribly bad reader of books. It's really only on holiday that I get the John Le Carrie out. And if it's not John Le Carrey, then it tends to be P G Woodhouse, because he makes me laugh more more than anyone else in print. And it would probably be the first book that I ever read of his, which I found in the school library at the age of sixteen, and it was called Uncle Fred in the Springtime.
The luxury
I've decided to take a car. And it doesn't really matter what sort of car it is, but it should be a nice one, and therefore I think it should be an Aston Martin. And all I want to do to it really is clean it, so it can be locked up, and so I can't use it to sleep in it, and no petrol, and w we presume no roads to drive it on. But I could build a a little bamboo car port. And as long as with the car came A plentiful supply of car wax, and a plentiful supply of those of those little orange dusters with red sewn edges that you find in all good hardware stores. Then I would just occasionally clean it and look at it.
Presenter asks
8:16At what point did you know you would never use your [engineering] degree?
It was about a year later, because I started off at Newcastle University, and then I went on to Oxford to do research. And I suppose it was a year into Oxford that I'd started to take all the review sketchwriting, sketch performing very seriously. And it was in the summer of that year, having met up with a very dear friend of mine, Richard Curtis, who since that time has written or co-written virtually everything I've ever done, and to whom I'm very, very much indebted. And he and I did a review in the summer of 1976, at which I got my first review in the local paper in the Oxford Mail. And it was a very flattering review indeed. And it was at that point that I decided to at least give it a try.
Presenter asks
22:35Fame, as you've described, came upon you really rather suddenly. A lot has been said about your having had too much too fast. Do you feel that?
Well, I did feel it in that it's something that I was very worried about at first, that I would just be a flash in the pan and and would disappear. But I to a certain extent I've I've come to live with it. It's sometimes extremely difficult if fame gets in the way when things are going wrong, it's always that moment when you've just missed the train and somebody comes up and starts to pester you, or when your car's broken down, or you get to the cash till at the motorway services and you haven't got any money and you've left it in the car.
Presenter asks
26:19What do you want them to say when they say 'Rowan Atkinson' — do you want them to say 'Black Adder'?
Well, for the time being, they tend to say it. So I'm perfectly happy with that. … I enjoyed the time at Not the Nine O'Clock News because it gives you such an opportunity to explore a range. I mean every week you can play five or six different characters and you don't feel remotely typecast and people know you as Rowan Atkinson rather than as Mr. Black Adder.
“I feel now that I've only attempted about 40% of what I feel as though I could do. I'm not saying I will ever get the opportunities to explore the other 60%, but that's what I j I genuinely feel.”
“Someone asked if I'd do something in a one night review at the Oxford Playhouse, and I had to think of something, and I'd never written anything at that stage and so I just started sort of improvising in front of a mirror and suddenly these peculiar creatures started to characterize and to form in front of me.”
“It was in the summer of that year, having met up with a very dear friend of mine, Richard Curtis, who since that time has written or co-written virtually everything I've ever done, and to whom I'm very, very much indebted.”
“If you are a character actor, which to a certain extent I hope I am, then of course most character parts are not set in your twenties, they're set in in in your forties or in your fifties. And they are the sort of parts that hopefully will become increasingly easy to cast me in.”
“If it reminds you of your past, even if it's saddening or makes you cry, I think if it reminds you of your friends, then I think it'll stop you killing yourself.”