Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Actor, writer and director, best known for stage hit Another Country, Hollywood film My Best Friend's Wedding, and his Oscar Wilde passion project The Happy Pri
On the island
Eight records
favourite song from my disco youth and theme tune of my film about disco in 1970s Paris. I see Rudolf Nureyev dancing to it, we dance, then I get a sniff of poppers and the world explodes.
Billie Holiday is a very important character to me. Lady Sings the Blues with Diana Ross turned my head as a teenager. This is one of her last recordings when she's a wreck and you can feel the pain.
Feed the Birds (Tuppence a Bag)
Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman
This is a song from Mary Poppins. The first film I ever saw, it completely turned my life upside down.
One of my favourite songs. It reminds me of coming to London when it was falling to pieces. An extraordinary place full of bedsits.
Being BoringFavourite
Pet Shop Boys are my household gods. When my film The Happy Prince went to Berlin, Neil and Chris came at nine in the morning and their accolades were more important than anyone else's.
Antônio Carlos Jobim and Newton Mendonça
A Joe Beam song. George Michael did an extraordinary version too.
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan
A piece I used in The Happy Prince when Oscar Wilde tells two little street boys he's going to die. Very ghostly and beautiful.
I came home demoralised from a job and saw Stormzy at Glastonbury. It made me feel better about things.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:35How do you look back on those lean periods [in your career]?
The lean periods for most people in my business are the ones where you are forced to work harder. I think life is a struggle, and it's rather like being a kind of blade of grass growing between concrete slabs. And sometimes when you get lucky and you throw double sixes, it's difficult to not get lazy. And when you do go back to the bottom of the snake, you really have to try harder.
Presenter asks
5:28You came out in the mid-1980s. You later said that your honesty was detrimental to your career. Why was that?
I didn't really have a motivation. I just loved going out. Really being part of the gay scene, I suppose, more in a way than trying to carve out a place for myself in show business. I loved that whole culture. I couldn't live in that world and pretend I was something else. It just wouldn't have worked apart from anything else. And living a lie or trying to be dishonest. I'm not against it if that's the way you want to live your life, but it's quite difficult. And for me, that just wasn't the trip I wanted to go on, really.
Presenter asks
13:27You were just seven when you were sent away to boarding school. How did you cope with it?
It's a kind of heartbreaking experience that you never quite recover from. I think these schools were made for empire because they calcified the hearts of the empire rulers. They would never be as hurt again as they were hurt by the abandonment of their parents. It changed you. … It cauterises some emotional thing.
The keepsakes
The book
Graham Greene
Well, certainly not the Bible. I've had enough of it. I've had it up to there. I would take my favourite book, which is Travels with My Aunt by Graeme Greene. It's just works as my favourite book about the 60s, and I love Graeme Greene.
The luxury
I'm not really mad on luxury items much. I'd have uh some decent vegetables. Any particular ones that we can um courgettes, maybe, or cabbages. I think we can do cabbages. I mean, it's luxury score. Peas, I love peas. Peas and cabbages, yeah, right. You know, consider it done. And corn.
Presenter asks
18:27You were living this life [of gay nightlife] while also studying at drama school, and after a while there you were asked to leave because of insubordination. What did you do?
Well, I don't know. Looking back on things, I feel that I was a terrible show-off. I was probably distracting to everybody. That was really my all-time low, because once you're chucked out of drama school, it doesn't feel like there's anywhere you can go. And that's where probably I benefited from a kind of rationing blitz background because I managed to get into my first theatre after that, which was the Citizens in Glasgow, which was the one I'd always wanted to go to.
Presenter asks
22:47You'd had your reservations about [The Next Best Thing] but you'd been talked round and persuaded to take it on. When did you realise that it wasn't coming together as you'd hoped?
Everything went wrong right from the beginning. I was rewriting the script with a friend of mine and we came over to see John Schlesinger, who was going to direct the film, who was an old friend of mine. And so it was very exciting. But when we were pitching to him what we were going to write, He fell asleep.
Presenter asks
26:42It took a decade to get ['The Happy Prince'] made. What kept you going through that time?
Desperation mostly and blindness, never quite knowing how bad the situation was. And also when things did get very bad, then something good would happen. The show business is run on enthusiasm. We're very enthusiastic. If one little tiny thing happens, you think, oh there, that's a sign. I've got to keep going.
“I think life is a struggle, and it's rather like being a kind of blade of grass growing between concrete slabs.”
“I didn't really have a motivation. I just loved going out. Really being part of the gay scene, I suppose, more in a way than trying to carve out a place for myself in show business. I loved that whole culture. I couldn't live in that world and pretend I was something else.”
“It's a kind of heartbreaking experience that you never quite recover from. I think these schools were made for empire because they calcified the hearts of the empire rulers. They would never be as hurt again as they were hurt by the abandonment of their parents.”
“Oscar Wilde is the beginning of the road to gay liberation. And he was the first person that you could look at on the street and say, that is a gay man.”
“I would take my favourite book, which is Travels with My Aunt by Graeme Greene. It's just works as my favourite book about the 60s, and I love Graeme Greene.”
“The Pet Shop Boys. Because they would make me feel that I was me.”