Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An actress best known for Sheila Grant in Brookside and winning a best comedy actress award for The Royle Family.
On the island
Eight records
Dinah Washington & Brook Benton
I'm not clear when this actual recording crept into my life. I feel it's always been there. I remember I did used to play it on the piano when I was young, so that my mother could sing it or I could sing it, and nobody wanted to listen to us, but we rather enjoyed it. And I just find it the most beautiful and touching record.
Well, this is my teenage years because I'd always loved music like Love Walked In, romantic stuff, and then suddenly along came this Eddie Cochrane man, and I sort of woke up a little.
You'll Never Walk AloneFavourite
When you want through a storm. Hold your hand the pie. And uh Jerry and the Pacemakers and You'll Never Walk Alone and memories for your island, Sue Johnston, of singing and swaying with the scarves on the cops. You're a passionate Liverpool sporty, yes. Passionate, yes. Was that your dad's influence? That was my dad's influence, yes.
Well, it obviously has to be a Beatles, and it had to be Twist and Shout because. I was there the very first day they performed it, and John Lennon came on stage and said We've got a new tune. And they played Twist and Shout and we erupted.
Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra
Well this I discovered I was on tour, I think I was in my early twenties. It was the first job I had from drama school and I stayed at a friend's flat in Cambridge and they had this record and I'd never heard it before and I played it and it just bowled me over and has done ever since.
Well talking about my son, this is Paul Simons, you can call me Al. We've often gone to Italy together and my memory is of us driving through the Italian countryside with this blaring out on the cassette and the joy of finding that now he's grown up, he's got his own copy because he loves it too.
This makes me want to cry and it makes me want to laugh. It's just a very special record with no. It doesn't really make me it doesn't really belong to any era or any part of my life, it'll just always be in it.
Well, my last but by no means least record is Bob Dylan, and Bob Dylan was such an influence in my young student life. I still have Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll as one of my favourite poems. But I wanted to take something of his that was later. I just had to have something of his that would make I know all the words to those others, and this one, it's not just the words, it's just the way he sings it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:04What is it that makes you love acting so much?
I think it's a lot to do with losing yourself, becoming somebody else. I find it maybe a bit like being a psychologist in that you have to dive into characters and find them out.
Presenter asks
1:04I wonder you've not been traumatised by this endless run of grim characterisations [like Sheila Grant and others]?
I've never been traumatized by it, and you know why? I think it's because it's like drama therapy. If I had something on Brookside to do, like I remember when I did the rape stuff, and it was pretty harrowing to do, and I had once been attacked, so to relive that was quite frightening, and I didn't quite know how I'd behave. But in pouring it out, I suddenly felt relaxed about it. I always come away singing.
Presenter asks
2:47Did Caroline Aherne ever say to you, 'Look, do you mind being so desperately unglamorous' [as Barbara Royle]?
No, not she never said that. In fact, she said to me once, You've no vanity, have you? And I thought, ooh, now is that a good thing or a bad thing? My mother would say it was a bad thing, but I actually think for an actress it's a very good thing. That's what's necessary for Barbara.
The keepsakes
The book
Peter Ackroyd
Because I love Dickens so much, I've had this book for seven years and I dip in and out of it, but I've never had the time to sit and read it, and time is what I'm going to have a lot of.
The luxury
because I feel it would be the greatest treat whenever I was lying on this desert island feeling sad and homesick, I would listen to their Friday night road reports about traffic on the M one and the M six, which I'm usually stuck in, and think, Hey, life ain't so bad here on this island.
Presenter asks
5:27What do you mean by saying that The Royle Family is one of the most disciplined shows you've worked on?
It may look as if we make it up on the spot and giggle a lot, but in fact it's extremely carefully written and Caroline is very strict. Carolina Hearn is very strict about us knowing those lines, those pauses, those oohs. They're all written in those scripts.
Presenter asks
7:02How difficult was it to get that way of doing [The Royle Family] accepted by the people who were going to produce it?
It was extremely difficult. She was trying to fight desperately to have it done. ... she was having to convince them, because it was comedy, that you didn't need a set, you know, you didn't need the multi-camera shoot and the audience. ... She wanted it to be just enclosed in that room. Very intimate.
Presenter asks
23:10How big a decision, therefore, in the end, was it to quit [Brookside]?
huge. I think it almost made me feel Ill. That sounds very dramatic, but I the stress and the worry of whether I was doing the right thing. ... I felt guilty because Joel was eleven. and I thought I might I might never work again, but I just knew in my heart I had to go.
“I've never been traumatized by it, and you know why? I think it's because it's like drama therapy.”
“Working on Barbara, doing Barbara, is probably the realest thing I've ever done. You don't play her for comedy, don't play her for laughs. She has to be totally truthful and totally on the ball.”
“There's nothing nicer than curling up on the sofa with the people you love best, I think.”