Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (28 page)

I chose
1984
though, because it’s a literary classic and contains pertinent
warnings for us all as we move towards the future. There are so many words and
phrases in it too, which have become part of our everyday language, such as
‘Thought Police’ and ‘Big Brother’. The novel tells the story of the hapless
civil servant Winston Smith as he attempts to fight the power of the all-seeing
Big Brother and gain some individuality and freedom. One very telling piece in
it describes the newspapers that are read by the ‘proles’ — the amorphous group
of so-called ‘lowlifes’ who scrabble around on the fringes of society poor and
under-educated. These papers are more like comics and take the minds of the
proles off anything more important that may be going on. Weirdly, apparently
when the
Daily Mail
serialised
1984,
they left out this bit.

I
championed
1984
in one of those BBC
The Nation’s Favourite-type
shows,
and I think
1984
came third or fourth. I made a programme about it and
we did much of the filming in a disused tube station near Green Park in Central
London. God, it was terrifying being that far underground in the dark with
cobwebs and dust. I was pleased to get back up and breathe the air, even
London’s dirty polluted sort.

The
infamous Room 101 came out of Orwell’s time at the BBC, and we managed to visit
it halfway through its demolition and redecoration. No rats there though,
thankfully.

The Children of
Dynmouth
by William Trevor

William Trevor is a lovely
Irish writer whose writing I find easy to read and quirky
The Children of
Dynmouth
is an arresting novel about a very strange, rather disturbed teenage
boy who lives in a typical, sleepy Dorset seaside town whose occupants are
seemingly content and unsullied by scandal. Our anti-hero Timothy Gedge decides
he wants to win a prize in the tableau competition at the church fete, so
having decided he is going to portray the Brides in the Bath murders, he sets
about gathering the various bits and pieces he will need to achieve this aim.
As he has no money he needs to beg, steal or borrow a bath and a wedding dress
among other things. He does this through a series of encounters with the town’s
occupants, in which he uses information about them to persuade them to cough up
the goods, and in so doing pruriently uncovers the seedier side of the
so-called respectable town-dwellers’ lives.

I have
always thought that beneath the veneer of respectability of some of our more
picturesque areas lurk many unsavoury stories waiting to be told, and in this
novel, elderly spinsters and old colonels alike are shown to be hiding secrets
they would rather not reveal. Don’t read this if you are posh and
well-respected and hiding an unpleasant secret, as this will only depress you.

It has to be said,
spare-time-wise, I have pretty undemanding hobbies. Books, films and theatre
are my big pleasures, and over the years I have spent many happy hours sat in
cinemas in the dark crying, laughing and stuffing very unhealthy food down my
gullet … bliss. Here are my favourite films.

Local Hero

This Bill Forsyth film is
an absolute joy with a cracking soundtrack by Mark Knopfler. It tells the story
of an oil company executive visiting a beautiful coastal village in Scotland to
try and persuade the villagers to allow their unspoiled region to be used for a
new oil plant. They are offered huge sums of money and are all keen, apart from
one old geezer who has lived on the beach itself for years.

This is
a perfect film for me as I remain anti-American to my core: their aggressive
brand of expansionism and the ruining of the beauty of many natural areas has
often pissed me off over the years. Eventually in the film, the boss Burt
Lancaster comes over to try and persuade the old man to cave in and we are
treated to an array of wonderful comedy characters played by actors including Denis
Lawson and Peter Capaldi.

Many
years after I first saw the film I met Peter Capaldi at a ‘do’ at the London
Studios and got the opportunity to tell him how great I thought he was. I never
find it easy to do this as it always sounds so wanky. However, we eventually
got to work together on
Getting On
as he directed it, and it was a real
pleasure to spend time with the comedy genius who plays one of my favourite
characters, Malcolm Tucker.

True Stories

True Stories
is a film made by David Byrne of Talking Heads, and it features him
as a cowboy-hatted stranger visiting a small town called Virgil in Texas which
is preparing for some celebrations for the 150th anniversary of its founding.
It was one of the very early roles for the magnificent John Goodman from
Roseanne,
who plays a lonely bachelor looking for love, and the film builds to his
performance of a song at the celebration. The film is an idiosyncratic visual
and musical feast, which completely confirms David Byrne’s genius. Every song
is memorable and it’s a very funny and touching film.

Cabaret

This is Liza Minnelli’s
finest moment, playing Sally Bowles, an American performer in Berlin in the
thirties, in the film based on the novel
Goodbye to Berlin
by
Christopher Isherwood. The songs are so evocative, and as a relationship
develops between her and a slightly staid English teacher played by Michael
York, we follow the progress of the rise of the Nazi Party whose increasing
threat and inexorable march towards power is not only reflected in the action
of the film, but also within the songs that Sally Bowles sings at the Kit Kat
Club, a down-at-heel cabaret filled with an array of unsavoury characters.

The
performance of Joel Grey as the maitre d’ is unforgettable, and I rewatch the
film every few years to soak up its genius. I remember once being in a car
going to a show out of town with Hattie Hayridge, and we were playing the
soundtrack in the car. When it got to the song ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ which
is sung in a chilling scene outside a country tavern and encourages, one by
one, a series of Aryan young men to stand up and pledge themselves to Nazism,
I’m afraid Hattie and I started doing Nazi salutes … much to the puzzlement
and dismay of the occupants of the car next to us at the traffic-lights.

A
couple of years ago, I went to see Julian Clary play the maitre d’ in the West
End. It was a great performance and I also got to see Julian’s bum, which is
not something huge numbers of women can say I’m sure.

Great Expectations

David Lean’s iconic version
of the Dickens novel was a big feature of my childhood, mainly because the
chilling opening scene in which Pip meets the criminal Magwitch in a graveyard
scared the shit out of me and stopped me sleeping for many nights. John Mills
is absolutely delightful as the grown-up Pip, and the images of the film have
stayed with me for many many years and fostered a love of Dickens’ novels that
I certainly didn’t have when I first saw it as a seven year old.

To Kill a
Mockingbird

Gregory Peck as Atticus
Finch, a lawyer representing a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama, is
my all-time favourite character. Considering most of the output of studios of
the time was unchallenging, morally bland stuff about lurve or adventure, this
film is a ground-breaker in so many ways and it opened the debate about racism
for many Americans whose shameful history needed to be explored.

All the
performances are amazing, from that of the little girl called Scout to the
accused Tom Robinson, and if you’re not a reader prepared to tackle the book,
at least see the film.

Terms of Endearment

Terms of Endearment
is in some ways one of the most slushy films of the last fifty
years, but it is also hugely funny as well, featuring an Oscar-winning
performance from Shirley MacLaine as the tight-arsed, snobbish mother of the
central character played by Debra Winger, who is dying of leukaemia; and Jack
Nicholson as a pissed, sardonic ex-astronaut. In parts it is heartbreaking and
in others hysterical as Shirley MacLaine’s dignity is endlessly compromised by
Jack. Makes you want to hunt down and marry a pissed ex-astronaut.

Riff Raff

Riff Raff,
directed by Ken Loach, is a film by that most unusual of creatures,
a film-maker with a political conscience. It’s set in London in the Thatcherite
era and tells the story of a group of builders converting a wrecked NHS
hospital into luxury flats. It stars Robert Carlyle, Ricky Tomlinson and Emer
McCourt and has a strong political message underlying the many unparalleled
comical scenes. The foreman is the best swearer in the business and equals
Malcolm Tucker in
The Thick of It
for his obscene rants about laziness.
I have a tenuous connection with Emer McCourt who played Robert Carlyle’s
girlfriend Susan, because she ended up directing
Human Traffic,
a film
in which I had a don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-me part. In fact, you did miss me,
because I was edited out of the final cut. No idea why assume I was shit, don’t
ever ask about those things.

Twin Town

I am a huge adolescent,
because there’s nothing I like better than relentless, creative swearing, and
you get massive amounts of it in this very funny Welsh film. Starring Rhys
Ifans, it tells the story of twin brothers attempting to get justice for their
father who has been injured in a work accident. There are drugs, local gangsters
and Welsh male voice choirs, a cameo by Keith Allen whose brother Kevin
directed it, and an hysterically funny scene with my very good mate Griffo
playing a prostitute. It’s bloody brilliant, and if you want to upset your
slightly uptight grandma, send her a DVD for Christmas.

One of the great joys of
living in London is the number of theatres that are on our doorstep. To be
honest, I don’t get out much, but I do try and make it to the theatre as often
as I can. First of all, it’s such a unique experience: no one show is the same
as another, and the actors are right there in front of you, sweating their bits
off to bring you a transcendental experience that I find stays with you much
longer than a film does. Also, there’s nothing quite as bad as bad theatre —
it’s really, really,
really
bad. But when it’s good it’s unbeatable.

Going
to the theatre should not be a posh/middle-class thing either, but should be
there for everyone. I know that prices are prohibitive, but when I was a nurse
I used to go because I would rather have seen one play than five films.

Plays
that have left me spellbound are:

Candide

Now who would have thought
that an eighteenth-century satire by Voltaire could have been turned into a
successful musical? Well, not me for a start-off, but I was persuaded to see it
because it had such stunning reviews, and it is an understatement to say that I
was not disappointed. Beautifully and imaginatively staged, it starred that
giant of the theatre Simon Russell Beale, whom you may never have heard of
because he so rarely gets his gob on the telly.