HERE’s YOUR CLASS

For a quarter of a century, I interviewed writers, directors, actors and comedians for newspaper and magazine articles. My first victim was the dramatist Christopher Hampton, my last the director Robert Altman. Among many others in between were Henry Fonda, Max Wall, Beryl Reid, Hal Prince, Trevor Griffiths, Paul Scofield, George Burns, Alan Simpson & Ray Galton, Edward Bond, Sue Pollard, Mervyn LeRoy, Stanley Baxter, Donald Sinden, Betty Marsden, Stephen Sondheim, Stephen Berkoff, Ursula Andress, Ken Dodd, Joel Grey and Patricia Routledge.

I learned one golden rule very quickly: that an interview is only as good as the interviewer, not the interviewee. Whether for print, screen or radio, a well-prepared, imaginative interviewer who listens can make the dullest subject – Cameron Diaz, say – come across as interesting. A cloth-eared, self-centred interviewer can disrupt the timing of even a Peter Ustinov.

The interview as a television form has been making something of a comeback, largely because it is one of the cheapest ways of filling a BBC hour or a commercial half-hour. Mark Lawson, who falls into the cloth-eared camp as far as I am concerned, gets regular hour-length slots to fill on BBC4 and, I guess, has a lot of say in whom he gets to interview even though, in recent times at least, his interviews have been apt to be slotted into themed runs: thus tonight his interview complements the opener of a short series on British sculpture. I might be more likely to watch if the programme were entitled Anthony Caro Talks to ... Mark Lawson but it follows the usual formula of Mark Lawson Talks to ... Anthony Caro and who the hell wants to watch that? But, having caught the end credits of a lot of his interviews while awaiting the start of something less irritating, I notice that he rarely enjoys the services of the same producer and/or director twice, so I cannot help wondering if this suggests that he is impossible to work with.

Mark Lawson Doesn't Listen to ...

Sky Arts have been bankrolling two interview series: In Confidence has Laurie Taylor quizzing a variety of accomplished individuals, mostly not from among the usual suspects; In Conversation has Derek Malcolm taking on a range of movie directors and actors. Taylor’s approach is the nearest in recent years to that of the granddaddy of serious cultural interview series, Hugh Burnett’s Face to Face, which was presented by John Freeman. Though it ran only from 1959 to 1962, that series still casts a long shadow, particularly among those who mourn the dumbing-down of television. The format was that the interview was broadcast live and hence uncut and the focus didn't leave the subject’s face (shown from two or three angles) – Freeman was never seen. The range of guests was huge, from Bertrand Russell to Danny Blanchflower, Hastings Banda to Cecil Beaton, Edith Sitwell to Nubar Gulbenkian, Carl Jung to Adam Faith. Of all the interviewees, only Bernardo Bertolucci and Albert Finney survive, but Freeman himself, splendidly, turns 96 this month.

The great John Freeman

The present granddaddy of interview series pretends to be a seminar. Inside the Actors Studio sits a professional before an audience (supposedly) of students of Pace University in New York (rather than the actual Actors Studio itself). The guest is interviewed according to a well-worked format by the dean of the Pace Actors School, James Lipton, and has been recorded for transmission since 1994 (a total of sixteen seasons). In Britain, the individual programmes are shown in any old order and have been shunted around the satellite, housed variously by the Biography Channel, Performance, Sky Arts and now Sky Atlantic (both the latter two channels screened the Hilary Swank edition last Sunday).

Episodes from the first three seasons, many of which did not get onto air at the time, can be considered as collectors’ items: Sondheim, Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Shelley Winters, Dennis Hopper, Arthur Penn, Carol Burnett, Christopher Walken, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Reeve. Mike Nichols. How enticing to be able to see those – why has no broadcaster snapped up the rights?

Le vrai Lipton at work

Of course, the sessions are cut to ribbons for transmission. The ellipses are very apparent, none more so than in the interview with Peter Falk. Every continuity person in the movies will tell you that the biggest headache for editing is cigarettes. Falk chain-smoked through his interview – you still could on public platforms in New York City in 1999 – and the respective lengths of his cigarettes shot back and forth like Roadrunner.

This being an American show, much time that could be accorded to matters of substance is wasted on applause, in particular the applause that denotes recognition (a much feted movie, say, or the name of a great star dropped). Naturally, the audiences are generally enthusistic, though poor Ellen Barkin could barely half-fill the hall. Other precious minutes are taken up by establishing the guest’s credentials. In his introduction, James Lipton always gives a comprehensive run-down of the award nominations that the guest has received, however fatuous they might seem, and then, as each movie comes up for discussion, reiterates the nominations that the particular performance has garnered. “All right, already” you shout at the screen, “it’s still a pretty crappy movie”. What’s more, Lipton modulates his welcome according to the awards. He is “proud” to welcome a guest who has never won an Oscar, “very proud” to welcome an Oscar-winner and “very, very proud” when it’s a two-time Oscar-winner (like Swank). But people who hand out awards are not the sole judges of merit. The arbitrary and destructive nature of awards (and of honours) may perhaps furnish the subject for another posting as the prize-giving season gets into its stride.

The main problem with Inside the Actors Studio is that it is such a missed opportunity. Talking seriously about the craft of film-making is a perfectly useful exercise. Several years ago, before Lipton cornered the market, my old pal Beth Porter and I took a notion to The Guardian when it was in the process of investigating how it should join the on-line market. Our proposal was to build a bank of formatted interviews with actors, all answering an identical, comprehensive list of questions, upon which television programmes could draw for illustrative material. Our title was Lights, Camera, Acting! We thought we had hit on a winner. We got to pitch it to a guy who looked like a school-leaver and whose surname, rather worryingly, was Murdoch. We never heard back from him.

Lipton is a really terrible interviewer. His self-regard is such that he can never resist telling his guests how much he and they have in common, from which continuous reinforcement of public detail the regular viewer knows well that Lipton comes from the mid-west, that his parents divorced when he was a child, that he shares a birthday with Jeremy Irons (how utterly fascinating, Jim), that he is the proud holder of a pilot’s licence and a regular horse-rider, that he would have a tattoo if his wife would only allow it, that he was spoofed by Will Ferrall on Saturday Night Live and is determinedly genial about it, that he once arranged a gala in London at which the guest of honour was the Duke of Edinburgh, that he has acted in and written soap operas, acted on Broadway and in Hollywood, written book and lyrics for a musical and produced television specials including for Bob Hope. He is also a Francophile and a proud Chevalier. And of course he is a teacher of drama and, though there is comparatively little talk about technique, at least until the students get to ask questions, he is always keen to signal that he knows or knew every acting teacher to be mentioned. One of the most legendary of all American acting teachers, Nina Foch, is perhaps known to the widest public for her role as the “older woman” chasing Gene Kelly in An American in Paris. Lipton was married to her for a few years in the 1950s.

The programme logo

Lipton is also a sucker for a party turn, especially a (snatch of) song or dance and, that arsehole of show business, an impersonation. “Oh god” he is apt to laugh suddenly, the kind of laugh that sounds utterly phoney. This stuff is mere playing to the gallery, nothing whatever to do with the study of acting or movie-making, but of course the guests love to be called upon to show off. Only Barbra Streisand, who anyway resisted the show’s invitation for a long time, made it clear that she wasn’t doing any singing from cold. Quite right too.

Before throwing it to the floor, Lipton ends with a questionnaire. He used to characterise this document as being “invented by Marcel Proust”, perhaps misled by the magazine Vanity Fair, which has long run its own variation on the exercise, calling it ‘The Proust Questionnaire’. Someone has evidently set Lipton right. In reality, Proust was the most famous person to have submitted himself to a similar questionnaire – on two occasions, the first as an adolescent – and to have given the most precocious and high-falutin answers.

Lipton always attributes the questions he employs to Bernard Pivot, smug in the knowledge that his (Lipton’s) audience will never encounter this person, though we did get to see him when Lipton and the production team took a trip to Paris to record interviews with Jeanne Moreau and Juliet Binoche. The French broadcaster is clearly as dopey as Lipton. The questions are:

– What is your favourite word?
– What is your least favourite word?
– What turns you on?
– What turns you off?
– What sound or noise do you love?
– What sound or noise do you hate?
– What is your favourite curse word?
– What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
– What profession would you not like to attempt?
– If heaven exists, what would you like to hear god say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

"The Great Bernard Pivot"

How can anyone have a favourite or a least favourite word? Virtually all Lipton’s victims cite an attractive or repellent concept – energy or truth or negativity and so on. Few offer a sequence of sounds they find especially euphonious or horrisonant – imbroglio, say, or montbretia or thew. My response to this question would be that I am a writer, all words are my friends, though those upon the spelling or exact nuance of which I forever trip are treacherous friends. Again, many things turn one on and off, many sounds likewise. Some guests are so keen to ingratiate that they give as a sound their children laughing or saying ‘Daddy’. Eeeuuuuwwww!

The curse is often bleeped for transmission, rather defeating the purpose. Anyone routinely deploying an expletive is anyway in danger of becoming a prize bore. As for professions, why would anyone working in a state of perpetual ego-massaging for millions of dollars on the world’s most envied racket think of another profession? Ah, but they want to be rock stars, write children’s books and give their names to wines and perfumes as well.

Finally, heaven doesn’t exist. Anyway (it’s hardly my place to correct the interpretation of other people’s superstitions, but) it isn’t god who greets you at the pearly gates: “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” Christ says to Peter [St Matthew’s Gospel 16:18-19]. I would want St Peter to say: “Don’t worry, there’s no questionnaire”. I never saw any form that made a fit with my circumstances or asked questions I cared to answer as framed; and questionnaires are the most perverse form of forms.

Over the years, it’s not to be wondered at that Lipton has become a parody of himself. Now (perhaps surprisingly) 84, he may be the only man on television whose hair and beard are dyed different colours. He clings to his prompt cards as to a life saver and rarely veers from his standard set of questions, beginning with: “Where were you born?” (hurrah if it was in the mid-west). These are the questions of an attorney, questions to which the questioner already knows the answers. (Were it me being asked who was my co-star in such-and-such a movie, I’d be sorely tempted to reply: “I don’t know, I haven’t seen it”). A proper interviewer, seeking new knowledge, asks questions to which he doesn’t know the answers.

Lipton and guest Liza Minnelli

Another infuriating tic is the question that begins “when [for instance] Robert De Niro and Marty Scorsese occupied that chair, they told us about the experience of making Goodfellas. What was your experience?” I would want to reply: “Well, funnily enough, when Larry King interviewed me, he asked about Goodfellas too”. I mean, what has it got to do with the present guest that his predecessors have talked about a movie that he was in?

After the dreaded questionnaire, Lipton blessedly departs the stage, handing the guest over to “your class” and the students pitch their own concerns, usually a lot more probing than Lipton’s and yielding more interesting responses but of course the television cut allows only a couple of these. After all, there are the credits to be got through. You can be sure that Lipton’s three end-credits (count ‘em) are perfectly legible, along with the one he had at the top of the show, but what Leona Helmsley famously called “the little people” whizz by in a blur. At least Lipton’s “tailored clothes” no longer get a credit that would have been the reward for dressing him at no cost (and you bet he got to take them clothes home).

How much longer will television draw from this well? Anthony Hopkins was the first Brit to guest on Actors Studio but not before the fourth season. John Hurt followed him the next year and then, as the list of willing Yanks was whittled down, more and more of them were invited, even some, like Vanessa Redgrave, who only really wanted to talk about the theatre. In recent years, Hopkins has been among those who have returned for a second session. Moreover, the net has been thrown wider and wider, now embracing stars of television comedy, rock musicians and even ensemble casts.
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Adam Godley as Elliott

On the subject of British actors in America, I was amazed to see Adam Godley turn up in the episode of Breaking Bad most recently broadcast in Britain on the FX channel. Godley is a surpassingly English actor – among his triumphs was his performance as Kenneth Williams in Terry Johnson’s comedy Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick at the National Theatre over a decade ago – yet here he was playing a wholly American character (the hero’s oldest friend) in an American teledrama. When you think of the numberless native actors in their mid-40s who could have played the role, it does seem extraordinary that a Brit should land it. But then all the comic superheroes currently being regurgitated for the movies are being played by Brits. I suppose the secret must be that they come cheaper than Americans.

Incidentally, I like Breaking Bad very much. It’s a noirish tale about a chemistry teacher going spectacularly off the rails after being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. The spiral he plunges into, through a mixture of circumstance and impulse, develops enticingly and with the right level of mordant humour. Bryan Cranston’s gritted-teeth portrayal of the anti-hero, never remotely tempted to try for the ingratiating, gets it pinpoint right. His reward has been an Emmy for “outstanding lead actor in a drama series” for each year that it has played. Vince Gilligan, who cut his teeth on The X Files, is the instigator and director.

Breaking Bad: the poster

But why has it taken three years to reach Britain? In the States, it will begin its fourth season in the summer and I cannot imagine how it will have sustained its premise through more than thirty episodes. How long must we wait to find out?

LYING FALLOW

A couple of postings ago (‘Messenger Shooting’ December 5th), I mentioned an unpublished letter that I had sent to The Guardian in response to David Hare’s “hymn of praise” (as I called it) for Simon Callow, who frequently reviews theatre-related books for the paper. Sir David’s review of – or rather disquisition upon – Callow’s collected occasional pieces along with a new biography of Sarah Bernhardt may be read here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/nov/20/david-hare-actors-sarah-bernhardt

You may wonder, as I did, whether the world is truly short of books telling us how wonderful actors are. Sir David requires to keep actors as a breed rather sweeter than do the rest of us because they are the ones who bring the majority of his important words to us.

My letter went like this:

“Dear Madam,

The paperback edition of Simon Callow’s Love is Where It Falls (Penguin 2000) was prominently adorned with a quotation from David Hare: ‘Exquisite … Perhaps the best theatrical memoir of our day’. As a theatrical memoir was precisely what the book wasn’t, one naturally fell to wondering whether Sir David had indeed troubled to open it.

The puffing of one’s friends, particularly in the books pages, is a harmless and timeless sport, save when it perpetrates an injustice. In further beatifying Mr Callow (Give actors a break, November 20), Sir David commits several of these, not least the rendering of Sir Antony Sher as hors de combat in his gathering of an imagined consensus around the notion that Callow is ‘the best writer-actor we have’.

Having been (I thought) woefully miscast as Mozart in the original stage production, Callow fared better in the much smaller role of Schikaneder in Milos Forman's movie of Amadeus

Finding himself in general agreement with Callow on individual actors reinforces Sir David’s admiration. They evidently concur that Paul Scofield was ‘the supreme actor’, in whom they detected ‘emotional wisdom’. The tired technicalities and career-spanning mannerisms of Scofield find a contemporary mirror in Sir Ian McKellen, whose wheels may be observed noisily turning in every performance. Hare does manage to name one player with a genuine gift for accuracy of reading and truth of effect in Penelope Wilton, for me the Celia Johnson of our generation – now there was an actress whose economy of means and unerring emotional authenticity was supreme, but her stage work is forgotten, far more so than that dear old ham o’ the halls, Sir Peter Ustinov [whom Hare had bogglingly described in his piece as ‘forgotten’].

As to the resentment that Hare detects towards actors among journalists, I merely observe that, as one of a multitude squeezed out of a journalistic career in recent years by the daily invasion into our trade of actors, comedians and, I dare say, playwrights, I will be pleased to slap down any actor who crosses my path, however fêted.

Yours faithfully,”

That Hare and Callow are old chums may not be doubted. In the index to Callow’s first book [Being an Actor 1984], there are more references to Hare than to anyone else save for Laurence Olivier, Callow’s hero.

When I first came to London in the mid-1960s, I immediately began to haunt the Old Vic. At this lovely old theatre, Olivier’s National Theatre Company were in residence and presenting a revolving repertoire of (mostly) classics with the occasional new play. I saw everything they mounted there. Though I retain no memory of his face, I remember that there was one noisy, chirpy, flirtatious chappie often on duty in the box office. It was only after I got to know him about a decade later that I was able to confirm that this was certainly Master Callow.

Never perform with children or animals

The first of Simon’s acting performances that I saw would have been his role in Martin Sherman’s Passing By, presented by Gay Sweatshop at the Almost Free Theatre off Shaftesbury Avenue. Gay Sweatshop – which came to be known to its familiars as Sweaties – was an attempt to establish a tradition of theatre that addressed homosexual issues of all kinds. It was set up by Roger Baker, Gerald Chapman, Drew Griffiths and Laurence Collinson – all of them now dead – and, after a perilous start, it attracted Arts Council funding and enjoyed a bumpily productive run for several years. The other actor in that inaugural season to catch my eye was a South African called Antony Sher.

I don’t recall the occasion upon or circumstances in which I first properly met Simon – it turned out that we had quite a few friends in common, as was apt to occur on the London gay scene (or, I dare say, on the gay scene anywhere) – but I was gravely informed by a mutual friend later that Simon found me “the most sexually exciting man” whom he had met all year. And, before you ask, we met in November. So I was predisposed to look upon him favourably. At what point we bumped into each other at Bang disco – the only place to be, in those days, on a Monday night – and found ourselves back at my place, I cannot now recall. But we passed a jolly night.

Thereafter, I followed his career with particular interest. And in those days, Simon Callow was beginning to be a name to drop. He was terrific in Mary Barnes, Epsom Downs and A Mad World, My Masters. The critics loved him and he caught the eye generally but he was yet very much a star of what was still a new movement in the theatre: the London fringe.

The birthplace of fringe theatre was the Edinburgh Festival, where indeed Callow had first trodden the boards. In August 1978, when I was a drama producer at BBC Birmingham, I went to the overlapping Edinburgh Television Festival, then in its infancy. Following a screening at Film House one afternoon, I sat down in the lounge area with various industry pals while we loudly discussed what we had just seen. Already at the table where we sat was a strikingly beautiful young man, whose eye I caught. As I carried on being dazzling with my chums, I found myself playing kneesie with this vision and, whenever I caught his eye again, he dissolved into smiles. As far as I could see, my colleagues (one of whom, bizarrely, was a woman with whom I had earlier been involved) were unaware of this private romantic comedy. Then we all got up to go, having a reception to attend and, thereafter, a party. I turned to my new friend and invited him to join us – which, to my delight, he readily did.

His name was Aziz Yehia. His late father had been what Aziz termed a pasha in Egypt – pasha is in fact a Turkish word – and the family had been driven out under Nasser’s rule. Aziz always described his mother as “a Turkish peasant”; she lived in Switzerland where Aziz had citizenship. He had divided his growing years between Zurich and Los Angeles. In both locations, the Yehias seem to have mixed with a movie crowd: the Gene Kellys, the William Holdens, Kay Kendall (who supposedly dropped the baby Aziz from her lap when drunk), Marlene Dietrich and so on. Sydney Guilaroff, a name familiar from thousands of Hollywood credits, did his mother’s hair.

Aziz was then a student at the National Film School in Beaconsfield. He was wholly a movie brat, but very much in a glossy, romantic tradition, the sort of fare that he would have seen constantly while growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s. He fancied himself as Audrey Hepburn, in whose elfin image he was certainly cast by nature. He liked to tease me with Audrey’s most charming lines: “Do you know what’s wrong with you? Nothing”.

But he was also damaged goods, as indeed seemed to be everyone with whom I discovered a mutual attraction. He was clearly what we now call bipolar. When in one of what he called his “black lagoons”, there was no reaching him. Even when he was up, he drank suicidally strong coffee first thing and later Carlsberg Special Brew, the tipple of serious drunks.

Callow, always a colourful character

All that aside, he and I had a delightful relationship that extended through the better part of a year. We went to a lot of theatre and cinema together and one riveting occasion was a revival of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at the tiny Half Moon Theatre in Aldgate. The lead was taken by Simon Callow. The night we saw it, he had an explosive, streaming cold. In the role, he wore a clownish false nose on an elasticated string. His cold poured out around this nose. At his fittest, Simon is an exudative performer, perspiring and spitting and generally leaving a trail of mucus, snot, sputum and sweat. On this night, the audience was drenched in bodily fluids.

In the pub afterwards, I introduced Simon to the highly excited Aziz. We lathered the star with praise. Looking back, I think this was probably his finest piece of work. Another evening, Aziz and I had dinner with friends I had made through my fan-like attachment to Sweaties: Peter Whitman and Alan Pope. Also present were Simon and his then boyfriend, the actor Robin Hooper. After dinner, we were prevailed upon to play a sort of variation of the television game Mr & Mrs, rather against my better judgment. Alan and Peter, the longest established couple, won this easily. I found I did not much enjoy Aziz and I being asked searching questions about our relationship, especially when I gave answers that I thought tactful and kind and then Aziz contradicted me.

I doubt that this was any kind of augury of the end of our relationship. Nor do I think that Aziz began to see Simon before we broke up. A decent interval passed after we agreed to go our separate ways before I heard that Simon and Aziz were an item. Not everyone thought them well suited. I recall one member of Simon's circle saying that he thought Aziz played the “beauty and the beast” card a little too obviously.

At some point in their relationship, Aziz lost his right to stay in Britain. He returned to Switzerland from whence I occasionally heard from him. His depressions not surprisingly deepened. In 1982, my then flat-mate Phil Taft took his own life. Aziz, who had known and rather scorned Phil’s skittishness and youth (he was ten years younger than me, seven younger than Aziz), was electrified by this event. Two years later, he followed suit.

When Callow published the aforementioned Love is Where It Falls, I decided not to rush to read it, having swiftly learned that Aziz figured in it as well as its second lead (after Simon himself), Peggy Ramsay. But I inadvertently blundered into the author reading from the book late at night on the BBC World Service and then could not switch off. The first thing that struck me was that Callow pronounced his late lover’s name as As-is. He had introduced himself to me – and I had always known him as – As-ease. This was strange.

What Simon writes of Aziz in the book only occasionally chimes with what I knew and/or would have written. His characterization of the boy as some kind of intellectual is perfectly absurd, the kind of exorbitance that, pace David Hare, only an actor would reach for. My sole appearance in the account is this: “[Aziz] and I had met some two and a half years before. He had then been involved with a mutual friend, but in the fullness of time, this involvement had come to an end, and I had seized my moment” [p 22]. “A mutual friend” is a curiously inapt phrase but, along with the variations on the notion of being “involved”, it seems to argue from Simon’s perspective that my relationship with Aziz was to be discounted in the light of his own grand passion. He doesn’t mention, also, that I acted (brilliantly, I can confidently add) in one of the short films made by Aziz at Beaconsfield, to which Simon alludes. I can’t help remembering, too, that a resonant backdrop to all this is Callow’s earlier feeling declared about me.

The unbridled account of Simon’s mourning after Aziz’ death is hard for a non-theatrical to take. One part, coming after the lovingly detailed description of his first expressions of emotion, particularly sticks in my craw: “the days were filled with telling his friends and mine what had happened. They already knew, of course; such news seems to pass around almost before it’s happened, but they needed to hear it from me, and I needed to tell it to them” [p 125]. All, that is, except the “mutual friend”, whom Simon didn’t think to call until Aziz had been dead over a week. And I didn’t already know because all our other mutual friends assumed that Simon would have told me. That left a bitter taste that has yet to go away.

Simon describes a week he spent on Capri “howling like an animal, till my throat was sore” [p 129] yet is in love with someone else within eight pages, like any actor ringing down the curtain on one role and rushing off to the next read-through. Is it any wonder if I find actors a shallow breed?

Apart from a passing encounter in the auditorium before one of the last shows at the lamented Mermaid Theatre, I have not seen Simon Callow to speak to in many years. In 1998, I left a message on his answering machine because I wanted to pick his brains about the control of emotion when one is reading to an audience – I was going to recite a Shakespearean sonnet at my father’s funeral and I once heard Simon read the entire sonnet-sequence, stumbling only over the most famous (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”) – but he never returned my call.

In truth, Simon Callow is one of the most personally generous people I have ever known. The generosity of his laughter is known to anyone who has ever sat in the same audience as him. He is, in all things, profligate and no one is ever in want when he is near.

I once wrote a stage play of which I felt rather proud. I had hugely enjoyed Tony Harrison’s rhyming-couplets translation of Molière’s Le Misanthrope, with which the National Theatre had a huge hit, starring Alec McCowen and Diana Rigg. Under its influence, I wrote a comedy in rhyming couplets called The Secretive Agent, wherein a London literary agent was comprehensively embarrassed by a sudden visit from his parents, whose dull suburbanism he wished to keep from his circle and from whom he wished to keep his own homosexuality. I don’t suppose for a moment that the satire was either very penetrating or very correct but I believed that I had handled the discipline of the verse with considerable niftiness.

Simon read the play and was kindly about it. He was more than kindly; he offered to arrange a reading of it at his flat. He and I between us recruited a stellar cast (Miriam Margoles, Pam St Clement, Drew Griffiths). He supplied the food and drink and the paper and printing machine upon which I ran off enough copies for the cast to read. He was enormously supportive but the reading taught me that the play really didn’t work.

With (right) Sir Antony Sher and (centre) Gregory Doran (Lady Sher)

But he also did something odd. On another occasion I had told him that I wanted to write a play for him, entitled The Private Life of Charles Laughton. I knew of his obsession with this extraordinary actor – he later wrote a book about him and played (excitingly) Perelli in the gangster saga On the Spot and (not too well) Brecht’s Galileo, two of Laughton’s signature roles – and I thought he could embody Laughton, whose life as a self-hating, closeted gay man was certainly powerful. I told him that I thought Zoë Wanamaker would be wonderful as Elsa Lanchester, Laughton’s wife (then still alive).

Some time later, I ran into him at a watering hole where he was holding court – in those days, Simon frequently had a claque about him – and he suddenly started talking about the notion of a play about Laughton, claiming it and the casting of Wanamaker as his own idea. I was astonished and resolved that instead I should write the play for the up-coming Simon Russell Beale who anyway was already the better actor. I never wrote it, needless to add.

But it is the failure of Callow’s promise as an actor that is the most distressing aspect of his career. In the ’70s, he was marked for leading the profession. Dusty Hughes, then the theatre editor at Time Out, remarked that he would be the first knighted actor of our generation. But he wasn’t. That honour fell to Tony Sher. I don’t know whether Callow and Sher were great rivals or whether such rivalry is something I imagine. For a long time, their lives and careers ran in parallel, even to the point that when Simon was stepping out with Robin Hooper, Sher’s boyfriend was Robin’s actor brother Jim.

But a chasm opened up because Tony started to scale all the peaks of the classical stage and Simon never did. The only Shakespeare roles he has taken are a rather unlikely Orlando in As You Like It at the National, in which he was the first ever Orlando who was clearly never in danger of losing the wrestling match, and Titus Andronicus at the Bristol Old Vic (which I didn’t see). He played Falstaff at Chichester, but in Orson Welles’ restructuring of Henry IV parts 1 & 2 as The Chimes at Midnight (Welles is an even greater Callow obsession than Laughton). That was his only performance that I ever got to review and I said that he would grow into it but in truth it was terrible.

All his vanity projects have been disastrous. There was the only movie he has directed, a rendering of Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café, which was a doggedly comprehensive hommage to the only film that Laughton ever directed, itself an hommage to DW Griffith, The Night of the Hunter. The gulf between them is that the Laughton was gradually recognised as a knockdown masterpiece whereas the Callow is, and I confidently predict will remain, forgotten. Then there was his stage version of Marcel Carné’s rapturous movie Les enfants du paradis, which we knew long before we saw it lose the RSC a huge fortune to be a truly wretched idea.

Callow’s trouble – not uncommon among thespians or among outgoing, ebullient, generous-hearted non-thespians – is that he finds it impossible to say no to anything or anyone. Tony Sher has chosen wisely and discriminatingly and planned the arc of his career with imagination and wonderful timing. He’s also much the better writer, of fiction and drama as well as books about acting. He has not enjoyed the success that Simon has had in movies but the Callow filmography is all over the place and the clear successes have not depended on his participation. His turn in Four Weddings and a Funeral is charming and touching, largely because he is pretty much playing himself, but the most affecting thing about it is the reciting of Auden’s verse by John Hannah as his bereaved lover at his funeral and the most haunting thing about that – which, to my amazement, I have never seen remarked in print – is Hannah’s facial resemblance to Aziz Yehia.

But for every Room with a View or No Man’s Land, there is an Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls or a Thunderpants. And Simon’s willingness, nay eagerness to fling off his clothes at every opportunity – to the point where, at one time, we thought the requirement must be a clause in his standard contract – is no longer sought by producers or front of house.

If there are two classes of person the young Callow excoriates in Being an Actor, they are directors and critics. Needless to say, he went on to practice both professions. I remember going to see him in Restoration, a revisionist restoration comedy at the Royal Court. I “went round” afterwards – a theatrical ritual that I loathe and only ever did regularly for Simon (and once for Tony Sher) – and he had no topic of conversation but the iniquity of Edward Bond who had not attended the press performance the night before, which sin Simon could almost forgive in him as the writer but not at all as the director. Nothing, he declared, should keep a director from seeing the cast through the first night. Not so very long after that, I heard him interviewed on the radio about his direction of a play out of town, whose first night, he mentioned en passant, he would not be able to attend.

I find him useless as a critic because he is a wholly uncritical enthusiast. He mostly reviews books about practitioners of theatre and/or film and he loves them all. Simon is one of those people – perhaps the leading one – who positively invites the properly despised term “luvvie” because he embodies every trait that that term seeks to parody. He talks and writes about actors as though they are pioneers, heroic and creative. They are not. They are gypsies and vagabonds, hired to flesh the imaginations of truly creative artists. It makes my blood boil to see actors described as having “created” a role. The playwright created the fucking role, you morons. And don’t start trying to bring things to the script. Try finding things in it instead.

Simon Callow is not the only person I have known who went on to be famous. He shares with the others the fact that I am no longer in their address books. Fame removes you from real friendships and delivers you into a world of celebrity in which you know all the other members to say hi to and know them like friends barely at all. Since his affair with Aziz, Callow has become very famous and has failed, or so I read, to find a lasting relationship. I only wish him well. I hope he can find someone who values him for himself and not for his fame. And I hope that he can turn down crap projects, refuse a few of his unnecessary reviewing offers and apply himself really self-critically to the senior years of his acting career. He could be a great Lear or a great Krapp if he truly wants to be. He could still be the fine actor he once promised to be, but he doesn’t have a lot of time.

GOT IT MADE

I finally caught up with the first of three new programmes on BBC1 under the title The Making of Me. In each, someone in the public eye explores, as far as is feasible, how her or his particular personal make-up came to be formed. These being contemporary documentaries, such material can only be filtered through the medium of what are claimed to be ‘celebrities’. Whatever the viewers may actually want or be open to, broadcasting executives believe that no pill can be administered without a coating of stardust. So, if you happen to abominate the chosen ‘celebrity’ (and such abomination – like its opposite, adoration – is entirely subjective and even wilfully absurd), you will be deterred from taking your pill.

The episode I wanted to see was certainly for its pill – the subject matter – and not its sugar coating. John Barrowman is an actor and singer who specialised in musicals until he gained a wider audience through acting in Doctor Who and its spin-off, Torchwood. He has also regularly appeared as a judge in the series of musical audition shows that BBC1 has favoured for Saturday night prime-time fare. Barrowman was born in Scotland of Scots parents but his family moved to Illinois when he was eight and he now sounds like – and comes on like – an American. His parents, still US residents, remain resolutely Scottish and, in their company, Barrowman’s accent joins theirs, though he reverts when talking in their presence to his American nephew. There’s an interesting question hovering in the air as to which persona is his ‘correct’ one.

The other significant aspect of Barrowman’s make-up is that he is gay. Even in these liberated times, it is relatively rare for actors to be ‘out’, believing as they do – and there is some evidence that they are not wrong – that being tagged as gay will do harm to their job prospects. This fear is especially rife in Hollywood where movie and television actors are quite as closeted as gay sportsmen everywhere. The difference between the worlds of sport and drama is that the latter is, in everyday practice, highly tolerant of omnisexuality and indeed tends to attract people of unbuttoned sensuality. As that charming old thespian Alec McCowen once told me: “all actors are more or less gay …” [exquisitely timed pause] “… with the possible exception of Jack Hawkins”.

So I take my hat off to John Barrowman. He has always been upfront about his sexuality. And indeed the burden of the programme here under consideration was to explore and try to determine the source of that sexuality. Personally, I am not very interested in Barrowman’s sexuality qua the sexuality of this particular person. For my taste, he is too much the cardigan model in looks, too much the always-on performer in behaviour and too much the class show-off in style (“less talking” crisply advised one of the scientists who examined him in the film). His predictably elegant civil partner appeared in the film, their ceremony cheesily preserved in Barrowman’s screen-saver (he in his kilt, Scott in a dapper suit, the two dogs oblivious to the fuss). Way too self-conscious for moi.

And I fear that there is a large and largely unexamined question mark over the wisdom of the quest. Barrowman declared his starting-point boldly enough: he believes that sexuality is a given and that he couldn’t alter it even if he wanted to, which he certainly doesn’t. He hoped his quest would reinforce this conviction. But as Johann Hari notes in a related article in the current issue of Attitude, “there is a dark possibility we will end up wishing we hadn’t asked the question in the first place”. I agree with Hari. I have always feared that a conclusion will be reached in the struggle between nature and nurture for the recognition of responsibility for determining our sexuality. While the matter remains in doubt, the enemy cannot select its weapons. Once science has made a definitive pronouncement, the bigots will begin to prepare their means for eliminating homosexuality once and for all.

If science finds for nature – the elusive ‘gay gene’, the event in the womb, the chemical balance brought about by a succession of male foetuses – geneticists will move in to eliminate the gay gene, biologists to ‘correct’ the flow of testosterone and parents will sign up for the abortion of foetuses that are thought to be potentially gay. If science determines for nurture – learned behavioural patterns, social influences, the enduring nexus of accounts first put forward by Freud – behaviourists and moralising busybodies will launch a re-education programme to ‘save’ parents from unwittingly ‘making’ inverts of their children. Either way, it’s bad news for the gay community.

There is a great deal to be said for science’s interventions in the structure of human cells. The prospect of pre-empting the onset of deadly diseases or inherited disabilities is not lightly to be passed up. As in many other fields of human quest, the dangers arise when vested interests, particularly those driven by supernatural superstition, begin to make demands on the uses to which such research and development is put.

There is of course a fundamentally homophobic basis to the whole field of research and, sadly, to Barrowman’s attempt to answer his personal question. “What makes you gay?” presupposes that being gay is some departure from the norm and is therefore itself questionable. We might just as fairly ask “what makes you straight?” or – a better question still – “what makes you sexual?” Such a question would not, I hope, carry within it the implication that the answer will furnish the means by which it can be stopped.

SPEAK UP, I CAN'T HEAR YOU

"There's nothing more surprising and enjoyable than getting a comment on your blog" wrote Guy Browning in The Guardian Weekend magazine the other day ('How to ... Blog' December 16th). I'm sure what he suggests is true but I really (clearly) wouldn't know.

When I worked as his producer on the television serial King of the Ghetto, the director Roy Battersby said many things that I remember and by which I remain nourished. Pertinent to the matter in hand is his description of taking home rushes (the daily unedited footage on tape) for long and detailed discussions with his family. "Christ," I thought when I first heard this, "I'll be lucky if anybody in my family even gives me any sort of indication that they watch it on transmission, let alone volunteering to put in their twopenn'orth during the process of making it".

My father who, as the saying goes, "never read a book in his life", certainly never read any of my three books published in his lifetime; or, if he did, he never told me so. My mother lived to read my novel, not a work she would ever have encountered had it not been, as it were, related to her. Her only comment was to deprecate a passing reference in the story to a man taking a shower, pulling back his foreskin and soaping the glans of his penis. It was hardly the pivotal moment of the story and I waited eagerly for her to find something in the main traffic of the plot to remark upon but she never did. While they were both alive, I published a large body of journalism which, I fondly imagine, she at least would comprehensively have read, but as to whether it ever entertained, educated or informed her, I remained unenlightened. My father used to spend a long time with his face buried in "the paper" but I never heard that he read anything that his son wrote. Maybe it was just a cover for snoozing, or avoiding issues.

Even my partner of nigh on 27 years, as voracious a reader as I know on seven continents, is not what I would venture to call forthcoming about my own stuff. If he has read my book Common Sense (freely downloadable from the link to the right of this entry) and if he reads this passing squib, I do not expect ever to discover it (but if I do, I will report back).

Why is this? Is it something about me? Is it something about writing? Some 15 years ago, I worked for a while in a bookshop. The shop manager was also a singer in the local choral society, a highly regarded body of voices that has appeared on professional recordings. Now, you understand, she was one voice among many. Even so, she manifested lasting indignation that, while working at the shop, I omitted to attend a performance by this choir, the choir needless to say playing a supporting role in which, as I say, she was but one unidentifiable voice. I thought – but did not say – "I wonder which if any of my books you have read. Books, after all, are your business as a book shop manager. And a book is a considerably more personal investment for its writer than is a performance in a choir by one of its members". I did not lay indignation on her. But I thought her own indignation was, to put it mildly, disproportionate.

Performers do seem to think that they are entitled to a remarkable degree of reassurance. All the actors I have known over the years – quite a few – have expected me AS A MATTER OF COURSE (I don't want to shout but I have yet to find how to access italics on this blogsite) to make the effort to witness their performances, however paltry the role in however humdrum the telly serial or play above a pub, however fugitive the advertisement or inaccessible the regional rep production. I think to myself: "Here I am forcing myself to watch an episode of The Bill that I would really rather not bother with for one scene towards the end but to how much trouble does this actor put himself in order to read all or any of my exquisitely honed pieces of journalism? Does it even occur to him that to seek my pieces out would be an appropriately equivalent gesture?"

I have been hugely gratified by the volume of downloading that my book has attracted. Of course, in one's fantasy version, one anticipates THOUSANDS of downloads so that, after just a week or two, one can tell the sceptical publishing editors who thought one was "too intellectual" for their market (ha!) that one has attracted sufficient readers that, were they paying, one would be in the best seller list. (Well, dear reader, unless you pass the word as assiduously as I hope you might, this will not be achieved for all that the download has exceeded my expectations). But I really wish I had a better idea of what response the stuff has wrought. Instructively enough, with the odd bright exception, the initial feedback came from writers of one kind or another, not least the aforementioned Mr Battersby, an auteur manque if ever there was one (as well as italics, I have still to find accents here). They KNOW that writers need quite as much reassurance as performers do. I don't want to bleat but I do wish everybody understood that.

So please, if anything in this blog or the associated book touches any chord at all for you, either positively or negatively, do take a few moments and a deep breath to say so. It makes far more sense to me than an uninterpretable digit on a visitor counter. And do have a cool yule.