Episode 10 My Life in Books

Thank you. Welcome to My Life In Books, a chance for our guests to talk about their favourite reads

and why they're important. With me tonight, Rick Stein, chef, restaurateur

and TV star, known for his seafood, his restaurants in Padstow and the late Chalky,

who in my time was one of the most requested clips on Points of View.

Alongside him, our finest classical actress, Fiona Shaw. She's also a director and writer.

No part has ever daunted her. The first ever female Richard II,

Aunt Petunia in Harry Potter and, of course, Marnie the witch

-in the massive US hit vampire series True Blood. Welcome to you both.

-Thank you.

APPLAUSE

-Rick, can we start with you?

-Why not?

-Where were you brought up?

In the Cotswolds, in Oxfordshire, on a farm outside Chipping Norton.

A very idyllic place to have been brought up, really.

I was born on the farm that I lived on until I was 18.

-And plenty of books around?

-Well, yes. My mother read a great deal to us, all of us.

-It's a great gift, a mother who reads.

-Such a great thing to do for your kids.

-Fiona, how about you? Where were you?

-Well, I was brought up in Cork, just outside Cork.

For a while I lived in Cove in County Cork, and my mother read to us at the end of every evening,

after the rosary and before homework. So we had enforced Dickens, but, of course,

-it became addictive.

-What was Cove like?

-Cove was an eccentric place.

It was a hangover from the Second World War. It was a port which had been given back to the English

and so it had a lot of leftover British navy folk, Commander McGoldrick and one who measured

the tennis court net every day. They were like something from Alice in Wonderland.

Not surprisingly, then, your first book is Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

-by Lewis Carroll.

-It is.

I don't really like... I never liked Alice. She was too prim and proper.

And she was, of course, English, but the strange Anglo-Irish element to my early childhood meant

that I had some sense of what being English was.

-How old would you have been when you read this?

-I can't remember.

It must have been after Enid Blyton and before Evelyn Waugh!

-So I suppose it must have been 11, maybe 11.

-And quite a scary book.

A very scary book. And it's had a terrible history since as a book.

It's been psychoanalysed almost into being pornography now, but I read it in all innocence,

as I hope most people continue to. If art or genius comes out of great suffering,

Lewis Carroll or Dodgson had a lot of suffering.

But he did produce an enormous amount of not just clever, but strange interludes

about people's mis-hearing, abilities to mis-hear things.

People playing croquet, of course, with flamingos is a kind of possible thing.

-It's just surreal. And I love always the Mock Turtle. Shall I have a read of that?

-Yes.

The Mock Turtle, for those of you into education,

is a mock turtle. Maybe Rick would know about mock turtle soup.

Nobody touches turtle soup any more, but the mock turtle was made from some sort of stock

-and didn't have any turtle.

-He sort of plays on that.

So they went up to the Mock Turtle who looked at them with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing.

"This here young lady," said the Gryphon, "she wants for to know your history, she do."

"I'll tell it to her," said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow voice.

"Sit down, both of you, and don't say a word until I've finished."

So they sat down and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought, "He can't finish if he doesn't begin,"

but she waited patiently. "Once," said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh,

"I was a real turtle.

"When we were little," said the Mock Turtle, he went on more calmly, though still sobbing,

"we went to school in the sea.

"The master was an old turtle. We used to call him Tortoise."

"Why did you call him Tortoise if he wasn't one?" Alice asked.

"We called him Tortoise because he taught us," said the Mock Turtle.

-That's wonderful.

-APPLAUSE

-At that time, you weren't when you were reading that, Fiona Shaw.

-I was Fifi Wilson.

My father's name was Wilson, but when I went to RADA, they felt Fifi no one would take seriously.

And there was another Fiona Wilson in Equity and so I had to change to Shaw.

I took my grandmother's name.

-And you were never Rick Stein.

-No, I wasn't.

My mother christened me Christopher

and I got called Rikki because my oldest brother, Jeremy,

my mother had clearly been reading from The Jungle Book, the story of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,

and I guess I was 2 or 3 at the time and had a lot of red hair

and maybe was nosing around into various things like a mongoose.

It's a bit tricky if you get called a name as a child. It does stick in the family.

It can't be that bad. You have chosen this one.

It's funny because you're right. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

It has a sort of resonance

through everyone's life. I think the point of it is

that it's the story of a plucky mongoose and it's quite a lovely picture of a family in India.

But there's danger lurking in there. That's a bit like real life.

There's a lovely, chirpy mongoose and the lovely kids,

but there's the snake, two snakes, Nag and Nagaina,

who are like the dark side. Life has to have a dark side.

I've just chosen this passage which introduces us to Nag, the cobra.

From the thick grass at the foot of the bush there came a low hiss,

a horrid, cold sound that made Rikki-Tikki jump back two clear feet.

Then, inch by inch, out of the grass rose up the head and spread hood of Nag,

the big, black cobra.

And he was five feet long from tongue to tail.

When he had lifted one third of himself clear of the ground, he stayed balancing to and fro,

as a dandelion tuft balances in the wind. He looked at Rikki-Tikki with a wicked snake's eyes

-that never change their expression whatever the snake may be thinking.

-That's wonderful.

APPLAUSE

-Yeah, it's lovely.

-We've got a picture of you.

-Really?

I think you're a bit older. How old are you there? It's the whole family, isn't it?

With me in a duffel coat, John, my mum and dad.

I think we would have been on our farm in Oxfordshire. We used to have Easter standing on the terrace.

-It would have been there, I think.

-Oxfordshire, Cornwall, then sent to school at Uppingham.

-Yes.

I went to...to Uppingham School.

My brother, who is a lot brighter than me... It's a problem I have.

I always, through my life, felt a bit second string, I think.

So I wouldn't go to the school he went to, Winchester, partly because when I went with my parents

I noticed that they were washing themselves with a jug and a bowl

and Uppingham had showers.

That mattered to me as a 13-year-old, I must say.

How about you, Fiona? School-wise?

Not boarding school. I went to a day school. It was a lay school, very unusual in Ireland,

rather than a religious school. My mother was nervous about my spending too long with nuns.

-Quite right.

-Yeah, I think she was.

A highly religious school, but full of eccentrics.

It was just a house, actually.

What was the main thing you were interested in?

Probably I was like a lot of children. My father was quite severe

and at school I was able to be wilder. That was probably... A bit of that was in it.

And I flourished with poetry because I found that suddenly being able to do a poem in front of the school

-was very empowering. A lot of kids find that.

-So your next choice,

it's The Collected Poems of WB Yeats.

Yes. It's maybe an unusual choice for somebody so young at the time.

But I went to a lady called Miss Scott at the School of Music in Cork

and she would say, "Right, off you go." She'd give me some poem like Yeats' of later life.

"That is no country for old men. The young in one another's arms, Birds in the trees

"Those dying generations at their song, The salmon falls..." I didn't know what it meant!

But it sounded grand. And I think actually it gave me permission to see that, in the end,

the great thing about poetry is that it is language which comes from yourself,

but it can either be aerated and doesn't have to have logic.

Like Rick, my elder brother was a scientist and incredibly clever and he was getting scholarships,

but at least I had this imaginative language that was a tool against everybody else.

Rick, when you left Uppingham, was cooking on your mind?

Well, not really. I had rather an overbearing father

who was very keen for me to do something with my life.

He tried to get me into BP, but I didn't want industry.

So I hit on the idea of becoming a hotel manager

as a way of appeasing him. So I joined British Transport Hotels as a trainee manager.

And spent the first part of that management course... training...cooking.

But it all came a bit unstuck. My father, who had been... who was a manic depressive,

killed himself.

It came as a real shock to me because I think my mother...

Well, I know my mother, her role in life was hiding the real reality of my father's illness

from the rest of the children. It was the protective thing she did for us, really.

So when he did die, it was a shock.

But also, I have to admit it, a slight sense of relief

because he had been so oppressive to me for so many years before that.

I now can see that the problem with serious depressives is

that you feel so inadequate that anybody that reminds you of...of you

is somebody that you don't like yourself, I suppose.

He saw in me that I was the most like him of all his children.

So he was really hard on me and I found it quite unpleasant at times.

I sort of gave up work and I fled abroad, really, for two years,

mostly in Australia and New Zealand. And, interestingly, the book I want to talk to you about

-is one of Conrad's books.

-Lord Jim.

-He ran away to sea, in a sense,

being Polish and he joined the British Merchant Navy.

But while I was away, I made the big mistake of travelling on my own at sort of 19,

and I was incredibly lonely.

And so I read a great deal and I read a lot of Conrad,

but much of Conrad - I'm thinking of Nostromo and Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim -

is about loneliness and alienation. It's a fabulous bit of writing.

That's what I love about Conrad. He's such a fabulous writer.

Fiona, while you were at school, did you want to be an actress?

I very quickly wanted to be an actress, yeah.

I didn't know what that meant. We didn't have any theatre locally. We had an amateur dramatics.

We never had any Shakespeare or anything. I just wanted to be one, whatever it was.

I played the judge in Trial By Jury at school. I did everything I could and my father absolutely forbade me.

A bit like with his father, my father was...

He was pretty strict, just pretty 19th century and very keen we all got jobs that were proper jobs.

When I tried to propose going to audition for RADA, he just thought

it was morally and spiritually wrong!

So I had to go to university. So I did go to university locally.

I went to University College, Cork, and I read philosophy there.

But you did as he asked. You got your degree and then he allowed you.

He did. I think I half ran away and auditioned for RADA and then told him I'd got in

and dared him not to pay the fees! He was very decent about it and that was fine.

You're passionate about this book. The Mill On The Floss by George Eliot. Why is it so important?

I think George Eliot, in the end, holds in this book

the essence of what I think novels are. It's not that I haven't enjoyed many other novels,

but this book is about a family who live in Dorlcote Mill, near the Floss,

some time in the early 19th century. It almost doesn't matter.

They're described, each member, so beautifully, but particularly Maggie Tulliver,

who loves her brother, Tom. Tom isn't so bright. Maggie is very bright.

I don't identify with her, in the sense that I had a very bright brother. It wasn't that dynamic,

but Maggie Tulliver is flawed. She just... She so loves her father, she so wants to be loved,

like we all do. But she has fits of kind of surety about things.

She runs away with the gypsies at one point and tells them she's going to live with them.

Very kindly, the gypsies take her back and meet her father.

In later life, when she is meant to marry Philip Wakem, a lovely man, she falls in love with Stephen Guest

and goes off with him until she realises... She says, "It doesn't matter what happiness is.

"All that matters is that we listen to our conscience." And it is agony that this girl has impetuousness

and, for me, impetuousness is actually the opposite of what Catholicism is.

I think people sin first and they regret the sin afterwards.

People make mistakes and they're unforgiven or they are forgiven, if you're lucky,

but it's the essence of literature. It tells you there are other people like you who make mistakes

and then live out the consequences. I think that is what literature is. Compassion.

-You eventually did get to university, didn't you?

-Yes. Possibly because I'd read so much

that I sort of realised I probably could. I've always had a great interest in literature.

I did English at university. Not terribly successfully.

I was probably enjoying myself a bit too much.

I left Oxford again under a bit of a cloud, I suppose.

I'm always leaving places under a cloud. I had been running a mobile disco at the time.

It was the only thing to do.

And I found this nightclub on the quayside in Padstow. I'd moved there from Oxfordshire.

And I bought it with a friend of mine. We both had a bit of money.

I had an uncle. A great uncle in Germany, called Otto left me 12 grand,

which in the early '70s was a serious amount of money. We opened this club, lasted a year

and were closed down by the police as not fit and proper people to run a club.

And I opened the restaurant as a way of paying the bills, really.

For the first years it was just hard slog and I can remember a time

sort of wishing I was in London, wishing I was in Oxford,

wishing I was not working on the stoves every night

and my mother, in my early 30s, gave me

A Dance To The Music Of Time.

And the reason above all that I loved it was because it was about London.

Actually, well, it starts in the First World War and moves on to the '20s and '30s

just describing life for, I suppose, upper middle class people in London,

but meeting all these slightly dodgy characters.

It's just the way that Anthony Powell, although I don't think you pronounce it like that,

but I do. I can't say "Pool" or "Pole".

He just has a delicious understanding of people's failings and weaknesses.

So it was just a sort of life that I sort of felt I should have lived,

but I was cooking and I wouldn't say I wasn't enjoying the cooking,

but I just felt I needed to be back with the literature.

We have actually got a clip of a very, very early appearance on television.

Your first ever, in fact, appearance on television.

-You're the sidekick to Keith Floyd here.

-Yes.

-It's 1984.

OK, so you've all got that at home. You could use any root vegetables you fancied.

-This is Nick's own very special recipe.

-Rick, dear boy.

-Rick! Sorry!

-Once you've seen one cook, you've seen them all! Can I call you Charles?

-Why not?

-Great.

-This is a TV programme and film's very expensive. Get on with it.

-OK.

APPLAUSE

-Was that quite deliberate?

-I think it was deliberate.

Looking back on it, we fell out of love for a few years, I must say, soon after that.

I think, well, he wanted to be top dog

and by the time I was talking to that, I was getting on famously with the director, David,

-and I think Keith saw...

-Jealous.

-He saw the warning lights.

-Yeah.

He had a right to be jealous because I have my own sort of style on TV now,

but I copied a lot of things he used to do - his mannerisms

and that sort of wonderful blokiness that he had. He was very charismatic

-and, fortunately, towards the end of his life we made up.

-Oh, good.

And ended up good friends. And then he died.

Fiona, you might have felt out of place at RADA to begin with,

but by your second year you were just gathering all the prizes.

There was no doubting. You excelled. You got the Ronson Award, the Bancroft Gold Medal...

-You were the star.

-For me, it was a very lucky thing because it brought with it publicity.

And I was very quickly snapped up by the National Theatre,

so I went pretty well straight through. I did a film, initially, and then to the National.

That was a lucky start. Then I went to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

So really from the mid '80s to the end of the '80s, I was in another schooling situation

of being at the RSC playing sometimes two or three plays a week.

I'd play one in the afternoon, one in the evening. And really most of my life was spent

either on the stage or off it, and I began to not know which I was!

Then there was an important partnership with Deborah Warner.

I was asked to do a tragedy with her and I thought, "No!" She was asked to do one with me and said, "No!"

We just sort of got kettle drummed into doing Electra.

And, tragically, when I went to the RSC, my brother Peter was killed in a car accident,

my youngest brother, and I think having had, not an idyllic childhood,

but a very safe childhood, this was the first streak of suffering that came - tragedy, really -

right through the family. I don't think families recover from an untimely death.

-Something really happens. The whole structure of the family shifts.

-Absolutely.

You have to hold it and I was at the RSC and...

I was having a marvellous time, but it was terrible for my parents because he was the youngest child,

he was still at home and he was killed at 18. So when we performed Electra,

I kept on thinking the play was really about Orestes and Electra,

because Electra thinks her brother Orestes is dead. And it's the first play where I realised the plays were

actually to do with life! I just thought plays were things I was in.

Suddenly, I connected. I should have done that a few years earlier! The plays were about real people,

not just in a funny sense, but seriously about the evisceration of their pain being made present

so that you could maybe feel it and not kill yourself by watching it.

So that play was so successful that people used to camp outside the Barbican to see it.

That was the first time I'd been part of a sensation where the public imagination was caught by a play.

Your final book - I love this - is the Selected Diaries of Virginia Woolf.

Yes. I'm embarrassed in a way not to be picking another novel when they're such a part of my life,

but she just captures... And it's so innocent the way she writes.

She writes with such a direct eye. It's not high-blown or exotic.

It's often that she is astonished by the ordinary.

Again, I think, that's what books give us - the ability to turn us all into artists and to be excited

by what you see and people. Also, diaries are interesting because they become memento mori.

You look at them and know the story. In advance of them, you don't.

And she had a huge problem with depression and she has these terrible black times

in which she said, "I would never have been able to be so happy if I hadn't been so sad."

So the price is there, but she also alludes, I noticed,

she alludes to thinking that she might not live beyond 70.

And it's very interesting when, inadvertently, through our lives

we allude to our own deaths. She didn't know she wasn't going to live to 70, but she says,

"I meant to write about death only life came breaking in as usual.

"I like, I see, to question people about death. I've taken it into my head that I shan't live 'til 70."

-She wrote that in 1922 and she didn't die until 1939.

-I'm so glad you recommended it.

Much more accessible than some of her novels. Rick, you've difficulty remembering all your restaurants.

I do. It's very...up myself, really, isn't it?

-Five, I think.

-Five.

-I've got one, two, three... Four in Padstow.

-Yeah.

-And, em... Yep, four. And a pub just outside Padstow and a fish restaurant in Falmouth.

-And you divide your time...

-And one in Australia, too!

-Whoops! He forgot a restaurant.

-There used to be another star in your programme.

-There was.

-It would be unforgivable if we didn't give Chalky a look in.

-Well, there we go.

-Your Jack Russell.

Well, cooks, I think they are a breed in themselves...

CHALKY GROWLS Cooks...cooks are a breed unto themselves.

LOUDER GROWL Chalky, you all right, old boy?

-Do you want me to carry on?

-Yeah.

-Yeah, OK.

CONSTANT GROWL I can't...

I mean, how can I carry on with him... Ooh!

Ah!

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

-Oh, dogs.

-That's fantastic!

-It's the furry thing on the mic, is it?

-Yeah, a fluffy microphone.

I think he thought it was a rat. Or a rabbit.

-Rick, your final book.

-Well, it's Evelyn Waugh's Scoop.

I've loved everything he's written, watched Brideshead, the film, the TV series.

But I do think the earlier, savage books are the best. There's a reason I like it.

It's such a wonderful satire of journalism. As I said earlier on, I did a bit of journalism at Oxford,

and swiftly realised that... You know, with all due respect,

-you've got to be a bit of a scallywag to be a journalist or you can't tell a story.

-Of course!

What I love about it is it's not savagely against journalism.

It sort of understands the need and the sort of dynamism of journalism.

And in Lord Copper, who's this sort of press baron who runs the Daily Beast

and is a bit like a Beaverbrook or the Murdoch sort of type,

there is a sort of male virility, which has to be, really.

But the downside of it, of course, is most stories are fabrications

and I think that's what comes out of Scoop, that they are a scurrilous bunch,

but there's a sort of energy about them all, which makes it sort of OK.

I've just got this passage which I think sums it up really well.

"Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read.

"And it's only news until he's read it. After that, it's dead."

And then he goes on to say, "Corker recounted the heroic legends of Fleet Street.

"He told of the classic scoops and hoaxes, of the confessions wrung from hysterical suspects,

"of the innuendo and intricate misrepresentations,

"the lushest detailed inventions that composed contemporary history,

-"of the positive, daring lies that got a chap a rise."

-Wonderful.

APPLAUSE

-Very good.

-So...

-Time has beaten us.

It only leaves me to say thank you so much to Rick Stein and Fiona Shaw.

Details from this series are on the BBC website, of course.

And you can also hear our guests read a passage from their favourite children's book.

Alas, this is the very last show in the series. I hope you've enjoyed it. Good night.

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