Episode 2 My Life in Books

Hello and welcome to 'My Life In Books',

a chance for our guests to talk about their favourite reads

and why they're important.

My first guest tonight is British actress Natascha McElhone.

She's come a long way since her first appearance in Shakespeare in the Park.

She's now an international star,

playing alongside the likes of George Clooney, Brad Pitt

and Robert De Niro.

With Natascha is broadcaster Chris Hollins,

who hasn't appeared with George Clooney, Brad Pitt or Robert De Niro,

but does appear with me on Watchdog, which is obviously just as good!

Thank you both for being here.

APPLAUSE

I realise that you're both children of the '70s. You're both '71 babies.

-Yes.

-Brought up quite differently. You grew up in Brighton, didn't you?

-Yes.

-Why Brighton?

I think because my stepfather went as a mature student to Sussex University.

Quite odd, having a stepdad a student, was it?

-They were really young anyway.

-Was he a sort of protesting student?

Very much so. Very political, very active.

I spent lots of my childhood on shoulders

waving banners of 'Thatcher Out!' or 'Troops Out!'

-Meanwhile, you were in leafy Kent.

-I was in leafy Kent. Suburbia, really.

My parents, again, it amazes me now how young they were.

22 and 20, when they got married.

I popped along when they were 24 and 22 and a half.

In Kent, was there a banner saying 'Thatcher In' or 'Good Luck To Thatcher'?

We were very nouveau riche.

My dad was very upset with the amount of tax he was paying in the early '70s,

so he was very much Conservative.

A complete contrast of upbringing, I suppose.

Let's have a look at dad, who, of course, by the time you were born,

was already a famous footballer, wasn't he?

Yes. He made his debut in 1962. I think that's about '77 or '78.

But as you can see... I mean, that's just my life, really. Really happy.

I was quite a simple kid.

I just wanted to go out, get muddy, play football, and come home and have dinner.

We had a great time. It was a great time.

Your mother, had the term been termed by then, she was a WAG, wasn't she?

Yes. It's a good job she's not here, because no-one ever calls her a WAG.

Mum is a very strong, independent woman.

She just so happened to marry my dad.

Still regretting it, obviously, some 40 or 50 years later!

But Dad was not a footballer. He didn't come home in a Bentley.

He came home in a Mini.

He was on the Tube, he was on the train. He made a mess at home. He got a rollicking from Mum.

So it was a very normal upbringing. Really, really normal.

And your mother, a journalist, was also a strong woman.

-And also is a strong woman.

-Yeah.

-Oh, look! There you are as a baby.

This is my mum's attempt... When I said I was coming to do your show,

and I said, I've got nothing to talk about, books as a child,

because I didn't pick one up. I have no idea.

She said, "I found a picture of you holding one. Maybe they'll believe it." So, yeah.

If you didn't read, when did you get interested in books?

-I really didn't read until I was about 13.

-In protest?

Shocking, isn't it?

I think I was always banished to my room with the order of,

"Go and read a book and be quiet for two minutes."

I didn't shut up.

I was constantly popping out from behind the sofa with a play that I'd tried to write.

I was trying to get people's attention all the time.

My poor parents were trying to study and write and make careers.

I was a nuisance.

And your first choice is 'Rebecca' by Daphne Du Maurier.

Was this something your mother thrust into your hands?

Yeah, she did. It had a huge impact on me.

I absolutely loved it,

because I think what I'd missed about books was,

I'd always thought it was this very sedentary, rather solitary activity.

That everything stopped and you had to read a book.

With 'Rebecca', it was akin to all the fantasies I'd been coming up with myself anyway.

So for the first time, those two things met.

My imagination and reading.

Just remind us of the story.

She's a companion, what's known as a companion, I think,

in the South of France or Monaco or somewhere.

She meets this man who's much older than her and looks slightly troubled and very debonair.

She desperately wants to penetrate and understand him and, of course, he's unavailable and won't.

But one day, he sort of says,

"I want you to marry me and come back to Manderley and live."

And, of course, she does.

Then the whole story unfolds where his dark secret is he had another wife

and did she commit suicide, or he was accused of the murder? And so forth.

Did you subsequently see a film, one of the 'Rebecca' films?

-Were you disappointed seeing it?

-Not the Joan...

-Is it Joan Fontaine?

-Yeah.

-And Laurence Olivier. I loved it.

In fact, at drama school, we had to do these radio plays

and I chose an extract from 'Rebecca'

so that I could "talk like that and ask him if he loved me."

Why did they speak like that? Was it just the era?

-I still try to at home!

-Do you?

-Yeah.

Meanwhile, back in intellectual Kent...

I'm going to be so embarrassed.

Wonderful imagery, and I'm just about to bring out my first book.

-It's got a short title, hasn't it?

-Yes.

-It's called 'The Shoot! Annual'.

It's called 'The Shoot! Annual'.

Like most boys, I would probably

have driven you mad if we'd lived in the same house.

I was like, "Let's go out, get muddy and run around and get on a bike."

You were much younger when you read this than when I read that.

-This is 1975, so I'm about four.

-You were little.

If you play sport, your grandma, your grandad, your uncles

and your aunts, your best friends, all buy you a sports book.

'Shoot!' was the big football annual. This one is... It's amazing.

If I pick this up and smell it and see the photographs,

I'm straight back in my bedroom at home, you know,

just waiting for dinner.

Mum's making dinner. I flick through the pages.

The amazing thing for me is when I flick through these books,

there's Kevin Keegan, there's Franz Beckenbauer, oh, look, there's Dad!

And here it is. Page whatever it is,

there's a picture of Dad and his massive '70s haircut.

I bet he wishes he had that now, that thickness. But that's Dad.

-Mum, that's Dad!

-And he played in the Premier League.

Yes. It was obviously the First Division then. He played...

Did you know that, Natascha? That it was then the First Division?

-Of course! Yes!

-I think he made his debut at 16 in 1962.

Sorry if I've got that wrong. And he played until 1986, something like that.

So 23 or 24 years in the top division.

He obviously had a very expensive son and daughter that he had to look after!

-So that's him. He's just scored a goal there.

-Who's he playing for?

He's playing for Chelsea. I think that's in the early '60s.

What's lovely now, whenever I walk down the street, I get,

"You're off the telly. You did that dancing. Send my love to Annie."

Or they say, "Your dad was a great footballer."

It fills me with a lot of pride. It's good.

-Natascha, you were at school in Brighton. Were you a scholar?

-No!

No, far from it. Hence the, you know, not reading a book until I was 13.

-What did you want to do?

-Act.

-You did?

-Yeah.

-From a very early age?

From when I was three, apparently. So my mum tells me.

You did get to drama school. Was that with your parents' consent?

Absolutely. They were very supportive.

I mean, anything, I think. Just contain her.

But you had begun to get serious, because your second choice of book, tell us about it.

It is quite serious for a teenager, isn't it?

Isn't that what teenage years are about?

I was more serious then than I am now.

Yes, 'De Profundis' by Oscar Wilde.

I went through a massive Oscar Wilde phase. Obsessed.

-I used to dress like him.

-Really?

-Yes, with the tailcoats, and I...

Yeah, very pretentious.

And this is 'De Profundis', which is a 50,000-word letter he wrote once he was in jail.

Yes, that's right. After two years of waiting for a letter from Bosie...

Which is the reason...

..which was the reason he was in jail, he had received nothing.

Then he received a letter asking him permission

for Bosie to sort of print personal letters that he'd written to him.

I suppose to raise some money, because he used a lot of his money

and he was no longer providing for him.

This is really a letter back,

essentially saying, have you learnt nothing through all of this?

Do you have any idea what it's been like in here?

And also, I suppose, just talking about suffering,

but also about how the suffering wasn't for nothing in end.

At first, he thought it might be.

And that he'd taken his genius for granted,

that he'd squandered it on people like Bosie and he wished he hadn't.

But having done that, he'd learnt so much

and the thing he learnt most was, he discovered humility.

It was a journey, a spiritual journey. It's very moving.

-You're going to read a small passage.

-Yes.

Just after talking about how he'd been a spendthrift of his own genius,

and had grown careless of other people's lives

and had lived this life of indulgence, he then went on to say,

"Now I find hidden away in my nature something that tells me

"that nothing in the world is meaningless, and suffering least of all.

"That something hidden away in my nature like a treasure

"in a field is humility.

"It's the last thing left in me and the best.

"The ultimate discovery at which I have arrived.

"The starting point for a fresh development.

"It has come to me right out of my self,

"so that I know that it has come at the proper time.

"It could not have come before or later.

"Had anyone told me of it, I would have rejected it.

"Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it.

"As I found it, I want to keep it. I must do so.

"It is the one thing that has in it the elements of life. A new life.

"A Vita Nuova for me."

Just after that, he also says the two gracious things that happened.

Here, he says,

"I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply

"and without affectation that the two great turning points of my life

"were when my father sent me to Oxford and when society sent me to prison."

-Back in Kent...

-Back in Kent!

I notice you didn't ask me to read an extract from Shoot!

You could have done, Chris, if you'd wished to.

-"The ball went into the net!"

-But I love your next choice.

The next choice is 'The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 and Three Quarters' by Sue Townsend.

-We're just celebrating 30 years.

-That's right.

I read in a newspaper that it touched lots of people's lives,

which is really good.

I think David Walliams was talking about,

he read it again,

and he picked up so many things that he'd missed in the first place.

The reason why it meant so much to me,

this book, I mean, it's pretty self-explanatory,

it's Adrian Mole

aged 13 and three quarters,

trying to find his way through life

and he, rather embarrassingly,

writes everything down.

I remember picking up this book

and it coincided with the first time I'd ever gone to a school disco,

and I was always a bit cocky and quite loud.

We were at this school disco and boys were one side,

girls on the other side, and one of the parents said,

"Chris, you've got confidence, go and ask one of the girls to dance,

"otherwise this is not going to be a dance."

I walked across the dancefloor and asked this girl to dance

and she said no!

And I had to walk past all the way back,

and that was the first time you get rejection,

and suddenly you start questioning yourself,

and then you think those pretty things with long hair, I want to know a bit more about them.

This is exactly what was happening to Adrian Mole.

Fantastic observations.

Did he, were you encouraged by reading it

to measure the size of your penis?

LAUGHTER

Do you know, I never thought I'd have that asked of you, Anne, on television!

-But it's wonderful!

-I didn't actually get a ruler out, as he did.

But what does come over, it did make you feel, as a boy,

because a boy never talks to anybody about what he's going through,

girls tend to talk to their girl friends,

you actually felt a bit better.

Nothing was quite as bad as Adrian's poor life

and that you weren't, probably, as insecure as Adrian about everything.

Poor Adrian even had spots.

We all had spots as teenagers, but not quite as bad as Adrian.

-Are you going to read an extract?

-Yes, he wrote a poem off to the BBC.

I don't know whether you remember,

but Pandora is basically the love of his life.

-He's just split up with her.

-He's just split up...again!

-Pandora.

Poor old Adrian writes on the 14th March -

"It's a Saturday. I went out for a sad walk

"and took Pandora's horse two pounds of cooking apples.

"Thought of a poem about Blossom..." which is the horse.

"..Wrote it down and when I got back to the house...

"I wrote it down and got back to the house where I live.

"It's Blossom by Adrian Mole aged nearly 14.

"Little brown horse eating apples in a field,

"Perhaps one day, my heart will be healed.

"I stroke the places Pandora has sat.

"Wearing her jodhpurs and riding hat.

"Goodbye brown horse, I turn and retreat.

"The rain and the mud are wetting my feet.

"I've sent it to the BBC and I've marked the envelope - Urgent."

Wonderful.

You get lost and then suddenly you realise

that this is through the eyes of a teenager,

"I've sent it marked - Urgent," and it's brilliant.

I really loved it.

Meanwhile, Natascha, your third choice is Leo Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina'.

What prompted this?

There was an audition for War and Peace at the National

and I'd gone along to try.

I read half of it and then didn't get the part, so I abandoned it.

I then went on to Anna Karenina.

And I have to say, I think it's my favourite book ever.

It's often described as the greatest novel ever written, isn't it?

-It's just amazing.

-Just remind us of the story.

Well, it's about so many different things.

It's about social change, a lot of my stepfather's politics

are embedded in this book as well,

which is why it's slightly nostalgic for me.

It's also a terrific love story.

There's three main characters, I suppose,

and Levin is the male character that I really related to at that time.

I notice in my diary, because I looked back at my diary,

all my entries are passages about him and him trying to lead

the most productive life he possibly could and not rest on his laurels,

change, and the belief that you can change,

that it's a state of mind, you're not...change is possible.

I was obsessed with that at about that age.

It's not so much Anna Karenina, there was something, obviously,

you know, her fate is, right from the beginning...

They meet at a train station and it's flagged up then,

there's a terrible omen because someone's just thrown themselves under the train.

So I was more fond of the male character in it.

Do you mind a book with a deeply unhappy ending?

-Love it!

-Really?

Your next big break, there weren't any gaps.

-After The Park, you got this offer from James Ivory to star in...

-That's right.

..Surviving Picasso, starring yourself and Anthony Hopkins.

What was that like?

It was blinding, I have to say, it was the most incredible experience.

Set in the South of France.

You see where that picture is?

It's a little church on top of a little hill

in a place called Menerbes in the South of France.

When we walked in there to film,

I remember thinking, I'd love to get married in this church one day.

Cut to a few years later

and that's where I got married, at that very altar.

-But not to Anthony Hopkins!

-No, even better, you married...

Much better!

Well, this is wonderful, obviously!

You married Martin...

-Yes.

-..who was somebody you'd known

in childhood.

I first met him when I was about 15 or 16,

and then we'd gone our separate ways.

I had jobs like waitressing, or working in restaurants

at the weekends. I wanted to have my own money.

-By the time you re-met him, he was a doctor.

-He would have been an SHO.

He wasn't quite a surgeon, but he was still...

The huge, massive change in your life was in 2008, wasn't it,

when you were filming over in LA and Martin was back here

and you got a phonecall?

-Definitely.

-That he'd died.

-Yes, and, erm...

-You were pregnant at the time.

I was pregnant with my third son, so there's that massive change.

I think I'd always told Martin that two's great.

You've got a left hand and a right hand, and there's two of us, and that's a perfect square.

He'd always bargained for a third.

So that was one huge irony.

He got the third, but he wasn't here to meet him, which was, of course,

still, every day, makes me incredibly sad.

And then, so it's a one-man band, a one-woman band.

How do you cope with filming and the children, and being here?

The gig that I have right now, Californication,

has just been this gift.

I'm eternally, eternally grateful and indebted to that company

for giving me that job, and the audiences for watching it and keeping it going.

I love you in it, because you're so real in it and so American.

-Well, good.

-Do you find yourself slipping back, while you're there,

does it seem easy?

No. No, on set, I'm mostly American, I suppose.

Because my kids will come for lunch and I'm in the trailer.

One time, I think, I wasn't focussing,

the make-up artist was working on something,

and Theo was playing chess with someone on the back of the trailer

-and I was doing my lines with someone else and I went into my Karen voice.

-Do your Karen voice, I love it.

He leant back and said, "Why are you doing that terrible accent?

"What is it meant to be?"

And I felt about that big.

He said, "Is it Australian?"

Theo is my oldest son, by the way.

So, yeah, out of the mouth of babes."

-You wanted to be a footballer.

-That's right.

Throughout my youth, I always thought,

I'm going to be a sportsman.

Dad was a sportsman, I was really good at most things I did.

I played professional cricket, played a bit of football.

-You played cricket for Oxford.

-I played for Oxford,

played some England Schools' rugby. I was quite good at everything.

Then when I reached Oxford, Durham and then Oxford,

I suddenly started failing at cricket and I couldn't understand it.

It was easy until...

It took me a long time to work out that you actually

have to work hard, and I didn't know about the work hard bit.

I thought it was just going to happen.

It got me into journalism, this book.

It's 'Rich: The Life Of Richard Burton' by Melvyn Bragg.

He wasn't happy working in films.

He actually enjoyed working on the stage

and he enjoyed working on radio. Radio, he really loved.

I'm not sure he was entirely content whatever he was doing.

No, that is the other thing you don't know as an outsider, as a film-goer.

You don't quite work out how tortured he really was with himself,

and how much he drank,

and how volatile his relationship was with Elizabeth Taylor.

My goodness.

-That's obviously a good time!

-He married her twice.

Married her twice, but obviously, infatuated is probably the word

with Elizabeth Taylor, but never could quite work it out.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall

for one of the rows, just to have seen it,

and to see how they tried to resolve it, normally with diamonds, I think.

Your final choice of book, Natascha, is not, it's very far from fact,

it's fiction and it's fantasy.

It's Angela Carter, the late Angela Carter,

'Nights at the Circus'.

Why this one?

It's the first book that I read where I saw the film of it on my eyelids,

if you like, as I was reading it.

I just thought, this is so intensely visual, it's so visceral to read.

As you read, you can almost sort of smell the room she's describing.

Give us a rough idea about the book.

It's about, the main character is called Feathers,

and she was hatched out of an egg, so she says.

She has wings.

You never actually see the wings.

You do see them once she's up, she's an aerialist in a circus,

and it's about the circus.

And a journalist comes, sort of a tabloid journalist,

it's very contemporary as well, set in 1899, and necessarily so.

It's about that huge change, breaking into a new century.

But it's such a fabulous book and it's magical realism,

I know that term's over-used, but it is absolutely that.

You don't know what's true and what's fantasy,

and what's in her mind and what's real, and neither does he.

He gets sucked into this vortex and ends up falling in love with her.

He's younger than her and quite naive.

He thinks he's getting a scoop, he thinks he's going to sell her out

and find the truth that she doesn't really have wings.

Of course, instead, he becomes imbedded and can't extricate himself.

It ends with the question, "You believed me all along, didn't you?"

By the way, I left out, she's meant to be a virgin as well.

-You have to have a huge imagination to appreciate this book.

-Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

It does, and it goes once you're in part three in Siberia,

it's quite out there.

You're still in Californication.

You started it in 2006.

Do you have a lot of time, when you're sitting in your Winnebago, reading?

Do you know, when I'm filming something, I'm very bad at reading,

because I feel I can't keep two stories going at once.

-OK.

-In the evenings, once I've put my kids to bed, is when I read.

Chris, you've become a major television journalist, having failed...

Still waiting for my Winnebago!

Strictly Come Dancing - your mother must have been so proud.

Mother was very embarrassed, the whole family were embarrassed.

I'm always intrigued how often sports people do so well.

I think the most important thing is, is that one, they're willing to train hard.

Two, they're willing to push themselves a little bit extra,

be it uncomfortable.

The third thing is, when you play sport and you play it very badly,

your team mates and the crowd let you know you're rubbish.

There are not many people who say,

"Bad luck, old bean, for missing that open goal."

It's more like, "You're rubbish!"

So when you go and see the judges and they say you were rubbish, you say, "I know. I was there."

-But you're competitive.

-You're competitive and you go back and say,

"I know I was rubbish and I'll give it another go."

I think that's the thing why sportsmen and women do really well.

It brings me to your final choice, which is a really interesting book.

It's called 'Bounce: The Myth Of Talent And The Power Of Practice'

by Matthew Syed.

Tell us what it's about.

You know these people who say,

I can't do maths, I haven't got a head for it,

or I haven't got an eye for a ball, I'd never makes a sportsman?

Matthew Syed, who is a former international table tennis player,

says that's all rubbish.

He takes a lot of theories from all over the world

and says it's all about the amount of practice you do.

He uses two examples which will illustrate it.

Number one - he lived in a certain part of England

and he went to this school.

In a radius of 10-15 miles around his house,

there were six or seven international table tennis players.

Are they drinking special water? Are they having special food? No.

The sports teacher at the school set up a table tennis club,

so they all practised and played and played.

The other example which really fascinates me - forgive me if I get some of the facts wrong -

but an East German scientist said children are like sponges.

If you just chuck them in at the deep end in a sporting activity,

they will soak it all up and get better and better.

He married a woman who was willing to do this experiment.

They had three daughters.

The parents had never played chess, knew nothing about chess,

and even when thy were babies, they'd throw them chess pieces,

so they'd feel knights and rooks and pawns in their hands.

They let them play chess

and all they did was play chess, chess, chess.

The first daughter, the eldest,

was the first woman to beat a Grand Master.

The second one was the first woman to become World Champion,

and the third daughter's the greatest female chess player that's ever lived.

-Are they still talking to their parents?

-That's the other question!

It's not necessarily a great social experiment, but it got me thinking

about how I approach sport and whether I would do that to any of my children.

Would you consider doing that with your three children?

I think they gravitate towards things they're interested in.

If you expose them to as many things as you can, they'll gravitate towards it.

That's the time you seize it, once they're interested. That's the hook.

It's easier because there's no forcing.

It does open up a big argument.

My mum always says to my dad, "You should have pushed him.

"He could have been a whatever, footballer, cricketer."

But also, I always think about Maria Sharapova.

She became World Number One in tennis,

but she left home at 13, lived away from her mum.

-There's a tab to be picked up.

-Is that success?

I would argue, no, not necessarily. It's too big a price to pay.

Would you have become a great footballer

if you'd read this book 20 years ago?

No, it's not a proven science.

What I would say is, I think I'd have been better equipped

in the years you have to deal with rejection.

I wish I'd had a bad time when I was 13

because by the time I was 18, I'd have gone through it.

I wouldn't have had the joy of working alongside you on Watchdog.

-Exactly, and now life is perfect.

-Of course it is.

I can't thank you both enough. You've been terrific guests.

Thank you very much, Natascha McElhone and Chris Hollins.

APPLAUSE

Just to remind you, details of this series are on the BBC website...

You can also hear our guests read a passage

from their favourite children's book.

Please join me again tomorrow. Goodnight.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd