Episode 6 My Life in Books

APPLAUSE

Thank you, and hello, and welcome to My Life In Books,

a chance for our guests to talk about their favourite reads and why they're important.

Now, my first guest tonight is comedian and actor Chris Addison,

famous for playing the hapless, special adviser with the completely

hopeless love life in the political comedy series The Thick Of It.

Alongside him, Kate Silverton, she anchors BBC News at all times of day,

but currently is experiencing a very early morning shift,

she's just had her first baby.

Welcome to you both.

Thank you.

APPLAUSE

And just to remind you,

this series is part of the BBC's celebration of World Book Day.

Kate, you're an Essex girl.

I am. A very proud Essex girl, yes. Waltham Abbey.

Big house, double drive?

No, no, my parents, my dad was a cabbie.

A black cab driver?

A black cab driver, and my mum was a playschool teacher,

so we grew up in a house that was less on the wealthy side,

but a huge amount of love and support when we were growing up,

my two sisters and I.

And you were the other end of the country?

Yes, well, yes. I was in Manchester.

My dad was a doctor, a hospital doctor.

A consultant?

A consultant, yes, at the Children's Hospital in Manchester.

And my mum did lots of things, she was a teacher, she was a social worker,

and then later on she went back to, she went back to university

which is what she missed out on, what she most wanted to do.

Were you read to as a small child?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, that was, some of my favourite, kind of, memories.

I think it's really important, reading to kids. I do that.

That's my big thing now, it's to get home in time to read stories to my children.

Your children are now...?

They're five and three quarters, the three quarters is very important.

Yes.

And my daughter is, she's two,

although she'll tell you that she's two and four quarters.

Kate, you were quite an outdoor girl.

I was the one who used to like playing in the brook and bringing things home in jam jars.

I used to love nothing more than going off to Brownies and Guides and making fires.

Oh, Brownies, come on, can you do a bit of the Brownie promise?

Oh, don't, what was it?

-I'm not asking you.

-I wasn't in the Brownies.

I have a feminine aspect but I was not actually in the Brownies.

OK, it was, um, I promise that I will do my best, to do my duty to God,

to serve the Queen, help other people, and to keep the Brownie Guide Law.

Thank you very much.

Can you do the Scouts?

It's the same, but with Scouts where Brownies...

Baden Powell was fundamentally quite lazy when it came to writing laws.

We've got a picture of you, Kate.

Where's that?

That was in Devon.

My mum, again, bless her, wouldn't allow anything hairy into the house,

we were only allowed to have a tortoise for a pet.

So anywhere that we went that we had an animal,

I was either petting it or jumping on it if it was a horse,

and again, yes, loving the outdoors, and natural history in general.

So, your first book is no surprise.

My Favourite Animal Stories,

collected by Gerald Durrell.

Yes, he was a very well known natural historian and conservationist.

And he wrote himself,

but this is just a lovely, lovely book of his favourite stories,

that includes things like Tarka the Otter and Moby Dick, which were also favourites of mine.

It's quite sweet, when I was asked to come in the programme,

I picked up the book and there's a little quote saying,

"One of the first brilliant books I read, Kate, kiss."

I obviously wrote that as I read it.

-That's very sweet.

-I used to love any book that would take me in,

and take me off into another world.

And just to, I suppose, evoke something in you, emotional.

Just the very first story in here, I mentioned Tarka the Otter and others,

but The Snapshot of a Dog was the one that really got me,

it was about an American bull terrier called Rex.

And the narrator is one of three brothers, and it was their dog,

and was always getting into fights, and it was to the shame of the family.

He was very stoic and polite about how he got into fights,

he'd never go for the throat, but the ear to teach the other dog a lesson.

He would never start a fight, he'd get involved if it was necessary.

Even as I read it last night before coming on the programme,

it made me cry again.

Because it just talks about how Rex came home and walked up the path one day,

and the owner knew that something was wrong,

and Rex had obviously got into a fight and was the worse for wear.

And he came into the house, and he was battered and bruised,

but he could tell that one of his three masters wasn't home,

and he battles, and it's a big description of how he battled,

as he battled swimming upstream, as he battled in all the fights before,

in that last hour to wait for his last master to come home.

And when his third master finally came home,

he lay down at his feet and he didn't get up again.

Oh, I hate it, a sad dog story. So sad.

I know, and it just summarises that devotion

and the link between man and dog.

But, I suppose, that was why it was one of my best and most brilliant reads.

Well, it's well sold there.

Chris, meanwhile you're growing up in Manchester,

and where do you come in the family?

I am one of the children, and I'm the eldest of three.

-Oh, you're the king baby?

-King baby, yes. That is in fact, how I'm still referred to.

And your mum suggested your first book?

Yes, well, my first book is I, Claudius by Robert Graves,

which I read when I was about 13 or 14, I guess.

It pretends to be the autobiography of the Emperor Claudius,

and the history of Rome in his lifetime.

And my mum told me this, and told me how it was all about Romans.

I liked Romans cos they were in Asterix,

but I loved it, it's just a history of murder,

and sex, although it's only ever mentioned,

it's never described, because it was published in the 30s.

It is sex and violence.

It is, and it's astonishing, you go through it,

you think, how, everybody you meet is dead within pages.

But it's really beautifully done,

and it really breathed life into, you know, the idea of history.

Have you seen the series, subsequently?

-I have seen the series subsequently.

-We've got a clip.

What do you want?

Your life, Lady, your husband's orders.

No!

He wouldn't do that! My husband wouldn't do that.

Read it!

It has his signature.

I'm to offer you the dagger first, if you'll have it.

And then to cut off your pretty head and put it on a spear.

No!

APPLAUSE

That was Sheila White playing Messalina,

when she received some not very good news.

Nice bunch.

That, that happened most episodes.

It's lovely to see those, that's from 1976.

It's lovely to see those old, studio-bound, very slow, ponderous, old dramas.

I love that.

Kate, meanwhile, you're school in Essex?

In Essex, West Hatch, yes, good comprehensive school.

With ambitions?

Well, I remember, people ask me, "When did you first want to become a journalist?"

I'd always loved adventure, as we've discussed,

and anywhere that was vaguely dangerous appealed.

So, when I had this insatiable curiosity about places,

I wanted to go off, I'd heard about the Palestinian territories,

so I went on a kibbutz and went down into the West Bank,

and talked to people about the situation there.

That's when I was quite young, 17. Of course, it gave my mother kittens.

But I was always had that very curious nature

I want to learn about what was going on in the world.

And your second choice of book, did this encourage you?

It's The Burning Shore by Wilbur Smith.

Yeah, Wilbur Smith is always a guilty pleasure for people, seen as,

but he was a journalist and grew up in South Africa.

So everything he wrote, whether about Nelson Mandela, the setting up of the ANC,

or this, The Burning Shore, which is about Namibia and a woman's journey.

It's set in the time of the First World War,

and it's a woman's journey across the Skeleton Coast.

It was all done from his observations and all factually correct.

So much so, that when I read this,

I thought, it was set in Namibian, "I want to go there."

So, the next year, having read the book

I actually went off to Namibia, with two friends, just to see the burning shore myself.

So that was when I really travelled,

and I ended up travelling a lot in Africa,

Zimbabwe most specifically with something called Operation Raleigh,

which was a charity, you'd go off and build schools, and loos,

and go off into the jungle and get stung by scorpions and things.

Now, is that in Zimbabwe?

That was in Zimbabwe, it was on the borders with Mozambique.

And the night before that was taken I had been stung by a scorpion

and lost the use of my left arm, as you do.

So, the next day we had to climb out of this massive gorge,

and you can see the worried look on the chaps face below me,

he's one of out guides, we had no ropes, the crocodiles were all waiting beneath us,

and I think everyone thought I was actually a goner.

So, were there any scorpions at this point for you, Chris?

Yes, my life was filled with scorpions.

At university?

Yeah, I was at the University of Birmingham studying English.

A full life that was completely safe.

I spent most of my time directing plays in my spare time,

which is what I really wanted to do.

And when you went back home,

were there many ads in the Manchester Evening News for theatre directors?

Turns out, no, there weren't, no.

And, yes, you can do that, it's one of the things that you won't get an advert for,

you actually have to do that yourself.

It's dead easy to do that at school or university,

because there are rooms you're entitled to use,

and loads of like-minded people hanging about with time on their hands.

And you can put stuff on relatively easily.

Once you get out into the real world, after university,

and that black year of horror that no-one tells you about.

-Very bleak.

-It's an appalling year, the year after university,

and nobody ever gets warned about this, but it's horrendous.

And all of the stuff that was just open to you is gone.

The minute you throw that mortarboard in the air at graduation, it's all gone.

Your next choice of book, you read at university in your last year?

It's The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth.

The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth,

which is a novel from the early 80s set in California,

it's about a group of young people in California trying to make their way in the world.

The key thing about this book is, it's in verse.

It's absolutely amazing, I didn't know it was in verse, I opened it and thought, "Oh, oh, dear."

And I started to read it, and it's incredible.

It's so light on its feet, and it's witty,

and the way that he's managed to, you know,

there's something really attractive about it, because of the puzzle that he's solving.

How to say the things he wants to say,

having giving him self the restriction of a rhyme scheme.

-Making everything rhyme.

-Yeah, and it's amazing.

-It remains my favourite book.

-Really?

I reread it for this show, and it's just, it's a delight.

-Would you like to give us an extract?

-I will.

This is after the meeting of John and Liz.

"Who was it said, love is the friction of two skins,

"from your place or mine,

"there follow weeks of sweet addiction to insular, if sparkling, wine.

"Liz, now addressed by John as Honey,

"responds to him with, Funny Bunny.

"Their diction has, alas, become incomprehensible and numb.

"Their brains appear to be dissolving to sugary sludge as they caress.

"In lieu of fire, force, finesse, we have a ballet now,

"involving a pretty pas de deux instead,

"with common walkmans on their head."

That's wonderful.

-Yes, it's brilliant.

-It's quite happy.

It is, but it's, the book is, it's elegiac and it's heartbreaking,

and sad, and hopeful.

And all sorts of things.

And it really appealed to me at the time because it was young people making their way,

and I knew it was the thing I have to do next.

And, um, yeah, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Did you get any theatre jobs

when you left university in this bleak year?

No. Initially, I, I came to London, I tried to move to London

so that I could realise my tremendous theatrical ambition.

And I sold cigarettes in Selfridge's,

for a little while.

Then went back with my tail between my legs, to Birmingham,

and tried to hang around there for a while,

where I worked in market research,

which is one of the great, soul destroying jobs of all time.

-Yes, it's horrible.

-But you did manage to do some performing.

I did, I mean, because it was that horrible, bleak year.

I just needed creative outlet,

I needed something just to release the pressure.

And the very simplest thing you can do,

just from a logistical point of view, is stand-up.

It's just, somebody else does everything,

they sort out the lights, they publicise it, they get the place, the mic, all of that,

you pitch up with some words and do your bit.

What was your first gig?

My first gig was Easter Monday, 1995,

so it was slightly under a year after I graduated,

in the Frog and Bucket pub, in Manchester, in the northern quarter.

And it was horrendous, it was, um...

My stomach, I can feel it already, the nerves.

Oh, yeah, it was, so, I turned up very early,

I didn't know what time, I'd never been.

The next people, eventually, finally, when somebody came in,

were Caroline Aherne and her husband at the time, Peter Hook,

the bassist in New Order, a band that I loved.

So, two really important people to me came through the door.

And I thought, "Oh. Oh."

And I went up first after the interval,

with a cigarette and an exaggeration of the northern aspects of my accent.

For extra credibility.

And it wasn't heckling, it wasn't heckling

because the audience weren't a heckley audience that night,

but they were just quiet, they were just silent.

It was completely silent for five minutes, just a bunch of people doing that.

And my clearest memory of it is Peter Hook,

this bassist for the band that I loved, doing that.

Just looking at me with boredom and contempt.

And it was, it was horrendous.

Can you remember any lines?

Yeah, well, actually, the material I went on to use for years.

I don't know whether it was a subsequent desire to prove them wrong, but I did.

Now, your third book, very different from Vikram Seth.

It's Daughters of the Desert,

described as, "the remarkable life of Gertrude Bell,"

by Georgina Howell.

Tell us about Gertrude Bell.

Well, yes, Gertrude Bell, really, in my view,

and in a number of others,

is probably the most unsung heroine of our time.

She was a woman who was born and brought up into a very privileged family in the north-east,

she turned her back on the debutante lifestyle to go off

to become an explorer, an archaeologist, she was a spy, a linguist.

-It was the turn-of-the-century, wasn't it?

-Yes.

-1909, 1910?

Yes, she was born in 1868.

The author here, who is actually a fashion features writer for Vogue,

but she also came under Gertrude's spell,

and she wrote, I think she probably expresses it far more simply than me.

"I just love the way she dressed and the way she lived,

"so stylishly, a pistol strapped to her calf under silk petticoats

"and dresses of lace and tucked muslin."

There she is. "Her desert table laid with crisp linen and silver,

"her cartridges wrapped in white stockings."

And what she says, it wasn't money that got her a first at Oxford,

or that then helped her survive these encounters with murderous tribes in the desert.

Or made her a spy, or a major in the British Army,

or qualified her as a poet, a scholar, historian,

mountaineer, photographer, archaeologist,

gardener and cartographer.

In each of these fields she excelled, and even pioneered.

You can imagine her striding off in to the desert,

and all these tribes, you know, murderous tribes,

and she'd go along, she was fluent in Arabic.

She'd sit down with them in their tents and take them, and they loved her.

In fact, in Iraq, even today, she's on the national syllabus,

because of what she did in helping form the modern-day Iraq.

Did you read this book before joining the BBC?

No, during, it was around about 10 years ago.

So it was in the middle of all of that,

It did make me think, I'd just come back from reporting in Iraq,

so it was very timely, in that sense.

And her grave, she lived in Iraq, is still there.

How did you get started in journalism?

Well, I knew Durham as an area very well, because I'd been to university there.

And I phoned the BBC in Durham, I said,

"Can I come and have a look around?"

Two days later I walked in to the newsroom, everyone was swearing at each other

and throwing bits of paper and I thought, "Oh, I'm home.

"This is just it." I started at the bottom, I made tea,

I answered the phones at three o'clock in the morning.

And I believe in earning your stripes,

you've got to learn the hard way and you've got to make mistakes.

I probably did every job going in that building and built my way up.

You went from traffic reporting, to reporting.

-Yes.

-And finally news and current affairs?

At the BBC, yes, thankfully, still here.

Now, you've travelled for the BBC, you've been to Iraq, you've been to Afghanistan,

we've got some footage, this is you in Afghanistan.

Good morning, we're live in Afghanistan,

in Helmand province, in Lashkar Gah,

one of the main military bases here,

I've also been out on the ground with British troops

at the sharp end of the fighting in the green zone,

finding out what life is like for them,

and asking when will the British mission here end?

-Oh, she's very serious, isn't she?

-Well, she's reporting on quite a serious story, to be fair to her.

No hair or make-up before you go on?

No, everyone always thinks you've got people with you,

but no, it's just a quick dash of blusher and you're on.

-Did you get any training...

-Bit of blusher.

-Don't mind me.

Yes, but the army do the same, don't they?

"Going on patrol, there we go."

Did you get any training in how to cope out there?

Yes, there was an added bonus, actually,

from going out to Iraq in Afghanistan,

because you have to do a course called the hostile environments course,

which is a week-long course and you essentially get taken, kidnapped,

and taken hostage and beaten a little bit to prepare you for the fact...

This is a BBC course?

Yes, I don't think they'll like me describing it like that.

It's a good thing for stand up, isn't it, to learn how to get beaten up?

Hostile environments course? Yes.

It would be very different, a lot less beating up, a bit more swearing.

It's essentially a course that prepares you for hostile environments,

so, if you get shot, or kidnapped, taken hostage.

What should you do?

You shouldn't talk too much, which was my first mistake, try to make friends with people.

No, you've got to be the grey person, and not make yourself...

-Because?

-Because the person who talks a lot will get shot first.

Well, that's worth us all knowing.

Yeah.

There was one added bonus though, because it's how I met my husband,

because he was an instructor on the course.

I joke that he tied me up and put a hood over my head,

and that was it, I was smitten.

LAUGHTER

-Oh, that's lovely.

-So, yeah.

What were you fighting at this time?

I suppose around this time I would have been taking stand-up shows to Edinburgh,

to the Fringe, to the festival there.

It's a long game. I'd been doing that for a few years.

So, how did you become Ollie?

Who we love.

-Ollie, oh, poor Ollie.

-In The Thick Of It.

Well, Armando Iannucci...

-The king of...

-The king of British satire

but he's also the man behind The Thick Of It.

We met when I did the News Quiz on Radio 4,

and at the time, Armando was thinking of putting together a, sort of, modernish Yes, Minister.

He'd made a documentary about Yes, Minister.

And, yeah, then I got a call to come in.

Normally, when you go in for castings, there's a script to read and what have you.

But here I was just asked to improvise as an advisor.

So, I'd never done any acting,

and walked in to a room that had Armando, Peter Capaldi and Chris Langham,

three men I had admired for years and years and years,

brilliant at what they do.

And, um, I was terrified. Everybody else in the room had acting, you know...

-Credentials?

-Yeah.

After the second day, I was panicking and thinking, "I don't know how going to do this."

I got a lift home with my wife,

I went and met her from work and we drove home together.

I said, "I don't know if I can do this."

And she said, "OK, stop, stop. Describe the character."

And I went, "Well, he's quite bolshy,

"he sort of thinks he's a player but he's not, he's a bit of an idiot."

And the more I described him, the more I thought, "Wait a minute!"

I mean, yeah.

LAUGHING

Let's have a look.

Could you meet me at the door tomorrow?

-Oh, sorry. Yes, of course.

-Like carrying two fridges in.

Yes.

Right, so, the lunch, I've gone with The Guardian in the end,

I thought maybe not The Mail,

they might be nice to your face, but then brand you a man-hating, Euro slag.

Ollie, if you had to choose three nasty adjectives that describe me,

what would they be?

-Sorry?

-I was talking to Malcolm and he mentioned a pejorative word

which I hadn't thought of before, so I'm just keen to get your take.

-OK, top three?

-Yes.

Um...

Sour? Uh...

OK.

..Frumpy and...uptight?

Yeah, OK.

APPLAUSE

The Leopard is your third choice, Chris,

-by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa.

-That's him.

I got it out.

The Leopard which is an Italian novel from the 1950s, I think.

It's about the end of the aristocracy in Sicily

and about the coming of democracy, and about...

The key phrase is, "If you want things to stay the same, everything must change."

It's quite literary, but I found it a really easy read.

Even though I studied English, I'm a very slow reader,

and I get confused easily, and I read at night.

So, do that thing where you've read the same sentence six times,

"I can't do this. Give me that Star Wars book."

But this, somehow, there's something about the way that it's written,

and the brilliance of the translation,

that just completely sucked me in.

As it is translated,

do you think if you read it in its original form...

Do you speak Italian?

No, but, having read this and having gone to Italy,

which we now, as a family, try to go every year, somewhere different.

So, I wanted to learn Italian,

and my ambition is to learn it well enough

that I'll be able to read this.

Oh, you can come back and explain it all to us again.

But, whether that ever happens...

is an entirely different thing.

Kate, I think your final choice of book is very interesting,

because after Gertrude Bell,

which is this woman who, who...

is the pioneer for women.

You go back to a book that was published 10 years ago

by Alison Pearson - it's a wonderful book actually, I Don't Know How She Does It -

but it is about trying to be a good mother, and to have a career.

Yeah, when I was pregnant, Sophie Raworth, newsreader,

gave it to me, and she said, "Read this."

I read it very quickly, but it depressed me. I can't tell you how much it depressed me.

It's about a woman who works in the city,

she has two children, long-suffering husband,

She's trying to juggle,

she gets up in the middle of the night to bash mince pies that she's bought from Sainsbury's

to try to make them look like they're home-made, sprinkling icing sugar on them

so she can put them to the school fete.

Everyone saying they... this is the life we're now living.

We're trying to do it all and we're failing.

I became so depressed, I went to Sophie and said, "Tell me life is not like that with children."

And she said, "It is."

LAUGHTER

And the saving grace is the end, which I won't...

-No, no, don't.

-No, I won't give away.

It's in the form of e-mails.

Yes, lots of e-mails to her friends, all very witty.

I'm now in that club of women who are talking to each other saying,

"How are we going to cope with childcare,

"and raising children as well as having a job?"

I suppose it spoke to me at a time when I hadn't really anticipated the hardship that parents face

and the challenges they face when they've got children.

And finally, Chris, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists,

by Gideon Defoe. Tell us about it.

The story of the book is, the legend of the book is, Gideon Defoe,

in an attempt to impress a girl one evening, said, "Yeah, yeah, I'm a bit of a writer.

And she said, what are you writing?

And he said, I've written a book, it's a story about pirates.

She went, "Oh, I'd love to read that." He went, "OK".

And, so, had to write it.

And it's hilarious, it's a group of pirates

who, in this book, there are four or five books now,

in this book they help Charles Darwin defeat the evil Bishop of Oxford,

who is attempting to suck the life force out of young ladies

so he can remain younger.

And it is...

It's a boy's book.

It's not, cos it's full of jokes. The story is relatively unimportant,

it's just a series of brilliant, hysterical jokes. It's lovely.

You've got an extract to sell it, finally.

I will read you, from the beginning of the book,

just after there's been an argument about shanties.

"The pirate captain was secretly relieved when he heard the strains

"of a rowdy shanty coming through the roof of the galley.

"He'd been worrying about discipline on board the pirate boat,

"and there was an old pirate motto - 'if the men singing a shanty,

"'then they can't be up to mischief.'

"'Come into my office for a moment', he told the pirate with the scarf, who was his second-in-command.

"The captain's office was full of mementos from previous adventures.

"There was a 10 gallon hat from the pirates' adventure with cowboys,

"some old bits of tentacle from the pirates' adventure with squid

"as well as post-it notes reminding the pirate captain to say things like,

"'Splice the mainsail' or 'Hard about, lads!'

"On the walls, there hung several paintings of the pirate captain.

"One of them showed him looking anguished and cradling a dead swan, this painting was titled, 'Why?'

"Another, another was of the pirate captain reclining naked except for a small piece of gauze,

"and the third picture,

"the pirate captain sharing a strange futuristic looking drink

"with a lady who seemed to be made from metal."

I think you should do the audio book.

I would, I'd kill to do the audio books for these,

they are wonderful.

-Thank you both very much.

-Thank you very much.

Kate Silverton, Chris Addison.

APPLAUSE

And just to remind you, details from this series are, of course,

on the BBC website.

You can also hear our guests read a passage

from their favourite children's book,

and, please, join me again tomorrow. Good night.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd