Episode 7 My Life in Books

APPLAUSE

Thank you. Hello and 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, actor Phil Davis, famous for playing shifty characters,

men on the make, in fact, adding spice to any role he takes on.

Alongside him, Rosie Boycott, whose life reads better than any novel.

Founder of Spare Rib at 21,

later, editor of three national newspapers,

and now the Mayor of London's food adviser.

Thank you both for coming.

APPLAUSE

Two very different backgrounds.

Phil you started life as an Essex boy...

-On a council estate in Essex, yes.

-Yeah.

What did your dad do?

My dad worked in a soap factory and my mum, worked,

when she did work, in a hospital canteen.

And were there books in the house?

Not many. And my mum and dad didn't read to me when I was a kid,

although I was encouraged.

Rosie, your start was very different, wasn't it?

My dad was in the Army, so my first five years were spent

being taken around the world as a baby.

Then, when he came out of the Army in 1956,

it's quite difficult now to imagine, but here's a bloke

who's around 40 with no job. He'd been to Sandhurst after school.

He had no ability to do anything apart from being the army,

so, my parents found themselves living in a very small house

in Essex, in fact, in Harlow.

My father had jobs in Selfridge's selling sheets and Christmas decorations

while he studied to be an accountant.

We were very, very short of money, is my memory.

Was he reading to you at this stage?

Yes, he always read to me, always read me books.

He kept reading to me, actually, until I was quite old.

My father read me Lorna Doone when I was a teenager,

and it gave me a love of being read to and indeed, of reading to people.

I think it's an incredible privilege.

It's a wonderful way to hear words.

By the time your father had qualified as an accountant,

things were looking up.

They were looking up because I remember having enough money,

or them having enough money, for me to go and have riding lessons.

-Impressive!

-Source of pride, that picture!

I'm a little bit older, there. I'm probably 11 or 12, maybe.

I had borrowed this horse. It was called Pinto.

Not surprisingly, your first choice of book is...

Black Beauty, for anyone who hasn't read it, is an extraordinary

story about a horse from the point of view of a horse.

At the moment, people are saying

that Michael Morpurgo wrote War Horse,

wrote about Joey, and that was the first story

written from the point of view of a horse, but in fact,

Anna Sewell, long time before that, wrote the story of Black beauty.

It's the tale of a horse's life, in a particular moment in England,

about 100 years ago and how the horse goes from very good times

and changes owners and is moved around,

and then has very bad times. What's fascinating,

I think, about the way she writes it, is that the horse

is like a blank canvas,

onto which you can imprint all of human behaviour.

So, in a sense, the horse, like a child

begins as a completely innocent, well-meaning animal,

who will learn from a good master and become broken by a bad master.

-Read us an extract.

-Yes. It's very powerful.

I re-read it again the last few days. It still makes me cry.

This is a very moving passage

and Black Beauty is now working as a horse

drawing a cab in London.

"One day, whilst our cab and many others were waiting outside

"one of the parks where a band was playing,

"a shabby old cab drove up beside ours.

"The horse was an old, worn-out chestnut,

"with an ill-kept coat and bones that showed plainly through it.

"The knees knuckled over and the four legs were very unsteady.

"I'd been eating some hay and the wind rolled a little lock of it

"that way and the poor creature put out her long, thin neck and picked it up,

"and then turned round and looked about for some more.

"There was a hopeless look in the dull eye,

"that I couldn't help noticing. And then,

"as I was thinking where I had seen that horse before,

"she looked full at me and said, 'Black Beauty, is that you?'

-"It was Ginger."

-APPLAUSE

I'm glad horses could talk in those days.

They chat to each other. They weren't chatting to you and me.

-Phil, no riding lessons for you, growing up.

-No. Nothing like that.

I mean, it wasn't a particularly harsh or deprived background,

money was tight but we made it through.

We've got a picture of you as a little boy. A beautiful blonde you are!

-In Trafalgar Square.

-Trafalgar Square. Day out?

-Day out.

Up in London, feeding the pigeons.

And your first choice of book is Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

-Tell me about why.

-Well, this was the first grown-up book

I ever read. I came across it about 14 or 15.

It wasn't a set text at school.

I just read it off my own bat. It was given to me as a birthday present.

And it resonated with me in a way no novel has, before or since.

It sort of rang me like a bell.

This story of an unexceptional boy,

plucked out of one background and put into another.

Bearing in mind that I had a desperate obsession to be an actor.

I wanted so much to be an actor, before I'd ever seen a play.

He's not the nicest person, the lead character.

No, he's not, he's not. He's presented, warts and all.

But Dickens gets inside his head, the psychology of the character,

I think its very acute and very well drawn. And, of course,

he's desperate for a different kind of life, in the same way that I was.

This makes his relationship with Joe Gargery,

to whom he's apprenticed as a blacksmith, very, very complicated,

because he's very fond of Joe, loves him dearly.

But he's desperate to get away and I felt the same, and so it resonated.

-Will you read an extract?

-I will.

This is... he's having a conversation with Biddy, a housekeeper,

after his sister is too ill to look after the household.

" 'Biddy', said I, after binding her to secrecy, 'I want to be a gentleman.

" 'I wouldn't if I was you', she returned.

" 'Biddy', said I, with some severity,

" 'I've particular reasons for wanting to be a gentleman.'

" 'Well, you know best, Pip, but don't you think you're happier as you are?'

" 'Biddy', I exclaimed, impatiently, 'I'm not at all happy as I am.

" 'I'm disgusted with my calling

" 'and with my life. I've never taken to either since I was bounced.

" 'Don't be absurd.' 'Was I absurd?', said Biddy, quietly raising her eyebrows.

" 'I'm sorry for that. I didn't mean to be.

" 'I only want you to do well and to be comfortable.

" 'Well, then understand once and for all

" 'that I never shall or can be comfortable or anything but miserable,

" 'unless I can lead a very different sort of life from the one I lead now.' "

APPLAUSE

Wonderful. Thank you. In fact, you've managed, through the years,

to be in quite a lot of Dickens, haven't you?

The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist...

Oliver Twist, Nicolas Nickleby.

Dickens has kept cropping up, and more recently, Bleak House,

the BBC's version of Bleak House.

Wonderful as Smallweed, a nasty

greedy old man, the moneylender.

Yes, very fierce. But, you know, bear in mind, he has a disability.

He can't walk. So he has to go everywhere carried by these servants.

I wondered how a man like that, a money lender,

who would have enemies, would cope, because life

was very harsh and cruel in Victorian London and so, I think his ferocity

was something of a front, to protect himself from the rest of the world.

Let's have a look.

Mr Smallweed, very good of you to trouble yourself.

Honoured, Mr Tulkinghorn, privileged, deeply gratified. Set me down gently.

Gently!

Off, out, way outside!

Savages!

I'm half killed!

If you'd be so kind as to ask your man to shake me up a bit.

Ooph!

BONES CRACK

Much obliged.

APPLAUSE

While Phil is lost in Great Expectations

you were at Cheltenham Ladies College.

Yes, I was indeed there. I didn't last the course, you might say,

I didn't get on with Cheltenham very well.

I had a very chequered education.

I went to Cramers, got chucked out, did this, did that,

but in the end, I did manage to get some A-levels

and was accepted into Kent University to do pure maths,

of course, which I knew I probably wouldn't stay in.

You took a gap year before?

I took a gap year. Yes, the success of the A-levels

meant that my parents said you can go hitchhike round America,

because by that point, I was becoming obsessed with all things American.

-Tell us about your second choice.

-My second choice is...

..which I read just before I went,

and finished reading while I was there.

It's a wonderful book. It's a story

of the travels of two men.

It's based on the real lives of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady.

In the book they're called Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.

It's really just about journeys.

But what it's also about at heart, it's about longing for something.

It's about longing for something bigger,

about the search for spirituality, a search for completion,

a search for... The expression "kind of far out" came up,

and how far could you go, how far could you push yourself?

What could you do?

And this is set in the '50s,

at the start of a kind of restlessness that I think America absolutely epitomised,

because it had that sense that you could take

great geographical journeys.

And I liked following the fact that they are...

We were hitchhiking on parts of Route 66

and different routes, but I went with two friends who were boys,

who were just platonic friends,

and we flew to New York and our parents had bought us Greyhound bus tickets

because they thought this was a very safe way to travel.

We took the Greyhound bus tickets over one night, then, I have to say,

got rid of them, and hitchhiked the rest of the way.

Playing hippies?

We were not playing.

We were!

I remember eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

overlooking Big Sur, listening to the Grateful Dead

and thinking, "Life was OK."

Phil, did you hit the '60s knowing what the '60s were?

No, not really. The '60s happened to me in the '70s, really.

-But, um, I mean, I was 16 in 1969.

-Yeah.

Still at school and a rock music fanatic,

but I was a strange, something of a melancholy, boy, really,

cos I was longing to get going as an actor, you know?

But you were acting at school?

Yeah, I was in lots of school plays and amateur dramatics

and stuff we would get together ourselves.

Here's a picture of you. Can you remember...?

I can't remember the play. I remember the girl!

Isn't she pretty?

I knew you'd remember the name of the girl!

That was Margaret Fender. I wonder if she's watching?

And the book you've chosen next is...

I'm delighted by this -

Why this one?

I always loved poetry, you know?

I love reading out loud, and so I love poetry.

But when I discovered this, it dropped like a bomb,

because this was Liverpool, like The Beatles.

This was accessible, funny, irreverent, like song lyrics.

And we loved it, but it did get me into some trouble.

Occasionally, we were allowed to do the school assembly.

Instead of reading from the Bible, we were allowed to read poetry.

You know, published poetry.

My friend handed me this and said, "Will you read this one? Schoolboy."

And I hadn't read it. And I opened the page and the first line is,

"Before playtime, let us Consider the possibilities

"Of getting stoned on milk"

And there's this verse about halfway through the poem.

It goes, "Girls, still mysterious

"Arithmetic-thighed

"Breasts measured in thumbprints Not inches

"Literature's just another way out

"History is full of absurd mistakes

"King Arthur, if he ever existed Would only have farted

"And excused himself From the Round Table in a hurry"

There was a big roar of laughter and the headmaster said,

"Davis, that's enough."

But I loved this book and I love it still.

And it sort of dropped like a bomb in our schooldays.

There was a published book of poetry using the same language that we used.

You, meanwhile, had given up on Kent University and pure maths.

Did that seem like a brave move?

No, it seemed like an inevitable move.

I remember leaving one late February day,

and I had a very old, blue Hillman, and I drove to London and I slept

in the Hillman for about three weeks in the Gloucester Road.

And by that time I had managed to find a job

on an alternative newspaper called Friends,

and I felt like I'd arrived home.

I thought, "This is extraordinary,

"you can get paid to be a journalist!"

OK, we didn't actually get paid on the underground press,

but you got given some free meals and the odd free book.

And it was quite soon after that that the feminist movement

was beginning, and a group of us who worked in the underground press

started having meetings, started thinking about,

"Well, this is an alternative life but, actually, it's only an alternative life for the guys."

And the girls are meant to carry on being secretaries,

as well as being sexually available.

That was their alternative bit. And this wasn't good enough.

So you founded Spare Rib, the two of you. You and Marsha Rowe.

Yes, and we had a very small office in Soho, just off Carnaby Street.

Not surprisingly, your next choice is...

Being a child of the '50s and coming into your own in the '70s,

yours was a generation who really appreciated this book.

We really appreciated it, and I particularly appreciated this

because Germaine had worked on Oz Magazine,

so she also had a sense of the underground press.

And what I loved particularly about Germaine and her spirit

was that she was about life.

And there was a lot of feminist writing at that time which was,

well, quite frankly, very heavy, and very academic and rather dry.

And Germaine allowed you to have a really good time as women.

It wasn't just about, "Let's also get equal pay,

"let's embrace the idea that you can have sexual desire."

It took in the whole thing and it was immensely exciting.

Were you already campaigning?

No. Well, yes, I was, but I mean,

The Female Eunuch had already come out.

We started with Spare Rib and we were at the time

with the campaigns for equal pay, for the right to abortion,

for the end of discrimination,

so there were campaigns going everywhere.

We were constantly on marches. I've enjoyed marching ever since.

It is a very angry... When I read it now,

it's a very angry anti-male book.

I don't... I disagree with you.

I think it's angry and I think it's important that it was angry,

and indeed, talking to people today,

women of my age wanting to put together and look at new feminism,

the fact that there's still lots you can do.

Anger's disappeared, and yet, exactly the same.

You know, we still have unequal pay.

The same number of women are killed in domestic violence.

All sorts of discriminations still go on, not to mention the things

that ought to be done about women all round the world.

And it was very influential, not just to me,

but to vast numbers of people.

Were you an early feminist, Phil?

I'm afraid I wasn't, no.

I met a lot of early feminists in the theatre when I first started working.

How did you train, not being able to go to drama school?

I was really lucky, because I answered an advert in The Stage

in 1972, and a theatre director called Joan Littlewood,

fantastic theatre director, she took me on.

Working with her for the first year of my career was a real advantage not having trained,

because she worked in such an idiosyncratic manner,

and it taught me a wonderful kind of pragmatism.

I never felt uncomfortable if I didn't quite know what was going on.

It got you onto the London stage.

It did, it was my first break.

But I was off then, and my career had begun.

You played in a play by Barrie Keeffe called Gotcha,

that then was a Play For Today on the BBC.

-You were an angry young man, really, weren't you?

-I was.

This was 1977.

It was like the theatrical equivalent of a punk record.

It was set in a big comprehensive school

and a kid leaves on his last day with a terrible report,

and he's going to hit the real world like a wall.

And he holds a teacher and the headmaster hostage.

Wonderful part for me, and it launched my career, really.

It runs in the family, dunnit?

Yeah, my grandma was mad.

Old Grandma!

Right round the bleedin' bend, she went.

Had to look her up in a room no bigger than this.

I used to go and see her.

I says to her once, I says, "Why are you in 'ere then, Gran?"

She said, "They say I'm mad."

I said, "Why's that?"

She says, "Cos I go up the shops with no clothes on."

I said, "Don't you get cold?"

"Oh, no!" she says.

"I only do it in heat waves."

APPLAUSE

Brilliant.

-You're very tasty there.

-Yes!

-Love the hair.

-Very tasty!

Yeah, it's terrible what happened to me!

-Age, you know?

-Then, Mike Leigh and you came together, didn't you?

I came across Mike Leigh, who was a massive influence on me

and really changed the way I thought about myself as an actor because,

previously, I'd always kind of imagined the characters I played

were just various versions of me.

But with Mike, you start with no script

and you make these characters up, collaboratively, with Mike.

You invent a fictional character in the same way you would in a novel and the world around it.

Suddenly, I thought, "Wait a minute. I can do anyone, I can do anything."

Cos you did Who's Who with him.

I did Who's Who and Grown-Ups. And High Hopes.

And then, very famously, Vera Drake.

-Very famously, Vera Drake, the most recent one. Yes.

-Yeah.

The next choice of book, which is Any Human Heart, by William Boyd,

that is something you read while preparing

for Vera Drake?

It was, yes, because Vera Drake was set in 1950.

Of course, one was playing a character who was born just at the turn of the century,

and so all the research I was doing

on what life was like at that time was very much the same

kind of journey that Logan Mountstuart,

the main character in Any Human Heart, was taking.

The defining event in the lives of people

of that generation was the Second World War.

But this is a wonderful novel.

It takes the form of a journal, and this is a man who was at Oxford

and at the school in Oxford in the '20s, and was working around London

and a friend of his had an art gallery in Paris,

and he comes across all these real characters, you know?

Evelyn Waugh, he meets James Joyce, he meets Virginia Woolf,

he meets Picasso.

-His life is very messy and very complicated.

-Yeah.

He has an unhappy marriage,

finally falls in love with someone, has a child with her

and the war blights it because he's in prison in Switzerland -

they imagine he's dead, then they're killed by a bomb.

It's a very messy life,

but you get a picture of what life was like in the 20th century.

They'll read this in 100 years and say,

"That was what it was like."

For people of that class in that time, it's very accurate, and a wonderful story.

When you were cast as Stanley Drake,

did you know much about what was going to happen in the movie?

No, I didn't.

I mean, we invented this character, these characters, this family.

But I'd been working for about four and a half months.

I had no idea that Vera Drake had been off doing backstreet abortions.

Until one day, we were doing an improvisation.

We were celebrating the engagement of the Drakes' daughter to Reg.

And we'd been at it for about six and a half hours -

we had real tea and that -

and suddenly, there was a knock at the door.

I answered it and there were these actors

dressed as policemen, come to arrest her.

And I didn't know why.

And I could see by her face something was seriously wrong.

And then we went downstairs

and they'd transformed the rest of the rehearsal rooms

into a police station, with all these policemen around.

They kept me waiting for about two and a half hours

and finally let me in to see her, all the time in character.

And then she told me what she'd been doing,

and that was the first time that I, Phil Davis,

knew what she'd been up to, of course what the film was about to be about.

And Mike Leigh's vision of it, does that encourage you to be more real?

This was an improvisation, but when we came to film that sequence,

I knew everything about the character -

I knew what the fears were,

all the things he didn't quite say but nearly said.

all that subtextual stuff that you normally have to lay on to a script,

a text, was all there for me.

And so it was very easy to act it,

cos it was based on this improvisation,

which by then had taken on a kind of quasi-reality.

-It's a great performance.

-Thank you.

Rosie, you go right back in time for your final choice, don't you?

The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck.

Why this?

There's so many reasons why this.

-I left Spare Rib because I fell in love.

-Yeah.

Which was a very feminist thing to do(!)

LAUGHTER

I fell in love with Steinbeck's son.

And I didn't know much about John Steinbeck then,

I think I'd read The Pearl

and I think I'd probably read some of the Cannery Row books,

but I hadn't read a lot and I fell completely in love,

really for the first time in my life.

He had a great friend who arrived in England

and he was dying of cancer, he was 30.

He went to an acupuncturist in Ladbroke Grove.

The acupuncturist said,

"Why don't you go to India to see a guru called Sai Baba?

"He performs miracles."

He came back and he said, "Will you come with me?

"Will you guys come with me?"

I don't suppose one would do it now, but we just said,

"Yes, of course we will."

The following day, we booked tickets for India and we were off.

And for the next six months, we lived in an ashram in southern India,

where Steve slowly died.

We took his ashes, which were returned from the crematorium

in an Ovaltine can that was this large,

which was all very, very strange.

We bought a motorbike in Delhi

and we set off on the motorbike into northern India, up the Ganges,

and ended up in Kathmandu, where we started smoking opium.

And in the time of that,

we read each other every single John Steinbeck book

that we could purchase in Kathmandu,

which over the course of a few months was pretty much all of them.

And we'd lie around all day and read aloud.

Would you have read Steinbeck if it hadn't have been for his son?

I hope so, because I think Steinbeck is an extraordinarily wonderful writer.

I like many things about it -

I love fiction that is based with wonderful journalism.

I really want books about now,

I want books about the crash, I want books about what it's like,

you know, living in this society at this moment.

The thing about this book is it began with 13, I think, articles

that were written for the San Francisco Chronicle

about the plight of the migrant workers in the Salinas Valley.

These were mainly Mexican workers that had come up

and were working for the farmers.

For some of them, they did strike big,

but for the Joads in this book, they ended up being exploited

and working in very hard circumstances.

What's incredible about is that nothing has actually changed -

you still have migrant workers, they're still being exploited, they're still on the land.

You know, we have the same situation here.

So this book for me, as someone who's been a campaigning journalist

as well as very involved in environmental issues,

it's completely relevant.

We know things but still carry on and do them.

What's interesting about your life...

Well, many things are, but it's the peaks and troughs, isn't it?

Because having led this hippy life, heroin, drugs,

you went to jail at one point because you were found with...

Not with heroin...

No, with a bit of marijuana, actually,

not even a great deal of marijuana, but...

But you then sort of come back and go straight -

you edit three national newspapers, you give up drugs, you give up alcohol.

And eventually, you give up Fleet Street, don't you?

Yes, I do.

And then another trough.

Yeah, another trough. Yes, I fell off the wagon.

I got drunk, on and off, for about two years,

in the time of which I managed to have an incredibly bad car accident.

I came out the other side,

I really got restored through gardening, through growing.

Gardening and growing is probably our best therapy that the world knows.

And now I work for Boris Johnson, and one of things

I do is to create community vegetable gardens in London.

-We're just about to open our 1,500th.

-Fantastic.

We've got 50,000 volunteers.

I've got beautiful stories.

There's a street that I was visiting the other day,

and they started with one community garden -

they took a bloke's garden cos he wasn't very well, couldn't garden -

taken over by three families.

Two more gardens. Now they have an orchard.

In two years, from nobody knowing each other, they all know each other.

I'm really proud of that.

And the other important thing is that Charlie,

who you went on that first trip with before going to university, you've re-met.

We re-met after 27 years, and we're now married.

-There you are - happiness.

-I know, things can happen.

Phil, you also go back in time for your final book.

-It's The Sirens Of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut.

-Yes.

-Why's...?

-Yes, my brother gave me this in 1972.

Whenever he discovered anything - any new band or any new album,

he'd pass it on to me, and he gave me this.

It's a very complicated story,

but if you're interested in the big questions -

you know, "Why are we here? What's the meaning of life?" -

then this book has got all the answers.

And the central conceit of the book is that the human race has evolved...

..so that a piece of metal can be delivered to a robot

who's living on Titan, which is a moon of Saturn,

so he can continue his journey a trillion miles away,

on the other side of another universe,

because he has a very important message.

And that message is, "Greetings."

LAUGHTER

So the human race have evolved specifically so that this can happen.

There's a wonderful character called Winston Niles Rumfoord,

who drives his spaceship into a chronosynclastic infundibulum...

This is very complicated, I know! I won't try to explain what that is.

Think of a black hole where funny things can happen.

He's manipulating history and events.

And it is so imaginative, and it is so funny.

It's not really a sci-fi story, it's a satire.

He's a wonderful writer, Kurt Vonnegut.

Have you read much of his work?

Yes, I've read Cat's Cradle, and Fahrenheit 451's very good.

OK. Time has run out, so thank you very much, Rosie Boycott and Phil Davis.

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.

APPLAUSE

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd