Episode 8 My Life in Books

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

a chance for our guests to chat about their favourite reads

and what they mean to them.

Here tonight, Keith Allen, actor, pop star,

documentary maker, famous dad,

and very often, a whole heap of naughty.

Alongside him, the distinguished editor of British Vogue,

Alexandra Shulman.

So obviously, I've changed my outfit about four times

before settling on this one. It's great to see you both.

APPLAUSE

Alexandra, you're the daughter of two very distinguished journalists -

your father was a famous theatre critic, Milton,

and your mother was one of my heroines,

because I was in Fleet Street in the '60s,

and she was very much the name to celebrate, wasn't she, at that time.

Yes, she was one of the first women to work full-time on Fleet Street.

She worked all the way through, so I had a working mother all my life,

which is a great help when I became a mother myself,

and went straight back to work and worked full-time.

I knew that you didn't have to damage your kids.

Yes, and she wasn't frowning on it either.

Oh, no. No, she would have frowned if I hadn't worked.

-And was it a house full of opinions?

-Very much so.

I remember one of my friends coming to dinner with us

and going back to school the next day and saying to everyone in the class,

"I can't understand it. They just argued all the time."

And we... I said, "No, it's not arguing, it's discussing."

You know, we always all had lots of chats, lots of opinions.

And living in just about the smartest part of London - Belgravia.

Yeah, it's a funny thing I was brought up right

in the most expensive square in London.

It makes us sound like we were kind of princesses or something,

but actually my dad came to Britain in the war, in the Canadian army,

and didn't have any money at all and got a job eventually as a journalist

and he just decided that he was going to live in the best place

he could and he was determined to stay there, all his life,

-right in the middle of London.

-Keith, you were quite a long way from Eaton Square, weren't you?

-No.

-LAUGHTER

-No, I lived in Eaton Square.

-But growing up?

-Not growing up.

I was born in Wales, but I was brought up in Gosport,

which is close to a naval base, HMS Dolphin.

So it was very communal, actually.

-Was your father an officer?

-No.

No, he went in as a naval seaman,

and came out as a...what they call an ERA.

So living in naval accommodation,

were you very conscious who was an officer's child and...?

No, not at all. I'm sorry to disappoint you. No, ha-ha!

I was having far too much fun playing with anybody I could

-to worry about class.

-Yeah.

-Class didn't affect me at all.

Not until I was about 11 or 12.

And Alexandra, the first book you've chosen,

which is Ballet Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild,

it's...it very much...

mirrors the kind of life you were living.

-Tell us about the book.

-Well, for anyone that hasn't read it,

it was a book about three orphans

who were adopted by a man who was a fossil collector.

And they were able to kind of fulfil their dreams,

and I think that's what's so enchanting about the book,

all these girls, they all have these great dreams,

-and they're able to become those people.

-Did you go to ballet classes?

I was forced at school to do ballet

and I gave it up as quickly as I could

because I was always cast and told that I had to be the thunderstorm,

whereas all my friends were the raindrops.

LAUGHTER

It really wasn't my thing!

Keith, were you in a house full of books?

Oh, yes.

And I was constantly at ballet class, you know...

-LAUGHTER

-Not that I remember, no.

My dad to this day tries to convince me

that I was brought up reading Jungle Book, but I can't remember any of them.

The only books that I remember reading as a child, and I used to read them avidly,

were the Enid Blyton books, The Secret Seven and Famous Five.

-You've chosen The Secret Seven, actually.

-Yeah, yeah.

I clearly remember as a child,

because the adventures were kind of so normal,

they were based on very normal events,

like an observation of, you know, a car driving down a certain street,

stopping at a certain place. And it meant that I did spend a lot of time

looking for mystery and adventure...

-Yeah.

-..like the milkman appearing at eight o'clock.

I'd think, "What is he doing? Delivering milk? I don't think so."

LAUGHTER

I remember every summer as a child, we would go and stay at my uncle's smallholding in Carmarthen.

He was a farmer there. And all our summers were spent in Wales,

two weeks of which would be on the farm.

And myself and my cousin would sleep in the attic

-and there was a window there.

-Yeah.

I swear, this is true, you'd look out, and of course now I look back I know what it was,

there would be a light some distance away and trees would move, the wind.

But no, it wasn't, it was obviously a smuggler, you know, with a torch.

We would creep out at midnight, you know,

get about 50 yards from the house and go, "No, should we go back?"

A bit dodgy. But, yeah...

-You didn't have Scamper the dog to help you.

-No, no, we didn't.

-Sorry.

-LAUGTHER

Alexandra, your second choice of book

is The White Album, by Joan Didion. Tell us about it.

Well, Joan Didion is one of my favourite writers.

I guess I started reading her when I was about 19.

And she and her husband were a golden couple,

they were screenwriters in Hollywood.

-Yeah.

-Were you attracted to Hollywood?

Los Angeles is a place I completely loved.

I went for a year just before I left school

-and I fell in love with it totally.

-That's you at 17.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Ha-ha-ha!

-It's very much a picture of... What I love is...

-Sorry, I'm only laughing cos it's so LA.

-Ha-ha! And so 17.

But also, I believe that chair, that wicker chair, almost everyone has been photographed on the chair.

LAUGHTER

At some point, yeah!

So, Joan Didion...

The White Album is a collection of her journalism, her essays,

about America, really,

and America at a time when the '60s were turning into the '70s.

And what attracted ME to her,

and indeed a lot of the new journalism of that time,

was that she always made the journalist impersonal in some ways.

So, in a way, she was one of the first kind of 'me writers.'

Now every time you open a newspaper, it's all about the journalist,

the pictures of the women, taken about my marriage break-up or the clothes I wear.

But at that time, it wasn't like that.

Journalism was serious, and she was the one who'd start

writing about her nervous breakdowns and her children

and her family whilst reporting on other things.

Alexandra, will you give us a taste with a reading from The White Album?

"I recall a time when the dogs barked every night

"and the moon was always full.

"On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end

"of my sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills

"when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard

"about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski's house on Cielo Drive.

"The phone rang many times during the next hour.

"These early reports were garbled and contradictory.

"One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains.

"There were 20 dead. No, 12. No, ten, 18.

"Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed.

"I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly,

"and I also remember this, and wish I did not -

"I remember that no-one was surprised."

Somebody described her writing as it's like an icy pond

-where there might be sharks underneath.

-Brilliant. Yeah.

-Yeah.

Now, Keith, what were you up to in your school years?

-Being a good boy?

-Oh, yes, I was very studious(!)

LAUGHTER

No, I was very busy getting expelled from everywhere.

Were you still, were you in Gosport, or were you...?

Well, my father, bless his heart, he thought he was a socialist at the time

and where I was in Hampshire,

-they... It was the first place to have a comprehensive.

-Yeah.

And I'd passed my 11+

and all my friends had passed their 11+,

and they all went to Gosport Grammar, and my dad in his wisdom thought,

"No, I'm a socialist, I'll send him to comprehensive,"

which was the worst thing that he ever did.

-Why?

-Well, one because it cut me off from my friends.

-And not only that, there were girls so that was the end of it.

-LAUGTHER

Yes, ruin. I mean, it was a stage perfectly built for me.

I was very small, I was five foot until I was 17, incredibly, I know.

I had to compensate, so I spent most of my childhood showing off.

So were you at that comp for the rest of your schooling?

No, no, I went there... I did one year, and then I won a scholarship,

a naval scholarship to Brentwood Public School.

Yeah. And you had your little trip, first trip to Borstal, didn't you?

That was after being expelled from public school, went back to comprehensive,

-got expelled from there, then went to a detention centre.

-Was that nice?

-I'm just trying to lay the land to explain to you that I never read many books.

-Yeah.

-LAUGHTER

-I didn't have time, ha-ha!

So, Borstal...

-Best thing that ever happened to me, I think.

-Really? You enjoyed it?

-I loved institutions, loved them!

-Why is that?

-If you have an institution, it's clearly defined what you're bucking up against,

who the enemy are. It's very clear.

It's like having Thatcher as a prime minister - you know who your enemy is.

-Unlike having Tony Blair, who pretends to be your friend.

-Yeah.

It's easy to know who your enemy is, and in institutions it's simple.

So you went out from Borstal, you then went on to further education.

-Yeah, I came out of Borstal, I didn't know what to do and I had O-Levels, you know.

-Yeah.

I'd heard about this thing called student,

-which I just thought was the most romantic, wonderful thing that a human being could do.

-Yeah.

I met the guy who was to become my best friend,

he was my tutor, and became my mentor.

A wonderful jazz guitarist and English teacher called

-David Williams, who's now dead.

-And this is how your next choice...

The Mill On The Floss, that was on the curriculum.

-The Mill On The Floss, George Eliot.

-Yeah.

David had become by this time by best friend

and he was only ten years older than me, and as I say,

he was a wonderful guitarist,

so I used to spend all my evenings in jazz clubs,

up and down the valleys of South Wales with him, you know.

Sleeping with women, doing all that kind of stuff that young men get up to.

And then, he would go in the next morning and start to read

from A Mill On The Floss, you know, and we'd have to study it.

-Can you remember the story?

-I can remember the story, you know,

of the brother and the sister, Maggie and Tom.

-I mean, let's just say, first of all, I've gone back to it, I've revisited it.

-Yeah.

George Eliot, I think, is the most wonderful writer,

a brilliant woman. You talked about that lady being ahead of her time -

-George Eliot was even further ahead.

-Did you know at the time it was a woman?

-I had no idea.

-I thought it was a man.

-Would that have made any difference?

Yeah, of course it would. Ha-ha!

No, none whatsoever, but I became very aware

that there was something going on, cos it was the late '60s

and, you know, feminism and women's rights and everything was to the fore,

-it was the kind of discussion of the day.

-Did you have time to decide whether she was a feminist,

-or were you too busy...?

-I never got to the end of the book, to be honest

because I didn't take the exams, ha-ha!

I was having too much fun.

Alexandra, any jail at this time for you?

LAUGHTER Sadly not, no.

She was in a prison of her own making.

-I was, university.

-Oh, don't...

It's interesting that it was Joan Didion that possibly

set you on the road to journalism rather than your parents, then.

I think often young people don't want to do what their parents do.

I mean, you have a quite...

-You know, you want to carve your own identity.

-Yeah.

I mean, even now, I find it difficult,

because the fact that I've got journalistic parents always comes up,

that your parents are journalists. In a way, it'd be more,

I think I'd be more interesting if I'd done something different,

but I happened to go down that route and be good at it.

What you were... I mean, in the late '80s, the early '90s,

you'd actually achieved the position of editor of GQ magazine,

which is a huge triumph.

Was it difficult to take over that sort of role?

No, it wasn't. It was... It wasn't.

It was really nice. I loved working with the men on it.

And they knew all about, you know, Formula 1, and girls and everything.

And I was quite good at just kind of keeping the team together.

That's sort of what you do as an editor,

you're like a conductor, really - you know, come in here and whatever.

Did you read GQ magazine?

No, I've never been a reader of that kind of stuff.

My affiliation with fashion is limited, to say the least.

How would you describe, Alexandra, Keith's fashion?

Oh, he's a very trendy, mustard corduroy,

-very much of the Bowman jacket, I would say.

-Yes.

Wow!

And also, I quite like the jeans, cos they've got...

They're trendy, aren't they, with bits...

-Distressed.

-Distressed.

-Trendy. This is ridiculous. Trendy.

-There's holes in this. I'll tell you. Shall I tell you why that's there?

-Yes.

Cos I spend a lot amount of time with my pigs, going,

"Come on! Come on, pigs!" That's what I do.

LAUGHTER

-But what about the bit down the end?

-That's a shoe.

-No, no.

LAUGHTER

-Right. We better get back to books.

-LAUGHTER

Alexandra, your third book is High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby.

Does that reflect your GQ time? Cos it's a blokey book.

-I actually read it once I was at Vogue, High Fidelity.

-Yeah.

You know, I just loved it. It's a very funny book.

I read it, I'd just had my son.

And somebody told me that you should take a holiday

eight weeks after you'd had a baby,

which me and my then husband booked.

I don't know now why that person thought that was a good idea, taking a baby.

We went to Mallorca with the screaming baby

and the whole thing was unbelievably stressful.

You know, even like getting the flight and everything.

And I had this book with me and it just made me laugh,

and I just laughed and laughed and laughed when I had...

I was actually crying through the nights, trying to feed the baby and...

I have a real affection for it.

He makes a list of the five women

who he's had failed relationships with

in the hope of finding out...

Where they went wrong.

Now, do you think that's a guy thing?

-No, not really.

-No, it's a very girlie thing.

Keith, have you ever listed...?

Well, none of my relationships have ever gone wrong.

Oh, well, I see.

I mean, in my first two marriages, what happened was...

LAUGHTER

So, did you get to the '90s without any more jail?

Ha-ha.

-No, there was a brief incarceration in 1984.

-Yeah.

As a result of, you know, shenanigans, just silliness, really.

I'd...I'd smashed up a night club

on my own, sober, which isn't the reason I got sent away.

-Yeah.

-And I was sent to Pentonville.

Anyway, while I was there, I came out on appeal,

but while I was there, I did manage to grab a book from the library.

It was a book called Unemployed Struggles 1919-1936.

-I'm sure you've all got it.

-Yeah.

Written by a guy called Wal Hannington,

who was a trade union leader, a communist.

He was imprisoned.

And there I was, sat in this cell, and I started to read his account

of being imprisoned in Pentonville in 1926,

which was roughly 60 years previous,

-and the astonishing thing was nothing had changed.

-Right.

Absolutely, I could have written it myself.

I could've taken it verbatim, sent it home and said, "That was my day." It was exactly the same.

Well, Pentonville, either because of it or in spite of it,

your...your career was taking off as a stand-up, wasn't it?

Um... Yeah, yeah, it kind of had, yes.

-Brave!

-No.

-Don't you think, Alexandra, to do stand up comedy?

-Yeah, unbelievable. I can't imagine.

-Yeah.

-Look, can I just make something absolutely clear here?

-Yeah.

Go on, then.

For, you know, a person with a massive ego

bordering on, you know, psychopathic narcissism,

full of self-interest and the extraordinary ability to want to show off

to any living person in the world,

to stand on stage and entertain is not brave.

-It really is not brave.

-Let's have a look.

-Oh, God!

-LAUGHTER

-No, settle down, settle down.

Before we go any further, I'd like now to take this opportunity

to do a little slice of the act for all those grovelling,

cretinous, moronic comics out there in Noddyland.

'Where's the camera?'

I was young!

Out there in Noddyland,

desperately wishing they were up here!

This is for you, boo-boo.

That was the sound of me earning ten quid!

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

-It's so bad!

-Do you write your own material?

I never wrote anything, obviously. I never wrote anything down.

I didn't realise, when we put you two together,

that your lives obviously...

-Were so similar!

-LAUGHTER

-Parallel lines.

-LAUGTHER

And Alexandra, this fantastic elevation

to the top of journalism through the editorship of British Vogue.

That was year 1992. I'd never worked in fashion before.

They'd asked, I think, three people I knew, they'd asked to edit it,

who hadn't accepted the offer.

It was a very lucky break for me.

-And it's been a fantastic job and I've kept it for...

-20 years.

For 20 years now, yeah.

And there are several things that have marked your time,

one being huge circulation.

But also the refreshing thing that you yourself

had never felt at that time you had to be a slave to fashion

or to become a double zero size.

Well, I had a decision to make when I got the job, you know,

either I was going to try and make myself become something that I...that I wasn't.

That would be a more normal idea of, I suppose, Vogue editor.

But, seeing, as I was, a thunderstorm and not the raindrop,

that was going to be difficult for me,

so I thought the best thing to do is just try and be the way you are.

Listen, like everybody, you know,

would I rather be half a stone thinner? Of course, I would.

But, I mean, trying to fit into sample sizes every day

would just be, like, a waste of time.

And your final book, Alexandra,

which I love, is The Best Of Everything by Rona Jaffe.

Yes, fantastic book.

Everyone I've recommended it to has completely loved it.

It's about a group of young women who all go

and work in a New York publishers.

And it's about them trying to make their way in the world

and different things that happen to each one.

The extraordinary thing is reading it,

you kind of realise that not that much has changed, really,

from then to now, even though it's 50 years.

Well, obviously, the world has moved on fantastically for women,

so what is it you think that makes struggles similar?

I think women themselves, actually,

I think that the things that we demand of ourselves...

the way we feel about ourselves...

We give ourselves a sort of set of pressures which, in a strange way, haven't changed.

I mean, in this book, you have a mixture of the kind of the career girls,

mixed with the ones who just want to get married,

and the ones who want to be an actress and everything.

It's really fantastic.

Keith, I think it's only fair to say by the time you got to the '90s,

you had very much developed...

-Yeah, some people...

-..as a serious actor,

and we do have a clip of you in Martin Chuzzlewit.

Will you have me for your husband? Eh?

Ah...

Ah...

Ah...

Oh...

No, please...

Please, don't!

No! Please, no!

-No! No!

-I must go to her!

-Not till you say yes. Will you have me for your husband?

No, I won't! I can't bear the sight of you!

Besides, I always thought you liked my sister best. We all thought so!

-No, you didn't.

-I did!

You never could think I preferred her while you were by!

-Let me go to her!

-Say yes and I will!

If ever I brought myself to say so,

it should only be that I might hate and tease you all my life.

That's as good as saying it right out.

APPLAUSE

Did you love that part?

Yeah, I mean, it's a...

It's... To this day,

one of my most wonderful memories of anything, really,

that I've ever been in, seen or done, was sitting in a horse carriage.

We shot it in Kings Lynn. We were filming a scene of us arriving,

and there was myself, Sir John Mills, Paul Scofield

and Julian Fellowes, just us four.

And I was just this oik, you know, basically.

We had to keep going around the one-way system to come back and shoot,

all the time, and it took a long time to get there...

-So I spent the day in a carriage with those guys.

-Yeah.

Just listening to these people...

I mean, I was actually told... To be told by Sir John Mills

what he was doing on the night before the D-Day Landings

in detail for a kid like... It was...

It was just astonishing, you know, and I'll never forget that.

Keith, your final choice is a very modern book,

and very typical, I would say, of something that you would choose.

It's called Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers.

-Tell us a bit about it.

-I can tell you a bit of what it's about.

Basically, I buy books nowadays at airports and railway stations.

And in order to do it, you have to read the back very quickly.

And I read this, "Harrowing, spellbinding...

"Nothing less than an indictment of the entire Bush era."

When you read that, you think, "I've got to have it." And believe me, it does.

It's an account of a Syrian businessman. He's a builder.

He's been in America, he's a naturalised American.

He's been there for over 20 odd years, married an American woman who became a Muslim.

It's an account of what happens to him,

his family during and after... Katrina.

Yeah. Because he's done nothing during Hurricane Katrina...

-But all he's done...

-..but help people, stay behind and help.

All this guy has done is dug out an old canoe that he had out in the garage.

He's stayed to look after the properties that he's working on, look after his own house,

he's paddled around helping people

and he's suddenly arrested by American troops

and he is put in what they call, I think it was Prison Greyhound.

Within two days, they've managed to build a link fenced compound

to hold people, with toilets, with water,

with everything that you need to build a prison, they'd done it within two days.

The way they treated this guy and his friends is unbelievable.

You will cry. I swear to you, you will cry.

It's injustice on a massive scale.

-It's just astonishing.

-Yeah.

I mean, you get to a point where you go, "Surely not,"

and you have keep reminding, "Yes, it can be like this." And it is like this.

It makes you think more and more about...

God, if this is happening to this guy,

what's happening to just poor black people in New Orleans?

Never mind anyone else, you know.

-It's harrowing, and brilliantly written.

-Yeah.

I mean, brilliantly written.

-Are you going to read us a little bit?

-I can certainly read you a bit.

"When he was originally arrested,

"Zeitoun had not been sure if his country of origin

"had anything to do with his capture.

"After all, two of the four men in their group

"were white American born in New Orleans.

"But the arrest had taken on an entirely different cast

"by the time they were brought to Camp Greyhound.

"And though he was loathe to make this leap,

"was it so improbable that he, like so many others,

"might be taken to an undisclosed location,

"to one of the secret prisons abroad, "to Guantanamo Bay?"

I mean, that is... Can you imagine feeling like that

-because you have gone out of your way to help people?

-Yeah.

You suddenly find yourself in this extraordinary prison,

living under these conditions.

These guys actually are calling him Taliban. It's just ridiculous!

It's horrendous. You must read it, it's a brilliant book.

-It'd be a great movie, actually.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-Lovely.

You're quite a new dad again now,

but you're also a famous father, aren't you?

-I am, yes.

-To Lily.

-How does that feel to have someone else in the family...?

-Much the same as...

You know what it's like, the press do write garbage about people like me.

Not all of it, I'll admit, but a lot of it is just rubbish.

I mean, it's lies, it's downright lies.

I used to explain this to Lil and to my father, actually, and mother.

And Lily, who'd go, "Yeah, Dad, no, it's so you, that."

Within three weeks, she's on the phone,

"You're right. They do make it up, don't they?

"It's just rubbish, isn't it?" "Yeah, it is."

And it's OK being somebody's dad rather than the star?

It's great. I mean, it was... You know,

When you do a series, they have a get-together for all the cast and the crew

and you have to go around and you sit there and you read the script

and you have to introduce yourself. It's one of those things you do.

And it would come to me, and I would always say,

"Lily Allen's dad reading," and I always got a huge laugh...

SILENCE

Oh, God!

LAUGHTER

-We'll put the laugh in.

-No, it's all right.

I can live with it, I'm used to failure.

-LAUGHTER

-Thank you both very much indeed.

-A pleasure, thank you.

APPLAUSE

And just to remind everybody, all details about this series

can be found on the BBC website, of course.

You can also watch our guests read a passage from their favourite

children's books there, too.

And please do join me again tomorrow. Good night.

APPLAUSE

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd