S8, E12: Paterson Joseph, actor and author

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian a podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life because even as a restaurant critic I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:45Hello friends. You find me right now, at my mirror, smearing what can really only be described as nappy cream onto my cheeks. things are getting a bit desperate around here now the cold weather's come I'm also getting ready for my next guest it is peep show and wonka actor Patterson Joseph I've always loved him I love his work ever since seeing him in the iconic Tilda Svinton and Leonardo DiCaprio Danny Boyle film The Beach in the year 2000 I was but a mere strip of a girl when I went to see that at the cinema. Now this man is dapper, so I need to look my absolute best for him. I wanted to tell you what I've been musing on recently.

1:34It is my skin. I don't know about you, but my winter skincare routine has to adapt and adapt dramatically as the weather cools down and the cold sets in and the wind starts blowing and my skin starts subtly at first, but then at great speed to become drier and drier and well drier and now with my spray tan on top of it I resemble a rather charming crunchy nut cornflake. Oscar Wilde once said that beauty is a form of genius and right now my genius smells distinctly of a baby's bottom. I can think of worse things to smell of. Now, Patterson grew up in North London before turning to the stage, the TV and the movie set.

2:24And as well as being an actor, he is an acclaimed novelist with his book, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, based on the first man of African heritage to vote in Britain. Patterson is Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University. He's one of our best loved character actors and he was even at one point bookies favourite to be the next Doctor Who. I'm still holding out for that by the way and I can't wait to find out what he's eating when the director yells cut and he's back home on the sofa.

3:06Patterson, Joseph, welcome to Comfort Eating. Thank you and I'm hungry. I'm hungry too before we dive in you and I have got something very strange in common um I want to talk to you about your mother's old job oh now she worked at the McVitie's biscuit factory oh yeah I am from Carlisle oh yes and I grew up right beside uh McVitie's biscuit factory. It was a big deal. We know the excitement of the door opening and somebody coming in with a bag. Brown paper bag. Bags of broken biscuits. We had a very different, ours is very different because my mum was a little bit of a high-synth bouquet and so never had broken biscuits, Grace Poshos.

3:57Now we lived above a shop in Wilson Green, but we never had broken biscuits. They were It was the ones where the packet was slightly twisted. Yes. And we were rationed. There's no way we were taking them out of the house. You were never just given a big plastic bag of chocolate biscuits that some of the, they'd kind of melded together. Oh, your childhood was golden. Yes. No, no, no, no. I mean, we once, sorry, this is the truth, got beaten for nicking biscuits without permission. Because there were five of us at that point. I had a sister who was 10 years younger. She wasn't part of this game.

4:29and the biscuits were precious because we were as my mum used to call us destroyers so if there was any food around it would just go like locusts see because i had these siblings who were a little bit older than me everyone had a different method we'd get three biscuits at night my mum would come back from working at mcvitties and she'd we'd get up i mean it's so bad now it's even on a school night and we'd have three we'll have three and mine was i would like to lick off the all the chocolate and then make it like a digestive biscuit and dip that in my tea we all had our different methods each week i invite a celebrity guest to my house and i ask them to bring me the ultimate comfort food now this is the food that allows them to play a shakespearean character one day and then write a novel the next what have you brought for me will you may i please unveil the snack this is scrambled eggs with mushrooms on sourdough toast god it does look lovely oh and then lovely and warm as well now what i need you to do is i need to describe exactly what is on this plate how it's done and why and where you eat it so it's very hard to get in you know at 11 o 'clock at night if you've been doing a show or midnight and think i'm just gonna go straight to bed i need something a bit of a wind down so the cooking of scrambled eggs always made with butter always made with milk you put milk in scrambled eggs always yeah um and then the mushrooms i would saute usually before get them well sauteed before and then add them either on the side or i might scramble them within it does the cooking of that late at night kind of chill you out cooking does generally yeah and it makes me feel a little bit like a scientist because i I never taste it.

6:18I never taste anything before I'm sitting down to eat it. But I kind of know how it's going to be. Yes. Because it's instinctive because it's in you. Yeah. As I was training to be a chef, they said, oh, you should, this is before I became an actor, you should always taste your food as you go along. But I don't need to. And it's memory. Like if I think about the eggs, I think about my dad would go out to his job as a, he was working in an engineering plant in Cricklewood in northwest London. And he would do a night shift. and my mum, who would have worked all day, would come back. And whilst Coronation Street was just about finishing, it's my dad's favourite programme, she would scramble onions and eggs.

6:59Yeah. And as a kid, watching her do that and the sandwich that she made, I wanted to eat that so much. I'm salivating thinking about that. It's a caramelised onion with egg in it. Oh, my goodness. So simple. But that's what it reminds me of. It's a sort of comfort love food. She made it for him to go out in a sort of loving gesture.

7:26Let's return to January 1999. Straight out of drama school, there was some fringe theatre and some time with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But then you land a job which sends you to Thailand to film The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio, Tilda Swinton. It's directed by Danny Boyle. You were out in Thailand for four months. This must have been a wild time. I can see your face. Look at it. A broad smile has come across your face. And I'm guessing that this is memories of 1999. Memories of 1999. I tell you, I'd worked with Danny before at the RSC way back then, And even though I had been reluctant, I was glad because I met some great people like Sam Mendes and Danny.

8:14And so I was very comfortable. It wasn't like, oh, I'm doing a Hollywood movie and it's a big Hollywood star. I was like, oh, what are you working with Danny? He was one of the most down to earth people you'd ever meet. Not only that, I had my wife with me. So I wasn't like a homestead. We were there for four months. They put us up. It's some Hollywood film. So they put us up in great places. We ate great food. The people in Thailand, as I'm sure anyone who's been there know, are the most gentle, open, wonderful people. men are not aggressive it's just beautiful but you met leonardo dicaprio he had his 25th birthday when we were out there and we had a great old time and he's he was he was one of those guys who think you're just a kid from la you're not you haven't got that hollywood star thing about you and all he wanted to do was really great work i remember talking to him on top of this this hill we were looking down on the set and he said oh paterson i just want to i don't want to be the pretty boy you know that titanic and all that stuff i hate that stuff i can't stand it i want to do real acting yeah and sure enough he did he kept on sort of breaking that image he stopped playing you know the sweet beautiful boy and started playing rougher and rougher characters and the beat was just was the beginning of that how does leonardo dicaprio celebrate his 25th birthday well he had a bunch of mates with him he was he was good he had that he's his grandmother and his mother.

9:32So there was going to be a limit on how wild things are going to get. But he still had a massive villa there in Thailand. And then we had Thai boxing at night. Proper professionals came in and fought. Because the local guy called Santa Pestongi. Don't know whether he's still around. He could get anything from anywhere. So it was very lavish and slightly sinister. Because, you know, there were bodyguards and things around, you know. He knows how to party. I can say that. He might have slowed down now. Who knows? I'd hope so. When you think back to that time in Thailand, what do you think about food?

10:09What stands out there? Well, I thought, oh, these people have been on this beach, my particular character, a guy called Keeti, for at least three years. He is clearly going to be eating maybe a bit of fish, but mostly just veg and a bit of rice. So that's what I did for about three months before. Oh, God. I just finished doing casualty. I found out on my very last day that I got the beach and I just went, right, I'm going to go on a diet. And that's what I did. Were you very conscious when you were going out and filming? Look, as a black guy, you always were expected to be physically some sort of specimen.

10:47People often got you to take your shirt off in things unnecessarily. I'm a lawyer. Why am I in the shower naked? So I was always resistant. even as a young actor was resistant to that that body image thing so I never thought about it but the beach accidentally because we had that diet and two times a day we sweated on that beach doing exercises I never looked like that before or since

11:20let's go back to the beginning he grew up in wilson green in northwest london in the 60s tell me about the joseph householdst lucian parents so quail with a w was spoken in the house So that's Saint-Lucian Creole. What's that close to? French. Makes for French and some native Carib dialects. That's what we spoke in the house. So would you say, like, je vous drais, for like, I would like, or is it kind of... It would be like, if I was going to say to you in French, you know, give you an order, ferme la porte. Okay. In Creole, you'd say, ferme la porte, la. The R's of the French become W's. So your mom and dad are speaking that?

12:04That's what they speak in the house. We all speak it in the house. You speak it. And then at three years old, it stops. So my mum decides that we're all going to get accents or we're going to have trouble. And there's some, my boy's half French. I know I've studied it a lot. There's a lot of, there can be a lot of trouble in bilingual households, especially if the kid, if that language isn't respected outside of the house. So if you're a French kid and you're in England, everybody goes, oh, you speak French. So you know that French has got currency. But if you're speaking Quail, 1965, 66, that's not currency.

12:31so it was a almost like a shame for us to speak it and then I struggled and here's a memory I'm at school and I'm being asked what I had for Sunday lunch and I say rice and peas and chicken and all the kids all of them in my infant school are Irish so they don't know what I'm talking about and they all start laughing but I persevere and I said and then we had salad with lettuce tomato and cucumber cucumber and I didn't know where cucumber I'm five years old I didn't know where cucumber had come from. But cucumber is quail for cucumber, right? So I was a bilingual kid struggling with how to articulate myself because obviously there's a lot of quail in me.

13:07Bilingual is a superpower. I know. Do you realise that? Yeah. It always depends on the currency of the language. I mean, did St. Louis play a big part in your house? Yeah. I mean, it was home. It was home till probably I was about 18. And then I figured out, well, I don't speak the language and I probably wouldn't fit there. I want to go there and see it. But I'm English. I'm British now. What did your mum say? My mum would never say, because they came in 1958. It was like 10 years after, 10, 12 years after the first boats were coming. People call that the Windrush generation. My mum is absolutely livid if anybody says that.

13:42Windrush? I didn't come on the Windrush, you know. I take a boat, we go to Italy, we went all the way through France, and then I came across on the ferry. We didn't have Windrush? You call me Windrush? Mum is really mad about that. I can see what your mum's like. My mum's fancy. No, she's quite fancy. She is beautifully St. Lucian. Jamaicans. Don't hang around with them Jamaicans, you know. Them people, rough, rough, rough people. I once said I was going down to Brixton. Brixton, you better be careful down there, you know. There's all them Jamaicans down there. Was there eight of you? There were eight of us all together, six kids eventually, and my mum and dad.

14:18How do you feed six kids? Quickly. So my mum was a whiz at being able to cook up stews. I mean, Sunday was the big, you know, rice and peas and chicken and yam and sweet potatoes and all of that. But we'd all kind of muck in then. Thursdays were oxtail soup and dumpling days. Now, you say dumplings. We say dumpling. Now, a dumpling is basically a ball of flour. And they look like little buns. You fry them. It's like your bread. and my mum would do that on the soup and that's my favourite soup. Yeah, she sounds like a good girl. The dumpling soup with oxtail in it so it's thick and dark and with beans in it.

15:01It's delicious. The six children around this table, the food is coming out and what I find really interesting about anyone that's from a big family is that I meet so many people that eat as if there's scarcity at all times and they... Grace is watching me eat and I'm halfway through my... And a lot of people have never experienced scarcity, except when you meet someone from a big family. Yeah, you better eat it because, you know, first of all, that's the food that your parents have worked hard to put on your plate. There were no fussy eaters in my family. If you had to name names right now, and it's about who was the worst person around that table for, like, getting their hand out, like, you know, a hungry hippo and taking everything.

15:45Which sibling is this? This is Jackie. Jackie Joseph of Homes Under the Hammer. What she would do, you'd ask her, because we'd sort of help each other and make toast or whatever. If she made toast for you, Jackie Joseph would bite off the corner so you always knew it was hers. And you'd scream, why have you done that? She went, tax.

16:09Back then, how do you get hold of Caribbean ingredients? How do you get a yam in 1960s, Wilsdon? anybody who went back to the Caribbean and came back. My mum was talking about this the other day. I just picked her up from the airport. She'd just been to St. Lucia. And it's the first time she's ever come without bringing most of the ground provisions, as we call them, with her in the suitcase. I said, this suitcase is very light. She said, yeah, because if we had storms, there was nothing. I couldn't have any yams. There was no yams. There was no mangoes, no coconuts. So people would just bring them.

16:40So suitcase, you open the suitcase and it's just sealed with newspapers because you don't want things to leak. And you just take out all these amazing things. You have this wonderful jelly, guava jelly, which I have never had since. The guava jelly made at home where you could put your spoon in it and it would never move. I loved that. So that's where we got our stuff. To walk through Heathrow. Back in the day, you could have brought anything with you, right? Because until sort of later, after 9-11, I suppose, it was quite slack. It must have been exciting, though, when that suitcase arrived. Oh, when the suitcase opened and you go, what are we going to get this time?

17:14And there were things in there that I don't, even today, I'm like, I don't even know what this is. You know, the first time you properly see a yam, a breadfruit, which, you know, I don't know, this is a big, much like a pear. And it cooks down to the sort of buttery, soft texture.

17:40Nowadays, you are Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University. Yeah. So I'm interested to hear about your school days and the 70s and 80s in North London. What kind of pupil were you? I'm a bit of a joker clown. Once I get over the racism and all the rest of it, I sort some people out because I was the only black kid. So I got picked on. Irish school? Irish kids, yeah. I loved the sort of social aspect of school, but the academic aspects were tough. I had a wonderful teacher, one wonderful teacher called Mrs Bird, who was from Goa. And years later, he was kept in touch. She said, you know, that the teachers always say don't bother with the Caribbean kids or the Irish kids.

18:18They'll never learn anything. Because at that time, there was a sort of idea that immigrant kids, these immigrant kids coming from Ireland in particular and the Caribbean, were not intelligent. We couldn't actually take in information. And it was part of our education system. They did it to the working class as well. They used to call us educationally subnormal. Even before you'd opened your mouth, Grace, you hadn't actually said anything or presented your personality. And that happened to me day one. Did they take you and put you in a different room or anything? No, it wasn't that. It was just the way that they treated you.

18:49Just no expectation. You just knew, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really no low expectations. And any mistake you made was just sort of exacerbated. Like, of course you didn't know. And I bunked off as soon as the idea occurred. 13. Yeah. I bunked off for two years solidly. They sent. Did truancy come round? No. I went to a sinkhole comprehensive in Harlston called Cardinal Hinsley, which thankfully no longer exists. And I had two letters that came home because I could forge my mum's signature and it had the Cardinal Hinsley logo. I could just sign that and off. I went, I wouldn't do anything bad. I'd just go off and hide in the library, Wilson Green Library.

19:25Thank God for libraries and just read all day. But yeah, I hated school, every aspect of it. But that says so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Always loved reading and I loved the idea of escape. And as soon as I, I remember there's the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I remember getting that and disappearing. I wasn't in Wilsdon Green anymore. I was in Narnia. I could see that wardrobe and I could see the fur coats and I could see how it was nighttime. And then suddenly there was a snowy path and there was a lamp and I can still see it now. And I can see Mr. Tumnus with his shopping, walking. And these images are in my head.

20:00Like I say, when I talk about my novel, I say novel is the most intimate form of storytelling, despite being a public performer because it's a word that you've deciphered on a page it's gone into your head and it's an image that only you have no one else has it someone might do a movie of it but they're not going to cast it quite right and they're not the lighting's going to be a bit flash or it's not going to be quite as grubby as you imagined it so there was a purity of storytelling in books that drove me it was like an addiction really is there a specific thing that kind of almost comes like a lifeboat and saves you here there's a degree of uh ego in a positive sense to not being crushed by what people are saying about you and it's not arrogance it's just going i know deep inside that i've got intelligence i know that what you're saying to me is that i can't articulate anything and i don't know anything but i i feel that i do so whatever this is i'm not going to allow myself to be crushed by it but most people don't even work that out until 25 years later where they go and what come on yeah whereas you you're a little boy i think it was because it was intense it was coming at you very intensely you had to deal with it it was it was it was sink or swim i just thought i've got something to say and i had enough anger and there's a little bit of rage always in me about injustices particularly towards the working class i i i don't hate many people but margaret thatcher i think i could i could i I definitely say there's a hatred there because I could see the fragmentation that was happening even as I grew up in the 80s, late 70s, 80s, in the communities around me.

21:36Everybody became sort of much greedier. Everybody became much more separated. Even as a kid, I recognised that I didn't want that. And I became quite, I swear, socialist. How did you become a chef? Finished school with nothing. One of my older sisters, Glenda, said, why don't you go to do a business diploma? I had no interest in it, but I thought I should do something. I did one. And whilst I was doing it, I realised never could work in an office. It will kill me. My mum had a grand scheme of starting a restaurant. And she said, why don't you do the chef thing at the Royal Free, where she worked as a ward orderly cleaner in the wards.

22:13So that's how I got that job. A good cook. I think I am. Yeah. You're like your face so happy. I tell you why I think I am is because I would do rice and peas, which is my mum's, you know, speciality. But when my mum sits down and I hear her properly sucking on that bone, any Caribbean kids out there, you'll know what I mean. Proper enjoyment of that thing. And she goes, mm, that was good. I feel like I've had applause from a thousand people. It passed muster with my mum.

22:58I love that you say that, you know, you were going to study something to do with business and you realized that you would just completely, you know, you could never have done it. You were completely not cut out for it because then when you go to peep show, you must have mustered. Like you took that from the bottom of your soul and you're playing Johnson. You're playing a senior loan manager. Now nobody loves the office more than this person. And he loves the whole, you know. It's his world. It's his whole world. Peep show. It stars David Mitchell, Olivia Colman. And it was described at the time as the best comedy of the decade.

23:36Now, for people who have not seen this show, I'm going to try and paint them a picture. Oh, wow. I'm looking forward to this. Your character is kind of the corporate boss from hell in a way. But he's also very charming at times. You end up calling David Mitchell's character a pathetic, worthless punk and a turkey fucker. you say that Olivia Colman's character has a fat ass at one point this comedy is dry dry as old toast but like absolutely delicious what's it like on set just me giggling I didn't know this world so I'm on set giggling because I'm a little disciplined you're not meant to laugh at your own jokes or how funny you know someone else is you're meant to be like focused but I found myself crying with laughter.

24:19The one I've talked about quite a lot was when David was not well. David's character Mark wasn't well and he was having squits. So I came in to rescue him. We were off to Frankfurt for some sort of conference. And I come to the door and Rob's character Jeremy says Johnson. Jeremy. And then I hear, oh, Johnson! And I go to rescue him so I did all that and that was all fine and then I go in and I see they sort of painted him green really he's sitting on the loo sort of leaning on the side like you would do like you can't even hold your own body up and I just started laughing and it was about 45 minutes before we could finish that is that normal pooing sorry can we go again well that's now on Netflix and kids are watching it do you still get recognized for that very much so in fact it's probably the most I get recognized for it.

25:17And people are so pleased. So I don't mind ever people approaching me, but everybody's really happy whenever. And I think he's such a horrible man. He's someone who hasn't sort of admitted that he's first of his an alcoholic, but he's also a failure. I mean, when he starts his business in his bedroom, you know, consultious consultium or whatever he calls it, it's like, it's the most pathetic. Where are my big scissors? Where are my big scissors and you think why would you and also he's horrible to everyone you were in something else that means the absolute world to a lot of people wonka oh yeah glorious timothy jellumais yeah grant olivia coleman rowan atkinson oh yeah yeah were they ever all in the same room together yeah yeah we did that a couple of times and um what does that feel like delightful because Because it's a children's film.

26:13And so all the egos go out the room. We had a ball. Was there endless, everlasting gobstoppers? No, you know what? We had, I mean, negatively, it was just about COVID. So everything was served up in polystyrene box. That's the opposite. The best thing about that was, though, the chocolate. Because I didn't think I was a chocolate fiend, but I got really obsessed with these vegan chocolates. because Matt Bainton, who played one of the chocolatiers, is vegan. So all of the chocolates have to be vegan. So there's hover chocks that we eat. Oh, my God, they were so delicious. What exactly is a hover chock?

26:53Well, it is a beautiful concoction made by lovely Mr. Wonka. And it has a winged shell, two-sided, very crispy chocolate. So it goes as you bite into it. and then there is a sort of egg in the middle and it is so soft and I think there might be passion fruit in it and it just melts in the mouth proper. I mean like you say we have to describe it like that. That's what it was like. I managed to get one of them. We had about 10 of them. I got one of the plastic ones because eventually they said we've got to stop giving these people chocolates. But yeah, it was brilliant. I ended up eating at least 10 of those.

27:44Let me ask you a serious question. You were once tipped to be the 11th Doctor Who. Is that a serious question? Okay. Well, I'll answer it successfully. Yes. David Tennant was leaving. You were the bookie's favourite. What I want to ask you is, how do you deal with a big part coming and then going? It never came. My life is rejection. if I couldn't deal with rejection I would have stopped being an actor in 1989, the year after I left drama school you are constantly I've got to do an audition today, I've got half a script in my head because I've got to do a screen test to be honest with you sorry if I get it, but the chances are I'm never going to get this job but you do it anyway, and you do it with all your might and then they say no and you go right and you just move on and it's garbage in, garbage out, you forget about it oh you're so good do you not have a day like me where you have to kind of lie down on the sofa, like having inward arguments with everybody from my old headmaster to parents and relatives that aren't even with us anymore to, you know, and then flounce about a bit and eat a whole packet of biscuits.