Alexander Armstrong: My default setting is fear- I expect the worst of people

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project, and this is the spiel I normally open an episode with, designed to allow me to spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio. But Alexander Armstrong, this is a bit different because I actually see you every day. Every morning. Most people, because they'll be listening to me on LBC between 10am and 1pm, won't be aware that you present a rival programme on Classic FM at exactly the same time. A partner programme. A sister. That's what it is. A sister brother programme. Yeah. Every morning, without fail, because I have to go in and I have to pre-record one tiny little bit because we have one link where the ads go two different ways.

0:45So we call it a split link. And that has to, one little link has to be pre-recorded. so I go in and then come out of the studio about four minutes before my show starts and invariably bump slap into you with about a bucket full of tea my enormous mug enormous mug of tea and um yeah and we we exchange we exchange Kurt greetings cheery greetings and then almost always I'll see you later in the day on the telly it did occur to me that there must be more than 24 hours in your average day it's yeah I think I think I've worked it out what I have to start doing is working in When I lie awake at night for three hours, which I just do every night, it doesn't matter, of course.

1:20Maybe it's age. I don't know. What I should be doing is getting up and working then, actually. Think a bit more on your next book, perhaps, which we'll talk about the latest one imminently. But we begin at the beginning. I mean, it's an overused word, but your childhood sounds relatively idyllic. I think it probably was. It was, I mean, yeah, I look hard for dark clouds in there. And it was it was pretty it was pretty wonderful. We grew up in Northumberland. My father was a doctor, rural GP, a very uncomplaining, very lovable, loving and indeed loved man. Right at the heart of our village in we live in this beautiful village.

2:04We're just outside it, Rothbury in Northumberland in the nestle sort of in the moorlands. And yeah, it was it was pretty it was pretty perfect. How many siblings? Two. Two. Two, older than me. Oh, OK. Older than me, four and a half years older, three years older. And you get lots of benefits from that being the youngest in that you are spot rotten. And obviously, you're allowed privileges many years before they were. And you always just have to bat away and say, well, I wasn't allowed to do that. I wasn't. But you pay for it when you're in your teens and suddenly your siblings have all gone off to university.

2:43and, you know, school holidays. A bit of loneliness kicks in. Yeah, it's just you and the dogs, really. Especially if you've gone away to school because you don't have friends around the corner. Yeah, well, also, we lived, we didn't have around the corner. Was it in the middle of nowhere? No, that makes it far too exciting. It was nowhere near the middle of nowhere. It was way off, the top left-hand corner of nowhere. So, yeah, we lived in a farm. It was about four and a half miles out of the village. So, yeah, we were up. And we were very isolated. I mean, I loved it. I did love it. And there were times of year when you just thought, this is heaven.

3:17In the summer, particularly, when the sun was out, you felt you were part of the world. When it was overcast, which in that part of Northumberland, it is a lot, you feel much more isolated, weirdly. I remember bringing my then girlfriend, now my wife, up to Northumberland for the first time and just being so delighted that the sun shone. because it didn't feel like you were right out at the butt end of absolutely nowhere. Did you embrace nature? I did embrace nature, yes. So you were into sort of creepy crawlies and animals and wildlife and all that sort of thing? Yes. I mean, even if you weren't really necessarily into them, you had a very close relationship with them.

3:55And you had birds, a bird life around us was incredible. It strikes me because you were born in 1970. Yeah. And you've described a sort of physical, a geographical isolation. But the world was very different technologically as well. You could, this childhood could have been lived in any of the sort of three or four previous decades, probably. Oh, I thought you were going to say centuries. Yeah, I think definitely. But there'd have been a telly. Definitely decades. Yeah, we had a telly. We did eventually get a colour telly. Right. When I remember that was in 1970, for the Jubilee. In 1977, we got a colour telly.

4:28It came from the Mart in Rothbury. And it had, I think it was an old school. You know how tellies in schools used to have doors and shutters and things? So it had these sort of concertina doors. So, yeah, but you're completely right. It was a childhood very... I mean, it was sheltered, but in a good and bad way. You know, we were wonderfully sheltered. Were you missing anything? Were you conscious of, you know, I don't know, Finder's French bread pizzas or trappings of modernity that were... No. Not really. No. I mean, there were some. Sure. There were some things. And, you know, we were. I mean, there's some quite weird.

5:08I remember very clearly when aged 11, when I was 11, my sisters had confessed to my brother, older brother, that she she really liked the police. She was really into, she'd fallen in love with Sting and was into pop music. I remember my brother just thinking, you're what? I mean, this is, we were like, it was like something from a sort of Janet Winterson novel. It was my brother, older brother, you're hot, you, you, you, you, you, you're into pop. Are you? Are you really? And she sort of led the way and I scampered in after her. Gosh. Yeah, became obsessed. I mean, that was the other thing, living in the middle of nowhere with nature and all of its bounty at our disposal.

5:54Obviously, we it allowed you to become obsessive. You know, you really could indulge in enthusiasm to the nth degree. Yeah, absolutely. And so so I did. But I yeah, we were we were kind of from the 19th century. Yeah, that's what I'm hearing. There was something in a nice way, in a really nice way. And we were crackers as well because we just we entertained ourselves. and my brother who was sort of, I mean, he's my dearest, dearest friend and he throws his head back and laughs about it now. But, you know, he was sort of, he's been sort of brought up on Walter Scott novels and Baroness Orksy and things like this.

6:32And he was so, he sort of lived in this mad sort of world of billowing white shirts. I mean, he saw himself as this Byronic hero. He announced one year because he, we all had nicknames because he gave us all nicknames and he didn't have one. and I remember him one summer saying I should like to be known as Menelaus and he's never been allowed to forget that he's not known as Menelaus nor has he ever been so I read when you were working with Ben Miller that you fell into the younger brother role as well so there's a bit of repetition there isn't there there's a sort of definitely there is what does that mean does it mean that you're waiting for someone else's lead yeah I think it does I think it means I mean, I don't think it's an attractive role, actually, when I say that.

7:17I think it's one where you are... It's weird. I mean, typically if you've got this kind of older siblings I have that were very good at processing, they would do all the processing, and I would just sort of get the pre-chewed pap in a way from them. So anytime anything happens, to this day, I don't really react to things until hours or days after things have happened. So I take bad news with equanimity, usually, and it'll be a long time later. During those three-hour nighttime contemplations. Yeah, usually. And then I'll suddenly, then I get it. And I'm sure that's a consequence of having, I think, very protective older siblings.

7:58It's a form of emotional hand-me-downs, almost. It is exactly that. It's like everything I've ever, I'm surprised, it's so nice to wear trousers these days that don't have ladders. The tidelots of them all going up there. Out of the way. So when did popular culture, the police notwithstanding, when did popular culture first? Because, I mean, comedy would be the most obvious question to ask. When did comedy first sort of beat on your radar? Popular culture came in the form of madness. That was my first obsession when I was 11. Absolutely just, that was just everything for me. And then comedy, when I was a little bit older, I think I was probably about 12 or 13.

8:31I remember my brother had got the Monty Python, I can't remember which album it was, but anyway. he's suddenly a Monty Python album that was a great time probably live at the Hollywood Bowl whereas the one with the arm that wraps and wraps around it it wasn't the contractual obligation I can't remember what it was and of course I listened to that obsessively and the Beatles as well did you do the voices all of them, all the characters and you'd learn these things off by heart because they were just you sort of sucked on these things because the sweetness of comedy was something, I mean, because we grew up with, you know, on that colour TV behind its shutters, we would watch Dick Emery and the two Ronnies, and, you know, and as a family, we would sit and watch.

9:19I used to love not quite understanding necessarily all the jokes, in fact, probably about a fifth of the jokes, but I loved that everyone would laugh, and there'd be a laugh track on the thing just to tell you. Communal. Yeah, lovely sense of it. Don't really get that anymore, do you? No. All laughing at the same thing, all watching the same thing at the same time. Yes, it was. It was a sweet thing. The first time you get a joke, like a grown-up joke, a joke that your dad, and you get it, it's a wonderful moment. You sort of think, oh, I actually know that. I know why that's funny. I worked that one out.

9:48Yes, exactly that. Yeah, yeah. I love that. And lots and lots of books. Lots of books. Lots and lots of books. Yeah. I mean, that was a wonderful thing, to grow up in a house that had lots of books, lots of music as well. I was, well, classical music. I mean, interestingly, classical music, my love of classical music came not because we were so schooled in classical music by any means, but because I was an insomnia. I always have been. I always wake up far too early. I mean, you know, and I'm always just sitting there drumming my fingers, waiting for everyone else to come downstairs. And so I used to just go and play with anything I wasn't allowed to play with in daylight hours.

10:29and that genuinely, I mean, if I had been able to find the key for the power drill bits, I'd have gone into that. But as it happened, I went for the record player and thought, right, I'm not allowed to play with this during the day. What have we got here? I can't even say that. And they only had classical music records. I mean, yeah, the kind of sort of Ella Fitzgerald and things like that. There were a few sort of things like that. But I, and Nina and Frederick, I don't know about that. Nina and Frederick was this sort of, yeah, It was this sort of, I think, very popular in the 60s. They were a sort of pop duo.

11:03Anyway. It's almost like an experiment, that, isn't it? So a child in the 70s, if he was exposed early and only to classical music, would almost certainly develop a love for it. And crucially, I think if they were put in, if they would master of it themselves or mistress of it themselves. And in my case, it was a sort of rebellious thing because it was something I wasn't really allowed to do. How funny. And also I wanted company. I had at least an hour to kill before everyone else got up. and I just put something on. When you put the needle down and you've got a symphony orchestra just playing there, you just think, hey, this is fun.

11:36Because it's huge. It's huge. And it's mine and it's so grown up and it's at my command almost. The way you describe it is the opposite of what you'd later sort of come to feel about it being a bit geeky or other kids not thinking it's cool. You're making it sound really cool. Well, it was cool. Of course. And its effect is really exciting. The first time I then saw a symphony orchestra playing, many years later, my jaw just hit the floor. I've got goosebumps even talking about it now, just thinking that. Bloody hell, this thing, this massive crowd of people, they were all playing at the same time.

12:11They've all got the same thing in front of them, and they're all doing it. And that's what makes that noise. And that noise, I thought, was just one thing. Turns out it's about five things playing at the same time. It is magic. It's really magic. It's really exciting. So, yes, it's something to this day. Well, if there's time, we might get onto it. But it's my... Of course we will. Actually, for fans of this, for fans of Full Disclosure, you looked very like... So I interviewed Natalie Haynes earlier this week, who is four years behind you, I think, at Cambridge and the Footlights and what have you.

12:40And she described seeing Diana Rigg in Medea when she was about 14, in exactly the same way that you just described your goosebumps and talking about music. So these cultural moments that are epic heft. Epic heft. They really do. But I think at that age also, you're looking, I mean, all the way through from, you know, when you start to click in as a sort of young person, perhaps seven or eight, I think probably, and right up to your mid-twenties, I should think, you're just so hungry. You're going to suckle at anything that offers you whatever feels like great sustenance. There's that film, the short circuit, about the robot that achieves consciousness and just runs around going, more input, more input.

13:21Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. Yeah, that was from last year, wasn't it? I think they did a remake last year. I prefer the original. Were you precocious enough to have favourites or did you just love all of it? I was precocious enough to have favourites. Beethoven symphonies, they were all there. They were a great box set of them. The only sadness was side one of the seventh symphony had a scratch on it. So I could only get to know the third and fourth movements of that one. But I've made friends with the first two in the interim. but yeah then Gilbert and Sullivan was a big was a massive thing I remember going to see them that's when I first saw an orchestra play live wow the Theatre Royal in Newcastle right and that was exciting anyway I mean being we sat right up in the gods because they were the only tickets my cheapskate could have got and we were up there looking down I mean it was very exciting just being so high up and seeing so many people and there was the orchestra you just see the strings of it and the conductor and the orchestra started playing they played the overture and I remember the curtain just going up whipping up on these Venetian seams the gondoliers and it was so bright and it was so colourful and so full of movement and this extraordinary opening chorus full of really beautiful harmonies and I was just in an ecstasy watching that thinking I'm not sure I've experienced anything as exciting as this it was just like a moving train of brilliant things.

14:50Were there any stirrings of the future performer? Early stirrings? Undoubtedly. I think undoubtedly. I think also they had come through because being Northumbrians and being I don't know. It is still very much there but certainly in the 70s in Northumberland there was a very strong folk thing. I mean not folk in inverted commas thing but a folk we are the communities of Northumberland are still very much, they still have a really proper, vibrant folk tradition, it goes on, people write songs all the time you can go and hear beautiful folk concerts and you hear a tune and think, oh I must look that one, I'm not sure I know that one, and the end of it I say that was written by Gavin and Gavin goes, hey and you think, oh I see, oh of course yes, it's new it's new, it's evolving constantly And so there were always songs.

15:48There were always, you know, you go to evenings where people would stand up and perform something. We still do as a family. We always, not always, but we'll very often round off an evening or finish with us singing. And there's just great Northumbrian, brilliant songs, some of them very funny and some of them incredibly sentimental.

16:12so when you then allowed yourself to dare to dream about the future jump ahead a little bit you would have seen yourself in your dreams as a musical performer rather than a i think probably yeah i think that was that was probably i wasn't quite sure what i'd i loved playing all sorts of instruments well at that stage i'm not sure i did i think i was learning mrs piper was teaching me the piano in in rothbury um so i used to go once a week that and i loved piano lessons that was great but I wasn't sure that was necessarily going to set you on the road to stardom. Not sure. So I presume school was a relatively straightforward business for you?

16:47It was, yeah. Village school, Rothbury, which was lovely. Yeah, the Church of England. And then prep school at seven, traditional prep school. But you were a day boy, I think. No, I wasn't. I was a boarder. You boarded at seven. Yeah, it was an hour away. It was weird because our village school, which I really loved, there was an experiment that was done in the 70s in various schools. I'm not sure it was universal, where kids were taught to read ITA, the initial teaching alphabet. And our school had been singled out for this. They thought, well, Rothbury, Northumberland, let's try it there. I mean, what harm can it do?

17:31so we weren't taught to read normal written English. We were taught to read this sort of curious phonetic thing. I don't know about this. And all our books, including sort of Lady Bird books, and all the stuff we read in school was all in ITA. And to this day, my brother can't spell for toffee. Because of this? Because of this. My sister really struggles with it. So it was a, yeah, it was a... It was a disaster. It was a sort of disaster. It didn't work brilliantly. my mum had got wise to it by this point and had sort of taught me to read sort of grown up English alongside because she'd seen the damage it had done to her siblings it hadn't been an unmitigated success so there we are so yeah it was kind of a it was timely I think if I mean awful I mean really I mean a wrench like I mean, you've boarded.

18:28You'll presumably know what that... It's extraordinary to people who haven't done it. And the more you see their shock and bewilderment, the more you question what the hell everybody was thinking. But it was just normal. And yet I eventually loved it. I mean, I don't know if there's an element of Stockholm Syndrome in there. No, well, you have little choice but to love it. You have to love it. Yeah, of course. And I really, I ended up adoring it. And everything began then. I mean, you were into a curriculum, which previously it hadn't. Maybe we were at Rothbury School. It never felt like it. But you were suddenly on a, you had sort of milestones you had to pass.

19:05And there were people who were absolutely determined that you were going to get from here to there this term. And you're going to get from there to there. And so suddenly you are, I don't know, even my sense of time before 1977, September, was a kind of nebulous. it was just a sort of lovely meld of colours and just bits and pieces and the occasional things they sort of stick out and then suddenly from then I can probably I can pretty much say which month or certainly which term anything happened from that point on in my life I can pinpoint it that was that and you flourished I know your music was very much encouraged by the headmaster's wife who sounds like a rather lovely figure it makes a big difference to it So prep schools are bleak places, potentially.

19:53And any touch of warmth, particularly feminine warmth, is ten times more valuable than it is in other contexts. Completely. And you flourish under it as well. And they become the things. I mean, it's amazing how you learn how to look for your rewards and the little sweet spots in your term are going to get you through. Yes, I think I did flourish. I was very short-sighted. I didn't discover that until my second year there and I'd gone in into a set that was way above my actual abilities and I was floundering and plummeted quickly and they moved me down a year That's brutal as well for a seven year old again it's the hard knock life God it really is, I mean it was extraordinary and yet one sort of took it fairly equably and you think well I'll be back then we were we were I remember we would go our summer holiday every year was in Ireland so we'd go up from Northumberland you'd cut across to Stranra get the ferry across it was just for heaven and I remember one journey on travelling to Ireland my my mum had discovered that my brother couldn't really see the the registration number of the lorry in front and she was saying can you my sister absolutely could read everything Zander and I was going, eh, Laurie?

21:19You know, and it was, off we went to opticians before we went back to school. Massively short-sighted. So, yeah, glasses arrived. And that improves everything. You get back to school and you can see the blackboard and keep up with the... It was incredible. What were you good at, apart from music? I was good at English. I was good at, I was eventually good at, I think I was eventually good at most things. I'm very good at Latin. That was a thing I really enjoyed. Very, very logical and very, very strictly taught. Well, it's part puzzle and part poetry, Latin. It is really, yeah. It is exactly that.

21:56It's sort of cryptic and satisfying. And actually brilliantly taught by this. I mean, God, if I look back over our, the sort of the dramatist personae of the staff room at a Northumbrian prep school in the 70s. I mean, yeah, bloody hell. what a melange there were some brilliant people in there but we had this psychopath who used to teach us who used to teach us Latin who used to I mean we'd just hurl board rubbers if he thought someone wasn't paying attention at full speed, this is a lump of wood it's not a sponge, I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea no, a lump of wood with a bit of felt woven into it you know you had no choice but to learn but yeah, it was it was it was good once the brutality and actually i sort of trace some of my uh phobias and and weird quirks personality they inevitably i think all probably go back to that that time that that first year particularly at prep school were you beaten i don't think i ever particularly was i was threatened once with the cane right because they're very different schools i mean everyone uses it as a generic term but some of them are hideously violent oh god some of them were others less so i was slippered once right really really unfairly yeah um so you didn't live in fear then a lot of people in those schools sometimes do live in a form of fear no i mean i have my default position on on other people generally is to be initially quite scared is it i have a sort of i have a fear of yeah you know one expects the worst somehow of people and it's always such a lovely surprise when you discover people really nice usually yeah you know in 99 of cases um And you're pulled up occasionally by some.

23:43But it means, I mean, in a funny way, I think I'm generally very positively and optimistically disposed. And I'm sure it's probably because day-to-day life is always so much nicer than I think I might have imagined it when I was seven. I wonder why that is then. I don't know why. Because school was nice. School was okay. But I think the other boys were, eventually they were great. Sure, but there's always a way of you. But there's always a, I think you have a fear of what other people are, which far exceeds. What's going to happen next. Yeah. It was a form of hypervigilance, isn't it? Yeah, I think that's right.

24:17What is going to happen. And there was a bit of a trauma when the, I mean, it's quite a story, this. I was already thinking about casting that melange of teachers in your, but then the headmaster's wife and the headmaster broke up and you no longer had your muse. I came back. Yeah. Easter term. Was it? Of course it's Easter term. Oh, it's Easter term. when terrible things happened. I came back, and then I'm not sure it was even made clear until two or three days in, and suddenly there was no Mrs. Dakin. She'd gone. She'd had enough of the terrible man. I mean, I think he was a terrible man. And this was a very big deal for you.

24:52I mean, it was the end of... She ran a choir there, and she ran it in such a way that everybody wanted to be part of it. It was brilliant. There was no sense of anybody feeling that music wasn't for them. There was no one... There was certainly no sense of music being a slightly effete pursuit for, you know, I'm not going anywhere near that. Everybody wanted to be in the choir because Mrs. Dakin was fabulous. And she would have this big tin of sweets like those of toffees, those of Quality Street type sweets. And every time she'd just chuck one towards someone who thought, well, they'd be good.

25:24Oh, who's not had a sweet yet? Oh, you better have one. You know, in a school, we weren't allowed anything sweet apart from tuck on Sundays. I mean, mad, you know, after lunch on Sundays. That's the corollary to the board robber, isn't it? So it's almost too binary that. Yeah, exactly. That's what you call it. You've got to learn to catch as well as learn to sing. Exactly that. I know you feel strongly about this. I've already picked up on it. And I picked up on it in my research as well about that portrayal of music as being a feat, as being something that's not cool, as being something. When did it first, when did the scales sort of fall from your eyes and you realise that not everybody felt the way that Mrs.

26:01Dakin did? I think when I went to big school. I think that was when suddenly I realised that if you were a musician, you were sort of generally thought to be a bit of a race apart. Because you weren't a rugby player. Because you weren't a rugby player, and I really wasn't a rugby player. I couldn't wear glasses on the field. That was the point. You can't wear glasses. And if you really are as short-sighted as I am, you don't really see the ball until it's a couple of inches away from you. And so, yeah, always enthusiastic, always terrible. So what was big school? Big school was Durham. Durham school.

26:39And you didn't enjoy that? I did quite enjoy Durham, actually. So how old were you when you went there? Because the chronology gets confusing. It gets terribly confusing. It gets terribly confusing because I did one term, I think, or two terms in my prep school with no Mrs. Dakin. Right. She'd gone. Yes. And everything. It was just awful, I'm afraid. It didn't work. And music had so clearly been my... So we'd gone overnight from being a central part of your school, but also the whole school, and to just not being there at all. Just not really being there. That's awful. And it was, yeah. And, you know, it wasn't for want of, you know, they found a replacement person for her, and she gave it her best shot, but she was no Mrs.

27:17Dakin, was the truth, I'm sorry to say. Have you been in touch with Mrs. Dakin? Oh, I have. Sadly, she's no longer around, Mrs. Dakin. But you had the chance to tell her. I saw her in 2019, and it was just, it was lovely to see her. Oh, lovely. And I was reconnected with her son. oh that's nice so yeah I mean it's been it's she continues to exert terrific influence but I then my mum found this music school in Edinburgh which was attached to the cathedral St Mary's Cathedral and she looked into me possibly going there so I went to this music specialist school okay for two years from 11 to 13 and this that's why I got confused because big school is normally at 13 isn't it when you finish 13 So your mum really sort of realised that you were in need of a major intervention.