Martin Shaw: The Professionals was a monster that swallowed my career

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0:42hello and welcome to full disclosure a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than i would ever be allowed on the radio martin shaw welcome i'm excited about this one well i'm excited about all of them but i i was particularly excited about sitting down with you because you are i mean you you you sort of run through the dramatic history of the last few decades like blackpool through a stick of rock kind of kind of um we begin at the very beginning i didn't know you were a brummie um i i was fascinated to discover that you were but i think probably the first thing of note was how how young your parents were when when when had you absolutely my mother was 19 my dad was 21 and back in 1944 that was very young indeed but you wouldn't be aware of it as a child because you only know the parents that you've got but in in some ways they'd be closer in age you'd be closer in age to them than some of your contemporaries were to their parents and almost similar generations if you broke it down absolutely I mean, they were very good people, naive, incredibly young, and in the case of my mother particularly, traumatized by the war.

1:55Yes. And it gave her intense nervous problems for the rest of her life and mine. You lived with her parents, I think, as a family. There was a lot of people in a small house. I don't know. Yes. I mean, it was one of those very early council houses. is a thing that were built around the First World War. And my parents, and I only know this anecdotally, but they got a flat somewhere in Erdington, and my mother stayed there a week and said, I want to go home. So my poor old dad, who adored her, we ended up with my grandmother in Erdington. So a lot of love in the house, I think. Yes, great deal. I read that your dad was a non-conformist, but I'm not quite sure what that means.

2:45Do you mean religiously or socially or all of the above? Across the whole spectrum. My dad was a wonderful man, very damaged by having his father walk out when my dad was nine. Right. And life was very, very difficult there. That would have been in the late 20s, early 30s. And they were extremely disadvantaged by that, and he couldn't get the education that he wanted and he was naturally incredibly intelligent and he had aspirations which were quashed. And I think that stayed with him for most of his life. Never to be seen again, his dad, pretty much. No, not at all. Which again would have had stigma as well, wouldn't it?

3:31Social shame as well as dashed ambitions. He was just gone. I remember many, many years later, or I must have been in my late teens. We were driving through Quinton, and my dad said, I think my father's buried in that cemetery over there. Gosh. And I said, well, let's go and find his grave, and he was resistant. Really? Yeah. Because he shut that door. But I wanted to. Yes. And so I walked around and around the cemetery until I saw a grave with Edwin Shaw's name on it, you know. But my dad was not particularly, he wasn't engaged, you know. He didn't want to say, oh, bugger him, or he didn't want to say, oh, yeah, just said, okay, okay, let's go.

4:15Survival mechanism, probably. Yes, absolutely. I wonder if that's why he was so keen to start creating his own domestic bliss so quickly, if he wanted to settle down and create a family and a home because he hadn't had one for much of his life. I think so, but also it goes, in a sense, to the naivety and their youth because my mother looked a lot like Ginger Rogers. And she was passionate about ballroom dancing and was very, very good at it. In fact, we had a cup, you know, on bed. Really? We had a cup on the book ice that my mother had won. And my dad sort of looked like one of those dark, wavy-haired, Italian-lit film stars.

5:04And I think both of them were into that without actually really getting to know each other. Oh, gosh. Okay. And just extreme youth, you know. Yes. A youthful crush. Yes, but a happy marriage? I suspect not. Oh, okay. No, I don't think so. It was compromised, I think, by the confines of the house that we were in. Of course. by my dad adoring my mother so much. Right. And my mom being so traumatized by the war. Of course. And also she was the product of a surprise birth, I think, because her brother was 11 years older and he could do no wrong. And my mother was the little doll. Right. And you've done therapy.

5:58Yes, I have. You know how all these things can echo through generations. Yes, absolutely, and through families. So what was your, where did you sit on that scale? Could you do no wrong when you were little? Because I got an image of grandma being the apple of grandma's eye. Absolutely. I was the apple of grandma's eye. I was the apple of my mother's eye, but she was unable to show it. Oh, okay. and I think that she was alarmed, disconcerted, worried, defensive about showing affection and so the message that I got really which I understand now through my journey through therapy was confused you know your mother adores you you're the most important thing in your life but I seem to the one causing her trouble.

6:55So it was difficult. It was difficult. But I only see this in retrospect because when you're a child, this is what reality is. You don't have a chance to work it through. So her mental instability stayed with her till her death but she was a very jolly, funny woman but she was not stable. Were you a performer at home? Would you make her laugh? Would you try and jolly her out of her low moments? I don't think so. That didn't come until a sort of a natural way of being arrived. I remember at school one of the teachers saying, let's do stories. Who wants to tell us a story? And, of course, when we were only about eight or nine, nobody got up.

7:45And I thought, well, I'll tell a story. And I didn't know I could do that. But then my father used to read bedtime stories. And he was brilliant at bedtime stories. And he did all the voices. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And so I had that grounding. And I remember telling a story at the class and then the teacher saying, okay, okay, actually having to stop me because I didn't find that difficult. And you felt something you hadn't felt before. You sort of had a sense of this, hang on, I'm good at this. Exactly. Exactly. And as things progressed, you know, and more school, I found that I wasn't very good at very much at all, except English and drama.

8:30Was mum a frustrated performer then with the dance? Did she dance after you were born or had she got it all out? Very little. OK. Very little. But I think she was. I mean, they were both frustrated because they both had enormous talents that they had no outlet for. What were your dad's? The storytelling and things like that? Well, storytelling, he had an extraordinary mind. Right. But at that time, if you didn't have university, you didn't have a recognized education and something that looked good on paper, you were not given the opportunity. Yeah. And so it was quite a struggle for him, too. And he would have been conscious of that.

9:12I mean, at university, presumably, particularly with an absent father, wasn't even a sort of distant prospect. Not even remotely. He couldn't even go to the school, the secondary school that he was entitled to and was going to go to because his mother couldn't afford the books or the uniform. Gosh. And so I know for a fact he carried that with him. But he went to night school. Later. Yeah. Because he wanted to learn. He just wanted to absorb knowledge for knowledge's sake. He wanted to be able to say to the bosses, this is what I can do. But it was always held back because he didn't have the school or the...

9:49So you didn't grow up, and this is where the phrase non-conformist kicks in again, either despite or because of his frustrations. I sense you'd never grew up thinking that certain futures weren't for the likes of you. You would have... Because by the time you leave home to come to London and go to drama school, You don't seem to have been held back by any sense of thinking people from my kind of background shouldn't be having dreams like this. In a way, in a way I was. But fortunately, there was something else. I mean, I think the ground of being that I got from my father was integrity and kindness.

10:34and throughout my experience of life you know love conquers all and integrity and kindness are I suppose aspects of love and so I think it enabled me to just come out of the box enough to find out oh yeah and then my make my own way out of the box I when I left school at 16 and I didn't like school but I hated school absolutely hated it and I was irritatingly precocious and self-destructive in the sense that I could tell if a teacher was not a good teacher and if the teacher paced up and down pointing at the blackboard and wanted us to memorise what he was saying. Part of me knew that this wasn't the way to do it.

11:31I don't know how or why, but I knew I needed to be enthused. And that was his job? Yes. Yes. And very few of them did it. But two of them did it as a work of art, my English teacher and my drama teacher. Oh, gosh. So, you know, guess what? Yeah, but what if the maths teacher and the physics teacher had been the brilliance, where would we be today? Honestly, I really don't know. I suspect nowhere. Because I still think, and it's only partly true, but not completely untrue, I'm virtually innumerate. Really? Yes. I mean, I was trying to work out my electricity bill with a calculator a couple of days ago.

12:14And I just kept doing it and doing it. And by the time I got to the end of the calculation on the calculator, I'd forgotten what the beginning was. So, no, I don't think I have any acumen for figures whatsoever. But words were a different matter. Words were an entirely different matter. And I loved vocabulary. And I had some wonderful teachers. Even before I went to secondary school, I had a brilliant teacher. It's a two-way street, though, isn't it, Martin? They must have seen something in you that prompted them to be on their A game, as it were. I think so. I think so. Yes, entirely, entirely right.

12:50But the secondary school, that was divided into groups. And so if you did well in the intermediate exams, you would go up. And if you did badly, you would go down. And in the lower groups, that's where I found the enthusiastic teachers who were interested and wanted to really get you going. And then at the top, it was dry. And the teacher with a very chalky gown falling off his shoulder and throwing the blackboard rubber at people. You know the one. I do, actually. So the end game of that little era of education. So there's no sense of your dad's frustrated academic ambitions being hung around your neck then?

13:31No. No, I don't know. Not at all. But when I left school, I went to work in a chemical company in Hockley, Hockley Chemical Company. You have to say that in a Birmingham magazine. Hockley Chemical Company. in the sales office because that was what my dad had been doing. Right. And the sales director obviously saw something. I don't know what it was, but one day I saw him looking at me across the office. And he said, have a look at these leaflets. And he gave me a whole load of leaflets because it was about barrel deburring and taking this stuff off metal and so on. And they had a new machine. and he said read all those leaflets and then write me a direct mail advertising and tell people why they should buy it and i was only 16 yeah well by the end of the week i was running the campaign with a secretary who was old enough to be my grandmother um which was quite confronting Yeah.

14:40But in the evening, I was continuing to do semi-professional theatre because my drama school teacher was doing street theatre. Right. Is this the Pied Pipers? Well done. This is the Pied Pipers, and it was Commedia dell 'arte, and we would improvise a theme in a rented school hall and then go out at the weekends to the bomb sites, of which in 1960, 61, there were still many in Birmingham. And that was the start of that, improvisation. So would you just try and gather an audience on the bombsite, would you? I mean, that was the Pied Pipers part of it, because everybody who could play an instrument did, and those who couldn't had a kazoo.

15:27Then we would gather the children in a circle and say, now, children, this is the story of... And we were wearing commedia dell 'arte costumes, you know, Arachino and all that. And then just perform. But they were invited to participate. Quite a visionary. What would the word be to describe that drama teacher? He was quite on the nose. I mean, that was quite a bold thing to do at the time in that area. He was extraordinary in every sense of the word. I mean, bear in mind that when I started in his classes, would have been about 58, 59.

16:08And then he would do after-school classes, and we had quite a big school hall. He was... He actually looked like a Neanderthal. And I'm told that they were remarkably... And they're remarkably intelligent species, you know. I mean, it's used disparagingly. Yes, of course. And he was a rugby player, very muscular prognathous jaw but he would put on a piece of classical music and then say right dance to it and we we just had to dance to whatever the movement was now at first i thought oh my god this is embarrassing yeah especially as people could see in from the outside that when i tried it i thought my god this is liberating really although i didn't know it was liberating but I know now that was what was happening so we were flinging ourselves around to this music really and it's sort of unlocked something a permission not to be embarrassed that's really valuable mmm and he knew exactly what he was doing oh boy did he ever what was his name Tom Knowles I went to his funeral many many many years later with us as an adult did he see your success no I don't quite think so I don't think so but my English teacher Alan Hill did and I I corresponded with him other boys in the class presumably were not responding in the same way that you were so so you that that's why it's so valuable that sense of being set free from embarrassment because the you know the idea of looking at something it's effeminate mm-hmm you know it's it's not serious it's not sporty it's none of the things that would have been valued by the average 12 year old brummie boy and yet somehow somehow it spoke to you well uh i mean this is incredibly non-woke and and and probably now illegal but at one class we were asked to be and this was a tom knolls class yeah we were asked to be a burning candle gosh and so you know the idea was to start like this and gradually melt them and there was one boy in the class who was our star footballer just wouldn't didn't didn't want to do it yeah and he was playing up and giggling and giggling and giggling and tom knolls walked over to him don't forget he's a rugby player and he picked this boy up by the scruff of the neck and just dangled him and said be a be a candle be a candle dropped him to the floor and we all thought okay this isn't very effeminate This is very interesting.

18:51Exactly.

18:55Hey, it's your ceiling vent, so I'm dripping. Could be the rain, could be the upstairs bathroom. Yikes. You could hire the guy your neighbor recommended, but I'm pretty sure that's just his cousin. Do we know if he's licensed, or does he just stone a ladder? Listen to your home. Go with Thumbtack. Upload a photo or voice note and we'll diagnose your project and match you with the right pro for the job. Thumbtack. We know homes. Hire the right pro today. When did the sort of planets begin to align then? Because you've got off to a spectacular start in the world of what you probably didn't even know was called copywriting, even though that's what you were doing.

19:35But you're still doing it in the evening. Had you allowed yourself to frame an ambition that you could do this sort of thing for a living? No, not really. I mean, the careers officer at the end came and talked to me and listened to my thoughts and said, you go and be a librarian. And I thought, that's the opposite of an actor in a way, isn't it? I mean, apart from the literary connection or the words, if you had to pick two sort of jobs on the scale of attention, the librarian would be at the bottom of whatever. Absolutely. It couldn't have been worse. But fortunately, I used to go to the Central Jazz Club in Birmingham and listen to traditional jazz.

20:22And I met a girl. And she was far more intelligent than me and far more grown up than me. And she wanted to be an actress and she was going to RADA. Okay. So what are you now, 17, 18 or a bit younger? Just coming up to 18. Just coming up to 18. Just coming up to 18. and I said that's that's in London and that meant she was going to go away and I thought about it and I thought I'll go to Radha then and half of it was I think I might have a talent for this right but half of it was I didn't want her to go away and so I auditioned for Radha and I didn't get in I got a well done try again okay but at that time there were three great drama schools there was rada there was lambda and there was central yes and i auditioned for lambda and i got in which was incredibly fortunate because lambda suited me far better than rada would have done what did mom and dad think of this plan oh they were very worried yes i bet they were very worried you've done what oh yeah i mean it was well they they they thought it was incredibly insecure they were right they were entirely right you know completely but that's what they were worried about they weren't worried about airs and graces or they just wanted you to be and you've got a good job yeah in the in the chemical factory you know you've got a future there you've got security you've got a pension presumably on the horizon all of these things and and you weren't interested in that no i just i just wanted to go where jonah was so it wasn't i was say it wasn't the lure of the grease paint or the roar of the crowd it was the allure of janet that was the 100 100 i mean knowing what i know now having done the therapy journey and so on i think i think a lot of us have got that that impulse inside us to get out yes and do something so i know that was there and it was the exciting idea of being in london and so off off we went got a bedsitter in Paddington for two pound ten shillings a week and off to Lambda and by Christ that was when that was when the world got turned around right because our inception was was very very scary because I had an idea of what it might be like I thought everybody was going to speak beautifully and I must change whatever residual accent that I had and that I thought that there was a certain way to be.

23:03Janet and I had gone to Birmingham Rep whatever production was on then to the Alex and then every weekend we'd go to Stratford and look at the actors in The Dirty Duck and they all had a certain way of being and I thought that was really what one had to be, chappy old man. Did you try to be like that? Well, no, I didn't try to be. Thank God. I didn't try to be, but I thought that was how you had to be until I got to Lambda. Well, this is a very era-based thing as well, isn't it? Because this is kind of the point where it stopped being all Terence Rattigan plays. Exactly. And started being a bit more Alan Silito-type territory, John Osborne.

23:47I mean, you were kind of, and I know that you got cast in Don't Look Back in Anger not long after leaving Lambda, but you were in the, was it right in the middle of it? Five years previously, possibly you would have started trying to talk like Terry Thomas. Five years later, five years later, you wouldn't have had, you wouldn't have had the comparisons to make because the world would have turned even more by then. And the Finneys and the Tom Courtney's would have been in their pomp. 100%. Gosh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the ethos at Lambda, I mean, we had people like Charles Marowitz, Thelma Holt, Peter Brook.

24:23I mean, these were all the people who were involved with Lambda. And, you know, our inception speech was really daunting about how difficult and demanding professionalism and dedication was. And I thought, oh, my God. And they were, I remember Norman Ayrton, the vice principal, saying, if you don't fit in, we'll throw you out. If you misbehave, we'll throw you out. So it was a training with a purpose. It wasn't a kind of dilettante, faffing about for three years. Absolutely not. They wanted you really schooled and ready to work and to earn. I mean, this was the apotheosis, if you like, of professionalism.

25:10what it means to be an actor it means that you are an artist you know and we'd seen films of how strict aspiring ballet teachers were taught it was like that okay you know but you were ready for that i think i wasn't no no not at all i really wasn't because i mean i had i think tom knowles might have given you a bit of preparation for it he gave me some preparation for it but my background and my my journey thus far i think had given me a a pretty severe dose of imposter syndrome right um but also i understood that i'd got the beginnings of clarity of interacting with clarity but in my 18 year old sense and my insecurity it manifested as bombast.

26:02Okay. So at the end of the first year you're getting it aren't you? I am getting it. I'm just ringing a couple of bells. So at the end of the first year the happiest year of my life thus far I was sent into the principal's office and he said Michael McCann the great, great Michael McCann said, well, I think we're going to have to let you go. Ice in the veins. Worse. All my blood drained out of my body and my ground of being. Because genuinely, that was the happiest year of my life by far. And he said, you ride roughshod over the students and the staff. and truly this had no resonance with me at all i absolutely genuinely didn't know and so we talked for a bit and he said i'm not convinced but i'm going to let margaret collins talk to you it was another one of the stuff and i'll i'll accept what she says and i went across the corridor and talked with margaret for i think nigh on four hours and the essence of it was that you don't know do you you don't know and I said no and I didn't really truly understand it even then but I just knew that I had to be different and so Michael McCohen said all right he would let me stay and then people in the second year kept coming up to me and saying what have you done you're so different you're so different and I truly wasn't really deeply aware of being so different but I was deeply aware of being aware, if you know what I mean.

27:58I do know what you mean. And of being kind and listening a lot. Being your father's son. Yeah. A bit more than you had been in your first year. Yeah. When you were playing the role of what you thought a first year drama student should be like. Absolutely. Perhaps. And as soon as I was hearing, you know, my in drama school friend Brian Cox, you know. Of course, yeah. Talking about that. I said, get away. I said, Martin, you've got to, really, you've shaved the beard off your look down. And all that stuff. I said, you don't have to speak beautifully. No, of course. And he was such an amazing actor.

28:35And still is. You could see it then. Could you ever. Yeah, yeah. That's really interesting, isn't it? that line that she said to you that you don't know do you and that's why they gave you the benefit of the doubt it's the difference between arrogance born of insecurity and arrogance born of entitlement I think brilliant yes entirely and yours was the first kind obviously yes and it's you know the accumulated wisdom of knowing the difference coming across it quite lucky then that junction in your life I mean James so lucky so lucky you know time after time after time even the I think the greatest insight in what acting meant was when we were asked to do scenes from plays and I did a scene from Long Day's Journey Into Night and I played the younger brother who virtually said nothing he just interjected occasionally and the older brother was it was full of angst and and alcohol and so on and suddenly i realized all i had to do was listen that was it that is the whole whole story and for the first time in my training i understood what acting was about I didn't have to do anything because I really, really was fond of this other guy as a friend that has a brother within the play and the intensity of the writing and I was moved by him and I didn't have to act the tears I didn't have to act the feeling all I had to do was listen and that for me in the ensuing 60 years has been just listen and see what happens.

30:37This is what actors mean when they talk about being present, I think. You're just there. In a way, you can't really explain to a civilian. It's a different level of engagement and consciousness. God. Where would you have put yourself on how good you were? So you could watch someone like Brian Cox and think, Christ, he's brilliant. what kind of perception did you have of your own talents at this stage very little really just didn't think about it no I don't think I thought about it very much but there was another inspirational teacher a teacher called Vivian Matelon and he encouraged this whole thing about listening don't demonstrate don't try to tell the story don't anticipate Basically, it just came down to, listen, and how do you feel?

31:36And we did another great American play called Dark of the Moon, in which I had to say nothing. Really? I didn't even have any lines. But I was in the congregation of the church when the Baptist preacher is getting the congregation going. And I was given all that. and afterwards Vivien Matelon after he'd given notes to everybody Vivien Matelon came to me and he said don't think that I didn't see what you were doing don't ever underestimate your contribution by doing what you're doing and that was something else that stayed in me of course it did though because a lot of other people would have been counting lines and cursing the person who'd not given them any but you still found the beauty in doing what you did on that stage.

32:28First year, Martin, would not have been able to do that, I don't think. No, I wouldn't have been able to do it in the first year. Not at all. Not at all. Because I thought it was... Yes, we all love the applause. Yes. We all love that feeling of, oh, I've got that line absolutely right. Oh, this feels good. But actually, what feels best is that spontaneous emotion that comes through you or spontaneous joy, spontaneous feeling. And it only comes from listening. and not caring about how good you are. Not having the mental... I mean, you're not going to the space where you care about how good you are.

33:08You're in a different space, as we said. Thumbtack presents Uncertainty Strikes. I was surrounded. The aisle and the options were closing in. There were paint rollers, satin and matte finish, angle brushes and natural bristles. There were too many choices. What if I never got my living room painted? What if I couldn't figure out what type of paint to use? What if I just used Thumbtack? I can hire a top-rated pro that knows everything about interior paint, easily compare prices, and read reviews. Thumbtack knows homes. Download the app today. As the end of the third year, the end of the final year approaches, what would have been either your plan or your ambition?

33:51What would you have said? What were you hoping? I mean, I suppose getting an agent in the first instance, but what were you? Just get a job. Any job. Any job. Any job. And the first job I got was a Hornchurch rep as an ASM. Right. And that was fine, you know. ASMs in those days didn't do very much. I mean, acting ASM didn't really do any acting at all. It was mostly ASMing and walking on. In fact, I still think of the delicious irony. My first professional job after drama school was literally shoveling shit. Literally. Because the stage manager said, right, we've got an old prop store over at the White Hart.

34:42And it hasn't been opened in 20 or 30 years. So here's the key. bring me an inventory of the furniture and props we've got there. When I got there, I opened the door and it was literally that deep in Ratchelor. Oh my lord. So I was given a spade and a prune. Oh, the glamour. And I actually, I had to stop and laugh because I thought this is my first job and I'm shoveling shit. And I think Bristol shortly afterwards you went off to the Old Vic. Was that? Yes, it was Bristol Yes, Bristol Old Vic after that. Where you met, I think you met Lawrence Olivier there, did you? No, no, no, that came quite a lot later.

35:23Okay, so what's in between, just slowly building up? Just slowly building up Bristol Old Vic, and then they started television roles at Granada Television, when it was a separate organisation run by Sidney Bernstein. uh then then there was the right then that's right it was royal court that so that was a big one so two years of i think you've described it as two years of hell but but just on the basis of the conversation we've had so far you would have been absorbing and learning and growing throughout that period even if elements of it were frustrating but then you got cast in look back in anger in i think late 68 at the age of 23 oh that was about right yes and also i mean significantly at one point at the horn church anthony hopkins came to do two plays right um and we shared a house he had the posh flat downstairs and i had the bed sit upstairs but we shared a kitchen and and used to talk about acting yeah in the kitchen you know and and he was another one he was a great influence on me because of the even he was he was 28 at the time right and his his power was extraordinary but fatally his alcoholism at the time was very attractive to you yes right you know the glamour of it yes and seeing him in the white heart with 10 empty glasses around and studying his script and i thought i want to be like that gosh but you know um but ironically you know um anthony hopkins has been teetotal for the last 50 years and i've been teetotal for the last 53 years You beat him to it.

37:05Beat him to it. But I don't know that you ever succumbed quite as much as he did to the... I don't think so, no. But you might have done. I might have done. Yes, I might have done. But it was not so much, I think, an addiction to alcohol as an addiction to the escape that I thought that it was giving me from what I was repressing inside of it. The hole it was filling. Yeah, thank you, yes. I thought about that when I was reading up on you earlier because I just watched the new film the Richard Burton film and the destructive nature the one with Toby Jones playing Philip Burton the destructive nature of that relationship with alcohol and obviously Hopkins springs to mind because he very much followed in Burton's footsteps your decision was based on an encounter with someone that you'd been at drama school with I think who just yes or inspired partly by him Yes, it was, I mean, that's rolling quite a long way forward.