Natalie Haynes: Greek Myths, Medea and the Comedy of Classics

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio. This doesn't happen very often, Natalie Haynes, but you're one of my favourite radio presenters. Shut up, is that true? Yeah, absolutely. I love your show. Thanks. stand up for the classics it's quite hard for people who are not familiar with it it's quite hard to categorize this yeah it is a bit yeah i'll give you that it's not a genre no is it really no yeah no the stand-up i was a stand-up comedian for uh 10 12 years um after i left uni and i had been a classicist at uni um and so gradually the two kind of merged and when I started writing books with Ancient Guide that came out in 2010, or as I like to think of it, five years ago, then I knew I needed a way to promote it because I couldn't get sales any other way.

1:06And I was like, imagine if I came to these book festivals where people are, there's three people talking on a panel. And instead of that, you ditch the chairs and you didn't need to pay two or three other people. You could just pay me and I'll just talk and you can pay me three times the money and buy my books yeah I mean yes and so it took people a little bit of time I think to realize that that wasn't a fully deranged idea and it took me another three or four years to persuade the BBC that they wanted to let me do that on Radio 4 we started in 2014 um but yeah we've been back we'll be back for Series 12 next year so people listening still not entirely clear what it is I guess it is you work your way through so it began with a book and you'd work you'd have a sort of stage version.

1:52Yeah, exactly. So I started out with sort of topics. In Ancient Guide, I did things like law in the ancient world or politics in the ancient world or, you know, the role of women or the role that's played by the city versus a rural existence, which is a huge divide in ancient times in a way that it's perhaps not quite so much now. And then when we came to do the series for Radio 4, I made it biographical and I said, I'll stand up for a different person from antiquity each week. And so sometimes they're writers, sometimes they're politicians, sometimes they are people about whom we know. We did a program on Sappho about whom we have three poems and otherwise just fragments.

2:35And I could get through all the things we actually know about Sappho in about 40 seconds. And it's like, well, I'm going to have to find a way to make this program 28 minutes long. And so sometimes it's a tremendous exercise in talking about historiography and how history works and how ancient history works and what counts as a source and why we might have lost things and how that we've lost between 97 and 99 percent of ancient greek literature so you know why sometimes it's the other way around in that you're just going to struggle to distill it down sometimes it's 28 minutes go on then give me your best give me your best cicero facts so you don't think of yourself as a stand-up comedian anymore i saw on your it's too tough it's too tough a life you can't claim it if you don't do it every day yeah so that's a personal perspective you could do couldn't you because you do that you tour the book you do a show you stand up and you make people laugh i know but now i hear what you're saying um and so i'm offering you the classicist answer which is that it feels disrespectful to my former colleagues who are doing a much harder job than i have to do because brutally and i say this just before the tour starts so feel free to watch me fall flat on my face in the ensuing days when When people turn up to my shows, what they're hoping for is like a fun, interesting talk.

3:45And I don't have to get a gag in every 60 seconds. Otherwise, they might, you know, start throwing things. That's not going to happen. My friends who are on the circuit on a Friday night late show who are having to hit with gag, gag, gag, gag, gag to make sure they keep a fairly drunk audience in check. That is a that is a rough job. So it just feels like I'm claiming something that I no longer do. But yes, there is no fourth wall. I do stand there. there is a microphone people laugh yeah I can't deny that but yeah um I asked that I wanted to clarify that because I looked at your the alumni page on your um Cambridge College website and it and it described you as a former comedian I thought perhaps with a sense of relief from the college authorities yeah my um Radio 4 producer Mary um used to call me a recovering comedian and I think that's probably right um it's like if things all went wrong I guess I could slide back into it like a bad habit lost already established that the radio show doesn't really have any um genre nor does the straddling of stand-up and classics does it I don't think following anybody else's footsteps no it seemed really obvious to me that it would be a fun and interesting thing to do but I can't pretend there was someone else doing it I mean brutally there weren't very many women doing stand-up when i was doing stand-up we were about 10 it's better now i think in statistical were you the first woman to get the best newcomer nod at the no i was the first woman doing a solo show to be nominated for the best newcomer um so i think i'm right to say that uh alice lowe i think had been nominated as part of garth merengue or had okay but i my memory for i used to be really good at knowing who'd done what for the perrier and and for the booker i used have them all memorized and now I'm like um so yeah I think um I think I was the first woman with a stand-up show I think is it I mean an indication of how what it was like back then I mean how hard it was it was I mean it was incredibly hard and the joy slash horror of Edinburgh is that you're a much better performer at the end of it than you were at the start because you've gone on stage and made an audience work you know work that crowd for an hour a night you know 26 27 times but you've also best case scenario lost hundreds worst case scenario thousands of pounds even if the show sells out every night you're out people don't realize that whenever people complain about how expensive it is going to edinburgh as a punter i would like them to stop and take a minute because i did five shows in 2002 three four five six and i was incredibly lucky and i had a sponsor for those shows and without that sponsor i would have lost 10 000 pounds a year and i couldn't afford to do extraordinary isn't it it's like they sold out every night you know every year yeah because the venues are tiny and the tickets are as expensive as people can make and people go oh they're so expensive now it's like you pay rent here for a year it's just impossible um on a brighter note i read that you are the you have the honor of being the only person to perform at every single newbury comedy festival i don't know if this is true or not it's on the internet well there you then yes objectively it's the case but there are no more newbury comedy so i will always have this you're like one of those olympians who like did the tiddlywinks in 1934 you can never ever have your medal that's right i'm going to get my laurel wreath right now and i'm going to sport it at all times um i'm torn because i've got some questions i'd like to ask you i've just come back from holiday in greece and we visited as i always tried to do some sites so i have some questions okay i'm here for you scholarship i'm not an archaeologist i'll give it my best shot no it bit you just said then before we get stuck into your life about the difference between the city and the and the rural community so i went to messini which is which is mad because it's like five or six sites in one isn't it so you can go to epidaveros or the parthenon or you can go to the i went to corinth and another occasion or you can go to the olympic stadium but when you go to messini you've got like a little mini version of all five or six of those things the theater the forum how did they decide to build a city there do we know i mean that specific location or any i don't know exactly but my guess is i mean sometimes it's to do with it's always due with water at least in part um it's usually to do with high ground so they can see people coming so you can see people coming i mean at the point when athens was um being visited by parzenias so parzenias is a geographer he's writing a travel book basically the first travel book pretty well in the second century first century into the second century i think and when he turns up in athens he can see not just the parthenon that we can see now which is kind of insane when you think about it yeah um but also isn't it you're sitting there thinking saint paul stood here or or his letter got read out here it is nuts isn't it yes it is nuts i get that um and so when pausanias visits there's not just the parthenon there's other temples to atheney there's not just the statue of athene who is inside the parthenon obviously long gone now although you can see a replica in nashville of course um if not there then where um but there's well i'm here for these questions but there's also an athene promocos so athene in the front line of battle um so she's wearing the helmet she's got her spear and you could see apparently um the tip of her spear and the the top of the um uh illustrated sort of what's the word i want like the feathers the plume on her helmet you can see them from sunion sunion is more than 30 miles away and it's like if what you were hoping to do was convey to people that they would think twice before they attacked your city that's not a bad way of doing it and of course when athens is is building these temples and these statues um they have been invaded by the persians you know a few decades earlier so where these things are being built in the second half of the fifth century bce so the Persians invade in 490 and then in 480 the city is torched you know Athena's olive tree is is burned although before the day is out it's put up a whole new shoot that's like a cubit long or two cubits long or something so you can never keep her down in her own city.

9:50So this is slightly sycamore gap. Right exactly but slightly more you know divine intervention I think in terms of the replacement but then you find other places in antiquity where you know why does Rome become I'm so powerful. I think the answer is roughly something like salt. It has a tremendous supply of salt, and salt is incredibly valuable. The word salary comes from salt. It just grows up around it. So, you know, that's why Rome becomes Rome rather than Alba Longa becoming Alba Longa, I guess. And if I didn't live in one of those cities, where would I have lived? Would I have just lived in a hut with my goats?

10:23Yeah, I suppose so. You might have. I'm not going to rule out that you might have had the odd chicken. Okay. Why not? Of course. You might have had a dog. You wouldn't have had a cat. There aren't cats in mainland Greece until relatively late. So there are mountain cats and things like that, but cats are in like Egypt, but you have to assume the old one made it onto a boat or something. Cats being famously so fond of water and strangers. But yeah, so you might have had a dog and you'd have lived in Attica, I guess. So the area around Athens. and that would have been a really good bet to avoid things like the plague that takes Athens in the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War for 431 into 430 but the people who are in the area around Athens are drawn inside the city walls because of the attacks from Sparta from the south where you were and so it's overcrowded and then more people get plagued I'm afraid.

11:15I warned you that I could do this for the whole hour so I'll try not to but Finally, how did they achieve renown? Because like individuals, I was looking at some of the, you reminded how much has been lost. But how would you become a player in these cities, in these societies? Well, Athens is a really interesting one because, of course, it has democracy, not representative democracy as we do, but direct democracy with the caveat that you always have to remind yourself of when we talk about this, which is a limited franchise, which is citizen men. So not only no votes for women, not only no votes for, of course, slaves, but also people who come to Athens from other parts of Greece, metics, as they are called, who don't get a vote in Athens either.

12:00So this very limited adult male franchise of citizens nonetheless have a direct democracy. So if you wanted to be a local councillor by modern standards, you would never stand for that as a role to be elected. You would simply be chosen by sortition, by lot. And you would serve for a day or a year. And then you'd be, you know, not booted out, but just moved on. You know, everyone's in constant rotation. And so you lose continuity, I suppose. But on the other hand, corruption can't thrive for too long. and how do you, you know, their juries were massive and they worked on the same system of people being chosen by lots.

12:42So how do you bribe a jury when there might be 500 of them and you don't know who it's going to be? So if you wanted to get ahead, what you needed to be good at was talking. So it would be great news for you. Yeah. I was born in the wrong era. Yeah, I feel the same thing. I bet you do. Yeah, don't get me wrong. I really like having medicine and a vote. Of course. These are positives. These are net positives. Overall. But yeah, so you would have gone and spoken at the Agora the marketplace you'd have had everybody hanging on your every word just like socrates does um until 399 went slightly less so um and that's what they valued that there is no education in antiquity without speech um if you want to be a politician you're going to have to be a orator if you want to be um powerful as a kind of mover and shaker you're still going to need political clout you're still going to need that kind of you know cicero gets into politics in rome because he's he's a brilliant lawyer and he's following a path um that's been trodden by people like demosthenes before him demosthenes gets into the law because he's been robbed of his patrimony by dubious relatives and he wants to go to the law courts to argue for it back so literally argue for it back yeah literally do better with the words than the other lot and win fully did yeah Yeah, absolutely.

14:03It's incredible. That's a perfect answer. Because you kind of looked at it and thought, what do they actually do? You've got 10 people here. How does that one end up top dog? And the answer is he was better at the chatter than the other nine. He was probably better at talking. And some people, of course, are richer than others. So Nysias, who is the nephew, I think, of Pericles. Pericles is the great 5th century Athenian statesman who, amongst other things, pushes so hard for Athens to be beautified and made splendid. using money which they have looted from their colonies is slightly ungenerous, but not far off.

14:38And his nephew, Nysias, he partly owns or owns some of silver mines in Larion, nearby Larion. So that's a good way too, is to have family holdings, let's say. It's always, yeah, plus a chance. Yeah, yeah. Be born rich is one of my top tips for you, she said, from Birmingham. The last Duke of Westminster said, when someone asked him for advice on precisely that, he said it was a very good idea to have an ancestor who was best friends with William the Conqueror, which I think is a similar theme. I think that's probably right, isn't it? I mean, if you want to, then that's a good way of doing it.

15:17You've already provided an extraordinary insight into how deep and broad your knowledge is. So when do you know that you've found the territory for your next book? which of these myriad individuals and threads are the ones that just do your antennae start twitching they do a bit i mean this one is this one is unusual no friend to this house is an unusual one because i have been writing and thinking and talking about medea and the medea story the story of the argo the quest for the golden fleece um since i was a teenager so euripides medea is my favorite greek tragedy um it's the first or maybe second uh greek play i read in Greek in the sixth form um my dad drove me down from Birmingham to London to see Diana Rigg play her at the Almeida wow um I know because my dad had a crush on Diana Rigg because he's not a fool win win exactly and I had that thing and you know I I don't think many people have this kind of experience but I think the people who do you know if you're going to have it it might well be in the theatre it might well be in the you know unexpected and I watched her as she the the Almeida's not a big theatre you know and they had a huge metal kind of sheet at the back of the stage and when Jason comes on spoiler spoiler spoiler when Jason comes on and demands the bodies of his children she slammed her fist into the back wall and these two giant metal panels dropped they were on wire and the clanging noise everyone jumped like a foot in their seats and i remember thinking even as it was happening i will never be the same again and i was never the same again so you know those times when you think oh you know these kids at this you know on this school trip at this theater production are really annoying give them a minute some of them will be having something magical might be happening yeah that was great could you put into words why you knew you would never be the same again it was just so intense it's honestly talking about it now I was making the hairs on the back of my neck go up even after all this time it is it's a play which has two quite extraordinary and devastating monologues both delivered by her so it gives a huge range to an actor who's playing that role but what's properly and I've been thinking about this for decades now you know I'm 16 when I first saw this so I've had a lot of time I wrote my dissertation on it as an undergraduate on the um heroics of gendered infanticide i don't have children before anyone writes in nor did i used to have children before those people write in as well um but um i the thing is when you meet her the chorus of this play have just said medea's in a terrible state um you know she's just lying on the ground she's you know she's turned her face away from us no matter what you say she can't you know she won't respond she just groans and then by the time she comes on stage which is only a few moments later she's completely composed and you're like oh okay and then she says to the chorus you know my husband has behaved appallingly and i'm going to find a way to make him pay and if i can you have to promise to keep the secret and they go yeah all right and then every single encounter we because it's a play and not a novel every time we see her she's in dialogue with somebody else apart from these two you know big monologues and she's different every single time and somehow and i still don't really know how he does it we the audience know who the real medea is and we know that she's putting on an act for each of these people that she's talking to and sometimes it's really clear you know after creon leaves the stage she says i would never have formed on him if it didn't help me out and other times you're like i i know you're playing this person false but i don't know why I don't know how I know that.

19:05You've just made that happen. And I think it's the greatest play ever written in any language. So quite bold then to think. Do you think? I know. Someone was saying to me, I think when Stoneblind came out, because there are no literary sources really, almost none, Ovid and a tiny, tiny scraps of like Hesiod about Medusa. And they said, oh, you know, the thing about kind of classical myth retelling is that you're kind of filling in the gaps, right? that you're like yeah i'm going to do this and i was like oh hang on and then i realized that a play isn't a novel and so before i started writing this novel i sat down and i translated the play longhand which i haven't done since i was a student um translated bits and pieces for the radio for the other books but i sat down and and and that's where the title comes from i made it I don't know about line 76 or something and uh the tutor the children's tutor says of Jason um that man is no friend to this house and I was like oh that's so cool I'm having that um and I thought there were lots of ways I thought that the play would um give me the form or the structure for the book and it turned out not to be so and the maddening thing actually from my perspective is that I spent the entire book looking forward to two scenes neither of which ended up being in it i thought all the way through i thought i'm gonna have such a good time doing the scene with um talos as he is beautifully named in the 1963 um ray harryhausen version of jason and the argonauts and you know he's the big bronze giant and i was like the seminal version exactly yeah the canon text as we like to think of it um and i thought this is going to be so much fun because in apollonius of rhodes's argonautica he is not um met by the argonauts on their way to the Golden Fleece, but on the way back.

20:57So it is Medea who takes him on. And it's so creepy. She basically puts the whammy on him and forces him to smash rocks into his own foot until he dies. And it's like, that is terrifying. And then when I got to that point in the book, I was like, oh, this scene doesn't fit in. I don't get to write my big bronze giant. I can't believe it. And then the big monologue where Medea decides whether or not to kill her children in Euripides. I was so sure. I was I was like I'm so ready to write this and I got to that point in the book and I was like god damn it it's not gonna it's not gonna fit it's the wrong it belongs on a stage it doesn't belong in the book so at least I got to translate it before I started writing the novel what then for the benefit of the tape what is the conceit of the novel what is the sort of well I wanted to show you the story of as it were more of the Argonautica the whole quest of the Argo so I wanted to start with the idea of the golden ram and and who becomes spoiler the golden fleece and where that creature comes from and what is obviously magical it's obviously divine in some versions it can fly occasionally there's a suggestion that it can swim occasionally it can talk depending on the version of your myth so it's like okay where does where does that ram come from and that's the bit that I started although it's not the beginning of the book it's the interlude which which comes a bit later but it was where I thought that the book started and then I was like oh hang on I've started in the wrong place hold on everyone And I wanted to take the story of the Argo, which has this hero in the in the most Greek sense of the word.

22:51A protagonist is a closer because Jason isn't very heroic. He isn't very heroic in Euripides. He isn't very heroic in Apollonius of Rhodes. He's a very plausible, charming hero, but he's not particularly strong. He's not particularly tough. The Argonauts want Hercules, Heracles, as the Greeks would have him, to lead them rather than Jason. And he sort of manages to persuade them. And so he is a fascinating figure because we're so used to liking him from the movie, I think. And, you know, the bit where he fights the earthborn warriors who, of course, Harryhausen made them skeletons. Before that, they aren't.

23:34And now it's impossible to think of them any other way. And I don't know how I'm going to talk on the tour because a lot of my readers are too young to have seen a film from 1963 because it wasn't on the only three or four channels there were. Every bank holiday forever. Exactly, wasn't it? It was like the Wizard of Oz for bank holidays. Yeah, it was a bylaw. It was either Clash of the Titans, Sinbad. Or classics. yeah exactly that's all jason and the organelles and there we all were watching them every single time so yeah we basically knew them all by heart and so the jason that i mean the jason that we get in that film is an interesting one because i think it was quite a shall we say fraught film set i believe uh from interviews given later um but in antiquity he is he's a hero who receives a great deal of help from goddesses.

24:23But he never seems particularly confident. He never seems sort of particularly masculine in the terms of Greek myth compared with, say, Achilles or Odysseus. And of course, his encounters with Medea, she is a super powerful witch and priestess, but only a teenage girl when they meet. so it's like you can be incredibly smart and yet emotionally very vulnerable i imagine um but uh so she was she was always going to be in it and of course their their relationship is i mean toxic doesn't really come close i think so there is describing it so i really wanted to i really wanted to take on a story that i have loved so many times and i was worried i'd broken it in my in my head if you see what i mean that once i'd written the book i would have just thought about it enough for it not to kind of hit me again and then i there was a japanese a kabuki production of it at the coronet in notting hill earlier this year and i got tickets to it and i don't just finished doing the audiobook for this i think um it was incredibly hot day and we went to see it and it was just by the end of it we're like oh my god and they kind of added a sort of meta narrative of the lemnian women i was like you are kidding me and you know it got to the end we were on our feet and i was like i think it still works rolling down my face it's good it still works for me that's lovely was that your first mentioning those films that that sort of to try harry hamlin there you go there's a name that popped into my head for a very long time but was that your first nibble was that your first yeah i know what i'm supposed to say is that i had i was reading you high-minded book about green absolutely not i was sitting there with my brother okay harry hamlin's the we love purses i wanted that clockwork owl more than other people wanted you know oh little owl i longed for him and so yeah i mean um there's a huge gap between them jason and elginauts is 63 yeah exactly that feels like a modern film yeah so they did a remake recently i think yeah they did and i feel like it was sam worthington who played the role but this is one of those things where you know i would uh i don't want to speak for absolutely every single person on earth but i am going to say it nonetheless that by modern beauty standards for men sam worthington is clearly way more fit way more muscular objectively it is just simply the case that he is much more modernly handsome than harry hamlin and yet it's harry hamlin all day long every single time it's like nope sorry this is the rules doesn't matter that he's not as muscular we'd absolutely go for harry hamlin

27:11we can back up now almost to that sofa in in birmingham on which you'd have been sitting with your brother watching these films um because that is where you are from rain raised in in bourneville that's right the home of the chocolate central yeah i know i thought everyone when i read charlie and the chocolate factory i didn't understand why it was special because i thought everyone grew up with the smell of chocolate you know in their back garden i went out with a girl in Bourneville when I was correct when I was a teenager and um no pubs no only really recently it was dry for until just a few years ago so if you want to go for a drink and and you're in Bourneville you've got to I mean I suppose you can drive but you're gonna have to walk home because that is just the right thing but yeah fittest alcoholics in the country how did the family end up there what did you have grandparents that worked for Cadbury or was it no were they Quakers did you no my mum and dad were both my whole family is from birmingham and my mum and dad met because they taught in classrooms next door to one another um adorably my dad taught history my mum taught english when they had my brother they decided that they would like to live somewhere that was slightly um you know not the thing about bourneville is that it's it's a model village it's great to have children still now it's a great place to have children because you can walk everywhere um because there is a village green with shops that are still shops you know it's it's one of those 15 minute cities isn't it that the left is the right wing gets so upset about yeah it turns out the quakers were way ahead of them you can walk everywhere and everything you need is is within reach yeah exactly including schools doctors yeah the whole the whole so it was it was it an idyllic childhood it was you know it was and i still go back as often as i can it's one of the nice things about um touring is that you know you can get if you can't get back to london and you often can't you can often get back to birmingham so i can always go and stay with my mom and she doesn't even mind she likes it um the only downside is when i go running in bourneville because it is quite hilly and i'd always felt like it was probably just me um because it's not ever spoken of as a sort of objectively hilly place and then when birmingham had the commonwealth games a couple of years ago the marathoners went out to bourneville so they were running around the bit that i run around and there's just a moment i came around a corner and this elite marathon runner and just so it turned out to be another freaking hill and i was like yes yes madam i know your pain albeit that i would be doing it at approximately one half of the speed that's brilliant so it's vindication i felt so good about it the hills i've told you this really it's very hilly i know it's not sepield or rome they're famous for their hills but this is Bournemouth.

29:46I never clocked that. So unsurprising then to discover and given that people who weren't already aware of your work will be now very aware of your intellectual clout and the ease with which you talk about these subjects. It was a house full of books. It was a house full of books because my grandmother worked for a bookshop in the centre of Birmingham. So she worked for Hudson's. It was Hudson's. And then she worked with a lovely man named Bill Horne um and he had a little bookshop uh called hornbiz which was my first saturday job i started working there the week i turned 16 because he'd worked with my nan it's all about who you know you see where was hornbiz was that in bourbon it was just at the top of the ramp uh so you'd go up the ramp into the palisades as it was then yeah i can hear my birmingham accents coming back mine will as well talking about it yeah so you'd go up the ramp and then it was on the left next to what was austin reed yeah that's right the tailors there's a sandwich shop or a baked potato shop that's right yeah exactly and so i worked there for several years um and so when my grandmother worked at hudson's um she had all the book reps who would bring around the proof copies of children's books that were coming up knew she had two grandchildren and so they would always bring them for her and she would just you know bring them back and so we had a constant supply and They never had the covers on, of course, and also the remainder ones where they've torn the cover off.

31:12And we would have I didn't read a book with an actual cover. Yes, I don't think. But it's happened to me two times, I think now, once in Birmingham and once gloriously, unexpectedly in Amsterdam. I have met somebody who worked with my grandmother who is still a bookseller. And both times it's been everything I could do not to just burst into tears because it was so big. You know, my grandmother died 20, more than 20 years ago. But it was, I was in Amsterdam doing a book event a year or two ago. And I walked into the Waterstones for, of course, there is one in Amsterdam and asked them if they wanted me to sign books.

31:48And they did. And the guy, I said, you're a long way from home because I could hear his accent. And it turned out that he had worked at, and he was like, oh, I used to work at Waterstones in, in Birmingham, but before it was Waterstones. And I said, when it was Dylan's, he said, oh, before that. and I'm like when it was Hudson's it was so great lovely so yeah it's always just a I'm always really conscious of the fact that my first job was selling books and I was following in the family tradition selling books and now I get to do a whole different thing of writing them was that I mean did you form that ambition early no you didn't no I had no idea you could write books really I I remember interviewing Fran Lebowitz about 150 years ago for Radio 4 and I asked her when she knew she wanted to write books and she said as soon as she realized that books weren't like trees and that people made them and i was like what a great answer i wish it was mine but no absolutely not i went into stand-up because i thought i could be a stand-up and then i started writing op-ed for newspapers because you know i kind of wanted to spend time in my flat with my then partner and then i started writing books kind of thinking was just it's like a long yes it's just a bit bigger isn't it what's the worst that can happen and so yeah i still find it strange I think that's I think that might be my ninth book I still don't really accept it so where did it first emerge then the I mean it's knit all these strands together you've got an enthusiasm for the classical world based largely on Harry Hamlin correct and and the owl and the owl of course and the passion for books which you've inherited from your grandmother and also it's been facilitated by the extraordinary number of books that you have access to did you did you shine at school were you a very clever little girl at school I was yeah and I must have been super annoying why I think just generally smart kids can be quite annoying um and I don't think I was always generous with I was clever without always being kind I think probably um which is something I've tried to temper over time by becoming being impatient with people who aren't as clever as you I am impatient still and I just try harder now not to be so how would that emerge at school you just i think i was probably just i'm i was always quite quick-witted i suppose which turned into um which turned into being a comedian and i just think i wasn't necessarily the i was definitely a person that you could cram homework off i'm quite you know i will have always done it um i say this blithely as though i'm not going to walk on stage in a couple of days having written it on the bus but yeah details um so i was yeah i think i was always that thing where you're supposed to be funny because you know otherwise the other kids will bully you i'm five foot nine nobody was going to bully me i've been tall for ages so um i think probably i wasn't kind as i as kind as i could have been to teachers rather than students i think i would have i definitely for sure corrected spelling mistakes and things and that's just not a very kind thing to do stop laughing you're making it work but there must have been teachers who well no maybe not but but were very special yeah i was incredibly lucky because you know classics isn't a particularly popular subject when did that kick because there's a difference between liking the films and wanting to study it yeah so i started doing yeah i had compulsory latin at my school everyone did everyone did this is at king edward the sixth that's right high school for girls in edgbaston big old nerd school i have another girlfriend from my days in the midlands who was head girl at edgbaston high which was the big rival yeah although i opened the tour for my last book at edge high and i didn't think it would be a thing it still was because you know we're in our 40s and yet i had a whole bunch of people i was in school going cannot believe you're opening your show there with the enemy like is it possible it's all fine let it go although it's kind of apt given the territory that you explore these grudges are not easily surrendered exactly yeah and i should have remembered the lifelong honor of the house of haynes yes exactly exactly that traitor so and as soon as you started studying it you loved it I loved it right yeah I loved it straight away right is it though I think Latin is a really great language for little kids to learn because brutally it's relatively easy and you never have to say it so the thing that I think kind of makes us come unstuck as a nation with learning other languages which we are notoriously bad at is of course that English is a world language so we often don't need another language but it's also i think a very british sense of embarrassment that you might get it wrong yes and i still have it too and i can follow reasonable quantities of modern greek but i absolutely wouldn't say i'll definitely get the emphasis on the syllable i'm feeling slightly embarrassed thinking about it and the joy of latin is you don't have to say it you can read it you know and so i always try and remind people when they ask me how you pronounce a name and it's like i I can tell you how I pronounce it, but it's not right.

36:45It's just how I pronounce it. And I use anglicite. I would say Ovid instead of Ovidius. And, you know, that would be fine. So there isn't really a right answer. So what's the appeal? It's a combination of puzzle and poetry. Exactly. And when you start learning Latin, it's basically maths, which I loved. It's equations. You're having to substitute things for things. And the word sentence is so predictable. the word shape the sentence shape is so predictable the word order and so you find you know you'll you very quickly work out what agrees with what that the endings on words are the same if they agree with one another so you can identify which noun and adjective belongs to because they've got the same endings and if it's like cracking a code that's why so many of the code breakers at had been classicists um and so that bit is great and then suddenly you kind of you get your gcse which you can do perfectly successfully essentially treating it like maths and then you start having to learn to write about poetry and you know you suddenly it becomes an art rather than just a science and you realize that i'm obviously profoundly biased that classics therefore is kind of the best of both worlds it means that you can respond at an artistic level but also that your basic you know need to solve a puzzle element is being fed at the same time and so I was incredibly lucky because my school taught Greek which almost nowhere did then let alone which wasn't compulsory it wasn't I had to choose to in Greek and German and I once had the great delight of standing on stage as a comedian in Berlin and explaining to an audience of German people that I would be doing my set in English because I'd had the chance at school to choose between German and Greek, ancient Greek.

38:33And I'd chosen Greek because I thought it would be more useful. Thank you. Thank you. That's the laugh I was waiting for. And it's only 25 years too late because I swear to God, 400 German people as one went, that's a difficult choice. Your parents must be very proud of you. And then for the whole of the rest of the night, I was like their wayward niece at a family wedding who's doing better than they thought she would so well done her so yeah i chose i chose greek because i liked the i liked the alphabet how many people were in that class there were i think there were 13 of us 12 or 13 oh yeah we were and there were seven of us doing a level greek two years later so we were you know a game-changing year you went all in for a levels presumably latin greek and ancient history i literally did yeah in general studies to you know prove that i wasn't a one-trick pony just to mix it up and and were you already earmarked for i mean it's not actually that many places where you can do classics but were you earmarked for oxbridge already yes i suppose so i certainly wanted to go there my parents were um were really hopeful i think that i would go there um and my grandparents i think the whole idea seemed slightly insane to them that i was doing you know latin and greek and it because it's so abstruse um i don't think it ever occurred to anyone that i would do it i remember somebody saying to my mom when i'd chosen my you can hear we're birmingham talking because i'm going back to mom as opposed to mom like i would say now because i'm fancy and southern these days so yeah i remember someone saying to my mom that um they were like well what's she going to do with triple classics and my mom said whatever she wants she'll do whatever she wants and she was right Well, if I'd met you then in the upper six and said, what do you want to do when you grow up?

40:19What would you have said? I don't I don't think I had any idea, really. I started doing stand up when I was in my first or second term in Cambridge. Second term in Cambridge, I think. Did that come out of nowhere? No, I mean, were you in plays at school and stuff like that? I'm incredibly shy. And no performing, no show off, no look at me, Jean. No, uh-uh, uh-uh. That's weird then. And I start, right? And then I met this incredibly handsome man at a party. Did he look like Harry Hamlin? he didn't look a lot he looked like a donis he was so beautiful and i he said you're the funniest girl i've ever met and i was like that's almost the adjective we were looking for but at least that's a superlative i'll work with what i've got and so i said oh we should write something for footlights and then obviously it was the 90s so i took him home that night and we dated for like three weeks or something and then he broke my heart into a thousand shards but then a couple of days later he turned up with a sketch that he'd written which was awful but i couldn't tell him because he was so handsome and so i was like well i can't appear in that so i'll just write and i was like oh i'm working something too and he walked me to the audition and i was auditioned by um james barkman and robert webb um and uh and they you know in the because it's the day pre-phones because i'm 900 years old um they used to put up a list of who'd been accepted into the cabaret night um the next day you know and i remember going my name was like oh staring going on the notice board with you looking for your name yeah and there it was and so my first ever stand-up performance i guess technically was to uh james and robert and then the second was to a full house at the adc theater in cambridge to 225 people i think what was it it was i can i can remember there being a line about nina simone i remember there being i can't remember anything about it i i i think probably a lot of stand-ups actually that's maybe not true it maybe divides into two there are the people who can fanatically remember every single moment of every single gig and then there are people like me who forget so that they don't have to drink to forget and so you're i will routinely find myself um in a small town somewhere anywhere in the country and I will know from some kind of mysterious muscle memory that I've been there before.

42:36And sometimes I can even get, I find myself walking past the venue and I know I've performed in it and I have a strong emotional hit, but I cannot tell you whether it was a good or a bad gig. It's like my brain has fully wiped the details to protect the guilty. So I think that's a good system. But you remember the feeling you had that night, I think. It was incredible. Another one of those clanging metal sheet type moments. Yeah, exactly. and that thing where you think oh i think this must be what drugs are like you know this must be what it's like because i would that the sense of being on stage and having that it's illusory at the start of your career almost and sometimes it's still illusory um but the sense that you have this or this audience and you have total emotional kind of connection with them that you will decide when they next laugh it is an incredible moment to and you're like i can i can make this laugh come here or i can cruise it and bring it out here or i can do this with it and it is just an astonishing it's so heady and you spend a long time trying to get that back uh you know you generally the first time i used to find that you do material it absolutely works and then like times two to ten yeah and then after that you work out how to make it sound like you did it the first time and then usually it works so i'm really glad that the the new tour is like 11 shows long

44:09and i mean you're obviously good at it and addicted to it you say it was like drugs how quickly did you allow yourself to think it could be a career immediately straight away immediately because that's quite again that's you know presumably mum and dad weren't over the moon about i think they were expecting me to do something slightly more predictable yeah yeah i think that's fair enough i don't know what they thought i mean you know i'm literally qualified to be a classicist and by experience to be a stand-up comic i have exactly the job i trained for yes but it is a job i had to invent this is no one else no track record no guides no no and yet here we are it was all fine but you did teach for a bit i think straight off the 20 minutes yeah i taught harrow yeah right and i did a double take on it because you know what it's like these days with the internet you sort of that can't quite yeah no i taught a term at winchester college and a term at harrow school and then i retired from teaching at the age of 23 and now people say oh wouldn't you like to teach or wouldn't you like an academic post i just couldn't do the paperwork i couldn't do it then i well you do you do the nice bits of teaching that's exactly I get to teach hundreds of people at a time and I never have to write a report it's like this is the holy grail version of teaching because you just get to do the bit where you impart information to people who are happy to hear it interestingly you went well I suppose it's because it's classics and they wouldn't be taught at many schools you'd have to go to public schools but I read that you kind of do you were quite chippy when you got to Cambridge though I think I was really chippy yeah I felt really strongly that like nobody I knew really at my college had had a job and I was like even a holiday job weekend nothing was it all public school all but it was still a very male dominated college they'd only let women in the previous decade I think and it was like and I'd come from a girls school yeah you know and I had you know I had a brother I've got one I don't not like boys sometimes some people might have said as an undergraduate I like boys too much but I didn't necessarily want to be surrounded by quite as many brain ones as I was sure I would say and so I have still got one really close friend who has been my close friend since that first term at college and I don't keep in touch with a single other person even the fellow footlighters I keep yeah we were at different colleges but the same university so yeah a few of them yeah and I see them around the place obviously because we overlap a bit at radio four um so yeah i do yeah i keep in touch with some of the footlights people but i don't keep in touch with anyone from my actual college okay except one um and did you love the work or did the i did did the new love eclipse the old i a bit a bit it probably did um it was bound to it had to a bit stand up is a is a heady drug for sure but i did still love i mean i i specialized in ancient philosophy when i was an undergraduate because my director of studies the person who was in charge of my day-to-day study of classics at my college um was and is a world authority on hellenistic philosophy um he literally co-wrote the book on hellenistic it's called the hellenistic philosophers not even a joke um and so i did papers on aristotle and plato because he was such a brilliant teacher and he was one of those he was one of those teachers who makes other people cleverer because otherwise he would have no one to talk to if you see what i mean like a chess player yeah so you would be discussing zeno's paradoxes or something and he would say ah i think the argument that you've just advanced is the one made by aristotle and you'd be sitting And they're going, yeah, all right.

47:53Yeah, let's say I have. Yeah, let's say that's the case and continue. And then he would refute Aristotle's argument. You'd be like, that idiot. So, I mean, fully engaged with this and for a long time. And the allure of footlights, literally and metaphorically notwithstanding, never tempted by academia. Because not wanting to be a teacher. So you might have done it. So, yeah, I stayed an extra year in Cambridge when I was starting out as a stand up. So when you're doing open spots, you're doing unpaid shows five minutes at a time, learning your trade. And I would have happily stayed and done a master's degree then had I been able to afford to do it.

48:36But I couldn't. And of course, you know, it's way, way, way, way, way more difficult for students now. So I try not to be that, you know, hopelessly unaware person of a certain age telling young people to follow their dreams because it's just so much more expensive to do that. And now I think if I'd had to pay£9 ,000 a year in fees, would I have been so cavalier about the job prospects? I don't know. I mean, the year after I graduated, I signed on and just did open spots for about eight months, I guess. And every two weeks I would have to turn up at the job center. And they were so kind. And, you know, I would explain to them that I was going to do an open spot and they would explain to me that that was the same as a job interview.

49:26so I didn't need to declare that I mean it's gonna make me cry thinking about you know the 10 pounds that I would get having turned out to do it and I I guess in total probably the money that um I received from the state that year would have been something like about I don't know with housing benefit 2 ,000 pounds maybe 3 ,000 pounds I'm not sure how long it takes me to pay that back in tax now but it's not it's not very long it was a really good investment and that was the difference between being able to do it and not being able to do it. Yeah, if I had wanted to stay on a do a master's then I would have had to find the money for the rent and I couldn't have done it.

50:03It's a funny thing isn't it because journalism is not entirely different in the sense that if you couldn't live in London and be available for shifts you would never get a foot in the door. Absolutely. It's probably harder now than it was then for all the new labour social mobility i think that's exactly right and the thing is you felt it so strongly if you weren't from london yes um and it's like i i still i knew i felt so i felt the unfairness of it so so strongly seeing friends whose parents lived within zone three who were able to just give them somewhere free to stay while they interned at a newspaper never mind the ones with trust funds in flats in Pimlico exactly I mean just having just having that you know there's that great line that Jess Phillips said about the House of Commons that she thought she'd known posh people in Birmingham but it turned out they just liked olives and it's like oh my god I have rarely felt so seen yeah I love that I love that

51:06how quickly did it happen for you then with the stand up yeah but you start but you knew it was worth persevering no i didn't i now i do just throwing all your eggs into that basket yeah exactly i was such a brave little kid and now i look back on it and i think i was driving the length of the country i might do a thousand miles in a weekend a knackered old car i was staying i can't even i would be staying somewhere and you know you would have no gps so i've got a road atlas and my dad would write the directions on a post-it note and stick it to the road atlas so And then you would get to Manchester or Sheffield, for which, of course, you didn't have an A to Z because you didn't live there.

51:48An A to Z, people who are younger than me, is like Google Maps, but older. And then maybe the promoter might have photocopied a page out of the A to Z. And then they might have taken a highlighter pen and put an X near the venue. And that would be it. That would be all you had. And I just used to turn up and then hunt around for somewhere to park the car and then try and be good at reverse parking. And then try and find the gig. and then you know it would be a disaster and you'd have to drive all the way home again and it'd be like two o 'clock in the morning and now i think i don't know what i think if i'd been the parent of me age 23 i would have locked me up in a tower rather than let that happen and yet i am afraid of no audience now you know because i've when people say you've done it oh how bad could it be exactly someone says oh when i introduce you on stage it's like it doesn't matter you can do whatever you like what's the worst there's a superpower in a way in a way it is because once you've been on stage and it has literally caught fire yes you start that you're like we'll be fine we'll be fine when then would you have allowed yourself to relax and think okay i've cracked it now i'll sleep when latin's dead um i never i mean what's you know all right not relax but this is no longer a purgatory or this is no longer like the first five years were really yeah that's what i'm getting that impression the first five years were really hard and the whole time that i was doing it i kept thinking you know you'd put dates in your diary knowing they were going to be really hard and i would dread them from the minute they were in my diary till they happened and sometimes that might be four months and every time you flip the pages you'd be like oh i'm gonna have to go and die on my ass that night and then i the whole time i was like if i can just get to the point where i'm not if i can just get through the nerves it'll be and although i did learn through that that you know sometimes you're nervous and it looks diffident sometimes you're nervous and they like you sometimes you're confident and you look arrogant sometimes you're confident they like you there's not necessarily alchemy isn't it yeah and same with writing you can have a good day of writing and it reads bad you can have a bad day of writing and it reads bad you can have a good day and it reads great you know bad day it reads perfect you'd never believe that it went down one syllable at a time but it did and i thought if i just get through the fear i'll be all right and then after about five years i stopped being so worried by it all and you know what i didn't love it as much okay and i was oh god it was the fear i was addicted to i think adrenaline i think so i thought it was the hit of the live show but i think it was overcoming the fear that i wanted and yet i haven't replaced it by you know doing parachute jumps or something i don't crave damage at all costs so at least there's that so in fact it's less of a mystery then about knocking it on their head when the other parallel enthusiasm began to overtake the comedy when the classic started moving so in fact it wasn't like a very difficult decision it really wasn't when I go and speak to kids which I don't get to do as often as I used to these days I always tell them that I ran away and joined the circus and then I ran away from the circus and joined the library and that's pretty well true you know I didn't ever stop being interested in classics while i was doing stand-up but it was a sort of interest or a hobby at that point and then gradually as i was writing for as i was writing op-ed you know how did that present itself i was i was booked on a tv show um because the booker had heard me on radio four and i was on radio four because i'd been perrier newcomer nominated and the booker on the tv show got in touch and said uh would you come on our tv show and i wrote back and said no I don't really like TV and I don't think I'd enjoy it.

55:27And she said, please. And she was extremely persuasive woman. And so I said, yes. And it was like a topical sort of newsy discussion show. The first or second or third time I was on, I sat next to Daniel Finkelstein, now Lord Finkelstein. And he was running op-ed at the Times at that point. And Alan Corrin was unwell. and he said do you think you could write me i can't remember what it was like 900 words uh for saturday and like all people who are freelance i said yes of course

56:06and you know delivered and i wrote for them for about five years um and then i made a sideways move to the independent because i thought what if i could do this but for much less money that would be great and then I was there for about five years too so there's three dogs running now there's the classics, there's the comedy I'm a big fan of plate spinning as a freelancer you have to because you don't know which one's going to crash I spent a decade reviewing arts for mainly the BBC doing review show and then review and then doing Saturday review for Radio 4 when when tele reviewing had dried up and i wrote film reviews and uh and so i arts reviewed for about a decade but of course there's just no the bbc does very little of it now it's extraordinary it's just finished sarah cox's show as well haven't they yes did you have ambition during this period did you think that's something i'd like yeah i would have absolutely loved if if the market for for reviewing had stayed intact i used to have an absolute ball doing it um and i used to review things that i knew nothing about on a regular basis so everything you think about reviewers is true they really don't know anything and they are idiots um but i had an absolute ball and sometimes you know i did things that you would not normally do you know getting up at four in the morning to fly to uh i don't know amsterdam i think in order to review a dutch masters exhibition and then being flown back all ryan air before anyone writes in um you know the bbc confidently paying approximately 15 pence to keep his reviewers in the air um and so it was just a fantastic time i think we've almost come full circle because i was about to ask about because you talk about spinning plates and i was going to ask a very clever question about when you managed to get two plates onto the same stick and started spinning two plates of this but that's where we began isn't it when you realize that in order to promote ancient guide the book yeah you would do a version of i would do something that was a bit like stand-up or at least owed its form to stand up although it wouldn't be as funny although there are plenty of people who saw me when i was technically funny who would be like yeah i wouldn't put on the hands and that's fair enough and when did you realize that was working was it on that first tour with with the first book i mean my philosophy generally when you're trying to persuade people that they want a thing that you know you can do but that there isn't a thing a space for it yet is that you basically just have to smash your head into a brick wall over and over again until the wall breaks and the whole time you have to do it you have to pretend it doesn't hurt and so it was quite a trying time in lots of ways saying to people but in a minute this is going to be amazing but in a minute this is going to be amazing and mostly the thing which is one of the nicest things about my life now is that i have to spend so much less time persuading people that it will actually be good and they should let me do it and you know sometimes they're they're they're noble reasons that they have for for suggesting that you don't do that you know when i way back in series five of stand up for the classics i told them that what i wanted to do was do a solo episode which we'd never done and so it would be one voice for 28 minutes on radio four which is incredibly unusual the grammar of radio is that you don't do that and i said i'm on tour at the moment hardly ever get to do it that way around where i've practiced it before i do it for the radio it's always the other way around but on this one occasion because i was promoting a thousand ships at the time i was doing an iliad a version of the iliad in about 35 40 minutes and i said i can get it down to 28 and they said okay and i was like no honestly it's amazing it'll be great and they were like and then people kept they kept trying to sort of stage an intervention go you know you don't have to you know and i was like it'll be great it'll be great it'll be great it'll be great and everybody was so i was worried about it and trying to get it down to because you've got so little to play with you know because the running time has to be i don't think this is wrong it had to be not less than 27 45 yeah and not more than 28 15 and that is not a lot to play with when you're trying to decant 24 books of greek poetry into that many minutes and i was like i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it and we did we recorded it at the radio theater just across town for the bbc and it was so stressful the tension of doing it trying to hold my whole body tight trying to do it so it's like and with everybody basically going she doesn't have to do this you know we did tell her she didn't have to do it and i was counting it on this is recreating the adrenaline i know yeah i was just like this is the fear I can't now find elsewhere and so I'd got my um iPad with everything turned off so no one could text me um just to act as a timer yeah and I told the audience I was like we're going to try this thing and I don't know how it's going to go and if if I start to to do this at you to make tiny signs it means laugh less because we're running out of time but I've got to bring it in no no shorter than this no longer than that got it and they went and 28 minutes and 14 seconds later as I brought it in with one second to spare and it felt like I had just parked like a spaceship on something and I it was just that the room went wild I collapsed to my knees you know I've I've run I don't know how many half marathons now nothing was as arduous as doing that was and I got home and I was like that was amazing and then I had to go back out on tour the next day and then I had to go back on tour the day after that and I got home I think three days later and threw up every 20 minutes for two days so I was like okay let's not do that again that's too much tension good lord yeah um the book is out now the book is out no friend to this house and you're touring it yes people can find out your website is it natalie names.com it absolutely is yeah so um the launch show is bloomsbury um on tuesday the 9th and then i will also be in warwick and edinburgh and hexham and uh chester and monmouth and oxford and cambridge going back uh just to check they haven't made the place nice while i was away um and so yeah i'll be around the country talking about it and talking about the argonaut myth basically myth and is there anything that you really want to do that you haven't done yet i mean there are more books to write you're just quite happy with this there's more radio to please may i carry on yeah basically i'd like to see that doesn't count as a major ambition no just well i mean it does a bit doesn't it it's not carrying it's not headline is it yeah no i suppose not but i want to be a i want to make a film or i want to set it to music or i want to i mean those things are definitely outside my skills i think so when somebody else does it's always really lovely when other people make work off your work yes you know when people have produced um artwork or stage work but it's it's so it is so thrilling and And a few years ago, when we were in lockdown, I translated Ovid poems every week on video, having spent my entire stand-up classics career mocking Pliny the Younger.

1:03:25Because when Vesuvius erupted, he stayed at home reading Livy. I then became him. And when the world ended, I stayed at home reading Ovid. Oh, my God. No wonder I mock him. I am him. And I was just going to write some letters about drains and that'll be it. and so I would still love to do more with those I think I wrote I wrote one adapted one I suppose that Olivia when Olivia Williams performed for German Street Theatre in 2020 not with a live audience but on camera that was amazing so it would be lovely to to do that again the stage is where a lot of my heart belongs I think so yeah maybe that we'll see.

1:04:05Natalie Haynes thank you. Thanks for having me.

1:04:18This is a Global Player original podcast.