Stephen Mangan: When Mum died, I knew I couldn’t waste life being a lawyer- I had to act

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project designed to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio. And Stephen Mangan, you are so interesting that you're one of those people with a portfolio job description, aren't you? Oh, yeah. Actor, writer, presenter, model. that's still swimwear model yeah i mean i know i don't know how that happened but it has happened it's latterly that you've added the extra yeah because i was wow i was all in on acting and acting alone and religiously you know categorically um turned down anything that wasn't to further you know my my acting and making it better and here i am with all these other you know commas and bits after my name so yeah nice though you clearly i mean there's an authenticity to everything you do isn't there you do it whether you're presenting the portrait program or writing your children's books you clearly love it yeah i pick thing i do have the luxury and i i have always been very rigorous about picking stuff that i want to do because i think that's the only criteria you can apply to a job offer is that program something i would watch is that play something i would watch is that book something i want my children to read you know so that's that's it so i everything i do i try to do obviously if you want me for an hour or half a day i might um look to the the more the money end of the the proposition but if you want six months of my time then has to be something i really want to do yeah and i do very cleverly insulate yourself from accusations of being one of those celebrities who who merely adds his name to a children's book by working so closely with your own sister, Anita, who does the illustrations.

1:51So there's absolutely no question about who's doing the heavy lifting here. Yeah, my sister. We will get to that, but we'll begin at the beginning. I didn't realise, well, two things. There's a surprising amount in my notes about the derivation of your surname, which apparently translates from the original Irish as hairy. Well, I mean, you say hairy. I prefer luxurious growth of hair, which is what I've been told it is. Well, when I say I've been told it is, I think I read it on a key ring i bought at dublin airport uh mangan or omongan in the gaelic uh is i think a main is it's a main i've got a main on but you i mean i did not not not coincidentally then it's a fairly magnificent phenomenon stephen harry does have hair can confirm that and the second bit is which i feel i should have known is is relevant to that observation which is that your background was pretty straightforward irish working class in london yeah um but your i i mean your persona your public persona has a lot more to do with the school that you ended up at when you were 13 i'm a real mix of things people do think i'm fairly from a well-to-do family because i had a pretty well-to-do education um i very very rarely get mistaken for an irishman in fact i've never played irish in my entire career i played at drama school but yeah my parents were both from county mayo in the west coast of ireland uh when i was asked to do who do you think you are the researchers came back with your family history is way too boring because it's irish farmer irish farmer irish farmer back as far as the eye can see no one's royalty no one's related to danny dyer must have had a viking in there somewhere no well maybe i mean i don't know maybe at some point but um yeah irish parents left Ireland in the early 60s like a lot of people did and certainly all their family my dad was one of nine, all nine ended up in England mum was one of seven, all seven ended up in England my grandfather, my maternal grandfather was a seasonal worked on the building site seasonally, would go home for three months every winter so yeah, dad came over probably, they left school at both, they left school at 14 really pretty shocking um schooling not much education to speak of very bright people but uneducated they moved to kilburn and willsden in london dad worked in the building sites mum was a barmaid in a pub in camden um and what you do when you come over especially if you're 15 16 17 is you find a pub that's run by somebody who's come over from your bit of the world because everyone in that pub will be from that little bit of the world.

4:36So there was a pub, the Camden Stores on Parkway in Camden, was run by a woman from, my parents were from villages two miles apart, and they met there, a bit of dancing at the Galtie Moor and dancing in Camden, and they got married very young and had me. Mum had me when she was 22. There's a romance to that, isn't there? But it was not necessarily easy. working on building sites is back-breaking work and being being a barmaid is no yeah and also being irish in london was no picnic either um you know that was the no dogs no blacks no irish kind of era uh obviously the troubles began and you know the the place was awash with um thick paddy jokes and interestingly i mean i thought about this recently rehearsing a play but mum and dad called us Stephen, Anita and Lisa.

5:33We're not called Seamus, Mary and, you know, and Sheila. And I wonder whether that was mum just trying to free us of the maybe the stigma that she felt she had, you know. So, yeah, but dad was the fourth brother to come over. His brothers, Michael, Paddy and Jack were already here and had sort of sussed out the way things worked and realized that you need to set up your own business really to make it you know grafting with your own you know just hard labor all your life there were maybe easier ways to make money and ways of making more money so they set up a company together Mangan Brothers Limited and they went into the sort of you know building trade so dad from about the age of 23 24 was in business with his brothers my mum's brothers went into business together so it's no surprise really that i'm working with my sister no i guess not and that speaks of a physical proximity as well of all the 15 or 16 aunts and uncles were quite a lot in the same area of london they well my dad's family were mum's family all end up in the south coast they all end up in chichester for some reason and they're still down there in bognor and chichester uh dad's family all end up in kilburn only because michael ended up here the first one ended up here you know if he'd gone to edinburgh like a lot of my other relatives you know wider relatives did i'd be speaking with a scottish accent now um or manchester like say steve coogan's family who are from a similar part of the world that's where i'd be uh from but yeah um north london uh and here we are i'm still there um how irish did you feel growing up i mean that's not a silly question let me explain why because obviously at home you felt very irish but when you said about the christian names and indeed about the political climate i think i thought you were younger which is a compliment i hope but so but you were right in the thick of it this was my father who's also from mayo was covering at the troubles for the daily telegraph at the time and having the name o 'brien in the paper brought an enormous amount of abuse down on on his head so how irish were you outside the house well i don't yeah i didn't feel irish i mean i went to mass every sunday i was an altar boy um dad was in the cateenians which is sort of an irish you know quite middle class so he'd become owner manager by now well dad we when when i was my dad was also in the cateenians and also from mayor there you go we probably should have a secret handshake it's exactly that um i think what happened was we moved to ponder's end which is where i was born which is a you know not particularly affluent suburb yeah it's a bit leafier than wilson that's for sure um and then things started to go a bit better we ended up moving to enfield dad started playing golf and being a bright funny interesting guy he started in making friends with the people at the golf club so his mates became were journalists right and doctors and all you know he moved into a sort of different social sphere I suppose from the one that he was you know born into or was naturally part of from his you know from his youth so um yeah um I did I feel Irish I mean I had parents at home that sounded very Irish we but it was never ran down my throat we went to ireland every summer i spent all my summers there but ireland felt like it was on the other side of the globe because it took a day and a half to get there so i don't know i think people at school used to i used to i used to identify as irish but it didn't really come up i suppose with a million cousins presumably every summer yeah million cousins i mean i've got 52 first cousins we still all go back in august we still all hang out together we're really close um that's special but that journey is you know crazy it's it was a five-hour drive to liverpool eight-hour ferry to dublin six and a half hours then from dublin to mayo i mean it did you did feel like you were going somewhere far far away uh which made it exciting i mean now we have knock international airport things have really changed of course um and and home life was happy clearly really happy my parents were very much in love they were very happy um they had three kids pretty close to each other and very young as an old dad i look on that with envy um anita was a year younger than me and then two years after that lisa came along um yeah life was good um and the love is the defining thing here really isn't it because you've already portrayed your dad as someone who could have been a bit intellectually frustrated he could have actually clearly with the brain but not the education that could have translated into a bit of resentment or a bit of bitterness and it obviously didn't quite the opposite it didn't because i think he he was very curious about the world he was you know my grandfather was too they just read a lot they were you know they were into politics they were into geography and history and they just were curious about the world and what was around the mum was really into the arts she went to the theater she read a lot i think if any people would have loved a chance to study properly it was them but they managed to do it themselves anyway and um you know they valued education i think like a lot of immigrant parents especially parents who didn't have a chance it was always drummed into me to get a good education i was put on a slightly different path from my sisters because i was a boy and you know that there we would we would treated differently yeah again right on the cusp of the era change yeah age-wise where it would be perfectly feasible for the boys to go to you know all boys Catholic schools yeah girls not to go to anywhere well in fact the girls went to a local state Catholic school and I was I've got a scholarship to a boarding school and ended up in much against my parents wishes becoming a border because of the overnight element that's because of the yeah I mean I wanted the education but they didn't want you to like it was totally alien idea to them why would you send your children away yeah and i've got to say now looking at it from this end of my life i i'm with them why would you something else we've got in common yeah um but we've run ahead a little bit what were you like at primary school did you thrive i mean i sense there were lots of books at home you you kind of had the vocabulary of of culture yeah i i read and read and read and i um we even we had a bench we should sit on two benches uh on the uh next to the dining table and for some reason mum and the two girls sat on one side and me and dad on the other which left a gap between me and dad at the table and i had a book there the whole time i would read all the way through dinner all the way through breakfast um yeah i just discovered books early and loved them and uh um was really encouraged by my mum i remember her taking me to museums even from you know six seven years old taking me to see plays i remember going to see ron moody and oliver wow um you played fagan around that i played him when i was 12 yeah i did uh i did and heavily influenced by ron moody's performance there's worse influences if you can yeah you'd be the only fagan would you yeah yeah for the years to be heavily influenced by ron moody um but no one had a problem with that i just for the benefit of people who listen to all of these full disclosures there was a guest in the last 12 months who had the opposite experience when they were told not to read books books were kind of not for the likes of them or they were anathema or you were getting ideas above your station i think i remember who it is but i'm not going to say it out loud in case i'm wrong yeah but that was not the case with you at all no i mean even at dinner which would be for some families that would be very poor but also i you know in ireland books learning stories it's part of the furniture it is part of the furniture and it's it's respected and my and dad you know would tell us about going to you know mum grew up in a house without electricity or running water or you know any of those sort of conveniences and the whole village all the kids would just go to a house on of an evening and listen to someone telling ghost stories so that's that was their that was the way they were brought up so that you know what were you good at at primary school apart from reading it's good at acting i was already i became it It came early, yeah, it did.

14:03At primary school, I played Long John Silver. I played Beauty in Beauty and the Beast, if you can believe it. I played Fagin. And early on, it became something that I liked. I played cricket, which confused the heck out of my parents. Yeah. Didn't understand what that was about. I was good at maths. I was pretty smart at school. I did well. I got put up a year. Yeah. And they earmarked you for this scholarship as a consequence of that? They did, yeah. Well, you know, you got to the last year of primary school, and then because I'd gone up a year, I then had to sort of sit that year again. Oh, of course.

14:40And then there was four or five of us who were in that position, and they just prepared us for this scholarship exam. What was that like? I mean, did you go to the school to sit it? Yeah. It was, what, the actual scholarship exam? Yeah, we did. That would be quite a big deal for a young Stephen. It was really daunting. Yes. Because the school, Halebury, which is between Hertford and Hodderston. Clement Attlee. Clement Attlee, Alan Akebourne. I'm not sure there were that many other. Christopher Nolan. Christopher Nolan. And he was there when I was there. If only I'd known, it would have been so much nicer to him.

15:13He was about three years younger than me. Oh, I'd have treated that kid so well. Have my tuck. Have all my tuck. Why? Why, Captain Hindsight? But there's a big change from your lovely home life to this very traditional public school environment. And you'd get a flavor of that even visiting to do the scholarship. Yeah, you're suddenly walking into a quadrangled Victorian, or even earlier maybe, set up. hundreds of kids as opposed to you know maybe 700 kids a huge sort of chapel with a copper dome a dining room that seats the entire school in one sitting you know 650 people so walking into that environment was really daunting but you wanted a bit of it well it was exciting and I've read so many books about kids who'd you know gone to boarding school and had adventures and got up in the night and solved crimes.

16:13I mean, obviously, I didn't expect that to happen, but it just sounded exciting. I mean, you kind of did. And I think I wanted to be independent and on my own. Really? Yeah, I mean, I was... My parents loved me really, you know, I felt really, genuinely, beautifully loved, but it can feel oppressive when you're 13. Maybe, yeah. You just kind of want to get away from it and do your own thing, and it sounds awful, that. you know, but it doesn't. You just want to, you want to sort of strike out. And I mean, it's one of the things that attracted me about acting was that it was something that hadn't been done by anyone in my family, something new that I could do.

16:53So yeah, I made this decision. My parents didn't like the idea. I got the scholarship. How did they make it clear to you that they didn't? They just were not happy about the idea of me going away because also it was a school where you only came home every three and a half weeks.

17:08but I already knew more about the English education system than they did they thought you know a lot of my classmates were going there I seemed to know what I was doing it seemed to be an opportunity to get something a bit special you know really special education I mean this is one of I mean you know certain public school snobs will tell you it's a second 11 school but it's certainly not a slouch of a school by any means. No, and it works. And it works, that system. That's why the system has sustained for all these years because it works. It delivers things that you can't get anywhere else. Yeah, yeah.

17:44Did they change their views over the years while you were there? I don't know because I, I mean, it was like running into a brick wall when I arrived there for me. I hated it. But because it had been my idea, I just felt I couldn't tell them how unhappy I was. I felt I had to kind of stick it out and it was my decision they i was already i'd already upset them by making the decision to go there i didn't want to double down on it by telling them how much it was you know causing me misery what was so miserable what was miserable i was very small for my age i was very confident i was quite gobby you're dead you're dead you're dead i you know i didn't have the and i overreacted i couldn't i couldn't do that thing of you know so you end up getting in fights that you lose you end up being picked on remorselessly and of course it's like you know it's like the big brother house the cameras are on 24 hours a day there's no escape there's nowhere you can go so for two years yeah it was hell it was awful it's it's a bit of a different rationale for sticking it out to most people's including mine which is that you were so conscious of the sacrifice that your parents were making that you would have felt guilty telling them that you were miserable but yeah your your experience is almost the opposite of that which is it was your fault you were there my fault i was there yeah literally so suck it up mate yeah but it got better it got better it got better i mean acting saved me again i you know did a big part in my first year in the kind of big school play which normally the sixth formers were only involved in you know these blokes sort of hairy men they had kind of moustache they're huge and you know girls because we had girls in the sixth form not the rest of the school what was the part i did the browning version and so it's the young you need a little boy you need a boy and danny hearn who was a actually an irish rugby player who who ended up in a wheelchair after an accident playing rugby professionally was our director and he was fantastic he was quite a hard taskmaster but he was great um and then things picked up i you know everyone got bored of you know having a go at me you grew a bit presumably i grew a bit voice broke girls girls turned up yeah you know um and i and i really enjoyed the last two or three years yeah and and acting once again became both a kind of pleasure and a refuge yeah acting was my thing you know i think you're lucky if you have something at school that you love and are known for and are good at and that was definitely acting for me so yeah I played all the kind of lead parts and loved it and people responded to it which is very important when you're kind of 15 16 mm-hmm how conscious of you were were you of class pretty pretty conscious right more so Irishness even because I mean my parents were always smart enough to judge people on who they were not on how they sounded yeah but there was a special ire reserved for snooty upper middle class people who look down on you know there are snobs in every strata of society looking up or down yes and there are idiots in every sort of you know and my parents were mates with all sorts of different people but there was something about i mean dad always remembers you know because dad had been a builder so anything needed doing around the house he would do it and he was out i think i don't know laying down some tarmac in the back garden for the front garden or something i don't know and the next door neighbor came around and said when will the owner be home dad said well i am the owner no no don't be ridiculous you know and that that sort of stuck in his claw because he was like how dare you judge me because of what i'm doing so yeah i was very conscious of it i always have been because i have that double thing you know i'm from a irish family i have this public school education so i contain both sides within me did you go through any period of being embarrassed by them no i didn't actually because my parents were always they were my friends loved them they were always more welcome at any gathering than i was my dad was hilarious mum was lovely gentle kind of you know a great laugher at people's, made just people really warm to her, so no and they weren't that older than me either, they were always younger than all my mates parents, by some distance if not chronologically then behaviourally yeah I mean I look at how old I am, I'm now the old dad at the school gates compared to the other kids they were the opposite, they were all they were all very young and and energetic and i imagine if you'd come home with any kind of brideshead revisited or with nell and i type as and graces they'd have got very short i wouldn't have lasted a second but i'd always like to have witnessed that like one of those overcoats or something yeah no forget it um who do you think you've come as so yeah there was none of that

22:51if i'd met you in the sixth form then and said what are you going to do after university because by now it just would be presumed that you would go on to university and with the academic pedigree you've mentioned probably oxbridge is what are you going to do after that what would you have said i didn't know no i literally didn't know i didn't know i would have wanted to be an actor but there just wasn't an option why not because we didn't i mean how do you become an actor i mean where do you start we didn't know any actors it's not like now whether there are loads of shows about getting into acting or people blog about it or do podcasts about it the actors were these rare beasts even for someone at a school like yours yeah there might be slightly more within no no utterly alien i mean alan akbourne went to our school of course and they opened the akbourne theater the year after i left and i got they asked me to come back and sing oh what a beautiful morning from oklahoma for him as part of the opening ceremony wearing a cowboy hat and a fake gun and i did that was the closest i ever got to anyone working in the professional there's a little bit of you that's hoping alan eight one will tell you to one side afterwards and say i've just written a new play i've got something what are you doing very special what are you doing cowboy songs so it was just a pipe dream and albeit a real it wasn't even really factored into it as It was an option.

24:10It just wasn't. It was like becoming the Pope or an astronaut. Just where do you begin? All you ever hear about actors is none of them work. They're all out of work all the time. The only actors you see are in the movies and on stage, and they just look like exotic. They're left from another planet. So given your skill set and background, it would then be journalism, law or politics? Yeah, I mean, the instructions, tacit instructions from my parents, but nevertheless understood by me, were go to university one yeah to do something that's actually useful yeah i mean don't go to university and talk about philosophy for three years or you know something esoteric like that do something that actually has a real life because you need to earn a living yeah and you're a bloke and you're going to have to provide for your family so i had a weird set of a levels i did maths further maths english and history so sort of both sides of the coin so i left and right brain Someone said to me, law is, and the old cliche about barristers basically are actors in court.

25:12It's a cliche for a reason. Cliche for a reason. Not all of them. A lot of them are very, very boring people doing kind of, you know, property cases. But there are, there is that Rumpole flamboyance. There is that idea, isn't there? So someone said that to me and I went, all right. So I did that. I went and did a law degree. Did mum and dad want you to be a lawyer or they just wanted you to do something constructive and secure? I think they wanted me to get my degree. and I think they wanted me to get my degree without falling into alcoholism drug addiction or some other nefarious there was that poor daughter of a Tory minister that's right and I remember the first lunch my parents when they came up to Cambridge to see me the first thing they did was ask me to show them my forearms because they'd read that story and thought well now he's gone to university he's probably shooting up um that's yeah you know they hadn't been you know they've never been it's beautiful it's an act of love isn't it yeah and concern and also i'm over romanticizing steven but also a sense of you being in a world that they don't really have a map for they totally didn't have a map for it i mean for goodness sake i went to a public school which you can imagine must have been about as alien for them as you can get I mean it was weird for me but at least I'd you know at least you slept there I slept there and I got you know worked it out so then you know get into Cambridge go there um was that was that a fairly effortless segue I mean academically did did Cambridge sort of feel like a fairly natural progression or was it another moment where you had a lot riding on it I couldn't believe I got in right I certainly didn't think that's where I'm headed but your teachers must have done otherwise They told me they well, no, they told my parents that he didn't work hard enough.

26:59Oh, OK. Yeah. My whole life has been he's fairly bright, but he could try harder. So I think they thought there's just no way he's going to get in. So and I actually tried before my levels and didn't get in. OK. And then got the A levels and went back and did. So it was it was astonishing. I couldn't believe my luck. And in fact, where I slept in my first year, we'd have to go through King's College. It wasn't the college I went to, but that's King's College Chapel. It's incredible, you know, medieval chapel. And I would literally stop. And I've always done this. When I left my primary school, I remember standing in the car park and looking across the car park thinking, this is the end of an era and the beginning of, you know, and another one.

27:46It's sort of weird. So you're starring in your own film. Well, or just maybe just parents who had to leave home and there was a sense of kind of displacement or, you know, that life can really change utterly had been sort of instilled in me. And I remember thinking, I'm leaving behind this primary school and I'm going on to the next phase. And every day, literally every day walking through King's College, I would stop and look around and go, I cannot believe I'm here. I cannot believe. Because, you know, I hadn't been to Cambridge before. It's a ridiculously beautiful town. It's crazy. It's like Toy Town in some ways.

28:27So I never lost that sense of, wow, I just can't believe I'm here. And you didn't fall into any of the traps that your parents were worried? No, I didn't go down that route. I mean, I had a good time. I drank a lot, and I did a lot of plays. I think I did 21 plays when I was there. I played football for the college team and I had a I had a great time not a lot of law was done do you feel school and then at university did you feel like someone who fitted in yeah I think after that initial period of school yeah I've I've I've um yeah I've I've not I think again from my parents who and I really admire this in my eldest You know, I remember seeing him going into a judo class or something or something he'd never been to before, aged about six.

29:20And I said goodbye to him outside and he just walked in the door. And I sort of admired his bravery and social kind of confidence just to do that. But then I think I was probably a bit like that. I was sort of, you know, I don't know. It's not like it was a brave choice. It just never seemed to me that there was any other way of doing it. You might as well get in there and start talking to people. 21 plays. what were your favorites what were the highlights oh um we did a tour of europe uh with midsummer night's dream which i absolutely loved for your bottom i wasn't bottom no dominic rowan who went on to become a professional actor was bottom um we had james harding playing uh demetrius who went into your business yeah latterly editor of the times now now owns the uh you know i wasn't exactly I wasn't joking when I said acting journalism or politics.

30:13It's astonishing how many people are part of that triangle. I know, I know. So, yeah, that was fantastic. There were a lot. Tom Holland, The Rest is History, wrote a play about Joan of Arc that I was in. That was interesting. He was there at the same time as me. We set up a theatre company when I left. I set it up with Jez Butterworth and Mel Gedroych and a few, you know, Paul Ritter and a few others. So, yeah, that's where I learned that it was a possibility to become an actor. I was about to say, that's when it began to feel feasible. It began to feel feasible because there were a lot of people there who were, that's what I'm going to do.

30:54And also I sense, particularly because of what you said about the architecture, oddly, is that you wouldn't have been one of those people who took it all for granted. You would have been conscious of how gilded this existence was. I mean, theatrical terms, just doing these plays with these people who were probably, if pedigree was anything to go by, going to go on to be famous directors or famous playwrights. You're smack in the middle of it. Yeah, it felt exciting. It is exciting. Well, it is exciting. The thing about university, I'm trying to explain this to my son, who's kind of on the verge of doing his A-levels this year, is that the buildings are important, the course is important, all the facilities, all that is important.

31:38but you want to go to a place and you will go to a place where you'll meet exciting people i just couldn't couldn't get over the the the people i met who who were brighter than me more creative than me more talented than me and just the kind of buzz of being in their company or putting on a play with them or just sitting in a bar and talking how funny they were how interesting they were how curious they were how smart they were how better read than me they were it just the world just exploded it just opened up for me in a way that school hadn't at all and you found your tribe i found my tribe i mean i had a kind of because you know you you're in colleges so i was in i was in a college and i found a great group of mates mostly lawyers and they're still lawyers to this day who i'm really good friends with and then there was another group of mates who were the kind of people i met doing drama i never got involved with the footlights no why not i I went along one day.

32:37It never been my, I always wanted to be an actor. I never thought of myself as a comedian. I still don't. No, fair enough. But I went along. I think I was auditioning with someone who knew the people. There was a sort of chummy cliquey-ness that was really just very off-putting. I probably wasn't very good. I just thought, I'm not going to go back. To be fair, with 21 plays on your boat, you wouldn't have had much time. So I moved. I moved. How'd it go? I didn't go. Yeah, I left that. um you describe it like a feast that that that collection of people that variety of of talents and and you sound like someone who couldn't wait to fill his face rather than someone who was made insecure by it i loved it i just loved it and i you know i i'm i'm certainly competitive as a person i'm not going to sit here and pretend that you know everything has happened by accident i've just oh you know what's it daisy you know i want stuff i want i want to be involved in the good stuff i want to you know be doing interesting jobs but it just was genuinely a thrill i mean one of my closest friends i did a play this is kind of how it worked basically we did a three-hander play that was put on by nicholas schindler who has since gone on to be the probably most successful tv producer around she was directing there was a guy called paul ritter and james harding and me in this play james went on to have this journalistic career um paul ritter was an actor and i remember sitting in my room with paul who was called simon adams then and just the two of us we just sort of decided that acting might be a possibility and we had a conversation both of us just saying i just want to be like in darlington maybe in a play it's thursday morning you're leaving digs you've got a matinee you're going to the theatre to do a matinee of a play you're being paid for and then another show that night can you imagine can you imagine doing that that was the goal it just seemed so exciting and suddenly like actually possible and that was a kind of yeah fantastic brain explosion

34:47graduate from cambridge um the legal career had now faded into i mean i was not a good lawyer I just found it so dry. You know, you talk about, law is about kind of almost sucking the emotion out of a situation to try and really get to the dry, rigorously dissect a situation. And talking about murder and manslaughter and the difference between them, I was more interested in what it felt like to be, you know, lying there with someone holding a knife standing over you. What is that moment? What's the emotion in that? That's the exciting bit, the opposite of what lawyers are interested in. so yeah law was not an option um and now having had a a very blessed existence um the the really shitty stuff happens yeah well it happened to my mum but yeah and then to us yeah of course yeah mum got ill i was having it was september i graduated that summer uh mum and i were alone having dinner for some reason i don't know where dad was that night she said i'm just give me a minute she went out of the room 10 minutes later she hasn't come back i found her doubled over in the i mean typical you know sort of don't i'm i'm not even going to show you i'm in pain i'm going to go next door and and and face this agony turns out she had bowel cancer and she died six months later age 45 i'm sorry yeah well it's horrendous and her mum had been 47 when she died of cancer so yeah but I got to spend six months I was at home I had no real plans so I put everything you know I just put my life on hold and helped dad out and looked after for six months and I'm really grateful I had that chance to properly care for her I mean yeah take her at all you know you know cancer is a is a is a process and there's all sorts of appointments and there's things to be done as well as the kind of more emotional support it shook your catholicism i think yeah i mean i faith that was pretty i'm not sure how i mean at one point i had you know if i'd been born 100 years ago i'd become a priest there's no question that is showbiz for you know oldest son exactly but yeah i just you look at that and you think there's a purpose behind that there's a that's a part of a plan really it was pretty hard to take it's pretty hard to take especially a mom i think who at 45 you know her children were just starting to leave school and university and had all sorts of plans you must have been angry i was angry i was I was really confused I think I I didn't really know how to cope with it to be honest now how would you yeah I mean the one thing it did do was make me go okay grandmother at 47 mum at 45 I'm now 22 or whatever I was I'm definitely not going to be a lawyer I'm going to try I'm definitely not going to do that if I've got 20 years I'm going to try and be an actor I really am going to go for it but you push all your chips into the middle of the table and you apply to RADA and it gives you that little bit of bravery because who cares now frankly at that point I hadn't thought of it as being liberating in a way it's completely liberating all that kind of I'm throwing away a law degree from Cambridge I have this education that I need to use or I fuck it Just really?

38:30Really? Yes. And if it doesn't work, who cares? Yes. But you got into Radha, which was a very good start. I think that helped Dad cope with it. Yes. Because there was a legitimacy there, I suppose, rather than my mates. It's the only drama school most people have heard of, isn't it? Yeah, and they've decided you might have a future, I think, really helped sell him. And it was a three-year course. and I basically spent those three years kind of hiding from the world and trying to get over what had happened with mum I grew my hair really long hence the name hence the name I just sort of I sort of hid from the world but also immersed yourself in the yeah but it's tiny I've gone from this university with 10 ,000 undergraduates to essentially a terraced house on Gower Street yeah it's 15 men and 15 women in each year and there's three years there's 90 students in the whole place and and the three years fly by as it were because three years fly by i mean i i don't know maybe because half the half the students there were 18 and it was their first move into higher education and the rest of us the other half of us were either three or four graduates some people who'd done other jobs so i don't know there was a slight division between people who were getting their first kicks of non-school life um it was too long for me i don't think i needed three years yeah i was i couldn't wait to leave by the end but yeah i enjoyed it and then your that dream that you shared in your rooms in cambridge sort of came true you became a stage actor yeah doing a wide variety of work and um and and with with with success i mean you know some international work some tours yeah a bit with the lsc not not all at the same time obviously but you you clearly you clearly had what it takes well was that a relief or did you know no you don't know because i mean right even the process of rada you know you have this agents evening at the end where you have two minutes each to get up and do something or you can combine with someone else and have a between you have a four minute so you get up and you do your two minutes and the place is full of agents and producers and then afterwards there are drinks and some people are surrounded by agents other people are standing there with a glass of water brutal yeah brutal so busy already yeah what did you do what was your two minutes um i did i played an irish uh i did uh i did a bit of the libertine by stephen jeffries and i did a bit from uh god i can't remember what it's called now uh played a priest but yeah it went well and um i i i got an agent i told her that i only wanted to do theatre.

41:12I wasn't interested in film or television. Don't put me up for it. And to her credit, she went, okay. And for five years, that's what I did. I didn't do any film or television, apart from foreign commercials to subsidise the kind of, you know, the difficulty of earning a living from working in basically regional theatre, which is what I did for five years. And did it live up to your expectations? Did you love it as much as you had expected? Straight away. I mean, I went to Farnham, the Redgrave Theatre in Farnham. We did a, which is no longer, we shut the place down, actually. But we did a Shaw and a Moliere and just loved it.

41:47Then I went to Nottingham, did three Shakespeare's in Nottingham over three years. I went to Norwich, Winchester, Salisbury, Manchester, Glasgow, all over. And I just did plays. I lived in digs. I did exactly what I was hoping to do. And I loved it. That's magnificent. Yeah. That really is, isn't it? Yeah, it's brilliant. What a win. And not just that. I mean, the lifestyle is great because I wasn't a sort of panto guy. so you get to november or december and if i was single i would look up where england were playing cricket and i would get on a flight and i would i live for 10 pounds a day and follow england around the tour so i went to india and pakistan and sri lanka and you know happy days happy days we're now approaching the bit where people will know what you're up to we're not quite there yet but it's really the turn of the millennium isn't it the very early noughties yeah and i think i I watched Billy Elliot the other night, completely by coincidence.

42:38I wanted to show it to my daughter. There you are. There I am. That was pretty much probably my first filmed role. I presumed it was. Yeah. Because I mean, it was like, is it? Yes, it is. Yeah. It is. It is. It's me. And then Adrian Mole, which was a biggie. Yeah. It was a big part to get. Yeah. I presume lots of people went out for that, including people who were better known than you. I don't know, because I'd worked with, I'd been lucky enough to work with Armando Iannucci and a bit with Chris Morris. So the producer... That's how you ended up as Dan, I presume. Yes. The Alan Partridge. Exactly.

43:11And the producer I knew a bit, and I don't know whether... Yeah, I mean, I got to meet Sue Townsend, who at that point was starting to lose her eyesight. I mean, she went blind later, but at the time it was going, but it hadn't completely gone. She explained to me... Go on, I think I know what you're going to say. Yeah, well, she explained to me that, you know, Adrian Mole is a pretentious sort of bit of a geek. And the most important thing is he's not good looking. Would I mind if she had a good look at me? And she pulled out this massive magnifying glass and came up to within about three inches of my face and scanned me left to right, left to right, all the way down my face, put the glass down and said, yeah, you're perfect.

43:52She'd obviously degenerated more than she was letting on at this point. She was an absolute hero of mine. I thought you were getting, there's another story about how she temporarily improved her condition by smoking very strong weed. I don't know, I read that. Oh, did you? Yeah, it was her that said it. It's not like a kind of showbiz story. That's a huge success. And in many ways, I don't want to make it sound easier than it was, but you're off. Yeah, I mean, I suppose so. I remember having a drink in the pub when I got that part and thinking, because, you know, I got to the point where I was like, regional theatre is great and I love it.

44:27but I'd realized because I thought it was all about the big parts it was playing the parts that made you a better actor I came to realize it was the people you're working with it's the other actors and the directors you're working with and the writing you're working with that they're all important and obviously there are talented people working in theater of course there are but they're also talented people and I should get off my high horse and do a bit of film and television yeah and getting Adrian Mole it was like okay well I've actually got a lead part yes in a in a BBC one show i never felt like i was off this was it it was just easy street because you just don't as an actor because you know the road is littered with a thousand examples of people who were one hit wonders um i suppose it wasn't until like i did alan partridge i did work with armando on his sketch show you know there was stuff coming in and it was fun stuff i mean interestingly in on the stage i was playing heroic young men i get to television where now the audience are only six inches from your face i'm playing freaks and geeks there must be something inherently weird looking about my face but yeah then and i suppose green wing was then the next thing that really was a big hit and and that's that's stopping the street territory isn't it that became yes that became uh yeah it was really liked by people it was really and it was the first time i'd been involved in a show that was nominated for all sorts of awards yes you're going to the baftas and all the South Bank Awards and the Royal Television Society Awards.

45:54Did you enjoy all that? Yeah, because it's so exciting. And also it's happening at the right time. If it had happened straight out of RADA, it might have been a very different, a slightly curdling experience. Yeah, I mean, I think still one of the most exciting things I did was going early on to the BBC Light Entertainment Party and being in the same room as the two Ronnies. What more could you ask for? I mean, for goodness sake. Would you tell your dad these stories? Yeah, he loved it. He'd get that. He would love all of that. I mean, I think he didn't really get the humour of Greenwing, but he could see that it was a popular show and so was sort of delighted.

46:29And if I ever did a play, he'd come three or four times and bring friends and, you know, and he loved all that stuff. Well, I suppose we'd inexorably end up at the bit now where around this time he got ill. Yeah, I mean, lightning struck twice, basically. and you know my mum's family have not enjoyed the best of health so okay there's been a but dad's family are the opposite i mean his father lived into his 90s his mum died at 89 you know he was the sixth of nine my dad uh and until very recently the only one that had died he died at 63 he came back from a trip searing headaches brain tumour and weirdly like mum it was almost exactly six months from diagnosis till when he died you also quite a lot of caring for him well actually in the early part of his illness we were filming the second series of Green Wing so I would spend all day in the hospital pretending to be a doctor and then go to hospital in the evening and visit my dad and then they actually put the filming of green wing on hold for 10 days which is unheard of in this business so i could be there at the end and kind of um yeah but you know again how unlucky is he you know he lived a pretty healthy life uh but just you need a bit of luck don't you you really do i'm glad i'm so glad he saw you success yeah he saw my success and but he never met louise he never met my kids and you know that's anyone who's who lost their parents early will tell you that's a never-ending source of sadness there was much more success to follow i sound like amon andrews now this is your life no here he is here he is but i do i don't want to skip through it but there's some extraordinary moments coming up now and some extraordinary collaborations you mentioned working it's important to work with um people from whom you can learn uh you're doing norman conquests at the at the old vic did alan remember your oklahoma he didn't oh bastard i do you know what i mean i opened the show with with i wasn't like you know well that's matthew walkers and then you're working with sharon horgan in in free agents um film uh you know you extend out of television and um and then you mentioned matt leblanc as Well, that's a mad show.

49:02Just tell me briefly about how that came about. The writers of Friends decided to make a show about a British couple turning up with a parody version of Matt LeBron. Next, out you go. But, of course, if you are David Crane and Geoffrey Claret, you can kind of do whatever you want next, can't you? Yeah. David Crane, yes, started, was one of the three names you see at the end of Friends. So, you know, he's made enough money to last 16 lifetimes. he doesn't need to to work but he loves it and his partner jeffrey wanted to satirize the tv industry the you know the big networks in america that sitcom and the way that they can take a good idea and destroy it so the idea and of course if you if you make your two writers from another country it's easier for then people to have to explain to them what is going on you know because they're looking at it with fresh eyes um so yeah we have this successful show about an english boarding school with a headmaster um played by richard griffiths in the uk and then it's bought by network they want to turn it into a show about an ice hockey coach called pucks and they make us cast matt leblanc as the uh teacher so matt's playing himself and yeah it was just i mean talk about good writing and working with good people jimmy mulville produced it he's one of the best in the business at that Tamsin I'd worked with on Tamsin Greg I'd worked with on Greenwing I knew how good she was and you had proper chemistry and we had chemistry and and Matt is just all you want because he's you know like like all the people you enjoy working with he takes the work seriously he doesn't take himself seriously and that's the that's to me the golden um you know that's the that's the that's what you're aiming for so yeah it was a treat and the only sad bit was it was set in hollywood we filmed most of it in wimbledon for money reasons but apart from that yeah it was a treat but then there's like the stuff that you know just sort of trips off the cv now doesn't it web therapy was your own project wasn't it you co-wrote that and then then you'd end up charles dancer was sitting in that chair last week it was your dad celia rimery's your mum yeah jessica hines is your sister i mean that that does that plan to work with good people that's going all right by this stage yeah i mean that was a dream because we cast you know katherine parkinson david tenon you know we're just an endless role of people we admired you know it's one of the frustrating things in this business of of you know seeing good actors not either good actors not getting the work they should or just the wrong actors being put in the wrong part for for commercial reasons so to be able to cast people you know are good yeah it was a treat uh that show was was was good one that got away though we only got one series yeah there's always well there's no guarantees regime change happens all the time of course it does someone like amanda you knew she should write a drama about it um and and then it makes it all the not stranger necessarily but this golden period which is still you're still in really and come the early 2020s you suddenly have an overwhelming urge to write a book to yeah well things suddenly i don't know i have an itchy brain i like stuff that i haven't done before because you go into an area that's new it feels like you're starting out and the starting out bit is always the most exciting bit because everything's like the first yeah read through the first read through but just you know write a book i hear i am my sister suggested it she knew i always wanted to write always wary of the celebrity author thing yes and i appreciate there are all sorts of you know difficulties around that and for a long time that stopped me writing that's a shame well i understand what you mean but it is a shame yeah i mean i realized in the end that it's not my responsibility to police that you know if you're the publishers you feel have a duty to make money and you know but they also have a duty to nurture new talent and a good publisher will will keep both pots going yes um so uh yeah i anita suggested i write a book she wanted to illustrate she'd done a massive career change and moved into illustration and so yeah we wrote a book and i'm currently writing on my ninth and they've been really successful yeah i love them i love it um people can work their way through the the previous seven because you're here to talk about barry saves christmas which is timely i was in selfishness the other day and their christmas shop was open and i had a very middle-aged reaction to it and then i thought no hang on it's the christmas shop they're allowed to play carols if people are visiting from overseas and they're buying their baubles then you can play last christmas yeah the middle of october or september receive wisdom i've discovered is that you get it you get halloween out the way and then that's when people's thoughts turn towards christmas but what is barry well i mean i can work out the rough gist of what barry saves christmas yeah they i was asked to write a christmas book and i thought santa's been done elves have been done you know what what what new angle can i put on it and i thought of saint bernards and their heroic work in the snow and there must be a christmas story there so i did a deep dive intost bernard's amazing dogs um thest bernard's pass in the alps the thest bernard's monastery um been there for a thousand years uh rescuing lost travelers my favorite fact is that the the older dogs would train the younger dogs the monks wouldn't take dogs out and teach them how to do it the dogs would teach each other what to do which i loved taking shape already isn't it yeah story it's a lovely narrative so um saint bernard yeah and i just read um the bee sting by paul murray which was a sort of multiple narrative story so i thought that's interesting i'll have i'll have each chapter coming from a different point of view um one from the the boy lawrence one from carrie and one from the dog and um yeah barry well spoiler alert barry saves christmas but it's all about the how not the what it's all about the how um and it's brought you to an entirely new audience i imagine you do book signings and yeah have cues of children but the fart that changed the world being the sort of yes but probably the one at the top of the pile well it's i mean it's clickbait isn't it because you know as we all know can't lose children have a million other things they could be doing and we know how how devious and addictive screens can be and like any anyone who enjoyed reading like i did as a kid it sort of breaks your heart that children might not think of it or might not get around to it and i'm not going to solve the problem single-handedly of course but i wanted to write books that you know give me give me three or four pages just let get your kid started on the book and i promise you it's funny it's exciting it's a lot happens it's a page turner and maybe you know the children i mean it'll stick there's no review i can get better for anything i do for films or stage or whatever no review is better than an adult saying i've got a 10 year old they didn't like reading they started your book we can't get it off them they just can't wait to finish it you know that that's magic that's amazing and i used the word authenticity at the beginning of this conversation it's clear that the little boy with the book on the bench between him and his dad is is in the room at the I think it's no coincidence that I'm writing for children in the age that I was when I discovered books.

56:32These are for 8 to 12. That was when I really discovered books. I think it's that magic is still there. And I want to write for that group. And you don't want to stop. I mean, this is not just a sideline. It's a sort of parallel career. It is, yeah. To the point that it impinges on the actor? It doesn't impinge. It's just like expanding cavity wall insulation. if i'm not doing another job i should be writing yeah even as i'm sitting here i'm thinking i did i did 1200 words between what i had to do this morning and this interview i really need to go home and write another 800 words just to get my my count up because i you know i've got a book another book i won't detain you much longer um i imagine it's a rude question then given what you've just described to say do you want to write for grown-ups one day because no i don't particularly i don't know um i don't know i think i need to have the idea yeah i think i think i would need to yeah i'd need to have a book that wanted to be written i don't think i have been approached i'm sure am i interested and it doesn't really mean anything unless you have an idea because i mean you know books are hard to write i mean when i finished my first one i thought i should be carried shoulder high through the streets he's finished a book it just goes on for months and it's such hard work i mean you know i get i get there are harder you know i'm not i'm not digging holes in the ground but it is it is a long long process um but yeah if the idea comes i mean i've been asked to write my memoirs no way whatever i just i'm not that interested i know i've been talking about myself for an hour but i'm that's about it what you've heard is pretty much all i've got what an interviewer there is no more to be gleaned so you know fair enough right final question speaking of the future you you've had broad brushstroke ambitions haven't you you've sort of thought i want to be doing that kind of theater and now i want to move into working with is there anything left yeah just on the acting side particularly acting side uh i mean i would i would do nothing but plays if i could yeah i'd still love it i still find that sense of occasion that listening to the you know being backstage hearing a good a few hundred people outside turning away before the curtain goes up exciting and i've never lost that but it's murderous on family life yes because you're working six nights of the week you're just not there for weeks on end and i become obsessed and you know i sort of disappear so it's it's that's tough i i hope to carry on doing there's so many plays i'd like to do um though the big the big ambition is to write a play that's something i have never done have you tried i have an idea but i as of yet haven't got further than you know a week or two's work on it it probably needs it probably needs somebody to give me a small amount of money and therefore i owe them the play which will make me write it you know that i think is the only way these things work it's the great thing about advances my advice is to spend it twice right because then you've really got to write you've really got to write it yeah so um but i think it's a good idea and i will be i will kick myself if i never get around to writing it i've got a feeling you will barry saves christmas by stephen mangan is out now and my goodness knows how many other projects are also imminent Stephen, thank you.

1:00:04Thanks, mate.