- So Hugh, thank you so much for joining me
to chat about your brand new book, your memoir,
"Playing Under the Piano."
- Gosh, it sounds really strange
to hear it spoken aloud. (Holly laughs)
You know, my memoir, my first book as well,
so it's very exciting and trouser-wettingly exciting.
(Holly laughs)
- Hopefully none of that today. (laughs)
- Well-
- Well, we'll see.
- You haven't seen what I'm wearing.
Luckily, the camera's stopping around here.
(Holly laughs)
- And so it charts, kind of, your life
in terms of with your parents,
but also your love of theater
and your, kind of, progress into acting.
What was it that made you think,
"I wanna be up on the stage. I wanna be the one performing"?
- Well, I think there were a couple of factors, really.
One is we had a really good dressing up box at home.
(Holly laughs)
My dad had served, done his national service
in the Far East.
My mum had been born in Egypt.
So, there were these exotic clothes in the dressing up box.
Partly Dad's uniform, or clothes they'd picked up
in the Far East, or Mum from Egypt,
and from my granny, you know, old, sort of, old frocks.
So, I got into cross-dressing from an early age.
I love putting on frocks
and just inventing characters, really.
And my mates in my road only wanted to play football and
you know, and played, you know,
German soldiers and British soldiers in the back garden.
But I really wanted to put on plays.
So , I pretended to really be into football, so,
to get them onside, so to speak.
And then I'd reel them in
and get them to be in my little plays at home.
So, that was a factor that just,
I suppose the, you know, trying to use my spare time,
or use my imagination in my spare time.
- And teenage you got it in your head
that you really wanted to be Cassius in Julius Caesar.
(Hugh laughs)
What was it about Cassius that caught your attention?
- I don't know.
I can't remember, actually.
But I do remember auditioning.
I was, you know, so wet behind the ears.
I was, you know, I just joined big school
and having, you know, played decent parts,
I suppose at my junior school, something I thought, well
I'll be able to do that at the big school too.
(Holly laughs)
And I was a quite a chunky lad.
And, of course, Cassius has a lean
and hungry look, so why, you know.
I remember this teacher asking me about it, saying,
"Hey, what have you been doing tonight?"
I said, "I've just auditioned Julius Caesar, sir."
And he said, "Which part are you hoping for?"
"Cassius, sir."
And he sort of laughed, and I thought, what?
And there was this chunky boy, his voice hadn't broken,
you know, thinking he could play one
of the leads in the school play.
- Is it true that you still remember the lines?
- For once upon a raw and gusty day,
The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,
Caesar said to me- Yes, I can really.
(Holly laughs)
But that was quite a lot of it.
- And you mentioned a minute ago,
about your passion for acting.
Why do you think it matters so much that acting,
and the arts more broadly, should be accessible to everyone?
- The number of times I've been at an event,
public speaking event, as in the audience,
and seeing someone who's got this wealth of information
and wealth of talent, but is so bound up
and tight about being in front of an audience,
and not being able to communicate it,
not being able to look that audience in the eye,
and their breathing goes and they get tighter and tighter.
Of course, that just ripples out
across the audience, and everyone's feeling really tense,
and none of the information that this, you know,
fantastic amount of knowledge that this person may have,
or this great widget they want to share, they can't do it
because they're so blocked off and self-conscious.
Something as simple as being, doing a theater game
in a classroom environment eases people
into being able to communicate and look
at each other as you and I are now
with confidence and express things to each other,
express emotion, express information.
- Talking of, kind of, the importance
of the arts and the joy of it,
your dad, he is a musician.
He loved music, and through dementia
that was the thing that he held onto for quite a long time.
So, what did you see that he got from that?
- It was really the last tangible thing
that my dad had access to, you know,
his, as his journey went deeper
into dementia and luckily I was so, you know,
we were so blessed, my family, that he was,
his was a peaceful and and benign form of the disease.
Of course, you know, Alzheimer's can be very, very cruel,
and can be violent, and personalities can change horribly.
With my dad, fortunately, it didn't happen.
He was still, always, a gentle, kind man.
But the music was the thing that kept him in touch.
And I'd go around to his apartment and, you know,
for a morning coffee, and sometimes I'd sit outside the room
just so I could hear him play
because when he was playing music,
he was in touch with the world and not fading away.
- And you found out something quite amazing
about your mum that you didn't know for many years.
You found out that she was part of MI6.
- I know, it really, I mean, yeah,
it does sound really cool.
- It does sound so cool.
- It does sound cool.
- But I mean, it was not quite as
as glamorous as you might think.
She wasn't, you know, Rosa Klebb
or, indeed, Moneypenny or anything like that.
But often in the school holidays I'd go with dad,
and we'd drop Mum off at this office block in Lambeth North,
and then I'd go on with Dad to,
on his rounds of the hospitals in Central London.
And it was just Mum's office.
And then one day when I was, years, years later, you know,
20 years later, I opened the evening newspaper one day,
and it said, "MI6 Building to be Sold."
And I thought, that's Mum's office.
So, I rang her up, and she was out in the garden,
and dad called her in, and she went, "Hello."
And she always had this funny telephone voice.
And I said, "Mum, were you in MI6?"
And she said, "Oh."
I said, "My God, you were a spy."
She went, "Well, no, no."
And I said, "But you were, that's your, you were.
You worked at Century House, that's MI6."
And she says, "Well, yes dear."
And I said, "What did you do there?"
"Oh, just a bit of filing."
I said, "You never told me you worked for-"
"Oh, I wasn't allowed to
One doesn't talk about that sort of thing."
And I mentioned this on the radio show, Desert Island Discs.
And a few days later, via Frank Gardner,
the security correspondent at the BBC,
I got a message saying, a gentleman from River House, right,
MI6, would love to talk to you.
Would you be open to it?
And I thought, oh my God, what am I...am I gonna be strapped
to a chair and, you know, have my nuts used
for baseball practice or something?
And he invited me to go in and have a chat over lunch
to the gang, to the employees.
And so I went to MI6, and a man my age, a bit younger
than me, came up to me and said, I worked with your mum.
And I said, "Oh."
He said, "I joined when I was 18,
so I was very new, and she was in charge
of our little bit of whatever section it was called."
But the thing that really got
to me, or touched me was, he said, you know,
"We'd be sitting there in the office, you know
doing the crossword, and suddenly we'd hear these footsteps,
and we'd go, that's Pat, that's Pat. Quick, everyone, quick,
you know. And I- and he described the footsteps,
and I suddenly remembered those footsteps.
'Cause I'd heard her on, you know, plenty
of floors in the past and the way that she walked.
And suddenly it was, again,
it was this strange emotional connection through a sound.
And I suddenly felt very close to this bloke
because he knew my mum in a world that I never knew her in.
And it led on to a couple of other stories, which I talk
about in the book, about other people who I didn't realize
that she worked with in a professional capacity.
And I thought they were just,
I thought it was just Derek from the Village.
And so it was fascinating. It was really fascinating.
But the way that, you know, this memory was connected.
It...suddenly she came alive for me in a different way,
obviously knowing this little bit more about her.
But it was just the footsteps,
the sound of the footsteps, that he remembered,
and I suddenly remembered them too.
- I love that, that kind of legacy.
- Yeah.
- So there are two films that, well, film and a TV show,
and another two films, that we can't not talk about.
So, Downton Abbey and Paddington, let's start with Downton.
- Yeah.
- It's such a fan favorite.
There's so much warmth around it and so much joy.
It became like this massive hit
in a time when period drama was maybe not,
kind of, the flavor of the month.
So, why do you think that Downton was the thing
that became the hit?
- I think it had a lot to do
with the feelings I felt when I read it,
which was, I wanted to know what happened next,
and I quite liked spending time with these characters.
And there were enough of them to be, you know,
to find your favorite or you could ignore.
And also the pace of the show was so fast
that you could, you know, latch onto a new character
or a new story very quickly.
But also, you know, the production values were fantastic.
I've worked on shows where, you know,
you're reading a letter,
and it's just got squiggle, squiggle or, you know,
a shopping list, really.
But, you know, if Robert Grantham, Robert Crawley
as Lord Grantham was reading a letter from, you know
Mr. Johnson, the butcher.
There's a letter from Mr. Johnson, the butcher,
in beautiful period calligraphy describing the meat
or whatever it might be.
Or it's a letter from Lady Rose abroad
about her adventures in France.
And it's there. It's real. It's been written.
And the audience is never gonna see that, but I am.
And that meant so much to us as a team
that everyone was really took great care in the detail.
And albeit, yeah, there was a sort of house rule
that we wouldn't put hands in our pockets.
Now whether, you know, that was just Alastair Bruce,
who was our historical advisor, we called him
The Oracle, and it was just a policy decision that,
you know, the men wouldn't put their hands in their pockets,
and we had to re shoot one scene 'cause I'd forgotten that.
(Holly laughs)
And ultimately, I then had my trousers made
in the second season without any pockets.
So, I couldn't do that again.
But it was an escape.
It was a place to escape to for many people
- Talking of going to, you know,
the next level lengths to do something, was that wall
of water that hits you in Paddington real?
- It was absolutely real, and it was quite funny.
This is a mark of Paul King,
the writer director of Paddington, and a mark
of his determination and his genius, really,
during the shoot of Paddington 2, every, you know,
once a week during lunch break, he'd go
off to watch the rehearsal of the wall of water.
And every time he'd come back and go,
"Nope, it's not right. It's not right."
Either it was, he just didn't, he said,
"I just don't believe it."
You know, when you open a door,
you want to sort of believe that this water has built
up behind the door with Paddington in the bath.
And he, someone, can actually open a door like that,
and it would actually do that.
You sort of believe it in the film
because you've constructed the world appropriately.
But each time he went to watch a rehearsal,
either, you know, he'd open the door,
and the water would just go
(Hugh blows a raspberry)
Or, you know, or it would spray out the sides,
or it would, you know-
Anyway, it took weeks, if not months.
And the effects team behind it who'd,
you know, built this, what was a shipping container,
and cut a hole in it, and, you know,
worked out the water pressure and everything else.
It took them ages, and finally we, we got there.
But it was shunted down the schedule all the time
because Paul was going,
"Nope, it's not right yet. It's gotta be absolutely right."
And yes, it was a big wall of water.
- How does it feel to get hit with a big wall of water?
- I'm not gonna give away technical secrets,
but let's say there are other people
in the world who look quite like me,
they are roughly my build, who sometimes,
when I can't be asked to come out of the trailer,
help out a bit.
(Holly laughs)
But I did. I like, I'd like to point out
that a lot of it was me.
- Well, Hugh, this has been such a pleasure.
The book is an absolute joy to read.
Thank you so much.
- Thank you very much, Holly.
(jazz music)