The Observer has some extracts from the forthcoming book that looks very nice indeed…
Yes, it’s another photo from that pub-based session. Anyway:
David on how to cope with coffee:
Tea, of course, is the answer to how to cope with coffee. It can be made to a high standard without a large and noisy machine and we British enslaved a subcontinent to ensure our supplies of it. It is no exaggeration to call coffee-drinking a slight to the efforts of the hundreds of millions who toiled under the yoke of the Raj. The only downside with tea is that decent tea is genuinely unobtainable in any other country, and indeed in Starbucks. One of the many things that makes me well up with hate is when someone gives you, instead of a tea, a cup of tepid water with distant memories of having been boiled – and a tea bag on the side. As if they have no idea what you might use the tea bag for or where to put it. “Many people,” they are implying, “like to pop the bag under their tongue while sipping the lukewarm water.” No, they don’t. When I order something in a café, I expect more than the ingredients. It’s like asking for a bacon sandwich and being chucked a bag of Sunblest and a pig.
Rob on how to cope with actors:
Now I enjoy a good stereotype as much as the next wimpy bleeding-heart, but steady on. Although there might be a smidge of truth in the idea that the average cast-member of Hollyoaks may not be able to beat Simon Schama at chess while singing “Nessun Dorma” backwards in Gaelic, they do have to remember a lot of lines. And stand in the right place. At the same time! Sometimes they have to move from one place to another while remembering and saying those lines in a manner that convinces the audience that they’ve just thought of them in their pretty heads.
It’s a weird skill-set but it definitely involves the brain as much as any amount of accounting or human resources management. And when it comes to daft political outbursts, well, yes, sometimes Vanessa Redgrave used to turn up on Question Time and talk a load of dangerous gibberish. But then so does Richard Littlejohn. Vanessa Redgrave is also very very good at acting. Richard Littlejohn has no other job apart from making sense, but has still yet to do so.
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