Mark Strickson Interview 2024

Mark Strickson interviwed by Paul Carmichael, 2024, full transcript

PC: Mark, thank you for agreeing to have a chat with me for Who on the Wirral. Can we go right back to begin with? Can I ask – what is your very earliest memory?

MS: People talk about this, and I don’t really remember much. I can’t honestly say I remember anything until I was six or seven. But then,one of my first memories would be going to junior school, in honesty. I probably have vague memories before that, but nothing I really remember. So my first day at junior school. I went to a tiny village school in a place called Ilmington which is eight miles outside Stratford-upon-Avon. Very, very rural, incredibly rural at the time; one bus a week to Shipston-on-Stour. There were old people living in the village who’d never really left the village. So it was a very, very rural upbringing I had. We lived in a cottage that didn’t even have a road to it.

PC: So was art something that was part of your life? I’m wondering when that started.

MS:  My da was a musician. He was the organist at Holy Trinity church in Stratford-upon-Avon, which is the church where Shakespeare is buried. It’s the only church outside the cathedrals where the choristers are allowed to wear red. So it’s a very important church and it has quite a famous, massive organ. So my dad was the organist there and I was in the choir by the time I was six and a half, seven. So classical music was a huge part of my life.

PC: And then in school we keep up the Shakespeare connection. Did you go to Stratford Grammar?

MS:I did,yes. It’s just the local school. I passed the eleven-plus, as they had in those days, and I went to the local boys’ grammar school.

PC: Did you discover a love of Shakespeare, or was that something that was just around?

MS: I don’t know. I mean, I quite like Shakespeare...I think Shakespeare’s a wonderful, wonderful writer, but I don’t sit down and read Shakespeare every day. I just think he’s got such incredible wisdom, and where he got it from no-one will ever know,but what he can tell you about the human spirit and how we as humans function is quite amazing. How this boy from Stratford-upon-Avon got to that point, we will never know. If you’ve never read Shakespeare, I would suggest you give it a go. But it’s not easy. It’s really hard. I mean, it’s not hard for me because I was brought up with it, I suppose. But my son, who’s fifteen, he can’t sit down and read Shakespeare. It’s not going to happen. It’snot accessible in that way.

PC: Is that purely a generational thing? I’m thinking of my own kids, who are a similar age...they don’t really read.

MS: No, I don’t think it’s a generational thing...it hasn’t been accessible for decades, hundreds of years, really. You can make it accessible through films and productions...but it’s much more accessible when it’s spoken than when it’s on the page. To sit down and read Shakespeare, I would think, for a young person, would be very hard.

PC: I’m going to jump ahead to a question I was going to ask in a little while. Is there a similarity between performing Shakespeare and Doctor Who? Because they are both heightened.

MS: There is no similarity at all. Shakespeare is much easier. Shakespeare is about truth. That’s the wonderful thing about Shakespeare, he tells these human truths in just one line. I’ll give you an example. In Othello,where Iago is the villain and he causes Othello to kill Desdemona,and there’s a scene in it with Iago’s wife, who only has one line. Iago asks her if she’s coming home and she says, “Perchance,Iago, I will n’e’er come back.” And you know, at that moment,that she knows he’s guilty. Just that one line changes the whole thing. And it should stop the production in its tracks, that line. From a relatively minor character. And that was Shakespeare’s gift, the gift of telling the human truth.

Now,Doctor Who has nothing at all to do with human truths. It’s a fantasy. Shakespeare wrote about the reality and tragedy and passion of life,human life. Doctor Who has nothing to do with that. It’s a fantasy in which anything goes. That’s one of the joys of Doctor Who, anything can happen.

PC: Are you still looking for the truth within it as an actor, some kernel of truth in the fantasy?

MS: Of course, that’s what acting’s about. Acting’s about telling the truth. If you’re getting chased down a corridor by a green slimy monster and it’s supposed to be trying to kill you, if you don’t believe that green slimy monster – however pathetic or ridiculous it may look – is going to kill you, you’ll look like shit. You must believe in the truth of the scene that you’re in, as an actor. That’s one of the joys of acting, is that you lose your personality, you lose yourself in those moments, and you’re truly living the moment. And when it stops you come back to yourself. But there’s not the emotion that there’d be in something like Shakespeare. It’s very simple emotion, because Doctor Who is about very simple things.

PC: When does acting become something of importance in your life then? Was that in junior school when that happened?

MS: Oh no, no...acting never really was that important to me. It really wasn’t, it wasn’t this life obsession. I joined the National Youth Theatre when I was sixteen, but again, that was because my brother had an audition for it and didn’t turn up, so I thought I’d turn up for it. That’s why I got into the National Youth Theatre. I then started writing music for the National Youth Theatre, because I was a French horn player and I was a good musician by the time I was fifteen or sixteen, so I was writing musical scores. And then I thought, well, the actors don’t seem to work anything as hard as I do and they seem to be having a lot more fun, so I’ll become an actor. And I did. And I did one or two productions at secondary school. People wanted me to go for my Oxbridge entrance and things,I was academically very bright, and I decided I wanted to be an actor. So I auditioned for drama school, got into every one I applied for, and chose RADA.

PC: RADA is, what, twenty places in five or six thousand applicants…

MS: I think it was twenty in four thousand when I applied.

PC:So what did you have, do you think,that made them choose you?

MS: I’ve no idea. It’s impossible to answer that, because I was very lucky. I was lucky that I was bright as well, because I knew how to manage myself as an actor, and I applied for jobs, and I was very energetic in trying to get work. But lots of people who go to RADA don’t have any career. So whatever it is they’re spotting, it’s certainly not infallible. And lots of people who go there do very well. But just because you get into RADA, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be a successful actor.

PC: No. So you went from RADA to...was it the Mikron Theatre Company was your first professional job?

MS:Yes, it was. And that was completely random too...although not really, when I come to think about it. I could write music, and Mikron needed someone who could write musical scores. And I was born and brought up in the country, and they toured the the country on a narrow boat on the canals. Well, I’ve always loved boats, and I thought, “this’ll be great, I quite like this”. And it was well-paid. I did it for two years and it was fantastic. We made an album at Abbey Road, and I sang a song with Buffy Davies on that album, who plays the landlady in TheArchers now, Jolene or whatever her name is...and Mark Williams, who plays Father Brown and all those things, he took over from me for Mikron.

PC: Was it theatre in education, or full plays that you did?

MS: No, not at all. It was documentary theatre based on history, so the history of the waterways, the history of the industrial revolution. We played pubs and small theatres, audiences of anything from forty to six hundred.

PC :It sounds wonderful. Hard work, but wonderful.

MS: It was very hard work, but it was great if you were twenty or twenty-one, to be earning really good money – and it was really good money – and we toured from Liverpool right down to Godalming, south of London, we toured 3,600 miles on the canals, so I did every inch of the canal network twice. It was an amazing experience to have. And I’ve ended up living on boats for a lot of my life.

PC: Yes, because you had a narrowboat, didn’t you? Was it in the eighties?

MS: Ohno, I’ve had it for years. I was living on a narrowboat two yearsago. I’ve lived on boats, on and off, all my life.

PC: So what about the transition to television? That must be around about now.

MS: I decided after two years of Mikron that I should come back to London and do something else. All the time I’d been away I’d been writing to Lambeth Council to get a council flat, and I got a council flat in Waterloo, near the Old Vic. It was fantastic, but it was  really, really rough area at the time, and to get the council flat I had to agree to found a community organisation and whatever, but it was fantastic. Then I got my agent, Joan Evans at Evans & Reiss, and then I started getting TV auditions. I was in Angels, which was a hospital soap opera that preceded EastEnders, then I was in Juliet Bravo, then I got into Doctor Who.

PC: One name that always comes to mind when we talk about Angels– or EastEnders– is Julia Smith. Do you have any particular memories of working with her?

MS: Not really...she was very nice and she employed me. She was a very sweet lady. She was very hands-on as a producer, she and Tony Holland, who wrote the scripts. And then she and Tony went on to write scripts for EastEnders, they were the same team, they just moved. She was a creative powerhouse, a fantastic woman. And very nice.

PC: A bugbear of mine is what happened with Eldorado, which should have been brilliant and wasn’t, and sort of did for Julia Smith.

MS: It didn’t really do for her, she was very successful. I’m sure she’d earned plenty of money to retire on.

PC: So you were on Angels and then Al Hunter Ashton, who was a chap I knew about fifteen years ago now, was it that he was ill so they promoted you to the lead?

MS: They never even asked me. Al had quite a serious illness so he couldn’t continue on the series, so they wrote me in as the lead. Because I was Al’s sort of assistant ambulance man, Terry. They announced this and I rang my agent and said, “Look, I’m just not that keen on staying in Angels for the next two or three years. What else am I up for?” And they said, “You’re up for Doctor Who.” So I said, “When’s the audition?” “Oh, it’s not going to be for months, I don’t think”. Well, I had a BBC pass, so I went to Threshold House in Shepherd’s Green, went to the Doctor Who office,knocked on the door and said, “Hello, you don’t know who I am,I’m Mark Strickson, could I see Mr John Nathan Turner the producer please? I’m up for a part in Doctor Who, and I just want to know if there’s any chance of getting it, if he can spare me five minutes.”

That’s what I mean about taking things into your own hands. You don’t just sit there and go “Oh, I’m not being cast”. In the nicest possible way, with great humility, you go and knock on the door and ask for five minutes.

PC: I think everyone has this idea with acting that it’s 95% luck, but I think sheer chutzpah and tenacity…

MS: Oh, I disagree. It is 95% luck, but I don’t think that a bit of tenacity doesn’t help. It does. But, I mean, yes, not to be mean, but it is luck. Really,really talented actors never get anywhere and people with not much talent become stars. Sorry, but that’s the truth. And if you can’t cope with that about acting, then don’t become an actor,because you’re going to be a very, very sad person unless you’re successful.

PC: So what made the choice for you to go for the Doctor Who role rather than sticking with Angels? Because that was a twice-a-week soap, and it was successful.

MS: I just didn’t…Angels was very mundane,it was just having quiche and a coffee with your girlfriend, and it wasn’t much fun. I thought Doctor Who would be more fun.

PC: Fair enough. So the first thing, presumably, that would have happened is...this is a name that’s become a Mecca to people like me: the Acton Hilton*. And yet I ask people about it and they say,“It’s just a building”. What were they like? Do you have any particular memories about it?

*The nickname of the BBC’s Television Rehearsal Rooms in Acton,London. Now a block of overpriced flats.

MS: Well, it was just a building. But my memory of it is that you felt you were almost part of a repertory company. You’d get there at lunchtime or breakfast and it was pretty busy and everyone would be rehearsing, so you might be sitting at a table with...I mean, I’ve sat at a table with Paul McCartney, Ronnie Barker...you just sat down. I remember sitting with Ronnie Barker, there weren’t any seats, so I just said, “Excuse me, Mr Barker, would you mind if I joined you?” He said, “Oh, do join me, young man. Sometimes I think I smell, no-one ever sits at my table!” He was just the sweetest, most lovely man. And you made lots of good friends, not just from the productions you were in but from the other productions as well.

There wasn’t even a pub anywhere near it, and I’m sure that’s why the BBC put it there, because there was nowhere for actors to go and be distracted. It was on a traffic roundabout off the A40.

PC: But presumably magic must have happened there when you consider what you ended up with onscreen.

MS: No, magic didn’t happen there. Hard work happened there! Magic doesn’t happen like that. You learn your lines, there’s red sticky tape all over the floor to mark each set out, you learn your moves, you learn where the camera’s going to be and you get on with it. It’s hard. The magic happens in the studio when you see the set. Because you only get one go at the scene – we frequently only got one go at the scene. But that was when it felt like everything came together because you had the effects, the lightning...that’s when it happens. It’s like when you’re rehearsing a stage play –I don’t like working on stage, but when you rehearse in a rehearsal room for a stage play, when you first step onto the stage with the set, it’s a whole different world. That’s when the magic starts to happen, not in the rehearsal room.

PC: Is there such a thing as an average studio day when you’re working on Doctor Who?

MS: Yes, totally. An average studio day was: get there at seven o’clock in the morning, get into your makeup, be ready to go out by half past eight, nine o’clock, work until ten o’clock at night, go home.

PC: And that ten o’clock was the complete cut-off, wasn’t it?

MS:Yeah. But it wasn’t like some great, great fun social time. Obviously you’re not on  set all the time, but you have to be in the dressing room, you have to be on call all the time, because a scene might fall over and that might need you to move, to be around...so if you’re on call all day long from nine o’clock until ten o’clock, that’s a thirteen-hour day. And then you’ve got to get your make-up off, and then you’ve got to get home, so you’re home by midnight and then you’ve got to be back by seven in the morning. And that’s three days of studio. Then you have two more weeks’ rehearsal, and then three more days of studio. Filming first, two weeks’ rehearsal, three days of studio, two weeks’ rehearsal, three days of studio.

PC: And that system has mostly gone in television drama, hasn’t it? Rehearsal has gone. How do you feel about that?

MS: No, it hasn’t mostly gone, it’s totally gone. No, sorry, that’s not true, it’s not totally gone. There’s still rehearsal.

PC: But it’s changed an awful lot, hasn’t it, television drama production. Do you think we’re missing out on still not making multi-camera drama in studio?

MS: I don’t know, I think that would now look very old-fashioned.  

PC: As an actor, though, did it give you that immediacy that you could work your way through a whole scene rather than shooting it like a motion picture? Was there a way of performing that you preferred?

MS: Well, we shot every scene in one take. We had four cameras, one take.

PC: And when you’ve got to ten o’clock and the lights go out…

MS: You’d be wringing yourself out, you were so tired.

PC: I think Terminus was one where you got to ten o’clock and it wasn’t finished, and I think Sarah Sutton’s last scene had to be shot however it could be done. But I don’t think you could spot that unless you knew it.

MS: It was the same in my last episode, Planet of Fire. The scene where I’m in the wrecked spaceship talking to my home planet. We had forty seconds to do it and the scene ran over a minute, so I had to just cut as I went.

PC: So it’s basically an improvised performance?

MS: Yes.

PC: Can I ask you – John Nathan Turner is usually presented as a bit of a divisive character, but, I think, mainly by people who never worked with him. Then I ask people who did work with him and they say, “No, he was a wonderful, creative man”. Who was he to you?

MS: John was a very dear friend. He came from Birmingham, like me, so we had that in common. And he was always very supportive and lovely. He ran a tight ship, he was very disciplined. He could party as well,but he partied at the right time, not at the wrong time, and he expected you to be the same. And that was fine. I mean, I had enormous respect for John.

PC: And when you got onto Doctor Who, did you take a licence to work as a stuntman as well?

MS: No, what I did was, I became an Associate of the British Society of Fight Directors at RADA. So I signed a contract saying that I would do my own stunts, because I’d been trained.

PC: So can I ask you about Enlightenment and what happened with the Kirby wire? If I may.

MS: Oh, yes, you can ask me about that. Enlightenment was a story about travelling through time on tall mast ships, but the ships are in space, not on the ocean. Interestingly, my grandfather – this is how old I was – he ran away to sea in the nineteenth century. This is only two generations ago. My mother’s father ran away to sea in the nineteenth century and went in front of the mast, going around the Horn on a tea clipper and whatever, and then he was invalided out when he got a spear through his nose in the Southern Ocean from some not-friendly natives. He then became a steeplejack, because he was used to...can you imagine being on those masts, going round in storms?

So, anyway, that was what Enlightenment was about, was this race on these ships. I was supposed to be having problems with the Black Guardian,and I was supposed to throw myself off the ship and commit suicide, to throw myself into space. And so they put a thing called a Kirby wire round me, and a Kirby wire is the thing that Peter Pan uses to swing through the air in the theatre, they’ve got a Kirby wire on them. It’s a harness on a wire, an invisible wire that you can’t see. Well, it’s difficult to see. And it’s called a Kirby wire because it’s owned by a company called Kirby, and it’s their insurance, they fit it, and they must fit it every night. A particular person from the company has to fit it. So I got fitted with this Kirby wire and I threw myself off into space, and it broke on impact. And it was like jumping twenty foot onto a brick wall with your legs apart. It was incredibly painful. Obviously, we only did one take, because I wasn’t able to walk afterwards. These days you would probably sue or something...obviously, I was in a lot of pain. I don’t think I even ever had a doctor’s check. I had terrible...swelling. I’ve had a son since, so it obviously didn’t do any permanent damage. But I couldn’t walk for ten days, two weeks, and so when you look at that episode you’ll see...Doctor Who in those days was completely shot out of sequence, so you’ll see a lot of scenes in the TARDIS where I don’t move much, I hardly move at all. That’s because I can’t.

PC: That brings us on to why you left the show, but let’s talk about Turlough first. He’s fascinating because he’s an antihero. Was he presented as that by JNT on the first day? Did you know you were going to get something a little more, from a characterisation point of view, than maybe some of the others had had to work with?

MS: Yes. That was made very clear to me by Eric Saward, the Script Editor. Yes, Turlough was meant to be a more complex character, so that he could drive plots himself.

PC: After those initial eight episodes though, when you’ve been trying to kill the Doctor – I believe the Black Guardian’s crystal used to burn you, so you’re trying to act with that, but once you’ve got rid of that, how do you then develop that character?

MS: You can’t, because there isn’t enough time. And that was the problem with Turlough. And that, in a sense, is why I left the show. I resigned. I didn’t resign because I was unhappy, I really enjoyed working on Doctor Who, it was fantastic. I worked with lovely people, and I had very strong scripts for the most part. But Turlough was too clever by half. He couldn’t be this “yes, no” person, he had a good brain. And once he stopped killing the Doctor he needed a function, and there was no function for Turlough on the TARDIS. That function is played by the Doctor.

PC: But did it give you scope to say the lines in a different way?

MS: It didn’t give me scope to. I did say the lines in a slightly different way, yes, but it didn’t do that, that was me as an actor doing that. If you assume the character is intelligent, the character must know something. So when you see something on the screen and you’ve got a line like, “What’s that, Doctor?”,you can say that the way most companions would say that. But I would assume I knew what it was. It’s a completely different personality, and that was Turlough all the way through. Turlough knew what was going on, and that was what I had to remember all the time, every line, was that Turlough was at least as bright as the Doctor.

PC: Did that in any way come from the writers, or was that you?

MS: No, that came from me.

PC: So was that frustrating as an actor…

MS: Eric Saward, the Script Editor, knew that. He knew that Turlough needed to be in control of things and come across as intelligent, so Eric was a great help. But generally line by line, it came from me.

PC: And you said that was one of the reasons why you left. Where you aware that Janet and Peter were leaving at the same time? Did you ever discuss the fact that you were all off?

MS: No, I think I resigned first, from what I can remember. Then I learned that Peter was leaving. Janet, obviously, left before, so I knew Janet was leaving, but that was nothing to do with me leaving. I could have stayed on, it was my decision.

PC: What would it have taken to get you to stay on? If they’d just kept you and the Doctor so you weren’t having to dilute the story, would that have done it?

MS: No, no, no, I don’t think it would have done. I mean, I left with a strong story. Turlough was an impossible character to write for for scriptwriters. He’s far too bright. You either have the Doctor or you have Turlough, and then it would be called The Turlough Show. It’s not, it’s called Doctor Who! But you can’t have both.

PC: So you work as an actor for another five or six years before you head off to Australia.

MS: Yeah, six years. And then I worked in Australia as well.

PC: And is it then that you start to become interested in going into the natural world, and also into production?

MS: No, not at all. I just kept being an actor. And I did up properties as well, which I still do. I just kept being an actor until I was 29, and then I emigrated to Australia to do a zoology degree. I’d always been interested in the environment, I was born and brought up in the country. I was a country boy, so that was always very much a part of me.

PC: So what was your first pet? Did you have animals around you from a nearly age?

MS: We had an old dog called Jenny when I was young.

PC: So you’ve got all these different interests coming together.

MS: Not really, no, they’re not coming together. I was an actor, then I decided to do a zoology degree. I realised I wouldn’t do that properly if I stayed in the UK, and also we had three horrible summers with no sun, and I knew the sun shone in Australia – and it did. It does what it says on the packet – and I went to Australia. But I made these big decisions, it’s not like it’s things coming together, you make a big decision and you go with it.

PC: Again, it’s that tenacity you talked about earlier. You make a big decision and you go with it, in a different direction.

MS: Yes.

PC: So what is that move into production? When does that become interesting to you, going behind the camera as well? Or has that always been there?

MS: Not at all, no. The reason why I did the zoology degree is because I wanted to communicate to people about the environment and make them care for the world they live in. Once you do that, that’s called writing scripts. You have to write films and sell them, and you become a producer. And that’s exactly what I did. I wrote films, I sold them, and I became a producer. And I had no inclination to be in front of the camera.

PC: Not as a presenter on your own work?

MS: No, not at all, not at all. I mean, I’ve done it, as it happens, but no, that was not in any way part of that.

PC: But you developed this very interesting style, I think. Because in this country we’d been very used to that beautiful way that the BBC shoot natural history, those beauty shots they do. I remember what must have been one of the first programmes you did with Steve Irwin and it this almost guerrilla filmmaking approach to it, which made it very fresh and very exciting. Was that a deliberate thing you were doing to try and bring the film to a wider audience and educate more people?

MS: Yes it was, and the first film I made with Steve, The Ten Deadliest Snakes in the World, absolutely fundamentally changed the way people shot documentaries, and particularly wildlife documentaries, but in fact all documentaries, and shot presenters. There’s a golden rule of shooting animals: you need to be on the eye level of the animal. Now we were shooting snakes, and previously snakes had been filmed off a tripod. Static shots from above. It was, as far as I know, the first ever documentary to be shot on video, it was shot on DigiBeta, so it was completely different from shooting on film. Then we took the camera off the tripod, we ran after the snakes, we ran after Steve. We then did a seven-month, I think, natural history shoot after filming thirty days with Steve to get the snake behaviour.  And I still see some of the stuff we shot in documentaries to this day, because it was so amazing. It was not a cheap film to make; I think it cost £360,000, which was a lot of money in 1996. But yeah, we took the camera off the tripod and it became real.

And I got back to the UK, and my executive producer watched it, and there was a general consensus of feeling that I was incompetent because I hadn’t used a tripod.

PC: Really?

MS: I was told we were up for a reshoot. Then Discovery watched it and thought it was the best thing they’d ever seen. It was one of the most popular natural history shows ever shown. And from that point onwards the camera never went back on the tripod, pretty much, when people were shooting natural history presenters.

PC: It seems to have changed everything.

MS: It changed everything. It did change everything. And very, very much credit to my brave cameraman Jeff Goodman, who was brilliant. Then it was history, because it was such a success that I just became a “name” producer and director overnight.

PC: Is that when you decided to go fully freelance and open up your owncompany doing this sort of work?

MS: No. I worked for other companies, I’ve worked for other companies most of my life. I mean, I do have my own production company, but I’ve mostly worked for other companies, from Granada to Hat Trick,Emporium to United, it was at first, making programmes for NatGeo, Discovery, WLET, you name it. I’ve made hundreds of hours of documentary now. Many hundreds.

PC: It’s a fascinating career you’ve got, because it has these massive changes in it…

MS: Not really. I’ve been making documentaries for about thirty years now. Certainly twenty-five years. I’ve made hundreds of hours. My career has been rock-solid documentary producing for at least the last twenty-five years.

PC: How do you feel, then, about the fact that people still want to talk to you about something you did so long ago as Doctor Who?

MS: Fine! It’s fine.

PC: So just to end on then, something that could possibly bring production and acting together, can I just act you about BBC special effects?

MS: Yes.

PC: This is coming from the perspective of someone who, when Warriors of the Deep went out, was nine and thought the Myrka was probably the best thing he’d ever seen. It still gives me a little buzz when I see it. How was it to work with these things?

MS: Well, you dealt with each monster, this is what I mean, you didn’t know what it was going to be like when you got to the set. So you worked with – in the example of the Myrka, your worked with two actors who were going to be in the Myrka suit in the rehearsal room to work out the moves and things, and they were bending over, holding on to each other, you know.

PC: They were the pantomime horse in Rentaghost as well.

MS: That’s right. But then, you didn’t know what it was going to be like until you got into the studio. And the Myrka when we got into the studio, the paint was still wet on it and it was so heavy they couldn’t move. So all the moves that they’d worked out didn’t work at all...they could pretty much move one leg, and that was it,that was where they stopped. And this is what I mean about the difficulty of acting in Doctor Who and the ease, in a way, of acting in Shakespeare. Shakespeare writes for real people with real emotions. When the Myrka’s chasing you,one foot moves and you have to run off screaming, petrified you’re going to die. It’s not nice, it’s very difficult to act that and find truth in it. And the Myrka is not giving you a lot back.

PC: So as an actor, did you have a particular methodology or a particular way of approaching each scene? I think Lis Sladen used to say that she just put in her script “OOB” to tell her if she was out of breath or not. As an actor, did you have a way of getting into the moment? Or did you just have to do it? 

MS: I lived in the moment. Just be in the moment. That’s what acting’s about. That’s why I miss acting. Acting is very therapeutic, it’s like meditation. From the point at which you start a scene to the point at which you end a scene, you never think about your own life. You’re totally in the moment. And that’s what people try to attempt through meditation. They try and lose themselves and find this calm in some way, and that’s what you do as an actor, you lose yourself in the moment.

PC: Lovely. Well, thank you for chatting. I’m just going to say this, because I told my wife I was going to: a very strange, chance meeting in 1985. I was ten years old and you were at a convention in Liverpool, and it was featured on NorthWest Tonight that this was happening. My dad, assuming it was going to be a bit like the Blackpool exhibition, said “Oh, I’ll take you tomorrow”. We got there and it was twenty quid each to get in, and he said no, it’snot happening. I was devastated. And all of a sudden there was atap on my shoulder and you were there, giving me the full Turlough look. And then you smiled, and you talked to me for about five minutes, and then we were joined by John Leeson and Michael Wisher. And that really did have a huge impact on me in terms of the degree I did, where I met my wife...just that moment and to be surrounded by that world, it meant a lot to me, and I really did appreciate that.  

MS: My pleasure. I just think that actors should always remember that if people didn’t watch the programmes you’re in, or go to the theatres you’re on at, you wouldn’t earn a living. So be grateful to them and be nice. You know? We can only do this because of them. Without them…

PC: “Be nice” is a good message, I think.

MS:“Be nice”. Well, I’ve tried to live like that, and I’ve sometimes failed, but it’s a good motto to have on your wall. “Be nice”.

PC: Mark, thank you very much indeed.

MC: My pleasure, nice to talk to you.