One friend, Sir Don Gosling, has a wonderful yacht, which is usually in the south of France during the summer, and he occasionally asks parties down. He drives us down on a Thursday and flies us back on a Tuesday, and we’re in Lotus Land for four or five days.
I’ve been to Marrakesh — staying at that wonderful hotel, the Mamounia. I travelled with an American friend who likes driving — which I hate. We went up into the Atlas Mountains, and that was charming — all those hair-pin bends — and then on to the seaside at Essaouira (the old Mogador), where I stayed in a little room in a rather chic hotel, owned by a friend of mine at the time. It used to be a famous brothel.
I’m not very adventurous, and once I arrive in a place, I find it difficult even to get down to doing some sightseeing; I’m happy staying put in restaurants and bars. But two friends recently chartered a yacht, for a couple of hundred of their closest friends, to sail around the Med. They flew us to Rome, where I had a couple of days before joining the boat. One of my American friends, a devoted sightseer, dragged me around the Sistine Chapel, which I would never have managed to get to on my own. There was a terribly long queue, but the chapel was absolutely breathtaking.
Then we joined the boat, and stopped off at Capri, then Sicily, just for one day. We looked at the old theatre there — at Taormina, overlooking Mount Etna — one of those nice open-air amphitheatres, where someone who knew a little Greek happily went down to the stage area and spoke a bit of Euripides. I went down and spoke something — I can’t remember what: “To be or not to be”, or “Once more unto the breach, dear friends”, or some such. The acoustic was wonderful.
It was a time when Etna erupted quite dramatically. It was interesting, because Tim Rice, who wrote the lyrics for Jesus Christ Superstar, and Robert Powell, who played Jesus in Jesus of Nazareth, were both going up the railway thing when Etna started behaving rather badly. The papers all carried stories about British tourists being trapped, but didn’t mention that Jesus Christ and his lyricist were in the party.
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We then went up the Yugoslav coast, to Dubrovnik — that was lovely. Just after they moved Loose Ends to the evenings, the BBC had said “You must do every Saturday”. I said, “I can’t do that one, because I’m in Dubrovnik.” So we broadcast it from the yacht. With Terry Wogan, Tim Rice and Robert Powell on board, it wasn’t hard to fill 45 minutes.
As a child, I lived on a farm, so we weren’t very good at holidays, because farming doesn’t let up. Much of the summer was spent working with the harvest.
When I was very small and the harvesting was at its height, my mother used to take my brother and me off, out of the way, down to Burnham-on-Sea. The great excitement used to be the ice-cream parlour, which had knickerbocker glories. There was also a wonderful miniature railway the first year we went, but when we went back the following year, it had gone. We were told that a rich man had bought it for his children, but it wasn’t that at all: it was rotten and rusting and, in order to save it, had been moved to somebody’s estate miles away. I almost became a socialist for a few days.
When I was in New York for a couple of years, we used to go down to Florida for weekends. Key West was fun. I remember one weekend, staying at the Harbour Hotel and, suddenly, who should come along but dear old Tennessee Williams and one of his biographers, Dotson Rader. We had a drink and then they went off, and the next morning, I was fascinated to hear that they’d got up the noses of some rednecks. Tennessee, I think, very much wanted to keep a low profile, but Dotson Rader couldn’t wait to get on the local radio and say how dreadful it was that America’s greatest playwright had been insulted by these rednecks.
I half flirted with the idea of living in New York for good, but it’s much more satisfactory back here. It would be nice having a country cottage, but there would be the awfulness of having to go and open it up each weekend and take food down, then close it up again and come back. So — not for me.
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Ned Sherrin talked to Veronica Groocock