This much I know . . . that anyone who begins a description of the actor’s life with “This much I know” is not going to then go on to fulfil her stated ambition a few lines later not to be pretentious. But do not judge Diana Quick too harshly. Her opening contribution to The Essay series Half Shame, Half Glory (Radio 3, 11pm — the last is tonight) was intelligent, thoughtful and, despite its occasional tendency to disappear up its own colon, grounded in reality.
For one thing, Quick is a thesp who really does deserve the description “courageous” — in the real sense of the word, rather than the actorly. After a fall that smashed her jaw and paralysed her larynx she had to learn to speak again.
Quick’s monologue — and that of Clemency Burton-Hill, who closes the series tonight — were the bread around a particularly well-organised sandwich. They could all have taken the high-art route, or the self-deprecating, jokey angle by which actors like to show that they are real people after all, and not soldiers in a world full of “civilians”.
But instead we got Simon McBurney describing his thought processes as he went through a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame on stage, and the disabled actor Mat Fraser talking about what it takes to get work when your arms were shortened by your mother having taken Thalidomide before you were born (his description of fumbling for the doorknob after a failed audition was light, but heartbreaking).
But the real meat of the series came on Wednesday — for non-actors, anyway — when Olivia Williams talked about working with the tyrannical Roman Polanski on The Ghost. For one thing, it was about movies — theatre and TV have their place, but you can’t top the experience of someone spilling the beans on working with a famous monster on a film with a budget of $35 million. Add to that Williams talking about her experience of sitting on a bed, “naked and crying”, while Polanski made infinitesimal adjustments to the sheets, the pillow, the lamp, as he bullied all objects, both animate and inanimate, towards the picture he had in his head, and you had the life of an actor the way you, the viewer and listener, sort of wanted it to be. Actors really are like cattle. Hurrah.
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It’s a series I would like to play for my own stage-struck teenager, because it showed that, even for those who have made it, the actor’s life is not a happy one. But then she would probably say: “Yes, Dad, but they’ve made it.” And there’s no answer to that.
Second, on Wednesday I walked from work to the railway station listening to coverage of the Isner-Mahut match from Wimbledon on Radio 5 Live Sports Xtra. After an hour on the train I changed to the local line. While waiting for it to arrive I listened to the Isner- Mahut match. At my local station I got into my car and drove for 25 minutes to my home, listening to the Isner-Mahut match. You try doing that with television.
Finally, after what seems like eight years but is actually seven and a half, this is my last radio column for The Times. From now on I shall listen to the radio without being paid for it. Result!