Desert Island Dicks - NIGEL PLANER

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

NEIL FROM THE YOUNG ONES! Actor, comedian, novelist and playwright, Nigel Planer joins Dan to share who and what he'd hate to be stuck with on a desert island. Be sure to follow the podcast @dickspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify. The global commerce platform that supercharges your selling wherever you sell. With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash tech, all lowercase. That's shopify. Hi, I'm Dan from Desert Island Dicks, feeling a bit croaky and standing in my kitchen recording this. Our guest this episode is Nigel Planer,

who's an actor, comedian and writer, but is most famous for playing Neil in The Young Ones, which is certainly where I first saw him, as I've loved that programme since I was about five. So I felt like a nervous little schoolboy talking to him, which wasn't helped helped by the fact that due to me having a bad cold whilst talking to him I've sounded very croaky and pubescent. Anyway it was a pleasure chatting to him and I hope it's a pleasure for you to listen to him and if that is the case and you enjoy this podcast then please do subscribe and give us a little rating or a review it doesn't have to be long just clicking

the subscribe button is great and it doesn't take much time at all and it's really helpful for us and we really appreciate it so thanks if you do it otherwise i don't know just do it next time please uh i think there was something else i was supposed to say here but i can't remember what it was so we might as well get along with Desert Island Dicks with Nigel Planer. Hi I'm Dan Benedictus and welcome to Desert Island Dicks, the show that sees you marooned on a desert island after a plane crash with the worst people and worst things imaginable. Who they are and why they're a dick is up to our guest. And here to share their Desert Island Dicks with us today is actor, comedian and writer Nigel Planer.

Hello. Hello. Hello. How are you doing? Yeah, not bad. Not bad at all, actually. Considering, you know, the circumstances circumstances this lockdown's been quite uh okay for me yeah there's quite a range of uh of sort of feelings about it i feel that often i speak

to people and the longer it goes on the greater the sense of acceptance about it all you know and then yeah suddenly everything's going back to normal and you think oh i don't know if i want all of the normal life back yeah exactly and it's also quite you know readjusting what's okay and what's not okay it's quite anxiety producing you know yeah yeah and everyone's at very different stages at least when it was locked down we all knew the rules whereas now exactly yeah yeah and how did you find the process of making your choices for the island today? Well, it's very, it's not very pleasant, actually, because it's the sort of, such a part of our culture now, isn't it?

To be dissing other people. It's like a massive troll show you've got going here. It's like one big troll show you've got going here it's like one big troll who can we who can we diss now who can we ridicule or you know how can we all have a moan and say um you know oh this is this is rubbish this is rubbish or that person is is no good um and you know on the whole i try and avoid you know normally in life i try and try and avoid doing that i just shout at the computer and moan at the technology and the answer you know when you're left on an answer phone queue and things like that yeah um because i think people's feelings do get more hurt than we admit. You know, critics and pundits all think it's, you know,

fair enough to criticise other people's efforts. And they don't realise that their criticisms really do, you know, hit the mark. Mind you, I just saw this film last night, The How To Build A Girl, and that's about a Julie Burchill type character who gets her career by really ridiculing and deriding the bands she's reviewing. And then she has a bit of a crisis in her life and she has to go back and write apologies to them because she realizesises it makes her feel bad having been horrible to everyone. So I think there's room for more kindness.

Having said that, all of that, let's get on and really ditch some people. Maybe one day I'll start a companion podcast where we just focus on all the good in life. Oh, how nice. Maybe I'll have to do that yeah yeah i mean another another difficulty i had with it is that a few times uh a few examples where i've either met people in the public eye who who i have been supposedly cool, who turned out to not be cool at all,

or the other way around. And I've also, on a couple of occasions, had to play, you know, to act a character who is definitely not cool. And then doing the research and reading about them and looking at them in interviews and things, you get to sort of know them and you think, well, maybe they're not as bad as all that after all.

And you start to kind of appreciate them as a three-dimensional, as a human being, rather than just some kind of spitting image puppet. And so it's a difficult thing, this. You know, take somebody like Peter Mandelson, who at the time was in the media in the in the sort of spitting image world he was he was definitely people dissed him and you know he was he was called sort of evil or that of the night and I got to to act him in a you know comic strip film and so I saw I read his biography I listened to his audio book, I saw the documentary about him.

And in the end, I thought, you know, it's quite interesting. I saw the full human anyway. So I think we find it a bit easy to just have hate figures. Again, having said that, some of them, you know, don't redeem themselves very well, do they? Okay, well, at the back of our mind during this podcast, we'll have that these people probably deserve a second chance somewhere. Yeah, yeah, go on, do that. A cup of tea and a chat.

Yeah, do that, yes. Nigel thinks they're nice, really, even though. Yeah, like, you know, if I really twist your arm, this is who we're putting on the island. But, you know, at some point on the desert island, you're going to have a chance to see their true colours and maybe they'll all be friends after a while. Yeah, on the island, maybe, yeah. Okay, well, let's get stuck in then.

Who's going to be your first choice? You know, to be on the island, this is definitely the worst choice, would be Mark Zuckerberg. Right, okay, yeah. Imagine spending all eternity, you know with mark zuckerberg the sort of robotic man plus who knows what he's got up in space looking down at what you're doing on that island you know when when they were um india said they didn't want his Facebook. I don't know if you remember that. He had designed a massive aeroplane with huge wings

that would have enough power to override their desire not to have his product, that could cut through that and provide it to people whether they wanted it or not and he spent millions on doing that um so i see him as a sort of old-fashioned colonial imperialist i think that's what he is he's taken over the world he's got his own class of shares in his company i know this is you know that sort of company law and you think well it's it's uh complicated to understand but he has special class shares, so nobody has any control over what happens in the company.

So he is totally responsible for every decision that's made, just him. Yeah. More so than any government in the world, even, you know, even dictators. He's a dictator. Well, yeah, and more powerful than a lot of dictators and governments these days. I mean, there are more people on Facebook. He's Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, isn't he? So there are more people on that than...

I'll get the figures wrong because I don't remember the numbers, but something like the whole of Western Europe. He's got billions of people in his empire, you know. But that's not what would be so awful just because he's amazingly powerful and successful but i think what would make him awful to be with on the island as if you've seen that interview when he was up in front of the uh american commission yeah uh they were investigating him and he turned up in a suit and he he did look like a tailor's dummy it didn't look like a a person he I don't think he'd crack a smile I I don't think he would know how to relate to another human being which would make him very

difficult to get on with yeah absolutely I I think the thing with Mark Zuckerberg is there's a weird sort of balance between the sort of, on the face of it, Facebook just seems like this very silly, pointless platform of people sharing pictures of what they eat or their cats or whatever. But there's this whole sort of pernicious thing behind the background, this whole sort of machinery working away to, you know, looking at your likes and dislikes and just harvesting data and things like that and it's it's sort of at least you know with something like I don't know like say if it's like tobacco

advertising you kind of know what it was in it you know is it sort of like oh just get in touch with people and share your emotions and and connect but we're gonna steal everything about you it's much more underhand isn't it yeah it i think it is very underhand i i mean i think it's interesting i don't know if you saw the movie about the start of facebook uh i haven't because i just thought i'd had i'd had enough of it in my life already the fictional movie you know where that actor whose name i've forgotten social network yeah yeah but uh i didn't realize it started as a kind of bullying network um what it was was he was at college and this girl uh rejected him and because

he had the technology all lined up with some of his mates they started a sort of online platform for putting pictures uh reviews of the girls on the campus. Right. And saying, I don't think her tits are very good, or, you know, I'd like to do this to her, or this one doesn't give it... You know, a real boys' bullying platform. And that was the birth of Facebook. And that kind of sums it up to me. Yeah.

He gives the whole... It's a community. It's connectivity of people. We're going to connect them and we're going to, everybody can share and all of that. But as you say, it's a share, but it's a one-way share. Because he's sharing your details with other people who are giving him money. That's where the share is yeah i am i knew someone who worked at facebook and she invited us um over once some some friends just to go and have a look one one

evening and at first it's like a just a sort of willy wonka type playground you know there's yeah vending machines where everything's free and that you know there's vending machines for drinks and foods and even sort of new laptop uh keyboards and things like that or like you know fridges full of drinks and soft areas and a climbing wall and all this stuff and you go into the toilets and there's free mouthwash and toothpaste and things but then there's also notices everywhere that when you actually sit on the toilet and look there's like a noticing have you fulfilled these objectives for this week and like that you know but really there's a lot there's it's the whole thing is as passive-aggressive as it seems yeah but there's lots of these kind of little reminders and and a lot of the reason of course they make it so nice to be there all the

time so you never leave you know or they say oh well like if you want to work a bit longer we can freeze your eggs you know so you don't have to take time off to have kids or you know we can give you a desk with a treadmill in it so you can walk while you're working and things like that and it's all a bit it's just creepy i don't i do think it's creepy i do think it's creepy i agree so i mean and and so it's it's what he represents as well, isn't it? You know. So he would be my least favourite. And I imagine, as you said, he's not very human. So I think just for someone to have a conversation with on a deserted island,

it would just be just really dull because he would say, human, speak at me. What response now? Unless he suddenly had a meltdown because he's away from all his power he's on the desert island and he suddenly starts becoming very needy imagine a very needy mark zuckerberg going but don't you like me please tell me you like me really wouldn't that be awful yeah i thought that's the sort of thing once i might have mentioned this in an earlier podcast that we did but um he's one of those people that believes in only having one outfit. So he goes to his wardrobe and there's only grey t-shirts or whatever.

And he said he seems, he thinks that choosing your clothes and taking time over your appearance is frivolous. And I was like, you work on a platform where most people post pictures of their breakfast. I mean, like, how can you talk to me about being frivolous? But I think it's a very sensible choice jolly good um and who would be joining him on the island with you are we allowed dead people yes yes well i mean i don't mean that i want a dead body there no i don't mean the person as if they were still alive you know when they were alive yeah yeah it's a bloke called thomas babington mccauley, that old chestnut.

Yes, the one you know all about. So I don't need to explain anything. Yeah, it's him and his ilk, but he's the best example of it. He's the sort of archetypal racist, really. Right. There's a lot of quotespal racist, really. Right. There's a lot of quotes, if you look him up, there's a load of quotes attributed to him, some of which may have stuck to him that he didn't actually say.

But it's fair enough because the things he did actually say, he's become the flypaper to which it all sticks um he was a a colonial administrator in the in the raj we're talking sort of 1830s and he basically he thought the best thing would be that the indian languages and the indian culture culture should be dropped basically. The famous quote he said was that the whole of the Sanskrit texts all the Ayurvedas the Upanishads

the whole of Indian literature and culture was worth less than a shelf from an abridgment shelf of the Western canon of literature. He said that the entire canon of the Sanskrit language is less valuable than the most patchy abridgment

in a prep school textbook. And he said if we don't allow them to use their language, they may, if they're very lucky, get a bit of Western, particularly English, culture and language. And that's where we will get them to what we want them to be, which is truly a dominated nation. That is a quote from him. Truly a dominated nation. And the benefit of this to them would be that they would have the benefit from the wisest nations on earth so he's kind of if you're looking for somebody's statue

to knock down he's the guy if you see what i mean he there were lots of them at the time there was you know lord curzon who who did the first partition of bengal there were plenty of them at the time there was you know lord curzon who who did the first partition of bengal there were plenty of people who over here were great politicians great men and no doubt doing wonderful uh you know altruism maybe like this colston guy you know maybe did wonderful things here but if you look at what they were doing and saying and thinking over there there's a whole other story and so thomas babington mccauley in my book would be a bad guy to have around on your desert island yeah i imagine so i mean that's just extraordinary isn't it to sort of just to be able to sort of override any kind of like all history of a huge nation like that isn't it it's just well and the more ancient uh you know ancient uh literature and culture that the um i'm going to get my facts wrong again but i think it's

the ayurvedas or the upanishads the the the texts are something like 13 times the size of homer the homer iliad and the odyssey that the amount of of written the Homer, Iliad and the Odyssey, that the amount of written material is infinitely greater, bigger, just in terms of volume. I'm not talking about quality because I can't read Sanskrit, but I've read in translation, you know, some, a fair amount of Indian. I'm a bit of a keen India buff, you know some a fair amount of Indian thing I'm a bit of a a keen India uh buff you know yeah and so I I read a lot of Indian literature obviously in translation um but that one really takes the biscuit that quote yeah yeah it's it just feels really symptomatic of that kind of

underlying like incredible like arrogance of you know that sort of so much of what our country is built on you know whereas you sort of and it gets scary when you kind of see the language kind of being used again these days when they talk about sort of I don't know there's like a sort of arrogance these days when it's like oh everything will be all right with this and that because we're British and we did it the first time in this completely different situation, so we'll be OK now, whether that's Brexit or a pandemic. It all kind of harks back to this kind of insanely unjustified self-belief and misguided patriotism, I think.

Yeah. I mean, having said that, they weren't all like macaulay there were many uh british indian cross-cultural things where the you know the brits took on indian culture indian took on brit culture and the archaeological society was started the archaeological societyological Society of India was started you know um in fact I think the first member of Indian Congress again I may get my facts wrong but I think the first uh chairperson of the Indian Congress who started the Indian Congress party was was a was a Brit okay and certainly Annie Besant who was a woman Brit, was voted to be the leader at one point. So it's not like all of the people were like that. There's been a mix of cultures all along,

but I couldn't agree more that those kind of attitudes survive, and that's why I'd like to shove them all on this desert island yeah good idea good plan i um it reminded me slightly this is going to seem slightly tangential at first but it was recently my mum's 80th birthday and some of her friends got her a big hamper and one of the items in this hamper was a jar of it's called colonel skinner's hot mango pickle or mango relish oh yeah i thought i thought i bet there's some dark stories behind how colonel skinner got his recipe for this mango mango chutney yeah it seemed like the most colonial thing it can't just be like traditional rajasthani mango chutney. It's called, the cross cookery thing is called chutney Mary, isn't it?

Is where you've got what the Brits liked in India, how they liked it being, how they liked their curries, as it were. It's called chutney Mary cooking. Yeah. I just thought, I don't know. I just, something about Colonel Skinner. I keep meaning to look him up and see if there was one who committed some atrocities over there in the Royal Palace.

But I mean, there was an awful lot of cross-cultural communication and love. And, you know, a lot of children as well were born. You know, a lot of Anglo-Indian families and children. And there was a, you know, we go back a long way. And we go back before the Raj, 200 years. You know, the Raj was the long way and we go back before the Raj 200 years. You know, the Raj was the sort of culmination of it was this big oppressive, pompous thing. But before that, it was there was the East India Company, greedy land grabbing, et cetera, et cetera. But alongside that, it's always a complicated story um alongside that there was a

lot of uh i believe a lot of cross cross-cultural communication you know yeah i mean i was wondering how he'd get on on the island um but i mean sort of being able to sort of be completely in charge of a land and set the rules, he might be quite happy. And I think maybe with Mark Zuckerberg there as well, it's like another... He's part of a huge company that has the weight of a big continent who sometimes has slightly white supremacist tendencies. So maybe they'd be happy together maybe they'd be happy the only thing is they've got no one to boss around have they except me except me

but i'm not going to make up for the billions of facebook followers nor the whole of the indian subcontinent the population the downtrodden nation i i'm not going to be able to you know satisfy their their greed yeah yeah that's the only thing that i think they might both fall apart that's what i'm going with that they they might become very needy both of them it'd be quite nice to watch them both fall apart from sort of the complete sort of polar opposites in time and space but brought together on the island just seeing them both kind of fall apart would be quite interesting but yeah except that you being there would mean you've got to be their therapist haven't it you'd have to listen to it all mind you that might be good because you could sort of infiltrate their minds by pretending to be

their pal and and just start to sort of have your own back and put them back together the right way, maybe that would be possible. Yeah. Well, I imagine someone like Thomas Babington McCauley will probably have such a stiff upper lip, he'll never let on what's happening in his mind. So maybe you won't have to give him therapy too much. Whereas Mark Zuckerberg, I mean, he'll want therapy for days, I and weeks and months he'll want yes maybe yeah you know because he's you know silicon valley

talking about his feelings well maybe he doesn't i mean it doesn't seem like he has feelings so who knows well but he he he makes out he does doesn't he makes out he's very very charitable and all of that but yeah but he's not giving i mean it has to be said he's he's giving a tiny percentage in terms of of joining the the bill gates foundation and giving massive amounts to the to their um to charities and things around the world i think mark zuckerberg is is one of the least generous of them all well he's got lots of grey T-shirts to buy. I mean, come on, you know. Bezos, though. Actually, I forgot about him.

He can come too. Well, yeah, so we move on to your third. Are we going with Bezos or do you want someone else? No, Zuckerberg, I think. Zuckerberg and Macaulay, really, yeah. Yeah, okay. All right, who will be your third choice? Oh, my third? Well, are we allowed...

We're allowed dead people we're allowed live people are we allowed sort of um what's the word abstract you know people am i allowed you know because whenever i was thinking about this and thinking of things that i really don't like in people and i'm discussing it with my wife and she's got this little sort of smirky grin on her face and I'm thinking that and that's the grin when she's she's thinking you do that and um so I'm thinking the hardest thing to be with on this island would be kind of your shadow self right yeah would be the real you because you present yourself don't you all the time as being this person i'm doing it now who's okay to deal with but there's all sorts of other things i mean i write characters i write you know i'm i'm

writing stories i write plays and i'm writing book, and I write these comedy characters who are terrible people who do these terrible things, and they're quite funny, but they're kind of, you know, I've suffered doing this. You know, this is my problem. Now you can have it. It's kind of just pushing it to one side. And it's like your shadow side. And that's what, if you're trying to write,

that's what you have to think or act or do anything creative like that that's based on your imagination. You have to get honest with yourself and think, I do that. You know, that's, and how would it be if that was exaggerated? How would it be if that was, you know, like my character Neil.

That's, there's lots of aspects of that. That comes from me. I didn't, you know, they didn't write the script, and then I auditioned for the part. That was a character I created who I was doing as an act, and then I did a character, a vain actor character called Nicholas Craig, who gives people acting lessons and thinks he's great

and gets away with it always, being completely hypocritical. And when we were writing Nicholas Craig with my co-author, Christopher Douglas, I'd be working in acting and I'd come to the writing meeting and I'd say, oh, do you know what? They've only not given me the scripts until the last minute or some actor-type complaint. And he'd just be sniggering and writing under the table

everything I said down. And it would go into the character because all the characters are manifestations of your own shortcomings so really what i'd imagined was an abstract my third character i'll call him henry for the purposes of this is a manifestation of all of the all of my own shortcomings and i've got to face them every day because he's there on the island with me. Am I allowed that?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, is there a particular trait of yourself that you deplore, do you think, or do you think just a general amalgamation of everything exaggerated? Well, if I think of just going through those characters, like Neil, say, there's a sort of a grandism of his own suffering. You know, nobody ever listens to me. Oh, well, I might as well. It's going to be me, does it?

Just this constant sort of selfish grasping at being a victim, which I think is quite relevant today. This sort of, you know, that... It's a kind of self-pity, but it's passive-aggressive, isn't it? It's self-pity being used to give everyone else a hard time, to draw attention to yourself. And I think that's pretty much one of the things. being used to give everyone else a hard time, to draw attention to yourself. And I think that's very much, yeah,

that's pretty much one of the things. It would be a real pain to have to live with that side of me. And then the Nicholas Craig character. Yeah, and then it's an inability to find yourself ridiculous and funny, you know. So we'll call his character, we're calling him Henry Planer. The trouble is that sounds a bit like one of my sons, so let's call him... And there's Nicholas Craig and there's Neil, so let's call him... Is there another name that begins with N?

Nicholas, Neil, Niall... N nils let's call him nils nils planner great okay and he can be there so you've got two kind of awful men already and then there's someone who's just holding up your own failings or your own kind of yeah parts of yourself you don't want your own lack of success as a human being oh so that's yeah that's quite a quite a good uh combination so you're sort of hit from all sides yeah yeah it's pretty miserable existence if those are your only friends i mean your only companions yeah yeah yeah absolutely good you're a podcast listener and this is a podcast ad reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads.

Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com. Okay, well, now, mercifully, amongst the wreckage of the plane, there was some food and drink left over. Unfortunately for you, it's your least favourite food and drink in the world.

What are they and why are they so bad? Well, there's crates and crates of cheap white wine. And in the freeze box, not melting, is boxes and boxes of mini magnums. Okay. And it's not that they're my least favorite foods. It's that once you've had one mini magnum, it's not quite enough. And so you have another and another, and then you're feeling sick. And after a few days of that, you put on a lot of weight.

And they're not really making you feel good like food does they just like it's like there was a big pile of heroin there or something like that mini magnums and cheap white wine gives you a bad stomach it goes down so easily like pop yeah and you can just glug it back you're not even really enjoying the taste of it and you just before you know it you're kind of drunk obviously but been in a kind of bad tempered way sweaty and you can't stop because they're if their sugar buzzes do you see what i mean so although initially you think you like them if you were stuck on a desert island and that's what you had every day you would really really grow to hate them i think

cheap white wine and mini magnums are a lot of sort of girls nights in you know it's like an ideal saturday night kind of yeah i think yeah so it sounds good doesn doesn't it? But imagine if there were no baked potatoes anymore, there was no nice vegetables, there was nothing except white wine, cheap white, bad white wine, not nice white wine, and magnums. By Monday, if that was your girls' night in Saturday night,

by Monday you'd be vomiting. Yeah. I always feel as well with mini magnums that there's a part of me that thinks they really sort of tap into that the guilt that they sort of want you to have guilt about things. It's like, oh go on, it's only a

little one. Yes, exactly. Oh okay, oh it's only small. Whereas they should just say, it's a delicious ice cream, have a big magnum enjoy it and it sort of taps into that like i mean in fact you you put your finger on it because it's a very strange thing because magnum means bloody big it's definitely it's a magnum magnus means the biggest so having a mini biggest is the stupidest thing ever actually like there was an advert for Galaxy chocolate, and it was hinged around a woman kind of hiding it

from her flatmate under her bed. And you just think, just, I don't know, get a different flatmate and enjoy chocolate. But you shouldn't be hiding your food and feeling guilty and going, oh, I'm on my own now. I can have my mini Magnum or my chocolate. It's just that side of advertising is just very kind of a bit snidey isn't it yeah but it's you know the trouble is those kind of things are quite

difficult to resist they're quite addictive aren't they those those foods yeah on the plus side seeing as you know we did say at the beginning we were going to see the good in some people and things uh mini magnums are quite good for three-year-olds i've found so for my son they're quite a good age because he thinks he's had an ice cream it's enough for him but you know i'm not giving him too much ice cream so that's quite a good yeah you go to an ice cream van they pour you one that's the size of a traffic cone yeah and you know and then i've got to sort out that but um yeah the trouble is many magnums come in a box if you buy them at the supermarket yeah they come in

a box and there's about 11 of them and if you're a very undisciplined person who's drunk on white wine you could get through quite a few of them and then feel really bad yeah yeah i think well that's partly the thing usually i'll get them out when he's around by the time that it's finished if i want another one i can't because he's around so i can't oh that's happening yeah and then i forget that they're there later so then you know oh yes or i need to save them for him yeah but on the on the uh on the desert island there'd be none of that no you'd be stuck with them mark zuckerberg just noting down what flavors you tend to gravitate to yes insatiable appetite for data that's right that's right and people who liked this white one usually liked the almond one

yeah yeah and then you've got thomas babington mccauley who just he only wants the white ones obviously you know yes not quite i think that's i think that's a strong choice fortunately though you won't be without entertainment on the island. The plane's entertainment system continues to work, but just your luck, it only has two working settings. One is your least favourite film of all time and the other is your least favourite song. What are they and why?

Least favourite film, although on the desert island, actually, maybe this isn't such a bad choice, is The Horse Whisperer. OK. But the reason I put it there film although on the desert island actually maybe this isn't such a bad choice is the horse whisperer okay but the reason i didn't i put it there was because when i first saw it it first i mean i've only ever seen it once and i haven't even seen all of it because i left the cinema after the first sort of hour and a half went did some shopping you know went for a beer went back into the cinema and and it was still on you know and it went on for another hour and because it just goes on and on and on but actually if you were stuck forever on a desert island that might not be so but you've got all the

time in the world haven't you you're not going to worry about whether he's whispered to the horse or whether the woman's going to have an affair with him or you know you you'd have all the time in the world like he's got to train this horse so actually this might be this might be i might have sneaked one in that's actually quite good it's like i wonder if if you're a taxi driver do you care if you're stuck in traffic knowing that you're going to be in the car all day anyway does it matter you know and it's ah yeah you know it's that sort of thing of like well you've only got that to watch so you might as well string it out but i still think there's a part of you that just go god this is crap i wish

i had a decent i've noticed that with uh with some taxi drivers are different you know some of them don't have got exactly that kind of zen approach to the traffic. They're very calm about it and it's their job and they just sit there. Whereas others get driven as mad by it as I would be, you know, sitting there. And they fret and they accelerate a brake,

accelerate a brake, you know, and they get stressed by traffic. So I think it depends who you are. So in that sense, I would probably be in the latter group when it came to The Horse Whisperer, and I'd still find it irritating. I haven't seen The Horse Whisperer, but I've sort of seen the trailer and I'm aware of it,

but it just feels like Robert Redford wrote a film just presenting how he wanted to be seen by the world you know oh yeah yeah i mean i don't i don't have a problem i'm a great admirer of robert redford because i think he's a much more changing and subtle actor than people give him credit because he looks so good people people always think oh he's just doing robert redford but if you look at all the always think, oh, he's just doing Robert Redford. But if you look at all the films, there's one where he's in Cuba in sort of Hawaiian shirts playing a bit of a dodgy spiv gangster type.

And yeah, he never sort of changes his accent and his posture and all that. But he gives off a different vibe. And I think he's actually a much more subtle actor than his reputation allows and again, you know, I think you're right he obviously likes riding horses and being out in Wyoming in the open plain

and that was how he liked to be seen, you know there's a story about it, isn it isn't it wasn't the book i think i've got this right the book of the horse whisperer was written by an english teacher who lived in stockwell in london really and he got a phone call in the middle of the night the book would just come out as i think i've got this right he got a phone call in the middle of the night 3 a.m he went yeah who is it and it was a voice said hello this is robert redford i want to buy the rights to your book and he said you're kidding me you know it's one of those kind of showbiz stories and they bought you know he said oh how much for and he said oh we'll three million do or whatever the story goes you know it's kind of one of those dreams that you would dream of

that Robert Redford rings you in the night and says, I want to give you a million dollars. But I think that's true. I think it's true that that, I think it was that one. And I've not read the book, but the film, it's just the relationships in it. The woman comes with her daughter who needs the open spaces and the marriage isn't good. And Robert Redford is this perfect man and she falls in love with them.

And I think they have an affair. And then they talk about it a lot about, shall we have this affair? Did we have this affair? And then they go back and do some more horses. And then they talk again about, was it the wrong thing to have this affair and shall i go back to my husband and it just goes on and on and on and on yeah it feels like i think i don't know not the biggest the best cause you could do a film about it's like you know helping little girl reconnect with her horse i mean it feels like there's bigger fish to fry, you know? I mean, not that every film has to be about something great and epic and worthy,

but, you know, it just, I don't know, it just doesn't do it for me. No, I mean, I was never, I mean, that's apart from anything else. I was never that into horses anyway. So, I mean, it's not going to be the film on the desert island. I'm not going to go, oh, great, the horses again. You know, it's going to be, it's not going to be the film on the desert island. I'm not going to go, oh, great, the horses again. You know, it's going to be, it's not going to do it for me. No, no, I think that sounds wise. And what would be the song choice?

Well, the song choice is not so much like, you know, the recording. It's not a pop song. It would be something like, or indeed, Onward Christian Soldiers. Okay, the hymn. The hymn, yeah. A load of people singing that very enthusiastically. Not like in a church, when it's all slow, and the organ's going slow.

Some people who really think it's great. Because that would get on my nerves um christian soldiers onwards i i just find the sort of logic of it difficult to swallow onward christian soldiers marching to war hang on what's what religion is this we're meant to be subscribing to onward christian soldiers marching as to war with the flag of jesus going on before get your guns at the ready see how many you can kill oh no that wasn't sorry that's not the lyrics of onward christian soldiers but it's that's but that's the feeling of it, isn't it? Get the guns out, make sure you're feeling really aggressive and warlike and get out there and win a battle with a flag of Jesus.

So, you know, it's pushing it, isn't it? Yeah, it's very much this sort of crusader's attitude to religion of like, I love my God so much much i must kill everyone else who doesn't you know yeah i agree and that and it seems to me uh well crusader is the word yeah the crusaders and you know mass uh you know thugs um murdering and and not even not even murdering the right place they turned up once in i think i've got it istanbul and and that you know the wind wasn't right to go further to the holy line so they trashed the place they arrived just for the hell of it anyway for jesus no doubt but that hymn sort of to me sums up where it all went wrong yeah again i imagine thomas babington mccauley would be all

over it though that's the other disadvantage of course is he would love it he'd be singing it in your ear yeah or he'd think oh can we put it on again please can we put the song on again and that would just you know that would be too much wouldn't it yeah yeah it's that whole thing isn't it it's like i remember sort of uh there's that bill hicks quote where he was talking about how uh he was making fun of religion and two cowboys came up to him after the show and said we don't like these things you said about jesus because we're christian and we don't like the way you talk about jesus and he said well forgive me then you know and it's that sort of that's it yeah yeah you know and it's that sort of... That's it. Yeah.

You know, and it's that complete sort of like completely forgetting about the main lesson of the whole thing about, you know, turning the other cheek and being nice and accepting. Yeah, yeah. And also it's something to do with school because I went to a school and we had to sing hymns and we did, you know, I don't know if they still do this. I shouldn't think they do it nowadays, but I'm quite old.

I was at school in the 50s and the 60s. And we had to sing these hymns. We had to sing Onward Christian Soldiers and all these things that were written in the 19th century, which just didn't make sense to me when you have the priest saying, and Jesus taught us that we should love one another, as you say, and then let's all go out and get a flag of Jesus

and attack the others. To me, that doesn't... I'm sort of, you know, my whole childhood was spent trying to work out what these adults really were, you know, trying to make sense of this crazy contradiction. Yeah. Yeah, it's strange, isn't it? It's a bit more Old Testament vibe to that song, I think.

Well, except it's got the word Christian. You know, Old Testament wouldn't have been Christ, would it? Well, that's what I mean. It sort of has the sort of fire and brimstone Old Testament kind of vibe, but that's why it doesn't quite fit. It would be pretty terrible hearing that all the time, I think. Yeah, and also I think even, I just think even if it was the worst kind

of pop song you'd just sort of get into it after a while it would become it would sort of fade into um sort of subconsciousness quicker than a sort of a very rousing sort of vaguely military sort of him you know on the other hand it could be that you're stuck on a desert island and it starts to make you nostalgic for sort of 1950s britain and you start thinking oh if only if only there was i really miss that militaristic singing that we used to do when i was a kid and you'd get you'd get all sad and homesick now finally the island is overrun by the biggest dick of all the animals which animal is it and why um it's a skunk a skunk yeah i feel like they don't get that much press these days you know when you're younger and you watch a lot of cartoons they pop up in cartoons a lot but

you don't really see much many programs on them and stuff yeah i mean i i have to, it also would make me feel slightly at home. I live in London and London smells of skunk. That's what it smells of these days. And it's not a nice smell. I don't think. And it's really a sticky smell that won't give up, will it? It's not one of those smells that wafts away in the wind. It's one of those smells that's like a treacly on the air.

It sticks onto you. It sticks onto the buildings. It comes out of buildings and it hangs in the street. And if somebody walks past you who's been smoking it, I mean, you can smell it hundreds of yards away. Yeah, sometimes you can spot where it comes from. But yeah, sometimes there's no one around. You smell it in lockdown when you go out for a walk

and you think, I can't even see anyone here. Yeah, yeah. It's a very, very pervasive smell. And again, on the island, it might make me, if I had a skunk, it might make me feel homesick. But to be honest, walking around streets in London, even in the park, when there's no one there, as you say, you get a little waft of it from the wind. And it really isn't a nice smell. It's not exotic like other forms of drugs might be.

Even tobacco has a slightly zingy smell to it. Although I don't like it. I used to smoke. I don't anymore. But I don't like the smell of tobacco. But it's got a kind i don't like i used to smoke i don't anymore but you know i don't like the smell of tobacco but it's got a kind of ping to it it gives you a sort of it's got a tang and then it's gone but skunk says no i'm here now that's it i'm here you're not getting rid of me i'll be on your clothes when you go in today you know you've just taken a walk you go into your house all your clothes are going to smell of me

and uh i i really don't like it fair enough well uh skunk goes on the island with you now uh nigel i'd like to be um slightly cheeky and uh because uh being having been a fan of the young ones since i was about five i'd like to slip in a little bonus question based on your character Neil now obviously I know that your career has been very long and successful since then so apologies for going all the way back to the start but can I ask you of the characters in The Young Ones who do you think would be the worst addition

to the desert island for you because they're all they're all really... The trouble is I know the guys who played them and they're all kind of... I love them all. They're like my brothers.

And I've got to think of the worst one. So it wouldn't be Alexei because I see him all the time anyway. Okay. So if he was the worst, what am I doing? You know, I mean, we're still pals. We see each other almost every week. And I put up with it. So it wouldn't be him.

It wouldn't be Jerzy Belowski. It wouldn't be Adrian, it wouldn't be Vivian because again I see him often, we write together, we write plays together now and the situation is although there's quite a lot of

you know, we sort of not friction but you know we bump up against each other, we went on tour and did a play together last year that we'd written. And there's a lot of, we have a lot of fun. It's very enjoyable, as well as being quite tough. The relationship's quite sort of abrasive, I think. So there's a really close bond there.

So he wouldn't be on the island. That would be like normal life for me um so chris that's um mike chris ryan i i see him fairly often and he's just such a nice chap he's he would be really nice to have on the island so i'd like him on the island that would be great um but then that's not what we were talking about we're talking about the worst one like him on the island. That would be great. But then that's not what we were talking about. We're talking about the worst one to have on the island. So it would have to be Rick. He'd be the worst one, merely by a process of elimination.

Because he, yes, I mean, if there are any negatives, because there's just too much energy to deal with all the time, you'd have to be going, oh, no, just... Is there any kind of valium? Has the plane left any valium? Because you'd want to sort of calm him down, because there's always this energy that is very funny, but it's like non-stop, the energy's there, always.

And that's tiring. Um, so it would have to be Rick, although it wouldn't be bad, you know, even that wouldn't, it's not so bad. I could,

you know, that he might alleviate, um, Thomas Babington, McCauley and Mark Zuckerberg. I'd like to see Rick dealing with Mark Zuckerberg. That would be funny. Yeah.

And you could, you could just sit back and watch the fireworks. I think that would be great. Actually, so really, in answer to your question, I can't think of any one of them that would be really bad. They'd all be great to have around, actually. Well, I'm actually very relieved because as a fan of the show, I'm very happy that everyone involved is really nice. I'm very happy with the answer. Brilliant.

Nigel, thank you so much for coming on today. And what have you been working on? Is there anything you'd like to talk about that you've been working on recently that people should know about? Yeah, I've been in lockdown. I've been working on a couple of things. I was writing plays before and we were nearly getting I had four plays sort of ready to to put into theatres and obviously that's you know that's had to drop out so in lockdown I've done a couple of things I've written a book based on some earlier work I did a sort of comedy adventure inspired by sort of Terry Pratchett type thing because I did

all of not all of a lot of Terry Pratchett's audio books in that I'm hoping in that kind of style anyway inspired by that kind of style um that's called Jeremiah born in time um and i've gone back to the songs i wrote songs when i was like 20 19 20 and they've never seen the light of day and i went back to them with a mate called chris wade who who has a band that's just him called dodson and fog he's He's in Leeds. And we've been recording these songs slowly, but surely. And we're making a little album out of these songs with him on guitar, me doing, even me doing, I haven't played guitar for 40 years, doing a little bit of guitar.

Oh, no, I tell a lie, because we did Bad News. That was 30 years ago. But so even me doing a little bit, you know a bit sending it to each other singing some harmonies and doing these rather sweet songs from like 1971 um and uh that's quite fun i mean they're coming out as they sound as if they were recorded in 1971 as well because they're pretty You know, I'm really an amateur in that department. But it's quite a fun thing to do in the lockdown. Well, you sound like you've been the most productive person in lockdown that I've spoken to so far by quite a long way.

So I think it was very impressive indeed. But Nigel, thank you so much for coming on again. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you.