Blog posts by year and monthDecember 2010
Posts (12)
Toast: The magic and humour in memoirs of my childhood suppers
When I started writing Toast it never crossed my mind it might one day become a film, let alone one starring Helena Bonham Carter and Freddie Highmore. The book had started life as a short story about the food of the 1960s and 1970s for my weekly Observer column, but I soon realised that the...
Upstairs Downstairs: Playing Mr Pritchard
I came to play the role of Mr Pritchard by a curious turn of events. I had worked on Cranford with both Heidi Thomas (the writer of this revival) and Eileen Atkins. They'd also seen me in a play at the National Theatre. And the part kind of landed in my lap from that really. It was to...
Christmas Top Of The Pops: My nearly accident-free show
You know it's Christmas when you start thinking seconds for dinner is normal and thirds is something to push for, your nan has only gone and got you that same pair of slippers again, and Top Of The Pops is on the TV. One of my earliest memories of watching Christmas Top Of The Pops was seein...
Tony Jordan's Nativity: I play Mary
I loved that Mary wasn't written as a perfect, saintly being, which had been my image of her as I grew up. In the script, she was very real, very fallible - a girl with innocence, confusion and doubt, and also great courage and faith. She was complicated.
Nordic Noir: The Story Of Scandinavian Crime Fiction
The Stieg Larsson phenomenon was building to a crescendo when we decided the time was ripe to take stock of Scandinavian crime fiction in the documentary that became Nordic Noir. Why had a region best known for Volvos, Abba and Ikea begun producing dark and violent thrillers filled with broo...
Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently: How slavishly should a screen adaptation follow the book?
It's been made very clear to me, mainly through conversations on Twitter, that a lot of people hold the Dirk Gently books in great affection and that they are going to be very upset if we don't get it right. Dirk is described as "a pudgy man who normally wears a heavy old light brown suit, r...
Imagine: Ben-Hur comes to Bath
Almost exactly a year ago, an idea was formed in a tiny room in the Theatre Royal to bring a Hollywood epic of biblical proportions to the main stage. Ben-Hur was coming to Bath. The cast and crew? A motley gang of amateurs brought together by a desire to live out their dreams in front of a ...
Macbeth with Sir Patrick Stewart: The Scottish play from stage to TV
Huddled against the cold in a huge overcoat, I'm cowering by a wall with a vicious-looking Alsatian snapping at my heels. That's one of my more vivid memories from the location shoot for director Rupert Goold's film of Macbeth with Sir Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood. Fortunately my c...
The Art Of Germany
"Every nation writes its own history in three books, the book of its words, the book of its deeds, and the book of its art: the last of the three is the most reliable." Well, that was John Ruskin's theory, and I'd go along with it. I hope our new series, The Art Of Germany, lives up to R...
Watch a sneak preview of the BBC's Christmas shows
You will probably already have seen details of some of the great programmes we have coming up this Christmas across all of BBC television. This week we published our final schedules for Christmas and last night we gave a sneak preview of our festive highlights to the press, and I though it would...
