yes, you need to take your jacket off. hello, i'm john wilson, welcome to this cultural life, the radio 4 podcast in which i ask leading creative figures to reveal the key moments in their life and the most important cultural works that fired their own artistic imagination. my guest is director, screenwriter and playwright mike leigh. he's known for gritty social dramas, including vera drake and secrets and lies, domestic comedies like life is sweet and happy—go—lucky and historical stories, including mr turner and peterloo. i spoke to him in one of the many radio studios in bbc broadcasting house. mike, welcome to this cultural life. let's take you to the beginning. what is your earliest

cultural memory? as a kid, we had — and i was exposed to — pantomime, live theatre of various sorts, circus — the circus was a big deal — variety — live variety, the old, you know, descendants of the music hall, including, at the age of nine, a trip to the ardwick hippodrome in manchester to see laurel and hardy live on stage... ..on their famous tour — we later realised was the famous tour — and the two important things about that were one — two extraordinary things — one is that it was in colour, they were in colour. chuckles. and two, that oliver hardy completely couldn't get his act together at all. he was absolutely out of control. and, of course, later we've — realised, we realised that was because he was cracking up, and it was the end of their career.

were they funny? no. but i was fascinated. didn't make any difference. of course, in school, from the earliest age, i was drawing, putting on sketches, generally wanting to be creative in all kinds of different ways. this is salford — salford grammar school? yeah. well, that's even — i'm talking about primary school and, you know, salford grammar school was, of course, later, and there i was in all the school plays and did art and all that stuff. because, obviously we were middle class, my old man being a doctor, i went to the local schools, local primary school, working class kids, 90—odd percent, salford grammar school, very much the same. and so, i kind of had a very broad sense of society, i suppose, of community and character, but character is what it's been all about, from the word go,

just observing people. so, it's a sort of a cultured upbringing, to an extent. was your creative, your own personal creativity, encouraged by your parents? well, that's a very interesting question. i mean, it would be very difficult not to say that, in many respects, my folks weren't philistines, because they kind of were. there's culture and there's culture. i mean, they used to — they actually, at times, went to stratford and they went to the halle, so you could say there were cultural. on the other hand, anything that was, in inverted commas, arty, or what we would identify as avant—garde, they were horrified by. but apart from anything else, from an early age, i was drawing people, and on the whole, you could describe what i was drawing as caricatures. and when i was about six or so,

my dad forbade me from drawing grown—ups when they came around because in case it might offend them. chuckles. and throughout my development, he had a very, very strong resistance to my being an artist of any kind. the reason is very straightforward. his father, my paternal grandfather, was a commercial artist. he — you know, they coloured in photographs in that wishy washy way that used to be the mode and they had a picture framing business. and in the slump in the depression, nobody wanted pictures or frames and grandpa couldn't feed the family, so my dad had a deep—seated fear of the notion of his offspring being an artist of any kind. it meant penury.

later, when i'd run out of steam with the academic journey i was on and announced that i wanted to apply to go to drama school, he was — to say he was horrified would be a gross understatement. he thought it was the worst thing that could've happened. he assumed, you know, he would — he would have wanted me to be a doctor, or a lawyer or something. was there any chance that would have happened, though? no, none whatever. imean, from... you never had any interest in medicine? no. i mean, i knew from an early, you know, i used to go to — we haven't talked about movies — i used to go to the pictures as often as they let you, you know, the local — there were, there were 14 local cinemas walking distance from our house. 14? 14. i mean, flea pits, a lot of them, really decaying ancient, horrible places but they showed movies

i used to go to the movies. i used to watch westerns from the earliest age. i remember there were two things that — one major thing that i always thought about films was, wouldn't it be great if you could have a film where the characters in the film were like real people, not like actors? and the other thing, which is of far, far less significance — or of no importance at all — is that watching westerns, you know, because of the nature of the number of friends and a length of film, the wheels on the — on a vehicle or a stagecoach would go around backwards. yes. and i used to think, sit there thinking, "when i make films, they'll go round the right way". now, that was from a very early age. the first big cultural influence that you've picked, that you suggest has had a formative effect on your work, is ronald searle — illustrator, artist, best known for st trinian�*s, for creating st trinian�*s and for the molesworth books,

and also contributing illustrations and drawings to so many books and magazines over the years, in the post—war years. how did you discover searle? when i was six, somebody gave me a copy of hurrah for st trinian�*s, a collection of cartoons by ronald searle, for my birthday. that was it. the great thing about searle is that he was, apart from he was a great draughtsman, he was a fantastic observer and his style of drawing influenced my style. in fact, my handwriting to this day is influenced by ronald searle�*s style of handwriting. and what was he doing? i mean, just to evoke a sense of his style? well, there are two things, really — one is his observation of character and his expression of character but the other is his line. you know, he had a great — he had a range of different kinds of line, but he had

a great facility to allow the pen marks to be themselves. you think about the characterisation that ronald searle comes up with in those drawings, those kind of quite spindly characters, they're sort of etiolated figures. is there a link, do you think, in those characters, between those characters and some of the characters that you create in yourfilm? i think the important thing about searle being an inspiration — or, if you like, an influence on me — it's not so much about specific characters, it's about a way of looking at the world. i mean, if you look at my characters in my films, and, indeed, plays, it's never — i never allow it to be described as naturalism, it's realism. it gets to the essence of what's real. i mean, you have to believe in it being absolutely real when you see — in the moment when you see it. but there's a certain — there's an edge, there's

a distillation, there's a heightening which is a natural thing for an artist like ronald searle to do, and that's what i do. so, i can't talk about a direct correlation between this ronald searle character or that character in one of my films. it's about a way of looking at life, really. the next big turning point, the next big influence, drawing — life drawing. just tell us about that class. well, here's the thing. i went to rada, i acted fora bit, including in a couple of films. i then went to camberwell art school on the foundation course for a year. i then went to a year in the theatre design department of the central school of arts and crafts and i went to the london film school, all within four years. for me, what was — i mean, of those various kinds of study, the only year i spent — the only thing i did,

which wasn't directly related to theatre or film was the foundation course at camberwell. but it was there that i had a really seminal experience as an artist. we were all sitting around and had a nude model and everybody was quietly drawing away and i looked around the room, and i thought, "what is happening in this room "is something that we never experienced for one split "second at the royal academy of dramatic art". "really creative work is happening. "everybody in the room is looking at something that's "real and finding an organic, truthful way of expressing it, which we didn't do as student actors. it was all mechanical and superficial and inorganic and, therefore, dull. and that revelation in that moment in the life

drawing class, that, you know, was — absolutely resonated with notions that i had on the go, in a primitive form at that point in time, that somehow, you could create theatre, you could create films in an organic way by collaborating in a way and using rehearsal as more thanjust a mechanical way of interpreting what somebody had already put down on paper. and so, from what i understand, you gather a cast of actors. you have a subject, in a very broad sense. you never give a title to the film — they're usually untitled — and then, the year in which you're making the film and then you ask each of those actors to create their own character. well, i collaborate with each actor to create a character. and what i do to start with is to get each actor to really make lists of real people they know. and i then — and this involves long discussions, one on one, with nobody else there, with each actor —

and we gradually, i — i — finally whittle it down and choose the source or usually sources from people they know. so, it means the actor has got somewhere to start, something to — like an art — like the artists — like the students looking at the subject, at the model in the life drawing class, the actor has got, you know, he or she is going to start to stand up and play this person they actually know and then, that person they know, and then we meld them together and the character is created. but, of course, the two famous myths about what i do with actors is one is that the actors come with ideas and the committee is formed as to what the subject — that's not the case at all. in fact, it's very — it's essential that they — when i say to an actor, "participate in this piece "of work, this play or this film," we can't talk about a character because there isn't a character. you and i are going to collaborate to create a character, and you will never know anything about the whole thing, except what your character knows.

so they don't know about the other characters? not until — not until and unless they meet them in the context of the work. are they banned from talking to the other actors about... absolutely. but it works totally. everybody enters into the spirit of it, and there's never been a case where anybody has, as it were, broken the rules or cheated. people, they — actors are highly stimulated by it because it means each actor feels in possession of something that only he or she has and, apart from anything else, it means that the actors can — the actor doesn't have — isn't distracted or inhibited or in any way affected negatively by an overview. he or she, each actor or actress, sees the whole thing from the point of view of the character but it mostly means that we can explore situations in a completely truthful and organic way and arrive at the dramatic material. and on set, are you ever writing down the lines

and putting them on a piece of paper? no, i don't write and give to the actors because we don't need to. it comes out — they know it. and actually, one of the things that always amuses me and is, i think, interesting is that every time i've ever made a film, after a few days, you hear an electrician or somebody say, "i don't understand it. "there's no script, but they know the lines. "they never dry up, they never forget their lines." and of course, unlike an ordinary film, particularly films where they don't really rehearse properly, most of the time's taken up with people not being able to remember what to say and stuff, or looking for the character, which obviously in the case of my stuff, we've long since established who and how the character is. your next big influence is not so much a moment, as a whole era. you want to talk about the �*60s. you arrived in london from salford in 1960 at the start of that decade. what are your key cultural memories of that moment when you arrived? well, first of all, talking about movies,

for all the movies i saw between 1943, when i was born, and 1960, none of them wasn't in english. they were all hollywood or british movies, with the exception of le ballon rouge, that famous french short, which i was bored to tears by then and i'm bored to tears by now. somebody — they showed it in school, for some reason. so i'm in london and i've just arrived and somebody says, "there's a sort of arts festival going on in st pancras "and there's a film showing. "shall we go?" i said, "yeah, let's go." this is literally in the first week or so. and there was this film in swedish about a knight playing chess. of course, i discovered bergman and i then discovered the french nouvelle vague that was going on, a bout de souffle, breathless, was playing. i discovered the russian cinema, i discovered satyajit ray,

the bengali filmmaker, i discovered rossellini and bicycle thieves and japanese cinema, ozu, kurosawa — i mean, itjust was a massive revelation. the whole world, really, isn't it? absolutely. and what were these directors doing that was so different, do you think? it's the possibilities. the thing about influence and the thing about being stimulated by what other artists do, it's as much about making you think about the possibilities of what you might do. but with the french new wave in particular, was it also about the visual style? do you think that had a direct influence on your later work? well, i mean, the great move forward was shooting in the streets, was shooting in real places. now, of course, i, unlike, for example, my compatriot, ken loach, who was a great pioneer, who, again, was a great inspiration to me a little bit later on in the �*60s, with the work that

he and tony garnett, whom i also used to work with in television, bbc. their great revolution was to say, "well, let's not... "bbc drama is studio—bound. "let's get out there in the street "with the guys that shoot documentaries and make, "you know — make it real, in that sort "of spontaneous and alive way." but just thinking about some of your films and the way that you have explored social issues, whether that's unemployment in meantime, or back street abortion in vera drake, or class and race in secrets and lies, do you regard yourself as a political filmmaker? yes, i do. i mean, i think that my films, with the arguable exception of peterloo, which is obviously about the peterloo massacre and is without any question a simple statement about democracy, i think my films must be understood to be

implicitly political, rather than overtly political. you once said, i'm going to quote you here, "i know i return endlessly to the same preoccupations, "but i'm not always aware of it initially." what are those preoccupations, do you think? well, i mean, if you look at my films and plays, you know, about how we live, relationships, work, responsibility, surviving, secrets and lies, you know, the stuff of living, really. class ? and class, yes. it's funny, it's interesting, i didn't put that instinctively at the top of the list, but fair do�*s, you know. could you characterise a typical mike leigh film? what sort of films does mike leigh make? no, i couldn't do that and i'm not going to try. laughing you've chosen as your next cultural moment an experience from 1965. you directed the original production

of little malcolm and his struggle against the eunuchs, a play by david halliwell. you've described this experience as a life—changing experience. why? because... david halliwell, who was a close friend and a very talented guy, he's no longer with us, but he wrote the play so that he could play the main character, malcolm scrawdyke, and to cut a long story short, he was impossible to direct. he'd say, "oh, a director's just a chairman." i'd say, "why don't you move over there on that...?" he'd say, "why? "i could move there, i could move anywhere." and so — at this point, i'd already — we'd talked about this, i'd already formulated notions about — cos i wanted to write and direct and i'd formulated notions about other ways, collaborative ways

of making work. and this experience, much though i felt — think the play is great and much though i was very fond of halliwell and we had a good gang of folk involved, it was a defining experience, just because i decided that i would — this is not what i was going to do. i was not going to battle with scripts. i was going to find a way of creating organic work, basically. how do you regard theatre now, as somebody as somebody who is primarily regarded as a filmmaker? well, i mean, it's — they're two sides of the experience, really. i mean, i love filmmaking, i love everything about film, i love being out in the — making the heightened, distilled drama happen in real places. i love what you can do with film and apart from anything else, i love the way that film can be disseminated very widely. theatre is a whole different experience. it's in this closed place.

but the audience experience of theatre is very important because you're actually there, you know. i call it the trapeze factor. you go to the circus, you're in that space, she's in that space, on the trapeze. if she falls off that trapeze and breaks her neck, she's doing it in your space, you know. now, i always say that in films, in movies, i aspire to the condition of theatre, in other words, to the trapeze, to the tradition of trapeze, so that although the audience knows objectively that they're watching something on a two—dimensional screen, that you are drawn into it, so that you really have that sense of reality. and i want my plays in the theatre to aspire to the condition of cinema, in the sense that you really, really believe that it's up there in that real place and it's happening. one of your best known works is abigail's party, which people think about as

a play for today on television, but it actually started out on the stage. it was written as a stage play. are you surprised at the enduring appeal of that piece? yes and no. i mean, one of the reasons why it became so popular is because when it was... i mean, we did it in a theatre, hampstead theatre in north london, and it was very successful and the producer, margaret matheson, was short of something, something had been cancelled and so we wheeled it into the television studio after 104 performances in the theatre, so it was very solid, and just did it. the third time it was shown on bbc was on an evening... on a night when storms raged throughout the british isles. um, there was a strike on itv and a very posh programme withjonathan miller, an esoteric programme on bbc2 — there were only three channels at the time. this was before

channel 4 was invented. and so, 16 million people tuned in to bbc1 and watched abigail's party and in many ways, the rest is history. well, what do we want to listen to then, beverly? demis roussos. well, if everybody else wants to listen to demis roussos, we'll put him on. tone, do you like demis roussos? i yeah, he's all right. he's fantastic, isn't he? sue? i don't know him, i'm afraid. ah, you'll like him. he's lovely. sue, he's really great. - would you like to hear him? yes. yeah? laurence, angela likes demis roussos, - tony likes demis roussos, i like demis roussos- and sue would like to hear demis roussos. _ so, please, do you think- we could have demis roussos on? yes. thank you. at the time, i was —

i'd moved to the suburbs, with my ex — my now ex—wife, alison steadman, who of course was in it, we were living that — bohemian but nonetheless suburban experience, you know, um... and we were talking about having kids. indeed, my eldest son, toby leigh, the illustrator, is discernibly inside beverly's tummy when you watch the television version. i think i would have to say that the play worked as a piece and, you know, spoke to the audience really. what drives you on now, mike? well, i was slightly early and so i stood up at oxford circus for a bit and i did what i do, which is ijust clock people walking past, really. because i knew i was coming

here to do this programme, ijumped on the tube and i caught myself doing what i do, which is to clock everybody coming down the escalator... going up the escalator as we went down, just seeing characters, basically. so, fundamentally, what drives me is people and life and wanting to capture it and deal with it and distil it and tell stories about it. mike leigh, thank you very much indeed for sharing your cultural life. thank you. for broadcast episodes of this, go to bbc sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. hello there.

i think it's fair to say that the weather doesn't look and feel much like summer at the moment. these were some pictures taken on friday. it was particularly windy in the southwest of england and we actually had more rain in cornwall on friday than fell during the whole of last month, and we had rain far and wide across the uk as well. that rain has been working its way northwards on that weather front there, which is wrapped around an area of low pressure, and that will dominate the weather through the rest of the weekend. now, the rain, by saturday morning, is in the far north of scotland. temperatures, 12—14 degrees. some showers already arriving and we'll see more of those as the winds pick up, particularly across england and wales, with the strongest of the winds in the south. 40mph gusts quite widely, maybe a bit stronger, especially around some coastal areas. and it could bring some damage and some disruption, especially as those downpours arrive. and we'll see these showers breaking out more widely through the day. some wetter weather,

particularly for wales and western parts of england. thunderstorms almost anywhere. some heavy showers arriving in scotland and northern ireland where it's not going to be quite so windy here, but temperatures are still a bit disappointing, really, for the time of year. we're likely to find 18 or 19 widely. a touch warmer in the southeast where there shouldn't be as many showers in the afternoon. the low pressure itself is continuing to push northward. it may take away the worst of the weather for sunday. although, having said that, it could be a bit windier than saturday for scotland and northern ireland and we've got some showers here, some of them heavy, maybe some longer spells of rain. but not quite so windy on sunday for england and wales. there may be a bit more sunshine around, but there's still the chance of some showers too. even though there aren't as many showers around, we've still got those temperatures peaking at only 20 or 21 celsius in the afternoon. now, looking ahead to next week and some changes on the way. it's not going to be quite as windy next week. there may be a bit more sunshine around and fewer showers,

but we're not going to get any of the heat that's affecting southern parts of europe — you may be pleased about that. 22 or 23 degrees the top temperature, probably, over next week. it's going to be much hotter across southern parts of europe. temperatures not quite so high around coastal areas, but it will be especially hot as you head inland.

a mountain as his canvas. live from london, live from london, this is bbc news. this is bbc news. soaring temperatures are impacting countries across europe. southern europe and are expected to break records next week. the international criminal court begins an investigation into evidence of war crimes in sudan after three months of fighting. the largest strike in nearly six decades is underway in hollywood as actors join the picket lines. and the swiss artist who creates art of a gigantic size with the side of