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.

wow. 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. 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 that was because he was cracking up, and it was the end of their career. were they funny? no. but i was fascinated. it 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 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. and your father was a doctor, wasn't he? he was, and we lived over the surgery until i was about 13, in a very working class area. my memory of coming home from school during the surgery hours, i could go in through a sort of pass door by that end of the house... ..and all you'd hearfrom the, from the waiting room was... 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. 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, in case it might offend them. 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 run out of steam with the academicjourney i was on and announced that i wanted to apply to go to drama school... ..hewas... ..to say he was horrified would be a gross understatement. he thought it was the worst thing that could have 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, and, you know, the local... 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, and they showed — often they'd — usually the programme changed on a wednesday, we had a different programme on sunday, and each programme had two films in the theatre. you saw a lot of films, and perhaps we'll come back to that later. 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 frames on 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. what sort of 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. 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 being a great draughtsman — he was a fantastic observer, and his style of drawing influenced my style. 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. in other words, it was polished in his own terms, but it wasn't — it didn't affect to have a kind of gloss finish. you actually studied art, didn't you, at camberwell school of art? idid. did you ever think of becoming an artist, a visual artist? 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 for a 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, 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 than just 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 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. so the rehearsal process, the rehearsal room, then, 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. 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, 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. they showed it in school, for some reason. so i'm in london and i'vejust

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 film—maker, 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, who i 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 film—maker? 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. 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 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... and we've talked about this, i'd already formulated notions about... because i wanted to write and direct and i'd formulated notions about other 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 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 film—maker? well, i mean, it's... they're two sides of the experience really. i love film—making, 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 of that trapeze and breaks her neck, she's doing it in your space, you know. 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, 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, because 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. there was a strike on itv and a very posh programme withjonathan miller, an esoteric programme on bbc two. there were only three channels at the time. this was before channel 4 was invented. and so, 16 million people tuned in to bbc one 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?

yeah, he's all right. he's fantastic, isn't he? sue? i don't know him, i'm afraid. oh, 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 nevertheless suburban experience, you know, 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 here, and so i stood up at oxford circus for a bit and i did what i do, which is clock people walking past really. and then, 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. hello there. it's been another day with some blustery showers, but also some sunny spells around at times, too. it is set to stay very unsettled as we head through the rest of the week. and it's been a very wetjuly so far. in fact, some spots, particularly towards the north and the west

and also across central southern england, have seen around one and a half times the average july rainfall so far. we're only halfway through the month. of course, a lot of months to come and a lot more rainfall, too, particularly over the next few days or so. this is the rainfall accumulation chart. as you can see, around 30 to 50 millimetres more expected as we head through the next few days, especially out towards the west. now, this is our low pressure system from this weekend. it's pulling out towards scandinavia. so the winds will tend to lighten further as we head through the overnight period and into tomorrow. still a brisk northwesterly, though, for much of scotland. some longer spells of rain, plenty of cloud here throughout the night. further south, across much of england, wales, northern ireland will see some long, clear spells and temperatures will drop lower than they did last night. it's a cooler start to monday morning than we saw earlier on this morning, maybe high single figures where we keep those long, clear spells and then into monday, still plenty of cloud across much of scotland. we could see some more showers here develop as we head throughout the day. sunny spells and scattered showers elsewhere.

we've still got a key north westerly across northwest scotland, but elsewhere the winds will fall lighter. watch out for a rumble or two of thunder, particularly later on through the day across the midlands and into parts of lincolnshire, towards the south east of england. we could stay dry for much of the day. temperatures will be highest here 22, maybe 23 degrees celsius. now, looking at the wider picture on monday into tuesday, there is another occlusion approaching from the west that is likely to bring us some outbreaks of rain, some of which will turn out to be rather heavy at times across northern ireland. moving into north west england throughout the day, south west england will see this heavy rain turn into showers behind the main weather front. but towards the south east of england, i think it could stay dry again for much of the day. temperatures here 24 degrees celsius elsewhere underneath the rain in the high teens and the winds are a lot lighter. now, here's the outlook as we head through the rest of the week. wednesday, looking largely dry for many a few showers around. it won't feel too bad in the best of the sunshine. it will be turning cooler, though, on thursday with the north westerly winds.

welcome to newsday. welcome to newsday. reporting live from singapore, i'm monica miller. reporting live from singapore, i'm monica miller. the headlines. the headlines. almost 40 people die in devastating almost 40 people die in devastating floods in south korea, floods in south korea, following days of torrential rain. following days of torrential rain. it's a different picture in much of the us where there are scorching temperatures. i'm sophie long, live in las vegas seeing how people are coping on what could be the hottest day ever recorded. the spaniard, carlos alcaraz, atjust 20 years old, ends novak djokovic's reign, as king of wimbledon.

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