applause tim minchin, the cabaret star who wrote matilda the musical. he grew up in western australia, started writing songs in his teens and made his name as a musical comedy performer at the 2005 edinburgh festival. mrtim minchin! after a series of live solo albums, tim was commissioned to write a stage adaptation of the roald dahl book, matilda. the show went on to win olivier and tony awards and has now been turned into a film. in this episode of this cultural life, the radio 4 podcast, he reveals his formative influences and experiences and how, despite fame and acclaim, bad reviews still hurt. no, i'm not good at taking criticism. you still take it personally? 0h, hugely, yeah.

i'll take myjacket off. yeah, you'll get warm. you'll get warm. what, are you going to ask me some quite heated questions? yeah. you're going to be sweating. no, stay cool. let's stay cool. tim minchin, welcome to this cultural life. hi, john, how are you? you were born in northampton. yeah, can't you tell? and moved to perth in australia at a young age? yeah. musicalfamily? what sort of music was played at home? not particularly. although one quirk of my childhood is that in my house, from a very young age, was my great—grandmother's pianola, which some people call a pedal piano, and a lot

of people had pedal pianos and inherited them, but mostly, they sat there gathering dust. but my mum retained ours and kept it working because we had this collection of something like 300 or 400 pianola rolls, scrolls, and so that was played a lot. and so i grew up listening to all these old pre—war songs like, you know, funiculi, funicula and all these weird songs and then, you know, sound of music and oliver! and all those musicals were on pianola rolls. i mean, it feels like a completely different generation. it's a mechanised piano. so then did you start emulating on the piano? were you following along on the keys? i wonder if... ..the extent to which that influenced me. certainly, it's not that simply causal, but, yeah, and look, mum and dad had a few records, but they weren't musos. interestingly, my brother took up guitarjust as a kid and i learnt piano and i didn't really take to music lessons

very well and neither did he, but he was much more interested in music than i was. he had all the australian bands on his wall and would, because he was learning chords, he could teach himself songs and that was, in the end, the thing that kept me on music was . my brother going, "oh, come and work out the intro to light my fire", because, you know, we'd listen and i would do the keyboard bits. do you regard yourself first and foremost as a musician or a comedian? 0h, certainly not a comedian. i mean, i would consider myself a musician and then probably a writer in the broader sense and then an actor and then a comedian, probably, now. now? now. while i was a comedian, i would have happily called myself a comedian. but even during that time, i tended not to call myself a comedian. so you've passed through the comic phase, then? well, really, i got known as a comedian, but i was always a cabaret artist who was just pretty funny between songs. the best thing i ever did was stop calling myself a cabaret artist and start calling myself a comedian, and everything went bang. cheering the first choice that you've made for this cultural life is being asked to write a musical version of love's labour's lost when you were still a teenager.

yeah. what was this for? well, i was very lucky. i went to a school that had a drama department. in fact, it had a sort of adjunct theatre company called midnight youth theatre company. and through high school, i always did the school plays. i never got the lead roles, but i kind of was into it. butjenny davis, who remains a very good friend of mine, who's a theatre maker from perth of my parents�* generation, sort of wrote me a note one day and said, "i'm doing this version "of love's labour's lost that has songs in it that someone else had written some years before. but we think the songs need to be rewritten, would you write the songs for it? we have a $500 budget, lovejenny." and it was on a card. you know, this is 1994. and i sort of thought, "i don't know if i can do that, but if she's asking me to, she must think i can." but you were, what, 16? no, it was the year i turned 18. so i was 17 and a half. still quite an ambitious commission to take on.

yes, i suppose so. but it was a youth theatre company that i felt very familiar with, and i pretty quickly decided i could do it. just by sitting down and trying. and i had written a lot of songs by then and i had written, you know, i had gone through this phase in my teens, like a good teenager, of musicalising ts eliot poems. like, i've got this song that i can still hear that goes: # let us go, then, you and i # when the evening is spread out against the sky # like a patient, etherised upon a table...# yeah, i know it. right? we all know that. and by the way, i've gone back to eliot in my later years and it stands up, man. it's brilliant. it's beautiful stuff. anyway, i even had, i did a bit of wasteland as well. # this is the way the world ends...# like, i was using this grunge stuff coming out of seattle and, like, putting it to ts eliot lyrics. so i was already writing music to pre—existing lyrics and this love's labour's lost thing was built of the script, which has a few songs in it, you know, like all his comedies have a "hey, nonny nonny" and a bit of a thump,

but then it was enhanced with other sort of metaphysicists and elizabethan poets likejohn donne, but other shakespearean sonnets that have been wedged into this script to kind of make it more of a musical. and it really worked. and i wrote this set of songs and i think we performed it for three nights and everyonejust loved it. and everyone in the cast and everyone who saw that show remembers it. # 0 mistress mine where are you roaming? # 0 stay and hear, your true love�*s coming...# it was profound because i could feel both the kids who were in the show and the audiences, i could feel them, the stillness, i could feel that i had captured them. and that's a very intoxicating feeling to go, "oh, i've got these people. that person's got a tear in their eye. i made that happen." but i thinkjenny asked me, "can you write songs for a musical?"

and i went, "i don't know, i'lltry." and the answer was, yeah, i can. i mean, a bit. and then somewhere between then and now, i got better at it. your next choice for this cultural life is the 1997 album, whatever and ever amen, by the american singer—songwriter ben folds. what ben did is gave me hope as what i later described myself as a rock �*n�* roll nerd, you know? in that song, i say, "i always dreamt of being a star, but he learnt piano instead of guitar, which in the �*90s doesn't get you very far" — because that was my experience. i was deep in the grunge. west australia, in my part of perth in the �*90s, was just grunge and i was a pianist doing songs for theatre and stuff and thinking, "is there...? i mean, obviously i can't sell records, my band won't go anywhere because, you know, it's too nerdy." and then ben came along, just thrashing the hell out

of this piano. it sort of gave me permission to go, "oh, that thing i do naturally, which isjust bash the hell out of a piano and that kind of aggressive attitude to the piano, i don't have to sit there like, you know, a jazz or a classical player. i can have my own... "there is a place for pop." it's a rock and roll attitude to the keyboard... that's exactly right. ..which ben folds brought, but also, there was a kind of a literate sensibility to the lyrics as well. there's a complexity, isn't there? there's also a very sardonic humour. that's exactly right. and ben, like many of the bands i've loved, uses lyrics... they're not comedians, and this plays into the conversation about my musical comedy. you know, the kinks, remember, they were writing dedicated follower of fashion

and "i want to be like david." like, they were doing musical satire, and the beatles were winking and nodding and giggling through the whole thing, until they got super—serious. but so much of it was sardonic. and ben folds definitely, with rockin�* the suburbs and all that, and one angry dwarf and all that, was right on some sort of cusp between pop and satire. 0ne angry dwarf and 200... solemn faces. ..solemn faces, which is the opening track on this album. great title, isn't it? forever and ever amen. yeah. # now i'm big and important # 0ne angry dwarf # and 200 solemn faces # and you # if you really want to see me, check # the papers and the tv...# that's a revenge song, isn't it? yeah, i guess. you have written your own revenge song in the past, haven't you? i have written lots of revenge songs, yeah. there's one in particular.

who is phil daoust? 0h, phil. oh, god. yeah, i feel bad about that. it's one of those interesting ones. when people ask about giving yourtime again, "what would you not do and say?" and with me, given that a lot of my comedy was sort of flirting around the edges of offence, they expect me to talk about that stuff, but actually when i regret... i don't... i regret hurting individual people. phil was a journo with the guardian in my first year at edinburgh. when i wasjust... it's not like i had spent years being lauded. i had spent years getting nowhere and years with closed doors. and i finally had an open door and everyone was being very generous in edinburgh. all right. so, anyway, i've been here for a month playing funny songs on a piano. i'm not a standup. i thought, why not, now i'm feeling a bit cocky, do a bit of standup? and he was the firstjourno to kind of do the sneer,

that, of course, comes whenever anyone gets any popularity. there's got to be an equal and opposite reaction. and he wrote in the guardian, which was the paper i read and which had, what, in 2005, five million readers? it was pretty big because it was before it alljumped off the page, and he wrote this just utterly sneering review, one—star review, really snobby in that sort of guardian way, like, quoting shakespeare. i was like, "how dare you quote shakespeare at me? i'll quote shakespeare at you!" and just incredibly sneering and ungenerous, a thing that just says i'm terrible at myjob. it really, really threw me. and so, like, a year later, when i had to come up with a new show, i thought, "well, i'm going to take that guy down." so i wrote the song for phil daoust. # ding, dang, ding dang dong # this ends my phil daoust song # everybody sing along # la la la

la la la la # i hope something you love catches on fire, phil # ding, dang, dong, i've written you this special song # to show how far i've come along # in my efforts to be more mature in the face # of negative feedback.# which really is a song about me not being able to take criticism. it is a complete mickey—take of my own insecurity, but on the way to pointing a spotlight on the fact that i'm pathetic about not being able to take that criticism... because it's quite extreme. it's very, very extreme. it talks about tearing pieces of his face meat off and making his children watch, you know, like, it's like a murder fantasy. and it was very funny, and people loved it. # and it was very self—critical, but it was very, very mean. and it was a joke, but ijust didn't know what was subsequently going to happen, which is that i was going to have the power of a guardianjournalist,

that very soon after i wrote that song, i could slander anyone and really have an effect on their lives. because youtube was taking off and my little 150—seat, 50—seat cabaret rooms where i was doing this dark comedy, i suddenly realised that anything i said could spread. and that is a profound change, because you're no longer some little guy in a cabaret room punching up at some meanie. you're someone who can really hurt someone. and i think that song probably hurt phil. i think probably his name... do you know that? have you talked to him? i tried to. we did a little online. we talked and sort of displayed that we had forgiven each other. but i'd got the video eventually taken down, but not soon enough. the irony, of course, is that if you hadn't written that song and hadn't performed it publicly, nobody would have remembered. very few people would have remembered the original review. probably, except that it was the number one hit on my name for a year when i was trying to make a career, when my wife was having a baby. i'm living overseas. you type my name into google and a one—star review saying i'm talentless was what people read. like, that was my feeling. was like, "hey, phil daoust, do you reckon you can use

clever words to take someone down? 0k, hold my beer." that was my attitude. i was like, "you don't use... that's my tool." do you regret that now? regret the tone or the anger? no, no, no. i think it was very, very clever. and i think it was... i don't have regrets because i don't even understand the idea of regret. in a hypothetical parallel universe, given my time again, knowing where i was going to go and that i was going to have so much power and such a loud megaphone, i wouldn't have done it, but i didn't know even what digital technology was doing quite at that point. but are you better at taking criticism now? oh, no, no, no. you never get... you never... i'm better at not reading it, and i'll never be in a situation again where one person's assessment of me can be so dominant in the digital space. but no, i'm not good at taking criticism. you still take it personally? 0h, hugely, yeah. when did the tim minchin stage image and persona develop?

you know, the shock of wild hair, the very thick kohl eyeliner? yeah. make—up. but then also paired with a frock coat. the concert pianist�*s tails. yeah. when did that start? i mean, it was quite a quick sort of not particularly thought about decision about the end of 200a. i was in sydney writing a little musical with my friends, actually, and this cabaret thing i was doing was definitely quite clearly looking like the thing i should concentrate on. people were really enjoying it and the room was... you know, sometimes i was playing to two people in the audience, but in general, people were starting to take a bit of an interest. # you could be clever as voltaire # but it won't get you nowhere...# if you want to sell discs... and very early 2005, i did a show at the seymour centre in sydney and i had just decided to... i've got very curly hair. i decided to straighten my hair, don't know why. and i'd lost a bit of weight and ijust thought, ijust had this sense that maybe

this show i was doing, which at the time was called dark side, might be a bit of a chance. and so i thought... i've always had a fairly pragmatic attitude to this. i'm not someone who thinks, "well, i'm an artist, they will come because i'm brilliant." i'm like, "how do i make something that people are just going to really enjoy? like, how do i entertain these people with everything i've got?" and i always thought mucking around with ideas of rock and roll and virtuosity, which is really what i built my career on, is playing with ideas of punk versus virtuosity, high status versus low status. and i didn't think about it too much, but i think that's what i was doing. i was like, "what if i'm this weird genius who then is just swearing his box off aboutjesus, you know?" darwin's theory of natural selection. i mean, not only is it... what's the word... ? right. if that is an image that is constructed, is the stage persona of tim minchin different to the offstage tim minchin?

he really was then. the 2005 guy was a character. it was sort ofjust a person i was pouring my nerves into, probably. i was hiding behind a sort of... a kind of slightly stuttering, kind of, "oh, i'm so brilliant, i can't control my thoughts." there's a streak, a kind of misanthropic thing. a little bit like a battered... yeah, like he might not like going outside very much, that he spends his life in his own head, having these slightly quirky thoughts, these sort of sexually perverted thoughts and, you know, talking about inflatable dolls. # your love for me is not debatable # your sexual appetite�*s insatiable # ever make me waitable # delectable # inflatable you...# and then just going on around about logical philosophy and wearing... i'm looking like edward scissorhands crossed with robert smith from

the cure, and you got the sense that he was someone who didn't get out much. yes. and that's very different from who i am and who i was. the next choice you've made for this programme is being commissioned to write the songs for matilda the musical. so you were approached by the director, matthew warchus, to create these songs for the adaptation of the roald dahl book for the royal shakespeare company. why did he ask you? well, this was 2008, and i had... i was now a bit more established as a comedian in the uk and i was touring, and i thinkjeanie 0'hare, who was the literary manager at the rsc, pointed matthew towards me as a singer—songwriter, basically, who had some dexterity with the english language, arguably. and matthew came and saw my show, which was called ready for this at that stage, my 2008 show.

# only a ginger can call another ginger, ginger...# and he enjoyed it. it probably would've been a bit edgy for matthew. he wouldn't have necessarily agreed with everything i said, but he thought my songs were very clever and angular in a way that he thought matched dahl. he wasn't sure about whether i was right because it was all very sardonic and sarcastic. but sometimes, for an encore, i'd go on and drop all the irony. and that night i went on and played white wine in the sun, which is my christmas song for my daughter. and about your family, about reconnecting? about home, and it makes people sob. # you won't understand # but you will learn some day # # that wherever you are and whatever you face # # these are the people who make you feel safe # in this world # and matthew went, "0h, 0k,

he's got that as well." and so he called me into a meeting and asked me if i'd heard of roald dahl and the story of matilda, which of course i had, because dahl was huge in my childhood. and, yeah, itjust has completely changed my life. matilda just changed my life. # r-e-v-o-l-t-i-n- revolting times! # we'll s-i-n-g- # u-s-i-n-g # it is 2l84u...# # we r—e—volting # there are themes in roald dahl�*s matilda, that of revenge, anarchy, using your wits to overcome an adversary, a violent adversary as well. is that part of what appealed for you? i think so. i think i really like writing from children's point of view, a kid unpacking the fact that she realises she's different from other people. it was just such a joy to pour all my 37—year—old knowledge into a six—year—old genius.

# and when i grow up i will be smart enough # to answer all the questions that you need to know # # the answers to when you're a grown—up # # and when i grow up # i will eat sweets every day # 0n the way to work # and i will go t bed late every night # matilda the musical has now been turned into a film. # r-e-v-o-l-t-i-n- revolting times! # we'll s-i-n-g # u-s-i-n-g # we'll be r-e-v-o-l-t-i-n-g. .. it means that millions more people around the world will get to see and hear your songs.

once it becomes that big, does it change your relationship with your work, with the work that you produce for matilda, do you think? yeah, itjust has its own life. and one of the extraordinary strokes of luck in my life, of which there have been many, is that this thing i helped create, itjust lives without me and it lives in culture. and, you know, a high school in sydney right now is doing it, well, dozens of high schools in sydney are doing it. and you know, the finnish version, i just got sent the translation, i think the mandarin back translation and then there's children's books and now there's this incredible feature film. # sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty.# and i actually feel uncomplicated about it. i feel like matilda, of all the things i've done, there's just no... ..downside to matilda. it's done so much good in the world. it's generated incredible opportunities for kids and money for charities and good messages for young women. and it's... i'm very, very lucky

to have been involved. and a personal affirmation for you, for your work. has it changed the way that you write songs or the way that you feel about your confidence, for instance, in being a songwriter? yeah, it completely changed my life because i was on this comedy trajectory, and i think i always thought i would leverage the reputation i had got. i always wanted to get back to acting and stuff, but i... i think i had basically gone, "0h, satire, that's obviously my thing." and obviously it was, i obviously had some propensity, but when matthew asked me to write matilda, not only did he get me to write it, but after my first drafts, one of the things he said to me is, "oh, this song here, you're kind of wink... "you're commenting, it's commenting on itself? it's very meta?" and i'm like, yeah, that's, i was born in 1975. we are the meta generation. it's all irony. you know, you're a step removed. you're commenting, right? and it's only got worse since that.

he appealed to me to try and write less ironically, to not be, like, going, "oh, this is like a bit from les mis", or stop musically commenting on itself and stop textually commenting on itself. he was like, "just write..." i mean, he didn't put it in that many words. he just gave me a nudge in that direction. i realised what he was saying is i didn't need to armour myself with meta, with irony, with satire. i could just write with words to try and elicit a genuine emotion out of the audience. and once he gave me permission to do that, it actually... changed my life. matilda sits in culture as something that altered british culture a tiny bit, and i contributed to it and that made me think, "oh, i could be an artist, notjust a clown." so ijust am very, very lucky. and i am lucky that i was able to leverage some of my losses into gains to find ways to talk about the human condition.

i mean, if you're writing about the human condition, which most artists are on some level, and i definitely am in a quite explicit way, the how are we to live question, like what is moral and what is meaningful? and groundhog day and upright and even matilda, they're all explorations of how to live ethical lives. if that's yourjob, then all the slings and arrows and all the blows must necessarily be leveraged into your future work. and in doing so, in turning them into work, yourjob is to take the manure of your life and plant flowers in it and take all those nutrients of grief and rejection and whatever, and figure out how you can use it to make nice stuff. tim minchin, thank you so much for sharing your cultural life. it's a pleasure. thanks for listening to me ramble on! good. beautiful. nice. we're good actors. yeah, that was good. we should be

the new mighty boosh. for podcast episodes of this cultural life go to bbc sounds or where ever you get your podcasts. hello. saturday was certainly a lively day of weather with lots of showers around, some thunderstorms, and... ..a water spout! well, this was spotted just off the coast of sandown in the isle of wight. looks kind of terrifying, doesn't it? now, the day's showers were particularly widespread across all of the uk. the wettest spot was crosby, merseyside — picking up 20 millimetres of rain — but many of us did see downpours through the day, and right now those showers are continuing to fade away — just one or two continuing across parts of wales and western areas of england, as well. but otherwise, most of us have got clear skies at the moment, with temperatures hovering

around about ten to 12 degrees celsius as we head into the first part of sunday. now, there will be a change to the weather for northern ireland on sunday — we've got a little bit of rain coming through here — but for scotland, england, wales, it is another day of sunshine and showers. so a bright start for northern ireland before that band of rain arrives. showers from the word go across wales and western england. but for most of scotland and eastern areas of england, should be a dry start, and heading into the afternoon, the showers will tend to focus along this convergence line across eastern england and maybe eastern scotland, too. now, if you're underneath that, yes, you could see some heavy downpours and some thunderstorms, but away from that, should be dry through the afternoon for a good part of west scotland, wales and western areas of england. and where the sunshine comes out, although temperatures for many will be just below average, it will feel warm in the sunshine. reading/leeds festival continues. now, there is a risk of seeing a shower, i think, as we go through sunday. and for notting hill carnival — yes, here, too, we could see an odd passing shower —

although for large parts of the day it should be dry. now, heading into what will be bank holiday monday for a number of you, we've got a weak ridge of high pressure moving in, and what that will do is it will tend to kill the showers off. could still be one or two, but not as widespread as we've seen over the course of the weekend. so a bit more in the way of dry weather, a bit more in the way of sunshine, and temperatures an odd degree higher — about 19 to 21 or 22 in the warmest spots. beyond that — tuesday, wednesday, thursday — low pressure dominates, really, the weather picture. well, we've been used to that for a good stretch of august, haven't we? and that means showers return from tuesday onwards — some of them turning heavy and thundery with some warm august spells of sunshine in between. heading into september, little change.

live from washington, this is bbc news. three people are dead in florida after what authorities are calling a racially motivated mass shooting. thousands descend on washington's national mall

marking the 60th anniversary of a civil rights march where the "i have a dream" speech was delivered by martin luther king jr. and fifa suspends spain's soccer chief over world cup final kiss, as coaching staff resign. hello, i'm helena humphrey. we begin in the us state of florida, where three people are dead in what authorities are calling a racially motivated mass shooting. we've just heard that president biden has been briefed on the situation. the attack took place at a discount store in the city of jacksonville. the city's sheriff says the suspected shooter was a white male in his 20s, who turned the gun on himself. he killed two women and one man, all black, with no other injuries reported. the gunman was carrying a handgun and an ar—15—style rifle, while wearing a mask and tactical vest.