claytoncast

Most people, if they’re lucky, only do three or four job interviews in their life. A couple of shifts here, a rung or two up the ladder there, and before you know it you’re in a swivel chair with a pension scheme and a lanyard. Lovely. For actors, it’s different. We do them all the time. Weekly, sometimes daily. Except we don’t call them interviews. We call them auditions. These days, that often means a self-tape — two syllables that strike more fear into the average actor than “tax return”. Picture the scene: you, in front of the only bit of white wall in your flat that isn’t cracked, crooked or adorned with a poster of Les Mis. You’re trying to summon the emotions of a broken man while balancing your phone on a stack of cookbooks and praying the neighbour’s dog doesn’t start yapping during your big moment. You send it off, you wait, you hear nothing. Then weeks later you’re watching telly with a digestive and a cuppa when there it is — the very job you auditioned for, being play...

In my grandparents’ shop in the Soviet Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, debt wasn’t so much a matter of money as a sort of permanent fixture — like the weighing scales or the flypaper. Nobody thought of it as debt. It was just “tick,” and everybody had some. The shop was the beating heart of the village, and part of that was letting people have things on trust until Friday. Mrs Whittaker, say, popping in for her twenty Park Drive, would be told by my mother — or my grandmother, depending on whose turn it was — “Oh, and there’s six and seven on your slate.” If Mrs Whittaker paid up, fine. If she didn’t, my mother would sigh in the manner of someone taking on an additional personal bereavement and say, “All right, love. But I will be putting your name in the window.” I never recall her actually doing it, though the possibility was enough to keep the village in a state of mild moral vigilance. In a mining community where everybody knew everybody’s business — and some of their unde...