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Why My Dentist Thinks I Should Write a Memoir

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As we inch towards the end of the year — the time when we realise the bathroom scales aren’t faulty after all — we tend to look back. Lately, several people have suggested I should write my autobiography. This has come from a surprising range of sources: readers of my new novel My Lie, Your Lie, friends, colleagues, and — more worryingly — my retired dentist and a Canadian skateboarder. When those two align, one must take notice. Part of me winces at the thought: am I really that man at the dinner party? The one dispensing anecdotes while everyone else eyes the vol-au-vents? But perhaps they have a point. I’ve now written 15000 of my South Yorkshire childhood: adopted, realising I was gay, wrestling with school, and balancing intellectual curiosity with a burgeoning sexual desire — all while my parents ran a bustling village shop full of characters who would give Alan Bennett palpitations. I’m hoping it might be a decent read. It’s now out with agents (if you know a good one, do sh...
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Meeting Up

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The other week I found myself in Portugal. In a room with six hundred people. Yesterday it was Waterloo, just one person across a table. Both were meetings, and both worked. It’s strange how different these feel compared to Zoom or Teams. Those little squares on a screen always remind me of Celebrity Squares — for those of us old enough to remember it — only with less glamour and more broadband problems. Neat, tidy, very modern, but relating to people like that is a bit like looking through a stamp collection. Ordered, but no sense of life. In a room you feel things. You notice the air shift when people laugh, the little glance that says “yes, I’m with you,” or the silence that says “no, you’ve lost me.” It’s messy, it’s unpredictable, it’s human. And it’s where work actually gets done. I’ve been watching the COVID inquiry — the Boris Comedy Act, as it’s become — with its endless admissions of what went wrong. We talk about ruined education for thousands of children, but I can’t ...
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Booked Out

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At this time of year my mind always drifts back to school. New satchel, polished shoes, the faint smell of pencil shavings. And it’s been rather like that this past month — a busy time, conferences everywhere, me scurrying round with my homework in hand. Portugal was the big one. My biggest every year. And, in the end, it was rather marvellous. Everyone acquitted themselves, as my old headmaster used to say, and there were some brilliant touches. Chief among them, an interview with the racing driver Billy Munger. Inspiring, honest, authentic — and truly moving. The sort of lad who makes you feel you could climb Everest before breakfast, or at least manage the hill up to Marks & Spencer without wheezing. Back home I landed on the rarest of rare things — an on-time British Airways flight. Almost a miracle. I was still savouring that when the phone went at baggage claim. Lexus. Always Lexus. The part they’d promised to fit on Tuesday has been “back-ordered”. Which, near as I can t...
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“Tea, Sympathy, and a Fun-Size Mars Bar”

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When I’m in rehearsals with my director’s hat on, my job is simple: create a space where actors can be their best. They’ll do it differently to me—sometimes wildly differently—but that’s the joy. There’s no point in giving line readings or barking orders. I can offer tips, I can validate, I can occasionally mutter, “Perhaps try it without the limp this time,” but above all, I need to let them flourish. I have a single rule: I never ask actors to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. Which means trapeze, horseback, and bicycles are all out. I’ve attempted at least one of those in the past, and the less said the better. (Picture me in a harness, dangling like an apologetic ham, and you’ll get the idea.) It struck me recently that this is the same in the workplace. If you’re a leader in a company, you’re asking your staff to perform. But here’s the test: would you, yourself, do what you’re asking of them? This thought crystallised during my recent excursion into the seventh circle of he...
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The Waiting Game

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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...
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Tick

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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...
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On the Importance of Accounting for Oneself

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When I left the Soviet Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire at eighteen — tender, earnest and armed with a suitcase full of ambition and socks — I went to Manchester to study drama. Three years of Chekhov, Gorky, tragedy, comedy, and the occasional play that wasn’t an act of national endurance. I thought I was embarking on a life of art. I didn’t realise I was also embarking on a life of accounts. Yet here I am, decades later, still keeping ledgers. Not metaphorical ones — actual, black-and-red, hard-backed ledgers. Bought annually, with all the quiet ceremony of a religious observance, from the sort of stationer that also sells brown string and those pens you have to lick. We had a marvellous tutor at drama school called John McGregor — an actor who’d once played Cornwall in Lear and had the receipts to prove it. He taught us on Friday mornings, not about Ibsen or inner truth, but about the tax-deductible nature of fake beards. It was John who first explained that keeping track of ...
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