Everybody's talking.

One of the most boring things I think it's possible to witness is actors talking about acting. How they did it. How painful it was. How emotionally dredging. It drives me nuts. Just get on and do it.

In the rehearsal room I've always been of the same mind. Get up there and do something. Then have a discussion about whether it works or not, but just keep trying things out. I know acting is supposed to be an art and  we are artists, but to me acting has always been a trade. A job. That doesn't mean to say it can't be done with the highest level of craftsmanship, but it involves technique. It is an artifice that is used to show truth. "To hold a mirror up to nature" as the great bard himself put it.

I think the best jobs have a mystique about them. I have absolutely no comprehension  as to how our plumber makes our boiler work, and this actually this makes me appreciate him even more. The fact that he  went to Eton, is blonde and has got arm muscles as big as my thighs has absolutely nothing to do with it.

 In my current role as co-chairman of The Actors Centre in Covent Garden, the idea of acting as a job to be pursued to the highest excellence is something that I am trying to institute. Industry led classes, practical advice on all aspects of an actor's life. Not to provide long sessions where actors can sit and gaze at their navel and chat away to others about it.

 Talking can be good. A problem shared is a maxim that is often prove true in my life and the support of my friends who have sometimes heard my troubles, and my wonderful partner who provides a sounding board for so many things, are much appreciated.

 Talking too much is dull. I am incredibly sorry for what the victims of Jimmy Saville and the inhabitants of the children's home in North Wales have suffered. I cannot even begin to imagine how one's childhood could be so mangled by the selfish and perverted desires of adults. Yet I am bored rigid of hearing about this on the news. It's not the victims who have been sounding off. For the most part they seem to have behaved with a dignity that is surprising and commendable, given what they have endured.

What absolutely riles me is the endless introspective navel gazing of the BBC and the media. The fact that the BBC is now investigating the BBC is enough to make me look at those three initials as a sendup of everything that the modern media stands for. At the time of the scandal the BBC was akin to the civil service. Antiquated, outmoded, and a gargantuan leviathan that did what it wanted with its own rules. As actors working for the BBC in the 70s and 80s we were treated like civil servants. Your pay was based not on the size of the part that you were about to play in a program, but on how many times you had worked for the BBC before. It was perfectly possible that an actor walking on with four or five lines would be paid more than the young actor who was playing the lead, just because they had worked for the BBC on a large number of occasions. Their "Cat" fee would be high. It was a pay system where longevity was rewarded. Once you were in, you were looked after.

That pay scheme went out of the window when the BBC was forced to compete in the free market, and although it has lowered actors fees across the board, in general it is a good thing. Experience, when it means somebody can do the job better, should be rewarded. But only when they can do the job better. As far as actors are concerned these days it's all immaterial. Nobody is paid well, so in that sense we have reached equality.

It was in this huge antiquated media civil service that these offences occurred. We can't change that. We can't go back in time and change it. Otherwise why don't we go back in time and try and change witch drownings, or religious persecution in the early 15th century. What we can do is learn from it, and make sure that we don't allow institutions to be in a position where things like this can happen again. We learn from allowing the victims to speak. What we learn by filling every news bulletin with introspective shit about one arm of a particular organisation attacking another I am not sure.

Of course somebody had to be fired. George Entwistle had sacrificial lamb written all over him, and yet even he and the BBC don't seem to have the wisdom of seeing that paying somebody off to the tune of half  a million pounds for 54 days work is hardly likely to build up the trust that the BBC is so sadly lacking at the moment. Do the honourable thing and donate it to ChildLine.

Then conduct your internal enquiries, tighten your procedures, slap your news editors, and start trying to reinstate the high standards that we all thought the initials BBC stood for. But for God's sake stop gazing at your navel…..

….. and stop talking about it!