I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

  Flesh and Blood ended up winning two Royal Television Society Awards, Peter for best writer, and myself for best actor. Incredibly, I found myself up against Albert Finney, who was nominated for The Gathering Storm. When Albert’s face came up on the screen, I was convinced he was going to win it. There is part of me that will never quite believe I won an acting award ahead of my hero.

  Peter, for sure, deserved his award. He’s an incredibly brave writer. He enters areas that others wouldn’t even go near, let alone walk away from. He understands the need, not simply to give a voice to those with different lives, different needs, but to reveal them as themselves, not patronised, not moulded to suit preordained and stereotyped ideas of what makes good television. Look at Leon Harrop as Ralph in The A Word – the fact he has Down’s syndrome is neither here nor there. Neither Peter Kirby in Flesh and Blood nor Leon have been defined by ‘disability’. That suits me down to the ground. I have always had my eyes open – my mum and dad would always, always, encourage me to see the person first. Inclusivity is a word oft bandied around to the extent that cynics roll their eyes. It should never be seen as something tiresome, a box to be ticked, and then tacitly ignored. It is a real vital thing. If anything, it is me who has been included in Leon’s life, not the other way round. He can do ‘northern curmudgeon’ as well as any actor I’ve ever known. It is Leon every time who delivers the chemistry that makes the scenes with him and Maurice so memorable. It is Leon who enriches those scenes as he enriches the world he occupies away from the camera.

  The A Word says so much to me because it is, at its heart, about northern families and their inability to communicate. Amid that carnage of stilted conversation, Leon is in fact the most open and honest of us all because he lacks our conditioned inhibition. It’s that thing again – the limitations of communication within the confines of masculinity. That is what Peter is so very adept at writing about, the beauty being that he can find such great and poignant humour in it.

  I don’t have to go far to find Maurice – he is definitely, no shadow of a doubt, 100 per cent, a version of my dad: the unintentional comedy, the brusque insensitivity, the whole ‘What? Me?’ My dad always did it with a twinkle, and I try to do that with Maurice. He’s cleverer than he lets on. There’s a knowingness to Maurice.

  It’s clear I have been extremely fortunate to have appeared in some magnificent productions by some magnificent writers. It’s not just me; there are many who recognise a brilliant complexity to those programmes, and that comes from the pen way before the camera. If an actor wants a career in film, they should probably kiss directors’ arses a lot more than I have. I want to be successful, but not at the cost of why I started acting, which is to be original. Ongoing relationships with writers have delivered some of my best work on that score. They have delivered my career. Look at Shallow Grave. That film wasn’t dependent on Kerry Fox, Ewan McGregor and me. They could just as easily have cast Kate Winslet, Robert Carlyle and Linus Roache. Actors are ten-a-penny. My performance in Shallow Grave is very well looked upon, but that’s because it’s very well written. I know, because I have worked in the industry, that there are hundreds of actors as good as me. I got the role, and if you get a role that’s well written, basically all you’ve got to do is use your common sense as an actor and deliver it. The best actors know that.

  Somebody came to see me in Macbeth. ‘You were the best thing in it,’ they said.

  ‘Well, I had the best part,’ I pointed out.

  And I did. Purely because I was on stage so much, people might have made a judgement that I was the best. There’s a huge amount of luck to what we do, and I am a good actor – there are a lot of good actors. I am also a good actor who used to have good angles, genetic gifts. And I am an actor who has always appreciated great writers.

  There is one I have yet to work with, Mike Leigh. There’d have been a pleasant symmetry since he too was raised in Salford. Mike is another man of high principle. He thinks you have to come from working class to play working class. I think he’s right. To have working class play working class makes for a richer performance. I certainly don’t like to see middle-class actors playing working class. I always think I can see through it. And I don’t like it in principle because they’ve got enough work anyway. But I do like it if one of us lot acts up a social class or two and really pulls it off. I think of it as revenge.

  For me, the connection with a writer goes way beyond a script. I feel I understand writers in a way some actors don’t. Or maybe it’s just I take an interest in them. It’s an immersive experience, which I attribute to my dad, his love of crosswords, books, opening the dictionary, spotting a word – ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ I can still feel the charged atmosphere of him reading to me in bed, his ability to inhabit those two particular books, Tom Sawyer and Black Beauty, the colour he brought to those stories. There was a point of connection in that room, as if our souls touched through the written word, and I think that very connection led directly to my fierce adherence to writers. My fall-outs on set have often been about defending the writer and their relationship with the audience. Russell T. Davies, Peter Bowker, Jimmy – I always feel they have a pact with the viewer that ‘you are brighter than me’. Run-ins with directors have come when they’ve been simplifying the script or conjuring up visual clichés and asking me to act them, ignoring the complexity to the writing. Shortcuts. In the early days, Jimmy was always happy if I was on set because he knew if it came to it, I’d be another voice backing his corner, the Roy Keane to his Alex Ferguson. But I was standing up for the audience as well. In the James McTaggart Memorial Lecture that Dennis Potter gave in 1993, he talked about the audience’s intelligence. I identified with every word. As a child, I sat in a room with my mum and dad and watched serious dramas and felt just how engaged they were, how concerned, and how complex their reactions were. I always regard the audience as my mum and dad – very, very sensitive, intuitive people.

  It saddens me that TV drama covering social issues has slipped so far off the radar, and, no doubt, some remarkable writers with it. Peter Flannery, Peter Bowker and Jimmy McGovern have shown that television that covers real lives can, if written correctly, have wide appeal. Writers like Alan Bleasdale, who gave us Boys from the Blackstuff, and Jim Allen, who wrote The Spongers, were seen then and are seen now by some as soapboxing. They were doing nothing of the sort. They took people experiencing serious social issues and turned them into real multi-dimensional characters. Bleasdale didn’t soapbox. His characters didn’t deliver party political speeches. Why would they? That’s not what happens in normal houses, normal lives. Instead, Bleasdale pursued the truisms of working-class existence. His characters were on the floor but he, and indeed they, had a fine line in tragi-comedy, and that, better than any big set speech, reflects working-class life. Peter does the same with The A Word. He highlights social discrepancy, but politics doesn’t come into it. Alan Clarke was the same. He wrote and directed some of the most incredible works of social realism, but he didn’t try to come down on left or right. With Scum he said, ‘Here’s what borstal’s like.’ Same with Elephant, about sectarian killings in Belfast. That’s the gap he left when he died early. Jimmy McGovern is in that gap, but it’s a very small space to get into, and it’s getting smaller all the time. TV has become chewing gum for the eyes, all high-concept glossy drama that will fit nicely in a boxset.

  Commissioners should credit the viewer with a depth of intelligence, an inquiring mind, and a belief in TV as a tool of awareness, reflection and betterment. Equally, they should recognise that there are incredible writers out there capable of delivering such television as entertainment, not soapboxing, but revealing real life with all its incumbent pain, pathos, ridiculousness and humour.

  Our Friends in the North is the ultimate in applying ambition to television. I retain that ambition for the medium, but the truth is there hasn’t been a broad-scope social and political drama made since. For years, I’ve been saying there h
as to be a black Our Friends in the North. Take a 17-year-old disembarking the Windrush in 1948 and follow them and their family through the generations. Why has that programme not been made? Trouble is, while the country has changed, the industry hasn’t. How many black theatre directors are there? How many mainstream black actors? How many black agents? The industry reflects modern multicultural society in a pittance of ways.

  The same can be said for drama school. If I was starting again today, I wouldn’t be able to go, full stop. Neither would Maxine Peake and hundreds of others who came through that system. The ladder has been pulled up. Financial hardship allied to a lack of grants means working-class actors are finding it harder and harder to gain a foothold. I’ve spoken on the subject many times and, as someone who scrambled over the barbed wire to see the problem from the inside, that’s only right. Of course I’m going to go out and say, ‘Do you know how many of us make it into this profession?’ Of course I’m going to go out and say, ‘Shakespeare is fantastic but it doesn’t have to be received pronunciation and it doesn’t have to be white.’ Of course I’m going to have that attitude. I think it’s perfectly legitimate. Even though I did make it into drama school, I’m pretty sure the likes of me were only there to fill a quota – ‘We need eight from Oxford, six from Cambridge, and two scrotes from up north.’ Up until about twenty years ago, there’d be one northerner in a Shakespeare cast and they’d play the clown, Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, or the fool. That’s someone who is white and male. The world is virtually set up for me. The only problem I’ve ever had is being working class. Try being black, working class and female.

  I should be making the kind of programmes that deliver those opportunities. Actions instead of words. Instead, I’m still just an actor. But the time will come. I won’t be hiding in a Trojan Horse. I’ll be out in the open, and I’ll have some incredible writers alongside me.

  19

  MAN AND MASCULINITY

  ‘There’s going to be girls there, is there?’ I was fifteen and going to Butlin’s at Barry Island with school.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, you know the score, don’t you? Johnnies and all that.’ Dad paused. ‘Do you want some more bread?’

  Someone asked me recently if my dad ever told me he loved me as a kid. I almost laughed in their face. It was clear he did love me, as per the games as a kid, but it was never going to come out verbally. He wouldn’t have done it even if he was so inclined because he knew he had to toughen me up for what was coming next. It’s undeniable that if you raise children with sensitivity and introspection, they are not going to survive very long among heavy artillery or, more likely in my case, heavy industry.

  That right there is the seed of the gender gap, specifically what it is to be masculine. If a man is to be effective, he must shut down his vulnerability, a conscious brutalisation process that goes back years, decades, centuries. Only in 1899, my grandparents’ era, was the school-leaving age raised from ten to twelve. It was raised from fourteen to fifteen only in the year of my birth. The message was clear – ‘You are only going to be given the most rudimentary education and emotionally you are going to be raised in an environment that makes you capable of hard, relentless work.’ Tough love they call it, and it lives on even now. In my family, it consisted of a lack of physical demonstrativeness and a stultifying dearth of emotional communication, a stoic working-class northernness if you like. Even now there’s a part of me that believes we don’t have a right to those finer feelings. We don’t deserve those emotions as they are the realm of a cerebral class. I was definitely born into that crucible and so was Dad. That’s why we had to manufacture closeness. That’s why sliding on the oilcloth and grabbing his paper, and his reading to me in bed, were so important to us both. They said ‘I love you’ without ever having to use the words.

  As I got older, we found common ground with a private love of character and words. He recognised a similar appreciation in myself, hence the leaning over the arm of his chair with those fierce eyes reading definitions from the dictionary. That was my window into Dad’s soul. While some people may recall lung-crushing embraces from their fathers, or long and complex discussions, for me, and many others I suspect, that closeness came from incidents rather more obtuse. We’d be watching TV together and suddenly, when the Granada logo came up, Dad would reverse the letters and go ‘Adanarg’. It sounds so trivial, but actually revealed an absurdist element that contrasted so much with his tension and machismo. It demonstrated a shared love of language even if we were hopeless at expressing its finer emotional forms to one another.

  There is no doubt in my mind that I looked to the arts to express what I felt about my family, and not only landed on acting but became the kind of actor I am. It is purely because we didn’t reveal our passions and our loves that I am this very physical actor. Some actors, born from a world of openness and considered education, exist on an intensely emotional and intellectual plain. I don’t know how to intellectualise a role, but I do know how to physically inhabit it.

  The extent of my physicality isn’t something I have always been aware of. It was a factor largely learned, again, from Peter Vaughan in a bar in Newcastle while working on Our Friends in the North.

  ‘You’, he told me, ‘need to learn how big you are.’

  ‘That’s fine coming from you, Peter,’ I said. He was huge – big craggy face, long nose. ‘I don’t mean your size,’ he replied. ‘Although you do need to take that into consideration. What I mean is you’re a big presence. You need to dial it down because it scares people.’

  At first, I couldn’t quite reconcile what was being said with who was saying it. Peter was by some distance the most intense actor on Our Friends in the North. Forget me, forget Daniel Craig, forget Mark Strong – it was Peter Vaughan. He was the one who you really didn’t want to upset. But I soon realised he was telling me, for the sake of my own good, as a person and an actor, to be conscious of my impact. I loved Peter. He took a paternal and professional interest in me.

  That presence, that intensity, that some people, not just Peter, have identified again comes from growing up, like most working class children, with the institutional message, ‘You’re stupid’, as did my father, as did my brothers. If you’re working class in this country, you may be able to shovel shit or push a trolley, but, ‘You are thick. You do not emote.’ ‘You are thick. You are not worthy of a decent education.’ Those central messages of unworthiness become so ingrained that they are self-perpetuating. Come up with a big word and not only are you mocked – ‘Oh, where did that come from?’ – but you mock yourself. So yes, I am intense, and that’s because there’s a lot of fierce concentration on trying to be articulate, rather than that laid-back public-school attitude to intellect that some people seem to have.

  Possibly I do also intimidate people because of my size. I’m actually under 6ft, 5ft 113/4, but people always think I’m 6ft 2. I’ve always had a physical presence, broad shoulders, wiry, good hand–eye coordination, but it is how you make that presence felt. Dad’s skill in that department, that quality of presence and intensity, unwitting as it was, has come to me. Peter, I think, had clocked that and wished to alert me to it. I think perhaps the same thing had happened to him. Sometimes on sets you see actors far more busy trying to lay down the steps for their next job than doing the job they’re actually there for. I’m from Salford – ‘Right, what am I here to do?’ That whole ethic of ‘let’s get on with this’ definitely comes from my dad. A million-mile gap, you might think, would exist between the Colgate-Palmolive factory and a TV set, but actually me and Dad operated in a very similar manner. Dad was a shipping out foreman. A massive flatbed lorry, a ‘wagon’ as he called it, would come in and my dad’s team of stacker truck drivers would load it up. As foreman, he made sure they did it pronto. He too would get very adrenalised from his job. He worked with a physical and emotional intensity, exactly the same labels attached to me. I like that straightforwardness, and als
o there’s a lot of technicians who don’t need me floating around going, ‘What’s my motivation here?’ Get on with it – it’s a job of work. Peter admired that attitude, but he was also referencing that others don’t always view a person in the same way they view themselves. If I walk through a door, I’m walking through a door. To others already in that room, me walking through a door wanting to crack on might be a little more unnerving. My intensity might be a little overwhelming. He wasn’t wagging his finger; it was a lesson from an older actor to a younger one. Peter had bigger shoulders than me and I listened.

  My dad had definitely shared with me a very visible masculinity. His appearance and actions shouted standard maleness, but the way I viewed him was different. It seemed obvious to me that, at his core, causing his outward behaviour, was a great femininity and vulnerability. My view of maleness was formed from how tyrannical my dad could be and yet how gentle. Through him, I learned to accept that the two things could coexist. I too have a masculinity allied to an intensely female side. Perhaps the difference is I’m aware of it. Dad, I think, found his sensitivity a source of conflict. For many years, I was the same. I resented it. I resented the part of me that made me different. If you are a late-twentieth-century male, traditional working-class, you are not going to like that side of yourself. I wanted to be black and white. I didn’t understand that it is the sensitive side that offers true insight in life – intuition and empathy.