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In Touch - transcript BBC Radio 4 |
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21 December 2004 Listen to the In Touch for 21 December 2004 IN TOUCH TX: 21.12.04 2040-2100 PRESENTER: PETER WHITE PRODUCER: CHERYL GABRIEL WHITE Good evening. For almost six decades actor Peter Sallis has pursued an interrupted career working in theatre, film and television. He's played almost every kind of role in that time but of course is particularly known and loved as Clegg - the laconic philosopher - in the BBC's Last of the Summer Wine and more recently providing the voice of Wallace in the animation series Wallace and Gromit. And yet Peter Sallis was never offered a part in a school play and only decided when he was in the Royal Air Force that acting was the profession for him. Over the past few years he's developed Macula Degeneration - one of the most common causes of visual impairment as people grow older. But he's continued to work and to do what many listeners to this programme do on a regular basis - cope as best he can. Well for today's programme producer Cheryl Gabriel and I have been to talk to Peter Sallis, to see what adjustments he's had to make in his life and his work. Join us as we joined him in his Central London flat. [LIFT DOOR CLOSING] Hello, is that Mr Sallis? SALLIS Well who else do you think - oh you can't see either. WHITE I can't see either. SALLIS Oh my god, come in, come in. WHITE Thank you very much indeed. SALLIS You're going left. WHITE Right thank you. SALLIS Are you both blind? WHITE Cheryl's partially sighted and I'm totally blind. SALLIS Well can you see anything down there Cheryl - down there to go in and I'll be with you in just a second. WHITE Okay. SALLIS My goodness me we're going to have a real party aren't we. When I arrived in this place I thought of Jack Benny immediately and I looked out through the window that you can't see and I thought to myself - well I'd rather be in the dump I'm in looking at those trees than be out in that square looking at the dump I'm in. WHITE Peter Sallis, living space is quite an issue when you have poor sight and I suppose perhaps particularly when it's deteriorating and you maybe can't always predict what it's like, what's this like as far as living space for you is concerned? SALLIS It's ideal. This room is quite big and then I have a large bedroom, I have a double bed, which I sleep in by myself, and a lot of cupboard space. So really this room, that we're sitting in now, is a sort of - I'm almost tempted to say workshop - it's my - if I was a captain this would be my bridge. WHITE And how much do you actually plan it, in that I think what I'm saying is - how much is your visual loss something that you allow for? SALLIS Oh, well I don't really allow for it at all, no, I mean I just simply have that CCTV, that's behind you there, that I magnify practically everything that comes through the post and anywhere else for that matter. I've got my 32" television, which I sit about three feet away from and I've got my hi-fi system - I listen to my music. WHITE Would you describe yourself as an organised person? Have you had to become more organised in the flat - where you store things and all that kind of stuff? SALLIS I'm learning gradually and I've come through the end of doing a summer season of Last of the Summer Wine and this place is in a - it doesn't look as though it's in chaos but I can't find anything at the moment. But I'm learning, I'm getting better at it through making mistakes and losing things, I'm always losing things. The only thing I've got going for me is something I've had since I was a child, which is an awful sort of sense of humour and consequently when I am breaking down and sobbing and thinking - I've just written it down... I've just put the ... where - you know and all that sort of stuff is going on, I then get the giggles. And while I can continue to get the giggles I know I'm alright. WHITE Was there a point or an incident or something when you did think - hang on my sight's - there's something happening here and this is not just something I can ignore? SALLIS Yes there was. I went into an opticians on the high street, just for an ordinary eye test. When it got to my left eye, I said I'm sorry but there's - I've got a bit of gunge in here and she had a look and she said - No that's not gunge, you must go straight - and then she named an eye surgeon or eye expert. And I went to him and he said - you have got Macula - no he didn't even say I'd got Macula Degeneration, he just described it as the wear of an underlay of a carpet. Well I didn't mind what he called it, all I knew was that all of a sudden I was losing the sight of my left eye - the central vision, not the peripheral vision, you keep your peripheral vision - Cheryl knows about that - it's your central vision that you lose. WHITE This may sound a daft question and I apologise if it is but I wondered what was the thing about it that worried you the most - whether it was professional or personal or - because people do react to these things in very different ways? SALLIS Well as you know it's a very slow ongoing process, thank goodness, it doesn't really just hit you overnight. I mean this hit me overnight, if I'd gone to see this man two or three weeks before, let us say, he might have been able to - he did laser me actually but it was too late. So I'm evading - not really evading the question I've forgotten it. WHITE I wondered which aspect of it worried you ... SALLIS Well, no, I was just worried in general terms. I said to him - Am I likely to get it in the other eye, the good eye? And he said - Well you have a 1 in 10 chance of getting it. And I got it. So I've got wet in one eye, for those who know what I'm talking about, and dry in the other. WHITE I was particularly interested in how you viewed it in terms of your profession, because obviously in coming here I've looked at your career and what strikes one immediately is the range of what you've done, how long you've been doing it, the fact that you go on doing it and I wondered if there was any point when you thought - hang on, am I going to have to stop doing it? SALLIS No because it's all been pretty gradual and because now that I'm equipped and now that I know that - I think I'm right in saying - that the worse that can happen to me is that I will have two eyes both with peripheral vision only. It's a possibility due to photodynamic therapy that they may be able to preserve what there is of the dry eye. But even if they don't by now I'm sufficiently, shall I say, prepared and it doesn't affect you when you're acting because you can see - you can see where the person ought to be. If I close my good eye and I can't see your head but I know you're there because we've just been talking to each other. And so when it comes to lining up the cameras and so on I know that Brown is going to be there and Smith is going to be there and the people watching it will have no idea that I can't see them. WHITE What about learning lines, reading parts, reading scripts? SALLIS Well I have this device, it looks like a portable typewriter. You lift the lid and you put whatever you want to digest face downwards, close the lid, press a button and about 30 seconds later it's reading it to you. Hello Jim, how are you? What a pity we bumped into each other this day on this occasion like this - it sounds a bit like that and you'll hear it in a minute. It's a lady and I call her Jane. Without her I would be sunk and of course what I do is to record what Jane is reading to me. WHITE And then you learn the part? SALLIS Yeah. WHITE It's quite complicated isn't it. SALLIS Well yeah it would be better if I could see. WHITE Can we go through and meet Jane? SALLIS Yes. Come with me. By now we know that neither of you can see, so there may be some banging of - as you knock over bookcases and things like that. WHITE Well as long as you've not got your best china in here. SALLIS No, there is no best china actually. What we're looking at here is Jane. Now first of all I have to switch her on - a voice will tell us when she's ready. WHITE Have you got something on the go at the moment that you're actually trying to learn or ...? SALLIS No, no I've finished that for the time being. I'm still doing Wallace and Gromit but of course I don't have to learn that because they blow up the pages for me in the studio when I'm recording the voice and you do it a line at a time anyway, you never really record a conversation like you would if you were recording a television or a radio voice. That's the one thing that I've had definitely to give up. ELECTRONIC VOICE Welcome. Text window. SALLIS Now I'm going to put this in. This is just a couple of pages from the Observer Book of Horses. I hope I've put it in the right way round. Anyway we'll soon find out. There we go. JANE Description: Height not exceeding 14 hands. Colour: Black, brown, bay or grey. Head is small with a broad forehead tapering to the nose. SALLIS I'm going to leave it running because I don't know enough about it. So we're going back into the workshop now. So I've got two white sticks - one for each eye. WHITE As I'm assuming that you're not acting in anything called the Observer Book of Horses this is just an enthusiasm as yours? SALLIS I've got a few of those Observer books, which I don't look at anymore, but I happened to think that it was a good example for us to have on this programme that's all. WHITE If we can talk perhaps just a bit about your career. Again what's most noticeable, going through all your credits, which are huge and long, but the thing which for most people, perhaps particularly listeners to this programme, will associate you with is your voice and the voice is what really sticks in people's mind about Clegg and of course it's what sticks in people's mind about Wallace. Did you know you had a voice? SALLIS No. I had no idea at all. It wasn't, I don't think, until I was deep, deep, deep into Last of the Summer Wine - I mean well 20 years ago, not more - and I'd been doing voiceovers, which I don't do anymore, but I had about 14 or 15 years of doing ordinary, what I would call, advertisement voiceovers. And somebody said to me - just out of the blue - you have a very distinctive voice. Although I'm listening to it a lot of the time, because I watch things that I'm in and all that sort of stuff, it never really occurred to me. But more and more people, like you, have told me this. I can't figure it out but that's why Nick Park asked me to do Wallace. After we'd done the second film - The Wrong Trousers - I said to him - Why did you pick me Nick? And he said - Oh well because I like the noise your voice makes when you're doing Clegg. So one thing in a sense led to another. WHITE Did you work on that voice? I mean I'm hearing, as I talk to you, I'm hearing Clegg in my head and there's a slightly different noise, in a way, because - with you as who you are, as Peter Sallis and I just wondered how much you worked on Clegg to give him that kind of ruminative wise sort of laconic style that he has? SALLIS No I didn't work on it at all, I just did it. WHITE Right, and it just came out that way. SALLIS Yes, just came out like that, yes. Eeh I don't know really, it just seems such a pity that you've come on such a lovely day like this when you could be out there in the garden ... WHITE So you just give him the sort of accent he should have had. SALLIS Yeah and when I'm doing Wallace I hate to say so but he comes out pretty much the same - What no cheese Gromit? You know, I mean it's just - it just happens and I don't even have to really think Wallace or Clegg, it just happens. I've just got two voices - Peter Sallis and somewhere up there in the north. CLIP FROM WALLACE AND GROMIT WHITE What is it about acting that attracts you? I mean you've acted in television, in film, in theatre now for almost six decades, you've done everything from playing Pepys - I read you did Holby City a couple of years ago - is it just acting? It seems to me that you're happy to take on most roles if they're offered. SALLIS Yes well I mean I think most actors would say the same. First of all, a lot of them would say what I'm going to say, which is I don't know what else I would have done, I mean I was in the bank before the war and we won't go into that because that was a tragedy waiting to happen, if ever I saw one. I found that I could do it and of course if you can earn a living at it, which thank god I have been able to do, took a long time to get really the wheels going but never mind I never really stopped, I was never really out of work for any period of time. And that's how I kept going. And I've never been ambitious and I am a thousand miles from being a great actor. But what I do and where I've been successful I happen to have done it probably better than anybody else would have done. That is not quite the same thing as being [LAUGHING] a very good actor, it just - the slots have been filled. WHITE I think I understand what you mean but it's a bit more than being in the right place at the right time isn't it, you have actually done what other people perhaps half heard in their ears or saw. SALLIS Yes, yes, yeah. WHITE Just to come back to your eyesight. You're in a very gregarious profession where recognising people is important and the whole networking business is important, do you find that difficult now - I don't know how much you go to parties and that kind of thing - but can it be a problem? SALLIS I don't go to parties. I am a member of a club and those members of the club are people that I probably know collectively as a bunch better than any other bunch of people and I can't spot them, I can spot them once they talk and so on but facially no and it doesn't - I mean it bothers me in the sense that I wish I could see them but it doesn't really bother me. And you know if anybody is in any doubt I just say I'm sorry but I can't see very well, I am - I say - partially sighted, that's the phrase I use and they're happy, they accept it. WHITE It doesn't embarrass you now when somebody comes up to you and you can't place them? SALLIS No, no it doesn't embarrass me at all because there's nothing I can do about it, you know, it's not my fault, not really. WHITE How worried are you about the future, in the context of your eyesight? SALLIS Well I do think that what I'm doing at the moment I can continue to do and I can't see that "my career" (in inverted commas) is going to stretch much more than it has. I mean I'm very good, as you can tell, at interviews, you see, so perhaps I could make a killing out of giving the interviews you know. In fact I'm doing two or three, as I said, before Christmas, including this one. WHITE You do want to go on though really? SALLIS Oh yes, oh blimey yes, oh what an unfortunate phrase - blimey, because we know what that stands for don't we. Oh yes, I mean - I don't know what I'd do - oh well I'd watch the television of course and play records. WHITE So you do this still because it's what you do and presumably because you love doing it do you? SALLIS Yes and because it's a source of income. WHITE Just to end on the career because I'm sure that's where you'd like to end really, anything on the go at the moment, coming up, something you're looking forward to? SALLIS Well we've been invited, thank goodness, by the BBC to do another series of Last of the Summer Wine and we're in the middle of a - yes roughly in the middle - of a feature film for Wallace and Gromit. And boy if that isn't enough for an old chap of 83 to get on with I don't know what is. WHITE Well we'll let you get on with learning the lines, although I know you're not really quite engaged on that yet, but good luck with it all. Thank you very much for allowing us into your home. Peter Sallis thank you. SALLIS Thank you very much both of you, thank you. Visit the In Touch Message Board Back to the In Touch page The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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