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James Fox - The absent-minded Professor Chronotis

Strange volumes
  What is the most bizarre book you have ever read?

I have a very old book my brother gave me for my wedding. It's from about 1580 and it's the Psalms in rhyming form. [Its] obviously [from] just before the 1611 bible so it's a very ancient original manuscript. It's newly bound but those pages are from about 1580, 1590. It's lovely and all perfectly intelligible and rather beautifully scanned and rhyming.

Tea for all
  What's your favourite aspect of the character?

Well, I very much like the Professor. He's a tea maker, and tea is very important to him and it's very important to me as well. My wife started me off on tea when we got married because she was a nurse and they drink enormous amounts of tea, and so does the professor.

So I think it's my tea making that I'm most proud of, and my vast library of course which I haven't got a complete handle on yet. I like it a lot. It's fun.

Bad haircut
  What would you have been doing, and wearing, about the time Shada was originally partially made?

I was being criticised for my wardrobe and my hairstyle at that time. I was living in the north in Leeds and I remember getting very rude remarks from my mother for the various green suits and green mackintoshes that I would buy and the very bad cheap haircuts I had. She didn't like it at all, so the seventies were not my best dressing period.

Pencilling the Professor
  Describe what your character looks like?

Are we talking about the late seventies here? I think he's a throwback from several centuries before that, but in the 1970s he would still be hanging on to that post-Second World War look, wouldn't he? Cardigans probably, jackets.

In the summer I think he wears a black one incongruously, because it attracts more heat, but it would be light-weight material. He probably wears a panama hat too, and he would walk around Cambridge I think maybe with a stick, but of course he'd look best in a mortar board.

Watching Who
  Was Doctor Who ever something you watched yourself?

I wasn't a great fan, but I certainly did find myself at five o'clock on many occasions just being transfixed by the sights and sounds and the wobbles and strange appearances of the various mechanical characters.

No, they were wonderful and of course they were great heroes as they passed before us across the screen. Endlessly enjoyable.

Soul work
  I understand you've done quite a lot of vocational work?

Yes, I was in the universities of Sheffield and Leeds doing vocational work.

It was spiritual work, in connection with the New Testament and the gospel and things to interest students in spiritual matters. With some success, and with some rejections as well.

My wife and I were engaged in this voluntary work and we found it very rewarding. I took ten years out of acting to do it and it was a very, very important period of my life, yes.

Time, space and Douglas Adams
  Have you had any previous experience of Douglas Adams' work?

I did read Hitchhikers and I of course got many giggles out of it. I think he really was ahead of his time too, because science has become more and more popular to lay people.

I think he was one of the great ones that made it fun and accessible as well as very informative, and I think his fascination with time and time travel has stayed a main interest for the public, about this extraordinary fourth dimension that we all live in and have to think about.