Transcripts for BBCNEWS This Cultural Life 20240604 15:59:30 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
going to do all day? you know what samuel beckett said? why do you write? he said, not good for anything else . it s too late for me to be a ballet dancer. oh, alas, a vanished career. well, i m a freelancer, you know? and that s a good thing because i don t have a boss. you are your own boss. continue to be. very enviable. margaret atwood, thank you so much for sharing your cultural life with us. thank you. and for podcast episodes of this cultural life, go to bbc sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.
later on in the 60s, with the work that he and tony garnett, who i used to work with in television, bbc. their great revolution was to say, well, let s not. bbc drama is studio bound, let s get out there in the street with the guys that shoot documentaries and make, you know. make it real, in that sort of spontaneous and alive way. but just thinking about some of your films and the way that you have explored social issues, whether that s unemployment in meantime, or back street abortion in vera drake, or class and race in secrets and lies, do you regard yourself as a political film maker? yes, i do. i mean, i think that my films, with the arguable exception of peterloo, which is obviously about the peterloo massacre and is, without any question, a simple statement about
works is abigail s party, which people think about as a play for today on television, but it actually started out on the stage. it was written as a stage play. are you surprised at the enduring appeal of that piece? yes and no. i mean, one of the reasons why it became so popular is because when it was. i mean, we did it in a theatre, hampstead theatre in north london, and it was very successful. and the producer, margaret matheson, was short of something, because something had been cancelled and so we wheeled it into the television studio after 104 performances in the theatre, so it was very solid, and just did it. the third time it was shown on bbc was on an evening. on a night when storms raged throughout the british isles. there was a strike on itv and a very posh programme withjonathan miller, an esoteric programme on bbc 2. there were only three
i was coming here to do this programme, ijumped on the tube and i caught myself doing what i do, which is to clock everybody coming down the escalator. going up the escalator as we went down, just seeing characters, basically. so fundamentally, what drives me is people and life and wanting to capture it and deal with it and distil it and tell stories about it. mike leigh, thank you very much indeed for sharing your cultural life. thank you. podcast episodes of this cultural life, go to bbc sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.