YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Griffiths

lines on the record: 28
first: 2006-01-08
most recent: 2006-01-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Disks Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio 4.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“dreaming from his scenes of childhood played by Vladimir Horovitz and that was recorded at the Moscow Conservatory in nineteen eighty six. Now, Richard, if you could only take one of those eight records with you, which one would you take?”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was elbowy and hang out the stars in Indiana from the original soundtrack of Withnell and I'm married Richard to Heather Have been forever, I think, since the early 70s. And that's about all we know about your adult personal life, isn't this? Yes, that's part of the part of the part”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does he do to you as an actor on the stage and to your fellow actors on stage? I mean, surely it just changes the whole dynamic. You can't really spool back.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's how you treat that. You've stepped out of these roles on two occasions that I know of anyway on the stage in order to tell the audience off about its mobile phones. I mean, it's a large decision, isn't it, for a character on the stage to do it? Because what damage might play?”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Derry Rafferty in Baker Street and the glamour of being in the big smoke. Currently, Richard, you're in the big smoke, certainly you're Henri, the gentle, rather passive war veteran in this play Heroes. He's got a gammy leg. You'll read it with John Hurt and Ken Stott. He's got a twinkle in his eye. He's heterosexual, this one, isn't he? Oh, thank you.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's where it leaves you. Your mother, as we said, died when you were at drama school. Your father died, I think, as well.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talked about your mother's suspicion of doctors and things. I think you've got a sense in which you feel you're a victim of.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it suited you wonderfully, and not least, I suppose, because of your shape and your size. It is one of the defining things of your presence on the stage.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Johnson singing come unto these yellow sands one of the songs of Ariel from the RSC production of the Tempest. He was accompanied there by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Wind Ensemble composed and conducted it was by Guy Wolfenden. Pie in the sky, Richard Griffiths, for BBC television was a series in the mid nineties that gave you stardom. It ran to four series, so you must have got something right You were a detective who became a chef who loved his food and still did lots of detecting. Was it specially written for you, that role?”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I gather you've got an extra joke in the film version that's based on you personally, Alan Binnett's, slipped a special line in you.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But anyway, I mean, it all came good because you scooped the pool, really, didn't you this last time around with Mr Hayes? In the history boys, you've got the lot, the Olivier. critic circle He's a wonderful character, Hector, isn't he? I can tell you're, I mean, he's very unfashionable, of course, because he's a schoolteacher who does not believe in the exam system.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was a very good production of once in a lifetime, as well as the comedy about three Vaudeville stars going to Hollywood. You came near to winning an award for that performance, didn't you? But you always were pipped to the post by people called McKellen and Gambon, I think.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of the third movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto number three played on the Moog synthesizer by someone who says the daddy of the synthesizer, Walter Carlos. Your career, Richard Griffiths took off after that, whatever your father thought, you'd obviously made a good choice, even if it wasn't the right choice for you you're suggesting. But you went into the Royal Shakespeare Company, you were there for 10 years, 74 to 84, you made brilliant Ferdinand in Love's Labour's Lost, the King. You started getting the king roles quite quickly.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of D Moldau from Smittner's Move last my homeland played by the Leipzig House Orchestra conducted by Vaklaf Neumann So this was Stockton Billingham Tech. You discovered there that you had a natural talent for art. What kind of art did you do, Richard?”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you obviously witnessed a lot of grief in your childhood and a lot of anger too. How could two people who didn't have any language argue?”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came in under the wire. It's the old one, you know. And your brother a bit later. But your mother as a result had an understandable, I suppose, deep distrust of doctors and medicine industry.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lenny Priston and his home recording of his composition called Friends Four more of your siblings were to die after that. You'd followed Mary into this world, and then later on you had a brother who survived. But what happened to the four in between? I mean, were they cot deaths?”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One child who preceded your birth who died about her. Going to call Mary Perfectly normal, and then about a week after Charlie had been delivered, she woke up one morning as my dad was coming down from the north of Scotland where he'd been working, and he arrived at the hospital to see this distraught woman who'd just been told that Baby had died. It had died apparently because she'd pushed it out of the bed and it fell on its head This is five six day old baby. And to this day I doubt it. I mean it completely clouded the marriage. What was your mother's take on it and what did she say? She had the baby up. In her arms she was lying on the bed, and she knows that she had nodded off. I mean, when she woke up, she was still lying basically on her back.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at the time I was dragged around from the edge of four to the shops, and I loathed shopping. And to this day I can't bear it. Because you did too much of it early too early. I find it loathsome. You were the first surviving child of your mother and father, and they were more infant death to come after you. But tell me first of all about there was...”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, no language is such that at all. But obviously, I had to communicate with sign language. Self-taught stuff. Yes, you point. What you want and any point where you want it? So you learn to do that at a very early age, presumably, because otherwise you couldn't communicate with your parents. Yeah, and you will starve So you have to point and take things, and then discipline is when it's taken away and you'll slap for it, you know. But they took you there for shopping with them, because of course you became very useful to them. Somehow I learned how to talk. I have no idea from whom.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and listening so to that you know we are the Alvatinis and Dan Dare pilot of the future which I adored and I've had a lifelong passion for science fiction ever since but this as I mentioned in the introduction is because your parents were both deaf profoundly deaf and therefore couldn't speak. Yes. It's not that they couldn't make noises. Oh, no, no. Most deaf people have got nothing wrong with their vocal cords and can make lots and lots of noise in the way that the rest of us can, but they can't form it because they don't hear it.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Record number one. Tell me where that is. I was sort of an employed teenager when I first heard this. The Beatles, please please me. And though I say so myself, I have a sense from the second I heard it this was a whole new thing. Beatles, and please, please me, and memories of your youth, Richard Griffiths in Stockton on T's, which at home at least was a pretty silent business. We didn't have a TV or a radio, and I didn't know about the BBC. And I knew about Radio Luxembourg because when I was an infant, I would be palmed off or babysat in the apartment next to the one we lived. My lovely French girl called Andre Patterson. And she taught you how did she teach you English? Well, no, we sat and listened to Radio Luxembourg. I remember being sort of two and three.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what I think you should do is let the audience's imagination do the business for you. Well, how do you do that? And I said, well, I'll come in, I'll back Paul around the room and squeeze. Paul McGann, there's barely room to get around the bed. And he said, what happens? I said, well, I back him into the corner, and you're now behind me, and you're looking at Paul, you see, over my shoulder. And then you will see that I flash the dressing gown. And what's the horrified reaction on his face and that'll tell the audience what to do? Great moment. No wonder everybody remembers it. I mean to have you even if it must be burglary.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They all know the dialogue far better than that. I mean, you know, I did it 20 years ago. I can't remember anything I did 20 years ago. But they know the lines, the dialogue, it's all a bit scary. I can remember. And I mean to have you even if it must be burglary. I mean to have you even if it must be burglary. And you know when we came to do that in that tiny little bedroom in the cottage I said to Bruce, I'm sorry, I know you will despise me for this, but I cannot do what it's asked for, which is to come in with an extraordinarily China doll facial makeup, and nothing else. And I cannot impose this dilapidated body on the viewing public. And he said, Oh, Donnie, don't worry about it. I said, but I've got an idea. He said, oh yeah, what's that? I said, well, he's got this beautiful dressing gown.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not. But you can't blame people. You can't blame people. It makes it easier if you're having infected their imagination, you see. That's what it is. What about withmal, though? I mean, Uncle Monty is really a character that dogs you, isn't it? School leavers are mad about with authenticity about the attitudes in Withnell that strikes an absolute chiming note with people of a certain age, that edge being from fifteen to about thirty five. What is it that strikes them, do you think? This autodestructive, a hedonist stick indulgence and disregard for authority is exactly where they repose their trust. Not personified, I'd have to say by Uncle Monty. Not at all. Monty is an establishment figure. He's an outrageous El Queen. He's terribly so, you know. And what do they call out?”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“actors he is Richard Griffiths. You've really cornered the market, Richard, in large avuncular figures, haven't you? Gay or beastly or whatever. Which one offers you greatest recognition when people see you in the street? What do they say? Amongst the kids it has to be Uncle Vernon. Guy came up to me at eleven o'clock in Tescas one night. He said would you come and tell my son that you are Uncle Vernon? A he should be in bed. Bup here, you know, to entertain eleven year olds and C, you know, I think you've got to explain to him that for a moment. Real. And I'm not Uncle Vernon. You're in crusty old Uncle Vernon mood. I was. I was, you know, and I sort of am. I'm sort of hostile to this thing of trying to make it real.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My castaway this week is an actor, as gay Uncle Monty in the film Withnell and I he won a whole generation of fans, as beastly Uncle Vernon in the Harry Potter films he's won an entirely new one. He's famous for many other roles too as the detective chef hero of the BBC series Pie in the Sky, and most recently as the English master in Allan Bennett's hugely successful play The History Boys. He's had to work hard for his achievements, both his parents were profoundly deaf and couldn't speak. Throughout his childhood he was their ears and voice. He disappointed his father by deserting art college for the performing arts, and then worked his way up slowly through the RSC and finally into television and films too. He won three best actor awards for the history boys, and the big screen version is currently in post production while he stars in the West End hit Heroes, all proof if it were needed, that he's one of this country's leading characters.”
2006-01-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Griffiths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source