YouSaid · the spoken record

Simon Callow

lines on the record: 39
first: 2022-12-26
most recent: 2022-12-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's simply not true. I mean, it's a terrible reduction of how it actually works, which is that Christmas was tremendously popular, and Washington Irving, the great American writer who wrote Rip Van Winkle and all that stuff, had already written in a nostalgic vein about the And that very last, very, very last, and the most famous last line of all time is and as Tiny Tim observed God bless us everyone. It's not God bless us, everyone, it's God bless us everyone all of us not just me, not just the rich, not just the hard work everyone must be blessed by this extraordinary festival.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Massive. I mean, he had, when, this is much later, but when he needed a scene on the river bank for our mutual friend, he hired a pleasure steamer and filled it with his friends and had a small band, food and drink. This was just so as he could observe he was involved in absolutely everybody all the time, very generous host, listening to people, laughing at people, dancing himself, pouring the wine, handing around the food, and observing the scene on the river bank, and going home and writing it down in great detail. It was an extraordinary brain, I mean just on the simple technical level of being able to observe and remember everything.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nickleby, the old curiosity shop, Oliver Twist, all of these great novels, hugely popular and successful. But this was the one in which he just absolutely reached the heart of the British people. And in fact, people all over the world. It became it was sort of almost beyond just a book. It became a sort of article of faith or something. It became an expression of a philosophy, which he ever after the rest of his life called it carol philosophy, which is the, you know, the instinct to be generous and for the whole of society to hold hands with each other.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's always having fights with his publishers, and he's self-published it. He paid for his publishers to actually put it together, and he wanted it to be beautiful. And it had gold around the side of the pages and the leather binding was exquisite and all of that. And it sold out. It just massively sold out. But he was, this is the wonderful paradoxes of Dickens. He was very upset because he didn't make much money out of it. But it was not only was it a huge success, but it also won over some of his critics, and even Thackeray and people like that said, you know, how can you criticize a book like this? It's a public benefit. And it really reached the heart. And I think this is the exact moment Dickens was hugely successful already. He'd written Pickwick Papers.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's dread, and anguish and guilt, and all of that, and I think you need to do those things. I mean, I've done the Panto version of it in Lincoln years ago, and it was just a sort of romp, basically. But in the end, it's bigger than that, I think. I mean, it was, I'm just going to anticipate the next question, which is, was Christmas Caroline immediately? It certainly was an immediate success. And Dickens knew it would be. I mean, he wrote it at high speed in six weeks while he was still writing Martin Juzzlewit, and he absolutely knew, I mean, he was just thrilled, and those descriptions of how afterwards he rushed off to a party and danced like a madman and did conjuring tricks and everything, because he knew he'd hit the nail on the head. And it was he wanted it to reach everybody.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indeed, although it has to be said that because of its becoming such an annual event in the theatre, it's not actually a children's book. It deals with things which children would find quite hard to grasp. And I think there's a lot of terror in it. It was the first piece of theatre I ever saw when I was seven years old, and it scared the hell out of me, and I thought no more Dickens for me, please. It was just too frightening. It was in the round, and I just I was shaking afterwards, and I still think that that element is never far from it, as it never is with Dickens. He knew all about terror and anguish. He covered it wonderfully with this astonishing humour and inventiveness, but right down there inside”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have all the characters, but you never have that thing we were talking about at the beginning of Dickens sitting on your shoulder and actually whispering in your ear. And I think that we had to cut a lot. It's only seventy-five minutes long and so on, but it is very, very direct storytelling. And I'm very satisfied with it. I have to say.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have always loved Brian Desmond Hearst's wonderful film starring Alistair Sim as Scrooge, and with all kinds of wonderful actors playing all these very famous parts. It's quite old-fashioned as a piece of film, but why not? But Alistair Sim himself is just sublime. But I'm now going to say something which is completely unforgivable, which is that I think that our version, the one that I shot, is the best because for a very particular reason which is just as when I did it in the theatre, because it's just one person speaking, I am able, as it were, to use, to channel the voice of Charles Dickens himself. Whereas if you dramatize it, that's the thing you lose.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, of course he had an astonishing ear, and as a young clerk, solicitor's clerk a job that he detested after the end of his exactly two years of education, which is all he ever had, he wandered the streets of London. He learned London, just like a black cab driver. He got the knowledge, and he knew the accent of every single different part of London could instantly, like a sort of Henry Higgins, identify where you came from. And so he would have done those voices with absolute precision, and it might for his audience have told them where the guy came from, you know, and or he might have imitated a famous actor of the day as well, because he remained steeped in the film.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The horrible indeed. And as you say he simply doesn't see it, he doesn't realise it's him. He thinks it's some poor man. He's feeling compassion for somebody that he doesn't understand is himself. That's the whole process of the book, isn't it? It's like a therapy, really. Scrooge has prescribed himself a therapy whereby he has to be finally reconciled to himself. It isn't good enough just for him to start to love mankind. He's got to forgive himself too”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, said the first, with a yawn. And what has he done with his money? asked the red faced gentleman, with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose that shook like the gills of a turkey cock. I haven't heard said the man with a large chin, yawning again, left it to his company, perhaps he hasn't left it to me, that's all I know. This pleasantry was received with a general laugh. It's likely to be a very cheap funeral, said the same speaker, for upon my life I don't know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer. I don't mind going if a lunch is provided, observed the gentleman, with the expressence on his nose. So it's his own kind who've turned against him.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tiny little scene typical of this book has made up of thousands of little shards of brilliant, realistic insight. The spirit stopped beside one little knot of businessmen. Observing that the hand and the spirit of Christmas yet to come has no face and no voice, just a hand that points points towards the next terrible revelation. The spirit stopped beside one little knot of businessmen. Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge advanced to listen to their talk. said a great fat man with a monstrous chin. I don't know much about it either way. I only know he's dead When did he die? inquired another. Last night, I believe. Why, what was the matter with him? asked a third, taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff box. I thought he'd never die.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and what's very interesting about it, very vivid about it, is that it's in the city of London, which is where Scrooge sits, amassing all this money and denying people their proper lives and access to all the things that make life possible in the very city of London, which is, I think early when he sees Marley's face on the doorknocker, he says that Scrooge being a man of no imagination, I can't remember the exact phrase now, but it's about, of which there is very little to be found in the city of London. But so these are people he's dealt with and who know him. These are stockbrokers. And it's a wonderful little vignette this scene.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, can you quarrel with his analysis? He says that these are the source of almost all that is wrong in the world ignorance and want As we look round the globe today, is he not the two villains of the piece still?”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they cling to me appealing from their fathers. Boy, is ignorance. beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy for on his brow I see that written which is doom unless the writing be erased Deny it cried the spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city slander those who tell it ye admit it for your factious purposes and make it worse and abide the end have there no refuge or resource cried Scrooge Are there no prisons? said the spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words Are there no wonder? outstruck dwelling. and the spirit disappears. And of course that refers right back to the very first scene in Scrooge's office when some gentlemen come to try to get some money for the poor who suffer so terribly, as they say at this time of year. The thing is of course always so depressing is that”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yellow, meagre, racked scowling, wolfish, but prostrate too in their humility Where graceful youth should have filled their features out and touch them with its freshest tints A stale and shrivelled hand like that of age pinched and twisted them and pull them into shreds where angels might have sat enthroned devils lurked and glanced out menacing No change no degradation no perversion of humanity in any grade through all the mysteries of wonderful creation As monsters, half so horrible and dread Scrooge started back appalled, having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitudes. Are they yours? Scrooge could say no more. They are man's said the spirit, looking down upon them.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He determined he said to strike a hammer blow against all of this. And what he did wasn't at all to make a speech, which is his original plan. He wrote a Christmas carol right at the centre of a Christmas carol is this vision which is as the spirit begins to fade Scrooge from the foldings of its robe Scrooge sees the spirit of Christmas present brings out two children wretched abject frightful hideous Miserable They knelt down at its feet and clung upon the outside of its garment O man Look the hair, look. Look down here exclaimed the ghost. They were a boy and girl.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“generous vigorous spirit of Christmas past sorry a Christmas present I'm talking of Christmas present begins to sag and to look feeble and in an extraordinary visionary passage which brings us absolutely back to the original inspiration for a Christmas carol, which was not to celebrate Christmas or to spread a lot of good humoured benevolence around, but as a direct protest against what he and most of his horrified fellow countrymen had read in the not so recent not so long ago published parliamentary report on the condition of children working in the mines and the factories which revealed a whole substratum of absolute depravity of those children being exploited rarely seeing the light hardly being paid at all dying young and in agony it's a shocking jocking document. I mean shocking even now when it's so far from common practice but for Dickens and his”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dickens was the opposite of a Puritan, but he just said Look, guys, it's never going to happen unless you organize, organize yourselves, and you will make your own life better, and then no one can take it away from you. I mean, you know, that was his view. But in the Christmas card, of course, he goes on with the spirit of Christmas present to see all kinds of, as John was just saying, all the very excellent things that people devise to amuse themselves at Christmas time. And then he goes to his cousins, and of course they're having a wonderful time sending Scrooge himself up and even Scrooge looking at them manages to laugh at himself. There's a wonderful breakthrough too. But as the scene fades, the spirit, this extraordinarily warm”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. Which was his fundamental political philosophy, which is that you can't look to other people for these things. You have to find them in yourself. And that's why he supported so strongly all the working men's educational organizations and indeed working men's organizations generally, because he was a political pessimist of the most extreme kind. He said he despised the parliament of his day, which was not so very much better than the parliament of our day, unfortunately, but he absolutely despised it, and he said you never look to politicians to give you anything or sort anything out for you. You must do it for yourself. And so he poured his energy into all these organizations of self help, but not quite in the Samuel Smiles sense of, you know, Puritan sense get on with it. Not at all.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“until the last it's the beginning of Scrooge beginning to understand, to sympathize with other human beings and so on. But it's just a phrase like that they were not a handsome family, they were not well dressed. Their shoes were far from being waterproof. But they were happy, contented with the time. It's just and that sort of simple eloquence of Dickens always grabs me we all know that he was quite capable of tipping over into sentimentality, not as much as he's accused of, but especially if it involved a young woman crying, then he collapsed completely in the face of that. But this sort of thing I just find that magisterially simple and effective.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dickens has this wonderful paragraph it's so almost like the opposite of everything else in his style. It's so simple. It's ordinary language, but to me has always moved me in performing it. I have to fight back tears a little because it's so essentially good-hearted. He says after the games and so on have gone on, Dickens says there was nothing of high mark in this. They were not a handsome family, they were not well dressed. Their shoes were far from being waterproof, their clothes were scanty, and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside of a pawnbroker's But they were happy. grateful pleased one another and contented with the time. When they faded and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings of the spirit's torch at parting. Scrooge had his eye upon them. and especially on Tiny Tim.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A benevolent giant sitting on top of a great pile of food the spirit of Christmas present the spirit of Christmas takes him round showing how other people know how to celebrate Christmas which Scrooge is unable to do and the most telling visit of all they go to Fred's and all the rest of it the most telling one of all is the Cratchits who have no money at all and they make that famous and wonderful scene of the arrival of the goose and all of that and then the pudding and so on they turn it into mythic things, you know, as Dickens does they transmogrify them into something meaningful and wonderful and they tell stories and they sing songs and tiny Tim sings a song and then”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first one is by now the spirit of Christmas past has forced Scrooge to confront his slow ossification which has already started, you know, and when he says goodbye or rather his girlfriend says goodbye to him because now he only worships money. We never know why this happened it's in the nature of this kind of a book it just happens he becomes absurd despite the fact that he's been apprenticed to the Fezziwigs, which is a joyous organization and filled with laughter and good will to all people, he slowly turns towards money and she sees that and she says.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“not a proper adult I'm thrilled that you chose that passage I couldn't include it in my own show and nor did Dickens when he read it but it's absolutely central I've always thought”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But fancy is a wonderful word that his fancy and fantasy is. Everywhere, even in the darkest novels and bleak house, the personification of things, of fog and all the rest of it's very much in this tradition, this fairy tale tradition, and also I must say it links up to his theatre going, because the pantomimes were full of events like this. This was the absolute magic of pantomime was transformation, things suddenly going from being one thing to being another, or the exotic, all that sort of enchantment. And I think it was another reason why so many right-thinking people thought that Dickens was just not to be taken seriously because he was immersing himself in children's books, children's literature. He was just not an adult.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's wonderful, isn't it? And it's him. He's talking, writing about himself. This is exactly his childhood reading. And he immersed himself in it completely. And during the terrible days of his working in the blacking factory while his father was in debt as jail and all of that, these are the books that he consoled himself with. They liberated him, freed him up, gave him fantasy, access to phantasy, and he loved them all his life, and whole scholarly volumes have been written about the influence of the Arabian Knights on Dickens' writing, and I think it's spot on, that's exactly.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How utterly, utterly different it would have been, it would have been built up of a thousand details, but Dickens' massive broad strokes like this. I love it.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally and it's fundamentally which I suppose is the big theme of the book I wrote about him it's fundamentally theatrical and Dickens was absolutely immersed in the theatre to a degree I think uncommon I mean perhaps unknown in any other of the great writers and that of course why he was able to perform them so wonderfully eventually but the very method, the procedure is essentially theatrical you set something up on a grand scale you put a line around it you know in an extraordinarily vivid kind of way it's exaggerated it depends on exaggeration just like the theatre of his own time you know and it's very very different from imagine if George Elliot had decided to write a book about such a man”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a lot of Dickens' writing in this book is like I often think that Cartoon would be the absolutely ideal medium for Christmas Carol. Unfortunately, all the cartoons that have been made of it, I'm afraid to say, I'm in one of them are just rubbish.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is extraordinary that passage because As I said, it's epic, it's, I mean, it's impossible, it's completely unrealistic. It estews psychology of any kind or realism of any kind. This again is the sort of thing that his contemporaries thought contemptible in Dickens. They thought why can't he just describe things as they are and unravel people's psychology? But that isn't what Dickens' game was at all. And I think there's an almost direct link between Dickens and Chaucer. It overlaps Shakespeare, almost, though he adored Shakespeare, but the archetypes that he lands on and these extraordinary images of people. I mean no actor can play that at all. It's impossible. You just simply can't do it. It's almost like a”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What did Scrooge care? Tas the very thing he liked to edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance was what the knowing ones call nuts to”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain and snow and hail and sleet could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often came down handsomely, and Scrooge never did. Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say the gladsome looks My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me? No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle No children asked him what it was a clock No man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place of Scrooge Even the blind men's dogs appeared to know him and when they saw him coming on would tug their owners into doorways and up courts and then would wag their tails as though they said Know I at all is better than an evil eye Dart master”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice A frosty rhyme was on his head, and on his eyebrows and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him. He iced his office in the dog days, and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas. External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him, no wind that blew was bitter than he, no falling snow more intent upon its purpose, no pelting”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was a tight fisted hand that the grindstone was old Scrooge, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner hard and sharp as flint from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire secret and self contained and solitary as an oyster.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would. But I just say before reading it that it's a complete change. There's a complete change of tonality here. Suddenly he goes into something epic, from having been easy in conversational, he takes us into myth.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“speaking to so of course it became the first great reading that he did, and he read the whole thing one Christmas Eve, I think it was or either boxing day in Birmingham. He read the whole thing three and a half hours, and so successful was it that they immediately asked him to do it again a day or two afterwards, which he gladly did. No, it's”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when Tom Kenz was the director of my Christmas carol show and indeed of the film, but Tom just mentioned rather kindly just now, we've had this feeling that it was rather like the soundtrack of a 1930s movie. It could be Humphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade. Marley was dead to begin with, there is no doubt whatever about that. The register for his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it, and Scrooge's name was good for anything upon change that he chose to put his hand to. Oh no, old Marley was there. That's absolutely dashful hammet, you know, I mean, and it's a fascinating book in that way because it's so a sort of magical performance, or generally he makes things appear and disappear and so on, but never loses contact with the audience that he's”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course there's a man who was constantly criticised by his contemporaries, his fellow writers for his inelegance of style, his little comment about the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country's done for is very personal. But it's also a wonderful start for a ghost story, because that's what it says on the title page, and Dickens loved ghost stories, and he'd already written several before he wrote Christmas Carol. But the immediacy of it, the ease with which he engages with us, he sucks us in straight away, and he always said that thing about he liked to think that he was on the reader's shoulder, you know, whispering into his ear, all of that. It's terribly conversational.”
2022-12-26 · Intelligence Squared · The Magic of A Christmas Carol, with Simon Callow and John Mullan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT