Andrew P. Stephen: From Stage to Screen in Expensive Denim

Hey, screen rats, couch potatoes, watchers of the screen.

Today's guest is the wonderful actor, Andrew P.

Stephen.

He's a star of stage, television, and film, and he's here to talk to us about all things telly.

Now, Andrew did say he was using an external mic, but I'm not massively sure it was plugged in, because the audio quality is less than perfect.

I've worked my magic and tried my best to make most of it audible and legible.

Let's just see how we get on.

But apologies for the bad audio in advance.

So here we go.

This is Television Times Podcast, featuring the great Andrew P.

Stephen.

Welcome to Television Times, a new podcast with your host, me, Steve Otis Gunn.

We'll be discussing television in all its glorious forms.

From my childhood, your childhood, the last 10 years, even what's on right now.

So join me as I talk to people you do know and people you don't about what scared them, what inspired them, and what made them laugh and cry here on Television Times.

There's three settings on the back of this mic.

Yeah.

Let me just have a look to see what they are.

That's right.

And one, two, three.

Those well-known mic settings, one, two, and three.

We'll go for two.

It sounds like something, maybe you do know.

What's his name?

The Inspector Calls guy.

I remember being at the playhouse once and he leant back to me.

He just stared at me with his one good eye and just went, can you just put that up half a point?

And then I looked at him and went, what?

And he went, yeah, that's better.

And nothing happened.

I like to look like I'm in control, even when I don't know what I'm talking about.

I can't remember if I met him or whether you just described him so vividly that I feel like I did.

I think I auditioned for it once.

I think it was with him.

Yeah, he was the director of The Children, I believe, in...

We can't miss a merchant on here, so I have to cut this.

But he was like the first guy I knew who was like...

When I found out he was 54 or something, the age I'm going to be in October, I remember thinking, what?

Because he was like trainers and bouncy and kind of like a young guy.

And he's the first time, first young 50 something.

He's like Jimmy Salvo.

Jimmy Salvo.

The fucker comes up almost every episode of this so far.

So what I do at the beginning of this, because there's an audience out there who's going to hear you, so I ask every guest to just tell the audience a bit about themselves.

Professionally.

However you, whatever you want to say, however you want to say it.

Well, my name's Andrew Stephen.

Andrew P.

Stephen is what I call myself in spotlight and INDB or whatever.

I'm an actor.

I've mainly done theater over the years on pretty much all levels.

And now I'm making little forays into film and television.

So we've known each other for about 20 years, a bit more, tiny bit more.

It would have been a tour of Woman in Black in 2001, I think, Wakefield, I believe I met you.

Opening Wakefield, isn't it?

Opening Wakefield, we shared digs, became firm friends.

But it was one of those things for me, like I'd done a few tours before that, it sounds like we're in the army.

I've done a few tours before that and made friends, but you're never really massively sure if you're friends or tour friends, you know what I mean?

Oh, yeah.

And I remember our friendship being solidified, like cemented, three years later when we did another tour in Asia.

We went to India and Singapore.

That's right.

And that was from there.

What's your biggest memory about that?

That was a very kind of watershed period, wasn't it?

No, I remember you walking into the Fortune just before that tour and being vaguely introduced to you by, well, sort of your arrival being announced by either Kenny or I think it was Robin probably.

Yeah, Robin, the director, always used to say something like, Steve Otis Gunn, as I live and breathe.

He would say that every time I walked in at the beginning of every single tour that I did, one of about, well, I haven't got them written down.

I'm probably on a CV somewhere, but not like you.

Essentially from the year 2000 to, no, I have, I bet I have.

I bet I got them in this big book underneath here.

But there is a seven or eight year period where I am literally doing Woman in Black one year, Inspector Calls the next year, Woman in Black the next year, Inspector Calls.

And even sometimes I think I did it twice.

I think 2005, I did both shows.

So, and then went straight to Australia and did another tour of Inspector.

So I lived on those two shows for seven or eight years and handsomely, I wasn't handsome, I was paid enough to save enough money to basically work for six, seven months and then go away for the remainder of the year, usually to Asia or somewhere and then come back and start another job generally in January.

You'd sell me the guitar you bought on that tour.

Exactly.

I would go to Japan, I would record an album, I'd spend a load of money I didn't have on a load of equipment, then I'd come back and usually sell like a Takamini or some kind of Telecaster to Andrew.

In hope that I could buy it back, it was like my own personal...

What they called in America, those stores, not Thrift Store, the one with the Pawn Broker.

You'd have the guitar for a couple of years and I'd try and buy it back off you.

Have I accidentally put on a guitar podcast?

Get on with the talk about Tele.

So I'm going to start with a format point, I think, pretty early on, just a fun one to get things started.

What was the first person or character on television that gave you that funny, fizzy feeling?

Funny, fizzy feeling.

Well, you fancied them, but you didn't know why.

Well, that's an interesting point.

My elder brother, who's only a year older than me, was always very much more front foot than me.

I was always very much more kind of reflected back foot.

I remember the first time or I remember the early stages of him seeing girls on television and sort of this implication that they were quite fanciable in some way.

And finding it a little bit slightly unnerved.

What's all this then?

But also kind of exciting as well.

But coming at it from a slightly different angle.

It wasn't because it was a group of people that I knew that sort of talked about things in that way.

It was more personal in some way.

But I remember girls, I remember Black Beauty.

It was very, I don't know.

Don't we kind of fold that thing?

The Lloyds Bank advert.

Yeah.

And there were, I think there were two girls on that.

And well, there were, I know there were.

The second, which was Stacey Dawning, who became, I don't know, she was on Children's Telly.

Stacey Dawning?

Kind of a Cupid doll face, big eyes and very approachable in a way.

But there was another one, and I think probably before, I think there might have been a couple of series or something.

And she was called Judy Bowker, and she had a much more sort of grave beauty, a much more sort of serious, slightly unapproachable.

She might have been thinking of nothing at all, I have no idea.

But, you know, you project.

And I remember finding her intriguing and the fact that if she got sad, it seemed to be quite all encompassing and very involving.

And I'm ever finding that very attractive.

And I think that that sort of Edwardian vibe, whenever it was set, Edwardian, whatever it was, kind of stuck with me in a sense.

So there was definitely that very early on.

And then, you know, later, I remember reading the book, Walk About School, with the class in English.

And then the film was going to be on telly.

And my English teacher said, ask your parents to watch it.

But of course, it was a Nick Rowe film and it had loads of nudity in it.

And she was absolutely appalled that she'd recommended we watched it.

How old were you when she said to watch it?

I was probably 13, 14, something like that.

So it wasn't a little child.

But I remember being utterly captivated by Jenny Agatari in Walk About.

And apparently Nick Cave was as well.

And this was on television?

It was on telly.

I have heard this before.

9.1, I think.

And so it meant sort of staying up till next week.

That's what people don't realize is that there weren't films on TV all the time.

There was like maybe one or two a week, right?

That's right.

It was scheduled and heavily advertised.

Yeah, and people watched them in their masses.

And it's a very arty film.

A strangeness, a sort of dreamlike sort of quality of it, which kind of enhanced that sort of, you know, people talk about the male gaze and all that kind of thing now, but there was something, you know, it didn't seem, it wasn't like in any way carry on-ish or sort of cheeky.

It was, you know, this sort of beautiful, natural nakedness.

It's funny you mentioned the carry on films, because I think the first time I ever saw mostly naked breasts was probably Barbara Windsor in Carry on County.

That would have probably been the first time I ever saw.

And I don't remember, yeah, the bra flying off.

Yeah, yeah.

And that was considered okay for kids to watch, right, at the time?

It was.

It's that strange seaside postcard thing, isn't it?

Yeah, that's what I was going to say, the seaside postcard, yeah.

And it's funny.

I mean, obviously, my wife is Swedish, and they don't have any sense of smut or that cheeky kind of attitude to sexiness.

You know, if they do, it's certainly not a mainstream thing, but it's very much, or it was very much, part of English, British life, certainly in the 70s, 60s and 70s, and probably to a lesser extent earlier on.

If you're mentioning, obviously, Victorian and Edwardian, it's British repression, isn't it?

We all feel those things, but we're not really supposed to.

Oh, it's rude.

Oh, look at that.

You know, matron, it's all that stuff.

But there's this funny sort of the chase, isn't it?

The chase of women, these funny, dizzy creatures tottering about and these kind of...

Yeah, Benny Hill, the intro to Benny Hill.

That's exactly what that is.

Inadequate or unlikely men.

Chasing women.

Sort of rubbing their thighs.

Yeah, rubbing their thighs.

Well, even Vic Greaves did that right up to the 90s.

You know, the thigh rubbing, the chase in the girl, and basically, as a millennial or Generation Y would...

Well, this one, Generation Z would absolutely consider to be sexual abuse, coming up and grabbing their dresses and squeezing their arses.

And it's supposedly funny, and that's what we all grew up with, this sort of kiss chase, essentially.

I mean, I always felt quite outside it, but not that I was above it in some way, but that it was...

I was too shy to be...

you know, to put myself in the position of somebody who was going to chase after someone in that kind of way or impose myself on them.

But it was very much kind of the way it was shown.

It was the way that it was done almost.

It was what you were brought up with.

And if you didn't really feel capable of it, again, you would like to feel a bit inadequate in some way.

Absolutely.

Well, I think I've only just made that connection between the chasing, like the Benny Hill thing and the carry on, because I believe in infant school, I was reprimanded for kiss chase.

Because I remember playing kiss chase, which I think is probably illegal now, where you would chase a girl you liked and try and kiss her.

And I remember taking it to new heights and really, really going for it.

And I was told off.

And I would have been, well, before 10, you know, 8, something like that.

And I wonder if I was literally copying television, because where would I have got it from?

It's very mixed messages, isn't it?

I think you're right.

I think people really don't care anymore.

When a certain actor whose name we won't mention, but everyone knows who it is, who was, there was a big, they tried to sort of out him for being pegged by prostitutes or whatever, he'd go to prostitutes.

Very well-known actor in a very well-known show, I'm sure you know who I'm talking about.

And when it came out, no one cared.

I didn't care, did you care?

No one cares.

It's like, whatever you do, who cares about that?

Do you know who it is?

I don't know.

I'll let it out.

Bye now.

Yeah, we will cut this out.

So he was outed by one of the tabloids as they were gonna, like, we're gonna release this information about this actor who's been going to prostitutes and having them shove dildos up his ass or whatever.

And it came out and everybody went, that's a bit weird, but like, it hasn't changed my opinion of him.

I mean, sometimes I do think about it when I'm watching, who were the kids?

But I can't leave this in.

But we can't say who it is.

We can't say who it is.

So I did, I don't know how I'm going to edit this, we'll have to just keep bleeping his name out.

But I did some extra work on one TV show.

Oh, this is television, one TV show.

So in, oh, I'm going to say 98, yeah, about 1998.

You might know this story, I might have told you.

Me and my friend Desi, he was after some work.

And he said, oh, there's extra work at the job center.

So it's so weird, we went to the job center.

I had a job.

We went to the job center in Fulham and he put his name down for extra work.

And so I was there, so I did the same thing.

He didn't get it, I did.

And about three days later, I was whisked away to some really fancy country house to be an extra in the mini series based on Oswald Moseley.

All right.

And I've since found clips of me.

I've found clips of We cannot mention.

Walking in, talking to someone and there's me in the background going for it and wiggling my head, sticking my mustache back on, moving the fucking salt cellars around to fuck up the continuity.

And then after a little while.

But you were sitting at the table.

I'm in there, you can see me.

I mean, I'll send you a link.

You can see it, I'm on YouTube, blatantly me.

And so I got this gig and it was really funny.

And we're there all day.

I think I got paid 50 quid.

That's the number I seem to remember, but I might be making money in them days.

I do remember they came to me at the end.

No, they came to the crowd of extras and they said, does anyone here play piano?

And I went, well, yeah, I sort of played piano.

Well, I did, I was selling pianos a few years before.

So I was like, yeah, I can kind of play.

And they went, great.

Took me to makeup, slicked all my hair back, put a different clothing on me, took the mustache off, stuck me in front of a wooden piano, sorry, a piano with a sort of wooden fake keyboard where the keys didn't move up or down.

And I had to pretend to play this tune.

And in the background at the time, it was like some kind of Charleston kind of music, really fast.

And I was like, pretending.

They said, don't worry, you won't see your hands.

You just need to, you know, have the movement up and down.

So, okay, big camera pans across.

And then when it came out, the tune was like, some kind of real chill out thing.

And my hands are fucking going mental.

Doesn't make any sense.

Well, listen, I'm really looking forward to your upcoming appearance in this TV show, Silo.

I have one question for you beforehand, because this won't go out until it's on anyway.

Are you American in it?

Yes.

It's very strange.

I mean, I did understudy and whatever and fringe and little bits and bobs for years and years and years.

And then because of the whole lockdown thing, it suddenly became the thing to do, to do self tapes.

And both the things I filmed at the beginning of last year were self tapes.

I didn't even meet a casting director.

One of them was this big Apple series silo, and another one was a main part in a low budget, but decent horror thriller, whatever, called Dark Game, which is coming out later this year.

Yeah, I'm very much looking forward to that.

And so, yeah, and both of them were Americans.

We did have some vocal coaching on it.

I mean, the fact that because they're supposed to have lived underground in this silo, what's left of the human race or whatever is living underground in this silo and has done for generations.

And of course, there isn't any regional accents if they all live together.

And there isn't really a sort of a classy fit.

I suppose there might be, but it was, the idea was that they wanted everybody to speak as alike as possible, I think.

Yeah, there's a lot of English people pretending to be American.

I thought, not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with the show, I love the show.

It's really, really intriguing.

But I thought, oh, surely different levels would have different accents.

I thought that'd be cool.

Yeah, I think I asked about that, whether there's any mileage in the lower down the totem pole you are, because there's a different strata of workers or whatever.

Yes, exactly.

In the way society does, they might develop sort of a superior accent or a more subversive accent or whatever.

Yeah, you would think the ones on the upper floors would be posher and the ones in the engine room at the bottom would be maybe a little more common with that sounding rude?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely, whatever that means.

But I mean, the common man, whatever, working class in some kind of way.

And my character was supposed to be a very disaffected, sort of angry geezer.

And I imagine that he might have this rather flit-turnt and throw away kind of way of speaking.

But I guess the nature of television to some degree is that things like that are not, they're certainly not really addressed on set because there's so much technology.

I mean, basically my scene, it's a three person scene, me and Roberto and this other actor, who seems he's not credited as being in silo on IMDB at the moment.

That's worried me slightly because I think, I think cut my scene.

Who is the other actor?

Chinaza Uche.

The IMDB is never, I can watch things and see a person in it and online it says they're not in it.

So I wouldn't put too much weight on that.

But it was a fairly simple scene on the face of it.

But while we were filming it, they would change the camera angle and set up from a different angle.

And then suddenly a whole parade of extras would come marching behind me.

Like, here's some school kids coming along, chatting, blah, blah, blah.

Oh, there's a guy sweeping them with a bag and, you know.

And the Sherpa, the guys with the bags running up the stairs.

Yeah.

And they're being marshaled.

I hadn't met any of these people, they were not in my dressing room, my sort of little trailer park with the expensive Swedish coffee machine.

And then they're suddenly all there and I'm like, oh my, what's happening with it?

What I'm seeing on the screen looks obviously enormous and mad, a bit like Star Wars.

So, I mean, without giving too much away, how much of what I'm looking at is there and how much is like, did they have wraparound screens or was it all?

It was a fairly massive set, which was a massive kind of truck depot kind of place, you know, which is now kind of hollowed out.

It's vast.

It's basically the existing buildings, as far as I can tell, with a whole village of places that are being used for makeup and hair and the multiple dressing rooms.

But this massive central space, and there may have been others, this sort of stage which is on different levels.

It's got a huge central space with this massive staircase going up.

There are bits of it that were green.

Oh, so there are real levels.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's massive.

And this incredibly painted, almost slightly deco-ish houses or dwellings all the way around it.

It's all sort of aged.

It was very, very impressive.

It's just vast and huge.

It looks very metallic on screen.

It looks like everything is made of iron.

Yeah.

It's not.

It's not.

So, the commitment, I find it very difficult to commit to TV these days.

I completely agree with you.

It's an interesting, that's interesting.

The way that you perhaps used to kill time, the occurrence of killing time, it's both an age thing.

And I think it's also that, you know, I can get quite frustrated at not wanting to be bogged down or feel committed to something that to me is ultimately a waste of time when I think, well, I'm on the downwards slope.

I've only got so much time left.

But also I think the fact that there is so much choice.

Yeah.

That if you're not really getting on with something, you think, how many episodes?

I'm not sticking through 12 episodes of this and then at the end of it going, well, I've spent how many days of my life watching this nonsense.

And I knew from the beginning, it wasn't gonna be very good.

But sometimes there are TV shows that end before their time.

And I'm quite happy about it.

Like at the moment, two shows that I love, Barry and Succession are coming to an end.

They're great shows, both ending on season four.

Fantastic.

And I'm looking forward to it being, not just being over, but I love the way that they've decided to end it relatively early and just do good episodes and not drag it the fuck out for another decade.

Like what they do with Walking Dead or a million spin-offs.

I couldn't get into a world like that.

That's why I never watched Game of Thrones.

Never seen it.

I probably will at some point.

It will be like a Sopranos moment.

I'll pick a moment and I'll watch it.

But right now, it doesn't seem to be my cup of tea.

But that eking out or stretching it out thing, it's sullying the legacy, isn't it?

You've got something that's called the Poulsey Tower syndrome, isn't it?

That everybody is the paragon of British comedy and all that because they only make 12 episodes.

But yeah, you don't want to outstay your welcome, do you?

And flogging a dead horse and jumping the shark and all that kind of stuff.

When you speak like that, I immediately think of Lost, which had about three seasons that were just treading water.

And then it ended in a way that everyone was just like, huh?

And it didn't wrap it up.

I mean, they should have just left it, I don't know, three seasons in, keep it weird, get canceled, we'll never know what happened.

In some ways that's better.

Leave it to the imagination, like the plays we've worked on.

Yeah, I think that either spinning out something out too long or sometimes just tying something up too neatly.

And you think about something like, I don't know, the Big Bang Theory or something which went on for a long time.

And then the basic premise of what these kind of people were like, these dysfunctional people, it becomes they all sort of settle down and their clothes become less colorful.

And you think that's not what this program is about.

And you don't necessarily want to see something turning into becoming more normalized.

It seems to me partly the vanity of the actors to some degree, to some extent, this idea of wanting to be loved in a way.

You start off by saying, look, I'm good at being this great character.

And then you end up, it becomes you inevitably sort of, because it takes up so much of your time, so much of your life, people end up playing themselves a bit too much and looking for validation for their own personal selves.

And that isn't to me as good television.

There are shows that go on too long.

My, as you, I'm probably bored you with before, one of my favorite shows is Kirby Enthusiasm with Larry David, obviously fantastic.

Has become a parody of itself, but it's almost like a parody of the parody of itself now, and it's ending after 20 something years.

It hasn't done 20 seasons, obviously.

I think it's 12 or 13.

But the point being, it doesn't seem like it outstayed its welcome.

Like it went away for a bit, then it came back pretty strong.

It's for its audience, it's not for new people.

You're not gonna come in at season 10 and start watching that and think it's funny.

It's for me, it's for the people that have been with it the whole way.

It's like a little tree that comes along every now and again.

And the fact that he's ending it makes total sense to me, and it probably should have happened before.

But I'd argue that that one...

It's managed to dodge all that, just by taking little breaks and knowing what it is and not changing.

I mean, it has not changed.

This first season and the last season, it's the same show.

I mean, to some people that would be repetitive and boring.

To me, it's absolute genius.

I haven't bothered it in the way that you have, but there is something quite sort of meta about it as well, is that kind of all of Mirror's thing that it's...

Because it plays with the idea of what is of reality and spontaneity and making things up as you go along or whatever, somehow that that does lend itself in a way to repetition, that sort of cyclical thing.

It kind of works there.

It's when you've just got...

I mean, even a single movie or a made for television thing, sometimes you can see how well it starts and then by the end of it, it goes crap even within the space of a couple of hours because they've kind of gone off the boil or they've had some great ideas to kick around and then they think they've got to resolve them in a certain way.

Or you can see that maybe part of it was written almost as a pilot or something and full of ideas and invention and then by the end of it, they're running a bit thin or they don't know where to take them further.

And in a sense, I think, you know, as an audience member, I like to be sort of treated with the respect that, you know, that my intelligence can cope with, carry on the idea beyond the thing.

It doesn't have to be kind of wrapped up.

It's the questions that are asked, the situations that are created.

And then you can be left with it ringing in your ears, and you can go away and think about it.

And that's a satisfying thing.

You don't want it all served up until your belly is full.

Oh, I hate spoon-fed television.

But we were watching something recently.

I don't want to besmirch it.

It's a good show.

And it's got, you know, an Irish actor in it who I really like.

But the American actors in it were talking in a way that people just don't speak in real life.

And I couldn't watch it because it's just, that's not how we convey information to each other.

We don't speak that way.

We don't say our own names.

I'm not sitting here going, so Andrew, what would you like?

I'm not saying your name every five minutes or talking about, you know, it's just, I can't watch it.

I can't watch stuff like that.

Well, it's probably to do with people assuming that the audience's attention spans are shorter and they do need kind of reminding.

And who's that guy again?

All right, you know, but it can be insulting, can't it?

And, you know, that clumsy way, as you say, it's exposition or whatever that is done in such a clumsy way that it just takes you out of it.

And you go, no, you've lost me.

That's actually undermining that character and the whole sort of concept of reality in some way, because, you know, you're making it unreal.

You find a slightly more expensive way of doing some kind of flashback or, I don't know, just to fill us in.

Did you ever watch Dexter?

No, I haven't seen it.

Oh, it was so good.

We watched it avidly, but there was a moment where we stopped taking it seriously.

And there was this weird sort of telenovela moment in Dexter in which this character, Angel, as we call her, Angel, his partner Maria comes up to him in the kitchen and he's getting a drink out of the fridge.

And she sort of beckons him to the bedroom.

And he just looks at her and he goes, it is a long way from the kitchen to the bedroom, Maria.

And then the camera pans over his shoulder.

And I'm like, what the fuck is happening?

Did you watch a lot of TV when you were a kid?

No.

We didn't have a telly when I was very small.

So when we went to my grandma's, the Thursday or Friday, we would watch stuff.

The Virginian.

It's that cowboy stuff.

That was me and my brother's favorite.

We were kind of at the butt end of the Westerns.

Yeah, rawhide.

For us, it was the Virginian, and then there was a series after that called Men From Shiloh, which is a spin-off series, and Ada Smith and Jones.

Yes, I remember that.

And there was a thing called The High Chaparral that was on on Sundays, wasn't there?

Yeah.

Yes, you watched that.

Yeah.

With Cameron Mitchell.

I can remember the act of Henry Darrow, Mark Slade.

He had one of those those theme tunes that reminded you a bit of The Magnificent Seven or something like that, very much of that era.

And we loved that.

And we loved, you know, I think my love of denim comes from Cowboy.

The love of denim.

I followed this man around shops all over the world, trying to buy the perfect Levi's.

Oh, it's so funny.

That is so true.

You still seek them out.

Yeah, not not not exclusively Levi's, but I liked a good bit of denim.

I've got so much that, you know, old stuff that I just keep in that and it still fits.

Hallelujah.

But yeah, you've not gone Wrangler, have you?

I haven't got any Wrangler.

No, I do start and Diesel and Levi's jackets.

Levi's are still my favorite.

Oh, yeah, they're really nice.

Wranglers are the ones with the massive zip.

For some reason, men in the 60s and 70s had the 12 inch long flies.

They go all the way up.

That's right.

They just have massive dicks in the 70s.

I don't understand what they like to give the impression.

So, talking about kids TV, I mean, I don't know how much of it you saw.

It doesn't have to be kids TV, it could be in your teenage years.

What was the TV show you saw as a kid that frightened the shit out of you?

Oh, it would be very boring to say Doctor Who, but that's the one that sticks in my mind.

That's okay.

I didn't see many of them.

There was one of them about some kind of stone devils or gargoyles or something that came to life.

And I had a kind of, I mean, my parents are religious.

We went to church as a child.

And so they played with Satanism on television and stuff in things like Starsky and Hutch and all that kind of thing.

It was very much a theme.

There was a wasn't anything.

But it was something that people sort of toyed with the idea of the supernatural more.

And I think it was something that was much less, less of a joke in a way.

And I remember being shit scared of gargoyles coming to life and these kind of, they would probably be utterly risible if you saw them, you know, they're just ridiculous.

But to a child and I forget, cyber men and Daleks and whatever, the idea of stone devil creaking around.

And another one where they were sitting, people sitting around doing some kind of seance thing and making this giant spider thing appear.

Oh, I remember that.

That's awful.

Well, the first few buns triggered me.

Yeah.

I'm trying to think what TV show I'm suddenly, it might be A Towns of the Unexpected, but there was, I remember there, remember there were like these TV shows, oh, that were the Hammer House films, but there was a Hammer House TV show.

Was there a TV show?

Yes, the Hammer House, I don't think there are many episodes, but maybe 12 or something.

But I watched one of them the other day because I remembered it.

And not because of, I knew it was coming in here.

About a woman who's, that she's with her husband and her children, and they have a car crash.

And she believes that he's been replaced by a doppelganger.

Right.

Because he's badly injured.

And there's this whole thing of, that he had beautiful teeth.

Yeah.

And she thinks that this guy has bad teeth.

And then she, then there's a point in it where they managed to convince her that this guy is, that she had a temporary aberration and that everything is fine.

And they sit around and they're celebrating and raising a glass to each other.

And he lifts up the glass and he goes, cheese.

And he shows her his rotten teeth.

I remember that.

I remember the impact of that.

I watched it the other day and of course, I found it, I dug it out on YouTube.

That's horrible.

You just reminded me of a couple of things from that same era.

The house that bled blood or something, like they turn on the taps in the house and blood would come out.

Drip blood.

Yeah.

Was that a TV show or a movie?

The house that dripped blood.

That was a TV.

I think it's a movie.

Oh, was it a movie?

Yeah, early 70s, maybe late, one of the late Hammer films, maybe.

Yeah.

There was some kind of TV show and they had all these weird episodes.

It must be Tales of the Unexpected, but there was this family and they were living in a room and every time they opened, they woke up one day and they opened the curtains and it was metal outside and they couldn't open the door and there was nothing outside and it got hotter and hotter and hotter and they were melting and it was getting hotter.

And this, it was like a play for about 20 minutes, but it was getting more and more uncomfortable.

They're sweating, things are melting in the room.

And at the end, the sort of payoff is, you see this other kid, another child comes into the room and they open what is like an airing cupboard and they've left their doll's house in there.

And these are the people that were in that doll's house.

It just stuck with me.

It's just really creepy and claustrophobic and horrible.

It's got to be Tales of the Unexpected, right?

Yeah.

They're in short stories, mainly a couple of books of short stories by Roald Dahl and I think they may have made some more up when they worked their way through the Roald Dahl one.

But that sounds a bit more kind of Ray Bradbury or something.

But it could be Ray Bradbury.

Was there a TV show?

There was actually a TV show called Ray Bradbury Theatre, which ran from 1985.

However, the TV film I'm talking about was called Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense, Child's Play from the year 1984.

Yeah, that's quite, you know, and the idea that it's, you know, that we're all just little atoms or something, that everything's sort of scaled down and there's a bigger world going on beyond you.

And that sort of idea that seems to be inherent in that story, they're just people in a doll's house that think that that's the world.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, there's a lot of things like that that led to me having nightmares I've talked about on here before, but something I haven't talked about is a dream that I used to have that was recurring where I would get up in the morning for school, but the sun wouldn't come up.

And then I couldn't quite get the lights on.

Like the night, the bulbs would just be glowing a little bit, but not enough for us to see.

And we couldn't quite see where we were, but we knew it was like 11 o'clock, but the sun hadn't come up and it just didn't come up that day.

And we're wondering if it ever would.

And there's just this horrible oppressive feeling.

And it must've come from watching shit like that.

Yeah.

There's an episode.

I should pitch that.

Pitch that to your friend.

How would we light it?

I'm watching all these inside and on the lines, and they're fantastic.

Some of those are just absolutely brilliant.

I'd love those guys to adapt my book, actually.

You Shot My Dog and I Love You, available in all bookshops worldwide.

Okay, so it sort of alluded to it a little bit there with not inappropriate content, but something you would have seen as a child that you shouldn't, that was horrific.

But what about things we were exposed to in television?

Like I would often come down and see the Sweeney was on, and obviously they wouldn't pause that then, it would just be on, and you'd have to walk through and see John Thorpe beating up a prostitute or whatever, slapping someone around or calling someone a, you know, you fucking tart or whatever.

Did, I mean, you would have had a telly when you were older.

So did your parents watch things like you said, they're quite religious, did they watch highest television?

Or did they watch the rough stuff as well?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, sort of standard nine o'clock ITV things, like Sweeney, I don't think they would have said fuck, but they, I remember-

It's more the violence.

Yes, violence was less checked in some respects.

I mean, it's like the westerns again, and people getting shot, people carrying guns around and shooting people.

It's a matter of course, people that weren't bad characters, just killing people when you think, couldn't you just have had a word with them?

Exactly.

Couldn't they have been better?

I've just remembered one of those moments of being a child and my parents watching something.

It had the Scottish guy from my, some others, not some, Ayn Arfott mom, but there was some kind of nightclub or something and there was one of the strippers came in or a potential stripper girl and she took off her top to show her breast.

And there was suddenly bare breast bobbling around in them.

On television, in your house?

Yeah.

And my mom said something to me like, look, you're obviously embarrassed.

It's past your bedtime.

You shouldn't be up anyway and sort of packed me off to bed.

And I very willingly went because I was embarrassed.

And I thought what was going on.

And just thinking, is this what grownups do?

Sit around watching things like this.

No wonder they want to pack us off to bed.

At least she talked to you about it though, because a lot of people would never bring it up.

They'd just be too embarrassed to go, okay, off to bed.

That was nice.

Yeah.

That's actually pretty sweet.

Yeah.

So with that in mind, what kind of situations do you find yourself in with your kids that are similar to that?

Do they come in when you're watching something that you don't want them to see?

Because obviously we can pause things now.

My son actually knocks on the door because if you're watching something like, I don't know, we watched a comedy show, Dave or something a little raunchy, you don't want them coming in to see someone having sex or whatever.

It doesn't happen very much, to be honest with us.

The kids being put to bed is usually pretty conclusive and there's usually a bit of a period where we fart around tidying up or whatever before we actually settle down to watch anything.

We're usually faster to eat by then.

But if a child in the past has been upset and had to at least come downstairs for a cuddle on the sofa, I tend to turn what we're watching off.

The closest I would say I get to that is scrolling through Instagram or something on my tablet and my daughter here behind me.

Yeah, they do that, don't they?

They're always over your shoulder.

Yeah, don't look at things over my shoulder.

I know that things do crop up and particularly things like for some reason boxing or some kind of MMA video that will just start scrolling.

I don't want them to see people knocking the shit out of each other.

Or just news in general.

It's like Five Dead in Moll shooting or something.

Oh shit.

Yeah.

Both of them read well and my son particularly reads very quickly.

I don't want that kind of vibe going around.

I don't have to explain it or even confront the issue and such.

I don't want them to have to deal with that.

I'll take it you're not on TikTok.

I'm not on TikTok.

That's the worst thing.

I was on it for just for a little while just to sort of test the water and see what it was and I found myself just losing time.

I was on a bus and I saw someone using it in London about a year ago and I thought, wow, what an enormous waste of time.

Why are they doing that?

And then I got on it and I started doing the same thing.

And I remember even at one point going, I'll just give myself an hour to look at all this trash.

And within about three minutes, you're thinking 9-11 is fake.

No one's been to the moon and the world's flat.

So it's like you got to get off there as quick as you can.

I might go back on it for comedy reasons, but I'm kind of scared of it in the way that I've never taken cocaine and I don't want to.

I mean, Instagram seems to me to be somewhat like that.

And I just find it, it's the opposite of edifying.

It just makes me feel bad for numerous reasons, mainly because I think I shouldn't be watching this kind of thing.

It sets off the wrong kind of triggers in me.

And walking away from it, I'm not in any way kind of improved to make me approach the next thing that I've got to do in a positive way.

And I think, why am I doing it?

And as you say, I think you just have to snap yourself away from it because it's the thief of time.

And it also, it's very bad, I think, personally, for my mental health on some level, somewhere at the bottom end of the wedge, maybe.

But it's just, there's nothing good in it.

I don't see that there is.

It's just fucking noise.

It's just noise.

And even if we use it in a promotional way for you, for your acting, me for the podcast and comedy, I'd almost rather do it without that level of interaction because I want, I mean, doing this podcast, I've only now been doing, you're my, let me look up here, you're on my fifth record so far.

So you're going to be the fifth episode.

I'll just let you know, Andrew, when it's going to be out.

So you're going to be, this one goes like June 21st.

Just like in Silo.

I'm the fifth episode.

Yeah, you're the fifth episode.

There we are.

Mr.

Five.

Five is your lucky number right now.

So that's true.

You're the fifth episode.

And what I've found is, I know I've met, I met up with Andrew quite recently.

We had a nice little chat in Cambridge.

I went down there.

Unfortunately, I didn't feel very well that day.

Sorry about that.

In a way, I'm talking to people and yeah, there's a, you know, this is slightly heightened.

I'm talking to you in a slightly different way.

I will talk to you if we were in a cafe.

Not that much.

Just in the knowledge that other people are listening.

But what I found doing these, it is connecting me to friends and people I've worked with and people who I wasn't even sure that, are we friends?

Or are we just acquaintances?

It's kind of like, I'm sort of working, oh, well, that's an acquaintance actually.

We've got lots to talk about, but that's an acquaintance, not a friend.

Oh, my God, I didn't realize we were that close, tick.

And this is actually, you know, being the age I am, I am struggling with the notion of having real friends because, you know, you're my real friend.

I know you're my real friend, but I don't see you because we live hundreds of miles away from each other.

So it's that feeling of like, this is giving me a connection again.

And it's in a public forum, but it is really nice to do.

And to let everybody talk about what they want to talk about, but there is a kind of, for me, it's another way of engaging with people that I like, people I'm interested to hear about their lives.

And you'll probably say something on this that you wouldn't say to me in person.

So I find out more about you.

You know what I mean?

It's really good in that way.

Yes.

And I mean, I personally don't have many opportunities to do this.

You know, being around people and at school, picking up the kids say, I'm rubbish at that.

It's not something I find myself wanting to sort of separate myself from them rather than connect with them in a lot of instances.

And sometimes I succeed in not doing that, but it's an exception.

And obviously going to work, you can have fabulous time on a film set or something, or even a play reading or something.

But there isn't that personal connection to it.

And you don't walk away from a feeling sort of personally enriched in the same way.

And as you say, it is wonderful when you actually are reminded of people that you actually really like and that produce some kind of positive effect on you.

That you don't feel that you're somehow depleted by the experience.

You feel that you're enriched by it in some way.

That might sound a bit twee in some kind of way, but it's true.

And we need those things.

It's not just a matter of being bombarded with images and things.

That what you like this, you want.

Because you end up going some kind of, whoa, no, no.

When I said I liked it, I don't mean...

No, well, when I'm on social media, I feel that nobody knows who I am at all, because I get bombarded with things.

And what they don't seem to realize is I don't want anything.

I don't want anything.

There's nothing I need that I don't already have, apart from maybe some money to buy a house, which apparently I was told recently that it's too late, because there's only 16 years left for me to get a mortgage.

So they're basically telling me you're nearly dead now, we can't lend you money.

So going back to that, I mean, this is just me talking to you, but you are the first person that I remember actively having the thought on tour afterwards, feeling good and going, huh, we're actually friends.

That's actually real, because I think I went through a bit of a phase in the early theater time.

I don't know if many, from all the tours I've done, handful of friends, what, a few, two, three?

I don't know, you're one of them.

But I do remember thinking that it was all very fickle, because I remember the first time I went on tour, I was friends with everybody, I was close with everyone, it was like a family.

And when it ended, I felt empty and alone and sad.

And I think the closest to depression I've ever, I don't get depressed, but I definitely felt depressive.

I was sad, I spent a Christmas in a room in Brixton going, and I spent all the money I had on tour as well, because I decided that I'm not going to save anything, I'm just going to have fun.

And I had a really good time.

And I saw one person from that tour again, 10 years later, never saw them after that.

That was it.

And I remember after that going, I think I got quite cold.

I was on another tour and I remember being quite cold to this other person who was quite young and they came on the show and I was like, the veteran guy who'd done three tours by this point.

And they were like, oh, we're going to be friends forever.

And I'm like, no, you're not, you're never going to fucking see them again, mate.

But that's not necessarily true and not a nice thing to say, but I mean, it really is kind of true.

You're close for a bit of time.

And yeah, the tour love is a real thing.

A friend of mine who worked with Victor Spannetti, well, a guy that, I did get on very well with him many, many years ago, well, in 1980 it was.

And he worked with Victor Spannetti.

And Victor Spannetti gathered the whole group of them who had been in this play together at the end of it and said, yeah, right, this is over now.

You and I, we might bump into each other in the street.

Just remember, we're not the best of friends.

We work together on a play, right?

So don't treat me as if I'm your best mate because I'm not.

Andrew, what is a show that was on television when you were younger, that you just cannot believe was on TV?

It could be something that, it was just creepy, it could be something a little bit dodgy, that they just would not make it now, and you can't believe it was ever on.

Anything come to mind?

Apart from Mini Pops.

Remember Mini Pops?

What's Mini Pops?

It was very short-lived, because it was taken off for the very reasons that...

Tell me more.

It should never have been on.

As far as I remember, it was a sort of a kids pop show, which had preteen children dressed up and mouthing to the pop hits of the time, but wearing hideously inappropriate clothing, makeup all over their faces and doing all kinds of provocative dancing, potentially provocative to the wrong sort of people, you know, whatever.

But somebody thought it was a good idea.

Do not Google this.

Do not Google me.

You do not want this in your search history.

Certainly was well documented at the time that it was such a bad idea and who did this.

And that was even in those days.

And I can't think quite when it would have been, presumably maybe mid late 80s.

Mid late 80s?

I thought you were talking 70s or something.

It could be early 80s.

Really?

So does it exist?

Is there someone dressed up as Gary Glitter in mini-pops doing this?

It could exist, couldn't it?

Blimey.

That's really quite something.

Is there anything that's springing on mind?

Just something you couldn't believe that was on.

I mean, I think you've answered it.

Thinking back as well, I just remembered you know shows that you shouldn't have known.

Like I remember watching The Comedians.

Now that ended in the 70s.

And I remember watching that.

Highly inappropriate content, sexism, and all of my wife this, my mother-in-law that, Mike Reed's pretty much swearing, but not swearing maybe.

Put this one, I remember going to see a firework display and the celebrity opening the display embarking was Mike Reed and it was about 1979.

So I must have known who he was because I was excited to meet him.

But he was at the, he did a kids' show called Run Around, didn't he?

Oh, is that why I knew him?

Run Around.

Run Around, that sounds familiar.

That's probably closer to that.

Run Around, I remember you used to read out the questions and one of them was, where are the Hebroids?

Sometimes he'd just get the Hebrides, you know.

Oh, I got you there.

He presented them.

He was like the first, I mean, he was cockneyed, he was proper mockneyed, he was really putting it on.

Absolutely, yeah.

So Andrew, obviously you're in silo this weekend, that will have been on by the time this goes out, so episode five, check that out.

But there's another exciting, it's not television, but you can plug it, a film that you've been in, yes?

Yes, a film at a similar time, early last year, it's a sort of horror thriller, I suppose, about an illegal game show on the dark web and a policeman's attempts to track down the perpetrators of it.

And I play the masked, rather diabolical game show host.

And it's fabulous.

I mean, I, you know, I've become a little disillusioned with some of the theatre I had been doing.

And just turning up at that, I assumed I hadn't got it.

It was a self-taking again.

And then my agent said, no, I think you're in the mix.

And she got back to them.

And then all of a sudden, in a big kind of flurry, I had to have a Zoom meeting with the director and producer.

They sent me the script.

And like 10 days later, I was in Bristol filming it for a week.

Just hit the ground completely running.

And it was just rather than people sitting around going, I think we should do it like this.

What do we think about?

It was just wind up the monkey boy.

Off you go.

Do your stuff.

And there's a load of really on it professionals standing there watching.

And I just had the time of my life.

It was exhausting.

It was just utterly brilliant.

I'm really looking forward to seeing it.

You had a market screening at Cannes this week.

So that's good news.

That's something that they do in order to get distribution sorted and whatever.

I mean, obviously, I don't know the synopsis of it exactly, but I wrote down last week, actually completely unrelated to this.

We were watching some reality TV, which I can't really stand apart from Traders and maybe The Apprentice, things like that, which is also getting a bit old.

But I did write down here.

This was a line I wrote last week.

It goes, how far away are we from a game show where the contestants actually die?

And I mean, like a proper, I mean, because Channel 4 is getting weirder and weirder.

I do believe we're what, 20 years away from releasing some prisoners into something to get killed for a winner to walk free or something.

It can't be long away.

It's going to happen.

Someone's going to do it.

It's grim, isn't it?

I mean, that's what they're thinking about.

But yeah, who knows?

Who knows where we're going?

I mean, imagine if you pitched Naked Attraction in like 1985, they'd have gone, what?

Of course not.

I'm not going to show people's bits.

I'm watching it, mate, but we can't make it.

Don't be done.

I'm sorry.

Andrew, thanks for coming on this.

I really do appreciate it.

It's nice to have a friend on.

It's been a delight.

Such a talented man.

You too, sir.

It's nice to see you.

I wish you well in all your future endeavors, and I'm sure you're gonna be on telly a lot more.

I wish you all the very best and hope to see you too.

Thanks, man.

Andrew P.

Stephen there, a fine actor of theater, television and film.

Now, not only is Andrew an actor, he's also a musician, having released two albums, the first of which was called Almost Like You, which came out in 2007.

I know this because I produced the album.

We were on the road together as he wrote it and one of the songs is called Baby Sleeps Alone.

This was the only one we wrote together.

I wrote the music, he wrote the lyrics, while we were in Newcastle of all places.

The song was then taken to Tokyo for remixing and that's the version we're gonna play today.

All these songs will hopefully be remastered and put up on the various music platforms shortly.

I'll let you know via this podcast when that happens.

But for now, here it is, the Tokyo Edit of Baby Sleeps Alone by Andrew P.

Stephen.

Ah, a busy Cardiff Street in 2007, back in the day.

I used to stick microphones out of windows and try and get sound effects.

That's what I used to do.

Anyway, if you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to tune in next week for another great episode of Television Times Podcast.

Follow us wherever you get podcasts.

See you next time.

Bye for now.