BBC One | Pebble Mill at One | Arthur Lowe’s LAST ever interview and appearance | Dad’s Army | 1982

ladies and gentlemen arthur it's good to see you in civvie gear i must say what a marvelous team effort that was and what a great sadness when it finished arthur yes people are still asking me when he's coming back you know and uh when i say that half of us are dead anyway and the other half are too old to jump over the fences anymore and so because you're in surprise you know i said but uh tv people don't get old i mean you know they think you some secret of immortality well that's really the only reason why it stopped because as i said we lost three of our leading characters and and and we were all getting rather old so you know we stopped while the going was still good now you are one of the lucky people one of the the most um proficient actors that we see on television in that um instead of having a character stamped on you through like blackpool rock after swindling you you emerge as a completely different character in captain mannering how difficult was that for you to shake off that character of swindling well i mean it wasn't all that difficult because because of the the the standard writing you see of the series i mean that's the end that's the be all in the end of all good series if if the writing is good then you have a very much better chance than if the writing is bad and i believe you have a convenience series where the writing has been very bad uh and hence they haven't lasted but if it's i think from the first script i read of uh dead zombie it was obvious that it was going to be good and the one could make something from the character without trying very hard because it was there it was self-explanatory it was like reading shaw you know there's a there's a saying in the theater that uh there are two ways of playing berlin sure one is one is to act active and the other is to learn the lines because if if you learn the lines you don't need to act his writing is so good that if you just say the lines the rest will come yeah i know that you get across sometimes when people say to you um how much of you is there in the character that you're portraying particularly with something like mannering you know what do you say to those people make you cross about that question well yeah it's just strange things yeah but i the less personality an actor has of his own the better he is able to portray the characters that his child demands of him um i don't think you should be very clever for the start to be a good actor i think you should be very intelligent but once you start getting clever then forget it because that's that's not your job to be clever your job is to is to interpret what the man has written just as a penis job is to interpret what what his composer's written and you start being too clever then out the window goes the character you know um but because on the other side of the coin i think that no matter how clever an actor may be um in in in hiding his own personality there must be a certain amount of himself comes into the part i don't think this can really be helped but i'm also keeping it at a minimum yes many people would have said that the next series you created the next sort of legendary character you created on television was potter red was potter who we all came to love and adore now you're in the middle of or you will be this summer recording another series thankfully yes we're going to do another six episodes of joining this summer yeah a lovely old codger he was sort of retired managing director of the family firm yeah he drove his wife matt she will have a reminder of a super moment from the last series where you were being extremely helpful to a lost abandoned french couple and here you are practicing your french yeah great stuff you laugh when you watch it don't you are you streaming what was in that suitcase something quite hilly i felt it yes oh yeah and that design is not just a glamorous one is it oh newspapers it's very hard yeah very good and we'll look forward to when we see that in them in august um well i don't know we shall we'll know it will be i should think next spring before they'll come out i think know another character which you really did develop very successfully is um in bless me father you enjoyed doing that didn't you please yes i enjoyed it very much i enjoyed that because it was such a change from these these um these bumbling old englishmen but i would have liked to do more of that but for some reason or other we didn't i don't i don't know quite why for one thing how young abhinav the boy who played my curette uh went to australia morris you know on a permanent basis he may marry the girl out there and [Music] and we've lost him to the to the clergy but uh i don't think that was a sufficient reason in itself i think i mean there must have been some other politics behind it because one can always get another cure but however lionel jeffers has done something similar yes recently sir you're such a busy man you haven't really stopped working for 34 years when you first set foot on the stage in manchester now that was where you met your wife joan yes and you've been married to her ever since yeah now at the moment you're on tour with a production which i saw last night and enjoyed enormously a good old fashion production from rc sheriff a real old thriller home etc what what do you like about acting with the wife on stage don't destroy the microphone well i like it because it means that we get we get a lot of nice paid holidays uh we would do a nice season in eastbourne last year and i went to australia and and new zealand the year before and so on um so that's nice yeah uh we both get bored with holidays as such and i i i i can't bear that's that's probably why you work so much thinking about it i'll smash this one you're getting tangled up while you sort yourself out alpha thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Nostalgic News UK

Views: 399,760

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Id: 9W4vDXCDbKk

Length: 7min 14sec (434 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 15 2022