Abigoliah: Hello, everyone. Welcome to All British Comedy Explained, the podcast where I learn about all the British comedies I’ve been missing out on. And today we have a very special interview with Steve Nallon. You might recognise Steve Nallon’s voice — or many voices — from his time on Spitting Image, where he played characters like the Queen Mother, Alan Bennett, David Attenborough, Harold Wilson and, of course, Margaret Thatcher.
He is also a stand-up comedian who has done many live shows and one-man shows. He has appeared in The New Statesman as Margaret Thatcher and has written several very good books. And, of course, with me for this interview is Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello. Yeah, Steve Nallon was, surprisingly, maybe to him, a big part of my childhood because I was the kind of guy who would watch the credits of shows like Spitting Image, clock when some of those same people would appear in the flesh, and start to be able to hear who was doing what voice.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. I feel like when we got into the interview, I got really excited talking about voice acting and might have taken over a bit. So did you have a nice time with Steve?
Tom: Of course. Yeah. No, he’s a delight. He’s one of those interview subjects where you ask one question and you get five answers back, which, as far as I’m concerned, is absolutely ideal.
Abigoliah: Oh, he was great. And so, basically, little behind the scenes, guys: we recorded the interview with Steve, and then we took a break, and now we’re back recording the intro and the outro. And in that break, I went to my bookstore and I ordered Steve Nallon’s Ghost Stories. And I am so excited because spooky season is coming up. So I’m going to—
Tom: Read—
Abigoliah: —his book of ghost stories, and I’m very, very looking forward to it.
Tom: Yeah. I mean, it is a problem if you are, especially, an impressionist and your stock-in-trade is impersonating somebody who is the focus of public attention, like the Prime Minister. Then you’re on the gravy train until they stop being Prime Minister.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And then you have to diversify. But it seems like he’s done that very successfully.
Abigoliah: It seems like he has. And, as he said, make something that is your own.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: And that kind of blew my mind. And at the same time, my whole comedy career is something I’ve made on my own. Yet the things I’ve been most successful with are things I’ve worked with other people. I’m more of a collaborative person.
Tom: I mean, make something your own doesn’t necessarily mean not doing it in collaboration.
Abigoliah: That’s true.
Tom: Collaboration to some extent. But if you are just coming in to read someone else’s script, and that’s going to be brought to life by someone else’s puppet, then you are quite a small cog in quite a big machine.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But this is yours and mine.
Abigoliah: Yeah, this is ours. We share it. Guys, enjoy this interview. Oh, it’s so cool to hear him do all the voices too. I didn’t want to ask, and I’m so glad I didn’t have to. He just does them. It’s so good. It’s so good. All right, shall we let everyone listen to it?
Tom: I think we should.
Abigoliah: All right, let’s go.
* * * * *
Tom: Hello, Steve. Welcome to the podcast.
Steve: A great pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Tom: I heard your voice an awful lot when I was growing up, but I didn’t always know it was your voice.
Steve: Well, that is true. I mean, Spitting Image was, you know, one of the most popular shows on television. Fourteen million viewers. And for a ten o’clock Sunday evening, that was very impressive. But nobody knew who we were, you know.
And I mean, I was there on Steve Coogan’s first day, and Harry Enfield and John Sessions and a load of— It was a really interesting time because you suddenly had this flowering, if you like, of voiced talent. Rory Bremner, Chris Barrie, you know, all suddenly more or less the same generation. And pretty much everybody worked on Spitting Image, but nobody knew our names.
Tom: Yeah. They were scrolled by at great speed at the end of the episode.
Steve: That’s right.
Abigoliah: That was actually one of my questions. Did people ever— I mean, you do the voices so well, Margaret Thatcher specifically. Did anyone ever hear you speak in your natural voice and go, “I know him from somewhere. Where do I know him?” Did you get any of that?
Steve: Well, once, interestingly— I mean, occasionally I did appear in newspapers because they were fascinated, the press were fascinated, by the fact that it was a man doing Margaret Thatcher. And occasionally I would do interviews on television, but incredibly rarely.
And actually I was making a film as a straight actor, and it was called Frankie and Johnnie. It was with Hywel Bennett, and we worked in a newspaper office. You don’t need to know any of that. But as part of our research, we had to go into a court, and the usher came up to me — a lady came up to me — and she said, “You’re Steve Nallon, aren’t you?”
I said, “How on earth did you know that?”
She said, “Well, it’s my job, you see. I’ve got to be good with faces.”
And then she said something really interesting, which I’ve never forgotten. And it had a big effect on me, in a way. She said, “You know what your problem is now?” You know when people come up to you and say, “You know what your problem is?” You— Oh God, what are they going to say?
And she said, “You know what your problem is, and the problem you’ll have in your life and your career, is you’re too good at one thing. You may end up being good at other things, but you will struggle because you’re too good at the Margaret Thatcher. And people will always put that right at the top, and you’ll probably never be quite as good at anything else, even though you may well be good at it. You may not be quite as good at it.”
And that stayed with me. And I think over the past 40 years, there’s been a lot of truth in this.
Tom: So I remember—
Steve: Of course, please let me finish. It’s an important point. I’m very, very happy, of course, always to do the voice of Margaret Thatcher. But could I just make an observation regarding Spitting Image? And that is that the way I am doing the voice of Margaret Thatcher now — now, some people may say it’s an accurate impersonation, and I’d be very glad if they did — however, that voice was wrong for the puppet.
Because on Spitting Image, the key was you had to match the voice to the puppet, and the puppets were caricatured. And so I listened to the first show I did, which wasn’t very good. It wasn’t successful, but we’ll talk about that later. And I realised it didn’t work.
And so I went away and I had a long chat— Well, I had a long chat to Peter and Roger, who were the caricaturists, Peter Fluck and Roger Law. And they said, “Look, can you do something about this? We want you to match our caricature,” especially when they started dressing her up as Churchill.
And I said, “Well, one of the things I’ve noticed is Mrs Thatcher has got lots of different voices. She has the interview technique, you know, that very quiet voice.” And that was the one I was doing.
But I said, “She also has the House of Commons voice.”
And they said, “Well, try that.”
And I said, “Well, the Right Honourable gentleman doesn’t understand the nature of fiscal policy. He has—”
And they said, “Could you combine—”
And I said, “What I could do? Yeah, I could do that. I could combine that rather intimate sort of voice with the Right Honourable gentleman.”
And that is the voice that we had on Spitting Image for Margaret Thatcher. It wasn’t how she sounded in real life.
Tom: No.
Steve: But it was how people imagined she sounded. You see, that’s, with impersonations, far more important: is to capture what people have in their heads as opposed to what the reality is.
And what impressionists do is capture the essence. And with caricature impersonation, you caricature that essence in some way.
And what we found — I’m not mentioning any names here — but what we found on Spitting Image was some very talented impressionists came on the show, but they couldn’t do the caricature side. They— it was too accurate, and they were trying to get it right, which was great for what they did on their stage show or in their cabaret act or stand-up act or whatever. But it wasn’t right for the show.
And the other thing on the show is you also had to do sketches. You had to have a talent to do sketches. And that’s slightly different to acting. With sketches, you have to ping the important words. You have to ping the comedy line, you know. In a periodic sentence, where you put the most important word at the end, you have to ping that. You know, you have to find a way of just underlining the word, and it gets very technical.
And of course, we had probably the, in my opinion, having worked with lots of producers, we had John Lloyd, who was the finest comedy producer I’ve ever met. I mean, he’d done Not the Nine O’Clock News, he’d done Blackadder. But his instinct and understanding of comedy and his ability to get that across to the performer — I’ve never, sadly, I’ve never come across anybody as good as John.
Tom: He—
Steve: He just had the most brilliant comedic mind. He could take a script, a very wordy script, and he— In fact, I gave him a pencil at the very beginning of one series. I noticed at the end of the series, it was like that.
Tom: Because—
Steve: He had the same pencil, because it was his pencil, Steve, and I recognised it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. But he could go through a script and he could take out the words that you didn’t need.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Steve: And one of the problems, I think, when I see comedy done, sketches and sketch shows: too many words.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: My instinct is just take out the words. The person who understands this best in modern comedy is Jimmy Carr.
And what he does over his— He says that over his years, he produces basically 100 gags. But he spends all his time honing and honing them down. So there’s the most, not necessarily shortest, but it’s the most efficient way of getting the gag across.
Abigoliah: Yeah, that economy of language.
Steve: It’s the economy of language. Absolutely right. And one of the things that, when I do work with students— And I’m going to steal that line, incidentally, economy of language.
Abigoliah: It’s yours now.
Steve: Thank you.
Abigoliah: You’re welcome.
Steve: Because you’re absolutely right. And it applies to plays as well. I did a play at Greenwich Theatre, a trouser part, as we call it, because it wasn’t in a frock. And I said to the writer, I said, “You’ve just got too many words in this play.”
And he was a bit upset about it, but I said, “Look, can I take this word out? This word, this word, this word?”
And then he wrote me a letter after the production and he said, “I wish you’d have done the whole play like that.”
You know, everybody— Because it’s not difficult, but you’ve just got to spend time taking out the words you don’t need. Because audiences just know instinctively when somebody is saying too much.
Because the sense doesn’t go in.
And, you know, I quote this when I teach sometimes. I say two of the most powerful words at the end of a film that I can think of are just two words. And one is “come” and the other is “stay”. And it’s the end of E.T.
Steve: You don’t need anything more than “come”, “stay”. That’s the problem that they have in their dilemma. And you could have had this long, you know, long scene when they know— Come, stay. And I say that is the most economy of language I know.
Tom: Yeah.
Steve: And it’s a brilliant, brilliant piece of— So I don’t say that everybody should turn their scripts into one-word sentences. But when I work with young writers, you know, I just take out the words. And I apply that to myself.
Tom: Well, speaking of young people, Steve, I’m really interested to know what your kind of comedy heroes were when you were a young person, when you were growing up. Who were your influences? What were you watching?
Steve: Well, here’s the thing. People have this argument about whether women are funny. I’ve never—
Abigoliah: I have opinions on this.
Tom: Yeah.
Steve: Well, I’ll tell you my opinion. I watched Lucille Ball when I was growing up.
Abigoliah: I love Lucille Ball. She’s, like, my favourite.
Steve: Well, she was funny. She— I mean, she’s the child in an adult body. You know, she’s the eternal child. But she was just funny.
And it wasn’t the— You know, she was a huge— But then, of course, you had all these wonderful British character actresses from the North. We had a character called Hylda Baker. There was, of course, then Joyce Grenfell, and then people like Margaret Rutherford on film. And then, you know, later in life there’s Victoria Wood and Caroline Aherne.
The comedy I understood best, because I’m from the North, I’m from Yorkshire, the comedy I understood best were people like Les Dawson. I understood where his comedy was coming from.
But I also tried my best to find the previous generation. I was fascinated that Morecambe and Wise— Eric Morecambe had talked about a man called Jimmy Jewell— Jimmy James, rather, not Jimmy— Jimmy Jewel was a comedian as well. A man called Jimmy James. And he said that he was the funniest comedian he’d ever seen.
And then there was a documentary about Jimmy James on television. And I watched it because I didn’t know who this man was, and I understood exactly what he meant.
He was interesting, but people won’t know who he is. But he was fascinating because he was a stand-up comic, but he used stooges and he used routines and he used improvisation, and he interacted with the audience. His act was so varied. It was all those things together.
Abigoliah: One question. What do you mean by stooges?
Steve: Well, he had somebody come on, and then he came on and he said, “I’ve got, I think it’s—” The line is, “I’ve got an elephant in this box.” And it was a shoebox. “I’ve got a—” It’s not a giraffe, it’s an elephant.
And what happens with the stooge is that you build a relationship. The comedian builds a relationship with the stooge, but also the audience’s attitude to the stooge. You’re playing with the two things.
And often you’re dealing with people— I mean, for example, there was—
Tom: Was this a plant in the audience, Steve?
Steve: It wasn’t a plant in the audience. It was actually Roy Castle.
Tom: Oh, right. Okay.
Steve: Roy Castle was just— He came on and he was somebody to play off, play the comedy off, and you had to keep—
And it was played in later life by Roy Castle.
A different type of stooge is the one that Hylda Baker worked in her act. Now, Hylda Baker was a tiny little, rather loud— I can do an impersonation of her because I used to do— She used to say, “Hello,” and talk like that. And she had a very peculiar, very peculiar voice.
And she was about five foot two or something. She was tiny. And her stooge was a man in a frock who came on, on stilts, who was about seven foot high, finally played by Matthew Kelly.
Tom: Oh.
Steve: Matthew Kelly was Hylda Baker’s final stooge. And what it meant was that she could build— She could talk to the stooge, but she could also relate to the audience. And what I used to say when I was sort of teaching stand-up is that you’re creating different dynamics here. You’ve got a dynamic attitude towards the stooge and the stooge’s attitude to you, but you’ve also got playing with the audience’s attitude to the stooge and whether they think they’re stupid or clever or whatever.
And the stooge in Hylda Baker’s case never spoke. She just nodded her head. I mean, the jokes were terrible.
And I saw the act right at the end of her life. Here’s a personal thing. My grandmother took me to my first gay bar when I was 16.
Abigoliah: I love your grandmother.
Steve: And the reason why she took me to the gay bar was because I wanted to see Hylda Baker. Now, Hylda Baker had been a huge star in the early 1970s, but she’d faded. And this was 1976, and I couldn’t get into a pub on my own.
So I said, “I want to go see Hylda Baker.” And it was very sad really, because it was a pub, and she’d played some of the biggest theatres in the country. So it was really— And she had Alzheimer’s as well. So the act didn’t work.
But I wanted to see her, and I said, “Well, you—” I said to my grandmother, “Will you take me?” And she said, “Jennifer, do you want to go see Hylda Baker?” She said yes. So my Auntie Jennifer and my grandmother— And of course I’d never been in a gay bar, but I recognised it was a gay bar.
Well, in fact my grandmother, she said, “Oh, there’s a lot of men in here, isn’t there? A lot of men.” And I think she and Auntie Jennifer and maybe a couple of other women were the only women in the bar.
And that was a really interesting— The act died. It was— She’d written it in the 1950s, and she had Alzheimer’s. It was desperately sad, but I’m glad I got to see her.
Tom: Yeah.
Steve: I also got to see people like, you know, Tommy Cooper.
Tom: Oh yeah. Oh, cool.
Steve: And of that generation, Bob Monkhouse, who I later worked with and got to know a little bit. And Bruce Forsyth. So I tried to see as many at the Leeds Grand Theatre— I used to book to see as many of the comedians. Max Boyce, Mike Yarwood as well. I saw him. Ken Dodd, of course, I saw several times. And Victor Borge as well, bizarrely, you know, the pianist.
So I tried to see as many of the comics as I— That was my interest, was just absorbing as much as I could and trying to, by osmosis, understand it.
Abigoliah: That’s great. And going to see it live, you know what I mean? People have so much access to stand-up comedy now, but it’s so different through a screen, be it a special that’s, like, an hour long, or little clips. It’s like, no, man, you got it— You got to be in the room. You got to really feel it, you know?
Steve: Well, that is where you see the greats from the goods.
I adored Ken Dodd. He was the best— one of the best comedy live acts I’ve ever seen.
The one that I remember, though, is Dave Allen.
Tom: Oh, yes. Okay.
Steve: And I met him afterwards. I went— You know, he met us all afterwards. He was very gracious. And we all went to his dressing room and chatted. He was a very nice guy.
I just loved the danger that he could take you to in his comedy. I know he didn’t— And this was because it was live in a theatre. He could get away with or say certain things he couldn’t on television. And he pushed it, you know. He pushed on television. It was dangerous. He was dangerous enough on television, but in a theatre.
And he really was, to me, the first what you might call alternative comedian.
Tom: There’s a few people. There’s him, there’s Jasper Carrott. There’s a few people who were— Billy Connolly as well — who were doing that much more personal, much more storytelling style of comedy at a time when most people in the working men’s clubs were doing mother-in-law jokes.
Steve: Well, absolutely. And I worked with several of them. I’ve worked with Bernard Manning. I’d worked with Frank Carson later in life. You know, not on the clubs. And they’re gag-tellers. Nothing— I mean, one of the things with people— I had lunch with Bernard Manning and lunch with Frank Carson. They don’t talk to you, they tell you gags. And they do, and they’re honing it down.
And I remember Frank Carson telling me a story and I thought the story was true, and then I realised halfway through it was a gag.
Abigoliah: My partner is— So I’m a stand-up comedian, and ergo all my friends are stand-up comedians. And sometimes my partner is like— We all hang out together, me and my friends and my partner, and afterwards he’s like, “It’s just so exhausting because you don’t actually talk to each other. You just shout bits at one another.”
And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s talking. I don’t understand what you’re missing here.”
He’s like, “You don’t have real conversations.”
I was like, “That’s how we— That’s our language. That’s our love language.”
Steve: It’s a really good point. But it’s part of your work, isn’t it?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: It’s part of— And I remember doing an evening at Brighton with Zoe Lyons, and she ran this great comedy club in Brighton. And I was the first to arrive for whatever reason, and she started telling me about something that happened with her cat.
And I can’t remember the details of it. And then the next comedian came in, and then she said, “Oh, and this happened with my cat,” and she slightly changed the words this time around.
And I noticed that everybody came in, she did the cat routine. And then she went on stage and did it. And she’d never done that before.
So what she was doing, and you understand this, she was testing the audience out one person at a time.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: And just getting the wording right. And did I react well? And could I change? I mean, her comic instinct was great. I regard it as part of the weirdness of comedians.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: But it’s part of what we are.
Abigoliah: And I would argue that sometimes, like for me personally, I don’t realise I’m doing it. And then at one point I will go— I’ll have to stop and go, “I think I’m gonna do this on stage,” so someone knows that it’s like, I didn’t mean to be testing it, but now it’s a thing.
Tom: Now, I wrote a pilot about a bunch of comedians, and one of my favourite moments is when they’re all four in a car together, riffing, and then somebody goes, “Wait, whose is this?”
Abigoliah: Whose— whose bit is it?
Tom: Is it—
Steve: Mine. Mine.
Abigoliah: Anyway, when you started in the working men’s clubs in the seventies, were you doing impressions? Were you doing voices from the very beginning?
Steve: Listen, I’m not a natural stand-up. I mean, Paul Merton makes an interesting distinction. He says, you know, there are gag-tellers, which, you know, we’ve talked about Bernard Manning, Frank Carson, in a sense. The people who say funny things. They’ve got good timing, but it’s the gag that’s funny.
And then there are people who do funny. You get comedy magicians, you get comedy jugglers, impersonations, impersonators. We do funny.
And then he’s absolutely right. He said the rarest are the people who are funny. And they just have to go on stage, like Tommy Cooper. And there’s something about them. And then there’s greys between all those things.
I was a huge fan, and I very rarely put my own sort of personality on stage. So when I started doing the clubs, I came on stage as Hylda Baker because I had a big fur coat and a wig. And then I took the wig off. Everybody wouldn’t have known who she was. So I then put the— I took the fur coat off, and underneath I had a mackintosh, and then I put a beret on, and then I was Frank Spencer.
And then I did Frank Spencer, and then I can’t remember what character came next. But I very rarely spoke as myself except to introduce the people I was doing.
So once I got over— You may find that odd now because I’ve been talking non-stop.
Tom: But—
Steve: You know, I sort of grew in confidence. But what I’m saying is that, you know, I was hiding behind these impersonations.
But there were one or two impersonations that I did that nobody else did. So one of them was an actor called John Inman, who was on a very popular series in the seventies called Are You Being Served?, if you ever—
And he was slightly camp and he had this lovely little voice like that. So I used to do a routine as John Inman. And nobody had ever heard that before because I was starting to do people who Mike Yarwood didn’t impersonate, because Mike Yarwood was, you know, my big hero.
And I worked with him in the eighties and he was right at the end of his career, which was sad, actually. And he said to me something interesting which, again, I didn’t forget. He said, “Everybody I do now is older than myself. I can’t do anybody young.” He was only 55 or so. He said, “I can’t do anybody younger because I know it will sound wrong and look wrong.”
And I thought, yeah, you’re right. Twenty-five-year-old impersonating somebody 50: funny. Fifty impersonating somebody at 25: not funny.
And I thought, right, I’ve got a short career.
Tom: But do you grow up with some of your impressions?
Steve: Well, you know, some of my favourite voices I just do because I enjoy doing voices.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: But I don’t do new ones. I haven’t done a new one for about ten years.
Abigoliah: Why do you think that is? Is it because vocally, as the voice ages, you can’t get to the 25-year-old register?
Steve: I think there’s a— There’s absolutely— But I think it’s more physical. I think it’s more physical. I think it’s a mixture of the vocal quality. As you get older, you simply sound older.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: And you can’t catch it. But there’s also something cheeky-chappy, 25, doing impersonations, slightly mocking somebody who is 50 and past it. That’s unfair, but you know what I mean.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: But somebody who is sort of 58 trying to do somebody young and make a fool out of them, it just feels wrong somehow. It just doesn’t feel right.
I used to see in my own act when I was, you know, I won them over eventually, but I played, when I was 55 or something, I played Preston University on a Friday night and they were all young. They were all in their twenties and I won them over. But I felt uncomfortable about doing certain— not voices, but just having to win them over.
And then I stopped doing it because I thought there’s a— It’s going to reach a stage where it’s going to be sad and embarrassing, me going on stage and doing this stuff. And I no longer do Thatcher because somebody asked me to do Thatcher last year in a play. I think I said no.
When I was 25, I could put make-up on and look a little older.
Tom: Yeah.
Steve: I’m now 65. There’s no way— I’m going to look like a drag act. Nothing wrong with a drag act, but I’m not going to look like her.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: Whereas actually, in the eighties, you know, I had very good skin and make-up was good. Mrs Thatcher always had a porcelain skin. She always had— You know, she always looked physically— She aged later, but, you know, she was a relatively young woman when she became Prime Minister. And that was all fine.
But I, as I say, I couldn’t— I think I just— If you just— I’ll keep— You ask me a question, but I’ll come back to you because I’ve got a book I wrote with me on the cover, and you’ll see what I mean.
Tom: Well, I would like to talk more about Thatcher. When did you first start impersonating her? Do you remember when you first became aware of her and—
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: Hello.
Abigoliah: Look at you.
Tom: I’m Margaret. Lovely.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. You look— Yeah.
Steve: And that, I think, is a mock-up of a— I think it was a Norman Parkinson picture that he did of her, nicely backlit and all the rest of it. But that’s actually me. No messing around in those days because the eighties. So you can’t buy that book anymore. It’s, you know, there’s only about four copies left.
What happened was Mike Yarwood, when Mrs Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition in 1975, I think he was the leading impersonator. So he had a go at doing Margaret Thatcher.
Tom: Oh.
Steve: And he acknowledged it didn’t work. It was just awful. And I watched it and I thought, well, I’ll have a go myself.
And I was only about 15. I think my voice had probably just broken. And I simply sat down. There was nobody in the house. I just remember sitting down and suddenly it was slightly higher in those days. The voice was higher, and I could reach, because I’ve got a high voice, I could reach that higher voice that she had, and slightly posher than she became in the eighties.
So in the seventies it was there, and Mike couldn’t get there.
Tom: Yeah.
Steve: I mean, I’ve been watching Life on Earth, actually, recently, the BBC series with David Attenborough. And I’ve always done David Attenborough, and that’s always been one of my favourites that not everybody else did.
But interestingly, in the seventies his voice is a lot higher. So I was able to do the female voices because I have a naturally, you know, higher voice. I can pitch lower to get the deeper voices, but I have to work at that. But Mike couldn’t do that.
Abigoliah: And when you find an impression, when you find a voice for someone, do you watch them and repeat after them? Do you have certain words that trigger it? How do you find— I’m so fascinated with voice acting.
Steve: Well, actually, all those things. All those things you’ve said. I did a show in Edinburgh in the late nineties. It’s called The Big Odyssey, and it was, oddly enough, a telling of The Odyssey, which, you know, I did it shorter than Christopher Nolan did, in about an hour.
And my Odysseus, I decided, would be Robin Williams because I thought he’s a trickster character and he can tell the story and do the voices.
So I sort of put— I wanted Rob— But I couldn’t do Robin Williams.
So I had the poster printed and Robin Williams’s name was at the top. So I had to make myself do Robin Williams.
And what I did was I listened. And what I realised with Robin Williams, he’s got about 30 different voices.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I was going to say, he’s a voice guy as well.
Steve: Exactly. So I thought, how am I going to do this? So I remember walking around the house for several weeks going, “I mean, really—”
And every so often a word, as you said, a word would come out. “Oh. Oh. And then yes. Good word. Money.”
Steve: Vietnam. Oh yes, indeed. Thank you, boys. And suddenly— Oh yes, let’s go over here and try it like that. Let’s slow down. No, no, no, no, no.
Steve: And so I was doing all this mixture of— “Oh,” you know, all of his—
Tom: Favourite—
Steve: —his famous phrases, you know. “Thank you, boys. No, no, no, no. Yes, indeed. Good Morning, Vietnam!”
All sort of coming together. And very, very few people had done Robin Williams.
And when I went to Edinburgh, one of the reasons the show was successful was because, “Have you seen Steve’s Robin Williams? It’s really good.” But that took a long, long time. That was pure hard work.
And then you’ve got what I call a bell note or a bell phrase, which is the word that gets you into the voice. With Thatcher, it’s “Goodness me.” So if I want to get into Thatcher very quickly, “Goodness me,” and muscle memory in your throat and your tongue and your head and all that gets you there.
I’ve got a friend of mine staying with me at the moment, and we watched an old Miss Marple from the eighties, because we’re both sort of whodunnit fans. And I’ve always liked Joan Hickson. She’s my favourite Miss Marple.
And I remember not wanting to do an impersonation of her, but, you know, just one day I, having listened to another voice in the car for two hours, I came home, put my bag down, and suddenly I said, “Ooh, Chief Inspector. Yes, I was wondering when you would call. Oh dear. Oh, you see, it was in the sherry. That’s how the murder was done. But you must have realised that, mustn’t you?”
And that’s— When I talk to people like Lewis MacLeod or Alistair McGowan, they always get me to do Miss Marple because they know how difficult it is to take a tiny voice.
You know, there are— You know, going back to the old days, you know, “Ooh, missus!” Frankie Howerd. “Ooh, now—”
I could teach anybody to do that.
But you see, a voice that’s so slight, you see, so much like a diamond, so much more difficult. And they say, “We just love that,” because we know how difficult it is to make it sound tiny.
Abigoliah: And I just want to go back to Spitting Image for a bit, because I have a lot of questions about how that was done. So now, were you in, like, a sound booth recording the voices? Were you guys on set with the puppets? How did working with the puppets and your voice— What was that process?
Tom: Well, it changed.
Steve: It changed. Completely changed.
Abigoliah: And then— Sorry, and I’m going to add a tag to it. How much did you influence the puppets? Like, I know you did the voice of the guy who spits. Was that your idea or did the puppet spit, and then you went in and did the voice with the spitting?
Steve: Well, I’ll tell you how it used to work. When we started the show, in the way that The Muppets used to be made to some degree, because we had a guy called Peter Harris who was our director, who’d worked on The Muppets, and the puppeteers said you really have to record the voices live in the studio because of the way it’s paused, of the way, you know, you have to pick up a prop or whatever.
That proved to be impossible because Spitting Image had dozens of sets. And as we were recording one, we were also setting the other, so they had to stop work. So it was purely a practical thing.
And of course, the voice performance would be wrong or the puppet would be wrong. So the first few shows, the puppeteers would be operating it and the actors, which was basically me and Chris Barrie doing many of the voices in those days, we would stand aside with a microphone and watch and, and, and so on.
But it sounded dreadful. And when we came to the first show, we had to dub all of it because the sound quality wasn’t good enough.
And then John Lloyd brought in a lot of extra people. So some of the puppeteers in the original few shows, they did the voices of people like Norman Tebbit or the Duke of Edinburgh. And they were pretty upset when the voice people came in.
But it was the only way to do it. And the performances were better, frankly.
So what we used to do, to give you a time scale, we used to record the whole show vocally in sound booths and, you know, in a studio sometimes.
Tom: And as a group? Or were you brought in just to do your lines?
Steve: Yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: Oh good, because I was like, how do you— how do you—
Tom: Do a radio—
Abigoliah: —alone in a booth?
Tom: Okay.
Steve: It was essentially, it was like radio. But again, the other thing that the voice actors had to do was put in action in their voices. So they had to read the script and put that sound as if, you know, “I’m hitting— I’m going to hit you, Norman Tebbit. Yes, I am.” And you had to put that sound in it so it matched what the— You know.
And again, there were many voice people who couldn’t do that. So we learnt all those sort of techniques and we got a very, very fine team of performers. Some of them less known, like John Glover, but who was on the series for years. Such a solid performer who just knew how to do it, frankly.
And so we’d do that on the Saturday. So then you had all the voices prerecorded. They then would mime to them in the studios, and you could put— you could edit. If somebody said, “We need a bit more time to do that,” you could, you know, get the scissors in and edit.
Abigoliah: It sounds like doing it just on your own, it creates such a sterile environment because there’s no bounce.
Steve: There’s no bounce.
Tom: I mean—
Steve: You know, I did different versions, and I do, of course, audiobooks and stuff like that. So I can— I know how to pitch it so I can sound as if I’m reacting to, you know, somebody saying— But it’s never as good as the rhythm that you get.
And, from a comedy point of view, we used to— It’s a slightly different point, but we used to have comedy directors come in and they were cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting. And you— Please leave it in the wide. Let the puppeteers— Let the puppets react to it. Let them react to each other.
Don’t, you know— It’s— You don’t want single, single, single. You want, you know, them talking to each other. And the number of times directors would come in— And of course, they had been trained to speed up, to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.
And we say— I said to one, I was not rude, but I said to one of them, I said, “Look, can I offer you some word of advice here?”
Tom: Yeah.
Steve: “Go watch a Blake Edwards film with Peter Sellers. Let the comedians do what comedians do, which is react.”
Tom: Yeah.
Steve: Live and in the moment.
And I give you an example in film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I think. Is that the one with Sean Connery? I can’t remember which.
So Spielberg, well, like Hitchcock, well known for creating his storyboards and all the rest of it. And he came onto the set and the interaction between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery was so funny that he threw away his storyboards and just, “I’m just going to leave it in the two-shot.”
Abigoliah: What I’m learning from you is cut words, but not actions. Like, leave space for everything to breathe.
Steve: Breathe. Absolutely. That’s a great— It’s a great way of saying it. Just let it—
The number of times nowadays I watch television and it’s cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And I understand why they’re doing that. We’ve got to keep it alive. Got to keep it moving. Not with comedy. Just let it breathe.
You’re a Lucille Ball fan?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: What did they— They didn’t say, “Oh, I’m the director of this and I’ve got to prove my worth by cutting, cutting.” They left it on the wide.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And you need that for the reactions of—
Steve: You know. Yeah. And sometimes you need to cut away for reaction, but sometimes them just staring at this mad woman.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: You know, it’s what John Cleese said. Somebody acting mad isn’t funny. Somebody watching somebody acting mad and reacting, that’s funny.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: John Cleese, his character, Fawlty Towers, going crazy isn’t funny. It’s funny when Prunella Scales as Sybil is watching it with a deadpan face.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Yes.
Steve: And she was a great comedian because she understood deadpan.
You know, and I, again, I used to read about the comedians of a previous generation and I was fascinated by Buster Keaton. I mean, in the old days when I was a kid, all those movies used to be shown on a Saturday morning. So I watched Laurel and Hardy, I watched Charlie Chaplin, I watched Buster Keaton, which younger people tend not to anymore.
I love Buster Keaton. One of my favourites. And I was fascinated by reading about him because he began in vaudeville as a young lad with his father. He had an act with his father, and part of the act was to carry him, sort of, you know, flat by the audience, used to carry him.
And the poor lad showed pain, and he said, “Buster, nobody will laugh if you show pain. Dead face. Learn the dead face.”
And he was the greatest deadpan face comedian there has been.
And so, you know, I’m meandering all over the place, but, you know, I could see that tradition in what Sybil did, what Prunella Scales did. She had the tiniest reaction and understood. And actually lesser comedic performers would have put, you know, gurning faces in, which is wrong.
Abigoliah: I’m doing a lot of reading right now about the Smothers Brothers, who were a double act in the sixties in America. And Tom, spoiler alert for when we do the episode, but Tommy was the silly one and Dickie is the straight guy. And Tommy always said about his brother Dick, who’s the straight guy, he’s like, most important job because he sets the tempo for the whole sketch. Like, he’s the one who makes it march to a certain beat and pulls him back in and directs the sketch. He’s like, without the straight man, it just doesn’t work.
Tom: Can I tell—
Steve: Can I tell you a quick story which I think sums up double acts? I was working on a television series with Little and Large, Syd Little and Eddie Large, and we’d done our bit. And the director said, “Eddie, we need a voiceover from you, and everybody else can go to lunch. But we just need a voiceover from—”
And I was about to leave, and you know what Eddie said? And Syd was about to leave, and Eddie turned around and said— He said, “Syd, I can’t do it without you stood beside me.”
And they said, “No, no, we don’t—”
“No, I need you there, stood beside me.”
And I thought, I was rather moved by that.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: It was a tiny moment, but I thought this sums up their act. You know, he physically can’t do it without his friend.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: That’s beautiful. Yeah. I have a couple more questions about Spitting Image, and I know we’re getting close to an hour. This has been such a good conversation.
But one of my questions is, what was your reaction when you first saw the puppets? Because when Tom showed me Spitting Image and I saw the puppets, I was like, “Oh, this is the stuff of nightmares.” Like, this—
Tom: Is—
Abigoliah: They are terrifying-looking.
Steve: Well, I think you’re— I mean, we didn’t quite, you know, we were working on the show sort of seven days a week, more or less. And so we never really got a sense of the audience’s response. And it’s only over the last 40 years that I’ve got, you know, people coming up to me and saying, “You gave me nightmares.”
Abigoliah: What did you think when you first saw the puppets? Like the slug cabinet guy, and Margaret and the Queen and all of them. Like, were—
Tom: You like—
Steve: I thought the— I knew their work because they had, I think, worked for The Sunday Times. They used to do Plasticine models. And so I knew their work.
I’m not quite sure how to answer that question, to be honest, because I was, you know, slightly obsessed with getting my own work right.
Tom: Yeah.
Steve: But what I would say was how brilliantly— This may not answer your question, but I think it’s a real quality of the puppets. They didn’t know how the puppets would work with real people. And then we went on to Channel 4 and did a show called The Tube, which was a live show on a Friday night. And then we realised the puppets were so alive that when they interacted with real people, the real people thought the puppets were real.
Abigoliah: It’s like the Muppets. As they say about the Muppets.
Steve: And even though it was a monster face, even though it was frightening, as you said, and people have said to me, it had its own reality, if you will.
And I think— I don’t know. I don’t know about America. I mean, obviously I know that The Muppets was a huge thing, but one of the traditions that is a European tradition is commedia dell’arte and Punch and Judy. So when I was a kid, Punch and Judy shows were around. So we’d seen these things before.
Abigoliah: And they’re quite—
Steve: We were brought up with them.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: And I don’t think— And we’d all read Animal Farm as kids.
Tom: And—
Steve: Possibly seen it. So I sort of think that maybe for somebody who hadn’t had that physical tradition in front of them, you know, that hadn’t seen sort of puppets alive, you know, with the Punch and Judy look and all the rest of it. But we would— I mean, I think we, the people, you know, as kids growing up in Britain, we saw it all the time.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: You were primed for it.
Steve: We were primed for it. Yeah, we were primed for it. And I mean, was it Lamb Chop? Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop. I was— She was great.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: And again, we had no problem. I mean, as a kid I had no problem with Pinky and Perky. But my favourite was a character called Basil Brush, and he always had a human next to him.
And, yeah, I mean, I know the guy now that does him. And I saw his show recently at the British Film Institute and we all had a puppet reunion. And contract— I’m sure he won’t mind me saying this, but he’s not allowed to perform Basil so that you see the arm.
Abigoliah: Of course.
Tom: Yeah.
Steve: He has to keep Basil real. The character has to be kept real. And to me, Basil was real.
You know, and so when you’re brought up with that thing of these being real things, so Spitting Image was ugly, and it was an extension of that. And some of the caricatures worked better than others.
The Queen was the best caricature for the very simple reason she had such a large mouth. And because it was a foam mouth, you could put any expression in it.
And we had Louise Gold, one of the finest puppeteers we’ve ever had. And she’d worked on The Muppets and she’d been trained by Jim Henson, and she’s still working for Muppets, and she’s stunningly good.
And she was able to put almost any expression in the Queen’s mouth because she was able to, you know—
And puppeteering— I got to be a reasonably good puppeteer because they tripped me up. And I said to Louise, on the first day we met, I said, “How do you be a puppeteer?”
And she said, “Well, you take this and make it look alive. It’s that easy.”
And of course, it’s incredibly difficult.
And then somebody said to me more recently, the good puppeteers make it look alive. Great puppeteers make it look as if it’s thinking.
Abigoliah: Oh, yeah. Wow.
Steve: That is what Jim Henson could do.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: You know, anybody can make— You can train anybody up to make it look alive. You simply get it to look at an object, you know, and suddenly it’s looking at an object. “What is that?” It looks more alive.
Get it to think. To get a piece of foam or a piece of felt to make it look as if it’s thinking—
Tom: Well—
Steve: That’s magic, isn’t it? I mean, that’s just wonderful magic.
Tom: I remember doing an Avenue Q pastiche for a corporate some years ago, and we had a little bit of puppet training, and one of the things they told us is, if your puppet isn’t speaking, you’ve got to make sure it’s still breathing. Because if anyone glances over and your puppet is just still, suddenly it just becomes a doll. It just becomes lifeless.
Steve: It becomes a doll. And it, it, it— You’ve just got to keep it— Just not necessarily upstaging.
Tom: Yeah.
Steve: You mustn’t have that. But what you have to do is to keep it alive. It’s what Louise said. The starting point is make it look alive.
Abigoliah: That’s why you keep it in the wide shot, to see all that little work.
Steve: Absolutely. And again, what I discovered was I was very lucky because I can’t really see the top of my arm, but my— I have incredibly long arms. And puppeteers have— Because many puppeteers have arms that sort of go to there, and I have, you know, way high— High— Huge advantage for being a puppeteer because obviously you’re, you know, you can hide your head.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: If you had little arms, you can’t.
I don’t know, I’m not a very physical comedian, physical comedy isn’t my thing, but I could sort of make the puppet funny. You know, I could put funny movements in, and I was good at lip-sync.
And actually I then got trained up. And then, oddly enough, when Mrs Thatcher came to an end, people thought I was no longer on television. And in fact, I was on television four or five times a week in puppet shows. It’s just nobody knew about it.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: I love puppeteers. Puppeteers are the loveliest people I know because their ego is from here to here.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s so interesting. That’s beautiful. Yeah.
Tom: Just from elbow to fingertip.
Steve: Elbow to fingertips. They’ve got no ego for themselves.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: Zero. But their ego is here. Is this working? Can I get this to work? Can I make it look alive? Can I make it look as if it’s thinking? Can I be as good as I can? And, you know, those are the great puppeteers.
And because they have no ego for themselves, they are just lovely, lovely people to work with.
Abigoliah: So what is your favourite voice that you got to do on Spitting Image, and what is the favourite puppet that you got to puppet on Spitting Image?
Steve: Maybe I’ll actually answer in some ways— Well, I’ll give you two.
So it was about the fifth series, quite late in the series. So nobody had got the Queen Mother right. They tried it and it didn’t work.
And somebody had given me the challenge to do Beryl Reid. So John Lloyd said to me on the first day, he said, “Look, Steve, we’re paying you all this money. What new voices have you got for us?”
And I said, “Well, interestingly, I’ve been working on Beryl Reid.”
And he looked at me in horror. He said, “Beryl Reid? She’s 80. You know, we’re not going to make a Beryl Reid puppet. You know, come on, Steve.”
I said, “No, I— What I think is that the Beryl Reid voice—”
You know, she’d been very popular in variety. She had this character called Marlene, who was from the Black Country. And I said, “Why don’t we do the Queen Mother like this?”
Steve: Yeah. It is— I mean, he burst out laughing, ran straight to the writers’ room, and they came up with a script.
And that was the thing. It wasn’t so much caricature, but it was taking— Nobody knew what the Queen Mother sounded like because she hadn’t given an interview since 1932.
Abigoliah: Oh wow. I didn’t know that.
Steve: She really didn’t talk to anybody.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: “Nice job,” and that was about it. So we gave her this personality that worked.
Now sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t with, you know, doing that. But with the Queen Mother, for whatever reason, it worked. And people were giggling and laughing and I thought, oh, I’ve hit on something here.
And that was just— It was a lovely voice. It’s a fun voice, you see.
Steve: Hello. You know, I’m 106— and you’re laughing, you see. It’s a funny voice.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: It’s got that nice sound to it. Naturally funny. And again, I’d been a big Beryl Reid fan.
So— And the other voice was— which I worked very hard at. And again it goes back to John Lloyd. We had a little puppet of who was then the Archbishop of Canterbury, a man called Robert Runcie.
And the Archbishop of Canterbury, he was quite a posh man and been in the Army, and he spoke very slowly and deliberately in the way that Archbishops of Canterbury do.
And John said to me, said, “Steve, it’s a great, great voice, except it’s too slow. We can’t do a sketch like that. And it’s a little puppet.” He said, “Now take that voice and make it sound as if it’s seven years old.”
Steve: So I took the voice and then I just sort of speeded it up and made it seven years old, and sounding a little bit like a little boy, but obviously with the grown-up voice in it.
And he burst out laughing and said, “That’s the way we’re going to do it.”
And it worked. It didn’t sound like him remotely in the sense that it wasn’t an accurate impersonation, but it was right for him. And I knew people in the Church of England, I knew priests and so on, and they said everybody does your impersonation of him when they, you know—
They talk like that.
Steve: So those were my two favourite because I think, as I said, it was the caricature essence.
Frankly, there were other people on the show that were probably better than me. Harry Enfield always was stunningly good at the caricatures.
Tom: And I was thinking about him when you were talking about people who were brilliantly accurate impressionists who weren’t right for Spitting Image. And I remember seeing Harry Enfield interviewed and he essentially said the opposite. He said, “I’m not a very good impressionist, but I understood how to create a big voice that could go with the big puppet.”
Steve: Exactly right. And Harry was employed, and the other impressionists were not. Exactly.
Yes, he was. He was a genius at just being able to look at the puppet and get exactly the right voice for it, which I was never great at, particularly on the characters that weren’t famous. But— So he, I always— I’ve always said on the record, I’ve always said that he was the best voice artist on the series.
Tom: Now, you’re always known as the voice of Margaret Thatcher, but you have lots of other strings to your bow as well. You’re— As you talked about, your one-man show for The Odyssey, another one-man show as well, haven’t you? And now novels and non-fiction books too.
Steve: Well, that’s right. I mean, I’ll tell you a quick story. And I used to love meeting my heroes. And I met Michael Bentine, you know, who worked on The Goon Show. And— Well, he’d worked on some of The Goon Show.
And I’d been a big fan of Spike Milligan, but I’d always liked Michael Bentine because I liked his gentle comedy, his surreal gentleness.
And I met him on a radio show, and he was dying at the time. It was public knowledge. He was dying. And I wanted to impress him, you know. I wanted to go in there and he said, “What’s your name?”
I said, “I’m Steve Nallon and I work on the series called Spitting Image.”
“Oh, Spitting Image.”
And then I reeled off all the voices I did, and I thought, I’m going to go— And you know what he did? He looked at me and he said, “You must do something of your own.”
Abigoliah: Wow.
Steve: And that stayed with me, you know.
And without overdoing it on the, you know, promo stuff—
Abigoliah: No, overdo it.
Steve: I’ve written a young adult fiction novel, which has proved very popular with young children.
Abigoliah: Called The Time That Never Was.
Steve: The Time That Never Was. It’s a sort of time-travel story. And my grandmother, we’ve mentioned my grandmother, she’s the mentor figure. So there’s no Dumbledore or Gandalf. My mentor for the young lad is my Yorkshire grandmother.
Abigoliah: I’m getting— I’m sensing a theme with you, Steve, of strong women. Like, I feel like it’s really— it’s really inspired and driven you, from your grandmother to—
Steve: I don’t get on with alpha men. I get on well with alpha women. Always have done.
What I discovered about Lucille Ball was how different she was in real life to her character.
Abigoliah: Yeah, she was.
Steve: And how tough a lady she was.
And the documentaries I’ve seen, my admiration changed because I thought she was like that in real life. You know, as a kid, you’re watching the Lucille Ball—
So, no, she created this character from radio and then onto television. And a ballsy woman, if you don’t mind that expression. It was a tough time for her.
So— But yeah, my grandmother was in this, and I wrote this, which is a time-travel film and television—
Abigoliah: Destination Time Travel. You’re holding it up, but this will also be audio, so Destination Time Travel. Tell us a little bit about— So it’s TV and time travelling. What is—
Steve: That, we basically— This is about time travel. So I— For the website, for my website—
Abigoliah: The Time That Never Was is about time—
Steve: Time travel. It’s a time-travel— So what I did was, for my website, I simply wrote a few rules. The different rules that Doctor Who have, the different rules that Back to the Future have. And so I started writing this up as a short essay.
I said it’ll be about 5,000 words and it’ll help search engine optimisation. The publisher read it and said, “Steve, this is a book.” So 5,000 words became 100,000 words and became Destination Time Travel.
I mean, Dick works at the BFI. I’ve known him for years. He’s an expert on film and television, and we wrote the book together. And it pretty much is the book on time travel, you know.
If you want to— There’s— I’ll give you just a brief indication of some of the chapters: Who Tells the Time Tale, Time Machines, Portals, Passages, Gateway, Vortex, Time Windows, Time Guardians, Time Villains, Time Loops, Causal Loops, Paradoxes of Time Travel, Dramatic Devices of Time, Tale Time, Codes, Dreams, Foretelling, Memory, Utopias, Counterfactuals, Time Sleep and Time Stopped.
I mean, it’s pretty, pretty definitive.
Tom: So is my absolute favourite Sapphire & Steel in there?
Steve: Oh yeah. Wasn’t that Joanna Lumley?
Tom: That’s right.
Steve: Yeah.
Tom: David McCallum.
Steve: Yeah, absolutely. I can try and find it for you, but I assure you it’s there.
Tom: No, I believe you.
Steve: We’ve got pretty much everything that was interesting. I mean, we could talk about this whole, you know, different aspect of it because there were another series I loved as a kid— There were three series I loved as a kid, and all of them were time travel.
Catweazle.
Tom: Oh yes.
Steve: You remember?
Tom: Geoffrey Bayldon.
Steve: Wizard coming into the present day from, you know, 900 years ago. The Time Tunnel, the American series, which I absolutely adored. The Tomorrow People also had time travel in it. And Doctor Who, of course.
So, you know, as a kid, I was ten or 11 years old, I’d come home and you’d get time travel pretty much every night. Because even Star Trek, the original series, had a couple of episodes. The great one with Joan Collins.
Tom: Yeah, yeah. “The City on the Edge of Forever”.
Steve: Absolutely. “The City on the Edge—” And very moving one is that. It’s tremendous. It’s always been the favourite, but it’s a great time— And the rules of the time travel in that, fascinating as well.
So no, I’ve always been— And the other thing I’ve been a big fan of over the years are ghost stories. So I’ve now written pretty, pretty large—
Tom: Wow.
Steve: Four-hundred-page, 12 stories of— And often you find that there’s alpha women in these as well. I’ll give you a great example of one of the alpha women, who’s— There’s a Thatcher one, but my favourite picture that Scott Brooker created, because he was on Spitting Image. Now, if you want an alpha woman who’s a tough lady, you’re not going to beat her.
Who did this? I wanted to look like my grandmother.
Tom: And—
Steve: She’s the Witch of Endor. We brought back the Witch of Endor, who’s mentioned in the Book of Samuel. And she’s a great character.
Abigoliah: And that book is called—
Steve: Steve Nallon’s Ghost Stories. So I didn’t want to call it that. I wanted to call it Weird and Wonderful. And they said, “Well, nobody will know what that is. Do what it says on the packet. You know, it’s Steve Nallon’s Ghost Stories.”
And they have been well received. You know, people have enjoyed them. And as I say, Scott Brooker, of Spitting Image fame, who now runs— essentially runs Spitting Image, he did all the drawings. And I rang him up and said, “Would you be interested in doing a book of ghost stories?”
He said yes for two reasons: “I love ghost stories, and secondly, I lived in a haunted house.”
Tom: So the first experience—
Steve: We had a great time. It was a lovely experience writing this.
And, you know, somebody said to me— I said, “What do you think of them?” I sent them to a journalist friend of mine, Johnnie Maitland, if you know him.
Tom: Yes. Yeah.
Steve: And he said, “Steve, you’ve got to do more of these because it’s macabre and funny. Many people can do macabre, many people can do funny. You do macabre and funny, and that is your USP.”
You know, there’s nothing wrong with M. R. James. He’s great, but he’s not funny.
Steve: Not intentionally so, I don’t think. But he— maybe he’s got— So, yeah.
And, you know, there’s also an essay on the ghost-story tradition in the book. So I had to— I learned a lot. So I now do talks on the ghost story as well, and as well as reading. So I don’t want to perform anymore, but I like doing my talks and I like doing my readings.
Tom: Lovely. That’s awesome. All right, we’re gonna have to let you go quite soon, but a couple of questions we want to finish on.
So one is: I’m taking you on this journey through classic British comedy, mainly television, and we’ve seen some of the classics so far. Victoria Wood, Fawlty Towers. Is there anything which is a personal favourite of yours which you think we might otherwise overlook?
Steve: It was never done with a live audience, but I did enjoy The Ghosts of Motley Hall, without going on about ghosts. I don’t know if you remember that. It had a great cast. Arthur English was in it, Peter Sallis was in it, Sheila Steafel was in it. It was a very sort of gentle comedy.
I mean, you’re talking about sitcoms and things like that.
Tom: Anything, really. Yeah. The only thing we exclude is children’s shows and panel shows.
Steve: Off the top of my head, it’s all the classics. It’s— it’s Lucille— You know, I Love Lucy. It’s Dad’s Army. It’s Fawlty Towers.
Slightly later in life, learning about Fawlty Towers, it was when I was a teenager. But growing up as a kid— Oh, there was a series I loved called Meet the Wife.
Tom: Oh, yes.
Steve: Thora Hird and Freddie Frinton. And Thora Hird, again, funny woman, you know, very—
And I had the great pleasure of working with her on Call My Bluff. That was one of the great thrills of my life. I mean, you know, people say, you know, and I said, “I met Thora Hird. I worked with Thora Hird.” She was about 90 at the time, and she was everything you’d hoped she’d be. Just completely lovely. But she was tuned in. She—
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s lovely to hear.
Steve: I used to love watching her. And then, of course, when I watched the old fifties movies, I would see—
So actually, Meet the Wife, and nobody remembers Meet the Wife.
Abigoliah: Is Meet the Wife—
Steve: A sitcom. It’s a sitcom. A very early one. One of the classics was when they go and buy a bed. And it was clean and, you know, it was just warm comedy and it was very credible and very believable.
And I remember the theme tune: “Ours is a nice house. Ours is— It’s got no rats or mice.” I just loved the rhyme of “house” and “mice”. That’s right.
So that was very early on. That must be what, late, late sixties? Maybe mid-sixties. That was probably the first sitcom I encountered and watched out for.
Abigoliah: Yeah, that’s I Love Lucy for me. That was my first, like, what is this? What— You know, who is this? And I, as a child, I hoovered that up as much as possible.
Steve: Exactly. And you know what you’re going to do with the rest of your life. You’re not going to try to reproduce that, but, you know, somehow you’re going to work in comedy, don’t you?
Abigoliah: You think, I really did.
Steve: This is just— I want to be this. Not her, but I want to be in this world.
And I really— talking about the usher earlier, but not the tragedy of my life, but I was born 20 years too late, and I really would have been— 1940s and fifties radio comedy is where I would have been at my best.
Abigoliah: Steve, I feel the same way. I went to school for musical theatre right as, like, Wicked was all the rage, and, like, musical pop, you know, musicals that have pop in them became really big. My biggest problem is my singing voice. I sound like Ethel Merman, and no one is like—
Abigoliah, singing: There’s no business like show business—
Steve: I know everything about it is appealing—
Abigoliah: Yep. That’s me.
Steve: You could go on. We could do the routine.
Abigoliah: Yeah, we could do the whole thing.
Steve: Yeah. Again, I loved the— Ethel Merman. And I loved that— Is it The Naked Gun? One of the other ones where they said, “Oh, there’s a mad person in the next bed. He thinks he’s Ethel Merman,” and Ethel—
Abigoliah: And it’s actually Ethel Merman.
Tom: It’s Airplane!. It’s the original Airplane!.
Abigoliah: It’s Airplane!. Yeah, that’s what it is. I know, I know.
Tom has a hard out. We have a couple more wrap-up questions. One I need to know: do you own personally any of the Spitting Image puppets?
Steve: I do. I have— I haven’t done Alan Bennett because— Oh, that was one. I went up to John Lloyd and I said— I said, “Well, why don’t we do Alan Bennett? You know, I’ve worked on this impersonation. Nobody else does him, you know, and I’m from Leeds.”
And he said— He said, “No, Steve, I like Alan Bennett. I really like him. I don’t want to make fun of him.”
And then we had a chat with the director, John Henderson, and basically John said, “Look, we’ll team Alan up with Thora Hird and Kate Robbins can do Thora Hird.”
And they became very popular because they leavened the show. So you had all this heavy political satire, you had, you know, people hitting each other. Then you suddenly had, you know, little Alan Bennett and Thora Hird sat watching television and eating, you know, Jammie Dodgers and tea.
And it just changed the rhythm slightly to the show. And they’re always little sketches. And me and Kate loved doing those. You know, she got Thora Hird brilliantly.
And, of course, what it allowed them to do is they were— It was a very early version of Gogglebox, because Alan and Thora would be watching the sketch on Spitting Image and say, “Oh, I didn’t like that one, did you, Thora?” or whatever. And so it was a sort of— it was a sort of early Gogglebox, really.
So— And I have him. He’s sadly— He’s in a state of decay because he’s a latex puppet and latex— He’s in a box upstairs. There’s somebody I can give him to that worked on Spitting Image that would be able to look after him better than I can, I’ll put it like that.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: I don’t really have memory— I don’t— I have very little memorabilia. I have a couple of pictures. I’m not into memorabilia. You know, I don’t like to keep things. But he’ll go to a good home.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s beautiful.
Steve: You know, he’s a sweet man. And he said— They said, “What do you think of your puppet?”
And he said, “Oh, I didn’t recognise it at first because I thought it a bit too good-looking. But I thought the person who did the voice was very good, except then they told me the same person who did my voice also did Margaret Thatcher, and I didn’t like that at all.”
It’s a very typical Alan Bennett.
And now, of course, everybody does Alan Bennett. But, you know, I was technically the first one to get it.
And that’s the other thing that Mike said to me, Mike Yarwood. He said, “You get a good impression, everybody will be able to listen to it and then hear how it’s done.”
Abigoliah: Yeah, I feel like you see that a lot. Christopher Walken is kind of the perfect example of— I very luckily got to see Christopher Walken on Broadway, and the whole time I was like, I have forgotten what he actually sounds like because I’m so used to hearing an impression of an impression of him.
Tom: That—
Steve: I don’t know who got there first, but with, you see, Morgan Freeman, and you see him and you see a couple of others I see all the time.
Tom: And yes, he was the first to do Rolf Harris. And then suddenly everybody was doing Rolf Harris.
Steve: Yeah. And Chris Barrie on Spitting Image, he did David Coleman. Nobody had done David Coleman before, and then suddenly everybody was impersonating him.
And Mike said to me, he said, “You’ve got to get used to this, Steve. You’ve got—” He said, “They’ll steal it.”
Abigoliah: Yeah. I was going to say, how do you feel about that as a voiceover artist? Are you like, they took my bits? Or, you know—
Steve: Yeah, there’s an element of that. And there’s a certain courtesy with voice artists. If somebody gets asked to do a voice and they say, “Actually, no, the person you should go to is Steve or Chris or John, because they did it first.” So there’s a certain courtesy.
But sometimes you just— You’re asked, “Will you do it?” and you’re in a voiceover studio or whatever and you have to do it.
But you also have to let it go. So when I left Spitting Image and somebody else took over the Queen Mother and Thatcher, and I went back for the very last episode — they invited me back for the last episode in 1996 — but they let the other guy do the Queen Mother. And you have to accept that.
You know, just— And also, it’s about moving on. You can’t hold on to— It’s what Michael Bentine said. You’ve got to do something of your own in life.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: And I feel very privileged now. And I’m not particularly wealthy or anything like that. And the books have sold, but they’ve not, you know, not Sunday Times bestsellers, but they’ve done okay. But I’m very glad I’ve done something of my own.
And I loved— I still do voices because I’ve got a little voiceover studio next door and stuff, and I still do that. But as I get older, I think, you know, I’m glad I put the effort in to get these done.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Steve: Even though people don’t know about them, you know.
Abigoliah: Well, they know about them now because you’ve talked about them on All British Comedy Explained.
Tom: We don’t charge for this podcast and we aren’t offering you a fee. But what we would like to do is ask you if there’s a charity that you support, which our listeners could donate to.
Steve: Well, I think Barnardo’s. Lovely.
Tom: Great. We’ll put a link to Barnardo’s in the show notes.
Steve, this has been absolutely fascinating. Like I said, I grew up hearing your voice all the time. And so it’s been wonderful talking to you today and hearing so many—
Steve: Nightnightmares.
Tom: I think I might very well. Steve, thank you so very much for coming on All British Comedy Explained.
Steve: A pleasure. Great, great. Loved our chats. Thank you.
Abigoliah: Thank you.
* * * * *
Tom: Steve Nallon, everybody. He did not disappoint.
Abigoliah: Oh my gosh. What a well— What a well of knowledge.
Tom: Absolutely. And a long career as well. He said he thought he was born in the wrong decade. But, you know, he goes all the way back to pre-alternative-comedy people like— Do you know Bernard Manning has come up a couple of times?
I mean, a slightly unsavoury character, but definitely a very successful comedian who understood what his audience wanted from him.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Well, you know, we didn’t really call him out on that when he said he was born in the wrong era, and maybe we should have, because it’s like, no, you were born in the right era.
Tom: You were born in the Thatcher era, crucially.
Abigoliah: And for his voice work, like, what would Spitting Image be without Steve Nallon? You know what I mean? He’s just so brilliant, so brilliant.
Tom, do we have anything coming up? Do you want to tell anyone about the Patreon and stuff like that?
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: No. Okay. Fair enough.
Tom: So— Okay, I will. Yeah. So we are doing something a bit different on Patreon this time around. So for £3 a month, you still get ad-free episodes, if those ads are annoying to you, or if you just want a way of showing us your monetary appreciation.
But if you can stretch all the way up to £5 a month, then you get bonus episodes. And instead of little mini episodes for each of the regular episodes, this time what we’re doing is full-length All-American Comedy Explained episodes where Abigoliah talks me through shows like I Love Lucy, The Carol Burnett Show, and this month it’s going to be The Smothers Brothers.
Abigoliah: And I’ll tell you right now, Tom Salinsky, my two great inspirations from doing the show with you are now Victoria Wood and the Smothers Brothers.
Tom: Really?
Abigoliah: We— I will explain why when we record the episode, but I can’t stop watching it.
Tom: Usually—
Abigoliah: Usually I’m like, okay, here we go. Gotta watch another one, because all American shows apparently all last ten seasons. But this one I’m like, keep giving it to me, boys. What else you got?
Tom: Fantastic. I can’t wait.
Abigoliah: Awesome. And is your play out right now?
Tom: Yes. Yes, it will be. It’s coming back to the King’s Head in a few weeks’ time. Maybe not quite starting when this is out, but very soon. And then going to Richmond, Oxford, Cambridge, Guildford and Chichester. It’s called The Gang of Three.
Abigoliah: The Gang of Three, guys. Tickets are probably available as you’re listening to this, so please go check it out, see what else Tom works on because he’s an incredible, incredible writer and playwright.
Yeah. Well, until next time, guys, I’m Abigoliah.
Tom: And I’m Tom. Cheerio.
Abigoliah: Bye-bye.