Radio drama taught me that you should always talk to an audience as if it’s one person. Working in radio teaches you to focus totally on the person you’re talking to. It was superb training. In my early radio days, you could stand on either side of the mike and look into the eyes of the actor opposite. But, later, microphones developed and we actors found ourselves on the same side of the mike. The sound might have been better, but the connection between us was much harder to achieve.
Turning the pages of the script was another skill to be mastered. It had to be done completely silently: a bunny dip away from the microphone, holding one corner of the page between thumb and finger, then turning back, having turned the page as you turned away. Modern paper makes it almost impossible to achieve a silent page turn.
The radio artists I worked with through the years were probably the most skilled in the world. I’d grown up with their voices as a child, and for me they were celebrities. Marjorie Westbury was the queen of Radio in her day. She played Paul Temple’s wife, Steve, in the famous detective series. She was small and dumpy like me, but had a clear, warm sound and knew how to use it. She made such an impression on one of her listeners that she was left £42,000 in their will.
So far, this hasn’t happened to me.
The other great ladies of my radio days were June Tobin, absurdly sexy and great fun; Grizelda Hervey, always smoking with a husky voice (no wonder) — her Irene in The Forsyte Saga was one of the greatest performances I ever heard. Mary Wimbush, who was loved — especially by Tony Jackson, a gifted young actor, who won the Carleton Hobbs radio prize at RADA and had a long affair with her, despite her being very much his senior. They’re all dead now, but their voices live on. The recordings in the BBC archives hold magic; the Corporation should digitise them all and give us the chance to listen again to the great voices of the past.
The engineers and studio managers also taught me the skills of the medium; explaining that I shouldn’t talk straight into the microphone, but speak slightly across it. That way, the voice is still present, but not threatening the mike — you won’t ‘pop’ and distort the sound. I discovered for myself that a smile is helpful for warming the tone of the voice. I don’t know why, but the lift at the corners of the mouth gives a ‘shine’ to your sound; there is an energy of some kind, a warmth and pleasure, which communicates across the microphone.
When working for radio, of course, you must also be keenly conscious of time. Announcers require that particular facility when they know the ‘pips’ are approaching, heralding the news. Once, when a live radio production of Hamlet seemed in danger of bumping into the ‘pips’, a resourceful announcer softly interrupted Hamlet’s fight with Laertes with: ‘And there we must leave Elsinore…’
I was lucky to work for many renowned radio directors in the studios of Broadcasting House. David Thomson, for example, an endearing eccentric who had came into drama from the Features department. In 1968, he directed me as the ‘Old Gal’, an upper-class woman in her nineties, in A Breath of Fresh Air, a play set during the First World War. I still think it’s one of the best things I ever did.
I enjoyed working with Reggie Smith (also from the Features department) whose productions may have suffered from the rollicking lunch hours we spent in the George Tavern; Betty Davies, tall and Welsh and sexy, who always wore hats, and lived to be a hundred; and Audrey Cameron, Scottish and quite waspish. And the late, great John Tydeman, of course, the immensely influential director who became head of BBC Radio Drama. He directed me ‘down the line’ reading Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I in which I played every member of the Royal Family sitting in a studio in Los Angeles, while John was in London. That was made into a disc and went platinum. John was at Cambridge with me and became a great friend. We were both homosexual and fell in love with Australians.
Enyd Williams started as a studio manager and became one of the BBC’s finest directors. She persuaded me to record Dickens’ Women in the Paris Studio in Lower Regent Street for Radio 4. I didn’t believe it could work, but her sensitive understanding of the piece made it one of my most successful broadcasts. Enyd taught me so much, for example: ‘When you take a breath, don’t let’s hear it, Miriam. You have to snatch your breath, but softly and quietly.’ I notice some newsreaders breathe heavily. They need Enyd to teach them.
Radio is a civilised medium; you have only your voice to use but, of course, when you’re acting a part, the whole body comes into play. A voice is a person: if you’re just doing a voice, you’ve left the humanity out — you’re only doing half the job.
Our producers in the 1960s were remarkable. The real oddballs had come to the Drama department from Features. Former actors David Thomson and Reggie (R. D.) Smith were huge characters. Martin Esslin, a refugee from Nazism, was intellectual, precise but with a great sense of humour; Ronnie Mason was always smoking, full of mischief.
I remember when B10, the flagship studio, opened in the basement of Broadcasting House. It looked like a moon landscape, with a choice of acoustics, staircases which led nowhere and masses of sound effect doors, full of different bells, knockers and planks. They were covered with the wittiest graffiti, which should have been preserved like Banksy’s work. Patricia Gallimore remembered one that ran: ‘Miriam Margolyes thinks Clement Freud is a School of Thought. Clement Freud thinks Miriam Margolyes is a School of Porpoises.’ Others were far more scurrilous and while we were waiting for our green light we used to read the doors — suppressing our sniggers.
Radio is a particular world and I belong there. The great, glory days have gone — that was in the fifties and sixties, before television became the medium of choice. I was in the last generation brought up entirely on radio: every night I listened to Children’s Hour with Derek McCulloch, to It’s That Man Again with Tommy Handley, Deryck Guyler, Jack Train, Joan Harben and Dorothy Summers. I heard Dick Barton, The Brains Trust, Gilbert Harding, and The Barlows of Beddington. Toytown with Ralph de Rohan and Norman Shelley.
These voices are part of my youth and it is a source of high delight to me to think I follow in their footsteps, in their voicesteps.
Swinging London
Despite my BBC contract, I wasn’t earning much, but it was a proper salary at last, and Mummy decided it was time for me to move out of Plaistow. She hated Plaistow; she felt happy, in one way, to have arrived in Oxford, and my returning to a place she felt she’d escaped from was a blow — an entirely class-based attitude. She said, ‘Well, you can’t live there now, darling. It’s time to move to somewhere else.’
I wanted somewhere within reasonable distance of Broadcasting House, on the Central Line and perhaps near Hyde Park. I stayed in rooms in Lancaster Gate, in Portland Road, Notting Hill and viewed many flats in Rachman-land. (Peter Rachman was the unscrupulous slum landlord who took over West London and exploited his tenants outrageously.) After some looking, I found my flat in Gloucester Terrace, a beautiful street of early Victorian, white, five-storeyed houses resembling the terraces of Brighton, but in the heart of London. Mummy always called it Bayswater, but it was Paddington, really.
The house was owned by a Jewish lampshade-maker called Mr Sagar, and his wife, Sibyl; they lived in the basement and were both hunched, as if the house above pressed them down, like two little moles that seldom came up from downstairs into the light. They resembled people from a Dickens noveclass="underline" Sybil was cadaverous, with a deep voice; they had no children and seemed to lead entirely solitary lives, but were educated and artistic. I wish now I’d asked them more about themselves and why they became lampshade-makers and what their backgrounds were. They were intelligent and entirely benevolent, but in those days I didn’t see that — I laughed at them and thought they were ‘odd’, instead of celebrating their individuality. They had a tough cleaning lady, Mrs Morgan, who took many years to get to like me.