More than Feyn

Serendipity prevented me from reviewing the Challenger documentary a few weeks ago. It was so good and we enjoyed it so much, if those are the right words to use for a programme about something as tragic as the Challenger explosion. But I ran out of time.

William Hurt was the perfect Richard Feynman, or so I thought until Sunday night when the documentary was shown again, followed by an hour about the real Feynman, featuring interviews with friends and family as well as Feynman himself.

I’m glad we saw William Hurt’s Feynman first. That way we knew both about his work to find the reason for the Challenger tragedy, and we knew what the ‘fake’ Feynman was like. A very fine man, and an ill man. After the triumph of finding out that NASA had covered up certain facts, we had to face Feynman’s illness and subsequent death.

But fine as the actor was, Feynman was far better at being him. I was sad to know he died 25 years ago, making it impossible to meet him. That’s not just my fondness for Nobel prize winners, but my general liking for brilliant minds talking. It never ceases to amaze me how much some people are able to think and understand when it comes to really tricky stuff.

One thing I learned on Sunday was that ‘everything’ is electromagnetism, which is a subject we have come into closer contact with than we’d like in recent months. Feynman came up with the term quantum physics (or so I believe), which is another familiar subject. Unintelligible, but familiar.

I take some comfort in the letter Feynman wrote to the mother of a student, telling her not to worry about science, because love was more important. I’ll go for love any day.

It seems a little unfair that such a clever man should be good at more than physics. He played the drums. He could draw fantastically well. He was interested in a great variety of things, while still finding time to be a person, to spend time with his children, the way his own father had spent time teaching him about the world.

Feynman now means so much more to me than the name on the covers of those books certain people leave lying around the house. I am tempted to try reading one, but suspect I might come to regret such an impulse. Maybe I could watch his talks on YouTube?

For anyone who missed The Fantastic Mr Feynman on television, here is the iPlayer version. I can’t recommend it enough. Do watch.

(Lovely to learn that his little sister Joan is an astrophysicist. I wouldn’t mind a programme about her. And the fact that they grew up in Far Rockaway was a fun coincidence for me. I’d been half wondering if it’s a fictional place. Seems not.)

Magazine Mark

Is there anyone out there who needs a pile of magazines with Mark Harmon articles and interviews?

Not me, which is why I’m asking. Shall I just put them in the bin? Or do people still collect stuff like this?

It could be a zeitgeist thing. Either we all want something, or none of us do…

Lena – how she lives now

You know how it is. The girl who lived down the road and who sang the most beautiful songs as you skipped rope together is discovered and becomes a star almost overnight. Your lives go in different directions, and forty years later one of you (that would be me) thinks it’d be good to interview the other one (Lena Andersson, or Lena Hubbard as she is today), to find out what she did after stardom.

Lena always had a fantastic voice, so it was more circumstance – like the birth of ABBA – than any lack of talent that had her career fade away some years later. But I’m never sure if teen fame is a good thing, so it might have been for the best.

Ten years ago Lena married Tobe Hubbard and moved to America with him. And a couple of years ago we met up again, online, and I had my idea of interviewing her. She rarely travels to Sweden these days, and I travel to the US even more rarely, so an email interview was inevitable. But it’s OK; we have our shared skipping background.

This is mainly about her present life. We – some of us, anyway – know about her famous past. It’s interesting to find out what Lena does now.

(For good measure I interviewed Lena twice. Once for each language, so here are two interviews for the price of one! English. Swedish.)

Pauley Perrette on the Jeff Probst Show

The invitation came just over two weeks ago. But even though I am a big (have they seen a photo of me?) fan of Abby and Pauley and NCIS, I generally can’t dash off to Los Angeles to sit in on chat shows at the drop of a hat. Not that I’d heard of Jeff Probst or his show, but if he wanted Pauley, that’s enough of a recommendation for me.

Now that I’ve seen the finished result, I’m reasonably sure they wouldn’t have wanted me. The audience looked very nice, with the prettiest and youngest at the front, and I doubt there would have been a seat far enough at the back to accommodate me.

Watching it. Yes, that had its problems, just like getting to the show would have. The link is on Twitter, but I live in the wrong place to be allowed. (Don’t tell anyone, but I found it on YouTube.)

This being my Abby season, they couldn’t have timed the interview better (I suspect it was to coincide with the start of NCIS season 10, but Halloween is coming up fast, too.)

Pauley has always been big on crime. Solving it, rather than committing it, obviously. Playing Abby is all based on her dog. And if that leads to the highest Q-rating, why not? Elizabeth Taylor was a big fan, apparently. They talked on the phone. Good thing Pauley went to LA ‘for the pilot season’ just over ten years ago. Nothing to do with planes, however.

She works full time on NCIS. And then she works full time with her 30 charities, because you can never go wrong being kind to people.

Boyfriend Thomas Arklie was there, and he does seem like a very nice man. British. Ex-marine. Says it all, really. (Still trying to work out who he reminded me of, though.) They have fun together.

I have to admit to having found the Jeff Probst Show much better than I’d expected. Nice interview technique. And his Dad likes Pauley.

But the biggest surprise was to find that Pauley has curly hair. Who’d have thought?

(All photos © the Jeff Probst Show.)

Noises off, maybe

What with me going on about lost customers and noisy restaurants, I was thinking of another angle on this. I should have done an interview with an author last week. (The fact that it had to be cancelled due to my inconvenient illness, is beside the point here.)

The author and I spent some time deciding where to meet. She, who was in Manchester only briefly, suggested a couple of chain bars/restaurants, just because she knew they existed. I said I’d prefer somewhere quiet enough, so that when I sat down to type out the recording, I’d actually be able to hear what we’d been saying. I’ve done countless interviews in noisy bars, where the listening afterwards was a real pain, bordering on me making stuff up, because I couldn’t hear properly.

Background music can be very nice, and sometimes useful. At quiet times it’s good with something preventing an embarrassing total silence. But no need for disco volume while eating. And once customer numbers are up, there is very little need for WWIII levels of entertainment in the background.

OK, maybe a little, just in case we all stop talking at the very same second. Although, how likely is that?

In the end, we settled on someone’s house for the interview. That’s what’s best. No muzak, and no infuriating coffee-making monstrosities. No irritating laughing woman at the next table.

As a family, we used to go out for an Italian meal on Christmas Eve at one of those lovely Scottish-Italian restaurants. But we gave up on that too in the end, as we all got older and some felt they could no longer take part in the conversation because of the music and other noise.

What strikes me is that – yet again – businesses are losing custom this way. If you’re not clubbing, you are unlikely to say ‘Let’s go to XYZ to eat/drink coffee! I love the way you can never hear what people are saying in there.’

It’d be useful to have a ‘noise card’ to hand over to anywhere you can’t make yourself heard in. A bit like those red and yellow cards in football.

30 seconds of fame

15 minutes is really hoping for too much. In fact, I wouldn’t want that 15 minutes of fame. My seconds were more than enough.

I was reminded of this embarrassing event when author Lucy Coats told ‘all’ about her recent interview on Blue Peter. In a way it was a relief to hear how much time was spent on what turned out to be so brief. And it’s a lesson that you don’t need to go to too much effort. Just be yourself.

And whatever you do, don’t bother cleaning the house.

For me it was walking home from school with Offspring. Just an ordinary afternoon, with Daughter in the pushchair and Son walking next to me. We saw these weird types outside the local theatre, and I realised I was about to be used for something.

The short one told me they were from the BBC and the news was that the theatre was due for demolition and what did I think of that? I told him. (I was quite fluent and sensible, on the whole.)

Then he said, would I mind repeating that on camera, and I couldn’t very well refuse. Except I was barely able to recall what I said the first time, so sounded pretty incoherent. I went home and put the video recorder on for the local news. I had dinner to make and people to feed.

It was embarrassingly bad. I had no idea I sound like that. I wondered how anyone could possibly put up with me. Two more people were interviewed. My neighbour across the road, and another school-run mother.

Afterwards the local children stared at me, and my friend’s husband told her to ask for my autograph. Luckily for her she didn’t.

The theatre went some months after. In its place is the ‘magnificent’ entrance to the new car park for the public school which owned the building and had been waiting to get rid of it. At least the parents collecting their children by car have somewhere to park.

We no longer have the Roger Whittaker concerts or the pantos or any of the other entertainment in this former 1930s cinema.

John Barrowman – the book interview

In my infinite generosity I have decided to share last week’s book interview with John and Carole Barrowman with my CultureWitch readers on the grounds of John generally being a culture kind of celebrity. He sings and he acts, but he certainly doesn’t write books.

I know, it’s confusing isn’t it? He gets his sister Carole to write books for him. This time it’s Hollow Earth, which is a children’s adventure novel, and that is why I went to Glasgow a week ago to speak to them.

They are crazy, and very nice. The interview is a little crazy too. It sort of rubbed off.

Finding Pam Dawber

Recently, online searches for Pam Dawber have overtaken even those for Abby’s tattoos, which for so long have been my most wanted items. And it’s easy to post blogs on Abby and her tattoos. Far harder to give readers anything new on Pam. Or even something old. There is simply not very much about Pam out there.

But then I stumbled across a proper length ‘interview‘ with Pam on YouTube. Can’t remember what I was actually looking for, but there it was. And I’m fairly certain it hadn’t been available before. Intimate Portrait: Pam Dawber, Lifetime Real Women, and I’m guessing it’s a television programme from about 15 years ago, judging by what people look like. Pam herself looks as beautiful as ever, and ‘Mr Dawber’ still has dark(ish) hair.

It’s divided into five parts, presumably where the breaks for commercials would have come. It’s a nice interview, albeit with little new content. Interesting to see Pam’s friends and colleagues talking about her, and sometimes I’m just really surprised to find people are willing to tell so much. Pam strikes me as a woman who likes her private life private, in which case this portrait is her pay-off, ‘you can have this, but that’s all you get’ kind of thing.

Daniela Ruah on the Late Late Show

with Craig Ferguson. The man is insane. I’m surprised they allow him on television, but I’m awfully glad they do, because he is refreshingly crazy and entertaining.

But I have to say that this time, with Daniela Ruah as his guest, he was surprisingly daring, even for a boy from Cumbernauld. Daniela has an unexpected background in London, with a French non-Welsh speaking boyfriend in Wales. She gave that as her reason for having escaped visiting Cumbernauld. (I can recommend the service area. I really can.)

Watch, and enjoy.

More on those Roger Whittaker shows

As I was saying, I was sent some old television programmes featuring Roger Whittaker a while ago. First there was a track of Mexican Whistler from a positively ancient (well, 1968) French show, showing Roger sitting in an outlandish setting, whistling away. Great fun!

Four years later there was a Roger Whittaker Show on German television. It seems to be the kind of programme where someone famous hosts a show, with a few other guest stars appearing. Apart from some startling dances by a Timotei girl lookalike, we get the Les Humphries Singers, who I remember, but suspect I never actually saw. Roger accompanies them on harmonica, of all things.

Someone else I’d managed to forget all about is Vicky Leandros, who sang several songs, including a duet with Roger. And Roger gets to sing  quite a few songs of his own.

On to 1980 and the Herzlichst Roger Whittaker, also from German television. Here the team have come to London to see Roger, and it involves an awful lot of turns round Piccadilly Circus by car, to prove they are driving in London. Some pretty cherry blossom and some dramatic looking rain completes the London look.

Along with many well known tracks by Roger, we get to visit him and his family at home, witnessing a game of croquet in the garden and some backgammon in front of the fire. Unfortunately, because it’s a German programme, the interview with Roger is dubbed into German.

Most of the songs are the usual ones from back then, but at least one less common track, Sail Away.

It’s good that some countries know to appreciate Roger. And I definitely appreciate my fellow fans, who so thoughtfully provided me with new old entertainment.