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Piers Plowright and Dr Jonathan Miller at Burgh House
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‘Watch Big Brother to see we’re a lousy lot’
He can’t bear the theatre, considers Beyond the Fringe a catastrophe and calls himself an amateur. Matthew Lewin heard Dr Jonathan Miller discuss his life and career
THE BIG row over Celebrity Big Brother “took the manhole cover off the subterranean dirty currents of British racism”, Dr Jonathan Miller told an audience at Burgh House last Thursday.
“People who don’t watch Big Brother because they are fastidious or because they don’t watch television are not availing themselves of important evidence – evidence of what a lousy lot we can be,” said Dr Miller, who lives in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town.
“Here we are in Hampstead, comfortable, affluent and so forth and we behave decently. But with just a little shift in the tectonic plates of society, who knows how badly we would all behave,” he said.
Dr Miller, 72, who has been a doctor, comic performer, writer, television presenter and theatre and opera director in his extraordinary career, was interviewed by the distinguished BBC Radio producer Piers Plowright.
Dr Miller confided that, among other things, he never went to the theatre, had only seen about six operas in his whole life, that he was a fan of popular music and that it was his obsession with trivia that had enabled him to be successful as a director.
He began by describing how anti-Semitism had affected his family and how his father, also a doctor, had been forced into one of the “reject subjects of medicine, the Jewish topics of skin, venereal diseases and madness. He became a child psychiatrist”.
He continued: “Even when I was at University College Hospital there was not a single Jewish consultant, with the exception of one man who was appointed by the University of London and not by his fellow consultants.
“Some of the most able and interesting people I knew, and the best clinicians I had ever met, simply could not get a job as a consultant because of these hunting squires who just didn’t want Jews in their club.”
Questioned by Mr Plowright about his well-known atheism, Dr Miller confirmed that he had never been moved by religion. “When I was a child I never heard anyone talk about God or anything, and I have always said that if they get to you before your cognitive immune system is working, then you’re theirs. Certainly no one got to me.
“There are many things, particularly music, like Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which can move me enormously, but it’s got nothing to do with God, it’s to do with what we all have by virtue of being human.”
His involvement in comedy acting happened, like everything else in his career, “by accident” he claimed.
At Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences, he had occasionally “arsed about” with comedy and appeared in Footlights reviews. But he was intent on a medical career and was working in the UCH casualty department when he was approached to appear with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett in the famous Beyond the Fringe revue in Edinburgh which was, he said, “cataclysmically successful”.
“I look back at that show and see it as an absolute catastrophe. I should have gone back to medicine but by the time three or four years had passed, my moral fibre had completely rotted and I went on doing this silly business of entertaining people.”
His directing career also happened by accident. “George Devine, who was running the Royal Court theatre asked me to direct a play by John Osborne. I’d never directed anything in my life, but he said to me: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll pick it up as you go along.’ I had nothing to lose, so I had a go, and I found it was quite interesting. I found that I had an eye for what human conduct was like and I got it right and it worked quite well.”
Then he was asked to direct a production for the Kent Opera with conductor Roger Norrington, “and when I protested that I couldn’t read music, Roger assured me that he could, and that it would be all right”.
“But really, I am a blundering amateur,” he continued. “That’s not false modesty, because in this business being an amateur is what it’s all about. If you are too professional, what you do is get boring. Amateurishness means that your allegiance is to reality rather than to the theatre.
“I can’t bear the theatre and I never go to it. I think I have been once in the past 10 years. And I think I’ve seen only six operas in my life. I wouldn’t dream of going to the opera.
“But they are good fun to direct. I am like an Indianapolis race-track mechanic – I like being in the pit underneath, fixing the gears and adjusting things and finding out how things work. But I rarely watch my own productions, and I certainly can’t bear to go on the first night.”
Dr Miller also revealed that if he was ever invited to do Desert Island Discs again, he would choose to take The Ballad of Billie Jo, by Bobby Gentry. “It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of naturalistic southern poetry by someone who is not seen to be a poet. It’s the most extraordinary piece of literature, and I think it’s wonderful.
“You see, I’m absolutely obsessed – and this is crucial to my work as a director – with the negligible and the vulgar and the commonplace, and this is possibly why I’m a good director.”
He described his deep dislike for period productions of opera where performers wore wrinkled tights and looked silly, and for theatre actors who declaimed their lines as if their were singing an aria.
“When I hear people howling like that, it makes me want to shout: ‘Oh shut up!’” When he was directing Christopher Plummer in Shakespeare’s King Lear in New York, he took the actor to a street corner to see a very irritable drunk who would stand there shouting and swearing at the traffic. “I told Christopher: ‘That’s what Lear is doing. He is defying the elements.’ Plummer did it, and it suddenly sounded like what this mad, exasperated old man was doing.
“What I say is, pay attention to the trivial, because heaps of triviality become considerable. I try to remind actors and opera singers what it’s like to be alive. People often ask me what directing consists of, and I say it’s a simple business, it’s about reminding your performers what they knew all along but had forgotten, and getting them to forget what they ought never to have known in the first place. That’s all it is.”
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