REPRINT: Sunday Herald, The, Oct 17, 1999 by Graeme Virtue
I'm sitting in a famous sound studio called Silksound in Berwick Street, a famous bit of Soho, where I often work in advertising doing commentaries and voiceovers. I know everyone here and actors drop in for a coffee or tea. Silksound is quite a well-known rendezvous for actors in the know. See you at Silk, they say.
So it's kind of like the Groucho club?
Well, it's much nicer than the Groucho club. That's full of irreversible shits, famous shits, outrageous shits, all the great shits of London congregate there; these animated turds, smiling and laughing at each other. Funnily enough, I was taken there for dinner the other day and it was actually extraordinary how many people approached me to shake my hand that I'd never heard of; really awful, oleaginous gits came and said how they'd like to work with me. It's a kind of cruising joint, really. The people who cruise in pubs are the people who haven't got the price of the next drink. Or in lots of places, the worst people are journalists cruising for copy. It must be a great thing to be a journalist, because all you need is a hard skin and a glib mastery of language and it's getting easier and easier because of email, you know, which is actually completely ruining all language now, isn't it?
Why have you written a children's book?
My autobiography Who On Earth Is Tom Baker? was something of a success, I suppose. So then I wrote this children's story of a wicked child, to make people laugh. I didn't want to write about a happy child, anyway. I'm not interested in happy children. They're okay, who cares about happy children, they're having a great time? But if you want to write something, you can't write about happiness, there's no market for that. So I thought I'd write about a wicked child, and try and make people laugh.
But is The Boy Who Kicked Pigs really a children's book?
I think it did start out as a children's book, and I think it was accepted by Faber & Faber as a children's book, but then they did some soundings as everybody does these days, and people were being violently sick, while other people said it was depraved and things like that. They're hoping now for the so-called niche market, whatever that is.
It reads a little like Roald Dahl.
That's very flattering. Let's hope some of the reviewers pick up on that. I think we all, in our fictions and fantasies, like monsters and horror, don't we? We don't wake up in the morning all in a sweat thinking, I dreamt last night of the Angel Gabriel.
There is an astonishingly brutal part when a horse jumps off a bridge into heavy motorway traffic.
In my part of Kent, you see lots of women on horses, and you can't really stop and talk to girls on horses and ask them what they're doing because they'll think you're a dodgy old man. You've got to talk to journalists about it, or write to the Daily Mail and ask them, since the Daily Mail knows everything. And sometimes, I've seen them in a line, going over a motorway bridge and enjoyed this grotesque thought wondering what it would be like if they were to leap off. And this thought grew, and I was wondering how to get it across in the book. It would be impossible for the wicked child with a crossbow to think about the horse jumping, it had to be a consequence. That's when I settled on the ladies' bottom.
So the kid was aiming for the bottom?
It's amazing when you see beautiful horses at the racecourse walking away from you, with great arses, and a beautiful human arse above it. And then there's the grotesque wickedness of the boy wanting to pierce it. Lots of men have a fantastic desire to pinch arses, don't they, and then of course there are certain men who - and I can understand it perfectly - have a desire to fondle them. And then most men, once they reach a certain age, are quite willing to just watch them go by. In the lovely summer that we've had, it's marvellous to actually contemplate thousands of pairs of jaunty buttocks, when you stand at the corner of Charing Cross station.
So what did you read as a child?
I was reading much more violent stuff than that. I was brought up very religiously, so I was reading the Bible. All the grotesque images and violent impulses and everything all spring from my Christian upbringing, really. The Old Testament is still my favourite violent reading.
It's certainly quite a thriller.
It is. In fact, I've just finished playing God in a Radio 4 play called Take Two, with James Bolam, about God talking about the commandments. I enjoyed playing God.
Was that one of your ambitions?
Yes, but everyone who holds the floor is in a minute way playing God. I mean, parents play God, teachers play God, footballers play God. Sometimes God apparently plays God, but he's not very convincing now, really. There's a limit to being a recluse, this God who's more reclusive than JD Salinger. It simply won't do. I think he's got to come clean, he's got to come on television. He's got to give us a few hints. Having all these incompetent clergy interpreting for us. All his PR people are so terrible and it's a great script. One of the sad things about Christian PR is they don't believe it themselves, and it's beginning to show.