Comic Relief

About Time

CRAIG

Hello and welcome to Desperately Seeking Wisdom with me, Craig Oliver. This is a podcast for people who want to live a simpler, more fulfilled life, but aren’t sure how to get there. A little while back I hit the buffers. Outwardly I'd had a successful life, but I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t see much point in anything. I rarely felt at peace, and thought of life as a grind that I just had to get through. I realised I was far from alone, and wondered if there might be a different, better way.

So, for Desperately Seeking Wisdom, I’ve been talking to some wise people. People who’ve managed to change or have had change forced upon them. What was the wisdom that got them through it? What would they say that would help others, who like me, were struggling?

RICHARD

I think we're living at a particularly interesting time. Where race, gender climate mean that someone like me, has not been focusing on the wrong things, but mustn't any longer insist that these are the right things.

CRAIG

This week's guest is the director, screenwriter and Comic Relief co-founder, Richard Curtis. Richard has always struck me as having it all together. Bright, optimistic, caring and a huge success at whatever he turned his hand to. But life hasn't always been so straightforward. He spoke to me about the sadness he's encountered in later years - and a warning that there are frank comments about suicide in this conversation. So how are you?

RICHARD

Um, look, I've - it's been a really interesting and strange year where I've had the benefit of a lot of family time, which has been great, but also a lot of fundraising, which has been interesting because it's possible to do it from a village in Suffolk, rather than having to be in the BBC for three months. So, er, generally, I'm in good shape.

CRAIG

It's - now I just wanna go back and talk about some of the stuff in your past before we move on to the present a bit, and I read that your father was a refugee, and I wondered what impact that had on you as a person, your thinking?

RICHARD

Well, he was like a kind of slow-moving refugee. His dad died in Czechoslovakia when he was 14, and things were getting rocky. So yeah, he travelled on a boat to Australia, er, with his brother to meet relatives he'd never met before. And I don't know, I mean, I think it certainly my dad had a very good effect on me in that he had had a hard life in comparison to my easy one, so whenever I would complain about things, he would say, ‘You know, I was cleaning toilets at 16, and had had to abandon my dream of becoming a doctor because I, I’d had to give up school’.

So I think that my dad's experience gave me a tremendous sense of perspective, and also the fact that my dad was a mixture between Italy, Czechoslovakia and Australia, has always made me feel not English. You know, I feel like I'm a global person, rather than a, rather than an English person.

CRAIG

And what wisdom did he pass on to you?

RICHARD

Oh, he had a lot of wisdom. He, he was a great believer in hard work. Um, he had a great motto which was, ‘You can't be happier than happy’ and that just sort of means, if you're enjoying yourself on a holiday, don't wish you could be staying at a better hotel. You know, if you're having a good time, you're lucky. He also used to say to me, ‘Problems are problems ‘cos they can't be resolved’. He's kind of a realistic basis for me, ‘cos I am instinctively an optimist.

And he was quite clear to point out that the world was a complicated place where sometimes conflicts were conflicts for such deep reasons that they couldn't be glossed over. So I think, you know, hard work and modest expectations were his, you know, bywords.

CRAIG

It's interesting, ‘cos, like, you haven't had modest expectations, particularly in like, some of the phil- philanthropic work you've done. You've like, wanted to solve some of the big major problems.

RICHARD

You know, you've come back to almost everything I've ever done, Craig, I've thought we're gonna leap up the whole staircase here. We're going to make poverty history, as it were. And then you realise afterwards, we took two steps. And even when there's a reverse, you think, ‘Well at least one step of our two steps still exists’. So I think I, I'm more like my mum when I start out, and when I reflect back, I’m more like my dad.

CRAIG

You were saying there that you consider yourself a citizen of the world, because you actually did move around a lot before you came to England. That moment when you came to England, what was it like and how did you fit it in, having lived in many other places?

RICHARD

So I mean, look, it was allied to the boarding school experience. My parents were living in Sweden, and I was sent to boarding school in England. And boarding school’s always tough, even though I didn't find it horribly tough, and I know a lot of people really are shaped and tormented by their experiences. And then my parents moved here a few years later, and I started to become more English and certainly, I had an American accent when I arrived at my boarding school, and that went within about a week and a half.

I think I've got that strange thing of having a distance, I'm allowed to disassociate my things, the things I don't like, from the things I don't like in the UK, and I'm particularly passionate about the things that I do like in the UK, like, you know, pop music.

CRAIG

Most people if you said Richard Curtis, they would say that he is English, and a lot of his output exemplifies a certain kind of Englishness. But you're sort of rejecting that.

RICHARD

I mean, these are very grand examples, but you know, Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, two great British playwrights, you know, both from Ireland, as it were. Tom Stoppard’s from Czechoslovakia. Anthony Minghella, you know, of Italian stock. I think there maybe is a bit of a tradition, in fact, that the people who kind of love and relish English things may not have their deepest roots here.

CRAIG

And you won a scholarship to Harrow, as you said, going to boarding school. Um, eventually becoming Head Boy, and I read that as Head Boy, you abolished fagging. Er, can you explain to anyone who's listening to this, um, who perhaps doesn't understand what that was, and why you did it?

RICHARD

Well, fagging was this, you know, weird public school system - God, I hope it doesn't exist anymore - where the senior boys were allowed to get the junior boys to do tasks for them, basically. You would stand at the top of the house, which had about 60 boys in it, an 18-year-old would yell, ‘Boy, boy, boy!’ and everyone 14 and under would charge there, and the last person who got there would have to go to the tuck shop and buy the 18-year-old a sausage roll.

I profoundly disagreed with it. I do think that somewhere deep inside me, I really do believe all people are equal. I, I hate the concept of respect. I think it should be sort of friendship and partnership. I don't want to do things for people because they're either richer than me or have a title and I don't think people should do things for me because I'm older than them. So, i-i- I thought it was a profoundly bad system. I did only abolish it, I think, in my own house and it was re-instigated the next term by some crypto fascist.

CRAIG

But it's fascinating, isn't it? I think most people today, would - the, the concept that a kind of form of institutionalised slavery existed within a school would be horrified by it, but I imagine at the time, there were a lot of people talking about, ‘This is our culture. This is the right thing. This is okay’. Did you experience that? People being very defensive about it.

RICHARD

You see, it’s a cunning system. That's the problem. Because you suffer so much in your first two years, the only benefit is that you're told that in your last year you'll be taken - you'll be able to take advantage of them. So no one ever wanted to abolish it, because they said, ‘Yeah, do it once I've gone, but I need payback for what happened when I was young’.

CRAIG

That's interesting. It's funny, it ma- and it's not related in any way, but it made me think of - my mother was a police woman in London in the 1960s. and she told me that as soon as she became pregnant, she was expected to leave, and that was just the norm and you're like, this is within living memory in our country that those sort of things happened, and it's interesting, isn't it that they're not that long ago?

RICHARD

Oh, yeah, look. My, um, me and my brother went to private school and my sisters went to state schools ‘cos my dad didn't think their education was as important. I mean, I - one of the things I'm always trying to reflect on are the changes that have happened. You know, there are the tragic ones that haven't, but you know, extreme poverty was halved between 1990 and 2015, and you've got to relish those things that have occurred, as well as fight for those things that haven’t.

CRAIG

And looking back at your biography, um, it seems to me that, that you were successful quickly and that actually, pretty much what you've turned your mind to has been a success. Is that right? It's very easy to look on the outside and think that it, that things have been pretty straightforward for other people, but have - did you feel the struggle? Did you find it difficult?

RICHARD

Um, look, I - no - I've been unbelievably lucky. I think that, you know, I had this epic piece of good luck of bumping into Rowan Atkinson when I was 19. Whether or not I would have succeeded as a comedy writer if he hadn't performed the things I was writing, I think is doubtful. I didn't show, you know, superhuman talent. So I, I think that, you know, I consider myself pretty lucky. Like all writers, I could send you a list of the 20 things I've written that hadn't been made, but that's true of everybody.

And as far as the charity work is concerned, you know, that is, [SIGHS] that, that's such a… big thing about the fact you know, is it my success or is it the fact that if you give everybody an opportunity to do the right thing, if you open that door a little bit, everybody charges through? So I wouldn't say, you know, the success of Comic Relief is due to me. I would say the success of Comic Relief is due to me thinking of something and then it turning out that if you create an opportunity, you know, millions of people want to take advantage of it.

CRAIG

I wanna come to that properly in a bit, but I, I was gonna start more on, on your films and your television programmes, and I, so I've been looking at quite a few of the things that you've done, just knowing that I'm gonna be talking to you, and it seems to me that the quest for love is just a major theme in your work, and that looking for and finding the one. Um, do you feel that is sort of the sort of key to life?

RICHARD

Well, by the way, I would point out, I had to bottle that up for a decade. Um, there's no romance in ‘Not the Nine O'Clock News’ or ‘Blackadder’. So you know, I had to hold it waiting, um, until I started to write my own films. And I think my answer to that may be different now to what it would have been, you know, when I was 35. I, I think my films are as much about friendship. If you kind of look at ‘Four Weddings’ or ‘Notting Hill’, as you know, as they are about love - I mean, love’s the overarching plot mechanism, but the context is friendship.

I wish I'd written more about family sooner, so it would be love, friendship and family and in ‘About Time’, and actually a certain amount in, um, in ‘Love Actually’, there's a lot about family, brothers, sisters, fathers, sons. But those are the defining things in my private space and I’m very much a believer in my films, of writing what I know about. In the public space, you know, they are the joy and complexity that we have, but there are hugely important things about being a citizen, that for me don't have to do with just protecting your family and spending time with your friends.

CRAIG

So I watched ‘About Time’ last night, um, and I remembered it from, I think it came out about like, eight or nine years ago, but it’s - I remembered at the time when it first came out that it seemed to be a very personal film to you, and just to remind anybody who hasn't seen it recently, it's a story of a man who discovers that the men in his family have the ability to go back to key moments in their own lives, and so he uses it, um, to help him get his girlfriend.

But in the second part of the film, it really becomes much, much more about family and particularly the death of his father, and for various reasons why he has to let him go. Um, it seems to be there’s quite a key moment in the film where he decides that he loves his father, but he's going to have to let him go because that's sort of the natural order of things. Um, is that right? Is that - did you really want to write about that side of things and how love, it has to naturally end at stages?

RICHARD

Yeah, I mean, and it does. I think, you know, in the years before I lost my mum, my dad and my sister in quick succession, so I was very aware of you know, the fact that you do let go and I suppose I wanted that reflected. By the way on the love thing, you know, it was a problem for me. Um, so the reason I reflected that is at seven, I fell in love with a girl on a bus and stole a ring from my mum and gave it to her and she chucked it out the school window into the snow, and you know, I was always absolute fool for love so it definitely was too big a bit of my, you know, somewhere deep inside, that is a problem, so…

CRAIG

So where did that - where did, where did where did that come?

RICHARD

I don't know, and it was really odd and it's not, I think, that usual ‘cos when we interviewed boys to play the young boy in ‘Love Actually’, which, um, Tom Sangster eventually played, and we asked all the 10-year-olds, how, you know, big a feature is love in your lives? and it didn't ring a bell with any of them. So that was just some, you know, I don't think it's psychological damage but definitely there was some psychological freakery, er, there and it did just mean that when I watched films, the ones that really rang a bell were, you know, ‘Ghost’ and ‘Gregory's Girl’, and all of those films that had love as their plot device.

CRAIG

Did you get the ring back?

RICHARD

No. It was such a farce. I remember making friends with her brother, Greg, who I didn't like at all, just so that he would invite me around to his house and I could see Tracy from time to time.

CRAIG

And, and just - just going back to ‘About Time’, because I do think it is, it is so personal to you and, and understanding what you're trying to say, throughout the film, you can - towards the end, you see the main character going back to trying to fix things, and discovering that even though he's got a second chance, you can't often do that. And it seemed to me that you're, you're basically saying that we are set to lose people, we are set to get things wrong and there's an element of just having to accept that.

RICHARD

Yeah, I mean, so much so. I think that - I can't remember where it is in one of my films, but, you know, I, I seem to remember writing that life has a pile of good things and a pile of bad things, and the good things don't mean the bad things don't happen, and the bad things don't mean we should ignore and not relish the good. So I think everybody as they go through life, some people learn very harsh lessons early, others learn them late, but it is a mixed bag, and we do live with and through that.

CRAIG

And towards the end of the film, you become very explicit about the father offering wisdom, and one of the pieces of wisdom that he offers his son is like, to live each day normally, and you see the stresses and strains of that day, and then he says, ‘Go back a live it again, particularly looking out for the joyful, special moments’ and it felt to me that you - I think you actually used the phrase ‘Rel- relish the remarkable ride’. [Yeah]

It seemed to me that you were saying that too often in life, we don't recognise that whatever’s happening, this is an extraordinary place to be and there are extraordinary things, and actually, we've got to shift our perspective towards recognising that sometimes and actively give ourselves a shove away from being negative.

RICHARD

No, no, - I mean, I so believe that and, I, I'm a worrier, you know, and the, the motivation in a funny way for that whole film was a conversation with a friend of mine, whose life to an outsider would seem to have been much more chaotic and much less successful, but he's definitely much happier than me. He's enjoyed it, he's relished the ride, whereas I've just worried about the edit and worried about the TV show, and spent too much time. So that movie was almost a message to myself to say, ‘Sharpen up and try and notice the beauty of the day’.

CRAIG

Did you take the advice?

RICHARD

I'm trying to now and actually, I'm, I’m starting to work a lot less at the moment. There are lots of reasons for that, but in order to, you know, enjoy the wind and the sun and the rain.

CRAIG

Yeah. No, the, the thing that often comes up in some of these conversations is people talk about Viktor Frankl, the, the famous psychiatrist who spent a huge amount of time in Auschwitz and he basically said that ‘Even in the worst circumstances, I will choose to be happy, and I will choose to have joy’ and you kind of think, ‘Well, if you can do it, then I should be able to as well’.

RICHARD

Yeah, I mean, I haven't found that possible with work, Craig. You know, the truth of the matter is, in so much of my creative and even the Comic Relief work, the, the line between finishing it properly, you know, the last five percent is so often so important that I've not been able to say, ‘Oh wait a minute, this is fine, it’s a love- working with lovely people, the film's okay, it's all gonna go right’. Er, I’ve found it hard to keep that perspective and particularly hard in Comic Relief, when you think, ‘If I get this film emotionally right, this little appeal, or if I make this phone call and convince this person, there are lives at stake’. I've, I’ve found it hard, taking life easy.

CRAIG

So it sounds like you pay an emotional price for that. Do the people around you sometimes as well?

RICHARD

Well, I think all my kids think I'm a, you know, I work too hard. I was horrified when - I can't remember it must have been my either 60th or 50th birthday, they gave me a comic book that they written about me not being a very good father, and then them going down a magic slide and arriving in a village in Botswana, and understanding why I'd been in a bad mood and worked so hard. So, er, I’m, I'm not sure I've, I've done - done my job very well.

CRAIG

That, that must have been quite tough to receive.

RICHARD

Oh, I mean, like, they thought I'd love it. They thought I’d love it. They gave it to me at dinner. They said, ‘Look’ and it was a beautiful object, but it was a hurt- a hurtful one.

CRAIG

Yeah, I can imagine. Um, the other pie- and just - we’ll leave ‘About Time’ in a moment, but the other thing that, that's a very specific piece of wisdom that you, the, the father gives in that film is, he says, ‘First of all, marry someone kind’. And then you just move on and you don't say anything else. He just says, ‘Marry someone kind’ and it's just like, it's almost as if you're saying like, that's an obvious point

[Yeah] but it seems that a lot of people do struggle to take that advice.

RICHARD

Well, of course, and love’s a lunatic and people fall in love with the wrong people, or people, you know, who don't quite match their, their mood and way of behaving. Love and kindness are so fundamental and central. I'm obsessed by the brilliance of the title of Help Refugees, that their motto is ‘Choose love’, what an extraordinary observation, that you're dealing with a complex political issue with all sorts of ramifications and deep policies involved and that they said, ‘In the end, you know, would you love another human being? Would you take that child off that boat?’

Er, and you would, and I do think sometimes even in the large world, one of the problems is when people are making policy decisions, they're made without love, without consideration of how it affects individuals.

CRAIG

And what is it with the, you know, the obsessive compulsive side of pop music? I mean, people say, like, you can say, when something was number three in the charts in 1975, or whatever. What - where is that? Are you see - you do see it in your films, [Yeah] like the soundtracks and stuff like the pop music, you absolutely clearly love it.

RICHARD

I mean, I don't know. It's such a wonderful thing for me that the single thing I love most in life, I have no talent at, so I've just been able to be a fan. I never, I wasn't like a musician and then I think, ‘Well, I don't like that because it, er, my mu- my music has moved away from jazz’. Um, and it's, you know, it's just a lucky gift life gave me. Some people love gardening, I adore pop music. It's made me happy, it's taught me a million lessons.

I'm deeply moved by it. I, I mean, I, I can't listen - the only opera I've ever heard is ‘Tommy’ by The Who. So there are all sorts of limitations musically, but it's just been a, a huge gift. I don't know, my, my brain is in tune with that bit of human creativity, I mean, much more than painting or novels. But I just got lucky, or shallow.

CRAIG

So let's move on to Comic Relief. Um, actually, this is sort of how I ran into you and got to know you because when I was in government, we were doing a lot of stuff on international aid and I would sort of occasionally run into you at things. Tell us how did you suddenly latch on to it? Wa- had you been active for a long time in this sort of field and then this was the big idea? Or was it something that just suddenly exploded into view?

RICHARD

I mean, it's a strange thing, all things like this are complicated, I had done nothing for charity ‘til, um, Live Aid, which inspired me to do what I did. I almost fell into Comic Relief. I offered to go with a friend who was going to Ethiopia to see what was happening, on the off chance I could help. It wasn't me who said, ‘I must do something’. I offered to help a friend who was doing something and then when I got back, having seen the horrors that I'd seen, then for the rest of my life, I’ve felt, you know, ‘I must do something’.

And so you look back and think ‘Well, what, w- is there a root there?’ And I think, you know, it may be - look, either it's in my character to be over-aware of other people's suffering, or it really mattered that I was raised for three years in the Philippines and was terribly aware that as I drove to school, I drove past 10,000 people living under corrugated iron with no sanitation. I was aware of that split.

I remember when I was at Harrow, you know, I was very left wing, um, because I thought you should help people in society whose lives are tough. And, you know, it may just be because when I was 12, my mum cancelled Christmas. She saw, it was the Biafra famine, and she said, ‘Let's not have any presents and let’s have beans on toast on Christmas Day, and give that money away’ and maybe - and we had a rather good Christmas, and maybe that just made me think that was the bit of family behaviour that I was most proud of.

CRAIG

And when you went to Ethiopia that first time, looking back now, what are the things that stick in your head? What was the thing that just really grabbed you specifically?

RICHARD

Well, I mean, two things, really. It, it was terrible sights to see. You know, it wasn't at the height of the famine, but you would go to places and there would be three corrugated iron huts and in one, people had a chance, in the other people probably were going to live, and then the last one, they were going to die. And so I saw, you know, terrible hunger, beautiful people in the worst situation, who still strangely kept their sense of humour, um, which was a surprise. I remember the children still laughing.

But it's just, you know, the, the thing that bangs around in my head is the - is the phrase, that simultaneity of suffering. Basically, ever since then, every day, I just think, ‘I'm eating this meal and someone else is not. I'm wandering into Boots, and someone else is making the choice whether to buy food or medicine for their children. I'm driving home, and someone else is leaving home due to terror and now not knowing where they're going’.

It's just got branded in my mind as, as a, as a situa- and it is probably like a branding. You know, it's just always there on my brain, because the horror of starvation was so, um, acute.

CRAIG

There was a period wasn’t there, around 2008, where it felt like the, the mood of the country was very much behind the idea of international aid and that, that developed, but it feels like now we're shifting to a period where by no means everybody, but a very large group of people in this country, feel very strongly that charity begins at home. The British Foreign Aid budget has been cut and people feel it should be. And it seems to me that that view is completely alien to your worldview. Can you understand where they're coming from at all, or do you just feel pissed off about?

RICHARD

No, I mean, I do understand it but, you know, let it be noted that when, you know, Nigel Farage attacked the RNLI, they had their biggest single day of donations from people who do care. So I'm never dispirited by hostile voices because I know so many voices that are supportive. I mean, I do think, yes, on the subject of the aid budget, which I think is a, er, a terrible, terrible, murderous decision, and a very, very bad one indeed, I do believe all people are equal and that human lives abroad are equal to human lives in the UK, and I passionately care about both of them, and I don't see that it's an either or.

CRAIG

So I'm obviously deeply sympathetic to your approach to it, but I think a lot of people would push back and, you know, what you see constantly is this diet of there are, there is corruption in the countries that this is going to, that, that the governments of those countries are authors of the fate of them, that if you keep pumping money into them, they just abuse - either take it, or they just continue along their merry way doing it. So some people would say it's, look, it's not as straightforward as I can save that child's life; it's more complicated.

RICHARD

Yeah, but [How would you react?] also it’s complicated, but about the leaders, I'd say, ‘So what?’ You know, if there's corruption, who's it hurting? Poor people in that society, and if you can work out ways of getting to them while bypassing that, then that's fantastic and that's clearly what DFID has been working on. Er, and the idea that not working perfectly is a reason for cutting it, I mean, if you went to a school and it was a bad school, would you suddenly say, ‘I know, let's cut education funding by a quarter, we'll just get rid of that. Schools aren't great, lot of schools are bad’. No, what you say is, ‘Let's fix that school’.

It - I, I think it's, there's a lot of false argument there. I mean, I would never, and Comic Relief has always been 50/50. I would never say, prioritise, you know, other people's lives abroad, over ours. Do both.

CRAIG

And there were moments where Comic Relief was definitely trying to do the right thing, where it bumped up against controversy. So you read, you know, about - there was an Ed Sheeran film and I think a Stacey Dooley film where people accused it of having a white saviour mentality, and then I think David Lammy said that you were promoting stereotypical views about Africa. When that happened, did you feel the unfairness of it, or did you think, ‘Actually, they've got a point’?

RICHARD

I mean, I actually disagree with most of what David Lammy was saying, but the - history has moved things on since then. I mean, we're at a very gripping time, in terms of the issues of race, gender, diversity, representation, everything like that. I think he was actually ahead of the curve. I wish he hadn't gone about it in the way that he went about it, but I now think we would and should do things differently. You know, all my conversations with my children now, they don't like 20 percent of my jokes, ‘cos they think they're, you know, old fashioned and wrong in some way.

So I'm really interested in how a, er, a generation that's grown up to be passionate, angry and pedantic about these issues may well change things for the better. And if those were the things that those arguments did, you know, hurray and they were right.

CRAIG

I definitely want to come on to the next generation thing, um, but th- that white saviour thing, surely that hurts, or -?

RICHARD

Oh, it - no, it, it, it really did and, you know, th- I, you know, in the end, I feel that those films spread empathy, compassion and interest, rather than encourage stereotypes, on balance. And I feel that if they did make more money, then if you asked people in those projects, ‘Are you willing to risk a little bit of stereotyping on BBC One on a Friday, or would you rather have the extra £100,000?’ I find it hard to believe they wouldn't say, ‘Give me the extra £100,000’. So it is complicated.

But as often with complications, the answer is something new. Without using those films, we actually made more on our appeal films this year on Red Nose Day, without using celebrity presenters, than we had before, ‘cos you find a new way of doing it. So I think you can have your cake and eat it too.

CRAIG

So I’m not trying to labour it to say you were wrong, I'm just interested in that moment where the world sort of nudges you along, or you, you sh- you have- you shift position and you go, ‘Actually, maybe we should approach this differently’. It seems to me that, that there is a wisdom, sometimes in those moments, even if they are quite painful at the time.

RICHARD

There is, you know, and one of the things, Craig, that worries me generally, is that politicians, and sometimes, you know, entertainers and everything like that, get locked in the fervour of their 20s and 30s. If you ask most people, ‘What's your favourite 10 films?’ they name films they saw before they were 25. And often politicians are arguing about things that are out of date, and I think we're living at a particularly interesting time where race, gender climate, you know, mean that someone like me, has not been focusing on the wrong things, but mustn't any longer insist that these are the right things, that I used to be obsessed by.

You know, so I think that, you know, how does change happen in societies? How important is it to take climate into account when you're talking about poverty? And you know, how aggressive should you be about diversity? I, I like to feel that I'm feeling the change, feeling that other younger people can do it better than me. I wish there was more 25-year-olds in the Cabinet.

CRAIG

And we live in worrying times, as you sort of look towards the future. I mean, the IPCC is saying that climate change is getting worse, er, and it's worse than we thought it would be at this stage, and as a result of that, the knock-ons of that, certainly in terms of poverty and that kind of thing, is gonna be a huge problem. Do you look forward - fa- you're famously and you talk about yourself as an optimist - do you look forward on that with optimism, or do you feel, God this is such a huge problem, how on earth are we gonna deal with it?

RICHARD

Well, my, you know, my optimism has always been tempered by the need to do all you can, while you're being optimistic. And certainly climate, you know, creates an expectation of action, individually by businesses, and most importantly by politicians, that isn't happening at the moment. So all I can say is, let's all be optimistic that our actions can accelerate the actions of politicians. You know, if the climate’s gonna get worse, you've got to think, what kind of pressure what kind of action can we do to try and make, make a difference? But I - you know, the climate thing is terrifying for, you know, our children's generation.

CRAIG

And when you look back on Comic Relief in your time, it's been going for such a long time now, what did you learn from it that you perhaps weren't expecting to see? Were there certain things that jumped out that people maybe found unexpected, that you learned from this thing that basically has been on an international stage and dragged in some of the most famous people on the planet? And were there things that you took away from it that you felt, God, I really hadn't expected that that was going to be the outcome, or that was what I would find?

RICHARD

That's interesting. I mean, I think, you know, the first thing is, charity doesn't have to be po faced, that that was definitely there, right at the beginning. And that people aren't sort of, you know, don't mind the contrast between quite biting comedy, and then an appeal film full of passion, so, you know, it's on that rather surprising revelation that people are intelligent enough to see that you can be both funny and compassionate at the same time.

Er, I think the fact that Comic Relief was sort of educationally helpful. Part of the argument that led to a generation that cares a bit more, was more aware, eventually got nought point seven led to the Make Poverty History campaign. My personal motto is, you know, in order to make things happen, you have to make things and sometimes the things you make have an effect, not quite where you ex-expect it. You know, I, I was talking the other day to the person who started Giving Tuesday and he said he did it because of Comic Relief. That's what he grew up with.

And Giving Tuesday is an amazing, very different fundraising scheme. But one of the effects of Comic Relief is to have made that happen. The result of it may be unexpected, you know, and benign, but you got to do things, you got to make it happen.

CRAIG

Er, my dau- my middle daughter, er, got me to watch Bo Burnham's film on Netflix about lockdown, which is called, ‘Inside’ and [Yeah] it's an extraordinary, um, creative thing, and there's a very funny song in it which is called ‘White Woman's Instagram’, which I sort of imagine -

RICHARD

Yeah, no, I've, I’ve seen it. Er, it is a remarkable bit of work.

CRAIG

- and I sort of imagined that, I thought you would, you would like it too, but he does take the piss out of business and purpose and that kind of thing that you were just talking about. And a line that really resonated with me would be - partly because of some of the stuff that I'm doing in my career at the moment was, ‘The question is no longer, do you want to eat and buy Wheat Thins? The question is now will you support Wheat Thins in their fight against Lyme disease?’ And he's sort of saying that in a way that actually we've gone from business needs to have a purpose that works, to suddenly we've got to grab hold of any purpose and make it look like we're socially aware, and sometimes that can feel very weird.

RICHARD

Yeah, look, I, um, I, I agree with all that satire and I think you've got to be jolly careful. But, you know, there's a really interesting thing happening with, I remember talking to Mark Carney and him saying that one of the biggest risks to companies is that they're found out to be hypocritical. Er, and that, in fact, once that - the Wheat Thins have supported Lyme disease, if it turns out that they're not paying their taxes, or that they've actually not supported it, they're going to be in real trouble.

So, so often, the, you know, good intentions, lead to the necessity to hold to those good intentions. They actually create an expectation of good behaviour, and then if you're caught out not doing it, it does serious business damage. So I think, you know, I, I worry about tokenism, you worry about greenwashing, but that shouldn't stop us encouraging it because I think when you really encouraged it, and you know, very soon, companies are going to have a temperature attached to their behaviour.

You will actually say, ‘Unilever is a three point two, you know, degree company’, and then everyone will know that what Unilever do- I mean, Unilever’s a very bad example ‘cos they're a very good company, but you will know if their behaviour is consistent with what they're promising, and they will bring those temperatures down, they will actually improve their behaviour. So, you know, if, if all you do is attack, you probably don't make as much change as if what you do is support good intentions and then check up on them.

CRAIG

You described, um, a lot of young people earlier as pedantic. Is, is that a good thing?

RICHARD

Good thing, yeah. Good thing.

CRAIG

Wh- why is that?

RICHARD

I mean, you know, slightly tiresome sometimes in conversation, but, but good thing. You know, they've got a - we haven't done enough about race. I d- you know - you just can't believe when you look back at the Civil Rights movement in 1960s and you think that's 60 years ago. Wh- where did all the compromises come in between when all those, you know, young 20-year-olds felt that and now they're the 70-year-olds, and they haven't got enough done?

You've got to stick to your guns, and I think it'll be really interesting if this generation, how it'll work, you know, what kind of businesses they'll create, what kind of, you know, pedantic things they will insist on in contracts and in behaviour, and in conversation, and on TV. And it'll often be, you know, tough and you'll say, ‘But that isn't what I meant’, or, ‘If you do that we can't be funny’. Or, ‘If you don't compromise on this, the law will never get through’.

There, there are always gonna be problems at putting things into action, but the passion of that, you know, determination is, is gonna be always welcome. I've been a compromiser, and, and, and I love Bob Geldof who doesn't.

CRAIG

Yeah, but you've been a compromiser and you have also made major achievements. I guess I suppose what I'm saying is I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying, but what's interesting as you get more miles on the clock, you kind of realise things are quite complicated sometimes, or maybe that is just selling out, some people think, but, you know, there is a sort of thought of like, sometimes people say stupid things that they don't really mean, or if you spend some time explaining it to them, or whatever, they then - they - it might be an easier way of going about it, rather than everybody shouting at each other all the time.

RICHARD

Yeah, I, I, I, I know that's true, and you know, it brings you on to Extinction Rebellion, and are they doing the right thing or the wrong thing? But, you know, if you look at the climate thing, some politicians have to do some bloody brave things in the next five years, which aren't compromises, aren't patient, aren’t waiting, just stop subsidies, as it were, Just stop - can’t they - just have to do it, so, er, I think you know, that dynamic between the people who don't compromise and the people who do is probably a useful one, er, and probably the Greenham Common women, as it were, move people in the centre in a very useful way, even if you don't agree with them.

CRAIG

And how do your, um, children feel about your films and TV programmes when they look at them? Are they, are they kind to you about them?

RICHARD

[LAUGHS] Um, yeah. I mean, they are starting to look like historical documents. Um, they are kind to me, I mean, Scarlett, who's my most activist daughter, goes about her activism in a very different way from me, and if anyone ever attacks me, she defends me as being someone who did what seemed right in the way they thought right at that time. So she doesn't find it necessary to do an either or. Um, so, I mean, I just wish I could get my girlfriend of 30 years to watch an episode of ‘Blackadder’. That's, that's one of my aims for my retirement.

CRAIG

And she's still never done it?

RICHARD

She’s just too busy, just too busy. [LAUGHTER]

CRAIG

I was struck in this conversation with you about you saying that you wanted to, you wish that you'd written about family more, earlier. Um, and it seems to me that that is something that's obviously incredibly important to you. And one of the reasons why we started to do this podcast was we think a lot of people struggle in relationships, or struggle with their lives, and they want to change and they want wisdom in terms of how to get along in that, and they just find it very difficult.

But it seems to me that when you're saying that you want to write about families and their importance and their dynamics, that in a way you're trying to sort of point a way to people of how might they be a bit more fulfilled, or a bit happier?

RICHARD

Yeah, I mean, this is difficult, because I believe that the reason - I mean, I've had - in the second half of my life, quite a lot of deep sorrow, but I had a very happy and lucky childhood. And, er, I think that, you know, I've seen it as a responsibility to reflect that joy, as embodied in the music of the Beatles as it were. And I sometimes think that people, that writers write about the only bad thing that's ever happened to them, instead of writing, finding a way to write about the good things, and create a sense of, of joy and reflect the joy of the planet, you know.

The definitive person there would be Vincent Van Gogh. Unbelievably harsh life, extraordinary joyful output. But I don't think it's for me to offer advice to people on, you know, the complexities of families and relationships because they can be so hard and so intractable, and, you know, I suppose my reaction to that in life has been to say, ‘Can I make people happy through the comedy, and can I try and help projects working for people through the charity and campaigning work?’

CRAIG

But in that sorrow that you've experienced, um, in this, the latter part of your life, it seems to me that that you what you're, you're, you're almost saying, ‘I know that I need to choose to see the world and my experience of it as a positive thing and that will help me, despite the fact that I am going to bash up against some things that are deeply hard to deal with’.

RICHARD

I mean, I want to be practical about it, you know, so all the love and all the money in the world couldn't stop my sister from committing suicide. And I don't know how you deal with deep mental anguish, but I do know that Comic Relief supports a lot of projects that have, you know, may help people to avoid suicide. So, you know, that's an example of a practical action, but I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't solve it at home, and I - it couldn't be solved by watching one of my films, either.

CRAIG

I appreciate it's, it’s a difficult thing, but did you feel that you came to terms with your sister killing herself, or is that something that's still very raw and impossible to overcome?

RICHARD

It’s - no, it’s something I think about a lot, but I actually… It's, it’s a very complicated thing. And then I go right back to my dad, ‘A problem’s a problem because it can't be resolved’. You know, we, we do live in a, in a mixed world.

CRAIG

This is an incredibly broad question, um, but what does the word wisdom mean to you?

RICHARD

Gosh, I mean, that's such an interesting question to ask, after we've been talking about the value of intolerance and extremism, and trying to change things. You know, one, for me, understanding what the phrase ‘all people are equal’ really means, you know, paying attention to that, so that when you're

making decisions, see whether or not your decisions are good for others as well as good for yourself.

I think that's perhaps - you know, I'm not sure about learning from experience ‘cos I love the passion of people who haven't learnt from experience. So I'm gonna say wisdom is understanding that you live in a world of people of equal value to you, and basing your actions on that.

CRAIG

And if there was one thing that you could say to people, having experienced everything you have done in terms of the entertainment industry, and philanthropy and that kind of thing, is, is there one piece of wisdom that you would offer to people or to, to your children in general?

RICHARD

Well, I suppose number one would be don’t work with Hugh Grant, that would probably, that’d probably be the top one. [LAUGHS] And I think, oddly enough, on the creative side, I would say, be very careful about compromise, ‘cos it may just render all your work useless. You know, an, an unfinished bit of work that's five percent off may not be any good. So I think fight for your vision of things, even if it's in a cooperative context. I think that's important -

CRAIG

Have you experienced a moment where you have compromised and really regretted it.

RICHARD

Yeah. I have.

CRAIG

Are you gonna tell us what it is?

RICHARD

No, but you know, just some - some of the work just turned out to be ordinary. I would say on the sort of trying to change the world way, try to stop talking and start doing as soon as you can. So I think locking, er, an actual deed is a helpful thing.

CRAIG

Many thanks to Richard for being so open and frank. One of the big themes that comes up time and again is that sense of recognising what a gift life is, despite what it throws at us. If listening to this raised any issues for you around suicide, please go to the Samaritans website for further help. Thanks to Gloria, Barney and Georgia for their help putting this together. Please like and subscribe to this podcast, and tell people about it. You can also visit our website: desperatelyseekingwisdom.com. Next week's week's guest is Ruth Davidson - one of the most talented politicians of her generation.

RUTH

I think that as you get older, er, you see the world’s and see the compromises that are in it and see that not everything is black and white, and that it's harder to navigate, and sometimes you get things wrong.

CRAIG

Ruth has had an extraordinary life, including being seriously injured twice and facing severe depression. You really don't want to miss it. This is a Creators Inc Production and I’m Craig Oliver.