More Rosebud - Larry Lamb, a Life Story in Poetry

Larry Lamb joins Gyles for a really unique episode of Rosebud. For the past few years, Larry has been telling the story of his life in poetry, and that's what you'll hear in this edition, interwoven with a Rosebud conversation about his early memories and upbringing. Larry's poetry is original, powerful and has a rhythmic punch which takes you right into the turbulence of his childhood: he was born into a loveless marriage and spent years watching his parents argue, and when he was only nine years old his mother left the family home never to return. This trauma left a lasting mark on Larry, and through poetry he has begun to make sense of the legacy of his past. This is a fabulous episode which we hope will move and inspire you. It was recorded at the Fleet Festival of Words earlier this year. Larry is appearing at the Queen's Reading Room Festival at Chatsworth this weekend. Our thanks and admiration to Larry Lamb for this tour de force. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:23Speaker 02

  Hello again, I'm Giles Branford. This is Rosebud. It's actually more Rosebud, and I'm not alone. I'm here with my producer and friend, Harriet Drain. How are you today, Harriet?

• 1:34Speaker 03

  I'm a bit tired, Giles.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't look it, but you have every reason to be tired because last night, let's tell everybody, Harriet and I were out on the razzle-dazzle, and we went to a party. We're podcasting this from the West End of London. We're in Mayfair at Grosvenor House. Last night, we were in Piccadilly, visiting, I think it claims to be London's oldest bookshop, Hatchards. There was a party to which we had been invited because one of our former Rosebud alumna, the brilliant and beautiful-

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Rachel Stirling.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  -was there, being funny and fabulous, launching her book, celebrating her mother Diana Rigg's life. She was there. Jim Broadbent, who you've appeared on stage with when we celebrated last year Winnie the Pooh. So Jim Broadbent was there. There were stars of stage and screen. Well, Rachel Stirling is a brilliant actress. John Lithgow, who was in London and on Broadway with her in the play about Roald Dahl, he was there. But what excited us? We found ourselves in a corner, this very, very noisy, exciting party, with a young person, and they told us their name. Shall we reveal what their name was?

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. Tuesday.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  We found a person called Tuesday, and I thought, oh, how marvelous. We always begin on a Tuesday saying, "It's Tuesday. It's more Rosebud. It's Tuesday." And I thought, how amazing if we could get someone who is Tuesday to say, "It's Tuesday." So I produced my phone and said, "If you don't mind, would you say to us, 'It's Tuesday, it really is' because that's how we can introduce our Rosebud, because we normally say, 'It's Tuesday. This is more Rosebud.'" So it was a very noisy room, but this is a very special person and a unique introduction to more Rosebud this Tuesday.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  It's Tuesday. It really is.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Well, thank you, Tuesday. It is indeed Tuesday. This is more Rosebud, and it's more Rosebud with a special guest. And the special guest is an actor. It's Larry Lamb. Now, how do you know Larry Lamb?

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, obviously, he's a big part of Gavin and Stacey. He's Gavin's dad, and he's married to Alison Stedman. He's brilliant in that. And then he was also in EastEnders, wasn't he? And he's George Lamb's dad. And George Lamb, when I was younger, was kind of a very dishy TV presenter. So I know him as George Lamb's dad. I don't think George Lamb is a TV presenter anymore. I think he runs some sort of biodiverse farm in the south of France, which sounds fabulous.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Larry Lamb is also, of course, a fine classical actor.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  I know. I haven't seen him do that, but I bet he's brilliant.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  He is brilliant. I've seen him years ago, I think when he was at the Royal Shakespeare Company. I mean, he really can do the lot. He's got a great presence and a great story. And I said to him, "Oh, I'd love you-"

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Well, and a fascinating childhood.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  And a fascinating-

• 4:34Speaker 03

  A difficult childhood.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Challenging childhood. And I said to him, "Would you please do Rosebud? You're a great actor." And he said, "Well, I'm doing other things now, Giles." I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "I'm writing poetry." I said, "Larry Lamb, the poet?" He said, "Yeah, Larry Lamb, the poet." He said, "Could I do my Rosebud in poetry?" And you will remember, he volunteered to audition.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  And Larry Lamb came to Grosvenor House. We had to the Park Room here. We had tea, and he performed to us. Do you remember that?

• 5:06Speaker 03

  He did. It was amazing.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  It was truly amazing. And he began, we sat down with him to have tea, and he just sat forward and performed for us a famous 1930s Stanley Holloway monologue, a comic monologue called Albert and the Lion. And we were mesmerized. We laughed. He got us on his side. And then I said to him, "Well, how are you going to tell your life story through poetry?" And he began to read some poems. He linked them with his stories. And I thought, this is remarkable because it's a different kind of Rosebud, but it still rang true to us, didn't it?

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and the poetry's excellent, isn't it?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  It really is first-of-division stuff. So we met up with him again at the Fleet Festival off Fleet Street. There was an audience there because we thought, let's test it with some real people. People came along, including, was it a couple of Larry's ex-wives?

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Yes, I think it was maybe-

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Two, three?

• 6:04Speaker 03

  -one ex-wife and one ex-partner, and the mother of George Lamb, and yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  I mean, extraordinary.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Various people in the audience.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  They were quite, it was quite, I mean, I think seven of the people in the audience could have been former partners or wives.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  They're all on very good terms.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  On great terms. Well, he's very likable, isn't he?

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  You can't-

• 6:20Speaker 03

  He's very charming.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  He's very charming. He's irresistible in many ways.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  I'm sure Larry's listening to this. You're irresistible, Larry.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  You are irresistible. And I'm going to be seeing him again soon. The reason we're doing it now, we're putting it out today, is because this weekend Larry is going with this story, with his poetry, to Chatsworth House, which is in Derbyshire, the home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, though I think the house is now run by their son, and which is hosting this weekend the Queen's Reading Room Festival.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Oh, wonderful.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  You know this charity of which I'm a trustee, which is Queen Comedians Project, for encouraging the joy of reading. And it's basically a literary festival, but all human life will be there, including Larry Lamb. And I thought, well, also, National Poetry Day is coming up. People do like to write poems. It's a good way of expressing yourself. But Larry Lamb writes wonderful poetry.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  He really does.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  And he tells his own story. So we went to the Fleet Festival in London. I sat down with Larry Lamb, and I said, "Tell me your story. What, Larry, is your very first memory? And as you'll discover, please listen to this." You may think, "Oh, God, poetry, Larry Lamb, Giles, what's going on here? Just give it a listen. I think you will be very pleasantly surprised, amazed, and occasionally moved."

• 7:44Speaker 03

  And, we hope, inspired.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. If anybody wants to send us a poem that actually is a poem about memory, about your first memory, why not? Maybe I should say limited to 14 lines, no longer than a sonnet. Would be quite fun, and we might read them out.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Brilliant.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Any ones we like. What's our address for writing into?

• 8:05Speaker 03

  [email protected].

• 8:07Speaker 02

  [email protected]. So, it's Tuesday. It's more Rosebud. It's Larry Lamb. Cue the music.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Dear, dear, dear, dear. This is Larry Lamb, I'm Giles Brand, but this is a very different episode of Rosebud. This is Rosebud on the road. We've come to the Fleet Street Quarter Festival of Words, with a final event, it's their third festival. They were sweet enough to say this was the highlight of the festival, I'm not surprised, because it's Rosebud. I'm particularly not surprised, because it's Larry Lamb. On Rosebud, we've interviewed all sorts of interesting people, many distinguished actors, and a number of distinguished poets. We've had Simon Armitage, the poet Laureate, as a special guest. We've had, oh, one of my favourites, Pam Ayers. Wonderful Pam Ayers. We've had Roger McGough as a guest.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  So we've had some interesting guests, actors and poets. We've never before had an actor who is a poet. And that's going to be the difference about this podcast. Because Larry is going to tell us his story, in his own words, some of them will be like a conversation, but others of them will be poetry. And before I ask you the very first question, Larry, I've got two questions to ask you. One is, Larry Lamb can't possibly be your real name, so what is your real name? And two is, when did you get into writing poetry?

• 9:46Speaker 04

  Lawrence Douglas Lamb was on my birth certificate, but my father was of a generation where if you were in the forces and you were a Lamb, you were automatically Larry the Lamb. So he, Ronald, his brother Alec, and Bill, they were all Larry the Lamb amongst their people in the forces.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  This is because there was a wireless series called Adventures in Toy Town.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  And Larry the Lamb.

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. So Larry the Lamb, and then I said to this agent that had taken me on, I said, "What do you think about my name? I think maybe I'd prefer to be called Lawrence Lamb." And she said, "Look, if I look down a list of names, which agents and people always do all the time, if I see Lawrence Lamb, I just keep bum, bum, bum, I'm reading. If I see Larry Lamb, I won't forget it."

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Very good.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  So that's it.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Commercially.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  Got a rebirth.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Good. Larry Lamb it is. How did you get into writing poetry?

• 10:45Speaker 04

  I, in 1983, I was getting myself ready to go on my first ever great big on-location job all round the world. I was pretty fit at the time, but I really began to work on it. I stopped drinking, I was running, I was doing everything to get myself as fit as I possibly could. And all of a sudden, this stuff started coming out of me. Poetry started to erupt, but all observations of me as a little boy, which was, you know, really not a good world to be born in for me back then. And so the poems came out, and they got put in a file, and up in the attic. And about thirty, forty years later, I found them. And a very good friend of mine, who's a wonderful poet called Hussein Manoa, sitting right

• 11:28Speaker 04

  there, and he said, "I've got to read these." And he read them, and he said, "Look, we've got to do something with these." So he really encouraged me. He also taught me how rap and street poets work, in different rhythms. Mine was all, "You can talk a gin and beer when you're quarter safe out here, and you can send a penny fights and order shot it, but when it comes to slaughter, you'll do your work on water, and you'll learn to lick the boots of him that's got it." That was poetry to me, right? All rhyming couplets. And I began to realise that within that narrative, the story you're telling, there are other rhythms, there are other rhymes. And that became a real voyage of discovery for me, a year and a half ago.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  So here we are, eighteen months in, and you are on Rosebud. The only person I know who's done an autobiography fully in verse is the late great Sir John Bettsman, poet Laureate, so you're following in distinguished footsteps.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's a bit of a rap poet, you know? When you read his poetry, he does, he'll hold on to a rhyme like three, four, five lines. You're following him, boom, and there it comes. Brilliant.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Good. Well, he's brilliant.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  Brilliant.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  I think you're brilliant. And I think this is going to be, well, it's going to be a unique episode of Rosebud, because it's your story, told largely in poetry by you. So Larry Lamb, born on the first of October 1947. What, Larry, is your very first memory?

• 12:53Speaker 04

  It was a blazing row between these two people, who were my parents. And we were living in the upstairs of my maternal grandfather's house, in Enfield, out on the edges of London. And I remember the staircase, and I remember a laundry basket. It's really, it's kind of a scene that's there. I probably was three. We only lived there for so long, because they were a bit peripatetic. We were, you know, everything would go wrong, and we'd move again, you know? I've got a poem here that I wrote about it, and it's called "A Random Coupling." "Someone had to bear the blame for giving the party where Mum and Dad met.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  Clearly Dad's neighbour, Georgie Clark. It was his fault, they'd gone and made love in the dark, down the park, at the end of Dad's road. Years later, red-faced, dear old Mum had confessed that indeed, yes, that was where my life had begun, on a bench in that park where my Dad had played with his mates as a boy, but then only for fun. This, though, was serious. Teenagers both, as the war had started, they'd learned from the movies about love and marriage, but this flash of passion was nothing but that. No princess, no prince, no golden carriage, a story not destined for a happy ending. On the upper floor of her parents' home, forced into marriage, going nowhere like

• 14:22Speaker 04

  two caged beasts with their newborn son, not planning a future, just desperate to run, both of them. All they shared was hatred and me, a boomer, certainly born with a bang."

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Wow. Tell us about these two people. What were they called? And is that poem true about how they met?

• 14:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, Ron and Jessie. They both went into the forces, they went to do their bit. They were born, you know, a few years apart in the thirties. And she went off to be, she was in the land army, she was cutting pit props in the timber corps up in Norfolk. He went off to train as a, whatever he could be in the RAF, and finished up a radio operator, air gunner, a wireless operator, air gunner, a WAPAG, as they called him. And it didn't do either of them any good. And him particularly, he was very, very disturbed by it. He'd had a terrible upbringing with a bullying father, he was a middle son of five, and so he got a lot of grief from the father, who was a raging drunk.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  And so Ron and Jessie went to a party at Georgie Clark's house, my Dad's neighbour, Georgie Clark. My Mum and her friend Reenie turned up at this party, somebody must have told them there was a party going on. It was New Year's Eve, 1946, going into 1947. And as it says here, it was Georgie Clark's fault, they went to make love in the dark, in the park, at the end of the road. I remember doing a job, I had a job in Edmonton, I had to drive out to Edmonton to go to do a commercial job in an old factory system out there on the edge of what's now the North Circular.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  And I got there very early, and I thought, you know what, I'm going to drive down the old street where I lived with my nan, once, you know, the whole family had sort of busted up. And I pulled alongside of the park, and I looked through at this hut, that had been a part of my life when I lived there for a while. And I went to see my Mum, and my Mum was a very straight, old-fashioned, educated, working-class woman. You didn't swear around her, you didn't talk about sex, whatever you did, nothing like that, that was horrible. And I said to her Mum, and I explained what had happened, how I'd felt really, quite strangely moved by something there.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  And as I started to explain what had gone on, she just began to go bright red. And basically, I said, "Did my life start in that park?" And it did.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Gosh.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  And that's what happened. And like, you know, and nine months, you know, nine months later, when I was born, in the interim, they'd been married, they'd been forced to marry, they were living in her parents' home on the upstairs, and they already hated each other with such bitterness. I remember saying to my mother that my father had died, you know, years later, and she said, "Dude, I beat him."

• 17:34Speaker 02

  So was there any happiness for you when you were small? Because you've done, I know there's a poem about your holidays.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  I mean, were there moments of happiness, or was it all...

• 17:44Speaker 04

  There were always moments of happiness, aren't there? There were funny, you know, funny little bits. I remember my father had decided that for some reason or other, he wanted to make some brawn. I don't know whether, well, I'm sure people of a certain age know that, you know, you take, it's what they call a fromage de tête in French, but it's a chopped up pig's head. You take all the bits of meat out of the pig's head, chop them all up, and you make a sort of a jellyfied pate, right? So he was going to make some brawn. So he'd bought half a pig's head, and he came home with a half a pig's head, put it on the kitchen table, dug out the one eye, put it there, put it there, and ran round the garden chasing my mother, who was screaming like a banshee woman. She just was freaking out completely.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  So there were little things I remember.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  That's about the biggest laugh you're gonna get.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Well, that's certainly a most unusual memory.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  He went on family holidays. What did you, I mean, as a child?

• 18:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Were you the only one of their union?

• 18:44Speaker 04

  No, no, no. I had a brother who was a year younger. But the weird thing is that when my brother and I spoke about those years together, he somehow managed to keep out of the firing line. I was the one, I was the one in the middle. I was the one that, I was the elder boy, you know, so I was the one that's...

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Well, you were the reason they got married.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  That's it.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  If you hadn't been conceived, the shotgun wouldn't have taken place.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  That's it. So it all, I mean, there's, I have another little poem that gives you an indication of what it was like when we had a potentially jolly time.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Good.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  Because they were always of a family sort of thing. You had to have a holiday. No matter there was a war going, you know, you've got to have a, you've got to go on a family holiday, right? And so I wrote this one called "A Cozy Nook". "In a caravan named Cozy Nook, parked in the pouring rain, as it drummed down, I realised yet again I was trapped in a family holiday but with no chance of a getaway. Age seven. Exactly when life should have held at least one or possibly two moments of fun each week, I'd figured out that I was being robbed of what a little boy's life should be. But trying to calm the two of them had become a full-time job for me.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Constantly sampling the atmosphere, sniffing out any approaching flare-up still in its formative stage, calculating when we'd feel the furnace blast of his next rage. Anything could trip the wire, unleash the beast, let loose the fire, the war damage all bottled up in him. A cup of tea, too hot or cold, could send him off. Years later, as I'd told the tales, set the scene, it struck me just how brave I'd been when I would throw myself between them pleading, having run out of distractions, dragging them apart from roaring and screaming, each in the other's face. The embarrassment, the disgrace. The clock was ticking, though.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Looking back now, of course, I know I still had two more years to go before it would all blow apart. But for the best, and I could rest from my duties and start preparing for the test still to come. And number one, farewell mum."

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Wow. You are literally, because I know your mother, I think, leaves when you're about nine, so you're up to the age of nine, yeah. You're physically intervening in some of these rows, are you?

• 21:08Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, because they were going on all the time. I mean, I remember coming back, I'd gone off to do something, I don't know, taken off on a school trip. And I came back from this thing, and the way the house worked was you opened the front door, went into the hallway, and then there was a little living room, but there was a pair of glass doors at the end of it. And I looked through the glass doors, because I could hear my mother weeping with a cone of tea leaves on her head, and the steam coming off the tea leaves, and the tears mixing with the tea as it drained down her face. He got the tea, she got the tea wrong, and a lot of it, boom, went on her head. So there were sort of scenes like that.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Why do you think he behaved like that? What was there in his story?

• 21:51Speaker 04

  Because his father was a real Victorian tantrum-throwing male. That's what you did to get attention. You threw a tantrum, and boy, did he know some tantrums. Is it quite possible the tantrums have been passed on? They're a learned thing. You learn tantrums and you learn how they work.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  And what, how did he earn his living?

• 22:13Speaker 04

  How did he what?

• 22:13Speaker 02

  How did he earn his living?

• 22:15Speaker 04

  He, when he came out of the Air Force, he, but he went back into the gas company as a gas fitter. And then he went and did night school. He was, you know, with all his faults, he was a highly intelligent man with a great lust for knowledge and travel and all the things that I've, you know, picked up from him, and poetry. And then he started to study to be a draftsman, you know, and so he was drawing plans that were handed down to him by the people that wanted something designed, and that's what he was. He was a draftsman, but had different jobs. But then, he, somehow or other, they managed, somehow or other, they managed to get a fish and chip shop in Harlow Newtown. So suddenly, I'm a fish shop boy. Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Was that quite fun?

• 22:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was. You're kind of out there, you know, you're out there.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  And that, and selling fruit and vegetables on a, on a market stall.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Which he then did as well, and you helped, you helped out.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Give me your sweetest, your best memory of him, because there must be some. Let's have a, a moment for Ron of a good memory of you and Ron.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  That's a very interesting question. It's, it's, it's not easy to summon them up. My dad, like all his brothers, had an instinct for comedy. They were all comedians. And so the only day everybody got together, all this extended family got together there in Edmonton at my nan's house, it was the centre of it all, was when they all got together and they would all banter and banter, and the banter was very, very hot and very funny. And so those, it's times like that that I remember about his best, because he was amongst, you know, amongst the four or five, the five boys, he, he would come out with his call, because he had an instinct for picking a joke out of anything, a lot of which I've, I've got from him.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. But you were protecting your mother. Your mother was everything to you.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  You looked after her.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  And then when you're nine, she leaves, what happens?

• 24:09Speaker 04

  That's it. Here we go. Well, then, so I wrote this poem because that was the kind of pickup to everything else, and I called it "Nan". I'd have been about nine, my brother eight, my baby sister only just born, without any warning, things at home now so bad, mum finally grabbed the baby and ran, away from it all, but mainly from dad. Not a trace of a note to say goodbye, but even at that age, it was obvious why, to me, in an empty house. But then, to the rescue, came nan. Having lost two babies and raised six more, sending three of them off to fight in the war, nan knew all about mothering. Forget the seaside, the sweet shop, the zoo, I was

• 24:51Speaker 04

  moving into 192. Those mystical numbers fixed to her door, a place that had always meant so much more than a tiny old house in a grubby old street. There, you stepped back in time. There, love, song, and laughter reigned. There, nan ran it all. And at last, I felt safe."

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Oh. Well, that, I think that applause is not just for your poem, it's for nan as well.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, nan was special.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Who rescued your childhood. Tell us, though, what happened to your mother. She went with, what happened? Literally what happened?

• 25:28Speaker 04

  We lived in Harlow, and they had the fish and chip shop. There was a patch of land next to the fish and chip shop, because this was a town in development. There were all sorts of spaces ready to do things, and in Harlow, they were building a new pub in each area. So there was a space that was eventually going to be a, a, a pub, a site. It was our playground. My brother and I used to, to play there, that was it. And all of a sudden, the building started. Now, this was getting at a crucial stage in their relationship. They'd probably been, they managed to stay together nine years. So this would have been about eight years into it. And so there were a gang of guys working there every day. And one of these guys, a big, burly, old country labourer, he heard rows going on in that

• 26:09Speaker 04

  fish shop next door, and he took a shine to my mum, and she took a shine to him. And that was it. Bob's your uncle.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  So they, they ran off together.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  They ran off together.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Leaving your dad and the two boys, you and your younger brother.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, but the fortunate thing was that, that my dad, my dad realised something had to be done with these two boys, so he took us to his mother, to nan.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  And lived at 192?

• 26:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, and we moved into 192 together. And so, of course, all his tantrums, the level went right down. It wasn't, there was no way you were pulling tantrums around her. She'd had a lifetime of tantrums from her husband. So like, tantrums were right off the menu.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  And he knew that? And he behaved like our son, because he was now a little boy again?

• 26:55Speaker 04

  Went back to being her son, as well as being the father of these two boys. And so, you know, life continued, and it was far jollier.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Did you see your mum at all? Did she get in touch?

• 27:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, every, we saw my mum at the bus stop every two weeks. That's what we did. We went to the bus stop.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  And saw her off the bus?

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. I wrote a little poem about that.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Please.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Funny you should say that. And I called that poem "Waiting".

• 27:21Speaker 04

  At the stop around the corner to my nan, where every other Saturday, if things went according to plan, my brother and me would wait patiently, well, at least I did, he wasn't also happy about it, for our mum and our baby sister to turn up from wherever they got the bus, we never knew, and for us, not knowing where she lived was part of the pain of separation. Bus stop, or occasionally the station up the road was where we'd meet her and greet her with a kiss. Although I can't quite summon up an image of this, as even though I'd have been only nine or 10, this whole bus stop kiss routine had a sadness to it back then that couldn't have been more embarrassing. But I certainly learned how

• 28:03Speaker 04

  to wait. Sometimes for an hour or two, as there was no way she could get a message through to us if she'd missed her bus, one of the ones that would crest the hill, and we'd watch them till we could read their numbers, betting whether she'd be on the 231, the 144, or the 102. No way you ever knew. But those few numbers remain fixed and forever lodged in my brain from all those Saturdays, waiting for my mum to come.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  You mentioned the baby sister there. Was that a baby sister by your father?

• 28:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, she ran off with the baby.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  And she took the baby, left the two boys. So she disappears. There you are. Do you have friends outside the home? You're at school by now.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was at school. I was about to go to grammar school. I'd always been, you know, a bright boy and was reading. My mother had always made sure I read ahead of my age. And so I got into the best grammar school in Edmonton. The problem was there, I was so emotionally smashed. I just couldn't deal with it. I couldn't deal with it. I didn't study, I didn't know how to study. All I wanted to do was escape. So as soon as I was old enough, I started to get jobs. And the jobs were to earn me money because money meant escape. Because I'd had enough of living around her and him. And then he got a job in Harlow Newtown, back again there as a draftsman.

• 29:30Speaker 04

  And so we went to live, my brother, myself and him, the three of us together. But he was really embittered by what had gone on. You know, he was a deserted man. He felt, you know, cuckolded, you know, that was the problem. It was all that.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Did your mother stay with the man that she met?

• 29:46Speaker 04

  Oh, forever.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Forever, and they actually were happy?

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Did you get to know him and like him as a stepdad? He was okay?

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I mean, I never lived under their roof. No, no, that was all you. I mean, we weren't even, we didn't know where she lived. We weren't allowed to know anything about.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  So here you are, living now with your dad. He's an unhappy, embittered person. But at school, you feel you're a mess, you're not working as you should do. But do you have friends at school? Do you have some good friends?

• 30:12Speaker 04

  I had some friends at school.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Can you remember the best friend at all now?

• 30:15Speaker 04

  I didn't really have a best friend at school. I didn't, I was always a loner. From the moment my mother, when I came, I have this memory, this vision of walking along this chain-linked fence on the field of the school that I was at, going home, not knowing what was going to be going on there and going home. And that was it, there was nobody there. There was no note to say anything. And then we were moving to Nans, that was it. And from that moment on, that's been my life.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Gosh.

• 30:56Speaker 00

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• 31:28Speaker 01

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• 32:28Speaker 02

  Were there girls at the school?

• 32:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, there were girls at the school, but I was very fat, ugly, pimply, and not at all what they'd be choosing.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Gosh, how times have changed.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  How times have changed, fortunately.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Well done.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  Would I be on here if I were fat and ugly?

• 32:43Speaker 02

  So, I mean, so did you have crushes on people? Can you remember?

• 32:47Speaker 04

  I always had crushes, but nobody was interested.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  God, so you're this lonely boy.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  I was a really, really lonely. And I was commuting to school. I was, you know, a bus, a bus, a train, a bus, a bus every day to get to school for quarter to nine or whatever it was. And then rush all the way back home to get home to make the dad's tea. That was it.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  You were expected to make the tea.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was my job, you know, did all the shopping. My nan had made sure, she knew one day when I lived with her, I was gonna have to take care of a home for the three of us. Literally, there's nothing in the house I can't do. And you literally cleaned all the shoes, you did the ironing, you did the washing, you did the shopping, you did the washing up, you did the drying up, you did everything.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  So nan became, is nan the most significant person in your childhood?

• 33:36Speaker 04

  Without a doubt, without a doubt, she is. Because she saved my life. She did, she gave me some, she gave me this, this little hideaway of peace, tranquility, of laughter. It wasn't all about the next row.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Eventually, though, you do, you say you were not an attractive specimen, but love does come into it, doesn't it?

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Love does.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Because you're, oh, a lot. At what age is this? I mean, you're obviously post 12, 13?

• 34:07Speaker 04

  Well, I mean...

• 34:08Speaker 02

  And how did it come?

• 34:11Speaker 04

  It's very, you see, because what happened with all of that, this craziness, right? All your values, all your senses, all I was looking for was love, right? Because mum had had to go. Mum had always, in the midst of all the rows and the fights and everything else, the one thing that was always been said was, "Don't worry, I'm here, everything's all right." And so she, but in the end, she was living with a crazy man and she had to leave. There was nothing else she could have done. I mean, he was potentially dangerous. And so off she went, and that was it. And so there's a little poem here that I called "Lover Boy", which sort of, in a way, answers that.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  "Nan had done her best to nurse me through the loss of mum. Even though she wasn't dead, I had to mourn as though she'd gone. As her firstborn now ejected from her life, she might as well have been no more all-embracing love for me, this lost, abandoned son. Having mourned her, having learned to face the fact she wasn't there, it didn't mean I'd overcome the need to have her love again. So profoundly had she planted it within my soul, I couldn't bear the hunger for it, eating at me any time, anywhere. A friendly female glance could set me off to fall in love again. "Like to dance? Let's get married." What's she a name? Just like that.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  So desperate to find what I'd learned I had to do without. I'd say that and mean it, fall in love at the drop of a hat."

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Wow, this is the legacy of this childhood trauma, what you've just described, this, this need for love.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  This is the legacy, this is what happened.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  This is, this explains, we may touch on this if there's time, I don't know if there are any poems about this. You've had three wives and I think four strong wife substitutes.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Well, seven marriages.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Seven marriages.

• 36:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, three official and four extending for anything from three to 15 years.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  We collect these on Rosebud. We've had Gaddy Oldman who's had five wives.

• 36:16Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  So, but I think...

• 36:18Speaker 04

  That's serious, right?

• 36:20Speaker 02

  That is quite serious.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  Marrying five times. I mean, I can remember doing it the third time with my glorious, my glorious son's glorious mother. And I thought, I can't go through this ever, ever, ever again. I can't, because I'm just, I'm telling lies here, just in front of everybody I know. And so that was it. And then, you know, I realized, you know, over these years of living with all these glorious women, and I've been so lucky because every one of them was, that's why I wrote that autobiography about 15 years ago and called it "Mummy's Boy", after having a row with a publisher about what I'm gonna call it. And they put it through their titles department. I said, "You've got a titles department? So what do you think I'm gonna call it?" And they gave me a list, I said, "I'm not calling any of that."

• 37:07Speaker 04

  They said, "What are you gonna call it?" I said, "I'm calling it 'Mummy's Boy' because that's what I've been. It's these mummies in my life that have carried me on."

• 37:14Speaker 02

  So this is the legacy of the trauma. You lose your own mother, your nan is wonderful, but she is your nan. So you are serial, fall in love with people.

• 37:23Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  And if they are ready to mother you, and there's a bit of the other thrown in.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  And it's all, you know, it's all, it's that, it's that, that sort of figure of a person that I was looking to replace. But in the same way, what went on was that it just wouldn't hold. I was always looking for fault. That's the problem. And so it would never hold together, but be not because of them, because of me. And that's what he did as well, you know, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick. And that's what his father had done, pick, pick, pick, pick, pick, accusing somebody of being, you know, unfaithful. I mean, craziness.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  And for kids to live amongst craziness, it's like, there's a poem I wrote here, excuse me, it was called "Learning to Doubt".

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Once you've been around unkindness as a kid, you remember every bit of who did and said what to who, trying to work out what to do when the two people you love more than anyone or anything say exactly what they're not supposed to. Things that people who don't like each other say, and you listen scared, knowing there's no way people who really care for each other would or could say things like that. And it's even more confusing when they tell you that they didn't mean it, but you've seen it and heard it all before. Like the last time, trying to believe them to the sound of the slamming of a downstairs door. Every time they say they love each other, the more confused you are

• 39:07Speaker 04

  as you try to work out all these things that don't ring true. What are you supposed to do as yet again they tear your little world in two? You always hoping for peace and picking up the pieces for the rest of your life.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  Oh my.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Before we take the story on and you leave school, just unpick a little bit of that and the legacy and how you've got through it. You've obviously, by writing the poems, it's helped clarify it. Have you had other help over the years? Obviously, your seven wives have helped you.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  They have. They've kept me steady. In terms of like, I find these poems have been a great big emptying of the psychological cupboard. But I did, I spent, I went every week for several years with a fantastic Jungian psychiatrist. And then I spent three months going every day to a fantastic, equally fantastic, but different Freudian.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  Up the road from the Tavistock, mate, that was it. And we really went into, me and my dad. Not so much with my mum, because the thing that was really hanging over me was my dad. But so...

• 40:28Speaker 02

  You unpicked your childhood with your father.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  A lot of it, a lot of it.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  What I'm keen to know before we move on with the story is having done this, having done this learning curve, you having explained to us quite clearly what you're getting from your seven wives, why towards the end of it do you not think, well, actually, I don't want to go on repeating this. I have a good relationship. Why am I not making it work for longer than four years, seven years? Because these have all been long relationships.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. These, I mean, I...

• 40:55Speaker 02

  This is not short affairs.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  I'm not talking about just, you know, affairs or anything. I didn't really have any affairs.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  You didn't have time with seven wives, honestly.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  I want to get married. Yeah, what's your name?

• 41:06Speaker 04

  So I did write a poem out there and it's called "Trying to Live the Dream". "I'm not entranced for one second anymore at the thought of strolling barefoot along a tropical shore with a beautiful woman whom I just met and encountered by chance. My heart already full of love, my mind a blissful lifelong romance. No, at last I've found contentment alone, on my own, having never left a stone unturned in a life spent seeking the one who I'd wander off with hand in hand into the setting sun. However, it hadn't stopped at one. Every time I'd found her, she who would definitely fit the bill,

• 41:47Speaker 04

  it still always finished up, running the same route, ending the same way, reality creeping in day by day, the vision dissolving slowly and sadly, fading away to tears and heartbreak for both of us. And me having no answer as to why I had to say goodbye to all we'd built and once again wreathed in guilt walk away. The dreamed of end, the blissful one, the sunset one, still there, but with me unable to bear to say anything but sorry."

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  The risk you're taking, Larry, in sharing that poem and sharing this conversation is, here you are, a hugely attractive human being. If there's somebody here at the Fleet Street Festival who's saying, well, actually, I rather fancy him, you know, a bit of a silver fox, he's not that, he looks much younger than he is. But she knows now it's going to end in tears. I mean, do not produce these poems at the first date. That's all I'm saying.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  The thing is interesting, having lived with the mother of my two daughters for fifteen years, then being separated for about seven or eight, nine years, we finally finished up under the same roof. Having really interesting pally life, which it, oh, you know, it just...

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Are you back together now?

• 43:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, we live together.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  As friends?

• 43:15Speaker 04

  As friends, but literally as friends. And it's just really, I can really, really recommend it. After living through the first episode of it, this is all together. You know, but yet again, a really extraordinary woman. Because putting up with somebody like me is not easy. You know, that's all there is to it.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  This is an educational podcast. I mean, we are all learning a lot about love and life. Okay, go back to you at school. You don't do very well because of all this at school.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  Just came out with a bit. All I could do was French.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Oh, well done. You got French O level?

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I got a French O level and then I've lived in and out of France for forty years.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Often on as a result of that. So you leave school at what age?

• 44:00Speaker 04

  I left school at seventeen. I went off to a sixth form college and then my uncle offered me a job in the wastepaper business and that was it. I was out of there. And I thought to myself, well, this company he runs as a business in Germany, as I've learned, you know, reasonable French and I like doing that whole thing of doing, you know, speaking in a foreign language really, I found that fascinating. And so they had a business in Germany, so I went to the German Cultural Institute and I did basic German. And then I found a job in Germany selling encyclopedias to American soldiers.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Of course, I'm now seeing this. You can be another person. You can be free when you're speaking in French or German. One thing's I think most fascinating about Larry, when I first met him, it happened to be a day when he was talking like me. And do your received pronunciation. Talk to me like, as though...

• 44:54Speaker 04

  But I rather enjoy speaking just like you. It's such a different way of looking at things. I lived with a really lovely, lovely woman who was from just your side of the fence, I guess.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  This is very interesting. When Larry and I first met, he was talking like that, maybe to send me up, I don't know.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  Oh, no, not at all.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  But I assumed that's what he was like. Because when he talked like that, didn't he look for a moment like a distinguished barrister or judge? He suddenly became that person. And then, and I thought, oh, you're, I said, your niece and it's just so brilliant because you do that accent and all that, fantastic. Where did you learn that? And then you broke into it. So what I'm saying, what I'm suggesting, because when you speak French, it is impeccable. And I think it was even when you were a boy. Was there an element of when you were speaking French or even indeed German that you were playing someone else?

• 45:45Speaker 04

  Without a doubt. When I'm with my friends in France, I pick up all different, really accents. And so I will speak with my friends. You know, I've got friends from the south. "Dans le sud de la France, ils ont un accent comme ça. Ils parlent comme ça, pas avec un accent du nord. C'est complètement différent." And I do, I pick these things up.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  So you are a natural actor, but to escape the emptiness and the trauma of being Larry Lamb the lad.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  So you go to Germany, you get this job selling encyclopedias to American...

• 46:23Speaker 04

  ...soldiers who were part of the occupational forces in nineteen sixty-eight. But, you know, there were a million of them there and their families were there and all the other facilities and everything there to keep that, keep that society going. So naturally, whenever you went to a big headquarters zone, there'd be a drama group. And the drama groups were very well set up and they were run by professional directors who were flown in from universities all over the United States. It was an extraordinary thing to tumble into. And so I started to work with people, the directors as all, we'd been doing it for years. And a lot of the soldiers there were escaping, being in Vietnam. They were, almost all of them had gone low on their figures, on their scores in university. And they were, you know, you've got to sign up.

• 47:06Speaker 04

  And so you get all these people that were really into drama and were looking to do something in it. So I went in, you know, into an extraordinarily lucky situation. I was with serious people and I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it. I found, I thought, I can do this.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Can you remember the first part you played?

• 47:25Speaker 04

  I certainly can, I dare.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  And what was it?

• 47:28Speaker 04

  I played Henry VIII in "A Man for All Seasons".

• 47:31Speaker 02

  But this is, my god. It's very big stuff.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  I turned up at this place up in Bremerhaven, right? And Bremerhaven was a big station where every single item that the American military and all their dependents needed to sustain their lives was all shipped in through Bremerhaven and then put on trains and sent down through into Germany. And so there were people from all over there and there was a big American community with a big American high school. And I arrived up there and went and presented myself to the guy that was running the theatre. And he gave me a job. He said, well, what would you, I said, I would do anything. Right, he said, we need somebody to do the sound. And so they sat me in a booth and there was a red light and a green light. And when the red light went, I lifted the arm up of this record player.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  And when the green light went, I put it down. And that was it. I was in show business. That was it. That was a big hit. And so... He said to me a week or two later, he said, look, we've got a bit of a problem. He said, we're going to be putting on A Man for All Seasons. It's the first time it's ever been done in Germany. And our local star, who's one of the senior teachers at the high school, is not happy that he's not going to be playing Sir Thomas More. And I've offered him the part of Henry VIII. And he said, I don't do supporting parts. Do you think you could play Henry VIII? Well, what he didn't know is I'd just recently seen the film with Robert Shaw playing Henry VIII. So I gave him a very good impersonation of Robert Shaw

• 49:02Speaker 04

  playing Henry VIII. And that was it. So all of a sudden, I'm acting. I'm on the stage, acting. Nervous, nervous to the point of complete meltdown. Because all through the rehearsals were lovely. I love the rehearsals. But nerves, nerves, nerves. Oh dear, terrible. I can remember because I'm booted and I've got tights on underneath. And my knees were knocking like castanets. I should not control them. It was just terrible. But I pushed on through and, you know, it took me about 30 years not really to be nervous on stage.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  Seriously?

• 49:40Speaker 04

  Oh, big time, big time. I just became very good at making people think I was in charge. But of course, that's a lot of energy not to be spending what you're on there to do. Which is do the part. I'm pretending Larry Lamb is at ease playing the part, which is a big confusion and a waste of energy. So I wasn't ever nearly as good as I might have been.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  And as you think you eventually became.

• 50:17Speaker 01

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• 50:44Speaker 00

  Hi, it's Danny Pellegrino from Everything Iconic. 12 celebrities, one Don, and cold hard cash. From the producers of The Traitors comes The Mob, a new Hulu original series. The iconic Parker Posey hosts this unique reality competition show where 12 celebrity contestants shake down in an Italian villa to win a share of up to $250,000. Watch the new Hulu original series, The Mob, premiering October 26th on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

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• 51:50Speaker 02

  Can you remember the first time, I know we're jumping forward, we'll go back in a minute, that you went on to a stage or stood in front of a camera and did feel at ease? And thought, actually, all the energy is now going into the performance?

• 52:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I did, I did. I do remember it. It's a... I'd got the sack from a massive production in America run by the Peter Hall. And it was the most soul destroying, embarrassing mess I'd ever been in.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  But this is the great Sir Peter Hall, director of the National Theatre, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

• 52:21Speaker 04

  That's it.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  And what are you doing for him?

• 52:23Speaker 04

  I'm doing for him a whole, a play that was called, was a series of 10 plays called The Tantalus.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Oh, somewhere down in Texas?

• 52:30Speaker 04

  No, it was in the Rocky Mountains in Denver.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Denver, Denver, Colorado.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  The Denver Theatre Center.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  And this was the big ambition of his life to produce this.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  That's it.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  It was a big thing for him.

• 52:37Speaker 04

  So all of a sudden, I get a call from my agent, would you go to see Peter Hall? And talk to him about being in this. I said, has he got the right Larry Lamb? So she said, yeah, well, he wants to see you. So I go along there and I see Sir Peter Hall. He'd sent me the plays the day before. Because it's 10 plays. It's the Trojan Wars is what it is. And he wanted me to play Menelaus, Agamemnon, and Priamod Creon. I always muddle up who it is, like the three. So...

• 53:07Speaker 02

  These are big parts. These are the mighties.

• 53:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  The mighty Greeks.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  There you go. Mighty Greeks. So I go along and do this for him. But in the morning, I got a message on my phone to go back and see Sir Peter Hall again. And Sir Peter Hall said to me, look, Agamemnon particularly is a great orator. He's a man of the people. And I'm not sure about whether what we did in that reading and in that interview, in that audition, tells me that you can play Agamemnon. So I did Agamemnon. I did a speech from a play called Inherit the Wind. I did that speech for him and he just looked at me and he said, we're in business. And I got to Denver about six weeks later. And three weeks later, he sacked me.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  Because this is a mountain you're not going to be able to climb. So I...

• 54:00Speaker 02

  That's the words he said.

• 54:01Speaker 04

  That's exactly what he said. However, I have to say, I think he was right. So anyway, go back to England, reboot my life. I'm just about to sign a contract to go into a show that was going into the West End. And suddenly, across the room in the agent's office, something, she said, speak to Stephen. And Stephen Pimlot is directing a production of Hamlet. And they'd like you to play Claudius.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  So anyway, obviously, I accepted and went to work for this extraordinary man, Stephen Pimlot. I'd worked two jobs with him before.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Who was your Hamlet?

• 54:39Speaker 04

  Sam West.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. In this extraordinary, this massive, massive sort of Bang and Olafson style set, you know? Everybody in these beautiful tailored suits. I mean, it was a real backstage at the White House or across between that and Number 10. Apparatchiks everywhere, right?

• 55:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 04

  On the first night, the first, this is the first public performance of that show for that season, the 2000, 2001 centennial season, right? The Batman scene goes. It's, everything's wonderful. There's a great banging. And then I and Marty Crookshank, my Gertrude, we come through those doors, which are about 30 foot high. And we come down and we stand downstage, looking at the audience. But between me and the audience, there are 25 apparatchiks all the way across, all looking at me and my wife.

• 55:49Speaker 04

  Though yet of Hamlet, our dear brother's death, the memory be green. And that it us befitted to bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe. Yet so far hath discretion.

• 56:10Speaker 04

  And I looked at my wife, my Gertrude, and she looked at me as much as saying, nothing I can do to help you, dear.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Oh, my.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  And the clock is tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And as I turn, my understudy is under my nose.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  And I realize he's speaking Chinese. So what am I going to do with that? And I look across stage left and I know the book is behind there with the stage manager. And I know if I go there, I'm going to be really in trouble. So as I come back, I look into the ground and I start falling through that stage. Five million light, light days a second. Like, and all of a sudden, this huge steel clamp goes in the back of my head. And white hot magnums pouring out of me, right? And I'm then drenched in cold sweat. And I finally managed to steady it like that. And in the end, I realize I've, you know, I've got to do something.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  So I try and make it look as if it's all part of the act. And I kind of walked to this closed off quarter in the, right in the end. And I get behind this cloth. And I think, well, this is it, boy. You either run and never come back, or you better get back on that stage. So I just turned and I walked back. Came out there like that with her, with Marty. Looked at Marty. Marty looked at me. And I just launched right back into that speech.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 57:51Speaker 04

  Not a thought, just went straight on, right through the whole evening, right the thing. And in the end, I am in my dressing room, absolutely slaughtered, lying there thinking, I've got 15 months of this and I can't even get through the first preview. The door flew open and Stephen Pimlot flew in. He said, well, darling, that really was drama.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  Have you written a poem about the actor's life? Because that's what happens, you become an actor.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  I became a maxi, as I used to call them.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Tell me, as in Max Factor?

• 58:32Speaker 04

  As in Max Factor.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Max Factor, Cockney rhyming slang.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  I'll get the maxis on here.

• 58:36Speaker 02

  So, did you go to drama school as a result?

• 58:38Speaker 04

  No, no, no.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  So, you just did the amateur groups with the...

• 58:41Speaker 04

  Yep, amateur groups, but with really good people.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  Why did you end up in Canada? You were some of it in Canada?

• 58:46Speaker 04

  I was in the oil business in Libya. And I'd married an American girl and went to live in America. And the company I was working for sent me up to Canada to run a job. And I joined a group up there in a university. And became a really avid amateur actor. And one of my friends said, they're doing auditions at the local rep company. I went and I did an audition for Robin Phillips.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. And Robin was putting together a new company.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Who ran Stratford, Ontario for a while.

• 59:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, there we go, Ontario, with Maggie Smith and Jeremy Brett.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  All the big names.

• 59:21Speaker 04

  All of them, yeah. But anyway, I wrote this one because it's not really the main way in my life, Brett, because I kept getting breaks that actors don't get. So, I wrote one about a sort of a general look at the life of a working actor. Today, I'm a baker, yesterday, a faker, a week ago, a surgeon, next week, an undertaker. Reflecting on the lives I've lived, imagined, never real. And now they've raised my family, but not the way I feel. A lifetime of rejection, to the point of getting sectioned, would somehow prove a true relief and come with no objection. To constantly be waiting for the job to change it all, but forced to grab at any gig, never anything too small. Every time you've got a job, always it's the one that's gonna change your life for good.

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  A new one's just begun. Building castles in the air, but this time, it's for real. A limo waiting out the front, a chauffeur at the wheel. Walking that red carpet amidst the cheering from the fans. Repeating in each interview your projects and your plans. Lobbies jammed with superstars, all getting off their tits. Being thrilled with every second of the glamour and the glitz. Called up to the stage, still not believing that it's true. You're clutching your reward because it's that that means it is true. Thanking everybody from the bottom of your heart. Then you realise you're dreaming and your whole world falls apart. You're lying staring at the ceiling of your very own bedroom. All the five-star world has flown away, leaving yet more gloom.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  With a Christmas time audition in the morning where you'll play the arse end of old Rudolph pulling dear old Santa's sleigh.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  Did it take long, though, for your career to take off?

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  No, I was so lucky. I was so lucky. Jeremy Brett, in the company, right? He said, and we'd become real good pals. He said to me, darling, I just had a call from my agent in New York. And she said, could I play a Belfast doker? And I said to her, darling, I've known a few Belfast dockers. But I couldn't play one. But I know somebody who could. Because he knew, you know, with different accents. I had family in Northern Ireland, so I could do a Northern Irish accent. So, playing a Belfast doker was, you know, within my thing. And so, in the end, I finished up going to New York. And I was on Broadway and played George McBrain in that play, which was a huge hit, comedians.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  Good grief.

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  I know, I know.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  So, you start on Broadway. Thanks to Jeremy Brett, the best Sherlock Holmes has ever been.

• 1:01:57Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Oh, it is extraordinary. And then we take off from there.

• 1:02:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  Now, look, we haven't got much more time. And I want, there's one special poem I want you to do in a moment, but not yet. We've just got to touch a little bit on two things. One, you sort of threw in getting your first marriage and being off in the Middle East and then going over to... You had a daughter with your first wife, didn't you? And you were only 21.

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  I was.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Are you still on speaking terms of the daughter?

• 1:02:22Speaker 04

  I only ever met the daughter once, yeah.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  Her mother and I were divorced by the time she was born.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  Wow. Does she know that? Does she know your father?

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  I've no idea, I've no idea. So, this is a sort of a little dark corner.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  And you think, well, obviously, you think about it because you wouldn't not. Gosh.

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  So, the legacy of your childhood really has dogged your whole life, hasn't it?

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. But I think it does everybody, which is a relief that I find him writing these poems. As I say, empty in the cupboard, because I'm not unique.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  You know, there are people sitting in this room who have had a similar story to tell. And I find that if, you know, if I get it off my chest, if I write a poem about it... I mean, we wrote one poem, or I wrote a poem, and Hussein filmed me doing the poem. Put it online, half a million people were clicking on it. And all sorts of people were making the most extraordinary comments. You were speaking for them.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  Now, this is, I mean, this is why we do Rosebud, because we've discovered that a childhood lasts a lifetime. Give us the poem Collateral Damage, because this essentially, in a way, is the story of your life.

• 1:03:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  The price you paid for the childhood you had.

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  Collateral damage. Like a slightly chipped plaster figure in a gardening shop display, standing out amongst all the rest, certainly not the best and no way the pick of the day. Shop-soiled, as they used to say, for damaged goods still sellable. Indelibly marked at a greatly reduced price. All the good ones, twice what they'll charge for you because you're flawed. And clearly not as good as you should be, or indeed, might be. As despite always trying to do your best, testing yourself constantly. It's what lurks beneath the surface that only you see, that interferes. When over the years, you found ways to cover up what appeared to be the fault. Indeed, taught yourself how to look the real deal. Not the bargain basement one they sold you off as.

• 1:04:30Speaker 04

  But the one you really are, emotionally scarred, but a well-repaired survivor all the same. Nameless, blameless, another broken gnome from a broken home.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  What happened to your parents ultimately, your mum and your dad? What happened to them?

• 1:04:52Speaker 04

  She lived on happily with that, with her husband. He married again. That lasted quite a few years, but in the end, she just could not deal with him and she left. And he wandered off and went and found himself...

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  That's Ron, you mean?

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  This is Ron. And Ron went off and found himself a place to stay on the beach in Spain. And that was it, that was the end of it.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  And were you, in a sense, reconciled with them at the end?

• 1:05:15Speaker 04

  Oh, God, no, not with him, no.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  Not with him at all?

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  We leave dad with Jung and Freud. Dad has been sorted out by Jung and Freud. That's fine.

• 1:05:23Speaker 04

  Exactly, that's it.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Mum, how does that story end, in terms of you and her?

• 1:05:27Speaker 04

  Mum was sort of sorted out by the American wife, Jackie Paris, who unfortunately, you know, passed away about three, four, five years ago. She worked in maternal-child psychological welfare. She was a head nurse, you know?

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  This was your first wife?

• 1:05:44Speaker 04

  She was the second wife.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Your second wife.

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  And so, she made me understand that you could understand what was going on in your head. Something I didn't realise about, you know, you could understand why you were the way. And he said to me, you know, you keep on really berating your mother. And I know this is coming from your father. You need to talk to your mum. And I went and I spoke to my mum. And my mum said to me, look, you know, your dad was running around after people that were friends of mine and accusing me of being, you know, playing around. And so, what I learned was all the stuff that I'd been fed,

• 1:06:28Speaker 04

  which was poison from my father, which is what his father had been passing on to him. Because he was the same. I remember speaking to my dad's older brother, years, he was about 90-odd, and he said, my dad was like that. Jealous, vitriolic, awful, awful, awful scenes, accusing this woman of being unfaithful. So, he picked it up, and this is what happens.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  I want to do two more things before we finish. I want to hear one more poem, and then I've got three quick questions to ask. It'd be frustrating for people who've tuned in thinking, oh, I hope we're gonna hear about Gavin and Stacey. What it's like being, you know, married to Alison Stedman. I want to hear about the EastEnders years. Well, that's a different conversation. This, for me, has been much more interesting. In terms of your work, is there one part, one role, that you'd like to put in the time capsule? That so, 100 years from now, people want to know what Larry Lamb was best at professionally? What would that be? Movies, television, stage?

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  I think in all honesty, I mean, as much as, you know, a lot of the reason I'm here is because of the success of Gavin and Stacey. You know, you become a kind of part of the tapestry. But it was, you know, as you know, you don't really learn how to act in front of a camera. You learn to act on stage. And I, in that part, that part that I played in Inherit the Wind, the film, you know, Spencer Tracy played lead in it. Playing that part, it was probably the most important part that I'd ever played, which led on to playing in an Arthur Miller play, The Price. And so, those were the two, together with the Hamlet thing.

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  It's those roles that I want to put into a time capsule.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  All right. Before I ask you my three final questions, I know you've written a poem really about growing older and about your relationship with... How many children do you have in all? That you, you have the boys?

• 1:08:31Speaker 04

  I have my boy, and I have two daughters, and I have a lost daughter.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  The lost daughter. So, you've got four children in all, but three that you know and love?

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  Right, being part and parcel of raising, haven't I, dear?

• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  She did all the heavy lifting with George.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  We took that for granted, can I say?

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  But well done. So, is this poem, this is a poem about growing older? About your family, your children? This is gonna be your last poem, and I've got a couple of quick questions afterwards.

• 1:08:59Speaker 04

  Okay. Yeah, I wrote this poem because it suddenly appeared to me something was going on in my life that I had to kind of understand. And then, and you know, bearing in mind where I came from and how my life has sort of led me on to understand more about me and to be able to kind of make amends for everything and be able to look myself in the face and think, well, you're not done bad. You're all right, you understand yourself, and you're not really messed up. You've got out of it, you've moved on. So, I wrote this poem called Weaning Us.

• 1:09:34Speaker 04

  You don't phone them just because you want to as before, when now it might mean silence for perhaps a week or more, or even more. Messages you've left, still unanswered, won't even get a mention. And you'll slowly come to understand that this is the intention. They're weaning you off them, leaving you behind, forcing you to swallow it, not trying to be kind. No, this is serious. This is game changing. Cut you out, leave you out. Oh yeah, that's what it's all about, so face it. They're bowing out of your show, because now it's time for their go. And whatever you do, don't start keening because they're weaning you off needing them,

• 1:10:14Speaker 04

  just as you did all those years ago when feeding them day and night gave you the right to decide. It's the way it goes. Now they're in charge. New rules, their rules, writ large. But give yourself a break and take it how it's meant. It's not about not loving you. It's just what they have to do to start the next stage of your journey. And they'll be back, they'll be there, especially when you need their care. Hopefully.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  Thank you for taking us on this extraordinary journey through your story and your poems. Three quick questions, Larry Lamb. Tell me just what comes into your head when I ask you for a moment of joy from your life.

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  My boy bursting onto the scene.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  And how old were you? How old was he?

• 1:11:19Speaker 04

  I was thirty-two.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  You were thirty-two?

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  And that changed you in what way? Why was it so special?

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  Just being a father, all of a sudden. Just realizing I wasn't the most important thing in the world. And it took a long time for that to really get through.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  And have you tried as a father not, obviously, to repeat the sins of the father?

• 1:11:38Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  And you think, we hope you've done reasonably well?

• 1:11:42Speaker 04

  Yep. I think basically because this wonderful woman here stopped me repeating my father. And she just said to me, "Look, if you carry on behaving like this with your boy, you're going to finish up in the same relationship with him as you have with your father. And you don't want that, do you?" And just a big bell went, "Dying", and I never, ever, ever started to dominate him, because that's what ran my life, was domination. And, you know, so from that point on, I started to get myself together.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  So a moment of sadness now. What comes instantly into your head?

• 1:12:21Speaker 04

  I think really my brother dying. Because we drifted apart. And he got cancer and, you know, I went, I went up, he was in Newcastle and I... They made me up a bed in the corner of the hospice room and I spent the last week of his life up there with him, looking after him, nursing him. And they'd taken out his voice box so he couldn't speak. But, you know, we were just joking and laughing and just enjoying each other like we were little kids again. And we hadn't done that for years and years and years. And I remember looking down at him, he was lying there like that, and he was just in a real mess. And he just went... And I said, "You want a kiss?"

• 1:13:06Speaker 04

  And so we kissed each other on the lips. And it was just lovely. And then he just gradually, he just gradually drifted off. But we got back together again. And I was absolutely determined not to drive up to Newcastle, because I thought it'll all go wrong. And it couldn't have gone, it couldn't have gone righter.

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  Wonderful. Do you remember your nan dying? How old was she and how old were you?

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  Sadly, my nan, I was living in America and she got dementia and she'd moved in with one of my uncles and aunties. And so I wasn't, I was no, I didn't hear about my nan dying for probably two or three weeks. But she's there.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, she's part of your story completely. She's been the heroine of the evening. One last question, and that is, what, Larry Lamb? You're going to be eighty next year. That's amazing, isn't it?

• 1:14:00Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  Well done. You don't look it.

• 1:14:02Speaker 04

  Neither do you.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  No, I know. We're both working on it. My God. But, you know, seven wives, Larry, seven wives. And you can actually bring them out. I mean, and not just number one.

• 1:14:14Speaker 04

  I don't know whether that'd work.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  Can't work out whether it's number two or number three. You're going back home to number four, she's made supper for you? I mean, it's beyond belief. You've really got it sorted, Larry Lamb.

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  I don't know. I think, yeah, that, you need to ask that question.

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  There's going to be a follow-up podcast. I know one of them is no longer with us, but with six of the seven, we're going to, and it will be, the ratings will go through the roof. We've enjoyed hearing your side of the story.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  My life will go down the drain.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  But we want to hear from the girls. But seriously, what a life you've led and what pain there was in the early years and how brilliantly you've shared your way of dealing with it. And how much I loved your poetry, I've really loved it, to be here at the Fleet Street Festival of Words and hear words that express so personally painfully and occasionally amusingly. Your life story is fantastic. But what in a nutshell, Larry, has life taught you?

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  Be nice to everybody all the time. I wish I'd learned that a long time ago. People tried to teach me. But I, you know, I got a bit stroppy at times. But I, you know, I've just turned into this old, genial old boy now. And it's wonderful. You go, I was just, I was doing a film, I was on a film set yesterday, last day of the shoot. And I thought, this is just, this is my life. I'm sitting amongst all these young people, all starting off, and just watching them and thinking, you know, I was one of them. And fifty years later, I'm the old boy in the group, older than everybody.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  And it's such a joy, such a joy. They're like my family.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  Well, it's been such a joy for us, Larry Lamb. Thank you for being part of Rosebud.

• 1:16:04Speaker 04

  Larry Lamb, ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  Bravo, bravo, bravo. Bravo, bravo.

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