Show Notes
Twiggy is back, and she has brought a Dame with her.
After more than a year away, Twiggy explains where she went: Sadie Frost's documentary about her life took her round Britain and Europe from film festival to film festival for most of last year. The nice twist is that the film only exists because of this podcast. Twiggy had Sadie on to talk about her Mary Quant film, asked what she wanted to make next, and Sadie said she was after someone with a connection to the sixties. The answer was sitting across the table.
Her first guest back is the writer, actor, comedian and singer Dame Meera Syal, who Twiggy has known since Meera played Leigh Lawson's secretary in Kinsey at the start of the nineties. What follows is two women comparing notes on the same unlikely life. Neither looked like anybody already doing the job. Neither had a single connection. Both got in anyway, and both have spent the years since telling the people coming behind them that the not-fitting-in was the point.
In this episode:
Being made a Dame: Meera passes on the message she got from another Dame, which was, roughly, that it means very little and she should enjoy every second of it. Twiggy admits she forgets about it half the time and that official letters keep addressing her as Dame Lawson.
Essington: a mining village in South Staffordshire, halfway between Cannock and Willenhall, and a two up two down with the loo outside. Baths in front of the fire. A childhood spent out of the house from morning until dark, which Meera argues built the resilience and the appetite for risk that the generation after hers was never given room for.
New Delhi, 1960: her parents arrived as what Meera calls a terrible mixture of ambitious, talented and poor. Her father's family lost everything in the partition of India in 1947 and he was in a refugee camp at thirteen. Her mother was recruited as a teacher in India by the British Department of Education and got the job offer first. Her father came by ship and spent a fortnight with his head down the toilet.
Who Do You Think You Are: Meera found out that her mother's father had been arrested, imprisoned and tortured for fifteen months by the British authorities after joining a peaceful march for the freedom to worship. Her mother had never heard the story. Twiggy's own episode took her back to a great-great-grandmother left with six children and no money, who ended up in the workhouse.
Mr Cartwright: the Spanish teacher who ran the guitar group with his cigarette wedged in the fret, was not supposed to be smoking in school, and did not care. He was the only teacher who asked Meera how she felt rather than how her grades were. He told her that if she chose the thing she was good at it would not feel like work, that her parents would come to understand, that he would back her up, and that she would be sad for the rest of her life if she never tried.
The diary that became a career: Meera started writing as a teenager because of the confusion of a bicultural life, one person inside the house and another outside it, swapping accents like masks. She recommends journaling to anybody who wants to write, on the grounds that it teaches you your own voice.
Goodness Gracious Me and the Kumars: the observations she used to laugh at on her own, entirely unaccompanied, became sketches. Sanjeev Bhaskar's brief for the granny was that she should be a hand grenade in the family, because nobody expects the old Indian lady to be the most radical person in the room. Meera describes what she got away with as that character, including staying in a hug with Tom Jones for a very long time to see what he would do.
Anita and Me: her first novel, closely based on the Essington childhood. The designers worked from photographs of her actual family home and recreated the wallpaper, the carpet and the fake leather sofa.
A number one single: the Kumars with Gareth Gates for Comic Relief. There is a gold disc on the wall, and they got to perform on Top
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Mark Kermode has spent more than thirty years telling Britain which films are worth seeing. Here he tells Twiggy how he got the job in the first place: by bluffing, busking and refusing to go away. The two of them last met on stage at the BFI IMAX, where Twiggy was the final guest on Mark's monthly live show. He asked her to pick an iconic movie scene. She asked if she could pick a director instead, and chose Ken Russell, the man who cast her in The Boy Friend and the man Mark came to know as a friend. In this episode: A cinema-mad childhood: Mark grew up in Barnet, at the very end of the Northern line, and decided he wanted to live in the cinema after his mum took him to Krakatoa, East of Java (a film now famous for the fact that Krakatoa is west of Java). Too young to get into Planet of the Apes on his own, he would wait outside for a grown-up to take him in. Twiggy trumps him with her mum, who walked into every film halfway through, watched the B picture, and then stayed to see how the story began. School, rejection and Manchester: a council-funded place at Haberdashers', five university rejections, and a place at Manchester through clearing. He stayed on for a PhD he says he finished through persistence rather than brains, and lived in the Hulme Crescents, where burglars stole the safety door the council had fitted after the last burglary. Twiggy, meanwhile, loved school and was only sorry to leave it when 1966 happened. Bluffing in: how Mark talked his way into an interview at Time Out with an appointment that did not exist, and a first radio review so shaky that his mum's only comment was that the signal was very clear. Radio and Simon Mayo: from Radio 5 and Danny Baker to Radio 1, where Simon Mayo needed a film critic. Mark has been working with Simon since the early nineties, almost as long as he has been with his wife, Linda. The bands: busking skiffle in Manchester with the Railtown Bottlers, his band the Dodge Brothers, and the day Nanci Griffith joined in on backing vocals at a soundcheck without having met anyone. Twiggy tops it with the night Carly Simon, who her daughter Carly is named after, came to a New Jersey studio to sing backing vocals on a song of Twiggy's that has never been released. Ken Russell: how Mark met him, the promise he made to track down the missing scenes from The Devils, and how he kept it. Twiggy on the mentor who fought for a year to cast her in The Boy Friend, and the evenings at his house learning about Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and classical music. The people who believed in them, Sadie Frost's documentary about Twiggy's life, and the director who walked up to Mark at the BFI and demanded he repeat his review to his face. LINKS Twiggy's official website: https://theofficialtwiggy.com Every episode of Tea With Twiggy: https://theofficialtwiggy.com/podcast The music for the podcast is Twiggy's version of Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks and can be found on Apple Music here: https://music.apple.com/gb/album/romantically-yours/693460953 If you have enjoyed listening to Tea With Twiggy, please take a moment to give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts. It really helps other people find the show. And if you have not already, please subscribe so the next episode arrives automatically. A Stripped Media production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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