Sergeant on parade

Now that he is finished with probing the nation’s politicians, John Sergeant can indulge in larking about, preferably on the barges of Great Britain if his new TV series is anything to go by, says Sally Saunders

a lot of emotion on screen – television is particularly good at that. Facts are easy – facts are Google. So I am keen on television to concentrate more on feelings and intuition, things you can get across quickly and so powerfully, so much more than just a line on the internet. “But what you also need on television is a rhythm. It’s better if you are saying something to have a joke or a twist in it. It’s your job to provide something that makes people smile or think. You have to strike the right note and keep it. “A lot of it is about being true on screen – it’s not faked. You might have done something more than once but it’s still real. I think that’s just fun and if you have it, it works.” He particularly loves working with bystanders (“People are much better than they used to be when they see a TV camera now. They know what’s going on and they play to the camera”) and animals. One of his favourite parts of the series is when he has a heart-to-heart with a horse that has been towing the barge down part of the canal. “When else are you going to be allowed to talk to a horse on screen?” he asks. “The whole series was unscripted. That was an amazing level of trust, a real honour for them to trust me with eight episodes with no script. But it was so much better that it was, because if they’d scripted ‘and then John will talk to the horse, and give him a mint’ it would have seemed really faked. As it was, it was true, and that’s why it works. “I can’t do things I am being told to do. A little voice in me thinks, ‘I’m not doing that, and I’m certainly not doing that!’” But again, thanks to the freedom of not worrying too much about his career anymore, there are lots of things that he is prepared to do now. “At my age you probably perform better – you can be yourself more now, you are not looking in the mirror the whole time. I get on and do this the best I can – not as others would do it. So when I did a series on trains I didn’t watch Portillo’s series, I wanted to do it like me, not like him. That’s when you start hitting runs, start scoring sixes, because it’s just you.” But for all his devil-may-care attitude, he still clearly does care about what he does a great deal. He speaks passionately about his work on television, and suddenly his transition from an early life in comedy (when he joined the BBC as a journalist, he was referred to as Alan Bennett’s sidekick thanks to an early role in On the Margin) to a position at the