The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I procrastinate at an Olympic level’
Bill Nighy dreamed of being a novelist – not an actor. To compromise, he’s voicing his hero: Terry Pratchett
‘There is a way of looking at my life and my career as just one long exercise in displacement activity,” sighs Bill Nighy. Growing up, he didn’t really want to be an actor. “I wanted to write, my heroes were writers. I procrastinate at an Olympic level, and I’ve managed to get to my ripe old age” – he’s 72 – “without writing a single word. I didn’t have the courage, and I think it’s probably a very good thing that I didn’t, because I don’t feel that I would have been a very good writer.”
He tells me all this in that lugubrious, gently self-mocking tone he has, a voice that could bring dry humour and world-weary charm to reading the phone book. Though Nighy’s latest role isn’t exactly that, it’s close: he reads the footnotes, and nothing but the footnotes, to 40 audiobooks coming out in batches over the next year.
Fortunately, the books in question are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, which contain some of the funniest footnotes committed to paper. Take the one about a very small country that nonetheless had a standing army. Footnote: “Except when he was lying down.” Discworld’s one-liners are superb: “Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”
Casting Nighy was a stroke of genius. When he describes Pratchett’s tone – “Droll in the extreme, sardonic, friendly, [with] a kindly but wary view of the world” – he could be describing his own.
Nighy enjoys recording audiobooks – even if it takes “an enormous amount of preparation, if you don’t prepare it can be disastrous” – but he admits he has never actually listened to one. “I don’t own a car, so I suppose that’s probably why. But I take great pleasure in reading, it’s my reward for everything.” He’s a fan of “English sci-fi”, particularly John Wyndham. “I like the juxtaposition between English village life and things from outer space.”
We’re not speaking under ideal circumstances. A Pratchettian farce seems to be unfolding in the background. He’s phoning from somewhere in London, late and apologetic: there’s been “a slight emergency”. Is he at home? “Erm, ye-es, I’m around, sort of thing.” The first half of our conversation is punctuated by a crying baby – “Sorry, that’s my granddaughter giving her opinion” – while for the second half, Nighy sounds as if he’s in a high wind, halfway up an alp.
And yet, between all this, he mounts an eloquent and impassioned defence of science fiction. “Marginalised and trapped between lurid covers is the literature of the imagination,” he says. “It’s not taken seriously, which is kind of bonkers... People will say they don’t like sci-fi, but they’ll sit and watch all the blockbusters – which are all basically sci-fi because they all have high-concept plots that rely on fantastical things happening.”
And Nighy has always had a soft spot for “genre” blockbusters. He’s turned up in almost every sci-fi or fantasy franchise going: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Underworld, Pokémon, Pirates of the Caribbean… “I like the genre world because it’s generally benign,” he says. “I’ve been a vampire, I’ve been a zombie, I’ve been a werewolf –” he corrects himself, “no, I haven’t been a werewolf, actually. I’ve been an octopus. I’m about to be an alien.”
The alien is Thomas Newton, the titular Man Who Fell to Earth played by David Bowie in the 1976 film, and by Nighy in a forthcoming television series. Non-human characters like Newton are “fun parts to play. You try and find that which is familiar or human.”
It was sci-fi that gave Nighy his big break on the London stage. “I remain a founder member of the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, which mounted the first production – the only production – of Illuminatus!, exclamation mark.”
He pronounces the punctuation with a raised eyebrow that I can hear down the phone. That eighthour sci-fi epic, first staged at the unimprovably named Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun, transferred to the National Theatre, where Nighy became a fixture in the 1980s and 1990s, starring in new plays by Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and David Hare.
“Ken [Campbell, the director of Illuminatus!] didn’t like the expression science fiction,” says Nighy. “He thought that was part of how they marginalised it, and part of the way in which it was dismissed.”
For proof that fantasy and scifi are still dismissed today, there’s
Pratchett. In the 1990s, he was Britain’s most popular living writer. His novels have sold more than 85 million copies. But despite a knighthood and the respect of fellow authors, such as AS Byatt, seven years on from his death he remains in a curiously marginal position, dismissed offhand by those who haven’t read him: too silly for fantasy purists, too outlandish for lovers of comic fiction.
Equal Rites – one of this month’s batch of audiobooks, narrated by Fleabag’s Sian Clifford – begins with Nighy’s authorial voice insisting, “I would like it to be clearly understood that this book is not wacky.” He gives me a similar warning: “What’s that expression? Oh yes, ‘contempt prior to investigation’. Put all of your prejudices to one side, and trust me that they’re almost certainly not what you think they are. It’s a unique world that is funny, insightful, wise and compassionate.”
A socially minded caricaturist, Pratchett had far more in common with the take-all-comers populism of Dickens than the hermetic highmindedness of Tolkien. For Pratchett, as for Larkin, ordinariness and common sense are life’s key virtues. His Discworld may be carried on the back of a giant turtle flying through space, but the people who live there – street urchins, alcoholic policemen, thoroughly sensible middle-aged women who just happen to be witches – are generally too busy with life to stop and mention that fact. “He’s fully aware of the absurdity of the human species and yet he looks at us with affection, and manages to make it amusing,” says Nighy. “He’s a great and benign influence in the world.”
‘Put your prejudices to one side: Pratchett’s novels aren’t what you think they are’
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett is available now; more Discworld audiobooks are out on April 28