My cultural life: Steven Mackintosh

The Times Saturday October 13th 2001

Television:

My chief comforts are music and television and sometimes I am at my happiest when I am vegging out to dross on the box. I resisted Big Brother for as long as I could, but I have to admit that I did get sucked in and by the end was jumping up and down and wanting Helen to win.

I was in the middle of filming Swallow for Channel 4, a quite challenging drama written by one of the best writers around — Tony Marchant. It raises a lot of ethical questions about the pharmaceutical industry and it was using my brain up. Though I am not saying that Big Brother is good television, it was quite comforting to come home and watch them talking in such trivial terms.I do like Chris Morris’s comedy, particularly Jam, which was so warped and on the edge. But I didn’t see that controversial paedophile episode of Brass Eye, so I can’t say if it was on or off the mark. People Like Us was really spot-on, tapping into that whole reality television thing and done so beautifully. And I thought that Spaced (above) was fantastic. Half-hour sitcom has been in the gutter for yonks — since Only Fools and Horses, really, but Spaced was unique and mad and genuinely made me laugh. There were elements that really appealed to me, such as the fact that one of the characters is a 30-year-old skateboarder, which is something that is dear to my heart.

I watch Frasier (Channel 4, Thurs, 10pm) religiously. Kelsey Grammer is God as far as I am concerned. I love that slightly camp communication thing between him and Niles. It is bliss. I love it. I can’t get enough of it.

Films:

Festen (1998), the Danish Dogme film directed by Thomas Vinterberg, stands out a mile, head and shoulders above anything else. Devastatingly dark, funny and shocking and shot on video, it is about a family reunion from hell. It is a truly remarkable film that leaves you completely floored at the end.

I also like that odd littleAmerican movie with Randy Quaid called Parents (1989), which is disturbing but brilliantly funny. It is about a family who live in almost-too-perfect suburbia, but they are cannibals.

The 1971 sci-fi thriller Silent Running was a film that affected me a lot when I was younger. This guy (Bruce Dern) has a greenhouse in space in a futuristic age when the Earth is in serious ecological trouble. He is the last eco warrior, floating around up there, looking after these rare species with lots of funny little robots tending to them on their little space buggies.

Every year I succumb to It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) because it is such a cracker, and when I first saw James Stewart late one night on television in Harvey (1950), a classic comic fantasy about his friendship with a giant, invisible rabbit, it blew my mind. It is such a trippy film. Quite extraordinary.

Music:

 Music unlocks something dark in me: a sort of compulsive collector side. I am obsessive about music: about having it; about getting it; about listening to it and about knowing about every aspect about it. I have several music strands going on at the same time. My Seventies groove has been going on for a while and that started with my love for Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, the world of soul and finding obscure, funky gems. At the moment I am into a strand of Brazilian music. It is a phase that came about when I bought a compilation CD called Tropicália (Polygram), which is based around a sort of Brazilian psychedelic movement in the late Sixties. But I am quite fickle and it could easily be something else next week. I deliberately don’t catalogue my collection, which is probably shooting myself in the foot because I often can’t find the CDs that I am looking for, but I have to keep some aspect of it messy otherwise the obsession becomes too much.

Books:

There is a certain homework element to reading because I have to read so much to do with my work, but when I do commit to a book, I love it. I was half way through A Map of the World (Black Swan, £6.99) by Jane Hamilton, which my wife recommended, but even though it is a really strong and amazing read I had to stop half way through because it was getting too heavy.It is about the course of events in a woman’s life, the snowball effect that they have and how her world then starts to collapse and fall apart.As an antidote to that I am reading Head-On/ Repossessed (HarperCollins, £12.99) by Julian Cope, who was a musician and singer in the Eighties with a band called Teardrop Explodes. It is a really amusing, fun rock memoir; easy to read and one that you can pick up and put down again. There are also some references there that I can get all nerdy and anoraky about.

Sport:

My favourite has to be skateboarding, although I don’t do it asmuch as I used to because it hurts now when I fall off. I am so passionate about it that my wife and I have written a short film about the sport that I am going to direct.I still have my original Seventies skateboard and go and mess about on the street corner and stuff. I am sure people go past and think: “Christ, that’s a 35-year-old bloke on that skateboard!” I wasn’t a professional skater, but I could do some fairly serious leaping about if you put me in a pipe. I got very excited one weekend when my nine-year-old daughter managed to balance on my board and said that she would like one of her own. Great, I thought. I would love to see a little girl getting really gnarly on a board (“Gnarly” is a skateboarding word meaning radical). But two days later, it was: “Nah, I don’t think so. . .”

City:

I love the way in which Sandy Welch wrote Sweet Revenge because it champions London. In a way, London is a stronger character than any of the people in it. Paul McGann plays a lecturer who teaches the history of London and talks about revenge stories connected with the city and the river. He is very passionate about the place, and that was a real thrill because it made me think about the city as well.One of the real pleasures of filming is that you get to see some extraordinary corners of London on a Sunday when nobody else is around. We filmed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which was spectacular — an oasis with honed gardens and cloistered passages, all five minutes away from the bustle of the Aldwych.Tokyo is amazing. I was there for ten days when I did a tour with the National Theatre in the Eighties. I adored it, it was so futuristic, fast and modern with a kind of Blade Runner (1982) thing going on, and then around the corner you could look into an alley and see a temple and someone in a kimono. On the same tour we went to Moscow and I was blown away by the Metro. It is sparse, elegant, immaculate — everything that the London Underground isn’t. I went down an escalator expecting to catch a train and it was like a Tate Modern (London SE1) experience.

Pet hate: The ridiculous price of CDs.

Steven Mackintosh was interviewed by Pauline McLeod.