Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! 🔥
Guests include: Stephen Fry, Miriam Margolyes, Armando Iannucci, Alice Loxton, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Lucinda Hawksley, John Mullan, Pen Vogler, Andrew Davies, Rosie Holt, Bernard Cornwell .... and many more academics, writers, actors, directors and descendants of the great man himself!
Along side these interviews there are special Dickens readings from across his works ...
Thank you for listening 🔥
Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! 🔥
Charles Ignatius Sancho: with Paterson Joseph
The award-winning actor and writer Patterson Joseph takes the listener on a fascinating journey into the captivating life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, an African man who found favour among the highest reaches of 18th-century British society, and who had a front-row seat to the infamous Gordon Riots of 1780 ...
Sharing the inspiration behind his thrilling novel -The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho-Paterson shares his unique writing processes, heavily influenced by Dickens' immersive character development, and his uncanny knack for sensory detail
Here is also a link to Paterson reading the audiobook of Sancho:
https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Secret-Diaries-of-Charles-Ignatius-Sancho-Audiobook/B09TD1SGLZ
If you like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrard
Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: Léna Gibert
Original Music: Dominic Gerrard
Thank you for listening!
In Bath on the 29th of November 1768, the great Thomas Gainsborough painted a portrait of a servant of the Montague household. Gainsborough's subject is a man of colour, but he is not presented here as you might expect him to be. He is not offering up a basket of fruit to a fine lady or carrying her flowers. He is not standing in the corner of a richly furnished drawing room while his masters are seated in front of him. He is alone, effortlessly dressed in fine clothes, with a bright patriotic red waistcoat with gold trimmings and a dazzling white cravat. His right hand rests comfortably inside his clothes over a well-fed belly.
Dominic Gerrard:This is Charles Ignatius Sancho writer, composer, actor, abolitionist and grocer, born on an Atlantic slave ship in 1729, now a gentleman living among the aristocracy. He will become the first black man to vote in a British parliamentary election and the first to have an obituary in the national press. His correspondence, published two years after his death, includes a thrilling account of the Gordon riots which he witnessed first hand, and he even breaks off his writing at one point with the words Gracious God.
Paterson Joseph:What's the matter now? I was obliged to leave off the shouts of the mob. The horrid clashing of swords and the clutter of a multitude in swiftest motion drew me to the door. It is now just five o'clock. The ballad singers are exhausting their musical talents with a downfall of popery.
Dominic Gerrard:The violence of the London mob leads Sancho to conclude.
Paterson Joseph:I am not sorry, I was born in Africa. Another letter describes a prisoner as A daring chap escaped from Newgate, was the most active and mischief at Lord Montague's and was the first person shot by the soldiers. So he found death a few hours sooner than if he had not been released.
Dominic Gerrard:I am thrilled to welcome today's guest, patterson Joseph, who has been an award-winning actor of stage and screen for over 30 years, with lead roles at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre. His screen credits range from the Beach, directed by Danny Boyle and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, to a personal favourite of mine, his portrayal of Harrison Ames in the HBO series Avenue 5, created by one of our previous guests, armando Iannucci. He is currently appearing opposite Daisy Haggard in the BBC thriller Boat Story. Patterson also played Scrooge in Jack Thorne's adaptation of A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic.
Dominic Gerrard:Patterson has also written and performed solo dramas about Sancho's extraordinary life and has now written a thrilling novel, the Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, a book I thoroughly recommend should be bought and placed inside stockings this Christmas. It spans Sancho's entire life and is powerfully told. It struck me also as being very Dickensian in so many aspects. To give one example, there's a moment very early on where a young Sancho stands at a crossroads in his life, with the terrible slave catcher Jonathan Sill standing at one path and the kind and benevolent John Duke of Montague at the other. Patterson, hello and welcome to Charles Dick and the Brain on Fire. It's so fantastic to have you here. Thank you, dominic, it's lovely to be invited. I've just finished your novel, the Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, and I've been completely swept away on such a vibrant, colourful journey about someone I knew nothing about. How did that come?
Paterson Joseph:about for you. So Sancho is someone I found way back in 1999, even though I was already in my late 30s a black British figure that I should have known about. So when I began to figure out a way of presenting him, I started with a monodrama Sancho and Active Remembrance. But that was the sort of thrust of it and always been the thrust of it is to sort of get people to see him as I saw him, the surprising figure of this man painted like a lord by Thomas Gainsborough in 1768 in that portrait. And it just makes me feel that each time I present Sancho that's what I'm doing, so to immerse myself in him, which is my trick, and was reading this morning that Dickens prefers to Tale of Two Cities. He talks about that immersion in the mind of the characters and the times that he's writing about, and I guess that's what I'm trying to do and it's really gratifying that people get it. But I'm really trying to introduce you to the mind and the thinking of this extraordinary man, charles Ignatius Sancho.
Dominic Gerrard:Yes, well, you've definitely done that, and there's something incredibly to Kensene about the fact that you've acted him and you've talked about as that character and you've spoken his words aloud, and then you set it down on paper.
Paterson Joseph:Yeah, I mean I would love to read this bit because it struck me even just this morning. So, tale of Two Cities. My story with Tale of Two Cities is that at drama school they were always looking for things that they could use for big casts, because you've got quite a number of students. So they chose to adapt a Tale of Two Cities. So we each got a section and we worked it up and put songs in it. So it's one that sort of dear to my heart and of course got that brilliant opening line. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But here's his preface. It's not that long, she don't mind me reading it.
Paterson Joseph:When I was acting with my children and friends in Mr Wilkie Collins' drama of the Frozen Deep, I first conceived the main idea of this story. Strong desire was upon me then to embody it in my own person. As the idea became familiar to me, it gradually shaped itself into its present form. Throughout its execution it has had complete possession of me. I have so far verified what is done and suffered in these pages. It's that I have certainly done and suffered it all myself. Brilliant thing about that is it feels like he is immersing himself like an actor, does you know, hot seating himself as the characters involved in this French Revolution story. And that's precisely what I did.
Paterson Joseph:It's amazing to me to see that Dickens was so ahead of the game in that he linked storytelling in history and theatre in that way, and he would perform himself. He's my forerunner, very much so in terms of that, but the immersion, which is why I think we love Dickens so much, is so complete. He's such a fantastic sort of Daniel Day Lewis of literature, isn't he? He just sort of appears into these characters. When you think about Pickwick, which is another one of my favourites, I didn't have many Dickens books. I sort of give them away, I think. But the two that I've kept, I think out of a sense of sort of love for them, are the tale of two cities that I have still with my annotations from drama school I was a much more diligent actor then and the Pickwick papers, just because the characters in this and the descriptions of people, the way he lavishes his attention on the minutiae of people, gives you psychology.
Paterson Joseph:So suddenly we're reading a psychological drama as well as a great roller-king tale of all these disparate characters. There's character development and transformation. So he has to be for anybody who thinks that they can tackle a novel, especially about a big time or about big events. You have to go to Dickens just because he was so good at reporting as well as immersing himself in these events and times.
Dominic Gerrard:Yes, and to be so generous with detail in such a strong sensory way. You know, there was a moment in your book that did strike me as quite Dickensian, I think, where Sancho goes to the Black Tar.
Paterson Joseph:Tavern, oh yeah.
Dominic Gerrard:And he meets Anne for the first time and all that detail about they were the most extraordinary instruments you know, describing drums and various things.
Paterson Joseph:I think that's a pure Dickensian moment there, yeah there's no doubt about it, the Black Tar Tavern, because I didn't want to just paint a pretty picture, it was just, it was an imperative of mine to describe a scene that historians and visitors to London and the other cities in England had described, which was what they called Black Hops or Negro Frolicks. So this idea that there was a sort of jump up, there was a dance of some kind of rave and that there were Black people with their women and the instruments playing, but never described, they never described it in any detail. There was one on Fleet Street that was described by the Morning Chronicle in the 1760s and it says you know, here's a tavern in London and Fleet Street frequented by Black men and their women. They dance and play instruments. No whites are allowed to enter and I think that's first of all, that's highly unlikely that no white person would be allowed to enter. But there would have been all sorts of people. So now I do describe the Irish Catholics, who were a persecuted minority, deeply persecuted.
Paterson Joseph:We might hear about the Gordon Riots later, which they were part of. We also would have had Arab sailors. We would have had Indian sailors. Lascares would have had the free Blacks. We would have had servants, possibly runaway slaves, if they would risk going out of a night, would be there. There were lots of runaway slaves. So what those instruments were, dominic, what that sounded like that's where Dickens is brilliant Is that he'll give you sensuality, he'll give you the smell of a place, he'll let you know exactly what was you know dripping off the nose of a street monger. It's about a time travel, if you like. It's about taking yourself right back and immersing yourself in, and that's, I guess I have to imitate that. He's the door you have to go through, I think, but nobody does it better than him, nobody.
Dominic Gerrard:I'd love to read you a thought that I jotted down from reading your book and how it really affected me, but I felt that you, as an author, in writing this, you have an actor's gift of allowing an audience to feel, not just pushing buttons or trying to draw sound and fury. This makes your story more powerful and allows the shame to cut deeper when the reader's conscience is giving the space to work for itself.
Paterson Joseph:Oh, that's beautiful. What a great review that is. Thank you, I love that I put that on my wall.
Dominic Gerrard:If only I was famous, you could have used that on your cover. But that's certainly what I felt, because if you'd written a book that was full of fury at the slave trade and the treatment of black people in England in those times, no one would have gone. Well, there's no justification for that. Fair-minded people would have been right behind that. But you go so deeper and far more complex, which I'd love to talk to you about, because I think that's really extraordinary. You know, in these pages you celebrate the beauty of white people and black people and the ugliness depending on their character.
Paterson Joseph:Basically, yeah, I mean I think that my duty with Sancho, and with any character I've ever played, is not to exploit them in any way. We use them as a cipher for some other idea that I have, and it's sort of the tension between wanting to make something feel weighty enough. Why deal with the subject of Britain under slavery if you're not gonna deal with slavery in some way? But because I'm not a polemicist and I'm not a politician, that wouldn't have suited me. I'm a storyteller, so how can I wrap it in a story, was my challenge.
Paterson Joseph:And the thing I've always said, dominic, was that I mustn't make Sancho a 20th or 21st century person. He's a man of his time. And that's what I mean about. The immersion is that if you don't immerse yourself properly in the time, you can end up having anachronistic ideas or sentiments. And so Sancho grows in the novel and I think that's probably helped give him that sense of giving us the sense of being in his head, because there may be things that we know more than he does about the slave trade or about the politics of the world, but he's only 10 or he's only 15 or he's only 19 at the time.
Paterson Joseph:I'm recounting some of these instances in his life, so he knows what he knows. Then To really hold onto the integrity of the story is to fight the urge to tell in this sort of godly way, looking down, moralizing about things. It's actually, I think, the visceral quality, hopefully, of the hit when you hear the slave ship account, for example, or what happens to one of these poor girls on the sugar plantation and goes to. But it's a natural occurrence with the character, it's not something you put them into that situation in order to get something out of them.
Dominic Gerrard:How did you get from looking at sources and Sancho's letters, I presume to then adapting it and acting it as a solo piece? First of all, what was that step? And then and I suppose the second part of that question, if it's not an overload did you then come to the end of that feeling that there was more that you wanted to say? You had unfinished business with a character, and then you found yourself writing a novel.
Paterson Joseph:So I started rehearsing, researching Sancho in 1999. I picked up a book called Black England, which has just been republished by Gertziner, and I found a bunch of characters in it who were just unbelievable, like Septimius Severus, who was the emperor of Rome in the second and third century AD In Britain. He came to Britain and he was from Libya, his wife Julia from Syria, and all these troops that came over from Eastern Europe with him, and Sub-Saharan and North Africa, and I was blown away by it. So finding Sancho drove me to tell these stories that seem to have been curated from my history.
Paterson Joseph:So rather than do a complex play, which of course I didn't feel the confidence to do, I thought let me do what I do as an actor. That's what I wanted to do with Sancho. Say what was it like? What if I had no recollection of my parents? My birth was mysterious and I only picked it up from bits of fragments I heard from gossip from servants or overhearing my mistresses. I'm a black child in the middle of 1700s London and I have no friends, no family. By the time I'm 15, probably over-educated, with the secret books I'm getting from the Duke of Montague and I don't fit into the working scene either, not really.
Dominic Gerrard:I got from your book. London has Laws Against Black People Working in the City, doesn't it?
Paterson Joseph:Yeah, in the city itself. I mean, the city was very narrow now, very much the city of London as we think of it, around the Bank of England et cetera. But then there was obviously the wider borough and Westminster et cetera. You could work in that world needed me to explain it. But what I didn't want to do was have a whole bunch of characters obscuring our knowledge of Sancho. So the one-person show came to mind through a kind of immersion in the hot seating him. And then I thought we've got to set the scene and so I set it in the painting room of Gainsborough and on the back of the portrait which is in Canada, in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, it says that it was painted in 100 minutes by Thomas Gainsborough in Bath in 1768. And I thought, well, let me make my show, roughly speaking, about 100 minutes, and I thought that's a good gauge. Let me start there. I'm sitting having my portrait painted and there are people who are watching that happen and then I'm going to talk to them. That's very public and that is Sancho showing and telling people who he is, and then you get the portrait which is Sancho's hand immersed in his waistcoat, like that is the sign of a gentleman of leisure, as we know, the way he has his hand tucked into his waistcoat. But he was a valet or valet to the Duke of Montague, very high in the court of the Georgian King's, montague. But there is that bright red waistcoat, the girl braiding, the bright buttons, the white cravat, the look on his face, everything about that painting is like a cinematographer's dream. The lighting he's painting by Canada, like Gainsborough, so he's obviously controlling the lighting and the shade. Then his letters, which are being read aloud because hardly anybody could read. They're also curated letters to the newspapers. Obviously, his music, which is like dance music chigs, reels, coutillions, they're all everything's public about him.
Paterson Joseph:So the book which I wrote mainly during lockdown I wrote some of it in 2018, but mainly during lockdown 2020. Has all of that in it, has all of the sort of flower and flounce that Sancho has, his love of words, his vanity of words and expressions and classical illusions, et cetera. All of that. But the still voice of the inner monologue is it also in there as well?
Paterson Joseph:And I think, and I've said on the road, that novels are the most intimate form of storytelling. Yes, you could argue that the oral tradition can match it, but the oral tradition is a bit like anybody tells you a story again. They're always telling you a slightly different angle, they're always embellishing it slightly. You know, the past is always being embellished each time we tell it, whereas you fixed story on a page is the perfect communication from writer to reader and you're there, immersed on your own in the room, and as long as you can decipher the hieroglyphs, they form pictures in your head that are just absolutely unique to you.
Paterson Joseph:No one's cast Jane Eyre for you. No one's cast Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. No one casts Tom Jones in the fielding. No one has done that, it's just you in your head. This is what he looks like, this is what Sophia looks like and it's perfect. And that's why I think I wanted to pour out my 22 or so years at that point of knowledge of Sancho into something as intimate as that, because it would get it all out, rather than the sketchy form which you have to do with the play. You can't do everything, because it would be five hours long.
Dominic Gerrard:This is why it's such a joy to read is that, yes, I could enjoy it in a historical way. I can enjoy feeling like the past is very different, but actually I think equally and possibly more powerful is when you feel. Obviously the resonance is today. So, for example, the experience of wanting to fix your hair with oils so that an African's hair doesn't stand out amongst a lot of white people's hair, that has a very powerful contemporary resonance. I mean, how does that impact on you personally when you're exploring all of this? Do you feel a kind of remove from it or is it a combination of the two?
Paterson Joseph:I didn't really register what I was writing. It was just the practicalities of how he gets his hair to look like that. If you look at the portrait, his hair looks as if it's been straightened and pulled back, and it might be a surprising thing. We find out Sancho is mixed heritage in some way.
Paterson Joseph:His hair is very soft. It's not tight and curly, so it was really just a practical thing. But of course, when you look back at these things you go, oh my god, yeah, that is such a modern reference to westernizing yourself or Europeanizing yourself in terms of hair. Black girls in particular have this massive problem of the way they're treated depending on whether they have something that's culturally more African in their hairstyle and the billion dollar market in hair straighteners, which is all about conforming to a sort of Western image. But that's sort of a byproduct of the world you live in. Like if I was just describing a bit like Mallory Blackman does in Nautz Crosses and she talks about Callum cutting his finger and said if he's going to get him plaster and the plaster being flesh colored, but the flesh is brown, that sort of purposefully laid there to shock us and wake us up and so many young people read that suddenly been enlightened by it and I think that was purposeful. But I think a lot of what I'm doing one of what I did in the novel and I look back at it now of course and I can see it are literal truths of his life that I just laid down and then imagined what it would be like to have to practically work those things out. I mean, I think about things like education.
Paterson Joseph:He was refused the right to read his first letter to Laurence Stern, who he writes to and has a lovely correspondence for a couple of years.
Paterson Joseph:He says something like the people who were guardians of me thought that ignorance was the best guarantee for obedience, so they didn't teach him how to read and he runs away from home and his family that you could monitor, you who educates him secretly. Well, I was part of that cohort of African Caribbean kids who were labeled ESM by the British educational establishment educationally subnormal. We were definitely treated in that way. I went to school in the late 60s, early 70s and you just knew it. You just knew you were being treated in that way, without the teacher even knowing who you were, that there was a dismissal of your intellect and I ran away and I played truant and I read a lot in the library all day and all night, whenever I could bucked off for about two years at the end of school. But that idea of oh, that's the thing I'm writing about Sancho, because I know that's what's happened to him, and then looking back and going, but that's, oh God, that mirrors my life.
Dominic Gerrard:So much that's so interesting. Of course, elements of your experience in your life are going to come out through a first person narrative about Sancho. You couldn't help it with the best will in the world and it's all the stronger for it. But education in the late 60s and in the 70s did you feel that it must be the case that if you are treated like your education is subnormal, that you lose the confidence in what you have to say? Was it acting that and being good at learning and reading and being articulate? Was that your way out of that trap that was set for you so early on?
Paterson Joseph:Yeah, I mean, I think I was lucky in that there were avenues for me to explore drama and later this was about term 18 at that point and also that there was no pressure on me to make money. When I told my mum at that 18 that I wanted to be an actor she's got six other kids, so you know she basically went as long as you make money and walked off, you know, and I remember saying to her the door just closed Well, the actors don't really make money. I didn't even know about it to me, but I was lucky in that I found that because I don't know where I would have gone or how I would have coped with it. I did cope with it. You do cope with it.
Paterson Joseph:If somebody says your education is subnormal, then there's two things that go on. There is the external I've been given this, oh God, they've told me that I'm this and then there's whatever battle you have with yourself internally, whether you believe it or not, and I knew that I wasn't thick, that was the word they used. I knew that I wasn't thick, but I didn't think I was academic. I thought there was something wrong with the way I was being taught because it wasn't engaging me. But it wasn't about being engaged, it wasn't the fancy word, it was just it's not sticking with me and I'm not good at it. But what I am good at is just reading. So I'm going to do that, I'm just going to read and that's what I did. And it was a.
Paterson Joseph:I was lucky that there was a library, wilson Green Library, that it had, you know, funding and that it was there. Again, I don't know what I would have done otherwise. I used to sometimes walk from. I was at Northwest London. I used to sometimes walk from school. So after I did the register, you know, joseph, yes, sir, then I walk out of school Genius idea and not recommended to anybody. But I would then walk from Halston, northwest London, about an hour and a bit, to Brent Cross and in Brent Cross there was a WA Smith's, a large one, and they had a book section. So I'd all go in there as well, read new books Very carefully, try not to bend anything.
Dominic Gerrard:And were you accosted, did people say why aren't you at school? I don't know.
Paterson Joseph:I don't even know why I was very it wasn't like I looked like the bloke. I was very short and very childlike, even up to the age of 16. I don't really know why. Actually I don't think it was a very caring school. Clearly because they only sent two messages back home. There were two letters and we did have a phone so they could have found. In the two years that I bumped off, I intercepted them both and I could sign my month, which is so. I just signed the signature and that was that. They never phone, they never inquired. But that's a sinkhole school. It's horrible and it doesn't exist anymore, thank goodness.
Dominic Gerrard:Yeah.
Paterson Joseph:There you go. I mean, the question might be then how did I come to have the confidence even to write? I've always written and I've always wanted to write. I've always been a storyteller in one way or another. But I hid it, like a lot of people do, hid it in the bottom drawer, and I'd always been writing about the past and about my parents generation a lot sort of obsessed with it and my generation and how we fit and how we didn't fit, how we were different.
Paterson Joseph:And so, coming to write, having to think about what I would want to write is when I had that question from Name Drop Tilda Swinton when we were working on the beach in 1998. And she said what do you want to be remembered for before you die? And so I said, such as when. It was a very difficult question. And so I basically said, oh, I'd like to write a book, film, play I don't know about the black presence in Britain before my parents generation for the younger generation to know who they are. And then we carried on playing cards or whatever we were doing, and I honestly think that that is the reason that I'm still doing this today. I realized that I had been writing it, but now I was going to take it seriously and I didn't start with Sanchez, I started with modern and parent stuff when I properly started writing Sort of mission to tell that story which had been missing.
Dominic Gerrard:Yes, I think I'm returning to the point that, possibly, I made a little bit earlier on. That, though, is the manner in which you go about. It is so generous and embracing and includes everyone. You know, there's that moment where Sanchez talks about the cause.
Paterson Joseph:Yes.
Dominic Gerrard:And I think readers of every background could get behind the cause that's in this. And at what point did you start to know that there was actually a black history in the United Kingdom before Windrush and before your parents generation?
Paterson Joseph:I would not have known until I believe I picked up Black England about anything other than that odd character. I didn't know anything about the Tudor court, john Blank, the great famous trumpeter for Henry VII and VIII, and the other black musicians and courtiers who were part of the entourage of Catherine of Aragon, etc. I didn't know anything about Shakespeare's London that there would have been black people there, because I was never taught it and never saw it. It had been curated out of all the history that I'd ever seen. And yet it's there, it's archival-y there.
Paterson Joseph:If you read Miranda Kaufman's Black Tudors, you know you just get an array of people. You just think, my God, why don't we know this? Why has this not been a film? This is just dying for a depiction.
Paterson Joseph:So why I wanted to, I suppose, talk about Sancho in those terms that are inclusive rather than polemic and accusatory, is that he himself calls his letters conversable. He says they're conversable and what he means by that is he wants to have a conversation. You can't have a conversation if you're leaving out people who are part of that conversation, and I get why there are some particularly black writers et cetera, thinkers who say, well, they were no longer explaining racism to white people. We moved on from that. White people have to deal with it. I would say, yeah, I mean, I get that point of view, but most of the circle of friends, colleagues, that I hang out with are white. So I have to deal with the fact that my world's not a world in which I can shut that argument down and not that I would even want to but I have to have a conversation with the audience that I have in front of me, as opposed to an audience that I would like to have in front of me or would prefer to have in front of me. And I think that's the same with the writing is that I'm imagining an audience that is of everybody, and then the book is written. As I say right at the beginning, this is our story. It's a human story, it's a story about Britons, and they happen to be black, and it happens to be a longer time ago than you would imagine. But that's the world I want to paint for you, the world that wasn't painted for me when I was growing up and I never thought it was missing until I found it, this massive, this massive landscape that I want everybody to see, not just black people I mean again.
Paterson Joseph:Come back to our subject, dickens. That's what he did. He wants to have a conversation and interrogate our obvious tropes of working poor. They must be criminal. The landed gentry, they must be the greatest and the wisest. And he's always undermining these ideas. And the smartest people are the ones who live hand to mouth on the street and the dumbest people are the ones who have all these powers and leaders of power To follow his example and to have other people be able to read it. And even though it doesn't affect them ethnically, it's not their ethnicity that is being addressed, or their demographic or their gender. To find a way of making that feel connected was most important to me.
Dominic Gerrard:That thing you're saying about the complexity of characters, I think when we first meet Jonathan Sill, who's a fantastic villain in the piece, isn't he the slave catcher? But there's this moment, I'm sure it's in the first instance, and this is pattern forgiveness. I mean, this is where I misquote your own book back at you, but you mentioned this at the point where you talk about his. I think his blue eyes, that might have been fair or handsome. Yeah, had he not been such a total ratbag. Basically. And another character, if we're going to spin the character wheel, francis Williams is very interesting, isn't he? He meets Sancho, a very young Sancho, doesn't he? In the Duke's library, but I love the way that he goes next door to play a piano and sing something ironic that undermines. And could you talk a little bit about that? How would you set that up to explain to us what that's about? Because that's so fascinating.
Paterson Joseph:So Francis Williams is a real person and there was a very strange painting of him, but you can certainly look him up and he is a Jamaican teacher, free man from free parents, and he is sponsored somehow by John Duke of Montague, who's the man who rescued Sancho when he ran away from home at the age of seven, and he rescues him and gives him books secretly. So Francis Williams was said to have studied at Cambridge. There's no record of him at Cambridge. I wonder if there might have been certificates that he passed. They emerge over time.
Paterson Joseph:But when Francis and Sancho meet for the first time, sancho is about 11, I think, and they meet in the library of the Duke of Montague in Blackheath. And it isn't an easy relationship because Sancho has never had a black person in authority over him and Francis is obviously extremely well educated and Sancho, because he's usually the only one in any situation, does a thing that those of us who were sort of isolated either by gender or ethnicity in certain places that are culturally, you know, monocultural. Sancho feels the specialness of himself despite himself, feels his isolation and his uniqueness despite himself, and he has the introduction of another black person. He does it with Rio, the Rio Montague, who was one of the servants of the Duke of Montague, where he thinks oh, this is a black boy, they're going to tell me to go away because there can't be two black boys in a household. That strange psychology of if I'm the only one, then I must be special. Oh, but there's someone else here, so what does that make me? I wanted to deal with that a little bit. It's a sort of drop. He doesn't think about it too much because he's too naive to figure that out. It's not until later that he says I was very rude to him or I treated him with suspicion.
Paterson Joseph:But Francis is not a perfect character either. He's quite grand, and then I also wanted him to be a little bit like some of the uncles that I've known, to be slightly nomic. You know that. You think you know what he's saying, but actually when you think about it, has he just insulted me or is he trying to instruct me? But he's not saying it in a straight way, you know. And then when he goes off to play the roast beef of England, it's just such a weird tune. It's such a weird tune and he plays it on the harpsichord like with vigor and performs. Suddenly this intellectual giant becomes a sort of slightly musical character, but with a snidey dig at England, you know. And Sanchez lost because he doesn't know where he's at. He's been shown satire before he's even sort of understood the world that he's in and he can't quite figure it out. It's not until later, I think, that he figures it out and then Francis at some point plays country gardens.
Dominic Gerrard:Yeah, exactly, because it always like messing with his mind.
Paterson Joseph:So those characters to me they're like, not straightforwardly oh, these are heroic characters. He's going to tell them all about slavery, take him under his wing. That's not quite how it works. And then Jonathan Sill, who is my Bill Sykes, so my first role. Actually there's two Dickens stories that I have about my childhood.
Paterson Joseph:So the first one is even when I was sort of six or seven, school was a bit of a struggle. I had one great teacher, a lady called Mrs Bird, who was from Goa, and she told me much later that she sort of protected the Irish kids and the black kids because she knew what the scheme was, how they were going to treat us. So she was lovely and I knew her all to the point at which she died a few years ago. Beautiful woman. But Mrs Bird put me in a sort of sketch of Oliver Twist, which is the trial scene, and I was cast as the beetle, seven years old, and we're in the assembly hall and I've got an entrance and she says oh, could you make sure that when you come, when you jump up to do entrance, that you don't jump up because you're meant to be a bit of an older man? I remember thinking OK, and then, of course, when the day came and the audience there, I jumped up to do my bit and walked across and then I stopped halfway and sort of looked at her, the audience, but it looked like I was doing it at the audience and I got a massive laugh. And I looked at her and she was pissing herself, laughing and I thought I've got to wait with it. But I was terrified that I'd done something wrong because I'd leapt up that way and then I'd walk slowly. So I remember playing the beetle and I remember in sort of enjoying shouting the odds, and then the other dickens. I'm 10 years old and again I get cast as Bill Sykes. Somebody said, oh, there's terrible casting. I was like I didn't think about that. There was any black kid in the school so I was probably, maybe under sensitive, but it didn't seem to me. It just seemed like a great role to me and I couldn't sing as well as John Morris, morris O'Connell and John O'Connell, who really good singers, and they were playing Twist and Fagan. So I came on for this entrance, my very first entrance, and the feeling of the sort of joy of the pantomime villain, which I didn't understand, I just knew I was getting this feeling that I was a bad guy. Honestly, it was like the best experience I ever had at school ever and the most compliments I have received. So that Bill Sykes role, I've always had an eye on it and when I came to describe Jonathan Sill, I wanted to have that thing where you go.
Paterson Joseph:I'm really attracted to this character. Somehow there's some fire, some energy about him, but he's an absolute bastard. He's an absolute evil, two-dimensional, nasty figure. And Jonathan Sill is that figure. I don't give him a lot of backstory, I do give him some family, but I mean he's not in it often enough. I wanted him to be just that menacing presence to signify that it's not safe here, and it certainly wasn't safe. But describing his eyes as the eyes of the blue, as blue eyes, that would have been seen as near beautiful if the intent within them were not so deadly. I know those eyes, I know those eyes where it is and I'm like, wow, these beautiful, this beautiful color, but behind it, you know, there's rage or menace. So yeah, that was all part of just painting as deep a picture of the world as possible.
Paterson Joseph:And there are obviously some wonderful people like John Duke of Montague, who are characters that they're not like the white hero. It's not like you know. Montague basically sees Sanctuary for the first time. That's the most important thing for Sanctuary. Montague is the first person who looks at him and goes I see you. And that love that he has for him is genuine and it's in his letters. I mean he absolutely adores the Montagues without reservation. There's a father and son relationship that could seem incongruous but I'm certain was true of them, given the writing.
Dominic Gerrard:Yeah, it's very powerful all the moments where the Duke comes into Sanctuary's life and I'll misquote you again, but you talk about, I think, one of Sanctuary's first impressions about how his opinion of the white world had sunk so low that he expected only something awful from the Duke and then the opposite happens for him. There's a complexity there as well, because you there's a moment where Sancho questions the Duke's motives a little bit, possibly from talking to Francis Williams about whether Sancho and he are projects yes, little pet projects for the white man to yes.
Paterson Joseph:I mean, I think that that's a logical conclusion. If you are asked to perform the thing that you can do, which is play the harpsichord and the violin and all these other instruments for some guests of the Duke, then you would do that. I've done that myself where I went to the becluses, who are the Montagues, about five years ago perhaps, I did a documentary and I performed a little bit of the one person show in one of their drawing rooms and it was behind the painting Gainsborough's painting of the Duke and Duchess who were Sancho's boss later in his life, and I didn't think of it then. It was for the becluse family and I thought I'm really glad I conveyed this story because they're interested in the Sancho bit of their world. They're doing lots of archive work and they really sort of mean it. It's great there's also part of you that went. Have I just done this thing where I've just performed for the Duke? Is this dignified or is it somehow?
Paterson Joseph:I'm a sort of paid performer. It feels a bit odd and that sort of hybrid feeling I suppose bled into the book as well that you go. No, it's wonderful. Look, I'm presenting before George II or George III and I'm doing a bit of Ovid's Metamorphosis this is going to be. This is a wonderful privilege at the same time. Yes, I'm there for their entertainment, so I think it's solvable. But there is a kind of circular thing. No, this is good thing. I'm presenting myself and I'm presenting, if you like, even if I'm representing black intelligence here. I am being Sancho and being really intelligent and showing that we can be artistic and sensible. And then you go out and think, do I really need to do that? So all the complicated things that performing lends itself to those ideas that you are a servant, yes, but you're also meant to be somehow conveying something, you know, in the Hamlet way of catching the conscience of kings and queens. You know, with our art.
Dominic Gerrard:You saying that almost in a way reminds me of the seeming high status and the very low status of an actor in general, because anyone that is an actor can sort of see you as a kind of superhero, as a king, a prince, you know, but actually you think, no, you're the last piece of the jigsaw. So often in any project you're right at the end. You know you're a pawn on the chess board.
Paterson Joseph:Yes, I remember hearing that years ago there's an old actor passed away now called Dinsdale Langdon, and I remember him saying oh, we're merely waiters. We're just waiters. And feeling really insulted by that. No, we just didn't know what has been given to us and we just laid on the table. I don't think we're quite just waiters, but I do think there's a truth in that. But we seem as if we're more power than we actually are.
Dominic Gerrard:Yeah, we carry the glory and the shame of a failure, don't we also? We're the sort of front face of it. But I have to say I don't know if you feel this, because obviously you go way beyond acting into writing and creating Do you ever feel like it's actually a relief to almost be a waiter sometimes, to just show up and just be told what to do and go? Yeah, I'm there. I don't have to solve any of it, it's done. I just have to deliver my little piece.
Paterson Joseph:Yeah, I'm looking forward to that. I've been doing stuff and I feel so responsible for it that, yes, yes, yes, I really am looking forward to just going and read these lines, learn these lines, say these lines don't fall into anything or bump into anybody.
Dominic Gerrard:Talking about your novel, I don't want to give the impression that it isn't also riotously funny, because there's a moment there was a gag in there that just hit me. It was so funny because what's so brilliant about it is you have all these fascinating characters. You have Handel, you have Hogarth, franklin, all these people showing up, and obviously George the second. But this is a bit where you say Hogarth could be a sneery bastard when it came to other people's artistic pursuits. He fantered himself a musician of the first order. He was not. Is that in the stage version as well? That deliver? It's not, it's not.
Paterson Joseph:I think it's not because I wasn't really opening up the world like that, though because it is Sanchez World. Hogarth and Garrick and Johnson were all part of the same circle and Sanchez knew them all, and Hogarth was an amateur musician, a bit like Gainsborough, and both he and Gainsborough really fancy themselves. Both of them fancy themselves as really good musicians, and Hogarth even wrote a sort of treatise on music, but his other friends were dropped by rumor that he wasn't as good as he thought he was, so I thought I'd add that bit. It's a sort of local flavour, I suppose.
Paterson Joseph:And then you think about Sanchez and his work, his actual letters. They're so full of humour, they're so full of Chandy and digressions. He's the lover of Laurence Stern, so dashes and quick thoughts. When you think about the Gordon Riots, the letters, the most violent riots that England has ever known that took place in London, but certainly outside Sanchez's shop in King Charles Street, just off Parliament Street. When he writes, he writes with his eye on the humourous. He doesn't simply lay out some facts, he's always trying to entertain while he writes, and I wanted that as well, that in the midst of heavy darkness there is always going to be humour. There is a survival energy in laughter, in having joy in the small things. I see a lot of communities that don't have a lot of money really enjoy being with each other and laughing and singing and dancing, playing music. You need that to offset the heavy stuff that's actually happening to you.
Paterson Joseph:And I think with Sancho I always needed to keep that slight twinkle in his eyes like, oh God, you don't know the half of it. You know, and he does it in his letters. He'll say something heavy and then he'll get himself out of it very quickly. So, yeah, that's his buoyant spirit, that's coming through there in those bits of humour. And I mean my favourite bit.
Paterson Joseph:If I was going to say a favourite bit of my own, and it's not even mine, it's just what happened was the Royal Fireworks, because that's like okay, you could make up a set piece like that and I might have been clever enough to have made it up. But everything that I'm saying is absolutely true. It was April. They did build Versailles, they did light it up. It did get set on fire. A couple of soldiers got their hands burnt. A woman did catch a light. They did have to strip her naked. So you know, part of the job is to take bits of history and to tease out the humanity in it, and it will always have some light as well as darkness in it.
Dominic Gerrard:I have to ask you as a parting question, because you talk about playing the beetle and Bill Sykes, but a year ago or two years ago, you were Ebenezer Scrooge at the Old Vic, yeah. So I wondered what springs to mind when you think of that experience? What was that like? Do you know what?
Paterson Joseph:I was thinking about Scrooge when I was doing it. A lovely Christopher Eccleston's doing it this year, so I would urge you to go and see it at the Old Vic. That it was a kind of hamlet for your middle-aged actor, because he has such a transformation to go through that it needs to be plotted psychologically very carefully so that it doesn't just become a kind of magic thing and bling overnight. His learning is intense and of a very, very short period of time, but he does learn to be a human being, he does learn to have humanity, and it was a beautiful experience. Not only that, you are immersed in Dickens' world and Jack Thorne's writing is so close to the Dickens that you don't really feel like you're being sold something. That's a kind of you know, strictly speaking an adaptation. It feels like these are all his words and they've been constructed brilliantly by Jack Thorne's. It's seamless in that way, but it's a joy because the words are both theatrical and sort of skillfully wrought and also quite conversational. It's not quite Shakespeare, it's not even Laurent Stern, it's not even late 1700s. It just feels like the first kind of modern writing as well. It's quite journalistic and punchy in words and phrases. I mean when he comes to the ghosts. It's a bit more lyrical but it's beautifully styled and I broke every night but it would break me down every night.
Paterson Joseph:That play which point when I was at the door, when I was at the door with the two doors the tiny Tim door obviously would always get me when I was just me and the kid and they were asking you know what I had brought and they're wanting to share. It really always got me, I think, because I've gone so deeply into that life's just about me and everybody else is my enemy and they're out to get me. To get to the point at which you go, this little child is showing me I know nothing. Look at this. Kids got nothing and wants to share with me what he's been given. So that always broke me, always got me. And the bit at the door where I was saying goodbye to the love of his life who he waited too long to commit himself to.
Dominic Gerrard:That's great, I have to say. Also, you are brilliant at playing bastards Bastards that people enjoy watching, you know, because I just think of Avenue 5 and Peep Show before then. Where did you discover that in yourself? Because what it is, what I'm trying to understand is, as an audience member, we know that on a level, you're a very, very decent, kind, generous human being, but then you're displaying something that can be the opposite, so we can revel in it. We really we can. You can carry us through the darkness.
Paterson Joseph:Yeah, maybe I've exposed myself too much so people actually now will not believe me. I mean honestly, of course. I totally believe that we hold worlds within us and that it's only circumstance and our own will to express things that prevent us from being certain kinds of people. And the kind of person that Johnson is Adam Johnson, who is at the boss of David Mitchell's character mark in Peep Show. He is without conscience. He is a sociopath with, I think, terrible addiction issues, but more than anything he is one of these human beings that I would not want to spend 10 minutes with. I guess there's a part of me that's a bit like him. Then maybe I can certainly contact it the thing where you just make everybody a sort of object in your world as opposed to a real human being with concerns of their own. I think he thinks that we're all the same as him, like everybody's just fighting this fight and then everybody must be destroyed or undermined or subjugated in some way. It's quite a Scrooge trait as well.
Dominic Gerrard:Yeah, it is.
Paterson Joseph:It is just treat the world like the world's out to get you and get it first.
Dominic Gerrard:Paterson has been so fantastic talking to you. Thank you, it's been a pleasure, and everyone listening to this, wherever you're listening to this. If you look in the description you can find a link to purchase your copy of the Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho either the book or the audiobook read by Paterson, or both Up to you. I recommend them both very highly. Thank you so much again. It was a pleasure. Thanks, Dominic.
