Sheila Hancock: one for the rages

1 IT ANNOYS ME WHEN PEOPLE ATTRIBUTE WORDS AND BEHAVIOUR TO THE DEAD. They tell me John [Thaw] would have been proud of, or would have enjoyed, or would have said such and such. The thing that I loved most about my husband in life was that I never knew how he would react or what he would do. That is why in 30 years I never tired of him.

2 IT SHOULD BE A QUALIFICATION FOR MARRIAGE THAT EVERYONE MUST LEARN THE TASKS THEIR PARTNER DOES IN A RELATIONSHIP. Then when one dies the other is not completely unable to cope with the bills, the cooking, changing a light bulb or doing the ironing or whatever.

3 IT’S A MYTH THAT PEOPLE GET WISER AS THEY GET OLDER. One of the worst things about old age is when you see things happening in the world, like war in Europe, that you hoped would never happen again. We don’t learn from our mistakes. I don’t. I have known for years my bathroom tiles get slippery when wet and I have been meaning to get a rubber mat. Three months ago I fell and broke my wrist. I still have not bought a mat. Wise?

4 WE UNDERESTIMATE CHILDREN’S CAPACITY TO LOVE LANGUAGE. With their rap, street talk and performance poetry they are experimenting with words. Yet we sometimes cut and bowdlerise Shakespeare to make it ‘clearer’. I did a sonnet class with some kids from the White City estate in West London and they loved it so much they asked to do one of his plays. And when I was artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare tour, after we’d done one workshop with schoolchildren and they’d seen the shows, I swear to God there was not one child who didn’t end up relishing Shakespeare as much as I do.

5 I AM IRKED BY PRODUCTS THAT ADVERTISE THEMSELVES AS REJUVENATING, ANTI-AGEING, AS IF OLD AGE WERE SOME DREADFUL DISEASE. I don’t remember acne-ridden, heartbroken youth being much fun.

6 I WOULD LIKE TO GO BACK TO A SIMPLER WAY OF LIFE. When I was doing [the TV series] Great Canal Journeys with Gyles [Brandreth], we talked to an archaeologist who was digging up a Stone Age encampment. He said that, in that period, men and women dressed fetchingly in fur and leather, ate well on the results of their hunter gathering and had a lot of entertainment and craft work. They had musical instruments – maybe only one string and a bit of wood, but they obviously made music and maybe had a singsong. They lived and worked in close communities where they knew and supported one another, together achieving miracles like Stonehenge, as evidenced by the recent exhibition at the British Museum. I came out of it thinking, ‘God, then was a hell of a sight better than now!’

7 I CAN’T COMPREHEND THE NEED FOR EVER MORE MONEY. Over a certain sum you don’t need it. When I watch programmes such as the BBC’s Inside Monaco: Playground of the Rich, and I see all those people with their gaudy yachts and their ugly clothes, and facelifts I think, ‘You’re not having a good life. You’re not really enjoying yourself, deep down in your soul. You could have a much better life if you used your money in a different way. For instance, you might be surprisingly happy and proud if you helped the needy by paying your bloody taxes.’

8 THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM IS OBSOLETE. We should have a circular debating chamber, with everybody there because they want to do something to help the country, not because they want to win votes and get a nice job after they finish. We, the electorate, need to be well-informed if we’re going to be privileged enough to have a vote – and, God knows, a lot of countries would give their eye teeth to have a vote – so that we understand thoroughly what we are voting for.

9 IT REALLY P****S ME OFF THAT NOBODY SUBSCRIBES TO WIKIPEDIA, the hugely popular website that miraculously brings knowledge of everything in the world to our fingertips. It is run by people who do everything – do the research and run the website – for nothing. They’re always saying, ‘Look, would somebody please send us a few quid?’ And when they make these appeals hardly anybody sends any money.

10 IT DRIVES ME MAD THAT WE NOW TALK IN SUPERLATIVES THE WHOLE TIME. We as a nation had ‘the best test and trace’, the ‘best coronavirus strategy’, we have the best everything, and we are ‘best with refugees’. I wish our politicians would realise that governing is not a competition with the rest of the world, cooperation reaps better results. And I am sick of being told there has never in world history been a better singer than some new, merely adequate youngster. And can the weathermen please stop telling me, ‘It is the coldest since the Ice Age’ or that ‘the water has never been so high since Moses divided the Red Sea’? Just give us the facts for God’s sake.

11 I HATE THE WAY TV INTERVIEWERS TRY TO MAKE PEOPLE CRY. ‘Tell me,’ sad, sympathetic face, ‘how did you feel when you watched your child die?’ It’s not a good interview if the interviewee doesn’t cry real tears. I heard somebody asking about the return of Darwin’s notebooks to Cambridge University. They were stolen a few years ago, and whoever stole them left them in a bag, undamaged. There was an interview with the librarian who found them, and she was obviously thrilled, she was excited and pleased, but the interviewer actually asked, ‘Did you cry?’ You know, please!

12 LYING HAS BECOME ENDEMIC IN SOCIETY. People no longer apologise if they are found out. Boris [Johnson] is so desperate to be loved he will say any old thing to please us. It was fascinating in the bulletins during the lockdown how he writhed in agony if the medical men said anything worrying. He tries to emulate Churchill, forgetting that he always told us the plain unvarnished truth. ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,’ Churchill told us during the war. He treated us like grown-ups.

13 AND THEN THERE’S THE PRESSURE TO BE CHEERFUL. During lockdown I was constantly being told by television Zoom chat-show directors, ‘Keep it upbeat, Sheila. Be positive. Everyone wants to have a laugh.’ Wrong. People were feeling wretched, and they didn’t want some celebrity wittering, ‘Oh I’m doing lovely things in my garden and you know I actually said hello to my dustbin man the other day! It’s lovely.’ Not if you’re stuck in a high-rise flat, with overactive kids and a workless, depressed partner it’s not.

14 EVEN WHEN WE’RE TERRIBLY WOUND UP ABOUT STUFF, WE NEED TO LAUGH AT OURSELVES. I mockingly laugh at myself a lot, though I laughed more when John was alive. If I’m watching something on the telly, I try to imagine what he would be saying about it, because he was unbelievably cynical, and very funny with it. I miss that terribly. He gave me a sense of proportion, and teased me about my ‘Messiah complex’, as he used to call it. He was amazing at making me realise I was probably too concerned about things, always trying to change the world, and you can’t change everything. Or indeed anything much. But I do feel as strongly as I ever did that I want to try. And until the day I die I will, because human beings and this planet are potentially so wonderful.

15 WE’VE GOT TO CHANGE OUR MINDSET TOWARDS SOCIAL MEDIA. It’s something we’ve never been taught to handle, and we should be teaching our youngsters, right from primary school, when they start to look at porn and all the ridiculous anti-vax stuff, how to decide what is true and what is not. We’ve got –this wonderful online world opened up to us compared with when I was young, but we have never been taught that a lot of people lie, that you can be defrauded, you can read inaccurate information about medicine and all sorts. They must be taught to detect and analyse that.

16 MOBILE PHONES AND TABLETS ARE HERE, AND WE’VE GOT TO ACCEPT THAT. It’s how children communicated with their friends during lockdown. There was no school, no football, no games, there was nothing, at a very serious time in their development, so they communicated with friends through games played on a machine. It's weird to us oldies but it seems to work for them. Although I do worry about their eyes.

17 TRIGGER WARNINGS ARE ABSURD. I worry when the news bulletins say, ‘There are things that are going to upset you’. Surely to God, if people are dying in Ukraine, we can look at it! We’re not experiencing it, but we should look at it and be appalled, and maybe stirred into action of some kind.

As told to Rose Shepherd

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