Honestly, puppets themselves are actors effectively. The joy of puppetry is that it is very simple and low-fi, which I love.
Brummies run themselves down, they're very self-deprecating. Whereas Yorkshire people certainly aren't.
I think that cheap music often does make you dream more than more serious music, whether that's serious music by Beethoven or Miles Davis or Pink Floyd. . . if the Floyd ever did serious music, which I seriously doubt.
I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was a child. I did want to be a cartographer but that was partly because I liked Ordnance Survey maps and when I used to go to my grandparents' house from Southampton Station one went past the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey.
I don't see any point in having a public service broadcaster which attempts to compete with the commercial sector. Obviously part of its remit is to entertain, but entertainment doesn't necessarily mean scraping the bottom of the barrel and appealing to the very lowest common denominator.
When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed me to write, more or less anything.
One doesn't mind adverse criticism so long as it isn't stupid.
You have to open up to the world and learn optimism. . . Contentment with the past, happiness with the present, and hope for the future. Learned optimisim.
Art, after all, is traditionally displayed against vacancies: paintings on dun walls, sculptures in empty spaces, music in quiet halls.
Tilting at windmills hurts you more than the windmills.
Treat people you do business with as if they were a part of your family.