Life with Jack

On Sunday, 1 May, 2005, Sir David Frost interviewed Maureen Lipman

Please note "BBC Breakfast with Frost" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

Maureen Lipman

DAVID FROST: Maureen Lipman must rank as one of our most versatile actors on stage and screen. In a career spanning 35 years she's never been out of work.

What really sets her apart is her range, from musicals and pantomimes to plays, films and of course those famous BT ads - she's done them all. We'll talk to her in a moment, particularly about her late husband.

But first here she is doing a bit of stand-up comedy with a joke about her own Jewish mother and mothers everywhere.

MAUREEN LIPMAN: The waitress came up and said: "Oh Mrs. Lipman I haven't seen you for ages, how are you, oh it's lovely to see you. Is this your Maureen with you?

Isn't it lovely to have her home then, oh you do look well, you never change. I'll be back with the menu in a minute". And my mother said "I've never seen her in my life before - hasn't she put weight on!!"

DAVID FROST: There she is, and here she is, right here right now. Maureen, across your whole career that's a great accolade there, never been out of work in her life really, and it's true isn't it?

MAUREEN LIPMAN: It is true yes, I've only ever had one job in my life and that was a waitress in Bridlington and I got fired after a week for talking to the customers. Got demoted to the toffee apple stand outside and then sent home.

DAVID FROST: Oh dear!

MAUREEN LIPMAN: That's my only working experience.

DAVID FROST: You weren't allowed to talk to the customers?

MAUREEN LIPMAN: Well not to be chatty and do impersonations and tell jokes probably. Instead of just standing at the counter and shouting one sos tom two without!.

DAVID FROST: And you've just done a book, well you've completed a book, an autobiography by our dear late husband who I first met, Jack Rosenthal, on, he wrote for That Was The Week That Was.

MAUREEN LIPMAN: I know, yes, he's got a story about you in the book somewhere.

DAVID FROST: Is there?

MAUREEN LIPMAN: About you ordering breakfast as the plane landed.

DAVID FROST: Oh (laughter) sound true, sounds very true, and I'm telling you you know that the coffee might go everywhere or something like that. How did the love story begin?

MAUREEN LIPMAN: Oh, gosh, well he's got a ... I think I'm done in about a page in the book. But it's a beautiful page. We met at Granada in the late '60s and there was some sort of bet went on with an ex-wrestler and him in the film Exchange, who said you'll get nowhere with her mate.

And I guess Jack won. But he covers, you know, the point about the book is that he never wanted to write a biography, he was being pushed and pushed as you all are. And he really didn't want to write prose. And in a restaurant one night, I think it was me, I'm going to take the credit.

DAVID FROST: If no one else was there you can never have it disproved!

MAUREEN LIPMAN: I said well why didn't you write it as a screen play, because that's what you do. And he said no, it wouldn't work. And then he went and did it. And he wrote all the way through the treatment for myeloma, right through chemotherapy, nobody could believe how he just... and he used to have this hallucination when he was really ill about spidery handwriting which was all he'd gone through his life, 250 scripts you know and he just kept seeing this spidery handwriting.

It was a nightmare, but he also asked me during that time whether I could do something, because he had to take Saddam Hussein's children to school the next morning. You know - I said don't worry love, somebody else will do it. So when it got to - he wrote six decades of his life which covering the golden age of television as we know it, and then he just said "nobody's going to want to read this". And he stopped, and we couldn't persuade him to start again. And it was the kind of... it was as if the juice had gone out of him then. So after he died there was the question of do I publish the book as it is?

Because people do publish biographies all the time, which don't end, you know. It can end 16 years before their life's end. Or do I finish off the last ten years in order to say this was the man, because he was too modes to every say what a great bloke he was. And it was an agonising journey but we did it. My daughter wrote the foreword, you know, and edited it, virtually, co-edited it. And I finished off the last ten years with all the stories about the time when television wasn't treating writers well.

DAVID FROST: Yes, because it got worse didn't it. I mean he's famous for all those one-off plays and everything. And one-off plays are in short supply at the moment.

MAUREEN LIPMAN: Well because you can't get a hook into a one-act play David, you see, something like The Apprentice or you know this other chef thing which, you know, I'm glued to The Apprentice, I'm not knocking it.

But there's no writer, there's no director as such, you know, it's just hours and hours of film on ordinary people. And of course they're going to say something funny after a while - of course they're going to say something brilliant. You just edit nine hours down to ten minutes. And you think - who needs a writer? And that's what television's become.

DAVID FROST: And how was the period after you knew he was, he'd got this probably fatal illness? How long was the period you had together after you had jointly that news?

MAUREEN LIPMAN: Well we never admitted that it was, he was going to die. We had two years of illness, and it was sometimes it was all right and sometimes you know, but all the time it was hopeful and he never ever till the day before he died, accepted that he was going to die. I suppose I accepted it a bit earlier. And we just cosied up as you do and had privilege time together and it was an amazing time with an amazing man.

DAVID FROST: And how was it when you came back, came back on the stage, in panto wasn't it? I mean that must have been a hell of a switch from the sorrows before, to panto, what a choice!

MAUREEN LIPMAN: I sometimes wonder what people must think I'm like really. You know, all I know David is work, and after he died I went to America.

I knew I was going to do that, just to be with friends. And I went to New York, and I went to LA, and then I came back and, what am I doing do, you know, it's all I know. Obviously going home to an empty house is not a very nice thing.

But I share that with a million other women, and men in this country, you know I'm not - the difference is that I've got this incredible body of work which is always there, it's immortality. And I have to fight to get his last play on to ITV, which I'm going to do. The pantomime is what was offered to me.

And I'm good at panto actually, I'm very good with sort of Barry Cryer type jokes, you know.

Interview Ends

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NB: this transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy.

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