I’m absolutely thrilled to be talking this week with actor Peter Davison, star of All Creatures Great and Small, Doctor Who, At Home with the Braithwaites, West End musicals like Spamalot and Gypsy, and much more. He’s also the author of a delightful memoir, Is There Life Outside the Box: An Actor Despairs, and Doctor Who fans also know him as the creator of the 50th anniversary special, The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. Peter talks with me about many of those things, plus how he came to write his book, the “rise of the nerds,” and more.
Episode breakdown:
[00:01:10] Childhood creativity, music, becoming an actor.
[00:10:08] Taking on Doctor Who, and being unsure how to approach the character.
[00:17:03] Doctor Who, and playing unpleasant characters well.
[00:24:54] All Creatures Great and Small and the lessons learned from Robert Hardy.
[00:35:18] Actors fear of being replaced, and the difference between US and UK actors.
[00:42:13] Acting as the best job.
[00:50:28] Writing his memoir.
[00:55:34] The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.
[01:03:07] Doctor Who fandom and the “rise of the nerd.”
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Transcript: Peter Davison
Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host, creativity coach, Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go. I’m absolutely thrilled to be talking this week with actor Peter Davison, star of All Creatures Great and Small, Doctor Who, At Home with the Braithwaites, West End musicals like Spamalot and Gypsy, and much more. He’s also the author of a delightful memoir, Is There Life Outside the Box? An Actor Despairs. And Doctor Who fans also know him as the creator of the 50th anniversary special, The 5ish Doctors Reboot. Peter talks with me about many of those things, plus how he came to write his book, The Rise of the Nerds, and more. Here’s my conversation with Peter Davison.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:55]:
Peter, welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Oh, thank you very much. So I start everybody else out with the same question, which is, were you a creative kid or did you discover your creative side later on?
Peter Davison [00:01:10]:
That, I don’t really know. I mean, I just never felt anything. I was particularly 1 thing or the other. I used to make… The earliest creative thing I remember doing is making models of Gerry Anderson’s Fireball XL5 out of a loo roll and just, you know, painted it. And I used to build those model aircraft kits, the model aircraft kits. And I used to hang them from the ceiling, which I thought was pretty good. Most people put them on a stand and painted them brilliantly. I would hang them on bits of wire from the ceiling so that when someone came in the door, they would appear to fly across. And sometimes I’d set fire to them, which is not a good idea because they belch out black, highly polluting smoke. But, you know, what else do you do with them? You’ve got to use them in some kind of practical way. So, you know, Like every kid, you play in the street and you imagine, mainly imagine when I was younger, I was Popeye. I wanted to be Popeye the Sailor Man, so I tried to eat spinach. Tinned spinach, which by the way is disgusting. It’s awful. It is really awful. Actually, I love spinach now, but not tinned spinach. No. I don’t know if I was creative. I think I became creative, first of all, in terms of music at school, because we always had a piano in our house. My father played the piano, taught himself. He wasn’t properly, he couldn’t read music or anything like that. So I would bang out chords on my piano. Then I think I joined the school orchestra when I was about 12, and played the clarinet in the school orchestra. Pretty terrible. It was a pretty terrible school orchestra, I have to say. I don’t know if anyone could ever recognize the piece of music you’re playing. But I did that and then I took music. So I didn’t gravitate towards art, didn’t really go out. My sister was more artistic than I was in terms of drawings and things like that. But I did start writing songs quite early on. In fact, even when I joined, I then joined the drama club and then from that I joined an amateur dramatic society. And then I did, it’s an old story, I’ve told this many times, but did terribly badly in my exams at school. And so I thought, well, I might as well apply for drama school, which I did and miraculously got in. But, and so I sort of somehow set myself on this very artistic course, while not really thinking of myself as being particularly artistic. I remember at drama school being terribly embarrassed because I didn’t really know that many actors. So people would talk about very famous, I can’t remember them now because I didn’t ever hear who they were, and I would go, who are they? And they would look at me in absolutely, you know, a shocked face that I didn’t know who this particular actor was. But my influences, weirdly, were… There’s a radio series over here called, I’m sorry, I’ll read that again, which Saad John Cleese and Graham Chapman and Bill Ardy. So those people who went on to be kind of the leaders in off the wall cult comedy, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. And I think the others went off to do the Goodies, which was a TV series over here. And also I was a big fan of the Goon Show. So it was really, I was more interested in the comedy side of things, really. That didn’t kind of work. Well, that’s what it did really, I had to do sitcoms. So I was never a great theatre guy, you know, I didn’t really spend a lot of the people at drama school would go off to the theatre a couple of times a week. I never really did that. And I was also much more focused on a career writing songs. That’s what I really thought my strong point was. Even after I left drama school, I found a diary that I kept for a few months. In that, I was talking about being irritated by being an actor, I’m being offered an acting job because it meant I couldn’t sit at home and write these songs on my tape recorder. But then circumstances overtake you and suddenly people kept offering me acting work. I got distracted for about half a century.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:19]:
Anyway. Funny how that happens. When I read your book, I was so surprised at the songwriting side because I hadn’t been aware of that and how much you debated which way to go.
Peter Davison [00:06:32]:
Yeah, I mean, I was doing okay with the songwriting stuff. Somebody wanted to buy a couple of my songs and I was offered an EMI songwriting contract. EMI is basically the Beatles were with and it was the major record label over here. But it was such a terrible deal. It was, I think it was something like 600 pounds a year. But you had to produce for them 10 songs that were acceptable to them. And of course, if they took 9 of those songs and said, sorry, you haven’t come up with the 10th, presumably they wouldn’t have to pay you any money. So it was a bad deal. I turned it down. And I always sold a song to Frank Sinatra at 1 point. Also the man told me, it would have been bad, but I turned that down because I thought, if it’s that good, why am I giving it away for virtually nothing? And then I did a song on Dave Clark’s 5 album. Then I wrote theme tune for TV series, couple actually, couple. So by that time, I think the acting sort of was taking me away from this. So, and I was sort of very happy about that. You know, once I got into TV, I felt like I’d found a home. I just felt I understood it. I didn’t even know why I understood it. But where lots of people around me, actors around me didn’t understand it, couldn’t quite grasp, couldn’t quite manage to say their line as well. A red light was coming on a camera. I kind of understood it and I don’t know why. I suppose my father was not in the business at all. He was an electrical engineer. I had a technical knowledge of things, how things worked, which probably if you were too artistic, you couldn’t be bothered to learn. It always kind of fascinated me, the technical side of television and film. That’s always fascinated me. I’m always kind of, when I’m on the set, always asking the cameraman or the sound guys how certain things work. I just like it. I mean, it’s not that I’m not interested in the acting, I am, but I’m interested in how all these disparate groups of people come together, whether it’s costumes, sets, sound, camera, to make the whole. And we’re just simply a part of that. I feel very much like the actors are just simply 1 slice of the pie.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:18]:
That’s so interesting, because my father’s an electrical engineer, and I can imagine that if I were in that position, I’d be doing the same thing. How does this work? Tell me what that is. I’d want to do all the same things. Yeah.
Peter Davison [00:09:30]:
Yeah. That’s interesting. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:33]:
So, yeah. So you found a home in TV and then and then you landed this little part that changed everything.
Peter Davison [00:09:43]:
Now, which little part is a matter of interest that you talk about a part with that? Be the. Are you talking about the Doctor Who? No, just maybe. Yeah. All right. OK. I mean, Doctor Who, I can’t really separate who in my mind from all creatures, great and small, which is true before because
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:06]:
it.
Peter Davison [00:10:08]:
I work with John Nathan Turner and all creatures, great and small, and he left after 1 season of all creatures. He was just what they call the production unit manager. And he left All Creatures to become the producer of Doctor Who. And I didn’t think any more about it. I mean, we got on very well, John and I. But I think the nature of that part, the nature of the Tristan part, had somehow convinced John that I was what he called a personality actor. And I had never seen myself as that in any shape or form. I had just seen myself as sort of someone like most actors, no character at all, and had to sort of create this, this, this, this character from, you know, just reading the script. So when he, when he, when he rang up 1 night and offered me Doctor Who, you know, my first thought was, well, how the hell do you do this? But he was just saying, well, just do it like you. And I thought, well, I don’t even know who I am. You know, I mean, it’s like, you know, he believed that I was Tristan. You know, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen All Creatures. Oh, yeah. But so he believed that I was this sort of rather daredevil chap, sort of always up for a pint of beer and, you know, chasing the girls around and things like that. And I had seen myself as a very shy, a not very sociable person. But playing that Tristan had kind of, I’d found an outlet for something that wasn’t really even particularly me. Interestingly, it’s kind of grown a bit, it’s grown more like me through the years. So I don’t even know who I was then. So it was troubling to me when, I just didn’t know how to play this part. He was sort of saying, do it, I’ll cast you because you’re a personality actor. And I was saying, no, I’m not. I don’t know what personality I’m meant to be. So, but I had, of course, had 1 advantage over previous Doctor Who’s was I had watched Doctor Who. So I had, you know, and I was a fan of the programme. Not a mega, mega fan like some son-in-law I know. But I was I was I was I was a fan of the show. So so I was able to go, well, you know, my 2 doctors were William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. So I’ll try and draw on elements of those the sort of irascibility of William Hartnell and the kind of rather wide-eyed foolish innocence of Patrick Troughton. And I suppose, you know, I hadn’t really watched much of, I hadn’t really watched much of John Bertwee or Tom Baker, really, not because I didn’t like them, simply because, like my sons, I was off at drama school, I was doing other things, and that kind of whole Saturday afternoon thing sort of goes out the window when you’re hungover. So I drew mainly on the first 2 doctors. I love the kind of the vulnerability of Patrick Troughton, which I felt was something that had been lost in the brief things I’ve seen of both John and Tom, actually. I mean, John was very much the sort of male, alpha male superhero, actually, who was hitting people and punching people and being involved in fights and knowing much, much better than his companion what to do. And Tom was just never, he was very funny, Tom. I thought he was very clever and funny, especially when, oh God, he tried to guide to the galaxy. Douglas Adams. Yeah, when he was the script editor, I thought he had this marvelous undergraduate humor, which I was sort of a fan of, through John Cleese and all that. But I didn’t think, I thought he had lost the kind of sense of danger that he was ever really under threat. You got the feeling that no matter what happened, even if death was approaching, he’d be handing out jelly babies and, you know, being perfectly jolly about it. So, you know, I tried to create a character through that. But prior to my starting, you know, famously, well, in my I say famously in my head, it was famously I did this this panel on this lunchtime chat show in Britain, where they had got several people, just members of the public, to suggest ways in which I might play the Doctor. And there were various suggestions. When they thought I needed help, I don’t know. It was just that it was Pebble Mill at 1. It was in Birmingham. It was a lunchtime, fairly light lunchtime chat show. Anyway, so I was just listening to all these people going on a bit but then 1 bloke at the end said, uh, I think you should be like Tristan, but brave. And I thought, well, that’s it, really. That’s about, that’s what I’ll be, Tristan, but brave. So, um, uh, uh, That’s how I embarked on it. But I wasn’t confident. I felt that, I suppose, again, I was more like Pat Troughton. I mean, I think John came with, John Pertwee is sort of full-on, in your face, personality. Tom came with his full-on eccentricities. And I felt a sort of kinship with Patrick, who I think was a bit like me. They didn’t think he was anything, you know, special in terms of personality, just was an actor doing his job. And that’s why I like the idea of Tony. I’ve noticed in recent years, I’ve become a little more eccentric, but nevermind. I suppose that’s only to be expected. There you go.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:17]:
But, And I think that, you know, your doctor is different because he isn’t as in your face, you know, he’s not the James Bond, he’s not the over-the-top costume and all of that. And I think that he’s very underrated because of that. And I will, I will say, you know, full disclosure, I am a total Fifth Doctor fangirl, so that’s where I’m coming from here. But I’m always disappointed when I see people saying online, you know, you know, I see people’s rankings and he’s like down at the bottom of the list. You guys are really missing out. And I don’t know, you know, what what you think. I think that the fifth doctor is far wily or than people give him credit for. Yeah. You know, I think he knows more what’s going on and just doesn’t necessarily
Peter Davison [00:17:03]:
let on that he knows what’s going on. Oh, definitely. Yeah, that would definitely be true. I mean, I think he does have an element, which as I say, in my doctor anyway, of being slightly reckless in terms of the consequences. But that’s something that was very much a feature when I think when Dotty came back. So, you know, he has the best intentions, But sometimes things don’t quite work out the way that he wants them to, or hardly ever actually, you know. So, yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I never really take much notice of people who say things. I’m not really aware of it, because the truth is that, you know, if you see, if you, when you meet people, you know, it’s not many people who come up and go I don’t like you. Most of you are getting the people who go I really like your doctor so I’ve got a very rosy view of it. But, you know, it was a very… What people have to understand is that, you know, I really enjoyed doing Doctor Who. I’d watched it before I did it. And I really enjoyed all the running up and down the corridors and saving the universe. But it was a phase of my career. I did not want it to be, I’ve never wanted to be defined by Doctor Who, which is why I asked when you said the part that changed my life. I think I have several of those in my career mind, which have led me into different facets. Many years later, I was, now I got this reputation for playing nice characters all the time and then I went out for a part, just a small part speech in a series that Annie Henry was doing about school. I was playing a terrible headmaster who ended up screaming at his kids, really viciously screaming at them. I’d go for the audition and I thought, well, if I, they said, do you want to, do you want to read? And I said, no, because I said, if I read, I think I’ve stand this chance of getting it. And they got, they offered me the part, but that, that little part in that thing, people saw me screaming at someone and thought, oh, he can shout at people. And so that moved me into a different phase, which included A Home With The Braithwaites and things like that, where I was cast to make unpleasant characters slightly nicer. It’s true. I mean, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a home with the right things? Right, well, so it was a very different part for me, this, because I was playing a rather unpleasant husband, unfaithful and, you know, a bad guy, really. And I was, It was 1 of those parts where they just rang it up and off a bit to me. I thought, that’s amazing that they’ve done that because it’s so unlike the sort of parts I play. And after we finished the first block of film and I said to the producer, you know, thank you for giving me the opportunity to play this unpleasant character. And he said, well, thanks for making him so pleasant. Because The way these things work is they had this unpleasant character, but they needed the audience to empathize with him because actually they wanted, they needed the audience to like him in some way. So I somehow moved into that area of making rather unlike characters, kind of acceptable And then, which I think is quite good, because, you know, when you’re playing these parts,
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:08]:
you yourself don’t think they’re terrible. Otherwise, it just would never work. You have to come. Anyway, I think I’m skipping ahead. That’s okay. That’s totally okay. I mean, it actually kind of segues into something that was on my list to ask you, which is, I was catching up on some Big Finish a couple months ago because I interviewed Sarah Sutton on stage in Long Island in November, and I wanted to catch up on her whole older Nyssa saga with Big Finish. And in that sequence, there’s a story called Cradle of the Snake, which is the Mara story, only instead of infecting Tegan this time, the Mara infects the Doctor. And the whole time I was listening to it, I kept thinking, he is having so much fun with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like the rare opportunity for the fifth doctor to be really bad.
Peter Davison [00:21:59]:
Yeah. Yeah, Absolutely. And you do realize those things. I have to say, after you’ve played an unpleasant character for some time, it’s quite nice to then go back to play a nice 1. But you do enjoy those things like the big finish where it’s sort of, you know, a day in the studio, basically. Yeah, you do enjoy it. We like to kind of stretch our wings and get this venom out of us somehow.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:19]:
Extract the venom from our souls. That’s a great metaphor for the Mara. And I think we enjoy listening to it too because it’s so different and because we can tell that you’re having fun with it, but it’s also like, wow, what if the fifth doctor, you know, sweet, pretty under, you know, what’s the word I want? Understated fifth doctor is suddenly over the top evil taking over the world. Like, whoa, hang on, What’s going on here? Yeah. And I think Big Finish is great for that. You know, all the things that you never really got to do on screen and you also don’t have to worry about what the special effects budget is.
Peter Davison [00:22:57]:
Yes. Or the lack of 1, in fact.
Nancy Norbeck [00:23:02]:
Exactly. There will be no Mirka’s in Big Finish. So I have 1 other Doctor Who question that I have to ask you because it came up on Twitter recently and I promised people that I would ask. So there was a discussion about that particular son-in-law of yours, having asked to have the end credits changed so that his character said the doctor rather than Doctor Who. And someone thought that you may have done the same thing when you were in the part and they weren’t sure if it was you or if it was John Nathan-Turner. So I said I would ask. I mean, I don’t know. Are you saying referring to themselves as Doctor Who? In the credits, in the end credits. Oh, in the credits, right. The Doctor.
Peter Davison [00:23:46]:
Yeah, no, that wasn’t me. But I mean, I think John’s thing was, it was Doctor Who question mark. So it was playing, you’re playing the Doctor. Yeah. So I certainly was in my time, It was called The Doctor, but I can’t really take credit for that. Sadly, I wish I could. So my question is, yes, it was all me. It was all you. I did that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:24:13]:
It was all you. But we should talk about All Creatures Great and Small because I did get a little bit ahead of myself there because it was, you know, it was such a big deal. And I remember in my house, in fact, when I discovered Doctor Who, my mother was a big fan of All Creatures. And I remember telling her, oh, the guy who played Tristan is on Doctor Who, you know, to try to impress her, which didn’t work in the slightest. But I tried. But yeah, I was really intrigued by the way that you talked about Robert Hardy in the book and how he worked. And I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about that.
Peter Davison [00:24:54]:
I just thought he was 1 of the most unique actors that I have met. I couldn’t see, I could never see his influences. You know, a lot of the, a lot of actors that came were coming along after Olivier and Gil, but you could kind of see the influences, but with, he made his own way. I very much felt he made his own way. And it was sort of magical for me because I was tremendously, I suppose, scared, really, of working with him. He was in this series, which I remember watching, called The Age of Kings, I think it was called, all about, it was based on Shakespeare, but they sort of melded it and rewritten it and put it together, and he played Henry V in that, Prince Hal and then Henry V. And he was just kind of mesmerizing in it. But it wasn’t like I was thinking at that 0, I’d like to be like him, because that was so far away from anything I imagined would be possible. And then I just found myself suddenly working with him. My mother was in love with Robert Hardy because of that same series. So of course I had to live with, for the entire time that we did all creatures. My mother being far more interested in Robert Hardy that she was in me. I would ask her about an episode that would be on and she’d go, oh, I thought Robert Hardy was so brilliant in that. And I was going, hang on, hang on, I was in it too. Anyway, but, and what happened was, as I said, I was very, very scared of working with Robert Hardy. In fact, all of them, because I felt myself as a BBC newcomer. You know, I hadn’t really done that much stuff before. And we started working on it, And I thought, how the heck am I going to even keep up with this man? The 2 brothers had quite a lot of scenes together, mostly arguing scenes. And I just thought it was the most brilliant lessons I learned working with him, because he was never the same. You know, most actors, when they’re approaching TV, or stage, I think, probably, but mostly TV or film, is they try and pin down the character they want to play and the way they want to play a scene. And they have a fairly clear idea in their mind how they want to do it. I may be talking about British actors now. American actors may have a different style because they’re much more prone to making it up and changing things on the set than I think is the tradition over here. Because our history is from theater where you learn a specific script and you don’t bugger around with the lines. So that that tradition of going, let’s do a little improv here doesn’t really happen so much. It may be coming in more now. I don’t know. But when I was coming up, there was no tradition of going, let’s just see how it goes. Let’s just say whatever you like. That never happened. You had the script and you tried to get the script done as well as you could. And he would, so I was always working, okay, I’m gonna do the scene like this. I think Tristan should say this line like this, he should do that. And Robert Hardy never did that. Every single time you did the scene with him, he was completely different. Sometimes he would fly at you in a rage in the scene as Seagreed, And sometimes he’d be reading. And I just had to react all the time to that. And it was an extraordinary lesson in how to just never try and not nail things down quite so much in terms of the emotion, the words, yes, but not in terms of the way you might react. Don’t decide the way you’re going to play a line until the other person says the line to you. It’s got to come off almost the top of your head, the reaction. Maybe that’s what I mean. It was about how the acting is reacting, reactive. You know, it’s very much reactive. And and He would just throw things at me all the time. We go for another take and things. Sometimes he would be the best he ever was in rehearsing before we ever filmed it. When we got to the film, he never quite managed to do that same thing. And he knew it. He would get very cross with himself and sometimes be a bit irate on the set because of it. But I knew what he was saying. He was saying, I didn’t get it right. I couldn’t keep it down. I couldn’t keep it under control because he just… I mean, the genius of him was kind of his inconsistencies in terms of the way he played it. How they would cut 2 scenes together that he did. I don’t know, because he was always just different, depending on how it grabbed him at the time. And he liked the way that I was able to keep up with him. I think I wasn’t doing any more than that, but I could keep up with it. And so he then went and said to the, because the original idea was that Tristan was only in, I think, 5 episodes of the first series. And then he went back to college and sort of disappeared. And he said, he went to the producer and said, we need to have Tristan, my character in it much more because I like to do, I like those scenes. They’re a chance for me to really sort of go for it. And so I was in it, well, until I departed to do another series, which I couldn’t do a series. I was in it all the time. Then I came back for the final special. So yeah, I mean, he was really, I learned, I felt I learned an enormous amount from him. He had a bit of a reputation for being a bit sharp on that, but I understood why that was. I thought it was great.
Nancy Norbeck [00:31:16]:
That sounds like the kind of thing that that sticks with you forever.
Peter Davison [00:31:20]:
Yeah, it was. And also, I can’t leave Chris Timothy as well, I think was a huge, not in the acting department, so not so much as just being nice on the set and generous on the set. So and he taught me that. And I think sometimes when I read about bad behavior of soap actors you get in this country, I think it’s because unfortunately for them, they didn’t have the right people around to teach them that you don’t have to do those things. You don’t have to sort of be obnoxious. You can just, you can work and get the job done. And that makes it easy for everyone, everyone on the set.
Nancy Norbeck [00:32:06]:
Yeah. That’s interesting. I know that, and I know that this is like an actor’s nightmare, but to me, Robert Hardy is always Siegfried. Every time I see him in anything. That’s my first reaction is, oh, it’s Siegfried.
Peter Davison [00:32:23]:
Interesting enough, in the break, we did 3 series between 77 and 79. And then we stopped because we’d taken the series up to the war, and we thought that was it. We thought 3 series was enough. We all got together and said, oh, no, I think we’ve done now. We all wanted to go off and do other things. And Chris went off and did a West End musical. I went off and did a couple of sitcoms and then into Doctor Who. And Robert Hardy played Winston Churchill. And when he came back, he sort of turned into Winston Churchill. I mean, and it’s a weird thing. It happens to every actor that plays Winston Churchill. They always become Winston Churchill. It’s the most extraordinary thing. They all… They all bang that at something. But so he had to be sapped about a bit before he returned to Siegfried. I said to him, you sound like Winston. He said, tell me if I sound like Winston Churchill.
Nancy Norbeck [00:33:30]:
That’s funny, because I remember reading something that must have come out around that same time where he said, well, with a face like mine, you have to play Winston Churchill.
Peter Davison [00:33:39]:
And I thought, never even occurred to me until. He was incredibly youthful. He was terrifyingly youthful. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was on the face of it, absurd that we should be brothers because there was enormous difference in our age, but actually it didn’t really make any difference at all. I didn’t think, you know, it was plain. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:34:03]:
1 of the things that I found so interesting in the book is that you’re remarkably willing to be honest and vulnerable in this book about your experience. And 1 of the things that you comment on is how every time you’d get a part, there was this part of you just waiting for the phone call saying, oh, nope, sorry, we’ve made a terrible mistake. We really meant to call someone else.
Peter Davison [00:34:30]:
You know, here’s the sad thing. Yesterday I did a read through for a thing I’m doing starting next week, the TV thing, and it was on Zoom, the read through, and they’re always terrible on Zoom, I hate them. But I was literally, I had to go in for a costume fitting today, and then 1 of the producers came out and said, oh, I love the reading. I love the read-through yesterday. I said, really? I said, I said, I said, I said, repeated this thing. I said, I always think, you know, I’m going to be recast after the read-through. It never goes away. You think you get to a point where you go, oh no, this is fine. No, read-throughs are horrible, horrible things for me.
Nancy Norbeck [00:35:15]:
Because
Peter Davison [00:35:18]:
you think everyone is listening to you, right? But because you’re all thinking that, no 1 is actually listening to anyone. All you’re thinking is, oh God, I’m terrible at this. I think what most actors are saying, whether they’re honest about it or not. And so you get some actors who will whisper really quietly. So nobody anything they’re saying. They just whisper everything. So everyone’s going, what was he saying? Because they’re afraid of giving a performance because, you know, if they don’t give a performance, they can’t really fire you on the basis of that. But so you don’t know where to pitch it. But you are thinking I never listen to anyone going, oh, they’re rubbish. I’m thinking, oh, God, I’m rubbish. And I think most of the other actors around the table are. Meanwhile, the producer said it appears to notice that tool and think, oh, everyone’s paid. But then when you get on the set, it’s different because then you’re actually in the process of making it. So it’s usually it’s usually that phase after the read through where I think I’m going to be recast. It’s never actually happened to me, but I have known it happened to a couple of people. 1 of whom I was in something with and they’d actually actually done 1 episode and they decided that it wasn’t working and just. We can’t. To be fair, it wasn’t working. So it’s a very it’s a difficult problem. I mean, it’s the most awful thing because you know that person has been so excited about getting the part. And then we’ve actually recorded an episode. And then the powers that be come to a decision, which actually, if you’re honest, the actors agree with as well. We all say we don’t. We all say, oh, it’s terrible that they did to her and it’s so awful. But the fact of the matter is, what are you gonna do? You’re gonna make the entire series and it’s gonna be not good, or do you have to make a brutal decision for the sake, I suppose, of the series? But I don’t know what the best thing to do is. It can be a cruel world. So I know that it happens, and I know that people have been recast. So it just fortunately, up to this point, has never been me yet. I might get the phone call tomorrow morning. I don’t know.
Nancy Norbeck [00:37:40]:
I think it’s valuable to talk about the fact that that’s what goes through your head, though, because I think most of us, you know, especially those of us who aren’t actors, just assume that, you know, oh no, I went in and I read really well and I got this. It’s all going to be great. And I think that exposing the reality that, you know, it’s normal for people to feel like this is all you know, I did a terrible job and they’re going to realize it and it’s going to come crashing down is is really not that unusual. No, it’s and I don’t know.
Peter Davison [00:38:13]:
I speak I spent a couple of months in the mid-80s, I guess it was, being in Los Angeles and going around for a few auditions. It was just that my then wife was over for pilot season and I wasn’t doing anything. So I came over and then her agent started sending me up for various things. And there is a difference between, this is gonna be a bit of a generalization, because I know, I’m sure there are American actors who aren’t like this, but there is a kind of self-confidence in American actors that isn’t there in British actors, and I don’t know why it is. So I would sit in the room waiting for the audition, and there would be American actors, and I’d end up talking to them. And they quite often would say things like, oh, I did a movie last year, but it hasn’t come out yet, which is such a shame because I was absolutely brilliant in it. And I think, I just can’t imagine saying that. So there was a kind of confidence about what they were doing. And I always thought, you know, when, you know, when Dallas and Dynasty were reigning supreme and The truth is they were pretty terrible scripts, so Dallas and Dynasty things really. I mean, they were very popular, but they were pretty terrible scripts. They quite often draft English actors and actresses into those series. And I felt when I would watch them that I could see behind their eyes that they thought, this is a really terrible script, but I’m doing my best to say it. But the American actors would go for it full on and, of course, bring it off. So people like Larry Hagman, you know, actually would go for the full thing. Whereas, you know, I remember watching people like Stephanie Beacham. It was like She was very successful in it. But I’d work with her. And I just felt when she had a really terrible line, there was a kind of subtext in her performance which said, I know this is a terrible line. Please forgive me. Yeah. So I’m not knocking American actors, because that confidence can bring you through all sorts of crises that maybe British actors have. But I think there’s a kind of assurance in certain areas. Maybe it’s just film or television. Maybe it’s not the same on stage. Because we have a kind of background of stage, therefore stage feels like home to us in a funny kind of way. Whereas once you branch into films, we feel that’s really the American territory. That’s where Americans are, know what’s going on. As I say, I would, if I did a movie and they started saying, let’s just do, let’s just improv the scene, Peter, I wouldn’t know where to start. I would be completely lost. Anyway, you can still offer me a job if anyone’s out there. I’m willing to take the job. They can be wrong.
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:26]:
Well, I want to make sure that we have time to talk about the book, And I’m hoping that we can also talk about musicals too, and they sort of come together in the book because the book is their life outside the box, is structured so that you have kind of an opening for each chapter that is sort of present day that usually has something to do with Gypsy.
Peter Davison [00:41:53]:
Yeah. And then that- Oh yes, the diary, yes, yes. Is reflected
Nancy Norbeck [00:41:57]:
in, you know, the memories that go, that kind of, you know, go with that diary entry. Which I thought was really fascinating And we’ll get into that. But I’m first of all curious about what inspired you to write the book in the first place.
Peter Davison [00:42:13]:
Well, Someone came to me, a comedy writer called Andy Merriman, who I’d done a radio series with sometime before. He said, do you want to work together on your autobiography? I love Andy, and he’s a great writer, but I felt if I was going to do it, I had to do it myself, every word. So Andy, very kindly, I said, I’m very happy to have you on board to give me any advice about what I’ve missed out and how I should approach certain things. But he said, well, why don’t I just go off and do research? So he went off and he met up with various people I’d been to school with, and at a drama school, and he met up with my sister and talked to her and got sort of background info that maybe I didn’t get. But I was just determined to write it myself. I wanted to write something that was how I, my experience of an actor, of being an actor, which I’m sure is very common. It’s certainly not unusual, But as you say, maybe actors don’t always put that down on paper. Some people do. I mean, some of us do. But it’s just, I think it’s what’s appealing about actors is our, you know, our stupidity. We are terribly, we are on the 1 hand, terribly frivolous people. We’re a terribly frivolous, we’re a really frivolous job. I mean, we really like to entertain people. And we, or not even that really, it’s just a great job to do. If I’m honest about it, you couldn’t imagine a better job to do because I’ve enjoyed nearly every single day, even if it’s been terrible, that I’ve been in this business. And you can’t really say that, I think, for a lot of people. It’s a Monday to Friday thing you struggle through, and you live for the weekend. I live for the working, and I find the weekend intolerably dull. So because I said to my wife last year, thing is I’ve got to the age now, it was always on the cards, we’ve got to the age now where My social life is working. That’s why I meet the people I talk to. And it’s nice. I’m trying to think. I just I got tired of actors being worthy. You know, it just can be terribly worthy sometimes. It’s a really important piece I’m doing here. I think it’s really, you know, it’s important people’s rubbish. Rubbish. It’s just, you like doing it. It’s a good job to do if you can get into it and just enjoy it for what it is, whether it’s the thing I’m doing at the moment is a really, really silly comedy film. It’s a TV thing, but it’s a Christmas special comedy film, which I will enjoy just as much as anything that I might think is worthy or moving. You know, we just entertain people. You can entertain people by making them cry or sad or happy. You know, it’s just, It’s a frivolously silly job we do, and we shouldn’t be talking too importantly about it. You know, virtually everyone else, for a start, on the film set, works harder than actors do. Nearly every single other job out there is worthier than, more important than an actor’s job. Whether you’re cleaning the streets, whether you’re teaching, whatever you’re doing from lowest to high, in my view, They’re nearly all more important than being more an actor, but they’re not as much fun. And so I just shamelessly now got to the point where if someone offers me a job, I think I’ll enjoy it. That’s my 1 criteria, just I think I’ll enjoy it. I shouldn’t be saying this really, but I just, you know, we’re, we’ve come out of a pandemic, you know, and this ought to be the roaring twenties. It really ought to be the roaring twenties. We ought to be getting out there and having fun and enjoying ourselves. And we should be putting on shows to entertain people, joyous, you know, you can make a moving, I like Gypsy, all those things and entertaining. Instead, I just find, you know, I’m looking for something to watch, endlessly depressing things, which I just am not interested in viewing. I don’t want to see them. And I would prefer to watch virtually anything than those things. I think this is really important to show this particular crisis that people… No, rubbish. Just you’re taking it as a good job, you can chance to show off your acting. I’m not saying the writer didn’t write it with those intentions in mind, but you’re not doing it for that. You’re doing it because you want to show what a great actor you are. You don’t want to really inform people. That’s just what actors prod and talk. Said too much. I should shut up. This is why she never did. So anyway, I just think it ought to be the roaring twenties. And instead, we just appear to be closed down on every front. We seem to want to torture ourselves with our entertainment rather than entertain. There you go.
Nancy Norbeck [00:47:59]:
I can kind of see that.
Peter Davison [00:48:01]:
Sort of the golden age of television. But there is a lot of that. It ought to be. It ought to be all happening now. We’ve come out of a pandemic, admittedly not another world war yet, but we’ve come out of a pandemic. Everyone was in a sort of depressed state. So rather than come out of it with flags waving and, you know, let’s go out and, you know, have a great time. We seem to want to just beat ourselves, you know, senseless with what we think is, you know, important.
Nancy Norbeck [00:48:31]:
Well, maybe we’ll get there. Maybe enough people hear this and take up the maybe
Peter Davison [00:48:36]:
as a couple of years later, we all go, oh, to hell with this. That’s
Nancy Norbeck [00:48:44]:
maybe, maybe. Well, I’m curious how how you decided to set the book up the way you did with the diary entry and then.
Peter Davison [00:48:54]:
Yes, let’s go. Let’s talk about that. Let’s not get me into more trouble. Yeah. So, well, it was simply that I was writing the book when I was doing Gypsy. And I thought, why don’t I just make a diary of this sort of journey that’s relevant to the book? I mean, I knew I was writing the book, and then I was working. And it worked out quite well, because when you’re doing theatre, people from your past keep popping up at the stage door. You know, suddenly someone you haven’t seen for 30 years, you know, the stage doorman will ring through and say, Oh, I’ve got so and so here. And I think, Oh, my goodness me. And then someone from your history will just sort of walk in. And just funny, just funny things happen. It just seemed you could, which you could connect, which I connected with things in the book. So when something happened, either on stage or some coming to the stage, or I just then recall an event from my life, it seemed to be fun. It was just seemed a neat way of putting things together. And I managed to take it all the way through to the end. After I’d finished Grand Gypsy, we went off to Florida, where I managed to fail to win an Olivier Award.
Nancy Norbeck [00:50:23]:
Well, I was amazed that you managed to make that structure work the whole way through.
Peter Davison [00:50:28]:
There always seemed to be something in the present that called up the past. So that’s an impressive feat. Well, that’s what best informed the past, what informed what I was talking about, really. And there were days of things that were missed out, you know, it wasn’t so that, you know, obviously things didn’t happen every day, but when they did happen, then they, well, that’s when I would connect it with the thing that happened and I was writing about in the book. I enjoyed the whole process. And I did write every, well, I’m very proud that I wrote every 1 myself. And then we had battles with publishers over titles of the books. It was just it was very silly because they want to sell. So they want they wanted big pictures of the TARDIS on the front. And, you know, we are arguing over the title. They didn’t understand the subtitle. An Act of Despair, which is from Stanislavski, an Act of Prepares, which is the famous acting book that you get given. My mother gave it to me actually, believe it or not. Yeah, I did think about updating it at some point, but I don’t know if it’ll be worth it. 1 thing I really am disappointed with, which I hope to put right at some point, probably too late, is that normally, they rang me up afterwards and said, do you want to read the audio book? I said, yeah, sure. They said, okay, We’re doing it on whatever it was, September the 23rd or some such date. And I said, I’m busy on that day, I can’t do it, I’m working. They said, okay. So then I assumed they would come back with another date. Instead, they just got someone else in to read it. So I felt the book wasn’t really done justice to in the audio format.
Nancy Norbeck [00:52:24]:
Well, it’s interesting because I looked to see if there was an audiobook with you reading it and was kind of surprised that there wasn’t. But as I said to a friend of mine once I started reading it, because I said, you should read this, it’s really delightful. And I said, there’s no audio with him reading it, but it’s okay, because read it, it sounds exactly like him. You will hear him in your head and it’s fine.
Peter Davison [00:52:46]:
Oh, that’s good. I mean, I would have done it if I’d been free, but I don’t understand why they didn’t assume it. It’s a very bizarre situation. I think he was Scottish. I think he’s actually reading in a Scottish accent.
Nancy Norbeck [00:52:58]:
It does seem odd that they wouldn’t have made it. Yeah, I know.
Peter Davison [00:53:03]:
Anyway, that’s 1 of the things. But yeah. So did my wife talk about this? We’re now writing a book. No, she didn’t. She didn’t? No. I don’t even know. It might not even come to anything. I mean, at the moment, it’s basically us arguing with each other about what should be in any chapter.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:26]:
I’m waiting for the response from the back room. I’m starting to think the 2 of you should have your own show.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:31]:
Yeah.
Peter Davison [00:53:34]:
Basically, we should do. Just the discussions are interesting. So what happened was she writes these romantic sagas and I was asked by the Romantic Saga, whatever it is, society, to present the awards, the Romantic Saga Awards this year, which I did, got rather jet lagged. I hadn’t just come back from America. And at the dinner, the publisher said, you know, why don’t you 2 write a crime book, a crime novel? Because I used to read a lot of those. And she’s written a lot of books, and I’ve written my autobiography. So anyway, so we sat down to write it, and we got about 15, 000 words, I think. But there’s a lot of discussion about what should be in and what shouldn’t be in, and how 1 should describe these things. And sometimes the arguments can get quite heated and then we just give up and have a cup of coffee and go back to work. But it’s, I’m not sure, I think it’s a creative argument we have. It’s not very healthy and as you say, it shouldn’t really be televised. But we’ll see. Yeah, I don’t know if anything will come of it, but I’m enjoying it. But
Nancy Norbeck [00:55:04]:
well, I’ll keep my eye out for it.
Peter Davison [00:55:07]:
Yeah. Right. OK. Either either that or some heinous murder committed in this in this house because we’re over syntax.
Nancy Norbeck [00:55:19]:
I hope not. No, he won’t.
Peter Davison [00:55:22]:
It’s absolutely fine. But it’s quite funny. Well, and you did also write
Nancy Norbeck [00:55:27]:
the wonderful, I’m going to call it a love letter to fans that was the 5ish doctors reboot. Oh, yes, yes, yes,
Peter Davison [00:55:34]:
yes. Which was a surprise. Yeah, I think it was a surprise to everyone, really. I mean, I had this idea. I’d done, originally I’d done 2 very short videos that I think are at somewhere on Vimeo or something like that, which were for, in the old days, Gallifrey 1 Convention in California. And 1 year I was invited, in 2010, I was invited by Sean to come over and I couldn’t go because I was in a play, I was in a legally blocked in the West End. And so he said, could you do a short video, you know, saying, sorry, I can’t be there. It turned into about a five-minute, six-minute video, funny video about why I couldn’t get there. Then the following year when I could go, I thought I’d do another video about me arriving in the TARDIS, and I actually then appeared out of the thing. So I got used to doing these sort of videos. And then when the 50th came around, I just thought it’d be quite fun to just do a little story, just filming with my home video camera, which is how the others were done. And, But I thought I needed to film in Cardiff. So I sent the script off to Stephen Moffat saying, is it possible to spend just a day shooting little bits? They got hold of it. Faith Penhall got hold of it and said, I’d like this to be, you know, part of the celebrations. And they literally, they said, we’ll give you a budget of 25, 000. Sounded like an enormous amount of money to me. And then you sit down with 1 organizer, the production manager, and It’s gone. It’s gone in like an instant. But I had a brilliant woman who worked in the doctoring office at the time called Katie Player, who really arranged the whole thing for us. And as I went on, I managed to persuade Colin and Sylvester and Paul, who were quite reluctant at first because they just thought it was a bit of nonsense, that it was worth doing. And then by the end, they were really giving up a lot of their time to doing it. And and we got it out in the nick of time. I think I finished everything about 3 days before it went out. And we didn’t know how it would go down at all. And But fortunately, I think it was rather fortunate, we were on this terrible program on the BBC, hosted by people who knew nothing about Doctor Who, and asking companions and doctors really stupid questions. And it was at the end of the, after the special, the 50th anniversary special, had been aired. And so everyone, I think, fans and everyone in the studio, especially the fans out there, were thoroughly depressed by this debacle of random interviews with people and nothing. And then they announced at the end that if they wanted, if anyone wanted to see anything else about Doctor Who, it was on what they basically called the red button. So I think because the fans were so depressed by this program that we’d all been involved in, it was just nonsense, they all pressed the red button and there came up this thing which they didn’t expect, which they overreacted to in spectacular terms. So they were going, oh my God, this is amazing. This is the most amazing. But I think we were helped by the appallingness of the BBC thing that had gone out. And so it just, it seemed to grow in people’s imaginations of how good this thing was. And it was great, Bjorn, it was funny. I think I was very happy with the way it worked out with the budget we had. But yeah, it was, but this time I thought about doing another 1 this year, but it just proved too difficult, too difficult. The way things are done these days, everyone has to be so careful about what they say. When you write something in a script, they go, no, you can’t say that, you can’t say that. It’s not worth doing. In a way, that’s why it hasn’t happened because there was a freedom in that thing to go with the way we wanted. I mean, we were still getting notes from BBC execs, which we ignored for the most part, and then they just gave up. And so it went out largely as we wanted as I wanted it to. But nowadays that everyone is running so scared of everything. You’re just told all the time you can’t do this, you can’t say that, you can’t have that, You can’t have that person in it. He said something at some point. And it just becomes a pointless exercise. So I suppose my own way by failing to do it, I’ve contributed to the miserable 20s.
Nancy Norbeck [01:01:16]:
So I’m sorry about that. But it just couldn’t be. Well, that’s a shame. But at the same time, I feel like, you know, if you were only going to get 1 shining moment to have that magic happen, I think you achieved that, And I think that you achieved it beautifully.
Peter Davison [01:01:36]:
Thank you very much. But I would. And I will. The other thing is, I wouldn’t want to have done it unless I believe it could be as good or better as the first 1. And I think that was always going to be very difficult to do, simply because everyone in that first 1 gave their time for free. You know, all the actors came in for nothing. And I don’t know how easy that would have been for them to do again. And I would have wanted to be sure that it could be as good or better, as I say. And I don’t think it would have been. So Well, and I think
Nancy Norbeck [01:02:16]:
it really did feel like a love letter. You know, it was so obvious that you guys were doing it because you wanted to. And I remember seeing on, it must have been on Twitter, the day that you were all out with the protest signs. And none of us had any idea what was going on. And people were like, what are they doing? What are they doing? Because we did, we thought, are they serious? They’re really upset. What’s going on? And then when we finally saw it and it turned up in there. It was like we finally were in on the joke and it was fantastic. But the whole the whole thing and and the way that you know you roped that son in law into, you know, looking like he had been roped into it And all of it was just just it couldn’t I don’t think it could have come together much more perfectly if you know,
Peter Davison [01:03:07]:
I get a choice. Yeah. The thing is, I also felt that it was my kind of love as well as well as it was obviously Colin’s and Paul’s and David’s as well. But I felt it was I felt quite personally about it because of maybe what you were talking about earlier, that maybe sometimes people don’t take my Doctor Quite seriously. I wanted to sort of say that I had been a fan of this series since it started really. And I wanted to say that it does mean to me, something to me as well, but it’s very important to me that I did this and that I showed that I do like the whole business. In a way, the whole fandom business is extraordinary because it’s so, you know, it’s like a haven for anyone with any sort of troubles. Not only for genuine science fiction fans, but for people who I always think, you know, you meet them, obviously people at conventions should have trouble sort of interacting with people. And yet now that they find themselves in this family of Doctor Who, going back, it was quite a small family because, you know, while Star Trek was much bigger, Doctor Who was quite small. Doctor Who has expanded now. But in that first instance, you know, it was people who were devoted. And it was a haven for all sorts of weird and wonderful people. And it still is. But it’s just got, it’s sort of got bigger. So I, and everyone was so just accepting of everybody and in that, within that fan, that fandom, it was, it was great. And you would go along in the old days Because we didn’t know any better maybe, you know, you just spend the entire weekend sitting around with all the fans. You know, as it’s got bigger, that’s become more difficult. In those days, it was like a large family of weirdos and we were another group of weirdos. There’s something great about weirdos. I suppose it was sort of before the rise of the nerd, wasn’t it, really? Now, in those days, nerds were kind of like, ooh, they’re a nerd. But now, he’s a nerd. It’s now a pretty wonderful thing to be. You know, my son really does count himself a nerd and is damn proud of it. So now, you know, you have now, you know, the nerd shall inherit the earth, I suppose.
Nancy Norbeck [01:05:52]:
I think that’s true. And I think that’s 1 of the really cool things that I don’t think is limited to just a Doctor Who fandom these days, where, You know, you can go to a con and meet the people who’ve made the show as well as the other people who love it like you do, and you’re all in it together. There isn’t that sense that, oh, you know, they’re just here to be on the panel and then there’s the rest of us. There really is that sense that, yeah, you know, you can go have a conversation with Peter Davison and he gets why you love the show just as much as you do. And, you know, when I talked to Paul McGann a couple of years ago, he talked about how he loves hearing the stories of, you know, how that show has has impacted people’s lives and, you know, what it’s done for them. And I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of those, too. Oh, lots of them, yes.
Peter Davison [01:06:40]:
You know, I mean, you don’t quite know what to say when people come up. You know, we met and fell in love and got married after meeting you. It’s my pleasure. Thank you. But no, it is very, very nice. And you do get, I know, she’s the sweetest girl who’s just, just spent an entire time, when I should have been talking to her, just crying. Because I was there and you want to say, this is nothing special, just me. But then you think, is that a wrong thing to say? Because it’s the idea that they want you to be something special and different. I never quite know how to handle that. You don’t want to let someone down when they meet you. You want to live up to their expectation, but you’re never quite sure what their expectations are. Right. So I just try and talk to people, come out and just talk to them. Right. You know, but then I, when people get so emotional, I’m not awfully good at handling it. I sort of, I go a bit British, you know, oh, it’ll be fine. Just take a deep breath.
Nancy Norbeck [01:07:54]:
Well, I will say the first time I met you was at Long Island 2 in 2016. And it was the photo op with you and Colin and Paul and I did reach over to shake your hand and say you got me through high school because you did. And that was when I started writing. I started writing my own Doctor Who stories with Fifth Doctor and Teagan and Turlough, and that was how I got started.
Peter Davison [01:08:20]:
And it was an escape. And that’s always, yes, absolutely. That’s always lovely to hear, and it makes you feel good. But I never, I’m not, I’m not going to get a hand in it. So I don’t know why I said I was, oh, but I’m going to get a hand in it. No, you were great. And then Colin got very jealous
Nancy Norbeck [01:08:36]:
because I had no idea at that point that you guys had your little rivalry thing going on. And so that made it very interesting. But but, you know, And I’m sure that there are plenty of people out there who, you know, have a very similar story, got their start writing or acting or whatever because of something that they saw you guys do or or the Star Trek folks or whoever it was. Well, look at it now. We look at the you know, the 2 out of the last 3
Peter Davison [01:09:02]:
showrunners, you know. Well, Russell T. So Russell T. Davis, Stephen Moffat, crazy Doctor Who fans. The lunatics are running the asylum.
Nancy Norbeck [01:09:16]:
Well, that’s true of much of Big Finish too. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, yes, they’re completely nuts. Which I think is great. It’s like, wow, look, the fans that turned it into a real thing, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Amazing.
Peter Davison [01:09:30]:
Yes. I got an email yesterday from the guy who does the extras for the Blu-ray releases, DVDs, and they’re working on the 20th season now, which we’ve done. I think he must just be editing. But he’s just being… We did a trip from London to Germany, Janet, Sarah and myself, in a car, where we just basically argued the entire time. There’s a pattern emerging here, isn’t there? I’m arguing with Janet. Anyway, He said it was originally meant to be 20 minutes long, but it’s now 75 minutes long on the DVD. He said because I couldn’t cut any of it because it’s all so ridiculously funny. Because we just never stopped playing like that. So yeah. So we’re all crazy. That’s what I’m saying. It’s wonderful. So whether you’ve turned me up, crazy or we’ve made you crazy, I don’t know. It all works out terribly well. Yeah, I think it’s perfect.
Nancy Norbeck [01:10:47]:
Perfect the way it is. All right, okay. Well, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. This has been a blast.
Nancy Norbeck [01:10:57]:
That’s our show. Thanks so much to Peter Davison and to you for joining me. Please leave a review for this episode. There’s a link in your podcast app, and in it, tell us what you’d like the new Roaring 20s to look like. If you enjoyed our conversation, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. Thanks so much.
Nancy Norbeck [01:11:15]:
If this episode resonated with you, don’t forget to get in touch on any of my social platforms or even via email at Nancy@fycuriosity.com Tell me what you loved and if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now and you haven’t yet signed up for my free email series on 6 of the most common creative beliefs that are messing you up, please check it out. It’ll untangle those myths and help you get rolling again. You can find it at fycuriosity.com, and there’s also a link right in your podcast app. See you there and see you next week. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever
Nancy Norbeck [01:12:15]:
you get your podcasts. It really helps me reach new listeners.