Q&A

Various dates and venues

MICHAEL PARKINSON (1980)³³⁵: You have an extraordinary range of interests and you move between theatre and opera and films and television; you range from documentaries about the human body, to this new venture of yours – the [BBC] Shakespeare thing.³³⁶ It seems to me not to have a unifying theme, but is there one, to yourself?

MILLER: Yes, and there always has been, in that I’ve always been interested just simply in the way in which – it sounds very pompous, this, but I really mean it very strongly – I’m interested in the way in which this peculiar part of nature has come together with the nervous system and is capable of understanding the rest of nature, and of acting inside nature, and the thing that’s always interested me is the way in which the nervous system actually performs, and how we get around, how we understand and how we act – acting in real life or acting on the stage – and all of these things intrigue me, and I’m just simply interested in performance of every sort, whether it’s performance in real life or performance on the stage, and the representation of behaviour and the details of human natural history.

ROBERT BOOTH (1988)337: How do you feel about first nights? What happens to you? The cast is on the stage, who are suffering first night nerves and so on, but you’re responsible for the production, aren’t you?

MILLER: I get nervous on the first night, partly because my tension doesn’t have the opportunity of being discharged in action, which of course is what happens to the performer. The performer may be juddering with fear before they go on and it may even last for the first half of the first scene, but once they’re performing, their nerves usually go because they are somehow relieved by the action of simply doing it. All I can do is pace around at the back. I’ve never actually attended one of my own first nights.

BOOTH: Why not?

MILLER: Partly out of terror and partly out of boredom. The funny thing is that, by the time you’ve rehearsed the play over and over again, the frustration, the tension and the boredom of having seen it so many times without having had the advantages of performing it, make it really almost impossible for me to attend the performance. I’ll hang around at the back. I’ll even go to the cinema, or out to dinner. But what I won’t do is sit in the auditorium, hypersensitive to the slightest rustle, the slightest restlessness, and feel ‘Oh God, they’re not liking it.’

BOOTH: Will you come back for the last five minutes?

MILLER: I will sometimes come back for the last five minutes, but I don’t really even like that, because I don’t like to hear the amount of applause. It never seems to me to be quite enough.

RICHARD BLACK (2001)338: Does it bother you as an opera director that ‘bums on seats’ – getting the public in – is as important as doing what you want to do with a work?

MILLER: That’s always been a problem when you make things. You have to get people to pay for it. You have to get people to pay you and you have to get people to pay for the paint or whatever you’re doing. That’s always been a difficulty. In fact, in some respects it’s easier now than it was, say, 150 years ago, when the state felt no responsibility to pay for these things. There might have been the benevolence of a German prince or graf or duke, who would, as it were, pay for it as an ornament of his court – or when the Medicis paid for it as an ornament of their life and their world.

BLACK: But surely you like the idea that your work is universally appealing? I remember that production of Rigoletto.³³⁹ “La donna è mobile”, the famous aria, began with someone putting a dime into a slot machine.

MILLER: I was pleased that the audience liked it.

BLACK: But it was popular and it seemed self-consciously popular, in a wonderful way.

MILLER: It’s just that that seemed to me to be a nice way of doing it. I didn’t do it because I felt it would be popular. I was doing it because I was a creature of my times who had been soaked in movies and gangster films of that sort, so it was inevitable that I would do it since I was not hidebound by the normal restraints and resistances that a traditional producer might have. He or she might have felt themselves briefly, ‘wouldn’t that be nice to do…but one couldn’t possibly do that.’ Whereas, because I came from outside the operatic world, I was much less restrained and held in by those sorts of compunctions. I felt I could do what I damn well liked!

PARKINSON (2007)³⁴⁰: Did you ever have a chance to go to Hollywood, Jonathan?

MILLER: No. No, I… I was once asked by Peter Sellers to go and meet him while he was making a film, in order to talk about something, and I went on to the set while he was doing the thing and it was about three days after I’d arrived, and there he was, and he suddenly saw me through the lights. (Waves.) ‘Oh, hi! What are you doing here?’ He’d completely forgotten that he’d asked me to come. He was completely potty.

PARKINSON: He was mad, yes.

MILLER: I directed him once when I did the film of Alice in Wonderland. He played the King of Hearts, and he was absolutely mad then. It was very hard to get him on to the set because on one occasion, for example, he’d arrived, and a black cat had gone across the road in front of his Rolls Royce, and therefore he’d consulted his astrologer, who said that he ought to spend at least three hours readjusting himself to the possible tragic outcomes of this encounter between the Rolls and the cat. It was very hard to get him back on to the set to film with him.

He was barmy but brilliantly talented. He improvised wonderful stuff in Alice in Wonderland. We had one wonderful moment when we were doing the trial scene and Wilfrid Brambell was playing the White Rabbit – we got rid of all the animal masks, you see – and Wilfrid Brambell said, ‘Oh, this letter’s just been picked up.’ (Played it very gay, you see.) And Sellers said, ‘Who’s it from?’ ‘It’s not addressed to anyone.’ That was in Lewis Carroll. And Sellers then said, ‘Well it must be addressed to somebody.’ He said, ‘I mean, you can’t just write to nobody. If everyone did that all the time, well, I mean, the Post Office would come to a standstill.’ That was absolutely off the top of his head. Wonderful.

DICK CAVETT (1980)341: You have as far as I know never directed movies, and that’s supposed to be the hot medium that everyone finally wants to get into: cinema and celluloid.

MILLER: Well, I’ve got into celluloid several times but only as it were for the BBC. I’ve never ‘worked for the majors,’ mainly because one has to encounter these awful sort of weight-reducing figures in the front office who always say (leans forward, fixed stare) ‘We’re very excited by your project,’ and this huge sort of Easter Island face confronts you with its excitement. I remember once having to go to see some extraordinary figure once in London, because I was trying to make a film of Alice in Wonderland, and I was ambitious to make it on the big screen so I thought that I would have to go and try to get the money from a big American company. My agent said ‘they’d like you to take a meeting with…’ – agents always want you to ‘take meetings with’ people, rather than have meetings… ‘I’d like you to meet with Mill Frankenstein who’s just taken over Europe for United Artists.’ This sort of Attila-like figure ‘taking it over’! I had to wait in the outer office for a long time and there was this secretary filing her nails, sitting at a strip-pine flower bin converted into a desk. ‘Mr Frankenstein will see you now.’ And I went in to see Mill Frankenstein, who had that terrible thing that those big, big American producers have: they don’t just shake your hand, they incubate it. Have you noticed they do his? (Miller wraps Cavett’s hand with both of his.) In the hope that your hand will hatch in some way. And he gives you a level, sincere stare and a slight head-rock as if it’s on gimbals: ‘We’re very excited by this whole project over at UA.’ And then they said, ‘We’re very concerned to get into the whole zany area. We see Jane Fonda as Alice.’ And then I realized that I had to go to the BBC and try and reconstruct some version of what I had in mind when I thought of the thing.

CAVETT: You did a movie once, I’m told, called Take a Girl Like You.

MILLER: Oh, I knew it would come up! (Writhes in pain.) Well, yes, I did have one brush with the majors. I did a film of a Kingsley Amis novel and it was an absolute disaster, I’m afraid. It was very heavily pressed on by the front office and there was a producer who wanted certain things… I mean, the terrible scenes I had to do… I had to do a kissing scene, shall we say, in which Hayley Mills and Oliver Reed had to get into some sort of carnal contact with one another. And I directed it, I thought, rather delicately. It wasn’t a chaste scene, by any means, but nevertheless there was a certain amount of hand-lightly-on-breast at one point. My producer said (coarse, booming American) ‘No! Get in close on that hand!’ And I said, ‘No, there’s no need to do that at all. I think the audience can see even on a wide-angle lens that what he’s doing is what he’s doing.’ ‘No, you’re not making television! Get it right in there and show it.’ And I said, ‘I am not going to do a close-up of that hand on that breast.’ ‘I’ll take them away and do it myself!’ (In a side room, a hand-on-breast room…) Fortunately, my actors were very loyal to me and Hayley Mills was not going to lend her breast to this cutaway, and Oliver Reed wasn’t going to lend his hand to it either. So I thought for a moment that I’d got away with it until I was seeing the rushes the next day. Suddenly, in the middle of the rushes which I’d shot of this wide-angle scene, quite suddenly, there was an enormous hand clawing a breast. And indeed it was Oliver Reed’s hand, and, from what I could tell, Hayley Mills. But I noticed that… ‘I didn’t shoot that, and I know they hadn’t shot it…’ Then I suddenly realized from the grain of the thing that, actually, what the producer had done was he’d taken a frame from my wide-angle shot and blown up the section where the hand was on the breast. So it looked like captured Nazi atrocity film, you know. And I believe it’s still in the film; the whole film suddenly changes its optical quality, and there’s this extraordinary hand with grain dancing across it. I realized then that there was really no point in being in the movie industry.

DR KEVIN PATRICK (1987)342: Norman Cousins has stated that medical students typically arrive at medical school in a state of what he calls educational disequilibrium. They have emphasized, much to their detriment, science over the humanities. They have had little training in human behaviours. Would you care to comment on this, and if you could design a medical educational process, how would you do that in ways that would perhaps deal with this problem?

MILLER: It’s very easy to start designing medical programmes from a distance when you haven’t really got to make it stick, so that most of the ideas that I might have are sort of utopian transfers, really. I do think there are problems about people coming into medicine the way that they do, perhaps because they’re trained in science first. I’m not certain that a training in the humanities actually makes them into better doctors. I think that reading Middlemarch doesn’t actually make you into a better person, and science may not actually pre-empt the possibility of being a sympathetic person either. I actually think the problem is that you get people too young. Not that they’re ignorant by being scientists, but probably people start too young. I know that they start later in the United States and that they have to be graduates before they can become MDs. Even so, I think probably it’s too early. I wouldn’t let anyone really lay hands on patients until they were 30. I just think that the most important experience you have to have is just simply living life. I don’t think a course in the humanities necessarily helps you. I think there’s a prevailing belief, perhaps stronger in the United States than it is in England, that you could actually legislate for improvements in personality. You could just set up ideal conditions to make people warm, relating, nice people who would be naturally good at the bedside.

I remember once seeing an example of this when I was doing Così Fan Tutte in St Louis. I went to Barnes Hospital on a grand round on the maximum patients’ surgical floor, where people were suffering and undergoing really the most appalling and mutilative operations for carcinomas of the upper respiratory tract. There were also problems with the young interns and the young residents having to confront these things. There were plans to have psychiatric sessions for the benefit of the residents and the interns. I really found myself objecting very much to the scheme. It seemed to me to be typical of what I think is happening today, that you can actually set up programmes to fix things, to get people to be less disturbed by, or more responsive to, say, mutilating operations. I don’t think it’s a matter of psychiatry. It’s actually a matter of encouraging the imagination in some ways, and that’s not necessarily done best by expert systems. I would dread having a psychiatrist tell me how to adjust myself to the idea that half of someone’s face was going to be taken away. I think that the way you do this is by using plain English very clearly and saying, ‘What you’re going to see is someone with half of their face not there. Try and imagine what it’s like having a skin graft which results in your nipple growing out of your tongue.’ This is what I saw in the ward there. But instead there are these elaborate expert-system circumlocutions to remove, which are supposed to actually train these kids into sensitive human beings. Actually, I don’t think there is any way of legislating for it. I don’t think programmes in humanities do it either. You can read Middlemarch until you are blue in the face, but I don’t think you’ll do better at the bedside. I think actually what does make people better at the bedside is just simply living out some other form of existence before you are allowed the privilege of laying hands on someone else’s body. I think people come to it too early. I just think that a whippersnapper of 22 who is allowed to ask someone whether their sex life is very good…it’s an impudence. I think that these are intimate questions. I think people ought to be qualified to ask people the questions. It’s a great privilege to have access to someone else’s body and someone else’s privacy, and I don’t like the idea of a young punk being allowed to do that simply because he’s wearing a white coat. We robe people in white coats and stethoscopes and give them reins of office. This licenses them to intrude in ways in which we normally would hit them in the face for asking such questions if they weren’t wearing white coats. I really think that we ought to start later.

ELEANOR WACHTEL (2000)343: I get the sense that you’re mocked for being brainy and then you’re disdained by the pure scientists.

MILLER: I do feel caught between two fires. In theatre or in journalism – where you are criticized by people who, in fact, are not your peers – you are either envied or despised for being what they call ‘brainy.’ So I can read without moving my lips and make references to things that are outside my field of expertise, and I’m called a polymath – which is really another way of saying jack of all trades and master of none. But I’m usually accused of that by people who are barely jacks of one trade.

WACHTEL: You said that to lay claim to being an intellectual is stating an occupation, but in England there’s an uneasiness with intellectuals and it’s regarded as a boast. Why do you think that is?

MILLER: I don’t know why there’s such suspicion of organized and often difficult thought. One can become quite fascinated by things which actually defeat all analysis, like being able to speak fluently and grammatically. What goes into speech is much more complicated than it seems to us as performers. That’s one of the things that Chomsky drew our attention to. Now, you start to invoke a name like Chomsky amongst English journalists, and they say, ‘Yeah, yeah, Chomsky, Chimsky… Just a blabbermouth.’ The people who say that are not clever enough to understand what Chomsky did – that he actually drew attention to the fact that we can do things which seem second nature, which seem dead simple, but are actually very complicated. That what allows us to do them is something that currently defeats analysis. We may be able to invent computers that can play games of chess, but we’re not very smart at inventing computers which can see that this sentence might mean at least five things. If it’s as difficult as it turns out to be, then it’s worth being difficult about it. But that’s thought to be pretentious and stuck-up in England; a way of just strutting around. A bit of strutting around is quite useful, really. A lot of interesting things have happened by strutting around.

WACHTEL: Is there a place for public intellectuals?

MILLER: In England, yes, but they have to have a certain sort of form. On the whole, people who cross boundaries and see connections between more than two things are thought to be pretentious. It’s regrettable and it’s rather sad. It’s quite hard to live in a country where most journalists think it’s acceptable to use the word pseud, from that ghastly magazine Private Eye. What do they mean if they call something pseud? What do they mean by pseudointellectual? Presumably they have some standard of what being intellectual is, by which you can judge whether something is pseudointellectual. Well, most of the people who invoke the notion of the pseud have a very marginal acquaintance with what it’s like to be an intellectual at all, or they think it’s just as simple as being able to read Anthony Trollope.

WACHTEL: Is it any better in North America? Here we would probably think it’s better in England.

MILLER: In North America there’s a much more generous accommodation to the idea of cross-disciplinary interests, to moving from one field to another and seeing that they are closely related to one another – that thoughtfulness, in fact, is valuable and interesting and productive. This is not necessarily because it’s materially productive – producing laptops, for example – but because what goes into making laptops helps us to think about what it’s like to have a mind. On the whole, North Americans are much more hospitable to these sorts of cross-references, and they don’t think it’s pretentious. They delight in it and they like to see people making smart moves. I like that. I think that it’s one of the reasons why America has been as explosively successful, intellectually and technically, as it has been. If you’re bending over backwards to appear reticent, modest and a decent English gent, the result of it is that you don’t actually do anything.

PARKINSON (1977)344: When did you get your first opportunity to be a director?

MILLER: It was by accident. George Devine, who was directing the Royal Court at that time, was looking for someone to direct one half of a double bill of John Osborne plays, and I believe that they had hawked it around and hadn’t been able to find a director.³⁴⁵ So, finally, scraping the bottom of the barrel, they said: ‘Why don’t we try one of those Fringe fellows?’ and the script was sent to me through the post.

I hadn’t even directed a play before, and I had no idea of what one did; there were all sorts of anxieties about words, and so forth. ‘Blocking.’ People kept on using the word ‘blocking’ to me. I met John Dexter – who was directing the other half – after about the third week, and he said, ‘Well, I’ve finished the blocking now. How about you?’ I said, ‘Ah, well. Um – ah, yes…ah, yes. Re the blocking – I’m hoping to get round to that, perhaps, just before we open…’ And I began to be very anxious that, if I asked the actors about the blocking – ‘Are you missing the blocking here?’ – they would wonder about my competence. Then I still hadn’t blocked anything, whatever it was, and so I would just have to wait for those frightful reviews saying: ‘This brilliant play of Osborne’s was marred by an incompetent sense of blocking.’ It seemed to go all right, so, from that day on, I’ve never blocked a thing – not knowingly.

SUE LAWLEY (2005)³⁴⁶: Trivia is what you’re concentrating on artistically, isn’t it? You do collages and sculptures made up of bits of old rubbish, detritus.

MILLER: Well, I wouldn’t think of it as art, really. I like pieces of faded, coloured typography, and I began putting them together again in geometrical assemblies.³⁴⁷ I’m deeply influenced in some ways by something which is completely out of date now. (Everything about me, I suppose, is out of date.) I’m an early-twentieth-century modernist, in the sense that those are the people that excite me, and I think I’m still under the influence when I start making my own compositions, and I do things out of wood and I do things out of paper, and metal now.

NORMAN LEBRECHT (2009)348 You direct, you write, you sculpt, you paint. It sounds almost too much for one life, but you don’t believe in that any more?

MILLER: No – I do them all one after another. In a way I’m a sort of grasshopper. A much better title than polymath. It’s just that I get taken up by something which intrigues me, or accept an invitation to do something. And I simply say, ‘Well, why not?’ I think perhaps if I’d concentrated more on one or two things I might have done them better, though I’m quite proud of some of the things I’ve done in the theatre, in the opera. I do think they’re actually rather good; though, or if not because I say it myself!

BISHOP RICHARD HOLLOWAY (1987)³⁴⁹: One of the ways that we handle [death] is to act out our grief in appropriate ceremonies: funeral services and memorials. Do you have any ideas about how you want to be memorialized in that way?

MILLER: I’m very glad you’ve raised that question because I do think that funerals for the godless are dreadful affairs. I do deplore these increasingly frequent visits which I make to crematoria around London to see my godless friends off the map. We are at a loss for words and ceremonies and ways of somehow dignifying it. We collect scraps and anthologies of poems that he or she might have liked. Bits of music which he or she might have liked. And they sound like benefits for a theatrical charity, and we climb on buses and go away and feel that something was missing, and yet I cannot subscribe to the ceremonies which in fact are wholeheartedly undertaken by those who believe. I sit enviously at the back of funerals conducted in churches or in synagogues or in cemeteries where there is a minister and feel, how nice it would be if I could subscribe to all that. But I know that for people like myself, one must just endure one’s going hence and know that it’s going to be a scrappy, suburban business.

HOLLOWAY: You’re not going to leave any directions then?

MILLER: Well, in one’s wilder moments, like these desert island disc³⁵⁰ ideas of heaven, of course one does – as a parlour game, like Trivial Pursuits, it is the most trivial of all pursuits inventing one’s own secular funeral service in which one says, ‘I’d like very much to hear…’ but since I won’t be there, ‘I’d like them to hear…’ the wedding canon from Così Fan Tutte, the quartet from the first act of Fidelio. But in fact, as one goes on, one realizes what one’s doing in concocting this posthumous event is actually, really, putting on costume jewellery. It’s a species of vanity. It’s a way of saying ‘My word, this was a sensitive fellow that is now being conducted to the grave!’

HOLLOWAY: No, people love you and they will want to affirm your life and their grief and take leave of you and that there is a way of doing that in dignity.

MILLER: In which case, then, I hope that it’s up to them. But the idea of someone before death compiling their own exequies and putting together an anthology is, I think, a species of vanity. It’s a way of combing one’s hair and adjusting one’s parting and putting on a really nice tie and something which shows off the colour of one’s eyes. It’s a way of showing how smart, how clever, how sensitive one was, and might continue to be in this afterlife which you’ve invited me to believe in. But it’s a good parlour game. It’s a good trivial pursuit. It’s a good after-dinner conversation.

MARK LAWSON (2007)351: I wasn’t sure what to call you, because since 2002 you could be Sir Jonathan. I think of you as Dr Miller. When they offer you, on those websites, the little drop-down menu, what do you take?

MILLER: Well I usually just have my name, Jonathan, and sometimes – because I’m proud of being a doctor – I quite like…because it was a qualification which I earned by exam. The other thing…one doesn’t know how one earns it, or indeed if one ever did! And therefore I never use it at all.

LAWSON: Some people don’t take them at all. I think it’s known that Michael Frayn the playwright said ‘no,’ as others have, but you took the knighthood.

MILLER: Yes. It’s very interesting the people who didn’t, but nevertheless it’s known that they refused, so that they have the advantage of the honour and also the reputation of a sort of social chastity of refusing. It seemed to me to be reasonable to accept and it was quite nice going to the Palace and having all that…dubbing going on, and seeing people being called in one by one. ‘Miss Elaine Shilders for services to the hard of hearing in Cumbria: an OBE.’ So it was quite a good thing to watch.

LAWSON: And at the moment of dubbing, what was said to you?

MILLER: Well there was rather a marvellous moment. Perhaps I’m going to be executed for saying this, but, as I rose unsteadily to my feet, at the age that I am, and one shakes hands with Prince Charles, he said ‘I gather you’re not working that much in the United Kingdom at the moment?’ I said ‘No.’ And then he turned to one side and said, ‘I wish I was in your shoes.’

CAVETT (1980)352: Were you brought up religious?

MILLER: It was a Jewish family that I was born into, and I say that as if to say I’m not Jewish, and in a sense I am trying to say that because although my family were Jewish and I am genetically Jewish, I have absolutely no subscription to the creed and no interest in the race. I don’t believe in race and I find racial notions objectionable but I can’t think of myself as being Jewish in that way. I’m Jewish for the purpose of admitting it to anti-Semites, and that’s all. It’s something that, if it matters to someone else that I am, then yes, all right, ‘Do you want to do something about it?’ But I’m not prepared to be Jewish in the face of other Jews.

CAVETT: Have you ever been in that position that was in Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes in which he was at a wealthy country home…

MILLER: And people makes anti-Semitic remarks? Yes, I’ve heard people make anti-Semitic remarks in my presence, because I don’t look like what people who are anti-Semitic tend to think Jews look like, and therefore they tend to tell me all sorts. I remember one marvellous episode once, when I went to my bank manager to ask for some sort of investment advice – a vacuous thing for me to ask for – and he said, ‘Well, look. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll get you some fellow down from the City who will give you some chat about this.’ And so a strange, flushed, blue-eyed sea-captain-like figure appeared who was a big investment figure from the City, and he said, ‘Have you had any advice up to now on your investments?’ I said, ‘No. Well, I did know someone…’ and I mentioned the name of a well-known Jewish commodity merchant, and I said, ‘Well, I’ve had some advice from him.’ ‘Oh yes, well that’s a very sound opinion. A very sound opinion. A bit of a hook-nose, but a very sound opinion.’ Well, now. I didn’t find that I was personally offended by that remark. I didn’t feel he was getting at my race. I found it offensive as just simply a human being to hear people discriminating on those grounds. Anti-Semitic remarks don’t offend me vis-à-vis my Jewishness, but vis-à-vis my humanity.

CAVETT: You didn’t feel obliged to say, ‘What did you say?’

MILLER: ‘Now, look here! I’m Jewish. I’m as Jewish as you are…I’m sorry, I’ll put it another way. I’m as Jewish as you’re not, let’s put it that way.’ But I do find it very paradoxical, the idea of being Jewish in England if in fact one doesn’t actually participate in Jewish life or have an interest in Israel or do all the things, in fact, which your interested Jewish friends – one’s committedly Jewish friends – think one ought to do. And often I find myself in great conflict with my relatives over the fact that I don’t stand up and count as a Jew. As I say, I will only stand up and count myself as a Jew for the purpose of putting down anti-Semites. But it doesn’t interest me to join the Jews for the purpose of any solidarity. I don’t think the solidarity is important. I don’t think it prevents holocausts, for example. And I think that one of the things which I find objectionable about holocausts was the moment when one of the characters in the Holocaust found, when execution was going on on the other side of the wall, that he couldn’t say the Mourner’s Prayer. ‘I’ve forgotten the words,’ he said, and his friends looked pityingly at him, as if somehow, if only he had kept up his Jewish commitment, he would have known the prayers and could have kept his solidarity. I think that’s an invidious idea, that somehow his humanity was vitiated by the fact that he hadn’t kept up his subscriptions to the Jewish race. You keep up your humanity by keeping up your subscriptions to the human race, and if you don’t feel an immediate allegiance to your own racial group for religious reasons, I don’t think it’s any reason to feel guilty that you’ve actually assimilated into the group where you live, which is what I have done in England. And it may well be that I shall learn at some future date that I will be dug out and identified as a Jew and burnt for it, but that’s their problem not mine. And in a way anti-Semitism is the problem of anti-Semites, rather than Jews.

PARKINSON (1977)353: Was your stammer very bad as a child, Jonathan?

MILLER: It always got troublesome when I was on trains or on buses, having to ask for my fare; and then there were all these stammerers’ circumlocutions that I had to go through.

The awful thing about stammering is that you never know which consonants are going to be the fatal ones. You think that you’ve got it all taped – avoid T-s and D-s today, and it’ll be all right. Then, suddenly, you find that you’d be tripping up over an N. I remember once having a very bad time with initial M-s, which made the noise that tube trains make when they’re waiting – a sort of Westinghouse stammer – and, very foolishly under the circumstances, travelling to Marble Arch. I could see the conductor coming down the corridor towards me and I knew that I would have to say ‘M-M-M-’, and, finally, as often happens with stammerers, a fantastic act of creation took place. I said ‘One to the arch that is made of marble, please.’

I used to have to go to Swiss Cottage, which was all right on M days, but there were times when – ‘Sw-Sw-Sw-’ – you produced this sound of a bath house. So what I had to do was either to get off unnecessarily soon and walk the rest of the way, or else find that the only station I could possibly get to was somewhere like Wembley Park. So I was given extra fare money by my parents to cover this. I would simply take a long journey out to Wembley Park and then aim as near as I could for Swiss Cottage or Finchley Road. But then, by the time I got out at Wembley Park, my stammer had changed to initial F, and I would have to go out to Dollis Hill again. Now I have a Red Rover, fortunately.

KIRSTY WARK (2004)³⁵⁴: Are you terrified of boredom?

MILLER: No, I’m not terrified of it. I’m frequently a victim of it. I descend into these things which the medieval theologians refer to as acedia – long periods of staring sightlessly at nothing and wondering what on earth is worth doing, and then something would get me going again. Acedia and activity are alternating forms of my own existence. I don’t dread one and relish the other. It’s just that I find myself alternating between acedia and activity.

PARKINSON (1977)355: You went to America for the first time with Beyond the Fringe. How much of a culture shock was New York for you?

MILLER: The real shock was comparing the fantasy of America, always seen on films through the back window of Yellow Cabs, with the reality. I remember being amazed by the strange antiquity of New York. It wasn’t the modern, bristling, pristine, clear place that I’d thought. It was actually a rather grimy, nineteenth-century city and, in a way, almost like H. G. Wells’s fantasies about the shape of things to come.

Going to Los Angeles was a fantastic shock. You get this extraordinary distortion of all four dimensions, because the city seems to extend infinitely – for thousands of miles, apparently; it seems to have no limits at all. But, on the other hand, everything is only about five years old. You get this squashing of time and extending of space, so that one is sometimes overwhelmed with the antiquity of something which was built in the 1920s. You go to visit somewhere like Venice, in California, and you feel as if you’re visiting Herculaneum.

PARKINSON: Did you go to any of the sexy, showbiz parties in America that you hear of?

MILLER: There were occasional, rather disreputable parties, set up for entirely sexual purposes. I was once invited to one of those and sat, rather anxiously, on the edge of a bed, in total darkness, while all sorts of grunting and strainings went on. While there were these heaving things one could see occasionally against the slatted blinds, there was this very decorous man, in a white coat, walking around with a silver tray, offering whisky to people who were… And that was all very odd. We started off in perfectly normal light, everyone was talking and chatting about shows, and then suddenly the light went out. There was total silence for about five minutes and then there was this faint rasp and noises and giggles. I sat on the edge of the bed, hoping that I would be seriously interfered with. I hoped I was relaying my desire to those nearest to me, but nothing happened at all.

DR ANTHONY CLARE (1999)356: Seeing what you know about a condition like Alzheimer’s, do you worry about it affecting you, since you so represent in a sense a certain kind of intellectual vitality?

MILLER: Yes. Of course. I think that anyone who has had it in the family thinks, ‘My God, am I…?’ as I forget names or forget telephone numbers or find that I’ve forgotten the name of a painter. I think, ‘A-ha. This is it. I’m on the same slippery slope.’ But I think everyone thinks about that now, and I think anyone who’s had it in the family always, always dreads that. I don’t dread it because I think it’s going to be the fall of a fine mind! Anyone who’s got a mind at all, who could find his way to the front door without advice, dreads the thought that they might in fact fall victim to this.

CLARE: Do you feel any better than you did a few years ago about getting old?

MILLER: Oh, I’ve never been worried about getting old.

CLARE: You were pretty critical of it?

MILLER: Well, I mean, I don’t want to get feeble. I’m not worried about the fact that I have less time left than I once had. I don’t want to go home from the party before the jellies and the musical chairs, and that’s what I always feel about death. But then, looking at so many people who I know who have died recently, you see that on the whole they get to a point where they don’t want the musical chairs. They are prepared to go home before the jellies and the presents are unwrapped.

CLARE: They’re tired.

MILLER: They’re tired, and I hope what happens is that I remain intellectually and physically vigorous and surrounded by my family until the moment when in fact something occurs which makes me think, ‘Well. Bye-bye. Time to get off the bus. This is a request stop.’

LAURIE TAYLOR (2010)357: Do you sometimes think that you might wish that you were a national treasure, like Alan Bennett?

MILLER: I’m rather glad I’m not. I’m quite pleased to be what I think I am, which is a sort of national liability.