This script has been lightly edited for clarity.

 

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob, and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

It’s 1938 and Noele Gordon, Nolly to her friends, sits in a nondescript TV studio. Scottish inventor and engineer John Logie Baird buzzes beside her, the air rife with excitement and anticipation. It’s only then, with a turn of her head, that Nolly makes history, becoming the first woman in the world to appear on color TV.

Fast forward almost four decades and she’s done it all — cinema, stage, thousands of TV episodes, chat shows. But her longest, and arguably most beloved role was as Meg Mortimer in the soap opera drama Crossroads. 

 

CLIP

Nolly: Well, what have you got to say for yourself young lady?

Poppy: It’s very nice to meet you. It’s such a lovely motel.

Nolly: It was once a family home. But when my husband died, 18 years ago, I converted it to survive.

 

Crossroads was a phenomenon in Britain, as viewers raced home three nights a week to catch the backstabbing and betrayals going on at the Crossroads Motel. While the show was notorious for flimsy sets and cheap production values, lead Noele Gordon and the cast gave it their all, and Nolly herself regularly beat out actors from bitter rival Coronation Street at television awards shows.

Yet, despite her remarkable career, talent, and adoration from fans, Nolly was unexpectedly fired from Crossroads in 1981, after 18 successful years. 

 

CLIP

Nolly: This is Noele Gordon speaking.

Jack: Nolly, quite a day.

Nolly: Isn’t it? Yes, uh, how are you?

Jack: Fine, thank you. And you?

Nolly: Well, I am distraught.

Jack: Well, yes. Understandably.

Nolly: Then it’s true?

Jack: Yes.

Nolly: I’ve been sacked?

Jack: Yes.

Nolly: And Meg is going to die?

Jack: Yes.

 

It seems as if no one knows why Nolly was sacked. But also a mystery was how the writers were going to end Meg’s story. Each week, the cast would scour the newly arrived scripts for clues. 

 

CLIP

Jack: Go, go!

Jane: Does it tell us?

Jack: What happens? What happens? It doesn’t say. It doesn’t say!

Susan: There’s got to be clues. We’ve only got two weeks left, Nolly.

Nolly: All it says is that I’m making my will, and leaving everything to you.

 

Nolly, written by Russell T Davies, seeks to answer the questions surrounding Gordon’s sacking, and the three-episode mini-series examines how trailblazing women are placed on pedestals and then brutally torn down. Nolly herself refused to play by the rules, even as Crossroads became a British institution, one that counted among its devoted viewers Paul McCartney, who went so far as to record his own version of the theme song with his band Wings.

This week, we’re joined by Nolly composer Blair Mowat to discuss how he approached writing the music for this eloquent and emotional real-life drama series, for which he earned a BAFTA Television Award nomination for Original Music.

 

Jace Lacob: And this week we are joined by Nolly composer Blair Mowat. Welcome.

Blair Mowat: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on.

Jace Lacob: So you’ve composed the scores for over 200 productions, which is truly staggering to me, everything from Class to After The Flood, Men Up, McDonald & Dodds, to name a few. Before we get into Nolly, I want to look at your work more broadly. Do you see yourself as being incredibly prolific, or is that just the life of a composer?

Blair Mowat: I actually think I probably am quite prolific. I’ve done a lot of stuff, especially for my age. I knew that I wanted to be a composer very early on. So I think that was a big part of it, is that I knew at the age of about 16 or so that I wanted to write music for film and television, and as a result of that, I have worked on a lot of stuff. At the same time as a film and TV composer, you have to learn to write music incredibly fast. And that’s something that I knew that I was going to have to practice and get good at from an early age. So yeah, that’s another thing, that I was kind of honing that skill, so that when there’s a crunch, and there often is a crunch because sometimes the edit is late and that broadcast date does not move. Yeah, you’ve got to move at a really fast pace.

Jace Lacob: You studied harp and piano from age 5. You have degrees from Durham and Bristol. You met renowned composer Philip Glass when you were 15 years old, I believe at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh.

Blair Mowat: Yeah, that’s correct.

Jace Lacob: How formative an experience was that for you?

Blair Mowat: I mean, I’d been a huge fan of his work for a couple of years at that point. I think I was introduced to him possibly by a guy called Kenneth Dempster who was a composition lecturer at one of the universities in Edinburgh and I started doing private lessons with him. And I think it was him who might have introduced me to Philip Glass.

The other possibility is I watched The Truman Show which has some Philip Glass music in it and that’s what got me into Philip Glass as well, because I think they happened roundabout the same time and I was like oh yeah that’s that guy. And so I started diving into his other pieces and getting CDs from the library and stuff like that and I just fell in love with it. And I think it’s partly because a lot of the music that was being pushed on me at that age was very modern classical contemporary stuff, which was very atonal as we say as composers, which basically means dissonant or plinky plonky, to use a layman term.

Jace Lacob: A technical term.

Blair Mowat: Yeah. And I actually really fought against that because I just found it very alienating and it wasn’t really of huge interest to me because I really liked all the textural stuff in the compositions, all the orchestration and the weird sounds and stuff. But the lack of melody, the rallying by 20th century modern concert hall composers against melody to me just didn’t connect. And I wanted to write these big lush, you know, John Williams, romantic film score stuff. And Philip Glass was kind of a rejection of that concert hall music, which was incredibly dissonant, and instead it was playing around with minimalism and repetition, but it was incredibly melodic and it was very cinematic.

And it’s no coincidence that he would then go on to do some film music for productions like The Hours, there’s also Notes on a Scandal as well, which is a great film. And those scores are beautiful film scores in their own right.

Jace Lacob: You studied music beginning at such a young age. Where did the impetus for wanting to actually compose your own music come from?

Blair Mowat: That’s a good question. I think the moment that I kind of realized that I had something that people were noticing in terms of being a composer was when my piano teacher, she went to the bathroom and I was playing my own stuff. And I was an incredibly bad student. I was very bad at doing my scales. I was very bad at practicing my Beethoven and my Mozart and stuff. And when she came back, she was like, oh my God, that was really beautiful. What were you playing? And I was like, it was my own piece, it’s something I’ve been writing. And she was like, wow, you play that so much more beautifully than you play Beethoven.

And she put me in the direction of sort of studying composition and developing that further. Because she saw something within me that wasn’t really there, the passion for practicing the piano itself, and pushed me in the direction of what I do today. So I’m incredibly grateful to her. I’ve had a sort of difficult relationship because I always felt very guilty every week when she would come around for not having done as much practice as I should have done. But she really did sort of set me off on that journey.

Jace Lacob: How do you approach a project when you’ve been hired as a composer? Does it start with the scripts, with footage, with a tone meeting with the director? All of the above?

Blair Mowat: Yeah, it can be very different depending on what stage of a project you’re hired on. I personally prefer to be hired at the script stage so I can read the script. What I tend to do is assemble a folder of temp score, which is possibly some of my old music and possibly other composers’ music. And then it’s a case of sending that to the producer, the director, the execs and starting to kind of narrow down what it is that they’re responding to.

And then after that, for something like After The Flood, for example, I was on that early enough that I was able to create a 90 second main theme. And then after that, I created a variation of maybe like five or six pieces. And those were sent to the editor so that when they were creating what they call the assemblies, which is when they take the footage that they’ve shot every week and put those scenes together kind of roughly so they can send it to everyone to see how it’s how it’s coming out, they were starting to use my music already, which is a really good thing because they have this thing called temporary music where they will use other film scores and TV scores instead of your music up until the point when they lock the edit in place. And people can get very attached to that music.

So it can cause problems for composers like myself. So getting in there early and getting those themes and variations on the main theme allows everybody to get used to the music and hopefully fall in love with it.

Jace Lacob: Your scores have such an incredible sense of time and space and tonality. How tricky is it to write a score? What sorts of factors do you need to weigh and what tends to take the upper hand for you? Is it character? Is it pacing? Is it tension?

Blair Mowat: Yeah, I think it varies depending on the project. There’s this adage that people sometimes say, a good film score is one that you don’t notice, it’s sort of subliminal. And I only partly agree with that because if you think about Darth Vader arriving in The Empire Strikes Back, you should notice it. Everybody loves that theme. It’s incredibly iconic. The music is a huge part of that moment.

But if I was working on a project like Black Dog, for example, which is a feature film that I scored 18 months ago or so, that is an incredibly subtle character piece more in line with something like Past Lives, that A24 film, which I watched the other day and really loved. So that’s a lot more subliminal and you’re kind of trying to stay out of the way of these incredibly nuanced, subtle performances.

So it really depends on the projects and what the project needs. But I would say I’m quite a melodic composer. I like to have a main theme. I like to have something which is idiosyncratic and recognizable for that particular project. So wherever possible, I do like to have a strong melody and a strong sense of self to the score so that it feels unique to that project.

Jace Lacob: So let’s apply that then to Nolly. So, you get Russell T. Davies’s incredible scripts for Nolly, you sit down to read them. What goes through your head as you’re reading? Are you already in that initial read starting to hear music or specific notes or undercurrents in your head?

Blair Mowat: Yeah, I mean, Russell even had stuff written in the script about certain musical moments. I think it only happened about two or three times, but one of them was the idea of this syncopation. So in episode one, there’s the moment where they’re rehearsing the scene and Nolly is effectively rewriting the script as she’s going along and you can see her sort of trampling over the director.

And Russell wrote something in the script about having this kind of syncopated rhythm going through that. So Peter Hoar and I, the director, we talked about how we might like to go about that. And I suggested the idea of me sampling a typewriter. Basically, it’s played on a drum kit with lots of little bits of percussion. But there’s these moments where she’s rewriting the script or it’s like changing to like a different scene, and we put in these little typewriter sounds that click, click, clickity, clack. And then also that sshhhhk thing when you push it forward to create a new line.

 

CLIP

Nolly: Meg standing by the window. Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Not with the lighting over there. Does anybody watch this thing? No, I’ll stand here by the settee. Jill and Honour, facing me, I think. Adams, you go there. Rodney, does that work? Yes?

Rodney: Yes, fine. Meg on 3, swap with 1.

Sandra: Meg on 3, swap with 1.

Nolly: It says Adam sitting? Why would he sit? He never sits.

Tony: I can stand.

Rodney: Standing on 2.

Sandra: Standing on 2.

 

Jace Lacob: So with Nolly, it is an interesting project in that you’ve got to contend with both the real life Noele Gordon and Crossroads, the television series within the series.

Blair Mowat: Yeah.

Jace Lacob: And you’re too young to remember Crossroads, much less to have watched it.

Blair Mowat: That’s true.

Jace Lacob: Did you look at old episodes of Crossroads or, or listen to the Crossroads theme by Tony Hatch in terms of creating, for want of a better term, a sort of auditory mood board for Nolly? Did you go back to Crossroads itself?

Blair Mowat: Oh, absolutely. I did a bit of a deep dive. And I did listen to the Tony Hatch theme. I actually tried to get the Tony Hatch theme in there several times, and I was not successful. I think there was a feeling that when we went too meta with stuff, it became a bit knowing. And it’s such a true, emotional story, it’s such an important story to Russell who loves Noele so much. I think when we crossed into that kind of knowing territory, he was very wary of us not staying with her as much. So there were a couple of moments where we had to remove it, unfortunately, where we weren’t able to sneak the theme in in the end.

Jace Lacob: Having said that, you do get your own chance to craft a 1970s vintage television tune with “Vintage 70s TV Tune” set to a scene of ham sandwich making, no less. Let’s hear some of that track.

 

CLIP: “Vintage 70s TV Tune”

 

Jace Lacob: How much fun was it to write this specific piece to draw upon that sort of 1970s vintage TV feel?

Blair Mowat: Yeah, the thing that was really interesting about it is that the kind of theme that we wanted,  we were very careful for it not to sound too American because it’s very brassy and very showy. And what I realized was, the best way in was to listen to some of the old Carry On films from the same era. And so those were actually the inspiration in terms of trying to recreate a sound that felt suitable to that era and felt as accurate as possible. Because the production design, cinematography, it’s an incredible recreation of that time period. And so I wanted to be as authentic as possible in going about that.

So yes, the only other challenge with that was creating something that felt almost like a live band on a TV budget, because despite the amazing names we had attached, like Russell and Helena, we didn’t actually have a huge budget. And so I had to think very carefully about how we recreate those things. So there was a lot of mixing instruments within the computer with live instruments and a lot of those were recorded remotely, individual like brass players and stuff, because we didn’t have the budget to go hire Abbey Road and get a brass ensemble in there. So yeah, it was tricky, but it was a really fun challenge.

And because I was hired at quite an early stage for Nolly, I think I was hired months before they started shooting, having read the script, it meant that we could plan for some of those things and instead of just going to library music to find something where we could shove in there. I did actually get the chance to work on a few of those moments which are diegetic, as we call them, which basically means the music exists as the characters can hear it rather than score and only us hearing it. So yeah, that was a really fun one to get into.

 

MIDROLL

 

Jace Lacob: So, we meet Noele Gordon in 1938. She becomes the first woman to appear in color television, thanks to John Logie Baird. There’s a lightness to the score that builds throughout the scene and the next at the cathedral for Meg’s wedding, to then Poppy’s first day in 1981. What were you looking to say with the music in these opening scenes?

Blair Mowat: One of the things I remember thinking about when we first meet Noele as a young person, there’s a kind of emotional swell before the title comes up with Nolly. And I was trying to make you kind of fall in love with Nolly immediately because we’re going to meet her very quickly after that as somebody who’s a bit spiky, a bit difficult to deal with, with some of her colleagues. And I kind of wanted to tell you immediately that she’s somebody that you should fall in love with. She’s capable of great warmth. And so it was lovely to have a little snippet of that before we then have that time jump going into the future.

And then once we’re there and into the future, and she’s taking control, I think it was about showing her bossiness and her energy and how that had obviously changed over the decades. And then when Poppy arrives, there’s something about capturing that youth and that naivety that we see at the very start of the show. And Poppy is almost taking on some of that energy and bringing that energy back into Noele’s life when she arrives.

Jace Lacob: So, Noele gets back at Poppy after she corrects her about the actual viewing figures by putting her on the spot when the phone rings. “Oh, it’s for you.”, before we segue into Noele arriving at home and switching on all the lamps in her flat. Let’s take a listen to “Nolly At Home”.

 

CLIP: “Nolly At Home”

 

Jace Lacob: So it’s a very feminine, almost romantic theme. How does it help to set up the different spheres in Noele’s life, the private sphere versus the more public one of the workplace? Is there a sense that this is her inner sanctum where she can run her lines even if she lies about not reading the scripts?

Blair Mowat: Yeah, absolutely. We were very careful in that scene that we didn’t want to be too melancholic because she is at home by herself, and we did want a sense of pathos, a sense of warmth and romanticism. We’re almost kind of going towards old Hollywood or musical theater. But we wanted to be very careful not to kind of make you feel sorry for her. Russell was quite insistent that we shouldn’t do that. She loves reading those scripts. She loves being at home. She loves her inner sanctum and her space. She’s a woman who very much enjoys going home and letting the mask drop. And so that was the main concern in regards to that piece was having a sense of warmth and emotion and romanticism, but for it not to feel too sad. We never wanted to pity Nolly in that particular moment.

Jace Lacob: Nolly discovers she’s been sacked and they’re going to kill off her Crossroads character Meg Mortimer. “Meg Is Going To Die” captures that heart thumping shudder of Nolly learning that from her agent. Nolly meets with Jack to ask him to change the plan. We then get the tail end of “Meg Is Going To Die” as Nolly stalks down the hallway at ATV before the elevator doors close on her and she screams.

 

CLIP

Nolly: Don’t kill me. Change the story. Save my life.

Jack: But you’re not dying. This is Meg we’re talking about.

Nolly: Is it? Back to work. (Screams)

 

Jace Lacob: How did you decide to punctuate this beautiful bit of melodrama with the score?

Blair Mowat: So yeah, for me it was about doing something which showed the anger and the emotional intensity of what Nolly was feeling at that moment. And of course, it’s the end of episode one, so we want you to continue watching and find out what happens in episode two. So it’s basically a cliffhanger and she ends it with screaming, as you say. So yeah, there’s actually a trumpet scream at the end as those lift doors close. So the trumpet scream is sort of mimicking, the musicians are literally mimicking what Helena is doing, what Nolly is doing at that moment.

Actually I remember with that moment I kind of scored elements of that bit almost like a western. So Nolly is sitting there in front of Jack and realizing what she needs to do and what the impact of this is for her. And it’s kind of like a standoff between two very powerful figures. And so if you listen carefully, there’s actually hints of composers like Ennio Morricone in there, to make it almost feel like a kind of Western standoff. It’s not incredibly obvious, but it is there if you manage to listen to the score in isolation.

And then when she storms off,  there’s almost like a march. She marches off with an incredible determination to either save her career or, well, work out what’s going to be next and how she can make it as brilliant as possible. But of course, she’s also incredibly insecure and she’s incredibly afraid of what’s going to happen to her. And that bravado, that confidence that she has is kind of a defense mechanism to that great worry and feeling that she has inside.

And so the trick there is trying to sort of reflect all of that emotional complexity within a piece of music. And Helena is such an amazing actor that she gives you so much as well. When you’re looking at a scene as a composer, you’re trying to work out what the actor has given you and the subtext of the script, what things that you can pick up on best so that you’re not necessarily just doing what the actor is doing. How can you add layers of complexity to the performance that’s in front of you?

Jace Lacob: I love that. She goes to visit her old friend, Larry Grayson, played by your frequent creative collaborator, Mark Gatiss. And we’re given this gorgeous montage of their friendship together, punctuated by Larry’s punchline about Nolly. Let’s take a listen to “Visiting Larry”.

 

CLIP: “Visiting Larry” 

 

Jace Lacob: How did you look to capture their sense of shared nostalgia here with “Visiting Larry”? What were the musical influences?

Blair Mowat: So yeah, this was about old Hollywood really, old musical theater, romanticism, capturing a feeling of nostalgia. We need to make you feel in the space of about 90 seconds, because we obviously have very limited screen time in telling this story, we need to tell you as an audience member just how much these two people mean to each other.

Obviously it is a platonic relationship, but there’s some fun flirting going on. And that’s alluded to with the proposal and stuff like that. And really, it was more about scoring it as a romantic relationship because, you know, yes, this isn’t a sexual relationship, but it is a relationship where they deeply, deeply love each other. And so really it’s about telling a love story in 90 seconds. And obviously montage and music is an incredible way of making you feel that. So yes, that’s where we would spend some of our budget and get those beautiful live string players who did a fantastic job of evoking that era that we were going for and giving it that kind of vintage nostalgic feel.

Jace Lacob: In the dressing room scene between Nolly and Larry as they discuss Crossroads Meg living and sailing off on the QE2 and Larry leaving the Generation Game, there’s a lack of music here for most of this sequence. You could have used diegetic music here, that is music that characters, as you said earlier, might hear playing on the wireless or on a record player, but the silence cocoons Larry and Noele here. We hear the clink of ice in their glasses and the traffic in the street. Does that lack of score, I guess, create or help to create a more intimate space in a way?

Blair Mowat: It absolutely does, yeah. So you’ve gone from the stylism of having that musical montage to an incredibly intimate moment. And, it has to do with a few things. It’s to do with the performances, it’s to do with how Peter shot it, the nature of the scene itself. And I guess the power of having that silence and allowing the music to only come in at the end where that emotional moment sort of comes to a climax.

Occasionally you have to save scenes or you have to add things that maybe didn’t happen in a TV show or a film that you’re working on. But that was never the case with this particular show because you’re working with an amazing director, Peter Hoar, who won the BAFTA for It’s a Sin, he’s a lovely man, incredibly collaborative. Our amazing editor Sarah as well, again, she won a BAFTA for It’s a Sin that they worked on before. And you’ve got one of the best writers in the UK, Russell T. Davies.

It’s hard to write a scene of that length. People say you shouldn’t write a dialogue scene in one place more than three pages or something like that. Obviously, you know yourself, Jace, I know you know a lot about writing, you know, there’s lots of opinions on that kind of stuff. But Russell is such a talented writer that he’s one of those people like Aaron Sorkin where if you sit two characters down in a room, you can do a long scene like that easily and it will hold your attention because everything that he writes is just absolutely phenomenal and full of character and warmth.

And so, there’s a real joy in watching that scene and watching these two old friends get together and reminisce and talk about something which is really affecting Noele’s life. And honestly, there was no question in my mind, it wasn’t even really a discussion, that we just didn’t need music there. Because as soon as I said that to Peter, our director, he completely agreed. It’s incredibly captivating. And you’re right, it does create a sense of intimacy by having that sparseness.

Jace Lacob: So we get that sandwich making scene as Nolly prepares to watch Meg’s fate on her final episode of Crossroads. Her Crossroads, her little foil wrapped ham sandwich and her glass of champagne in hand, and “A Bus to Catch” starts to play as Nolly ditches the broadcast and instead gets on the bus with Tony. Here’s a clip from “A Bus to Catch”.

 

CLIP: “A Bus To Catch”

 

Jace Lacob: How does the use of samba help to inject a sense of energy here?

Blair Mowat: Yeah, it’s fun, isn’t it? That was just something that came about naturally in terms of, she’s almost performing a dance. There’s a sense of irreverence, we would say cheeky in the UK, where she’s kind of defying what she was being told to do; sit there in front of the television and wait for her episode of Crossroads. And she says, I don’t care, I’m in control of my destiny. I’m going to go off and I’m going on the bus with my best friend. And so the music there needed to capture that energy from the character there. And for some reason, the samba, that sort of dancing feel, the performative feel, she’s doing a very performative thing, a very rebellious thing.

And so something which has a slightly evocative dance just felt like an appropriate thing to have at that moment. And sambas are a little bit jazzy and we definitely have that kind of jazziness within the score and within Nolly’s theme. So yeah, it felt like a good way in.

Jace Lacob: So, looking ahead to the final episode, the final scene of the show without spoiling anything, is set to your beautiful piece, “Looking Back On Life”, which was recorded with a live orchestra.

 

CLIP: “Looking Back On Life”

 

Jace Lacob: Was this the last piece of music you composed for the show and why did you save it for the very end?

Blair Mowat: It was indeed, it was indeed the last piece of music that I saved for the show. I always find it very sad when a project ends. Working on Nolly was genuinely a career highlight for me. Working with Russell was a really beautiful thing. He’s somebody who’s work I’ve admired for a long time. I myself am a fan of Dr. Who. I watched it way back when I was two, three years old onwards. So, to get a chance to work with somebody who brought Dr. Who back as well was a great privilege. And so it was very sad for me for that project to come to an end. I loved working with all of those people, our execs, our producers, our director. Everyone was just top of their game, just the loveliest people. It really was an absolute joy to work on this project.

And so me writing that last piece of music was me saying goodbye to a job that I really, really loved as well. And I’d gone on this journey from, I didn’t really know who Noele Gordon was because as you say, I wasn’t old enough to watch Crossroads back in the day. And I think that’s part of the reason that Russell obviously wrote the show is because people like myself didn’t really know who Noele was. She was kind of lost to history. And now she’s back triumphantly in the minds of people like ourselves.

And so I’d really fallen in love with her character and the journey that she went on, and I was actually crying when I wrote this piece of music. I remember, obviously not the whole way through because it took me a while because it’s a long sort of four and a half minute piece of music. But I remember telling the execs, I was like, listen, I was literally sobbing over my piano as I was writing this piece of music.

So I just couldn’t help myself because, again, no spoilers, but “Looking Back On Life”, I wanted to create a piece of music that would almost be kind of universal for anybody who was at the point in their life where they’re looking back on everything that they did with the sense of kind of, it’s always going to be bittersweet, isn’t it? Nobody gets their life perfect and they’re obviously going to be sad that it’s ending and that they’re going to miss it. And so it’s a huge universal thing that none of us will experience until the very end of our life. But as a composer, putting yourself into the shoes of somebody experiencing that you start to think about your own mortality and your own choices.

And in combination with somebody at the end of their life and realizing that, you know, that character’s life ended the way that it did, it just, it just really got to me. And I think you can hear it in the music and if you listen to the music and in isolation, I think those emotions are there. It’s a personal kind of passion project. It’s a very personal moment for me as well as it is for the character.

Jace Lacob: So, let’s say you’re in Edinburgh. You’re up at Arthur’s seat, which I know is a favorite spot of yours.

Blair Mowat: It is!

Jace Lacob: What are you listening to? Is it music? Is it a podcast? Is it Arcade Fire? Is it Radiohead? Is it your favorite bands, or are you not listening to music then?

Blair Mowat: Yeah, well, it depends who I’m with. If I’m there by myself, I would often go up there by myself and listen to music as a teenager, and back then, it was probably things like the Pixies and Blink 182. But in terms of film scores, there’s a beautiful film score for One Day, there’s an amazing score for that by Rachel Portman. It’s a really, really beautiful score. And there’s a moment in that film and in the book where they go to Arthur’s Seat and they walk up Arthur’s Seat.

And I do remember a while ago walking up Arthur’s Seat and putting that film score on because it’s the perfect moment for walking up Arthur’s Seat. And I remember thinking about how art mimics life and the kind of metaness of listening to a piece of music that was basically designed for walking Up Arthur’s Seat.

Jace Lacob: Blair Mowat, thank you so very much.

Blair Mowat: Thank you very much for having me on.

 

Next time, Nolly returns to her roots on stage and stars in the musical Gypsy. But the rehearsals have left her feeling less than sure about herself. 

 

CLIP

Tony: It sounds rather marvelous.

Nolly: No, but don’t you see? I can’t. I don’t think I can do it.

Tony: The place will erupt!

Nolly: Will you just listen to me for a second! I didn’t bring you here to tell me that everything’s going to be alright. I am saying no one is going to clap because I can’t do it. This part is a monster. She is a legend, she is a major piece of work and I’m not good enough!

 

Join us next week as we talk with Nolly herself, Helena Bonham Carter, about how she approached playing such an iconic figure.  

 

CREDITS