John Sessions interview
Actor and comedian John Sessions has long been fascinated with poet and novelist DH Lawrence (the inspiration for his Gloomsbury character DH Lollipop), revealing a surprising source for his initial interest - the work of popular Northern funnyman Ken Dodd. He explains: "I've been fascinated with DH Lawrence since I was a child, when I used to watch Ken Dodd play a character called DH Dodd. It was all about his 'passion' and his 'mounting towers' and his, shall we say, quite blatant imagery. And I was a big fan of Lawrence at university. My girlfriends were very against him, they called him sexist and a male chauvinist pig but I could never see that. I found him fantastically fresh after a lot of 19th-century novels."
"I also wrote a show for television a few years ago called Neighbours and Lovers where DH Lawrence moves to Ramsay Street and seduces Helen Daniels and two of the other lads have a naked wrestling match like in Women In Love. So I've had a lot of fun doing this project - playing a spoof of Lawrence has been like coming back to an old pal!"
"DH Lawrence was this sort of working class toy for the Bloomsbury Group. They were all middle class and sensitive - Virginia Woolf apparently once fainted when she saw a man digging the road - but they all had Lawrence round and patronised him and patted him on the head. Being from Nottingham, Lawrence was quite chippy and he would sort of rail against this. But I admired Lawrence because he really told it how it was and he did address issues like the battle of the sexes and what makes men different from women. And obviously you can take that seriously but you can also have a lot of fun with it, as Sue Limb has done in her wonderful script."
A regular contributor to the airwaves, John Sessions has a great regard for radio. He says: "This is my kind of a project. There's an obsession with accessibility in television today and many people might consider this project too elitist but I fight that like the very devil. Radio is a wonderful land which has kind of been left alone by managerial types and it seems to be where all the really interesting things go down."
"This project makes the assumption that people have read something or know a little bit about the Bloomsbury Group. There is a thing in Britain called Waterstones and it sells books. People buy those books and read them. And some of them actually remember what was said in those books! So you can make a fair assumption that if people see Gloomsbury they'll know that we're having fun with Bloomsbury. And that covers not just Lawrence but also all the others. Big strapping lesbian Vita Sackville-West, married to a whoopsy daisy husband, having an affair with Virginia Woolf, who in turn was married to a rather sexist man. I mean you couldn't make the Bloomsbury Group up! They were in and out of each others trousers all day long!"