Nigel Planer interview
Nigel Planer was kept busy during the recording of Gloomsbury, playing characters from both ends of the social spectrum - academic Lionel Fox and servant Gosling. He found himself fascinated by the class divide of the period. He says: "I read the most marvellous book - Mrs Woolf and Her Servants by Alison Light - which is about Virginia Woolf and the way she treated her servants and the arguments she had with her cook particularly. These master/servant relationships are explored in Gloomsbury and it's fascinating because these were very bohemian people, at the beginning of liberalism and feminism, yet they were in the top quarter percent of the population in terms of wealth and privilege and had very old-fashioned attitudes towards their staff."
"I find the group intriguing because they've long been revered as great figures but when you go into their ordinary lives and look at how they treated their servants they often came up short and the contrast is very funny. We have a tendency now to reassess historical figures and look at the way people conducted their lives as well as they grand things they did and I think the Bloomsbury Group are ripe for send up because they're a great example of how things have moved on in society."
Did Nigel do much research into the way different people spoke in that period? "There's a wealth of original recordings on the internet which is fascinating and you go back as far as the 1870s and see how people talked then. I also listened to Kentish people of the day talking on the BBC archive but I quickly abandoned it. This isn't supposed to be anthropological - it's a comedy series - so the best thing to do is find a voice which works for the script. I find a little bit of research can go quite a long way."
So what has Nigel enjoyed most about the project? "It's great to be doing something that is literate - I hope that word won't turn people away in droves - and that's well-informed and not crude. Well actually it is immensely crude! It's full of filthy jokes and innuendo, which I love, but it's put together in a very sophisticated way!"
"I hope that this will transport people to another world - albeit one which has lots of sex in it! The Bloomsbury Group were at it all the time but in peculiar ways and we have a prurient fascination with them. Gloomsbury gratifies that in buckets but in a sophisticated way. It's literary sex!"