On another occasion, quite recently, I was at Waverley Station in Edinburgh when my back went into spasm. The pain was too much to bear but there were no empty seats nearby, so I asked this young guy for his seat. He was on the phone and I shouldn’t have interrupted, I realise that, but there was nowhere for me to sit and I really needed to rest my back. I said to this young man, ‘Would you mind if I had your seat?’ ‘What? What? I’m on the phone, for Christ’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘There are seats over there. Go over there!’ Then he went back to his phone conversation.
I had a bottle of water with me. I took off the cap and I poured it on his head. He got up then! A woman saw; she came over and she said, ‘I saw what you did. That’s a common assault! You assaulted that man!’ I said, ‘Madam, I’m in pain and I needed somewhere—’ ‘I don’t care,’ she interrupted. ‘You assaulted that boy. I’m going to get the police.’ She returned with a transport police officer. By now, the young man, just a little bit damp, had disappeared, but I explained what had happened: that I’d emptied some water on the man’s head when he had refused to offer me his seat, to which the officer said, ‘Oh, dear, that doesn’t help matters, does it?’ I agreed, and then I saw that my train was coming in, so I just got up and walked away. The policeman didn’t come after me, and I wasn’t arrested, so in a sense, I got away with it.
Usually I’m quite sweet, but I was so angry with that young man. How dare he! He was at least fifty years my junior. I’ve noticed that the people who do offer their seat are usually women. Men rarely bother; they pretend to be too engrossed in a newspaper to notice if someone needs to sit down. But good manners still matter. You should always be as polite, careful and caring to people as you possibly can be. But if people are nasty and cruel, then fuck it — they’ve got it coming.
My spine may be unstable and my knees are giving up, but I’m not. That’s the benefit of being a character actress. My looks have changed over the years, but as I was never beautiful, I’m no less beautiful now. I get more work, if anything. In the last five years, I’ve co-starred in Frog Stone’s BBC Four sitcom Bucket, in which I played a foul-mouthed and flatulent septuagenarian from hell (NAR — No Acting Required), ticking off my daughter and my bucket list of must-dos before I snuff it. (By the way, that’s an example of the literary term ‘zeugma’, which I’ve always longed to use.)
More recently, I’ve been busy on stage at the Park Theatre in London playing Sydney and the Old Girl, and in Melbourne taking on Maggie Smith’s great hit, The Lady in the Van. (I was so nervous about taking on the role that I went round to Alan Bennett’s house to get his blessing. He reassured me that it didn’t matter I was so short. I’m also realising what is now not possible for someone of my age. There is a sadness in accepting I will now never play Masha in The Three Sisters, for example. But I’d advise everyone to look at the footage of Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies reciting Juliet on TV when she was nearly one hundred years old. It will give you hope.
I’m too old for a lot of things, but I’m not too old for everything. I’ve been fortunate my career has opened up surprisingly well in the last fifteen years. Documentaries have become an important new strand in my professional life. I enjoy talking to complete strangers. When I need to sit on a park bench, I go to where someone’s sitting. Most people like to pounce on an empty bench, but I long for human communion — that to me is Holy Communion. I love talking to people, and asking them questions. They’re giving me a present of their stories. Talking, listening, learning what it’s like to look through the eyes of another soul. That’s what I relish about being a ‘documentary person’.
It started in 2005 with Dickens in America: ten episodes for BBC Two directed by Richard Shaw. Both Dickens and I had unexpectedly gone to America in the middle of our careers and following in his footsteps, I felt I understood the man and the writer better than before. And it seemed we shared an opinion about America. He had written: ‘this is not the Republic of my imagination’. His delight in the new democracy had soured. But I had to wait for eleven years before my next foray into dockos. In 2016, I did a little morning programme about the NHS in Scotland and got a smashing review in the Guardian (the headline ran: MORE MIRIAM MARGOLYES PLEASE)[23] and I took part in the first The Real Marigold Hotel documentary. The BBC sent me, singer Patti Boulaye, former newsreader Jan Leeming, chef Rosemary Shrager, dancer Wayne Sleep, former Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy, comedian Roy Walker, and former World Darts champion, Bobby George, to live for three weeks in a luxurious private mansion in Jaipur, to see if we could contemplate retiring there.
E. M. Forster wrote that when you go to India you come face to face with yourself and I hoped that would happen, but I found that the heat proved too difficult for me. I wasn’t keen on the lack of flush toilets beyond the confines of our hotel. The caste system and the disparity of wealth was equally hard to stomach. In one day we visited both the slums and the palace of the royal family in Jaipur. The striking thing was that the standard of politeness and grace was exactly the same in both milieux. The people of India — their courtesy, energy and intelligence — are remarkable; I’d love to go back, despite my disgust at their prime minister, Modi. He’s one of the evil men of the world.
When we won the Grierson Award for Best Constructed Documentary Series, it opened the door for more series, and I have travelled to many more foreign places since, meeting geishas and tango dancers and pandas, making many new friends along the way. The documentary-makers threw me together with an unusual selection of vintage celebrities, mostly delightful.[24] And I discovered I loved making documentaries. You don’t have to learn lines, you have a licence to be inquisitive and to travel the world — with somebody else paying.
And in learning more about the world, I’ve learnt much more about myself, which has led to documentaries about fatness and death, subjects that most people avoid talking or even thinking about. But for me, no subject is off limits. I believe strongly that being able to talk about everything is the only way to face our demons and it is why I decided to confront the subject of dying. I went to see my parents’ grave in Wolvercote Cemetery. Jews are pragmatists. We don’t bring flowers when we visit a grave; we bring a stone. Flowers die like people, stones don’t. As soon as I arrived at Mummy and Daddy’s burial place, however, I realised that, stupidly, I’d only brought one stone; so with real chutzpah, I had to nick one from a nearby grave. I hope Daddy doesn’t mind that it was just a little stone, but it was like that in life too — Mummy was big and he was little. I think they would have approved of Miriam’s Dead Good Adventure, which I made precisely because I’m terrified of death. I hoped it would help me to be less frightened. And to some extent, it did.
A good death, to me, means that you die in bed, hopefully without pain, surrounded by people you love, and you can smile at them, close your eyes and go. That’s what I long for. But, as the last eighteen months have shown, you can’t count on anything. So many people have died in isolation wards, without being able to see their loved ones. The pandemic has even removed the therapeutic side of funerals. Funerals don’t work on Zoom: the whole point is the living, breathing people. I want to see all my friends and fellow mourners and be able to talk and sing and cry together, sharing our memories of the person we are there to honour. And experience the black humour, finding joy in those shared memories of the dead, that’s what I love most about funerals. I think laughter is better than God.
23
The only one I definitely wouldn’t want to stay in touch with, was Stanley Johnson, Boris’s father, who has achieved a surprising eminence, but, sadly, proved the adage that the rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.