It's been a while since we had acting talent on the show, so it gives us great pleasure

to welcome the wonderful John Sim to soundtracking, the Screen Music Podcast with me, Edith Bowman.

John has appeared in so many fantastic productions. He's perhaps best known for his roles in

Life on Mars as Sam Tyler and Doctor Who as the Master.

His films include Wonderland, Human Traffic and 24-hour Party People

and we'll obviously be featuring tracks from all these projects throughout the conversation.

He's also an accomplished musician, with plenty more about his exploits on that front to come.

But we begin with the fantastic collateral, one of his most recent outings which aired on the BBC

earlier this year. And for reasons that will become clear shortly, it's probably the only

time in history anyone has discussed the work of David Hare,

accompanied by some 1990s UK jungle.

John, welcome to soundtrack and it's a real pleasure to see you.

And I was just saying I've been lucky enough to see two episodes of your new BBC

essays collateral that's coming on bloody great oh thanks was it instant for you and you read the

script then yeah do you know what I took the job without reading the scripts did you yeah I never do

that and I knew SJ the director because we met up when we were both working in America for lunch

and she was telling me about this script that Sir David Hare had sent her

and she told me about it and I thought it's like state of play

and she said it is like state of play, it's that good

and she was uming and a naring whether to do it or not

and then eventually she did do it and I was on something else

and she called me and said look me and David would love to offer you the MP and I said yes yes and now can I read it

...