Rory Bremner

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2003

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the impressionist and satirist Rory Bremner. He was born in Edinburgh in 1961. A self-confessed show-off, he started doing impersonations at primary school, sending up teachers, sports commentators and Moira Anderson! Entertaining his school friends inevitably developed into performing on stage and he worked as a stand up on the comedy circuit, and notably at the Edinburgh Festival.

Following his sell-out run at the Festival in 1986 the BBC offered him his first television series, Now Something Else. It ran on BBC2 for seven years. In 1993 he moved to Channel 4, where his show Rory Bremner - Who Else? developed a much more hard-edged, satirical and political bite. It also picked up more than 10 major awards including Baftas for himself and fellow writer-performers John Bird and John Fortune. His meticulous research and observation of the politicians he mimics inevitably led to his fraternising with them and ultimately led to being awarded the final accolade for a satirist: he was banned from Labour's battle bus in the 2001 election campaign.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Have I Told You Lately? by Van Morrison Book: The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon Luxury: Radio

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an entertainer. The BBC gave him his own show on
0:27.4	television when he was 25. In those days he was an impressionist wittily
0:31.8	impersonating personalities in the great tradition of one of his childhood
0:35.5	heroes Mike Yarwood. His move to Channel 4 some years later taught him that his talent could be used
0:41.4	as a satirical weapon and these days his shows
0:44.2	elaced with critical and often very serious intent. The journey from popular
0:49.6	comedian to witty satirist is perhaps a natural one for the Edinburgh school boy who
0:54.0	always knew how to make his friends laugh but who suffered depression in his adult life.
0:58.6	One voice impressionists don't use is their own he says it took me a long time to begin to use
1:05.3	my own voice he is Rory Bremer it's one of the great tricks of light entertainment
1:11.3	or indeed I suppose serious acting really isn't it that it's
1:14.3	easier to be somebody else than to be yourself.
1:16.5	Oh very much easier yes I don't think I knew who I was until about four years ago
1:20.7	five years ago really a long time.
1:22.4	That recently?
1:23.0	Oh yes, absolutely.
1:24.0	So you were hiding behind the voices?
1:26.0	To some extent, yeah, it was a combination of a professional and personal happiness really.
1:30.0	And I've been professionally happy in the last two or four or five years, particularly in the shows
1:33.6	we've been doing with John Bird and John Fortune.
	...

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