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yes, do you need to...? take your jacket off. hello, i'm john wilson, welcome to this cultural life, the radio four podcast, in which i ask leading creative figures to reveal the key moments in their life, and the most important cultural works that fired their own artistic imagination. my guest is director, screenwriter and playwright mike leigh. he's known for gritty social dramas, including vera drake and secrets and lies. domestic comedies, like life is sweet and happy—go—lucky, and historical stories, including mr turner and peterloo. i spoke to him in one of the many radio s...

hello, i'm john wilson, welcome to this cultural life, the radio four podcast, in which i ask leading creative figures to reveal the key moments in their life, and the most important cultural works that fired their own artistic imagination. my guest is director, screenwriter and playwright mike leigh. he's known for gritty social dramas, including vera drake and secrets and lies. domestic comedies like life is sweet and happy—go—lucky, and historical stories, including mr turner and peterloo. i spoke to him in one of the many radio studios in bbc broadcasting house. mike, welcome...

this cultural life. let's take you to the beginning. what's your earliest cultural memory? as a kid, we had, iwas exposed to pantomime, live theatre of various thoughts, circus, the circus was a big deal, variety, live variety, descendants of the music hall, including at the age of nine a trip to the ardwick hippodrome to see laurel and hardy live on stage on the famous tour, which i later realised was the famous tour, and the two important things about that were one, two extraordinary things, one was it was in colour — they were in colour — and two, that oliver hardy com pletely...

Really, isn't it? absolutely. and what were these directors doing that was so different, do you think? it's the possibilities. the thing about influence and the thing about being stimulated by what other artists do — it's as much about making you think about the possibilities of what you might do. but with the french new wave in particular, was it also about the visual style? do you think that had a direct influence on your later work? well, i mean, the great move forward was shooting in the streets, was shooting in real places. now, of course, i — unlike for example my compatriot ken loac...

Later on in the �*60s, with the work that he and tony garnett, who i used to work with in television, bbc. their great revolution was to say, well, let's not... bbc drama is studio—bound, let's get out there in the street with the guys that shoot documentaries and make, you know... make it real, in that sort of spontaneous and alive way. but just thinking about some of your films and the way that you have explored social issues, whether that's unemployment in meantime, or back—street abortion in vera drake, or class and race in secrets and lies, do you regard yourself as a political film...