Timothy West

I got very cross with the term, kitchen sink. It just meant that you invaded different kinds of houses, where it was very difficult to avoid kitchen sink.

Anybody can decide if they have got the money to fight a case if they don't like a particular thing, and they complain to the watch committee, local council or whatever.

Towards the end of the Lord Chamberlain's era, when his hold was being loosened, private prosecutions began to happen. A member of staff at the Royal Court ordered to stop the play, and the police were brought in.

You're not allowed to step out of whatever the rules are, politically, or socially, and they'll get you for it, they'll hunt you down. That's the really frightening thing.

There were loads of plays which were very popular before and after the war, where everybody wore a dinner jacket in the third act and it was in a house that you wished you'd owned with people that you wish you knew. It was life seen through a very privileged way.

Suddenly we saw that you could do plays about real life, and people had been doing them for some time, but they weren't always getting to the audiences. They were performed in little, tiny, theatres.

In 1968 the Arts Council managed to get a grant from the treasury to buy up a lot of derelict touring theatres and put them back in the hands of the local authorities.

When you're writing about people that are not very well off, you seem to see the kitchen sink. So it was a bit of a sort of cosy phrase that got used a bit too much.

The Long and the Short and the Tall made a great impression on me because it was a very ugly tale about the reality of soldiering at a time when we were being gung-ho about the whole thing of war.