Film & TV

'My biggest career regret? Not turning up for that interview for a part in Alien'

What got you started?

I had no desire to be an actor. But I started going along to the Citizens theatre in Glasgow in my mid-teens and got completely obsessed. I saw everything from Shakespeare to Brecht; I went so often they eventually just let me in for nothing. Later, after drifting into the building trade as a quantity surveyor, I decided to pack it in and become a drama teacher. I was asked to be in a schools' play, and the next thing I knew I was an actor.

What was your big breakthrough?

I was a founder member of the Scottish company 7:84, and in 1973 we made a show called The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, about the effects of the discovery of North Sea oil on Highland life. We toured it to places few shows had ever gone to – let alone a show about crofting and oil rigs. It really affected Scottish social, political and theatrical life.

Would independence be a good thing for the arts in Scotland?

I wouldn't want to see a narrowing down into a purely Scottish view of the world. But a lot of Scottish people will say: "We'll do it much better if we're independent; we won't have to filter everything through London." It's much too big a subject to sum up in a phrase.

If you could change anything about your career, what would it be?

Maybe I should have turned up for that interview for a part in Alien. "Nobody will watch this," I thought. "And Ridley Scott won't want me anyway."

Who or what have you sacrificed for your art?

Planned holidays and the vague possibility of a company pension.

What work of art would you most like to own?

Rembrandt's Titus, the Artist's Son, in the Wallace Collection in London. It's the most beautiful painting of Rembrandt's son, who died just a few years later. It wouldn't take up a lot of room: you could almost get it off the gallery wall without them noticing.

What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?

I used to do a lot of shows in schools. After a show in Glasgow, I was crossing the playground when a little girl came up to me and said, in this tone of disdain: "You were in that an awful lot."

What's the best advice anyone ever gave you?

When I told my folks I was giving up quantity surveying to do a course in drama teaching, they were very good about it. My dad said quietly: "Just make sure you make a go of it this time, Billy." Forty-three years later, I can say that I've at least had a go.

In short

Born: Glasgow, 1945

Career: Film and TV includes The Killing Fields, Truly, Madly, Deeply and The Singing Detective. In theatre, he has worked at the National, the Royal Court and the Almeida. Performs in And No More Shall We Part at the Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 (020-7722 9301), until 18 February.

Low point: "Leaving a theatre company in a wet wee Scottish town one Christmas and saying I wouldn't be coming back – the work was very bad. But that meant I was available for a show which turned out to be a real high."

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Horror thriller The River makes its ABC debut – but will it fall victim to the pitfalls that plagued previous series in the genre?

There's been a recent resurgence of horror television, led by AMC's zombie hit The Walking Dead, which shuffles back with new episodes this Sunday. American Horror Story, Ryan Murphy's homage to the genre on FX, has been renewed for a second season. Tuesday night marks the premier of ABC's The River, a found-footage thriller produced by Steven Spielberg and Paranormal Activity writer/director Oren Peli.

But despite the growing trend towards the genre (ABC has also picked up another supernatural horror pilot called 666 Park Avenue for possible inclusion in next year's schedule), the contemporary horror series is still in its infancy – and these shows are very much still in the process of figuring out how to solve the practical problems created when a genre known for explicitness and gore in two-hour doses is applied to a full-length television season on a network with stringent content standards.

The Walking Dead, which broke out as the biggest rating hit for the cachet-abundant yet viewer-anemic AMC, encountered a full-blown backlash for the first half of its second season. It didn't help matters that the second season was beset by behind the scenes drama (showrunner Frank Darabont left due to creative differences with the network) but the biggest issue, according to fans online, was that the show simply got boring. The unstoppable waves of starving zombies that made season one so terrifying were gone from the first seven episodes of season two, replaced by a pensive, talky story in which the gang of apocalypse survivors settle in at a barn and wax poetic about what life means after the fabric of society breaks down. It's a pacing issue that highlights the biggest problem facing a horror series: how to kill off enough characters to maintain the requisite sense of dread, but at a slow enough clip that viewers can feel hopeful that there's a hopeful resolution in sort for at least some of them.

In American Horror Story, creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk solved that problem by boldly killing off the family that occupied its haunted house. In its second season, Murphy says, the show will return with all new characters and a completely new scary story, placing the series in a previously unoccupied middle ground between a traditional series an a mini-series. It's a risky choice, to be sure, as no one who grew attached to the characters in season one necessarily has a reason to return for season two.

But it solves the horror-television conundrum by essentially stretching a movie-length premise out to a 12-episode season. The question is, what happens if and when the writers choose a direction that fails to capture the audience? American Horror Story was the most watched new cable series of 2011, but because it'll be a new show every time it premieres, it'll have to reprove itself with every season.

The River, the latest entry in the horror-television mini-boom, seems to have things figured out based on its pilot. Then again, the same could have been said about both The Walking Dead and American Horror Story. The River brings the found-footage format that Peli used to great effect in Paranormal Activity to television, as a woman and her son (Leslie Hope and Joe Anderson) go in search of his father, Emmit Cole (Bruce Greenwood), an explorer whose vessel went missing somewhere on the Amazon River.

The found-footage conceit is getting a bit long in the tooth, though Chronicle did take the top box-office spot over Super Bowl weekend, so apparently audiences haven't grown weary of it. But whatever its limitations, presenting the show as documentary footage lends it a verisimilitude that wrings genuine scares out of moments that would come off corny if presented any other way. The River also makes a point to balance the macro-mystery of what happened to Emmit with smaller horror plots that will be resolved more quickly, making it more of a spiritual cousin to Lost than to Peli's film.

But like any horror television series, how long The River will run is difficult to predict because there are unavoidable stumbling blocks of the medium. A series like The River is ultimately in the same position as its characters, tip-toeing around nervously hoping not to get axed.

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Gossip abounds at the Oldie of the Year lunch as the great and good gather to exchange jokes, jibes and a bit of mild filth

Off to the Oldie of the Year lunch and some of the nicest gossip of the year. I noticed the magazine's slogan – "Buy it before you snuff it", which does not have quite the same cheery ring as, say, "It's naughty but it's nice". I bumped into the great children's illustrator Shirley Hughes, who was chatting to the celebrated TV critic Philip Purser, whom she had met only once since they learned ballroom dancing together in Wirral, Merseyside, some 70 years ago.

There was Lord West, the former First Sea Lord (the head of the army told him he envied his splendid title. West replied: "Then you would be the First Land Lord.") The former terrorism minister arrived wearing the first bowler hat I've seen, on a head, for decades.

He revealed that when he accepted the job under Gordon Brown, the image freaks in No 10 asked him not to wear it. But recently it has reappeared, and saved him from a nasty injury when he fell off a pavement. "I was partly careless and partly pissed," he said, "but it stopped my head hitting the kerb."

Between them the guests must have known everyone who matters in the country, at least everyone who matters over the age of 60. One was fuming about David Miliband, whom she had seen making a speech at Chatham House two months ago. "He said 'the situation in Israel is deeply sub-optimal'. And to think that a man who talks like that almost became leader of the Labour party!"

Conversation turned to the Reverend Ian Paisley, lying in intensive care in a Belfast hospital. My Irish neighbour recalled the time when the BBC's only Westminster studio was a cabin opposite parliament. It had a hospitality cupboard, and visitors had to sign for their drinks. Paisley got on with the late Gerry Fitt, leader of the SDLP, but never drank. So Fitt would sign for his own first gin and tonic, then for all the (several) he had subsequently, would sign Paisley's name – to the reverend doctor's rage when he found out.

The first award winner was the Oldie of the Year, the lord chancellor, Ken Clarke, who is now 71 and regarded by those on the Tory right as little better than Polly Toynbee in Hush Puppies. Ken accepted, then disappeared to work, shouting over his shoulder: "You ask what happened to my companions. They have all fled me by going to the Lords." And so they have. (If you ever find yourself in the House of Lords bar, you'll see it's like being in a 25-year-old edition of Spitting Image.)

Terry Wogan was chairing, and delighted the audience with his jokes. They were ancient, but beautifully told. He recounted the one about the chap who came home to find his wife in alluring lingerie. "'Tie me up!' she says, 'and you can do anything you like!' So he tied up her and went to the pub."

Peer of the Year went to Baroness Trumpington, 89, who was a codebreaker in Bletchley Park, and recently became famous for making a V-sign to Lord King in a debate in which he said something she didn't like about her age. She referred to Ken Clarke's "great honour", then made a V-sign at his back, to the delight of the assembled oldies, who enjoy a bit of mild filth.

The film-maker Ken Loach was Movie Man of the Year, saying cheerily: "I 'ave a go, lady, I 'ave a go." Then Sir Peregrine Worsthorne was named Fashion Icon of the Year, justifiably, since he was wearing – indoors – a brown trilby with a mauve hatband, a fuchsia scarf, a lavender shirt, cherry red trousers and a navy jacket.

"Having failed to become a sage, I will now be remembered as a dandy," he said, a little ruefully perhaps.

Cross-Channel Swimmer of the Year was Roger Allsop, a retired cancer surgeon who last year at the age of 70 became the oldest person to swim the Channel. And the final award went to the 106-year old Hetty Bower, who has been an antiwar campaigner since waving men off to the Great War when she was nine. And realising that many of them never came back.

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He has man-made web-shooters, a hot new romance and there's an extra layer of intrigue, but can Andrew Garfield's incarnation as the Spidey one make the reboot worthwhile?

If there's one thing Andrew Garfield's arrival as Spider-Man/Peter Parker in Marc Webb's much-hyped comic reboot is likely to confirm, it's quite what a skewwiff choice Tobey Maguire was to take on the role under previous director Sam Raimi. While Maguire revelled in the part, he made for a watery-eyed wallcrawler whose innate geekiness was ramped up and who often seemed less confident than the comic book version. The Spidey I remember from thumbing through inky pages as a kid might have been a good egg who worried about his Aunt May and struggled to get by on meagre freelance photographer wages, but he was cocksure and even arrogant when wearing the red and blue suit.

The latest footage from Webb's forthcoming film, which was shown around the world yesterday during a fans' extravaganza that linked up four cities, London, New York, Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, hinted strongly that the Garfield iteration is likely to be a brasher, more insouciant Spider-Man. For a start there's a different dynamic between Parker and the object of his affections, Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy, than we saw between Maguire and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson. Garfield, for all his clowning – he turned up in a home-made Spidey costume at last year's Comic Con in San Diego and was cringeworthily over-enthusiastic on stage in LA once again for last night's event – is a strapping, handsome chap who appears just as likely to trap Stacy in his romantic web as she is to lure him in to her affections. As Stone herself said, speaking on stage in Rio: "Gwen falls in love with Peter Parker, but Mary Jane falls in love with Spider-Man." Gone is the sense that Parker is rather punching above his weight in the romance stakes: when they flirt in a school corridor during one scene screened yesterday, it seems to be as relative equals.

What else is different about this Spider-Man? One of the major points picked up by keen fans of the comic book early on about Webb's take is that Garfield's Peter Parker has man-made rather than organic web-shooters. This allows the film-makers to play up the teenager's status as something of a budding scientific genius, rather than just a talented student. This in turn ties into the key plotline within The Amazing Spider-Man, which revolves around Parker's relationship with scientist Dr Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans). Connors once worked with Parker's late father, adding an extra layer of intrigue when his dodgy experiments transform him into the Lizard. Webb, speaking in LA, said his film would examine "the emotional consequence of what it means to be an orphan." He added: "We wanted to treat Peter Parker in a more realistic, naturalistic way. There are a lot of things from the Spider-Man canon: this starts off with Peter Parker and his parents."

Intriguingly, the footage screened for fans focused extensively on personal interplay rather than spectacle. As well as flagging up the chemistry between Garfield and Stone, there was plenty of screen-time for Martin Sheen's Uncle Ben as Parker's replacement father figure, and Garfield was shown in costume teasing small-time criminals with wisecracking, devil-may-care flare.

Spider-Man, with his penchant for swinging breezily through Manhattan skyscrapers, is surely the perfect candidate for 3D and Webb was keen to play up the fact that the production had been shot entirely in stereoscope. But while aerial scenes (in 2D at this early stage) were sharply realised, there were further hints that the film's focus will lie elsewhere. Speaking on stage in London, Ifans even described the reboot as a "tech-lite" Spider-Man. Such an approach may be wise, for the action scenes were not radically divergent from the look of those in 2007's Spider-Man 3: it is after all, only five years on and the film has been produced by the same studio, Sony.

The latest trailer for The Amazing Spider-man, which debuts across the world in July, will arrive online today and is in full 3D for screening in cinemas. No film in the series so far has returned anything less than spectacular box-office results, but the continuing presence of Garfield in the suit may come down to whether audiences accept that this particular iteration of the webslinger on the big screen is different enough to the last one to make a reboot worthwhile. On this evidence, the jury is still out, but there has clearly been a genuine attempt to deliver a new Spidey era.

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Youngest director to helm a chart-topping movie pushes Jack and Jill down the hill with Man on a Ledge coming tumbling after

The winner

On a weekend that saw a highly diverse set of new releases whose rankings weren't necessarily so easy to predict, low-budget sci-fi Chronicle won the day with £2.19m, including Wednesday/Thursday previews of £617,000. The high-school lads with superpowers edged out family-friendly adventure sequel Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, Adam Sandler cross-dressing comedy Jack and Jill, Sam Worthington thriller Man on a Ledge and a whole new batch of awards contenders arriving in an already crowded market.

With Chronicle also nabbing first place in the US, the film's 26-year-old director Josh Trank has been hailed as the youngest ever to helm a chart-topping movie. Following the likes of Cloverfield, District 9 and Paranormal Activity, Chronicle is another reminder that a clever concept, well executed and marketed, can more than compensate for a lack of marquee-name talent.

Chronicle didn't quite match the debuts of those precursor titles – Cloverfield opened with £3.49m, District 9 with £2.29m and Paranormal Activity with £3.59m – but backers 20th Century Fox will point to the deterrent effect of snow blanketing Britain for much of the weekend.

Awards battle carnage

With only one weekend left as a possible release date for films qualifying at this year's Baftas, competition for audiences is fiercer than ever, and the list of casualties just got longer. Carnage – aptly named, given the current field of arthouse battle – managed a decent £299,000 from 112 screens, including previews of £19,000. That was enough to earn Roman Polanski's play adaptation 10th place, a notch below The Artist, now in its sixth week of release. The Descendants tops the current field of awards contenders, with £1.11m, although its cumulative total (£4.17m) is behind both The Artist (£5.31m) and The Iron Lady (£8.97m). Many of these titles still have plenty of life in them, but it's clear the current crop of awards contenders is not going to match the 2011 batch, which included The King's Speech (£45.7m) and Black Swan (£16.2m).

Two prestige titles landed outside the top 10: Young Adult, from Juno director-writer pair Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody; and Martha Marcy May Marlene, directed by Sean Durkin. Young Adult has picked up some attention from critics' groups for stars Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt, and has a Writers' Guild nomination for Cody, but overall is not a big awards contender. Martha has likewise earned nods from critics, notably for stars Elizabeth Olsen and John Hawkes, and has four Independent Spirit nominations, but the marketing value of these endorsements is questionable, in the UK at least. Young Adult opened here with £137,000 from 157 screens, yielding a weak average of £874. Martha managed an average in four figures, just, thanks to a tally of £107,000 from 100 sites.

The big fallers

Possibly thanks to the snow, all films in the market suffered major drops, gentlest in the top 10 being The Descendants, down 38%. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a couple of the biggest drops were experienced by films that struggled the previous weekend on their opening frames, with Like Crazy plummeting 92% and Intruders, starring Clive Owen, crashing 94%. Both lost significant sites and showtimes.

The local factor

The rule of thumb when making box-office comparisons with the US is that here in the UK films should gross, in sterling, one-tenth of the number achieved in dollars in North America. Local factors can skew those figures, so it's not such a surprise to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows manage £26.1m here so far, better than its US gross of $184m would suggest. Ditto War Horse, another film based on British material, and partly set in Devon, which has taken £15.3m here and $77.3m over there. Perhaps more surprising is The Artist, which is after all set in Hollywood: in the US the film has managed $20.6m to date, but in the UK is running ahead with £5.3m, more than double what might be indicated. On the other hand the Paris-set Hugo, largely populated with British actors, has notched up $61.9m in North America, and is running behind the pace here with £5.2m. Biggest local boost of all belongs to The Iron Lady. Its UK gross of just under £9m compares with $20.6m in the US.

The future

The market is once again significantly behind 2011 levels, with box office a troubling 38% behind the equivalent weekend from a year ago, when Tangled and The King's Speech topped the chart, and The Fighter was top new entry in third place. This week fresh blood arrives in the shape of Disney's The Muppets, which will be hoping to convert massive publicity and awareness into bums on seats. Also doing an awesome PR job is The Woman in Black, starring Daniel Radcliffe, and based on the book and hit stageplay. Joker in the pack is the 3D rerelease of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace – theoretically a huge event for fans, although not necessarily the episode they most want to see. Then there's The Vow, with Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams; whale-rescue film Big Miracle (scoring better in US exit polls than its soft box office might suggest); and last of the awards contenders, A Dangerous Method, from David Cronenberg.

Top 10 films

1. Chronicle, £2,193,072 from 397 sites (New)

2. Journey 2 The Mysterious Island, £1,200,587 from 431 sites (New)

3. The Descendants, £1,112,964 from 407 sites. Total: £4,169,946

4. War Horse, £889,687 from 492 sites. Total: £15,333,104

5. Jack and Jill, £848,814 from 324 sites (New)

6. Man on a Ledge, £697,394 from 389 sites (New)

7. The Grey, £521,188 from 348 sites. Total: £2,209,907

8. A Monster in Paris, £474,941 from 440 sites. Total: £1,666,446

9. The Artist, £374,889 from 195 sites. Total: £5,314,327

10. Carnage, £298,733 from 112 sites (New)

Other openers

Young Adult, 157 sites, £137,284

Martha Marcy May Marlene, 100 sites, £106,967

Bombay Beach, 2 sites, £2,361 (+ £3,160 previews)

Best Laid Plans, 6 sites, £362

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Entries are now being accepted for the inaugural tache film festival to be held in Maine in March. Films must be no longer than eight minutes and feature facial hair. Here are some magnificent cinematic taches for inspiration

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The Muppets big-screen musical is coming to town, but, ladies and gentlemen, we need to know who is the greatest star of the Muppet show … does Miss Piggy hog your heart or has Kermit the Frog leapt into your affections?

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Gallery: Even a fire evacuation and a no-show for best actor winner Michael Fassbender didn't dampen spirits. If you weren't there, here's some of what you missed

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It took Judi Dench's astonishing 1989 production of Look Back in Anger to give us the play that John Osborne actually wrote – a play, like Beckett's, about waiting

British theatre is full of consoling myths. One of them is that John Osborne's Look Back in Anger caused an overnight revolution when it opened at the Royal Court on 8 May 1956. That's not quite true. What the play did do, though, was give youth a voice, stimulate other dramatists and liberate audiences. It certainly changed my life. I was a 16-year-old, Shakespeare-saturated, Midlands schoolboy when it opened. Because of Look Back I became hooked on new drama, and eventually a bit of a Royal Court groupie. I've often told the story of how, when I finally got to London to see Look Back on a Saturday evening, I studied the faces of people coming out of the matinee performance to see what impact it had made on them.

Why did the play cause such a stir? Several reasons. One was its scorching attack on the stuffiness of 1950s England. Through Jimmy Porter, Osborne has a go at everything in sight: pompous politicians and clerics, poncey upper-class twits, patronising literary pundits and a prevailingly patrician culture. Osborne's talent to abuse took everyone by surprise in those more reticent times. But the play also, through its searing portrait of Jimmy's marriage to the socially superior Alison, combines the sex war and the class war, and expresses Osborne's own gnawing discontent.

It would be a mistake, however, to see Look Back simply as a sustained monologue or a personal diatribe. In fact, Osborne is on record as saying that Judi Dench's 1989 production, the source of the clip we've just put up online, was the first in over 30 years to get the play right. "Kenneth Branagh," Osborne wrote in the introduction to his Collected Plays, "succeeded in taking the rant out of Jimmy Porter. He tried to take it trippingly on the tongue." And, in so doing, he made Jimmy very funny. Equally important was that Emma Thompson's Alison was not the usual martyred punchbag, but a genuine combatant who used silence and obdurate withdrawal as weapons of retaliation against Jimmy. It took Judi Dench's astonishing production to give us the play that Osborne actually wrote.

Dench's production also helped to nail one other myth: that Look Back in Anger was the polar opposite of Beckett's absurdist Waiting for Godot, which opened in London the year before, in 1955. I wouldn't deny the stylistic difference between the two plays. But Osborne admired Beckett's work and, according to biographer John Heilpern, "related to the dark, heroic soul of the man". And both Look Back and Godot explore one of the great themes of modern drama: the dilemma of waiting. Jimmy Porter and Beckett's tramps are both, in a sense, passing the time yearning for something that will make sense of their existence. "Why do I do this every Sunday?" says Jimmy hurling aside the papers in that extraordinary first scene of Look Back. "Nothing to be done," is the opening line of Godot, as Vladimir exasperatedly tries to pull off his boot. The echoes are fascinating and remind us that Osborne's landmark play, like Beckett's, is all about waiting and the agony of hope endlessly deferred.

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A clip of Thames Television's 1989 production of John Osborne's play starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson

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