Mark Williams plays Sam Chase
What is Sam's home life like?
Sam is married to Barbara. He's a bus driver and she's only ever worked
in shops. They live on an estate and they've got a very clever son who
goes to the local grammar school, of whom they're very proud.
Like many people of their generation, they're greatly impressed by
the opportunities that their son has that they didn't.
They take life as it comes and Sam's a bit of a philosopher.
Is he the traditional family man?
He is, yes. They probably had a bit of a good time in their youth,
Sam and Barbara, probably a bit of a motorbiking and a bit of rock 'n'
roll dancing going on. Sam, in my mind, was a bit of an ex-rocker.
I am exactly the age that the book was written about, in terms of the
three main teenagers. I was going through all of that in Birmingham
in 74/75. Jonathan Coe and I had almost parallel lives.
On set in the Chase house, Philip's bedroom was decorated in posters
taken out of NME and one of the posters is for a concert I was actually
at - it was for a band playing at the Birmingham Town Hall, supported
by an unknown band called Queen! 27 November 1973.
How does he deal with the thought of his wife's infidelity?
He finds it hard to believe and then he cooks up a plan to deal with
it and fights him on his own turf.
What do you think the appeal of The Rotters' Club is?
What's good about it is it's not nostalgic. It doesn't matter where
it's set, there's all this energy going on and, as Ben says at the beginning
in the narration, this was happening, that was happening but we weren't
bothered - we were into love, music and stuff like that.
It's looking at the recent past through the eyes of three young men
who were growing through it.
Do you have anything else coming up?
Another series of Carrie And Barry [大象传媒 ONE] next year, another documentary
series for The Discovery Channel called The Industrial Revelations,
that's the third one I've done for them. A Michael Winterbottom film
called Tristram Shandy and also Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire.
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