Declan Lynch: How to be Bill Nighy? Avoiding social media and books as the perfect restaurant companion | Irish Independent
Flor Lynch
Radio reviews
Oliver Callan. Photo: David Conachy
Bill Nighy spoke to Brendan O'Connor on RTÉ Radio 1. Pic: Wireimage
In olden days – say, 20 years ago – people used to read good books. It was a strange but sophisticated process in which the readers would find pleasure in the work itself, and also perhaps find their own lives mysteriously enriched by engaging with fictional characters. Great days, they were.
Then you had the not-so-great days in which bookshops seemed to be full of stuff aimed at enriching the lives of men in particular, but in a relatively crude form – they liked a number in the title, such as 12 Ways to Become a Top Bloke, or Five Secrets of Stonkingly Rich Men. You wouldn’t need Dostoevsky on the job for these, but they found a market.
Now we’ve got Bill Nighy who, in addition to being a successful actor, does an excellent podcast called Ill-Advised.
He doesn’t write good books, as such, but he reads them, which is the next best thing. On RTÉ 1’s The Brendan O’Connor Show (weekends, 11am) he talked about eating all his meals in restaurants, with a book for company – a good one, of course. He didn’t specify, but we can take it that Bill won’t be relying on Jordan Peterson to get him through the night.
Nighy is in a tradition of thespian raconteurs such as Peter Ustinov and David Niven, except his material does not depend on outrageous anecdotes about Hollywood legends – rather, it is the minutiae of his own life that he shares with listeners who ask him for “advice”, with the understanding that being some kind of a lifestyle guru is self-evidently absurd anyway.
Again, we see a subtle departure from the more didactic school of agony uncles grabbing you by the proverbial lapels, straightening you out. Bill just natters away, like you’re having a cup of tea with him, in a style that used to be called “urbane”.
Since he is “unattached”, keeps no food in the fridge, and eats out alone while reading good books, and buys women’s clothes – not for himself – and dances at homes to dodgy disco records, in some quarters Bill might be diagnosed as being on some kind of spectrum. But Bill is too cool to define himself by any “condition”. The only condition he has, is Being Bill Nighy.
The life he describes is normal to him, and to others who seek inspiration and amusement in that normality. It is sublime.
Nighy told Brendan that he tries to avoid any interaction with social media. Since many of the most damaged people of our time are “very online”, it seems to work for Bill that he is very offline. It just works all round, this Empire of Nattering that he has built.
Oliver Callan. Photo: David Conachy
You wonder if there’s any chance of it catching on, this kind of success on the part of intelligent, talented, sophisticated people with an essentially good-hearted approach to life? Actually, you could find two other examples of it on RTÉ radio last week, without even leaving Cork.
Poet and author Theo Dorgan was another guest of Brendan O’Connor’s, while Jimmy MacCarthy was talking to Oliver Callan (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays, 11am) about his life and times and the famous songs he has written, such as Ride On and No Frontiers.
From the Dorgan interview we got Leonard Cohen’s email address – it was bald...@aol.com. Dorgan got it from former RTÉ producer John McKenna, a friend of Cohen’s.
He wanted the address because he had dedicated a poem to Cohen and wanted to inform him of this, without “inflicting” the poem on him. But Cohen replied, to the effect, “inflict away”.
A week later Dorgan got this response to the poem: “Honoured. Leonard.”
You could live off that for a while, but a few quid is nice, too. Morning Ireland (RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays, 11am) had a piece on the Basic Income for Artists Scheme that had an odd omission – it was odd to me, anyway, that the pilot scheme finished in February, but the lucky contestants in the fully-fledged scheme will not know their fate until September.
If some artists on the pilot scheme will also qualify then, it means their basic income, as it were, has been stopped for several months. Which was easily foreseeable.
You wanted Morning Ireland to ask the question: would this kind of treatment be acceptable when dealing with important people like doctors or lawyers or civil servants? If the minister was unavailable, they could ask Bill Nighy.