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You kind of stumbled into getting into Drama and then you got a teacher who's about to
produce the next play, you've been allowed to have girls in the play before which you're
very excited about, its a boys school and the girls have been allowed in and now you're
going to do another play and you're waiting to see which part you're going to get and
he said I don't think I can direct this Ken can, was that a turning point for you?
It was yeah, we'd started to put plays on in the Lower Sixth Form at the school I was
at, we've moved out of Liverpool then to Widnes about 12 miles away this foreign land and
a group of us just friends wanted to put some plays on and it was an old boys school so
we put the first one on which I think was it was the RC Sheriff but we liked it and
I was in it briefly and I also stage managed it. Then we decided that we'd like to do another
one but we had a Geography Teacher who directed it and we thought we don't really want to
get dressed in drag and there was a girls school opposite so we asked our Head Teacher
if we could go and speak to the girls school to get some girls, actual girls and he said
well I don't think the Head Mistress will agree to that, I said do you mind if we try
so he said that's alright so we set off from our school across the playground to their
playground it was like going through Checkpoint Charlie to this other place where there were
girls and all the boys were leaning our of our windows as we approached and the girls
were leaning out watching us as we approached, we spoke to this lady and we said we'd like
some girls please for the play and she said of course that would be wonderful, we're surprised
you didn't ask sooner. So this girls showed up and as you say we sat in circle and we
expected the teacher, the Geography Teacher to direct the play and he cast all the parts,
all the big parts and I was still sitting there and I thought well OK so I suppose I'm
Stage Manager and he said exactly that, that I haven't got time to direct the play I think
Ken should and I was absolutely astonished, when I looked around waiting for the whole
room to say seriously but they didn't they all nodded and said yeah and I had never thought
of directing a play, never occurred to me that I could but I thought I'll give it a
shot, so I went and studied the play hard and I watched other people do it and I directed
that and the subsequent plays, I actually did a lot of directing as a student, I really
loved it, if he hadn't seen it in me I don't think I would have seen it in myself.
So that's a really great thing about teachers, we were talking before we came on about the
other teacher in Liverpool roughly at the same time that had two of the Beatles in his
class, the Music Teacher lets talk about that.
This book is a sequel to one we published in 2009 called The Element and basic premise
of it is that you meet people, a lot of people who don't much enjoy the work they do they
just do it and get through the week and away for the weekend, I'm not saying that's true
of you of course not, you work for Pearson but you know it is true of a lot of people
you think well how do I get to be doing this and wander into it by some series of happenings
and here they are doing this job and kind of get up in the morning thinking let me get
through it its a job. In fact Gallop has just published a lot of research to show alarming
high levels of people who are disengaged at work, in America they reckon about seventy
per cent of people and of those maybe thirty per cent are what they call actively disengaged,
you know they're busy while the boss is around and then they're back on Facebook as soon
as they can be. But I also meet people who absolutely love what they do and they couldn't
imagine doing anything else, if you said to them why don't you change track and do something
different for a change they'd say I don't understand this is what I am not what I do,
its what you mean by being in your element you're doing something that resonates so deeply
with you that you really couldn't image it. So the book is about that, the difference
about these two ways of being and the difference it makes to peoples' lives, I interviewed
lots of people for the first book including Paul McCartney from the popular music group
The Beatles. The reason I was able to talk to him is his old school in Liverpool he'd
obviously, I went to a place called The Collegiate and he went to a place across the city, he
John Lennon and Paul McCartney and George Harrison went to a school called The Institute
and that's now been converted and it has been for the past ten to fifteen years into a School
for the Performing Arts its a fantastic place and I helped a little bit in the early days
and I met him several times so I asked him if I could talk to him about this book and
its exactly what you said I asked him if he liked music at school and he said he didn't
at all then, he didn't enjoy it and I said did your Music Teacher think you had any talent
musically and he said no, never mentioned it. One of the other people in the same music
class, the same programme was George Harrison the lead guitarist of The Beatles and I said
did anybody think he had any talent and he said no, no one noticed it, I said would this
be a fair summary that there is one music teacher in Liverpool in the 1950s who had
half The Beatles in his class and he missed it, well that's a bit of an oversight isn't
it. Anybody interesting in your class this year? Not really, oh two future Beatles but
apart from that.
Terri my wife is here to day and she's a major fan of Elvis Presley, we all are in the family
now, Elvis Presley wasn't allowed in the Glee Club at school in Tooplo, Mississippi they
reckoned he would ruin their sound, Elvis but we know what great heights the Glee Club
went on to once they kept Elvis out of the way.
McCartney said he applied to sing in the choir at the Cathedral and they wouldn't let him
in they said he wasn't good enough, how good was that choir? That's a good choir, is that.
The reason I tell these stories is not because of their inherent interest, I find them inherently
interesting, its the general principle which is that human talent is often buried quite
deeply beneath the surface, you may not come across it, its true with all of you watching
this, people often have quite remarkable resources that they've never discovered, its like the
Earth's natural resources they're often under the ground you have to go digging for them
refining them and creating opportunities and its like most people who are brought up in
the mono lingual household end up speaking one language and they struggle to learn a
second one in their teens or twenties but anyone who asks anybody brought up in a multi
lingual household will learn every language they're supposed to and there's no natural
limit to it as far as I can tell, you don't reach a point where kids say keep my grandmother
out of here I can't handle one more regional dialect its doing my head in because we all
have these capacities but whether we actually develop them into working abilities is a different
matter that's a matter of opportunity and application, that's where the education argument
becomes so important