Steve Nallon, best known for being the voice of Spitting Image's Margaret Thatcher, has written a biographical book about his tough upbringing in Leeds
“I did impressions of my teachers at school and realised quite early on that I enjoyed making people laugh, although my real ambition was to be an actor. I entered a talent contest in Leeds when I was 15 and did lots of impressions including Margaret Thatcher and I won.
“My dad was a really clever man and wanted to be a maths teacher, but he really struggled with his mental health and in those days if you had a mental health diagnosis such as schizophrenia it was impossible to find work. In the end the church took him in and he worked as a caretaker.” “When we lived with my grandparents three of us slept in the attic and at times my childhood was rocky. I know all this sounds like the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ Monty Python sketch, or the dilapidated house in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but that’s what it was like. And neither Roald Dahl nor John Cleese ever lived in those sorts of worlds for real.”
Nallon has drawn on these women for the character ‘Granny’ in his first solo novel The Time That Never Was. He also co-wrote I, Margaret with Tom Holt, a spoof autobiography of Baroness Thatcher, published by Macmillan. He spent a lot of lockdown writing and has just completed the second in the trilogy. But getting the book published was far harder.
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