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Paterson Joseph - Nigel Townsend

Spiritual realm
  Do you believe in ghosts?

I don't really believe in kind of headless spectres. I do believe in 'spirit' and I do believe that there can be spiritual presences in places.

I walked into a house of a rock star who died in quite horrible circumstances many years ago, and you could feel a palpable presence of something quite dark. I'd never experienced that before - I thought, 'Oh well, that's peoples' imaginations' - but it was actually something tangible.

So I do believe that there are things out there and there's a spiritual realm, very much so.

Travel broadens the mind
  What might be fun about travelling back to the 1830's?

I think what would probably be really enjoyable about it would be the fact that you'd have such a range of - if you like - worlds to look at.

We're all one kind of homogenised world - even if you go to the top of a mountain in Thailand, you still find people with Coca Cola tee shirts. Whereas the world [then] would have been so vastly different.

If you travelled to Africa it would have been truly African, it would have been truly a mysterious continent, or if you'd gone to India you would have found incredible things which you would not have seen in the West.

That would have been the greatest thing I think, travelling and seeing what was there. What I would have missed would probably be things like the Game Cube, which is my favourite toy. I think I would have missed that.

Bite me
  Do you have any favourite big screen vampires?

I saw Nosferatu in the cinema when I was in my mid-twenties, and I had been brought up on Christopher Lee's Dracula.

I wasn't very scared. I was scared as a kid, but I wouldn't have been scared seeing it as an adult. But Nosferatu was really, really freakish because there is something almost documentary-like about it. There's no sound and it's just very moody.

So I think of that when I think of vampires. That's it really. For my research, I've watched about three quarters of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

If you were a real vampire, who would you most like to bite?

Ah, somebody with good blood. That's a very good question. Who would I most like to bite? I don't know. My wife!

Clerks
  What made you want to become an actor?

I suppose because I didn't think I could do anything else after a while. I started out being a chef [then] working in an office and thinking that I was going to be a clerk and all that stuff.

It was in the Civil Service of all things, but I worked in an office for a couple of weeks and that put paid to that. So I tried something that I thought was just going to be fun, and went to a youth theatre whilst I was still working as a chef and loved it. I loved the aspect of creating something that people could believe in, even though I'd just made it up.

I remember the first day I went in I built a wall, obviously out of thin air, but the audience or the people who were watching it completely accepted that I was building this brick wall and I just thought, 'that is magical.' So that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Train trouble
  If you had the chance to possess a magical power, what might it be?

Absolutely the power of travel, the power of teleportation. To transport myself from one place to another, one continent to another, in the blink of an eye. To get myself home without using the Tube like that. That would be fantastic. It would just revolutionise everything. our trains are rubbish.

Fun, fun, fun
  Are you enjoying getting your teeth into Nigel?

Well, it's got to be said this is my most favourite job of the whole year. I've just done some Shakespeare, played a major role, and we got wonderful reviews and blah, blah, blah... I've also done a lot of television stuff, which has been really good fun, but this, these two days [have] been the biggest blast I can remember in a very long time.

When I heard about it, I just thought, 'I can't believe it, I'm finally going to do a voice on a cartoon!' I hit the roof with excitement, and my agent was like, 'What's your problem, this is just a two day thing?' I said, 'This is just amazing' and he went, 'Okay'.

But he doesn't understand . I'm working with the voice of Zippy, the voice of the Daleks, the voice of C3PO, the voice of the Sorting Hat. It doesn't get any better than that!

Neverwhere
  This isn't your first brush with the genre, as you did Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Any particular memories of that?

The negative memory of it is that the BBC didn't spend enough money on it. If they had, I think it would had a bigger following.

The best memories of it really were just the great Neil Gaiman, and the fact that his imagination is just so fertile. He's a fun guy as well, but his imagination is just so fertile he could have written 50 episodes of that and still kept us thinking, 'Gosh'.

Also the great thing [was the idea of] using the stations of London - like Blackfriars was where all the black friars lived. Seven Sisters were seven evil, not to be trusted, sisters. Wonderful stuff, really clever stuff. At Knightsbridge, there was a Knight on a bridge, and you couldn't get past unless you defeated the knight. Now that kind of imagination was wonderful.

Good ghosts
  Who do you think would make a great ghost?

I think somebody who would be completely unhappy about being a ghost, somebody that we think of as being quite vain would be good.

Somebody like Casanova or Marie Antoinette, or somebody who would just be so frustrated that they couldn't get their hands on somebody else. Shakespeare would be good, because he'd have so many plays and he still needed to write, and he was so sorry he'd stopped and retired so early. I really think he would be good. It would be fertile ground there, that kind of character.

Americanisms
  Do you think the writers lend an American favour to the dialogue, or is it authentically British?

It doesn't matter. It's better if it's something that sounds like we would speak today, because for those people living then it didn't sound like 'old' English, did it? I suppose it's better that we have those little Americanisations, like saying 'Yeah.' I don't think a very high-class English person would have said, 'Yeah,' but it doesn't really matter.

I had a couple of lines yesterday that I thought, 'Do you mind if it sounds a bit American?' They didn't, and I don't either. It's fine, as long as the audience don't think, 'That's suddenly American.'

Cartoon capers
  How should Nigel look in cartoon form?

I don't think he should look vastly different to the way I do I suppose. I think that there should be a sort of gauntness about him, which I obviously would have to work on, but I think he would have a sense of being slightly dissipated and drawn.

At the same time, he rather enjoys that look of, 'I could die at any moment' - he's got that kind of look about him, slightly melancholic but sardonic at the same time. Obviously I don't think shaven heads were the norm in early 19th century England, but if he had short hair that would be fine too.