PETER CAPALDI TRIBUTE TO WIFE

DOCTOR Who and The Thick Of It star Peter Capaldi has paid tribute to his producer and actress wife Elaine Collins as he revealed she took a job to let him pursue his unpredictable acting career when they both struggled financially. 

The 66 year old from Glasgow, who stars in the new series of Black Mirror, is notoriously private about his marriage, but wanted it noted that Lanarkshire born Elaine, also 66, gave him the financial freedom he needed to choose his roles.

Elaine made her acting debut in 1975 in  series Lord Peter Wimsey before movies including Soft Top Hard Shoulder, Mrs Brown and The Wyvern Mystery as well as TV shows City Lights, Selling Hitler and Psychos. 

Since the 2000s, she has worked as associate producer on drama film Strictly Sinatra, as well as being a script editor on detective series A Touch of Frost and creative director on shows like Shetland.

Now living in London, the couple met in 1983 working for Paines Plough Theatre Company, and married in 1991. They have a daughter born in 1992 and two grandsons. 

Peter says without Elaine his acting career in movies like Local Hero and Dangerous Liaisons wouldn’t ever have been possible. 

He explained: “Elaine really changed my life. She's an incredible woman, amazing mother and producer and actress and all of these things. I don't want to go into it in huge detail because I also have a private life but she's the person who changed everything for me because she took me in at a time when I wasn't in great shape, and loved me. Ironically for someone who's had such an embarrassment of riches, great luck and good fortune, I developed quite a kind of lack of confidence, applying limitations to myself that were not necessary, when I was probably about 26, 27.”

“People think the first automatic characteristic of an actor would be that they were full of confidence. I know many actors who are genuinely insecure because the business is so volatile and you can be ditched by it very quickly. And you have no control over it. One of the things that happened to me was that I decided that I wasn't really very clever or very smart or that I should limit my ambition.”

Peter who said he suffered a type of ‘imposter syndrome’ at the time added: “She began to say to me, ‘No you must think more of yourself. You must work harder and take bigger risks and read more.’”

“It's funny, because people come in to our house, and say, ‘Oh, you're so well read, Peter’.And I say, ‘That's not my books, they're Elaine’s.’ And of course, during one of my down periods, which went on for quite a while, we were really struggling financially. But she decided when we had a particularly difficult year, and I wasn't bringing in any money, that she had to do something. And she asked around and got a job through the BBC reading scripts“

“…So she would read scripts and she'd get paid. I don't know how much, 25 quid or something like that. Elaine took it very seriously and also was very fast so began to earn more money.

“And the BBC noticed and said ‘This person is really good at doing this. Shall we invite her to apply for a job as a drama assistant?’ That was really a job that largely someone who had just come from Oxford or Cambridge would normally get.

And she applied, she got the job.”

“Although that wasn't a lot of money, it was a regular wage and it allowed me to say, ‘Okay, well, I don't have to do this job or that job. I can make a choice about which one I think is artier or better or a job that would help me more.’

It gave me the power of veto.”

Elaine has since produced long running detective series including Vera and Shetland.  

Peter told podcast Three People: “What an achievement. And now finally, she does a show that I'm in called Criminal Record, with Apple, which has just been commissioned for a second series. So she just made our life happen.”

“She made me seek and make more of myself and also made so much of herself and brought up our family and made our beautiful home and also produced these shows. I'm just in awe of her. It's the greatest.”

DOCTOR WHO AND OUTLANDER STARS CELEBRATE AT THE BAFTA SCOTLAND AWARDS

DOCTOR Who stars Ncuti Gatwa and Peter Capaldi joined  Saiorse Ronan, Jack Lowden,   Dougray Scott, Sam Heughan, and more at the BAFTA Scotland awards. 

The bash, was held at Glasgow’s Doubletree Hilton to celebrate the wealth of Scots talent in performance, production, and craft, in gaming,TV and film ad theshowbizlion.com took the opportunity to catch up with them. 
Former Doctor Who actor Peter Capaldi was delighted to welcome new Scots Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa as the latter entered the red carpet shirtless in his two tone lapelled suit but the two never stood side by side until they mingled properly at the after party. 

Ncuti was thrilled to be back in Scotland but remains as down to earth as ever despite his recent rise to fame through Sex Education and as the new Doctor. 

The actor, who thanked the audience for welcoming him since getting his big Doctor Who role, said of his forthcoming adventure: “It’s going to be a really fun ride.”

Peter Capaldi also picked up his award for Outstanding Contribution to Film and TV thanked Armando Ianucci , Bill Forsyth and more on his speech. 
He also joked that according to racial stereotypes his parents couldn’t be there cause ‘they are busy working in the chip shop’. He thanked them for his sarcasm and told Ncuti he was about to learn all about being Doctor Who - including spotting anoraks.

American Irish actress Saiorse Ronan made a separate entrance from her other half Jack Lowden and looked resplendent in her mustard strappy dress with pearl and tassel detail and strappy diamanté heels.  
Outlander’s  Sam Heughan, in a striking blazer and polo neck combo with dark trousers, got the loudest cheer of the night as he greeted fans of the epic Starz time travel series. 

The winner of the Audience Award who made a long acceptance speech pointing out all the work and money which Outlander has brought to Scotland, said: “It’s so nice isn’t it to be back here to celebrate Scottish film and TV and to see familiar faces as well which we haven’t been able to do with the pandemic. We may be a small country, a small affair but it’s a big celebration.”
Dougray Scott, who picked up the award for best actor TV for Irving Welsh’s Crime, said: “It was a long journey to get Crime to the screen. I sat with Irving Welsh 12 years ago. I’m a little bit nervous, but thank you so much. I really appreciate this. It means the world to me to get this award tonight. So thank you very much.”

Jack Lowden made a plea to those in the room to pledge money to help the film industry in Edinburgh following recent news of the demise of the Film House.

DOCTOR WHO REVISITS GLASGOW UNIVERSITY FOR TIME TRAVEL COURSE

DOCTOR Who fans can now examine his time travel theories and experiences during a new Glasgow University course.
The short course entitled Dr Who and Philosophy: Time Travel And the Nature of Reality will see tutors examine if time travel is possible, and if it is, what it tells us about the nature of reality.
Students who attend on Monday June 5 or Saturday July 1 are promised a tour of philosophy's deep mystical questions using characters and episodes from the series during the course which will take place in June and July this year.
The uni which has previously offered a Game of Thrones Philosophy course as well as one inspired by The Simpsons says the £30 course is already proving a hit with Doctor Who fans who want to explore the possibilities of having a tardis of their own.
Tutor Dr John Donaldson said: "This is a course offered by a part of the University Centre for Open Studies to give people a taster of the courses we offer. They are open to the general public."
Following the success of our Simpson's Introduction to Philosophy we looked at other figures in popular culture and Doctor Who has quite an obvious connection with Philosophy and Metaphysical questions of Time Travel.
There will be twenty five students in the class from 10am until 4pm and I'm still working on what clips from the show we will use, but there are two main issues in the philosophy of time; first the nature of time and what time is and the second issue is of time travel itself.
The nature of time brings up some big metaphysical and philosophical issues and there are different views we will examine from the Block Universe View which says the universe is an unchanging four dimensional block where time exists equally in the past present and future.
We will also look at the Growing Block view where only Past and Present exist, not the Future and and thirdly we will examine Presentism where the Past and the Future don't exist.
It is most obvious how time travel can occur if the Block Universe View is used but there are theories about the other models too, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
"With regards to Doctor Who and his Tardis, travel into the future is in theory easier than into the past. Relativity theory says the faster you travel as a proportion of the speed of light the slower time goes for you relative to someone else, so time for them will go much faster than it will for you.
"Even today we can build a spaceship to travel ten to twenty percent to the speed of light and even when we got on a plane and off a plane we become a few milliseconds younger than when we got on.
Travelling into the past however, like the Doctor also does, is a lot harder because to travel into the past, if you accept what physics says, you need to build a wormhole and use it to travel back to the time when you first built it."
Dr Johnson is planning to illustrate his course with some episodes which see the Doctor Who travelling back and forth in his tardis.
For example, in one story called Father's Day the Doctor and his companion Rose travelled back into the past to save Rose's father from dying but the result was a paradox in which monsters known as Reapers destroyed almost all life on Earth until the time stream was set back on track.
Dr John Donaldson explained: " To the question, 'Can I visit myself?' You build a wormhole and wait while you travel back to meet yourself just after you built it. We run into serious issues with the grandfather paradox though because if time travel into the past is possible then it's possible to travel back into the past to kill your grandfather before your grandfather meets your grandmother, or even directly kill yourself. It means you'd never come into existence."
"Doctor Who approaches time travel differently from Back To The Future and we will examine the complex debates surrounding his method. We won't be looking so much at the technology but more about the issues surrounding it.
Dr Donaldson is unsure at the moment if the actual Doctor Who who is said to have studied at the university, will use his tardis to attend his particular course, but he laughed: "If anyone wants to wear a long scarf I'd be more than happy to have some Doctor Who's in thr audience. We all time travel to a point when we fly on a plane but I haven't had the opportunity to go inside a time machine. I would be severely tempted if I had the opportunity. I'm not sure if our physics department are working on that.


- Posted with love from Scotland by theShowbizLion.com