UR TV CAST

I remember, 10 or 15 years ago, I said, `Look, any actor who’s still standing in 10 or 15 years, and isn’t a robot, is going to be very important!’ “I asked if he would still want to make a film from Henderson the Rain King – a pet project based on Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel about a wealthy, successful but disillusioned American who decides to go off to tribal Africa to find fresh challenges.”Well, I’m almost old enough to play the part! It’s one of the few properties I’ve ever owned, and I had a meeting about it with Saul Bellow, one of my great heroes We were never able to bring it around. I worry most of the time, and finally my answer to `Why didn’t you do this?’ is `Because I did that’ And I’m a man who considers himself lazy I’ve just done five things in a year. Because I looked at the year and said, well, I really have no life – for one of the first times in my life – nothing, no life. So I laid it out with work, getting away from the pretension of being a diva, and being a workman.”. If you look upwards, the effect is almost hallucinogenic.

Through the metal lacework of the grille, the lenses circle noiselessly on their base of mercury, bending the light into slow repeated patterns of refraction. Dazzle and shadows filter to the floor below, mingling with a watery dawn and the gleam of the brass plates. After a while, you start to feel dizzy, unbalanced by the unceasing turning and returning. Look downwards away from the light, and there’s the receding curves of the tower steps, curling like a snail’s shell to an invisible centre. Stay too long and you’ll lose your grip, spun off your axis with all these optical illusions

Lighthouses have always possessed powers of distortion. Not merely the distortion you get from projecting and magnifying two surprisingly puny lightbulbs outwards to a distance of 29 miles, but the man-made distortions of mind and heart and memory.

From the beginning of the Scottish lighthouse service, two centuries ago, you got the same effect; armchair mariners besotted with the romance of the lonely, sea-struck towers, historical tourists wandering drunkenly through the tales of gales and wrecks. Even the poetry of their names was enough to turn the most adult of men back towards childhood: Sule Skerry, Esha Ness, Ushenish, Skurdy Ness, Muckle Flugga. In Victorian times there was a thriving trade in lighthouse memorabilia: pictures, postcards, bits of brass and perfume bottles. Nothing else, not even boats, had quite the same allure.
Not that there’s much to have illusions about any longer. The polish of the past has long gone, most of the brass fittings have been stripped away, and there’s nothing much here now apart from banks of stolid monitors and computer fittings. The buildings are still there, admittedly, as plain and weather-beaten as they always were, but not much else. Even the keepers, fine figures of romance and loneliness, are going, the last of them pensioned off with nothing but memories and habits that have outlived their usefulness.