{"id":641327,"date":"2026-06-16T08:57:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T08:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/641327\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T08:57:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T08:57:07","slug":"kevin-whately-i-loved-acting-with-laurence-fox-its-a-great-shame-his-life-took-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/641327\/","title":{"rendered":"Kevin Whately: \u2018I loved acting with Laurence Fox. It\u2019s a great shame his life took over\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thanks to that early introduction, Kitty is now an acclaimed mezzo opera singer and Whately has taken a keen interest in her career. \u201cI\u2019ve had to learn quite fast. Some of it I absolutely adore. Opera singers are like athletes, they work and work at it, much harder than actors need to, and yet they are paid a pittance.\u201d He deplores the mutilation inflicted on the UK opera scene in the 2022 Arts Council England<\/a> review which cut funding to several leading companies and demanded that the ENO relocate to Manchester<\/a>. \u201cIt seemed like a horrible thing to do, to cut the ENO<\/a> off at the knees like that. It\u2019s a great company, with a hugely hugely loyal audience and certainly one of the best choruses I\u2019ve ever heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does he think the political establishment today devalues opera because they consider it elitist<\/a>? \u201cThere definitely used to be much more money,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I was at drama school [the Central School of Speech and Drama, during the early 1970s], the Arts Council gave me a grant to take a dozen opera lessons because I was massively into musical theatre at the time. There\u2019s nothing like that available now. You\u2019d think, what with Starmer being a music man, having trained with youth orchestras, [he\u2019d take a bit more interest]. Of course, it is very expensive to put on, and garden opera such as this perhaps feeds into the idea that it\u2019s elitist. But it\u2019s such a shame because, at its best, opera is absolutely ecstatic. You can create emotion with music in a way we mere actors can never do.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another life, Whately might have been a musician himself. He was a choirboy at school in County Durham and for a while earned a crust as a folk singer. Yet acting was always his first love, and after an unlikely stint as an accountant in Newcastle, he graduated from drama school in 1975 having busked at Oxford Circus Tube station each weekend to pay his way.<\/p>\n

Eight years later, he was being mobbed at Billy Connolly concerts by screaming fans thanks to the success of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, ITV\u2019s filthy, heart-warming comedy about seven lairy northern construction workers who escape the dole queue to work in Germany at the height of the 1980s construction crisis. Coming quick on the heels of Alan Bleasdale\u2019s Boys from the Black Stuff, which also shone a spotlight on unemployment and working-class disillusionment, it marked a watershed in working-class TV drama. \u201cJimmy [Nail], Tim [Healy] and I were from the North East and the audience up there thought of us as one of them,\u201d he says. \u201cSo when we were out, it was very much, \u2018hey boys, come and have a pint\u2019. It was like being in a rock band.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thanks to that early introduction, Kitty is now an acclaimed mezzo opera singer and Whately has taken a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,5343,168438,96,347,216333,80719,5438,3133,167224,58919,56,54,55,157732],"class_list":["post-641327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-culture","tag-culture-editors-choice","tag-entertainment","tag-itv","tag-laurence-fox","tag-opera","tag-standard","tag-television","tag-television-editors-choice","tag-top-story","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-us-content"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}