Moral Maze

[gentle music]

On This Cultural Life, Nicholas Hytner, my guests choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity, and your first choice for this program is the clown Charlie Cairoli.

Mm-hmm.

Um, where did you first see him? In Blackpool, I presume.

And I-- that never felt to me to be a dilution of the National Theatre's mission.

It felt to me that the National Theatre should be embracing the challenging and the popular, and in an ideal world, both at the same time.

I don't think I ever programmed anything thinking that it might be a big commercial success.

War Horse, absolutely not.

Yes, that's the second He-Man reference in this series of Sideways.

It's a programme as a child I used to watch every week.

Anyway, Benjamin's original idea becomes Roboto, a heroic action figure in the Masters of the Universe toy line, and a version of it is still available to buy today.

But Benjamin's very first business idea came even earlier, at the age of eight.

I don't know where to start.

I mean, one thing I would say is, so I was on Moral Maze a while back and I was talking or debating with Giles Fraser about the pace of ethnic change.

And so it's about race, he says.

And I said, well, look, there are people who are comfortable with a certain rate of change.

This is the hardest thing to get through people's heads.

And I was trying to make this point.

Actually, I think I did manage to make it on The Moral Maze, was that we cannot reduce every question about the whole and about the country as a whole or the system to questions about individual membership.

So if I talk about the impact of ethnic transformation, that should not be reduced down to, oh, you want to exclude someone who isn't white British from being an equal.