Val Guest

Well, yes, as I was a rather bad actor then and I wasn’t making enough money, I thought, to make enough money to not make money as an actor, I’d better do some writing.

At those times I got into… I suppose you call it a rut. I used to do comedy, comedy, comedy and I suddenly thought I ought to break away from this somehow.

And then she finally said yes. And we have been married, I want you to know, for 51 years.

Now, I’ll tell you something that might interest you. Casino Royale was the first Bond book that Ian Fleming ever wrote. And he couldn’t get anybody to touch it, to publish it – he couldn’t do anything about it at all. Nobody wanted to know.

I don’t know how we had about eighteen international stars in it, all playing James Bond.

And he said that he wrote the Bond character based on the character of David Niven. That’s how he saw Bond.

I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill… as well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and everything.

I wrote Murder at the Windmill. And it was accepted and we made it and it was the first film I made with Danny Angel, well the only film I actually made… I made a lot of it at the Windmill itself.

Oh, yes, we were on location with Another Man’s Poison, which I wrote for Bette Davis.

We worked solidly for a long time together. George Marriott Edgar and myself.

No, we didn’t shoot… in the ones that I did there were hardly any sex… there were suggestions of sex scenes but we never actually shot a sex scene as such.

Yes, The Persuaders, that was great fun because one of my favourite actors is Roger Moore.

I had a terrible job letting me do anything that wasn’t comedy.

Well, The Day the Earth Caught Fire was a story… I don’t if anybody knows what it is but it was about… in the early days of testing nuclear bombs, that Russia and America happened to test a nuclear bomb at the same moment at different ends of the earth.