I haven’t seen Danny Boyle since 1978, though I’ve obviously followed his career from afar with great interest. His take on Britishness in the Olympic opening ceremony was extraordinary and magical - a people's history laid out with passion, drama, honesty and self-deprecating humour. Danny's introduction to the event is well worth reading, and I like what Anthony Painter says about it here.
Danny was a contemporary of mine at Bangor. I studied English and History, and he was studying English and Drama along with well-known actress Fran Barber, then known as Frances Brookes, and we would see each other regularly in lectures and so on. The drama crowd were a special group, quite close knit, obviously working together intensely in workshops and on productions. That meant we didn’t see a lot of them in student union activities, though I think Danny probably attended one or two of the large mass meetings held in the run-up to the November 1976 events I described here and Andy Chandler gives more detail on here. I remember seeing Danny in the performance of Edward Bond’s play Saved referred to here by Prof Tony Brown and I seem to remember also a production of Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. I also remember towards the end of our first year a student studying English with me calling Danny ‘the bloke who looks like a rockstar’. Well, he did then look one of the coolest guys in the college and after Friday, rock-star seems to fit!
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