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Maybe he had been having a bad day, maybe he just enjoyed putting up barriers, but somehow the vibes were not good when I was introduced to Robert Morley.

He was sitting in his dressing room, hands outstretched, not in a greeting, but in an attempt to hold up a daily newspaper broadsheet. The newspaper partly hid his face, and beneath its' pages came a hearty "Hello how are you."

I sat down and waited for him to lower the paper, but nothing happened. Instead, this cheery deep voice barked "Well, what do you want to ask me."

There was no option but to commence the interview, albeit addressing myself to a talking newspaper.'

I knew that he had strong views on Education, so I asked him about these.

"I have strong views on everybody in Education. I do not think that Schoolmasters have done a very good job in my lifetime. I am always longing for them to have a breakthrough and find out how to teach children. Really I think that the answer is to let the children learn for themselves."

"You see a Schoolmaster fills a child's mind with knowledge which he is never going to find any use for later. This puts him off learning anything afterwards, and a child closes its' mind when they close their desk at school."

There was now a slight pause, and at last he lowered the newspaper and smiled. "There does happily appear to be a vague repentance on the part of Schoolmasters, a vague feeling that they must do better," he said. "They have to acknowledge that they must fulfil the purpose of education. This is not to teach children the name of 27 different cakes beginning with the letter c but to want to find out what the world and happiness and existence is all about."

Robert Morley was educated through the English Public School system, and I noted that although it sounded as if his own schooldays had not been very happy ones, he still held on to some of the traditions. Not once during the interview did he refer to Schoolteachers' it was always Schoolmasters.'

His career in show-business has encompassed Theatre, Television, and Film. We talked about the differences between each medium, and there emerged a certain disregard for the merits of screen acting.

"Filming for me is a means to an end, it enables me to live. I do not have a very great opinion of screen acting. I have never seen anything done on the screen which could not have been done, indeed sometimes has been done, by intelligent animals."

"When a film is cut, edited, and re-dubbed anybody can give a bad performance. As an art

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