The NABIL SHABAN Interview, May 1999
for MISTFALL, magazine of the Brisbane Dr. Who Fan Club
1. Do you read any of the new novels based on Doctor Who?
No
2. Describe birefly the circumstances surrounding your casting as Sil.
Ron Jones was searching for someone small to play Sil....he'd interviewed and auditioned
many "dwarf" and "midget" actors for the part but was not satisfied with any of them. Time
was running out and rehearsals were scheduled to start within the month. Then Martin Jarvis
who had already been cast as the Governor of Varos asked if Sil had been found yet, and
when he was told No, he said he knew of the ideal person. Apparently his wife had seen me
in a TV show a few years previous and reminded Martin that I could be what Dr. Who was
looking for. So as a result of Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis suggestion I was invited to read a couple of
scenes of Varos at an audition with Ron. At the end of the interview/audition, Ron offered
me the part outright. However, I nearly didn't make to the interview because I got stopped by
a traffic cop for carrying out an illegal motoring manueuver...and because I insisted on
arguing with the pig when I had no right to (I knew I was in the wrong but I don't respect the
Law and I despise the pigs), he very nearly arrested me....however, I like to think that the
ghost of William Hartnell was looking after me (as I was his biggest fan) and he planted a
thought-form into the "Rozer" (English slang for cop) brain and so I was allowed to continue.
3. Given the minor adventure you had with the traffic police on the way to
your interview for the part of Sil, as well as the fact that you are a
long-term fan of Doctor Who, the question begs as to just what rehearsals
were like, in particular your first day.
As a fan of DW since its birth in 1963, I was extremely excited and nervous on the first
day....by chance I got into the lift with Patrick Troughton....of course he had no idea who I
was or what I was doing at the BBC. I didn't tell him...we just smiled at each other. I took the
coincidental encounter as a good omen. Because I was an inexperienced, untrained actor and
disabled, I didn't want to appear a dud...so I learnt all my lines before the first day...I assumed
all the actors would have done anyway...Well, I then became embarrased when I discovered I
was the only actor to know the script word-perfect...so for the first few days I had to pretend
NOT to know my lines, but Forbes Collins and Martin Jarvis saw through my ruse and Colin
Baker announced that I was a Swot and trying to win Brownie points from the
"teacher"....Also by the first day of rehearsal I had the Sil laugh off to a tee (hee). I'd met a
snake the week previous and got my inspiration from watching it flick its tongue back and
forth....I think Anthony Hopkins got his "Animal Lectern" slurping noise from Sil's
laugh....very similar, don't you think?
4. What work did you do immediately before and immediately after Doctor Who?
I don't know about immediately before or after...I'd have to look that up in my diaries. I
know, not long before (1983), I'd gone to India to do a theatre show (Casting Out), shook
hands with Indira Gandhi whereupon she became jinxed and was shot within a year.
Afterwards was a film shot in Turkey (Born of Fire) about Satan and his plot to destroy the
world. I was a good guy and helped the hero to foil the Devil's plans. However, the movie
was a flop, the stars' careers plummetted and we all nearly got burned, earth-quaked and
arrested by trigger-happy soldiers - in that order. The Shaban Jinx strikes again.
5. Do you have a favourite role? A favourite project you've worked on?
Obviously, Dr. Who. I liked other roles/projects for different reasons. "Born of Fire" because
I had the chance to play a sympathetic character and the location was exotic and exciting.
"Deptford Graffiti", a TV play. Again a sympathetic role...the romantic lead, in fact. I'm a
rebel with a cause and I have a love scene. I also join a gang of bikers and give the cops grief.
I love teenage/youth angst movies e.g. "Quadrophenia", "If....", "Trainspotting" etc. "Deptford
Graffiti" is in that tradition, also it was directed by one of the stars of "Quadrophenia", so it
had proper "street-cred". But my best work has been on stage...Hamlet, The Emperor,
Volpone, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Crutch...
6. Are there any TV programmes or films your fans should look out for to
see examples of the variety of your acting abilities?
Deptford Graffiti, Raspberry Ripple, Born of Fire, Wittgenstein, Slave of Dreams
7. City of Joy springs to mind. I understand that production was plagued
with disasters from the beginning. Have you any interesting tales to tell
about that?
The first disaster was that the Calcutta authorities and intellegentsia didn't want us there....so
we were continually harassed and abused. Eventually we were driven out by the persecution
and had to finish the filming in England. The village set was dismantled and shipped to
Pinewood Studios, London and rebuilt. The production was accused of making a porn movie,
murdering a newspaper journalist, corrupting the child actors. On the first day I arrived, there
was a petrol bomb attack. After that we had demos, riots making it impossible to film in the
streets. On the last day, the cops came to the hotel to arrest the Director for making the
film....and me, for playing a leper who gets burned by Calcutta gangsters....they regarded my
portrayal as libellous, so I had to be prosecuted. Unfortunately for the authorities, the police
were a bit slow and arrived several hours after we had all flown out of India. The worst
disaster however, was having ME, International Jinx, in the movie. Patrick Swayze's career
flopped after that, Roland Joffe never made a good movie since and the film itself bombed....
8. What types of music do you listen to?
Rock and Roll, Blues, Punk, Raggae, Electronic (Dr. Who theme was the first electronic
music I fell in love with), Techno, Ambient.
I enjoy the Doors, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, the Beatles, John
Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Moody Blues, Toyah Wilcox, Sex Pistols, Stranglers, Crass, the Clash,
OMD, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, the
Who, Pulp, Oasis, Sinead O'Connor
I also like listening to traditional music of different countries...so I have folk albums of Irish,
Australian, Russian, Indian, Japanese, Andean etc.
9. What kinds of TV shows do you watch? Do you have an all time favourite?
I don't. I hate TV now. 99 percent is utter crap. Nowadays, I watch video presentations of
some TV programmes e.g X-files, Red Dwarf, Blackadder, Yes Minister. Sometimes there
are the occasional good TV dramas like "Our Friends in the North" or "Ivanhoe". I hate Yank
TV...X-files is just about okay as Yank shit is concerned...pity I never got the chance to make
The Ghosthunter, which I suggested to the BBC in 1988 as a replacement for Dr. Who. If the
Beeb had taken up my idea, Britain would have got in before the X-files and done it better.
But at the time the BBC shortsightedly claimed there wasn't a market for the Paranormal and
UFO stuff.
When I was a kid and right up until I was 22, Doctor Who was IT...the greatest TV
programme in the world...in all time and space. Nothing was allowed to get between me and
my Saturday viewing of this fantastic show. I hated Star Trek when it first came out because
it attempted to usurp the Time Lord's cherished spot.... Then in 1975, the pulling power of
DW vanished and I lost interest....I only became interested again when I miraculously found
myself in it and all the old shows came out on video.....
I like science, history, nature and current affair documentaries but they are becoming
increasingly rare. Also I love watching foreign films...but they are getting rarer in British TV.
We get stupid docu-soaps, endless garbage on the police and medical matters. We have too
many police and medical dramas, all telling lies about how wonderful the cops and doctors
are...The only cop series I really enjoyed was "Between the Lines" but that was showing how
corrupt the British police were....and another excellent British series was "Law and Order",
showing how unjust British legal and justice system is....Needless to say, the police, judges,
solicitors, prisons all complained bitterly to the BBC and threatened to deny further
cooperation with future TV productions.
There are too many damn cookery, gardening, motoring, food, drink programmes. Simply,
TV today is bloody boring..... Its getting to be as unwatchable as Yank TV.....
10. Do you have a favourite film? Do you go to the cinema often?
I use to go to the cinema at least once a week (in the Seventies) but as a disabled person in a
wheelchair, today I'm rarely allowed access without an able-bodied escort (apparently, I'm a
fire-hazard)....when I was younger, I had friends who were unattached, so finding someone to
go with me wasn't so difficult...now, people have partners, married, have families....also I live
40 miles out of London and most of my friends are Londoners, so I rarely go to my local
flea-pit. Besides, I now hate most movies because they are Yank Hollywood commercial
hype-tripe. Also, I boycott films where too much money has been spent or where the stars are
overpaid. I think it is obscene that actors can get paid anything over a million dollars. Also
most Yank movies all style and special effects and no content. The stories and
characterizations are tedious and predictable, bland, shallow and I just feel like burning the
cinema down (well, I am accused of being a fire-hazard...so I might as well practise what
they preach).
However, I do have loads of favourite films....and surprisingly, many are Yank.
eg. One Flew over the Cuckoo's nest, The Exorcist, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Taxi
Driver, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Godfathers 1 and 2, Glory, Posse, Malcolm X, The Doors,
JFK, Nixon, Natural Born Killers, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, Deer Hunter, Close
Encounters....John Carpenter's The Thing, I like most Spike Lee movies, Jim Jarmusch, Hal
Hartley.
Favourite British films include Whistle Down the Wind, If....., Clockwork Orange, Women in
Love, Oh What a Lovely War, Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Quadrophenia, 2001,
Alien, Trainspotting, Gandhi,...
Most non-Yank and non-British films are brilliant. I love loadsa movies of Russian, French,
German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Latin American, Turkish, African etc origin.
Oz movies? Yeah! Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mad Max (1 and 2), The Last Wave, My Brilliant
Career, Gallipoli, The Cars that Ate Paris, Muriel's Wedding, The Chant of Jimmy
Blacksmith, Man of Flowers.
11. A favourite book? What kinds of literature do you usually go for? Are
you more of a newspapar/magazine man at all?
No, I'm not a newspaper/magazine man. It's literature for me...I like existentialist stuff.
Dostoievski, Camus, Kafka, Tolstoy, Sartre...I also like Zola, Gogol, Turgenev, Voltaire,
Herman Hesse, Knut Hamsun, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence, Stephen King,
John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clark, Salman Rushdie, George Orwell...well, lets just say, I love
books. I read a lot of non-fiction too. Politics, occult, mysticism, religion, conspiracy
theories, biographies, Ufology, philosophy
12. Favourite type of food? (And we know it's not dyed peaches...)
Food bores me....
13. What have your general impressions been of Australia during your visit?
How do Australian fans compare to British ones? (Please, be honest and, if
necessary, brutal.)
Australia.....hot, bright, seemingly empty (that is, when away from the cities). Long straight
dusty roads. Sometimes I felt like I was in America... a Road Movie or a Wild West.... I like
the isolation, the vast open spaces, the animals, the danger of the deserts, the crocodiles....I
like the aborigines, their myths and folklore, their mysticism and music. The non-aborigine
Australians are okay too, they seem friendly and helpful. I found people always willing to
chat. Of course, I know there is sexism, racism, ethnocentrism....but no country is perfect....I
felt greater racism in Yankland than in Australia....I was surprised at how good Australia was
for disabled people.
The Oz Fans as compared to Brits? I didn't see much diferrence. Perhaps your enthusiasm and
knowledge is more extreme but where you are similar as opposed to the Yank Fandom, is
your interest in the hardware, story and monsters....the Yanks are mainly into the glamour,
the superficial shit...but then your average Yank is pretty dumb, so it's not surprising, really.
14. Do you have any specific religious beliefs? Are these based more on any
dogmatic teachings from your adolescence, or are they based more in your
own current world view?
I don't have any religious beliefs...other than Religion is the Opiate of the People. Orthodox,
institutional, establishment religion are based on human wishful thinking and created as a
means of social control. Religion never practises what it preaches, so it is not worthy of
respect. The concept of blasphemy is absurd...since no one can prove that God exists or that
Jesus is still alive and our Saviour or that the Koran came from Allah. If God exists as
portrayed in the Bible or the Koran, then he is a Fascist cruel Tyrant, unfit to rule the
universe and therefore my enemy, and when I die, I'll have a big fight with him. But I believe
the Bible and other so-called Holy Books are all mythologies created by human imagination
attempting to explain the inexplicable. There are strange, supernatural things in the universe
and in our domain....we are strange supernatural things...I suspect there are more powerful
beings than us. We are most of the time limited in our senses....so our grasp of reality can
only ever be incomplete. Our mortal intelligence is finite, so how can we know the
truth.....Even if it is out there....which I doubt.... If God or gods and goddesses try to speak to
us, we will invariably misinterpret the messages or deliberately distort to suit our
nationalism, politics and homo-centrism. Men wanting to dominate and oppress women will
design God as a male...whereas new feminism trying redress the balance, wanting men to feel
inferior and ashamed and no longer fit to rule the planet, will create the Earth Goddess in
their own feminine image. Religion is about worshipping and obeying some supreme Creator,
it is about seeking salvation, it is about escaping mortality, pain, suffering. It is about anger at
being born imperfect or living in an imperfect world. Religion is an attempt at removing our
fear of being ultimately alone and unloved. Because I can see why religion exists, I see it as a
human invention and therefore I cannot accept it as a fountain of truth...I despise it as a
comforter. I reject it because it does our thinking for us. Ultimately religion hinders us from
discovering the truth.....Howz that for a load of pretentious bullshit....I bet you wished you
hadn't asked. Once some Mormons visited me...gave me the story of their founder, Joseph
Smith, to read...and then came back the following week to ask me the most important lesson
I learnt. I told them that I should do what Joe Smith was told to do by the Archangel Moroni
(Moron?). He was told not to join any church but create his own. So, I told the Mormons, I
must follow Joe Smith's example (they didn't like me calling him "Joe" - I wasn't giving him
due respect) and NOT join the Mormons and form my own church.....They were not amused.
15. Are you superstitious of anything?
No. Superstition is about fear and I fear nothing.
16. With recent ecomonic slumps in the Asia-Pacific region and so many
ethnic wars in Eastern Europe of the last few years, do you see the current
world economy or political climate falling into ultimate degredation in the
near future, or is there a light at the end of the tunnel?
Lets put it this way, I wouldn't be surprised if we humans don't destroy ourselves or the planet
in the near future. Ever since I was a child I had expectations of the Doomsday scenario
occurring during my lifetime....and so spent the past thirty years watching out for tell-tale
signs, reading about prophecies, myths and legends of the End-Times. Inevitably, it's not
surprising I should think like this...since I am of the Atomic Age Generation....also the WWII
with its 50 million deaths and its Jewish Holocaust and its Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only
finished 8 years before my birth....then the Cold War, Cuba, Teenage Angst through Sex,
Drugs and Rock n' Roll...and having been brainwashed in Christian Apocalyptic
Fantasies....the emerging science fiction culture and of course, Doctor Who fed much of my
Armageddonist dreams, desires and paranoias. Most of the Doctor Who stories are concerned
with his Messianic mission of saving either our planet or some other planet. The Apocalypse
is intrinsic to 20th century culture. If the world doesn't end in the next 10 years (I'm giving
the Prophets a margin of error), it is quite likely Apocalyptic beliefs, visions and stories will
be less influential in the 21st century....
However, I see no reason for optimism. I don't believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Human nature is basically self-centred, greedy, discontented and therefore self-destructive.
We know what's wrong with us but on mass we don't care enough or are too apathetic to do
anything about it. We keep expecting someone else to do it for us. That's why we believe in
the Second Coming, in Messiahs, Saviours in Spaceships. Or...We think all we have to do is
pray and our problems will be saved. Well, we have been praying for two thousand years and
our shit has got thicker and stinkier. The Moslems thought praying to Allah would give them
victory over the west during the Gulf War, but they were wrong... We shirk our
resposibilities....we blame the politicians, the multinational corporations, the unions, the
communists, the capitalists....we blame everyone but ourselves. But we get the society, the
government, the religion we deserve. If we collaborate by cooperating with the rulers, by
buying trash, by voting, by constantly consuming when we don't need to, then we are
personally responsible for the crimes of humanity. The only way to stop the rot is total
revolution but....how?
17. I understand you are something of an avid Ufologist, as well as a
member of BUFORA. If you can pin it down to any specific event or attitude,
why do you think you are so keenly interested in the supernatural?
Disillusion with the Christian fairy stories, realising the story of Jesus Christ was at best a
half-truth - the vacuum had to be filled. A new search for the miraculous was on. The idea of
life on other worlds made more scientific sense than the existence of God. Since I have
chosen to believe scientists more than priests, the existence of planets, stars, the moon as
potentially habitable, solid worlds which through advanced technology I could travel to,
makes it likely that extraterrestrial intelligences exist throughout the universe. And since we
see a progression in our scientific and technological development, it is not difficult to
imagine that other beings may be much further advanced....We are constantly revising our
beliefs in the laws of nature, we are continuously pushing back the boundaries of the
seemingly impossible...therefore just because at present we neither have the resources or
technology or cannot even scientifically conceive of breaking the speed of light barrier....it
doesn't mean ET is so self-limiting. These were all thoughts I started to have in the
mid-sixties, no doubt aided and abetted by avidly watching Doctor Who..... Obviously, the
story of flying saucers was beginning to impinge on my consciousness...I'd read claims of
their presence in our world. But I was sceptical....I wanted to believe so much I draconiously
denied myself the indulgence of believing. I think most irrational, hardline sceptics are closet
believers....Then, one day in 1965 I met a teacher of maths and physics, someone whose
opinion I could respect...he told me he had seen UFOs on two occasions. That blew my mind
and I became an avid reader of all things Ufological. However, I had to wait 8 years before I
saw my first UFO. What I saw, together with another witness, was a flying saucer shaped
object. We saw it on a day UFOs were being reported in various parts of the world. We saw it
before the evening TV news told us that UFOs were being seen elsewhere. Since that year of
1973, I have had several other sightings of UFOs. I don't know what these things are other
than they are very strange and have a psychic component. I have no evidence of them being
vehicles from outer space, controlled by ETs (or EBEs). I don't believe they are machines
produced by the Yank government - much as U.S. would like us to think they are so
advanced and powerful. Flying saucers historically have been around long before the Stealth
bombers and U2 spy planes. If the UFOs of the Forties and Fifties were really secret weapons
belonging to the Americans, they would have been used in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf war and
in Yugoslavia. In fact the Yanks' best war technology was still pretty inept compared with
what UFOs have always been reported of being capable of. If the Americans had had fifty
years of UFO aeronautical ability, they would have put to commercial use by now. When war
isn't the mother of invention, then the profit motive is....The winged aeroplane would be a
mode of transport as redundant as the abacus is in relation to the personal computer. The
UFO phenomena is too universal, experienced by too many highly qualified witnesses and
has agitated too many governments for it to be treated as a non-issue. They may be
time-machines from our future, they may be spiritual or mystical or supernatural entities, or
physicalized thought-forms, or extra-dimensional elementals (EDEs) or from alternative
universes, demons, angels, or possibly survivors of a dying or destroyed planet (perhaps
Mars) orbiting the Earth in giant space stations....in the fifties there were reports of giant
space craft in Earth's orbit. At the moment we have only speculation...though some
governments may know more than they are admitting to. In a way, it's now harder to discover
the facts because of the wide-spread coverage of sci-fi programmes like the X-Files.
Investigators can never be sure that a witnesses claims have not been contaminated by
exposure to such programmes.
18. While on the topic, do you think the planet even has a future, what
with all the Millennium paranoia circulating currently? Or do you think
it's all hogwash?
It could be all hogwash....or it might not be.....we won't really be confident about writing it all
off as a load of bollocks for about 10 years. In 999, there was extreme Millenium paranoia
and during the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. The goal-posts are always being shifted.
On the other hand, this is the first time in human history we have had the capability to
destroy the planet in just a few days, given our stockpiles of nuclear bombs. Even without
nuclear weapons, with our biological and chemical weapons we could destroy most of the
current complex life forms in a short space of time. And in less than a hundred years, we
could destroy the planet with just our overpopulation coupled with runaway consumerism
and capitalism and pollution. In the past, Millenial Fever has come from fear of God's
Judgement Day and Retribution....today, we can be the global executioners as we now have
God's power to wipe out life on Earth.....
19. Are you an avid follower of science fiction?
No. I like some of it but it often gets dated too quickly. Also, writers today are not as
innovatory as as they used to be. Fact has caught up with most fictions and there are not
many new ideas being generated. Most new science fiction today are pale regurgitations of
yesterday's. Most of it is boring. The movies are thick with special effects and thin on ideas.
20. With the immense hype surrounding the new Star Wars movie, although
more science fantasy than science fiction, one would imagine that you have
seen it by now. What were your impressions of it, both as an individual
film and as part of the greater Star Wars canon?
I'm not interested in Star Wars, so I haven't seen it and have no intentions of seeing it. If there
is too much hype around something, I try to avoid it. Besides, I prefer the original story -
Lord of the Rings.
21. What did you think of the new Comic Relief Doctor Who special? (Indeed,
have you seen it?)
Nope, never saw it.
22. Your documentary, "The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds", was most
impressive, all the more so as you also wrote and directed it. I understand
it formed part of a series of documentaries encouraging disabled awareness
(is that the right term?). Could you tell us a little more about the
background to the project, how you got commissioned, how you got the idea
to use that story in particular (its focus on disabled awareness is hardly
prominent).