RADLEY DONS Ed Tolputt Iinterviewed by Jamie Robinson (Twyford, F Social, formerly Second Prefect). Ed Tolputt joined Radley as a Physics teacher in 2009. Let’s start… When you left school what did you envisage doing with your working life? I had no idea. I was about to spend a year singing in Wells Cathedral Choir followed by four years studying engineering at Cambridge, so I suppose, if pressed, I might have predicted becoming a singer or an engineer. But it would have been a wild guess. A gap year spent singing in a cathedral choir? It wasn’t meant to be a “finding-one’sinner-self ” kind of gap year. But I absolutely loved it. Wells is the most beautiful city in England, at the heart of which is a picture-postcard cobbled street, built in 1363 to house the Vicarschoral. I lived at Number 11. The street narrows from one end to the other, making it seem longer: 14th Century false-perspective; that appealed to my inner geek. When I wasn’t singing, I sold ice-creams for £2.50 an hour. If there is such a thing as finding one’s inner self, I did it that year. So singing. You like singing. Yes. It was probably the reason I got into Cambridge. At Kings and St John’s they make a place for you if you are good enough for the choir, which means that you aren’t competing academically against the other applicants. A good thing too; I wasn’t great at Engineering, not in Cambridge terms. I failed my exams in the first year (I got what is called a “Special”, which looks rather good on my CV) and nearly got kicked out. Getting into university is one thing, staying in is another.
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Do you still sing? Not so much now; mainly for the Choir of London. Two friends, one of whom worked in East Jerusalem at the time, set up the choir in 2004 for a tour of the West Bank. Since then the project has grown to include an orchestra, an opera company (with Samuel West as director) and a bursary-scheme for young Palestinian musicians. Since 2004, we’ve returned to Palestine four times. The most recent tour was in August this year. And acting? Weren’t you in Sherlock Holmes? Well, err, yes but no. I worked on Sherlock Holmes – but I was cut. In fact I wasn’t cut, my scene was reshot with a different actor. Which is much, much worse. A tragic story. But yes – a few years after university, I did a post-graduate course at the Royal Academy of Music and became a Hamlet-quoting out-of-work actor for four years. Actually, I wasn’t penniless because I bill-paid with freelance structural engineering, and I wasn’t always out-of-work. I acted for various people and companies, including a Stephen Poliakoff film called “Friends
and Crocodiles”, which crops up on the TV from time-to-time. I played a weird bloke who knows loads of stuff. The character ages during the film, and my younger self is played by Harry Melling who plays the fat bully cousin, Dudley Dursley, in Harry Potter. I was cast first. Stephen Poliakoff has an equally madhaired and epic brother, Martin, who presents “Sixty Symbols” on YouTube, and teaches my Vth form sets everything they need to know about absolute zero. Which brings you on to… Ah yes. Teaching. Armstrong and Miller’s immortal words “and then I became a teacher”. Guilty as charged. But I don’t mind. Teaching is a very rewarding job, and Radley is a very rewarding school. So it’s double-plus good. I like doing acting and I like doing singing, but there is nothing I’d rather be than a teacher. Or, rather still, a “schoolmaster”. That’s right – from now on I’m going to call myself a “schoolmaster”. I think that would suit you, Sir.
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