Ask an astronauts with Tim Peake for Living Paintings. This question is from Finn aged three and a half. Did you see any aliens in space?

Did I see any aliens in space no I wish I had, uh, but uh, I didn’t see any aliens in space. Um, uh, we spend a lot of time looking out of the coupla windows and we’re always interested in anything unusual that we might see. And, um, of course, a lot of these have explanations, just, just looking at the weather systems on earth, the thunderstorms, the Aurora Borealis, Aurora Australis and things like red sprites, which are these unusual streaks of red light that you get near thunderstorms. And so we quite often see some unusual things. One day I looked out and it was daylight and I saw three bright lights flying in formation. Now in the daytime, we normally don’t see any bright lights outside, uh, because the, the light from the sun and the reflected off the earth is so bright that you don’t see any stars.

You just see complete blackness of space. So if you see a light in space in the daytime, it’s normally another spacecraft coming towards you. And we certainly didn’t have any cargo vehicles coming towards us that day. So I called one of my crew mates over and said, Hey, Jeff, you know, take a look at this. What do you make of that? And he was as bemused as I was about these three lights in formation, there’s suddenly a fourth light, joined them as well information. Uh, and then I realized that the lights, which I thought were a long, long way away, we’re actually very, very close and they were tiny, tiny lights, and it was droplets of liquid. And the light was reflecting off the liquid and it was actually leaking out of a progress resupply vehicle. So, uh, what we first thought might be a, you know, sort of alien ships coming towards us actually ended up being leaking liquid out of a progress vehicle.

Hello, I’m Francis De La Tour and I’m an actor. Over the centuries a number of female actors have played Hamlet. Not many I have to say, but a few Sarah Bernhardt, perhaps being the most well known. I found the role of Hamlet very challenging, not for the reason you might expect, but for the sheer breadth of the role physically and emotionally. It’s true. I was playing a young man though I didn’t play it in a masculine way nor as a woman, but rather as an emotionally tortured young person, a youth struggling to understand his own predicament. Hamlet has the best soliloquies in the English language. And I let the poetry speak for itself. It was particularly challenging too, because our production at the then Half Moon theatre in Tower Hamlets was a promenade production, which means we didn’t have a single stage as such, but a series, three or four at the most, of platforms on which we would perform different scenes and the audience, which was not seated, they stood throughout would promenade to the different stages or platforms to watch us. At the beginning of the play, the actors were on ground level with the audience so we were almost rubbing shoulders with them. This whole interaction with the audience and proximity was both nerve wracking and very stimulating. We found out later that, far from the audience being made to feel self-conscious, they found the experience very freeing. I remember I cried after the last performance, as I knew, I would never say those wonderful words of the young Hamlet ever again.

An actor, particularly an actor that attempts any of the great classical works, particularly the Shakespearian Malawian works has to have a voice that is capable of sounding like more than one instrument in an orchestra. If you’ve got an audience listening to your voice for three hours in the course of an evening, you’ve got to play many different instruments in order to get their attention and retain their attention, which is why I love theatre. And it’s why I love classical theatre above all, because it asks of an actor to give a display of all aspects of his craft, um, and all the skills that he can control the prime one of which is vocal, which is his voice. I love radio because it depends only on voice. You have no costume to help you, you have no set to help you. I mean, it’s pure really how you sound. And that can for the listener be very, very strange because I listen to people on the radio, for instance, and I get a mental picture of them. And when I meet them, if they are totally unlike what their voice conjured up. So voice is essential. The words and the voice are essential, particularly in theatre drama. Not so essential in anything to do with the camera, almost unessential in movies, because it’s not always what you say. And it’s very rarely about how you say it. Movies are about eyes and faces rather than voices, but from an actor’s point of view, the vocal skill you need to acquire is a great thrill in itself. And it gives the, the stage actor, a great buzz. It’s very important. I think it’s probably the most important thing in an act as armoury, his voice.