Dad and his workmates were keen on sailing, which is strange when you consider that we lived in Bromsgrove, near Birmingham — about as far from the coast as you can get. They bought a little cruiser and occasionally they’d invite me when they were heading off to Pembroke Haven, in Wales.
That love of the water seems to have rubbed off on me. If my holiday doesn’t involve a boat, I don’t really class it as a proper holiday. A couple of years back, I was in St Petersburg and decided to have a wander round the docks. There’s an icebreaker called the Krassin that’s been turned into a museum. Magnificent thing, it is.
I love museums, especially smaller ones. There’s a brilliant tractor museum in Prague; then you’ve got the Fram Museum, in Oslo. The Fram was the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s boat, and it was designed to be carried to the North Pole by the ice current. What a leap of faith. It didn’t work.
There’s something about Scandinavia that really does it for me. I love the fact that, in winter, you get every shade of black, white and grey. The sky, the sea, the land — like an extraordinarily beautiful black-and-white photo. I got to travel by dog sledge in Tromso. Those working huskies are lean and lithe, and when they pull you out on the sledge, the other dogs start howling with excitement because they want to be out there too. Howooooh!
My job involves a lot of hanging around. If it starts raining while we’re filming, we get packed off to our trailers (posh caravans, basically). Whenever I’m in one, listening to the rain beat on the roof, I’m transported back to my childhood.
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My parents weren’t bothered about fancy holidays. We camped or hired a static caravan. Me and Dad would be sitting at the little table, trying to read our books, as Dad furiously pumped the Tilley lamp.
I don’t do beach holidays — Thailand and the Caribbean are not my thing. But I wouldn’t mind going to Jamaica, because the culture and music were such a part of growing up in the West Midlands. I’d manage half an hour on the beach, then I’d be off talking with one of the local fishermen.
I run a lot on holiday. It’s such an easy way to look around. Paris is a great city for running, with all the little backstreets to explore. I remember going down one tiny street and finding an old shop that had been turned into a home. It was filled with birds and giant plants, like a micro-jungle.
I hope I’ll get to see more of Africa. I’ve been to Zimbabwe, Morocco and Egypt. I was working in Israel during the time of the First Intifada, back in the 1980s, and it was all getting quite hectic, so me and a couple of mates had a few days off in Cairo. We had a wonderful time.
The Cairenes have a really dry sense of humour — just ordinary people having a quiet joke about the ups and downs of life. Same as we do. With that kind of humour, you don’t need to know the language, as everybody understands it.
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Mark Williams, 58, worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre before joining the cast of The Fast Show in the mid-1990s. Harry Potter fans will also know him as Arthur Weasley. He’s currently starring in the sixth series of the BBC drama Father Brown, based on the books of GK Chesterton. He lives near Lewes, East Sussex, with his wife, Emma, and daughter, Lily
