The Rocky Horror Picture Show creator talks about his love of Frasier, his hatred of Trump, and why YouTube is leaving terrestrial TV on life support.

Richard O’Brien wrote The Rocky Horror Picture Show back in 1973 as an ode to the pop culture treasures from what he calls his “misspent youth” (O’Brien was born in England but moved to Aotearoa at the age of 10 in 1952). His homage to trashy pulp fiction novels, breathless romance comics and horror B movies began life as a live stage musical, before being adapted into one of the most popular cult movies of all time. 

Now, living in Tauranga at the age of 82, O’Brien still enjoys feverishly consuming popular culture – although he says he gave up on new music around the time disco came about. He is also still dreaming up universes just as imaginative as Dr Frank N Furter’s fishnet-laced laboratory. O’Brien describes his latest live show, The Kingdom of Bling, as a “bedtime story” which he wrote after watching too many Trump videos. 

“The first thing I do when I open up my iPad is look at Trump’s latest, because I want to know what this dreadful man is doing,” he told The Spinoff. “This is a dystopian dog-eat-dog world future that he’s promising us, and I just don’t understand how any decent human being could endorse this man.” In his frustration, he penned a fairytale story about two children who go off into a dream land and are confronted by a corrupt and deeply unpleasant world. 

O’Brien is currently touring The Kingdom of Bling around the country, and hopes that it is both “delightfully entertaining and thought-provoking” for audiences. In the middle of preparing for his onstage role as narrator, the Rocky Horror legend was kind enough to take us on a… time warp… through his own fascinating life in television.

My earliest television memory is… I’m guessing it was about 1950 and we went over to our neighbour’s house. We sat in the front room, and the curtains were drawn, and a thing with valves on it stood in front of us with a small screen at the front of it. It was BBC airing, and we watched Laurel and Hardy’s A Chump at Oxford. That was my first television experience, and it was quite wonderful. Moving pictures in your sitting room – just extraordinary. 

It’s actually a real tragedy that we no longer watch things communally anymore. Back when there were only two or three television channels, especially on the weekend, we’d all watch Morecambe and Wise or something of that nature. People would be talking about it at work the next week, and it just felt like we had a lot more shared community experiences. That’s no longer in our world, that’s a big thing that has shifted. 

My earliest television crush was… Dr Kildare? Oh no, Nancy Whiskey. She was a singer with a musician Chas McDevitt, and they sang ‘Freight Train’ together. Many, many years later I met Chas McDevitt when he was around 80 years old, and I said “Oh, you used to sing with Nancy Whiskey – I fell in love with her.” And then he said “so did I – I married her.” 

My TV guilty pleasure is… I do have YouTube rabbit holes that I go down. It’s like a wonderful classroom. I sit in front of the television now and I am taken on an archeological dig somewhere, or I will spend all night watching a craftsman making a cabinet. It’s much more enjoyable than terrestrial television. Terrestrial television is like watching a gas lamp going out while there’s electricity on the horizon. It’s past its sell-by date, and it’s a great tragedy. 

My favourite TV show of all time is… Attenborough. The perfect classroom with the perfect teacher, what wonders and what a joy to see a person so engaged with their subject and so in love with it. He enthuses us as well and helps us all in building our relationship to the natural world in a way that is exemplary. 

My favourite TV character of all time is… Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army. He was a terribly funny man, a pompous man. 

The most stylish person on television is… Peter Wingard was pretty stylish in the early 70s, but that was years ago. There’s not many stylish people anymore. I think style is going out of the window, quite frankly. I went back to London for 10 days recently, and there’s just no fashion anymore. Nobody looks chic or fashionable, it all just looks a bit bleak and terribly boring. There’s just T-shirts and sneakers and jeans everywhere you look. 

My favourite TV ad of all time is… There was a New Zealand ad with the troops, and the guy sticks the cassette in and it sings “Dear John” and this woman is basically letting him know that she is leaving him. I recall that one was terribly funny. 

The funniest show on television is… I have to say Frasier. I absolutely adored Frasier, and now to learn that Kelsey Grammer is a Trump loving right wing Christian bore is so odd. Frasier was so liberal, so open, and I just can’t put two and two together. It doesn’t add up. I loved the way it would go from sheer comedy into pathos in a heartbeat. It was terribly well structured, but Kelsey Grammer is one of the great disappointments of my life. 

My favourite TV project I’ve ever been involved in is… I did The Crystal Maze for four years, which was people running around an acre of all these different worlds – a futuristic world, an Aztec world, an antique world. I enjoyed it so very, very much. I was 50 at the time and it gave me a new lease of life. I was able to outrun all the contestants, and climb the walls quicker than they could, and it gave me such great confidence. It was the first time I did something without lines or makeup or a character, and I was a little terrified I would come across as the fool that I actually am. Luckily, I managed to fool them all – and myself. 

The TV show I’d love to be involved in is… I suppose I wouldn’t mind sitting in the corner of the Rovers Return, just as the camera went by, in Coronation Street. 

My most controversial TV opinion is… Terrestrial television is in intensive care at the moment. I don’t know how it’s going to fare, because now everyone’s watching all this different visual information on so many different networks and so many different devices, and each separately having algorithms taking them down different tracks. It’s a real problem that we should all be worried about. 

A TV show I will never watch, no matter how many people tell me to, is… I remember when Big Brother first came on and my friend said she loved it and I said it was like watching paint dry. I don’t want to watch any Big Brother or I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here or anything like that. It’s generally filled with people that haven’t got any work going on. I was asked three times to go into the jungle for I’m a Celebrity and I just thought “for God’s sakes, get a grip on yourselves.” 

The last thing I watched on television was… The latest Trump developments are what I’m always watching, and people in discussions about this insanity. There’s rambling at the moment, dribbling and rambling and spewing out all this ugliness. And he’s surrounded by all these people like he’s in a Batman movie. Rudy Giuliani could play The Penguin. 

Richard O’Brien’s The Kingdom of Bling is touring the country now.