It was one of those long waits before one of those endless retakes that are part of a television show and Peter Noone was trying to pass the time. He played cards, lost, paced a bit, then sat down beside me muttering, "If I could change anything in my life it would be this endless waiting in dressing rooms."
      I could feel a lecture coming so I decided to pursue the subject.
      "OK", I asked, "If you could live your life over again, how would you change it?"

I'M VERY CHANGEABLE

      "Change my life! I wouldn't. If I did I wouldn't be me. There are some minor habits I might want to change and there are some aspects of show business I would like to have altered. I'm a very changeable sort of person, you know. I change from day to day and so do my ideas. Some days like today I don't think that I want to change anything in my life and other days I feel like changing everything. I'm a very weird sort of person, you know, in that I have totally different ideas from one day to the next.
      Actually, today my thought is that I would change very little. I would like to have a little brother to share things with, but I'm very happy with my sisters - in fact they are the most wonderful little girls, and then I think that perhaps I wasn't meant to have a brother.

WAITING IS SO BORING

      In my past there is nothing I would change, because then I wouldn't be me or where I am today, you know. There are things that are happening in show business, in the pace of it all, that I would change.
      I'd definitely like to change this hanging around and waiting to go on stage. Dressing rooms have got to be the most boring things ever invented. There's nothing to do in them. They're just four walls and a couch and a table and a bunch of soft drinks and waiting around. Once in a while you'll have friends who come in, but more often there's no one there but the guards and the other performers.

I LOSE TRACK OF TIME

      Another thing is that I travel around a lot and the pace is so fast that I never get a chance to see anything. I'd like to do things at a slower pace. I'd like to travel the world and just learn about everything. Right now when I travel, I lose track of what day it is and where we are, and like on the tour at Christmas. I didn't even know it was Christmas day, you know. I just sat there playing chess from about nine o'clock to four o'clock.

  

      The main thing I dislike about tours is not being able to have enough time to myself. There's so much that happens that goes by too fast to remember. I'd definitely like to have more time in my life for everything. There's so much to learn and learning, to me, is a very important kind of thing.
      I wish, that I had a little more time for school, but being in show business interfered with that. Sometimes I think that I would like to go back to school and learn, and at other times I feel that I can learn just as much, if not more, by just traveling around and seeing things and meeting people.

I'M IMPULSIVE

      Oh, one thing I'd like to change. I'd stop getting myself in embarrassing situations. One of the most recent ones I can remember that was really very embarrassing. I went running up behind someone. I put my hands over his eyes and said, "Guess who?" He said, "Alf" and I said, "No". "Bert?" "No". "Jack?" "No", for about half an hour of that and he said, "Well, come on and let me see who is is" and he turned around and he'd never seen me before in his life and I'd never seen him. I'm a kind of impulsive person and it does get me in some bad situations at times.

I FORGET EASILY

      I'd like to be able to remember things. I only forget trivial things, you know. I think it's the worst thing for anyone who can forget things. I often forget words to songs and things like that which are really trivial, but I hate people who forget things and sometimes I hate myself. I really suppose I ought to do something about it.
      There are a lot of things that I suppose I should change like bad habits in order to be a perfect type of human, but then there aren't any really perfect human beings are there? I'd like to go back and change some of the more unpleasant things, but you know the thing about life is that you really can't change it after it happens. If we could, we'd all be magicians. So I imagine I'll just go on being what I am . . . Peter Blair Denis Bernard Noone.
      I thanked Peter and agreed that if he were to change even a little, he would not be the wonderful guy I know as Peter Noone. After that, we picked up the cards and played until he was called before the cameras.

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