As a child, Peter Capaldi played Doctor Who in a bedroom wardrobe – Alison Graham catches up with him now he has a Tardis of his own
This article was published in RT in August 2014 and is part of our digital Doctor Who anniversary bookazine, — click here to download it for free. Peter Capaldi snorts with laughter as he describes the “BBC Entertainment version of The Ipcress File” that surrounded his unveiling as the 12th Doctor in a glittery, dry-iced, peak-time BBC1 show last August. “There was a lot of cloak-and-dagger stuff on the way to the studio; the BBC genuinely felt it had to maintain secrecy so I was taken to a car park, dropped off by one car and put in another car with a blanket over my head. For all I knew, because I couldn’t see or hear anything, there might have been no one there and it could all have been a load of baloney.” Surely acting like a spy in a Len Deighton novel must have been exciting as he shrugged on the mantle of his lifelong hero last year after weeks of fervid speculation? “Yes, if you’re 15… But you just have to go, ‘OK, yeah, if you insist.’ ” If this makes Capaldi, whose first, feature-length adventure is unveiled this Saturday, sound a bit grumpy and grudging, it shouldn’t. He’s cheerfully funny and a blessedly good talker. We’re here because Capaldi – an actor, Oscar-winning film-maker, writer, artist – has seized one of British TV’s great roles at the age of 56. He’s the oldest ever Doctor, a devotee of the show from its shaky black-and-white beginnings, who takes over the Tardis after two cute “boyfriend Doctors”, David Tennant and Matt Smith. When we meet, on a fetid, broiling hot day in London, he’s almost completed filming his first series and is striding onto the Doctor Who publicity treadmill that inevitably accompanies what is now, inescapably, a global “brand” sold around the world. It’s a planet-spanning success – last year’s 50th anniversary special was broadcast simultaneously in 94 countries and Capaldi’s launch includes Doctor Who’s first-ever “world tour” of five continents in 12 days. “These markets are really, really crazy for Doctor Who. It’s huge in South Korea and gigantic in Mexico,” says the new Doctor. But first, the Radio Times photoshoot. Capaldi arrives, breezy and smiling to shake the hands of everyone in the room before throwing himself into various poses for the photographer and RT’s art team. “As you have seen today, I just go where people tell me, because that’s the nature of the operation,” he says later over lunch, as we both dig into a huge bowl of chips. (“How are we going to get through that? That is a huge amount of chips, a vat of chips.”) We know each other, a bit. I first interviewed him in 2006 on the set of The Thick of It, at the height of my unwholesome crush on the long streak of bile that was sweary government apparatchik Malcolm Tucker, one of Capaldi’s defining characters. We’ve since hailed one another across crowded rooms, mainly at Bafta Awards dos from which he has emerged, to my continued bafflement, empty-handed (nominations, but no prizes, for The Thick of It and The Hour). Never mind, because now he’s the Doctor. As a child growing up in Glasgow with his Irish mum and Italian dad, he was a fan, so did he ever actually see himself, all grown up, as the two-hearted time-traveller? “I never thought I would be in the frame for it because the Doctors were getting younger and younger and that was fine.” A call from his agent tilted his world towards the Tardis. “She said, ‘How would you feel about being the new Doctor Who?’ And I just started laughing very joyfully. It was such a wonderful idea and even if it never went any further, just getting that phone call was great fun.” But it did, eventually, go much further when he auditioned at showrunner Steven Moffat’s house. (Moffat has said since that Capaldi’s was the only name on his 12th Doctor wish-list.) Not much later, as he filmed the BBC1 drama The Musketeers in Prague, he phoned his agent. “She said, ‘Hello Doctor,’ and that was great. But I couldn’t tell anyone. I was dressed as Cardinal Richelieu and I couldn’t say a word to anyone on the set, so I just had to go off into a corner.” And he had to lie. “I wandered around Prague singing the Doctor Who theme to myself with a great beard, which I had to shave off for the presentation of myself as Doctor Who. I had to explain why I’d shaved off the beard so I told them I was doing a pilot for a new show with [The Thick of It creator] Armando Ianucci.” When we meet, Capaldi is just finishing his 28th consecutive week of filming. He works in Cardiff throughout the week and returns home to north London at weekends. “Doctor Who is a very intense working experience because, like most things at the BBC, there’s not quite enough money and money is time and there’s really not quite enough time to do it, so you are always on the hoof, pedalling as fast as you can.” The budget issue has flapped around Doctor Who since its inception in 1963. Most recently, Moffat insisted there’ll never be any on-screen evidence of tight funding but admitted the 50th anniversary episode was “extraordinarily difficult. We were making a feature-length Doctor Who on the schedule and budget for an hour.” So after a couple of spry, tail-wagging Doctors, will Capaldi’s be mature and sage-like à la William Hartnell? “I think I’m a more grown-up Doctor, but he’s still mirthful. He is serious when he needs to be but he’s still quite comic.” On his very first day of filming, Capaldi had to step out of the Tardis: “I’d never been in the police box before, apart from the wardrobe at home when I was a kid pretending it was a police box. I was shocked to find that it was just like a wardrobe, like something your dad had made. And there was a prop bloke and a smoke machine. When I had to step out of it, it was quite nerve-racking, but delightful as well.” Not that Capaldi thinks he’s found his feet just yet, even as the end of the first series hurtles towards him. “I don’t know if it’s quite fallen into place yet. I think it’s a mistake to get it to click, to get into a groove. I’ve tried to avoid finding a way to do it and then just repeating that. I’m trying all the time to see what works and what doesn’t work, though I’m trying to bring back some of the Doctor’s mystery and strangeness, which is hard to do given that the show is 50 years old.” Even as a lifelong fan he insists: “I’m not an expert on Doctor Who, despite being a kid who was really into it.” Capaldi is, of course, a serious man who’s serious about his work (he’s been all over British TV for decades in The Crow Road, Prime Suspect 3, Peep Show, The Devil’s Whore, The Vicar of Dibley) but mercifully he doesn’t imprint Doctor Who with great cosmic, existential purpose. “Doctor Who is monsters, corridors to run up and down, sets that shake occasionally, some over-the-top acting, some under-the-top acting, some magic, some Grimm’s fairy-tale darkness.” Until his early teens he avidly watched the Saturday-evening adventures of the first four Doctors – William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker – until he found other pursuits as a teenager. “I loved it from the start and stayed with it until I was 17, then, probably about halfway through Tom Baker’s reign, I checked out.” Young Peter Capaldi even wrote a letter to Radio Times when he was 15, praising our “excellent Dr Who Special”. He cringes when I bring this up: “Yes, that’s embarrassing, do you really want to see your 15-year-old self?” In the old days, Doctor Who episodes could not be subjected to the pinprick levels of scrutiny they receive today from fans. “Nowadays, with DVDs and all that sort of thing, things are available and you can watch programmes over and over again, but in those days, that wasn’t the case. They went out on a Saturday evening and if you missed them, you missed them. If you saw them, you saw them, you couldn’t rewind them, you couldn’t see the joins, which is why I don’t like looking at the old episodes now. “I can see that they’re struggling with a lack of money and time. But what you also see is a great creativity, you see people working and coming up with great ideas, notions and costumes. Sometimes they can’t deliver because they don’t have the resources. But to see other worlds being brought to life in the corner of your sitting room as they flicker on the telly is just magical.” Doctor Who was never, and will never be, buff and shiny. “It’s not sci-fi, it’s not Star Trek, all gleaming corridors and smart American people walking around sorting things out. Doctor Who is more crumbly than that, darker, more tobacco-stained and creepier.” It is also “just great fun, a big, daft popular TV show with lots of wonderful things in it that people either like or they don’t like, or they pass through it and they like it occasionally.” Capaldi has had many supportive chats/texts/lunches with predecessors, David Tennant and Matt Smith. What advice did they give? “That’s exclusive to the small club of Doctor Whos.” Whatever they said, he found it useful: “Sometimes you’re in the middle of a big production that has a lot of BBC politics and administration at work and it’s a big commercial vehicle. But you’re an actor and sometimes have to compare notes to see how the others might have felt about the things I am going through or am being asked to do. It’s good to be able to chat to people who have been in the same situation.” More prosaically, it’s good to chat about the workload: “It’s nice to talk to people who know what it’s like to get back to your flat at 7.30 at night and still have five pages of dialogue to learn for the next day and the hours are ticking away, and you’ve still got to get some sleep. It’s good to have something to do with people who you have seen triumph in that situation.” Of course, where there is a Doctor, there is a companion, in this case the sensible, likeable Clara (Jenna Coleman). At 27, she’s under half his age, so a pretty young woman and an older man rattling around in a police box, time for a bit of queasy inter-generational hanky-panky..? But no, Capaldi is emphatic, there will be no funny business in the Tardis. “It’s not a romantic relationship. Clara has to keep him in line, he’s not good at getting human beings. That includes her. At first she doesn’t know him. He has completely changed and she struggles. But he has a deep affection for her and wants to make sure she’s looked after.” As we talk, we are still a few weeks away from the two-pronged “world premiere” of the first episode, which was screened, accompanied by Capaldi, Moffat and Coleman press conferences, on the same day in Cardiff, where Doctor Who is filmed, and later in London. Capaldi was rapturously received – I somehow ended up holding his Coca-Cola as he signed autographs for children at the after-party in the British Film Institute. He says: “I have been in the bubble of making the show for seven months so I’m not really aware of how it functions in the world, I don’t quite know what is going to happen to me now. Maybe nothing will happen to me. That would be fine but life may change dramatically. I hope it doesn’t, but David and Matt made clear to me that there are things that will change, that you have to be prepared for, like your visibility.” With this in mind, before accepting the role, Capaldi and his wife, Elaine Collins, a TV producer (the couple have a grown-up daughter), talked about what they could expect, including press intrusion. “We had a big talk. I’ve been very lucky. My life has been blessed and I had to think whether I wanted to change that. I was happy walking down the street doing what I want to do without having paparazzi there. And yes, we agreed there’d be pluses and minuses but so much of it was unknown.” Is he ready for the potentially enormous, distorting focus on his personal life? “My personal life is quite dull, there’s not much to be interested in. I think that’s one of the advantages of being this age, I’m not going to be running around clubs or buying a Ferrari.” Of course, the early Doctors didn’t have to throw up their arms against the instant criticism of social media and, particularly Twitter. Is Capaldi worried he might get a flaming? “I’m not on Twitter or Facebook. I don’t feel like a fuddy-duddy because I don’t care and I don’t have time. It’s impossible for me to escape people’s opinions, I don’t go out there looking for them, but it would be impossible not to know whether one is generally favoured or unfavoured. “But, you know, I was alive for 50 years before Twitter, empires grew, the Roman Empire came and went, in World War Two the Allies managed to defeat the fascist menace without Twitter, so I think I will be OK.”
Russell T Davies: 'I’m more proud of It's A Sin than anything else - it’s a privilege'
The creator of It's A Sin talks about bringing the new Channel 4 drama to life.
When Russell T Davies came out as gay to his “lovely, middle-class” mum and dad in his early 20s, he wasn’t exactly delivering a bombshell: “I mean, look at me – a great big six-foot-six nancy, they were hardly surprised. The whole family simply rolled their eyes and said, ‘What’s for tea tonight?’” I first met Davies in 1997 in a huge shed on the backlot of the old Granada studios in Manchester where he was filming his first ITV drama, The Grand (imagine Downton Abbey in a hotel in the 1920s). It was pouring with rain and the noise of water slapping on the roof nearly overcame the limited capacities of my arthritic tape recorder. But not even the elements could defeat Davies, with his chandelier-rattling laugh and his big, bold vision as a television writer. I knew even then that here was a man who would always make himself heard, audaciously and loudly, not just in person but as the writer. He went on to create what would become punchy, classic television – Queer as Folk… Casanova… Bob & Rose… Cucumber… Years and Years… the revival of Doctor Who (of course)… Torchwood… A Very English Scandal and his latest, It’s A Sin, which starts on Channel 4 this Friday. And if he wants to refer to himself as a “nancy” then he jolly well will. Of all his work, It’s A Sin is probably Davies’s most autobiographical piece, a fiercely angry, poignant, heartbreaking, often outrageously funny, five-part account of the emerging HIV/Aids virus and its effect on a group of young gay men in the early 1980s. It’s something he’s been writing since 2016: “It took a while. People are very kind and say that someone in my position ‘must get everything you write made’, but it’s not that easy; it’s never easy to convince people to part with money.” The story starts in 1981 as the lads – quiet trainee tailor Colin; cosseted, closeted Ritchie growing up on the Isle of Wight, desperate to be an actor; and vividly camp Roscoe, rebelling against his fundamentalist religious parents – come to London and become friends, hurling themselves into the pulsing hedonism of the gay scene. Until paragraphs start to appear in newspapers talking about a “gay plague” in America and young men start dying grimly frightening, protracted and often lonely deaths. “I was 18 in 1981, just like Ritchie, so the bones of this story were always in me, but it took a long time to get there,” says Davies, now 57. “Maybe I had to reach this age first.” Not that Davies’s teens were anywhere near as wild as those of his characters. “I must have known hundreds of lads like them, but though we all had those mad nights on the town, I was lucky, I escaped HIV. I was rather more well behaved than my characters, that’s why I write them doing what they do. But in the 1980s I kept my head down and worked a lot, I didn’t start going out properly on the gay scene until I was in my 30s, in the 90s. “Also during the whole decade [the 80s] I was determined to become a writer and everyone told me it was the path to poverty and I’d end up freezing in an attic. So I was saving my money, always with my intention of leaving regular work and becoming a writer.” Davies, who has two sisters, was born in Swansea. His mum and dad, Vivian and Barbara, were both teachers. They were the first generation of their families to go to university (Swansea, of course) and young Russell’s admission to Oxford University to study English Literature “was a very big deal for us. Huge!” His first television job was at the BBC in Cardiff, directing kids on the studio floor of the children’s show Why Don’t You..? “For £25 a day. It was a fortune.” He went on to be a storyliner for Coronation Street then to write Granada’s children’s drama Children’s Ward, before he turned to the grown-up stuff. So Davies sees It’s A Sin as a coming-of-age story that mirrors his own: “leaving home, going to college, growing up, getting my first job… though it’s a coming-of-age story in the shadow of an enormous virus.” And there it is, that inescapable word, “virus”. Chronology means that any similarities to the current pandemic are, as they say, entirely coincidental. “I think people will watch It’s A Sin with the PPE, the masks, the green hospital gowns and will think I did that on purpose, that it’s a commentary on 2020. But it was written long before COVID-19.” Filming wrapped last January. There are some similarities, though, in the chatter surrounding both illnesses, particularly in the rumour and misinformation about HIV/Aids and now the coronavirus. “You know, I look back and I don’t know how we got any information in the 1980s about anything. You and I might complain about this internet world but we can lay our hands on information quickly now. In the old days, how did we ever hear about anything?” Davies, though, remembers the rumours, the falsities and the sheer lack of knowledge about something that was cutting a deadly swathe through a huge part of the world’s population. There are scenes that echo this uncomprehending fear in It’s A Sin that are shocking, but they are all true, uncovered by Davies’s research – a family burning their son’s bedding and everything he ever touched on a bonfire after his death because they feared contamination, and the ailing young man detained in a locked hospital ward under a court order. Then there is the sheer shame of boys like Ritchie, who simply can’t tell his nice parents (played by Keeley Hawes and Shaun Dooley) that he’s gay. In It’s A Sin we see such fears feeding into the growth of an illness that claims so many victims because a wider society can’t bring itself to acknowledge gay men, never mind gay sex and that phrase, “bodily fluids”. Information about HIV/Aids is scant – just rumours and whispers, and it costs the three boys and their friends dear, says Davies, “relegated to the back streets”, hidden under blankets of shame and fear, where it flourishes. Though Davies acknowledges his own luck in surviving, he lost many friends. “This is why I wrote It’s A Sin, partly as a tribute to them, to remember them.” One of It’s A Sin’s major characters is Jill (played by Lydia West), who’s at the heart of the boys’ friendship circle. She’s real, a lifelong friend of Davies’s. “Jill was better than me, she went to the hospital wards and held the hands of men who were dying. I did a bit of that but she did a lot and dedicated her life to it.” The gay male characters are all played by gay actors, something Davies thinks is massively important. “I’m not being woke about this… but I feel strongly that if I cast someone in a story, I am casting them to act as a lover, or an enemy, or someone on drugs or a criminal or a saint… they are NOT there to ‘act gay’ because ‘acting gay’ is a bunch of codes for a performance. It’s about authenticity, the taste of 2020. You wouldn’t cast someone able-bodied and put them in a wheelchair, you wouldn’t black someone up. Authenticity is leading us to joyous places.” Though the cast features some unknown young actors, there are two big-time male stars in smaller roles. “These days, whether you like it or not, you have to get stars in to get the money, that’s simply how it works, and we were very lucky that this subject matter attracts people with good hearts.” Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser and How I Met Your Mother) is in episode one as a quietly “out” man living with his partner. “I never thought he’d be remotely interested,” says Davies, but with this subject… particularly gay actors like him, they will sit up and pay attention and want to be part of it. And bless him, what a laugh, he was absolutely hilarious. We were all very worried (‘He’s an actor from America, we’d better put kale on the menu and have air purifiers…’), but he walked in, drinking and smoking and laughing like the best of them.” View oEmbed on the source website Stephen Fry crops up, too, as a wealthy Conservative MP desperate to make an impression on Margaret Thatcher. Of course, he can’t breathe a word of his dalliances with a very mischievous Roscoe. “We had amazing chats off-stage. We’d sit and have a coffee and talk about the friends we lost, all of the funerals we’d been to, all of the lies that were told, and all of the people who survived.” In 2018, Davies suffered a profound loss, the death of his husband Andrew Smith. Andrew was diagnosed with a brain tumour and Davies had been nursing him for eight years. Sometimes, says Davies, he will go for a walk and let himself daydream that if he takes a different path, he’ll return home to find Andrew still there. Such a bereavement has left him bubbling with anger on behalf of relatives separated from dying loved ones by restrictions and regulations during the current pandemic. “Andrew was very ill many times in those eight years and if I hadn’t been able to visit him I don’t know how angry I would be. We haven’t begun to cope with this pandemic – the anger of those households, those many thousands of households, will echo for years.” For now, Davies is involved in a joyful project, script-editing Sir Lenny Henry’s ITV drama Three Little Birds. “It’s a fictional version of his mother’s story; she emigrated from Jamaica in 1957. It’s delightful and ITV commissioned it on the spot.” But it’s what Davies describes as his “queer body of work”, including It’s A Sin, that pleases him the most. “I’m more proud of that than anything else. It’s a privilege.” It's A Sin starts Friday on Channel 4 at 9pm. If you're looking for something to watch in the meantime, check out our TV Guide. This interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy.
David Tennant on why it's important killer Dennis Nilsen's story is told in ITV's Des: 'This is dark and bleak - and ready to be told'
Alison Graham talks to David Tennant about how he approached playing one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers.
In the opening episode of Des, a police officer approaches a pan on the stove in the seedy kitchen of a grim north London flat. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, guv,” shouts an underling before the detective has a chance to lift the lid. Though we don’t see it, the pan contains a human head. The flat is at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, an address – like 10 Rillington Place and 25 Cromwell Street, homes of mass killers Reg Christie, and Fred and Rose West – that will live in infamy. The Cranley Gardens flat was the home of Dennis Nilsen, 37, a civil servant who murdered young men. His crimes were only discovered when the drains became blocked by human flesh. The flesh that Nilsen had flushed down his toilet after he dismembered his victims – men who had fallen through the cracks in society, men Nilsen picked up in London bars, took home, ostensibly for a drink and a meal, and later killed, confident they wouldn’t be missed. Nilsen was jailed for life at the Old Bailey in 1983, after being convicted on six counts of murder and two of attempted murder, though police always believed the death toll was much higher. He died in prison in 2018. The repulsive story transfixed Britain and the wider world and remains a byword for the horrors that can lie behind the most banal doors on the most ordinary of suburban streets. David Tennant was only 12 when the case broke, so his memories are sketchy, though he later became fascinated by how an outwardly nondescript-looking man who worked in a job centre in Kentish Town, north-west London, and whose colleagues thought he was pompous and boring, went home to bloody, anarchic, murderous chaos. He plays Nilsen in ITV’s three-part Des, showing on three nights this week. It was written and executive-produced by Luke Neal, and developed by Neal with its director, Lewis Arnold. Tennant’s extraordinary performance dominates. Even when he’s not on screen, his Nilsen shadow is long and dark. He has captured not only Nilsen’s casual narcissism and utter lack of remorse, but also his dead-eyed stare, the one everyone knows from his arrest photo. Tennant looks like the killer, too – oddly, people have never been afraid to mention this potentially unflattering observation. “Yes, I know, it’s always the kind of thing that people would point out,” Tennant tells me, “so maybe that was one of the reasons why I thought, ‘Maybe there’s a story to tell’.” Tennant’s interest in the Nilsen case was piqued “when I read Brian Masters’s book Killing for Company when I lived in Crouch End [a stone’s throw from Muswell Hill]. It was nearby and the Nilsen story was almost local folklore.” https://www.instagram.com/p/CE4DpXkIRyR/ Various Nilsen scripts floated around down the years as Tennant became one of Britain’s most sought-after actors and Casanova, Doctor Who and Broadchurch all came and went. But it was while working on the latter that plans for a true-crime drama began to take shape with director Lewis Arnold and a script from a friend of a friend of his actor wife Georgia’s, Luke Neal. Its primary source material was Masters’s book, published in 1985 after Masters (played by Jason Watkins in the drama) had spent many, many hours interviewing Nilsen in prison about his crimes. After some years the project was given the go-ahead because, as Tennant puts it, “This is a dark story and a bleak story and an extraordinary story and one that I think is ready to be told.” As the script took shape, Tennant deep-dived into research about Nilsen, a sadist who made life easy for future biographers and actors by leaving mountains of handwritten notebooks full of tedious self-justification. How did Tennant achieve that sinister empty look? “There is some footage of Nilsen in an interview he did with Granada Television when he was in prison,” explains Tennant, “and he was an avid home movie-maker, some of which survive, so we were able to see those. “It was a useful starting point to see how he moved and how he sounded, as there are occasional bits of audio of him around, too. And of course the notebooks – he wrote and wrote and wrote in prison.” Deliberately, Des shows nothing of the crimes (some of them committed at an earlier London flat of Nilsen’s, at 195 Melrose Avenue in Cricklewood) and there are no flashbacks to his life before he was arrested – apparently when he returned home one evening after the monstrous detritus had been found in the drains. The landlord had received a report of the blockage. Des follows the investigation into the murders led by Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay (played by Daniel Mays), his interviews with Nilsen and Nilsen’s relationship with Masters. Tennant is emphatic: “What we didn’t want to do is titillate or turn Des into a horror movie. That is not the kind of story we are trying to tell. What we are doing is trying to figure out who this creature was. “Why he did what he did, in terms of what went on when he picked up men and took them back to his flat – the only real witness we have to any of that is Dennis Nilsen. But he’s proved himself to be an unreliable narrator on many occasions. So the audience is taken into the story by Peter Jay’s character, you discover the horrors through his eyes [as in the pan-on-the-stove scene]. “We can never really understand Nilsen’s point of view so we have to come to it through Jay and Brian Masters. They both view him through very different lenses.” The drama shows initial tension between the detective and writer. Of course the profound horror of what Nilsen did to those young men reverberates and the production made every effort to contact, and discuss the project with, any surviving family members. “When you’re making a story about something that is living history, you must do it sensitively,” says Tennant. “You are talking about things that are still very raw and we were aware of that every day on set and in the edit. We were always discussing this, even down to what cards you put up at the end [before the credits of the third and final episode] to talk about what happened after the event.” So why does Tennant think serial murderers such as Nilsen have such a hold on the television-viewing public’s imagination? “I think it’s inevitable we are fascinated by the extremities of human experience, because it’s not a fairy tale or a movie where the villain is from another dimension. “With someone like Nilsen we all have to deal with the fact that we are members of the same species as him. We are all human beings, we are all aware of where the abyss is, without having to look into it. “What is extraordinary to us is that someone like Nilsen steps into it. I think that’s why we are interested in these stories; they remind us that these people are not from another planet.” Most of the “action” in Des takes place shrouded in a fug of cigarette smoke, particularly in the police station. It was the 1980s, after all. No one needed to nip out to the pavement to light up. Of course, the cigarettes smoked on set were herbal. “Whenever we talked to anyone who had been there [including police officers involved in the investigation],” says Tennant, “they talked about the chain-smoking of endless cigarettes. But cigarettes were a useful way of getting Nilsen’s favour so he would talk.” View oEmbed on the source website He certainly talked, casually chatting away to the investigating detectives. His confessions were long and tough to hear, not just because of their content, but also because of Nilsen’s unshakeable self-absorption. “I think in every moment he believed he was king of his own narrative, and he would be the one to define what his own story was.” Of course, David Tennant is a sensible and well-balanced man, and most certainly did not take home his abhorrent character to his actor wife Georgia Moffett (who we saw recently in the lockdown comedy Staged with her husband and Michael Sheen). “But I think the run-up to filming, when you are steeped in research, reading everything and watching everything and talking to people [about your character], that’s almost more what you bring home. That’s the time when Georgia was likely to ask, ‘Are you ever going to talk about anything else?’” The filming of Des finished in January, though the final production processes were finished during lockdown. Of course, the world is an uncertain place, but once restrictions are lifted Tennant and his Des co-star Jason Watkins hope to resume filming of the BBC adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days, which was interrupted in South Africa by the pandemic. Like the rest of us, Tennant has spent the past few months at home, with his family. “We did all right, we are lucky, we have a garden – five kids are a lot during lockdown. But they can run outside, and at least home-schooling is over, I hope for ever.” Read more about Des Meet the cast of ITV's Des The Real ‘Des’: True story behind Dennis Nilsen drama Where is ITV's Des filmed? The real locations of Dennis Nilsen’s murders This interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy. If you’re looking for more to watch, check out our TV guide.If you want to read Killing For Company, head over to Amazon now.
Why Endeavour is the most comforting show on TV
Endeavour Morse and his old-fashioned boss Fred Thursday were made for Sunday binges, says Alison Graham
It’s the dog-days of winter, and Sunday afternoons can be long, chilly expanses of grey, more grey and a bit more grey after that. The roast beef and Yorkshire puds are lying heavily but it’s too cold for a walk around the block to aid the digestion. So what could be better than a box set of Endeavour? I have an actual proper old-fashioned physical DVD box set of Endeavour and there’s still a residual thrill at putting a silvery disc into the ancient machine before I’m enveloped in comfort. I’ve watched them to bits but, truly, there’s nothing better for a post-lunch binge than Endeavour Meet the cast of Endeavour series six Here’s why Endeavour changed Morse’s look with a moustache Endeavour star Roger Allam auditioned to play Lewis in the original Inspector Morse A new series is currently airing and the Sixties have definitely stopped swinging (it’s 1969). Endeavour himself (Shaun Evans) has a moustache and looks like he’s already hit the 1970s. The old Oxford City Police service has gone, absorbed by the huge Thames Valley force. Yet I still love the box-set old days of pub saloon bars turned yellow with nicotine-stained paintwork, the old-fashioned coppering (some of it highly questionable) and that once burgeoning partnership, later friendship, between Morse and his boss, the mighty Fred Thursday (Roger Allam). The one thing that always characterises writer Russell Lewis’s Endeavour episodes (he’s written every single one) is the care he takes. These are stories you can get lost in for nearly two hours, which is a rarity in days when we are told everyone wants quick hits of short shows. But in the crazy world of rapidfire television, Russell Lewis takes his time with Endeavour, and you know you are in for a near-enough two-hour treat. I have a handful of favourites, though I think Nocturne (series two, episode two) is top of my list. There’s a delicious hint of the supernatural, even the gothic with possibly a small dash of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, as Morse and Thursday arrive at a girls’ school after the murder of an academic in an Oxford museum. There are reports of hauntings and indeed Morse thinks he sees a ghost – I know, I know, I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. But there’s a genuine air of menace, of not-of-this-world, about the episode, which is, of course, beautifully filmed. View oEmbed on the source website Then there’s Sway, also from series two, which is achingly sad and gives us a glimpse into Fred Thursday ’s war experiences, particularly an incident in occupied Italy involving a lovely young woman called Luisa. Years later, she turns up in Oxford, and Fred’s heart is ripped open all over again. I’m sure you have your own favourites, but at the epicentre of every single episode is the relationship between Morse and Thursday. Morse is young, enthusiastic, brilliant but a bit wayward, while Thursday is the steady, experienced hand, the old-fashioned copper who isn’t the big cuddly rabbit he might at first seem. Fred can be brutal in his methods and isn’t afraid to use his fists to coerce/punish suspects, much to Morse’s fury. Yet there is so much that binds Fred and Morse, not just the police work, but their adoration, in different ways of course, of Fred’s lovely, spirited, independent daughter, Joan. So I’ll look forward, when the time comes, to adding series six to those Sunday box sets. The afternoons just won’t be long enough… Endeavour airs Sundays at 8pm on ITV
Poldark series 3 finale: Eleanor Tomlinson reveals the truth behind the Poldark marriage
Will she stay loyal to Ross or choose charming Hugh?
Handsome, brave, soulful, damaged soldier Hugh Armitage takes his adored Demelza Poldark – the wife of his friend and saviour Captain Ross Poldark – to the sand dunes in Sunday’s highly charged series finale. There they stand alone, windswept and shimmering with sexual tension. Poldark series four air date confirmed First behind-the-scenes sneak peek at Poldark series 4 Poldark commissioned for a fifth – and probably final – series He’s written her poems, surreptitiously drawn her lovely image and told her, “I am wholly disorientated… shipwrecked… lost… You are the woman who I love more than life.” But the sight in Hugh’s melting cow eyes is failing after his brutal confinement in a squalid French prison and, to paraphrase inelegantly, he asks Demelza for a quickie before he goes blind. Or, as he puts it, “Shall we grant ourselves each other so I can go into the darkness knowing I have once tasted heaven?” View oEmbed on the source website It’s not a bad chat-up line, agrees Eleanor Tomlinson, who plays Demelza, a woman caught between two lovers. “Yeah, right,” she laughs. “It’s very funny, but very sweet. I think Demelza just feels honoured by the attention – no one has ever written her poetry before, and Ross has never sat down with a sketchbook and taken the time to draw her. Demelza is swept away by it all.” It’s the latest talking point between the Cornwall-based drama’s legions of fans – five million tune in every week. Will Demelza, surely the most faithful of women (and she’s had a lot to put up with), cheat on her buccaneering, often inconsiderate husband? It would be unfair to anyone who hasn’t read Winston Graham’s books and who doesn’t know the outcome to this beach-based tryst to be specific about what happens between Hugh and Demelza. But the flirtation, which began when Ross (Aidan Turner) rescued his friend Dr Dwight Enys and Hugh Armitage, scion of Cornwall gentry, during that daring raid on the French prison, has intensified on both sides during the third series’ later episodes. It marks, too, a highly significant moment in the development of Demelza, arguably the character who has come the furthest – emotionally, intellectually and sexually – since Poldark, a hugely successful reboot of the 1970s classic, began two years ago. In the very first episode she was pulled literally from the gutter by Ross Poldark, who thought she was a boy, when she was being abused and teased by a group of yobs in the street. He took her home to Nampara to be his maid, rescuing her from a brutal father, and not too much later, Ross, enthralled and entranced by Demelza’s spirit, married her. In many ways it’s a very modern, 21st-century relationship of equals, particularly in this series as Demelza, left to her own devices by a husband who leads a dangerous foray into Revolutionary France, grows and flourishes; she takes charge of the family business, the copper mine, and keeps the home fires burning. Tomlinson has to chop a lot of logs and do a lot of baking and thump a lot of dough: “Ah yes, the angry baking!” For Poldark’s thrilled and devoted audience it’s been a joy to watch Demelza thrive throughout three series, learning to use her extraordinary power to charm men, secure funds for a community charity project for the starving poor and help her husband as he locks antlers with the wealthy stalwarts of a Cornish society that is on the brink of exploding into class warfare. “Demelza is not a stay-at-home wilting flower, she is strong and she will go out there and do what she thinks is right for the community,” says Tomlinson, 25, who grew up in Beverley in Yorkshire. “In her independence from Ross she has grown up; she knows what’s right and wrong and how she wants to live her life, and it gives her confidence.” Demelza has always been forthright, but increasingly demands a bigger voice in the marriage. “Not once have you asked my advice or harkened to my opinion!” she yells at Ross, after rounding on him about the latest manly adventure from which she is excluded. Says Tomlinson: “Demelza loves Ross, but she doesn’t need him to the extent that she once did and I think that this relationship with Hugh comes out of someone paying her attention, someone highlighting her worth, while she’s being ignored by Ross. “She wears her heart on her sleeve and she is very true and very honest to Ross and I think it’s lovely. That’s what’s nice about her, she doesn’t conform to a society where women behaved themselves and were very much under their husbands’ thumbs. Demelza speaks her mind.” But poor Demelza must always and forever fight Ross’s residual love for his former fiancée, the glacially lovely Elizabeth. So is Demelza simply getting her own back with Hugh? “I don’t think it’s tit for tat at all,” says Tomlinson. “At the end of series two Ross and Demelza decided they still loved each other and marriages aren’t easy, they come with enormous problems, but they decide they have to work through them together and Ross promises to include her in every decision.” Debbie Horsfield, Aidan Turner and Alison Graham at the BFI Radio Times Festival Writer Debbie Horsfield, who has adapted Graham’s novels for the screen and has almost completed series four, agrees. “I don’t think it’s motivated by a desire for revenge, that’s not who Demelza is.” Demelza could probably be forgiven for wanting to get back at the man who has, in all likelihood, fathered a child (Valentine) with Elizabeth, whom he arguably raped in the previous series – and whom he’s now been spotted kissing in the local church. The audience knows that there was a certain let’s-go-our-separate-ways quality to this secret snog, but Ross, for some reason, can’t tell his wife this. So when the divinely sensitive Hugh peers at Demelza through those prettily fogging eyes and tells her she’s “the woman I love more than life”, surely it’s game on? Not quite, says Horsfield. “If only Ross had told Demelza what he truly felt about Elizabeth [something only we, the audience, got to hear] at the end of the last episode… It’s important that we know what he was thinking – he’s not just a b*****d. It’s not Demelza thinking she’ll get her own back, it’s more, ‘OK, I really fancy this guy, why shouldn’t I?’ “Besides, it’s almost like they are two kids together, and Ross is caught up in other things so he takes his eye off the ball and is maybe a little too sure that Demelza is not going to be interested elsewhere.” Indeed, as Demelza wrestles with her conscience and longing and her loyalty to her marriage and two small children, she tells her husband: “I wish I could be two people but just for a day, to give myself to him without it being a threat to our marriage.” And there it is, the key to everything, the Ross and Demelza marriage. Says Debbie Horsfield: “It’s a genuine marriage, it’s not rose-tinted. In the first series it was lovely, they were falling in love and it was incredibly passionate and really romantic. Then it had its trial and tribulations in series two. “By series three they were grappling with the challenges of what is going to be a long-haul marriage… What we are exploring is a threat to that marriage that comes from a different place – it comes unexpectedly from Demelza.” Series four promises plenty of London-based action as Ross moves to the capital to become an MP, which will eventually lead Demelza into even more socially exalted circles. But initially, says Eleanor Tomlinson, “Demelza becomes more independent, because Ross goes off to London and she very much becomes the boss of Nampara. That is her power – she and Ross are on an equal level and I wonder how he will respond to that.” View oEmbed on the source website
Why it's too soon to make a drama about the events of ITV's Manhunt
The three-part series starring Martin Clunes follows the real-life detective who caught Milly Dowler's killer – but Alison Graham says it's too early to use her name in a primetime drama
There are some names that we all know. They are the victims of crimes that convulsed the nation, that made us all turn a harsh and piercing spot-lit glare upon ourselves. The result, often, is that as a society we have been found wanting. These are, invariably, the names of children and young people… Stephen Lawrence, James Bulger and Milly Dowler. I feel considerable conflict and unease at mentioning Milly’s name. She was a 14-year-old girl not only robbed of her life, her dreams and her promise by the man who murdered her, Levi Bellfield, but she was also robbed in death of every last vestige of her privacy when her diaries were read out at her killer’s trial. Her family suffered and continues to suffer incalculably after losing her in the most brutally arbitrary way imaginable. They faced hideous indignities at Bellfield’s trial and it would later emerge that blameless Milly was at the epicentre of the phone hacking scandal that changed the face of newspaper reporting in Britain. Manhunt detective Colin Sutton:”I think about victims – I try not to think about Levi Bellfield” Meet the cast of ITV's Manhunt Viewers were impressed by Levi Bellfield drama Manhunt – but some felt uneasy about the subject matter But there you go, I’m doing it, I’m bringing up Milly Dowler’s name, which shouldn’t be bandied about by strangers like me, it should be left quietly with her family, to treasure. I hope, though, that my reason for doing so is a valid one. ITV's Manhunt – a three-part drama from Ed Whitmore based on the memoirs of the detective, Colin Sutton, who linked Bellfield with the 2002 murder of Milly as he investigated the murder of French student Amélie Delagrange. Amélie was attacked on Twickenham Green in south London in 2004 as she walked home after a night out. Manhunt is really very good, Whitmore has deliberately made sure that he didn’t write a thriller and the entire three hours are understated in the best sense. It actually feels like an authentic police procedural as Sutton (Martin Clunes, who is excellent) and his team become embroiled in a complex inquiry based on hard slog – combing hours and hours of CCTV, checking thousands of vehicles, going through statements. So this is my problem – Manhunt is a good drama made with the utmost respect for the real-life victims and their families. But I feel that despite all of this it’s simply too soon, even though we are 16 years on, to insert the name of a young girl who harmed no one and who became a totem for so much she never asked for, into a drama. Maybe the time will never be right. Some things just can’t be touched and made entertainment, because that’s what dramas are. It took more than 40 years before television drama was prepared to go near the Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley with See No Evil in 2008 and looking back now I think those killings, which still hang over this country, should have been left alone. Similarly, Appropriate Adult, about the Fred and Rose West murders in Gloucester, was a good piece of drama, but it simply couldn’t get anywhere near the scale of depravity and horror inflicted by those two on their victims. If you can’t paint the truest of true pictures, then what’s the point? Milly should be left quietly to her family. Although she’s by no means at the centre of Manhunt, she’s a vital, unseen figure who is much discussed. I just feel that it’s simply wrong to put the name of a girl about whom we already know so much that we are not entitled to know, into a primetime drama. The final episode of Manhunt airs on Tuesday 8th January at 9pm on ITV
After Big Brother, Channel 5 has grown up and struck documentary gold
From heartwarming escapism to Michael Palin in North Korea, out of nowhere Channel 5 has become the home of smashing documentaries, says TV editor Alison Graham
I must make a confession. It’s not a big confession, it’s not Watergate, I’m not going to go on telly to insist there was no cover-up before it is revealed that there WAS a cover-up and I have to apologise publicly and leave Radio Times in a helicopter, with one last salutary wave. No, my confession is that roughly this time last year I had a favourite show that I watched in my own time, not as part of my job. I’d decided it was just too frivolous to bring to anyone’s attention, except my own as it turned out. Dear readers, I watched a two-part documentary about Christmas shopping in Harrogate and I loved it. There, I’ve said it. I’m not ashamed. It was called Harrogate: a Yorkshire Christmas and honestly, there was nothing to it, just footage of businesses in the well-heeled spa town arranging their festive window displays for the year’s best Christmas scene competition, and setting up the Christmas lights. Big Brother legends bid farewell as reality show airs final episode on Channel 5 Channel 5 to embrace original commissions and new drama in the post-Big Brother world Will axed Big Brother return on another channel? View oEmbed on the source website I loved it, and it was made by Channel 5. No other channel would have bothered, but Channel 5 will make documentaries about anything, and they do it jolly well. The Harrogate thing was pure escapism, but it was also heart-warming, a little programme about people who simply loved their town, were proud of it and wanted it to look its finest. What’s wrong with that? Channel 5 has suddenly, out of nowhere, become the home of smashing docs. Nothing fancy, just straightforward, informative stuff about disused railway lines, railway modellers, doctors, vets, farms (Our Yorkshire Farm, Tuesday 27th November: C5 clearly has a fascination with Yorkshire), Michael Palin in North Korea, and this week, Oxford Street (Oxford Street 24/7, Thursday 29th November). There’s also Egyptian Tomb Hunting with Tony Robinson (Tuesday 27th November) and there are a load more Inside documentaries coming up. There is a place in the television landscape for documentaries that have no frills and no fuss. There’s nothing fancy about any of these shows, but they do a job. I love Portillo’s Hidden History of Britain (Friday 30th November), which is packed with nuggets of quotable information. Like the one about the abandoned nuclear bunker in Cambridge, and Britain’s hopelessly inadequate plans for possible nuclear annihilation, which included civil servants handing out biscuits to whoever was left alive. Biscuits? Other channels , particularly the BBC, of course, do the Big Stuff, the Major Issues, and so they should (see They Shall Not Grow Old). But Channel 5 is good at nosing into corners and bringing us small stories, things that won’t make us feel overwhelmed and despairing (just about any Channel 4 documentary). They might even make us feel good. It’s a valuable service and, more widely, it’s heartening to see a channel that used to be a bit of a joke actually grow up, dump Big Brother and start stretching its limbs into not just documentaries, but new drama, too (see new series Blood, which was really quite good). And I hope that there’s a return visit to Harrogate this year…
The Woman in White: why the BBC should stop updating the classics
TV editor Alison Graham wonders why adaptations of classic novels can't be allowed to be 'of their time'
Sunday’s BBC1 adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s gothic mystery The Woman in White starts with a cross-looking Jessie Buckley eyeballing the camera and saying: “How is it that men crush women time and time again and go unpunished? If men were held accountable they would hang every hour of every day.” OK, we get the message – it’s time to buckle up, as yet another beloved classic is mined, filleted and gutted for contemporary resonances. I can imagine Wilkie Collins telling his mate Charles Dickens, while writing the novel in 1859, “Just in case it’s adapted for television in 2018, I must make sure The Woman in White has plenty of contemporary relevance.” To which Dickens surely replied, “Don’t bother, Wilkie, look what they did with Dickensian. Can we visit our mistresses now?” View oEmbed on the source website Who stars in The Woman in White? Meet the cast What time is The Woman in White on TV? I know Collins was a free thinker, with what would be termed these days a “complicated personal life”, but The Woman in White and his other best-known work The Moonstone were primarily cracking stories. In fact The Moonstone is widely considered the first ever work of detective fiction, with the first ever fictional detective, Sergeant Cuff. The Woman in White is a closely-packed thriller, full of sleights of hand and misdirection, and not just a book about a strange woman who wanders around in a big nightie, scaring people. In this particular adaptation (it’s been done twice before by the BBC) Jessie Buckley plays Marian Halcombe, half-sister of the wet Laura Fairlie, who’s also a bit of a nightie-lover. Laura is insipid and ill-used, betrothed to an older man she doesn’t love, and by the end of episode one I wished she’d find a lime kiln and walk into it. Meanwhile, hearty Marian wears loon pants and walks like a builder. Yes, she’s a modern woman who doesn’t wear her hair in a bun and bridles against being thought of as a girly girl, though this doesn’t leave her entirely blind to the charms of Walter Hartright, the handsome art teacher hired by her uncle to give the women painting lessons. It’s a doorstop of a book, packed with complicated plots and strange characters – and indeed the progressive Collins did have something to say about the treatment of Victorian women. But to bring this to the forefront of the first episode, making it the thrust of the action? It’s those modern sensibilities again, and it’s all so painfully righton. Can’t classic novels simply be allowed to be of their time? They don’t need their emphases updating, and they don’t need to be given fingers just for wagging at 21st-century audiences. (Hey, women had it bad in the olden days! Did you know? Isn’t it awful?) I fear, yet again, this happens as a means of ensuring something like The Woman in White (which is incredibly wordy and dense, and probably, by those pesky modern standards, a bit boring) is made palatable for the Young People. Because God forbid that they should ever feel left behind or alienated by a story, or unable to empathise on a completely 21st-century level with its (particularly female) characters. If everything is refracted through a 21st century prism, then everything will look the same. Television will be so emotionally carbon neutral it might as well wear hemp sandals and eat houmous. This article was originally published in April 2018
Gwyneth Hughes' modern slavery drama Doing Money is almost too tough to watch
The BBC’s harrowing Why Slavery? season stuns viewers into inaction, argues Radio Times' TV critic Alison Graham
After watching Gwyneth Hughes’s fact-based drama Doing Money I went home stifled by a cloud of misery that couldn’t be dispersed, even by the repeats of ancient Big Bang Theories I watched long into the evening just to try to flush the horror from my system. I found Doing Money so overwhelming – the true story of Ana, a young Romanian woman working as a cleaner in Britain who was abducted by a trafficking gang from a London street and forced into sex slavery. I was harrowed as she was repeatedly brutalised into submission by a series of men who treated her savagely. To them, she and the other girls became nothing. They had nothing, they were nothing. They had no passport, no state, no home, they weren’t even allowed to keep their real names. Meet the cast of BBC2’s Doing Money How do we create more opportunities for female TV writers? Stay up to date with the RadioTimes.com newsletter View oEmbed on the source website And in a detail that moved me because it was so pointlessly cruel, the horrible woman who kept the women (and often very young, sometimes underage girls) in check took Ana’s glasses, leaving her peering through a blurry fog. Though maybe this is just the fellow feeling of another wearer of glasses. I know I’d be lost without mine, even in the most benign situations. God knows how I’d feel in an extreme of despair, fear and pain. But can you bring yourself to watch it? To be ruthlessly honest, if it wasn’t part of my job, I think I’d have given Doing Money a wide berth. We made it our main pick of the day in our magazine listings, but more in hope than expectation. In my heart of hearts I know that it’s probably just too tough to watch and I can’t judge anyone who turns away. Doing Money is part of the BBC’s Why Slavery? season, timed to coincide with International Anti Slavery Day on 18th October, and includes six other films commissioned in collaboration with the Open University for BBC2, BBC4 and BBC iPlayer. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch any of the other films in the season because seasons about anything difficult always leave me feeling helpless and hopeless. Because there’s nothing I can do. I know modern slavery is monstrous, but I can’t handle such a storm force of misery concentrated into six films because I can’t help. Watching Doing Money I yearned for someone to show Ana (a remarkable performance from Anca Dumitra, who will pierce your heart) just the tiniest bit of kindness. She couldn’t even contact her mum. She was utterly lost. And I could do nothing, just as I can do nothing for all of the other countless Anas out there who live without hope. I know seasons are meant to act as a focus, and to shake us out of our complacency. But it’s helplessness, not complacency, that makes even compassionate, intelligent people turn away from such a bombardment. A Woman Captured, Selling Children, Maid in Hell, I Was a Yazidi Slave, Jailed in America… All are amazing films, I’m sure. But taken together the impact is just too great. I’m not sure how much good such seasons actually do. So much horror shocks decent people into inaction, leaving us feeling that whatever we might try to do, it just won’t be enough. Doing Money airs on Monday 5th November at 9pm on BBC2 To report a case of modern slavery call the helpline on 0800 0121 700 or report it online at the modern slavery helpline website
'Dark Heart’s maverick cop belongs in a museum'
Female characters only exist to marvel at DI Will Wagstaffe (Tom Riley) in ITV's outdated police drama, argues Alison Graham
I watched Dark Heart in 2016 when it first went out on that anomalous, now defunct channel Encore, where ITV put dramas it wasn’t sure what to do with (Harlots, The Frankenstein Chronicles). But the “pilot” has been taken out of the cupboard, dusted, cut in half and turned into two opening episodes (Wednesday 31st October and Thursday 1st November on ITV at 9pm) before two brand-new stories from Unforgotten’s Chris Lang, based on maverick cop Will Wagstaffe (Tom Riley). And boy, is it a museum piece. Those two years might as well have been a century. I didn’t realise how much has changed until I watched the first story again. Particularly when it comes to women characters and their relationship to male protagonists with ragged holes in their souls. Time, and women, have moved on. Everything you need to know about ITV’s Dark Heart Emma Thompson to star in new BBC drama Years and Years Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter View oEmbed on the source website These first two (old) episodes really are all about the man at its centre (it will be very interesting to see how the new stories pan out later in the series). Wagstaffe is the kind of male cop you don’t see any more, the one who wears a personal, terrible pain like a high-vis jacket. But lordy, just look at the female characters, ciphers who exist solely and exclusively to drive Will Wagstaffe (who is brilliant and intuitive, of course) through the story. They have no lives of their own, they breathe plot-oxygen only when they are by his side. So, he has an ex-girlfriend (Miranda Raison) with whom he gets in touch for a quickie solely to make him feel better about himself. She must hug Will post-coitally as he stares empty-eyed into the abyss. “I hardly even know my own name at the moment,” he moans. Oh, get lost. We never learn anything of her life. I don’t even know what her job is, though clearly it pays enough for a lovely flat. How do we create more opportunities for female TV writers? Will has a sister (played by the superb Charlotte Riley, also wasted here) who is used as a physical punchbag by her boyfriend and as an emotional punchbag by her brother, who anoints himself her protector. She has no direction or agency of her own. Will also has the nerve to have a go at her because he doesn’t think she feels the pain of their parents’ deaths as keenly as he does. What a git. Wagstaffe has a female sidekick who wordlessly adores him. Just look at her, gazing at him with mute love. She is there not just to shine with joy whenever he walks into the room, but also to be the woman who must be the buzzkill, who must rein in his wayward genius. Because that’s what women do, isn’t it? She even says, “Woah there!” when he gets all amazing and goes off on a maverick tangent. (She’s played by Anjli Mohindra, who was so terrifying as that ultimate perversion of female empowerment, Nadia, the would-be suicide bomber in Bodyguard.) My, my, in those two short years how times have changed for women characters in dramas (think of Lang’s brilliant Unforgotten, with Nicola Walker being the calm and un-mavericky boss) that have had to run to catch up with a real world where women are fighting back with new purpose against prejudice and inequality. I respect Chris Lang hugely, a writer with a finely tuned ear who can pick out the notes being played in this new movement. So I hope the rest of Dark Heart sounds like the world as it is now, not as it was then.
As the iconic children's television show celebrates its 60th birthday, Radio Times' TV editor Alison Graham reflects on how the programme influenced a generation
When I was six or seven I wrote a poem about a deer and sent it to Blue Peter. It was terrible, of course, just a load of sentences featuring a lot of clanking doggerel, but as I say I was six or seven and I was no Carol Ann Duffy. Besides, I’d never seen a deer in real life as I was growing up in a heavily industrialised area of the country. Which makes me wonder why I didn’t write a poem about the steelworks’ blast furnace I could see from my bedroom window. But I wasn’t Ted Hughes, either… Konnie Huq, Anthea Turner and more to return to Blue Peter for special 60th anniversary episode Blue Peter now has a diamond badge and its seriously blingy Presenters and fans wish Blue Peter a happy 60th birthday View oEmbed on the source website Anyway, I wanted to be a poet and my mum and dad were kind enough not to tell me that (a) I would never make a living from poetry and (b) the chances are that I’d be flipping awful at it and people would run away from me and possibly call the police if I ever told them that I wrote poetry. But I won a Blue Peter badge! It arrived in a brown envelope accompanied by a lovely letter that came all the way from London. Great big London! And from the telly, too! I was thrilled beyond words. A Blue Peter badge. Can you imagine? Growing up in the 1960s, Blue Peter was simply the world and I looked at my Blue Peter badge the way I look at Tiffany Diamonds by the Yard now. Thinking about it closely all these years later, that Blue Peter badge was probably the very first affirmation of what would be my career and life choice, to be a writer. My six-year-old self loved stories and made “magazines” with “free gifts” from bits of paper and I’d write all of the content myself. My mum and sister had the good grace to look impressed whenever I “sold” them the latest edition. I knew I wanted to be some kind of a writer, even at that age, hence the poet dream. And total strangers down in Big London, on my favourite show, rewarded me for my writing. And I’m writing about it now, in Britain’s top magazine, decades later. Ah, the circle of life. Blue Peter is 60 years old and BBC4 marks the birthday with a night of repeats. I’m not sure I’ll be able to watch, as Blue Peter meant so much and I think I might get a bit weepy. Too many memories. We viewed as a family, and I would hover round my mum, begging her to finish the washing-up liquid so I could use the empty bottle to build whatever it was Val Singleton had made that week. We loved the fearless John Noakes and at school we threw ourselves into the annual Blue Peter Appeal, collecting milk-bottle tops and used stamps. And when Val, or Peter Purves or John lit the first candle on what now looks like an almighty fire hazard, the Blue Peter Advent Crown, we knew Christmas wasn’t very far away. The Blue Peter of my childhood was routinely denounced as “middle class” (this is always used as an insult in the way “working class” never is) and “cosy”. But who wouldn’t want their child to watch something that never induced anxiety and was a beacon of kindness? Blue Peter is still going, of course, but I bet it doesn’t resonate so deeply and so widely with kids now as it did when I was growing up. Which is a shame.
Jodie Whittaker, Michaela Coel and Jodie Comer represent a "real sea change" in TV
Radio Times TV editor Alison Graham celebrates three brilliant female British stars at the centre of a new wave of television
As the quality of the light changes, and autumn brings its burnished shades and colours to a Mother Nature who's ready to cast off her dowdy cloak, it's time to switch on the central heating and murmur, "By heck, isn't telly good again?" But it's not just the brilliance and sheer talk-about excitement of the dramas - we have to mention once again the all-conquering Bodyguard, of course, which broke the boundaries of its medium to turn up on newspaper front pages and the BBC 10 o'Clock News the day after the finale. When does Killing Eve start on TV in the UK? Killing Eve author: 'I want people to be appalled by Jodie Comer's Villanelle - but also cheer her on' Phoebe Waller Bridge's Killing Eve renewed for series two before the first has even aired It's more than that: it's towering performances by incredible young female leads. View oEmbed on the source website You could stick lighted matches in my ears and I still wouldn't be able to look away from the goddess-like Michaela Coel in Black Earth Rising. True, I have very little idea what the hell is going on but I don't care, and it doesn't matter. Coel was wonderful in her own comedy show, Channel 4's Chewing Gum, and watching her in Hugo Blick's dense and dangerous drama is like being wrapped in a velvet blanket made of puzzles while being kicked in the shins. I love Coel's furious containment as Rwandan genocide survivor Kate, who was adopted as a child by human rights barrister Eve (Harriet Walter). Now she's a woman in search of her past. Kate is a driven, solitary and damaged soul in the most terrible danger. But she's fearless and pulsing with the howling need for revenge, and she looks amazing with her neat backpack, black jeans, big boots, leather jacket and sturdy, determined stride. And - fashion note - just the right amount of pitch-perfect silver jewellery. These things are important... It's an awesome performance and I think if I ever met Coel in real life she would terrify me just a little bit. What, too, of Killing Eve: everyone's go-to, talk-about binge-watch? What of Jodie Comer, whom I've always liked - but who knew her face could be so magnificently expressive? Coquettish and winning one moment, black-eyed and heartless the next as a playful, charmingly deranged assassin? And boy, does she know how to dress. Remember that netty pink thing she wore in an early episode (above)? I wanted that dress so badly, even though it would make me look like a caravan covered in candy floss. There's another Jodie, of course, who will blaze through autumn: Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Who, a proper mould-breaker and a terrific performer. Isn't this all so exciting? I love it, I love the confidence of these young actresses. I can't call them actors, sorry; they are actresses and they should be proud of the noun, they should own it. The thing is, there's something really important going on here, there's a real sea change and the atoms in the air are shifting. Great actresses in great shows, with great fashion that doesn't wear them, they wear it. Everything meshes beautifully and it's all rather wonderful. They aren't maverick cops, they don't weep about faithless partners, they take their places in a world where they truly belong.
From Wanderlust to Bodyguard, everyone's having sex – so why is it all so miserable?
Women aren't being objectified in TV's latest hit dramas — but does all the sex have to be so worthy, asks television editor Alison Graham
Every now and again the country goes a little bit bonkers. It’s currently clutching its pearls and running into the street, hailing a passing hansom cab, to escape all the sex on telly. The fact that everyone seems to be At It has led to the kind of “Flipping heck, what do we have here?” newspaper features that use the words “cavort” and “romp”. Words, incidentally, that no one actually says to anyone in real life. There are saucy scenes all over the place as papers screen-grab the juicy bits in Bodyguard and Wanderlust and write about how it’s the women who are now calling the sexy-time shots in television dramas. Toni Collette drama Wanderlust has a wonderfully refreshing approach to sex and relationships Meet the cast of Wanderlust Stay up to date with the RadioTimes.com newsletter This is all true, but then we know that telly doesn’t tend to wake up to the zeitgeist until the zeitgeist has wrapped a blanket around its knees as a pan of milk warms on the stove (see diversity in casting, which was a looooooong time coming). View oEmbed on the source website But, oh dear me, does it all have to be so joyless? It isn’t too long since the so-called destructive, “angry sex” in Doctor Foster. And much has been made of the supposedly boundary-breaking adultery drama Wanderlust (Tuesdays on BBC1), where married couple Toni Collette and Steven Mackintosh decide (at the wife’s suggestion and initiation) to sleep with other people. There’s lots of sex, but it’s all so miserable – everyone sounds as if they’ve trapped a hand in the car door. After two episodes I decided I couldn’t waste another second on any of them – and God knows I love a bit of middle-class angst. In Bodyguard (Sundays on BBC1), doomed Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes) came on to her bodyguard David Budd (Richard Madden), but she was in charge. He even bridled and referred to himself as “room service” when she offered to knock on his hotel-room door for a bit of booty after she’d finished her paperwork. It was a good scene: Julia was in control, he was the BLT and pot of coffee from the 24-hour menu. But it’s impossible to gloss over the fact that he tried to strangle her during a waking nightmare shortly afterwards, because he had a Damaged Soul. Then she was blown up by a terrorist bomb. Women, they aren’t allowed any fun in dramas. (See also Apple Tree Yard, where a woman’s adultery was punished in every possible way when she ended up in court after her lover murdered her rapist.) Still, at least these women, all of a certain age (refreshing!) get to keep their vests on. It’s good to get away from those nonsensical scenes where a naked woman in a drama never got out of bed without tucking the duvet under her armpits and hobbling to the bathroom. It looked ridiculous and cumbersome, like a ferret dragging a sideboard. In Bodyguard it was Richard Madden’s bum that did a lap of honour while Keeley Hawes kept her modesty. I assume these cover-ups (Toni Collette remains clothed, apart from that hideous underwear thing she wore in episode one that looked like the nicotine-stained net curtains from a 1950s dockside pub) are a statement, that women are no longer being objectified. That’s absolutely right, of course, but that doesn’t mean this all has to be so miserable and worthy, does it? Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
Thanks to Apple Tree Yard, we at last have a challenging, adult drama
“A work of television fiction that is ruthlessly, excruciatingly honest about so many things,” says Alison Graham
Oh, it’s marvellous to be treated as an adult and to be allowed to enjoy the sunny uplands of maturity by a television drama that looks directly at me and says: “This is going to hurt.” Apple Tree Yard has been piercing and painful and a rare example of a work of television fiction that is ruthlessly, excruciatingly honest about so many things; what can be the initial heady liberation of apparently no-strings adultery for a (cover your ears/look away now) middle-aged woman with much to lose. And, most importantly, the destructive consequences of a savage act. Meet the cast of Apple Tree Yard Emily Watson on her Apple Tree Yard role: ‘Sexuality is powerful at 50’ Apple Tree Yard review: a gripping psychological thriller with a dose of Fifty Shades I know I take this particular horse to water regularly, but it still must be said, loud and clear – if a drama involves the rape of a character (female or male) it has an absolute duty to spare us little. Apple Tree Yard has spared us nothing. Its lead character Yvonne Carmichael (Emily Watson, who is just terrific) is a successful, respected geneticist, who starts a torrid affair with a stranger. They simply pick each other up after she’s given evidence to a House of Commons select committee, and do the deed in a cupboard in the Crypt. Wey-hey! It’s out of character for Yvonne, who seems to be happily married in an affluent suburb, with a lovely kitchen and a commendable recycling routine. She secretly smiles to herself on the Tube, hugging her secret, and carries a new confidence as she’s warmed like a sunflower by the attention of a thrillingly mysterious man whose name she doesn’t know. But Yvonne’s life and spirit are destroyed when she’s savagely sexually assaulted by a colleague at a leaving do, and this is where Apple Tree Yard takes us into territory that’s rarely explored – consequences. Because Apple Tree Yard is ALL consequences. It treats the attack, not just as a plot point or as a means of teaching Yvonne a medieval lesson (she’s had an affair and she’s married! PUNISH HER!) but as an action from which everything else springs, everything, right up to the closing moments of the very last episode. Author Louise Doughty explored this magnificently in her original novel and adapter Amanda Coe has done a fine job of staying absolutely true to the spirit. But what I really love about Apple Tree Yard is its constant challenges to us, the audience. What would you do? It wants to know. Would you happily be tupped by a stranger in a cupboard? Would you really take off your knickers in a pub toilet at the behest of your lover before a swift rogering in an alleyway? It wonders, too, whether we are the kind of people who make judgements about rape victims. There’s a chilling scene where a police officer informally talks to Yvonne about making an official complaint. “[Your] being drunk will be a gift for the defence.” And you’ll want to thump an odious little twerp who advises Yvonne about a court appearance: “You ladies don’t make it easy for us.” But it’s a level of Apple Tree Yard’s sophistication and maturity that it presents us with the unpalatable and then doesn’t give us any answers. It’s a thoroughly adult drama for the 21st century, though having said that I’m not sure even ten years ago a television drama would invite such excoriating self-examination from its audience. It’s been a long time coming, but I’m glad we are being trusted to think the unthinkable for ourselves. View oEmbed on the source website
Bodyguard has finally put powerful female characters front and centre – who cares if it's "unrealistic"?
From Keeley Hawes in Bodyguard to Jodie Comer's assassin in Killing Eve, TV has finally discovered the benefits of "gender-blind casting"
I wish I lived in a world where everybody was required to address me as “ma’am”. Bodyguard's Keeley Hawes as Home Secretary Julia Montague (SPOILERS) made it to the end of episode three before she was assassinated. But before she died in a bomb blast, everybody had always called her “ma’am”. Not just her booty-call bodyguard David Budd, but her staff, strangers, everyone. I’d like that. Recently I stayed at a posh hotel where a waiter called me “my lady”, which I thought was pushing it a bit as he wasn’t Parker and I wasn’t Lady Penelope. But “ma’am”, yes. Respectful and deferential without being “let-me-lay-down-my-coat-for-you-to-walk-on”. (Though secretly, I’d like that, too.) When does Killing Eve start on TV in the UK? Killing Eve author: ‘I want people to be appalled by Jodie Comer’s Villanelle – but also cheer her on’ Phoebe Waller Bridge’s Killing Eve renewed for series two before the first has even aired View oEmbed on the source website Nearly all of the women in Bodyguard are addressed as “ma’am” because they are doing big, important jobs. This has troubled a lot of people, including our Viewpoint writer Rohit Kachroo, the ITV News security editor, in a recent issue of Radio Times. “Counter-terrorism is largely a man’s world… many of the specialist areas shown in this programme are still dominated by men.” I’ve had arguments I really never expected to have with friends and colleagues about this aspect of Bodyguard, and there’s been a bit of a faff about it, inevitably, on social media, where no scab ever goes unpicked. Oh no! Really important pretend women characters in a pretend world in a television drama ARE WOMEN and people are upset about it! What are we to do? We can’t go giving women ideas above their stations. Fluffy, muddleheaded ladies should be at home knitting cushions with cat hair or learning to play the harp. If you depict them running important political and police departments or defusing explosives they might (gasp) want to do it in real life! Then where would we be? There’d be bombs going off all over the place because the women in charge would be too busy with their curling tongs or texting photos of cute labrador puppies to their friends. Come on, please, give us something. I’m sure Jed Mercurio knows that women anti-terrorists, police and bomb-disposal bosses are thin on the ground, but he’s always put women front and centre in his dramas. Bodies, Line of Duty, now Bodyguard. People talk about colour-blind casting – this is gender-blind casting and it’s about time. What, I wonder, will people say about the bonkers but oddly alluring Killing Eve, where a top assassin is a woman, as is the MI5 operative who tries to hunt her down (Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh are both brilliant). Will they say, “Ooh, this is so unrealistic, paid assassins are usually men, they go to assassination school and are all called Vladimir”? Comer, who sometimes floats around in pretty dresses and adopts whoopsy girly voices, couldn’t be more terrifying if she were an eight-foot-tall tattooed brickie with upper arms the size of poodles. And boy, she can shin up a drainpipe, no problem. Impressive. The point to all of this is that we have to let go of our ideas of what is “right”, that men should be in charge of absolutely everything important and any dramatised hint of an alteration to the status quo is somehow dishonest. How else can change happen? Killing Eve starts on BBC1 on Saturday 15th September at 9.15pm and will then be available as a box set on BBC iPlayer
‘Shameless opened up all kinds of scabs in my family’: Paul Abbott on writing from life and his latest show No Offence
The screenwriter opens up about revisiting his childhood for hit show Shameless – and the impact it had on his mental health
Talking to Paul Abbott is like trying to pin down a moth. He can be wildly inattentive and elliptical, he’ll settle for a few minutes then he’s up and off again, making coffee, fetching water or taking off his jumper because he’s hot. But I forgive him anything, because once you harness his restlessness, Abbott is a terrific, skin-strippingly honest, hugely funny and unguarded interviewee. We have spoken on and off over the years and first met in 2004 just after the brilliant State of Play and as Shameless was about to launch. But between Shameless, to which he eventually contributed only the odd episode and which by his own admission went on too long (it ended in 2013), and No Offence — which starts its third series on Channel 4 this week — he’d been very quiet. When is Channel 4 police drama No Offence back on TV for series 3 Autumn’s top 20 dramas – introduced by their writers and creators View oEmbed on the source website When I ask Abbott (58) why — did he have writer’s block? — he’s brutally frank. It was because the doors he had to open on to his dreadful childhood and painfully complicated family background for Shameless let out too much horror, and his already fragile mental health suffered acutely. “No, I wasn’t blocked, I never stopped writing, I just wasn’t handing it over. I think what happened with Shameless — and I have to be careful what I say here [Abbott’s relationships with some of his relatives are rocky] — I spent a lot of time running away from [my family] history. That had its consequences in mental-health terms. It didn’t stop me writing, I just wasn’t handing it over and that’s as toxifying as not writing.” Abbott’s upbringing is well documented; abandoned by his mother when he was nine and brought up by his sister, with just occasional appearances from his feckless father, portrayed as Frank Gallagher in Shameless. Abbott’s creation of this infamous drunk infuriated his dad, and the pair stopped speaking. “The truth about Shameless is that it opened all kinds of scabs in my family. It was horrible, my family was pissed off, my dad hated Frank… There are so many nice people in my family, I have to be careful…” It’s at this point that Abbott, tellingly, is at his most restless. “I didn’t attend my dad’s funeral and my family hate me for that. I loved having written Shameless but using the family archive was perilous.” Abbott says he had a “bad time psychiatrically” after Shameless; “But like every other time you have a dip, you come out much more knowledgeable about yourself. You just wish you didn’t have to do it that way.” He was treated, more than once, at The Priory Hospital. “We were on first-name terms, I went in a few times for, like, six weeks. The last time I was there was six years ago and it was voluntary. I went there saying, ‘I don’t feel safe’. I was cold. I was going through a divorce [from his previous wife Saskia]… I came out after six weeks… Now I feel back on form.” So what was behind this writing but not submitting? What was going on there? “I’m really good at memorising new scripts that I haven’t typed up, I can tell you every scene to the nearest comma. I’ve typed it up in my head, it’s a tool I’ve sharpened. But when I put things on paper people think it’s the finished product. This is why I went quiet, because anything I wrote would have been made. I would say, ‘It’s not ready.’ But that wouldn’t matter. It had my name on the front and it was a two-inch script so it was a movie. “But I knew better than them. I wanted to get things right before I got behind them.” Now, he says, he has seven “active projects” on the go. While working on No Offence Abbott and the show’s team of writers were on lockdown at the huge house he shares with his American wife Larkin and their daughter Ellis (four) in Cheshire. It has vast rooms looking out on to a fabulous garden, but such lovely views are distracting, so Abbott writes in his garage. “They [the writers] stay here and we talk it to death. No one gets it right first time. We often do eight drafts of a script, maybe more. We did 12 on one script.” Abbott also has trenchant views on the current “homogenised” state of British television. “If commissioners see anything good on another channel they will copy it instead of bettering it. We are so terrified of ratings that people want to be all things to all men. But that’s not your job [as a writer], your job is to take people to a place they didn’t know they wanted to go.” No Offence airs on Thursdays on Channel 4 at 9pm
'Crying on TV has broken out of its talent show confines'
Can everyone on TV please dry their eyes, pleads Radio Times TV editor Alison Graham
I like Bank Holiday Mondays, those welcome blips in the calendar that scream: “I’m a free day, waste me! Go on, no one will judge you if you sit in your dressing gown until 2pm eating croissants. You’re at work again tomorrow, when once more you will be a productive and useful member of society, when people will stop you in the office kitchen to talk about Bodyguard – and there will be carrot cake because it’s always someone’s birthday at Radio Times.” So Bank Holiday Mondays tend to be squandered on daytime television, and I don’t feel I must face any kind of judgement as I pick my way through the daffodils of Homes under the Hammer, Wanted Down Under and Escape to the Country (of course, without Escape to the Country my life would be a long bleak avenue of existential despair). And, a new one for me, BBC1’s Murder, Mystery and My Family. Celebrity MasterChef 2018 line-up revealed: Gemma Collins, Spencer Matthews and Dolly Parton’s sister Stella to star Stay up to date with the RadioTimes.com newsletter View oEmbed on the source website Well it’s got “murder” in the title, and “mystery”, so clearly it’s right up my bloodstained boulevard. I enjoyed it, too. It’s a clever idea where two barristers re-examine evidence in old murder cases where the guilty were hanged but where modern-day family members feel there has been a miscarriage of justice. Then a judge reviews the case and decides whether the conviction is unsafe. I’m not sure what happens after that. But anyway, it’s a hit and will return next year with a new series. Watching this random episode, though, instantly, I knew, I just knew, as I looked straight at the family member, and said, “That lady is going to cry, as people always do on television when they unearth a long-dead distant family member’s sad story.” Sure enough, she did cry, quite a lot, about a relative she had never met (the convicted woman was executed for killing her husband in the 1920s). Here we go again. The tears, the ascribing of motives and actions that no one can possibly know because it all happened nearly a century ago. The standing at the grave, weeping, with the words “It’s been a journey, I feel like I know you now.” OK, the only journey anyone undertakes is by bus, train, car or bike. And no one knows anyone they have never met. But I can’t blame this participant for having a sniffle. After all, everyone is doing it. One day soon, Huw Edwards, or more likely the ridiculously self-dramatising Tom Bradby on ITV News, will wave their hands in front of their faces in that little “I’m going to cry now” pantomime gesture as they sob about Something Sad. Crying has broken out of its talent-show confines. They’ve always done it on The X Factor, they do it on MasterChef, and they do it on Great British Menu. Really, so your scallops look a bit wan? Your squid ink pasta isn’t very inky or squid-y? Stop blubbing and get over yourself. It’s dinner. It’s not like you’ve tried to split the atom only for the atom to roll off the counter top and get stuck under the fridge. Everyone, everywhere on television, we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: please dry your flipping eyes before we’re all washed away on a great tide of tears. Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
Divorced from reality: why BBC1's new drama The Split fails as feminist escapism
"I feel that I am expected to love The Split simply because its three main characters are women," says Alison Graham, "yet they all still talk about men all of the time"
I’m in torment. I’m lost in a vortex of pointless obsession because I hate every single one of the jackets in The Split. That white one that divorce solicitor Hannah (Nicola Walker) wears, the one that makes her look like a 1950s provincial butcher? I hate it. The pink thing wronged decent wife Goldie (Meera Syal) wears to her divorce court hearing in Tuesday’s episode? I hate that one, too. In fact, there’s a scene where all the women are wearing jackets and I can’t stand a single one. But wait, of course, the jackets aren’t the real problem here (though they are truly horrible). No, it’s The Split itself. I have a visceral antipathy towards Abi Morgan’s divorce drama. Meet the cast of BBC divorce drama The Split RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox First look: BBC divorce drama The Split is sharp, smart and entertaining View oEmbed on the source website I think it’s all the posturing and fake insights. “A pre-nup is written by the head when the heart has forgotten it once loved,” Hannah said last week. The words came from her mouth, not from a really inappropriate greetings card, which is surely where they belong. Now, I’m sure that The Split could be viewed as glossy escapism, what with all the expensive clothes (not the jackets, though) and the shoes and the handbags and the lovely houses. Hannah, it has to be said, has the most amazing kitchen. I bow to no one in my love for glossy escapism, particularly glossy escapism featuring women who gather around bottles of wine to make said fake insights. (See Mistresses, that great beacon of female-centric nonsense, which is one of my all-time favourite flu-viewing box sets. It helps to have a slight fever when you watch it.) But I feel that I am expected to love The Split simply because its three main characters – sisters Hannah, Nina and Rose – are women. Hey, look, it’s a Lady-Drama, let’s make Aperol Spritzes and do each other’s hair. The women in The Split are supposedly modern and independent, and yet they all still talk about men all of the time. And the men they talk about are TV drama drips. Rose’s poorly caricatured fiancé (he has a perpetual sniff, he’s a bit nerdy, he’s a little gauche) is just a joke figure who would rightly provoke outrage if the roles were reversed. There’s even a wet Church of England vicar who’s staggered out of a 1970s sitcom. I’m not religious, but I’m offended on behalf of everyone who is. Hannah is a top-flight divorce solicitor who makes oodles of money, has a lovely husband (played by Stephen Mangan) and that great kitchen, and yet still makes limpid eyes at an ex-lover, a smooth, boring foreigner who works at the same firm but looks as if he’s got lost on his way to The Bridge. Or possibly The Killing. (Yes, I know actor Barry Atsma is Dutch, not Swedish or Danish, don’t write in. But why does Hannah behave like this? The script gives us no clues. It feels so wrong; she has a good marriage and, again, a great kitchen. Why throw an ex in her way, like a bag of recycling that’s missed the collection? If there are to be more dramas powered by women (and hooray, yes there flipping well should be, both in front of and behind the cameras, which in fairness The Split truly is, with female directors and executives), then they must say something. They have to be good, they can’t let themselves be dismissed by people like me. Come on, this is our time, so let’s get these shows right. Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
The Mighty Redcar is warm, funny and engaging, and I love it
Radio Times TV Editor Alison Graham delights in the Yorkshire resort town and BBC series that's close to home
Redcar means a lot to my family. Not so much now, when we are all scattered by the winds of career and family, but decades ago as we grew up nearby. We still visit and we are protective of this seen-betterdays seaside resort on the North East coast. So when I was at a BBC2 new-season launch at a posh London hotel, the kind of place where the lighting is so pointlessly subdued you need a burning torch to find the lifts, and the new docu-soap The Mighty Redcar was announced, I groaned. Everything you need to know about BBC's The Mighty Redcar Autumn’s top 20 dramas – introduced by their writers and creators Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter View oEmbed on the source website Then my hackles went up and I polished the chip on my shoulder to a buff shine. Oh God, I thought, it’ll be one of those “Ooh, look at the funny northerners” series, like the Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse sketches where someone kept northerners as pets. I wasn’t alone. I saw my brother a few weeks later, who wondered, “I’ve seen trailers for something called The Mighty Redcar. Is it a joke?” I hope not. To us Redcar was the place we piled off to at the first hint of sun on a weekend. Dad would wrestle with the windbreak and put up the deckchairs, the kids would pelt into the freezing North Sea. I did (hated) ballet lessons in Redcar; Mam and Dad had their silver wedding party there; we spent our pocket money in the massive seafront Woolies (ah, how I loved that plastic crash helmet, my favourite purchase). And I hung on to my big brother as I howled in terror on the ghost train in Redcar’s tiny amusement park. We ate fish and chips, and to this day I give a little inward swoon as I think of Redcar’s justly famous lemon-top ice creams. You’ll have to try one, I can’t explain. Then we lost loads of coppers in the amusements, failing to secure that windfall that was surely just another penny away. Today, looking at my favourite framed family photos, I realise that a lot of them were taken on the seafront, or the “prom”, at Redcar. Invariably we’re huddled against the cold. I realise I’m not painting much of a picture here; Redcar isn’t Las Vegas. But it’s ours. We don’t want anyone making fun. Yet here’s the thing, The Mighty Redcar doesn’t make fun. It’s warm, funny and engaging, and I love it. I even felt a bit nostalgic during the opening episode, though the heart has long since been ripped out of the town I knew by the closure of its steel works with the loss of 1,700 jobs. The lifeblood stopped pumping in 2015, leaving poverty and hardship to flutter in Redcar’s depleted veins. The Mighty Redcar focuses firmly on the town’s young. Those who don’t have the expectation of dads, grandads, great-grandads, that they’d go into the steelworks and have a job for life. But the teens in The Mighty Redcar have wit and imagination. It’s narrated by local lass Madison Cooper, from a script she helped to write, which adds a brilliant blanket of authenticity. Madison is clearly proud of her town and that makes me so happy. These kids dream dreams, as I did; they can’t stay put, they want opportunities and that probably means leaving Redcar. Which makes me sad. The Mighty Redcar airs on Thursdays at 9pm on BBC2 from 6th September
TV announcers, please stop spoiling our emotional screen moments
Let viewers enjoy emotional moments in peace, begs Radio Times' television editor Alison Graham
Imagine you’ve reached the last lines of a book you’ve treasured, a book that’s led you to steal away at every available minute just to read a few more paragraphs. There’s a lovely, poignant moment at the end and you are swept away by your thoughts and reactions. It’s one of the great things about being human, about loving words and appreciating the emotions of others. Then someone you don’t know leans right into your face and barks, “WASN’T THAT FANTASTIC?! I REALLY ENJOYED IT AND I WAS VERY MOVED. CAN I RECOMMEND SOMETHING ELSE YOU MIGHT LIKE TO START READING STRAIGHTAWAY?” Eh, what? Who the hell are you? “No one you know,” comes the reply. “Just a complete stranger who’s paid to pop up and scatter inane comments into the air like a stale breeze dispersing the remains of yesterday’s barbecue tray.” “The women characters talked about men all the time”: Is the BBC’s #HearHer campaign really helping women in TV? Why Huw Edwards should never leave the BBC News studio View oEmbed on the source website That, ladies and gentlemen, is how I feel about the announcers, presentation people, call them what you will, who hijack special moments at the end of programmes precisely when I need a bit of space. Oh lord, I hear you cry, not this again. Yes, sorry, it is this again. Everyone hates it, no one’s life is enriched by someone unseen and unknown popping into our heads to offer unsolicited inanities at the end of shows – particularly dramas, where it’s as unwelcome as a seagull on a rotary dryer. Dear announcer/presentation person. Please believe me when I say that we have shared nothing, I don’t know you and you don’t know me. We haven’t sat on the sofa together getting chocolate on the cushions through an entire series of Poldark. Neither have we spilt wine on the rug because we were laughing so hard during A Very English Scandal. And yet here you are, being all chummy. It happened at the end of the movie Florence Foster Jenkins on BBC1 the other week. What a great film. I’d seen it before and enjoyed it thoroughly again (how do I love thee, Hugh Grant, let me count the ways). It has a sad, but beautifully tender ending, thanks to Grant, Meryl Streep as the tineared Florence, and director Stephen Frears. I knew what was coming, and I was braced. When it happened, I was just as sad as when I saw it the first time, and I needed to gather myself a bit as the final credits unfurled. But, hey ho, what do you know, a presentation/announcer person gatecrashed my special moment with something so unmemorable that I have, unsurprisingly, forgotten it. Though I think it was some tat about “dreams can come true”. You don’t say. It couldn’t have been more annoying if she’d burst through the patio doors bearing a pot of tea and a copy of The Little Book of Mindfulness, and stroking a cat. I don’t need your trite observations, I have more than enough of my own, thank you. You add nothing and you take me nowhere. If you really must pipe up, then wait, use some judgement, you know what’s gone before so you must know when viewers would welcome a bit of quiet. And don’t leap in to tell me that there’s another film on somewhere else later in the evening. We are a nation of TV planners, we do our own scheduling (of course with the invaluable help of RT) so we know this already. Please, for once, just button it.
Eat Well for Less is secretly one of the best shows on TV
Yes, really. The bad diets in the Gregg Wallace BBC series showcase the beautifully British lack of self-awareness
My favourite bit in every Eat Well for Less?, my most beloved television show, is the geezer pincer-movement when a gurning Gregg Wallace and Chris Bavin ambush grocery-shopping couples as they reach the supermarket checkout. Remarkably, none of the participants is stunned by the rapid-fire mateyness as Gregg and Chris analyse the shockingly unhealthy contents of their trolleys. This is after the couples have very gamely pretended that having Gregg Wallace and Chris Bavin jump out at them during a supermarket trip is absolutely the last thing they were expecting. Gregg Wallace’s top 10 money-saving tips for shopping clever and eating well Gregg Wallace: judging Bake Off is “easier” than judging MasterChef RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website Oddly, though, they have signed up for the show, they are appearing on the show and have been followed throughout their shopping trip by a camera crew. For the show. What did they expect? Why did they think the camera was there? Some kind of performance art? I love BBC1’s Eat Well for Less? (sadly ended but thankfully available on iPlayer), despite its redundant question mark, because it combines my two great loves: shopping and judging people, more specifically judging people and finding them wanting. But that’s the point. Eat Well for Less? allows us to scoff heartily at anyone who doesn’t recognise vegetables, let alone cook with them, and who eats doughnuts for breakfast. And, memorably, that man who drank more than three and a half litres of cola every day. Surely his burps would power the National Grid? Gregg and Chris are kindness itself as they deal gently with almost thermo-nuclear levels of witlessness. THEY don’t judge, whereas you and I can sit at home on our lofty plateaux and say, “Why is that woman crying because she doesn’t recognise a tomato? This is a savage indictment of the British educational system. We are a nation that doesn’t cook any more but no one cares, we just watch TV shows where people bake cakes.” The idea of EWFL? is that Gregg and Chris take away the rubbish food and replace it with healthy stuff, or they try to cut shopping bills by replacing expensive items with cheaper models. What’s great about the show is that it brilliantly encapsulates what it is to live in mimsy Britain in 2018. Never seen an avocado before? Well go on telly and cry about it till someone gives you a hug. No one will tell you you’re a halfwit who shouldn’t parade his or her ignorance in public. I love this about British people: they go on things like EWFL? without any kind of self-awareness. They are happy to show the world they eat only chocolate cake and they don’t use the kitchen: it’s just there “because it came with the house”. They don’t mind laughing with Gregg and Chris as they discuss how they spend hundreds of pounds on takeaways every month, yet one of them works as a chef but doesn’t cook at home because he “doesn’t know where anything is”. Or discussing their dream of chopping something, “then putting something else on it” and “I’ve never really used a chopping board before”, while attacking a mushroom with a knife as if she’s trying to behead a python. Part of me admires everyone who takes part in EWFL? because we live in an unforgiving world where the social-media artillery takes aim and fires abuse. No one can get away with anything and your faults and weaknesses and the judgements of potentially millions of strangers are trapped for ever in the ether. Now shut up and get me an avocado. Eat Well for Less? is available to watch now on BBC iPlayer Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
Why Huw Edwards should never leave the BBC News studio
"Whenever Huw Edwards leaves the BBC News studio, my world makes a little less sense," says Alison Graham
Whenever Huw Edwards leaves the BBC News studio and the safety of his big fancy desk to report on location, my world makes a little less sense. Huw Edwards should be securing my personal news-planet and making sure it doesn’t spin off its axis by directing operations on the bridge of the news-ship, like Lord Nelson in a good suit. But Huw (may I call you Huw, Huw?), in the open air, in public? Ah, that’s another matter. Alfresco Huw is like an antelope lapping at a water hole in the desert, fair game for hyenas. Or in this case, members of the public. As soon as I switched on the BBC News during Brexit breakdown day, I knew Huw and I would have to face our foes and get through this together. He was badly lit and squinting in the open air, a tethered balloon at a provincial fair with the waltzers on one side and the ghost train on the other. BBC gender pay gap closes as John Humphrys, Huw Edwards and Nicky Campbell take salary cut Sarah Montague “incandescent with rage” over BBC Radio 4 pay gap Channel 4 gender pay gap makes for “uncomfortable reading” admits chief executive View oEmbed on the source website Throughout his afternoon reports, poor Huw and his guests, pallid men sweating in wool, had to put up with a cacophony of noises, the shrieks and yells of members of the public. Whether they were pro- or anti-Brexit I couldn’t hear, it all became a symphony of British unrest, the dissonance of impotent fury, illustrated by someone waving Union Jack and EU flags frantically in the background. Everyone was so giddy. On Radio 4’s Today that morning, John Humphrys, interviewing the Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer after David Davis resigned (and before Boris Johnson packed his hairbrush), referred to the Labour Party as “your lot”. “Your lot”? Whatever you might think of them, they are still the Opposition, not a rival pub quiz team. Maybe the madness was fuelled by the fact it was meltingly hot. If all of this had happened on a chilly winter afternoon there wouldn’t have been the mounting hysteria, everyone would have been a bit more circumspect and would have talked with the unhurried gravitas that can come only with the wearing of a cashmere scarf. But as the temperature rose, cameras were trained for hours on Boris Johnson’s front door and we all went a tiny bit mad. A nice door, with a lovely period street light outside. But still, it was a front door. None of this flim-flam helped to contribute to the sensible debate we all needed, it just stirred the pot of hysteria-stew. Meanwhile, back to Huw at large in Westminster. Someone had started playing music at top volume, or maybe it was open-air karaoke, but if a man pushing a cart had come past selling candyfloss at that precise moment, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Over on Channel 4 News, Jon Snow told the protesters, politely, to “shut up, guys”, but Huw was one step away from having to scream at his interviewees as he struggled so manfully against a tide of disrespect. Oh, Huw, if only you’d stayed in the studio, in your very own environment, one that you can master and control. But you were still there at 10pm for the main bulletin, and it was only a matter of time before some random bloke stood behind you and started waving at the camera. In fact, this interloper seemed to be watching the news on his phone so he could see himself waving. People, this is Britain, right now. What are we to do?
Three Girls is harrowing – but it's a real-life drama you need to watch
We need terrifying true crime stories on TV – like the BBC's depiction of the Rochdale sex scandal – for a better society, argues Alison Graham
There’s a heartbreaking scene – one of many – in Three Girls, based on the Rochdale child abuse scandal, where a blank-eyed, fragile, underage girl describes to the police how she was systematically raped by different men. “You are passed around like a ball. They get your number… then there’s like 50 people you don’t know ringing you.” All of these calls are demands for sex. Nicole Taylor’s harrowing story shows young girls being picked up from school in their abusers’ taxis, being plied with drink and cheap takeaways before being taken to derelict buildings to be assaulted. Then they are left to make their own way back to whatever they call home. If they are “lucky” they might be handed the odd grubby tenner. I can understand that the prospect of three hours of such remorseless bleakness might be offputting (it’s broadcast Tuesday to Thursday on BBC1). But Three Girls provides a proper, valuable public service, shining halogen-bright lights into one of Britain’s most fetid corners. View oEmbed on the source website This is what true-crime dramas – if they are careful and sensitive – can do so brilliantly. We’ve all seen and read coverage of the court cases into not just the Rochdale abuse ring, but also the murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones (Little Boy Blue, which ended on ITV on Monday), the Fred and Rosemary West murders (Appropriate Adult), the hoax kidnapping of Shannon Matthews (The Moorside) and the Ipswich prostitute killings (Five Daughters). Some of us are old enough to remember our mums warning us not to go out to play on the waste ground near our houses during the hunt for and subsequent trial of the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, dramatised in 2006 for See No Evil: the Moors Murderers. We know the bald facts of all of these infamous crimes, but what a good dramatisation does is give a story emotion and dimension. Court cases are all foreground, true crime dramas give us background. We get to “see” the victims, people like young Rhys Jones, and the girls in Three Girls, who were perhaps once filled with hope and happiness. Until someone came and snuffed out the light. In Little Boy Blue we go home with Rhys’s broken parents, Mel and Steve, as their marriage starts to crumble under the weight of a grief they simply don’t know what to do with. “I don’t know if I love you any more, I can’t feel anything,” says Mel (Sinead Keenan). You don’t get that in court cases. View oEmbed on the source website Both of them can do little except sit in their dead football-mad son’s bedroom and will themselves to be close to the child that has gone for ever, taken from them by a bullet fired across a pub car park. It’s that sense of emptiness, of now hollow lives that can never be properly filled again, that good true crime dramas show us. Similarly, anger at a judicial system that fails those it’s meant to protect is rarely aired in court. But in Three Girls sexual health worker Sara Rowbotham (the splendid Maxine Peake) explodes into fury when police decide, at last, to take a serious interest in allegations of child grooming by gangs of largely British-Pakistani men. Why should the girls say anything to detectives when they’ve been trapped in a cycle of “raped... beaten… not believed… raped… beaten… not believed,” yells Rowbotham in the face of a complacent cop. It’s these hinterlands we rarely hear about that make good true-crime dramas so valuable. We need them.
Paula was a mire, a mess, a great big sponge pudding stuffed with nonsense
"Up to now I’d thought that The Replacement would be this year’s drama turkey," writes Alison Graham. "But Paula, you deserve a special place on the table"
*** Spoilers ahead. Do not read on unless you have watched the third episode of Paula *** Oh my, that really was the worst ending to one of the most dreadful television dramas of recent years. Paula was a mire, a mess, a great big sponge pudding stuffed with nonsense and topped with idiocy. There was Paula herself for a start, played by Denise Gough. It’s completely commendable for a television drama to show a mature woman exercising her sexual autonomy but come on, boffing the rat-catcher within minutes of his arrival? And what about that hapless, badly-shaved copper? They’d barely had time to wipe their feet on Paula’s well-trodden WELCOME mat before they were in the throes of helpless passion. I mean, did that man even wash? He looked filthy. Her previous lover, the married PE teacher at the school where Paula taught chemistry, ended up dead, beaten to death by the rat catcher (Tom Hughes) who for some reason had two “wives” at home, one of whom he eventually shut in a cupboard. (He also kept getting visions of his dead sister). But, dearie me, that denouement. Paula drugged then buried alive in some kind of tin coffin the rat-catcher, leaving a feeding tube up his nose. He eventually found comfort cuddling the ghost of his dead sister. Then Paula announced to the grubby copper that she was pregnant. The end. Er, what? By this point Paula had long ago slipped the bonds of coherent drama and had become a series of random exchanges and incidents, like the dog in a bag that had been left on her kitchen floor by someone or other. Everyone operated in such isolation that when she shot up a hotel loo NO ONE came to check on the noise. Or when the rat catcher smashed into parked cars at night on a residential street, overturning his van and NO ONE came out to check on the noise. Up to now I’d thought that The Replacement would be this year’s drama turkey. But Paula, you deserve a special place on the table.
'Tak' for the memories, as we bid goodbye to The Bridge
As the Scandi noir crime drama comes to an end, TV editor Alison Graham reflects on the bittersweet final moments
Parting is such sweet sorrow, says Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. You’re right, Juliet love, but I’m not sure “sweet sorrow” covers that depth of feeling when one of your favourite television shows ends forever. I mean, for instance, did Juliet have a mini meltdown at the end of Mad Men? Did she cling to people at bus stops bewailing the fact she’d never see Don Draper again, after that last shot of him smiling and cross-legged in an ashram, when he’d dreamt up the I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing Coca-Cola campaign? There was nothing sweetly sorrowful about that, I can tell you – I had a difficult few months. I’m fine now, though I still cling to people at bus stops. The Bridge series 4 episode 7 recap: A killer is unmasked and an emotional reunion paves the way for the final ever episode The Bridge creator takes us on a tour of Malmo and Stockholm Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter View oEmbed on the source website Endings, eh? They can be fraught, they can be awful, they can be unhappy, they can be completely irritating or they can be perfect, shiny things, buffed and faceted and beautiful forever. I feel like that about The Bridge, the Swedish/Danish crime drama that ends for good on Friday 29th June on BBC2. No writer has a duty to come up with a happy ending for a beloved character, in this case emotionally shuttered detective Saga Noren (Sofia Helin). But she/he has a duty to leave us satisfied, nodding our heads, even through our tears, as we murmur, “Ah, yes, that’s a good one. Just right.” Unlike the finale to The Bridge’s Danish cousin, The Killing, which was simply weird and bad. The Bridge’s ending is note-perfect because it does what the best endings should always do – leave us thinking that, although a character has left our screens, in this case Saga, she has gone on to live a life beyond the story. She exists somewhere Out There, even though we can’t see her or know what has happened to her. There’s always been something bleakly magical about Saga, who connected with so many viewers, though she herself found relationships almost impossible until, it seemed, she’d finally fallen for her troubled and despairing colleague Henrik. She didn’t do small talk, and when she tried it was misjudged and excruciating. (Remember when she attempted to engage female colleagues in chit-chat about their periods?) Like a missile, Saga couldn’t deviate; she was propelled to hit a target while missing emotional nuances, verbal and visual clues, and she had a tin ear when it came to empathy and the consequences of her ruthless honesty. There was a great scene in the final series where she made an explosive remark about a suspect’s baby. Helin was magnificent as Saga and remains so to the final moments of the episode, when she says goodbye to us, and we say goodbye to her. I was lucky enough to interview Helin at a Nordic television festival in London a few years ago and it was like being on stage with Led Zeppelin. Or so I assume. I’ve never been on stage with Led Zeppelin. But as we walked in, the audience was on its feet, yelling, clapping, cheering and parting for Helin, who I think was even more taken a back than I was. Without wishing to sound too Danielle Steel, there was a real love for Saga/Helin. Not a kind of fluffy, protective love, but a demonstrable devotion to someone who, despite her emotional solecisms, always unerringly did what she thought was right. So yes, I am very sad to see her go, but in this case the sorrow is indeed sweet. Goodbye, Saga, and tak for the memories. This article was originally published on 29 June 2018 Sign for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter here
"The women characters talked about men all the time": Is the BBC's #HearHer campaign really helping women in TV?
"Hear Her is a kind of gluten-free television loaf, stodgy and dull'," TV critic Alison Graham argues
BBC seasons give me indigestion. There are only so many of these virtue-signalling “now listen while we explain something for your own good” parades I can stand. We’re currently in the midst of two: hear her, promoting programmes featuring women; and a pile of documentaries and live reports marking 70 years of the NHS. Or maybe that should be “nhs”, as the bbc seems to have a problem with upper case letters. It should be Hear Her. Or HEAR HER. I take particular issue with Hear Her, whose virulent logo (big red lips on an orange background) keeps popping up, like a tiresome relative on a camping trip, at the oddest, seemingly random moments. Or maybe they aren’t random at all. Maybe Our Girl, BBC1’s Bunty Goes to War comic strip, is seen as some kind of feminist-forward shout-out to fighting women everywhere, rather than a mawkish soap punctuated by violence, and thus deserves the Hear Her sticker on its trailers. (It doesn’t.) Where is BBC crime drama Hidden filmed? Piers Morgan on Trump, feminism, quitting morning TV – and his bid to become an “international treasure” View oEmbed on the source website Though it’s really stretching a point to shove the recent, excellent two-part documentary Conviction: Murder in Suburbia into the same lady-bracket just because the people re-examining a (man’s) murder conviction were women. Isn’t that just the kind of thing we aren’t supposed to notice any more, it’s people just getting on with valuable work, rather than Women Getting On With Valuable Work? There’s something unprepossessingly worthy about BBC seasons but Hear Her must be the most wretchedly narcissistic, a kind of gluten- free “it’s good for you so shut up and listen” television loaf that ends up feeling stodgy and dull. Or in the case of Hear Her, tokenistic. Live at the Apollo: All Girls? Why? And Snatches, BBC4’s season of monologues (and is there a more deadly phrase in the English language than “season of monologues”?) written by and for women. The first was by Abi Morgan, who wrote The Split, which, as we have discussed on this page, was a female-centric drama where the women characters cried in slow motion and talked about men. All the time. That’s emancipation for you. I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating, “seasons” are fatuous because, whoever the broadcaster, they always sound as if some new and fine wisdom is being handed down from a big mountain. But really it just feels like someone’s throwing boiled sweets in the hope that you might catch one, like a particularly educational pantomime dame. Of course, the irony of a season such as Hear Her, which is supposed to give a platform to women's voices through, mainly, documentaries, is that it's always let down by another member of the family, in this case dramas. In the miserable Welsh crime thriller Hidden (Saturday BBC4, Wednesday BBC1 in Wales) a young woman is abducted by a serial killer of women and imprisoned in a dismal cottage on a grotty smallholding in the middle of a wood. Yes, of course it sounds familiar, substitute “dungeon” for “dismal cottage” and you describe a particular drama template that I thought maybe, just maybe, had vanished for good. But no, here we go again. The young woman is without any dominion or control, she’s physically overwhelmed by her captor in a very distressing scene, and tied to a bed where she’s left to scream and scream for help into the unforgiving darkness. So no one can “Hear Her”, can they? Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
"Tokenism is no use to anyone" – more women on panel shows won't change anything
Radio Times' TV editor Alison Graham argues that women trying to "be funny on male comedian terms" is a waste of time
After watching the dramatised force-feeding of suffragettes in Lucy Worsley’s recent BBC1 documentary, I read a snippet about how Channel 4’s 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown is to do an all-woman show to mark 100 years since some women were given the vote. Of course, it’s very well intentioned, but surely there’s no sensible woman on Earth who didn’t think, upon hearing the news, “Ah yes, clearly that’s what women fought for, sometimes died for, and were pinned to chairs with rubber feeding tubes shoved up their noses for. So there could be an all-woman panel show in 2018.” Meet the cast of Channel 4's comedy High and Dry RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website I’m sorry if this sounds snippy, but come on, why would any woman, comedian or public figure, even bother to appear on a panel show? Don’t play the game, women! Do your own thing! Don’t feel you must strain to be funny on male comedian terms, why put yourself through it? I’ve stopped watching (and listening to) panel shows. I even gave up on Have I Got News for You, for so many years a comedy beacon in my viewing week. But, nah, not any more. This wasn’t just because of the shoehorning of women into the line-up, as I have no particular objection to all-male panels as long as they are funny. Maybe it’s just the snippiness, the endless slyness, the self-satisfaction, the general corrosive powers of sarcasm (yes, I’m one to talk, I know). Maybe it’s an age thing, but I can’t be doing with any of it. I ’ve turned my back on HIGNFY parent show on Radio 4, The News Quiz, for the same reasons, much as I like Miles Jupp (I love his sitcom In and Out of the Kitchen). Maybe when you’re no longer young and angry, you’re just older and more weary, keeping up with such sourness is a waste of energy. So why any woman would jump at the chance of throwing her views down the echoing well of the male world outlook will remain a mystery to me. The 8 Out of Ten Cats Does Countdown special is just that, a special – presumably it will go back to its usual panel make-up in the new series. A bit of tokenism. This is all fine and dandy as far as it goes, but in the long run it will make no difference. Panel shows will still largely feature men shouting at each other in acid-laced battles for supremacy as women try to get a word in here and there, and the audience feels duty-bound to laugh, even when the women aren’t funny. But there are other more important battles to fight. All-women anythings – panel shows, documentaries, dramas – can only go so far and are pointless if they aren’t any good. Just look at The Split, which had a mainly female cast, was written by a woman and had a strong female production team. What emerged was a cloying narrative punctuated by soppy songs where supposedly clever middle-class women with excellent jobs talked about men. If this is what comes of all-female productions, then this woman says: forget it. Men, go ahead, you might as well make endless dramas about tortured women being kept in disused freezers by leering yet highly intelligent male psychopaths. Tokenism is no use to anyone, particularly to women. Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
"There's snobbery at work here": Bafta TV keeps snubbing popular dramas like Broadchurch and Doctor Foster
"Broadchurch was the most watched drama of 2017. Surely that’s worth at least a chocolate replica Bafta and a can of pop?" asks Radio Times TV editor Alison Graham
It’s a common cry every April, when the Bafta TV nominations are announced. Not just in the Radio Times office, but also in front rooms and on social media. That joyless, outraged chorus of “but what about… [and then you must insert the name of your favourite, cruelly ignored show here]?” There might also be a gentle accompanying symphony as the murmurs of “not The Crown AGAIN” waft through the atmosphere. “It’s not even on proper telly!” Unlike the Bafta TV awards themselves, of course, which are on BBC1 on Sunday. Follow all the Bafta TV Awards action as it happens – on stage and behind-the-scenes – with RadioTimes.com's LIVE BLOG View oEmbed on the source website When are the British Academy Television Awards on TV? Who’s hosting, and who’s nominated Bafta TV Awards 2018: Kate Adie “very honoured” to receive Bafta Fellowship RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox Yes, The Crown is splendid, and it should be nominated. But last year brought us two towering dramas on what I will describe through gritted teeth as “mainstream TV” that stamped on all before them, securing huge audiences and critical acclaim. Usually “critical acclaim” means “it was really good, no one watched” but Broadchurch and Doctor Foster did the double. Massive. And, come on, Broadchurch was the most watched drama of 2017. Surely that’s worth at least a chocolate replica Bafta and a can of pop? Yet look at the Bafta shortlists and what do you see? Surely there are Best Drama nominations for both Chris Chibnall and Mike Bartlett’s dramas? Best actress nods for Olivia Colman and Suranne Jones? Maybe Best Actor handshakes for David Tennant and Bertie Carvel? Think again, suckers! View oEmbed on the source website Nothing, apart from a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Julie Hesmondhalgh, who was so achingly memorable as rape victim Trish. I hope she wins, she deserves to. Now, I know ratings aren’t everything and aren’t necessarily an indicator of quality. But big audiences for major event-dramas surely can’t be ignored. And Broadchurch, the last ever series, was a major event, even if the ending was a bit “what the heck?” Similarly, Doctor Foster, for its many faults (its final episode was a horrible mess), was hugely talked about. That final episode secured nearly ten million viewers. The show was the third most requested programme on iPlayer last year (after Taboo, also ignored). There’s a snobbery at work here, a noseholding when it comes to good, old-fashioned talking-point TV. Really big, hugely watched dramas like these must have something, surely, that juries can see sets them apart from the ordinary, that makes them fit for industry award shortlists in the Best Drama Series or Miniseries categories? Instead, we get The End of the F**king World (Channel 4), watched by no one but it became a social media talking point, the dreary Howards End, and modish, contemporary, fact-based dramas that get a lot of newspaper attention – The Moorside, Three Girls, The State. Again, these were excellent, and The Moorside and Three Girls were well watched and enormously appreciated. But there should be room for the big guns too. Where, for instance, is Britain’s most beloved drama, Call the Midwife, on the lists? Where is Poldark? In the comedy categories, what about The Detectorists which finished for good on BBC4 with a third series? Just a supporting acting nod for Toby Jones, but nothing else. It’s routinely suggested that categories should be expanded from four to six, but that doesn’t work for me, the big shows would just be padding for the trendy stuff so beloved of juries. A nomination must be meaningful. But maybe in these days of fractured viewing, of bingeing, of catch-up, of streaming, of scattered audiences who for some shows aren’t on the same episode at the same time, awards just don’t mean anything any more. The Bafta TV coverage starts at 8pm on Sunday 13th May on BBC1 Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
"For crying out loud, could everyone stop blubbing on TV?" Alison Graham on Britain's Best Home Cook
Radio Times TV editor Alison Graham sheds tears of fury at the BBC's latest cookery challenge: "Dry your eyes, for goodness sake, it’s only food"
I texted a hurried SOS to a friend during the last stages of the recent series of MasterChef. “John Torode has cried twice in this episode. What’s going on?” I convinced myself it was a sign that the world had stopped, tilted and was heading for the eternal flames of destruction. “When John Torode cries on MasterChef” should surely be an official indicator of forthcoming disaster. You know, like that story about us having to prepare for the final conflagration if Radio 4 goes off the air. Who is Britain's Best Home Cook judge Chris Bavin? RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website Sometimes the DAB radio in the bedroom is a bit tardy in delivering the Today programme of a morning, and I’m already whitewashing the windows and wrapping myself in tin foil by the time it tunes itself properly and Giles Fraser is delivering a sanctimony bomb in Thought for the Day. (Thought for the Day, it always makes me feel so bad, as if I’m lounging in bed, biting the heads off mice, when I should be knitting blankets for someone in need). But I suppose it was inevitable that the habitually dry-eyed Torode should weep, because cookery shows are awash with tears. In Britain’s Best Home Cook (Thursday BBC1) people cry for no particular reason that I can make out. It’s not a ruthlessly highly pressured environment, like the MasterChef kitchen is always made out to be by Torode and Gregg Wallace with their Greek chorus of variations of, “If it’s not cooked for long enough, it won’t taste nice”. Britain’s Best Home Cook presenter Claudia Winkleman is very huggy and kind, and the judges, led by the beatified Mary Berry, hardly constitute a firing squad as they almost give themselves hernias trying not to say a bad word about anybody. And there are some very uninspiring dishes, despite the contestants having to “put all of their personality and talent into the dish.” Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter I think what’s really going on here is that contestants are so immersed in the narrative of these sorts of shows they just fit in and do what’s expected – complain about the pressure, talk about how “passionate” they are, spread a bit of sentimentality talking about their families (they are encouraged to personalise their work stations with family photos and other bits and bobs), and cry a bit. In the excruciatingly inconsequential Top of the Shop (Tuesday BBC2), where a grinning Tom Kerridge oversees kitchen table food producers as they try to sell their goods in a North Yorkshire farm shop, there are many mentions of the two most deadly words in the English language “artisan” and “heritage”. Which is bad enough. But in the first episode people cried about their pickles, which was a first. Now, there are many things in this world that are worthy of our tears – the gassing of toddlers in Syria to name just one. But pickles? Dry your eyes, for goodness sake, it’s only food. Just give me a competition where nobody blubs. Like University Challenge, and the brilliant Only Connect, whose final was on Monday on BBC2. I love Only Connect, I still see it as a little secret between you, me and a hamster called Alan, even though it does very good business on BBC2. It’s fun, no one takes it seriously, and everyone is lovely. Contestants know mad things and the winners are those who know even more madder things than their opponents. There’s something very charming and British about it, not least that everyone remains dry-eyed throughout. Britain's Best Home Cook is on Thursdays at 8pm on BBC1
We need to talk about Darren Criss’s killer performance in The Assassination of Gianni Versace
Criss is astounding as the murderous Andrew Cunanan, writes TV editor Alison Graham
There’s a bravura moment in The Assassination of Gianni Versace – American Crime Story when murderer Andrew Cunanan, resplendent in a red PVC jumpsuit, dances wildly on his own in front of a group of bemused partygoers. It’s not quite up there with Cunanan dancing in only a tiny pair of orange pants to Philip Bailey and Phil Collins’s Easy Lover as one of his pick-ups, a closeted gay elderly gentlemen, writhes in terror, his face a mask of gaffer tape. But it’s close. The best true crime shows on Netflix Who is Andrew Cunanan? Why did he kill Gianni Versace? View oEmbed on the source website If you haven’t seen The Assassination of Gianni Versace yet, then please, run directly to iPlayer with your arms outstretched and feast on any episodes that remain there. It’s brilliantly written by British screenwriter Tom Rob Smith (who also wrote one of my all-time favourites, BBC2’s London Spy, in 2015) and has an astounding central performance from Darren Criss as Cunanan. I’d never heard of Criss (he was in Glee, which passed me by) but as Cunanan, he delivers the performance of a lifetime. (Cunanan murdered fashion designer Gianni Versace in July 1997, the culmination of a serial killing spree that left five men dead. Cunanan later killed himself as police closed in.) What Rob Smith and Criss have done is make a whole person, someone who exists outside of those few bare details. Versace hardly appears in the series, which belongs almost entirely to Cunanan/Criss, as we witness a damaged life spin slowly, then quickly, then completely, out of control. Cunanan seems at first the quietest of whirlwinds, a handsome boy who drips with charm and affability. But – and this is what Criss and Rob Smith are so good at conveying – there’s something a bit off, something not quite right you can’t put your finger on. Like a photo that’s a little out of focus. And then the killing starts. Brutal, swift, out of nowhere. Yet you’ve been expecting it all along, and not just because this is an infamous story. It’s because Criss’s Cunanan trembles with murderous fury, even when he smiles. Particularly when he smiles. View oEmbed on the source website Rob Smith, who is so adept at digging into the dark mud of broken lives, cleverly throws out any accepted version of narrative to play around with the timeline, and with Cunanan’s descent. So it’s only in this week’s eighth, penultimate, episode that we learn of his twisted childhood as the “special” son of a narcissistic, fraudulent, abusive liar of a father and a fragile, emotionally vulnerable mother. Criss’s Cunanan is terrifying. Good-looking, personable, but you don’t want him around. There was a point in one episode, when he rang the doorbell of the man who would become his next victim, when I shouted, “Don’t answer the door, don’t let him in!” Despite all of those very generous outward charms, you know straightaway why people around him find him unsettling to be with and uncomfortable to know. He’s obsessive and forces his way into “friendships” with unwilling men who just wish he’d go away. Or he preys on older gay men who’ve never been able to come out. Of course, none of this is easy to watch, which is just as it should be. Cunanan’s story was inescapably one of obsession and violence. But as a cautionary tale about someone who wants above all else to be famous, it’s very, horribly, modern. The Assassination of Gianni Versace is on Wednesday nights at 9pm on BBC2