Jonathan Ross reveals his predictions for the 2026 Oscars
Who does the presenter of ITV's coverage think will go home victorious on Sunday night?
Oscars Live airs Sunday 15 March at 10:15pm on ITV1 and ITVX. Add it to your watchlist Jonathan, you’re hosting ITV’s coverage of the Oscars again this year. What do you tip to win best picture? Well, I think it's going to be a toss-up for best picture between Sinners, which I think will probably have more traction in the States than it had here, and One Battle After Another. I suspect it will go to One Battle After Another. Do you have a favourite? I liked them both about the same, but if pushed, I think I slightly preferred Sinners. It felt like they were taking that genre movie and doing something really interesting with it. I liked One Battle After Another, but think it's somewhat over-praised for what it is. It's really solid filmmaking and fun, but I don't think it's an important film… not that it should be. What about the other nominees? I had the same feeling about Marty Supreme as I did with One Battle After Another: I enjoyed it, but I wasn't crazy about it. Hamnet wasn't for me, but I can see why some people really like it. I love the way Frankenstein looked and felt, and I love all of Guillermo's stuff, as he's also a friend of mine – so I can't say anything there! But it wasn't my Frankenstein. But I did like lots of it. So what about best actor? Who do you see winning there? It might be Michael B Jordan for Sinners, I think, because it's a very showy performance. But also it might be Leo's year again. I think because we all have a slight ick about his personal life, we sometimes forget that he's an amazing actor.
Jonathan Ross reveals his predictions for the 2026 Oscars including best actor pick because of "very showy performance"
The presenter offers his Oscar tips and reveals the perils of second screening.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. What’s the view from your sofa? My wife [screenwriter and producer Jane Goldman] and I mainly watch TV in bed. I know that’s terrible sleep hygiene. The view from my bed is I’m lying here, my wife’s on my left and we have a TV that rises from the foot of the bed – very grandiose. My eyeline to the TV is obstructed by the two dogs lying in front of it, and as it gets towards the end of the evening, the two cats join us to bully me into giving them their nighttime feed. If we’re watching anything with subtitles, it can be a nightmare, because there’ll always be an animal walking in front of the words. What have you been enjoying watching from your bed? The Pitt, which is sort of the unofficial sequel to ER. I’m already halfway through the second season, and it’s amazing. Noah Wyle is fabulous in it. I always watch Gogglebox; Steal with Sophie Turner on Prime was quite fun; and because Jane and I like to watch horror, we enjoyed Evil, which is like The X-Files, but set in the world of the Catholic Church and demonic possession. Who controls the remote? The person in charge is Jane, and so it should be, because I would watch any old s**t. I do “second screen” quite a bit. She gets annoyed with me and goes, “Are you actually watching this?” I go, “Yeah, no, no, I am. I’m sorry. I was checking a message from the kids.” Then she sees I’m actually watching a video of a cat falling over, which is hard to resist. You’re hosting Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing, Channel 4’s reality series, where chalk-and-cheese people are literally handcuffed together to see if they can bear each other for two weeks. What sort of person would you least like to be handcuffed to? Weirdly, I get on with most people. I like to think I’m fairly low maintenance. On the other hand, I think I would find being with anyone 24/7 a challenge – even my wonderful wife. One thing I hope I’ve learnt from hosting chat shows is that my opinion isn’t really what’s important. Someone will say something I disagree with, and sometimes I will try and draw them out on it more, or get to the heart of it, but even if I might think they’re wrong, I’m actually interested in finding out how they’ve arrived at that position. Several of the contestants’ position is that Britain is broken. Do you agree with that point of view? I think it’s easy to arrive at that view, even if I don’t believe it’s necessarily the correct one. It’s the way information is shared, the speed of exchange of information these days, and also how easy it is to find yourself, even if it wasn’t deliberate, in an echo chamber with others who think the same way. Then you see repeated back the same views, and you begin to think that that is the consensus rather than the reality. Everyone’s going to think that the roads are broken if you’re on the Facebook “potholes” group… You’re also hosting ITV’s coverage of the Oscars. Who do you tip to win? It’s going to be a toss-up for best picture between Sinners, which I think will probably have more traction in the States than it had here, and One Battle after Another, which I suspect it will go to. I slightly preferred Sinners because it felt like they were taking that genre-movie idea and doing something really interesting with it. One Battle after Another is solid film-making and really fun, but I don’t think it’s an important film – not that it should be. Best actor might be Michael B Jordan, because it’s a very showy performance, but also it might be Leonardo DiCaprio’s year. I think because we all have a slight ick about his personal life, we sometimes forget he’s an amazing actor. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing continues at 9pm on Mondays and Tuesdays on Channel 4. Oscars Live airs Sunday 15 March at 10:15pm on ITV1 and ITVX. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
'The Queen is terrified of what the outcome will be for their friendship'
Ruth Gemmell, Golda Rosheuvel and Adjoa Andoh on playing Bridgerton's formidable leading ladies
Add Bridgerton to your watchlist Ruth Gemmell plays Lady Violet Bridgerton In its own impeccable way, Bridgerton has always pushed TV boundaries. The surprise for series four is that it’s Ruth Gemmell’s character, matriarch Lady Violet, doing some of the pushing. “Mostly she does more of the same this year,” says Gemmell, “trying to force her children into marriage. She’s rather irritated with Benedict at the beginning because he’s not really playing ball. But she also spends a lot more time with Marcus Anderson (Daniel Francis).” “Spending a lot more time” is Gemmell’s euphemism for what becomes quite the steamy romance with Anderson. “I was a little bit scared when I read the scripts, if I’m honest. Just because I’m pushing 60 and the idea of having the same kind of storyline as the children was not massively appealing. But it was a laugh. Daniel’s lovely and it was a bit of a chance to do something different.” Violet’s relationship with Marcus is indeed something different. In fact, his character doesn’t actually feature in Julia Quinn’s novels and was invented entirely for the series. Quinn has stated she couldn’t imagine anyone good enough for Violet and never wrote about her remarrying. “I felt quite strongly that I wasn’t massively open to the idea [of Violet finding a new partner],” Gemmell says. “Only because we have steered away from the books quite a lot and I don’t want to do the books or their fans a disservice. But then when you have a book, it changes dramatically when you put it onto screen. So you have to go with it.” Which she gamely does. Violet and Marcus have, if not a torrid affair, then a simmering one, and it’s undoubtedly unusual for television to depict older people in such an intimate sexual relationship. “We’re not dead!” says Gemmell. “As a society, we get wrapped up in the first throes of love and that is represented with youth and all of that. But I think there’s a lot of mileage to come from somebody with experience, whether that’s heartbreak, grief or life in general. Our viewer demographic is around my age anyway. So, it’s nice to be representative.” This new storyline meant that, for the first time in four series, Gemmell worked with an intimacy coordinator. “The first time I realised that there was going to be a bit of a foray into this area was at a costume fitting and that freaked me out. But they were very respectful about what I was and wasn’t prepared to do. You have a conversation with the intimacy adviser, it’s a closed set and you have a crew that you know well, so you feel safe. Also, it was very restrained compared to some of the younger lot. Which was a bloody relief for everyone, probably.” Golda Rosheuvel plays Queen Charlotte and Adjoa Andoh plays Lady Danbury "There’s a little bit of an upset with our best mate, Lady Danbury,” is Golda Rosheuvel’s description of the trouble at the top in series four. (And note the appropriate use of the regal plural – Rosheuvel has been playing a Queen for six years now and speaks fluent majesty). “She comes into the season thinking that she has a lovely new toy in Whistledown (Nicola Coughlan), that they’re going to be best mates and she’s going to be able to control the gossip. And then she’s wrong-footed by Danbury asking to leave.” “Danbury’s hit that time in her life,” explains Adjoa Andoh, “where she wants to know all of who she is. We have to remember that Danbury was sent over from Sierra Leone to the UK to marry an old git. As we saw from the Queen Charlotte series, she had a loveless marriage, four children and then he dies. Phew, thank goodness. Now I’m independent.” In series three, her brother Marcus returned and the issue of her family and background re-emerges. “And at a certain point she realises there’s a piece of the jigsaw in her life that she doesn’t have available to her, and that is: ‘Who was I in Sierra Leone?’ I know from friends who have been fostered or adopted that there’s something about filling in a gap that – at a time in your life – becomes more necessary.” Danbury’s announcement that she is off to find herself forces a schism at the top. “The Queen is lonely,” says Rosheuvel. “She needs her best friend by her side. She’s terrified of what the outcome will be for their friendship.” Predictably, the Queen doesn’t take it well. “She says, ‘I’m the Queen, so you have to do what I say,’” say Andoh. “And Danbury goes, ‘Well, if I have to do what you say, I won’t to be your friend.’” Cue juvenile squabbling. “How they’re going to resolve that in a satisfactory way is their story arc throughout the season.” It’s a tale of significant friendships and how they mature – and sometimes falter – over time. Something both women are familiar with. “I have a great friend who was in America and she’s just moved here,” says Rosheuvel. “Years ago, when someone asked me out, she was the person I phoned and went, ‘What do I do?’ She was like, ‘You don’t have to marry her, just enjoy what you’ve got.’ It was great advice – because I’d been on my own for five years at that point. And 12, 13 years later, I’m married to that person.” Andoh’s closest friend is her younger brother. “He’s a musician and he lives in LA so he’s not around the corner, but we share a sense of humour being from the West Country – ‘All right poo face, you look like shit.’ ‘You don’t look much better’… that kind of thing. If I’m in LA, I go back to my brother and I’m in a grounded place immediately. He’s always been in bands – I was a punk; I got him into it. In fact, that’s all I ever wanted to do – be a bass player in a punk band.” Which both is and isn’t very Lady Danbury, all at the same time. Episodes 5—8 will be released on 26 February
It’s the turn of Benedict Bridgerton to find love this series, but will his encounter with a Lady in Silver lead to his happily ever after?
Add Bridgerton to your watchlist It is, surely, what every young actor dreams of. Not just a lead role in a beloved period drama, but an exit from a lake in a sodden shirt with a smitten belle looking on bashfully from behind a tree. Enter Luke Thompson, star of Bridgerton series four. This is your Mr Darcy moment. “I just felt really excited to dive into it,” says Thompson, with a wry half-smile at his own pun, clearly very pleased to be taking the lead in finding love this series having played Benedict Bridgerton since the start of the drama. “I kept saying, ‘You look like Mr Darcy’ to him,” chimes in Yerin Ha who plays Sophie Baek, the below-stairs Cinderella to Thompson’s Prince Charming (and hands him a towel when he emerges from his swim). “In truth, I was a little bit jealous – I wouldn’t have minded a dip myself. It was a beautiful September day when we filmed it.” “It was cold in the water, though,” says Thompson. “We probably did it five or six times. The tricky bits were when I thought I was about to lose consciousness and then they’d say reset, go again, and there wasn’t time for me to get out and get dry.” If Bridgerton’s homage to the BBC’s classic Pride and Prejudice is a little corny, it’s an element of the period drama that, Thompson says, the fans both love and require. “There are a lot of romance novel tropes in the show, whether it’s getting out of the water or it’s love at first sight at the masquerade ball.” And that is the central storyline in this season of the world’s favourite amped-up Regency fairy tale. Based on Julia Quinn’s novel An Offer from a Gentleman, Benedict Bridgerton is the bohemian second son who refuses to settle down despite protracted pleas to do so from matriarch Lady Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell, see overleaf). Until, that is, he is poleaxed by the sight of a mysterious Lady in Silver at Lady Violet’s masquerade ball – where everyone wears flimsy masks that completely conceal their identity. With the reluctant help of his sister Eloise (Claudia Jessie), Benedict sets out to uncover the identity of the mysterious stranger. What he doesn’t realise is that the object of his affections is not a part of the Ton or the Marriage Mart at all. In fact, she’s a resourceful maid called Sophie Baek, who soon also crosses his path. And so, Benedict has to wrestle with his affection for his fantasy Lady in Silver alongside this intriguing housemaid, unaware that they are one and the same person. What all this unrequited love really required, first and foremost, was chemistry between Thompson and newly cast Ha. They first met on that hotbed of romance, a Zoom call. “You might think it’s tricky to have chemistry on Zoom,” says Thompson, “but it turns out you can! I found doing the readthrough that you can just feel… something. It felt quite enigmatic, our connection, like there was quite a lot to unpack. And that’s what you want.” Next stop on the path to true on-screen love was dinner at writer Jess Brownell’s house. “We had a bit of wine, some tacos…” laughs Ha. “It was only two weeks before prep began so we just chatted.” “And then we just jumped right in!” laughs Thompson, delighted at the chance to drop another Darcy swimming pun. Ha, a plain-talking Aussie, looks suitably unamused. But Thompson, who is Rada-trained and likes to read Dostoevsky, wins her round: “As soon as I had the audition with Yerin – and this will look terrible because it sounds glib – I knew it was going to work.” Work it does, with Benedict starting out very much as a latter-day Prince Harry with Sophie, like Meghan, his star-crossed lover from the wrong side of the tracks. I put it to Thompson and Ha that they are playing a version of the Sussexes and they both burst out laughing. “Personally that’s not something that I’ve thought about,” says Thompson. “People will see whatever they want to see,” flat bats Ha. “Ultimately, this is just a story about seeing who you are on the inside. What drew me to Sophie was her moral compass: she doesn’t change who she is for anybody else. It’s a real push-and-pull game, because he’s of a noble class and Sophie’s of a lower class. “What’s beautiful about their relationship is that they see each other for who they are, and they start to question society’s standards. Why should that matter?” Ha prefers the Cinderella analogy. There’s a missing shoe and Sophie even has two wicked stepsisters, Rosamund and Posy (Michelle Mao and Isabella Wei), who with their mother, Araminta Gun (Katie Leung), make Sophie’s life a misery. Both characters, however, are outsiders, with Benedict experimenting with his sexuality in the demimonde while Sophie navigates her way through the prejudices of the Ton. And this Thompson and Ha understand perfectly. Ha’s grandparents were actors in South Korea and, though she was born in Sydney, she studied in Korea for three years before going to Nida [The National Institute of Dramatic Art] back in Australia. Thompson was born in England but grew up in France, then moved back over when he was 20. “And then I had the even stranger experience of being like, ‘Well, this is where I was born, but I don’t have any of the cultural references.’ I think there are parallels between us.” The parallels are that both of them are used to concealing identities and wearing masks. “You’re both at home and not at home in a character,” says Thompson. “You’re yourself and not yourself.” Perfect, then, for a pairing that begins in disguise at a masquerade ball.
Bridgerton legends explain "juvenile" season 4 feud for Queen Charlotte and Lady Danbury
There's trouble afoot for the two Bridgerton friends.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. “There’s a little bit of an upset with our best mate, Lady Danbury,” is Golda Rosheuvel’s description of the trouble at the top in Bridgerton series four. (And note the appropriate use of the regal plural – Rosheuvel has been playing a Queen for six years now and speaks fluent majesty). “She comes into the season thinking that she has a lovely new toy in Whistledown (Nicola Coughlan), that they’re going to be best mates and she’s going to be able to control the gossip. And then she’s wrong-footed by Danbury asking to leave.” “Danbury’s hit that time in her life,” explains Adjoa Andoh, “where she wants to know all of who she is. We have to remember that Danbury was sent over from Sierra Leone to the UK to marry an old git. As we saw from the Queen Charlotte series, she had a loveless marriage, four children and then he dies. Phew, thank goodness. Now I’m independent.” In series three, her brother Marcus returned and the issue of her family and background re-emerges. “And at a certain point she realises there’s a piece of the jigsaw in her life that she doesn’t have available to her, and that is: ‘Who was I in Sierra Leone?’ I know from friends who have been fostered or adopted that there’s something about filling in a gap that – at a time in your life – becomes more necessary.” Danbury’s announcement that she is off to find herself forces a schism at the top. “The Queen is lonely,” says Rosheuvel. “She needs her best friend by her side. She’s terrified of what the outcome will be for their friendship.” Predictably, the Queen doesn’t take it well. “She says, ‘I’m the Queen, so you have to do what I say,’” say Andoh. “And Danbury goes, ‘Well, if I have to do what you say, I won’t be your friend.’” Cue juvenile squabbling. “How they’re going to resolve that in a satisfactory way is their story arc throughout the season.” It’s a tale of significant friendships and how they mature – and sometimes falter – over time. Something both women are familiar with. “I have a great friend who was in America and she’s just moved here,” says Rosheuvel. “Years ago, when someone asked me out, she was the person I phoned and went, ‘What do I do?’ She was like, ‘You don’t have to marry her, just enjoy what you’ve got.’ It was great advice – because I’d been on my own for five years at that point. And 12, 13 years later, I’m married to that person.” View Green Video on the source website Andoh’s closest friend is her younger brother. “He’s a musician and he lives in LA so he’s not around the corner, but we share a sense of humour being from the West Country – ‘All right poo face, you look like s**t.’ ‘You don’t look much better’… that kind of thing. “If I’m in LA, I go back to my brother and I’m in a grounded place immediately. He’s always been in bands – I was a punk; I got him into it. In fact, that’s all I ever wanted to do – be a bass player in a punk band.” Which both is and isn’t very Lady Danbury, all at the same time. Read more: Bridgerton season 4's leading couple talk about their Cinderella story and steamy river scene: "It was cold in the water, though" Bridgerton season 4 star reveals Lady Violet's sexy new romance as a mature woman: "We're not dead!" The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Bridgerton season 4 part 1 premieres on January 29th and Part 2 on February 26th, both on Netflix. Seasons 1-3 are available to watch on Netflix now. You can buy the <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bridgerton-Collection-Inspiration-Netflix-Original/dp/0349430187?tag=radtim0b-21&ascsubtag=radiotimes-2381335" target="_blank" rel="sponsored" data-geniuslink="https://buy.geni.us/Proxy.ashx?TSID=114542&GR_URL=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.co.uk%2FBridgerton-Collection-Inspiration-Netflix-Original%2Fdp%2F0349430187%3Ftag%3Dradtim0b-21%26ascsubtag%3Dradiotimes-1612614&dtb=1">Bridgerton book series on Amazon. Add Bridgerton to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Bridgerton season 4's leading couple talk about their Cinderella story and steamy river scene: "It was cold in the water, though"
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It is, surely, what every young actor dreams of. Not just a lead role in a beloved period drama, but an exit from a lake in a sodden shirt with a smitten belle looking on bashfully from behind a tree. Enter Luke Thompson, star of Bridgerton series four. This is your Mr Darcy moment. “I just felt really excited to dive into it,” says Thompson, with a wry half-smile at his own pun, clearly very pleased to be taking the lead in finding love this series having played Benedict Bridgerton since the start of the drama. “I kept saying, ‘You look like Mr Darcy’ to him,” chimes in Yerin Ha who plays Sophie Baek, the below-stairs Cinderella to Thompson’s Prince Charming (and hands him a towel when he emerges from his swim). “In truth, I was a little bit jealous – I wouldn’t have minded a dip myself. It was a beautiful September day when we filmed it.” “It was cold in the water, though,” says Thompson. “We probably did it five or six times. The tricky bits were when I thought I was about to lose consciousness and then they’d say reset, go again, and there wasn’t time for me to get out and get dry.” If Bridgerton’s homage to the BBC’s classic Pride and Prejudice is a little corny, it’s an element of the period drama that, Thompson says, the fans both love and require. “There are a lot of romance novel tropes in the show, whether it’s getting out of the water or it’s love at first sight at the masquerade ball.” View Green Video on the source website And that is the central storyline in this season of the world’s favourite amped-up Regency fairy tale. Based on Julia Quinn’s novel An Offer from a Gentleman, Benedict Bridgerton is the bohemian second son who refuses to settle down despite protracted pleas to do so from matriarch Lady Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell, see overleaf). Until, that is, he is poleaxed by the sight of a mysterious Lady in Silver at Lady Violet’s masquerade ball – where everyone wears flimsy masks that completely conceal their identity. With the reluctant help of his sister Eloise (Claudia Jessie), Benedict sets out to uncover the identity of the mysterious stranger. What he doesn’t realise is that the object of his affections is not a part of the Ton or the Marriage Mart at all. In fact, she’s a resourceful maid called Sophie Baek, who soon also crosses his path. And so, Benedict has to wrestle with his affection for his fantasy Lady in Silver alongside this intriguing housemaid, unaware that they are one and the same person. What all this unrequited love really required, first and foremost, was chemistry between Thompson and newly cast Ha. They first met on that hotbed of romance, a Zoom call. “You might think it’s tricky to have chemistry on Zoom,” says Thompson, “but it turns out you can! I found doing the readthrough that you can just feel… something. It felt quite enigmatic, our connection, like there was quite a lot to unpack. And that’s what you want.” Next stop on the path to true on-screen love was dinner at writer Jess Brownell’s house. “We had a bit of wine, some tacos…” laughs Ha. “It was only two weeks before prep began so we just chatted.” “And then we just jumped right in!” laughs Thompson, delighted at the chance to drop another Darcy swimming pun. Ha, a plain-talking Aussie, looks suitably unamused. But Thompson, who is Rada-trained and likes to read Dostoevsky, wins her round: “As soon as I had the audition with Yerin – and this will look terrible because it sounds glib – I knew it was going to work.” Work it does, with Benedict starting out very much as a latter-day Prince Harry with Sophie, like Meghan, his star-crossed lover from the wrong side of the tracks. I put it to Thompson and Ha that they are playing a version of the Sussexes and they both burst out laughing. “Personally that’s not something that I’ve thought about,” says Thompson. “People will see whatever they want to see,” flat bats Ha. “Ultimately, this is just a story about seeing who you are on the inside. What drew me to Sophie was her moral compass: she doesn’t change who she is for anybody else. It’s a real push-and-pull game, because he’s of a noble class and Sophie’s of a lower class. “What’s beautiful about their relationship is that they see each other for who they are, and they start to question society’s standards. Why should that matter?” Ha prefers the Cinderella analogy. There’s a missing shoe and Sophie even has two wicked stepsisters, Rosamund and Posy (Michelle Mao and Isabella Wei), who with their mother, Araminta Gun (Katie Leung), make Sophie’s life a misery. Both characters, however, are outsiders, with Benedict experimenting with his sexuality in the demimonde while Sophie navigates her way through the prejudices of the Ton. And this Thompson and Ha understand perfectly. Ha’s grandparents were actors in South Korea and, though she was born in Sydney, she studied in Korea for three years before going to Nida [The National Institute of Dramatic Art] back in Australia. Thompson was born in England but grew up in France, then moved back over when he was 20. “And then I had the even stranger experience of being like, ‘Well, this is where I was born, but I don’t have any of the cultural references.’ I think there are parallels between us.” The parallels are that both of them are used to concealing identities and wearing masks. “You’re both at home and not at home in a character,” says Thompson. “You’re yourself and not yourself.” Perfect, then, for a pairing that begins in disguise at a masquerade ball. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Bridgerton seasons 1-3 are available to watch on Netflix now. Season 4 will arrive on Thursday 29th January 2026. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media. You can buy the <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bridgerton-Collection-Inspiration-Netflix-Original/dp/0349430187?tag=radtim0b-21&ascsubtag=radiotimes-1612614" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored" data-geniuslink="https://buy.geni.us/Proxy.ashx?TSID=114542&GR_URL=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.co.uk%2FBridgerton-Collection-Inspiration-Netflix-Original%2Fdp%2F0349430187%3Ftag%3Dradtim0b-21%26ascsubtag%3Dradiotimes-1612614&dtb=1">Bridgerton book series on Amazon. Add Bridgerton to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Bridgerton season 4 star reveals Lady Violet's sexy new romance as a mature woman: "We're not dead!"
Ruth Gemmell spoke with this week's issue of Radio Times magazine.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. In its own impeccable way, Bridgerton has always pushed TV boundaries. The surprise for series four is that it’s Ruth Gemmell’s character, matriarch Lady Violet, doing some of the pushing. “Mostly she does more of the same this year,” says Gemmell, “trying to force her children into marriage. She’s rather irritated with Benedict at the beginning because he’s not really playing ball. But she also spends a lot more time with Marcus Anderson (Daniel Francis).” “Spending a lot more time” is Gemmell’s euphemism for what becomes quite the steamy romance with Anderson. “I was a little bit scared when I read the scripts, if I’m honest. Just because I’m pushing 60 and the idea of having the same kind of storyline as the children was not massively appealing. But it was a laugh. Daniel’s lovely and it was a bit of a chance to do something different.” Violet’s relationship with Marcus is indeed something different. In fact, his character doesn’t actually feature in Julia Quinn’s novels and was invented entirely for the series. Quinn has stated she couldn’t imagine anyone good enough for Violet and never wrote about her remarrying. “I felt quite strongly that I wasn’t massively open to the idea [of Violet finding a new partner],” Gemmell says. “Only because we have steered away from the books quite a lot and I don’t want to do the books or their fans a disservice. But then when you have a book, it changes dramatically when you put it onto screen. So you have to go with it.” Which she gamely does. Violet and Marcus have, if not a torrid affair, then a simmering one, and it’s undoubtedly unusual for television to depict older people in such an intimate sexual relationship. “We’re not dead!” says Gemmell. “As a society, we get wrapped up in the first throes of love and that is represented with youth and all of that. But I think there’s a lot of mileage to come from somebody with experience, whether that’s heartbreak, grief or life in general. Our viewer demographic is around my age anyway. So, it’s nice to be representative.” This new storyline meant that, for the first time in four series, Gemmell worked with an intimacy coordinator. “The first time I realised that there was going to be a bit of a foray into this area was at a costume fitting and that freaked me out. But they were very respectful about what I was and wasn’t prepared to do. You have a conversation with the intimacy adviser, it’s a closed set and you have a crew that you know well, so you feel safe. Also, it was very restrained compared to some of the younger lot. Which was a bloody relief for everyone, probably.” The latest issue of Radio Times will be released on Tuesday 20 January – subscribe here. Bridgerton seasons 1-3 are available to watch on Netflix now. Season 4 will arrive on Thursday 29th January 2026. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. You can buy the <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bridgerton-Collection-Inspiration-Netflix-Original/dp/0349430187?tag=radtim0b-21&ascsubtag=radiotimes-1612614" target="_blank" rel="noopener sponsored" data-geniuslink="https://buy.geni.us/Proxy.ashx?TSID=114542&GR_URL=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.co.uk%2FBridgerton-Collection-Inspiration-Netflix-Original%2Fdp%2F0349430187%3Ftag%3Dradtim0b-21%26ascsubtag%3Dradiotimes-1612614&dtb=1">Bridgerton book series on Amazon. Add Bridgerton to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
In Frauds, Jodie Whittaker’s character is adept at putting on masks – which is a skill she’s been perfecting all her life
Add Frauds to your watchlist It’s an image that once seeded is hard to suppress: “Suranne is a swan,” says Jodie Whittaker, “and I’m a feral chicken.” That’s one way of describing two of Britain’s best actors, an award-winning duo yoked together as the odd couple in ITV’s current drama Frauds about a pair of hucksters on their last heist. Whittaker’s Sam is the calm and Jones’s Bert is the chaos, but in real life, says Whittaker, it’s the other way round. “Suranne is a swan because although there might be little legs pedalling underneath, she is gliding along on top. Then there’s me saying, ‘Argh, I’ve lost my scripts. I think I’ve left part of my costume in my trailer.’ I’m like the 14-year-old boy who forgot their backpack and gets sent home from school. I’m loud, noisy and unfocused whereas Suranne is just such an amazing person to be around because it feels like she’s got her s**t together.” Yet, with all due respect to feral chickens, Jodie Whittaker has very much got her s**t together. If every modern actor craves variety, meaty scripts, a dab of acclaim and a modicum of fame, then Whittaker is currently in pole position. She was and remains, of course, the first female Time Lord in Doctor Who. But since then, she’s zigged and zagged from hard-edged dramas like Jack Thorne’s Toxic Town and the second series of Jimmy McGovern’s Time, to roles doing cartoon voiceovers, the new job in Frauds – funny, smart, action-packed — and after this a starring role in the much-anticipated TV adaptation of James Graham’s hit play Dear England. Along the way there’s always the Tardis to fall back on, as she did in her surprise cameo earlier this year. “I’m really lucky – I get to work in some very intense, emotional dramas and I will always want to be a part of that. But there is something very refreshing about getting to the end of the script of episode one of something like Frauds and going, ‘Oh, I haven’t cried.’” Putting on Sam’s shoes also gave Whittaker license to be a bit naughty. With literal partner-in-crime Bert, Sam picks pockets, slips watches and attempts to steal famous paintings from Spain’s finest galleries. In real life, Whittaker would like to stress, she does none of the above. “Absolutely not. I’m the most honest person in the world. I don’t like breaking rules. To the point where I’ve done that thing of getting a takeaway coffee and then deciding I’m going to sit at a table outside, so I’ve gone back in and said, ‘Do I need to pay more to sit at the table?’ If it says don’t do it, I don’t do it.” In Frauds, part of what draws Sam back to law-breaking is that she and Bert are/were highly proficient fraudsters. Flashbacks show them at work back in the day, duping marks, working scams, Robin Hooding lizard-like ex-pats and generally having a right old laugh. “They’re actually good at something,” says Whittaker. “And I understand that. I’m not one of those people that are multi-skilled – there are a lot of actors who speak seven languages and trained to be a doctor or whatever. That is not the path I was on. I literally barely speak English and I’ve lost all ability to write now because I send everything abbreviated with two thumbs. So Sam and I share that thing – without this one avenue, especially at 43, I find myself thinking, ‘What would I do outside of this?’” She also, as a married mum of two, appreciates the lure of some mid-life thrills that Sam can’t resist. “There’s an adrenaline attached to what she does and I understand from an acting point of view what it feels like to have adrenaline attached to your job.” Being an actor, Whittaker concedes, contains an element of fraudulence every time you go on stage. “The thing that I can totally associate with is the masks. You’ve got many masks, many versions of yourself as an actor. But then that’s the same with anyone – you wouldn’t get someone in a restaurant shouting, ‘Shut up, eat your dinner!’ like you do at home. We all have a million masks.” One of the things that Sam keeps telling Bert is she needs to grow up. Whittaker, born and raised in West Yorkshire, was cast as the lead in a major film, Venus, the year after she left drama school in 2005. “Growing up? What does that even mean? Because what’s so wonderful for me is that the thing I loved the most as a kid was playing pretend. And I’m still doing it.” But the playing field has changed. Back then there was no way that an actress like Suranne Jones, who came up through soap, could be calling the shots in TV production and creating female-led dramas like Frauds or her recent Netfix show Hostage. “One of the great things if you’re in a position like Suranne where you’re creating your own work, is you don’t just create one female character. She and Anne-Marie [O’Connor, co-creator] have written a world of amazing female roles of all ages in this.” The funny thing amid all this mutual admiration is that she and Jones have never worked together before. They don’t live far apart from one another in London and have frequented the same coffee shops – where Whittaker keeps trying to pay extra for a table. So why couldn’t she do a Suranne Jones herself, take up the baton, create some Whittaker originals? “I’m not a writer, don’t want to write and I never will. I am in pre-production on quite a few projects and there are lots of development opportunities that I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of. But what you realise is that things move a bit slower than you thought. Sometimes, a project that I would audition for six weeks before it starts, can be six years in development.” Part of the story in Frauds is about leaving your past behind, or trying to. Does she think people can change or are their feet cemented in their own history? “Everybody changes – love, life, loss, all of those things shape you as humans the older you get. But my best mates from growing up are still my best mates. They are literally arriving in Kings Cross in two hours’ time and we’re going to see Coldplay tomorrow night. I think if I’d reinvented myself too much I’d have lost too many core things.” There’s now another constant in her life. One job that keeps coming back round again. Right in the middle of filming Frauds in Tenerife, Whittaker had to sneak back to Cardiff to film a cameo as the Thirteenth Doctor for Ncuti Gatwa’s farewell in The Reality War. “It was a right ball-ache, because no one on Frauds knew, so we had to sell it to them as some sort of pick-up job I had to do back in the UK. I flew into Gatwick at midnight and got picked up and taken to Cardiff at like half three, four o’clock, got picked up at six and taken straight to work. And then I remembered that sci-fi dialogue is actually quite hard to learn.” Still the job, she says, was pure heaven. “I’ve never loved a job more than I did Doctor Who. It was a joy. We were a massive family, working with Mandip, Brad, Tosin, all my companion team and every actor that came in. Living in Wales, I loved it. I’d never worked with Russell T Davies, even though we’ve talked so much [Chris Chibnal was showrunner during Whittaker’s tenure]. So, for him to call me and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this scene.’ I was like, ‘Yep. I don’t need to read it, I’ll be there.’” Which means the next question hardly needs asking. “Would I go back again? Absolutely 100 per cent. It might be 15, 20, 30 years later but the joy of being the Doctor is you never know when you’ll be called on.”
Doctor Who icon Jodie Whittaker discusses exciting new role: "Suranne Jones is a swan and I’m a feral chicken"
In Frauds, Jodie Whittaker’s character is adept at putting on masks – which is a skill she’s been perfecting all her life.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It’s an image that once seeded is hard to suppress: “Suranne is a swan,” says Jodie Whittaker, “and I’m a feral chicken.” That’s one way of describing two of Britain’s best actors, an award-winning duo yoked together as the odd couple in ITV’s current drama Frauds about a pair of hucksters on their last heist. Whittaker’s Sam is the calm and Jones’s Bert is the chaos, but in real life, says Whittaker, it’s the other way round. “Suranne is a swan because although there might be little legs pedalling underneath, she is gliding along on top. Then there’s me saying, ‘Argh, I’ve lost my scripts. I think I’ve left part of my costume in my trailer.’ I’m like the 14-year-old boy who forgot their backpack and gets sent home from school. I’m loud, noisy and unfocused whereas Suranne is just such an amazing person to be around because it feels like she’s got her s**t together.” Yet, with all due respect to feral chickens, Jodie Whittaker has very much got her s**t together. If every modern actor craves variety, meaty scripts, a dab of acclaim and a modicum of fame, then Whittaker is currently in pole position. She was and remains, of course, the first female Doctor in Doctor Who. But since then, she’s zigged and zagged from hard-edged dramas like Jack Thorne’s Toxic Town and the second series of Jimmy McGovern’s Time, to roles doing cartoon voiceovers, the new job in Frauds – funny, smart, action-packed — and after this a starring role in the much-anticipated TV adaptation of James Graham’s hit play Dear England. Along the way there’s always the Tardis to fall back on, as she did in her surprise cameo earlier this year. “I’m really lucky – I get to work in some very intense, emotional dramas and I will always want to be a part of that. But there is something very refreshing about getting to the end of the script of episode one of something like Frauds and going, ‘Oh, I haven’t cried.’” Putting on Sam’s shoes also gave Whittaker license to be a bit naughty. With literal partner-in-crime Bert, Sam picks pockets, slips watches and attempts to steal famous paintings from Spain’s finest galleries. In real life, Whittaker would like to stress, she does none of the above. “Absolutely not. I’m the most honest person in the world. I don’t like breaking rules. To the point where I’ve done that thing of getting a takeaway coffee and then deciding I’m going to sit at a table outside, so I’ve gone back in and said, ‘Do I need to pay more to sit at the table?’ If it says don’t do it, I don’t do it.” In Frauds, part of what draws Sam back to law-breaking is that she and Bert are/were highly proficient fraudsters. Flashbacks show them at work back in the day, duping marks, working scams, Robin Hooding lizard-like ex-pats and generally having a right old laugh. “They’re actually good at something,” says Whittaker. “And I understand that. I’m not one of those people that are multi-skilled – there are a lot of actors who speak seven languages and trained to be a doctor or whatever. That is not the path I was on. I literally barely speak English and I’ve lost all ability to write now because I send everything abbreviated with two thumbs. So Sam and I share that thing – without this one avenue, especially at 43, I find myself thinking, ‘What would I do outside of this?’” She also, as a married mum of two, appreciates the lure of some mid-life thrills that Sam can’t resist. “There’s an adrenaline attached to what she does and I understand from an acting point of view what it feels like to have adrenaline attached to your job.” Being an actor, Whittaker concedes, contains an element of fraudulence every time you go on stage. “The thing that I can totally associate with is the masks. You’ve got many masks, many versions of yourself as an actor. But then that’s the same with anyone – you wouldn’t get someone in a restaurant shouting, ‘Shut up, eat your dinner!’ like you do at home. We all have a million masks.” One of the things that Sam keeps telling Bert is she needs to grow up. Whittaker, born and raised in West Yorkshire, was cast as the lead in a major film, Venus, the year after she left drama school in 2005. “Growing up? What does that even mean? Because what’s so wonderful for me is that the thing I loved the most as a kid was playing pretend. And I’m still doing it.” But the playing field has changed. Back then there was no way that an actor like Suranne Jones, who came up through soap, could be calling the shots in TV production and creating female-led dramas like Frauds or her recent Netflix show Hostage. “One of the great things if you’re in a position like Suranne where you’re creating your own work, is you don’t just create one female character. She and Anne-Marie [O’Connor, co-creator] have written a world of amazing female roles of all ages in this.” The funny thing amid all this mutual admiration is that she and Jones have never worked together before. They don’t live far apart from one another in London and have frequented the same coffee shops – where Whittaker keeps trying to pay extra for a table. So why couldn’t she do a Suranne Jones herself, take up the baton, create some Whittaker originals? “I’m not a writer, don’t want to write and I never will. I am in pre-production on quite a few projects and there are lots of development opportunities that I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of. But what you realise is that things move a bit slower than you thought. Sometimes, a project that I would audition for six weeks before it starts, can be six years in development.” Part of the story in Frauds is about leaving your past behind, or trying to. Does she think people can change or are their feet cemented in their own history? “Everybody changes – love, life, loss, all of those things shape you as humans the older you get. But my best mates from growing up are still my best mates. They are literally arriving in Kings Cross in two hours’ time and we’re going to see Coldplay tomorrow night. I think if I’d reinvented myself too much I’d have lost too many core things.” There’s now another constant in her life. One job that keeps coming back round again. Right in the middle of filming Frauds in Tenerife, Whittaker had to sneak back to Cardiff to film a cameo as the Thirteenth Doctor for Ncuti Gatwa’s farewell in The Reality War. “It was a right ball-ache, because no one on Frauds knew, so we had to sell it to them as some sort of pick-up job I had to do back in the UK. I flew into Gatwick at midnight and got picked up and taken to Cardiff at like half three, four o’clock, got picked up at six and taken straight to work. And then I remembered that sci-fi dialogue is actually quite hard to learn.” Still the job, she says, was pure heaven. “I’ve never loved a job more than I did Doctor Who. It was a joy. We were a massive family, working with Mandip, Brad, Tosin, all my companion team and every actor that came in. Living in Wales, I loved it. I’d never worked with Russell T Davies, even though we’ve talked so much [Chris Chibnall was showrunner during Whittaker’s tenure]. So, for him to call me and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this scene.’ I was like, ‘Yep. I don’t need to read it, I’ll be there.’” Which means the next question hardly needs asking. “Would I go back again? Absolutely 100 per cent. It might be 15, 20, 30 years later but the joy of being the Doctor is you never know when you’ll be called on.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Frauds is streaming now on ITVX and continues at 9pm on Sunday 12th October on ITV1. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Suranne Jones stars as a con artist in a thriller with female friendship at its heart
Add Frauds to your watchlist So many stories start on Coronation Street, and the partnership between Suranne Jones and writer Anne-Marie O’Connor is no different. “We’d known each other socially,” explains Jones, who played Karen McDonald on the cobbles between 2000 and 2004, “through Jen and Lee [Jenny James and Lee Boardman, both actors on the show].” “And we were with the same agency,” adds O’Connor. “But I would never have gone to Suranne and said, ‘Hey, will you have a look at a script’, because that would just have been mortifying.” It took Jones writing a page treatment for what would become the 2023 ITV drama Maryland for her agents to pair them up. It worked so well that on the first day of filming in Ireland, an exec from the production company asked them what else they had. View Green Video on the source website “We really winged it,” says Jones. “In fact, you winged it, AM. You said, ‘We’ve been talking about this new series about some frauds.’ It was freezing cold that day and we said, ‘It needs to be different to Maryland – it needs to be hot.’” “That’s about as much as we had,” says O’Connor, who then set the series in southern Spain. Their work together on Maryland meant that ITV’s head of drama, Polly Hill, was listening, and Frauds was quickly commissioned. Jones and O’Connor duly got out their whiteboard to flesh out their story. “I’ve not met anybody,” O’Connor says, “who wants to dive into characters’ stories and what makes people tick in the way that Suranne does.” For Maryland, a story about sisters, they talked about family. For Frauds, the subject was female friendship. “For me, it was about sharing all of my memories, good and bad, with Anne-Marie,” says Jones. “Even traumatic stories – it was stuff that I needed to get out. It’s like purging when we work together. If Anne-Marie gets stuck on anything she’ll ask me, ‘How would you feel in this moment?’” And so together they created a pair of chalk-and-cheese grifters taking on one last job on the Costa del Sol. We meet Bert [Jones] and Sam [played by Jodie Whittaker] on the day of Bert’s release from prison after a 10-year stretch. Her sentence was the result of a job that went wrong, meaning they’re yoked together – by guilt on Sam’s part for avoiding prison, by necessity on Bert’s. On her release, Bert announces that she has cancer and only has months to live, so she proposes one last job. Reunite the dynamic duo, rekindle the past, no matter how toxic, to see them both off for retirement on easy street. “Every woman knows a Bert,” Jones smiles. “She’s the sort of frenemy who’s like an addiction. You know in your heart she’s not good for you but she’s hard to give up.” Jones may be best known as a Bafta-winning actor, but she has been writing for over a decade. “The first person to encourage me was Joe Ahearne, the director of The Secret of Crickley Hall [2012]. After that, I got an agent and finished a full script for the first time. We tried to hoick it around, but it was maybe a bit too before its time.” She also started to take an interest in backroom operations, working as an executive producer for the first time on Scott & Bailey. “But the main thing I like is script. What I appreciate about this relationship with AM is I know that I’m good with character, I know I’m good with dialogue, but she is a writer and she can put it all together.” To date, all of the work produced by Jones’s company TeamAkers Productions (her husband, Laurence Akers, is a producer) has starred Jones. She is still the sell. But she admits, “I’d like eventually to not be in everything that we’re creating.” For now, Jones (who also has a young family) is promoting Netflix’s Hostage, launching Frauds, is then off to Glasgow and Norway to film the third instalment of Vigil, while also starring in Aimee Lou Wood’s Film Club. Oh, and she’s “in a writers’ room for something that starts filming in February because I’m developing and producing that”. Why put herself through it all? “Well, I do ask myself that question a lot. I don’t know how my head doesn’t blow up. And then I spend all of my money on massages and face treatments because I look 100… The thing is being part of a creative team feels so good and it’s also a retirement plan for when I maybe don’t want to act so much any more.” She adds that mostly she wants to keep telling women’s stories from women’s perspectives “whether they’re perfect or not… Hostage and this are so different, worlds apart, but there are two women in each of these shows. And that’s a lot of story for women.”
Suranne Jones says producing shows like Frauds could be her retirement plan "when I maybe don’t want to act so much"
The actor spoke to Radio Times magazine about her darkly comic drama for ITV, which she co-created and executive produced.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. So many stories start on Coronation Street, and the partnership between Suranne Jones and writer Anne-Marie O’Connor is no different. “We’d known each other socially,” explains Jones, who played Karen McDonald on the cobbles between 2000 and 2004, “through Jen and Lee [Jenny James and Lee Boardman, both actors on the show].” “And we were with the same agency,” adds O’Connor. “But I would never have gone to Suranne and said, ‘Hey, will you have a look at a script’, because that would just have been mortifying.” It took Jones writing a page treatment for what would become the 2023 ITV drama Maryland for her agents to pair them up. It worked so well that on the first day of filming in Ireland, an exec from the production company asked them what else they had. “We really winged it,” says Jones. “In fact, you winged it, AM. You said, ‘We’ve been talking about this new series about some frauds.’ It was freezing cold that day and we said, ‘It needs to be different to Maryland – it needs to be hot.’” “That’s about as much as we had,” says O’Connor, who then set the series in southern Spain. Their work together on Maryland meant that ITV’s head of drama, Polly Hill, was listening, and Frauds was quickly commissioned. Jones and O’Connor duly got out their whiteboard to flesh out their story. “I’ve not met anybody,” O’Connor says, “who wants to dive into characters’ stories and what makes people tick in the way that Suranne does.” For Maryland, a story about sisters, they talked about family. For Frauds, the subject was female friendship. “For me, it was about sharing all of my memories, good and bad, with Anne-Marie,” says Jones. “Even traumatic stories – it was stuff that I needed to get out. It’s like purging when we work together. If Anne-Marie gets stuck on anything she’ll ask me, ‘How would you feel in this moment?’” And so together they created a pair of chalk-and-cheese grifters taking on one last job on the Costa del Sol. We meet Bert [Jones] and Sam [played by Jodie Whittaker] on the day of Bert’s release from prison after a 10-year stretch. Her sentence was the result of a job that went wrong, meaning they’re yoked together – by guilt on Sam’s part for avoiding prison, by necessity on Bert’s. On her release, Bert announces that she has cancer and only has months to live, so she proposes one last job. Reunite the dynamic duo, rekindle the past, no matter how toxic, to see them both off for retirement on easy street. “Every woman knows a Bert,” Jones smiles. “She’s the sort of frenemy who’s like an addiction. You know in your heart she’s not good for you but she’s hard to give up.” Jones may be best known as a BAFTA-winning actor, but she has been writing for over a decade. “The first person to encourage me was Joe Ahearne, the director of The Secret of Crickley Hall [2012]. After that, I got an agent and finished a full script for the first time. We tried to hoick it around, but it was maybe a bit too before its time.” She also started to take an interest in backroom operations, working as an executive producer for the first time on Scott & Bailey. “But the main thing I like is script. What I appreciate about this relationship with AM is I know that I’m good with character, I know I’m good with dialogue, but she is a writer and she can put it all together.” To date, all of the work produced by Jones’s company TeamAkers Productions (her husband, Laurence Akers, is a producer) has starred Jones. She is still the sell. But she admits, “I’d like eventually to not be in everything that we’re creating.” For now, Jones (who also has a young family) is promoting Netflix’s Hostage, launching Frauds, is then off to Glasgow and Norway to film the third instalment of Vigil, while also starring in Aimee Lou Wood’s Film Club. Oh, and she’s “in a writers’ room for something that starts filming in February because I’m developing and producing that”. Why put herself through it all? “Well, I do ask myself that question a lot. I don’t know how my head doesn’t blow up. And then I spend all of my money on massages and face treatments because I look 100… The thing is being part of a creative team feels so good and it’s also a retirement plan for when I maybe don’t want to act so much any more.” She adds that mostly she wants to keep telling women’s stories from women’s perspectives “whether they’re perfect or not… Hostage and this are so different, worlds apart, but there are two women in each of these shows. And that’s a lot of story for women.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Frauds premieres on ITV1 and ITVX on Sunday 5th October. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast. Add Frauds to your watchlist on the <a id="OWA8b702c45-bee9-94e4-f018-57518e78041b" title="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" href="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-outlook-id="449c28d9-909e-4aab-b6b8-153454f55d5e" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="0">Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more.
The stars reveal the flawed family members behind their new roles
Add House of Guinness to your watchlist Anthony Boyle is Arthur Guinness “I play Arthur, the eldest. He left Ireland early on and went to Eton. He rejected his Irishness; he’s a classic, what we Irish would call a ‘West Brit’ — someone who aspires to be more English than Irish. Arthur loves the trappings of high society and likes British rule. He’s in London having a lovely time, living his authentic, true self, when his father dies and he has to return home. “He thinks he’s going to get a chunk of money from his father’s will. But he ends up tied to his brother Edward; they have to run the brewery and share all the money — or else they both get nothing. Arthur has also been concealing his sexuality. He’s gay — this was true — and he met partners at Eton. He just wants to go to London, have sex, drink, smoke, and have the craic. Whereas Edward lives the Guinness brand, as we’d say now.” Louis Partridge is Edward Guinness “Edward is the youngest brother and, along with Arthur, the inheritor of the brewery. He’s lived in his father’s shadow, and he’s always thought, ‘Once Dad pops his clogs, I’m going to run this brewery my way.’ He has ideas, he’s a bit of a strategist and is quite confident in his ability to grow the business. He’s a champion of social benevolence — he pioneered the pension, which is amazing — but it’s because to him benevolence equals votes, votes equals power, power equals expansion, and expansion equals profits. He has ideas to expand Guinness into the New World — ideas that we now know worked. “His problem is the rest of his family. Benjamin’s a complete f***-up and a liability; Arthur’s gay in a time when you could not be gay, and Anne’s sleeping with Rafferty [James Norton]. He just wants these problems to go away so he can concentrate on the business. But then he meets someone he shouldn’t and realises that there’s a life outside the brewery.” Emily Fairn is Anne Plunket (née Guinness) “The eldest daughter of Benjamin Guinness, Anne is a very strong woman, particularly for this period when everything is piled against her. But when she’s given nothing in the will, she doesn’t know what to do with herself. “She has a degenerative disease, which we believe was MS, so she’s desperately trying to make more of her life, but both society and her own health are pushing her down. Plus, she’s in an arranged marriage in which she’s deeply unhappy.” Fionn O’Shea is Benjamin Guinness “Middle son, Benjamin, is the black sheep. He has amassed a pretty significant gambling debt and is an alcoholic and a drug addict. When his father Benjamin Sr dies, Ben receives nothing in his will. It’s the final straw for him, so he quits Ireland, gets sober and joins the military in the UK. There’s a honeymoon period when he has money, a house in London, even an arranged marriage. But eventually he realises that none of these things will bring him happiness. That’s when he starts to unravel.” James Norton is Sean Rafferty “Rafferty’s a lapsed Catholic from south of Dublin, with a military background — we reckon he fought in the Crimea — who found himself working for the Guinnesses. He’s the foreman of the brewery, officially. In actuality, he’s the fixer who runs things for the family — he’s known throughout Dublin as the man who will get his hands very dirty if needs be, but then the next day he’s in a smart shirt talking about balance sheets. “His weakness is love. And sex. He has these complicated relationships with women of high status. And while normally he’s cool and reptilian, he starts to fall in love and it terrifies him. “I have to say that until Steven Knight’s scripts came along, I hadn’t pictured myself doing a thick Dublin accent in mid-19th century Ireland. But when I read it, it’s Steven at his absolute best, firing on all cylinders.”
Peaky Blinders writer is “firing on all cylinders” with new show, reveals James Norton – as its cast explain their characters
Meet the flawed family members of House of Guinness.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. The stars of Netflix's new series House of Guinness discuss their characters in the new show. Anthony Boyle is Arthur Guinness “I play Arthur, the eldest. He left Ireland early on and went to Eton. He rejected his Irishness; he’s a classic, what we Irish would call a ‘West Brit’ — someone who aspires to be more English than Irish. Arthur loves the trappings of high society and likes British rule. He’s in London having a lovely time, living his authentic, true self, when his father dies and he has to return home. “He thinks he’s going to get a chunk of money from his father’s will. But he ends up tied to his brother Edward; they have to run the brewery and share all the money — or else they both get nothing. Arthur has also been concealing his sexuality. He’s gay — this was true — and he met partners at Eton. He just wants to go to London, have sex, drink, smoke, and have the craic. Whereas Edward lives the Guinness brand, as we’d say now.” Louis Partridge is Edward Guinness “Edward is the youngest brother and, along with Arthur, the inheritor of the brewery. He’s lived in his father’s shadow, and he’s always thought, ‘Once Dad pops his clogs, I’m going to run this brewery my way.’ He has ideas, he’s a bit of a strategist and is quite confident in his ability to grow the business. He’s a champion of social benevolence — he pioneered the pension, which is amazing — but it’s because to him benevolence equals votes, votes equals power, power equals expansion, and expansion equals profits. He has ideas to expand Guinness into the New World — ideas that we now know worked. “His problem is the rest of his family. Benjamin’s a complete f***-up and a liability; Arthur’s gay in a time when you could not be gay, and Anne’s sleeping with Rafferty [James Norton]. He just wants these problems to go away so he can concentrate on the business. But then he meets someone he shouldn’t and realises that there’s a life outside the brewery.” Emily Fairn is Anne Plunket (née Guinness) “The eldest daughter of Benjamin Guinness, Anne is a very strong woman, particularly for this period when everything is piled against her. But when she’s given nothing in the will, she doesn’t know what to do with herself. “She has a degenerative disease, which we believe was MS, so she’s desperately trying to make more of her life, but both society and her own health are pushing her down. Plus, she’s in an arranged marriage in which she’s deeply unhappy.” Fionn O’Shea is Benjamin Guinness “Middle son, Benjamin, is the black sheep. He has amassed a pretty significant gambling debt and is an alcoholic and a drug addict. When his father Benjamin Sr dies, Ben receives nothing in his will. It’s the final straw for him, so he quits Ireland, gets sober and joins the military in the UK. There’s a honeymoon period when he has money, a house in London, even an arranged marriage. But eventually he realises that none of these things will bring him happiness. That’s when he starts to unravel.” James Norton is Sean Rafferty “Rafferty’s a lapsed Catholic from south of Dublin, with a military background — we reckon he fought in the Crimea – who found himself working for the Guinnesses. He’s the foreman of the brewery, officially. In actuality, he’s the fixer who runs things for the family – he’s known throughout Dublin as the man who will get his hands very dirty if needs be, but then the next day he’s in a smart shirt talking about balance sheets. “His weakness is love. And sex. He has these complicated relationships with women of high status. And while normally he’s cool and reptilian, he starts to fall in love and it terrifies him. “I have to say that until Steven Knight’s scripts came along, I hadn’t pictured myself doing a thick Dublin accent in mid-19th century Ireland. But when I read it, it’s Steven at his absolute best, firing on all cylinders.” View oEmbed on the source website The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. House of Guinness is coming to Netflix on Thursday 25th September 2025. Add House of Guinness to your watchlist on the <a id="OWA8b702c45-bee9-94e4-f018-57518e78041b" title="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" href="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-outlook-id="449c28d9-909e-4aab-b6b8-153454f55d5e" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="0">Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guideto find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Stephen Graham reunites with the director of Boiling Point for an unflinching new one-shot drama
Add Adolescence to your watchlist It is the smallest of bumps but it consigns 45 minutes of hard work to the bin. I’m on-set in South Kirkby, West Yorkshire, watching filming on Adolescence, an extraordinary new Netflix drama starring Stephen Graham and Ashley Walters. Each of the four episodes is one continuous take. In the first, playing out here before my eyes, 13-year-old Jamie (played by newcomer Owen Cooper) gets a knock on the door at his house. Police officers pile in and the boy is arrested for murder. His father Eddie (Graham), shocked and bewildered, joins Jamie in the police car on the journey to the police station. View oEmbed on the source website The house, a real location, is just minutes away from a studio, where the production team have built an entire walk-through police station set. The camera follows Jamie and Eddie in the car – it is literally passed through the window at one end and passed out again when it arrives at the police station – and then the cameraman walks backwards as Jamie is led to be checked in and charged. But then the cameraman nudges a doorframe, ever so gently… “It was a beautiful take,” says Graham afterwards, “but there was a bump. So we can’t use it.” They will do it all again. In fact, the team filmed each episode around ten times before choosing the best take. The end result is a series that is as immediate and bracing as the shocking story it tells. “Where it came from, for me,” explains Graham, who co-created and wrote Adolescence with Jack Thorne (The Virtues, Toxic Town), “is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl, and she was stabbed to death by a young boy. I just thought, why? “Then there was another young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop. And there was this thing up North, where that young girl Brianna Ghey was lured into the park by two teenagers, and they stabbed her. I just thought, what’s going on? What is this that’s happening?” Graham, who has two teenage children of his own with his wife, actor Hannah Walters, was adamant from the outset that the story shouldn’t play into stereotypes. “I wanted him to be a kid from a working-class background whose parents were hard-working. You know, his mum wasn’t an alcoholic, his dad wasn’t violent, and he hadn’t been molested by his uncle. I didn’t want there to be a reason we can go, ‘Oh, well, we blame it on this.’ I think we’re all accountable in some way. We just wanted to throw it out there, ask the question why, and see where it lands. And if it can create debate within living rooms with people watching it with their families, our objective is completed.” Graham and his longtime friend and collaborator, director Philip Barantini, with whom he previously worked on two continuous-shot Boiling Point films as well a TV series, pitched Adolescence to Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B. “Brad was on the phone with us and he was so enthusiastic,” says Barantini, before pausing and laughing at himself talking about how much Brad Pitt loves his work. Barantini is by no means the first film-maker to use continuous takes, but he sees the immersive nature of one-shot filming as an antidote to the way television is consumed these days. “Personally, I find myself watching things, and it could be brilliant but I’ve got one eye on my phone, so you have to really grab me,” he explains. “I think what the one-shot does is makes you sit up and you can’t take your eyes off it, because if you do blink for a second you miss something. It draws the audience in. “It’s like going to a play. If you go to a play, you can’t be on your phone, yeah? And so you’ve got to pay attention to everything.” Making one-shot television requires meticulous planning and oversight. Barantini and his director of photography Matthew Lewis (see panel right) ran the movements of the camera and the performers again and again until it became muscle memory. For each of the four episodes they gave themselves a week for cast rehearsals, another week for tech rehearsals and then a third for the shoot. For the actors – Graham is joined by his A Thousand Blows co-star Erin Doherty, playing the clinical psychologist assigned to Jamie’s case, as well as Walters, who plays one of the investigating officers (see right) – filming in one long shot is exacting. It requires learning a lot of lines and staying switched on for the entire 45 minutes that the shoot takes. There are no opportunities to film reaction shots, no time to take a breather. “Doing this you combine both disciplines, theatre and television,” says Graham. “Without sounding too pretentious it’s the most Zen and in the moment you can ever be as an actor. You have to be ready and in that moment to carry it right the way through – the intensity, the ups, the downs, the highs, the lows. You have to have worked it out with your director and with your other actors, and you have to really have an understanding of where it may go and what it might be, but also allow different things to pop in or pop out, like someone forgetting a line, or doing something unexpected. Graham and Barantini’s friendship was forged on the set of Band of Brothers in 2000. Barantini was an actor himself at that point, but from there their careers diverged. Graham powered on to become a major screen star; Barantini, by his own admission, remained a jobbing actor who had always wanted to direct but had lacked the self-belief. It was Graham agreeing to star in Barantini’s 2019 short film Boiling Point, about a chef struggling with addiction issues – and do it in one continuous shot – that set their working relationship in motion, as well as jump-starting Barantini’s directing career. “It took a lot of hard work for me to get to where I am,” says Graham. “But if you have that, you have to put your hand out to help other people get up on the ladder. Otherwise, there’s no point being there. “I mean, it started with a short film and now we are doing a massive four-part Netflix thing that’s strong and visceral and important. Two kids from a council estate! You know what I mean?”
Stephen Graham and Adolescence director explain why Netflix crime drama is filmed in one take
"Doing this you combine both disciplines, theatre and television."
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It is the smallest of bumps but it consigns 45 minutes of hard work to the bin. I’m on-set in South Kirkby, West Yorkshire, watching filming on Adolescence, an extraordinary new Netflix drama starring Stephen Graham and Ashley Walters. Each of the four episodes is one continuous take. In the first, playing out here before my eyes, 13-year-old Jamie (played by newcomer Owen Cooper) gets a knock on the door at his house. Police officers pile in and the boy is arrested for murder. His father Eddie (Graham), shocked and bewildered, joins Jamie in the police car on the journey to the police station. The house, a real location, is just minutes away from a studio, where the production team have built an entire walk-through police station set. The camera follows Jamie and Eddie in the car – it is literally passed through the window at one end and passed out again when it arrives at the police station – and then the cameraman walks backwards as Jamie is led to be checked in and charged. But then the cameraman nudges a doorframe, ever so gently… “It was a beautiful take,” says Graham afterwards, “but there was a bump. So we can’t use it.” They will do it all again. In fact, the team filmed each episode around ten times before choosing the best take. The end result is a series that is as immediate and bracing as the shocking story it tells. “Where it came from, for me,” explains Graham, who co-created and wrote Adolescence with Jack Thorne (The Virtues, Toxic Town), “is there was an incident in Liverpool, a young girl, and she was stabbed to death by a young boy. I just thought, why? “Then there was another young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop. And there was this thing up North, where that young girl Brianna Ghey was lured into the park by two teenagers, and they stabbed her. I just thought, what’s going on? What is this that’s happening?” Graham, who has two teenage children of his own with his wife, actor Hannah Walters, was adamant from the outset that the story shouldn’t play into stereotypes. “I wanted him to be a kid from a working-class background whose parents were hard-working. You know, his mum wasn’t an alcoholic, his dad wasn’t violent, and he hadn’t been molested by his uncle. I didn’t want there to be a reason we can go, ‘Oh, well, we blame it on this.’ I think we’re all accountable in some way. We just wanted to throw it out there, ask the question why, and see where it lands. And if it can create debate within living rooms with people watching it with their families, our objective is completed.” Graham and his longtime friend and collaborator, director Philip Barantini, with whom he previously worked on two continuous-shot Boiling Point films as well a TV series, pitched Adolescence to Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B. “Brad was on the phone with us and he was so enthusiastic,” says Barantini, before pausing and laughing at himself talking about how much Brad Pitt loves his work. Barantini is by no means the first film-maker to use continuous takes, but he sees the immersive nature of one-shot filming as an antidote to the way television is consumed these days. “Personally, I find myself watching things, and it could be brilliant but I’ve got one eye on my phone, so you have to really grab me,” he explains. “I think what the one-shot does is makes you sit up and you can’t take your eyes off it, because if you do blink for a second you miss something. It draws the audience in. “It’s like going to a play. If you go to a play, you can’t be on your phone, yeah? And so you’ve got to pay attention to everything.” Making one-shot television requires meticulous planning and oversight. Barantini and his director of photography Matthew Lewis (see panel right) ran the movements of the camera and the performers again and again until it became muscle memory. For each of the four episodes they gave themselves a week for cast rehearsals, another week for tech rehearsals and then a third for the shoot. For the actors – Graham is joined by his A Thousand Blows co-star Erin Doherty, playing the clinical psychologist assigned to Jamie’s case, as well as Walters, who plays one of the investigating officers (see right) – filming in one long shot is exacting. It requires learning a lot of lines and staying switched on for the entire 45 minutes that the shoot takes. There are no opportunities to film reaction shots, no time to take a breather. “Doing this you combine both disciplines, theatre and television,” says Graham. “Without sounding too pretentious it’s the most Zen and in the moment you can ever be as an actor. You have to be ready and in that moment to carry it right the way through – the intensity, the ups, the downs, the highs, the lows. You have to have worked it out with your director and with your other actors, and you have to really have an understanding of where it may go and what it might be, but also allow different things to pop in or pop out, like someone forgetting a line, or doing something unexpected. Graham and Barantini’s friendship was forged on the set of Band of Brothers in 2000. Barantini was an actor himself at that point, but from there their careers diverged. Graham powered on to become a major screen star; Barantini, by his own admission, remained a jobbing actor who had always wanted to direct but had lacked the self-belief. Read more: Adolescence makes ratings history – enormous viewing figures confirmed Adolescence star Owen Cooper's audition tape for hit Netflix show has been released It was Graham agreeing to star in Barantini’s 2019 short film Boiling Point, about a chef struggling with addiction issues – and do it in one continuous shot – that set their working relationship in motion, as well as jump-starting Barantini’s directing career. “It took a lot of hard work for me to get to where I am,” says Graham. “But if you have that, you have to put your hand out to help other people get up on the ladder. Otherwise, there’s no point being there. “I mean, it started with a short film and now we are doing a massive four-part Netflix thing that’s strong and visceral and important. Two kids from a council estate! You know what I mean?” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Adolescence will stream on Netflix from Thursday 13th March 2025. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
In a new survival series, 12 celebs confront caimans, spiders and jumping ants while being hunted down by Bear Grylls — so what happened when RT's Benji Wilson was sent to Costa Rica to experience it too?
Add Celebrity Bear Hunt to your watchlist Normally, when a bunch of celebrities are dropped into the jungle for television entertainment, the worst they have to put up with is a bowl of sheep’s testicles and a ribbing from Ant and Dec. Celebrity Bear Hunt is different. Granted, the celebrities are still dumped in the jungle, but this time the jungle is in Costa Rica – and their judges are not the voting public, but former SAS soldier and survival expert, Bear Grylls. As Bear puts the celebrities – including Shirley Ballas, Mel B, Boris Becker and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen – through a series of survival challenges, those who fail to pass muster face the “Bear Pit” – a Hunger Games-style face-off set in four square kilometres of savannah, scrub and jungle, where they’re hunted down by Bear himself over 60 minutes and, if captured, eliminated from the show. Meanwhile, presenter Holly Willoughby, once a guest host of I’m a Celebrity… herself, looks on with concern. But really, how scary is Bear Grylls? Billed by Netflix as “one of the world’s most fearsome predators”, from the comfort of my sofa I scoffed at the idea that the 50-year-old former Chief Scout might have some bite with his bark. I’ve watched him eat elephant poo to survive in the wild, but I’m not actually scared of him. Or rather, I wasn’t until last year, when I was flown to the set of Celebrity Bear Hunt in Costa Rica and dumped in the “Bear Pit” myself. It turns out it is a genuine test of survival skills. The conditions are challenging in themselves – hot, humid and dehydrating. I’m warned about Lyme disease, told that my feet may get fungal infections and that there are face-eating spiders and bullhorn acacias (which harbour armies of ants that jump on you if you brush against them). Luckily, Grylls himself appears from nowhere to give me some tips. He starts by smearing mud on my face. “At least get you looking the part,” he says. “When you’re lying in the dirt motionless, a caking of dirt helps protect you from ants and mosquitoes.” The most important thing when you’re being hunted, Grylls says, is obviously to avoid detection. “You’re trying to break up the very distinct shape and shine of the human head and shoulders and conceal your glistening, sweaty face.” The art of concealment is all about the “S”s, he adds: “Shape, shine, shadow, smell, sudden movement and silhouette. Plan your route – if you’re walking across a ridgeline, drop down ten foot, then someone can’t see that skyline figure.” I start planning my route. The aim of the Bear Pit is to get from one side to the other, to an exit gate, while somehow avoiding the expert survival guru. I was going to stick to the path but remember Grylls’s warning: “You don’t want to be leaving tracks and you don’t want to get ‘track happy’. You’re so vulnerable if you just stick to a path. It makes it easy for me.” I head towards the “Razor Ravine” area of the Bear Pit, not far from the “Caiman Pool”, where I was told they had already seen an actual caiman – a sharp-toothed reptile related to an alligator – as well as some snakes. Various tools are left around the site, but they’re often near to trip wires. I’m not falling for that. I skirt round a rather obvious snare trap feeling quite pleased with myself. And then I have a brainwave. Recalling how Arnold Schwarzenegger had conquered the Predator, I stand stock still and wait. Quietly, I dig down into the leaf mould and make myself at one with nature. Six minutes later Bear Grylls taps me on the shoulder, cuffs me with ropes and puts his foot on my head. I still have no idea where he came from. What had I done wrong? “You can stay still,” my survival sensei says, “but ultimately, it’s evasion and escape – not just evasion. You have to take some risks to win.”
Strictly’s head judge Shirley Ballas was out of her comfort zone, but gets a ten for courage
Add Celebrity Bear Hunt to your watchlist Why did you agree to be hunted by Bear Grylls? When I first got asked to do it, I talked to my mother. She said, “Don’t do it! You’re too old! It’s too far away! You’re going to get bitten by a snake or a spider.” But I thought, why not put myself so far out of my comfort zone that people think, “Is she mad?” I was the eldest there, by the way. Boris Becker and I, we were like Mum and Dad. But Bear Grylls believes we’ve all got an action hero inside us. I think I found that in myself. How did it feel being hunted in the Bear Pit? They put you in this head-to-toe costume so you don’t get bitten, then you’ve got to find these tools to get yourself out before he catches you. It’s a very strange feeling to be hunted. God, I was sweating. When it got late in the day and the shadows were coming, all the time knowing Bear is lurking... it terrified me to death. Did you discover anything about yourself? I lived without a mobile phone for the whole time we were there. First day, first two days, difficult. After that, great. Didn’t have to talk to anyone. I think I learnt that I like my own company. What was it like going from being a judge to a contestant? It’s not a problem for me. I like to be told what to do. I’m the same on Strictly. What do you need from me to make this work? Tell me. How did this challenge compare to what Chris McCausland did on Strictly? It was phenomenal, what Dianne [Buswell, his professional dance partner] did with Chris McCausland. I mean, for Chris, it was difficult because he didn’t even see shadows, did he? Even he thought he wasn’t going to last past week two. Have you picked up any survival skills? Yeah, if I get stuck on a desert island, I know how to collect pee and use it to stay alive. Did you drink your own wee? I wouldn’t exactly say it was mine… I’m just going to say it taught me survival skills beyond anything else. I mean, I had a scorpion in my trousers! They have all sorts of critters. Did you call it Craig Revel Horwood? It didn’t have a name, darling, but it sure did scare me. Did the show give you an appetite for more adventures? All the years that I’ve danced, I’ve flown to pretty much every country in the world, but I’ve seen none of it. You’re teaching all day. I’d love to now go back to Cuba where the cha-cha-cha was invented. I’d like to find the roots of Brazilian dance. I’d like to just go all over the world.
Far from the lap of luxury, interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen surprised himself...
Add Celebrity Bear Hunt to your watchlist You get put through the wringer in this series — why subject yourself to it all? I live a life of unendurable luxury, of insufferable comfort. So there was something at the back of my head saying, “What would it be like? Is it survivable?” There is that sort of really bolshie, irritating instinct that makes me feel I should do something like this, because I’ve never done it before. And if I don’t do it soon, the chances of ever being able to get away with it will be incredibly compromised. From the glimpse we get in the trailer it doesn’t look like you did get away with it? I’m not going to blow too much of the surprise but it was literally, I think, one of the few times I have come face to face with mortality. What did you learn about yourself? I thought I was a floppy so-and-so who wouldn’t want to get involved in this stuff – that Bear would detail all these challenges and I’d go, “That’s not for me. I’ll be in my tent with a gin and tonic.” But I discovered I’m actually rather irritatingly gung-ho. I got overexcited at the idea of pushing myself, intoxicated by the surges of testosterone compelling me to want to do well. How were the older celebs supposed to compete against athletes like Danny Cipriani? Well, this is meant to be the point. We were supposed to be divvying up challenges based on our skill sets. I was flying a flag for the elderly contingent alongside Shirley and Boris. The idea was that, particularly Shirley and I, would be strategic about thinking how best to deploy the resources we had. Do you think you might have overdone the camouflage? I admit I might have gone a bit too far. We were supposed to be in camouflage. But I think I looked more like a showgirl: there’s something very Folies Bergère about my camo. But as I pointed out to Holly when she said I might have gone a bit over the top, “Darling, the jungle is over the top.”
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen came "face-to-face with mortality" on Celebrity Bear Hunt
The TV personality spoke to Radio Times about his Costa Rican adventure for the Netflix series.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. You get put through the wringer in this series – why subject yourself to it all? I live a life of unendurable luxury, of insufferable comfort. So there was something at the back of my head saying, 'What would it be like? Is it survivable?' There is that sort of really bolshie, irritating instinct that makes me feel I should do something like this, because I've never done it before. And if I don't do it soon, the chances of ever being able to get away with it will be incredibly compromised. From the glimpse we get in the trailer it doesn’t look like you did get away with it? I'm not going to blow too much of the surprise but it was literally, I think, one of the few times I have come face to face with mortality. What did you learn about yourself? I thought I was a floppy so-and-so who wouldn’t want to get involved in this stuff – that Bear would detail all these challenges and I’d go, 'That’s not for me. I’ll be in my tent with a gin and tonic'. But I discovered I'm actually rather irritatingly gung-ho. I got overexcited at the idea of pushing myself, intoxicated by the surges of testosterone compelling me to want to do well. How were the older celebs supposed to compete against athletes like Danny Cipriani? Well, this is meant to be the point. We were supposed to be divvying up challenges based on our skill sets. I was flying a flag for the elderly contingent alongside Shirley and Boris. The idea was that, particularly Shirley and I, would be strategic about thinking how best to deploy the resources we had. Do you think you might have overdone the camouflage? I admit I might have gone a bit too far. We were supposed to be in camouflage. But I think I looked more like a showgirl: there's something very Folies Bergère about my camo. But as I pointed out to Holly when she said I might have gone a bit over the top, 'Darling, the jungle is over the top'. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Celebrity Bear Hunt comes to Netflix on Wednesday 5th February 2025. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Shirley Ballas on being hunted by Bear Grylls: "I had a scorpion in my trousers!"
The Strictly Come Dancing judge talks to Radio Times about survival series Celebrity Bear Hunt.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. When veteran Strictly Come Dancing judge Shirley Ballas stepped off the helicopter in the Costa Rican jungle and met her fellow contestants for Netflix's new reality contest, Celebrity Bear Hunt, she was concerned. "They were all so young! I was the eldest one there," the 64-year-old says. "I mean, Danny Cipriani is this strapping rugby player… My worry was that I wouldn't be able to hold up my end of the deal because I'm older and I'm not as strong. But I put myself into it 100 per cent. And actually, I think I did relatively well." The challenges of Celebrity Bear Hunt are all about survival – making shelters, tying knots, keeping hydrated (yes, drinking wee is involved), evasion and escape as the wannabe survival experts go head to head with Bear Grylls. But as Ballas points out, "Bear believes there’s an action hero in all of us," and so there’s a fair dollop of self-improvement in this Bear Hunt, too. "Bear's whole credo is that you can find things within yourself in survival that you maybe didn't know were there," she says. "Putting yourself in situations that you could never, ever imagine yourself being in and working as a team. So if you're not a team player, you're in a bit in trouble." And Ballas considers herself a team player. "I'm that kid from a housing estate. I can just fit in. I don't need you to look after me – I'm not an old lady yet. And I didn't go in there with any airs and graces. You know, I'm not that type of person," she says of diva-like behaviour. "We had a few of them, but I wasn't that person." Fellow contestant Boris Becker, who joined Bear Hunt after a stint in prison for bankruptcy fraud, was one of the good guys, she says. "We were like Mum and Dad for the group. I fell in love with that man. Just a lovely human being." She stresses that in the jungle, sometimes a more mature person’s considered approach won the day: "Working things out, thinking and sometimes taking your time a little bit was important. Staying focused on the job, not being impulsive or getting sidetracked or chatting." In spite of having made a career as a choreographer – essentially, giving directions to other people – Ballas says that in real life she’s a follower, not a bolshy sergeant major. "I like to be told what to do. I'm always on time. I'm orderly. I'm organised. On this I didn't miss one deadline. [Another contestant] Big Zuu was the chef and I was the bottle-washer and kept the kitchen clean." If that makes Bear Hunt sound like domestic bliss, Ballas is quick to point out that it was no cakewalk. There were the critters, for a start. "I don’t do spiders. I don't do red ants. I mean, they showed us these trees that, if you brushed up against them, the ants that live on them would just climb on you, and scratch and itch you to death – which happened to a couple of people." And as if attack ants weren’t enough, at the end of each team task, those who Grylls deemed to have underperformed were put in a Bear Pit. This was a 50-acre tract of scrub and savannah packed full of trip wires, snare traps and cages, from which the contestants had to escape before Bear hunted them down. "Terrifying," Ballas remembers. "It’s complete jeopardy. You have to find these little arrows to help you find your way out, and all the time you know he’s lurking there, waiting to capture you." Her approach was to turn every challenge into a dance. "Every single task I did was like a piece of art or a piece of choreography. If it’s a bridge that's got slats missing, do I do a jump over it? Which is the best angle to go at it? How can I do that gracefully? Everything I did, I stayed focused." And while she won't say how she did in the final reckoning, she does say that in her own mind she won just by agreeing to go on the show in the first place. "When I look back now, to be honest I think it’s another person that went in there and not me. I mean, who in their right mind would do this?" The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Celebrity Bear Hunt comes to Netflix on Wednesday 5th February 2025. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Despite global success, Squid Game didn’t make its South Korean creator Hwang Dong-hyuk rich – which is why he’s made a sequel
Add Squid Game 2 to your watchlist Last year, the director and creator of the ultra-violent South Korean drama Squid Game, Hwang Dong-hyuk, was scrolling through YouTube when he came across a video that stopped him dead. “It was these African children playing Red Light, Green Light,” he says, referring to the now infamous playground game (we’d call it grandmother’s footsteps) that featured in Squid Game. “The biggest surprise for me was just how far and fast the show has reached all over the world,” says Hwang. “Despite the fact that this is a series that kids cannot watch.” Whether or not those kids had watched the 18-rated TV show, the video clip – and countless others like it – proved that its influence was global. In the dying embers of the Covid crisis, somehow a Korean-language take on The Hunger Games took over the world. Released in late 2021, the story of a deadly set of children’s games being played by debt-laden down-and-outs dressed in green tracksuits on a mysterious island, is Netflix’s biggest ever show. It ranked number one in Netflix’s top ten in 94 countries across the world, including the USA, India, Brazil and Turkey. More than 142 million households spent over 1.65 billion hours watching it in the first 28 days of its release. Here was a genuine cultural phenomenon, leading to a worldwide resurgence of interest in Korean culture. It earned Hwang Dong-hyuk an Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series, making him the first Asian winner and the first native Korean in the category. It was also the first time a non-English language series had triumphed. Even so, he’s still surprised to see African children mimicking his creation. “I think it came as a shock to me to really see how much influence and impact we have in this day and age,” says 53-year-old Hwang. Squid Game was a global smash that almost no one, its creator included, expected. Now, on Boxing Day, the games begin again, with a third and final series set for 2025. “Back when I was working on season one, honestly, I didn’t have any thoughts about being able to do a second or if there would be a sequel at all,” says Hwang. “And so I went into it thinking that I would be happy if the story ended with the last scene of season one.” In that scene Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), the winner of the games – the last man standing after six days of win-or-die brutality – is about to board a plane with his winnings of 45.6 billion Korean won (about £25 million), but then he changes his mind. Series two picks up the story three years later, with Gi-hun determined to find the people behind the game and put an end to their vicious sport. As for director Hwang, he says he was so stressed shooting series one that his teeth started falling out. And the show’s astonishing success has only brought him more pressure. “I think this is the busiest time of my entire life, and it’s been going on for two years,” he says. “Despite the huge success that season one enjoyed, I have just been working non-stop, preparing for this subsequent season and creating it.” Fame and success haven’t made much difference to his life, he notes, because he’s had no time to enjoy them. “I didn’t really have the time or room in my life to experience any other changes. I have been living and breathing in Squid Game world for the past five years, since 2019.” And Hwang is refreshingly candid about what brought him back. “Money!” he laughs. “Although the first season was such a huge global success, I honestly didn’t make much. So doing the second season will help compensate me for the success of the first one.” The irony of all this is that his work is fuelled by a staunch critique of late-stage capitalism – and the things some people will do for money. Squid Game, he explains, was always intended to come with “a serious message” for its audience. “I lost my father at the age of five, and so our family was not the most well off, to say the least,” he says, linking himself to the players in the game who are all drowning in debt. “My mother had to go through a lot in order to bring her children up. And I think I can safely say that I had a lot of experience with being poor and having a tough time making ends meet. “At the time, when I enrolled in college in the 1990s, we were the last generation of students that were heavily involved in the democratic movement in Korea. And so, I spent my 20s thinking a lot about – and also actually participating in – such protests. I thought a lot about political messages and the theme of capitalism. That kind of background has led me to become a film-maker who is drawn to the issues of global inequality and capitalism.” Even though Squid Game’s first series also consisted of regular cliffhangers that made it one of the most instantly bingeable series ever made, its broader purpose, Hwang says, was to make people think. Series two is intended to do the same, at a time when there is plenty in the wider world to think about. “We made season one during the Covid pandemic, and when we were creating season two, the pandemic was over. However, if we stop to ask whether the world has become a better place, I don’t think I can say yes to that.” Notably, series two contains a voting element for the players, one that was written and filmed in the same year that some of the world’s largest and most influential nations have gone to the polls in crucial elections. This is not by accident. “We have been witnessing so much more conflict and division,” says Hwang, “and also there are so many things that are continuing to threaten humanity – the great crisis we face due to climate change, as well as significant and very harsh wars and conflicts that are going on in many corners of the world. All of that has been seen everywhere around the world, really. And those are some themes that I hoped to reflect on in season two.” That doesn’t mean series two of Squid Game is going to turn in to a version of Radio 4’s Moral Maze. Gi-Hun returns armed and angry and his mission will take him back to the island and back into the contest. Which means there will be new games for him to play. “When we were creating season two, there were some contenders [games] that didn’t make it into season one that we brought back. And also, thanks to the experience we had of creating season one, there were some games that we were able to create,” says Hwang. But just what those games might be, he’s not letting on. “Much like season one, all of them are close to children’s games, where they have to be very simple and easy for everyone to instantly understand,” he teases. Indeed, simplicity is one of Hwang’s watchwords – and that might go some way to explaining how Squid Game took over the world in the first place. “During season one, I always wanted to go simple,” he says. “It could be the games or it could be the symbols – the shapes, the masks, the sets. I just wanted them to be very simple. Because the simplest things transcend all barriers. Being simple is the secret sauce to this being a success.”
Squid Game season 2 will feature games cut from the first season
"Much like season 1, all of them are close to children's games, where they have to be very simple and easy for everyone to instantly understand."
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Last year, the director and creator of the ultra-violent South Korean drama Squid Game, Hwang Dong-hyuk, was scrolling through YouTube when he came across a video that stopped him dead. "It was these African children playing Red Light, Green Light," he says, referring to the now infamous playground game (we’d call it grandmother’s footsteps) that featured in Squid Game. "The biggest surprise for me was just how far and fast the show has reached all over the world," says Hwang. "Despite the fact that this is a series that kids cannot watch." Whether or not those kids had watched the 18-rated TV show, the video clip – and countless others like it – proved that its influence was global. In the dying embers of the Covid crisis, somehow a Korean-language take on The Hunger Games took over the world. Released in late 2021, the story of a deadly set of children’s games being played by debt-laden down-and-outs dressed in green tracksuits on a mysterious island, is Netflix’s biggest ever show. It ranked number one in Netflix’s top ten in 94 countries across the world, including the USA, India, Brazil and Turkey. More than 142 million households spent over 1.65 billion hours watching it in the first 28 days of its release. Here was a genuine cultural phenomenon, leading to a worldwide resurgence of interest in Korean culture. It earned Hwang Dong-hyuk an Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series, making him the first Asian winner and the first native Korean in the category. It was also the first time a non-English language series had triumphed. Even so, he’s still surprised to see African children mimicking his creation. "I think it came as a shock to me to really see how much influence and impact we have in this day and age," says 53-year-old Hwang. Squid Game was a global smash that almost no one, its creator included, expected. Now, on Boxing Day, the games begin again, with a third and final series set for 2025. "Back when I was working on season one, honestly, I didn’t have any thoughts about being able to do a second or if there would be a sequel at all," says Hwang. "And so I went into it thinking that I would be happy if the story ended with the last scene of season one." In that scene Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), the winner of the games – the last man standing after six days of win-or-die brutality – is about to board a plane with his winnings of 45.6 billion Korean won (about £25 million), but then he changes his mind. Series two picks up the story three years later, with Gi-hun determined to find the people behind the game and put an end to their vicious sport. As for director Hwang, he says he was so stressed shooting series one that his teeth started falling out. And the show’s astonishing success has only brought him more pressure. "I think this is the busiest time of my entire life, and it’s been going on for two years," he says. "Despite the huge success that season one enjoyed, I have just been working non-stop, preparing for this subsequent season and creating it." Fame and success haven’t made much difference to his life, he notes, because he’s had no time to enjoy them. "I didn’t really have the time or room in my life to experience any other changes. I have been living and breathing in Squid Game world for the past five years, since 2019." And Hwang is refreshingly candid about what brought him back. "Money!" he laughs. "Although the first season was such a huge global success, I honestly didn’t make much. So doing the second season will help compensate me for the success of the first one." The irony of all this is that his work is fuelled by a staunch critique of late-stage capitalism – and the things some people will do for money. Squid Game, he explains, was always intended to come with "a serious message" for its audience. "I lost my father at the age of five, and so our family was not the most well off, to say the least," he says, linking himself to the players in the game who are all drowning in debt. "My mother had to go through a lot in order to bring her children up. And I think I can safely say that I had a lot of experience with being poor and having a tough time making ends meet. "At the time, when I enrolled in college in the 1990s, we were the last generation of students that were heavily involved in the democratic movement in Korea. And so, I spent my 20s thinking a lot about – and also actually participating in – such protests. I thought a lot about political messages and the theme of capitalism. That kind of background has led me to become a film-maker who is drawn to the issues of global inequality and capitalism." Even though Squid Game’s first series also consisted of regular cliffhangers that made it one of the most instantly bingeable series ever made, its broader purpose, Hwang says, was to make people think. Series two is intended to do the same, at a time when there is plenty in the wider world to think about. "We made season one during the Covid pandemic, and when we were creating season two, the pandemic was over. However, if we stop to ask whether the world has become a better place, I don’t think I can say yes to that." Notably, series two contains a voting element for the players, one that was written and filmed in the same year that some of the world’s largest and most influential nations have gone to the polls in crucial elections. This is not by accident. "We have been witnessing so much more conflict and division," says Hwang, "and also there are so many things that are continuing to threaten humanity – the great crisis we face due to climate change, as well as significant and very harsh wars and conflicts that are going on in many corners of the world. All of that has been seen everywhere around the world, really. And those are some themes that I hoped to reflect on in season two." That doesn’t mean series two of Squid Game is going to turn in to a version of Radio 4’s Moral Maze. Gi-Hun returns armed and angry and his mission will take him back to the island and back into the contest. Which means there will be new games for him to play. "When we were creating season two, there were some contenders [games] that didn’t make it into season one that we brought back. And also, thanks to the experience we had of creating season one, there were some games that we were able to create," says Hwang. But just what those games might be, he’s not letting on. "Much like season one, all of them are close to children’s games, where they have to be very simple and easy for everyone to instantly understand," he teases. Indeed, simplicity is one of Hwang’s watchwords – and that might go some way to explaining how Squid Game took over the world in the first place. "During season one, I always wanted to go simple," he says. "It could be the games or it could be the symbols – the shapes, the masks, the sets. I just wanted them to be very simple. Because the simplest things transcend all barriers. Being simple is the secret sauce to this being a success." The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Squid Game season 2 is released on Netflix on Boxing Day. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
On set in South Korea, RT gets an early glimpse of the follow-up to the hit drama, Squid Game
Add Squid Game to your watchlist How do you follow-up Netflix’s biggest ever show? For the director of Squid Game, Hwang Dong-hyuk, coming up with Squid Game 2 was a huge challenge — not least because, as he admits speaking on set in South Korea, “nearly everyone died!” View oEmbed on the source website Nearly, but not quite everyone. The show’s hero Gi-hun, played by Lee Jung-jae, was the sole character who did make it through the first series’ gauntlet of deadly children’s games to take the first prize of 45.6 billion Korean Won (around £28 million). Now, he’s back in the game. “Remember,” says director Hwang, “that at the end of season one, Gi-hun promised to find the guys who host the games. That’s the big storyline of season two: he goes into the game once again to find who that is. That’s why we’re here again.” “Here” is a production studio in the South Korean city of Daejeon, an hour south of Seoul, on the set of Squid Game’s infamous maze stairs, a series of staircases looking like something created by MC Escher, which take the contestants from their lodgings to each of the games. Next to the maze stairs is the contestants’ dormitory — and with details of the new series plot kept top secret, it’s on our way between the two sets that Radio Times spots a clue. Passing the costume department, alongside the ranks of familiar green tracksuits and pink guards’ jumpsuits, we notice a box of patches: Xs and Os for the Squid Game players to wear alongside their numbers. What could it mean? “Aha!” says Hwang. “Well, if season one was about class differences, in season two I wanted to show people siding with other people and the animosity that creates. So those Xs and Os are simple symbols for players voting for who wants to stay in the game and who wants to leave.” Voting, factionalism, anger? In 2024? Once again it looks like Squid Game has tapped into the zeitgeist…
Queen Charlotte star Golda Rosheuvel teases Bridgerton Easter eggs in new series
The universe sort of swirls round within itself, so it will be fascinating to see whether the fans notice little nuances."
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. While filming the second season of Netflix hit Bridgerton (wig the size of a mature shrub, 20kg dress strapped on like a bomb disposal suit), actor Golda Rosheuvel, who plays Queen Charlotte in the drama, received a text message. “It said I needed to go to a meeting that evening with [Bridgerton creator] Shonda Rhimes. So I got on to Zoom, there were a few other faces on the screen, a few things were announced and then Shonda said, ‘Oh yeah… we’re going to see if we can do a spin-off about Queen Charlotte.'" Rosheuvel, who’s speaking to Radio Times magazine via Zoom, does her own impression of the shocked emoji to illustrate the group reaction. But actually, she says, it makes total sense: an origin story for her character, the Queen of Great Britain from 1761, after her marriage to King George III, is an origin story for the hit series itself. “It’s set in the same world as Bridgerton, with the same costumes and colours. We wanted to show how Charlotte came to be, the first steps of a 17-year-old young woman who came to this country from Germany and married George, a man she’d never met before. You see the first encounter of George and Charlotte, which is beautiful. And then you see how they live and how they interact with each other and how they get used to each other. Ultimately it is a love story.” Rosheuvel also points out that in spite of the title, Queen Charlotte isn’t just about the young Charlotte, who’s played by India Amarteifio, the young King George (Corey Mylchreest), or the queen in her middle years, when Rosheuvel takes over the role again. “Lady Danbury and Violet and the whole matriarchy are there, too, both young and as they are in Bridgerton. It’s about how these women came to be – how a woman of colour, in Danbury’s case, got into the court and then all of the emotional love, the relationships between the women and how they were built up. But throughout, it’s all kept under the umbrella of Bridgerton.” The mechanics that enable the older Queen Charlotte and her 17-year-old persona to exist in the same universe are described by Roshuevel as “a behind-the-scenes [version of] Bridgerton”. The two series overlap in flash-forward and flashback. “...So where in Bridgerton I might have been at the Presentation Ball and then leave the room, in Queen Charlotte I walk straight into a scene that’s in the spin-off.” This format functions like a series of elaborate footnotes. Queen Charlotte offers an explanation for Charlotte’s psychology and character in her later years – haughty, magisterial, aloof – by showing how minor German princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was treated when she first came to England. “Shonda has been really clever in connecting the worlds, connecting the two series together,” says Rosheuvel. “Lady Whistledown [the anonymous author of the weekly gossip pamphlet that scandalises society, known as ‘the Ton’] is there, the young and older Danbury [played as a young woman by Arsema Thomas and as an adult by Adjoa Andoh] are there. "The universe sort of swirls round within itself, so it will be fascinating to see whether the fans notice little nuances and Easter eggs that we’ve put in both productions. It’s a fascinating way of telling the story.” Rosheuvel is delighted with the story Queen Charlotte tells, too. Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz doesn’t appear in Julia Quinn’s source novels at all: her inclusion as a mixed-race queen in Bridgerton was Shonda Rhimes’s idea, placing race front and centre for the first time in a TV period drama. “It’s great to see somebody like me in a wonderful, amazing, fantastical, beautiful, glitzy and glamorous period drama,” says Rosheuvel. “That’s really important to celebrate.” View Green Video on the source website And then there’s the serious stuff: Queen Charlotte gets all the best hairdos. “Yes, we have broken the record on Queen Charlotte for the heaviest wig! There are two that are my personal favourites. There’s a wig in an opera scene that is the tallest thing I’ve ever worn in my life. And then there’s the wig I wear when I’m talking to my children and they’re telling me what a terrible mother I am.” Ultimately, however, in a show with two queens playing revolving doors, the main requirement is that they need to be believably the same person. Rosheuvel says that, because of the way the story is told, she and Amarteifio were essentially filming separate series – they had no scenes together, but they did cross paths. “India and I met very briefly, and we discussed the fact that it was her role – I don’t have ownership of it. Yes, I created it but I’m a champion for the younger generation, the younger storytellers coming up in the world and embodying these characters for themselves. I hope she’s had the best time, because I have. India would do a scene in the morning, and I’d do a scene in the afternoon, and we’d pass each other, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, nice wig, girl!’” But she must have had a doppelgänger moment when first presented with an actor meant to be her 30-years-younger self? “Ha! Well, we don’t think that we look alike, but people say she’s the spitting image of the younger me. Although I have these two moles here and here,” she says, pointing to her face, “that India doesn’t have. So they made her these two prosthetic moles to complete the picture! It’s a bit weird… but it’s great.” India Amarteifio on playing the young Queen Charlotte Your first thoughts on getting the part… "The immediate response was terror. Golda’s Charlotte is such a beloved character in the Bridgerton world. This was my first lead, I’m 20, it was a lot of pressure. But I read an interview that Golda did in which she said that the Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton isn’t based on facts. She’s a historical figure, but this isn’t a documentary, it’s a fantasy world in which real people exist." On the plus side, you get the cutest little dog, Pom Pom. What was she like? "She was great. Her name was Vicki and she was bought specifically for the show by an animal trainer who also has monkeys and cats and supplies a lot of the animals for Bridgerton and for Queen Charlotte. Vicki was very pampered. She had this little area on set that was hers and hers alone." There’s plenty of formal dancing for you and your co-star Corey Mylchreest to learn. How were your ballroom skills before this role? "I’m actually a trained dancer and singer! But then, as I got older, I went to the Sylvia Young Theatre School and I started to really love movies. Then, as I kept injuring myself all the time with dance, I thought I can’t be abusing my body like this any more. Why don’t I go down another route?" As a woman of mixed heritage, what has the success of Bridgerton meant to you? "[Showrunner] Shonda Rhimes is at the forefront of this movement of including people in genres where they didn’t exist before — people just weren’t writing shows for people of colour to be in period costumes. I completely relate to this — I never used to watch period dramas. I’m half Black and white. My family looks like lots of different people. I didn’t see myself represented so I didn’t ever feel a need to watch them. But now? Now I love period pieces." By Toby Earle Corey Mylchreest on playing the young King George III What did you know about George III before you came to this part? "If I wasn’t acting, I’d want to be a historian, so I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t know anything about George! We look at The Madness of King George or [the musical] Hamilton, which are all in their own style great representations, but they’re not necessarily the most accurate. "In 2015, 20,000 pages of George’s diaries and letters were released and they fed into Andrew Roberts’s biography, which I did read. What I learnt is that whoever met George never saw him as a real person. He was first and foremost “the King”. That is incredibly tragic — how can he work out who he is when his entire waking existence is in service of this version of himself? What’s beautiful about this story is that George finds himself in his love for Charlotte." We know about the so-called “madness” — does Queen Charlotte address that? "The series and George as a character definitely explore mental health. But for the audience, for the story and to pay homage to the man that I researched, it’s important that we don’t explicitly diagnose what it was he was dealing with. He’s just trying to be a normal young man, but he has this affliction and it’s incredibly painful." Whose costumes were harder work, yours or India’s? "The women had it worse. I had heels, stockings (which I changed to tights because they wouldn’t stay up), breeches that go up to your belly button and lovely linen shirts. No, I didn’t get to keep one. I’m still a bit angry about that…" By Toby Earle Read more: Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story review – Unlike Bridgerton in the best way Queen Charlotte stars reveal how prequel is different to Bridgerton Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story will land on Netflix on Thursday 4th May 2023. Looking for something else to watch? Check out our guide to the best series on Netflix and best movies on Netflix, or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide. Try Radio Times magazine today and get 12 issues for only £1 with delivery to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Jodie Whittaker: 'If I don't go back to Doctor Who, I'll be devastated'
Jodie Whittaker talks to Radio Times Magazine about leaving Doctor Who - and maybe coming back.
Nobody likes goodbyes – but when you’re an inveterate weeper like Jodie Whittaker, the kind of person who can barely get through a Christmas advert without sniffles, endings are unbearable. “I am that person,” she says. “I cry. I cry if someone else cries and I’m not even upset. So my last scene? That last day? It was so emotional.” “That last day” was Whittaker’s final day as the Doctor. Doctor Who isn’t always shot in scene order – a finale can just as well be filmed on day one – but in this case her regeneration scene was the last thing she filmed as the time-travelling Time Lord. “Ninety per cent of that last day I was basically in bits,” she says. “It’s the best job I’ve ever done and I’ve loved every second of it, but it was the right time. It was like giving yourself stitches – you know you need to do it, but it felt like s**t.” And so she cried. A lot. Jodie Whittaker is, by her own admission, an emotional person, full of smiles, tears and – as in this interview – near-constant laughter. “I’m always on the brink of tears. And I’ve had to contain that playing this character more than I do most characters I’ve ever played. Usually being on the brink is like my winning ticket. With the Doctor I’m much happier [she says it with jazz hands] than I normally am.” Whittaker credits departing showrunner Chris Chibnall – who also wrote for her on three series of Broadchurch as the endlessly browbeaten Beth Latimer – for bringing out the real Jodie. “For a long time I don’t think anyone knew that I had a Yorkshire accent and laughed a lot. Had Chris not been the person to give me this job I don’t think I’d have been seen for it.” Chibnall got to know Whittaker on Broadchurch, where he saw the person in between takes, when she wasn’t performing or doing “troubled”. That person is, in her own description, “a bit fidgety, a bit twitchy, doesn’t sit still, tries to have about 15 conversations but doesn’t quite get to the end of any of them, winds everyone up because I’m really exhausting and I don’t know when to shut up…” It’s true – the real Jodie does talk a dime a dozen, spiralling off on errant, TARDIS-style tangents that are both maddening and fascinating (ranging from her terrible handwriting and an anecdote about spiders to her well-documented love of Coldplay). One thing she loves about Doctor Who and the passing of the torch is that it legitimises this level of discussion. “This is the only job where you get to go to the next person, ‘Can I just tell you what I think?’ whether they want it or not. David [Tennant], Matt [Smith] and Peter [Capaldi] never tried to say to me, ‘This is what it’s going to be like,’ but the one headline they all said was, ‘It’s like nothing you’ve ever done.’ So what I would say [to Ncuti Gatwa, the new Doctor] is to just be really, really in the moment. I realised within an hour of starting that I was going to have the time of my life.” She says that although she hasn’t actually met Gatwa in person yet, they have spoken about the role. “He’s going to be amazing. Even just hearing his voice you can tell he is someone who speaks with a smile. And I absolutely love that in people. That kind of energy for the Doctor is beautiful.” She delivers that line with a thunderous expletive and I tell her that it’s funny to hear Whittaker swear. In fact, she swears quite a lot. “Why do you have to pick up on one of my flaws?” she says, laughing. “When I’m at work I’m a nightmare. Especially when I forget a line. It really rolls off the tongue. It’s like, ‘Beep. BEEP. BEEEEEP!” It’s only striking because we haven’t heard her swear much before. She is, after all, the Doctor, the lead role on a flagship BBC programme that brings with it an ambassadorial brief. There’s a scrutiny that comes with the job. With Whittaker, it came from the moment her casting was announced. “This was a massive break but I was 36, I’d already worked. So I knew the bits of my job I liked and the bits I didn’t. I’d already decided a long time before this job what I’m comfortable with, and a lot of that is blocking out noise. So therefore zero social media: don’t need to know. And then it’s just about knowing you’re working for a show that’s bigger than you. Just don’t be cocky and disrespect it.” Loved this Big RT Interview? Check out these... Funding, streaming and the future: BBC boss on the next 100 years Charlie Hunnam: "I'm not fully proud of my conduct through those years" Bryan Cranston: "At some point relatively soon I'm going to hit the pause button" That includes fan interactions because everyone wants a selfie with the Doctor. “If you don’t want people coming up to you, particularly fans, don’t do this job. To me, if someone’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’m a massive Doctor Who fan!’ that’s great. I wasn’t a Whovian beforehand but I’m a massive fan now.” Not all her fan experiences have been so positive, however. When it was announced in 2017 that a woman would take the previously male role of the Doctor, some disgruntled fans criticised the move, even starting a Twitter hashtag called #notmydoctor. Despite avoiding social media, it’s clear Whittaker was aware of the vitriol, which has continued on and off throughout her tenure. “‘No bras in the TARDIS!’” she barks back in a silly voice. “‘Come on! What’s your argument? I’m. Playing. An. Alien!’ There’s a fine line between the hilarity of it and the fact that it’s terrifying that a woman being given a particular job can cause so much rage. It’s just a tiny vial of rage, of course, but the anger, the negativity, are always the loudest.” A fact that isn’t mentioned much is that Whittaker’s time in the TARDIS has coincided with her being a mum to a young daughter and, this year, to another baby. This is by design: she has been adamant that she doesn’t talk about her children, to the point where she hasn’t even made their names public. Even so, Doctor Who is a lot of work, a lot of time away from home – and any parent will tell you that the simplest job changes completely with a toddler in tow. “It opens up a can of worms to talk about it,” she says, explaining her reluctance to cover the topic, “but I have been so lucky, because I have an amazing support network. Without that the wheels would have come off.” View oEmbed on the source website She does say that for all of her final episode, which was filmed this time last year, she was in the early stages of pregnancy. “I was very sick and no one knew. [co-star and friend] Mandip Gill didn’t know because I didn’t want to worry her. She did keep commenting on how much chocolate I was eating – ‘That’s your third Penguin!’ Filming and feeling sick – that’s when I really felt sorry for myself.” Now she is, she says, “on maternity leave. I didn’t think at 40 that I’d be going into an interview and saying I’m on maternity leave. But I don’t really need to think about work at this time, so I’m really lucky.” Whenever she does return to work, she has the satisfaction of knowing she won’t be repeating herself – there’s no other character quite like the Doctor. And she knows that old Doctors never retire. David Tennant, for example, is back next year for the show’s 60th anniversary celebrations. “I said to [new showrunner] Russell T Davies, ‘Don’t ever think of it as being ‘too soon’,” she says. “If I’m not asked back, I will be devastated. I know it might need to be a few years, but Russell knows – I’m going to be like a little terrier at his heels.” Doctor Who is available to stream on BBC iPlayer with episodes of the classic series also available on BritBox – you can sign up for a 7-day free trial here. Check out more of our Sci-Fi coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight.
Maureen Lipman talks DNA Journey, Celebrity Gogglebox and TV habits
The actor and writer spoke to Radio Times magazine about her current favourite programmes and why she wanted to be a part of ITV's genealogical docuseries.
As Dame Maureen Lipman makes an appearance on the new season of ITV's DNA Journey next week, Radio Times magazine caught up with her to find out all about her time on the show. The Coronation Street actor also revealed what she's been watching on TV recently, and whether or not she will ever make a return to Celebrity Gogglebox. This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. What’s the view from your sofa? At the moment I don’t really have a sofa. That’s between me and Sofology... but I have a chair and I have a fake fire, and like to sit there with a glass of wine. And what do you watch? I’ll watch what’s on Sky Arts and then I’ll scroll down and if there’s something like Countryfile on I’ll watch that: it gives me some peace. I don’t care whodunnit. Not for me. What I’m really enjoying is This Is Going to Hurt. It’s wonderful. Beautifully acted, very funny, but also hard and dark. I believe it. What won’t you watch? I hate cookery programmes. The other night, the news from the Ukraine was absolutely heinous and then the television changed from the new... and it’s Nigella. Obviously, this isn’t Nigella’s fault, but there she is saying, “I like steak. I like to do it with double cream...” And I’m just thinking, “This is so inappropriate.” You’re in the new series of ITV’s DNA Journey with Rula Lenska. Why did you want to do it? I didn’t really want to do it because I’m prejudiced against what I call weeping documentaries. Even The Repair Shop, which I used to love, has gone completely lachrymose. And also because I knew that Rula was a Countess, whereas I was from some dismal shtetl. As it happened, it turned out to be one of the nicest things I’ve ever done. You make a great couple… I didn’t really know her until we were both on Corrie. It was great when she was on because I had someone else like me – if you could describe her as like me. She’s a bit more glamorous. We were the elderly crumpets. Well, she was the elderly crumpet. I’m just elderly. But I think if you’re at this age, and you’re not a couple – I lost my partner [Guido Castro, to COVID-related complications] in January last year – then you do rely on friends. Because, my God, even with my life, which would seem on the surface to be very busy, you do spend a lot of nights sitting in front of the cathode ray thinking, “I don’t want to be here.” We miss seeing you on Celebrity Gogglebox with Gyles Brandreth. Is that all done? It is from my point of view. I’m sure they’ll put someone else with Gyles. I went into Gogglebox imagining that they wanted me for my wit and my brain. Of course, they just want to show you willies and for you to be shocked. Honestly, we were really funny together, but none of that was used. And if they don’t want to use what we gave them, f**k them. You were involved in a couple of public spats about cancel culture and Helen Mirren playing Golda Meir. Do you regret putting your head above the parapet? My kids would like me to rein it in. I don’t mean to be provocative, but if you are an opinionated person or if you care about injustice, then you do tend to speak out. I don’t think it’s made me very popular to be anti-Corbyn or indeed to take Ed Miliband on about his attitude to Israel. I’m not on the BAFTA list any more, or the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. Those days have gone. But criticism always hurts whatever age you are. I don’t feel “released” to be a cantankerous old bag, even if I am one. I like things to be nice as well. You can read the full interview with Dame Maureen Lipman in this week's issue of Radio Times magazine. Subscribe now to get each issue delivered to your door. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey. DNA Journey with Dame Maureen Lipman and Rula Lenska airs on Tuesday 12th April at 9pm on ITV and ITV Hub. Find something to watch tonight with our TV Guide.
David and Georgia Tennant, Michael Sheen and Anna Lundberg on what is and isn’t 'Staged' on their Zoom drama
The Staged stars spoke exclusively to Radio Times about the challenges of filming the Zoom comedy drama at home during lockdown.
Georgia Tennant has been married to David Tennant for nearly a decade, but it took until last year for the actors to finally work together. It’s not been for a lack of trying. “Nobody seemed to want to let me do it,” explains Georgia. “For one part I was told by a casting director that I wasn’t a convincing partner for him… I was like, ‘But we’re married. With quite a few kids!’ So, basically, every actor who could possibly play the part would have to be eliminated in order for me to be allowed to play his wife…” It’s taken a global pandemic for those stringent criteria to be met – and now, thanks to Staged, Tennant and Michael Sheen’s BBC comedy drama about the two stars trying to rehearse a play in lockdown via Zoom, Mr and Mrs Tennant have finally got to play Mr and Mrs Tennant. “I don’t think this is something we would have imagined we’d have done,” says David, 49, who is sporting a moustache that Georgia calls “slightly creepy”. “But then suddenly in March, Around the World in 80 Days is closed down and I’m airlifted out of South Africa [he was filming a new TV adaptation currently in production] and nothing's happening, all bets are off. And then, well, the only thing we can do has to be from our house. And this idea presented itself.” No other actor could enter the Tennants’ west-London home, so if anyone was going to play David’s wife, it would have to be David’s wife. “And anyway, imagine having to tell my wife that she was being played by someone else,” laughs David. Except that that is precisely the big joke that kicks off Staged series two. America, it is imagined, has seen the first series of Staged and wants to make their own version. It’s a word-for-word rewrite of the UK version but with “David Tennant” and “Michael Sheen” recast with other players. So begins six more 15-minute vignettes of paranoid actors, lockdown delirium and blurred faces (and their partners) shouting at laptops. Funnily enough, say both Tennants as we talk on Zoom, they experienced similar low points last year, particularly with home-schooling. “It was the worst,” says Georgia, 36. “It brought out the worst in us as parents.” “Awful,” says David. “And the worst in our children.” “There was one point,” says Georgia, “in something like week two, where I went, ‘I’m sorry. I just have to…’ and I climbed out the window and sat on our roof. It was the only place I could go where I knew that no one would think to look for me, because why would Mummy be sat on the roof?” David looks mildly concerned at this statement. “I wasn’t going to throw myself off the roof,” says Georgia. “It was the only place I could find to sit! And also, at that point we had no idea how long it was going to last for. And the idea that this could be until the children were 18… I thought, ‘I can’t do this. I’ve had so many kids – no one told me there was gonna be a pandemic.’” The pair have five children at home: Ty, 18, Olive, nine, Wilfred, seven, Doris, five, and baby Birdie, who was born in October 2019. To add to the fun, both parents thought that they had contracted the virus early on. “We’d both been sick, presumably with COVID although it was back in the days when you couldn’t get tested,” says David. “It wasn’t long after you got better that we started filming,” says Georgia. “So the whole thing with Staged was, ‘We need to make this easy as possible’. And if we can make those characters really easy to get into, because we’ve only got 20 minutes to film a scene between childcare, then let’s tweak it so we’re not having to sit there going, ‘What would my motivation be?’ Because at that time our motivation was really just to stay awake.” It meant that Staged offered a teasing insight in to the Tennants and their home life, albeit one that they stress has always been under their full control. “It’s not like we’re letting a crew in,” says David, “it’s just us with our laptops and our mobile phones filming each other.” The fact remains, however, that Staged is their first shared screen appearance since they met while filming an episode of Doctor Who, which aired in 2008. He was the Doctor, and she – then Georgia Moffett – was the daughter of fifth Doctor, Peter Davison. We all cooed at how sweet it was that together they’d jumped through a heart-shaped hole in the space-time continuum. But the same Whovian circle of love meant their marriage attracted the interest of the tabloids, and they became wary. “At the beginning of our relationship it felt like people were trying to get in and get information we didn’t want to give them,” says Georgia. “Actually, when people started caring less, it felt like we let our guard down slightly.” “We’ve definitely been on a bit of a journey towards being more comfortable with sharing bits of ourselves, haven’t we?” says David. “But we’re probably more guarded than doing something like this would make us appear.” Staged is just one part of the Tennants relaxing their guard in public – Georgia now acts under the name Georgia Tennant rather than Georgia Moffett and there is a growing Tennant presence on social media. But it’s Georgia, not David, who is active on Instagram. “The social media explosion happened at a moment in my life where I was losing my anonymity,” explains David. “So it felt like that was the last thing I wanted to get involved in. Now I can see that if you use it well and confidently it can work, but I feel like I’m so far away from catching that bus that I’m just gonna enjoy being the person who’s not on it.” By contrast, Georgia regularly posts pictures of David and the children (albeit not their faces). “For me, it’s the opposite. Social media came at a time when I felt slightly like I didn’t have an identity. In that world [entertainment and acting], you don’t want to be just somebody’s wife. So this has given me an identity that I felt like I had slightly lost a grip of.” David sanctions any posts with him in them, which means that Staged plus Instagram has had them working together on two fronts. “I think exclusively now I will only work with David,” says Georgia, which sounds like a joke until David says that they do in fact have another his-and-hers project in the works. “Before, I thought husbands and wives working together was really cringey,” says Georgia. “Then I listened to Judi Dench – actually on your podcast [David looks astonished that his wife knows he has a podcast] – talking about working with her husband Michael Williams. “She said, ‘Why would I not? I get on really well with him. And he’s my best friend.’ And I thought, that’s exactly how to think about it. “We enjoy it, and I feel like Staged has proved it’s possible. I’d like to go back to that casting director and say, “See? I can play his wife!” Michael Sheen and Anna Lundberg Ten minutes into a Zoom call with Michael Sheen and his actor partner Anna Lundberg, a gentle mewling is heard off-screen. The couple exchange a few “I’ll go”s, before Anna apologises and pops upstairs to try to get their one-year-old back to sleep. “That’s why there aren’t many scenes in Staged with just the two of us,” says 51-year-old Sheen. “We had to wait until she was having a nap to do any filming. If the baby wakes up, one of us has to go off.” “That’s why I’m in more scenes with Georgia [Tennant] than Michael and I together,” says Anna when she comes back in front of the computer, the baby successfully placated. “Those have been filmed when she’s been asleep.” This is not how television programmes are normally made, but then Staged is not a normal television programme. With both the Tennants and the Sheens having to fit filming in their own homes around childcare and lockdown restrictions, it’s all been cobbled together, fitted in, done on the hoof. Understandably, perhaps, the scenes where the two couples finally get to sit down together as a four are their favourites, because they offer some respite. “They tend to happen in the night because of the babies being asleep and there tends to be alcohol involved as well,” says Sheen. “So they’re a bit… looser.” It’s somehow pleasing to think of the two couples sharing a glass of wine and a spot of chitchat, even if it is on camera. Anna Lundberg hadn’t met Georgia Tennant until the London premiere of Good Omens, the show that pitched their two partners together as an angel and a demon. That was in May 2019 – aeons ago in lockdown time. “I’ve only met her once or twice after that,” says Anna, “but she’s lovely. We were following each other on Instagram and messaging back and forth because we both had babies at the same time. I think we soon discovered that we do have quite a lot in common.” Lyra and Birdie, their daughters, were born in September and October 2019 respectively. “I mean, David and Georgia are old hands, obviously – they’ve got about 20 of them,” says Sheen, who has a grown-up daughter of his own (Lily, 21) with Kate Beckinsale. “But the fact that we did have babies so close to each other, that has been a big bonding thing as well.” The two newest arrivals have now met, Sheen says, and as you’d expect, are a regular topic of conversation (“The experience of changing a baby’s nappy at three in the morning never really leaves you”). Lyra has finally been able to meet her Swedish grandparents (“They missed out on her entire first year really. So I’m just very glad that they were able to come for her birthday,” Anna says) and the Tennants and Sheen/Lundbergs now count themselves as friends. It’s a friendship that is now close enough to allow room for some gentle (and not so gentle) mockery. This has formed the backbone for writer Simon Evans’s best scenes, turning David, Michael, Georgia and Anna into sitcom characters in their own right, making jokes at one another’s expense. "The more near the knuckle it gets, the funnier that we find it,” says Sheen. “In fact, that’s been an issue a couple of times – we’ll be doing a scene and improvising and David has said things that have made me laugh so much that it’s ruined the scene. When it does get very, very close to the truth, then that just makes it much funnier.” That said, even as they sit in front of the brick fireplace that’s become so familiar as a backdrop in Staged, trying to get their baby to sleep, both Sheen and Lundberg are keen to stress that there’s a gap between their on-screen and off-screen personas. “I don’t think that I would have coped with you, if you were the version that you are in the show,” says Anna. “We are very careful to try and make it seem as natural as possible when we’re doing it, but it’s scripted,” says Sheen. “A lot of people go, ‘Oh, did you just improvise the whole thing?’ That really annoys Simon [Evans] because Simon wrote it. And Simon has no idea what our relationship is like. I mean, none of us had ever met Simon before we started filming it. Actually, he’s written and directed two series of this – and we still haven’t met him.” If you’re a Staged fan it’s a little uncanny to do a Zoom call with Michael Sheen and Anna Lundberg and talk to them about a show that consists entirely of Zoom calls when both of them are “on location”. “I’ve come to quite enjoy the fact that whenever I do Zoom calls with anybody who’s seen Staged, they think they’re in Staged because they look like they’re on the set,” says Sheen. The brick fireplace is real; the house is their home in south Wales. “You are seeing our house,” he continues, “but in our case, people see literally one square of it because that’s all we show. That’s partly a conscious choice because we don’t want people seeing around our house.” David and Georgia Tennant film in multiple rooms of their home but that, Sheen says, is because they had no choice. “They were sort of forced into it because they’ve got a house full of children, so there are only certain places they can be at a certain time. I wouldn’t be as comfortable with filming stuff all around the house.” Nonetheless, the Lundberg/Sheen partnership has become a key relationship in Staged, with Anna the stern Swede with the encyclopaedic knowledge and the tossed-off Viking references set against Michael, the slightly shambolic curmudgeon with the unstoppable facial hair. View oEmbed on the source website “I didn’t even know that I was going to be in Staged until just before you were about to start filming the pilot script,” says Anna. “You said to me, ‘Oh, and by the way, you’re in it.’ I didn’t have much time to think about it.” “Well, just from a practical point of view the only people who could be in it are people who are in the house because you are in lockdown. That meant us,” answers Sheen. “So it was very handy that we’re both actors.” The complication was that they were actors with a new baby who couldn’t leave the house. [When we speak, Wales is back in full lockdown.] But Michael and Anna say that in their case lockdown with a baby has been a blessing. “We’re very fortunate to be able to say this, but the arrival of the baby has had a bigger impact than the coronavirus on our lives,” says Sheen. “The plan when Lyra was born was just to spend time together as a family at home. We’ve got a garden and the weather was good in the spring and summer in Wales, so for us it has all been rather lovely.” “And the luxury of Michael just being at home has really been amazing and Lyra has certainly loved it,” Anna adds. “Otherwise Michael’s always sort of popping in and out and now you’ve really been able to fully be here. We’ve been able to connect together as a family, and that routine has kept us sane.” Staged season two continues Monday at 9:45pm on BBC One. While you wait for the next episode to air, 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.
Spitting Image creator Roger Law on bringing satire to Britbox as he reveals what he really thinks of Boris
Benji Wilson talks to Roger Law, the man who brings Spitting Image's flamboyant puppets to life.
COVID, Brexit, Donald Trump, the climate crisis, doomsters, gloomsters, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Dilyn the Downing Street dog. You may either laugh or cry. Which is why, in the annus horribilis that is 2020, there has never been a better time for the return of Spitting Image. “What’s going on, it’s just terrifying when you stop to think about it,” says Roger Law, one half of the original creative pair that made Spitting Image the benchmark for wrecking-ball satire in the 1980s and 90s. “I suppose that’s the reason I wanted to go back to it. The time is definitely right.” It’s been 24 years since Law and co-creator Peter Fluck saw their latex puppets with the podgy fingers and fabulously foul mouths waddled off stage by ITV. At its peak, Spitting Image was watched by 15 million viewers, and it was still managing around half that when it was axed in 1996. Now, in a different time and wielding the same satirical sledgehammer, Spitting Image is back. But this time, Fluck isn’t involved. “Flucky?” says Law. “Ha! He’s a fine artist now. Does he want any more of this? No, he doesn’t. He made it clear years ago.” But Law, in his Mao hat and swearing like a trooper throughout our chat, now wants more himself. “I was asked all the time, but I just turned it down for ages. It took 13, 14 years of my life. It was like a production line. I did it for so long… I’d had a gutful.” Law moved to Australia with his wife Deirdre to start a new life. Then he moved to China to start a new career as a ceramicist and then back to Australia. They were away for 20 years. “Jolly interesting it was, too. But I got to the point where I had to decide whether to stay in Australia or come home – I’ve got eight grandchildren that I’m curious about on occasion, so I came back.” Needless to say, the political scene he found on his return to Britain was not to his liking. “You realise what a nest it all is. And I sort of wanted to do it again.” Revitalised, Law met with Avalon, the production company behind Not Going Out, Catastrophe, Breeders and Taskmaster. They recruited Jeff Westbrook, an award-winning comic writer of 15 years standing on The Simpsons, and a team of British and American scribes, and then they made a pilot. This was also, in Law’s words, “jolly interesting”. “In it, Donald Trump is in bed with Melania, his phone keeps ringing and at the same time he’s tweeting people with his a***hole – he’s got an extended colon. It wasn’t hilarious but it was the sort of thing the Brits like, where there’s a sharp intake of breath.” That “sharp intake of breath” was the hallmark of Spitting Image at its peak. With a grey John Major, Douglas Hurd with a Mr Whippy hairdo and a gin-swilling Queen Mother, it was crude, pugnacious and proud – just the tonic for a nation divided by Thatcherite politics. https://www.instagram.com/p/CFzNjW2Ia2i/ “I remember watching some market research focus groups about the show,” says Law. “All that was interesting about the results was that we had two audiences. One was people that went around in fast cars, drank lager and had a university education, and the others were bright, working-class people.” If Spitting Image crossed a national divide back then, today it will have to reach across a chasm. “Boris and the boys are totally illogical and very, very right wing,” says Law. “They are far to the right of Thatcher.” Spitting Image, Law says, is able to land punches on the vainglorious because it depicts them as puppets. “Armando Iannucci said you can’t satirise Trump because he satirises himself,” says Law. “And I thought, ‘Sod that. You can.’ Because with puppets you can do stuff you can’t possibly do otherwise.” John Lloyd was the show’s original producer. He had just come from working on Not the Nine o’Clock News, the BBC’s “alternative comedy” sketch show that lampooned the great and the good. “Lloydy said he had wanted to do some things on NTNON with Mel [Smith] and Griff [Rhys Jones] and they’d say, ‘We don’t want to do that – we met them at a party. Really nice chaps. He’s great. She’s lovely.’ Well, puppets don’t talk to you at parties; they don’t have agents and you can put them in a cupboard when you’ve finished with them. That’s the difference.” With a combination of the old muckers – Law, production designer Scott Brooker and wardrobe designer Helen McGrother – and a new, young writing staff, the revived Spitting Image should be just as relentlessly ribald as its predecessor. But will it find an audience? The series is going out exclusively on BritBox, the combined BBC/ITV subscription service – there’s no way it will reach the 15 million of its 80s peak on a national channel. Law, however, sees the show’s new home as a bonus, not a constraint. “BritBox is subscription, so you’re not going to have the kind of nonsense that you get with the regular channels.” By “nonsense”, he means television executives trying to censor his output. He tells a story of how a US version of the show was pulled in its entirety when they ran a sketch featuring Ronald Reagan with a plaster on his nose, when the president had recently announced he had skin cancer (Law says it was written by a young Ian Hislop, then part of the Spitting Image writing team). There have already been some rumours that BritBox executives didn’t like a trailer that featured a naked Boris Johnson. “We’ll get some nonsense,” says Law, “but in the main with BritBox you have more freedom. We’ve done several things which we couldn’t have done with ITV. You can’t have people tweeting with their bum on regular television, for example.” Law is 79 now, and regularly bemoans his age, but over several Zoom calls he is still incorrigible and deliciously potty-mouthed. He has said that he fell out with everyone on the original show, bar John Lloyd. Has he mellowed? “All I can tell you is I haven’t fallen out with Avalon. Yet.” But even as he talks about the difficulties overseeing the workshop and the caricatures from afar, there’s a glint in his eye. He’s palpably excited about the new show – “The production values are a knockout. I have never seen puppets looking this good” – and he grants RT exclusive permission to visit the Spitting Image workshop in north London, before watching filming. There’s an anarchic, roguish, distinctly Law-ish glee to the whole operation. And it is an operation – hundreds of puppets, heads lolling lifelessly as they await the puppeteers’ hands stuck up their windpipes – Dilyn the Downing Street dog is there, with goggle eyes and a lolling tongue; Donald Trump’s tiny hands sit on stands on a workbench; Michael Gove’s bulbous cheeks sit next to Ed Sheeran’s carrot head. Filming – in this case a sketch about Kanye West trying to “grow” trainers – involves three puppeteers working on each body (one controlling the head and left arm, one the right arm, and a third the eyes, using a cable release for blinking). You’re reminded that puppets done well, even before they say a word, are very, very funny. “It’s a different show but I think it’s a very good show,” says Law. “Jeff [Westbrook] has done things with this show that we never did. The scripts are smarter – the original was so crude. This is cool in places, there are little sitcoms that run across episodes and you don’t want to turn it off – in the original the only thing that lasted more than a minute and a half was John Major eating peas with his missus.” The show may be different, but the cultural climate in which Spitting Image returns is different, too. There were, of course, no hashtags, social media, Black Lives Matter or cancel culture back then. Predictably, Law has little time for Twitter storms or trolling: “All that nonsense on social media? I mean, get a life. There are bigger things to worry about, especially now.” View oEmbed on the source website But he has already experienced some controversy around the new show. An image was released of the puppet of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which has a large, hooked nose. Zuckerberg is Jewish and so, even before its launch, Spitting Image v2.0 found itself being accused of anti-Semitism. “Well, screw it, you know,” says Law. “People sit around looking for things to complain about, and I do big noses and big ears. It’s personal – it’s not a racist thing.” Personal parody, he says, “has more effect on individuals than waxing lyrical about their policies. Everybody cares about how they look. I’m wearing my hat now because I’m virtually bald – we’re all at it.” Law concedes that “some of the things we did in the 80s might now be called racist. But you can’t do that now, we’re not and we wouldn’t.” Instead, he says, the aim is “to lance the boil”, where “the boil” is politics, politicians and the powerful. People who need taking down a peg. “I’ve got pictures of Dominic Cummings outside Buckingham Palace, posing when he was about 35, smoking a cigarette and being a rebel: he’s a loser. He’s not this magician that’s running everything. You don’t hang around in cheap clothes and a nylon hat trying to look like a rebel when you’re meant to be doing something quite serious.” As for our prime minister? “Boris is exactly what you thought he was. He’s a journo buffoon and I understand this because part of me is exactly the same. [Law started out as an illustrator and cartoonist on the Observer and The Sunday Times.] Boris has the attention span of a gnat. And would I put someone like me in charge of anything? No.” 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.
Kate Beckinsale: starring in The Widow was a "gamble"
The Hollywood actress is appearing in a TV series for the first time in 20 years
Kate Beckinsale can barely remember the last time she appeared on television. “The last time I did a TV series I was getting my A-level results,” she says, racking her brain to recall the few TV roles she’s done. “And I remember I did Emma on ITV a long time ago [it was in 1996 when Beckinsale – now 45 – was 23 years old]. But no, nothing like this. I mean look at me.” She’s referring to her costume for new drama The Widow, written by Harry and Jack Williams, the sibling duo behind The Missing, Liar and Baptiste. It consists of jeans and a dirty singlet. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and her face is smeared with sweat and dust. “Not exactly high glamour,” says the woman who usually appears in the press as the acme of Hollywood style. Kate Beckinsale to star in new ITV drama from the makers of Liar and The Missing Everything you need to know about The Widow on ITV Listen to the RadioTimes.com Podcast now: subscribe on iTunes/subscribe on Google Podcasts In The Widow, Beckinsale plays Georgia Wells, a woman who believes her aid-worker husband died in a plane crash in the Congo three years previously. Living as a virtual recluse in northern Wales, one day she gashes her leg on a rock and goes to the doctor in town. In the surgery waiting room, the TV is showing a news bulletin with footage of riots in Kinshasa. And there Georgia sees – or thinks she sees – a glimpse of her supposedly dead husband. View oEmbed on the source website That leads her on a journey to Africa and takes her into the shady world of coltan mining (coltan being a highly lucrative component in mobile phones and electric car batteries) and child exploitation. As ever with the Williams brothers, no one is quite who they seem to be, and stories set in seemingly disparate worlds – a blind man in Rotterdam, a Congolese child soldier – are slowly pulled together. It’s a thriller laden with hooks, but sustained with the promise that, come the ending, all will become clear. When Beckinsale was initially asked to play the lead, there was no ending. “I was sent three scripts but I didn’t know how the story ended, so it was a little bit of a gamble,” she says, sitting in a bungalow that’s being used for filming just outside Cape Town. “I was a little bit nervous of that. I thought, ‘Hang on… what if I end up not liking it?’ In fact, it was terrifying. “But I am a big fan of the boys, as I call them,” she continues, referring to the Williams brothers. “When I met them, I could tell that it was bad form to say, ‘Please tell me what happens in the end.’ In a way it makes sense not to know: Georgia starts out not really knowing what she’s doing or where she’s going, and I was in the same position.” Why would movie star Kate Beckinsale want to put herself in that position? “The industry has changed a lot recently in that you can explore a character in a much more complete way over eight hours than one and a half. That’s why a lot of actors are getting really seduced by television.” Beckinsale isn’t the first actress to have twigged that television, as opposed to feature films, is the growth area right now. She also says that the Williams brothers involved her in the creative process. “Harry and Jack are very collaborative, and so from early on they wanted to hear my thoughts and my notes. I think they also wanted to hear a woman’s perspective because they’re voicing this woman who’s got an incredibly complicated emotional journey.” But there was also her own life to consider – she was adamant that she wouldn’t take a long, exacting job several thousand miles from home in LA until her daughter Lily had flown the nest. “When I was younger I got a bit blindsided by suddenly finding myself pregnant [in 1999, aged 26] and having to be a mum. I’ve been saying for years, ‘When my daughter goes to college, then I’m going to be able to go off and do jobs that are far away.’ ” It was lucky that, just as her daughter left home for college last year, the call came. “They said, ‘Do you want to go to South Africa for six months and do The Widow?’ It felt like, ‘OK, it came around a little bit sooner than I was anticipating… it’s a bit of a leap of faith and I’m a bit scared and I don’t really want to but… OK.” Meet the cast of The Widow on ITV And while she is the first to recognise that acting is never as tough a job as manual labour, it has been a demanding shoot. In one of her Instagram posts she’s lowering herself down a snowy mountain in Wales , with the caption: “Setting off for a bathroom break shooting #thewidow in Wales…” View oEmbed on the source website This post, and the accompanying video clip of Beckinsale in a beanie reversing awkwardly down a rock face, captures her rather well: she combines old-school Hollywood glamour with moments of endearingly self-effacing loopiness. In The Widow, her character often finds herself surrounded by French people. Georgia is supposed to look confused – she doesn’t speak French. Whereas Beckinsale does speak French, very well in fact; she read Russian and French at Oxford. “There hasn’t been a huge call for the Russian on this one…” she says with a heavy dose of irony. “I’ve been in a lot of scenes with two or three people who are French. I’m not supposed to speak French in the scene, which is tricky, because I do. We’re sitting here gassing away in French, and then we go into a scene and I have to go, ‘Duh?’ It’s annoying because I’m ignorant about so many things, but not that.” She mentions that one of the main reasons she was drawn to The Widow was the central plot device – the idea that Georgia thinks she sees her husband on the news. “I like that – everyone who’s lost someone does have that moment of going, ‘Hang on, I think I saw them on the Tube.’ It’s a very common part of grieving. I think that’s what everyone around her thinks is happening at first.” Beckinsale knows all about families and grief. Her father, Richard Beckinsale, most famous for his role in Porridge, died of a heart attack in 1979 aged 31. Kate was five at the time. She followed in his footsteps, and her career blossomed with appearances in movies like Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado about Nothing and Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco but, after a stint as an action hero in the Underworld series, she has reverted to independent films, and now back to TV. Her love life has been similarly unpredictable – she dated and had daughter Lily with actor Michael Sheen but they never married. She did marry Len Wiseman, her director on Underworld, and they were together for 12 years before divorcing in 2016. Since then Beckinsale has been linked with comedians Jack Whitehall and Pete Davidson. “I’ve never had a plan, but not having a plan has meant that I’ve had this quite schizophrenic career where I could do various low-budget things and then I’ll suddenly do an action thing, and then I’ll do something like The Widow. So, it’s interesting: now that my daughter is a bit older, I want to find out what my sensibility is.” The Widow was released on Amazon Prime in the US on Friday 1st March. It will begin in the UK at 9pm on Monday 8th April on ITV, and will air two episodes weekly on Monday and Tuesday nights
"I like British writing": Julie Walters reveals why she turned down Hollywood
The Oscar-nominated actor also talks why she's doing a documentary about trains and how the Weinstein scandal made her "angry more than anything"
Earlier this month, Julie Walters was made a Dame. As the Queen awarded her the honour, they had a little chat. Walters recalls: “The Queen said, ‘It’s so marvellous that you’ve got this, I’m so pleased. How long have you been doing acting?’ “I said ‘43 years’ and she replied, ‘In so many different things, well done.’” Well said, Ma’am: from Mo Mowlam to Molly Weasley, from Mrs Overall to Mamma Mia! to a sexual predator’s wife in last year’s scorching National Treasure, part of what makes Julie Walters a worthy Dame is her infinite variety. Julie Walters: why National Treasure isn’t about Jimmy Savile Julie Walters and Maxine Peake reflect on their friend Victoria Wood But I have to tell her, as she takes a well-earned breather at her farm in West Sussex, that I never pictured Dame Julie Walters presenting a programme about trains. “Ha! I’m often asked to do documentaries and my agent always says, ‘Don’t do this unless you’re really passionate about it’. The thing is, I’ve got a romantic thing about trains, I really have. I remember steam trains at Snow Hill station in Birmingham from my childhood, going down there with my parents and meeting people and how exciting it was. “And then there’s the filmic thing with Strangers on a Train and Brief Encounter and of course Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Express. So when this came up I thought, ‘Well actually, I quite fancy this.’” The result is a four-part series that is really just an opportunity for more of the British public to meet one of their enduring favourites (the phrase “national treasure” having been rendered off limits ever since the Channel 4 drama), and for her to meet them. View oEmbed on the source website She’s well aware that she is, as she puts it, with another raucous laugh, “stepping into Michael Portillo’s trousers”, but her approach is distinctive – it’s Walters that makes the programmes watchable. People just really like her – and she likes them. She may be acting royalty, but she’s happiest among the masses. “That’s the side of it I loved,” she says. “Just meeting the people. I’m really curious about how people live their lives, how they ended up where they are, why they do things and all of that. I suppose that’s part of being an actor as well – that you’re curious about other people, unendingly curious.” Walters, it’s apparent, could make a pretty good career out of this presenting lark – except that she’s a little bit busy with the day job. The coastal railway journeys were filmed in between roles in the newly released Paddington 2 film and Disney’s forthcoming Mary Poppins Returns. Then she made an indie film called Country Music with Jessie Buckley, and when we speak she’s in the middle of shooting the follow-up to Mamma Mia!, a decade after the first one. “I’m knackered!” she says. “When Mamma Mia! finishes I’m going to lie down.” For Walters, solace comes at her organic farm, which is run by her husband, Grant. She spends time on her vegetable patch, though 2017 hasn’t been a vintage year. “No, not good this year. The skin on the tomatoes was like leather, and me brassicas? Don’t ask. “For Grant it’s seven days a week and it’s very hard work but he loves it. He was up at four this morning and he won’t be back until about seven tonight, he’s gone to market today. We talk about it endlessly – the farm is the main topic of conversation.” What they don’t talk about is retirement. “I don’t have to continue working now, I could retire, but I don’t. I often think, ‘What would I do if I was forced to retire?’, because you don’t know what’s going to happen in your life. I’d maybe get into baking and things like that, I don’t know. I think I’d probably write something. I’d have to do something, though. I couldn’t just sit and do the crossword.” For the time being, however, there’s the task of promoting Mary Poppins, which stars Emily Blunt as the famous nanny and Emily Mortimer and Ben Whishaw as the now grown-up Banks children, Jane and Michael. Not just grown-up, but with children of their own. View oEmbed on the source website Walters plays Ellen the housekeeper, still in post and looking after the family home. “She’s gone a bit dotty really and is losing it and can’t find things and forgets things and the place is falling apart. That’s why Mary Poppins comes in again.” It’s not a major role, but it does contain a Walters first. “For the first time in my career I get to fly. Get in a harness, sing a song, fly across the London sky… I can’t tell you – it was like a religious experience.” Not only has she made her aerial debut this year, but for Mamma Mia! this 67-year-old has been singing and dancing once again. When we speak she’s just come home from a week spent on set at Shepperton studios, shaking a leg with Cher. “I love her! Last time round I sprained my ankle but luckily – touch wood – no injuries yet. I’m not a dancer or a singer and we’re all ten years older, probably ten pounds heavier. But it’s been joyous. You want to tell the young cast that it doesn’t get any better than this. Do they realise how fabulous this job is?” She acknowledges, though, that it’s not all oranges and sunshine in showbusiness. When we talk she’s sitting beneath a photograph of her long-time friend and collaborator Victoria Wood, who died of cancer 18 months ago. “I always look at that picture when I go past. Sometimes, when there’s nobody around, I look at it and say, ‘Where are you?’ I still find it difficult to take in.” If her friend’s death still causes her immense sadness, then the recent revelations about the behaviour of Harvey Weinstein have made her furious. “I only worked with him once and I wasn’t a young girl, either, so I didn’t see it. But the stories that have come out have made me very angry more than anything. It was shocking – but also not shocking, somehow. The extent of it was so disgusting and awful.” Walters started out at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, a setup that she describes as “very right-on”. “I felt equality with everybody I worked with, so I didn’t feel like I was a little girl and they were quite big men – that wasn’t apparent at all. So I’m very fortunate. I know that stuff has gone on because it’s now being talked about hugely, but I wasn’t in Hollywood then and by the time I got anywhere near that sort of thing I was older.” Though Walters wasn’t in Hollywood, many people thought she should have been. After Educating Rita saw her nominated for a best actress Oscar in 1984, the world was her oyster. “I did have plenty of offers then but I don’t ever regret not taking them. Because I’m British, I guess, and I like British writing and British work, and I love it here. I think the way you look is much more important in Hollywood than possibly it is here. If something amazing came… but nothing ever has, nothing really amazing. People go and move there to try to do something else with their careers – but I don’t want to do anything else with my career particularly.” I have a suggestion – she’s just been to see the Queen at Buckingham Palace, and observed her closely, as she likes to do. There happens to be a series called The Crown on Netflix at the moment that we know is going to be recast in a couple of years. Would a newly minted Dame consider playing Her Majesty? “I’d be interested – it’s a brilliant Peter Morgan script, so possibly. But who could follow Helen Mirren? I couldn’t.” She pauses and thinks about it. We both know she could. Britain’s Coastal Railways with Julie Walters is on Sunday 8.00pm Channel 4