Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2025-03-28T10:30:30.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: The Chic Geek
items: Long Lost Family: Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell reunite father and son separated by nearly 3500 miles
items: Call the Midwife: why the NHS used sock puppets to teach breastfeeding
items: All hail the women of Peaky Blinders
items: The Durrells: meet the kids
items: Was Queen Victoria really "surprisingly sexy"?
items: Call the Midwife’s Stephen McGann reveals his troubled family history
items: Top of the Lake’s Elisabeth Moss and Jane Campion on the gender war that brought them together
items: The Durrells' Keeley Hawes on how she juggles family life with being TV's most sought-after actress
items: Gregory Fitoussi is "really scared" his mad French spin-doctor series is coming true
items: Jim Broadbent: “I love the idea of actors being rogues and vagabonds, picking at the weaknesses of the powerful”
items: Wolf Hall's Claire Foy on Anne Boleyn: "She had bigger balls than anyone at Henry’s court"
items: “It’s gonna be epic": The Last Kingdom stars reveal what to expect from series two
items: Call The Midwife's Stephen McGann on the real-life NHS drama that inspired the BBC series
items: The truth about Henry VIII’s six wives
items: Poldark writer Debbie Horsfield says Ross did not rape Elizabeth
items: Hooters, moles and parenthood: Katherine Ryan’s cancer story
items: Gold medallist Greg Rutherford lost his grandfather – now he has an important message for all men
items: The Fall's John Lynch on alcoholism, getting sober and growing up in The Troubles
items: Benedict Cumberbatch on The Hollow Crown, bloody warfare and discovering he's Richard III's cousin
items: How Keeley Hawes lost her Shakespeare virginity
items: Doctor Foster's Bertie Carvel on playing one of the most hated characters on television
items: Adrian Lester on Undercover: "It would be so much more powerful if we did all the press for this show without once mentioning colour"
items: Robson Green on the new series of Grantchester: "I defy anyone not to cry"
items: James Norton won hearts in War and Peace – now he's terrifying us as Happy Valley's psycho
items: How Manjinder Virk is shaking up Midsomer Murders
items: A Song for Jenny author Julie Nicholson reveals the cost of the 7/7 bombings to her family - and her faith
items: Meet the next Gordon Ramsay: his 13 year-old daughter Matilda
items: How screenwriter Sarah Phelps adapted JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy for TV
items: Classical star Alison Balsom says cutbacks in music make her furious

The Chic Geek
type: item
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: App
subject: App features
subject: App Doctor Who 20
description: Matt Smith thought he was going to be a footballer but ended up embracing Einstein to become a Time Lord. E Jane Dickson finds out how the new Doctor is settling in
encoded: This article was published in RT in April 2010 and is part of our digital Doctor Who anniversary bookazine — click here to download it for free. Regenerating is a tough gig. Filling the shoes of the most popular Doctor in the history of the world’s most popular sci-fi show is hard enough. When you have precisely 65 minutes to foil your first intergalactic threat, you need to hit the ground running. “Yeah, no pressure,” laughs Matt Smith, the 27-year-old actor who came, appropriately enough, from nowhere to scoop the title role in the new series of Doctor Who. “My Doctor is like a new-born lamb, trying to discover what these limbs are on his body, but he’s straight into active service. It’s a bit like trying to save the world with flu.” It seems a safe bet that eight-year-olds all over Britain will soon be plaguing their mums for a bow tie. There’s a fogey-ish charm to the 11th Doctor (Smith prefers “geek chic”) with his worn tweeds and flapping fringe. Smith’s own manner is a likeable blend of puppyish and professorial, with a tendency to talk in italics. Playing the Doctor, he points out, is a little like “giving your Hamlet”. You have to make the part your own. “I mean,” he says, “the Doctor has always been, and he always will be. But how many parts are there in world TV that could be played by a 27-year-old or a 60-year-old? It’s been wonderful, just exploring the multitudes of him, but it takes a while to evolve a strong identity.” A graduate of the University of East Anglia, where he studied drama and creative writing, Smith has his own way of accessing this enigmatic character. “I had the part six months prior to shooting anything on camera – and for much of that time it was all a big secret – so I had to find a way of channelling my energy and excitement, my lust, as it were, for creating this persona. I was thinking, ‘Who in the world has a brain and a silliness which is close to the Doctor?’ and then I saw that photograph of Albert Einstein poking his tongu…

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Long Lost Family: Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell reunite father and son separated by nearly 3500 miles
type: item
date: 2018-07-17T12:41:42.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: ITV's tear-jerking documentary series Long Lost Family sees a father and son reunite after three decades
encoded: All his life, Pearse Egan wove dreams around the father he had never met. “Every little thing I did – learning to ride a bike, learning to swim, I always felt my dad was there with me, showing me how.” The fact that Pearse, 29, was growing up on the outskirts of Dublin, while his father Edilson “Eddie” Santos, 62, lived and worked in Manhattan, added glamour to the fantasy. “I knew my dad was Brazilian and I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, because it made me different to anybody else in Ireland. I had one little picture of him, an old photograph from the time he was with my mum in America, and I kept that with me always.” What time is Long Lost Family: What Happened Next on TV? Everything you need to know about the ITV reunion series Why I love Long Lost Family – especially the tears New on Netflix: the best movies and TV shows released every day Pearse’s parents met when they worked together in New York, but his Irish mother returned home to have her baby. “I couldn’t ask for a better mum,” says Egan. “She made a brilliant job of raising me and my brother on her own. But I think when you’re a parent, you just have to make the decisions you think best at the time. She was very young when she found out she was pregnant, and I think she was really scared. She just felt it would be better to have me at home, in Ireland, and over the years she fell out of touch with my dad. View oEmbed on the source website "He sent me a birthday card when I was six, and I remember one phone call – that was the only contact,” Egan continues. “But in a way that’s really hard to explain, he was always very present to me. I came in for a bit of bullying at school. Kids pick up on the slightest insecurities, and there were digs thrown at me for being from a one-parent family. But I had that photo of my dad. I’d look at it and think, ‘Well, people say I don’t have a dad, but I do…’" <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2018/07/LONG_LOST_FAMILY…

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Call the Midwife: why the NHS used sock puppets to teach breastfeeding
type: item
date: 2018-05-11T13:34:55.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The strange history of knitted nipples in 1960s Britain
encoded: The British have a thing about breasts. We’re happy to expose them, inflate them or fetishise them, but when it comes to their primary purpose – feeding infants – squeamishness sets in. “Being very northern European about this, we still don’t tend to breastfeed in front of each other all that easily,” says Terri Coates, the midwifery adviser on Call the Midwife. And while medical advances over the past 60 years have transformed many aspects of giving birth, the knitted breasts and sock-puppet babies used to teach 1960s mums about breastfeeding today remain an oddly retro feature of antenatal teaching. “There’s a lot to be said for the knitted body part,” laughs Coates. “Sock puppets are actually very good for showing how the baby latches on to the breast, and the knitted uterus is great for demonstrating how the neck of the womb opens when a baby is being born – just think of pulling a very tight polo neck over your head!” Call the Midwife only uses real newborns for its birth scenes – but how do they cope with all the babies? How realistic is that Call the Midwife Christmas stillborn storyline? Coates has worked on Call the Midwife since the first series in 2012; indeed, it was an article she wrote in the Royal College of Midwives’ Journal in 1998, calling for “the James Herriot of midwives” to step forward, that inspired retired midwife Jennifer Worth to write the bestselling memoirs on which the series was based (Coates also advised on the books). A practising midwife, lecturer and author, Coates started her own clinical training in 1975. “The people who were training me were the girls in Call the Midwife, ten years on.” Social and political factors have complicated women’s response to feeding their babies, says Coates. “Midwives, though, have always been required to promote and support breastfeeding. In the 1950s and 60s, if someone was bottlefeeding, we actually had to notify the authorities, because it was seen as a risk to the baby. But around the same time, …

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All hail the women of Peaky Blinders
type: item
date: 2018-02-16T14:27:22.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Nobody messes with Aunt Pol... Star Cillian Murphy and creator Steven Knight talk feminine power in Peaky Blinders
encoded: Nobody messes with the Peaky Girls. They may not be packing blades, but Peaky Blinders’ women are some of the sharpest in TV drama. At the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley in the West Midlands, where much of the cult gangster series is filmed, fans lay siege to the “canal of no return” where assorted bad’uns have been offed. There’s a soft stutter of camera-phone clicks as Tommy Shelby, played by Irish actor Cillian Murphy, strolls across a cobbled bridge with his full posse of womenfolk, purposeful as panthers in fabulous flapper frocks. Who were the real Peaky Blinders? Meet the cast of Peaky Blinders series four When is Peaky Blinders series 4 on TV? One hooded glance, however, from “Aunt Pol” (Helen McCrory), the Midlands’ answer to Chicago’s Ma Barker, and even the boldest star-hunter ducks out of sight. If bad, beautiful Tommy Shelby is the Sun King of Small Heath, each of the women in his orbit, from matriarch Polly to his many love interests, has her own agenda in this hotly anticipated fourth series. “In the period after the First World War, women were incredibly powerful in working-class communities,” says series creator Steven Knight. “While the men were away at war, the workplace – including illegal gambling rackets – had been run perfectly well, if not better, by women. But when the war was over, legislation was passed saying men must once more be preferred over women for jobs, and women were quite rightly baffled by the idea they were suddenly being told not to work. “I wanted to reflect that – and do justice to those women. Tommy, to his credit, doesn’t care if it’s a man or woman doing what needs to be done; he sees it’s in the natural order of things for smart people to make the decisions and for less smart people to carry them out. So it’s not at all surprising that, in a family like the Shelbys, strong, intelligent women would rise to the top.” View oEmbed on the source website The enigmatic Tommy, Knight goes on, is shaped by feminine influe…

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The Durrells: meet the kids
type: item
date: 2017-11-24T12:54:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The young actors playing Leslie, Larry, Gerry and Margo reveal what it’s like to play the children to Keeley Hawes’s Mrs Durrell
encoded: Callum Woodhouse, 22 plays Leslie, 18 “It’s good playing someone slightly younger because you can look back and see what makes that age funny. Leslie’s obsessed with guns, so I had to learn how to shoot and how to skin a rabbit, which was unpleasant. For the new series, I had to learn to milk a goat, which is very, very satisfying when you get it right. “Leslie is a total mummy’s boy — which I can completely relate to — so that was easy to step into, especially when you’re playing against someone like Keeley. This was my first job out of drama school and she was amazingly helpful, guiding in a motherly way, but never condescending. She has brought us all together in the nicest possible way.” Josh O’Connor, 26 plays Larry, 24 “Larry’s a miserable old sod — I’m desperately trying to find little nuggets of niceness in him. I did a lot of research into the real Lawrence Durrell, but I don’t think we’re trying to do a biopic here — for a start I’m twice his height. I’ve read most of his novels now, and they’re completely sex-fixated, so we’ve got that bit right. “A couple of years ago, I went to Glastonbury with Douglas Booth, who I worked with on The Riot Club; girls were falling over him and I was just traipsing around in his shadow. Last year at Glastonbury was a bit different, and that has to be down to the ‘Larry effect’. In real life I’m sheepish and shy, so the whole thing’s hilarious.” Milo Parker, 14 plays Gerry, 11 “I don’t think there’s anyone quite like Gerry. I don’t think anyone can replicate how passionately devoted he was to his animals. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I’m definitely a lot more confident now, especially after interacting with the new animals we’ve got on the show this year. Last year, I was nibbled by a pelican on my shoulder. It was pretty awful! “I’m supposed to be 11, and life for 11-year-olds was very different in Gerry’s time. You’d go out and explore to entertain yourself, or you’d read books. There wasn’t even electricity. No…

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Was Queen Victoria really "surprisingly sexy"?
type: item
date: 2017-10-27T07:57:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Writer Daisy Goodwin reveals the scandalous nature of the young monarch's diaries
encoded: Throaty giggles flow from Daisy Goodwin as she points at a magnificent portrait of a well-endowed Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn and father of Queen Victoria. “Sorry,” she says, “it’s not just the trouser bulge. He’s posing with a cannon. He’s keen to show his, erm, potency.” We’re on the set of Victoria, ITV’s eight-part drama about the British monarch, and writer and executive producer Goodwin is in chatelaine mode. “We use this for ceremonial events,” she says, sweeping through a gallery hot with candle-light and gilded to within an inch of its life. The production is lavish; a full-size replica of Victoria’s state and private apartments in Buckingham Palace has been erected on an airfield in Yorkshire, and, by the looks of things, this queen was not of the Tupperware persuasion. “Actually,” says Goodwin, “what you see here had a lot to do with George IV’s taste. Buckingham Palace had been in the royal family since the 18th century, but George IV, the biggest, blingiest monarch of all time, was the one who really went for it.” There’s not much Goodwin doesn’t know about her subject. She’s the dynamo producer behind shows such as Home Front, Grand Designs and How Clean Is Your House? and presenter of a clutch of poetry-related programmes, but history is her first love. She wrote a dissertation at Cambridge University on Victoria’s relationship with the media and is the author of bestsellers set in the 19th century. Her screenwriting debut covers the early years of Victoria's reign. Daisy Goodwin at a Victoria press event “I’ve been thinking about this project pretty much since I was a student. History is basically storytelling, and the monarchy is an integral part of the story we tell ourselves as a nation – we project ourselves onto the royals. And Victoria is just such a fantastic subject. I think most people think of her as Judi Dench – this old, stern widow – but her early life is astonishing. It’s very nice to spend some time with this young, effe…

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Call the Midwife’s Stephen McGann reveals his troubled family history
type: item
date: 2017-08-06T06:08:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Books
subject: Drama
subject: Going Out
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The actor may play Dr Turner in the BBC drama, but his ancestors were far from healthy...
encoded: Stephen McGann was a sickly child. Childhood asthma and a bout of pneumonia left him chronically short of breath. Given the McGann family circumstances – five siblings crammed into a modest terraced house in Liverpool – it’s easy to read his symptoms as the clichéd fight for oxygen. McGann, best known as Call the Midwife’s Dr Turner, is deeply interested in disease as metaphor, but his new book, Flesh and Blood: a History of My Family in Seven Maladies, reaches confidently beyond cod psychology. Spanning 150 years of social history, it’s a detailed meditation on the way lives and histories are shaped by health. “I was always the kind of nerdy kid who wanted to know why things happened,” says McGann, 54. “I’ve been interested in genealogy since my teens. I went on to study the relationship between science, medicine and society [he holds an MSc from Imperial College, London] and of course, as an actor, I’m professionally concerned with the mechanics of human motivation. The book, I suppose, is my way of bringing these different strands together.” View oEmbed on the source website Each chapter in Flesh and Blood deals with a specific malady and its iterations down generations of McGanns. The family history begins in the 1860s when, driven out of Ireland by famine, McGann’s great-great-grandparents emigrate to Liverpool, only to see their English-born baby die of malnutrition in the slums of the North End. On one-year-old Teresa McGann’s death certificate the cause is recorded as “marasmus” but this, McGann points out, “is just a lovely word for starvation”. Hunger would return to stalk the family in the Second World War, when Billy McGann was interned by the Japanese in Batu Lintang camp in Borneo. McGann remembers family parties where Uncle Billy would swallow flowers snatched from vases. It was a peculiar point of family honour that “Billy could eat anything”; only later did McGann learn how his uncle had survived as a prisoner of war sustained by rotten potatoes and…

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Top of the Lake’s Elisabeth Moss and Jane Campion on the gender war that brought them together
type: item
date: 2017-07-27T14:36:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The actor and screenwriter talk motherhood and taking revenge on creepy men with their new series
encoded: In the depths of the Pacific Ocean, a skein of long black hair spools out of a suitcase. This is the central image of China Girl, the long-awaited second series of Jane Campion’s award-winning TV drama, Top of the Lake. Starring Elisabeth Moss as Detective Robin Griffin, the six-parter shifts the action from the vast and silent landscape of New Zealand’s South Island to inner-city Sydney. When the suitcase and its sinister load washes up on Bondi Beach, it’s up to Griffin to piece together the story of Cinnamon, a murdered Thai sex worker. “This time, for Robin, it’s all about ‘the wilderness within’,” says Moss, 35. Her sunstreaked, valley girl bounciness is at odds with her watchful screen persona. She’s with Campion at the British Film Institute in London to promote the new series; the pair – clearly great friends – finish each other’s sentences, smooth each other’s hair. View oEmbed on the source website “In series one the lake was such a great metaphor, because you have the still waters on the surface, and all that darkness underneath,” says Moss. “In series two, the ocean is the metaphor for what’s going on with Robin; sometimes it’s very still and grey, sometimes it’s beautiful, often it’s terrifying…” “…and very feminine,” adds Campion. “You know? That tidal thing.” Campion, too, is much larkier than her streaming grey locks and austere, wise woman image might suggest. At 63, she is the acclaimed doyenne of art house cinema, director of films such as An Angel at My Table and Bright Star and the only female director to date to receive the Palme d’Or at Cannes (for her 1993 film The Piano). The fact that Top of the Lake: China Girl premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival was not only a mark of respect for Campion’s oeuvre but an acknowledgement of how far television drama has come. “It’s all just storytelling,” she says. “A six-hour drama is short-form television, really, but you could also see it as three or four feature films run together. You have time t…

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The Durrells' Keeley Hawes on how she juggles family life with being TV's most sought-after actress
type: item
date: 2017-04-30T17:39:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: "It's hard to be a mum"
encoded: Each thwack of leather on willow releases a new cloud of butterflies from the long grass around the cricket pitch. Stationed behind scones and cucumber sandwiches, ladies in shady hats cast appraising glances at the players. Then the pelicans invade the pitch... It could only happen on The Durrells. The hit Sunday night drama is back for a second run, and holding a Bafta best drama nomination, to the delight of the nation, and Keeley Hawes. “Throw a stick round here, and you’ll hit a lovely man,” says Hawes, with satisfaction. And indeed the lush Ropa Valley, 20 minutes from Corfu Town, is not short of talent as Greek and ex-pat British extras shoot a “Greece v England” cricket match for the new series. Adapted from Gerald Durrell’s childhood memoir My Family and Other Animals, The Durrells stars Hawes as an English widow and mother of four, who strikes out for a new life on Corfu. In the book, Mother is a comfortable figure, a sketchily drawn dispenser of tea and good sense. Hawes’s Louisa is altogether more entertaining. Funny, courageous and – when she gets the chance – sexy, she’s the emotional lode-stone of the drama. “I think it wouldn’t be too bad, having Louisa as your mum,” considers Hawes. “She’s got the right mix of worrying about her kids and letting go. She’s a wonder, really, and I slightly love the fact that she’s on her own, because there are some amazing single mothers out there and they’re not always advertised that way. And I think it’s great that Louisa isn’t considered ‘past it’. Nobody’s ever ‘past it’, of course, but a woman of Louisa’s age would arguably be more ‘past it’ in a drama set in 1930s England.” At 41, Hawes is unquestionably in her prime. The daughter of a London cabbie, she trained at the Sylvia Young stage school and landed her breakthrough role in Dennis Potter’s Karaoke). Her English rose looks and a particular kind of screen intelligence opened up an astonishing range of performance; she has turned her hand to period drama (Ou…

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Gregory Fitoussi is "really scared" his mad French spin-doctor series is coming true
type: item
date: 2017-04-14T07:00:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The star of new political drama Spin says "there’s a chance the far right could win. And I honestly don’t want to think about that”
encoded: Grégory Fitoussi stirs his coffee and considers the vortex. “Europe is changing so fast,” he says. “The whole world is waiting for something to happen. I’m not sure it’s going to be something good.” The star of Spin has a point. For the first time since the Second World War, Europe is the floodlit centre of the world stage. With pressure from the far right in France, Holland, Germany, Greece, and the nervous regrouping of alliances around Russia, European democracy is in crisis. As Britain drags its gaze from the spectacle of US politics to its nearer neighbours, Spin, the French political thriller that, for its first two series, enjoyed cult status on More4, suddenly seems like required viewing. The third and final season opens with the assassination of a far-right politician, who’s riding high in the polls and is tipped to be the new French president. And this in the same month the French go to the polls to vote for a real president. View oEmbed on the source website With the narrow defeat of extreme right-winger Geert Wilders in last month’s Dutch elections, and Angela Merkel’s centre-right position looking ever more precarious in Germany, the upcoming French elections are a bellwether for the rest of Europe. Can Fitoussi see Front National leader Marine Le Pen sweeping into power? “All I can say is I’m really scared. I don’t think this will happen, but yes, there’s a chance the far right could win. And I honestly don’t want to think about that.” France’s best chance, he says, is that the “shock results” of Trump’s presidency and Brexit will act as a wake-up call to disaffected voters. “People who haven’t voted for years because they think that everything will be the same whoever wins, maybe those people will look at Trump and think, ‘Actually, this time it can be really dangerous?’ ” Fitoussi sets the thought rolling with an epic Gallic shrug. The 40-year-old actor, already known to British viewers for his roles in Mr Selfridge and Beowulf: Return to the Shieldl…

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Jim Broadbent: “I love the idea of actors being rogues and vagabonds, picking at the weaknesses of the powerful”
type: item
date: 2017-04-14T07:00:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: The actor reflects on a life of being a “character actor” – and reveals why he turned down an OBE
encoded: Jim Broadbent, now 67, is mildly chuffed to find that time, finally, is on his side. He’s not the type of man to claim a last laugh, but over breakfast in central London, he reflects candidly on a career spent with his name below the title. “As a young actor, I was advised to bide my time. Back then, there weren’t good roles for someone like me. There were handsome leading men and character actors for smaller, supporting roles. But I was told to hang in there, and it was good advice. We’re all character actors now,” he smiles. “Even a handsome man is a character actor at my age.” “Hanging in there” barely describes Broadbent’s decorated filmography. He won a Bafta for best supporting actor in Moulin Rouge! in 2002, the Academy Award and Golden Globe for best supporting actor in Iris the same year, as well as an Emmy, Golden Globe and TV Bafta for his television work in Longford and The Street. He’s worked with Mike Leigh (Life is Sweet, Another Year) and Woody Allen (Bullets over Broadway). He was terrific with Lindsay Duncan in Le Week-end and now, with a gratifyingly starry supporting cast (Michelle Dockery, Charlotte Rampling, Emily Mortimer), he takes the lead in an adaptation of Julian Barnes’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending (in cinemas Friday 14 April). Moulin Rouge! Barnes and Broadbent are made for each other; it’s hard to imagine an actor who could better embody the novel’s interleaving of hope and regret. Broadbent plays Tony Webster, a man in his 70s looking back at his student days and, in an age of fast-crack dialogue and faster editing, director Ritesh Batra holds each note. On the travelled landscape of Broadbent’s face, old excitements fade and flare, matching the subtle shifts of the narrative. If the screenplay offers a sense of redemption that was with held from the novel (purists might call this the point of the story), Broadbent, who loved the book, is unconcerned. “Books and films are different beasts – you need to look a…

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Wolf Hall's Claire Foy on Anne Boleyn: "She had bigger balls than anyone at Henry’s court"
type: item
date: 2017-04-10T01:00:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The actress looks deep into history's most enigmatic queen
encoded: "History has done a great disservice to Anne Boleyn," says Claire Foy. Hollywood, it could be argued, hasn't helped much either. While it's generally agreed that Boleyn was Henry VIII's most interesting wife, the ill-fated queen has suffered from typecasting, portrayed variously as traitorous witch, innocent victim or scheming seductress. Foy, who plays Anne in the Tudor drama Wolf Hall, believes the truth may be more complicated, and more interesting: “For the amount that she achieved, and given the limited role of women in her time, Anne really had massive balls – bigger balls, I think, than anyone at Henry’s court. If she had been born in a man’s body, I think she would have made an extraordinary ruler.” Adapted from Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the BBC’s six-part series is a finely nuanced interpretation of historical events. “All the facts are incredibly well researched,” says Foy, “but Hilary has written Anne as Thomas Cromwell would observe her. And that’s not particularly easy for an actor, because you can’t play what people see in their mind as opposed to what is actually going on.” Stockport-born Foy, 30, a graduate of Liverpool’s John Moores University and the Oxford School of Drama, who rose to prominence as the heroine of Dickens’s Little Dorrit (BBC, 2008) and went on to star in The Promise, The Night Watch and Upstairs Downstairs, relished the challenge of playing England’s most enigmatic queen. “I had read Hilary’s book long before finding out about this job and I was already a bit obsessed with Anne. She broke with tradition in every possible way, at a time when English women had no real purpose, other than to sit around sewing and looking pretty. Anne was educated in France - she had the European sensibility - and then she came to England where women weren't supposed to talk about anything too revolutionary. If you had an active mind- - as Anne had - it must have been incredibly frustrating. Bu…

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“It’s gonna be epic": The Last Kingdom stars reveal what to expect from series two
type: item
date: 2017-03-23T20:10:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Alexander Dreymon and David Dawson also uncover the political message behind the swordplay saga
encoded: Dark Age drama is having a moment. From Game of Thrones and Vikings to Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands, hairy, scary warriors are rampaging across the schedules. This week sees the return to BBC2 of The Last Kingdom, the acclaimed blood-feud-and-bearskins saga adapted from the first two of Bernard Cornwell’s bestselling Saxon Stories. Series two opens, pleasingly, with Uhtred, son of Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon) sprawled on a bed of furs. Sleep, however, is not the warrior’s friend. Uhtred has places to go, people to kill. There’s barely time to tighten his ponytail before galloping north to his ancestral lands. View oEmbed on the source website “It’s gonna be epic,” promises Dreymon. “It’s like the whole drama just got bigger.” Shorn of Uhtred’s shaggy up-do, in jeans and leather jacket, today he seems oddly domesticated, like a wolfhound in a bandana. Uhtred’s hair, he admits, is just too much bother, and he marvels at the grooming stamina of ninth-century Danes. “We know they took their look very seriously – tweezers and combs were found in Viking graves. The warriors would file their teeth down to make them pointy, use kohl to make their eyes look darker and red pigment on their teeth to make them look bloody.” David Dawson, who stars alongside Dreymon as the Saxon King Alfred, loves the show’s interplay of fact and fantasy: “I’m a total history geek, and Alfred is just this endlessly interesting character; he was huge, for example, on education and believed passionately that the working classes should be literate. “I also love the fact that ‘our’ Alfred is not just some monarch whose word is law – he’s created this think-tank called the Witan, which is essentially the first parliament, and he achieves his aim though democracy and diplomacy. I think this is really what scares his enemies – he’s not your big stocky champion on horseback – he’s someone who thinks carefully about how to manipulate his enemy, like it’s a giant game of chess.” Dreymon as the Viking-…

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Call The Midwife's Stephen McGann on the real-life NHS drama that inspired the BBC series
type: item
date: 2017-01-15T07:00:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The man behind Dr Patrick Turner talks about his upcoming BBC2 midwife documentary
encoded: It’s February 1963, the coldest winter in over 200 years. Though the swirling snow, a midwife appears on her bike. Cue the music, the shining eyes, the moment of reverence that marks each new life on Britain’s best-loved drama. Except that for Stephen McGann, who plays Call the Midwife’s Dr Patrick Turner, it wasn’t quite like that when he was born. “The midwife who delivered me was in a foul mood, really snappy and impatient. My mum said I came into the world apologising. I always like to think that if you were doing the movie of it, you’d cut to the present day and here is that nuisance of a baby on a TV programme extolling the virtues of midwives.” Presented by McGann, Call the Midwife: the Casebook is a documentary that explores the events and issues behind the drama, from a potted history of midwifery to the story of public health in the postwar period. And if Sigmund Freud might have something to say about McGann’s career path, the man himself is inclined to enjoy the coincidence. “As a very mature student – I was in my 40s – I took a break from acting to a do master’s degree in science communication at Imperial College,” he explains. “So to suddenly find myself playing a doctor at the centre of a highly rated medical drama was really useful.” McGann now has a flourishing second career as a public speaker – in 2015 he addressed the Cambridge Science Festival on the relationship between medicine and the media – but plans for a PhD were shelved when it became clear that the success of Call the Midwife was no flash in the pan. Six series, plus Christmas specials, have enjoyed top ratings and another three series have been commissioned, taking the action through from the postwar period to the mid-1960s. “I think part of the reason Midwife is so fascinating as a historical drama is that the history is recent enough that we can still touch it. I was a kid in Liverpool when the slum clearance was going on, and there was terrible poverty, very similar to London’s East…

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The truth about Henry VIII’s six wives
type: item
date: 2016-12-07T09:00:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Historian Lucy Worsley looks back at the serial monogamist’s queens in a new BBC series
encoded: It’s doubtful Henry VIII would top a poll of history’s Great Romantics. For Lucy Worsley, however, he’s merely misunderstood. “He was what we would call a serial monogamist, always looking for his one true love,” says the historian who, as Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces knows a thing or two about the domestic arrangements of British monarchs. Now, in a new series that mixes history with drama, Worsley sets out to explode some of the myths surrounding Henry’s queens. “I think each generation needs to discover them for themselves,” she says, “because Henry’s marriages were more than a series of love stories; they each had massive political repercussions, which in many ways turned us into the country we are today. Personally, I’ve always been more interested in the wives than in Henry, and in this series we’ve tried to look at events from their perspective. It’s time they got to tell their own stories.” Catherine of Aragon Paola Bontempi as Catherine of Aragon There’s been a tendency to portray Catherine as bitter, disappointed, menopausal, cast aside – all the clichés of the first wife. But there’s so much more to her than that. She was, in fact, fantastically well trained to be queen; she’d been brought up in an environment of powerful women – her mother, Isabella of Castile, created Spain as a country along with her father Ferdinand of Aragon. So Catherine really was a terrific match for Henry; they were – for a time – the golden couple. One of the sources for our first episode is the Westminster Tournament Roll, a really long picture that depicts, almost like a video, the tournament given to celebrate the birth of Catherine’s son, Henry, in 1511. We see Henry breaking his lance on the helmet of his opponent (which we know didn’t actually happen, because they kept the score card), then the “action” switches to Catherine, looking very young and beautiful – not at all the grim-faced, religion-obsessed widow of popular imagination. Sadly for Catherine, the fir…

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Poldark writer Debbie Horsfield says Ross did not rape Elizabeth
type: item
date: 2016-10-25T04:00:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: "Ross is fundamentally a man of honour," says Horsfield as she weighs in on Sunday's controversial scene
encoded: We knew it. Demelza knew it. You could hear the corsets creak as erotic tension built between Ross Poldark and his first true love, Elizabeth. Yet controversy swirled like Cornish mist around their long-anticipated encounter in Sunday night’s episode of Poldark. The BBC drama, adapted from Winston Graham’s bestselling novels, first excited speculation when leading man, Aidan Turner, before the series began, revealed that a scene portrayed as rape in the BBC’s original 1970s series had been reconfigured as consensual sex. View oEmbed on the source website Writer Debbie Horsfield has never felt pressure to “live up to” the 1970s TV version of Poldark. “We’ve always been very clear that we’re doing a new adaptation,” she points out. “It’s not a remake.” The rape scene in Sunday’s episode, she goes on, wasn’t “axed” because it was never written in the first place. Much less was it removed at the request of the actors. “To be absolutely clear,” says Horsfield, “the script never changed from the moment I wrote it, to how it was shot.” For Horsfield, however, the positioning of Ross and Elizabeth as consensual lovers had more to do with fidelity, not just to character but to the spirit of Winston Graham’s original Poldark novels. In truth, the scene shown on Sunday bears little resemblance to one written by Graham in Warleggan, the third book in the Poldark series. In the 1953 text, Elizabeth accuses Ross of treating her “like a slut”, to which our hero replies, “It is time you were so treated.” Her protest (“Ross, you can’t intend…Stop! Stop, I tell you”) is ignored, and she’s carried to bed. “It’s interesting that people are getting outraged about the 'dot…dot...dot' moment, because what happens next isn’t actually described,” says Horsfield. “It’s up to the individual reader to decide what the dots mean in that moment. There is a degree of ambiguity if you just read that chapter, though it is clear, subsequently, that when Elizabeth remembers the incident, she thinks of…

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Hooters, moles and parenthood: Katherine Ryan’s cancer story
type: item
date: 2016-10-21T13:00:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Comedy
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Ahead of Channel 4’s Stand Up to Cancer, the comedian reveals how she has to joke about her brush with cancer
encoded: When Katherine Ryan says she came to Britain “for the weather”, she’s not entirely joking. “Your overcast weather is good for the skin,” explains the Irish-Canadian comedian. Ryan, a regular panellist on Mock the Week, Eight Out of Ten Cats Does Countdown and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, is scrupulously careful of her pale complexion. “I’m like a jellyfish colour of white,” she says. “My skin tries to kill me.” Twelve years ago, Ryan was diagnosed with Stage 2 skin cancer and she now has a sizeable scar on her thigh where a chunk of flesh the size of a golf ball was removed. It’s a reminder, she insists, of good fortune: “The cancer wasn’t that serious. It wasn’t into my lymph nodes, I didn’t have to have chemotherapy. "It did recur, but it was easily dealt with. I feel like I was really lucky just to get that lesson, that little smack on the arse of ‘Hey, wait a minute. Listen to your body, here.’ ” View oEmbed on the source website Ryan, 33, is part of the celebrity line-up raising funds and awareness for Channel 4’s 2016 Stand Up to Cancer telethon (see our full guide here). Her experience of the disease dates from her student days, when she was studying Urban Planning at Toronto University and working part-time for Hooters, a chain of US sports bars famous for its cheerleader-style waitresses. “It’s not perhaps aspirational, as a feminist, to get a job where you are decoration,” she admits, "but there are very many bars where the waitresses wear little skimpy outfits and, with Hooters, I always felt it was satirical." “Maybe it’s not meant to be as satirical as I found it, but it’s not like it’s a titty bar; it’s a very sporty look. I had all my clothes on, but this little section of my thigh was showing and one day, my co-worker, Jordan, said to me, ‘Ew, that mole on your leg looks funny.’ “I was like, ‘Naah, it’s fine.’ I just didn’t think twice about it. In retrospect, it didn’t even look that strange, just a bit discoloured, but I think your body has a way of w…

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Gold medallist Greg Rutherford lost his grandfather – now he has an important message for all men
type: item
date: 2016-10-21T07:40:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Entertainment
subject: TV
description: "If only he’d held on to see the Olympics"
encoded: For Olympic long-jump medallist Greg Rutherford, the joy of qualifying for the Beijing Games in 2008 was over-shadowed by the news that his beloved grandfather was dying. “I was prepping for my first Olympic Games, and to be perfectly honest it was just about the least important thing in the world for me at that time. Grandad was diagnosed with stomach cancer in January, and by July we knew he wasn’t going to make it. I’d told myself that I probably wasn’t going to the Olympics –I wasn’t training as much as usual because I’d been seeing Grandad more. "So it was such a weird, emotional thing, when I went to the National Championships at Birmingham, won the competition and jumped the qualifier. I took the medal straight back down to Hemel Hempstead where my grandad was spending his last few days. It would have been lovely if he could have held on to see me actually at an Olympic Games, but he was very proud.” Rutherford, now 29, went on to win gold in the 2012 Olympics and bronze in Rio (currently he’s strutting his exceptionally buff stuff on Strictly Come Dancing). He still swallows hard at the memory of his grandfather’s last days, and is passionate about using his profile to promote early detection of cancer symptoms. View oEmbed on the source website “Grandad died at 72. His father died at exactly the same age, from the same type of cancer. Even so, Grandad was suffering with what he thought was digestive trouble for about six weeks before he went to the doctor. So the males in my family, including me and my brother, are now very alert to the signs. Cancer, Rutherford knows, can strike at any age. His friend and fellow athlete Leo Barker was 31 when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. “Thankfully they caught it early enough and now he’s fine,” says Rutherford. “I think that people, and especially men, get either scared or embarrassed about going to the doctor, particularly when it’s to do with a part of your body that’s considered taboo. Nobody wants a camer…

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The Fall's John Lynch on alcoholism, getting sober and growing up in The Troubles
type: item
date: 2016-09-29T14:00:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: For the Northern Irish actor, the serial killer drama is a story that feels close to home
encoded: The Fall's John Lynch has a great face for sorrow, the look of a man who’s peered into the abyss. “I’m half Irish, half Italian,” he says, by way of explanation. “That’s quite combustive. And I take things seriously. I always have done, and I suppose that shows.” Let’s just say that Lynch is not your go-to actor for the larky roles. His recent performance as Bill Douglas in the BBC1 drama One of Us (which finished recently) is a study in heartbreak and fury. And now he’s back as the tormented assistant chief constable Jim Burns in series three of The Fall. View oEmbed on the source website For Lynch, 54, a Catholic, who grew up in South Armagh at the height of The Troubles, the fact that The Fall is set in Belfast is a masterstroke. The series has been hailed as a welcome and necessary evolution from political drama about Northern Ireland but, as Lynch points out, the tangled roots of tribalism are just below the top soil. “I think the writer, Allan Cubitt, has been very clever, because he’s used those shadows – the shadows I grew up in, and tried to escape from – really well. There’s this overpowering sense of trapdoors to darkness. “The North [of Ireland] is just starting to get over what has happened, and out of that shadow of death, this very unusual killer emerges. Belfast carries that resonance, and I think it’s totally believable that the city would spawn somebody as cocky and as lethal as Paul Spector.” The same innate darkness, indissoluble from sense of place, Lynch argues, is in Bill Douglas, the character he played in One of Us. The thriller, set in the Highlands (“Beautiful,” says Lynch, “but brutal, too.”) kept viewers guessing until the last frame, but Lynch felt the danger in Bill from the beginning. “I’d only been sent the first three episodes when I met the producer and director to discuss the role. Their first question to me was, ‘Who do you think did it?’ and I immediately said, ‘Bill, because he’s got nothing to lose.’” View oEmbed on the source…

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Benedict Cumberbatch on The Hollow Crown, bloody warfare and discovering he's Richard III's cousin
type: item
date: 2016-05-14T06:00:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The actor and his co-stars Sophie Okonedo and Adrian Dunbar, talk Kings, medieval courts and dying for power in the BBC2 adaptation of Shakespeare's history play...
encoded: Sleek and savage as a raven in sheeny blue-black robes, Benedict Cumberbatch is surrounded by a force-field of concentration; you can practically hear the crackle of synapses as he prepares to go on set as Shakespeare’s Richard III. A few feet away, Judi Dench sits quietly, hands on lap, possibly meditating on her role as Richard’s mother, possibly planning her dinner. Sophie Okonedo, on the other hand rises, visibly, to the boil for her big entrance as Margaret of Anjou. When the camera finally turns, the release of energy on the Shepperton sound-stage is explosive. In a fiery speech, ‘mad Margaret’ curses everyone around her. The worst of her fury is reserved for Richard (“Thou elvish-mark’d abortive rooting hog! “. ) Watching Cumberbatch blench under this attack on his character’s physical deformities, you find yourself moved to stand between theatre’s blackest villain and his tormentor. Cumberbatch plays Richard III in the last two parts of The Hollow Crown - Henry VI Part II this Saturday and in Richard III next Saturday. The landmark BBC2 series is epic in scale and boasts a cast that includes Hugh Bonneville, Michael Gambon, Keeley Hawes and Samuel West - and Andrew Scott, Cumberbatch's old Sherlock nemesis Moriarty, makes an appearance as King Louis. It was partly the sheer scope of the project that persuaded Cumberbatch, arguably the most in-demand actor of his generation, on board: his faceted performance of the Bard’s "bottled spider" is helped enormously by the fact that viewers have, in the course of the series, witnessed the events that shape Richard’s psychopathy. “I took the part because it has some of the most extraordinary, visceral, gut-punching language and action that you get in any of Shakespeare’s dramas," says Cumberbatch. “Richard III is a tragedy, but you only really appreciate that tragedy if you have seen Richard through all the plays and have met the adolescent who becomes the despot who becomes the regretful, nightmare-haunted wreck bef…

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How Keeley Hawes lost her Shakespeare virginity
type: item
date: 2016-05-07T13:00:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The actress stars in new adaptation The Hollow Crown this weekend - and she wasn't the only first-timer on set...
encoded: I was a Shakespeare virgin before The Hollow Crown,” says Keeley Hawes. “I didn’t grow up reading Shakespeare and my family certainly weren’t in the habit of going to see the plays in the theatre.” For the normally feisty actor, star of The Durrells and Line of Duty, the Bard’s blank verse was blankly terrifying. “I was really frightened of it, frightened of the words and of that whole world. But it’s a box I had to tick. I couldn’t get away with not doing Shakespeare any longer.” She needn’t have worried. Hawes’s performance as Elizabeth Woodville, the commoner Queen of King Edward lV, is one of the highlights of The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, the overall title of the three films that conclude BBC2’s landmark production of Shakespeare’s histories, comprising Henry VI, Parts I, II and III, and Richard III edited into three two-hour films. The cast of the three films is a spectacular representation of the best of British acting talent, so from a standing start Hawes found herself acting with eminent Shakespeareans including Benedict Cumberbatch, Judi Dench, Sophie Okonedo, Hugh Bonneville, Adrian Dunbar, Anton Lesser, Jason Watkins and Samuel West among others. View oEmbed on the source website “I started reading about the real-life Elizabeth and I decided to see my character as a sort of Princess Diana figure,” she explains. “Elizabeth is incredibly bright and able – far ahead of her game politically – but she is looked down on by the royal family because she’s been married before. When she gets together with Edward, it’s a bit of a shocker, but they have a happy marriage, at least in Shakespeare’s version – although he was dying of syphilis, so I’m not sure how happy it would have been really. Once you understand the characters, the language falls into place – you realise that it’s just people talking to each other. And I was doing scenes with Judi Dench, for goodness’ sake! So I found myself having a lovely time, and if I can have a lovely time with Shak…

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Doctor Foster's Bertie Carvel on playing one of the most hated characters on television
type: item
date: 2016-04-15T12:50:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The actor discusses the audience reaction to the show's finale, how acting is like journalism and the cult of celebrity
encoded: Doctor Foster is one of the six shows you can vote for in the BAFTA Radio Times Audience Award People had plans for the shears in the title sequence of BBC1’s Doctor Foster. As the marriage of Gemma (Suranne Jones) and Simon (Bertie Carvel) unravelled, sympathy snowballed for the deceived wife. In the run-up to the hotly anticipated final episode, fans of the show took to social media, expressing the view that castration was too good for the spineless Simon. Hauled onto the sofa on daytime TV, Carvel (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Babylon, Coalition) shared his fears that he’d be attacked on the street. “I didn’t really mean it,” he says, looking sorry to disappoint. “Interviewers say these things with a grin on their face, and you kind of play ball. I never feared for my life, but it’s true that public reaction to the show was phenomenal. It seemed to engage all those gut reactions – anger, pity, fear – that tragedy, according to Aristotle, is supposed to excite.” It’s quite a leap from primetime to Aristotle, but Carvel, 38, is that kind of actor. A self-diagnosed tendency to “overthink everything” bears fruit in fantastically finely calibrated performances. He scooped an Olivier award for his monstrous turn as Miss Trunchbull in Matilda the Musical. As Nick Clegg in Channel 4’s Coalition, on the other hand, he steered scrupulously wide of caricature. And if Simon in Doctor Foster got under our skin, it is due largely to Carvel’s portrayal, a forensic case-study of guilt and cowardice. “Simon has already made his bed before the drama begins,” he says. “He’s a couple of years into this mess, this spiral of lies. Until very close to the end of the series, his main objective is not to have the sky fall in. Partly that’s about protecting himself, but it’s also about protecting this house of cards that he has built, because he knows that the consequences, if he's found out, are going to cause a huge amount of damage. So my preparation for the role had a lot to do with…

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Adrian Lester on Undercover: "It would be so much more powerful if we did all the press for this show without once mentioning colour"
type: item
date: 2016-04-03T07:00:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The actor on why he thought about turning down his OBE, the power of saying 'no' and why it's character that matters - not skin colour - even when he's breaking new ground...
encoded: Adrian Lester can smash a brick with the back of his hand. It’s not a party trick, and there’s not much call for brick-smashing in the life of a classical actor. It’s just something Lester, a black belt in Taekwondo, can do. His hand, sketching the move in the air, is soft and loosely curled; the gesture, precise as ballet, couldn’t be farther from the cartoon “karate chop”, but it’s powerfully suggestive of withheld force. “It’s all about discipline,” he explains. “Martial arts are as connected to fighting as making tea is to culinary skills. Fighting’s a part of it, but it’s much more about self-discipline.” On stage and off, Lester, 47, is the master of contained power. As Shakespeare’s Henry V at the National Theatre in 2003, his savvy, statesmanlike performance made Laurence Olivier’s iconic incarnation of the same role look like a trigger-happy hysteric. His equally acclaimed Othello in 2013, also at the National Theatre, was all charisma and quiet authority. Today, wedged into a hotel sofa to promote BBC1’s new political thriller Undercover, Lester adopts the attitude of actor-at-leisure – arms crossed, powerfully built legs flung out. Every other thing about him – his careful speech, the way he listens to each question as if combing it for subtext – signals a man on high alert. “Concentration is my thing,” he acknowledges. “I enjoy the rigour of acting, the accuracy and the technical challenge. But it’s also about the level of what you convey. What you sing is deeper than the tune. “ Undercover , written by former barrister Peter Moffat ( Silk, Criminal Justic and The Village) is a tense, six-part multi-level drama, that lifts the lid on covert operations within the UK security establishment. Lester plays Nick, husband of high-flying human rights lawyer Maya (Sophie Okenedo). Maya is tipped for a politically significant appointment as the first black Director of Public Prosecutions, but Nick has a secret which threatens to blow their family apart. With the B…

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Robson Green on the new series of Grantchester: "I defy anyone not to cry"
type: item
date: 2016-03-02T15:34:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The actor is enjoying a fine bromance with James Norton – but on screen it'll all end in tears
encoded: The scene is set for a bromance. A picnic on the meadows. Sunlight on the shoulders of Rev Sidney Chambers and Detective Inspector Geordie Keating as they plunge into the river Cam for a swimming race. All good, back-slapping, pec-rippling fun. But this is Grantchester, where every idyll has its serpent. Fans of the ecclesiastical crime drama, now in its second series, are in for a shock. The unlikely pairing of a clergyman (James Norton) and a cop (Robson Green) is the bedrock of this drama. But later in the series when a murder suspect faces hanging (legal in Britain until 1965), the friendship between Sidney and Geordie is thrown into jeopardy. For Robson Green, this development demands a step up from both actors and audience. “I defy anybody not to cry as the relationship really starts to fracture,” he says. “In the first series, we basically wanted to say to the audience, ‘Do you like this?’, ‘Do you like these characters?’ It set out to charm, and it worked. I think the likeability is still there, but what we’re doing with the characters in the second series is quite unsettling. Sidney and Geordie are poles apart on capital punishment — Sidney is against the death penalty, Geordie sees it as justice. Arguments for and against are put forward, and each is equally valid. But it’s never a dry, political argument. The whole beauty of Grantchester is that the politics are implicit in the characters.” Interlocking storylines, adapted by Daisy Coulam from James Runcie’s Grantchester Mysteries, subvert viewers’ prejudices at every turn. Sidney is a vicar who has seen active service in the Second World War; Geordie sees beyond villains and victims to the ripple effect of crime on society. “Geordie wants to know why Sidney always sides with the bad ones,” explains Green. “Is it because Sidney has himself taken lives in the past? And Sidney asks Geordie, ‘Where is our compassion in all this?’ But Geordie’s compassion is not only for the victims, but for the destruction c…

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James Norton won hearts in War and Peace – now he's terrifying us as Happy Valley's psycho
type: item
date: 2016-02-09T15:24:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The actor, who plays the murderous Tommy Lee Royce, talks series two, obsessive fans and posh actors on TV
encoded: James Norton's hair deserves it's own agent. The rise of Britain's hottest man can pretty much be charted in haircuts. The terrible dye-job in the first series of Happy Valley series one somehow underpinned his character's psychopathy. Clerical Chic in Grantchester was swiftly followed by Bohemian Floppy in Life in Squares and a clipped moustache rang the changes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Most recently, the hair turned in an extravagant, bouffant performance in War and Peace. Today, it’s rocking a severe, prison buzz-cut because, to the delight of nations, Happy Valley – hailed by RT critics as the best show of 2014 – is back for a second series. Tommy Lee Royce, the killer who kept us behind our sofas, is back, and this time he’s behind bars. “Everyone else got invited back way before me,” says the 30-year-old, cheerfully. “I was getting these emails from Rhys [Connah], who plays my son Ryan, saying, ‘Are you coming back?’ And I was saying, ‘I don’t know, mate.’ Then I got the call.” It was a great call, in every sense. The relationship between Tommy Lee Royce and Sergeant Catherine Cawood (played by Sarah Lancashire) in series one of Happy Valley was not so much cat-and-mouse as tiger-and-shark – two immensely subtle and complicated characters closing in for the kill. We last saw Tommy scrunched like a foetus on the floor of a barge as an out-of-control Catherine kicked ten bells out of him, but we knew that the fight wasn’t over. “It’s an even stranger dynamic between them this time,” promises Norton. Tommy’s in jail, he’s been there for 18 months; there’s only one face-to-face meeting, at a funeral, between him and Catherine in the whole series. But they’re still totally obsessed; for each of them everything is fuelled by, rotates around, the other. There are clues, in the first episode, that Tommy has taken to religion in jail, but redemption, you suspect, really isn't his thing. "We discussed how there are two options available to someone in Tommy's position…

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How Manjinder Virk is shaking up Midsomer Murders
type: item
date: 2016-01-06T18:30:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Four years after an executive producer left the series after saying it wouldn't work with ethnic minorities, the murder mystery has hired its first British Asian actor
encoded: If you’re going to play a pathologist, Midsomer Murders is the gig to get,” laughs Manjinder Virk, who has just joined the corpse-strewn ITV crime drama as Dr Kam Karimore. She has a point. Virk barely has time to climb out of her overalls between inventive storylines in the new series, including body-snatchers and alien abductions. “You almost have to take a tongue-in-cheek approach because, despite the body count, there’s a real feel-good factor to the series,” she says. The feel-good factor took a dent in 2011 when Brian True-May, then executive producer, claimed it “wouldn’t work” with ethnically diverse actors and described the show as “the last bastion of Englishness”. The comments, in Radio Times, sparked national debate and True-May subsequently left the programme. Four years on, Virk, 40, is the first British Asian actor to join the regular cast, alongside Neil Dudgeon’s DCI John Barnaby and Gwilym Lee’s DS Charlie Nelson. “I was aware of the comments Brian True-May made, but it wasn’t really in my thoughts when I went up for this job,” says the Coventry- born actor. “The main thing for me was that they wanted to create a really rounded character, regardless of race. But I also feel that my being there will make a difference. Because Midsomer is seen in so many countries, hopefully seeing a British Asian character taking her place in that community will, in some small way, break down preconceptions of what England is.” View oEmbed on the source website It’s a diplomatic response to a delicate situation but Virk is political to her boots. She met her husband, writer/director Neil Biswas, on a film about the Bradford riots and her nuanced performance as a jihadi suicide bomber in Peter Kosminsky’s Bafta-winning Britz (2007) drew international acclaim. More recently, Out of Darkness (2013) the award-winning short film she wrote and directed, starring Tom Hiddleston and Riz Ahmed, dealt with the psychological trauma of aid workers. Virk owes her sense of artist…

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A Song for Jenny author Julie Nicholson reveals the cost of the 7/7 bombings to her family - and her faith
type: item
date: 2015-07-05T06:45:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Ten years ago, Nicholson’s daughter Jenny died in the London terrorist attacks. Now a BBC1 drama starring Emily Watson tells her story...
encoded: Your first-born is special," says Julie Nicholson. She recalls how, in the first moments after her daughter Jenny's birth, she felt remade by motherhood – no longer an individual, but a parent whose first and fervent vow was to protect her child. “Symbolically,” she says, “your first-born defines your position in the universe.” When Jenny died, aged 24, in the 7/7 terrorist attack in London in 2005, Nicholson, a Church of England priest, felt everything she thought she knew slip away. Her daughter was killed at Edgware Road Underground station by the bomb planted by Mohammad Sidique Khan, the bombers’ ringleader from Dewsbury, and Nicholson was forced to reappraise her convictions. “When protecting your child becomes... not possible, that is not something that can be got over,” she says. “You are changed and you will carry it always, like a wound inside.” A Song For Jenny is a tenth-anniversary tribute to all 52 victims of the London bombings. Adapted by award-winning screenwriter Frank McGuiness, from Nicholson’s 2010 memoir of the same name, the film stars Emily Watson as Nicholson and tells the story of Jenny’s last morning and the days that followed. Watson’s portrayal of mind-altering grief is terrible to see and can’t have been easy to play (the actress wept at the Bafta screening of the drama). For Nicholson, who had no expectations of catharsis, much less of closure, watching the film was “mainly uplifting”. “That first time, watching Emily, who was just extraordinary, I lost track of whether I was watching her or watching me. I felt this mix of being quite objective about it, as if it were someone else’s story, but at the same time feeling that this whole narrative was somehow in me." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jN7i308xnk The content of the drama reflects Nicholson’s unrelenting, visceral need for facts at the time of her daughter’s death; her need to see for herself the bomb site in the immediate aftermath of the explosion; her decision, against offi…

Meet the next Gordon Ramsay: his 13 year-old daughter Matilda
type: item
date: 2015-04-14T13:13:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The celebrity chef's youngest has already landed her own cookery show on CBBC - and boasts impeccable manners
encoded: It takes a special kind of chutzpah to share a kitchen with Gordon Ramsay, but TV's newest celebrity chef reckons she's got it taped. "My daddy's quite mushy on the inside," says Matilda Ramsay, 13. "It's always fun in our kitchen at home.” Tilly, as she’s known to family and friends, has been cooking since the age of six and now she has her own show on CBBC, Matilda and the Ramsay Bunch. Shot over a summer in Los Angeles, where her dad was shooting the US version of MasterChef, the programme is loosely structured around the food blog Matilda started as a way of keeping in touch with her friends back in England. Half video diary, half cookery show, it’s a crisply edited snapshot of the Californian teen dream: Matilda and her siblings – Megan, 16, and 14-year-old twins Holly and Jack – have a go at everything LA has to offer, from surfing to zip-wiring, Hollywood parties and a stunt lesson at a film studio. All with suitably themed snacks. View oEmbed on the source website Smiley and capable, Ramsay fille is the least temperamental of cooks. She devises all her own dishes and chats to camera as to the manner born. “It’s not really hard, because I tend to chat a lot anyway,” she says. “I just have to remember to look up and explain more and try to make it easy for people to follow.” Cooking is a special bond between Matilda and her parents (mum Tana has brought out her own range of recipe books). “Mum’s always cooking at home for us all and it's always very relaxed – just making things up from what is left in the fridge. But when my daddy cooks, he seems to know exactly what he's doing and everything is very fast. So I watch them both and then just cook my way." Matilda’s signature dishes are big on impact (there’s a spectacular Halloween platter of severed mincemeat hands in a welter of ketchup and gorgeously “dressed-up” baked potatoes worthy of the red carpet) but easy for young cooks to follow. "It's great for kids to know about cooking," she says, "because it hel…

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How screenwriter Sarah Phelps adapted JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy for TV
type: item
date: 2015-02-15T09:50:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: Books
subject: Drama
subject: Going Out
subject: News
subject: TV
description: “I was very straight with Jo and told her that I needed to write a different ending,” says the former EastEnders writer. "What works in a novel doesn’t always work on screen"
encoded: Sarah Phelps is used to treading in the footsteps of giants; her acclaimed screenplays include BBC adaptations of Dickens’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. However, when it came to dramatising JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy for the small screen, Phelps felt rather more exposed, “like Man Friday, making his print in the sand”. “It’s one thing adapting a writer who’s been dead for a century or so,” says Phelps, “but when you have a writer who is not only very much living and breathing but who is as phenomenally successful as JK Rowling, the dynamic is rather different.” Especially if you intend to change her ending... Phelps sees The Casual Vacancy as the natural successor to the socially engaged rural novels of Mrs Gaskell and Thomas Hardy, although it has to be said that Rowling’s original denouement makes Hardy seem like a cock-eyed optimist. “I was very straight with Jo and told her that I needed to write a different ending,” says Phelps. “It’s still heartbreaking, but I had to find some kind of redemptive moment at the end of it all, that sense that after the tragedy, someone gets to stand with a slightly straighter back. “Also, what works in a novel doesn’t always work on screen. Nobody wants a finger wagged in their face, and I learnt on EastEnders that if you just go ‘grim, grim, grim’, viewers will simply disengage. If you’ve invested three hours of your leisure time to watch a show and get involved, there’s got to be rewarded. You’ve got to think that it was worth it and that the characters aren’t just a pack of s***s; they’ve got to be a little bit funny, a little bit understandable.” The Casual Vacancy, Rowling’s first novel for adult readers, came out to global hype, enormous sales and mixed reviews in 2012. Set in the fictional West Country village of Pagford, it is a forensically detailed account of social problems and power struggles in an idyllic setting; behind those golden stone walls and flowery water troughs, bitter rivalry for a place on th…

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Classical star Alison Balsom says cutbacks in music make her furious
type: item
date: 2014-05-16T22:15:00.000Z
creator: E Jane Dickson
subject: audio
subject: News
subject: TV
description: “We know the countless benefits of what music can do,” says the BBC Young Musician host
encoded: “I play who I am,” says Alison Balsom. “With the trumpet, you have to wear your heart on your sleeve. It’s risky, but it’s thrilling.” She’s the most garlanded trumpet player of her generation, winner of the 2013 Gramophone Artist of the Year award, three times winner at the Classic Brits. She’s performed as soloist with the world’s greatest conductors and orchestras, but still recalls the “life-changing” moment when she was announced brass category winner in the 1998 BBC Young Musician competition. “Winning the brass final was like a dream. Getting to the concerto final was a baptism of fire. It was the first time I’d ever played a solo with an orchestra and there just aren’t that many brass solo players in the world. Undoubtedly, it was that experience that gave me the strength to carry on and make solo trumpet my career.” Returning to BBC Young Musician as co-presenter (with guitarist Milos Karadaglic) of the category finals and this week’s semi-final is, says Balsom, “the most fantastic privilege”. “Presenting and being at production meetings has been so lovely – just seeing the enormous respect the crew has for the young musicians, the care that is taken over how best to film them without disturbing their thought process. Often, with TV talent shows, performers are basically hamsters on the wheel. But with Young Musician it’s not ‘You are our hamster.’ It’s ‘You are an artist and we’re trying to capture that.’ With this competition it’s a given that everyone has talent and it’s more about imagining where that talent is going to go in the future, rather than just exploiting it for ratings. And to see a child use their own self-discipline to dedicate themselves to something they want to do that much, it’s quite life-affirming, isn’t it?” Discipline is one thing, but the stereotype of the hothoused prodigy, closeted away from the usual distractions of child- hood is, in Balsom’s experience, unhelpful. “Personally, I don’t think you should make everything else take…

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