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
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 tongue out and it just clicked. I found this book of quotes by Einstein – which I recommend as a life choice, he was such an insightful man – and I started writing short stories about Einstein and the Doctor, where the Doctor was getting irritated with the great man’s buffoonery. He’d be saying, ‘Come on, Albert, keep up!’ and I think that, more than anything, was my way in to the part.” With new head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat on board, the role could be tailored to Smith’s own personality as the season developed. “There’s a slight sort of madness and a great tenderness to the Doctor. I don’t know if that’s me, but he’s also very clumsy and that’s definitely me,” says Smith. “It helps, too, that I’ve always been completely fascinated by the time/space continuum. I was never that into sci-fi – I grew up in that barren age when Doctor Who was taken off the air – but I once shared a house with an obscenely clever guy who was doing his doctorate for Cambridge on the subject of time, and ever since, it has seemed to me the great, omnipotent force of the world. The new series plays so cleverly with the concept of time travel. I don’t know how Steven does it; you think there’s no way he’s going to be able to join those dots and tie the whole thing up but, by God, he does. For me, to go to work and be in touch, on a daily basis, with that crazy, time-bending magic is just incredible.” Smith needed all his enthusiasm – supplemented by weapons-grade Vitamin C – to carry him through the series’ seven-month shooting schedule at Cardiff HQ, where he featured in practically every scene. “If you’re ill, it’s just tough. I think your head would have to be falling off before you could take a day off.” Fortunately, Smith is used to pushing himself to the limit. Long before he thought of acting as a career, he was set to be a professional footballer. Selected for Northampton Town under 11 and 12s, Nottingham Forest under 12, 13 and 14s and Leicester City under 15s and 16s, he was on course for the premier league – he remembers playing against Jermaine Pennant who went on to play for Liverpool – when a serious back injury knocked him out of the game. “That was a difficult time for me, for sure. But you know, what doesn’t kill you… And my dad was always very keen to drill into me that it’s not the disappointment that counts, it’s how you react to it.” Smith was switched onto acting by Jerry Hardingham, his drama teacher at Northampton School for Boys. “I can remember his first drama lesson,” says Hardingham. “He possessed this raw power and presence. I knew that if that power could be harnessed, he could go places. I cast him in Twelve Angry Men while he was on holiday, without auditioning him. I rang his mum and told her to tell him he’s doing it; he hasn’t got a choice! He did and he loved it – he got a taste for it.” In other words, Smith discovered his soccer skills were eminently transferable. “So much of what I do, instinctually, as an actor, comes, I’m sure, from my footballing background,” he says. “There’s supposed to be this divide between art and physical culture, but I look at someone like Zinedine Zidane and I see the pure expression of artistic grace. The courage needed to be a great sportsman applies equally to art in general and acting in particular. So much of acting is about summoning courage and confidence and, as in sport, there are lots of elements of your life that have to be put on a back burner because there’s only one real focus. Not to mention the need for timing, rhythm and balance.” Rising through the ranks of the National Youth Theatre, Smith appeared in the second run of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, the play that was a springboard for a new wave of British talent including James Corden, Russell Tovey and Dominic Cooper. “They were in the first run,” Smith points out, scrupulously. “I’ve just been working with James [for episode 11 of Doctor Who, The Lodger] – God, he’s funny – and he’s constantly going on about how he was doing History Boys in New York and I was doing it in Milton Keynes. Nothing against Milton Keynes” – Smith seems genuinely concerned not to give offence – “there’s a wonderful theatrical culture there, but New York it ain’t.” Does he hope to follow previous Doctors David Tennant and Christopher Eccleston to Hollywood? “Why the hell not?” says Smith. “I could do with a bit of poolside. I’d take my mum – she’d love it.” Certainly he’s keen to pursue new projects in shooting breaks from Who, but he’s not going anywhere before mastering the sonic screwdriver. “I’ve broken four of them,” he confesses. “I like to have it about my person at all times, just twirling it around and flicking it. It’s all part of the magic, isn’t it?” For Smith, for now, Doctor Who is where he wants to be. “I feel very safe, literally safe, in the Tardis,” he says. “I can’t quite explain it. Maybe it’s because I know that once it lands, the adventure is about to begin.”
Long Lost Family: Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell reunite father and son separated by nearly 3500 miles
ITV's tear-jerking documentary series Long Lost Family sees a father and son reunite after three decades
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_EP1_12-53c5e50.jpg" width="590" height="586" alt="From Wall To Wall Productions LONG LOST FAMILY: Tuesday 17th July 2018 on ITV Pictured: Family Photo - the only photo Pearse Egan had of his father, Edilson Santos. This week, two of our youngest ever searchers, looking for birth family on the other side of the world. A man whose last contact with his father was a snatched phone call from America when he was six. And a woman whose life was transported from Bogata to Berkshire when her Colombian birth mother had to give her up. © Wall To Wall Productions For further information please contact Peter Gray 0207 157 3046 peter.gray@itv.com This photograph is © ITV and can only be reproduced for editorial purposes directly in connection with the programme LONG LOST FAMILY: or ITV. Once made available by the ITV Picture Desk, this photograph can be reproduced once only up until the Transmission date and no reproduction fee will be charged. Any subsequent usage may incur a fee. This photograph must not be syndicated to any other publication or website, or permanently archived, without the express written permission of ITV Picture Desk. Full Terms and conditions are available on the website www.itvpictures.com" title="LONG_LOST_FAMILY_EP1_12" /> Pearse trained as an actor, then travelled the world, teaching preschool children in Australia and Asia before settling into theatre work in London. But the more experience he gained, the more he felt a fundamental part of himself was missing. “I’d be going to auditions, but I wasn’t able to commit fully to roles, because the type of parts I would be going up for were either a young dad, or an adult having issues with their father.” With his mother’s support, Pearse decided to trace his father. Appeals on social media came to nothing. Then a post popped up on Pearse’s Facebook page, putting out a call for people to appear on ITV’s Long Lost Family. “I knew the show, but I always got too emotional watching it. This time, though, I thought, ‘Well, what better way? I’ll give it a go.’” Within weeks, co-host of Long Lost Family Nicky Campbell was interviewing an emotional Eddie Santos in Manhattan. Santos couldn’t wait to meet the son he thought he’d never see, and flew to London at the earliest opportunity. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2018/07/LONG_LOST_FAMILY_EP1_09-34f7623.jpg" width="2671" height="1560" alt="From Wall To Wall Productions LONG LOST FAMILY: Tuesday 17th July 2018 on ITV Pictured: (l-r) Searcher, Pearse Egan reunited with his birth Father Eddie Santos © ITV Photographer Tony Ward For further information please contact Peter Gray 0207 157 3046 peter.gray@itv.com This photograph is © ITV and can only be reproduced for editorial purposes directly in connection with the programme LONG LOST FAMILY: or ITV. Once made available by the ITV Picture Desk, this photograph can be reproduced once only up until the Transmission date and no reproduction fee will be charged. Any subsequent usage may incur a fee. This photograph must not be syndicated to any other publication or website, or permanently archived, without the express written permission of ITV Picture Desk. Full Terms and conditions are available on the website www.itvpictures.com" title="LONG_LOST_FAMILY_EP1_09" /> “When I walked into the restaurant to meet my dad for the first time, I felt like a little kid running to the playground gate,” Egan recalls. “The first thing I said to him was, ‘You have really big hands!’ I have massive hands myself, and it was a part of me I could immediately see in my dad.” Father and son have since spent time together in New York and have discovered they have many things in common. Eddie, a retired security guard, had wanted to be an actor in his youth. There’s a shared sense of humour, a shared propensity for losing things. Above all, there is, says Egan, a sense of completion for him and for Santos. “It was the most beautiful thing,” he says. “All the years of longing collapsed into that one moment when my dad hugged me and said, over and over, ‘My son!’” Long Lost Family returns to ITV1 on Tuesdays at 9.30pm
Call the Midwife: why the NHS used sock puppets to teach breastfeeding
The strange history of knitted nipples in 1960s Britain
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, Page Three topless models were a big deal, and breasts weren’t primarily seen as something for nurturing an infant. Then, in the 70s, Women’s Lib played its part – if the baby was being fed by bottle, the mother could get back to work. “But more recently, in some circles, breastfeeding has been promoted with such zeal that women felt guilty if they’re bottlefeeding – which is sad, because breastfeeding isn’t right for everybody. Personally, I feel it doesn’t really matter how you feed your baby as long as mother and baby are well and happy. That’s possibly not the line everyone would like a midwife to take, but being pragmatic, I think it’s probably the best.” In the era that Call the Midwife is set, Coates says that becoming a mother was sociable. “Until well into the 80s, pregnant women were offered training in what was called ‘mothercraft’ and later became ‘parentcraft’ – a series of classes, paid for by the NHS, where they made great friendships that lasted beyond their baby’s birth. “If dads attended those early antenatal classes, it was mostly to tell them what to expect after delivery – and if they were present at the birth, it was generally because they hadn’t left the room quickly enough! In our antenatal sessions we used to shoo the dads off to the pub. The mums then had a whole different level of intimate conversation. The camaraderie was wonderful. “Nowadays, because there is so much information at the touch of a button, I don’t think people feel the same need for midwives’ professional advice – and the way the NHS is funded now, we couldn’t afford to run classes like that anyway. But the problem with Google or Siri is that, if you don’t know which questions to ask, you’re not going to get the right answers. Technology has isolated mothers enormously.” View oEmbed on the source website Birthing scenes in Call the Midwife are so realistic that they’re used as a teaching resource for trainee midwives. “I help the director choreograph what is clinically plausible within a given scenario,” says Coates, who is studying for a PhD in the portrayal of childbirth in TV drama. “We practise with dolls and prosthetics, so you can spend five or six hours doing a birth, but the baby is only on set for a minute or two. I’m always there, crouching, dangling or leaning just out of shot, to make sure the baby is safe.” The filming of newborns is strictly regulated and all babies appearing are licensed, with initial paperwork sometimes being completed while they’re still in the womb. “We have babies just a few days old, others a week or so, but we prefer it when they’re born slightly before their due date so they’re still sleepy and curled up,” she says. For “first birth” scenes, the babies are massaged with oil warmed to body temperature “to make them look wet,” Coates explains. “If we used water, the baby would chill very quickly. We also maintain a very, very warm environment – it’s uncomfortable for the cast and crew, but we’re keen on making sure that everything is 100 per cent right for the babies.”
Nobody messes with Aunt Pol... Star Cillian Murphy and creator Steven Knight talk feminine power in Peaky Blinders
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 influence – not just the women present in his life but, crucially, the Gypsy mother he lost in childhood. “The First World War was a moment in history when a kind of pastoral culture died. Tommy’s mother, with her link to the land and horses, represents that pastoral tradition. He watched her disintegrate because of the pressure she was under, and it’s a deep scar for him.” Cillian Murphy agrees that Tommy Shelby was, and still is, beholden to the women in his life. “All the good stuff in Tommy comes, through his mother, from the Romany side. Polly’s the one he trusts most. And he loves his sister, Ada, even though he’s frustrated by her politics. His romantic relations are less straightforward.” That puts it mildly. In series one and two, Tommy swung between Irish secret agent Grace Burgess and horse-loving aristocrat May Carleton. No sooner did he marry Grace at the beginning of series three than she was murdered. Since then, he’s had a go at orgies and erotic asphyxiation with Tatiana, a double-crossing White Russian, and enjoyed regular hook-ups with his brother John’s ex-fiancée, Lizzie Stark. Murphy takes a deep breath. “Right,” he says, “during the time Tommy was married to Grace he was completely faithful. Prior to that, sex was basically a way of self-medicating, then Grace’s death spun him off into something else entirely. I think that as we meet him now, he’s probably shut down again emotionally, and sex is just a physical need that has to be met.” It sounds, and is, exhausting. “For any actor, playing one character exclusively drives you crazy. I don’t share one strand of DNA with Tommy,” says Murphy, who has two sons with artist Yvonne McGuinness. “He couldn’t be further away from me, so it’s always an effort to play him, and then an effort to shake him off.” Bearing that in mind, would Murphy return for a fifth series? His steel-blue eyes spark up. “You’d be an eejit to want to walk away from something as good as this.” Peaky Blinders returns Wednesday 9pm BBC2
The young actors playing Leslie, Larry, Gerry and Margo reveal what it’s like to play the children to Keeley Hawes’s Mrs Durrell
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. Now you’re on your phone or your iPad all day, and that’s quite sad, I think. So it’s very nice to spend eight weeks of the year in 1935!” Daisy Waterstone, 22 plays Margo, 16 “Margo is still trying to figure herself out, which is good, because even though she’s 16 and I’m 22, I’m trying to figure myself out, too. So it’s nice to do it with someone else. I think of Margo as being uncomfortable in her body — she’s boy-mad, but she’s a bit awkward and it doesn’t help that in this series she’s covered in acne. “I’ve got seven older siblings, so it was quite easy for me to blend into a family atmosphere. At my audition, I actually punched Callum in the arm, because he looked quite punchable and he was supposed to be my brother. And then at the read-through with all the others, something just clicked. The family dynamic somehow just fell into place without us having to try.” The Durrells in Corfu airs on Sundays, 8/7c, PBS Masterpiece
Was Queen Victoria really "surprisingly sexy"?
Writer Daisy Goodwin reveals the scandalous nature of the young monarch's diaries
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, effervescent, enthusiastic girl before she morphs into the Mother of Empire. Meet the cast of Victoria “When Victoria comes to the throne, she’s just 18 and people are so relieved to have this lovely girl after all these ghastly, corpulent Hanoverian men with their mistresses and their scandals. But you have to remember that Victoria was the first queen in living memory. ‘God Save the Queen’ would have felt as odd to people then as ‘God Save the King’ will feel when our own queen dies. And, as we know, any time a woman does anything controversial, she’s called irrational or hysterical. George III had gone mad, so there was a lot of debate, every time Victoria did something people didn’t like, about whether she’d got ‘the hereditary taint’. Either way, it felt like a new world, a new regime, new everything.” A scatter of dolls in the Queen’s bedroom brings home Goodwin’s point (“Victoria was a lonely child; these dolls were imaginary friends”), as does the diminutive throne in the audience chamber. “One thing that helped me get into her character is that she was so small – 4ft 11, tiny, even for those days. She had to have a special throne made. Just imagine what it was like to be this tiny teenager surrounded by a forest of old men telling her what to do. I have a teenage daughter, a bit younger than Victoria but also small. I had this vision of what it would be like if the nation was being ruled by my daughter – all those hormones in that tiny package! – and from that point, Victoria sprang into my head.” Victoria and Albert As if on cue, the young queen, played by the exquisitely dainty Jenna Coleman paces out a scene on the arm of Tom Hughes (an implausibly handsome Albert). Coleman, 30, who bowed out as Clara in Doctor Who last year, turns in a nuanced performance that flickers with humour and blazes into royal indignity when her will is crossed. “One of the things I love about Victoria is how open, impulsive and vivid she is,” says Coleman. “She’s so un-precious and so funny. But if she hadn’t had this will of iron, there’s a possibility that she wouldn’t have been queen.” Reading Victoria’s exceptionally detailed diaries was, says Coleman, a fantastic resource. Preparing for the coronation scene, the actress was able to access an hour-by-hour account of the day, “Even though she’s the centre of this massive event, she’s always attentive to what’s going on around her. On the morning of her coronation, she was awake at 4am, listening to the voices outside the palace. She talks a lot about the people and how proud she felt to be queen of such a nation. That inner strength and pride are what I’ve been trying to get at.” Jenna Coleman could be the new Queen of Sunday night TV in Victoria If Victoria catches on (Goodwin is raring to go on a sequel), this could be a long-term commitment for Coleman. “I’ve only gone into the diaries up to where we are in the story now,” she says, diplomatically. “It keeps things fresher.” Even so, she’s already emotionally and physically immersed: “It’s helped so much having this amazing permanent set – not just the scale of it, but the fact that you can go, in one shot, between the grand public rooms and Victoria and Albert’s private quarters, where there is all this personal stuff – her water-colours, his books. It feels like our home.” Jenna Coleman as Victoria Not all the decoration on set is as authentic as it appears. Neo-classical wall decorations bristling with swords and shields feature gold-painted toy armour from a Pound Shop, while a rococo revival frieze was manufactured from beach-scavenged scallop shells. “Our production designer, Michael Howells, is a genius,” says Goodwin. “He brought in students from a local art school and taught them how to do proper gilding, so we’ve had all these Yorkshire teenagers gilding shells to make Buckingham Palace!” One detail faithfully observed is the mechanism devised by Albert to lock the bedroom door with a button next to the bed. “That way they could ensure their privacy from courtiers and children, without having to get out of bed and break the moment,” says Goodwin. “They were a very sexy couple. One of the most hilarious entries in Victoria’s diaries, which, amazingly, got past her youngest daughter who censored her journals, is a passage where Victoria says something like ‘Seeing Albert in his skin-tight britches – it’s magnificent! And he’s got nothing on underneath!’ Then, after the birth of her ninth child – I think she had a prolapsed uterus – the doctor says, ‘Really, ma’am, I don’t think you should have any more children.’ And she says, ‘Ooh doctor, no more fun in bed?’ Coleman and Hughes as Victoria and Albert “In a way, Victoria is the first woman to ‘have it all’ – husband, nine children and she’s the most important woman in the world, so there’s more here for a modern audience than you might think. How does she keep Albert happy while he’s always one step behind? He’s one of the cleverest men of his time but, initially, very unpopular because he’s German and people don’t think he’s grand enough – it’s almost like the Queen’s marrying a Kardashian. “It was quite handy Victoria was pregnant all the time; it meant there were periods when Albert could take the reins, but there was a lot of arguing. They had big, stand-up rows and she would throw glasses of wine over him. She really wanted to give him his place as her husband, but she was not a ‘surrendered wife’ by any means.” For all Victoria’s devotion to Albert, he was not her first love. Victoria spells out explicitly the often-fudged nature of her relationship with her first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne (played, with devastating charm, by Rufus Sewell). Victoria and Lord Melbourne “Melbourne is a worldly, funny, elegant aristocrat in his 50s with a tragic, romantic past. Victoria was besotted,” says Goodwin. “Diarists said at the time, ‘The Queen is clearly in love with her Prime Minister and her feelings for him are sexual, although she doesn’t know it yet.’ There was as much scandal and rumour then as there would be now, and I’ve fed all that into the story. I’ve tried to look at events through the prism of what people felt at the time, as if they’d been reading the Daily Mail.” With her gift for “seeing past the tiara to the person”, would Goodwin fancy a crack at dramatising our own royal family? “Ooh. The most interesting thing would be writing about Carole Middleton – the coal miner’s daughter who becomes mother of the future queen? It’s a great story and makes us think there’s social mobility somewhere in this country.” For now she has her own scene to play, a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo as the gloriously named Lady Cecilia Buggins. It’s time, she groans, to get into her corset. “We’re so lucky to be women today. It’s very easy to watch period drama and think, ‘Oh, I’d like a bonnet.’ Then you spend ten minutes in a corset and think, ‘Actually, I’ll take the Spanx any day.’”
Call the Midwife’s Stephen McGann reveals his troubled family history
The actor may play Dr Turner in the BBC drama, but his ancestors were far from healthy...
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 hatred of his captors. Links between disease management and social justice are clear. “When you’re talking about a family rising from subsistence level in the 19th century to relative prosperity in the present day, the conclusion is unavoidable: history is politics and politics is history,” says McGann. “Before the post-war consensus my family survived, we were OK; we could labour in the docks or serve in the armed forces. After Clement Attlee’s reforms, we had a stake in society.” Flesh and Blood’s most urgent argument is found in the chapter on pestilence, which segues from death by smallpox to the notion of “moral contagion”. Dr William Duncan’s 1842 report on sanitary conditions in Liverpool directly accuses Irish immigrants to the city of “lowering the standard of comfort among their English neighbours… and fast extinguishing all sense of moral dignity, independence and selfrespect”. This same slur, McGann points out, was repeated down the generations, finding terrible force in the tabloids’ attitude to Liverpudlian victims of the Hillsborough football disaster in 1989. McGann was at the match with his brother Paul, saved from asphyxiation in the crush by random ticket allocation. “Hillsborough taught me that a stone can still be thrown down at my family from the higher balconies of the nation,” he says. Certainly the family has suffered at the sharp end of history. A great-uncle was a fireman on the Titanic who survived exposure in the North Atlantic. McGann’s late father, a former Royal Navy commando, never really recovered from the trauma of the D-Day landings. His wife’s brother (McGann is married to Call the Midwife creator Heidi Thomas) was one of the patients at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital whose organs were unlawfully retained. No less affecting is the personal tragedy of McGann’s mother, whose first-born twins were lost to polyhydramnios (a complication of pregnancy arising from an excess of amniotic fluid). “I told my mother’s story to Terri Coates, our medical advisor on Call the Midwife, and Terri just burst into tears,” says McGann. “She said: ‘But we can spot that condition so easily now!’ At that time my mum didn’t even know the name of the thing that killed her children.” As Flesh and Blood progresses, it’s clear that the flip side of a close family dynamic is the struggle for individual identity. The days when the McGann brothers were a travelling band of players, starring together in musicals and TV series, are remembered fondly, but without nostalgia. “The all-singin’, all-dancin’ McGann Brothers, that was just a funny little suit of clothes we put on in the past. It’s nothing to do with the men we are now.” With its mix of readable science and passionate sensibility, Flesh and Blood is essentially an attempt to heal the old rift between science and art. “I absolutely believe you can write artistically about science and scientifically about art,” says McGann. “When we take possession of both, our lives are richer for it.” To order Flesh and Blood: a History of My Family in Seven Maladies (Simon & Schuster) for £17.49 incl p&p, please call 0344 245 8092 * quoting RTBOOKS32
Top of the Lake’s Elisabeth Moss and Jane Campion on the gender war that brought them together
The actor and screenwriter talk motherhood and taking revenge on creepy men with their new series
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 to build up a universe; it’s a thrill and a luxury to be involved in a complex story.” Moss as Detective Robin Griffin in Top of the Lake: China Girl Series one of Top of the Lake was remarkable for the ghastliness of male characters (“Crazy, right?” says Moss. “It’s not like I’ve ever met a sleazy, creepy man in real life…”) and the second season, focusing on the exploitation of women in the sex industry, is again preoccupied with female experience in a patriarchal society. “I guess I’m taking revenge on all the guys I’ve had to deal with in my life,” says Campion. “They deserve it,” says Moss, “and just for a few hours they can deal with it! Actually, one of the great things about Jane’s and [co-writer] Gerard Lee’s writing is that even the ‘villains’ are complicated – every preconception is turned on its head. So it’s not like we’re choosing sides in the ‘gender war’, we’re just showing you humanity, with all of its terrible flaws, in all of its glory.” The emotional nexus of series two is Robin Griffin’s tentative relationship with Mary, the daughter she gave up for adoption (played by Campion’s own daughter, Alice Englert) There’s also a searing performance from Nicole Kidman as Mary’s adoptive mother, while parenthood and exploitation is further explored in a subplot about illegal surrogacy. “I think motherhood is the equivalent of what happens to men when they go to war,” says Campion. “There’s just so much going on; you become hyper-aware of this other person. I can feel it in my body if my daughter’s not OK, and I don’t think I understood how many detonations I’d laid for myself in this script – there are scenes where my daughter’s character is abused and I very quickly decided, ‘Well, I’m not going to direct that.’ “But it’s not just the children you bear; you have miscarriages that are so disturbing you can’t even talk about them – I personally had three miscarriages and a baby who died – and all of that really isn’t in our cultural discussion because most of that discussion is run by guys. So it was great to tell a story that has maternity at the centre of it.” Detective Robin Griffin (Moss), alongside Miranda Hilmarson (Gwendoline Christie) As the star and executive producer of Channel 4’s impeccable adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Moss too is steeped in the politics of maternity. “I’m not a mother myself, but I was able to really feel and see, and, for want of a less cheesy word, identify with this feeling Robin has, which is ‘I gave birth to this child, but I don’t feel the things that you’re supposed to feel towards your child’. “So she has to figure out what her version of being a mother is, and I found that really touching and unusual, because everyone has this perception of motherhood: that you have a child, and flowers sprout out of your vagina, and it’s all perfect from day one. But I’ve talked with enough mothers to know that isn’t always true.” Moss is the least showy of actors, but arguably unmatched in her ability to portray a character’s interior life. She knows she’s hit the truth, she says, when her heart starts pounding and she feels it in her ears. “What’s written on the page is just one layer of a character. It’s everything that’s underneath that’s interesting, and the great thing about working with Jane is that she allows you to not know where you’re going.” Campion appears equally delighted by departures from the script. “The qualities Lizzie has are so mysterious and, as with all good mysteries, you just accept them as gifts. For me one of the big encouragements [to film a second series] was just to come in every day and see what the hell she could do with this thing.” Campion on the Top of the Lake set Moss is Hollywood born and bred (her parents were musicians in Los Angeles), but Campion, from Wellington, New Zealand, considers her friend an honorary Antipodean. “American girls tend not to be outspoken; they talk like they have to be careful to please the guys. But this,” she says, pulling Moss close, “is one very coolheaded risk taker. She’s a really enduring avatar for me, both as Lizzie and as Robin Griffin.” So does Campion see in Robin an alter ego, or rather a chance to revisit and reshape her own experience? “I don’t think it’s my way of reimagining myself,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to be Robin, but I feel for her, when I see her trying to be brave, or hiding stuff, or making mistakes, or not being chosen… Robin gets her courage from supporting others, and I think I do, too.” Campion looks round, apparently astonished, at a fleet of waiting publicists and journalists, the whole circus her talent has conjured. “I got into this because of how much joy I had from films when I was younger, films I felt brought me into the adult world with conscience and with questions. It makes you want to give back to that tradition.” And Campion hasn’t finished. Happy endings are not her thing: “I got into this because I was a lost soul. I didn’t know how to live. I needed to find myself through work. If you were a happy person you wouldn’t do that. People ask me, ‘Why aren’t there more women in film?’ Sometimes I think, ‘Well, maybe they’re just too smart. Maybe they want more life.” Top of the Lake: China Girl is on Thursday 9:00pm BBC2
The Durrells' Keeley Hawes on how she juggles family life with being TV's most sought-after actress
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 (Our Mutual Friend, Tipping the Velvet), comedy (The Casual Vacancy, Inside No 9) and contemporary thrillers (she met her husband, Matthew Macfayden, on the set of Spooks). Last year, at a stage when actresses are wont to report diminishing returns, Hawes pulled off the spectacular hat-trick of starring in three of TV’s most-watched – and most harrowing – dramas. She made a triumphant Shakespearean debut as Elizabeth Woodville in The Hollow Crown, scared the bejesus out of viewers as deranged cop Lindsay Denton in Line of Duty, and played a mother hollowed out by grief in The Missing. She was rewarded for her efforts with a Broadcasting Press Guild best actress award in March. “The Shakespeare was one of those ‘go-for-it’ moments,” she says. “I’d never done it before and I thought, ‘Well, if it’s rubbish, I’ll never do it again’. And it was great to put Lindsay to bed. Then it was slightly funny because I had to do some dubbing for The Missing when I was here on set in Corfu. So I was standing dressed as Louisa Durrell, voicing this really dark, grim ‘child-in-the-cellar’ drama.” Not every actor would welcome this near-schizoid division of labour, but Hawes used it to her advantage: “When we were shooting The Missing, it was good to have the thought of The Durrells in my head. Having all this to come back to,” she says, opening her arms to the golden Greek afternoon, “was a lifeline!” Much of the first series revolved around the Durrell children’s attempts to fit their mother up with a man – she was courted by a terrible old sea-dog and engaged to a sexually conflicted Swede (though viewers, some seven million of them, were willing her into the arms of Spiros, the family’s Greek “fixer”). Now, in the hugely anticipated second series, Louisa finds a new love interest in a raffish ex-pat, Hugh Jarvis. In terms of plot, the second series steps away from Gerald Durrell’s memoir, but it loses none of its heart. “As a child I really loved My Family and Other Animals,” says Hawes, “and I was reading it to my two littlest children when I got the call for this part. But of course the book was written from a child’s point of view and what Simon Nye has done so brilliantly is to make this fantastic, layered drama that appeals to all ages. “I’m sure that’s why we had such a great reaction to the first series. I had a lovely email from a woman in her late 50s, who said she’d watched the show with her mother, her daughter and her daughter’s daughters. So they were aged 9 to 93 and they all loved it. “Simon is a father of four, so there’s very little that he wouldn’t have been through with his own kids that Louisa isn’t going through with hers. Her heart goes out to the child who needs it most at the time – I’ve got three kids and I know that feeling – it’s really hard, sometimes, not to feel that you’re spreading yourself too thin, to remember that you’re dealing with three completely different people. All that’s brought to the surface and stripped to the bone in The Durrells, so it’s really truthful. “It still blows my mind, really, that the real Mrs Durrell just upped and took her family to a country where they didn’t speak the language, with no money or jobs to go to. And there was no easy way to get to Corfu in the 1930s – it was like travelling to the other side of the world. It’s difficult enough for me to take three children on holiday with the help of Easyjet!” There was, she recalls, an “Angelina Jolie moment” when her own children Myles (16), Maggie (11) and Ralph (ten) and her “adopted” Durrells all came together. “My kids came out on set for a week, and yes, a bit of eyeing-up went on. But my three think the big ones are super-cool, and the guys here made such a fuss of them. So it was a big treat. I absolutely adore them all.” Hawes immediately brings herself up short, embarrassed by the inflections of luvvie-speak. “Oh, I know. It might be a bit sickening, and everyone always says how marvellous the people they work with are, but the kids are just amazing. Well, I call them the kids, though apart from Milo, who plays Gerry, they’re all in their 20s. They treat me very sweetly like one of the gang, and then I look in the mirror and remember that I’m twice their age. “But we do spend an awful lot of time together, even when we’re not shooting. We have birthdays and meals together and there’s not a week gone by when I haven’t been in contact with all of them in some way, and that’s very unusual. There really is this huge warmth, and I think that does transfer to the screen.” Lunch with cast and crew on the verandah of the Corfu Golf Club, which is doubling today as a cricket pitch, is hectically convivial. The actors, from Milo Parker (14) to the very elegant Leslie Caron (85), who plays Countess Mavrodaki, share an easy intimacy. There are nicknames and in-jokes, and many, many hugs. Working with Greek actors has enriched this atmosphere. It was, from the outset, a point of principle to cast Greek talent as The Durrells’ Corfiot characters. “Alexis Georgoulis, who plays Spiros, is a massive star in Greece, just huge,” Hawes points out. “It’s been such a privilege to act with him and Yorgos Karamihos (Dr Theo), and it really brings home the point about two cultures coming together. “Although actually, the human actors in the series are now outnumbered by the animals – which can make things complicated on a small set,” she muses. “We have animal wranglers out of shot, dangling bits of food. And a lot of dust-pans and brushes for the goats.” This series Hawes is particularly excited to play a scene with the “Rose-Beetle Man”: “Die-hard Gerald Durrell fans will understand how thrilling that was,” she promises. “There I was, with all these flying beetles and crates of canaries, and it was such a lovely thing, like watching a magic show. “But then,” says Hawes, looking about at the lovely illusion, conjured from “heart”, nostalgia and the Greek sun, “so much of The Durrells has been like that. Just magical.”
Gregory Fitoussi is "really scared" his mad French spin-doctor series is coming true
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”
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 Shieldlands, plus Spiral(another French-language hit), has a thoughtful manner. It’s a far cry from his Spin persona, media adviser Ludovic Desmeuze (think Malcolm Tucker without the jokes but with immeasurably better suits). Nicolas Marié as Alain Marjorie and Anne Loiret as Annie Vaneck in Spin Terror attacks on France, says Fitoussi, have forced a new mood of self-reflection and he recalls, only too vividly, the massacre, in November 2015, of 89 people in the Bataclan concert hall, just a few hundred metres from his Paris flat: “We know these things can happen anywhere, at any time. Nothing can justify such horrible acts, and when it happens in another part of the world, you’re sorry for the people there. But when it’s just downstairs, when you hear the gunshots, it’s different. We need as a country to think, ‘Why is this happening?’” Spin, with its rapid-response storylines, is part of that self-reflective mood. Known in France as Les hommes de l’ombre(Men of Shadows), the drama probes the softest parts of the establishment. And if resemblance to real people or events is incidental, French viewers and a gleeful French press are well able to make connections. Series three, seen in France last autumn, ramped up the intrigue at the Elysée Palace and Le Monde did not miss its mark, claiming, “The current President of the Republic and his men of shadows may well see their own stories played out on the small screen.” Fitoussi agrees. “Sometimes, after reading the scripts, we think, ‘No, this is going too far,’ and then, a couple of months later, we have exactly the same thing going on for real.” Part of Spin’s genius is its ability to maintain a discreet, legal distance from public figures and events. The first series set up the scenario of an Islamic extremist bomb attack. It ran with a persuasive portrait of the far right’s attempt to capitalise on public fears, before revealing that the bomb had nothing to do with Islamic extremism. Series two launched a storyline about the release of French hostages from an Algerian power plant, closely recalling the attack by militants on the Tigantourine gas plant in 2013. Series three sails still closer to the wind. President François Hollande, whose dignity has never quite recovered from revelations about life in the Elysée by his former partner, Valérie Trierweiler, cannot be greatly entertained by a storyline about a Socialist president caught between his young mistress and an unstable First Lady. A subplot around a back-stabbing prime minister closely matches the career curve of Manuel Valls (French premier ministre2014–16). And as the series develops, other familiar-looking hares are set running. A glamorous and ambitious minister from a poor, north African family has more in common with former Minister of Justice Rachida Dati than her killer heels, while a subplot about radicalisation in the Paris suburbs is all too current a story. (L-R) Laurent Lucas as Maxime Beaugendre, Nicolas Marié as Alain Marjorie and Anne Loiret as Annie Vaneck As for Fitoussi, his character has no real counterpart and no real politics: “I don’t see Ludovic as a bad guy. He’s not kind, and he doesn’t bother being polite or nice with people, but he’s in a world of sharks, where each must bite deeper than the next. And like so many people who don’t behave well, I think he’s convinced he’s in the right. He could be working for the left or the right – he doesn’t care – but he knows what his goals are and does what it takes to achieve them.” What it takes with the women in Ludovic’s powerful force field is not complicated. “I try, always, to make him a little bit ‘pervert’,” says Fitoussi, in the Gauloise-roughened voice that, on screen, has stony-faced political mavens falling at his feet. “Because, for him, everything is about power. He has sexual power over women and he knows this, so he uses it. But it’s a little sad because this guy doesn’t have feelings for anyone. He’s a bit lonely. I wouldn’t like to be him.” Time spent with real political spin doctors was, he says, instructive and “a little bit scary”. Most shocking to Fitoussi was the genuine clout of media advisers in government. “Before, I thought the job was pretty much about telling clients what colour of tie to wear, but these really are the guys holding the strings of our politicians.” In the era of “fake news”, he believes, the issue of spin has never been more crucial: people are hungry to know what goes on behind the scenes. “There are those who think everything is fake. It’s a very serious problem, and it’s one of the reasons why people want to watch this kind of drama.” For his own part, he is “not completely cynical” about politics, but he’s heading that way. “It looks like it’s impossible for politicians to be honest,” he says. “It seems to me that no matter how they try to be good, and to do good, they can’t manage it in the world they’re living in. It’s not even their fault. I’d love to see just one politician who could be 100 per cent trusted. Show me that guy, and I’ll vote for him. I’ll vote for someone, it’s my civic duty, but it’s not straightforward.” Spin airs at 9:00pm on Friday 14th April on More4
Jim Broadbent: “I love the idea of actors being rogues and vagabonds, picking at the weaknesses of the powerful”
The actor reflects on a life of being a “character actor” – and reveals why he turned down an OBE
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 at them in different ways – but as soon as I read the novel, I could imagine myself playing Tony. “I enjoyed the imagining of it, thinking what I might do with the character. I’m interested in that whole notion of what is history, how much we misremember – on a human level. But what really appealed to me is how Tony behaves like a silly teenager. I like that recognition that we don’t really mature in a profound way. We get older, and more sophisticated, and a bit cleverer, but certainly boys, and men, are as childish and basic as we ever were.” Behind owlish specs, Broadbent’s large blue eyes are trusting, unfiltered. It occurs that what makes him so compelling on screen, so un-actorish in the flesh, is a capacity for plain truth. His parents, both artists, were liberal pacifists who ran a loose kind of commune in Lincolnshire, and Broadbent was educated by Quakers – “Lovely people,” he recalls, “very undogmatic and accepting.” Spared the usual parental hand-wringing at his choice of profession, he did a stint at art school, before switching to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. View oEmbed on the source website “I went from playing the hero’s best friend to the dad and grandad without the romantic lead interlude,” he says, reflecting on a career that has seldom seen him out of work. “The system has changed now, there are more varied roles, partly because there’s so much more television and so much less theatre. So I sort of got a head start by doing lots of different things and not being associated with one particular thing at an early age. When the industry moved more into character roles, I was already there.” Have the demographics of an ageing population, the power of the grey pound, opened up more parts for older actors? “I’m not sure,” he ponders. “The Magnificent Hotel in India, or whatever it’s called [The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel], was a big success, and there are others – Le Week-end, I suppose, 45 Years, The Lady in the Van – but you get the paper and 13 new films are being reviewed every week. If you’re lucky, two or three of those would appeal to the older generation. “Actually, there are far fewer parts for older people, so I’m now part of a minority for the first time. That’s all right because I’m choosy anyway, but sometimes I’ll watch a TV programme, say Peaky Blinders, and I think ‘Oh, this is really good. I’d love to be in it.’ And then think, ‘Hang on, there’s nobody of my age in it. What would I play?’” Hollywood was never a great lure. “Occasionally I’ve been asked to do American roles, and once or twice I have, but I don’t understand Americans. I don’t have any real feeling for American culture. I do have it with British culture. I understand what makes us tick. To a degree.” Le Week-end Any lingering “what ifs” were put to rest when Broadbent won the Oscar, aged 52. “It was mainly a relief. Because I didn’t have to waste time thinking, ‘Why didn’t they pick me?’ An Oscar clears the deck of envy and resentment. You think ‘Well, I’ve got that. I can relax now.’” That same year, however, he declined the offer of an OBE. “First you’re awardable, then you’re establishment,” he says. “I love the idea of actors being rogues and vagabonds picking at the weaknesses of the powerful.” A veteran of 1970s agitprop and 80s fringe theatre (he looks back warmly on his days as one half of the National Theatre of Brent), Broadbent is sorry for millennial actors who are denied grants and forced to chase the money to pay their sky-high rents. “We’ve been very lucky in our generation – peace, home-owning, pensions – all these things that youngsters now aren’t going to have. But there’s a political energy now, an anger, that hasn’t been evident for a long time. Maybe all this is part of something breaking – a system that has to break to come back stronger.” The master of the slow burn seems immensely cheered at the prospect of a blaze. “More hopeful than optimistic,” he qualifies. “I hope it happens in my lifetime. Because it’s the only time I’ve got.”
Wolf Hall's Claire Foy on Anne Boleyn: "She had bigger balls than anyone at Henry’s court"
The actress looks deep into history's most enigmatic queen
"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. But she had an opinion and wasn’t afraid of voicing it. “She was brave and intelligent and incredibly religious, yet, in Hilary’s version, she punches people and pinches them and screams at them. I think the pinching thing is so illuminating; she has to get her anger out on someone and she is very immediate in her responses. In the end I had to convince myself that the contradictions within her character were the thing that made her alluring. She wasn’t a saint, she may not even have been a particularly nice person, but she was really important to English history.” Anne’s power struggle with Cromwell (Mark Rylance), whose politicking brought about the queen’s beheading in 1536, is key to the drama: “Henry wanted rid of Anne so he could marry Jane Seymour, and Cromwell made it happen,” says Foy. “I don’t think he was so terrible for doing that, because he was saving his own skin. Given half a chance, Anne would have had him killed. And how interesting would it have been if Cromwell had gone and Anne had survived?” The execution scene, shot in front of 200 weeping extras, was an intense experience, says Foy. "I had to have a bit of a word with myself, because I was feeling very emotional about the whole thing whereas Anne, by all accounts, really kept it all together. She takes her death sentence on the chin and that’s what I find really heartbreaking. She obviously had real moments of desperation while she was in the Tower, but I think she genuinely believed that if she had been accused falsely in this life, she would find justice in the next. We used her own words, verbatim, for the scaffold speech and shot the whole thing a bit like a documentary. So for the audience it feels like you’re watching the whole thing live. “The most disgusting thing, in my mind, about Anne’s death, is that the charges against her were all lies. It was so pathetic that they had to chop her head off just so Henry could get away with marrying someone else. But she wouldn't give up. She refused to go to a nunnery, she wouldn't accept that she was no longer of use to the king, and so they killed her. She was entirely at the behest of this one man. And he did it because he could." Henry VIII, as played by Damian Lewis in Wolf Hall, is a far cry from the bloated despot of popular iconography: “Damian is perfect casting, because he’s so athletic and charismatic and charming,” says Foy. “You can see why Anne would have loved Henry – in her way. Her trump card is always that she doesn’t need people. Henry followed her around like a lap dog. I think they loved each other the only way they could. But my sympathies are with Anne. I mean, not to pass the blame, but Henry was the one with the attention span problem.” Foy, who is expecting her first child in March (she is married to actor Stephen Campbell Moore), was newly pregnant when shooting started on Wolf Hall. Anne's elaborate costumes were, she says, an “inconvenience”. “It was too early to tell anyone and it’s quite unpleasant when you can’t sit down or drink any water but, if I’m honest, all costumes, unless I’m in pyjamas, end up p***ing me off a bit.” Career plans are now on hold as Foy contemplates parenthood. “The baby is pretty much the project of the moment,” she says. “I haven’t really given much thought to the whole ‘working mother’ thing. I think the less pressure you put on yourself at this point the better, so I guess I’ll just try to cope and make the right decisions when the time comes. But I’m very, very excited.” Two major projects in a season are, she agrees, enough for anyone, and it looks like Wolf Hall is landmark television. “I’d like viewers to watch it, knowing that it’s an attempt to do something original and not patronise people,” she says. “For me, that’s as good as it gets.” View oEmbed on the source website Wolf Hall is currently airing on Sundays on PBS Masterpiece
“It’s gonna be epic": The Last Kingdom stars reveal what to expect from series two
Alexander Dreymon and David Dawson also uncover the political message behind the swordplay saga
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-raised Uhtred On and off screen, Dreymon (American Horror Story) and Dawson (Ripper Street, Peaky Blinders) make an odd couple. Dreymon, German-born and French-educated, is the epitome of laid-back Euro-cool; Dawson, natty in tweeds, is slight and sharp as a blade. “My favourite scenes are the ones between Uhtred and Alfred,” says Dreymon. “It’s totally a bromance between them. The way David plays Alfred, he’s this very frail and delicate character, but at the same time he has a steely inner strength, he’s the rock in a tumultuous sea. Meanwhile, Uhtred is running round doing his thing – he’s the unpredictable element in the story.” Dawson adds, “Basically, both men hate that they need the other to achieve their goals, and it gets very intense between them. I went to the gym the other day, and somebody came up to me and said, ‘I love The Last Kingdom so much, but stop being such a dick to Uhtred!’ I take his point, but I prefer to think of it as tough love.” The collision of two moral universes – Arthur is Christian, Uhtred resolutely pagan – gives The Last Kingdom heft beyond exceptional production values and intricacies of plot. It takes a few episodes, for example, to get your head round the fact that, for the Danes, slaughter is practically a sacred act. “It’s a moral code that coincides less with ours today,” Dreymon acknowledges. “Though certain aspects of Uhtred’s world view are, in a way, saner than ours. Not the business of going out and killing 50 people before breakfast – but in a world where every day could be your last, it kind of makes sense to be less self-punishing about living your life and enjoying it.” David Dawson as Anglo-Saxon king Alfred At a time when nationalism and nationhood are high on the global news agenda, both actors admire The Last Kingdom’s vision of a blended tribe: “Alfred’s real dream is to create an identity for his people,” says Dawson. “This whole series is basically about what it means to be English, and if you look at our history, we’ve always been a multicultural society. It wasn’t just the Saxons and the Danes – you’ve got Angles, Goths, Normans… all these separate influences that have left their mark. “We were all on set when we heard about Brexit, and it was like a black cloud hanging over everybody’s head,” recalls Dreymon. “The atmosphere was palpably dire. I think it’s really important, right now, to have a drama that shows how different traditions coming together makes a nation stronger.” It’s possible that fans aren’t just tuning in for the politics. Uhtred often peels off his jerkin to have sex on furs (well, you’d get sweaty) and, with the decapitation of his prophetess lover Iseult at the end of series one, he’s currently in need of comfort. There’s a game ex-nun in the picture, and a flame still burns for his old companion-in-arms, Brida (Emily Cox). “There’s this immense love between Uhtred and Brida that never gets lost, it just changes character,” says Dreymon. “They start out almost as brother and sister, then they become lovers, enemies, allies, but always she’s his equal.” Powerful women abound in The Last Kingdom and are entirely credible (it’s thought that up to 50 per cent of Viking warriors were female). And, for all the “humping” (the series writers’ preferred, if etymologically dubious, term), female characters are also celebrated for their minds. “Alfred’s daughter, Aethelflaed, is going to play a major part in the new series,” reveals Dawson. “She was a fiercely intelligent woman – Arthur trained her up as a kind of mirror image of himself – and she later became ruler of Mercia. We don’t hear much about her now, but she was a real legend, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing the rise of this fantastic woman in our story.” Good citizenship, it’s fair to say, takes a nose-dive in the battle scenes, but if violence in The Last Kingdom is extreme, Dreymon argues that it is, at least, accurate. “We had people on set who know a freakishly scary amount of information about how someone would behave if they had a sword through the heart, or if they were hamstrung, or stabbed in the stomach… where the blood would appear, how long it would take them to die. “In the second series we really tried to make it more realistic – not to make it more violent, but just to take the gloss off it. I wouldn’t want to be part of a show that showed violence for the sake of it – and I don’t honestly think we do that – it’s just where the story goes.” Dawson agrees: “We never wanted to do those kind of gung-ho ‘shields at the ready and slaps on the back’ kind of battle scenes. We wanted to show how grim and grubby this world was, and I think the very dark humour that runs through the series makes you feel that violence is something that happens daily in these people’s lives.” It’s 15 months since the first series aired, and a third series is a big commitment for young actors. Dreymon is now based in Los Angeles; Dawson prefers “grim old London”, where he can work in theatre. Would they sign up for another roll in the mud? “Like a shot,” says Dawson, while Dreymon points out that there are many more books to go in Bernard Cornwell’s original series. “And I miss everyone terribly when we’re not shooting.” He just needs a bit of notice so he can start growing his hair. The Last Kingdom is on Thursday 9.00pm BBC2
Call The Midwife's Stephen McGann on the real-life NHS drama that inspired the BBC series
The man behind Dr Patrick Turner talks about his upcoming BBC2 midwife documentary
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 End as portrayed on Midwife. We lived on a terraced street and our house was nice, but the ones they were knocking down were terrible, and I played in those slums. “It’s easy [for TV producers] to think, ‘Right, it’s the 60s now, it’s all going to be like James Bond’, but those worlds changed very, very slowly in my living memory. And I jumped at the chance to make this documentary because there are people still around who can talk, for example, about the early years of the NHS, who can tell us why things were put together in that way, what it meant to people then, and what it still means now.” One of McGann’s interviewees is Aneira Thomas, the first baby of the NHS era, born just after the stroke of midnight on 5 July 1948, and named after Aneurin Bevan, Minister for Health in Clement Attlee’s Labour government. McGann with Aneira Thomas The documentary points out that, unlike McGann’s screen character, who embraces Bevan’s “great and novel undertaking”, the majority of doctors at the time vehemently opposed the creation of a national health service. The public, however, signed up to the new service in such numbers that the British Medical Association had no choice but to fall in line. “It’s not terribly surprising to think that there were many people, many professionals, who thought that the status quo was fine,” says McGann. “What’s more remarkable, when I look back, is how this great monolith, the NHS, could ever have been attempted in the first place. "I think it speaks to the great political consensus of the postwar years, and the attitude that pervaded the generation who had come home and wanted something different, a different social settlement, so that even with the disagreement of the doctors, it was pushed through.” But McGann believes that half a century of health care free at the point of delivery has bred not just complacency, but contempt. “We more than take the NHS for granted; we now see these structures simply in terms of their challenges and problems. So it’s nice to take a trip back, to ask people, ‘What were you thinking? What was it all for?’” Is he confident of a future for the NHS as we know it? “I can be as confident as I am confident in other people. It’s not a privately authored entity. Like any good thing or any bad thing that has been collectively built, the NHS can vanish tomorrow if we want it to. “It’s not immortal, it’s a social construct, and if we choose to proceed in a different way, it can go. We get our choices in elections and we live by what we’ve chosen, so we’ve got to decide, all of us, whether we think it’s a good or bad idea. I think it’s a great one.” The documentary does not shy from the failures of public medicine, and nor does the drama. The severe birth defects caused by prescription of thalidomide as an anti-sickness drug for pregnant women in the early 1960s appeared as a storyline in series five, and for McGann, interviewing thalidomide survivor and disability rights campaigner Rosaleen Moriarty-Simmonds was a highlight of working on the documentary. View oEmbed on the source website Thalidomide, he argues, marked a watershed in our relationship with medical science. “Up until thalidomide, Big Medicine – if you want to call it that – had scored a series of home runs. Penicillin knocked out infections that used to kill, X-ray machines were catching TB. “We were winning and winning until thalidomide happened. Now we’re living in more hardened times. We don’t necessarily trust authority in the same way.” Married to Call the Midwife creator and writer Heidi Thomas, McGann sees popular drama as the ideal medium to confront social issues. “Heidi and I come at it differently – I see the science, she sees the human stories – but really the core of drama is the same as the core of science; it’s a truth-seeking exercise.” Given the social flashpoints documented by Midwife – women’s rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, racism – McGann is bewildered by the image the series has that it’s a kind of Sunday night nostalgia-fest. “Nostalgia is such an easy word to bandy about, but I don’t think we really unpick it very much. You can’t be nostalgic for backstreet table-top abortions, you can’t be nostalgic for a world where a woman is sent on the road to ruination by an affair with a married man. I’d suggest that what people connect to is the idea of people caring for each other. They don’t watch so they can think, ‘Oh, I’m so nostalgic I’m going to burst into tears.’ They burst into tears because they’ve felt something.” How does he feel about the argument that midwifery in our era has been over-medicalised, that the caring side of the job has been squeezed out by paperwork and time constraints? “I can’t speak to the state of midwifery right now,” he says, “but I know that when I attended the birth of our son, almost 20 years ago, I couldn’t believe that this incredible, terrifying momentum could be managed so cleverly. And when I chat to midwives about what they feel the one centrally important task of the job is, they always say the same thing: it’s making the mum feel safe. "It’s not the medical side – they have to do that, and they’re trained to do that – but the real skill is pastoral. In the middle of this most important moment of a mother’s life, there’s this voice and this hand saying, ‘I’m here. It’s going to be OK.’ And that’s a beautiful thing.” Call the Midwife: the Casebook is on 5.05pm Sunday, BBC1
Historian Lucy Worsley looks back at the serial monogamist’s queens in a new BBC series
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 first Prince Henry lived only a few weeks. Again, she’s been done a disservice by history, as she’s often referred to as “infertile”. While it’s quite hard to work out her gynaecological history – there were six pregnancies, but only one of her children [Mary Tudor] survived – she certainly wasn’t infertile! Of course, it was very dodgy and dangerous to suspect the king’s health, so you can see how the blame would be laid on poor Catherine. Yet even when she’s put aside by the king and sent into damp and pestilential Cambridgeshire, she remains steadfast and dignified. She’s definitely my favourite wife. Anne Boleyn Claire Cooper as Anne Boleyn There are two schools of thought on Anne Boleyn. For many centuries she had an image as a witch, a sexual predator with almost magical powers of seduction. Then there’s the idea, advanced by Protestant historians in the reign of Elizabeth I, that Anne was a proto-Protestant martyr, punished by conservative forces for wanting to bring about a new world order. I think she’s quite a tragic figure; the reason she strikes a chord is that she quite often makes choices that are like the choices a modern person would make. She doesn’t seem like a Tudor person in the way she strategically manages Henry – telling him, “I’m not going to sleep with you for seven years until I’m sure you’re going to make me queen of England.” Also, it was considered “a matter of hygiene” for the king to sleep with other women when the queen was pregnant, and one of the remarkable, modern things about Anne is that she did seem to expect Henry to stay faithful. More recently, of course, Wolf Hall has made Anne look like she’s the victim of Thomas Cromwell, but historians don’t think there was a faction or plot against Anne. So she’s not a total martyr brought down by politicians, but nor is she a wicked witch. I see her, in many ways, as an admirable, forward-thinking woman with a sense of her own worth. Jane Seymour Elly Condron as Jane Seymour The stereotype of Jane is that she was a bit of a doormat – her personal motto was “Bound to Serve” – and I think that, in this case, the stereotype was probably right. I think of her as being a bit like a geisha; her attitude to Henry was basically, “What do you want, my lord? I will give it to you.” And if you wanted to stay alive in 1536, that was a good way to go, because in that year, Catherine of Aragon dies, practically of a broken heart, and Anne Boleyn gets her head cut off. Yet it is known that during the dissolution of the monasteries, Jane spoke up for the monks, so maybe she wasn’t so doormatty after all. It’s often wrongly said that Jane died in childbirth, either during or because of a caesarean. There are even popular ballads about this – one song goes that if you marry Henry VIII, he’ll chop off your head or rip open your belly to get his baby out – but this is Catholic, anti-Henry propaganda, presenting the king as someone who kills his wives like Bluebeard. Jane didn’t have a caesarean. We know that she was alive ten days to two weeks after the birth of Prince Edward, and died of septicaemia. Certainly she was sincerely mourned by Henry and was eventually buried with him in the same tomb. Which says something about Henry’s romanticism – it’s the queen who leaves him, “the one who got away”, who dominates his memory. Anne of Cleves Rebecca Dyson Smith as Anne of Cleves The story goes that Henry is shopping for a wife, and gets sold a pup; the court painter Holbein creates a flattering portrait of Anne who, in reality, is so ugly that the king is unable to consummate the marriage. The real problem seems to have been that Anne’s figure was very full – there are reports of Henry saying “I don’t like her belly, I don’t like the looseness of her breasts” – and according to contemporary concepts of the body, that meant she wasn’t a virgin. Certainly her wedding night was much discussed, as it later became a legal issue. There are depositions from a senior lady in waiting, claiming that Anne doesn’t fully understand about sex, and and from Henry’s physician, Dr Thomas Butts, to the effect that the king is well able to “do the deed” with other women, he just can’t do it with Anne. It must have been mortifying for her. I like to think our version of events at least gives her side of the story. Katherine Howard Lauren McQueen as Katherine Howard She has a strong image as “the flibbertigibbet wife”, but we absolutely represent Katherine Howard as a victim of child abuse. We know that the king was handed a letter that said, “Your queen, who you think was a virgin when you married her, actually has a past.” What’s less well known is that as a young girl, Katherine was sent to live with the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk to be educated about the ways of the court. There were lots of young ladies living in this household, and they all slept together, locked in a room called the Maidens’ Chamber. However it was possible for men to get hold of the key and we know that Katherine was having sex with at least two men during this period. This all came out when the men were tortured. We don’t know exactly when Katherine was born, but she was possibly just out of her teens when she had her head cut off. There’s a heart-rending account of her asking to “try out” the executioner’s block, so that she doesn’t mess up her beheading. For us, Catherine is not a good-time girl at all – she’s a little victim. Katherine Parr Alice Patten as Katherine Parr Katherine Parr is traditionally seen as the caring wife, ministering to the King’s wants and treating his bad leg. This is historically incorrect; Henry had male servants and doctors to give what was called “body service” – it wouldn’t have been a woman’s job. Katherine was an intellectual powerhouse, the first woman in England, let alone the first queen, to publish a book under her own name. She also produced a devotional work, Lamentations of a Sinner, at a time when it was illegal for women even to speak about religion. It was Katherine who saw to the education of her stepdaughter, Elizabeth. One of the reasons Elizabeth was a great queen is that she had Katherine Parr as a role model. Six Wives with Lucy Worsley is on Wednesday 7th December at 9pm on BBC1
Poldark writer Debbie Horsfield says Ross did not rape Elizabeth
"Ross is fundamentally a man of honour," says Horsfield as she weighs in on Sunday's controversial scene
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 Ross’s 'caresses' and talks about not wanting to go from one man’s caresses to another’s. "Obviously, I had my own interpretation, but we wanted to make sure of the author’s intention. Winston Graham died in 2003, but fortunately we were able to ask his son, Andrew, who discussed the novels with his father while he was still alive, and it was pretty clear, from our point of view, how the scene should be written.” In a public statement, Andrew Graham came down heavily on the side of requited passion. “The only way to judge what my father intended,” he said, “is to read the novels as a whole. Doing so, it becomes clear from earlier scenes, as well as from Elizabeth’s immediate reactions and later mixed emotions, that what finally happened was consensual sex, borne of long-term love and longing.” While it’s entirely possible that the Graham estate has as large an interest in maintaining Poldark’s popularity as the TV production company, Horsfield is convinced that the narrative dots were deeply considered. “The truth is there are incidents in the Poldark novels where a rape occurs, and Winston Graham is perfectly explicit about it. There’s no doubt that when a rape occurs, he calls it a rape.” Will these scenes also be presented as the author intended? “Well, it won’t occur in series two,” says Horsfield. “I can’t really say more because it involves characters we haven’t met yet.” In September, Heida Reed, who plays Elizabeth, was quoted in the press, commenting on this scene, but Horsfield says, “The actors don’t have any input into the script. Of course, in rehearsal actors are able to give their own interpretation of a scene and we discuss how the scene should be interpreted – that’s just the norm, but it was clear to me that remarks made by Heida Reed about the rehearsal process were taken out of context. They were taken to mean that she had dictated what was written and that was never the case.” She is equally clear that Aidan Turner’s standing with fans had no bearing on her decisions; if anyone’s reputation was being protected, it was Ross Poldark’s. “Although he is hot-headed and reckless – in the books and as depicted on screen – Ross is fundamentally a man of honour, a rebel who stands up for the underdog. How likely is it that he would commit a crime against a woman, a woman he has loved for ten years? It would fly in the face of everything we know about him.” That said, Horsfield is aware that not all Poldark’s passions go down well with fans. “He is by no means a spotless character - and I don’t mean that he has characteristics which are unappealing but we love them anyway - he has genuinely unappealing characteristics, and some of them have come more to the fore in this second series; it would be handy, for example, if instead of rushing about fighting for the common man, he paid his wife a bit of attention. Some viewers have said they’re disappointed in some of the things Ross does; for me it’s the fact that he isn’t heroic that makes him an authentic character. “There’s a broader discussion to be had about what was deemed acceptable and desirable in the 1940s, when these books were first written. I’m not saying rape has ever been acceptable. I am saying, however, that if you remember the famous scene in Gone with the Wind where Rhett carries Scarlett upstairs, it’s clear we’re supposed to feel that was thrilling and exciting. And it’s absurd that marital rape was only made illegal in 1991. We’ve come a long way.” The Poldark plotline comes at a time when sexual violence against women is, properly, the focus of public debate. Blurred lines around sexual consent figure prominently in pop culture, while an increasingly pervasive porn culture supports an assumption that “no" is a preamble to “yes”. “Consent workshops” are now a routine feature of Freshers’ Week in universities and just last week the actress Doon Mackichan spoke out against TV drama that presents brutalised women as “entertainment fodder”. Bonnet-and-britches drama is not easily confused with documentary. Nor is Poldark is the first classic to be toned down for the screen. (It’s unlikely Oliver! the musical would have made the cut if Nancy had stayed, as written by Dickens, an abused child prostitute.) It remains to be seen what subsequent series of Poldark will bring. For now, one fewer rape served up with the Sunday-night snacks must surely be counted a win. Poldark continues Sundays, 9pm BBC1
Hooters, moles and parenthood: Katherine Ryan’s cancer story
Ahead of Channel 4’s Stand Up to Cancer, the comedian reveals how she has to joke about her brush with cancer
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 warning you when things aren’t right. I developed a rash on my chest, and I went to a dermatologist for that, because I was 21 years old and, to me, this was a cosmetic issue. "The doctor gave me some ointment for the rash, and I was walking out the door when I turned and, as an after - thought, said, ‘Oh, and my friend says I have this funny thing on my leg.’ ” View oEmbed on the source website Tanning had never been a priority for Ryan (“I was always the one with my shirt over my face in the sun”) so she was surprised when a biopsy revealed Stage 2 melanoma. “Even then, I didn’t feel like it was super serious,” she recalls. “I think when you’re young, you just feel invincible. I was kind of numb about it, then I rang to tell my parents – very matter of fact – and my dad cried. “He lost his father to cancer, and there was Stage 4 melanoma, which is tough to beat, on my mum’s side of the family. That kind of brought things home to me. You’re so selfish when you’re young, you don’t care. I was this very laissez-faire 21-year-old, and I didn’t get scared. But then you see your dad cry. You see how it affects your family. Until cancer happens to you, you wouldn’t believe how many people care about you and are scared for you.” Now a parent herself – her daughter is seven – Ryan is “super-vigilant” about UV protection and wears a hat, even in winter in London. “I’m also bringing back the parasol,” she adds. “Like an absolute tit. “It’s one thing being someone’s child, and thinking, ‘Oh, these people need me to be OK,’ but now as someone’s mother, especially as a single mother, I see how devastating a cancer diagnosis can be. To be someone’s mother who knows that she’s ill and maybe isn’t going to be there for her child – I just can’t imagine how you battle that. “My experience of cancer was not a battle, it was one surgery – in and out – and I’ve since had various moles removed under local anaesthetic, which is nothing at all. But some people have a real fight on their hands. “And it’s not just better cures or treatments they need – they also need support to deal with that emotional weight of thinking about your children or the various people who depend on you – which is what Stand Up to Cancer is all about.” Laughing in the face of this most feared disease is, says Ryan, an affirmative action. “Having had this short brush with cancer, I’d joke about it now and then, because that’s what I do; that’s how I make loads of things better. I like to find light in the dark. "And people have been very disapproving and said, ‘Ooh, but my auntie had cancer.’ And I think, ‘Well, of course your auntie had cancer. And her brother. And his cousin. And his cousin’s friend. That’s the entire point about cancer. It touches us all.” Stand Up to Cancer starts 7pm tonight, C4
Gold medallist Greg Rutherford lost his grandfather – now he has an important message for all men
"If only he’d held on to see the Olympics"
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 camera up their bum. But I’m not being funny – it’s either the camera up the bum or you die. If you leave cancer alone it will kill you. But if you get treatment at the right time you can go on and live a normal life. “Even in very serious cases, we all hear stories of people who ‘beat the odds’ and survive. Now we need to capitalise on the fact that it can be done. Supporting Stand Up to Cancer, getting behind the research and the education about cancer, could save millions of people over the years to come. Or it could keep one family together for longer. It’s something that genuinely makes a huge difference. Because there’s never enough time with someone you love.” Stand Up to Cancer is on tonight at 7:00pm on Channel 4
The Fall's John Lynch on alcoholism, getting sober and growing up in The Troubles
For the Northern Irish actor, the serial killer drama is a story that feels close to home
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 website Lynch left Ireland in 1981 as a teenager, and was glad to leave. “It wasn’t just what happened on the streets or on the barricades, with petrol bombs or Armalites, it was the echoes of violence that went through every household in Northern Ireland, each family got touched. “I had an English teacher, Sean Hollywood, who used to put me in plays, mainly in the Irish language, and he said to me, ‘I think you should go to drama school.’ That seemed scary and different, but Sean helped me audition and get a grant for drama school in London. I arrived just before the Falklands War. It was Thatcher’s time, a dark time, but it was just good to get away.” Lynch has since worked across the globe – he collected a slew of awards for his leading role in the Australian feature Angel Baby (1995) and played opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in the Hollywood comedy Sliding Doors (1997). Ireland, however, has never been out of his focus. In In the Name of the Father (1993), he took the part of Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four who was wrongly convicted and imprisoned for the IRA bombing of two pubs in 1974. View oEmbed on the source website In 1996, he portrayed IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Some Mother’s Son. Such politically charged roles were not without repercussion. “In 1995, around the time of one of the cease-fires, I made a film with Thaddeus O’Sullivan called Nothing Personal, loosely based on the Shankill Butchers [a notorious Ulster Loyalist gang]. "The director decided it would be a good idea to do some local research and, like a twerp, I ended up doing this pub-crawl with some English actors round the Shankill area. I had minders looking after me, but naturally the minute women arrived, they forgot about me, and some people started to have a problem with the fact that I was there, because I’m a Catholic and because of some of the films I’ve done. It was quite a brutal night.” The shoot-out that ended series two of The Fall has left the Belfast Strangler (Jamie Dornan) fighting for his life, while his softly spoken nemesis, Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson), waits anxiously to resume her investigation. View oEmbed on the source website Plotlines are strictly embargoed (and, on previous showing, unguessable), but it’s fair to surmise that Lynch’s character, Jim Burns, hasn’t had his last dance with Gibson – in the last series he tried, disastrously, to rekindle their long-dead flame. “It’s a tremendous obsession,” says Lynch. “He obviously can’t get over what happened between them, but she also infuriates him and there’s envy in there, too – he knows he’s not the police officer she is, yet he’s still fighting fires for Stella. “And he’s drinking again and has ongoing issues with that. Jim’s a complicated character, but then they’re all complicated characters in this drama. In essence, The Fall is about things coming apart at the seams – what makes people tick, what makes them dysfunctional.” If, in speech, Lynch observes a certain economy – what Seamus Heaney called “the tight gag of place and times” – he takes fight in his “alternative profession” as a writer. He’s published two novels and is working on a third. Torn Water (2005) and Falling Out of Heaven (2010) are intimate interrogations of Ireland, despite (or, he might argue, because of) the fact that Lynch now lives in the South of France. “I think you need to put some distance between yourself and where you began, so you can look back with some kind of objectivity,” he explains. “Writing is more exposing than acting. With acting, if you’ve been around long enough, you’re bound to pick up technique – I don’t mean that it’s about hiding, but it’s about leading yourself into emotional trouble and getting yourself out of it. Writing has to be total.” Alcoholism is a dark, autobiographical stream running through Lynch’s fiction. “There’s a proverb that goes: ‘The man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, the drink takes the man.’ That’s how it was for me.” He started writing around the time he stopped drinking, not as therapy, but as a way of being honest with himself. “When I got sober, I was obsessed by definition, by clarity. "I started digging, really digging into me. It’s tough, it’s an alone thing, but when I’m not acting, it keeps me sane. And my life has completely changed since I stopped drinking. I’m much more outgoing and, believe it or not, I’m less sorrowful.” France, too, has been a new start. Lynch has “always felt European, given my blood and my heritage” and regrets Brexit (“a bad decision, made for wrong reasons”). He now lives in Nice and enjoys having Italy just over the border. The “old time” came hurtling back on 14 July this year when 86 people died when a lorry ploughed into the crowd during the terrorist attack on the Promenade des Anglais. “My partner, Christine, is French,” says Lynch. “A couple of days after the truck drove down the Promenade, we went down there together. There were flowers everywhere, people lighting candles, and it was like a muscle went in me. Christine said to me, ‘I know now why you’ve always been so alert, so vigilant. You grew up with that.’ And we did. We all grew up with the possibility that, at any time, anything could happen.” Finally though, for Lynch, hinterland is shading into new horizons. “I love the challenge of existing in a new culture. With Christine, I speak in French. We kiss in French. I’m doing my second film in French. And it’s tremendously liberating. Being an exile has done me the world of good.” The Fall returns tonight on BBC2 at 9pm
Benedict Cumberbatch on The Hollow Crown, bloody warfare and discovering he's Richard III's cousin
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...
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 before he dies in battle.” The exhumation, in 2012, of the remains of Richard’s body in Leicester allowed unprecedented authenticity in the matter of the king’s hump ( Cumberbatch is shirtless in an opening scene of next week's Richard III); a prosthesis was created which replicates exactly the spinal scoliosis found on the skeleton. Things got spooky, however, when scientists working on the king’s remains shared a new discovery with Cumberbatch. “It was an extraordinary bit of serendipity, as I was literally dressed as Shakespeare’s version of Richard III when I received an email from Leicester University saying that I was a not-altogether-ridiculously-distant descendant of Richard. I’m a third cousin sixteen times removed, which is still distant, but puts me ahead of an awful lot of other people. I was asked to read the poem written for the occasion by Carol Ann Duffy at the re-interment in Leicester Cathedral. To have been present when Richard III found his resting place was moving; I was at the burial of a king. “ It’s easy to see the History Plays as a meander through the mists of time, but for Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Richard’s defeat at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 was of lively interest, pivotal to their sense of national identity ( much like today's interest in the First World War). Even for our own time, Cumberbatch argues, The Hollow Crown strikes unsettling chords: “These films stretch well beyond the remit of historical or period drama," he says. "They are about everything we we’re facing, all the debates about who we should ally ourselves with, whether we should be part of Europe, and how deep these divides go within a society. And the violence of medieval warfare has a resonance with what’s going on with extremism in the world at the moment. To see the headlines, and then read the day’s shooting script, realising we are enacting a beheading, literally taking someone’s head off their shoulders and having it witnessed – sad to say, these are things which are still part of our world. “ The war scenes recreated for Hollow Crown are big on bloody realism, as evidenced by the gallons of fake gore – silicone wax for clotted blood, a sugar compound for the runny stuff - laid in at The Weald and Downland Museum in West Sussex, where the Battle of St Albans ( Henry VI, Part II) is in full cry. There’s also a state-of-the-art armoury doing brisk business as iron-clad warriors limp off set in various states of disrepair. “Most of the actors on this production wanted to do their own stunts, “ says armourer Hamish Macleod, “and they’ve been working in horrific conditions; we’ve staged battles in nine inches of mud, with torrential rainstorms crashing down. We’ve had to develop an armour system that can take that kind of punishment, but when it gets too much, we’d rather the armour broke than the actor, so we’ve got our forge going here for running repairs. “ In the thick of the fighting, barely visible in a miasma of battlefield smoke, Adrian Dunbar, who plays Richard Plantagenet, is taking chunks out of the enemy with a broadsword. “You’ve got the armour and everything on, and you think ‘this is going to be great’” says the Line of Duty star. “Then they give you a sword, and you think ‘ah, it’s not too bad.’ And after ten minutes you’re just standing there thinking ‘Please, I can’t be doing this all day. I mean, I really don’t know how people sustained themselves in real battles. Someone would just come along and slaughter you because you’d be too tired to lift a sword.” Plantagenet, who defeated the Lancastrian forces at St Albans in 1455, is the great king England never had, says Dunbar: “I‘d say he presents the same qualities that Geoffrey Boycott would present today. He’s a Yorkshireman, he calls a spade a spade and he gets on with things. His world is in a state of flux, no one is secure, people are being killed right, left and centre. Someone, somewhere, has got to sort it out, and, in this story at least, Plantagenet did his best. “We have a tendency to call primitive people ‘noble savages’. I think we could turn that around and call the guys in our story savage nobles. They had to be savage; life expectancy was very short, you were married as a teenager, had children by the time you were twenty, so life was a huge rush, and I think these films really get that point across.” Above all for Dunbar, The Hollow Crown tells a fabulous story. “It’s got everything- battles, power being wrested from people, witchcraft – it’s the proper game of thrones. And I would see people being able to ‘get it’, because of that. I think there are a lot of young people, in particular, who watch Game of Thrones, or who are playing games that exist in the same kind of territory, so these plays won’t be as alien to them now, as they might have been to audiences watching 30 or 40 years ago.” Certainly Sophie Okonedo’s Margaret of Anjou fits the fantasy genre; in the course of The Hollow Crown, Margaret, the wife of Henry VI, is required to age from fairy-tale princess, to warrior queen and , ultimately, wild-eyed prophetess. It’s a tour de force for the star of Criminal Justice and Undercover. “We haven’t been shooting in chronological order, so one day I’m a young girl, the next I’m an old hag,“ she explains. I did a lot of preparation in my head, so that when I come to a particular scene, I can sort of remember where I am at, emotionally, and then I just think young or think older – I don’t do funny voices or anything. And, hopefully, it just kind of happens. “ Okonedo is equally phlegamatic about the byzantine wranglings of the medieval court. “Margaret thinks her lot have a divine right to the throne, and the others are scumbags. She loves hard and she lives hard, and, a lot of the time, her fantastic energy is channelled into violence. Maybe if she was around today, she’d have gone into politics.” Everyone is keen to point out contemporary parallels, but six hours of late Elizabethan drama is high-risk programming. Can The Hollow Crown reach out to viewers across four centuries? Benedict Cumberbatch is in no doubt that it can. “We are living through a golden era of television. To marry the talent in film with the bedrock of all drama in this country, in the shape of Shakespeare, will bring a lot of new eyes to this material. If the audience has half as much fun watching it, as we have had playing it, it will be well worth tuning in for.” The Hollow Crown: Henry VI Part II is on Saturday 14th May at 9pm on BBC2 (Sunday 10pm in Wales)
How Keeley Hawes lost her Shakespeare virginity
The actress stars in new adaptation The Hollow Crown this weekend - and she wasn't the only first-timer on set...
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 Shakespeare, anyone can!” For series director Dominic Cooke, the Shakespeare virgins (the role of Henry VI is played by Tom Sturridge, another first-timer) brought a particular energy to the set. “Of course, it’s wonderful to have all these experienced actors who are absolutely at home in Shakespeare. Benedict is a brilliant Richard III, just brilliant. I came home from shooting each day thinking, ‘We have genius here.’’ But then you have someone like Keeley, who’s never been near Shakespeare. She came in, did the work, watched and learned from Judi and I think she’s as good as anybody.” For rookie viewers, as much as for actors, six hours of blank verse is a big ask, but an elegant and beautifully spoken adaptation eases Shakespeare’s language round some of the trickier corners, while respecting cadence and metre. “We did quite a bit of adjusting,” says Cooke, who worked with National Theatre veteran Ben Power on the script. “We moved lines around and there’s a lot of compression. Some things, like the Cade rebellion, which is a glorious episode in Henry VI Part II, were hard to let go of, but when you’re turning four three- and-a-half-hour plays into three two-hour episodes, you have to make choices. We were trying to be faithful to what we thought the plays were about and what Shakespeare was doing, but at the same time trying to turn it into something very filmic and exciting to watch.” Hugh Bonneville, Sophie Okonedo, Benedict Cumberbatch, Judi Dench and Tom Sturridge in The Hollow Crown “Exciting” is the word. Heads roll freely in the new series. They also bounce and spurt; they are impaled on stakes and dropped into unsuspecting laps. If Shakespeare’s vexed succession of English kings is the original game of thrones, then these are the Bleeding Years. “War is a horrible thing,” says Cooke. “It’s about people dying, and I wanted to honour the truth of that situation. But if we showed what medieval warfare was really like, people would be unable to watch.” The BBC’s 2012 adaptation of The Hollow Crown showcased different directors for each film but all three films in the new series are directed by Cooke and executive-produced by Sam Mendes. These are Cooke’s first films and they make up a spectacular debut. Equally at home with Shakespeare and new playwrights (he is credited with turning round the fortunes of the Royal Court Theatre, where he was artistic director, 2007–13), he brings a sense of immediacy and contemporary comment to some of Shakespeare’s least digestible drama. It’s safe to say the Henry VI plays, stiff with battles and constitutional wrangling, will never top a poll of most popular Shakespearean works, but in Cooke’s action-packed edit, they provide an engrossing foundation for the psychological masterpiece of Richard III. “We’re used to seeing Richard as a fully formed psychopath,” he explains. “I see him as a child of war, traumatised by watching his younger brother, Edmund, killed. Post-traumatic stress disorder was only coined as a term in the 1980s, yet here is Shakespeare writing in 1602 and his insight is incredible.” Benedict Cumberbatch and Luke Treadaway Academics, including the historian Simon Schama, have characterised the history plays as Shakespeare’s patriotic attempt to legitimise the Tudor dynasty. Cooke takes a wider view: “The thing with Shakespeare is that he’s so complex and brilliant that any time he puts forward an idea, there’s always the opposite built into the play. For me, these plays are much more about what sort of personality suits power, and what goes wrong with the commonwealth when you have the wrong person in power. “Whenever his plays are performed, Shakespeare always speaks to the times. We knew when we were shooting these films that there were parallels with what’s going on in the world today. Look at the US presidential elections. Think about how and why political parties have turned to violence or decided to go to war – we’ve lived through a series of disastrous decisions in the Iraq war which we’re still paying for. There are major issues of revenge in these plays, and we see the politics of revenge playing out every day in the Middle East. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to make the wars quite bloody; I didn’t want to pull any punches, because it’s very important for viewers to understand what war is like. The mass graves in the final scene of the series deliberately recall Belsen or Srebrenica. It’s shocking, and it’s meant to be shocking because this is what happens when we lose our moral compass this can be the consequence of decisions made in cabinet rooms. Shakespeare embraces horror because it’s part of the human experience, and I think we have to do the same.” Tom Sturridge and Sophie Okonedo If TV audiences warm to Shakespeare, says Cooke, it’s because Shakespeare, in many ways, defined the modern medium: “I think there’s something about the way we think about film which has come from the Jacobeans and evolved into something else. Shakespeare came up with the idea of the multi-locational story, he invented that.” It’s an idea that is fully exploited in The Wars of The Roses, with stunning locations ranging from Gloucester Cathedral, Leeds Castle and Alnwick Castle to the Brecon Beacons and the Peak District. “Shakespeare invented soap opera with Henry VI, too,” Cooke continues. “It’s that basic soap progression; two families, tension within them, families in conflict. The play is more than that, of course, but it was a huge commercial success for Shakespeare, which is why he wrote sequels. When you think how Shakespeare evolves – in just two years – between writing Henry VI Part I and Richard III, it’s truly extraordinary.” Cooke has no ambitions to present the “definitive” version of these histories. If purists baulk at his choices, so be it. He stands by them, citing Shakespeare himself as someone who “played fast and loose” with historical events. “Even if you were to do the whole text uncut, on stage, the minute you cast an actor, you’re making a choice; the minute you put a piece of scenery on stage, you’re presenting a particular vision. There’s always an element of authorship. I feel quite free in that, and it made this a very creative and enjoyable thing to do.” The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses begins on BBC1 today (Saturday 7th May) at 9.00pm with Henry VI Part 1
Doctor Foster's Bertie Carvel on playing one of the most hated characters on television
The actor discusses the audience reaction to the show's finale, how acting is like journalism and the cult of celebrity
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 what it feels like to be caught between a rock and a hard place. “I have no interest in defending Simon,” Carvel goes on, “but we all do things that others might consider wrong. To err is human. I think Simon is errant, but I don’t think he’s evil. If he was simply a nasty piece of work, then viewers would just think, ‘Well, thank God Gemma’s out of that.’ What makes you angry and sad for her, is that somebody she loves, and who loves – or has loved – her, could betray her in this way.” After weeks of mounting tension, the final episode of Doctor Foster drew ten million viewers, many of whom – if Twitter was anything to go by – felt cheated of a good old-fashioned blood-bath; in the closing scenes Simon, testicles intact, set off for a new life in London with his young, pregnant mistress. “I was actually surprised to hear that people were disappointed with the ending,” says Carvel. “The bit that surprised me was the sudden violence of Simon pushing Gemma against the window and knocking her out. You have to think what that does to him, in terms of the way he feels about himself. He goes off to London to live with Kate and so on, but he’s got that violence on his conscience, and this isn’t a man who has a deficit of conscience. I should think that, in terms of cosmic punishment, he doesn’t come off lightly, he doesn’t get away scot-free.” Given his bent for analysis, it comes as no surprise to learn that Carvel’s mother is a psychologist. His father, John Carvel, is a distinguished Guardian journalist. “I’ve always felt that acting is, to some extent, like journalism. It’s looking for truth,” he says. “One of the things I love about Doctor Foster is that although it is in some ways a melodrama, it is true to life. And when, in life, did the ‘goodies’ get the treasure and the ‘baddies’ get their just deserts? It doesn’t work that way.” Beyond the barest biographical bones — a childhood interest in fantasy role-playing games, a first class degree in English literature from Sussex University – Carvel’s personal life is a closed book. “I’m realising that the cult of celebrity is a horrible thing to be part of,” he says. He sounds genuinely distressed, like a man waking up from a bad dream to a worse reality. “I’d rather be anonymous,” he goes on, “but of course I want my work to go wide, and you make that slightly Faustian pact, don’t you? I think I’m getting better at having a sense of humour about it, not taking myself too seriously, butyoudohavetobecareful–wealldonowin the age of social media. You can’t any more think, ‘I’ll just be who I am and that will come across.’ Because unfortunately we live in a world where the presentation of facts is so much louder than the facts themselves.” As an actor, he argues, the last thing he wants is for the characters he plays to be overshadowed by his own personality. And if that means the women of Britain are out for his blood, so be it. Filming for series two of Doctor Foster starts in September. Can Carvel give us any kind of steer on the further adventures of Gemma and Simon? “Mike Bartlett, the series writer, is in his garret, creating as we speak. There’s nothing I can tell you. And if I did,” says Carvel with a rare unguarded smile, “I’d have to kill you. I’m really interested to see what Mike does with Simon now, and viewers, I’m sure, will have a lot of fun speculating.” Doctor Foster is one of the six shows you can vote for in the BAFTA Radio Times Audience Award
Adrian Lester on Undercover: "It would be so much more powerful if we did all the press for this show without once mentioning colour"
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...
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 BBC under pressure to address diversity issues, media coverage of Undercover has stressed the significance of a prime-time drama with two black actors in leading roles. This, in itself, is not completely remarkable - there is a line of distinguished black performances on British television, stretching back to the 1950s. There have been all black sitcoms (Desmonds), dramas with a black lead (Luther), all black ensemble casts (BabyFather). What’s different about Undercover is the fact that the ethnicity of the lead characters is largely irrelevant to the plot. Colour-blind casting is old news in theatre. TV and film, lacking the distancing effect of stage performance, has been slower to catch up. The trumpeting of Undercover’s ethnically diverse cast has been well-meaning, celebratory. And it drives Lester nuts. “It would be so much more powerful, “he says, “if we did all the press for this show without once mentioning colour. That’s not going to happen – it’s just my pie-in-the-sky thought – but it would be a real kick along the path to where we all should be going.” It’s a reasonable, if unfashionable stance. Should we be marvelling, in 2016, at a drama where black professionals sit down to pasta in a smart kitchen? “For me,” says Lester, “that’s what a family looks like.” He has no intention of weighing in to the diversity argument. “Issues and numbers and representation can be talked about without my commentary,” he says firmly. “I no longer feel the need to join with that conversation.” This is as much as an aesthetic consideration as a political decision. “If,” he goes on, “you reduce everything that’s contained in a drama to skin colour, to surface, then you lose everything that has been created. “ Fair enough. Nobody assesses the achievements of, say, Kenneth Branagh, in terms of his blue eyes. And there is much in Lester’s career to celebrate without which, he points out, is “literally skin-deep.” The drama also speaks to current concerns about the deployment of undercover surveillance among activist groups. Last year the Metropolitan police paid out £425,000 in legal damages to a woman who discovered that the father of her son was an undercover officer with the Metropolitan police. “The best things I’ve been involved with, the very best things, always point at something in our world that we haven’t sorted out yet, that we haven’t got right,” says Lester. “As an actor you can do wonderful things with this kind of script, because although the audience understands they’re watching a drama, they also understand that this kind of thing goes on. The characters, the story, are imagined but they’re rooted in reality, and it’s something we should be talking about.” “I did some reading and research on undercover surveillance,” he goes on, “and it pointed to a world that is really quite questionable. Most of us have no problem understanding that a section of the police force is infiltrating groups who, to further their own cause, would harm the public. Infiltrating those groups to find out what they’re planning to do, that’s fine. "But then when you find out that many of those groups got their organisational capabilities from the undercover officers who were infiltrating them, that the groups benefited from money, transport etc [supplied by the police], that the infiltrators were marrying activists and having children… it’s murky. You start to think ‘What is going on here? Who is serving whose ends?’ In a profession where the jangling of silver spoons grows ever more insistent, Lester, whose parents and grandparents immigrated to Britain in the 1950s, came up through the traditional route of graft, talent and ambition. His mum worked as a medical secretary and his dad ran a cleaning company. “My access to the greatest stories I had seen or heard was through television.” he recalls. “Just kids’ stuff, nothing classical. I loved Doctor Who, and I remember countless westerns and war films where the directors built tension by silence on the screen. Around the age of 14, I got involved with youth theatre at Birmingham Rep. "Actors I admired came in, and I was astounded at how they would transform themselves with different accents, different dress. I watched their commitment, and was profoundly affected by this process of shape-shifting. I remember thinking ‘How do you do that? To me, it was like alchemy, creating something precious out of nothing.” Lester went on to RADA – “there were grants in those days” – where he reconnected with fellow-student Lolita Chakrabarti, who grew up on the same street in Birmingham (the couple married in 1997 and have two teenage daughters). A modest debut in the daytime soap Crossroads kicked off a career of serial mould-breaking, “I make it a policy to step away from the thing I’ve just done.” Acclaimed for his performance as Rosalind in Cheek By Jowl’s all-male production of As You Like It in 1991,Lester side-stepped to musical theatre, winning an Olivier Award in 1996 for his part in Stephen Sondheim’s Company. His Hollywood breakthrough as Henry, the idealistic presidential aide in Mike Nicholls’ 1998 film Primary Colors turned out to be a frustrating false start. “When was in LA at that time, I met everyone on the ground – this was way before Idris Elba or David Harewood did it – and I remember sitting in the room of a casting director who looked at me – because I was a British actor who had played an American - as if I was this kind of alien being. He said to me, ‘Well, if we have anything like Henry, we will of course think of you.’ I was absolutely adamant that after doing something like Primary Colors – the film opened in Cannes, for god’s sake – the least I could do was get a good bit of telly. I was offered a small part here, or a touring play there, and I turned them down.” It was a brave - and deeply considered – decision. “As an actor, your only power is saying ‘no.’ For every job I do, there are a hundred other jobs that I didn’t get, that I wanted. Equally there are jobs that come your way and you say, ‘No, thank you’. So it’s only when and how you say ‘no’ that dictates your career. “ Mistrust of “pigeon-holing” steered Lester away from long-term commitments, though he made an exception for the role of Mickey in BBC1’s hit drama series Hustle. “That was a chocolate box of a part. The whole point of Mickey is that he is a shape-shifter, every episode felt like a new role.” Undercover is on Sunday 3rd April at 9pm on BBC1 Awarded an OBE for services to drama in 2013, Lester is characteristically thoughtful about the significance of the honour. “I think it crossed my mind not to accept, but as soon as the news hit my mum’s ears, that was it. It made me think, ‘Yeah, actually, there was a reason why my granddad felt “I have part-ownership in the welfare of this country”, because I did my bit for it, and therefore my children and my children should have absolute rights to benefit from it.’ "Two generations later, I think he was right. Without my bloodline, and people like me, and their bloodline, this country would be on its knees. Also the OBE is an acknowledgement of what we [actors] are doing in our field to make this place, where we all live, better. So, yeah, I will say, ‘Thank you very much’ for that kind of acknowledgement.” If Lester has shied from public debate on diversity issues, his contribution has been profound. Most recently, he took the starring role in a West End revival of his wife Lolita Chakrabarti’s award-winning play, Red Velvet, a deeply political piece about the 19th-century black Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge. Undercover is another milestone on the road. On the basis of being the change you want to see, Lester has changed more than most. There’s more than one way of smashing a brick. Undercover begins on Sunday 9pm on BBC1
Robson Green on the new series of Grantchester: "I defy anyone not to cry"
The actor is enjoying a fine bromance with James Norton – but on screen it'll all end in tears
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 caused to the victims’ families and the people who loved them. “On the other hand, murderers have families, too. It’s a moral minefield, and it forces uncomfortable choices on the viewer. You understand why the crime was committed – murder in Grantchester is always an act of passion – and then you have to start dealing with it.” Green’s own views on capital punishment are equally ambivalent. “Is it justice, or is simply revenge? Does it really solve anything? Personally I don’t think it does. It’s not a religious thing for me, the way it is for Sidney. I don’t believe in the Almighty at all – I certainly don’t think we can solve problems by confiding in an invisible friend. And I don’t think people are born bad, I think they’re made bad–or come to do bad things–by circumstance. But can we make a killer a better person? Is there evidence that rehabilitation works in cases of sexual assault? That debate is still open. “I know that if someone I loved and cared about was hurt,” he goes on, “I’d want some kind of revenge. But I guess that’s where the justice system comes in, to stop us acting on our basic impulses. Because we all have an objective and a subjective view, and neither can be ignored.” While the series has been something of an ethical work-out, the Northumberland-born star has scant patience with actors who assume their characters’ ideas and dilemmas. “I’m not a Method actor, and if I find myself surrounded by actors who take their work home with them, I’ve got a sign I put out – I got myself one of those triangular ones like a roadworks sign – which says ‘Danger: Actors at Work’. Sometimes my fellow actors don’t like it, but it’s my little thing. I’ll go on set and say, ‘OK, everyone, we’re telling a story here. It’s pretend. I’m not a detective and you’re not a victim of crime. So let’s just all enjoy ourselves, OK?’” He is also the actor least likely to bang on about the “bravery” required for a given role. “My dad was down a mine for most of his working life, in an industry that just wasn’t designed for human beings. My mum worked in a shop and then cleaned houses in the evening to make sure that her children didn’t go without. I work hard out of respect for my parents, respect for what they sacrificed in order for me to have a better life. But Grantchester isn’t work to me. Dad always said, ‘Work’s not meant to be enjoyed, that’s why they call it work. Find a job you love, and you’ll never have to work again.’ And it’s true. I genuinely love playing Geordie. Grantchester’s one of those series where you look at the characters and think, ‘I wish I could have been there, at that time, with those people’.” Green is 50. It’s a curious thing, he admits, this nostalgia for a world before his time. What qualities does he see in Grantchester that have disappeared from modern life? “Charm,” he says unhesitatingly. “We’ve lost that ability to connect to each other face to face. Maybe it’s because we’re all so hyper-connected. People are starting and finishing relationships with a text. They’re dating on the internet. Maybe I’m just showing my age, but I mean! Talk to the woman!” There is, he says, an element of mentoring in his off-screen relationship with James Norton. “Can’t stand the man!” he roars, fondly. “James is the engine of the programme and he’s an absolute joy. He’s on such a wave at the moment, and he deserves every bit of it, because he’s a really creative talent. But there will be ups and downs, and that’s when it can be good to talk to someone who has survived in the industry long-term.” Green’s longevity is partly down to his willingness to diversify. “I love the balance between acting and presenting,” he says. “I’ve just completed a show on the Flying Scotsman, and I’m about to take off to the Philippines for a documentary on Robinson Crusoe. Tales from Northumberland has been a monster hit for ITV, and now I’m doing Tales from the Coast, travelling round Britain’s islands and talking with people about how they thrive in these unforgiving conditions.” Then there’s Extreme Fishing with Robson Green, in which our hero goes mano-a-mano with monsters from the deep. “I’ve just been offered the lead in a BBC drama and they wanted me to film in Manchester – but Extreme Fishing want me to go to Nicaragua and Cuba and Alaska and Senegal. Kind of a no-brainer.” Could some unspeakable deep-sea horror lure Green away from a third series of Grantchester? “I’d do it like a shot,” he says. “Grantchester is my happy place. If it wasn’t for the body count, I’d move there tomorrow.”
James Norton won hearts in War and Peace – now he's terrifying us as Happy Valley's psycho
The actor, who plays the murderous Tommy Lee Royce, talks series two, obsessive fans and posh actors on TV
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," explains Norton, who with the help of a psychologist has researched the nature of psychopathology. “Either he stays as we last encountered him, in vulnerable, abused-child mode, or he works out what he can control from jail, and how he’s going to do it. We see him training in order to get physically powerful, and we also know he’s spent hours and hours just lying on his bed, filling himself with hate for Catherine.” Bulking up for the role turned out to be more interesting than expected. “I went to the gym for a month, and I didn’t drink for a month, and it’s weird how that changes you; you do feel this increased sense of control. It was important to me to have that physical side to Tommy, because he’s a very vain man, but it was also about experiencing that obsessive, almost OCD quality that intensive training brings.” Norton, mercifully, is not a Method actor; off screen he is positively twinkly with easy, impeccable manners. "For me, acting is all about empathy. I know I’m not the first actor to say this, but I believe it’s vital; you have to somehow like the character, or at least understand why they act the way they do. With Tommy, I can’t stand ‘outside’ and be cynical or judgemental about him. In his head, every hit, every rape, is about survival. It’s the saddest thing, just heartbreaking, when you think that someone can think of the world as so hostile, can be so threatened by everyone and everything, that he can justify what he does in his own head.” This level of emotional connection with a character, once accessed, is never quite lost. “It wasn’t hard for me to get back into the on-screen relationship with Sarah, even though I don’t, in this series, have the privilege of acting so much with her. What’s really wonderful about these long-form TV series is that you’ve got all these memories in the bank. I had Tommy’s story with Catherine in my head, but there’s a form of physical memory, too. I had physically been in that situation with Sarah kicking the s**t out of me, or me smashing her face against a wall: horrible, horrible stuff, but really powerful, and the kind of thing you don’t forget. “Those things are now imprinted on my mind, so for the second series it was a case of re-engaging with them. I was almost surprised how easy that was. Sarah and I were staying in the same hotel and, because our characters spend so much time thinking and talking about each other, there was this funny moment when we actually saw each other across the bar and it was like, ‘There you are!’ The new series also features a creepily compelling performance by Shirley Henderson as a woman romantically obsessed with Tommy’s “celebrity psychopath” status. “People create their own fantasies around figures like Tommy,” says Norton, with obvious discomfort. When series one was airing, he was disturbed to receive messages from young women on Twitter saying: “Take me to your cellar”. “I read some case studies and it’s very common, this instinct to save these broken souls. I think maybe the women feel protected by the fact that the object of their obsession is behind bars, but it’s not that simple; with Tommy, you never know if this new relationship is genuine or simply manipulative. But people are drawn to darkness. The reason why we love things like Happy Valley is that we are obsessed by the extreme edges of life, and these people are the absolute extreme.” Versatile hair and exceptional good looks notwithstanding, one suspects it’s this deep thoughtfulness that lands Norton the parts. The son of teachers, he was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire, and went on to read theology at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He came at theology, he explains, not so much from a “belief-based perspective”, but as a way of looking at the effects that belief systems have on the world. At Cambridge he was heavily involved with student drama and Rada seemed a reasonable next step “A lot of actors share that hunger for understanding, and for living your life in an inquisitive way. I think my degree set me up for that.” A key scene in Andrew Davies’s adaptation of the BBC’s War and Peace has Norton’s character, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, communicating Tolstoy’s existential angst just by looking at a tree. “There’s pages and pages of this intellectual wrangling in the book,” he laughs. “I was a bit nervous that I would simply look inanimate. But I couldn’t be more delighted by the way the public has got behind the show.” Norton’s range is remarkable in an industry that loves to pigeonhole (filming Happy Valley series one and Grantchester back to back, he had to wear a hat over his “vicar hair” in his final scenes as Tommy). He’s politely frustrated by the argument that acting in Britain has become the preserve of the posh. “There’s two discussions to be had. One is that producers are afraid of taking risks on actors; they somehow forget that actors are there to transform – it’s kind of the point of what we do. When Happy Valley first came up, I was in South Africa. So I auditioned on tape and sent it off. Which turned out to be lucky, as they didn’t know that I didn’t usually speak in a Yorkshire accent. They probably realised once they did a bit of research, but they took the risk, and I will be forever grateful. So many actors aren’t allowed the opportunity to transform because people have so many preconceptions about them and make so many judgements about them, just on the way they speak. “It’s also true that there’s a lot of period drama done here. Americans love it, we love it, and we’re good at it. Often in these dramas there’s a disproportionate amount of RP [received pronounciation] speakers, so it follows that if there’s a higher amount of period drama, there’s a higher amount of ‘well-spoken’ actors. “It’s a real shame, though, when you get some- body like Eddie Redmayne, who is such a great ambassador for British drama – two Oscar nominations in two years, it’s extraordinary – and at least half the press cover- age on him is about the fact he went to Eton. What’s their point? Are they asking him to take that into account and maybe take his foot off the accelerator for a while?It’s ridiculous.” Norton has just returned from LA, where he’s been doing publicity for War and Peace and the forthcoming second series of Grantchester. He’s delighted about the latter: “It was lovely going back into that world, and the show has matured a lot. Everyone loves the relationship between Sidney and Geordie [Robson Green], but in this series we start to threaten and thwart them, so it’s a really interesting change of direction.” Neither is he minded to decamp to Hollywood just yet. “There were a few meetings about meetings,” he says vaguely, “and of course there are wonderful opportunities for actors out there, but there are wonderful jobs here, too. And I missed the rain." He’s not entirely joking. He lists his chief recreation as “chatting”, but when Norton isn’t playing tennis or cycling round London (he moved recently to Peckham, south of the river), he takes to the hills. “My sister gave me a book of really long hikes in the UK, and my resolution is to go on a long walk, on my own, with a tent, once a month or at least every two months. Otherwise I’d just be at the National Theatre watching another play. I think it’s really healthy to take your head as far out of the industry as possible; otherwise it can become all-consuming.” For now, however, Norton’s head is firmly in Happy Valley. “It was such a joy to return. Not only for the chance to go deeper into Tommy’s twisted, fascinating mind, but also to see where [writer] Sally Wainwright was going to take the show. I can tell you, she hasn’t disappointed.” Happy Valley returns tonight at 9pm on BBC1
How Manjinder Virk is shaking up Midsomer Murders
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
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 artistic mission to her parents, who came to Britain from Punjab in the 1970s. “My dad’s very political – he worked in a car factory and was very involved in the Indian Workers’ Association. And both my parents are massively into the arts. They were very liberal – my dad says he brought me and my sister up like boys. That stereotype of Asian family life where women, mainly, do what they’re told, never applied to us.” The outside world wasn’t always so enlightened. “I remember being on a double decker bus in Coventry with my sister. We both had really long hair, and I remember a father and his son sitting at the back and trying to throw lit matches at our hair. Things like that make you aware that these things exist, that people will hate you without knowing you.” With two children of her own (her daughter is five, her son one), Virk, who’s from a Sikh background, is conscious that the terror attacks in Paris have fanned ancient mistrust and sparked new tensions in British communities. “As days go by, it gets more complicated and, to be honest, it terrifies me. When I played a suicide bomber in Britz, the shocking thing was that it was a female. Now you read about a woman blowing herself up with a suicide belt, and it’s not a surprise any more.” The question of diversity in British television was pushed up the agenda with Lenny Henry’s 2014 Bafta Lecture, which focused on the low numbers of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) professionals in the creative industries and the exodus of high-profile BAME actors to the US. Does Virk ever think about heading to California herself? “There was a time, before I had kids, when I was very interested. I have a manager in LA, so does my husband, and that life was possible. But I love the fact that British Asian actors are making a real change over here now, and I think we need to keep up the momentum. “Whatever happens in my career, I try not to think, ‘It’s because I’m Indian,’ or ‘It’s because I’m a woman’. I’ve worked hard to get where I am. I feel lucky that I’ve had lead roles. I just don’t want to feel grateful.” Midsomer Murders is on ITV today (Wednesday 6th January) at 8:00pm
A Song for Jenny author Julie Nicholson reveals the cost of the 7/7 bombings to her family - and her faith
Ten years ago, Nicholson’s daughter Jenny died in the London terrorist attacks. Now a BBC1 drama starring Emily Watson tells her story...
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 official advice, to see her daughter’s mutilated body. There is an indescribably sad mortuary scene where Nicholson anoints with holy oil her daughter’s arm and hand – the only part of Jenny recognisable in the undertaker’s swirl of muslin – and prays for her. Nicholson has written in her memoir that she believes it was for this moment alone that she was ordained as a priest. A year later, however, she resigned her position at the Church of St Aidan with St George in Bristol to work in community theatre. Her decision provoked headlines about “the priest who lost her faith”, or “the priest who couldn’t forgive”, but the truth was not so simple. “Faith, to me, is not like a shopping bag full of stuff that you can pick up and put down,” she says, carefully. “It’s something that is woven through me. It’s a mysterious thing, and sometimes I engage more with one part of it than another, but I think what I rejected absolutely was the easy language of faith that, actually, just doesn’t measure up when times are tough. I could stand up as an Anglican priest, with my dog collar on, and speak those words of forgiveness and reconciliation. And then I would go into my house and close the door, and know I didn’t believe them.” Nicholson, now in her early 60s, recalls being asked, very soon after Jenny’s death, if she “still had hope”. “This was from a very senior member of my profession – a dear, kind, good person – and it’s so typical of the questions the Church will ask. My answer was ‘Yes, of course’, but what was going on in my head was, ‘Yes, I hope I can continue getting up in the morning and getting into the shower. Yes, I hope I can continue to be a good mother to my surviving children. I hope I can continue to pay bills. I hope I can just survive this.’ Hope as a verb, I understood. Hope in the abstract was meaningless.” Accuracy, linguistic and emotional, matters a lot to Nicholson. She has not tried “ever so hard” to forgive Mohammad Sidique Khan for Jenny’s murder, because she is not convinced parental forgiveness is appropriate. “I would say that this whole business of offering forgiveness on behalf of someone else is a very wobbly subject. I can’t forgive on behalf of Jennifer, I could only consider forgiveness for the wounds to me as a mother, and those wounds remain raw. So it’s not something I’m going to countenance.” Such exactness can appear brisk on paper. In person, Nicholson is softer, with a clear, candid smile. She looks like she’d be very good at confidences. She did try, very hard, to find out, and understand, where Khan was coming from: “But I found that almost impossible. I think Muslim communities were, understandably, afraid of engaging with someone like me. I have always said – and believed – that I do not blame all Muslim people for what happened to Jenny. Who do I blame? The man who detonated the bomb and took her life and the life of others. If you ask me who do I hold responsible, then that’s another question, and I suppose, at one level, we all have to take responsibility for the world and the society that we live in." Julie, left, and her daughter Jenny “I think that the simple, personal faith of people, whether that’s Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam, is at heart a beautiful thing. But when faith, any faith, becomes religious fundamentalism, that is a huge problem for me. And I think there is a fear of doing the wrong thing, or making mistakes, or stirring up a hornet’s nest, that stops us from engaging, in an honest and productive way, with religious fundamentalism in this country. We’re not getting to the root of the enormous disaffection among young British Muslim people, and in particular, young British Muslim men." “From what I hear reported, there are initiatives for police and social services, and schools, but it’s not really about what we can do for people who are in the process of being radicalised, or who have become radicalised, it’s about what happens before that. You can look at issues of poverty, issues of education, but not everyone becomes radicalised, so what is that thing that is happening to some and not to others?” The recent addition of “British Values” to the school curriculum is unlikely, in Nicholson’s view, to bridge cultural and ethical gaps. “I think there’s a big grey area around what constitutes ‘British Values’. I would rather people talked more about common humanity.” Nicholson’s second book, “about the person I was and the person I am becoming since Jenny was killed”, is slowly forming. Writing, however tangentially, about your child’s death can never get easier. Why does Nicholson put herself through it? Why, for that matter, did she want this film made? “I wanted to show who Jenny was, and to show this immense loss that I’m sure all 52 families affected by 7/7 felt. I’m sure there are other resonances for others, but for me, it’s about trying to draw back the personal from that very public disaster. I can’t speak for Jenny’s father [Nicholson parted from her husband, Greg, after, but not, she says, because of, Jenny’s death]. If I’m honest, I think he wasn’t sure he wanted the film made. But he was part of the family viewing, which was a very emotional experience for everyone – I think that was quite a healing thing – and we remain parents for our children, both living and departed." "We were a unit of five. I often see us with these kind of links,” says Nicholson, spooling invisible cords from open palms. “Once Jenny was killed, the chain was broken. The effect of traumatic bereavement on siblings is an area of research that I think really needs to be developed. My daughter, Lizzie, who was 22 at the time, said people would be phoning or coming to the house and their first question was always, ‘How are your mum and dad?’ She would answer, but inside she was screaming, ‘What about me?’" Nicola Wren as Jenny in the TV drama "And there was a moment before the funeral when my 17-year-old son Tom was making breakfast for himself while I was taking a phone call in the kitchen. The person on the end of the line asked me how I was feeling and I said, ‘Well, I just feel dead inside. I feel I have nothing to give.’ After I put the phone down, Tom, who never stopped putting Marmite on his toast, said, ‘You know, Mum, you’ve still got Lizzie and you’ve still got me.’" "That was painful for me to hear, but it was important to hear, and I think they are both very courageous people to say those things to me. We haven’t got it all right as a family. We had to work hard to find ways of linking ourselves again. Our family’s a different shape now, but in some ways I hope we’re stronger.” Births and weddings remain difficult: “That’s where I have had strong feelings of, ‘This should be my daughter, this should be her baby.’” It’s an unusually honest admission, but you feel that with Nicholson, honesty is a fundamental act of faith, as if something less than total truthfulness would stint her daughter’s memory. And there have been moments of grace. When a survivor of 7/7 gave birth, against all odds, Nicholson performed the baptism, joyfully. “Of course there is joy for friends and family members in love, for new babies coming into the world. For me, it may always be bittersweet, but it’s important to pay attention to the sweetness.” A Song for Jenny is on BBC1 tonight (Sunday 5th July) at 9pm
Meet the next Gordon Ramsay: his 13 year-old daughter Matilda
The celebrity chef's youngest has already landed her own cookery show on CBBC - and boasts impeccable manners
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 helps you understand how to eat healthily and it teaches independence for later on in life." Her mum, she confides, is more into the healthy stuff than her dad ("He's more on the side of treats"). View oEmbed on the source website The family’s American summer was the perfect opportunity to present food with a transatlantic twist. “I’d say the main difference between British and American food is the portion sizes!” says Matilda, “but I also like the fact that you get to cook outside a lot – I loved cooking fish stew in a bucket on the beach! I really enjoy sports and it was great being in my swimming costume most of the time. But I also love coming home to my London life – even school!” Matilda recently had a taste of her new fame when she presented an award at the National Television Awards. “The hardest bit was having to do the red carpet, because everyone is shouting at you to look at them and you don’t know what to do.” The kitchen, on the other hand – even a kitchen bristling with cameras – is her natural comfort zone. “The best tip Daddy has given me is to just do what I like doing, because it really shows when you make food that you’ve enjoyed cooking. He always says, ‘Just have fun, enjoy, and mind your manners!’” Matilda and the Ramsay Bunch is on Tuesdays at 4.55pm on CBBC
How screenwriter Sarah Phelps adapted JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy for TV
“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"
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 the town council exposes interweaving stories of child neglect, domestic abuse and aggressive corporate development. “It feels like a really malign Midsomer Murders,” says Phelps with relish. “We all have a kind of atavistic attraction to these beautiful parts of the country, but then you look closer and there are all these people being foul to each other.” The three-part television drama is a co-production between the BBC and HBO. Rowling took an executive-producing role, but was, says Phelps, “exceptionally generous” when it came to surrendering her story for adaptation to the small screen (by contrast, she was known for her hands-on approach with the Harry Potter films). “I know that when I hand over a script to a director, it’s a bit like watching your kid go off to school and hoping nobody’s going to beat them up in the sandpit, and it must be the same for an author. “I met up with Jo in Edinburgh to talk about the book, writer to writer. I told her what I thought the book was about, which characters really leapt out at me, and how I might shape the series and she just said, ‘Great. That’s your job.’ She read the scripts as they came in and commented appropriately, but I had a great deal of freedom. I suppose, having seen Harry Potter adapted, she must be used to it, but it still meant a lot that she trusted me just to get on with it.” It’s easy to see how Phelps would win Rowling’s confidence. Down to earth and hyper-articulate, she shares the writer’s passion for social justice and, like Rowling, found professional success relatively late in life: “I came to scriptwriting in my mid-30s. Before that I looked after polo ponies at Ham Polo Club, worked in pubs, worked in kitchens, went to university and worked in telesales, which I was crap at – I used to ring up and pitch to my own answer machine 20 times a day.” While working as a dresser at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Phelps responded to a BBC initiative to find new writers and went on to write more than 50 episodes of EastEnders (including the return of Dirty Den and his final demise) and the First World War drama The Crimson Field. “There’s always an excitement about finding that shining thread that runs through a story,” says Phelps. “In the case of The Casual Vacancy, I think it’s the character of Krystal. She’s a 16-year-old who’s doing the job of 20 people. She’s the carer for her heroin-addicted mother and her infant brother and she’s really bright and really damaged.” If Krystal is the poster girl for marginalised youth, Pagford is an unlikely microcosm for all society’s ills. “I love Jo for speaking up when people need to be spoken for, and sometimes, when you think about things in microcosm, they become more true,” says Phelps. “If you try to be universal, you’re going to miss every target you aim at, but by focusing on a tiny community you can sometimes land the bigger punch, just by letting the characters talk for you. “We think a lot about the problems affecting urban communities, but there is a really important story in what is happening in the countryside. Once upon a time, it was where food got grown, but its whole function and purpose has changed. Who is it there for? Who lives in it? How are they to live, when there is no industry? People have become nasty to the vulnerable, to those living in a precipitous situation, and we need to think about these things." As you might expect from Cranford-meets-EastEnders the opening episode is a slow run-in: “You’ve got to meet everybody and there’s a hell of a lot of information to take in,” Phelps points out. “You’ve got to let the thing breathe; it can’t be like the beginning of Star Wars, where you read pages and pages of setup.” We meet the Pagford community reeling from the sudden death of a town councillor – the empty seat on the council is the casual vacancy of the title. But it’s not a murder mystery; the councillor died of an aneurysm. The plot turns on the ramifications of what that loss means to every single person who knew him. “Of course,” says Phelps, “the real ‘vacancy’ is death itself, and that remains the deepest mystery there is.” Read our review of The Casual Vacancy here
Classical star Alison Balsom says cutbacks in music make her furious
“We know the countless benefits of what music can do,” says the BBC Young Musician host
“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 a back seat to music. At various points in your life as a performer you’ll have to do that, but I think the more rounded you are as a person, the more interesting you are as a musician. Anything you experience, you can put into your music-making. And it will make you better, because music is essentially self-expression.” The daughter of a builder and a social worker, Balsom, 35, grew up in Royston, Hertfordshire, where she attended state schools and played in the town band. The provision of free music lessons in schools – now pruned by the Department of Education – is, for Balsom, “a basic right” and she is blistering in her attack on Michael Gove’s utilitarian adjustments to the curriculum. “These cutbacks make me so furious. How short-sighted is it not to see how useful music is? We know the countless benefits of what music can do to your brain – you learn to listen, to take in information, to work with other people. “ Just look at the BBC Young Musicians – they’re not all going to become concerto soloists, but whatever they do in life, they’re going to do it brilliantly because of this formative experience of making music. “Music education is about so much more than turning out professional musicians, but I have to say that if I’d been born a few years later, there’s no way I would be having this career. I didn’t go to a specialist school. At my little primary school we all got the chance to play an instrument. I remember seeing the trumpet for the first time and thinking, ‘Ooh, it’s so cool. It’s beautiful!’ I had a great teacher at school and I went to Junior Guildhall [the London Saturday school for talented young musicians] but I didn’t have a specialist trumpet teacher until I was 14. I know that if, as a child, I’d been dependent on the Government funding that’s around now, I simply wouldn’t exist as a professional player.” While the media has made much of Balsom’s lonely eminence as a female star in the macho world of brass, the whole “gender thing” is clearly beginning to bore her. “Not so long ago, it used to be all men – the whole orchestra,” she points out. “But the world changes. It’s just not cool now to be like, ‘This is a men’s club.’ No one intelligent thinks that’s the way to go.” The fact that she looks like a Renaissance angel (if angels wore Armani, and who’s to say they shouldn’t?) is equally incidental. “To be honest, I will buy clothes for the stage that I don’t even feel I look nice in, but that I feel are appropriate. If you’re wearing a great gown, it’s your armour. But if that’s all you’ve got – even if you look amazing – your career won’t last ten minutes. The obsession with gender and appearance is just lazy journalism. I pay my mortgage by playing concertos with orchestras. The ticket holders aren’t going because they read that kind of headline.” With around 90 international engagements a year, a four-year old son (Balsom split from Charlie’s father, ENO conductor Edward Gardner in 2011), and a new album and tour to promote, a clear, overall vision is paramount. “My single goal is to go out and play music that I love. The lack of solo repertoire for brass is a challenge, but the trumpet is so versatile; if you use your imagination, you can go in almost any direction. “My new album is loosely based on a theme of Paris, with classical pieces by Ravel, Satie and Messiaen, but also more mainstream things like La Vie en Rose and Autumn Leaves. As a young musician, when asked to go down the crossover route, I said no. But I’ve been making classical records for 12 years now, I’ve gone down the hard route. Now I can enjoy it and do some sexy songs. Just at the point where everyone is going, ‘Nooo! Don’t go sexy on us, you’re too old!’ ” This seems unlikely. Nor is a deviation from the “hard route” necessarily easy. Pushing boundaries is what Balsom does best. “I’ll never master the trumpet,” she says, “but I’ll spend the rest of my life trying.”