Jessie Burton: "If you want to get a job as an actor, write a novel. It’s a long audition process"
The writer behind The Miniaturist talks fame, negative reviews and the inspiration behind her debut novel...
There was a moment during the filming of the BBC’s Christmas drama The Miniaturist when Jessie Burton found herself wondering if it was all really happening. Six years ago, she was working as a personal assistant in the City after struggling for years to make it as an actor, and decided to write a novel set in 17th-century Amsterdam featuring a mysterious doll’s house. Burton did several “unwieldy” drafts and wasn’t sure whether anyone would understand the point of it. But the manuscript became the subject of a bidding war and, on its publication in 2014, the novel became an instant bestseller that sold more than a million copies. Then the TV rights were snapped up and now it’s been made into a sumptuous two-part drama starring Romola Garai and newcomer Anya Taylor-Joy. The drama was filmed in Rotterdam and Essex and Burton herself appears as an extra in a scene set at a grand ball. Meet the cast of The Miniaturist Secrets of The Miniaturist’s cabinet house and dolls revealed BBC1’s The Miniaturist is a wonderfully unusual treat It was when she was in a trailer, getting her costume fitted, that Burton had the surreal experience of looking around her “and seeing all these actors with their wigs on and thinking, ‘I’ve conjured this up from my imagination’”. Burton shakes her head at the unexpected weirdness of it, aware of the irony of having written a book to get away from acting, only to end up with a small part in her own adaptation. “Yes,” she says, “the moral of the story is: if you want to get a job as an actor, write a novel. It’s a long audition process… Burton’s initial inspiration for The Miniaturist came courtesy of a 2009 mini-break with her then-boyfriend to Amsterdam. He suggested they visit the Rijksmuseum, and it was there that Burton stumbled across an elaborate doll’s house, made in 1686 for a Dutchwoman by the name of Petronella Oortman, who was married to a silk merchant. Burton was fascinated by the detail and artistry on display. “It was so intimate and intricate as a piece of art, but also really imposing,” says Burton. “Everything she had made she had in her own home, including silk screens from Japan. Painters of the day even agreed to do miniatures of their paintings for her. When I discovered she spent as much money on it as on her real home, I thought – psychologically speaking – why?” That was the starting point for what became a heart-stopping tale of secrecy, corruption and sexual intrigue centred around Nella, a newly - wed country girl who arrives at the house of her rich merchant husband in Amsterdam’s wealthiest quarter to find that life isn’t quite what she has expected. Her husband, Johannes (played by Alex Hassell), is elusive. His sister, Marin (Romola Garai), is unforthcoming. Otto, a manservant and former slave (Paapa Essiedu), is a mysterious presence. When Nella is given a doll’s house as a wedding gift, she commissions a craftsman to furnish the rooms. The miniaturist of the title sends eerily lifelike dolls that mirror the happenings in the household and even seem to predict the future. In uncovering the hidden truths that lie at the heart of the doll’s house, Nella also comes to understand herself. Despite the visually impressive period setting (on screen, Anya Taylor-Joy looks as if she’s walked straight out of a painting by Vermeer), the screenwriter John Brownlow has remarked on the book’s “absolutely modern” concerns. “Yes, I got flak for that [when the book was published],” says Burton, referring to one of the very few negative reviews. “But I guess the way I thought about it was that in 1686, they were the most modern people to themselves. They considered themselves to be on the cutting edge of existence. “I don’t use the words ‘feminism’ or ‘racism’. I just used logic and combined that with my research to create this household where Otto, a black man, is treated as an equal and Marin is a business partner who is appreciated for her skill.” Garai was, Burton says, “amazing” in the part of Marin, and so persuasive in her portrayal of an embittered older woman that, “I found her terrifying, quite frankly.” The two of them had met years before when Burton had a small part in a film starring Garai. Meeting again under such different circumstances brought it home that the past few years have been an extraordinary phase of transition for Burton. After reading English and Spanish at Oxford, she tried her hand at acting, only to find herself ground down by constant rejections. When she began writing The Miniaturist, it was a lastditch attempt to do something fulfilling – as she describes it, an act of “creative autonomy”. She wrote the book primarily for herself and hoped it would find a home. There was no way she could ever have predicted what a success it would turn out to be. But success itself has been a mixed blessing. Burton talks eloquently about how, as humans, “we set this goal and define ourselves according to that goal. But if you reach that goal, your identity disappears… You see it with lottery winners or boy-band members. It can be incredibly destabilising.” When The Miniaturist shot to the top of the bestseller lists, Burton found herself on a lengthy and draining publicity tour. She had been used to writing on her own, with no pressure and no expectation of what the book would become. Suddenly, she was pitched into the limelight at a succession of literary festivals and talks and was also trying to write her second novel, The Muse. “There’s a complete difference between being a writer on your own and facing failure and being the glib public face of your work two years down the line… It’s an enormous privilege, but at the same time, you pay the price.” Burton was diagnosed with depression in September 2015. “Not serious depression,” she clarifies. “Just a lack of joy.” That has now eased and when we meet, she is engaging, charming company. She says that her parents, Linda, a retired teacher, and Edward, a former architect and now an antiques restorer, have a low-key approach to her fame. “When I told Dad what the publishers were paying for The Miniaturist in America, he went, ‘Oh for God’s sake!’” Her father gets his hair cut at a salon down the road from his home in Wimbledon, south London, and for the past few years, says Burton, he’s paid his hairdresser exclusively in bottles of whisky and signed copies of The Miniaturist in different translations: Cantonese, Slovakian, Bosnian. “Both my parents are very, very proud,” says Burton, but as for her father, “He’s got no hair left.” This article was originally published on 14 December 2017 View oEmbed on the source website
Wanderlust's Toni Collette: 'Someone told me I'm the first woman to have an orgasm on the BBC'
The star of Hereditary and About a Boy discusses her role as Joy, a therapist, in Nick Payne's BBC drama Wanderlust
Toni Collette was recently informed she had reached a notable professional milestone. “Someone told me I was the first woman to have an orgasm on the BBC,” she says with a grin. “And I’m happy to take the accolade.” In Wanderlust, a six-part drama co-produced by the BBC and Netflix, Collette plays Joy Richards, a therapist trying to keep her relationship with her husband alive after a cycling accident makes her reassess their marriage. One of the opening scenes depicts Joy’s teenage son walking in as his mother is trying to masturbate. Later in the first episode, Joy has a sexual encounter in her consulting room that leads to the, ah, eventual climax. It’s fairly edgy fodder for the BBC and marks one of the first times that a middle-aged woman’s desires have been so frankly portrayed on screen. This was one of the things that attracted Collette to the part. “It’s so honest and fresh in the way the women are portrayed,” she explains. “To be a middle-aged woman, to be in a longterm relationship and to be alive, dealing with a lot of things – it’s tough. Certainly a middle-aged woman’s sense of self-esteem, of sexuality, is not often talked about.” When is BBC drama Wanderlust on TV? Meet the cast of Wanderlust Toni Collette drama Wanderlust has a wonderfully refreshing approach to sex and relationships View oEmbed on the source website Was she anxious about filming some of the more explicit scenes? “At first I was a little bit nervous but I got over it quite quickly. The more empathy I have with the character, the easier it is and it’s an important story – it’s representative of a big truth that’s got no real voice.” Like her character, Collette is middle-aged (45), she’s in a long-term marriage and she’s a mother – she has two children, Sage, aged ten, and seven-year-old Arlo. Unlike her character, she is a highly successful actor: after drama school in her native Sydney, her breakthrough role came at the age of 22 when she starred in the hit indie film Muriel’s Wedding. Collette still has people shouting the famous line “You’re terrible, Muriel” at her in the street. After that, Collette rapidly became known for her scene-stealing turns in movies such as Little Miss Sunshine, About a Boy, The Hours and The Sixth Sense, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She has won an Emmy and a Golden Globe, and is one of the most respected character actresses of her generation. But she admits that, like Joy in Wanderlust, she finds it hard to keep her career, children and marriage on track. “I think when you’re in your 20s and alone, you can afford to be selfish and I really wish that I’d enjoyed it much more,” says Collette. “Once you have a relationship and beautiful little people to look after, your life changes.” We are talking in a café in the photographic studio in south-west London. She’s wearing a pink coat and has a large bottle of water in front of her and has yet to go into make-up for the shoot to accompany this interview. There are dark circles under her eyes, the result of having just stepped off a long-haul flight from her home in Los Angeles. Occasionally she will lapse into silence as she apologetically tries to fish out the right word from the edges of her sleep-addled brain. “My children are the lights of my life and I certainly can’t imagine my life without them. But I can’t imagine my life without acting either and it’s good for them to see me being passionate and working hard.” On a practical level, it comes down to highly efficient scheduling with her husband, the musician Dave Galafassi. “I’m a very organised person but I’m crap at cooking. My husband does most of the cooking. I’m happy to do laundry and water the garden or take the kids to gymnastics.” But at times, she adds candidly, “it really is just about putting one foot in front of the other”. Wanderlust, which is written by playwright Nick Payne, explores many of these preoccupations. The quality of the script persuaded Collette to swap the sunshine and blue skies of California for five months filming in Manchester. Plus, “it was the most incredible cast”, she says (her co-stars include Steven Mackintosh and Zawe Ashton). “So f***ing talented.” View oEmbed on the source website Ah yes. As well as being willing to act out an orgasm, Collette loves to swear. She’s Australian and speaks with delightful straightforwardness about almost anything, including therapy (“I’ve had it”), ageing (“I love it”) and doing accents (“My favourite is Indian because it’s so much fun to do but it’s also very racist”). Does she think Brits are more repressed than Australians? “Yeah, until they’re really drunk,” Collette replies, laughing. “And maybe that’s why people drink in this country. That and the weather. Australia is very laidback, there’s a youthful quality compared to what is tradition in this country, which I think is still repressed and really polite. I’m not like that. I just call a spade a spade.” It’s an attitude she formed growing up in a suburb of western Sydney, the daughter of Bob, a truck driver, and Judith, who was in customer services. Collette recalls her mother being “capable and resourceful” and her parents instilled in her a strong work ethic. When she decided to quit school at the age of 16 to pursue a career in drama “they must have been freaking out! I was such a baby, I was completely unaware.” They needn’t have worried; Collette had already proved herself to be a naturally gifted actress at a much younger age – so gifted, in fact, that when she pretended to have appendicitis at the age of 11, doctors actually went ahead and removed her appendix. “I’m mortified. It’s so embarrassing! My mum had hers taken out and told me, so maybe that was why I did it. I did have a slight stomach ache…” After graduating from Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art, Collette got parts in an Australian television drama and then in the comedy feature film Spotswood, with Russell Crowe and Anthony Hopkins. Muriel’s Wedding came along in 1994 and the role – as a socially awkward woman who dreams of getting married – required her to gain 40lb in seven weeks. “It didn’t bother me,” Collette says. “I’ve always had this understanding that what is on the inside is most important… It wasn’t about me, it was about the character.” If there is a through-line in her work, it’s perhaps that she has always chosen the unexpected, multifaceted parts, and is often drawn to women who are dealing with some level of emotional trauma. Even in About a Boy, a 2002 comedy drama based on the novel of the same name by Tony Parsons and starring Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult, Collette gave the film its beating heart with her portrayal of a single mother living with depression.“I was like, this is a comedy! Why am I the one crying all the time?” she jokes. “I look for things that challenge me… I never wanted to repeat myself.” View oEmbed on the source website She was also a suburban housewife with dissociative identity disorder in three seasons of the American television series United States of Tara. This year, she starred in the supernatural horror film Hereditary, dubbed “the scariest movie of 2018” by critics. “Yeah,” Collette says drily. “It was heavy.” Along the way, she has worked several times with the disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. Collette says Weinstein never subjected her to unwanted sexual harassment, but, “I did a lot of films with him in the 90s. I think he gave off a ‘don’t f*** with me’ vibe. I was very young and I was aware that his behaviour was questionable around other people and that he was a bully but I didn’t know the extent of how sexual it was.” She thinks the #MeToo groundswell and the rise of the Time’s Up movement marks a necessary change in attitude. “Absolutely. It’s about time… Any time I hear of someone who is a bully in that way, I just think ‘Wow, what an unevolved person you are.’ It’s so pathetic that someone would use their position of power to treat people that way. “I’m really now inspired and proud of the women who are coming forward to speak about their own experiences because when it’s that public, it’s very confronting.” It has not always been the easiest industry for women in their 40s to flourish in, but Collette is positive about the future. It’s certainly true that she has never been out of work and her performance in Wanderlust has given an overlooked demographic a necessary voice. “I think if we women are loud and persistent enough, things will change for the better,” she says. “We all need to see ourselves reflected and understood [on screen], rather than just seeing some middle-aged white guy.” She laughs her signature throaty cackle – a combination of warmth and depth. And as she leaves, I find myself thinking that if you’re a middle-aged woman struggling to make your voice heard, there are probably few better custodians of your story than Toni Collette. Wanderlust will air on BBC1 on Tuesday 4th September at 9pm Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
How realistic is new drama The Split on BBC1? Princess Diana's divorce lawyer separates the fact from fiction
Divorce lawyer Sandra Davis' client list ranges from Princes Diana to Jerry Hall – so what does she think of Nicola Walker's depiction of a high-flying divorce lawyer?
There’s a scene in the first episode of BBC1 drama The Split, in which a man tells his wife he wants to break up. The couple are sitting around a glassy conference table in the flashy offices of legal firm Noble & Hale, and the wife (played by Meera Syal) is so taken aback, she knocks over a cup of coffee. The coffee ends up all over the expensive, dry-clean-only clothes of the expensive divorce lawyer, Hannah Stern (played by Nicola Walker). I’m watching the episode in the company of Sandra Davis, a real-life divorce lawyer, who’s worked for more than 30 years at Mishcon de Reya, one of the UK’s leading law firms. Have hot drinks ever been spilled over her? “I had a sugar bowl thrown at me once,” she says matter-of-factly. In The Split, Hannah rushes to the ladies’ toilet after the coffee incident and mops herself with a wet wipe. View oEmbed on the source website When does The Split start on BBC1? Meet the cast of divorce drama The Split By contrast, Davis remained resolutely unflustered when crockery shattered and sugar cubes tumbled onto the floor. “I said, ‘I think we should take a break.’” Davis recalls, with perfect sang-froid. “The thing is, it’s not about me. To be able to function in this area of the law, you have to be calm. You have to disengage your own baggage, if you have any.” As head of Mishcon’s family law division, Davis has negotiated the break-ups of several high-profile and high-net-worth individuals. She represented Princess Diana during her divorce from Prince Charles, supermodel Jerry Hall in her split from Mick Jagger, footballer Thierry Henry, and fashion tycoon Tamara Mellon, co-founder of Jimmy Choo. And those are only the ones we know about – Davis is frustratingly discreet. She won’t even confirm her hourly rates, but doesn’t dispute it’s somewhere north of £600. The gender make-up of the drama is a reflection of the real-life world of divorce law, which is overwhelmingly female. In a survey of the legal profession conducted by Spear’s magazine last year, seven out of the top ten family lawyers were female (Davis, naturally, made the cut). “I think that in this field, you not only need to be competent at the law, you need to have softer skills,” says Davis, who nurtured childhood ambitions to be a lawyer after watching too much Perry Mason on television. “You need to have empathy. You need to appreciate and understand human dynamics.” Ever since the landmark case of two farmers in 2000 (known in judicial circles as White v White), London has become the divorce capital of the world. The case set a precedent for splitting assets equally between breadwinner and homemaker, meaning “economically weaker spouses” (usually wives) of high-net-worth individuals flock to Britain for their decree nisi. Does Davis believe people sometimes marry purely for money? There’s a slight twitch of the lips. “There are always those for whom marriage is an investment.” Divorces involving foreign nationals account for one sixth of cases before the UK courts – an estimated 17,000 of the approximately 107,000 divorces in the UK each year. As a result, Davis’s caseload – just like Hannah’s in The Split – often consists of complex tax negotiations across several international time zones. It also means the stakes are high – not just financially but also emotionally. She has many anecdotes pertaining to the righteous fury of her clients, from the time priceless bottles of a feckless husband’s vintage wine collection were poured down the loo by an angry wife, to another spouse whose immediate response to learning her partner wanted a divorce was “to rush off to her husband’s employers and make a scene, bad-mouthing him, sending emails, all that sort of stuff. There are examples of behaviour that, in a reasoned set of circumstances, people would not descend to if they weren’t emotionally off-kilter.” Davis says that in any divorce case where children are involved, she asks for a picture of them in order to remind herself that their wellbeing should be placed firmly at the centre of proceedings. “I really feel that children are the most important part of the process,” she says. The best divorces are those in which “both parties recognise they have to re-frame the relationship… While the couple’s relationship may have been damaged, they’re still parents to their children. “I feel passionately about what I do. I don’t get a personal sense of satisfaction from other people’s misery. It’s the challenge to make something negative into something the client feels is copable with in the end. I get a sense of satisfaction from navigating that turbulence.” But she’s careful to tell her clients that she isn’t a therapist. “I can give a practical solution, but I’m an expensive shoulder to cry on… We always recommend that, alongside the divorce process, our clients talk to a therapist. First of all, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper. Secondly, it stops people reacting immediately and inflaming the situation.” Davis freely admits that the only way she was able to balance the demands of her career and her two sons (now aged 28 and 26) was by having a full-time nanny who didn’t take a single sick day in 15 years. She also points out that, as depicted in the drama, female lawyers often walk to work in flat shoes and change into high heels in their office: “I have ten pairs of heels under my desk.” The lawyers on television are immaculately dressed. How does Davis feel about clothes? “I like clothes and, of course, I think about what I wear. I dress for me, but I’m not the story. So if I go to court, I dress appropriately to blend into the background. The client is at the forefront. I would say that I like to show a little bit of personality. My style is classic with a twist.” Today, she’s wearing a well-cut dark blue suit that might or might not be Chanel (she refuses to discuss labels: “I’m an eclectic shopper”) and a black leather handbag that is definitely Diane von Furstenberg (I recognise the logo). Davis herself has been married for almost 30 years, although she refuses to disclose her own age and says that simply because she’s an expert on divorce does not make her an expert on how to stay hitched. Still, her one piece of advice is “honest and open communication… I think marriage is something you have to work at every day.” That, and to get a pre-nuptial agreement. She says she’ll insist on one for her own sons if they ever tie the knot. “Absolutely. No question. It avoids grief further down the line – and cost! You wouldn’t employ a builder for an extensive renovation without a contract. This [marriage] is the most important contract of your lives.” It must be wildly intimidating for her sons’ girlfriends the first time they meet Davis, I say. “I like to think I’m not intimidating. I try not to speak in legalese at work or outside the office. Most of my job is to ask questions and then listen to find a point of connection and then work on that, rather than reminding someone of who I am and what I do.” And as the credits roll on The Split, Davis is keen to make it clear that her job is “not about your own ego. You don’t bring yourself into the negotiation.” Preferably, you leave the sugar bowls outside too.
Bake Off is back – but has Paul Hollywood forgiven Prue Leith for last year's accidental tweet?
It’s been a long hot summer in the tent – but the judges are keeping cool for The Great British Bake Off 2018
Prue Leith and Paul Hollywood are sitting outside, enjoying the hot London summer. Paul has shuffled under the shade provided by the table umbrella. Next to him, Prue is splayed out glamorously across her chair, soaking up every ray of sunshine she can. Since taking over from Mary Berry on The Great British Bake Off last year, Leith says that the most frequent question posed by faithful viewers who stop her in the street is, “Why don’t you bronze up a bit so that you don’t look like a pale judge next to the perma-tan prince?” “That’s why you’re always sunbathing, is it?” Hollywood asks. “Yes, I’m nearly there,” Leith bats back, closing her eyes like a cat and angling her face towards the sun. The duo are about to return to our screens, in varying shades of perma-tan, to front the ninth series of Bake Off. It will be Leith’s second stint inside the bakers’ tent after the programme moved from the BBC to Channel 4 last year, in what was quite possibly one of the most controversial moments in our national history. Prue Leith reveals Channel 4’s strategy for preventing Bake Off spoilers in the new series Liam Charles made his judging debut on Bake Off: the Professionals – and viewers loved it When is The Great British Bake Off 2018 back on TV? View oEmbed on the source website There was a collective outcry over Hollywood supposedly “selling out” when he announced his intention to carry on being a judge. Mary Berry and presenters Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc all stepped down, the latter two claiming in a statement they were “not going with the dough”. Leith was baffled by all the fuss. “I hadn’t watched Bake Off. I had no idea it was the nation’s favourite programme… It just didn’t cross my mind that I would be in it. And so it wasn’t until I was cast that I realised – and started reading all the press stuff – that this was a highly dangerous thing to be doing. I was about to be the cause of the nation’s grief!” She’s joking, of course, but it’s true that no one expected Channel 4 to do so well with the show – in the event, 7.7 million viewers watched the 2017 final, the channel’s highest overnight ratings since the Paralympics Opening Ceremony in 2012. Neither of them watched the BBC’s attempt at creating a rival show, Britain’s Best Home Cook, fronted by Claudia Winkleman, with Mary Berry becoming a judge (a second series has recently been annouced). “I caught a snippet of it,” Hollywood says. “I didn’t watch it,” adds Leith. It seems that Bake Off has retained its peculiar magic on Channel 4. It is still an oasis of gentle nostalgia in a world that is otherwise spinning off its axis. “It feels like putting on a comfortable pair of slippers,” Hollywood agrees. He says he was relieved when Leith came on board, along with the new presenters, Sandi Toksvig and Noel Fielding, “because they diluted all the stuff I was getting… I’d been copping it for six months." “That was so unfair,” Leith says, soothingly. “I know.” “All you’d done was stay loyal to the programme.” “I hadn’t left anything!” Hollywood insists. “I know,” Leith repeats, in the manner of a capable nanny tending to a toddler’s grazed knee. “But you were the villain.” View oEmbed on the source website It’s clear they get on well. When I ask them each to compare the other to a baked good, Hollywood replies, “Prue is a sachertorte – just as sweet on the inside as she is on the outside,” while Leith counters with, “a Krispy Kreme doughnut. He has got this crisp exterior but absolutely a soft middle.” Hollywood says the two of them will often have dinner and a glass of wine after a day’s filming and “put the world to rights”. In fact, they have become such good friends with Toksvig and Fielding that the four of them are going on a mates’ minibreak to Copenhagen in December. “To see the Tivoli Gardens at Christmas,” Leith says. Gosh, I say, you’ll cause quite a stir on the Easyjet flight over. “No one will know us when we’re there,” Hollywood replies. “We’ll hide.” Click here to find out more about the 12 confirmed contestants for series nine of GBBO. Before that, there’s the business of Bake Off to be getting on with. This year, the tried-and-tested format of a dozen bakers in a tent trying their absolute hardest to get their ganache to set on their layered Opéra cakes remains the same. But Leith reveals they’ve introduced a vegan week and some of the vegan cakes were so good, “I was personally shocked”. She is not a natural fan of the recent trend for “clean eating”. “It’s surrounded by a lot of pseudo-science and I really hate all that because I think it makes people frightened of food and begin to be neurotic about diet and that leads to anorexia and all sorts. “Food goes in fashions and this [clean eating] became a very, I would say, London-centric, fashionable, yummy-mummy obsession.” Hollywood, meanwhile, claims never to have heard of it and goes off on an unanticipated riff involving a meringue made from lamb’s blood that he tasted in Iceland. “It’s grey, not red. You could eat it yourself and go, ‘That’s delicious.’ And then you’re told, ‘It’s made with blood.’ And you go, ‘What?’” Prue frowns. “That would not do for vegans,” she says sternly. "No, we couldn’t have used it that particular week,” he replies. When Bake Off 2018 airs, there will be no bloodied meringues, says Hollywood, but we can look forward to “great characters and unique baking, which has never been seen before… And the heat, which has been draining for the poor bakers.” Ah yes. The heat. This series of Bake Off was filmed during one of the hottest summers in recent years. “It was certainly the hottest Bake Off we’ve ever had,” says Hollywood. “Worse for the bakers than for us, because we just come in briefly and go out,” adds Leith diplomatically. “They’re in there all the time.” “It was roasting and some of the challenges…” Hollywood trails off. Leith, as she often does, completes his sentence: “Chocolate.” “Yeah,” he says. “Chocolate week suffered a little bit. Caramel sugarwork suffered a little bit. Although bread week, when it was slightly cooler, ironically enough…” “They could have done with the heat,” Leith jumps in. “But compared to last series, when it was so cold at the beginning… In fact it was freezing and rainy, so we were wearing wellies to get to the tent and I was wearing a heavy overcoat and we were holding hot-water bottles. That seems amazing now.” This year the two of them had to cool down by applying iced chamois packs to their necks once the cameras were turned off. Still, they got through it with aplomb. As it’s filmed so far in advance, one of the hardest things is knowing who has won for some time before the programme is aired. Last year, Leith almost triggered a state of national emergency by inadvertently revealing the identity of the winner, Sophie Faldo, before the final had been shown on television. Newspaper headlines accused her of “ruining” the show and she was trolled on Twitter by furious fans. “It was very scary at the time and horrible,” she says now. “I had so many people saying, ‘You ruined my life, how could you?’” She had been on holiday in Bhutan with her husband, and she’d got the time zones muddled up. The production company had sent her a message telling her to remember to congratulate the winner after 10.30pm. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s after 10.30.’ And so I immediately tweeted. And of course it was five hours out or something.” The tweet (below) was up for 89 seconds before Leith’s personal assistant noticed it and deleted it. “But it was too late,” Leith says, her face collapsing. “Two people had retweeted it, saying, ‘How disgraceful, she has given away the secret.’ And then they gave it away!” She shakes her head at the stupidity of her own mistake. What was her husband doing throughout all of this? “He was fast asleep!” I ask Hollywood where he was when he found out, in the same way that one might ask someone where they were when JFK was shot. “I think I was having a bacon butty and a cup of tea in a bikers’ café. And I went, ‘Pffft!’, and my tea went everywhere.” He laughs, clearly relaxed about the whole thing. “Oh darling,” Leith says, looking aghast. “I’m sorry.” She cannot stop berating herself. “Stupid,” she mutters. “So stupid.” As Leith has discovered, it’s a feature of Bake Off that anyone who appears on it becomes more newsworthy simply by association. Hollywood, who in 2017 split from Alexandra, his wife of 20 years, has recently been the subject of much tabloid speculation over his relationship with a 22-year-old barmaid. How does he feel having his love life… “I don’t want to answer,” he says, before I even get the question out of my mouth. A few days before we meet, former Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain has also made the headlines by criticising the sugar tax. What do Leith and Hollywood make of the Government initiative to force manufacturers to pay a levy on fizzy drinks? “The sugar tax alone won’t do it, but I think it’s a good idea,” says Leith. “I think that the most important thing is to teach children to cook at schools. And not only to cook but to understand about where their food comes from.” She says it should be part of the curriculum, as it is in Finland. “The end goal is making children want to eat healthily,” Leith says. “And it’s just like maths, you know? The parents can’t say, ‘This is none of my business,’ [because] it’s Government money that has to pay for the obesity crisis… I had this argument with Michael Gove when he was education secretary. I said, ‘If you made it part of the curriculum and part of the schools’ responsibility to address the lack of children’s knowledge on food and eating… you can justify that.’” She is warming to her theme now and is quite formidable. Such is the force of her utterly reasonable personality that if I were Michael Gove I would institute everything she describes immediately. “I would be quite draconian about it and I’d ban lunchboxes,” Leith continues. “I think however well-educated a parent is… very few parents really give their children healthy lunchboxes because of the pressure from the kids. “The kids say, ‘I get that, and Lucy gets that and Emily gets that, why can’t I?’ In Finland they don’t let any children bring anything into school and it’s confiscated if they see it. So they all sit down, have a proper meal, learn. Lunchtime is a lesson during which the kids should be learning to share and respect each other, by which they mean table manners. They should learn to play nicely and share, and they all help in the kitchen and they clean up.” Our time is drawing to a close and Leith has not only redrawn the national curriculum but has almost topped up her tan to satisfactory levels. The two of them potter off to have their photo taken. They’re looking forward to the new season and confident that it will be even more successful than last year’s. “Although I’m getting nervous as we’ve now done the final, so I’m a liability,” says Leith. “I think I should have my phone taken away from me.” For the sake of our national morale, could someone please ensure this happens? The Great British Bake Off airs on Tuesdays at 8pm on Channel 4
'I’m not the perfect Muslim, I'm not the perfect Brit: I'm just being me': Bake Off's Nadiya Hussain talks living in the spotlight ahead of her new BBC cookery show
The Great British Bake Off's 2015 winner brings a feast of fresh ideas to Nadiya’s Family Favourites
Nadiya Hussain’s three children have no idea what their mum’s job is. They know vaguely that it’s something to do with television and baking cakes and writing things. But when someone recently asked her 11-year-old son what his mother did, he replied without missing a beat: “She lives her dreams.” Hussain smiles as she tells the story. “And I was like, ‘You know what?… That means to me one day they’re going to go and live their dreams. What more can a mum want?’ I don’t care what they do as long as they’re happy doing it.” You can understand her elder son’s confusion. Hussain has had a dizzying three years. She won the sixth series of The Great British Bake Off in 2015, a victory watched by 13.4 million, approximately 13.3 million of whom were moved to tears by her rousing victory speech: “I’m never gonna say, ‘I don’t think I can,’” she said at the time. “I can and I will.” Nadiya Hussain quits The Big Family Cooking Showdown after just one series The Big Family Cooking Showdown hosts and judges share their favourite home recipes RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox Overnight, Hussain became a new kind of role model. She was young, modern, British and also a hijab-wearing Muslim woman of colour who grew up one of six children in a working-class Bangladeshi community in Luton and had an arranged marriage at the age of 20. On screen, she was an infectiously warm presence, and a move into presenting seemed the natural progression. Since then, she’s fronted several food programmes, including a BBC2 series last year called Nadiya’s British Food Adventure, and was chosen to bake the Queen’s 90th birthday cake. She’s also got a novel and five cookbooks to her name. View oEmbed on the source website The latest, Nadiya’s Family Favourites, was published in June and Hussain, 33, is now launching an accompanying television series, featuring a selection of recipes that mix together the best bits of several cultures. Growing up, her father was a restaurateur and her mother cooked eight curries a day because she was worried about people going hungry. Hussain ate traditional Bangladeshi dishes alongside fish and chips, so culinary eclecticism came naturally. The dishes in Family Favourites therefore include a pork pie stuffed with samosa filling, a fish-finger lasagne and macaroni cheese with piccalilli. “To me, spices and pies and spaghetti and curry, they’re not different cuisines,” Hussain explains. “I suppose I’m spoilt in the sense that I don’t follow tradition. I cook Bangladeshi food and I cook British food and I cook some other food. And I don’t feel guilty tossing the recipes up in the air and coming up with something completely different.” She proudly confirms a report I’d read that she once ate 18 fish fingers in one sitting. “And I only left the other two because I felt like it was impolite!” she whoops. “I can do more now, you know. I’m training my fish-finger habit!” The idea behind the TV series is to provide easy, inventive meal ideas for harassed families who “struggle for time”. Hussain knows about this only too well, having spent much of the past three years juggling work commitments with maintaining a family life that is deeply important to her. “The only thing I ever try really hard at is being the best mum I can be,” she says. “And you don’t need to have lots of money or lots of time to eat well and eat together. Every time I sit down with my kids and have a meal, it’s madness – madness! – but my god, it’s the best feeling in the world… That’s, I suppose, the spirit of the show.” Hussain and her husband, Abdal, have brought up their three children – two boys, Musa, 11, and Dawud, ten, and a seven-year-old girl, Maryam – to be unfussy about food and also not to be scared about experimenting. When Hussain was younger, her mother often cooked with offal and she has introduced the same flavours to her own kids, so that they are now entirely unfazed by the idea of tripe and cow’s tongue. “If you asked them what their favourite thing was… this morning there was some [leftover] fish-head curry so I said, ‘Can you have that when you come back from school?’ At 6.45 in the morning, I’ll tell you the scene in my house.” She assumes the voice of an excited, shouting child. “‘Fish-head curry! Fish-head curry!’ That’s what they were chanting at 6.45 as I was leaving. Can you imagine the sound?” She laughs. Unsurprisingly, Hussain has little truck with fussy eaters. The recent trend for “clean eating”, as propounded by myriad Instagram influencers, makes her visibly shudder with distaste. “I think we spend so much time as a society worrying about what we shouldn’t be eating and clean eating and being picture perfect, I don’t think we spend nearly as much time as we should on our minds. Because what is that doing to your head? “Every time I turn something on or read something or look at social media, there’s always someone telling me I can’t eat this, I can’t wear this, this isn’t allowed, this shouldn’t be done. I’m kind of fed up with it.” At home, practicality rules. “I always say to [my kids], ‘It’s not a restaurant, there’s no menu, you eat what you’re given or you go to bed hungry.’ And I’m a little bit of a tiger mum like that. When they were really young they would go to bed hungry and I’d feel really guilty but I’d say to myself, ‘Get over that guilt, because actually this will make them better people if they realise that actually Mum works hard and she doesn’t need to cook five different meals for five different people.’” Sometimes the family will eat at a table, sometimes they will sit on the floor eating curry with their hands – just as Hussain did as a child. On Friday nights, for a special treat, they will occasionally get fish and chips and spend the evening at home in Milton Keynes playing board games, culminating in Twister, which Hussain’s daughter Maryam “always loses. She always goes off in a strop, has a little cry. That’s our routine on a Friday night. And then they’ll all snuggle into bed with me. They’ll all fall asleep and then one by one I’ll peel them out into their own beds when my husband comes up. And that’s what gives me sanity.” The lovely thing about Hussain is that, in spite of the rapid and overwhelming scale of her celebrity, she remains seemingly untouched by it. She is warm, engaging company, a woman who talks a mile a minute and then apologises for giving me overly long answers. She is appalled, when she walks into the central London hotel room where we are doing the interview, to find that the gas fire is lit in high summer while the air-conditioning is also on full blast. “What’s that about?” she asks, before ordering a green tea with honey. She’s got a sore throat, she explains apologetically, and has just come from doing six hours of voiceover recording for the new TV series. “Three episodes of voiceover. And [you have] to remain enthusiastic after five hours: pinch yourself, eat more sweets, stay awake.” In person, Hussain has an impressive presence. She has a beautiful face, almost entirely unlined (“Make-up!” she insists) and radiates a sort of bright, easy compassion. She remains aware of where she came from and of the privileged, rather peculiar position she now finds herself in. Her grandmother, who came to the UK from Bangladesh in her 30s, is illiterate and does not speak English, so has never been able to read one of her granddaughter’s books. “She knows ‘Vaseline’ and ‘Vicks’ and that’s about it,” says Hussain. “I did show her my first cookbook and I said, ‘Look at this picture, this is your cod in clementine!’ And she looked at it and she goes, ‘It doesn’t look right.’” Hussain laughs. She’s often called an inspiration, and it’s an accurate description. It has meant that she is often catapulted into discussions about race and religion because there are so few women of her cultural background in the public eye. In January, she hit back at racist Twitter trolls telling her to “go home” by responding: “Go home to where? I am home." I wonder how it feels to be expected to represent an entire community or faith, purely because of winning a baking competition? “I think if you’d asked me that a year after Bake Off I would have said I just kind of want to blend into the background and that my wearing a headscarf should be completely incidental,” she says. “You know, it’s a part of who I am and it shouldn’t be what defines me. But I think, three years on, I understand the importance of it now. “I do identify as a Muslim and I do identify as a Bangladeshi girl, I identify as British, as well, and a woman and I’m a woman of colour, and why am I ashamed of that? And I used to not want to talk about it… But that is me. “And I think in accepting that, I’ve become a lot more comfortable being who I am… I said from the get-go, I’m not the ‘perfect’ anything: I’m not the perfect Muslim, I’m not the perfect Bangladeshi or the perfect ‘British person’… so anyone who’s got abuse or criticism, go ahead! I don’t care. I never said I was perfect! I’m just being me, and that’s all I can ever be. But I understand the importance of being a brown, Muslim woman of faith who is in the public eye, because there aren’t that many of us. So I know that I’m representing a lot of groups and I know how important that is, especially for women.” In the past, Hussain has been open about living with panic disorder. How does she manage that now that she’s famous and people on the street routinely ask her for selfies? “I would love to tell you that it’s balanced,” she says quietly. “But it’s not. I have really good days. And I have really, really, bad days. And when I’m really tired, I know I get really upset.” Mostly it’s a positive experience when she gets recognised, although she tends to shop less in supermarkets now and do more online to avoid the hassle. She’s found that if she wears a white headscarf, she never gets noticed and a lot of the time, people can’t quite place her. “A man came up to me and he looked me in the face and he said, ‘You work at H&M.’” She grins. “And I said, ‘Yes. Yes I do.’ And about a month ago this lady said, ‘Are you Fatima?’ I said, ‘Nope.’ And I gave her a chance just to kind of come back and say, ‘I think you might be Nadiya off the telly.’ And I didn’t say anything and then my daughter was like, ‘She thinks you’re Fatima! Who’s Fatima?’ Ha! But the best one has to be, ‘You’re that girl who won MasterChef.’” She laughs. She didn’t win MasterChef, of course, but I wouldn’t put it past her. After an hour in her company, I’m entirely convinced that Nadiya Hussain could do anything she set her mind to – and that includes being a role model for modern Britain as well as eating a whole packet of 20 fish fingers. Nadiya’s Family Favourites starts on Monday 16 July at 8pm on BBC2
Picnic at Hanging Rock star Natalie Dormer: "I had no desire to get into a corset again”
Game of Thrones' Natalie Dormer talks costume dramas, getting older and the lack of complex female characters
Last February, Natalie Dormer found herself in Australia, in searing heat, wearing a corset, a hat, a veil and a period gown made of wool. She was filming for the new six-part drama, Picnic at Hanging Rock, in which she plays a headmistress haunted by her past, and the opening scene required her to do several seven minute takes in 35°C heat. Beneath the make-up and costume, Dormer was sweating. It was, essentially, Bikram Acting. “I think sometimes people forget that acting is a cardiovascular exercise,” the 36-year-old says when we meet in the air-conditioned splendour of a BBC conference room. “You don’t want to be anywhere near me when I take my corset off because it’s gonna honk.” View oEmbed on the source website Still, it was worth suffering for her art. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Dormer delivers a brilliantly nuanced performance as Hester Appleyard, a traumatised woman who is trying to reinvent herself on the other side of the world at the turn of the 20th century. The series is an adaptation of a 1967 novel by Australian writer Joan Lindsay, which was also adapted for the big screen in 1975 by Peter Weir. It tells the story of a group of adolescent schoolgirls who go missing in the Australian bush after a sunny Valentine’s Day picnic at the titular scenic spot. Headmistress Hester is pitched into a feverish world of speculation as the ripple effects of the unsolved mystery begin to spread. The series is directed by the Canadian Larysa Kondracki, who gives the whole thing a lush, magical, almost punk-rock quality. “People’s imaginations run wild when they think of a group of three young girls and a teacher going missing,” Dormer says. “Is it murder? Is it abuse? Is it dying of malnutrition in the middle of the outback? Have they run away? Your imagination just takes you there.” First look at Natalie Dormer in new TV series Picnic at Hanging Rock Natalie Dormer knew about her Game of Thrones death a year before everyone else Everything we know about Game of Thrones’ final series In the midst of mounting paranoia, Hester starts off buttoned-up and cold, sporting high collars and severe hairdos. By the end, “her clothes became slightly more breathable and the hair has to become a little messier,” says Dormer. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s Blanche Dubois or Hamlet, an actor getting to play psychological unravelling is fun. But it also comes with a cost. Picnic is dark; residue does get left [on you] because Hester doesn’t like herself and she has a lot of unanswered pain and trauma. As an actor you have to, at the end, walk away from that, which isn’t always easy. She was harder to shake off than a lot of [characters] can be.” Given that Dormer’s previous roles include playing Anne Boleyn in the glossy drama The Tudors, who ended up beheaded; and Margaery Tyrell in Game of Thrones, who married her brother’s male lover for political expedience, then married sociopathic teenager Joffrey Baratheon before dying in an inferno ignited by her mother-in-law, this is no small admission. “This was much harder to shake off than Game of Thrones,” she insists. After playing Hester, she needed downtime and found it through “listening to happy music, exercise, meditation, yoga and running”. Dormer, who was raised in Berkshire by her mother and her stepfather, a building contractor, always wanted to be an actress. “It was just always there. I wish I had a nice eureka-moment story for you. There really isn’t one.” She was an only child until the age of seven when a younger sister and brother appeared in quick succession, so she was quite used to playing on her own with the dressing-up box and inventing stories to entertain herself. After attending a local independent school and being offered a place to study history at Cambridge, she failed to get the requisite A-level grades and went instead to the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. These days, she lives in London with her fiancé, the television and film director Anthony Byrne, who came to visit her for five weeks on set in Australia while she was shooting Picnic at Hanging Rock. “We’ve always made a point of visiting each other’s sets and watching each other work,” she says. View oEmbed on the source website Recently, they collaborated on In Darkness, a London-set thriller directed by Byrne and co-written by him and Dormer, in which she stars as a blind pianist who overhears a murder. “I wanted to make In Darkness with him because I’d watched him for years and I was jealous of the other actors. I was like, ‘He’s a really great director!’ And I can only assume that he thought I was all right as an actress or he wouldn’t have employed me.” She also wanted to create her own material because of what she saw as a lack of complex, interesting female parts on offer. When she graduated from drama school, Dormer had no plan (“the only manifesto to begin with was to pay my bills”) but she kept getting offered period pieces. After a while, their charm began to pall. (Picnic at Hanging Rock was the exception to the rule because, she says, “the scripts really grabbed me”.) “I had no desire, Elizabeth, to get into a corset again,” she says, with disarming candour (she has got a charming habit of remembering one’s name and deploying it to great effect, mid-spiel). “Why I started writing In Darkness [in 2009] was because there was a dearth, as I saw it, of three-dimensional, fleshed out, anti-heroines - you know, flawed female roles.” There has been a shift, she says, and things are no longer looking quite so bleak. “It’s not as quick as we would all like it to be, of course it’s not, but I’d rather lean into the positive.” As an actress who has always opted for unorthodox roles, often featuring women grappling with some inner darkness, I wonder what she makes of the endemic sexism in her industry, the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the rise of the #MeToo movement? “The fact that it has to be a point of conversation, I think is part of the evolution,” she says. “I personally don’t want men to feel like they don’t have a creditable place at the table to have a discussion. I know a lot of heterosexual, white men feel like they have no right to talk about this subject and they should just shut up and get out of the room, and I think that has significant challenges… I’m feminist in the true sense of the word – that it’s about equality.” Dormer is refreshing company: bright, witty and frank. She likes being in her mid-30s (“Who am I kidding? Mid-to-late 30s,” she jokes) because her 20s were riven with “self-doubt”. “In your 30s, you know so much more about yourself because you’ve been in so many more situations. It’s just literally experience. You’ve f ***ed up, you know? When you’ve done that a number of times, hopefully the idea is you don’t f*** up as badly the next time when you’re presented with a similar situation.” She goes on to quote the late American playwright, Edward Albee: “If you’re willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.” And that’s just what Natalie Dormer continues to do: succeed interestingly – in and out of the corset. Picnic at Hanging Rock begins Wednesday 11th July at 9.05pm on BBC2
The Affair star Ruth Wilson on the gender pay gap and new movie Dark River
The actress won a Golden Globe for her role in The Affair – but feels certain her male co-star was paid more than her
Ruth Wilson is talking about how to castrate a lamb. “You take an elastic band and you put it over the balls,” she explains. “Then you just let go. The elastic band works its magic, and they shrivel up and drop off.” She says all this in a no-nonsense sort of way, sitting on a sofa next to a table full of croissants in the offices of a central London PR agency. It’s a fairly surreal mismatch of setting and subject, but Wilson seems unflustered. As an actress, the 36-year-old Wilson is nothing if not versatile. On the small screen, she won plaudits as Alice in the BBC’s hit psychological crime drama Luther and, since 2014, has played Alison, the “other woman”, in Showtime’s acclaimed The Affair. For the latter, Wilson put on a note-perfect American accent and won a Golden Globe – she returns in the fourth season later this year. On stage, Wilson’s riveting portrayals of complex women – from Anna Christie to Hedda Gabler – have won her two Olivier Awards. Ruth Wilson to star as her own grandmother in new BBC1 drama about her family’s secrets Hedda Gabler review: Ruth Wilson is extraordinary in this bold Ibsen Her latest role sees her starring in Dark River, the third feature film from The Selfish Giant writer/director Clio Barnard. Wilson plays Alice, who returns to her home village in Yorkshire following the death of her father (Sean Bean) in order to claim the tenancy to the family farm she believes is rightfully hers. Alice is haunted by the sexual abuse she endured as a child, and her homecoming is plagued by post-traumatic flashbacks and outbursts of violence from her troubled brother, Joe (Mark Stanley). View oEmbed on the source website Sheep break their legs, rats infest the farmhouse and the weather remains relentlessly bleak throughout. It’s a bit like The Archers, as rewritten by a terminal pessimist. But the film is lifted by Wilson’s performance, in which every nuance of emotion plays across her features. She has a very expressive face: clear blue eyes that seem to stare right through you, eyebrows perched like a couple of circumflex accents and a mouth that appears to be on the brink of doing something dramatic. Her beauty has a certain intimidating quality to it. “Yeah, I have had people on the street saying, ‘Cheer up, love,’” she says. Wilson prepared for the role by shadowing a farming couple, Hazel and Malcolm, who live and work near Skipton, where filming took place. She woke early every morning and was taught all about sheep-dipping, shearing and livestock. One scene required her to skin a rabbit [note: the rabbits weren’t killed for the purposes of filming]. The action was due to be shot the day after the Brexit referendum. “I was furious,” she says. “And I took it out on those rabbits. I was sort of imagining it was Nigel Farage that I was skinning.” Aside from politics, the subject matter of Dark River (in cinemas from Friday 23 February) now has a deeper resonance. Wilson was filming before the Harvey Weinstein scandal erupted and the rise of the #MeToo movement, but there are many parallels between Alice’s silence in Dark River and the sense of shame many of Weinstein’s alleged victims felt. Wilson, who consulted therapists and survivors as part of her research, thinks that “the core, often, of why people don’t talk about abuse is because they feel that somehow they’re responsible for it. To feel that you haven’t got a voice… for me, that’s one of the most frightening things.” Wilson has not, herself, been subjected to any “casting couch moments” but has been aware of “more systemic, general misogyny” throughout her working life. “I definitely get less money than a male in my situation would. Definitely,” Wilson says, looking directly at me. Her eyebrows seem to arch a little bit higher, as if in protest. Does she get paid less than Dominic West, her co-star in The Affair? “Yeah. I think so. Certainly when I signed up to that project, I would have got paid less. Then they [the producers] might argue, ‘Well, he’s already done a major American TV show [The Wire] so he’s already got a level.’ But even after a Golden Globe I’m not going to be on parity. So he definitely gets more than me. I mean, I don’t know what the figure is, but I’m sure he does.” Has she ever talked to West about it? She squirms. “Ah, well, I mean, no. It’s sort of funny. It’s quite hard to bring that up in a way. But it needs to be an open discussion and men need to help us out,” Wilson admits. “I don’t want more money, I just want equal money. Which means men have to take less.” Despite her nascent celebrity, Wilson still lives in the UK, in a loft apartment in Bermondsey, south-east London, and is generally able to go about her business without drawing attention to herself. “I had someone here who saw me in Borough Market and she said, ‘Oh my God, you look just like that American actress on The Affair.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, do I?’” Wilson laughs, delighted. “I quite like that.” Besides, what she really enjoys about acting is being able to disappear into different characters and work out “the puzzle” of why they act the way they do. And yet there were no actors in her immediate family: her father, Nigel, is an investment banker, and her mother, Mary, raised Wilson and her three older brothers before retraining as a probation officer. When she decided to go into acting, after a history degree at the University of Nottingham, Wilson as baffled by her passion until her grandmother died and a startling family story emerged. It turned out that Wilson’s grandfather, Alexander, had been a bigamist and a spy. “We realised there were four wives in total,” Wilson says. They discovered he had fathered several other children, including a son who was an actor and another who was a poet. Suddenly her desire to act seemed more understandable. “There’s this whole creative streak that came from my grandfather and his storytelling and the many versions of himself that he played,” she says. “It all made sense in a slightly frightening way. I was like, ‘Wow, maybe I’m a bit like him.’” In a neat little twist of art imitating life, Wilson is going to play her own grandmother in an upcoming BBC drama based on her family’s story, called simply Mrs Wilson. She’s looking forward to it, she says, and not just because there’ll be less call for skinning rabbits or castrating sheep. Dark River hits UK cinemas on Friday 23rd February
Kit Harington on Game of Thrones fame, his ancestry and what he’d do if he were prime minister for a day
The Game of Thrones star was born to play the lead in a drama about the Gunpowder Plot, and he’s got the DNA – and the hair – to prove it
Kit Harington’s hair is a thing of wonder. The actor, who for the past seven years has played Jon Snow in Game of Thrones, is famed for his shoulder-length barnet. A cursory internet search returns nearly two million hits. There are GoT fansites devoted to analysing whether the precise inflection of Harington’s hair might hint at possible plot twists. There are photoshopped images showing what he might look like with a shaved head. There are style guides on how to achieve his tousled curls (“While blow-drying, use your fingers to twirl strands and get that curling action going”). Harington, 30, finds it all a bit mystifying. “It’s bizarre,” he says, sitting in a light-filled room in east London, dressed all in black and sporting a pair of owlish spectacles. He confesses he’s looking forward to a haircut once the next, final, season has filmed, “but I have to keep it like this until then”. Luckily, in the meantime he’s found another role that requires a healthy head of hair. In BBC1’s three-part drama Gunpowder, about the 1605 plot to blow up Parliament, Harington plays the ringleader Robert Catesby and his hair is long, luscious and reassuringly 17th century. “I looked at pictures of Catesby and, well, I can’t deny he had a beard and long hair,” says Harington, who is also an executive producer. But the connection went beyond the purely follicular: Catesby is one of Harington’s ancestors on his mother’s side. He grew up in Acton, west London, being told by his parents all about the nefarious activities of his forebear. And Catesby is his middle name. It was Catesby who led the plan to bomb the House of Lords in protest at King James I of England’s relentless persecution of Catholics. Catesby’s co-conspirators included Guy Fawkes, who was arrested guarding barrels of explosive after an anonymous tip-off. The foiled plot is still commemorated every year on Bonfire Night, when effigies of Fawkes are burned. Harington couldn’t understand why the story of his ancestor had never before been dramatised, and so decided to do it himself. He put together an outline with his friend, Daniel West, and sold the idea to Kudos, the production company behind Spooks. The cast includes American actress Liv Tyler (“She does a fantastic English accent”) and Sherlock star Mark Gatiss. The script was written by Northern Irish author Ronan Bennett (Top Boy) and he doesn’t shy away from depicting the brutal aspects of the era: in the first episode, a priest is beheaded and Catesby’s aunt is stripped naked before being crushed to death on a public scaffold. “Yeah, that’s historically accurate,” Harington says. “I think it was important to us – that brutality – because it sets Catesby on a very specific path. We need to understand why this man goes about putting together a team to carry out this act. We need to understand what pushed him to that place.” Although set more than 400 years ago, Gunpowder is a story with modern relevance: a group of disaffected young men, driven by religious zealotry, plan what is essentially a terrorist act. Was Harington aware there could be certain parallels made with the recent atrocities committed by Islamic extremists? “We understand that there is obviously a modern resonance with terrorism,” he says carefully. “But we are not using the term ‘terrorism’ because they weren’t terrorists. A terrorist is someone who goes and plants a bomb or causes a terrifying act to frighten a population and therefore push the government to do something. These guys were revolutionaries. They wanted to bring down governments so they could then put a new government in place. So, they weren’t technically terrorists.” Yes, but it’s often said that one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. “It’s true it could have real resonance among an audience, in that they see a group of young men who were disenfranchised, who go and decide to do a very violent thing, and who decide to kill people for what they see is the greater good,” Harington says. “You do see that on our news.” Despite his Catholic ancestry, Christopher “Kit” Catesby Harington was raised in the Church of England but isn’t particularly religious. His mother, Deborah, was a playwright, his father, David, a businessman, and his earliest ambition was to be a writer: “I was a complete mummy’s boy and wanted to write just like Mum did.” When he was 11, the family moved to Worcestershire and Harington and his older brother, Jack, attended the local state school. It was there that he discovered a talent for acting, thanks in part to the efforts of his drama teacher, Sue Hickman (sweetly, he specifically asks me to mention her in this piece). He liked drama, “because I’m a massive show-off and that sort of turned into a love for it”. Harington went on to study at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where he landed a role in the original stage production of War Horse at the National Theatre. After graduating, he auditioned for a part in a new HBO drama set in a fantastical world inhabited by dragons, giants and an army of the undead. “I didn’t know what it was going to become,” he says. “I think I knew there was something different and interesting about it, but right then I wasn’t in a position to pick roles. It was just this TV show, it was American and it was HBO. So I said yes.” The show was Game of Thrones and it has changed his life, not least because the actress who played his love interest, Rose Leslie, is now his fiancée. “I don’t talk about my relationship,” he says politely, “but me and Rose are very happy together and we live together and yeah, it’s all good.” Game of Thrones also made him hugely famous. He recalls a trip to LA shortly before the sixth season aired, and finding an enormous billboard with his face on it covering one side of a skyscraper. “It was so surreal. It blows your mind something like that.” Did he take a photo of himself next to the billboard? He grins. “Yeah, of course!” He laughs. “Would have been rude not to.” In “Thrones”, as Harington calls it, Jon Snow is the moral compass: brooding, intense and reluctant to claim the power that is rightfully his. Harington thinks one of the core messages of the show is that the people who most want power are the least deserving of it. “I think that’s the problem with politics,” he says. “At the heart of it is that, if you want to be a politician you probably crave power and therefore you probably shouldn’t be a politician. And that’s just a natural human condition I’m afraid. I’ve always thought maybe we should choose politicians almost like we do jury service: ‘You’re going to be prime minister and you got randomly selected.’” What would Harington do if he were prime minister for the day? There is a long pause. “I would pump more money into state education.” One of the interesting things about Harington is that despite his blue blood – his father is a Baronet; and Wikipedia states that he’s a direct descendent of Charles II, although Harington has no idea if that’s true – he has escaped the “posh actor” tag often applied to contemporaries such as Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston or Benedict Cumberbatch. “Well, I didn’t go to Eton,” Harington says. “My parents weren’t wealthy, we didn’t have a huge house. I went to state school… I’m proud of my family history but I don’t think of myself as posh. It’s an outdated term anyway and should become more outdated.” I ask him whether he worries that it’s harder for people from less privileged backgrounds to become actors and he becomes more animated, leaning forward in his chair, tucking his hair behind his ears as he talks. “The wealth gap affects this industry as much as it affects any industry, and more so. You can’t be an actor if you need to hold down another job… It’s much easier to be an actor if you have an independent source of wealth. If I hadn’t got the job straight out of drama school I would be screwed because my parents couldn’t have supported me through trying to find work. “But I think it’s deeper than that. The reason people like Eddie Redmayne and Benedict Cumberbatch continue to work, is because (a) they’re incredibly talented actors, and (b) they were given the resources by their educational system to go into that and to have every chance of success. “I really believe if we’re looking at trying to get more and more underprivileged people into the creative industries, and acting especially, it needs to start at government level through funding. And I think right now the arts in schools are just going completely underfunded.” He’s so passionate on the subject, I wonder if he’s ever been interested in a political career, but he says all his future projects are to do with acting or producing. It’s a shame, though. If Harington stood for prime minister, he (and his hair) would get my vote. Gunpowder begins on Saturday 21st October at 9.10pm on BBC1
Love Island is like Shakespeare with a suntan
From the language to the romance, Love Island's slice of reality television could actually make us more civilised, argues Elizabeth Day
The world is divided into two types of people: those who adore ITV2’s Love Island, and those who abhor it and believe that watching it hastens the decline of civilisation. I fall into the former category because the latter group is, well, wrong. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that watching Love Island can actually make you more civilised. It is reality television at its most naive: think back to the first series of Big Brother and you have something of the flavour of it. Admittedly, the show’s premise might sound tacky on paper: a group of random, swimwear-clad strangers are plonked in a telegenic holiday villa and are encouraged to “couple up”, which involves sharing a bed and possibly allowing romance to develop. The public then vote to keep their favourite pairing in the villa. The last couple standing scoops a £50,000 cash prize. But the amazing thing about Love Island is that most of the contestants seem to forget about both the cash and the cameras almost as soon as they walk in the villa. They start talking, utterly sincerely, about wanting to find “the one” and “someone who gives me butterflies” and you realise that, ultimately, we are all engaged on this endless quest to be understood. It’s the kind of narrative that has obsessed us since time immemorial. It’s why we’re still riveted by the work of Jane Austen or Shakespeare: because we are all searching for someone who helps us make sense of ourselves. Of course there’s lots of fake tan and white teeth and preposterous, silicone-enhanced body types, and the occasional night-time shuffle under the sheets. But at its heart, Love Island is a show about people forming relationships – romantic ones, yes, but also platonic ones. In fact, one of the most appealing things about Love Island is that the contestants are, by and large, nice to each other. One of the most enduring partnerships this series has been between two men: Kem, a hairdresser from Essex who appears to be approximately 4ft 2in, and Chris, a “golf clothing ambassador” (no, me neither) from Gloucestershire who cracks jokes like, “What’s the most common owl in Britain? A teat-owl.” The two of them are engaged in a deeply felt bromance. As a woman, it’s fascinating getting an insight into how men talk to each other when they think no one’s watching (mainly they talk about clothes and feeling insecure, and occasionally break into a spontaneous, good-humoured rap song). And then there’s the language. Shakespeare is said to have invented more than 1,700 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, or simply making them up from scratch. The Love Islanders continue this noble tradition in some style. I’ve been introduced to a whole new lexicon, including “melt” (someone being soppy; an idiot), “muggy” (making a fool of someone) and “pied off ”, which means to be rejected, often in favour of someone else. When romance blossoms, islanders say they are “catching feelings”, as if falling in love were a disease. Before the sun sets on Love Island this Friday, I urge you to give it a go. It’s rather like The Archers in that you’ll need to persevere with those characters who remain, but I promise it’s worth it. Shakespeare, ever the populist, would love it. Love Island is on Sunday to Friday at 9pm on ITV2
How well do Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield actually know each other?
We put the This Morning presenting duo to the Newlywed Game test...
They present This Morning together four days a week. They've won a host of TV awards. But are they really best friends? There's only one way to find out: subject the pair to an in-depth quiz on each other... Holly on Phil 1. What colour are his eyes? Holly Oh my… I look at him every day and I really don’t know! Hazely-brown?! Phil Green. 2. His most annoying habit? Holly Tidying my stuff. I just leave everything lying around. Phil I really don’t think there’s anything she’s mentioned that annoys her. 3. Which soap is he addicted to? Holly He’s a Corrie fan. Phil Corrie. View oEmbed on the source website 4. What would he choose as a final meal? Holly This is one of our favourite games! He’s going for a soft-shell crab starter, steak with peppercorn sauce and a cheese board for dessert. Phil A seafood starter of some sort, a really good steak and — I don’t have a sweet tooth — so probably cheese. 5. Ultimate TV detective? Holly Cumberbatch. Phil Sherlock. 6. His perfect holiday destination? Holly He has a house out in Portugal, where they go every year, so probably there. Phil We’ve both got homes out in Portugal and have had the best times there all together, so I’d say there. 7. Perfect evening? Holly We both like a takeaway on the sofa. Phil I’d probably say drinking on the sofa. 8. Secret phobia? Holly He’s not scared of anything but he can’t eat egg whites. Phil I’m not scared of anything. Phil and Holly at this year's NTA awards Phil on Holly 1. What colour are her eyes? Phil Blue? Holly Green. 2. What’s her most annoying habit? Phil She goes, “Well…” to fill silences but she doesn’t actually have anything to say. Holly Umm… that! I need to fill silences so I will just say “Umm…” even though I have absolutely nothing to say! 3. Soap addiction? Phil Corrie. Holly Corrie. 4. What would she choose as a final meal? Phil We’ve played this! Something classic like prawn cocktail, roast chicken and then anything with chocolate for desert. Holly Classic prawn cocktail, roast beef with all the trimmings and then Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream with chocolate sauce. 5. Ultimate TV detective? Phil She’s a big Marple fan. Holly Marple — girl power! 6. Her perfect holiday destination? Phil I know she loves Portugal a lot, too, but anywhere in the sun with a bottle of rosé. Holly You can’t beat lying in the sun and doing nothing in the Maldives. 7. Perfect evening? Phil Probably takeaway on the sofa. Holly I love an indian on the sofa. 8. Secret phobia? Phil Holly is scared of everything! Holly I’m scared of everything! This Morning is on Monday–Friday 10.30am ITV View oEmbed on the source website
What do Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby really think of each other?
The This Morning presenting duo also talk corpsing and THAT hungover show after the NTAs
The world can be a dreary place. Forecasts of economic doom. Predictions of global apocalypse. An orange-hued former reality television star in charge of the nuclear codes. That kind of thing. But when you’re feeling a bit down about the state we’re in, there are few better ways of picking yourself up than typing “Phil and Holly Funny Bits” into YouTube. It will bring up more than 5,000 video compilations of Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby dissolving into giggles at regular interludes as they present ITV’s flagship daytime show, This Morning. Their laughter is chaotic and unpredictable, generally occasioned by an innocent double entendre, like the time chef Gino d’Acampo cooked sausage-in-the-hole or when they had to introduce an item about Gwyneth Paltrow’s “tidy pantry”. View oEmbed on the source website “They’re never planned,” Schofield says when we meet one morning just after the duo have come off air. We’re sitting in a cramped dressing room backstage at the ITV studios on London’s South Bank and both of them are still in their on-screen make-up: faces inch-deep in powder and fake tan. “Because we have the same sense of humour, it works at the same speed. We think the same thing, more or less, we laugh at the same stuff. So, you know, if you write in a script anything about Gwyneth Paltrow’s tidy pantry, it’s going to get us both at the same time.” “It’s going to tip you over the edge,” Willoughby agrees, sitting next to him on a low sofa, sipping on a cup of tea. “And then one goes and it makes the other one worse and then that makes the other one worse,” adds Schofield. “So it builds.” “And suddenly you just can’t remember what you’re giggling about,” concludes Willoughby. View oEmbed on the source website They’re laughing again now, egging each other on. It seems they genuinely can’t help it. Sometimes, she will give him “a little nudge” when there’s a “slightly naughty or slightly rude” phrase in the script. Today, it happened when she had to say “two ways with rhubarb” and Schofield could barely contain himself. “I have a very limited ability to stop myself from laughing,” he concedes. “It’s very easy to push me over the edge.” Schofield and Willoughby know each other’s weak points. In fact, they know each other so well, Willoughby claims to be able to intuit what he is thinking. They go on holiday together, they hang out with each other’s families and Willoughby can make Schofield a margarita that meets his exacting standards. How does he like them? “Strong!” she says. The two of them have presented This Morning together for eight years. Before that, they fronted seven seasons of Dancing on Ice, so all in all, they’ve been a partnership for longer than many real marriages last. The ever-discerning readers of RadioTimes.com have just voted Schofield and Willoughby their favourite on-screen couple. “We were surprised when we won because Ant and Dec were in the mix and no one beats Ant and Dec in anything,” says Schofield. What’s the secret to their success? Well, essentially it’s that there is no secret. Both of them claim to be exactly the same on television as they are in their normal lives. Certainly they seem easy and relaxed in each other’s company. Willoughby, 36, is warm and bubbly, all floral print and long tumbling blonde locks. The 55-year-old Schofield has a slightly sterner manner and is more reserved than I’d anticipated: the silver-haired older brother to a cheeky younger sister. “I think that if you watch This Morning on a regular basis then you get an insight into our friendship, which is the same on screen as off,” says Schofield. “We have a laugh.” Willoughby nods. “It’s also the nature of the show,” she adds. “It’s two hours, live, every day. So it’s like we don’t give people the option [to like us or not]. We’re in your house for two hours!” Viewers hold them in such deep affection, that even when they turned up slightly the worse for wear to present This Morning the day after winning a National Television Award last year, no one seemed to begrudge it. Both of them were still in the same black-tie clothes from the night before and seemed to be staring somewhat blurrily into the autocue. There were empty champagne glasses cluttering the on-screen coffee table. View oEmbed on the source website “We just had to get through it,” Willoughby says now. “Whoever was watching had voted. It was kind of their fault.” The two of them had gone back to Ant McPartlin’s house to celebrate after the awards ceremony and had ended up playing a game of Pie Face. “You’ve got your head through a mask and there’s a little spoon thing in front of you and it’s full of cream,” Schofield explains. “Then you turn a little dial and you turn it and turn it, and you never know when it’s going to go and then finally it will flip up and it will dump this lot on your face. That’s all well and good, but then you start to ramp up the pressure. You put piccalilli on it.” Willoughby is laughing now. “We just went to the fridge and found jars of stuff.” “Chilli oil,” Schofield says. “I got chilli oil in my eye.” It’s why, if you look carefully at the footage, you will see stains of yellow on Willoughby’s white designer gown. She thinks it was piccalilli. Or mint sauce. Neither of them can really remember. Anyway, they didn’t get into trouble and it’s not an incident that’s ever been repeated, although, as Schofield says, “Never say never.” Apart from these occasional lapses, they are consummate professionals: coming in each morning, reading their scripts in the car, being briefed on the guests and then writing their own questions for every interview segment. Often, when they compare questions, they find they’ve written down exactly the same ones. “Career-wise he’s kind of guided me,” she says. “We spend quite a lot of time together and quite often I’d come in in the morning and I wouldn’t have slept properly because of the kids [Willoughby has three with her husband, TV producer Dan Baldwin] or something and he’s my first port of call to talk to, really.” “Holly is incredibly sympathetic,” Schofield says. “She’s the best person to tell secrets to. She’s got a brilliant ability to see sense through mess. She’s also more diplomatic than I am.” It’s lucky they have such chemistry. Have they ever wondered what it would be like to do this job with someone they secretly hated? “I think it would be really hard,” Willoughby replies, “because it would just drive you mad. I just don’t think you can.” “You could do,” Schofield says, “but it just would not be any fun.” They catch each other’s eye and start to giggle. It’s clear they have fun, both on and off screen. Even better: we have fun watching them do it. This Morning's Live Wedding airs on Thursday at 10:30am on ITV Click here for This Morning's Be Kind Campaign and Live Wedding
James Norton on Christmas in Grantchester: "There are bad jumpers, snow and an impending birth..."
The Happy Valley and War and Peace actor looks back on a stellar 2016 – and addresses those James Bond rumours
Over the summer, James Norton found himself filming scenes for a forthcoming movie by a lake in a remote part of northern Canada. Out of the corner of his eye, he spied a boat being rowed across the water. The boat stopped abruptly as it got close to him. The woman at the helm pointed at him and said, semi-accusingly, “You’re the vicar!” It was, Norton admits, slightly surreal to be recognised on the other side of the world for his part in Grantchester, the hit ITV 1950s detective series in which he plays crime-solving Anglican vicar Sidney Chambers. It’s a mark of just how popular Norton has become, with Grantchester regularly attracting six million viewers in the UK and also airing on PBS in the States. Now it’s returning for a one-off Christmas special that, Norton promises, will feature “bad jumpers and church services, snow and an impending birth... it’s perfect for Christmas.” Today, we are meeting on set in the distinctly unglamorous location of Whipsnade Zoo car park. Norton, 31, has just come into the canteen bus from filming a scene in which Sidney engages in “this really great big epic theological discussion” with his archdeacon. He’s still wearing his full vicar’s regalia: starched shirt and a dog collar that looks slightly too small for his neck. “Yeah, it’s actually really uncomfortable,” Norton says, struggling to unbutton it. I stare. “You’re fascinated by the clothes, aren’t you?” I am. I can’t help it. It’s not often you see such a handsome man in clerical robes. Norton has an easy, engaging manner and a foppish charm. When he smiles, his eyes crinkle in an altogether pleasing fashion. He has long dimples on either side of his mouth. His jaw is so square it could fit through a letterbox. The last time a clergyman was this good-looking, it was Richard Chamberlain in The Thorn Birds. James Norton as Sidney Chambers in the Grantchester Christmas special Unsurprisingly, rumours have been swirling that he might be the new James Bond. So... is he? “I have as much clue as you,” he says. “I hope Daniel [Craig] has at least two more films left. It’s very bizarre and flattering to be involved in that conversation.” One of the other rumoured frontrunners for the role was Tom Hiddleston, who recently had a much-publicised three-month fling with American pop star Taylor Swift. I try a different tack: does Norton have any imminent plans to date Taylor Swift? “No,” he laughs. “I’ve never met Taylor Swift. Why – has she asked me for a date?” Like 007, Norton has good looks, a posh accent and a top-notch education behind him (Ampleforth, Cambridge and then a stint at Rada). Yet he is an extraordinarily versatile actor who has made a successful career out of conspicuously not being typecast. This year alone, he has gone from playing the dashing Prince Andrei in the BBC’s glossy adaptation of War and Peace to the murderer Tommy Lee Royce in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley. He adopted an American accent to film Flatliners in Canada over the summer, a modern-day sequel to the 1990 classic. James Norton as Prince Andrei in War and Peace He’s been so busy, he hadn’t been to the dentist in five years. He went recently and came back with a new filling, which he isn’t happy about. “Suddenly I’m getting all these aches and pains,” he grumbles. “I’ve had to have physio on my shoulder... I haven’t had a holiday for ages.” And he’s not slowing down next year — he’ll hit the big screen in Hampstead and Flatliners, will be filming BBC crime drama McMafia, and there’ll be another series of Grantchester. Is he worried he’ll burn out? “No, I still love acting. I still get the buzz. You do get the odd moment at the end of a long week and you feel, ‘What am I doing?’ but those are eclipsed by the 99 moments of what it is to be doing what I love. I think also that one of the reasons people work and work is they’re afraid [jobs are] suddenly going to disappear. It can be very fickle.” Norton has always been a worrier – even as a child, growing up in a loving family in north Yorkshire, he remembers inexplicable bouts of anxiety and guilt. Acting was his release: “I did it from an early age - putting on plays and inventing stories. I was the annoying, precocious boy who made all his friends be in his productions.” Although he was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth and read theology at Cambridge, Norton is not himself a believer. But because he plays a vicar in Grantchester, he gets people coming up to him and saying things like, “‘Of course, as you know it says in Paul IV’ – and I don’t have a clue!” James Norton with Sarah Lancashire in Happy Valley Norton’s family find his fame surreal. His parents, Lavinia and Hugh, are both teachers. His younger sister, Jessica, is a doctor. “They find it very weird because they’ve known me since I was a spotty little kid,” he says. “Family is really important to me. It’s a great leveller.” They follow his career avidly. His 93-year-old grandmother, Jean, a former Second World War Wren, sometimes visits him on set, and his mother was so involved in Happy Valley that she used to get up and shout at the screen at Norton’s character, Tommy Lee Royce. “She’d ring up and say, ‘I didn’t like it when he did this. No, no, no! Just tell the producers we don’t want that.’” Norton will be with his parents and sister at Christmas. He lives on his own in a flat in south-east London, and is looking forward to returning to the Yorkshire countryside. “We do have quite a set timetable,” he says. “We still do stockings... Then we have a big breakfast, a long walk, then a big meal that stretches into the evening.” What would he like for Christmas? He gives this question some serious contemplation. “I do love a nice salad bowl.” This might be the most middle-class answer I’ve ever heard. “Because I don’t have time to buy it myself!” he protests. These days, Norton says he’s grown out of his childhood anxiety. But he still has a Sidney-like angst about the state of the world. In the aftermath of the vote to leave the EU in June, Norton tweeted a link to the petition for a second referendum and was astonished by the level of resulting vitriol. “It was a real eye-opener for me,” he admits. “Actually, I regretted it because I was ignoring the idea that the majority of the country wanted this change.” It’ll be a welcome relief to get away from it all this Christmas. Especially if someone gives him that much longed-for salad bowl.
Fearless star Helen McCrory: "We’re all pioneers as women now because there’s no blueprint"
The Harry Potter actor also talks mistaking her OBE for a parking ticket and how husband Damian Lewis convinced her to join her new ITV drama
Helen McCrory arrives in the north London pub where we have agreed to meet wearing checked trousers and a peaked flat cap to keep the sun off her face. She speaks rapidly as if struggling to match the pace of her own thoughts. The whole impression is that of an energetic Victorian chimney sweep or an extra from Oliver Twist. At first, I don’t even recognise her. But then, she has always been a chameleon, an actress capable of feats of transformation. At 48, her CV is testament to her range: she was Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, Medea on stage and is about to reprise her role as Aunt Polly in Peaky Blinders (the cap she’s wearing was actually borrowed from the set). Her latest incarnation is as the lead in ITV’s new political thriller, Fearless, scripted by Homeland writer Patrick Harbinson. McCrory plays Emma Banville, a campaigning lawyer who fights to free a man she believes was wrongfully convicted of killing a schoolgirl. View oEmbed on the source website RT: What drew you to the role? HM: Patrick got in contact with me and said, “We’ve written something for you.” And I read it. I loved the fact that you could tell he’d been writing in America for so long. It just eats plot, like the American dramas do: plot is king and you kill a storyline in 60 minutes that in British drama would often take six hours to do. And I really like Emma. I like the fact that she cares about other things more than herself. And in such a narcissistic culture it’s really nice to read a character who actually does put other things in front of them. Emma has no children and you get the sense she’s devoted herself so much to her work that she hasn’t found the right time for motherhood. Was that an important part of her character? I liked that Patrick wrote her as a person rather than necessarily as a woman. Through the series, she wants to adopt a child and there’s a vulnerability there. I know from friends of mine that it’s very hard to have children later in life. I think we’re all pioneers as women now because there’s no blueprint. My generation – we weren’t quite told you could have it all. And of course you can’t. Emma sacrificed things because of who she is and what she wants to do, and that’s her personal life, and I know that to be true for lots of women. Lots of really great writers, producers, directors, actors that I’ve worked with – they go home alone. But you seem to have managed it. You had your children [Manon, ten, and Gulliver, nine, with actor Damian Lewis] in your late 30s once you’d established yourself as an actor. Was that a conscious decision? No, it wasn’t. I was brought up in Africa [McCrory’s father was a diplomat and she lived in Nigeria, Cameroon and Zanzibar] and I was very much without the influence of advertising or being told what a girl should be or what I should aspire to be. I didn’t really ever have those images of being “the mother” or “the wife”. McCrory with husband Damian Lewis at the 2013 Olivier Awards Of course, everyone in life wants someone to love and be loved by, but I think I was always just engrossed and involved in work. And no, the timing was pure fluke, pure chance, it always is, isn’t it? That’s what’s so horrible. You fell in love with Damian when you were both starring in a play at the Almeida in London in 2003. Was it love at first sight? He just made me laugh a lot. And still does. What’s it been like watching his success in the US series Homeland and Billions? Do people assume he’s an American now? Yes, they’re so confused that he’s not. We get stopped in New York and he says [English accent] “Thank you very much.” And honestly, they look like you vomited on them! I’m so proud of him. As we know, just because you’re talented doesn’t mean you’re going to be successsful. So I’m really, really proud of him and really pleased for him. And he wears it well. Is he equally supportive of you? Yes, he is. Much more so than I am. He was the one that persuaded me to do Fearless. He told me, “You have to do Fearless. You have to.” I pointed out that he was going to be in America filming Billions and in ten years I’ve always had the children when he goes away filming. But he replied, “Well, I’ll do it. Of course I can.” Helen McCrory as Emma Banville and Jonathan Forbes as Dominic in Fearless Fearless deals with the encroachment of national security on our everyday lives. Is that a subject that concerns you? No. Because at the moment I’m not trying to topple a government. Who knows? Tomorrow I may be. How did you prepare for the role of a campaigning lawyer? Actually, I sort of hijacked someone on a train. I was playing The Deep Blue Sea at the National Theatre and I was going into rehearsal one morning on the Tube and I heard this guy chatting away, and he said, “and another thing is that human rights lawyers are constantly misrepresented”. So I earwigged on the Northern Line and then followed him off the train at Charing Cross and I was pegging it down Fleet Street and I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation…” He looked quite alarmed as he held his bag closer to him. And I said, “I’m an actress and I’m about to play a human rights lawyer, what do you know about it?” The guy was called Adam and was a human rights lawyer… so I bribed him with tickets for the National and after a while he realised that I wasn’t crazy so we met and we talked a few times and I went down to the Old Bailey to sit in on a trial. I also read books by people like [solicitor] Gareth Peirce and [barrister] Michael Mansfield… And you realise that these people are with their clients for two or three years often, before they even get to court. People like Emma Banville just doggedly don’t believe anything until they question it for themselves. Emma has some telling character traits – she smokes roll-ups and drives around in an extremely battered old car… Yeah, I brought in the liquorice rollies because I wanted her to have that old-school thing. And the car – she can’t be arsed to get a new one… It’s the car she bought when she left college. And why not? I get that. I’ve still got the same covers on my children’s bed that I had when I was 15. They look like s**t, but they work. Comedian John Bishop plays your love interest in Fearless. What was it like working with him? I love him. He’s just totally charming. He did the first read-through and Patrick Harbinson was there, and I think we did episodes one, two and three at the read-through. And the next day at ten o’clock, bing! the email went and they’d got another six scenes for him. I mean, he just worked so well, they wanted more of him. You were awarded an OBE in December. What was that like? I was really excited. I got a phone call saying, “Oh hello, this is so-and-so, just wondering if… We’re just phoning up to find out if you’re going to accept your honour?” I said, “Oh, thank you, what honour?” and they went, “Your OBE.” It was unopened! I thought it was a parking ticket. Thank God they phoned because you have to say yes or no. And I was like, “Yes, yes!” I was really thrilled… I had a really great year. I got a doctorate last year, and I got an OBE. Where’s your doctorate from? York. It was the first time I’ve ever been into a university. I was overwhelmed. Does Damian have an OBE too? Yeah. He hasn’t got a doctorate though! We’ve got gongs, but not matching mortarboards. Fearless is on Monday at 9.00pm ITV
Poldark's Aidan Turner: People are a little scared to approach me in public – and I'm happy with that
The BBC1 star admits he thinks he has "a leave-me-alone kind of face" when not on set – but that he dearly loves being back in the saddle for Poldark series three
Aidan Turner doesn’t want to talk about his love life. But there comes a point in our conversation when he simply can’t help himself. He has, he admits, grown very close to a Poldark co-star. The two of them have just finished filming three series together and have developed an intimate bond. “Our relationship certainly has matured,” Turner says, before paying tribute to his co-star’s “sensitivity”. Truly, he can’t imagine his life without Seamus the horse. Like the 33-year-old Turner, Seamus the horse hails from Ireland. The two of them have been together since filming their very first scene. “I talk to him all the time,” says Turner. “I rarely use any other horses unless Seamus isn’t around for some reason, [because] I understand how he works and I guess he understands how I work.” View oEmbed on the source website In fact, Turner has a lot to thank Seamus for: he had never really ridden before auditioning for the role of the brooding, swarthy Ross Poldark. He blagged his way through with the producers in order to get the gig. He did so with such aplomb that, these days, it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. As Poldark, the handsome captain who returned to his native Cornwall after fighting in the American War of Independence, Turner is moody and magnetic and has turned furrowing his brow into an art form. He’s tricky to read and yet we root for him, even when he acts in unlikeable ways. The second series stoked controversy with a scene between Poldark and former fiancée Elizabeth Warleggan (Heida Reed) that some critics claimed was “legitimising rape”. But by the end of the run, Poldark was happily reunited with his wife Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson), while the newly remarried Elizabeth discovered she was pregnant with a baby that might or might not be her husband’s. “He has ups and downs,” agrees Turner, “He’s difficult to be around.” Turner is understandably sick of talking about his pectorals. When he stripped to the waist to do a spot of scything in the first series, a Radio Times readers’ poll voted it the best TV moment of 2015. But he insists that he doesn’t think of himself as a sex symbol, and neither does his family, back in Dublin. “It’s never mentioned, strangely enough,” he says drily. He speaks with a pronounced Irish accent and is charming, jokey company. “They don’t say anything. We don’t keep photographs or posters of my jobs in the house… I mean, we watch the shows. My mum’s obviously a big fan, but there’s no shrines to Aidan Turner around the house.” Has it been difficult acclimatising to this level of celebrity? “If I go to an event or a screening or something, yeah, you’re naturally going to attract a load of fans and then it can be more intense. But walking around, I get the odd thing. You keep the head down and you walk fast. I don’t tend to loiter.” Besides, he thinks he might have “a leave-me-alone kind of face”. Turner has grown a dense beard and has pronounced eyebrows and a positively Heathcliffian stare. Today he’s wearing a black T-shirt, black jeans, black trainers and a black beanie cap despite warm sunshine outside. “I think people are just a little bit scared [to approach me],” he says, “and I’m happy enough with that." He describes Ross Poldark as “a control freak… you know, it’s quite stressful for him and he feels he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.” Does Turner feel that too? “I don’t know. I guess we all go through bouts of different emotions from time to time… When you play any character, you can only get it from yourself; you can’t just pick it out of thin air. So, much of it is me. Some parts are exaggerated, obviously, and you push boundaries and other emotions and other attributes and characteristics, but the vast majority of it is my instinct, you know, it is me.” So, has he fathered any illegitimate children? Turner breaks into a grin. “To my knowledge, I have not.” The third series of Poldark is about to air, moved from last year’s autumn slot where it clashed with ITV’s Victoria. Lots of action is on the cards: tension between Ross and Demelza, a daring prison break and rising political agitation. It takes seven months to film a series, and the schedule is unforgiving. Poldark is shot on location in Cornwall and there’s a lot of physical action involved (mostly galloping in a picturesque fashion along a beach at sunset). Last year, Turner took some time off to go travelling because “I was a little bit burnt out”. He went to Odessa in Ukraine (“pretty cool”) and Helsinki to visit friends. When he returned to the set, “I showed up a few pounds too heavy and I think they had to split the back of the waistcoat… It was too tight around here,” he says, gesturing to his stomach, “and not tight enough up here,” he points to his upper body. “His physicality is very much a part of who he is,” he says. “It’s something I can’t get too lazy about. It’s boring but I have to do it.” Being a sex symbol was never really part of the plan for Turner. He grew up in Dublin, where his mother was an accountant and his father an electrician. At home they told stories and sang songs, and the young Aidan was encouraged to develop a party piece for family gatherings. If he didn’t perform, his grandmother wouldn’t let him into the room. “I love that, you know? Irish people do like to tell a yarn. It’s part of our make-up.” He refuses to tell me what his party piece was, except to say that it wasn’t anything to do with singing because “I have a terrible voice.” Was it Irish dancing? “It wasn’t, no.” In fact, Turner took up ballroom and Latin American dancing at the age of six and represented his country for ten years. View oEmbed on the source website Does he watch Strictly Come Dancing? “No. I hate it. God, I hate watching it now, I can’t stand it really.” He says the reality series is “not about dancing… the dancing is rubbish”. But they must have asked you to be on it? “I don’t know if I’m eligible because I used to compete at an amateur level. I think you need to be, like, a raw beginner. They haven’t asked me, no. And just for the record, I wouldn’t do it.” After school, he worked for a bit as an apprentice electrician for his dad. “My dad is one of the old stock. He can do anything – fix a vintage car, do plumbing, lay flooring. He’s one of those real men, you know? They’re a dying breed.” Turner then got a job as a cinema usher, which sparked his interest in acting. He attended a Dublin theatre school, and went on to win roles in the vampire drama, Being Human and Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy before Poldark came his way. Turner as Kíli in The Hobbit After five years of working professionally, he found himself thinking, “I guess I’m an actor now. This is what I’m doing. Can’t back out now,” and he’s still incredibly grateful for the lucky breaks. “It’s nice to be working,” he says, sheepishly, and his parents are “relieved that I manage to get paid for it”. But he still finds it difficult to look at himself on screen. This is not something the majority of his fans struggle with, it must be said. He hasn’t seen the final three episodes of the last Poldark because he hates watching himself so much. “Straightaway you’re thinking of better ways you could have played it or different takes they may have used,” he says. “It’s a bit distracting, and I think, ‘Jesus no, take two was better than take three, why didn’t they use that?’” I don’t think Turner means to sound unnecessarily gloomy. I think it’s simply that he finds it excruciating being the focus of so much attention. In conversation, he’s witty, quick and self-deprecating and as soon as the tape is turned off, he visibly relaxes. He apologises if it sounded like he was dodging the odd question. “I’d tell you any day of the week,” he says, “but it’s just when it’s going to get printed it’s a bit weird.” I get it: he’s basically a lovely lad from Dublin who once fitted light sockets and fell into acting just because he liked it. Now he’s panted over by fans and asked about naked scything and his supposed love interests are splashed across the media every week. It must be surreal. But I still want to know what his childhood party piece was. Go on, I say, trying one more time. What was it? “No, I’ll just have people hounding me to do it all the time now!” he joshes. “Skip that, I’ll come back to it later.” He doesn’t, of course, but it’s hard to begrudge him: Poldark or not, he’s surely allowed to keep some things private. Poldark Season 3 returns to BBC1 on Sunday 11th June
Joan Bakewell tells her side of the story about her affair with Harold Pinter
In response to Pinter’s hit 1978 play Betrayal, which chronicled their relationship, Bakewell wrote Keeping in Touch – which is to be aired on Radio 4
When Joan Bakewell embarked on an eight-year affair with the playwright Harold Pinter in the 1960s, she never suspected he would make a play out of it. But then he wrote Betrayal and sent it to Bakewell for her comments. Her first response was horror. “I was really deeply shocked because it used my private life,” she says, talking to me in the upstairs sitting room of her four-storey north London home. “It was so close to our affair.” By 1978, when Betrayal opened, both Pinter and Bakewell were happily ensconced in new relationships and had remained friends. But the play upset Bakewell because he hadn’t told her he was writing it. She asked him to change the title, which she felt was “accusatory”, but he refused. It became a critical and commercial success and was later adapted for the screen. Bakewell, meanwhile, kept her silence for almost half a century, during which she became a revered broadcaster, writer and a Dame of the British Empire. Pinter died in 2008. Today, at the age of 84, Bakewell has decided the time is right to have her say. Keeping in Touch, a 45-minute drama that she wrote in the 1970s as an immediate riposte to Pinter’s work, will be aired for the first time on Radio 4 this week. It’s about a married woman with children who starts questioning her life, and looks at how Bakewell’s affair came about. The play was originally written, she says, “for my own satisfaction” in a fit of “intensity” and was almost a cathartic exercise. Then she put it away and forgot about it. Pinter and Bakewell on Late Night Line-Up in 1969 It was only when Bakewell was sorting through her archives recently that she came across her play again. What does she think Pinter would have made of it? There is a pause. “Harold would not be very pleased.” Still, in spite of everything, she remembers Pinter with great affection and considers herself “bloody lucky” to have conducted an affair for the best part of a decade while also enjoying a family life with her first husband, the television producer Michael Bakewell. She never felt particularly compromised by the affair. “Once, I was doing a series about bridges that required occasional filming outside London,” she says cheerfully. “I said to Michael, ‘I have to get up early because I have to go to Ironbridge.’ I went to Heathrow and got a flight to Paris to spend the day with Harold, who was filming there. I was back in time to cook supper for the children.” There’s a distinct note of pride in her voice. When I ask her what’s the most adventurous thing she’s ever done, Bakewell insists she’s “a timid person, really” but acknowledges that the trip to Paris was “quite daring because it had to be organised”. “I had a family,” she says. “The children [Harriet and Matthew] lived here. It was a good family; a successful family. But I was having an affair with Harold. I suppose people find that very strange.” Not strange, I say, although they might wonder if you ever felt guilt over the deceit. The Queen presents the Help The Aged Living Legend Media award to Bakewell in 2006 “No,” Bakewell says firmly. “Guilt was something I had to deal with quite early on. I remember thinking, ‘If I’m going ahead with this, I’m not going to be racked by guilt...’ I have quite a strong moral background that I suppose I was flouting, but who’s to say people shouldn’t have affairs? As far as women are concerned, other men don’t cease to be attractive because you’ve found the one you’re married to.” Bakewell got married again, to theatre producer Jack Emery, but they divorced in 2001 after 26 years. Emery was 12 years her junior. “The age difference did matter, but other things mattered more.” She really is the most invigorating company. I shouldn’t be surprised that an 80-something woman has such a modern outlook, but I am. It’s partly because Bakewell looks at least a decade younger than her age (twice-weekly Pilates) and speaks with such stimulating eloquence on everything from Twitter to transsexuals to extreme pornography that I occasionally forget who I’m talking to, only to be brought up short by her saying something like, “Well, of course, I’ve lived in this house for over 50 years.” 1975: Joan Bakewell and Jack Emery after their wedding Bakewell has six grandchildren (the youngest is 17) and she’s forever asking them questions about their life and how to use her laptop: “They’re good friends, really.” Would she ever get a tattoo, as David Dimbleby did at the age of 75? Bakewell shudders. “No. I thought that was really cheesy.” In her heyday, when she was hosting flagship arts and discussion programmes such as Late Night Line-Up and Heart of the Matter, Bakewell was famously termed “the thinking man’s crumpet” by her friend, the broadcaster Frank Muir. She’s since dismissed the remark as “silly”. Bakewell wasn’t insulted by Muir’s epithet because, at the time, women in TV were surrounded by sexism. She remembers asking one of her superiors at the BBC in the late 60s if he ever thought a woman would read the news, and he immediately said no. Would the men she worked with leer at her? “Yes, of course. It was a way of life. There was no man who didn’t leer, or think of it. It was the tenor of the times, which is why, strangely enough, no one bothered with Jimmy Savile. He was just a strange man. There were plenty of them around. The mood was that there was nothing very offensive about it. As someone who was quite pretty in those days, you got stroked and pinched everywhere, and in a way, the thing was not to let it matter.” She’s glad to have lived to see a second female prime minister and, despite being a Labour peer, describes Theresa May as “a capable woman”. Pause. “I think her skirts are a bit short. Please don’t make a thing of that,” she adds, plaintively. Bakewell has been a feminist all her life and remembers telling her mother as an eight-year-old growing up in Stockport that she would rather have been born a boy because men “went out into the world”. Bakewell went to a local grammar school and then won a scholarship to read history at Cambridge before launching her TV career. What does she make of modern-day feminists such as Beyoncé? “Is she the one with the big thighs?” she asks, then instantly apologises. “What a terrible thing to say about another woman!” Would Beyoncé mind? At least she hasn’t called her a crumpet. Keeping in Touch is on Radio 4 at 3.45pm on Saturday 22 April
Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall: “Why am I walking away from the two best actors in the country?”
The writer confesses to his second thoughts on ending the series
Chris Chibnall loves a whiteboard. When he started writing Broadchurch, which is set in Dorset, where he lives, he wanted it to last for three series, involve multiple storylines and have myriad plot-twists and surprising character developments. And that required a lot of planning. “I have four giant whiteboards and a brilliant script editor,” says Chibnall. “We storyline everything and then start with the characters... When you plot an hour-long episode, you have to do it very tightly in four acts around the ad breaks.” Why did he focus on a violent sexual assault? “Because often it’s not treated with the time or delicacy it deserves,” he says. “What I did was to deliberately slow the pace down because I wanted to go into detail of how you report an attack.” Chris Chibnall and Olivia Colman at the Radio Times Covers Party Did he find it hard to shake off the subject matter? “Once I step away from the computer, I hope I’ve given everything to it — like a footballer leaving everything on the pitch. The emotion goes into the show.” Did he expect Broadchurch to be such a success? “No! No idea. Any success is not in our hands, it’s in the hands of the audience — they decide what they want to talk about.” And how does he feel on the eve of the final series? “Very emotional. It’s hard to say goodbye. I’ve asked myself, ‘Why am I walking away from the two best actors in the country?’” Does Chibnall have a favourite scene? “Yeah, but I can’t tell you what it is,” he laughs. “It’s late in this series, it’s very moving and it’s the biggest scene we’ve ever done.” So we’ll know it when we see it? “Yes,” he says. Until then, like so much else around Broadchurch, it remains a closely guarded secret. Broadchurch begins at 9pm tonight on ITV
Christina Ricci: I would never have got to play Zelda Fitzgerald if I hadn’t cast myself
The Addams Family actor has grown up – with an attitude
Christina Ricci is small but fearsome. She sits in a London hotel room, her tiny frame swamped by the felt upholstered sofa, and looks at me with wide, piercing eyes, like a meerkat about to pounce on an unsuspecting insect beetling across the Namib desert. If a question is deemed overly simplistic, she dispatches it with an unflinching gaze and a one line response. When I ask her how she mastered the Alabama accent for her role as Zelda Fitzgerald in Z: the Beginning of Everything, she shrugs. “I mean, you know, it’s an accent.” View oEmbed on the source website Ricci doesn’t much like interviews. And she’s done more than her fair share. She became famous at the age of nine, when she co-starred in Mermaids alongside Cher and Winona Ryder. A bevy of critically acclaimed film roles followed – Wednesday in The Addams Family; the sexually curious adolescent in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm – so that by the time she was a teenager, Ricci was sick of the promotional rigmarole of hotel room Q&A sessions. “I was 14 and I was being criticised, analysed, examined and asked very pointed questions,” she says now. “I was so uncomfortable I lashed out.” She made some deliberately wild statements – that it was “natural” to have sex with one’s parents; that she wasn’t afraid to die and so on – just to shake things up. She felt “hostile” towards the world. These days, she’s more pragmatic. She still finds interviews “difficult” but she no longer measures herself according to whether she feels she’s failed or succeeded at them. I suspect she just gets bored. View oEmbed on the source website At 36, Ricci is one of the most ferociously smart and interesting actors I’ve ever interviewed. Her brain is quick; her thought processes unexpected. If she doesn’t agree with something you’ve said, or if she thinks your reasoning is lazy, she will tell you so. It proves to be less of an interview, more of a university tutorial. So it’s not surprising she’s done a lot of research for her latest role, reading all of Zelda Fitzgerald’s own writing and several biographies. Zelda was the wife of The Great Gatsby novelist F Scott Fitzgerald. She was a flapper who chafed against social convention and struggled with mental illness before dying in a hospital fire at the age of 47. Was Ricci drawn to the role because of Zelda’s rebellious streak? “No.” For a moment, I think she’s going to stop there and I flail around for a follow-up question, but then she continues, “Because I was so rebellious, I think rebelliousness doesn’t fascinate me at all. What I respond to is Zelda’s recklessness – the lack of foresight, the lack of understanding of how serious the world is, because, you know, decisions you make will last for ever.” Ricci’s performance as Zelda is both nuanced and compelling. The series is set in the interwar years and charts the beginning of the Fitzgeralds’ troubled relationship. Ricci is perfect in the role: she has one of those on-screen faces capable of portraying the thought that lies within. But she also shows Zelda as light and spirited, a girl who snuck out at night behind her father’s back to go dancing. Ricci initially read Z: a Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Fowler while running very slowly on the treadmill at the gym (“I hate exercise”), and couldn’t believe no one had bought the rights. She promptly snapped them up herself and pitched it to Amazon Studios. “It’s interesting, for such a rich story with two famous, glamorous people, that it’s never been made,” Ricci says. “And I think it provoked a little bit of my sense of injustice. It’s bizarre that with two people, both so famous, we know all about one person [Fitzgerald] and only horrible things about the other [Zelda, whose reputation is dominated by her mental illness].” Putting herself in the lead was a conscious decision. “I would never have been cast in this part, ever, because people just don’t see me as a romantic lead,” Ricci says. “I just don’t fall into that category. So I just created the part myself.” Why doesn’t she fall into that category? “I couldn’t tell you why… Possibly with love stories, there’s a lot more suspension of disbelief than with other stories and perhaps it’s that I don’t buy into it myself.” Ricci has said in the past that she thinks she’s too short to be taken seriously as a leading lady (Ricci is five foot one) but it’s probably also that her face is so striking and unusual: heart-shaped and elfin and dominated by a pair of saucer-like hazel eyes. She looks much younger than her years, and says she still feels 18. She can’t quite believe she has a two-year-old son, Freddie, with her husband, James Heerdegen, a dolly grip she met while working on the TV series Pan Am. She was born in Santa Monica, California and can’t remember ever not wanting to act. “In all my memories, I was an actress,” she says. Her mother was a former model and real estate agent, and her father a primal scream therapist who used to treat patients in the basement of the family home. Their screams could often be heard by Ricci and her three older siblings in the kitchen upstairs, so perhaps it’s understandable that she became intrigued by the darker side of life. As a child, she loved reading CS Lewis and science fiction, particularly the Dune books, which she has reread several times. At the age of eight, she starred in a school play called The 12 Days of Christmas. The part had originally been given to a classmate, but Ricci wasn’t having it. “I knew I was better than him,” Ricci recalls. “I used to, when I was younger, when people were aggressive to me, I would get them to fully commit to their aggression and then they would get in trouble. I was…” she pauses, “very strange and manipulative.” This is what happened with her classmate; she annoyed him so much that he eventually hit her in the face. “Then I told the teacher he hit me in the face and I got the part instead,” she concludes crisply. Ricci’s course was set. A local theatre critic spotted her in the production and soon she was being cast in TV and films. As an adult, she has sought out difficult parts: troubled, often overlooked women, such as the girlfriend of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster, or the teenage runaway Dedee in The Opposite of Sex. In America, she is a spokesperson for a charity for victims of incest and rape, all of which points to a certain understanding of and empathy for abused women. With the election of Donald Trump as President, a man who has openly boasted of groping women, I wonder if she feels it is a particularly tough time to be female? “Well, leaving the Presidency out of the answer, I think that things are bad for women and have been bad for a long time and I think just because this person has been elected, it’s not anything new. Things aren’t great but I do think we have a responsibility, as women, to look at why it’s not so great for us and change our own roles before we expect people who don’t have our life experience to understand.” She goes on to say that the fact things are difficult for women “has more to do with other women than with men”. In what way? “Look at Zelda’s story – she allowed it to happen.” She explains that F Scott lifted sections from his wife’s journals to use in his own novels and that Zelda didn’t object until it was too late. “Once she gives him permission to take her writing, it basically means she has to accept the secondary position,” Ricci says, then adds that women “have to redefine our roles for ourselves. You tell people how to treat you.” Is that why she started producing her own projects? “Yes. I can’t just whinge and moan about things. If you have a problem, change it.” It’s a fairly uncompromising stance. I wonder if she’d feel differently if she were bringing up a daughter. As it is, her son “really loves me a lot. He’s very sweet, cute and cuddly. It’s crazy that boy thing though. It’s: ‘What are you climbing on now? What is that you’ve just put in your mouth?’” She laughs, for the first time during the course of the interview. Recently, Ricci watched the sci-fi horror series Stranger Things on Netflix and loved it so much she immediately watched it all over again. She’s now seen it “four or five times”. “I didn’t want it to be over,” she says. “I wanted to stay thrilled.” It’s rather a beautiful sentiment. Twenty-six years on from her screen debut, Christina Ricci is thrilling us still. And I don’t know about you, but I’m willing to be a tiny bit challenged in exchange for that. The first episode of Z: the Beginning of Everything is available now Amazon
The Missing's David Morrissey: Television was my education, much more than school
The Walking Dead star takes over from James Nesbitt in the second series of BBC1 crime drama The Missing
David Morrissey is very serious. Really terribly serious. He walks into the London hotel where we’re meeting with the demeanour of someone thinking profound thoughts. When he smiles, he looks immediately affronted by the actions of his own face. When he talks about enjoying television he can “tune out of ” and I blithely ask him what his “guilty pleasure” is, he peers over at me as if from a great distance. “I don’t believe in guilty pleasures at all, really,” the 52-year-old Morrissey says sadly. “Any pleasure is pleasure.” Oh dear, I think. This is going to be as much fun as a wet weekend in the Kensington area of Liverpool where he was born and raised. To be fair, he is here to talk about starring in the second series of The Missing, in which he plays a soldier called Sam Webster whose daughter has suddenly reappeared after 11 years in captivity. His on-screen wife is played by Keeley Hawes. View oEmbed on the source website The first series, starring James Nesbitt as a traumatised parent of a missing child and written by brothers Harry and Jack Williams, was so grippingly realistic that many parents couldn’t bring themselves to watch it. “Yes, I guess, there are a lot of parents out there,” says Morrissey, who has three children aged 21, 18 and 12 with his wife, the novelist Esther Freud. “Children in danger is always very, you know… We can get very weirded out by all that.” As research for his role, Morrissey immersed himself in books about real-life kidnapping cases (“all the Josef Fritzl stuff ”, the Austrian who kept his daughter captive in his cellar for 24 years) and had to wear a prosthetic scar on his back, which took two hours to apply on set each morning. Over the last few years Morrissey, who is probably best known for his roles in State of Play, Red Riding and Thorne, has played the villainous Governor in The Walking Dead and a hangman in Martin McDonagh’s acclaimed play, Hangmen, at the Royal Court. Morrissey as the Governor in The Walking Dead No wonder he’s a bit morose when we meet. But then two things happen to warm him up. One is the appearance of the English Breakfast tea Morrissey ordered (he is, I note, particularly polite to the waiters). The second is that we start talking about what television he likes to watch. I’ve lost count of the number of actors I’ve interviewed who claim never to watch TV, insisting they prefer to read difficult books or think about great art. Morrissey is the polar opposite. He’s currently engrossed in the Netflix series Stranger Things with his youngest son, and is rewatching The West Wing, which he loves. He’s also into Victoria on ITV and “grown-up” stuff like Gomorrah and Narcos. He caught Daisy Lowe and Will Young on Strictly Come Dancing at the weekend and thought they were “great” and, he adds, “I love Bake Off.” Is he worried about its move to Channel 4? “Er… no. I’m so bored by it. I mean, I enjoy Bake Off but I do feel it’s a subject that’s been over-talked about and by the time this comes out it’s probably going to have more column inches. I haven’t lost sleep over it.” Morrissey with his wife, Esther Freud. Morrissey’s father, Joe, was a cobbler and his mother, Joan, worked in Littlewoods. No one in their family had ever been an actor. So television was Morrissey’s gateway into that world. “Television was very much my education as well as school; probably more so than school,” he says. Unlike his three older siblings, Morrissey failed the 11-plus and went to the local secondary modern. He is strongly against the Government’s recently announced plans to reintroduce grammar schools. “I think testing someone at 11 in a way that will affect them for what could be the rest of their life, or certainly the next six years of their education, is pretty c**p really… “I felt really stigmatised by going to a secondary modern. It felt like failure at a very early age, and nothing in my education, nothing in my schooling, when I got to that establishment, relieved me of that feeling.” He was “14 or 15” when he announced to his parents that he wanted to take acting seriously. They were worried, he says, because it’s not exactly a profession known for its high employment rates and, “It wasn’t like they could phone up my Uncle Tommy and say, ‘Look, can you take him on for a couple of weeks, because he quite fancies being a carpenter?’ You know, they didn’t know anybody to help me.” He says class is still a “massive” issue for people wanting to get into the arts. “I feel that certainly in my profession it’s harder and harder – and not just my profession, actually, I think it’s true of many professions, it’s certainly true of journalism – that in order to get on the first rung on the ladder, you need to be supported through those early years financially by your parents. “So the fact is that if you haven’t come from a middle-class background, [that career] is denied you.” Morrissey was lucky. He joined the Everyman Youth Theatre as a teenager in Liverpool, and quite quickly “found my tribe”. His contemporaries there included Ian Hart and the younger McGann brothers, Mark and Stephen. His father died from a blood disorder when Morrissey was 15, and the Everyman gave him a chance to channel his emotions. “He’d been ill since I was about eight. So from then onwards I was aware that he would die any minute, which was quite odd. There was a lot going on emotionally with me and I was able to give vent to it and express it. “But also, as a kid, you just get on with it. And I was the youngest, so my two older brothers and my older sister were there for me, so it wasn’t as if I was abandoned. “And when he finally died he’d been ill for such a long time that, you know, it was not the biggest shock in the world. For myself, anyway. So, yes, it was a stage of life, but I think as a teenager… I wouldn’t say I was equipped to deal with it, but I had the advantage of the ignorance of youth.” These days, Morrissey is a vocal supporter of Cardboard Citizens, a charity that provides creative workshops for homeless people to tell their stories, and then perform them in prisons, hostels and theatres. It’s about “giving voice to people who feel that they have no voice” and you can see why, given his own background, Morrissey so fervently believes in what they do. He is politically engaged, and has played politicians on screen twice. First in Paul Abbott’s 2003 BBC series State of Play, for which Morrissey shadowed Peter Mandelson for a day, and then, also in 2003, he portrayed Gordon Brown in The Deal, Peter Morgan’s feature-length drama. View oEmbed on the source website Morrissey put on two stone for the part and, as he does for all his characters, devised a playlist to get him in the right mood. For Brown, it consisted of a lot of 60s music. (For Sam in The Missing, it was heavy metal.) He’s met Gordon Brown since and, “he tells me he’s never watched it.” A small smile. What does Morrissey make of what’s currently happening in the Labour Party? “It’s been a bit of a mess for the last couple of years, hasn’t it?” He says that now Jeremy Corbyn has won a second election as leader “quite decisively”, his MPs should unite behind him because “the job of the Labour Party is not to implode, but to fight; to be there as a strong opposition to the Tories, and hopefully to be in government. “My real worry is just the nature of the language – not just in the Labour Party actually, I think in politics in general there’s a vitriol in the language that is used in people’s arguments, political arguments, that I haven’t heard before.” He was particularly taken aback by the debate on immigration that took place before and after the EU referendum. Morrissey does volunteer work for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and has undertaken trips to refugee camps in Jordan and to the Greek island of Lesvos. In Lesvos, he met a 14-year-old boy called Mohammed “who was on his own, he had lost his mother and father on the trip, he didn’t know whether they were alive or dead… And just seeing the state he was in was unbelievable.” He looks at me with that familiar seriousness. I realise I was wrong. David Morrissey isn’t lugubrious. He’s sincere. He cares a lot. It’s a very likeable quality. Still, I’m glad he gets to go home and laugh at Bake Off. The Missing series 2 starts at 9pm on BBC1
Emily Blunt on sexist casting calls and why she hates to be judged by her looks
The Girl on the Train star speaks out against Hollywood's double standards
When Emily Blunt was cast as the lead in The Girl on the Train there was concern that she wasn’t right for the job. Paula Hawkins’s bestselling thriller, on which the film is based, features an overweight, addled alcoholic protagonist called Rachel whose life is falling apart after a marital breakdown. Blunt, who doesn’t exactly have a face like the back end of a bus (or, indeed, a train) was described by Hawkins as simply “too beautiful” to play the role. Luckily, the wardrobe and make-up departments were on hand. Blunt, 33, had prosthetic under-eye bags applied every day, along with a smattering of rosacea colouring and fake varicose veins. “I had a full contact lens that covered my whole eye to give that look as though your eyes are bloodshot,” she says, when we meet in a London hotel. “There was a pink one and there was the incredibly raging red eye for a drunk look and the hungover, yellow, sallowed sort of eye.” View oEmbed on the source website Today Blunt’s eyes are free of lenses and sparkling blue. Her hair is blonde and shiny. She is wearing an impeccably tailored blue and maroon dress. There’s not a varicose vein in sight. As Rachel, Blunt spends much of the movie wearing a baggy tweed coat. “Isn’t that the ugliest coat you’ve ever seen in your life?” she asks me. Yes, I say, without hesitation. “When [costume designer] Ann Roth handed it to me, I just thought, ‘It’s over. It’s over. I’ll never get a beauty campaign after this.’” She also had to wear an ill-fitting trouser suit, although when Blunt talks about it she says “pant suit” without flinching. She grew up as the second of four children in Roehampton, south west London. Her father, Oliver, is a QC and her mother, Joanna, a former actress, but Blunt took US citizenship last year. It made sense, she says, because her husband, the actor and director John Krasinski, is American and she needs to be there a lot for career reasons. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski on the red carpet of The Girl On The Train The couple have two daughters, Hazel, two, and Violet, almost four months. “Old lady names,” she says. “They should have a bridge club or something.” Blunt still feels British but her daughter Hazel recently asked for water by softening the central consonant in a decidedly American fashion. “It was rather uncomfortable,” Blunt says, doing an impression of a scolding mother, “No, it’s war-tah. Krasinski, who became famous in the US version of The Office, is, she says, “my greatest confidant… His opinion means more to me than anybody else’s. He’s very honest. I mean, he delivers information in a very straightforward, loving way. I can always rely on John to give honest feedback on something. Always.” Luckily, he enjoyed The Girl on the Train (in cinemas now), although at one point while watching it he turned to his wife and said, “Oh my God, you look like a ghoul.” Blunt says it was liberating looking so unlike her normal self. As someone who merited a spot in FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women of 2015 (number 90), it came as something of a relief not to worry about what other people thought of her appearance. “It can truly just be about the internal understanding of the character, as opposed to trying to keep a peripheral awareness of how you might be looking,” she says. But Blunt has never been the kind of actress who relies on her looks. Since her breakout performance as Tamsin, the gay schoolgirl in 2004’s My Summer of Love, Blunt has become one of our most versatile and interesting film stars. She seems just as comfortable portraying a queen in period drama The Young Victoria as she is playing a futuristic, kick-ass, allaction heroine opposite Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow. To say she has range is an understatement. View oEmbed on the source website Later this year, she starts rehearsing for the lead role in the Disney remake of Mary Poppins. On screen, Blunt is a compelling mix of vulnerability and impenetrability: you might not know what she’s thinking, but she’s thinking something that makes you want to keep watching. The Girl on the Train appealed to her because it challenges expectations in a way that she found refreshing. “There’s this façade, because we want women to be likeable – my least favourite word in Hollywood right now. She’s got to be relateable and likeable and pretty and held in some sort of feminine ideal that we strive for. Actually, I want to play people who are less about being likeable, more about being credible.” Blunt is grateful that she is at a point in her career where she can pick and choose. “I heard someone say the other day, ‘I can’t believe all those girls on Game of Thrones who just get their tits out.’ “Well, they want to work and that, maybe, is all they’ve been offered and they’re happy to get a job and pay the rent.” She is still sent scripts, however, where the description for a female character is all about her appearance. “‘She’s blonde and vivacious and very attractive.’ And I’m like, ‘Cool. What’s she like?’ That always irritates me.” She notes that the leading man, by contrast, often “gets a rather insightful introduction as to his deeper being”. Blunt and her husband recently moved from Ojai, outside Los Angeles, to New York, partly to give her daughters “a chance at not being surrounded by a superficial ideal”. She goes on to say that, “I’m aware of the physical pressures on women for sure, especially now with two girls.” But that pressure is not just about body image. In The Girl on the Train, Blunt plays a woman depressed by her infertility. Ironically, she discovered she was pregnant with Violet while filming and she explains that she had to tap into the “deeply heart-wrenching” experience of friends who have been unable to conceive. “There’s such societal pressure on women,” she says. “From whether you breastfeed or not, how long you breastfeed for, to whether you can have a kid or want a kid, whether you can keep a husband. “‘Keeping’ a man is a phrase I hate hearing. And women are seen as ‘less than’ if they don’t have children and that is wildly wrong.” I mention recent comments made by Tory MP Andrea Leadsom, who questioned whether the now Prime Minister Theresa May would have a sufficient stake in the future of the country given that she has no children of her own. “I think that’s unfair,” says Blunt, cautiously, before adding that, “I always get myself in trouble talking about politics.” Still, debate runs in the blood: her uncle is the Conservative politician Crispin Blunt and I wonder if, as a child, she was influenced by the theatrics of her father’s work as a barrister? “I’m sure he likes to think of himself as the biggest actor in our family,” she laughs. “It is the ultimate performance, especially for my father who is usually defending guilty people.” Blunt has been to see him in court a couple of times. “He’s so articulate and so eloquent, and he also sounds and looks rather like Richard Burton. “A lot of people talked about his speech at our wedding as being the one that you remember and I do get very proud watching him do his thing. You know, lying through his teeth.” A few years ago, he started being introduced as “Emily Blunt’s dad”. Understandably, that doesn’t go down very well. “He likes to say he’s the real star in the family, so it’s a bit of a slight.” Her sister, Felicity, a literary agent, is married to actor Stanley Tucci (Blunt introduced them after meeting him on The Devil Wears Prada). So presumably Oliver Blunt QC also gets called Stanley Tucci’s father-in-law? “Exactly! My sister – she’s a really fantastic literary agent, she made the top 1,000 list in London or something – and she said that it was so annoying because they talked about her as known by association. Like, ‘Stanley Tucci’s wife and Emily Blunt’s sister’. That really p***es me off. People should be known in their own right.” Indeed, they should. And, despite her ability to play such a wide range of nuanced characters on screen, there’s no doubt that Emily Blunt will still be known very much as herself. The Girl on the Train is out in cinemas now
Mamie Gummer on The Collection and her mother, Meryl Streep
The actress was born to act and follow in Mum’s footsteps
Mamie Gummer’s favourite memory of her mother dates from when she was 13 and had got dressed up as Charlie Chaplin for a Halloween party. She remembers it because it was her first Halloween as a teen, around the time that you start growing up and begin discovering truths about life, such as “finding out that Santa Claus isn’t real”. Her mother drove her to the party. But when they arrived, Gummer was horrified to see that no one else was dressed up. Her friends were all wearing normal clothes and “flirting with boys”. Gummer, sitting in the passenger seat, felt suddenly humiliated by her own immaturity. And that was when her mother stepped in. “Mum, without blinking, gave me her leather jacket, put it on over the costume and wiped my make-up off,” says Gummer now, nearly 20 years later. “It was that transition [from childhood to adulthood] that’s so difficult for kids, made within the space of 20 minutes. And she was there on both sides of it. She’s a great mother.” Mamie Gummer, Rick Springfield and Meryl Streep She is also, it should be said, Meryl Streep. Gummer, 33, is the second of Streep’s four children with the sculptor Don Gummer. It’s hard enough having one of the most famous women in the world as your parent, but now that Gummer is an actress in her own right, with her latest role in the hotly anticipated Amazon Prime drama The Collection, it becomes even more awkward. Did she ever want to do anything other than act? “If I had, I would have done it,” Gummer says drily. As it was, she grew up in Salisbury, Connecticut, a first-hand witness to her mother’s success. The year she was born, Streep won her first best actress Oscar for Sophie’s Choice. When she was two, her mother was starring in Out of Africa. By the time Gummer was 12, Streep was in The Bridges of Madison County. And that’s before you even get to Streep’s roles in The Hours, The Devil Wears Prada, The Iron Lady or Mamma Mia!. Gummer, by contrast, has had a quieter ascent. She started out in school plays and was in two produc tions of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (“I was an intense kid”). After graduating in 2005, she enjoyed critical acclaim in a number of Broadway plays before moving to the small screen. She played Nancy Crozier, the mischievous lawyer in The Good Wife, and took on the part of Sally Adams in the 2008 HBO series John Adams. There was a short-lived stint as the lead in the American medical drama Emily Owens MD, and she has appeared in a few films, too – Lasse Hallstrom’s The Hoax in 2006 and last year’s Ricki and the Flash, which also starred her mother. Her younger sister, Grace, is also an actress and has appeared in The Newsroom. Youngest sibling, Louisa, is a model and older brother, Henry, is a musician who has also been in a few films. It seems to run in the blood. But when we meet in a private members’ club in London, it’s clear she wants to be taken seriously in her own right. Questions about her mother are politely deflected. She is guarded and reserved, even a touch cold (although this might be shyness). She’s at her most relaxed when talking about her work. In The Collection, an eight-part drama set in Paris after the Second World War as the city emerges from Nazi occupation, Gummer plays Helen Sabine, a divorcee who has remarried the head of a fashion house. In the taster video clip I was allowed to see, the clothes look fabulous. The Collection is pegged to be the most fashionable drama since Mad Men “Yes! It gave me a kind of architecture,” she says. “The undergarments particularly: it was different and you sort of altered your posture.” She wore a wig for the part, “which helps with the process. I spent more time in hair and make-up when I played Emily Owens, where it took one-and-a-half hours to perfect her normal hairdo.” Gummer has always been “fascinated by uber-feminine characters, because it’s quite alien to me.” In person, she has a striking look – an asymmetrical face, pale, freckled colouring and a faraway expression in her flinty, blue eyes. She finds it difficult to watch herself on screen: “The first time you see yourself, it’s ‘Ugh! The left side of your face is weird’, or ‘Why is one tooth longer than the other?’” Is there a lot of pressure for women to look a certain way in her industry? She nods. “It’s confusing because you’re meant to be vulnerable [as an actress] and then you have to have the skin of a rhinoceros when walking down a red carpet, being scrutinised. There’s definitely a conflict of interest but it’s worth it – the trauma of self-promotion is completely undone when you get the job and do the work.” Today, she’s wearing low-heeled suede boots and jeans and appears fresh from a massage without a scrap of make-up. Her features are delicate. Her hair is almost white-blonde. The most colourful thing about her is a dazzling silver and floral-patterned coat that she keeps on throughout the interview. “We spend a lot of time covering up how we’re feeling,” Gummer says. “Clothes can be part of that. With acting, we get to release that. Everyone in this show is covered up so it’s about excavating what’s underneath.” Although The Collection looks glamorous, it was mostly filmed in Swansea, and Gummer spent a lot of time shuttling to and from London on a train. “I found it pretty reliable and very comfortable,” she says. Besides, she likes Britain, especially the light and “even the weather. I think it comes from my background. My people are very, very white and not wild about the sun.” In fact, she has Norwegian, German, Swiss, Dutch and Irish blood. She lived in Los Angeles for a bit for career reasons, but found it “creatively stifling. There’s an infectious desperation in the air. I was going to lots of SoulCycle classes and juice bars, and not working.” Gummer gets asked “all the time” whether she’s European. Partly it’s because her American accent is faint. She reminds me of Katharine Hepburn, in the way that she speaks and her reserve: she has that sense of being far older than her years. “It’s just occurred to me I’m not a girl but – I’m going to sound like that Britney Spears song now – I’m still a young woman. I feel pissed off when people say ‘ma’am’ but I was never comfortable with the ‘ingenue’ thing. I feel like I’ve lived a bit.” She got married at 27 to the actor Benjamin Walker and divorced two years later. Now in her 30s, Gummer feels “more settled”. “All my world wisdom,” she says. “I can’t help it – I just collected it for better or for worse” Having been brought up by a strong woman, it’s no surprise to learn that Gummer is supporting Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Presidential bid. “We can’t allow Trump to lead our country,” she says. Clinton, by contrast, “has the experience necessary. She has compromised in certain ways and surprised people in the ways she hasn’t.” There’s a pause. “Also, I really want to see a woman lead the United States.” It’s not such a stretch of the imagination. She’s been raised to believe women can do anything. The Collection is on Amazon Prime from today
Remembering the imagination of Roald Dahl
Lucy Dahl talks about her father, Roald – parent, writer and secret agent
Lucy Dahl has many precious memories of her father, Roald. The beloved children’s author, who was born 100 years ago this September, believed “boredom was a curse”. To get his children to eat their greens, he would claim that cabbage had been delivered by a Buckingham Palace footman. In the mornings, he would drive them to school still wearing his nightshirt and cap. Sometimes he would wake them up in the middle of the night to go on the hunt for badgers. “He always liked children more than adults,” Lucy recalls. “He used to say, ‘I have the same sense of humour.’” It was this capacity for thinking on their wavelength that made Roald Dahl one of the world’s best-loved children’s authors. The life of the dark comic genius behind classics such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG and Matilda is to be celebrated in a season of programmes kicking off on Radio 4 this Saturday with Roald Dahl – Boy, dramatised tales from the writer's own childhood. A BBC2 documentary at the end of July will form the centrepiece. Perhaps Lucy’s most lasting image of her father is not of the fantastical storyteller, admiration for whom she shared with the world, but an intimate memory of him as a much older man, lying in a hospital bed at the age of 74, suffering from a blood disease that would prove to be fatal. “I had two young children at the time,” Lucy recalls when we meet in a central London private members’ club. “My youngest, Chloë, was two months old. I was in Dad’s room and said, ‘I have to go and feed the baby,’ and he said, ‘All right.’ I gave him a kiss, walked to the door and he said, ‘Lucy.’ I turned around and he said, ‘Take care of your children.’” They were the last words he would ever say to her. She wells up at the memory. He died 26 years ago, but she still speaks to him “all the time. I can always find him when I need him. More so than when he was alive. I meditate every day, ask him for guidance and ask him questions.” And does he have the answers? She smiles. “Yes.” At 50, Lucy Dahl is the youngest of her father’s five children with the late American actress Patricia Neal. She is tall, willowy and beautiful, wearing rings on every one of her fingers. In person, she bears a striking physical resemblance to her father and has followed him into a writing career. She is currently a screenwriter living in Los Angeles and the mother of two daughters – Chloë is now a restaurateur and Phoebe, a fashion designer – and aunt to the model and author Sophie, who is married to the jazz musician Jamie Cullum. They’re quite an impressive bunch, the Dahls. Does she think her father would be proud of them all? “I know he’s proud. I think he’s very pleased of the woman I’ve grown to become.” When she got married for the first time, at the age of 22, it was to a windsurfing instructor she’d met on holiday at Club Med. Lucy had been a troublesome teenager and was expelled from school at 15. Getting married so young was a further act of rebellion. Her father didn’t approve and yet she never once doubted that he was on her side. In the back of the Rolls-Royce on the way to the church, Lucy remembers Dahl saying, “I’ll make a deal with you… If you stay in the car and let me walk into the church and announce, ‘She’s changed her mind. She’s not coming in. You can all go home,’ I will give you what this wedding has cost in cash.” Lucy turned him down. The marriage lasted six years. (She later remarried: when we meet, she is going through her second divorce.) Still, Dahl never said, “I told you so”. He simply wasn’t that kind of man. His defining characteristic, Lucy says, was “a belief in magic”. He used this to create extraordinary imagined worlds in his bestselling books – from the oversized peach that took to the skies, to the dream-catching friendly giant and the square-footed witches who couldn’t abide the smell of children – but he applied it to his family life, too. “He was able to walk a very fine line between tragedy and humour,” says Lucy. “He used to say, ‘If you tell a child a story about a man walking down the street and he steps on a banana and slips, they will roar with laughter. But the minute they realise he’s actually broken his back, they stop laughing and it’s not funny any more.” Dahl always teetered on the right side of the line. The humour in his books was only ever heightened by the possibility of unexpected horror. His real life, too, was punctuated by tragedy – but it was the sort of tragedy he refused to be defined by. In 1960, his son Theo was severely injured when his pram was struck by a taxi in New York, leaving him brain damaged. Dahl's response was to help invent a device to alleviate hydrocephalus, which became known as the Wade-Dahl-Till and is still in use today. (Theo, meanwhile, is living in Florida with his wife and 12-year-old daughter.) When, two years later, their daughter Olivia died of measles encephalitis at the age of seven, he became a forthright proponent of immunisation and later dedicated The BFG to her memory. Then, in 1965, his wife, Patricia, suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms while pregnant with Lucy. She was left unable to read, write or talk and had to relearn key motor skills. The neurosurgeon offered her daily two-hour rehabilitation sessions. Dahl, recalls Lucy, “refused to accept this. He said: ‘We’re going to get her back.’” He brought his wife home and organised a rota with all her friends from the village of Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, so that she would be occupied from nine in the morning till six in the evening. It meant that Lucy was learning to walk and talk at the same time as her mother. “They would teach her how to say ‘A’ and she would go ‘uh’,” Lucy says. “She would try to feed herself and miss her mouth. She’d try to put lipstick on and it would go down her face. And as she began to learn to sit up and feed herself and walk and talk, so did I.” When Dahl discovered that his wife found it easier to sing than speak, he devised family ditties to be sung in the car on road trips. Lucy remembers the same thing being done to help her learn her times-tables. “That was magic happening,” she says now. “That was him making the impossible possible.” Although Neal did eventually make a good recovery, it meant that Dahl was in the position of being both primary carer and breadwinner. He stuck to a strict routine: making the children’s breakfast (“He used to tell us the Minpins had delivered us little tiny eggs and then he’d put quails’ eggs inside fried bread”), taking them to school, then settling down at his typewriter for an hour’s correspondence. He would be in his writer’s hut from 10am until midday to work on the latest novel or screenplay: during this period, he bashed out scripts for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Bond film You Only Live Twice. After lunch, “He’d have a nap and usually a little bet – the bookies’ number was taped to the side of his bed.” By late afternoon, he was “back in Dad mode” and often picked up the children from school. He always wanted to know “what the naughtiest thing someone had done that day was”, and these tales later fed into his 1988 novel Matilda. At home, Dahl would create another outlandish meal for supper before telling them bedtime stories. It was from these stories that many of his fictional characters were created, including the BFG. The soon-to-be-released film adaptation of The BFG, starring Mark Rylance, is, Lucy says, “wonderful”. I wonder, given the emphasis he placed on acts of imagination, what Roald Dahl would make of today’s children and their reliance for entertainment on smartphones and iPads? “I don’t think he’d like it,” Lucy says. “It replaces the parents in a way. It certainly replaces the time a child spends with a parent. If we had had them when I was a child, I wouldn’t have had all these lovely stories… Now, in the car, the first thing that happens is the screen comes down and on comes the TV show, and parents don’t sing songs about times tables.” Although Dahl’s marriage to Neal failed and he later married Felicity Crosland, a family friend, Lucy says her mother always believed “she had him at his best”. Curiously, Lucy and her siblings always felt they knew her father so intimately – and yet, in recent years, they’ve made some startling discoveries. Donald Sturrock’s acclaimed 2010 biography of Dahl revealed that he had, in fact, been a spy during the Second World War – and seduced a bevy of women along the way. Lucy whoops with delight when I bring it up. “Yes, he was a spy! I was shocked that he was able to keep that secret, because he wasn’t a good secret-keeper. He was a terrible gossip, and the fact that he kept it secret was the biggest surprise of all.” But then Roald Dahl was always a master storyteller – a man who, 100 years after his birth, still has the capacity to delight us with a marvellously unexpected twist in the tale. Roald Dahl – Boy is on Radio 4 on Saturday at 2:30pm Lucy Dahl will talk about her father in the documentary The Marvellous World of Roald Dahl, to be shown on BBC2 at the end of July as part of the BBC's campaign to celebrate the pleasure of reading. Other Radio 4 highlights this week include: Archive on 4 – Roald Dahl In His Own Words – Saturday at 8pm Roald Dahl: Served With a Twist – Monday - Friday at 10:45am/7:45pm Roald Dahl: A Gremlin in the Works – Thursday at 11:30am
Piers Morgan: “Self-doubt is a massively tiresome virtue. I don’t really get the point of it”
As the journalist joins Good Morning Britain, he talks to Radio Times about guilt, Catholicism and why he'd rather "get a large anvil and smash it repeatedly on my head" than go into politics
Piers Morgan is keen to tell me about his great skin. “I’m in the top 18th percentile,” he says proudly, jutting his chin forward across the restaurant table so that I can better examine his pores. “And I’ve never had any work done. No Botox, nothing.” When he first moved to Los Angeles to take over the Larry King interview slot on CNN in 2010, Morgan visited a dermatologist. The way Morgan tells the story (which is effectively the way he tells every story: painting himself as the hero of events) the dermatologist informed him there was nothing that could be improved. “I’ve never moisturised!” Morgan, 50, says gleefully when we meet in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It’s true that his skin is the smooth, pink- hued texture of a baby-faced Englishman abroad. He says Joan Collins once told him the secret to good skin was staying out of direct sunlight. Morgan will be able to do a lot more of this in future because he is returning to the UK as part of the presenting team for ITV’s flagship break- fast show, Good Morning Britain. Morgan will be co-hosting the show with Susanna Reid three days a week, splitting his time between LA and London. Is he a morning person? “I am actually, yeah. I’ve always been good in the morning. Up early. My high-energy moments are normally in the morning. I’ve been getting good practice because my daughter has the most unbelievably bad sleeping pattern,” he says, referring to four-year-old Elise, his child with his wife, the journalist and author Celia Walden (he also has three sons from his first marriage). In fact, Morgan has worked out that the latest possible time he can set his alarm for will be 3.26am. “Military precision,” he says, pouring himself tea from a white china pot. For all his good cheer, it is hard not to think of this as some sort of comedown. When Morgan was hired by CNN and made the permanent move to the US, he was hailed in the American press as “the new king on the block” and expected to attract stellar ratings with his blend of forthright questioning and tabloid guile. The former Daily Mirror editor had already enjoyed a stint as a judge on America’s Got Talent and won the US version of Celebrity Apprentice in 2008, raising more money than all the other contestants combined. But CNN was not his natural home. By the end of his four-year stint, Morgan’s show was attracting just 270,000 viewers and he had alienated a large portion of the audience with his calls for gun control. Now he returns to front a breakfast format that has struggled to find its way: despite a recent increase in ratings, Good Morning Britain is still regularly trounced by the BBC. Morgan is refreshingly open about all of this. He says breakfast TV has suffered “with the explosion of news channels” and that ITV's offering in particular has “had a very tempestuous period... Over the last few years it’s become very disjointed, lost its identity.” But, as ever, he is chipper about the future. He thinks ITV bosses want him to be “lively” and “unpredictable”. He’s a big fan of his co-host Susanna Reid, who, he says, “treats me like a thoroughly naughty boy”. If you had to describe what it is that Piers Morgan will bring to breakfast TV, I start... He interrupts – Morgan is so eager to answer that interviewing him is a bit like having a very friendly terrier persistently scratching at one’s trouser leg. “Susanna would probably say, ‘Look, he’s half very nice and half Hannibal Lector.’” A brief pause. “But she likes it.” It is terribly un-British, this unassailable sense of self-worth, and it earns Morgan his fair share of enemies. On Twitter, he is combative, opinionated and routinely trolled — he once woke up to someone expressing the hope he and his children be beheaded by Isis. His response was sanguine: “Fortunately he didn’t know how to spell ‘beheaded’ so I was able to correct him.” Does he care about being loathed? “No. Because if I did I would be suicidal... I think if you’re going to be somebody like me, with my kind of persona, you may as well just play up the whole pantomime villain thing and enjoy it, which I thoroughly do. I never understand why you’d be bothered about what people you don’t know think of you.” Does he enjoy stirring up controversy for the sake of it, or does he believe what he’s saying? “I think it’s a protective persona, it’s easier that way,” he reflects. “I think once you’ve been a tabloid editor your persona is panto villain whether you like it or not... I’m afraid this is what I’m like: sort of combative, and I like an argument. Like a debate. Provocative. When it’s quiet, I try to stir things up. Write columns that blow up and get everyone talking [Morgan is editor-at-large for MailOnline], I love all that. But if you’re going to do that, you’re going to attract a lot of heat. It can get ugly, and I think you’ve got to have a thick skin to do it.” So there’s no self-doubt? “I do think self-doubt is a massively tiresome virtue. I don’t really get the point of it.” This might be the most Piers Morgan thing Piers Morgan has ever said about himself. But I am resolutely deter- mined to winkle out some depth behind his bombastic surface charm. His father, who died when Morgan was one, was Irish, and Morgan was raised in the Catholic faith. Does he still consider himself a Catholic? “I do.” Does he feel guilty over past mistakes? “All Catholics have to be guilty, that’s the whole point of it,” he jokes. “That’s the good thing about being a Catholic, you can do terrible things, feel guilty, apologise and move on. That’s the beauty of the religion.” Does he ever cry? “Children or football clubs. I have shed tears over Arsenal.” Does he go to confession? “Not for a long time. But I have done, yeah. It takes a long time, as you can imagine.” When was the last occasion? “Oh God, quite a few years ago. I wouldn’t say I’m the most fervent Catholic in terms of actively practising, but I do believe in God, I do believe in the Catholic religion, I do pray.” His critics would no doubt argue that Morgan has a lot of sins to confess. Before turning his hand to television, he was a tabloid journalist. At 29, he was appointed by Rupert Murdoch to be the youngest-ever editor of the News of the World. A year later, he was editing the Daily Mirror. He was sacked from the Mirror in 2004 after running staged photographs of British troops supposedly abusing Iraqi prisoners. “I remain of the view that the pictures depicted a wider truth,” he says now. “It’s not an excuse for publishing fake pictures, though I thought they were genuine... But the story that ran with them [about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners] never got denied and it’s believed to have been true.” And then there are the allegations of phone-hacking. Morgan has always denied that he was personally involved in the phone-hacking during his time at the Mirror. He has been interviewed by police as part of their inquiries under Operation Golding. “I can’t talk about it. And it’s not me being slippery, it’s just that there’s an ongoing investigation at Trinity Mirror. I can’t say anything. I would be happy to, but I can’t until it’s all over.” He went to visit his friend Andy Coulson in Belmarsh prison. Coulson, a former editor of the News of the World who became communications director for David Cameron, was serving an 18-month sentence for phone-hacking offences. “It was a very sobering experience,” Morgan says. But: “The tea was quite good.” He considers Coulson one of his best friends and is appalled by how Cameron “threw him to the wolves”. He still follows British politics and describes the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader as “absolutely, mind-blowingly, ridiculous... I saw him described as a sex symbol the other day and nearly fell out of my car. Jeremy Corbyn! He’s an Arsenal fan, so he’s not all bad... but it’s a ridiculous appointment. It makes them unelectable.” Would Morgan ever go into politics, I wonder? “No,” he says. “I’d rather get a large anvil and smash it repeatedly on my head.” And politics would probably be a waste of Morgan’s natural ebullience. Besides, his 18th-percentile skin is made for television. Good Morning Britain is on Weekdays at 6.00am on ITV
Emma Willis: "It’s great that women in their 40s on television are not being got rid of"
From MTV to Saturday nights at the BBC, how did Emma Willis hit the big time?
When Emma Willis was growing up, she thought she’d end up working in a hospital. She laughs when she describes herself as a teenager at school in Sutton Coldfield in the Midlands: “I had a blonde perm, brown eye shadow up to my eyebrows and I loved Bros. That was me.” Now, though, the perm is long gone and Willis is one of several female presenters – including Tess Daly, Claudia Winkleman, Caroline Flack and Holly Willoughby – dominating the Saturday-night schedules. But back then, television just didn’t seem like a real job. Willis’s father, Steve, was a postman and her mother, Cathy, an auxiliary nurse on a labour ward. Presenting primetime TV programmes was about as far away from her daily life as the idea of walking on the Moon. “I never thought it would happen to someone like me,” she says now, sitting in a brightly lit café in north London next to the studio where she has just had her Radio Timesphotoshoot. “I wanted to do what my mum did. I love blood and guts, I’m fascinated by it.” Her bright blue eyes sparkle unexpectedly at the thought of entrails and gruesome operations. Despite her ghoulish preoccupations, Willis was never destined for a job in surgical scrubs. At the age of 17, she was signed by Models 1 after a friend of her mother’s suggested she should give it a go. She moved to west London and was put up in a flat in Fulham with several fresh-faced wannabes. After ten years of modelling for GAP, Chanel, Vogue and Elle, she was hired by MTV and made the jump into TV presenting. At first, she found it ludicrous. “I felt silly saying things!” she recalls. “I was terrified, do you know what I mean?” At one point, a producer at MTV made her say the line: “Hello, and welcome to MTV” over and over again until she stopped sounding embarrassed. It worked – eventually. View oEmbed on the source website Now, at the age of 39, Willis is rapidly becoming one of the most recognisable faces on primetime: she is the regular host of Big Brother on Channel 5 and has fronted two series of The Voice UK, the BBC’s flagship talent show. This week she returns to BBC1 as the co-host of a new Saturday-night game show alongside fellow presenter and DJ Reggie Yates. Prized Apart features ten contestants, with partners. Each week, the ten competitors are given a range of tasks to carry out on location in Morocco, from jumping out of helicopters to navigating through one of the biggest souks in the world. Those who come last are flown back to the UK, where their partners (be it a spouse, parent, friend or child) must successfully answer a series of general knowledge questions to keep them in the game. It was the relationship between the contestants that most appealed to Willis. “I love people. Especially when you have that element of slight jeopardy... I mean, I like real people,” she adds, “not celebrities. I like the public.” And it’s true that, on screen, Willis conveys an authenticity and empathy that means people instinctively seem to warm to her. She enjoys getting to know what makes people tick. It’s part of the reason she likes Big Brother so much – she claims never to have missed a single episode. So who is her favourite contestant of all time? “Oh God, so many,” she replies. There is an anxious pause while she runs her fingers through her short, spiky hair. “Victor [Ebuwa]. Jade Goody. Kate Lawler. Brian Dowling. Nasty Nick... I will just go through all of them.” The Big Brother connection, the on-camera emoting and the dark-brown bob have all led to inevitable comparisons to Davina McCall. “Yeah, people say I’m a cut-price version,” Willis says, matter-of-factly. “For me, she’s the best. I’m sure I am a disappointment to lots of people but I know I’m not trying to copy someone, so f*** ’em.” In fact, her hair isn’t even naturally dark brown: she’s “a mousy, browny blonde” and these days she says she mostly dyes it to cover up the grey. Willis turns 40 next year. Her husband, the rock musician Matt Willis, is seven years her junior and she insists she is completely unfazed by the ageing process, despite working in an industry that has been accused of discrimination against older women. That has certainly not yet been Willis’s experience. She points out that most of her high profile contemporaries – like Daly, Winkelman, Flack and Willoughby – have been “plugging away for quite a while”. “We’re all in our 30s and 40s, which is nice because I think back to myself in my 20s and I knew b****r all and it’s only as I’ve got older that I feel I’ve started being taken slightly more seriously and I’ve figured out who I am a lot more,” she says. “As a woman that’s getting older it’s nice [to work in television] especially with what they say about Hollywood not having parts for older women. It’s great that women in their 40s on television are not being got rid of.” Does she feel more confident now than she did in her 20s? “Yeah... but I’m waiting for my luck to run out, do you know what I mean? I’ve been very lucky and there’s part of me that thinks: ‘When are they going to figure out I’m a bit of a fraud?’ But then Big Brother keep me and The Voicekeep me, so then you think, ‘OK, I must be doing something right.’” She has never encountered sexism and describes herself as a feminist. Having grown up in a female-dominated household – she has an older sister, Sharon, who is a financial adviser, and a younger sister by 13 years, Becky, who is a stylist on ITV’s This Morning– she clearly likes and supports other women. “Feminism now, it’s not about hating men, it’s about loving being a woman and loving men and wanting equality and why not? So, yeah, I believe in equality so I guess I’m a feminist.” Willis and her husband share the childcare duties equally – and when he is on tour with his band, her parents step in to help. They have been a couple since 2004, but it has not always been easy. Matt has struggled with drug and alcohol abuse and has had three stints in rehab – in 2005, briefly in 2006 and then in 2008. View oEmbed on the source website “We dealt with quite a lot quite early on,” says Willis. “We’re not big thinkers, we don’t plan, we just do and it’s only afterwards we look back with a bit of perspective and think, ‘Bloody hell!’ We’re quite similar in that respect and I think that helps. We just kind of get on with things and we’re both quite patient. I think we have a lot of belief in each other, so even when it got hard, we both knew that it could get better and were willing to do what it took to make it better.” These days, she describes her husband in glowing terms. He is: “just a brilliant person. He’s my best friend, incredibly good fun, extremely charismatic, very loving, very thoughtful, he’s selfless. I’ve never met anyone that has a bad word to say about him. Ever... And I fancy him still. He’s getting better with age.” The couple have two children: Isabelle, five, and Ace, three. Partly because of Willis’s fascination with medical procedures, she prepared for the arrival of her first child by watching endless birthing videos and episodes of One Born Every Minute. What was she like when she gave birth? “High!” she replies, laughing. And then the laughter fades and her voice drops. “I was kind of all over the place actually. It was really quite a tricky one and there was a lot of trauma – not mentally but physically.” The baby “got stuck... and at that point, you kind of, you just want to get her out”. Both Matt and her mother were in the delivery room with her. “Matt was OK because my mum was there. Had my mum not been there, we would have panicked much more. But she has worked on delivery wards for 20 years and she’s seen everything. We knew that if she wasn’t panicking then things were OK.” Willis opted for a caesarean the second time round. “The easy option,” she calls it. Not easy, I say: it’s major surgery. “Trust me,” she says, grinning, “it’s easier.” These days, her children are just about old enough to understand a little of what she does for a living. They watch The Voice and insist on re-enacting it at home. “It’s: ‘Mummy, Mummy! Tell me what Rita thinks!’” She giggles. “I always have to be Rita [Ora] because they love her. So they know what I do and that I’m on the telly but it’s just a job to them.” Just a job, maybe. But it’s one that Willis clearly adores – even taking into consideration the sad lack of blood and guts. Prized Apart airs on BBC1 on Saturday nights from 7pm
Jeremy Paxman on why he's trading news for comedy in this year's election
The veteran journalist will be co-presenting Channel 4's alternative election coverage alongisde David Mitchell, Richard Osman and other entertainment figures
Jeremy Paxman doesn’t like to watch himself on screen. In fact, he tends to avoid it altogether. “I find looking at myself on television horrible,” he says, a touch balefully. The BBC’s former inquisitor-in-chief, who left Newsnight after 25 years last June, is speaking in the back of a taxi on his way to the airport. This week, the 64-year-old will be fronting Channel 4’s election-night coverage and he is grabbing a short break trout fishing in Scotland before the hectic run-up to polling day. What’s the secret to landing a fish, then – patience? He bats away the question like a bored lion swishing at a fly with its tail. “People always say that, but actually, it doesn’t require a tremendous amount of patience at all,” he sighs, and for a moment I feel like a University Challenge contestant who has answered “Victoria Beckham” to a question about particle physics. “It requires concentration and immersion.” A pause. “Sometimes literally,” he adds. On Thursday night, 7 May, Paxman will be joined by comedian David Mitchell and guests including Pointless presenter Richard Osman for an acerbic, occasionally light-hearted look at the results as they come in. View oEmbed on the source website “The aim is to tell the whole story and to tell it in an entertaining way,” Paxman explains. “I’m not preparing any [comic] sketches, but there are some monologues about voting, about Scotland, what’s wrong with politics. And one or two bits of telly on the night that will involve the three of us.” At first glance, it might seem rather surprising that Paxman, the man who has never used one sneer when three would do and whose interview manner strikes icy fear into the heart of the ill-prepared politician, would sign up for this. But then you remember that, last year, he took a one-man show to the Edinburgh Fringe where he made jokes about tandem cycling with Sigourney Weaver and setting up a high-street Dignitas franchise. (“You’ll take Auntie Doris there and drop her off and she will say, ‘See you next Tuesday,’ and you will say, ‘Well... possibly.’”) His motto, he tells me, is “Be unexpected” and he did the one-man show because “I was scared of doing it and I feel very strongly you should do things you’re scared of doing.” The Paxman I’m speaking to today is very much the stand-up version – borderline jolly and frequently given to extravagantly sarcastic remarks, often made at his own expense. When I ask him how he feels about turning 65 four days after the election, he groans. “Do you have to intrude into private grief in this way?” And when I gingerly press him on his departure from Newsnight and whether there is anything about it he misses, he chuckles benignly. “I don’t have any second thoughts about my decision. I don’t see Newsnight, I’m afraid. My idea of fun is to go to bed at 10.30pm and read a book.” He has just finished Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery, a memoir written by the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, which he thought was “rather wonderful”. View oEmbed on the source website Perhaps it’s the prospect of a few days by a picturesque Scottish loch that’s making Paxman so Zen. He says he hasn’t looked back over the interviews he did with David Cameron and Ed Miliband on Channel 4 in March, even though his questioning style was criticised by some for being overly aggressive. Andrew Marr called Paxo’s technique “disdainful” and “contemptuous”, dismissing his former BBC colleague as “a genuinely tortured, angry individual”. Did Paxman see those comments? “Yeah, I did read them,” he says. “You are not the first person to try to get me to be rude about him [Marr], and I’m not going to, I’m afraid.” But is Paxman a tortured and angry individual? There is a light squall of laughter. “That’s for others to judge.” It seems nothing can diminish his good mood. He is excited about the election, he says. “I think it really matters... I’ve no sympathy whatsoever with people who say ‘I don’t vote’.” (He did admit to RT 18 months ago that he had once abstained from voting.) He once described himself as “a one-nation Tory”. Who is he going to vote for this time? “Mind your own business.” He has no sympathy – “none whatsoever” – with the comedian Russell Brand (below), who previously encouraged people not to vote in protest at the deficiencies of our democratic system [though since the time of this interview, Brand has encouraged people to vote Labour]. View oEmbed on the source website “I’m just astonished anyone would take that position [not to vote] seriously,” says Paxman now. “It’s the position of an idiot.” Would he be in favour of the introduction of compulsory voting, as in Australia? “On the whole, I’m in favour of the state getting out of people’s lives, but I would not have a problem with voting being made compulsory. But if you did that, you’d have to have a box for ‘None of the above’.” He acknowledges there are serious shortcomings in the way politics is conducted in Britain, most notably the “self-selecting bunch” of MPs currently sitting on the upholstered green benches of Parliament. The choice at this general election, he says, “is between one man who was at primary school with Boris Johnson and one man who was at secondary school with him, both of whom did PPE at Oxford.” He snorts. “What a high old world!” If it were up to him, Paxman would dust off the cobwebs, make the House of Commons into “a museum” and build a new Parliament “in some garden city in the Midlands”. As for modern politicians? “I really wish they just had a bigger interest in the world." View oEmbed on the source website In the week that we talk, Nick Clegg is pictured with the reality TV star Joey Essex at a Liberal Democrat press conference. During a bout of laser-sharp questioning reminiscent of Paxo’s most incisive interviews, Essex asked Clegg why his party has such a “weird” name. It turned out he mistakenly believed they are called the Liberal Demo-cats. Does Paxman know who Joey Essex is? He guffaws. “Of course I know who Joey Essex is!” Has he watched The Only Way Is Essex? “I have. I didn’t like it as much as I like Take Me Out, which I think is a fantastic show.” I’m sorry, I say. I thought I just heard you say you like ITV’s downmarket dating show... “I do!” In fact, it turns out Paxman has quite an extensive hinterland when it comes to trash TV. He has seen Made in Chelsea (“Just because I don’t like the people in it... it’s probably a reflection on me, not them”) and makes a knowledgeable passing reference to The Voice UK. Yes, Paxman certainly has mastered the knack of being unexpected. As it happens, this isn’t the first time I’ve interviewed him. On the last occasion, I was a 17-year-old wannabe journalist and Paxman kindly agreed to talk to me for the Malvern Gazette on the recommendation of my French teacher, Mr Leng, who had been Paxman’s housemaster at Malvern College in the late 1960s. Back in 1996, I asked Paxman which Winnie- the-Pooh character he most related to. He said Eeyore. What about now, I wonder? “It’s still damp in my part of the forest, I’m afraid,” he says. “But I think I’m getting slightly more Tiggerish in my old age.” It’s true: he’s bouncier than he’d have you believe. Channel 4's Alternative Election Night begins on Thursday 7th May at 9.00pm, and runs until 6.00am