Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2025-01-27T17:05:37.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: 'Of course I was anti-Thatcher'
items: Steve Coogan on Thatcher portrayal in new drama: 'We cut something in the edit that was too kind'
items: Emily Maitlis on A Very Royal Scandal and the relationship between media and monarchy
items: The Prince and the Reporter
items: "Grenfell was a tragedy right on my doorstep": Newsnight's Emily Maitlis recalls reporting from the scene of the fire
items: Piers Morgan on Trump, feminism, quitting morning TV – and his bid to become an “international treasure”
items: Gordon Ramsay: I was asked to dust a soufflé with cocaine
items: Emily Maitlis: A guide to election night
items: Emily Maitlis: "Reporting on the Manchester bombing hit me so hard"
items: Matt LeBlanc on Chris Evans, Jeremy Clarkson – and Joey from Friends
items: David Attenborough on Planet Earth II, Brexit and the future of humanity
items: When Newsnight's Emily Maitlis met The Daily Show's Jon Stewart

'Of course I was anti-Thatcher'
type: item
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Speaking to Emily Maitlis for RT, Steve Coogan grew up with a ‘huge antipathy’ for Margaret Thatcher. But in making his new drama about her encounters with Brian Walden, he found himself empathising with her instead
encoded: Add Brian and Maggie to your watchlist On the morning Steve Coogan and I sit down, Kemi Badenoch is railing against the “bland, soggy old sandwich” and declaring a war on lunch. Nigel Farage is posting a picture of himself on X with a “Great British sandwich” and some crisps, while Keir Starmer has upped the stakes by calling it a “British institution” and hailing the lunchtime toastie. None of this is odd. Indeed, it feels entirely appropriate. Because this is now how our politicians communicate. Today, the lengthy, forensic television interview of yore is the political equivalent of dinosaur bones in the Natural History Museum. Celebrated with the quiet awe reserved for the extinct – and then turned into TV drama. The drama of the television interview became my world last year when the 2019 Newsnight interview I did with Prince Andrew was serialised in A Very Royal Scandal and became a feature-length film in Scoop. But as 2025 begins, it feels like we aren’t done with the genre. There’s an appetite to see these moments of recent history set back in context – to flesh out the characters, to better understand them once the news cycle has stopped rolling. And this is why we are meeting. Steve Coogan and Harriet Walter have re-created the 1980s interviews for London Weekend Television between Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher in a two-part drama called Brian and Maggie. It’s based on Rob Burley’s book Why Is This Lying B*****d Lying to Me? about the potential the longform interview unlocks. It asks questions of the relationship between the protagonists. And whether in all powerful interviews there are the seeds of betrayal. Coogan plays former Labour MP Brian Walden, who becomes disillusioned with his party, or perhaps with politics, and goes over to “the other side” to become a TV interviewer. His very first encounter is with the newish leader of the opposition, one Margaret Thatcher. The drama charts the subsequent interviews between them alongside the shifts of po…

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Steve Coogan on Thatcher portrayal in new drama: 'We cut something in the edit that was too kind'
type: item
date: 2025-01-21T00:01:12.000Z
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Channel 4
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: Emily Maitlis speaks to Steve Coogan about his new Channel 4 drama Brian and Maggie for the latest issue of Radio Times magazine.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. On the morning Steve Coogan and I sit down, Kemi Badenoch is railing against the “bland, soggy old sandwich” and declaring a war on lunch. Nigel Farage is posting a picture of himself on X with a “Great British sandwich” and some crisps, while Keir Starmer has upped the stakes by calling it a “British institution” and hailing the lunchtime toastie. None of this is odd. Indeed, it feels entirely appropriate. Because this is now how our politicians communicate. Today, the lengthy, forensic television interview of yore is the political equivalent of dinosaur bones in the Natural History Museum. Celebrated with the quiet awe reserved for the extinct – and then turned into TV drama. The drama of the television interview became my world last year when the 2019 Newsnight interview I did with Prince Andrew was serialised in A Very Royal Scandal and became a feature-length film in Scoop. But as 2025 begins, it feels like we aren’t done with the genre. There’s an appetite to see these moments of recent history set back in context – to flesh out the characters, to better understand them once the news cycle has stopped rolling. And this is why we are meeting. Steve Coogan and Harriet Walter have re-created the 1980s interviews for London Weekend Television between Brian Walden and Margaret Thatcher in a two-part drama called Brian and Maggie. It’s based on Rob Burley’s book Why Is This Lying B*****d Lying to Me? about the potential the longform interview unlocks. It asks questions of the relationship between the protagonists. And whether in all powerful interviews there are the seeds of betrayal. Coogan plays former Labour MP Brian Walden, who becomes disillusioned with his party, or perhaps with politics, and goes over to “the other side” to become a TV interviewer. His very first encounter is with the newish leader of the opposition, one Margaret Thatcher. The drama charts the subsequent interviews between them alongside th…

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Emily Maitlis on A Very Royal Scandal and the relationship between media and monarchy
type: item
date: 2024-09-16T14:00:08.000Z
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: The new Prime Video drama debuts this week.
encoded: It has been almost five years since the BBC Newsnight team — class of 2019 — sat down with the Duke of York for a television interview that would rock his world and — in different ways — rock ours, too. Now, a three-part drama on Amazon Prime will take you behind-the-scenes of what was happening inside the BBC newsroom — and bring you our understanding of some of the conversations that were going on in royal circles at that time, behind the hallowed gates of Buckingham Palace. The writing is fast paced, funny and lays bare both the high-stakes tension and the low-level chaos that went into that journalistic endeavour. Michael Sheen’s superb portrayal of the journey Andrew takes is oddly moving. From gentle buffoon to social pariah — he’s a man who nevertheless instils huge loyalty and love from the women closest to him. It explores the curious relationship between the media and the monarchy — asking who needs who more — and showing what each side has to fear from a public clash that goes wrong. But this drama quietly poses another question. In the peerless hands of director Julian Jarrold and producer Josh Hyams, it looks at the power of journalism and, frankly, at its limitations too. The ability to hold to account those at the very top of our public institutions — church, crown, state — is what makes a free press thrive and a democracy healthy. But five years on, the drama asks — what has fundamentally changed for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims or for Andrew? As Ruth Wilson [playing Maitlis] notes drily: "He’s still at Sandringham for Christmas." Prince Andrew’s life has changed, of course. Stripped of royal titles, a job, and a wider sense of any public role, you could argue that everything stopped for him after the public reaction to the Newsnight interview. The duke (or perhaps his mother, Queen Elizabeth) paid undisclosed millions of pounds to settle a civil case with Virginia Giuffre, who accused him of sexually assaulting her on three occasions — opting for a pay…

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The Prince and the Reporter
type: item
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Prince Andrew went from gentle buffoon to social pariah following her interview. But as a new drama examines the aftermath, Emily Maitlis asks: is that enough?
encoded: Add A Very Royal Scandal to your watchlist. It has been almost five years since the BBC Newsnight team — class of 2019 — sat down with the Duke of York for a television interview that would rock his world and — in different ways — rock ours, too. Now, a three-part drama on Amazon Prime will take you behind the scenes of what was happening inside the BBC newsroom — and bring you our understanding of some of the conversations that were going on in royal circles at that time, behind the hallowed gates of Buckingham Palace. The writing is fast paced, funny and lays bare both the high-stakes tension and the low-level chaos that went into that journalistic endeavour. Michael Sheen’s superb portrayal of the journey Andrew takes is oddly moving. From gentle buffoon to social pariah — he’s a man who nevertheless instils huge loyalty and love from the women closest to him. It explores the curious relationship between the media and the monarchy — asking who needs who more — and showing what each side has to fear from a public clash that goes wrong. View oEmbed on the source website But this drama quietly poses another question. In the peerless hands of director Julian Jarrold and producer Josh Hyams, it looks at the power of journalism and, frankly, at its limitations too. The ability to hold to account those at the very top of our public institutions — church, crown, state — is what makes a free press thrive and a democracy healthy. But five years on, the drama asks — what has fundamentally changed for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims or for Andrew? As Ruth Wilson [playing Maitlis] notes drily: “He’s still at Sandringham for Christmas”. Prince Andrew’s life has changed, of course. Stripped of royal titles, a job, and a wider sense of any public role, you could argue that everything stopped for him after the public reaction to the Newsnight interview. The duke (or perhaps his mother, Queen Elizabeth) paid undisclosed millions of pounds to settle a civil case with Virginia Giuffre, wh…

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"Grenfell was a tragedy right on my doorstep": Newsnight's Emily Maitlis recalls reporting from the scene of the fire
type: item
date: 2018-06-14T15:31:43.000Z
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Newsnight reporter Emily Maitlis didn’t want to report on the Grenfell fire – she dashed to the scene to help instead
encoded: It’s extraordinary to realise we are nearly one year on from Grenfell. The number of dead has been confirmed at 72. There is a still a criminal investigation, a public inquiry, there are many people still not permanently rehoused, many more with problems sleeping from the trauma they experienced that night. But this is my attempt to make sense of it from a personal perspective. It is one of the stories that has affected me most in my lifetime as a journalist and as a citizen. I have covered many tragedies in my professional life – just in the past year the Manchester and London terror attacks, before that the terror attacks in Paris, twice. I’ve been sent to America to cover numerous and appalling shootings. All are linked by the same overwhelming sense of outrage and futility. Never before, though, have I covered something on my doorstep. This felt very different. My first inkling of something strange that Wednesday morning came at around 1am. My husband was out of bed at the sound of sirens. We live about 15 minutes away, on a main road, so we are used to sirens, but these were more persistent. “There’s been a fire,” he said. And at that point, I remember my sense of relief that it wasn’t terrorism. Fires, we know, don’t really kill people. Not in London. Not in the 21st century. Channel 4 to go inside Grenfell Tower in virtual reality documentary DIY SOS reveals new project to help Grenfell Tower community RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox By dawn, I was up running with the dog on Primrose Hill. It was only when I reached the top that I looked back and saw the heavy grey smoke in the direction I’d just come. That was when it started to sink in. I wasn’t working that day, and I remember feeling relieved. I didn’t want to cover that fire as a journalist. I felt strongly I didn’t want to be down there with a microphone and a camera, intruding on grief and confusion when things were so raw. It’s my job, unfortuna…

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Piers Morgan on Trump, feminism, quitting morning TV – and his bid to become an “international treasure”
type: item
date: 2018-03-03T09:00:48.000Z
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: ITV's Good Morning Britain presenter speaks candidly ahead of his new series of Life Stories
encoded: Piers Morgan helps himself to a cup of tea, sits down at the kitchen table, and asks me how I am. For the next five minutes, I tell him. My week, my month, my anxieties. Then I suddenly realise what’s happened. I’m doing all the talking. And that’s wrong – because I’m meant to be asking the questions. And that is also very Piers Morgan. There’s a reason he called his interview series Life Stories – because people talk to him. “On the way here,” he says, “just a 20-minute walk, I had three taxi-drivers calling to me out of their windows. At the café, six or seven people came over to talk about Trump.” Piers Morgan’s wife surprises him on live TV with an interview of her own Home Secretary Amber Rudd tells Piers Morgan that pardoning suffragettes is “tricky” Even with more than six million followers on Twitter, he’d prefer to be thought of as the bloke you strike up a conversation with over a fry-up. They’re talking to him about Trump because of January’s Davos interview – the first, lest any of us forget, “international television interview with the US president”. It took a year to secure. He had a phone call with Donald Trump – whom he’s known for a decade – in the month after he won the 2016 election and was promised, whenever an interview finally happened, he’d be the first. View oEmbed on the source website The reaction to it, Morgan is quick to point out, has been confusing. “It may not have been a traditional, conventional hard news interview, but that wasn’t my intention. My intention was 45 minutes of prime-time. They’re different animals. And I’ve been really struck by the public reaction, universally saying, ‘I saw a different side to him.’ Not that they thought better of him, but different.” Journalistic reaction wasn’t so generous. I’m wondering what Morgan made of veteran BBC world affairs editor John Simpson weighing in on Twitter to tell him, “The art of the political interview, Piers, is to push your interviewee hard – not let them spout self-evident …

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Gordon Ramsay: I was asked to dust a soufflé with cocaine
type: item
date: 2017-10-19T13:07:19.000Z
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The chef tells Emily Maitlis all about his war on drugs, his bust-up with his father-in-law and his very public feud with Jamie Oliver
encoded: “Seeds…,” Gordon Ramsay is telling me. “Seeds should be inside a f****** cage. Fed to your parrot. Or your canaries. Seeds should go inside a cage and stay inside a cage.” It is vintage Ramsay. I have unleashed a small tirade by asking the multi-Michelin-starred chef what food fads most annoy him. “And foam,” he adds, for good measure. “Foam should go in your hair. Not on a plate. In the 1990s I had a cappuccino soup with white beans, but I moved on. Foams have to be abolished.” We are sitting in the Union Street Café in south-east London, one of his 31 restaurants worldwide, drinking coffee. He takes his short and black with – almost incongruously for a man with such a finely tuned palate – an injection of artificial sweetener on the side. But it is another ice-white chemical substance we are here to discuss today: cocaine and his loathing of it. And this is where shouty chef departs and in his place I meet a man who passionately wants to spill the beans on “the hospitality industry’s dirty little secret”. He’s made a two-part documentary to expose its prevalence and its power – not least over those he has loved. He lost a head chef, David Dempsey, in 2003 in a cocaine-related death. And his brother Ronnie is a long-term heroin addict who’s now been missing for six months. But the momentum for this film came, he tells me, at Christmas last year. “A customer took a side plate from the table, went into the bathroom, snorted a couple of lines of coke and handed the plate back to the waiter and said, ‘We’ve just done some lines of coke for lunch, can you change the sideplates…’ This started the whole dilemma of how far this is going on and the pressure restaurants are up against from customers.” The diners got a ticking-off from the manager. Ramsay says if he’d been there he would have thrown them out. He was shocked about the openness of the drug use, and decided to test the loos used by public and staff of his own restaurants – including the Union Street Café where w…

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Emily Maitlis: A guide to election night
type: item
date: 2017-06-08T20:05:00.000Z
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: From the polls closing to the final results – every second counts
encoded: Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis reveals how to keep up with the action on election night 10pm The polls close and David Dimbleby will announce the results of the joint BBC/ITV/Sky exit poll. At that moment we should have a pretty good idea which seats could be changing hands. Two years ago the exit poll predicted a Conservative victory while the opinion polls got it wrong... 10.45pm Sophie Raworth is in Sunderland which is usually the first seat to declare. This time there’s competition from Newcastle — which may mean that for the first time in 20 years there will be a proper race to declare first. 1am Watch Wales. The seats along the north coast of Wales have relatively small populations, which means there are fewer votes to count so they should be quite quick. If the Conservatives are having a good night they might see an early gain in Wrexham. 1.30am Islington North — Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency and one of the quickest seats in London. It’s obviously a safe Labour seat — but we will listen to his speech. And Nick Robinson will be there with him to read the runes. 2am The first results from Scotland. Will Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP, currently with 56 of the 59 seats, complete its near clean sweep north of the border, or will the Scottish Conservatives, under Ruth Davidson, push back and mount a serious challenge? Will Labour and the Liberal Democrats, each with just one sitting MP, be in attack mode — or defence mode? We’ll start to see the picture around this time. 2.30am Bring on the key marginals! This is where the night gets interesting, so I’ll be looking out for Darlington, Tooting and Nuneaton. Nuneaton was the centre of the psephological universe last time around when it stayed with the Conservatives. If Labour fights off an attack in Darlington with a larger returned majority, they might be safer than we thought. But if this town starts to wobble, Labour could be in trouble. 3am By now Jeremy Vine’s virtual battlegrounds will be colouring up at the rate of fi…

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Emily Maitlis: "Reporting on the Manchester bombing hit me so hard"
type: item
date: 2017-06-04T07:00:00.000Z
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The Newsnight journalist reveals the emotional repercussions of her coverage of the bombing
encoded: It is a thankless and ultimately futile task to start comparing one terror atrocity with another. I have covered enough. Too many. In Paris, in London, in Orlando, in Charleston, in Virginia. And recently in Manchester. I know what time and where the vigil will be without asking. I can predict the moment they’ll colour up, or darken, the Eiffel Tower in solidarity. I do not say this glibly. I say this with a knot in my stomach that’s like a rock. There is a pattern: prayers and poems, hashtags and hugs – it’s the aching familiarity of it all that’s so painful. Which is why I’m struggling to understand why the bombing of the Manchester Arena hit me so hard. On the day after the bombing I reported for Newsnight from Manchester. I spoke to Ian, a tough-looking Glaswegian barman who’d made Manchester his home for 20 years. The morn ing after the attack he turned up at the blood bank for the first time in his life, and he started crying as soon as he spoke to me. He didn’t really stop for the whole interview. I talked to Colin Parry, who’d lost his 12-year-old son in an IRA attack on a shopping centre nearly 25 years ago. A boy going to look at a pair of Everton football shorts. “He didn’t even have enough money saved up to get them,” he joked. A father who’s had decades to think of the ramifications of that one tiny act, and its devastating result. “What advice would you give these parents?” I asked. “I wouldn’t,” he said. “You spend the first months just surviving. You sleep and eat and sleep and eat and nothing else is required of you until finally you think, maybe I’m now able to hold a conversation.” It devastated me to hear his raw honesty of a life reduced to that. Much has been said about the loss of such young life in Manchester. The concert will have been a rite of passage for every teenager, every kid, falling in love with music for the first time, tasting what it means to leave your hang-ups – and your parents – at the door, and enter a sublime brave new worl…

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Matt LeBlanc on Chris Evans, Jeremy Clarkson – and Joey from Friends
type: item
date: 2017-03-05T09:00:00.000Z
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: TV
description: "I would like people to sit down and try to watch Top Gear with an unbiased mind"
encoded: Like some great big fat cosmic joke, Radio Times has invited an interviewer whose motoring adrenaline falls some way short of Postman Pat’s to interview the World Famous Presenter of Top Gear. An interviewer who describes cars by their colour, who believes McLaren is a byword for a pram not a racing team, and who keeps one foot on the brake when driving on a motorway to kill her speed. Yes dear reader, I am that person, and right now I’m caught somewhere between trauma and thrill at what is about to unfold. I’m setting my phone to record when the door opens and there – in a baseball cap, jeans and a slightly too-bright blue sweatshirt, stands Joey from Friends. Except he’s no longer Joey from Friends, he’s Jeremy from Top Gear. Except he would hate that even more. So let’s just say there stands Matt LeBlanc. He looks trim, tired, slightly wary – little does he know how little I know! “Go gently,” I say. “I want to understand your passion for cars, but treat me like I’m engine blind.” And so it begins: “Well, a car is a box you sit in that has four wheels. No, five if you count the steering wheel...” But what emerges is not – as I had expected – the riff of a man who has been unsuitably parachuted into a role, rather like the character he plays in the sitcom Episodes, but a man who lives and breathes cars. A man who is not just at home behind the steering wheel but actually underneath any of the other four. A man who enjoys playing around with “the giant three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle”, who describes the thrill of “fixing things”, and who tells me, “I’m pretty handy... I was one of those kids who took stuff apart and put it back together and got into trouble for it.” His dad, he admits, wasn’t around much, but he was a mechanic who bought him his first set of tools. “I’ve got more tools than most people,” he tells me. It’s a cracking boast and I giggle because actually I am properly impressed. I had not expected him to sound this, well, useful. Does he feel sad, I w…

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David Attenborough on Planet Earth II, Brexit and the future of humanity
type: item
date: 2016-12-11T18:00:00.000Z
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The legendary presenter talks to Emily Maitlis about everything from Mars to Jeremy Clarkson
encoded: Perhaps I should have guessed that a man who has spent a lifetime hiding stealthily in undergrowth should be able to enter a room without anyone seeing. But the first time I’m aware that David Attenborough is behind me is when he observes, “It’s the small eyes – too close together – and the length of the nose. The rat is never going to make it.” He has found me in the middle of a conversation about what makes some animals lovable to humans and some repellent. It is, of course, his home turf. Not just the understanding of the animals themselves. But of how we – the humans – respond to them. He leads me off to a more private room to continue our chat, making his own coffee on the way. I confess to him that I’m still having dreams about a particularly vivid scene from the first episode of his new series, Planet Earth II, where a newly hatched marine iguana has to escape a medusa-like string of snakes as it runs to the sea to find food. View oEmbed on the source website It’s my first warning – spoiler alert – that not every animal in the series makes it out of there alive. And from Attenborough, it elicits a gentle rebuke to my way of thinking. “We are very, very strange that we think every child has got to survive. There are very few creatures in the world like that.” It will be a theme he develops later – he’s passionate about population control, and realistic in the part we should play in it. He looks 60, perhaps, not 90. A head full of silver hair, a playful face that crinkles easily into laughter. Maybe it’s the youthfulness of a man who can say he has spent a lifetime doing what he adores. Or maybe – my eyes wander to the stash of KitKats on the table before him – he’s fuelling his old age with the right stuff. Either way, it appears to be working. He’s taken to the skies in a hot air balloon for this series, and seems shocked when I admit I’ve never tried it. “One of the best things is that suddenly you will hear much nicer things. You hear church bells, you hear…

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When Newsnight's Emily Maitlis met The Daily Show's Jon Stewart
type: item
date: 2015-05-06T11:52:00.000Z
creator: Emily Maitlis
subject: Comedy
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The British presenter turned fan girl to quiz the king of US satire
encoded: He is sitting at the bar, with his back to me, ordering a coffee when I get to the north London studio. Normally, I don’t get nervous. This time I am. And it takes me a second to understand why. As I stare at the back of his head, I realise I am willing this Jon Stewart to be the one I fell in love with on The Daily Show. The one I have just flown back from an Alp in order to meet. The comedian who has managed to teach me so much about my own journalistic profession, and has done it with an almost reckless ease at his own brilliance. I do not want to find out he’s a complete muppet in real life. That his thoughts are all tightly scripted, his jokes pre-prepped. I am desperate, in other words, not to be disappointed. I order a coffee as his arrives, and he insists on paying for it with “this English money” – which he throws around with abandon like Belarusian rubles – as if he has no intention of returning here, ever. We are here to discuss the film Rosewater, his directorial debut. It has been sent to me by the PR company ahead of the release date in cinemas on Friday 8th May. And, in keeping with current practice in the industry – as a foil to piracy, they have burned my name across every single frame of the film so I can’t share it. All the subtitles now appear to end with the phrase EMILY MAITLIS – which I admit to him makes for slightly unnerving viewing. “Yes,” he deadpans – without missing a beat. “Not just your copy, everyone’s. We made sure every single version of that film has EMILY right across the screen.” And my shoulders drop with relief. It is vintage Jon Stewart. His tone. His voice. Suddenly I know it’s all going to be fine. Rosewater is the true story of Maziar Bahari (played by Gael García Bernal), an Iranian BBC and Newsweek journalist who was thrown into prison for 118 days after filming incriminating footage of the security services during the election of 2009. It was Iran’s “Green Revolution” that brought social media – especially Twitter – to…

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