Winter Paralymics 2026: Meet the Presenters
The Winter Paralympics 2026 presenters on legacy, ambition - and who they're most excited to watch
Add the Winter Paralympics 2026 to your watchlist Ade Adepitan The presenter has been part of Channel 4’s Paralympics coverage since London 2012 and is a familiar face on programmes from The One Show to Unreported World. He won a bronze medal in wheelchair basketball in the 2004 Paralympics. How are you on snow and ice? Rubbish on ice, OK on snow. I ski a bit, although I got a bit too ambitious on the snow a few years ago and injured myself. Anyone who’s had polio doesn’t like the cold. I’m the sort of person that starts wearing thermals from the Notting Hill Carnival onwards, so I’ll be wearing heated underpants, heated socks, heated gilets… I don’t know if you can broadcast with a balaclava on, but I might give it a go. Is there a different vibe to the Winter Paralympics? It feels more chilled than the summer Games, but with a lot more danger to it: visually impaired athletes coming down an icy mountain, relying on a guide to tell you over Bluetooth where to turn? The stakes are so high. Which Brits are you tipping for victory? Neil Simpson and his brother Andrew, his guide in the super-G, won our only gold last time, so I hope they defend their title. Menna Fitzpatrick had a bad injury in December so she won‘t be 100 per cent, but at her best she can compete with the top skiers. And I love James Barnes-Miller — watching him go from young whippersnapper to snowboarding veteran has been amazing. I’d love to see him finish with a medal. What legacy would you like to see from these Paralympic Winter Games? There’s nothing more life-affirming, when you have a disability, than going to the top of a mountain, then seeing the faces of non-disabled people as you glide past them in a sit ski. The energy, strength and confidence that gives you is massive and I want every disabled person to experience that. Society beats you down as a disabled person and I want these Paralympics to show people what we’re about, despite everything we have to deal with. Alice Tai The consolation for the triple Paralympic gold-medal-winning swimmer is that instead of competing she will be reporting on the action from Italy for Channel 4… As a Paralympic swimmer, how do you feel about reporting rather than competing? Really excited! I deeply understand the connection between a good performance that’s not got you on the podium, and one where you won a medal but you’re disappointed in the performance. I’m intrigued by all the technicalities. I had my eye on making the Para biathlon team myself but left it a bit late because I was training for Paris. A Brit has never medalled at both Paralympics and Winter Paralympics, and I really wanted to do it first. I know that Jo Butterfield could achieve that feat this year. I want her to win, but selfishly, I’m kind of hoping she comes second! What event are you most excited about seeing? The sledge hockey: you think wheelchair rugby is violent? Just you wait. And you’re working alongside Dame Sarah Storey, a Para-athlete who switched disciplines very successfully. When I first started Paraswimming, I was beating her British records. That’s how I found out that she used to swim! I’d love to take a leaf from her book — to stay at such an elite level for so long is really impressive — and I think she’s had enough success in cycling to not be bitter about me taking her records… What are your memories of London 2012? I remember, after the Olympics, those Channel 4 posters saying, “Thanks for the warm-up”. I’d never seen such care and love put into the marketing of the Paralympics and it got me so excited for it. Then watching Ellie Simmonds in the 400m freestyle, when she turned for the final 50m and the crowd erupted… I was like, I want to do this. Billy Monger After a crash curtailed a promising motorsport career and resulted in a double leg amputation, Billy Monger has continued racing, broken world Iron Man records and Raced across the World with his mum. He’s now co-hosting Channel 4’s daytime Paralympics coverage. Does this feel like your first proper Paralympic Winter Games, given the Covid restrictions around 2022? Yeah, the lack of buzz in Beijing was weird. Ed Jackson and I are hosting the daytime live show between us, which is an exciting step up, because a lot of my motorsport work is as a pundit rather than presenter. And being in a studio halfway up a mountain provides its own challenges, as you can imagine. Are you a winter sports fan? When I was a kid, I went skiing a few times and I’ve taken up sit skiing since my accident. Engaging your core in a different way takes time to get used to, but flying down a mountain is a thrill. Who are you looking forward to watching? I’ve followed the cross country skier Scott Meenagh for a few years. In my early days, figuring out how to get through after my crash, as a fellow double amputee he seemed to have that strong athletic mindset. At first, the priority is regaining the basic independence of being able to walk again. But I wanted to feel like I could still live an exciting life and he really opened my mind. It’s his last hurrah, so a medal would be a cool way to bow out. And you’ve got your own Paralympic ambitions? I’m continuing the training that worked for me in Kona, Hawaii (breaking the Iron Man world record for a double amputee in 2024), with the aim of competing in the paratriathlon at Los Angeles in 2028. To wear the GB colours for the first time is an exciting thought, although it might be hard to keep up the work for Channel 4 at the same time!
From his three pet cats to Three Lions, the comedian is a feline-obsessive
Add David Baddiel: Cat Man to your watchlist What’s the view from your sofa? We’ve got quite a big sofa, in front of the telly and a gas fire. Normally there are two or three cats on or around it and a mix of family. I like to decide what to watch around 8pm. If we leave it to half nine, I’ll be falling asleep, as will my wife [writer Morwenna Banks], and the kids will be FaceTiming friends. Do you agree on what to watch together? She won’t thank me for mentioning this, because it sounds a bit self-indulgent, but Morwenna has showrun Down Cemetery Road [the Apple TV thriller starring Emma Thompson] and likes us all to watch it together. That can be quite complicated, because if we start talking, she’s like, “Shhh, this is a good bit!” My son Ezra and I watch football together, and my daughter Dolly and I recently watched Severance with Frank Skinner, who lives on the same street. Morwenna and I are keener on documentaries. You’ve also written a new TV drama? Yeah, I love storytelling and I really enjoyed writing Hunting Alice Bell [an upcoming C4 thriller], which is about four women who are mistaken for being the lover of a notorious serial killer and come out fighting against the mob. It’s a metaphor for the disinformation and madness we’re seeing now and also a fairly low-budget thriller, so seeing a helicopter blow up on Down Cemetery Road stirred some complicated feelings. Do your cats watch telly? Tiger really likes telly, although Ron and Zelda are less bothered. Tiger loves sport and sometimes music, especially the Bee Gees. They’re all from the same mum, but we gave Zelda to my parents as a kitten. When my dad got dementia and my mum died, Zelda was mainly living in the garden. By the time she came back to us, it wasn’t like Long Lost Family, unless Long Lost Family had an episode where someone spat and hissed at their new mum. Zelda [pictured above] is very high maintenance, Tiger loves you unconditionally and Ron is a weirdo, although he’s become more friendly since his mum died. What is David Baddiel: Cat Man about? It’s a polemic, in a way, pushing back on stereotypes that cats don’t do anything, that they’re mean and selfish and have no empathy compared to dogs. The programme has paddleboarding cats, cats that go for walks, cats that help out at hospitals, and I have Jonathan Ross, Ricky Gervais, Dawn O’Porter and other people speaking about cats in a very emotional way. Have you always been a cat person? My dad was a Welsh working-class bloke whose top note was irritation. I said at his funeral that he was a man who liked football, food and shouting, “Who the f***ing hell is this now?” every time the phone rang. The one place he showed affection was towards our cat, which was foundational for my brothers and me because we’ve all ended up as cat people. The relationship you might have with a cat is possibly more complex than with a dog, and cats are more like humans. You’ve been called the voice of football, alternative comedy, laddism, British Jews… Would you drop all those to be the voice of cats? Absolutely! I’ve always been obsessed, to some extent, with cats. I don’t feel very happy unless there’s a cat in the vicinity. I also don’t particularly like being seen as one thing. When I’m asked to speak about antisemitism, I tend to say no now – not because it’s not still a very important issue, but because I’ve decided to not be seen as an activist. Your 1996 single Three Lions will be rolled out at the World Cup this year. Does that still make you proud? Well, there’s been a concerted effort by the FA to supplant it with Sweet Caroline, which is weird, given it’s an American anthem and not about football. In the Gareth Southgate era, there was a sense of needing to move on, especially because our 1998 version had audio footage of him missing the penalty, so I understood why he found that difficult! But I’m very proud of Three Lions. The music’s great and the lyrics do connect with football fans.
David Baddiel explains why he's pushing back on cat stereotypes in new show with Ricky Gervais and Jonathan Ross
From his three pet cats to Three Lions, the comedian is a feline-obsessive.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. What’s the view from your sofa? We’ve got quite a big sofa, in front of the telly and a gas fire. Normally there are two or three cats on or around it and a mix of family. I like to decide what to watch around 8pm. If we leave it to half nine, I’ll be falling asleep, as will my wife [writer Morwenna Banks], and the kids will be FaceTiming friends. Do you agree on what to watch together? She won’t thank me for mentioning this, because it sounds a bit self-indulgent, but Morwenna has showrun Down Cemetery Road [the Apple TV thriller starring Emma Thompson] and likes us all to watch it together. That can be quite complicated, because if we start talking, she’s like, “Shhh, this is a good bit!” My son Ezra and I watch football together, and my daughter Dolly and I recently watched Severance with Frank Skinner, who lives on the same street. Morwenna and I are keener on documentaries. You’ve also written a new TV drama? Yeah, I love storytelling and I really enjoyed writing Hunting Alice Bell [an upcoming C4 thriller], which is about four women who are mistaken for being the lover of a notorious serial killer and come out fighting against the mob. It’s a metaphor for the disinformation and madness we’re seeing now and also a fairly low-budget thriller, so seeing a helicopter blow up on Down Cemetery Road stirred some complicated feelings. Do your cats watch telly? Tiger really likes telly, although Ron and Zelda are less bothered. Tiger loves sport and sometimes music, especially the Bee Gees. They’re all from the same mum, but we gave Zelda to my parents as a kitten. When my dad got dementia and my mum died, Zelda was mainly living in the garden. By the time she came back to us, it wasn’t like Long Lost Family, unless Long Lost Family had an episode where someone spat and hissed at their new mum. Zelda [pictured above] is very high maintenance, Tiger loves you unconditionally and Ron is a weirdo, although he’s become more friendly since his mum died. What is David Baddiel: Cat Man about? It’s a polemic, in a way, pushing back on stereotypes that cats don’t do anything, that they’re mean and selfish and have no empathy compared to dogs. The programme has paddleboarding cats, cats that go for walks, cats that help out at hospitals, and I have Jonathan Ross, Ricky Gervais, Dawn O’Porter and other people speaking about cats in a very emotional way. Have you always been a cat person? My dad was a Welsh working-class bloke whose top note was irritation. I said at his funeral that he was a man who liked football, food and shouting, “Who the f**king hell is this now?” every time the phone rang. The one place he showed affection was towards our cat, which was foundational for my brothers and me because we’ve all ended up as cat people. The relationship you might have with a cat is possibly more complex than with a dog, and cats are more like humans. You’ve been called the voice of football, alternative comedy, laddism, British Jews... Would you drop all those to be the voice of cats? Absolutely! I’ve always been obsessed, to some extent, with cats. I don’t feel very happy unless there’s a cat in the vicinity. I also don’t particularly like being seen as one thing. When I’m asked to speak about antisemitism, I tend to say no now – not because it’s not still a very important issue, but because I’ve decided to not be seen as an activist. Your 1996 single Three Lions will be rolled out at the World Cup this year. Does that still make you proud? Well, there’s been a concerted effort by the FA to supplant it with Sweet Caroline, which is weird, given it’s an American anthem and not about football. In the Gareth Southgate era, there was a sense of needing to move on, especially because our 1998 version had audio footage of him missing the penalty, so I understood why he found that difficult! But I’m very proud of Three Lions. The music’s great and the lyrics do connect with football fans. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. David Baddiel: Cat Man begins on Friday 16th January at 8pm on Channel 4. Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Andy West went from visiting his brother in jail to teaching inmates philosophy – now his memoir has been turned into a prison drama
Add Waiting for the Out to your watchlist Andy West has spent much of his 30s in prisons – no surprise perhaps, given his father, brother and uncle all served time when he was a child. Yet West himself has nothing more criminal on his record than a ticket for cycling through a red light. Instead, he is a philosopher who teaches in prisons across the UK, leading classes for men and women, young and old, including lifers, addicts and sex offenders. His traumatic and fascinating experiences were first brought to life in his 2022 memoir The Life Inside: a Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy and now form the basis of Waiting for the Out, a new six-part BBC One drama written by Dennis Kelly (Utopia, Together). The adaptation ramps up the book’s drama and humour but never soft-pedals its fundamental truths or humanity. “I didn’t want it to be a standard, gritty shankings-in-the-shower prison drama,” says West, a softly spoken, thoughtful and engaging figure, the ideal combination of intellect and empathy in regulation thick-rimmed glasses and turtleneck. “There are great versions of that, but prison isn’t violent every day. It’s much drearier: daytime TV, body odour, unwashed socks, another afternoon gone. “I’m not going to say, ‘Please watch my show, it’s very boring’, but it catches something of the way time changes and drifts. We wanted something honest and humorous, not an earnest show about survival. Importantly, the people in our show have also committed crimes. Things like The Shawshank Redemption, where the lead is effectively innocent, are a bit of a cop-out because they sidestep a lot of moral complexity.” That’s not something that could be said of either his book or the series. Josh Finan (The Responder) plays Dan, a prison philosopher haunted by thoughts of his violent, mercurial father (Gerard Kearns), amiably enduring his uncle’s (Phil Daniels) well-worn anecdotes of a criminal past and cautiously reconfiguring his relationship with his brother (Stephen Wight), a recovering heroin addict and now a devoted dad. These situations and characters are very familiar to West. “I grew up in a few different places, in two chapters,” he says. “There was childhood with my dad, who I haven’t had contact with since he went away [to prison] when I was 12. That upbringing felt chaotic, dangerous and economically hairy – bailiffs at the door, trouble with the police. Later, I was with my mum and my stepfather, a double-glazing salesman. I could live my teenage years with a bit of breathing space, where the bills were being paid.” West remains close to his mother and brother; his uncle died in 2023. After leaving school with two GCSEs, West was taken under the wing of a philosophy teacher at sixth-form college and ended up with a degree. “I’d heard about these people doing philosophy in prisons and felt envy, because a lot of my journey involved letting go of parts of my identity,” he recalls. “That wisdom I’d accumulated from my childhood wasn’t really relevant in a lecture hall, and these people were reclaiming it – so my motivations weren’t totally wholesome! “But the more I’ve taught in prison, the more I’ve realised the questions that drive me came because I’d visited my brother in prison, or because my dad was going away. Rather than outreach, it was ‘inreach’. I was going to the source of these questions.” A key question seems to be: how did he avoid falling into the same traps as his dad, uncle or brother? “That’s such a philosophical question!” he says, delighted. “A big part was my father going away, but also age gaps: my brother is over a decade older, so I’d seen his path and was able to consider others to take. After seeing how demonised he was in the family and in society, I was desperate to be the golden child. Or it may be that some people have more propensity for addiction or risk. We just have to be relatively humble about why we believe someone’s done bad things.” Although the prisoners’ engagement with Beckett, Socrates, Descartes or Malcolm X fluctuates in both the book and the series, their observations are keen, unexpected and valuable – philosophy as emotional engagement, not logical problem solving. How could it be otherwise when they address freedom and guilt, hope and shame, luck and desire? “A lot of prison life is about becoming cattle: being ‘shipped out’, ‘feeding time’, then back in your cell. I think of two guys in the book. One of them, serving a long sentence, left a note on my desk that just said: ‘two-hour holiday’ – while he’s in the class, he’s somewhere else. Another guy told me, ‘Philosophy is all right’, which in prison is tantamount to saying it’s brilliant. There’s an atrophy of the human spirit in prison, so to be reminded you have a mind, to go somewhere you can think, reflect and have your inner world taken seriously means something.” Britain’s prison system is overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed: prisoners are often confined for 23 hours a day, while prison officers can begin work after only two months of training, compared with two years for their counterparts in Norway. It’s small wonder West regards it as “an embarrassment”. “Most people think of prisons the way they think of sewers: necessary but unpleasant to think about, a place where we can build a wall between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and hold the idea that chaos and violence exist behind it, rather than within all of us. Until people, who have often come from chaotic, abusive and financially precarious backgrounds, have their basic needs met, it’s a lot to ask them to change. I glimpsed the edges of that world from a young age and it left me with a sense of responsibility: this is something that I should attend to, because other people probably won’t.” Attending to it has included telling stories removing that wall – a process with tangible benefits not only for the open-minded reader or viewer, but for West himself. Like Dan in Waiting for the Out, West has been tormented by “the executioner” – his term for corrosive shame, intrusive thoughts and “OCD-like” behaviours that he continues to manage. “I learned over time that the executioner wants to make sure you’re OK and fusses all the time,” he explains. “A lot of dealing with it is having the thought without moving it to the top of my to-do list: OK, you’re afraid, you’re having catastrophic thoughts, let’s deal with that in five minutes. By which time, inevitably, it’s not there. There’s a grief for all the time I wasted worrying about stuff that never came to be or wasn’t even remotely possible, but when I go back to the book or watch the show, I’m struck by how much more cheerful and relaxed I am these days.” Using words like “catharsis” in conversation with a philosopher is a perilous business but, in the spirit of fearlessness, I go for it anyway. Was writing the book cathartic? West smiles kindly. “Not exactly, but it took me forward somehow. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips paraphrased Freud when he said, ‘My patients don’t recover, they just become bored of their symptoms.’ There’s something about writing your interior world for three years and 300 pages where you become bored of yourself. It allowed me to speak about what I felt. For so long, that was unspeakable, so it was very necessary to do that digging. But that corner has been charted now. What’s the rest of life about?” West is looking to the future: a psychotherapy qualification, a new book attempting a moral rather than psychological reckoning with human nature, perhaps even the further televised adventures of Dan. First, though, he’s running a half-marathon. “Two weeks before I turn 40,” he laughs. “If that’s not a cry for help…”
Waiting for the Out author reveals new BBC drama doesn’t avoid the "moral complexity" of characters in prison
He grew up in the shadow of crime but chose philosophy instead – now Andy West’s prison-honed memoir is reimagined as a humane, darkly funny BBC drama about guilt, freedom and the lives lived behind bars.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Andy West has spent much of his 30s in prisons – no surprise perhaps, given his father, brother and uncle all served time when he was a child. Yet West himself has nothing more criminal on his record than a ticket for cycling through a red light. Instead, he is a philosopher who teaches in prisons across the UK, leading classes for men and women, young and old, including lifers, addicts and sex offenders. His traumatic and fascinating experiences were first brought to life in his 2022 memoir The Life Inside: a Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy and now form the basis of Waiting for the Out, a new six-part BBC One drama written by Dennis Kelly (Utopia, Together). The adaptation ramps up the book's drama and humour but never soft-pedals its fundamental truths or humanity. "I didn't want it to be a standard, gritty shankings-in-the-shower prison drama," says West, a softly spoken, thoughtful and engaging figure, the ideal combination of intellect and empathy in regulation thick-rimmed glasses and turtleneck. "There are great versions of that, but prison isn't violent every day. It's much drearier: daytime TV, body odour, unwashed socks, another afternoon gone. "I'm not going to say, 'Please watch my show, it's very boring', but it catches something of the way time changes and drifts. We wanted something honest and humorous, not an earnest show about survival. Importantly, the people in our show have also committed crimes. Things like The Shawshank Redemption, where the lead is effectively innocent, are a bit of a cop-out because they sidestep a lot of moral complexity." That's not something that could be said of either his book or the series. Josh Finan (The Responder) plays Dan, a prison philosopher haunted by thoughts of his violent, mercurial father (Gerard Kearns), amiably enduring his uncle's (Phil Daniels) well-worn anecdotes of a criminal past and cautiously reconfiguring his relationship with his brother (Stephen Wight), a recovering heroin addict and now a devoted dad. These situations and characters are very familiar to West. "I grew up in a few different places, in two chapters," he says. "There was childhood with my dad, who I haven't had contact with since he went away [to prison] when I was 12. That upbringing felt chaotic, dangerous and economically hairy – bailiffs at the door, trouble with the police. Later, I was with my mum and my stepfather, a double-glazing salesman. I could live my teenage years with a bit of breathing space, where the bills were being paid." West remains close to his mother and brother; his uncle died in 2023. After leaving school with two GCSEs, West was taken under the wing of a philosophy teacher at sixth-form college and ended up with a degree. "I'd heard about these people doing philosophy in prisons and felt envy, because a lot of my journey involved letting go of parts of my identity," he recalls. "That wisdom I'd accumulated from my childhood wasn't really relevant in a lecture hall, and these people were reclaiming it – so my motivations weren't totally wholesome! "But the more I've taught in prison, the more I've realised the questions that drive me came because I'd visited my brother in prison, or because my dad was going away. Rather than outreach, it was 'inreach'. I was going to the source of these questions." A key question seems to be: how did he avoid falling into the same traps as his dad, uncle or brother? "That's such a philosophical question!" he says, delighted. "A big part was my father going away, but also age gaps: my brother is over a decade older, so I'd seen his path and was able to consider others to take. After seeing how demonised he was in the family and in society, I was desperate to be the golden child. Or it may be that some people have more propensity for addiction or risk. We just have to be relatively humble about why we believe someone's done bad things." Although the prisoners' engagement with Beckett, Socrates, Descartes or Malcolm X fluctuates in both the book and the series, their observations are keen, unexpected and valuable – philosophy as emotional engagement, not logical problem solving. How could it be otherwise when they address freedom and guilt, hope and shame, luck and desire? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/12/531662-9c52fb6.jpg" width="4743" height="3162" alt="Charlie Rix as Zach, Sule Rimi as Samson, Josef Altin as Greg, Ric Renton as Wallace, Steven Meo as Macca, Francis Lovehall as Dris, Tom Moutchi as Junior and Josh Finan as Dan in Waiting for the Out, sat in a circle in a hall, all looking at someone off screen." title="531662,TITLE:Waiting For The Out" /> "A lot of prison life is about becoming cattle: being 'shipped out', 'feeding time', then back in your cell. I think of two guys in the book. One of them, serving a long sentence, left a note on my desk that just said: 'two-hour holiday' – while he's in the class, he's somewhere else. Another guy told me, 'Philosophy is all right', which in prison is tantamount to saying it's brilliant. There's an atrophy of the human spirit in prison, so to be reminded you have a mind, to go somewhere you can think, reflect and have your inner world taken seriously means something." Britain's prison system is overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed: prisoners are often confined for 23 hours a day, while prison officers can begin work after only two months of training, compared with two years for their counterparts in Norway. It's small wonder West regards it as "an embarrassment". "Most people think of prisons the way they think of sewers: necessary but unpleasant to think about, a place where we can build a wall between 'us' and 'them' and hold the idea that chaos and violence exist behind it, rather than within all of us. Until people, who have often come from chaotic, abusive and financially precarious backgrounds, have their basic needs met, it's a lot to ask them to change. I glimpsed the edges of that world from a young age and it left me with a sense of responsibility: this is something that I should attend to, because other people probably won't." View oEmbed on the source website Attending to it has included telling stories removing that wall – a process with tangible benefits not only for the open-minded reader or viewer, but for West himself. Like Dan in Waiting for the Out, West has been tormented by "the executioner" – his term for corrosive shame, intrusive thoughts and "OCD-like" behaviours that he continues to manage. "I learned over time that the executioner wants to make sure you're OK and fusses all the time," he explains. "A lot of dealing with it is having the thought without moving it to the top of my to-do list: OK, you're afraid, you're having catastrophic thoughts, let's deal with that in five minutes. By which time, inevitably, it's not there. There's a grief for all the time I wasted worrying about stuff that never came to be or wasn't even remotely possible, but when I go back to the book or watch the show, I'm struck by how much more cheerful and relaxed I am these days." Using words like "catharsis" in conversation with a philosopher is a perilous business but, in the spirit of fearlessness, I go for it anyway. Was writing the book cathartic? West smiles kindly. "Not exactly, but it took me forward somehow. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips paraphrased Freud when he said, 'My patients don't recover, they just become bored of their symptoms.' There's something about writing your interior world for three years and 300 pages where you become bored of yourself. It allowed me to speak about what I felt. For so long, that was unspeakable, so it was very necessary to do that digging. But that corner has been charted now. What's the rest of life about?" West is looking to the future: a psychotherapy qualification, a new book attempting a moral rather than psychological reckoning with human nature, perhaps even the further televised adventures of Dan. First, though, he's running a half-marathon. "Two weeks before I turn 40," he laughs. "If that's not a cry for help…" Waiting for the Out will premiere on Saturday 3rd January at 9:30pm on BBC One. Add Waiting for the Out to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
High-flying comedian Guz Khan on how family and friends help him keep it real
Stuffed will air at 9pm on Tuesday 23rd December on BBC One. Guz Khan has come a long way in ten years. While teaching at a secondary school back then, Khan had been posting online skits as Brummie Muslim “Mobeen”. After a couple went viral, Joe Lycett invited him to be his opening act at a stand-up gig and, before long, Grace Academy was looking for a new humanities teacher. In 2017, Khan turned Mobeen into a layered character for BBC Three comedy-drama series Man like Mobeen, about a drug dealer who, despite being reformed by faith and family, is never quite able to leave his old life behind. Four more series and three Bafta nominations followed, as did supporting gigs in productions by Judd Apatow and Mindy Kaling. Now, projects with Riz Ahmed and Rebel Wilson are in the works, while Khan’s new comedy drama, Stuffed, will be on BBC One over Christmas. In another sense however, the 39-year-old comedian insists he hasn’t gone far at all. “My friendship circle has been the same for decades. Me and my wife have known each other 21 years. I go to work, have a good time, then come home to my gang and no one really talks about it. Everyone’s like, ‘You’re the same prick you’ve always been.’ I don’t think I’m more talented than anybody else, I just never worried if something didn’t work out – it was one more for the memory bank.” Have public attitudes towards him changed with his success? “Not a day goes by where someone doesn’t ask how I’m doing or if they can have a photo. My interactions in person are so varied, but overwhelmingly positive. In my online life, if you look at my X, you’ll see I’m an idiot and respond to things, partly because it’s entertaining and partly because you want to teach those people sitting in their mum’s basement, typing ‘Go home, you ___ b*****d’, that in real life you just wouldn’t say that. I tell my kids to be careful with all this, because online is realer than real life for a lot of people.” Family is everything for Khan. He laments how easily distracted he gets while running errands (“My missus is always like, ‘Why did I marry you?’, but I always come home with one of the four things on the list, because it keeps the marriage together”) and references their five kids throughout our conversation, whether it’s “cussing each other out” while checking out random facts on YouTube, or his admiration for their earnest interest while watching Louis Theroux’s documentary The Settlers. He splutters with laughter at his own earliest TV memory, recalling his sister playing him a VHS of Eddie Murphy doing stand-up when he was just five. “It rewired my brain; and my sister is now one of the leading child safeguarding officers in the West Midlands. How about that?” Khan was brought up by his mother and two sisters in the Coventry suburb of Hillfields. “My earliest memories are that, to get in on a conversation between my mum, sisters, three aunties and one uncle, I had to say something that maybe I shouldn’t: if my aunties wanted to beat me up afterwards, my mum and uncle would laugh. I think that’s what honed my comedy: saying something that I knew was funny, but would probably p*** a few people off.” Khan, who still lives in Coventry, hasn’t lost that childhood instinct to entertain without fear of the repercussions. In his new Christmas caper, Khan plays a Muslim grinch whose wife (Morgana Robinson) suggests a family trip to Lapland, where chaos reigns. It’s daft and energetic, and, like all his work, smuggles the thought-provoking alongside the silly. For example, why are multifaith marriages (particularly happy ones) still so rare on British TV? “They’re pretty commonplace out there!” he chuckles. “It’s not overt in Stuffed – we go through familiar family s**t, we’re not sitting around talking theology – but I know I’ll get messages saying, ‘I’m so glad you and Morgana were a couple on screen, because we don’t see it.’ Not enough people get to tell their stories, still. One of the reasons I ended Man like Mobeen is because I’m not the kid who had those experiences 20 years ago any more.” I finish with a festive poser: is it better to give or receive? He laughs, shocked: “My G, what type of people are going to read this?!” Then he takes it in the intended spirit. “It’s always nicer, in life, to give. Take from that what you will.” What I take from it is that Guz Khan has plenty left to give.
Guz Khan reveals why he ended Man Like Mobeen - and how he portrays multi-faith marriages in new Christmas caper
High-flying comedian Guz Khan on how family and friends help him keep it real.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Guz Khan has come a long way in ten years. While teaching at a secondary school back then, Khan had been posting online skits as Brummie Muslim “Mobeen”. After a couple went viral, Joe Lycett invited him to be his opening act at a stand-up gig and, before long, Grace Academy was looking for a new humanities teacher. In 2017, Khan turned Mobeen into a layered character for BBC Three comedy-drama series Man like Mobeen, about a drug dealer who, despite being reformed by faith and family, is never quite able to leave his old life behind. Four more series and three Bafta nominations followed, as did supporting gigs in productions by Judd Apatow and Mindy Kaling. Now, projects with Riz Ahmed and Rebel Wilson are in the works, while Khan’s new comedy drama, Stuffed, will be on BBC One over Christmas. In another sense however, the 39-year-old comedian insists he hasn’t gone far at all. “My friendship circle has been the same for decades. Me and my wife have known each other 21 years. I go to work, have a good time, then come home to my gang and no one really talks about it. Everyone’s like, ‘You’re the same prick you’ve always been.’ I don’t think I’m more talented than anybody else, I just never worried if something didn’t work out – it was one more for the memory bank.” Have public attitudes towards him changed with his success? “Not a day goes by where someone doesn’t ask how I’m doing or if they can have a photo. My interactions in person are so varied, but overwhelmingly positive. In my online life, if you look at my X, you’ll see I’m an idiot and respond to things, partly because it’s entertaining and partly because you want to teach those people sitting in their mum’s basement, typing ‘Go home, you ___ b*****d’, that in real life you just wouldn’t say that. I tell my kids to be careful with all this, because online is realer than real life for a lot of people.” Family is everything for Khan. He laments how easily distracted he gets while running errands (“My missus is always like, ‘Why did I marry you?’, but I always come home with one of the four things on the list, because it keeps the marriage together”) and references their five kids throughout our conversation, whether it’s “cussing each other out” while checking out random facts on YouTube, or his admiration for their earnest interest while watching Louis Theroux’s documentary The Settlers. He splutters with laughter at his own earliest TV memory, recalling his sister playing him a VHS of Eddie Murphy doing stand-up when he was just five. “It rewired my brain; and my sister is now one of the leading child safeguarding officers in the West Midlands. How about that?” Khan was brought up by his mother and two sisters in the Coventry suburb of Hillfields. “My earliest memories are that, to get in on a conversation between my mum, sisters, three aunties and one uncle, I had to say something that maybe I shouldn’t: if my aunties wanted to beat me up afterwards, my mum and uncle would laugh. I think that’s what honed my comedy: saying something that I knew was funny, but would probably p*** a few people off.” Khan, who still lives in Coventry, hasn’t lost that childhood instinct to entertain without fear of the repercussions. In his new Christmas caper, Khan plays a Muslim grinch whose wife (Morgana Robinson) suggests a family trip to Lapland, where chaos reigns. It’s daft and energetic, and, like all his work, smuggles the thought-provoking alongside the silly. For example, why are multifaith marriages (particularly happy ones) still so rare on British TV? “They’re pretty commonplace out there!” he chuckles. “It’s not overt in Stuffed – we go through familiar family s**t, we’re not sitting around talking theology – but I know I’ll get messages saying, ‘I’m so glad you and Morgana were a couple on screen, because we don’t see it.’ Not enough people get to tell their stories, still. One of the reasons I ended Man like Mobeen is because I’m not the kid who had those experiences 20 years ago any more.” I finish with a festive poser: is it better to give or receive? He laughs, shocked: “My G, what type of people are going to read this?!” Then he takes it in the intended spirit. “It’s always nicer, in life, to give. Take from that what you will.” What I take from it is that Guz Khan has plenty left to give. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Stuffed will air at 9pm on Tuesday 23rd December on BBC One. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
The choirmaster will be celebrating his 50th on stage — followed by hot yoga
Add BBC Cardiff Singer of the Year to your watchlist What’s the view from your sofa? A compromise between my desire for an enormous cinema-size screen and my wife’s [English teacher Becky] desire to have something appropriate. I have very nice speakers on stands – if the kids [Esther, Gilbert and Dvora] knock them off, I’ve told them I will kill them! Who controls the remote? I’m embarrassed by how stereotypical it is, but I like to be near the remote. Although, honestly, it’s mostly word of mouth controlling it, friends recommending stuff. We rarely watch things at the same time as other people unless it’s The Traitors, Race across the World or Gladiators. What have you been enjoying recently? Couples Therapy is fantastic – the way they craft those stories so your sympathies swing from one person to the other. Orna Guralnik [the therapist] is an amazing television presence. Also, What We Do in the Shadows is hilarious. I run around the streets of north London, shouting, “Bat!” Are you ever still surprised by your TV career? I remember my wife and I were in our tiny rented flat in West Hampstead, talking about how The Choir could change everything. We had no idea what that meant in practice – the attention, opportunities, challenges – but we went for it. It became this monster and I suddenly found myself having lunches at the BBC. It’s strange. The last time you spoke to RT, you talked about burnout. Do you watch out for that now? Yeah, it’s pretty classic, isn’t it? I got into the public eye when I was about 30 with no children, going to the gym and filming two days a week. Suddenly, I’ve got three children, my series are longer, bigger, so I drop the gym membership. At the end of last year, I was like, “OK, I need to sort myself out and feel better.” I started taking vitamin D and going to hot yoga and I feel absolutely great. You’re about to go on tour with Sing-along-a-Gareth. How have you prepared for that? I’m determined to build more exercise into the schedule and not have too many late nights, because touring is a weird night-time existence where you start feeling like a vampire. With the show, I know what people are looking for now, but it’s my 50th birthday and 50 years of Bohemian Rhapsody, so we’ll do a big version of that. Why is communal singing important? I was really struck by what one of the singers told me when I ran a community choir for the London Symphony Orchestra. After our first concert, they said, “I lost my father at the beginning of this term and this has really helped me.” That was the first time I realised there was something to explore, and it sustained me through all those series of The Choir. My belief in its spiritual benefits is pretty unshakeable now. You’ll be spending your 50th (9 November) on stage at the Warwick Arts Centre — dream birthday? For me, the party is always on stage. I might have to wind down a bit afterwards, but it’s not like I’m getting through the gig to hit the town. I’m at a different point in my life and a lot more appreciative of what I have. To still be working and in good shape is a privilege. The fluff and noise aren’t important. It’s about connections with people and feeling good about yourself. Singing makes me happy… along with hot yoga. Anything else you’d like to accomplish? Right now, I’m enjoying still having a career! I’m not busting a gut to do Strictly. The Masked Dancer was fun, but I got to the end of it thinking, “I’m really looking forward to waking up tomorrow and being a musician again.”
Gareth Malone: "I'm not busting a gut to do Strictly"
The choirmaster will be celebrating his 50th on stage — followed by hot yoga.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. What’s the view from your sofa? A compromise between my desire for an enormous cinema-size screen and my wife’s [English teacher Becky] desire to have something appropriate. I have very nice speakers on stands – if the kids [Esther, Gilbert and Dvora] knock them off, I’ve told them I will kill them! Who controls the remote? I’m embarrassed by how stereotypical it is, but I like to be near the remote. Although, honestly, it’s mostly word of mouth controlling it, friends recommending stuff. We rarely watch things at the same time as other people unless it’s The Traitors, Race Across the World or Gladiators. What have you been enjoying recently? Couples Therapy is fantastic – the way they craft those stories so your sympathies swing from one person to the other. Orna Guralnik [the therapist] is an amazing television presence. Also, What We Do in the Shadows is hilarious. I run around the streets of north London, shouting, “Bat!” Are you ever still surprised by your TV career? I remember my wife and I were in our tiny rented flat in West Hampstead, talking about how The Choir could change everything. We had no idea what that meant in practice – the attention, opportunities, challenges – but we went for it. It became this monster and I suddenly found myself having lunches at the BBC. It’s strange. The last time you spoke to RT, you talked about burnout. Do you watch out for that now? Yeah, it’s pretty classic, isn’t it? I got into the public eye when I was about 30 with no children, going to the gym and filming two days a week. Suddenly, I’ve got three children, my series are longer, bigger, so I drop the gym membership. At the end of last year, I was like, “OK, I need to sort myself out and feel better.” I started taking vitamin D and going to hot yoga and I feel absolutely great. You’re about to go on tour with Sing-along-a-Gareth. How have you prepared for that? I’m determined to build more exercise into the schedule and not have too many late nights, because touring is a weird night-time existence where you start feeling like a vampire. With the show, I know what people are looking for now, but it’s my 50th birthday and 50 years of Bohemian Rhapsody, so we’ll do a big version of that. Why is communal singing important? I was really struck by what one of the singers told me when I ran a community choir for the London Symphony Orchestra. After our first concert, they said, “I lost my father at the beginning of this term and this has really helped me.” That was the first time I realised there was something to explore, and it sustained me through all those series of The Choir. My belief in its spiritual benefits is pretty unshakeable now. Buy Gareth Malone tickets at Ticketmaster You’ll be spending your 50th (9 November) on stage at the Warwick Arts Centre – dream birthday? For me, the party is always on stage. I might have to wind down a bit afterwards, but it’s not like I’m getting through the gig to hit the town. I’m at a different point in my life and a lot more appreciative of what I have. To still be working and in good shape is a privilege. The fluff and noise aren’t important. It’s about connections with people and feeling good about yourself. Singing makes me happy… along with hot yoga. Anything else you’d like to accomplish? Right now, I’m enjoying still having a career! I’m not busting a gut to do Strictly. The Masked Dancer was fun, but I got to the end of it thinking, “I’m really looking forward to waking up tomorrow and being a musician again.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Sing-along-a-Gareth 4: 50 Years of Song tours the UK from 2 November – tickets are on sale now. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what else is on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Keeley Hawes is back in Greece, this time playing a ruthless killer – but family is also at the heart of her new thriller, The Assassin
Add The Assassin to your watchlist When Keeley Hawes heard she was being cast opposite Freddie Highmore, she had one priority: “a Zoom to check we weren’t repelled by each other”. The relationship between the two actors, both on screen and on set for The Assassin – the latest scintillating serio-comic thriller from Jack and Harry Williams (The Tourist, The Missing), coming to Amazon Prime Video – suggests that the Zoom call went well. In fact, as they sit in a wind-buffeted trailer on an exposed stretch of the Greek coastline, the co-stars are sympatico to an unusual degree, with no clashing egos. View Green Video on the source website Hawes is, of course, one of British television’s biggest names, her CV stretching from Spooks and Tipping the Velvet to Bodyguard and Miss Austen. Highmore followed a first act as a child star with bona fide US small-screen stardom in the Psycho prequel TV series Bates Motel and the medical serial The Good Doctor. The pair play mother and son Julie and Edward, whose messy, awkward relationship is defined by emotional distance and secrecy. Julie has retired from her clandestine life as a hired killer and now lives in a hillside cottage on a remote Greek island; he is an earnest investigative journalist, meeting her for the first time in four years with some significant life news and a burning desire to identify his father (“There will be references to Mamma Mia!” Highmore laughs). Then that old “one last job” rears its head for Julie and all hell breaks loose. “This has flown by,” says Hawes, who’s dressed in the retired assassin’s costume of vest top and three-quarter-length khaki trousers. “Getting on isn’t a given and if you’re not having fun, it can feel like a long time to be away from home.” “We’re oddly on the same page, even more than one might think,” says Highmore, every inch the holidaying hack in crumpled shirt and jeans. “There are moments when we look at each other and think: ‘We’re sort of the same person in this weird way.’ Or certainly on the same wavelength.” That rapport is born from a shared sense of humour and affectionate mutual teasing, which surfaces frequently. But perhaps it also comes from the shared experience of starting out in the industry at such a young age. Hawes signed up for the Sylvia Young Theatre School at nine and worked as a model before getting her big break at 19 in Dennis Potter’s Karaoke, while Highmore – the son of an actor and a talent agent – was ten when he was acting opposite Johnny Depp, first in Finding Neverland and then in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “We’ve never spoken about that,” marvels Hawes. “Isn’t that weird? Freddie looks young, but he’s wiser than his years. Maybe an element of that comes from being treated as an adult from so young, because that’s what happens on the set. But I certainly didn’t feel like I missed out on anything. I had the time of my life, but it’s a very different thing now – I imagine I’d have a tutor and so on, but the rules were more relaxed then, with all the pros and cons of that. It didn’t feel like working, just really exciting. And it still is, most of the time.” “I always had a great time filming when I was young,” agrees Highmore, who took time out to study languages at Cambridge and work as an intern at banks and law firms. “But it’s not play – you’re aware there’s a seriousness, which for me was part of the enjoyment. Acting felt like an addition to my childhood. My parents helped me maintain a degree of separation and normality. Going to university and not acting for a bit was really important because I never wanted acting to become a continuation of my childhood rather than the choice of an adult.” Greece has been an annual holiday destination for Hawes and her family since The Durrells finished in 2019. “It’s been lovely to be back and working with a lot of the same crew,” she says. “You feel immediately relaxed. It’s the sort of location where people want to come to visit you – my kids are old enough that they’ve all come over under their own steam.” For Highmore, it represents a welcome change after more than a decade leading two long-running series. “There’s a part of me that misses the family you build over shows like that. At the same time, it’s really exciting to do something else, especially something British after so long in North America. Even though it’s Athens, it feels familiar.” He looks apologetic. “I’m afraid I can’t give you a pithy reason why British television is different from American, but there is an inherent difference.” “The catering is better over there,” suggests Hawes, and Highmore chuckles heartily. The laughter will continue through the night: soon they’ll be clambering into a 4x4 to brave the mountainous hairpin bends up to a derelict military outpost. The ensuing gunfight, thrillingly staged and enthusiastically performed, isn’t a novel experience for Hawes, who has form with action scenes in BBC1’s Crossfire. “I had a scene where Julie puts a rifle together, which I learnt to do in my trailer 20 minutes beforehand,” says Hawes. “I’m not bad at Lego so I didn’t find it too difficult. In fact, I had a note afterwards to look more inept! This is the most stunt-y show I’ve done, and we’ve been allowed to do a fair bit ourselves – I did throw a man over a car – but I feel no pressure because Julie’s meant to be rusty. Julie’s out of practice because she’s been on the hill, drinking a lot. A lot of the fights are improvised, they’re not meant to look slick, so when I screw up, I can blame it on the character.” Even though the physicality was enjoyable for both actors, it was the emotion and nuance of the family dynamics that appealed most. “I find their relationship really relatable,” says Hawes. “I have that back-and-forth with my children, so that part feels very real to me. Quite often you do clash with the people you’re most like, probably because you recognise things in them that you don’t like in yourself. Julie does have that vulnerability beneath the surface, but she also doesn’t care about being likeable – I admire people like that.” “There’s a tragedy at the heart of their relationship,” adds Highmore. “In some ways they know each other better than anyone else, despite the secrets they’ve been keeping from each other. They want to be closer and know they should be, but they just keep getting it wrong. They’re both alone in a way, feeling a little separate within the family structure, seeking that connection and trying to find a place in the world.” “That’s brilliant,” says Hawes. “Can I use that when you’re not around?” “Of course!” beams Highmore, leaning forward to whisper conspiratorially: “We haven’t spent ten years as friends before the show, but it feels like we have.” Hawes goes still further, with a glint of mischief. “Freddie basically is my son!”
Keeley Hawes formed a mother-son bond with Freddie Highmore, her co-star in thriller The Assassin
Keeley Hawes is back in Greece, this time playing a ruthless killer – but family is also at the heart of her new thriller, The Assassin.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. When Keeley Hawes heard she was being cast opposite Freddie Highmore, she had one priority: “a Zoom to check we weren’t repelled by each other”. The relationship between the two actors, both on screen and on set for The Assassin – the latest scintillating serio-comic thriller from Jack and Harry Williams (The Tourist, The Missing), coming to Amazon Prime Video – suggests that the Zoom call went well. In fact, as they sit in a wind-buffeted trailer on an exposed stretch of the Greek coastline, the co-stars are sympatico to an unusual degree, with no clashing egos. Hawes is, of course, one of British television’s biggest names, her CV stretching from Spooks and Tipping the Velvet to Bodyguard and Miss Austen. Highmore followed a first act as a child star with bona fide US small-screen stardom in the Psycho prequel TV series Bates Motel and the medical serial The Good Doctor. The pair play mother and son Julie and Edward, whose messy, awkward relationship is defined by emotional distance and secrecy. Julie has retired from her clandestine life as a hired killer and now lives in a hillside cottage on a remote Greek island; he is an earnest investigative journalist, meeting her for the first time in four years with some significant life news and a burning desire to identify his father (“There will be references to Mamma Mia!” Highmore laughs). Then that old “one last job” rears its head for Julie and all hell breaks loose. “This has flown by,” says Hawes, who’s dressed in the retired assassin’s costume of vest top and three-quarter-length khaki trousers. “Getting on isn’t a given and if you’re not having fun, it can feel like a long time to be away from home.” “We’re oddly on the same page, even more than one might think,” says Highmore, every inch the holidaying hack in crumpled shirt and jeans. “There are moments when we look at each other and think: ‘We’re sort of the same person in this weird way.’ Or certainly on the same wavelength.” That rapport is born from a shared sense of humour and affectionate mutual teasing, which surfaces frequently. But perhaps it also comes from the shared experience of starting out in the industry at such a young age. Hawes signed up for the Sylvia Young Theatre School at nine and worked as a model before getting her big break at 19 in Dennis Potter’s Karaoke, while Highmore – the son of an actor and a talent agent – was ten when he was acting opposite Johnny Depp, first in Finding Neverland and then in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “We’ve never spoken about that,” marvels Hawes. “Isn’t that weird? Freddie looks young, but he’s wiser than his years. Maybe an element of that comes from being treated as an adult from so young, because that’s what happens on the set. But I certainly didn’t feel like I missed out on anything. I had the time of my life, but it’s a very different thing now – I imagine I’d have a tutor and so on, but the rules were more relaxed then, with all the pros and cons of that. It didn’t feel like working, just really exciting. And it still is, most of the time.” “I always had a great time filming when I was young,” agrees Highmore, who took time out to study languages at Cambridge and work as an intern at banks and law firms. “But it’s not play – you’re aware there’s a seriousness, which for me was part of the enjoyment. Acting felt like an addition to my childhood. My parents helped me maintain a degree of separation and normality. Going to university and not acting for a bit was really important because I never wanted acting to become a continuation of my childhood rather than the choice of an adult.” Greece has been an annual holiday destination for Hawes and her family since The Durrells finished in 2019. “It’s been lovely to be back and working with a lot of the same crew,” she says. “You feel immediately relaxed. It’s the sort of location where people want to come to visit you – my kids are old enough that they’ve all come over under their own steam.” For Highmore, it represents a welcome change after more than a decade leading two long-running series. “There’s a part of me that misses the family you build over shows like that. At the same time, it’s really exciting to do something else, especially something British after so long in North America. Even though it’s Athens, it feels familiar.” He looks apologetic. “I’m afraid I can’t give you a pithy reason why British television is different from American, but there is an inherent difference.” “The catering is better over there,” suggests Hawes, and Highmore chuckles heartily. The laughter will continue through the night: soon they’ll be clambering into a 4x4 to brave the mountainous hairpin bends up to a derelict military outpost. The ensuing gunfight, thrillingly staged and enthusiastically performed, isn’t a novel experience for Hawes, who has form with action scenes in BBC1’s Crossfire. “I had a scene where Julie puts a rifle together, which I learnt to do in my trailer 20 minutes beforehand,” says Hawes. “I’m not bad at Lego so I didn’t find it too difficult. In fact, I had a note afterwards to look more inept! This is the most stunt-y show I’ve done, and we’ve been allowed to do a fair bit ourselves – I did throw a man over a car – but I feel no pressure because Julie’s meant to be rusty. Julie’s out of practice because she’s been on the hill, drinking a lot. A lot of the fights are improvised, they’re not meant to look slick, so when I screw up, I can blame it on the character.” Even though the physicality was enjoyable for both actors, it was the emotion and nuance of the family dynamics that appealed most. “I find their relationship really relatable,” says Hawes. “I have that back-and-forth with my children, so that part feels very real to me. Quite often you do clash with the people you’re most like, probably because you recognise things in them that you don’t like in yourself. Julie does have that vulnerability beneath the surface, but she also doesn’t care about being likeable – I admire people like that.” “There’s a tragedy at the heart of their relationship,” adds Highmore. “In some ways they know each other better than anyone else, despite the secrets they’ve been keeping from each other. They want to be closer and know they should be, but they just keep getting it wrong. They’re both alone in a way, feeling a little separate within the family structure, seeking that connection and trying to find a place in the world.” “That’s brilliant,” says Hawes. “Can I use that when you’re not around?” “Of course!” beams Highmore, leaning forward to whisper conspiratorially: “We haven’t spent ten years as friends before the show, but it feels like we have.” Hawes goes still further, with a glint of mischief. “Freddie basically is my son!” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what else is on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Johnny Vegas on his passion for antiques and art, his ADHD diagnosis – and why his heart is no longer in comedy
Add Johnny Vegas's Little Shop of Antiques to your watchlist Where does Bono end and Paul Hewson begin? What divides Michael Caine and Maurice Micklewhite? Johnny Vegas – star of Ideal, scene-stealer of panel shows and sitcoms and lachrymose, splenetic, heavy-drinking stand-up – has been considering personas recently. Born Michael Pennington, he is on jovial, thoughtful form over Zoom while discussing Quest’s Johnny Vegas’s Little Shop of Antiques, in which he turns a lifetime habit of collecting bric-a-brac into a fledgeling business by opening a pop-up shop in Cheshire. “It’s about another of Michael’s pastimes,” he concedes. “I’ll always be trading under the name of Johnny Vegas, but I’m doing less comedy now, so Johnny is getting squeezed out as Michael comes into play. I love being Johnny, but it’s nice to take people by surprise and show my artistic, creative side. I don’t just go from pub to pub, making people’s dreams come true!” Like Channel 4’s Johnny Vegas: Carry On Glamping, his new series depicts the establishment of a genuine enterprise, telegenic charm and ballast provided by Vegas’s inquisitive, acquisitive nature and his double act with long-suffering assistant Bev Dixon. It came about as Vegas was considering thinning out his own collection, and the production company all but dared him to do so. By way of demonstration, he’s speaking to me from his home in St Helens, seated in front of a Star Wars pinball machine, a neon champagne-bottle wall fixture and some faintly terrifying dolls. “I’ve only ever bought to keep,” he explains. “I’ve traded with other people and I’d started befriending other dealers, but would anybody out there share my taste? It was exciting to go shopping for a living without getting into trouble for bringing another bizarre item home.” His children – 22-year-old Michael from his first marriage and nine-year-old Tom from his second – are used to it. Tom apparently told him that if his house continued like this, it could look like a municipal dump. Vegas erupts in that familiar wheezing laugh. “It’s beautiful chaos! My biggest fear is getting hit by a bus and my children selling things for a quid at a car-boot sale. I’ve got a lot of stuff, possibly too much, but everything has a resale value or is something, like the bricks and scrap metal in the garden that I’ll use for my art. I’m not holding on to stacks of newspapers.” Nonetheless, he acknowledges, there is also a psychological reasoning behind his acquisitions. “Alzheimer’s has been rife in my family, so having constant memories is something I find important. I know the story behind every object. My house is a visual diary of my life.” That life changed significantly in 2023 when, at the age of 52, he was diagnosed with ADHD – an impact he explores in the forthcoming Channel 4 documentary Johnny Vegas: Art, ADHD and Me. “Personally, it made sense of a lot of things,” he explains. “Talking to other people about it, as well. There are behavioural traits I now understand around timekeeping, tidiness, hitting deadlines, not getting overwhelmed at the start of the day and being motivated in the direction you need to be. ADHD is like having a head full of butterflies, and sometimes you’ll catch one. It’s good to share and not beat myself up about not doing something, but I don’t want to trade off it or use it to make excuses.” It also means that, when I suggest he could be the latest self-made mogul to join Dragons’ Den, he’s spluttering into his tea. “I am the least entrepreneurial person! With ADHD, you’re always moving on to the next idea. I’m not very practical but I don’t fear failure, I fear not giving something a go – I just need people around me like Bev to bring these ideas to fruition.” One such idea is the stage revival of Ideal, Graham Duff’s cult 2005–11 BBC3 sitcom, in which he’ll reprise the role of Mancunian weed dealer Moz two decades after its launch. “This one’s for the fans,” he says. “So many people were coming up to us, going: ‘Love that show, why can’t I see it?’ So we finally got it back on iPlayer and thought, after seeing the success of Early Doors on stage, we could investigate it more. We never got to finish the story on the telly.” Vegas’s own story began in St Helens, but a happy childhood was scarred by a difficult time at secondary school and then a violent attack in his late teens. “For a while, I became quite agoraphobic,” he recalls. “It really sent me into myself. Getting to college and working behind the bar gave me a new confidence in myself. I knew I could entertain people, singing and messing about, then I saw Dominic Holland doing a gig in St Helens and comedy made sense to me, that whole notion of: how can somebody be so consistently funny for so long? I understood it, became obsessed with it, realised I’d been absorbing it for years – all my VHS tapes were comedy shows recorded off the telly. Johnny awakened at college and I started sneaking out to do stand-up – you only find out you’re funny when you start gigging.” Does comedy still make sense to him? “I remember Bob Monkhouse interviewing me years ago, and it was astounding how up to date he was, talking about all of us new comics with such exuberance rather than going: it was better in my day. I don’t keep on top of it like I should because I’ve got other things going on, but I’ll never resent comedy for evolving.” The occasional compering gig aside, it has been three years since Johnny went on tour – he’s in no great hurry to return. “Has Johnny had his time? I don’t know. I’d have to wake up and really want to do it, because if I planned it, I’d be anxious about it. You only ever want to do stand-up when your heart is completely in it.” Vegas’s act often involved retreating to a potter’s wheel to throw some clay on stage. Far from a gimmick, it was instead an opportunity to pursue a passion hidden in plain sight: he has a degree in art and ceramics from Middlesex University, his work has been acquired by the V&A and, over lockdown, he started on a display for Liverpool’s Walker Gallery. “Art is a part of my life again, thank God. Like stand-up, it’s not done by committee, it’s you and your idea, and I don’t mind standing or falling by those. There’s also a permanence, that this will outlive me, this will be in somebody’s home. The feedback from the Walker has been incredible, people saying it affected them, sharing details about their mental health. I take real pride in that.” Still, it wasn’t the art, the sitcoms or even the stand-up that brought the sort of fame where people do double-takes in the street. “It’s bizarre what can make you a household name,” he says of his pairing with Monkey, a knitted puppet voiced by Ben Miller. Their adverts for ITV Digital and then PG Tips eventually even made him a household name in his own household: son Tom was thrilled to find one advert online in which they made a cup of tea using a digger. The campaign has recently been revived with Emily Atack, but Vegas – or the more reflective and contented Michael Pennington, at least – bears no malice to the Rivals star. “Good luck to her! Not to Monkey, though. We’ve had words. I’ve sat upstairs with my Monkey, just shouting at him: how could you do this to me?”
‘It made sense of a lot of things’: Johnny Vegas on ADHD, stand-up burnout and Ideal's comeback
Johnny Vegas on his passion for antiques and art, his ADHD diagnosis – and why his heart is no longer in comedy.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Where does Bono end and Paul Hewson begin? What divides Michael Caine and Maurice Micklewhite? Johnny Vegas – star of Ideal, scene-stealer of panel shows and sitcoms and lachrymose, splenetic, heavy-drinking stand-up – has been considering personas recently. Born Michael Pennington, he is on jovial, thoughtful form over Zoom while discussing Quest’s Johnny Vegas’s Little Shop of Antiques, in which he turns a lifetime habit of collecting bric-a-brac into a fledgeling business by opening a pop-up shop in Cheshire. “It’s about another of Michael’s pastimes,” he concedes. “I’ll always be trading under the name of Johnny Vegas, but I’m doing less comedy now, so Johnny is getting squeezed out as Michael comes into play. I love being Johnny, but it’s nice to take people by surprise and show my artistic, creative side. I don’t just go from pub to pub, making people’s dreams come true!” Like Channel 4’s Johnny Vegas: Carry On Glamping, his new series depicts the establishment of a genuine enterprise, telegenic charm and ballast provided by Vegas’s inquisitive, acquisitive nature and his double act with long-suffering assistant Bev Dixon. It came about as Vegas was considering thinning out his own collection, and the production company all but dared him to do so. By way of demonstration, he’s speaking to me from his home in St Helens, seated in front of a Star Wars pinball machine, a neon champagne-bottle wall fixture and some faintly terrifying dolls. “I’ve only ever bought to keep,” he explains. “I’ve traded with other people and I’d started befriending other dealers, but would anybody out there share my taste? It was exciting to go shopping for a living without getting into trouble for bringing another bizarre item home.” His children – 22-year-old Michael from his first marriage and nine-year-old Tom from his second – are used to it. Tom apparently told him that if his house continued like this, it could look like a municipal dump. Vegas erupts in that familiar wheezing laugh. “It’s beautiful chaos! My biggest fear is getting hit by a bus and my children selling things for a quid at a car-boot sale. I’ve got a lot of stuff, possibly too much, but everything has a resale value or is something, like the bricks and scrap metal in the garden that I’ll use for my art. I’m not holding on to stacks of newspapers.” Nonetheless, he acknowledges, there is also a psychological reasoning behind his acquisitions. “Alzheimer’s has been rife in my family, so having constant memories is something I find important. I know the story behind every object. My house is a visual diary of my life.” That life changed significantly in 2023 when, at the age of 52, he was diagnosed with ADHD – an impact he explores in the forthcoming Channel 4 documentary Johnny Vegas: Art, ADHD and Me. “Personally, it made sense of a lot of things,” he explains. “Talking to other people about it, as well. There are behavioural traits I now understand around timekeeping, tidiness, hitting deadlines, not getting overwhelmed at the start of the day and being motivated in the direction you need to be. ADHD is like having a head full of butterflies, and sometimes you’ll catch one. It’s good to share and not beat myself up about not doing something, but I don’t want to trade off it or use it to make excuses.” It also means that, when I suggest he could be the latest self-made mogul to join Dragons’ Den, he’s spluttering into his tea. “I am the least entrepreneurial person! With ADHD, you’re always moving on to the next idea. I’m not very practical but I don’t fear failure, I fear not giving something a go – I just need people around me like Bev to bring these ideas to fruition.” One such idea is the stage revival of Ideal, Graham Duff’s cult 2005–11 BBC3 sitcom, in which he’ll reprise the role of Mancunian weed dealer Moz two decades after its launch. “This one’s for the fans,” he says. “So many people were coming up to us, going: ‘Love that show, why can’t I see it?’ So we finally got it back on iPlayer and thought, after seeing the success of Early Doors on stage, we could investigate it more. We never got to finish the story on the telly.” Vegas’s own story began in St Helens, but a happy childhood was scarred by a difficult time at secondary school and then a violent attack in his late teens. “For a while, I became quite agoraphobic,” he recalls. “It really sent me into myself. Getting to college and working behind the bar gave me a new confidence in myself. I knew I could entertain people, singing and messing about, then I saw Dominic Holland doing a gig in St Helens and comedy made sense to me, that whole notion of: how can somebody be so consistently funny for so long? I understood it, became obsessed with it, realised I’d been absorbing it for years – all my VHS tapes were comedy shows recorded off the telly. Johnny awakened at college and I started sneaking out to do stand-up – you only find out you’re funny when you start gigging.” Does comedy still make sense to him? “I remember Bob Monkhouse interviewing me years ago, and it was astounding how up to date he was, talking about all of us new comics with such exuberance rather than going: it was better in my day. I don’t keep on top of it like I should because I’ve got other things going on, but I’ll never resent comedy for evolving.” The occasional compering gig aside, it has been three years since Johnny went on tour – he’s in no great hurry to return. “Has Johnny had his time? I don’t know. I’d have to wake up and really want to do it, because if I planned it, I’d be anxious about it. You only ever want to do stand-up when your heart is completely in it.” Vegas’s act often involved retreating to a potter’s wheel to throw some clay on stage. Far from a gimmick, it was instead an opportunity to pursue a passion hidden in plain sight: he has a degree in art and ceramics from Middlesex University, his work has been acquired by the V&A and, over lockdown, he started on a display for Liverpool’s Walker Gallery. “Art is a part of my life again, thank God. Like stand-up, it’s not done by committee, it’s you and your idea, and I don’t mind standing or falling by those. There’s also a permanence, that this will outlive me, this will be in somebody’s home. The feedback from the Walker has been incredible, people saying it affected them, sharing details about their mental health. I take real pride in that.” Still, it wasn’t the art, the sitcoms or even the stand-up that brought the sort of fame where people do double-takes in the street. “It’s bizarre what can make you a household name,” he says of his pairing with Monkey, a knitted puppet voiced by Ben Miller. Their adverts for ITV Digital and then PG Tips eventually even made him a household name in his own household: son Tom was thrilled to find one advert online in which they made a cup of tea using a digger. The campaign has recently been revived with Emily Atack, but Vegas – or the more reflective and contented Michael Pennington, at least – bears no malice to the Rivals star. “Good luck to her! Not to Monkey, though. We’ve had words. I’ve sat upstairs with my Monkey, just shouting at him: how could you do this to me?” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what else is on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Neil Forsyth’s The Gold ended with some of the Brink’s-Mat robbers in prison – but what happened to the rest of the gang and their incredible haul?
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in June 2025. Add the new series of The Gold to your watchlist The 1983 Brink’s-Mat heist may have begun with six villains in a van, but the £26 million in gold bullion they stole launched one of the longest and most expensive investigations in the history of the Metropolitan Police. The first series of the BBC1 drama The Gold ended with some of the gang in prison and the police – led by Hugh Bonneville’s DCS Brian Boyce – realising they had only been hunting half the haul. The second series, once again written by Guilt and Bob Servant creator Neil Forsyth, picks up the trail in the late 1980s to consider what might have happened to the rest. “We go into new areas of international crime funded by the proceeds of the gold while the police, now a depleted task force, are still trying to engineer some sort of result,” Forsyth explains from his home just outside London. “It’s about how Brink’s-Mat still defined these people even when they were trying to escape it, and the escalating pressures that put on them.” Boyce and his compact team of Nicki Jennings (Charlotte Spencer) and Tony Brightwell (Emun Elliott) are bolstered by controversial copper Tony Lundy (Stephen Campbell Moore) to focus on two primary targets: small-time gangster Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell, briefly glimpsed in Spain at the end of series one) and John Palmer (Tom Cullen), the West Country gold smelter now laundering his wealth in a Tenerife timeshare scam, and whose position alongside Queen Elizabeth II in the Sunday Times Rich List causes considerable establishment embarrassment. The truth is always a slippery concept for dramas rooted in but not beholden to the facts; while Palmer was a real person, Miller and his accomplice Douglas Baxter (Joshua McGuire) are composite characters created to unclutter the narrative. Forsyth’s interpretation of individual scenes also vary from the most plausible, to the most agreed upon, to the most dramatically compelling. “Sometimes people use the phrase ‘creative licence’ in a pejorative way, which is kind of insane,” he says. “Creative licence is vital to writing drama, otherwise why not make a documentary? For The Gold, a lot of it is simplifying a very murky, complicated story. There’s no aspect of it where more than one opinion was not available, so it’s about trying to make the right decision: is it a very sensitive area where you have to be particularly careful, or a purely dramatic turn of events where you’re well within your rights to pick the most interesting path? It’s about understanding characters and motivations, then putting that into an entertaining dramatisation. You’re not doing it to be flippant or fudge a lack of knowledge. And frankly, real life is messy and complicated and weirdly unrealistic.” Indeed, if ever a story demonstrated truth as stranger than fiction, it’s The Gold – one villain’s girlfriend did name her dogs Brinks and Mat and another associate did drop £10,000 in the street en route to the bank. At the outset of the second series, a significant portion of the bullion is buried in Cornish tin mines – a story drawn from a couple of paragraphs in the London Evening Standard in the mid-80s. “We found it in the archives,” says Forsyth, grinning. “It’s not online and has never been reported anywhere else: one of the criminals had links to the South West, and Cornish police – off the back of credible reports – conducted extensive searches of the mines. A lot of the research was piecing things together because connections weren’t made at the time. I’ve even told Brian [Boyce, who consulted on the series] things he didn’t know, which was very gratifying.” As this was a stretch of the Brink’s-Mat trail with fewer news stories, trials and with many criminal protagonists either never convicted or in witness protection, grounding the story in one-to-one interviews was as important as painstaking archival trawls. Boyce and his long-retired peers were once again essential, says Forsyth: “They give you the colour of the investigation beyond the black-and-white facts in public records.” And what about those people on the other side of the law? “Some of the stories we heard…” Forsyth marvels. “I wish they’d been caught so I could write about it.” The most prominent villain Forsyth admits to consulting is the ostensible leader of the heist, the late Micky McAvoy (played by Adam Nagatis), whose theory Forsyth credits with underpinning both series: the idea that the robbers themselves, way out of their depth, made vanishingly little compared to the white-collar figures who, capitalising on an era of financial deregulation, took over and made millions. In fact, Forsyth’s focus on class and social mobility saw the first series accused of treating some of the criminals too kindly; unsurprisingly, he mounts a stout defence. “I’ve got a very clear conscience because I know more about the characters and events than anyone making passing commentary,” he reasons. “A lot of these guys were charming, which is how they managed to corrupt the police. Look at the character arc of any of our major criminal characters and where they end up – I don’t think you can conclude they’ve been treated in a glamorous or sympathetic way.” Forsyth’s next series is Legends, a six-part drama for Netflix with Steve Coogan and Tom Burke. He’s off to the set at “another north London warehouse” after our conversation and concedes that, as a true story about customs investigators going under cover in the international drugs trade, it operates on adjacent turf to The Gold. But true crime is a broad church, ranging from Ryan Murphy’s lurid serial-killer fantasias to Jeff Pope’s angular, diligently researched treatments. The genre, argues Forsyth, appeals because, “viewers don’t want to watch people living within the natural confines of life and making safe decisions”. It can also be unexpectedly relatable: during filming of The Gold in Hastings, Forsyth was approached by McAvoy’s former prison guard who happened to be walking his dog nearby – proof, he says, that if “hundreds were involved in the Brink’s-Mat crime, thousands must have known someone connected to it”. Most rewardingly for the writer, true crime also acts as a Trojan horse. “Other People’s Money [his 2007 book about a credit-card fraudster] was about a young guy in search of identity. Guilt was about siblings. The Gold is about greed at a particular point of British history. Legends is about people dissatisfied with their careers and seeing opportunities to do something different.” In one sense, there’s no mystery around The Gold at all. It’s not called Detective Boyce, or Jennings and Brightwell. The star of the show is in the title. Does Forsyth understand its allure? “Definitely. We had some very convincing gold-plated bars on set and I think every single crew member sneaked over for a photo. I had a lively, hedonistic youth, but I have become more and more responsible, because my writing has come to show the appalling consequences of recklessness.”
Who's who in the second series of The Gold
Add the new series of The Gold to your watchlist The Cops Brian Boyce (Hugh Bonneville) Because the money is spreading so far and wide, it’s increasingly difficult for Boyce’s team to keep up, especially as their operation is facing pressure to scale back: they’re now working from a basement in Tottenham Court Road. They struggle on regardless and Boyce’s reliance on Jennings and Brightwell becomes key. Lundy couldn’t be more different to Boyce, but he gets results. As long as Boyce doesn’t know how he’s got them, he’s prepared to let Lundy get on with it. Tony Lundy (Stephen Campbell Moore) Lundy was part of the supergrass system but now it looks like the end of his career. He’s been cleared of corrupt practices, but his superiors want to move him into retirement. Then he’s picked up for Boyce’s task force because of the contacts he uses outside normal procedure. Lundy’s almost an old-school bounty hunter whose mission it is to track down Charlie Miller. We’re never quite sure how trustworthy or legal his methods are, but his intentions are good. Tony Brightwell (Emun Elliott) and Nicki Jennings (Charlotte Spencer) Brightwell is more confident, self-assured, and relaxed — more jaded, too, perhaps — but with as much determination and integrity as before. His connection with Boyce and Jennings is stronger — they’re now fully endorsed by Boyce who’s reaching the end of his career, so they’re taking on a lot of his responsibilities. Brightwell is secretly slightly in awe of Lundy, seeing him as this lone wolf who has his own methods — and they work. Jennings and Brightwell still have that fire, but this time it’s burning quietly: they’re in their groove and understand the job now, even as the trail is going global. Jennings is like a little rottweiler, she is always on guard and it’s hard to earn her trust. She doesn’t like Lundy and thinks he’s bent, but she comes round to him because Boyce trusts him, and she sees Boyce as a wise man you have to respect. Like Dumbledore! The Robbers Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell) and Douglas Baxter (Sam McGuire) Miller’s been waiting it out in Spain before coming back to claim his prize, but the heat hasn’t died down and Boyce’s team come after him. He’s got a strategy, which I don’t think they’ve bargained for, and it becomes a chase around the world as he tries to use the gold to go legit and become a financial player. He doesn’t really have the capacity to realise his aspirations, so he joins Baxter in a horrible ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ of a duo. Baxter is a lawyer who lost his licence after being discovered taking drugs in a toilet. His sideline in money laundering is to make ends meet, which is how Miller finds him. Baxter thinks he’s the finest legal mind of his generation, but he’s not really cut out for the criminal life — that gap between the reality and what he thinks is where the comedy lies with him. He’s a far less cool character than everyone else in the series! Logan Campbell (Tom Hughes) Campbell is an expat laundering money for a Caribbean drug cartel. He’s a man who appears on the outside to have everything in balance, but it’s a veneer. He’s terrified of opening up to anyone because that would mean opening up to himself, where underneath is a well of complexity and self-loathing and pain. He’s running away from himself and that makes him dangerous — he’s a lost man in a world of aspiration. John Palmer (Tom Cullen) In series one, John was apprehensive and uneasy but, having started his life with nothing, he’s now at the top: calling himself the King of Tenerife, building a timeshare scheme and flying around in a ridiculous private jet. Then other factions start to move in, he develops a cocaine addiction and things are not at all good with his wife. He’s allowed the gold to infect him. It’s starting to erode his core.
The Gold season 2 will reveal details of Brink’s-Mat heist aftermath that have "never been reported"
The second season of the hit BBC drama lands this weekend.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. The 1983 Brink’s-Mat heist may have begun with six villains in a van, but the £26 million in gold bullion they stole launched one of the longest and most expensive investigations in the history of the Metropolitan Police. The first series of the BBC1 drama The Gold ended with some of the gang in prison and the police – led by Hugh Bonneville’s DCS Brian Boyce – realising they had only been hunting half the haul. The second series, once again written by Guilt and Bob Servant creator Neil Forsyth, picks up the trail in the late 1980s to consider what might have happened to the rest. “We go into new areas of international crime funded by the proceeds of the gold while the police, now a depleted task force, are still trying to engineer some sort of result,” Forsyth explains from his home just outside London. “It’s about how Brink’s-Mat still defined these people even when they were trying to escape it, and the escalating pressures that put on them.” Boyce and his compact team of Nicki Jennings (Charlotte Spencer) and Tony Brightwell (Emun Elliott) are bolstered by controversial copper Tony Lundy (Stephen Campbell Moore) to focus on two primary targets: small-time gangster Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell, briefly glimpsed in Spain at the end of series one) and John Palmer (Tom Cullen), the West Country gold smelter now laundering his wealth in a Tenerife timeshare scam, and whose position alongside Queen Elizabeth II in the Sunday Times Rich List causes considerable establishment embarrassment. The truth is always a slippery concept for dramas rooted in but not beholden to the facts; while Palmer was a real person, Miller and his accomplice Douglas Baxter (Joshua McGuire) are composite characters created to unclutter the narrative. Forsyth’s interpretation of individual scenes also vary from the most plausible, to the most agreed upon, to the most dramatically compelling. “Sometimes people use the phrase ‘creative licence’ in a pejorative way, which is kind of insane,” he says. “Creative licence is vital to writing drama, otherwise why not make a documentary? For The Gold, a lot of it is simplifying a very murky, complicated story. "There’s no aspect of it where more than one opinion was not available, so it’s about trying to make the right decision: is it a very sensitive area where you have to be particularly careful, or a purely dramatic turn of events where you’re well within your rights to pick the most interesting path? It’s about understanding characters and motivations, then putting that into an entertaining dramatisation. You’re not doing it to be flippant or fudge a lack of knowledge. And frankly, real life is messy and complicated and weirdly unrealistic.” Indeed, if ever a story demonstrated truth as stranger than fiction, it’s The Gold – one villain’s girlfriend did name her dogs Brinks and Mat and another associate did drop £10,000 in the street en route to the bank. At the outset of the second series, a significant portion of the bullion is buried in Cornish tin mines – a story drawn from a couple of paragraphs in the London Evening Standard in the mid-'80s. “We found it in the archives,” says Forsyth, grinning. “It’s not online and has never been reported anywhere else: one of the criminals had links to the South West, and Cornish police – off the back of credible reports – conducted extensive searches of the mines. A lot of the research was piecing things together because connections weren’t made at the time. I’ve even told Brian [Boyce, who consulted on the series] things he didn’t know, which was very gratifying.” As this was a stretch of the Brink’s-Mat trail with fewer news stories, trials and with many criminal protagonists either never convicted or in witness protection, grounding the story in one-to-one interviews was as important as painstaking archival trawls. Boyce and his long-retired peers were once again essential, says Forsyth: “They give you the colour of the investigation beyond the black-and-white facts in public records.” And what about those people on the other side of the law? “Some of the stories we heard…” Forsyth marvels. “I wish they’d been caught so I could write about it.” The most prominent villain Forsyth admits to consulting is the ostensible leader of the heist, the late Micky McAvoy (played by Adam Nagaitis), whose theory Forsyth credits with underpinning both series: the idea that the robbers themselves, way out of their depth, made vanishingly little compared to the white-collar figures who, capitalising on an era of financial deregulation, took over and made millions. In fact, Forsyth’s focus on class and social mobility saw the first series accused of treating some of the criminals too kindly; unsurprisingly, he mounts a stout defence. “I’ve got a very clear conscience because I know more about the characters and events than anyone making passing commentary,” he reasons. “A lot of these guys were charming, which is how they managed to corrupt the police. Look at the character arc of any of our major criminal characters and where they end up – I don’t think you can conclude they’ve been treated in a glamorous or sympathetic way.” Forsyth’s next series is Legends, a six-part drama for Netflix with Steve Coogan and Tom Burke. He’s off to the set at “another north London warehouse” after our conversation and concedes that, as a true story about customs investigators going under cover in the international drugs trade, it operates on adjacent turf to The Gold. But true crime is a broad church, ranging from Ryan Murphy’s lurid serial-killer fantasias to Jeff Pope’s angular, diligently researched treatments. The genre, argues Forsyth, appeals because, “viewers don’t want to watch people living within the natural confines of life and making safe decisions”. It can also be unexpectedly relatable: during filming of The Gold in Hastings, Forsyth was approached by McAvoy’s former prison guard who happened to be walking his dog nearby – proof, he says, that if “hundreds were involved in the Brink’s-Mat crime, thousands must have known someone connected to it”. Most rewardingly for the writer, true crime also acts as a Trojan horse. “Other People’s Money [his 2007 book about a credit-card fraudster] was about a young guy in search of identity. Guilt was about siblings. The Gold is about greed at a particular point of British history. Legends is about people dissatisfied with their careers and seeing opportunities to do something different.” In one sense, there’s no mystery around The Gold at all. It’s not called Detective Boyce, or Jennings and Brightwell. The star of the show is in the title. Does Forsyth understand its allure? “Definitely. We had some very convincing gold-plated bars on set and I think every single crew member sneaked over for a photo. I had a lively, hedonistic youth, but I have become more and more responsible, because my writing has come to show the appalling consequences of recklessness.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Gold season 2 will arrive on BBC iPlayer at 6am on Sunday 8th June, before airing on BBC One at 9pm. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
As Black Mirror returns with more cautionary tales about new tech, Charlie Brooker has one eye on the past, but says he's not 'anti-tech'…
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in April 2025. Add Black Mirror to your watchlist This year is more reflective,” Charlie Brooker says of his seventh season of Black Mirror. “While I was writing it, I was thinking about how the Beatles’ Get Back documentary used technology to bring the past back to life. It was startling, like staring through a periscope into 1969, so reliving moments from the past was definitely on my mind.” This tone is most evident in the fifth of the new season’s six stories, Eulogy, in which solitary Philip (Paul Giamatti) experiences new technology that enables him to step into old photographs in search of memories of a long-estranged lover, now deceased, so that he can contribute to her memorial service. “One of the key ingredients,” says Brooker of what he calls his “Rolodex of ideas”, “is a technology whose appeal and use you can absolutely understand. It’s always a bit of a barometer for an episode: would you use it yourself?” And would he? “Oh yeah, although maybe only in small doses with a therapist present. I found myself having to read an actual eulogy for my dad while we were finishing the episode. My mum had dug out some old photos I hadn’t seen in 40 years; one had my dad going to a fancy-dress party wearing a plastic ape mask and a coat with something written on it. I thought, ‘If only I could step in, I could read it…’” Brooker, 54, who started out writing for a gaming magazine, tries to keep an admirably open mind when it comes to his sons – 13-year-old Covey and Huxley, 11 – and screens. “It would be hypocritical of me to go, ‘Get off that machine, it’s a sunny day outside!’ I just hear echoes of my parents. Instead, I’m often saying to them, ‘Why are you playing Fortnite? You should be playing Split Fiction!’ I’m probably annoying like that. “I’m not anti-tech in that way that people might think. The thing that scares me about the future is disinformation, people getting radicalised or misled by the horrible stuff that they see.” The seventh season of Black Mirror has its fair share of “horrible stuff” to go with the contemplative, openly affecting moments, all of them testament to a big, boiling brain that seemingly cannot stop dreaming up new narrative hooks. “One of the things that makes old photos even more evocative is that they’re candid because you don’t get a chance to polish them,” Brooker concludes. “You can now use an AI tool to make it so everyone’s smiling – you’re constructing a false memory in the moment.” He goes quiet, filing another entry for that Rolodex. “That’s a good idea for a story!”
Starring in Black Mirror took Paul Giamatti back to his loft party days on the Lower East Side – but were they memories he wanted reminding of?
Add Black Mirror to your watchlist For Paul Giamatti, the new Black Mirror episode Eulogy was a journey into a parallel past. As his character, New Englander Philip – “a guy who’s a little stuck, pretty content but with some unresolved issues from his past” – stepped back into old photos of life squatting in Manhattan’s loft apartments in the early 1990s, Giamatti also came to reflect on his own gloriously chaotic formative years. “I knew a lot about that world,” says the 57-year-old on set in Shepperton, far more approachable and cheerful than the curmudgeonly roles that brought him to prominence in the likes of Sideways and Billions. “The rooftops on set are re-created very accurately, exactly the kind of place I lived in on the Lower East Side, although a few years later than Philip. “What I mostly remember about those years was scrapping around, looking for work, then having a baby in this ridiculous apartment that was in no way suited to having a baby. It was a real death trap, open sockets in the walls… There were no dividing walls, so we made them out of bookshelves. It was a good time.” The work picked up eventually. Now, with two Oscar nominations (for Cinderella Man and The Holdovers) to his name, Giamatti is one of America’s most in-demand actors. He is also no stranger to working in the UK, having shot here on a range of projects, including Saving Private Ryan, Downton Abbey and, er, Thunderpants. “I love that movie!” Giamatti beams of the 2002 film he made with Rupert Grint post-Hogwarts. “There’s a kind of sanity to the work here that we lack in America. It doesn’t feel rushed. The days are normal and there’s an eye towards people having a life outside of work, which is not the case in America a lot of the time.” Giamatti was delighted to return to Britain to film Eulogy, despite the unusual demands it placed on him: “I don’t often feel that I consciously bring anything of my own life into something, but there were definitely moments of thinking about my own past here. Regrettable relationships, things that were left open-ended in uncomfortable ways...” A long-time fan of Black Mirror and dedicated reader of Philip K Dick, Isaac Asimov and Ted Chiang, Giamatti appreciates the show’s measured view of technology while being no tech trailblazer himself. “I am on Instagram, although only my friends know it’s me,” he says, explaining that he uses a pseudonym he declines to share with me. “My girlfriend [Billions co-star Clara Wong] is heavily into TikTok but I don’t want to engage in that. That endless scroll and loop is terrifying. The second that you’re confronted with algorithms and nudges, you feel coerced. It’s strange and troubling.” Despite that, the actor adds, he isn’t one to retreat into the past for comfort. “I’m not a big nostalgia guy and I don’t have a ton of photos. I regret that now. I wish I had kept a lot of things – photographs, but also letters, school papers, tests, reports. I never kept anything. I was always just thinking, ‘What’s next?’” As he is called back to set, we end our conversation, appropriately if morbidly, with the subject of funerals. “I think about death a lot as I get older,” he says. “Do I believe anything is going to happen to me after I die? I used to think not, but now I’m not so sure. I go back and forth between burial and cremation, but I have this funny thing of wanting to know that my body is still around, just in case. “Maybe I should be cryogenically frozen. Or maybe I have been watching too much Black Mirror!” Patsy Ferran: 'I'm a luddite!' Your character guides Philip into photos from his past. How did you find your AI voice? I went for an Alexa-type voice initially as it’s a client-service provider relationship, but we realised that loses dramatic tension quite quickly. The Guide has to make Philip feel relaxed and safe. It evolved into something similar to my own voice, making her seem more human vocally. It made my job a lot easier. If there was an old photo you could step into, what would it be? I’d be curious to see my parents when they were really young and dating. We have some amazing photos of them in 1970s garb. How do you feel about the technology in Eulogy? There’s always some fallout with seemingly benevolent technology, although less so with Eulogy, which is more a human story of potential regret and sadness. You could trigger something you didn’t want to remember with this. But as technology goes, it’s probably the least harmful. I might use it. Are you an early tech adopter? I was up to date until about ten years ago. The fact there are no actual buttons on smartphones now drives me mad. I’m regularly shouting at my printer because it doesn’t want to connect. Actually, I think I’m a full-on Luddite. GT
Charlie Brooker: 'I'm not anti-tech – I fear people being radicalised by what they see online'
The Black Mirror creator spoke to Radio Times magazine about the new season.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. As Black Mirror returns with more cautionary tales about new tech, Charlie Brooker has one eye on the past. This year is more reflective,” Charlie Brooker says of his seventh season of Black Mirror. “While I was writing it, I was thinking about how the Beatles’ Get Back documentary used technology to bring the past back to life. It was startling, like staring through a periscope into 1969, so reliving moments from the past was definitely on my mind.” This tone is most evident in the fifth of the new season’s six stories, Eulogy (see over the page), in which solitary Philip (Paul Giamatti) experiences new technology that enables him to step into old photographs in search of memories of a long-estranged lover, now deceased, so that he can contribute to her memorial service. “One of the key ingredients,” says Brooker of what he calls his “Rolodex of ideas”, “is a technology whose appeal and use you can absolutely understand. It’s always a bit of a barometer for an episode: would you use it yourself?” And would he? “Oh yeah, although maybe only in small doses with a therapist present. I found myself having to read an actual eulogy for my dad while we were finishing the episode. My mum had dug out some old photos I hadn’t seen in 40 years; one had my dad going to a fancy-dress party wearing a plastic ape mask and a coat with something written on it. I thought, ‘If only I could step in, I could read it…’” Brooker, 54, who started out writing for a gaming magazine, tries to keep an admirably open mind when it comes to his sons – 13-year-old Covey and Huxley, 11 – and screens. “It would be hypocritical of me to go, ‘Get off that machine, it’s a sunny day outside!’ I just hear echoes of my parents. Instead, I’m often saying to them, ‘Why are you playing Fortnite? You should be playing Split Fiction!’ I’m probably annoying like that. “I’m not anti-tech in that way that people might think. The thing that scares me about the future is disinformation, people getting radicalised or misled by the horrible stuff that they see.” The seventh season of Black Mirror has its fair share of “horrible stuff” to go with the contemplative, openly affecting moments, all of them testament to a big, boiling brain that seemingly cannot stop dreaming up new narrative hooks. “One of the things that makes old photos even more evocative is that they’re candid because you don’t get a chance to polish them,” Brooker concludes. “You can now use an AI tool to make it so everyone’s smiling – you’re constructing a false memory in the moment.” He goes quiet, filing another entry for that Rolodex. “That’s a good idea for a story!” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Black Mirror season 7 will stream on Netflix from 10th April 2025. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Sci-Fi coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Black Mirror season 7 director reveals filming secrets behind emotional new episode
New episodes of Black Mirror are landing on Netflix this April.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Paul Giamatti is standing in a Shepperton studio, poring over some old polaroids. It's not, perhaps, what one would expect for the filming of an episode of the tech-savvy Black Mirror, the often bleak dystopian anthology series created by screenwriter Charlie Brooker. But don't be fooled - there's still a sci-fi twist in this tale. In the episode, one of six due to be released this year, Giamatti's character Philip is informed of the death of an ex-partner, and asked for stories of her younger years to be included at her memorial service. All he can offer are buried memories and old polaroids - but with the help of an immersive Artificial Intelligence (played by Patsy Ferran), he's able to step into those photos, with the images of gigs, rooftop parties and hotel rooms from decades ago coming to life around him. Behind the scenes, it was co-directors Chris Barrett and Luke Taylor who had to make the immersive photos look convincing. "We wanted things to be tangible," says Taylor. "If the actors couldn't reach out and touch it, it wouldn't be connected to Philip's memory. The more real things felt, the more they actually would be." Rather than take the easy route of computer-generated imagery, the figures in the photos are dancers, prepped by acclaimed movement coach Polly Bennett. Positions were held for several minutes during filming as Giamatti and Ferran explored the space, with the physical photo itself taken at the end to avoid changing how the scene would be shot. "Polly was responsible for how good it looks," says Barrett. "If you or I were to freeze, we'd probably strike a pose, but she helped the dancers move... and then pause. It wasn't so much about being frozen but about capturing a moment in time." The directors also had to dodge their instincts to frame that all-important final image perfectly. "We wanted the photos to feel candid and captured," says Taylor. "It should look like someone's just gone: click!" The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Black Mirror season 7 will stream on Netflix from 10th April 2025. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Sci-Fi coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
From a White Lotus resort in Thailand to a gritty real-life story in Toxic Town Corby, the actor is finding her voice
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in March 2025. Add The White Lotus to your watchlist Sex Education has been the midwife to a generation of new acting talent, from Time Lord Ncuti Gatwa and SAS Rogue Hero Connor Swindells to erstwhile Barbie Emma Mackey. Aimee Lou Wood won a Bafta for her role in the series — now, the 31-year-old is basking on a Thai beach in The White Lotus. She is also appearing in Toxic Town, based on the true story of a group of Corby women who went to court to prove their children’s limb differences resulted from the council’s steelworks reclamation. Six years on from your TV debut, you’ve just spent seven months in Thailand making one of the biggest shows on TV. Is that journey from Sex Education to The White Lotus as mad as it sounds? It is quite mad. We had no idea how Sex Education was going to go down, whereas The White Lotus is the first time I’ve been a superfan of something I’m in – which is scary. How has it felt to watch your Sex Education castmates move on? It’s been great. I remember Ncuti [Gatwa] looking at everyone during season four, going: “We are 30-year-olds. We need to graduate!” It was a bit untethering at first when it finished, wondering what my life was without this thing. As it gets further away, it feels more like a fever dream. There was a pressure when it first came out, of being put into a certain mould, but we’ve all done our own thing since. Your characters in both that and The White Lotus, Aimee and Chelsea, seem superficially similar: kind, curious, a bit green and stuck in a toxic relationship. Would you agree? Because they’re both me, there will always be things I’m expressing that are of a similar frequency or energy. Even though they’re both underestimated, they’re on very different life journeys and are very different at their core. I feel people think I play similar characters if they have northern accents. If I had an RP accent, I wonder whether they would? Chelsea was originally American but she now has your accent. Why was it changed? Why can’t Chelsea be from Manchester? She’s already an outsider and a misfit in this world, so it made sense to me and to [showrunner] Mike White. With Chelsea, I was craving not having separation from her, including speaking in my own voice. All my favourite actors reveal some of themselves. I was having a proper Meg Ryan weekend recently, and she conveys so much of herself through her parts. Have you ever been anywhere like that Thai resort before? No, I’m not an adventurer, but I want to work on that part of myself because, otherwise, I would happily stay in my bit of south-east London. I’d never been to Thailand and there’s nothing like seven months living in a hotel you’re filming in. You become like a White Lotus guest – it was the most immersive experience I’ve ever had, blurring fiction and reality. You’re also currently in Toxic Town playing real-life Corby mum Tracey Taylor — why is it an important story to tell? I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard about it – it never really got into the national news, so it’s important to the real Tracey on a practical level. Anything that exposes an uncomfortable truth feels important to be a part of. I was in awe of her resilience. She doesn’t see herself as a hero at all, but all the other mums do. And it was liberating because, although I care how it’s received, once I knew Tracey was happy, it was “job done”. Between Toxic Town and BBC3 comedy Daddy Issues, you spent a lot of last year either playing pregnant or a mum. What was that like? It made me definitely want kids. I did start to interact with my bump on BBC3’s Daddy Issues as if it was real. On Toxic Town, I had a week-old baby on my shoulder and it felt very real and intense when she was taken away. But you’re playing a teenager one minute, then you’re pregnant and then a mum. It happened pretty much overnight. Goodbye, youth! My next phase will be grandmas… Did turning 30 last year feel like a meaningful landmark? Something definitely shifted in me. Then a few days later I went to Thailand for the biggest experience of my life, which was odd because I’d got a flat and was so ready to be 30-year-old Aimee, whoever that was! I found 29 harder than 30 – there was a relief in escaping the pressure of my 20s. The first TV series you’ve written, Film Club, is soon set for BBC3. How did that come about? It started off as a fun way to pass time during lockdown when I was watching a lot of films, and the idea came to me and Ralph [Davis], my co-writer, that every episode could be based around a film these two friends are watching. I don’t want to be in the next thing I write because you don’t really get to switch off, but I love writing. It’s what I wanted to do when I was younger. I didn’t want to be an actor. So what happened? I knew I could do funny voices and funny characters, so it was a self-protective thing at school. Then I did Guys and Dolls when I was 16 and my English teacher encouraged me to pursue acting because I could still keep up the writing. So, it was a defence mechanism that got way out of control! The White Lotus is on Monday Sky Atlantic/Now; all four episodes of Toxic Town are available to stream on Netflix
'I became aware of race at drama school'
Tamara Lawrance hopes that her role as a Jamaican detective will be a game-changer – for her career and primetime TV
Add Get Millie Black to your watchlist Tamara Lawrance has had a big 18 months. Having stolen scenes from Bella Ramsey and Jodie Whittaker as a mother imprisoned for killing her baby in the deadly serious Time, she then played Lennie James’s externally ebullient, inwardly troubled daughter in the funny and affecting Mr Loverman. She’s now bagged that most coveted of gigs, the eponymous television detective in Booker Prize winner Marlon James’s debut drama series Get Millie Black. And yet, despite the quality, profile and variety of these projects, she’s “free and available at the moment,” she says with a smile. “I’ve been very lucky with my career, but some of my friends are like, ‘You’re leading this show. How come you don’t have another job yet? I thought you’d be in Hollywood now!’” the 30-year-old actor explains. “Listen, I’m in north London washing my dishes… It’s still hard – getting momentum is a struggle. People in the industry are speaking more about metrics and social media numbers – producers need to guarantee something will make money, so they’re more likely to cast somebody with a huge following, instead of taking a risk. I think people are craving newness – how many productions of Jane Eyre can you put on? Hopefully, this year opens doors.” None of this, it should be emphasised, is said with a hint of self-pity. Lawrance, speaking to me from her home (and not washing up, at least as far as I can tell), is by turns serious and playful, intense and relaxed, warm and challenging, and always admirably matter-of-fact. And if there’s any justice, playing Millie Black should be a game-changer for her. Lawrance is magnificent as a detective working on the Jamaican Police Force’s missing persons unit three years after a disastrous case saw her forced out of the Met. Her best friend is closeted professional partner Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jr); her sister Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen) transitioned some years earlier and lives among the “Sunshine Ladies” in Kingston’s unglamorous storm-water gullies. When a teenage girl goes missing and a Met detective, Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie), arrives to pursue his own overlapping case, she tugs at threads that unravel Jamaica’s criminal underworld and old-money elite, all ingeniously tangled with post-colonial legacies of violence and the slave trade. In case it isn’t already obvious, this isn’t Death in Paradise – although Lawrance laughs that “filming in Guadeloupe does sound like a nice gig”. She did film on location in Jamaica, which lent authenticity to the portrayal of Caribbean lives in the drama – a more nuanced one than the juxtaposed clichés of sun-kissed beaches, tropical cocktails and Bob Marley v guns, gangs and ganja. It was also something of a homecoming for Lawrance, whose mother, a hospital clinical technician, arrived in the UK from Jamaica at 17. Lawrance, born and raised in Wembley, hasn’t been back since she was three. “I was raised culturally Jamaican, so filming there contextualised so much for me,” she says. “It helped me to understand my mum and myself, as a Londoner who sometimes feels at odds with her British heritage. “Being raised in a country where the majority of people look like you in the media affirms your identity – that doesn’t happen when you grow up here. I’ve always felt very proud of Jamaica, fascinated to understand this land and people that created a culture touching all four corners of the Earth. I’d love to spend significant time in Jamaica in my future, but not as a tourist in the areas where only expats live. It’s on my mind, how you engage in the community and give back.” Lawrance doesn’t do victims. July, the enslaved woman she played in 2018’s Andrea Levy adaptation The Long Song, eventually transcends her status; Mr Loverman’s Maxine defies expectations to pursue a career in fashion; Time’s Abi will not be cowed by her fellow inmates’ hostility or a life behind bars. But Millie’s agency and drive are striking, even in such company. “A lot of what drives Millie subconsciously is trauma and guilt for all the abuse that Hibiscus suffered [from their conservative, religious mother],” says Lawrance. “There is a thread of caring for those failed by their parents, and joining the Met was her way of trying to make things right while bringing some structure to her behaviour, not always that successfully. “It’s so inspiring to see a woman who, in the face of all of her trauma, has not assimilated and doesn’t go out of her way to ingratiate herself or make other people feel comfortable. In fact, she does the opposite because she knows herself. Our director would tell me off for being too nice, because my instincts are to include people. But for those reasons, she’s a very empowering character. I could use a bit more of Millie’s directness in my own life.” Not that she is a shrinking violet. Lawrance took control of her destiny at a young age, acting in school plays at six, and at 11 persuading her secondary school to open up a drama club for younger students. “There was no back-up plan, it was all or nothing,” she says. In reality, this has meant sacrifices, whether it was messing about outside with friends, playing school netball or attending her best friend’s wedding. “But being sure of what I wanted was a privilege,” she says. “I put a lot of energy into making sure things worked out.” With the support of her sixth-form drama teacher, she got into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2012. Did she enjoy her time there, considering in 2020 the school labelled itself “institutionally racist”? “I wasn’t so aware of race and class until I got to drama school,” she acknowledges. “My primary and secondary schools were fairly diverse and my friends were from around the world. Then at drama school people started talking about casting brackets… in my third year I played a maid, an enslaved person, a campaigner for Barack Obama. I started to understand how the industry might see me. “Class plays a massive part as well, especially through nepotism. It’s really frustrating when you get a part you’ve worked really hard for, only for people to say, ‘Oh, you only got it because of wokeism or diversity policies.’ It is hard navigating different perceptions and presumptions, but I’ve got to validate myself, and Millie’s really helped with that.” That validation also applies to the series’ Jamaican queer and trans characters, who live in a nation where same-sex intercourse means ten years in prison: Hibiscus is clear that she needs to be accepted, not saved. Lawrance was surprised and heartened by the degree of allyship and safe spaces she found for the trans community in Kingston. And she is no less proud of the show’s spiritual cousin, Mr Loverman, which posed a parallel challenge to those in both her homelands who might dismiss queerness as either fad or aberration. These are worlds seldom, if ever, depicted with such complexity on primetime British television. For all that, Lawrance cautions against complacency. “There are too many shows with black female leads, like Champion or Riches, getting cancelled. I’m over the moon to be a part of these projects, but I’m interested to see where they go. Get Millie Black has the potential to do more, but will it? “Variety makes the world beautiful and some of our popular channels like to have the appearance of variety, but we see these waves of diverse shows a lot and the real support for the long-standing careers of black writers, showrunners, producers, isn’t there. Even in the past 18 months, I’ve been on jobs with one Asian person and one black person in a crew of 200. There’s a long way to go.”
Tamara Lawrance on Get Millie Black and the challenges faced by Black female-led shows
The Get Millie Black star chatted to Radio Times magazine about the exciting new detective drama.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Tamara Lawrance has had a big 18 months. Having stolen scenes from Bella Ramsey and Jodie Whittaker as a mother imprisoned for killing her baby in the deadly serious Time, she then played Lennie James’s externally ebullient, inwardly troubled daughter in the funny and affecting Mr Loverman. She’s now bagged that most coveted of gigs, the eponymous television detective in Booker Prize winner Marlon James’s debut drama series Get Millie Black. And yet, despite the quality, profile and variety of these projects, she’s “free and available at the moment”, she says with a smile. “I’ve been very lucky with my career, but some of my friends are like, ‘You’re leading this show. How come you don’t have another job yet? I thought you’d be in Hollywood now!’” the 30-year-old actor explains. “Listen, I’m in north London washing my dishes… It’s still hard – getting momentum is a struggle. People in the industry are speaking more about metrics and social media numbers – producers need to guarantee something will make money, so they’re more likely to cast somebody with a huge following, instead of taking a risk. I think people are craving newness – how many productions of Jane Eyre can you put on? Hopefully, this year opens doors.” None of this, it should be emphasised, is said with a hint of self-pity. Lawrance, speaking to me from her home (and not washing up, at least as far as I can tell), is by turns serious and playful, intense and relaxed, warm and challenging, and always admirably matter-of-fact. And if there’s any justice, playing Millie Black should be a game-changer for her. Lawrance is magnificent as a detective working on the Jamaican Police Force’s missing persons unit three years after a disastrous case saw her forced out of the Met. Her best friend is closeted professional partner Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr); her sister Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen) transitioned some years earlier and lives among the “Sunshine Ladies” in Kingston’s unglamorous storm-water gullies. When a teenage girl goes missing and a Met detective, Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie), arrives to pursue his own overlapping case, she tugs at threads that unravel Jamaica’s criminal underworld and old-money elite, all ingeniously tangled with post-colonial legacies of violence and the slave trade. In case it isn’t already obvious, this isn’t Death in Paradise – although Lawrance laughs that “filming in Guadeloupe does sound like a nice gig”. She did film on location in Jamaica, which lent authenticity to the portrayal of Caribbean lives in the drama – a more nuanced one than the juxtaposed clichés of sun-kissed beaches, tropical cocktails and Bob Marley v guns, gangs and ganja. It was also something of a homecoming for Lawrance, whose mother, a hospital clinical technician, arrived in the UK from Jamaica at 17. Lawrance, born and raised in Wembley, hasn’t been back since she was three. “I was raised culturally Jamaican, so filming there contextualised so much for me,” she says. “It helped me to understand my mum and myself, as a Londoner who sometimes feels at odds with her British heritage. “Being raised in a country where the majority of people look like you in the media affirms your identity – that doesn’t happen when you grow up here. I’ve always felt very proud of Jamaica, fascinated to understand this land and people that created a culture touching all four corners of the Earth. I’d love to spend significant time in Jamaica in my future, but not as a tourist in the areas where only expats live. It’s on my mind, how you engage in the community and give back.” Lawrance doesn’t do victims. July, the enslaved woman she played in 2018’s Andrea Levy adaptation The Long Song, eventually transcends her status; Mr Loverman’s Maxine defies expectations to pursue a career in fashion; Time’s Abi will not be cowed by her fellow inmates’ hostility or a life behind bars. But Millie’s agency and drive are striking, even in such company. “A lot of what drives Millie subconsciously is trauma and guilt for all the abuse that Hibiscus suffered [from their conservative, religious mother],” says Lawrance. “There is a thread of caring for those failed by their parents, and joining the Met was her way of trying to make things right while bringing some structure to her behaviour, not always that successfully. “It’s so inspiring to see a woman who, in the face of all of her trauma, has not assimilated and doesn’t go out of her way to ingratiate herself or make other people feel comfortable. In fact, she does the opposite because she knows herself. Our director would tell me off for being too nice, because my instincts are to include people. But for those reasons, she’s a very empowering character. I could use a bit more of Millie’s directness in my own life.” View oEmbed on the source website Not that she is a shrinking violet. Lawrance took control of her destiny at a young age, acting in school plays at six, and at 11 persuading her secondary school to open up a drama club for younger students. “There was no back-up plan, it was all or nothing,” she says. In reality, this has meant sacrifices, whether it was messing about outside with friends, playing school netball or attending her best friend’s wedding. “But being sure of what I wanted was a privilege,” she says. “I put a lot of energy into making sure things worked out.” With the support of her sixth-form drama teacher, she got into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2012. Did she enjoy her time there, considering in 2020 the school labelled itself “institutionally racist”? “I wasn’t so aware of race and class until I got to drama school,” she acknowledges. “My primary and secondary schools were fairly diverse and my friends were from around the world. Then at drama school people started talking about casting brackets… in my third year I played a maid, an enslaved person, a campaigner for Barack Obama. I started to understand how the industry might see me. “Class plays a massive part as well, especially through nepotism. It’s really frustrating when you get a part you’ve worked really hard for, only for people to say, ‘Oh, you only got it because of wokeism or diversity policies.’ It is hard navigating different perceptions and presumptions, but I’ve got to validate myself, and Millie’s really helped with that.” That validation also applies to the series’ Jamaican queer and trans characters, who live in a nation where same-sex intercourse means ten years in prison: Hibiscus is clear that she needs to be accepted, not saved. Lawrance was surprised and heartened by the degree of allyship and safe spaces she found for the trans community in Kingston. And she is no less proud of the show’s spiritual cousin, Mr Loverman, which posed a parallel challenge to those in both her homelands who might dismiss queerness as either fad or aberration. These are worlds seldom, if ever, depicted with such complexity on primetime British television. For all that, Lawrance cautions against complacency. “There are too many shows with black female leads, like Champion or Riches, getting cancelled. I’m over the moon to be a part of these projects, but I’m interested to see where they go. Get Millie Black has the potential to do more, but will it? “Variety makes the world beautiful and some of our popular channels like to have the appearance of variety, but we see these waves of diverse shows a lot and the real support for the long-standing careers of black writers, showrunners, producers, isn’t there. Even in the past 18 months, I’ve been on jobs with one Asian person and one black person in a crew of 200. There’s a long way to go.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Get Millie Black will begin airing on Channel 4 at 9pm on Wednesday 5th March. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what else is on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Aimee Lou Wood says Netflix's Toxic Town reveals an uncomfortable truth
The Toxic Town star chatted to Radio Times magazine about the new Netflix series.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Sex Education has been the midwife to a generation of new acting talent, from Time Lord Ncuti Gatwa and SAS Rogue Hero Connor Swindells to erstwhile Barbie Emma Mackey. Aimee Lou Wood won a BAFTA for her role in the series — now, the 31-year-old is basking on a Thai beach in The White Lotus. She is also appearing in Toxic Town, based on the true story of a group of Corby women who went to court to prove their children’s limb differences resulted from the council’s steelworks reclamation. Six years on from your TV debut, you've just spent seven months in Thailand making one of the biggest shows on TV. Is that journey from Sex Education to The White Lotus as mad as it sounds? It is quite mad. We had no idea how Sex Education was going to go down, whereas The White Lotus is the first time I’ve been a superfan of something I’m in – which is scary. How has it felt to watch your Sex Education castmates move on? It’s been great. I remember Ncuti [Gatwa] looking at everyone during season 4, going: “We are 30-year-olds. We need to graduate!” It was a bit untethering at first when it finished, wondering what my life was without this thing. As it gets further away, it feels more like a fever dream. There was a pressure when it first came out, of being put into a certain mould, but we’ve all done our own thing since. Your characters in both that and The White Lotus, Aimee and Chelsea, seem superficially similar: kind, curious, a bit green and stuck in a toxic relationship. Would you agree? Because they’re both me, there will always be things I’m expressing that are of a similar frequency or energy. Even though they’re both underestimated, they’re on very different life journeys and are very different at their core. I feel people think I play similar characters if they have northern accents. If I had an RP accent, I wonder whether they would? Chelsea was originally American but she now has your accent. Why was it changed? Why can’t Chelsea be from Manchester? She’s already an outsider and a misfit in this world, so it made sense to me and to [showrunner] Mike White. With Chelsea, I was craving not having separation from her, including speaking in my own voice. All my favourite actors reveal some of themselves. I was having a proper Meg Ryan weekend recently, and she conveys so much of herself through her parts. Have you ever been anywhere like that Thai resort before? No, I’m not an adventurer, but I want to work on that part of myself because, otherwise, I would happily stay in my bit of south-east London. I’d never been to Thailand and there’s nothing like seven months living in a hotel you’re filming in. You become like a White Lotus guest – it was the most immersive experience I’ve ever had, blurring fiction and reality. You're also currently in Toxic Town playing real-life Corby mum Tracey Taylor — why is it an important story to tell? I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard about it – it never really got into the national news, so it’s important to the real Tracey on a practical level. Anything that exposes an uncomfortable truth feels important to be a part of. I was in awe of her resilience. She doesn’t see herself as a hero at all, but all the other mums do. And it was liberating because, although I care how it’s received, once I knew Tracey was happy, it was “job done”. Between Toxic Town and BBC Three comedy Daddy Issues, you spent a lot of last year either playing pregnant or a mum. What was that like? It made me definitely want kids. I did start to interact with my bump on BBC Three’s Daddy Issues as if it was real. On Toxic Town, I had a week-old baby on my shoulder and it felt very real and intense when she was taken away. But you’re playing a teenager one minute, then you’re pregnant and then a mum. It happened pretty much overnight. Goodbye, youth! My next phase will be grandmas… Did turning 30 last year feel like a meaningful landmark? Something definitely shifted in me. Then a few days later I went to Thailand for the biggest experience of my life, which was odd because I’d got a flat and was so ready to be 30-year-old Aimee, whoever that was! I found 29 harder than 30 – there was a relief in escaping the pressure of my 20s. The first TV series you've written, Film Club, is soon set for BBC Three. How did that come about? It started off as a fun way to pass time during lockdown when I was watching a lot of films, and the idea came to me and Ralph [Davis], my co-writer, that every episode could be based around a film these two friends are watching. I don’t want to be in the next thing I write because you don’t really get to switch off, but I love writing. It’s what I wanted to do when I was younger. I didn’t want to be an actor. So, what happened? I knew I could do funny voices and funny characters, so it was a self-protective thing at school. Then I did Guys and Dolls when I was 16 and my English teacher encouraged me to pursue acting because I could still keep up the writing. So, it was a defence mechanism that got way out of control! The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Toxic Town premieres on Netflix on Thursday 27th February 2025. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Writer Jack Thorne and the star of his new drama, Jodie Whittaker, shine a light on the battle won by mothers who fought the Corby toxic waste case
Add Toxic Town to your watchlist Is the smoke OK for baby?” asks Jodie Whittaker, cradling a mithering two-week old. It’s an innocent question, but considering we’re on the set of Jack Thorne’s four-part drama Toxic Town, which is dressed to look like a council house in the Northamptonshire town of Corby, it feels inadvertently loaded with significance. Yes, she’s reassured, the smoke used for special effect is also used at National Trust properties and completely harmless. The same couldn’t be said of the air that was actually inhaled by Susan McIntyre, played by Whittaker on screen, who led a group of local mothers in a decade-long campaign to expose the biggest case of child poisoning since thalidomide. With the help of Corby-born solicitor Des Collins (played by Rory Kinnear), they proved the link between toxic dust created by the Labour council’s reclamation of a shuttered steelworks site between 1984 and 1999, and the disproportionately high numbers of children born with limb difference over that period. In doing so, 19 settlements were reached and legal history was made. The landmark decision was the first in the world to establish a link between atmospheric toxic waste and the impact on babies carried by women breathing it in. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re in good company. Neither had Thorne, Whittaker nor anyone else in the cast. A low-key 2020 Horizon documentary aside, it has been largely forgotten since the verdict in 2009; even at the time, with the exception of the Sunday Times reports that brought several of the mothers together in the first place, it made remarkably few headlines. “A friend of mine from Corby told me about the case, and I was outraged and embarrassed that I hadn’t heard about it,” says executive producer Annabel Jones, who – alongside Charlie Brooker – is half the brains behind Black Mirror and whose idea this series was. “We met the mums of all 19 families. Because it had taken them so long to win the case and the council had put out a lot of propaganda against these women in terms of cost to taxpayers, quite a few families didn’t want that scrutiny again. We focused on who we thought would show the tapestry of the town, because the fact the toxic waste was airborne meant it was democratic and affected everyone.” “Susan was the natural leader,” says Thorne, who was instantly intrigued by a story of mostly working-class women taking control of the narrative. “I loved everything I read about her, then I met her and loved her even more – she’s a complicated, wonderful person, joyous to write.” Despite the pain and trauma of their experiences, Thorne says Susan and her fellow plaintiffs were remarkably generous with their time and insights. “The trouble you can get into is when people say, ‘There’s a version of me I want to tell’. But they didn’t. They told us everything, even stuff they found deeply moving and very difficult to talk about. The responsibility as a writer is huge, but I love shows that are prepared to do the hard yards and find the drama within complication.” Toxic Town is full of complication, embodied by council leader Roy Thomas. A composite character out of necessity, as no one was convicted in the case, he’s played by Corby-born Brendan Coyle. “My cousins and brother knew some of the people involved,” says Coyle. “They tell me this drama is the talk of the town. British Steel provided a sense of identity, and when the works closed in 1980, about 11,000 people in a town of 50,000 lost their jobs. It was a desperately bleak place through the 1980s, but the council didn’t want Corby to become a sink town like some that were left to rot after the coal mines closed. Growth was all important, and for me the crucial moment comes when Roy is asked: ‘What’s more important – the progress or the mess?’” Aside from a few establishing shots, the fact that little was filmed in Corby itself speaks volumes about the superficial success of the council’s stated mission to regenerate the town. Such matters are right in Thorne’s wheelhouse. “I’ve always been obsessed with community politics,” he laughs. “I grew up in Newbury during the bypass protests and in the shadow of Aldermaston. I became the Young Labour officer for the Newbury constituency at 16, so I learnt to love getting inside civic responsibility and talking about these vital things. “But waste is also an obsession, and as a country we need to have a conversation about it. They [the Government] are talking about building modular power stations to fuel an AI revolution, and cutting back on planning laws to fuel growth. Are we considering the true cost of that?” Thorne also hopes that a little of the impact made by Mr Bates vs the Post Office will rub off on Toxic Town. “I think every writer in the social realism realm took a breath when that came out, particularly when everyone said: ‘This is what TV drama can do!’ We’ve been trying to do that for years… B*****ds! But it was amazing seeing how far it reached and that’s the dream, because there’s a lingering sense that no one paid attention. “I don’t think it’s about the mothers going after more people, and they certainly weren’t in it for the money. They’re worried for where our country is at, worried that what they and others went through has been forgotten and, when the Government is talking about slashing regulations and red tape, concerned about how we protect ourselves and our children.”
Jodie Whittaker plays Susan McIntyre, who fought in the Corby toxic waste case
Add Toxic Town to your watchlist Why did this story and playing Susan McIntyre matter to you? These lionesses were incredible. They had their cubs in their mouths, and however long it took, they carried them to the finish line. They weren’t lawyers but they knew that they were right. Had the council been the ones fighting for justice, they might have had a bigger headline. A story is never finished if it’s still having an impact. Lessons haven’t been learnt, unfortunately — water companies are being fined for dumping sewage and major buildings and housing projects have been built over reclamation sites. You hope the containment is there, but we have no sense of whether there’s going to be a disaster down the line. Did you meet Susan before filming? No, but the mums did come on set one day. It was really emotional and nerve-racking, because I knew how fiery Susan was. If she didn’t like the way I was doing it, she’d say so. I was very needy and asked her, “Do I sound like you?” Because that accent mixing Corby and Glasgow is challenging! She just said, “Yeah,” and gave me a big cuddle. After that, the narcissistic actress got her head out of her arse. This was not about me! How do you feel about Susan now, having embodied her struggle? Susan, as a single parent, was fighting before it even started. A woman who is opinionated, who doesn’t conform and speaks her mind is instantly met with a brick wall — people have made up their minds already. It was easy to pin Connor’s limb difference on her behaviour or lifestyle, the medication she’d been on, the fact she liked a drink. Her son was in hospital, having operation after operation and was in so much pain, and she was blamed. I’ve not had to experience screaming into a tunnel when you know you’re right and everyone’s saying you’re wrong. I’m sure, emotionally, she wasn’t OK with being hated in the town, but she marched that march anyway. What impact do you hope Toxic Town will have? I asked Susan whether she feels the people in her life know what she went through. I think this will shine a light on the fight, and her grace and integrity.
Jodie Whittaker hopes Netflix's Toxic Town shines a light on true story of a mass poisoning
Jodie Whittaker chats to Radio Times magazine about leading new Netflix drama Toxic Town.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Why did this story and playing Susan McIntyre matter to you? These lionesses were incredible. They had their cubs in their mouths, and however long it took, they carried them to the finish line. They weren’t lawyers but they knew that they were right. Had the council been the ones fighting for justice, they might have had a bigger headline. A story is never finished if it’s still having an impact. Lessons haven’t been learnt, unfortunately — water companies are being fined for dumping sewage and major buildings and housing projects have been built over reclamation sites. You hope the containment is there, but we have no sense of whether there’s going to be a disaster down the line. Did you meet Susan before filming? No, but the mums did come on set one day. It was really emotional and nerve-racking, because I knew how fiery Susan was. If she didn’t like the way I was doing it, she’d say so. I was very needy and asked her, “Do I sound like you?” Because that accent mixing Corby and Glasgow is challenging! She just said, “Yeah,” and gave me a big cuddle. After that, the narcissistic actress got her head out of her arse. This was not about me! How do you feel about Susan now, having embodied her struggle? Susan, as a single parent, was fighting before it even started. A woman who is opinionated, who doesn’t conform and speaks her mind is instantly met with a brick wall — people have made up their minds already. It was easy to pin Connor’s limb difference on her behaviour or lifestyle, the medication she’d been on, the fact she liked a drink. Her son was in hospital, having operation after operation and was in so much pain, and she was blamed. I’ve not had to experience screaming into a tunnel when you know you’re right and everyone’s saying you’re wrong. I’m sure, emotionally, she wasn’t OK with being hated in the town, but she marched that march anyway. What impact do you hope Toxic Town will have? I asked Susan whether she feels the people in her life know what she went through. I think this will shine a light on the fight, and her grace and integrity. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Toxic Town will stream on Netflix from Thursday 27th February. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
David Tennant on There She Goes, Staged and his Doctor Who return
The Good Omens star spoke with Radio Times magazine about his prolific work-life, the "family business" and returning to Doctor Who.
This week’s television has a David Tennant for everyone. On Wednesday, he returns to BBC2 in a one-off special of There She Goes, alongside Jessica Hynes playing Simon and Emily, parents of two children including one with a severe learning disability. It clashes, rather unfortunately, with the third episode of ITV1’s Litvinenko, in which he stars as the Russian dissenter who accused Vladimir Putin of ordering his assassination. Not enough Tennant for you? Later that evening, you can flick over to BBC One and watch him reunited with Michael Sheen for their ongoing Zoom meta-com Staged. Or, for those who prefer Tennant delivering a cheekily engaging voiceover, you will find him narrating more aquatic encounters with nature on Sunday with Spy in the Ocean. Even for a man with his work ethic and an enthusiastic fanbase ready to lap it all up, isn’t this a bit much? "I don’t know if it’s remarkable or unfortunate," he muses, wryly articulate as ever during a rare week off (sitting in a kitchen that, thanks to Staged, is now almost as famous as he is). "But having five kids does generate a certain necessity to keep going, and I do like to know what the next thing is because I don’t think one ever quite relaxes. Ultimately, though, you want your work to be seen by as many people as possible." If nothing else, this glut of televised Tennant (Tennivision?) demonstrates his formidable range. While Litvinenko is a necessarily serious piece about an unfathomably brave man, his remarkable widow and the despot they defied, There She Goes is a very different type of real story. Writers Shaun Pye and Sarah Crawford, whose teenage girl Joey has the same chromosomal condition as Simon and Emily’s daughter Rosie, continue to wrench breathtakingly candid, sad and funny stories from the frontline of parenting as Rosie uncomprehendingly enters puberty. "You can’t really slip a bus ticket between the real family and the family on the show," says Tennant, whose character may have reined in the drinking but still erects a shield of dark humour (describing Rosie as "the girl who never grew up, like an annoying Peter Pan") against the raw terror of an uncertain future. In a time of echo chambers and talking over listening, There She Goes has been aptly described as a parable about communication. "That’s a lovely way of putting it," agrees Tennant. "Part of what makes Shaun and Sarah so extraordinary is their willingness to examine their own shortcomings. [The show] would become homogenised and sentimental if they were more objective. Jess and I are always thrilled to return to it, because it’s so honest – you can recognise that portrait of parenting and cast yourself within that family." Did it lead him to reassess aspects of his own parenting? "It’s hard to know," he demurs. "You’re influenced by things you’re not necessarily aware of, but parenting defines who you are to such an extent that this job feels accessible in a way other days at work don’t. The bit you get paid for is making up the difference between your own experience and the experience of the character." If so, his salary for Staged must be vanishingly small. In this third series, yet another version of "David Tennant" once again trades with "Michael Sheen" barbs that only close friends would dare hurl. Alongside some gloriously executed farce and with their partners Georgia Tennant and Anna Lundberg on sparkling form, it’s a silly, cerebral treat. "We needed an idea clever, creative and silly enough to be able to spin some new stuff," Tennant admits. "[Writers] Phin Glynn and Simon Evans came up with something, slightly inspired by the Beatles’ Get Back documentary, that gave us reason to come back. We love doing it – that first series was such a huge tonic in the heat of lockdown, when we had a very young baby and were reaching the nadir of our day-to-day experience with home-schooling." Staged has also seen the previously reticent Tennants open up their domestic lives with unexpected glee. "I don’t think it’s something we would have done, had circumstances not enforced it," he concedes. "We’ve always been – and I don’t apologise for this – quite overprotective of our family bubble, which comes from having our relationship scrutinised very early on and wanting to keep all that to ourselves. But we’ve been together for a long time and maybe we’re more confident about that now. We recently did our first photoshoot as a couple, which was very peculiar." Next stop Hello!? He roars with laughter. "We’re not there yet, but give us time! Every time we’ve done anything together, we’ve liked it more, so Staged allowing us to do it may have helped us loosen up a bit." One of the surprise cameos in Staged comes from their 21-year-old son Ty, previously seen in House of the Dragon and Channel 4 drama Consent; with their 12-year-old daughter Olive also appearing on screen for Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar and BAFTA-winning Belfast, how does Tennant square his concerns over the industry with the need to support his children’s acting? "Well, it is undeniably the family businesses," he shrugs. "Georgia’s parents [Sandra Dickinson and Peter Davison] were both in it and my kids have grown up surrounded by it. You can’t deny them if they’re desperate to do it, but while we help them where we can, we certainly don’t encourage it – we would love them to be doctors and lawyers! "Your heart’s in your mouth when you think, ‘What if they can’t do it? What if they turn up and it’s all a bit embarrassing?’ It’s a great relief when you realise they’re good, because, while having parents in the industry might initially get you in a door, if you can’t do it after that, it ain’t going to happen. That’s as it should be. This is an oversubscribed industry and you’ve got to earn your place." Most would agree Tennant did that decades ago. And yet, despite the cult immortality, mainstream smashes and Radio Times covers ("the only accolade I search for"), a BAFTA eludes him. A gloriously pointed exchange with Catherine Tate at this year’s awards saw Tate lament her six nominations and zero awards, only for Tennant to point out he has none, either. A good punchline – but does it genuinely rankle? "It can’t! When you start out, everyone tells you actors don’t make a living, but you always think you’ll be all right and that it’ll be everyone else that won’t work. Then, when I left drama school, I didn’t get a job for about six weeks. I was abjectly skint, no prospects at all, staring into the abyss. Then I got lucky, got a job and began picking up all kinds of ludicrous gigs to pay the bills. "I remember filming adverts for [early on-demand service] HomeChoice in 2000, shouting in a beret like Citizen Smith in a tank on Leamington Spa High Street. Then I’d do Romeo and Juliet at the RSC in the evenings! I am incredibly fortunate to be working consistently, so it would be really churlish to get worked up about the rest of it." Still, his banter with Tate did also serve as a tantalising taster of their imminent reunion with Russell T Davies for Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary – another time we’ll see Tennant on our screens this year. "The specifics of coming back to Doctor Who took a bit of wrangling," he says. "But we were always receptive to the notion. Initially, it was a casual conversation going, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do a one-off?’ Then Russell was back running the show and suddenly it could be something bigger. But there’s really no pressure. It’s a victory lap, in a way – you get to enjoy something that had meant so much to you, one last shot before you get too old to do it again." Has he seen incoming Doctor Ncuti Gatwa at work? "I have!" he grins with the excitement of a lifelong fan. "It makes me feel like I’m just holding the coat till he arrives, because he’s very exciting." While it’s too early to say whether his ubiquity will stretch into a 2024 already affected by ongoing writers’ strikes in America, Tennant’s other three forthcoming projects present yet more sides to the man. He will be back on our screens in July as the demon to Sheen’s angel in Good Omens, and his stage debut as Macbeth will be one of four major productions of the Scottish play this year (another starring Ralph Fiennes). His will be at London’s Donmar Warehouse in December, opposite Deadwater Fell co-star Cush Jumbo and directed by Max Webster, the man behind the Olivier-winning Life of Pi. Tennant has a healthy trepidation about it. "It’s possibly the play I’ve seen most – I’ve seen some absolutely brilliant ones and some terrible ones. When it works, it flies but, oh man, it can go wrong – I saw it set on a spaceship once! Cush as Lady Macbeth is as good casting as we could have hoped for and Max is fantastically exciting – fortunately it’s a play that can take reinvention." Finally, there’s Jilly Cooper’s Rivals (Disney Plus), from which he is currently enjoying a week’s break. His obvious relish in playing unreconstructed cad Lord Tony Baddingham has been only slightly diluted by the revelation that Rishi Sunak is a Cooper fan. "It was a bit of a blow," laughs the lifelong Labour voter. "But I’ve enjoyed it, not least because it’s my first period piece that I have direct experience of having lived through. It’s been interesting to look back on that period, with Thatcherism… well, is it in the rear-view mirror? We’ll see. "There’s something both awful and liberating about playing characters who live by a different moral compass. The world has progressed in the right direction, but it’s fun to visit a sort of consequence-free version of that world. He was a man of his day!" So says the man of the moment. View Green Video on the source website There She Goes returns to BBC Two at 9pm on Wednesday 21st June 2023. Catch up on BBC iPlayer. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. Take part in the Screen Test, a project from Radio Times and the Universities of Sussex and Brighton, to explore the role of television and audio in our lives. 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The Windsors Coronation Special: "It's good to tell jokes about the royals"
The show forms part of Channel 4's alternative coronation viewing.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Despite The Windsors bearing her family name, the Queen never featured in Channel 4’s uproariously soapy spoof – she simply wasn’t silly enough. The same, it seems, cannot be said of her eldest son and heir. "A couple of people asked whether we were going to ‘do’ Charles now he's king," says Bert Tyler-Moore, co-creator of the series with his late writing partner George Jeffrie. "Of course we are, because he hasn't changed! We didn't take the mickey out of the Queen, less because of her role as head of state than her as a person. King Charles is still all the things that we took the mickey out of before." Rich meat indeed for a comic actor as gifted as Harry Enfield, who’s clearly enjoying his newfound seniority on the set of the show’s Coronation Special, in Hertfordshire’s Brocket Hall (the ancestral pile of convicted fraudster and former reality TV darling Lord Brocket). Solemnly entreating Radio Times magazine to "bow", he ascends from the kitchens to a room whose walls are covered in portraits of predecessors including, ominously, Charles I. In the scene, the faintly befuddled future king and Camilla (Haydn Gwynne) are debating the budget for the coronation with Wills (strait-laced, vowel-mangling Hugh Skinner) and Anne (Vicki Pepperdine, reprising her Mrs Danvers-style Princess Royal). Wills and Anne counsel thrift, restraint and, ideally, a Holiday Inn off the M4 as the venue, with the backing of PM Rishi Sunak (Amit Shah, Happy Valley’s homicidal pharmacist). Charles and Camilla aren’t so sure. "I enjoy ceremony and ritual when it's done well,” says Gwynne later. “The royals offer that symbolic connection to our pasts and ancestors that I find quite moving. But I'm glad I'm not the one deciding how much to spend.” “I'm glad for the pomp and parties, but you've got to be mindful of what you're spending and when,” adds Louise Ford, who plays newly minted Princess of Wales Kate Middleton. “No one wants to see something that seems grotesquely indulgent at this time.” Read more: Channel 4 and Channel 5 announce "alternative" coronation schedule Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa to perform at Coronation Concert Written, shot and edited on a painfully tight schedule, The Windsors always walks a tightrope of real life and parallel universe, with newsy lines being crammed in at the very last minute. “The closer it gets to filming, the more fraught it becomes,” says Tyler-Moore. “What have they done now? Same for the politics – the only real trouble we got into a few years ago was with Theresa May, who we initially wrote as this all-powerful woman because she had this huge majority. We just about had time to fix it. Fortunately, I didn’t even have time to start on Liz Truss. “All that is both the beauty of it and what makes it harder work than a regular sitcom: the material is great, but it's constantly evolving so you have to reflect that.” The biggest royal ruction in recent times was, it seems, the easiest to resolve. Previously characterised in the show as a Terry-Thomas-style rogue, Prince Andrew is now entirely absent. “It wasn’t a hard decision,” explains Tyler-Moore. “He’s not funny anymore. But his shadow looms over Beatrice (Ellie White) and Eugenie (Celeste Dring) in a way that gives you something different to play around with, that delusional denial. How do they walk into a room, knowing that everyone thinks their dad did that awful stuff?” And then there are Harry (Richard Goulding), Meghan (Kathryn Drysdale) and Spare, with its onslaught of revelations that prompted Tyler-Moore to consider anew how to satirise something apparently beyond parody. “Oddly our Harry was always quite sweet, dim and lovable. After Spare came out, we saw a side that was more petulant and chippy, maybe not such a nice character. It's weird to think that we might have been a bit nicer to him than we should have been.” Certainly, the publication of Harry’s memoir caused a stir on set: “I was wondering whether Prince Harry had been watching too much of The Windsors,” laughs Gwynne, while Skinner found it “fascinating and gripping”. But Prince Harry himself, AKA Richard Goulding, says he hasn’t read it. “You don't need to research beneath the surface too much [for this series]. Also, I'm quite busy. There's Tolstoy to read!” After being recast in The Windsors’ third season owing to commitments elsewhere, including playing Charles’s private secretary on The Crown (“it was an unavoidable situation from my point of view, alas – I couldn’t do the series”), Goulding returns for this special to play Harry. And oddly, it’s not the first time he’s play-acted the coronation – he also played Harry in Mike Bartlett’s acclaimed 2014 play King Charles III, later adapted for the BBC with the same cast. Still, he insists the two versions are different. “Harry in King Charles III was a kind of tortured prince, a Hamlet/Romeo type,” Goulding says. “I felt duty-bound to play something more truthful and sensitive there, although the two have elements of the party boy, and of course in both fictions he ends up with a girlfriend who is in some way contentious. “But they're very different overall, and Harry’s life has clearly changed a lot since I first played him. The Windsors is very loosely based on something almost approaching a tiny kernel of truth, but it’s so over the top that it's difficult to know if I have any relationship with the real Harry at all.” And what of the real royals’ relationship with the show? “We think Beatrice and Eugenie have seen it,” says producer Camilla Campbell. “Someone said they’d come over with footage of it on their phones, saying ‘Look what they've got us doing’. And whether or not Wills has watched it, he definitely knows about it, because he made a very sweet, gracious joke at a Channel 4 event a few years ago saying, ‘I shouldn't talk to you because you made The Windsors.’” Generally, speaking, most of the cast are shy of expressing firm views on the real-world implications of royal scandals, Megxit, the accession et al, although Goulding reckons “there’s probably still a weird trauma about the Queen not being there anymore”, while Ford concedes to being Team Wills and Kate in any dispute: “If you portray somebody then you always have a connection to them.” View Green Video on the source website For her part, Drysdale is understandably stout in her defence of Meghan. “Before I came in the show, Meghan was getting a lot of stick from the press and I didn't really like that,” she says. “What's been brilliant about our portrayal is that we don't make her mean or nasty or feed any of that noise.” “Underneath it all, our characters all kind of love each other,” says Tyler-Moore. “On Spitting Image [on which he has written], you can be pretty mean because they’re sketches and gone in a minute. This Coronation Special is a whole hour so there's got to be some warmth about them, or it'd be a turn-off.” And he cheerfully counters concerns he might be sent to the tower with a defiant “bring it on!” Could his iconoclasm be more widely shared with a new, rather less mysterious monarch on the throne? “I think this probably is landing in a slightly different environment to previous series,” he says. “Maybe after the coronation, there'll be a bit more of a reckoning: why do we have this weird system? King Charles was opening a community centre in my street. This bloke asked what was going on and I told him, but it felt strange. "If it had been the Queen, it would have felt quite exciting, but ‘King Charles’ felt like an odd thing to say. Maybe we'll all get used to it, but I think it has shone a spotlight on the whole thing – which is good for our show!” “It's good to tell jokes about the royals,” he concludes, having already started work on a fourth season. “Better that than a revolution.” The Windsors Coronation Special airs on Channel 4 on Sunday 30th April at 9pm. All previous episodes are available to stream now on All4. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what else is on. Try Radio Times magazine today and get 12 issues for only £1 with delivery to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Andrew Buchan on Better, embodying a ruthless kingpin and playing men in crisis
Speaking to Gabriel Tate in Radio Times magazine, Andrew Buchan discusses his new role in BBC's Better and what helped get him into the mindset of a drugs kingpin.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Andrew Buchan has a useful face and demeanour for an actor: handsome enough to take a lead and sufficiently adaptable for character roles, plus a placid and affable manner allowing deeper emotions to surface when required. Seen to most telling effect as Broadchurch’s grief-stricken plumber Mark Latimer, it has lately come in handy for his two most recent roles in The Crown (as Andrew Parker Bowles) and This England (playing Matt Hancock), both controversial, high-profile series. Now, Buchan’s starring in BBC One’s new five-parter Better as Col McHugh, a property developer whose easy-going persona disguises the ruthlessness of a drugs kingpin. How did you, a seemingly unflappable 43-year-old, manage to tune out the noise? "I’ll never forget flying over to LA for a screen test once and thinking, I could become a nervous wreck here. I had a strong word with myself – it’s got to be just me and this other person doing the scene, otherwise I’m going to fall apart. I’ve tried to apply that to everything and not think too much about the exterior stuff." What was it like to play Col McHigh in Better, after playing the man who broke Princess Anne’s heart and then the politician who became the pantomime villain of COVID and I’m a Celebrity? "It was refreshing! I definitely search for roles that make me afraid and this seemed packed full of those moments, because Col has quite a few facets. "On one hand he’s calm and in control, on the other he’s a broken, complex man dealing with trauma. I was interested to see him unravel." Col seems wholly beyond correction – something Buchan clearly relishes. "I was on set with Peter Mullan once, and said, ‘I think I’m going to have to be quite vile towards you in this next scene.’ He smiled at me and said, ‘I know. It’s great, isn’t it? It’s like a holiday.’ I’m quite light and smiley in general, so playing someone like Col was fun." The criminal underworld isn’t entirely alien to Buchan, whose father was a customs officer at Manchester Airport. "He always said to look for the shoes – if someone was coming through in a gorgeous three-piece suit but their shoes were £20 off the rack, he’d be wanting a quick word." Buchan also had a serendipitous encounter a couple of weeks before auditioning that, he thinks, bagged him the role of Col. "I was in a tiny pub with a friend and this guy sat down at our table, at ease and exuding confidence. He got the drinks in and chatted with us for a couple hours, then another guy sat down. "We were getting on famously then the first guy left and we were like, ‘That was class, wasn’t it?’ The other guy’s face drained of colour: ‘You know that man was the head of the such-and-such crime organisation?’ We couldn’t believe it. "I went into the audition and said, ‘I can’t play Col as a gangster, but I could play the bloke I met in that pub’ – which was exactly what they were after." Buchan spent the early part of his career hiding in plain sight, somehow flying below the radar despite prominent television roles in dramas both period (Cranford, Garrow’s Law) and contemporary (Party Animals, The Fixer). It took Broadchurch to make him a star. "I was away when the first episode came out. Somebody phoned me and said, 'You might want to come back – it’s gone down quite well…' I remember being in a house at New Year after the first series and 20 people came over asking, ‘Come on, what’s happening next?'" Did he ever spill the beans? "Never! I never told a soul." The role also sent him down a career cul de sac of everymen in crisis. "I asked my agent to press pause on those roles – maybe a bit of lightness instead? Not long after that, I had an audition as someone in a car where a bomb was about to go off. "Hard to mine the lightness in that situation." While he awaits that elusive comedy, Buchan has taken matters into his own hands and written his own, a horror-comedy series that starts filming this month. “I was always that guy on buses and in coffee shops, scribbling on the back of receipts and napkins, so this is nerve-racking and exciting. "I won’t be the actor who comes in and goes, 'I don’t think I’d say that.' Well, you would say that, because I’ve carefully crafted that line for two-and-a-half years. "Believe me, you would." View Green Video on the source website Better premieres on Monday 13th February on BBC One, with episodes airing weekly on Mondays at 9pm. The series will also be available to stream as a boxset on BBC iPlayer. If you’re looking for something else to watch in the meantime, check out our TV Guide or Streaming Guide visit our dedicated Drama hub. Try Radio Times magazine today and get 12 issues for only £1 with delivery to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times View From My Sofa podcast.