The Hardacres stars Julie Graham and Claire Cooper reveal the importance of a women-led set and why the show is so needed today
Actors Julie Graham and Claire Cooper on class, family dynamics and female-led stories.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Julie Graham’s breakthrough role was in Sally Wainwright’s At Home with the Braithwaites in 2000. Since then, she’s brought her grit, wit and humanity to, among others, Benidorm, Shetland and This City is Ours. Claire Cooper made her name as Jacqui McQueen in Hollyoaks and went to on play Anne Boleyn in Lucy Worsley’s Six Wives and starred in Kay Mellor’s In the Club. Now they’re back as mother and daughter, Ma and Mary, in series two of the rags-to-riches period drama The Hardacres... Ma and Mary’s relationship is tricky, tempestuous and tender. How does it develop in the new series? Julie Mother and daughter relationships are complicated. I never believe mother-daughter relationships where they’re all nice with each other and supportive. It’s just b***ocks. So I love the tensions between Ma and Mary. Claire This time around, we’re more agreeable but we haven’t lost that bite. We’re still spicy with each other. Julie Whenever we can, we find little moments where we can really get on each other’s nerves. Similarly, when we find the emotion of it as well, it’s really special. Claire and I are friends but I do feel like I’m her mother sometimes. What’s your relationship like with your own mother? Julie Mine’s dead, so it’s great now. Claire My mum’s awesome. Does your on-screen chemistry come naturally or is it something you can manufacture? Claire There needs to be a genuine spark. Julie gives me that freedom, an environment where I can take big risks. Ultimately, a friendship blossoms because you’re being so authentic with each other. Julie If you’ve got to play something that’s a little bit spicy and a little bit antagonistic, as Ma and Mary often are, it does help if you adore somebody. The more you like them, the easier it is. The Hardacres doesn’t romanticise the class system or fetishise poshness. Is it the anti-Downton Abbey? Julie The fact that it was created by working-class writers [Amy Roberts and Loren McLaughlan] makes it unusual because writers like that are rare. Tell us where you’re from and how you got into acting... Claire I’m from a West Yorkshire working-class family and, apart from loving theatre, didn’t have an obvious “in” into the industry. Drama school was costly but luckily I got a scholarship for Guildford School of Acting. However, when I left it was just about banging on doors. I got an agent then eventually got into TV but it wasn’t easy. Sometimes I feel as if I’m still banging on doors. Julie My mum [actress Betty Webster] was from a working-class background. She was a single parent living in a two-bedroom flat in a Glasgow tenement, and I was raised by my granny and my aunties – strong, matriarchal women. I had an easier crossover into acting because my mum had done it, and that opened doors for me. But I had a chip on my shoulder worrying I only got this particular job because my mum knew the director. Any diversions along the way? Julie Starting out, I was told to get rid of my accent and only do auditions in a neutral English or RP [received pronunciation] accent. At the time, that was common advice to Scottish and working-class actors but that felt wrong, like I wasn’t being myself. So I ignored it – and I don’t think my accent has held me back. How has the industry changed over the course of your career? Julie When I think about stuff that we had to put up with – how unsafe sets were for women, the huge power imbalance between men and women on a film or sometimes in the theatre… it was palpable. Now, there’s so many more guardrails around that kind of behaviour. I’m so protective of younger actors, but often I don’t need to be, because they’ve got it sorted out. Outside of the soaps, why do you think older women’s stories have been neglected by TV drama? Claire It just doesn’t make sense to me because those women are the very demographic that they’re selling to, so why not feature them and their stories? Julie If the gatekeepers are older, straight, white men, and we are not attractive to them, then they’re probably not interested in our stories. But you’ve got people like Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman using their power to tell new, different stories. That has trickled over here to a certain extent. I for one will not accept a part for a token older woman. It just doesn’t interest me. Claire I love being on a female-led set. On the first series of The Hardacres, the director, writers and producers were all women, and obviously there was us, and that’s a great working environment. It’s still rare though. Is that key to The Hardacres’s appeal? Julie Yes, obviously it’s the women at the heart of it all. Claire The stories aren’t violent or sexualised so it’s a show you can watch as a family – and we do. Unlike the shows that my husband is in [Emmett J Scanlan, Mobland], which we can’t. And with what’s going on in the world, we need the escapism that the likes of The Hardacres provides. Are you driven more by curiosity or ambition? Julie People assume that every actor or director wants to be successful and famous, but actually, that’s not really what the job’s about. For me, it’s about discovery. Every job you do, you learn something, whether it be from the story you’re telling, the people you work with, or the experiences that you have. Claire Curiosity, definitely, but with a sprinkling of ambition. The Hardacres season 2 begins on Thursday 14 May at 9pm on 5. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. 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.
Mawaan Rizwan talks saying goodbye to Juice: “I think it’s healthy to close chapters”
The creator, writer and star of sitcom Juice now has a Bafta nomination – and big ideas for the future
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It’s the morning after the night before and Mawaan Rizwan has a languorous air about him. Tired but satisfied, almost post-coital, he reclines in the back of a car leaving London for Stratford-upon-Avon where, until 30 May, he’s on stage at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Bertold Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. As the city’s edifices of steel, sandstone and glass give way to suburban sprawl, Rizwan is in a reflective mood. “I’m really alive right now,” he says. “Like, every cell in my body is creatively fulfilled.” The night before was the Bafta Craft awards, where those who work behind-the-scenes in TV are recognised for their creativity and talent. There, Juice’s Philippa Mumford picked up the award for production design, declaring it “a dream come true” before Rizwan crashed the stage to sing her praises. “It’s unheard of that a comedy wins this category because we were so low-budget,” he said, as the ingenious and inventive Mumford beamed beside him. “Philippa worked her arse off and the team were incredible and everything was made by hand. In the age of AI, we need people like Philippa.” We need people like Rizwan too, says Seán Linnen, who directs him in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a parable about the rise of Hitler that has clear resonance for today. “He has such a hunger to tell a story in the most entertaining way and if you give him a note or an idea, he’ll run into it head-first and explode it – which then gives permission for the actors around him to do the same thing. And they go to places that you think are impossible to reach. He makes other actors bolder and braver. He has such precision and poise, and then is also fearless in being messy and ugly and raw and mischievous.” When I relay Linnen’s comments to Rizwan in the back of his car, he sits up and is palpably moved. “That Seán sees all that is beautiful,” he says. “If I had a CV, I’d put that on it.” At the top of that imaginary CV would also be Juice, the series Rizwan created, written and stars in, which has earned him his own Bafta nomination at the Television Awards. It’s a series he loves – not least because it has been the making of him. “Five years of my life doing two series, it’s such a privilege being at the epicentre and having creative control of a project like that, but it’s a lot of pressure and a really intense process,” he says. “You can write on your own but unless it’s a one-person show, you need other people to embody it and then it takes on a life of its own. I love that transition moment where the caterpillar of the script becomes the beautiful butterfly of performance.” And, Rizwan says, you have to let that butterfly fly. “You can’t control it too much. You have to let other people do their thing. On Juice, it was a constant dance – being a leader, but getting out of people’s way, particularly my mum and brother [who also star in the series]. And look what happened yesterday [at the Bafta Television Craft Awards] – Philippa took the ideas and ran with them on series two. There were things where, if I tried to control it, it just wouldn’t have been as beautiful and magical as the stuff she made.” Rizwan draws an analogy from Of Mice and Men. “You can love the rabbit too much and squeeze it to death.” Win or lose, the Baftas will be his goodbye to Juice. “It will always be my first love and there isn’t anyone involved with that show that I don’t adore, but I think it’s healthy to close chapters.” Though he’s upfront that his work is therapeutic, Rizwan is adamant that he’s no tortured artist. “Some people work great in that energy but I need to feel hope to make stuff. Even if I’m writing something really dark, I need to feel hope to be disciplined and get to the desk or the rehearsal and be a ‘yes, and…’ person. I need to be alive, lively.” And with his relish at being part of someone else’s show, alive Rizwan most certainly is. His languor has evaporated as he leans forward to tell me of a new goal he has to aim for. “The day before we came up to Stratford from London, we went to the Together Alliance march against fascism. It was such a nice way of finishing the rehearsal process and seeing all these different communities coming together – Muslim aunties and uncles dancing to a trans[gender] DJ, Jews Against Genocide – was just joyous and beautiful. By the end of it, I was just crying. We’ve been so indoctrinated into believing there’s nothing we can do, but there is resistance and hope that comes from just showing up, congregating and listening to each other. “My goal is to show up and the more I show up, the less I’m at home alone and doomscrolling. After all, it’s the resistible rise. Stress on the resistible.” The Bafta Television Awards are on Sunday 11 May at 7pm on BBC One. BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises Shot at Sea Containers London Photography: Rachel Louise Brown @rachellouisebrownstudio Styling: Natalie Read @natreadstylist Set Design: Propped Up @propped_up_ltd Hair and make-up: Niki Mark @makeupby_niki The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Comedy 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.
Things You Should Have Done creator Lucia Keskin talks ADHD medication, old comedies and dark humour
The Bafta-nominated creator, writer and star of Things You Should Have Done loves everything from Carry On to Nighty Night.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. From YouTube sensation to Bafta nomination, yours has been quite the journey. How are you enjoying it? I never go out and I’ve never done anything like this before, so it’s fine. Plus I’ve just started new ADHD medication. And how is that? I don’t feel any different yet as it takes ages to get on the right dose, but it’s the road to focusing. I really struggle with it – it takes me ages to get anything written down. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2026/01/BBC-comedy-96ee4bd.jpg" width="4241" height="2827" alt="A young woman stands outdoors beside a black-and-white horse, which is close to the camera and slightly out of focus in the foreground. She wears a colourful padded jacket and a scarf, with a mildly unimpressed expression, while trees and greenery fill the background." title="Things You Should Have Done Series 2" /> We hear a lot about younger generations being horrified by the political incorrectness of old comedies like the Carry On films. What do you think of them? I watch loads of old comedies like Carry On… and Hancock’s Half Hour. And unless something’s incredibly offensive to the point where it’s not funny, it doesn’t bother me. I enjoy a very dark humour, though. I love Nighty Night and I did really enjoy After Life. The Bafta Television Awards are on Sunday 11 May at 7.00pm on BBC One BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises Shot at Sea Containers London Photography: Rachel Louise Brown @rachellouisebrownstudio Styling: Natalie Read @natreadstylist Set Design: Propped Up @propped_up_ltd Hair by Philipp Haug & Eden Thomson for Schwarzkopf Make-up by Armani Beauty The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Comedy 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.
Rivals star reveals why her new Harry Potter TV series role was a no-brainer
Katherine Parkinson is nominated for Best Female Comedy Performance at the 2026 Bafta Television Awards.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It has been 12 years since Katherine Parkinson won her Bafta for Best Female Comedy Performance for her role as Jen Barber in The IT Crowd. Now, ahead of this year's ceremony where she is up for the same award as matriarch Rachel Jessop in Here We Go, she shares her thoughts on the nomination, her on-screen husband, and her upcoming role in the new Harry Potter TV series. Last year, you were nominated for Lizzie in Rivals and this year for Rachel in Here We Go. What do they have in common? I knew I wasn’t going to win last year and I know I’m not going to win this year, so there’s that. The amazing Jessica Gunning won last year for Baby Reindeer, and rightly so. I’m not going to say who I think will win this year but it won’t be me and I’m totally OK with that. It means that you don’t have to prepare a “funny” speech and you can just relax. Would you say that you and Jim Howick, who plays your husband Paul and is also nominated for a Bafta, are very much a double act? Even though playing it can leave you feeling really stressed, I do really enjoy how quickly they get to such a fever pitch of being incredibly cross with each other. When we started, I remember thinking, “Is this potentially over the top?” at how hysterical I get, and then – and I hope they don’t mind me saying this – I spent time with my parents and realised that Paul and Rachel’s is a very authentic relationship. Next up, you’re playing Mrs Weasley in the new Harry Potter TV adaptation. Was it an easy decision to take the role? I’m a mother and my children would never have forgiven me if I hadn’t taken the part. So from that point of view, it was a complete no-brainer. The Bafta Television Awards are on Sunday 11 May at 7pm on BBC One. BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises Shot at Sea Containers London Photography: Rachel Louise Brown @‌rachellouisebrownstudio Styling: Natalie Read @‌natreadstylist Set Design: Propped Up @‌propped_up_ltd Hair by Philipp Haug & Eden Thomson for Schwarzkopf Make-up by Armani Beauty The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Comedy 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.
Here We Go writer teases season 4 - while star and Ghosts favourite explains secret to its success
Here We Go is nominated for two awards at the 2026 Bafta Television Awards.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Since debuting in 2022, Here We Go and the Jessop family have gone on a three-season run, with the BBC sitcom earning two nominations at the upcoming Bafta Television Awards. Creator, writer and actor Tom Basden and star Jim Howick share what it is that has made the comedy such a success. Tom Basden Creator, writer and actor in Here We Go What’s your writing process for Here We Go? I’m actually in the middle of writing series four. I’m very, very bad at admin in general, so I have lots of notes all over the place, in notebooks or Word documents or on my phone or on random bits of paper in my bag. So the start of the process is always trying to unearth everything, to do an audit of all the ideas that I’ve ever had for Here We Go – and everything else – and then just go through them. How is writing comedy different to drama? I don’t want to generalise but in drama, the stakes are usually a lot higher, and therefore characters’ responses are usually the same. It’s like, “We’ve got to catch the murderer” or “We’ve got to keep this hospital patient alive”. It doesn’t really matter who the detective is, or who the doctor is. Whereas in a comedy, the stakes are often coming out of relationships, and quite personal. I think that’s a lot of the reason why the characters become funny – they respond to things in a way that the audience doesn’t necessarily expect them to, but completely recognises. Jim Howick Star of Here We Go Nominated for actor in a comedy Why do you think Here We Go has become such a success? It follows family dynamic tropes very well, but the stories can often be quite goofy and mad. Also, sitcoms really benefit from a sort of “open house” culture. Often, when the doorbell goes – and that’s actually a joke in the show – you know that it’s going to offer a new flavour and texture to the comedy. As part of the collective behind Ghosts and Horrible Histories, what’s the difference working with scripts you didn’t co-write? It’s a lot more relaxing to be an actor for hire on someone else’s script, especially when it’s one of Tom’s scripts. Tom is a quiet genius and his scripts make me laugh out loud. I would never laugh out loud at my own script – that would be sort of psychopathic. How much latitude is there for improvisation? Tom can be particular sometimes, but as long as it’s not disrupting the story beats and as long as you’re not being self-indulgent, there’s a real value in ad-libbing, especially as it fits with the guerrilla film-making format of Here We Go. The Bafta Television Awards are on Sunday 11 May at 7pm on BBC One. BAFTA Television Awards with P&O Cruises Shot at Sea Containers London Photography: Rachel Louise Brown @‌rachellouisebrownstudio Styling: Natalie Read @‌natreadstylist Set Design: Propped Up @‌propped_up_ltd Hair by Philipp Haug & Eden Thomson for Schwarzkopf Make-up by Armani Beauty The latest issue of Radio Times is out on Tuesday – subscribe here. Check out more of our Comedy 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.
From The Responder to The Cage, Tony Schumacher reveals the very personal inspiration behind his dramas – and why he’d never dream of setting them anywhere but in his hometown of Liverpool
Add The Cage to your Watchlist On the wall of Tony Schumacher’s bright, airy office in the heart of Liverpool, there hangs a collection of pictures, posters and things that tell the story of who he is. A montage of a man – a memento, trophy or talisman in every frame. There’s one of his book covers from when he wrote novels, a poster of a 1970s housing estate like the one he grew up on, his “Dad corner” full of photos and scrawly drawings. “I’ve got a five-yearold son,” he says, proudly. There’s a front page of the Liverpool Echo from when Everton won the FA Cup in 1966, a poster of his hit cop show The Responder, another for the 1938 Will Hay film Ask a Policeman (a gift from former colleagues in the police force), and a map of the Shipping Forecast. “I’ve always wanted to write something about the Shipping Forecast. It reminds me of being a taxi driver… listening at 1am and 5am.” Finally, there are two Bafta nomina - tion certificates (“I’ve got a few awards but I don’t like putting them out because it’s embarrassing”) a guitar he’s never played and never will and a poster of The Sopranos – “the ultimate in TV writing”. And in the middle of it all, there’s Schumacher’s prized possession – a sketch of Yosser Hughes from Boys from the Blackstuff as drawn by the writer of the 1982 drama, Alan Bleasdale. Holding it as if it’s a holy relic, Schumacher speaks reverentially of the inspired, inspiring Scouse writer, and later he’ll talk in similar tones about another local writing titan, Jimmy McGovern. The sketch is, of course, extraor - dinary in and of itself – a cultural artefact from Margaret Thatcher’s Britain and a time when television drama dared to be genuinely political. But it’s also significant for what it might symbolise. When Bleasdale handed Schumacher that sketch, you might surmise that he did so because he was all out of batons. If Schumacher’s life is up there on his office wall, distilled into a handful of images and objects, it’s also in his work, but there it informs every script, is diffused into every scene. The Responder – raw, brutally truthful and a drama that really connected with audiences – was based on his experiences, not all of them pleasant, as a police officer. When Martin Freeman read the script, he noted admiringly that it had clearly been “written by someone who meant it” – and Schumacher meant it because he’d lived it. It’s that sincerity that gives Schumacher’s writing its power and, to employ a much over-used word, its authenticity. And so to The Cage, his new drama about casino workers Leanne (Sheridan Smith) and Matty (Michael Socha) who each discover the other is stealing from work. Their reasons differ, their desperation doesn’t. In telling the story of two people trapped by their circumstances and caught in a system seemingly designed to not just disadvantage them but use them to others’ advantage, Schumacher delivers a tense, funny, humane thriller that’s also a scathing critique of consumer capitalism and an exploration of addiction. Schumacher says that he writes what he knows – “I definitely dip my pen in my head and feel those experiences” – so whence The Cage? “My brother Philip was an alcoholic who passed away last year. In 2019, when I came up with the idea, I was going through a bad period with Phil, who was drinking quite badly. I had a meeting with two brilliant producers Hilary Martin and Simon Judd, and I think I brought it up. We started talking about addiction, but alcoholism felt too close to home. I used to work on cruise ships and everyone who worked in those casinos would gamble like mad the minute they weren’t working. They all had, and I can say this with a degree of certainty, a bad relationship with money, which fascinated me.” That idea became one script, then several and Schumacher was soon ready to approach the actor he had in mind when he wrote the scripts: Smith. She, then Socha, signed up and Schumacher was almost ready to go. Just one last casting to confirm – that of Liverpool itself as the location. Was Schumacher conscious of depicting the city as having a grubby underbelly populated by gangsters, liars and delinquents? “When I did The Responder, I was genuinely scared that I was going to get abuse for it,” he admits, “and I’ve spoken to other Liverpool writers who shall remain nameless, who won’t set stuff in the city for that reason. But I think about what making a show here gives back to the city. Financially, the three series I’ve made cost in excess of £30 million to make and a large percentage of that’s been spent in this city. “We made a bit of profit on The Responder that we fed back into the Liverpool Film Office. We spent money on training apprentices on The Responder who were fully qualified working on The Cage. And on top of that, you’ve got Martin Freeman travelling the world, on chat shows and at awards shows, saying how fantastic this city is – and it is.” So what does he say to those who complain about representation of Liverpool as some sort of Gomorrah on the Mersey, “Have a bit of confidence about yourself. This city is incredible. I’m fairly certain people in Birmingham aren’t complaining about Peaky Blinders.” As with everything he says, Schumacher is utterly sincere. However, he does allow himself a smirk when he says, “Imagine I set a show in Manchester. I mean, I love Manchester – I used to do stand-up comedy there, badly – but imagine how people in Liverpool would kick off…” For like so many Liverpudlians, native and transplant alike, Schumacher is rooted in the city. His resolve to stay true to those roots, in his work and in his life, is what assures him of that sincerity, his subsequent authenticity and, ultimately, his success. “I still go to the same café in the morning, I’ve still got mates on the taxis, and I’ve never been to a f***ing dinner party. I’ve never been to a party where people have made dinner as it seems anathema to me. You have your dinner before you go to a party. Apart from Martin [Freeman, star of The Responder for whom he wrote the part], I don’t have showbiz mates. And I hated going to the Baftas.” Excuse me? But they always look so much fun. “Like any award show, they’re awful. Absolute hell on Earth, I can’t stand them. But I went because I might never get the chance to go again and I love the people I work with and I want to be with them enjoying their moment because it isn’t just mine.” Schumacher would probably go so far as to say that he enjoys going to the tip more than awards shows. “I used to work at a council tip and, the other week, I took a load of cardboard to the tip and had a cup of tea with the lads for three quarters of an hour because they’re friends and I love them. If anyone asks me what I do, I tell them I drive a cab.” Safe to assume that Schumacher won’t have his head turned by the intoxicating world of telly, then. Partly, this is because he got into it “older and less concerned whether or not people like me” and also because living in Liverpool gives him distance from “the industry”. “I’m forever going backwards and forwards on the train, which costs a fortune, but I do think that distance enables me to defend what I’m doing from too much outside influence.” Schumacher has a “no d***heads rule” about the people that he works with, which clearly serves him well. But overall, he sees “the industry” as, well, unwelcoming to people like him. “By calling it imposter syndrome, it makes you feel as if it’s in your head and you’re the one that’s in the wrong. But it isn’t and you’re not. The television industry wasn’t built for working-class people. We’re not meant to be here. When I go to a meeting, I find it astonishing that, not always but more often than not, I’m the only one who grew up in a s***ty house. Someone said to me recently that they were too embarrassed to get their laptop out in a meeting, and to me, it’s unbelievable that we still live in a world where that’s a thing. But that’s not just this industry, that’s this country.” I ask Schumacher if he sees himself in the mould of Bleasdale and McGovern and he actually blushes. “I’d love to be in that canon but I’m not.” Not yet, anyway. “I’d do the petition for them to replace the liver birds [as emblems of the city]. I still get a buzz when I get a message off them and it’s astonishing that I have the opportunities to sit with them lads and listen to them. I never met them before they were Alan and Jimmy but I doubt they were any different 50 years ago than they are now. If I was working with young writers and they asked who they should model themselves on, I’d point to Alan and Jimmy.” He’d be too humble to point to himself, of course. “I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want to be recognised,” Schumacher says. “I just want to sit in this office and do what I’m doing. That’s enough for me.”
‘I love my work but don't identify as an actor'
The Cage star Michael Socha gives his all to every role but remains true to himself
Add The Cage to your Watchlist You did a two-hour audition for the role of Matty in The Cage. Surely, that isn’t how long they all last? Normally you get 15 minutes to half an hour, if you’re lucky. But I’ve known [director] Al McKay since we worked together on This Is England, so we’d had a chat about the intricacies of the character beforehand, which helped me figure out who Matty was. I take every audition seriously – I make sure I’m off-book [don’t need a script], make sure I understand the character – but I worked my arse off for The Cage. So in the audition itself, I got to play, to try stuff, to mess around. It was my favourite ever audition and when I left, I knew I’d done my best. Have you ever done an audition in which you felt you didn’t do your best – but were offered the part anyway? Yeah, and I don’t understand how – and that always gives me anxiety on the first few weeks of the project, like they’ve got it wrong. That sounds like a case of imposter syndrome. Is that something you feel? I definitely have my days of insecurity and times when I’m like, “How the f*** has this happened? How am I here? How am I working with these amazing people?” Because I didn’t go to drama school, sometimes I do feel out of my depth and there have been times over the years when I’ve felt I don’t fit in. But I just have to forget about all that and get on with the job at hand. How have you stayed grounded? Being from where I’m from [Socha grew up in Derby] and having lived the life I’ve lived. I wasn’t a child actor. I was a late teen actor, so I know a life outside of work and I have a grounding there. And I live a very normal life in which I’m not Michael Socha the actor. Don’t get me wrong– I love my work. But I also really enjoy my own life outside of work. I don’t identify as An Actor. I identify as me. I’ve got other responsibilities. Your breakthrough role was in Shane Meadows’s This Is England. What was your biggest revelation from that time? I couldn’t believe that the crew got paid. I thought it was a hobby, something people did for fun. I didn’t know that people made money out of it and paid their bills from it. Your CV since – Chernobyl, Showtrial, What It Feels like for a Girl, and further Shane Meadows projects – suggests excellent taste in scripts. My agent has good taste. As an actor, I’m very lucky that I get to express myself. I get to play the range of ups and downs and express emotions that in real life you can’t necessarily get away with. So we’ve got to harbour it, control it, and just forget about it. Is acting, if not therapy, then certainly therapeutic? I’m always scared of saying that sort of s**t but I think it is. If, to play the truth of a character, I have to rely on some aspects of my own personality or I have to examine something in my past, I’ll do it. As a result, I delve into things I don’t necessarily want to. But I do, I deal with them and I release. But all art is therapy. The other week I went to the Tracey Emin exhibition [at Tate Modern in London] and it’s incredible. And it’s the same thing – it’s gotta come out. As an artist, you have to be able to release and get whatever’s in your head out of your head. If you don’t, I don’t know what happens… Have you ever played a character you’ve grown sick of? In a therapeutic sense, once I’ve got to a level where I’ve expelled all the darkness within or whatever, there are certain characters I’ve needed a break from. Again, another cliché, but I’m an actor: I try and feel the actual emotions of each character, and sometimes that can give me a headache. Sometimes it can be stressful and it drains me. It makes me feel like a w****r when I say that’s what happens. But I get spent. How do you recharge? I would say I’m really into hiking, but every person’s into bloody hiking these days. I did the Camino de Santiago and I’ve walked England coast to coast, west to east. But the other day, I went on a hike with my mate Badger and we both agreed that we’re done with it. So we have to find a new obsession. I like keeping fit. I like boxing. I like kickboxing and watching movies and going to museums and art exhibitions. I like walking. I don’t like hiking any more.
Half Man review: After Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd faces a difficult second album
Stomach-churning, unrelenting, violent... the writer and actor behind one of Netflix's biggest shows returns with a BBC drama that has a lot to admire, but not a lot to love.
If misery loves company, trauma likes an audience. With more triggers than an El Paso gun show – strong and discriminatory language, scenes of violence and underage sexual abuse, and flashbacks to late-20th-century Scottish fashion trends – Half Man is Richard Gadd’s difficult second album – the perilous next trick after the surprising runaway success of Netflix’s Baby Reindeer. That series established Gadd either as a daring writer prepared to show his vulnerability while mining the gloomier recesses of the human psyche for material… or as an emotional exhibitionist seriously lacking boundaries. Whichsoever, he won three Emmys and a Golden Globe, delivered a sensational, disturbing global hit for Netflix, and got labelled as a go-to guy for traumatic telly. The bar set high then, Half Man charts the toxic, tragic relationship, over 30-odd years, between Niall and Ruben, de facto stepbrothers who become locked into co-dependency as destructive as anything dreamt up by Tennessee Williams or Emily Brontë. Gadd’s drama could lay a persuasive claim to being about love – specifically, men’s capacity for it and their inability to express it. I cannot stress enough that this does not make it date night material. In fact, Half Man is not soothing viewing by any measure. If you’re looking for something more emollient with which to salve a bruising day, might I suggest… The Pitt? Half Man might provide the same sort of audience experience as horror movies and TV shows – feeling anxiety and fear and the related dopamine high in a safe, controlled environment – but I am early-X-Files-Scully-sceptical. In horror, the threat is neutralised as the monster is defeated. Here, the menace embodied by dangerous, damaged and charismatic Ruben (played by Gadd himself, and in younger form by Stuart Campbell who’s surely the show’s break-out star) doesn’t retreat so much as submerge. Like a crocodile, prehistoric and patient, it waits, biding its time until its next strike. This is never very far away in what amounts to nearly six hours of television. In episode 2, in which the mild-mannered, shame-filled Niall (Mitchell Robertson, then Jamie Bell) goes to university, Ruben goes, well, full-ragey, as they say in Scotland. He dishes out such stomach-churning, unrelenting, intimate violence – and it’s at this juncture where many viewers may well permanently part company with Half Man. As Ruben wreaks havoc, Bell’s Niall wearily wears his accumulating trauma like an old coat – heavy, shapeless, impossible to discard - and seems perpetually braced for a impact, conflict, a hurricane. As a love story between two repressed men, Half Man is also a study of masculinity. Unlike the semi-autobiographical Baby Reindeer, Gadd maintains that Half Man is entirely fictional. Yet what its protagonists feel, emphatically, is not. Sometimes, Half Man feels like an essay, encouraging a ‘reading’ as much as a viewing. Sometimes, it feels like an exorcism - messy, intense and not entirely within the control of even the person conducting it. This tension is evident in the show’s more overtly symbolic moments. A classroom scene that ends with Stuart McQuarrie’s teacher assigning Romeo and Juliet is followed by a nocturnal encounter that echoes the play’s famous balcony scene, albeit in a far more unsettling register, with Ruben’s dad beseeching his son for contact outside Niall’s bedroom window. Half Man is both more ambitious and less accomplished than Baby Reindeer. That the other characters – especially the women – are woefully underwritten suggests a script in need of more development. As do the plot holes and ‘I don’t buy it for a minute…’ moments. To wit, I don’t buy it for a minute that a mum – a Scottish mammy, no less – who loves her son as much as Lori loves Niall would let a psychopath move into her teenage son’s bedroom and hijack his life up to and including his wedding decades later. But the whole drama is contingent on it so we accept it when we should believe it. And here’s the rub: Half Man is half-baked. Compared to Baby Reindeer - a piece of theatre stress-tested at the Edinburgh Festival before years of development at a top-drawer production company turned it into telly - of course it is. And Half Man is half-baked partly because Gadd is still learning his craft. Prior to Baby Reindeer, he’d only written a few episodes of other people’s shows, notably Sex Education. By contrast, when Adolescence blew up on Netflix, writer Jack Thorne had more than 20 series under his belt. Baby Reindeer was an unexpected hit that thrust Gadd into a spotlight that, yes, illuminates him as a singular voice in television, but also throws into stark relief his inexperience, as evidenced in the scene in which Ruben appears on a motorbike at Niall’s wedding. Removing his helmet to stare down his “brother from another mother” he conjures a vibe that says less ‘psycho biker troublemaker’ and more ‘demented shampoo advert’. I’m not sure this was the intention. All that said, there is a lot to admire about Half Man. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot to love. That’s PTSD TV for you. Half Man will arrive on BBC iPlayer at 6am on Friday 24 April. Add Half Man to your watchlist on the <a id="OWA8b702c45-bee9-94e4-f018-57518e78041b" title="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" href="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-outlook-id="449c28d9-909e-4aab-b6b8-153454f55d5e" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="0">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.
The Responder writer reveals the real-life personal inspirations behind his new Sheridan Smith drama
Tony Schumacher reveals all about his new BBC drama, The Cage.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. On the wall of Tony Schumacher’s bright, airy office in the heart of Liverpool, there hangs a collection of pictures, posters and things that tell the story of who he is. A montage of a man – a memento, trophy or talisman in every frame. There’s one of his book covers from when he wrote novels, a poster of a 1970s housing estate like the one he grew up on, his “Dad corner” full of photos and scrawly drawings. “I’ve got a five-year-old son,” he says, proudly. There’s a front page of the Liverpool Echo from when Everton won the FA Cup in 1966, a poster of his hit cop show The Responder, another for the 1938 Will Hay film Ask a Policeman (a gift from former colleagues in the police force), and a map of the Shipping Forecast. “I’ve always wanted to write something about the Shipping Forecast. It reminds me of being a taxi driver... listening at 1am and 5am.” Finally, there are two Bafta nomination certificates (“I’ve got a few awards but I don’t like putting them out because it’s embarrassing”) a guitar he’s never played and never will and a poster of The Sopranos – “the ultimate in TV writing”. And in the middle of it all, there’s Schumacher’s prized possession – a sketch of Yosser Hughes from Boys from the Blackstuff as drawn by the writer of the 1982 drama, Alan Bleasdale. Holding it as if it’s a holy relic, Schumacher speaks reverentially of the inspired, inspiring Scouse writer, and later he’ll talk in similar tones about another local writing titan, Jimmy McGovern. The sketch is, of course, extraordinary in and of itself – a cultural artefact from Margaret Thatcher’s Britain and a time when television drama dared to be genuinely political. But it’s also significant for what it might symbolise. When Bleasdale handed Schumacher that sketch, you might surmise that he did so because he was all out of batons. If Schumacher’s life is up there on his office wall, distilled into a handful of images and objects, it’s also in his work, but there it informs every script, is diffused into every scene. The Responder – raw, brutally truthful and a drama that really connected with audiences – was based on his experiences, not all of them pleasant, as a police officer. When Martin Freeman read the script, he noted admiringly that it had clearly been “written by someone who meant it” – and Schumacher meant it because he’d lived it. It’s that sincerity that gives Schumacher’s writing its power and, to employ a much over-used word, its authenticity. And so to The Cage, his new drama about casino workers Leanne (Sheridan Smith) and Matty (Michael Socha) who each discover the other is stealing from work. Their reasons differ, their desperation doesn’t. In telling the story of two people trapped by their circumstances and caught in a system seemingly designed to not just disadvantage them but use them to others’ advantage, Schumacher delivers a tense, funny, humane thriller that’s also a scathing critique of consumer capitalism and an exploration of addiction. Schumacher says that he writes what he knows – “I definitely dip my pen in my head and feel those experiences” – so whence The Cage? “My brother Philip was an alcoholic who passed away last year. In 2019, when I came up with the idea, I was going through a bad period with Phil, who was drinking quite badly. I had a meeting with two brilliant producers Hilary Martin and Simon Judd, and I think I brought it up. We started talking about addiction, but alcoholism felt too close to home. I used to work on cruise ships and everyone who worked in those casinos would gamble like mad the minute they weren’t working. They all had, and I can say this with a degree of certainty, a bad relationship with money, which fascinated me.” That idea became one script, then several and Schumacher was soon ready to approach the actor he had in mind when he wrote the scripts: Smith. She, then Socha, signed up and Schumacher was almost ready to go. Just one last casting to confirm – that of Liverpool itself as the location. Was Schumacher conscious of depicting the city as having a grubby underbelly populated by gangsters, liars and delinquents? “When I did The Responder, I was genuinely scared that I was going to get abuse for it,” he admits, “and I’ve spoken to other Liverpool writers who shall remain nameless, who won’t set stuff in the city for that reason. But I think about what making a show here gives back to the city. Financially, the three series I’ve made cost in excess of £30 million to make and a large percentage of that’s been spent in this city. “We made a bit of profit on The Responder that we fed back into the Liverpool Film Office. We spent money on training apprentices on The Responder who were fully qualified working on The Cage. And on top of that, you’ve got Martin Freeman travelling the world, on chat shows and at awards shows, saying how fantastic this city is – and it is.” So what does he say to those who complain about representation of Liverpool as some sort of Gomorrah on the Mersey, “Have a bit of confidence about yourself. This city is incredible. I’m fairly certain people in Birmingham aren’t complaining about Peaky Blinders.” As with everything he says, Schumacher is utterly sincere. However, he does allow himself a smirk when he says, “Imagine I set a show in Manchester. I mean, I love Manchester – I used to do stand-up comedy there, badly – but imagine how people in Liverpool would kick off…” For like so many Liverpudlians, native and transplant alike, Schumacher is rooted in the city. His resolve to stay true to those roots, in his work and in his life, is what assures him of that sincerity, his subsequent authenticity and, ultimately, his success. “I still go to the same café in the morning, I’ve still got mates on the taxis, and I’ve never been to a f**king dinner party. I’ve never been to a party where people have made dinner as it seems anathema to me. You have your dinner before you go to a party. Apart from Martin [Freeman, star of The Responder for whom he wrote the part], I don’t have showbiz mates. And I hated going to the Baftas.” Excuse me? But they always look so much fun. “Like any award show, they’re awful. Absolute hell on Earth, I can’t stand them. But I went because I might never get the chance to go again and I love the people I work with and I want to be with them enjoying their moment because it isn’t just mine.” Schumacher would probably go so far as to say that he enjoys going to the tip more than awards shows. “I used to work at a council tip and, the other week, I took a load of cardboard to the tip and had a cup of tea with the lads for three quarters of an hour because they’re friends and I love them. If anyone asks me what I do, I tell them I drive a cab.” Safe to assume that Schumacher won’t have his head turned by the intoxicating world of telly, then. Partly, this is because he got into it “older and less concerned whether or not people like me” and also because living in Liverpool gives him distance from “the industry”. “I’m forever going backwards and forwards on the train, which costs a fortune, but I do think that distance enables me to defend what I’m doing from too much outside influence.” View oEmbed on the source website Schumacher has a “no d**kheads rule” about the people that he works with, which clearly serves him well. But overall, he sees “the industry” as, well, unwelcoming to people like him. “By calling it imposter syndrome, it makes you feel as if it’s in your head and you’re the one that’s in the wrong. But it isn’t and you’re not. The television industry wasn’t built for working-class people. We’re not meant to be here. When I go to a meeting, I find it astonishing that, not always but more often than not, I’m the only one who grew up in a s**tty house. Someone said to me recently that they were too embarrassed to get their laptop out in a meeting, and to me, it’s unbelievable that we still live in a world where that’s a thing. But that’s not just this industry, that’s this country.” I ask Schumacher if he sees himself in the mould of Bleasdale and McGovern and he actually blushes. “I’d love to be in that canon but I’m not.” Not yet, anyway. “I’d do the petition for them to replace the liver birds [as emblems of the city]. I still get a buzz when I get a message off them and it’s astonishing that I have the opportunities to sit with them lads and listen to them. I never met them before they were Alan and Jimmy but I doubt they were any different 50 years ago than they are now. If I was working with young writers and they asked who they should model themselves on, I’d point to Alan and Jimmy.” He’d be too humble to point to himself, of course. “I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want to be recognised,” Schumacher says. “I just want to sit in this office and do what I’m doing. That’s enough for me.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Cage starts Sunday 26 April at 9pm on BBC One, and will be available as a boxset on BBC iPlayer. Add The Cage to your watchlist on the <a id="OWA8b702c45-bee9-94e4-f018-57518e78041b" title="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" href="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-outlook-id="449c28d9-909e-4aab-b6b8-153454f55d5e" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="0">Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. 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This Is England legend talks his new Sheridan Smith drama: "I worked my arse off for The Cage"
The Cage star Michael Socha gives his all to every role but remains true to himself.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. You did a two-hour audition for the role of Matty in The Cage. Surely, that isn’t how long they all last? Normally you get 15 minutes to half an hour, if you’re lucky. But I’ve known [director] Al McKay since we worked together on This Is England, so we’d had a chat about the intricacies of the character beforehand, which helped me figure out who Matty was. I take every audition seriously – I make sure I’m off-book [don’t need a script], make sure I understand the character – but I worked my arse off for The Cage. So in the audition itself, I got to play, to try stuff, to mess around. It was my favourite ever audition and when I left, I knew I’d done my best. Have you ever done an audition in which you felt you didn’t do your best – but were offered the part anyway? Yeah, and I don’t understand how – and that always gives me anxiety on the first few weeks of the project, like they’ve got it wrong. That sounds like a case of imposter syndrome. Is that something you feel? I definitely have my days of insecurity and times when I’m like, “How the f*** has this happened? How am I here? How am I working with these amazing people?” Because I didn’t go to drama school, sometimes I do feel out of my depth and there have been times over the years when I’ve felt I don’t fit in. But I just have to forget about all that and get on with the job at hand. How have you stayed grounded? Being from where I’m from [Socha grew up in Derby] and having lived the life I’ve lived. I wasn’t a child actor. I was a late teen actor, so I know a life outside of work and I have a grounding there. And I live a very normal life in which I’m not Michael Socha the actor. Don’t get me wrong – I love my work. But I also really enjoy my own life outside of work. I don’t identify as An Actor. I identify as me. I’ve got other responsibilities. Your breakthrough role was in Shane Meadows’s This Is England. What was your biggest revelation from that time? I couldn’t believe that the crew got paid. I thought it was a hobby, something people did for fun. I didn’t know that people made money out of it and paid their bills from it. Your CV since – Chernobyl, Showtrial, What It Feels like for a Girl, and further Shane Meadows projects – suggests excellent taste in scripts. My agent has good taste. As an actor, I’m very lucky that I get to express myself. I get to play the range of ups and downs and express emotions that in real life you can’t necessarily get away with. So we’ve got to harbour it, control it, and just forget about it. Is acting, if not therapy, then certainly therapeutic? I’m always scared of saying that sort of s**t but I think it is. If, to play the truth of a character, I have to rely on some aspects of my own personality or I have to examine something in my past, I’ll do it. As a result, I delve into things I don’t necessarily want to. But I do, I deal with them and I release. But all art is therapy. The other week I went to the Tracey Emin exhibition [at Tate Modern in London] and it’s incredible. And it’s the same thing – it’s gotta come out. As an artist, you have to be able to release and get whatever’s in your head out of your head. If you don’t, I don’t know what happens… Have you ever played a character you’ve grown sick of? In a therapeutic sense, once I’ve got to a level where I’ve expelled all the darkness within or whatever, there are certain characters I’ve needed a break from. Again, another cliché, but I’m an actor: I try and feel the actual emotions of each character, and sometimes that can give me a headache. Sometimes it can be stressful and it drains me. It makes me feel like a w****r when I say that’s what happens. But I get spent. How do you recharge? I would say I’m really into hiking, but every person’s into bloody hiking these days. I did the Camino de Santiago and I’ve walked England coast to coast, west to east. But the other day, I went on a hike with my mate Badger and we both agreed that we’re done with it. So we have to find a new obsession. I like keeping fit. I like boxing. I like kickboxing and watching movies and going to museums and art exhibitions. I like walking. I don’t like hiking any more. The latest issue of Radio Times is out on Tuesday – subscribe here. The Cage begins Sunday 26 April at 9pm on BBC One. 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.
Mint review: A charming romantic drama for these permissive times
The new BBC series comes from Scrapper writer and director Charlotte Regan.
There would have been a time, not so long ago, when Shannon, the luminous lead in BBC One’s Mint, would have been portrayed as a vampire. If this romantic crime drama had been made in the early 2000s – post-Twilight, when you couldn’t move for bloodsuckers and lycanthropes in the likes of Supernatural, True Blood, Being Human, Crazy Head, The Fades and The Vampire Diaries – Shannon would have been a vamp and her love interest Arran (Benjamin Coyle-Larner, otherwise known as musician Loyle Carner) would have been... oh I don’t know... a zombie? Rather than star-crossed, the lovers would be witch-cursed and some ancient beef between zombies and vampires would have been the main obstacle in the way of their love. As it was employed in so many of the shows that made the so-called supernatural boom earlier this century, a mystical element would immediately raise the stakes, if you’ll pardon the pun. Because all dramas live or die on how they answer two questions for their central characters: Is there enough at risk? Do I want to belong to this gang? As it is, creatures of the night have had their moment in the sun and it is in the criminal underworld, as opposed to the mythological one, that Charlotte Regan (the creator, writer, director and executive producer) sets Mint. The aim is the same – to make credible the idea that in these permissive times, there are near-insurmountable obstacles in the way of two single young people in love becoming a couple. That Regan achieves this aim partly, and ironically, because of Mint’s moments of magical realism is just one of the things that make the show so charming. View Green Video on the source website But then Regan achieves a lot with Mint; not least creating a thoroughly compelling, highly entertaining, deliciously rich dynamic between Shannon (Emma Laird), her romantic mother Cat (Laura Fraser) and her cynical, sexual grandmother Ollie (Lindsay Duncan). Though Coyle-Larner, Sam Riley and especially Lewis Gribben are all good (even if Riley’s accent occasionally does a wee wander across Scotland) – Mint belongs to Laird, Fraser and Duncan. In choosing the milieu that she does, Regan places her drama in a long tradition of gangster fiction that has enjoyed a boom of late. A genre that’s especially popular during periods of economic hardship – so make what you will of its contemporary currency – gangster movies had their first flush of popularity during the 1930s. The 1970s revival heralded by The Godfather and The Godfather Part Two coincided with the oil crisis and consequent shocks to economies across the west. Today, with a global affordability crisis showing no sign of abating, shows such as MobLand (Paramount+), This City Is Ours (BBC iPlayer) and of course the juggernaut that is Peaky Blinders (BBC iPlayer / Netflix) attract rave reviews and large, loyal audiences. To cash-strapped viewers being squeezed by the system, criminals have a certain cachet – and Mint speaks to the moment we’re in just as eloquently as This City Is Ours, albeit in more hushed tones. Even if there are echoes of other gangland dramas in Mint – Ollie has a distant ancestor in The Sopranos’ malign Livia – in both its focus and its form, it is sweet and unique. The BBC describes it as “unconventional”. You could call it “leftfield”. Were it not such a naff word, you’d say it was quirky – because it is quite. Add Radio Times as a Preferred Source on Google Keep up to date on what’s worth watching with your favourite entertainment news from Radio Times – see more of our exclusive news and interviews featured prominently in Top Stories when using Google. What Mint is completely is Regan’s vision. She’s primarily a filmmaker (her excellent, exuberant Scrapper is currently on iPlayer) who has made music videos for, among others, Stereophonics and Mumford & Sons. Both backgrounds are evident in Mint’s striking filmic visuals. These go some way to compensate for when Mint feels slight, or doesn’t dig deep enough into the morality of the family who are, lest we forget, a violent, venal, vicious bunch who profit from the miseries of others. Perhaps Regan and her cast’s finest achievement is not only giving us a gang to which we want to belong, but making us care for these monsters – and there’s not a vampire among them. All eight episodes of Mint are available on BBC iPlayer now. Episode one airs Monday 20 April at 9pm on BBC One. Add Mint 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.
The actor on the cult of television, working with Jimmy McGovern – and the ultimate interview question
Add Unchosen to your watchlist Born in Salford in 1964, Christopher Eccleston made his name in dramas like Cracker and Our Friends in the North. His films range from Shallow Grave to GI Joe, with recent TV jobs including HBO’s The Leftovers and Peter Bowker’s The A-Word. Most famously he played the ninth Doctor in Doctor Who, which he doesn’t discuss outside conventions – his “no Blue Box” rule. Next up is his role as a cult leader in the new Netflix drama Unchosen. What was the appeal of playing a cult leader? What attracted me to Mr Phillips was Unchosen’s writer, Julia Geary. There’s a great trend in drama at the moment for antagonists who are toxic, white, apparently heterosexual, late-middle-aged men. Thankfully, Julia gave him dimension and placed him in a story of tragedy involving the loss of his son and alcoholism. It’s a gift of a role because of the awkward questions it asks of our audience. Do audiences want to understand villains and their dimensions? I’ve had this argument in Hollywood regarding one-dimensional villains I’ve played. It doesn’t make the heroes look smarter taking on villains like that. It makes them look stupid. What Julia understands is something that so many people in television and film, in their arrogance, will not accept – that audiences are much brighter than we are. Is TV being dumbed down? Historically there would be programmes that I watched when I was young where I would feel patronised – Love Thy Neighbour or whatever – but there was a lot where I felt I was being respected. The likes of the Plays for Today and The Naked Civil Servant. But with the erosion of the writer’s culture to almost writing by committee, I’ve heard stories about some of the idiotic – and sometimes downright hateful – assumptions about the audience’s intelligence today. A lot of people in television think the audience is stupid. Why do cults appeal? We yearn for certainty, though we know that the tragedy and beauty of life is that there are no absolutes. When you’re making TV or film, it does become somewhat cult-like. You’re working with the same people six days a week, 12 hours a day, and you’re all obsessively trying to get everything right. You once said you were insecure in your masculinity as you hoped all men were. What did you mean? Going into the arts, leaving my background and my class, made me question the certainties around my masculinity I was given as a child by society. Masculinity is in crisis, and it seems it’s particularly white, working-class boys who are being neglected, left to rot by governments and targeted by the far right. So, as an ex-working-class, white boy, I try, if I can, to address some of those things. Masculinity shouldn’t be contingent on other people’s oppression. Your departure from Cracker, in which your character bleeds out while giving a “statement of a dying man” over his radio, is a landmark moment in British TV. How did it happen? They wanted me to sign for three series but I said I’d sign for one, see how it went. When it went well, I said I’d go back, but I wasn’t going to hang around and support Robbie Coltrane, bless him, for three series. That handed Jimmy [McGovern, who wrote it] a provocation. Nowadays, major characters are killed off constantly, but it had never been done before he did it in 1994. I don’t think either of us could have imagined the effect that it would have, but back then there were four channels and we were getting 13 million viewers. If it’s a brilliant performance, it’s for one reason and one reason only: the writing. You’ve worked with Jimmy a lot. Without Jimmy McGovern, I wouldn’t have a career in television. I did Cracker, a film called Heart, Accused… And I did Hillsborough, which is the most important thing I’ve ever done. It provoked questions in Parliament and got me over my silly guilt that being an actor isn’t a real job. I will always want to work with McGovern and I’m hoping that one day he’ll employ me again, maybe in an old people’s home. You played Nicky in the state-of-the-nation drama Our Friends in the North – why don’t we see ambitious series like that any more? State-of-the-nation dramas are possible – look at the success of Adolescence – but I don’t think we have those visionary, politicised, poetic people who want to make them now. People like Michael Wearing [who produced Boys from the Blackstuff and commissioned Our Friends in the North], Kenith Trodd [Dennis Potter’s producer] and Tony Garnett [This Life]. As an avid reader, do you worry that reading is in decline? From a family of readers – my mum’s 94 in April and still a reader! – I do worry. But I have two children and they are both voracious readers. We spend so much time in bookshops. Hopefully we’ll get these new measures from the Government about restricting social media for children as that would be a very positive thing Is there a question you wish you were asked more often in interviews? I wish more people would ask about failure. I interviewed my hero Alex Ferguson once and the first thing I asked him was about losing. I mean, why ask him about winning? Him aside, losing is what the majority of us spend our lives doing.
It’s about power, says Lindsay Duncan, as she plays a crime family matriarch determined to exert her influence – by any means necessary
Add Mint to your Watchlist In Mint, Charlotte Regan's leftfield love story set in central Scotland’s criminal underworld, Lindsay Duncan plays Ollie. Mistress of this mobland when her husband was master, we meet the widowed Ollie as she is transitioned/relegated/sidelined into the mother of the king, with the ascension of her son Dylan (Sam Riley) to the position of the Godfather of Grangemouth. No longer queen bee in this hive of illegal activity, Ollie spends her days assembling and reassembling firearms, doting on her granddaughter Shannon, picking on her daughter-in-law, Cat, and satisfying her not insignificant sexual appetites by bedding Dylan’s henchmen – though beds are apparently optional. In a certain light, I suggest to Duncan when we meet, Ollie looks like a psychotic sexual predator. She wrinkles her nose in disagreement. “That sort of thinking is no help to me,” she declares, which is perhaps the nicest way in ages I’ve been told I’m talking rubbish. “The sex isn’t just about the sex.” The sex is about power, says Duncan, who originated the role of the scheming Marquise de Merteuil in Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1985 at the Royal Shakespeare Company (in a production that would transfer to the Barbican, then the West End and then Broadway). “You don’t get to be as domineering and as provocative as Ollie is without the grains of that when she was young. She’d have to insinuate herself, get close to power and take it, as women have done for ever, with a whisper in the ear in bed or over drinks, sowing a seed of doubt about someone or whatever. She does have a sexual appetite, but I also think it’s absolutely linked to her stating her claim. She’s saying to people, ‘You better take me seriously because I will use all the power I have at my disposal’ – including her sexual prowess.” Ollie is also at an age, 75-year-old Duncan points out, at which some people think it’s inappropriate for a woman to have sexual desires. “So, she’s like, ‘Oh you think so? I’ll show you…’ There’s a defiance to her.” Duncan smiles a smiles that says, “Dare to disagree with me.” I don’t. As a powerful woman, Ollie is entirely in keeping with Duncan’s oeuvre, which includes queens, duchesses, ladies, upper-class doyennes, the home secretary in Black Mirror and Margaret Thatcher in Margaret. Over a 50-year career, Duncan has often attracted adjectives like “glacial”, “icy” and “aloof” but in real life, she couldn’t be warmer. We talk of cake: “I don’t deny myself very much, but I can’t have cakes around the house because who’ll eat them but me and Hilton [McRae, Duncan’s husband and a fellow actor]?” Of how nice the PR is: “Not at all PR-y. I was bracing myself because you come across so many impossible people.” And, randomly, of how once, years ago, she put a vanilla pod in the oven when she was selling a house. Did it work? I ask. “Yeah.” Did it? “Could’ve been the house.” There is something gloriously conspiratorial about Duncan and never more so than when we talk of how Ollie is a departure for her. Because Ollie is not posh. Ollie is Scottish, and Duncan does the accent. It’s only the second time in her career that she’s done a Scottish accent on screen. Which is as curious as Duncan being a go-to for icy English Establishment types. Because Duncan is actually, technically, Scottish. Born in Edinburgh to working-class parents who moved to Leeds then Birmingham when she was a baby, Duncan says she feels Scottish – “and I do more as I get older” – but it is, as they say, complicated. “I would never call myself English – no way! – but when I’m called Scottish, I sometimes feel like it’s a little lie because I wasn’t educated there. But being there, with work previously, I felt the pull of Edinburgh, because my mum was from there. The same with being in Glasgow for Mint. I felt not like an outsider – even though I sound l udicrously like an outsider.” That the most important voices in her life have been Scottish makes a difference to Duncan. Her husband is from Dundee. “The first time I heard his disembodied voice, we hadn’t been together that long. It was an answering machine, and it was so powerful. When I was with him, I wasn’t aware of it but just hearing it, it was so Scottish. If the first voices in your ear were Scottish, as mine were, it’s fundamental, even if you’re in England.” All the same, Duncan is aware of what she calls her “vulnerability”. “Here I am playing Scots and I live in England while there are plenty of great actresses in Scotland who could play this part. But what can I do? I’m not going to say, ‘No, I will not do this job because I’d like you to offer it to another actress.’” She cackles. “I don’t think so! I’m not that nice!” Duncan is perhaps best known for the work she has done with three giants of British drama: Stephen Poliakoff and Alan Bleasdale on TV and Harold Pinter on stage. She calls that work – Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and Close to the Enemy; GBH and The Sinking of the Laconia; Ashes to Ashes and The Homecoming – “the bedrock of everything”. “It makes me really emotional because they’re people who mean so much to me and I’m so grateful that those writers are or have been in the world – because we need those people. To be asked repeatedly to work with them is a source of real pride because I respect them so deeply and in those three cases, I love them too,” she says. “I’m incredibly grateful for what they’ve done for me because I’m not someone who can just spin on nothing or stand in front of a camera with absolutely nothing to go on. I rely on the material and I celebrate the material. I love it, and I love writers. I’ve been incredibly lucky to be around at a time when those people were making work.” It’s talent more than luck that gets Duncan into any room, isn’t it? “I’m not change-the-world talented, but I’m good and care about what I do.” That much is clear from how interesting her career is. What’s also clear is that it’s not ambition that drives Duncan but curiosity. “Yes!” she exclaims. “Everything has just happened to me and most of it has been really brilliant. It’s made my life so great as an actor and as a human in the world. The people, the situations and the places I’ve been in, this business has enriched it and made it more exciting. “I look back at the last year and think to myself about what an amazing, unpredictable year it has been. The things that have come I could never have hunted down. It’s curiosity. That’s how it’s been, that’s how it’s gone, and that’s how it’s going – and it’s great!”
Christopher Eccleston: "Masculinity shouldn't be contingent on other people's oppression"
The actor on the cult of television, working with Jimmy McGovern – and the ultimate interview question.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Born in Salford in 1964, Christopher Eccleston made his name in dramas like Cracker and Our Friends in the North. His films range from Shallow Grave to GI Joe, with recent TV jobs including HBO’s The Leftovers and Peter Bowker’s The A-Word. Most famously he played the ninth Doctor in Doctor Who, which he doesn’t discuss outside conventions – his “no Blue Box” rule. Next up is his role as a cult leader in the new Netflix drama Unchosen. What was the appeal of playing a cult leader? What attracted me to Mr Phillips was Unchosen’s writer, Julie Gearey. There’s a great trend in drama at the moment for antagonists who are toxic, white, apparently heterosexual, late-middle-aged men. Thankfully, Julie gave him dimension and placed him in a story of tragedy involving the loss of his son and alcoholism. It’s a gift of a role because of the awkward questions it asks of our audience. Do audiences want to understand villains and their dimensions? I’ve had this argument in Hollywood regarding one-dimensional villains I’ve played. It doesn’t make the heroes look smarter taking on villains like that. It makes them look stupid. What Julie understands is something that so many people in television and film, in their arrogance, will not accept – that audiences are much brighter than we are. View oEmbed on the source website Is TV being dumbed down? Historically there would be programmes that I watched when I was young where I would feel patronised – Love Thy Neighbour or whatever – but there was a lot where I felt I was being respected. The likes of the Plays for Today and The Naked Civil Servant. But with the erosion of the writer’s culture to almost writing by committee, I’ve heard stories about some of the idiotic – and sometimes downright hateful – assumptions about the audience’s intelligence today. A lot of people in television think the audience is stupid. Why do cults appeal? We yearn for certainty, though we know that the tragedy and beauty of life is that there are no absolutes. When you’re making TV or film, it does become somewhat cult-like. You’re working with the same people six days a week, 12 hours a day, and you’re all obsessively trying to get everything right. You once said you were insecure in your masculinity as you hoped all men were. What did you mean? Going into the arts, leaving my background and my class, made me question the certainties around my masculinity I was given as a child by society. Masculinity is in crisis, and it seems it’s particularly white, working-class boys who are being neglected, left to rot by governments and targeted by the far right. So, as an ex-working-class, white boy, I try, if I can, to address some of those things. Masculinity shouldn’t be contingent on other people’s oppression. Your departure from Cracker, in which your character bleeds out while giving a “statement of a dying man” over his radio, is a landmark moment in British TV. How did it happen? They wanted me to sign for three series but I said I’d sign for one, see how it went. When it went well, I said I’d go back, but I wasn’t going to hang around and support Robbie Coltrane, bless him, for three series. That handed Jimmy [McGovern, who wrote it] a provocation. Nowadays, major characters are killed off constantly, but it had never been done before he did it in 1994. I don’t think either of us could have imagined the effect that it would have, but back then there were four channels and we were getting 13 million viewers. If it’s a brilliant performance, it’s for one reason and one reason only: the writing. You’ve worked with Jimmy a lot. Without Jimmy McGovern, I wouldn’t have a career in television. I did Cracker, a film called Heart, Accused… And I did Hillsborough, which is the most important thing I’ve ever done. It provoked questions in Parliament and got me over my silly guilt that being an actor isn’t a real job. I will always want to work with McGovern and I’m hoping that one day he’ll employ me again, maybe in an old people’s home. You played Nicky in the state-of-the-nation drama Our Friends in the North – why don’t we see ambitious series like that any more? State-of-the-nation dramas are possible – look at the success of Adolescence – but I don’t think we have those visionary, politicised, poetic people who want to make them now. People like Michael Wearing [who produced Boys from the Blackstuff and commissioned Our Friends in the North], Kenith Trodd [Dennis Potter’s producer] and Tony Garnett [This Life]. As an avid reader, do you worry that reading is in decline? From a family of readers – my mum’s 94 in April and still a reader! – I do worry. But I have two children and they are both voracious readers. We spend so much time in bookshops. Hopefully we’ll get these new measures from the Government about restricting social media for children as that would be a very positive thing Is there a question you wish you were asked more often in interviews? I wish more people would ask about failure. I interviewed my hero Alex Ferguson once and the first thing I asked him was about losing. I mean, why ask him about winning? Him aside, losing is what the majority of us spend our lives doing. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Unchosen is released on Netflix on Tuesday 21 April. 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.
British acting legend Lindsay Duncan talks "provocative" new BBC drama role – and why she'd never call herself English
It’s about power, says Lindsay Duncan, as she plays a crime family matriarch determined to exert her influence – by any means necessary.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. In Mint, Charlotte Regan’s leftfield love story set in central Scotland’s criminal underworld, Lindsay Duncan plays Ollie. Mistress of this mobland when her husband was master, we meet the widowed Ollie as she is transitioned/relegated/sidelined into the mother of the king, with the ascension of her son Dylan (Sam Riley) to the position of the Godfather of Grangemouth. No longer queen bee in this hive of illegal activity, Ollie spends her days assembling and reassembling firearms, doting on her granddaughter Shannon, picking on her daughter-in-law, Cat, and satisfying her not insignificant sexual appetites by bedding Dylan’s henchmen – though beds are apparently optional. In a certain light, I suggest to Duncan when we meet, Ollie looks like a psychotic sexual predator. She wrinkles her nose in disagreement. “That sort of thinking is no help to me,” she declares, which is perhaps the nicest way in ages I’ve been told I’m talking rubbish. “The sex isn’t just about the sex.” The sex is about power, says Duncan, who originated the role of the scheming Marquise de Merteuil in Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1985 at the Royal Shakespeare Company (in a production that would transfer to the Barbican, then the West End and then Broadway). “You don’t get to be as domineering and as provocative as Ollie is without the grains of that when she was young. She’d have to insinuate herself, get close to power and take it, as women have done for ever, with a whisper in the ear in bed or over drinks, sowing a seed of doubt about someone or whatever. She does have a sexual appetite, but I also think it’s absolutely linked to her stating her claim. She’s saying to people, ‘You better take me seriously because I will use all the power I have at my disposal’ – including her sexual prowess.” Ollie is also at an age, 75-year-old Duncan points out, at which some people think it’s inappropriate for a woman to have sexual desires. “So, she’s like, ‘Oh you think so? I’ll show you…’ There’s a defiance to her.” Duncan smiles a smiles that says, “Dare to disagree with me.” I don’t. As a powerful woman, Ollie is entirely in keeping with Duncan’s oeuvre, which includes queens, duchesses, ladies, upper-class doyennes, the home secretary in Black Mirror and Margaret Thatcher in Margaret. Over a 50-year career, Duncan has often attracted adjectives like “glacial”, “icy” and “aloof” but in real life, she couldn’t be warmer. We talk of cake: “I don’t deny myself very much, but I can’t have cakes around the house because who’ll eat them but me and Hilton [McRae, Duncan’s husband and a fellow actor]?” Of how nice the PR is: “Not at all PR-y. I was bracing myself because you come across so many impossible people.” And, randomly, of how once, years ago, she put a vanilla pod in the oven when she was selling a house. Did it work? I ask. “Yeah.” Did it? “Could’ve been the house.” There is something gloriously conspiratorial about Duncan and never more so than when we talk of how Ollie is a departure for her. Because Ollie is not posh. Ollie is Scottish, and Duncan does the accent. It’s only the second time in her career that she’s done a Scottish accent on screen. Which is as curious as Duncan being a go-to for icy English Establishment types. Because Duncan is actually, technically, Scottish. Born in Edinburgh to working-class parents who moved to Leeds then Birmingham when she was a baby, Duncan says she feels Scottish – “and I do more as I get older” – but it is, as they say, complicated. “I would never call myself English – no way! – but when I’m called Scottish, I sometimes feel like it’s a little lie because I wasn’t educated there. But being there, with work previously, I felt the pull of Edinburgh, because my mum was from there. The same with being in Glasgow for Mint. I felt not like an outsider – even though I sound ludicrously like an outsider.” That the most important voices in her life have been Scottish makes a difference to Duncan. Her husband is from Dundee. “The first time I heard his disembodied voice, we hadn’t been together that long. It was an answering machine, and it was so powerful. When I was with him, I wasn’t aware of it but just hearing it, it was so Scottish. If the first voices in your ear were Scottish, as mine were, it’s fundamental, even if you’re in England.” All the same, Duncan is aware of what she calls her “vulnerability”. “Here I am playing Scots and I live in England while there are plenty of great actresses in Scotland who could play this part. But what can I do? I’m not going to say, ‘No, I will not do this job because I’d like you to offer it to another actress.’” She cackles. “I don’t think so! I’m not that nice!” Duncan is perhaps best known for the work she has done with three giants of British drama: Stephen Poliakoff and Alan Bleasdale on TV and Harold Pinter on stage. She calls that work – Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and Close to the Enemy; GBH and The Sinking of the Laconia; Ashes to Ashes and The Homecoming – “the bedrock of everything”. “It makes me really emotional because they’re people who mean so much to me and I’m so grateful that those writers are or have been in the world – because we need those people. To be asked repeatedly to work with them is a source of real pride because I respect them so deeply and in those three cases, I love them too,” she says. “I’m incredibly grateful for what they’ve done for me because I’m not someone who can just spin on nothing or stand in front of a camera with absolutely nothing to go on. I rely on the material and I celebrate the material. I love it, and I love writers. I’ve been incredibly lucky to be around at a time when those people were making work.” It’s talent more than luck that gets Duncan into any room, isn’t it? “I’m not change-the-world talented, but I’m good and care about what I do.” That much is clear from how interesting her career is. What’s also clear is that it’s not ambition that drives Duncan but curiosity. “Yes!” she exclaims. “Everything has just happened to me and most of it has been really brilliant. It’s made my life so great as an actor and as a human in the world. The people, the situations and the places I’ve been in, this business has enriched it and made it more exciting. “I look back at the last year and think to myself about what an amazing, unpredictable year it has been. The things that have come I could never have hunted down. It’s curiosity. That’s how it’s been, that’s how it’s gone, and that’s how it’s going – and it’s great!” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Mint begins at 9pm Monday 20 April on BBC One and iPlayer. 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.
Frances Barber talks politics on TV and playing Margaret Thatcher: "I hated her"
The versatile actor on politics, becoming Thatcher and playing a rock survivor.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. What’s the view from your sofa? I’ve got a very big television – 65 inches or something – that I’ve had for 20 years and it still works. It’s not HD or anything, but I hate looking at myself anyway, so the idea of myself in HD would just give me a breakdown. Next to that is a painting of my old bulldog Smack, to whom I was devoted, that Sir Ian McKellen gave me. Over your shoulder I can see another beautiful painting... It’s me! Very narcissistic, isn’t it? I was doing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with Christian Slater years ago, in the theatre, and an artist asked if he could paint us. Initially, I thought it was a gift, but we had to pay. But I liked it so much and he was young, so I thought that was OK. What telly turns you off? Question Time. I used to be addicted and now I can’t bear it. It’s all soundbites, playing to the crowd and plants in the audience – and every discussion is so binary. Politics is much more complicated and nuanced than that. You played Margaret Thatcher in last year’s award-winning radio play When Maggie Met Larry. Were you a fan of hers? I hated her. I was in my 20s when she was prime minister and I went on demonstrations and protests against her and her policies. For the play, I did hundreds of hours of research to try and get her voice right. I kept thinking, “I still disagree, but I believe she believed in what she was saying and that it was for the good of the country,” even if it patently wasn’t. Are you a political animal? I am, but I don’t know where we go from here because it’s very hard to trust anyone. What we have now, unfortunately, is a set of politicians who do focus groups and tell us what they think we want to hear. No one believes what they say any more and all of it feels like a lie. That’s why we, as the electorate, are very depressed. I think the electorate want to hear something from the politician’s heart. You were raised on a Wolverhampton council estate. What was your childhood like? I had a happy childhood. My mum was a great singer – we used to sing around the house to Shirley Bassey together – but she had six kids. Very generously if you think about it, she wanted me to have the life she never had, so was always incredibly supportive, as was my dad. When I went to university, there was never a sense of me running away from anything. Actually, I took it all with me. How would you describe yourself as an actor? I was once described as mercurial, and I like that because I’ve never fitted into any box. More often, I’ve been called “sexy and unhinged”. Which I don’t mind. In your film MUSIK, written by Jonathan Harvey with music by Pet Shop Boys, you play Billie Trix, who first appeared in their 2001 musical Closer to Heaven. I’ve never been in a show that got such shockingly bad reviews, but I loved it and I love her. She’s one of those great survivors – like Marianne Faithfull – who went through it all, bought the T-shirt and is still standing. It took more than 20 years but she’s back, deliciously delusional, with six new songs by Pet Shop Boys. It’s a recording of your one-woman show – was that a big responsibility? There was never a night I wasn’t terrified. And as much as I relished it, it’s also quite lonely. The producer, director Terry Johnson and the Pet Shop Boys would pop in, but apart from my dresser, who was wonderful, you’re there on your own. To me, the whole point of being an actor is the camaraderie – working out stuff in the rehearsal room, playing off each other on the actual stage – so I’m not going to lie, I found it very difficult. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Film 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.
The Beyond Paradise star is channelling Columbo, Miss Marple and Withnail and I
Add Beyond Paradise to your watchlist What’s the view from your sofa? Documentaries and sport! When you spend seven months of the year on a film set, the last thing you want to watch is something that takes place on a film set. I find it hard to suspend my disbelief so I’m not a binge watcher of anything, which is rather unfortunate for my wife. Because she wants to watch Game of Thrones? I’ve never seen Game of Thrones. We haven’t even seen Adolescence either. The greatest drama for me is in real life. What’s so special about sport? Nothing ever brings me to tears, or close to tears, like sport does. I think it’s the immediacy of it, and that the jeopardy is real. I’m all about the underdog, too, and you really get that David and Goliath thing going on in sport. Which documentaries do you like? Anything that’s “man against the elements”. Free Solo is an amazing film about Alex Honnold, who climbed El Capitan in Yosemite [3,000ft] without ropes or protective gear. In January, he climbed the Taipei 101 [1,667ft] in Taiwan on Skyscraper Live on Netflix. The Alpinist, about Canadian free solo climber Marc-André Leclerc, is great. So you enjoy watching movies? I have a pantheon that I absolutely love and will add to occasionally – Terms of Endearment, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Apocalypse Now, Withnail and I, Robert Altman’s films and, more recently, Don’t Look Up. I speak French, so Jules et Jim was a big part of my growing up. I’m a huge Truffaut fan, and I’m all for those French New Wave films. This does sound – I can hear myself as I’m saying it – incredibly esoteric. Do you ever watch your own films? Love Actually now seems to have become a Christmas TV tradition… I’ve only watched it once. Obviously, because of the cast and Richard Curtis, we knew it was going to be popular, but that it’s part of the cultural lexicon is crazy. I was listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning and they were discussing Keir Starmer refusing to let Donald Trump use our air bases and asking if this was Starmer’s “Love Actually moment”. We made it almost 25 years ago! Have your children discovered it yet? They’re 13 and 10, so not quite old enough to see their dad banging on about backpacks full of condoms. That Rubicon is yet to be crossed. Beyond Paradise is back for a fourth series. Talk us through Humphrey’s detective DNA. I’m not saying that I’ve lifted parts of my favourite TV detectives and made them into one character, but there are elements of Columbo, and Jim Rockford, because I was a huge fan of James Garner. There’s some Marple in there, and a bit of Barnaby Jones, who’s an American detective. There are little homages to my favourite films, too – nods to Withnail and I, which are hard to spot but you can see if you know what you’re looking for. How do you keep the character and series interesting? I’m not used to playing characters for more than three years before saying I’ve had enough and moving on, but I’ve been playing Humphrey now, off and on, for 13 years. So, this is new ground for me, evolving the character. But he’s getting older, as am I, and one of the things I love about Beyond Paradise is that it’s not just a detective show. It’s cosy crime for sure, but there are elements of melodrama and comedy. And it’s about a community and family. And Selwyn the duck, of course, who has been interviewed by Radio Times… Really? I didn’t know that. I’m absolutely flabbergasted. But to use a duck analogy, and as I’ve always said about Death in Paradise, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface to make it look serene on top.
Beyond Paradise star Kris Marshall reveals which TV detectives helped inspire Humphrey – and that he's only watched Love Actually once
The Beyond Paradise star is channelling Columbo, Miss Marple and Withnail and I.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. What’s the view from your sofa? Documentaries and sport! When you spend seven months of the year on a film set, the last thing you want to watch is something that takes place on a film set. I find it hard to suspend my disbelief so I’m not a binge watcher of anything, which is rather unfortunate for my wife. Because she wants to watch Game of Thrones? I’ve never seen Game of Thrones. We haven’t even seen Adolescence either. The greatest drama for me is in real life. What’s so special about sport? Nothing ever brings me to tears, or close to tears, like sport does. I think it’s the immediacy of it, and that the jeopardy is real. I’m all about the underdog, too, and you really get that David and Goliath thing going on in sport. Which documentaries do you like? Anything that’s “man against the elements”. Free Solo is an amazing film about Alex Honnold, who climbed El Capitan in Yosemite [3,000ft] without ropes or protective gear. In January, he climbed the Taipei 101 [1,667ft] in Taiwan on Skyscraper Live on Netflix. The Alpinist, about Canadian free solo climber Marc-André Leclerc, is great. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/11/Martha-d940585.jpg" width="4284" height="2856" alt="A group of people stand together indoors at a festive gathering, clapping and smiling. A man in a navy suit and a woman in a cream satin dress are at the front, both looking happy and celebratory. Behind them, two older women also clap, surrounded by warm fairy lights, stone walls, and a decorated Christmas tree, creating a cosy holiday atmosphere." title="Beyond Paradise" /> So you enjoy watching movies? I have a pantheon that I absolutely love and will add to occasionally – Terms of Endearment, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Apocalypse Now, Withnail and I, Robert Altman’s films and, more recently, Don’t Look Up. I speak French, so Jules et Jim was a big part of my growing up. I’m a huge Truffaut fan, and I’m all for those French New Wave films. This does sound – I can hear myself as I’m saying it – incredibly esoteric. Do you ever watch your own films? Love Actually now seems to have become a Christmas TV tradition… I’ve only watched it once. Obviously, because of the cast and Richard Curtis, we knew it was going to be popular, but that it’s part of the cultural lexicon is crazy. I was listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning and they were discussing Keir Starmer refusing to let Donald Trump use our air bases and asking if this was Starmer’s “Love Actually moment”. We made it almost 25 years ago! Have your children discovered it yet? They’re 13 and 10, so not quite old enough to see their dad banging on about backpacks full of condoms. That Rubicon is yet to be crossed. Beyond Paradise is back for a fourth series. Talk us through Humphrey’s detective DNA. I’m not saying that I’ve lifted parts of my favourite TV detectives and made them into one character, but there are elements of Columbo, and Jim Rockford, because I was a huge fan of James Garner. There’s some Marple in there, and a bit of Barnaby Jones, who’s an American detective. There are little homages to my favourite films, too – nods to Withnail and I, which are hard to spot but you can see if you know what you’re looking for. How do you keep the character and series interesting? I’m not used to playing characters for more than three years before saying I’ve had enough and moving on, but I’ve been playing Humphrey now, off and on, for 13 years. So, this is new ground for me, evolving the character. But he’s getting older, as am I, and one of the things I love about Beyond Paradise is that it’s not just a detective show. It’s cosy crime for sure, but there are elements of melodrama and comedy. And it’s about a community and family. And Selwyn the duck, of course, who has been interviewed by Radio Times… Really? I didn’t know that. I’m absolutely flabbergasted. But to use a duck analogy, and as I’ve always said about Death in Paradise, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface to make it look serene on top. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Beyond Paradise returns on BBC One and iPlayer on Friday 27 March at 8pm. 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Sheridan Smith and Michael Socha star in BBC One's new high-stakes thriller, The Cage
There are more than 150 local casinos across the UK (according to casino.org — “the world’s #1 guide for players looking to gamble smarter, safer and with more confidence”). And it’s in a fictional, Liverpudlian version of one such establishment that The Cage — named after the fortified area in which casino cashiers work — is set. A new thriller from The Responder’s Tony Schumacher, it stars Sheridan Smith and Michael Socha, and once again shines a light on Schumacher’s home town, though Liverpool, you may not be surprised to learn, is no Las Vegas. “Casinos are very much associated with America, in particular Vegas, but what was massively important to our show was a sense of place outside the casino, a grounded, real, character-driven world,” explains director Al Mackay. “I didn’t want sterile, glossy and characterless. I wanted it to feel as if it was new in the 80s…” Against this backdrop of faded provincial sophistication, Leanne (Smith) and Matty (Socha) each discover that the other is stealing from the safe at work. While their motives and methods differ, their desperation does not. In one scene Leanne is adamant: “We have to stop, Matty — so we stop.” Huffily, Matty agrees: “Yeah!” They’re not going to stop. Thrillers get their tension and propulsion from the plot, but it’s the characters, and how much we care about them, that determine the stakes. “A show like this is full of energy, music and colour and has two key stories,” Mackay says. “You just start weaving them faster towards the end, until it’s almost a montage. Tony is such a great writer.” Of stars Smith and Socha, he adds, “I’ve known Michael since he was a teenager, so there’s a long-term trust between us and that trust became contagious. Sheridan has incredible instincts for being in front of camera and I loved working with her. She can do a hell of a lot under the hood. You just have to make sure you capture it.” Gareth McLean The Cage is coming soon to BBC One
Call the Midwife's Heidi Thomas on saying goodbye to Sister Monica Joan – and those secret ghost cameos
Judy Parfitt's long-serving Call the Midwife character Sister Monica Joan died in the finale of the BBC drama's 15th season.
The end, when it came, didn’t arrive with a whimper or a bang. Instead, the conclusion-for-now of Call the Midwife will have been met, in living rooms from Aberdeen to Zouch (Nottinghamshire, trivia fiends), with sobs and sighs. Certainly, it was a tearjerker of an episode in which Midwife’s, er, midwife, showrunner Heidi Thomas, had doubled the usual doses of bittersweet poignancy and shiny optimism, injecting them into proceedings like emotional steroids. From Rosalind and Cyril’s shotgun nuptials and Beryl reconciling herself to being a Sister and never a mother, to Susan Mullucks gaining an independence unimaginable when she was born a thalidomide-affected baby a decade earlier, our 133rd visit with Nonnatus’s nuns’n’nurses delivered. Well of course it did. It was never more affecting and tender than when concerned with the passing of Sister Monica Joan. Hers was a death foretold, mostly by Sister Catherine, who was two-for-two in her predictions about Monica Joan’s demise – how her condition would worsen without treatment and who would guide her to the pearly gates. (With prognostics like that, Cathy’d make a mint down Walthamstow dogs). Yet when Monica Joan died, her death still came as a shock. Death always does – though perhaps it isn’t death that’s distressing but the absence of life where once there was such vitality. “With the death of Sister Monica Joan, I was very much inspired by the death of her late Majesty the Queen,” Thomas told Radio Times in an exclusive, post-finale interview. “As early as the Platinum Jubilee, we all knew the Queen was going to pass away but there was still this visceral sense when she died that we had all lost something. My grandmother lived to be 101 and there's a different kind of shock that comes in, because you think that when somebody lives that long, they won't ever die.” Read more: Call the Midwife creator talks series hiatus: "All of a sudden everybody was really sobbing" Call the Midwife star reacts to season 15 finale: "We’ve never had to be upset at the end before" But, with no fear of the hereafter, die Monica Joan did. And her end, when it arrived, came mob-handed, with a host of [checks notes] ghostly nuns in tow. Leading the spectral sisters was none other than Sister Evangelina, whose fatal stroke a decade ago provided quite the finale to series five. A surprising cameo, then, from Pam Ferris, who has retired from acting, it’s a treat of a scene for the show’s legions of loyal fans. “When I was writing the script, I said to [CTM’s veteran producer] Ann Tricklebank that we should contact Pam in confidence and see if it was something she was prepared to do. She may not have been up for it, in which case I would have developed my final episode differently and focus on other aspects,” Thomas explains. “But the answer came back almost immediately: ‘I will do it for Judy.’” With Ferris on-board, Thomas finished the script and the scene was filmed, well ahead of the rest of the episode, in September. “It was top, top secret: it wasn't on the call sheet, we put a fake name – Sister Elizabeth instead of Sister Evangelina – and we smuggled her onto the set,” Thomas says. “As soon as we had her back in her old costume, it was as though she’d never been away. Pam was so generous and the scene between them is just magical.” Ferris’s isn’t the only surprising cameo in the deathbed scene. Thomas herself appears as one of the ghost nuns. “You do fleetingly see me dressed as a nun when Monica Joan is led away,” she says. “I originally had a slightly bigger part, but I cut myself ruthlessly. But spending a day dressed as a nun was an education in itself.” For Thomas, telling Monica Joan’s story up to the very end was a labour of love. “With the death of Monica Joan, we had the ability to follow a path to the end of an elderly person's life, which, as I think a lot of people experience, can be a very extended period where the elderly person reflects on what is to come and has feelings about it, and the people around them reflect on what is to come and have feelings about it. "It seemed to me that that was a very interesting story to tell, and something you don't very often see on television where the story is often about action and surprise and pace. The the idea that we could do something gently and lovingly and slowly was very appealing to me as a dramatist. It was something that we could invest in and share in and part company with a character who's become very important to many people, not just in the show, but beyond the show as well.” Such was her determination to give Sister Monica Joan an exit befitting the character and Judy Parfitt who played her, Thomas, who is Anglo-Catholic, asked her own priest to give Monica Joan her last rites and to conduct her funeral. “Rather than ask him to be an advisor, I thought ‘why don't I ask him to actually do the scene?’ So that's a real priest in those scenes who knows exactly what he’s doing and the congregation is people from my own church. They came in a minibus and brought the church vestments. It really elevated the occasion and gave it a perfection and purpose that made it feel like much more than a pretend funeral.” Add Radio Times as a Preferred Source on Google Keep up to date on what’s worth watching with your favourite entertainment news from Radio Times – see more of our exclusive news and interviews featured prominently in Top Stories when using Google. When I interviewed Parfitt in November, she was not enjoying playing Monica Joan’s last days and “couldn’t wait” until she was done filming the death scenes. Parfitt, who celebrated her 90th birthday on the set of the show in November, said “I said ‘I’m practising [for my own death]”. How did Thomas deal with what sounds like an emotional situation? “Judy is a great actress,” Thomas says, “and she'd been very humorous about her deathbed scenes and was always wearing sparkly red toenail polish. But there was a very real moment where Judy and I were sitting alone in this rather scabby dressing room we have in the basement of Nonnatus House. She was in her night dress and I was dressed as a nun and she took my hand and her eyes filled with tears, and she said,’ You see, to me, she is a real person.’ I said ‘To me, she is too.’ We had our little moment then.” Call the Midwife’s greatest virtue is that it is – utterly, undeniably, gloriously – an optimistic show. With hindsight, we know that things get better for those centred in the stories: women, people with disabilities, gay people. We know medical advances will make childbirth easier – less fatal – and society will grow increasingly tolerant. We know that the 220 babies born over the course of the series will have, on average, healthier, longer and more prosperous lives than their parents. We know that technological advances will make everyone’s lives better (until they don’t, of course). Call the Midwife - which began with nurses on bicycles carrying glass rectal tubes ended with ultrasound and an electric wheelchair – has hope baked in. Its last episode (for a while at least) was celebratory, elegiac, joyful, cathartic – and the apt, happy ending that the show and its audience deserves, even if it is just a pause and not an ever after. View Green Video on the source website Call the Midwife seasons 1-15 are available to stream now on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. 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'There's a wonderful tone of togetherness'
Laura Main and Helen George on the Call the Midwife community
Add Call the Midwife to your watchlist Helen George and Laura Main are unanimous: they won’t miss Call the Midwife. At least not yet. “We’ve all been saying that we’ll feel it most in April because that’s when we usually start filming,” explains George, who has played midwife Trixie since episode one. “So when that comes around and we don’t, we won’t have the support network and community that work has given us.” “Apart from that first year, we’ve always known at the end of filming that we’d see each other again,” says Main, whom we first encountered as Sister Bernadette and later transitioned to Nurse Shelagh Turner. “Even that first year, we found out after the second episode that the show would be coming back. We’ve had rare and lovely stability for 15 years. We’ve never had to be upset at the end before.” “And it is just a pause because we know it’s coming back,” George adds. “But it won’t be the same, with different characters leaving and whatever.” Despite Main exclaiming brightly that “we’ve had 14 years of two Christmasses!”, there is an undeniable melancholy at Nonnatus House. “As ever with Heidi [Thomas], the art informs real life and on-screen, there has been a lot of change,” George notes. “We’re definitely all feeling that in our lives off-set, too. But in amongst the grieving, we’ve had these incredible moments of togetherness, playing charades or reminiscing about the Isle of Harris or South Africa, or guest stars that came and went.” “I’ve always felt very held, very nurtured,” Main notes. Of Jenny Agutter, Judy Parfitt and Pam Ferris, the three established actresses who launched the drama, she says: “They set this wonderful tone of collaboration and equality and togetherness that exists still. We all support one another.” “That’s the best thing about this job, it’s not competitive,” George adds. “Because Heidi writes for everybody, gives everyone a moment and something special to play, everybody gets a chance.” Why do they think that it’s resonated with audiences so much? “The show is about community and family, looking out for one another and how, when we do that, we are better as a society,” Main argues. “It is a lovely thing to get to play and when you see that volume of people tuning in over such a long time wanting to see it, it suggests that those values are important to the audience, too.” For George, who says there’s a selflessness that “we’re sadly lacking in society these days”, it’s even more profound than that. “We’re afraid to be ugly on the screen and we’re afraid to be ugly in our real lives,” she explains. “But sometimes, real life is ugly. It’s ugly and it’s dirty and it’s painful and it’s hard — it’s f***ing hard — and all that is shown on Call the Midwife. Not grotesquely glamorised and not sensationalised. Just…” She reaches for the right word. “Truthfully.”
Call the Midwife writer Heidi Thomas on creating one of TV’s most enduring hits –and bidding farewell to Poplar... for now
Add Call the Midwife to your watchlist Change is baked into Call the Midwife. Progress is what the drama is about. Indeed, in last Sunday’s episode there was an exchange between Nurse Crane (Linda Bassett) and Miss Higgins (Georgie Glen) on the subject of change. In it, Miss Higgins notes, “People speak of change as if they’re speaking about rats, as if change is something hiding underneath the house, attempting to get in and gnaw at all that we hold precious… Perhaps we would be better to compare change to the birds that carry twigs in their beaks, and seeds, so they build nests and sow flowers – however accidentally.” Having often voiced her thoughts through her characters, writer Heidi Thomas now says of her beloved show, “We have made 15 series in 15 years – I’ve known for a couple of years that that situation won’t go on for ever. The sets need repair. The nuns’ habits are worn out. “It takes 14 months to make every series. For two months of every year, the producer Annie Tricklebank and I work on two series simultaneously and the workload is immense. We call ourselves the Windmill Girls because for a couple of months, usually around September and October, we never close. I work until five in the morning and she gets up at five in the morning, we have an email handover, then I go to bed for a bit and she goes to the set. You can only sustain that for so long.” Almost exactly a year ago in an interview with Radio Times, Thomas first floated the idea that Call the Midwife might take a break “at some point”. Talking obliquely about “opportunities to expand our storytelling world”, Thomas said: “If we do take a break, it will be with a view to looking at other aspects of Call the Midwife.” Today, “if” has been supplanted by “when” – and when is now. Or to be more precise, this coming Sunday night when the 139th episode of Call the Midwife is broadcast, and the series as audiences know it will be paused – or as logophile Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt) might say, take a hiatus, from the Latin hiare which means “to gape” or “to yawn”. There will be no Christmas special, two-part or otherwise, come December and no 16th series next January. Fans of the Poplar saga of nuns and nurses, of which there are legions, will undoubtedly be bereft and BBC One will have a huge hole to fill in its winter schedule, a situation it hasn’t had to contend with since the series launched in 2012. Instead, there will be a three-part mini-series prequel set during the Blitz, and a movie set somewhere in the Commonwealth, probably Australia, in 1972. Given Thomas’s work ethic, the prequel could be on our screens at Christmas and the film released a year later. If she started writing the 16th series, it could feasibly return for Christmas 2028. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Back in the present – aka Call the Midwife 1971 – Thomas shares her last act as showrunner. Surprisingly, it was an act of petty theft. Although in the telling, she does not sound especially sheepish. After the very last scene had been filmed – a poignant vignette in the chapel between Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) and Dr Turner (Stephen McGann), which isn’t actually the final scene of the episode – but before a small fireworks display that drew a line under filming at the drama’s expansive Surrey campus, Thomas slunk away from the gathered cast and crew to return to the set of Nonnatus House. A woman on a mission. “I ran upstairs and nicked a picture of a nun off the wall that I’ve had my eye on for about seven years,” she confesses. “So I left the set with this picture under my arm and I thought, someone’s going to stop me and say, ‘Put that back!’ Then I realised that I was the showrunner and I could basically nick anything I wanted. The moment was a funny blend of high emotion and low farce, which summed up all the years we’ve spent together.” Such a transgression might seem a little out of character for someone who has, since creating the drama from the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, been lead writer and executive producer. But Thomas – fiercely self-assured, frighteningly talented and formidably industrious – offers no further explanation for her secret pilfering. Suffice it to say that emotions were running particularly high. “I shed more tears during the making of that episode than any other,” she says. “I thought, ‘Am I crying because of the story or am I crying because it’s our last episode for a while?’ In the end, I think it’s a mixture of everything.” Shedding a tear is, of course, understandable. The stories that have been building all series –Rosalind and Cyril’s shotgun wedding, the poignant exploration of Sister Veronica’s (Rebecca Gethings) desires and disappointments as a civilian, the return of the Mullucks family, and, of course, Sister Monica Joan’s decision to stop treatment for her kidney disease – are paid off in Sunday’s episode. Last week, Sister Catherine (Molly Vevers) laid out plainly to Sister Monica Joan: “If you refuse your medication, you will progress from chronic kidney disease to end-stage renal failure very rapidly.” Crescendo to climax, fans will not be disappointed, though they will surely be quietly devastated. The cast certainly was when filming the drama’s final scene – albeit, given the topsy-turvy way that TV drama is made, on the Wednesday of the penultimate week of filming. “Virtually all of the actors are in that scene and people just started to cry,” Thomas says. “I was crying, Helen George was crying, and then all of a sudden everybody was really sobbing. More than one pair of false eyelashes came adrift. I thought, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get through today,’ because the whole day was about filming that last scene. “But then, when we had to change some lighting, the cast went off and within about three minutes, Christopher Harper, who plays Geoffrey, had arranged a game of charades and everybody was laughing their heads off. You realise that the Call the Midwife family are all going through a degree of grief, but there’s also resilience. It was quite a profound moment because we’re parting company for a while, but we also got to look back down from the top of the mountain and think, ‘What a long way we’ve climbed.’” It has been an eventful ascent, and on a particularly challenging TV landscape. “Fifteen years ago, it was presumed that a period drama had to be about wealthy people or be what they used to call at the BBC ‘a slam-dunk title’,” Thomas recalls. “A book that people had done at A-level. Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dickens done very much in an Andrew Davies style. Cranford [which Thomas adapted] was definitely that.” Call the Midwife, emphatically, was not. It was none of the above. And yet it became the BBC’s most popular drama launch in a decade. Describing it as “a show that was instantly loved but took years to be respected”, Thomas says: “There was a point around series two when I asked myself, ‘Why are people dismissing this show that’s getting more than eight million viewers as “this lovely little cosy show”?’ There’s blood on the floor every week! It’s about high life- or-death stakes. We had this outpouring of love from the public and yet any serious commentary on the show was so patronising. Even if it was friendly, it was patronising.” Her answer? “It all relates to women – and also it’s about the working classes. Over the years, we have shown lives that didn’t habitually have very much light shone upon them. Small lives contain giant stories. Women’s lives are full of meaning but, certainly in the late 50s and early 60s, were very much put to one side – not just women, but disabled people and gay people – their lives matter. Call the Midwife has been able to tell and celebrate those stories. It has entered people’s homes on Sunday nights for 15 years, and maybe changed the way they think a little bit.” In the drama’s story, Thomas sees echoes of her own. “I was neither extremely working class nor highly educated. I wasn’t from a council estate nor have I been to Oxbridge. I’m a lower-middle-class, suburban girl with working-class grandparents, with nothing to distinguish me whatsoever. I was always thought of as very ordinary. But I’ve managed to achieve extraordinary things – I had a play on at the RSC when I was 23 – and I realised that Call the Midwife was the same. It looks ordinary, but it does something extraordinary.” In creating and writing the drama, Thomas has indeed achieved something extraordinary. Along with nurturing talent like actor Jessica Raine, Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell and writers Amy Roberts and Loren McLaughlin, who went on to create The Hardacres for 5, Thomas didn’t just tell stories that were rarely told, she rewrote the rule book on what period drama was and what Sunday-night drama could be. An unlikely radical, she describes herself as “bloody-minded”, so there is no doubt that when it returns, Call the Midwife will come back bolder than ever. Although, if it picks up where it ends in the early 1970s, mobile midwives making an inventory of their kit as the novice Jenny Lee (Jessica Raine) did with Sister Julienne back in the first series (“enema funnel, enema tube, rectal tube – glass… Second rectal tube, in case the first one breaks, also glass”) will be distant memories. It may feel like another drama entirely. “We’ll come back slightly recalibrated,” Thomas says. “Changes will have taken place, but the change itself is not destructive. It’s nourishing.” Recalibrated how? What changes? The seed of an idea has obviously already been sown. “I’m exploring the notion of a community hospital. They were big in the 70s and I was familiar with one in urban Liverpool; you would go there to see the GP or have your x-ray. By the end of the 1980s, they’d been phased out but they’re bringing them back now because it’s a model that works. “So, we’ll see. We don’t know when series 16 will be yet because we’ve got the prequel and then the film. And at the moment, I’m still concentrating on getting this one out of the door!”
Call the Midwife creator talks series hiatus: "All of a sudden everybody was really sobbing"
Call the Midwife writer Heidi Thomas on creating one of TV’s most enduring hits – and bidding farewell to Poplar... for now.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Change is baked into Call the Midwife. Progress is what the drama is about. Indeed, in last Sunday’s episode there was an exchange between Nurse Crane (Linda Bassett) and Miss Higgins (Georgie Glen) on the subject of change. In it, Miss Higgins notes, “People speak of change as if they’re speaking about rats, as if change is something hiding underneath the house, attempting to get in and gnaw at all that we hold precious… Perhaps we would be better to compare change to the birds that carry twigs in their beaks, and seeds, so they build nests and sow flowers – however accidentally.” Having often voiced her thoughts through her characters, writer Heidi Thomas now says of her beloved show, “We have made 15 series in 15 years – I’ve known for a couple of years that that situation won’t go on for ever. The sets need repair. The nuns’ habits are worn out. “It takes 14 months to make every series. For two months of every year, the producer Annie Tricklebank and I work on two series simultaneously and the workload is immense. We call ourselves the Windmill Girls because for a couple of months, usually around September and October, we never close. I work until five in the morning and she gets up at five in the morning, we have an email handover, then I go to bed for a bit and she goes to the set. You can only sustain that for so long.” Almost exactly a year ago in an interview with Radio Times, Thomas first floated the idea that Call the Midwife might take a break “at some point”. Talking obliquely about “opportunities to expand our storytelling world”, Thomas said: “If we do take a break, it will be with a view to looking at other aspects of Call the Midwife". Today, “if” has been supplanted by “when” – and when is now. Or to be more precise, this coming Sunday night when the 139th episode of Call the Midwife is broadcast, and the series as audiences know it will be paused – or as logophile Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt) might say, take a hiatus, from the Latin hiare which means “to gape” or “to yawn”. There will be no Christmas special, two-part or otherwise, come December and no 16th series next January. Fans of the Poplar saga of nuns and nurses, of which there are legions, will undoubtedly be bereft and BBC One will have a huge hole to fill in its winter schedule, a situation it hasn’t had to contend with since the series launched in 2012. Instead, there will be a three-part mini-series prequel set during the Blitz, and a movie set somewhere in the Commonwealth, probably Australia, in 1972. Given Thomas’s work ethic, the prequel could be on our screens at Christmas and the film released a year later. If she started writing the 16th series, it could feasibly return for Christmas 2028. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Back in the present – aka Call the Midwife 1971 – Thomas shares her last act as showrunner. Surprisingly, it was an act of petty theft. Although in the telling, she does not sound especially sheepish. After the very last scene had been filmed – a poignant vignette in the chapel between Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) and Dr Turner (Stephen McGann), which isn’t actually the final scene of the episode – but before a small fireworks display that drew a line under filming at the drama’s expansive Surrey campus, Thomas slunk away from the gathered cast and crew to return to the set of Nonnatus House. A woman on a mission. “I ran upstairs and nicked a picture of a nun off the wall that I’ve had my eye on for about seven years,” she confesses. “So I left the set with this picture under my arm and I thought, someone’s going to stop me and say, ‘Put that back!’ Then I realised that I was the showrunner and I could basically nick anything I wanted. The moment was a funny blend of high emotion and low farce, which summed up all the years we’ve spent together.” Such a transgression might seem a little out of character for someone who has, since creating the drama from the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, been lead writer and executive producer. But Thomas – fiercely self-assured, frighteningly talented and formidably industrious – offers no further explanation for her secret pilfering. Suffice it to say that emotions were running particularly high. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2026/02/CTM-17a9b00.jpg" width="4284" height="2856" alt="A bride and groom stand facing each other and holding hands during a wedding ceremony. The bride wears a white dress and veil, and the groom wears a grey suit with a white boutonniere. An officiant stands behind them at a desk with an open register, as soft light filters through tall lace-curtained windows." title="Call The Midwife s15" /> “I shed more tears during the making of that episode than any other,” she says. “I thought, ‘Am I crying because of the story or am I crying because it’s our last episode for a while?’ In the end, I think it’s a mixture of everything.” Shedding a tear is, of course, understandable. The stories that have been building all series – Rosalind and Cyril’s shotgun wedding, the poignant exploration of Sister Veronica’s (Rebecca Gethings) desires and disappointments as a civilian, the return of the Mullucks family, and, of course, Sister Monica Joan’s decision to stop treatment for her kidney disease – are paid off in Sunday’s episode. Last week, Sister Catherine (Molly Vevers) laid out plainly to Sister Monica Joan: “If you refuse your medication, you will progress from chronic kidney disease to end-stage renal failure very rapidly.” Crescendo to climax, fans will not be disappointed, though they will surely be quietly devastated. The cast certainly was when filming the drama’s final scene – albeit, given the topsy-turvy way that TV drama is made, on the Wednesday of the penultimate week of filming. “Virtually all of the actors are in that scene and people just started to cry,” Thomas says. “I was crying, Helen George was crying, and then all of a sudden everybody was really sobbing. More than one pair of false eyelashes came adrift. I thought, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get through today,’ because the whole day was about filming that last scene. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2026/02/547872-37ce373.jpg" width="4284" height="2856" alt="A warm, softly lit photo of an elderly nun standing in a doorway, smiling gently. She wears a traditional white head covering and a dark habit with a large wooden cross necklace. In the foreground, slightly out of focus, is the back of another person with curly hair, suggesting the nun is speaking to or greeting them indoors." title="Call the Midwife s15" /> “But then, when we had to change some lighting, the cast went off and within about three minutes, Christopher Harper, who plays Geoffrey, had arranged a game of charades and everybody was laughing their heads off. You realise that the Call the Midwife family are all going through a degree of grief, but there’s also resilience. It was quite a profound moment because we’re parting company for a while, but we also got to look back down from the top of the mountain and think, ‘What a long way we’ve climbed.’” It has been an eventful ascent, and on a particularly challenging TV landscape. “15 years ago, it was presumed that a period drama had to be about wealthy people or be what they used to call at the BBC ‘a slam-dunk title’,” Thomas recalls. “A book that people had done at A-level. Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dickens done very much in an Andrew Davies style. Cranford [which Thomas adapted] was definitely that.” Call the Midwife, emphatically, was not. It was none of the above. And yet it became the BBC’s most popular drama launch in a decade. Describing it as “a show that was instantly loved but took years to be respected”, Thomas says: “There was a point around series two when I asked myself, ‘Why are people dismissing this show that’s getting more than eight million viewers as “this lovely little cosy show”?’ "There’s blood on the floor every week! It’s about high life- or-death stakes. We had this outpouring of love from the public and yet any serious commentary on the show was so patronising. Even if it was friendly, it was patronising.” Her answer? “It all relates to women – and also it’s about the working classes. Over the years, we have shown lives that didn’t habitually have very much light shone upon them. Small lives contain giant stories. Women’s lives are full of meaning but, certainly in the late 50s and early 60s, were very much put to one side – not just women, but disabled people and gay people – their lives matter. Call the Midwife has been able to tell and celebrate those stories. It has entered people’s homes on Sunday nights for 15 years, and maybe changed the way they think a little bit.” In the drama’s story, Thomas sees echoes of her own. “I was neither extremely working class nor highly educated. I wasn’t from a council estate nor have I been to Oxbridge. I’m a lower-middle-class, suburban girl with working-class grandparents, with nothing to distinguish me whatsoever. I was always thought of as very ordinary. But I’ve managed to achieve extraordinary things – I had a play on at the RSC when I was 23 – and I realised that Call the Midwife was the same. It looks ordinary, but it does something extraordinary.” In creating and writing the drama, Thomas has indeed achieved something extraordinary. Along with nurturing talent like actor Jessica Raine, Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell and writers Amy Roberts and Loren McLaughlin, who went on to create The Hardacres for 5, Thomas didn’t just tell stories that were rarely told, she rewrote the rule book on what period drama was and what Sunday-night drama could be. An unlikely radical, she describes herself as “bloody-minded”, so there is no doubt that when it returns, Call the Midwife will come back bolder than ever. Although, if it picks up where it ends in the early 1970s, mobile midwives making an inventory of their kit as the novice Jenny Lee (Jessica Raine) did with Sister Julienne back in the first series (“enema funnel, enema tube, rectal tube – glass… Second rectal tube, in case the first one breaks, also glass”) will be distant memories. It may feel like another drama entirely. “We’ll come back slightly recalibrated,” Thomas says. “Changes will have taken place, but the change itself is not destructive. It’s nourishing.” Recalibrated how? What changes? The seed of an idea has obviously already been sown. “I’m exploring the notion of a community hospital. They were big in the '70s and I was familiar with one in urban Liverpool; you would go there to see the GP or have your x-ray. By the end of the 1980s, they’d been phased out but they’re bringing them back now because it’s a model that works. “So, we’ll see. We don’t know when series 16 will be yet because we’ve got the prequel and then the film. And at the moment, I’m still concentrating on getting this one out of the door!” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Call the Midwife concludes on BBC One at 8pm on Sunday 8 March 2026. 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. 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Call the Midwife star reacts to season 15 finale: "We’ve never had to be upset at the end before"
Call the Midwife stars Helen George and Laura Main reflect on the changes to come, the sense of community and the show's enduring truthfulness.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Helen George and Laura Main are unanimous: they won’t miss Call the Midwife. At least not yet. “We’ve all been saying that we’ll feel it most in April because that’s when we usually start filming,” explains George, who has played midwife Trixie since episode 1. “So when that comes around and we don’t, we won’t have the support network and community that work has given us.” “Apart from that first year, we’ve always known at the end of filming that we’d see each other again,” says Main, whom we first encountered as Sister Bernadette and later transitioned to Nurse Shelagh Turner. “Even that first year, we found out after the second episode that the show would be coming back. We’ve had rare and lovely stability for 15 years. We’ve never had to be upset at the end before.” “And it is just a pause because we know it’s coming back,” George adds. “But it won’t be the same, with different characters leaving and whatever.” Despite Main exclaiming brightly that “we’ve had 14 years of two Christmasses!”, there is an undeniable melancholy at Nonnatus House. “As ever with Heidi [Thomas], the art informs real life and on-screen, there has been a lot of change,” George notes. “We’re definitely all feeling that in our lives off-set, too. But in amongst the grieving, we’ve had these incredible moments of togetherness, playing charades or reminiscing about the Isle of Harris or South Africa, or guest stars that came and went.” “I’ve always felt very held, very nurtured,” Main notes. Of Jenny Agutter, Judy Parfitt and Pam Ferris, the three established actresses who launched the drama, she says: “They set this wonderful tone of collaboration and equality and togetherness that exists still. We all support one another.” Add Radio Times as a Preferred Source on Google Keep up to date on what’s worth watching with your favourite entertainment news from Radio Times – see more of our exclusive news and interviews featured prominently in Top Stories when using Google. “That’s the best thing about this job, it’s not competitive,” George adds. “Because Heidi writes for everybody, gives everyone a moment and something special to play, everybody gets a chance.” Why do they think that it’s resonated with audiences so much? “The show is about community and family, looking out for one another and how, when we do that, we are better as a society,” Main argues. “It is a lovely thing to get to play and when you see that volume of people tuning in over such a long time wanting to see it, it suggests that those values are important to the audience, too.” For George, who says there’s a selflessness that “we’re sadly lacking in society these days”, it’s even more profound than that. “We’re afraid to be ugly on the screen and we’re afraid to be ugly in our real lives,” she explains. “But sometimes, real life is ugly. It’s ugly and it’s dirty and it’s painful and it’s hard — it’s f***ing hard — and all that is shown on Call the Midwife. Not grotesquely glamorised and not sensationalised. Just…” She reaches for the right word. “Truthfully.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. 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.
Doctor Who legend Steven Moffat teases new TV show: "It’s the closest thing I’ve done to Press Gang"
Moffat reflects on his 1989 series Press Gang, while also teasing his upcoming Channel 4 show, Number 10.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Press Gang, the ITV comedy drama that ran from 1989 to 1993 and followed the production of a newspaper for and by young people, was a touchstone piece of children’s television. Quick-witted, gritty when it needed to be, rarely preachy and thoroughly unsentimental, it made an established writer — and Bafta winner — out of Steven Moffat, who wrote all of its 43 episodes, a star out of its lead Julia Sawalha (who would go on to Absolutely Fabulous and Jonathan Creek) and actual journalists out of many of its devoted fans — including myself and Radio Times’s deputy editor. “The show was a self-portrait of the people making it — we were just running around being adults for the first time,” says Moffat today. “What’s fun about bumping into the cast now is that they’re starting to realise I was only slightly older than them. Julia thought I was about 50 or something. I was 26.” For inspiration, Moffat cites Cheers, Moonlighting and The Kids from Fame: “I was just channelling those shows’ wit, speed and exuberance and doing my version.” While he pooh-poohs the idea of an authorial voice — “I’ve never even thought about it. That’s just how I write” — you can hear it in Press Gang’s crackling dialogue, its inventiveness with story, and through characters like Sawalha’s ambitious, courageous but flawed editor Lynda Day. He remembers: “I was always being told, ‘We’ve got to see Lynda’s inner vulnerability,’ and I’d always say, ‘Why?’ I’ve met strong people in my life, and you know what? They’re not particularly vulnerable. When you get Doctor Who right, the Doctor is not looking for your approval and doesn’t particularly think he’s the hero.” He adds: “I’m constantly apologising my way through life. But I’m fascinated by the unrepentant and I’ve written several versions [of them] over the years.” Madeline (played by Karen Gillan) in his 2024 comedy drama, Douglas is Cancelled, is one of those versions. “Madeline’s very much the case of ‘Just because something bad happened to me doesn’t make me a hero. I’m just dealing with that as best I can, not asking for anybody’s applause, and certainly not anybody’s pity.’” So Moffat’s not a fan of today’s fashion for weaponising one’s victimhood? “If I was an evil right-winger, I’d be encouraging people to do so, because it doesn’t work — even if it might seem to in the moment,” he says. “It’s so bad now. Everybody needs to have a diagnosis of some [kind of] mental illness. I’m absolutely certain I could have loads of acronyms — I’m every kind of compulsive. But so what?” Having “not been out of work in 39 years, so I’m not doing badly”, the Sherlock writer is currently busy with Number 10, his drama set behind the scenes of government, the party of which is never specified, for Channel 4. It stars Rafe Spall as the Prime Minister and Katherine Kelly as his chief of staff. “It’s the closest thing I’ve done to Press Gang,” he says. “Essentially, it’s a workplace comedy, although I don’t really think it’s a comedy any more than Press Gang was a comedy. It’s just quite funny a lot of the time.” So, will Moffat be tuning in for Press Gang now it’s showing again on Rewind TV? Awkwardly, he will not. “I like the current stuff, but I always find my old stuff difficult to watch.” He is, however, open to a Press Gang reunion. “Well, I would. But I can’t imagine anyone would be banging on my door to do it. We’re all quite long in the tooth to be a voice for today’s youth. I was at Dexter Fletcher’s 60th birthday party recently!” Press Gang is on Rewind TV weekdays at 6:30pm from Monday 2 March. Number 10 will air on Channel 4. 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.
Inside ITV's new drama about the former dresser to the once Duchess of York, The Lady
Add The Lady to your watchlist “Andrew does not feature,” writer Debbie O’Malley says emphatically of the royal formerly known as Prince and his presence, or lack thereof, in ITV1’s four-parter The Lady. The drama tells the story of Jane Andrews (former dresser to the once Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson), who killed her partner Thomas Cressman in 2000. O’Malley says The Lady isn’t “interested in the royal world because it’s very much about the female, domestic world of Sarah [Natalie Dormer] and Jane’s part in it. We only ever see the Sarah that Jane got to see.” The Lady’s attention to Andrews’s relationship with Ferguson — “a fascinating dynamic as close as friends but with a difference in status that will never go away” — forms part of what O’Malley calls Andrews’s “toxic fairy tale”. “You’ve got this girl who comes from ordinary beginnings and ends up mixing with the greatest in the land at Buckingham Palace — before things take a sad and upsetting turn. It’s an interesting way to explore one woman’s journey as well as British society at the time.” Of course, it’s not a fairy tale, though. It’s a true story, or at least based on one. “If you’re writing true crime, there are things you can never know, and we wanted to be transparent about that. So wherever possible we’ve tried to show key moments of Jane and Tommy’s relationship through the eyes of the friends that were around them. There was no way we could necessarily please everyone, but we weren’t setting out to upset anyone.” O’Malley says she takes the “enormous” responsibility involved seriously. “When you’re trying to understand a complex protagonist, it’s easy to lose sight of the victim. And that was something that was important from the beginning — to remember that a man lost his life and his family and his friends are still grieving that loss. You just have to approach it with integrity.”
The Lady writer explains new Sarah Ferguson TV drama and how series handles Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor
Why The Lady, the new drama telling the story of Sarah Ferguson's former dresser Jane Andrews, is a "toxic fairy-tale".
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. “Andrew does not feature,” writer Debbie O’Malley says emphatically of the royal formerly known as Prince and his presence, or lack thereof, in ITV1’s four-parter The Lady. The drama tells the story of Jane Andrews (former dresser to the once Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson), who killed her partner Thomas Cressman in 2000. O’Malley says The Lady isn’t “interested in the royal world because it’s very much about the female, domestic world of Sarah [Natalie Dormer] and Jane’s part in it. We only ever see the Sarah that Jane got to see.” The Lady’s attention to Andrews’s relationship with Ferguson — “a fascinating dynamic as close as friends but with a difference in status that will never go away” — forms part of what O’Malley calls Andrews’s “toxic fairy tale”. “You’ve got this girl who comes from ordinary beginnings and ends up mixing with the greatest in the land at Buckingham Palace – before things take a sad and upsetting turn. It’s an interesting way to explore one woman’s journey as well as British society at the time.” Of course, it’s not a fairy tale, though. It’s a true story, or at least based on one. “If you’re writing true crime, there are things you can never know, and we wanted to be transparent about that. So wherever possible we’ve tried to show key moments of Jane and Tommy’s relationship through the eyes of the friends that were around them. There was no way we could necessarily please everyone, but we weren’t setting out to upset anyone.” O’Malley says she takes the “enormous” responsibility involved seriously. “When you’re trying to understand a complex protagonist, it’s easy to lose sight of the victim. And that was something that was important from the beginning – to remember that a man lost his life and his family and his friends are still grieving that loss. You just have to approach it with integrity.” The Lady will launch on Sunday (22nd February) at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. 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.
Under Salt Marsh’s Rafe Spall talks impact of nepotism in his career: "That’s called an advantage"
Balancing fatherhood and a successful screen career is challenging, but he’s trying…
What’s the view from your sofa? It’s an open-plan TV area that has the TV, obviously, and a record player with lots of records beside it. And lots of baby toys, because we have an 18-month-old. You have four children. Do you enjoy being a dad? Being a father is my proudest achievement. My kids are 14, 13, 10 and 18 months, which is quite a big stretch, and sometimes the sense of responsibility is pretty crushing. But it’s what sustains me; it’s what keeps me going. It’s really defined by what you get wrong. I get a lot wrong and I find it difficult sometimes, but I show up and I try. Looking after these kids and giving them as nice a life as I can is really the only thing of any worth I’ve ever done. Eric Bull, your character in Under Salt Marsh, has entered the pantheon of British detectives. Tell us about him. He’s awkward. Brusque. Into mushrooms. He’s a gay man – or a man who happens to be gay. A lot of that stuff was on the page, but I had free rein to decide where he was from because he needed to be not from there, not Welsh, so I decided to go West Midlands. My partner [and Trying co-star] Esther Smith is from Stourbridge, and I like the idea of the Black Country. It’s geographically close to north Wales and you don’t hear the accent much on television. Given that Bull’s been conducting his murder investigation under the threat of an almighty, evidence-destroying storm that finally hits this week, how was filming Under Salt Marsh? It was one of the most difficult pieces of shooting I’ve ever done. Given that the show is, essentially, about a storm, it meant being under rain machines from November through to March in north Wales and Cardiff – and that’s physically quite demanding. There were a lot of wetsuits involved. But we’re well paid, and it beats digging a hole in the road. Trying, your Apple TV sitcom that’s now being shown on BBC One, must be a cakewalk, comparatively? When I go home after a day of Trying, I’m much more exhausted than I would be after a day under a rain machine on Under Salt Marsh. There are three jokes on every page that need to be squeezed for every bit of juice while looking effortlessly like you’re not serving up gags – and that’s mentally taxing. It’s one of the great merits of the show that it mixes comedy capers and set pieces with real emotions. And it is also really joyful because I’m with my partner and people I’ve made it with for six years. I draw on a lot of myself for Jason so he’s quite different from Bull. View Green Video on the source website Did you always want to be an actor? For as long as I can remember, but I had an amazing role model… You refer, of course, to your dad, actor Timothy Spall. So let’s talk about nepotism. People get insecure talking about nepotism because they think that it makes them look bad, but you’ve got to be real. My dad being a famous actor definitely meant that a casting director would look at a list of potential young actors and would want to see what Timothy’s son is like, out of interest. That’s called an advantage, and compared to Esther or Kelly [Reilly, his Under Salt Marsh co-star], who didn’t have a leg-up, it’s an unfair one. Now, in my experience, it gets you through the door, but it doesn’t get you the job. Why would a film-maker who has spent years trying to get a film off the ground put someone in it that he or she didn’t think was going to be good? The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Under Salt Marsh is airing on Sky Atlantic and NOW – find out more about how to sign up for Sky TV.. Add Under Salt Marsh 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.
Louisa Harland plays Louisa May Alcott in a drama about a 19th-century American spiritual movement
Transcendental Wild Oats is on Saturday at 3pm on Radio 4. Add it to your collection Among Louisa Harland’s many talents, albeit not showcased in Channel 4’s Derry Girls or in BBC1’s upcoming adaptation of Marian Keyes’s The Walsh Sisters, is that she can think and breathe in cockney. “I’ve been doing accents since I was a child and a role with an accent is a dream role for me,” she says, explaining that the modulation and indeed subsuming of her own Dublin tones is just part of perfecting an accent. “How you breathe or laugh as a character with an accent is maybe not the same as how I would myself. “When I did Renegade Nell [Sally Wainwright’s period romp about a highwaywoman], I had to do old-school cockney, so I would try and think in the accent as opposed to just sending out the right sounds, because then I feel that it’s more in my body.” Harland says she loves the transformative nature of doing an accent and admits that she’d love to take on an American one in a long-running US series. “Playing anything far away from myself is my dream. I love doing animation voiceovers, too, and I’d love to do more. A Bojack Horseman or something like it would be ideal.” We’re discussing accents on account of Harland’s polished American in Radio 4’s new drama Transcendental Wild Oats, in which she plays its author and narrator, Louisa May Alcott. First published two years after Little Women, in 1873, Transcendental Wild Oatsis an account of the Alcott family’s disastrous involvement with the Transcendentalist movement in New England in the 1840s. Under the influence of dour Englishman Charles Lane, her idealistic father moved the family to a commune where veganism, celibacy and general parsimony were the order of the day. At Fruitlands, they eschewed artificial light and heat, personal property was abolished and a “consociate” family was created out of the farm’s 14 residents, replacing the pre-existing family units. The utopia lasted all of seven months. In the original version of the story, Alcott bestowed pseudonyms on her characters – her father became Abel Lamb, Lane Timon Lion – but this adaptation, which combines the original short story with historical records including letters and diaries of the Fruitlands family, tears away that thin veil and unabashedly names and shames. For a meditation on the follies of arrogant and ignorant men and the price that women and children pay for those follies, the adaptation is a bit of a romp. If comedy can be called tragedy with distance, in Transcendental Wild Oats tragedy keeps its distance – just. Harland says the decision to take the part was a “no-brainer”. “I like to do anything Radio 4,” she says, having previously narrated a Book at Bedtime. “I heard this team were great – and they absolutely were – and it was such a brilliant cast.” That great team includes directors Gordon Kennedy and Edward Rowett, and actors Alistair Petrie, Rebekah Staton and Mathew Baynton. Transcendental Wild Oats is not the only period drama with which Harland is currently associated. There is the small matter of the movie Hamnet, in which she plays, in flashback, the mother of Agnes. How was that? “I’d read the book, so I was very excited to read the script, and I was just delighted to be on set for a week, because everything – the cinematography, the costumes, the performances… It was the most elevated filming experience I’ve ever been a part of.” Liz Lewin, who helped develop and executive produce Harland’s breakout series Derry Girls with writer Lisa McGee, says that Harland brought “a precision” to playing odd Orla, a part that could have been played broad. It’s that precision that marks the actor out as what Lewin describes as “terrifically talented”. Where does that precision, that talent, come from? “I’ve been doing poetry competitions since I was very young, pantos in church halls and stuff like that. It’s always been all-consuming for me,” she says. “I have such a want to be doing this and I feel lucky that I’m doing it. I take it very seriously, I suppose. I don’t think I ever saw it as a career, though, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a moment of thinking ‘Oh, I’m good at this.’ I just know that I love it.”
Yellowstone star Kelly Reilly reveals why she was ready for Under Salt Marsh after "violence and revenge" of Beth Dutton
"I love Beth to bits – but Beth is quite far removed from who I am and how I live my life."
Yellowstone star Kelly Reilly has said that she was “definitely ready” to play the lead in Sky Atlantic’s new thriller Under Salt Marsh after six years playing the mad, bad and dangerous to know Beth Dutton in the hit US show. “I was working on the last season of Yellowstone when I read [Under Salt Marsh] and I was really in the throes of Beth's violence and revenge. It's quite an interesting vibe to hold in yourself and it's not something that's particularly comfortable.” Reilly told Radio Times that getting into the right headspace to play Beth takes a psychological “boot camp” and exploring the psychology of Under Salt Marsh’s protagonist, Jackie Ellis, felt like a change of gear. "Jackie feels like she’s hiding, like she doesn’t want to take up space,” she explained of the character who, upon discovering the body of a murdered child three years after her own niece disappeared, starts her own covert investigation into the deaths. According to Reilly, the more contained Jackie is "more aligned to myself and easier to access than Beth”. “I love Beth to bits – I’m playing her now [in Yellowstone spin-off The Dutton Ranch, due 2027] – but Beth is quite far removed from who I am and how I live my life,” she says. “I love leaning into that aspect of myself, but I could never speak like Beth or do what Beth does.” Read more: Where was Under Salt Marsh filmed? Under Salt Marsh's Jonathan Pryce explains why thriller is "much deeper" than your average murder mystery Slow Horses' Jonathan Pryce on returning to his Welsh roots with new drama: "I left it physically, but emotionally, I've never left" As for Beth’s appeal, and her transformation from a character in a TV show into something of an iconic cultural figure complete with her own merch – you too can own a Don’t Make Me Go All Beth Dutton On Your Ass t-shirt if there’s a dearth in your wardrobe – Reilly is reflective: “I think people loved Beth's audacity. There was something about her in full ownership of herself that felt refreshing. She was unapologetic about her own inner violence, which is kind of scary to see in a woman, and her ferociousness tapped into some sort of zeitgeist.” Under Salt Marsh airs on Fridays on Sky Atlantic and NOW. Add Under Salt Marsh 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.