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.
Riot Women cast reveal season 2 is set to take a turn "no one will see coming"
The Riot Women cast joked about what's to come in season 2.
It was confirmed late last year that BBC's Riot Women would be returning for more episodes, with the Sally Wainwright drama clearly striking a chord with audiences everywhere for its exploration of the power of music and also, female friendship. While we'll just have to wait and see what the new season will bring, the Riot Women cast did stop by the Radio Times Covers Party 2026 and teased what's to come. Underlining the fact that the Happy Valley creator will return to helm the series, Amelia Bullmore said: "Sally's going to write it." "Sally's going to have her own band in it, that's what I think," Rosalie Craig also offered. Tamsin Greig, who stars as Holly Gaskell, also joked: "Hopefully, some of us are in it." Bullmore went on to map out the second season according to her, saying: "This is what I think, right? I think there's gonna be some good times, some bad times, I think there's gonna be some obstacles, there's gonna be some gigs ..." Greig added: "And there's gonna be a crafty midpoint that nobody's going to see coming." Bullmore then continued: "A very, very crushingly low point and then some sort of unequivocal resolution. "And then a very peculiar sex act," Greig concluded. You can watch the video for yourself below. View Green Video on the source website While we'll take what the Riot Women have to say with a considerable amount of salt, it's clear that the leading cast are all pumped for what's to come. On the announcement of the second season, Sally Wainwright said in a statement: "Oh, this is where the fun really starts!" "We've all been so deeply moved by the huge, overwhelming, joyous, emotional response to series one, and now we're able to take the Riot Women extravaganza onto the next level!" said the show's creator, writer, lead director and executive producer. "We hope you’ll all join us on the series two rollercoaster!" Read more: Taskmaster's Alex Horne teases new series with intriguing format change: "We've got something up our sleeve" Harry Potter TV series has release window confirmed by HBO boss - and it's sooner than you might expect Lindsay Salt, Director of BBC Drama, also said: "Riot Women has made people laugh, cry, think and connect with others – what more could we ask for... Bring on the next chapter!" Similarly, Roanna Benn, executive producer for Drama Republic, said the team were "bowled over by how hugely audiences have loved and resonated with Sally's brilliant characters and stories," teasing "so many stories yet to tell". Riot Women is available to stream on BBC iPlayer. Add Riot Women 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.
Under Salt Marsh star Kelly Reilly on the great outdoors
Add Under Salt Marsh to your watchlist When Kelly Reilly was in her 20s, she embarked on what might well be a rite of passage for every young British actor with ambition: she went out to Los Angeles to take meetings, perhaps to audition, to see and be seen. Or, as she puts it, “to hustle”. “I remember going and there being so much sun! And I love the rain. I love rain and being out in nature. It’s one of my favourite things about my jobs, and location is something I definitely take into consideration,” she says. “I don’t think I’d be very good on a procedural, on a set every day. I’ve got to feel like my soul’s on fire a bit.” And so, last winter — October through to February, in fact — Reilly found herself in the cold and the rain in the wilds of north Wales, playing the lead in the superlative thriller Under Salt Marsh. “You’re immersed in the place, in the land, and it can’t help but have an effect on you. You feel the energy of it.” For a significant amount of time, Reilly was also immersed in freezing cold, chest-high water for a scene in which her character Jackie, a police officer turned primary school teacher, discovers the body of one of her pupils. And let’s not forget the scenes in which an impending storm fulfils its potential, makes land fall and devastates the town, drenching, and indeed drowning, many of its residents. Reilly, 48, is unrepentant. “I’ve been filming in Montana for years and years [on Yellowstone, the US TV show turned cultural phenomenon in which she plays the violent, vengeful, occasionally tender Beth Dutton]. And then I get to go film in these mountains in Britain. And it was really quite an emotional thing. “I have a real love for north Wales from when I was a kid. We used to go there on holidays, and when I was in primary school, I had this wonderful head teacher who took us on a school trip to climb Mount Snowdon. It was so formative for me. You give yourself over to something greater and you feel humbled by nature and in awe of its beauty. The thrill of insignificance.”
'I didn't want to be the patronised older actor'
Sir Jonathan Pryce once said he’d retire at 60, but at 78 he shows no signs of slowing down. And now he’s finally back in Wales, where he has always belonged
Add Under Salt Marsh to your watchlist Had Jonathan Pryce retired at 60, as he once proclaimed he would when he was a young actor, his last movie would have been Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. He’d never have played the scheming High Sparrow in Game of Thrones, or Cardinal Wolsey in the BBC’s Wolf Hall. Though he probably would still have received his 2009 CBE for services to drama, it’s unlikely he’d have been knighted in 2021 for those services (presumably provided in the years from 2009 onwards). He’d still have his two Tony awards (one for Miss Saigon, despite controversy over his casting as an Asian character) and his two Olivier awards (his first, in 1980, for a radical production of Hamlet). But he wouldn’t have been nominated for an Oscar for best actor, as he was for 2019’s The Two Popes, in which he starred as the future Pope Francis opposite fellow Welshman Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict. Nor would he have been Emmy-nominated twice in the same year – 2024 – for two very different performances: the Duke of Edinburgh in the final seasons of The Crown and David Cartwright in Slow Horses. More of the latter later. Chances are, had Pryce given up acting in 2007, he would be best known for playing Juan Perón to Madonna’s Evita in 1996, or the Bond villain in Tomorrow Never Dies. He would never have given some of the best performances of his career. Pryce would have sold himself short. “When I said it, 60 was quite old and I didn’t want to be the older actor that the rest of the cast and crew patronised – which is what I’d seen happening on jobs that I’d been on,” the 78-year-old says now. “That hasn’t started happening yet and, on the whole, people are very kind to me so I’ll keep going. It might retire me, but at the moment, I don’t have to retire.” Does he ever worry that if you stop, you drop? “I very much think that, yes,” Pryce says, firmly. “That’s true for everybody in any walk of life. You’ve got to either keep going or definitely find something else to do when you do retire.” The latest character to keep Pryce going is that of pugnacious patriarch Solomon Bevan in Sky’s compelling, cinematic thriller Under Salt Marsh. “A double murder is being investigated in a small community that is under threat from rising sea levels and a massive impending storm,” is how Pryce – who, befitting his status, gets an “and” in the opening titles – outlines the drama. There’s a bit more to it than that, of course, with the haunting whodunnit – created, written and directed by film-maker Claire Oakley – concerning itself with big themes like trust and guilt, while delivering a propulsive plot. It also looks (bleakly) beautiful. Helmed by a captivating Kelly Reilly (see overleaf), ably assisted by Rafe Spall, Under Salt Marsh is better than Broadchurch. Pryce says he relished playing Solomon. A pillar of the community whose family farmed the land around the fictional Welsh coastal village of Morfa Halen for centuries, Solomon is a keeper of secrets – his own and other people’s – with the entanglements of his family, friends and neighbours as labyrinthine as the streams and creeks that anastomose the salt marshes. But, like many pillars of communities, Solomon has feet of clay. Another reason that Pryce enjoyed Under Salt Marsh was that it was a homecoming, of a sort. Having left his native Wales almost 60 years ago – first to go to art school, then to train as a teacher in Ormskirk, Lancashire, and ultimately to attend drama school in London – Pryce used his weekends off to reacquaint himself with the Welsh landscape. “When I was growing up, I didn’t see it as this beautiful country with epic landscapes, but rather as a place where I either played in the woods or went to the pubs and then almost couldn’t wait to get away from, like a lot of people when they are 18 or 19. But it is a beautiful country. Although the irony is that a lot of the beauty, especially in south Wales, is man-made. Those beautiful green rolling hills are grassed-over slag heaps, waste from coal mining and steel works.” After graduating from Rada, Pryce worked at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre and then, “it was anywhere but Wales for a long time”, to such an extent that “I would look enviously at casts that were filming in Wales. I left it physically, but emotionally, I’ve never left. Because my family is there – my sisters still live in north Wales – I go back to visit. I’ve left a bit of me, but I don’t think I’ve left Wales, if that makes sense.” For a long time, he was never referred to, or referred to himself, as a Welsh actor. Then, “I became a Welsh actor in America, where I was called a Welsh actor for the first time. They’re very aware of heritage and background.” As well as identifying as a Welsh actor, Pryce also admits to being “a praise w***e” who loves the complimentary attention his acting receives. Recently, that praise has been for Slow Horses, Mick Herron’s Apple TV saga about the sidelined spies of Slough House. His performance as David Cartwright – grandfather of River (Jack Lowden) and a former spy himself who now has dementia – is an exquisite slow-burn. James Hawes, who directed Pryce in the first series of Slow Horses and also in the film One Life – which again co-starred Anthony Hopkins – says: “He has these extraordinary small gears. We’re used to seeing Jonathan in that grandfather role, as somebody vulnerable, who’s deeply touching in his fragility, and yet with the slightest turn of the dial, he’s vicious and threatening and seriously malevolent. He’s masterful.” Pryce demurs. “When things are as well written as Slow Horses is, very little rehearsal is needed and there’s not a lot of discussion you need to have. You don’t overthink it.” As for the spectre that looms over River and David’s relationship, Pryce is familiar with the shadow cast by dementia. Even before Slow Horses, he was an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society. “I played a character on stage [in The Height of the Storm] who had dementia and I realised the power of theatre to tell that story. I’d meet people after the show at the stage door, who were so happy that they’d been to see that performance because they hadn’t felt alone. It was a problem shared and for many, it was the first time they’d been able to cry,” Pryce says. “With Slow Horses, I had another chance to portray a character and his dementia in as truthful a way as possible.” Pryce, who is married to the actor Kate Fahy, with whom he has three grown-up children, pauses – I think a Pryce Pause is A Thing – then says: “It’s a powerful thing, to be able to be a part of a trade and know that you’re helping people while educating people, while entertaining people.” And who’d want to retire from that?
Slow Horses' Jonathan Pryce on returning to his Welsh roots with new drama: "I left it physically, but emotionally, I've never left"
Sir Jonathan Pryce once said he’d retire at 60, but at 78 he shows no signs of slowing down. And now he’s finally back in Wales, where he has always belonged.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Had Jonathan Pryce retired at 60, as he once proclaimed he would when he was a young actor, his last movie would have been Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. He’d never have played the scheming High Sparrow in Game of Thrones, or Cardinal Wolsey in the BBC’s Wolf Hall. Though he probably would still have received his 2009 CBE for services to drama, it’s unlikely he’d have been knighted in 2021 for those services (presumably provided in the years from 2009 onwards). He’d still have his two Tony awards (one for Miss Saigon, despite controversy over his casting as an Asian character) and his two Olivier awards (his first, in 1980, for a radical production of Hamlet). But he wouldn’t have been nominated for an Oscar for best actor, as he was for 2019’s The Two Popes, in which he starred as the future Pope Francis opposite fellow Welshman Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict. Nor would he have been Emmy-nominated twice in the same year – 2024 – for two very different performances: the Duke of Edinburgh in the final seasons of The Crown and David Cartwright in Slow Horses. More of the latter later. Chances are, had Pryce given up acting in 2007, he would be best known for playing Juan Perón to Madonna’s Evita in 1996, or the Bond villain in Tomorrow Never Dies. He would never have given some of the best performances of his career. Pryce would have sold himself short. “When I said it, 60 was quite old and I didn’t want to be the older actor that the rest of the cast and crew patronised – which is what I’d seen happening on jobs that I’d been on,” the 78-year-old says now. “That hasn’t started happening yet and, on the whole, people are very kind to me so I’ll keep going. It might retire me, but at the moment, I don’t have to retire.” Does he ever worry that if you stop, you drop? “I very much think that, yes,” Pryce says, firmly. “That’s true for everybody in any walk of life. You’ve got to either keep going or definitely find something else to do when you do retire.” The latest character to keep Pryce going is that of pugnacious patriarch Solomon Bevan in Sky’s compelling, cinematic thriller Under Salt Marsh. View Green Video on the source website “A double murder is being investigated in a small community that is under threat from rising sea levels and a massive impending storm,” is how Pryce – who, befitting his status, gets an “and” in the opening titles – outlines the drama. There’s a bit more to it than that, of course, with the haunting whodunnit – created, written and directed by film-maker Claire Oakley – concerning itself with big themes like trust and guilt, while delivering a propulsive plot. It also looks (bleakly) beautiful. Helmed by a captivating Kelly Reilly, ably assisted by Rafe Spall, Under Salt Marsh is better than Broadchurch. Pryce says he relished playing Solomon. A pillar of the community whose family farmed the land around the fictional Welsh coastal village of Morfa Halen for centuries, Solomon is a keeper of secrets – his own and other people’s – with the entanglements of his family, friends and neighbours as labyrinthine as the streams and creeks that anastomose the salt marshes. But, like many pillars of communities, Solomon has feet of clay. Another reason that Pryce enjoyed Under Salt Marsh was that it was a homecoming, of a sort. Having left his native Wales almost 60 years ago – first to go to art school, then to train as a teacher in Ormskirk, Lancashire, and ultimately to attend drama school in London – Pryce used his weekends off to reacquaint himself with the Welsh landscape. “When I was growing up, I didn’t see it as this beautiful country with epic landscapes, but rather as a place where I either played in the woods or went to the pubs and then almost couldn’t wait to get away from, like a lot of people when they are 18 or 19. But it is a beautiful country. Although the irony is that a lot of the beauty, especially in south Wales, is man-made. Those beautiful green rolling hills are grassed-over slag heaps, waste from coal mining and steel works.” After graduating from Rada, Pryce worked at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre and then, “it was anywhere but Wales for a long time”, to such an extent that “I would look enviously at casts that were filming in Wales. I left it physically, but emotionally, I’ve never left. Because my family is there – my sisters still live in north Wales – I go back to visit. I’ve left a bit of me, but I don’t think I’ve left Wales, if that makes sense.” For a long time, he was never referred to, or referred to himself, as a Welsh actor. Then, “I became a Welsh actor in America, where I was called a Welsh actor for the first time. They’re very aware of heritage and background.” As well as identifying as a Welsh actor, Pryce also admits to being “a praise w***e” who loves the complimentary attention his acting receives. Recently, that praise has been for Slow Horses, Mick Herron’s Apple TV saga about the sidelined spies of Slough House. His performance as David Cartwright – grandfather of River (Jack Lowden) and a former spy himself who now has dementia – is an exquisite slow-burn. James Hawes, who directed Pryce in the first series of Slow Horses and also in the film One Life – which again co-starred Anthony Hopkins – says: “He has these extraordinary small gears. We’re used to seeing Jonathan in that grandfather role, as somebody vulnerable, who’s deeply touching in his fragility, and yet with the slightest turn of the dial, he’s vicious and threatening and seriously malevolent. He’s masterful.” Pryce demurs. “When things are as well written as Slow Horses is, very little rehearsal is needed and there’s not a lot of discussion you need to have. You don’t overthink it.” As for the spectre that looms over River and David’s relationship, Pryce is familiar with the shadow cast by dementia. Even before Slow Horses, he was an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society. “I played a character on stage [in The Height of the Storm] who had dementia and I realised the power of theatre to tell that story. I’d meet people after the show at the stage door, who were so happy that they’d been to see that performance because they hadn’t felt alone. It was a problem shared and for many, it was the first time they’d been able to cry,” Pryce says. “With Slow Horses, I had another chance to portray a character and his dementia in as truthful a way as possible.” Pryce, who is married to the actor Kate Fahy, with whom he has three grown-up children, pauses – I think a Pryce Pause is A Thing – then says: “It’s a powerful thing, to be able to be a part of a trade and know that you’re helping people while educating people, while entertaining people.” And who’d want to retire from that? The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Under Salt Marsh begins on Sky Atlantic and NOW from 30 January. 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.
Judy Parfitt always wanted to play a nun. Now, as Call the Midwife is put on hold after 15 years, she’s finding it a hard habit to break
Add Call the Midwife to your watchlist Judy Parfitt is in a reflective mood. It would be strange if she wasn’t. When we meet, on the wintry and sprawling Surrey set of Call the Midwife, Parfitt and the rest of the cast and crew are filming the final episode of the stalwart Sunday-night drama before it’s “paused”. It isn’t being axed, cancelled or canned – everyone is very emphatic about that. Rather, it’s being rested, so that a prequel series, set during the Second World War, can be made, along with a spin-off movie, set overseas in 1972. How long that rest lasts is undefined, so even though the BBC says that it “will remain at the heart” of the Corporation for years to come, it is undeniably an end of era for Call the Midwife. “This time of year, you thank God you’re nearly finished because you’re so tired,” Parfitt explains as she recounts the rhythm of the last 15 years during which she has played the magnificent, fragile, cerebral and mischievous nun, Sister Monica Joan. “From about the beginning of March, you start thinking how lovely it’ll be to see everyone and start working again. Then it’s April and I usually look forward to April. So for it not to be there really shakes me a bit. This company has been through so much together that we are a family. It’ll be hard for all of us.” Parfitt turned 90 in November last year and she’s found this last block of filming especially challenging – partly because of the circumstances, partly because of the storylines and partly because that’s the kind of actress she is. “I have to be a character and inhabit them,” she explains. “I can’t act any other way. I can’t sort of be external and watch myself. In these episodes, I’m playing scenes that there’s no way I can leave behind. It’s been horrendous, on occasion. For an actor, a vivid imagination is wonderful to have – and hell to live with.” So how has she found inhabiting Monica Joan over the years? “I’ve always wanted to play a nun because I was educated by nuns – and I loved Monica Joan’s character. The way she was written as quirky and offbeat was a joy; she spoke in a different way from everybody else, which is hell to learn. People come to her for advice but she’s also highly strung, very sensitive. If she’s thrown off-course, she loses the plot. Having all that to play was wonderful. I don’t know what I’ll do without her, actually.” Call the Midwife creator and writer Heidi Thomas regards Parfitt as similarly special. “Sister Monica Joan was a stand-out character in the original Call the Midwife memoirs, and I knew she was going to be important to the drama. In the books, she quotes eloquently from the Bible and the great poets. It is as though the love of language had seeped into her bones. “Once Judy was cast, her own extraordinary speaking voice and skill with verse came into play. I loved writing for Judy – she really is one of the finest and most precise actresses of the past century. I have never known her not to say a line exactly as I imagined it, unless of course it was to say it better!” Born in Sheffield, Judy Catherine Claire Parfitt only ever wanted to be an actress but she isn’t sure why. Her mum used to take her to the theatre and the cinema, which she loved, and when Judy was 10, she met Margaret Lockwood, then Britain’s biggest film star, and told her, “‘I want to be an actress’. She said, ‘Then you must do your voice’ and gave me an 8 x 12 inch photograph, which I’ve still got.” Years later, she bumped into Lockwood in a Mayfair hairdresser, and reminded the older woman of their first meeting. “I think she’d forgotten a lot by then,” Parfitt says, sadly. (By way of contrast, Parfitt is as sharp as a tack). In between those meetings with Lockwood, Parfitt trained at Rada and built an impressive career that ranged from The Avengers to Z Cars via Play for Today and The Jewel in the Crown to name but a few. She starred in a Laurence Olivier Presents… with Olivier himself and was Gertrude to Anthony Hopkins’s Claudius in Tony Richardson’s 1969 Hamlet. And what about Anthony Hopkins, I ask her. “We all said he wouldn’t amount to anything,” she replies, deadpan. As the century turned, Parfitt broadened her horizons further, playing the mother of Dr Elizabeth Corday (Alex Kingston) in ER from 2000 to 2002, and, in 2005, playing the monstrous Mercy Woolf in Jeremy Dyson and Simon Ashdown’s black comedy for BBC3, Funland. The latter has never been repeated on television, possibly because of Mercy’s toe-curlingly foul mouth. As I enthuse wildly about Funland, Parfitt is surprised and flattered that I remember it at all. “She was so horrendous I loved it,” she recalls. “When I was talking to them about it, I said ‘I won’t be allowed to say the things she says,’ but I did. So, she said things that I could never say in a million years myself!” Parfitt is diffident about her long career and summarises it thus, “I’ve played some interesting people and I worked with some amazing people. I did three things with [Peter] O’Toole.” As Heidi Thomas says, “Judy can be so playful that one often forgets she is the age she is. She once hitched up her habit on set and did a sort of Can-can, and I’m telling you she has the best legs in the show. But then she’ll tell you about working with John Gielgud [at the time when he was charged with ‘importuning for immoral purposes’] or remember being on the set of The Avengers the day Kennedy was shot. And you think, ‘She’s seen it all’. She’s truly one of the greats. I feel blessed that she took on the role.” Sitting on the sofa in the parlour of Nonnatus House with the glare of the electric fire illuminating the garish geometry of the historically accurate carpet, Parfitt says that come April, she’ll miss some aspects of playing Monica Joan less than others. Specifically, the outfit. “Ugh,” she exclaims, theatrically. “It ruins your hair and you can’t hear anybody. You’ve got a cap, which has a rim round it, and then the wimple, which is double-stitched. It really presses on you.” With our time nearly up and having discussed at length her dog, the impatience of the young, how everyone’s angry, our mistrust of politicians and the bizarre Channel 4 dating show Naked Attraction, I ask Parfitt what perspective age has awarded her. “I didn’t have a lot of confidence when I was younger, I didn’t think I was sexy, I didn’t think I was good-looking – like all young people. But now I look back at pictures…” She sounds not so much wistful, as tender, towards her younger self. “And I used to worry about what people thought of me. But I’m Yorkshire. In Yorkshire, they say what they think and I’m very direct. That’s not necessarily a good thing. I’m sure there are people who think ‘I can’t stand that woman’. But, you know – nobody’s perfect.”
Call the Midwife legend Judy Parfitt reveals the show’s upcoming hiatus "shakes" her a bit: "It'll be hard for all of us"
Judy Parfitt always wanted to play a nun. Now, as Call the Midwife is put on hold after 15 years, she’s finding it a hard habit to break.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Judy Parfitt is in a reflective mood. It would be strange if she wasn’t. When we meet, on the wintry and sprawling Surrey set of Call the Midwife, Parfitt and the rest of the cast and crew are filming the final episode of the stalwart Sunday-night drama before it’s “paused”. It isn’t being axed, cancelled or canned – everyone is very emphatic about that. Rather, it’s being rested, so that a prequel series, set during the Second World War, can be made, along with a spin-off movie, set overseas in 1972. How long that rest lasts is undefined, so even though the BBC says that it “will remain at the heart” of the Corporation for years to come, it is undeniably an end of era for Call the Midwife. “This time of year, you thank God you’re nearly finished because you’re so tired,” Parfitt explains as she recounts the rhythm of the last 15 years during which she has played the magnificent, fragile, cerebral and mischievous nun, Sister Monica Joan. “From about the beginning of March, you start thinking how lovely it’ll be to see everyone and start working again. Then it’s April and I usually look forward to April. So for it not to be there really shakes me a bit. This company has been through so much together that we are a family. It’ll be hard for all of us.” Parfitt turned 90 in November last year and she’s found this last block of filming especially challenging – partly because of the circumstances, partly because of the storylines and partly because that’s the kind of actress she is. “I have to be a character and inhabit them,” she explains. “I can’t act any other way. I can’t sort of be external and watch myself. In these episodes, I’m playing scenes that there’s no way I can leave behind. It’s been horrendous, on occasion. For an actor, a vivid imagination is wonderful to have – and hell to live with.” View oEmbed on the source website So how has she found inhabiting Monica Joan over the years? “I’ve always wanted to play a nun because I was educated by nuns – and I loved Monica Joan’s character. The way she was written as quirky and offbeat was a joy; she spoke in a different way from everybody else, which is hell to learn. People come to her for advice but she’s also highly strung, very sensitive. If she’s thrown off-course, she loses the plot. Having all that to play was wonderful. I don’t know what I’ll do without her, actually.” Call the Midwife creator and writer Heidi Thomas regards Parfitt as similarly special. “Sister Monica Joan was a stand-out character in the original Call the Midwife memoirs, and I knew she was going to be important to the drama. In the books, she quotes eloquently from the Bible and the great poets. It is as though the love of language had seeped into her bones. “Once Judy was cast, her own extraordinary speaking voice and skill with verse came into play. I loved writing for Judy – she really is one of the finest and most precise actresses of the past century. I have never known her not to say a line exactly as I imagined it, unless of course it was to say it better!” Born in Sheffield, Judy Catherine Claire Parfitt only ever wanted to be an actress but she isn’t sure why. Her mum used to take her to the theatre and the cinema, which she loved, and when Judy was 10, she met Margaret Lockwood, then Britain’s biggest film star, and told her, “‘I want to be an actress’. She said, ‘Then you must do your voice’ and gave me an 8 x 12 inch photograph, which I’ve still got.” Years later, she bumped into Lockwood in a Mayfair hairdresser, and reminded the older woman of their first meeting. “I think she’d forgotten a lot by then,” Parfitt says, sadly. (By way of contrast, Parfitt is as sharp as a tack). In between those meetings with Lockwood, Parfitt trained at Rada and built an impressive career that ranged from The Avengers to Z Cars via Play for Today and The Jewel in the Crown to name but a few. She starred in a Laurence Olivier Presents… with Olivier himself and was Gertrude to Anthony Hopkins’s Claudius in Tony Richardson’s 1969 Hamlet. And what about Anthony Hopkins, I ask her. “We all said he wouldn’t amount to anything,” she replies, deadpan. As the century turned, Parfitt broadened her horizons further, playing the mother of Dr Elizabeth Corday (Alex Kingston) in ER from 2000 to 2002, and, in 2005, playing the monstrous Mercy Woolf in Jeremy Dyson and Simon Ashdown’s black comedy for BBC3, Funland. The latter has never been repeated on television, possibly because of Mercy’s toe-curlingly foul mouth. As I enthuse wildly about Funland, Parfitt is surprised and flattered that I remember it at all. “She was so horrendous I loved it,” she recalls. “When I was talking to them about it, I said ‘I won’t be allowed to say the things she says,’ but I did. So, she said things that I could never say in a million years myself!” Parfitt is diffident about her long career and summarises it thus, “I’ve played some interesting people and I worked with some amazing people. I did three things with [Peter] O’Toole.” As Heidi Thomas says, “Judy can be so playful that one often forgets she is the age she is. She once hitched up her habit on set and did a sort of Can-can, and I’m telling you she has the best legs in the show. But then she’ll tell you about working with John Gielgud [at the time when he was charged with ‘importuning for immoral purposes’] or remember being on the set of The Avengers the day Kennedy was shot. And you think, ‘She’s seen it all’. She’s truly one of the greats. I feel blessed that she took on the role.” Sitting on the sofa in the parlour of Nonnatus House with the glare of the electric fire illuminating the garish geometry of the historically accurate carpet, Parfitt says that come April, she’ll miss some aspects of playing Monica Joan less than others. Specifically, the outfit. “Ugh,” she exclaims, theatrically. “It ruins your hair and you can’t hear anybody. You’ve got a cap, which has a rim round it, and then the wimple, which is double-stitched. It really presses on you.” With our time nearly up and having discussed at length her dog, the impatience of the young, how everyone’s angry, our mistrust of politicians and the bizarre Channel 4 dating show Naked Attraction, I ask Parfitt what perspective age has awarded her. “I didn’t have a lot of confidence when I was younger, I didn’t think I was sexy, I didn’t think I was good-looking – like all young people. But now I look back at pictures…” She sounds not so much wistful, as tender, towards her younger self. “And I used to worry about what people thought of me. But I’m Yorkshire. In Yorkshire, they say what they think and I’m very direct. That’s not necessarily a good thing. I’m sure there are people who think ‘I can’t stand that woman’. But, you know – nobody’s perfect.” 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.
Inspector Lynley is back! But not as you know him, say the stars of the BBC remake, Leo Suter and Sofia Barclay
Add Lynley to your watchlist Leo Suter is at pains to point out that the BBC detective drama Lynley is not a remake of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries. “These are new Lynley stories and the show we’re making is based on other books that weren’t adapted previously. It’s updated and it’s fresh.” This choice of source material isn’t the only difference between the new Lynley and the turn-of-the-century adaptation that starred Nathaniel Parker as peer-of-the-realm police detective Thomas Lynley, with Sharon Small co-starring as his scruffy, tough, working-class sidekick Barbara Havers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2026/01/Lynley-BBC-9886da6.jpg" width="4285" height="2857" alt="Two adults walk side by side along a coastal path beside calm water. One wears a smart jacket and open-collar shirt and carries a pair of green wellington boots, while the other wears a casual vest over a long-sleeved top. Trees, shoreline, and blue sky form the background in bright daylight." title="Lynley" /> “Our series is contemporary, and in the 20 years or so that’s passed since the previous show was made, UK society looks very different,” says Suter. “Class – this mismatch between upper-class Lynley and working-class Havers – is such a central feature of our show and class is always complicated and difficult to define. Even more so in a contemporary Britain and Norfolk [where Lynley is set] where the prisons are overcrowded and there’s drugs coming in from Europe onto the beaches. The social fabric of our Lynley is a very different one to Nat Parker’s 25 years ago and indeed to those original books that Elizabeth George wrote even before that.” Suter, who is 32 and best known for his leading role in Netflix’s visceral and violent historical drama Vikings: Valhalla, as well as period dramas Victoria, Beecham House and Sanditon, was seven years old when The Inspector Lynley Mysteries was first broadcast and hadn’t seen the previous series or read the books. In preparation for the role, he admits that he “did dip his toe into the first book” but his toe is as far as he got. While he acknowledges that an awareness of Lynley’s previous iteration is useful, he explains, “I respect it and am grateful for it, but there comes a point when you have to say, ‘We’re doing our own thing’ and plough on with your own interpretation.” As Suter says, class can be difficult to define. I ask him to have a stab at defining his because, on paper, he’s posh. He went to St Paul’s, an independent boys’ school in London, and then New College, Oxford. While he’s not aristocracy like Thomas Lynley – his parents were “business people” – he certainly would qualify as a peer to peers, as it were. To what extent does he think his privilege has factored in his life and career? “You’d be a fool to think that class, even though it looks different today, is not a pertinent feature in people’s lives, so I’m very grateful for the education I was lucky enough to receive and I’m aware of the fact that it’s afforded me privileges growing up,” he says, after some consideration. “One of the things I loved about going to university was that I met a whole diverse range of people who I had not met previously at school, and I really value that. Horizons were broadened.” What does he, as a son of business people, think of Lynley of the landed gentry? “He’s quite arrogant, he’s quite flash – there are so many things that you could not like about him. But I do like that he’s kind and that he’s turned his back on the life of being an aristocrat and just inheriting the pile. Instead, he’s doing what he loves and what he believes in, and he’s working really hard and in many respects, sacrificing his family life to be a good police detective. I think that’s very noble.” On screen, Sofia Barclay has appeared in Ted Lasso, as sister of Brett Goldstein’s Roy Kent, and in the acclaimed Marvel movie Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, but perhaps her most significant role has been on stage. At the National Theatre, in 2017, she was in Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes alongside Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams, who played sisters. It was there, watching from the wings as Colman opened the play bouncing on a gym ball and engaging in quickfire dialogue with Williams, that Barclay learnt “one of the best things ever”. “The scene is really fun and sets the show off to the races but if, for whatever reason, the audience were a bit flat, Olivia would literally just go, ‘All right, I’ll get them on the next one.’ She wouldn’t sit with it, she wouldn’t worry about it and she wouldn’t let that be her internal dialogue for the whole show. She cares about the work, but when it came to her ego, she didn’t care. She threw it away every night and trusted that she’d make up for it.” And so, the then 29-year-old Barclay had an epiphany. “I thought, ‘I could spend the rest of my life really wearing perfectionism heavily around my neck – which I’d been doing up until then – or I can just do the best I can, show up and work really hard, then let it go. And I thought, ‘I want to be like that. I don’t want to be the way I’ve been’. And I changed.” There’s a breezy, alluring confidence to Barclay that might well be the result of this epiphany. It might be born of landing a prime role in a potentially long-running, returning series. Or it might be a consequence of her privilege. Her character Havers might well be rough around the edges – and indeed all the way through – Barclay is not. Yet she seems surprised when I make enquiries into her background. She is in fact a granddaughter of the reclusive billionaire businessman David Barclay who, along with his identical twin brother Frederick, once owned, among other things, Littlewoods, The Ritz hotel and The Telegraph newspaper group. Before their empire collapsed, the Barclay brothers were reputedly worth £7 billion. When did she realise she came from a privileged background and how does that figure in her work? Barclay chooses her words judiciously. Trying to navigate a path through the perilous territory presenting itself – the Barclay Brothers were notoriously secretive, and notoriously litigious to maintain that secrecy – she’s a ballerina pirouetting through a minefield. “I’ll preface it by saying that anything that you read in the papers – particularly if it’s something that you know about – you always go, ‘Well, that’s not 100 per cent true.’ I would say there’s something that’s just, you know, very, very specific when those things happen,” she says, rather opaquely. “But where class comes in with this show, there was just such an immediate thing about Barbara, right? She is a woman in a very male world. There’s a lot of prejudices against her. She’s living at home with her parents. She’s half Indian. She’s got a lot of baggage and she just has to do the best she can, to go as far as she can in her journey and in her work and put that first. And that is something that feels very aligned to me. And that probably, I think, answers your question.” It doesn’t, but it’s the only answer I’m going to get. Clearly, obfuscation is hereditary. Barclay is more direct – and more amused –when I ask her what she thinks the producers saw in her to cast her as Havers, described in Elizabeth George’s novels as “dowdy” and “overweight”. “A feral spirit,” she declares, impishly.
Martin Compston: 'As Brits, we need to fight for our NHS and BBC'
Martin Compston is the new action hero lead – and he's worried about the state of the world.
Martin Compston is feeling combative. This is, in part, attributable to his latest role, in Red Eye, ITV’s high-octane, high-altitude, thoroughly daft conspiracy thriller. In it, he plays Clay Brody, CIA agent attached to the US Embassy in London who strides around regenerated Battersea, looking very hench in an extremely tailored three-piece suit. He wears the suit almost as well as the thousand-yard stare he sports for scenes in which he isn’t beating up baddies – old-fashioned fisticuffs, throwing them through windows and such – or muttering into his sleeve. “It’s always fun playing the haunted man,” Compston says, “and Brody’s history is murky. We think he’s the good guy, and he does some good things, but who is he really?” There are lots of fight scenes in Red Eye Fiercely choreographed frenetic ballets in which each of the ‘dancers’ is at the peak of physical fitness. “We had a terrific stunt co-ordinator and stunt guys who are just great to collaborate with on those scenes,” Compston enthuses. “The trust that you build when you’re throwing guys through stuff.” It isn’t just trust that you build. There’s muscle too. Since I last interviewed him in 2020, for The Nest, Nicole Taylor’s surrogacy-goes-awry thriller (does surrogacy ever go right in a thriller?), Compston has been working out. “I have,” he says, slightly sheepishly, “but I do anyway. I enjoy working out - I think it's coming from a soccer background - but I am very fond of a pint and a pizza as well so really I need to work out a lot because my diet is not the best.” He really threw himself into the physical side of the role, training regularly with the director of Red Eye, Kieron Hawkes. “He’s one of my best friends and he got me into Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art. I train four or five times a week so when we were doing Red Eye, Kieran and I lived in the same apartment block with its own gym space, so we’d train at night.” Of Compston’s regime, his co-star and Red Eye lead Jing Lusi told me “We were doing long hours and really hard days and at the end of the day, he’d be off to the gym and I was like ‘I am going to lie on my sofa for five hours’. When we filmed in that building for the American embassy, it was on the fourth floor. But rather than take the lift, he would be up and down four flights of stairs like a squirrel! Martin is so disciplined.” As well he might be. He may do a bit of running around on Line of Duty but we all know that Vicky McClure is the muscle of that operation. In Red Eye, Compston is a bona fide action hero. “Harrison Ford said in an interview to do as much of your own stunts as you can because when you see the actual jeopardy of the stunt on the actor’s face, you can relate to it. But as soon as they cut to a wide shot and you know it’s not the actor, a bit of that connection is lost,” he explains. “That’s why Tom Cruise is the best in the business – because he does his own stunts and you see him going through it. On Red Eye, they let you do as much as you can, which is great.” And Compston had big shoes to fill, replacing Richard Armitage as Red Eye’s male lead. “Because he’s a big old fella, those literally are big shoes! And he’s a proper movie star. I mean, I loved The Hobbit movies!’ Still, Compston relished the pressure. “The first series was a massive success. You’re coming onto it because it’s good and it’s your job to try and take it to the next level, to make it bigger and bolder. And I think we do that. It’s a good pressure.” View Green Video on the source website Crucially, for Compston, it’s also fun. “We're just grown-ups running around playing cops and robbers. The writer Pete [Peter A Dowling] grew up on films like Die Hard, Speed and The Fugitive, which don’t make any sense but are a helluva lot of fun. As this show goes on, it gets bigger and more unbelievable - but it's escapism. That's what people want to see sometimes. Of course there are times for dramas like Mr Bates Versus the Post Office but there are other times when people just want to sit down and be entertained. Red Eye lives in that space which makes it perfect viewing for this time of year. For all that it may be fun to make and to watch – to paraphrase Miss Jean Brodie, for audiences who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that they like – Red Eye is hard work. How does Compston get into character? “I've worked with people who are Method actors and I've worked with people who can be telling you an anecdote about how many drinks they had last night and then switch into character. There's no right way of doing it. If you can just deliver what's on that page, whatever way you can, then that's all that matters for me. Essentially, there's no awards for what you do off-screen.” And if he has to deliver an emotional scene, what is Compston’s process? As someone who got his big break in Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen (2002) after attending an open audition in his community, he has no drama school training to fall back on. “I'll just go find a quiet room and get myself into the right head space. I hate when a set gets tense and becomes a place for one person to stomp about being all ‘Look at me. I'm getting into the character’.” I ask Compston if doing conspiracy thrillers like Red Eye and Line of Duty changes the way he looks at the world. “You used to do things and go ‘Well, this isn't believable’ and now you’re like ‘This is nothing compared to what's really happening’. Real life is stretching the limits of credibility and I think it’d be very hard for someone to do a show about conspiracy theory now and somebody say ‘That couldn't happen’. It feels like we're living in a fucking reality show at times right now,” he says with a hollow laugh. Does the state of the world worry him, especially as the father of a young child? “It can make you insular,” he says after a moment. “Because you just go ‘The world's turning to shit so I'm just going to look after me and mine and not care about anybody else’. But that's what they want you to think. So you have got to guard against that to an extent because it can make you selfish and make people want to turn on things that they should be defending.” And here we reach the other root of Compston’s current combativeness. “It does get my back up when I hear the NHS getting attacked. Being in America a lot, I always find it bizarre when I hear American politicians saying ‘We don't want our health system to end up like Britain’. The NHS is one of the greatest things about being British and an institution we should be proud of. "Of course it can be improved - many of our institutions can be improved - but most of them are underfunded. I do feel we should try not to lose what's best about us. The NHS should be fought for and cherished while the American system is…,” Compston, who lives in Las Vegas with his wife, American actress Tianna Chanel Flynn, and their young son, is momentarily lost for words. “I don’t know how sick people survive here. You’ll go into hospital for something and two or three years later, you’re still getting bills for $100 or $200.” Compston recalls going to hospital following a minor car accident in Los Angeles a few years ago: “The doctor told me that I needed an MRI and it would cost two grand. I said ‘I’m not paying two grand for an MRI’ and the doctor replied ‘No, you get their insurance to pay for it’. And that’s when I realised that’s what it’s all about: an industry sustaining itself. It’s a bit of a racket. Which is quite depressing.” As we’re talking about (beloved) institutions under attack, does Compston feel the same about the beleaguered BBC? “The BBC is a great institution. Of course it can be improved – of course it can! – but you look at the licence fee and if it was a Netflix, Apple or Amazon saying ‘you’re going to get all these channels, all these dramas and radio and podcasts’ and everything you get for the licence fee, you’d go ‘that is a great deal’. For me, the licence feel is very much worth it,” he says. “In relation to Red Eye, it’s on in that 9pm slot on ITV. That slot on both ITV and BBC1 is where you want to be as an actor because you feel as if you’re with the whole of the UK. It’s the crème de la crème.” Speaking of which – and really it couldn’t have been a better segway if I, or a shadowy organisation, had planned it – I think this is my cue to ask Compston about the return of Line of Duty. After all, he once told Radio Times that it’d be a sad day when he wasn’t asked about Line of Duty - and who am I to make the 41-year-old actor glum? No danger of that as he breaks into a broad grin. “We always knew we'd work together again at some point, but Jed [Mercurio, Line of Duty’s writer/creator] was adamant that he wouldn’t come back if he didn’t have a story to tell. Nor would there be any announcements until it was concrete. I get that because you don't want to get people excited by saying “Yeah, we're doing another one’, they ask when, and you say ‘We don’t know’. With it now official that the cop’n’corruption drama will return, dare I ask when AC-12 gets back together? “We're back next year and I'm looking forward to getting back with the team. They’re more than colleagues. They are some of my best friends,” he says with such warmth in his voice. “So even just from that point of view, I can't wait to get back over to Belfast and then have Vicky running our lives.” Is there anything he can say about the story? “I think it’s going to be quite,” he pauses for effect, “explosive.” Combative, perhaps. But Martin Compston is also feeling contented. Red Eye premieres on New Year’s Day on ITV and STV and will be available for streaming on ITVX and STV Player. Add Red Eye 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.
Red Eye star Jing Lusi reveals the pressures to deliver with season 2 and the importance of being the series lead
As Red Eye takes off for a second series, lead Jing Lusi talks ratings, representation and filling big shoes.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. When someone tells you that they had “a moment” at London’s Euston station, you assume, not unreasonably, that it was a moment of despair, or rage, or a combination of the two, in response to some train-related tribulation. Not for Jing Lusi, who plays DI Hana Li in Red Eye, ITV’s high-octane, thoroughly daft, edge-of-your-seat-compelling thriller. Her moment at Euston was a joyful one. “When Trigger Point [the bomb disposal drama starring Vicky McClure] came out, I remember it was all over the big billboards in Waterloo station. I took a video of it and sent it as a joke to my producer asking: ‘Can this be us?’. Fast-forward a year, and it was us, at Euston. Seeing it was quite a moment. Pretty amazing, actually.” The amazing part wasn’t that her giant face was plastered all over billboards – although, “That is surreal,” the 40-year-old says, “especially when you don’t expect it”. What thrilled Lusi was what the billboards meant. “That ITV were doing all this marketing was a real vote of confidence. I had such a good time making it that, for me personally, I was already winning regardless of the reception it was going to get. Anything else is a bonus.” The broadcaster’s confidence was, it seems, well-placed. Despite attracting what we might diplomatically call mixed reviews, and launching in the shadow of Hijack on Apple TV, which was a similarly-themed thriller at 35,000 feet, albeit with double the budget and Idris Elba as the lead, Red Eye was a hit. “I’ve never worried about ratings before,” Lusi explains. “But I’ve never led a show before – I was like ‘It’s on the lead. It’s their funeral…’ With this, I cared. It probably wasn’t the healthiest habit but I was looking at ratings as soon as they were announced every week. I was so surprised and overwhelmed that the audience grew every week.” Red Eye’s popularity meant that chief among the “anything else” of bonuses coming Lusi’s way was, inevitably, a second series. “My exec said to me, ‘This is your sophomore year. You’ve made a hit album, you’ve set the bar high and now you’ve got to deliver’. And she was right. We do have to deliver.” View Green Video on the source website Lusi obviously believes that the second series delivers, in spades, and she makes no bones about fulfilling a lifelong ambition with the show. “My whole career, I’ve wanted to lead and I’d posit that most actors want to lead. I’ve worked with some amazing leads – Constance Wu [on Crazy Rich Asians], Gal Gadot [on Heart of Stone], Rowan Atkinson [on Man vs Bee] – and I’ve learnt so much from them. Not just about performance but about how you are setting the tone on set every day. Watching and learning for most of my career has been pivotal to then being able to have such a good time on Red Eye and to be the lead that I wanted to be.” The lead that she is – the person that she is – is east Asian. Born in China, Lusi and her parents moved to the UK when she was five, settling in Southampton. Up until recently, it was rare to have a lead in a returning primetime drama that wasn’t white – unless that drama was explicitly concerned with exploring race or the realities of multicultural Britain. Among the notable exceptions: Luther, starring Idris Elba, Killing Eve with Sandra Oh, and, back in 2004, Hustle, BBC One’s con artist caper, which was led by Adrian Lester. The first Line of Duty starred Lennie James but while the series returned, he did not. But lately that picture seems to be changing with the arrival of DI Ray, starring Parminder Nagra, Ellis with Sharon D Clarke, and, of course, Red Eye. Lusi has previously talked about the importance of representation, so does she feel a responsibility to be a spokesperson? “I spoke about it a lot promoting season one and I’m so glad I did, but I have let that go,” says Lusi, who is soon due to start filming Stephen Moffat’s new political comedy drama Number 10. “The actor Benedict Wong, who has been very kind to me during this whole process, said to me, ‘You just need to do you’ and that if I take that [responsibility] on, it will ruin the experience. As an actor, I realised that it’s way beyond what I should be doing.” The pro that she is, Lusi brings it back to the show. “In series one, you got to see all this amazing representation, it was a drama about British-Chinese relations and Hana’s ethnicity mattered to the story. Series two has moved on, it’s a different conspiracy, and Hana just happens to be an east Asian cop. So, she’s just being her – and I’m just gonna do me.’’ 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.
Martin Compston on going "bigger and bolder" in Red Eye season 2 - and Line of Duty season 7
From filling Richard Armitage’s shoes to throwing himself into full-blown action hero mode, the Red Eye star talks stunts, training and taking the thriller to new heights.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. How nerve-wracking is it stepping into Richard Armitage’s shoes as the male lead of Red Eye? They are big shoes to fill because he’s a big fella, and he’s a bona fide movie star – I loved The Hobbit movies. Plus, the first series was a massive success. But it’s my job to try and take it to the next level, to make it bigger and bolder. You do a bit of running about in Line of Duty but in Red Eye, you’re practically a proper action hero. Harrison Ford said in an interview to do as many of your own stunts as you can because when you see the jeopardy of the stunt on the actor’s face, you can relate to it. That’s why Tom Cruise is the best in the business — he does his own stunts. On Red Eye, they let you do as much as you can, which is great. Did you start working out in preparation? Yes, but I did anyway. I enjoy working out, but I’m very fond of a pint and a pizza, so I need to exercise a lot because my diet isn’t the best. How much discipline does that take? It helped that the director Kieron Hawkes is one of my best friends. He got me into Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art, so I train several times a week. While filming, Kieron and I lived in an apartment block with a gym, so we’d train at night. View Green Video on the source website How was working with Jing [Lusi, who plays Detective Hana Li]? Jing is a great number one [on the call sheet]. She really cared about her show, was protective of it and wanted the best for it. I’ve been in that position and sometimes you can take too much on, so I kept saying, "Just remember, this is fun". Is it fun? We’re grown-ups playing cops and robbers. Peter A Dowling, the writer, grew up on films like Die Hard, Speed and The Fugitive, which don’t make sense but are a lot of fun. As this show goes on, it gets more unbelievable — but it’s escapism. That’s what people want sometimes. How do you feel about Line of Duty returning? We always knew we’d work together again, but Jed Mercurio was adamant that he wouldn’t come back if he didn’t have a story to tell. So, when are you back? Next year, and I’m looking forward to getting back with the team. They are some of my best friends. So I can’t wait to get back over to Belfast and have Vicky McClure running our lives. Can you say anything about the story? I think it’s going to be quite explosive. Read more: Line of Duty's Martin Compston hints season 7 will answer unresolved questions Red Eye season 2 premieres on ITV1 and ITVX on New Year's Day 2026. Add Red Eye 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.
Lynley star Leo Suter clarifies how new series is "updated" and "fresh" – and not a remake of classic drama
Inspector Lynley is back! But not as you know him, say the star of the BBC remake Leo Suter.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Leo Suter is at pains to point out that the BBC detective drama Lynley is not a remake of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries. “These are new Lynley stories and the show we’re making is based on other books that weren’t adapted previously. It’s updated and it’s fresh.” This choice of source material isn’t the only difference between the new Lynley and the turn-of-the-century adaptation that starred Nathaniel Parker as peer-of-the-realm police detective Thomas Lynley, with Sharon Small co-starring as his scruffy, tough, working-class sidekick Barbara Havers. “Our series is contemporary, and in the 20 years or so that’s passed since the previous show was made, UK society looks very different,” says Suter. “Class – this mismatch between upper-class Lynley and working-class Havers – is such a central feature of our show and class is always complicated and difficult to define. Even more so in a contemporary Britain and Norfolk [where Lynley is set] where the prisons are overcrowded and there’s drugs coming in from Europe onto the beaches. The social fabric of our Lynley is a very different one to Nat Parker’s 25 years ago and indeed to those original books that Elizabeth George wrote even before that.” View Green Video on the source website Suter, who is 32 and best known for his leading role in Netflix’s visceral and violent historical drama Vikings: Valhalla, as well as period dramas Victoria, Beecham House and Sanditon, was seven years old when The Inspector Lynley Mysteries was first broadcast and hadn’t seen the previous series or read the books. In preparation for the role, he admits that he “did dip his toe into the first book” but his toe is as far as he got. While he acknowledges that an awareness of Lynley’s previous iteration is useful, he explains, “I respect it and am grateful for it, but there comes a point when you have to say, ‘We’re doing our own thing’ and plough on with your own interpretation.” As Suter says, class can be difficult to define. I ask him to have a stab at defining his because, on paper, he’s posh. He went to St Paul’s, an independent boys’ school in London, and then New College, Oxford. While he’s not aristocracy like Thomas Lynley – his parents were “business people” – he certainly would qualify as a peer to peers, as it were. To what extent does he think his privilege has factored in his life and career? “You’d be a fool to think that class, even though it looks different today, is not a pertinent feature in people’s lives, so I’m very grateful for the education I was lucky enough to receive and I’m aware of the fact that it’s afforded me privileges growing up,” he says, after some consideration. “One of the things I loved about going to university was that I met a whole diverse range of people who I had not met previously at school, and I really value that. Horizons were broadened.” What does he, as a son of business people, think of Lynley of the landed gentry? “He’s quite arrogant, he’s quite flash – there are so many things that you could not like about him. But I do like that he’s kind and that he’s turned his back on the life of being an aristocrat and just inheriting the pile. Instead, he’s doing what he loves and what he believes in, and he’s working really hard and in many respects, sacrificing his family life to be a good police detective. I think that’s very noble.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Lynley will premiere on BBC One and iPlayer on Monday 5th January at 8:30pm. Add Lynley 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.
As Red Eye takes off for a second series, stars Jing Lusi and Martin Compston talk ratings, representation and filling big shoes
Add season two of Red Eye to your watchlist When someone tells you that they had “a moment” at London’s Euston station, you assume, not unreasonably, that it was a moment of despair, or rage, or a combination of the two, in response to some train-related tribulation. Not for Jing Lusi, who plays DI Hana Li in Red Eye, ITV’s high-octane, thoroughly daft, edge-of-your-seat-compelling thriller. Her moment at Euston was a joyful one. “When Trigger Point [the bomb disposal drama starring Vicky McClure] came out, I remember it was all over the big billboards in Waterloo station. I took a video of it and sent it as a joke to my producer asking: ‘Can this be us?’. Fast-forward a year, and it was us, at Euston. Seeing it was quite a moment. Pretty amazing, actually.” The amazing part wasn’t that her giant face was plastered all over billboards – although, “That is surreal,” the 40-year-old says, “especially when you don’t expect it”. What thrilled Lusi was what the billboards meant. “That ITV were doing all this marketing was a real vote of confidence. I had such a good time making it that, for me personally, I was already winning regardless of the reception it was going to get. Anything else is a bonus.” View Green Video on the source website The broadcaster’s confidence was, it seems, well-placed. Despite attracting what we might diplomatically call mixed reviews, and launching in the shadow of Hijack on Apple TV, which was a similarly-themed thriller at 35,000 feet, albeit with double the budget and Idris Elba as the lead, Red Eye was a hit. “I’ve never worried about ratings before,” Lusi explains. “But I’ve never led a show before – I was like ‘It’s on the lead. It’s their funeral…’ With this, I cared. It probably wasn’t the healthiest habit but I was looking at ratings as soon as they were announced every week. I was so surprised and overwhelmed that the audience grew every week.” Red Eye’s popularity meant that chief among the “anything else” of bonuses coming Lusi’s way was, inevitably, a second series. “My exec said to me, ‘This is your sophomore year. You’ve made a hit album, you’ve set the bar high and now you’ve got to deliver’. And she was right. We do have to deliver.” Lusi obviously believes that the second series delivers, in spades, and she makes no bones about fulfilling a lifelong ambition with the show. “My whole career, I’ve wanted to lead and I’d posit that most actors want to lead. I’ve worked with some amazing leads – Constance Wu [on Crazy Rich Asians], Gal Gadot [on Heart of Stone], Rowan Atkinson [on Man vs Bee] – and I’ve learnt so much from them. Not just about performance but about how you are setting the tone on set every day. Watching and learning for most of my career has been pivotal to then being able to have such a good time on Red Eye and to be the lead that I wanted to be.” The lead that she is – the person that she is – is east Asian. Born in China, Lusi and her parents moved to the UK when she was five, settling in Southampton. Up until recently, it was rare to have a lead in a returning primetime drama that wasn’t white – unless that drama was explicitly concerned with exploring race or the realities of multicultural Britain. Among the notable exceptions: Luther, starring Idris Elba, Killing Eve with Sandra Oh, and, back in 2004, Hustle, BBC One’s con artist caper, which was led by Adrian Lester. The first Line of Duty starred Lennie James but while the series returned, he did not. But lately that picture seems to be changing with the arrival of DI Ray, starring Parminder Nagra, Ellis with Sharon D Clarke, and, of course, Red Eye. Lusi has previously talked about the importance of representation, so does she feel a responsibility to be a spokesperson? “I spoke about it a lot promoting season one and I’m so glad I did, but I have let that go,” says Lusi, who is soon due to start filming Stephen Moffat’s new political comedy drama Number 10. “The actor Benedict Wong, who has been very kind to me during this whole process, said to me, ‘You just need to do you’ and that if I take that [responsibility] on, it will ruin the experience. As an actor, I realised that it’s way beyond what I should be doing.” The pro that she is, Lusi brings it back to the show. “In series one, you got to see all this amazing representation, it was a drama about British-Chinese relations and Hana’s ethnicity mattered to the story. Series two has moved on, it’s a different conspiracy, and Hana just happens to be an east Asian cop. So, she’s just being her – and I’m just gonna do me.’’ How nerve-wracking is it stepping into Richard Armitage’s shoes as the male lead of Red Eye? They are big shoes to fill because he’s a big fella, and he’s a bona fide movie star — I loved The Hobbit movies. Plus, the first series was a massive success. But it’s my job to try and take it to the next level, to make it bigger and bolder. You do a bit of running about in Line of Duty but in Red Eye, you’re practically a proper action hero. Harrison Ford said in an interview to do as many of your own stunts as you can because when you see the jeopardy of the stunt on the actor’s face, you can relate to it. That’s why Tom Cruise is the best in the business — he does his own stunts. On Red Eye, they let you do as much as you can, which is great. Did you start working out in preparation? Yes, but I did anyway. I enjoy working out, but I’m very fond of a pint and a pizza, so I need to exercise a lot because my diet isn’t the best. How much discipline does that take? It helped that the director Kieron Hawkes is one of my best friends. He got me into Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art, so I train several times a week. While filming, Kieron and I lived in an apartment block with a gym, so we’d train at night. How was working with Jing? Jing is a great number one [on the call sheet]. She really cared about her show, was protective of it and wanted the best for it. I’ve been in that position and sometimes you can take too much on, so I kept saying, “Just remember, this is fun”. Is it fun? We’re grown-ups playing cops and robbers. Peter A Dowling, the writer, grew up on films like Die Hard, Speed and The Fugitive, which don’t make sense but are a lot of fun. As this show goes on, it gets more unbelievable — but it’s escapism. That’s what people want sometimes. How do you feel about Line of Duty returning? We always knew we’d work together again, but Jed Mercurio was adamant that he wouldn’t come back if he didn’t have a story to tell. So, when are you back? Next year, and I’m looking forward to getting back with the team. They are some of my best friends. So I can’t wait to get back over to Belfast and have Vicky McClure running our lives. Can you say anything about the story? I think it’s going to be quite explosive.
Judy Parfitt and Helen George have worked together on Call the Midwife for 13 years. But will they watch the Christmas special?
Call the Midwife is on Christmas Day at 8.15pm and Boxing Day at 8.30pm on BBC One. Add it to your watchlist Judy Parfitt, 90, plays Sister Monica Joan, the Keats-quoting grande dame of Nonnatus House. Devoted to her calling, she has an abiding love of cake and an interest in astrology. Helen George, 41, plays Trixie Aylward, the troubled party girl — but formidable midwife — who married a baronet. The pair have worked together since the drama began in 2012. Helen, when did you first meet Judy? Helen At the first-ever read-through, and she looked every bit the star she is: sparkling blue eyes, fiery red curls, beautiful cashmere and pearls complementing her porcelain skin. I introduced myself – nervously – and she was delightful. I was terrified initially because she has such a strong presence, but she quickly took me under her wing. She’s been a wonderful friend and confidante over the years, be it in work or in my private life. I love her dearly. Working with Judy and Jenny Agutter and watching the way they conduct themselves on set – how fun they are and how naughty they can be, but how professional and how dedicated they are to their craft – has been an exemplary education. Judy, were you aware you were such an inspiration? Judy Monica Joan is such a wonderful character and I’ve been having so much fun; I didn’t think I was teaching anyone anything. I was educated in a convent, you see, and I always wanted to play a nun. Helen What I admire most about Judy is that she gets the work done, but with such innate talent. She doesn’t suffer fools – she’s very direct, unapologetically, and I really appreciate that, especially as a woman. I used to always apologise for myself. Now I think, ‘I’ll be a bit more Judy!’ I just say it. Without a sorry at the end. She gets away with so much because of that sparkle in her eyes! She’s an icon. Do you feel iconic, Judy? Judy Well, I haven’t got anything after my name to say that I am! Would you like something? Judy I’d like to be Dame Judy, for my family and for me. So many actors ask me why I’m not and I don’t know. But I’ve never been asked and I’m not sure if it’s because of something I haven’t done or because of something I have! How will you celebrate Christmas? Judy I like to have Christmas Day by myself. My family go away and I have nice food that I’ve prepared because I cook every day. And I watch Call the Midwife. Monica Joan isn’t usually involved in all the storylines so when it comes on at Christmas, it’s brand new to me. And because we filmed it in April, I’ve forgotten the bits I did. It’s wonderful, like seeing a programme I know nothing about! Helen I have just moved into the perfect house for Christmas Day – when I saw it I knew exactly where the tree was going to go! I’ve always had such fond memories of Christmas and I want my kids to have them, too.
Legendary photographer Martin Parr looks back on his work and recalls the way we were
Speaking to Gareth McLean in Radio Times magazine back in August 2025, Martin Parr shared his singular vision of Britain.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine in August 2025 – just months ahead of Parr’s death on Saturday 6th December 2025. “Yellow card!” Martin Parr admonishes. “You’re intellectualising these things a bit too much for my liking.” I have earned his reproach for suggesting that the razing of the Lido in New Brighton — as featured in The Last Resort, the series of photographs that made his name — could be seen as a metaphor for the hollowing-out of Britain’s working-class communities over the past 40 years. “There’s politics in my images if you want to find it, but I don’t push it down people’s throats,” Parr proclaims. “People should just sit back and enjoy the images, really.” People certainly do enjoy Parr’s photography. As well as chronicling changing life in Britain, Parr’s work has transformed photography itself, with his garish but gritty signature style influencing everything from fashion editorials to war-zone reportage. Why does he take photographs? “It’s just what I do naturally,” he says. “I have a desire to go out and capture these images, and the crazier the scene in front of me, the happier I am.” The subject of a BBC4 documentary and co-author of an upcoming memoir, Utterly Lazy and Inattentive, which looks at his life by reflecting on 150 of his best-known photographs, Parr says that of the hundreds of thousands of photographs he’s taken, not one of them has been perfect — though he’s got close. “You know when you’re out shooting that most pictures you take aren’t going to be perfect or great. But you keep shooting to have that momentum so, as and when, things start to fall into place.” Parr ponders. “It’s just the luck of finding a scene.” Mayor of Todmorden’s Inaugural Banquet, West Yorkshire 1977 “Between 1975 and 1980, I lived in Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire and would attend all the different social events that were going on. This photograph was taken at the inauguration of the mayor of Todmorden, and it’s the best buffet scene I’ve ever managed to shoot. I’ve done buffet scenes many times since, but I’ve never managed to equal it. It’s the guy in the middle squeezing his way through that makes the picture.” Sedlescombe 1995—99 “I started using a macro camera, which I bought in 1995, and that was a real revelation: using the camera to focus on the foreground and letting the background fall out of focus. I started out doing pictures of things like British food, then different days around Europe, and then ended up doing these series of pictures in England. You can see here the flash on the Union Jack and you can see the outline of the woman sitting behind. Those two things combined made the picture really work.” New Brighton 1983—85 “We moved to Wallasey in 1982, and just down the road was New Brighton, a resort that I knew would be very interesting to photograph. And so it was. I got there when it was looking very shabby, lots of litter on the ground, which I liked, and I worked on this project over the next three years. It turned out to be the most successful one I’ve ever done. The flash and the palette of quite bright colours done with a colour negative for quite intense rendition was novel, very different to other colour documentary images.” Skegness 1992 “Whenever there was a dramatic news headline, I used to go out and try to capture people reading newspapers. It’s not something you’d do now, because newspapers have virtually disappeared, especially the red tops. If you went to the seaside today, you probably wouldn’t see anyone reading a paper — maybe a few older people — but everyone else would be looking at their phones. Smartphones affected everything. Cameras are being replaced by smartphones and everyone’s a photographer now. I take proper pictures on my phone because the quality is so good, especially when there’s no light.” New Brighton 1983—85 “This is the burger bar at the New Brighton Lido. Obviously everyone at the front is concentrating on either getting their burger or putting the tomato sauce on it, but as for the others… I’ve been back to New Brighton a few times, but the energy that was there in the 1980s has disappeared because the Lido, which was one of the best and biggest buildings there, has been pulled down. It’s gone — levelled [after a storm in 1990] and nothing was built on the site for years.” Sand Bay 1997 “You couldn’t get a better cup of tea if you went to a studio and set it all up. I got this at one of our favourite cafés in Weston-super-Mare, Monks's Rest, where they also did great scones. It’s closed down now. The teacup and the saucer are perfect, the colour of the tea is pretty good, and the tablecloth with the gingham is also good: this cup of tea is the classic cliché. Therefore it gets used quite a lot, on things like T-shirts, and imitated. I encourage pastiche of my work. I take milk in my tea. Just milk.” If you're looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide and Streaming Guide. Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only £10, PLUS a £10 John Lewis and Partners voucher delivered to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Call the Midwife star reveals she wants a damehood as cast tease much-anticipated 2025 Christmas special
As Call the Midwife returns for Christmas, Judy Parfitt and Helen George talk friendship, fame and festive traditions after more than a decade at Nonnatus House.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Judy Parfitt, 90, plays Sister Monica Joan, the Keats-quoting grande dame of Nonnatus House. Devoted to her calling, she has an abiding love of cake and an interest in astrology. Helen George, 41, plays Trixie Aylward, the troubled party girl – but formidable midwife – who married a baronet. The pair have worked together since the drama began in 2012. Helen, when did you first meet Judy? Helen: At the first-ever read-through, and she looked every bit the star she is: sparkling blue eyes, fiery red curls, beautiful cashmere and pearls complementing her porcelain skin. I introduced myself – nervously – and she was delightful. I was terrified initially because she has such a strong presence, but she quickly took me under her wing. She’s been a wonderful friend and confidante over the years, be it in work or in my private life. I love her dearly. Working with Judy and Jenny Agutter and watching the way they conduct themselves on set – how fun they are and how naughty they can be, but how professional and how dedicated they are to their craft – has been an exemplary education. Judy, were you aware you were such an inspiration? Judy: Monica Joan is such a wonderful character and I’ve been having so much fun; I didn’t think I was teaching anyone anything. I was educated in a convent, you see, and I always wanted to play a nun. Helen: What I admire most about Judy is that she gets the work done, but with such innate talent. She doesn’t suffer fools – she’s very direct, unapologetically, and I really appreciate that, especially as a woman. I used to always apologise for myself. Now I think, ‘I’ll be a bit more Judy!’ I just say it. Without a sorry at the end. She gets away with so much because of that sparkle in her eyes! She’s an icon. Do you feel iconic, Judy? Judy: Well, I haven’t got anything after my name to say that I am! Would you like something? Judy: I’d like to be Dame Judy, for my family and for me. So many actors ask me why I’m not and I don’t know. But I’ve never been asked and I’m not sure if it’s because of something I haven’t done or because of something I have! How will you celebrate Christmas? Judy: I like to have Christmas Day by myself. My family go away and I have nice food that I’ve prepared because I cook every day. And I watch Call the Midwife. Monica Joan isn’t usually involved in all the storylines so when it comes on at Christmas, it’s brand new to me. And because we filmed it in April, I’ve forgotten the bits I did. It’s wonderful, like seeing a programme I know nothing about! Helen: I have just moved into the perfect house for Christmas Day – when I saw it I knew exactly where the tree was going to go! I’ve always had such fond memories of Christmas and I want my kids to have them, too. Read more: Call the Midwife stars tease epic Christmas special with unexpected 'stunt': "It felt like Mission: Impossible" Call the Midwife creator and cast reveal show was hit by typhoon while filming in Hong Kong The Christmas double issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Call the Midwife's two festive specials will air at 8:15pm on Christmas Day and 8:30pm on Boxing Day on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. Add Call the Midwife 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 and presenter on The Traitors, speaking out — and being a superhero
Over an illustrious 40-year career, Alan Cumming, 60, has appeared in an eclectic range of TV shows, films and stage plays — from the Emcee, full of licentious glee, in Sam Mendes’ productions of Cabaret to the weapons-grade camp host of The Traitors USA. Grammy-nominated, he has won Emmy, Tony and Olivier awards and was named by Time magazine as one of the three most fun people in showbusiness (alongside Stanley Tucci and Cher, apparently). He’s played God and the Devil, sold out Carnegie Hall and written seven books. Now, the actor-writer-singer-activist-photographer has added artistic director to his talents, taking charge at Pitlochry Festival Theatre in Scotland where he recently announced his inaugural season next year. You have quite a CV — have you ever been presented with an opportunity and thought “I’ll pass”? I believe in saying yes – and why not? If you have the pizazz and passion for it, give it a go. I feel like the most successful things I’ve done are things I haven’t overthought. I’ve just had a funny feeling in my tummy, excited and inspired, which is what I’ve got about Pitlochry. It’s about celebrating Scottish talent and bringing new ideas and international stuff to Scotland. When you were on Desert Island Discs, you said, “I do things I might fail at”. You’re not frightened of failure then? I’m not. I mean, it’s not my favourite thing, but Patti Smith said to me, “Alan, it won’t be a failure if you’ve done your best”. It could be a failure in financial terms, but those things don’t matter to me. The biggest and most important critic to me is myself. I’ve found in my life that if you believe in something, your passion can inspire other people. This is why I think I’d make a good cult leader. It feels harder than ever to be hopeful these days. As someone who lives in America, how do you remain optimistic? Depressed isn’t quite the right word to describe how I feel about American politics. I’m disgusted. Appalled. I recently hosted The Jimmy Kimmel Show and I did a monologue about trans rights. Everyone went nuts and people said, “You’re gonna get deported,” but all I was doing was saying the truth. So few people do that because they’re scared of being deported, of being attacked. I have a confidence because I have another life, another passport. I feel more at home in Scotland right now. The Traitors USA has been a huge hit, winning you four Emmys. Did you imagine it would be so successful? I thought it was going to be good but I had no idea that it would become this cultural phenomenon. People love it because there’s a panto element to it: it’s a way for us to boo and hiss and scream at the baddies and cheer the goodies. Would you go on the UK celebrity version of the show if asked? I’d love to do it. It’d be so fascinating to see it from the other side because I see up-close how people make terrible decisions when they’re mesmerised by this psychological experiment. It’s around episode five or six that they start taking leave of their senses. Christmas is coming up — how do your Christmasses now compare to those of your childhood? I grew up on a country estate so I’d be selling Christmas trees until Christmas Eve. After that, Christmas was an old-school Scottish affair. Family-oriented, satsumas in your stocking, maybe a wee Advocaat… This Christmas, our new house in the Highlands isn’t ready so we’ll be upstate [in New York] in the Catskills. We have a life-sized neon horse – from The Threepenny Opera I did – which we decorate then spend time doing nothing, making delicious food and watching films. You always seem busy — are you really able to “do nothing”? It might seem like I’m not good at it but I really am. With this show I’m filming in Manchester, I’m living a monastic life, doing a lot of reading and enjoying not having to see people. When I finish that, I’m off to a wee hotel in the Highlands, just me on my own, to rest up. You’re referring to Tip Toe, Russell T Davies’ new “suburban thriller” — what can you tell us? I’ve been trying to work with Russell for 20 years – I did a little thing on Doctor Who last year but I mean one of his big dramas – and finally now I’m in the right place at the right time. It’s beautifully written, it’s prescient, and I regularly go home emotionally and physically battered. It’s about rage, how we got into this current febrile atmosphere where there’s all this anger towards marginalised people, and how we might escape it. David Morrissey and I play neighbours. I get locked out. We have an interaction and 10 days later, the world changes. So it’s an anti-Reform drama? It’s a drama about having a moral centre, and the vigilance required to maintain a kind society. And finally, not since Gudrun Ure in Supergran has there been a high-profile Scottish superhero, but you’re reprising your 2003 X-Men character Nightcrawler, in next year’s Avengers movie, Doomsday. How does that feel? It is insane and incredible. I imagine that somewhere there is a production manager having a breakdown, trying to schedule 28 of the world’s busiest actors into the same scenes. I did my bits very quickly, on green screen because there was no one else around. I can’t quite believe that I’m doing another superhero movie. I turned 60 recently…
Alan Cumming teases "prescient" new show from Russell T Davies about rage faced by "marginalised people"
The actor and presenter on The Traitors, speaking out – and being a superhero.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Over an illustrious 40-year career, Alan Cumming, 60, has appeared in an eclectic range of TV shows, films and stage plays — from the Emcee, full of licentious glee, in Sam Mendes’ productions of Cabaret to the weapons-grade camp host of The Traitors USA. Grammy-nominated, he has won Emmy, Tony and Olivier awards and was named by Time magazine as one of the three most fun people in showbusiness (alongside Stanley Tucci and Cher, apparently). He’s played God and the Devil, sold out Carnegie Hall and written seven books. Now, the actor-writer-singer-activist-photographer has added artistic director to his talents, taking charge at Pitlochry Festival Theatre in Scotland where he recently announced his inaugural season next year. You have quite a CV – have you ever been presented with an opportunity and thought “I’ll pass”? I believe in saying yes – and why not? If you have the pizazz and passion for it, give it a go. I feel like the most successful things I’ve done are things I haven’t overthought. I’ve just had a funny feeling in my tummy, excited and inspired, which is what I’ve got about Pitlochry. It’s about celebrating Scottish talent and bringing new ideas and international stuff to Scotland. When you were on Desert Island Discs, you said, “I do things I might fail at”. You’re not frightened of failure then? I’m not. I mean, it’s not my favourite thing, but Patti Smith said to me, “Alan, it won’t be a failure if you’ve done your best”. It could be a failure in financial terms, but those things don’t matter to me. The biggest and most important critic to me is myself. I’ve found in my life that if you believe in something, your passion can inspire other people. This is why I think I’d make a good cult leader. It feels harder than ever to be hopeful these days. As someone who lives in America, how do you remain optimistic? Depressed isn’t quite the right word to describe how I feel about American politics. I’m disgusted. Appalled. I recently hosted The Jimmy Kimmel Show and I did a monologue about trans rights. Everyone went nuts and people said, “You’re gonna get deported,” but all I was doing was saying the truth. So few people do that because they’re scared of being deported, of being attacked. I have a confidence because I have another life, another passport. I feel more at home in Scotland right now. The Traitors USA has been a huge hit, winning you four Emmys. Did you imagine it would be so successful? I thought it was going to be good but I had no idea that it would become this cultural phenomenon. People love it because there’s a panto element to it: it’s a way for us to boo and hiss and scream at the baddies and cheer the goodies. Would you go on the UK celebrity version of the show if asked? I’d love to do it. It’d be so fascinating to see it from the other side because I see up-close how people make terrible decisions when they’re mesmerised by this psychological experiment. It’s around episode five or six that they start taking leave of their senses. Christmas is coming up — how do your Christmasses now compare to those of your childhood? I grew up on a country estate so I’d be selling Christmas trees until Christmas Eve. After that, Christmas was an old-school Scottish affair. Family-oriented, satsumas in your stocking, maybe a wee Advocaat… This Christmas, our new house in the Highlands isn’t ready so we’ll be upstate [in New York] in the Catskills. We have a life-sized neon horse – from The Threepenny Opera I did – which we decorate then spend time doing nothing, making delicious food and watching films. You always seem busy — are you really able to “do nothing”? It might seem like I’m not good at it but I really am. With this show I’m filming in Manchester, I’m living a monastic life, doing a lot of reading and enjoying not having to see people. When I finish that, I’m off to a wee hotel in the Highlands, just me on my own, to rest up. You’re referring to Tip Toe, Russell T Davies’ new “suburban thriller” — what can you tell us? I’ve been trying to work with Russell for 20 years – I did a little thing on Doctor Who last year but I mean one of his big dramas – and finally now I’m in the right place at the right time. It’s beautifully written, it’s prescient, and I regularly go home emotionally and physically battered. It’s about rage, how we got into this current febrile atmosphere where there’s all this anger towards marginalised people, and how we might escape it. David Morrissey and I play neighbours. I get locked out. We have an interaction and 10 days later, the world changes. So it’s an anti-Reform drama? It’s a drama about having a moral centre, and the vigilance required to maintain a kind society. And finally, not since Gudrun Ure in Supergran has there been a high-profile Scottish superhero, but you’re reprising your 2003 X-Men character Nightcrawler, in next year’s Avengers movie, Doomsday. How does that feel? It is insane and incredible. I imagine that somewhere there is a production manager having a breakdown, trying to schedule 28 of the world’s busiest actors into the same scenes. I did my bits very quickly, on green screen because there was no one else around. I can’t quite believe that I’m doing another superhero movie. I turned 60 recently… 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.
She’s currently a copper in the Peak District, but this city girl would love to play a villain
Add Cooper and Fry to your watchlist What’s the view from your sofa? A massive pouffe to put my legs on and a lovely-sized TV. But what I really like to look at are memorabilia from shows that I’ve done, because when I think of the show, I think of the people. What kind of memorabilia? By the TV, there’s a gold frame from Can You Keep a Secret?, a sitcom that I filmed this year with Dawn French and Mark Heap [coming to BBC One in early 2026]. I’m really proud of it. I’ve seen bits of it five or six times and they still make me laugh. As a wrap gift, Dawn bought us each a lovely plate with Can You Keep a Secret? written around the rim, so I’ve got that out, too. Any other notable pieces? One of the presents that Jodie Whittaker bought me when we were doing Doctor Who [Gill played the Doctor’s companion Yasmin Khan] was this gorgeous lamp with a massive round bulb.The bulb has blown now and I can’t afford to replace it, but it’s not just an ornament because it wasn’t just a lamp. I look at it and I think of the show and of Jodie. In the kitchen, I’ve got a piece of fan art. Someone engraved Jodie and me in the last scene of Doctor Who onto a piece of cork, and it’s so beautiful. You reunited with Jodie to do Doctor Who audio dramas. How was that? So good. You’ve gone back to characters you adore, you’re working with these amazing people and also having such a laugh. They don’t need a budget for location so these stories can go anywhere – and you don’t need to learn your lines. And I get to spend 72 hours in a room with one of my best friends! We further that relationship between the Doctor and Yas that I know a lot of people cared about and invested in. I know I did. Your current TV drama series, Cooper & Fry, is adapted from the novels of Stephen Booth about an odd couple of Peak District detectives. Are you an avid reader? I started reading self-help books as an adult and everyone was like, “Are you OK?” Now I’m reading what I would call “warm books” – self-help, but much warmer. One of my favourites is The Comfort Book by Matt Haig. I read the little paragraph or chapter that’s in there for the day. And I adore a book where you believe the characters are real, like Chris Chibnall’s Death at the White Hart, which I’ve almost finished, and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train. There are 18 novels in Booth’s Cooper & Fry series. This could be a long job… We’ve adapted four of the early books so far and they’re each 120 minutes long, so essentially they’re little films. I play Diane Fry and Rob James Collier plays Ben Cooper. The characters are quite different in the way they approach investigations, but they both have issues in their personal lives and neither of them wants to give anything away. They both care about people and their work. What makes it more than just another detective show? It explores the folklore and superstitions of these rural communities. And although we filmed in Ireland, the Peak District and the countryside play a big part in how murders are committed – the equipment and the animals they have to hand… Do you like the countryside? I was born and lived in Leeds until I was 12 or 13 when we moved to the outskirts, and I’ve lived in London for the past 10 years, with stints in Cardiff. I’m a city girl. I’m a people watcher, I’m nosy and I like life noisy. You’ve never played a villain. Why is that? It’s not how people see me, although I’d love to play a baddie. I absolutely have it in me to play someone evil.
Doctor Who favourite Mandip Gill teases "furthering" relationship between Thirteen and Yaz in new adventures
"I know a lot of people cared about and invested in [it]. I know I did."
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. What’s the view from your sofa? A massive pouffe to put my legs on and a lovely-sized TV. But what I really like to look at are memorabilia from shows that I’ve done, because when I think of the show, I think of the people. What kind of memorabilia? By the TV, there’s a gold frame from Can You Keep a Secret?, a sitcom that I filmed this year with Dawn French and Mark Heap [coming to BBC One in early 2026]. I’m really proud of it. I’ve seen bits of it five or six times and they still make me laugh. As a wrap gift, Dawn bought us each a lovely plate with Can You Keep a Secret? written around the rim, so I’ve got that out, too. Any other notable pieces? One of the presents that Jodie Whittaker bought me when we were doing Doctor Who [Gill played the Doctor’s companion Yasmin Khan] was this gorgeous lamp with a massive round bulb. The bulb has blown now and I can’t afford to replace it, but it’s not just an ornament because it wasn’t just a lamp. I look at it and I think of the show and of Jodie. In the kitchen, I’ve got a piece of fan art. Someone engraved Jodie and me in the last scene of Doctor Who onto a piece of cork, and it’s so beautiful. You reunited with Jodie to do Doctor Who audio dramas. How was that? So good. You’ve gone back to characters you adore, you’re working with these amazing people and also having such a laugh. They don’t need a budget for location so these stories can go anywhere – and you don’t need to learn your lines. And I get to spend 72 hours in a room with one of my best friends! We further that relationship between the Doctor and Yas that I know a lot of people cared about and invested in. I know I did. Your current TV drama series, Cooper & Fry, is adapted from the novels of Stephen Booth about an odd couple of Peak District detectives. Are you an avid reader? I started reading self-help books as an adult and everyone was like, “Are you OK?” Now I’m reading what I would call “warm books” – self-help, but much warmer. One of my favourites is The Comfort Book by Matt Haig. I read the little paragraph or chapter that’s in there for the day. And I adore a book where you believe the characters are real, like Chris Chibnall’s Death at the White Hart, which I’ve almost finished, and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train. There are 18 novels in Booth’s Cooper & Fry series. This could be a long job… We’ve adapted four of the early books so far and they’re each 120 minutes long, so essentially they’re little films. I play Diane Fry and Rob James-Collier plays Ben Cooper. The characters are quite different in the way they approach investigations, but they both have issues in their personal lives and neither of them wants to give anything away. They both care about people and their work. What makes it more than just another detective show? It explores the folklore and superstitions of these rural communities. And although we filmed in Ireland, the Peak District and the countryside play a big part in how murders are committed – the equipment and the animals they have to hand… Do you like the countryside? I was born and lived in Leeds until I was 12 or 13 when we moved to the outskirts, and I’ve lived in London for the past 10 years, with stints in Cardiff. I’m a city girl. I’m a people watcher, I’m nosy and I like life noisy. You’ve never played a villain. Why is that? It’s not how people see me, although I’d love to play a baddie. I absolutely have it in me to play someone evil. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Doctor Who is available to watch on BBC iPlayer. Add Doctor Who to your watchlist on the <a id="OWA8b702c45-bee9-94e4-f018-57518e78041b" class="x_OWAAutoLink" 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 Sci-fi 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.
'I'm not tremendous on gore but I do love frightening stories'
The Ab Fab and Amandaland star dishes on ghosts, ghouls, and gore.
Add A Ghost Story for Christmas to your watchlist The day Radio Times visited the set of the Ghost Story for Christmas, The Room in the Tower, Dame Joanna Lumley was filming a pivotal scene, unrecognisable under impressive prosthetics. It is only between takes that her trademark plummy timbre confirmed that, yes, it was her under the make-up. “I do like a scary story. I’m not tremendous on gore but I do love frightening stories,” she enthuses afterwards. This is probably just as well, given her acquaintance with the genre. In the 1973 Hammer horror The Satanic Rites of Dracula, where Christopher Lee’s titular Transylvanian plotted to exterminate humanity, Lumley played Jessica Van Helsing, the often-screaming object of the count’s affections. This year, she appeared in Netflix’s Addams Family reboot Wednesday as Morticia’s mother, Hester. And in between, there was also the slightly terrifying Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous. “She can’t be killed,” Lumley says, merrily. “She lives off air and alcohol and smoke and drugs.” To that oeuvre, she now adds Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of the EF Benson story for what is the Sherlock writer’s eighth chilling tale for Yuletide. In it, Tobias Menzies plays a man haunted by a recurring dream of being invited to stay in a house that hides an unseen terror. Lumley plays its sinister mistress. It is The New Avengers and Amandaland star as you’ve never seen her before. I ask the most obvious question: does she believe in ghosts? “I do believe that there are ghosts. We know what happens to our bodies — to bones, to dust, then gone — but I can’t believe that the rest of it, the soul or the mind or the spark, just goes too. It goes somewhere…” She also believes in God — or something bigger than us at least. “I adore classical music and I’m so lucky to be married to a musician [conductor Stephen Barlow] because I learn from him all the time, and I do believe that there is such a thing as ‘the divine spark’.” She carries on with enthusiasm, “Mozart wrote his manuscripts, practically without a single error. It’s as if he became a conduit from some extraordinary power. Papa [Joseph] Haydn was the same. When you hear their melodies, you can understand what that power is. All those great creators believed in gods. They had a sense of godliness. And I think if we skip out on that, we’re missing out on something. “We’ve become unbearably vain and destructive and we can’t remember how to stop destroying. If history could be written by anything other than human beings, we would be seen as a plague, unable to stop breeding, to stop destroying, using up, never replacing. We’re a pretty wretched bunch. So, we’ve got to strive not to be completely bloody, to make amends for humans’ dreadfulness to each other and the planet.” Which brings us neatly to Christmas. Lumley is a fan, with the exception of one aspect: “I hate the way Christmas now starts in October. When I rule the world, I would declare that Christmas cannot start until well into December!”
From lunchtime carols to Michael Bublé, boozy cakes and EastEnders – Renee Bailey, Helen George and Natalie Quarry share their seasonal secrets
Add Call the Midwife to your watchlist Helen George plays Trixie Aylward <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/11/CMT-Christmas-92d8eab.jpg" width="7236" height="4824" alt="Two women dressed as angels walk through a snowy street at night, smiling as they take part in a festive parade. They wear white coats with fluffy collars and large feathered wings. One pushes a decorated pram covered in white fabric and gold stars, while the other waves at onlookers. Snow falls heavily around them, and a brass band plays in the background beneath strings of laundry hanging overhead." title="Call the Midwife" /> How is Trixie this festive season? Even though there’s a huge distance between Trixie and her husband, things feel more stable than they possibly ever have. For once, she feels settled, strong even, and in a space, psychologically and literally, where she feels at home. But you do wonder how Trixie would react if her whole world were to change, if Nonnatus House faced a fresh threat to its very existence. Trixie deserves stability after all the tumult but, as an actor, do you wonder where the drama is going to come from if she’s content? It’s quite a relief, actually. I’ve spent so much time enduring, going through things and being desperately heartbroken all the time, it’s really fun that now she’s fighting other people’s battles and not her own. Given this is the 14th Yuletide edition of Call the Midwife, there must be a great feeling of camaraderie! It’s a family and I absolutely adore them all. It’s Judy Parfitt’s (Sister Monica Joan) birthday today; it’s lovely that she’s here so we’re celebrating together and have filled her trailer with balloons and flowers. I had a Halloween party – I went as a banshee and my daughters [she has two, aged eight and four, whom she shares with her ex-partner Jack Ashton] were clowns so were terrifying – and Hilda, a focus puller on the crew, came with her husband and her son, and Victoria Yeates who played Sister Winifred came along, too. It’s just so nice to be in each other’s lives, and for so long. If you go big on Halloween, I’m assuming that you absolutely love Christmas? It’s like a festive bomb goes off in my home! I just moved and the reason we chose this house was that it’s just the perfect place for Christmas Day – it’s really obvious where the tree will go. I’ve always loved this time of year. All the family would go to my aunt’s house – she also had this brilliant house – and we’d all wear festive jumpers and play games. I have such fond memories of it and I really want to re-create them for my kids. So when do things get underway in the George household? When I start making the cake – I’ve had my fruit soaking since Bonfire Night so that it’s really boozy. What do the holidays mean to you? Family. And charades. And cheese! Do you stay traditional with Stilton? I have all of them. But with my cake, I like to have a slice of wensleydale. You’re also in panto this year, playing the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella opposite Basil Brush at London’s Richmond Theatre. Is that fun? It’s two shows a day for four weeks. I’ve got a show on Christmas Eve, off Christmas Day, back in on Boxing Day – and there’s only a week’s rehearsal. I’m taking my kids to Lapland afterwards to make up for the fact that I’m going to miss their school shows because I’ll be in one of my own! Natalie Quarry plays Rosalind Clifford Rosalind is surely one of the most decent characters on television? Rosalind has such a capacity for love and wants everyone to live with an open heart. It’s admirable. You wonder what her (ulterior) motives are but she doesn’t have any. Her blossoming relationship with Cyril has been a gentle joy. How has it been to play? Because of who they are and the circumstances that they are in, they couldn’t have rushed into it. That edging towards being together because they felt so strongly about each other – slowly getting to the point when they held hands, finally kissing at Nancy’s wedding – has been an absolute joy. It’s not all been moonlight and roses, though? Last season, when they were on a date, some people shouted at them [because they’re an interracial couple] and I imagine that they have to battle some pretty difficult situations. That they do it together is, to me, the important part. When do you start your preparations for Christmas at home? I’m a Christmassy person and in my head, as soon as it’s been Halloween, it’s totally fair to start thinking about it. Because I think that the anticipation is actually better than the day itself. You can be like “Maybe I’ll listen to a bit of Michael Bublé…” Have you listened to any Michael Bublé yet? No not yet! I used to work in retail, as many actors do, and their Christmas starts horrifically early. By December, you’re like “I cannot listen to this playlist again”. What do your celebrations look like? They have changed lately because I have a long-term partner now. I used to do every year with my lovely family but now we do one year at mine and then one year at his. It’s been interesting experiencing another family’s Christmas. My family are really music people, so we sing some carols after lunch. His family don’t. No singing of any carols at all. Renee Bailey plays Joyce Highland When did you start to learn about your character Joyce? It was March, three years ago when I got the audition. I’d never seen the show so I watched a couple of episodes to get the vibe and my agent, who’s a fan, gave me some notes about it – and then I started to find out about the character. But because the accent was Trinidadian and I was no good at that, I was like, “There’s no way I’ll get this job”. But I got a recall, read more about her and got really invested like I promised myself I wouldn’t. Then, in Tesco one day, just by the salad bar, I got the call. I was so excited! Would you describe Joyce as a woman of principle? I think Joyce will always do what she believes is right, regardless of how hard it is. Sometimes she might come across as a bit harsh but she always acts from a place of love. Is she based on anyone you know? There are so many elements inspired by my mum, my aunt and older Caribbean women I know and have grown up around, that’s how they operate. They’re not afraid to tell it to you like it is. What do the festivities mean to you? I have become a bit jaded about it all! Now, as an adult, it’s just about waking up and thinking, “Shall we have a drink?” Luckily, I have three nieces and two nephews ranging in ages from two to 14 so for me, it’s about the kids and the excitement they get out of it. Once they all get older, it will lose its sparkle again and become about how much can I eat. Do you have any traditions? Every year, we go to my aunt’s in the evening on Christmas Day. I see all my cousins, they have loads of their friends around, and it’s not quite a party but it’s got that energy – some people are playing games, some guys are in the corner playing poker, others are watching EastEnders on the telly, there are kids running around, and conversations happening… After EastEnders, does the TV contingent stayed tuned for Call The Midwife? Yeah, they do. And I’ll watch it to see the bits I’ve not been a part of.
Joanna Lumley dishes on Ghost Story for Christmas: "I'm not tremendous on gore but I do love frightening stories"
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. The day Radio Times visited the set of the Ghost Story for Christmas, The Room in the Tower, Dame Joanna Lumley was filming a pivotal scene, unrecognisable under impressive prosthetics. It is only between takes that her trademark plummy timbre confirmed that, yes, it was her under the make-up. “I do like a scary story. I’m not tremendous on gore but I do love frightening stories,” she enthuses afterwards. This is probably just as well, given her acquaintance with the genre. In the 1973 Hammer horror The Satanic Rites of Dracula, where Christopher Lee’s titular Transylvanian plotted to exterminate humanity, Lumley played Jessica Van Helsing, the often-screaming object of the count’s affections. This year, she appeared in Netflix’s Addams Family reboot Wednesday as Morticia’s mother, Hester. And in between, there was also the slightly terrifying Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous. “She can’t be killed,” Lumley says, merrily. “She lives off air and alcohol and smoke and drugs.” To that oeuvre, she now adds Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of the EF Benson story for what is the Sherlock writer’s eighth chilling tale for Yuletide. In it, Tobias Menzies plays a man haunted by a recurring dream of being invited to stay in a house that hides an unseen terror. Lumley plays its sinister mistress. It is The New Avengers and Amandaland star as you’ve never seen her before. I ask the most obvious question: does she believe in ghosts? “I do believe that there are ghosts. We know what happens to our bodies – to bones, to dust, then gone – but I can’t believe that the rest of it, the soul or the mind or the spark, just goes too. It goes somewhere…” She also believes in God – or something bigger than us at least. “I adore classical music and I’m so lucky to be married to a musician [conductor Stephen Barlow] because I learn from him all the time, and I do believe that there is such a thing as ‘the divine spark’.” She carries on with enthusiasm, “Mozart wrote his manuscripts, practically without a single error. It’s as if he became a conduit from some extraordinary power. Papa [Joseph] Haydn was the same. When you hear their melodies, you can understand what that power is. All those great creators believed in gods. They had a sense of godliness. And I think if we skip out on that, we’re missing out on something. View Green Video on the source website “We’ve become unbearably vain and destructive and we can’t remember how to stop destroying. If history could be written by anything other than human beings, we would be seen as a plague, unable to stop breeding, to stop destroying, using up, never replacing. “We’re a pretty wretched bunch. So, we’ve got to strive not to be completely bloody, to make amends for humans’ dreadfulness to each other and the planet.” Which brings us neatly to Christmas. Lumley is a fan, with the exception of one aspect: “I hate the way Christmas now starts in October. When I rule the world, I would declare that Christmas cannot start until well into December!” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Room in the Tower will air on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer this Christmas. If you’re looking for something else to watch in the meantime, check out our TV Guide and Streaming Guide, or visit our dedicated Fantasy hub. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Call the Midwife 2025 Christmas preview as Trixie's marriage gets a major update
Ahead of the annual Call the Midwife Christmas special, Helen George lifts the lid on Trixie and Matthew.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Ahead of this year's Call the Midwife Christmas special, Helen George sat down with Radio Times to discuss what's going on with Trixie and Matthew, her love of the festive season, and her upcoming stint as the Fairy Godmother in the Richmond Theatre's Cinderella pantomime. How is Trixie this festive season? Even though there’s a huge distance between Trixie and her husband, things feel more stable than they possibly ever have. For once, she feels settled, strong even, and in a space, psychologically and literally, where she feels at home. But you do wonder how Trixie would react if her whole world were to change, if Nonnatus House faced a fresh threat to its very existence. Trixie deserves stability after all the tumult but, as an actor, do you wonder where the drama is going to come from if she’s content? It’s quite a relief, actually. I’ve spent so much time enduring, going through things and being desperately heartbroken all the time, it’s really fun that now she’s fighting other people’s battles and not her own. Given this is the 14th Yuletide edition of Call the Midwife, there must be a great feeling of camaraderie! It’s a family and I absolutely adore them all. It’s Judy Parfitt’s (Sister Monica Joan) birthday today; it’s lovely that she’s here so we’re celebrating together and have filled her trailer with balloons and flowers. I had a Halloween party – I went as a banshee and my daughters [she has two, aged eight and four, whom she shares with her ex-partner Jack Ashton] were clowns so were terrifying – and Hilda, a focus puller on the crew, came with her husband and her son, and Victoria Yeates who played Sister Winifred came along, too. It’s just so nice to be in each other’s lives, and for so long. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/11/CMT-Christmas-92d8eab.jpg" width="7236" height="4824" alt="Two women dressed as angels walk through a snowy street at night, smiling as they take part in a festive parade. They wear white coats with fluffy collars and large feathered wings. One pushes a decorated pram covered in white fabric and gold stars, while the other waves at onlookers. Snow falls heavily around them, and a brass band plays in the background beneath strings of laundry hanging overhead." title="Call the Midwife" /> If you go big on Halloween, I’m assuming that you absolutely love Christmas? It’s like a festive bomb goes off in my home! I just moved and the reason we chose this house was that it’s just the perfect place for Christmas Day – it’s really obvious where the tree will go. I’ve always loved this time of year. All the family would go to my aunt’s house – she also had this brilliant house – and we’d all wear festive jumpers and play games. I have such fond memories of it and I really want to re-create them for my kids. Read more: Call the Midwife movie: Release date speculation, potential cast and plot, and latest news Call the Midwife favourite reveals there is "so much change coming" as scripts left cast reeling So when do things get under way in the George household? When I start making the cake – I’ve had my fruit soaking since Bonfire Night so that it’s really boozy. What do the holidays mean to you? Family. And charades. And cheese! Do you stay traditional with Stilton? I have all of them. But with my cake, I like to have a slice of wensleydale. You’re also in panto this year, playing the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella opposite Basil Brush at London’s Richmond Theatre. Is that fun? It’s two shows a day for four weeks. I’ve got a show on Christmas Eve, off Christmas Day, back in on Boxing Day – and there’s only a week’s rehearsal. I’m taking my kids to Lapland afterwards to make up for the fact that I’m going to miss their school shows because I’ll be in one of my own! The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Call the Midwife seasons 1-14 are available to stream on BBC iPlayer. Add Call the Midwife 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.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held prisoner in Iran for six years, while her husband fought for her freedom. A new BBC drama tries to do their story justice
Add Prisoner 951 to your watchlist Among the myriad delicate, difficult and perplexing questions that Stephen Butchard had to ask himself while writing Prisoner 951, was whether or not to feature Boris Johnson. As Foreign Secretary, Johnson played a pivotal part in the story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was detained and imprisoned by Iran for six years from 2016, and her husband Richard, who kept her name in the news in the UK by any means he could, including going on hunger strike. In November 2017, Johnson incorrectly told a Foreign Affairs Select Committee that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was in Iran “simply teaching people journalism” and although immediately refuted (she was visiting relatives), the Iranian authorities claimed that Johnson’s blunder was proof that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was engaged in propaganda against the regime. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/11/Prisoner-951-Nazanin-Zaghari-Ratcliffe-Richard-Ratcliffe-d7857da.jpg" width="4582" height="3055" alt="Narges Rashidi as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Joseph Fiennes as Richard Ratcliffe in Prisoner 951, sitting on a park bench with her head resting on his shoulder." title="Narges Rashidi as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Joseph Fiennes as Richard Ratcliffe in Prisoner 951." /> Undoubtedly, Johnson’s remarks endangered Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case, increased risk for her in detention and raised the spectre of Iran adding years to her sentence. When, in 2022, she met Johnson after her release, Zaghari-Ratcliffe told the then prime minister that she had “lived in the shadow” of his words for the past four and a half years. So Butchard couldn’t ignore the part that Johnson played. But casting someone to play him could become a distracting sideshow that both pulled focus and changed the timbre of the drama. “I decided we shouldn’t have an actor,” Butchard says. “Boris Johnson is almost a caricature himself, and if you bring in an actor to play that caricature, you get a buffoon. You might want to do it, but it wouldn’t be truthful.” Instead, Butchard opted for a smarter solution: he cast Johnson as himself. “You look for archive footage – from the news, say – and you play what he said off other characters.” This choice is informed by, and informs, answers to other questions that are fundamental to the nature of Prisoner 951 and the story that Butchard, director Philippa Lowthorpe and actors Joseph Fiennes and Narges Rashidi wanted to tell. “It’s a political thriller that has, at the heart of it, a love story,” says Lowthorpe, who began her career making documentaries before directing dramas such as Five Daughters, about the murder of five sex workers in Ipswich in 2006, which was co-written by Butchard. “This is a story about an ordinary couple getting caught up in geopolitics beyond their interest, beyond their lives, and catapulted into a Kafkaesque nightmare because one of them is in the wrong place at the wrong time.” “We had a working title of Love Story because that’s what this story is,” says Joseph Fiennes, who plays Richard. “It’s about Nazanin and Richard’s love for each other, the love of a mother and father for their child, and the love within the family and the families, who kept their daughter and their son-in-law on track.” Narges Rashidi, who plays Nazanin, parses the point: “It’s a political drama, about real people who are not political being politicised.” For her, it boils down to “a woman being punished for something she’s not responsible for, a man trying to get his family back, and a little child’s trauma.” When she was detained, Zaghari-Ratcliffe had her 22-month-old daughter Gabriella with her. Gabriella was eventually placed in the custody of her maternal grandparents in Iran, so she could visit her mother in prison. When she returned to the UK to start school, she needed a translator to speak to her father because she couldn’t speak English. Prisoner 951 is full of heartbreaking details like this as it establishes what Lowthorpe calls the “incredible humanity and relatability of Richard and Nazanin and each of their families”. If Prisoner 951 – which is based on A Yard of Sky, Nazanin and Richard’s soon-to-be- published book – is partly a love story, that begs another question: how do you demonstrate that love when the couple are 3,000 miles apart? After all, one of drama’s key tenets is “show, don’t tell”. “Stephen brilliantly begins with the phone call that signalled the beginning of Nazanin and Richard’s nightmare,” say Lowthorpe, “but it was really important to show their past. So I created these little scenes like a family album – of their weddings, in Iran and in the UK, and of them with their daughter. I’ve used that motif in all of the episodes and shown different little bits of their snapshots and their coupleness that anybody can relate to. Little glimpses of them together before they’re wrenched apart; then you know what they’re fighting for.” Believing in that love means believing in the characters who, let’s not forget, are real people. Which brings us to Fiennes’ and Rashidi’s contributions – their performances. How did they approach the roles? “You start at the point of being fairly forensic with the way they are physically, how they carry themselves, how they conduct themselves,” says Fiennes, who has form playing real people, having received rave reviews for his performance as Gareth Southgate in James Graham’s Dear England at the National Theatre. “You watch interviews with them, but interviews are artificial situations so it’s sometimes helpful to talk to someone who knows them rather than the person themselves. With Richard, he was very accessible. I spent hours in his company getting a sense of his essence, his spirit and his vital intelligence. Then it’s about me trying to calibrate all of that into the character.” Rashidi read everything she could find, watched every interview and pored over the documentary about the couple’s plight. And she read half of A Yard of Sky – the half written by Nazanin. “Philippa didn’t want me to have Richard’s perspective, because Nazanin didn’t,” she explains. “So I went into it subjectively, which was really useful.” Rashidi speaks for herself and, I think, for Fiennes when she says of the research and preparation: “Beyond that, there’s no more you can do. You ask questions, you give it your all and pray to God that it will happen.” For Butchard, these questions were asked and answered in pursuit of one thing: the truth. “There’s a difference between the facts and the truth. Something can be truthful without being an absolute fact, but you have to be truthful because otherwise it damages the credibility of the story.” And is that as true of fictional characters as it is of characters based on real people? “I always follow a truthful path, because the minute that a character does something that you don’t quite believe, it becomes melodrama and I switch off. I’m writing series two of This City Is Ours at the moment, so I think about this every day.” And the truths at the heart of Prisoner 951? That hope is an act of resistance, and in March 2022, the British government repaid to Iran a debt of nearly £400m that had been owed since 1979. The next day, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released. I ask Rashidi what scenes were the most difficult to film. “What weren’t the most difficult scenes to film?” she says. “Usually, you have three emotional scenes to play in an hour-long drama. With this, we’re telling the highlights of six years of an odyssey, so it felt like we had eight emotional scenes every day. That isn’t just tiring, it’s draining.” How do you put down such an affecting experience in order to not just pick up the next thing but to get on with life? “I don’t think you can – and I think you mustn’t,” says Lowthorpe. “As a director, you have to unzip yourself, bear your heart, bear witness to the power of the thing. Because if you’re not doing that and you’re distancing yourself, the audience will feel the distance. So you have to live with being a bit sad and then remember that it’s not your life.” And for rashidi, there was extra resonance. “I was born in Iran and left when I was very little, but obviously so much of my being is Iranian. A lot of that came up with this job. Even speaking the language, a lot is relived. But what helped me separate myself from the character was knowing that yes, it is draining and emotional to go through it for four months, but I got to go home every night, sleep in a warm bed, eat warm food. This is a true story that happened to a real person who went through it for six years and is still dealing with the consequences.” “You never really shake the story,” Fiennes says. “It might fall into a recess in your mind as you become engaged with something more novel or get engaged with the present, but every character I have played is somehow part of my DNA. Because you live it, breathe it, love it and no matter the character, their struggle or their story, something grows beyond the struggle that might even amount to some kind of celebration. Out of the mud, arises the lily.”
Prisoner 951 writer reveals why Boris Johnson wasn't cast with "buffoon" performance in Zaghari-Ratcliffe drama
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was held prisoner in Iran for six years, while her husband fought for her freedom. A new BBC drama tries to do their story justice.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Among the myriad delicate, difficult and perplexing questions that Stephen Butchard had to ask himself while writing Prisoner 951, was whether or not to feature Boris Johnson. As Foreign Secretary, Johnson played a pivotal part in the story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was detained and imprisoned by Iran for six years from 2016, and her husband Richard, who kept her name in the news in the UK by any means he could, including going on hunger strike. In November 2017, Johnson incorrectly told a Foreign Affairs Select Committee that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was in Iran “simply teaching people journalism” and although immediately refuted (she was visiting relatives), the Iranian authorities claimed that Johnson’s blunder was proof that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was engaged in propaganda against the regime. Undoubtedly, Johnson’s remarks endangered Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case, increased risk for her in detention and raised the spectre of Iran adding years to her sentence. When, in 2022, she met Johnson after her release, Zaghari-Ratcliffe told the then prime minister that she had “lived in the shadow” of his words for the past four and a half years. So Butchard couldn’t ignore the part that Johnson played. But casting someone to play him could become a distracting sideshow that both pulled focus and changed the timbre of the drama. “I decided we shouldn’t have an actor,” Butchard says. “Boris Johnson is almost a caricature himself, and if you bring in an actor to play that caricature, you get a buffoon. You might want to do it, but it wouldn’t be truthful.” Instead, Butchard opted for a smarter solution: he cast Johnson as himself. “You look for archive footage – from the news, say – and you play what he said off other characters.” This choice is informed by, and informs, answers to other questions that are fundamental to the nature of Prisoner 951 and the story that Butchard, director Philippa Lowthorpe and actors Joseph Fiennes and Narges Rashidi wanted to tell. “It’s a political thriller that has, at the heart of it, a love story,” says Lowthorpe, who began her career making documentaries before directing dramas such as Five Daughters, about the murder of five sex workers in Ipswich in 2006, which was co-written by Butchard. “This is a story about an ordinary couple getting caught up in geopolitics beyond their interest, beyond their lives, and catapulted into a Kafkaesque nightmare because one of them is in the wrong place at the wrong time.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/11/Prisoner-951-Nazanin-Zaghari-Ratcliffe-Richard-Ratcliffe-d7857da.jpg" width="4582" height="3055" alt="Narges Rashidi as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Joseph Fiennes as Richard Ratcliffe in Prisoner 951, sitting on a park bench with her head resting on his shoulder." title="Narges Rashidi as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Joseph Fiennes as Richard Ratcliffe in Prisoner 951." /> “We had a working title of Love Story because that’s what this story is,” says Joseph Fiennes, who plays Richard. “It’s about Nazanin and Richard’s love for each other, the love of a mother and father for their child, and the love within the family and the families, who kept their daughter and their son-in-law on track.” Narges Rashidi, who plays Nazanin, parses the point: “It’s a political drama, about real people who are not political being politicised.” For her, it boils down to “a woman being punished for something she’s not responsible for, a man trying to get his family back, and a little child’s trauma.” When she was detained, Zaghari-Ratcliffe had her 22-month-old daughter Gabriella with her. Gabriella was eventually placed in the custody of her maternal grandparents in Iran, so she could visit her mother in prison. When she returned to the UK to start school, she needed a translator to speak to her father because she couldn’t speak English. Prisoner 951 is full of heartbreaking details like this as it establishes what Lowthorpe calls the “incredible humanity and relatability of Richard and Nazanin and each of their families”. If Prisoner 951 – which is based on A Yard of Sky, Nazanin and Richard’s soon-to-be published book – is partly a love story, that begs another question: how do you demonstrate that love when the couple are 3,000 miles apart? After all, one of drama’s key tenets is “show, don’t tell”. “Stephen brilliantly begins with the phone call that signalled the beginning of Nazanin and Richard’s nightmare,” say Lowthorpe, “but it was really important to show their past. So I created these little scenes like a family album – of their weddings, in Iran and in the UK, and of them with their daughter. I’ve used that motif in all of the episodes and shown different little bits of their snapshots and their coupleness that anybody can relate to. Little glimpses of them together before they’re wrenched apart; then you know what they’re fighting for.” Believing in that love means believing in the characters who, let’s not forget, are real people. Which brings us to Fiennes’ and Rashidi’s contributions – their performances. How did they approach the roles? “You start at the point of being fairly forensic with the way they are physically, how they carry themselves, how they conduct themselves,” says Fiennes, who has form playing real people, having received rave reviews for his performance as Gareth Southgate in James Graham’s Dear England at the National Theatre. “You watch interviews with them, but interviews are artificial situations so it’s sometimes helpful to talk to someone who knows them rather than the person themselves. With Richard, he was very accessible. I spent hours in his company getting a sense of his essence, his spirit and his vital intelligence. Then it’s about me trying to calibrate all of that into the character.” Rashidi read everything she could find, watched every interview and pored over the documentary about the couple’s plight. And she read half of A Yard of Sky – the half written by Nazanin. “Philippa didn’t want me to have Richard’s perspective, because Nazanin didn’t,” she explains. “So I went into it subjectively, which was really useful.” Rashidi speaks for herself and, I think, for Fiennes when she says of the research and preparation: “Beyond that, there’s no more you can do. You ask questions, you give it your all and pray to God that it will happen.” For Butchard, these questions were asked and answered in pursuit of one thing: the truth. “There’s a difference between the facts and the truth. Something can be truthful without being an absolute fact, but you have to be truthful because otherwise it damages the credibility of the story.” View oEmbed on the source website And is that as true of fictional characters as it is of characters based on real people? “I always follow a truthful path, because the minute that a character does something that you don’t quite believe, it becomes melodrama and I switch off. I’m writing series two of This City Is Ours at the moment, so I think about this every day.” And the truths at the heart of Prisoner 951? That hope is an act of resistance, and in March 2022, the British government repaid to Iran a debt of nearly £400m that had been owed since 1979. The next day, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released. I ask Rashidi what scenes were the most difficult to film. “What weren’t the most difficult scenes to film?” she says. “Usually, you have three emotional scenes to play in an hour-long drama. With this, we’re telling the highlights of six years of an odyssey, so it felt like we had eight emotional scenes every day. That isn’t just tiring, it’s draining.” How do you put down such an affecting experience in order to not just pick up the next thing but to get on with life? “I don’t think you can – and I think you mustn’t,” says Lowthorpe. “As a director, you have to unzip yourself, bear your heart, bear witness to the power of the thing. Because if you’re not doing that and you’re distancing yourself, the audience will feel the distance. So you have to live with being a bit sad and then remember that it’s not your life.” And for Rashidi, there was extra resonance. “I was born in Iran and left when I was very little, but obviously so much of my being is Iranian. A lot of that came up with this job. Even speaking the language, a lot is relived. But what helped me separate myself from the character was knowing that yes, it is draining and emotional to go through it for four months, but I got to go home every night, sleep in a warm bed, eat warm food. This is a true story that happened to a real person who went through it for six years and is still dealing with the consequences.” “You never really shake the story,” Fiennes says. “It might fall into a recess in your mind as you become engaged with something more novel or get engaged with the present, but every character I have played is somehow part of my DNA. Because you live it, breathe it, love it and no matter the character, their struggle or their story, something grows beyond the struggle that might even amount to some kind of celebration. Out of the mud, arises the lily.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Prisoner 951 will air on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from Sunday 23rd November 2025. Add Prisoner 951 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.