The 5 Live DJ on the joys of fatherhood, the downside of modelling — and crying on air
5 Live Breakfast is on Monday-Friday at 6am on BBC Radio 5 Live. Add it to your collection What’s the view from your sofa? It’s a fireplace that I think I like, but I’m not completely sure about. It’s very ornate, with a wooden surround that incorporates a mirror above it. It probably dates from, and hasn’t been changed since, the 1920s. Then there’s the TV, which is small and probably temporary, and keeps tilting backwards because I mounted the little feet on it badly. Sounds like you need a TV upgrade! We left the TV that we loved in our old house because it was wall-mounted, was perfect in the space and it felt like a nice thing to do, to leave it for the next people. My wife Emer [Kenny, Karen Pirie writer and actor] and I really regret that now. You began your career as a model — when did you realise you’re handsome? I was a cute kid, I think, and then, from 10 to 16, which is the worst age for this to be the case, I was not a good-looking boy. At all. I wonder if, in those formative years, it was character-building. Then, around 17 or 18, the proportions of my face sort of settled down, and from that point, it’s been fine. It’s weird to go from being not-good-looking to, a couple of years later, getting scouted for modelling work. I did it when I was at university and just after. That was odd. I didn’t like it one bit. Aside from the models, who seemed fine, it’s an industry of a lot of not very nice people. I found it a bit grubby. What’s the best TV programme you’ve watched recently? Your Friends & Neighbours on Apple TV starring Jon Hamm. He’s great – the whole cast is good – and it has some quite interesting things to say about family. As a fairly new father, with anything that says anything at all about family and fatherhood, I am quite likely to cry. How do you juggle family life and, among other things, 5 Live Breakfast? It’s tricky, because both Emer and I work and I’m very conscious of ensuring that she still has all the time she needs to work. Trying to dovetail it all together is a complicated jigsaw. One good thing is that, although the hours of my job are horrendous, doing a breakfast show does mean I’m home in the day and I get to spend time with my son then. You have to make it work. How ready were you for fatherhood? It was definitely something we wanted to do, and I thought and read about it quite a lot. But there is absolutely no way you can be prepared for what it’s like. There’s a depth of feeling you really can’t get your head around before you experience it. It’s crazy how it’s massively heightened my emotional response to almost everything, because you just see everything through a new lens of: “What is that going to mean for his future?” How has it affected your work? My emotions are much closer to the surface, so when we have people on who have distressing stories, I’m very affected by them. In my first year doing 5 Live Breakfast, Russia invaded Ukraine. In those first few weeks, we were speaking to Ukrainians and it was like nothing I’d ever done before. It was completely overwhelming and I really struggled. I’ve definitely cried on air, and I think the audience kind of get that because it’s quite a human response, but you don’t want someone crying all the time. How’s your relationship with your dad? My dad was and is terrific. The world I live in is probably quite different from the world he lived in and lives in, but I still go to him for advice, even when I know he won’t know much about the thing I’m asking him, because I’m still interested to get his take. He’s a safe person for me. What has surprised you most about becoming a parent? Sometimes, being a parent is hard, sometimes boring, sometimes annoying. But you don’t let those fleeting emotions override the core emotion, which is “this is brilliant, this is special”. What it has made me realise is how much my mum and dad must love me.
Rick Edwards reveals why fatherhood has changed his presenting work for ever - and talks his modelling past
The 5 Live DJ on the joys of fatherhood, the downside of modelling — and crying on air.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. What’s the view from your sofa? It’s a fireplace that I think I like, but I’m not completely sure about. It’s very ornate, with a wooden surround that incorporates a mirror above it. It probably dates from, and hasn’t been changed since, the 1920s. Then there’s the TV, which is small and probably temporary, and keeps tilting backwards because I mounted the little feet on it badly. Sounds like you need a TV upgrade! We left the TV that we loved in our old house because it was wall-mounted, was perfect in the space and it felt like a nice thing to do, to leave it for the next people. My wife Emer [Kenny, Karen Pirie writer and actor] and I really regret that now. You began your career as a model — when did you realise you’re handsome? I was a cute kid, I think, and then, from 10 to 16, which is the worst age for this to be the case, I was not a good-looking boy. At all. I wonder if, in those formative years, it was character-building. Then, around 17 or 18, the proportions of my face sort of settled down, and from that point, it’s been fine. It’s weird to go from being not-good-looking to, a couple of years later, getting scouted for modelling work. I did it when I was at university and just after. That was odd. I didn’t like it one bit. Aside from the models, who seemed fine, it’s an industry of a lot of not very nice people. I found it a bit grubby. What’s the best TV programme you’ve watched recently? Your Friends & Neighbours on Apple TV starring Jon Hamm. He’s great – the whole cast is good – and it has some quite interesting things to say about family. As a fairly new father, with anything that says anything at all about family and fatherhood, I am quite likely to cry. How do you juggle family life and, among other things, 5 Live Breakfast? It’s tricky, because both Emer and I work and I’m very conscious of ensuring that she still has all the time she needs to work. Trying to dovetail it all together is a complicated jigsaw. One good thing is that, although the hours of my job are horrendous, doing a breakfast show does mean I’m home in the day and I get to spend time with my son then. You have to make it work. How ready were you for fatherhood? It was definitely something we wanted to do, and I thought and read about it quite a lot. But there is absolutely no way you can be prepared for what it’s like. There’s a depth of feeling you really can’t get your head around before you experience it. It’s crazy how it’s massively heightened my emotional response to almost everything, because you just see everything through a new lens of: “What is that going to mean for his future?” How has it affected your work? My emotions are much closer to the surface, so when we have people on who have distressing stories, I’m very affected by them. In my first year doing 5 Live Breakfast, Russia invaded Ukraine. In those first few weeks, we were speaking to Ukrainians and it was like nothing I’d ever done before. It was completely overwhelming and I really struggled. I’ve definitely cried on air, and I think the audience kind of get that because it’s quite a human response, but you don’t want someone crying all the time. How’s your relationship with your dad? My dad was and is terrific. The world I live in is probably quite different from the world he lived in and lives in, but I still go to him for advice, even when I know he won’t know much about the thing I’m asking him, because I’m still interested to get his take. He’s a safe person for me. What has surprised you most about becoming a parent? Sometimes, being a parent is hard, sometimes boring, sometimes annoying. But you don’t let those fleeting emotions override the core emotion, which is “this is brilliant, this is special”. What it has made me realise is how much my mum and dad must love me. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Rick Edwards presents 5 Live Breakfast Mon—Fri 6am/Fighting Talk 11am Sat/The Inside Track podcast Mondays. Check out more of our Audio 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.
All Creatures Great and Small's Anna Madeley on Mrs Hall's secret talent – and *that* Siegfried speculation
"They do get on and they do have a lot of affection for each other. Where that will lead...?"
Anna Madeley visibly bristles when I suggest that Mrs Hall, her much beloved housekeeper from All Creatures Great and Small, might be repressed. “It’s funny,” she begins in a tone that does not indicate amusement, "putting labels on characters when one of the things I love about this show, one of the things we’ve set out to do from the get-go, is avoid tropes and archetypes". Mrs Hall, Madeley is adamant, is not your typical busybody, buttoned-up housekeeper. “We could have very easily come out with the old trope of the bossy woman telling everyone what to do, which a lot of people expect, and instead what’s really refreshing is having a character who has proper story behind her, history that informs who she is.” And who is she? “She is a woman of her time with expectations of her life that fit where she’s from. She had a difficult time with her husband and she’s come through something there. She’s had a difficult time with her son and she’s come through something there. Her life’s been tough.” Madeley is, of course, quite right to challenge my broad brush strokes’ characterisation of her character. Younger than she is in the novels and altogether warmer a character, Madeley’s Mrs Hall is a woman with hinterland, and hidden talents. Just tonight, we discovered her heretofore unknown adeptness at darts. Played with delicacy and nuance by Madeley, Mrs Hall isn’t just Skeldale House’s beacon of decency, stoicism and quiet resilience – without whom the house could not function, on a very practical level – she is also its moral centre and beating heart. Yes, there is a fortitude befitting the period and Mrs Hall’s class and position, but there is also extraordinary tenderness. As the vets of All Creatures deal with wounded animals, Mrs Hall, in her own way, heals wounded souls – including her own. “She's someone who speaks her mind, gently,” Madeley says. “She’s the person in the house who does say there's an elephant in the room and we need to talk about it.” Read more: All Creatures Great and Small spin-off show confirmed with beloved special guest All Creatures Great and Small says goodbye (for now) to two long-running characters So far, it has just been metaphorical elephants that Mrs Hall’s had to deal with but anything is possible where Siegfried is concerned. Given the chemistry between the curmudgeonly eccentric vet played by Samuel West and Mrs Hall, might that include romance? "Oh my God, no," Madeley exclaims, half-laughing, half-aghast. “A real friendship has blossomed between the two of them and they are of a generation so there’s lots of things they can share and understand about one another from their lived experiences. But we just have a lot of fun with these two characters who butt heads a bit.” Seeming to put paid to any Sieg-drey entanglement, Madeley concedes that "They do get on and they do have a lot of affection for each other," before adding, somewhat tantalisingly, "Where that will lead, you don’t know." Certainly, in the post-war years, the times they were a-changing. And now that Mrs Hall has settled matters with her ex-husband and with her son… "It will be interesting to see where freedom from those concerns will now take her as a person," Madeley muses. "And whether it will allow her to be a little bit… freer." All Creatures Great and Small continues on Thursday at 9pm on 5. 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. Add All Creatures Great and Small 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.
'It's The Forsytes with a lot of Dallas'
Have Poldark’s Debbie Horsfield and Damien Timmer struck gold again with their reimagining of TVs greatest saga?
Add The Forsytes to your watchlist It began, as epic journeys often do, with a single step. It was the summer of 2021 and on Hampstead Heath – 800 acres of greenery and wild woodland in north London – writer Debbie Horsfield and producer Damien Timmer went on a walk to discuss what they might do next. Their last collaboration, Poldark, had ended two years earlier after five series and, as Timmer puts it, “Having had a rest after Poldark, we were trying to find a slab of story that Debbie could really enjoy getting her teeth into.” “I think it was Damien who first mentioned The Forsyte Saga,” says Horsfield. “I mean, I’m all for anything with ‘saga’ in the title.” Horsfield and Timmer were of course familiar with the previous dramatisations of John Galworthy’s novels, from 1967 and 2002. The former was a sprawling 26 parts from the BBC and is widely regarded as a TV classic. “It’s spoken about with hushed reverence,” Timmer notes. “And then there’s the Granada version for ITV at the turn of this century.” As Tuppence Middleton, who plays Frances Forsyte, says, “It hasn’t been done as often as some of the other big classics, but there’s still a reputation to live up to.” What Timmer intended to do was to “make a version for now. In our ever more divided society, there is a real parallel with that late Victorian era. We wanted to take a magnifying glass to this extremely wealthy family who are the one per cent.” Prior to Poldark, adapted from Winston Graham’s novels, Horsfield was known for big, messy family dramas like Making Out, The Riff Raff Element and Cutting It. “I’m from a big family and family dynamics have always fascinated me. I’ve written a lot about inter-generational conflict, and I don’t necessarily mean in a grim, serious way, but only ever my own original ideas, all contemporary and pretty much all set in Manchester, where I’m from. Then Poldark came along and it was very much new territory.” New to adaptation, Horsfield says, “Initially, I was nervous about taking on someone else’s characters, but I quickly realised I had to imagine they were my characters, to get inside their heads and understand what made them tick. So I did that and Poldark seemed to go OK.” Clearly, Horsfield has an aptitude for adaptation. “She’s so good at distilling a saga, keeping lots of different characters in play and knowing what each character’s story is,” says Timmer. “Which are exactly the skills you need to wrangle Galsworthy’s stories about the rich, troubled and often awful Forsytes.” From the shrewd, ruthless and controlling Soames and his oppressed but defiant wife Irene, to the bohemian Young Jolyon (who, despite being the first-born male heir, has little interest in the family firm and prefers making art to making money), the Forsytes are A Lot. “We’re synthesising Galsworthy, a bit of The Age of Innocence and a lot of Dallas,” Timmer says. “I want Oil Barons’ Ball vibes going on.” And that’s not even the half of it. “If you go back to the books,” he says, “a lot of the real meaty drama is actually hidden and the female characters aren’t well drawn at all. Irene, for example, is a shadowy figure who is really difficult to engage with because you never really understand her motivations.” To excavate the hidden drama from the novels and to illuminate their female characters would take Horsfield and Timmer another two years of walks on the Heath, he explains, “thinking about the timeline and talking about the family – who was and wasn’t there”. “We were clear from the word go that we weren’t going to do a straight adaptation of these male-centric novels,” says Horsfield. “What we wanted to do was redress the balance by fleshing out the women – but not at the expense of the men.” With their vision clear and Horsfield’s teeth well and truly stuck in – not to mention source material that was out of copyright so there was no need to buy the rights – Timmer had to find someone to commission it and foot the bill. He eschewed UK broadcasters “because we didn’t think they’d have a huge amount of interest”. Besides, “PBS really wanted it.” The American Public Broadcasting Service has had a long relationship with British costume drama, usually topping up budgets in return for the rights to show dramas such as Pride and Prejudice as part of its Masterpiece strand in the US. “It became clear early on that if they wanted it, they’d have to pay much more than they are used to,” says Timmer. “But they did want it, so they stepped up.” Timmer won’t be drawn on the The Forsytes’ budget, beyond saying that “it is substantially higher than our previous shows for PBS – Poldark, Victoria and Endeavour – and ten years ago, would have seemed eye-wateringly expensive. But drama costs have gone up a lot and now we’re competing with Apple and Netflix shows, there’s this kind of arms race inflation.” So is The Forsytes made for an American audience? “We’re making it with a sense of what we thought would work for a kind of broad audience around the world who enjoy a British costume drama,” he says, carefully. “And we’re making it for ourselves.” Horsfield has been true to her word. The 2025 version of The Forsyte Saga – just called The Forsytes as Timmer thought “saga” felt “a bit fusty” – is definitely not a straight adaptation. Moving the rival families of brothers James and Jolyon Senior into houses next door to each other and creating a family stockbroking business qualify as minor changes to Galsworthy’s world, given that with this first series Horsfield has, in effect, written a prequel to his novels – one in which Young Jolyon’s first wife Frances is not yet dead and, in fact, finds herself in a love triangle with her husband and a woman with whom he was in love prior to marrying her. (In the novels, Young Jolyon has had an affair with the nanny.) Where previous adaptations have focused on Soames and Irene’s toxic marriage, they’ve only just met in the first episode of Horsfield’s version. In doing what Stephen Moyer, who plays Jolyon Senior, calls “rewinding so we can see the origins of the stories that will propel the drama for three or four or five seasons”, Horsfield has broadened The Forsytes’ horizons by extending their timeline beyond the three novels and two interludes that constitute The Forsyte Saga in print. The result is an original, compelling and thoroughly modern period drama. Jack Davenport, who plays James Forsyte, was especially struck by Horsfield’s exploration of who wields power. “Because power isn’t handed to women on a plate in the way that it is for the men, the women have a self-awareness that the men absolutely do not. The men are powerful but clueless, and that makes for a fantastic tension.” With the financing in place and Horsfield thinking of the characters as her own – some of them were her own, after all – it was soon time to put faces to them all. “I love casting an ensemble,” says Timmer. “It is such fun and terrifying because you’re never quite sure how it’s going to work. It was easier with the older characters because we generally got our first choice – and it’s not like that all the time”. The challenge came in casting the leading men Young Jolyon and Soames. “We saw what felt like 300 actors for Soames and Jolyon. Every British actor with a pulse under 30 who was vaguely handsome, and about 80 Australian actors.” Among the throng were Danny Griffin and Joshua Orpin. “I initially auditioned for Young Jolyon,” says Orpin, who plays Soames. “That classic romantic leading man character is, more often than not, the sort of part I’m given to audition for. After that, I was asked to read for Soames and immediately I thought, ‘Wow!’ Morally ambiguous and darker than Jolyon, I’d much rather play him.” Griffin, who also auditioned for both roles, couldn’t be happier playing Young Jolyon – not least because he gets lots of scenes with Tuppence Middleton as his wife Frances. Hot from the success of The Motive and the Cue, the National Theatre play by Jack Thorne and directed by Sam Mendes, Middleton was Timmer and Horsfield’s first choice for Frances. “She is another level, so professional and her acting is just really… still,” Griffin says. “And if I decide to take a line one way and try it that way, Tuppence always follows so she’ll never do the same scene the exact same way. I love that!” With the female characters moved centre-stage, Irene is imbued with actual character by Horsfield, where previously she was remembered for something done to her. Audiences in 1967 were shocked by the rape of Irene (Nyree Dawn Porter) by her husband Soames (Eric Porter) – to demonstrate that she is his property – though you have to wonder if it was the brutality itself that shocked or the fact that it was being depicted on television. Marital rape wasn’t criminalised in Scotland until 1989 and 1991 in England so would have been part of many viewers lived experience, even as discussing it remained taboo. (That scene will take place in the second series of The Forsytes.) Doctor Who and Coronation Street alumna Millie Gibson takes on the mantle of Irene and is grateful for the opportunity, despite the gruelling nature of the part. “I don’t think a lot of casting directors see me as a heroine yet so it was nice to step into those shoes,” she says. Not that she thought she’d got the part. “I auditioned on Zoom and it was really hard. I had no sense of how I was coming across and afterwards I thought, ‘Well, that was awful.’ Literally a week later, I got a call asking if I’d be Irene.” For the key role of Louisa, the seamstress who has history – and perhaps a future – with Young Jolyon, Horsfield knew they’d need someone who would bring “nuance and vulnerability but also humour and strength”. The writer says, “It’s very different to the character she played previously for me, but I knew she’d be brilliant.” Step forward, Poldark’s Demelza herself, Eleanor Tomlinson. “I got a call from Damien asking me to lunch and thought, ‘Oh hello!’ ” says Tomlinson. “They sent me the scripts and I immediately started getting excitement flutters. We spoke about the character and who she was and what her journey was. And that was it. I was hooked.” The first series of The Forsytes was filmed last summer and the cast have just finished filming the second. There is at least a third to come. Fired and inspired by Galsworthy’s novels, Horsfield’s imagination could run to several more series. The books conclude with the next generation of the family (who are a long way off being born yet) reaching adulthood. And even that needn’t be the end of the story – though they might have to reattach the “Saga” to the title. After all, Horsfield’s The Forsytes is about intergenerational conflict, the weight of expectation passed down through families, and just how present the past is. The future, meanwhile, is full of possibility. Just as long journeys start with single steps, paths are made by walking them. Jolyon Senior played by Stephen Moyer Louisa Byrne played by Eleanor Tomlinson "They sent me the scripts and I immediately started getting excitement flutters. I was hooked." Frances Forsyte played by Tuppence Middleton "It hasn’t been done as often as some big classics but there’s still a reputation to live up to." Jolyon Forsyte played by Danny Griffin "Tuppence is another level. She will never do the same scene the exact same way. I love that." Ann Forsyte played by Francesca Annis Soames Forsyte played by Joshua Orpin "I auditioned for Young Jolyon but Soames is morally ambiguous – I’d much rather play him." Irene Heron played by Millie Gibson "I don’t think a lot of casting directors see me as a heroine yet so it was nice to step into those shoes." James Forsyte played by Jack Davenport
The new Forsyte Saga is not a straight adaptation of "male-centric novels", says Poldark creator
Have Poldark’s Debbie Horsfield and Damien Timmer struck gold again with their reimagining of TV's greatest saga?
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It began, as epic journeys often do, with a single step. It was the summer of 2021 and on Hampstead Heath – 800 acres of greenery and wild woodland in north London – writer Debbie Horsfield and producer Damien Timmer went on a walk to discuss what they might do next. Their last collaboration, Poldark, had ended two years earlier after five series and, as Timmer puts it, “Having had a rest after Poldark, we were trying to find a slab of story that Debbie could really enjoy getting her teeth into.” “I think it was Damien who first mentioned The Forsyte Saga,” says Horsfield. “I mean, I’m all for anything with ‘saga’ in the title.” Horsfield and Timmer were of course familiar with the previous dramatisations of John Galworthy’s novels, from 1967 and 2002. The former was a sprawling 26 parts from the BBC and is widely regarded as a TV classic. “It’s spoken about with hushed reverence,” Timmer notes. “And then there’s the Granada version for ITV at the turn of this century.” As Tuppence Middleton, who plays Frances Forsyte, says, “It hasn’t been done as often as some of the other big classics, but there’s still a reputation to live up to.” What Timmer intended to do was to “make a version for now. In our ever more divided society, there is a real parallel with that late Victorian era. We wanted to take a magnifying glass to this extremely wealthy family who are the one per cent.” Prior to Poldark, adapted from Winston Graham’s novels, Horsfield was known for big, messy family dramas like Making Out, The Riff Raff Element and Cutting It. “I’m from a big family and family dynamics have always fascinated me. I’ve written a lot about inter-generational conflict, and I don’t necessarily mean in a grim, serious way, but only ever my own original ideas, all contemporary and pretty much all set in Manchester, where I’m from. Then Poldark came along and it was very much new territory.” New to adaptation, Horsfield says, “Initially, I was nervous about taking on someone else’s characters, but I quickly realised I had to imagine they were my characters, to get inside their heads and understand what made them tick. So I did that and Poldark seemed to go OK.” Clearly, Horsfield has an aptitude for adaptation. “She’s so good at distilling a saga, keeping lots of different characters in play and knowing what each character’s story is,” says Timmer. “Which are exactly the skills you need to wrangle Galsworthy’s stories about the rich, troubled and often awful Forsytes.” From the shrewd, ruthless and controlling Soames and his oppressed but defiant wife Irene, to the bohemian Young Jolyon (who, despite being the first-born male heir, has little interest in the family firm and prefers making art to making money), the Forsytes are A Lot. “We’re synthesising Galsworthy, a bit of The Age of Innocence and a lot of Dallas,” Timmer says. “I want Oil Barons’ Ball vibes going on.” And that’s not even the half of it. “If you go back to the books,” he says, “a lot of the real meaty drama is actually hidden and the female characters aren’t well drawn at all. Irene, for example, is a shadowy figure who is really difficult to engage with because you never really understand her motivations.” To excavate the hidden drama from the novels and to illuminate their female characters would take Horsfield and Timmer another two years of walks on the Heath, he explains, “thinking about the timeline and talking about the family – who was and wasn’t there”. “We were clear from the word go that we weren’t going to do a straight adaptation of these male-centric novels,” says Horsfield. “What we wanted to do was redress the balance by fleshing out the women – but not at the expense of the men.” With their vision clear and Horsfield’s teeth well and truly stuck in – not to mention source material that was out of copyright so there was no need to buy the rights – Timmer had to find someone to commission it and foot the bill. He eschewed UK broadcasters “because we didn’t think they’d have a huge amount of interest”. Besides, “PBS really wanted it.” The American Public Broadcasting Service has had a long relationship with British costume drama, usually topping up budgets in return for the rights to show dramas such as Pride and Prejudice as part of its Masterpiece strand in the US. “It became clear early on that if they wanted it, they’d have to pay much more than they are used to,” says Timmer. “But they did want it, so they stepped up.” Timmer won’t be drawn on the The Forsytes’ budget, beyond saying that “it is substantially higher than our previous shows for PBS – Poldark, Victoria and Endeavour – and ten years ago, would have seemed eye-wateringly expensive. But drama costs have gone up a lot and now we’re competing with Apple and Netflix shows, there’s this kind of arms race inflation.” So is The Forsytes made for an American audience? “We’re making it with a sense of what we thought would work for a kind of broad audience around the world who enjoy a British costume drama,” he says, carefully. “And we’re making it for ourselves.” Horsfield has been true to her word. The 2025 version of The Forsyte Saga – just called The Forsytes as Timmer thought “saga” felt “a bit fusty” – is definitely not a straight adaptation. Moving the rival families of brothers James and Jolyon Senior into houses next door to each other and creating a family stockbroking business qualify as minor changes to Galsworthy’s world, given that with this first series Horsfield has, in effect, written a prequel to his novels – one in which Young Jolyon’s first wife Frances is not yet dead and, in fact, finds herself in a love triangle with her husband and a woman with whom he was in love prior to marrying her. (In the novels, Young Jolyon has had an affair with the nanny.) Where previous adaptations have focused on Soames and Irene’s toxic marriage, they’ve only just met in the first episode of Horsfield’s version. In doing what Stephen Moyer, who plays Jolyon Senior, calls “rewinding so we can see the origins of the stories that will propel the drama for three or four or five seasons”, Horsfield has broadened The Forsytes’ horizons by extending their timeline beyond the three novels and two interludes that constitute The Forsyte Saga in print. The result is an original, compelling and thoroughly modern period drama. Jack Davenport, who plays James Forsyte, was especially struck by Horsfield’s exploration of who wields power. “Because power isn’t handed to women on a plate in the way that it is for the men, the women have a self-awareness that the men absolutely do not. The men are powerful but clueless, and that makes for a fantastic tension.” With the financing in place and Horsfield thinking of the characters as her own – some of them were her own, after all – it was soon time to put faces to them all. “I love casting an ensemble,” says Timmer. “It is such fun and terrifying because you’re never quite sure how it’s going to work. It was easier with the older characters because we generally got our first choice – and it’s not like that all the time”. The challenge came in casting the leading men Young Jolyon and Soames. “We saw what felt like 300 actors for Soames and Jolyon. Every British actor with a pulse under 30 who was vaguely handsome, and about 80 Australian actors.” Among the throng were Danny Griffin and Joshua Orpin. “I initially auditioned for Young Jolyon,” says Orpin, who plays Soames. “That classic romantic leading man character is, more often than not, the sort of part I’m given to audition for. After that, I was asked to read for Soames and immediately I thought, ‘Wow!’ Morally ambiguous and darker than Jolyon, I’d much rather play him.” Griffin, who also auditioned for both roles, couldn’t be happier playing Young Jolyon – not least because he gets lots of scenes with Tuppence Middleton as his wife Frances. Hot from the success of The Motive and the Cue, the National Theatre play by Jack Thorne and directed by Sam Mendes, Middleton was Timmer and Horsfield’s first choice for Frances. “She is another level, so professional and her acting is just really… still,” Griffin says. “And if I decide to take a line one way and try it that way, Tuppence always follows so she’ll never do the same scene the exact same way. I love that!” With the female characters moved centre-stage, Irene is imbued with actual character by Horsfield, where previously she was remembered for something done to her. Audiences in 1967 were shocked by the rape of Irene (Nyree Dawn Porter) by her husband Soames (Eric Porter) – to demonstrate that she is his property – though you have to wonder if it was the brutality itself that shocked or the fact that it was being depicted on television. Marital rape wasn’t criminalised in Scotland until 1989 and 1991 in England so would have been part of many viewers lived experience, even as discussing it remained taboo. (That scene will take place in the second series of The Forsytes.) Doctor Who and Coronation Street alumna Millie Gibson takes on the mantle of Irene and is grateful for the opportunity, despite the gruelling nature of the part. “I don’t think a lot of casting directors see me as a heroine yet so it was nice to step into those shoes,” she says. Not that she thought she’d got the part. “I auditioned on Zoom and it was really hard. I had no sense of how I was coming across and afterwards I thought, ‘Well, that was awful.’ Literally a week later, I got a call asking if I’d be Irene.” For the key role of Louisa, the seamstress who has history – and perhaps a future – with Young Jolyon, Horsfield knew they’d need someone who would bring “nuance and vulnerability but also humour and strength”. The writer says, “It’s very different to the character she played previously for me, but I knew she’d be brilliant.” Step forward, Poldark’s Demelza herself, Eleanor Tomlinson. “I got a call from Damien asking me to lunch and thought, ‘Oh hello!’ ” says Tomlinson. “They sent me the scripts and I immediately started getting excitement flutters. We spoke about the character and who she was and what her journey was. And that was it. I was hooked.” The first series of The Forsytes was filmed last summer and the cast have just finished filming the second. There is at least a third to come. Fired and inspired by Galsworthy’s novels, Horsfield’s imagination could run to several more series. The books conclude with the next generation of the family (who are a long way off being born yet) reaching adulthood. And even that needn’t be the end of the story – though they might have to reattach the “Saga” to the title. After all, Horsfield’s The Forsytes is about intergenerational conflict, the weight of expectation passed down through families, and just how present the past is. The future, meanwhile, is full of possibility. Just as long journeys start with single steps, paths are made by walking them. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Forsytes will launch on 5 on Monday 20th October at 9pm. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
She’d love to return to acting, but for now she’s adding fizz to a new Saturday-night quiz show
Add The Inner Circle to your watchlist What’s the view from your sofa? I have a very bright, paprika orange sofa – my husband [music producer Chris Hughes] nearly had a heart attack when I got it – and the view from it is what you’d call a media wall. I found a good carpenter, who made the shelves and painted it green. Now I’ve got lots of different things on shelves – and, in the middle of them, a big telly. Who controls the remote? The kids. They’re on Netflix and YouTube and all the streamers and my algorithm is completely ruined with things like Wednesday and I Know What You Did Last Summer – or maybe it’s The Summer I Turned Pretty – which have nothing to do with my taste at all. Was there a summer you turned pretty? There was not! I had braces and a cowlick for years. Is watching television a communal activity in your house? There are certain shows that we all watch together – Strictly, Gogglebox and Modern Family. No one is allowed to watch those separately. If my mum’s here, we’ll catch Pointless. And I have to say Changing Ends, obviously, because of Alan [Carr]. The kids watch Amanda and Alan… but I don’t tend to watch things I’m in. Your daughter, Lexi, was scouted by the model agency Storm. The phrase “nepo baby” gets bandied about a lot these days… Yes, she’s related to me, but that’s nothing to do with me. The word “nepo” can be thrown around for ever but it’s unfair it’s been used in showbiz. When I was young, I got a job in a fruit ’n’ veg shop because my mum knew the fruit ’n’ veg guy. If you know someone that can help your child get in somewhere, you’ll do whatever. But they have to have talent and backbone, and work to succeed. I’m proud of my daughter, doing stuff for Storm as well as two normal jobs while at uni. She’s not going to come out with a debt. That’s amazing. Did you always want to work in showbusiness? My mum says I always wanted to act. I would do shows in the garden and make posters for them and stick them to the telegraph poles around our housing estate. My mum and dad had no money, so I didn’t go to extra classes. Then, by a miracle, when I was nine, a lady moved to Bishop’s Waltham [Hampshire], which is where I’m from, and started up an amateur dramatics group. You don’t do much acting now… And I miss it. I’m asked to do things all the time, including West End shows, but because of my other commitments – not least the radio show – I just can’t do eight shows a week. I absolutely am going to go back to it. I was nominated for an Olivier for my first big show, Thoroughly Modern Millie – and while I didn’t win, the nomination was probably the best thing that has ever happened to me. Tell us about your new show, The Inner Circle. It’s simple, really – general knowledge plus “who do you trust?” It’s a bit Weakest Link, a bit Traitors, a bit Golden Balls, a bit Runaround and a bit of fizz – that’s me! Are you competitive? Hugely! I like winning. I’m not one of those people who thinks that, at school, everyone gets a prize. There should be first, second, third. Because life is like that. We are getting softer and softer, and I’m not a fan of that. You also present Heart’s breakfast show, you’re a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, you swan around the Med in Amanda and Alan… and you present Cheat, a dating show on Netflix. What’s the key to your success? Suddenly, in my 50s, I’ve been discovered again, which is bizarre – and wonderful. I’ll tell you what I think it is: I have always been authentic, I’ve never been unkind, I have never had an ego, and I have never thought I was any better than anyone else. And I’ve always shown up on time. That’s key, with any job.
Amanda Holden: 'My daughter's not a nepo baby – her success is nothing to do with me'
She’d love to return to acting, but for now she’s adding fizz to a new Saturday-night quiz show.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. What’s the view from your sofa? I have a very bright, paprika orange sofa – my husband [music producer Chris Hughes] nearly had a heart attack when I got it – and the view from it is what you’d call a media wall. I found a good carpenter, who made the shelves and painted it green. Now I’ve got lots of different things on shelves – and, in the middle of them, a big telly. Who controls the remote? The kids. They’re on Netflix and YouTube and all the streamers and my algorithm is completely ruined with things like Wednesday and I Know What You Did Last Summer – or maybe it’s The Summer I Turned Pretty – which have nothing to do with my taste at all. Was there a summer you turned pretty? There was not! I had braces and a cowlick for years. Is watching television a communal activity in your house? There are certain shows that we all watch together – Strictly, Gogglebox and Modern Family. No one is allowed to watch those separately. If my mum’s here, we’ll catch Pointless. And I have to say Changing Ends, obviously, because of Alan [Carr]. The kids watch Amanda and Alan… but I don’t tend to watch things I’m in. Your daughter, Lexi, was scouted by the model agency Storm. The phrase “nepo baby” gets bandied about a lot these days… Yes, she’s related to me, but that’s nothing to do with me. The word “nepo” can be thrown around for ever but it’s unfair it’s been used in showbiz. When I was young, I got a job in a fruit ’n’ veg shop because my mum knew the fruit ’n’ veg guy. If you know someone that can help your child get in somewhere, you’ll do whatever. But they have to have talent and backbone, and work to succeed. I’m proud of my daughter, doing stuff for Storm as well as two normal jobs while at uni. She’s not going to come out with a debt. That’s amazing. Did you always want to work in showbusiness? My mum says I always wanted to act. I would do shows in the garden and make posters for them and stick them to the telegraph poles around our housing estate. My mum and dad had no money, so I didn’t go to extra classes. Then, by a miracle, when I was nine, a lady moved to Bishop’s Waltham [Hampshire], which is where I’m from, and started up an amateur dramatics group. You don’t do much acting now… And I miss it. I’m asked to do things all the time, including West End shows, but because of my other commitments – not least the radio show – I just can’t do eight shows a week. I absolutely am going to go back to it. I was nominated for an Olivier for my first big show, Thoroughly Modern Millie – and while I didn’t win, the nomination was probably the best thing that has ever happened to me. Tell us about your new show, The Inner Circle. It’s simple, really – general knowledge plus “who do you trust?” It’s a bit Weakest Link, a bit Traitors, a bit Golden Balls, a bit Runaround and a bit of fizz – that’s me! Are you competitive? Hugely! I like winning. I’m not one of those people who thinks that, at school, everyone gets a prize. There should be first, second, third. Because life is like that. We are getting softer and softer, and I’m not a fan of that. You also present Heart’s breakfast show, you’re a judge on Britain’s Got Talent, you swan around the Med in Amanda and Alan… and you present Cheat, a dating show on Netflix. What’s the key to your success? Suddenly, in my 50s, I’ve been discovered again, which is bizarre – and wonderful. I’ll tell you what I think it is: I have always been authentic, I’ve never been unkind, I have never had an ego, and I have never thought I was any better than anyone else. And I’ve always shown up on time. That’s key, with any job. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Inner Circle begins at 5:35pm on BBC One and iPlayer. Check out more of our Entertainment 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 Python on his love of language, poking fun at the powerful — and the joy of executive-free comedy
What’s the view from your sofa? Usually, it’s cricket – I love being indoors watching endless hours of cricket. I like the footie, too. I used to support Chelsea but I got tired of having my weekend ruined by 11 men in shorts. Are you watching anything else? Television now seems to be people trying to bonk each other on islands, game shows or news shows, so it’s not terribly interesting. I mean, it’s been stolen by the streamers, which is really bad news. They’ve uninvented television and it’s very sad. Do you miss watching television? Growing up, my generation – so that’s all of the Pythons – grew up without television. That’s quite a big difference, rarely observed. We grew up with radio, where the words involve your imagination much more. On radio, the Goons could set the Thames on fire. Is listening to radio where your love of language comes from? It meant we had a bias towards language; Terry Gilliam was the one putting in all the imagery. If you look at the Python sketches that are really funny, they all evolved from language – Argument Clinic, for example. Later, as we did on a couple of German shows, they were largely visual sketches. But that was because we had to learn them in German and we didn’t want to talk. When did you realise that you were on to something with Monty Python? When we were given our TV show, it was late on a Sunday night and the BBC was just trying to see if anybody was awake after 10pm and the pubs were closed. What was really lovely was that we could please ourselves, there was no one overseeing us, so it was executive-free comedy and all the funnier for it. No executive has ever improved a comedy. What makes you laugh today? What South Park is doing with Trump is heroic and I know they’ve done him a lot of damage. There’s a reason Hitler and Trump get rid of the comedians first. They hate being laughed at. So, it’s great that Governor Newsom is taking the p*** out of Trump and his hands. Comedy is saying the right thing at the wrong time. It’s so important. It’s telling truth to power and it’s keeping people sane. I was in the war, we laughed at Hitler and it makes a difference because it diminishes their power. I think it connects with an undercurrent of anti- and that’s vital. Stephen Colbert [who just won an Emmy as host of the US Late Show] was fired by his network very pusillanimously, but he’s got till May to say anything he likes. You’re prodigious in your output. Where do you get your work ethic from? I think it comes from boarding school. I was there for 12 years in Wolverhampton, and it wasn’t the most exciting place to be. Reading became a great escape. And the older you got, the more you wanted to read. History and literature is fascinating. I like geography, too. I made my own escape. You’re touring again. What appeals about performing live? I’ve always liked getting out there. On that stage, you must make the audience laugh, and if you do, you can surf that laughter; it lifts you up. So I’ve tried to go on stage at least once a year, especially in my later years, because it’s important to scare yourself, and to make sure you’ve still got that skill. Is it a farewell tour? Everywhere should always be goodbye. At my age [82], most of your friends are dead, which isn’t great. But it’s important to remember them, and remember them as funny. In my show, I talk about and show clips of old friends and sing songs about them. I sing a song called This May Be the Last Time You See Me, because it might be. Your song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life gets played at funerals a lot. What will be played at yours? Well, I used to say Sit on My Face, but my wife said I can’t say that any more.
Mawaan Rizwan squeezes humour from his messy moments
Add Juice to your watchlist Monetising your trauma is very trendy at the moment, isn’t it?” Mawaan Rizwan muses, pointedly. “I’m someone who struggles with boundaries, so I have to be careful.” At 34, the YouTuber-turned-stand-up comedian, actor and writer has realised that “life isn’t just fodder”. “In the early days, I’d be in a writers’ room and I’d disclose a terrible thing from my life that would get worked into the script,” he recalls. “Then I’d get a note back saying, ‘I don’t think the character should feel that’, or ‘That makes me really dislike them.’ And I’d be dying inside, feeling vulnerable and exposed, because that was the choice I made. “Sometimes you go through a traumatic thing or horrific event and there’s a part of your brain that’s like, ‘This would make a great episode.’ But you have to be careful because sometimes it’s a coping mechanism and it stops you from feeling what you need to be feeling in the moment. “You have to learn which one’s which. I’ve been learning to understand the difference between what’s for me and what’s for the art.” We are discussing the perils – and the pearls – of mining life for material because Juice, Rizwan’s glorious BBC Three comedy, has returned for a second series and concludes this week. The first, shown in 2023, earned rave reviews and won an RTS Award for best comedy drama. Rizwan, meanwhile, picked up the Bafta for best male comedy performance for his turn as Jamma, a hyper, hapless manchild whose inability – or unwillingness – to be a grown-up usually ends in disaster or humiliation. While Rizwan says that Juice is “definitely fictional”, it is undoubtedly at least semi-autobiographical. It feels authentic to be otherwise. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/09/403CKEK79-copy-6249187-e1758795912177.jpg" width="1178" height="785" alt="Week 40 Mawaan Rizwan" title="RETRANSMITTED AMENDING FIRST NAME OF SHAHNAZ (left to right) Nabham Rizwan, Emily-Lloyd-Saini, Shahnaz Rizwan, Russell Tovey and Mawaan Rizwan at a screening for series two of the BBC programme 'Juice', at Curzon Hoxton in east London. Picture date: Thurs" /> Just don’t confuse “true” with “realistic”. One of the show’s joys is its tone. If Fleabag was cynical and Big Boys sentimental, Juice is surreal. When Jamma gets into a heightened emotional state, the world around him changes. Called into the office of his green-fingered boss, for instance, an anxious Jamma finds himself in a jungle of predatory plants, with malign vines making beelines for his ankles. Elsewhere, in a fraught moment with his buttoned-up older boyfriend Guy (Russell Tovey), an avoidant Jamma disappears down a tunnel in his bed. While being fantastical, Juice is also familial. His brother Nabhaan (Informer, Kaos) co-stars as Jamma’s brother Isaac, and their mother, Shahnaz, plays the boys’ mum Farida. “Back in the day, when I used to make YouTube videos, that was the thing that kept me close to my family. When we put on wigs and played these silly characters, we could talk about taboo subjects. Comedy sort of saved us. On Juice, I get to see my family and so avoid the guilt that comes with not seeing them. And, better still, I get paid for it.” Rizwan credits his mother – who emigrated from Pakistan to the UK, became a single parent and for years lived under the threat of being deported – with instilling his drive. It was her belief that the phrase was “When life gives you mangoes, make mango juice” that gives Juice its name. “There is a ferociousness with which my mum raised us and I really thank her for it. Because she achieved the impossible, coming to this country and doing what she did, in a way, I had no choice. I could not be a failure. Even if I was a plumber, I’d be smashing it.” Does smashing it come with its own pressure? Not really, he says. There was no “difficult second album” syndrome with Juice. “There were so many things I wanted to do that couldn’t fit into the first six episodes, so they’re in the second series.” That said, Rizwan did feel a certain weight. “Every now and again, I would turn to my left and see the Bafta staring at me,” he says. “So I gave it to my mum to keep and now it’s in her bathroom.” He also says there were times when he worried that success would remove him from the conditions that inspired him. “I remember when I was rich enough to afford my first Egyptian cotton bedsheets, I was like, ‘It’s the beginning of the end!’ But I got over myself.” Born in Pakistan, Rizwan describes himself as queer. By virtue of his identity – or more accurately, his identities – he believes anything he does is political. “If you’re creative and from a marginalised background, sometimes there’s a pressure to be heavy-handed with a message or to right some of the wrongs of society through your work. That’s a shame because it can squash creativity and reduce the joy. And joy can in itself be political.” He is wary of being seen as speaking for anyone other than himself. “My goal is always to be someone who can’t be put in a box – a slippery fish, never a spokesperson. I’m not representing a community. I’m just waking up every day and writing one more page of script or filming one more scene.” Long may it continue.
Mawaan Rizwan on turning pain into comedy – and why Juice season 2 hits different
Mawaan Rizwan squeezes humour from his messy moments.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. “Monetising your trauma is very trendy at the moment, isn’t it?” Mawaan Rizwan muses, pointedly. “I’m someone who struggles with boundaries, so I have to be careful.” At 34, the YouTuber-turned-stand-up comedian, actor and writer has realised that “life isn’t just fodder”. “In the early days, I’d be in a writers’ room and I’d disclose a terrible thing from my life that would get worked into the script,” he recalls. “Then I’d get a note back saying, ‘I don’t think the character should feel that’, or ‘That makes me really dislike them.’ And I’d be dying inside, feeling vulnerable and exposed, because that was the choice I made. “Sometimes you go through a traumatic thing or horrific event and there’s a part of your brain that’s like, ‘This would make a great episode.’ But you have to be careful because sometimes it’s a coping mechanism and it stops you from feeling what you need to be feeling in the moment. You have to learn which one’s which. I’ve been learning to understand the difference between what’s for me and what’s for the art.” We are discussing the perils – and the pearls – of mining life for material because Juice, Rizwan’s glorious BBC Three comedy, has returned for a second series and concludes this week. The first, shown in 2023, earned rave reviews and won an RTS Award for best comedy drama. Rizwan, meanwhile, picked up the Bafta for best male comedy performance for his turn as Jamma, a hyper, hapless manchild whose inability – or unwillingness – to be a grown-up usually ends in disaster or humiliation. View oEmbed on the source website If the video above is not showing, you may need to change your privacy settings. In the Radio Times site footer, click ‘Manage Privacy Settings’. Under ‘Site Vendors’, consent to ‘YouTube’, then press Save & Exit. While Rizwan says that Juice is “definitely fictional”, it is undoubtedly at least semi-autobiographical. It feels authentic to be otherwise. Just don’t confuse “true” with “realistic”. One of the show’s joys is its tone. If Fleabag was cynical and Big Boys sentimental, Juice is surreal. When Jamma gets into a heightened emotional state, the world around him changes. Called into the office of his green-fingered boss, for instance, an anxious Jamma finds himself in a jungle of predatory plants, with malign vines making beelines for his ankles. Elsewhere, in a fraught moment with his buttoned-up older boyfriend Guy (Russell Tovey), an avoidant Jamma disappears down a tunnel in his bed. While being fantastical, Juice is also familial. His brother Nabhaan (Informer, Kaos) co-stars as Jamma’s brother Isaac, and their mother, Shahnaz, plays the boys’ mum Farida. “Back in the day, when I used to make YouTube videos, that was the thing that kept me close to my family. When we put on wigs and played these silly characters, we could talk about taboo subjects. Comedy sort of saved us. On Juice, I get to see my family and so avoid the guilt that comes with not seeing them. And, better still, I get paid for it.” Rizwan credits his mother – who emigrated from Pakistan to the UK, became a single parent and for years lived under the threat of being deported – with instilling his drive. It was her belief that the phrase was “When life gives you mangoes, make mango juice” that gives Juice its name. “There is a ferociousness with which my mum raised us and I really thank her for it. Because she achieved the impossible, coming to this country and doing what she did, in a way, I had no choice. I could not be a failure. Even if I was a plumber, I’d be smashing it.” Does smashing it come with its own pressure? Not really, he says. There was no “difficult second album” syndrome with Juice. “There were so many things I wanted to do that couldn’t fit into the first six episodes, so they’re in the second series.” That said, Rizwan did feel a certain weight. “Every now and again, I would turn to my left and see the Bafta staring at me,” he says. “So I gave it to my mum to keep and now it’s in her bathroom.” He also says there were times when he worried that success would remove him from the conditions that inspired him. “I remember when I was rich enough to afford my first Egyptian cotton bedsheets, I was like, ‘It’s the beginning of the end!’ But I got over myself.” Born in Pakistan, Rizwan describes himself as queer. By virtue of his identity – or more accurately, his identities – he believes anything he does is political. “If you’re creative and from a marginalised background, sometimes there’s a pressure to be heavy-handed with a message or to right some of the wrongs of society through your work. That’s a shame because it can squash creativity and reduce the joy. And joy can in itself be political.” He is wary of being seen as speaking for anyone other than himself. “My goal is always to be someone who can’t be put in a box – a slippery fish, never a spokesperson. I’m not representing a community. I’m just waking up every day and writing one more page of script or filming one more scene.” Long may it continue. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Eric Idle: "There's a reason Hitler and Trump get rid of the comedians first"
Idle has slammed CBS for axing Stephen Colbert, praised South Park’s savage take on Trump as “heroic”, and warned that comedy is vital for keeping power in check.
Comedian Eric Idle has criticised CBS in an interview with the Radio Times for cancelling Stephen Colbert – and praised South Park as heroic for its depiction of Donald Trump. Speaking before Jimmy Kimmel was suspended by ABC over comments about the death of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk, but after The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was cancelled by CBS, Idle said: "There’s a reason Hitler and Trump get rid of the comedians first. They hate being laughed at. "Comedy is saying the right thing at the wrong time. It is so important. It is telling truth to power and it’s keeping people sane," he continued. Reacting to the news of Kimmel’s suspension, Trump said on social media: “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. “Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy [Fallon] and Seth [Meyers], two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT.” Describing Colbert’s sacking as “very pusillanimous” in the Radio Times interview out on Tuesday, Idle noted that the broadcaster, who recently won an Emmy as the host of The Late Show, is "on the air until May to say anything he likes". Idle, who is currently on tour in the UK, also called South Park’s recent depiction of President Donald Trump "heroic" and said that the scathing, satirical, and sometimes scatological animated series has done "a lot of damage" to the US president. The Comedy Central series has portrayed Trump as petty and petulant and he is shown as being in a sexual relationship with Satan. Spamalot writer Idle, 82, added that Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s series "connects with an undercurrent of anti-, and that’s vital". "I was in the war, we laughed at Hitler and it made a difference. It diminishes their power." For tickets to see Eric Idle on the last few dates of his tour go to ericidle.com/tour. Read our full interview with Eric Idle in the next issue of Radio Times magazine, out on Tuesday 23rd September. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Oscar winner Rachel Shenton is used to the limelight – but her character Helen in All Creatures Great and Small is now looking for some excitement of her own...
Add All Creatures Great and Small to your watchlist When, in 2018, Rachel Shenton won an Oscar for The Silent Child, the short film that she’d written, starred in and produced – and had taken 12 years of hard work to make – she signed her acceptance speech using British Sign Language. She was making good on the promise she’d made to the film’s six-year-old lead, Maisie Sly, who played Libby, a profoundly deaf child born into a hearing family indifferent to learning sign language. “My hands are shaking a little bit so I apologise,” Shenton began, a tremor in her voice. She then went on, with astonishing composure given that she’d just been presented with an Academy Award for the first script she’d ever written, to draw attention to real-life Libbys everywhere. “Millions of children all over the world live in silence and face communication barriers... Deafness is a silent disability – you can’t see it and it’s not life-threatening.” Then the music struck up as Shenton’s co-producer Chris Overton (her then-fiancé, now husband) was thanking their parents for making cupcakes to raise money to finance the film, and Shenton’s moment in the sun was done. It must have been a surreal, magical experience. “We’d made the film on a shoestring, it was the first thing I’d written, and we never imagined it might be eligible for, never mind win, an Oscar,” Shenton says now. “While afterwards there was immense pressure that I’m only just getting over now, I’m incredibly grateful for it.” Shenton was inspired to write the film by a life-changing event. When she was 12, her father lost his hearing after undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Seeing the effects on her family and her dad, who died two years later, she learnt and fell in love with sign language and became involved with the deaf community. “I’ve seen the needless struggles that deaf people and deaf children face,” she’s said. “That gave me the impetus to write.” How did the Oscar change her life? Shenton, who until then was probably best known for playing Hollyoaks airhead Mitzeee Minniver, pauses for a moment. “It changes everything and it changes nothing. It changes everything in terms of getting a meeting and being able to talk about your project. If I was to send a script somewhere, it would probably get me read and maybe get me in the room. But in another way, it changes nothing. Because ultimately, it’s about the work. You’ve always got to be doing good work. Whether that’s producing, creating, writing, acting... it’s got to be good.” Luckily, Shenton has been doing good work, although that has less to do with luck and more to do with her talent and industry. This includes All Creatures Great and Small, returning for its sixth series this week, in which she plays the redoubtable – but feisty – Helen Herriot, wife to James (played by Nicholas Ralph). The Herriots’ relationship is the engine of the show: the first two series driven by the will-they-won’t-they of their romance, the next two by the will-they-won’t-they start a family. As Helen is the north star by which James navigates, she is the drama’s moral centre and its most significant character, yet she’s only really sketched out in James Herriot’s original eight novels. How did Shenton flesh her out so fully? “I made Helen with what I could pull from the books but everything we learn about her in the books is through James and what he feels about her. So we were really lucky that we had access to Jim and Rosie, the children of the real James and Helen. They’ve been brilliant and so generous with sharing stories and anecdotes. Because we didn’t know that much about her, there’s a freedom playing her because there was no blueprint.” But there was a real person – Joan, the wife of Alf Wight, the real James Herriot. Doesn’t playing that kind of role come with responsibility? “Although, when we started, I didn’t realise quite how global and loved it was, you know the world of James Herriot, so you want to get it right. Then I met Jim and Rosie and that feeling of wanting to do All Creatures justice becomes very real because here are two people who will be watching their parents on TV. Now, we’re an adaptation and it’s a drama, but of course you want to find and capture the essence of their mum. So I did feel personal responsibility, yes.” And has she captured the essence of Helen/Joan? “Rosie says so but maybe she’s just being polite,” Shenton says. “When I’ve emailed to ask her for stories and details, what’s stuck with me is Helen’s genuine joy with the small things, that she was very content in her pocket of the world and being at home, that she didn’t take life too seriously, that she was a bit cheeky. I’ve tried to weave those things in.” While ostensibly about the travails of now postwar Yorkshire vets, All Creatures also explores a period of extraordinary social change, especially through its female characters. However, it does give the period a much rosier glow and endows its characters with more liberal sensibilities than they would have possessed. How does Shenton find the balancing act between truthful and palatable, particularly when it comes to telling women’s stories? “I know women have always been multi-faceted but more often than not, we just didn’t see it. What’s so wonderful about getting to tell this kind of story through a modern lens is that we do get to tell the truth of these women as they always have been. We get to peek behind the curtain. “This season, Jenny goes off on an adventure and it prompts Helen to look at her life, at the things she hasn’t done, and to get a bit self-reflective, probably for the first time – and I think that’s probably the truth of the time. Helen is really family-centric: being the head of a house and looking after two small children is a huge responsibility and one that she loved. But I think you do get to see a glimmer of something else in this story. Things only become tricky when there’s a choice.” Shenton was born and raised in Stoke-on-Trent, where she studied performing arts at the local college, and her choice of parts suggests a fearlessness. Most recently, in The Rumour, Channel 5’s thriller about the real-life consequences of online gossip, she plays Joanna, a single mum who relocates, only to become obsessed with the rumour that a child killer lives in her new home town. What follows is what Shenton describes as “the psychological unravelling” of Joanna as she follows her feeling that something about her life isn’t quite right. “I loved it,” Shenton says with relish. She shot The Rumour – in which Joanna appears in almost every scene – when she was pregnant. “It was knackering and I was probably maybe even a bit extra tired, but it was brilliant.” It was also the first time Shenton found herself in the position of number one on the call sheet. “Whatever that means,” she says. Not that she’s taking her first – but surely not her last – TV lead for granted. Not when she considers how much effort it took to get to where she is and what she says are “the practicalities of being a working-class actor”. “When I was coming up, I was working three jobs at one point just to get to auditions and make it work,” she says, her flattened vowels hinting at her Staffordshire origins. “Often, people can’t even get in [to the industry] because they can’t afford to take time off, or can’t risk losing their job just to audition and take a chance on something. That’s the reality.”
All Creatures Great and Small star reveals Helen’s journey in season 6 - and how she captures the spirit of real-life figure
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. When, in 2018, Rachel Shenton won an Oscar for The Silent Child, the short film that she’d written, starred in and produced – and had taken 12 years of hard work to make – she signed her acceptance speech using British Sign Language. She was making good on the promise she’d made to the film’s six-year-old lead, Maisie Sly, who played Libby, a profoundly deaf child born into a hearing family indifferent to learning sign language. “My hands are shaking a little bit so I apologise,” Shenton began, a tremor in her voice. She then went on, with astonishing composure given that she’d just been presented with an Academy Award for the first script she’d ever written, to draw attention to real-life Libbys everywhere. “Millions of children all over the world live in silence and face communication barriers... Deafness is a silent disability – you can’t see it and it’s not life-threatening.” Then the music struck up as Shenton’s co-producer Chris Overton (her then-fiancé, now husband) was thanking their parents for making cupcakes to raise money to finance the film, and Shenton’s moment in the sun was done. It must have been a surreal, magical experience. “We’d made the film on a shoestring, it was the first thing I’d written, and we never imagined it might be eligible for, never mind win, an Oscar,” Shenton says now. “While afterwards there was immense pressure that I’m only just getting over now, I’m incredibly grateful for it.” Shenton was inspired to write the film by a life-changing event. When she was 12, her father lost his hearing after undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Seeing the effects on her family and her dad, who died two years later, she learnt and fell in love with sign language and became involved with the deaf community. “I’ve seen the needless struggles that deaf people and deaf children face,” she’s said. “That gave me the impetus to write.” How did the Oscar change her life? Shenton, who until then was probably best known for playing Hollyoaks airhead Mitzeee Minniver, pauses for a moment. “It changes everything and it changes nothing. It changes everything in terms of getting a meeting and being able to talk about your project. If I was to send a script somewhere, it would probably get me read and maybe get me in the room. But in another way, it changes nothing. Because ultimately, it’s about the work. You’ve always got to be doing good work. Whether that’s producing, creating, writing, acting... it’s got to be good.” Luckily, Shenton has been doing good work, although that has less to do with luck and more to do with her talent and industry. This includes All Creatures Great and Small, returning for its sixth series this week, in which she plays the redoubtable – but feisty – Helen Herriot, wife to James (played by Nicholas Ralph). The Herriots’ relationship is the engine of the show: the first two series driven by the will-they-won’t-they of their romance, the next two by the will-they-won’t-they start a family. As Helen is the north star by which James navigates, she is the drama’s moral centre and its most significant character, yet she’s only really sketched out in James Herriot’s original eight novels. How did Shenton flesh her out so fully? “I made Helen with what I could pull from the books but everything we learn about her in the books is through James and what he feels about her. So we were really lucky that we had access to Jim and Rosie, the children of the real James and Helen. They’ve been brilliant and so generous with sharing stories and anecdotes. Because we didn’t know that much about her, there’s a freedom playing her because there was no blueprint.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/09/All-Creatures-Great-and-Small-Rachel-Shenton-Nicholas-Ralph-a94e60c.jpg" width="3240" height="2160" alt="Rachel Shenton as Helen and Nicholas Ralph as James Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small, standing next to each other in front of rolling fields in the background." title="Rachel Shenton as Helen and Nicholas Ralph as James Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small" /> But there was a real person – Joan, the wife of Alf Wight, the real James Herriot. Doesn’t playing that kind of role come with responsibility? “Although, when we started, I didn’t realise quite how global and loved it was, you know the world of James Herriot, so you want to get it right. Then I met Jim and Rosie and that feeling of wanting to do All Creatures justice becomes very real because here are two people who will be watching their parents on TV. Now, we’re an adaptation and it’s a drama, but of course you want to find and capture the essence of their mum. So I did feel personal responsibility, yes.” And has she captured the essence of Helen/Joan? “Rosie says so but maybe she’s just being polite,” Shenton says. “When I’ve emailed to ask her for stories and details, what’s stuck with me is Helen’s genuine joy with the small things, that she was very content in her pocket of the world and being at home, that she didn’t take life too seriously, that she was a bit cheeky. I’ve tried to weave those things in.” While ostensibly about the travails of now postwar Yorkshire vets, All Creatures also explores a period of extraordinary social change, especially through its female characters. However, it does give the period a much rosier glow and endows its characters with more liberal sensibilities than they would have possessed. How does Shenton find the balancing act between truthful and palatable, particularly when it comes to telling women’s stories? “I know women have always been multi-faceted but more often than not, we just didn’t see it. What’s so wonderful about getting to tell this kind of story through a modern lens is that we do get to tell the truth of these women as they always have been. We get to peek behind the curtain. “This season, Jenny goes off on an adventure and it prompts Helen to look at her life, at the things she hasn’t done, and to get a bit self-reflective, probably for the first time – and I think that’s probably the truth of the time. Helen is really family-centric: being the head of a house and looking after two small children is a huge responsibility and one that she loved. But I think you do get to see a glimmer of something else in this story. Things only become tricky when there’s a choice.” Shenton was born and raised in Stoke-on-Trent, where she studied performing arts at the local college, and her choice of parts suggests a fearlessness. Most recently, in The Rumour, 5’s thriller about the real-life consequences of online gossip, she plays Joanna, a single mum who relocates, only to become obsessed with the rumour that a child killer lives in her new home town. What follows is what Shenton describes as “the psychological unravelling” of Joanna as she follows her feeling that something about her life isn’t quite right. “I loved it,” Shenton says with relish. She shot The Rumour – in which Joanna appears in almost every scene – when she was pregnant. “It was knackering and I was probably maybe even a bit extra tired, but it was brilliant.” It was also the first time Shenton found herself in the position of number one on the call sheet. “Whatever that means,” she says. Not that she’s taking her first – but surely not her last – TV lead for granted. Not when she considers how much effort it took to get to where she is and what she says are “the practicalities of being a working-class actor”. “When I was coming up, I was working three jobs at one point just to get to auditions and make it work,” she says, her flattened vowels hinting at her Staffordshire origins. “Often, people can’t even get in [to the industry] because they can’t afford to take time off, or can’t risk losing their job just to audition and take a chance on something. That’s the reality.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. All Creatures Great and Small returns to 5 on Thursday 25 September at 9pm. You can order James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small from Amazon. 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.
Andrew Lincoln stars in Coldwater, the new thriller written by David Ireland about violence, faith, masculinity and middle age
Add Coldwater to your watchlist Spoiler alert: Coldwater, the new ITV1 thriller created by Irish playwright and screenwriter David Ireland and starring Andrew Lincoln, begins with a shocking act of violence. In a London playground with his children, John (Lincoln) sees a man punch a boy in the face. Shocked, he says nothing. A woman also witnesses the assault. Appalled, she calls the man out. The man then attacks her. This time John does something — he runs from the park with his children, leaving the woman to a brutal beating. This incident propels John, his wife Fiona (Indira Varma) and children to move to Coldwater, a remote and apparently idyllic Scottish village, which John imagines will be free of monstrous characters like the playground thug. Encountering his neighbour Tommy (an unrestrained Ewan Bremner in full weirdy-beardy odd Scot mode) and his wife Rebecca (a seemingly less unhinged Eve Myles), John soon realises that he couldn’t be more wrong. As Coldwater reveals its slimy underbelly, tension gives way to violence, mayhem leads to murder, and John finds out that you can’t avoid the fight for ever. Monarch of the Glen, this is not. What’s Coldwater about? DAVID IRELAND I’m still not really sure. I’m never really sure what anything’s about. I wrote the first episode in 2020, during the lockdown. I was obsessively running and obsessively reading the Bible and obsessively reading true crime books, and my wife and I were talking about moving to the countryside. All that fed its way in, so every time I watch it, I see something different. I think it’s about faith. I think it’s about community. I think it’s about a man running away from himself and running away from God. When he runs away from London, John thinks he’s running into safety, but actually… Andrew described it as about somebody who runs into the woods and meets a monster. I think that’s probably the best description of the show, in a nutshell. What was it that appealed to you about the part? ANDREW LINCOLN I said no to it twice. I was suitably frightened by the part, because it’s a man being dismantled. His masculinity being dismantled, he’s lost and there’s a real sense of a man in freefall, trying to get a sense of who he is in middle age. But I couldn’t get away and kept returning because I admire David’s writing so much. His superpower is that he writes such brilliant, funny dialogue. He tickles you as he pushes you off a cliff and I’d describe it as an unromantic comedy thriller. There are so many familiar things to me – I recognise myself in the part and I recognise the marriage. I worked on it for six months in the development stage, but still I kept asking, “What is this? What are we doing?” One minute, it’s hopefully very funny and then one minute, it’s horrific. It’s really knotty as a result of that. The opening scene of a man viciously attacking a woman is quite disturbing, not least because the protagonist — our “hero” — does nothing. DI I was really surprised when everybody started talking about it being controversial. I’ve written some really violently shocking plays and compared to them, it’s not controversial. Writing it was fine, hearing it in the reading was fine, but it was only when I saw it on screen, I thought, “This is maybe a bit much…” AL The opening sequence was the reason I said no to it. So, when we shot it, I said: “This is going to be a tightrope”. Because he’s not an archetype – he’s an everyman not behaving in a way that everybody would want to behave under duress. For that to be in the eyes of the audience is challenging. For your return to British television after a decade of playing The Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes, Coldwater is quite a departure. AL It was a very conscious decision: after an archetypal sort of hero, this is the palate cleanser. And it was the best possible way of coming back to the UK. Not that I had left – my kids go to school here – and I hadn’t turned my back on anybody. It just so happens that my head’s been over there and my career’s been over there and I was under contract over there. I’m just trying to find work, whoever will have me. Coldwater is about masculinity, among other things. Who taught you to be a man? AL My mother, because she was much more present in my life than my father – and my peers. It’s interesting having children because there are certain tipping points – puberty, obviously – where they know all your best lines, your politics and your opinions and they turn away from you towards their peers. Your job is done until they get through that and you meet them again at 24, shake hands and say, “Nice to see you again”. DI My father died when I was four, and I’m not sure he’d have been a good role model. My mother remarried when I was nine and my stepfather was a decent, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth man – and he was a good role model. I find myself pretty clueless as a father but I think a lot of people feel that way. I try to make my children laugh, I try to be as patient as I can and never lose my temper and that’s the best I can do. From that first scene, Coldwater contains moments of explosive violence. Have you ever been confronted by violence like that? DI I’ve been in situations where things threatened to get violent a few times but never with my children around. In those few instances, I remember having a moment of freezing and hesitation – and then intervening. But it was never an intervention to the extent that it got too frightening. A lot of writers are naturally passive and observe things, and I think sometimes in any dramatic incident, there’s something in me that will watch and take it all in. AL I don’t remember much of the 90s but I do remember being with my old school rugby team, everybody a bit worse for wear, in a Hells Angels bar. A fight started, a glass got smashed, one of our guys had hit this other guy, and then he hit another of my friends and flattened his nose. Someone had a glass in my face and I was like, “Whoa whoa whoa! Look at his nose!” That gave us about 30 seconds to get the hell out of Dodge. I don’t think that was particularly heroic.I think it was just adrenaline. Have you ever felt that violence within yourself? AL I’m pretty mild-mannered and it takes a lot to get me riled. Although I did lose it with my daughter when she was two, because she wouldn’t put a sock on. I had to walk away and count to 20. And I remember another instance: I was in Australia, doing my PADI [Professional Association of Diving Instructors] course, with two friends, Shaun and Andy. Shaun is black and Andy is Asian. And there was this guy called Jeff. It was hot, I was three days into having given up smoking and we were quite nervous because there were great white sharks in Sydney Harbour. Jeff just kept being racist and I lost it. Both Andy and Shaun stepped in on my behalf and said – and this was really interesting – “Calm down. It’s not like we’re not used to it”. To this day, they say that I went “full Nosferatu”. DI Growing up in Belfast, in a working class environment, I saw a lot of violence. Initially as a child, you’re shocked by it, but then as you grow up, it becomes normal. I grew up with the fear that inside me, there was a potential for violence. I think that’s where a lot of the violence in my work has come from. It’s like the characters of John and Tommy. Tommy is very comfortable with violence and John has violence within him but he’s very uncomfortable with it. Tommy and John are both me. There’s an intense bathroom scene in which you bare your bum — do you feel nervous filming nude scenes? AL There’s nothing like getting into a shower with a camera – and cameraman – that close to you. It builds a camaraderie that no other scene can. Actors and crew are people trying to make something out of nothing so they’re genuinely very supportive, collaborative and generous – because they know how exposing and strange it is. So, everyone is very respectful. It’s so different to the way it was on This Life. That was like the Wild West. There were no intimacy coordinators then, it was bonkers. You mention faith as a theme of Coldwater. Do you have faith yourselves? DI Around the time I was writing the first episode, I started praying and all I can say is that something happened. I had some kind of experience that changed me and made me want to read the Bible and go to church. I used to read it before but not for any Christian purposes. I read it because it’s one of the cornerstones of our civilisation and it’s got great stories in it that might inspire me – some of which are extremely violent. Now though, every morning before work, I read four or five chapters of the Bible for Christian purposes. AL I’m deeply moved by being inside a church. I understand and I respect people’s devotion, but the only time I’ve ever felt compelled to go to church was in the 90s to hear a gospel choir. I love a gospel choir. I have friends who are Muslim, I have friends who are Jewish, and Christian friends as well. I’m jealous about their practice and how family and community is absolutely epicentre of a lot of worship in the world.
Coldwater star Andrew Lincoln reveals one moment in life when he "lost it" - and talks filming shower scenes
Andrew Lincoln stars in Coldwater, the new thriller written by David Ireland about violence, faith, masculinity and middle age.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Spoiler alert: Coldwater, the new ITV1 thriller created by Irish playwright and screenwriter David Ireland and starring Andrew Lincoln, begins with a shocking act of violence. In a London playground with his children, John (Lincoln) sees a man punch a boy in the face. Shocked, he says nothing. A woman also witnesses the assault. Appalled, she calls the man out. The man then attacks her. This time John does something — he runs from the park with his children, leaving the woman to a brutal beating. This incident propels John, his wife Fiona (Indira Varma) and children to move to Coldwater, a remote and apparently idyllic Scottish village, which John imagines will be free of monstrous characters like the playground thug. Encountering his neighbour Tommy (an unrestrained Ewen Bremner in full weirdy-beardy odd Scot mode) and his wife Rebecca (a seemingly less unhinged Eve Myles), John soon realises that he couldn’t be more wrong. As Coldwater reveals its slimy underbelly, tension gives way to violence, mayhem leads to murder, and John finds out that you can’t avoid the fight for ever. Monarch of the Glen, this is not. View oEmbed on the source website What’s Coldwater about? DAVID IRELAND I’m still not really sure. I’m never really sure what anything’s about. I wrote the first episode in 2020, during the lockdown. I was obsessively running and obsessively reading the Bible and obsessively reading true crime books, and my wife and I were talking about moving to the countryside. All that fed its way in, so every time I watch it, I see something different. I think it’s about faith. I think it’s about community. I think it’s about a man running away from himself and running away from God. When he runs away from London, John thinks he’s running into safety, but actually… Andrew described it as about somebody who runs into the woods and meets a monster. I think that’s probably the best description of the show, in a nutshell. What was it that appealed to you about the part? ANDREW LINCOLN I said no to it twice. I was suitably frightened by the part, because it’s a man being dismantled. His masculinity being dismantled, he’s lost and there’s a real sense of a man in freefall, trying to get a sense of who he is in middle age. But I couldn’t get away and kept returning because I admire David’s writing so much. His superpower is that he writes such brilliant, funny dialogue. He tickles you as he pushes you off a cliff and I’d describe it as an unromantic comedy thriller. There are so many familiar things to me – I recognise myself in the part and I recognise the marriage. I worked on it for six months in the development stage, but still I kept asking, “What is this? What are we doing?” One minute, it’s hopefully very funny and then one minute, it’s horrific. It’s really knotty as a result of that. The opening scene of a man viciously attacking a woman is quite disturbing, not least because the protagonist — our “hero” — does nothing. DI I was really surprised when everybody started talking about it being controversial. I’ve written some really violently shocking plays and compared to them, it’s not controversial. Writing it was fine, hearing it in the reading was fine, but it was only when I saw it on screen, I thought, “This is maybe a bit much…” AL The opening sequence was the reason I said no to it. So, when we shot it, I said: “This is going to be a tightrope”. Because he’s not an archetype – he’s an everyman not behaving in a way that everybody would want to behave under duress. For that to be in the eyes of the audience is challenging. For your return to British television after a decade of playing The Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes, Coldwater is quite a departure. AL It was a very conscious decision: after an archetypal sort of hero, this is the palate cleanser. And it was the best possible way of coming back to the UK. Not that I had left – my kids go to school here – and I hadn’t turned my back on anybody. It just so happens that my head’s been over there and my career’s been over there and I was under contract over there. I’m just trying to find work, whoever will have me. Coldwater is about masculinity, among other things. Who taught you to be a man? AL My mother, because she was much more present in my life than my father – and my peers. It’s interesting having children because there are certain tipping points – puberty, obviously – where they know all your best lines, your politics and your opinions and they turn away from you towards their peers. Your job is done until they get through that and you meet them again at 24, shake hands and say, “Nice to see you again”. DI My father died when I was four, and I’m not sure he’d have been a good role model. My mother remarried when I was nine and my stepfather was a decent, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth man – and he was a good role model. I find myself pretty clueless as a father but I think a lot of people feel that way. I try to make my children laugh, I try to be as patient as I can and never lose my temper and that’s the best I can do. From that first scene, Coldwater contains moments of explosive violence. Have you ever been confronted by violence like that? DI I’ve been in situations where things threatened to get violent a few times but never with my children around. In those few instances, I remember having a moment of freezing and hesitation – and then intervening. But it was never an intervention to the extent that it got too frightening. A lot of writers are naturally passive and observe things, and I think sometimes in any dramatic incident, there’s something in me that will watch and take it all in. AL I don’t remember much of the 90s but I do remember being with my old school rugby team, everybody a bit worse for wear, in a Hells Angels bar. A fight started, a glass got smashed, one of our guys had hit this other guy, and then he hit another of my friends and flattened his nose. Someone had a glass in my face and I was like, “Whoa whoa whoa! Look at his nose!” That gave us about 30 seconds to get the hell out of Dodge. I don’t think that was particularly heroic. I think it was just adrenaline. Have you ever felt that violence within yourself? AL I’m pretty mild-mannered and it takes a lot to get me riled. Although I did lose it with my daughter when she was two, because she wouldn’t put a sock on. I had to walk away and count to 20. And I remember another instance: I was in Australia, doing my PADI [Professional Association of Diving Instructors] course, with two friends, Shaun and Andy. Shaun is black and Andy is Asian. And there was this guy called Jeff. It was hot, I was three days into having given up smoking and we were quite nervous because there were great white sharks in Sydney Harbour. Jeff just kept being racist and I lost it. Both Andy and Shaun stepped in on my behalf and said – and this was really interesting – “Calm down. It’s not like we’re not used to it”. To this day, they say that I went “full Nosferatu”. DI Growing up in Belfast, in a working class environment, I saw a lot of violence. Initially as a child, you’re shocked by it, but then as you grow up, it becomes normal. I grew up with the fear that inside me, there was a potential for violence. I think that’s where a lot of the violence in my work has come from. It’s like the characters of John and Tommy. Tommy is very comfortable with violence and John has violence within him but he’s very uncomfortable with it. Tommy and John are both me. There’s an intense bathroom scene in which you bare your bum — do you feel nervous filming nude scenes? AL There’s nothing like getting into a shower with a camera – and cameraman – that close to you. It builds a camaraderie that no other scene can. Actors and crew are people trying to make something out of nothing so they’re genuinely very supportive, collaborative and generous – because they know how exposing and strange it is. So, everyone is very respectful. It’s so different to the way it was on This Life. That was like the Wild West. There were no intimacy coordinators then, it was bonkers. You mention faith as a theme of Coldwater. Do you have faith yourselves? DI Around the time I was writing the first episode, I started praying and all I can say is that something happened. I had some kind of experience that changed me and made me want to read the Bible and go to church. I used to read it before but not for any Christian purposes. I read it because it’s one of the cornerstones of our civilisation and it’s got great stories in it that might inspire me – some of which are extremely violent. Now though, every morning before work, I read four or five chapters of the Bible for Christian purposes. AL I’m deeply moved by being inside a church. I understand and I respect people’s devotion, but the only time I’ve ever felt compelled to go to church was in the 90s to hear a gospel choir. I love a gospel choir. I have friends who are Muslim, I have friends who are Jewish, and Christian friends as well. I’m jealous about their practice and how family and community is absolutely epicentre of a lot of worship in the world. 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.
After 32 years of being Sonia in Albert Square she’s ready for gardening leave
Add Cooking with the Stars to your watchlist What’s the view from your sofa? There are two sofas. From one, you can watch telly; the other looks out on to lovely fields. I was a town girl growing up [around Islington, north London], but I made the choice to move out to the countryside. For my two daughters, it really makes a difference. What do you like about living in the countryside? We go out for nice walks. Having the country pub and the village hall, it’s very Vicar of Dibley. There’s a sense of everybody looking out for each other, which is sometimes missing in a city. What have you enjoyed watching? The whole of Glastonbury. We had family over and it felt like our own mini festival at home. I like to switch off and just watch nice, easy things like Gardeners’ World, University Challenge or Grand Designs. The older I get, the more I just like gentle television. If you’re a Gardeners’ World fan, does that mean you like gardening? My other half, Marc [Humphreys, a cameraman] is more of the gardener. Having two kids and a full-time job, I feel like it’s something you do when you’ve got a bit more time. I do enjoy it when I can, though. It can be a very meditative thing – potting plants, looking at your seeds, even watering the garden in the evening when it’s been really hot. You’re a contestant on Cooking with the Stars. Do you enjoy cooking? I’d say cooking is probably my favourite hobby. Being in the kitchen, putting the radio on… it’s all about having the time to do it. That’s why I love Sundays – they’re all about making a roast dinner. It’s a bit like a religion for me. It sounds as if food isn’t just fuel to you, as it is for some people. I love food. I love cooking and going for meals. Cooking for people and watching them enjoy what you’ve cooked, it brings me joy. I just think it’s the heart of family and friendship. You released weight-loss DVDs in 2007 and 2013. Is there a tension between loving food and the scrutiny your body is subject to as a woman? The DVD wasn’t a good move for me – I did it for the money. I’m now 42, and to be honest, I could be doing a bit more exercise at the moment, but I just can’t be bothered. I think, “If this is the size I’m meant to be, then I need to be happy with that.” I don’t overeat. I enjoy my food. I like a glass of wine. I like a packet of crisps, but you can’t do it every day. I think everything in moderation. If I go the other way and want to lose a lot of weight, my days aren’t as good. That sounds like sensible behaviour to be modelling for your children. I think it really is. There’s so much pressure with image that I just try to put it into perspective and say to them, “You’re so lucky to be able to see, to be able to hear. As long as you’re not abusing yourself – drinking too much, overeating, you know – whatever shape we are, we’re just very lucky to be here.” Was it difficult to leave EastEnders after 32 years of playing Sonia? It was a really natural decision to make. Sometimes when you’re in something, you think that’s all there is, so when I had a break from EastEnders last year, I did The Masked Singer and a doc for Channel 4 [What’s the Big Deal: Britain’s Best Buys?]. Unless you’re free, you’ll never know what’s out there. So I thought I’d like to say goodbye to Sonia and see what else is going on. What is out there? My podcast [Life with Nat] is going really well, and I’ve got a book [Happy Days] coming out in October. I would love for a gritty or funny role to come up, but after being Sonia for such a long time, I’m really enjoying being myself.
Photographer Martin Parr shows us his singular vision of Britain
Add I Am Martin Parr to your watchlist “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’ 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.”
EastEnders icon Natalie Cassidy reveals how leaving soap was a “natural decision” - and why weight loss DVDs were not “a good move”
After 32 years as Sonia in EastEnders, Cassidy is relishing life beyond Albert Square.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. What’s the view from your sofa? There are two sofas. From one, you can watch telly; the other looks out on to lovely fields. I was a town girl growing up [around Islington, north London], but I made the choice to move out to the countryside. For my two daughters, it really makes a difference. What do you like about living in the countryside? We go out for nice walks. Having the country pub and the village hall, it’s very Vicar of Dibley. There’s a sense of everybody looking out for each other, which is sometimes missing in a city. What have you enjoyed watching? The whole of Glastonbury. We had family over and it felt like our own mini festival at home. I like to switch off and just watch nice, easy things like Gardeners’ World, University Challenge or Grand Designs. The older I get, the more I just like gentle television. If you’re a Gardeners’ World fan, does that mean you like gardening? My other half, Marc [Humphreys, a cameraman] is more of the gardener. Having two kids and a full-time job, I feel like it’s something you do when you’ve got a bit more time. I do enjoy it when I can, though. It can be a very meditative thing – potting plants, looking at your seeds, even watering the garden in the evening when it’s been really hot. You’re a contestant on Cooking with the Stars. Do you enjoy cooking? I’d say cooking is probably my favourite hobby. Being in the kitchen, putting the radio on… it’s all about having the time to do it. That’s why I love Sundays – they’re all about making a roast dinner. It’s a bit like a religion for me. It sounds as if food isn’t just fuel to you, as it is for some people. I love food. I love cooking and going for meals. Cooking for people and watching them enjoy what you’ve cooked, it brings me joy. I just think it’s the heart of family and friendship. You released weight-loss DVDs in 2007 and 2013. Is there a tension between loving food and the scrutiny your body is subject to as a woman? The DVD wasn’t a good move for me – I did it for the money. I’m now 42, and to be honest, I could be doing a bit more exercise at the moment, but I just can’t be bothered. I think, "If this is the size I’m meant to be, then I need to be happy with that." I don’t overeat. I enjoy my food. I like a glass of wine. I like a packet of crisps, but you can’t do it every day. I think everything in moderation. If I go the other way and want to lose a lot of weight, my days aren’t as good. That sounds like sensible behaviour to be modelling for your children. I think it really is. There’s so much pressure with image that I just try to put it into perspective and say to them, “You’re so lucky to be able to see, to be able to hear. As long as you’re not abusing yourself – drinking too much, overeating, you know – whatever shape we are, we’re just very lucky to be here.” Was it difficult to leave EastEnders after 32 years of playing Sonia? It was a really natural decision to make. Sometimes when you’re in something, you think that’s all there is, so when I had a break from EastEnders last year, I did The Masked Singer and a doc for Channel 4 [What’s the Big Deal: Britain’s Best Buys?]. Unless you’re free, you’ll never know what’s out there. So I thought I’d like to say goodbye to Sonia and see what else is going on. What is out there? My podcast [Life with Nat] is going really well, and I’ve got a book [Happy Days] coming out in October. I would love for a gritty or funny role to come up, but after being Sonia for such a long time, I’m really enjoying being myself. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – <a class="_mizu194a _1ah31bk5 _ra3xnqa1 _128m1bk5 _1cvmnqa1 _4davt94y _4bfu1r31 _1hms8stv _ajmmnqa1 _vchhusvi _syaz14q2 _ect41gqc _1a3b1r31 _4fpr8stv _5goinqa1 _f8pj14q2 _9oik1r31 _1bnxglyw _jf4cnqa1 _30l314q2 _1nrm1r31 _c2waglyw _1iohnqa1 _9h8h16c2 _1053w7te _1ienw7te _n0fxw7te _1vhvg3x0" title="https://www.buysubscriptions.com/print/radio-times-magazine-subscription" href="https://www.buysubscriptions.com/print/radio-times-magazine-subscription" data-renderer-mark="true" data-is-router-link="false" data-testid="link-with-safety">subscribe here. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Michelle Ryan on why she's returned to Albert Square
Add EastEnders to your watchlist It is one of soap’s most memorable moments. On a chilly October night in Walford, in the heat of a blazing row, a frantic Kat and Zoe Slater traded two lines of dialogue that are probably the most famous ever uttered in EastEnders. Today, they still resonate with the British viewing public to such an extent that the last time Jessie Wallace, who plays Kat, had them parroted back at her by a member of the aforementioned public was the morning of her interview with Radio Times – despite the dialogue being almost 25 years old. ZOE: You ain’t my mother! Beat. KAT: Yes I am! Watched by an audience of some 19 million, that moment in late 2001 when Kat revealed to a stroppy Zoe (Michelle Ryan) that they were not sisters, as Zoe had thought, as indeed Zoe had been told by her whole family for her entire life, cemented the Slaters as a cornerstone clan of Albert Square. They arrived in Walford in September 2000, a shower of shrieking banshees, causing a commotion on the day of Ethel Skinner’s funeral. It was a carefully considered collision of old and new, a changing of the guard moment for the BBC soap. Like the Battersbys in Coronation Street and the Dingles in Emmerdale, the Slaters were disruptors who generated stories by antagonising, or seducing, their neighbours. Audiences were divided between Slater fans and Slater haters, but there was one thing everyone agreed upon: you couldn’t ignore them. The confrontation between Kat and Zoe had been the culmination of years of planning. We the audience had known that Kat was Zoe’s mum since Kat and her dad Charlie’s heart-to-heart six months prior, in which she shared how hard it was treating her child like her sister. The “big reveal” on that autumn night was only really news to Zoe. The shock for the audience was discovering the exact nature of Zoe’s parentage – that, at 13, Kat had been raped by her uncle Harry and that she’d carried the resulting pregnancy to term with the baby then raised by Kat’s mother, Viv, as her own. It was a fantastic back-story, making sense of Kat as a character and confirming her status as a survivor, tough as old boots but carrying damage you could see from space. For Zoe, however, the clash marked a high point for a character who was arguably never more compelling than in its immediate aftermath. When Zoe left Albert Square in 2005, tears were shed but there was no “Don’t Go, Zo” campaign. Cut to 20 years later and Zoe has come home to Walford. And no one is more surprised than Michelle Ryan. After all, she’d been asked back before and always declined. “In the past, the timing just wasn’t right. I didn’t feel a need to do it and, for me, there always has to be a need,” Ryan explains, relaxing after the Radio Times photoshoot with a glass of what might be champagne. “This time, I surprised myself with how open I was to it.” She continues: “It was the 40th [anniversary of EastEnders, in February] and there was a lot of buzz about it. I happened to have just joined Instagram at that time and I saw some of the fan comments and was really moved by them. Then I met up with Kacey [Ainsworth, who played another Slater sister, Little Mo] and we were reminiscing about the good times, how it was primetime television, and there were such great scripts. Kacey and I were saying how lucky we were to be a group of women, a family of women, that were at the forefront of all these huge storylines that hadn’t really been explored before.” Ryan mentioned all this to her agent “and she was like, ‘Are you psychic? I’ve had EastEnders on the phone.’” So, what had changed for Ryan? “I just want to be working more regularly,” she says with refreshing candour. “I really had loved the freedom of going from job to job, doing theatre and then maybe a film and building an eclectic CV. But there comes a time when you think, actually, it would be great to have a routine.” Ryan’s post-EastEnders CV certainly qualifies as eclectic: a recurring role in Merlin as sorceress Nimueh, a guest role in Doctor Who, a part in Steven Moffat’s Jekyll and the lead in the short-lived remake of Bionic Woman that necessitated a move to America. Turning her back on Albert Square was never a move the 41-year-old actor regretted. “I started so young and I just wanted to explore different things. Leaving was a tough decision because we’d had a really good run, but things went quiet and you have to decide: stay and keep doing the same sorts of storylines, or leave? I was in my 20s and so I thought I’d jump.” Chief among Ryan’s reasons for leaving was her dislike of long contracts. “I’d done a three-year and then a two-year and I was done at five years. When Bionic Woman came up, it was a seven-year contract. I really didn’t want to take it, but it was another of those ‘nothing to lose’ moments. I was 21 with no US credits, so I took it. With those big contracts, you have to be in the mindset for them. So probably to my detriment, I’ve turned some down, because you realise that they don’t always run that long.” Bionic Woman, for example, was cancelled after eight episodes. Now armed with a contract shorter than in her previous run on the Square, Ryan seems unfazed by the long days on set ahead of her. In fact, now she’s back, she says she relishes the workload. “The other day, we did a three-page scene with edits, one rehearsal, one take, and that was it. The quality was there, but you won’t do that speed on anything else. When we were discussing some of the storylines for Zoe, one of the directors said, ‘You will get match-fit again’. And he’s so right. because you can audition for things, you can be working on a series or a play, but there isn’t anything like a soap. And it’s just so good for the mind.” Ryan’s clearly very pragmatic – she concedes that as an actor in her 40s, job offers may not be as forthcoming as they once were – but all the same, returning to EastEnders must have more allure than a nice routine and keeping her mentally sharp? It’s good for the heart too, no? “Jessie is one of the best actresses I’ve ever worked with,” Ryan says. “The rapport we have and our friendship off screen as well, it all just feeds into that mother-daughter bond. On set, it’s like having someone in your corner all the time and always knowing that I’ll be fine. I can just talk to Jessie. We have a shorthand, and we have a similar kind of view on the characters and their journey.” They’re so in-sync that when it was suggested that there might be some sort of call-back to those famous lines or that they might be somehow repeated, “Instinctively, we were like, ‘We don’t think so,’ because it’s such a classic. So, we’ve had a little bit of input in certain areas, which you get from years of experience.” Ryan is undaunted by the prospect of returning to the tabloid glare, or of attracting attention. In contrast to Wallace, she says she now has very little experience of people shouting at her in the street. A bonus, perhaps, of an eclectic CV. “From the first day the Slaters were aired, I had someone shout out ‘Zoe’ to me and that continued until lockdown – that changed everything in the world. Now, I’m not really sure that it affects my life too much. I have realised that you need a profile, because without one, you can’t get the jobs that you want to be doing. I sort of stepped back, which was my choice, but then if you step back too far, then you suddenly aren’t on people’s radar. “So, a little bit of being recognised is important, even if you don’t get to choose it. But if people are shouting things out, it comes with the job, and it’s kind of key, because it means that people want to see you.”
Katherine Kelly has come a long way from pulling pints in the Rovers – now she’s flying high on screen and behind the scenes
Add In Flight to your watchlist In the 13 years since Katherine Kelly left Coronation Street, in which she played the self-sabotaging, cider-swilling barmaid Becky, she has played a lady of the realm, a newspaper editor, a call centre manager, an academic, a senior Post Office executive, at least three police officers – two of them DCIs – a housewife turned part-time sex-worker, a psychologist, two high-ranking civil servants – one of whom was definitely a spy – a mental health counsellor, and a physics teacher (although technically speaking, she was an alien masquerading as a physics teacher). In any given year, the only similarity shared by the characters that Kelly plays is that they are completely different from each other. In every role, blue-collar or upper-crust, she’s thoroughly convincing; as credible downtrodden as she is haughty. Impossible to typecast, perhaps Kelly’s neatest trick is that she transcends class. “That is a big compliment,” she says, a little thrown. “It’s one of the biggest barriers on and off-screen and I made a real conscious effort, very early in my career, to prove that I can play both. I’m a working-class girl from Yorkshire, but I went to Rada and didn’t do anything in my own accent until the last play I did. That’s why it was so important to me to play Lady Mae in Mr Selfridge after Corrie, because she was right at the top of the food chain in that show. Because of that, it’s never been an issue – although sometimes I do have to remind people that I am actually happier in a tracksuit than I am in a suit.” Class is on Kelly’s mind a lot these days. With her partner, award-winning writer Tony Pitts, she has established her own production company Make Me Films, to spot and nurture working-class talent. Later, Pitts will join us and tell me that it’s harder now for working-class kids to get into the arts than it was when he started out more than 40 years ago. Kelly agrees, “Getting your foot in the door is harder than ever and I find it really deeply upsetting that all that talent out there that is being ignored.” And so Kelly and Pitts are working with Arts Emergency, the mentoring charity and support network co-founded by the comedian Josie Long, to establish training schemes and outreach work. At a time when provision of arts subjects in state schools have been slashed, Kelly says “there are kids out there who are artistic but not from privileged backgrounds, who don’t think they have permission to get involved with the arts or creative industries”. As Pitts adds, “unless it’s put in front of you, you don’t even know it exists. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it”. Kelly’s latest role in Channel 4’s crime thriller, In Flight, is closer to Corrie’s Becky than to Mr Selfridge’s Lady Mae. Jo Conran, working as airline cabin crew, is “an everywoman” whose life is turned into “a living nightmare, frankly” when her son is imprisoned in Bulgaria and she is blackmailed into drug smuggling by some Very Bad Men on pain of his death. It’s clearly Kelly’s show and she is in almost every scene of the six-part drama. In a four-month shoot, from last November to this February, she had barely a day off. “Jo wakes up every morning and she doesn’t know if her son’s dead or alive. She then has to put her front-of-house face on and smile her way through the day. To be that polished and then to feel that edgy and raw was so appealing to me,” Kelly explains. “As it goes on, she becomes more adept at what she’s doing, but there’s never a point where you feel like she’s on top, like she’s in control of what’s happening. She’s constantly failing upwards. She messes it up, then she fixes it. She messes it up and then she fixes it.” For Kelly, the scariest aspect of this “rip-roaring thriller” is that “Jo’s not just fighting individuals, she’s fighting systems; the underworld system and the legal system in Bulgaria. Being at the whim of a system is the most terrifying thing.” As in Mr Bates Versus The Post Office, where she played Angela van den Bogerd, a senior executive at the postal company? “Exactly. Terrifying.” In Flight is also a story about the lengths to which a mother will go in order to protect her child. “She’s doing all of this to save her son’s life. I think she gets to a point, with the guilt and the knowledge of what she’s doing, that she’d rather not live. But she wants her son to live so she keeps doing it.” Coincidentally, the same man cast her in both Coronation Street and her latest drama. In 2006, Tony Wood was Corrie’s executive producer. Today, he is CEO of Buccaneer Media, makers of In Flight, as well as Paramount+’s The Crow Girl, another project in which Kelly stars. “I was in my final week in the Corrie job when I cast her from her audition tape,” Wood explains. “On it, she was adding a layer of detail and emotional range to the character that nobody else who auditioned got anywhere near. I was gutted I didn’t get to actually meet her then – until The Crow Girl, in fact. “The more you ask Kate to do, the more she’ll stretch to. She gets on with it all, she asks all the right questions, and she’s very dynamic. She goes so far in the emotional rendition of the part.” Wood’s praise goes some way to explain why Kelly is also an executive producer on In Flight. In short, she’s earned it. “I’m a very all-or-nothing person, so if I’m doing the job, I’m 100 per cent,” she says. “So I was delighted to be asked to be an exec producer and I’m so proud of this show that I was very pleased to put my name to it in another way, as well as first billing.” Kelly hesitates, squirming. “But I don’t want to sound arrogant. That doesn’t sound arrogant, does it?” A tense and claustrophobic six-part thriller shown over two weeks, In Flight’s skies may be wide as Jo jets between London, Istanbul and Thailand – all filmed, inventively, in Belfast, in fact – but it’s often uncomfortably intimate and an incredibly stressful watch. Do parts like Jo stay with Kelly? “I’m not a very retrospective person. I’m very forward-moving and if my thoughts rest, it’s always on the future,” Kelly says. “I’ve never taken it home with me or let it bleed into real life. I’ve always been very good at switching off the emotions. Most of the time, I’m just so grateful that that’s not happening to me.” This must come in especially handy on dark dramas like The Crow Girl and the devastating The Long Shadow, in which she played Emily Jackson, the second victim of the serial killer, Peter Sutcliffe. “The Crow Girl is part of a trilogy and we’re making the next one this winter and the second book is so much bleaker than the first – I found that book really hard to pick up,” she says. “The company that had the option before gave up because they couldn’t see how you could make it for television. So I’m really proud that we didn’t just make it, but that Milly Thomas’s scripts were so good, it got great viewing figures and it was reviewed so brilliantly.” If nothing else, Kelly has no time to stew as a divorced working mum with two daughters, so when I ask how she juggles her priorities, her eyes narrow. “I hope you ask dads questions like this…” she says, pointedly. “I was always quite picky but I’ve got a lot pickier. When I first came to this business, so much was filmed in London. Now, there’s so much made in mainland Europe or other UK cities – The Crow Girl was Bristol, In Flight was Belfast – that these days it means being away from home for work. And for me to be away from my kids, I’ve got to really want to do it.” For the first five years after drama school, Kelly did nothing but theatre and, having not done any for a while, she misses it. “My heart is theatre and hopefully next year,” she says, wistfully. But having young children makes working in theatre particularly challenging so, in the meantime, she’ll continue to defy typecasting on screens of varying sizes. Fundamentally, Kelly is a grafter. “You have to earn it. You have to prove that you can do it and that people believe you are versatile enough to play all these different characters. It’s the biggest compliment to me that I get entrusted with these characters. You’re only as good as your last job, so you have to make every job count.”
Katherine Kelly reveals the “most terrifying thing” in her “rip-roaring” new thriller In Flight
She's come a long way from pulling pints in the Rovers – now she’s flying high on screen and behind the scenes
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. In the 13 years since Katherine Kelly left Coronation Street, in which she played the self-sabotaging, cider-swilling barmaid Becky, she has played a lady of the realm, a newspaper editor, a call centre manager, an academic, a senior Post Office executive, at least three police officers – two of them DCIs – a housewife turned part-time sex-worker, a psychologist, two high-ranking civil servants – one of whom was definitely a spy – a mental health counsellor and a physics teacher (although technically speaking, she was an alien masquerading as a physics teacher). In any given year, the only similarity shared by the characters that Kelly plays is that they are completely different from each other. In every role, blue-collar or upper-crust, she’s thoroughly convincing; as credible downtrodden as she is haughty. Impossible to typecast, perhaps Kelly’s neatest trick is that she transcends class. “That is a big compliment,” she says, a little thrown. “It’s one of the biggest barriers on and off-screen and I made a real conscious effort, very early in my career, to prove that I can play both. I’m a working-class girl from Yorkshire, but I went to Rada and didn’t do anything in my own accent until the last play I did. "That’s why it was so important to me to play Lady Mae in Mr Selfridge after Corrie, because she was right at the top of the food chain in that show. Because of that, it’s never been an issue – although sometimes I do have to remind people that I am actually happier in a tracksuit than I am in a suit.” Class is on Kelly’s mind a lot these days. With her partner, award-winning writer Tony Pitts, she has established her own production company Make Me Films, to spot and nurture working-class talent. Later, Pitts will join us and tell me that it’s harder now for working-class kids to get into the arts than it was when he started out more than 40 years ago. Kelly agrees, “Getting your foot in the door is harder than ever and I find it really deeply upsetting that all that talent out there that is being ignored.” And so Kelly and Pitts are working with Arts Emergency, the mentoring charity and support network co-founded by the comedian Josie Long, to establish training schemes and outreach work. At a time when provision of arts subjects in state schools have been slashed, Kelly says “there are kids out there who are artistic but not from privileged backgrounds, who don’t think they have permission to get involved with the arts or creative industries”. As Pitts adds, “unless it’s put in front of you, you don’t even know it exists. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it”. Kelly’s latest role in Channel 4’s crime thriller, In Flight, is closer to Corrie’s Becky than to Mr Selfridge’s Lady Mae. Jo Conran, working as airline cabin crew, is “an everywoman” whose life is turned into “a living nightmare, frankly” when her son is imprisoned in Bulgaria and she is blackmailed into drug smuggling by some Very Bad Men on pain of his death. It’s clearly Kelly’s show and she is in almost every scene of the six-part drama. In a four-month shoot, from last November to this February, she had barely a day off. “Jo wakes up every morning and she doesn’t know if her son’s dead or alive. She then has to put her front-of-house face on and smile her way through the day. To be that polished and then to feel that edgy and raw was so appealing to me,” Kelly explains. “As it goes on, she becomes more adept at what she’s doing, but there’s never a point where you feel like she’s on top, like she’s in control of what’s happening. She’s constantly failing upwards. She messes it up, then she fixes it. She messes it up and then she fixes it.” For Kelly, the scariest aspect of this “rip-roaring thriller” is that “Jo’s not just fighting individuals, she’s fighting systems; the underworld system and the legal system in Bulgaria. Being at the whim of a system is the most terrifying thing.” As in Mr Bates vs the Post Office, where she played Angela van den Bogerd, a senior executive at the postal company? “Exactly. Terrifying.” In Flight is also a story about the lengths to which a mother will go in order to protect her child. “She’s doing all of this to save her son’s life. I think she gets to a point, with the guilt and the knowledge of what she’s doing, that she’d rather not live. But she wants her son to live so she keeps doing it.” Coincidentally, the same man cast her in both Coronation Street and her latest drama. In 2006, Tony Wood was Corrie’s executive producer. Today, he is CEO of Buccaneer Media, makers of In Flight, as well as Paramount+’s The Crow Girl, another project in which Kelly stars. “I was in my final week in the Corrie job when I cast her from her audition tape,” Wood explains. “On it, she was adding a layer of detail and emotional range to the character that nobody else who auditioned got anywhere near. I was gutted I didn’t get to actually meet her then – until The Crow Girl, in fact. “The more you ask Kate to do, the more she’ll stretch to. She gets on with it all, she asks all the right questions, and she’s very dynamic. She goes so far in the emotional rendition of the part.” Wood’s praise goes some way to explain why Kelly is also an executive producer on In Flight. In short, she’s earned it. “I’m a very all-or-nothing person, so if I’m doing the job, I’m 100 per cent,” she says. “So I was delighted to be asked to be an exec producer and I’m so proud of this show that I was very pleased to put my name to it in another way, as well as first billing.” Kelly hesitates, squirming. “But I don’t want to sound arrogant. That doesn’t sound arrogant, does it?” A tense and claustrophobic six-part thriller shown over two weeks, In Flight’s skies may be wide as Jo jets between London, Istanbul and Thailand – all filmed, inventively, in Belfast, in fact – but it’s often uncomfortably intimate and an incredibly stressful watch. Do parts like Jo stay with Kelly? “I’m not a very retrospective person. I’m very forward-moving and if my thoughts rest, it’s always on the future,” Kelly says. “I’ve never taken it home with me or let it bleed into real life. I’ve always been very good at switching off the emotions. Most of the time, I’m just so grateful that that’s not happening to me.” This must come in especially handy on dark dramas like The Crow Girl and the devastating The Long Shadow, in which she played Emily Jackson, the second victim of the serial killer, Peter Sutcliffe. “The Crow Girl is part of a trilogy and we’re making the next one this winter and the second book is so much bleaker than the first – I found that book really hard to pick up,” she says. “The company that had the option before gave up because they couldn’t see how you could make it for television. So I’m really proud that we didn’t just make it, but that Milly Thomas’s scripts were so good, it got great viewing figures and it was reviewed so brilliantly.” If nothing else, Kelly has no time to stew as a divorced working mum with two daughters, so when I ask how she juggles her priorities, her eyes narrow. “I hope you ask dads questions like this…” she says, pointedly. “I was always quite picky but I’ve got a lot pickier. When I first came to this business, so much was filmed in London. Now, there’s so much made in mainland Europe or other UK cities – The Crow Girl was Bristol, In Flight was Belfast – that these days it means being away from home for work. And for me to be away from my kids, I’ve got to really want to do it.” For the first five years after drama school, Kelly did nothing but theatre and, having not done any for a while, she misses it. “My heart is theatre and hopefully next year,” she says, wistfully. But having young children makes working in theatre particularly challenging so, in the meantime, she’ll continue to defy typecasting on screens of varying sizes. Fundamentally, Kelly is a grafter. “You have to earn it. You have to prove that you can do it and that people believe you are versatile enough to play all these different characters. It’s the biggest compliment to me that I get entrusted with these characters. You’re only as good as your last job, so you have to make every job count.” 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.
EastEnders’ Michelle Ryan reveals why she changed her mind on returning as Zoe Slater after 20 years away
20 years after their teary goodbye, Albert Square’s fiery mother-daughter duo are back together. Now Michelle Ryan reveals the secrets behind soap’s biggest reunion.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It is one of soap’s most memorable moments. On a chilly October night in Walford, in the heat of a blazing row, a frantic Kat and Zoe Slater traded two lines of dialogue that are probably the most famous ever uttered in EastEnders. Today, they still resonate with the British viewing public to such an extent that the last time Jessie Wallace, who plays Kat, had them parroted back at her by a member of the aforementioned public was the morning of her interview with Radio Times – despite the dialogue being almost 25 years old. ZOE: You ain’t my mother! Beat. KAT: Yes I am! Watched by an audience of some 19 million, that moment in late 2001 when Kat revealed to a stroppy Zoe (Michelle Ryan) that they were not sisters, as Zoe had thought, as indeed Zoe had been told by her whole family for her entire life, cemented the Slaters as a cornerstone clan of Albert Square. They arrived in Walford in September 2000, a shower of shrieking banshees, causing a commotion on the day of Ethel Skinner’s funeral. It was a carefully considered collision of old and new, a changing of the guard moment for the BBC soap. Like the Battersbys in Coronation Street and the Dingles in Emmerdale, the Slaters were disruptors who generated stories by antagonising, or seducing, their neighbours. Audiences were divided between Slater fans and Slater haters, but there was one thing everyone agreed upon: you couldn’t ignore them. The confrontation between Kat and Zoe had been the culmination of years of planning. We the audience had known that Kat was Zoe’s mum since Kat and her dad Charlie’s heart-to-heart six months prior, in which she shared how hard it was treating her child like her sister. The “big reveal” on that autumn night was only really news to Zoe. The shock for the audience was discovering the exact nature of Zoe’s parentage – that, at 13, Kat had been raped by her uncle Harry and that she’d carried the resulting pregnancy to term with the baby then raised by Kat’s mother, Viv, as her own. It was a fantastic back-story, making sense of Kat as a character and confirming her status as a survivor, tough as old boots but carrying damage you could see from space. For Zoe, however, the clash marked a high point for a character who was arguably never more compelling than in its immediate aftermath. When Zoe left Albert Square in 2005, tears were shed but there was no “Don’t Go, Zo” campaign. Cut to 20 years later and Zoe has come home to Walford. And no one is more surprised than Michelle Ryan. After all, she’d been asked back before and always declined. “In the past, the timing just wasn’t right. I didn’t feel a need to do it and, for me, there always has to be a need,” Ryan explains, relaxing after the Radio Times photoshoot with a glass of what might be champagne. “This time, I surprised myself with how open I was to it.” She continues: “It was the 40th [anniversary of EastEnders, in February] and there was a lot of buzz about it. I happened to have just joined Instagram at that time and I saw some of the fan comments and was really moved by them. Then I met up with Kacey [Ainsworth, who played another Slater sister, Little Mo] and we were reminiscing about the good times, how it was primetime television, and there were such great scripts. Kacey and I were saying how lucky we were to be a group of women, a family of women, that were at the forefront of all these huge storylines that hadn’t really been explored before.” Ryan mentioned all this to her agent “and she was like, ‘Are you psychic? I’ve had EastEnders on the phone.’” So, what had changed for Ryan? “I just want to be working more regularly,” she says with refreshing candour. “I really had loved the freedom of going from job to job, doing theatre and then maybe a film and building an eclectic CV. But there comes a time when you think, actually, it would be great to have a routine.” Ryan’s post-EastEnders CV certainly qualifies as eclectic: a recurring role in Merlin as sorceress Nimueh, a guest role in Doctor Who, a part in Steven Moffat’s Jekyll and the lead in the short-lived remake of Bionic Woman that necessitated a move to America. Turning her back on Albert Square was never a move the 41-year-old actor regretted. “I started so young and I just wanted to explore different things. Leaving was a tough decision because we’d had a really good run, but things went quiet and you have to decide: stay and keep doing the same sorts of storylines, or leave? I was in my 20s and so I thought I’d jump.” Chief among Ryan’s reasons for leaving was her dislike of long contracts. “I’d done a three-year and then a two-year and I was done at five years. When Bionic Woman came up, it was a seven-year contract. I really didn’t want to take it, but it was another of those ‘nothing to lose’ moments. I was 21 with no US credits, so I took it. With those big contracts, you have to be in the mindset for them. So probably to my detriment, I’ve turned some down, because you realise that they don’t always run that long.” Bionic Woman, for example, was cancelled after eight episodes. Now armed with a contract shorter than in her previous run on the Square, Ryan seems unfazed by the long days on set ahead of her. In fact, now she’s back, she says she relishes the workload. “The other day, we did a three-page scene with edits, one rehearsal, one take, and that was it. The quality was there, but you won’t do that speed on anything else. When we were discussing some of the storylines for Zoe, one of the directors said, ‘You will get match-fit again’. And he’s so right. because you can audition for things, you can be working on a series or a play, but there isn’t anything like a soap. And it’s just so good for the mind.” Ryan’s clearly very pragmatic – she concedes that as an actor in her 40s, job offers may not be as forthcoming as they once were – but all the same, returning to EastEnders must have more allure than a nice routine and keeping her mentally sharp? It’s good for the heart too, no? “Jessie is one of the best actresses I’ve ever worked with,” Ryan says. “The rapport we have and our friendship off screen as well, it all just feeds into that mother-daughter bond. On set, it’s like having someone in your corner all the time and always knowing that I’ll be fine. I can just talk to Jessie. We have a shorthand, and we have a similar kind of view on the characters and their journey.” They’re so in-sync that when it was suggested that there might be some sort of call-back to those famous lines or that they might be somehow repeated, “Instinctively, we were like, ‘We don’t think so,’ because it’s such a classic. So, we’ve had a little bit of input in certain areas, which you get from years of experience.” Ryan is undaunted by the prospect of returning to the tabloid glare, or of attracting attention. In contrast to Wallace, she says she now has very little experience of people shouting at her in the street. A bonus, perhaps, of an eclectic CV. “From the first day the Slaters were aired, I had someone shout out ‘Zoe’ to me and that continued until lockdown – that changed everything in the world. Now, I’m not really sure that it affects my life too much. I have realised that you need a profile, because without one, you can’t get the jobs that you want to be doing. I sort of stepped back, which was my choice, but then if you step back too far, then you suddenly aren’t on people’s radar. “So, a little bit of being recognised is important, even if you don’t get to choose it. But if people are shouting things out, it comes with the job, and it’s kind of key, because it means that people want to see you.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Visit our dedicated EastEnders page for all the latest news, interviews and spoilers. Add EastEnders 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 Soaps 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.
'We didn’t even know that people were going to watch it'
The first season of Netflix hit Wednesday smashed records and made a huge star of Jenna Ortega. But here the rising star says success was never guaranteed…
Add Wednesday to your watchlist Jenna Ortega remembers exactly how she felt before the first-season launch of Wednesday, director/producer Tim Burton’s Addams Family reboot for Netflix, in which she plays the titular Wednesday, a brilliant but dour world-weary teen with psychic powers, the gloomiest of outlooks, a font of acid putdowns and a near-homicidal misanthropy. Woe is she. “I was scared s***less,” she says, plainly. “I didn’t know what I was doing, I met Tim once before starting to create the character. There was just an obscene amount of pressure and worry and I wasn’t sleeping… We didn’t even know that people were going to watch it.” It sounds awful and, perhaps mindful that it sounds awful, Ortega pivots. “I mean that in an exciting way. I love being able to sink my teeth into something and give it my all.” And Ortega did give Wednesday her all. She wanted to do justice to the character, she explains. As such, her research was extensive and forensic. Rather poetically, she describes it as a search to find the character as if Wednesday was out there somewhere, lost in the woods. Surprisingly, it was a quest that began with Buster Keaton and involved a lot of trial and error. “Because a lot of what you hear of Wednesday speaking is in her head, I watched a lot of silent films when the actors’ eyes are telling the story,” Ortega explains. “And because she’s not allowed to give a lot of expression, I landed on Buster Keaton because he was known as the deadpan man.” From there, she went on to explore Wednesday’s physicality. “So much of it was spending as much time as I could outside of work trying to physically become her. To walk like you’ve got teacups on your head and without swinging your arms too much – because when you swing your arms too much, you feel stupid for some reason. To not blink, as blinking feels like a sign of weakness and she doesn’t want to be caught off guard. When people stare at you, it can be intimidating and uncomfortable – and that’s what she is. She’s such a specific character, she lends herself to you, but it took a lot of trying to get there.” Ortega is incredibly dedicated and fastidious. Because Wednesday speaks a few phrases of German in one episode, Ortega learnt German. Because we see Wednesday play the cello, Ortega actually learnt to play the instrument. No short cuts or sleights-of-hand. And Wednesday never blinks. As investments go, Ortega was all-in. Happily – which isn’t a word you’d associate with Wednesday herself – Ortega’s investment paid dividends. Wednesday, with 252m views according to Netflix, is the world’s biggest English-language TV show – and second only to the first season of Squid Game (265 million) in the streamer’s global, multilingual, all-time top ten. Though the diffident Californian would never say it herself – and looks pained when I mention it – playing Wednesday makes Ortega the world’s biggest female TV actor, a position that was thrust upon the then 20-year-old in November 2022, when the streamer dropped the first season and it notched up a billion viewing hours in a month. Factor in the merchandise bearing her likeness, the Halloween-costume homages, the myriad internet memes based on Wednesday’s delicious, deadpan one-liners, and the hundreds of thousands of YouTube and TikTok clips of an idiosyncratic dance sequence that have been watched billions of times, and Wednesday, and therefore Ortega, was everywhere, all at once. Though she was by no means an unknown prior to Wednesday – Ortega began performing when she was nine, landed the lead in a Disney Channel sitcom at 13, and was successfully transitioning from child actor, mostly via roles in horror movies – nothing could have prepared her for this catapult to global fame. “Every once in a while I remember the magnitude of things,” Ortega says. From the look that flits across her face, and the way she says “really scary and really overwhelming”, this doesn’t appear to be an entirely pleasant experience. Ortega is at pains to point out her “overwhelming gratitude” for the show’s popularity. “We put in so much time and effort, the fact that people connect with it is very, very lucky and we’re very, very honoured.” That said, she admits that the last couple of years have been challenging. “I think I just kind of got in my head and was maybe a little bit too frightened and wasn’t accustomed to that kind of exposure.” She finds red-carpet events “bizarre” and out of her comfort zone, and thinks that being asked “Who are you wearing?” is “such a weird question”. “I try not to live in that space too much because it’s not naturally human, not part of what we’re supposed to be exposed to,” she reflects. “I take a step away. It’s important to appreciate things but not dwell on them. I want to make sure I’m present in my everyday life.” The truth is that Ortega is most comfortable on set. Being at work is her safe place. “I understand what it is to move on set as a professional and to be number one on the call sheet, you definitely set the tone,” she says. “You want to make sure that everybody’s working in an environment where they feel heard and included and empowered. And I know what it takes to create a healthy work environment. And I want to make sure that everybody has that.” For all the power, pressure and privilege coming her way, Ortega, to her credit, appears to navigate it all rather well. She credits her family background with keeping her grounded. It took her three years to persuade her parents – her mother Natalie, an ER nurse, and her father Edward, a sheriff – to allow her to pursue acting as a profession. “I’m one of six kids and my siblings are all in completely different fields. I’m the only one who does this. When I go home and visit, it’s very easy to remember where I came from when I have such lovely people around me.” What of her fictional family? What’s it like working with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Joanna Lumley? Ortega’s face lights up. “Some of the most glamorous, generous people I’ve ever met and had the pleasure to work with. Also talented. Unbelievably talented! I was so glad to have more scenes with Catherine this season. Yeah, obviously, Morticia is just such a delicious character, and Catherine has got the yummiest voice and persona, so it was really nice to be able to see her flesh that character out a bit more. “And Joanna Lumley, as you know, isn’t just a national treasure but international. She’s just so beautiful, and she’s everything that you hoped she would be, and she calls you darling, and you melt to the floor. So it was just the best. And being able to work with two strong, beautiful women, all three of us playing strong, stubborn characters, was just so much fun. It’s exactly the kind of environment I like to work in.” Is Wednesday a feminist show? “Yes, definitely. I think the whole show should be empowering to anybody, really, but I’m really proud of how strong our female characters are. Even outside the Addams family, in [Wednesday’s fellow high school students] Enid and Bianca, they’re very complex and layered people. And I think that there’s a woman for everyone.” As for getting back into character for the second season, how easy – or difficult – was it, after the search for Wednesday before season one? “It’s such a gift to revisit a character that is so meaningful to so many people, myself included,” Ortega says. As for the labours of finding Wednesday’s physicality? “At this point, it’s all muscle memory.”
Meet Catherine Zeta-Jones's Morticia Addams
‘The Addams family is the ultimate model family — it encourages the difference and nurtures the quirkiness’
Add Wednesday to your watchlist Having children is one of the most amazing joys of my life,” Catherine Zeta-Jones says emphatically – which is to say, sounding a little more Welsh than usual – on a balmy June afternoon from Bilbao. Did she always want children? “I’ve always wanted kids, yeah. Though not like my cousin. She was always saying she wanted babies. Baby mad! And she did. Though she only had one in the end.” Not that motherhood was all sunshine and lollipops. When I ask Zeta-Jones if she was ever a bit of a gloomy Wednesday, she announces, “Absolutely not!” and says she was much more of an Enid, Wednesday’s bubbly best friend (played by Emma Myers) who always looks on the bright side: “I saw the rainbows more than the dark.” Motherhood, though, changed all that. “All of a sudden, I saw doom and gloom everywhere. My husband would be throwing them up in the air and I’d be thinking, ‘We have ceiling fans! They’ll be decapitated!’ I started to see the worst-case scenarios everywhere. But I think that’s just getting older and thinking ‘Ooh, what if?’” Catastrophising aside, Zeta-Jones says, “the world is terrifying for grown-ups and children alike. Me and my husband say to our kids, ‘Sorry, but it’s up to you guys. Your generation has a lot of strong views, strong values and strong opinions and you have to get out and vote to make changes, to be the change and try and put us back on an equilibrium.” Did becoming a parent make her re-evaluate her own parents? “Definitely. My mother brought up three kids. She had no help. My brother was judo, my other brother was swimming, I was dancing. I was part of the amateur dramatics, the Dylan Thomas Theatre, I’m sure there was gymnastics thrown in there at some point… Just taking us to all of that, as a parent you think, ‘Oh my gosh,’ whereas as a kid you’re p****d off that she was five minutes late in picking you up that one time.” Zeta-Jones says she loves the relationship that her children have with her own parents. “I’m adamant that they go back to Wales every year to be with their grandparents for two weeks,” she says, proudly. “Nana and Grampy’s rules!” She adds, “They’ve been to Butlin’s, Legoland, seen the sights in London, up to Scotland, over to Ireland. They’ve even been to the Isle of Man, I think.” Certainly, anyone who follows either Carys or Dylan on Instagram can attest to their sojourns to Wales over the years. “As a parent, you guide them, you give them the best, broadest options, you don’t smother them, you put them into situations where you hope they see the reality of the world. And you hope they become good citizens of the planet.” You might be tempted to ask Zeta-Jones if being a mother was the role of a lifetime, the part that she was born to play. But let’s keep things in perspective. In 2010, Zeta-Jones won a Tony for playing Desirée Armfeldt in Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece A Little Night Music – her Broadway debut. Clearly, that is the role of a lifetime that she was born to play. We are talking motherhood and parenting because Zeta-Jones returns, in magnificent form, as Morticia Addams, mother to Wednesday. To her daughter, Morticia is something of an antagonist, but adults, and parents in particular, might see her more sympathetically, as a mother demonised for doing her best as she deals with a wilful, wily daughter who doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. After the wildly successful first season, Zeta-Jones plays a bigger part in the second with the arrival of Joanna Lumley as Hester Frump, Morticia’s own mother. While Wednesday and Hester get on, Morticia and Hester’s relationship is a little more fractious – so Zeta-Jones gets to play both a mother and a daughter. “The scenes we play together are like magic,” she says. “Jenna brings her A-game and Joanna and I bring ours. We wanted to show the truth of the relationships and keep them as real as possible. The relationship I have with Wednesday is nothing like the relationship I have with my daughter, but I’ve seen other mothers have that relationship with their daughters. My relationship with Hester is nothing like my relationship with my mother but I know people who do have that relationship. So, it’s all rooted in truth and that’s what makes it so relatable. I think the Addams family is the ultimate model family. It encourages the difference, nurtures the quirkiness. It says that being an outcast is good and that’s what makes you who you are. When you think about it, it’s a very modern way of thinking.” Zeta-Jones is in Bilbao because she’s four months into filming Kill Jackie, an epic, hugely expensive, explosively action-packed revenge thriller series for Amazon Prime in which she plays the title role. This afternoon, though, she’s not working. It’s her first time off in four weeks. “I’m working now until next July and it’s the only time in my career that I’ve known what I’m doing that far ahead,” she says. “It’s actually really nice, because I can tell my family where I’m gonna be – and the good thing about being at this point in my career is not having to keep at it just to be at it, you know?” Getting to this point in her career where she is able to cherry-pick roles but still being busy and with an Oscar and a Tony on her mantelpiece has taken hard graft. “Dancer’s grit,” Zeta-Jones, who started out in musical theatre, calls it. “When I was younger, my ambition and my drive were absolutely essential. You don’t come from Wales to where I am now without that. In my early career, you take what you’re given – or you take the best of the bunch. Obviously there are things you just don’t take, but you buy for the better pieces and what comes your way, you foment and guide yourself into a career. Because you’d rather be working and be seen than not. Then there are lulls – there are always lulls – and then your next chapter starts and everything you’ve done prior stands you in good stead for whatever comes next.” Zeta-Jones is well-versed in chapters and lulls, highs and lows. Following her breakthrough role in ITV’s The Darling Buds of May and mid-1990s move to America, she struck $250m of box-office gold with 1998 blockbuster romp The Mask of Zorro, and married Michael Douglas in 2000. She won the 2003 best supporting actress Oscar for Chicago and gained critical acclaim for the Coen brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty opposite George Clooney in 2003. But among the gems there were also flops – Lay the Favorite (2012) starring Bruce Willis and Broken City (2013) with Russell Crowe among them. And her diagnosis with bipolar disorder also meant sabbaticals from acting. Today, Zeta-Jones is definitely on the upswing, her mood buoyed, her outlook rosy. “I want to work with people who are kind and sweet and creative, and I’m looking forward to doing smaller budget films with interesting roles. And in the last month, I’ve been offered three plays. Maybe it’s just where I am in my life but now, if the choice is living to work or working to live, it’s the latter. It’s definitely the latter.”
‘It is spectacular — I’ve never seen such attention to detail and beauty and extravagance. I get to wear many, many huge wigs’
Add Wednesday to your watchlist Joanna Lumley loves a good wig. “A lot of actors, as opposed to actresses, say that the shoes make them feel a certain way – ‘Oh that’s how he would walk!’ – and they get into the character from there,” she explains, enthused. “But women change their shoes so often, I have never found shoes to be useful. But I have found hair to be useful. How women do their hair is terribly useful. I like to get that straight and I can feel myself slipping into character.” The look of a character’s hair equates to the cut of her jib? “I love to have a wig or something, something that stops me looking like I look like in front of you now – particularly because I do travel shows as myself and people know that this is me, Joanna. So, if I have a wig, I look different and it brings a different feeling. You feel different and then I think you can give a different performance. You hope you’ll be so different in a part that people will go, ‘Who can that be? Oh my goodness, it’s Joanna!’ but that’s not always the case.” She sounds almost rueful, before declaring, “Laurence Olivier used to say he loved a good nose.” A good nose? “Transformative,” Lumley nods. “All acting is hoping you’ll get a break from your own face.” Lumley must, to a certain extent, live in hope. Over a career that began when she became a model in swinging 60s London, she has rarely had a break from her own face. From early roles as a Bond girl, a part in Christopher Lee’s last Hammer Horror Dracula film and a brief appearance in Coronation Street as a girlfriend who dumps Ken Barlow, through her big break as Purdey in The New Avengers, to the role that began her career’s second act – Absolutely Fabulous’s Patsy Stone – Joanna Lumley is now almost always on TV playing Joanna Lumley or a Joanna Lumley-esque character. The only attribute more recognisable than Lumley’s face is her voice. She’s at a level of fame when she’s booked because they want “Joanna Lumley” for the part. Lumley isn’t complaining. “You’re mad if you don’t realise that part of acting is typecasting, but the point of an actress is that you can change, change, change. After Sapphire & Steel, all I was offered was the same sort of thing and I turned them down, even though they were quite good things written for me. But I wanted to keep changing.” Lumley is amused at the idea that she has a career, carefully planned and executed. “I’ve had no career – I was trying to earn money to keep myself alive. I’ve never had any idea of a destiny or where my career would go and I have never ever asked myself, ‘Will this damage my career?’ I loved acting, so that was going to be my chosen thing. We actors just wanted to get to be better actors, and we wanted to work so we could pay the rent. We weren’t longing for stardom. We’re jobbing actors and we’re no different, really, from painters and decorators. It’s a precarious profession at the best of times and I’ve just done anything to keep my head above water.” The latest role in her non-career is perhaps the biggest: Wednesday’s grandmother, Hester Frump. Morticia’s much-discussed but previously unseen mother, Hester is being billed as Wednesday’s closest ally, even as she antagonises Morticia. Wednesday creator Miles Millar says, “That Wednesday-Hester relationship is unique. You see the twinkle in their eyes when they’re together on screen.” Crucially, Hester’s hair is, like her daughter’s, lustrous and perfectly coiffed. But unlike Morticia’s, in what is surely a nod to Ab Fab’s Patsy, it’s beehive-esque. “It is spectacular,” Lumley says, both of Hester’s hair and Wednesday as a production. “I’ve never seen such attention to detail and beauty and extravagance. I get to wear many, many huge wigs one on top of the other.” Lumley worked with Tim Burton “a thousand years ago” on James and the Giant Peach and Corpse Bride – both in roles that gave her a break from her face. In the former, a combination of live-action and stop-motion animation, she wore prosthetics to play the vile Aunt Spiker. In the latter, which was entirely stop-motion, “Albert Finney and I played the parents of a character I can’t remember. She was awful. “Tim is like a screwball professor – brilliantly visual and creative but vague. He doesn’t finish his sentences and drifts off,” she says. “He rang and asked if I’d read it. I thought it sounded gorgeous.” By all accounts, Lumley was a big hit on set. Millar describes her as “perfect and hilarious. She nailed every single line, and it’s just so delicious.” So delicious, in fact, that, according, to Lumley, the part of Hester became “a bigger part than I agreed to, which was lovely, as the writers wrote her lots of new scenes”. I note that Jenna Ortega, at 22, is the same age as Lumley was when she started acting. How would a 22-year-old Lumley have coped with the extreme fame that Ortega experiences? “I’d have been terrified,” Lumley admits. “Although I was working and doing all kinds of things – a Dracula film and Coronation Street and James Bond – it was really only The New Avengers that locked me in place, as it were – and that was when I was 30 and I could cope with it. Any applause, appreciation or adulation went over my head: it didn’t matter to me and it didn’t affect me. But I think if I’d been young… “It’s a completely different age now. She’s American and there’s an American way of doing things. Jen is hugely powerful, a big, big figure. I was never that and I’m not now. She’s as smart as a whip, watching everything as I think she wants to direct at some stage in her life. She has input. It’s her show. She can do it. She’s terrific.” When I ask Lumley what she thinks is key to her longevity. She isn’t sure, but she’s grateful for it. “When I started, all acting was to a certain extent, ‘Are you pretty enough?’ Because I’d been a model, all I was seen for was pretty girlfriends and there’s usually not much you can do with those parts. Actresses were told to keep going until 29 and then you might be too old and you’re out. But you think to yourself, ‘Stick around, stick around, stick around.’ It’s hard but you stick around. “Now, you look at the wonderful parts for people as old as me, and also interesting, different looking parts that don’t need a pretty face. Men have always been allowed to be whatever they want to be, but women have always had to look attractive or alluring or something. That’s fading away. Now you have all kinds of extraordinary people like Frances McDormand or Judi Dench, or any of our great actresses. They’re not necessarily raging beauties, but they can play anything they want.” I ask if she has any advice for aspiring actors and actresses. “The least you can do is offer complete professionalism, which is to be clean, tidy, on time, optimistic, flexible, and ready with all your words. You’ll often get really lousy scripts, but do the best you can. You’re lucky if you get a good director and a good script and a wonderful cast, but quite a lot of the time you’re dragging the log of plot around the stage, trying to make things come to life. “Even then, you’ve always got friends around you and everybody’s trying to do their best. Nothing is going to be a smash hit all the time. We all go in and out of the shadows, and that’s how it should be. You’re lucky enough if you’re remembered at all.”
Wednesday star Catherine Zeta-Jones reveals her scenes with Joanna Lumley are “nothing like” her relationship with her own mother
"The Addams family is the ultimate model family," says the Wednesday actor. "It encourages the difference and nurtures the quirkiness."
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Having children is one of the most amazing joys of my life,” Catherine Zeta-Jones says emphatically – which is to say, sounding a little more Welsh than usual – on a balmy June afternoon from Bilbao. Did she always want children? “I’ve always wanted kids, yeah. Though not like my cousin. She was always saying she wanted babies. Baby mad! And she did. Though she only had one in the end.” Not that motherhood was all sunshine and lollipops. When I ask Zeta-Jones if she was ever a bit of a gloomy Wednesday, she announces, “Absolutely not!” and says she was much more of an Enid, Wednesday’s bubbly best friend (played by Emma Myers) who always looks on the bright side: “I saw the rainbows more than the dark.” Motherhood, though, changed all that. “All of a sudden, I saw doom and gloom everywhere. My husband would be throwing them up in the air and I’d be thinking, ‘We have ceiling fans! They’ll be decapitated!’ I started to see the worst-case scenarios everywhere. But I think that’s just getting older and thinking ‘Ooh, what if?’” Catastrophising aside, Zeta-Jones says, “the world is terrifying for grown-ups and children alike. Me and my husband say to our kids, ‘Sorry, but it’s up to you guys. Your generation has a lot of strong views, strong values and strong opinions and you have to get out and vote to make changes, to be the change and try and put us back on an equilibrium.” Did becoming a parent make her re-evaluate her own parents? “Definitely. My mother brought up three kids. She had no help. My brother was judo, my other brother was swimming, I was dancing. I was part of the amateur dramatics, the Dylan Thomas Theatre, I’m sure there was gymnastics thrown in there at some point… Just taking us to all of that, as a parent you think, ‘Oh my gosh,’ whereas as a kid you’re p****d off that she was five minutes late in picking you up that one time.” Zeta-Jones says she loves the relationship that her children have with her own parents. “I’m adamant that they go back to Wales every year to be with their grandparents for two weeks,” she says, proudly. “Nana and Grampy’s rules!” She adds, “They’ve been to Butlin’s, Legoland, seen the sights in London, up to Scotland, over to Ireland. They’ve even been to the Isle of Man, I think.” Certainly, anyone who follows either Carys or Dylan on Instagram can attest to their sojourns to Wales over the years. “As a parent, you guide them, you give them the best, broadest options, you don’t smother them, you put them into situations where you hope they see the reality of the world. And you hope they become good citizens of the planet.” You might be tempted to ask Zeta-Jones if being a mother was the role of a lifetime, the part that she was born to play. But let’s keep things in perspective. In 2010, Zeta-Jones won a Tony for playing Desirée Armfeldt in Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece A Little Night Music – her Broadway debut. Clearly, that is the role of a lifetime that she was born to play. We are talking motherhood and parenting because Zeta-Jones returns, in magnificent form, as Morticia Addams, mother to Wednesday. To her daughter, Morticia is something of an antagonist, but adults, and parents in particular, might see her more sympathetically, as a mother demonised for doing her best as she deals with a wilful, wily daughter who doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. After the wildly successful first season, Zeta-Jones plays a bigger part in the second with the arrival of Joanna Lumley as Hester Frump, Morticia’s own mother. While Wednesday and Hester get on, Morticia and Hester’s relationship is a little more fractious – so Zeta-Jones gets to play both a mother and a daughter. “The scenes we play together are like magic,” she says. “Jenna brings her A-game and Joanna and I bring ours. We wanted to show the truth of the relationships and keep them as real as possible. The relationship I have with Wednesday is nothing like the relationship I have with my daughter, but I’ve seen other mothers have that relationship with their daughters. My relationship with Hester is nothing like my relationship with my mother but I know people who do have that relationship. So, it’s all rooted in truth and that’s what makes it so relatable. "I think the Addams family is the ultimate model family. It encourages the difference, nurtures the quirkiness. It says that being an outcast is good and that’s what makes you who you are. When you think about it, it’s a very modern way of thinking.” Zeta-Jones is in Bilbao because she’s four months into filming Kill Jackie, an epic, hugely expensive, explosively action-packed revenge thriller series for Amazon Prime in which she plays the title role. This afternoon, though, she’s not working. It’s her first time off in four weeks. “I’m working now until next July and it’s the only time in my career that I’ve known what I’m doing that far ahead,” she says. “It’s actually really nice, because I can tell my family where I’m gonna be – and the good thing about being at this point in my career is not having to keep at it just to be at it, you know?” Getting to this point in her career where she is able to cherry-pick roles but still being busy and with an Oscar and a Tony on her mantelpiece has taken hard graft. “Dancer’s grit,” Zeta-Jones, who started out in musical theatre, calls it. “When I was younger, my ambition and my drive were absolutely essential. You don’t come from Wales to where I am now without that. "In my early career, you take what you’re given – or you take the best of the bunch. Obviously there are things you just don’t take, but you buy for the better pieces and what comes your way, you foment and guide yourself into a career. Because you’d rather be working and be seen than not. Then there are lulls – there are always lulls – and then your next chapter starts and everything you’ve done prior stands you in good stead for whatever comes next.” Zeta-Jones is well-versed in chapters and lulls, highs and lows. Following her breakthrough role in ITV’s The Darling Buds of May and mid-1990s move to America, she struck $250m of box-office gold with 1998 blockbuster romp The Mask of Zorro, and married Michael Douglas in 2000. She won the 2003 best supporting actress Oscar for Chicago and gained critical acclaim for the Coen brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty opposite George Clooney in 2003. But among the gems there were also flops – Lay the Favorite (2012) starring Bruce Willis and Broken City (2013) with Russell Crowe among them. And her diagnosis with bipolar disorder also meant sabbaticals from acting. Today, Zeta-Jones is definitely on the upswing, her mood buoyed, her outlook rosy. “I want to work with people who are kind and sweet and creative, and I’m looking forward to doing smaller budget films with interesting roles. And in the last month, I’ve been offered three plays. Maybe it’s just where I am in my life but now, if the choice is living to work or working to live, it’s the latter. It’s definitely the latter.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Wednesday season 2 is streaming from Wednesday 6 August on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Fantasy 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.
Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega says she was “scared s***less” when show started: “I didn’t know what I was doing”
The first season of Netflix hit Wednesday smashed records and made a huge star of Jenna Ortega. Now she’s back in season two with Catherine Zeta-Jones and new co-star Joanna Lumley
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Jenna Ortega remembers exactly how she felt before the first-season launch of Wednesday, director/producer Tim Burton’s Addams Family reboot for Netflix, in which she plays the titular Wednesday, a brilliant but dour world-weary teen with psychic powers, the gloomiest of outlooks, a font of acid putdowns and a near-homicidal misanthropy. Woe is she. “I was scared s***less,” she says, plainly. “I didn’t know what I was doing, I met Tim once before starting to create the character. There was just an obscene amount of pressure and worry and I wasn’t sleeping… We didn’t even know that people were going to watch it.” It sounds awful and, perhaps mindful that it sounds awful, Ortega pivots. “I mean that in an exciting way. I love being able to sink my teeth into something and give it my all.” And Ortega did give Wednesday her all. She wanted to do justice to the character, she explains. As such, her research was extensive and forensic. Rather poetically, she describes it as a search to find the character as if Wednesday was out there somewhere, lost in the woods. Surprisingly, it was a quest that began with Buster Keaton and involved a lot of trial and error. “Because a lot of what you hear of Wednesday speaking is in her head, I watched a lot of silent films when the actors’ eyes are telling the story,” Ortega explains. “And because she’s not allowed to give a lot of expression, I landed on Buster Keaton because he was known as the deadpan man.” From there, she went on to explore Wednesday’s physicality. “So much of it was spending as much time as I could outside of work trying to physically become her. To walk like you’ve got teacups on your head and without swinging your arms too much – because when you swing your arms too much, you feel stupid for some reason. To not blink, as blinking feels like a sign of weakness and she doesn’t want to be caught off guard. When people stare at you, it can be intimidating and uncomfortable – and that’s what she is. She’s such a specific character, she lends herself to you, but it took a lot of trying to get there.” Ortega is incredibly dedicated and fastidious. Because Wednesday speaks a few phrases of German in one episode, Ortega learnt German. Because we see Wednesday play the cello, Ortega actually learnt to play the instrument. No short cuts or sleights-of-hand. And Wednesday never blinks. As investments go, Ortega was all-in. Happily – which isn’t a word you’d associate with Wednesday herself – Ortega’s investment paid dividends. Wednesday, with 252m views according to Netflix, is the world’s biggest English-language TV show – and second only to the first season of Squid Game (265 million) in the streamer’s global, multilingual, all-time top ten. Though the diffident Californian would never say it herself – and looks pained when I mention it – playing Wednesday makes Ortega the world’s biggest female TV actor, a position that was thrust upon the then 20-year-old in November 2022, when the streamer dropped the first season and it notched up a billion viewing hours in a month. Factor in the merchandise bearing her likeness, the Halloween-costume homages, the myriad internet memes based on Wednesday’s delicious, deadpan one-liners, and the hundreds of thousands of YouTube and TikTok clips of an idiosyncratic dance sequence that have been watched billions of times, and Wednesday, and therefore Ortega, was everywhere, all at once. Though she was by no means an unknown prior to Wednesday – Ortega began performing when she was nine, landed the lead in a Disney Channel sitcom at 13, and was successfully transitioning from child actor, mostly via roles in horror movies – nothing could have prepared her for this catapult to global fame. “Every once in a while I remember the magnitude of things,” Ortega says. From the look that flits across her face, and the way she says “really scary and really overwhelming”, this doesn’t appear to be an entirely pleasant experience. Ortega is at pains to point out her “overwhelming gratitude” for the show’s popularity. “We put in so much time and effort, the fact that people connect with it is very, very lucky and we’re very, very honoured.” That said, she admits that the last couple of years have been challenging. “I think I just kind of got in my head and was maybe a little bit too frightened and wasn’t accustomed to that kind of exposure.” She finds red-carpet events “bizarre” and out of her comfort zone, and thinks that being asked “Who are you wearing?” is “such a weird question”. “I try not to live in that space too much because it’s not naturally human, not part of what we’re supposed to be exposed to,” she reflects. “I take a step away. It’s important to appreciate things but not dwell on them. I want to make sure I’m present in my everyday life.” The truth is that Ortega is most comfortable on set. Being at work is her safe place. “I understand what it is to move on set as a professional and to be number one on the call sheet, you definitely set the tone,” she says. “You want to make sure that everybody’s working in an environment where they feel heard and included and empowered. And I know what it takes to create a healthy work environment. And I want to make sure that everybody has that.” For all the power, pressure and privilege coming her way, Ortega, to her credit, appears to navigate it all rather well. She credits her family background with keeping her grounded. It took her three years to persuade her parents – her mother Natalie, an ER nurse, and her father Edward, a sheriff – to allow her to pursue acting as a profession. “I’m one of six kids and my siblings are all in completely different fields. I’m the only one who does this. When I go home and visit, it’s very easy to remember where I came from when I have such lovely people around me.” What of her fictional family? What’s it like working with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Joanna Lumley? Ortega’s face lights up. “Some of the most glamorous, generous people I’ve ever met and had the pleasure to work with. Also talented. Unbelievably talented! I was so glad to have more scenes with Catherine this season. Yeah, obviously, Morticia is just such a delicious character, and Catherine has got the yummiest voice and persona, so it was really nice to be able to see her flesh that character out a bit more. “And Joanna Lumley, as you know, isn’t just a national treasure but international. She’s just so beautiful, and she’s everything that you hoped she would be, and she calls you darling, and you melt to the floor. So it was just the best. And being able to work with two strong, beautiful women, all three of us playing strong, stubborn characters, was just so much fun. It’s exactly the kind of environment I like to work in.” Is Wednesday a feminist show? “Yes, definitely. I think the whole show should be empowering to anybody, really, but I’m really proud of how strong our female characters are. Even outside the Addams family, in [Wednesday’s fellow high school students] Enid and Bianca, they’re very complex and layered people. And I think that there’s a woman for everyone.” As for getting back into character for the second season, how easy – or difficult – was it, after the search for Wednesday before season one? “It’s such a gift to revisit a character that is so meaningful to so many people, myself included,” Ortega says. As for the labours of finding Wednesday’s physicality? “At this point, it’s all muscle memory.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Wednesday season 2 is streaming from Wednesday 6 August on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Fantasy 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.
Joanna Lumley reveals “I’ve had no career – I was trying to earn money to keep myself alive"
"It is spectacular – I’ve never seen such attention to detail and beauty and extravagance," says the Wednesday actor. "I get to wear many, many huge wigs."
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Joanna Lumley loves a good wig. “A lot of actors, as opposed to actresses, say that the shoes make them feel a certain way – ‘Oh that’s how he would walk!’ – and they get into the character from there,” she explains, enthused. “But women change their shoes so often, I have never found shoes to be useful. But I have found hair to be useful. How women do their hair is terribly useful. I like to get that straight and I can feel myself slipping into character.” The look of a character’s hair equates to the cut of her jib? “I love to have a wig or something, something that stops me looking like I look like in front of you now – particularly because I do travel shows as myself and people know that this is me, Joanna. So, if I have a wig, I look different and it brings a different feeling. You feel different and then I think you can give a different performance. You hope you’ll be so different in a part that people will go, ‘Who can that be? Oh my goodness, it’s Joanna!’ but that’s not always the case.” She sounds almost rueful, before declaring, “Laurence Olivier used to say he loved a good nose.” A good nose? “Transformative,” Lumley nods. “All acting is hoping you’ll get a break from your own face.” Lumley must, to a certain extent, live in hope. Over a career that began when she became a model in swinging 60s London, she has rarely had a break from her own face. From early roles as a Bond girl, a part in Christopher Lee’s last Hammer Horror Dracula film and a brief appearance in Coronation Street as a girlfriend who dumps Ken Barlow, through her big break as Purdey in The New Avengers, to the role that began her career’s second act – Absolutely Fabulous’s Patsy Stone – Joanna Lumley is now almost always on TV playing Joanna Lumley or a Joanna Lumley-esque character. The only attribute more recognisable than Lumley’s face is her voice. She’s at a level of fame when she’s booked because they want “Joanna Lumley” for the part. Lumley isn’t complaining. “You’re mad if you don’t realise that part of acting is typecasting, but the point of an actress is that you can change, change, change. After Sapphire & Steel, all I was offered was the same sort of thing and I turned them down, even though they were quite good things written for me. But I wanted to keep changing.” Lumley is amused at the idea that she has a career, carefully planned and executed. “I’ve had no career – I was trying to earn money to keep myself alive. I’ve never had any idea of a destiny or where my career would go and I have never ever asked myself, ‘Will this damage my career?’ I loved acting, so that was going to be my chosen thing. "We actors just wanted to get to be better actors, and we wanted to work so we could pay the rent. We weren’t longing for stardom. We’re jobbing actors and we’re no different, really, from painters and decorators. It’s a precarious profession at the best of times and I’ve just done anything to keep my head above water.” The latest role in her non-career is perhaps the biggest: Wednesday’s grandmother, Hester Frump. Morticia’s much-discussed but previously unseen mother, Hester is being billed as Wednesday’s closest ally, even as she antagonises Morticia. Wednesday creator Miles Millar says, “That Wednesday-Hester relationship is unique. You see the twinkle in their eyes when they’re together on screen.” Crucially, Hester’s hair is, like her daughter’s, lustrous and perfectly coiffed. But unlike Morticia’s, in what is surely a nod to Ab Fab’s Patsy, it’s beehive-esque. “It is spectacular,” Lumley says, both of Hester’s hair and Wednesday as a production. “I’ve never seen such attention to detail and beauty and extravagance. I get to wear many, many huge wigs one on top of the other.” Lumley worked with Tim Burton “a thousand years ago” on James and the Giant Peach and Corpse Bride – both in roles that gave her a break from her face. In the former, a combination of live-action and stop-motion animation, she wore prosthetics to play the vile Aunt Spiker. In the latter, which was entirely stop-motion, “Albert Finney and I played the parents of a character I can’t remember. She was awful. “Tim is like a screwball professor – brilliantly visual and creative but vague. He doesn’t finish his sentences and drifts off,” she says. “He rang and asked if I’d read it. I thought it sounded gorgeous.” By all accounts, Lumley was a big hit on set. Millar describes her as “perfect and hilarious. She nailed every single line, and it’s just so delicious.” So delicious, in fact, that, according, to Lumley, the part of Hester became “a bigger part than I agreed to, which was lovely, as the writers wrote her lots of new scenes”. I note that Jenna Ortega, at 22, is the same age as Lumley was when she started acting. How would a 22-year-old Lumley have coped with the extreme fame that Ortega experiences? “I’d have been terrified,” Lumley admits. “Although I was working and doing all kinds of things – a Dracula film and Coronation Street and James Bond – it was really only The New Avengers that locked me in place, as it were – and that was when I was 30 and I could cope with it. Any applause, appreciation or adulation went over my head: it didn’t matter to me and it didn’t affect me. But I think if I’d been young… “It’s a completely different age now. She’s American and there’s an American way of doing things. Jen is hugely powerful, a big, big figure. I was never that and I’m not now. She’s as smart as a whip, watching everything as I think she wants to direct at some stage in her life. She has input. It’s her show. She can do it. She’s terrific.” When I ask Lumley what she thinks is key to her longevity, she isn’t sure, but she’s grateful for it. “When I started, all acting was to a certain extent, ‘Are you pretty enough?’ Because I’d been a model, all I was seen for was pretty girlfriends and there’s usually not much you can do with those parts. Actresses were told to keep going until 29 and then you might be too old and you’re out. But you think to yourself, ‘Stick around, stick around, stick around.’ It’s hard but you stick around. “Now, you look at the wonderful parts for people as old as me, and also interesting, different looking parts that don’t need a pretty face. Men have always been allowed to be whatever they want to be, but women have always had to look attractive or alluring or something. That’s fading away. Now you have all kinds of extraordinary people like Frances McDormand or Judi Dench, or any of our great actresses. They’re not necessarily raging beauties, but they can play anything they want.” I ask if she has any advice for aspiring actors and actresses. “The least you can do is offer complete professionalism, which is to be clean, tidy, on time, optimistic, flexible, and ready with all your words. You’ll often get really lousy scripts, but do the best you can. You’re lucky if you get a good director and a good script and a wonderful cast, but quite a lot of the time you’re dragging the log of plot around the stage, trying to make things come to life. “Even then, you’ve always got friends around you and everybody’s trying to do their best. Nothing is going to be a smash hit all the time. We all go in and out of the shadows, and that’s how it should be. You’re lucky enough if you’re remembered at all.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Wednesday season 2 is streaming from Wednesday 6 August on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Fantasy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
From Alan Partridge's latest comedy offering to political insights and gripping true crime, these are the podcasts to get into this summer.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Whether you're in need of a laugh, looking to catch up on the latest political goings-on, or hoping to improve your general health and wellbeing, podcasts have become a big part of daily life for many of us. Here, Radio Times runs down the 30 best podcasts of summer 2025 – from the worlds of entertainment, current affairs, history, crime, wellness and sport. Best podcasts for summer 2025 Entertainment 1. Alan Partridge: Tales from the Oasthouse Some 34 years after Partridge hatched, fully-formed, as the unwittingly naff and desperately insecure golf sweater-wearing sports reporter on BBC Radio 4 comedy On the Hour, Steve Coogan’s excruciating creation shows no signs of getting tired. Male vanity is, as far as comedy is concerned, the gift that keep on giving but it is testament to Coogan’s precision and nimbleness as an actor that he also delivers moments in which your heart goes out to his petty, resentful and un-self-aware character. Gareth McLean Steve Coogan: "The only threat to Alan Partridge is reality" 2. Heavyweight In the first episode of Heavyweight, a show in which Jonathan Goldstein seeks to bring closure and/or reconciliation to his guests whose lives are marked by rifts and estrangements, the American-Canadian humourist tried to heal the decades-long division between his father and his uncle. Poignant, bittersweet, funny, it set the tone for this extraordinary, often tender, occasionally horrendously awkward, pod. GM 3. The Teen Commandments Radio 2 presenter Sara Cox and her longtime BFF Clare Hamilton discuss the often-messy reality of parenting teenagers as well as reminiscing about their own teenage misdemeanours in the 1980s. A refreshing and rare beast amid a sea of parenting pods focused on babies and young children, the result is, Cox says, “not an advice pod”. “We thoroughly encourage people to do the opposite of what we do with our parenting. People call it more of a parental panic group.” GM BBC Radio 2's Sara Cox reveals why she sometimes "struggles to maintain eye contact" with friends after new podcast 4. The Problematic Gaze Social historian Dr Lee Arnott and TV producer Dave Moor each week ask how a pop culture artefact from yesteryear measures up to today’s mores. Episodes range from the place of race in Til Death Us Do Part to how Friends treats trans characters, via The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Carry On Girls and Men Behaving Badly. GM 5. Central Intelligence A stellar cast headed by Kim Cattrall and Ed Harris bring to life the hidden history of the CIA in this scintillating drama that delights in its roll call of maverick agents. Cattrall is our guide to the USA’s many foreign policy misadventures in her role as the agency’s highest rank female officer, Eloise Page. David Crawford 6. Nile Rodgers: Deep Hidden Meaning Artists discussing their “process” might sound a little high-falutin but when the art is music and the artists range from Paul McCartney and Bjorn Ulvaeus to Shakira and Debbie Harry - each in conversation with the genius Nile Rodgers - the listening couldn’t be more compelling. Rodgers’s insights abound and the joy of shared creativity is infectious. GM Current affairs 7. The Rest Is Politics US Famously sacked by Donald Trump after 11 days in the role of White House director of communications, Anthony Scaramucci shares his insider-outsider insights and impressive historical knowledge in one of the fastest growing and always compelling political podcasts. Bringing an expertise honed over 30 years reporting on world news, his co-host is the cut-glass Katty Kay. GM Anthony Scaramucci: "My wife hates Trump almost as much as Melania hates him" 8. A Podcast of One’s Own Extremely earnest, lacking rhetorical flair and apparently content with what is a terrible name for her show, Julia Gillard, the former Australian prime minister and presenter of this interview series focused on folks striving for gender equality, is not a natural broadcaster. And yet her limitations do not diminish but rather enhance her encounters with activists, actors and authors, among others. It’s an odd kind of alchemy. GM Former Australian PM Julia Gillard explains the mission behind her podcast - and where its earnings go 9. Newscast BBC News political editor and co-host Chris Mason tells RT that, in a market packed with similar offerings, what sets this daily analysis show apart are its BBC values, what he calls “anchors not shackles”. He tells us: “Opinions are ten a penny. There is still an audience for hopefully intelligent conversation which is deliberately not about what I think.” Caroline Frost 10. Black British Lives Matter Inspired by the 2021 collection of essays of the same name edited by Sir Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder, the podcast interrogates and celebrates what it means to be Black and British. With each episode dedicated to a particular subject - from mental health to art, food to hair - Henry, Ryder and their guests’ conversations are rich and revelatory. GM 11. The Take (Al Jazeera) For those missing the breadth and depth of the BBC’s HardTalk, some comfort is to be found in this daily interview-driven gem of a show fronted by Malika Bilal. In the last month, it has focused on the attempted assassination of Colombia’s presidential candidate Miguel Uribe, student protests in Bangladesh, and Iran’s right to resist regime change. GM History 12. Empire – William Dalrymple and Anita Anand With three years, almost 300 shows and 75m downloads under their belts, Dalrymple and Anand have come a long way from when Dalrymple first appeared as a guest on The Rest Is History. But from small acorns, great oaks grow. Much like empires. Only great oaks don’t brutally suppress, massacre and inflict famines on other trees. If you believe that the British empire was a benevolent, virtuous and civilising force, you should listen to this podcast. You won’t, but you should. GM 13. The Rest Is Classified – David McCloskey and Gordon Corera Another thoroughbred from Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger stable, The Rest Is Classified has a former CIA analyst and ex-BBC security correspondent trade spy stories to raise eyebrows and heart rates. Meanwhile, we await Goalhanger’s inevitable podcast about sleep, “The Rest Is Rest”. GM 14. Centuries of Sound With a mix of up to four hours for every year of recorded sound since 1859, James Errington’s aural collages are epic, sprawling portraits of change. For example,1925 was the first year that, in theory, all audible sound could finally be captured. Among Errington’s ear-tefacts from the time are songs from Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong and Guy Visser with his Singing Duck. GM 15. Half-Life Author Joe Dunthorpe uncovers a disquieting truth when he tries to learn more about his German-Jewish family’s dramatic escape from Nazi Germany in 1936. Themes of hidden family trauma, ethical compromises and the very physical scars of war mix in a story that stretches across continents and features a soundscape that subtly reflects the disturbing subject. DC 16. 16 Sunsets From the team behind the award-winning 13 Minutes to the Moon, including space expert presenter Kevin Fong, this offers a deep dive into the cultural, political and scientific context of the birth of the NASA Shuttle programme. The Zimmer-esque score sets the scene, celebrating the collaboration of uniquely skilled people, all clearly made of “the right stuff”. CF Crime 17. Mark Horgan – Stakeknife Three years in the making, featuring dozens of interviews and using never-before-heard secret recordings, Mark Horgan’s investigation into the double life of Freddie Scappaticci aka “Stakeknife”, the IRA member responsible for punishing informers within the paramilitary organisation – who was himself an informer – is a rare and unflinching look at just what the British got up to in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. GM 18. The Grave Robbers - Sue Mitchell Having caught a scorpion in Iraq and exposed widescale abuse of England’s power of attorney in previous series, the award-winning Sue Mitchell maintains a domestic focus for her next must-hear pod: an investigation into criminal gangs who fake wills to steal the estates of the dead and purloin other people’s inheritances. Two-thirds of Britons don’t have a will so the victim pool is huge. Luckily, Mitchell used to be a lifeguard. GM 19. Not Another Crime Podcast Not to be confused with the possibly-a-parody Not Another True Crime Podcast presented by “partners in crime, wine and time” Danny Murphy and Sara Levine, this Australian offering has journalist Georgia Love and civilian Sammy Petersen discuss often gruesome deaths, usually of women, also over a glass or two of wine. Because nothing goes with discussions of violent misogyny like a chardonnay. GM 20. Operation Seal Bay A sleepy Welsh coastal village. Some strange goings-on down at the beach. Retired locals set out to investigate in the true story of what happened when some wrong’uns chose a quiet Pembrokeshire cove to stash their… I won’t spoil it. Six enjoyable episodes remind us there’s no sleuth like a pensioner, especially when a stranger starts dropping £50 notes in the village pub. CF 21. Stalked The horrors of one of the most pervasive and pernicious of modern crimes, cyber stalking, are laid bare in this empathetic series, which gently draws listeners into the story, through the relationship between investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr (the journalist who exposed the workings of Cambridge Analytica) and the victim, who happens to be her ex-stepdaughter, Hannah. DC Wellness 22. The Mel Robbins Podcast Mel Robbins describes her podcast as about “being real” and herself as “a friend who tells you the truth, helps you focus on what matters, and pushes you to create a more meaningful life”. She wants to help you change and, with a reported 37m monthly downloads, Robbins seems to be effecting change on a large scale, as seems necessary nowadays. After all, don’t we all know at least one person who could do with such guidance? (If you don’t know someone, it’s you who needs the guidance.) GM 23. Where Should We Begin? The intimate environment of the medium has lent itself to thousands of therapy podcasts but, for eight years, the grand dame of couples counselling has been Belgian-American Esther Perel. With humour softening the blows of her forensic insight into people’s motivations and demons, time and again she dismantles the armour around her subjects and helps them find a way to tell another, truer story. CF 24. Just One Thing With his scientific but accessible approach to improving health and wellbeing, Michael Mosley changed hundreds of thousands of people’s lives. Just One Thing is the perfect legacy of the man and his endeavours. “He was a great communicator and people trusted him,” his widow Dr Clare Bailey Mosley told RT in November. “He really did want to make a difference to people’s lives.” GM 25. Katherine Ryan’s What’s My Age Again? Probably the only podcast to demand blood from its celebrity guests – in order to establish their age at a cellular level – this series sees the Canadian comic play host to a resident scientist advising the likes of Katie Price, Jedward and Alastair Campbell on how lifestyle changes may make them feel younger. “More sleep, less alcohol” may be news for some. GM Sport 26. The Price of Football Football finance experts Kevin Day and Kieran Maguire deep-dive into club accounts and tot up the costs of the beautiful game – and often reveal some ugly truths. Twice weekly, this digest covers the Premier League and local clubs with the same no-nonsense diligence. GM 27. Football Daily: The Commentators’ View Though BBC commentators Ian Dennis, Alistair Bruce-Ball and John Murray have their name above the door, there’s a whole community of commentariat called up to offer insights and wisdom you don’t hear on the radio, including Vicki Sparks, the first woman to commentate live on a World Cup match on British TV, in 2018. GM 28. The Grade Cricketer Among dozens of podcasts dedicated to all things leather on willow, this remains the giant, with a slot on TV and live shows around the world. Hosted by Australians Sam Perry and Ian Higgins who met playing grade cricket, the tone is more Shane Warne than Ricky Ponting, with their respect for the game matched by their larrikin irreverence for everything else. CF 29. Sir Bradley Wiggins’ Café Aficionado If you’re going to have a podcast about professional cycling, then who better to host it than the first Briton to win the Tour de France and a man who’s not short of an opinion or two, Bradley Wiggins? He’s joined by his friend, the journalist and similarly velo-obsessive Graham Willgoss, to ruminate on all the latest action from the cycling world. DC 30. The Game Changers The bad news is that “women’s sport” in 2025 still needs its own podcast. The good news is that, with host Sue Anstiss (co-founder of the Women’s Sport Collective), we meet athletes, coaches and administrators, all trailblazers who have broken down barriers, and shifted the needle on equality in sport. Inspiring stuff, even as Anstiss waits for the day when we have to call it “the men’s World Cup”. CF The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Audio 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 actress on badgers, broken bones, the birth of the Beatles — and the debt she will always owe to Beverly…
Add Here We Go to your watchlist Born in Liverpool, Alison Steadman is best known for her roles in Gavin & Stacey and The Singing Detective, as well as the unforgettable Beverly in the Mike Leigh play Abigail’s Party and the subsequent TV adaptation. Now she’s back on television playing ebullient matriarch Sue in the third series of Tom Basden’s very modern family sitcom Here We Go. View Green Video on the source website How does Sue fit into the pantheon of formidable women that you’ve played? Although she’s pushy, she’s not nasty. And I love working with Jim [Howick] who plays my son. It feels so easy and natural, and that’s down to the writing. If you haven’t got a decent script, you can’t do a decent part. Tom is such a good writer. With every series we’ve done, he brings more fun to it. Everything comes from the writer – or the writers, as it was on Gavin & Stacey with Ruth Jones and James Corden. Didn’t Jones and Corden write Pam, Gavin’s melodramatic mother, with you in mind? They sent me the first episode and said “Would you consider playing this part?” So I read the first scene where she’s lying on the couch with cucumbers on her eyes and Gavin goes, “All right, mum?” She says, “No, I’m not actually. I’ve been crying because I just saw these little badgers on the television that had died and the mother was crying.” And he goes “Mum – badgers don’t cry”. And she says, “Gavin, I know what I saw”. Then she gets up and does the evening meal. I love that scene. In 1974, you were one half of the first lesbian kiss on British TV — in the BBC play, Girl by James Robson. Did it feel daring then? I don’t think I realised at the time what a big deal it was. It was within the first two or three years of me doing television, but I was most concerned for my parents, really. They were from a small community in Liverpool where everybody knew everybody and suddenly their daughter was on television doing a lesbian kiss! But they were so good about it. Were your parents always supportive of your acting? They were thrilled when I got my place at [East 15] drama school and, on my 21st birthday when I was starting my second year, my dad made this lovely speech. He said that they were so proud of me for pursuing this career in a difficult profession and he was sure I’d succeed, but if it wasn’t working out and I wanted to come back home, I shouldn’t be ashamed because the time at drama school will have enriched my life. It was such a progressive, compassionate attitude. Was it daunting leaving Liverpool for London? Before my audition, I’d only been to London once, when I was ten. My aunt took me and my cousin, and we went to London Zoo and Buckingham Palace, then we got the train home. In those days, there were very few drama schools and they were all in London. Now, there are too many. Of course, everyone should be given a chance, but there isn’t enough work for everybody when they leave. It’s a shame. Fast-forward half-a-century. Are you busier than ever? It used to be that as an actress, if you could keep acting after the age of 40, you were really lucky. I’m 79 in August and luckily, I’m always being offered work. I haven’t been that busy this year because I had an accident [she broke her leg and hand in a fall in January]. But I’m almost back to normal now. I can walk again with a crutch, and I’ve just got to have one more operation. Have you retired from working in the theatre? I got to the point where I was finding it too scary. When you’re on top of it and you know what you’re doing, when you’re playing a part you love and you have that rapport with the audience, it’s absolutely wonderful. But as you get older, learning lines becomes more difficult – not for everyone, but for the majority of actors – and I couldn’t enjoy it any more. What do you think of the infamous Beverly from Abigail’s Party now? I developed the character, then we did the play at the Hampstead Theatre and within weeks it was sold out. After we finished the run, the theatre wanted us to go back so we went back for three months and it was a sell-out again. That made me think that it was quite important. Guys would come up to me in the bar and say “I know that woman. I know her very well”. It was lovely. And then, of course, getting asked to do it for telly… When you were a teenager, you saw the Beatles play at the Cavern Club. What was that like? I can still remember the fun of it. They hadn’t written or recorded anything, but they would play all these different songs and we used to sit in rows of wooden chairs. I remember Paul saying “Say hello to Ringo Starr. Ringo is playing for Pete because Pete can’t be with us today” And we were like “Oh, poor Pete. What’s happened to Pete?” How do you feel about being described as a national treasure? I don’t know whether I’m that keen on the phrase. Though if someone gives me that name, I’m not going to say “Oh, don’t call me that!” I’m grateful and flattered I’ve got to that stage. Here We Go is on Friday 9.00pm BBC1; the full series is available on iPlayer