Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2025-12-07T16:01:03.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Dame Judi Dench opens up on her declining eyesight, family history, and having a temper: "Oh yes, I’m sometimes very cross"
items: Diane Keaton: 'I was told to become more feminine – it drove me crazy'
items: Diane Keaton: 'They said I should be more feminine'
items: 'Drink was their blessing and their curse'
items: House of Guinness's real-life descendant reveals true family history - from royal parties to fart jokes and cheeky toys
items: 'I find it hard to believe I'm a sex symbol'
items: The Split star Stephen Mangan on being considered a sex symbol: “I find that hard to believe”
items: 'Murder mysteries don't appeal to me'
items: Back in the game
items: Squid Game is ending with season 3 – but star Lee Jung-jae wants it to continue
items: 'I don’t put any store in being the lead'
items: Siobhan Finneran on taking the lead in Protection – and memories of Happy Valley
items: Death, actually
items: 'I don't have the steel of a spy'
items: Keira Knightley: 'Black Doves is a Christmas series – like Love Actually, but we kill everyone!'
items: Ben Whishaw on Black Doves: "A queer assassin had a certain interest for me"
items: The rough and the smooth
items: "There are lots of irritating things and I like them"
items: David Mitchell on new detective series Ludwig, his career so far and what irritates him
items: Striking the right chord
items: Boss man
items: Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent talk The Duke and future of the BBC: "It's a fine, fine institution"
items: Jimmy McGovern on new BBC prison drama Time: "I didn’t want to write an easy villain"
items: Emily Mortimer on the importance of The Pursuit of Love today: "You have to live as if there’s no tomorrow"
items: Years and Years creator Russell T Davies: caring for my husband is the greatest work I'll ever do
items: Line of Duty's Adrian Dunbar: "I’d love to do a sitcom with Anna Maxwell Martin"
items: Poldark’s Jack Farthing on playing George Warleggan, stripping off on camera and his crush on Timothée Chalamet
items: King Lear's Anthony Hopkins on Shakespeare, family break-ups, life... and death
items: "I'll never see a better Lear than Anthony Hopkins," says King Lear director Richard Eyre
items: Sofia Helin explains why it will be a "relief" to say goodbye to Saga Noren and The Bridge

Dame Judi Dench opens up on her declining eyesight, family history, and having a temper: "Oh yes, I’m sometimes very cross"
type: item
date: 2025-12-07T16:00:29.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Documentaries
subject: TV
subject: Channel 4
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: At 91, acting legend Judi Dench speaks candidly about sight loss, memory worries, her inherited temper, and the comfort of Shakespeare.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. The snow is falling sluggishly, barely settling, as we drive down ever-more-winding country lanes and draw up to Dame Judi Dench’s fairy-tale cottage, with its heavy wooden door. It emerges beyond a barn and outbuildings, a lake, swimming pool and six acres of her beloved woodland in which, each time a dear friend dies (and there are a lot of them by now), a tree is planted with their name attached: recent additions being Maggie Smith and Diana Rigg. The grounds are tended by a friendly young man (the son of one of the longstanding group of women who help the actor), dressed in tweeds, a bounding dog at his side. Dench would doubtless demur at "grounds" – being the least given to airs and graces of any interviewee of her stature. Last time we met, in 2017, she told me how much she loathes being called an "icon" and actively despises "national treasure", relishing Tracey Ullman’s hilarious portrayal of her (available to watch on YouTube) as a swearing, boozing, shoplifting, dog-poo-throwing tearaway hiding behind her revered status. Outside is perishing, but inside all is warmth and good cheer. Indeed, it feels Christmassy, down to the glass of champagne from which Dench takes the occasional sip. Age has not withered her. Jude – as she is known to her friends – is so warm and fun (God, is she fun! And so game!), as well as funny, making spontaneous quips that reveal a still-lively mind even if she worries about losing her marbles. But on 9 December she turns 91 and the passing of time has had an impact. Her bright blue eyes, which can turn to steel when playing a part like M in the Bond films, no longer see. Her sight has been declining for some years, due to age-related macular degeneration. When I ask whether she can see my face – we are seated very close to one another, she at the head of her kitchen table – peering intently, she says, "You’re in a fog." She suffers from both eyes being "wet", the worst conditio…

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Diane Keaton: 'I was told to become more feminine – it drove me crazy'
type: item
date: 2025-10-13T14:39:21.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Movies
description: In 2017, Diane Keaton sat down with Ginny Dougary for Radio Times.
encoded: This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in June 2017, with the release of Hampstead, a comedy drama film starring Diane Keaton, Brendan Gleeson and Lesley Manville. Her outfit precedes her. By which I mean, the vision in front of you is so very "Keaton” that it is hard to see beyond her look, which is as singular now as it ever was. Since the late 1970s, when she redefined kookiness in her Oscar-winning performance as Annie Hall – written for her by ex-boyfriend Woody Allen and allegedly about their own relationship – her name has rarely been unyoked from the words “style icon”. Then, it was all about pulling off that girl-dressed-as-boy schtick, which on her was impossibly feminine and cool… the wide kipper tie and even wider bell-bottoms, the little waist-coat over crisp white shirt and the men’s fedora. The men’s hats remain her trademark – today it’s a pale one, with black trim around the tip and crown. The inspiration came from observing French actress Aurore Clément. “I remember her on the set of The Godfather [Keaton portrayed Kay, who married Michael Corleone, played by another ex, Al Pacino] and she was wearing one of the men’s hats, and I said to myself, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta get a hat like that!’ So then I would buy them from the Goodwill [an American charity shop] or at the swap meet [flea market].” Now Keaton has them specially made at Baron Hats in Burbank. Her trousers are also quite Annie Hall – very tight around her pencil frame, fanning out around her high-heeled black sandals – cinched in with a belt as wide as a weightlifter’s, which a costume designer created for her. The black-and-white striped shirt with oversize cuffs and a stiff collar is one she has worn for a long time. What Keaton then does – which makes her so inimitable – is mess the whole thing up with huge knuckledusters on two or three fingers of both hands, leopard-skin patterned stick-on fingernails, and clunking great crucifixes (“Cheap chains – and I found the crosses …

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Diane Keaton: 'They said I should be more feminine'
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
description: In 2017, Diane Keaton sat down with Ginny Dougary for RT. The subheading read: "Diane Keaton on Woody Allen, happiness and why she buys her clothes in charity shops."
encoded: This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in June 2017, with the release of Hampstead, a comedy drama film starring Diane Keaton, Brendan Gleeson and Lesley Manville. Add Hampstead to your watchlist Her outfit precedes her. By which I mean, the vision in front of you is so very "Keaton” that it is hard to see beyond her look, which is as singular now as it ever was. Since the late 1970s, when she redefined kookiness in her Oscar-winning performance as Annie Hall – written for her by ex-boyfriend Woody Allen and allegedly about their own relationship – her name has rarely been unyoked from the words “style icon”. Then, it was all about pulling off that girl-dressed-as-boy schtick, which on her was impossibly feminine and cool… the wide kipper tie and even wider bell-bottoms, the little waist-coat over crisp white shirt and the men’s fedora. The men’s hats remain her trademark – today it’s a pale one, with black trim around the tip and crown. The inspiration came from observing French actress Aurore Clément. “I remember her on the set of The Godfather [Keaton portrayed Kay, who married Michael Corleone, played by another ex, Al Pacino] and she was wearing one of the men’s hats, and I said to myself, ‘Oh, I’ve gotta get a hat like that!’ So then I would buy them from the Goodwill [an American charity shop] or at the swap meet [flea market].” Now Keaton has them specially made at Baron Hats in Burbank. Her trousers are also quite Annie Hall – very tight around her pencil frame, fanning out around her high-heeled black sandals – cinched in with a belt as wide as a weightlifter’s, which a costume designer created for her. The black-and-white striped shirt with oversize cuffs and a stiff collar is one she has worn for a long time. What Keaton then does – which makes her so inimitable – is mess the whole thing up with huge knuckledusters on two or three fingers of both hands, leopard-skin patterned stick-on fingernails, and clunking great crucifixes (“Cheap c…

'Drink was their blessing and their curse'
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Guinness heiress Ivana Lowell introduces her wealthy and wild family, whose brewery is at the heart of a new drama penned by Steven Knight
encoded: Add House of Guinness to your watchlist Ivana Lowell is the daughter of writer, beauty, muse (as she is always described, with the addition sometimes of “alcoholic”) and Guinness heiress Caroline Blackwood; her stepfather was the blueblood American poet Robert Lowell and she grew up in a series of grand but austere homes. Steven Knight is the son of a blacksmith, one of seven children bunked up together in shared beds in more modest but warmer-hearted circumstances, in Birmingham. Knight is one of our most successful screenwriters – from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (as one of the quiz show’s three creators) to the dark grit of Peaky Blinders – and was recently announced as the writer of the next Bond film. Lowell has written a memoir of her extraordinary life, Why Not Say What Happened? (a line lifted from one of her stepfather’s poems) and, 15 years on, is deep into writing another. The two have come together to create The House of Guinness, which starts in 1868 in Dublin with the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness, the man responsible for the astonishing success of his family’s brewery. The series is full of zip and brio, dash and panache, intrigue and violence – with Sean Rafferty, the family’s fixer (played by James Norton), striding down the streets in a long black coat, handing out punches and kisses in equal measure. There’s a strong musical score (à la Peaky), including controversial Irish group Kneecap’s song Get Your Brits Out thumping during a fight scene at the funeral procession. The first two (of eight) episodes introduce us to Sir Benjamin’s children, to whom he left a fortune equivalent to £100 million today (according to the helpful on-screen caption). But let’s just say that none of the four – Arthur (Anthony Boyle), Edward (Louis Partridge), Anne (Emily Fairn) and Benjamin Jr (Fionn O’Shea) – is happy with the reading. It has taken some years for the drama to get to this point, which, Lowell explains, started with her 20-page treatment. Several wri…

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House of Guinness's real-life descendant reveals true family history - from royal parties to fart jokes and cheeky toys
type: item
date: 2025-09-15T23:01:22.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
subject: Netflix
description: Guinness heiress Ivana Lowell introduces her wealthy and wild family, whose brewery is at the heart of a new drama penned by Steven Knight.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Ivana Lowell is the daughter of writer, beauty, muse (as she is always described, with the addition sometimes of “alcoholic”) and Guinness heiress Caroline Blackwood; her stepfather was the blueblood American poet Robert Lowell and she grew up in a series of grand but austere homes. Steven Knight is the son of a blacksmith, one of seven children bunked up together in shared beds in more modest but warmer-hearted circumstances, in Birmingham. Knight is one of our most successful screenwriters – from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (as one of the quiz show’s three creators) to the dark grit of Peaky Blinders – and was recently announced as the writer of the next Bond film. Lowell has written a memoir of her extraordinary life, Why Not Say What Happened? (a line lifted from one of her stepfather’s poems) and, 15 years on, is deep into writing another. The two have come together to create The House of Guinness, which starts in 1868 in Dublin with the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness, the man responsible for the astonishing success of his family’s brewery. The series is full of zip and brio, dash and panache, intrigue and violence – with Sean Rafferty, the family’s fixer (played by James Norton), striding down the streets in a long black coat, handing out punches and kisses in equal measure. There’s a strong musical score (à la Peaky), including controversial Irish group Kneecap’s song Get Your Brits Out thumping during a fight scene at the funeral procession. View oEmbed on the source website The first two (of eight) episodes introduce us to Sir Benjamin’s children, to whom he left a fortune equivalent to £100 million today (according to the helpful on-screen caption). But let’s just say that none of the four – Arthur (Anthony Boyle), Edward (Louis Partridge), Anne (Emily Fairn) and Benjamin Jr (Fionn O’Shea) – is happy with the reading. It has taken some years for the drama to get to this point, which, Lowell explains, …

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'I find it hard to believe I'm a sex symbol'
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Stephen Mangan is rarely off our screens, whether it’s as an actor or a presenter – not bad for a bloke who thinks he looks like a donkey
encoded: Add The Fortune Hotel to your watchlist Everyone loves Stephen Mangan, don’t they? Handsome, funny, self-deprecating, talented. Married since 2007 to fellow actor Louise Delamere, with whom he has three boys, who he often talks about and plainly adores. Also, everyone feels they know him because of his ubiquity. What we want is for the person we admire to conform to the impression they have given us of themselves and not be a disappointment. So… When he turns up punctually at a London private members’ club without anyone in tow – how refreshing, how unusual – all crumpled linen and damp curls in the heat, we settle into a reassuringly amicable interview for 90 minutes, covering everything from prejudice to loss to class to religion – with some quite uncontrollable laughter, too (he is very funny). To the casual Mangan observer, the 57-year-old actor (add presenter, game show host, children’s author) can come across as a bit of a posho because of the way he speaks, his public-school background (Haileybury, where he boarded from 13), thence to Cambridge graduating with a law degree before pivoting to his first love, drama. After Rada, he toured the country with the Royal Shakespeare Company doing the classics and later moved on to a successful career in television and book writing. But dig just a little deeper and it’s a very different story. He is the only son, with two younger sisters (Anita and Lisa), of James and Mary, both born in County Mayo of large Catholic families: his father one of nine, his mother one of seven (Mangan has 52 first cousins). They came from impoverished backgrounds – “It wasn’t Angela’s Ashes,” he has said, “but not a million miles from it” – and both left school at 14 before emigrating to north London, at a time of extreme “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” prejudice. Mary was a barmaid and James a builder, and they met in the Camden pub where she worked. It was Mangan, a bright boy (he won a scholarship), who wanted to board at Haileybury. His…

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The Split star Stephen Mangan on being considered a sex symbol: “I find that hard to believe”
type: item
date: 2025-07-28T20:00:14.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Entertainment
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: ITV
subject: Magazine
description: Stephen Mangan is rarely off our screens, whether it’s as an actor or a presenter – not bad for a bloke who thinks he looks like a donkey.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Everyone loves Stephen Mangan, don’t they? Handsome, funny, self-deprecating, talented. Married since 2007 to fellow actor Louise Delamere, with whom he has three boys, who he often talks about and plainly adores. Also, everyone feels they know him because of his ubiquity. What we want is for the person we admire to conform to the impression they have given us of themselves and not be a disappointment. So… When he turns up punctually at a London private members’ club without anyone in tow – how refreshing, how unusual – all crumpled linen and damp curls in the heat, we settle into a reassuringly amicable interview for 90 minutes, covering everything from prejudice to loss to class to religion – with some quite uncontrollable laughter, too (he is very funny). To the casual Mangan observer, the 57-year-old actor (add presenter, game show host, children’s author) can come across as a bit of a posho because of the way he speaks, his public-school background (Haileybury, where he boarded from 13), thence to Cambridge graduating with a law degree before pivoting to his first love, drama. After Rada, he toured the country with the Royal Shakespeare Company doing the classics and later moved on to a successful career in television and book writing. But dig just a little deeper and it’s a very different story. He is the only son, with two younger sisters (Anita and Lisa), of James and Mary, both born in County Mayo of large Catholic families: his father one of nine, his mother one of seven (Mangan has 52 first cousins). They came from impoverished backgrounds – “It wasn’t Angela’s Ashes,” he has said, “but not a million miles from it” – and both left school at 14 before emigrating to north London, at a time of extreme “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” prejudice. Mary was a barmaid and James a builder, and they met in the Camden pub where she worked. It was Mangan, a bright boy (he won a scholarship), who wanted to board at Ha…

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'Murder mysteries don't appeal to me'
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Despite admitting she’s not a big fan of the genre, Phyllis Logan takes the lead in a new cosy crime drama – puzzling indeed…
encoded: Add Murder Most Puzzling to your watchlist Phyllis Logan may not be as wildly exuberant as her character Cora Felton in a new soft murder series, Murder Most Puzzling – for the first time in a long career she has the main role, playing a flamboyantly dressed, smoking, swearing, gun-toting, kinky-sex-loving, married-six-times, Bloody-Marys-for-breakfast kinda gal – but she’s no po-faced goody-goody bore either. The last time we met was in 2013, when I interviewed her for one of the later seasons of Downton Abbey. She was joined as Mrs Hughes by Jim Carter’s beloved Mr Carson and I was yet another pesky interviewer asking, “Will they, won’t they?” (spoiler alert, they did). She told me a joke so filthy it couldn’t be printed in a family magazine. There’s a heavy artillery of f-words in Murder Most Puzzling – does Logan swear as much as Cora in real life? Pause, a dry laugh and then, in her gently modulated Scottish accent: “Well, of course!” The strongest expletive I hear, for the most part of our interview, is when the doorbell rings and she mutters, “Oh blimey, oh Riley,” under her breath. However, when we talk about growing older – I’m 68, she is 69 – and I mention Jane Fonda in that fantastic series of unlikely friendship Grace and Frankie, Logan doesn’t hold back: “Now, she is well old. I know I’m old, but isn’t she in her 80s?” Are we having an aging competition now? “Well, we’re much younger than her!” And apropos of Mike Leigh, with whom she worked about 30 years ago on one of his most successful films, Secrets and Lies, she can’t resist a little dig: “With Mike you don’t have a script whatsoever. You make it up yourself, which would imply that you are one of the writers. But, of course, nobody ever gets a credit for that in any of his films!” We are talking on Zoom and the actor is sitting in the light-filled kitchen of the west-London home she shares with her husband of 14 years, fellow actor Kevin McNally. Behind her, a cast of different people come and go …

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Back in the game
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
subject: App archive 100
description: Model, businessman, movie star and exhausted victor of Netflix juggernaut Squid Game, South Korean megastar Lee Jung-jae returns to the deadly playground – and the global stage
encoded: This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in June 2025. Add Squid Game to your watchlist. The third instalment will be on Netflix from 27 June. It’s a funny thing, to conduct an interview in Korean through an interpreter. The question can be brief and to the point but the answer may be epic in length, interspersed with the odd outbreak of laughter that leaves the interviewer curious but ultimately none the wiser, since the interpreter’s answer is joke-free and short. The pace is also curious, with some extended longeurs as we play catch-up with one another. Throughout, however, Lee Jung-jae, the star of Squid Game – in which he plays hero Seong Gi-hun (whom we first meet as a dishevelled, hopelessly addicted gambler in massive debt) – is smiley, pleasant, courteous and engaged. I start by saying that I’m a great fan of the show – and that we have a lot of common interests: a shared passion for good coffee, interior design, clothes, Italian cooking (Lee has a keen interest in food and owns a chain of Italian restaurants in Seoul)… but maybe not so much his love of basketball. Translation; laughter. Our interview takes place via Zoom, with Lee speaking to me from his Seoul office. He collects art and has a gallery, so it’s no surprise that in the background hangs a large painting, a modern piece by an American artist. He doesn’t offer the name, but when I ask he lists some of his favourite US artists, including Ed Ruscha, Donald Judd, Cy Twombly and Jenny Holzer. Ever polite, and possibly conscious of RT’s readership, he also reels off favourite English artists such as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and JMW Turner – he confirms that he has visited the fantastic collection of Turners at Tate Britain, as well as Marc Quinn’s monumental sculptures at Kew Gardens last year. Today, though, the main topic is a different kind of visual art. We’re meeting to talk about the third and final season of Squid Game, the dystopian mock-reality horror thriller (watched in…

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Squid Game is ending with season 3 – but star Lee Jung-jae wants it to continue
type: item
date: 2025-06-09T23:01:24.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: Lee spoke with Radio Times magazine about the Netflix hit's final season.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It’s a funny thing, to conduct an interview in Korean through an interpreter. The question can be brief and to the point but the answer may be epic in length, interspersed with the odd outbreak of laughter that leaves the interviewer curious but ultimately none the wiser, since the interpreter’s answer is joke-free and short. The pace is also curious, with some extended longueurs as we play catch-up with one another. Throughout, however, Lee Jung-jae, the star of Squid Game – in which he plays hero Seong Gi-hun (whom we first meet as a dishevelled, hopelessly addicted gambler in massive debt) – is smiley, pleasant, courteous and engaged. I start by saying that I’m a great fan of the show – and that we have a lot of common interests: a shared passion for good coffee, interior design, clothes, Italian cooking (Lee has a keen interest in food and owns a chain of Italian restaurants in Seoul)… but maybe not so much his love of basketball. Translation; laughter. Our interview takes place via Zoom, with Lee speaking to me from his Seoul office. He collects art and has a gallery, so it’s no surprise that in the background hangs a large painting, a modern piece by an American artist. He doesn’t offer the name, but when I ask he lists some of his favourite US artists, including Ed Ruscha, Donald Judd, Cy Twombly and Jenny Holzer. Ever polite, and possibly conscious of RT’s readership, he also reels off favourite English artists such as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and JMW Turner – he confirms that he has visited the fantastic collection of Turners at Tate Britain, as well as Marc Quinn’s monumental sculptures at Kew Gardens last year. Today, though, the main topic is a different kind of visual art. We’re meeting to talk about the third and final season of Squid Game, the dystopian mock-reality horror thriller (watched in the world of the show only by sinister masked billionaires in a private screening room) where desperate …

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'I don’t put any store in being the lead'
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
subject: App archive 100
description: After standout performances in shows from Benidorm to Happy Valley, Siobhan Finneran takes centre stage in a new ITV drama about a cop in big trouble
encoded: This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in March 2021. Add Protection to your watchlist There’s a scene in Happy Valley, Sally Wainwright’s electrifying West Yorkshire cop drama, where police sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) and her sister, recovering addict Clare, played by Siobhan Finneran, are sitting on the back steps of the terraced house they share, each with a big mug of tea, having a chat. It’s such a lovely moment: the relaxed warmth between the two women and the sense of comfort that radiates from this most ordinary of routines. Is it too much to hope that some of that quality might permeate this interview with Finneran? She is an actor, after all, and in real life could turn out to be an entitled, pretentious diva, far from the approachable and down-to-earth character she plays in some of her most notable parts – even her smaller roles, such as the caring chaplain in Jimmy McGovern’s Time prison series, are memorably touching. But nothing could be further from the case. Phew. We’re here to talk about her new ITV drama, Protection, and start off in the jaunty spirit in which we finish. I have some minor tech issues with the Zoom camera and she could hardly be more understanding. Perhaps it’s an age thing – she’s 59 and I’m a decade older. “I can’t use my laptop, so I’m always delighted when it looks like someone else is struggling,” she says softly, but with a hard northern clang on the final g. As the camera reveals my backdrop, she says, “Is that your kitchen? It’s beautiful.” She is in the living room of “my fella’s flat” – her fella being the latest detective in Death in Paradise, Don Gilet. Finneran has a great range. She was, for instance, intriguing as the sour and conniving maid, Sarah O’Brien, in Downton Abbey. Then in 2014 came her peach of a role as Clare in Happy Valley – “When you get sent a script like that…” There had been a number of projects with Wainwright before, as well as with producer Nicola Shindler. “I r…

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Siobhan Finneran on taking the lead in Protection – and memories of Happy Valley
type: item
date: 2025-03-11T00:01:57.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: Finneran spoke with this week's issue of Radio Times magazine.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. There’s a scene in Happy Valley, Sally Wainwright’s electrifying West Yorkshire cop drama, where police sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) and her sister, recovering addict Clare, played by Siobhan Finneran, are sitting on the back steps of the terraced house they share, each with a big mug of tea, having a chat. It’s such a lovely moment: the relaxed warmth between the two women and the sense of comfort that radiates from this most ordinary of routines. Is it too much to hope that some of that quality might permeate this interview with Finneran? She is an actor, after all, and in real life could turn out to be an entitled, pretentious diva, far from the approachable and down-to-earth character she plays in some of her most notable parts – even her smaller roles, such as the caring chaplain in Jimmy McGovern’s Time prison series, are memorably touching. But nothing could be further from the case. Phew. We’re here to talk about her new ITV drama, Protection, and start off in the jaunty spirit in which we finish. I have some minor tech issues with the Zoom camera and she could hardly be more understanding. Perhaps it’s an age thing – she’s 59 and I’m a decade older. “I can’t use my laptop, so I’m always delighted when it looks like someone else is struggling,” she says softly, but with a hard northern clang on the final g. As the camera reveals my backdrop, she says, “Is that your kitchen? It’s beautiful.” She is in the living room of “my fella’s flat” – her fella being the latest detective in Death in Paradise, Don Gilet. Finneran has a great range. She was, for instance, intriguing as the sour and conniving maid Sarah O’Brien in Downton Abbey. Then in 2014 came her peach of a role as Clare in Happy Valley – “When you get sent a script like that…” There had been a number of projects with Wainwright before, as well as with producer Nicola Shindler. “I remember reading the opening scene with Sarah in the pl…

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Death, actually
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
description: It’s been 21 years since Keira Knightley delighted viewers with a festive offering – but her new series written by Joe Barton is altogether darker…
encoded: Black Doves is on Netflix from Thursday. Add it to your watchlist Funnily enough, one of Britain’s favourite festive films, Love Actually, has not and will never be watched by Keira Knightley and her family at Christmas. The actor has seen the classic romantic comedy – written and directed by Richard Curtis – in which she starred as an 18-year-old, only once, at its premiere in 2003 – “and I’ve never seen it since”. Perhaps she’s missing out? “I’m not in it that much… Maybe I could just fast forward through that bit.” It was Love Actually that, around the same time as it was released, influenced Joe Barton when he was a young student, doing a film course at the University of Westminster with aspirations of being a director. “I was aware that Richard Curtis had been a screenwriter and now he was directing something,” Barton recalls, “and I was, like, ‘Oh well, if that guy’s done it maybe I could, too.’ ” View oEmbed on the source website Barton tells me that he started writing stories as a child and made little films from a young age, and says that he’s happy to have stuck with writing rather than try his hand at directing. His best-known television shows are Sky’s time-travel science-fiction The Lazarus Project and the BBC’s Japanese crime co-production Giri/Haji, with its mesmerising rooftop dance-fight finale. We’re talking yuletide films because Barton has written a new spy thriller series, Black Doves, starring Knightley in the lead, set in London and opening in a pub with the familiar, slurring warble of Fairytale of New York. “Yes, it’s a Christmas series,” Knightley exclaims, brightly. “So maybe this is the new Love Actually… but we kill everyone!” “Death Actually,” deadpans Barton. This is typical of the tone of jolly banter in this Zoom interview – Barton in what looks like a study, whose backdrop is a moody, dark green wall, covered in art; Knightley in a pale, rather elegant-looking room, with one of her young daughters clamouring to come in. Black Doves …

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'I don't have the steel of a spy'
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
description: His grandfather may have been a spy in the Second World War, but Ben Whishaw is far happier playing one on screen
encoded: Black Doves is on Netflix from Thursday. Add it to your watchlist He may have played Q, the hi-tech briefing Quarter- master of 007, with a boffin-like knowledge of life-saving gadgets that is legendary, but Ben Whishaw himself is the polar opposite. We are discussing how ageing it is when one’s fingers don’t race swiftly over the keyboard of a mobile phone. How quick are his? “I can do it quite fast, but if I look at my niece and nephew, they’re on a whole other level of aptitude.” So he isn’t a technological whizz? “Not at all,” he says. “No, I’m very bad with technology, sadly.” He actually does sound mournful. Does it genuinely bother him? “Not really, but sometimes you do feel inadequate. I should probably have a better grasp of it all.” View oEmbed on the source website Whishaw is gentle and engaging and has a great range as an actor. There’s something subtle about his performances, whether as the tragic young poet John Keats in Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion, or his fantastic, constantly shifting portrayal – from slyly manipulative, to fragile, to courageous, as well as inadvertently comedic – of Norman Scott, the lover of Jeremy Thorpe, in 2018 BBC mini-series A Very English Scandal. The actor had standout acclaim for his 2004 Hamlet at the Old Vic, at the age of 23, only a year after leaving Rada – with much being made in the build-up of him being an unknown, state-educated youth from Bedfordshire. And, then, there are his adorable voiceovers for the Paddington films and the clumsy bear’s encounter with the late Queen Elizabeth II for her Platinum Jubilee weekend, in June 2022. Did he meet the Queen? He didn’t go to Buckingham Palace for the filming, but had met her when she visited Rada as patron of the drama school: “She came and shook our… No, no,” he corrects himself with a grin – “we didn’t shake, we genuflected to Her Majesty. I did think she was lovely in that sketch.” It was only three months later that she died at the age of 96, so she must …

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Keira Knightley: 'Black Doves is a Christmas series – like Love Actually, but we kill everyone!'
type: item
date: 2024-12-02T00:01:12.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
description: Knightley and Black Doves creator Joe Barton spoke with Radio Times magazine about their new spy thriller series.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Funnily enough, one of Britain’s favourite festive films, Love Actually, has not and will never be watched by Keira Knightley and her family at Christmas. The actor has seen the classic romantic comedy – written and directed by Richard Curtis – in which she starred as an 18-year-old, only once, at its premiere in 2003 – "and I’ve never seen it since". Perhaps she’s missing out? "I’m not in it that much… Maybe I could just fast forward through that bit." It was Love Actually that, around the same time as it was released, influenced Joe Barton when he was a young student, doing a film course at the University of Westminster with aspirations of being a director. “I was aware that Richard Curtis had been a screenwriter and now he was directing something,” Barton recalls, “and I was, like, ‘Oh well, if that guy’s done it maybe I could, too.’ ” Barton tells me that he started writing stories as a child and made little films from a young age, and says that he’s happy to have stuck with writing rather than try his hand at directing. His best-known television shows are Sky’s time-travel science-fiction The Lazarus Project and the BBC’s Japanese crime co-production Giri/Haji, with its mesmerising rooftop dance-fight finale. We’re talking yuletide films because Barton has written a new spy thriller series, Black Doves, starring Knightley in the lead, set in London and opening in a pub with the familiar, slurring warble of Fairytale of New York. “Yes, it’s a Christmas series,” Knightley exclaims, brightly. “So maybe this is the new Love Actually… but we kill everyone!” “Death Actually,” deadpans Barton. This is typical of the tone of jolly banter in this Zoom interview – Barton in what looks like a study, whose backdrop is a moody, dark green wall, covered in art; Knightley in a pale, rather elegant-looking room, with one of her young daughters clamouring to come in. Black Doves is the name of the spy organisation Knightley’s…

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Ben Whishaw on Black Doves: "A queer assassin had a certain interest for me"
type: item
date: 2024-12-02T00:01:04.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
description: Whishaw spoke with Radio Times magazine about his character Sam in the new Netflix spy thriller.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. He may have played Q, the hi-tech briefing Quarter-master of 007, with a boffin-like knowledge of life-saving gadgets that is legendary, but Ben Whishaw himself is the polar opposite. We are discussing how ageing it is when one’s fingers don’t race swiftly over the keyboard of a mobile phone. How quick are his? “I can do it quite fast, but if I look at my niece and nephew, they’re on a whole other level of aptitude.” So he isn’t a technological whizz? “Not at all,” he says. “No, I’m very bad with technology, sadly.” He actually does sound mournful. Does it genuinely bother him? “Not really, but sometimes you do feel inadequate. I should probably have a better grasp of it all.” Whishaw is gentle and engaging and has a great range as an actor. There’s something subtle about his performances, whether as the tragic young poet John Keats in Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion, or his fantastic, constantly shifting portrayal – from slyly manipulative, to fragile, to courageous, as well as inadvertently comedic – of Norman Scott, the lover of Jeremy Thorpe, in 2018 BBC mini-series A Very English Scandal. The actor had standout acclaim for his 2004 Hamlet at the Old Vic, at the age of 23, only a year after leaving Rada – with much being made in the build-up of him being an unknown, state-educated youth from Bedfordshire. And, then, there are his adorable voiceovers for the Paddington films and the clumsy bear’s encounter with the late Queen Elizabeth II for her Platinum Jubilee weekend, in June 2022. Did he meet the Queen? He didn’t go to Buckingham Palace for the filming, but had met her when she visited Rada as patron of the drama school: “She came and shook our… No, no,” he corrects himself with a grin – “we didn’t shake, we genuflected to Her Majesty. I did think she was lovely in that sketch.” It was only three months later that she died at the age of 96, so she must have been quite frail. “Yes, it was touching, ac…

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The rough and the smooth
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
subject: App archive 100
description: Wolf Hall returns with a fiery Henry VIII and wise counsellor Thomas Cromwell by his side… star Damian Lewis and director Peter Kosminsky slip into character for RT
encoded: This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in November 2024. Add Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light to your watchlist So this is a first. My interviewee has walked out. Not in a flounce or in uncontrolled anger but dead casually, as though it’s no real biggy. But it is. Our one-hour interview, agreed in writing, was to be done remotely – as many are since Covid – with our cameras on and an agreement that RT will use clips to promote the return, after almost ten years, of the BBC historical drama Wolf Hall. However, this fellow turns up ten minutes late, no apology offered, with his camera off. Then, when asked if he would mind making up the time at the end, he announces that not only will he not do that but, as a matter of fact, as he mentioned just before the interview started, he will have to “bail” 15 minutes early, thereby cutting our agreed time by half (reduced yet further when he pulls the plug). View oEmbed on the source website It’s cunning to do it on the spot when there’s not a lot that can be done about it. Capricious, because that’s how his behaviour comes across. Controlling, generally. It’s interesting that these traits are shared by Henry VIII, the character he plays in BBC1’s six-part adaptation of the last part of the late Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. Is it method acting in reverse with Damian Lewis, perhaps? And if so, then it’s tempting to say that his co-interviewee today, director Peter Kosminsky, who is as reasonable in his manner as Lewis is brusque, is his Cromwell, not only enabling his star’s behaviour but left to clear up the departed despot’s mess. To start with, the invisible Lewis is not happy about the positioning of my camera. “Can you alter your framing a bit?” You don’t like the way I have the camera? “No.” I make an adjustment. “That’s better.” While acknowledging the truism that great writing makes the universal out of all characters regardless of time and place, my …

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"There are lots of irritating things and I like them"
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Subtitles, new versions of Cluedo, mint KitKats, loud social gatherings… David Mitchell takes delightful exception to them all
encoded: Add Ludwig to your watchlist Imagine the exhilaration of having a one-man comedy show performed for you as the only VIP guest. Not a tiresome, “wacky”, trying-too-hard, parade-of-funny-voices performance, not even a conscious performance, either – more a gentle glide into a delicious rant here, a quietly witty observation there and an effortless scattering of bons mots everywhere. David Mitchell – the actor, writer, comedian, sometime Observer columnist, panel and quiz show host and guest – starts by acknowledging that, as in his new BBC series Ludwig, he has been in the fortunate, audition-free position of having all of his roles created for him. “It’s never happened as directly before,” he says, “but every major part I’ve played before has been written for me. “Peep Show was written for me and Rob [Webb], and then when Ben Elton wrote Upstart Crow [with Mitchell as Shakespeare], he sent the script to the BBC and initially said, ‘I’m looking for a younger David Mitchell.’” We both laugh, a touch ruefully... tempus fugit, and all that. “But with make-up and figuring that in the 16th century by the time you were 30, you looked like you were 50, it was fine.” View oEmbed on the source website Mitchell’s instinctive brake if he feels he’s steering too close to self-serving waters is humour: “It’s the best way of being cast. I would advise it to all actors. If they’ve got you in mind already, you’re ahead of the pack, because no one is going to be as much like you as you are.” We move onto the co-creator and writer (with Sam Bain) of Peep Show, Jesse Armstrong, and his more recent global hit series all about the appalling behaviour at the heart of an American media empire family, Succession. Both shows share great writing but could hardly be more different, could they? “It’s definitely there in the whole sense of the futility and laughability of human endeavour,” Mitchell observes. “What he’s had the imagination to create is a world where you realise these people in pos…

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David Mitchell on new detective series Ludwig, his career so far and what irritates him
type: item
date: 2024-09-24T08:00:44.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Interview
description: The Ludwig leading actor chats to Radio Times about the upcoming series, Succession's Jesse Armstrong and not being a "real introvert".
encoded: Imagine the exhilaration of having a one-man comedy show performed for you as the only VIP guest. Not a tiresome, “wacky”, trying-too-hard, parade-of-funny-voices performance, not even a conscious performance, either – more a gentle glide into a delicious rant here, a quietly witty observation there and an effortless scattering of bons mots everywhere. David Mitchell – the actor, writer, comedian, sometime Observer columnist, panel and quiz show host and guest – starts by acknowledging that, as in his new BBC series Ludwig, he has been in the fortunate, audition-free position of having all of his roles created for him. “It’s never happened as directly before,” he says, “but every major part I’ve played before has been written for me. “Peep Show was written for me and Rob [Webb], and then when Ben Elton wrote Upstart Crow [with Mitchell as Shakespeare], he sent the script to the BBC and initially said, ‘I’m looking for a younger David Mitchell.’” We both laugh, a touch ruefully... tempus fugit, and all that. “But with make-up and figuring that in the 16th century by the time you were 30, you looked like you were 50, it was fine.” Mitchell’s instinctive brake if he feels he’s steering too close to self-serving waters is humour: “It’s the best way of being cast. I would advise it to all actors. If they’ve got you in mind already, you’re ahead of the pack, because no one is going to be as much like you as you are.” We move onto the co-creator and writer (with Sam Bain) of Peep Show, Jesse Armstrong, and his more recent global hit series all about the appalling behaviour at the heart of an American media empire family, Succession. Both shows share great writing but could hardly be more different, could they? “It’s definitely there in the whole sense of the futility and laughability of human endeavour,” Mitchell observes. “What he’s had the imagination to create is a world where you realise these people in positions of enormous power and influence are just like the people…

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Striking the right chord
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
subject: App archive 100
description: The Sherwood stars on playing saints and sinners in the hit BBC drama
encoded: This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in August 2024. Add Sherwood to your watchlist. Monica Dolan Monica Dolan plays Ann Branson, a formidable crime-family matriarch who is out to avenge her son’s murder. You’ve been in so many terrific series, from BBC parody W1A to playing serial killer Rosemary West in Appropriate Adult — and then there’s the recent Mr Bates vs the Post Office and now Sherwood. How do you choose your roles? It’s intuitive and instinctive. I look at what’s in front of me and I think, “Do I want to do this?” I didn’t have to audition, playing Ann Branson – by the way, it’s Ann with no “e”, which I kind of like. Makes her a bit meaner somehow. And I didn’t audition for Marion Thorpe [opposite Hugh Grant’s Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal]. But I definitely did have to audition to play Rosemary West. Your performances are brilliantly subtle and you are transformed in each role. Do you get recognised? What I found, particularly after The Post Office, is that people think they know me from somewhere… but what’s extraordinary is how quickly they fill in the blanks of how they know me. Not long ago, I was walking my dog, and this woman said, “I know you. You told me I wasn’t controlling my dog properly.” And I was thinking, “I’ve never met you before in my life and I’ve never told anyone how to control their dog.” Then quite recently I met another woman and she said, “Oh, how’s Philip?” And she started filling in all the people and the relationships of how she knew me. And it’s a bit embarrassing to explain, “I think you might just have seen me on telly”, because it sounds really bigheaded! Sometimes it’s just easier to go, “Yes, that was me with your dog.” You seem to have perfected the banality of evil — in Sherwood, when we first meet you, you’re talking about vegetables but have murder on your mind… Sometimes very unnerving people who are capable of actions that are unthinkable to the rest of us are inclined to give very di…

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Boss man
type: item
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: App
subject: App features
subject: App archive 100
description: David Morrissey is famous for taking his work seriously. But sometimes the lad from Liverpool lets the mask slip…
encoded: This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in August 2024. Add Sherwood to your watchlist. David Morrissey and I start our conversation with some graveyard banter. I share my epitaph with him: ‘Too much is not enough.’ What would his be? “Don’t dance.” Quick as a flash. You don’t like dancing? “No, as in Don’t Dance on my Grave.” (At least one of us has their wits about them.) Has he considered it before? “No, I just thought of it now.” Wow, he’d be good on Have I Got News for You! He loves the show (along with Gogglebox and many others), has never been on it and… yes, come on BBC, of course he would go on if he were asked. Well, this is David Morrissey as rarely seen: a man of smiles and laughter animatedly talking about baking, love, growing into yourself as you age and no longer feeling the need to impress at dinner parties. He’s like a big, playful pussycat – not coiled but alert – with a slow, sideways grin. There’s something beguiling about him, too – an impression of self-awareness about how he might be seen to take himself as seriously as he does his acting and the world beyond, alongside a willingness to toy with that image. He’s currently on screen displaying this lighter side in critically acclaimed BBC sitcom Daddy Issues alongside Aimee Lou Wood, but we’re meeting to talk about the return of Sherwood, the intense crime drama series, written by James Graham and inspired by two actual murders in Nottinghamshire in 2004. It’s set in an ex-mining village, much like the one Graham grew up in. The locals live under long shadows cast by the bitter divisions from the 1984 miners’ strike, with characters still spitting “Scab!” over their pints to former co-workers who breached picket lines. It’s also an investigation into the so-called “spy cops” thought to have infiltrated the mining communities, in the same way they did the women’s protest camps at Greenham Common. The finale of the first season was one of the most watched British dramas of 2022 …

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Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent talk The Duke and future of the BBC: "It's a fine, fine institution"
type: item
date: 2022-02-19T09:00:58.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Movies
subject: The Big RT Interview
description: "If Kempton was around now, he’d have been fighting to save the BBC; he’d be on the side of the BBC against the Government."
encoded: Dame Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent star in The Duke, a film about the life of Kempton Bunton who was charged with stealing Goya's Duke of Wellington portrait from the National Gallery. Kempton (played by Broadbent) strongly and truly believes in the common man, and is vehemently against paying a TV licence as he sees it as a tax he shouldn't have to pay as an elderly man - a debate which rumbles on in 2022, still. Radio Times magazine spoke exclusively with Helen Mirren (who plays Kempton's wife) and Jim Broadbent about The Duke, the BBC, and what's next for the acting royalty. Helen Mirren Dame Helen Mirren, looking like a slightly wayward prima ballerina just back from some barre work – thick pigtail to one side of her pale face, framed by a wide leopardskin scarf as a hairband, and leotard-like T-shirt – throws back her head and roars with laughter. This comes à propos of my making a glancing reference to her as an old glamour-puss. “It’s so interesting that you should say that, Ginny, and I will now confess something to you… one minute before our interview [on Zoom, from her home in Italy], I checked myself and I looked so awful that I went running off to the bathroom to put lipstick on and mascara and I was in such a rush [acts daubing her face in a frenzied way] that I missed my mouth and the mascara went all over the place and now – I just look like a mad old lady. So I’m not really glamorous!” We may all beg to disagree – even pushing 70 (she’s 76 now), she was still being described as a sex-pot, which, incidentally, irritated her – but what is unarguable is that Mirren is definitely far from glamorous in her new role. In The Duke, the final film from director Roger Michell, who died last September, she plays charlady Dorothy Bunton, the drab, worn-down, perpetually on her hands and knees wife of real-life character Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent). What attracted her to play Dorothy? “I loved the character and because the Queen is sticking to me like an old …

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Jimmy McGovern on new BBC prison drama Time: "I didn’t want to write an easy villain"
type: item
date: 2021-06-06T08:00:29.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: The Big RT Interview
description: Time stars Stephen Graham and Sean Bean.
encoded: When Jimmy McGovern was growing up in his beloved Liverpool – where he and the remaining seven of his siblings still live, with nephews and nieces galore – it was a source of pride to his family and their neighbours that only one of the residents on their street had gone to prison. “It’s a working-class boast,” the writer laughs wryly. “You say this to a middle-class person who doesn’t understand and they go, ‘The fact that one went to prison is shameful.’ But you couldn’t imagine the street I was born in. They were two-up, two-down rat-ridden slums, they really were. And my poor mother brought up nine kids and that was nothing, that was small. There were Irish Catholic families of 13…” It’s beginning to sound a little like a Monty Python sketch, I dare to joke (McGovern is the most approachable and warm of interviewees). “Yeah, born in a shoe and all that!” he cracks back. “But, you know, it isn’t shameful. In a poverty-stricken area you do get people ending up in prison. I can only speak for myself, but as a young man when I was skint, I did things that were very naughty in order to survive.” What sort of things? “Just pinching and stealing things. Nothing major. I wasn’t brave enough to do a big bank robbery or anything like that – but I could’ve ended up on the wrong side of the law. I could have, but I didn’t and I was lucky.” The much-garlanded writer of TV dramas cut his teeth on the Channel 4 soap Brookside before going on to create ITV’s Cracker in the 1990s: “I found the only way to write Cracker was to be like Cracker – yeah, ‘method writing’ – so I was smoking like a chimney and drinking like a fish.” As with BBC One’s The Lakes, The Street and The Accused and ITV’s BAFTA-winning Hillsborough, the docu-drama widely credited for sparking a fresh inquiry into the football stadium tragedy, his new three-part BBC One drama is powerful, affecting and urgent. View oEmbed on the source website The aptly named Time is set in a prison and revolves principally aro…

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Emily Mortimer on the importance of The Pursuit of Love today: "You have to live as if there’s no tomorrow"
type: item
date: 2021-05-09T08:00:33.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: The Big RT Interview
description: Emily Mortimer speaks about her directorial debut in The Pursuit of Love.
encoded: Emily Mortimer grew up with the Mitfords, in a manner of speaking. In the white 1930s house with its pale-green slate roof in Turville Heath on the edge of the Chiltern Hills – which her father, the late QC and Rumpole of the Bailey writer John Mortimer, had inherited from his blind barrister father Clifford – there would be frequent talk about that eccentric family, with its six famous daughters (and one son) of Lord and Lady Redesdale, known as Farve and Muv. “My dad was mad about the Mitfords,” says the actor, who makes her directorial debut with a three-part adaptation of the cherished Nancy Mitford novel The Pursuit of Love. Stepping into the BBC One Sunday slot vacated by Line of Duty, it offers an entirely different experience from the adrenaline-rush of the past seven weeks. Mortimer also plays “the Bolter” in the series, a mother forever leaving her daughter behind for new lovers. Published in 1945, Mitford’s witty, thinly veiled account of her eccentric upbringing was an instant success, and an enduring one. Mortimer read the novel as a teenager and remembers her father planning to adapt Hons and Rebels, the 1960 memoir of Nancy’s sister Jessica, the political activist, former Communist, investigative journalist and unlikely late-blooming pop star. That book describes Jessica’s aristocratic childhood and her difficult relationship with her sisters Unity and Diana, who were enthusiastic supporters of Nazism. John had also written a radio play about Unity: “So I grew up hearing him talk about these incredible characters and exciting, wonderful, dangerous people,” says Emily. “They were part of my life.” Jessica – “Decca” to family and friends – emigrated to the US in 1939, settling in California, where she remained until her death in 1996. Emily Mortimer has now been living in Brooklyn for long enough for it to feel like home. She met and fell in love with her husband, the American actor Alessandro Nivola, when they were filming Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labo…

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Years and Years creator Russell T Davies: caring for my husband is the greatest work I'll ever do
type: item
date: 2019-05-21T18:49:49.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Andrew Smith and Russell T Davies were together for 20 years before Andrew died of a brain tumour in 2018
encoded: Russell T Davies arrives slightly breathless and immediately friendly. He is tall (6ft 6in), dressed in a plaid shirt, jeans and hiking boots with a rucksack slung over one shoulder. In a single bound, he enfolds me in the warmest of hugs and pours himself a cup of tea. We’re in the boardroom of the company that’s publicising his new BBC1 drama, Years and Years, which starts next week – his last was A Very English Scandal, with Hugh Grant as Jeremy Thorpe. It’s intended to be set in a dystopian future but feels anxiously all too recognisably like today. Did he feel that he could write quickly enough about the future to be ahead of the material he was creating? When is Years and Years on TV? First look at Emma Thompson in Russell T Davies drama Years and Years Russell T Davies drama The Boys about the 1980s AIDS crisis to air on Channel 4 “The world is now so mad that it’s faster than my imagination,” he says. “I mean, at no point could I have imagined Donald Trump standing in a gold room full of hamburgers. It’s impossible to predict.” The six-part series, which spans 15 years from 2019, has a terrific roll call of British actors, including Anne Reid, Russell Tovey, Jessica Hynes, Rory Kinnear and, in a splendidly splenetic role, Emma Thompson. With the exception of Thompson, who plays populist celebrity-turned-politician Vivienne Rook – think Katie Hopkins meets Nigel Farage – the others are members of the Lyons family who live in Manchester. It’s an epic drama, with a shocking finale in the first episode, but at its centre lie the ties and tensions of family life. View oEmbed on the source website As Davies says, it’s quite tricky to describe, “which is almost a worry when you’re pitching and selling to people because I like a one-line pitch”. I say it’s Peter Watkins’s 1965 The War Game meets Davies’s own Queer as Folk meets Doctor Who… “meets Cold Feet,” he adds. “The nice Manchester happy people. I love Cold Feet. Please bring back Cold Feet. PLEASE! This year …

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Line of Duty's Adrian Dunbar: "I’d love to do a sitcom with Anna Maxwell Martin"
type: item
date: 2019-05-05T07:00:01.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The Line of Duty star reveals what writer Jed Mercurio has in store for Superintendent Ted Hastings
encoded: Within ten minutes of talking to Adrian Dunbar, I find myself channelling Superintendent Ted Hastings, the chief of police anti-corruption unit AC-12 and most popular character in the BBC’s wildly successful TV drama Line of Duty, which is heading for its feature-length series finale this week. The actor, a Catholic brought up in Northern Ireland – like Hastings – is talking about whether his character will find love again. Our man is still in love with his wife Roisin but she has found someone else and wants a divorce. “That’s probably something that people might be interested in. There’s a site, I think… What do they call them – Silver Singles?” Meet the cast of Line of Duty series five Stephen Graham’s character is the "most dangerous" Line of Duty villain yet The best TV shows airing in 2019 Noooooh, please, for the love of God, don’t have upright, uptight, old-fashioned Hastings going on a dating app! “You never know,” the actor says, in his wry, understated way, “Jed [Mercurio, series creator] might decide to have a bit of fun with him.” View oEmbed on the source website This is the first time in my life that such an antique, deity-summoning phrase has come out of my mouth, but then the LoD effect is sweeping the nation. We are all talking in acronyms now – blithely referring to AC-12, the OCG (organised crime group) and SCG (serious crime group); DNA, DIs and DS-es tripping off our tongues with ease. And, above all, H. Please Jesus, Mary and Joseph do not say our guy, our beloved Hastings, is the most bent of bent coppers. Who is 'H' in Line of Duty? Meet the suspects Dunbar is, of course, not saying a word. He and fellow regulars Vicky McClure (DI Kate Fleming) and Martin Compston (DS Steve Arnott) are well-practised – five seasons in – at the Seamus Heaney line, “Whatever you say, say nothing.” But they also like to tease… We’re discussing a long scene that features in the finale, with Hastings (last seen banged up in a prison cell, shouting “I am not bent!…

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Poldark’s Jack Farthing on playing George Warleggan, stripping off on camera and his crush on Timothée Chalamet
type: item
date: 2019-02-19T10:44:42.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The star discusses why he wouldn't mind ditching clothes for a role, his Poldark crisis of confidence – and how he accidentally broke his cat's leg
encoded: There’s a funny thing that Jack Farthing does. Unaccustomed to giving interviews, the 33-year-old actor – who plays George Warleggan and is as far a cry from Poldark’s bully banker as it is possible to be – does not have an arsenal of polished anecdotes. There is something charmingly unfinished and raw about him. But there are a few actorly giveaways, and one is his unconscious habit of slipping into the lingo or accent of the characters he is discussing. Talking about the Essex rent boy he played in Carmen Disruption – Simon Stephens’s 2015 reimagining of the opera as a modern piece, with the central character a male prostitute – he starts slurring the odd phrase: “sort of” becomes an estuaryish “sorrov”, quite unlike his usual, clipped diction. Later, talking about aristocratic nincompoop the Hon Freddie Threepwood in the BBC adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s Blandings, he says the whole experience was “just bananas!”, a Boris-ism that could have come straight out of the mouth of the hapless second son of Lord Emsworth. Meet the cast of Poldark series 4 Where is Poldark filmed? RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website Farthing is incredibly slim and slight, with a modest and understated manner. When the camera is on him, his eyes are rather sleepy and dreamy; off it, they become sharp and focused. He is the very opposite of a diva. When his car fails to turn up at the end of our interview, he shrugs his shoulders and walks to the Tube – anonymous and unassuming in his baseball cap, denim jacket and trainers. He was born in north London and has stayed there all his life: “Can’t get enough of it.” His brother, Tom, three years older, is an artist, as is his uncle, Stephen Farthing, a Royal Academician. His mother is a radiologist, his father a gastroenterologist. His childhood was “lovely”, marred only by the traumatic event of jumping on one of the family’s two cats (sisters who never grad…

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King Lear's Anthony Hopkins on Shakespeare, family break-ups, life... and death
type: item
date: 2018-05-28T09:41:15.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Westworld and Silence of the Lambs star Anthony Hopkins stars in BBC2's adaptation of King Lear
encoded: At 80, Sir Anthony Hopkin s believes he has reached the perfect age to inhabit the ancient despot who loses everything – King Lear. He’s certainly convincing as a very “foolish fond old man” who fears that he’s not in his right mind. So much so that during filming of the BBC production, dressed in a shabby khaki overcoat, pushing a trolley full of plastic bags through a shopping precinct, a kindly passerby – not recognising one of our greatest living actors – pointed him in the direction of a homeless shelter just down the street. The binding threads of Shakespeare’s masterpiece – ageing, betrayal, the abuse of power (swiftly revealed to be unabsolute), the nature of love, the fear of and descent into madness, redemption, what it means to be a parent as well as a child and, finally, death – are what makes King Lear both universal and timeless. This adaptation is set in modern-day England: the hundred knights are rowdy, boozy soldiers; Lear is a self-made dictator with a military past; the poor, naked beggars sheltering in hovels on the heath have become refugees in a camp. When is BBC2's King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins on TV? BBC and Amazon reveal new images of Anthony Hopkins as King Lear RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website I wonder which themes of the actor’s favourite Shakespeare play speak most eloquently to Hopkins. “It’s hard to define, really,” he says, sounding incredibly Welsh and sing-song, even after all his years living in California. “I did Lear about 30 years ago with David Hare, at the National Theatre. It was a wonderful production but I think I was too young. I didn’t get it right. “For the last few years, I had contemplated doing it again because at 80 I can understand the mechanisms within an older man – mechanisms of fear and despond – and so I thought I was right to play it.” The idea crystallised when Hopkins was in The Dresser with Ian McKellen, directed …

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"I'll never see a better Lear than Anthony Hopkins," says King Lear director Richard Eyre
type: item
date: 2018-05-28T08:24:57.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Legendary director Richard Eyre discusses his new BBC adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear
encoded: Richard Eyre’s last Lear was in 1997, the year he received his knighthood, in the National’s most intimate theatre, the Dorfman (then called the Cottesloe). Ian Holm was a brilliant, twitching, neurotically strutting, pomp-stripped king, and caused a sensation as the first Lear to rip off his clothes to become the “thing itself ”, like poor naked Tom, during the storm. The director recalls his late sister, Georgina, asking at the time: “‘Why did you put Dad on the stage?’ I told her that I had never imagined that for a moment and she said, ‘Well, you got him to behave exactly like our father’. I could only infer from that that all fathers are like King Lear at some stage.” View oEmbed on the source website When is BBC2's King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins on TV? BBC and Amazon reveal new images of Anthony Hopkins as King Lear RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox When we first spoke, in 2001, the director eloquently expressed the ways in which Holm played Lear like their father: “…the irascibility, the extremes, the sense in which he would test the love of his children, that refusal to concede. One of the reasons I was fascinated by the play is that it takes the family as a microcosm of the state, and of course all parents have the potential for tyranny.” Looking back, Eyre says that while “Ian, and Paul Scofield [who starred in a 1962 RSC production], are great, great Lears, I don’t think I’ll ever see a better Lear than Tony’s [Anthony Hopkins]. He, like Hopkins, sees the play as being all about family. When I ask him if he has ever been tempted to abuse his power (another underlying narrative of King Lear), say when he ran the National Theatre or in his role as a director, he brings it back to his family. “I don’t think I’ve ever abused power in an institutional fashion. However, it’s very easy to abuse power in a family situation, and I can think of occasions when Lucy, my daughter, was growing up when I might h…

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Sofia Helin explains why it will be a "relief" to say goodbye to Saga Noren and The Bridge
type: item
date: 2018-05-11T07:56:48.000Z
creator: Ginny Dougary
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The Swedish actress prepares for what's set to be the final series of Scandi drama The Bridge – and reveals her ambitions for what to do next
encoded: The Swedes say S-ahh-ga; the Danes say S-eyyy-ga. But please don’t call the whole thing off. Alas, this is being trumpeted as the final season of The Bridge. Sofia Helin, its star, however, has talked about being brought back in her 50s so, you know, is it just wishful thinking to say: “Sag aldrig aldrig”? (Never say never, in Swedish.) Sofia Helin is perfectly groomed, with lustrous locks and bright eyes which immediately meet your gaze. In fact, it’s hard to see any trace of Saga in this charming woman, with her friendly manner and ready smile. Only when she’s in front of a camera, looking far off in the distance, does she assume that remote, slightly puzzled frown, with the raised eyebrows, and I feel a familiar rush of affection. Sofia Helin on her favourite things to do in her hometown - Stockholm Hans Rosenfeldt on why he needs to reduce the body count in The Bridge RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website Saga inspires legions of fans, some bordering on obsessive. Helin tells me of one woman who turned up to an event, dressed in exactly the same clothes as the detective’s unchanging uniform – leather trousers, military boots, greatcoat – all in shades of drab khaki and dung. “She had even bought the same car,” Helin adds, still slightly astonished, referring to Saga’s 1970s olive Porsche 911, which has its own cult following. We repair to a small room, where Helin balances a canteen-style lunch of chicken and chips on her lap, opening onto it a bag of edamame beans, bought the previous day as emergency healthy food rations, which keep pinging haphazardly off the plate. She loves it, she tells me, when people tell her Saga is their feminist icon: “Oh, it makes me so happy. That’s the most beautiful compliment I can get.” Last year, Harvey Weinstein revelations led to the global #MeToo movement, with its various national iterations. Sweden’s version is called tystnadtagning, trans…

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