If Donald Trump destroys the BBC, there would be a horrible historical logic – so here's who I would pick as Tim Davie's replacement
With editorial failures and resignations at the top of the BBC, as well as the threat of an American takeover at ITV, broadcasting as we know it is facing the greatest challenge it has ever seen, writes Mark Lawson.
Historians may cite last week as the beginning of the end for British broadcasting. On Remembrance Sunday, 9 November, both the BBC and ITV faced threats to their existence as we know them. As the corporation lost its two most senior editorial figures at once – director-general Tim Davie and chief executive of news Deborah Turness resigned over the handling of complaints about an episode of Panorama that misleadingly edited a speech by President Trump – ITV was considering a reported bid of £1.6 billion from Comcast (the American owners of Sky) for all of its on-air networks and the ITVX streaming site. The ITV story is simply financial. Television advertising and sponsorship are collapsing and so ITV’s shareholders perhaps hope to release the value in the broadcast business before it falls further. The logic for Comcast is presumably the possibility of selling advertising and subscriptions across a super suite of digital and terrestrial channels. However, as ITV Studios, which provides most of ITV’s content, would now be separately owned, it’s unclear how the supply line of shows such as Coronation Street and I’m a Celebrity… might be affected in future. The BBC situation is also financial, though complicatedly and now doubly so. It is massively funded (and its pension scheme underwritten) by £3.66 billion of licence-fee income. But support for what some see as a legally enforced broadcasting tax has reduced during a series of scandals – and dissent will surely have been accelerated by recent events. Negotiation with the Government of a new BBC Charter (from 2027) – including funding methods – starts next month, though with the BBC currently lacking a team to attend and a Trump lawsuit still hanging over them. Having threatened to sue for $1 billion unless he received an apology and compensation he regarded as adequate, last week Trump got a qualified “sorry” (though the BBC still claims the speech tampering was accidental) and no money. Trump has not publicly accepted the apology and has warned he will still sue for “between 1 and 5 billion dollars.” The new risk for the BBC is whether to use licence fee money to fight a very rich American President in court. Doing so would please many staff, though further inflame enemies. So what went wrong at the BBC? On Monday 10 November on Radio 4, Today presenter Nick Robinson delivered an on-air monologue that described a right-wing conspiracy – of newspapers, politicians, think tanks – seeking to bring down the BBC. That’s half the story – there are businesses and politicians who crave a reduced or removed BBC. The crucial other half of the story is that the BBC, and especially BBC News, keeps handing lethal weapons to its enemies. If the BBC were to be destroyed by Trump, there would be a horrible historical logic. BBC News has a decade-long history of getting the 45th and 47th Presidents catastrophically wrong. On US election day 2016, a senior journalist (still on the payroll) announced that, as Trump had no chance of winning, discussion should turn to President Hillary Clinton’s policies. Again, last November, a BBC viewer might have concluded that Kamala Harris would win and perhaps (and this is where it becomes editorially problematic) should win. It’s understandable that many, even most, BBC staff might personally have preferred on two occasions a female president to an oddly coiffed, strangely tanned former presenter of The Apprentice, found liable in civil law for sexual offences and whom they regard as anti-democratic. But journalists should report what they see, not what they hope. (This seems also to have been an issue in some coverage of Brexit and the Gaza war.) Much of the BBC (with the exception of some on the Americast podcast) never took Trump seriously, but the current consequences of crossing him show how serious he can get. Another ominous aspect for the BBC is a sense of multiple crises gathering. As front pages of newspapers reported the downfall of Davie and Turness, middle pages contained stories about the BBC Complaints Unit upholding 20 complaints against newsreader Martine Croxall for changing the words “pregnant people” on her autocue to “women”, while making a facial expression interpreted as disapproving. Some titles also serialised or summarised Andy Webb’s Dianarama, a new book about the 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana that a retired judge later found to have been secured by reporter Martin Bashir through faked documents and false claims. For two Panoramas almost 30 years apart to be found guilty of serious journalistic malpractice – with Webb’s book further deflating the reputation of some former bosses – suggests something more endemic than occasionally accidental. After what can be seen as slow and clumsy reactions since the Trump Panorama problem was known months ago, BBC Chair Dr Samir Shah might not need his free 2026 BBC desk diary. A basic rule of journalism is that, if you call someone “litigious”, they sue harder and Shah foolishly called Trump that. In his statement on the departure of Davie and Turness Dr Shah seems to be representing and defending the interests of BBC staff and executives rather than licence-fee payers. That has long been a fault line in the corporation and apart from the future funding model, the supervisory and disciplinary structures of the BBC will be a huge part of Charter renegotiation, whoever leads it. If I were in the nightmare scenario of being BBC Chair, I would appoint Dorothy Byrne, smart and tough former head of Channel 4 journalism, for six months as interim DG. After that, who knows? The two current broadcast empire meltdowns may overlap because any sale of ITV could release senior talent, including CEO Dame Carolyn McCall and director of television Kevin Lygo. However, such is the BBC mess – with potentially more to come – that, were they to begin an application, family and friends would surely divert them at once to a psychiatrist. It has come to this: no sane person would take what was, until now, the biggest job in British broadcasting. Read more: So, is it all over for our national broadcasters like the BBC and ITV? Not so fast Former BBC News boss argues BBC's "survival is at stake" amid "chilling" political landscape Check out more of our TV 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.
Is this the end of British TV as we know it?
With editorial failures and resignations at the top of the BBC, as well as the threat of an American takeover at ITV, broadcasting as we know it is facing the greatest challenge it has ever seen
Historians may cite last week as the beginning of the end for British broadcasting. On Remembrance Sunday, 9 November, both the BBC and ITV faced threats to their existence as we know them. As the corporation lost its two most senior editorial figures at once – director-general Tim Davie and chief executive of news Deborah Turness resigned over the handling of complaints about an episode of Panorama that misleadingly edited a speech by President Trump – ITV was considering a reported bid of £1.6 billion from Comcast (the American owners of Sky) for all of its on-air networks and the ITVX streaming site. The ITV story is simply financial. Television advertising and sponsorship are collapsing and so ITV’s shareholders perhaps hope to release the value in the broadcast business before it falls further. The logic for Comcast is presumably the possibility of selling advertising and subscriptions across a super suite of digital and terrestrial channels. However, as ITV Studios, which provides most of ITV’s content, would now be separately owned, it’s unclear how the supply line of shows such as Coronation Street and I’m a Celebrity… might be affected in future. The BBC situation is also financial, though complicatedly and now doubly so. It is massively funded (and its pension scheme underwritten) by £3.66 billion of licence-fee income. But support for what some see as a legally enforced broadcasting tax has reduced during a series of scandals – and dissent will surely have been accelerated by recent events. Negotiation with the Government of a new BBC Charter (from 2027) – including funding methods – starts next month, though with the BBC currently lacking a team to attend and a Trump lawsuit still hanging over them. Having threatened to sue for $1 billion unless he received an apology and compensation he regarded as adequate, last week Trump got a qualified “sorry” (though the BBC still claims the speech tampering was accidental) and no money. Trump has not publicly accepted the apology and has warned he will still sue for “between 1 and 5 billion dollars.” The new risk for the BBC is whether to use licence fee money to fight a very rich American President in court. Doing so would please many staff, though further inflame enemies. So what went wrong at the BBC? On Monday 10 November on Radio 4, Today presenter Nick Robinson delivered an on-air monologue that described a right-wing conspiracy – of newspapers, politicians, think tanks – seeking to bring down the BBC. That’s half the story – there are businesses and politicians who crave a reduced or removed BBC. The crucial other half of the story is that the BBC, and especially BBC News, keeps handing lethal weapons to its enemies. If the BBC were to be destroyed by Trump, there would be a horrible historical logic. BBC News has a decade-long history of getting the 45th and 47th Presidents catastrophically wrong. On US election day 2016, a senior journalist (still on the payroll) announced that, as Trump had no chance of winning, discussion should turn to President Hillary Clinton’s policies. Again, last November, a BBC viewer might have concluded that Kamala Harris would win and perhaps (and this is where it becomes editorially problematic) should win. It’s understandable that many, even most, BBC staff might personally have preferred on two occasions a female president to an oddly coiffed, strangely tanned former presenter of The Apprentice, found liable in civil law for sexual offences and whom they regard as anti-democratic. But journalists should report what they see, not what they hope. (This seems also to have been an issue in some coverage of Brexit and the Gaza war.) Much of the BBC (with the exception of some on the Americast podcast) never took Trump seriously, but the current consequences of crossing him show how serious he can get. Another ominous aspect for the BBC is a sense of multiple crises gathering. As front pages of newspapers reported the downfall of Davie and Turness, middle pages contained stories about the BBC Complaints Unit upholding 20 complaints against newsreader Martine Croxall for changing the words “pregnant people” on her autocue to “women”, while making a facial expression interpreted as disapproving. Some titles also serialised or summarised Andy Webb’s Dianarama, a new book about the 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana that a retired judge later found to have been secured by reporter Martin Bashir through faked documents and false claims. For two Panoramas almost 30 years apart to be found guilty of serious journalistic malpractice – with Webb’s book further deflating the reputation of some former bosses – suggests something more endemic than occasionally accidental. After what can be seen as slow and clumsy reactions since the Trump Panorama problem was known months ago, BBC Chair Dr Samir Shah might not need his free 2026 BBC desk diary. A basic rule of journalism is that, if you call someone “litigious”, they sue harder and Shah foolishly called Trump that. In his statement on the departure of Davie and Turness Dr Shah seems to be representing and defending the interests of BBC staff and executives rather than licence-fee payers. That has long been a fault line in the corporation and apart from the future funding model, the supervisory and disciplinary structures of the BBC will be a huge part of Charter renegotiation, whoever leads it. If I were in the nightmare scenario of being BBC Chair, I would appoint Dorothy Byrne, smart and tough former head of Channel 4 journalism, for six months as interim DG. After that, who knows? The two current broadcast empire meltdowns may overlap because any sale of ITV could release senior talent, including CEO Dame Carolyn McCall and director of television Kevin Lygo. However, such is the BBC mess – with potentially more to come – that, were they to begin an application, family and friends would surely divert them at once to a psychiatrist. It has come to this: no sane person would take what was, until now, the biggest job in British broadcasting.
Louise Kennedy’s novel Trespasses charts the dangers of inter-faith relationships during the Troubles – now it’s a Channel 4 drama
Add Trespasses to your watchlist For all the terribly consequential religious divisions in Northern Ireland, Catholic and Anglican services share an almost identical prayer. Known as the ‘Our Father’ (or the Lord’s Prayer), it contains the lines: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. “It’s certainly the first prayer I learnt in childhood,” remembers the novelist Louise Kennedy, who was born in Holywood, County Down and grew up in Dublin and Kildare. “And it’s a word that’s not really used in normal speech. I remember thinking – ‘trespasses, isn’t that a mad word?’ – it’s sort of a sin, but more than that.” Around five decades later, Kennedy repurposed the plea for divine forgiveness as the title of her 2022 debut novel; Trespasses was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction and is now the source material for a four-part Channel 4 drama. The story is set in Northern Ireland in 1975 – during the Troubles of the Catholic-Protestant conflict – where single Catholic school teacher Cushla and married Protestant civil rights lawyer Michael begin an intense affair. “That’s a religious and moral trespass,” says Kennedy. “But there’s other trespassing going on in the book, along class lines and even geographical lines, because Cushla goes to parts of Belfast she wouldn’t normally.” So, in essence – and this may be hard for some younger viewers to believe – it’s the story of how loving the wrong person could be a death penalty? “Absolutely,” confirms the novelist. “There were tarrings and featherings and assassinations because of relationships. There was constant judgement and suspicion.” In the book, the violence suffered by one supporting character for having a so-called “mixed marriage” [Catholic-Protestant] is shocking but, on screen, we flinch at the camera’s clinical examination of swelling, bruises, scabs, stitches. Kennedy thinks the brutal detail is important: “When I was about 12, we were sent to go and find something in the school library to read and I actually sat down with the newspaper. And it was the time that the trial was going on of the Shankill Butchers [a gang of loyalist paramilitaries who kidnapped, tortured and murdered a number of random civilians, both Catholic and Protestant]. “There were very graphic descriptions of what happened to victims and I just sat and read and read and I think that will never leave me. Of course, you could ask whether someone should have stopped a 12-year-old girl from looking at all that stuff!” The constant threat of death in Trespasses may, Kennedy acknowledges, have a personal as well as historical element. She started writing fiction in her early 50s in 2019 when recovering from surgery for advanced skin cancer: “So to take my mind off the fact that I might be dying, I tried to write 1,000 words a day. The cancer came back as stage 4 in 2021 and I had immunotherapy which got out all the melanoma. I probably should be dead – but I’m not.” Trespasses is full of cultural references that, in the TV version, means vintage clips of Mastermind and The Generation Game. “TV in Belfast then was so British. I grew up with Dick Emery and Morecambe and Wise. On TV on a Sunday, they had every sport you could imagine – men’s hockey, netball, everything. But there was never a mention of Gaelic football or hurling. And I think it made the nationalist population feel almost like we were mad or invisible. Our community was completely absent from public life. But it also made people who were interested in those things – or the Irish language – feel subversive.” However, dramas set in Northern Ireland weren’t exactly popular fare with British viewers either, I suggest. “I could absolutely believe it,” says Kennedy. “When it was on the news every night – assassinations, bombs, hunger strikes – you could understand why people didn’t want more of it in drama. But I think there’s distance now and also an audience that knows nothing about it at all and is interested.” Trespasses is part of a rise of Northern Irish culture that includes Anna Burns’s 2018 Man Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman and a stream of other big TV shows. I offer Kennedy a TV quiz question – where is Mastermind filmed and produced? “I’ve no idea.” The answer is Belfast. “Really? No way!” Also made there were Game of Thrones and Line of Duty. “That has been amazing,” she acknowledges. “People working on Trespasses had also made The Fall, Blue Lights, Derry Girls. So there’s a huge base of experience.” Despite such visible evidence of what was promised as the “peace dividend”, Kennedy is among those who feel that promises have not been kept in other areas. “There are huge issues still. A lot of time the government doesn’t function, so there has been money available from Westminster that wasn’t spent. “The services, like the NHS, have been run into the ground. The Civil Rights movement started in the first place because people – and mainly the Catholics – had more limited access to housing and education. The Catholic areas never caught up. In some places, the deprivation is worse than it was.” Does Kennedy think the peace will hold in Northern Ireland? “I certainly hope so. I think a border poll is inevitable and will happen sooner rather than later. [Under the Good Friday Agreement, a referendum on a united Ireland must be held if the Secretary of State believes a majority of people in Northern Ireland would vote for unification.] When I was growing up, it was at least 60 per cent Protestant but now it’s 51-52 per cent Catholic. So, the tipping point has been reached. And I would have worries about the possible return of violence in the event of a border poll.” Kennedy’s new novel Stations follows a pair of teenagers in Ireland and London from the 1980s to the start of this century and will be published next September. No doubt readers and viewers will hope she explores even further the complicated history of her birthplace. 'It's part of my life' For actor Lola Petticrew, Trespasses is still relevant Born in Belfast in 1995, Lola Petticrew, who plays Cushla in Trespasses, belongs to a very specific period in Northern Irish history. “I’m a ceasefire baby,” they (their preferred pronoun) say, referring to the time in which the IRA suspended violence as a prelude to 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. Set five decades ago, Trespasses will seem like ancient history to many, but Petticrew stresses: “Although it’s history for me, it does also feel like part of my life. And the questions that arise for Cushla in 1975 are the same as in Northern Ireland now.” Petticrew cites the work of Lyra McKee, a Northern Irish journalist shot dead in Derry in 2019: “She investigated why more young people had taken their own lives after the Troubles than were killed by sectarian violence during them.” And what conclusions have been drawn? “I think a lot of it is to do with inter-generational trauma. The ceasefire was signed and then the peace agreement, but we never had anything like the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa. In Northern Ireland, it was ‘It’s done! That’s it!’ We don’t have the correct health services, we have huge divides of class and poverty. So what hope do young people have? There’s a massive sense, for ceasefire babies, of promises made to us, that weren’t kept. Why can’t you afford to buy or even rent a house? Why are there no educational opportunities?” Cushla is an Irish speaker, who becomes closer to Michael by teaching him the language. Did Petticrew need a crash course? “I’m not fluent. I had an Irish tutor during filming. I didn’t go to an Irish-speaking secondary school. I wish I had. My parents sent me to an English-speaking school because they thought I’d have better prospects. And, when you hear that out loud, it’s really sad. I’d like to learn more. I have a little book with me here in New York” — where Petticrew is filming the crime drama, Furious — “and I’m trying to brush up on it.”
Trespasses author reveals hopes for Northern Ireland’s future as Channel 4 drama arrives on screens
Louise Kennedy’s novel Trespasses charts the dangers of inter-faith relationships during the Troubles – now it’s a Channel 4 drama.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. For all the terribly consequential religious divisions in Northern Ireland, Catholic and Anglican services share an almost identical prayer. Known as the ‘Our Father’ (or the Lord’s Prayer), it contains the lines: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. “It’s certainly the first prayer I learnt in childhood,” remembers the novelist Louise Kennedy (inset, below), who was born in Holywood, County Down and grew up in Dublin and Kildare. “And it’s a word that’s not really used in normal speech. I remember thinking – ‘trespasses, isn’t that a mad word?’ – it’s sort of a sin, but more than that.” Around five decades later, Kennedy repurposed the plea for divine forgiveness as the title of her 2022 debut novel; Trespasses was shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction and is now the source material for a four-part Channel 4 drama. The story is set in Northern Ireland in 1975 – during the Troubles of the Catholic-Protestant conflict – where single Catholic school teacher Cushla and married Protestant civil rights lawyer Michael begin an intense affair. “That’s a religious and moral trespass,” says Kennedy. “But there’s other trespassing going on in the book, along class lines and even geographical lines, because Cushla goes to parts of Belfast she wouldn’t normally.” View oEmbed on the source website So, in essence – and this may be hard for some younger viewers to believe – it’s the story of how loving the wrong person could be a death penalty? “Absolutely,” confirms the novelist. “There were tarrings and featherings and assassinations because of relationships. There was constant judgement and suspicion.” In the book, the violence suffered by one supporting character for having a so-called “mixed marriage” [Catholic-Protestant] is shocking but, on screen, we flinch at the camera’s clinical examination of swelling, bruises, scabs, stitches. Kennedy thinks the brutal detail is important: “When I was about 12, we were sent to go and find something in the school library to read and I actually sat down with the newspaper. And it was the time that the trial was going on of the Shankill Butchers [a gang of loyalist paramilitaries who kidnapped, tortured and murdered a number of random civilians, both Catholic and Protestant]. “There were very graphic descriptions of what happened to victims and I just sat and read and read and I think that will never leave me. Of course, you could ask whether someone should have stopped a 12-year-old girl from looking at all that stuff!” The constant threat of death in Trespasses may, Kennedy acknowledges, have a personal as well as historical element. She started writing fiction in her early 50s in 2019 when recovering from surgery for advanced skin cancer: “So to take my mind off the fact that I might be dying, I tried to write 1,000 words a day. The cancer came back as stage 4 in 2021 and I had immunotherapy which got out all the melanoma. I probably should be dead – but I’m not.” Trespasses is full of cultural references that, in the TV version, means vintage clips of Mastermind and The Generation Game. “TV in Belfast then was so British. I grew up with Dick Emery and Morecambe and Wise. On TV on a Sunday, they had every sport you could imagine – men’s hockey, netball, everything. But there was never a mention of Gaelic football or hurling. And I think it made the nationalist population feel almost like we were mad or invisible. Our community was completely absent from public life. But it also made people who were interested in those things – or the Irish language – feel subversive.” However, dramas set in Northern Ireland weren’t exactly popular fare with British viewers either, I suggest. “I could absolutely believe it,” says Kennedy. “When it was on the news every night – assassinations, bombs, hunger strikes – you could understand why people didn’t want more of it in drama. But I think there’s distance now and also an audience that knows nothing about it at all and is interested.” Trespasses is part of a rise of Northern Irish culture that includes Anna Burns’s 2018 Man Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman and a stream of other big TV shows. I offer Kennedy a TV quiz question – where is Mastermind filmed and produced? “I’ve no idea.” The answer is Belfast. “Really? No way!” Also made there were Game of Thrones and Line of Duty. “That has been amazing,” she acknowledges. “People working on Trespasses had also made The Fall, Blue Lights, Derry Girls. So there’s a huge base of experience.” Despite such visible evidence of what was promised as the “peace dividend”, Kennedy is among those who feel that promises have not been kept in other areas. “There are huge issues still. A lot of time the government doesn’t function, so there has been money available from Westminster that wasn’t spent. “The services, like the NHS, have been run into the ground. The Civil Rights movement started in the first place because people – and mainly the Catholics – had more limited access to housing and education. The Catholic areas never caught up. In some places, the deprivation is worse than it was.” Does Kennedy think the peace will hold in Northern Ireland? “I certainly hope so. I think a border poll is inevitable and will happen sooner rather than later. [Under the Good Friday Agreement, a referendum on a united Ireland must be held if the Secretary of State believes a majority of people in Northern Ireland would vote for unification.] “When I was growing up, it was at least 60 per cent Protestant but now it’s 51-52 per cent Catholic. So, the tipping point has been reached. And I would have worries about the possible return of violence in the event of a border poll.” Kennedy’s new novel Stations follows a pair of teenagers in Ireland and London from the 1980s to the start of this century and will be published next September. No doubt readers and viewers will hope she explores even further the complicated history of her birthplace. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Train Dreams will be released on Sunday 9th November 2025 and will be available to watch on Channel 4. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Perhaps even Jackson Lamb’s slowest horses aren’t quite ready for the knacker’s yard? Christopher Chung, Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Tom Brooke are hot to trot
Season five of Slow Horses begins on Apple TV+ on Wednesday 24 September. Add it to your watchlist Actors in the Harry Potter movies famously used to rush to read each new book to find out what their characters would be doing next. It’s little surprise, then, to hear that the cast of Apple TV+’s acclaimed spy series Slow Horses, also plotted far ahead in the source material, turn to Mick Herron’s novels in a similar way. After all, at least one failed spy seems to meet their maker each series... “I’ve always read ahead to make sure I don’t die and can pay my mortgage,” says 37-year-old Australian actor Christopher Chung, who returns as eccentric tech genius Roddy Ho in the fifth season of the drama, which begins this week. “When I first got the role, I checked out the books that had come out at the time to see if Roddy had a prominent role in any of them – which he really did in the fifth one, London Rules. I always hoped we would get to play out its storyline.” So, in dramatic terms, is office menace Roddy the protagonist or antagonist this time around? “Oh, he’s always the antagonist!” laughs Chung. “But yes, he takes front and centre this season. He gets a girlfriend, which leads to much questioning from the other Slow Horses about how he’s pulled such a gorgeous woman.” Actors often want to play likeable people, but the abrasive, misogynistic Roddy can be spectacularly dislikeable. “You think so?” challenges Chung. “I would put him down to being misunderstood by everyone else. He lives in his own world. He’s a character people love to hate. The greatest compliment I get when people recognise me is: ‘You’re such an arsehole in that show. I absolutely love you.’ Which is wonderful, but an oxymoron.” In the first episode of season five, we get a glimpse of Roddy’s home life, with ornamental swords on the wall and Warhammer figures and protein shakes everywhere. “Yes, it’s over the top and man-child. It’s another example of the way that every season gives a little bit more detail about the characters. I worked with the art and costume departments this season to show sides of Roddy we haven’t seen before.” One Slow Horse comments about Roddy having an “annoying walk”. Did Chung work with a choreographer? “No! It’s my walk! I don’t know if it’s something [Slow Horses showrunner] Will Smith saw and decided to put in.” (When RT asks Smith, he insists he wasn’t being rude about Chung’s own walk.) Over five series, Chung is pleased that Roddy’s eccentricities have made him less racially stereotyped than many East Asian characters on screen. “When we were in rehearsal for season one I had quite lengthy discussions with Will and the director James Hawes to make sure that we avoided that. By my own admission, there were some things I thought about the character that leaned into that stereotype. So we avoided them.” The easy cliché being Roddy as a maths or IT super-nerd? “Yes. But nobody wants to see that again. “We wanted to make him someone who marches to the beat of his own drum. He’s in some ways absurd. But people who come up to me often say: ‘Oh, we’ve got someone exactly like Roddy in our office.’ I’m amazed that someone like that could actually exist.” Off screen, traces of racial stereotyping linger. “Jack Lowden [who plays fellow Slow Horse River Cartwright] is said to be a contender to be the next James Bond. And someone said to me: ‘Oh, you could be Q.’ And I said I’d rather be James Bond! But I think all the characters in Slow Horses could be put somewhere in the Bond universe.” We’ve all seen later seasons of shows where the actors turn up looking contractually obliged, rather than raring to go. But in Slow Horses, everyone seems as if they want to be there. What’s the secret? “I think it’s because Will slightly reinvents the show each series to keep the actors engaged. When actors stop enjoying something, that’s because they are doing the same thing every year.” Actors on political dramas often find themselves invited to Number 10 or the White House – do the Slow Horses cast dine with MI5 and MI6? A long pause from Chung. “No comment.” But real spooks do watch it? “They do and they are very big fans. Because I think they find it representative of their reality. Gary Oldman [who plays Jackson Lamb, head of Slough House] met Queen Camilla and I know that she – and, I would assume, the King – are fans of the show. So maybe we’ll be at Buckingham Palace.” In the meantime, Chung is awaiting the arrival of his pre-ordered copy of Herron’s new novel, Clown Town, hoping that it will reveal more insight into Roddy’s peculiar soul – and that he survives to the end.
Will Smith on flatulence, Farage – and saying farewell
Add Slow Horses to your watchlist One of the biggest challenges for a returning TV series is maintaining freshness and avoiding repetition. And for Will Smith, serving as showrunner and lead writer for the fifth and final time on Slow Horses, this discussion even extended to how much the calorific and alcoholic diet of Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb – flatulent leader of a group of naughty-step spies exiled from MI5 – should repeat on him. “In this series, there were originally three farts,” says Smith. “One came from a story Gary told me – I hope he doesn’t mind me saying – about breaking wind in one of those cavernous restaurants where the sound bounces round the whole place, and there was another at the end. But in the course of the edit, we cut those two so there’s just the one now in episode three, which is a silent fart. So you never actually hear one in season five. It seems an odd thing to say, but we want the farts to be story-led.” Smith’s CV includes two of the best TV series about politics – the comedies The Thick of It and Veep, both with Armando Iannucci – making him a good fit with author Mick Herron, whose Slow Horses novels always reflect Westminster developments. While earlier series featured the shambolic Boris Johnson-like Peter Judd, season five has Dennis Gimball, a furious Eurosceptic modelled on Nigel Farage. “In the first book, which came out in 2010, there’s a line that actually predicts the UK leaving Europe,” says Smith. “So Mick’s always had a radar for these things. When the book London Rules came out, it was definitely about Brexit, but the TV version is more about right-wing populism and immigration, which suddenly feels even more topical than when we were making it. There’s not much doubt that Farage is the inspiration for Gimball, although Farage wasn’t even an MP when we made the series.” London Rules was also prescient in predicting the levels of public unrest and demonstrations that have been seen recently in Britain. “I don’t know how Mick does it. It would be much better if he was wrong about these things.” There is one main major change from the London Rules story in the new series. “The villains are from North Korea,” Smith explains. “In the book you don’t know who they are at first; we’re in their heads. Whereas, on TV, as soon as you saw them you’d have a sense of where they were from. And, in the book, the villains’ motivation is fear of the Supreme Leader and being put to death. We just wanted to give them more agency.” On the whole, however, Smith stays close to the books – and in close touch with Herron. “Sometimes, adaptations change pretty much everything. And you think: ‘Oh, you loved the book but didn’t like the story or characters! Why spend all that money buying the rights if you’re going to throw it all out?’ Often, if we get stuck, we go back to the book and ask, ‘What did Mick do?’ We use a lot of his dialogue.” Smith and Herron aren’t always sure who created a particular line, although one of the TV Lamb’s most famous insults – describing meetings with his staff as being “like explaining Norway to a dog” – is definitely Smith’s. “The reason I know that one is me is that I also used it in The Thick of It and in a stand-up show. Although I’d forgotten about that until I put it in Slow Horses and other writers said, ‘Oh, nice touch, an Easter egg!’ But it wasn’t – it was accidental. So it’s had a few lives, that line, but it was Gary saying it that really made it.” None of the lines in the next series will be Smith’s, however, as he is stepping down as showrunner. “I feel I’m going out at a good time and leaving the show and the characters in an interesting place,” he says. “I was very emotional. There were tears, but not in front of everyone. Even now, talking about it, I feel the emotion. It’s a very hard thing to let go of.” So why leave? “It’s a very intense schedule. When I was doing the writers’ room for season five, that was the same time as the edit of season three and the prep and shooting of series four. You’re writing the next series at the same time as rewriting the one that’s being shot and it just became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to have season six ready for when it needed to be. So with great sadness on both sides, I had to stop.” Gaby Chiappe (Misbehaviour, The Beast Must Die) is taking over as showrunner for season six, with Ben Vanstone (A Gentleman in Moscow) lined up for season seven. Did Smith leave handover notes or take them out to lunch? “No. I always think it’s better not to be the ghost at the wedding. It’s not something I could do part-time or have oversight of. It was mine... and now it’s theirs.”
'You want to add things that aren’t in the books'
As the crime drama returns for a fifth season, the actors tell us what we can expect from Shirley Dander and JK Coe this time round
Add Slow Horses to your watchlist Aimee-Ffion Edwards plays Shirley Dander Is it easier playing a returning character than a new role? There are new edges and spikes each time — and Shirley has a lot of edges and spikes. In a series based on books, there’s already a passionate following, so it makes the stakes higher as you have to meet people’s expectations. But also you want to add some things that aren’t in the books. What have you tried to add? I’ve tried to understand where her anger comes from. In the books, Shirley is very angry and ragey. We’ve tried to make her a bit more human. In London Rules, there’s a lot of detail about Shirley: 62 days clean of drugs, how many anger-management sessions she’s attended, the wrap of cocaine she carries in her pocket to celebrate the end of her treatment… As an actor, are they almost like stage directions for you? Yes. I remember reading all that in the book and thinking, “How do you show that?” You can’t have a camera in her pocket. But there’s a scene with River that lets us know it’s there and then you know why she often keeps a hand in that pocket. Her relationship with River becomes very important in this series. But it’s a platonic relationship — as are others between men and women in the show. This is still relatively rare in TV shows, isn’t it? Yes, it’s really refreshing. You don’t see many platonic male-female relationships on TV. There’s an expectation of sex and romance. But chemistry and sparks can be all sorts of things. Tom Brooke plays JK Coe Christopher Chung tells us he’s read all the books to find out what happens to his character. Have you done the same? I have now! I have to admit that initially I turned the role down. I said: “He doesn’t do anything.” And they said, “No, he does a lot later on,” to which I said, “I’ve heard that before!” Luckily, my wife had read the books. She said, “You idiot, you need to call them back immediately.” JK Coe does initially seem like a minor character. But as often happens in this series, he becomes more important later on. Yes. Will Smith was extraordinarily gracious in our first conversation. He said, “You’ve read these books just now, I read them three years ago. If there’s anything you think should be in, just tell me.” I thought he was just being nice, but I asked for a couple of things and in they went. What did you ask for? I asked why the phrase “electric carving knife” had been cut from a speech that was in the book. And there was another one where Coe had a knife and I asked if it could be a push-knife. They both went in. You seem to know a lot about knives... That is weird, isn’t it? But I do. My parents let me collect them when I was young. Then, when I became a teenager, they vanished from the house. I think my parents probably thought, “Enough!” Did you also get to meet Mick Herron? I met him on my last day. It was going to be before then, but it never happened. Mick told me that Coe is the character who’s most like him.
Slow Horses showrunner on "emotional" exit and how Nigel Farage inspired season 5 story
Will Smith on flatulence, Farage – and saying farewell.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. One of the biggest challenges for a returning TV series is maintaining freshness and avoiding repetition. And for Will Smith, serving as showrunner and lead writer for the fifth and final time on Slow Horses, this discussion even extended to how much the calorific and alcoholic diet of Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb – flatulent leader of a group of naughty-step spies exiled from MI5 – should repeat on him. “In this series, there were originally three farts,” says Smith. “One came from a story Gary told me – I hope he doesn’t mind me saying – about breaking wind in one of those cavernous restaurants where the sound bounces round the whole place, and there was another at the end. But in the course of the edit, we cut those two so there’s just the one now in episode three, which is a silent fart. So you never actually hear one in season five. It seems an odd thing to say, but we want the farts to be story-led.” Smith’s CV includes two of the best TV series about politics – the comedies The Thick of It and Veep, both with Armando Iannucci – making him a good fit with author Mick Herron, whose Slow Horses novels always reflect Westminster developments. While earlier series featured the shambolic Boris Johnson-like Peter Judd, season five has Dennis Gimball, a furious Eurosceptic modelled on Nigel Farage. “In the first book, which came out in 2010, there’s a line that actually predicts the UK leaving Europe,” says Smith. “So Mick’s always had a radar for these things. When the book London Rules came out, it was definitely about Brexit, but the TV version is more about right-wing populism and immigration, which suddenly feels even more topical than when we were making it. There’s not much doubt that Farage is the inspiration for Gimball, although Farage wasn’t even an MP when we made the series.” London Rules was also prescient in predicting the levels of public unrest and demonstrations that have been seen recently in Britain. “I don’t know how Mick does it. It would be much better if he was wrong about these things.” There is one main major change from the London Rules story in the new series. “The villains are from North Korea,” Smith explains. “In the book you don’t know who they are at first; we’re in their heads. Whereas, on TV, as soon as you saw them you’d have a sense of where they were from. And, in the book, the villains’ motivation is fear of the Supreme Leader and being put to death. We just wanted to give them more agency.” On the whole, however, Smith stays close to the books – and in close touch with Herron. “Sometimes, adaptations change pretty much everything. And you think: ‘Oh, you loved the book but didn’t like the story or characters! Why spend all that money buying the rights if you’re going to throw it all out?’ Often, if we get stuck, we go back to the book and ask, ‘What did Mick do?’ We use a lot of his dialogue.” Smith and Herron aren’t always sure who created a particular line, although one of the TV Lamb’s most famous insults – describing meetings with his staff as being “like explaining Norway to a dog” – is definitely Smith’s. “The reason I know that one is me is that I also used it in The Thick of It and in a stand-up show. Although I’d forgotten about that until I put it in Slow Horses and other writers said, ‘Oh, nice touch, an Easter egg!’ But it wasn’t – it was accidental. So it’s had a few lives, that line, but it was Gary saying it that really made it.” None of the lines in the next series will be Smith’s, however, as he is stepping down as showrunner. “I feel I’m going out at a good time and leaving the show and the characters in an interesting place,” he says. “I was very emotional. There were tears, but not in front of everyone. Even now, talking about it, I feel the emotion. It’s a very hard thing to let go of.” So why leave? “It’s a very intense schedule. When I was doing the writers’ room for season five, that was the same time as the edit of season three and the prep and shooting of series four. You’re writing the next series at the same time as rewriting the one that’s being shot and it just became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to have season six ready for when it needed to be. So with great sadness on both sides, I had to stop.” Gaby Chiappe (Misbehaviour, The Beast Must Die) is taking over as showrunner for season six, with Ben Vanstone (A Gentleman in Moscow) lined up for season seven. Did Smith leave handover notes or take them out to lunch? “No. I always think it’s better not to be the ghost at the wedding. It’s not something I could do part-time or have oversight of. It was mine... and now it’s theirs.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Slow Horses season 5 begins on Apple TV+ on Wednesday 24th September. Seasons 1-4 are available to watch now – sign up to Apple TV+ 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.
Slow Horses star reveals his new season 5 spotlight - and how he’d rather be James Bond than Q
Perhaps even Jackson Lamb’s slowest horses aren’t quite ready for the knacker’s yard? Christopher Chung is hot to trot.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Actors in the Harry Potter movies famously used to rush to read each new book to find out what their characters would be doing next. It’s little surprise, then, to hear that the cast of Apple TV+’s acclaimed spy series Slow Horses, also plotted far ahead in the source material, turn to Mick Herron’s novels in a similar way. After all, at least one failed spy seems to meet their maker each series... “I’ve always read ahead to make sure I don’t die and can pay my mortgage,” says 37-year-old Australian actor Christopher Chung, who returns as eccentric tech genius Roddy Ho in the fifth season of the drama, which begins this week. “When I first got the role, I checked out the books that had come out at the time to see if Roddy had a prominent role in any of them – which he really did in the fifth one, London Rules. I always hoped we would get to play out its storyline.” So, in dramatic terms, is office menace Roddy the protagonist or antagonist this time around? “Oh, he’s always the antagonist!” laughs Chung. “But yes, he takes front and centre this season. He gets a girlfriend, which leads to much questioning from the other Slow Horses about how he’s pulled such a gorgeous woman.” Actors often want to play likeable people, but the abrasive, misogynistic Roddy can be spectacularly dislikable. “You think so?” challenges Chung. “I would put him down to being misunderstood by everyone else. He lives in his own world. He’s a character people love to hate. The greatest compliment I get when people recognise me is: ‘You’re such an arsehole in that show. I absolutely love you.’ Which is wonderful, but an oxymoron.” In the first episode of season five, we get a glimpse of Roddy’s home life, with ornamental swords on the wall and Warhammer figures and protein shakes everywhere. “Yes, it’s over the top and man-child. It’s another example of the way that every season gives a little bit more detail about the characters. I worked with the art and costume departments this season to show sides of Roddy we haven’t seen before.” One Slow Horse comments about Roddy having an “annoying walk”. Did Chung work with a choreographer? “No! It’s my walk! I don’t know if it’s something [Slow Horses showrunner] Will Smith saw and decided to put in.” (When RT asks Smith, he insists he wasn’t being rude about Chung’s own walk.) Over five series, Chung is pleased that Roddy’s eccentricities have made him less racially stereotyped than many East Asian characters on screen. “When we were in rehearsal for season one, I had quite lengthy discussions with Will and the director James Hawes to make sure that we avoided that. By my own admission, there were some things I thought about the character that leaned into that stereotype. So we avoided them.” The easy cliché being Roddy as a maths or IT super-nerd? “Yes. But nobody wants to see that again. “We wanted to make him someone who marches to the beat of his own drum. He’s in some ways absurd. But people who come up to me often say: ‘Oh, we’ve got someone exactly like Roddy in our office.’ I’m amazed that someone like that could actually exist.” Off screen, traces of racial stereotyping linger. “Jack Lowden [who plays fellow Slow Horse River Cartwright] is said to be a contender to be the next James Bond. And someone said to me: ‘Oh, you could be Q.’ And I said I’d rather be James Bond! But I think all the characters in Slow Horses could be put somewhere in the Bond universe.” We’ve all seen later seasons of shows where the actors turn up looking contractually obliged, rather than raring to go. But in Slow Horses, everyone seems as if they want to be there. What’s the secret? “I think it’s because Will slightly reinvents the show each series to keep the actors engaged. When actors stop enjoying something, that’s because they are doing the same thing every year.” Actors on political dramas often find themselves invited to Number 10 or the White House – do the Slow Horses cast dine with MI5 and MI6? A long pause from Chung. “No comment.” But real spooks do watch it? “They do and they are very big fans. Because I think they find it representative of their reality. Gary Oldman [who plays Jackson Lamb, head of Slough House] met Queen Camilla and I know that she – and, I would assume, the King – are fans of the show. So maybe we’ll be at Buckingham Palace.” In the meantime, Chung is awaiting the arrival of his pre-ordered copy of Herron’s new novel, Clown Town, hoping that it will reveal more insight into Roddy’s peculiar soul – and that he survives to the end. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Slow Horses season 5 begins on Apple TV+ on Wednesday 24th September. Seasons 1-4 are available to watch now – sign up to Apple TV+ 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.
Richard Marquise was the first FBI agent on the scene of the Lockerbie disaster. Now he’s advising on a drama adaptation that promises to cast new light on the story
Add The Bombing of Pan Am 103 to your watchlist Until 21 December 1988, the Frankfurt-London-New York-Detroit transatlantic route with the US airline Pan Am, was designated Flight 103. But, as is standard practice after an aviation disaster, those numerals were retired when the plane was blown apart by a bomb over Lockerbie, south-west Scotland, killing 243 passengers, 16 crew and 11 people on the ground. The first FBI agent to arrive at the crime scene was Richard “Dick” Marquise, who is now long retired, although the case remains to some extent open. “Lockerbie has literally been almost half my life,” says Marquise on the phone from his Florida home. “I was 41 when it happened and I’m about to be 78, but it’s still a big part of my life.” As an adviser on a six-part BBC drama, The Bombing of Pan Am 103 – for which one of the sources is his 2006 book, Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation – Marquise recently spent more than a year working with producers and actors, and visited the filming in Scotland. (In an increasingly common practice due to the huge cost of making a drama, The Bombing of Pan Am 103 will be shown in a UK “first window” on 18 May ahead of a later global release on Netflix, a co-producer.) In the drama, there’s a striking scene in which, as Marquise (played by Suits actor Patrick J Adams) prepares to fly to the UK to start the investigation, his wife tells him to keep thinking that it could have been their own sons on that plane; the FBI officer replies that he has to be rational, not emotional. Is that scene true to his working personality? Marquise laughs: “No! Viewers may think I’m an – pardon my French – asshole, but I understand why they’ve done it. There’s a scene where someone says: ‘I hope Dick has a heart under that suit of his.’ They’re portraying my character not so much as heartless but as devoted to the mission. Is that 100 per cent me? No. But I accept it for dramatic reasons.” The Bombing of Pan Am 103 focuses on hostility between the lead investigator for the local Scottish police, DCS John Orr (played by Peter Mullan) and Marquise. Orr is seen growling, “Scottish soil, Scottish evidence, Scottish procedure,” and slamming down the phone on his American counterpart. Were things as prickly as they are depicted? “We had our issues,” Marquise admits. “They’ve had to simplify things in the drama: you can’t have 35,000 characters. In reality, I didn’t have a lot of one-on-one dealings with John Orr. I got to know him later and we became good friends until he died. My main dealings were with Stuart Henderson [who joined as a senior investigating officer] and that was, for both of us, a work in progress. I hate to use the word “distrust” but you have a crime scene in Scotland with 190 American victims and you have this very small [Dumfries and Galloway] police force that had never investigated anything like this before. And I’ll be honest, the FBI is not used to not being in charge. But I’ll tell you this, no one could have collected evidence as diligently and expertly as the Scottish cops.” This, of course, is the second drama about the mass aviation homicide to be screened in the UK this year, following January’s Sky Atlantic five-parter, Lockerbie: a Search for Truth, with Colin Firth as Dr Jim Swire, the GP whose daughter, Flora, was killed on the flight and who has led bereaved families in a campaign for justice. Fact-based dramas often mark round-number anniversaries, but it is 37 years since Lockerbie and the double interest at this uneven anniversary results from many remaining questions and continuing litigation: a Libyan national, Abu Agila Mohammed Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, is scheduled to go on trial in Washington this summer, accused of building the Lockerbie bomb. In 2001, another Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted by Scottish judges of plotting the massacre; a past government of Libya also admitted responsibility. “So the case is still going on after 37 years!” says Marquise. In most instances, a recent-historical drama following just a few months after another would, however well done, seem repetitive and second-best. But The Bombing of Pan Am 103 tells a story almost completely different from the Colin Firth drama. The Sky series dramatised Jim Swire’s belief that the convicted and accused Libyans were framed to protect (for alleged international political convenience) a plot by Iran and pro-Palestinian groups based in Syria in which, Swire and his supporters suggest, the bomb was placed on the plane not at Frankfurt, but at London Heathrow. The BBC drama supports Libyan culpability, as advanced by Marquise and the FBI. “I haven’t seen the Colin Firth programme but I have read Jim Swire’s book,” says Marquise. “And I’ve told Dr Swire I disagree with his conclusion that we’re hiding things and that there’s much more to the story. I try to be respectful and I would never criticise a Lockerbie family member, but I simply disagree with him. The BBC programme is fact-based and will tell the story much more accurately than anything that’s ever been portrayed in the media, and I’m thankful for that.” The contention between Marquise and Swire largely rests on the forensic evidence, from which the FBI concluded where the bomb was made (Zurich), for whom (Libya) and how it entered the luggage hold (Frankfurt) of a plane with three airport stops and a feeder flight from Malta. “There’s a lot of disagreement,” the former FBI lead investigator says, “over a fragment called PT/35, a piece of a circuit board of the timer built by a Swiss company in Zurich for Libyan intelligence. It’s almost unbelievable a fragment that small could have been found in such a large crime-scene, but I know the great work the Scottish cops did in collecting evidence. I know what the fragment was, know how it was recovered, where it was, I’ve seen it.” The other side has claimed that the discovery of PT/35 was not “almost unbelievable” but completely so, casting doubt on how it was found and by whom. That fragment matters because it’s the main basis for the FBI/official line that the attack was run from Libya. Marquise, meanwhile, rejects the rival Iranian/ Palestinian theory: “We didn’t discover any link to Iran or Palestinian terrorists. We let the evidence speak for itself and it led us to conclude that it was a Libyan operation. The one thing I can never rule out is that the Iranians had some role way far in the background, but there’s no evidence for that.” Not even a six-hour BBC drama can give a sense of the patient and painstaking length of the investigation. Marquise recalls: “At the FBI, we hated to say that we were assessing stuff. The CIA analyses; we find evidence that we can take to court. But we didn’t get that evidence until three years afterwards. Until then it was a whodunnit in which we had to re-create that 845-square-mile crime scene and follow that evidence where it led.” A subtle way we see time passing in the drama is that the standard photo of the president on FBI walls changes from Ronald Reagan to George HW Bush. These days, it’s Donald Trump smiling out for the second time. How much difference does it make to the FBI who is in the White House? “I started in 1971 and worked under seven presidents [Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr]. And it made no difference who it was. I never felt anyone in the White House or Department of Justice was telling us how to do our job. Let me be clear, I don’t know how often I’ve said this publicly, but on Lockerbie I never had a single enquiry from the White House. The current president – that’s a whole different can of worms and I’m glad I’m retired…”
The Bombing of Pan Am 103 will tell Lockerbie story "more accurately", says FBI investigator
The BBC drama comes just months after the release of Sky's Lockerbie: A Search for Truth.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Until 21st December 1988, the Frankfurt-London-New York-Detroit transatlantic route with the US airline Pan Am, was designated Flight 103. But, as is standard practice after an aviation disaster, those numerals were retired when the plane was blown apart by a bomb over Lockerbie, south-west Scotland, killing 243 passengers, 16 crew and 11 people on the ground. The first FBI agent to arrive at the crime scene was Richard 'Dick' Marquise, who is now long retired, although the case remains to some extent open. “Lockerbie has literally been almost half my life,” says Marquise on the phone from his Florida home. “I was 41 when it happened and I’m about to be 78, but it’s still a big part of my life.” As an adviser on a six-part BBC drama, The Bombing of Pan Am 103 – for which one of the sources is his 2006 book, Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation – Marquise recently spent more than a year working with producers and actors, and visited the filming in Scotland. (In an increasingly common practice due to the huge cost of making a drama, The Bombing of Pan Am 103 will be shown in a UK “first window” on 18 May ahead of a later global release on Netflix, a co-producer.) In the drama, there’s a striking scene in which, as Marquise (played by Suits actor Patrick J Adams) prepares to fly to the UK to start the investigation, his wife tells him to keep thinking that it could have been their own sons on that plane; the FBI officer replies that he has to be rational, not emotional. Is that scene true to his working personality? Marquise laughs: “No! Viewers may think I’m an – pardon my French – asshole, but I understand why they’ve done it. There’s a scene where someone says: ‘I hope Dick has a heart under that suit of his.’ They’re portraying my character not so much as heartless but as devoted to the mission. Is that 100 per cent me? No. But I accept it for dramatic reasons.” The Bombing of Pan Am 103 focuses on hostility between the lead investigator for the local Scottish police, DCS John Orr (played by Peter Mullan) and Marquise. Orr is seen growling, “Scottish soil, Scottish evidence, Scottish procedure,” and slamming down the phone on his American counterpart. Were things as prickly as they are depicted? “We had our issues,” Marquise admits. “They’ve had to simplify things in the drama: you can’t have 35,000 characters. In reality, I didn’t have a lot of one-on-one dealings with John Orr. I got to know him later and we became good friends until he died. “My main dealings were with Stuart Henderson [who joined as a senior investigating officer] and that was, for both of us, a work in progress. I hate to use the word 'distrust' but you have a crime scene in Scotland with 190 American victims and you have this very small [Dumfries and Galloway] police force that had never investigated anything like this before. And I’ll be honest, the FBI is not used to not being in charge. But I’ll tell you this, no one could have collected evidence as diligently and expertly as the Scottish cops.” This, of course, is the second drama about the mass aviation homicide to be screened in the UK this year, following January’s Sky Atlantic five-parter, Lockerbie: a Search for Truth, with Colin Firth as Dr Jim Swire, the GP whose daughter, Flora, was killed on the flight and who has led bereaved families in a campaign for justice. Fact-based dramas often mark round-number anniversaries, but it is 37 years since Lockerbie and the double interest at this uneven anniversary results from many remaining questions and continuing litigation: a Libyan national, Abu Agila Mohammed Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, is scheduled to go on trial in Washington this summer, accused of building the Lockerbie bomb. In 2001, another Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted by Scottish judges of plotting the massacre; a past government of Libya also admitted responsibility. “So the case is still going on after 37 years!” says Marquise. In most instances, a recent-historical drama following just a few months after another would, however well done, seem repetitive and second-best. But The Bombing of Pan Am 103 tells a story almost completely different from the Colin Firth drama. The Sky series dramatised Jim Swire’s belief that the convicted and accused Libyans were framed to protect (for alleged international political convenience) a plot by Iran and pro-Palestinian groups based in Syria in which, Swire and his supporters suggest, the bomb was placed on the plane not at Frankfurt, but at London Heathrow. The BBC drama supports Libyan culpability, as advanced by Marquise and the FBI. “I haven’t seen the Colin Firth programme but I have read Jim Swire’s book,” says Marquise. “And I’ve told Dr Swire I disagree with his conclusion that we’re hiding things and that there’s much more to the story. I try to be respectful and I would never criticise a Lockerbie family member, but I simply disagree with him. The BBC programme is fact-based and will tell the story much more accurately than anything that’s ever been portrayed in the media, and I’m thankful for that.” The contention between Marquise and Swire largely rests on the forensic evidence, from which the FBI concluded where the bomb was made (Zurich), for whom (Libya) and how it entered the luggage hold (Frankfurt) of a plane with three airport stops and a feeder flight from Malta. “There’s a lot of disagreement,” the former FBI lead investigator says, “over a fragment called PT/35, a piece of a circuit board of the timer built by a Swiss company in Zurich for Libyan intelligence. It’s almost unbelievable a fragment that small could have been found in such a large crime-scene, but I know the great work the Scottish cops did in collecting evidence. I know what the fragment was, know how it was recovered, where it was, I’ve seen it.” The other side has claimed that the discovery of PT/35 was not “almost unbelievable” but completely so, casting doubt on how it was found and by whom. That fragment matters because it’s the main basis for the FBI/official line that the attack was run from Libya. Marquise, meanwhile, rejects the rival Iranian/ Palestinian theory: “We didn’t discover any link to Iran or Palestinian terrorists. We let the evidence speak for itself and it led us to conclude that it was a Libyan operation. The one thing I can never rule out is that the Iranians had some role way far in the background, but there’s no evidence for that.” Not even a six-hour BBC drama can give a sense of the patient and painstaking length of the investigation. Marquise recalls: “At the FBI, we hated to say that we were assessing stuff. The CIA analyses; we find evidence that we can take to court. But we didn’t get that evidence until three years afterwards. Until then it was a whodunnit in which we had to re-create that 845-square-mile crime scene and follow that evidence where it led.” A subtle way we see time passing in the drama is that the standard photo of the president on FBI walls changes from Ronald Reagan to George HW Bush. These days, it’s Donald Trump smiling out for the second time. How much difference does it make to the FBI who is in the White House? “I started in 1971 and worked under seven presidents [Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr]. And it made no difference who it was. I never felt anyone in the White House or Department of Justice was telling us how to do our job. Let me be clear, I don’t know how often I’ve said this publicly, but on Lockerbie I never had a single enquiry from the White House. The current president – that’s a whole different can of worms and I’m glad I’m retired…” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Bombing of Pan Am 103 premieres on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday 18th May, with new episodes premiering at 9pm every Sunday and Monday for three weeks. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
For the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, it’s taken 20 years and a TV drama to do what the law could not: tell the true story of his death
Add Suspect: the Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes to your watchlist Some of what happened to a young Brazilian electrician in London 20 summers ago was just horrific bad luck. For example, if he’d not been living in an apartment at an address associated with a man suspected of a recent terrorist attack on London, he would never have been tracked by police surveillance. But what happened next to Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005 was not misfortune; it was, it seems, gross police incompetence. Despite no positive identification of the suspect, the blameless 27-year-old was pursued onto a London Underground carriage, where he was shot dead by armed officers. Then came the lies. Rumours spread that the police were suspicious because their target ran from cops, vaulted a Tube barrier, was wearing bulky clothing in summer and was known to be an illegal immigrant or suspect in another investigation. None of that turned out to be true. But the falsehoods were so efficiently rooted that many may still believe them today. And following de Menezes’s death, no individual police officer has ever been blamed or disciplined (although the office of Sir Ian Blair, the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was fined for a breach of health and safety law). Two decades on, Suspect: the Shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes, a four-part Disney+ drama, aims to expose the police errors and correct the reputation of a completely innocent victim. “We hope the series will improve people’s knowledge of the story,” says Maria, de Menezes’s mother, speaking through a translator on a trip to London to support the series. “This drama is finally revealing all the lies by the police.” “It was hard for us to watch,” admits Giovanni, de Menezes’s brother. “There are parts of the film my mum has said she never wants to watch again. There are scenes that brought everything back; Mum started to cry.” For all this pain, there was some financial compensation from the British government – “It helped with lost earnings and interrupted plans but doesn’t solve anything,” says Giovanni – but no explanation or contrition. “The police insisted at the inquest, even years later, that no mistakes had been made,” says writer/producer Jeff Pope. “But some of the errors made in that operation that morning are so basic that you can’t excuse them.” Pope is the, well, pope of fact-based drama, with his credits including real-life police procedurals A Confession and Little Boy Blue for ITV, as well as the BBC’s Jimmy Savile drama, The Reckoning. Even so, he initially resisted the de Menezes story when another producer, Kwadjo Dajan, approached him with the idea. “I vividly remember him being shot, but the story in my head was jumbled,” Pope says now. “I thought it was an awful accident, that he had been running down the stairs and he vaulted the barrier.” He confesses: “I was flabbergasted to discover that none of what I ‘remembered’ was true. The only people running and vaulting barriers were the firearms officers chasing him. Jean Charles used his Travelcard and went down the stairs.” Fact-based drama often requires deep research and freedom of information requests but, in this case, all the information was in evidence and reports from multiple public investigations: two by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the Health and Safety at Work Executive and the coroner’s inquest. “It wasn’t about finding amazing revelations,” says Pope. “It’s all there in the inquiries, so it was about putting it together and finding a way through it. For example, did the cops shout, ‘Armed police’? They say they did, but 17 members of the public say they didn’t. Much of it is letting the audience make its mind up.” For the de Menezes family, the two key suspects in the fatal confusion were Commissioner Blair (played by Conleth Hill in the drama) and Cressida Dick (Emily Mortimer), who was operational commander during the pursuit and shooting. “The most perplexing aspect of it is how Cressida Dick was praised by the Health and Safety Executive – saying that none of this was her fault,” says Pope. “She emerged with no blame attached and I find it hard to believe.” Maria, mother of an innocent man shot dead on Dick’s watch, agrees: “I don’t have any hatred in my heart. But I do have feelings about the way the police officers treated my son. I have great resentment against Cressida Dick because of the way she led the operation.” The structure of Suspect as a drama may surprise viewers – despite his namecheck in the title, the victim is almost a minor character. “I had to think a lot about how to tell the story,” Pope explains. “Because if the sub-title is the Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, then where is he for the first two episodes? But I wanted people to understand the context. When we first meet him, he’s AN Other Londoner – finding the Tube shut on 7 July because of the terror attacks.” Without excusing the police, Suspect carefully lays out how 7 July 2005 – when Islamist terrorists exploded four devices on the London transport network, killing 56 people (including four suicide bombers) – led terribly to 22 July, when a young electrician was killed in the mistaken belief that he was another suicide bomber. But, crucially, the two dates are linked and bridged by 21 July, when five attempts by another cell of suicide bombers failed. “When I started, I’d actually completely forgotten about 21 July,” says Pope, “but it’s crucial. On 22 July, police were thinking, ‘We don’t know who was behind 7/7 and now there is a second group out there’. So there was a lot of fear and paranoia. It was seen as the most serious attack on London since the Second World War.” He adds: “I’m certain those guys went down onto that platform convinced that Jean Charles de Menezes was a terrorist. That was the mood at the time: ‘We’ve got one of them!’” Still, Pope is clear that context cannot be exoneration. “I have to be very careful because hindsight’s perfect sight. But there are just so many questions. Why is there no CCTV footage from the bus [on which the victim travelled] or the Tube station? You start to get an unhealthy whiff. No footage! What’s going on there?” Pope is also severely critical of Ian Blair and of Cressida Dick, who, despite the catastrophe under her control, later herself became Metropolitan Police Commissioner: “If they had put their hands up, we wouldn’t be here today. What would it have hurt her to say sorry? Over and again they use the word ‘regret’, not ‘remorse’, and that’s a crucial distinction for me.” Giovanni de Menezes agrees: “An apology wouldn’t fix anything, but it would be an ethical and human thing to do.” But wasn’t the Met perhaps like other scandal-hit institutions – the Post Office, the Vatican, the Church of England, the BBC over Savile – with bosses closing ranks to protect their jobs and pensions and the institution’s reputation? “I couldn’t possibly comment,” says Pope. “But you might be on to something.” And perhaps, as in Mr Bates vs the Post Office (one of the few major factual dramas that Pope didn’t make), lawyers advise clients never to apologise because compensation and prosecutions may follow? “Correct. Legally, things are often set up that you can never admit guilt.” Perhaps ironically, Suspect itself has attracted some criticism, with victims’ representatives and survivors (more than 770 people were injured) of the 7/7 attacks complaining when photos taken during filming showed a re-creation of the bombed bus in central London. “To be fair, there was in the background a blown-up bus and that’s an iconic image. So I understand why there was that noise,” says Pope. “But we don’t actually dramatise 7/7 happening and Suspect isn’t about 7/7. The point was to say: that had just happened – and now let’s see the impact.” Interestingly, to use a film crew in London streets like this requires permission from the Metropolitan Police and it was Commissioner Mark Rowley, Cressida Dick’s successor, who gave that authority: “He kept us at arm’s length, but he didn’t block us,” says Pope. However the drama is received, reliving the events is obviously difficult for the victim’s family. One of the more upsetting revelations in Suspect is that, before being killed, de Menezes was making plans to move home. “He planned to build a house near to where we lived,” confirms Maria. “He wanted to get married and live in Brazil near to his mum and dad.” So is it hard for her to come to London, given what happened here? She looks through the windows of the office where we’re talking. “I’ll be really honest,” she says. “I only came because I wanted everything to be crystal clear and to be understood. I really shouldn’t be here. Because of my age and I’m not well and my husband needs me. My life back home is very hard, but I came here, because I had to. For my son.”
Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes 'finally reveals police lies', says victim's mother
For the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, it’s taken 20 years and a TV drama to do what the law could not: tell the true story of his death.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Some of what happened to a young Brazilian electrician in London 20 summers ago was just horrific bad luck. For example, if he’d not been living in an apartment at an address associated with a man suspected of a recent terrorist attack on London, he would never have been tracked by police surveillance. But what happened next to Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July 2005 was not misfortune; it was, it seems, gross police incompetence. Despite no positive identification of the suspect, the blameless 27-year-old was pursued onto a London Underground carriage, where he was shot dead by armed officers. Then came the lies. Rumours spread that the police were suspicious because their target ran from cops, vaulted a Tube barrier, was wearing bulky clothing in summer and was known to be an illegal immigrant or suspect in another investigation. None of that turned out to be true. But the falsehoods were so efficiently rooted that many may still believe them today. And following de Menezes’s death, no individual police officer has ever been blamed or disciplined (although the office of Sir Ian Blair, the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was fined for a breach of health and safety law). Two decades on, Suspect: the Shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes, a four-part Disney Plus drama, aims to expose the police errors and correct the reputation of a completely innocent victim. "We hope the series will improve people’s knowledge of the story," says Maria, de Menezes’s mother, speaking through a translator on a trip to London to support the series. "This drama is finally revealing all the lies by the police." “It was hard for us to watch,” admits Giovanni, de Menezes’s brother. “There are parts of the film my mum has said she never wants to watch again. There are scenes that brought everything back; Mum started to cry.” For all this pain, there was some financial compensation from the British government – “It helped with lost earnings and interrupted plans but doesn’t solve anything,” says Giovanni – but no explanation or contrition. “The police insisted at the inquest, even years later, that no mistakes had been made,” says writer/producer Jeff Pope. “But some of the errors made in that operation that morning are so basic that you can’t excuse them.” Pope is the, well, pope of fact-based drama, with his credits including real-life police procedurals A Confession and Little Boy Blue for ITV, as well as the BBC’s Jimmy Savile drama, The Reckoning. Even so, he initially resisted the de Menezes story when another producer, Kwadjo Dajan, approached him with the idea. “I vividly remember him being shot, but the story in my head was jumbled,” Pope says now. “I thought it was an awful accident, that he had been running down the stairs and he vaulted the barrier.” He confesses: “I was flabbergasted to discover that none of what I ‘remembered’ was true. The only people running and vaulting barriers were the firearms officers chasing him. Jean Charles used his Travelcard and went down the stairs.” Fact-based drama often requires deep research and freedom of information requests but, in this case, all the information was in evidence and reports from multiple public investigations: two by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the Health and Safety at Work Executive and the coroner’s inquest. “It wasn’t about finding amazing revelations,” says Pope. “It’s all there in the inquiries, so it was about putting it together and finding a way through it. For example, did the cops shout, ‘Armed police’? They say they did, but 17 members of the public say they didn’t. Much of it is letting the audience make its mind up.” For the de Menezes family, the two key suspects in the fatal confusion were Commissioner Blair (played by Conleth Hill in the drama) and Cressida Dick (Emily Mortimer), who was operational commander during the pursuit and shooting. “The most perplexing aspect of it is how Cressida Dick was praised by the Health and Safety Executive – saying that none of this was her fault,” says Pope. “She emerged with no blame attached and I find it hard to believe.” Maria, mother of an innocent man shot dead on Dick’s watch, agrees: “I don’t have any hatred in my heart. But I do have feelings about the way the police officers treated my son. I have great resentment against Cressida Dick because of the way she led the operation.” The structure of Suspect as a drama may surprise viewers – despite his namecheck in the title, the victim is almost a minor character. “I had to think a lot about how to tell the story,” Pope explains. “Because if the sub-title is the Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, then where is he for the first two episodes? But I wanted people to understand the context. When we first meet him, he’s AN Other Londoner – finding the Tube shut on 7 July because of the terror attacks.” Without excusing the police, Suspect carefully lays out how 7 July 2005 – when Islamist terrorists exploded four devices on the London transport network, killing 56 people (including four suicide bombers) – led terribly to 22 July, when a young electrician was killed in the mistaken belief that he was another suicide bomber. But, crucially, the two dates are linked and bridged by 21 July, when five attempts by another cell of suicide bombers failed. “When I started, I’d actually completely forgotten about 21 July,” says Pope, “but it’s crucial. On 22 July, police were thinking, ‘We don’t know who was behind 7/7 and now there is a second group out there’. So there was a lot of fear and paranoia. It was seen as the most serious attack on London since the Second World War.” He adds: “I’m certain those guys went down onto that platform convinced that Jean Charles de Menezes was a terrorist. That was the mood at the time: ‘We’ve got one of them!’” Still, Pope is clear that context cannot be exoneration. “I have to be very careful because hindsight’s perfect sight. But there are just so many questions. Why is there no CCTV footage from the bus [on which the victim travelled] or the Tube station? You start to get an unhealthy whiff. No footage! What’s going on there?” Pope is also severely critical of Ian Blair and of Cressida Dick, who, despite the catastrophe under her control, later herself became Metropolitan Police Commissioner: “If they had put their hands up, we wouldn’t be here today. What would it have hurt her to say sorry? Over and again they use the word ‘regret’, not ‘remorse’, and that’s a crucial distinction for me.” Giovanni de Menezes agrees: “An apology wouldn’t fix anything, but it would be an ethical and human thing to do.” But wasn’t the Met perhaps like other scandal-hit institutions – the Post Office, the Vatican, the Church of England, the BBC over Savile – with bosses closing ranks to protect their jobs and pensions and the institution’s reputation? “I couldn’t possibly comment,” says Pope. “But you might be on to something.” And perhaps, as in Mr Bates vs the Post Office (one of the few major factual dramas that Pope didn’t make), lawyers advise clients never to apologise because compensation and prosecutions may follow? “Correct. Legally, things are often set up that you can never admit guilt.” Perhaps ironically, Suspect itself has attracted some criticism, with victims’ representatives and survivors (more than 770 people were injured) of the 7/7 attacks complaining when photos taken during filming showed a re-creation of the bombed bus in central London. “To be fair, there was in the background a blown-up bus and that’s an iconic image. So I understand why there was that noise,” says Pope. “But we don’t actually dramatise 7/7 happening and Suspect isn’t about 7/7. The point was to say: that had just happened – and now let’s see the impact.” Interestingly, to use a film crew in London streets like this requires permission from the Metropolitan Police and it was Commissioner Mark Rowley, Cressida Dick’s successor, who gave that authority: “He kept us at arm’s length, but he didn’t block us,” says Pope. However the drama is received, reliving the events is obviously difficult for the victim’s family. One of the more upsetting revelations in Suspect is that, before being killed, de Menezes was making plans to move home. “He planned to build a house near to where we lived,” confirms Maria. “He wanted to get married and live in Brazil near to his mum and dad.” So is it hard for her to come to London, given what happened here? She looks through the windows of the office where we’re talking. “I’ll be really honest,” she says. “I only came because I wanted everything to be crystal clear and to be understood. I really shouldn’t be here. Because of my age and I’m not well and my husband needs me. My life back home is very hard, but I came here, because I had to. For my son.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is available to stream on Disney Plus from Wednesday 30th April 2025. View Affiliate Playlist on the source website Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
The creator and stars of BBC detective drama Virdee on breaking the mould, making Bradford sexy and bringing the shocking new series to our screens…
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in February 2025. Add Virdee to your watchlist Viewers may think that by now every possible type of fictional and television detective has appeared. But Amit Dhand, growing up in Bradford as a voracious reader of crime fiction, was conscious of a gap. “I felt there wasn’t a South Asian character in an on-screen drama in the western world,” the 45-year-old author explains. “I grew up at a time when Goodness Gracious Me was viral. There were some really amazing global comics who were killing it. But no one had really done drama. So, I started writing Harry Virdee because I wanted to see him represented in the way I see myself. And I wanted his character to mirror the city of Bradford – light, dark, complicated.” Virdee, a detective of Indian heritage, has so far featured in four novels, starting with Streets of Darkness, which was published in 2016. The fifth in the series, The Chemist, is due in May, when its sales will surely be boosted by the upcoming six-part BBC1 series, adapted by the author from his first book. View oEmbed on the source website As well as introducing a South Asian detective and promoting Bradford, Virdee is also relatively unusual in that the lead character is happily married. This again, says Dhand, was a deliberate correction of a trend: “I was aware that detectives tended to be divorcees or womanisers. Virdee is a love story wrapped around a crime thriller. I wanted a detective whose family life was the strongest thing in his world.” The twist – and part of the powerful originality of Virdee – is that Harry and Saima’s happy marriage makes others very unhappy. Both have Indian backgrounds but he is a Sikh, she a Gujarati Muslim, a union that some in their families find unacceptable due to tensions going back to the 1947 Partition of India by the departing British colonial overlords, which created two nations, India and Pakistan, along largely religious lines. “It’s an inter-faith marriage,” says Dhand. “We’ve seen a lot of Catholic-Protestant, Catholic-Jewish couples on screen. The fact that it’s two brown people might be unique, but the concept is not.” Perhaps only a Jewish-Arab marriage, though, could be as dramatically freighted as Harry and Saima’s, due to the explosive geo-political context. Aysha Kala, who plays Saima, has professional experience of how this past intrudes into the present. During a TV career that includes Shameless, Indian Summers and Apple TV+’s Criminal Record, the 34-year-old actor also appeared on stage at the National Theatre in The Father and the Assassin, Anupama Chandrasekhar’s play about the historical division of – and subsequent divisions in – India. “You couldn’t put that play on in India,” Kala says. “At the National, we had walk-outs and protests. There was one show where we got heckled. But you just have to ignore it and carry on. I feel that these tensions exist in the world and so we shouldn’t shy away from them.” Some social media heckling may result from a racial and cultural clash in the first episode of Virdee. The BBC has embargoed any description of the moment until transmission, so I can only say that it involves a painful gesture of disrespect and that it’s one of the most extraordinary scenes I’ve seen on TV. “I’ll take that as a compliment!” reacts Staz Nair, who plays Harry – his first British TV lead after impressing in global hits like Game Of Thrones and Supergirl. “When I was playing it,” he says, “I tried to think beyond religion and to the emotions inside it. Harry has finally found what he wants with his wife and child, but there are people who won’t accept it. And he’s determined that his child won’t go through the same rejection. He has the courage to say, ‘Let bygones be bygones’, and he suffers the ultimate shame.” Dhand adds: “The scene you refer to is old-fashioned, but authentic. It was something I’d seen on my travels to India. I thought, ‘That’s quite astonishing, I’m going to use it one day’.” Questions of authenticity are increasingly applied to the casting process. (Daniel Craig’s lack of an Oscar nomination for his performance in Queer is attributed by some to unease about a straight man playing gay.) Kala, like her character, has a Gujarati Muslim background and says: “It’s an ongoing discussion, to what extent you should cast someone completely like the character. There are things in my background on which I draw for Saima.” Nair, who has Indian and Russian blood, says carefully: “I think authentic casting is important, the problem is that definitions of authenticity are different. It’s not our job to represent everyone, but to represent the character we’re asked to play.” The way in which the 33-year-old actor most identified with Harry was the character’s scars from an imperfect childhood: “Without going too much into my own life, my father wasn’t around a lot of the time when I was young. So, it’s more the complexity of family dynamics and the feeling of being abandoned and being starved of a person or emotional presence who should have been there to guide you. And the void that leaves and a desire to fill that void often not with good things.” While acting is about transformation, there is a startling contrast between Nair on the video-call screen and Harry in the series. In character, he’s dangerous, even frightening… “Thank you!” he beams. “How strange is my job that I thank you for saying that? I take that as a compliment. I’m quite a gentle person; I was raised by my mother and I enjoy being soft. But what I wanted the viewer to feel with Harry is, ‘OK this is horrible, but I get why he’s doing it’. You don’t condone the action, but you understand the motive.” As soon becomes apparent in conversation, neither of the leads are Bradfordians, which demonstrates another complexity of “authentic” casting. “We had to do a lot of work on the accent,” confesses Kala. “The first meeting after getting the part was with Natalie Grady, our great dialect coach.” Martin Freeman, who was born in Surrey yet played a Liverpudlian in The Responder, told me that he had certain phrases that he used like a tuning fork to find the voice on set. Did Nair try something similar? “Yeah. If I think about it, definitely, yeah,” he replies, in perfect Bradfordian. “Course, course, course.” Then back to his soft RP, “So, yes, you have areas you go to to find the accent. One day, one of the kids working on the show said: ‘So what part of Bradford is he from?’ That was a great moment.” Bradford didn’t need any coaching to play the show’s location. “I think it’s one of the most cinematic cities I’ve ever seen,” says Dhand, “and I think we really reflect that on screen. The Gothic and Bohemian architecture… I’m trying to show off my city. It’s almost like a child in a toy shop –which location am I going to show today?” The story of Virdee, though, is often very dark. Whereas the Jersey tourist board is sponsoring the impending remake of Bergerac, it’s hard to imagine the West Yorkshire tourist board endorsing Dhand’s show – although the BBC bringing it to the screen does tie in with it being designated the 2025 UK City of Culture. “As in any city, there’s light and darkness,” he demurs. “I think Bradford’s probably been associated for too long with dark and no one ever talked about the light. The Virdee books are the bestsellers in Bradford Waterstones, they’ve got a huge following in the city. And I think in the show they’ve shot Bradford very sexily. It looks amazing. I think people should be flocking to the city after seeing the series.”
Virdee is a love story wrapped around a crime thriller, says author Amit Dhand
Dhand, Staz Nair and Aysha Kala spoke with Radio Times magazine about their new BBC crime drama.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Viewers may think that by now every possible type of fictional and television detective has appeared. But Amit Dhand, growing up in Bradford as a voracious reader of crime fiction, was conscious of a gap. “I felt there wasn’t a South Asian character in an on-screen drama in the western world,” the 45-year-old author explains. “I grew up at a time when Goodness Gracious Me was viral. There were some really amazing global comics who were killing it. But no one had really done drama. So, I started writing Harry Virdee because I wanted to see him represented in the way I see myself. And I wanted his character to mirror the city of Bradford – light, dark, complicated.” Virdee, a detective of Indian heritage, has so far featured in four novels, starting with Streets of Darkness, which was published in 2016. The fifth in the series, The Chemist, is due in May, when its sales will surely be boosted by the upcoming six-part BBC One series, adapted by the author from his first book. As well as introducing a South Asian detective and promoting Bradford, Virdee is also relatively unusual in that the lead character is happily married. This again, says Dhand, was a deliberate correction of a trend: “I was aware that detectives tended to be divorcees or womanisers. Virdee is a love story wrapped around a crime thriller. I wanted a detective whose family life was the strongest thing in his world.” The twist – and part of the powerful originality of Virdee – is that Harry and Saima’s happy marriage makes others very unhappy. Both have Indian backgrounds but he is a Sikh, she a Gujarati Muslim, a union that some in their families find unacceptable due to tensions going back to the 1947 Partition of India by the departing British colonial overlords, which created two nations, India and Pakistan, along largely religious lines. “It’s an inter-faith marriage,” says Dhand. “We’ve seen a lot of Catholic-Protestant, Catholic-Jewish couples on screen. The fact that it’s two brown people might be unique, but the concept is not.” Perhaps only a Jewish-Arab marriage, though, could be as dramatically freighted as Harry and Saima’s, due to the explosive geo-political context. Aysha Kala, who plays Saima, has professional experience of how this past intrudes into the present. During a TV career that includes Shameless, Indian Summers and Apple TV+’s Criminal Record, the 34-year-old actor also appeared on stage at the National Theatre in The Father and the Assassin, Anupama Chandrasekhar’s play about the historical division of – and subsequent divisions in – India. “You couldn’t put that play on in India,” Kala says. “At the National, we had walk-outs and protests. There was one show where we got heckled. But you just have to ignore it and carry on. I feel that these tensions exist in the world and so we shouldn’t shy away from them.” Some social media heckling may result from a racial and cultural clash in the first episode of Virdee. The BBC has embargoed any description of the moment until transmission, so I can only say that it involves a painful gesture of disrespect and that it’s one of the most extraordinary scenes I’ve seen on TV. “I’ll take that as a compliment!” reacts Staz Nair, who plays Harry – his first British TV lead after impressing in global hits like Game of Thrones and Supergirl. “When I was playing it,” he says, “I tried to think beyond religion and to the emotions inside it. Harry has finally found what he wants with his wife and child, but there are people who won’t accept it. And he’s determined that his child won’t go through the same rejection. He has the courage to say, ‘Let bygones be bygones’, and he suffers the ultimate shame.” Dhand adds: “The scene you refer to is old-fashioned, but authentic. It was something I’d seen on my travels to India. I thought, ‘That’s quite astonishing, I’m going to use it one day.’” Questions of authenticity are increasingly applied to the casting process. (Daniel Craig’s lack of an Oscar nomination for his performance in Queer is attributed by some to unease about a straight man playing gay.) Kala, like her character, has a Gujarati Muslim background and says: “It’s an ongoing discussion, to what extent you should cast someone completely like the character. There are things in my background on which I draw for Saima.” Nair, who has Indian and Russian blood, says carefully: “I think authentic casting is important, the problem is that definitions of authenticity are different. It’s not our job to represent everyone, but to represent the character we’re asked to play.” The way in which the 33-year-old actor most identified with Harry was the character’s scars from an imperfect childhood: “Without going too much into my own life, my father wasn’t around a lot of the time when I was young. So, it’s more the complexity of family dynamics and the feeling of being abandoned and being starved of a person or emotional presence who should have been there to guide you. And the void that leaves and a desire to fill that void often not with good things.” While acting is about transformation, there is a startling contrast between Nair on the video-call screen and Harry in the series. In character, he’s dangerous, even frightening… “Thank you!” he beams. “How strange is my job that I thank you for saying that? I take that as a compliment. I’m quite a gentle person; I was raised by my mother and I enjoy being soft. But what I wanted the viewer to feel with Harry is, ‘OK this is horrible, but I get why he’s doing it.’ You don’t condone the action, but you understand the motive.” As soon becomes apparent in conversation, neither of the leads are Bradfordians, which demonstrates another complexity of “authentic” casting. “We had to do a lot of work on the accent,” confesses Kala. “The first meeting after getting the part was with Natalie Grady, our great dialect coach.” Martin Freeman, who was born in Surrey yet played a Liverpudlian in The Responder, told me that he had certain phrases that he used like a tuning fork to find the voice on set. Did Nair try something similar? “Yeah. If I think about it, definitely, yeah,” he replies, in perfect Bradfordian. “Course, course, course.” Then back to his soft RP, “So, yes, you have areas you go to to find the accent. One day, one of the kids working on the show said: ‘So what part of Bradford is he from?’ That was a great moment.” Bradford didn’t need any coaching to play the show’s location. “I think it’s one of the most cinematic cities I’ve ever seen,” says Dhand, “and I think we really reflect that on screen. The Gothic and Bohemian architecture… I’m trying to show off my city. It’s almost like a child in a toy shop –which location am I going to show today?” The story of Virdee, though, is often very dark. Whereas the Jersey tourist board is sponsoring the impending remake of Bergerac, it’s hard to imagine the West Yorkshire tourist board endorsing Dhand’s show - although the BBC bringing it to the screen does tie in with it being designated the 2025 UK City of Culture. “As in any city, there’s light and darkness,” he demurs. “I think Bradford’s probably been associated for too long with dark and no one ever talked about the light. The Virdee books are the bestsellers in Bradford Waterstones, they’ve got a huge following in the city. And I think in the show they’ve shot Bradford very sexily. It looks amazing. I think people should be flocking to the city after seeing the series.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Virdee will air on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from 9pm on Monday 10th February. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
The danger of adapting suspense novels is that viewers know the ending – but even author Harlan Coben can’t remember what happens…
Add Missing You to your watchlist The books of Harlan Coben are published, at the last count he was given, in 54 regions and numerous languages, including Korean, Japanese and Persian. With delays for translation and export, though, they can take years to reach foreign audiences. “But with Missing You on TV,” he enthuses, “on 1 January, someone at Netflix presses a button and this show will be on in 190 countries. I love the international aspect of it.” Geographical spread is significant in another way when it comes to Coben’s TV work. Missing You, adapted from his 2014 novel of the same name, moves the story of a cop mourning her dead father and vanished lover from New York to England, a consequence of the author’s collaboration with Manchester-based producer Nicola Shindler, who previously relocated his novels Stay Close and Fool Me Once, which is one of Netflix’s top-rated series globally and has been watched by over 98 million viewers. “I’ve done a number of books with Nicola and the same team,” Coben, 63, says. “We talk to the writer [adapting it for the screen] about making the book their own and that may mean moving the story to England. But I’ve got shows coming up set in Poland and Argentina. A lot of effort goes into deciding which book goes where.” Some novelists take the TV cash and an executive producer credit and stay at home writing the next book, but Coben is keen to be part of the screen team. “In the British shows, such as Missing You, I’m very involved,” he says. “With a foreign-language one, I’m more at a distance.” The linguistic promiscuity of Coben adaptations has been there from the start. His first screen work was Ne le dis à personne, taken from his book Tell No One, followed onto French TV by Une chance de trop (No Second Chance) and Juste un regard (Just One Look). Why such a strong French connection? “I’m one of the few American writers who sells more outside the US than in it, so I’ve always had a big relationship with European audiences. Tell No One was supposed to be a big American movie and I really didn’t like the script. Meanwhile, [director] Guillaume Canet kept calling me with ideas for the book and there came a time when I was able to get the rights back. I found a little home making shows in Europe, and now Netflix has been able to make that universal.” Coben’s TV CV is now so long that he says some people only know him as a TV showrunner rather than a novelist. I suggest that a big draw of TV for authors is that the medium offers a limitless number of hours. “These adaptations, like a book, can be as long as you need them to be. Some can be eight episodes, some can be five.” Also, whereas network TV has fixed slot lengths, streamers, like literature, allow for unequal chapters. “On these Netflix shows, an episode can be 39 minutes or more than an hour. It’s great to have that flexibility.” Some novelists, fearful of having second thoughts about sentences or plots, never reread their old books. Coben, however, is forced to. “It’s an interesting experience to be checking over your own stuff again. There are certainly moments of, ‘What was I thinking there?’ I don’t think anyone likes reading stuff they wrote ten to 15 years ago. “Luckily, I get to see it through the eyes of producers and writers who are newer to it and tell me it’s still great. Sometimes, if it’s a long time ago, I can’t always remember the plot. With Missing You, a part of me was going, ‘What are you doing here?’ I could remember the ending but had forgotten the role of certain characters.” A paradox in adapting bestselling suspense books for TV is that readers tuning in may remember the ingeniously withheld solution. “Sometimes, as in the case of Missing You, the book was quite a while ago. If I’ve forgotten bits of it, hopefully they will have, too? Usually, though, I throw in one extra surprise for TV. But Missing You has four different twists, so hopefully you wouldn’t remember them all and, in the TV versions, it’s often the emotional resonances of the twists that come through, being moved by the character’s predicament.” In Missing You, Rosalind Eleazar (Slow Horses) plays a detective who, 11 years after her fiancé left without explanation, sees his photo on a dating app. Sudden disappearance and reappearance are often key to Coben’s plots: his debut novel, Play Dead (1990), began with the disappearance of a sports agent; in Tell No One (2001), a man receives an email from his dead wife; Long Lost (2009) and Home (2016) feature missing people who unexpectedly turn up; and Think Twice (2024) starts with a man who has been dead for three years being named as the FBI’s prime suspect in a recent double homicide. “Yes, that’s fair. I really like writing about missing people,” Coben acknowledges. “I prefer missing to murdered because, with missing, there’s hope. I don’t want to get too deeply psychological about this, but there’s something of wish-fulfilment about it. Both my parents died fairly young – younger than I am now – and I miss them greatly. I think a lot of the stuff in the books about people coming back or turning up is, what if they were still alive? What if they could share this moment? Those sort of emotions play into the sense of hope in the books.” Has new technology given a new twist to old mystery plots? “Yeah. But it’s funny, I’m not really tech-savvy. I don’t know much about it, but it’s the world we live in. Someone going out on a date now, they’re going to google the guy. It would be unrealistic if they didn’t, like writing a book in the 1980s and someone didn’t have a landline. I’m always wondering what I could do with different technologies – like a nanny-cam to watch a kid. Or someone who put spyware in his kid’s computer to check on him. What can I do with that?” Coben seems to have an unstoppable annual flow of stories for print and screen – is there a file in his laptop with dozens of plot ideas? “Each time I finish a book, I’m the emptiest of vessels. Nothing left. I’m like the defeated boxer who thinks he’ll never lift his arms again. I fear I’ll never have an idea again. If I do have one while writing a book, it goes into the book I’m writing, which may be why I’m plot-heavy and twisty. I’ve just finished a book and have no idea what I’ll do next.” Because he now has parallel page and screen careers, does he sometimes wonder where to use a new idea? “It’s a feel thing. I just finished filming a series called Lazarus with Bill Nighy and Sam Claflin [due later this year on Amazon Prime]. That was an original idea. I thought, ‘I could write this as a novel, but I’m seeing it as a TV series.’ It’s a little more of a ghost story, very visual.” It feels natural to him to move between page and screen. “My generation of writers are still asked in interviews what are the key books that inspired us. There will be those, but you can’t get away from the fact that we grew up watching TV and movies. The Sopranos might be as significant as Dickens, and that’s bound to have an effect.”
Harlan Coben on Missing You and his next series: "A little more of a ghost story"
The popular novelist sat down with Radio Times to discuss his streaming projects.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. The books of Harlan Coben are published, at the last count he was given, in 54 regions and numerous languages, including Korean, Japanese and Persian. With delays for translation and export, though, they can take years to reach foreign audiences. "But with Missing You on TV," he enthuses, "on 1st January, someone at Netflix presses a button and this show will be on in 190 countries. I love the international aspect of it." Geographical spread is significant in another way when it comes to Coben’s TV work. Missing You, adapted from his 2014 novel of the same name, moves the story of a cop mourning her dead father and vanished lover from New York to England, a consequence of the author’s collaboration with Manchester-based producer Nicola Shindler, who previously relocated his novels Stay Close and Fool Me Once, which is one of Netflix’s top-rated series globally and has been watched by over 98 million viewers. "I’ve done a number of books with Nicola and the same team," Coben, 63, says. "We talk to the writer [adapting it for the screen] about making the book their own and that may mean moving the story to England. But I’ve got shows coming up set in Poland and Argentina. A lot of effort goes into deciding which book goes where." Some novelists take the TV cash and an executive producer credit and stay at home writing the next book, but Coben is keen to be part of the screen team. "In the British shows, such as Missing You, I’m very involved," he says. "With a foreign-language one, I’m more at a distance." The linguistic promiscuity of Coben adaptations has been there from the start. His first screen work was Ne le dis à personne, taken from his book Tell No One, followed onto French TV by Une chance de trop (No Second Chance) and Juste un regard (Just One Look). Why such a strong French connection? "I’m one of the few American writers who sells more outside the US than in it, so I’ve always had a big relationship with European audiences. Tell No One was supposed to be a big American movie and I really didn’t like the script. Meanwhile, [director] Guillaume Canet kept calling me with ideas for the book and there came a time when I was able to get the rights back. I found a little home making shows in Europe, and now Netflix has been able to make that universal." Coben’s TV CV is now so long that he says some people only know him as a TV showrunner rather than a novelist. I suggest that a big draw of TV for authors is that the medium offers a limitless number of hours. "These adaptations, like a book, can be as long as you need them to be. Some can be eight episodes, some can be five." Also, whereas network TV has fixed slot lengths, streamers, like literature, allow for unequal chapters. "On these Netflix shows, an episode can be 39 minutes or more than an hour. It’s great to have that flexibility." Some novelists, fearful of having second thoughts about sentences or plots, never reread their old books. Coben, however, is forced to. "It’s an interesting experience to be checking over your own stuff again. There are certainly moments of, 'What was I thinking there?' I don’t think anyone likes reading stuff they wrote ten to 15 years ago. "Luckily, I get to see it through the eyes of producers and writers who are newer to it and tell me it’s still great. Sometimes, if it’s a long time ago, I can’t always remember the plot. With Missing You, a part of me was going, 'What are you doing here?' I could remember the ending but had forgotten the role of certain characters." A paradox in adapting best-selling suspense books for TV is that readers tuning in may remember the ingeniously withheld solution. "Sometimes, as in the case of Missing You, the book was quite a while ago. If I’ve forgotten bits of it, hopefully they will have, too? Usually, though, I throw in one extra surprise for TV. But Missing You has four different twists, so hopefully you wouldn’t remember them all and, in the TV versions, it’s often the emotional resonances of the twists that come through, being moved by the character’s predicament." In Missing You, Rosalind Eleazar (Slow Horses) plays a detective who, 11 years after her fiancé left without explanation, sees his photo on a dating app. Sudden disappearance and reappearance are often key to Coben’s plots: his debut novel, Play Dead (1990), began with the disappearance of a sports agent; in Tell No One (2001), a man receives an email from his dead wife; Long Lost (2009) and Home (2016) feature missing people who unexpectedly turn up; and Think Twice (2024) starts with a man who has been dead for three years being named as the FBI’s prime suspect in a recent double homicide. "Yes, that’s fair. I really like writing about missing people," Coben acknowledges. "I prefer missing to murdered because, with missing, there’s hope. I don’t want to get too deeply psychological about this, but there’s something of wish-fulfilment about it. Both my parents died fairly young – younger than I am now – and I miss them greatly. I think a lot of the stuff in the books about people coming back or turning up is, what if they were still alive? What if they could share this moment? Those sort of emotions play into the sense of hope in the books." Has new technology given a new twist to old mystery plots? "Yeah. But it’s funny, I’m not really tech-savvy. I don’t know much about it, but it’s the world we live in. Someone going out on a date now, they’re going to google the guy. It would be unrealistic if they didn’t, like writing a book in the 1980s and someone didn’t have a landline. I’m always wondering what I could do with different technologies – like a nanny-cam to watch a kid. Or someone who put spyware in his kid’s computer to check on him. What can I do with that?" Coben seems to have an unstoppable annual flow of stories for print and screen – is there a file in his laptop with dozens of plot ideas? "Each time I finish a book, I’m the emptiest of vessels. Nothing left. I’m like the defeated boxer who thinks he’ll never lift his arms again. I fear I’ll never have an idea again. If I do have one while writing a book, it goes into the book I’m writing, which may be why I’m plot-heavy and twisty. I’ve just finished a book and have no idea what I’ll do next." Because he now has parallel page and screen careers, does he sometimes wonder where to use a new idea? "It’s a feel thing. I just finished filming a series called Lazarus with Bill Nighy and Sam Claflin [due later this year on Amazon Prime]. That was an original idea. I thought, ‘I could write this as a novel, but I’m seeing it as a TV series.’ It’s a little more of a ghost story, very visual." It feels natural to him to move between page and screen. "My generation of writers are still asked in interviews what are the key books that inspired us. There will be those, but you can’t get away from the fact that we grew up watching TV and movies. The Sopranos might be as significant as Dickens, and that’s bound to have an effect." The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Missing You is available to stream on Netflix. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
'The SAS has struggled with the tension between celebrity and secrecy'
The SAS don’t get enough credit for the brains behind their balaclavas, says Ben Macintyre
Add SAS Rogue Heroes to your watchlist One of the strangest stories of the last 50 years is how a top secret organisation became a global entertainment franchise. A second series of SAS Rogue Heroes, based on Ben Macintyre’s book about British special operations during the Second World War, swells an already popular genre. This includes 14 civilian or celebrity runs of Channel 4’s reality show SAS: Who Dares Wins; the movie Operation Mincemeat (based on another Macintyre book) and its West End musical spin-off; several TV documentaries; and Guy Ritchie’s film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, based on a book by historian Damien Lewis. “It is extraordinary,” says Macintyre. “I actually think it’s wonderful that the SAS has all these different entertainment iterations.” But, as the regiment’s regular historian, does he have a sense of what the not-so-secret soldiers make of now being in the running for Baftas and Oliviers rather than a Victoria Cross? “I would hesitate to give a collective view from the SAS. Certainly, the Regimental Association thinks SAS Rogue Heroes is brilliant. And I think they are grateful for the way it presents the past. “I get the impression, though this is speculative, that they are less happy with the Who Dares Wins how-butch-are-you stuff, because that’s a bit more simplistic. But look, the SAS, ever since 1980, has struggled with the tension between the celebrity of the organisation and the need for secrecy. There is a conflict between the clear public hunger for stories about the SAS and the need not to share what they do. And I think that balance has become more and more fascinating.” The dating of this contradiction to 1980 is precise. On 5 May that year, regular UK TV schedules were suspended to show SAS soldiers swinging on ropes into the Iranian embassy in west London in attempt to free 25 hostages (one had been killed the previous day), who had been held there by gunmen for six days. The paradox of Operation Nimrod – a covert operation broadcast live on TV – is the subject of Macintyre’s latest book, The Siege, for which screen rights have been bought by the Slow Horses stable. “What struck me researching The Siege,” the writer reflects, “was how utterly unknown the SAS was in 1980. People had never heard of it; it was an almost entirely covert unit. Before 1980, they operated in the shadows; afterwards they are the world’s most famous soldiers! And there are people in the regiment even today who feel that this did the SAS no favours at all. It becomes almost impossible to do special operations when everyone’s watching.” As viewers of SAS Rogue Heroes know, the earlier special services took advantage of invisibility to commit murder, theft, torture, arson and other side-steps of the Geneva Convention. In season two, writer Steven Knight shows SAS leaders Paddy Mayne (Jack O’Connell) and David Stirling (Connor Swindells) doing things that would now occupy public inquiries for years. So, were ethical concerns ever an issue? “When I was researching Rogue Heroes,” Macintyre says, “I found a letter, written by David Stirling, about certain things that Paddy Mayne had done when they were attacking airfields in Libya, notably that moment, brilliantly rendered in the first series, when Mayne walks into a mess and simply opens fire on celebrating Italian and German pilots. Stirling had real qualms about that and it weighed fairly heavily on him after the war. But there would have been no question then of launching an inquiry or anything. There was very much an attitude that there was a war on.” The continuum from Operation Mincemeat through SAS Rogue Heroes to The Siege is the batty audacity of the plans. Even the most paranoid enemy couldn’t reasonably anticipate trick corpses in the ocean, an attempt to break into a prison or men swinging on ropes into a hostage situation. British special forces, then and now, the author believes, have not been given enough credit for the brains inside their balaclavas. “We think of them as being fast, butch, shoot-’em-up types. And that can be true. But a lot of what they do is lateral reasoning. What Winston Churchill used to call ‘corkscrew thinking’. “The siege would have been a disaster if they hadn’t been able to adapt to a rapidly changing situation inside that building, which was not the one they expected. They are a military unit but they are also trying to out-think what’s going on on the other side. The direct link between what they were able to do in the desert in 1942 – and then fighting up through Italy, and again at the Iranian embassy – was the ability to adapt to unfolding situations. This is a psychological unit as much as anything else.” Usually, when a single source book is used for a second series, the adapter has to invent more. Is that the case with Knight’s SAS Rogue Heroes? “After the first series,” says Macintyre, “there was still plenty of war and of the book left. But what Steven wanted to do with the Libyan campaign in series two was to expand the story emotionally. He has built up characters and invented other situations. But a lot of it is still the real historical meat. I’m not one of those people who believes that, if a cap badge is wrong, the whole thing’s a disaster. After the first series, some people said, ‘My God! There’s a woman in there!’ Well, fine by me, because you are trying to attract a modern audience.” Fact-based dramas now routinely begin with a disclaimer about some scenes and people being imagined, but SAS Rogue Heroes has a caveat as punchy as its dialogue: “This is not a history lesson”. “Thank God!” says Macintyre. “It would be unwatchable if it were! That disclaimer says that, if you want to tell us that someone was shorter than that and someone else didn’t have a moustache, please don’t write in! “There are many different ways of looking at a historical story. You can be entirely faithful or you can say we are going to treat the period as a scene and create drama within it. Or you can take the Guy Ritchie approach, as in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which is a great shoot-’em-up movie but its relation to history is minimal. He takes events and creates a Guy Ritchie movie out of them. That’s great if it’s what people want. And, if viewers want to know what really happened, the books are there.” On his shows, Macintyre takes the title “executive producer”, which, as he says, “can mean anything from actually producing the show to standing around saying the costumes look nice”. His own duties are somewhere between and he’s regularly consulted by Knight. “We usually have a meeting at the start where he maps out the story. Then I get scripts and make a few comments.” Such as? “Gosh! At one point he had a Scotsman singing The Fields of Athenry, which is an Irish song. But that’s the only one I can remember. There haven’t been any real clashes of storytelling. I don’t think it’s good for a writer of history who allows their work to be adapted into other art forms to criticise the result. I’m in awe of screenwriters – the way Steven gets into a few words what it took me pages to say.” It’s pretty clear watching SAS Rogue Heroes – and knowing the later life of some of those men –that they had undiagnosed PTSD. “I have not come across any example of any of those people getting any kind of treatment for anything,” says Macintyre. “Which is astonishing. One of the most touching elements of writing SAS Rogue Heroes was the letters I got from family members of people who had been in the special forces during the war, saying thank you for explaining why Dad was like he was – the drinking, the violence, the inability to settle down. These are all symptoms of PTSD. And not being allowed to talk about it – due to the Official Secrets Act – obviously made it worse.” Although the series does hint at the psychological damage to the men, some have expressed concerns that SAS Rogue Heroes glamourises military violence. Macintyre, though, says, “I was careful in the book to avoid that. And I do think Steven has followed the same approach. These are troubled people who have to do terrible things. Without giving too much away, much of series two is about what it feels like to have to leave people dying in a wartime situation. “Yes, there’s a rocking soundtrack and scenes of incredible excitement. But it’s never a situation where the Nazis are mown down and then everyone goes to the pub. That may be an unfair way to describe Guy Ritchie’s film, but it’s certainly not the case in SAS Rogue Heroes.” Would he be pleased if the series encourages recruitment to the SAS? “If it encourages people to think they could walk into a mess firing a machine gun, as in the 1940s, then no. “The 1980 siege led to a massive upsurge in recruitment, with people turning up saying, ‘Give me a balaclava and a machine gun.’ And you probably don’t want that either. But we need an army and the SAS story has been a remarkable recruiting sergeant for the British Army and its reputation round the world.” People who watch the SAS spin-off series probably dream of the meta moment when Ben Macintyre himself goes on SAS: Who Dares Wins. Has he been asked and would he agree? “Ha! I’ve not been asked and I think no one in their right mind would want me. So, let’s cross that hill – mountain? ditch? – when we come to it. I very much doubt that we will. But it would bring the wheel full circle. What a great thought.”
SAS Rogue Heroes 'is not a history lesson – that would be unwatchable' says author
Author Ben Macintyre spoke with the Radio Times for the Christmas double issue.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. One of the strangest stories of the last 50 years is how a top secret organisation became a global entertainment franchise. A second series of SAS Rogue Heroes, based on Ben Macintyre’s book about British special operations during the Second World War, swells an already popular genre. This includes 14 civilian or celebrity runs of Channel 4’s reality show SAS: Who Dares Wins; the movie Operation Mincemeat (based on another Macintyre book) and its West End musical spin-off; several TV documentaries; and Guy Ritchie’s film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, based on a book by historian Damien Lewis. “It is extraordinary,” says Macintyre. “I actually think it’s wonderful that the SAS has all these different entertainment iterations.” But, as the regiment’s regular historian, does he have a sense of what the not-so-secret soldiers make of now being in the running for Baftas and Oliviers rather than a Victoria Cross? “I would hesitate to give a collective view from the SAS. Certainly, the Regimental Association thinks SAS Rogue Heroes is brilliant. And I think they are grateful for the way it presents the past. “I get the impression, though this is speculative, that they are less happy with the Who Dares Wins how-butch-are-you stuff, because that’s a bit more simplistic. But look, the SAS, ever since 1980, has struggled with the tension between the celebrity of the organisation and the need for secrecy. There is a conflict between the clear public hunger for stories about the SAS and the need not to share what they do. And I think that balance has become more and more fascinating.” The dating of this contradiction to 1980 is precise. On 5th May that year, regular UK TV schedules were suspended to show SAS soldiers swinging on ropes into the Iranian embassy in west London in attempt to free 25 hostages (one had been killed the previous day), who had been held there by gunmen for six days. The paradox of Operation Nimrod – a covert operation broadcast live on TV – is the subject of Macintyre’s latest book, The Siege, for which screen rights have been bought by the Slow Horses stable. “What struck me researching The Siege,” the writer reflects, “was how utterly unknown the SAS was in 1980. People had never heard of it; it was an almost entirely covert unit. Before 1980, they operated in the shadows; afterwards they are the world’s most famous soldiers! And there are people in the regiment even today who feel that this did the SAS no favours at all. It becomes almost impossible to do special operations when everyone’s watching.” As viewers of SAS Rogue Heroes know, the earlier special services took advantage of invisibility to commit murder, theft, torture, arson and other side-steps of the Geneva Convention. In season two, writer Steven Knight shows SAS leaders Paddy Mayne (Jack O’Connell) and David Stirling (Connor Swindells) doing things that would now occupy public inquiries for years. So, were ethical concerns ever an issue? “When I was researching Rogue Heroes,” Macintyre says, “I found a letter, written by David Stirling, about certain things that Paddy Mayne had done when they were attacking airfields in Libya, notably that moment, brilliantly rendered in the first series, when Mayne walks into a mess and simply opens fire on celebrating Italian and German pilots. Stirling had real qualms about that and it weighed fairly heavily on him after the war. But there would have been no question then of launching an inquiry or anything. There was very much an attitude that there was a war on.” The continuum from Operation Mincemeat through SAS Rogue Heroes to The Siege is the batty audacity of the plans. Even the most paranoid enemy couldn’t reasonably anticipate trick corpses in the ocean, an attempt to break into a prison or men swinging on ropes into a hostage situation. British special forces, then and now, the author believes, have not been given enough credit for the brains inside their balaclavas. “We think of them as being fast, butch, shoot-’em-up types. And that can be true. But a lot of what they do is lateral reasoning. What Winston Churchill used to call ‘corkscrew thinking’. “The siege would have been a disaster if they hadn’t been able to adapt to a rapidly changing situation inside that building, which was not the one they expected. They are a military unit but they are also trying to out-think what’s going on on the other side. The direct link between what they were able to do in the desert in 1942 – and then fighting up through Italy, and again at the Iranian embassy – was the ability to adapt to unfolding situations. This is a psychological unit as much as anything else.” Usually, when a single source book is used for a second series, the adapter has to invent more. Is that the case with Knight’s SAS Rogue Heroes? “After the first series,” says Macintyre, “there was still plenty of war and of the book left. But what Steven wanted to do with the Libyan campaign in series two was to expand the story emotionally. He has built up characters and invented other situations. But a lot of it is still the real historical meat. I’m not one of those people who believes that, if a cap badge is wrong, the whole thing’s a disaster. After the first series, some people said, ‘My God! There’s a woman in there!’ Well, fine by me, because you are trying to attract a modern audience.” Fact-based dramas now routinely begin with a disclaimer about some scenes and people being imagined, but SAS Rogue Heroes has a caveat as punchy as its dialogue: “This is not a history lesson”. “Thank God!” says Macintyre. “It would be unwatchable if it were! That disclaimer says that, if you want to tell us that someone was shorter than that and someone else didn’t have a moustache, please don’t write in! “There are many different ways of looking at a historical story. You can be entirely faithful or you can say we are going to treat the period as a scene and create drama within it. Or you can take the Guy Ritchie approach, as in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which is a great shoot-’em-up movie but its relation to history is minimal. He takes events and creates a Guy Ritchie movie out of them. That’s great if it’s what people want. And, if viewers want to know what really happened, the books are there.” On his shows, Macintyre takes the title “executive producer”, which, as he says, “can mean anything from actually producing the show to standing around saying the costumes look nice”. His own duties are somewhere between and he’s regularly consulted by Knight. “We usually have a meeting at the start where he maps out the story. Then I get scripts and make a few comments.” Such as? “Gosh! At one point he had a Scotsman singing The Fields of Athenry, which is an Irish song. But that’s the only one I can remember. There haven’t been any real clashes of storytelling. I don’t think it’s good for a writer of history who allows their work to be adapted into other art forms to criticise the result. I’m in awe of screenwriters – the way Steven gets into a few words what it took me pages to say.” It’s pretty clear watching SAS Rogue Heroes – and knowing the later life of some of those men –that they had undiagnosed PTSD. “I have not come across any example of any of those people getting any kind of treatment for anything,” says Macintyre. “Which is astonishing. One of the most touching elements of writing SAS Rogue Heroes was the letters I got from family members of people who had been in the special forces during the war, saying thank you for explaining why Dad was like he was – the drinking, the violence, the inability to settle down. These are all symptoms of PTSD. And not being allowed to talk about it – due to the Official Secrets Act – obviously made it worse.” Although the series does hint at the psychological damage to the men, some have expressed concerns that SAS Rogue Heroes glamourises military violence. Macintyre, though, says, “I was careful in the book to avoid that. And I do think Steven has followed the same approach. These are troubled people who have to do terrible things. Without giving too much away, much of series two is about what it feels like to have to leave people dying in a wartime situation. “Yes, there’s a rocking soundtrack and scenes of incredible excitement. But it’s never a situation where the Nazis are mown down and then everyone goes to the pub. That may be an unfair way to describe Guy Ritchie’s film, but it’s certainly not the case in SAS Rogue Heroes.” Would he be pleased if the series encourages recruitment to the SAS? “If it encourages people to think they could walk into a mess firing a machine gun, as in the 1940s, then no. “The 1980 siege led to a massive upsurge in recruitment, with people turning up saying, ‘Give me a balaclava and a machine gun.’ And you probably don’t want that either. But we need an army and the SAS story has been a remarkable recruiting sergeant for the British Army and its reputation round the world.” People who watch the SAS spin-off series probably dream of the meta moment when Ben Macintyre himself goes on SAS: Who Dares Wins. Has he been asked and would he agree? “Ha! I’ve not been asked and I think no one in their right mind would want me. So, let’s cross that hill – mountain? ditch? – when we come to it. I very much doubt that we will. But it would bring the wheel full circle. What a great thought.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. SAS Rogue Heroes season 2 will air at 9pm on New Year's Day on BBC One, while the full season will be available from 6am on BBC iPlayer. Season 1 is available on BBC iPlayer now. If you're looking for something else to watch, visit our TV Guide or take a look at the rest of our Drama coverage. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Can Strictly Come Dancing get its groove back?
As the BBC's flagship show returns to our screens after a summer of controversy, Mark Lawson wonders what it will take for Strictly to waltz into our hearts again.
Imagine if the 8.8 million viewers who watched last December’s final of Strictly Come Dancing were asked to score out of ten the show’s media coverage ahead of this week’s launch of series 22. It’s likely that the numbers on the ping-pong bats would make judge Craig Revel Horwood, even at his most boo-provokingly severe, seem relatively kind. Earlier this year, actor Amanda Abbington, who withdrew from the 2023 series in week five, accused her professional dance partner, Giovanni Pernice, of using unfairly demanding training methods. Although Pernice strenuously denied her accusations, in June the BBC announced he had left the series. Another professional dancer, Graziano Di Prima, will also be absent from the new run following reports in July that he kicked his partner, reality TV star Zara McDermott, during rehearsals last year. (He does not deny contact but has suggested it was accidental or clumsy.) By the time Paralympian Will Bayley alleged, later in July, that the BBC had shown “no duty of care” when he was injured during training in 2019, even the kindest, most constructive members of the fanbase – a sort of audience equivalent of soft-cop judge Motsi Mabuse – would have struggled not to wave a zero. Such was the public and media interest that when, a short time later, the BBC director-general Tim Davie launched the corporation’s annual report – containing a prominent photo of 2023 Strictly champions Ellie Leach and Vito Coppola and a shout-out in Davie’s list of the best BBC shows – he felt forced to address the loudly stamping feet on the dancefloor. “Alongside the fun and entertainment there will be a degree of competitiveness, hard work and a will to do well,” Davie said in a section added to his introductory speech. “That’s part of what makes this show. But there are limits and the line should never be crossed.” Taking questions from journalists, Davie stressed the BBC’s responsibilities to contestants and suggested that “safeguarding” would be increased. This led to reports that “chaperones” would be placed in Strictly rehearsals. These exchanges raised several questions. Where is the “line” and how does a participant know that they have gone over it? Will there be supervision of all rehearsals and what form might that take? And is it possible that what sounds like a #BeKind Strictly Come Dancing will mean some of the show’s appeal is lost? The biggest problem – it seems to me – is an inherent tension in the Strictly format, which asks highly trained professional dancers to take amateurs – who range from West End hoofer to the utterly clueless – and do their best to avoid them being embarrassed on air. Most competitors want to go as far as possible and are financially incentivised to do so. So, isn’t it sometimes necessary for the pro dancers to be demanding and hard taskmasters? And isn’t the “line” inevitably subjective? One contestant’s “really pushed me hard today” may be another’s “they hurt and humiliated me”? How do you deal with that? Since the bad news stories began, the extent of the BBC’s public tip-toeing around the subject would have won straight tens from the judges. Some of that is unavoidable: in common with other employers, the corporation is prevented by law and HR convention from discussing disciplinary procedures involving individual staff members, or publishing the findings of internal inquiries. On 2nd September, The Sun reported that the BBC was “racing” to conclude its Giovanni Pernice/Amanda Abbington inquiry in order to avoid overshadowing the new series, which starts on Saturday. The newspaper, though, had made this prediction before and BBC sources suggested the timeline was wide of the mark, while reiterating the confidentiality of internal procedures. That reticence could be justified by employment sensitivities. But the corporation may also be too instinctively defensive when faced with questions that are legitimate and justified. The BBC wants and needs its licence-fee payers to be interested in Strictly Come Dancing, so it can hardly complain if that interest extends to wondering how one of its most reliable ratings bankers will respond. So, I put some of these questions to the Strictly Come Dancing production team, but in response to most queries the BBC referred me to recently published new safeguarding guidelines. These state that on the new series there “will be a production team member present during training room rehearsals at all times” and the 2024 payroll will include two new roles on the show dedicated to welfare support – a celebrity welfare producer and a professional dancer welfare producer. The BBC’s current line seems to be that Strictly is a bit of fun that no professional dancer or contestant should take seriously enough to cause discomfort. But the risk for the series is that some of those involved, both amateur and professional, take it as a very serious examination of dance skills – and this may be part of the appeal to the audience. Are they, in short, operating on different sides of the “line”? Among the 2024 contestants, it seems fair to assume that the definition of a hard day’s training for Olympians Tom Dean, Sam Quek and Montell Douglas might be very different from that of actors Jamie Borthwick and Sarah Hadland and TV doctor Punam Krishan. This may give the professional dancers a dilemma over how pro to go with the amateurs, with the added complication that they also benefit both financially and in terms of media coverage from how far they progress. And, having seen the departures of Pernice and Di Prima, might this year’s pros adopt a soft-shoe approach for their own protection? Could such caution be reinforced by the severity of the punishment of Jermaine Jenas, who reportedly breached a different set of guidelines (relating to electronic communication with colleagues) and was sacked from Match of the Day and The One Show in double-quick time? The worry of some at the BBC I spoke to is that the application of a single behavioural code across all shows may overlook the fact that teaching someone with two left feet to rumba can involve a more rigorous approach than other broadcast preparation. It seems that the BBC may well need to keep up the nifty footwork, to avoid hobbling one of its most popular shows. View Green Video on the source website Strictly Come Dancing 2024 starts Saturday 14th September at 7:20pm on BBC One and iPlayer. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what else is on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
As the BBC’s flagship entertainment show returns to our screens after a summer of controversy, Mark Lawson wonders what it will take for Strictly to waltz into our hearts again…
Add Strictly Come Dancing Launch Show to your watchlist Imagine if the 8.8 million viewers who watched last December’s final of Strictly Come Dancing were asked to score out of ten the show’s media coverage ahead of this week’s launch of series 22. It’s likely that the numbers on the ping-pong bats would make judge Craig Revel Horwood, even at his most boo-provokingly severe, seem relatively kind. Earlier this year, actor Amanda Abbington, who withdrew from the 2023 series in week five, accused her professional dance partner, Giovanni Pernice, of using unfairly demanding training methods. Although Pernice strenuously denied her accusations, in June the BBC announced he had left the series. Another professionl dancer, Graziano Di Prima, will also be absent from the new run following reports in July that he kicked his partner, reality TV star Zara McDermott, during rehearsals last year. (He does not deny contact but has suggested it was accidental or clumsy.) By the time Paralympian Will Bayley alleged, later in July, that the BBC had shown “no duty of care” when he was injured during training in 2019, even the kindest, most constructive members of the fanbase – a sort of audience equivalent of soft-cop judge Motsi Mabuse – would have struggled not to wave a zero. Such was the public and media interest that when, a short time later, the BBC director general Tim Davie launched the corporation’s annual report – containing a prominent photo of 2023 Strictly champions Ellie Leach and Vito Coppola and a shout-out in Davie’s list of the best BBC shows – he felt forced to address the loudly stamping feet on the dancefloor. “Alongside the fun and entertainment there will be a degree of competitiveness, hard work and a will to do well,” Davie said in a section added to his introductory speech. “That’s part of what makes this show. But there are limits and the line should never be crossed.” Taking questions from journalists, Davie stressed the BBC’s responsibilities to contestants and suggested that “safeguarding” would be increased. This led to reports that “chaperones” would be placed in Strictly rehearsals. These exchanges raised several questions. Where is the “line” and how does a participant know that they have gone over it? Will there be supervision of all rehearsals and what form might that take? And is it possible that what sounds like a #BeKind Strictly Come Dancing will mean some of the show’s appeal is lost? The biggest problem – it seems to me – is an inherent tension in the Strictly format, which asks highly trained professional dancers to take amateurs – who range from West End hoofer to the utterly clueless – and do their best to avoid them being embarrassed on air. Most competitors want to go as far as possible and are financially incentivised to do so. So, isn’t it sometimes necessary for the pro dancers to be demanding and hard taskmasters? And isn’t the “line” inevitably subjective? One contestant’s “really pushed me hard today” may be another’s “they hurt and humiliated me”? How do you deal with that? Since the bad news stories began, the extent of the BBC’s public tip-toeing around the subject would have won straight tens from the judges. Some of that is unavoidable: in common with other employers, the corporation is prevented by law and HR convention from discussing disciplinary procedures involving individual staff members, or publishing the findings of internal inquiries. On 2 September, The Sun reported that the BBC was “racing” to conclude its Giovanni Pernice/Amanda Abbington inquiry in order to avoid overshadowing the new series, which starts on Saturday. The newspaper, though, had made this prediction before and BBC sources suggested the timeline was wide of the mark, while reiterating the confidentiality of internal procedures. That reticence could be justified by employment sensitivities. But the corporation may also be too instinctively defensive when faced with questions that are legitimate and justified. The BBC wants and needs its licence-fee payers to be interested in Strictly Come Dancing, so it can hardly complain if that interest extends to wondering how one of its most reliable ratings bankers will respond. So, I put some of these questions to the Strictly Come Dancing production team, but in response to most queries the BBC referred me to recently published new safeguarding guidelines. These state that on the new series there “will be a production team member present during training room rehearsals at all times” and the 2024 payroll will include two new roles on the show dedicated to welfare support – a celebrity welfare producer and a professional dancer welfare producer. The BBC’s current line seems to be that Strictly is a bit of fun that no professional dancer or contestant should take seriously enough to cause discomfort. But the risk for the series is that some of those involved, both amateur and professional, take it as a very serious examination of dance skills – and this may be part of the appeal to the audience. Are they, in short, operating on different sides of the “line”? Among the 2024 contestants, it seems fair to assume that the definition of a hard day’s training for Olympians Tom Dean, Sam Quek and Montell Douglas might be very different from that of actors Jamie Borthwick and Sarah Hadland and TV doctor Punam Krishan. This may give the professional dancers a dilemma over how pro to go with the amateurs, with the added complication that they also benefit both financially and in terms of media coverage from how far they progress. And, having seen the departures of Pernice and Di Prima, might this year’s pros adopt a soft-shoe approach for their own protection? Could such caution be reinforced by the severity of the punishment of Jermaine Jenas, who reportedly breached a different set of guidelines (relating to electronic communication with colleagues) and was sacked from Match of the Day and The One Show in double-quick time? The worry of some at the BBC I spoke to is that the application of a single behavioural code across all shows may overlook the fact that teaching someone with two left feet to rumba can involve a more rigorous approach than other broadcast preparation. It seems that the BBC may well need to keep up the nifty footwork, to avoid hobbling one of its most popular shows.
"Only when everyone's paid will I shut up"
The Post Office scandal made a hero of campaigner Jo Hamilton, but she’s still fighting for justice, discovers Mark Lawson
Add Mr Bates vs the Post Office: the Impact to your watchlist. When Sir Keir Starmer entered 10 Downing Street on 5 July, an email already awaited him from a Mrs Jo Hamilton of Hampshire. The wrongly convicted former subpostmistress (played by Monica Dolan in ITV1 drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office) urged him to do more than previous governments to settle the compensation claims of the still many hundreds of Post Office contractors who suffered combinations of imprisonment, disgrace, bankruptcy or mental destruction because of a faulty IT system that suggested they were pilfering from their tills. Hamilton says she hasn’t received a reply from the Prime Minister: “But, to be fair, he’s been very busy.” There was, though, a rapid invitation to meet Gareth Thomas, the junior minister in the Business and Trade department with Post Office responsibility. “So I met him, but then got sent the usual bollocks from civil servants. ‘It’s not our fault. It’s your lawyers and so on…’ How dare they? It was a carbon copy of a letter from a civil servant I’ve been shouting at for years. So I sent him a blaster back.” Emphasising her tenacity as a campaigner – which continues in Mr Bates vs the Post Office: the Impact, an ITV1 follow-up documentary – Hamilton also contacted the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, whom she met when he was a Labour member of the select committee investigating the scandal. “We got on OK at the select committee back in the day. And he sent me an email from his private account, which I guess doesn’t go through his stupid civil servants. So I have access to him directly. He assured me the business minister is on it. So we just hope.” Hamilton, who was wrongly convicted of stealing £36,000, is also a demanding constituent in North East Hampshire. She acclaims as a “superhero”, Lord (James) Arbuthnot, played by Alex Jennings in the drama, who helped to expose the cover-up and clear her name. But, when Arbuthnot retired, she found his Tory successor, Ranil Jayawardena, so unsatisfactory that: “I told him I was going to run for Parliament against him. He said, ‘Please don’t!’ ” In fact, Jayawardena lost in July to Liberal Democrat candidate Alex Brewer, of whom Hamilton admits, “I just had a run-in with her. I wrote as soon as she got in and she wouldn’t see me. Eventually, she offered me a meeting on 2 October. So I wrote back and said, ‘As this matter is so urgent, I am now dealing with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the minister directly.’ Stick that up your pipe! She wrote back and said she was glad I was dealing with the people with the real power.” Some would say that power also lies with Hamilton and the newly knighted Sir Alan Bates – played by Toby Jones in the drama, organiser of the GLO (Group Litigation Order) of 555 Post Office claimants – especially since Mr Bates vs the Post Office aired. Does she feel that? “Being listened to at blooming last. It’s that kind of power. You will bloody listen to me or I’ll shout or go to the newspapers. I find that exciting after all this time. We’ve been yelling for years about this. And we were ignored, especially in Parliament. And now they’re scared of us. There’s still the usual bullshit that they say one thing and do another. But at least they see us now.” Just before we spoke, Hamilton had received a photo from Dolan of the actor receiving another award for impersonating her. She’s excited but still astonished by how her life changed in early January this year, when Mr Bates vs the Post Office was screened. “My phone lit up just after the first episode started going out. And it never stopped.” Sir Alan is still fighting for his own financial settlement, alongside many others, whereas Hamilton has already done a deal. The figure is confidential, but “my lawyer asked me to come up with the figure I wanted and we got within £20,000 of that”. Since then, though, terms have been offered that are generally considered more generous. So does she now regret settling? “No! Hubby [David] had just got prostate cancer. It gave us enough money to pay off our mortgage and for him to give up work. He was 75 and still working as a gardener five days a week. And I had ten cleaning jobs across five days. We were like hamsters in a wheel. And it brought choice about whether we still wanted to work. And not to have a mortgage is amazing. We’ve not got masses of savings in the bank, but what we have is our house. We can sell it and downsize when we want to.” She continues to fight for the hundreds of those still uncompensated, however, because “I can’t believe we’re still getting the same bullshit. There’s a 91-year-old waiting for compensation. How bloody dare they? I said to the minister a couple of weeks back: she’s 91, so can’t someone just pay her? Don’t screw her over. Just give her the money. They still say to us that they have to be careful with the public purse. But they’re paying lawyers twice what they’re offering us. So who’s being careless with the public purse?” When I put Hamilton’s complaints to the Department for Business and Trade, a spokesperson responded: “We recognise the immeasurable suffering postmasters have endured and that they’ve waited too long to receive redress. That’s why we are working tirelessly across government to bring them some relief with full, fair and swift redress. Already we’ve paid out over £260 million to over 2,800 people across three redress schemes. We’ve also made 227 GLO offers and introduced a new compensation scheme to speed up redress for those with overturned convictions.” Hamilton still does around ten hours of house-cleaning a week, but fits it around sittings of the statutory public inquiry into the Post Office scandal, which enters its seventh and final phase this month. She has attended most days, deliberately sitting in direct sight of witnesses such as former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells, ex-business improvement director Angela van den Bogerd and another ex-CEO of the Post Ofice, Dame Moya Greene. Does Hamilton find the inquiry upsetting? “It just makes me angrier. And I really enjoy sitting there watching them squirm as Jason [Beer, KC, the victims’ counsel] reads out horrible things they wrote about me. Paula Vennells wrote that I ‘lacked passion’ and she was ‘more bored than outraged’ by the story. And I just sat there looking at her deadpan but enjoying every moment. I was sat just feet away from her when she kept saying she was sorry. As some of the others did. And Jason said: ‘Well, you’re all sorry now that it’s all up on a screen in front of you!’ ” It is now 21 years since the first doubts were raised about the reliability of the Horizon IT system. During the two decades when the campaign received little publicity and no success, the Post Office and government – evidence to the inquiry seems strongly to suggest – hoped that the subpostmasters would eventually give up. “Yes,” agrees Hamilton. “But I couldn’t. I was so angry. I promised my mum and my dad when they were dying that I would never give up, regardless of what was thrown at us.” As the ITV1 documentary illustrates, even more victims have come forward since the drama. “I’m in two big WhatsApp groups of victims, but I tend to sit back and let them support each other. I chip in occasionally to get the mood up. Some people have been to hell and back. I was just really fortunate that my community got around me because they couldn’t believe what had happened.” Sir Alan “isn’t on our WhatsApps because he doesn’t join groups. But he speaks to me privately.” After Sir Alan, is there a chance of Dame Jo? “I don’t think they’ll ever give me that. I’ve annoyed them too much. But I certainly wouldn’t turn down an OBE like Alan originally did.” Some who suffer upsetting events revisit them in sleepless nights. Does she? “I don’t have nightmares. I’ve dealt with it and it’s made me a much stronger person. I’m not scared of anything or anyone. If you said to me now, ‘The King wants to see you,’ I’d just go to see him. “But I struggle to get to sleep some nights because I lie there thinking: ‘Oh, for God’s sake, why can’t you just pay people?’ Hubby goes off to bed and my mind starts whirring with who I can write to next. So I’m campaigning in my head, as it were. But it’s not for my trauma, it’s other people’s. The only thing I’m still heartbroken about is that my mum and dad didn’t live to see me get my conviction quashed. But that’s the way it is. “When all the original 555 people we represented have been paid, I’ll feel I’ve done my job and can stop and will shut up and go away.”
Jo Hamilton on fighting for justice after the Post Office scandal: ‘I’m not scared of anything or anyone’
"When all the original 555 people we represented have been paid, I'll feel I've done my job and can stop and will shut up and go away."
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. When Sir Keir Starmer entered 10 Downing Street on 5th July, an email already awaited him from a Mrs Jo Hamilton of Hampshire. The wrongly convicted former subpostmistress (played by Monica Dolan in ITV1 drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office) urged him to do more than previous governments to settle the compensation claims of the still many hundreds of Post Office contractors who suffered combinations of imprisonment, disgrace, bankruptcy or mental destruction because of a faulty IT system that suggested they were pilfering from their tills. Hamilton says she hasn't received a reply from the Prime Minister: "But, to be fair, he's been very busy." There was, though, a rapid invitation to meet Gareth Thomas, the junior minister in the Business and Trade department with Post Office responsibility. "So I met him, but then got sent the usual bollocks from civil servants. 'It's not our fault. It's your lawyers and so on…' How dare they? It was a carbon copy of a letter from a civil servant I've been shouting at for years. So I sent him a blaster back." Emphasising her tenacity as a campaigner – which continues in Mr Bates vs the Post Office: The Impact, an ITV1 follow-up documentary – Hamilton also contacted the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, whom she met when he was a Labour member of the select committee investigating the scandal. "We got on OK at the select committee back in the day. And he sent me an email from his private account, which I guess doesn't go through his stupid civil servants. So I have access to him directly. He assured me the business minister is on it. So we just hope." Hamilton, who was wrongly convicted of stealing £36,000, is also a demanding constituent in North East Hampshire. She acclaims as a "superhero", Lord (James) Arbuthnot, played by Alex Jennings in the drama, who helped to expose the cover-up and clear her name. But, when Arbuthnot retired, she found his Tory successor, Ranil Jayawardena, so unsatisfactory that: "I told him I was going to run for Parliament against him. He said, 'Please don't!'" In fact, Jayawardena lost in July to Liberal Democrat candidate Alex Brewer, of whom Hamilton admits, "I just had a run-in with her. I wrote as soon as she got in and she wouldn't see me. Eventually, she offered me a meeting on 2nd October. So I wrote back and said, 'As this matter is so urgent, I am now dealing with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the minister directly.' Stick that up your pipe! She wrote back and said she was glad I was dealing with the people with the real power." Some would say that power also lies with Hamilton and the newly knighted Sir Alan Bates – played by Toby Jones in the drama, organiser of the GLO (Group Litigation Order) of 555 Post Office claimants – especially since Mr Bates vs the Post Office aired. Does she feel that? "Being listened to at blooming last. It's that kind of power. You will bloody listen to me or I'll shout or go to the newspapers. I find that exciting after all this time. We've been yelling for years about this. And we were ignored, especially in Parliament. And now they're scared of us. There's still the usual bullshit that they say one thing and do another. But at least they see us now." Just before we spoke, Hamilton had received a photo from Dolan of the actor receiving another award for impersonating her. She's excited but still astonished by how her life changed in early January this year, when Mr Bates vs the Post Office was screened. "My phone lit up just after the first episode started going out. And it never stopped." Sir Alan is still fighting for his own financial settlement, alongside many others, whereas Hamilton has already done a deal. The figure is confidential, but "my lawyer asked me to come up with the figure I wanted and we got within £20,000 of that". Since then, though, terms have been offered that are generally considered more generous. So does she now regret settling? "No! Hubby [David] had just got prostate cancer. It gave us enough money to pay off our mortgage and for him to give up work. He was 75 and still working as a gardener five days a week. And I had ten cleaning jobs across five days. We were like hamsters in a wheel. And it brought choice about whether we still wanted to work. And not to have a mortgage is amazing. We've not got masses of savings in the bank, but what we have is our house. We can sell it and downsize when we want to." She continues to fight for the hundreds of those still uncompensated, however, because "I can't believe we're still getting the same bulls**t. There's a 91-year-old waiting for compensation. How bloody dare they? I said to the minister a couple of weeks back: she's 91, so can't someone just pay her? Don't screw her over. Just give her the money. They still say to us that they have to be careful with the public purse. But they're paying lawyers twice what they're offering us. So who's being careless with the public purse?" When I put Hamilton's complaints to the Department for Business and Trade, a spokesperson responded: "We recognise the immeasurable suffering postmasters have endured and that they've waited too long to receive redress. That's why we are working tirelessly across government to bring them some relief with full, fair and swift redress. Already we’ve paid out over £260 million to over 2,800 people across three redress schemes. We've also made 227 GLO offers and introduced a new compensation scheme to speed up redress for those with overturned convictions." Hamilton still does around ten hours of house-cleaning a week, but fits it around sittings of the statutory public inquiry into the Post Office scandal, which enters its seventh and final phase this month. She has attended most days, deliberately sitting in direct sight of witnesses such as former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells, ex-business improvement director Angela van den Bogerd and another ex-CEO of the Post Ofice, Dame Moya Greene. Does Hamilton find the inquiry upsetting? "It just makes me angrier. And I really enjoy sitting there watching them squirm as Jason [Beer, KC, the victims' counsel] reads out horrible things they wrote about me. Paula Vennells wrote that I 'lacked passion' and she was 'more bored than outraged' by the story. And I just sat there looking at her deadpan but enjoying every moment. I was sat just feet away from her when she kept saying she was sorry. As some of the others did. And Jason said: 'Well, you're all sorry now that it's all up on a screen in front of you!'" It is now 21 years since the first doubts were raised about the reliability of the Horizon IT system. During the two decades when the campaign received little publicity and no success, the Post Office and government – evidence to the inquiry seems strongly to suggest – hoped that the subpostmasters would eventually give up. "Yes," agrees Hamilton. "But I couldn't. I was so angry. I promised my mum and my dad when they were dying that I would never give up, regardless of what was thrown at us." As the ITV1 documentary illustrates, even more victims have come forward since the drama. "I'm in two big WhatsApp groups of victims, but I tend to sit back and let them support each other. I chip in occasionally to get the mood up. Some people have been to hell and back. I was just really fortunate that my community got around me because they couldn’t believe what had happened." Sir Alan "isn't on our WhatsApps because he doesn't join groups. But he speaks to me privately." After Sir Alan, is there a chance of Dame Jo? "I don't think they'll ever give me that. I've annoyed them too much. But I certainly wouldn't turn down an OBE like Alan originally did." Some who suffer upsetting events revisit them in sleepless nights. Does she? "I don't have nightmares. I've dealt with it and it's made me a much stronger person. I'm not scared of anything or anyone. If you said to me now, 'The King wants to see you,' I'd just go to see him. "But I struggle to get to sleep some nights because I lie there thinking: 'Oh, for God's sake, why can't you just pay people?' Hubby goes off to bed and my mind starts whirring with who I can write to next. So I'm campaigning in my head, as it were. But it's not for my trauma, it's other people's. The only thing I'm still heartbroken about is that my mum and dad didn't live to see me get my conviction quashed. But that's the way it is. "When all the original 555 people we represented have been paid, I'll feel I've done my job and can stop and will shut up and go away." Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
“As long as they keep it on air, I’ll do it”
Hollywood star Gary Oldman says Slow Horses is a career highlight – and he’s in it for the long haul
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in September 2024. Add Slow Horses to your watchlist. When stars of a returning TV series start a new shoot, they expect fresh costumes, or at least the old clothes laundered. But for Gary Oldman – as shabby, malodorous disgraced spymaster Jackson Lamb in Apple TV+’s Slow Horses – the wardrobe department works hard to make everything look worse. “Each time we come back,” he says, “there’s a new greasy stain or cigarette burn on Jackson’s rain mac. This year, they really worked on the shoes to make them scruffier. But, essentially, it’s the same shoes with the same holey socks and I just go, ‘Hello, boys!’ ” The fourth season of Slow Horses (adapted from Mick Herron’s chart-topping novels about MI6 spooks sent into clerical-duty exile after mission failures) is a casting landmark for Oldman. After three appearances as James Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and also a cameo trio in the Harry Potter movies, he has now played Lamb more times than any other character. A fifth Slow Horses has already been shot and Herron has written five more novels that, so far, have yet to be adapted. View oEmbed on the source website “I’m incredibly committed to Slow Horses and it keeps me busy,” Oldman says. “As long as they keep it on air, I’ll do it, although I won’t do it as long as Peter Falk did Columbo, however long that was.” Thirty-five years? “Right! I don’t have 35 years in me, but I do love the show and Lamb. I just come in and put the mac on and step right back into it. I really enjoy Lamb and being with this group of people we have.” Those regular co-stars include Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, Rosalind Eleazar, Jonathan Pryce, Saskia Reeves and Christopher Chung. “It’s been a real highlight of my career. It’s up there with anything else. We’re like a theatre company so it’s no hardship picking it up again. And the return of this cast every time.” The returning cast... Ah. If not plot-spoiler, then plot-concern alert. An early publicity photo shows Lamb at what seems to be a funeral. And readers of the books will know that Herron has a Line of Duty attitude to big characters. Slow Horses has already lost two central figures: Olivia Cooke as Sid Baker and Dustin Demri-Burns as Min Harper. “Yeah. So somebody might cop it this time,” Oldman warns. And we’re going to be very careful here but – if someone cops it – because they’re such a close company, that loss must be quite a thing? “It really is. Listen, I remember back in the day when Sirius Black died, we heard a rumour before that [JK Rowling] book came out that someone big died in this one. And there were a lot of rumours and all the cast were taking bets. And I’d only just come into the series. And I thought, ‘Well, they’re not going to kill Harry Potter’s godfather. It’ll be Hagrid or someone.’ But then it was me! Yeah, we lose someone in this series. But Mick Herron is great at that.” When the remaining actors are playing the scenes after someone has gone, presumably the factual sadness at losing the actor from the company helps to play the fictional pain at the lost character. “Yeah. It’s very sad to see a friend go. Dustin is a comedian by trade and was so funny around the set that it was awful to see him go. You come back and regroup and there’s one of you missing. But, like you say, you can play that absence. Not that Lamb would care!” Up to a point. In the books, when Lamb says something fantastically flippant after a colleague dies, we can think maybe there’s more grief underneath, but Oldman can – and does – show us that damage. “You’re right. There’s an interesting thing Lamb says to [Jack Lowden’s] River Cartwright early on: ‘You’re going to see a lot more deaths. If you don’t think it’s for you, get out of the car now.’ There’s a jadedness in Lamb but he’s very loyal to these misfits. When it really comes down to it, he probably cares more than most, although he gives the impression, as a protection, that he doesn’t.” Evidence for that comes in season four. When Lamb is warned before entering a crime scene, “It’s bad in there!”, he replies, “I’ve…” “I’ve seen bad before!” Oldman overlaps and completes the line in character. “Yeah. We drop these little breadcrumbs about his past. With that line alone, we sense a lot. In a scene I just did for season five – it’s not giving anything away to say – another layer of the onion is revealed, a little more about what happened in the old days when Lamb was in Berlin.” As it happens, Herron recently published a novel, The Secret Hours, tangential to the series, that blows open the onion, revealing exactly what occurred in Cold War Germany to force Lamb into exile. Has Oldman read that book? “No. I deliberately only read each book before we film it. But someone told me that, in The Secret Hours, we know who they are but they are behind codenames?” That’s right, I say, but when an operative involuntarily farts during an undercover mission, we know at once that is Jackson Lamb. “Literally blowing your cover,” laughs Oldman. In that context, when I talked to Oldman for Radio Times, ahead of the first series of Slow Horses, we drew a contrast with his other big spy, John le Carré’s George Smiley in the 2011 movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and I used the phrase “From Smiley to Smelly”. “Yeah. Very good,” says Oldman. “Amazingly, none of us working on the show had thought of that.” It struck me, though, in this series, that the two spies came closer. Beneath George’s chosen (smooth) manner and Jackson’s favoured (rough) surface, there is a lot of pain and damage? “Yes! I think they’re both essentially good men. The North Pole of their moral compasses is more aligned than one might imagine. They despise the bureaucracy and corruption of spying. You could imagine Smiley – as a sidelined outsider at times – having ended up in Slough House.” And, unusually for spies, neither lies. Smiley by leaving pauses, Lamb by always saying exactly what he thinks. “Yeah, there’s subtext.” Between shoots of Slow Horses, Oldman still plays small film roles: as President Harry Truman in Nolan’s Oppenheimer and as the writer John Cheever in Paolo Sorrentino’s upcoming Parthenope. But the great role of Lamb must mean he’s turning down other parts; is that a frustration? “No, I’d rather not know what else is coming in. There’s no point. I’m sure there are opportunities I’ve missed. Oppenheimer was basically one morning of filming – five hours. Parthenope – I love Sorrentino’s films and he said, ‘I’ve got this part but it’s tiny.’ And I wrote back and said I’d play a shadow on a wall for him. But it was a beautiful location – ten days on Capri, six of them filming – and so one basically couldn’t argue with the gig.” Oldman lives in Palm Springs, California, with his fifth wife, art expert Gisele Schmidt. Having played President Truman and also presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), it must be fascinating for Oldman to be in America during 2024 campaign times in which one candidate (Trump) survives an assassination attempt and another (Biden) resigns eight days later. “Yeah. I think it was David Mamet who said we are living in times when he goes out of the room to clean his teeth and when he comes back the world has changed. It’s quite a circus.”
Guy Ritchie’s latest WWII romp is great entertainment. But what’s the darker truth behind the real mission the film is based on, asks historian Damien Lewis
Add The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to your watchlist There are many reasons why Rishi Sunak lost the recent general election, but one was almost certainly the public’s fury at his early departure from the 80th anniversary D-Day commemorations in Normandy in June. Is it an example, I suggest to bestselling Second World War historian Damien Lewis (not to be confused with the actor Damian Lewis, of whom more later), of how Britain is still shaped by the conflict? “Absolutely. I was at some of the D-Day celebrations, which were very moving,” Lewis says. “And what struck me was how real it all was. There are still a few veterans with us, which helps. But I think it was actually made more real by the war in Ukraine, which I believe is a struggle for all our democratic freedoms. “The other thing is the electoral advance of the far right in France, which is chilling. We were on the Normandy beaches as a significant proportion of the French population were preparing to vote that way. Something I try to underline in my books is that freedom and democracy – those things we take for granted – actually have to be fought for every day. The lessons of the Second World War are paramount.” Lewis set out some of those lessons in his 2014 book The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which covered secret operations during the war. One story from the book – about Operation Postmaster, a 1942 mission to capture German and Italian boats from a Spanish colony off the coast of west Africa – has now been turned into a film of the same name by Guy Ritchie, starring Henry Cavill as secret service pioneer Gus March-Phillipps and Alex Pettyfer as his second in command, Geoffrey Appleyard. The film swells a sub-genre of recent dramatisations of special wartime operations: most notably the movie and West End musical Operation Mincemeat, in which a stolen corpse is used to deceive Hitler, and the BBC1 series SAS: Rogue Heroes, where misfits and killers go behind enemy lines in north Africa. Strikingly, these shows present war somewhat farcically or comedically. Does that surprise or worry Lewis? “Yes and no,” he says. “I’ve had emails from readers in America, where the film has been out for some time, saying it’s an absolute scandal the book is treated so lightheartedly. But at the other end of the spectrum, I watched it with my wife and four children, including my youngest, my 15-year-old daughter. They all loved it. So it’s some achievement to make a film that appeals to such a family, some of whom have very little interest in the Second World War.” In defence of the screen versions, weren’t these missions often comically improbable, even unbelievable, in conception? “Absolutely. Nail on the head,” Lewis agrees. “One of the founding precepts of the SAS and the SOE was not just thinking the unthinkable, but doing it. If you had an idea –no matter how wild it might be – your idea deserved to be heard. If you could manage something completely unthinkable, then logically the enemy wouldn’t have thought of it and would be taken by surprise. Even today those units have that precept.” All these sorts of adaptations have a line in them in which someone says something like “They’re completely mad!” of the likes of March-Phillipps. Is that exaggerated? “Not at all. They were all eccentric, crazy people. The more you drill down into it you come across examples of wonderful British eccentricity and daring.” Some also see a risk that these wartime stories create a narrative of easy victory, of basic British decency and supremacy, that can be dangerous when applied to recent wars of western intervention, where our true role may be murkier. “It can lead to complacency,” Lewis suggests. “And I hope we’re not witnessing that at the moment. I worry greatly that we are not robust enough in our determination to fight for our freedoms.” And of course, another aspect of turning the Second World War into light-hearted entertainment is the increasing awareness of the mental damage inflicted on many of those who physically survived the conflict. Lewis is strongly conscious of this issue. “I was diagnosed with PTSD about six years ago from being a war reporter,” he says. “I don’t mind talking about it. I’m obviously very aware of it, so I had Ros Townsend, an expert on PTSD, read my trilogy on [SAS founder] Paddy Mayne. There were these people behind enemy lines, lost in the desert, not knowing if they would die of thirst or hunger, be killed or captured, having to do horrific things to the enemy in close combat. She said just one of those missions would give you PTSD, and some of these men did them for five years. After the war, a lot of them came home and essentially drank themselves to death. “PTSD didn’t exist as a diagnosis after the war. They did identify a condition called ‘psycho-neurosis’, for which the ‘cure’ was electric shock treatment.” As a war reporter for two decades, Lewis admits he took “insane risks” and saw “horrific things”. These experiences must have helped in writing his books? “Yes. When I’m interviewing people who have been on the front line, you know that you’re both speaking the same language.” These days, the non-fiction bestseller book lists are often dominated by books about improbable Second World War missions, written by Lewis or his fellow wartime chroniclers Ben McIntyre and Max Hastings. Apparently, this publishing boom has been aided by the documentation on these long-secret missions being declassified. “This is obviously not a golden age for eye-witness accounts of the war, but it is for documentation,” says Lewis. “I often come across a file that has never been opened and I apply to the committee at the National Archives at Kew or the equivalents in the US or France. No one alive now remembers why a file was closed for 150 years in 1945. So, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the file is opened, sometimes slightly redacted. I’ve only ever had one file that they absolutely refused to open. They didn’t say why, but my guess is that it probably mentioned a member of the intelligence services who has living family.” His next book, SAS: Daggers Drawn, is published in October and includes the involvement of the SAS in the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp and, Lewis says, “the real reason they went there”. Most authors would insist we buy the book to find that out, but Lewis generously previews the major revelation: “They actually went there to rescue one of their own. There was an SAS guy held in Belsen. They went there not knowing what they were going to find, and discovered the horror of the camps.” It might help book sales when readers see the name on the cover. In common with radio presenter Chris Evans, actor Brian Cox and historian Tom Holland, who have found their name shared by a Hollywood star, an astronomer and Spider-Man respectively, Lewis suffers from people thinking he’s “the other one”, despite the difference in their first names. “I get a lot of letters from young women who loved my performance in Band of Brothers and ask if I’m single,” he laughs. “I don’t know if he gets mine about the history of the SAS.” That said, this Lewis has recently been asked by a publisher and a film company to write the story of his life as a war reporter. So could there soon be the chance of seeing Damian Lewis play Damien Lewis in Damien Lewis? He laughs. “Yes. Although the problem is that I really don’t like writing about myself. I don’t think it’s the PTSD. I just much prefer telling other people’s war stories.” The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Damien Lewis is published by Quercus
The Reckoning creators on controversy and responsibility of Savile drama
Writer Neil McKay and producer Jeff Pope open up on the weight of responsibility when it came to tackling the story and crimes of Jimmy Savile.
My Zoom link opens to reveal the screenwriter Neil McKay wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap in a room with lights down and curtains drawn. His four-part drama The Reckoning, with Steve Coogan as Jimmy Savile, has been controversial – with objections that the story of the prolific sex offender should not be dramatised, especially not by the BBC, which employed him for more than 40 years. Does the writer not want to be seen? "Apologies," he says. "I’m not in disguise. A migraine just descended. I’ve got lights in my eyes and a pain at the back of my head, so I’m trying to simulate a darkened room." The fact that McKay declines an offer to defer the interview ­­– or leave it to Jeff Pope, producer of The Reckoning, who now joins us, fully lit, in another digital window – testifies to his desire to talk about a series that, in the three years since it was announced, has been subject to regular negative coverage led by The Sun newspaper. "Clearly, we realise how controversial the project is," says Pope. "When I asked Steve to do it, he didn’t immediately say yes, but talked to his family and friends. And they divided into two camps – you absolutely must do this, and you absolutely must not. There was no one in the middle. And it was that polarity that made him want to take it on." McKay acknowledges that he and Pope are used to a "degree of hostility". Titans of true-crime TV drama, their previous collaborations include This Is Personal: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper and dramas about the serial killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley (See No Evil: the Moors Murders) and Fred and Rose West (Appropriate Adult). As a result, they have had a long time to consider the common complaint that horrific crimes shouldn’t be turned into peak-time fiction. "I’ve faced that throughout my career," says Pope. "My view is that the quickest way to invite something like this to happen again is to ignore it. "I passionately believe we have to explore stories like Savile. The same is true with Fred West, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. The theme of a lot of stuff that Neil and I do is that it’s a warning from the past." McKay adds: "I think what drama can do – which documentaries can’t – is put you right in the middle of these scenes. Savile started out as a dance-hall DJ in Manchester. And DJs enjoy controlling a room. "I think he was a con man. What we try to show is how, in successive institutions – Leeds General Infirmary, the pop business, the BBC, eventually Margaret Thatcher’s private office and beyond – the mechanics of Savile’s con worked. That’s what I think only drama can give you." It was, though, a documentary – Exposure: the Other Side of Jimmy Savile – broadcast on ITV in October 2012, a year after Savile’s death, that first exposed allegations of serious sexual assaults on children and adults that expensive lawyers and strong connections with the media and police had kept hidden during the presenter’s lifetime. The film triggered multiple investigations that ultimately revealed hundreds of victims at hospitals and schools where Savile volunteered, and at the BBC. The position of the corporation was complicated by the fact that it had broadcast hagiographic obituaries of Savile, but pulled a planned Newsnight report into his paedophilia. Pope understands why some question the BBC’s suitability to broadcast a Savile drama. "It’s important to understand that this is not a BBC production for the BBC. It’s an ITV Studios production for the BBC." That is a small but crucial point. Although it may be of little interest to viewers, the fact is that major TV networks now make shows for each other. "So, in that respect, it is independent," says Pope. "It sends a signal to the outside world that this isn’t the BBC 'marking its own homework'. And, to amplify that, I can honestly say that there was never any case of the BBC saying, 'You can’t put that in because it makes us look bad,' which I know is what people suspect. But that never happened." In addition, explains McKay, "On all these dramas, we don’t even begin to do anything until we’ve spoken to people who experienced the crimes and we sense that we have a consensus to proceed." Each episode of The Reckoning is bookended by interviews with four people whose assaults by Savile are dramatised. A newspaper report suggested that the BBC "ordered" these inclusions to make the drama more sympathetic to victims. Totally untrue, says Pope: "The real victims were in there from the first draft. We taped their interviews and then Neil used some of their words in the scripts. Later, we re-interviewed them on camera. But they were always there as a concept." These Savile survivors are able to be shown because they have waived the lifelong legal anonymity that those who have suffered sex crimes are offered. Most victims haven’t, which is why, explains Pope, there are some composite characters and scenes: "People will obviously ask, 'Why are there invented sequences?' And the answer is that there are hundreds of Savile victims, most of whom can’t be publicly identified. But by combing through the hundreds of stories, you see a pattern." Crucial to McKay’s research were those who encountered Savile not as a victim but as an employee or friend. "There was a man called Charles Halligan, a fellow Catholic who knew Savile for most of his life and worked with him at Leeds Infirmary. I knew he was dead but managed to find his widow, Beryl, and got to know her in the last years of her life. She’s played by Siobhan Finneran in the drama and she and Charles are sort of us, the viewer. "Charles is the one who’s gullible and taken in. Beryl – and this comes directly from her own experience – had his number very early on, but her husband used to say, 'Oh, that’s just Jimmy!' So that becomes an important dynamic in the drama." No doubt viewers of The Reckoning will speculate to what extent Savile accepted guilt and expected exposure. McKay was strongly guided by Beryl Halligan on this: "She told me that every Mother’s Day she, Charles and Savile would go to Killingbeck, the Roman Catholic cemetery in Leeds, and they would put flowers on their mothers’ graves, which were near to each other. "And Savile used to say, with reference to his family burial plot, 'I’ll be going in there one day.' But Beryl knew Savile right to the end, and she said that, later on, he suggested to her that he wouldn’t go in the family grave at all." Instead, as requested in his will, Savile was buried in Scarborough’s Woodlands Cemetery in a gold coffin under a triptych headstone with the epitaph: "It was good while it lasted." At the request of his surviving relatives, that grave was levelled in October 2012, after the exposure of his crimes, and is now unmarked. "Beryl," says McKay, "came to the conclusion he didn’t want his dead family polluted by his presence. That it was a sort of confession. And that strain runs throughout the drama. I think he thought that the past would catch up with him; it was a race against the grave. The grave won, much to the fury of his victims and survivors. But I think he knew that it was coming and made sure to avoid the bulldozers going to his parents’ grave." Everyone, whether Catholic or not, struggles to understand how such a prolific and terrible criminal was simultaneously a Mass-going Catholic, one who probably feared that only his prolific charitable works might prevent him from an eternity of hellfire. Savile’s Catholicism was revealingly idiosyncratic: he "jokes" in an autobiography that if St Peter won’t let him in through the pearly gates, he’ll break St Peter’s fingers. Do we think that, as Catholics are required to, Savile made a deathbed confession? "I can’t answer that," says McKay. "People will have to watch the drama. But it’s fair to say the shape of the whole thing goes towards the deathbed and the breaking of St Peter’s fingers. It was just a matter of chance I found someone who could bear witness. "I can’t reveal the source of this, but I talked to a person who was in there at the very, very end and is a Catholic, and you’re absolutely right – his [Savile’s] faith stayed with him." Other revealing insights came to light when McKay visited Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands, where Savile kept a cottage. "I got to know the guy who was effectively the caretaker and also did various alterations. Savile got him to arrange a mirror so that, from his chair, he could see coaches coming down the mountain pass from Glencoe. "The drivers of the tourist buses would say, 'Coming up on the right here, the home of Jimmy Savile. And, if you’re lucky, you might see him.' Savile, having seen the bus in the mirror, would go out onto the balcony and wave and throw his hands up. "And because Savile, at the end, was lonely, this chap would go to sit with him and Savile would ramble a bit and say, 'I’ve never had a computer because that’s how they got Gary [Glitter].' But the most interesting thing was that Savile said that, in the dark at night, he feared there were bad men on the mountains who would come down and slit his throat. And that seems to me to go to something very deep in his psyche. "I put that in the drama but there wasn’t bloody space for it and we couldn’t afford to film at Glencoe. I’ve never told anyone this, except Jeff. But I think it tells you a lot." Conspiracy theories have suggested that the unusually long three years it has taken from The Reckoning’s commission to transmission resulted from delays caused by sudden BBC nerves about the subject matter, but Pope insists not. "What led to such a prolonged post-production period is that, at any given time, we were working in about four different dimensions. Is what we show on screen going to be triggering for victims? Also, there are paedophiles and perverts out there; we don’t want them to find 'useful' anything we put on screen. And, generally, there was the question of tone. "In order to understand Savile, you have to humanise him to some degree, but you also have to see something of his depravity. So, in every scene, there were multiple decisions of taste and tone." In the first episode, when Savile, dressed as a court jester, assaults a hospital patient, the camera is far away, at the other end of the ward – is the offence implied by reactions? "That’s a perfect example," Pope agrees. "The audience needs to know what happened, but they don’t need to see it." The star of The Reckoning, Steve Coogan, has been an accomplished mimic since his Spitting Image days, and, in costume, he also bears a startling physical resemblance to Savile. Did he, like some actors, remain in character at all times on set? "I had several lunches with him during filming," says Pope. "And it was someone who looked like Jimmy Savile but sounded like Steve. When we had victims on set – at their request and with all safeguarding support in place – Steve would come round the corner and you could feel the intake of breath because it was such an extraordinary similarity. So he made a point of saying, 'I’m Steve,' and he would have a conversation with them as Steve." The Savile drama coincides with another series about a Yorkshire-born psychopath, Peter Sutcliffe. The title of ITV1’s The Long Shadow deliberately omits the criminal’s name and press nickname, while the BBC drama also rejects using the famous name in favour of a title that suggests a coming to terms with the story by victims, institutions – and the drama’s makers. "There was a girl near us, growing up," says Pope, "who went on Jim’ll Fix It and we were all really jealous. Grotesquely, her fix-it was to meet Rolf Harris. That’s absolutely a true story. So it’s sobering and astonishing, five decades on, to be on the eve of showing who Savile really was." View Green Video on the source website The Reckoning starts Monday at 9pm on BBC One. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only £10, PLUS a £10 John Lewis and Partners voucher delivered to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Nicola Walker on BBC One's Marriage, Unforgotten exit and future roles
Speaking to Mark Lawson in the latest issue of Radio Times magazine, Nicola Walker says playing Sean Bean’s wife in an intimate new drama from the makers of Mum was harder than it looks.
This article was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Eight years ago, something happened that changed Nicola Walker’s attitude to acting. She was rehearsing A View from the Bridge, a revival of Arthur Miller’s classic of betrayal in an Italian-American family, which would become one of her career highs, transferring from the Young Vic to the West End and then Broadway. During an early run-through of one scene, the play’s director, Ivo van Hove, stopped her and suggested, gently, that she was overacting. “I was sobbing, saying, ‘You don’t want me to act. You want me to do what I would do in my kitchen!’ And Ivo said, ‘Yeah, do what you do in your kitchen with your partner’. It was a great wake- up call for me: ‘Just shut up and say the words. Don’t get in the way with your stupid acting.’ I’ve never forgotten that.” It’s possibly no coincidence that, the following year, 2015, Walker made her debut as DCI Cassie Stuart in ITV’s Unforgotten, creating one of television’s most understated but overwhelming characters. Further evidence of her low-key but high-impact style can be seen in BBC One’s Last Tango in Halifax, River and The Split. But it’s in Marriage, a new four-part drama written and directed by Stefan Golaszewski, that van Hove’s note about naturalistic acting proves most useful. For, as Emma, wife of Sean Bean’s Ian, Walker has long scenes actually in a kitchen. “Stefan had to really calm me down early on, because he said he did a lot of takes and suspected I wasn’t used to that. In all the telly I’ve done, if you’re not hitting the scene within three takes, you know you’re doing it wrong and wasting time. With Stefan, 12, 13, 14, 16 takes is not unusual. So, I spent the first week getting used to that. I was caught in that thing of gotta get it right, whereas Stefan is into you’ve gotta get it real, which takes longer.” A consequence of so frequently repeating action was revealed to Walker in a scene where Emma chews a chocolate bar. To reduce nausea or weight gain, actors doing eating sequences are offered the chance to spit out the food when the camera cuts. “The crew, lots of whom have worked on Stefan’s stuff, asked if I wanted a spit bucket. And I said, ‘No, no, I’ll just eat it’. But after 18 takes, you really need the bucket. Apparently, on [Golaszewski’s BBC Three sitcom] Him & Her, Russell Tovey once ate 24 chickens.” The illusion of naturalism is carefully orchestrated. So meticulous is Golaszewski that 52-year-old Walker was provided with Emma’s laptop computer and mobile phone a few weeks before shooting started so that using them would become second nature for her. Walker and Bean were also given rehearsal time to become familiar with Emma and Ian’s house. “It had to look like we knew where the recycling bin was and so on.” Prior to Marriage, Walker says her most difficult task on screen had been driving a 1970s tractor in Last Tango in Halifax. Then Golaszewski asked her to load a dishwasher. “This sounds ridiculous, but making it look like it really is your dishwasher is very hard. Emma would know where everything went, so I had to, too. You suddenly realise how easy it is to tell a lie on camera and you have to eradicate that, whether it’s pushing for a big dramatic moment or not quite remembering which shelf in the fridge the milk is on. But the number of takes helps you get there.” The most affecting aspect of Marriage is that, through the inevitable troughs of a long relationship, Emma and Ian are bonded by a terrible event that happened long ago, yet they almost never refer to it. “Their daughter keeps saying, ‘We need to talk’, and they just won’t. Because most people don’t. We don’t carry the past blazing around in the present because we couldn’t get up and make our breakfast if it was in the forefront of our mind all the time. Emma can’t talk about this thing that has happened because it’s too big. When she lets even a squeak out of it, it’s followed by a complete emotional breakdown. It’s embedded in their relationship, but they can’t talk about it. “I feel that about grief. When I lost my mum –a long time ago now – there was a month or six-week period when I felt that someone had pulled back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz and I really felt I saw the world for what it was: a very frightening place. Then, slowly, the curtain comes across again because you can’t live at the sharp end of grief. And that’s what Ian and Emma have had to achieve.” If further emotional research were needed, the co-stars have six marriages between them. Walker smiles. “I’ve only got one, so Sean brings up the average!” She considered it impolite to ask Bean what it was like to have been married five times. Walker and her partner, actor Barnaby Kay, have been together for 27 years, a similar span as Emma and Ian, but only married late on. “Me and my husband, because we both lost a parent young, we thought, after we had a child, we ought to get married, in case one of us dies, so that the legalities are clear. Which is not the most romantic reason to get married but is probably the only thing that would have got me to sign a piece of paper. I’m not a great advocate of marriage in real life.” How does Walker decide which parts to play? After all, she must by now be offered so many. “I’m not, actually. I don’t know if you can do anything about that. I started when I was 21 and did a long time in theatre before TV came along, so I’m still convinced that I will never work again. It’s not faux humility; it’s how I’m programmed. I go into next year with nothing on the slate for maybe the first time in 10 years. Part of me is excited and part of me is terrified.” But having played multiple detectives – from Touching Evil and Scott & Bailey to Annika and Unforgotten – presumably she would be wary of more cops? “Never too many! I don’t feel like that. If the script was good, I’d play another detective. But I can’t believe I’d ever find one I loved as much as Cassie.” On 29th March 2021, when Cassie Stuart was unexpectedly written out of Unforgotten in a startling finale to the fourth series, there was speculation that Walker had become bored with the part or too busy on other shows. Neither, she says, was the case. “I’ve worked with [Unforgotten creator] Chris Lang more than any other writer and we are friends. From the very beginning, we talked about Cassie’s story being finite; Chris was always putting her through a story arc that would damage her emotionally. The buzzword was that she was an empath, and the problem with being an empath is that eventually you break. I felt that to have her keep coming back would make her seem like a superhero. So it was very much a joint and long-planned decision. “But on reflection – we all feel the same – if we’d known COVID was coming, we would have given people a less depressing storyline. I feel guilty because, when it came out, I thought, ‘Crikey, we could have given them something more cheerful. The last thing they need is to be made to feel really sad about this brilliant cop.’” Six years as Cassie increased public recognition that began with 57 episodes as Ruth Evershed in the BBC One spy drama Spooks from 2003 to 2011. “In terms of the public, Spooks was the one, and still is, as it’s streamed a lot. But the Spooks audience is so witty. The first time I realised, I was in my local supermarket and someone sidled up and said, ‘The condor has landed; the geese fly tonight’, and wandered off down frozen foods. It was never just a run-of-the-mill ‘I love the show’.” After Marriage, will people come up to her at the fresh fruit and tell her how awful their spouse is? “I hope they do.” She’s sure, though, there won’t be a sequel called Divorce. “Ian and Emma would never split up. That’s the point.” Read more: Marriage review: Sean Bean and Nicola Walker drama redefines romance Marriage star teases "showdown" with Nicola Walker Marriage viewers shouldn’t expect “big stunts or reveals”, says Sean Bean Marriage begins on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Sunday 14th August at 9pm. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight. The latest issue of Radio Times magazine is on sale now – subscribe now and get the next 12 issues for only £1. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey.
Marriage creator "incredibly lucky" to get Nicola Walker and Sean Bean
How do you follow a huge hit like Mum? Speaking to Mark Lawson in the latest issue of Radio Times Magazine, Stefan Golaszewski has the answer...
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. It might seem rude to say of a writer/director that his work looks neither written nor directed. But in the BBC Two comedy drama Mum, Stefan Golaszewski achieved an extraordinary low-key realism – more like being than acting – as Lesley Manville’s 59-year-old widow Kathy was tentatively courted by old friend Michael, played by Peter Mullan. In Golaszewski’s latest project, Marriage, both husband and wife, Ian (Sean Bean) and Emma (Nicola Walker), are still alive, but their relationship may not be. And as in Mum, everyday actions – shopping, watching TV, cleaning teeth before bed, etc – reveal complex doubts and desires through short sentences and long silences. “My aim is to get the actor to behave as people would in real life rather than in a way that would be most useful to the audience to make clear what is going on,” Golaszewski explains. “In so many shows the actor is encouraged to do the storytelling, to put a sort of highlighter pen over the character’s intentions or emotions. My note to actors is just do what the person is doing in that moment.” Landing Walker and Bean, fresh from their triumphs in Unforgotten and Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama Time respectively, is, he says, a showrunner’s dream come true. “I was incredibly lucky to get those two actors. People like Sean and Nicola – also Lesley and Peter in Mum – you don’t audition them, you just offer the part. So you don’t quite know what they will bring into the room and, in all cases, it was better than I could possibly have imagined.” The theme of Marriage is the micro-aggressions and micro-affections that mark a long marriage. Ian and Emma have been together for 30 years, but the show’s title alludes to other marriages, too: one mourned by Emma’s widowed father (James Bolam in a moving cameo), another that might be made by the couple’s daughter to a man they detest. “It’s supposed to be a network of reflections about relationships. Marriage, I guess, is the institutionalisation of togetherness. I’ve been married 10 years and what fascinates me about marriage as an idea is that it is basically impossible. What I love about going to a wedding is seeing two people taking a leap into the unknown and trying to spend the rest of their lives together. That’s an incredibly complicated thing to achieve. It’s the sheer difficulty that makes the idea beautiful.” Golaszewski’s first success, the BBC Three sitcom Him & Her, about a 20-something couple, played by Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani, falling in love, was directed by Richard Laxton. But for Mum and Marriage, the writer came from behind the desk to go behind the camera. “I wanted to direct because, although it might seem an odd point to make, TV is a visual medium and writers tend to think verbally. So I wanted to direct in order to get both sides.” There are scenes in Marriage in which the couple fill and empty a dishwasher that are typical of the way Golaszewski puts domesticity on screen. Is every move of dish and spoon specified in his scripts or does he simply ask Bean and Walker to attend to the dishwasher? “Somewhere between the two. Some bits have their own stage direction – ‘Takes cup off table’, etc – but then when we get to the location and I see exactly what the kitchen looks like, I’ll work out what’s in every cupboard. It’s a bit tricky, really, working out where you would logically keep the stuff and where I need them to be in the room for the camera. So the script will say, ‘Puts a bowl in, closes dishwasher, she brings in another bowl, opens dishwasher, closes it.’ “There’s a kind of rhythm to it. Because the show is so still and observed – and the camera doesn’t move unless it has to – I’m always looking to get some dynamism in so it doesn’t completely become a still life.” After Mum and Marriage, might there be a third hyper-realistic M-word comedy or drama? Mortality? Murder? “I’ve got no idea. I keep squeezing the lemon, but the lemon’s dry. I’m going away for the summer and hope something will come after that. I can only write what my mind tells me to write. Which means I’ve had to turn down quite good offers of work because I can’t write it unless it comes from inside.” Marriage will air on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Sunday 14th August at 9pm. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight. The latest issue of Radio Times magazine is on sale now – subscribe now and get the next 12 issues for only £1. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey.
Succession's Brian Cox on Logan Roy in season 3: 'He’s more complicated than his rages'
Mark Lawson talks to Brian Cox ahead of Succession season three.
The role that has made Brian Cox a major TV star of the 2020s – family-feuding media tycoon Logan Roy in HBO’s Succession - fulfils a prophecy by a fellow Scottish actor who became a TV star of the 1970s. Fulton Mackay (Mr Mackay, strict prison warder to Ronnie Barker’s Norman Stanley Fletcher in Porridge) was a great mentor to young Cox in his early career and the pair became close friends. “One day, Fulton said to me,” says Cox, slipping into a perfect impersonation as actors can, “‘Brian, Brian, stop worrying about becoming a star! Forget ambition and just concentrate on being a good actor.’ It was the best advice I ever had because I realised it was about putting in the work. If you do the work, when something like Logan Roy comes along, you think: ‘This is what it was all for. This couldn’t be a better fit.’” Mackay’s advice was earned wisdom – he was in his 50s when he was in Porridge. Cox had to wait even longer, landing his defining TV role at 71 when Succession premiered in 2018, more than 50 years after his small-screen debut in a Wednesday Play on BBC One. Cox has always been an actor of great versatility. He’s played Shakespearean leads for the RSC and National Theatre and was a British communist academic in Tom Stoppard’s Rock ’n’ Roll in London and New York. He was the first big-screen incarnation of Hannibal Lecktor and graced both the Jason Bourne and X-Men franchises. He’s played both Hermann Göring (in the 2000 mini-series Nuremberg) and Winston Churchill (2017 movie Churchill), and heavyweight US figures from J Edgar Hoover to Lyndon Johnson. Succession’s patriarch felt to Cox like the culmination of this varied career: “Logan Roy has got classical elements, but also comedy, and he’s mysterious as well; you don’t quite know where he’s coming from.” From reading the pilot script, written by series creator Jesse Armstrong, Cox knew he had to do it. “But I had one question for Jesse: ‘Does Logan not like his children?’ And he said: ‘No, no, no. He loves his children.’ Once that was in place, all the toughness and viciousness make sense. Logan knows that he has put his children in this position and so he’s responsible for who they are and their problems. What they don’t get is that the whole thing is a game, which it is to him.” Cox was acclaimed for his King Lear at the National Theatre in 1990, playing a paranoid and enraged patriarch who tries to rule his empire by dividing his daughters, much as Logan manipulates and humiliates his children Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin), Connor (Alan Ruck), and their partners, including Tom (Matthew Macfadyen). Roy’s surname derives from roi, the French word for “king”, making him “King Logan”. Did Cox immediately make the Shakespearean connection? “Yes. Absolutely. That was my first reaction to it, and my way into it. But I realised it had to be done with more understatement.” Like Roy, Cox has three sons and a daughter – Margaret and Alan, from his first marriage, and teenagers Orson and Corin from his second. The actor says he gets “very nervous” before the most Lear-like scenes of family division, such as episode three of series two when, during a family hunting weekend in Hungary, Logan plays the sadistic game “boar on the floor”, in which the patriarch tests the honesty of his entourage by forcing those he judges untruthful to kneel on the floor and then fight for thrown sausages. “I’ve got a similar scene in the new series, and I’m aware of having to be careful of – forgive the expression – shooting my load in a theatrical way, in the moments when he goes completely demonic. I can’t do that too often. He’s infinitely more complicated than his rages. You don’t want too much of it.” Even so, it’s hard to imagine the scene played convincingly by an actor who had not conquered classical tragic theatre: two moments – the sudden delivery of one word as a whisper, and this paternal puppet master settling his hands on the shoulders of a child – are direct echoes of Cox’s Lear. Succession’s power props (private jets, helicopters, yachts, limos) presumably also help to inhabit the world of the super-wealthy? “They do – though, after a while, you just wish there were fewer shots of getting in and out of cars. Much of our recent filming in Italy [standing in for Croatia] involved getting out of cars on airport tarmac and into planes, or the other way round. The first day was 37 degree heat at Florence Airport. Poor J Smith-Cameron [who plays lawyer Gerri Kellman] got heat-stroke. We did another scene and I said, ‘I’m not getting out of the car.’ They said, ‘Why?’ and I said, ‘Logan Roy wouldn’t get out of the car in this heat.’” Because Rupert Murdoch is the best-known example of a dynastic, media-owning billionaire, Succession was initially interpreted as a satirical exposé of that family – gaining fascination in the UK from airing on Sky, which Murdoch then owned. Subsequently, references to media tycoons have widened: in the second series, Logan urinates from the prow of his luxury yacht, in a manner attributed to the late Robert Maxwell; allusions to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Silvio Berlusconi can also be detected. “There are bits of all of them in Logan,” says Cox. “But also the family have increasingly become their own thing. And, actually, one of the reasons I like Logan is that he would never do what f***ing Branson or Musk or Bezos did: ‘Let’s go up in the sky because we need more spaceships.’ No, we don’t need more spaceships. What is happening to the planet that we need more rubble up in the sky? We don’t need to go into space. Where’s their head, their sense of proportion, their living in the real world?” The first two series coincided with the unlikely presidency of another divisive businessman. “Our first read-through of the pilot episode was the day Trump was elected. Everyone was going off to Hillary [Clinton] victory parties, as they expected them to be. I didn’t, I’d never been a big fan of hers; I think there’s a big argument for saying she lost it as much as Trump won it because people just didn’t like her. My cousin in America, from Dundee originally, said he was voting for Trump as he couldn’t vote for Hillary. So I said: ‘Then don’t vote!’” Did Cox draw on Trump for Logan Roy? “Yes, he’s in there. But Trump is essentially a man with a bad script and Logan is a man with a good script. My old mate Brendan Gleeson has just played Trump [in the US mini-series The Comey Rule]. But I never could.” Why not? “He’s irredeemable. But there’s a secret somewhere in Logan, which I’m still toying with. He’s so alone and lonely that there’s something tragic there. There’s nothing tragic about Trump.” View oEmbed on the source website What about the man the 45th American president described as “Britain Trump”, Boris Johnson? “Don’t get me started. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Trump and Johnson arrived at the same time because there was this public mood for leaders who sounded positive and promised to sort it all out. But ‘we are the hollow men’, as TS Eliot wrote. And the hollow men have arrived with a vengeance. There’s a whole bunch of them: Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and that bogus upper-class prat, Jacob Rees-Mogg. That’s what I hate about this country. The feudal hierarchy. We’re not rid of it and we’re not going to be rid of it.” Cox has a base in London (where we talk) and is en route to his New York home from a summer holiday in Scotland, where he visited old friends and observed the new politics. He is drawn more and more to his homeland. As a young man, he was uninterested in the nationalist rhetoric espoused by Sean Connery and other actors – “I was too ambitious and wanted to get out.” And now? “It’s like an elastic band that pulls me back. It’s a beautiful country and the possibilities are huge.” Unionists and cynics will point out that, like Connery, Cox champions Scotland while not living there. Though unlike the former James Bond, Cox was never a tax exile: “I only ever went to America because I wanted to do movies; this island becomes very small after a while. I was 50 and really wanted to give cinema a go. I was too old to be a leading man and didn’t really want that responsibility. I saw careers destroyed because an ‘opening weekend’ went badly. So I decided I’d be a supporting actor.” Politically, though, Cox’s and Connery’s views have aligned: “I now think Scottish independence will happen, and will happen in my lifetime, which I never would have credited. Back in the 90s, I never believed in the President Sir Sean Connery stuff. But now I think something similar could happen.” President Sir Brian Cox? “No, no, no. I’m a Commander of the British Empire [CBE] but that’s it.” Cox’s Scottishness initially came as a shock to me. I first became aware of his acting power in 1984 when I saw him at the Royal Court in London as a brutal Northern Irish police officer in Ron Hutchinson’s Rat in the Skull, and assumed him to be an Ulsterman. To many US viewers, he’s American, like most of his characters from Logan Roy (although he, like Cox, was born in Dundee) to his most recent Broadway appearance, mastering the difficult sound of President Lyndon Johnson, a heavy smoker from Texas, in The Great Society. He seems to have an easy ear for dialects. “Well, my family are Irish-Scots. They came to Dundee from the North at the time of the famine. So that gives me access to both those accents. With Americans, I do the prep. I work with a speech coach. As a child, I was more interested in American cinema than English cinema. My first heroes were Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, Marlon Brando, James Dean [Cox played Brando for Sky’s Urban Myths]. So, actually, I did American accents as a kid because we played cowboys. It’s paid off. I’ve played more Americans than anything else. The hardest one to remember is to say ‘bin there’ rather than ‘been there’.” Want to read more from The Big RT Interview? French and Saunders on Titting About, their comedy careers and Death on the Nile Clive Myrie on his journalism career and striving to be a “friendly face” on Mastermind Suranne Jones on how her own experiences with mental health shaped Channel 4’s I Am Victoria This month, coinciding with the return of Succession, Cox publishes a memoir: Putting the Rabbit in the Hat. He offers me a generous preview of choice anecdotes, such as he how he got the part of Hannibal Lecktor in Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986): “The part was offered to Brian Dennehy, who said he wasn’t physically right for it. But Brian had come to see me in Rat in the Skull in New York because he was going to do the play in Chicago. And he said to Michael: ‘You want Cox for Hannibal.’ ” He says the only one of his 230-plus screen roles he has ever regretted was in 2003’s The Reckoning: “It was a very good script but my daughter wasn’t well at the time, and I didn’t get on with the director [Paul McGuigan, who went on to direct BBC One’s Sherlock and Dracula]. Some make-up went into my eyes and I couldn’t see for two days, and they had to get a doctor in to sort me out. But otherwise I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve ever done; I’ve been very lucky.” His best on-set story captures the absurd logistics and economics of a blockbuster. In the early 2000s, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, in which Cox played a CIA handler of Matt Damon’s amnesiac rogue agent, were his first experiences of a big Hollywood movie. “They would keep bringing in a new screenwriter to work on one scene or even a line. We never had the final scene with me and Matt. Several versions of it had been written; even Matt and I wrote a version of it. “I went off to Edinburgh to do a Chekhov play. The Bourne people called, saying, ‘We’ve looked at your schedule and seen that you don’t play Monday nights so we will have a private plane waiting for you on Saturday night after the show to take you to Germany. We’ll film with you Sunday, Monday and Tuesday morning and then get you back to the theatre.’ I had to shave off the beard I’d grown for the play and wear a wig because my hair was different. But we finally shot the scene. That’s cinema for you.” At 75, he feels reassured that, as long as body and mind remain responsive, there’s no retirement age for actors. His friend Anthony Hopkins (who succeeded him as Hannibal) just won an Oscar at 83, for The Father. “Yes. Acting gets more interesting. As you reach the end of your life, everything comes into a horrible focus. You bring more to a role because the parts are about extinction and why you did what you did in your life.” However, having played characters from many nationalities and backgrounds, he’s concerned by the drive for “authentic casting”, which suggests that, for example, blind or gay characters should only go to performers with that experience. Hopkins’s The Father, a portrait of senile dementia, is one strong counter-argument: only an actor who didn’t have Alzheimer’s would be able to learn and deliver the dialogue of a character who has. The trend, though, is for matching actor and part. While filming Succession, Cox often spent his time off watching films, including Russell Crowe as a mathematician with mental illness in A Beautiful Mind and Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. “Both brilliant performances,” says Cox. “My wife said, ‘Well, of course, they wouldn’t be allowed to do that now.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And she said, ‘Well, they’re not disabled or mentally ill.’ But that’s wrong, because it’s acting, it’s a piece of craft.” Actually casting a severely disabled or mentally ill person to play such a part, he feels, “might be exploitative”. Despite not actually being a megalomaniac media baron, Cox is happy to go on pretending to be one in Succession. “We’re definitely doing a fourth series. It depends how long Jesse feels it can go on. I’ve got a feeling there’s a lot more life in it. This season opens up storylines that I feel will take two series to resolve.” Succession season three starts on Sky Atlantic on 17th October at 9pm. If you're looking for more to watch, check out our handy TV Guide. This edition of The Big RT Interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy.
Jed Mercurio on Line of Duty's H mystery: "We do use misdirection at times – and it’s deliberate"
Jed Mercurio likes to keep us all guessing, but will he spill the secrets on H? Mark Lawson finds out...
Other screenwriters could casually give a character an Aunt Holly or a colleague surnamed Harris. But such is the heightened speculation about the identity of Line of Duty’s mysterious “H” – the senior cop behind a deep-rooted conspiracy under investigation by anti-corruption unit AC-12 – that Jed Mercurio, when writing the sixth series, had to be careful about capitalising the letter anywhere in the script, in case viewers think, “Aha!” “We’ve had to get smarter – we know the power that particular letter now has within the fictional universe,” he says. “Stephen Graham’s character in season five was called John Corbett, but there’s a way that Corbett could have been known as H if we wanted to go that way.” Via Steptoe and Son actor Harry H Corbett? “Exactly. His mates could have nicknamed him H from that. It’s built-in in case we need to go there.” So, having led us to believe that H is either Superintendent Ted Hastings (the prime suspect for many) or to be found among characters called Hunter, Hari, Huntley, Hilton and Hargreaves, Mercurio now warns us – typically, given his slippery plotting – that it could equally be someone whose surname begins with a C. He’s fully aware that viewers will scrutinise every line and image for clues, but some fans take it too far. “In a Q&A session, someone asked quite seriously if there’s some significance to the way Kate Fleming carries her handbag.” Oh, we’ve been so dense! H stands for handbag? “Yes, well, exactly. Clearly there is no significance. However, if you have created a set of mysteries, you also have to understand the significance of misdirection and red herrings. So we do use misdirection at times, and it’s deliberate.” As the identity of H is likely to be revealed only in the final episodes of the whole thing, it’s sensible to wonder how far advanced the story is now. So this is series six of how many? “We don’t know. Since probably season four, we’ve been talking to the BBC about the realistic longevity of the series. I’ve experienced broadcasters pulling the plug while we were still developing a storyline –Bodies and Cardiac Arrest both ended prematurely on the BBC. So it’s an ongoing discussion, is all I can say. A lot of it depends on the key creatives – me and the main actors – finding new stories to tell within that universe.” Having qualified as both a hospital doctor and an RAF flying officer, Mercurio knows more about science than most crime writers. For the future of his cop corruption drama, he draws a metaphor from astronomy. “Line of Duty may have reached something called the Chandrasekhar limit, at which a mass collapses under its own gravitational force.” At this, my eyes widen like an AC-12 interrogator with a suspect. In our previous interviews, Mercurio explained that securing a two-series commission was essential; if only one was guaranteed, he told me, he would wrap up the entire storyline, rather than risk it being cut short. So – without going the full Ted Hastings on him – either Mercurio knew the sixth was the last series or he has abandoned his rule of always plotting two series ahead. Which is it? “Yes,” he replies enigmatically, before elaborating: “That was part of the conversation with the BBC. We’re in a situation where it’s not entirely clear that there will be a seventh series. We would hope there could be. But we’re having to do our planning coming out of COVID, and a whole bunch of other things around the idea that these things aren’t guaranteed at all now.” Interviewing dramatists is often tricky, as they have a natural understanding of the rhythms and tactics of dialogue. But Mercurio is an especially challenging conversationalist, as his signature interrogation scenes show a highly sophisticated sense of the flow of information and misinformation. Tempted to borrow Hastings’s trademark exclamation of frustration, “Give me strength!”, I have another go. This time, then, Mercurio hasn’t stuck to his rule that, if he wasn’t sure there would be a next series, he would wrap it up in the one he was writing? “I haven’t necessarily been true to that,” he says. “I think the indications are that the BBC remains very supportive. So, without a formal commission, I would say conversations have been very reassuring from the standpoint of not having to wrap things up.” To which, Hastings would probably say, “Mother of God!” Still, the return of storylines and characters from the early series certainly suggests a tying up of at least some loose ends. One person from series one who also featured in season five – their name withheld until transmission – makes a significant reappearance. Mercurio once told me that somewhere in a safe or laptop there exists a master paragraph that outlines Line of Duty’s entire narrative. Did he always know which characters would feature in each series? “That’s a really interesting question. It’s not really about planning to achieve a particular storyline, but about deciding which tools are at your disposal. Being aware before the start of each season which characters might be able to come back, and which storylines revisited. But the main work of planning a season involves the guest star playing the ‘antagonist’. That determines everything else.” Today’s TV viewing habits have, however, allowed Mercurio to be playful with characters and storylines. “In multi-series shows from the past, it’s astonishing how rarely they brought back old characters because there could be no expectation the audience would remember them, or even have seen the earlier series. When series are being rewatched and streamed as box sets, you can have deeper backstories.” Not that Mercurio is pushing for a full series release on iPlayer at launch, which is rapidly becoming the norm for TV dramas across the channels. Does he have to fight to keep to a weekly release? “Not really, because the case is made by the BBC audience data on its performance. The seven days between the episodes allows a conversation to take place, through social media and elsewhere, about the development of the plot. I think everyone recognises that’s a big part of viewers’ enjoyment.” In recent times, Mercurio has reacted intemperately to the critiques and theories of some journalists. So is it out of revenge that the new series opens with a dead journalist? He laughs loudly. “I was actually thinking of investigative journalism, which deserves a lot of admiration – such as the work of Maltese reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia, who spent much of her career investigating high-level corruption, and was assassinated. In a lot of countries led by autocratic leaders, where corruption is rife, journalists’ lives are in danger. In the UK, we have a different phenomenon: large chunks of the press seem to be entirely supine to the corruption in the highest levels of society.” View oEmbed on the source website Line of Duty was four weeks into its four-month shoot in Belfast in March 2020 when the COVID pandemic closed down production for six months. Resuming under Culture Department rules for COVID-secure shooting necessitated rewriting: “If a scene was an interior, we’d look to see whether it could be moved outside, where the restrictions are fewer. For scenes involving lots of extras, we had to reduce numbers and distance people.” Alarmingly, the hardest set-up to make safe was its most famous: the long, close-up interrogation of suspects in the cramped interview room – scenes thriving on sweat, claustrophobia and long speeches, elements that might now be illegal or possibly even fatal. The original location inside Belfast’s BT Riverside Tower was still used to film people walking in and out, but all close-ups and interview scenes were shot in a ventilated studio with careful social distancing. The only visual hint of the restrictions is in the number of empty desks behind Hastings, Steve Arnott and Fleming, suggesting AC-12 has suffered savage staff cuts. “We tried to make it as invisible to viewers as possible. If you look, you will probably see groups of extras are socially distancing. But, beyond that, we tried to hide it.” Though filming resumed in October 2020, Line of Duty presents a parallel version of that time with no COVID and no regional tiers. “The fact that we’d already shot four weeks without COVID being present in the story universe became a problem we just couldn’t overcome. It would have been an enormous use of licence-fee payers’ money to reshoot to incorporate the pandemic. People watching it now will notice that COVID is missing, but, in five years’ time, I’m not sure that will necessarily be in play. “Do viewers want to watch people wearing masks and social distancing throughout a police drama? It’s a big question and I don’t think there’s any optimal answer. If we hadn’t shot for a month first, we’d have had a free choice and it’s possible we would have swung to featuring the virus. We may have got this wrong. I’m very open to people saying we missed a trick there. But, in the end, it was down to the practicalities of how much licence-fee money we were prepared to spend.” https://www.instagram.com/p/CMeicZ1AlIw/ Mercurio has been behind popular and critically praised TV shows for more than a quarter of a century since his 1994 breakthrough Cardiac Arrest, yet none of them has won him a BAFTA award, and even nominations have been rare. Does he feel overlooked? “Organisations such as BAFTA don’t have an institutional attitude to my work,” he says. “BAFTA movie awards are voted for by the Academy membership, which is thousands and thousands of people voting for the films they admire the most, but, for whatever reason, BAFTA has decided that the best way to determine its TV awards is to appoint one of their chums to chair a jury, and that person gets their chums in to form a jury and, between them, they decide who wins. Juries in the legal justice system are predicated on the fact that jurors don’t know each other, and they don’t know the defendant. But, in BAFTA, they all know each other, and they all know the defendants. So I think there’s room for reform.” In response to this, BAFTA says that the TV longlists are decided by a membership vote and that attempts have been made to widen representation on juries. Mercurio’s BBC hits come from outside the corporation – both Line of Duty and Bodyguard (2018) were made by World Productions, now owned by ITV Studios – and he has recently taken a further step to independence by setting up HTM Television (Hat Trick Mercurio Ltd) with Have I Got News for You supremo Jimmy Mulville. Its debut show, Bloodlands (written by Chris Brandon), makes way for Line of Duty this Sunday, which will give Mercurio 11 consecutive 9pm Sunday slots on BBC1. HTM has recently started shooting an ITV drama, Stephen (written by Frank and Joe Cottrell Boyce), a sequel to The Murder of Stephen Lawrence that follows Doreen and Neville Lawrence’s quest to get justice for their murdered son. On both Bloodlands and Stephen, Mercurio has the title “executive producer”, which in TV terms can range from being on the set every day to just turning up for the premiere party. How hands-on is he? “On Bloodlands, I was very involved all through – I read scripts, was in on casting and budget decisions. On Stephen, I wasn’t as involved in the genesis but, since I finished Line of Duty, I’ve been closely involved in the team.” Russell T Davies, creator of Channel 4 hit It’s a Sin, recently expressed a fear that the BBC is doomed as a drama producer, unable to compete with streaming platforms led by Netflix. Does Mercurio agree? “I don’t know if it’s doomed. Russell’s pretty smart, so he may see this more clearly than me. It’s a tricky one. I think the BBC has some issues that are real – and need to be reformed – and some that are misperception problems.” What are these “real issues”? “It’s still one of the least efficient broadcasters, in my opinion, from my experience of others. There are institutional issues – around levels of professionalism and work ethic, to be honest. For the latest news and expert tips on getting the best deals this year, take a look at our Black Friday 2021 and Cyber Monday 2021 guides. "I am very fortunate that, in the course of my career, I’ve migrated towards the people I have a good working relationship with, who are supportive and carry out their professional duties in the right way so we can address concerns in good time. But there are people within the BBC who I avoid like the plague because they have been there a long time and they are fundamentally work-shy.” Sadly, he declines to name them, or even hint with a tantalising letter of the alphabet… Line of Duty started on Sunday 21st March, you can read our Line of Duty episode 1 recap here. If you’re a budding writer or a massive TV fan, you don’t want to miss our exclusive event, Script to Screen with Jed Mercurio. Find out more information about the event, or you can purchase tickets here. If you’re looking for more to watch, check out our handy TV Guide. This edition of The Big RT Interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy.