Sir Ranulph Fiennes has conquered the Eiger and sawn off his own fingertips, but he won’t climb a ladder. Why?
“I know that I would be frightened up at the top”
Fear and Sir Ranulph Fiennes, you’d be forgiven for thinking, go together like a snowstorm and a heatwave. Yet the man who was once described by the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest living explorer turns out to be a normal person after all. At least, that’s what he’d have you believe. There’s something surreal about listening to a man say that he’s afraid of heights when you know that he has conquered the notorious north face of the Eiger with its 1,800 metres of sheer rock, and, who, at the age of 65, became the oldest Briton to reach the summit of Everest, which is close to the cruising altitude of a passenger jet. Surely he’s having me on when he reveals he can’t even clean the gutters at home because the thought of it makes him so queasy? Apparently not. “I hold the bottom of the ladder and send Louise [Billington, his second wife who is 24 years his junior] up to clean the leaves out because it’s three storeys,” he says in that rich and reassuring tone of his. “I know that I would be frightened up at the top.” How, then, did Sir Ranulph cope with life on the Eiger’s dizzying rock face in winter? Kenton Cool, his guide and one of the world’s most experienced climbers, is part of the answer. “He has experience of working with people who have vertigo and making them control their minds,” Fiennes explains. The trick, he says, is never to look down – or to even think about it. “For three days and even nights on little ledges I said that constantly to myself.” Steve Seaton, Peter James, Sara Odell and Sir Ranulph Fiennes on a glacier hike in Argentina in 1999 There was a hitch when he found himself perched precariously above a vertical 1,500-metre drop and had to look down in order to make sure his crampons were properly engaged with the tiny footholds. He had reached what’s known as the Traverse of the Gods on the north face of the Eiger and was terrified. “I wanted to retreat before the rushing noise of the vertigo made my fingers weak. You can’t afford to have weak fingers – particularly when half of them have gone on one hand,” he says, referring to the time when he sawed off the frost-bitten tips of the fingers of his left hand at home rather than wait for a surgeon to amputate. “Ginny [his first wife and childhood sweetheart who died of cancer in early 2004] brought me cups of tea. I had a proper Black & Decker workbench – bought it for the occasion – with a proper micro saw.” Back on the Eiger, Sir Ranulph screamed at Cool, who had disappeared around a curve in the rock face, to slacken the rope. But his guide was preoccupied with securing their position at a precarious point. “To hear someone screaming at him annoyed him and I got a whole load of abuse back (and a bit of slack) and I suppose my irritation at him screaming at me like that countered the onrush of the vertigo –which is mental – and I got to the other side of that horrific bit.” Then what? “Then you’ve still got to do it!” How? “Oh God knows, it’s probably one of the worst moments of all. In the same way as when I had my massive heart attack [he underwent a double heart bypass in 2003] I remembered nothing about it afterwards." Don't look down The closest parallel he can draw to this “dreadful, dreadful moment of terror” is the day he plunged into the Moran Canyon on the thundering Fraser River in British Columbia in a rubber boat. It was 1971 and the only people who had tried it before were two French canoeists who ended up on a mortuary slab. “The moment of letting go of the bank into the incredibly fast river was equally frightening. You have to say ‘Go, go, go!’ It’s a moment and you’ve got to go ‘bang’, like hitting a table with your fist.” At Eton, the young Fiennes would sneak off after lights out and climb local buildings. Because he couldn’t see down in the dark, he didn’t get vertigo. But while he was training with the SAS he was instructed to keep his eyes open on parachute jumps to avoid tangling with fellow jumpers. “As soon as I fell out I closed them until the parachute opened, which would have been a sackable offence,” he admits. Since his Eiger experience in 2007, Sir Ranulph has given up on overcoming his fear of heights. “When I got to the top – with huge relief – I knew that if I hadn’t lost my fear of heights on that climb then I never would. So I made up my mind: all future expeditions would be horizontal.” But, hang on. Everest [which he climbed at the third attempt in 2009] is hardly horizontal! “Well, there aren’t any drops,” he says. Seriously? “On the Hillary Step there’s a drop but you do that at night. You look down anywhere else and there’s a sort of white slope, not a drop.” Clearly, conquering fear is a case of mind over matter. And that attitude will come in handy for his next challenge. At the age of 72, Sir Ranulph is now attempting to become the first person to cross both polar ice caps and climb the highest mountain on each continent, in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care. Prince Charles and Sir Ranulph Fiennes Sir Ranulph’s life story reads like fiction. There was the time he shot a soldier while seconded by the British Army to fight for the Omani government in the late 60s. “We were setting up an ambush, as instructed by my commanding officer, and I said: ‘Put your hands up.’ The soldier swung his Kalashnikov round and in that brief half second I was extremely frightened. That’s why I shot him.” Fear, as you might expect, doesn’t play much of a role in Sir Ranulph’s day-to-day life. “I like to be in control,” he says. He’s now written a book exploring the psychology of fear and interviewed people who he says have experienced fear far worse than he ever has. His own recipe for overcoming fear sounds straightforward: avoid it. On expeditions, he says, “the key thing is to avoid risk and therefore avoid fear. So when there are polar bears around you want to have a gun. It’s only when I’ve been in an area with polar bears with no gun that I’ve felt frightened.” His advice to the rest of us? “Find out exactly what you’re frightened of and try and get away from that situation so it doesn’t exist any more.” As self-help goes, it’s at least a little more pragmatic than Roosevelt’s exhortation to the American people during his inaugural address. As the president said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Buy Fiennes' book, Fear: Our Ultimate Challenge, for £16.90 from the RT bookshop Book of the Week: Fear is also on Radio 4 Monday-Friday at 9.45am
Is Gary Lineker going to present Match of the Day in his underpants? "I’ve kind of said I’ll have to do it"
"It’s a mixture of excitement and agony," he says of Leicester City's bid for Premier League glory
It was Gary Lineker’s concern that, together with Gazza’s tears, won the hearts of a nation when Bobby Robson’s England fell tantalisingly short of reaching the World Cup final at Italia 90. Now, 26 years later, it’s the agony and ecstasy of the boy from Braunstone that symbolises the nail-biting progress of Leicester City towards the impossibility of Premier League glory. At a time when the financial gulf separating football from its fans has never been wider, it’s hard not to be charmed by the intensity with which the Match of the Day host is living his boyhood team’s every kick. Lineker’s Leicester roots run deep. As a child in the 1970s he helped his dad on the family’s fruit-and-veg stall in Leicester Market during the holidays. After leaving school with O-levels that included an A in maths, he joined Leicester City’s academy and, by the time he was transferred to Everton for £800,000 nearly ten years later, he had topped the old First Division’s scoring chart for 1984/5. Then, when the club faced financial difficulties in 2002, he was part of the consortium that helped to rescue it. No matter that Leicester’s closest rivals for the title are Tottenham Hotspur, with whom he won the FA Cup in 1991, every sinew of his muscular torso craves the fulfilment of an unlikely dream. Talking of torsos, Lineker was still so sure in December that Leicester couldn’t win the league that he vowed to present the first Match of the Day of next season in his underpants should they achieve the unthinkable. Will he be true to his word? "You’ll have to wait and see," he demurs, smiling. "I’ve kind of said I’ll have to do it." Of course, with Spurs hunting them down, Leicester may yet stumble, but at the start of the season they were 5,000–1 on to win the league. Punters may be cursing not taking those odds now. “I’d have said you were wasting your money as well,” says Lineker. “When I sent the tweet in December I categorically knew there was zero chance that they would win.” Which takes us back to those pants. His BBC bosses have given the thumbs up. “The conversation’s been had. I’ve told them many times, ‘Please tell me I can’t do it.’” But if Claudio Ranieri’s men win, the clamour for him to remove his trousers will be irresistible. The ratings, he predicts, would “either be the best ever or the worst ever!” Viewers could be in for a treat: he is in the gym three or four times a week. “I’m in good shape. For an old b*****d,” the 55-year-old says with a laugh. And he’s planning to step it up, should Leicester prevail. “I’ll probably work out for the two weeks beforehand very, very hard.” Lineker is much stronger now than he was during his playing days, when he was warned off lifting weights in what he sees as the misguided belief that it would hamper his speed. “It kills me basically,” he says of his training, “[but] as much as I hate it, I hate it more to miss it because I think as you get older the more important it is to keep fit and strong. If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have been in much better shape and, I think, a much better player.” He has four sons from his first marriage, to Michelle Cockayne: George (24), Harry (22), Tobias (20) and Angus (18). If Leicester do fall at the final hurdle, Lineker will be distraught, not least because the title run has been a family affair. “He can’t believe it,” he says of his father. “My dad’s quite a character. I think he [tweeted]: ‘I’ve waited 70 years for this. F***ing brill!’ “The thing is, it’s a mixture of excitement and agony. I just need them to do it. Three of my lads support Leicester as well. Even George [a Manchester United fan] is desperate for them to do it. It would destroy me if they didn’t do it now, just for the misery that would happen to my kids. They’d never recover.” The only Englishman ever to win the World Cup Golden Boot, having scored six goals at Mexico 86, Lineker would trade his feat for a Leicester league title. “If push came to shove, yes probably. Yes! I’ve had it for a while,” he says, laughing. “It’s genuinely the most exciting thing I’ve lived through in sport, for me personally, even when I played. Because this is impossible.” Hosting football shows fully clothed has become second nature to Lineker, but when he began, more than 20 years ago, it was a struggle. He was “thrown in at the deep end” as a TV presenter and found it “quite terrifying”. “I had to do a lot of work on my voice, just injecting some life into it, because I’ve got that East Midlands kind of monotone, which I still have when I talk normally. On television I have to introduce a bit of light and shade. I went to have lessons for that – especially for radio where you’ve only got your voice, and mine was pretty flat. When I’m presenting I feel like I’m shouting a lot of the time, because it’s up and down. The first two or three years were hard. There were lots of times I remember driving home after a show thinking, ‘I’m never going to crack this.’” But crack it he did – going on to become not only the BBC’s lead presenter for the 2012 Olympics but also, briefly, the golf. Not everyone felt he was at home away from the football. He admits now that he didn’t really enjoy fronting the golf. “I found it stopped me watching it properly. You used to go out to do interviews at the end, when it’s really exciting, and missed the finale. You feel like you’re getting in the way. Whenever you come on you’re stopping live coverage. It’d be the same if I was watching it. I’d be, ‘Oh come on! Just show us the golf!’ You become an irritant. And you don’t get pundits next to you, so you can’t have a bit of banter.” The Open also clashed with his limited time off. “In the end I said to the BBC, ‘I’d just sooner do the football, to be honest’. And that’s the truth.” These days Lineker juggles his Match of the Day commitments with anchoring BT’s Champions League coverage. Remembering the names of Europe’s elite isn’t a problem because he watches so much football in his own time. Though his private life is strictly off-limits, it’s natural to wonder whether his marathon TV-watching is hard to live with. “Yes, possibly,” he says. “But I’m not working nine to five: I might be around all day, so it’s different. I have to watch a lot of football, but that’s my work. Well, that’s the excuse I’ve always used, anyway!" After six years of marriage, Lineker and his second wife, the model and actress Danielle Bux – who at 36 is nearly 20 years his junior – announced in January that they were to divorce. They remain on the best of terms, but he has contempt for the divorce system. “Just generally speaking, it’s very easy to get married and very difficult to get divorced. And we know that lawyers try to manipulate it to make you spend more money and basically end up hating each other.” His solution? “I think there should be a mathematical equation that goes straight to the courts and they sort it out.” He’s sanguine, though, about the challenges of living in the public eye. “I’ve become accustomed to it and, yes, sometimes it’s hard, especially when you go through difficult periods because that’s when the press get more interested. But I’d honestly say the advantages generally far outweigh the disadvantages. It opens a lot of doors.” Never once yellow-carded, Lineker was the perfect role model as a player, but now he sometimes swears on Twitter and there are those who question his enduring endorsement of Walkers. Promoting crisps isn’t, perhaps, the most obvious fit for a man so concerned with his own physique. Our opening exchange on the subject is almost surreal. “How do they harm people?” he asks. With fat… “Oh, it’s a myth.” And salt. “No, it’s all about a balanced diet. Anything can harm you if you do things in excess.” He eats four or five packets a week himself. “We all deserve treats in life and snacks,” he insists and lays the blame for the obesity epidemic elsewhere. “The real issue is the lack of exercise. There are no playing fields at the schools, not as much sport played. There are too many other things that are understandably distractions, like phones, computers, PlayStation games, where they just sit on their backsides. That’s the real issue, not a little bit of a snack occasionally.” Parents and schools have to do more, he demands. “This is quite simple. If you do more exercise and you burn off more calories than you put in, you won’t put weight on.” We meet on the day Mars Food launched an initiative to mark some of its offerings as being for “occasional” consumption. Should Walkers follow suit? “I’ve never thought about it.” And now that we’re discussing it? “They’re potatoes. I don’t think they’re a desperately bad thing.” Lineker has been starring in a new Walkers ad with Barcelona striker Lionel Messi, although their roles were filmed separately so he still hasn’t met the man he considers to be on a different planet – including from Messi’s greatest rival, at Real Madrid. "Ronaldo’s a wonderful footballer and a brilliant goal scorer, but Messi’s truly joyous." Ronaldo and Messi, of course, are also both multimillionaires. As a 24-year-old leaving Leicester, Lineker was on £400 a week and, even when he became one of the world’s best paid players, he earned in a year what some of today’s stars make in a week. Still, he’s made a big financial success of life after football and last year he set up a TV production company, Goalhanger Films, which he co-owns. “I like good food, but I’m not lavish,” he says of his lifestyle. “I don’t buy loads of cars or jewellery.” As for the summer’s European Championships in France, Lineker is upbeat about England’s future. “We’re on the way up. We’ve got some really good young players, we’ve started coaching kids properly for the first time and we’re starting to reap the rewards. It might be a little bit early for them this summer, but whether it’s this time or two years’ time [at the World Cup] in Russia, I think we’re going to start to see us be seriously competitive. You never know in knockout football, but we’ve got the nucleus.” For now, though, it’s not the Three Lions Gary Lineker is consumed by – it’s the Foxes of Leicester City. Match of the Day is on Saturday at 10:30pm on BBC1
Jonathan Agnew and Geoffrey Boycott on why they're the odd couple of Test Match Special
As the Third Test of The Ashes gets underway, the chalk-and-cheese commentators talk cake-eating and gags in the TMS box
They are, in so many ways, the odd couple of BBC radio. Jonathan Agnew is a gangly 6ft 4in, every inch – in appearance at least – the overgrown public schoolboy, while Geoff Boycott is a sold 5ft 10in, with opinions as blunt as his Yorkshire accent. What unites them is a love of cricket and star billing on Test Match Special, the nation's favourite sports commentary and the soundtrack to this Ashes summer. Educated at Uppingham School, Agnew is the well-spoken three-cap wonder who took just four Test wickets for England. Boycott is the hard-bitten Yorkshire legend of the 1970s and 80s, the son of a miner who went on to captain his county and score more than 8,000 Test runs. It’s an unpredictable pairing. “Geoffrey”, as Agnew formally refers to Boycott with what can seem like mock-respect, somehow allows himself to be wound up without diminishing his status as a legend of the game. At 20 years younger, Agnew casts Boycott as a crotchety uncle, but one for whom he shows warm affection. Agnew may be the BBC’s cricket correspondent, but Boycott, with his playing record and bullish persona, plays the senior role. “I think he’s found his forte,” the Yorkshireman says of the man he first met not far short of 40 years ago. “He was a good county cricketer, [but] you could see he had a very modest Test career because he kept hitting the middle of the bat when he bowled and the idea was to find the edge. He’s got a good sense of humour, he can take the mickey, he can also accept it as well. You poke fun at him, he doesn’t get uppity.” This is Agnew's 25th season in the TMS box. It all began for him in 1991 as a summariser alongside Brian Johnston, who had an uncontrollable fit of the giggles at an Agnew double entendre, "Aggers, for goodness' sake stop it!" will go down as one of the great moments in sports commentary, but Johnston's influence went far deeper. "without Johnners' influence, I know what broadcaster I would like to be," Agnew says, 'but I don't think I would have had the guts to have done it. He really liberated me by example." It was Johnston who inadvertently initiated the tradition of cake-eating in the TMS box. In the days when Radio 3 broadcast the show, intervals would often be filled with classical music. One teatime Johnston handed back to the studio and, Agnew says, joked that there wasn’t any tea for the commentary team. The next day a lady sent in the first offering. One cake became two. The funniest cake, Agnew says, was a pair of breasts, sent to Edgbaston, that Johnners had great difficulty in carving. “He couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.” Just as many cakes are sent in as ever. During the first Ashes Test in Cardiff, a cake made of root vegetables turned up in celebration of Joe Root’s match-winning performance. “We still get lots of cakes, pies, scones... you name it,” Agnew says. “There’s a lovely lady who always sends me a tin of Harrogate toffee when we’re at Leeds.” And the cakes don’t go to waste. “Those we don’t eat we either give to Sky or we put in the Media Centre for people to eat. We get sent so many, we personally can’t eat them all or we’d be 25 stone,” Agnew says, but he sometimes takes them home. “It’s kind that they do it. It’s part of the culture of the programme.” And it’s a programme he hopes is a friendly place. "Even when Geoffrey's on it. We try to retain our humour," he jokes. Does his relationship with Boycott fill the hole left by his late friend Johnners? "That's an interesting thought. I don't know. We've always got on." They first met when at 18, Agnew was on a playing scholarship in Melbourne. Boycott was on the 1978/9 Ashes tour and Agnew bowled at him for hours in the nets one morning. “I bowled and bowled and bowled,” Agnew remembers. “And he kept singing, ‘I’ve got you under my skin’.” When, at last, they finished, Boycott invited the bowler up to his hotel room. But rather than an autographed bat, he offered him a cup of tea. “Right. Do you want English Breakfast, camomile or fresh peppermint?” Agnew expresses surprise at the idea that his partnership with Boycott is the slot on TMS. “I don’t rev myself up for Geoffrey, I don’t think, ‘Oh great, Geoffrey’s sitting down next to me.’” But he does concede: “Sometimes I will dig a bit of a bear pit for him.” Such as the day actor Daniel Radcliffe got in touch to say that Agnew actually had a higher strike rate than Boycott in one-day internationals. Without divulging whom they were talking about, Agnew tried to get Boycott to admit that the man with the faster scoring rate should be in the team. “That’s a typical Boycott wind-up,” says Agnew. “And everyone loves it. Because people get very upset, especially women – they think he’s being horrid to me. But he’s not being rude.” So what is Boycott really like? “Exactly what you see,” says the man himself. “There’s a soft side. I don’t have the diplomatic way of putting things. I am black and white, which is unfortunate.”Agnew sums him up thus: “Those who played in the same team as Geoffrey find it a little harder to see the soft side that maybe someone like me, who didn’t, does. I take the mickey out of him mercilessly. He lets me do that. He knows it probably takes a bit of pressure off, humour- wise, if I can take the mickey and people laugh.” “All I try to do is be myself,” Boycott says of his commentary. “Try to tell the truth. Try to be honest and fair. I like to say good things when people play well, but I don’t like bad cricket, I don’t like stupid cricket. I didn’t like it for myself when I played. When I played a bad shot, I’d look in the mirror and say, ‘You stupid bloody idiot.’” Boycott remains passionate about cricket and continues to go to county games. Agnew, though, while he still loves the sport, doesn’t see “any” county cricket. “You can’t now do county and international cricket and have a life. And I feel uncomfortable about that because people you haven’t seen do come up. I hadn’t seen [new England star] Mark Wood bowl. But you’ve only got three days between Test matches.” Sitting all day at a county game would, he implies, be boring. "I can only watch cricket now if I'm working. It's a job. I don't think you could really do my job properly if you're a fan. Because you've got to be a bit detached from that side of it to make some quite hard calls." Agnew claims to do little or no preparation. “I look at some young commentators who sit down with piles of notes, and of course, what are you going to do if you’ve spent hours preparing all this stuff? You’re going to bloody well read it out. Boring! Get out there and say what you see and tell stories about what you’ve been up to. You’ve got to be on top of things, but you can’t communicate when you’ve got your head buried in stats.” The show is shared by Radio 4 Long Wave and 5 Live Sports Extra. “There was a time where it looked like it might end up on 5 Live, which would have been a disaster for TMS because it would have been with news breaks and horse races, and God knows what would have happened on Saturdays. It’s a speech programme and it needs to be an intelligent speech programme. 5 Live can have more of a blokey feel to it – and that’s fine – I just think it’s important that you do retain what has made Test Match Special a bit different.”For all the pleasure TMS gives to its audience, there’s very little sense of it for those inside the commentary box. “You deliver what you think is a great line,” Agnew says, “or the person next to you laughs, but that’s the only kickback you get. You perhaps get a bit more on Twitter. But as for applause or laughter, you don’t get anything.” Their two-man theatre show helps to fill the void. “Geoffrey and I do get anxious about it. He’s always very nervous when he walks out – he almost expects people not to like him.” When Boycott takes the stage, though, “it’s like switching on the Christmas tree lights”. But, Boycott insists, nothing can replace the excitement of playing. Facing the West Indies quicks was, he muses, like the “buzz it must have given people to climb Everest when few people did it”. The BBC, Boycott (below) says, has never put pressure on him to rein in his opinions. And if they did? “Two words. One is off,” he affirms. Typical, properly if you’re a fan. Because you’ve got to be a bit detached from that side of it to make some quite hard calls.” Agnew claims to do little or no preparation. “I look at some young commentators who sit down with piles of notes, and of course, what are you going to do if you’ve spent hours preparing all this stuff? You’re going to bloody well read it out. Boring! Get out there and say what you see and tell stories about what you’ve been up to. You’ve got to be on top of things, but you can’t communicate when you’ve got your head buried in stats.” The show is shared by Radio 4 Long Wave and 5 Live Sports Extra. “There was a time where it looked like it might end up on 5 Live, which would have been a disaster for TMS because it would have been with news breaks and horse races, and God knows what would have happened on Saturdays. It’s a speech programme and it needs to be an intelligent speech programme. 5 Live can have more of a blokey feel to it – and that’s fine – I just think it’s important that you do retain what has made Test Match Special a bit different.” For all the pleasure TMS gives to its audience, there’s very little sense of it for those inside the commentary box. “You deliver what you think is a great line,” Agnew says, “or the person next to you laughs, but that’s the only kickback you get. You perhaps get a bit more on Twitter. But as for applause or laughter, you don’t get anything.” Their two-man theatre show helps to fill the void. “Geoffrey and I do get anxious about it. He’s always very nervous when he walks out – he almost expects people not to like him.” When Boycott takes the stage, though, “it’s like switch- ing on the Christmas tree lights”. But, Boycott insists, nothing can replace the excitement of playing. Facing the West Indies quicks was, he muses, like the “buzz it must have given people to climb Everest when few people did it”. The BBC, Boycott says, has never put pressure on him to rein in his opinions. And if they did? “Two words. One is off,” he affirms. Typical, no-nonsense Boycott. His strength isn’t, he admits, “dealing with people”, but he has “a gift of being able to understand the game and see what’s going to happen before it happens”.Boycott tries not to stay in the same hotel as the England team. “When I played I wanted space to do my own thing. If they came and asked me for my help, I'd give it gladly." If he does meet someone he’s criticised, he says, they “never remember the good stuff". For Agnew, wearing his correspondent’s hat is tricky. “It’s very responsible and it’s hard,” he says, after a “bruising” 18 months. A complaint that his reporting was biased against Kevin Pietersen went “all the way” up the BBC. “My stuff was analysed and shredded and of course it came out that it was perfectly balanced. But that’s a bit of stress – covering stories when you know there are such entrenched camps.” At least the stress levels are lower in the TMS box. How could it be any other way, with Boycott to wind up and cake to eat? The Ashes Third Test is Wednesday 29th July at 10am Sky Sports Ashes, 10.25am Radio 4 LW, 5 Live Sports Extra, 7pm (highlights) Channel 5 For details of Geoffrey Boycott and Jonathan Agnew’s live theatre shows, see simonfielder.com/aggers
Bruce Forsyth on politics, reality TV and leaving Strictly
"I was beginning to feel a bit stale. It’s an awful thing to feel as a performer, that you’re not enjoying it as much as you should do and you’re not giving as much as you could.”
Bruce Forsyth is fed up. Not with work, obviously. He turned 87 on 22 February, but it's not age that's getting him down. He's still got plenty of energy and retirement certainly isn't on the agenda. No, Bruce is tired of reality TV. “I have had enough of it,” he says. “I don’t know how long it’s been going on but it’s probably well over ten years.” Just before Christmas, he hosted Bruce’s Hall of Fame (below), a BBC1 show where a mix of performers celebrated the artists who inspired their careers, and he wants more of the same on our screens. “I’d like to see performers playing together, having fun together, entertaining together, instead of this thing that we’re caught up in.” View oEmbed on the source website Back in 1958, aged 30, Brucie had his big break as the host of ITV’s famous variety show Sunday Night at the Palladium. In those days, they’d fill the programme up to 40 weeks a year with homegrown talent as well as big-name stars from America. But because of the lack of variety stars these days, he’s unsure whether a revival would be possible today. “I don’t think you have the top-of-the-bill names. The top-of-the-bills in our day were huge world stars. It’s all got to be pop stars now.” The reason? The X Factor. “I don’t watch it because they have singer after singer after singer after singer... and then, after that, they have another singer. That, to me, isn’t entertainment. It’s a very good show, it’s produced very, very well and I’m all for giving young people a chance to become big names, but I want more in two hours of entertainment than only singing.” Brucie, of course, hosted The X Factor's biggest rival for ratings on BBC1, Strictly Come Dancing. But after 11 series and a decade in the job he decided it was time to step down last year. "I was beginning to feel a bit stale. It’s an awful thing to feel as a performer, that you’re not enjoying it as much as you should do and you’re not giving as much as you could.” And it was his decision. He didn’t feel any pressure from the BBC to go and, by way of evidence, points to having been immediately asked to present various Strictly specials. View oEmbed on the source website Live television, he says, is a hit and miss affair. “You don’t know what kind of reaction you’re going to get so you’re on a tightrope all the time, all ready to fall off and excuse yourself if the line doesn't get the laugh you hoped it would." Unsurprisingly, he's returning to his first love, the stage – more specifically the London Palladium – for the first time in almost two decades with his one man show as part of a three-leg tour in the spring. “I love theatre because you know what you’re doing. If something goes wrong, that’s marvellous, because you can always fix it at the moment.” Brucie still gets a buzz from performance. “When I walk on stage, some- thing happens to me. The other me takes over and I become this performer. That amazes me some- times.” Is it better than sex? “Well, it’s pretty close.” He does admit to having slowed down. “I do try to rest quite a bit these days. Mind you, I’ve been resting like this for a long time. If I’m tired or I’ve been working hard, I’ll go to bed at 4pm.” And for the past 30 years he’s been wintering in Puerto Rico with his wife Wilnelia, the former Miss World he met when they were judging the competition in 1980. When we meet, Brucie is wearing a dark blue shiny tracksuit and a baseball cap with a capital “B” in red. He won’t tell me whether he supports the Tory blue, but the general election is nestled between his second and third performances in early May and he’s likely to be watching closely. Last time round in 2010 he came back from Puerto Rico to watch events unfold on the BBC’s election boat on the Thames. “I thought it would be so exciting, but it wasn’t exciting at all because you weren’t kept in touch with what was going on. They were just making a few announcements. I like elections when I can look at the screen and see how Scunthorpe and East Lewisham voted. I love to see that part of it. So it wasn’t worth the journey to come back and stand on a boat not knowing what was really going on." Bruce Forsyth with current Strictly Come Dancing hosts Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly He declines to reveal his own politics because, he says, “In the States you can be Democrat or Republican and everybody accepts that if you're a showbusiness name. But it's not accepted in the same way in England." He has met prime minister David Cameron. “He’s the most pleasant man. I’ve met him a few times now and I think he’s done a good job. Very difficult with the coalition. We don’t know half the things that they’ve had to decide and get together on.” He thinks there should be a referendum on Europe. “Eventually there’s got to be,” he says. He sees arguments for and against membership. “Sometimes I think, ‘Oh yes, we’re better off in Europe.’ [But] I’m pleased we stayed out of the euro.” If there is a referendum, he’ll decide at the last minute and promises to phone me. Immigration, he thinks, is an important issue. “It should benefit the country, whatever decision is made. It needs sorting out.” As well as a 28-year-old son, Jonathan Joseph (JJ), with Wilnelia, Brucie has five daughters from his first two marriages, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. So where does he stand on inheritance tax? L to R: Bruce with daughter Charlotte, wife Wilnelia, son JJ and daughter Laura at Buckingham Palace in 2011 “I think your inheritance should go to your children more than back to the country that you’ve lived in. I’m not saying you don’t owe the country something, of course you owe your country a lot for living there all those years. But I think it can be a bit over the top.” He isn’t particularly religious, but he describes himself as a Christian. “There’s definitely someone or something there, although at times, when the dreadful things happen all round the world, it does make you think, ‘Is there a God?’” Is he afraid of death? “As I get nearer to it I fear it less because with the tiredness one gets at times, you think, ‘Is it just like having a nice long sleep?’ I wouldn’t say I fear it. I think I’ll be completely at peace when it does happen to me because I’ve been so lucky. I’ve had a wonderful career.” After decades in the spotlight he is, in his own words, “Uncle Brucie” to most people in Britain. And he doesn’t think he’ll ever retire. “At the moment I’m feeling fine. I take every day as it comes. I’m living on borrowed time. I’ve been given this extra little bit in the twilight of my career, so enjoy it and keep doing what you want to do.” Bruce Forsyth’s one man show is in Cardiff on 27th April, Norwich on 4th May and London on 10th May
Why the reunion gig will be vintage Monty Python
... except for a high-kicking chorus line courtesy of Arlene Phillips
Monty Python are back – which is great news for fans of surreal comedy and TV nostalgia, but, you might think, not such good news for lovers of something completely different. After all, the sketches are so well known that fans can parrot them word for word. What can possibly be new about a legendary 1970s comedy that was last revived more than 30 years ago? Eric Idle, 71, the Python charged with assembling and writing the new show, to be staged to sell-out crowds from 1 July in London’s vast O2 arena, explains: “This is a musical revue with a chorus of 20 and lots of Python songs, many of which have never been done by the Pythons before. And many of the sketches have never been performed live by us.” The last time the group performed together was in 1982 in Los Angeles, complete with Graham Chapman, who later died of cancer in 1989. “I wanted to do a show different from the Hollywood Bowl, in this our final outing,” says Idle, just days before the first of the ten live performances. “How wonderful to have the opportunity to say goodbye. “Comedy has been largely stand-up for the past 25 years. This show is different in so far as it is sketch comedy. So the stage will be filled more and there are sets and costumes and an orchestra, led by my old collaborator John Du Prez. This is the first attempt at musical revue for about 50 years. I called it ironically ‘Déjà revue’. “We pulled in Arlene Phillips, who choreographed The Meaning of Life, and she has been absolutely brilliant. The 20 boys and girls of the chorus give the whole show an energy that I felt was essential to fill the O2.” In November last year, when the Pythons announced their shock reunion, I met all five of them together and Terry Gilliam, 73, was bemoaning the impact of ageing: “The worst thing is on the bus or Tube when a girl in her 20s offers you her seat. It’s so depressing.” “I thought that was twerking,” responded Idle, to much laughter. “This tour is the opposite of A Hard Day’s Night. This is the geriatric version where we’re not being pursued by anybody. We’re very old and we just long to go to bed and have a sleep.” “Everybody’s become more comfortable,” replied Gilliam. “We need more money to live – and we’re just older. We’re not as a group as outrageous as we used to be and that’s why I keep trying to push it.” But today Idle is blithe about the challenges of writing in a new era: “We haven’t been dead! Many of us have been writing for years. Spamalot, for example. Everything changes all the time, but we change with it. We are no longer the same people we were in 1969. No one lives in the past. Monty Python Live (mostly) is at The O2 arena 1—5 July and 15, 16, 18—20 July 2014. Buy tickets with Radio Times Box office here “This is the Age of Entitlement. Modern celebrity culture is a product of television. Python always mocked television. We have updated Blackmail, for example, as a modern TV show, which reflects the tabloids’ obsession with celebrities and their sex lives. But this obsession isn’t new. The Profumo case at the beginning of the television age showed our interest in sex, power and corruption. But you could cite Nell Gwyn and Falstaff as examples that it has been ever thus. “Because it followed a satire boom, Python was never particularly topical, which meant that it didn’t date so quickly. Its comedy was more universal and less particularised. You don’t see re-runs of That Was the Week That Was. “We were the last generation to grow up with a radio. There was no television on, not until we were 12.” Radio comedy, he suggests, is “actually much more surreal and imaginative than TV, which paints everything for you.” Monty Python thrived through democracy, according to Michael Palin, 71. “John’s quite a dominant personality. Not only is he taller than anybody else, but also he has a quite incisive way of putting a point of view forward. On the other hand, right from the very beginning it was pretty democratic. John didn’t want to be the leader of the group. Nor did anyone else.” The Pythons, Idle says, were able to be honest with each other. “People would argue and fight – it was always about what size chair it should be in the sketch but we could say anything we wanted to about anybody’s work without them going out crying.” “At their best,” says Palin, “the Python writing sessions were wonderful. Some of the work would have been done – sketches were brought to the table by the various writing groups, so we had something to go on. Either people roared with laughter and we’d just say, ‘Tick that’, or we’d work on it together... people would pick up ideas and run with them – very often in the wrong direction. There was a real momentum to those meetings. It was as if we could have written comedy all day long.” “We literally sat down to do what made the rest of the group laugh,” adds John Cleese, 74. “We had no idea of a target audience or any of that crap. There was something about the joy of the silliness of it.” The results have stayed with the Pythons all their lives. “No matter where you go,” says Idle, “some- body in the world says Monty Python to you every day. So at first that’s kind of annoying. When you’re in your 30s, you’re trying to get away, you run as far as possible away and hide. But then in the end you go, ‘Actually, they liked it. This is fine, I’m comfort- able with it being Monty Python.’ In the end I learnt to exploit it. I did a tour called Eric Idle Exploits Monty Python and then I finally figured out, ‘Well, we can make a musical out of the Holy Grail’ and so it became Monty Python’s Spamalot. And my big secret was putting girls in it.” Which is exactly what he’s done in the new show. But, although he wrote it, Idle confirms that the read-through was a group endeavour. “We all read it together and added our comments. I asked every- one what they would like to perform for the last time.” There have been, he says, some interesting choices. “And we have put in a few surprises.” The Pythons’ success seems to have had something to do with the creative freedom they were granted. “The BBC was confident enough at the time to commission a series like Python on the merest whim,” says Palin. “We gave them very, very little information as to what should be in it and that helped us a lot. We weren’t easy to dictate to. We didn’t have executive producers saying, ‘Do this, do that.’” In the third series, though, the BBC “started making some fairly ridiculous censorship decisions. Not being able to say masturbation. We fought them for the right to say that.” It was cut out. So were they trying to challenge the establishment? “No,” insists Palin.” We were just trying to do something that would be very, very funny and would also have a shape and form that was different to anything done before. Of course, it came very close to Spike Milligan’s [1969 series] Q5, so there was surreal television around. But nothing quite like the way Python put all these things together. But Terry Jones, 72, maintains they were trying to subvert the establishment: “It was so stuffy in the 60s. The class system had a stranglehold.” The Pythons all wrote from different directions, says Palin. “John and Graham were quite angry, Eric was very witty and verbal, Terry and I were a bit more surreal and whimsical. And there were no rules really. That was the nice thing about Python. You could put in what you wanted to put in.” “We’ve always enjoyed each other’s company,” says Cleese. “Doesn’t mean we don’t argue and disagree about things. We do all the time.” The group have been friends “from way back”, says Gilliam. “There was this combination of six characters and it just was the right chemical balance. The molecule fitted. It worked. I don’t like ’em, but we’re friends,” he says and laughs. “No, no, it’s more than friends, it’s family.” Monty Python Live (mostly) is at The O2 arena 1—5 July and 15, 16, 18—20 July 2014. Buy tickets with Radio Times Box office here
Rio Ferdinand on racism, ballet and England's chances in the World Cup
"We’ve nothing to lose. Nobody expects us to set the tournament alight"
When Roy Hodgson’s England team lands in Brazil they will not be burdened by a nation’s hopes. There is almost zero expectation that the captain Steven Gerrard will return in July brandishing the World Cup. But for Gerrard’s old teammate Rio Ferdinand – holder of 81 England caps – that’s a good thing. “We got tagged as the ‘Golden Generation’ and that weighed heavily around a lot of our necks. We were never in contention.” Ferdinand didn’t play under Hodgson and retired from international football last spring. But he describes the England boss (a man fluent in five foreign languages) as a student of the game. “He’s got a free hit with a young squad – to keep the expectations low and real. He’ll be able to prepare for the following tournament. It bodes well for England in years to come.” Ferdinand is the BBC’s star signing for Brazil. Is he nervous? “If I wasn’t, it would be strange. It’s obviously out of my comfort zone.” But he’s been given training, done some TV work and won’t be going in “completely blind”. And he has the confidence of the BBC’s main presenter Gary Lineker, who backs Rio’s “reputation for telling it how it is”. How did Ferdinand react to pundits as a player? “When you’re winning it’s not a problem. When you’re losing they’re nitpicking.” We meet in central London at the launch of the BBC’s World Cup campaign. Although we don’t know it at the time, Ferdinand is living out his last few days as a Manchester United player, a club he’d been at for 12 years, winning six Premier League titles, two League Cups and, in 2008, the Champions League as captain. He is 35 now and a married father of three, but he is being supervised and my questions scrutinised. Behind him is a BBC publicist and across the table are two representatives from his agency. Born to a St Lucian father and an Anglo-Irish mother, Ferdinand was brought up on a Peckham council estate in south London. As a boy he didn’t just play football, but also trained in gymnastics where he was spotted and took up an offer of a scholarship to attend the Central School of Ballet. He divided his time between ballet and football between the ages of 11 to 13. “It wasn’t easy,” he says. “It was probably one of the hardest disciplines I’ve ever done. But it was a chance I grabbed to go out of my area and see different people from different walks of life.” His father told him to choose between ballet and football and his answer led to a glittering career. But ballet helped. “It put me in good stead for my future career – balance, strength and flexibility.” Before United signed Ferdinand for a then record fee of around £30 million in 2002, he played for West Ham and then Leeds United and was first capped by England at just 19. Now, 16 years later, a life after football beckons. “I’ve prepared myself for it. I’m looking forward to it.” He already owns a restaurant, fashion label and magazine and is taking his coaching badges. “People said to me probably five, six, seven years ago, ‘Why are you doing this? Who do you think you are?’ I always said, ‘When I retire, I’ll have avenues to go down.’ I’m not scared.” So what did his manager Sir Alex Ferguson think of his extra-curricular activities? “He didn’t want me to do it. But I understand. He was protecting his own investment – they had invested a lot of money and they wanted that player to think solely about playing football.” At United he was, he says, part of a group of players for whom winning had become a habit. “It’s almost like a drug. You just need to win.” How then did he react to his final disappointing season at Old Trafford under David Moyes? “The new manager comes in, you want to replicate what you’ve done for the old manager. That never changed, the desires were never different, we all wanted to win still. But for whatever reason it didn’t happen and it wasn’t a marriage made in heaven – the league table doesn’t lie.” Ferdinand hasn’t always been the perfect role model. He’s received four driving bans for speeding and, in 2003, he was banned from the game for eight months after missing a drugs test. Yet his performances on the pitch have been handsomely rewarded – his last contract with United in 2012 was reportedly worth over £5 million a year. Has he saved his money? “Yes. You’ve got to look after your money, but that all comes as a learning curve. Most of us footballers are working class and so no one in our families has seen money like it. They’ve never invested in their life, my family.” Growing up, Ferdinand experienced racism from some of the boys he played football against as well as from his next-door neighbour. But, he says, he’s never let it affect him. “I’ve always had good, strong parents behind me who’ve made me feel confident and proud of who I am and where I come from. It’s never something that I’ve beat myself up about.” For years Ferdinand played alongside Chelsea’s John Terry at the heart of England’s defence, but in 2012, Terry was fined by the FA and banned for four games for racially abusing Rio’s brother Anton in a club game. When Terry was selected for Hodgson’s Euro 2012 squad, Ferdinand was left out. Some suspected the manager of pragmatism, side-stepping potential problems by keeping the players apart. What was it like playing with Terry? “We had a good time and a good relationship,” says Ferdinand. What about race relations generally? “Now we have so much social media we’re seeing a lot more instances of racism coming out. I think we were fooled in this country a little bit.” What about in football? “Football can’t stop racism. Football’s a great tool, but you can have a man who’s 100 per cent a racist, but goes to a football match and says, ‘I’m not going to speak here, but when I get out and go down my local pub I’ll say what the f**k I want’. It’s a bigger social issue than football.” As for Ferdinand’s future, might he fill the boots of Alan Hansen who is retiring from his BBC pundit’s post after the World Cup final? “We’ll have to wait and see. Got to do the World Cup first. Hopefully I’ll do really well.” At least he will have a role model close to hand. “When people look at Gary Lineker now they don’t say, ‘You know that guy who played for Tottenham and England, a great goal-scorer?’ Now he’s the guy that does Match of the Day, who does crisps, the guy who played football years ago.” Clearly Rio Ferdinand does not want to be known as an ex-footballer. How do you rate England’s chances? I’m confident we’ll get to the quarter-finals. The young players have got energy and are fearless. England’s key men? Wayne Rooney has to be fit. He’s limped into most tournaments previously. A fit and firing Rooney will give the younger players confidence. I’m hoping Hodgson will let these players off the leash and allow them to go out and express themselves. We’ve nothing to lose. Nobody expects us to set the tournament alight. Who will win? Brazil. And the dark horses? Belgium have got a depth of talent. Led by skipper Vincent Kompany, if that talent can be harnessed to a team ethic, they’ll be contenders. Rio Ferdinand is part of the BBC’s World Cup team of commentators and football pundits
John Humphrys: I am a different interviewer now from the one who started on Today
The BBC’s grand inquisitor John Humphrys submits to a grilling by RT – that’s if we can get a word in...
John Humphrys interrupts me across his kitchen table. The fact that I’m in the middle of asking whether interrupting sometimes disturbs the flow of an interview doesn’t seem to register. Only half my question makes it safely across to his side of the table. “It’s essential sometimes. It’s vital – not just allowable or defensible,” he says defiantly, admitting that his reputation for interrupting was “maybe” once fair but not any more. “Otherwise you get party political broadcasts and people would go off on little journeys you don’t want them to go on.” Humphrys himself can be difficult to interrupt. He gives long, detailed answers that wind their way to a conclusion. He’s 71 this summer, and there’s no sign of him slowing down. In fact, he runs every day, cycles “pretty much everywhere in London” and is sporting a pair of trainers below his navy jumper and dark blue chinos. It’s 27 years since he joined Today. Years as a foreign correspondent, first in the US and then South Africa, as well as more than half a decade presenting the BBC’s Nine o’Clock News had come before. But it is as a fearless, sometimes frightening interviewer that he is now best known. He claims to have mellowed “enormously” over the years, but he’s lost none of his ability to eviscerate an interviewee. Just ask his former boss, George Entwistle, who resigned as BBC director-general hours after an appearance on Today, when he fell victim to Humphrys on devastating form. So, is the rottweiler reputation unfair? “Rottweilers – I’ve never had one and I don’t want one – but I’m told they can be extremely gentle. They’re big, powerful and strong – none of which I am. They just have to be trai...” He stops mid-word. Trained? “Your word not mine in the end! They have to learn and I am a different interviewer now from the one who started on Today. That is a fact." He says, though, that he does sometimes want to have an argument on air. Then he checks himself. “You don’t set out to have a row but when the row develops, you don’t necessarily want to recoil from it. It’s sometimes good radio. Sometimes it gets in the way and sometimes it can be illuminating. If the politician gets cross, it tells you something about the politician. So heated exchanges are not always a bad thing. The idea all the public ever wants to hear are reasoned discussions is nonsense.” What really matters for the BBC, says Humphrys, is that people trust it. Impartiality is key and his natural scepticism is helpful. He admits to having voted for “most political parties” and says what he is “NOT” is an ideologue. He wouldn’t be able to look in the mirror in the morning if he were ever influenced by any views while at the microphone. But this hasn’t, he says, always been the case with the organisation as a whole. “The BBC has tended over the years to be broadly liberal as opposed to broadly conservative for all sorts of perfectly understandable reasons. The sort of people we’ve recruited – the best and the brightest – tended to come from universities and backgrounds where they’re more likely to hold broadly liberal views than conservative.” On questions of Europe and immigration, the BBC was, he implies, not balanced. “We weren’t sufficiently sceptical – that’s the most accurate phrase – of the pro-European case. We bought into the European ideal. We weren’t sufficiently sceptical about the pro-immigration argument. We didn’t look at the potential negatives with sufficient rigour.” Quite some admission. But Humphrys says this is no longer the case: “I think we’re out of that now. I think we have changed.” Today has also changed since he started out. It has, in his view, become sharper and (unlike in the past) concerned with breaking news, as well as more accessible, less forbidding. Still, there are twice as many male presenters as female and Humphrys is a champion of gender equality on air. “It’s terribly simple. Obviously, not all men are the same as all women but they should have equal opportunities and the idea that you say, ‘Well, we’ve now got two [female presenters], that’s enough,’ is daft.” One of his female colleagues in the Today studio is Mishal Husain. A fuss was made in the press when he suggested last year, while hosting Celebrity Mastermind, that she was only in her news job because of her good looks. He says the comment was taken out of context – though he’s quick not to blame the producers. “I was making the point that it helps in the newsreading business – and this isn’t controversial, you only have to switch on the telly – to be young and beautiful AND,” he adds, “highly trained. She’s a proper journalist.” They get on, he concludes, very well. “Of course we do.” His guess is that the next vacancy at Today will be filled by a woman. Humphrys once stood in for David Dimbleby as the chair of BBC1’s Question Time and is the only presenter ever to have done so. But he did it, he thinks, very badly. He wouldn’t trade his Today job for anything but he’d like to do it again. Just not, as last time, on the same day as the Today programme. “I’d like to do Question Time when I’ve had some sleep.” Unsurprisingly, he’s an articulate advocate for Today. He believes it’s short-changed, given the role it plays. He’s quick to mention its seven million weekly listeners and says, without qualification, that it’s the “most important BBC programme. More resources should be devoted to Today... we’re as pared down as it’s possible to get.” The BBC is, he thinks, sympathetic to this. “But the problem was that when the previous regime was faced with having to cut its budget under huge pressure, and reasonably so because of the way we saw money was being chucked around – in some cases irresponsibly, big pay-offs to people who shouldn’t have had them – you look at your own programme and you think, ‘Bloody hell, we could have done with that.’” What, I wonder, does Humphrys think of BBC management? “There are too many of them. I think they think that. I think Tony Hall thinks that – I don’t know, I haven’t asked him, but I think he thinks that. Over the years we’ve been grotesquely over-managed, there’s no question. They’re now getting a grip on it. A lot have gone. I think more need to go.” Humphrys, though, has no intention of going himself. I point out that he’s just given up his freelance status to become staff again at the age of 70 and he roars with laughter at the irony. “A former director-general, I think his name was [Mark] Thompson, said to me, ‘Just remember how long Alistair Cooke went on.’ I think it was 92.” For the moment he wakes up in the morning thinking, “Bloody hell, it’s cold and miserable and I’d rather stay in bed,” before a second thought kicks in “very very quickly. ‘I’m looking forward to this.’ The minute I’m in the car, in the office, I am consumed with curiosity as to what we’re going to be doing because you don’t know... I love doing the programme. How could you not? My curiosity has not dimmed at all. If anything it’s increased.” And he still does his homework. “You’ve got to know what’s going on all the time and I mean all the time.” He reads “pretty much” all the papers every day and there’s no switching off, even when he’s on holiday in Greece where’s he’s built a second home. He reads the papers online but, while some colleagues have Twitter up and running live on air, he’s not a convert. He wants his news to be mediated. “I don’t trust it as a delivery mechanism for news. The idea that you need Twitter to keep up to date is rubbish.” So who, then, is John Humphrys really? “I’m a different person when I’m reading a story to my youngest child [son Owen, 13; he also has two grown-up children] or to my grandchildren in bed at night than I am when I’m sitting in front of the Prime Minister at ten past eight in the morning. Of course.” He says his proudest achievement is setting up a children’s charity in Africa. “I suppose when you do what I do you’re remembered for the destructive rather than constructive things. Had George Entwistle survived that encounter and was still director-general today, it would have disappeared. It’s an important job, of course it is. Holding to account people in positions of power – that’s absolutely essential. But it’s nice to be doing something that is not in any sense negative, is entirely positive and seeing the best in people. So there is another side to my life.” Today is on Monday - Friday at 6am and Saturday at 7 am on BBC Radio 4. Follow @RadioTimes
Jon Snow: “I’m really a reporter. I’m actually a rather poor presenter"
The Channel 4 News host says his real strength lies in bringing often harrowing world stories to viewers
Jon Snow is wearing a red tie and red socks. The face of Channel 4 News since 1989, he’s tall, friendly and emphatically modest. He’s known for carrying off outrageous ties while presenting cutting-edge programmes. But is he really a rebel? “If you asked people around here, they’d say I was one of the most conservative faces in the newsroom – that’s small ‘C’ – but there is a rebel in me. "I’m wearing a bright tie largely because they told me colours on television didn’t work. In old-fashioned colour TV they would blow out a bit. I wore them deliberately.” It’s late afternoon and we’re sitting in a glass office at ITN. The clock is ticking. At 7pm Snow will read the news to one million viewers. “I’ve probably done about 6,000 programmes and I love it. Every day is different and the challenges are great – sometimes very great if things happen just before I go on air, or while I’m on air.” Snow was born in 1947 in Sussex. In his teens he wanted to become a Conservative MP. It wasn’t until he was “radicalised” in Uganda while working for Voluntary Service Overseas that his ambitions changed. “I was suddenly aware that I was dealing with kids who were just as bright as any kid I’d ever met but who had absolutely no books. I felt a sense of injustice.” Despite a C, a D and an E in his A-levels, Snow took up a place at Liverpool University to study law. But he didn’t last long. It was, he says, at the height of the anti-apartheid era. “In my second year I was sent down for a year with nine others for organising a sit-in in protest against the university’s investments in South Africa.” Snow decided to become a journalist in a bid to return to Uganda. His first job was at a London radio station. “My first day as a hack was the very first day of LBC. Forty years ago this year!” He sees himself as the product of nepotism. His presenter cousin Peter, ten years older, was already at ITN when he applied for a role there. “I don’t think he put in a word for me, but I think it was he who tipped me off [about the job opening] and they possibly thought, ‘Well, he’s a bit like his cousin, we might do well to see if he’s any good.’” Of course, today there is another Snow on screen – Peter’s son, Dan – and taken together all three make something of a broadcasting dynasty, although perhaps not one to rival the Dimblebys. What does he think of the charge that nepotism is alive and well in broadcasting today? “We’re in a world in which who you know is very important. Our society is terribly rigid.” Earlier in the day Snow showed 30 schoolchildren from disadvantaged backgrounds around the newsroom. “I came away from it recognising something very important – that if you open a window on something it could create an idea in their heads, something that will perhaps be a light for them to fight towards.” Snow denies that Channel 4 News is left-leaning but says its role, “even constitutionally”, is to be different. “It should be other. It should be for those, perhaps, who have less of a voice anywhere else. I think there are a lot of people in minority communities who look to us for some reason and feel that we are more ‘on their side’. That may in part be because we actually have a very ethnically diverse presentation team.” The key to being a news anchor, Snow tells me, is communication. “Can you engage with the viewer? Can you be who you really are? I genuinely think I’m exactly the same person off the screen as I am on it. Either the camera loves you or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t there’s nothing you can do about it. If it does, you’re very lucky. And if it loves you, you’ll love it. I love cameras and people coming up and doing selfies. “A programme for me is an adventure. I feel the viewer – it’s only one viewer; I don’t think about the masses – and I go on a shared adventure. ‘Come on, let’s see what we can find out.’” Television news is a crowded market. What, I ask, makes Channel 4 different from BBC News? “The BBC has an enormously important job that is – on our behalf, with our money – to tell us what’s going on.” But with that responsibility, he says, comes huge institutional controls and caution. “They survive all sorts of slings and arrows and seem to go on still being excellent. I think that in some ways we’re better than they are when it comes to long-form television news. We’re a little less cautious. We’re prepared to get stuck in and to take risks. Not with the truth, but with guts and just pushing it as far as we possibly can.” Snow is not among those who see Newsnight as a rival. But there’s no doubt that the BBC2 programme has had a torrid year or so. Its reputation was damaged first by its failure to break the Jimmy Savile story, despite compelling evidence, and then its incorrect identification of a Tory political figure as a paedophile. And while Newsnight suffered, Channel 4 News was busy uncovering “Plebgate”. Ironically, it was former Newsnight political editor Michael Crick who delivered the scoop. Snow is just back from covering the Commonwealth Conference in Sri Lanka. His film Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields was nominated for a Bafta and Channel 4 News has focused attention on the atrocities allegedly carried out against the Tamil population. The programme had been denied entry to the country for more than four years. They were only re-admitted because, Snow says, it’s a condition of hosting a Commonwealth Conference that journalists are given visas. “It was eerie. I’ve never been in a place where we have, so specifically, been declared the enemy. We were actually described as Tamil Tigers. It wasn’t that I thought we really stood any danger from the state. I worried that once we were declared the enemy, some freelancer might just knock us off. You have car accidents...” The team returned home safely but they were tailed wherever they went. “There were visitations to rooms by thick-set security people.” Snow describes Channel 4’s coverage of events in Sri Lanka as a “serious journalistic attempt to put the record straight and to bring about justice. That can be done within the journalistic norms, and has been.” He disputes that it amounted to campaigning, although he accepts “there are truths that you pursue which, in their pursuit, do certainly have the appearance of, and the commitment of, a campaign.” Snow’s documentary did not spare the viewer the horrors of war. Even so, he’s seen things most of us never will. “Particularly with Sri Lanka, there’s an awful lot we’ve never been able to put out.” Have these pictures scarred him? “No, it’s not the images. It’s actually seeing it in the raw.” He finds it very easy to cry. “I think you do have to – not on camera – but you need to allow your emotions to deal with what you’re looking at. It never revisits me. I never dream about it. This time round I came as near completely convulsing in grief as I’ve ever been because this extraordinary tidal wave of women, weeping and screaming, besieged us in Jaffna. There may have been activists pushing it along, but it happened – and the effect on me was very, very hard.” Snow says he’d prefer to go down in history as a good reporter. “I’m really a reporter. I’m actually a rather poor presenter.” As an interviewer, he looks for the oddball question in an attempt to reveal something new about politicians. He asked David Cameron about being a fan, “if not addict”, of Breaking Bad. “It’s about a gifted man who goes off the rails. I thought, ‘Interesting that a prime minister would want that as his escape. Who is he? How does he identify with the hero or anti-hero?’ He completely came to life and we got by far the best interview of the day.” Snow turned down an OBE, which he thinks was for charitable work, because he doesn’t think journalists should take honours from people they are likely to deal with. And he’s not planning retire. “Obviously, if my features fall to pieces and become intolerable, or I become braindead, I’d pack up, but it’s still a fantastic adventure.” When he’s not working, Snow loves escaping to the countryside. He paints – “I do rather bad watercolours but they all go to auction for charities” – and plays a lot of tennis. When Snow was 12, his father, who had been a headmaster, changed careers to become the Bishop of Whitby. Today Snow goes to a tiny Saxon church in Berkshire – where he spends his weekends – once or twice a month: “I like the contemplation, the hour of peace, the hymns and the community. Dunno if that makes me religious. I believe in the collective power of the human spirit. Is that who God is? I don’t think my father would say so!” It’s nearly five o’clock. With just over two hours before he goes live for the 6,001st time, he’s off for a pre-programme ritual: buying grapes and nuts from the local newsagent. “The real secret of a good interview.” Channel 4 News Weekdays 7:00pm Follow @RadioTimes