John Cleese’s greatest triumph, Fawlty Towers, is still going strong after half a century. So why does he think his former employers have killed comedy?
Add Fawlty Towers: the Play to your watchlist Just mention the BBC, and John Cleese turns into Basil Fawlty in front of your eyes. It’s 50 years since the first broadcast of Fawlty Towers, which he and Connie Booth wrote and starred in and many regard as the funniest television programme ever made. Its two series consisted of just a dozen frenetic, intricate farces, shown on the BBC half a century ago, but they became so lodged in the public consciousness that the anniversary is being celebrated by something approaching Fawlty mania. U&Gold is repeating original episodes on weekdays; the Fawlty Towers stage show, running to packed houses in the West End, can be seen on TV on Friday; and there’s a book on the way (Fawlty Towers: Fawlts and All). Basil, Sybil, Polly and Manuel are everywhere. You would expect their creator to be enjoying all this, wallowing in the nostalgia and back- slapping with the BBC about the comedy triumph that seems to live for ever. But he’s not. He’s seething. The golden age of comedy, when British shows were the best in the world, is gone, he says. And it’s the BBC that’s killed it. “When was the last thing, the last, really good thing they ran. The Office? How long ago was that? You used to be able to switch the TV on and there’d be Penelope Keith or Nigel Havers or someone doing something amusing and you’d watch it for half an hour and go to bed with a smile on your face. It was a major contribution to society. Now? Let me tell you. Let me be absolutely frank…” Frank doesn’t begin to describe his account of his last meeting “a couple of months ago” with BBC executives to discuss possible projects. “There were two people from BBC Comedy. One had to leave early – he obviously had much more important things to talk about. The other, very senior in terms of commissioning comedy programmes, was really one of the most stupid men I have ever met. “We had some good, comedic ideas, but they weren’t interested. Not what they wanted. They were looking for Basil Fawlty on a ship or something. It was a hopeless idea but they seemed keen on it. I wanted to say to him: ‘You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.’ “This is the problem. It’s the BBC executives, the commissioners, who want to be the people with the ideas – so people can say, ‘He commissioned that programme.’ Not he wrote it, or he performed it – he commissioned it… what a Renaissance Man! To be looked upon with awe. “They’re not nurturing talent. Young writers go and see this clown and assume, as he is the one who commissions the programmes, he knows what he’s doing. The people in charge now have no idea at all. The writers deserve better than this. The British people deserve better than this.” It was all so different 50 years ago. Cleese was already established by then. He’d grown up in Weston-super-Mare in a resolutely ordinary family. Muriel, his mother who lived to 101, made him complicated – “she was depressed and angry all the time; she’s the reason I’ve spent a large part of my life in therapy”. Reg, his father, was “lovely and nice and the reason I’m not completely mad”. The family name was actually Cheese, but his dad changed it to avoid embarrassment, little realising his son would make a career out of it. He was clever enough to get a scholarship to Clifton College, arguably the poshest school in the West Country. And then on to Cambridge and the Footlights at the height of its fame. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe led to the BBC, sketches on The Frost Report and a central role in writing and appearing in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “The head of BBC Comedy, Jimmy Gilbert, took me to lunch and asked me if there was anything I’d like to do. I talked to Connie [Booth, his first wife] and we remembered the hotel in Torquay we’d stayed at when we were filming Monty Python and its breathtakingly rude owner. I didn’t really need to explain the idea. Jimmy simply said: ‘OK, I’ll commission it.’” The secret to its success is laid out in the new book Cleese has written about Fawlty Towers. It’s about taking huge amounts of time and infinite pains. It’s not just a collection of gags. It’s establishing and developing characters, intricate plotting, building up the pressure in that hotel lobby, constantly refining and editing – “boring, practical things”. He and Connie took six weeks to write each episode. Impossible now, he says. “The financing of British comedy would never allow people to do what we did.” They were pleased with it. Not everyone at the BBC was. The “Comedy Script Editor, Light Entertainment, Television” was unsparing in his scorn and put it down on paper in a memo to his boss. “I’m afraid I thought this one as dire as its title. A collection of clichés and stock characters which I can’t see being anything but a disaster.” Cleese and co only heard about this much later. Their lowest point came recording the second episode in front of the usual invited audience. Nobody laughed. It was only afterwards they found out the BBC had handed out the tickets to a big group of visitors from the Icelandic Broadcasting Corporation, who couldn’t speak English. The series ran first on BBC Two. The reaction was muted; the critics divided. The Daily Mirror said it was, “Long John [he’s 6ft 4in], Short on Jokes”. They didn’t know, or at least weren’t told, how many watched. The breakthrough came when the initial series of six was shown on BBC One. It was an almost instant hit, with 12 million viewers and a permanent place in the nation’s affections. It took four years to produce the second series, at least in part because John and Connie’s marriage broke down. “Some thought it surprising we could do any more programmes, but it didn’t seem too much of a problem because we didn’t stop liking each other,” he says now. The second series was an even bigger hit than the first. But they never made any more. “Connie and I both felt that if we did another series, it wouldn’t be quite as good. We’d simply set the bar too high. We’d put so much into it and not got that much out of it. “If you want to make money in British TV, do a lot of OK programmes; don’t attempt to do anything special. Get rid of the writers and real acting skill. What they are looking for now, more than anything, is something cheap. Find a format with a studio audience like Have I Got News for You. I suspect Ian Hislop has made a lot more money out of TV than I have.” By contrast, Fawlty Towers is excellence in aspic. Other writers, other stars, other broadcasters maybe, would have flogged a success like that to death. But Fawlty Towers remains just 12 pieces of comedy perfection whose reputation has grown, perhaps, because they weren’t ruthlessly exploited. But they’re certainly being exploited now, and the legions of fans all over the world seem to love it. I discovered this when I went to see the stage adaptation at London’s Apollo Theatre a day before our interview. The show is effectively three TV episodes bolted together, with actors who channel the original cast faithfully, even brilliantly. The fans were there in strength, along with the usual tourists just wanting to catch a show in the West End. I was sitting between two Americans who’d never heard of Fawlty Towers. They seemed to enjoy it but were bewildered by the way the audience erupted with laughter even before the punchlines. “All the guy said was, ‘The Germans are coming’ and the house came down…” The stage play is off on a national tour soon, Cleese is planning a second play featuring another three of the episodes, and he’s shortly embarking on yet another tour of his own show. He’s done hundreds of them. Perhaps because he seems almost to have given up on television. “How long has it been since the BBC last showed Monty Python – 20 years, more?” he says. “I think it’s because it’s so much funnier than anything they produce today; they don’t want to be shown up.” He thinks comedy today is hamstrung by political correctness. “The BBC, in particular, is cowardly about offence. We are a long way from the days when a BBC director-general would say, ‘There are some people one would wish to offend.’ “Now, they’re too influenced by the passion and nastiness of the extremely woke. A huge slice of comedy is put straight into the fridge because executives don’t want to get phone calls at dinner. They don’t seem to realise you tease people, you’re rude to people, that you’re fond of.” I wonder out loud if he’s worried the BBC might be upset by the trenchant way he seems to bite the hand that fed him with comments like this. Not at all. “If it makes people cross then I shall be happy.” More generally, he looks out at an England that’s barely recognisable from his childhood. A time when programmes on television “were at a much higher intellectual level than they are now”. When The Times and The Telegraph “would have been ashamed to put a pretty girl on the front page – we are now an almost entirely tabloid society”. He’s nostalgic for politicians like Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins – “impressive men. Now they come from think tanks and PR, I just don’t see who’s going to turn things round. I am very disturbed by what’s happening in Britain. I don’t think the people in charge are any good.” He may sound gloomy in these quotes, but in person he’s actually surprisingly cheerful, full of plans and schemes, lumbering a bit these days but as straight-backed and (mostly) benign as ever. He’s 85 now, nearly 86. I ask him what keeps him going and make the mistake of suggesting he doesn’t need the money. “Of course I need the money. Haven’t you heard about the divorce?” Everybody’s heard about the divorce. After all, one of his series of performances was called “The Alimony Tour”, another “How to Finance Your Divorce”. He’s been married four times, but it was the third wife, the American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger, who, as he would say, took him to the cleaners. “You know how much I had to pay? Just under £20 million. Have you ever given anyone £20 million? I had five properties; three had to be sold and she got the other two. “It’s been a terrible struggle to get back. It’s only now, this year, when I can start to do things because I’m interested in them, rather than because I need the money.” He’s not poor, he says. “But I gave my wife my London flat, I don’t have a car. I don’t have much money… but I don’t want it anyway. Wanting it is an illness.” He’s thinking of moving back to the West Country – “except it’s always raining there”. He adds, “I’d be delighted to think I had somewhere of my own where I could be buried.” He’s even cheery about dying. Perhaps because he can be assured of several kinds of immortality. There’s a lemur that’s named after him (he’s obsessed by them, apparently), and somewhere in space there’s an asteroid called Cleese. Plus, there’s a municipal rubbish heap in Palmerston North named “Mount Cleese”. He called the place “the suicide capital of New Zealand” when he was there on tour and that was their revenge. But beyond his name, it’s those 12 comedy classics in Fawlty Towers that he’ll be remembered for. As long as people laugh, he’ll live on.
John Cleese hits out at the BBC for damaging comedy: “The British people deserve better than this”
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Just mention the BBC, and John Cleese turns into Basil Fawlty in front of your eyes. It’s 50 years since the first broadcast of Fawlty Towers, which he and Connie Booth wrote and starred in and many regard as the funniest television programme ever made. Its two series consisted of just a dozen frenetic, intricate farces, shown on the BBC half a century ago, but they became so lodged in the public consciousness that the anniversary is being celebrated by something approaching Fawlty mania. U&Gold is repeating original episodes on weekdays; the Fawlty Towers stage show, running to packed houses in the West End, can be seen on TV on Friday; and there’s a book on the way (Fawlty Towers: Fawlts and All). Basil, Sybil, Polly and Manuel are everywhere. You would expect their creator to be enjoying all this, wallowing in the nostalgia and back-slapping with the BBC about the comedy triumph that seems to live for ever. But he’s not. He’s seething. The golden age of comedy, when British shows were the best in the world, is gone, he says. And it’s the BBC that’s killed it. “When was the last thing, the last, really good thing they ran. The Office? How long ago was that? You used to be able to switch the TV on and there’d be Penelope Keith or Nigel Havers or someone doing something amusing and you’d watch it for half an hour and go to bed with a smile on your face. It was a major contribution to society. Now? Let me tell you. Let me be absolutely frank…” Frank doesn’t begin to describe his account of his last meeting “a couple of months ago” with BBC executives to discuss possible projects. “There were two people from BBC Comedy. One had to leave early – he obviously had much more important things to talk about. The other, very senior in terms of commissioning comedy programmes, was really one of the most stupid men I have ever met. “We had some good, comedic ideas, but they weren’t interested. Not what they wanted. They were looking for Basil Fawlty on a ship or something. It was a hopeless idea but they seemed keen on it. I wanted to say to him: ‘You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.’ “This is the problem. It’s the BBC executives, the commissioners, who want to be the people with the ideas – so people can say, ‘He commissioned that programme.’ Not he wrote it, or he performed it – he commissioned it… what a Renaissance Man! To be looked upon with awe. “They’re not nurturing talent. Young writers go and see this clown and assume, as he is the one who commissions the programmes, he knows what he’s doing. The people in charge now have no idea at all. The writers deserve better than this. The British people deserve better than this.” It was all so different 50 years ago. Cleese was already established by then. He’d grown up in Weston-super-Mare in a resolutely ordinary family. Muriel, his mother who lived to 101, made him complicated – “she was depressed and angry all the time; she’s the reason I’ve spent a large part of my life in therapy”. Reg, his father, was “lovely and nice and the reason I’m not completely mad”. The family name was actually Cheese, but his dad changed it to avoid embarrassment, little realising his son would make a career out of it. He was clever enough to get a scholarship to Clifton College, arguably the poshest school in the West Country. And then on to Cambridge and the Footlights at the height of its fame. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe led to the BBC, sketches on The Frost Report and a central role in writing and appearing in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “The head of BBC Comedy, Jimmy Gilbert, took me to lunch and asked me if there was anything I’d like to do. I talked to Connie [Booth, his first wife] and we remembered the hotel in Torquay we’d stayed at when we were filming Monty Python and its breathtakingly rude owner. I didn’t really need to explain the idea. Jimmy simply said: ‘OK, I’ll commission it.’” The secret to its success is laid out in the new book Cleese has written about Fawlty Towers. It’s about taking huge amounts of time and infinite pains. It’s not just a collection of gags. It’s establishing and developing characters, intricate plotting, building up the pressure in that hotel lobby, constantly refining and editing – “boring, practical things”. He and Connie took six weeks to write each episode. Impossible now, he says. “The financing of British comedy would never allow people to do what we did.” They were pleased with it. Not everyone at the BBC was. The “Comedy Script Editor, Light Entertainment, Television” was unsparing in his scorn and put it down on paper in a memo to his boss. “I’m afraid I thought this one as dire as its title. A collection of clichés and stock characters which I can’t see being anything but a disaster.” Cleese and co only heard about this much later. Their lowest point came recording the second episode in front of the usual invited audience. Nobody laughed. It was only afterwards they found out the BBC had handed out the tickets to a big group of visitors from the Icelandic Broadcasting Corporation, who couldn’t speak English. The series ran first on BBC Two. The reaction was muted; the critics divided. The Daily Mirror said it was, “Long John [he’s 6ft 4in], Short on Jokes”. They didn’t know, or at least weren’t told, how many watched. The breakthrough came when the initial series of six was shown on BBC One. It was an almost instant hit, with 12 million viewers and a permanent place in the nation’s affections. It took four years to produce the second series, at least in part because John and Connie’s marriage broke down. “Some thought it surprising we could do any more programmes, but it didn’t seem too much of a problem because we didn’t stop liking each other,” he says now. The second series was an even bigger hit than the first. But they never made any more. “Connie and I both felt that if we did another series, it wouldn’t be quite as good. We’d simply set the bar too high. We’d put so much into it and not got that much out of it. “If you want to make money in British TV, do a lot of OK programmes; don’t attempt to do anything special. Get rid of the writers and real acting skill. What they are looking for now, more than anything, is something cheap. Find a format with a studio audience like Have I Got News for You. I suspect Ian Hislop has made a lot more money out of TV than I have.” By contrast, Fawlty Towers is excellence in aspic. Other writers, other stars, other broadcasters maybe, would have flogged a success like that to death. But Fawlty Towers remains just 12 pieces of comedy perfection whose reputation has grown, perhaps, because they weren’t ruthlessly exploited. But they’re certainly being exploited now, and the legions of fans all over the world seem to love it. I discovered this when I went to see the stage adaptation at London’s Apollo Theatre a day before our interview. The show is effectively three TV episodes bolted together, with actors who channel the original cast faithfully, even brilliantly. The fans were there in strength, along with the usual tourists just wanting to catch a show in the West End. I was sitting between two Americans who’d never heard of Fawlty Towers. They seemed to enjoy it but were bewildered by the way the audience erupted with laughter even before the punchlines. “All the guy said was, ‘The Germans are coming’ and the house came down…” The stage play is off on a national tour soon, Cleese is planning a second play featuring another three of the episodes, and he’s shortly embarking on yet another tour of his own show. He’s done hundreds of them. Perhaps because he seems almost to have given up on television. “How long has it been since the BBC last showed Monty Python – 20 years, more?” he says. “I think it’s because it’s so much funnier than anything they produce today; they don’t want to be shown up.” He thinks comedy today is hamstrung by political correctness. “The BBC, in particular, is cowardly about offence. We are a long way from the days when a BBC director-general would say, ‘There are some people one would wish to offend.’ “Now, they’re too influenced by the passion and nastiness of the extremely woke. A huge slice of comedy is put straight into the fridge because executives don’t want to get phone calls at dinner. They don’t seem to realise you tease people, you’re rude to people, that you’re fond of.” I wonder out loud if he’s worried the BBC might be upset by the trenchant way he seems to bite the hand that fed him with comments like this. Not at all. “If it makes people cross then I shall be happy.” More generally, he looks out at an England that’s barely recognisable from his childhood. A time when programmes on television “were at a much higher intellectual level than they are now”. When The Times and The Telegraph “would have been ashamed to put a pretty girl on the front page – we are now an almost entirely tabloid society”. He’s nostalgic for politicians like Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins – “impressive men. Now they come from think tanks and PR, I just don’t see who’s going to turn things round. I am very disturbed by what’s happening in Britain. I don’t think the people in charge are any good.” He may sound gloomy in these quotes, but in person he’s actually surprisingly cheerful, full of plans and schemes, lumbering a bit these days but as straight-backed and (mostly) benign as ever. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2024/08/Fawlty-Towers-Adam-Jackson-Smith-Basil-Rachel-Izen-Mrs-Richards.-Photo-Credit-Hugo-Glendinning-2a42ff4.jpg" width="7554" height="5036" alt="Basil Fawlty (played by Adam Jackson Smith) is standing behind a hotel reception desk in a white shirt and a green cardigan with a yellow trim. He has a moustache and long short wavy hair brushed back from his face, and is seen angrily holding a book out directly in the face of an elder female guest, who has permed hair and is in a brown suit with white trim. She is clutching a yellow handbag" title="Fawlty Towers_ Adam Jackson-Smith (Basil), Rachel Izen (Mrs Richards). Photo Credit_ Hugo Glendinning" /> He’s 85 now, nearly 86. I ask him what keeps him going and make the mistake of suggesting he doesn’t need the money. “Of course I need the money. Haven’t you heard about the divorce?” Everybody’s heard about the divorce. After all, one of his series of performances was called “The Alimony Tour”, another “How to Finance Your Divorce”. He’s been married four times, but it was the third wife, the American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger, who, as he would say, took him to the cleaners. “You know how much I had to pay? Just under £20 million. Have you ever given anyone £20 million? I had five properties; three had to be sold and she got the other two. “It’s been a terrible struggle to get back. It’s only now, this year, when I can start to do things because I’m interested in them, rather than because I need the money.” He’s not poor, he says. “But I gave my wife my London flat, I don’t have a car. I don’t have much money… but I don’t want it anyway. Wanting it is an illness.” He’s thinking of moving back to the West Country – “except it’s always raining there”. He adds, “I’d be delighted to think I had somewhere of my own where I could be buried.” He’s even cheery about dying. Perhaps because he can be assured of several kinds of immortality. There’s a lemur that’s named after him (he’s obsessed by them, apparently), and somewhere in space there’s an asteroid called Cleese. Plus, there’s a municipal rubbish heap in Palmerston North named “Mount Cleese”. He called the place “the suicide capital of New Zealand” when he was there on tour and that was their revenge. But beyond his name, it’s those 12 comedy classics in Fawlty Towers that he’ll be remembered for. As long as people laugh, he’ll live on. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. 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Sir David Attenborough's stark warning in new Netflix documentary A Life on Our Planet: "It’s about saving ourselves"
Sir David Attenborough on the planet's future, his new Netflix documentary and why we must take action now.
It’s an occupational hazard for prophets of doom that, just when you make your big pitch about the disaster waiting around the corner, the world gets clobbered out of the blue by something completely different. It happened this year to Sir David Attenborough, whose big, polemical film about the climate crisis, A Life on Our Planet, was due out in the spring. But, like so much else, it was put on hold because of the coronavirus pandemic and is now due for release in cinemas worldwide on Monday 28 September, before being made available on Netflix a few days later. When I met Attenborough earlier in the year he was, understandably perhaps, peeved that his project about what he regards as an existential threat to life on Earth faced being derailed by a passing disease of, as he put it then, “no particular significance”. When we catch up six months later, he acknowledges the pandemic has caused “and will continue to cause immense suffering”. But he believes that the lessons learnt will help in the even bigger battle against global warming. Hope, he says, may emerge “from the whole world having experienced a shared threat and found a sense that we are all in it together”. He speaks of “encouraging signs” of an increased trust in science, adding “the time for nationalism is over”. “There must now be cooperation between nations, and cooperation requires giving up things, as well as gaining them. Internationalism must be our approach. There must be greater equality between what nations take from the natural world. The wealthier nations, such as those in western Europe, have taken a lot and the time, perhaps, has now come to give.” As one of the two international champions in the climate change struggle, he is determined to remain positive. If humans as a species survive, our descendants may find it strange that, in the 21st century’s Great Climate Crisis, we were saved by an autistic teenager and a great-grandfather with a dicky heart and dodgy knees. An unlikely pair of superheroes, you might think, to stave off the sixth extinction and stop humanity going the way of the ammonites and the dinosaurs. But then, to subvert the Batman saying, we don’t get the heroes we deserve, we get the heroes we need. Greta Thunberg may divide opinion, but Attenborough is beyond mortal reproach. Seventy years cuddling up to mountain gorillas and whispering about the wonders of the natural world to television audiences in the tens of millions have turned him into a kind of global secular saint, the most famous naturalist of all time, arguably the most trusted man on Earth, and our chronicler and guide to all that is marvellous and beautiful about the planet on which we live. So, when Sir David Attenborough says we’re screwed – we’re screwed. https://www.instagram.com/p/CFb6KqxnK-0/ That’s essentially the message of A Life on Our Planet. His life, in this case, which seems to have exactly spanned that brief period in history in which we could experience all the wild beauty of the Earth before we destroyed it. The film is, he says (several times), his “witness statement”. For we are all on trial, all responsible, all guilty, all – spoiler alert, this comes just at the moment in the film when you’ll be feeling at your most despairing – with a last chance to avert the disaster we have caused. It’s powerful because the pictures are, of course, breath-taking, the case histories heart-breaking, the argument clear, the solutions simple – some would say too simple. But most of all, it’s powerful because it’s him. At 94, Attenborough is a bit more lined and crocked in the flesh than he appears on screen, but still somehow boyish in both his looks and his undimmed enthusiasm. The difference is that now he is driven. Gone is the judicious detachment of someone who once ran much of the BBC. He may still be the middle-class Englishman incarnate but, on film, and shuffling into the room with a wary smile, a characteristic squaring of the shoulders and tilting of the head, he is a climate change zealot. There’s not much time left, he says, for him or the planet: “We’re facing nothing less than the collapse of the living world.” Certainly, there’s no time for understatement or mealy-mouthed qualification. I ask him if there was a moment when he realised that it wasn’t just the survival of individual species, or even whole ecosystems, that was at stake, but the future of the Earth itself. He remembers it, he says, all too clearly. “I was diving on a coral reef [in 1998, while filming the landmark BBC series, The Blue Planet]. I slipped into the water thinking I would see what I was accustomed to seeing, but instead, I saw a white cemetery of coral that had simply died… That was truly frightening.” It’s there in the film. Ghostly, shocking, the coral is no longer bursting with life and dazzling colour but bleached into the jagged white tombstones of a dead world. It’s the result, scientists say, of an average rise in sea temperature of just one degree Celsius. As a metaphor for the way we are destroying what Attenborough repeatedly calls “our Garden of Eden”, it is chilling. A Life on Our Planet is big on metaphors. Attenborough takes as his starting point Chernobyl, prowling around the still-poisoned wreckage of the nuclear power station in Ukraine that exploded in 1986, ironically during a safety test. “The most costly mistake in the history of mankind”, he calls it, which is probably hyperbole but that hardly matters. For it’s a symbol to him of what we are doing to the Earth, “our finely tuned life-support machine”. “Bad planning and human error – it, too, will lead to what we see here,” he says, sombrely, as he hobbles through the ruins, “a place in which we cannot live”. And it’s happened in his lifetime. The film shows a young actor playing him in his childhood, ferreting for fossils in a quarry near his home in Leicestershire. It was ammonites he was looking for, molluscs that were once as widespread and successful as humans are now, but were wiped out, along with the dinosaurs, in a sudden “extinction event” 66 million years ago. Now, Attenborough says, we’re facing another extinction, and it’s entirely down to us; our greed, our thoughtlessness but, most of all, our sheer numbers. When he was fossil hunting in his schoolboy shorts before the war, there were two billion people; now there are nearly eight billion and we could be heading for a peak of nearly 11 billion by around 2100. “Humans have broken loose,” he says in the film. “Predators have been eliminated, we have food to order, diseases under control [he didn’t foresee coronavirus, needless to say], there is nothing to stop us, unless we stop ourselves.” It’s a long indictment. In his lifetime, half the world’s rainforests have been razed. The number of Bornean orangutans is down to 104,700, significantly fewer than were around when he first looked for them in 1956 – it’s estimated that more than 100,000 were lost between 1999–2015 alone. Nearly 90 per cent of the large fish in the sea have been “removed”, as he puts it. View oEmbed on the source website In the decades since Attenborough first applied to join the BBC, the pristine world he’s described has been debauched; the wild animal populations have halved. “A blind assault on the planet,” he calls it, popping up to punctuate his “obituary for the Earth” every few minutes to hammer the message home. His voice seems almost to break as he reaches the end: “Human beings have overrun the Earth”. He shakes his head, sorrowfully. “We have completely destroyed that world.” That’s it then, you might think. Game over. Soon the planet will be a celestial crisp and we’ll only have battery hens for company. But no. “What do we do?” he asks. Search me, you think from behind the sofa, but Attenborough has the answer. “It’s straightforward. The only way out is to rewild the world.” Exactly how, you wonder. And, seeing how our limitations have just been underlined by an all-too-wild microscopic virus, you’d imagine rewilding the whole world was rather a big ask. Quite the contrary. “It’s simpler than you might think,” he says to a background of stirring music. “A century from now, our planet can be a wild place again.” What follows is a call to arms, with carefully chosen examples to foster optimism and illustrate the human potential for change. On population, he picks out Japan, the country with one of the lowest fertility rates, highest life expectancies and oldest populations on Earth – and hardly any immigration, either – to show how our numbers can be controlled. Not Africa, whose population will triple this century; by 2100, one in three humans will be African. We must lift the world out of poverty, he says, raise the standard of living without increasing our impact on the planet. If it were a matter of will, or even aid money, that would have happened long ago. The really poor of this world live in failed, war-torn or at least disastrously governed states. Not simple. Phase out fossil fuels, Attenborough says, belching smoke stacks. Morocco gets 40 per cent of its energy from the sun, he says, but it shines there all the time and they’ve got half the Sahara to park their panels – “Renewables never run out.” That may be true, but they’re often not there when you need them, either. I raise some of these caveats and he brushes them aside. “How many problems do you want to solve at the same time?” he asks, only a touch tetchily. “What would you do? Say ‘Oh well, it’s just too complicated’?” There’s no answer to that, of course. Food’s the big thing. We must be more like the Netherlands – small place, lots of people but by treating agriculture as a vertical as well as a horizontal business it has become the world’s second largest food exporter. There are astonishing pictures of what look like artificial fields stacked on top of one another. But that’s not enough. “The planet can’t support billions of meat eaters,” he says. “If we all ate only plants, we’d need only half the land we use at the moment.” I ask the obvious smart-Alec question: when did he last eat meat? “Can’t remember, years ago,” he says, rather airily. Then, after a long pause: “I eat fish, and chicken, and my conscience does trouble me. I’m affluent enough to afford free range, but it’s a middle-class hypocrisy.” Attenborough is not a hypocrite. He’s both a national treasure and an old man in a hurry, convinced that if people only knew, they would elect governments that would get together internationally, raise huge amounts of money, agree to protect and expand the wild places, change our lifestyles, limit our numbers… Does he think he’ll see that in his lifetime? “It’s theoretically possible. It could happen,” he says. But then he adds, sadly: “I don’t think it will.” It won’t be for the lack of trying. He has more television series on the stocks, conferences to address, governments to lobby. I wonder aloud if he wants to be remembered as a prophet or a programme-maker, and am put straight very firmly. “I don’t waste any time at all thinking about how I will be remembered. It seems to me to be of no possible consequence.” He ends the film back in Chernobyl, which, 30-plus years on since the disaster, has largely returned to the wild, a symbol for him of hope rather than despair – how nature could reclaim what we have despoiled, how the Earth could recover if only we would let it. “In the end,” Attenborough says, “it’s not really about saving the planet. It’s about saving ourselves.” And nobody has tried harder than him. This 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. If you’re looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide.
How was They Shall Not Grow Old made? Peter Jackson reveals the extraordinary technology behind his First World War film
The Oscar-winning Lord of the Rigs director explains how modern visual effects helped bring old WW1 footage back to life
William Jackson was born at the wrong time. He joined a peacetime army to see the world and ended up in a dozen kinds of hell. His South Wales Borderers had not long swapped their red coats for khaki when he signed up in 1910. Then the world went mad and pitched William and what the German Kaiser had scornfully called “that contemptible little army” of British regulars into the industrialised butchery of the Great War. Within three months, the professional peacetime army had been all but wiped out. Their formidable musketry – 15 well-aimed rounds a minute meant that the enemy thought they were facing machine guns – had helped stop a swift German victory. They’d blown away the flower of German youth in the first battle of Ypres in 1914 (to this day it’s known there as the Kindermort, the slaughter of the innocents), but few of the “Old Contemptibles” themselves were left when it was over. How do documentary filmmakers tackle issues like PTSD and shell shock? Air date revealed for Peter Jackson’s ground-breaking First World War film They Shall Not Grow Old William survived, though. He survived Gallipoli, too, and won a Distinguished Conduct Medal there. He was wounded on the first day of the Somme and recovered just in time to fight at Passchendaele. Against the odds, he survived the war. But it took its toll. He died at 50, broken by his wartime injuries; one more forgotten hero of the “war to end all wars” – forgotten if it wasn’t for the grandson he never met. View oEmbed on the source website Peter Jackson, director and producer of blockbuster films like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, was raised on stories about his grandfather. “I grew up with the war in my household. Dad [who’d emigrated to New Zealand at the end of the Second World War] used to buy every book that came out about it, particularly those about places his father had been to. I read them cover to cover, and I’ve been fascinated ever since.” He’s turned that fascination into the most extraordinary and moving tribute to his grandfather and the generation that fought and died in their hundreds of thousands in Flanders Fields. He’s used 21st-century technology to take us back a hundred years to see them as they saw themselves. Not flickering, jerky, anonymous victims of a war lost in history, but living, breathing young men, matter-of-fact amid all the mayhem, larky, even, on the edge of doom. We hold their gaze from beyond the grave and a century disappears. We are there. I t wasn’t Jackson’s idea, but he leapt at it when the Imperial War Museum asked him to make a documentary to mark the centenary of the war’s ending. “They didn’t have any concept of it, other than wanting to use their archive, hundreds of hours of footage, in a different way.” Jackson turned to the special effects company he has in New Zealand. “I thought: how well can we restore it with the computer power we use for film visual effects today? We experimented and the results were far beyond anything I’d imagined.” Jackson talks in military terms of “throwing a lot of firepower at it”. He was able to bring to bear the equivalent of 7,000 computers and 15,000 people to the threadbare footage. “I was amazed at how you can take shaky, jerky black-and-white film and make it look as though it was shot now.” Jackson used techniques honed on his fantasy movies to sharpen the images and make them look crisp. But the crucial difference came when they started to work on the speeded-up jerkiness, the “Charlie Chaplin effect” as he calls it, of the old film. It was shot, often on hand-cranked cameras, at speeds between 13 and 15 frames a second. His team didn’t just slow the film down, they used computers to create artificial frames between the existing footage, making it 24 frames a second, smooth, modern and lifelike. Restoring the black-and-white footage was the main job, he says. Colour and 3D “was the icing on the cake”. It was done carefully by hand, using the most advanced computer technology. “It feels like you’re watching the Gulf War,” he says. “We’ve tried to make it close to what you could shoot on a video camera or your iPhone.” There was no sound on the original footage, but Jackson’s team have created a convincing soundscape that brings the film to life. You hear footsteps, tiles falling off a roof after a bombardment, as well as feel the shuddering impact of the shelling. They used lip readers to work out what the soldiers were saying and got actors to perform it “in a very real, natural way” “The end result,” says Jackson, “is that we see that war the way they saw it.” To match the resurrected pictures, Jackson has overlaid interviews from more than 120 surviving veterans that were recorded in the 1960s and 70s by the BBC and the Imperial War Museum. “They weren’t young then, but they weren’t ancient either,” he says, “and they were able to recount things incredibly well and talk with a great deal of honesty.” The film starts with the original flickering black-and-white inset in the centre of the screen, the chattering of a projector, and the veterans cheerfully signing up to fight. “I’ve never been so excited in my life,” one says. “Such a relief from the boring jobs at home, you see,” says another. A lot were under age, 15 or 16. We see them smoking and joking about ill-fitting uniforms, boots that they’d urinated on to soften the leather. We watch them brewing up tea from water that had boiled in the cooling sleeve of their machine guns. When the action shifts to the front in Flanders, the mood darkens and, in a moment of filmic genius that brings a lump to your throat, the picture fills the screen, is suffused with colour, amplified with sound. In an instant, it’s real. We’re in the trenches with the rats and lice. The ground shudders with explosions. “They say your past comes up in front of your eyes,” a veteran says. “I was only 19. I hadn’t had any past.” We see the soldiers in and out of the line, joking about queuing for the open-air lavatories and the everlasting bully beef and plum duff at one moment, quaking among the corpses under German bombardment the next. The film doesn’t blink when it comes to the horrors. Fly-blown corpses, a gangrenous foot, young flesh blown to pieces by high explosive. But nothing we see matches the veterans’ phlegmatic descriptions of what they saw. And all the time these ghosts brought back to life make lingering eye contact. Human again. Like us, only much more stoical and with worse teeth. Their stoicism impressed Jackson most. “The thing that amazed me was their lack of self-pity. They didn’t feel sorry for themselves and the majority of them didn’t feel sorry they’d experienced it.” War’s end seems as much an anti-climax as a relief. Most seemed to find it difficult to relate to those who hadn’t shared what they had been through. “We were a race apart,” said one. Jackson thinks it will surprise those with our preconceptions of the First World War. “I didn’t want a modern spin on it. I wanted them simply to say it as they saw it.” At the end, the film reverts to flickering black-and-white as the war is symbolically returned to the past. He’s left thinking about what happened to the men he’s cinematically brought back to life. “I wonder about these guys all the time. You see their characters and personalities; some make me smile and laugh. I always wonder if they survived or not. Hopefully, their descendants might now recognise them and come forward with their stories.” And the impact making the film has had on him? “I’ve been looking at documentaries and First World War films for as long as I can recall, and I’ve never seen anything that has affected me as much as what I’ve seen in the last year or so while we’ve been restoring this. Because the one thing this restoration does is make the faces of these men come alive.” It is, as it’s intended to be, a brilliantly realised impression of what it was like to be a Tommy in the trenches, no more. It’s narrowly focused. Much of the war is not mentioned. There is no context, no cause or consequence. That, of course, is its strength. Copies are being sent to every secondary school in the country. It will certainly promote empathy with that lost generation, but I wonder how much it will add to their understanding? We’ve come to see the First World War as a pointless waste and our soldiers as sacrificial victims who gave their lives for nothing in a futile conflict. But that’s not how they saw it, most of them, anyway, including, I would guess, Sergeant William Jackson. All war is a tragic waste, but the Kaiser’s territorial ambitions were not that very different from Hitler’s, and if Germany had triumphed, Europe would be very different today. They did not die totally in vain. We will remember them, and William’s grandson, with this haunting film, has made sure of it. They Shall Not Grow Old will air on Sunday 11th November 2018 at 9.30pm on BBC2
Vanity Fair's Michael Palin: 'Today Becky Sharp would be on Love Island – or working as President Trump's press secretary'
The Monty Python alumnus discusses playing the author of his favourite novel – and why Vanity Fair's protagonist is a heroine for modern times
The ghost of William Makepeace Thackeray still stalks the grand saloon of the Reform Club in London’s Pall Mall, where he spent many of the last days of his life. His huge portrait in the Strangers’ Room is staring down now at Michael Palin, who plays him in the new ITV production of his 1848 novel Vanity Fair, and who has come to pay his respects. Palin is impressed. Thackeray isn’t. The great Victorian writer’s expression of amused contempt, understandably enough, doesn’t change. Palin, a fan for 50 years, worries that he doesn’t look very much like him. It strikes us both, in fact, that Thackeray is the spitting image, a dead ringer, of the erstwhile Brexit secretary, David Davis. Suddenly Vanity Fair leaps out into the 21st century. Its cast of characters, whether venal and scheming, or dopey and entitled, and the way their lives play out in a never-ending fair in a town called Vanity, seems shockingly modern. That’s satire for you. Meet the cast of Vanity Fair When does Vanity Fair begin on TV? Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter It’s a good place to bring the two together. Palin is no stranger to the Reform. The clock in the Morning Room is the start and finish line for Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, on which Palin’s famous travel series of the same name was loosely based. Verne’s hero, Phileas Fogg, made it just in time. So did Palin, but the club wouldn’t let him in. The papers said it was because he wasn’t wearing a tie, which wasn’t true (and anyway they keep spares in the porters’ lodge for just such eventualities). Apparently, it was because they thought he would “disturb the members” – which recalls, perhaps unfairly, the world of snobbery, class and social climbing that their celebrated former member satirised so wickedly. View oEmbed on the source website Vanity Fair is Palin’s favourite novel, or at least he said it was in his 1979 appearance on Desert Island Discs, when he chose it as the book he would take with him into shipwrecked exile. “Actually,” he says, “I didn’t tell [presenter] Roy Plomley this, but I’d never been able to finish it. It’s a hefty book and it goes off in all sorts of wonderful directions. You can’t rush it, really. I just thought the desert island would give me a chance to read it through to the end.” Now he plays Thackeray “as a kind of fairground barker”, opening each episode, setting the scene and coming to engagingly unreliable conclusions about what’s been happening to the characters he has created. “Gwyneth Hughes, who’s adapted the book for television, wanted the author’s voice at the beginning. He’s the puppet master, putting his dolls on the stage and declaring what Vanity Fair is all about.” What it’s about, he tells us, is “a world where everybody is striving for what is not worth having”. He looks Victorian, with his frock coat and top hat, but sounds postmodern. Even the setting fused the two worlds. It was filmed in Syon Park – just across the river from Kew Gardens – in west London, under the Heathrow flight path. As they capered in their costumes, jets thundered overhead. “They were very low, and noisy. We just had to time it to the second. In an odd sort of way it seemed appropriate.” It was all very last minute for Palin. “Gwyneth said come in and do that line, so I went, did my bit as per the script and suddenly they wanted me in the rest of the series. There was no time to learn the words; I had to read them off cue cards. At four in the afternoon I wasn’t in Vanity Fair; at four the next morning I was in every episode. It was a manic night. Exhilarating!” It’s the mischief and the energy in this sprawling book, set in the time of the Napoleonic Wars, that Palin loves. And the central character, Becky Sharp (played by Olivia Cooke), the penniless but beautiful and clever young woman who weaponises her talents to make her way in a class-ridden and male-dominated world. “She’s so immoral, so calculating, so wilful and cruel – so attractive, in a way. It’s how she plays all the people she meets, strings them along; it’s thoroughly entertaining. There’s no character in literature who’s quite like her.” The subtitle of the first editions of Vanity Fair was A Novel without a Hero. Palin is unsure whether Becky will seem more heroic to the #MeToo generation than the Victorians, who were shocked by her. “She’s a tough woman, not afraid to speak her mind. It’s great that [in the book] women are as devious and villainous as men – but there’s no getting away from the fact she’s really cruel to those around her. Her ambition and unscrupulousness do seem contemporary, but Palin thinks a 21st-century Becky Sharp would take a different route to status and wealth. “Women can take centre stage as themselves now. Maybe she’d be on Love Island? But she’s clever. She’d realise the real money is in the City, the enormous amounts that people can make for doing very little. She would probably end up running a hedge fund. She would make some colossal investment that would collapse and then become President Trump’s press secretary.” He sees parallels everywhere. The way Thackeray throws so many storylines into Vanity Fair “reminds me of the Monty Python days,” says Palin. “We’d say: ‘Is that idea going to work? Well, let’s just chuck it in and see.’” The characters, drawn to the point of caricature, seem to him strikingly like the political world today. Nobody emerges from Vanity Fair with much credit, but Thackeray keeps his deepest contempt for the aristocracy, whom he ridicules as buffoons and gives ludicrous names, such as Lord Tapeworm. “It’s a rather modern attitude,” Palin says. “You can see how Peter Cook and Spitting Image did exactly what Thackeray was doing, 150 years before. I was brought up on The Beano and I think most of the politicians around at the moment could have had a twopage spread in it. You’ve got Lord Snooty, we know who that is… [I assume Jacob ReesMogg]. You’ve got Biffo Boris, and Theresa in there somewhere… All so ripe for caricature.” He worries, in his mild-mannered way, about how satire and comedy are going, generally. He was politely annoyed by the BBC’s comedy commissioner, Shane Allen, who recently said, when talking about next year’s 50th anniversary of Monty Python, “if you’re going to assemble a team now, it’s not going to be six Oxbridge white blokes”. “It’s been 50 years,” says Palin. “Talk about beating us up when we’re down. He was obviously manoeuvred into saying something silly. What does he mean? If you’ve had a good education and you’re white you’re not able to write comedy? “What are they going to say? ‘Oh God! The man who wrote that’s an Etonian.’ ‘But it’s hilarious.’ ‘It’s no good, he’s an Etonian!’” At least, he says, the BBC’s attitude to Monty Python has been consistent. “They didn’t want it in the beginning and put it out late at night when they thought nobody was watching. It’s known all over the world yet they still find it difficult to deal with. Great. Far rather that than a pat on the head and our busts in bronze in the BH [Broadcasting House, the BBC’s London office] foyer.” View oEmbed on the source website Times have changed, he says. “Then, a couple of people liked what we did and gave us 13 shows. There were no conditions. Nobody said, ‘Can we see a script?’ Now it has to go through half-a-dozen stages. They want to know what you’re writing about, how long it will take, how much it will cost. It has to be checked for political correctness, ‘compliance’, ‘diversity’. It’s much more controlled.” He keeps in touch with the surviving Pythons. They did a roadshow in 2014, Monty Python Live (Mostly), incorporating the voice and images of Graham Chapman, who died of cancer in 1989. “When we got up on stage it was as if we were all 29 again. But that’s it, I think. I’m glad it’s the last thing the Pythons will do.” Terry Jones had trouble remembering his lines during the tour, and has since been diagnosed with a form of dementia. “He’s the one I see most,” says Palin. “He can’t communicate his thoughts any more. It’s sad. I’m very fond of him and I enjoy going there and hanging out. Occasionally things click and we can understand each other.” Terry Gilliam “comes crashing in now and again. Terrific manic energy; he’s the Don Quixote of our times, forever charging at windmills.” John Cleese’s recent decision to emigrate didn’t surprise Palin. “He’s always emigrating, looking for the perfect place to live the perfect life. He laughs at me travelling the world but he’s become a nomad himself. He’ll be back.” Travel still excites him. He’s just been filming in North Korea: “Vanity Fair, in a way, at least for the leaders. It wasn’t as grim or as dangerous as I feared. The regime is impenetrable but we got glimpses of life there.” There are parts of the world he has yet to see. He wants to go to central Asia, to the “Stans”, and ride a little pony across the plains. “They’re fascinating countries in their own right, but so much of our history begins with an invasion from the steppes.” There are also favourite places he wants to go back to. A canyon in Peru, above the rapids in the headwaters of the Amazon, called Pongo de Mainique – “absolute peace, with every vision of nature around” – and, more prosaically, the west coast of Scotland: “Very wild, but very accessible. Besides, I like the Scots.” He’s 75 now and doesn’t plan for the future. But he never has. “There’s no scheme. I’ve always relished being able to do lots of different things. I get bored very quickly. I want to be open to every opportunity. Just like Becky Sharp, come to think of it. Vanity Fair will begin airing on ITV on Sunday 2nd September at 9pm with episode two on at 9pm on Monday 3rd September. It is will continue broadcasting the rest of its series (episodes three to seven) on Sunday evenings View oEmbed on the source website
‘The line between privacy and free expression can't be left to single judges’ - Michael Buerk on the BBC Cliff Richard verdict
The former BBC newsreader says that the "legal no-man’s land" between the right to privacy and right to freedom of expression must be fixed
There was a time, not so very long ago, when “scoop” was a dirty word at the BBC. The ideal news story was “high fibre” – serious, significant and reassuringly dull. To be seen reading the Daily Mail was career death and editorial meetings were like Oxford tutorials, with executives wrestling over whether there was an ellipsis in the semiotics (no, me neither). To be first with the odd foreign famine was OK, but nothing to shout about. A princess dishing the dirt on a royal marriage very worrying indeed, but luckily we got away with it. Sir Cliff Richard wins damages in privacy case against the BBC Stay up to date with the RadioTimes.com newsletter Not so now. The judge in the Sir Cliff Richard case castigated the BBC for “breathless sensationalism” in its coverage of the raid on his Berkshire home in 2014. And if you read the emails between the BBC newsdesk and its correspondents – the “jubilation” at getting the “money shot” (from a helicopter of police breaking into the flat) and the joshing about whether it was Cliff or Elvis who did Jailhouse Rock – you can see his point. I sympathise, though. Journalism is not the priesthood, even at the BBC. It’s a hard, competitive business. The average age of the ten o’clock News audience is now in the 60s. The young are too busy on Twitter talking about Love Island, and everybody has to shout louder to get heard. Cliff Richard says he “won’t go anywhere near children” now after televised police raid and BBC privacy case I’m pleased that the juices are still flowing at an organisation that can often look flatulent, bureaucratic and complacent. Great that the newsroom can still “go bananas” over a “cracking story” – even if it wasn’t. Nobody comes out of it very well. The BBC reporter got a genuine scoop, at the height of the hysteria over Jimmy Savile. Difficult to say it was not in the public interest or, as the law stood, that it was wrong to name a suspect before it could reasonably be expected he would be charged, however famous he might be. But the way the BBC almost blackmailed the South Yorkshire police into co-operating doesn’t look great. And neither does the schoolboy glee. Now it has to find £850,000 to cover Cliff ’s legal costs and £210,000 in damages – although at the time of going to press the BBC was deciding whether or not to go to the Court of Appeal. But that would put yet more license fee payers’ money at risk. Not god. The police look naive. The South Yorkshire detective superintendent in charge said they had “no option but to co-operate”. How about saying “OK, what happens if you go on TV saying we’re going to raid his home - and we don’t. How much of a tosser are you going to look?” But what does this mean for the rest of us? There’s a legal no-man’s land in the 1998 Human Rights Act between the right of privacy and right to free expression. The result is that the law is being made, and the freedom of the press redefined, by single judges. View oEmbed on the source website This is potentially damaging. We have too much secrecy as it is. The world has changed, even if judges haven’t noticed. In the cacophony of social media everything is everywhere anyway, suspects would be named almost instantly, however much you bind the steam-age media limping along behind. The line between privacy and freedom is one of the most important decisions a civilised society has to make. It’s time it was drawn by parliament and not left to be worked out piecemeal by judges on the basis of individual cases. The other question is: should the police be investing so much effort investigating historical sex allegations, sometimes against dead people. Recent crime figures showed killings, knife and gun violence rising sharply. The murder rate in London recently overtook New York’s. In only one in ten recorded cases is anybody charged. They’ve got better things to do.
Stanley Johnson talks I'm a Celebrity, growing old disgracefully – and whether son Boris will make Prime Minister
The Real Marigold Hotel star Stanley Johnson still has high hopes for his politician son – but he’s not about to give up on his own ambitions just yet...
Stanley Johnson and his eldest child are fast becoming the most famous father-and-son act since Oedipus; played as comedy, of course, rather than tragedy. You can’t switch on the television without catching the younger one on the news, and the older one on pretty much all the rest of what passes for programming these days. They’re both so ubiquitous they no longer need their surname. There is only one Boris, and the only other Stanley is a knife. Johnson senior may be 77 now but, of the two, he’s in better shape. He brushes that ridiculously luxuriant family fair hair, for a start. And the plus side of the torture chambers of reality television, as I know myself, is that being starved is just dieting under duress. He lost eight kilos in the jungle [doing I’m a Celebrity! Get Me Out of Here… in 2017] and is keen to keep it off. View oEmbed on the source website Greedy bankers, women’s rights… The politics in Poldark are as relevant as ever The best documentaries to watch on Netflix Boris Johnson should take a break from politics and do I’m A Celebrity says dad Stanley Johnson When we meet for lunch at the Garrick, the finest gentleman’s club in London and the world headquarters of bibulous bufferdom, he causes a sensation by asking for a straight soda water. The clatter is the sound of monocles falling on to the parquet floor; the dull thud is the waitress, who’s fainted. Stanley has packed a lot into 77 years. Trainee spy, international civil servant, politician, author, environmental campaigner, now reality TV star and, as one downmarket newspaper put it, “the toff among the tarts”. He absolutely loves it, glories in it, and wants to keep on going – for ever, if possible. His energy and enthusiasm are, frankly, exhausting to watch. “If you’re going to hit the buffers – and we all are,” he says, looking at me meaningfully over his soda water and my large sauvignon blanc, “you may as well hit them at full speed!” All of which might have caused a bit of a problem with his latest venture into reality TV, The Real Marigold Hotel. After all, the conceit of the series, churning along in the wake of the successful feature films, is to take a bunch of semi-cherished oldies out to India in search of an exotically different kind of retirement – and retirement is absolutely the last thing on his mind. He quotes at length from Tennyson’s Ulysses – I forgot to mention he’s a poet, too – and says his ambition is: To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the Western stars, until I die. “Old Tennyson had it right,” he says. “You’ve got to bloody well keep going". You have to give it him to come out with this stuff on one glass of soda water. I looked it up afterwards and found Tennyson was nearly two centuries ahead of his time and had neatly skewered the nature of Stanley’s 21st-century television fame in the same poem. I am become a name; For always roaming with a hungry heart. Stanley is enough of an old reality hand not to get too carried away about a programme until he’s actually seen it. After all, you can spend weeks not realising you are coming across as a petulant, self-centred jerk – or them doing it for you in the cutting room. But he obviously had a good time and he can’t stop his enthusiasm going into hyper-drive. “It was totally wonderful,” he says. “I absolutely loved it.” A lot of this was down to the company of “some stylish ladies”, including the former newscaster Selina Scott and the actresses Susan George and Stephanie Beacham. Stanley, a self-confessed ladies’ man – “in the nicest possible way” – was evidently in his element. By happy coincidence the “very, very stylish ladies” shared his interest in animal welfare. Stanley has a bee in his bonnet about animals – in fact, bees are possibly the only animals he’s not energetically campaigning to preserve. He and Scott spent a lot of time talking about goats, apparently. The other attraction was retracing a famous journey he made with an Oxford fellow student, Tim Severin, and a cameraman, Michael de Larrabeiti, when he was an undergraduate in 1961. The three of them borrowed a couple of BSA Shooting Star motorbikes with sidecars and, with a total budget of £200, set off in the steps of Marco Polo and his 13th-century journey to far-off Cathay. It was a heroic shambles from the start. “As soon as we got to France we realised the sidecars were on the wrong side of the bikes. Didn’t give it a thought.” They never got to China. One sidecar fell off in Yugoslavia, the other in Turkey. They smashed up one of the bikes in what was then Persia and rode, three up, on the remaining bike for 2,500 miles, through the Khyber Pass and beyond. There’s a picture of them at the Gateway to India in Bombay. De Larrabeiti is on the luggage rack, Stanley steering – “I was the only one strong enough to hold the bike up.” Two are wearing helmets, but Stanley is bare-headed. “Everywhere we went in Afghanistan the tribesmen gave us mutton stew and the only thing we had to carry it in was my helmet.” The haystack of hair was probably protection enough. He looks back on his younger self and sighs. “The things you do when you’re young – now, you just think, ‘That was a bit brash’. “We had a picnic once on top of a giant statue of Buddha, spread out on its head, 165 feet above the ground overlooking this amazing valley.” He pauses. “Christ, did we really behave like that in the 60s?” Severin wrote a book about their adventures, Tracking Marco Polo, and went on to become a famous explorer and travel writer. Stanley became a spy. “Hush, hush. Officially the Foreign Office, but, you know, MI6 they call it now. The most intensive clandestine training known to man.” The only thing he can remember is re-tying his shoes a lot – “Best way to tell if anyone’s following you.” I say that explains why James Bond always wears lace-ups, and he smiles a secret smile. He never did get a licence to kill. He went off to the World Bank instead, got married and had Boris. He’s obviously hugely proud of him. “He’s an absolutely massive talent. He knows an enormous amount about a whole lot of things – not just Greek and Latin, though that’s part of it.” Though scrupulously supportive of Theresa May, he clearly expects his son will walk into Number Ten in the not-too-distant future. “A man who’s been Brackenbury Scholar at Balliol can surely handle being PM.” They seem close, in a reticent, upper-crust kind of way. Closer than he was to his parents, anyway. “I was packed off to boarding school at eight. My parents might reluctantly come down once a year to see me.” He and Boris don’t speak that often – but then, as he says, they don’t have to. “If Boris wants to know what I’m doing he only has to switch on the TV. If I want to know what he’s up to I just pick up the papers.” It doesn’t always work that way. He was possibly the last person to hear that Boris had resigned as Foreign Secretary. “I was in the Himalayas looking for snow leopards” – naturally, the way you do – “and didn’t find out until six days later when I got into Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, you know.” He thinks it was the right decision. “He couldn’t do anything else after saying that trying to sell the Chequers deal was like polishing a turd, and talk of Britain being a vassal state is fairly apt. Curiously, I had spent that week in pursuit of snow-leopard turds. Funny, that.” He doesn’t think Boris has necessarily blown his career. “It’s a mess. Anyone who came forward and said they would deliver a real Brexit would stand a very good chance of being heard in the country as a whole. Stop faffing. We are leaving. Full stop.” You can’t help feeling part of what drives Stanley in his late-septuagenarian frenzy for fame is to be known as more than “Boris’s dad”. When I ask him about his motivation, he comes up with some guff about how being well known helps his environmental campaigning, but quickly realises he’s sounding like a Miss World contestant. “I’ve written 25 books but there are no points for that these days. I walk down the street and people say, ‘Oh, hello, Stanley.’ Maybe it’s vanity, but it’s the most cheering thing.” His children [six in total] are “totally supportive and not in the least embarrassed” about his late-flowering television career. His wife, Jennifer (his second), rather less so. He didn’t ask her advice about doing I’m a Celebrity – “She’s very sniffy about the whole thing; she’d only have said, ‘On no account do it’.” Instead, he set off on a previously planned trip, telling her that if he didn’t come back she should look in her drawers – “No, not those kind of drawers” – for a clue… a note, apparently, that just said, “Put the television on”. Predictably, he “had a marvellous time – loved sitting around, and the trials were no worse than prep school.” He developed a “deep and meaningful relationship” with a dishy young blonde called Georgia Toffolo, known in the shallower reaches of television by the sobriquet Toff, who went on to win the series. How the producers must have hugged themselves. “Sweet girl. Went to Blundells. Not in the first rank of public schools, of course.” (Stanley went to Sherborne; Boris, famously, to Eton.) “Unbelievably, she turns out to be a supporter of the Conservative Party.” There’s a lesson here for Theresa May – and, perhaps, Boris – he thinks. “This reality TV stuff we were doing plays so well with the younger generation, and if the Tories need anything, it’s to attract the younger generation.” I had two thoughts as Stanley cast his diet aside and we ordered our first bottle of the Garrick Club claret. First, that perhaps the saviour of the Conservative Party might turn out to be Johnson senior, not Boris, after all. Second, how come in the jungle he got to pair up with the glamorous Toff and I ended up bonding with Edwina Currie? Fine woman, of course, but still… Life can seem unfair, sometimes. The Real Marigold Hotel first starts on Wednesday 1st August at 9:00pm on BBC1
David Walliams on Billionaire Boy, growing up... and on wanting to be remembered "for looking great in a bikini"
Is lavatory humour the key to happiness? Michael Buerk investigates...
Lavatories loom large in the life of David Walliams these days, which just goes to show how life shapes art, or at least how it’s always flush with comic possibilities. Not long ago, he coughed up for a house with a history in London. Noel Gallagher, of Oasis, used to throw wild Britpop parties there back in the 90s, but it had since passed into the rather more glamorous hands of former Hollyoaks actress Davinia Taylor. She also happens to be an heiress. Her dad made £150 million out of cheap toilet paper and is still known throughout the North as the “Bog Roll King of Skelmersdale”. Fast-forward to this Christmas. A centrepiece of the BBC1 schedules is an hour-long adaptation of Walliams’s bestselling children’s novel, Billionaire Boy. The plot revolves around the troubles of Joe Spud, the richest lad in the coun- try, whose life is being ruined by the vast fortune his father has made out of – you’re ahead of me here, I’m sure – toilet paper. “Bum Fresh” has taken the world by storm and bought Joe anything he’d ever wanted, except friends. It’s dark, funny and archly lavatorial; kids love it. It’s a morality tale, of course. Joe only finds happiness when he can put his money, er, behind him (it’s catching). You wondered how Walliams dreams up all this stuff; now you know. Walliams, 44, isn’t a billionaire himself – yet – but he’s well on the way. Little Britain, the comedy sketch show he wrote and performed with Matt Lucas, was hugely successful and their stage show, Little Britain Live, has played at the biggest arenas in the country. He’s the fey foil to Simon Cowell as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent. On top of that, he’s the fastest-selling children’s author in the land. He’s sold more than four million books, several of which have been turned, like Billionaire Boy, into television specials. I really liked him myself until the grandchildren wanted Gangsta Granny played for the 57th time on the school run and something inside me snapped. The way he tells it, it’s simple. You just have to think yourself back to your own childhood and what you would have liked to read. “Fortunately,” he says, “I am very immature. “They want funny stories,” he elaborates, “scary and a bit forbidden. Books you’d read under the covers with a torch, and maybe get into trouble for reading.” No wonder he is endlessly compared with Roald Dahl – “really flattering for me, not so flattering for him”. In the flesh, he’s groomed and glossy; immaculately barbered with shiny manicured nails, handmade-looking boots of Cordovan leather and the kind of understated gold watch that’s so breathtakingly expensive they tell you it’s not really for you, you’re keeping it in trust for your heirs. He’s easy, in a slightly wary way; thoughtful and very polite. He reckons there’s quite a bit of himself in Joe Spud. “Joe’s short, fat and unhappy,” he says. “I was tall, fat and unhappy.” At Reigate Grammar, a fee-paying school in Surrey, they called him Daphne, “because I was so effeminate. I felt very alone and isolated.” He learnt to turn it into a joke and then become part of it. “That way, I won.” His epiphany came when he was cast as a queen in a school operetta and got lots of laughs, he’s still not quite sure how. “I got this incredible feeling of power, and suddenly felt in control of something. I wanted that experience over and over again.” Much of his comedy involves the ambiguities of sex and for a long time the tabloids obsessed about how ambiguous his own sex life was. On the one hand there was his strenuous, and rather public, pursuit of a string of glamorous women followed by marriage to Lara Stone, a famously leggy Dutch model (they divorced earlier this year). On the other, he’s quoted as saying he’s “70 per cent straight”. In fact, he sees himself as camp, not gay, and when asked straight out if he could ever see himself in a serious relationship with a man, bluntly answers, “No.” Campery, as he calls it, has a rich tradition in Britain, from the music halls through the Carry On films right through to today’s chat-show hosts. “All of them are camp,” he says. “Graham Norton, Paul O’Grady, Alan Carr, even Jonathan Ross. He’s pretty camp, the other three are gay and camp. We like it because it’s playful and fun.” His particular hero – he calls him his “obsession” – is Frankie Howerd. He even played Howerd in the BBC4 drama Rather You Than Me. There are interesting parallels. Both changed their names to be more distinctive (Walliams was Williams; Howerd was Howard). Both pushed the boundaries of camp sexual innuendo to breaking point – though Howerd was a promiscuous homosexual; he even groped me backstage at Comic Relief. Both fought long and hard against depression. Walliams has been diagnosed bipolar and has spoken of trying to hang himself aged 12, taking an overdose in his teens and slitting his wrists in his 30s. “Now, I have learnt a lot more how to recognise and pre-empt it; do things to distract myself,” he says. Nonetheless he caused a stir on Desert Island Discs in 2009 by choosing, as his “luxury”, a gun, telling host Kirsty Young, “If I really start hating it, I can shoot myself.” Back on the mainland, he’s busier than ever – reinventing the sketch show this Christmas for BBC1 with a new programme called Walliams and Friend, the friend being Joanna Lumley. They’ve been trying the sketches out in front of 50 people in the Hen and Chickens pub in Islington, north London. In the way out of the hotel where we’ve been talking we run into Barbara Windsor, the pocket-sized National Treasure and Carry On queen. It’s a sketch in itself. He’s huge – 6ft 4in. She’s smaller than tiny. They rush into a luvvie embrace that for a moment leaves him clutching empty air a few feet above her head and her hugging his kneecaps. Before he leaves I ask how he would best like to be remembered – meaning as a comedian or an author? “For looking great in a bikini.”
Righting a historic wrong: the real story of the mutiny on the Bounty
Michael Buerk tells the tale of the much maligned William Bligh and his perilous 3,600-mile journey across the pacific, now re-created for a Channel 4 documentary
William Bligh may well be the most maligned man in history. His name has become a byword for cruelty; a tyrant who drove the crew of his ship, HMS Bounty, to such despair that they were forced into the most famous of all mutinies. It’s almost complete nonsense. Bligh was no tyrant. Hot-tempered certainly, foul-mouthed occasionally – what naval officer wasn’t? But he was among the kindest and most considerate captains of his day. He was particularly decent towards Fletcher Christian, an attractive but weak man, whom he had befriended and sponsored but who repaid him by sending him to pretty much certain death. Ever since I was a boy who graduated from Treasure Island to Hornblower, I’ve been fascinated by the mutiny on the Bounty. It deserves its worldwide fame, but it should be for Bligh’s escape, one of the greatest maritime achievements of all time. And we’ve got the hero and the villain completely mixed up. View oEmbed on the source website Tahiti, in October, 1788, was a paradise that had only recently been discovered. The Bounty’s men had been banged up for nearly a year in a small wooden box that was stifling, squalid and damp. Bligh’s leadership had been the main reason they had survived terrible storms at Cape Horn. He kept them healthy as well as safe, priding himself on issuing hardly any punishments. Now they were surrounded by beauty, the people as much as the island. What must they have seemed like to the English sailors? Men who were mostly toothless, the majority of them pockmarked from endemic childhood smallpox, bow-legged, misshapen, scarred – and, despite Bligh’s best efforts, filthy and stinking as well. Tahiti was a sensuous and uninhibited society. The girls amazed and delighted the English sailors – and left Bligh aghast. He wondered in his log at the “uncommon ways they have of gratifying their beastly inclinations”. They had to stay five long, languorous months, collecting breadfruit plants the British government thought would make cheap food for slaves on the West Indian sugar plantations. It was a surly crew that said goodbye, probably for ever, to friends, lovers and, in some cases, unborn children. Admiral William Bligh, Captain of Bounty The atmosphere quickly soured. Bligh and Christian fell out. The flashpoint was ridiculously trivial. Somebody stole a couple of coconuts from a bag kept on deck. Christian was one of those Bligh accused of theft. There was an argument. But if the row was a storm, the Bounty was a teacup. So much so, Bligh invited Christian to dinner that evening. Christian, in a huff, refused. At dawn the following day, Bligh was woken in his tiny, windowless cabin by hands pressing down on him. Christian and three other seamen armed with pistols and cutlasses dragged him out of his cot and bound his hands behind his back. He kept shrieking “murder” at the top of his voice, as he was pushed up the stairway. Christian, who had spent the previous evening drinking, was wild and dishevelled, and kept poking Bligh with a bayonet. In the confusion, Bligh said to him: “Mr Christian, I have a wife and four children in England, and you have danced my children on your knee.” But the ship’s launch was swung over the side and the loyalists were ordered into it, far more than Christian had expected. At least four of those who wanted to go with their captain were forced to stay on board because there wasn’t room. They were pretty well bound to die. There were 19 men packed into the launch, which was only 23 feet long, and little more than six feet at its widest. Bligh seized in his cabin by mutineers They had managed to gather only minimal supplies – some bread, salted pork, a little rum, and water… enough to last that many people, on normal rations, just five days. The launch was so weighed down, the freeboard – the bit above the water – was just nine inches, the length of a man’s hand. Bligh sailed that overloaded little boat 3,618 miles. It took 48 days. It was a triumph of navigation, of seamanship, of pure leadership that has probably never been rivalled. And all the time he kept a detailed log, a journal of endurance that sometimes seems beyond belief. He first made for Tofua, the nearest island, hoping to supplement their supplies. But the islanders attacked them and beat the quartermaster to death before they could escape. Captain William Bligh being cast adrift Bligh decided – no more islands. Instead, he headed for the nearest European settlement, the Dutch East Indies, thousands of miles away. He set the ration – one ounce of bread and a quarter pint of water a day. He split the men into watches so that they could find a tiny amount of space in the impossibly overcrowded boat. Horribly soon they were in a violent sea, waves so high the launch floundered, becalmed in the troughs of their valleys. The men bailed nonstop, but the sea constantly threatened to swamp them. It went on like that for 24 days: endless downpours, numbing cold, the boat continually awash in the waves. Every so often, there were violent storms – thunder and prodigious lightning. All the time, they were bailing, bailing for their lives. The men had terrible cramps from not being able to stretch out. Because the sea was warmer than the air, Bligh got them to dip their clothes in it, wring them out and put them on again to warm up. He had no maps or charts. Just a quadrant and a compass, and a bit of rope they put knots in and slung over the side to gauge speed. 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. More storms. Even more suffering. All meticulously recorded in his log. “Our situation highly perilous… men half dead... Every person complained of violent pain in their bones.” It was nearly a month after they were cast adrift, when they reached the Barrier Reef and then the northern coast of what is now Australia. So exhausted and cramped, only half of them could get out of the boat to collapse on the sand. They found oysters and some berries, which made them violently ill. They coastal-hopped for four days to the northern tip of the continent. Then all that remained was 1,100 more miles of open water. The men were at the mortal limits of exhaustion when on 14 June the launch finally approached Kupang on the island of Timor. Their bodies were skin and bone, the limbs swollen, their wits stupid, their clothes rags. But they were alive. Thanks to Bligh’s careful management, there were still 11 days’ rations left. Bligh was lionised on his return. He died a vice-admiral after a chequered but eventful career. Some of the mutineers were caught, a few hanged. Christian died on Pitcairn Island where the mutineers’ descendants still live. It was his influential family – who were much better connected than any of the surviving crew – who started to blacken Bligh’s name and, after his death and memories of his achievements had faded, turned a hero into the villain he never was. Mutiny is on Monday 6th and Tuesday 7th March at 9:00pm on Channel 4
Joan Collins: “Everybody’s so incredibly ageist in this country!”
Michael Buerk dares to ask the starlet who never grew up about money, politics – and ageing
Joan Collins is not in the best of moods. Her London flat has been flooded and developers are turning Belgravia into Bedlam, according to her Twitter feed. She can’t go to her other home in New York, or the one in Hollywood, or even her villa outside St Tropez, because she has to plug her latest film, The Time of Their Lives. And that means she has to tolerate whippersnappers like me asking questions she thinks are either inane or unacceptable. Questions like, “Has age made you calmer?” “Certainly not. Not when my f***ing ceiling’s fallen down.” I should have known. I should have known not to chew the end of my glasses (she’s making me nervous). “Why are you doing that? Have you got an itchy mouth?” I should have known not to make much of her age, even though she’s nearly 84, and it’s the point of the movie we’re discussing. “Everybody’s so incredibly ageist in this country! Anyway, how old are you?” Seventy, as it happens. “What have you got that’s wrong with you?” Things aren’t going well and I’m heartbroken. The only other time we met she came hurtling across the baggage hall at Nice airport, pressed me to her bosom, and told me, breathily, how much she admired me. I nearly fainted. I was still trying to get pictures from the airport CCTV months afterwards. This time, I have invested in a selfie stick. I never get a chance to use it. She doesn’t look bad for a woman born on the very day Hitler took absolute power in Germany in 1933. I would never dare think that normally, let alone say it, but Dame Joan has made several fortunes out of still being considered glamorous after a quarter of a century as a pensioner. She’s sold 50 million books, container-loads of Timeless Beauty cosmetics, and whole warehouses of wigs – “now you can look gorgeous morning, noon and night”. Dynasty She’s dolled up to the nine-and-a-halfs, the raven hair is buoyantly bouffed, the trademark scarlet lips for the most part tight with disap proval. I would tell you more but I’m half-blinded by the light reflecting off her truly staggering amounts of jewellery. And, anyway, I’m too busy apologising for being here. She’s certainly glamorous, but it’s been a very long time since her mother had to hang a notice on her pram saying “Do Not Kiss”. The Rank starlet became a Hollywood beauty, then a brand and finally a phenomenon, well on her way to being the world’s first centenarian vamp. She’s good at playing divas. She’s at it again in The Time of Their Lives, playing Joan Collins, or at least an aged Hollywood star whose fading glamour is shored up with weapons-grade cosmetics, but whose spirit is undimmed. Her character, Helen, escapes from an old folks’ home to go to the funeral of an ex-husband with the help of a downtrodden frump called Priscilla (Pauline Collins – no relation – playing Shirley Valentine again). The film’s trying to press so many buttons it’s difficult to tell whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. It would be a road movie if it went anywhere; a feel-good film if it weren’t so busy pelting you with pathos. It will probably be a huge success – “oldies on the lam” plays well with my generation. I wonder aloud what drives her – “after all, you’re rich”. She bridles. “What’s rich?” she snaps. I would say four homes all worth several million, and a personal fortune, according to the papers, of $30 million. If I had the nerve. “I’m not exactly rich, no. Rich, as Robert Wagner said to me, is having f***-you money. I don’t have that and I’ve a lifestyle to support.” As Fontaine in The Bitch I ask her if, like the character she plays, she might be looking for a last adventure? To squeeze a bit more out of life before the curtain comes down? “Is that a question? You’re bumbling! I am a big squeezer of life. I couldn’t squeeze more out than I do.” Five marriages and a romantic life delicately described as “vivid” probably proves her point. Desperate now, I turn to politics. She’s smart and opinionated, though when I say so she treats it as a slur. She’s said Donald Trump was an inspiration for her most famous character, Alexis in the 80s soap Dynasty. “Are you a fan of Trump?” “I don’t know.” She was, for a time, a very public supporter of Ukip, wrote articles advocating Brexit, and has been quoted as saying “this tiny island” is going to “sink into the sea because of immigration”. “Are you pleased with the way things are going in Britain?” “I don’t know.” I’ve been told I only have 40 minutes with Dame Joan but that’s beginning to feel like a fortnight. I ask her what she thinks about her father, who famously said she would be washed up at 23, now she’s still a star in her mid-80s. “I’ve done well.” It’s all down to exercise, she says, unbuttoning a fraction, and instructs me to do some “or you’ll be all bent over and won’t reach 80”. What exercises does she do? “I’m not going to tell you.” A decided chill falls on the room. Finally, I ask her how she would like to be remembered. “As somebody who gave a lot of people a lot of pleasure.” “Of course,” I say. And with that, 20 minutes early, the audience is over. The Time of Their Lives is in cinemas from 10 March
Inside the bizarre world of ITV's Judge Rinder
Rinder's daytime courtroom reality series is compulsive viewing, finds Michael Buerk – but why?
He is not, to put it mildly, straight out of the stiffly formal traditions of the English judiciary. Offhand, I can’t think of many courtroom judges who would lean forward from their lofty eminence to shrill at a defendant: “I can smell a liar like a fart in a lift!” Or sum up the character of another: “If you had been at the Last Supper, you would have asked for ketchup”. But this is Judge Robert Rinder, star of a reality courtroom series on ITV that’s proved an instant hit, who is now spawning other programmes to showcase his forensic talents and flouncing personality. Every afternoon, Judge Rinder lords it in a rather adenoidal, and extremely camp, way over a steady stream of the kind of lowlife inadequates who seem to have been bred specially for daytime television. In one way, it’s Jeremy Kyle set in a small-claims court. The litigants bring their grievances for him to settle, and much of the guilty fascination lies in the eye-openingly bizarre lives they lead and the mess they make of their relationships. But Judge Rinder – it rhymes with tinder, not grinder – is what makes the whole thing cult viewing. OK, he’s not a real judge. But he is a criminal barrister of some considerable repute for his age (42). And OK, he can be preening and petulant in the high-camp style that’s almost obligatory on daytime TV. But he is very smart indeed (which, without being unkind, is far from obligatory for daytime, believe me). And often very, very funny. View oEmbed on the source website His grip on each case seems total. His ability to summarise, simplify, condense, can be a joy to watch. The way he rips gaily through the stumbling obfuscations is thoroughly entertaining, if cruelly one-sided. The programme’s real USP, though, is that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and most of the people brought up before him are clearly complete idiots. “I don’t get a cheap thrill out of calling them idiots,” he says when we meet. “I never put it in those terms, by the way.” He does, in fact. All the time. He threw one poor sap out of court with: “I’m sorry. I can’t take any more of you, I’m afraid. I think you’re an absolute moron. Get out. Out! Grow up!” He concedes the point gracefully. “OK, but by that stage, I am just saying what everybody else is thinking!” He insists he is not a snob and makes much of his working-class connections in north London. In fact, his dad was, and still is, the driver of a black taxi. But his parents were divorced when he was very young and his mother got first a degree, then a career, and ended up running a publishing company. View oEmbed on the source website Robert Rinder’s boyhood experience was thoroughly upper-middle-class, albeit with grandparents who lived most of their lives in a council house. He went to a very selective grammar school – “About five million apply for each place” (understatement is not his style) – where he was, by his own admission, loathsome. “I was an appalling person to teach. At 14, I was pretty advanced. I would read all the books in a few minutes, and I was bored. It must have been awful for a teacher to have a bright boy who’s giving them his undivided indifference.” He did well in exams, which, he says, infuriated the teachers. “One, very memorably – perfectly reasonably in fact – told me: ‘I’m afraid you’ve got an A, but I absolutely hate you.’” Redemption came in the shape of Mrs Jackie Grice, an inspirational teacher at his sixth-form college. “For the first time I met somebody who authentically believed in me, who said, ‘You know, you are really clever.’” He spurned Oxford to follow in her footsteps to Manchester University to read politics and history, and ended up with the top double first – “It really wasn’t an effort.” For a long time he toyed with acting. He joined the National Youth Theatre at 14 alongside present-day stars such as Matt Lucas and David Walliams. But his acting career ended abruptly at university when he went to audition for a part alongside another student called Benedict Cumberbatch. “I though I’d done well, and then I saw him deliver exactly the same lines and it was so different. He had a fizz, a chemistry and an understanding of the text that you just knew was what the writer wanted it to sound like,” he recalls. He gave up the stage there and then, and took up debating instead. He and Cumberbatch became best mates. In 2013 the actor got himself ordained to officiate at Rinder’s open-air wedding in Ibiza to his husband, Seth Cummings. And Rinder was one of Cumberbatch’s three best men when he married Sophie Hunter last year. A brilliant record in inter-varsity debates and that stellar degree got him straight from university into a pupillage in barristers’ chambers, “which was super-unusual”. He loved criminal law. “You have to have a passion for it. In the first few years, especially, the pressure was overwhelming... Three cases in an afternoon, barely an hour to prepare, and you’re often paid less than a bus driver. But I sometimes felt like Miss World.” Not exactly Rumpole, then. He progressed to more serious cases, murder and complex fraud, but you sense the passion flagged. “You’re required to invest a lot of emotional capital and you can go bankrupt very quickly,” he says. “I still loved the law, but was much more excited by the idea of TV.” In his spare time (“One of the happy consequences of my brain is that I rarely sleep”) he toyed with television formats. It was while he was pitching to do an updated version of the 1970s drama series Crown Court for ITV that his new career happened by what he calls “an exquisite accident”. ITV wasn’t in the least bit interested in his idea, but the holy grail of daytime TV has been running in the United States for 20 years just waiting to be imitated. Judge Judy features a tough, retired family-court judge, Judy Sheindlin, adjudicating small-claims disputes in a simulated courtroom. It’s long been the highest-rated daytime show in America and earns its eponymous presenter $47 million a year. Judge Rinder is a faithful copy, right down to the flag and the gavel, which have no place in real British courts. Rinder’s style is different – flamboyantly exhibitionist rather than gritty – but the format is the same. The participants sign up to accept the judgement, fully and finally, and then submit themselves to his cross examination, his banter and the jokes only he is allowed to make. Among the more curious cases was a rather touching argument between two sisters over a loan, which took off when the lender said she wanted the money repaid so she could give her Chihuahua, Chi Chi, a “wedding to remember”. Chi Chi had already had a £6,000 hen party, complete with stretch limo and smoked-salmon canapés fed to her by a “butler in the buff”. Judge Rinder milked it, a baffled-looking Chi Chi in his arms, before briskly dismissing the pet-pampering as legally irrelevant and awarding the lender her full claim. Then there was the 74-year-old, toothless busker who put his mankini on upside down with shocking consequences including, it was alleged, depriving his fellow band members of prize money in a talent competition, for which they wanted compensation. The case, like the mankini, didn’t hold up – dismissed, slightly surprisingly, for lack of evidence. View oEmbed on the source website It’s a show, but Rinder says the law is spot on and there are life lessons to be learnt. Like getting things down in writing – “Never trust people, always trust paper. I’d marry a piece of paper if I could.” He seems oddly lacking in self-awareness. He says he’s not an intellectual snob – indeed, claims for a while that The Only Way Is Essex is as culturally significant as Don Giovanni. But he finished off one case with: “That’s what’s called a Pyrrhic victory. Look it up.” And another: “There’s a lovely phrase and, let me tell you, in Darlington they talk of little else. It’s called caveat emptor.” He also claims not to enjoy his courtroom superiority, even though he slaps people down with: “Shut up. This is my field. I am in my element. Ooh, I’m in heaven!” His new series, Judge Rinder’s Crime Stories, is cashing in on a renewed fascination with true-life crime, riding a wave of similar programmes on Netflix and elsewhere. “The public want to understand real cases, to come to a conclusion themselves. They’re perfectly capable. That’s why we have juries. “Crime drama is popular, but people want authenticity above all else these days,” he says. His new programme mixes old footage with re-enactments and interviews with those involved, all wrapped up with Judge Rinder’s take on it all. The first episode reprises the cases of Laura Davies, who was murdered by her boyfriend, and the acid attack on Andreas Christopheros. It’s unlikely the programmes will break much new ground. But they have the fascination of true crime, without the tedium of sitting through a real court case, or trying to piece the story together through gobbets of daily news. And Judge Rinder, of course, who may not be a real judge but is clever, unpredictable and outrageous. He says his legal colleagues like what he does or, at any rate, the “good ones do”, which neatly disposes of those that sneer. I wonder if he’d like to be a real judge one day? “Oooh, I’d look really good in ermine!” Judge Rinder's Crime Stories is on 2pm Monday-Friday on ITV.
The Crown writer Peter Morgan: how I get inside the mind of Queen Elizabeth II
Michael Buerk speaks to the man behind Netflix's new royal drama, and how he wrote the life story of the most private public person on Earth
Peter Morgan has spent the best part of a decade living with a woman that he’s never met, and hopes he never will. It’s a relationship between two shy people that looks set to result in the most expensive television series ever made; Britain’s leading contemporary screen dramatist chronicling the longest reign in our history. He’s imagined the private life of Queen Elizabeth II, the most public figure of our age. Morgan has a track record of plays, programmes and films about the real-life mighty brought low by their fatal flaws (President Nixon in Frost/Nixon, Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, football manager Brian Clough in The Damned United), which has seen him headily described as a Shakespeare for the TV age. His previous portrayals of the sovereign, in the film The Queen and The Audience on stage (both starring Helen Mirren), were showered in awards. Now he's doing it again with The Crown, a television drama for US streaming service Netflix. View oEmbed on the source website For him, the attraction of the monarchy is political, not personal. He says he wouldn’t have chosen to base a huge television project on “a woman of limited intelligence, inward-looking, quietly spoken, whose interests are sport and the countryside”. He sees her as a simple, ordinary person who came to the throne by accident (he calls the abdication of her uncle, Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, “a deviation”). “She would have much preferred the life of a solid English countrywoman, living with her dogs and breeding horses.” Instead, he says, she has spent her long adult life in history’s most amazing ringside seat. “Through her eyes, you can see the entire second half of the 20th century.” Alongside that, there’s the story of a royal family he sees almost as victims. “That’s the imprisonment of the institution. And the suffering of the family ripples out from the crown, inflicting profound abuse on people upon whom it’s assumed it only projects luxury. It’s a hideous thing for them,” he says, “but as a drama it’s got everything.” The result is The Crown, a ten-part series that follows the Queen from her marriage to Philip Mountbatten in 1947 to the resignation of her first Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, in 1955. Netflix, the American-owned internet streaming service, is releasing it on 4 November. A second series, about the next decade of her reign, is already in production. View oEmbed on the source website Netflix has spent $100 million on it so far and has an option on as many as four more series. It’s sumptuously filmed, in magnificent locations, with a stellar cast – Claire Foy (Anne Boleyn in the BBC’s Wolf Hall) plays the Queen, the former Doctor Who star, Matt Smith, is a dashing and edgy Prince Philip, and the American actor John Lithgow makes a convincing, if rather tall, Winston Churchill. The re-creation of fading imperial grandeur is immaculate. The 1940s pomp reeks of deference and cigarette smoke. This kind of authenticity is expensive. The then Princess Elizabeth paid for her wedding dress with ration coupons; the screen copy cost £30,000. It’s gold-plated British television at what it does best but, in this case, television seems to have left the British networks behind. Morgan had hoped the BBC would do it. But when they wavered, Netflix snatched his arm off. It was mostly luck, he says, but he’s almost pathologically modest, a slight, quietly spoken man with baby-wide eyes that hint of emotions close to the surface. His pitch to Netflix coincided with a huge expansion of its global subscription service, from 60 countries to more than 190; many of them Commonwealth countries to whom, as he puts it, “the Queen is their grandmother”. They were looking for a big series that wasn’t US-orientated and they had a $6 billion annual programme budget to burn. “Normally I’m greeted with a heavy-hearted sigh,” he says, “but I found I’d walked into a room with an idea that dovetailed perfectly with a company’s strategy. For the first time in my life I was in sync with a corporation’s avarice.” What he’s done is tell the story of a young married woman suddenly pitched onto the throne long before she had expected it to happen. Her father is, rather shockingly, shown coughing up blood at the beginning of the first episode. View oEmbed on the source website He had lung cancer but doctors, Morgan says, colluded to hide the seriousness of it so he could carry on with his duty. He died at 56, “an unnaturally short life for a Windsor – they go on for ever, for God’s sake”. In an instant, and largely unprepared, he says, the new Queen had to stop being Elizabeth Windsor and start being Elizabeth Regina, “like inviting another person into their marriage”. Claire Foy, pitch-perfect as the young Queen, brilliantly captures a sense of bewilderment behind an impassive mask of duty. For Prince Philip – “a more fascinating man than I’d ever imagined” – it was a disaster. “He had banked on another decade or more in the Navy,” Morgan says. Matt Smith plays him chafing under the restrictions of his new life as a consort; breaking out to become something of a playboy. “This is very, very, very tricky,” Morgan says. There are hints of liaisons in the series, but no more. “I’m trying to make them human beings but, at the same time, I’m aware that nobody has come forward and identified people with whom Prince Philip did or did not have affairs. I’m not going to be the one to do that. “I’m not a vindictive person. But I do want to shine a light on human frailty and heroism in equal measure.” He says the Prince is “a joy” to write. “He tries to contain his own complexity, but it just explodes. It’s uncontainable. His temperament can change on a dime. It makes him unpredictable and dangerous.” Other characters come across as simply tragic. Princess Margaret’s life, he says, is “a terrific story”. He reckons she was better suited to a conspicuous public role than her sister. “She was much more charismatic; a complete star who, when deprived of the opportunity to express that stardom, turned tragically inwards.” The Duke of Windsor, too. Commenting on events from resentful exile, he provides a waspishly sharp running commentary that might surprise those who’ve come to think of him as merely shallow and weak. “Have you read his letters?” Morgan asks, unusually animated. “They’re breathtaking: cruel and dazzling, insightful and mischievous. It’s all there. Great letter writer; lousy king.” I wonder how he knows what the Queen thinks. She’s spent a lifetime avoiding controversy, bottling her own opinions. “Yes,” he says, “I went into this thinking she was an empty vessel but realised you can tell what she thinks from what she hasn’t said and hasn’t done. “I suspect there’s a million times she curses under her breath. I imagine her natural sympathies are with the Commonwealth, rather than Europe, and one of the reasons the country was able to contemplate Brexit was because the grandmother of our nation thinks that way.” Morgan is far from certain he will chronicle the rest of her reign. He wants to see how the first two series go down with Netflix’s 80 million-plus subscribers. “If I’m going to spend the rest of my 50s in this monogamous relationship, I need to know it matters to people.” He hardly needs the money. Or the fame. He works, he says, for “validation”, but doesn’t explain other than to say it’s more than mere approval. You sense he’s become an admirer of the Queen, not for what she is, but for what she has done: for her stoicism, her sense of duty and her staying power. She’s still there in her 90s after 13 Prime Ministers, many of whom, as he puts it, “simply chucked in the towel, a confederation of quitters”. Will the Queen like the series? “Who knows? These are the most written-about, satirised, portrait-painted people in the world. What do they care?” I wonder if he’d like to meet the Queen (he has a CBE already, so a knighthood would be the next step). He’s horrified at the thought. “I hope never to meet her. I’ve spent so long thinking and writing about the woman it would feel unnatural and uncomfortable. I’d just be embarrassed." The Crown is available on Netflix from 4th November 2016
Meet Jacqueline Gold, the woman behind Ann Summers
She made sex toys and kinky lingerie mainstream and is now the inspiration for a new ITV drama, Brief Encounters
It hasn’t exactly been a sheltered life. But I’ve managed to stumble through seven decades without getting a handle – if that’s the right expression – on sex toys. Of course, for a public schoolboy growing up in middle England after the war, sex itself was just a distant rumour. Even now, having caught up after a late and shaky start, the precise purpose of these devices is mercifully hazy. And the idea of women-only parties where they are demonstrated and traded is a vision of hell; at least to those of us who try to fathom the female mind from the safety of the Garrick Club bar. Men lost their grip on erotica about the time they lost their grip on 10 Downing Street, though it’s surely one thing Margaret Thatcher can’t be blamed for. It was another woman who took its dirty raincoat off, shifted it out of the back streets into the suburban lounge and rebranded sleaze as sensuality. For women, not men. Jacqueline Gold, 55, built one of the fastest-growing empires in retail history out of naughty nighties and daffy dildos. She’s one of the richest women in the country. Some reports say she’s wealthier than the Queen; a fortune running into hundreds of millions, anyway. It’s Jacqueline Gold CBE these days. She has respect, if not quite the respectability she craves. And now she’s getting the ultimate accolade, not to mention marketing tool. An ITV drama, Brief Encounters, inspired by the early days of her business and the parties that swapped Tupperware for sex wear. Sex is the family business. Her father is David Gold, whose fortune was largely made out of what were once called “dirty magazines”. He cried when she was born because she wasn’t a boy who could inherit the business. She didn’t see much of him after her parents divorced when she was 12. Her father had come home one day and found her mother having sex with the cleaner’s son in the swimming pool, according to one of her autobiographies. Meeting Jacqueline now, glossy and groomed, guardedly charming in the steely sort of way that comes from being the boss of 10,000 people, it’s difficult to imagine her as what she describes as an “incredibly shy” teenager, a year behind the others at school. Her mother was extremely protective. Jacqueline wasn’t even allowed into the front garden at home and, when they went to the beach, her mother drew a circle around Jacqueline, literally a line in the sand, which she was forbidden to cross. But her mum was not protective when it mattered. Jacqueline says her mother’s lover sexually abused her for three years. Her mother did nothing to stop it and, she says, slapped her across the face when it became too obvious to be ignored. It might have ruined her life, at least warped her attitude to sex but, she says, she didn’t let it. “I’ve always been a survivor, and what happened to me I saw as cruelty, not sex. It was a matter of control, somebody else’s control over me. I wasn’t going to be a victim. It made me want to take control myself, to be successful. All through my life, I’ve been determined not to allow what’s happened to me to shape my future.” Her first job was work experience – “getting paid less than the tea lady” – in her dad’s business. He’d bought some sex shops that had gone bust. They were called Ann Summers after the former owner’s girlfriend. Jacqueline was skivvying in the mail order section when she had a flash of insight that made her fortune. One night she went along to a Tupperware-type party. “Some of the girls there knew I was working at Ann Summers. They said to me: ‘We want to buy sexy underwear and sex toys to spice up our marriages, but we don’t want to have to go into a sex shop.’ I saw an opportunity to empower women, the exact opposite to what had happened to me as a child.” At 21, she found herself pitching the idea to her father’s board of directors, half a dozen men, running a business completely targeted at men. It was a hard sell. “One of the directors threw his glasses onto the table in exasperation and said: ‘This is never going to work. Women just aren’t interested in sex.’ I thought, ‘That says more about your sex life than the real world.’ ” The directors eventually agreed to let her start on a small scale, and the rest is history. From a handful of organisers she built up to 500 in a few months: housewives earning money on commission and “having a good time”. The parties propelled a business that grew 20 per cent a year. Now there are 7,000 party organisers, 140 high-street stores and a thriving internet business. She reckons the nighties, knickers and sex novelties have so far been worth £1.5 billion to the British economy. Most profitable of all is a vibrator coyly called the Rampant Rabbit, which went stellar after a hop-on part in Sex in the City, and is reportedly selling two million a year. That’s rabbits for you. She has, she says, feminised the world of sexual pleasure. Where once the customers were all men, buying whips and masks and maids’ outfits in large sizes, 80 per cent are now women. Sex is clearly an area of mutual incomprehension. Men apparently like women in red underwear; women think men like them best in black but actually prefer white or pink. There – news you can use for Valentine’s Day. But she’s had her battles. Some local councils haven’t seen the dividing line she defends between her “good clean fun” stores and seedy Soho sex shops. When she opened a store in Dublin she got a bullet in the post (it’s now one of her most profitable shops). For a long time Jobcentres refused to take her advertisements for staff. There was sniffiness over her CBE. She’s won nearly every time. “I’m tenacious. I’m relentless. I will not be bullied.” She’s definitely not someone to cross. Though she claims not to be hard-nosed, her attitude to those who’ve “done wrong by me” is “concrete shoes and the nearest river. "I’m really not very good at forgiving.” Her not-so-private life has been a struggle, too. The abuse, a failed marriage, depression, affairs with unsuitable men and finally, in an off-on relationship with a man 17 years her junior, several rounds of IVF, all detailed in her bestselling books. If she’s ever had doubts about the business she’s in, she doesn’t admit it; she sees herself as a role model and her life story as an inspiration. And, she says, times have changed; people are harder to shock. The stores have changed, too. Edible nipple tassles and the Orgasmatron (don’t ask) are at the back now; the lingerie is almost mainstream. In her eyes, she’s redefined the business of sex, which is probably true. There are occupational hazards about her business. I doubt the boss of BP goes around with a bagful of “stallion pouches”, for instance. For the uninitiated, it’s a man’s G-string with the business end moulded into the shape of a horse’s muzzle. Plus there’s a button on the end, which, when pressed, neighs. British innovation at its best, of course, but an embarrassment in business class when someone throws their laptop on top of them and they all go off at once. Not that it threw Jacqueline Gold for a moment. If all you need is a toy rabbit to change the world, you take these things in your stride. Brief Encounters starts on Monday 4th July at 9pm on ITV
Michael Buerk on the pain and torture of I'm a Celebrity, what it was really like in the jungle— and why he's glad he did it
The news reader hated the thought of going on the show — but despite suffering sleep deprivation, starvation and isolation, he doesn't regret a thing...
Reality television is a parallel universe with its own laws, and the executive producer of I'm a Celebrity...came into my hotel room waving them like Moses coming down the mountain with God's commandments for the Israelites. She had more than ten, as it happens, and they weren't burnt into stone but typed up on a laminated sheet that she drew out of her handbag. I doubt that Moses blushed as much handing down his proscriptions to his chosen people as Becca Walker did reading out ITV’s to this chosen person. Behaviour that was banned (for being “inappropriate”, of course – nothing is actually wrong these days) included bullying, “nonconsensual touching”, masturbation (she seemed particularly concerned about that), homophobic language or attitudes and “category A” swear words (which include the f-word and the c-word). Later it turned out that the conversation of several of my campmates consisted of little else. It was all rather odd because it was made clear that there was “no problem” with nudity (“in a nonsexual context”), sexual behaviour “that is reciprocated”, and rudeness. The one thing they were adamant about was harming the wildlife: “You could be prosecuted.” I was in “lockdown” at the time, which is lockup with room service. As soon as I set foot in Australia, I was stripped of my phone, my iPad and my freedom. In the week or so before going into the jungle, I was chaperoned round the clock and forbidden to contact anybody. Ok, my prison was a luxury hotel, but in every other way it was very much like starting your stretch at Parkhurst; here's the uniform, put your belongings in this black sack, it's too late to say goodbye, we've cut off the phone to your room (and they had, too). The wooing had taken a long time. I wasn’t just reluctant, I was horrified at the very thought. But the curious thing was that the more I told them I thought they were manipulative, the show was juvenile, the contestants were bird-brained attention-seekers and the audience was a lumpen load of slack-jawed voyeurs, the more determined they seemed to become. They were charming. With beautiful manners. They reeled me in – slowly, slowly. I struggled. I’d seen this stuff and knew what it would mean: three weeks in the famous hamster cage for preening narcissists trying to remember where they had left their dignity. It was money that clinched it in the end, of course. They would have to pay a lot. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, they did. To be fair, I’m a Celebrity... is, by some distance, the most professionally produced, and even caring, of the reality shows. The ITV people were kindness itself, when they weren’t actually torturing me. The format works on techniques perfected by the Gestapo and the KGB. The “jungle” is part prison camp, part torture centre, part laboratory experiment in social anthropology; cruelty with its tongue in its cheek, staged at vast expense (and huge profit) for the amusement of millions. We had no idea about what was happening to us from one moment to the next. We knew nothing of the world outside the camp. We weren’t allowed to know the date or even the time of day. They had taken our watches away at the airport and the camera crews that surrounded us had theirs carefully covered over. We had nothing to read, nothing to write with, nothing to listen to or watch, nothing to distract us except ourselves. The whole idea was to leave us powerless and disoriented. They starved us – quite deliberately. The diet was a couple of mouthfuls of unseasoned rice and beans twice a day, with just boiled water to drink. I lost 8kg in three weeks. From time to time we were allowed small amounts of always exotic, mostly unpalatable other morsels if someone had done well in the “trials” and “challenges” (torture sessions dressed up as games). What made it worse was that the production crew – there were more than 700 of them – were fed like kings by, apparently superb, “location catering”. You could see them getting visibly fatter every time they took us off, ever thinner, to be ill-treated. At nights you could hear them belching and farting behind the papier-mâché cliffs that hemmed us in. We were interrogated by faceless men and women all the time. They pretended to be nice, and may indeed have been so – but even the Spanish Inquisition reckoned to be concerned about its victims. It went on deep into the small hours (as far as I could tell), and in no time at all a disembodied voice over the tannoy would be shouting: “Celebrities! It’s time to get up!” Sleep deprivation was part of the programme. Where are human rights when you need them? If we were treating serial killers like this, Jeremy Corbyn would have been demonstrating outside the prison gates years ago. We could give up, but not escape. One step outside our half-acre of rainforest, and shadowy ex-SAS men in full sniper camouflage would emerge from the trees and turn us back. They never spoke. We were taken off for our “trials” in blacked-out 4x4s, not allowed even a glimpse of the world outside. I only had myself to blame, of course, and it wasn’t all bad. The production team were decent and caring, the most politically correct of torturers. I bet the KGB never had to fill out a four-page health and safety checklist before attaching their electrodes to your private parts. And my campmates proved not to be the emotionally stunted gang of nuclear egos I had imagined. Some of us had actually done something, though it was all a long time ago and the rest of us couldn’t quite put our finger on it. It’s true that nobody would confuse us with a Mensa awayday, or even a pub quiz team. Spelling and counting were trials in themselves. Nobody knew who Edwina Currie was when she arrived among us, like the Holy Ghost with a shopping bag; still less that she had been one half of one of the most jaw-dropping, illicit love affairs of the 20th century. They might have found difficulty placing the other half, even though John Major later became prime minister. They were keen on sex (and football) all right, but (with the exception of Edwina) were somewhat adrift when it came to those kinds of current affairs. Nearly a year’s gone by now, and like many ghastly experiences it doesn’t seem so bad in retrospect. The nightmares have stopped and I may soon be able to do without counselling. I still don’t like reality television, though. It’s not real, for a start. If it isn’t actually false, it’s contrived and exaggerated. I’m a Celebrity... was pretty fair, on the whole, but the show’s success depends on banging up a very carefully chosen group of passingly recognisable oddballs, putting them under a dozen different kinds of pressure and then watching them squirm. The trick is to extract little narratives from the tedium between the acts of cruelty, to sharpen up a tiny flirtation or a passing spat with ruthless editing into something that will look like real-life soap opera. Maybe, as some say, they are modern-day morality tales. The enormous audience, including a surprisingly high proportion of the young, the bright and the educated, seems to relate what it sees to its own experiences and values, and comes to moral conclusions about human behaviour. Or maybe it’s just a good laugh at the expense of stuck-up “celebrities”. As for me, after half a century on television I’ve found myself famous overnight. For no good reason (which after all is the main qualification these days), I am, apparently, a “celebrity”. I have landed on Planet Fame – become something, someone, I have long affected to despise. Even worse, I am rather enjoying it. I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here begins on Sunday 15th of November on at 9pm on ITV
Is the tabloid TV star really the "biggest bitch in Britain"? Michael Buerk enters her moral maze to find out...
Truth to tell, I rather enjoyed Katie Hopkins. Right up to the moment she said – as near as dammit – she wished I was dead. It cast a pall, I don’t mind admitting. Honesty and candour are all very well about other people but a bit of a conversation stopper when you’re in the firing line yourself. You begin to see why – how can I put this? – not everybody regards her as a national treasure. We’d been getting on terribly well, I thought. She’s smart, funny; attractive, too, in a beaky sort of way. She’d been rattling on, saying out loud the kind of things the rest of us feel guilty even thinking. She giggled a lot. I did a fair bit of sniggering myself, looking around furtively to make sure nobody was noticing. Then I made the mistake of asking the obvious question about her latest television venture, If Katie Hopkins Ruled the World... I couldn’t not ask her: well, OK, what would she do if she did? “Right,” she said, saucer blue eyes looking me up and down, evidently seeing a problem to be solved. “We just have far too many old people.” Did I know that one in three NHS beds was being blocked by the elderly and demented? A third of our hospitals filled up by people who don’t even know they’re there? She’d soon put a stop to that. “It’s ridiculous to be living in a country where we can put dogs to sleep but not people.” Her solution? “Easy. Euthanasia vans – just like ice-cream vans – that would come to your home.” After they’d finished in the hospitals, presumably. “It would all be perfectly charming. They might even have a nice little tune they’d play. I mean this genuinely. I’m super-keen on euthanasia vans. We need to accept that just because medical advances mean we can live longer, it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.” I stuttered something about not being entirely with her on this. “Not with me on that? Is it because you’re old?” I told you she was smart. Smart enough to be making a fair old living being rude about people, quite often to their faces. It’s a strange career for a conformist convent schoolgirl, whose first ambition was to join the Diplomatic Corps. At school, she says, she just wanted to fit in and be liked. The nuns were strict and she loved it, right down to the regulation green polyester pants that had to be ironed into six-inch squares. “We should have more of that in life. Particularly if you’re thick, of course.” Wham. Her sense of superiority came early. “They split you into A and B streams, which was great because you knew you were with the bright ones and all the thick kids were in the B group. It was fine and super-efficient – I still think so. If you’re slow, go sit with the slow kids. None of this endless negotiation, discussion, ‘golden time’ nonsense you get in state schools these days.” Biff. She gave up the idea of being a diplomat, not because she felt she lacked the diplomatic skills, certainly not, but because she thought “it would be too louche. Too much offering round chocolates.” Instead, she went to Exeter University – “Sloane Central” – on an Army scholarship and then on to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. “I had a brilliant time. I loved the discipline, the hardship, the ruthlessness of it. We started with 30 in the girls’ platoon – no ridiculous faffing around with a quota of girls in each section. Only eight of the lumpy jumpers made it to the Passing Out Parade." Hopkins was one of them. But then she passed out at the Passing Out Parade and her dream of being the first female general was over in seconds. She’d been diagnosed with epilepsy at 19 and not told the Army. “I had a little seizure. Everybody else carried on marching and I just stood, stock still. They chucked me out. Fair enough. I’d lied.” She’s definitely not what she would call a whiner. She says the prognosis of her epilepsy has changed since those early “petits mals” but doesn’t say how. In an open letter to her children she’s said epilepsy “will get her in the end”. Making the most of the hand you’re dealt is her mantra. She joined a small business consultancy, which was bought by a bigger company, and ended up in Manhattan, married to the boss. “I knew bugger all about it, but I always say if you get the right qualities into kids, they’ll have sufficient bravado to bluff their way in, then succeed by just working harder than everybody else.” That all came to an end when her first husband walked off with his secretary the day after her second child was born and, she says, neither she nor the children have seen him since. Not for the first, or the last time, Hopkins was back to square one. She got a job “flogging the weather” – marketing the Met Office. It wasn’t very exciting. “The public sector combined with scientists added up to a stifling level of sheer dullness.” So she applied to go on The Apprentice in 2007 and, out of 10,000 applicants, got picked for the show. The rest is showbiz history. “I thought I was doing well. People would see this fairly smart girl, quite tough, didn’t cry, didn’t take any crap. I thought everybody else was doing that honest bit. But it was just me.” She went back to the Met Office... “And then, six months later, this show, this monster, came on air and the stuff really hit the fan. This character, me, this evil, white witch person, this vicious cow with her killer one-liners became the thing.” A double-page spread about her in the Daily Mail was headlined “The Biggest Bitch in Britain”. To be fair, it was written from the – understandably partial – perspective of her second husband’s ex-wife “who I knicked him from”. But her parents were “mortified”. “They believe the Daily Mail and they believed it was true. I was so sorry for them. They didn’t ask for any of this. They’re not that sort of people. They’re really quiet and they’ve got this super-brash daughter. They’re endlessly forgiving of a child who must be quite a disappointment.” But the ex-business consultant and soon-to- be ex-Met Office executive (they weren’t impressed, either) had spotted a gap in the market. “For a woman to say the kind of things I say, to be really blunt to people’s faces – like, you know, ‘I wouldn’t employ you, you’re fat and lazy,’ is really strange. Nobody had seen that before.” So, ever since, on ITV’s This Morning, in her column for The Sun, in documentaries and reality shows like Big Brother, she goes after her targets with a sledgehammer, “saying the things we no longer have the courage to say”. About fat people, for instance. “You’re fat because you eat too much and don’t do exercise. End of. My dream job would be to sit in the doctor’s surgery, ticking them off. ‘Get a grip, you fat b*****d. Stop eating and get out there and walk.’ ” Wallop. The real breakthrough was when she had a rant about kids with what she considers chavvy names like Tyler, Chardonnay, Chantelle, Storm and Hunter. She says she did research that showed those names cropped up all the time on the lists of defendants in the law courts and she wouldn’t let her children play with them. There were 14 million hits on YouTube in a weekend. “It resonated, whether you think the same or called your kid Tyler. It flew.” Kapow. Her attack on would-be migrants in The Sun certainly resonated. She called them “cockroaches”, not knowing, apparently, that was what the Hutus called the Tutsis before murdering them by the hundreds of thousands in the Rwandan genocide. Then, the next morning, a boat went down in the Mediterranean drowning dozens of refugees; a perfect storm, as she says. She’s not quite apologetic. “Would I change a couple of words in that column? Yes I would. Do I ever feel bad about the rest of what I say? No I don’t, actually. I feel I want to say more.” More than 300,000 people signed a petition calling on the editor of The Sun to sack her, which she thinks “is a good enough reason for him to say: ‘Not bloody likely!’ Well done, you lefties!” Splat. She insists she means everything she says; she's not just doing it for the money — a "reasonable salary" over the past ten years, "far more than I'm worth recently, thanks to Big Brother. “You genuinely have to hold these views or you’d get caught out. But if I mean it, think it, feel it – I do it.” She doesn’t mind the hatred, which is vitriolic on Twitter and other social media but not, she says, on the street, where she feels “buoyed up” by waves of public support. “The rest genuinely doesn’t matter. I can park it and walk away.” Neither is she worried about the impact on her children (girls aged 11 and ten, and a boy, six). “So kids come up at school and say their mum’s a t**t. They’re at an age when they see me as really cool. Is it going to get trickier? Did I get caught having sex in a field [the pictures were all over the tabloids]? When they’re 14 and I’m telling them to behave, will they look at me and say: ‘You two-faced cow’ – yes. It’s going to be difficult. I’ll just have to do what I do best – be super-honest.” She’s nicer, wittier, feistier in person than on the screen. Good company, too. If your name’s not Tyler. Or you’re not fat, or old, of course. What’s that noise? Whatever is an ice-cream van doing out in the street at this time of night? If Katie Hopkins Ruled the World begins on Thursday 6th August at 10.00pm on TLC , and Michael Buerk chairs The Moral Maze on Wednesdays at 8pm on Radio 4