Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2025-09-12T13:53:17.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Don't mention the BBC!
items: John Cleese hits out at the BBC for damaging comedy: “The British people deserve better than this”
items: Sir David Attenborough's stark warning in new Netflix documentary A Life on Our Planet: "It’s about saving ourselves"
items: How was They Shall Not Grow Old made? Peter Jackson reveals the extraordinary technology behind his First World War film
items: Vanity Fair's Michael Palin: 'Today Becky Sharp would be on Love Island – or working as President Trump's press secretary'
items: ‘The line between privacy and free expression can't be left to single judges’ - Michael Buerk on the BBC Cliff Richard verdict
items: Stanley Johnson talks I'm a Celebrity, growing old disgracefully – and whether son Boris will make Prime Minister
items: David Walliams on Billionaire Boy, growing up... and on wanting to be remembered "for looking great in a bikini"
items: Righting a historic wrong: the real story of the mutiny on the Bounty
items: Joan Collins: “Everybody’s so incredibly ageist in this country!”
items: Inside the bizarre world of ITV's Judge Rinder
items: The Crown writer Peter Morgan: how I get inside the mind of Queen Elizabeth II
items: Meet Jacqueline Gold, the woman behind Ann Summers
items: 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
items: When Michael Buerk met Katie Hopkins

Don't mention the BBC!
type: item
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: App
subject: App features
description: 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?
encoded: 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 looki…

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John Cleese hits out at the BBC for damaging comedy: “The British people deserve better than this”
type: item
date: 2025-09-08T23:01:02.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Comedy
subject: TV
subject: Magazine
description: 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?
encoded: 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…

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Sir David Attenborough's stark warning in new Netflix documentary A Life on Our Planet: "It’s about saving ourselves"
type: item
date: 2020-09-27T08:00:10.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Sir David Attenborough on the planet's future, his new Netflix documentary and why we must take action now.
encoded: 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 sup…

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How was They Shall Not Grow Old made? Peter Jackson reveals the extraordinary technology behind his First World War film
type: item
date: 2018-11-11T21:50:40.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The Oscar-winning Lord of the Rigs director explains how modern visual effects helped bring old WW1 footage back to life
encoded: 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 an…

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Vanity Fair's Michael Palin: 'Today Becky Sharp would be on Love Island – or working as President Trump's press secretary'
type: item
date: 2018-09-02T20:00:48.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The Monty Python alumnus discusses playing the author of his favourite novel – and why Vanity Fair's protagonist is a heroine for modern times
encoded: 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 s…

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‘The line between privacy and free expression can't be left to single judges’ - Michael Buerk on the BBC Cliff Richard verdict
type: item
date: 2018-08-04T07:00:53.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Current Affairs
subject: News
subject: TV
subject: BBC
description: 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
encoded: 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, howev…

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Stanley Johnson talks I'm a Celebrity, growing old disgracefully – and whether son Boris will make Prime Minister
type: item
date: 2018-08-01T16:00:34.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: Reality TV
subject: TV
description: 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...
encoded: 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…

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David Walliams on Billionaire Boy, growing up... and on wanting to be remembered "for looking great in a bikini"
type: item
date: 2017-04-15T08:00:00.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Comedy
subject: News
subject: TV
subject: Christmas
description: Is lavatory humour the key to happiness? Michael Buerk investigates...
encoded: 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’…

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Righting a historic wrong: the real story of the mutiny on the Bounty
type: item
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Documentaries
subject: News
subject: TV
description: 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
encoded: 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 foo…

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Joan Collins: “Everybody’s so incredibly ageist in this country!”
type: item
date: 2017-03-10T08:00:00.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Comedy
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Michael Buerk dares to ask the starlet who never grew up about money, politics – and ageing
encoded: 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…

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Inside the bizarre world of ITV's Judge Rinder
type: item
date: 2016-12-05T17:40:00.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Rinder's daytime courtroom reality series is compulsive viewing, finds Michael Buerk – but why?
encoded: 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 fa…

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The Crown writer Peter Morgan: how I get inside the mind of Queen Elizabeth II
type: item
date: 2016-11-06T07:00:00.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: 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
encoded: 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 the…

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Meet Jacqueline Gold, the woman behind Ann Summers
type: item
date: 2016-07-04T08:50:00.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: She made sex toys and kinky lingerie mainstream and is now the inspiration for a new ITV drama, Brief Encounters
encoded: 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 st…

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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
type: item
date: 2015-11-15T15:00:00.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: Reality TV
subject: TV
description: 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...
encoded: 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 l…

When Michael Buerk met Katie Hopkins
type: item
date: 2015-08-06T06:30:00.000Z
creator: Michael Buerk
subject: Entertainment
subject: News
subject: Reality TV
subject: TV
description: Is the tabloid TV star really the "biggest bitch in Britain"? Michael Buerk enters her moral maze to find out...
encoded: 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…