Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2025-11-25T10:15:13.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Amadeus stars Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe talk Mozart drama's 'woke' accusations and the "strange" power of conducting
items: Edith Bowman opens up about replacing Sound of Cinema legend Matthew Sweet: "I hope that it does bring people to Radio 3"
items: The naked truth
items: The art of noise
items: Can we fix it? Yes we can!
items: 'The smell, sound and heat would have seemed a miracle 200 years ago'
items: 'There's nothing like it in the world'
items: Nuts, water and no carbs
items: Attention! Mr Burton is back
items: Educating Yorkshire’s Mr Burton talks show’s return and modern teaching: “I don’t think AI is ever going to be able to replace human teachers”
items: 'The shadow of the book hung over us'
items: Murder he wrote
items: 'Pierce and I have real chemistry'
items: 'I don't see myself as an old person'
items: 'Acting is not a battle or ego game'
items: The Thursday Murder Club’s Celia Imrie on how the "shock" of losing Victoria Wood reminds her life is "precious"
items: Pierce Brosnan reveals he would reprise James Bond role in next 007 film: "Why not? It’s great entertainment"
items: The Thursday Murder Club’s Helen Mirren reveals "real chemistry" with co-star: "Pierce is my wonderful late discovery"
items: Richard Osman reveals whether The Thursday Murder Club film will impact writing the books
items: Ben Kingsley reveals he and the Thursday Murder Club co-star are "Laurel and Hardy" on set
items: Lest we forget
items: Sails and scales
items: 'I'm going to do what I like now'
items: Rob Brydon reveals surprise and disappointment after period drama role was cancelled after one season
items: The mods who rocked
items: 'Acting is an affliction'
items: Death Valley's Timothy Spall: 'I'm in my late 60s – I'm not yearning to play romantic scenes'
items: 'It's all music'
items: They're my babies!
items: The river dragons!

Amadeus stars Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe talk Mozart drama's 'woke' accusations and the "strange" power of conducting
type: item
date: 2025-11-24T17:01:30.000Z
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
subject: NOW
subject: Sky
description: Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe are bringing the composer's story to life with divine intervention – and stunt strawberries.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. To paraphrase 1980s Austrian pop singer Falco: “Amadeus, Amadeus, let me shock you, Amadeus”. That’s to say, Sky’s five-part series, which flits between concert theatre, Imperial palace and brothel, contains some very naughty scenes. One particular encounter, on top of a (literally) groaning buffet, may or may not be narratively essential, but it’s certainly sexually ingenious. Was that really a strawberry? I ask co-stars Will Sharpe and Paul Bettany. “Oh, yes,” says Sharpe. “A stunt strawberry,” adds Bettany. Based on Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play of the same name, Amadeus takes place in late 18th-century Vienna, where Antonio Salieri (Bettany) is court composer to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Joseph II. At the very height of his profession, the religiously devout Salieri is nonetheless plagued by one doubt: is he any good? As if to confirm his fears, along comes young genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Sharpe), who is escaping his overbearing father in Salzburg and intent on having a good time in the capital of the Habsburg Empire. Salieri is the one who kneels before the cross, the composer who dedicates himself to the Almighty. Yet it is Mozart, dedicated to orgies and wine, who writes music of divine beauty. Infuriated by God’s practical joke, Salieri sets out to secretly destroy Mozart. Both actors are called upon to conduct and play the piano. “Will did an extraordinary job with his piano playing,” says Bettany. “I was more obsessed with the conducting, and specifically conducting the Requiem. It was an amazing feeling. A strange feeling of power.” The Requiem Mass in D Minor, Mozart’s last work, is “exquisite” says Bettany, but is it actually coming from God? “Well, I had to believe it was,” says Sharpe. “There were occasionally mad things that happened during filming. We’d shoot a scene where Mozart mentions God in some way, and then the moment I say ‘God,’ there’s a huge thunderclap, lightning through the windo…

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Edith Bowman opens up about replacing Sound of Cinema legend Matthew Sweet: "I hope that it does bring people to Radio 3"
type: item
date: 2025-11-24T17:00:49.000Z
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: audio
subject: TV
subject: BBC Radio 3
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: Edith Bowman is now the voice of Radio 3's Sound of Cinema – and insists it's not dumbing down.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Sound of Cinema has a new voice. After 12 years, presenter Matthew Sweet, who devised the show and established it as a bastion of quirky enquiry, has left to be replaced by Edith Bowman. On the evidence of her first few shows, Bowman is less likely to wander down alleyways than Sweet. New features like Harmonising Hollywood and a playlist that, so far, prioritises music like the pulsing electro-scapes of Oppenheimer’s Ludwig Göransson, feel like a turn to the mainstream. “No, I don’t think that’s the case at all,” she objects vigorously. “It’s not a case of dumbing down something, if that’s what you’re implying. It’s about really showing the breadth of what’s out there. And that’s not always necessarily something classical. It can be much more contemporary.” Bowman has fronted Cinematic Sound-tracks at Radio 3 Unwind since 2024 and presents Soundtracking, a film and music podcast that attracts big names, like Steven Spielberg. After talking to him, Bowman says, “I burst into tears and went, ‘I’ve just spoken to Steven Spielberg!’” Now 50, Bowman was brought up in Anstruther on the Fife coast, where her parents had a hotel and, like many people, she discovered scored orchestral music through film. “My dad bought a projector and he ran this little film club on a Saturday morning,” she says. “I would sit with him, be his little assistant and make membership cards for people. He showed things like Bugsy Malone, but the John Williams suites for Star Wars, ET and Raiders of the Lost Ark are the ones that I really remember.” She went on to work at MTV, C4, Virgin Radio, Radio 1, Radio 2, 5Live and Radio 6 Music, her resilience overcoming several setbacks. “We can’t put someone with an accent like yours on the radio,” someone told her during work experience at Radio Forth. “I was swallowing back tears,” she says. “But then with each of these things you build a thicker skin.” Later, Bowman would be disappointed again when …

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The naked truth
type: item
subject: App
subject: App features
description: A new documentary unveils artist JMW Turner’s secret passion for erotic sketches – and how critics wanted to erase them from history
encoded: Add Turner – the Secret Sketchbooks to your watchlist Think of the 19th-century Romantic artist JMW Turner and three famous images force their way into your mind: the locomotive hurtling out of the mist in Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway; the swirl of grey, white and black in Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth and the wooden hulk of The Fighting Temeraire being towed to the shipbreakers by a funnelled steamer, voted Britain’s greatest painting in a BBC poll in 2005. You almost certainly won’t be thinking of the bottoms, boobs or other body parts that appear in Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks, a new BBC documentary that features Timothy Spall – who starred in Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner – Chris Packham, Rolling Stone and painter Ronnie Wood and Tracey Emin. As Emin says of the remarkable sketches: “There’s a shape that looks like an erect penis with veins. I mean, it’s really over the top. And then there’s a woman reclining with her legs slightly up and her feet crossed as if she’s in some frozen ecstasy.” This might not be the Turner you imagined, yet the erotic sketches, being seen for the first time on television, have always been there, lurking in the huge tranche of 37,000 sketches the artist left to the nation on his death aged 76 in 1851, along with almost 300 oil paintings, collectively known as the Turner Bequest. But when the erotic sketches were discovered, the effect was dismay. Victorian writer Frank Harris gasped, “The pudenda of women, utterly inexcusable.” Horrified art historian John Ruskin, until then Turner’s fervent supporter, wrote to the National Gallery, where the Bequest was initially kept, asking that the “obscene drawings” were burnt as they had been “assuredly drawn under a certain condition of insanity”. For Emin, Ruskin could hardly be more wrong. “There is nothing obscene that I’m looking at here,” she says of the luminous works. Ruskin, who famously failed to consummate his marriage to the pre-Raphaelite …

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The art of noise
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Oscar-winning composer Anne Dudley has lived her life in music, from classical to TV scores. But she knew to stay silent when Poldark took off his togs
encoded: New Music Show is on Radio 3 at 10.30pm on Saturday. Add it to your collection If the composer Anne Dudley has one regret it’s that Aidan Turner’s shirtless scything in Poldark, a scene that set the nation a-quiver and which she calls “one of the most famous moments in television” is almost entirely dialogue-free. That means it didn’t require her to write any extra score – a creative process that would have required multiple viewings. “So, I didn’t get to see it about 50 times,” she says, “like I usually do.” Otherwise, the 69-year-old has a lot to be happy about. She has provided music for many television shows and films as well as Poldark, including American History X, The Crying Game and The Full Monty, for which she won an Oscar. Other awards include two Brits, a Grammy and an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. These are remarkable achievements for a woman who came from an ordinary household in Plumstead in south London where she loved the soundtrack to the 1960s children’s series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, listened to her dad’s 78s – “He liked classical music with a tune and quite frankly, who doesn’t?” – and absorbed 60s and 70s pop on the radio. “I don’t want to sound like an old fogey going, ‘Pop music was much better in my day’, but the thing is, it’s true.” Now Dudley is receiving one of the greatest accolades that the British music industry can give, becoming the 33rd Ivors Academy Fellow and joining the ranks of Kate Bush, Sir Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Dame Judith Weir, Sir Paul McCartney and Sir James MacMillan. “Just to be mentioned in the same breath as those people is a huge honour,” she says. Dudley is being recognised for body of music that stretches from composing the shimmering 2022 cantata One Touch of Nature to arranging for Rod Stewart and Tina Turner. But her career began inauspiciously one night in the late 70s at Tiffany’s nightclub in Wimbledon when, fresh from the Royal College of Music, Dudley …

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Can we fix it? Yes we can!
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: A bespoke radio station is hammering preconceptions about builders — and filling a serious gap in the market
encoded: Hard hats on, hi-vis zipped up,” comes the portentous announcement. “The builders’ station on mornings means… the Bald Builders!” It’s 6.06 am and Fix Radio is kicking off the day with star presenters Brad and Sam, famous in the construction trade as the Bald Builders. Two men with shiny heads, beards and intricate arm tattoos, who deliver three hours of on-air geezerish good cheer to a comm-unity that needs it more than you might think. Poor old builders, so often the butt of jokes. They have builders’ bums and builders’ tea to put up with but also, more worryingly, tool theft, unpaid bills and, increasingly, mental health issues. No wonder they’ve formed a broadcasting huddle and now have their own station. Fix Radio was launched in 2017 in the London area by then 23-year-old Louis Timpany who, after leaving Leeds University, went to work on construction sites and noticed a gap in the market. Builders – as you’ll know if your neighbours are having a dormer window put in right now – listen to the radio all day. But where was the station directed at them, the station where companies that sell things to builders could access their market directly? Eight years on, Fix Radio broadcasts nationally and delivers ultra-focused advertising slots for builders’ merchant chains and van manufacturers, reaching more than 800,000 listeners a week. It’s a small but burgeoning broadcasting phenomenon and to find out more, I’ve joined Fix’s community of listeners, many of whom, if their messages to the station are to be believed, have names like Guys and Dolls characters. I’m thinking, particularly, of Mickey the Squeak, doing “second fix joinery” in Yorkshire. Perhaps Mickey was in the crowd at this year’s inaugural FixFest. The one-day music festival in West Sussex had the expected commercial linkups with power tool makers and trade suppliers but also offered vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free food stalls for hungry plumbers. Not quite what you imagined? Nor me, but, as Brad makes …

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'The smell, sound and heat would have seemed a miracle 200 years ago'
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Train enthusiast Petroc Trelawny can’t wait for Radio 3’s day-long celebration of locomotion — but, he warns Michael Hodges, don’t play music in his quiet carriage
encoded: Train Tracks is on from 7.30am, Saturday on Radio 3. Add it to your collection Petroc Trelawny’s scarlet neck scarf Station, closely followed by his rakish grey quiff and beaming face. “Isn’t it amazing!” the 54-year-old says as the green hulk of Eddystone, a West Country class locomotive built in 1946, shunts past us on the platform. RT is trainspotting with the Radio 3 presenter and he’s right; as JK Rowling, Hercule Poirot and Jenny Agutter all know, steam engines have immense evocative power. “I’m passionate about them,” says Trelawny when we retire, at his suggestion, to the station’s Clermont Hotel, a surviving example of the grand establish- ments that used to make rail travel so enticing if you could afford it. “The smell, the sound, the heat coming from the boiler; the idea of someone shovelling coal into this spitting oven that heats water and drives the train forward. All that would have seemed a miracle when the first passengers were taken across open country 200 years ago.” Trelawny is referring to the momentous day, 27 September 1825, when George Stephenson’s Stockton to Darlington route opened with a journey by a train pulled by Locomotion No 1, becoming Britain’s – and the world’s – first passenger railway service. That journey, along with the following 200 years of British train travel, will be marked by Radio 3 on Saturday with Train Tracks, a day-long celebration of the bicentenary of our railways, with a unique live broad- cast on London North Eastern Railway’s (LNER) Highland Chieftain express service, travelling from mountains to metropolis. This is not a steam service, but one pulled by an technology inspired by Japanese bullet trains. Trelawny begins broadcasting at 7.30am at Inverness, then continues on the 7.55 King’s Cross service, which will have a dedicated studio carriage. There will be live performances, radio premieres of works commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Unfolding Landscapes by Erland Cooper and All Change! b…

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'There's nothing like it in the world'
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Stepping down after 27 years and more than 1,000 episodes, Melvyn Bragg is leaving In Our Time behind – but what does the future hold for the veteran broadcaster?
encoded: Speaking to Melvyn Bragg the day after the announcement that he will be calling time on In Our Time, the much-celebrated Radio 4 ideas programme that he has presented since its creation in 1998, I don’t know whether to congratulate him on a sensational innings or plead that he reconsider. “I feel the same myself,” the 85-year-old broadcaster says. “But, one way or another, we’ve all got to go sometime. And I just thought, I’ll go now. I’ll go before I’m pushed, I suppose.” Hopefully, there were no plans to push Lord Bragg out. Certainly, Radio 4 controller Mohit Bakaya was lavish in his praise after Bragg announced his departure, saying, “His fierce intellect, coupled with a wonderful curiosity and extraordinary passion for knowledge, marks him out as one of the broadcasting greats.” Bakaya is right; Bragg’s show, where leading academics are brought together to discuss a wide spread of subjects – episodes have included explorations of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the evolution of crocodiles and Ovid’s Metamorphoses – in ways ordinary listeners can understand, is the epitome of the Reithian ideal. “So many people have written in, saying, ‘I went to a state school, I didn’t know this, I didn’t know that, but this is providing education,’” says Bragg. “I can’t tell you how pleased I am about that. It’s immeasurable; it’s worth my whole broadcasting career.” In Our Time has also offered the BBC much-needed credibility when it has often been accused of dumbing down. In an age of anti-science conspiracy theories on social media and campaigns against “experts”, it has been a counterbalance to the sidelining of genuine intellectual curiosity. “I hope so,” says Bragg. “Because that is disastrous, utterly stupid and destructive. It’s disappointing that quite a bit of our public life is ignorant – but we’re not ignorant.” Back in 1998, the BBC told Bragg – who had been obliged to leave his berth at Start the Week when he entered the House of Lords as a Labour peer – tha…

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Nuts, water and no carbs
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: British soprano Louise Alder reveals how she’s preparing to take command of the stage at the Last Night of the Proms
encoded: The Last Night of the Proms is on Saturday at 7pm on Radio 3. Add it to your collection Millions of radio ears and television eyes will be upon soprano Louise Alder when she sings Rule, Britannia! at the Last Night of the Proms this Saturday. A nerve-racking prospect for many, but when she walks on stage at the Royal Albert Hall, Alder’s focus will primarily be on mastering the enormous space. “You look out from the centre of that stage and it’s mind-blowing,” she says. “You’re singing into a chasm initially, so you must project. The Prommers are close, yet there are people far away, right up in the gallery.” The 38-year-old has previously sung West Side Story, Strauss and Mozart at the Proms, but her relationship with the world’s greatest classical music festival began dramatically in 2014. While on holiday in Thailand, she answered a phone call from Glyndebourne Festival Opera. They were taking Der Rosenkavalier to the Albert Hall, but the singer playing romantic lead Sophie had fallen ill; Alder was straight on the plane. “I made several debuts that night,” she recalls. “My company debut, Proms debut, London Philharmonic Orchestra debut and Radio 3 debut.” After that, I suggest, Alder must be used to big pressure moments at the venue. “I don’t think you get used to the Royal Albert Hall,” she points out firmly. “Not ever.” Her day will begin with a photo call and then last rehearsals. She’ll avoid heavy carbs – “they make you feel horrendous and sleepy after an hour and a half” – snacking on nuts instead and drinking a lot of water. “I drink all the time,” she says. “We singers have to go to the loo a lot.” After that it will be her, a sea of flags and a very public chance to shine. Alder, who won the audience prize at the Cardiff Singer of the World competition in 2017 and is the state school-educated daughter of a violinist mother and opera-singer father, was surprised when she got the Proms call. “I thought, ‘My God. I’m Louise, I grew up in Wimbledon. They’ve…

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Attention! Mr Burton is back
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Twelve years ago, inspirational teacher Matthew Burton became the breakout star of a reality TV series set in a Yorkshire school. Now he’s returning to teach pupils (and us) more valuable life lessons
encoded: Add Educating Yorkshire to your watchlist Remember when Yorkshire and its magnificent scenery took over British television? Our Yorkshire Farm, The Yorkshire Vet, Yorkshire this, Yorkshire that – a small-screen succession of wild moor, verdant dale and craggy coast. But the best show set in the county’s broad acres didn’t centre on spectacular vistas. Broadcast on Channel 4 in 2013, Educating Yorkshire was based at Thornhill Community Academy, a large secondary school on the edge of Dewsbury, not far from the M1, and it was the interactions – both good and bad – between staff and pupils rather than the scenery that caught the public imagination. The most memorable of those interactions took place when English teacher Matthew Burton helped Musharaf Asghar. The Year 11 student had suffered from a profound stammer since he was five and was obliged, as part of his English GCSE exam, to make a speech. Burton, the sort of resourceful and committed teacher that every child deserves, borrowed a trick from the film The King’s Speech, telling “Mushy” to listen to music as he tried to talk. It worked. Viewers gasped, and perhaps stifled a sob, as Asghar’s first faltering words came out. There were dramatic outcomes for Asghar, who went on to university where he studied journalism and is now a motivational speaker, but also for Burton. His wife Laura had suffered a miscarriage at the start of the year, just when the series was being filmed. “It was a difficult period,” he says. Nine months later, when the episode was screened, she was pregnant again with their first child, Liv. “We watched the last episode, when Musharaf was on, in the school hall after a parents’ evening. Laura was standing next to me feeling Liv kick in her tummy. Not long after Liv was born, I became a different kind of teacher, a different leader. It was an unbelievable end to what started as a difficult year. 2013 changed my life.” Now Educating Yorkshire is back, and so is Mr Burton. He’s talking to me to…

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Educating Yorkshire’s Mr Burton talks show’s return and modern teaching: “I don’t think AI is ever going to be able to replace human teachers”
type: item
date: 2025-08-25T23:01:16.000Z
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: Documentaries
subject: TV
subject: Channel 4
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: Twelve years ago, inspirational teacher Matthew Burton became the breakout star of a reality TV series set in a Yorkshire school. Now he’s returning to teach pupils (and us) more valuable life lessons.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Remember when Yorkshire and its magnificent scenery took over British television? Our Yorkshire Farm, The Yorkshire Vet, Yorkshire this, Yorkshire that – a small-screen succession of wild moor, verdant dale and craggy coast. But the best show set in the county’s broad acres didn’t centre on spectacular vistas. Broadcast on Channel 4 in 2013, Educating Yorkshire was based at Thornhill Community Academy, a large secondary school on the edge of Dewsbury, not far from the M1, and it was the interactions – both good and bad – between staff and pupils rather than the scenery that caught the public imagination. The most memorable of those interactions took place when English teacher Matthew Burton helped Musharaf Asghar. The Year 11 student had suffered from a profound stammer since he was five and was obliged, as part of his English GCSE exam, to make a speech. Burton, the sort of resourceful and committed teacher that every child deserves, borrowed a trick from the film The King’s Speech, telling “Mushy” to listen to music as he tried to talk. It worked. Viewers gasped, and perhaps stifled a sob, as Asghar’s first faltering words came out. There were dramatic outcomes for Asghar, who went on to university where he studied journalism and is now a motivational speaker, but also for Burton. His wife Laura had suffered a miscarriage at the start of the year, just when the series was being filmed. “It was a difficult period,” he says. Nine months later, when the episode was screened, she was pregnant again with their first child, Liv. “We watched the last episode, when Musharaf was on, in the school hall after a parents’ evening. Laura was standing next to me feeling Liv kick in her tummy. Not long after Liv was born, I became a different kind of teacher, a different leader. It was an unbelievable end to what started as a difficult year. 2013 changed my life.” Now Educating Yorkshire is back, and so is Mr Burton. He’s talki…

'The shadow of the book hung over us'
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Celia Imrie plays Joyce in The Thursday Murder Club
encoded: Add The Thursday Murder Club to your watchlist The Thursday Murder Club is immense fun to watch. Was it just as much fun to make? Chris Columbus’s most magical qualities are his enthusiasm and encouragement. What more do you want? So it was wonderfully carefree, in a way, but we did all have the shadow of a very popular book hanging over us. It’s going to be as near to it as dammit, but there are some avid readers who will probably be critical. Well, they might be, but actually I think it’s a very faithful representation. View oEmbed on the source website Were you surprised to get the part? When we were first cast, of course there were some people who didn’t approve, but that’s all right. Peculiarly, people had talked to me about it two years before, saying, “C, you really should go up for this.” I didn’t know anything about the books, so I was quite naive. But how lucky am I? With some parts that come my way now, the chances are I’m going to be in a wheelchair or have Alzheimer’s. I’m still running fast away from that department. So you’re not quite ready to book into Coopers Chase yourself, then? I still think I’m 26, you see, and I hope I’ve got all sorts of challenges ahead. For actors, giving up and retirement just don’t come into our vocabulary.Although I do look back over birthday parties I’ve had recently, and see some people aren’t here any more. I don’t let it hang too heavily. Victoria Wood [her co-star in dinnerladies] died when she was far too young. I had no idea she was ill, so it was a terrible shock. But it just makes me think we’ve got to make the most of every moment rather than it being a cloud over my head. Every day, every hour, is precious and has to be filled to the absolute brim. That’s how I feel now.

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Murder he wrote
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: He’s always felt 80, so creating senior citizen sleuths felt natural for author Richard Osman. Now Steven Spielberg is bringing them to the screen…
encoded: Add The Thursday Murder Club to your watchlist Final, irrefutable proof that the Thursday Murder Club belongs to the world and not just Richard Osman’s imagination came last summer. The author and television presenter watched as a helicopter landed by a stately home in Berkshire, then Steven Spielberg stepped out to greet him. “It was an absolute dream,” says Osman, still a little bewildered by this Hollywood turn of events. “I very rarely ask people for selfies, but I thought, ‘I can’t let this encounter pass without commemorating it.’” View oEmbed on the source website Spielberg was there on set as his film and TV company, Amblin Entertainment, is producing the screen adaptation. The book has been a worldwide success, but began as a very personal project for Osman. After being intrigued by his mother Brenda’s retirement village, the Pointless creator conceived his own version, Coopers Chase, a country estate given over to genteel living for the retired, where a quartet of senior citizen sleuths – the Murder Club of the title – initially investigate 1970s cold cases before finding themselves on the trail of an active killer. “I have spent more time with these characters than anyone in the entire world,” says Osman. “So the idea that anyone is playing them on screen is entirely absurd for me because they are so real – they exist in my heart.” Nonetheless, producer Spielberg and former Home Alone and Harry Potter director Chris Columbus went ahead and cast Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley as the novel’s lead characters – respectively, retired(ish) intelligence officer Elizabeth, nurse Joyce, trade unionist Ron and psychiatrist Ibrahim – with roles, too, for Richard E Grant, David Tennant and Jonathan Pryce. “When they told me who they had, I was blown away,” says Osman, though one choice was no surprise. “People had spent three years shouting ‘Helen Mirren’ at me in the street because they all wanted Helen to play Elizabeth.” If this all fee…

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'Pierce and I have real chemistry'
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Dame Helen Mirren plays Elizabeth in The Thursday Murder Club
encoded: Add The Thursday Murder Club to your watchlist Was making The Thursday Murder Club as much fun as it looks? It was a wonderful coming together of the tribe – one of those magical moments in a career. Ben and I started out together in the Royal Shakespeare Company, both ambitious and obsessed. Celia and I became really good friends on Calendar Girls [2003]. I didn’t know Pierce before making this and the Paramount+ series MobLand, but we both did street theatre before he went off and became a massive movie star with James Bond. There was a synchronicity. View oEmbed on the source website How did you and Pierce behave with each other on those two different shoots? They are totally different characters, but Pierce and I have a very similar way of working, which is serious without being too serious about ourselves. Neither of us is what you would call a method actor. We find a nice, comfortable seat to sit in with our scripts and just chill together. Pierce is my wonderful late discovery. I’d like to work with Pierce for the rest of my life. I feel that we have a real chemistry. Is sexual attraction a necessary part of that on-screen chemistry? There is a bit of that in there, but it’s never the whole thing. Strangely, people with great sexual attraction to each other off-screen can have absolutely nothing on-screen. It’s very weird. And people who really don’t like each other off-screen can have this amazing sexual attraction that the audience can perceive. I guess viewers misread the loathing that they have for each other in real life as a frisson of attraction. Is Elizabeth’s steeliness, as you portray her, protection against her fear of ageing? Possibly. Elizabeth’s loss of her dear friend in The Thursday Murder Club is intrinsic to the story and it’s heartbreaking. And as you get older, like me, you must confront these tragedies. They come in the most unexpected of ways: sometimes it’s not the person you expect to lose that you lose. You have no idea what’s coming …

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'I don't see myself as an old person'
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Pierce Brosnan plays Ron in The Thursday Murder Club
encoded: Add The Thursday Murder Club to your watchlist Do you enjoy playing a rebellious pensioner? When I read the scene where Ron is in the swimming pool with the ladies, I thought, “This is going to be nice. I get the joke. This is fun.” Then, when I got down to the set, I’ve got my dressing gown on and my silly shorts, and for some reason I was thinking there’d be lovely ladies in bikinis, and here I am with a dozen old girls and me as the old boy trying to ham it up. They gave me a rubber ring. I thought, “Oh, boy, all right. I’ll jump in the pool and act the goat.” Every day was a joy, because it was so well written. Each scene was a jewel. View oEmbed on the source website What kind of pensioner are you? When I got onto the set and everyone was white-haired – all these little cotton buds – I thought, ‘S**t!’ I don’t see myself as an old person, but I am an old man and there’s joy in that. The older you get, the freer you get, because mortality is circling the wagons. Within this story, there’s a lovely lyricism. These four people want to keep their minds active and they also deal with the death that will befall all of us. And it’s all wrapped up in a whodunnit. Do you worry about getting older, about dying? You hope and pray for courage for whenever that moment comes, so that you can carry yourself through it all. For now, I just greet each day with gratitude. Time past, time present, time future. That’s all it is. But I think it’s perfect timing for the books to be made into movies. There is such a great wealth of wisdom in the elderly community that we don’t pay enough respect to. Would you do Bond again — is it time for a senior citizen 007? My wife Keely [Shaye Smith] and I have been listening to the drumbeat of expectation of who’s going to be the next James Bond. There are many great candidates out there, and I’m sure they’re going to make it a spectacle of delight. I don’t think anyone wants to see a craggy, 72-year-old Bond, but if [next 007 director Denis] V…

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'Acting is not a battle or ego game'
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Sir Ben Kingsley plays Ibrahim in The Thursday Murder Club
encoded: Add The Thursday Murder Club to your watchlist How did you get this role? My agent told me Steven Spielberg was after me for a project; I’d said yes four times before he got to the end of the sentence. Then I heard Chris Columbus was directing and I was over the moon. I Googled him a million times to find out what the project was, but only at the very last stages of my being invited was I told it was The Thursday Murder Club. I hadn’t come across the book and I thought it was delightful. View oEmbed on the source website You’re 81 — is it pleasantly surprising when all the lead roles are played by senior citizens? From my perspective, it isn’t surprising because of my work in Shakespeare and then playing Gandhi going from his 20s to 80. That sweep of mortality, that sweep of our journey on this blessed Earth, is celebrated by including everything – even the darker side of getting older. I feel mortality should be ever present in any story that explores the human condition. Do egos and styles clash when big-name actors come together? No, ensemble pieces tap into the essential exercise of being an actor. Spencer Tracy, one of my heroes, said, “Make the other guy look good,” which is honestly the opposite of some of the garbage that’s pumped into students by acting coaches who say you have to “win the scene”. It’s not a battle or an ego game. At times the quartet on the screen broke into two duets, and Pierce and I became complementary forces – we gently refer to ourselves as Laurel and Hardy. That was a joyful discovery for both of us, I think. Ibrahim is the quietest of the four Murder Club sleuths — were you taken by him? I’m fond of him, and I admire him, because he only speaks when it’s essential. He’s kind and his ego is comfortably in the right place. But he knows he’s a very, very good psychiatrist. And, if I’m asked, I’d love to put on his bow tie again.

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The Thursday Murder Club’s Celia Imrie on how the "shock" of losing Victoria Wood reminds her life is "precious"
type: item
date: 2025-08-18T23:01:50.000Z
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: Movies
subject: Magazine
subject: Netflix
description: The Thursday Murder Club star is grabbing every opportunity that still comes her way.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. The Thursday Murder Club is immense fun to watch. Was it just as much fun to make? Chris Columbus’s most magical qualities are his enthusiasm and encouragement. What more do you want? So it was wonderfully carefree, in a way, but we did all have the shadow of a very popular book hanging over us. It’s going to be as near to it as dammit, but there are some avid readers who will probably be critical. Well, they might be, but actually I think it’s a very faithful representation. Were you surprised to get the part? When we were first cast, of course there were some people who didn’t approve, but that’s all right. Peculiarly, people had talked to me about it two years before, saying, “C, you really should go up for this.” I didn’t know anything about the books, so I was quite naive. But how lucky am I? With some parts that come my way now, the chances are I’m going to be in a wheelchair or have Alzheimer’s. I’m still running fast away from that department. So you’re not quite ready to book into Coopers Chase yourself, then? I still think I’m 26, you see, and I hope I’ve got all sorts of challenges ahead. For actors, giving up and retirement just don’t come into our vocabulary. Although I do look back over birthday parties I’ve had recently, and see some people aren’t here any more. I don’t let it hang too heavily. Victoria Wood [her co-star in dinnerladies] died when she was far too young. I had no idea she was ill, so it was a terrible shock. But it just makes me think we’ve got to make the most of every moment rather than it being a cloud over my head. Every day, every hour, is precious and has to be filled to the absolute brim. That’s how I feel now. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.

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Pierce Brosnan reveals he would reprise James Bond role in next 007 film: "Why not? It’s great entertainment"
type: item
date: 2025-08-18T23:01:50.000Z
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: Movies
subject: Magazine
subject: Netflix
description: The former James Bond star revelled in the chance to ham it up in The Thursday Murder Club.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Do you enjoy playing a rebellious pensioner? When I read the scene where Ron is in the swimming pool with the ladies, I thought, “This is going to be nice. I get the joke. This is fun.” Then, when I got down to the set, I’ve got my dressing gown on and my silly shorts, and for some reason I was thinking there’d be lovely ladies in bikinis, and here I am with a dozen old girls and me as the old boy trying to ham it up. They gave me a rubber ring. I thought, “Oh, boy, all right. I’ll jump in the pool and act the goat.” Every day was a joy, because it was so well written. Each scene was a jewel. What kind of pensioner are you? When I got onto the set and everyone was white-haired – all these little cotton buds – I thought, ‘S**t!’ I don’t see myself as an old person, but I am an old man and there’s joy in that. The older you get, the freer you get, because mortality is circling the wagons. Within this story, there’s a lovely lyricism. These four people want to keep their minds active and they also deal with the death that will befall all of us. And it’s all wrapped up in a whodunnit. Do you worry about getting older, about dying? You hope and pray for courage for whenever that moment comes, so that you can carry yourself through it all. For now, I just greet each day with gratitude. Time past, time present, time future. That’s all it is. But I think it’s perfect timing for the books to be made into movies. There is such a great wealth of wisdom in the elderly community that we don’t pay enough respect to. Would you do Bond again — is it time for a senior citizen 007? My wife Keely [Shaye Smith] and I have been listening to the drumbeat of expectation of who’s going to be the next James Bond. There are many great candidates out there, and I’m sure they’re going to make it a spectacle of delight. I don’t think anyone wants to see a craggy, 72-year-old Bond, but if [next 007 director Denis] Villeneuve had something up h…

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The Thursday Murder Club’s Helen Mirren reveals "real chemistry" with co-star: "Pierce is my wonderful late discovery"
type: item
date: 2025-08-18T23:01:29.000Z
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: Movies
subject: Magazine
subject: Netflix
description: Helen Mirren says that filming The Thursday Murder Club was a magical moment in her career.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Was making The Thursday Murder Club as much fun as it looks? It was a wonderful coming together of the tribe – one of those magical moments in a career. Ben and I started out together in the Royal Shakespeare Company, both ambitious and obsessed. Celia and I became really good friends on Calendar Girls [2003]. I didn’t know Pierce before making this and the Paramount+ series MobLand, but we both did street theatre before he went off and became a massive movie star with James Bond. There was a synchronicity. How did you and Pierce behave with each other on those two different shoots? They are totally different characters, but Pierce and I have a very similar way of working, which is serious without being too serious about ourselves. Neither of us is what you would call a method actor. We find a nice, comfortable seat to sit in with our scripts and just chill together. Pierce is my wonderful late discovery. I’d like to work with Pierce for the rest of my life. I feel that we have a real chemistry. Is sexual attraction a necessary part of that on-screen chemistry? There is a bit of that in there, but it’s never the whole thing. Strangely, people with great sexual attraction to each other off-screen can have absolutely nothing on-screen. It’s very weird. And people who really don’t like each other off- screen can have this amazing sexual attraction that the audience can perceive. I guess viewers misread the loathing that they have for each other in real life as a frisson of attraction. Is Elizabeth’s steeliness, as you portray her, protection against her fear of ageing? Possibly. Elizabeth’s loss of her dear friend in The Thursday Murder Club is intrinsic to the story and it’s heartbreaking. And as you get older, like me, you must confront these tragedies. They come in the most unexpected of ways: sometimes it’s not the person you expect to lose that you lose. You have no idea what’s coming down the line, but it’s get…

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Richard Osman reveals whether The Thursday Murder Club film will impact writing the books
type: item
date: 2025-08-18T23:01:16.000Z
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: Movies
subject: Magazine
subject: Netflix
description: He’s always felt 80, so creating senior citizen sleuths felt natural for author Richard Osman. Now Steven Spielberg is bringing them to the screen.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Final, irrefutable proof that the Thursday Murder Club belongs to the world and not just Richard Osman’s imagination came last summer. The author and television presenter watched as a helicopter landed by a stately home in Berkshire, then Steven Spielberg stepped out to greet him. “It was an absolute dream,” says Osman, still a little bewildered by this Hollywood turn of events. “I very rarely ask people for selfies, but I thought, ‘I can’t let this encounter pass without commemorating it.’” Spielberg was there on set as his film and TV company, Amblin Entertainment, is producing the screen adaptation. The book has been a worldwide success, but began as a very personal project for Osman. After being intrigued by his mother Brenda’s retirement village, the Pointless creator conceived his own version, Coopers Chase, a country estate given over to genteel living for the retired, where a quartet of senior citizen sleuths – the Murder Club of the title – initially investigate 1970s cold cases before finding themselves on the trail of an active killer. “I have spent more time with these characters than anyone in the entire world,” says Osman. “So the idea that anyone is playing them on screen is entirely absurd for me because they are so real – they exist in my heart.” Nonetheless, producer Spielberg and former Home Alone and Harry Potter director Chris Columbus went ahead and cast Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley as the novel’s lead characters – respectively, retired(ish) intelligence officer Elizabeth, nurse Joyce, trade unionist Ron and psychiatrist Ibrahim – with roles, too, for Richard E Grant, David Tennant and Jonathan Pryce. “When they told me who they had, I was blown away,” says Osman, though one choice was no surprise. “People had spent three years shouting ‘Helen Mirren’ at me in the street because they all wanted Helen to play Elizabeth.” If this all feels faintly unreal, then it’s…

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Ben Kingsley reveals he and the Thursday Murder Club co-star are "Laurel and Hardy" on set
type: item
date: 2025-08-18T23:01:09.000Z
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: Movies
subject: Magazine
subject: Netflix
description: Kingsley plays a psychiatrist in The Thursday Murder Club, but formed a classic comedy double act with co-star Pierce Brosnan.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. How did you get this role? My agent told me Steven Spielberg was after me for a project; I’d said yes four times before he got to the end of the sentence. Then I heard Chris Columbus was directing and I was over the moon. I Googled him a million times to find out what the project was, but only at the very last stages of my being invited was I told it was The Thursday Murder Club. I hadn’t come across the book and I thought it was delightful. You’re 81 — is it pleasantly surprising when all the lead roles are played by senior citizens? From my perspective, it isn’t surprising because of my work in Shakespeare and then playing Gandhi going from his 20s to 80. That sweep of mortality, that sweep of our journey on this blessed Earth, is celebrated by including everything – even the darker side of getting older. I feel mortality should be ever present in any story that explores the human condition. Do egos and styles clash when big-name actors come together? No, ensemble pieces tap into the essential exercise of being an actor. Spencer Tracy, one of my heroes, said, “Make the other guy look good,” which is honestly the opposite of some of the garbage that’s pumped into students by acting coaches who say you have to “win the scene”. It’s not a battle or an ego game. At times the quartet on the screen broke into two duets, and Pierce and I became complementary forces – we gently refer to ourselves as Laurel and Hardy. That was a joyful discovery for both of us, I think. Ibrahim is the quietest of the four Murder Club sleuths — were you taken by him? I’m fond of him, and I admire him, because he only speaks when it’s essential. He’s kind and his ego is comfortably in the right place. But he knows he’s a very, very good psychiatrist. And, if I’m asked, I’d love to put on his bow tie again. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Gu…

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height: 2656

Lest we forget
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: To mark the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, John Eskdale and other survivors share their harrowing memories of war and stories of hope
encoded: Add VJ Day 80: the Nation's Tribute and VJ Day: We Were There to your watchlist. On 15 August at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire a 100-year-old man in a blazer festooned with medals and wearing the Green Beret of the Royal Marines will stand to attention. John Eskdale will be part of the Royal British Legion’s marking of the 80th anniversary of VJ Day and the end of the Second World War. As the bugler plays, Eskdale’s thoughts will flick back through memories of blitzed-out streets, the terror of being on a sinking warship and walking through the radioactive remains of Japanese cities. In its sweep, tragedy and, occasionally, humour, Eskdale’s story is the story of Britain’s war. The Welshman was 15 when that war began. “I remember it vividly,” he says, when we meet at his Gloucestershire cottage, where the widower’s armchair sits in front of photographs of children and grandchildren. “I was in a queue for the pictures in Bridgend when I heard war had been declared. I went home and dug an air raid trench for my family in the back of the garden.” Too young to serve, Eskdale was taken on by an aerodrome near Bath. Living in a village outside the city, he was volunteering as a runner with the fire service when he was caught in a bomb blast during a Luftwaffe raid on Bristol. Eskdale survived with only bruises and joined the Home Guard before, remarkably, he was blown up again in a Luftwaffe raid on Bath. “We were putting out a fire in a fish and chip shop,” he recalls. “And then out of the clouds a big bomb came straight at me. I thought, ‘Blooming heck!’ Then I was blasted to the other side of the road. “I was in bed for a couple of days and thought, ‘I’ve had enough of this, I’m going to fight back.’ The recruiting office said I was too young, but one sergeant said, ‘If you sign up for 12 years, I can take you.’” Which is how, after training, 18-year-old Eskdale found himself in the Marines detachment on board HMS Charybdis, a cruiser that escorted a…

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Sails and scales
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Poet laureate and landlubber Simon Armitage brings the Shipping Forecast’s lyrical energy to the Proms
encoded: This Proms performance will be played on Radio 3 at 9pm on Friday. Add it to your collection now Like most landlubbers, Simon Armitage – born far from the coast in West Yorkshire – has never deliberately tuned in to the Shipping Forecast, yet it exerts a strange power over him. “I find the Shipping Forecast peaceful and I can’t quite tell you why,” says the poet laureate. “People at sea rely on it for navigation, but I don’t think of it as a functional thing; for me it’s everyday poetry.” There is an undoubted enchantment in the forecast’s evocation of 31 names: the hypnotic lilt of Hebrides, Fisher and German Bight. Is it a little perplexing to be out-poeticised by a weather report? “No, it’s not. I’m sure the Shipping Forecast developed organically. Nobody imagined it would become this lullaby mantra.” That mantra, beginning with Viking then looping round the Bay of Biscay and Ireland and ending with Southeast Iceland, was first broadcast by the BBC in 1925. To celebrate the centenary, Armitage, 62, and Land Yacht Regatta, the rock band he plays in with Richard Walters and Patrick Pearson, has created a piece of music for the BBC Proms. Their seven-movement work, Yonderland, will premiere in Belfast on Friday night, performed with the Ulster Orchestra as part of a Shipping Forecast Prom that includes Storm from Britten’s Four Sea Interludes and traditional Irish music. There will also be excerpts from the BBC archive and the voice of Neil Nunes, the radio announcer with fathoms-deep tones, in a soundscape that will merge the band with the orchestra. “What we’re doing is fitting around the amazing swell of the orchestra,” says Walters. And how do the band fit music around Armitage’s spoken words? “You try to find a pace within the reading,” says Pearson. “The way that things are phrased often leads the conversation of what’s the tempo, what’s the signature, what’s the key?” Should the poet laureate even be in a rock band? It’s a question that Armitage winces at. “I…

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'I'm going to do what I like now'
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Years of struggling to break through made actor and comedian Rob Brydon reluctant to take risks – but, at 60, the TV veteran is flying high
encoded: Add Destination X to your watchlist Rob Brydon has some doubts about Rob Brydon. There’s his singing, “I toured with a band recently,” he says when we meet in London. “And I didn’t do that for a long time because I was afraid of ridicule.” And his height. “Just say I was taller than you expected when you write this up,” he suggests. And finally, work. “I said no to a few mainstream competitive BBC shows,” he reveals. “So, then you start thinking, ‘Oh, they’ll probably stop coming altogether.’ ” But the BBC didn’t stop coming. Instead, it’s just made Brydon presenter of Destination X, a new show – part The Traitors, part Race across the World – that takes 13 people to various mystery European locations, where they have to work out, as Brydon puts it, “where the X am I?”. They’re transported in two blacked-out buses; one to sleep in and a mobile operations centre where confused contestants receive clues as they try to judge their position on a map. It’s an idea originally from Belgium, and while developing it the BBC was looking for someone the public liked to front it. Brydon – Glamorgan-born star of the likes of Marion and Geoff, Would I Lie to You? and The Trip – is just that man, the centre of public affection ever since he brought to us the relentlessly upbeat Uncle Bryn in Gavin & Stacey. “So many people were coming up to me when the Gavin & Stacey special went out last year,” he says. “One woman in Kingston [upon Thames] WH Smith wanted to thank me. She’d been alone at Christmas and watching it had felt like she was part of a family.” But Destination X comes with a twist for fans of Brydon’s nice-guy image. Every week he must do something truly nasty, throwing people off the show and denying their dreams of a life-changing victory. It starts in episode one, when contestants who are only just recovering from the surprise of Brydon walking into the shot – “They didn’t know it was going to be me” – are almost immediately told to go home. Seeing him smash contestan…

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Rob Brydon reveals surprise and disappointment after period drama role was cancelled after one season
type: item
date: 2025-07-21T23:01:18.000Z
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Magazine
description: Years of struggling to break through made actor and comedian Rob Brydon reluctant to take risks – but, at 60, the TV veteran is flying high.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Rob Brydon has some doubts about Rob Brydon. There’s his singing, “I toured with a band recently,” he says when we meet in London. “And I didn’t do that for a long time because I was afraid of ridicule.” And his height. “Just say I was taller than you expected when you write this up,” he suggests. And finally, work. “I said no to a few mainstream competitive BBC shows,” he reveals. “So, then you start thinking, ‘Oh, they’ll probably stop coming altogether.’ ” But the BBC didn’t stop coming. Instead, it’s just made Brydon presenter of Destination X, a new show – part The Traitors, part Race across the World – that takes 13 people to various mystery European locations, where they have to work out, as Brydon puts it, “where the X am I?”. They’re transported in two blacked-out buses; one to sleep in and a mobile operations centre where confused contestants receive clues as they try to judge their position on a map. It’s an idea originally from Belgium, and while developing it the BBC was looking for someone the public liked to front it. Brydon – Glamorgan-born star of the likes of Marion and Geoff, Would I Lie to You? and The Trip – is just that man, the centre of public affection ever since he brought to us the relentlessly upbeat Uncle Bryn in Gavin & Stacey. “So many people were coming up to me when the Gavin & Stacey special went out last year,” he says. “One woman in Kingston [upon Thames] WH Smith wanted to thank me. She’d been alone at Christmas and watching it had felt like she was part of a family.” But Destination X comes with a twist for fans of Brydon’s nice-guy image. Every week he must do something truly nasty, throwing people off the show and denying their dreams of a life-changing victory. It starts in episode one, when contestants who are only just recovering from the surprise of Brydon walking into the shot – “They didn’t know it was going to be me” – are almost immediately told to go home. Seeing hi…

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The mods who rocked
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Cult classic Quadrophenia’s portrait of troubled masculinity still resonates with fans old and new
encoded: Archive on 4: We Were the Mods is on Radio 4 on Saturday at 8pm. Add it to your collection now. There’s only a narrow pathway between numbers 10 and 11 East Street, Brighton, but it’s a small thoroughfare with huge significance. This is the scene of a key moment in the 1979 film Quadrophenia, when existentially troubled teenage mod Jimmy, played by Phil Daniels, briefly escapes a street riot and has sex with Steph, the girl he has fixed his thwarted ambitions on, played by Leslie Ash. “Alleyways are romantic,” says Franc Roddam, director of the movie, now 79. “When I was a kid, you didn’t have places to go with your girlfriend, you went to parks and graveyards. So I’m not surprised it became a favourite scene. There’s a blue plaque saying Quadrophenia Alley there now, which makes me laugh.” The film was a screen adaptation of the Who’s 1973 concept album Quadrophenia, which looked back to the early 1960s mod scene from which the band emerged, and features in Archive on 4: We Were the Mods. Roddam, a young tyro who had just made the acclaimed TV drama Dummy, was recommended to the band as a director. All he had to do was convince main writer Pete Townshend and band mates Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle and Keith Moon. “Pete is a great intellectual, an extraordinary man,” says Roddam who, from working-class origins in County Durham, went on to create Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and MasterChef and direct in Hollywood. “I said, ‘I don’t want it to be like your rock opera Tommy. I want to do a street movie and to use other music as well as the Who’s’. Pete said, ‘It’s your film. Make it.’ Roger and John were wonderful. I saw Keith last; he arrived in a Rolls-Royce with a big bodyguard who was reputed to have thrown somebody down a lift shaft and killed them. It was quite a moment! Keith put on a pirate voice like Long John Silver and said, ‘Why don’t we direct the film together?’ Having to think very quickly, I said, ‘OK, as long as I can drum with you on the next two albums.’ Th…

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'Acting is an affliction'
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Timothy Spall is a retired thesp in his new series, but he won’t be stepping out of the spotlight any time soon
encoded: Add Death Valley to your watchlist The thing is,” says Timothy Spall, “when you try and explain where the character you’re playing comes from, you’re talking about something that is ineffable. If you’re not careful, you end up sounding like a prat.” Nonetheless, the Bafta-winning actor’s latest role, which is actually two roles, needs some explaining. In comedy crime drama Death Valley Spall is a fictional television detective, Inspector Caesar, and also John Chapel, the actor who played Inspector Caesar on screen before his retirement to a picture-book Welsh village. “Curmudgeonly, slightly childish but bright,” according to Spall, Chapel lives in a cottage in the fabulously verdant Vale of Glamorgan, where his solitary existence is disturbed by the arrival of DS Janie Mallowan (played by Gwyneth Keyworth), who is investigating the murder of Chapel’s neighbour. Almost the first thing Mallowan notices is Chapel’s framed Inspector Caesar Radio Times cover. That same cover is visible in Spall’s real-life London home today, along with two genuine RT covers for his previous turns as Porthos in The Three Musketeers in 1994 and Fagin in 2007’s Oliver Twist. “Radio Times is an iconic thing, isn’t it? It’s wonderful,” Spall says, before pointing out just how good Keyworth is: “It’s a wonderful performance as this eccentric, slightly disarming, but also slightly shocking, copper.” Spall’s Inspector Caesar is based on the “1950s type” television detectives he watched as a boy in south London. “There was nothing dreadful going on around our way,” he says. “A bit of house-breaking and so on.” His Chapel, a recluse who none-too-secretly yearns to be in the spotlight again, is an amalgam of the more “thespian” thespians Spall has encountered since leaving Rada in 1978. “I wouldn’t name any names,” he teases, “because there are aspects to Chapel’s character that people might not want to associate themselves with.” We’re meeting just before Spall addresses the nation on VE Day in t…

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Death Valley's Timothy Spall: 'I'm in my late 60s – I'm not yearning to play romantic scenes'
type: item
date: 2025-05-27T10:32:41.000Z
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: Comedy
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: The Wolf Hall alum takes on a very different presence in his new BBC mystery comedy-drama.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. "The thing is," says Timothy Spall, "when you try and explain where the character you’re playing comes from, you’re talking about something that is ineffable. If you’re not careful, you end up sounding like a prat." Nonetheless, the BAFTA-winning actor’s latest role, which is actually two roles, needs some explaining. In comedy crime drama Death Valley, Spall is a fictional television detective, Inspector Caesar, and also John Chapel, the actor who played Inspector Caesar on screen before his retirement to a picture-book Welsh village. "Curmudgeonly, slightly childish but bright," according to Spall, Chapel lives in a cottage in the fabulously verdant Vale of Glamorgan, where his solitary existence is disturbed by the arrival of DS Janie Mallowan (played by Gwyneth Keyworth), who is investigating the murder of Chapel’s neighbour. Almost the first thing Mallowan notices is Chapel’s framed Inspector Caesar Radio Times cover. That same cover is visible in Spall’s real-life London home today, along with two genuine RT covers for his previous turns as Porthos in The Three Musketeers in 1994 and Fagin in 2007’s Oliver Twist. "Radio Times is an iconic thing, isn’t it? It’s wonderful," Spall says, before pointing out just how good Keyworth is: "It’s a wonderful performance as this eccentric, slightly disarming, but also slightly shocking, copper." Spall’s Inspector Caesar is based on the "1950s type" television detectives he watched as a boy in south London. "There was nothing dreadful going on around our way," he says. "A bit of house-breaking and so on." His Chapel, a recluse who none-too-secretly yearns to be in the spotlight again, is an amalgam of the more "thespian" thespians Spall has encountered since leaving RADA in 1978. "I wouldn’t name any names," he teases, "because there are aspects to Chapel’s character that people might not want to associate themselves with." We’re meeting just before Spall addresses the n…

'It's all music'
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Whether it’s a Beethoven symphony or a Father Brown score, composer Debbie Wiseman wants us to open our ears to joy
encoded: Reel Music with Debbie Wiseman is on Classic FM on Friday at 9.00am. This is where the magic happens, the room in her north London home where Debbie Wiseman, presently celebrating her tenth year as Classic FM’s Composer in Residence, has created acclaimed soundtracks for scores of television programmes and hugely popular orchestral and choral works. There is a piano, a giant screen where she watches previews of the shows she’s writing music for – “I’ve got Father Brown on at the moment,” she says, “an absolute delight to write” – and, on the wall, a drawing of a particularly moody Ludwig van Beethoven. “Sometimes I think he’s looking down on me disapprovingly,” she says. As she also wrote the scores for Lesbian Vampire Killers and Alan Titchmarsh’s Glorious Gardens here, she may have reason to wonder. Listeners of Classic FM, however, are in absolutely no doubt and have voted for four of her works to be included in the station’s 2025 Hall of Fame Top 300. “It’s wonderful that people take time and trouble to vote for your music,” she says. “I check each year.” One of those Hall of Fame pieces is Wiseman’s score for Wolf Hall, the BBC drama that reached its dramatic apogee in 2024’s The Mirror and The Light when Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell finally met his end on the executioner’s block. How do you score a beheading? “It couldn’t be sentimental in any way,” Wiseman says. “If anything was going in that direction, director Peter Kominsky would slap my wrist and say, ‘No, no, no!’ So, I pulled back and let Mark Rylance [below] do a lot of the heavy lifting, which he does, effortlessly.” Wiseman now has a new four-part series on Classic FM. In Reel Music, she talks to people connected with programmes or films she has composed for: Stephen Fry (1997’s Wilde), songwriter Don Black (1999’s Tom’s Midnight Garden), Maureen Lipman (Radio 4’s Maureen and Friends) and, first up, Sheila Hancock. “I wrote the music for a [2017] film she was in called Edie,” Wiseman says. “Sheila …

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They're my babies!
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Palaeo artist Jay Balamurgan reveals how she creates dinosaurs
encoded: Add Walking with Dinosaurs to your watchlist What does a paleo artist do? A paleo artist specialises in reconstructing extinct animals. You need to have a really good knowledge of the animal’s anatomy and biology and also be artistically capable. I design their colour patterns, thinking about where each scale and feather goes. But it takes a lot of people and a lot of work to get from words on a page to what looks like a living dinosaur on screen. We go back and forth discussing the minutiae, like, “What did this thing’s toes look like? How small are the scales?” All those little details. I got so invested in each of these creatures. It really feels like they’re my babies in a way. Fossils are bones, so how do they reveal what dinosaurs looked like? There is some degree of speculation about every bit of information that we don’t have, so we make sure our work is informed by what we do have. With colours, where we may not necessarily know the exact details, we can look to modern animals or to the relatives of those dinosaurs. We made sure that every creative decision was backed with as much science as possible. There’s also a lot of debate as to whether dinosaurs roared. Listen to a lion and that’s an impressive sound. Dinosaurs can’t quite do that, but they are still making loud, impressive sounds. Whether or not you could call them roars is a bit of a semantics thing. Did you see the original series? Yes, it’s what got me interested in science. I grew up in Malaysia and when I was five, we stumbled across a bootleg CD of the original Walking with Dinosaurs at a night market. I was obsessed from that day onwards. How do your dinosaurs differ from those in the original series? The change in appearance is like night and day. An utahraptor features in our new series and in the original. Back then it was a scaly lizard-like animal, now it’s covered in a full coat of feathers – it has wings and it has gorgeous birdlike movements. It’s like it’s an entirely different anim…

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The river dragons!
type: item
creator: Michael Hodges
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Walking with Dinosaurs is back, with new discoveries rewriting what we thought we knew, says lead palaeontologist Professor Nizar Ibrahim as he introduces…
encoded: Add Walking with Dinosaurs to your watchlist Squatting by the remains of a 100-million-year-old dinosaur, wide-brimmed leather hat pulled down to guard against the desert sun, palaeontologist Professor Nizar Ibrahim runs his fingers over a fossil that has just been pulled from the ground by one of his team. It’s a metatarsal, a foot bone of one of the largest predators that ever lived: spinosaurus – a Late Cretaceous-period carnivore, with fearsome jaws and a bony fan on its back, that once chomped its way through what’s now the desolate Kem Kem region of eastern Morocco. If Ibrahim’s hunch is correct, the bone suggests the creature’s foot was paddle-shaped – this killer could swim. “The discovery rewrites the palaeontology textbooks,” Ibrahim tells me, safely back at the University of Portsmouth where he lectures. “It’s doing things no other dinosaur is doing. It has a giant paddle tail, too, and an array of incredible anatomical features. It was a river dragon.” Thanks to the new BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs, from which Ibrahim is the breakout star, there’s no need for us to merely imagine. Employing the latest computer special effects [SFX], on-screen footage of Ibrahim’s dig morphs into a land of forests, waterways and skies patrolled by immense flying beasts. There, under a tree, we encounter the spinosaurus. It has taken nearly three years to make the BBC’s reimagining of the ground-breaking original 1999 Walking with Dinosaurs. The first series – watched by more than 15 million viewers – concentrated on re-creating the past with visual effects; this time each of the six episodes begins with a different fossil dig that in turn generates a life-and-death story for, variously, triceratops, gastonia, albertosaurus, pachyrhinosaurus, lusotitan and the spinosaurus. Locations include Montana and Utah in the US, Alberta in Canada and Pombal in Portugal. “The digs show the most exciting current palaeontology going on,” says Andrew Cohen, the series’ executive pro…

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