Jo Butterfield on Paris Paralympics heartache: "This isn't a recreational thing for me, it's my job"
Jo Butterfield already has a Paralympic gold medal from Rio 2016. Now, she’s taking to the ice in pursuit of a historic curling win at Milano Cortina.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Some athletes genuinely are astonishing – Jo Butterfield is one of them. When the Paralympics GB mixed curling team takes to the ice in Cortina, she will be attempting to become the first British athlete to win a gold medal at both the Paralympics and the Winter Paralympics. “Nobody’s ever done it and I’d love it to be me,” says Butterfield, talking at the National Curling Academy in Stirling. “It’s a huge opportunity.” Butterfield, who is tetraplegic and uses a wheelchair, won gold in the F51 club throw (the equivalent of the hammer throw for athletes whose legs, trunk and hands are affected) at the Rio Paralympics in 2016. Even if she doesn’t win again in Italy, her life can rightly be regarded a triumph – especially if one considers the physical limitations she works with. “I can use my arms, but I have very little grip in my hands,” she explains. “My thumbs move but that’s about it. I’ve got very little wrist function. If I put my hand above my head, it falls back down.” Then, as she tends to do, Butterfield adds a positive. “But I’ve got good biceps.” The 46-year-old lives in Scotland with her wife Rhiannon but was born in Doncaster. Her mother was a secretary and her father a systems analyst. Brought up with two older brothers, she was “a bit of a tomboy” but not a sports obsessive. After completing a psychology degree at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, she worked at the Ministry of Defence for the next 10 years. “I managed soldiers’ careers, posting people on tours,” she says. “You never did it lightly, you were sending people to risky jobs. Unfortunately, some didn’t come home and some came home seriously injured.” In an irony that doesn’t escape her, Butterfield herself joined the ranks of the seriously injured following an operation to remove a tumour from her spine when she was 31. “I remember waking up paralysed from the operation on 28 January 2011,” she says. “There was a 0.01 per cent chance that could happen; it was so insignificant, but it happened. Things looked very scary, I was told that I’d need carers. It didn’t look like it was going to be that much fun.” But she did find something that was fun: after rehabilitation Butterfield discovered wheelchair rugby and then club throw. “I had no idea what the future held,” she says. “But something in me said, ‘OK, this is the new me – what can I make of it?’” Within four years she was winning gold at Rio. But she didn’t do it the easy way, tearing a cartilage in her shoulder beforehand. “I came into the holding camp not knowing if I was going to be able to throw.” Her second throw in the final was a new world record. The victory reset her life, gave it new possibilities. “My body isn’t perfect, my body isn’t elite. It’s a very broken body, paralysed, but sport has given me an avenue to be successful.” She took silver in the 2019 World Championships but Covid interfered with her preparations for the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics, which were postponed until 2021. Butterfield just missed out on bronze when she came fourth. “My attitude was, ‘OK, we’ve got through this. Let’s build now for Paris.’” But only weeks later, Butterfield discovered that there would be no women’s F51 club throw event at the Paris Paralympics. “I found out on Twitter and I was heartbroken. This isn’t a recreational thing for me, it’s my job. It’s what gives me purpose and suddenly it was taken away.” Butterfield then remembered conversations she’d had with Nigel Holl, who was then performance director of British Curling. “He always said to me, ‘Come and try curling’, so I picked up the phone.” Paralympian curling differs from standard curling. The aim is still to deliver stones to the centre of the target but there’s no brushing and the stone is delivered from a wheelchair with a cue-like stick. “You have to be pinpoint accurate when you release the stone,” says Butterfield. “We don’t have that ability to affect the stone afterwards, so we like to think that we’re slightly more accurate than the Olympic curlers.” As ever, Butterfield had to adapt. “Because I don’t have much grip we had to tie a cue to my hand with a bit of TheraBand”, she says. “Within six months, I was at my first world championships, and I got my first medal.” Through sheer force of will she had, once more, made a positive from a negative. Then in 2023, another setback – Butterfield was diagnosed with breast cancer. She went through radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery and still, today, has immunotherapy injections. “I was pretty much out for the whole season, but I still trained every week and that got me through. Being with the team was the only time when I didn’t think about what was happening: ‘Where could this go to? How bad could it be?’ I was just thinking about curling, being part of the team and doing my job.” Add Radio Times as a Preferred Source on Google Keep up to date on what’s worth watching with your favourite entertainment news from Radio Times – see more of our exclusive news and interviews featured prominently in Top Stories when using Google. And now this remarkable woman is heading to her first Paralympic Winter Games, with her curling partner Jason Kean, already imagining how she will perform. “I’ve visualised the whole process so far. I visualise getting out of bed, being on the bus to the arena, and going onto that ice for the first time.” And winning gold? “Well, I am annoyingly positive,” she says. “I annoy myself at times. I always see the world through rose-tinted glasses. But that’s not because I’m naive – I’ve been through some hard things. it’s because that’s what I choose to do. “Am I grateful that I’m in a wheelchair? No, it sucks 99 per cent of the time. As I fall out of bed, trying to get dressed and get washed, it’s hard. But the opportunities that I’ve had because of it have surpassed anything I could have dreamed of. So yes, I am grateful. And, yes, I am joyful.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Sport 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.
Alex Payne, James Haskell and Mike Tindall, hosts of The Good, the Bad & the Rugby, on community, mental health and the dark side of being in the limelight
It’s hardly enough for a line-out, and certainly not a scrum. But two big men joined by one smaller man is just the right amount for a very successful podcast. First broadcast in 2020, The Good, the Bad & the Rugby features former England rugby union internationals Mike Tindall and James Haskell, and journalist Alex Payne. Tindall, 47, a centre, was part of the 2003 World Cup-winning team. Haskell, 40, a flanker, famously played with a back injury in England’s 2016 Six Nations grand slam victory against France. Payne, 45, the smaller one, adeptly holds things together. It’s one of the world’s biggest rugby podcasts – the trio now sell out live tours and received the royal seal of approval when they recorded an episode with Princess Anne and the Prince and Princess of Wales at Windsor Castle; something Tindall, who is married to the Princess Royal’s daughter Zara Phillips, called upon family connections to get. “That was special,” he says, when we talk. “Everything I hoped it would be.” Counterintuitively, the show’s success might be down to its comparative lack of rugby minutiae. “We’re not really interested in ruck laws and scrum laws,” says Tindall, “We’re interested in the people. This is a very masculine sport. You have to be a warrior on the field, but you can’t ever show your pain. What we’re trying to do is show that people do have emotions, to peel back a few layers.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2019/11/GettyImages-1023013496-68da3b1.jpg" width="3330" height="1845" alt="NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND - AUGUST 24: James Haskell of Northampton Saints looks on during the pre season friendly match between Northampton Saints and Glasgow Warriors at Franklin's Gardens on August 24, 2018 in Northampton, England. (Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)" title="Northampton Saints v Glasgow Warriors" /> They do this by mixing emotional openness with dressing-room banter. “Some of us are more bombastic than others,” says Tindall, possibly thinking of Haskell, who arrives late as he has been at a “diversity and inclusion” session. “I learnt workplace banter is absolutely fine,” Haskell says. “As long as it’s not funny, directed at anybody, or says anything of any remote interest.” He’s jesting, I think, and so is Payne when he says, “Working with James for eight years has driven me to a therapist.” As Tindall points out: “James has seen a therapist since he was 17 years old, to try and maximise the best out of what he could do while he was playing, and that’s continued post-career.” Consequently, Haskell is very serious about the mental health of young men. “You’ve got guys like Andrew Tate, false prophets that people are now adhering to,” he says. “A lot of young men are left behind, not going to university, not doing the things that they should do.” Haskell quotes an unsettling statistic: “Male suicide is still up, and it’s still the biggest killer of men under 40. It’s something that’s got to be addressed.” Rugby union isn’t short of other issues to address. There’s turmoil at club level, a continuing debate about concussion and the shadow of Motor Neurone Disease. That condition claimed the life of Scotland’s Doddie Weir (and rugby league’s Rob Burrow) and there have been more recent diagnoses for union’s Ed Slater and Lewis Moody, although Tindall says we shouldn’t presume it was caused by playing rugby. “It isn’t as simple as hits and concussive blows,” he says. “I think we spend a lot of time in rugby telling negative stories, but what’s special about rugby is, if it does happen to one of our own, the sport rallies around people that have been affected and the community comes together.” In 2023 the trio launched the award-winning Blackeye Gin, through which, says Payne, “We’re trying to raise a million quid a year for injured rugby players.” But it’s former players’ mental health issues, often after their international careers, that feature regularly on the podcast. Joe Marler, a guest star on the show, has been public about his own struggles. Now Marler is admired by millions after his tenure on Celebrity Traitors. Payne is pleased, but also frustrated by the game’s failure to make the most of such an asset in an age where young fans follow players rather than teams. “It’s sad that a character as big as Joe Marler has had to go on The Traitors to unlock his full potential,” he says. “Rugby cuts off its tallest poppies, and that’s something that it needs to address if it wants to get some of that high-profile exposure.” High-profile exposure isn’t always positive. Haskell recalls a festival last year where he made a joke about his divorce from Chloe Madeley (daughter of TV hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan): “‘If I put as much effort into my marriage as I did into finding the perfect pint of Guinness, I’d still be married.’ That was reported as, ‘James Haskell admits his drinking problem got in the way…’” If happiness requires self-awareness, Haskell appears to be going the right way. “With entertainment and fun, you can often become the worst version of yourself to sell that amusement,” he says. “But there’s a real depth to what we do, that’s why the podcast has lasted so long.” But hang on, we haven’t talked about the rugby – which home nation can win, England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland? “It’ll come down to a grand-slam game at the end between England and France,” says Tindall. “Well, I won’t bet my house on England,” says Payne. Haskell shakes his head: “England are brilliant, they will win the grand slam.” But then, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Watch weekly episodes on Spotify and YouTube or listen via your podcast provider
Six Nations podcasters James Haskell and Mike Tindall talk landing Prince William and Princess Kate as guests on their show
Radio Times talks to the stars of The Good, the Bad & the Rugby.
It’s hardly enough for a line-out, and certainly not a scrum. But two big men joined by one smaller man is just the right amount for a very successful podcast. First broadcast in 2020, The Good, the Bad & the Rugby features former England rugby union internationals Mike Tindall and James Haskell, and journalist Alex Payne. Tindall, 47, a centre, was part of the 2003 World Cup-winning team. Haskell, 40, a flanker, famously played with a back injury in England’s 2016 Six Nations grand slam victory against France. Payne, 45, the smaller one, adeptly holds things together. It’s one of the world’s biggest rugby podcasts – the trio now sell out live tours and received the royal seal of approval when they recorded an episode with Princess Anne and the Prince and Princess of Wales at Windsor Castle; something Tindall, who is married to the Princess Royal’s daughter Zara Phillips, called upon family connections to get. “That was special,” he says, when we talk. “Everything I hoped it would be.” Counterintuitively, the show’s success might be down to its comparative lack of rugby minutiae. “We’re not really interested in ruck laws and scrum laws,” says Tindall, “We’re interested in the people. This is a very masculine sport. "You have to be a warrior on the field, but you can’t ever show your pain. What we’re trying to do is show that people do have emotions, to peel back a few layers.” They do this by mixing emotional openness with dressing-room banter. “Some of us are more bombastic than others,” says Tindall, possibly thinking of Haskell, who arrives late as he has been at a “diversity and inclusion” session. “I learnt workplace banter is absolutely fine,” Haskell says. “As long as it’s not funny, directed at anybody, or says anything of any remote interest.” He’s jesting, I think, and so is Payne when he says, “Working with James for eight years has driven me to a therapist.” As Tindall points out: “James has seen a therapist since he was 17 years old, to try and maximise the best out of what he could do while he was playing, and that’s continued post-career.” Consequently, Haskell is very serious about the mental health of young men. “You’ve got guys like Andrew Tate, false prophets that people are now adhering to,” he says. “A lot of young men are left behind, not going to university, not doing the things that they should do.” Haskell quotes an unsettling statistic: “Male suicide is still up, and it’s still the biggest killer of men under 40. It’s something that’s got to be addressed.” Rugby union isn’t short of other issues to address. There’s turmoil at club level, a continuing debate about concussion and the shadow of Motor Neurone Disease. That condition claimed the life of Scotland’s Doddie Weir (and rugby league’s Rob Burrow) and there have been more recent diagnoses for union’s Ed Slater and Lewis Moody, although Tindall says we shouldn’t presume it was caused by playing rugby. “It isn’t as simple as hits and concussive blows,” he says. “I think we spend a lot of time in rugby telling negative stories, but what’s special about rugby is, if it does happen to one of our own, the sport rallies around people that have been affected and the community comes together.” In 2023 the trio launched the award-winning Blackeye Gin, through which, says Payne, “We’re trying to raise a million quid a year for injured rugby players.” But it’s former players’ mental health issues, often after their international careers, that feature regularly on the podcast. Joe Marler, a guest star on the show, has been public about his own struggles. Now, Marler is admired by millions after his tenure on Celebrity Traitors. Payne is pleased, but also frustrated by the game’s failure to make the most of such an asset in an age where young fans follow players rather than teams. “It’s sad that a character as big as Joe Marler has had to go on The Traitors to unlock his full potential,” he says. “Rugby cuts off its tallest poppies, and that’s something that it needs to address if it wants to get some of that high-profile exposure.” High-profile exposure isn’t always positive. Haskell recalls a festival last year where he made a joke about his divorce from Chloe Madeley (daughter of TV hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan): “‘If I put as much effort into my marriage as I did into finding the perfect pint of Guinness, I’d still be married.’ That was reported as, ‘James Haskell admits his drinking problem got in the way…’” If happiness requires self-awareness, Haskell appears to be going the right way. “With entertainment and fun, you can often become the worst version of yourself to sell that amusement,” he says. “But there’s a real depth to what we do, that’s why the podcast has lasted so long.” But hang on, we haven’t talked about the rugby – which home nation can win, England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland? “It’ll come down to a grand-slam game at the end between England and France,” says Tindall. “Well, I won’t bet my house on England,” says Payne. Haskell shakes his head: “England are brilliant, they will win the grand slam.” But then, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Check out more of our Sport 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.
And yet, with an Olympic medal having eluded him in his career, Dave Ryding is determined to go out on a high
Add the Winter Olympics 2026 to your watchlist. To see our day-by-day guide of what to watch, click here. High in the Italian Alps, a 39-year-old Englishman is preparing to race. Soon he will lock into his skis, take a deep breath of sharp mountain air and then throw himself down the compacted frozen snow of the Winter Olympics slalom course beneath Monte Vallecetta. When he hurtles towards the finish-line, Dave Ryding will zigzag and turn through a series of gates marked by polymer poles, subjecting his knees and ankles to immense forces, while reaching speeds of 80km an hour. With some understatement Ryding, known as The Rocket, describes this as “quite stressful”. Downhill racing is faster, but slalom is the more technical event where competitors are more likely to make a mistake and crash – with hundreds of cowbell-clanging spectators waiting for him to do just that. “It’s an amazing experience in front of a big crowd,” he says. And frightening? “You learn to perform under pressure, to take the energy from the crowd and not have nerves about it.” When we talk, Ryding has just breakfasted on Greek yoghurt, oats “and blueberries from Aldi”. In summer he grows his own blackcurrants in the Lancashire home he shares with his wife, Dutch skier Mandy Dirkzwager, and their three-year-old daughter, Nina. Ryding, it’s clear, is emphatically not someone who spent months in the Alps every winter. He was brought up near Pendle in Lancashire and, rather than Courchevel, the first time Ryding encountered winter sports it was on the local artificial ski slope – taken there by his father Carl, a ski-mad visionary who sensed, rightly, that his six-year-old son might be good. Carl coached his son on the plastic slope and worked on a market stall in the nearby town of Leyland. “He sold women’s underwear,” says Ryding. “Then he became an industrial cleaner.” When it became increasingly apparent that both Ryding and his younger sister Joanna were talented skiers, Carl retrained as a gas engineer to increase his income and help pay for his son’s one holiday a year in the Alps to practise on the snow. Ryding’s mother, Shirley, who ran her own hair salon, kept the household going and drove the children to races. Even his grandparents helped. “My family had to make big sacrifices,” says Ryding. The sacrifices paid off. He went on to be the most successful British skier of all time and among the best slalom skiers in the world, getting seven world-cup podium finishes but no Olympic medal and always falling just short of the career-defining victory that would put him among the greats. “There have been more bleak moments than good,” he says. “But I’ve managed to maintain an attitude of ‘Why am I doing this?’. It’s not always about winning, but getting the best performance out of myself.” At the 2017 World Cup in Finland, Ryding was winning and then crashed. “I can still feel that moment when my skis went away from me and I fell. I’ll feel that until I’m 90. It was hard to take because I was so close. There was a sense of, ‘Will I ever get another chance like that?’” Then, just when he’d begun to doubt that he could do it, Ryding won. On 22 January 2022, at the World Cup in Kitzbühel in Austria, he took first place; the first Briton and, at 35, the oldest man to do so in the event’s history. Three weeks later Ryding was the flag-bearer for the Great Britain Winter Olympic team in Beijing and strongly tipped for a medal. But Ryding was unravelling. “The Word Cup was the ultimate high; I’d tried to achieve this my whole life, and worked to that moment,” he says. “I had a lot of positive feelings, but I just felt so drained, absolutely empty, to be honest. And then having to go to China in a Covid lockdown situation, I wasn’t mentally or emotionally ready to compete.” He was only 0.78 of a second behind a bronze medal place but came in 13th place. There were immediate consequences. As a result of what it judged to be a poor Winter Olympics performance, UK Sport withdrew much of skiing’s World Class Programme funding ahead of the 2026 Games. This lack of empathy for what Ryding had been through still rankles. “I really don’t think UK Sport understands,” he says. “They put a big emphasis on mental wellbeing, and they took no interest in what actually could have been going on in my mind for that Olympics.” A very different man is heading out to the 2026 Winter Olympics. As well as becoming a father in 2022, Ryding has also announced his retirement. Milano Cortina will be his fifth and final chance to win an Olympic gold. “The decision is an easy one,” he says. “I’ve got a family who I would like to dedicate some time to.” The final will be judged over two rounds. “That’s the beauty of slalom. Because you have to do it over two runs, and on the second run, it counts down so the leader goes last. So not only is the course at its bumpiest for the leader on the second run, but the stakes are at the highest. If you’re leading, you’re the one with it all to lose.” Moreover, the leader must sit in a chair with a camera pointed at him, waiting to see if he is beaten. “If there are another 10 people to go, and you’re leading it, you still have that buzz every time someone comes down.” In the past, Ryding has added some theatrics to the process by playing air guitar as he waits. “Some will think, ‘What a saddo!’, but it shows that I’m human, not some kind of robot,” he says. “There’s nothing worse than someone sitting in that chair showing no emotions.” Ryding is highly likely to be the oldest competitor in his event but is relatively unconcerned about his levels of fitness and credits his time on Pendle’s plastic slopes. “Touch wood, I sit here with no pains. I think it’s because I didn’t overuse my body when I wasn’t as strong. “When I was young, I’d ski twice a week on the dry slopes and it’s totally different – you don’t get the bumps, you don’t have the same crashes. If I had been born in the mountains, it could have been different. So, I look back and I wouldn’t change what I did. What I’ve achieved has been fantastic.”
Great Britain's Charlotte Bankes is already the current World Cup mixed snowboard cross champion, but will this be the year she wins an Olympic medal?
Add the Winter Olympics 2026 to your watchlist. To see our day-by-day guide of what to watch, click here. Great Britain’s 30-year-old Charlotte Bankes is among the favourites for the snowboard cross event at the Winter Olympics. One of the most exciting alpine sports, Olympic snowboard cross features four riders battling for position on a course between 1,000 and 1,500m long with curved banks (berms), humps and waves that help to launch riders into the air. The current World Cup mixed snowboard cross champion, Bankes’s career is laden with victories but no Olympic title yet. Is this her time? Your family moved from Britain to the French Alps when you were a child, so you initially represented France, until 2018… We didn’t move for snowboarding so much as the possibility of living a more outdoors life, but I feel fortunate they made that decision. Although I’ve grown up in France, I still feel British and feel proud to represent Great Britain. But the local community in France still supports me, so I’ve found the right balance. So, French coffee or British tea bags? I’m fuelled on tea; I probably drink two litres of tea a day. I take a flask with me on the hill so I can have a cup of tea before the start of a race. I’ve also got a kettle for the hotels so I can make a proper cup of tea. I take my own bags of Yorkshire Tea with me. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2026/01/062MCTTYR-DL-4685953-e1769695172357.jpg" width="7555" height="5040" alt="Week 6 Winter Olympics Charlotte Bankes" title="Charlotte Bankes of Britain, left, and Pia Zerkhold of Austria compete during a quarterfinal of women's snowboard cross at the FIS Snowboard Cross World Cup, a test event for the 2022 Winter Olympics, at the Genting Resort Secret Garden in Zhangjiakou in" /> Do you have a special diet, plenty of protein shakes? No, I don’t like any of that stuff! Riders don’t have to be that careful with what we eat, it’s more about getting a balanced diet that fuels the body properly. I really like a curry. There are certain mornings before races where you’re not that hungry and my go-to is toast and Marmite. Riders can reach speeds of 70km an hour, are you scared of crashes? Fear is there but it makes you concentrate. If you’re riding in a pack with people around, then you really have to focus on your own moves before wondering what the others are doing. You damaged your pelvis in 2011 and then, in 2025, crashed in training — how has that affected you going into these Olympics? My preparation hasn’t been the same as usual because I was injured. I broke a collarbone training on the World Cup track last season and I damaged my ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] in training. I was only back on the snow at the start of November. You have to stay focused on yourself, but also have to get back out there racing so you can perform. You won the mixed event with Huw Nightingale at the World Cup in Cervinia, Italy in December after being at the back of the race… I’m in a comfortable place when I’m just behind the pack and chasing. I’m good at seeing spaces to get past and making those overtakes. But wherever I am in the race at the Olympics, I won’t give up until I cross that finish line.
Snowboarder Charlotte Bankes reveals why she doesn't need to diet and worry about what she eats
"Wherever I am in the race at the Olympics, I won’t give up until I cross that finish line."
Great Britain’s 30-year-old Charlotte Bankes is among the favourites for the snowboard cross event at the Winter Olympics. One of the most exciting alpine sports, Olympic snowboard cross features four riders battling for position on a course between 1,000 and 1,500m long with curved banks (berms), humps and waves that help to launch riders into the air. The current World Cup mixed snowboard cross champion, Bankes’s career is laden with victories but no Olympic title yet. Is this her time? Your family moved from Britain to the French Alps when you were a child, so you initially represented France, until 2018… We didn’t move for snowboarding so much as the possibility of living a more outdoors life, but I feel fortunate they made that decision. Although I’ve grown up in France, I still feel British and feel proud to represent Great Britain. But the local community in France still supports me, so I’ve found the right balance. So, French coffee or British tea bags? I’m fuelled on tea; I probably drink two litres of tea a day. I take a flask with me on the hill so I can have a cup of tea before the start of a race. I’ve also got a kettle for the hotels so I can make a proper cup of tea. I take my own bags of Yorkshire Tea with me. Do you have a special diet, plenty of protein shakes? No, I don’t like any of that stuff! Riders don’t have to be that careful with what we eat, it’s more about getting a balanced diet that fuels the body properly. I really like a curry. There are certain mornings before races where you’re not that hungry and my go-to is toast and Marmite. Riders can reach speeds of 70km an hour, are you scared of crashes? Fear is there but it makes you concentrate. If you’re riding in a pack with people around, then you really have to focus on your own moves before wondering what the others are doing. You damaged your pelvis in 2011 and then, in 2025, crashed in training — how has that affected you going into these Olympics? My preparation hasn’t been the same as usual because I was injured. I broke a collarbone training on the World Cup track last season and I damaged my ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] in training. I was only back on the snow at the start of November. You have to stay focused on yourself, but also have to get back out there racing so you can perform. You won the mixed event with Huw Nightingale at the World Cup in Cervinia, Italy in December after being at the back of the race… I’m in a comfortable place when I’m just behind the pack and chasing. I’m good at seeing spaces to get past and making those overtakes. But wherever I am in the race at the Olympics, I won’t give up until I cross that finish line. Download our free Winter Olympics viewing guide, with a day-by-day TV planner to help you follow every winning moment The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Sport 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.
Alpine ski racer Dave Ryding talks mental health journey: "I really don't think UK Sport understands"
With an Olympic medal having eluded him in his career, Dave Ryding is determined to go out on a high.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. High in the Italian Alps, a 39-year-old Englishman is preparing to race. Soon he will lock into his skis, take a deep breath of sharp mountain air and then throw himself down the compacted frozen snow of the Winter Olympics slalom course beneath Monte Vallecetta. When he hurtles towards the finish-line, Dave Ryding will zigzag and turn through a series of gates marked by polymer poles, subjecting his knees and ankles to immense forces, while reaching speeds of 80km an hour. With some understatement Ryding, known as The Rocket, describes this as “quite stressful”. Downhill racing is faster, but slalom is the more technical event where competitors are more likely to make a mistake and crash – with hundreds of cowbell-clanging spectators waiting for him to do just that. “It’s an amazing experience in front of a big crowd,” he says. And frightening? “You learn to perform under pressure, to take the energy from the crowd and not have nerves about it.” Download our free Winter Olympics viewing guide, with a day-by-day TV planner to help you follow every winning moment When we talk, Ryding has just breakfasted on Greek yoghurt, oats “and blueberries from Aldi”. In summer he grows his own blackcurrants in the Lancashire home he shares with his wife, Dutch skier Mandy Dirkzwager, and their three-year-old daughter, Nina. Ryding, it’s clear, is emphatically not someone who spent months in the Alps every winter. He was brought up near Pendle in Lancashire and, rather than Courchevel, the first time Ryding encountered winter sports it was on the local artificial ski slope – taken there by his father Carl, a ski-mad visionary who sensed, rightly, that his six-year-old son might be good. Carl coached his son on the plastic slope and worked on a market stall in the nearby town of Leyland. “He sold women’s underwear,” says Ryding. “Then he became an industrial cleaner.” When it became increasingly apparent that both Ryding and his younger sister Joanna were talented skiers, Carl retrained as a gas engineer to increase his income and help pay for his son’s one holiday a year in the Alps to practise on the snow. Ryding’s mother, Shirley, who ran her own hair salon, kept the household going and drove the children to races. Even his grandparents helped. “My family had to make big sacrifices,” says Ryding. The sacrifices paid off. He went on to be the most successful British skier of all time and among the best slalom skiers in the world, getting seven world-cup podium finishes but no Olympic medal and always falling just short of the career-defining victory that would put him among the greats. “There have been more bleak moments than good,” he says. “But I’ve managed to maintain an attitude of ‘Why am I doing this?’ It’s not always about winning, but getting the best performance out of myself.” At the 2017 World Cup in Finland, Ryding was winning and then crashed. “I can still feel that moment when my skis went away from me and I fell. I’ll feel that until I’m 90. It was hard to take because I was so close. There was a sense of, ‘Will I ever get another chance like that?’” Then, just when he’d begun to doubt that he could do it, Ryding won. On 22 January 2022, at the World Cup in Kitzbühel in Austria, he took first place; the first Briton and, at 35, the oldest man to do so in the event’s history. Three weeks later Ryding was the flag-bearer for the Great Britain Winter Olympic team in Beijing and strongly tipped for a medal. But Ryding was unravelling. “The Word Cup was the ultimate high; I’d tried to achieve this my whole life, and worked to that moment,” he says. “I had a lot of positive feelings, but I just felt so drained, absolutely empty, to be honest. And then having to go to China in a Covid lockdown situation, I wasn’t mentally or emotionally ready to compete.” He was only 0.78 of a second behind a bronze medal place but came in 13th place. There were immediate consequences. As a result of what it judged to be a poor Winter Olympics performance, UK Sport withdrew much of skiing’s World Class Programme funding ahead of the 2026 Games. This lack of empathy for what Ryding had been through still rankles. “I really don’t think UK Sport understands,” he says. “They put a big emphasis on mental wellbeing, and they took no interest in what actually could have been going on in my mind for that Olympics.” A very different man is heading out to the 2026 Winter Olympics. As well as becoming a father in 2022, Ryding has also announced his retirement. Milano Cortina will be his fifth and final chance to win an Olympic gold. “The decision is an easy one,” he says. “I’ve got a family who I would like to dedicate some time to.” The final will be judged over two rounds. “That’s the beauty of slalom. Because you have to do it over two runs, and on the second run, it counts down so the leader goes last. So not only is the course at its bumpiest for the leader on the second run, but the stakes are at the highest. If you’re leading, you’re the one with it all to lose.” Moreover, the leader must sit in a chair with a camera pointed at him, waiting to see if he is beaten. “If there are another 10 people to go, and you’re leading it, you still have that buzz every time someone comes down.” In the past, Ryding has added some theatrics to the process by playing air guitar as he waits. “Some will think, ‘What a saddo!’, but it shows that I’m human, not some kind of robot,” he says. “There’s nothing worse than someone sitting in that chair showing no emotions.” Ryding is highly likely to be the oldest competitor in his event but is relatively unconcerned about his levels of fitness and credits his time on Pendle’s plastic slopes. “Touch wood, I sit here with no pains. I think it’s because I didn’t overuse my body when I wasn’t as strong. “When I was young, I’d ski twice a week on the dry slopes and it’s totally different – you don’t get the bumps, you don’t have the same crashes. If I had been born in the mountains, it could have been different. So, I look back and I wouldn’t change what I did. What I’ve achieved has been fantastic.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Sport 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.
After 27 years of Melvyn Bragg there’s a new host of In Our Time. What will the seemingly modest Misha Glenny bring to the table?
In Our Time is on at 9am on Thursday on Radio 4. Add it to your collection Misha Glenny really didn’t expect to get this job. “I was astonished, flabbergasted, absolutely thrilled,” he says of his appointment as presenter of In Our Time. In bagging the role, Glenny follows Melvyn Bragg, who presented the programme from 1998 to 2025. “This is one of the crown jewels of Radio 4 and Melvyn is such a towering figure,” Glenny says when we meet in Broadcasting House. “It’s an immense privilege and honour to be asked to take it on.” Like many of the two million listeners keen to feed their curiosity, there was one episode that hooked Glenny; the “absolutely brilliant” January 2008 programme on plate tectonics. “I was late and rushing to get out of the house but just had to listen to the end. The conclusion was that without tectonic plates there would be no life. Who knew?” Intrigued, Glenny later told BBC executives he’d want the job if it ever came up, but claims he wasn’t a shoo-in. “No, not anointed at all. The selection process included making a pilot and for three months I assumed I wasn’t going to get the job.” The 67-year-old already presents The Invention of… series on Radio 4 and until recently was Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Glenny also wrote the 2008 non-fiction book McMafia, which became a BBC drama series starring James Norton, and won a Sony Gold Award for his radio reporting in central and eastern Europe in the early 1990s. He says he’d like more Russian literature on the show. So, what else might change? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but the show might benefit from another guest, or one less,” he teases. He’d also like to tilt towards In Our Time’s many younger listeners: “It’s one of the most popular Radio 4 shows with the under-35s and that’s very important.” Mainly, Glenny says, he wants a smooth transition, so “people can build a similar confidence in me as they had with Melvyn. Frank Skinner said Melvyn acts like an ‘intellectual sheepdog’. That’s a beautiful description.” Bragg could be sharp if he thought the conversation was becoming unfocused – can Glenny? “That’s Melvyn’s genius. I’m not argumentative. Fortunately, I’m married to Kirsty Lang, who’s an experienced presenter and a hard taskmaster. She’s already pulled me up on certain things. She says I have to be a bit tougher.” One thing Lang can’t change is her husband’s background. Bragg, with working-class and northern origins, was a tribune for the people; London-born and public-school-educated Glenny is not that. “Someone who’s been a plumber since they’re 16 will generally have been much less privileged in terms of access to know-ledge than I have,” he admits. “I’m conscious I represent something else. I was brought up in what used to be called genteel poverty. My father, a brilliant translator of Russian literature, never really made any money; I was a direct grant fellowship kid. I hope my background will be countered by the fact I have had life experiences which are far from comfortable.” Those experiences include covering the horrors of the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. Glenny, who calls this period “deeply traumatising”, has just returned from Sarajevo, where he was recording The Invention of… the Balkans. “I wasn’t expecting to have quite such an emotional response,” he says of the trip. “At a museum about the massacre at Srebrenica, I was suddenly transported back to those days, and I felt overwhelmed. It was awful. All of us [who were there] carry the traumas in our own different ways.” Glenny has also encountered “unimaginable poverty and despair” in Brazilian favelas, and met witnesses to “terrible things” when he researched McMafia. He joined the Institute for Human Sciences, in part because his professional life had been “a series of rather traumatic encounters”. Did his job in Vienna save him? “If anything saved me, it was marrying Kirsty. But there was another event. Eleven years ago, my daughter took her own life aged 22. And that’s what I was recovering from, ultimately. In fact, it’s something you never do fully recover from, it is always there.” His daughter was one of two children from his first marriage (Glenny chooses to keep the details out of the public realm). He also has a son with Lang. Didn’t his wife, presently fronting Round Britain Quiz on Radio 4, want the In Our Time job herself? “It’s the last thing she wanted. Although she’d probably be much better than me. No question.” Much has changed since In Our Time started in 1998. Its podcast now has a wide international reach but the BBC, “a towering influence” during the Yugoslav Wars, has lost some of its international cachet. “Language services and the World Service have been progressively defunded and closed down,” says Glenny. “That’s a distressing phenomenon.” There are new threats from streamers, social media and the rise of artificial intelligence. “The enormity and speed of technological change is a fundamental danger to sustained rational social relations. We’ve all experienced, with social media and the internet, the mushing of the brain, so that we are permanently distracted.” That’s even happened to intellectuals like Glenny? “Oh, God, yes!” How does he deal with it? “I make sure that for at least two hours a day, I read a book.” And perhaps listen to intelligent radio shows? “In Our Time works against the distractions because it picks subjects which you don’t know that well but have always wondered about.” The first three episodes recorded in the Glenny era are on John Stuart Mill’s seminal philosophical work, On Liberty, and the bloody gore of the Roman arena. And the other? “The Mariana Trench.” That’s deep, I joke. “Deep?” says Glenny. “It’s profound!”
Misha Glenny reveals his wife Kirsty Lang’s advice as he replaces Melvyn Bragg for Our Time
From flabbergasted fan to the chair once occupied by Melvyn Bragg: Misha Glenny on inheriting Radio 4’s crown jewel – and why depth still matters in a distracted age.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Misha Glenny really didn't expect to get this job. "I was astonished, flabbergasted, absolutely thrilled," he says of his appointment as presenter of In Our Time. In bagging the role, Glenny follows Melvyn Bragg, who presented the programme from 1998 to 2025. "This is one of the crown jewels of Radio 4 and Melvyn is such a towering figure," Glenny says when we meet in Broadcasting House. "It's an immense privilege and honour to be asked to take it on." Like many of the two million listeners keen to feed their curiosity, there was one episode that hooked Glenny; the "absolutely brilliant" January 2008 programme on plate tectonics. "I was late and rushing to get out of the house but just had to listen to the end. The conclusion was that without tectonic plates there would be no life. Who knew?" Intrigued, Glenny later told BBC executives he'd want the job if it ever came up, but claims he wasn't a shoo-in. "No, not anointed at all. The selection process included making a pilot and for three months I assumed I wasn't going to get the job." The 67-year-old already presents The Invention of… series on Radio 4 and until recently was Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Glenny also wrote the 2008 non-fiction book McMafia, which became a BBC drama series starring James Norton, and won a Sony Gold Award for his radio reporting in central and eastern Europe in the early 1990s. He says he'd like more Russian literature on the show. So, what else might change? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it, but the show might benefit from another guest, or one less," he teases. He'd also like to tilt towards In Our Time's many younger listeners: "It's one of the most popular Radio 4 shows with the under-35s and that's very important." Mainly, Glenny says, he wants a smooth transition, so "people can build a similar confidence in me as they had with Melvyn. Frank Skinner said Melvyn acts like an 'intellectual sheepdog'. That's a beautiful description." Bragg could be sharp if he thought the conversation was becoming unfocused – can Glenny? "That's Melvyn's genius. I'm not argumentative. Fortunately, I'm married to Kirsty Lang, who's an experienced presenter and a hard taskmaster. She's already pulled me up on certain things. She says I have to be a bit tougher." One thing Lang can't change is her husband's background. Bragg, with working-class and northern origins, was a tribune for the people; London-born and public-school-educated Glenny is not that. "Someone who's been a plumber since they're 16 will generally have been much less privileged in terms of access to knowledge than I have," he admits. "I'm conscious I represent something else. I was brought up in what used to be called genteel poverty. My father, a brilliant translator of Russian literature, never really made any money; I was a direct grant fellowship kid. I hope my background will be countered by the fact I have had life experiences which are far from comfortable." Those experiences include covering the horrors of the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. Glenny, who calls this period "deeply traumatising", has just returned from Sarajevo, where he was recording The Invention of… the Balkans. "I wasn't expecting to have quite such an emotional response," he says of the trip. "At a museum about the massacre at Srebrenica, I was suddenly transported back to those days, and I felt overwhelmed. It was awful. All of us [who were there] carry the traumas in our own different ways." Glenny has also encountered "unimaginable poverty and despair" in Brazilian favelas, and met witnesses to "terrible things" when he researched McMafia. He joined the Institute for Human Sciences, in part because his professional life had been "a series of rather traumatic encounters". Did his job in Vienna save him? "If anything saved me, it was marrying Kirsty. But there was another event. Eleven years ago, my daughter took her own life aged 22. And that's what I was recovering from, ultimately. In fact, it's something you never do fully recover from, it is always there." His daughter was one of two children from his first marriage (Glenny chooses to keep the details out of the public realm). He also has a son with Lang. Didn't his wife, presently fronting Round Britain Quiz on Radio 4, want the In Our Time job herself? "It's the last thing she wanted. Although she'd probably be much better than me. No question." Much has changed since In Our Time started in 1998. Its podcast now has a wide international reach but the BBC, "a towering influence" during the Yugoslav Wars, has lost some of its international cachet. "Language services and the World Service have been progressively defunded and closed down," says Glenny. "That's a distressing phenomenon." There are new threats from streamers, social media and the rise of artificial intelligence. "The enormity and speed of technological change is a fundamental danger to sustained rational social relations. We've all experienced, with social media and the internet, the mushing of the brain, so that we are permanently distracted." That's even happened to intellectuals like Glenny? "Oh, God, yes!" How does he deal with it? "I make sure that for at least two hours a day, I read a book." And perhaps listen to intelligent radio shows? "In Our Time works against the distractions because it picks subjects which you don't know that well but have always wondered about." The first three episodes recorded in the Glenny era are on John Stuart Mill's seminal philosophical work, On Liberty, and the bloody gore of the Roman arena. And the other? "The Mariana Trench." That's deep, I joke. "Deep?" says Glenny. "It's profound!" In Our Time is broadcast on Thursdays at 9am on Radio 4. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our interviews 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.
Paul Bettany likes to go full throttle – whether it’s as Mozart’s nemesis Salieri or at a New Year’s Eve gig with friends
Amadeus is on 21 December-Christmas Day 9.00pm Sky Atlantic. Add it to your watchlist Paul Bettany is far from being too cool for Yule. “I love Christmas so much,” he enthuses in advance of the festive celebrations at his home in the USA. “Our Christmas Day is a very English affair with crackers and turkey, and then, when people start showing up after Boxing Day, the party just continues. Last year we had 40 people.” Bettany, co-star of Amadeus, Sky Atlantic’s five-part adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, lives with his wife, actor Jennifer Connolly, in a timber house in rural Vermont, New England, where “it snows every year”. So, the 54-year-old London-born actor will be having a picturesque Christmas – but also a loud one. “I have a band room with drums and piano and PA system and loads of guitars. Lots of people come up and play. We do a gig on New Year’s Eve.” You might be thinking, rather him than me. But Bettany likes to go at things full throttle, whether that’s entertaining friends at Christmas or in his performance as the scheming court composer Salieri in Amadeus, who dedicates his life to destroying Mozart. It’s one of those roles where Bettany, who has lived in America since 2003, pops back to the UK to remind us just how good he is. He did it before in 2021 when he played the alcoholic Duke of Argyll in the period drama A Very British Scandal. Now he’s facing off with Will Sharpe’s Mozart in 18th-century Vienna; an arrangement Bettany is charmed by. “I have enormous admiration for Will. He’s funny, gentle and kind – an attractive combination and rare. Usually, actors are working out how they can triumph against the opposition rather than how to make each other better.” Bettany is a thoughtful, compelling actor; even as android superhero The Vision in the Marvel universe where, since 2015, he has been wearing a catsuit and firing lasers out of his forehead. He does this so convincingly I ask him to explain what it feels like. “I have no frame of reference for laser beams coming out of my head,” he says, gently reminding me that, thanks to computer graphics, it isn’t really happening. Appearing in films like A Beautiful Mind, Master and Commander and The Da Vinci Code means Bettany has been well known in the US for a long time, yet he finds fame hard to talk about. “The things that are great about it outweigh those that are not so great. I do wonder what it’s like for somebody as famous as Brad Pitt. But, for me, without even noticing it, you get a good table in a restaurant and people are nicer to you at airports. So, you tend to meet people on their best behaviour. But, when you meet people on their worst behaviour, it’s sometimes a little alienating.” He has an example. In 2015, he got the news that his father Thane (also an actor) was dying. “I remember getting the call, that I needed to fly over to be with my dad. I was on the phone, trying to process this information and crying, when somebody came up and took a selfie with me. They just hadn’t noticed what was happening and couldn’t see that part of me in that moment. So that bit’s weird, but there are great things as well. The life that it has afforded me, my children and my wife is extraordinary.” Bettany and Connolly have a 12-year-old daughter Agnes and son Stellan, 22, and a son Kai, 27, from Connolly’s earlier relationship with photographer David Dugan. They’ll all be in Vermont, adding to the noise. “There are loads of kids, it gets crazy,” he says of the upcoming shindig. “And it’s a very inebriated affair. Lots of sledding.” Inebriated sledding? There are things that could go wrong with that. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere,” he concedes. “But it’s a lucky house. Nothing bad ever happens.”
As 12 celebrities brave the Apprentice boardroom, Lord Sugar says it won't just be chestnuts that he’ll be roasting this Christmas
The Celebrity Apprentice is on 29 and 30 December 9.00pm BBC One. Add it to your watchlist Merry Christmas, Sugar Claus! If you were Father Christmas, which public figures would you put on your naughty list? I would have to say no comment on this whatsoever, my friend. As you will know, the BBC has guidelines. I have to keep my big mouth shut and not make personal or political comments like that. In that case, can we assume the contestants in your Celebrity Apprentice Christmas specials went straight on the nice list? Nah! That’s the excitement of it. Most of the time, they’re schmoozed by everybody, told how marvellous they are. Then they get a gig where I’m telling them what a load of rubbish they are. They’re masochists, really. Still, it’s worth remembering they don’t get paid anything at all. They do it for charity and that is very, very commendable. What will you be making the brave contestants do in the two festive episodes? They’re going up to Lapland and meeting Father Christmas. There was snow and ice, as you can imagine, reindeers and sledges. The contestants were split into two teams and each team had to create a special Christmas biscuit. Then they came back to London and presented their biscuits to big supermarkets and the best biscuit won. The interesting thing is, for the first time ever, the products created in the programme are actually going on sale in the supermarkets. All the money is going to Children in Need. Does the show create its own celebrities now? Did you decide whether Thomas Skinner could come back as a “celebrity”? I’m not sure over the 20 years how many people who have appeared on my show have actually made a name for themselves. I can think of maybe three: Saira Khan did quite well, then Katie Hopkins, who everybody loves to hate, and Thomas Skinner, who ended up on Strictly. But I don’t have any input. I’m presented with these celebrities; the BBC seek these people out and find them. And it’s not easy, because you can imagine that some of them are working and can’t take four or five days off. I can dream and say, “Oh, I’d love Madonna, I’d love Adele, I’d love the ginger bloke with a guitar...” What’s his name? Ed Sheeran. So, it’s not a matter of you ringing up the Beeb and going, “Get me Piers Morgan”? Well, funny you should say that. He was in the very first Celebrity Apprentice and I fired him. I keep reminding Piers that I gave him his TV debut, but he says, “I was on TV before that.” But you know what an arrogant bloke he is. He’d never admit it. In our illustration we’ve imagined you as Father Christmas with your helpers Baroness Brady and Mike Soutar. Have you ever dressed up as Santa? No, I don’t do that. But I did go and see Father Christmas in a big grotto at Selfridges as a kid of eight or nine, and I remember thinking it was amazing. Did you enjoy Christmas when you were growing up in Hackney in the 1950s? Our family weren’t very religious Jews, so we semi-celebrated Christmas, but more the happy side of things. We put Christmas decorations up and all that stuff. As a kid, I’d look forward to getting a Christmas present. I remember when I was 10 or 11 getting a pair of metal roller skates with rubber wheels on them that you adjusted with a little spanner. Mum and Dad saved up and bought them for me and my sisters and brother. As I grew older, I didn’t dish out Christmas presents to people. We used to give the staff financial bonuses and things like that, not physical things. Where will you be spending Christmas this year? I’ve had Christmas away from England the last 40 years. I spend five to six months of the year in America, so I’ll be here in Florida. My family also have homes here, so we’ll all be together. The grandkids as well, though they’re not kids any more. We’ll have a big traditional at-home British Christmas lunch with turkey and things like that. Won’t you miss cold, rainy old Hackney? No. Will you be having any special Christmas treats? My wife went to the supermarket today and bought my favourite thing – chestnuts. It’s the time for them, isn’t it, Christmas? I remember the vendors on Oxford Street when I was a boy, those black ovens with coal underneath and the chestnuts sitting on the top. You’d buy a white paper bag full of them off the bloke for sixpence.
With 007 firmly in the past, Daniel Craig is glorying in unconventional roles in Knives Out and Narnia
Wake Up Dead Man is on Netflix from 12 December. Add it to your watchlist "I am hoping to get out of Narnia in time for Christmas,” says Daniel Craig. We’re supposed to be talking about the former James Bond star’s performance as Benoit Blanc, the mannered, sometimes manic, private detective from the Deep South of the US in Rian Johnson’s Netflix Knives Out mysteries. The new film, Wake Up Dead Man, is set in and around a neo-Gothic church in upstate New York where Benoit enlists the help of Josh O’Connor’s Catholic priest Father Jud Duplenticy to solve “a classic impossible crime”. But Craig’s mind is already a movie ahead of me. He’s presently filming The Magician’s Nephew, Greta Gerwig’s take on CS Lewis’s Narnia novel, in which he plays the eponymous magician, Uncle Andrew. It’s a role as un-Bond-like, in its way, as the unhinged gay author he played in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer last year (based on William Burroughs). Or, for that matter, Blanc, the driving intellectual and dramatic force of Johnson’s three Knives Out films. “I suppose I started freeing myself up from any convention,” says the 57-year-old Craig. “I’m not saying no to things that I might have been a little bit wary about before. When the Bond thing was going on in my life, the juxtaposition between that and another role would sometimes feel self-conscious. I’m working harder than I ever have, but I’m also just enjoying it more than I ever have. I get to do really interesting, different stuff.” No Time to Die was in 2021. That’s four years away from Bond now; has it made him happy? “I love my job but does it make me happy? Not always,” he muses. “It’s very complicated. It’s an incredibly tough job. It’s kept me away from my family over the years, and that has its downsides.” Craig is married to the actor Rachel Weisz. They have a daughter, Grace, born in 2018 (Craig has another daughter, 33-year-old actor Ella Loudon, from his previous marriage to actor Fiona Loudon) and homes in north London and New York. Craig likes nothing better, he says, than “watching Strictly with the kids – it’s a joy” and, if he is out of Narnia in time, will be celebrating Christmas with them. “Not in a religious way,” he says, “but celebrating the fact that it’s a family get-together. Much in a way like the Americans have Thanksgiving, Christmas is an English kind of thanksgiving. And saying thanks for having family is really what it’s about.” Ironically, after escaping a character that defined him in the public eye over five films and 15 years, starting with Casino Royale in 2006, Craig is now the centre of another franchise, Knives Out, playing a character who walks the narrow line between convincing characterisation and camp. “But that’s the fun bit, isn’t it?’ he says. “Walking the line.” Three films in, Benoit Blanc feels like he has a lot of mileage left… perhaps more than the five films Craig made as Bond? “As soon as we’re on the red carpet, Rian and I get asked, ‘Are you going to make another one?’ And we both go, ‘Hang on a second! Let’s get this one out first.’ But, of course, I would love to continue working with him. As long as Rian keeps inventing it the way he does, then I’m in.” Not that playing Benoit Blanc is easy. “I still have to work hard at this,” he says. “He’s not uncomplicated to play. I don’t turn up on day one and go, ‘I know how to do this.’ That would be just terrible. I work on it and work on it.” With that level of commitment, does Craig feel he’s now getting the hang of investigating? For example, if I were to be clubbed to death or poisoned, could he work out whodunnit? “No! It’s like asking me, ‘Do you think playing James Bond made you better at being a spy?’ ” Craig exclaims. “It’s not going to happen; I wouldn’t be very good in that situation. You need a brain. “I suppose what I like about Benoit is that he’s not aggressive, his way of doing things is to try and disarm people. He often pays compliments, and I think that’s an interesting way of getting what you want in life. You know, he’s a charmer.” His co-star O’Connor told RT that, because he’d been brought up thinking of Craig as Bond, he was surprised to encounter an actor whose “sweetness, insecurity, and funniness were such a pleasure to work with”. Does Craig recognise himself in that description? “Well, all actors are insecure,” he says. “We may appear to be confident, but we’re just ducks; looking good on top but the legs are going crazy underneath. I’m making it up as I go along.” Meet the other players The Knives Out stars submit to RT’s interrogation Andrew Scott plays Lee Ross Could you get away with the perfect murder? I don’t think I would be very good at murder – I suppose I’m the type, but I just don’t like blood. I have many faults, but I think I’m going to get away in this life with not murdering anybody. That’s the way it’s looking, anyway. Do you have a favourite detective… Sherlock Holmes, perhaps? Actually, it’s Hercule Poirot. One of the films that had a real influence on me was Evil under the Sun with Peter Ustinov as Poirot, made in the 1980s. I remember watching him, Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith and thinking, “Wow!” I’d never seen a film like that. Glenn Close plays Martha Delacroix Do you have a favourite detective? I loved Agatha Christie’s books and I was in Christie’s Crooked House in 2017. It had never been filmed because it has a very strange, disturbing ending. I also loved Prime Suspect. Helen Mirren was so good in that. Do you believe in good and evil? Oh, very much so, although I think we’re a complicated species. It’s a pretty deep question. I think there are very few people who are born evil, but there are some. It’s usually a malfunction in our very complex brains, and I think a lot of it is how you’re brought up. Josh O’Connor plays Father Jud Duplenticy Could you imagine yourself planning the perfect murder? No. Absolutely not. I’m too anxious. Most of the time, even if I make a plan to go and meet someone for dinner, I have second thoughts. I don’t think I’d ever make it out of the door. What about solving a murder, Josh? Again, I’d be useless. Crime-solving requires an incredible level of organisation. You’d have to be very directed in your thoughts. And I’m so doubtful of everything and anything and everyone. My answer to most things is, “I don’t know!” As a detective, you’d have to have a little more conviction. You don’t seem very confident in your abilities… I have low self-esteem and a big ego. You put those together and it’s chaotic. But it is perfect for an actor – most of us have low self-esteem. That’s why we need to be told that we’re good. But we also have a big ego and we want to be seen. It’s a strange one. Who was your favourite detective growing up? I used to love turning on ITV and watching Midsomer Murders on a Sunday afternoon with my family. We’d all sit there and predict who the murderer was. We loved it. Mila Kunis plays police chief Geraldine Scott Did you grow up watching murder mysteries? I grew up in Russia, and Sherlock Holmes was definitely around when I was seven or eight. Then, when I moved to the States, I loved murder mysteries. Clue is one of my favourite movies of all time. Would you make a good murderer? I couldn’t do it. I’m not a very aggressive person and I don’t think I’m very calculated. I’d also need to be so much more organised… Actually, hold on, that’s not true. If my life or my family’s lives were at stake, I’d have no problem doing something extreme – and a woman who’s juggling a job and a family and kids can do a lot of things. Of course, you’re on the other side of the fence in the movie — would you make a good investigator in real life? I’d make a great investigator. I have no problems asking questions and I’m also pretty observant. However, I’m not good at identifying people – in a line-up I’m not your gal.
Wake Up Dead Man cast reveal their favourite detectives and whether they’d make good murderers
Daniel Craig and the Wake Up Dead Man cast talk perfect murders, imperfect detectives and everything in between.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. “I am hoping to get out of Narnia in time for Christmas,” says Daniel Craig. We’re supposed to be talking about the former James Bond star’s performance as Benoit Blanc, the mannered, sometimes manic, private detective from the Deep South of the US in Rian Johnson’s Netflix Knives Out mysteries. The new film, Wake Up Dead Man, is set in and around a neo-Gothic church in upstate New York where Benoit enlists the help of Josh O’Connor’s Catholic priest Father Jud Duplenticy to solve “a classic impossible crime”. But Craig’s mind is already a movie ahead of me. He’s presently filming The Magician’s Nephew, Greta Gerwig’s take on CS Lewis’s Narnia novel, in which he plays the eponymous magician, Uncle Andrew. It’s a role as un-Bond-like, in its way, as the unhinged gay author he played in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer last year (based on William Burroughs). Or, for that matter, Blanc, the driving intellectual and dramatic force of Johnson’s three Knives Out films. “I suppose I started freeing myself up from any convention,” says the 57-year-old Craig. “I’m not saying no to things that I might have been a little bit wary about before. When the Bond thing was going on in my life, the juxtaposition between that and another role would sometimes feel self-conscious. I’m working harder than I ever have, but I’m also just enjoying it more than I ever have. I get to do really interesting, different stuff.” No Time to Die was in 2021. That’s four years away from Bond now; has it made him happy? “I love my job but does it make me happy? Not always,” he muses. “It’s very complicated. It’s an incredibly tough job. It’s kept me away from my family over the years, and that has its downsides.” View Green Video on the source website Craig is married to the actor Rachel Weisz. They have a daughter, Grace, born in 2018 (Craig has another daughter, 33-year-old actor Ella Loudon, from his previous marriage to actor Fiona Loudon) and homes in north London and New York. Craig likes nothing better, he says, than “watching Strictly with the kids – it’s a joy” and, if he is out of Narnia in time, will be celebrating Christmas with them. “Not in a religious way,” he says, “but celebrating the fact that it’s a family get-together. Much in a way like the Americans have Thanksgiving, Christmas is an English kind of thanksgiving. And saying thanks for having family is really what it’s about.” Ironically, after escaping a character that defined him in the public eye over five films and 15 years, starting with Casino Royale in 2006, Craig is now the centre of another franchise, Knives Out, playing a character who walks the narrow line between convincing characterisation and camp. “But that’s the fun bit, isn’t it?’ he says. “Walking the line.” Three films in, Benoit Blanc feels like he has a lot of mileage left… perhaps more than the five films Craig made as Bond? “As soon as we’re on the red carpet, Rian and I get asked, ‘Are you going to make another one?’ And we both go, ‘Hang on a second! Let’s get this one out first.’ But, of course, I would love to continue working with him. As long as Rian keeps inventing it the way he does, then I’m in.” Not that playing Benoit Blanc is easy. “I still have to work hard at this,” he says. “He’s not uncomplicated to play. I don’t turn up on day one and go, ‘I know how to do this.’ That would be just terrible. I work on it and work on it.” With that level of commitment, does Craig feel he’s now getting the hang of investigating? For example, if I were to be clubbed to death or poisoned, could he work out whodunnit? “No! It’s like asking me, ‘Do you think playing James Bond made you better at being a spy?’ ” Craig exclaims. “It’s not going to happen; I wouldn’t be very good in that situation. You need a brain. “I suppose what I like about Benoit is that he’s not aggressive, his way of doing things is to try and disarm people. He often pays compliments, and I think that’s an interesting way of getting what you want in life. You know, he’s a charmer.” His co-star O’Connor told RT that, because he’d been brought up thinking of Craig as Bond, he was surprised to encounter an actor whose “sweetness, insecurity, and funniness were such a pleasure to work with”. Does Craig recognise himself in that description? “Well, all actors are insecure,” he says. “We may appear to be confident, but we’re just ducks; looking good on top but the legs are going crazy underneath. I’m making it up as I go along.” Read our guide to the best Christmas TV for 2025 Andrew Scott plays Lee Ross Could you get away with the perfect murder? ANDREW: I don’t think I would be very good at murder – I suppose I’m the type, but I just don’t like blood. I have many faults, but I think I’m going to get away in this life with not murdering anybody. That’s the way it’s looking, anyway. Do you have a favourite detective… Sherlock Holmes, perhaps? ANDREW: Actually, it’s Hercule Poirot. One of the films that had a real influence on me was Evil under the Sun with Peter Ustinov as Poirot, made in the 1980s. I remember watching him, Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith and thinking, “Wow!” I’d never seen a film like that. Glenn Close plays Martha Delacroix Do you have a favourite detective? GLENN: I loved Agatha Christie’s books and I was in Christie’s Crooked House in 2017. It had never been filmed because it has a very strange, disturbing ending. I also loved Prime Suspect. Helen Mirren was so good in that. Do you believe in good and evil? GLENN: Oh, very much so, although I think we’re a complicated species. It’s a pretty deep question. I think there are very few people who are born evil, but there are some. It’s usually a malfunction in our very complex brains, and I think a lot of it is how you’re brought up. Josh O’Connor plays Father Jud Duplenticy Could you imagine yourself planning the perfect murder? JOSH: No. Absolutely not. I’m too anxious. Most of the time, even if I make a plan to go and meet someone for dinner, I have second thoughts. I don’t think I’d ever make it out of the door. What about solving a murder, Josh? JOSH: Again, I’d be useless. Crime-solving requires an incredible level of organisation. You’d have to be very directed in your thoughts. And I’m so doubtful of everything and anything and everyone. My answer to most things is, “I don’t know!” As a detective, you’d have to have a little more conviction. You don’t seem very confident in your abilities… JOSH: I have low self-esteem and a big ego. You put those together and it’s chaotic. But it is perfect for an actor – most of us have low self-esteem. That’s why we need to be told that we’re good. But we also have a big ego and we want to be seen. It’s a strange one. Who was your favourite detective growing up? JOSH: I used to love turning on ITV and watching Midsomer Murders on a Sunday afternoon with my family. We’d all sit there and predict who the murderer was. We loved it. Mila Kunis plays police chief Geraldine Scott Did you grow up watching murder mysteries? MILA: I grew up in Russia, and Sherlock Holmes was definitely around when I was seven or eight. Then, when I moved to the States, I loved murder mysteries. Clue is one of my favourite movies of all time. Would you make a good murderer? MILA: I couldn’t do it. I’m not a very aggressive person and I don’t think I’m very calculated. I’d also need to be so much more organised… Actually, hold on, that’s not true. If my life or my family’s lives were at stake, I’d have no problem doing something extreme – and a woman who’s juggling a job and a family and kids can do a lot of things. Of course, you’re on the other side of the fence in the movie — would you make a good investigator in real life? MILA: I’d make a great investigator. I have no problems asking questions and I’m also pretty observant. However, I’m not good at identifying people – in a line-up I’m not your gal. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is coming to Netflix on 12th December. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. 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.
Lord Alan Sugar dishes on Celebrity Apprentice and why he allowed Thomas Skinner to return for it
From Lapland tasks to childhood chestnuts, Lord Sugar reveals what makes a very Apprentice-style Christmas.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Merry Christmas, Sugar Claus! If you were Father Christmas, which public figures would you put on your naughty list? I would have to say no comment on this whatsoever, my friend. As you will know, the BBC has guidelines. I have to keep my big mouth shut and not make personal or political comments like that. In that case, can we assume the contestants in your Celebrity Apprentice Christmas specials went straight on the nice list? Nah! That’s the excitement of it. Most of the time, they’re schmoozed by everybody, told how marvellous they are. Then they get a gig where I’m telling them what a load of rubbish they are. They’re masochists, really. Still, it’s worth remembering they don’t get paid anything at all. They do it for charity and that is very, very commendable. What will you be making the brave contestants do in the two festive episodes? They’re going up to Lapland and meeting Father Christmas. There was snow and ice, as you can imagine, reindeers and sledges. The contestants were split into two teams and each team had to create a special Christmas biscuit. Then they came back to London and presented their biscuits to big supermarkets and the best biscuit won. The interesting thing is, for the first time ever, the products created in the programme are actually going on sale in the supermarkets. All the money is going to Children in Need. Does the show create its own celebrities now? Did you decide whether Thomas Skinner could come back as a “celebrity”? I’m not sure over the 20 years how many people who have appeared on my show have actually made a name for themselves. I can think of maybe three: Saira Khan did quite well, then Katie Hopkins, who everybody loves to hate, and Thomas Skinner, who ended up on Strictly. But I don’t have any input. I’m presented with these celebrities; the BBC seek these people out and find them. And it’s not easy, because you can imagine that some of them are working and can’t take four or five days off. I can dream and say, “Oh, I’d love Madonna, I’d love Adele, I’d love the ginger bloke with a guitar...” What’s his name? Ed Sheeran. So, it’s not a matter of you ringing up the Beeb and going, “Get me Piers Morgan”? Well, funny you should say that. He was in the very first Celebrity Apprentice and I fired him. I keep reminding Piers that I gave him his TV debut, but he says, “I was on TV before that.” But you know what an arrogant bloke he is. He’d never admit it. Did you enjoy Christmas when you were growing up in Hackney in the 1950s? Our family weren’t very religious Jews, so we semi-celebrated Christmas, but more the happy side of things. We put Christmas decorations up and all that stuff. As a kid, I’d look forward to getting a Christmas present. I remember when I was 10 or 11 getting a pair of metal roller skates with rubber wheels on them that you adjusted with a little spanner. Mum and Dad saved up and bought them for me and my sisters and brother. As I grew older, I didn’t dish out Christmas presents to people. We used to give the staff financial bonuses and things like that, not physical things. Where will you be spending Christmas this year? I’ve had Christmas away from England the last 40 years. I spend five to six months of the year in America, so I’ll be here in Florida. My family also have homes here, so we’ll all be together. The grandkids as well, though they’re not kids any more. We’ll have a big traditional at-home British Christmas lunch with turkey and things like that. Won’t you miss cold, rainy old Hackney? No. Will you be having any special Christmas treats? My wife went to the supermarket today and bought my favourite thing – chestnuts. It’s the time for them, isn’t it, Christmas? I remember the vendors on Oxford Street when I was a boy, those black ovens with coal underneath and the chestnuts sitting on the top. You’d buy a white paper bag full of them off the bloke for sixpence. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Celebrity Apprentice is coming to BBC One and iPlayer this Christmas. Add The Celebrity Apprentice to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Entertainment 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.
Amadeus star Paul Bettany reveals how a fan's selfie intruded on a tragic family moment
Paul Bettany on how he balances Hollywood fame with family fun in Vermont.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Paul Bettany is far from being too cool for Yule. “I love Christmas so much,” he enthuses in advance of the festive celebrations at his home in the USA. “Our Christmas Day is a very English affair with crackers and turkey, and then, when people start showing up after Boxing Day, the party just continues. Last year we had 40 people.” Bettany, co-star of Amadeus, Sky Atlantic’s five-part adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, lives with his wife, actor Jennifer Connolly, in a timber house in rural Vermont, New England, where “it snows every year”. So, the 54-year-old London-born actor will be having a picturesque Christmas – but also a loud one. “I have a band room with drums and piano and PA system and loads of guitars. Lots of people come up and play. We do a gig on New Year’s Eve.” You might be thinking, rather him than me. But Bettany likes to go at things full throttle, whether that’s entertaining friends at Christmas or in his performance as the scheming court composer Salieri in Amadeus, who dedicates his life to destroying Mozart. It’s one of those roles where Bettany, who has lived in America since 2003, pops back to the UK to remind us just how good he is. He did it before in 2021 when he played the alcoholic Duke of Argyll in the period drama A Very British Scandal. Now he’s facing off with Will Sharpe’s Mozart in 18th-century Vienna; an arrangement Bettany is charmed by. “I have enormous admiration for Will. He’s funny, gentle and kind – an attractive combination and rare. Usually, actors are working out how they can triumph against the opposition rather than how to make each other better.” Bettany is a thoughtful, compelling actor; even as android superhero The Vision in the Marvel universe where, since 2015, he has been wearing a catsuit and firing lasers out of his forehead. He does this so convincingly I ask him to explain what it feels like. “I have no frame of reference for laser beams coming out of my head,” he says, gently reminding me that, thanks to computer graphics, it isn’t really happening. Appearing in films like A Beautiful Mind, Master and Commander and The Da Vinci Code means Bettany has been well known in the US for a long time, yet he finds fame hard to talk about. “The things that are great about it outweigh those that are not so great. I do wonder what it’s like for somebody as famous as Brad Pitt. But, for me, without even noticing it, you get a good table in a restaurant and people are nicer to you at airports. So, you tend to meet people on their best behaviour. But, when you meet people on their worst behaviour, it’s sometimes a little alienating.” He has an example. In 2015, he got the news that his father Thane (also an actor) was dying. “I remember getting the call, that I needed to fly over to be with my dad. I was on the phone, trying to process this information and crying, when somebody came up and took a selfie with me. They just hadn’t noticed what was happening and couldn’t see that part of me in that moment. So that bit’s weird, but there are great things as well. The life that it has afforded me, my children and my wife is extraordinary.” View Green Video on the source website Bettany and Connolly have a 12-year-old daughter Agnes and son Stellan, 22, and a son Kai, 27, from Connolly’s earlier relationship with photographer David Dugan. They’ll all be in Vermont, adding to the noise. “There are loads of kids, it gets crazy,” he says of the upcoming shindig. “And it’s a very inebriated affair. Lots of sledding.” Inebriated sledding? There are things that could go wrong with that. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere,” he concedes. “But it’s a lucky house. Nothing bad ever happens.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Amadeus will be available to watch on Sky and NOW in December. Add Amadeus to your watchlist on the <a id="OWA8b702c45-bee9-94e4-f018-57518e78041b" title="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" href="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-outlook-id="449c28d9-909e-4aab-b6b8-153454f55d5e" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="0">Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Daniel Craig is back as detective Benoit Blanc in his third Knives Out film – a baffling locked-room mystery with an all-star cast. But Craig insists that it can't be labelled the same as the last previous two…
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is in cinemas from 26 November and on Netflix from 12 November. Add it to your watchlist There’s a bit of everything in Benoit.” Daniel Craig is pondering the inspiration for his performance as the eccentric gentleman-detective Benoit Blanc in writer/director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies. “Peter Ustinov’s Poirot from Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun is there, but also Albert Finney in Murder on the Orient Express, which is ridiculous but kind of glorious. Like every other actor, I’m a magpie. I think, ‘I’ll have a bit of that.’” Blanc’s southern drawl and mannered bearing, his penchant for ramping up the dramatic tension as he reveals who has committed the crime, his moral outrage and, perhaps as important, his elegant tailoring, were first seen in writer-director Johnson’s Knives Out, the meticulously plotted 2019 Netflix film that channelled the Agatha Christie golden age of crime into contemporary America. That reinvention of the genre was a huge success – so successful, in fact, that there was some disappointment when the second film in the series, 2022’s Glass Onion, featured tricksy exploding sets and slightly overdone performances. Including, some said, Craig’s. “There was criticism that I was over the top,” he says, as RT spends a day with the cast ahead of the release of the third instalment in the franchise, Wake Up Dead Man. “But I always try and remind people, that’s what he was supposed to be. The whole point of the movie was that Benoit Blanc was a caricature of himself, he was attempting to disarm these awful people.” Still, there are no worries about tone in Wake Up Dead Man. This is a scorching return to form, aided by Johnson’s decision to swap affectations like Glass Onion’s sun-drenched billionaire island for a dark American-gothic setting, with Epping Forest in Essex standing in for upstate New York. There is also a standout performance to put alongside 57-year-old Craig’s. Previously best known in the UK for playing Larry in The Durrells and Prince Charles in The Crown, Josh O’Connor is, at 35, rapidly becoming one of the most in-demand actors in the world. Here he plays young Catholic priest Father Jud Duplenticy, who, before taking holy orders, had been a professional boxer until he killed a man in the ring. Guilt-racked Duplenticy is sent as a penance of sorts to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a rural church in the settlement of Chimney Rock. Here he must serve under ferociously reactionary priest Jefferson Wicks, played by Josh Brolin as a MAGA monsignor railing against the sin and weakness of what he sees as a “woke” world. In response, Father Jud offers understanding for man’s weakness and the grace of God. If Glass Onion, with its face masks and sealed island-setting, played with Covid-era themes of isolation, then Wake Up Dead Man is addressing the cultural and political gap between left and right. For some of the American cast, Johnson has clearly made a film about contemporary divisions in the US. “I have to bite my tongue now, way more often than I used to, 100 per cent,” says Mila Kunis, who plays local police chief Geraldine Scott. “Somebody asks ‘What’s your favourite taco?’ If I say beef then the chicken people are going to be all upset with me. If I say chicken the beef people are going to be upset with me. Everything is politicised now, that’s the truth.” Glenn Close, who plays parish spinster Martha Delacroix, Wicks’s greatest supporter, likewise worries about America’s direction of travel. “I think about that a lot,” she says. “We live in scary times.” Father Jud is fighting for control of a parish that Wicks runs as a personal fiefdom. His all-star parishioners also include Jeremy Renner as Doctor Nat Sharp, Andrew Scott as Lee Ross, a formerly bestselling novelist, plus Kerry Washington as lawyer Vera Draven and Cailee Spaeny as disabled cellist Simone Vivane. As you might expect, everyone has their own dark secrets. As you might also expect, there’s soon a murder; the victim’s body found in an apparently sealed changing room, just off the altar. Baffled police chief Scott calls in Blanc who declares it, with relish, “a classic impossible crime”. Johnson is returning to the nuts and bolts of detective fiction, particularly drawing on the US writer John Dickson Carr, whose 1935 novel The Hollow Man – referenced in the film – is regarded as the great American example of a locked-room mystery. And, as the genre demands, in this film there is a solution in the end – one so satisfying it goes some way to explaining why murder mysteries are so popular again. After all, the original golden age of Christie and Dorothy L Sayers came after the slaughter of the First World War and during the disaster of the Depression. With contemporary society so fractured, perhaps we are drawn to someone, anyone, who can work out what is happening. “There’s something very satisfying about a conclusion when it’s all wrapped up at the end,” explains O’Connor. “We don’t always have that in life and we find pleasure in it.” Still, entertaining as Johnson’s plotting mechanics are, it’s the ensemble performances that make this film so compelling, in particular Glenn Close’s occasionally grand guignol turn as Delacroix, a devout woman forever marked by a traumatic childhood experience in the church. It’s something Close understands well because her family was enmeshed in the socially conservative Moral Re-Armament movement when she was a child. “From seven to 22 I had a cult-like upbringing, so I knew the territory,” she says. “If you’ve had that kind of experience when you’re so young, it stays with you always.” Rian Johnson has recently talked about his own very religious evangelical Christian upbringing and the effect it had on him and Wake Up Dead Man, revealing, “that’s where this whole thing came from.” His film offers two contesting kinds of faith (three, if you count Blanc’s rigorous atheism as a form of belief). Wicks’s faith is based on Old Testament vengeance, Duplenticy’s on New Testament values of love and forgiveness. “You sense Josh recognises a little bit of himself in Duplenticy,” says Craig. “And he feels a need to mentor or to nurture him.” O’Connor, who was brought up as a Catholic, agrees. “I definitely have faith, it is very present in my life,” he says. “I went to church every Sunday. I was an altar boy but was kicked off for smiling too much, which was a bit mean. But I think the thing that makes Jud and I more aligned is that my parents, who I would describe as socialist Catholics, believed in hope, in doubt, forgiveness and reconciliation.” While Craig is always the main draw on these movies, in this film’s co-lead, O’Connor, he almost meets his match. But the rising star sounds surprised by his own fame when I ask if he remembers the moment he knew his career was taking off. “Well, I’ve just wrapped on a movie with Joel Coen and I did this movie with Steven Spielberg this year, which is insane. So maybe this is the moment, actually right now, in this room.” He remains remarkably modest in the face of unstinting praise from his colleagues. Close compares his performance as Father Jud to a Hollywood great. “Josh is like Jimmy Stewart,” she says. “He really has that wonderful quality, a goodness that will be a comfort to people.” Craig states simply, “Josh is brilliant – you just want him to shine.” In their jobs Craig and O’Connor have different, although complementary, approaches. One intensely physically disciplined, the other a little less so – as suggested by their interactions with the film’s personal trainer. “We were in the gym every morning,” says O’Connor. “Well, I was in the gym some mornings. Daniel was probably in the gym every morning. But it was important to me, that this guy who was a boxer looked like it.” Could O’Connor take a punch? “I actually was punched in the face by an 11-year-old when I was 15. We went to a skate park in my home town and this boy who was a lot younger than me came up and said, give me your skateboard. I said, no. And then he punched me in the face and gave me a bleeding nose. Being punched by an 11-year-old, if you’re 15, is mortifying. But it was a long time ago.” O’Connor gives Craig the credit for his role in Wake Up Dead Man. “Daniel is a really incredible human being,” he says. “He’s so generous with his spirit and he brought me into Knives Out. He was the one that alerted Rian to my work. I didn’t know that until yesterday, actually, and it’s a big deal. “Daniel is also a proper actor. I think we sometimes forget, because of Bond maybe, that his body of work is extraordinary and diverse. He can do tragedy, comedy, grief, drama, everything. And as a person, he’s just a pure collaborator – incredibly full of self-doubt and self-loathing and not knowing whether he’s doing the right thing and constantly saying to me, ‘What do you think about that?’” Self-doubt? Self-loathing? Daniel Craig? That’s not what we expected. “Completely,” says O’Connor. “It’s partly because what he does with Bond is so confident. But that’s not him at all. He’s like a boy. He’s sort of this sweet, insecure man who is incredibly charming and brings you in. He’s brilliant. I loved working with him.” All the actors I speak to say, in their different ways, how much they enjoyed working with each other. “We were in a green room together all day, every single day,” says Andrew Scott of filming. “We didn’t go back to our trailer, we just all hung around as a group. Being in scenes with nine people is unusual and doesn’t happen a huge amount in movies, so we all got to know each other really well, they are just a great bunch of people.” For Kunis, “The atmosphere was unbelievable. I have already pitched myself multiple times for Knives Out number four. I know it’s never going to happen… but it could.” “They’re all of a very high calibre,” says Craig. “Working with someone like Andrew Scott, or Glenn, you have to raise your game. You don’t have a choice, really. I mean, it’s s***-or-get-off-the-pot time. When Glenn Close is on the set it’s, ‘Oh, OK, right, we’d better all be good then.’ You can’t be cagey, you have to come and meet her. And, you know, she’s there to have fun, but she’s also an incredibly serious actor.” He’s not wrong – when asked, Close describes this film to me as “Shakespearean”. “There’s a certain kind of order, then disorder comes in, and then it’s restored, either comically or with drama. And I love the ending of this movie. I think it will surprise people.” Faith, death, desire, revenge. To go back to an earlier question, perhaps we like whodunnits so much because they allow us to confront the big stuff whilst being entertained. But Craig stops me dead right there. “These movies are not whodunnits,” he admonishes. “Those are the worst kind of movies. Yes, there is a denouement at the end, but it’s a denouement with a twist. And that’s part of its genius.”
Wake Up Dead Man cast reveal Knives Out film's relevance to "scary times" we live in – and who has pitched a return for a sequel
"These movies are not whodunnits," says Daniel Craig. "Those are the worst kind of movies."
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. “There’s a bit of everything in Benoit.” Daniel Craig is pondering the inspiration for his performance as the eccentric gentleman-detective Benoit Blanc in writer/director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies. “Peter Ustinov’s Poirot from Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun is there, but also Albert Finney in Murder on the Orient Express, which is ridiculous but kind of glorious. Like every other actor, I’m a magpie. I think, ‘I’ll have a bit of that.’” Blanc’s southern drawl and mannered bearing, his penchant for ramping up the dramatic tension as he reveals who has committed the crime, his moral outrage and, perhaps as important, his elegant tailoring, were first seen in writer-director Johnson’s Knives Out, the meticulously plotted 2019 Netflix film that channelled the Agatha Christie golden age of crime into contemporary America. That reinvention of the genre was a huge success – so successful, in fact, that there was some disappointment when the second film in the series, 2022’s Glass Onion, featured tricksy exploding sets and slightly overdone performances. Including, some said, Craig’s. “There was criticism that I was over the top,” he says, as RT spends a day with the cast ahead of the release of the third instalment in the franchise, Wake Up Dead Man. “But I always try and remind people, that’s what he was supposed to be. The whole point of the movie was that Benoit Blanc was a caricature of himself, he was attempting to disarm these awful people.” Still, there are no worries about tone in Wake Up Dead Man. This is a scorching return to form, aided by Johnson’s decision to swap affectations like Glass Onion’s sun-drenched billionaire island for a dark American-gothic setting, with Epping Forest in Essex standing in for upstate New York. There is also a standout performance to put alongside 57-year-old Craig’s. Previously best known in the UK for playing Larry in The Durrells and Prince Charles in The Crown, Josh O’Connor is, at 35, rapidly becoming one of the most in-demand actors in the world. Here he plays young Catholic priest Father Jud Duplenticy, who, before taking holy orders, had been a professional boxer until he killed a man in the ring. Guilt-racked Duplenticy is sent as a penance of sorts to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a rural church in the settlement of Chimney Rock. Here he must serve under ferociously reactionary priest Jefferson Wicks, played by Josh Brolin as a MAGA monsignor railing against the sin and weakness of what he sees as a “woke” world. In response, Father Jud offers understanding for man’s weakness and the grace of God. If Glass Onion, with its face masks and sealed island-setting, played with Covid-era themes of isolation, then Wake Up Dead Man is addressing the cultural and political gap between left and right. For some of the American cast, Johnson has clearly made a film about contemporary divisions in the US. “I have to bite my tongue now, way more often than I used to, 100 per cent,” says Mila Kunis, who plays local police chief Geraldine Scott. “Somebody asks ‘What’s your favourite taco?’ If I say beef then the chicken people are going to be all upset with me. If I say chicken the beef people are going to be upset with me. Everything is politicised now, that’s the truth.” Glenn Close, who plays parish spinster Martha Delacroix, Wicks’s greatest supporter, likewise worries about America’s direction of travel. “I think about that a lot,” she says. “We live in scary times.” Father Jud is fighting for control of a parish that Wicks runs as a personal fiefdom. His all-star parishioners also include Jeremy Renner as Doctor Nat Sharp, Andrew Scott as Lee Ross, a formerly bestselling novelist, plus Kerry Washington as lawyer Vera Draven and Cailee Spaeny as disabled cellist Simone Vivane. View Green Video on the source website As you might expect, everyone has their own dark secrets. As you might also expect, there’s soon a murder; the victim’s body found in an apparently sealed changing room, just off the altar. Baffled police chief Scott calls in Blanc who declares it, with relish, “a classic impossible crime”. Johnson is returning to the nuts and bolts of detective fiction, particularly drawing on the US writer John Dickson Carr, whose 1935 novel The Hollow Man – referenced in the film – is regarded as the great American example of a locked-room mystery. And, as the genre demands, in this film there is a solution in the end – one so satisfying it goes some way to explaining why murder mysteries are so popular again. After all, the original golden age of Christie and Dorothy L Sayers came after the slaughter of the First World War and during the disaster of the Depression. With contemporary society so fractured, perhaps we are drawn to someone, anyone, who can work out what is happening. “There’s something very satisfying about a conclusion when it’s all wrapped up at the end,” explains O’Connor. “We don’t always have that in life and we find pleasure in it.” Still, entertaining as Johnson’s plotting mechanics are, it’s the ensemble performances that make this film so compelling, in particular Glenn Close’s occasionally grand guignol turn as Delacroix, a devout woman forever marked by a traumatic childhood experience in the church. It’s something Close understands well because her family was enmeshed in the socially conservative Moral Re-Armament movement when she was a child. “From seven to 22 I had a cult-like upbringing, so I knew the territory,” she says. “If you’ve had that kind of experience when you’re so young, it stays with you always.” Rian Johnson has recently talked about his own very religious evangelical Christian upbringing and the effect it had on him and Wake Up Dead Man, revealing, “that’s where this whole thing came from.” His film offers two contesting kinds of faith (three, if you count Blanc’s rigorous atheism as a form of belief). Wicks’s faith is based on Old Testament vengeance, Duplenticy’s on New Testament values of love and forgiveness. “You sense Josh recognises a little bit of himself in Duplenticy,” says Craig. “And he feels a need to mentor or to nurture him.” O’Connor, who was brought up as a Catholic, agrees. “I definitely have faith, it is very present in my life,” he says. “I went to church every Sunday. I was an altar boy but was kicked off for smiling too much, which was a bit mean. But I think the thing that makes Jud and I more aligned is that my parents, who I would describe as socialist Catholics, believed in hope, in doubt, forgiveness and reconciliation.” While Craig is always the main draw on these movies, in this film’s co-lead, O’Connor, he almost meets his match. But the rising star sounds surprised by his own fame when I ask if he remembers the moment he knew his career was taking off. “Well, I’ve just wrapped on a movie with Joel Coen and I did this movie with Steven Spielberg this year, which is insane. So maybe this is the moment, actually right now, in this room.” He remains remarkably modest in the face of unstinting praise from his colleagues. Close compares his performance as Father Jud to a Hollywood great. “Josh is like Jimmy Stewart,” she says. “He really has that wonderful quality, a goodness that will be a comfort to people.” Craig states simply, “Josh is brilliant – you just want him to shine.” In their jobs Craig and O’Connor have different, although complementary, approaches. One intensely physically disciplined, the other a little less so – as suggested by their interactions with the film’s personal trainer. “We were in the gym every morning,” says O’Connor. “Well, I was in the gym some mornings. Daniel was probably in the gym every morning. But it was important to me, that this guy who was a boxer looked like it.” Could O’Connor take a punch? “I actually was punched in the face by an 11-year-old when I was 15. We went to a skate park in my home town and this boy who was a lot younger than me came up and said, give me your skateboard. I said, no. And then he punched me in the face and gave me a bleeding nose. Being punched by an 11-year-old, if you’re 15, is mortifying. But it was a long time ago.” O’Connor gives Craig the credit for his role in Wake Up Dead Man. “Daniel is a really incredible human being,” he says. “He’s so generous with his spirit and he brought me into Knives Out. He was the one that alerted Rian to my work. I didn’t know that until yesterday, actually, and it’s a big deal. “Daniel is also a proper actor. I think we sometimes forget, because of Bond maybe, that his body of work is extraordinary and diverse. He can do tragedy, comedy, grief, drama, everything. And as a person, he’s just a pure collaborator – incredibly full of self-doubt and self-loathing and not knowing whether he’s doing the right thing and constantly saying to me, ‘What do you think about that?’” Self-doubt? Self-loathing? Daniel Craig? That’s not what we expected. “Completely,” says O’Connor. “It’s partly because what he does with Bond is so confident. But that’s not him at all. He’s like a boy. He’s sort of this sweet, insecure man who is incredibly charming and brings you in. He’s brilliant. I loved working with him.” All the actors I speak to say, in their different ways, how much they enjoyed working with each other. “We were in a green room together all day, every single day,” says Andrew Scott of filming. “We didn’t go back to our trailer, we just all hung around as a group. Being in scenes with nine people is unusual and doesn’t happen a huge amount in movies, so we all got to know each other really well, they are just a great bunch of people.” For Kunis, “The atmosphere was unbelievable. I have already pitched myself multiple times for Knives Out number four. I know it’s never going to happen… but it could.” “They’re all of a very high calibre,” says Craig. “Working with someone like Andrew Scott, or Glenn, you have to raise your game. You don’t have a choice, really. I mean, it’s s**t-or-get-off-the-pot time. When Glenn Close is on the set it’s, ‘Oh, OK, right, we’d better all be good then.’ You can’t be cagey, you have to come and meet her. And, you know, she’s there to have fun, but she’s also an incredibly serious actor.” He’s not wrong – when asked, Close describes this film to me as “Shakespearean”. “There’s a certain kind of order, then disorder comes in, and then it’s restored, either comically or with drama. And I love the ending of this movie. I think it will surprise people.” Faith, death, desire, revenge. To go back to an earlier question, perhaps we like whodunnits so much because they allow us to confront the big stuff whilst being entertained. But Craig stops me dead right there. “These movies are not whodunnits,” he admonishes. “Those are the worst kind of movies. Yes, there is a denouement at the end, but it’s a denouement with a twist. And that’s part of its genius.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is in UK cinemas now and is coming to Netflix on 12th November. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Edith Bowman is now the voice of Radio 3’s Sound of Cinema — and insists it’s not dumbing down
Sound of Cinema is on Radio 3 at 4pm on Saturday. Add it to your collection 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 she was let go from her 6 Music show in 2013. Undaunted, she used the moment to start Soundtracking, which launched in 2016 with Hans Zimmer as the first guest. There are no reports of Sweet being pushed out, but does Bowman, who was approached by station controller Sam Jackson, feel some sympathy towards her predecessor, leaving a show that he had very much made his own? “One of the first things that I said to Radio 3 was that I’d really like to reach out to Matthew and just drop him a message,” she says. “Whether he reads it or not, we’re all humans and we all have connections to things. I’ve been in that position. It’s not nice.” Few presenters come with Sweet’s intellectual credentials, but Bowman thinks her relative lack of classical knowledge is actually a strength. “I can only talk about music from a place of emotion and how it makes me feel, rather than talking about quavers and semi- quavers and timings.” So, is this iteration of Sound of Cinema a gateway show for people who don’t know much about classical music but, given the opportunity, might be open to discovering it? “Yeah. And how amazing would that be? I mean, that’s how I got into it. From talking about film on Radio 1 back in the day, I really started to get the chance to speak to people about the creative process behind the music and how involved it was in the storytelling.” New elements like Pick of the Flicks allow Bowman to get mainstream stars like Emma Thompson and Graham Norton on the show, talking about the film scores that have stayed with them. This tendency to see film music as biographical, as much a soundtrack to lives as movies, is another departure from the previous show. Dumbing down? As Norton proved when he chose Ryuichi Sakamoto’s evocative electronica Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence music, mainstream can be very interesting. “I have a genuine interest in this art form,” says Bowman. “I hope that it does bring people to Radio 3, brings them into this world and makes them feel part of it.”
Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe are bringing the composer’s story to life with divine intervention – and stunt strawberries
Add Amadeus to your watchlist 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 window, like it was theatrically managed. So occasionally there would be weird, ‘What’s happening here?’ moments.” Shaffer’s play has, famously, been given a screen treatment before, in MiloŠ Forman’s 1984 film in which Tom Hulce played Mozart and F Murray Abraham was Salieri. But rather than the giggling manchild Hulce gave us, Sharpe’s Mozart is a roistering gadabout whose apparent ability to produce utterly sublime music on request increasingly becomes a burden. “One of the main ways into him as a character for me was the music,” says Sharpe. “Hearing all the different shades of Mozart, how sometimes he is super playful and light, but he can also be very grand and dark.” Bettany seethes as the conflicted Salieri, visiting a prostitute to be beaten, doing something intensely personal over his keyboard – “I find that stuff very difficult to be honest, especially as I hurtle towards my dotage” – or simply staring at a score sheet, alone with the terrible thought that he might be mediocre. “And gosh, I have those same fears and make the same accusations,” he says. “I’m sure most people do, unless they happen to be Mozart.” Sharpe, who will be 40 next year, won rave reviews and a Bafta for Giri/Haji in 2019 and co-wrote and directed Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain in 2021. In the same year he co-wrote and directed the Sky Atlantic/HBO series Landscapers. Then, in 2022, came his acclaimed performance as troubled tech entrepreneur Ethan Spiller in The White Lotus. Given all that, does 54-year-old Bettany, who first came to wide public attention in 2001 alongside Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale and, more recently, has starred as Vision in the Marvel films and Disney+ series, have any fellow feeling with Salieri and his jealousy of the younger man? “It’s horribly revealing for me to say it, but this didn’t feel a massive stretch for me,” he says. “I think we all have these venal, mendacious, awful ideas that we hopefully don’t act on, so it was delicious to do it as actors.” When the cast photographs were released in August, social media noticed that Sharpe, who describes himself as British-Japanese, isn’t a white Austrian. His casting was decried as “woke”, among other things. “Not many people mentioned how un-Italian I am,” notes Bettany. Sharpe is inclined to play the furore down. “I’m only dimly aware of it, because I’m not really online. The play, and this show, is quite fictionalised, it’s not meant to be a historical biography of either character.” And that, of course, is key: this is a made-up story. In real life Salieri helped Mozart, and we have no evidence that he regarded himself as a failure. Rather, the plot was possibly a figment of an increasingly ill Mozart’s imagination, leading to rumours that were developed by the Russian writer Pushkin in his 1830 play Mozart and Salieri, and later reworked by Shaffer as a madcap morality tale about the high price that both jealousy and genius demand. Thus, a series that began with much bawdiness resolves in a poignant contemplation of the meaning of art and reputation, as the ailing Mozart finally understands Salieri is the author of his demise and Salieri realises a second cosmic trick has been played on him – it will be Mozart that history remembers. “There’s a moment where Salieri touches Mozart’s hand and suddenly, they hear music.” says Bettany. “I don’t know how it was for Will, but the whole way through the show, I was thinking, ‘How the hell are we going to convey this thing?’ And I hate to use this word, because you just sound like a ponce, but here we go. It just happened ‘organically’. There, I said it.”
Amadeus stars Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe talk Mozart drama's 'woke' accusations and the "strange" power of conducting
Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe are bringing the composer's story to life with divine intervention – and stunt strawberries.
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 window, like it was theatrically managed. So occasionally there would be weird, ‘What’s happening here?’ moments.” Shaffer’s play has, famously, been given a screen treatment before, in MiloŠ Forman’s 1984 film in which Tom Hulce played Mozart and F Murray Abraham was Salieri. But rather than the giggling manchild Hulce gave us, Sharpe’s Mozart is a roistering gadabout whose apparent ability to produce utterly sublime music on request increasingly becomes a burden. “One of the main ways into him as a character for me was the music,” says Sharpe. “Hearing all the different shades of Mozart, how sometimes he is super playful and light, but he can also be very grand and dark.” View oEmbed on the source website Bettany seethes as the conflicted Salieri, visiting a prostitute to be beaten, doing something intensely personal over his keyboard – “I find that stuff very difficult to be honest, especially as I hurtle towards my dotage” – or simply staring at a score sheet, alone with the terrible thought that he might be mediocre. “And gosh, I have those same fears and make the same accusations,” he says. “I’m sure most people do, unless they happen to be Mozart.” Sharpe, who will be 40 next year, won rave reviews and a Bafta for Giri/Haji in 2019 and co-wrote and directed Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain in 2021. In the same year he co-wrote and directed the Sky Atlantic/HBO series Landscapers. Then, in 2022, came his acclaimed performance as troubled tech entrepreneur Ethan Spiller in The White Lotus. Given all that, does 54-year-old Bettany, who first came to wide public attention in 2001 alongside Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale and, more recently, has starred as Vision in the Marvel films and Disney+ series, have any fellow feeling with Salieri and his jealousy of the younger man? “It’s horribly revealing for me to say it, but this didn’t feel a massive stretch for me,” he says. “I think we all have these venal, mendacious, awful ideas that we hopefully don’t act on, so it was delicious to do it as actors.” When the cast photographs were released in August, social media noticed that Sharpe, who describes himself as British-Japanese, isn’t a white Austrian. His casting was decried as “woke”, among other things. “Not many people mentioned how un-Italian I am,” notes Bettany. Sharpe is inclined to play the furore down. “I’m only dimly aware of it, because I’m not really online. The play, and this show, is quite fictionalised, it’s not meant to be a historical biography of either character.” And that, of course, is key: this is a made-up story. In real life Salieri helped Mozart, and we have no evidence that he regarded himself as a failure. Rather, the plot was possibly a figment of an increasingly ill Mozart’s imagination, leading to rumours that were developed by the Russian writer Pushkin in his 1830 play Mozart and Salieri, and later reworked by Shaffer as a madcap morality tale about the high price that both jealousy and genius demand. Thus, a series that began with much bawdiness resolves in a poignant contemplation of the meaning of art and reputation, as the ailing Mozart finally understands Salieri is the author of his demise and Salieri realises a second cosmic trick has been played on him – it will be Mozart that history remembers. “There’s a moment where Salieri touches Mozart’s hand and suddenly, they hear music.” says Bettany. “I don’t know how it was for Will, but the whole way through the show, I was thinking, ‘How the hell are we going to convey this thing?’ And I hate to use this word , because you just sound like a ponce, but here we go. It just happened ‘organically’. There, I said it.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Amadeus will be available to watch on Sky and NOW in December. Add Amadeus to your watchlist on the <a id="OWA8b702c45-bee9-94e4-f018-57518e78041b" title="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" href="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-outlook-id="449c28d9-909e-4aab-b6b8-153454f55d5e" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="0">Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Edith Bowman opens up about replacing Sound of Cinema legend Matthew Sweet: "I hope that it does bring people to Radio 3"
Edith Bowman is now the voice of Radio 3's Sound of Cinema – and insists it's not dumbing down.
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 she was let go from her 6 Music show in 2013. Undaunted, she used the moment to start Soundtracking, which launched in 2016 with Hans Zimmer as the first guest. There are no reports of Sweet being pushed out, but does Bowman, who was approached by station controller Sam Jackson, feel some sympathy towards her predecessor, leaving a show that he had very much made his own? “One of the first things that I said to Radio 3 was that I’d really like to reach out to Matthew and just drop him a message,” she says. “Whether he reads it or not, we’re all humans and we all have connections to things. I’ve been in that position. It’s not nice.” Few presenters come with Sweet’s intellectual credentials, but Bowman thinks her relative lack of classical knowledge is actually a strength. “I can only talk about music from a place of emotion and how it makes me feel, rather than talking about quavers and semi- quavers and timings.” So, is this iteration of Sound of Cinema a gateway show for people who don’t know much about classical music but, given the opportunity, might be open to discovering it? “Yeah. And how amazing would that be? I mean, that’s how I got into it. From talking about film on Radio 1 back in the day, I really started to get the chance to speak to people about the creative process behind the music and how involved it was in the storytelling.” New elements like Pick of the Flicks allow Bowman to get mainstream stars like Emma Thompson and Graham Norton on the show, talking about the film scores that have stayed with them. This tendency to see film music as biographical, as much a soundtrack to lives as movies, is another departure from the previous show. Dumbing down? As Norton proved when he chose Ryuichi Sakamoto’s evocative electronica Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence music, mainstream can be very interesting. “I have a genuine interest in this art form,” says Bowman. “I hope that it does bring people to Radio 3, brings them into this world and makes them feel part of it.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Listen to Sound of Cinema on Saturday at 4pm on Radio 3. Check out more of our Audio 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.
A new documentary unveils artist JMW Turner’s secret passion for erotic sketches – and how critics wanted to erase them from history
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 beauty Effie Gray, was sexually naive. Turner, born in Covent Garden, was not. He would visit brothels to sketch prostitutes and, as the film Mr Turner made clear, had a vigorous sex life. Accordingly, a few are graphic images. “I think for many people they are surprising, because we associate Turner so closely with landscape,” says Amy Concannon, curator of this autumn’s Turner and Constable exhibition at Tate Britain in London and expert contributor to the documentary. “We, of course, don’t know whether he was just an observer or a participant in the activities depicted, but a compulsion to draw these erotic subjects seems perfectly natural for someone who was rarely without a sketchbook to hand.” It’s this compulsive creativity that speaks directly to Ronnie Wood, now 78 and still painting. “I think what keeps you young is the drive to keep getting better,” he says. “Turner was obviously driven. He was possessed and I love that.” Turner sketched everywhere he went in Britain and Europe, taking impressions of landscapes before completing paintings at his London studio – a process Emin, who comes from Margate where Turner did much of his sketching, well understands. “My sketchbooks work like a diary,” she says. “It’s something which I treasure. And so maybe Turner felt the same way about his own sketchbooks. It wasn’t that they were secret, it was more that they were his. ‘Let the paintings be seen but let the book belong to me.’” When we first meet Turner in Mike Leigh’s 2014 film, he is outside sketching, and Spall, who learned to paint for the role and has since exhibited his own work, has a strong sense of what the artist was thinking. “Turner was trying to touch the sublime,” he says. “The Romantic movement wasn’t about what people saw, it was about what they felt about what they saw; about trying to catch a feeling, which is over and above the arrangement of the elements that you see before you.” In the end, what can we know of Turner, the working-class artist who, like Emin, was welcomed into the aristocratic Royal Academy; the visionary who shocked Ruskin? “That he didn’t hold himself back,” says Emin. “I think for Turner, whatever he was painting, it was all the same stuff for him.” Shocking they might be, but the erotic sketches are not the drawings of an artist obsessed by sex, but an artist obsessed by capturing wonder wherever he encountered it. “When you think he was a man in the 1800s, painting freely with his emotions, that’s the wildest thing,” says Emin.
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
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 arrived for a gig with her electric piano. “At the time I just thought it was a way of earning £17.50,” she says. “It was a discotheque, but they had a live band because the Musicians Union insisted on it. The bass player came in and said, ‘Oh, I like the sound of your piano. Would you hire it out?’ And I replied, ‘No, if you want my piano, you have to hire me.’ So rather than a hire company, I became a professional musician. It was probably the right choice.” The bass player was Trevor Horne, soon to be one of the key figures in British pop. Through him Dudley would arrange the strings on one of the defining albums of the early 80s, The Lexicon of Love by ABC, and then join the experimental, and highly successful, electronic pop group Art of Noise. In truth, it’s quite hard to keep up with all the things Dudley has done. The first person to be appointed BBC Concert Orchestra’s Composer in Association, she has also worked with Robbie Williams (“So funny and full of life. The Ivor Novello of his time”) and the Spice Girls, seemingly equally happy in classical or pop. “To me, musical barriers don’t exist,” she says. “Duke Ellington said there’s good music and bad music, and that’s it. But I’m not even sure that there’s bad music. There’s sometimes quite weird music, or music that maybe I don’t like, but I would hesitate to call it bad.” She went on to score television commercials for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Guinness, then got her first big TV series commission, the soundtrack for Jeeves and Wooster, starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Looking back over her career, the obvious high point would be an Oscar for 1997’s The Full Monty, beating Hans Zimmer’s score for As Good as It Gets. “I had no expectation of winning,” she recalls of the awards ceremony in Los Angeles. “I do remember just being shocked. I was wearing quite high heels, and my main thought was, ‘Don’t fall over.’ When I’ve seen it back, I appear to be quite calm. I’ve no idea how, really, because it was all a bit of a blur.” It was an important moment in her musical life, but not the most important. That had come much earlier, when she was 10. “The school acquired a clarinet and because I was the best recorder player I got the clarinet and free music lessons. Soon after that, I realised that all I ever wanted to do was music.” She would go on to win a “life-changing” junior exhibition at the RCM. Acutely aware that she was “born at the right time”, Dudley remains ever grateful to the Inner London Education Authority, which provided her free music lessons. “Those days are long gone, so I do feel blessed. Since I was a child, music has been devalued in the national curriculum. It’s not seen to be as important.” But, of course, it is and we tend to find out just how important in moments of personal and, sometimes, national crisis. At the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020 it was Dudley who arranged the socially distanced performance of Land of Hope and Glory at the Last Night of the Proms. “There was no audience at the Royal Albert Hall except me and Errollyn Wallen [now Master of the King’s Music] rattling around up in the gallery. It was a challenge to reduce Elgar’s magnificent orchestration, but also a joy to delve into the score. On the night the BBC Symphony Orchestra played the arrangement magnificently. I found it very moving.” And so she plays on, immensely respected by her peers and utterly dedicated to making good music, whatever genre we choose to call it. “The composer Elisabeth Lutyens said, ‘I write two types of music. I write my own music and film music.’ I thought that was rather a terrible thing to say because, really, you have to put yourself into everything that you do.”
A bespoke radio station is hammering preconceptions about builders — and filling a serious gap in the market
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 clear when we speak, pretty much everything I thought I knew about builders is out of date. “That whole stereotypical thing of builders going to the caff every morning for eggs, bacon, sausage, chips and beans and reading The Sun, that’s not the industry any more,” he says. “I’ve seen plasterers eating strawberries during the day.” And they don’t wolf-whistle any more? “No! That went before the fry-ups.” If builders have moved with the times they have also, according to Louis Timpany, come under far greater financial and psychological stress. Some of the FixFest proceeds went to the Fix Radio Foundation, a charity that assists tradespeople in distress, and there was a set-aside area at the festival offering help with mental health issues. “It’s a prevalent issue affecting our community,” Timpany says. “This is a heavily macho male culture, and men in general are not great at talking about their feelings. Also, much of the construction industry is made up of thousands of small businesses. So, you’ve often got somebody who is responsible for their business and for the livelihood of their family.” The Bald Builders are also family (Brad, 40, and Sam, 30, are brothers-in-law). Shouting out to chippies scraping frost off windscreens while most of us have yet to poke a tentative toe from under the duvet, the pair broadcast from a studio they made themselves. If they sound like builders, it’s because they are. As soon as the breakfast show finishes, they’ll be off to work, “doing up” houses. “We’re cut from the same cloth as our listeners,” Brad tells me. “We understand how hard it is when it’s cold and raining, because we’ve got the same job digging footings and foundations.” Once Brad and Sam have left for a day on muddy sites, Mikey Faulkner introduces At Work Anthems, a mid-morning show that delivers on its promise, supplying the requisite Fleetwood Mac and Depeche Mode for successfully thwacking nails. Following Mikey, from 12 to 3pm, it’s the station’s flag carrier when it comes to the serious stuff, The Clive Holland Show. The Midlands presenter and longtime building broadcaster takes on the major issues that affect the trade and, by extension, the country. The Government has committed to building 1.5 million new homes in England in this parliament. Moreover, there is a shortage of builders. On Holland’s show today they are covering the fraught subject of whether this shortfall means there need to be more on-site female “tradies”, Fix Radio argot for tradespeople. Not every male caller has been enthusiastic and a frustrated Mike the Electrician messages from Manchester: “The reason more women don’t get into our industry is because of some of the things men who have called in have been saying.” Fix Radio does have a predominately masculine tone but it also broadcasts the excellent podcast Tradeswomen Together, presented by Hattie Hasan and Steph Leese, “For women in construction. By women in construction”. During my day with Fix, meteorological conditions have been a regular source of comment. The elements have been too dry and then too wet. Render cracks, cement won’t set. Wood heats up and warps, then wood is soaked by rain and won’t cut. “These are the joys,” as one caller puts it, “of working in the UK weather.” Listening to talk of the newly chilly mornings, of plugging heatable gilets into car USB sockets, I realise this is a station that has a palpable bond with its listeners. I ask Timpany if Fix can keep on growing and he replies, “There are three million tradespeople out there.” Plenty more hi-vis to zip. Fix Radio is available on DAB and at fixradio.com
'The smell, sound and heat would have seemed a miracle 200 years ago'
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
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! by Jasper Dommett), an interview with Scotland’s only female freight train driver, plus slots for presenters Tom McKinney, Tom Service, Elizabeth Alker and Georgia Mann as the train heads south, stopping at Pitlochry, Edinburgh Waverley and Darlington before pulling into King’s Cross. It all sounds admirably ambitious, but what will they do when the train goes through a tunnel? “There will be blind spots, especially in the far north and as we pass through multiple tunnels. We have decided to record my reports a couple of minutes before they’re broadcast to ensure a smooth listen.” Radio 3 and railways are well suited. Trains are high-speed orchestras that rattle, swoosh and whistle and have been inspiring music since 1844, when French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan wrote Le chemin de fer. “There’s a huge amount of music about the railway,” says Trelawny. “Strauss wrote waltzes and polkas about trains. Dvorak was passionate about them. When he was living in the States and feeling homesick, he’d go to Penn Station and watch trains and think of the main station in Prague, which gave him reassurance and comfort. A work like Pacific 231 by Arthur Honegger really evokes the sound of a locomotive and it’s very hard to listen to Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto now and not imagine the train at Carnforth Station in Brief Encounter.” The romance of train travel hooked Trelawny long ago. He grew up in Cornwall at the far end of the Great Western and Cornish lines, over 280 miles of track, tunnels, bridge and embankment, begun by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, that strides out from Paddington all the way to the tip of Cornwall. As a boy he obsessed about its trains; as an adult he has done the journey “hundreds of times” but seldom gets on without thinking about his mother, who he last saw alive on Penzance platform, waving her off aged 12 when she was going to London for cancer treatment. “I remember her getting on to go to hospital…” Rather than it being a melancholy ghost train, he adds: “I also think of my late father, and the first time I caught the train on my own, going to the buffet car and being excited to buy a cup of tea and a sandwich with money he’d given me.” And the journey back to Cornwall is still a source of joy. “I never tire of the train running along the Exe estuary and then, suddenly, seeing the sea and chopping in and out of those cliffs at Dawlish. People walking along the seawall on the other side of the railway track, waving. People still wave at trains.” There is, he admits, “something lovely about sitting with other people in relative silence. The gentle clack-clack of the train; reading a book and realising you haven’t turned a page for 15 minutes because you’re looking out the window.” For many of us the magic of train travel is increasingly being disrupted by someone watch- ing their mobile with the volume turned up and no headphones. “Thirty years ago, we were complaining about Walkmans with the noise escaping from tinny headphones, but it’s moved on to something even worse and feels to me incredibly selfish,” says Trelawny. “There is a massive problem that our leading brand of smartphone got rid of headphone sockets. But it’s the epitome of selfishness to want to listen to anything and share it with other people. There are moments when we want to listen to stuff together, at the Royal Albert Hall or Wigmore Hall, but not on a train.” Would Trelawny say something if someone was listening without headphones on his carriage? “I’d like to think I would but, like most of us, I’m quite a coward and so seethe internally and don’t do very much about it,” he says. “I think it needs something broader than me getting very angry for 15 minutes and then prob- ably slightly red in the face intervening.” Locomotion No 1 averaged a speed of eight miles an hour and was preceded on the track by a horse rider with a flag carrying the Latin words, “Periculum privatum utilitas publica” (“The private danger is the public good”). There’ll be no flag in front of Saturday’s south- bound locomotive, which will hit speeds of 125mph. But these, as Trelawny admits, are days of fractured public confidence in the railways, especially in northern England. “I have lots of friends working for the BBC in Salford who are reliant on Northern trains, and they have quite a tough time,” he says. “It’s easy to romanticise elements of rail travel. It’s not so much fun when you’re standing in the rain on the platform at Hebden Bridge, waiting for a half-an-hour late train that replaced a train that’s been cancelled.” So, what if the Highland Chieftain is late? “This is a major express train,” he says. “I’m pretty confident that we’ll be on time.” Nonetheless he’s been preparing for other eventualities, on the simulator LNER uses to train drivers at King’s Cross. “It didn’t work out so well. I managed to undershoot the platform at Stevenage so only half my carriages were on the platform. I also failed to keep my foot on the dead-man’s break, so we stopped, and I brought trains on the East Coast mainline to a standstill.” Happily, Trelawny is a better broadcaster than train driver, presenting Radio 3’s Breakfast show for 14 years before he took over the 5pm In Tune slot in April, where he shares duties with Katie Derham. “You are with people at really a very intimate moment,” he says of the morning show that is now Tom McKinney’s domain. “They start heir listening in bed, then take you to the bathroom. They’re padding around the kitchen, trying to wake up, making a piece of toast while listening to you. The pieces of music that you play can shape their day." However, there were drawbacks. that feeling of the alarm waking you up from a deep sleep. There’s no chance of ‘I’ll just have another ten minutes.’ And also being tired in the evening, when you’re meeting friends.” Did he ever nod off in concerts? “Definitely! But I got good at closing my eyes and keeping my head up. I worked out a position that avoids your head slumping.” Trelawny’s new role is just one of the changes that have come since the arrival of a new controller in 2023. Radio 3 is flourishing under Sam Jackson, but some critics suggest the station has become safer, leaning on well-known works to attract an audience. Trelawny, who has live musicians on his afternoon show throughout the week, often playing new or less well- known pieces, strongly disagrees. “It’s just not true that we’re playing those works more,” he says. “People will hear a piece of music and think that because, by pure coincidence, they’ve heard it played twice in a month at completely different times of day, ‘Oh my God, it’s on all the time!’ But the variety and range of music that we’re playing is as broad and diverse as ever. I don’t see any danger of that ever changing – we’re still the biggest commissioner of new music in the country. At the same time, we must make ourselves welcoming to people who are dipping a toe into classical music. “There’s no point us existing for a tiny number of people who are privileged to have had an education and an introduction to the music when young, who went to a school that still has a good music department, which not many state schools still do. We have a responsibility to those [new] people.” In which case, all aboard.
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?
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 – that the new show could have six months and they would see how it went. “They offered me what was cheerfully called ‘the death slot’,” he says, of the Thursday 9am broadcast time. The very first episode was called War in the 20th Century. Executives had no idea what would happen but then, as he admits, neither did Bragg. “I had not the slightest inkling. It was just a sort of shot in the dark.” It turned out that ordinary listeners were hungry for knowledge. Within a year, the show was getting an audience of 1.5 million and today it is heard by more than two million people a week. The premise of In Our Time is disarmingly simple. Bragg is the everyman asking three academics, leaders in their field, questions on our behalf. A key part of the show’s continuing success has been Bragg’s unflagging curiosity and delight in finding things out. “I’ve been surprised, enchanted and baffled,” he says. “I hope that I’ve had the nerve to ask them what they really mean by that. In other words, can they say it in simpler terms, so ignorant people like me can understand.” This approach reached a wider audience than expected partly, says Bragg, because people missed things at school and regret it. “I missed science because I stopped doing it at 14, so the science episodes are a wonderland for me. Then you discover that people all over the country feel the same way, they want to learn about science. So, we all go away with a real increase in our knowledge, in our comprehension of what’s going on in the world.” All those thousands of questions have been delivered in that unmistakeable quizzical, northern, working-class accent – Bragg’s parents ran a pub in Wigton in Cumberland – albeit one tempered by six decades in London. Bragg was part of the 1960s generation that headed south, broke down class barriers and re-energised broadcasting, most notably with his long-running ITV/Sky Arts programme, The South Bank Show. Did he ever think of taking In Our Time on to TV? “I did think about it in the early days, for about five minutes. And I thought what would happen would be everybody taking part would become self-conscious, and it wouldn’t work as well, so I dropped the idea.” Instead, In Our Time was at the forefront of the corporation’s entry into podcasting, first on the BBC website and iTunes in 2004. “Some people wondered whether In Our Time was good enough, or grand enough, or important enough,” says Bragg of the switch to online that would attract a global audience. “But we just did it, and the audience came to us in millions, and it came to us from around the world. Though, obviously, I’m very surprised.” When the last series’ final episode, on civility, was broadcast in July, had he already made up his mind to leave? “No, I hadn’t. I found it quite a tricky one to do and later in the summer I had one of those moments where you think, ‘Well, which path do you take through the woods?’ Then you take one, and that’s it,” says Bragg, who has had several health issues recently. Has he regretted his decision? “Sometimes I’ve thought, ‘What a stupid thing to do,’ but mostly I think this is the right path for me.” Now there is the question of who can possibly replace him. It has been reported that the job was offered to Mishal Husain (who spoke to Bragg for the 1,000th edition of In Our Time, in 2023) to try to persuade her to stay at the BBC. Does he think it matters if it’s a woman? “No, not in the slightest.” So, who would Bragg want to see in the role? “It’s a good question,” he laughs. “I haven’t thought because it’s none of my business any more.” Bragg laughs again when I ask if he has a favourite episode. “Well, we’re talking about more than 1,000 shows. That’s not so much a sprinkle of shows as a shower, a downpour, a storm. I just can’t answer that, I wish I could.” Perhaps he can decide over the coming months, because rather than retiring he will be marshalling his energy for one more project around In Our Time, building on the work of the last 27 years. “Mohit very generously said, ‘Well, we’re going to do more stuff.’ I hope it’s going to be based on the archive, which is extraordinary,” Bragg reveals. “There is nothing like it in the world. It’s an oral encyclopaedia, the like of which exists nowhere else. A lot of young people now prefer to listen than to read, so I’m going to devote myself to doing something special with that. I hope it will be a contemporary encyclopaedia.” An exciting prospect for Bragg? “Oh, it’s going to be great fun.” The In Our Time archive is available via BBC Sounds
British soprano Louise Alder reveals how she’s preparing to take command of the stage at the Last Night of the Proms
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 had Jonas Kaufmann and Lise Davidsen on that stage. What on earth do they want me for?’ ” She is resolutely unassuming. When I point out the acclaim for her Contessa in The Marriage of Figaro at Glyndebourne (which also came to the Proms this summer), she says, “It seems to have gone down well.” Then jokes, “Is that a British enough answer for you?” She didn’t even plan to be a singer. “I thought it was weird, that opera singing was a bit odd,” she says. “Dad singing seemed different because it wasn’t as warbly as some female voices can be. It took a while for me to understand what classical singing in an operatic way was.” It would be a mistake, as the Last Night should demonstrate, to read that as timidity. “I get to escape when I go on stage,” she says. “I’m still Louise Alder, but the performer in me is another beast.” When we speak, Alder has just had a fitting for her costume, co-created with stage and theatre designer Nicky Shaw. “I will be doing three costumes,” she tells me. “There’s a special one for Rule, Britannia! You’ll have to wait and see what the colours are.” I ask if she’s entirely comfortable with the imperial swagger of Rule, Britannia!, which pained Sheku Kanneh- Mason so much he called for its cancellation. “I’m very honoured to do the Last Night of the Proms. That’s the bottom line,” is her response. Too polite, perhaps, to discomfort the BBC, Alder chooses to emphasise the event’s feel-good quotient. “I think that British celebratory party atmosphere appeals; it’s exciting seeing a huge chorus and soloist and a large orchestra all enjoying themselves so much.” And what will Alder be feeling as she steps out on Saturday? “That I want to convey excitement and a bit of light in this moment in a world that can feel quite heavy. I think we need concerts like this. We need to feel uplifted.” The Last Night of the Proms will also be televised — the first half on BBC Two, the second on BBC One
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
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 today from the poolside on a family holiday, a well-deserved break from the pressures of being Thornhill’s headteacher, a role he has filled for the last six years. In the new series, we see him leading from the front, out among his pupils supporting his “phenomenal” staff while employing the constant mantra, Be Nice, Work Hard. “It is the most incredible professional privilege to be a headteacher,” Burton says, only slightly fuller in the face over a decade on, still brimming with the positivity that lit up the first series. “There are tough days, there are days where you are frustrated, but there are amazing days as well, days where you celebrate.” For the documentary, 900 pupils and approximately 100 staff at the school were filmed between November 2024 and August 2025. But lessons were undisturbed by film crews. Instead, 64 fixed-rig cameras were placed around the school, capturing over 1,000 hours of footage. The resulting eight episodes will cover familiar issues in education but also a dizzying set of new problems. “Life in school in 2025 is a microcosm of society in general,” says Burton. Since 2013, British state education has had to accommodate challenges like knife crime, growing diagnoses of ADHD and gender dysphoria, plus the long shadow cast by lockdown and the unstoppable rise of mobile phone culture. “Not everybody had a mobile back then,” says Burton. “And they certainly weren’t as powerful as the ones you can get for a few quid now.” Mobiles are banned on school property; nonetheless one girl tells Burton she’s onscreen for 14 hours a day. In another scene, a teacher asks Burton for more training so she can better interact with a girl who claims to be a “furry”, someone who identifies with an animal displaying human characteristics, in this case a fox. “Society has changed markedly,” notes Burton. “AI [artificial intelligence] is another example; we have to get ahead of it.” When, in one episode, a pupil is suspected of using AI to write an essay that has, teachers believe, uncharacteristic wording, she passionately denies it. So, will AI destabilise teaching? “It will make us think,” says Burton. “Because you can’t necessarily set traditional homework of, ‘Right, go home and do this essay.’ Though we could look at AI as a huge positive for teachers as well, something to help them with resources and to support them with some of the workload.” Burton remains convinced of the transformative power of good, real-world teaching. “Some of the aspects of teaching are about emotional understanding, about that kindness and relationship you build,” he says. “I don’t think AI is ever going to be able to replace human teachers.” At heart, the school’s main issue is the same one encapsulated so neatly by Burton and Asghar 12 years ago: how do we help kids when they need it? And there is already a candidate for another Musharaf moment. Year seven pupil Tremaine has the reading age of a five-year-old; embarrassed during English lessons, he can become distraught and walk out of class. The staff are determined to help. “You’ll see him working on his reading comprehension and there are huge, seismic shifts for him being able to link the phonics together and read. It’s life-changing stuff and a symbol of what happens in schools across the country.” For a while in 2013, Thornhill was the most famous school in England and Burton found himself doing drama lessons with local star actor Jodie Whittaker, who volunteered to help the pupils. “It was a brilliant, surreal day,” he recalls. “Jodie was lovely and so generous with her time with our students. That was hugely inspiring; loads of wonderful opportunities like that came up for the school.” But will the new series come with dangers as well as opportunities? What if the pupil’s local accents or personal quirks become memes online or attract social media attacks? “We haven’t rushed into things; this isn’t about wanting the school to be famous. The decision was taken with lots of people involved, and lots of checks and balances,” Burton says. “Safeguarding and education trumps absolutely everything. Channel 4 and [production company] Twofour have got independent psychologists who work with families and students to say whether they can give informed consent to be able to take part. The vulnerabilities around that are considerable, but all students have been told about how to deal with potential online issues.” Yorkshire’s children are in good hands; 12 years after we first met him, Burton remains his pupils’ relentlessly upbeat champion. “Teenagers are great,” he says. “They’re so kind, so reflective, so intelligent, and really inspiring. A lot of headlines about school and teenagers aren’t necessarily positive, but we want to show that schools are still brilliant places to be.”
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”
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.
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 talking to me today from the poolside on a family holiday, a well-deserved break from the pressures of being Thornhill’s headteacher, a role he has filled for the last six years. In the new series, we see him leading from the front, out among his pupils supporting his “phenomenal” staff while employing the constant mantra, Be Nice, Work Hard. “It is the most incredible professional privilege to be a headteacher,” Burton says, only slightly fuller in the face over a decade on, still brimming with the positivity that lit up the first series. “There are tough days, there are days where you are frustrated, but there are amazing days as well, days where you celebrate.” For the documentary, 900 pupils and approximately 100 staff at the school were filmed between November 2024 and August 2025. But lessons were undisturbed by film crews. Instead, 64 fixed-rig cameras were placed around the school, capturing over 1,000 hours of footage. The resulting eight episodes will cover familiar issues in education but also a dizzying set of new problems. “Life in school in 2025 is a microcosm of society in general,” says Burton. Since 2013, British state education has had to accommodate challenges like knife crime, growing diagnoses of ADHD and gender dysphoria, plus the long shadow cast by lockdown and the unstoppable rise of mobile phone culture. “Not everybody had a mobile back then,” says Burton. “And they certainly weren’t as powerful as the ones you can get for a few quid now.” Mobiles are banned on school property; nonetheless one girl tells Burton she’s onscreen for 14 hours a day. In another scene, a teacher asks Burton for more training so she can better interact with a girl who claims to be a “furry”, someone who identifies with an animal displaying human characteristics, in this case a fox. “Society has changed markedly,” notes Burton. “AI [artificial intelligence] is another example; we have to get ahead of it.” When, in one episode, a pupil is suspected of using AI to write an essay that has, teachers believe, uncharacteristic wording, she passionately denies it. So, will AI destabilise teaching? “It will make us think,” says Burton. “Because you can’t necessarily set traditional homework of, ‘Right, go home and do this essay.’ Though we could look at AI as a huge positive for teachers as well, something to help them with resources and to support them with some of the workload.” Burton remains convinced of the transformative power of good, real-world teaching. “Some of the aspects of teaching are about emotional understanding, about that kindness and relationship you build,” he says. “I don’t think AI is ever going to be able to replace human teachers.” At heart, the school’s main issue is the same one encapsulated so neatly by Burton and Asghar 12 years ago: how do we help kids when they need it? And there is already a candidate for another Musharaf moment. Year seven pupil Tremaine has the reading age of a five-year-old; embarrassed during English lessons, he can become distraught and walk out of class. The staff are determined to help. “You’ll see him working on his reading comprehension and there are huge, seismic shifts for him being able to link the phonics together and read. It’s life-changing stuff and a symbol of what happens in schools across the country.” For a while in 2013, Thornhill was the most famous school in England and Burton found himself doing drama lessons with local star actor Jodie Whittaker, who volunteered to help the pupils. “It was a brilliant, surreal day,” he recalls. “Jodie was lovely and so generous with her time with our students. That was hugely inspiring; loads of wonderful opportunities like that came up for the school.” But will the new series come with dangers as well as opportunities? What if the pupil’s local accents or personal quirks become memes online or attract social media attacks? “We haven’t rushed into things; this isn’t about wanting the school to be famous. The decision was taken with lots of people involved, and lots of checks and balances,” Burton says. “Safeguarding and education trumps absolutely everything. Channel 4 and [production company] Twofour have got independent psychologists who work with families and students to say whether they can give informed consent to be able to take part. The vulnerabilities around that are considerable, but all students have been told about how to deal with potential online issues.” Yorkshire’s children are in good hands; 12 years after we first met him, Burton remains his pupils’ relentlessly upbeat champion. “Teenagers are great,” he says. “They’re so kind, so reflective, so intelligent, and really inspiring. A lot of headlines about school and teenagers aren’t necessarily positive, but we want to show that schools are still brilliant places to be.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Educating Yorkshire 2025 begins on Channel 4 on Sunday 31st August at 8pm. Check out more of our Documentaries 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.
Celia Imrie plays Joyce in The Thursday Murder Club
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.