'I walked up to the truck, saw the padlock on the ground, and my heart sank'
A new film charts the long and winding road between the theft and rediscovery of the precious bass guitar that helped Paul McCartney shape the sound of the Beatles
Add McCartney: the Hunt for the Lost Bass to your watchlist More than 50 years later, it still hurts. “It felt like the worst moment of my life,” says Ian Horne, remembering the morning in October 1972 when, aged 25, he realised he had just lost one of the most famous musical instruments of the 20th century. “I walked up to the truck, saw the padlock on the ground, and my heart sank.” Horne is a former sound engineer with Wings, the band Paul McCartney started with his wife Linda a year after the Beatles split up in 1970. Following a day in the recording studio with the band, Horne had parked a truck full of their musical equipment on a west London street. “It was a three-ton truck with a roller shutter at the back,” he recalls. “When I pushed the shutter up, I saw straightaway that it was gone. The bass wasn’t there.” The instrument in question, a 1961 Höfner 500/1 violin bass, is at the centre of BBC Two’s delightful new Arena film McCartney: the Hunt for the Lost Bass. It’s a documentary about the Beatles, the thrill of being young in Hamburg, the sudden and immense success that followed, and how that success soured. It’s also a detective story that follows the missing instrument over half a century, travelling through London’s criminal demi-monde, the hippy drugs scene, rural Hertfordshire and, at one point, a visit to the seaside. The story ends with the unlikely rediscovery of the bass in 2023 following several investigations and an online campaign that generated headlines around the world. But it begins with 18-year-old Paul McCartney in Hamburg in 1961, on the edge of everlasting fame. The Beatles had been working relentlessly for months, and McCartney needed a new bass. He bought a Höfner 500/1, made in Bavaria, for 287 Deutschmarks (£30) from Steinway Musikhaus in Hamburg. Within two years, the instrument would be as recognisable as the band’s mop-tops and collarless suits. This was the bass heard on the first run of hits, including Love Me Do, She Loves You and Twist and Shout. McCartney liked it so much he bought an updated version of the same model in 1963. The original 1961 bass was relegated to being a back-up, but it was still with McCartney when he went into the studio with Wings in 1972. The Beatles’ split had been so acrimonious that he had sunk into depression – one that only lifted when Linda encouraged him to start writing songs again. Now, finally, he had a new project. Following the studio session, Horne stopped to drop off fellow Wings crew member Trevor Jones at his flat in Notting Hill, west London. In one of those minor decisions that turn out to be major, he decided to stay at Jones’s flat on Lancaster Road rather than drive on to his own home on the outskirts of London. Horne parked on nearby Cambridge Gardens, once a grand street but by then, as the documentary makes clear, an area of squats and drug dealers where the urban poor and the counterculture squeezed up against each other. “All the big houses on Lancaster Road and Cambridge Gardens were squats then,” says Horne. “There were lots of nice people in the hippy culture, but there were some dodgy people about as well”. Jones knew where the dodgy people lived on Cambridge Gardens. When he and Horne discovered the bass had been stolen, they grabbed tools from the truck and went looking for them. “We visited two or three houses in a sort of threatening manner – you know, not very polite,” Horne admits. “But we didn’t find it.” Had they only known it, the two men were very close, but this was the point where the bass slipped out of Horne’s grasp. “I rang the police and went to the station to make a statement, but they were no help. There was nothing more to be done. I realised I had to go and tell Paul in person.” Horne feared the worst as he approached McCartney’s house near Abbey Road. “All these things go through your head,” he says. “I must have looked like a beaten man when I knocked on the door. I just came out with it: ‘I’ve got some bad news, Paul. Our truck was broken into and the bass was stolen.’ I expected him to go ballistic, but Paul was lovely about it. He said, ‘It’s all right, I’ve got another one.’” By which, of course, he meant the 1963 Höfner. But that one didn’t have quite the same emotional and historical resonance. It hadn’t been there in Hamburg and the Cavern Club in Liverpool. It wasn’t the bass that started it all. So why was McCartney initially so relaxed about losing the 1961 Höfner, and why, much later, did he change his mind? Perhaps, in 1972, still affected by the break-up with John Lennon and looking for a new musical path, the instrument represented what McCartney was trying to leave behind. In a sense, its departure confirmed that he was moving on creatively. But as we age, most of us begin to look back more tenderly on our youth. John Lennon died in 1980, Linda in 1998. McCartney later navigated a troubled marriage and divorce from Heather Mills in 2008. From 2009 he started to play more songs by the Beatles in his live sets – and if you’re playing the songs, you really do need the bass. “I think anything that’s nicked, you want back, especially if it has sentimental value,” McCartney said of the bass recently. “It just went off into the universe and it left us thinking, ‘Where did it go?’ There must be an answer.” Horne would stay with Wings for seven years, a key member of the team behind hits like Band on the Run and Live and Let Die. He went on to work with Ian Dury and Madness, but throughout it all there was the niggling memory of that fateful decision 50 years previously. “It was always in the back of my mind, wondering if it would turn up,” he says. “I felt like it had been stolen from me. And now it’s back.”
Paul McCartney’s iconic bass guitar going missing “felt like the worst moment of my life”, reveals former Wings sound engineer
"I walked up to the truck, saw the padlock on the ground, and my heart sank."
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. More than 50 years later, it still hurts. "It felt like the worst moment of my life," says Ian Horne, remembering the morning in October 1972 when, aged 25, he realised he had just lost one of the most famous musical instruments of the 20th century. "I walked up to the truck, saw the padlock on the ground, and my heart sank." Horne is a former sound engineer with Wings, the band Paul McCartney started with his wife Linda a year after the Beatles split up in 1970. Following a day in the recording studio with the band, Horne had parked a truck full of their musical equipment on a west London street. “It was a three-ton truck with a roller shutter at the back,” he recalls. “When I pushed the shutter up, I saw straightaway that it was gone. The bass wasn’t there.” The instrument in question, a 1961 Höfner 500/1 violin bass, is at the centre of BBC Two’s delightful new Arena film McCartney: the Hunt for the Lost Bass. It’s a documentary about the Beatles, the thrill of being young in Hamburg, the sudden and immense success that followed, and how that success soured. It’s also a detective story that follows the missing instrument over half a century, travelling through London’s criminal demi-monde, the hippy drugs scene, rural Hertfordshire and, at one point, a visit to the seaside. The story ends with the unlikely rediscovery of the bass in 2023 following several investigations and an online campaign that generated headlines around the world. But it begins with 18-year-old Paul McCartney in Hamburg in 1961, on the edge of everlasting fame. The Beatles had been working relentlessly for months, and McCartney needed a new bass. He bought a Höfner 500/1, made in Bavaria, for 287 Deutschmarks (£30) from Steinway Musikhaus in Hamburg. Within two years, the instrument would be as recognisable as the band's mop-tops and collarless suits. This was the bass heard on the first run of hits, including Love Me Do, She Loves You and Twist and Shout. McCartney liked it so much he bought an updated version of the same model in 1963. The original 1961 bass was relegated to being a back-up, but it was still with McCartney when he went into the studio with Wings in 1972. The Beatles’ split had been so acrimonious that he had sunk into depression – one that only lifted when Linda encouraged him to start writing songs again. Now, finally, he had a new project. Following the studio session, Horne stopped to drop off fellow Wings crew member Trevor Jones at his flat in Notting Hill, west London. In one of those minor decisions that turn out to be major, he decided to stay at Jones’s flat on Lancaster Road rather than drive on to his own home on the outskirts of London. Horne parked on nearby Cambridge Gardens, once a grand street but by then, as the documentary makes clear, an area of squats and drug dealers where the urban poor and the counterculture squeezed up against each other. “All the big houses on Lancaster Road and Cambridge Gardens were squats then,” says Horne. “There were lots of nice people in the hippy culture, but there were some dodgy people about as well”. Jones knew where the dodgy people lived on Cambridge Gardens. When he and Horne discovered the bass had been stolen, they grabbed tools from the truck and went looking for them. “We visited two or three houses in a sort of threatening manner – you know, not very polite,” Horne admits. “But we didn’t find it.” Had they only known it, the two men were very close, but this was the point where the bass slipped out of Horne’s grasp. “I rang the police and went to the station to make a statement, but they were no help. There was nothing more to be done. I realised I had to go and tell Paul in person.” Horne feared the worst as he approached McCartney’s house near Abbey Road. “All these things go through your head,” he says. “I must have looked like a beaten man when I knocked on the door. I just came out with it: ‘I’ve got some bad news, Paul. Our truck was broken into and the bass was stolen.’ I expected him to go ballistic, but Paul was lovely about it. He said, ‘It’s all right, I’ve got another one.’” By which, of course, he meant the 1963 Höfner. But that one didn’t have quite the same emotional and historical resonance. It hadn’t been there in Hamburg and the Cavern Club in Liverpool. It wasn’t the bass that started it all. So why was McCartney initially so relaxed about losing the 1961 Höfner, and why, much later, did he change his mind? Perhaps, in 1972, still affected by the break-up with John Lennon and looking for a new musical path, the instrument represented what McCartney was trying to leave behind. In a sense, its departure confirmed that he was moving on creatively. But as we age, most of us begin to look back more tenderly on our youth. John Lennon died in 1980, Linda in 1998. McCartney later navigated a troubled marriage and divorce from Heather Mills in 2008. From 2009 he started to play more songs by the Beatles in his live sets – and if you’re playing the songs, you really do need the bass. “I think anything that’s nicked, you want back, especially if it has sentimental value,” McCartney said of the bass recently. “It just went off into the universe and it left us thinking, ‘Where did it go?’ There must be an answer.” Horne would stay with Wings for seven years, a key member of the team behind hits like Band on the Run and Live and Let Die. He went on to work with Ian Dury and Madness, but throughout it all there was the niggling memory of that fateful decision 50 years previously. “It was always in the back of my mind, wondering if it would turn up,” he says. “I felt like it had been stolen from me. And now it’s back.” McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass is available from 11 April on BBC Two and iPlayer. The latest issue of Radio Times is out on Tuesday 7 April – subscribe here. McCartney: The Hunt for the Lost Bass airs on Saturday 11 April at 8:45pm on BBC Two and iPlayer. 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.
Seven celebrities with diverse beliefs set off on a journey of self-discovery from Whitby to Holy Island
Add Pilgrimage: the Road to Holy Island to your watchlist On a clifftop outside Whitby, six people gather in the hope of finding spiritual connections and even enlightenment. For now, they have little in common other than a public profile. Ashley Banjo is founder of the dance group Diversity, Hermione Norris is an actor known for Cold Feet and Spooks, Tasha Ghouri is a former Strictly contestant and public advocate for deaf people. Hasan Al-Habib and Ashley Blaker are stand-up comedians and Jayne Middlemiss is a radio presenter. Together they’ll walk a winding route around England’s top right-hand corner, travelling through North Yorkshire, County Durham and Northumberland before arriving at Holy Island, long known as Lindisfarne, where the seventh-century St Cuthbert was bishop. Eventually a figure in a beanie hat with wind-blown blonde hair comes into view. This, unmistakably, despite her clumpy boots and backpack, is the actor Patsy Kensit, the seventh pilgrim. She approaches tentatively but as Kensit greets the others, she seems to summon up resolve. “I’m a control freak,” she says later, when we gather after a screening of the opening episode. “I like to know exactly what I’m doing and at exactly what time I do it. But you have to surrender to these experiences and that’s what I did. I found that first day hard, but I kept saying to myself, ‘Keep walking.’ And the landscape is just so beautiful.” For some, like Al-Habib, a British Iraqi from Birmingham, the open moorland, deep wooded valleys and cliffs were a revelation. “I was struck by this incredible place. You have an amazing vista in front of you and the thought that the creator that you pray to has created it.” This is the eighth series of Pilgrimage., an achievement which will be marked when Pilgrimage is given a special Trustees’ Award at the Sandford Saint Martin Awards at Lambeth Palace in June (for the RT Readers’ Award shortlist, see overleaf). As the freshly installed Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent journey on foot to her new cathedral illustrated, many of us desire a different, more contemplative, way of travelling. The paths Kensit and her fellow walkers tread combine the pilgrimage routes for three saints: Cuthbert, Hild and Oswald. Perhaps it lacks the glamour of the Camino de Santiago, the famous route across Spain the series has previously travelled, but this is also a land with a centuries-old heritage of religious belief. Every step taken is through what was once the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Whitby Abbey, the romantic gothic ruin where the party make their first stop, was home in the seventh century to a monastic community under the rule of St Hild. She established Whitby as a seat of Christian learning, and is said to have turned snakes to stone, which is why local ammonite fossils are called snake stones. “I find Hild and those times fascinating,” says Norris. “And you can still feel it in that part of the world; the power is there.” The BBC pilgrims set off in different states of belief. Kensit says she is an “à la carte Catholic”; picking the parts of her childhood faith that bring her most comfort. Norris, brought up in the Church of England, finds the divine in the things around her. Al-Habib is an observant Muslim and Banjo a committed Christian. Ghouri describes herself as atheist, Middlemiss has sought prayer retreats in Indian ashrams, and Blaker performs funny sketches about his fixation with becoming the perfect Orthodox Jew. Several pilgrims carry baggage other than backpacks. Kensit has endured intrusive interest in her private life since the 1980s; her four husbands included Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr and Liam Gallagher from Oasis. “The treatment I had over the years from the media was pretty awful. My life was plucked out and this character was invented that was meant to be me. Actually, it was nothing like me and never was.” Kensit has learnt certain truths the hard way. “You don’t have to marry all your boyfriends,” she says. It’s advice she also offers to Ghouri in the show. Norris travels with her own burden. In the first episode it’s revealed she experienced a tragedy early in life. “Somebody very close to me took their own life when I was younger. It had a profound effect on me.” Did it affect her faith? “Everyone says when somebody dies, ‘Time is a great healer’ or ‘They’re at peace now.’ Culturally, I was raised a Christian, but back then suicide was taboo. If you’d taken your own life, Christianity’s response was, ‘You’re going down there.’” Norris drifted away from Anglicanism but retained her spiritual curiosity. Kensit stayed with her church, and believes it got her through the years in the spotlight. “I would go to mass regularly and it really did help me,” she explains, though she retains the right to define her own faith. “There is so much in the Catholic Church that I believe in but also aspects I didn’t agree with. So, I opened up to other things like meditation. You hear that word and think, ‘Ohm, ohm,’ and that you have to do yoga and be able to put your legs behind your head. But prayer can be mediation.” In that way, Kensit is like Cuthbert, who was noted for his meditative prayer on Lindisfarne and is buried in Durham’s Unesco-listed Norman cathedral. When they enter the building, the walkers will be discovering new things about this region’s past but also about each other including, in Al-Habib’s case, that he prays five times a day. “It was a blessing to be with these people that are so open-minded and eager to learn,” he says, and in turn, he learnt about his fellow pilgrims. One morning in the Durham hills he took a picture of the Jewish Blaker quietly considering a religious text. “Ashley was reading it but he was also, I thought, centring himself; saying this is who I am, this is what I believe in.” Al-Habib is still near the start of his career, while Kensit and Norris are veterans, but, for all of them, the appeal of the series has not only been discovering this other England of holy kings and venerated saints but each other. “I do put walls up around to protect myself,” says Kensit. “I tend to isolate and I lost a lot of that. For the first time in a long time, I really became part of the group. That’s huge for me.” Norris agrees. “Being with these people was a unique experience. They are my pilgrimage. I will treasure that.”
BBC's Pilgrimage star Patsy Kensit: "The treatment I had over the years from the media was pretty awful"
Seven celebrities with diverse beliefs set off on a journey of self-discovery from Whitby to Holy Island.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. On a clifftop outside Whitby, six people gather in the hope of finding spiritual connections and even enlightenment. For now, they have little in common other than a public profile. Ashley Banjo is founder of the dance group Diversity, Hermione Norris is an actor known for Cold Feet and Spooks, Tasha Ghouri is a former Strictly contestant and public advocate for deaf people. Hasan Al-Habib and Ashley Blaker are stand-up comedians and Jayne Middlemiss is a radio presenter. Together they’ll walk a winding route around England’s top right-hand corner, travelling through North Yorkshire, County Durham and Northumberland before arriving at Holy Island, long known as Lindisfarne, where the seventh-century St Cuthbert was bishop. Eventually a figure in a beanie hat with wind-blown blonde hair comes into view. This, unmistakably, despite her clumpy boots and backpack, is the actor Patsy Kensit, the seventh pilgrim. She approaches tentatively but as Kensit greets the others, she seems to summon up resolve. “I’m a control freak,” she says later, when we gather after a screening of the opening episode. “I like to know exactly what I’m doing and at exactly what time I do it. But you have to surrender to these experiences and that’s what I did. I found that first day hard, but I kept saying to myself, ‘Keep walking.’ And the landscape is just so beautiful.” For some, like Al-Habib, a British Iraqi from Birmingham, the open moorland, deep wooded valleys and cliffs were a revelation. “I was struck by this incredible place. You have an amazing vista in front of you and the thought that the creator that you pray to has created it.” This is the eighth series of Pilgrimage, an achievement which will be marked when Pilgrimage is given a special Trustees’ Award at the Sandford Saint Martin Awards at Lambeth Palace in June. As the freshly installed Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent journey on foot to her new cathedral illustrated, many of us desire a different, more contemplative, way of travelling. The paths Kensit and her fellow walkers tread combine the pilgrimage routes for three saints: Cuthbert, Hild and Oswald. Perhaps it lacks the glamour of the Camino de Santiago, the famous route across Spain the series has previously travelled, but this is also a land with a centuries-old heritage of religious belief. Every step taken is through what was once the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Whitby Abbey, the romantic gothic ruin where the party make their first stop, was home in the seventh century to a monastic community under the rule of St Hild. She established Whitby as a seat of Christian learning, and is said to have turned snakes to stone, which is why local ammonite fossils are called snake stones. “I find Hild and those times fascinating,” says Norris. “And you can still feel it in that part of the world; the power is there.” The BBC pilgrims set off in different states of belief. Kensit says she is an “à la carte Catholic”; picking the parts of her childhood faith that bring her most comfort. Norris, brought up in the Church of England, finds the divine in the things around her. Al-Habib is an observant Muslim and Banjo a committed Christian. Ghouri describes herself as atheist, Middlemiss has sought prayer retreats in Indian ashrams, and Blaker performs funny sketches about his fixation with becoming the perfect Orthodox Jew. Several pilgrims carry baggage other than backpacks. Kensit has endured intrusive interest in her private life since the 1980s; her four husbands included Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr and Liam Gallagher from Oasis. “The treatment I had over the years from the media was pretty awful. My life was plucked out and this character was invented that was meant to be me. Actually, it was nothing like me and never was.” Kensit has learnt certain truths the hard way. “You don’t have to marry all your boyfriends,” she says. It’s advice she also offers to Ghouri in the show. Norris travels with her own burden. In the first episode it’s revealed she experienced a tragedy early in life. “Somebody very close to me took their own life when I was younger. It had a profound effect on me.” Did it affect her faith? “Everyone says when somebody dies, ‘Time is a great healer’ or ‘They’re at peace now.’ Culturally, I was raised a Christian, but back then suicide was taboo. If you’d taken your own life, Christianity’s response was, ‘You’re going down there.’” Norris drifted away from Anglicanism but retained her spiritual curiosity. Kensit stayed with her church, and believes it got her through the years in the spotlight. “I would go to mass regularly and it really did help me,” she explains, though she retains the right to define her own faith. “There is so much in the Catholic Church that I believe in but also aspects I didn’t agree with. So, I opened up to other things like meditation. You hear that word and think, ‘Ohm, ohm,’ and that you have to do yoga and be able to put your legs behind your head. But prayer can be mediation.” In that way, Kensit is like Cuthbert, who was noted for his meditative prayer on Lindisfarne and is buried in Durham’s Unesco-listed Norman cathedral. When they enter the building, the walkers will be discovering new things about this region’s past but also about each other including, in Al-Habib’s case, that he prays five times a day. “It was a blessing to be with these people that are so open-minded and eager to learn,” he says, and in turn, he learnt about his fellow pilgrims. One morning in the Durham hills he took a picture of the Jewish Blaker quietly considering a religious text. “Ashley was reading it but he was also, I thought, centring himself; saying this is who I am, this is what I believe in.” Al-Habib is still near the start of his career, while Kensit and Norris are veterans, but, for all of them, the appeal of the series has not only been discovering this other England of holy kings and venerated saints but each other. “I do put walls up around to protect myself,” says Kensit. “I tend to isolate and I lost a lot of that. For the first time in a long time, I really became part of the group. That’s huge for me.” Norris agrees. “Being with these people was a unique experience. They are my pilgrimage. I will treasure that.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. 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.
Martin Clunes pinned back his ears and went on a diet to deliver the central role in a drama that recounts the grim scandal that ended the career of Huw Edwards
Add Power: the Downfall of Huw Edwards to your watchlist At Westminster Magistrates Court on 31 July 2024, Huw Edwards pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children. So ended, in public disgrace, the career of a BBC newsreader who only two years before had told the nation that Queen Elizabeth II was dead. Falls from grace are seldom so spectacular and now, invariably, there is a television drama to recount it. Power: the Downfall of Huw Edwards stars Martin Clunes as Edwards and he gives a remarkable performance that is revealing in every detail. The short back and sides with exact side-parting, the arm extended over the desk to project authority, the portentous Welsh tone: Clunes nails it all. “Edwards delivering the news of the Queen’s death is so well known, that it needed mimicry from me, in a way,” says Clunes. “Those rhythms and sounds had to be spot on. I was happy to get it sounding right.” Apparently happily married with five adult children, when not reading the news Edwards was paying a series of young men for sexually explicit images. The script is based on text messages between Edwards and a 17-year-old in south Wales, Ryan (not his real name), played with aching vulnerability by Osian Morgan. After sending texts demanding pictures, Edwards would calmly address the nation. “What’s so fascinating about this,” says Clunes, “is that we saw Edwards in our homes every night and because he was in the public eye, it just seemed to amplify everything.” Edwards’s treatment of Ryan was part of a pattern of online and text encounters that, the drama argues, led to his downfall. One 26-year-old man in Wales was sending the child porn that Edwards accessed – a crime, says Clunes, “which is awful, there’s no way back from that.” Did Clunes, an actor still bathed in the warm light of his 18 years as Doc Martin, consider the risks of such a dark role? “I’ve never thought like that,” he says. “Don’t ponder yourself too much, that way madness lies. The idea of, ‘Well, I won’t do that. It’ll burn me’. I’m still hanging in there by saying yes to all sorts of things.” As well as this new drama for 5, those different things presently include a cameo appearance on Best Medicine, the US version of Doc Martin in which he appeared as the father of the character he made famous (“my wife’s one of the producers on it and it seemed fun. They’ve just got their second series commissioned so, fingers crossed it’s a success”), as well as new British comedy film Mother’s Pride and his attention-grabbing turn as Mr Earnshaw in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. I suggest that it feels like a late career blossoming for the 64-year-old. “I was always good. I’ve been saying it for years, until I was blue in the face.” Really? “I just got a really good part in Wuthering Heights,” he laughs. To play Edwards, Clunes’s ears were “pinned back” and he went on the 5:2 diet. And the voice? “My wife and I listened to archive stuff. It was really weird, because you thought that he would be off duty and fun, but he was being quite creepy. I had it on my phone and would listen just to keep his interesting rhythms.” After Ryan’s mother and stepfather, played here by Sian Reese-Williams and Jason Hughes, approached The Sun, the paper published the story of a top BBC star paying a “teenager for sexual pictures” in July 2023. Power, directed by Michael Samuels and written by Mark Burt, gives the newspaper some credit for bringing down Edwards. Has the drama given Clunes a more positive opinion of tabloid newspapers? “No. I’m in the public eye like Huw Edwards, so all the papers want is for us to be shamed or caught as hypocrites or doing something awful.” But no one thinks ill of you, I say. You’re a figure who enjoys immense public goodwill. “Who better?!” Apart from referencing the public statement by Edwards’s wife Vicky Flind in July 2023, which named him as the presenter alleged to have paid for sexual images of a teenager, the drama pays little heed to Edwards’s family. “Huw Edwards is the bad guy,” says Clunes. “So, we don’t need [to see] the bad guy’s family.” But does he have sympathy for them? “I do. There’s no denying the fact that the families of people who commit these crimes are secondary victims. But this is Ryan’s story.” Clunes isn’t fantastically clued-up about modern communication technology – “I don’t look at social media” – and seems genuinely nonplussed by Edwards’s use of mobile phones to bully Ryan into sending pictures. “Edwards’s secret life was enabled by telephones and PayPal accounts and that sort of stuff,” he says. “I just didn’t know about it. Before phones, were people up to these things? Am I very blessed or naive?” What about his time in TV, did he ever notice… “Everyone’s at it?” he interjects. “Well, they used to be. But with consent. I mean, traditionally, actors have been painted as rogues”. He means sex, which is of course different to abuse. And as he points out, other institutions fare no better. “The church has got up to speed now, and the government. Remember tractor porn? That guy watching porn in the Palace of Westminster!” Would he play the MP? “Well, I’ve got a tractor!” We’re joking, though the evidence of his performance as Edwards and many other quietly brilliant parts, from Manhunt to Out There, suggests Clunes would do it very well. “I’m that sort of actor, I like to kind of get lost in someone. To lose me and just try to be them, rather than turning up and being charming. I have never quite pulled that off.” But we both know, he just has.
Sophie Rundle hopes to honour late co-star Helen McCrory
Add Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man to your watchlist You’ve been playing Ada for 13 years, do you look back at those early performances? I find it so awkward watching them. Who is that child who clearly doesn’t know what she’s doing? Also, I now have my babies. So, my Peaky bookends for me are young girl straight out of drama school and being a newly postpartum mother. My second son was 12 or 13 weeks old when we did the film. Did that make filming The Immortal Man tough? Maybe being that tired and delirious was quite helpful but it was an enormous undertaking. The Peaky team were amazing but it’s crazy to be filmed at this time where I’m really vulnerable and my body is different and I don’t quite know what I’m doing. I am petitioning for a little ticker tape to run across the bottom of the screen saying, “This woman has just had a baby.” View Green Video on the source website Did you realise that Peaky Blinders would have such an impact? Peaky’s changed our expectations of British television. People who love the show will get in touch and say, “We named our daughter Ada.” So, you feel this sense of duty to do it right. But it’s only now that I appreciate quite what an extraordinary beast this whole thing has been. It was one of my first jobs, and I remember thinking, “All jobs must be like this, so the next TV show I go on will be like this as well.” It’s only when you make other shows that you realise quite how extraordinary this has been. Is there a unique camaraderie among the cast and crew? It’s amazing. Everyone goes off and has these incredible life experiences, people are winning Oscars or having babies. It’s life and death. And then you come back and you put the costumes on and you’re like, “Oh, here we are again.” It was amazing to watch when Cillian got an Oscar. It was so right, so justified, so brilliant. I still feel like the girl that’s just out of drama school who’ll never catch up to her older siblings. I’ve always been deeply in awe of Cillian and Helen McCrory. Is it strange to still film without Helen? Helen was formidable as Aunt Polly and as Helen. She was so amazing to watch on set, the things that she would add, the ideas that she would come up with. I was just trying to catch up for most of it. It would have been impossible to have imagined she wouldn’t be here to finish it; that’s why we all wanted Ada to take Polly along almost. In the last series I wore this suit, and that’s all for Helen and for Polly; in honour of her. It’s devastating that she’s not here to finish it but it’s her legacy and I would love to think that I help honour Helen’s character in any way. Are you happy with what happens to Ada in the film, it’s quite momentous? I was pleased, that’s what you want to happen in these big mythic pieces. You want it to be as explosive as the character has been. I’m trying to speak in code, but it’s a fitting punctuation to the past 14 years of my life. I do kind of wish I could start from the beginning now, with all that I am and all that I know now and do it again. But then it wouldn’t be what it became. So maybe that ignorance and that “Let’s just do it” energy is what’s powerful.
How Rebecca Ferguson prepared for her big “moment of intimacy”
Add Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man to your watchlist Were you worried about joining the famous Peaky Blinders as Kaulo? I rarely worry what people are going to think, because it’s beyond my control. But I wanted to live up to the expectations of Cillian and those who are already in it and create something that merges into their world. Barry Keoghan, who plays your nephew, was a newcomer as well… Oh, I love Barry, he’s amazing, such an open soul and he feeds off things around him. I loved our relationship. His character, Duke, is self-centred, obsessed, but also self-sabotaging, so unpredictable, a time bomb that could just pop any second. Kaulo is the only person who can say, “Stop” and he listens. It’s like tough love, isn’t it? View Green Video on the source website Kaulo uses mystical powers on Tommy — do you believe in that? Well, I’m not religious in any way. But I do believe in the energies in a room. How do I feel before you walked in, and how do I feel now that you’re in it? And I loved going into the world of magic and séance, which a lot of these gypsies believed and believe in. There is a very long bedroom scene with Cillian, did you use intimacy coordinators? I think it’s wonderful that we can have intimacy coordinators and sometimes they are needed, but for me it’s very off-putting and it makes me feel uncomfortable because I have enormous boundaries and I can verbalise them. So we could sit down and say, “What do you need to feel safe? What do I need to feel safe?” And then she could step out of the scene. And then what? I had called Cillian and asked him how he wanted to work. It sounds so silly, but I said, “I’ve studied your sex scenes…” And he went, “That’s weird and awkward.” And I went, “I know, but bear with me. This is not a regular sex scene. This isn’t us getting our kit off, getting on with it, bish bash bosh. This is a moment of release. This is a moment of intimacy, there’s magic.” Are female actors judged differently to men? One of the first things to do is to not let yourself feel undermined. When you start thinking that you’re not worth more than a male lead star, or a female, then you’ve already placed yourself beneath them. If you go on a set and there’s a big male star, you have to project your power as well. Steven Knight says the Peaky Blinders’ story will continue. Would you like Kaulo’s story to carry on? I never say no. I think that Kaulo was so essential for this film, but I don’t always feel like a character needs to have a continuation; we can be satisfied with not being satisfied.
Tom Harper on directing the “explosive” film finale
Add Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man to your watchlist You worked on the very first series — what’s it like to come back to Peaky Blinders? We didn’t know what it would become, but we had cinematic aspirations for it and to be able to realise that was too good an opportunity to miss. Did Nick Cave record a new version of the theme song Red Right Hand for a key scene with Cillian? Yes, when we put that scene together in the edit, it immediately felt wrong with the original Red Right Hand, which feels like Tommy’s a young man, full of bravado and swagger. Of course, Tommy still has some of those things, but he’s broken and he’s cracked. So, we went back to Nick and he re-recorded it for us and I think it works perfectly. Tommy and Nick match each other a little bit. Nick’s older, wiser and sadder maybe. There’s tragedy in his voice, it’s more cracked, more broken. It’s beautiful and human. View Green Video on the source website Why did you decide to keep Cillian and Barry apart for a long section at the beginning of the film? It was always inherent in Steve’s script and the question was: “How long can you make people wait? When are you just going to piss off your fans?” I always wanted to push it as long as we could without feeling self-indulgent. Structurally, there are two very different energies — the stillness and the isolation of Tommy and the chaos and the energy of Duke. And you play them off each other until they come together and you get this kind of explosion. You’re a Quaker, did you worry about the violence in the film? Terrible violence exists in life and I think that storytelling helps us to understand things and to try and look at that in the most truthful, human way possible. It’s why I’m interested in this story of the Shelbys and always have been. As a group of people, they have experienced a great trauma. They came back from fighting for their king and country and were cast aside by the government, so they tried to take back something for themselves.
Peaky newcomer Tim Roth on the art of playing a villain
Add Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man to your watchlist Your character, Beckett, is a fascist traitor but, for Duke Shelby, very persuasive… The first thing that came to mind was playing him as a geography teacher; someone quite gentle. If you play him as the bad guy then it alerts the people that you’re trying to influence. So, he presents himself as a very reasonable guy with a good idea who just needs some help getting it done. I thought it was the appropriate approach as fascism is sly. It’s a monstrous thing that’s cleverly brought about and, quite often, you don’t realise when you’re in the midst of it. Steven Knight said the fascist elements in the film have contemporary echoes, do you agree? Yes, it seems all the more appropriate now. There are also echoes of my childhood in London, when it was the National Front. I went to school in Brixton and was in Students Against the Nazis. I got beaten up a lot. Their doppelgängers now are the same. Last time I was in England, I walked through a Tommy Robinson demonstration. It seemed familiar from the stories my dad told about the Second World War. View Green Video on the source website Your father was a gunner in RAF bombers during the war… I think my father had PTSD — his trauma was on many levels. This guy I’m playing is a nod to him because my character would’ve been someone that my father would’ve fought against. You bring your own emotions to a role when it’s needed. Beckett is the latest in a long line of Roth villains like Archibald Cunningham (Rob Roy) and John Christie (Rillington Place) — do you like bad guys? If you play a bad guy, people connect with it and you get offered a lot of them. But I don’t mind at all. When people ask, “What drives you as an actor?” I say, “Fear of unemployment, mate.” Which is very British. There’s the jobs you do to make sure the roof stays on and all that. And then there are the ones that you do for yourself and sometimes they fly under the radar, but that’s fine with me. You were a young tyro once, starring in Made in Britain at age 21. How is Barry doing? Well, he’s further along than I was then. I didn’t know what was going on — I’d never been in front of a camera before I was on that set for Made in Britain. At that time, most of the actors I was coming across came from the posh world and I was nervous about them and my lack of education or university. Accent was a big thing back then. Now it’s not. But I was taught as I went. I did little plays for television, one with Emma Thompson and, later on, with Stephen Fry. And I learnt that my prejudices were not accurate. That’s what you do, you learn that stuff along the way.
Cillian Murphy takes the reins for the Peaky Blinders feature film. But what’s the appeal of playing an antihero – and is this the end of Tommy Shelby?
Add Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man to your watchlist Tommy Shelby has been in our heads for 13 years, but even longer in Cillian Murphy’s. British TV viewers first encountered the Birmingham gangster in September 2013, when he rode a black stallion through the streets of 1919 Small Heath. For Murphy, presently sitting opposite me in a London hotel suite, the introduction came months before that, when he first opened Steven Knight’s script and realised Shelby was a part in a million. “I could tell that it was special,” says Murphy, a glossy amalgam of expensively barbered hair and radiant skin that belies his 49 years. “I read the opening sequence where he rides into Birmingham. That wordless, western style, it was instantly iconic, if that’s not an oxymoron. So bold and so confident. I knew I wanted to do it.” Murphy compares Peaky Blinders to a motorbike ride where, “Tommy Shelby is driving the motorbike and I’m in the sidecar going, ‘OK man, I trust you,’ and then he’s off. Very quickly I became the passenger and he became the driver.” Is it usual to be taken over like that? “I’ve never had it with any other character,” he admits. “You give yourself up to it. Something happens, some exchange of atoms. I couldn’t just put his flat cap on and step into it; every time we’d do a series it would be, ‘OK, three months of prep and then getting back into it. I don’t know how I’m going to do that again.’ But then you do it, you’re in the groove and every time Tommy became more a part of me. It’s a strange experience.” View Green Video on the source website And now, perhaps, it is coming to an end. “Steve and I explored how you bring this thing to a conclusion,” Murphy says of the discussions the two men had before The Immortal Man, the Knight-scripted Peaky Blinders feature film, which Murphy stars in and co-produces. “We have a weird symbiotic thing. Steve is preternaturally gifted. If you throw an idea at him, he throws it back infinitely better.” Can that be a little annoying? “No, it’s wonderful!” The film is widely predicted to offer a final redemption for Shelby who, it must be said, has done a lot that needs redeeming. “Steve has always said that Tommy is a good man doing bad things to a good end,” says Murphy. Still, if we don’t include German soldiers in the First World War, Shelby has killed around 15 people, ordered the deaths of more and, for much of the time, run a relentlessly criminal business model. “But it’s not surprising that people love flawed anti-heroes,” says Murphy. “There are a lot of people you really want to hate, but you can’t hate. It’s much more interesting to me than the square-jawed hero and the nefarious villain.” Has that made him more sympathetic to the bad people he meets in real life – after 13 years of Tommy, is Murphy a more understanding person? “It’s easy to say that, hypothetically, isn’t it? There’s an awful lot of othering happening in society nowadays. You get ‘They’re the bad people!’ from both sides of the divide and I think it happens very early on with children and teenagers now. It’s very hard if a person is threatening you or compromising your beliefs, but you should always be able to see the child or the human being behind the thug or the so-called villain or gangster.” Which, year after year, is exactly what Knight did. “Every time I got the scripts for the new season, I’d go, this is great, let’s go. Because Peaky Blinders went deeper as it evolved. It became more confident, its world got bigger but more detailed. And it went into darker places.” The film finds Shelby holed up in the remains of his country house, tortured by the deaths of his brother Arthur and his daughter Ruby, who died of tuberculosis aged seven in series six. Writing a memoir that, he hopes, will explain everything (The Immortal Man of the film’s title), Tommy is visited by Kaulo, the Romany aunt of his son Duke, who attempts to cure him with a séance. “Tommy is disdainful of doctors or modern medicine or anything that is vaguely part of the establishment,” says Murphy. “He is much more interested in a gypsy kind of magic.” Has Murphy encountered magic in his own life? “In that spooky way, no, but I have creatively. Sometimes, when you’re acting, the words hit the air and it just works. Everyone feels it but nobody can define it. I’ve had times where you feel like it’s almost transcendental.” There is something of that in the scenes between Tommy and Duke (kept apart by Knight until near the dénouement), played by Barry Keoghan. Both are damaged – one by the horrors of combat, the other by the long absence of his father. “I do believe in generational trauma,” says Murphy. “I also believe it can be stopped, that there’s a duty to stop it, or to identify it. Unfortunately for Tommy, I don’t think he’s capable of it because he effectively abandons his son.” Murphy, born in Cork, denies any deeper significance in he and Keoghan being Irish. “It’s entirely coincidental that we’re Irish actors doing it. But it probably helps, having the old chip on the shoulder.” Is there an Irish attitude both men bring to the work? “I am incredibly proud of being Irish, of my heritage, but as a younger actor I really wanted to not be identified [with Ireland], I wanted to be an actor first and Irish second. To just go off and play American and play English and not be inhibited by my extraction.” Murphy’s success in doing that reached a zenith in 2024 when he stepped onto the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to accept a golden statuette from a beaming Brendan Fraser. “The whole awards campaign is like an out-of-body experience,” he says of winning the best actor Oscar for Oppenheimer that night. “It’s not real. It’s very hallucinogenic. I’m very grateful for it but it’s so divorced from reality.” Still? “Yes, it’s like something that didn’t happen in real time, some magical kind of dream.” But then Peaky Blinders has been a dream of sorts – a BBC drama that became a worldwide sensation. “Connecting,” says Murphy, “in a way that none of us could have anticipated.”
'I'll keep doing it because people want it'
Steven Knight on his Peaky spin-off and prophetic powers
Add Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man to your watchlist The film dwells on Tommy’s existential crisis before the big things happen — are you teasing us? It’s Cillian Murphy having an existential crisis, so there’s plenty to look at. Though you can feel it, that voice saying, “Come on, get out there, put the guns back on!” However, he does something good, and I wanted it to be a big something good. The film is based on the events of Operation Bernhard, when the Nazi government printed millions of pounds worth of fake currency. At the end of the Second World War, the Bank of England changed the design of the £5 note because they believed a lot of that fake currency had entered Britain. Tommy’s decision to fight fascism has a contemporary resonance — did you intend that? It’s deliberate. It’s always unfortunate when one’s work becomes topical, because you don’t want it to be. A lot of stuff I’ve written about has then come along — that’s why I’m never going to write about the Third World War, because I think it will happen. But yes, it’s 1939 again today and I think it’s quite a good idea to remind people that this isn’t the first time people have thought that a really simple solution will work, and say to them, “Look what happened last time.” View Green Video on the source website Many people might not be aware how badly Birmingham was blitzed until they see the film? Absolutely, and the bombing at the film’s beginning of the BSA arms factory is real. The people who died working in the BSA on that night had been offered the chance to go to the shelters and they stayed because they thought the work they were doing was important. People are good. The British seem bad at remembering just how good they can be? I couldn’t agree more. That’s the sort of patriotism I think is really important, knowing what we did well, knowing where we stood, knowing where we still stand, maybe on our own, but we’ve got to be prepared for that. And wondering if we would we be as good as our parents and grandparents were. Cillian and Barry, father and son, communicate much of their feelings without words… A lot of this film is about how the men react with each other, and not suggesting that because these men don’t talk that they’re not emotional about something. They just don’t say it. There’s a lot of fathers and sons in my work, there is something mythological about that, about the passing on of intergenerational trauma. The funny thing is how we all turn into our dad, bit by bit. Does Barry Keoghan’s performance as Duke demand another series or film? Barry is phenomenal. I mean, that performance, Jesus! I can’t answer questions about that, but what I can say is that we will be shooting a series that is a continuation of the family story and I’ll keep doing it because people want it.
How a Father’s Day greeting led a superfan to take charge of the capped clan… Barry Keoghan on Blinders, Bond and the Beatles
Add Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man to your watchlist Barry Keoghan has waited a long time to be a Peaky Blinder. “I had that haircut for at least seven years, just in my normal life,” the actor explains. “I’m a massive fan, I was always asking Shaheen Baig, who casts the show, ‘Is there anything there I can do?’” It eventually turned out that there was. Duke Shelby is the violent, disturbed son of Tommy; he’s taken over the Peaky Blinders in his father’s absence and, as events unfold, is arguably the most important character in The Immortal Man. The result of a dalliance with a young Romany woman called Zelda before Tommy went to the Western Front, Duke is 25 when we meet him on the eve of the Second World War. Keoghan is older at 33, but with those cheekbones and his pale blue eyes, he looks young enough to play it – as he did in a Bafta-winning turn as manchild Dominic Kearney in The Banshees of Inisherin in 2022 and the murderous undergraduate Oliver Quick in 2023’s Saltburn. If the rumours of him playing the lead in the next, Steven Knight-scripted, James Bond film are true, Keoghan will make the most boyish 007 yet. “It’s an iconic role and a lot of weight and pressure comes with that,” he says. “It’s nice to see your name go up there, but I don’t think I fit the criteria for James Bond. I’d rather come in and do the villain. The man teasing Bond, that’s more me.” View Green Video on the source website Since becoming an international star following Saltburn, Keoghan was welcomed into a protective huddle with other Irish actors, which is how, in the end, he finally got the Peaky Blinders role. “I stay in touch with my Irish peers – Cillian, Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, we’re quite tight and supportive of one another,” he says. “So, I sent a message to Cillian on Father’s Day and said, ‘Happy Father’s Day.’ Cillian replied, ‘Happy Father’s Day back at you, would you like to play my son Duke?’” Keoghan got the part on the back of a Father’s Day greeting? “Honestly. Though I do send Happy Mother’s Day messages off to people that I’m close to as well!” The Immortal Man is, at its core, “the story of family,” Keoghan goes on to explain, “and I see Duke as a lad searching for his father and a lad sticking on a mask, a façade. That’s what resonated with me: I could dig deep and bring forward from my own experiences.” Keoghan was born in the deprived Summerhill area of Dublin where his mother Debbie struggled with heroin addiction and died of an overdose when he was 12. With an absent father, he and brother Eric were in and out of foster homes and then looked after by their grandmother. Absence is a recurring motif in his life. Keoghan himself attracted public criticism for allegedly not seeing enough of Brando, his now three-year-old son with ex-girlfriend Alyson Sandro, when he reduced the number of family pictures he put on social media. This riled him enough to complain to Louis Theroux in a podcast interview in 2024, that “People love to use my son as ammunition” – words that are, ironically, particularly apt for Tommy and Duke Shelby. “I was really moved by the journey alongside Cillian, the dynamics of us playing a father with his son,” he says of the film. “And being a father, I could definitely relate to Cillian’s side of it as well. I think there’s a lot of young men out there who will.” Torn by grievance, Duke runs the Peaky Blinders with a reckless violence that is both an expression of his rage and an attempt to gain Tommy’s approval, just as his father is offered a final stab at redemption for his many moral aberrations. The film pivots on one question: will Duke help or hinder Tommy? “It was a very emotional ending before the cameras even rolled, to be honest,” he says. “I was very grateful to be among the cast and crew that have worked on the show, to be accepted into that.” Was he nervous, entering that closed, Peaky Blinders world, being among people who had been together for so long? “Obviously. And it was nerve-racking doing the screen test and seeing Cillian transform into his character. I remember looking at him and saying, ‘My God, Tommy Shelby! That’s incredible.’ And Cillian said back at me, ‘Oh man, you look great.’ It warmed my heart when I saw him so moved and touched by how I looked. He was genuinely chuffed because this is his everything, this is his baby, this is going to live with him for ever.” He is, it’s fair to say, enamoured of his fellow countryman. “I love Cillian. He’s incredible and the pinnacle and the peak of what we Irish actors want to become.” Keoghan, who is now filming Sam Mendes’s four-film Beatles project alongside Dublin-born Paul Mescal, has a theory about the popularity of Irish actors outside Ireland. “The Irish are loved everywhere,” he says. “They’ve put a massive stamp on the world, the mythology and history, the charm of it, and I lean into that. But my Irish charm doesn’t work in Ireland! They’re like, ‘Oh, whatever!’ And they tell me that my accent has changed.” In The Beatles, Mescal is Paul McCartney and Keoghan Ringo Starr. “I’m playing a legend and it’s absolutely wonderful,” Keoghan says. “I think the most challenging part is it being a real person rather than a character. There are so many more layers to someone that’s real. It’s a bit of a scary thing, you’re exposing a little bit of yourself. But this is going to be a massive part of my life. I’m very, very grateful for it.” He talks about acting, I suggest, as if it has saved him, which is understandable, given his childhood. “I think so. I think that’s why I don’t always see it as work. Art is healing, it really does heal the soul. Though I still can’t tell you why I love to do this. It’s a feeling I can’t articulate, like love – I think love is the lazy way of saying that feeling as well. So, I don’t think I’ll ever articulate it, but it’s such a release, such an escape.” Before Keoghan goes, he says: “It’s crazy when you think of it. The irony in Cillian asking me to be in Peaky Blinders from a Father’s Day text. He and I were joking earlier, I said, ‘Imagine I’d texted and you went, ‘Who’s this?’ But I’m glad I got to be part of that last moment with Cillian and it happened how it did. Glad that I waited and it came around in such a magical way.”
Barry Keoghan reveals why Peaky Blinders film's story of fathers and sons moved him so much – and talks Beatles film role
"I remember looking at [Cillian] and saying, 'My God, Tommy Shelby! That's incredible.'"
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Barry Keoghan has waited a long time to be a Peaky Blinder. “I had that haircut for at least seven years, just in my normal life,” the actor explains. “I’m a massive fan, I was always asking Shaheen Baig, who casts the show, ‘Is there anything there I can do?’” It eventually turned out that there was. Duke Shelby is the violent, disturbed son of Tommy; he’s taken over the Peaky Blinders in his father’s absence and, as events unfold, is arguably the most important character in The Immortal Man. The result of a dalliance with a young Romany woman called Zelda before Tommy went to the Western Front, Duke is 25 when we meet him on the eve of the Second World War. Keoghan is older at 33, but with those cheekbones and his pale blue eyes, he looks young enough to play it – as he did in a Bafta-winning turn as manchild Dominic Kearney in The Banshees of Inisherin in 2022 and the murderous undergraduate Oliver Quick in 2023’s Saltburn. If the rumours of him playing the lead in the next, Steven Knight-scripted, James Bond film are true, Keoghan will make the most boyish 007 yet. “It’s an iconic role and a lot of weight and pressure comes with that,” he says. “It’s nice to see your name go up there, but I don’t think I fit the criteria for James Bond. I’d rather come in and do the villain. The man teasing Bond, that’s more me.” Since becoming an international star following Saltburn, Keoghan was welcomed into a protective huddle with other Irish actors, which is how, in the end, he finally got the Peaky Blinders role. “I stay in touch with my Irish peers – Cillian, Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, we’re quite tight and supportive of one another,” he says. “So, I sent a message to Cillian on Father’s Day and said, ‘Happy Father’s Day.’ Cillian replied, ‘Happy Father’s Day back at you, would you like to play my son Duke?’” Keoghan got the part on the back of a Father’s Day greeting? “Honestly. Though I do send Happy Mother’s Day messages off to people that I’m close to as well!” The Immortal Man is, at its core, “the story of family,” Keoghan goes on to explain, “and I see Duke as a lad searching for his father and a lad sticking on a mask, a façade. That’s what resonated with me: I could dig deep and bring forward from my own experiences.” Keoghan was born in the deprived Summerhill area of Dublin where his mother Debbie struggled with heroin addiction and died of an overdose when he was 12. With an absent father, he and brother Eric were in and out of foster homes and then looked after by their grandmother. Absence is a recurring motif in his life. Keoghan himself attracted public criticism for allegedly not seeing enough of Brando, his now three-year-old son with ex-girlfriend Alyson Sandro, when he reduced the number of family pictures he put on social media. This riled him enough to complain to Louis Theroux in a podcast interview in 2024, that “People love to use my son as ammunition” – words that are, ironically, particularly apt for Tommy and Duke Shelby. “I was really moved by the journey alongside Cillian, the dynamics of us playing a father with his son,” he says of the film. “And being a father, I could definitely relate to Cillian’s side of it as well. I think there’s a lot of young men out there who will.” Torn by grievance, Duke runs the Peaky Blinders with a reckless violence that is both an expression of his rage and an attempt to gain Tommy’s approval, just as his father is offered a final stab at redemption for his many moral aberrations. The film pivots on one question: will Duke help or hinder Tommy? “It was a very emotional ending before the cameras even rolled, to be honest,” he says. “I was very grateful to be among the cast and crew that have worked on the show, to be accepted into that.” Was he nervous, entering that closed, Peaky Blinders world, being among people who had been together for so long? “Obviously. And it was nerve-racking doing the screen test and seeing Cillian transform into his character. I remember looking at him and saying, ‘My God, Tommy Shelby! That’s incredible.’ And Cillian said back at me, ‘Oh man, you look great.’ It warmed my heart when I saw him so moved and touched by how I looked. He was genuinely chuffed because this is his everything, this is his baby, this is going to live with him for ever.” He is, it’s fair to say, enamoured of his fellow countryman. “I love Cillian. He’s incredible and the pinnacle and the peak of what we Irish actors want to become.” Keoghan, who is now filming Sam Mendes’s four-film Beatles project alongside Dublin-born Paul Mescal, has a theory about the popularity of Irish actors outside Ireland. “The Irish are loved everywhere,” he says. “They’ve put a massive stamp on the world, the mythology and history, the charm of it, and I lean into that. But my Irish charm doesn’t work in Ireland! They’re like, ‘Oh, whatever!’ And they tell me that my accent has changed.” In The Beatles, Mescal is Paul McCartney and Keoghan Ringo Starr. “I’m playing a legend and it’s absolutely wonderful,” Keoghan says. “I think the most challenging part is it being a real person rather than a character. There are so many more layers to someone that’s real. It’s a bit of a scary thing, you’re exposing a little bit of yourself. But this is going to be a massive part of my life. I’m very, very grateful for it.” He talks about acting, I suggest, as if it has saved him, which is understandable, given his childhood. “I think so. I think that’s why I don’t always see it as work. Art is healing, it really does heal the soul. Though I still can’t tell you why I love to do this. It’s a feeling I can’t articulate, like love – I think love is the lazy way of saying that feeling as well. So, I don’t think I’ll ever articulate it, but it’s such a release, such an escape.” Before Keoghan goes, he says: “It’s crazy when you think of it. The irony in Cillian asking me to be in Peaky Blinders from a Father’s Day text. He and I were joking earlier, I said, ‘Imagine I’d texted and you went, ‘Who’s this?’ But I’m glad I got to be part of that last moment with Cillian and it happened how it did. Glad that I waited and it came around in such a magical way.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in select UK cinemas now and will be available to stream on Netflix from Friday 20 March 2026 – sign up from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media. Add Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man 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 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.
Peaky Blinders veteran Sophie Rundle remembers late Helen McCrory: "It's devastating that she's not here to finish it"
Ada Thorne star Rundle is the only star, other than Cillian Murphy, to appear in all episodes of the original series and the new Peaky Blinders film.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. You’ve been playing Ada for 13 years, do you look back at those early performances? I find it so awkward watching them. Who is that child who clearly doesn’t know what she’s doing? Also, I now have my babies. So, my Peaky bookends for me are young girl straight out of drama school and being a newly postpartum mother. My second son was 12 or 13 weeks old when we did the film. Did that make filming The Immortal Man tough? Maybe being that tired and delirious was quite helpful but it was an enormous undertaking. The Peaky team were amazing but it’s crazy to be filmed at this time where I’m really vulnerable and my body is different and I don’t quite know what I’m doing. I am petitioning for a little ticker tape to run across the bottom of the screen saying, “This woman has just had a baby.” Did you realise that Peaky Blinders would have such an impact? Peaky’s changed our expectations of British television. People who love the show will get in touch and say, “We named our daughter Ada.” So, you feel this sense of duty to do it right. But it’s only now that I appreciate quite what an extraordinary beast this whole thing has been. It was one of my first jobs, and I remember thinking, “All jobs must be like this, so the next TV show I go on will be like this as well.” It’s only when you make other shows that you realise quite how extraordinary this has been. Is there a unique camaraderie among the cast and crew? It’s amazing. Everyone goes off and has these incredible life experiences, people are winning Oscars or having babies. It’s life and death. And then you come back and you put the costumes on and you’re like, “Oh, here we are again.” It was amazing to watch when Cillian got an Oscar. It was so right, so justified, so brilliant. I still feel like the girl that’s just out of drama school who’ll never catch up to her older siblings. I’ve always been deeply in awe of Cillian and Helen McCrory. Is it strange to still film without Helen? Helen was formidable as Aunt Polly and as Helen. She was so amazing to watch on set, the things that she would add, the ideas that she would come up with. I was just trying to catch up for most of it. It would have been impossible to have imagined she wouldn’t be here to finish it; that’s why we all wanted Ada to take Polly along almost. In the last series I wore this suit, and that’s all for Helen and for Polly; in honour of her. It’s devastating that she’s not here to finish it but it’s her legacy and I would love to think that I help honour Helen’s character in any way. View Green Video on the source website Are you happy with what happens to Ada in the film? it’s quite momentous... I was pleased, that’s what you want to happen in these big mythic pieces. You want it to be as explosive as the character has been. I’m trying to speak in code, but it’s a fitting punctuation to the past 14 years of my life. I do kind of wish I could start from the beginning now, with all that I am and all that I know now and do it again. But then it wouldn’t be what it became. So maybe that ignorance and that “Let’s just do it” energy is what’s powerful. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in select UK cinemas now and will be available to stream on Netflix from Friday 20 March 2026 – sign up from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media. Add Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man 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 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.
British acting legend Tim Roth talks his twisted new Peaky Blinders villain - and compares modern issues to the National Front he witnessed in his youth
'People connect me with bad guys' – Peaky newcomer Tim Roth on the art of playing a villain
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. In time for the release of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man on Netflix later this week, we spoke with acclaimed British actor Tim Roth about his antagonistic role in the film as John Beckett, a British ally of the Nazi forces during World War Two... Your character, Beckett, is a fascist traitor but, for Duke Shelby, very persuasive… The first thing that came to mind was playing him as a geography teacher; someone quite gentle. If you play him as the bad guy then it alerts the people that you’re trying to influence. So, he presents himself as a very reasonable guy with a good idea who just needs some help getting it done. I thought it was the appropriate approach as fascism is sly. It’s a monstrous thing that’s cleverly brought about and, quite often, you don’t realise when you’re in the midst of it. Steven Knight said the fascist elements in the film have contemporary echoes, do you agree? Yes, it seems all the more appropriate now. There are also echoes of my childhood in London, when it was the National Front. I went to school in Brixton and was in Students Against the Nazis. I got beaten up a lot. Their doppelgängers now are the same. Last time I was in England, I walked through a Tommy Robinson demonstration. It seemed familiar from the stories my dad told about the Second World War. Read More: Peaky Blinders icon Cillian Murphy: "I do believe in generational trauma, I also believe it can be stopped" Your father was a gunner in RAF bombers during the war… I think my father had PTSD — his trauma was on many levels. This guy I’m playing is a nod to him because my character would’ve been someone that my father would’ve fought against. You bring your own emotions to a role when it’s needed. View Green Video on the source website Beckett is the latest in a long line of Roth villains like Archibald Cunningham (Rob Roy) and John Christie (Rillington Place) — do you like bad guys? If you play a bad guy, people connect with it and you get offered a lot of them. But I don’t mind at all. When people ask, “What drives you as an actor?” I say, “Fear of unemployment, mate.” Which is very British. There’s the jobs you do to make sure the roof stays on and all that. And then there are the ones that you do for yourself and sometimes they fly under the radar, but that’s fine with me. Read More: Peaky Blinders creator talks contemporary importance of Tommy Shelby fighting fascism: "Look what happened last time" You were a young tyro once, starring in Made in Britain at age 21. How is Barry doing? Well, he’s further along than I was then. I didn’t know what was going on — I’d never been in front of a camera before I was on that set for Made in Britain. At that time, most of the actors I was coming across came from the posh world and I was nervous about them and my lack of education or university. Accent was a big thing back then. Now it’s not. But I was taught as I went. I did little plays for television, one with Emma Thompson and, later on, with Stephen Fry. And I learnt that my prejudices were not accurate. That’s what you do, you learn that stuff along the way. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in cinemas now and is released on Netflix on 20 March 2026. The latest issue of Radio Times is out on Tuesday 17 March – subscribe here. Read More: Rebecca Ferguson reveals why she studied Cillian Murphy’s sex scenes and how intimacy coordinators were used for Peaky Blinders film Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man review – Big screen spin-off keeps a firm red right hand on proceedings Peaky Blinders star breaks silence on major character absence from The Immortal Man film: "It’s something you don’t see on TV" Steven Knight explains how Peaky Blinders film ended up quite different from his initial plans 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.
Martin Clunes talks transforming into Huw Edwards for new drama tackling "awful" crimes – and reveals why Edwards's family do not feature
Martin Clunes pinned back his ears and went on a diet to deliver the central role in a drama that recounts the grim scandal that ended the career of Huw Edwards.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. At Westminster Magistrates Court on 31 July 2024, Huw Edwards pleaded guilty to making indecent images of children. So ended, in public disgrace, the career of a BBC newsreader who only two years before had told the nation that Queen Elizabeth II was dead. Falls from grace are seldom so spectacular and now, invariably, there is a television drama to recount it. Power: the Downfall of Huw Edwards stars Martin Clunes as Edwards and he gives a remarkable performance that is revealing in every detail. The short back and sides with exact side-parting, the arm extended over the desk to project authority, the portentous Welsh tone: Clunes nails it all. “Edwards delivering the news of the Queen’s death is so well known, that it needed mimicry from me, in a way,” says Clunes. “Those rhythms and sounds had to be spot on. I was happy to get it sounding right.” The script is based on text messages between Edwards and a 17-year-old in south Wales, Ryan (not his real name), played with aching vulnerability by Osian Morgan. After sending texts demanding pictures, Edwards would calmly address the nation. “What’s so fascinating about this,” says Clunes, “is that we saw Edwards in our homes every night and because he was in the public eye, it just seemed to amplify everything.” Edwards’s treatment of Ryan was part of a pattern of online and text encounters that, the drama argues, led to his downfall. One 26-year-old man in Wales was sending the child porn that Edwards accessed – a crime, says Clunes, “which is awful, there’s no way back from that.” Did Clunes, an actor still bathed in the warm light of his 18 years as Doc Martin, consider the risks of such a dark role? “I’ve never thought like that,” he says. “Don’t ponder yourself too much, that way madness lies. The idea of, ‘Well, I won’t do that. It’ll burn me’. I’m still hanging in there by saying yes to all sorts of things.” As well as this new drama for 5, those different things presently include a cameo appearance on Best Medicine, the US version of Doc Martin in which he appeared as the father of the character he made famous (“my wife’s one of the producers on it and it seemed fun. They’ve just got their second series commissioned so, fingers crossed it’s a success”), as well as new British comedy film Mother’s Pride and his attention-grabbing turn as Mr Earnshaw in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. I suggest that it feels like a late career blossoming for the 64-year-old. “I was always good. I’ve been saying it for years, until I was blue in the face.” Really? “I just got a really good part in Wuthering Heights,” he laughs. To play Edwards, Clunes’s ears were “pinned back” and he went on the 5:2 diet. And the voice? “My wife and I listened to archive stuff. It was really weird, because you thought that he would be off duty and fun, but he was being quite creepy. I had it on my phone and would listen just to keep his interesting rhythms.” After Ryan’s mother and stepfather, played here by Sian Reese-Williams and Jason Hughes, approached The Sun, the paper published the story of a top BBC star paying a “teenager for sexual pictures” in July 2023. Power, directed by Michael Samuels and written by Mark Burt, gives the newspaper some credit for bringing down Edwards. Has the drama given Clunes a more positive opinion of tabloid newspapers? “No. I’m in the public eye like Huw Edwards, so all the papers want is for us to be shamed or caught as hypocrites or doing something awful.” But no one thinks ill of you, I say. You’re a figure who enjoys immense public goodwill. “Who better?!” Apart from referencing the public statement by Edwards’s wife Vicky Flind in July 2023, which named him as the presenter alleged to have paid for sexual images of a teenager, the drama pays little heed to Edwards’s family. “Huw Edwards is the bad guy,” says Clunes. “So, we don’t need [to see] the bad guy’s family.” But does he have sympathy for them? “I do. There’s no denying the fact that the families of people who commit these crimes are secondary victims. But this is Ryan’s story.” Clunes isn’t fantastically clued-up about modern communication technology – “I don’t look at social media” – and seems genuinely nonplussed by Edwards’s use of mobile phones to bully Ryan into sending pictures. “Edwards’s secret life was enabled by telephones and PayPal accounts and that sort of stuff,” he says. “I just didn’t know about it. Before phones, were people up to these things? Am I very blessed or naive?” What about his time in TV, did he ever notice… “Everyone’s at it?” he interjects. “Well, they used to be. But with consent. I mean, traditionally, actors have been painted as rogues.” He means sex, which is of course different to abuse. And as he points out, other institutions fare no better. “The church has got up to speed now, and the government. Remember tractor porn? That guy watching porn in the Palace of Westminster!” Would he play the MP? “Well, I’ve got a tractor!” We’re joking, though the evidence of his performance as Edwards and many other quietly brilliant parts, from Manhunt to Out There, suggests Clunes would do it very well. “I’m that sort of actor, I like to kind of get lost in someone. To lose me and just try to be them, rather than turning up and being charming. I have never quite pulled that off.” But we both know, he just has. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards will air on Tuesday 24 March at 9pm on 5. 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.
Peaky Blinders icon Cillian Murphy: "I do believe in generational trauma, I also believe it can be stopped"
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Tommy Shelby has been in our heads for 13 years, but even longer in Cillian Murphy’s. British TV viewers first encountered the Birmingham gangster in September 2013, when he rode a black stallion through the streets of 1919 Small Heath. For Murphy, presently sitting opposite me in a London hotel suite, the introduction came months before that, when he first opened Steven Knight’s script and realised Shelby was a part in a million. “I could tell that it was special,” says Murphy, a glossy amalgam of expensively barbered hair and radiant skin that belies his 49 years. “I read the opening sequence where he rides into Birmingham. That wordless, western style, it was instantly iconic, if that’s not an oxymoron. So bold and so confident. I knew I wanted to do it.” Murphy compares Peaky Blinders to a motorbike ride where, “Tommy Shelby is driving the motorbike and I’m in the sidecar going, ‘OK man, I trust you,’ and then he’s off. Very quickly I became the passenger and he became the driver.” Is it usual to be taken over like that? “I’ve never had it with any other character,” he admits. “You give yourself up to it. Something happens, some exchange of atoms. I couldn’t just put his flat cap on and step into it; every time we’d do a series it would be, ‘OK, three months of prep and then getting back into it. I don’t know how I’m going to do that again.’ But then you do it, you’re in the groove and every time Tommy became more a part of me. It’s a strange experience.” And now, perhaps, it is coming to an end. “Steve and I explored how you bring this thing to a conclusion,” Murphy says of the discussions the two men had before The Immortal Man, the Knight-scripted Peaky Blinders feature film, which Murphy stars in and co-produces. “We have a weird symbiotic thing. Steve is preternaturally gifted. If you throw an idea at him, he throws it back infinitely better.” Can that be a little annoying? “No, it’s wonderful!” Read More: Peaky Blinders recap: 5 things you need to remember before watching the film The film is widely predicted to offer a final redemption for Shelby who, it must be said, has done a lot that needs redeeming. “Steve has always said that Tommy is a good man doing bad things to a good end,” says Murphy. Still, if we don’t include German soldiers in the First World War, Shelby has killed around 15 people, ordered the deaths of more and, for much of the time, run a relentlessly criminal business model. “But it’s not surprising that people love flawed anti-heroes,” says Murphy. “There are a lot of people you really want to hate, but you can’t hate. It’s much more interesting to me than the square-jawed hero and the nefarious villain.” 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. Has that made him more sympathetic to the bad people he meets in real life – after 13 years of Tommy, is Murphy a more understanding person? “It’s easy to say that, hypothetically, isn’t it? There’s an awful lot of othering happening in society nowadays. You get ‘They’re the bad people!’ from both sides of the divide and I think it happens very early on with children and teenagers now. It’s very hard if a person is threatening you or compromising your beliefs, but you should always be able to see the child or the human being behind the thug or the so-called villain or gangster.” Which, year after year, is exactly what Knight did. “Every time I got the scripts for the new season, I’d go, this is great, let’s go. Because Peaky Blinders went deeper as it evolved. It became more confident, its world got bigger but more detailed. And it went into darker places.” The film finds Shelby holed up in the remains of his country house, tortured by recent traumas and the loss of his daughter Ruby, who died of tuberculosis aged seven in series six. Writing a memoir that, he hopes, will explain everything (The Immortal Man of the film’s title), Tommy is visited by Kaulo, the Romany aunt of his son Duke, who attempts to cure him with a séance. “Tommy is disdainful of doctors or modern medicine or anything that is vaguely part of the establishment,” says Murphy. “He is much more interested in a gypsy kind of magic.” Has Murphy encountered magic in his own life? “In that spooky way, no, but I have creatively. Sometimes, when you’re acting, the words hit the air and it just works. Everyone feels it but nobody can define it. I’ve had times where you feel like it’s almost transcendental.” There is something of that in the scenes between Tommy and Duke (kept apart by Knight until near the dénouement), played by Barry Keoghan. Both are damaged – one by the horrors of combat, the other by the long absence of his father. “I do believe in generational trauma,” says Murphy. “I also believe it can be stopped, that there’s a duty to stop it, or to identify it. Unfortunately for Tommy, I don’t think he’s capable of it because he effectively abandons his son.” Murphy, born in Cork, denies any deeper significance in he and Keoghan being Irish. “It’s entirely coincidental that we’re Irish actors doing it. But it probably helps, having the old chip on the shoulder.” Is there an Irish attitude both men bring to the work? “I am incredibly proud of being Irish, of my heritage, but as a younger actor I really wanted to not be identified [with Ireland], I wanted to be an actor first and Irish second. To just go off and play American and play English and not be inhibited by my extraction.” Read More: Peaky Blinders creator talks contemporary importance of Tommy Shelby fighting fascism: "Look what happened last time" View Green Video on the source website Murphy’s success in doing that reached a zenith in 2024 when he stepped onto the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to accept a golden statuette from a beaming Brendan Fraser. “The whole awards campaign is like an out-of-body experience,” he says of winning the best actor Oscar for Oppenheimer that night. “It’s not real. It’s very hallucinogenic. I’m very grateful for it but it’s so divorced from reality.” Still? “Yes, it’s like something that didn’t happen in real time, some magical kind of dream.” But then Peaky Blinders has been a dream of sorts – a BBC drama that became a worldwide sensation. “Connecting,” says Murphy, “in a way that none of us could have anticipated.” Read More: Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man review – Big screen spin-off keeps a firm red right hand on proceedings Peaky Blinders star breaks silence on major character absence from The Immortal Man film: "It’s something you don’t see on TV" Steven Knight explains how Peaky Blinders film ended up quite different from his initial plans Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is in select cinemas now and on Netflix from Friday 20 March 2026. The latest issue of Radio Times is out on Tuesday 17 March – subscribe here. 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.
The Apprentice tsar on why the world’s best entrepreneurs and innovators aren’t British
Add The Apprentice to your watchlist The Apprentice is currently well into its 20th series, fronted, as ever, by the self-made multimillionaire, life peer, author and sometime political adviser, Alan Sugar. But after two decades of firing contestants who fail to meet his exacting standards, is the 78-year-old’s faith in young British entrepreneurs still intact? Or has he given up on a generation drawn by the lure of celebrity rather than his own ethos of hard work? The Apprentice is now in its 20th series — would you like to reach a quarter century? It’s not down to me but we have agreed another three years. I guess there’ll come a time when either I’m a bit knackered or viewers are phoning in and complaining that I’m like Joe Biden and losing the plot. The BBC will spend a few grand on some market research people and ask, “Should we get rid of Lord Sugar or what?” But, at the moment, I love doing it because it’s really about starting a business from scratch with young people. Have business practices changed since The Apprentice began in 2005? Yes, because of technology and because of the internet. When people create businesses now, rather than having a bricks-and- mortar shop or warehouse, they are created on the web. I like to have a physical product. Let’s make something! So why does The Apprentice remain relevant? Because of our audience. Every single year I get a new generation of youngsters, 13- or 15-year-olds, tuning in. The 15-year-old of 20 years ago is now 35. If you said to him, “Do you watch The Apprentice any more?” you’ll get, “No, it’s s**t. He [Sugar] talks a lot of b******s. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” But the new 15-year-olds are so in awe of it. And the show has created an awareness for business that’s done a great service for young people. You opened the latest series with boardroom scenes in Hong Kong — why? It was a surprise for the candidates. They’ve been sent abroad before, but this is the first time that I turned up. Our friends in China are fantastic. The entrepreneurs there are brilliant; people there, and India, have got a tremendous flair. And here in England you find that some of the great entrepreneurs are fr om second-generation Indian and Chinese families. They are great innovators, clever and smart people. Are you known in Hong Kong the way you’re known over here? It’s my old hunting ground. I used to go to Hong Kong three or four times a year, so I would have been known in the electronics industry 30 to 40 years ago, but not by the average person in the street like I am in England. That’s one of the reasons I like being in America, because no one knows who I am. Why do you not enjoy being recognised? It goes back to my days in football. Being recognised as the chairman of a football club wasn’t nice at all [Sugar was chairman of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club between 1991 and 2001]. Being recognised nowadays for The Apprentice is very nice. And people come up to me, they ask for selfies, they ask for autographs and all that stuff, and I don’t mind at all. In the football days, it was more like, “Get your f***ing chequebook out, you w****r.” That wasn’t very nice. Why do you think the Chinese are so good at creating entrepreneurs? It’s the hunger, actual physical hunger, that has created people who realise that they have to be self-sufficient to eat. Literally, to eat. They have to work hard in order to achieve things. No different from what it was like in England back in the 40s and 50s. People had to work really hard to get what they wanted. There were no free lunches and all that stuff. The Chinese and the Indians were very poor people for a long, long time. So, the necessity to eat and also to be prosperous and to be self-sufficient is within their culture. Do you want that hungry entrepreneurial culture here? Too late, mate. All the kids are interested in now is the latest Nike shoes, the iPhone 15 and TikTok. I sometimes think the parents are to blame. Get out and get a bloody job. Go and work in McDonald’s and scrape the hot plates and all that. But oh, no, “Not for me. I’m too busy on Saturday.” When I was a millionaire I sent my kids out to work on Saturday morning. And they made their own children do the same thing. The new series started with 20 candidates instead of 18. Did that make much difference? Well, it gave me a lot more scope to fire people. As you’ll have seen in some episodes already, if they really screw up, I can get rid of more than one of them at a time. And the candidates have changed, they’re very social-media and reality-TV-show aware, celebrity- aware. I spot some of them coming on the show for that. They normally don’t last too long. Which contestants have you liked the most over 20 series? I wouldn’t like to say. My wife sometimes says I didn’t get close to anybody, really. But business is business. I tell them that on the programme: we’re not here to make friends. I’m here to do business. Business is nine to five – and after five, that’s it.
Peaky Blinders creator talks contemporary importance of Tommy Shelby fighting fascism: "Look what happened last time"
Steven Knight on his Peaky spin-off – and prophetic powers.
This article appears in Radio Times magazine. As Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man arrives on Netflix on Friday 20 March 2026, Michael Hodges speaks with the franchise's creator, Steven Knight, about this explosive outing for Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy)... The film dwells on Tommy’s existential crisis before the big things happen — are you teasing us? It’s Cillian Murphy having an existential crisis, so there’s plenty to look at. Though you can feel it, that voice saying, “Come on, get out there, put the guns back on!” However, he does something good, and I wanted it to be a big something good. The film is based on the events of Operation Bernhard, when the Nazi government printed millions of pounds worth of fake currency. At the end of the Second World War, the Bank of England changed the design of the £5 note because they believed a lot of that fake currency had entered Britain. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2026/03/PeakyBlindersTheImmortalManFirstLooks2-05ab95a.jpg" width="8640" height="5760" alt="A man (Cillian Murphy) in a long dark overcoat and flat cap walks down a wet, dimly lit street at night, with snow falling around him and a vintage car steaming behind him near a brick wall illuminated by red light." title="Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man" /> Tommy’s decision to fight fascism has a contemporary resonance — did you intend that? It’s deliberate. It’s always unfortunate when one’s work becomes topical because you don’t want it to be. A lot of stuff I’ve written about has then come along — that’s why I’m never going to write about the Third World War, because I think it will happen. But yes, it’s 1939 again today and I think it’s quite a good idea to remind people that this isn’t the first time people have thought that a really simple solution will work, and say to them, “Look what happened last time.” 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. Many people might not be aware how badly Birmingham was blitzed until they see the film? Absolutely, and the bombing at the film’s beginning of the BSA arms factory is real. The people who died working in the BSA on that night had been offered the chance to go to the shelters and they stayed because they thought the work they were doing was important. People are good. The British seem bad at remembering just how good they can be? I couldn’t agree more. That’s the sort of patriotism I think is really important, knowing what we did well, knowing where we stood, knowing where we still stand, maybe on our own, but we’ve got to be prepared for that. And wondering if we would we be as good as our parents and grandparents were. Read More:Peaky Blinders recap: 5 things you need to remember before watching the film Cillian Murphy and Barry Keoghan, as father and son Tommy and Duke, communicate much of their feelings without words… A lot of this film is about how the men react with each other, and not suggesting that because these men don’t talk that they’re not emotional about something. They just don’t say it. There’s a lot of fathers and sons in my work, there is something mythological about that, about the passing on of intergenerational trauma. The funny thing is how we all turn into our dad, bit by bit. Does Barry’s performance as Duke demand another series or film? Barry is phenomenal. I mean, that performance, Jesus! I can’t answer questions about that, but what I can say is that we will be shooting a series that is a continuation of the family story and I’ll keep doing it because people want it. Read More: Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man review – Big screen spin-off keeps a firm red right hand on proceedings Peaky Blinders star breaks silence on major character absence from The Immortal Man film: "It’s something you don’t see on TV" Steven Knight explains how Peaky Blinders film ended up quite different from his initial plans The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is out now in UK cinemas and is released on Netflix on 20 March 2026. 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.
Lord Sugar reveals The Apprentice future and why the UK won't get a hungry entrepreneurial culture: "Too late, mate"
The Apprentice tsar on why the world’s best entrepreneurs and innovators aren't British.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. The Apprentice is currently well into its 20th series, fronted, as ever, by the self-made multimillionaire, life peer, author and sometime political adviser, Alan Sugar. But after two decades of firing contestants who fail to meet his exacting standards, is the 78-year-old’s faith in young British entrepreneurs still intact? Or has he given up on a generation drawn by the lure of celebrity rather than his own ethos of hard work? The Apprentice is now in its 20th series – would you like to reach a quarter century? It’s not down to me but we have agreed another three years. I guess there’ll come a time when either I’m a bit knackered or viewers are phoning in and complaining that I’m like Joe Biden and losing the plot. The BBC will spend a few grand on some market research people and ask, “Should we get rid of Lord Sugar or what?” But, at the moment, I love doing it because it’s really about starting a business from scratch with young people. Have business practices changed since The Apprentice began in 2005? Yes, because of technology and because of the internet. When people create businesses now, rather than having a bricks-and- mortar shop or warehouse, they are created on the web. I like to have a physical product. Let’s make something! So why does The Apprentice remain relevant? Because of our audience. Every single year I get a new generation of youngsters, 13- or 15-year-olds, tuning in. The 15-year-old of 20 years ago is now 35. If you said to him, “Do you watch The Apprentice any more?” you’ll get, “No, it’s s**t. He [Sugar] talks a lot of b******s. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” But the new 15-year-olds are so in awe of it. And the show has created an awareness for business that’s done a great service for young people. You opened the latest series with boardroom scenes in Hong Kong – why? It was a surprise for the candidates. They’ve been sent abroad before, but this is the first time that I turned up. Our friends in China are fantastic. The entrepreneurs there are brilliant; people there, and India, have got a tremendous flair. And here in England you find that some of the great entrepreneurs are from second-generation Indian and Chinese families. They are great innovators, clever and smart people. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2026/03/551800-ddbbcb3.jpg" width="4285" height="2410" alt="The candidates for The Apprentice, a mixed group of men and women standing and sitting in front of a huge desk inside a futuristic office building with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking an urban cityscape. At the other side of the desk Karren Brady and Tim Campbell are seated, with Lord Sugar standing between them looking at the candidates." title="551800,TITLE:The Apprentice S20" /> Are you known in Hong Kong the way you’re known over here? It’s my old hunting ground. I used to go to Hong Kong three or four times a year, so I would have been known in the electronics industry 30 to 40 years ago, but not by the average person in the street like I am in England. That’s one of the reasons I like being in America, because no one knows who I am. Why do you not enjoy being recognised? It goes back to my days in football. Being recognised as the chairman of a football club wasn’t nice at all [Sugar was chairman of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club between 1991 and 2001]. Being recognised nowadays for The Apprentice is very nice. And people come up to me, they ask for selfies, they ask for autographs and all that stuff, and I don’t mind at all. In the football days, it was more like, “Get your f***ing chequebook out, you w****r.” That wasn’t very nice. Why do you think the Chinese are so good at creating entrepreneurs? It’s the hunger, actual physical hunger, that has created people who realise that they have to be self-sufficient to eat. Literally, to eat. They have to work hard in order to achieve things. No different from what it was like in England back in the 40s and 50s. People had to work really hard to get what they wanted. There were no free lunches and all that stuff. The Chinese and the Indians were very poor people for a long, long time. So, the necessity to eat and also to be prosperous and to be self-sufficient is within their culture. Do you want that hungry entrepreneurial culture here? Too late, mate. All the kids are interested in now is the latest Nike shoes, the iPhone 15 and TikTok. I sometimes think the parents are to blame. Get out and get a bloody job. Go and work in McDonald’s and scrape the hot plates and all that. But oh, no, “Not for me. I’m too busy on Saturday.” When I was a millionaire I sent my kids out to work on Saturday morning. And they made their own children do the same thing. The new series started with 20 candidates instead of 18. Did that make much difference? Well, it gave me a lot more scope to fire people. As you’ll have seen in some episodes already, if they really screw up, I can get rid of more than one of them at a time. And the candidates have changed, they’re very social-media and reality-TV-show aware, celebrity-aware. I spot some of them coming on the show for that. They normally don’t last too long. Which contestants have you liked the most over 20 series? I wouldn’t like to say. My wife sometimes says I didn’t get close to anybody, really. But business is business. I tell them that on the programme: we’re not here to make friends. I’m here to do business. Business is nine to five – and after five, that’s it. The latest issue of Radio Times is out on Tuesday – subscribe here. The Apprentice airs on Thursdays at 9pm on BBC One and iPlayer. 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.
'Nobody's ever done it – I'd love it to be me'
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
Add the Winter Paralympics 2026 to your watchlist 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.” 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.” When to watch Jo Butterfield The curling star makes her first appearance at the Winter Paralympics alongside fellow debutant Jason Kean. 4 March 6.05pm Mixed Doubles
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.