Amadeus stars Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe talk Mozart drama's 'woke' accusations and the "strange" power of conducting
Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe are bringing the composer's story to life with divine intervention – and stunt strawberries.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. To paraphrase 1980s Austrian pop singer Falco: “Amadeus, Amadeus, let me shock you, Amadeus”. That’s to say, Sky’s five-part series, which flits between concert theatre, Imperial palace and brothel, contains some very naughty scenes. One particular encounter, on top of a (literally) groaning buffet, may or may not be narratively essential, but it’s certainly sexually ingenious. Was that really a strawberry? I ask co-stars Will Sharpe and Paul Bettany. “Oh, yes,” says Sharpe. “A stunt strawberry,” adds Bettany. Based on Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play of the same name, Amadeus takes place in late 18th-century Vienna, where Antonio Salieri (Bettany) is court composer to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Joseph II. At the very height of his profession, the religiously devout Salieri is nonetheless plagued by one doubt: is he any good? As if to confirm his fears, along comes young genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Sharpe), who is escaping his overbearing father in Salzburg and intent on having a good time in the capital of the Habsburg Empire. Salieri is the one who kneels before the cross, the composer who dedicates himself to the Almighty. Yet it is Mozart, dedicated to orgies and wine, who writes music of divine beauty. Infuriated by God’s practical joke, Salieri sets out to secretly destroy Mozart. Both actors are called upon to conduct and play the piano. “Will did an extraordinary job with his piano playing,” says Bettany. “I was more obsessed with the conducting, and specifically conducting the Requiem. It was an amazing feeling. A strange feeling of power.” The Requiem Mass in D Minor, Mozart’s last work, is “exquisite” says Bettany, but is it actually coming from God? “Well, I had to believe it was,” says Sharpe. “There were occasionally mad things that happened during filming. We’d shoot a scene where Mozart mentions God in some way, and then the moment I say ‘God,’ there’s a huge thunderclap, lightning through the window, like it was theatrically managed. So occasionally there would be weird, ‘What’s happening here?’ moments.” Shaffer’s play has, famously, been given a screen treatment before, in MiloŠ Forman’s 1984 film in which Tom Hulce played Mozart and F Murray Abraham was Salieri. But rather than the giggling manchild Hulce gave us, Sharpe’s Mozart is a roistering gadabout whose apparent ability to produce utterly sublime music on request increasingly becomes a burden. “One of the main ways into him as a character for me was the music,” says Sharpe. “Hearing all the different shades of Mozart, how sometimes he is super playful and light, but he can also be very grand and dark.” View oEmbed on the source website Bettany seethes as the conflicted Salieri, visiting a prostitute to be beaten, doing something intensely personal over his keyboard – “I find that stuff very difficult to be honest, especially as I hurtle towards my dotage” – or simply staring at a score sheet, alone with the terrible thought that he might be mediocre. “And gosh, I have those same fears and make the same accusations,” he says. “I’m sure most people do, unless they happen to be Mozart.” Sharpe, who will be 40 next year, won rave reviews and a Bafta for Giri/Haji in 2019 and co-wrote and directed Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain in 2021. In the same year he co-wrote and directed the Sky Atlantic/HBO series Landscapers. Then, in 2022, came his acclaimed performance as troubled tech entrepreneur Ethan Spiller in The White Lotus. Given all that, does 54-year-old Bettany, who first came to wide public attention in 2001 alongside Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale and, more recently, has starred as Vision in the Marvel films and Disney+ series, have any fellow feeling with Salieri and his jealousy of the younger man? “It’s horribly revealing for me to say it, but this didn’t feel a massive stretch for me,” he says. “I think we all have these venal, mendacious, awful ideas that we hopefully don’t act on, so it was delicious to do it as actors.” When the cast photographs were released in August, social media noticed that Sharpe, who describes himself as British-Japanese, isn’t a white Austrian. His casting was decried as “woke”, among other things. “Not many people mentioned how un-Italian I am,” notes Bettany. Sharpe is inclined to play the furore down. “I’m only dimly aware of it, because I’m not really online. The play, and this show, is quite fictionalised, it’s not meant to be a historical biography of either character.” And that, of course, is key: this is a made-up story. In real life Salieri helped Mozart, and we have no evidence that he regarded himself as a failure. Rather, the plot was possibly a figment of an increasingly ill Mozart’s imagination, leading to rumours that were developed by the Russian writer Pushkin in his 1830 play Mozart and Salieri, and later reworked by Shaffer as a madcap morality tale about the high price that both jealousy and genius demand. Thus, a series that began with much bawdiness resolves in a poignant contemplation of the meaning of art and reputation, as the ailing Mozart finally understands Salieri is the author of his demise and Salieri realises a second cosmic trick has been played on him – it will be Mozart that history remembers. “There’s a moment where Salieri touches Mozart’s hand and suddenly, they hear music.” says Bettany. “I don’t know how it was for Will, but the whole way through the show, I was thinking, ‘How the hell are we going to convey this thing?’ And I hate to use this word , because you just sound like a ponce, but here we go. It just happened ‘organically’. There, I said it.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Amadeus will be available to watch on Sky and NOW in December. Add Amadeus to your watchlist on the <a id="OWA8b702c45-bee9-94e4-f018-57518e78041b" title="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" href="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-outlook-id="449c28d9-909e-4aab-b6b8-153454f55d5e" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="0">Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Edith Bowman opens up about replacing Sound of Cinema legend Matthew Sweet: "I hope that it does bring people to Radio 3"
Edith Bowman is now the voice of Radio 3's Sound of Cinema – and insists it's not dumbing down.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Sound of Cinema has a new voice. After 12 years, presenter Matthew Sweet, who devised the show and established it as a bastion of quirky enquiry, has left to be replaced by Edith Bowman. On the evidence of her first few shows, Bowman is less likely to wander down alleyways than Sweet. New features like Harmonising Hollywood and a playlist that, so far, prioritises music like the pulsing electro-scapes of Oppenheimer’s Ludwig Göransson, feel like a turn to the mainstream. “No, I don’t think that’s the case at all,” she objects vigorously. “It’s not a case of dumbing down something, if that’s what you’re implying. It’s about really showing the breadth of what’s out there. And that’s not always necessarily something classical. It can be much more contemporary.” Bowman has fronted Cinematic Sound-tracks at Radio 3 Unwind since 2024 and presents Soundtracking, a film and music podcast that attracts big names, like Steven Spielberg. After talking to him, Bowman says, “I burst into tears and went, ‘I’ve just spoken to Steven Spielberg!’” Now 50, Bowman was brought up in Anstruther on the Fife coast, where her parents had a hotel and, like many people, she discovered scored orchestral music through film. “My dad bought a projector and he ran this little film club on a Saturday morning,” she says. “I would sit with him, be his little assistant and make membership cards for people. He showed things like Bugsy Malone, but the John Williams suites for Star Wars, ET and Raiders of the Lost Ark are the ones that I really remember.” She went on to work at MTV, C4, Virgin Radio, Radio 1, Radio 2, 5Live and Radio 6 Music, her resilience overcoming several setbacks. “We can’t put someone with an accent like yours on the radio,” someone told her during work experience at Radio Forth. “I was swallowing back tears,” she says. “But then with each of these things you build a thicker skin.” Later, Bowman would be disappointed again when she was let go from her 6 Music show in 2013. Undaunted, she used the moment to start Soundtracking, which launched in 2016 with Hans Zimmer as the first guest. There are no reports of Sweet being pushed out, but does Bowman, who was approached by station controller Sam Jackson, feel some sympathy towards her predecessor, leaving a show that he had very much made his own? “One of the first things that I said to Radio 3 was that I’d really like to reach out to Matthew and just drop him a message,” she says. “Whether he reads it or not, we’re all humans and we all have connections to things. I’ve been in that position. It’s not nice.” Few presenters come with Sweet’s intellectual credentials, but Bowman thinks her relative lack of classical knowledge is actually a strength. “I can only talk about music from a place of emotion and how it makes me feel, rather than talking about quavers and semi- quavers and timings.” So, is this iteration of Sound of Cinema a gateway show for people who don’t know much about classical music but, given the opportunity, might be open to discovering it? “Yeah. And how amazing would that be? I mean, that’s how I got into it. From talking about film on Radio 1 back in the day, I really started to get the chance to speak to people about the creative process behind the music and how involved it was in the storytelling.” New elements like Pick of the Flicks allow Bowman to get mainstream stars like Emma Thompson and Graham Norton on the show, talking about the film scores that have stayed with them. This tendency to see film music as biographical, as much a soundtrack to lives as movies, is another departure from the previous show. Dumbing down? As Norton proved when he chose Ryuichi Sakamoto’s evocative electronica Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence music, mainstream can be very interesting. “I have a genuine interest in this art form,” says Bowman. “I hope that it does bring people to Radio 3, brings them into this world and makes them feel part of it.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Listen to Sound of Cinema on Saturday at 4pm on Radio 3. Check out more of our Audio coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
A new documentary unveils artist JMW Turner’s secret passion for erotic sketches – and how critics wanted to erase them from history
Add Turner – the Secret Sketchbooks to your watchlist Think of the 19th-century Romantic artist JMW Turner and three famous images force their way into your mind: the locomotive hurtling out of the mist in Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway; the swirl of grey, white and black in Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth and the wooden hulk of The Fighting Temeraire being towed to the shipbreakers by a funnelled steamer, voted Britain’s greatest painting in a BBC poll in 2005. You almost certainly won’t be thinking of the bottoms, boobs or other body parts that appear in Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks, a new BBC documentary that features Timothy Spall – who starred in Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner – Chris Packham, Rolling Stone and painter Ronnie Wood and Tracey Emin. As Emin says of the remarkable sketches: “There’s a shape that looks like an erect penis with veins. I mean, it’s really over the top. And then there’s a woman reclining with her legs slightly up and her feet crossed as if she’s in some frozen ecstasy.” This might not be the Turner you imagined, yet the erotic sketches, being seen for the first time on television, have always been there, lurking in the huge tranche of 37,000 sketches the artist left to the nation on his death aged 76 in 1851, along with almost 300 oil paintings, collectively known as the Turner Bequest. But when the erotic sketches were discovered, the effect was dismay. Victorian writer Frank Harris gasped, “The pudenda of women, utterly inexcusable.” Horrified art historian John Ruskin, until then Turner’s fervent supporter, wrote to the National Gallery, where the Bequest was initially kept, asking that the “obscene drawings” were burnt as they had been “assuredly drawn under a certain condition of insanity”. For Emin, Ruskin could hardly be more wrong. “There is nothing obscene that I’m looking at here,” she says of the luminous works. Ruskin, who famously failed to consummate his marriage to the pre-Raphaelite beauty Effie Gray, was sexually naive. Turner, born in Covent Garden, was not. He would visit brothels to sketch prostitutes and, as the film Mr Turner made clear, had a vigorous sex life. Accordingly, a few are graphic images. “I think for many people they are surprising, because we associate Turner so closely with landscape,” says Amy Concannon, curator of this autumn’s Turner and Constable exhibition at Tate Britain in London and expert contributor to the documentary. “We, of course, don’t know whether he was just an observer or a participant in the activities depicted, but a compulsion to draw these erotic subjects seems perfectly natural for someone who was rarely without a sketchbook to hand.” It’s this compulsive creativity that speaks directly to Ronnie Wood, now 78 and still painting. “I think what keeps you young is the drive to keep getting better,” he says. “Turner was obviously driven. He was possessed and I love that.” Turner sketched everywhere he went in Britain and Europe, taking impressions of landscapes before completing paintings at his London studio – a process Emin, who comes from Margate where Turner did much of his sketching, well understands. “My sketchbooks work like a diary,” she says. “It’s something which I treasure. And so maybe Turner felt the same way about his own sketchbooks. It wasn’t that they were secret, it was more that they were his. ‘Let the paintings be seen but let the book belong to me.’” When we first meet Turner in Mike Leigh’s 2014 film, he is outside sketching, and Spall, who learned to paint for the role and has since exhibited his own work, has a strong sense of what the artist was thinking. “Turner was trying to touch the sublime,” he says. “The Romantic movement wasn’t about what people saw, it was about what they felt about what they saw; about trying to catch a feeling, which is over and above the arrangement of the elements that you see before you.” In the end, what can we know of Turner, the working-class artist who, like Emin, was welcomed into the aristocratic Royal Academy; the visionary who shocked Ruskin? “That he didn’t hold himself back,” says Emin. “I think for Turner, whatever he was painting, it was all the same stuff for him.” Shocking they might be, but the erotic sketches are not the drawings of an artist obsessed by sex, but an artist obsessed by capturing wonder wherever he encountered it. “When you think he was a man in the 1800s, painting freely with his emotions, that’s the wildest thing,” says Emin.
Oscar-winning composer Anne Dudley has lived her life in music, from classical to TV scores. But she knew to stay silent when Poldark took off his togs
New Music Show is on Radio 3 at 10.30pm on Saturday. Add it to your collection If the composer Anne Dudley has one regret it’s that Aidan Turner’s shirtless scything in Poldark, a scene that set the nation a-quiver and which she calls “one of the most famous moments in television” is almost entirely dialogue-free. That means it didn’t require her to write any extra score – a creative process that would have required multiple viewings. “So, I didn’t get to see it about 50 times,” she says, “like I usually do.” Otherwise, the 69-year-old has a lot to be happy about. She has provided music for many television shows and films as well as Poldark, including American History X, The Crying Game and The Full Monty, for which she won an Oscar. Other awards include two Brits, a Grammy and an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. These are remarkable achievements for a woman who came from an ordinary household in Plumstead in south London where she loved the soundtrack to the 1960s children’s series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, listened to her dad’s 78s – “He liked classical music with a tune and quite frankly, who doesn’t?” – and absorbed 60s and 70s pop on the radio. “I don’t want to sound like an old fogey going, ‘Pop music was much better in my day’, but the thing is, it’s true.” Now Dudley is receiving one of the greatest accolades that the British music industry can give, becoming the 33rd Ivors Academy Fellow and joining the ranks of Kate Bush, Sir Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Dame Judith Weir, Sir Paul McCartney and Sir James MacMillan. “Just to be mentioned in the same breath as those people is a huge honour,” she says. Dudley is being recognised for body of music that stretches from composing the shimmering 2022 cantata One Touch of Nature to arranging for Rod Stewart and Tina Turner. But her career began inauspiciously one night in the late 70s at Tiffany’s nightclub in Wimbledon when, fresh from the Royal College of Music, Dudley arrived for a gig with her electric piano. “At the time I just thought it was a way of earning £17.50,” she says. “It was a discotheque, but they had a live band because the Musicians Union insisted on it. The bass player came in and said, ‘Oh, I like the sound of your piano. Would you hire it out?’ And I replied, ‘No, if you want my piano, you have to hire me.’ So rather than a hire company, I became a professional musician. It was probably the right choice.” The bass player was Trevor Horne, soon to be one of the key figures in British pop. Through him Dudley would arrange the strings on one of the defining albums of the early 80s, The Lexicon of Love by ABC, and then join the experimental, and highly successful, electronic pop group Art of Noise. In truth, it’s quite hard to keep up with all the things Dudley has done. The first person to be appointed BBC Concert Orchestra’s Composer in Association, she has also worked with Robbie Williams (“So funny and full of life. The Ivor Novello of his time”) and the Spice Girls, seemingly equally happy in classical or pop. “To me, musical barriers don’t exist,” she says. “Duke Ellington said there’s good music and bad music, and that’s it. But I’m not even sure that there’s bad music. There’s sometimes quite weird music, or music that maybe I don’t like, but I would hesitate to call it bad.” She went on to score television commercials for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Guinness, then got her first big TV series commission, the soundtrack for Jeeves and Wooster, starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Looking back over her career, the obvious high point would be an Oscar for 1997’s The Full Monty, beating Hans Zimmer’s score for As Good as It Gets. “I had no expectation of winning,” she recalls of the awards ceremony in Los Angeles. “I do remember just being shocked. I was wearing quite high heels, and my main thought was, ‘Don’t fall over.’ When I’ve seen it back, I appear to be quite calm. I’ve no idea how, really, because it was all a bit of a blur.” It was an important moment in her musical life, but not the most important. That had come much earlier, when she was 10. “The school acquired a clarinet and because I was the best recorder player I got the clarinet and free music lessons. Soon after that, I realised that all I ever wanted to do was music.” She would go on to win a “life-changing” junior exhibition at the RCM. Acutely aware that she was “born at the right time”, Dudley remains ever grateful to the Inner London Education Authority, which provided her free music lessons. “Those days are long gone, so I do feel blessed. Since I was a child, music has been devalued in the national curriculum. It’s not seen to be as important.” But, of course, it is and we tend to find out just how important in moments of personal and, sometimes, national crisis. At the height of the Covid pandemic in 2020 it was Dudley who arranged the socially distanced performance of Land of Hope and Glory at the Last Night of the Proms. “There was no audience at the Royal Albert Hall except me and Errollyn Wallen [now Master of the King’s Music] rattling around up in the gallery. It was a challenge to reduce Elgar’s magnificent orchestration, but also a joy to delve into the score. On the night the BBC Symphony Orchestra played the arrangement magnificently. I found it very moving.” And so she plays on, immensely respected by her peers and utterly dedicated to making good music, whatever genre we choose to call it. “The composer Elisabeth Lutyens said, ‘I write two types of music. I write my own music and film music.’ I thought that was rather a terrible thing to say because, really, you have to put yourself into everything that you do.”
A bespoke radio station is hammering preconceptions about builders — and filling a serious gap in the market
Hard hats on, hi-vis zipped up,” comes the portentous announcement. “The builders’ station on mornings means… the Bald Builders!” It’s 6.06 am and Fix Radio is kicking off the day with star presenters Brad and Sam, famous in the construction trade as the Bald Builders. Two men with shiny heads, beards and intricate arm tattoos, who deliver three hours of on-air geezerish good cheer to a comm-unity that needs it more than you might think. Poor old builders, so often the butt of jokes. They have builders’ bums and builders’ tea to put up with but also, more worryingly, tool theft, unpaid bills and, increasingly, mental health issues. No wonder they’ve formed a broadcasting huddle and now have their own station. Fix Radio was launched in 2017 in the London area by then 23-year-old Louis Timpany who, after leaving Leeds University, went to work on construction sites and noticed a gap in the market. Builders – as you’ll know if your neighbours are having a dormer window put in right now – listen to the radio all day. But where was the station directed at them, the station where companies that sell things to builders could access their market directly? Eight years on, Fix Radio broadcasts nationally and delivers ultra-focused advertising slots for builders’ merchant chains and van manufacturers, reaching more than 800,000 listeners a week. It’s a small but burgeoning broadcasting phenomenon and to find out more, I’ve joined Fix’s community of listeners, many of whom, if their messages to the station are to be believed, have names like Guys and Dolls characters. I’m thinking, particularly, of Mickey the Squeak, doing “second fix joinery” in Yorkshire. Perhaps Mickey was in the crowd at this year’s inaugural FixFest. The one-day music festival in West Sussex had the expected commercial linkups with power tool makers and trade suppliers but also offered vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free food stalls for hungry plumbers. Not quite what you imagined? Nor me, but, as Brad makes clear when we speak, pretty much everything I thought I knew about builders is out of date. “That whole stereotypical thing of builders going to the caff every morning for eggs, bacon, sausage, chips and beans and reading The Sun, that’s not the industry any more,” he says. “I’ve seen plasterers eating strawberries during the day.” And they don’t wolf-whistle any more? “No! That went before the fry-ups.” If builders have moved with the times they have also, according to Louis Timpany, come under far greater financial and psychological stress. Some of the FixFest proceeds went to the Fix Radio Foundation, a charity that assists tradespeople in distress, and there was a set-aside area at the festival offering help with mental health issues. “It’s a prevalent issue affecting our community,” Timpany says. “This is a heavily macho male culture, and men in general are not great at talking about their feelings. Also, much of the construction industry is made up of thousands of small businesses. So, you’ve often got somebody who is responsible for their business and for the livelihood of their family.” The Bald Builders are also family (Brad, 40, and Sam, 30, are brothers-in-law). Shouting out to chippies scraping frost off windscreens while most of us have yet to poke a tentative toe from under the duvet, the pair broadcast from a studio they made themselves. If they sound like builders, it’s because they are. As soon as the breakfast show finishes, they’ll be off to work, “doing up” houses. “We’re cut from the same cloth as our listeners,” Brad tells me. “We understand how hard it is when it’s cold and raining, because we’ve got the same job digging footings and foundations.” Once Brad and Sam have left for a day on muddy sites, Mikey Faulkner introduces At Work Anthems, a mid-morning show that delivers on its promise, supplying the requisite Fleetwood Mac and Depeche Mode for successfully thwacking nails. Following Mikey, from 12 to 3pm, it’s the station’s flag carrier when it comes to the serious stuff, The Clive Holland Show. The Midlands presenter and longtime building broadcaster takes on the major issues that affect the trade and, by extension, the country. The Government has committed to building 1.5 million new homes in England in this parliament. Moreover, there is a shortage of builders. On Holland’s show today they are covering the fraught subject of whether this shortfall means there need to be more on-site female “tradies”, Fix Radio argot for tradespeople. Not every male caller has been enthusiastic and a frustrated Mike the Electrician messages from Manchester: “The reason more women don’t get into our industry is because of some of the things men who have called in have been saying.” Fix Radio does have a predominately masculine tone but it also broadcasts the excellent podcast Tradeswomen Together, presented by Hattie Hasan and Steph Leese, “For women in construction. By women in construction”. During my day with Fix, meteorological conditions have been a regular source of comment. The elements have been too dry and then too wet. Render cracks, cement won’t set. Wood heats up and warps, then wood is soaked by rain and won’t cut. “These are the joys,” as one caller puts it, “of working in the UK weather.” Listening to talk of the newly chilly mornings, of plugging heatable gilets into car USB sockets, I realise this is a station that has a palpable bond with its listeners. I ask Timpany if Fix can keep on growing and he replies, “There are three million tradespeople out there.” Plenty more hi-vis to zip. Fix Radio is available on DAB and at fixradio.com
'The smell, sound and heat would have seemed a miracle 200 years ago'
Train enthusiast Petroc Trelawny can’t wait for Radio 3’s day-long celebration of locomotion — but, he warns Michael Hodges, don’t play music in his quiet carriage
Train Tracks is on from 7.30am, Saturday on Radio 3. Add it to your collection Petroc Trelawny’s scarlet neck scarf Station, closely followed by his rakish grey quiff and beaming face. “Isn’t it amazing!” the 54-year-old says as the green hulk of Eddystone, a West Country class locomotive built in 1946, shunts past us on the platform. RT is trainspotting with the Radio 3 presenter and he’s right; as JK Rowling, Hercule Poirot and Jenny Agutter all know, steam engines have immense evocative power. “I’m passionate about them,” says Trelawny when we retire, at his suggestion, to the station’s Clermont Hotel, a surviving example of the grand establish- ments that used to make rail travel so enticing if you could afford it. “The smell, the sound, the heat coming from the boiler; the idea of someone shovelling coal into this spitting oven that heats water and drives the train forward. All that would have seemed a miracle when the first passengers were taken across open country 200 years ago.” Trelawny is referring to the momentous day, 27 September 1825, when George Stephenson’s Stockton to Darlington route opened with a journey by a train pulled by Locomotion No 1, becoming Britain’s – and the world’s – first passenger railway service. That journey, along with the following 200 years of British train travel, will be marked by Radio 3 on Saturday with Train Tracks, a day-long celebration of the bicentenary of our railways, with a unique live broad- cast on London North Eastern Railway’s (LNER) Highland Chieftain express service, travelling from mountains to metropolis. This is not a steam service, but one pulled by an technology inspired by Japanese bullet trains. Trelawny begins broadcasting at 7.30am at Inverness, then continues on the 7.55 King’s Cross service, which will have a dedicated studio carriage. There will be live performances, radio premieres of works commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Unfolding Landscapes by Erland Cooper and All Change! by Jasper Dommett), an interview with Scotland’s only female freight train driver, plus slots for presenters Tom McKinney, Tom Service, Elizabeth Alker and Georgia Mann as the train heads south, stopping at Pitlochry, Edinburgh Waverley and Darlington before pulling into King’s Cross. It all sounds admirably ambitious, but what will they do when the train goes through a tunnel? “There will be blind spots, especially in the far north and as we pass through multiple tunnels. We have decided to record my reports a couple of minutes before they’re broadcast to ensure a smooth listen.” Radio 3 and railways are well suited. Trains are high-speed orchestras that rattle, swoosh and whistle and have been inspiring music since 1844, when French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan wrote Le chemin de fer. “There’s a huge amount of music about the railway,” says Trelawny. “Strauss wrote waltzes and polkas about trains. Dvorak was passionate about them. When he was living in the States and feeling homesick, he’d go to Penn Station and watch trains and think of the main station in Prague, which gave him reassurance and comfort. A work like Pacific 231 by Arthur Honegger really evokes the sound of a locomotive and it’s very hard to listen to Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto now and not imagine the train at Carnforth Station in Brief Encounter.” The romance of train travel hooked Trelawny long ago. He grew up in Cornwall at the far end of the Great Western and Cornish lines, over 280 miles of track, tunnels, bridge and embankment, begun by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, that strides out from Paddington all the way to the tip of Cornwall. As a boy he obsessed about its trains; as an adult he has done the journey “hundreds of times” but seldom gets on without thinking about his mother, who he last saw alive on Penzance platform, waving her off aged 12 when she was going to London for cancer treatment. “I remember her getting on to go to hospital…” Rather than it being a melancholy ghost train, he adds: “I also think of my late father, and the first time I caught the train on my own, going to the buffet car and being excited to buy a cup of tea and a sandwich with money he’d given me.” And the journey back to Cornwall is still a source of joy. “I never tire of the train running along the Exe estuary and then, suddenly, seeing the sea and chopping in and out of those cliffs at Dawlish. People walking along the seawall on the other side of the railway track, waving. People still wave at trains.” There is, he admits, “something lovely about sitting with other people in relative silence. The gentle clack-clack of the train; reading a book and realising you haven’t turned a page for 15 minutes because you’re looking out the window.” For many of us the magic of train travel is increasingly being disrupted by someone watch- ing their mobile with the volume turned up and no headphones. “Thirty years ago, we were complaining about Walkmans with the noise escaping from tinny headphones, but it’s moved on to something even worse and feels to me incredibly selfish,” says Trelawny. “There is a massive problem that our leading brand of smartphone got rid of headphone sockets. But it’s the epitome of selfishness to want to listen to anything and share it with other people. There are moments when we want to listen to stuff together, at the Royal Albert Hall or Wigmore Hall, but not on a train.” Would Trelawny say something if someone was listening without headphones on his carriage? “I’d like to think I would but, like most of us, I’m quite a coward and so seethe internally and don’t do very much about it,” he says. “I think it needs something broader than me getting very angry for 15 minutes and then prob- ably slightly red in the face intervening.” Locomotion No 1 averaged a speed of eight miles an hour and was preceded on the track by a horse rider with a flag carrying the Latin words, “Periculum privatum utilitas publica” (“The private danger is the public good”). There’ll be no flag in front of Saturday’s south- bound locomotive, which will hit speeds of 125mph. But these, as Trelawny admits, are days of fractured public confidence in the railways, especially in northern England. “I have lots of friends working for the BBC in Salford who are reliant on Northern trains, and they have quite a tough time,” he says. “It’s easy to romanticise elements of rail travel. It’s not so much fun when you’re standing in the rain on the platform at Hebden Bridge, waiting for a half-an-hour late train that replaced a train that’s been cancelled.” So, what if the Highland Chieftain is late? “This is a major express train,” he says. “I’m pretty confident that we’ll be on time.” Nonetheless he’s been preparing for other eventualities, on the simulator LNER uses to train drivers at King’s Cross. “It didn’t work out so well. I managed to undershoot the platform at Stevenage so only half my carriages were on the platform. I also failed to keep my foot on the dead-man’s break, so we stopped, and I brought trains on the East Coast mainline to a standstill.” Happily, Trelawny is a better broadcaster than train driver, presenting Radio 3’s Breakfast show for 14 years before he took over the 5pm In Tune slot in April, where he shares duties with Katie Derham. “You are with people at really a very intimate moment,” he says of the morning show that is now Tom McKinney’s domain. “They start heir listening in bed, then take you to the bathroom. They’re padding around the kitchen, trying to wake up, making a piece of toast while listening to you. The pieces of music that you play can shape their day." However, there were drawbacks. that feeling of the alarm waking you up from a deep sleep. There’s no chance of ‘I’ll just have another ten minutes.’ And also being tired in the evening, when you’re meeting friends.” Did he ever nod off in concerts? “Definitely! But I got good at closing my eyes and keeping my head up. I worked out a position that avoids your head slumping.” Trelawny’s new role is just one of the changes that have come since the arrival of a new controller in 2023. Radio 3 is flourishing under Sam Jackson, but some critics suggest the station has become safer, leaning on well-known works to attract an audience. Trelawny, who has live musicians on his afternoon show throughout the week, often playing new or less well- known pieces, strongly disagrees. “It’s just not true that we’re playing those works more,” he says. “People will hear a piece of music and think that because, by pure coincidence, they’ve heard it played twice in a month at completely different times of day, ‘Oh my God, it’s on all the time!’ But the variety and range of music that we’re playing is as broad and diverse as ever. I don’t see any danger of that ever changing – we’re still the biggest commissioner of new music in the country. At the same time, we must make ourselves welcoming to people who are dipping a toe into classical music. “There’s no point us existing for a tiny number of people who are privileged to have had an education and an introduction to the music when young, who went to a school that still has a good music department, which not many state schools still do. We have a responsibility to those [new] people.” In which case, all aboard.
Stepping down after 27 years and more than 1,000 episodes, Melvyn Bragg is leaving In Our Time behind – but what does the future hold for the veteran broadcaster?
Speaking to Melvyn Bragg the day after the announcement that he will be calling time on In Our Time, the much-celebrated Radio 4 ideas programme that he has presented since its creation in 1998, I don’t know whether to congratulate him on a sensational innings or plead that he reconsider. “I feel the same myself,” the 85-year-old broadcaster says. “But, one way or another, we’ve all got to go sometime. And I just thought, I’ll go now. I’ll go before I’m pushed, I suppose.” Hopefully, there were no plans to push Lord Bragg out. Certainly, Radio 4 controller Mohit Bakaya was lavish in his praise after Bragg announced his departure, saying, “His fierce intellect, coupled with a wonderful curiosity and extraordinary passion for knowledge, marks him out as one of the broadcasting greats.” Bakaya is right; Bragg’s show, where leading academics are brought together to discuss a wide spread of subjects – episodes have included explorations of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the evolution of crocodiles and Ovid’s Metamorphoses – in ways ordinary listeners can understand, is the epitome of the Reithian ideal. “So many people have written in, saying, ‘I went to a state school, I didn’t know this, I didn’t know that, but this is providing education,’” says Bragg. “I can’t tell you how pleased I am about that. It’s immeasurable; it’s worth my whole broadcasting career.” In Our Time has also offered the BBC much-needed credibility when it has often been accused of dumbing down. In an age of anti-science conspiracy theories on social media and campaigns against “experts”, it has been a counterbalance to the sidelining of genuine intellectual curiosity. “I hope so,” says Bragg. “Because that is disastrous, utterly stupid and destructive. It’s disappointing that quite a bit of our public life is ignorant – but we’re not ignorant.” Back in 1998, the BBC told Bragg – who had been obliged to leave his berth at Start the Week when he entered the House of Lords as a Labour peer – that the new show could have six months and they would see how it went. “They offered me what was cheerfully called ‘the death slot’,” he says, of the Thursday 9am broadcast time. The very first episode was called War in the 20th Century. Executives had no idea what would happen but then, as he admits, neither did Bragg. “I had not the slightest inkling. It was just a sort of shot in the dark.” It turned out that ordinary listeners were hungry for knowledge. Within a year, the show was getting an audience of 1.5 million and today it is heard by more than two million people a week. The premise of In Our Time is disarmingly simple. Bragg is the everyman asking three academics, leaders in their field, questions on our behalf. A key part of the show’s continuing success has been Bragg’s unflagging curiosity and delight in finding things out. “I’ve been surprised, enchanted and baffled,” he says. “I hope that I’ve had the nerve to ask them what they really mean by that. In other words, can they say it in simpler terms, so ignorant people like me can understand.” This approach reached a wider audience than expected partly, says Bragg, because people missed things at school and regret it. “I missed science because I stopped doing it at 14, so the science episodes are a wonderland for me. Then you discover that people all over the country feel the same way, they want to learn about science. So, we all go away with a real increase in our knowledge, in our comprehension of what’s going on in the world.” All those thousands of questions have been delivered in that unmistakeable quizzical, northern, working-class accent – Bragg’s parents ran a pub in Wigton in Cumberland – albeit one tempered by six decades in London. Bragg was part of the 1960s generation that headed south, broke down class barriers and re-energised broadcasting, most notably with his long-running ITV/Sky Arts programme, The South Bank Show. Did he ever think of taking In Our Time on to TV? “I did think about it in the early days, for about five minutes. And I thought what would happen would be everybody taking part would become self-conscious, and it wouldn’t work as well, so I dropped the idea.” Instead, In Our Time was at the forefront of the corporation’s entry into podcasting, first on the BBC website and iTunes in 2004. “Some people wondered whether In Our Time was good enough, or grand enough, or important enough,” says Bragg of the switch to online that would attract a global audience. “But we just did it, and the audience came to us in millions, and it came to us from around the world. Though, obviously, I’m very surprised.” When the last series’ final episode, on civility, was broadcast in July, had he already made up his mind to leave? “No, I hadn’t. I found it quite a tricky one to do and later in the summer I had one of those moments where you think, ‘Well, which path do you take through the woods?’ Then you take one, and that’s it,” says Bragg, who has had several health issues recently. Has he regretted his decision? “Sometimes I’ve thought, ‘What a stupid thing to do,’ but mostly I think this is the right path for me.” Now there is the question of who can possibly replace him. It has been reported that the job was offered to Mishal Husain (who spoke to Bragg for the 1,000th edition of In Our Time, in 2023) to try to persuade her to stay at the BBC. Does he think it matters if it’s a woman? “No, not in the slightest.” So, who would Bragg want to see in the role? “It’s a good question,” he laughs. “I haven’t thought because it’s none of my business any more.” Bragg laughs again when I ask if he has a favourite episode. “Well, we’re talking about more than 1,000 shows. That’s not so much a sprinkle of shows as a shower, a downpour, a storm. I just can’t answer that, I wish I could.” Perhaps he can decide over the coming months, because rather than retiring he will be marshalling his energy for one more project around In Our Time, building on the work of the last 27 years. “Mohit very generously said, ‘Well, we’re going to do more stuff.’ I hope it’s going to be based on the archive, which is extraordinary,” Bragg reveals. “There is nothing like it in the world. It’s an oral encyclopaedia, the like of which exists nowhere else. A lot of young people now prefer to listen than to read, so I’m going to devote myself to doing something special with that. I hope it will be a contemporary encyclopaedia.” An exciting prospect for Bragg? “Oh, it’s going to be great fun.” The In Our Time archive is available via BBC Sounds
British soprano Louise Alder reveals how she’s preparing to take command of the stage at the Last Night of the Proms
The Last Night of the Proms is on Saturday at 7pm on Radio 3. Add it to your collection Millions of radio ears and television eyes will be upon soprano Louise Alder when she sings Rule, Britannia! at the Last Night of the Proms this Saturday. A nerve-racking prospect for many, but when she walks on stage at the Royal Albert Hall, Alder’s focus will primarily be on mastering the enormous space. “You look out from the centre of that stage and it’s mind-blowing,” she says. “You’re singing into a chasm initially, so you must project. The Prommers are close, yet there are people far away, right up in the gallery.” The 38-year-old has previously sung West Side Story, Strauss and Mozart at the Proms, but her relationship with the world’s greatest classical music festival began dramatically in 2014. While on holiday in Thailand, she answered a phone call from Glyndebourne Festival Opera. They were taking Der Rosenkavalier to the Albert Hall, but the singer playing romantic lead Sophie had fallen ill; Alder was straight on the plane. “I made several debuts that night,” she recalls. “My company debut, Proms debut, London Philharmonic Orchestra debut and Radio 3 debut.” After that, I suggest, Alder must be used to big pressure moments at the venue. “I don’t think you get used to the Royal Albert Hall,” she points out firmly. “Not ever.” Her day will begin with a photo call and then last rehearsals. She’ll avoid heavy carbs – “they make you feel horrendous and sleepy after an hour and a half” – snacking on nuts instead and drinking a lot of water. “I drink all the time,” she says. “We singers have to go to the loo a lot.” After that it will be her, a sea of flags and a very public chance to shine. Alder, who won the audience prize at the Cardiff Singer of the World competition in 2017 and is the state school-educated daughter of a violinist mother and opera-singer father, was surprised when she got the Proms call. “I thought, ‘My God. I’m Louise, I grew up in Wimbledon. They’ve had Jonas Kaufmann and Lise Davidsen on that stage. What on earth do they want me for?’ ” She is resolutely unassuming. When I point out the acclaim for her Contessa in The Marriage of Figaro at Glyndebourne (which also came to the Proms this summer), she says, “It seems to have gone down well.” Then jokes, “Is that a British enough answer for you?” She didn’t even plan to be a singer. “I thought it was weird, that opera singing was a bit odd,” she says. “Dad singing seemed different because it wasn’t as warbly as some female voices can be. It took a while for me to understand what classical singing in an operatic way was.” It would be a mistake, as the Last Night should demonstrate, to read that as timidity. “I get to escape when I go on stage,” she says. “I’m still Louise Alder, but the performer in me is another beast.” When we speak, Alder has just had a fitting for her costume, co-created with stage and theatre designer Nicky Shaw. “I will be doing three costumes,” she tells me. “There’s a special one for Rule, Britannia! You’ll have to wait and see what the colours are.” I ask if she’s entirely comfortable with the imperial swagger of Rule, Britannia!, which pained Sheku Kanneh- Mason so much he called for its cancellation. “I’m very honoured to do the Last Night of the Proms. That’s the bottom line,” is her response. Too polite, perhaps, to discomfort the BBC, Alder chooses to emphasise the event’s feel-good quotient. “I think that British celebratory party atmosphere appeals; it’s exciting seeing a huge chorus and soloist and a large orchestra all enjoying themselves so much.” And what will Alder be feeling as she steps out on Saturday? “That I want to convey excitement and a bit of light in this moment in a world that can feel quite heavy. I think we need concerts like this. We need to feel uplifted.” The Last Night of the Proms will also be televised — the first half on BBC Two, the second on BBC One
Twelve years ago, inspirational teacher Matthew Burton became the breakout star of a reality TV series set in a Yorkshire school. Now he’s returning to teach pupils (and us) more valuable life lessons
Add Educating Yorkshire to your watchlist Remember when Yorkshire and its magnificent scenery took over British television? Our Yorkshire Farm, The Yorkshire Vet, Yorkshire this, Yorkshire that – a small-screen succession of wild moor, verdant dale and craggy coast. But the best show set in the county’s broad acres didn’t centre on spectacular vistas. Broadcast on Channel 4 in 2013, Educating Yorkshire was based at Thornhill Community Academy, a large secondary school on the edge of Dewsbury, not far from the M1, and it was the interactions – both good and bad – between staff and pupils rather than the scenery that caught the public imagination. The most memorable of those interactions took place when English teacher Matthew Burton helped Musharaf Asghar. The Year 11 student had suffered from a profound stammer since he was five and was obliged, as part of his English GCSE exam, to make a speech. Burton, the sort of resourceful and committed teacher that every child deserves, borrowed a trick from the film The King’s Speech, telling “Mushy” to listen to music as he tried to talk. It worked. Viewers gasped, and perhaps stifled a sob, as Asghar’s first faltering words came out. There were dramatic outcomes for Asghar, who went on to university where he studied journalism and is now a motivational speaker, but also for Burton. His wife Laura had suffered a miscarriage at the start of the year, just when the series was being filmed. “It was a difficult period,” he says. Nine months later, when the episode was screened, she was pregnant again with their first child, Liv. “We watched the last episode, when Musharaf was on, in the school hall after a parents’ evening. Laura was standing next to me feeling Liv kick in her tummy. Not long after Liv was born, I became a different kind of teacher, a different leader. It was an unbelievable end to what started as a difficult year. 2013 changed my life.” Now Educating Yorkshire is back, and so is Mr Burton. He’s talking to me today from the poolside on a family holiday, a well-deserved break from the pressures of being Thornhill’s headteacher, a role he has filled for the last six years. In the new series, we see him leading from the front, out among his pupils supporting his “phenomenal” staff while employing the constant mantra, Be Nice, Work Hard. “It is the most incredible professional privilege to be a headteacher,” Burton says, only slightly fuller in the face over a decade on, still brimming with the positivity that lit up the first series. “There are tough days, there are days where you are frustrated, but there are amazing days as well, days where you celebrate.” For the documentary, 900 pupils and approximately 100 staff at the school were filmed between November 2024 and August 2025. But lessons were undisturbed by film crews. Instead, 64 fixed-rig cameras were placed around the school, capturing over 1,000 hours of footage. The resulting eight episodes will cover familiar issues in education but also a dizzying set of new problems. “Life in school in 2025 is a microcosm of society in general,” says Burton. Since 2013, British state education has had to accommodate challenges like knife crime, growing diagnoses of ADHD and gender dysphoria, plus the long shadow cast by lockdown and the unstoppable rise of mobile phone culture. “Not everybody had a mobile back then,” says Burton. “And they certainly weren’t as powerful as the ones you can get for a few quid now.” Mobiles are banned on school property; nonetheless one girl tells Burton she’s onscreen for 14 hours a day. In another scene, a teacher asks Burton for more training so she can better interact with a girl who claims to be a “furry”, someone who identifies with an animal displaying human characteristics, in this case a fox. “Society has changed markedly,” notes Burton. “AI [artificial intelligence] is another example; we have to get ahead of it.” When, in one episode, a pupil is suspected of using AI to write an essay that has, teachers believe, uncharacteristic wording, she passionately denies it. So, will AI destabilise teaching? “It will make us think,” says Burton. “Because you can’t necessarily set traditional homework of, ‘Right, go home and do this essay.’ Though we could look at AI as a huge positive for teachers as well, something to help them with resources and to support them with some of the workload.” Burton remains convinced of the transformative power of good, real-world teaching. “Some of the aspects of teaching are about emotional understanding, about that kindness and relationship you build,” he says. “I don’t think AI is ever going to be able to replace human teachers.” At heart, the school’s main issue is the same one encapsulated so neatly by Burton and Asghar 12 years ago: how do we help kids when they need it? And there is already a candidate for another Musharaf moment. Year seven pupil Tremaine has the reading age of a five-year-old; embarrassed during English lessons, he can become distraught and walk out of class. The staff are determined to help. “You’ll see him working on his reading comprehension and there are huge, seismic shifts for him being able to link the phonics together and read. It’s life-changing stuff and a symbol of what happens in schools across the country.” For a while in 2013, Thornhill was the most famous school in England and Burton found himself doing drama lessons with local star actor Jodie Whittaker, who volunteered to help the pupils. “It was a brilliant, surreal day,” he recalls. “Jodie was lovely and so generous with her time with our students. That was hugely inspiring; loads of wonderful opportunities like that came up for the school.” But will the new series come with dangers as well as opportunities? What if the pupil’s local accents or personal quirks become memes online or attract social media attacks? “We haven’t rushed into things; this isn’t about wanting the school to be famous. The decision was taken with lots of people involved, and lots of checks and balances,” Burton says. “Safeguarding and education trumps absolutely everything. Channel 4 and [production company] Twofour have got independent psychologists who work with families and students to say whether they can give informed consent to be able to take part. The vulnerabilities around that are considerable, but all students have been told about how to deal with potential online issues.” Yorkshire’s children are in good hands; 12 years after we first met him, Burton remains his pupils’ relentlessly upbeat champion. “Teenagers are great,” he says. “They’re so kind, so reflective, so intelligent, and really inspiring. A lot of headlines about school and teenagers aren’t necessarily positive, but we want to show that schools are still brilliant places to be.”
Educating Yorkshire’s Mr Burton talks show’s return and modern teaching: “I don’t think AI is ever going to be able to replace human teachers”
Twelve years ago, inspirational teacher Matthew Burton became the breakout star of a reality TV series set in a Yorkshire school. Now he’s returning to teach pupils (and us) more valuable life lessons.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Remember when Yorkshire and its magnificent scenery took over British television? Our Yorkshire Farm, The Yorkshire Vet, Yorkshire this, Yorkshire that – a small-screen succession of wild moor, verdant dale and craggy coast. But the best show set in the county’s broad acres didn’t centre on spectacular vistas. Broadcast on Channel 4 in 2013, Educating Yorkshire was based at Thornhill Community Academy, a large secondary school on the edge of Dewsbury, not far from the M1, and it was the interactions – both good and bad – between staff and pupils rather than the scenery that caught the public imagination. The most memorable of those interactions took place when English teacher Matthew Burton helped Musharaf Asghar. The Year 11 student had suffered from a profound stammer since he was five and was obliged, as part of his English GCSE exam, to make a speech. Burton, the sort of resourceful and committed teacher that every child deserves, borrowed a trick from the film The King’s Speech, telling “Mushy” to listen to music as he tried to talk. It worked. Viewers gasped, and perhaps stifled a sob, as Asghar’s first faltering words came out. There were dramatic outcomes for Asghar, who went on to university where he studied journalism and is now a motivational speaker, but also for Burton. His wife Laura had suffered a miscarriage at the start of the year, just when the series was being filmed. “It was a difficult period,” he says. Nine months later, when the episode was screened, she was pregnant again with their first child, Liv. “We watched the last episode, when Musharaf was on, in the school hall after a parents’ evening. Laura was standing next to me feeling Liv kick in her tummy. Not long after Liv was born, I became a different kind of teacher, a different leader. It was an unbelievable end to what started as a difficult year. 2013 changed my life.” Now Educating Yorkshire is back, and so is Mr Burton. He’s talking to me today from the poolside on a family holiday, a well-deserved break from the pressures of being Thornhill’s headteacher, a role he has filled for the last six years. In the new series, we see him leading from the front, out among his pupils supporting his “phenomenal” staff while employing the constant mantra, Be Nice, Work Hard. “It is the most incredible professional privilege to be a headteacher,” Burton says, only slightly fuller in the face over a decade on, still brimming with the positivity that lit up the first series. “There are tough days, there are days where you are frustrated, but there are amazing days as well, days where you celebrate.” For the documentary, 900 pupils and approximately 100 staff at the school were filmed between November 2024 and August 2025. But lessons were undisturbed by film crews. Instead, 64 fixed-rig cameras were placed around the school, capturing over 1,000 hours of footage. The resulting eight episodes will cover familiar issues in education but also a dizzying set of new problems. “Life in school in 2025 is a microcosm of society in general,” says Burton. Since 2013, British state education has had to accommodate challenges like knife crime, growing diagnoses of ADHD and gender dysphoria, plus the long shadow cast by lockdown and the unstoppable rise of mobile phone culture. “Not everybody had a mobile back then,” says Burton. “And they certainly weren’t as powerful as the ones you can get for a few quid now.” Mobiles are banned on school property; nonetheless one girl tells Burton she’s onscreen for 14 hours a day. In another scene, a teacher asks Burton for more training so she can better interact with a girl who claims to be a “furry”, someone who identifies with an animal displaying human characteristics, in this case a fox. “Society has changed markedly,” notes Burton. “AI [artificial intelligence] is another example; we have to get ahead of it.” When, in one episode, a pupil is suspected of using AI to write an essay that has, teachers believe, uncharacteristic wording, she passionately denies it. So, will AI destabilise teaching? “It will make us think,” says Burton. “Because you can’t necessarily set traditional homework of, ‘Right, go home and do this essay.’ Though we could look at AI as a huge positive for teachers as well, something to help them with resources and to support them with some of the workload.” Burton remains convinced of the transformative power of good, real-world teaching. “Some of the aspects of teaching are about emotional understanding, about that kindness and relationship you build,” he says. “I don’t think AI is ever going to be able to replace human teachers.” At heart, the school’s main issue is the same one encapsulated so neatly by Burton and Asghar 12 years ago: how do we help kids when they need it? And there is already a candidate for another Musharaf moment. Year seven pupil Tremaine has the reading age of a five-year-old; embarrassed during English lessons, he can become distraught and walk out of class. The staff are determined to help. “You’ll see him working on his reading comprehension and there are huge, seismic shifts for him being able to link the phonics together and read. It’s life-changing stuff and a symbol of what happens in schools across the country.” For a while in 2013, Thornhill was the most famous school in England and Burton found himself doing drama lessons with local star actor Jodie Whittaker, who volunteered to help the pupils. “It was a brilliant, surreal day,” he recalls. “Jodie was lovely and so generous with her time with our students. That was hugely inspiring; loads of wonderful opportunities like that came up for the school.” But will the new series come with dangers as well as opportunities? What if the pupil’s local accents or personal quirks become memes online or attract social media attacks? “We haven’t rushed into things; this isn’t about wanting the school to be famous. The decision was taken with lots of people involved, and lots of checks and balances,” Burton says. “Safeguarding and education trumps absolutely everything. Channel 4 and [production company] Twofour have got independent psychologists who work with families and students to say whether they can give informed consent to be able to take part. The vulnerabilities around that are considerable, but all students have been told about how to deal with potential online issues.” Yorkshire’s children are in good hands; 12 years after we first met him, Burton remains his pupils’ relentlessly upbeat champion. “Teenagers are great,” he says. “They’re so kind, so reflective, so intelligent, and really inspiring. A lot of headlines about school and teenagers aren’t necessarily positive, but we want to show that schools are still brilliant places to be.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Educating Yorkshire 2025 begins on Channel 4 on Sunday 31st August at 8pm. Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Celia Imrie plays Joyce in The Thursday Murder Club
Add The Thursday Murder Club to your watchlist The Thursday Murder Club is immense fun to watch. Was it just as much fun to make? Chris Columbus’s most magical qualities are his enthusiasm and encouragement. What more do you want? So it was wonderfully carefree, in a way, but we did all have the shadow of a very popular book hanging over us. It’s going to be as near to it as dammit, but there are some avid readers who will probably be critical. Well, they might be, but actually I think it’s a very faithful representation. View oEmbed on the source website Were you surprised to get the part? When we were first cast, of course there were some people who didn’t approve, but that’s all right. Peculiarly, people had talked to me about it two years before, saying, “C, you really should go up for this.” I didn’t know anything about the books, so I was quite naive. But how lucky am I? With some parts that come my way now, the chances are I’m going to be in a wheelchair or have Alzheimer’s. I’m still running fast away from that department. So you’re not quite ready to book into Coopers Chase yourself, then? I still think I’m 26, you see, and I hope I’ve got all sorts of challenges ahead. For actors, giving up and retirement just don’t come into our vocabulary.Although I do look back over birthday parties I’ve had recently, and see some people aren’t here any more. I don’t let it hang too heavily. Victoria Wood [her co-star in dinnerladies] died when she was far too young. I had no idea she was ill, so it was a terrible shock. But it just makes me think we’ve got to make the most of every moment rather than it being a cloud over my head. Every day, every hour, is precious and has to be filled to the absolute brim. That’s how I feel now.
He’s always felt 80, so creating senior citizen sleuths felt natural for author Richard Osman. Now Steven Spielberg is bringing them to the screen…
Add The Thursday Murder Club to your watchlist Final, irrefutable proof that the Thursday Murder Club belongs to the world and not just Richard Osman’s imagination came last summer. The author and television presenter watched as a helicopter landed by a stately home in Berkshire, then Steven Spielberg stepped out to greet him. “It was an absolute dream,” says Osman, still a little bewildered by this Hollywood turn of events. “I very rarely ask people for selfies, but I thought, ‘I can’t let this encounter pass without commemorating it.’” View oEmbed on the source website Spielberg was there on set as his film and TV company, Amblin Entertainment, is producing the screen adaptation. The book has been a worldwide success, but began as a very personal project for Osman. After being intrigued by his mother Brenda’s retirement village, the Pointless creator conceived his own version, Coopers Chase, a country estate given over to genteel living for the retired, where a quartet of senior citizen sleuths – the Murder Club of the title – initially investigate 1970s cold cases before finding themselves on the trail of an active killer. “I have spent more time with these characters than anyone in the entire world,” says Osman. “So the idea that anyone is playing them on screen is entirely absurd for me because they are so real – they exist in my heart.” Nonetheless, producer Spielberg and former Home Alone and Harry Potter director Chris Columbus went ahead and cast Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley as the novel’s lead characters – respectively, retired(ish) intelligence officer Elizabeth, nurse Joyce, trade unionist Ron and psychiatrist Ibrahim – with roles, too, for Richard E Grant, David Tennant and Jonathan Pryce. “When they told me who they had, I was blown away,” says Osman, though one choice was no surprise. “People had spent three years shouting ‘Helen Mirren’ at me in the street because they all wanted Helen to play Elizabeth.” If this all feels faintly unreal, then it’s of a piece with Osman’s own rather unexpected back story. Born in 1970, he grew up in Haywards Heath, West Sussex. A geeky lad in heavy-framed specs with an eye condition that limited his sight, he was only nine when his parents’ marriage broke up. His mother had to scrape a living to bring up Osman and his brother, Mat. “My mum had a tough time of it,” he says. “She had no money… it was a proper struggle.” Osman developed an eating addiction, but despite these limitations, or perhaps driven by them – “Whatever my issues were, I was enormously ambitious,” he says. “I wanted to be at the heart of things.” Osman built a successful career as a TV producer at Endemol UK, where he created and then hosted hits such as Pointless and House of Games, before turning to writing.He published his first novel, The Thursday Murder Club, in 2020, and has gone on to sell more than 10 million books – and they have made him wealthy. “I grew up in a very low-income family and every pound that I earn is an absolute delight to me,” he says. “I care about looking after people, and about empathy and kindness, but money is not a bad thing. It’s what my whole family have always wanted, what most families in this country want. I want to work hard and I want to be paid for it.” The Thursday Murder Club kick-started an international craze for British cosy crime that Spielberg was quick to recognise. Yet the genre, like the popular TV Osman loves, is sometimes sniffed at. (He waxes at length to me on the brilliance of Stacey Solomon’s Sort Your Life Out and, beyond that, on television and film in general in his podcast with Marina Hyde, The Rest Is… Entertainment.) Does that get under Osman’s skin? “I’m too old to be offended,” he says. “There are so many people in the world who are sniffy about so many things, and it doesn’t make them happier. If I ever say something is good on social media and someone slags it off I say, ‘You don’t need to slag it off, just reply with something you love.’ That’s all you need.” Osman’s interest in crime was sparked in childhood by his grandfather, a police officer in Brighton. “I was absolutely fascinated by any story he could tell me about wrongdoing,” he says. “If he pointed down a street and said, ‘That’s a brothel, that’s a drug dealer’s house,’ I’d be thrilled. I like to write about Oliver Bonas and Tesco Metro, but also the flat above where someone is cultivating two million pounds’ worth of cannabis plants.” This rubbing-up of the everyday against often murderous criminality is a large part of his books’ appeal. That and Osman’s deep sympathy for older characters. Rather than portraying them simply as colourful eccentrics or victims, he gives pensioners with hard-earned life skills due respect and agency. “I like to write about older people, I like to write about loneliness, I like to write about unlikely friendships,” he says. “A lot of people say to me, ‘I want to end up at Coopers Chase, where stuff is happening.’ I’ve always felt about 80 in my head, which is why I find it so easy to access these characters.” I ask Osman which character is most like him. Perhaps Joyce – the inquisitive, clever nurse, who bears more than a little resemblance to his mother? “Deep down I think I’m probably 40 per cent Ibrahim, 30 per cent Joyce, 20 per cent Ron and 10 per cent Elizabeth,” he says. “I know what they’re going to say at any given time. They all exist within me.” Will seeing those characters portrayed by Mirren, Imrie, Brosnan and Kingsley affect him when he works on future Thursday Murder Club books? “When I was writing the next novel there was a moment with Ibrahim when Ben Kingsley came into my head for a second because he really does have the look of Ibrahim, but I thought, ‘You already know who Ibrahim is, he is very close to you.’” And what about the reverse: does he approve of the characters’ representation in the film and the inevitable changes that director Columbus had to make? “There was never a moment during filming when I thought, ‘This is different to what’s in my head.’ Because if it wasn’t different it would be the worst thing ever made. What’s in my head is nine hours where every single line of dialogue and every single internal monologue is there. The world’s most boring film.” In the Thursday Murder Club, the pensioners are necessarily shaded by the spectres of dementia, death and loneliness, which Osman feels his own struggles attune him to. “When I write I’m able to access unhappiness and loneliness,” he says. “But I also think getting older makes you happy. You get a bit of perspective, and you do realise that you’re allowed to be in the world, you feel less shame about yourself.” This happiness must be helped by the books’ success and the deals he’s making – he tells me there will be a television series of his novel We Solve Murders – but he credits much of it to his wife, the actor Ingrid Oliver. “Ingrid has made me very happy.” She is in the film, playing Joyce’s daughter Joanna, but Osman isn’t. “I thought everyone would go, ‘Why is Richard in the back of a police station in Kent?’”
Dame Helen Mirren plays Elizabeth in The Thursday Murder Club
Add The Thursday Murder Club to your watchlist Was making The Thursday Murder Club as much fun as it looks? It was a wonderful coming together of the tribe – one of those magical moments in a career. Ben and I started out together in the Royal Shakespeare Company, both ambitious and obsessed. Celia and I became really good friends on Calendar Girls [2003]. I didn’t know Pierce before making this and the Paramount+ series MobLand, but we both did street theatre before he went off and became a massive movie star with James Bond. There was a synchronicity. View oEmbed on the source website How did you and Pierce behave with each other on those two different shoots? They are totally different characters, but Pierce and I have a very similar way of working, which is serious without being too serious about ourselves. Neither of us is what you would call a method actor. We find a nice, comfortable seat to sit in with our scripts and just chill together. Pierce is my wonderful late discovery. I’d like to work with Pierce for the rest of my life. I feel that we have a real chemistry. Is sexual attraction a necessary part of that on-screen chemistry? There is a bit of that in there, but it’s never the whole thing. Strangely, people with great sexual attraction to each other off-screen can have absolutely nothing on-screen. It’s very weird. And people who really don’t like each other off-screen can have this amazing sexual attraction that the audience can perceive. I guess viewers misread the loathing that they have for each other in real life as a frisson of attraction. Is Elizabeth’s steeliness, as you portray her, protection against her fear of ageing? Possibly. Elizabeth’s loss of her dear friend in The Thursday Murder Club is intrinsic to the story and it’s heartbreaking. And as you get older, like me, you must confront these tragedies. They come in the most unexpected of ways: sometimes it’s not the person you expect to lose that you lose. You have no idea what’s coming down the line, but it’s getting closer and closer. You could seriously get your knickers in a twist about that, but you just can’t. Would you be game to get involved in more Thursday Murder Club adventures? In a nanosecond. And it would be the team getting back together, which would be great. We did have a wonderful time shooting this. So all of us would jump at the chance, quite honestly
Pierce Brosnan plays Ron in The Thursday Murder Club
Add The Thursday Murder Club to your watchlist Do you enjoy playing a rebellious pensioner? When I read the scene where Ron is in the swimming pool with the ladies, I thought, “This is going to be nice. I get the joke. This is fun.” Then, when I got down to the set, I’ve got my dressing gown on and my silly shorts, and for some reason I was thinking there’d be lovely ladies in bikinis, and here I am with a dozen old girls and me as the old boy trying to ham it up. They gave me a rubber ring. I thought, “Oh, boy, all right. I’ll jump in the pool and act the goat.” Every day was a joy, because it was so well written. Each scene was a jewel. View oEmbed on the source website What kind of pensioner are you? When I got onto the set and everyone was white-haired – all these little cotton buds – I thought, ‘S**t!’ I don’t see myself as an old person, but I am an old man and there’s joy in that. The older you get, the freer you get, because mortality is circling the wagons. Within this story, there’s a lovely lyricism. These four people want to keep their minds active and they also deal with the death that will befall all of us. And it’s all wrapped up in a whodunnit. Do you worry about getting older, about dying? You hope and pray for courage for whenever that moment comes, so that you can carry yourself through it all. For now, I just greet each day with gratitude. Time past, time present, time future. That’s all it is. But I think it’s perfect timing for the books to be made into movies. There is such a great wealth of wisdom in the elderly community that we don’t pay enough respect to. Would you do Bond again — is it time for a senior citizen 007? My wife Keely [Shaye Smith] and I have been listening to the drumbeat of expectation of who’s going to be the next James Bond. There are many great candidates out there, and I’m sure they’re going to make it a spectacle of delight. I don’t think anyone wants to see a craggy, 72-year-old Bond, but if [next 007 director Denis] Villeneuve had something up his sleeve I would look at it in a heartbeat. Why not? It’s great entertainment. It could be lots of laughs. Bald caps, prosthetics… who knows?
Sir Ben Kingsley plays Ibrahim in The Thursday Murder Club
Add The Thursday Murder Club to your watchlist How did you get this role? My agent told me Steven Spielberg was after me for a project; I’d said yes four times before he got to the end of the sentence. Then I heard Chris Columbus was directing and I was over the moon. I Googled him a million times to find out what the project was, but only at the very last stages of my being invited was I told it was The Thursday Murder Club. I hadn’t come across the book and I thought it was delightful. View oEmbed on the source website You’re 81 — is it pleasantly surprising when all the lead roles are played by senior citizens? From my perspective, it isn’t surprising because of my work in Shakespeare and then playing Gandhi going from his 20s to 80. That sweep of mortality, that sweep of our journey on this blessed Earth, is celebrated by including everything – even the darker side of getting older. I feel mortality should be ever present in any story that explores the human condition. Do egos and styles clash when big-name actors come together? No, ensemble pieces tap into the essential exercise of being an actor. Spencer Tracy, one of my heroes, said, “Make the other guy look good,” which is honestly the opposite of some of the garbage that’s pumped into students by acting coaches who say you have to “win the scene”. It’s not a battle or an ego game. At times the quartet on the screen broke into two duets, and Pierce and I became complementary forces – we gently refer to ourselves as Laurel and Hardy. That was a joyful discovery for both of us, I think. Ibrahim is the quietest of the four Murder Club sleuths — were you taken by him? I’m fond of him, and I admire him, because he only speaks when it’s essential. He’s kind and his ego is comfortably in the right place. But he knows he’s a very, very good psychiatrist. And, if I’m asked, I’d love to put on his bow tie again.
The Thursday Murder Club’s Celia Imrie on how the "shock" of losing Victoria Wood reminds her life is "precious"
The Thursday Murder Club star is grabbing every opportunity that still comes her way.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. The Thursday Murder Club is immense fun to watch. Was it just as much fun to make? Chris Columbus’s most magical qualities are his enthusiasm and encouragement. What more do you want? So it was wonderfully carefree, in a way, but we did all have the shadow of a very popular book hanging over us. It’s going to be as near to it as dammit, but there are some avid readers who will probably be critical. Well, they might be, but actually I think it’s a very faithful representation. Were you surprised to get the part? When we were first cast, of course there were some people who didn’t approve, but that’s all right. Peculiarly, people had talked to me about it two years before, saying, “C, you really should go up for this.” I didn’t know anything about the books, so I was quite naive. But how lucky am I? With some parts that come my way now, the chances are I’m going to be in a wheelchair or have Alzheimer’s. I’m still running fast away from that department. So you’re not quite ready to book into Coopers Chase yourself, then? I still think I’m 26, you see, and I hope I’ve got all sorts of challenges ahead. For actors, giving up and retirement just don’t come into our vocabulary. Although I do look back over birthday parties I’ve had recently, and see some people aren’t here any more. I don’t let it hang too heavily. Victoria Wood [her co-star in dinnerladies] died when she was far too young. I had no idea she was ill, so it was a terrible shock. But it just makes me think we’ve got to make the most of every moment rather than it being a cloud over my head. Every day, every hour, is precious and has to be filled to the absolute brim. That’s how I feel now. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Pierce Brosnan reveals he would reprise James Bond role in next 007 film: "Why not? It’s great entertainment"
The former James Bond star revelled in the chance to ham it up in The Thursday Murder Club.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Do you enjoy playing a rebellious pensioner? When I read the scene where Ron is in the swimming pool with the ladies, I thought, “This is going to be nice. I get the joke. This is fun.” Then, when I got down to the set, I’ve got my dressing gown on and my silly shorts, and for some reason I was thinking there’d be lovely ladies in bikinis, and here I am with a dozen old girls and me as the old boy trying to ham it up. They gave me a rubber ring. I thought, “Oh, boy, all right. I’ll jump in the pool and act the goat.” Every day was a joy, because it was so well written. Each scene was a jewel. What kind of pensioner are you? When I got onto the set and everyone was white-haired – all these little cotton buds – I thought, ‘S**t!’ I don’t see myself as an old person, but I am an old man and there’s joy in that. The older you get, the freer you get, because mortality is circling the wagons. Within this story, there’s a lovely lyricism. These four people want to keep their minds active and they also deal with the death that will befall all of us. And it’s all wrapped up in a whodunnit. Do you worry about getting older, about dying? You hope and pray for courage for whenever that moment comes, so that you can carry yourself through it all. For now, I just greet each day with gratitude. Time past, time present, time future. That’s all it is. But I think it’s perfect timing for the books to be made into movies. There is such a great wealth of wisdom in the elderly community that we don’t pay enough respect to. Would you do Bond again — is it time for a senior citizen 007? My wife Keely [Shaye Smith] and I have been listening to the drumbeat of expectation of who’s going to be the next James Bond. There are many great candidates out there, and I’m sure they’re going to make it a spectacle of delight. I don’t think anyone wants to see a craggy, 72-year-old Bond, but if [next 007 director Denis] Villeneuve had something up his sleeve I would look at it in a heartbeat. Why not? It’s great entertainment. It could be lots of laughs. Bald caps, prosthetics… who knows? The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
The Thursday Murder Club’s Helen Mirren reveals "real chemistry" with co-star: "Pierce is my wonderful late discovery"
Helen Mirren says that filming The Thursday Murder Club was a magical moment in her career.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Was making The Thursday Murder Club as much fun as it looks? It was a wonderful coming together of the tribe – one of those magical moments in a career. Ben and I started out together in the Royal Shakespeare Company, both ambitious and obsessed. Celia and I became really good friends on Calendar Girls [2003]. I didn’t know Pierce before making this and the Paramount+ series MobLand, but we both did street theatre before he went off and became a massive movie star with James Bond. There was a synchronicity. How did you and Pierce behave with each other on those two different shoots? They are totally different characters, but Pierce and I have a very similar way of working, which is serious without being too serious about ourselves. Neither of us is what you would call a method actor. We find a nice, comfortable seat to sit in with our scripts and just chill together. Pierce is my wonderful late discovery. I’d like to work with Pierce for the rest of my life. I feel that we have a real chemistry. Is sexual attraction a necessary part of that on-screen chemistry? There is a bit of that in there, but it’s never the whole thing. Strangely, people with great sexual attraction to each other off-screen can have absolutely nothing on-screen. It’s very weird. And people who really don’t like each other off- screen can have this amazing sexual attraction that the audience can perceive. I guess viewers misread the loathing that they have for each other in real life as a frisson of attraction. Is Elizabeth’s steeliness, as you portray her, protection against her fear of ageing? Possibly. Elizabeth’s loss of her dear friend in The Thursday Murder Club is intrinsic to the story and it’s heartbreaking. And as you get older, like me, you must confront these tragedies. They come in the most unexpected of ways: sometimes it’s not the person you expect to lose that you lose. You have no idea what’s coming down the line, but it’s getting closer and closer. You could seriously get your knickers in a twist about that, but you just can’t. Would you be game to get involved in more Thursday Murder Club adventures? In a nanosecond. And it would be the team getting back together, which would be great. We did have a wonderful time shooting this. So all of us would jump at the chance, quite honestly. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Richard Osman reveals whether The Thursday Murder Club film will impact writing the books
He’s always felt 80, so creating senior citizen sleuths felt natural for author Richard Osman. Now Steven Spielberg is bringing them to the screen.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Final, irrefutable proof that the Thursday Murder Club belongs to the world and not just Richard Osman’s imagination came last summer. The author and television presenter watched as a helicopter landed by a stately home in Berkshire, then Steven Spielberg stepped out to greet him. “It was an absolute dream,” says Osman, still a little bewildered by this Hollywood turn of events. “I very rarely ask people for selfies, but I thought, ‘I can’t let this encounter pass without commemorating it.’” Spielberg was there on set as his film and TV company, Amblin Entertainment, is producing the screen adaptation. The book has been a worldwide success, but began as a very personal project for Osman. After being intrigued by his mother Brenda’s retirement village, the Pointless creator conceived his own version, Coopers Chase, a country estate given over to genteel living for the retired, where a quartet of senior citizen sleuths – the Murder Club of the title – initially investigate 1970s cold cases before finding themselves on the trail of an active killer. “I have spent more time with these characters than anyone in the entire world,” says Osman. “So the idea that anyone is playing them on screen is entirely absurd for me because they are so real – they exist in my heart.” Nonetheless, producer Spielberg and former Home Alone and Harry Potter director Chris Columbus went ahead and cast Helen Mirren, Celia Imrie, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley as the novel’s lead characters – respectively, retired(ish) intelligence officer Elizabeth, nurse Joyce, trade unionist Ron and psychiatrist Ibrahim – with roles, too, for Richard E Grant, David Tennant and Jonathan Pryce. “When they told me who they had, I was blown away,” says Osman, though one choice was no surprise. “People had spent three years shouting ‘Helen Mirren’ at me in the street because they all wanted Helen to play Elizabeth.” If this all feels faintly unreal, then it’s of a piece with Osman’s own rather unexpected back story. Born in 1970, he grew up in Haywards Heath, West Sussex. A geeky lad in heavy-framed specs with an eye condition that limited his sight, he was only nine when his parents’ marriage broke up. His mother had to scrape a living to bring up Osman and his brother, Mat. “My mum had a tough time of it,” he says. “She had no money… it was a proper struggle.” Osman developed an eating addiction, but despite these limitations, or perhaps driven by them – “Whatever my issues were, I was enormously ambitious,” he says. “I wanted to be at the heart of things.” Osman built a successful career as a TV producer at Endemol UK, where he created and then hosted hits such as Pointless and House of Games, before turning to writing.He published his first novel, The Thursday Murder Club, in 2020, and has gone on to sell more than 10 million books – and they have made him wealthy. “I grew up in a very low-income family and every pound that I earn is an absolute delight to me,” he says. “I care about looking after people, and about empathy and kindness, but money is not a bad thing. It’s what my whole family have always wanted, what most families in this country want. I want to work hard and I want to be paid for it.” The Thursday Murder Club kick-started an international craze for British cosy crime that Spielberg was quick to recognise. Yet the genre, like the popular TV Osman loves, is sometimes sniffed at. (He waxes at length to me on the brilliance of Stacey Solomon’s Sort Your Life Out and, beyond that, on television and film in general in his podcast with Marina Hyde, The Rest Is… Entertainment.) Does that get under Osman’s skin? “I’m too old to be offended,” he says. “There are so many people in the world who are sniffy about so many things, and it doesn’t make them happier. If I ever say something is good on social media and someone slags it off I say, ‘You don’t need to slag it off, just reply with something you love.’ That’s all you need.” Osman’s interest in crime was sparked in childhood by his grandfather, a police officer in Brighton. “I was absolutely fascinated by any story he could tell me about wrongdoing,” he says. “If he pointed down a street and said, ‘That’s a brothel, that’s a drug dealer’s house,’ I’d be thrilled. I like to write about Oliver Bonas and Tesco Metro, but also the flat above where someone is cultivating two million pounds’ worth of cannabis plants.” This rubbing-up of the everyday against often murderous criminality is a large part of his books’ appeal. That and Osman’s deep sympathy for older characters. Rather than portraying them simply as colourful eccentrics or victims, he gives pensioners with hard-earned life skills due respect and agency. “I like to write about older people, I like to write about loneliness, I like to write about unlikely friendships,” he says. “A lot of people say to me, ‘I want to end up at Coopers Chase, where stuff is happening.’ I’ve always felt about 80 in my head, which is why I find it so easy to access these characters.” I ask Osman which character is most like him. Perhaps Joyce – the inquisitive, clever nurse, who bears more than a little resemblance to his mother? “Deep down I think I’m probably 40 per cent Ibrahim, 30 per cent Joyce, 20 per cent Ron and 10 per cent Elizabeth,” he says. “I know what they’re going to say at any given time. They all exist within me.” View oEmbed on the source website Will seeing those characters portrayed by Mirren, Imrie, Brosnan and Kingsley affect him when he works on future Thursday Murder Club books? “When I was writing the next novel there was a moment with Ibrahim when Ben Kingsley came into my head for a second because he really does have the look of Ibrahim, but I thought, ‘You already know who Ibrahim is, he is very close to you.’” And what about the reverse: does he approve of the characters’ representation in the film and the inevitable changes that director Columbus had to make? “There was never a moment during filming when I thought, ‘This is different to what’s in my head.’ Because if it wasn’t different it would be the worst thing ever made. What’s in my head is nine hours where every single line of dialogue and every single internal monologue is there. The world’s most boring film.” In the Thursday Murder Club, the pensioners are necessarily shaded by the spectres of dementia, death and loneliness, which Osman feels his own struggles attune him to. “When I write I’m able to access unhappiness and loneliness,” he says. “But I also think getting older makes you happy. You get a bit of perspective, and you do realise that you’re allowed to be in the world, you feel less shame about yourself.” This happiness must be helped by the books’ success and the deals he’s making – he tells me there will be a television series of his novel We Solve Murders – but he credits much of it to his wife, the actor Ingrid Oliver. “Ingrid has made me very happy.” She is in the film, playing Joyce’s daughter Joanna, but Osman isn’t. “I thought everyone would go, ‘Why is Richard in the back of a police station in Kent?’” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Ben Kingsley reveals he and the Thursday Murder Club co-star are "Laurel and Hardy" on set
Kingsley plays a psychiatrist in The Thursday Murder Club, but formed a classic comedy double act with co-star Pierce Brosnan.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. How did you get this role? My agent told me Steven Spielberg was after me for a project; I’d said yes four times before he got to the end of the sentence. Then I heard Chris Columbus was directing and I was over the moon. I Googled him a million times to find out what the project was, but only at the very last stages of my being invited was I told it was The Thursday Murder Club. I hadn’t come across the book and I thought it was delightful. You’re 81 — is it pleasantly surprising when all the lead roles are played by senior citizens? From my perspective, it isn’t surprising because of my work in Shakespeare and then playing Gandhi going from his 20s to 80. That sweep of mortality, that sweep of our journey on this blessed Earth, is celebrated by including everything – even the darker side of getting older. I feel mortality should be ever present in any story that explores the human condition. Do egos and styles clash when big-name actors come together? No, ensemble pieces tap into the essential exercise of being an actor. Spencer Tracy, one of my heroes, said, “Make the other guy look good,” which is honestly the opposite of some of the garbage that’s pumped into students by acting coaches who say you have to “win the scene”. It’s not a battle or an ego game. At times the quartet on the screen broke into two duets, and Pierce and I became complementary forces – we gently refer to ourselves as Laurel and Hardy. That was a joyful discovery for both of us, I think. Ibrahim is the quietest of the four Murder Club sleuths — were you taken by him? I’m fond of him, and I admire him, because he only speaks when it’s essential. He’s kind and his ego is comfortably in the right place. But he knows he’s a very, very good psychiatrist. And, if I’m asked, I’d love to put on his bow tie again. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
To mark the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, John Eskdale and other survivors share their harrowing memories of war and stories of hope
Add VJ Day 80: the Nation's Tribute and VJ Day: We Were There to your watchlist. On 15 August at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire a 100-year-old man in a blazer festooned with medals and wearing the Green Beret of the Royal Marines will stand to attention. John Eskdale will be part of the Royal British Legion’s marking of the 80th anniversary of VJ Day and the end of the Second World War. As the bugler plays, Eskdale’s thoughts will flick back through memories of blitzed-out streets, the terror of being on a sinking warship and walking through the radioactive remains of Japanese cities. In its sweep, tragedy and, occasionally, humour, Eskdale’s story is the story of Britain’s war. The Welshman was 15 when that war began. “I remember it vividly,” he says, when we meet at his Gloucestershire cottage, where the widower’s armchair sits in front of photographs of children and grandchildren. “I was in a queue for the pictures in Bridgend when I heard war had been declared. I went home and dug an air raid trench for my family in the back of the garden.” Too young to serve, Eskdale was taken on by an aerodrome near Bath. Living in a village outside the city, he was volunteering as a runner with the fire service when he was caught in a bomb blast during a Luftwaffe raid on Bristol. Eskdale survived with only bruises and joined the Home Guard before, remarkably, he was blown up again in a Luftwaffe raid on Bath. “We were putting out a fire in a fish and chip shop,” he recalls. “And then out of the clouds a big bomb came straight at me. I thought, ‘Blooming heck!’ Then I was blasted to the other side of the road. “I was in bed for a couple of days and thought, ‘I’ve had enough of this, I’m going to fight back.’ The recruiting office said I was too young, but one sergeant said, ‘If you sign up for 12 years, I can take you.’” Which is how, after training, 18-year-old Eskdale found himself in the Marines detachment on board HMS Charybdis, a cruiser that escorted aircraft carriers during the siege of Malta and, later, accompanied the Queen Mary when she took Winston Churchill across the Atlantic. At one point, Noël Coward was also on board. But disaster lay ahead. On 23 October 1943, the Charybdis and several destroyers were lured towards the French coast – the German cargo vessel Münsterland being used as bait – and were ambushed by German torpedo boats. In the early hours of the morning, Charybdis was hit twice and sank quickly. “It was the worst time in my life, and the longest,” remembers Eskdale, who was among the last to get off the ship. “I was in the water for five hours before I got onto a Carley float [life raft]. There were two sailors, me and a petty officer whose legs had been damaged. It was six o’clock and still dark. He had a torch and said, ‘I can’t carry on.’ So, I took the torch and then, out of the murk, a British destroyer came straight towards us, suddenly turned and went away again!” The raft was finally spotted on the ship’s third turn. “They didn’t stop,” he says, “just put the netting down, and we had to grab hold of it as the ship passed. The chap with the damaged legs didn’t stand a chance, he was dead when they tried to get him on board. I got hold of the netting but was exhausted and just couldn’t move. Two sailors came down and helped me up.” Eskdale was left with injuries that still affect him. “My leg used to come out in blisters all over – brass filings were working their way out. They were going to take it off because I had gangrene, but an operation saved it.” The loss of an important ship and over 400 men in such circumstances – in effect, falling for a German trick – was humiliating. “It was such a disgrace, the Charybdis getting sunk,” says Eskdale. His own suspicion is that survivors of the Charybdis were deliberately sent far away from the UK to hush up the disaster. He himself would be posted to the Far East to help establish bomber bases as the Allies moved closer to the Japanese mainland. Before that, on release from hospital, he was assigned to future James Bond author Ian Fleming’s 30 Commando, the special Marines unit tasked with capturing Nazi documents and staff officers in the forthcoming invasion of France. He had liked Noël Coward, “a nice guy and very intellectual”, but Fleming was less at ease with the lower ranks. “I think he didn’t want to mix with us at all. We were his underlings.” With thousands of other men, Eskdale was in the Cage, a sealed-off military area around the D-Day embarkation points on the south coast of England, when he was sent out to have a lorry repaired. In his rush to get back, he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his lorry into a village telephone pole. “It rang every telephone in the village. A policeman came out and said, ‘You’re a clever boy,’ and made me a cup of tea.’’ By such a quirk, he missed the Normandy landings. Instead of France, he would be invading Japan and, after more skin grafts on his legs, was sent to Australia. “We were all preparing to move up into Japan,” he says. “The attack was imminent.” He was in Brisbane when news came that atomic bombs had been dropped and, subsequently, Japan had surrendered. Was he troubled by the new kind of bomb and the immensity of the slaughter? “We were just glad the war was over,” he says. “It saved our lives.” Three months later, Eskdale was in defeated Japan, escorting British photographers who were recording the effects of atomic warfare and the firebombing raids that preceded it. “From Yokohama to Tokyo it was virtually all flat, burnt out. Everybody was wearing face masks.” He remembers standing in what had been Nagasaki. “There was absolutely nothing there,” he says. “It was gone. Razed to the ground.” Victory in Japan was achieved, but Eskdale’s war smouldered on. His Commando unit was sent to Hong Kong’s New Territories to deal with Japanese units who didn’t know the war was over, and he didn’t get home until he was invalided out in 1947. He married his girlfriend Barbara, had two sons and turned his mind to civilian life. But every year he would attend the memorial service for his comrades on the Charybdis, just as he will this week. For Eskdale, remembering matters – not just the bravery of his lost comrades but, also, that the risk of war is always with us. “I’m afraid we’ve not finished with it yet,” he says, and reaches for the Green Beret that lies beside him.
Poet laureate and landlubber Simon Armitage brings the Shipping Forecast’s lyrical energy to the Proms
This Proms performance will be played on Radio 3 at 9pm on Friday. Add it to your collection now Like most landlubbers, Simon Armitage – born far from the coast in West Yorkshire – has never deliberately tuned in to the Shipping Forecast, yet it exerts a strange power over him. “I find the Shipping Forecast peaceful and I can’t quite tell you why,” says the poet laureate. “People at sea rely on it for navigation, but I don’t think of it as a functional thing; for me it’s everyday poetry.” There is an undoubted enchantment in the forecast’s evocation of 31 names: the hypnotic lilt of Hebrides, Fisher and German Bight. Is it a little perplexing to be out-poeticised by a weather report? “No, it’s not. I’m sure the Shipping Forecast developed organically. Nobody imagined it would become this lullaby mantra.” That mantra, beginning with Viking then looping round the Bay of Biscay and Ireland and ending with Southeast Iceland, was first broadcast by the BBC in 1925. To celebrate the centenary, Armitage, 62, and Land Yacht Regatta, the rock band he plays in with Richard Walters and Patrick Pearson, has created a piece of music for the BBC Proms. Their seven-movement work, Yonderland, will premiere in Belfast on Friday night, performed with the Ulster Orchestra as part of a Shipping Forecast Prom that includes Storm from Britten’s Four Sea Interludes and traditional Irish music. There will also be excerpts from the BBC archive and the voice of Neil Nunes, the radio announcer with fathoms-deep tones, in a soundscape that will merge the band with the orchestra. “What we’re doing is fitting around the amazing swell of the orchestra,” says Walters. And how do the band fit music around Armitage’s spoken words? “You try to find a pace within the reading,” says Pearson. “The way that things are phrased often leads the conversation of what’s the tempo, what’s the signature, what’s the key?” Should the poet laureate even be in a rock band? It’s a question that Armitage winces at. “If the job of the poet laureate is to connect art with the matter of this country, then that’s what this project’s about,” he says. “I can’t think of a poet laureate who hasn’t worked with music. Going right back to John Dryden who wrote what we would now call song lyrics. Betjeman had his Banana Blush project, and one of the last times I bumped into Ted Hughes before he died, he was with Pete Townshend talking about writing a musical opera of the Iron Man. There’s a tradition there.” Armitage isn’t the first poet to tap into the power of the Shipping Forecast; Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy were there before him. “The names are a gift,” he says. “It would be unwise not to tap into that energy. They seem to suggest a territory, a fictional landscape. When writing, I imagine these places almost have character, are realms in their own right. “There’s one section where I’ve written a list of fictional shipping forecast areas. Places like Narnia and Atlantis.” In Armitage’s telling, Rockall, the outcrop of rock that gives its name to an area of the east Atlantic, becomes “unmoored” and goes searching for romance. “It’s a rock of unspecified gender,” he says. “As befits the age we live in.” This is work tinged with humour, and it avoids the stormier subjects that bedevil British waters right now. “I don’t think getting into the politics of the small boats would have dignified that subject in this context,” he says, though he does argue that the Shipping Forecast, like the sea, isn’t the UK’s alone. “I’d like to think that the language of the Shipping Forecast joins all of that up.” he says. “Lots of people listen for nostalgic reasons, or it’s something that they really enjoy. And they’re not necessarily British – they just listen to the Shipping Forecast.” Do things work out for Rockall? “Well, without giving away a spoiler, something happens at the end with Lundy.”
Years of struggling to break through made actor and comedian Rob Brydon reluctant to take risks – but, at 60, the TV veteran is flying high
Add Destination X to your watchlist Rob Brydon has some doubts about Rob Brydon. There’s his singing, “I toured with a band recently,” he says when we meet in London. “And I didn’t do that for a long time because I was afraid of ridicule.” And his height. “Just say I was taller than you expected when you write this up,” he suggests. And finally, work. “I said no to a few mainstream competitive BBC shows,” he reveals. “So, then you start thinking, ‘Oh, they’ll probably stop coming altogether.’ ” But the BBC didn’t stop coming. Instead, it’s just made Brydon presenter of Destination X, a new show – part The Traitors, part Race across the World – that takes 13 people to various mystery European locations, where they have to work out, as Brydon puts it, “where the X am I?”. They’re transported in two blacked-out buses; one to sleep in and a mobile operations centre where confused contestants receive clues as they try to judge their position on a map. It’s an idea originally from Belgium, and while developing it the BBC was looking for someone the public liked to front it. Brydon – Glamorgan-born star of the likes of Marion and Geoff, Would I Lie to You? and The Trip – is just that man, the centre of public affection ever since he brought to us the relentlessly upbeat Uncle Bryn in Gavin & Stacey. “So many people were coming up to me when the Gavin & Stacey special went out last year,” he says. “One woman in Kingston [upon Thames] WH Smith wanted to thank me. She’d been alone at Christmas and watching it had felt like she was part of a family.” But Destination X comes with a twist for fans of Brydon’s nice-guy image. Every week he must do something truly nasty, throwing people off the show and denying their dreams of a life-changing victory. It starts in episode one, when contestants who are only just recovering from the surprise of Brydon walking into the shot – “They didn’t know it was going to be me” – are almost immediately told to go home. Seeing him smash contestants’ hopes is unsettling, for us and him. “I remember the look of disappointment on one contestant’s face when I said, ‘I’m sorry, you’re going.’ He looked devastated. I thought, ‘God, he’s taken that badly.’ I turned to the camera and said, ‘Well, that doesn’t feel nice’. And that was my genuine reaction.” The contestants include nuclear engineers, police officers and online ‘content creators’. Some admit to having no general knowledge, others claim to be excellent at working out clues (guess who does better). They have to contend with vehicle windows that magically mist up and must wear special goggles if they go outside. The show is so tightly policed public toilets are out of bounds, so the buses are followed by a mobile poo station – two Portaloos on a trailer. On top of this, contestants must plot and scheme against each other. The winner receives a £100,000 cash prize and, frankly, deserves it. “They sent me the Belgian version to watch,” he says. “The bus was dingy inside, not pleasant. The host was mysterious and drove a motorbike. I said, ‘I’m not doing all that.’ ” Instead, he took inspiration from the UK’s queen of competition programming. “I looked at Claudia Winkleman,” he adds. “She does such a great job; gets the balance just right. I like Claudia.” Brydon, who lives in south-west London with his second wife Claire Holland and their two sons (he has three adult children with his first wife Martina Jones), turned 60 in May. “When you’re young you can’t imagine being 60,” he says. “You tell yourself, that’s never going to happen to me. It’s the strangest thing. I remember when I was a teenager going to my friend’s parents’ 50th birthday and thinking, ‘Well, they’re basically about to pop off.’ Now I’m way more interested in being healthy, being more aware of what I eat and exercising and moving. I’m into all the fashionable things – sauna and cold plunge, trying to get ahead of the train.” Brydon didn’t enjoy early success. “It didn’t happen to me until I was 35, that’s a long time to be hustling,” he says. “I never forget all the years when I was knocking on doors.” So does that explain some of his self-doubt? “It was a big struggle for a long time,” he muses. “But you do need luck. You need some synchronicity. You need those Sliding Doors moments. I know plenty of very talented people that it hasn’t happened for.” The public might be used to him, but Brydon says he doesn’t feel like he’s been around for a long time. “Some people say to me, ‘I’ve grown up watching you.’ The first few times you hear that, you think, ‘Really? What are you talking about?’ But then you sit and you do the calculations, and yes, I suppose you could have done. It’s a curious thing to adjust to, being described as a veteran.” He pauses and considers the words and their implications: “Veteran performer, veteran actor.” As well as the saunas and cold plunges, at 60 Brydon has adjusted his professional attitude. “I thought, I’m just going to do what I like now.” He’s signed up for a new series of Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip with Steve Coogan, this time a Nordic adventure. Wasn’t The Trip to Greece in 2020 going to be the final one? “By the time you get to the end of living in each other’s pockets for five weeks, poking each other with sticks, you’ve had enough. Then time passes and one day you get a call from Michael and he says, ‘I’m thinking of doing another Trip.’ And he’s irresistible. So you go, ‘Yes, OK. Scandinavia.’” When Brydon agreed to the first instalment of The Trip in 2010, he envisaged an on-screen relationship with Coogan based on the 1988 Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin buddy movie Midnight Run. “At our best, yes, we have the dynamics of a double act,” he says. “I put myself in the Grodin role and Steve as De Niro. And then at other times, perhaps it’s a little more Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in its aspiration. He would be more Peter Cook and I would be Dudley Moore.” One of Brydon’s earliest memories is watching the duo’s 1960s sketch series Not Only… But Also, as a boy. “It was beautiful, timeless comedy with two people at the top of their game. So much to learn from watching those two.” He’s less keen on the duo’s later Derek and Clive routines. “There Peter’s being pretty cruel to Dudley and I don’t like that.” Coogan, too, can be cruel. In 2020’s The Trip to Greece he says, “Rob is known for accessible light entertainment.” And it’s not meant as a compliment. “I like to entertain,” says Brydon. “And I genuinely like all those different branches of entertaining.” But as his breakthrough roles in the sublime Marion and Geoff and Human Remains made clear, Brydon is an accomplished character actor. Shouldn’t he have done more of that and less hosting? “I do wonder, ‘What if I had just done that kind of thing, had been that kind of guy?’ ” he admits. “But I also love hosting. I love singing. And for a long time, I shied away from those things. I turned down some hosting gigs before I did Would I Lie to You? because I thought it would compromise my believability as an actor.” Not everything he does works. Brydon loved being in the 2024 Tudor fantasy period drama My Lady Jane and then Amazon Prime Video dropped it. “Oh, I was disappointed!” he says. “I was surprised, because my perception of it was that it was a hit. But I’m quite good at shrugging it off. I’m OK with those things because I experienced getting dropped from shows before. I was let go as a radio presenter on Radio Wales. I was let go as a TV host on a movie show I did on Sky. The new guy who came in got rid of me.” And if he saw that guy in a pub tonight, would Brydon take pleasure in pointing out how wrong he had been? “That’s so interesting,” says Brydon, sounding a little disappointed, I fear, by such a low thought. “But no. It’s always unsavoury when someone’s show comes to an end and you see them moaning about it in the press. No one owes you this. You don’t have a right to it. I’m still here, still working. It’s great. How can you moan about that? How could you do anything that would make you difficult to work with?” And yet, we often hear about people in light entertainment who are difficult to work with. “I certainly hear stories,” says Brydon, “and it’s just inexplicable to me, kicking off about things. If you can’t see that getting to do stuff like this is just gravy, then you need to have a little chat with yourself. What have I got to complain about?” There speaks a man who doesn’t have to share the mobile poo station.
Rob Brydon reveals surprise and disappointment after period drama role was cancelled after one season
Years of struggling to break through made actor and comedian Rob Brydon reluctant to take risks – but, at 60, the TV veteran is flying high.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Rob Brydon has some doubts about Rob Brydon. There’s his singing, “I toured with a band recently,” he says when we meet in London. “And I didn’t do that for a long time because I was afraid of ridicule.” And his height. “Just say I was taller than you expected when you write this up,” he suggests. And finally, work. “I said no to a few mainstream competitive BBC shows,” he reveals. “So, then you start thinking, ‘Oh, they’ll probably stop coming altogether.’ ” But the BBC didn’t stop coming. Instead, it’s just made Brydon presenter of Destination X, a new show – part The Traitors, part Race across the World – that takes 13 people to various mystery European locations, where they have to work out, as Brydon puts it, “where the X am I?”. They’re transported in two blacked-out buses; one to sleep in and a mobile operations centre where confused contestants receive clues as they try to judge their position on a map. It’s an idea originally from Belgium, and while developing it the BBC was looking for someone the public liked to front it. Brydon – Glamorgan-born star of the likes of Marion and Geoff, Would I Lie to You? and The Trip – is just that man, the centre of public affection ever since he brought to us the relentlessly upbeat Uncle Bryn in Gavin & Stacey. “So many people were coming up to me when the Gavin & Stacey special went out last year,” he says. “One woman in Kingston [upon Thames] WH Smith wanted to thank me. She’d been alone at Christmas and watching it had felt like she was part of a family.” But Destination X comes with a twist for fans of Brydon’s nice-guy image. Every week he must do something truly nasty, throwing people off the show and denying their dreams of a life-changing victory. It starts in episode one, when contestants who are only just recovering from the surprise of Brydon walking into the shot – “They didn’t know it was going to be me” – are almost immediately told to go home. Seeing him smash contestants’ hopes is unsettling, for us and him. “I remember the look of disappointment on one contestant’s face when I said, ‘I’m sorry, you’re going.’ He looked devastated. I thought, ‘God, he’s taken that badly.’ I turned to the camera and said, ‘Well, that doesn’t feel nice’. And that was my genuine reaction.” The contestants include nuclear engineers, police officers and online ‘content creators’. Some admit to having no general knowledge, others claim to be excellent at working out clues (guess who does better). They have to contend with vehicle windows that magically mist up and must wear special goggles if they go outside. The show is so tightly policed public toilets are out of bounds, so the buses are followed by a mobile poo station – two Portaloos on a trailer. On top of this, contestants must plot and scheme against each other. The winner receives a £100,000 cash prize and, frankly, deserves it. “They sent me the Belgian version to watch,” he says. “The bus was dingy inside, not pleasant. The host was mysterious and drove a motorbike. I said, ‘I’m not doing all that.’ ” Instead, he took inspiration from the UK’s queen of competition programming. “I looked at Claudia Winkleman,” he adds. “She does such a great job; gets the balance just right. I like Claudia.” Brydon, who lives in south-west London with his second wife Claire Holland and their two sons (he has three adult children with his first wife Martina Jones), turned 60 in May. “When you’re young you can’t imagine being 60,” he says. “You tell yourself, that’s never going to happen to me. It’s the strangest thing. I remember when I was a teenager going to my friend’s parents’ 50th birthday and thinking, ‘Well, they’re basically about to pop off.’ Now I’m way more interested in being healthy, being more aware of what I eat and exercising and moving. I’m into all the fashionable things – sauna and cold plunge, trying to get ahead of the train.” Brydon didn’t enjoy early success. “It didn’t happen to me until I was 35, that’s a long time to be hustling,” he says. “I never forget all the years when I was knocking on doors.” So does that explain some of his self-doubt? “It was a big struggle for a long time,” he muses. “But you do need luck. You need some synchronicity. You need those Sliding Doors moments. I know plenty of very talented people that it hasn’t happened for.” The public might be used to him, but Brydon says he doesn’t feel like he’s been around for a long time. “Some people say to me, ‘I’ve grown up watching you.’ The first few times you hear that, you think, ‘Really? What are you talking about?’ But then you sit and you do the calculations, and yes, I suppose you could have done. It’s a curious thing to adjust to, being described as a veteran.” He pauses and considers the words and their implications: “Veteran performer, veteran actor.” As well as the saunas and cold plunges, at 60 Brydon has adjusted his professional attitude. “I thought, I’m just going to do what I like now.” He’s signed up for a new series of Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip with Steve Coogan, this time a Nordic adventure. Wasn’t The Trip to Greece in 2020 going to be the final one? “By the time you get to the end of living in each other’s pockets for five weeks, poking each other with sticks, you’ve had enough. Then time passes and one day you get a call from Michael and he says, ‘I’m thinking of doing another Trip.’ And he’s irresistible. So you go, ‘Yes, OK. Scandinavia.’ ” When Brydon agreed to the first instalment of The Trip in 2010, he envisaged an on-screen relationship with Coogan based on the 1988 Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin buddy movie Midnight Run. “At our best, yes, we have the dynamics of a double act,” he says. “I put myself in the Grodin role and Steve as De Niro. And then at other times, perhaps it’s a little more Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in its aspiration. He would be more Peter Cook and I would be Dudley Moore.” One of Brydon’s earliest memories is watching the duo’s 1960s sketch series Not Only… But Also, as a boy. “It was beautiful, timeless comedy with two people at the top of their game. So much to learn from watching those two.” He’s less keen on the duo’s later Derek and Clive routines. “There Peter’s being pretty cruel to Dudley and I don’t like that.” Coogan, too, can be cruel. In 2020’s The Trip to Greece he says, “Rob is known for accessible light entertainment.” And it’s not meant as a compliment. “I like to entertain,” says Brydon. “And I genuinely like all those different branches of entertaining.” But as his breakthrough roles in the sublime Marion and Geoff and Human Remains made clear, Brydon is an accomplished character actor. Shouldn’t he have done more of that and less hosting? “I do wonder, ‘What if I had just done that kind of thing, had been that kind of guy?’ ” he admits. “But I also love hosting. I love singing. And for a long time, I shied away from those things. I turned down some hosting gigs before I did Would I Lie to You? because I thought it would compromise my believability as an actor.” Not everything he does works. Brydon loved being in the 2024 Tudor fantasy period drama My Lady Jane and then Amazon Prime Video dropped it. “Oh, I was disappointed!” he says. “I was surprised, because my perception of it was that it was a hit. But I’m quite good at shrugging it off. I’m OK with those things because I experienced getting dropped from shows before. I was let go as a radio presenter on Radio Wales. I was let go as a TV host on a movie show I did on Sky. The new guy who came in got rid of me.” And if he saw that guy in a pub tonight, would Brydon take pleasure in pointing out how wrong he had been? “That’s so interesting,” says Brydon, sounding a little disappointed, I fear, by such a low thought. “But no. It’s always unsavoury when someone’s show comes to an end and you see them moaning about it in the press. No one owes you this. You don’t have a right to it. I’m still here, still working. It’s great. How can you moan about that? How could you do anything that would make you difficult to work with?” And yet, we often hear about people in light entertainment who are difficult to work with. “I certainly hear stories,” says Brydon, “and it’s just inexplicable to me, kicking off about things. If you can’t see that getting to do stuff like this is just gravy, then you need to have a little chat with yourself. What have I got to complain about?” There speaks a man who doesn’t have to share the mobile poo station. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – 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.
Cult classic Quadrophenia’s portrait of troubled masculinity still resonates with fans old and new
Archive on 4: We Were the Mods is on Radio 4 on Saturday at 8pm. Add it to your collection now. There’s only a narrow pathway between numbers 10 and 11 East Street, Brighton, but it’s a small thoroughfare with huge significance. This is the scene of a key moment in the 1979 film Quadrophenia, when existentially troubled teenage mod Jimmy, played by Phil Daniels, briefly escapes a street riot and has sex with Steph, the girl he has fixed his thwarted ambitions on, played by Leslie Ash. “Alleyways are romantic,” says Franc Roddam, director of the movie, now 79. “When I was a kid, you didn’t have places to go with your girlfriend, you went to parks and graveyards. So I’m not surprised it became a favourite scene. There’s a blue plaque saying Quadrophenia Alley there now, which makes me laugh.” The film was a screen adaptation of the Who’s 1973 concept album Quadrophenia, which looked back to the early 1960s mod scene from which the band emerged, and features in Archive on 4: We Were the Mods. Roddam, a young tyro who had just made the acclaimed TV drama Dummy, was recommended to the band as a director. All he had to do was convince main writer Pete Townshend and band mates Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle and Keith Moon. “Pete is a great intellectual, an extraordinary man,” says Roddam who, from working-class origins in County Durham, went on to create Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and MasterChef and direct in Hollywood. “I said, ‘I don’t want it to be like your rock opera Tommy. I want to do a street movie and to use other music as well as the Who’s’. Pete said, ‘It’s your film. Make it.’ Roger and John were wonderful. I saw Keith last; he arrived in a Rolls-Royce with a big bodyguard who was reputed to have thrown somebody down a lift shaft and killed them. It was quite a moment! Keith put on a pirate voice like Long John Silver and said, ‘Why don’t we direct the film together?’ Having to think very quickly, I said, ‘OK, as long as I can drum with you on the next two albums.’ That seemed to do the trick. I passed the test.” Quadrophenia the film had a visceral authenticity, not least because of Roddam’s handling of the crowd scenes, be it clubs and raucous parties in London or the bank holiday riots in Brighton. The violence looked real, says Roddam, because it sometimes was. “We had a whole stack of actual mods, tough guys from the North and the Midlands, on the beach. I said to them, ‘Those effing extras are screwing everything up. Go for them for real!’ That’s what gave it such great energy. It’s the sort of thing you do when you’re a young director. I gave the mods the instruction, ‘Please attack the police.’” This authenticity, along with a young cast that featured Ray Winstone, Timothy Spall, Phil Davis, Toyah Willcox and Sting, and the adept use of matchless soul and rhythm and blues tracks like the Kingsmen’s Louie Louie – to which Sting performs one of the coolest dances in screen history – gives the film its potent punch. But were compromises made? In 2019 Trevor Laird, who played drugs dealer Ferdy, said he was told at the time that, being black, he couldn’t be seen kissing a white girl in a party scene. Roddam doesn’t remember it that way. “There’s a big party, and all these kids are messing around, smooching, and whatever they’re doing. Trevor is a mate still, and I love him. But I never consciously cut anything out.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/06/26RTJET5-copy-113a1a0-e1750334621976.jpg" width="1516" height="1010" alt="Week 26 Radio Lead" title="Press Release: 'Quadrophenia' cast reunite for 40th anniversary and help support young people with cancer. Teenage Cancer Trust proudly celebrated the 40th anniversary of iconic movie 'Quadrophenia' tonight (Tuesday 29 January) with the films original" /> It’s a sign of Quadrophenia’s continuing cultural importance that these things matter, nearly half a century later; a point that reverberates in We Were the Mods, which follows the story from the album and film to Townshend’s new project, a collaboration with Sadler’s Wells on Quadrophenia, a Mod Ballet. Curious visitors still wander along Quadrophenia Alley hoping for an echo of that far-off day; including Roddam. “Once, in Brighton, I thought, ‘I’ll take a peek, see how much graffiti there is.’ It’s become a holy spot, Lourdes for mods.” Does he like that? “You want your work to make an impression; Quadrophenia did. But we mustn’t forget the music – we mustn’t forget Pete’s original vision.”
Timothy Spall is a retired thesp in his new series, but he won’t be stepping out of the spotlight any time soon
Add Death Valley to your watchlist The thing is,” says Timothy Spall, “when you try and explain where the character you’re playing comes from, you’re talking about something that is ineffable. If you’re not careful, you end up sounding like a prat.” Nonetheless, the Bafta-winning actor’s latest role, which is actually two roles, needs some explaining. In comedy crime drama Death Valley Spall is a fictional television detective, Inspector Caesar, and also John Chapel, the actor who played Inspector Caesar on screen before his retirement to a picture-book Welsh village. “Curmudgeonly, slightly childish but bright,” according to Spall, Chapel lives in a cottage in the fabulously verdant Vale of Glamorgan, where his solitary existence is disturbed by the arrival of DS Janie Mallowan (played by Gwyneth Keyworth), who is investigating the murder of Chapel’s neighbour. Almost the first thing Mallowan notices is Chapel’s framed Inspector Caesar Radio Times cover. That same cover is visible in Spall’s real-life London home today, along with two genuine RT covers for his previous turns as Porthos in The Three Musketeers in 1994 and Fagin in 2007’s Oliver Twist. “Radio Times is an iconic thing, isn’t it? It’s wonderful,” Spall says, before pointing out just how good Keyworth is: “It’s a wonderful performance as this eccentric, slightly disarming, but also slightly shocking, copper.” Spall’s Inspector Caesar is based on the “1950s type” television detectives he watched as a boy in south London. “There was nothing dreadful going on around our way,” he says. “A bit of house-breaking and so on.” His Chapel, a recluse who none-too-secretly yearns to be in the spotlight again, is an amalgam of the more “thespian” thespians Spall has encountered since leaving Rada in 1978. “I wouldn’t name any names,” he teases, “because there are aspects to Chapel’s character that people might not want to associate themselves with.” We’re meeting just before Spall addresses the nation on VE Day in the guise of Winston Churchill. He first played Churchill in 2010’s The King’s Speech, part of a wide-ranging resumé that, as well as world leaders, features Brummie elect- rician Barry from Auf Wiedersehen Pet and the painter JMW Turner in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner. Spall is sitting in front of a painting he created for the role and beneath it sits his 2024 Bafta for The Sixth Commandment. “I always wanted one of these,” he says, still beaming. “It’s lovely to have it.” Now 68, the Battersea comprehensive boy, son of a Post Office worker and hairdresser, has had a sparkling run of late especially, as he puts it, as “posh characters”: as well as murder victim Peter Farquhar in The Sixth Commandment there was his ogre-like Duke of Norfolk in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. By comparison, Death Valley is light stuff, but Spall likes it very much, particularly the relationship between Chapel and Mallowan who, after initially sparring, settle down to solve murders together. “They recognise each other instantly in their souls,” says Spall. “They cut straight through any generational difference, any bizarre sexual difference or anything like that.” For once in this kind of odd-couple drama there is no will they, won’t they. This, says Spall, is more “uncle and niece”. Which is possibly a relief, as Spall is exactly twice the age of 34-year-old Keyworth. “Later on in the series, we find out that there is quite a lot of sexual attraction, but it’s not between them,” says Spall, of a series that also stars Gavin & Stacey’s Melanie Walters and Steffan Rhodri. Did Spall wonder if they would be attracted to each other? “Obviously, it was a question I asked. They’re both humans, for God’s sake. He’s an older guy. I’m an older guy, and you know, it doesn’t stop.” In which case, what about taking on more romantic roles in the future – are there enough for older actors? “I don’t yearn for it,” he says. “I’ve played many roles where I’ve had love interests, so I’m not sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, now I’m in my late 60s I hope I’m going to become some old codger romantic.’ But it’s good there’s more writing about older people who have love lives or unusual love lives. It’s easy to write people off when they get to a certain age, but people are living longer, and writers are living longer, and the audience is living longer, and they want things about them that are accurate and truthful, not written by people who are making assumptions about their generation.” But how would he find the time? Everyone wants a slice of Timothy Spall. There’s the request to write an autobiography – “I’ve had some ups and downs, so there’s a story to tell,” he says. “My vanity is always pricked by that, but then I think, ‘Actually, bloody hell, how would I go about it?’” – and there’s the painting to catch up with. “The gallery keeps on at me, but it’s just finding the time now. The day job keeps getting in the way.” That day job, as Spall admits, isn’t really a job at all. “It’s a vocation,” he says, “something that you have to do rather than something you choose to do. I call it an ‘affliction’. I sometimes think, ‘What’s the matter with me?’ It’s a weird combination of, if I’ve got to work on a part, if I’ve got it on my mind, it haunts me and drives me nuts and then you go through the worry of, ‘Did I get it right?’ But if I haven’t got a part on my mind, or it isn’t one that is a bit of a challenge, then I feel a bit lost.” Gwyneth Keyworth ...plays DS Jane Mallowan Tell us about your character in Death Valley I play DS Janie Mallowan. On a murder case she meets John Chapel, her all-time hero from her favourite TV show. What first seems like the best thing ever to have happened, sort of turns when she realises she can’t get rid of him… To start with, Janie hero-worships Chapel — does that reflect your own experience working with the great Timothy Spall? Not far off. It’s Timothy Spall! There was a bit of hero worship when we started. But I’d worked with his son Rafe before on stage [in Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird adaptation] — he was so nice, so I thought his dad would probably be nice as well. And I was not disappointed! Are you hoping that continues — could this become one of those long-running detective partnerships, like Morse and Lewis? I really hope so. I haven’t been told anything yet. But I’d be desperate to do it. Getting to hang out with Tim again would be an absolute treat. Death Valley is full of murder mysteries — but it’s also a very Welsh story. Was that part of the appeal for you? Definitely. It shows off Wales in all its scope and diversity. But also, I think Wales has a really good sense of humour about itself. We all watched the Gavin & Stacey Christmas special! And as a Welsh speaker, it’s nice to be able to speak some Welsh in the show. Do you ever worry about it being stereotypical, or tokenistic? There’s a definite worry. I’ve gone up for things before set in Wales that have clearly been written by people who are not from Wales. Suddenly everyone’s in a choir, no one has a degree and we’re all down a mine. And it’s disheartening, because you know that there is so much vibrancy and so much diversity within Wales. That’s what’s great about this — we’re showing a vibrant, modern version of Wales on primetime. HUW FULLERTON
Death Valley's Timothy Spall: 'I'm in my late 60s – I'm not yearning to play romantic scenes'
The Wolf Hall alum takes on a very different presence in his new BBC mystery comedy-drama.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. "The thing is," says Timothy Spall, "when you try and explain where the character you’re playing comes from, you’re talking about something that is ineffable. If you’re not careful, you end up sounding like a prat." Nonetheless, the BAFTA-winning actor’s latest role, which is actually two roles, needs some explaining. In comedy crime drama Death Valley, Spall is a fictional television detective, Inspector Caesar, and also John Chapel, the actor who played Inspector Caesar on screen before his retirement to a picture-book Welsh village. "Curmudgeonly, slightly childish but bright," according to Spall, Chapel lives in a cottage in the fabulously verdant Vale of Glamorgan, where his solitary existence is disturbed by the arrival of DS Janie Mallowan (played by Gwyneth Keyworth), who is investigating the murder of Chapel’s neighbour. Almost the first thing Mallowan notices is Chapel’s framed Inspector Caesar Radio Times cover. That same cover is visible in Spall’s real-life London home today, along with two genuine RT covers for his previous turns as Porthos in The Three Musketeers in 1994 and Fagin in 2007’s Oliver Twist. "Radio Times is an iconic thing, isn’t it? It’s wonderful," Spall says, before pointing out just how good Keyworth is: "It’s a wonderful performance as this eccentric, slightly disarming, but also slightly shocking, copper." Spall’s Inspector Caesar is based on the "1950s type" television detectives he watched as a boy in south London. "There was nothing dreadful going on around our way," he says. "A bit of house-breaking and so on." His Chapel, a recluse who none-too-secretly yearns to be in the spotlight again, is an amalgam of the more "thespian" thespians Spall has encountered since leaving RADA in 1978. "I wouldn’t name any names," he teases, "because there are aspects to Chapel’s character that people might not want to associate themselves with." We’re meeting just before Spall addresses the nation on VE Day in the guise of Winston Churchill. He first played Churchill in 2010’s The King’s Speech, part of a wide-ranging resumé that, as well as world leaders, features Brummie electrician Barry from Auf Wiedersehen Pet and the painter JMW Turner in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner. Spall is sitting in front of a painting he created for the role and beneath it sits his 2024 BAFTA for The Sixth Commandment. "I always wanted one of these," he says, still beaming. "It’s lovely to have it." Now 68, the Battersea comprehensive boy, son of a Post Office worker and hairdresser, has had a sparkling run of late especially, as he puts it, as "posh characters": as well as murder victim Peter Farquhar in The Sixth Commandment there was his ogre-like Duke of Norfolk in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. By comparison, Death Valley is light stuff, but Spall likes it very much, particularly the relationship between Chapel and Mallowan who, after initially sparring, settle down to solve murders together. "They recognise each other instantly in their souls," says Spall. "They cut straight through any generational difference, any bizarre sexual difference or anything like that." For once in this kind of odd-couple drama there is no will they, won’t they. This, says Spall, is more "uncle and niece". Which is possibly a relief, as Spall is exactly twice the age of 34-year-old Keyworth. "Later on in the series, we find out that there is quite a lot of sexual attraction, but it’s not between them," says Spall, of a series that also stars Gavin & Stacey’s Melanie Walters and Steffan Rhodri. Did Spall wonder if they would be attracted to each other? "Obviously, it was a question I asked. They’re both humans, for God’s sake. He’s an older guy. I’m an older guy, and you know, it doesn’t stop." In which case, what about taking on more romantic roles in the future – are there enough for older actors? "I don’t yearn for it," he says. "I’ve played many roles where I’ve had love interests, so I’m not sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, now I’m in my late 60s I hope I’m going to become some old codger romantic.’ "But it’s good there’s more writing about older people who have love lives or unusual love lives. It’s easy to write people off when they get to a certain age, but people are living longer, and writers are living longer, and the audience is living longer, and they want things about them that are accurate and truthful, not written by people who are making assumptions about their generation." But how would he find the time? Everyone wants a slice of Timothy Spall. There’s the request to write an autobiography – "I’ve had some ups and downs, so there’s a story to tell," he says. "My vanity is always pricked by that, but then I think, ‘Actually, bloody hell, how would I go about it?’" – and there’s the painting to catch up with. "The gallery keeps on at me, but it’s just finding the time now. The day job keeps getting in the way." That day job, as Spall admits, isn’t really a job at all. "It’s a vocation," he says, "something that you have to do rather than something you choose to do. I call it an ‘affliction’. I sometimes think, ‘What’s the matter with me?’ It’s a weird combination of, if I’ve got to work on a part, if I’ve got it on my mind, it haunts me and drives me nuts and then you go through the worry of, ‘Did I get it right?’ But if I haven’t got a part on my mind, or it isn’t one that is a bit of a challenge, then I feel a bit lost." The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Death Valley is available to stream on BBC iPlayer. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. 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Whether it’s a Beethoven symphony or a Father Brown score, composer Debbie Wiseman wants us to open our ears to joy
Reel Music with Debbie Wiseman is on Classic FM on Friday at 9.00am. This is where the magic happens, the room in her north London home where Debbie Wiseman, presently celebrating her tenth year as Classic FM’s Composer in Residence, has created acclaimed soundtracks for scores of television programmes and hugely popular orchestral and choral works. There is a piano, a giant screen where she watches previews of the shows she’s writing music for – “I’ve got Father Brown on at the moment,” she says, “an absolute delight to write” – and, on the wall, a drawing of a particularly moody Ludwig van Beethoven. “Sometimes I think he’s looking down on me disapprovingly,” she says. As she also wrote the scores for Lesbian Vampire Killers and Alan Titchmarsh’s Glorious Gardens here, she may have reason to wonder. Listeners of Classic FM, however, are in absolutely no doubt and have voted for four of her works to be included in the station’s 2025 Hall of Fame Top 300. “It’s wonderful that people take time and trouble to vote for your music,” she says. “I check each year.” One of those Hall of Fame pieces is Wiseman’s score for Wolf Hall, the BBC drama that reached its dramatic apogee in 2024’s The Mirror and The Light when Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell finally met his end on the executioner’s block. How do you score a beheading? “It couldn’t be sentimental in any way,” Wiseman says. “If anything was going in that direction, director Peter Kominsky would slap my wrist and say, ‘No, no, no!’ So, I pulled back and let Mark Rylance [below] do a lot of the heavy lifting, which he does, effortlessly.” Wiseman now has a new four-part series on Classic FM. In Reel Music, she talks to people connected with programmes or films she has composed for: Stephen Fry (1997’s Wilde), songwriter Don Black (1999’s Tom’s Midnight Garden), Maureen Lipman (Radio 4’s Maureen and Friends) and, first up, Sheila Hancock. “I wrote the music for a [2017] film she was in called Edie,” Wiseman says. “Sheila was over 80 at the time, and she climbed one of the highest mountains in Scotland for the part, so in Reel Music we’ll talk about never giving up on your dreams.” That’s something the 62-year-old Wiseman knows about. “Absolutely, there have been tricky moments,” she says. “Nobody has a completely smooth ride through a career, especially not in music, it can be quite brutal at times.” After leaving the Guildhall School of Music she initially struggled to get commissions and, with her now husband Tony, started a covers band that played in pubs and at weddings. “We did Stevie Wonder, George Michael, Frank Sinatra, Elvis. At the end of the evening, we’d play Moon River and everybody would get up on the floor.” That early example of the power of melody has served her well; few living composers have such popularity outside contemporary classical music. Wiseman composed music for the late Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th-birthday celebration, for the coronation of King Charles and wrote a choral piece for VE Day 80. Does she ever get nervous? “Of course – the coronation had a worldwide audience of billions! But you can’t think about that when you’re writing, or you’d be completely paralysed with fear.” Wiseman brushes off any snootiness about Classic FM or its penchant for playing music people will have heard on soundtracks. “There will always be people who don’t value music unless it’s written for the concert hall,” she says. “But whether it’s classical, rock, pop or for television, it’s all music and everybody’s working within the same 12 notes of the scale. It’s just how they’re interpreting it.” Similarly, she rejects criticism of the station for not featuring enough live music. “Classic FM are absolutely brilliant at it,” she says. “They have two live concerts a year at the Royal Albert Hall – Classic FM Live. They’re packed. There is a fantastically enthusiastic audience for this kind of music.” So, on she goes, score after score, commission after commission. “I work at all hours of the day. My husband just tunes it all out now. When I’m writing, it can be incredibly annoying because I’m repeating a phrase over and over again as I’m working it out. It’s not pleasant.” Other listeners may beg to differ.
Palaeo artist Jay Balamurgan reveals how she creates dinosaurs
Add Walking with Dinosaurs to your watchlist What does a paleo artist do? A paleo artist specialises in reconstructing extinct animals. You need to have a really good knowledge of the animal’s anatomy and biology and also be artistically capable. I design their colour patterns, thinking about where each scale and feather goes. But it takes a lot of people and a lot of work to get from words on a page to what looks like a living dinosaur on screen. We go back and forth discussing the minutiae, like, “What did this thing’s toes look like? How small are the scales?” All those little details. I got so invested in each of these creatures. It really feels like they’re my babies in a way. Fossils are bones, so how do they reveal what dinosaurs looked like? There is some degree of speculation about every bit of information that we don’t have, so we make sure our work is informed by what we do have. With colours, where we may not necessarily know the exact details, we can look to modern animals or to the relatives of those dinosaurs. We made sure that every creative decision was backed with as much science as possible. There’s also a lot of debate as to whether dinosaurs roared. Listen to a lion and that’s an impressive sound. Dinosaurs can’t quite do that, but they are still making loud, impressive sounds. Whether or not you could call them roars is a bit of a semantics thing. Did you see the original series? Yes, it’s what got me interested in science. I grew up in Malaysia and when I was five, we stumbled across a bootleg CD of the original Walking with Dinosaurs at a night market. I was obsessed from that day onwards. How do your dinosaurs differ from those in the original series? The change in appearance is like night and day. An utahraptor features in our new series and in the original. Back then it was a scaly lizard-like animal, now it’s covered in a full coat of feathers – it has wings and it has gorgeous birdlike movements. It’s like it’s an entirely different animal. What’s your favourite dinosaur in the series? The spinosaurus is my favourite. I even have one tattooed on my arm! It’s such a bizarre thing and so oddly proportioned that when I first saw it move, it was really like, “Whoa!” This is a creature that weighs upwards of seven tons, and it’s shaped like no other animal on the planet. SIX TO WATCH Your who's who of prehistoric creatures! 1 Triceratops Palaeontologists discovered Clover, a young triceratops, in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, not far from the remains of a T rex. A visual imagining of Clover’s encounter with it ensues. 2 Spinosaurus The story of Sobek was inspired by the discovery in Morocco of the only substantial spinosaurus skeleton. Sobek must run the gauntlet of predators to protect his young. 3 Gastonia Bones of the spikiest known dinosaur — a juvenile gastonia — have been unearthed in the Cedar Mountain Formation in Utah. Visual effects are used to imagine a youngster called George having to face the fearsome grizzly-bear-sized utahraptor. 4 Albertosaurus The albertosaurus was T rex’s faster, nimbler cousin. Unearthing the remains of a teenage skeleton in Alberta, Canada, is the springboard for Rose’s story, who is finding her place in a ferocious pack. 5 Pachyrhinosaurus <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/05/515072-1-ddca6d5.jpg" width="4800" height="2700" alt="TITLE:Walking With Dinosaurs,EP NUMBER:5 - The Journey North,TX DATE:22-06-2025,TX WEEK:25,EMBARGOED UNTIL:19-05-2025 19:00:00,PEOPLE:,DESCRIPTION:A juvenile Pachyrhinosaurus walking amongst the herd,COPYRIGHT:BBC Studios,CREDIT LINE:BBC Studios/Lola Post Production" title="515072,TITLE:Walking With Dinosaurs" /> During a confrontation on a 400-mile migration north to find food, pachyrhinosaurus Albie becomes separated from his mother. But evidence suggests that these dinosaurs were able to find one another. 6 Lusotitan A giant lusotitan — 25 metres in length — was discovered in a backyard in Portugal. As palaeontologists uncover the remains, the story of. Old Grande’s search for a mate unfolds. SHERNA NOAH
Walking with Dinosaurs is back, with new discoveries rewriting what we thought we knew, says lead palaeontologist Professor Nizar Ibrahim as he introduces…
Add Walking with Dinosaurs to your watchlist Squatting by the remains of a 100-million-year-old dinosaur, wide-brimmed leather hat pulled down to guard against the desert sun, palaeontologist Professor Nizar Ibrahim runs his fingers over a fossil that has just been pulled from the ground by one of his team. It’s a metatarsal, a foot bone of one of the largest predators that ever lived: spinosaurus – a Late Cretaceous-period carnivore, with fearsome jaws and a bony fan on its back, that once chomped its way through what’s now the desolate Kem Kem region of eastern Morocco. If Ibrahim’s hunch is correct, the bone suggests the creature’s foot was paddle-shaped – this killer could swim. “The discovery rewrites the palaeontology textbooks,” Ibrahim tells me, safely back at the University of Portsmouth where he lectures. “It’s doing things no other dinosaur is doing. It has a giant paddle tail, too, and an array of incredible anatomical features. It was a river dragon.” Thanks to the new BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs, from which Ibrahim is the breakout star, there’s no need for us to merely imagine. Employing the latest computer special effects [SFX], on-screen footage of Ibrahim’s dig morphs into a land of forests, waterways and skies patrolled by immense flying beasts. There, under a tree, we encounter the spinosaurus. It has taken nearly three years to make the BBC’s reimagining of the ground-breaking original 1999 Walking with Dinosaurs. The first series – watched by more than 15 million viewers – concentrated on re-creating the past with visual effects; this time each of the six episodes begins with a different fossil dig that in turn generates a life-and-death story for, variously, triceratops, gastonia, albertosaurus, pachyrhinosaurus, lusotitan and the spinosaurus. Locations include Montana and Utah in the US, Alberta in Canada and Pombal in Portugal. “The digs show the most exciting current palaeontology going on,” says Andrew Cohen, the series’ executive producer and head of BBC Science. “They are a time machine between the very place where those dinosaurs are being dug up now and the time when they lived and what they did when they were alive.” Going back 100 million years, the Kem Kem region was a broad river system that teemed with monsters. “It was the most dangerous place in the history of our planet,” says Ibrahim. “Full of giant predators, several species of crocodile, dinosaurs, flying reptiles and predatory fish the size of an SUV. There were many different ways to die in this ecosystem. A human time traveller wouldn’t last very long.” Today the region is a dry Saharan moonscape of shale-scattered ridges and a steep escarpment that the BBC crew, obliged to transport tons of equipment up its slopes, nicknamed Mount Doom. “It’s a very unforgiving place,” says Ibrahim. “A lot of time is just spent walking around the desert in scorching temperatures, looking for things sticking out of the ground, little bits of bone essentially, and it’s really hard work. There are sandstorms, snakes and scorpions.” On the dig, German-Moroccan Ibrahim speaks Arabic with the locals, whom he’s keen to credit. “They are a really crucial part of the spinosaurus story,” he says, “because the first few bones were found by a local fossil hunter.” In his early 40s, habitually in chinos and leather hat, there’s more than a hint of Indiana Jones about Ibrahim, but it was another Steven Spielberg epic, the original 1993 film Jurassic Park, that first inspired the BBC to give dinosaurs the documentary treatment usually reserved for lions or elephants. Ibrahim watched Walking with Dinosaurs as a young palaeontologist in Germany. “Some academics asked, ‘Should we really do this?’ But it inspired many people, including me.” Did the original get things wrong? “Well, that’s the nature of science, it’s based on new evidence coming in all the time. And I think they put a lot of effort into trying to get the anatomy of the creatures right. The dinosaur-bird transition is hinted at a little bit in the original series, but they were a little cagey about it because the evidence just wasn’t clear. Now, we have this incredible prehistoric menagerie of dinosaurs and dinosaur-like creatures and birds with feathers. We have a much richer painting in front of us in the new Walking with Dinosaurs.” Cohen was a young researcher at the BBC in the late 1990s and remembers “looking across the office at the people making Walking with Dinosaurs and seeing the excitement there”. It seems audacious to remake such a major show, but Cohen thinks technological and scientific advances demand it. “Visual effects [VFX] have transformed in the last 25 years,” he says. “Our understanding of how dinosaurs look has completely changed.” Many dinosaurs are now known to have feathers. Advancements in palaeontology and paleobiology mean experts have been able to examine preserved skin, pigment and even internal organs. The VFX dinosaurs are modelled digitally by London-based Lola Visual Effects, each creature’s development informed by a “bible”, a compendium of all known information that runs to hundreds of digital pages and includes, says series showrunner Kirsty Wilson, “every step of our dinosaur creations from the translucency of their eyelids to the look of their toenails”. The digital dinosaurs are then dropped onto the real-life filmed background – if you recognise a forest that’s because some scenes were shot in Scotland – where the movement in the bushes and ferns caused by a passing dinosaur was created by crew members dressed entirely in blue (including face masks) so they could be edited out later. In comparison, the original Walking with Dinosaurs looks clumsy and fuzzily pixilated, but the two series do share a fondness for pulling at the heart-strings. Many millions of years ago the world was an unrelenting Darwinian struggle, yet both versions, 1999 and 2025, occasionally give into cuteness. In the new series, two lusotitans – 25-metre-long, 40-ton vegetarian giants that lived 150 million years ago – become romantically entangled. Cohen says such dramatic narratives are backed up by the evidence of the digs. “Every single second of every single moment in the films is underpinned by a whole team looking at the facts,” he says. “As far as some of the animals and their little quirks and behaviours, things like little dinosaurs looking for parents, or parents looking for their babies, we were very much led by what animals do today and what animals do in the fossil record.” Ibrahim hopes that the new Walking with Dinosaurs will inspire a fresh generation of young palaeontologists. “When I do a talk, kids tell me they’re concerned that all the cool dinosaurs have already been found and there’s not much to discover. I always tell them, ‘Don’t worry, there are still many undiscovered treasures out there.’ The percentage of dinosaurs we’ve found, in terms of the number that can actually be found, is quite small. The majority of finds are still out there.” A perfect illustration of that theory is the spinosaurus – it took a decade to unearth and piece together the 100-million-year-old fossils. The only previous example of its skeleton was discovered in the Egyptian Sahara by German palaeontologist Ernst Stromer just before the First World War, but was then destroyed when the RAF bombed Munich in April 1944. So how did it feel when Ibrahim dug up another one? “It’s the ultimate experience for a palaeontologist,” says Ibrahim. “People sometimes think of scientists as very detached, but the truth is we’re just as emotional as everybody else. We poured a lot of blood, sweat and tears into excavating this dinosaur.” Appropriate words from a man whose work has taken us to a place that, despite the series’ occasional cute moments, was red in tooth and claw, and very bloody indeed.