The real-life Black Mirror predictions made in futurologist Yuval Noah Harari's new book
Will algorithms actually select your dream partner? Could robots do most of our jobs by 2050? Discover the technological revolution the best-selling author forecasts in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Yuval Noah Harari is a phenomenon. An Israeli professor of history, he became a huge bestseller when his book Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind sold more than eight million copies worldwide. Translated into English from the Hebrew in 2014, when he was 38, it was robustly argued, mind-expanding, often overwhelming in its scope. His 2016 follow-up, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, examined the way developments in biotech and infotech, among other factors, might affect the future for humans. It had the same boggling sweep and intellectual audacity: I’m still trying to work out how his passage about lawns as status symbols related to a vision of ageless billionaire cyborgs. New BBC book to celebrate the women of Doctor Who RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox Putting down Homo Deus, I thought Harari might be the new Stephen Hawking: a man trying to address highly complex matters for a popular audience, whose books might be bought but not read. Or, if read, not fully understood. View oEmbed on the source website Now here’s his new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which retools some of Harari’s earlier research and thinking in a more comprehensible form and applies it to our world today. It’s arranged in five sections – The Technological Challenge; The Political Challenge; Despair and Hope; Truth; Resilience – broken down into issues including immigration, religion, terrorism and post-truth. One of the central tenets of Harari’s work is that Homo sapiens won the evolutionary race over Neanderthals and other hominid species because of our ability to create and share useful fictions (religion, money, credit), which enabled us to organise into societies. But now it seems that belief in the dominant global narrative, of liberalism, has broken down. Harari sees the resurgence of nationalist myths embodied by Donald Trump and Brexit as regrettable but largely irrelevant, because the coming technological change will be more revolutionary than anything we’ve yet encountered. By 2050, he predicts, robots will do most of our jobs, including the supposedly “creative” or “intuitive” ones, creating a new “useless” class. Algorithms may become so sophisticated that they won’t just anticipate our Netflix choices, but also select (or even create!) our partners for us. It’s possible that only the wealthy will be able to retrain and equip themselves for the new world: the species could split into an overclass and an underclass, if it hasn’t done so already. There is some good news: most countries don’t want to go to war, as war is uneconomical now that information is more valuable than territory or goods. And some bad news: wars can still be started by human stupidity. We are already contributing to ecological destruction on a vast scale, but the looming bio-disaster may prompt humans to greater scientific innovation, as the two world wars did. We are more ignorant and detached from the world than our ancestors, who knew how their clothes were made and their food slaughtered and prepared. But though religious, national and political divisions persist, we are also more united as a species “when it comes to the practical stuff – how to build a state, an economy, a hospital, or a bomb”. Swings and roundabouts, then. Harari almost induces vertigo with the wild leaps he takes into the future and the way he zooms in and out of his subject matter, showing you things you thought you knew about in a completely new way. “If you are left with the nagging feeling that this is too much, and that you cannot process it all, you are absolutely right,” he writes. “No person can.” He lobs assertions at the reader like grenades. But there also seems to be in this book an acknowledgement that a remorseless survey of humanity has to be more, well, human. Harari puts a lot more of himself into this volume than into its predecessors, particularly on what it means to be gay, Jewish and Israeli. The section on Judaism in the chapter entitled Humility is fascinating. Overall, he suggests we’d all cope better with the world if we were a little more humble, a little more loving and – counter-intuitively – a little less inclined to put our faith in stories. And he says that two hours’ meditation a day helps him to deal with his own existential dread. Good advice – for, though I find Harari’s writing exhilarating, I feel the need for quiet contemplation after reading it. Yuval Noah Harari will be interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday 6 August
Book of the Week: A Line Becomes a Wall tells the story behind Donald Trump's border rhetoric
Francisco Cantu, whose work will feature in Radio 4's Book of the Week, tells why those desperate enough will always find ways around it
With borders and immigration the hot-button issues of the day, Francisco Cantú’s sparsely poetic nonfiction debut is timely. The 32-year-old Mexican-American – “I can easily pass for white, but I have a Hispanic name that tells people something else is going on” – spent four years as an agent of the US Border Patrol. He chased Mexicans who risked their lives to cross, repatriated the ones he caught, and stumbled across bodies of those who didn’t make it. These were not the “rapists” of Donald Trump’s fevered imaginings, but people fleeing poverty and the psychotic, institutionalised violence of Mexican narcotic cartels. Cantú saw the Patrol as a stepping-stone to diplomatic service or a job as an immigration lawyer, and as a Spanish speaker and trained paramedic, he thought he’d be able “to become a force for good in the agency”. But the parade of casual brutality, misery and desperation took its toll: he suffered horrific nightmares and ground the enamel off his molars. After quitting in 2012 he took a job in a coffee shop, embarked on a period of self-examination and research, and almost by accident found himself involved in the tragic case of a Mexican work friend, Jose, who faced deportation after 30 years. All of which ultimately fed into his book. The Line Becomes a River, Radio 4’s Book of the Week, is brilliantly evocative of the starkly beautiful reaches of the desert and of the human stories behind the statistics. Cantú brings to life the immigrants he briefly meets, and does not demonise his former friends and colleagues on the Border Patrol, even as he records them shredding clothes and urinating on foodstuffs cached by desperate individuals in the desert. Alongside the personal dimension, Cantú intelligently explores the history and causes of Mexican immigration to America, and the US response. “Our government policy, ‘prevention through deterrence’, means cities are well enforced, so crossers are pushed to more remote desert areas,” Cantú says. “Hundreds of people are dying in the desert each year. Our policy has precipitated a humanitarian crisis.” It has also unintentionally professionalised the smuggling gangs. At least 6,000 people are known to have died on the US/Mexico border this century, Cantú says. And what is happening there is replicated in the Mediterranean, in the Middle East, in Africa… “These deaths are not acknowledged, not mourned, to the extent I think they should be,” he says. “Those statistics are made up of individual lives. This is what I am most eager to change: to personalise the conversation for people.” He is not a fan of Trumpian rhetoric, but he understands it. “People are thirsty for easy solutions, so ‘build a wall’ sounds great,” he says. “And ‘open borders’ is the other extreme that makes sense to us, but what I hope to do with the book is present the border as something deeply complex and nuanced.” He adds that some 700 miles of the 2,000-mile boundary are fortified, and that smugglers jack up the panels and drive vehicles underneath, or cut human-sized holes in them with blowtorches: “No matter what obstacle we put up, people will always find ways up, over or around it.” Cantú grew up in Prescott, Arizona, with his mother, a park ranger, and had little sense of his Hispanic identity until he travelled through Mexico as part of his studies in immigration and international relations at the American University in Washington DC. After graduating, he thought a job at the Border Patrol would give him real-life experience of everything he’d read. “I was a literary nerd in college,” he says, “but I saw literature as an afterthought, until it became something I had to do.” His first drafts were direct transcriptions of journal entries, hence the book’s terse style. “A lot of writing about the desert is sparse,” he says. Much of his wider reading came from his attempts to make sense of what he’d been part of. In the book, he says that most of his life was spent circling the foot of a giant, before looking up and “finally seeing the thing that crushes”. Today, Cantú lives in Tucson, Arizona, and translates other writers’ work from Spanish to English, while formulating his own next writing project. “None of my ideas is fully formed enough to embark on yet,” he says, “but I want to continue to look at our border, and at borders more broadly. I think these issues that we see play out on the border are a microcosm of other issues. And I want to continue plumbing those depths.” Book of the Week: The Line Becomes a River Monday–Friday 9.45am Radio 4 FM
The story of Hitler’s rise to power is told in a gripping new detective drama
Volker Kutscher, the writer behind Sky Atlantic drama Babylon Berlin, reveals the thinking behind his Nazi Germany novels
“Unlike Quentin Tarantino, who blew up Hitler in his film Inglourious Basterds, I know what happened in history and I can’t change it,” says author Volker Kutscher. The 54-year-old German is six books into a series of nine that superimposes noirish, Berlin-set police-thriller plots onto real events, each charting a single year in Germany’s slide into Nazism and towards war between 1929 and 1938. Two of the novels have been translated into English and the first, Babylon Berlin, has been made into two eight-part series, the first of which begins on Sky Atlantic this week. Co-written and directed by Tom Tykwer (who made the films Run Lola Run, Cloud Atlas and the TV series Sense8), it had a reported budget of £35 million, making it one of the most expensive original language TV series ever made. The German title of Babylon Berlin was Der Nasse Fisch, which translates as “The Wet Fish”, German police slang for a cold case. Kutscher’s protagonist, detective Gereon Rath, is played by leading German actor Volker Bruch, while Rath’s on-off love interest and would-be fellow investigator Charlotte “Charly” Ritter is played by Liv Lisa Fries. Kutscher approved of the casting and says he was “very impressed” when he visited the set last year – four complete streets of inter-war Berlin have been re-created in Studio Babelsberg, just outside the city. But, he says, “I don’t want to make the mistake of paying too much attention to the series. They do their project, and I hope it is successful, but I have to concentrate on my novels, which is my project. I am now in 1935 and they are in 1929.” He hopes, though, that further adaptations of his novels will be forthcoming: “It makes no sense to stop in 1929. They have to at least get to 1933.” That was the year that Adolf Hitler’s rise was cemented by federal elections, and when many, including Germany’s Jewish community, still believed that his totalitarian instincts could be tamed. Kutscher thinks a fictional examination of the way his nation sleepwalked into fascism feels timely, given the resurgence of neo-Nazi parties and racism across the globe. “For me it is a big question – how this could have happened in Germany. It was a civilised country in the 1920s, and the young Weimar democracy was a good democracy. Many people thought it would work. To understand how it all went wrong is a big question and the answer is not simple. So maybe by writing and reading novels you can get closer to the answer.” Kutscher was an editor at the newspaper Kölnische Rundshau and had already written “three cosy crime novels – two contemporary and one set in 1795 – as a hobby” when he hit on the idea for the series of novels with the detective Gereon Rath at their heart. View oEmbed on the source website “In 2002, I saw Road to Perdition directed by Sam Mendes with Tom Hanks as a killer, which takes place in Chicago in 1931. The same year I saw Fritz Lang’s M [in which Peter Lorre plays a child murderer], released in 1931. I thought about how to mix up these two worlds: the American gangster world and the Berlin of Alfred Döblin [author of Berlin Alexanderplatz].” Kutscher wrote Der Nasse Fisch, but then faced 18 months of rejection before it was published. Given the subsequent success of the novels, and the huge amount of money riding on the TV series, the publishers who rejected his book must be kicking themselves now. Gereon Rath is “a child of his time, born in 1899 – the same year as Erich Kästner. He joins the army in 1918, but before he gets to the front the war is over. He was afraid he would be killed, but he isn’t. So he becomes cynical. “He doesn’t like politics, whether it is right or left – none of it interests him. And he makes mistakes. He is a liar. One positive thing – he is more interested in justice than in law. If someone has done something wrong, he punishes them.” Rath’s adventures amid pornographers and cocaine dealers, “Stahlhelm” nationalists and Russian émigrés, take place against a rigid framework of fact, and bring him in to contact with historical figures. Some, such as politician Konrad Adenauer, are well known; others, like the Berlin police commissioner Ernst Gennat, are largely forgotten, even in Germany. For the latest news and expert tips on getting the best deals this year, take a look at our Black Friday 2021 and Cyber Monday 2021 guides. But Kutscher is a stickler for research, even checking contemporary weather reports. “Maybe I am kind of mad,” he says. “But I am curious about it as a private individual as well as a novelist. I am a time traveller and I need to feel at home in this time.” The next book he will write, the seventh in the series, is set in 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics. The last will take Rath to 1938, “the year of so-called Kristallnacht, when everybody in Germany finally knew that anti-Semitism was about killing Jews, and that they were going to war.” Although he knows the historical backdrop for this last novel, he is less sure about the plot. “I knew it would be nine novels, and the years they take place, but I don’t have the whole story mapped out: it’s not Harry Potter,” says Kutscher. “I only know that Gereon Rath will survive eight novels, but I don’t know yet if he will survive the last.” Babylon Berlin is on Sunday 9.00pm, 10.00pm Sky Atlantic
The best of British: Radio 2's Ken Bruce reveals why he still loves working for the BBC
Bruce is one of the most popular presenters on BBC radio – how does he do it?
So, I say to Ken Bruce, what’s the secret? The 66-year-old broadcaster has parlayed warm, witty affability into a 40-year career, nearly 32 of those as host of Radio 2’s 9.30am weekday slot, where he gets a “fairly consistent” audience of 8.3 million and a 21.7 per cent share of all listeners. He is the station’s longest serving male broadcaster, and last year signed a new contract that will take him up to 2019 (he earns between £250,000 and £300,00, according to a report in July). “There’s no secret,” he says in that treacle-and-malt Glaswegian purr. “I just come on and am roughly myself – or a slightly better version – and hope that’s what people like. I don’t do laugh-out-loud stuff: wry smiles are what I like to get. A lot of it is luck: being in the right place, doing a good job, in the right slot. Mornings suit me, I’m sharper. And in terms of survival it’s probably that there is always a bigger problem than me to deal with.” This downplays his rapport with the Radio 2 audience, which rivals that of Terry Wogan. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” says Bruce. “The Radio 2 audience is a very giving group. It really is a dialogue. People have a feeling of ownership about the station.” On his first day at Radio 2, sitting in for Ray Moore in 1982, he was handed a box of records to play and a pile of cards from Moore’s listeners, welcoming him to the show. But you mess with this audience’s expectations at your peril. When Davina McCall stood in for Bruce in 2007, there were 150 complaints. Maybe Davina lacked his common touch. “You have to remember the broad sweep of the audience,” says Bruce. “Would something that works for someone my age work for someone of 15 who is listening in the car with their mum, or someone who is 35? Broadly speaking, I do normal life: things going wrong with your washing machine, children not cleaning their bedrooms. I don’t go to showbiz parties, but I wouldn’t talk about it if I did. If you talk about digging the garden – not everyone’s got a garden. Not everyone can afford a car. You have to not say things that’ll make people think, ‘He doesn’t begin to understand my life’.” Regular features of his show include the PopMaster quiz and Tracks of My Years, in which a guest chooses two personally significant songs each day for a week. Bruce has been cheerfully bickering with traffic reporter Lynn Bowles – “like a radio husband and wife” – for 15 years and every day takes the mickey out of Jeremy Vine, who takes over the airwaves at midday. There’s been one major change: the live sessions from the Radio 2 Piano Room found a permanent home on Bruce’s show in June. Christine McVie, Neil Sedaka, Benny Andersson and Gary Barlow are among those who have played two of their own compositions plus a cover version on the piano that Elton John gave to the station in 2010. “It’s brought a wonderful quality of live music to the show, which is what Radio 2 does best,” says Bruce. “When it’s a legend [performing], you get the old shivers down your spine.” A Piano Room album of the best tracks from Bruce’s show and previous sessions has just been released. Sedaka’s appearance was a highlight for Bruce, on a par with the time when James Taylor played Happy Birthday to him on his guitar. Lowlights include some unnamed rockers who wore sunglasses indoors, gave monosyllabic answers and lit up spliffs, and “a member of a girl group – well, it’s Geri Halliwell – who was not helpful, shall we say. She brought in somebody she had met on the street, and this was just after a major terrorism incident. And a dog that farted.” Behind the scenes, of course, much has changed in radio, and not just the exchange of physical records for digital tracks and of letters and cards for tweets and emails. When he started as a continuity announcer for the BBC in Scotland, Bruce spoke in received pronunciation and only reverted to his natural accent when he started presenting (a producer friend tells me this contributes hugely to his everyman appeal). “We used to smoke in the studio,” says Bruce, “and the drinking culture – God, it was massive.” But some things never change: “In 1978 I went to a meeting and was told radio was a dying medium and TV was going to be everything now. But television audiences have declined. Radio has seen a massive number of stations join in and the radio audience appears to have grown. People will download podcasts and the iPlayer is successful, but it’s not going to replace hearing something live, in its own time, on radio.” Similarly, Bruce sees the current attempts to restrict or reduce the BBC by government and commercial rivals as just the latest in a series of threats that the corporation always sees off, “sometimes by luck, sometimes by accident, sometimes by intention”. He abstains from internal BBC politics and never goes to meetings, but thinks it is “part of what makes Britain British and – without getting into any politics – it’s what makes the individual countries in Britain British. It is an organisation we would sorely miss if it were to disappear or be stripped back. It needs to be the gold standard of British broadcasting: it keeps the opposition honest, as they used to say in politics.” Bruce was the fourth and least extrovert child of a Glasgow businessman, which contributed to his appreciation of the well-timed quip. He attended grammar school and trained as an accountant then worked for a car-hire firm, until his voluntary work for hospital radio led him to the BBC. He’s done some television but prefers the intimacy, spontaneity and “lack of paraphernalia” of radio. He commutes in by train each morning from Oxfordshire, where he lives with his third wife Kerith, who was a broadcast assistant on his annual gig presenting the Eurovision Song Contest. He has three adult children from his first two marriages and three – the eldest of whom, 15-year-old Murray, is autistic – with Kerith. Does having young children keep him young? “It keeps me working,” he retorts. But after 32 years, aren’t there days when he can’t face the 6am alarm, the commute, bantering with Lynn Bowles, Jeremy Vine, a celeb in the Piano Room and a selection of joshing listeners? He looks at me as if I’m mad. “What’s not to like?” he says. Ken Bruce’s show is on Monday – Friday at 9.30am on BBC Radio 2
John Gordon Sinclair: I want people to get “a big old slap in the face” when they read my books
The Gregory's Girl star and thriller writer shocked reviewers when he wrote Seventy Times Seven, and now he’s tackling difficult content once again with the third book in the series
Gregory’s Girl is the elephant in the room when I talk to John Gordon Sinclair about his latest thriller, Walk in Silence, published this month by Faber. The former apprentice electrician from Glasgow shot into the limelight at 18 in Bill Forsyth’s charming 1981 romcom, kicking off an ostensibly accidental acting career that embraces film, TV and musicals like She Loves Me and The Producers. But he is ambivalent about acting and the mostly benign parts he’s (type)cast in. When the first of his two daughters was born, Sinclair wanted to stay at home, so he renounced acting for a while and reinvented himself as the tougher-sounding, goatee-wearing ‘JG’ Sinclair, writer of pacy and startlingly brutal thrillers. “I definitely took the gloves off with the first book [in 2012],” says Sinclair, now 55. “I thought, I know what people are expecting, and I want them to get a big old slap in the face.” That book, Seventy Times Seven, about mistaken identity and sectarian politics in Northern Ireland and Tuscaloosa in the 90s, garnered strong and sometimes horrified reviews. Gregory's Girl This month sees the publication of the third in the series, Walk in Silence, which is set in present-day Glasgow, New York and Albania. Its heroine is Keira Lynch. A child in the first book, she is now a drily witty, knife-throwing human rights lawyer with three bullet holes in her chest. And the subject is the sex trafficking of women and children. “Because of what’s happening in Syria and Afghanistan now and what happened in the Balkans in the 90s, there are all these displaced families and children, and in the criminal underworld they are treated like any other commodity,” he says. “They are trafficked around the world, and when there is a glut, they are cheaper. It’s just shocking.” The Albanian criminals who have homed in on this trade, and the police who supposedly hunt them, are both products of the battlefield. “When the civil war in former Yugoslavia started in the 90s, rather than raid the bakers for bread or the supermarkets, they raided the gun stores,” he says. “Everyone in Albania has a gun. Other international criminal gangs don’t like dealing with Albanians because they are too quick to violence. They won’t have a discussion about something, they’ll just shoot you.” Sinclair says that he ended up with a female protagonist by accident: when he realised there was more life in the story of Seventy Times Seven, Keira was simply the best person to carry it forward into the sequel, Blood Whispers (2014), and the new book. Although she is pretty damn tough, and a survivor, the awful violence meted out to her underlines the way the other women in the book are treated. Sinclair says he was inspired to make his own fiction “more graphic and more horrible” after reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which “aims to portray violence in such a way that people are sickened by it”. He adds: “The same rule applies to any of it. If it’s funny, I want people to laugh out loud. If they feel sad for a character, I want them to shed a tear.” One of the best responses he’s had to his first book was when his father, also formerly an electrician, rang him from Glasgow in tears after reading it. Walk in Silence is dedicated to his father – who is now 83 and seriously ill with chronic lung disease – as well as to his wife, Shauna, a GP who also grew up in Glasgow, and their daughters, Eva and Anna. There is an irony, perhaps, that Sinclair dreams up these dark visions of abuse from a female-dominated domestic idyll near Guildford. He’s a hands-on dad who delights in domestic tasks as much as the more traditionally macho skills of plumbing and wiring that are the legacy of his training as a spark. A self-confessed “socialphobe”, he’d rather be at home than down the pub or gabbing with actors. “I like hanging out with my wife and kids,” he says. “Writing gives you a great excuse to have to do that.” Promoting The Producers with Gene Wilder He works from a shed in the garden, doing all his research online, and grumbles that Albania is one of the few places that isn’t on Google Maps, so he couldn’t “go walking with the little yellow man” as he did with the locations for his previous books. On his passport it says “writer and electrician”, and he has plans for a book for young adults and two plays before he revisits Lynch for a fourth and final time. But he has not completely given up on acting. He is soon to be seen in a comedy Ill Behaviour and the drama Diana and I (both BBC2), and plays the manager of the singer Nico in a European film out this year. He recently took his daughters to a 35th anniversary screening of Gregory’s Girl at the BFI Southbank in London: “They’d never seen it, and it was in the same cinema I had first seen it in, so it was a nice way to say goodbye to it.” Was his big break a burden or a blessing, on balance? “Definitely a blessing. If it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t be doing any of this. But I think acting found me, rather than me finding it. Whereas I found writing, so there feels like a greater sense of achievement to it.” John Gordon Sinclair will be a guest on Saturday Live on Radio 4 this week Order Walk in Silence at the RT Bookshop by calling 0344 245 8092 and quoting RTBOOKS31
As the BBC broadcasts a powerful new drama about the Rochdale child sex ring, Andrew Norfolk – the reporter who uncovered the original scandal in Rotherham – reveals the lessons he learnt investigating the men who preyed on teenage girls
When I first meet Andrew Norfolk outside a Leeds coffee shop he seems an unassuming figure – bespectacled, grey-stubbled, dragging on a cigarette – but he can rightly claim to have changed British society. In January 2011 the investigative reporter, now 52, published an article in The Times exposing the sexual abuse of mostly white girls, typically aged around 12 or 13, by gangs of middle-aged men, mostly of Pakistani origin, in Rotherham. The girls were initially befriended, given free food and alcohol, then repeatedly raped, beaten and coerced into having sex with countless men for money. “I came up from London as The Times’s north-east correspondent in 2003 and over the years became increasingly concerned by what seemed to me to be a pattern of offending that wasn’t being recognised,” says Norfolk. “And every time there was a prosecution of two or three men, for what seemed like very similar offending, it was always treated as a one-off.” His ongoing campaign in The Times uncovered similar cases across the north, the Midlands and eventually as far south as Oxford. It also revealed what seemed to be an almost perfect storm of catastrophic inertia by local councils, police forces and social services, who had failed to act against known gangs for fear of being thought racist, or because they thought the girls – many of whom were from chaotic households or in children’s homes – consented to their abuse. Eventually, Norfolk’s work led to a complete rethink of the way such crimes, and particularly their victims, were treated. Andrew Norfolk One of the first cases to be reopened after his 2011 story involved a gang operating in Rochdale, which the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to proceed against in 2009, ostensibly because of doubts that the young female victim would be believed by a jury. This case is the subject of a three-part BBC1 drama, Three Girls, written by Nicole Taylor (The C Word) and directed by Philippa Lowthorpe (Call the Midwife). It was created with the full cooperation of three of the Rochdale gang’s victims and their families, although their names are changed in the script to protect them. Norfolk reported on the Rochdale trial that resulted in the conviction of nine men on charges that ranged from rape to trafficking for sexual exploitation. When Nicole Taylor asked to speak to him as part of her research for Three Girls he was glad that an issue so long ignored should continue to have traction, but concerned that the racial angle would be either sanitised or sensationalised. (Many abuse cases, including Rochdale, became inflammatory political grist for the likes of the BNP and the English Defence League. Norfolk and The Times were regularly accused of racism during the campaign, by fellow journalists as well as Muslim groups, but he also received letters from far-right supporters “expressing the hope that I would die” for not emphasising the racial dimension enough.) It is to the credit of Taylor, Lowthorpe and producers Simon Lewis and Susan Hogg that Norfolk’s concerns proved groundless. Three Girls is a heartbreaking, lucid and nuanced account of an awful case, which begins when Holly Winshaw, a bright girl from a loving family fallen on straitened circumstances, is arrested for vandalising a kebab shop and tells a yawning detective about the process of grooming, assault and enforced prostitution that led to that moment. Although the drama contains superb performances from Maxine Peake as a combative sexual health volunteer, Lesley Sharp as a sympathetic police investigator, and Paul Kaye and Lisa Riley as anguished parents, the focus is rightly on the younger players. The first two episodes tell the story through the eyes of Holly (played by Molly Windsor) and two sisters, Amber and Ruby Bowen (Ria Zmitrovic and Liv Hill). Holly is a bright girl from a loving, working-class family lately fallen on hard times, prompting a fractious relationship with her father. Amber and Ruby are daughters of a single mum and ride roughshod over her attempts to impose authority. They are curious about boys and booze, rebellious, wilful, and stroppy – difficult, in other words. Taylor chose to focus on these three because of the light their stories threw on the complexity of the case. The real-life Amber was forced to act as an enabler in the recruitment of younger girls, and was therefore listed as an accomplice rather than a victim at the trial so that her evidence could be included (it was feared the other girls would blame her and dilute the focus on the men if she were put on the witness stand as a victim). Ruby, who has learning difficulties, became pregnant at 13 and had an abortion; the foetus was seized by police and would later provide DNA evidence against one of her rapists, whom Ruby continued to regard as her “friends”. The third episode covers the trial, including the outbursts of ringleader Shabir Ahmed from the dock – he claimed that the girls were “prostitutes” running a “business empire” and that the trial itself was an example of “white lies” – and some of the aftermath. “What is very difficult to do when you’re writing this kind of story, which is also the task that every prosecutor and every witness had – and that’s to get the jury, or in this case the viewer, into the mindset of a 13-year-old girl,” says Norfolk. “To understand the confusion between the initial excitement and the adventure and loving the thrill, and then the process by which they get sucked into a world where they are out of their depth and horrible things start to happen. And to realise – as the police and so many professional services didn’t realise for so many years – that however complicit, however consenting, they may seem, these are children who are being brutally sexually abused.” Norfolk recalls the testimony of the real-life Ruby in court. “Here was a 13-year-old girl who had been made pregnant by a 42-year-old man, who didn’t see anything wrong about it at all. She thought the men were her friends, even then. The jury was listening in horrified fascination as she talked in a blasé way about being phoned up by ‘randomers’ – as she called them – and told to go and stand in an empty supermarket car park. Then a car would turn up with people she didn’t know and she was taken – not just around Rochdale but to Bradford, Leeds and Manchester – to chill with a bottle of vodka in a bedroom and it made her feel good. Then, yeah, they would have sex with her, but they were her friends…” Actually, “sex” is too bland a term to describe what was done to many of the girls: I make the mistake of asking Norfolk about the worst thing he heard in his investigations and he tells me things that make my flesh crawl. It was the very inhumanity of the actions that enabled the extreme right to make political capital out of the Rochdale trial. Norfolk says he initially shied away from writing about the Pakistani grooming gangs because “I didn’t know how to tell it without saliva dribbling down [BNP leader] Nick Griffin’s chin”. Griffin had already been prosecuted (but cleared) for “making speeches saying this was part of a global Islamic plot to impregnate every white girl and spread the caliphate”. But the racial angle is important – and complicated. The drama includes a scene where a far-right protestor outside the Rochdale courtroom shouts “You’re going down, you p*** bastard” at Nazir Afzal, the crown prosecutor who brought the case. It also includes an actor playing Norfolk, talking about the racial dimension of the case: “It’s uncomfortable, isn’t it.” In person, Norfolk reiterates an important point. “The vast majority of child sex offenders in this country are white men, nearly always acting alone, and the vast majority of it happens in the family,” he says. “With institutional abuse, whether it’s in the church or schools, again and again it’s white guys.” But when he researched his original story on Rotherham he found “17 cases in 13 different towns in the north and the Midlands, where 56 men had been convicted. Three of them were white, 53 were Asian, and 50 of those were Muslims, the vast majority of them from the Pakistani community.” The 2013 report of the independent inquiry by professor Alexis Jay stated that 1,400 children had been abused by men, predominantly of Pakistani origin, in Rotherham since the late 1990s, although people of Pakistani origin make up only 3.1 per cent of the town’s population. Norfolk makes the further distinction that many of the abusers came from the Mirpur region of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, where it’s culturally acceptable to marry a girl at a young age. The clash of these ultra-traditional values with “British society and what is seen as its decadences, the clothes girls wear and the fact that on billboards, movies, films, sex is everywhere” leads to a confusion of culture with religion in which the teachings of the Koran become twisted. “Stuff becomes permissible with a non-Muslim girl,” as Norfolk puts it. Although there have been cases where grooming is carried out by habitual criminals, “in Rochdale it was a former teacher in a mosque, a former schoolteacher, a couple of defendants who had been given glowing character references by Rochdale Council... This was a shared activity with friends, or with relatives, or work colleagues, where having sex with a 13-year-old girl was not seen as wrong, not seen as child sex abuse. These guys do not regard themselves remotely as paedophiles.” Norfolk believes that “middle-class social workers” may have practised a similar sort of doublethink, based on the backgrounds of many of the victims: “They seemed to accept things happening to those sort of girls that they would not have dreamt of as acceptable for their own daughters.” The police, paralysed by fear of accusations of institutional racism, were possibly also eager to write the girls off. “These are bloody difficult crimes to investigate as they are not easy kids to work with, often,” says Norfolk. He acknowledges his own reluctance to write about the issue represented another facet of the same attitude: “Shame on me.” Born in Kent to a family of teachers, Norfolk worked for the Scarborough Evening News and The Yorkshire Post, joined The Times in 2000, became north-east correspondent in 2002, and since 2011 has been writing pretty much fulltime about child sex abuse. He believes that being out of the “London loop” helped him pick up on the story and praises The Times for allowing him to concentrate on an issue “that doesn’t help sell copies”. Certainly, it was the dedication of this old-fashioned newspaper campaign that led to the change in attitudes surrounding child sexual abuse: it’s hard to imagine online purveyors of bite-sized news being so persistent. But on more than one occasion over the years Norfolk “begged the editor of The Times to let me stop” because writing about the issue exacted a heavy psychological toll. He doesn’t have a partner or children, and says his main distraction from work is watching Tottenham Hotspur. But until he wrote about sexual abuse “all my career, no matter what the story, how grim, how upsetting, I had never not been able to drop it at the end of the evening”. He is now, finally and gladly, working on a new investigation “totally unrelated to child abuse”. “Undeniably there were times where I really did almost despair for humanity,” he says. But such feelings were balanced by admiration for the girls and their parents who fought for justice for so long, and for the brave, lone individuals, like sexual health worker Sara Rowbotham in Rochdale, who helped them. And any personal cost to him must be weighed against the changes in attitude he helped to effect. “It all seemed hopeless for so long,” he says. “But men who do this are less likely to get away with it now. And girls who begin to get sucked into this world are far more likely to be met with understanding and support than they were five years ago. So never despair.” Three Girls is on Tuesday 16 – Thursday 18 May at 9pm on BBC1
Long Way Round's Charley Boorman: Even if I lost my leg, I would never give up motorcycling
An accident in Portugal left Charley Boorman fearing his leg would have to be amputated – but now he’s ready to ride again
I’m amazed when Charley Boorman walks to the door of his west London home. A year ago, the 50-year-old – who started out as a child actor in his father John’s films and gained a second bite at stardom on television as Ewan McGregor’s motorcycling partner in the Long Way adventure travel series – suffered a horrific bike crash. A Mercedes clipped the Triumph he was riding in Portugal. Boorman hit a wall and then bounced along the pavement three times. When he came to rest, as he casually puts it, “my leg was all flippy-floppy, bending in the wrong places and in the wrong direction”. He had shattered his left tibia and fibula and broken his right ankle and wrist. He underwent gruesome treatment in Portugal and then in London, and doctors feared he might lose the leg. View oEmbed on the source website He did lose a lot of work: a planned TV show about a bike trip through the perilous Darien Gap in Central America that had taken a year to plan, and commercial tours with bike fans in Australia and Africa, a lucrative offshoot of his celebrity. Sponsors, including Triumph, kept him afloat, but as well as pain and frustration, he faced crashing boredom. So, being a glass-half-full kind of person, he used the enforced year of recuperation to write a book. Long Way Back is an account of Boorman’s recovery, and also the story of his life, touching on his dyslexia (he takes great pride in having a literary agent), the death of his older sister Telsche from ovarian cancer at the age of 38 in 1997, and his own loss of a testicle to cancer in 2010. It’s also a handy guide to the world of motorcycling, where everyone knows everyone, and they all obsess about cylinders and paint jobs and regard broken bones as part of the ride. The book abounds with bikes trashed and accidents endured, including the time Boorman rode 400km in the Dakar Rally with broken hands. Boorman at last year's Chelsea Flower Show Ewan McGregor rode home with an undiagnosed broken leg after a crash in London, while he and Boorman were planning their second odyssey, Long Way Down, and Boorman tells me horrific stories of the likes of comedian Ross Noble (another mate) tweeting pictures of injuries from wipeouts. Boorman’s first thought when he was told he might lose his leg was: “Well, at least I can still ride…” – he knows an amputee stunt rider who uses a magnet to keep his artificial limb on his bike’s foot peg, you see. “You have to drive a car, but you choose to ride a motorbike or a horse, or climb a mountain,” he explains. “It’s to do with the freedom you have.” He grew up on an estate in the Wicklow mountains his dad had bought on a whim, and also on film sets, making his debut in his father’s brutal 1972 thriller Deliverance, aged six. John Boorman often cast his children in his films – as well as Telsche, who became a writer, and Katrine, now an actor and producer, Charley has a twin sister, Daisy, and three stepsiblings from his father’s second marriage. John thought acting might help his dyslexic son to express himself. Charley saw it as a means to hang out with interesting people and earn money to buy motorbikes, and doesn’t miss it at all. He is still close to his father, who is 84 and walks with sticks: when Charley was on crutches, they looked like twins, he says. His German mother, Christel, died a few years ago. Boorman Jr is great fun and wonderfully unstarry, whether remembering Lee Marvin (“a fun, really talented guy, and quite mad”) or recalling the years he spent as a painter and decorator to make ends meet. During this time, he got an acting job on The Serpent’s Kiss in 1997, where he met McGregor, and they talked about bikes, because that’s what bikers do, and cooked up the idea of a 19,000-mile, two-wheeled journey from London to New York that became 2004’s Long Way Round – a TV series, book and DVD. View oEmbed on the source website “If Ewan hadn’t been involved, it wouldn’t have had a chance to be successful,” says Boorman, frankly. “I do owe quite a lot of thanks to him for that.” He is also properly appreciative of Olivia, whom he’s been with for 30 years and married to for 25. Olivia matches lonely elderly people with tenants who provide company or help, and suddenly found herself also dealing with a husband who couldn’t manage the lavatory alone. “She was cooking every meal, and bathing me, which would do my head in,” Boorman says, “but she is a saint, my wife, incredibly practical, and just gets on with it.” Their daughters - Doone and Kinvara, 21 and 20 – are both at university, but Doone also had to be flown home last year after breaking her jaw on a skiing trip. View oEmbed on the source website You might think the gods are trying to tell the Boormans something about hazardous pursuits, but when we meet, Charley’s leg is nearly healed (he invites me to feel a screw that has worked loose beneath the skin) and he’s planning to resume his bike safaris in Africa in August, go on a speaking tour to promote the book, then try to put the Darien Gap TV project back together. What do his doctors think about that? “Dunno, I haven’t told ’em,” he says cheerfully. “I’m just going to crack on.”
Andrew Marr on life after his stroke: “I don’t do tears. I come from Dundee”
The veteran BBC journalist has made a documentary about his recovery - Andrew Marr: My Brain and Me
The extent of Andrew Marr’s physical impairment comes as a shock. His limp is pronounced and he “can’t really walk” without the brace attached to his paralysed left ankle. His left arm is flaccid, the fingers barely able to grip. In a new, authored documentary – which shows Marr seeking new treatments after his physical recovery reached a plateau – we see him lurching through hospital wards, dropping things, calling for the camera to be shut off when he can’t accomplish physiotherapy exercises. This is the real-life Marr, the one I meet in the flat he rents to paint pictures in near his north London home, far removed from the poised and posed figure he cuts in his eponymous Sunday politics show, where the only sign of the stroke is the way he sometimes cradles his left arm. “One of the things I said early on was that I didn’t want to become a poster boy for stroke recovery,” says Marr, 57. “I don’t really like talking about these things, or certainly being filmed. I didn’t enjoy watching the film. But when you are in public life, and something bad but very common happens to you – 1.4 million people are surviving strokes at the moment – then you have a kind of obligation to share your experience, particularly if it’s positive, and is going to encourage other people.” With Dr Ed Tobinick in Florida In this context, “positive” is a relative term, but Marr is a glass-half-full person, who wryly responds to director Liz Allen’s attempts to stir him to high emotion with the words: “I don’t do tears. I come from Dundee.” The stroke was almost certainly brought on by overdoing things. Marr’s wife, the political columnist Jackie Ashley, with whom he has three grown-up children, says in the film that four years ago her husband was “a workaholic, but immensely fit”. In the two years up to January 2013 he wrote a book and travelled the world for a documentary, while also hosting The Andrew Marr Show, and Radio 4’s Start the Week. He’d given up running due to ageing knees but was an enthusiastic swimmer, cyclist and skier, and on the night before the stroke he tried to row 5km in 20 minutes on his rowing machine. He felt strange, thought it was a migraine, cooked dinner, watched a film with Jackie, went to bed, and woke up on the floor with his arm and leg failing and his face fallen. “I tore the carotid artery and that blocked the blood supply to the bit of the brain that happens to control motor function on the left side of the body,” he says. He was rushed to Charing Cross Hospital where the necessary treatment to remove the blockage caused a further, more severe bleed on the brain. He almost died twice. “I was out of it, I don’t remember anything about it,” he says. “They [the doctors] became very worried and brought Jackie and the children in and said, ‘We’re really sorry, he’s not going to make it.’ Later on, they said, ‘We are pretty clear he is not going to make it.’ The third time they said, ‘Good news and bad news: we think he might well make it but if he does he will basically be unable to speak and will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.’ So that wasn’t a very attractive option for them [the family].” Fortunately, he woke up several days later, disoriented, unable to feed himself or go to the loo without help, feeling “not normal, but not too bad”. Interviewing Theresa May on The Andrew Marr Show Initially he was in denial about how disabled – his term – he was, and talked about a trip to Russia with Jackie, but over the months of tests, physiotherapy and strength training (“because I’m a bloke”), it gradually sank in. “I was never suicidal,” he says. “I was upset. Everyone I think who goes through this has periods of depression. What I have to emphasise is: it’s not the great big existential questions; it’s that yet again it takes 35 minutes to get dressed; yet again you drop the toast on the floor; yet again you find you can’t walk from A to B properly. It’s the small things that accumulate and make life a bit crappier than it otherwise would be.” We run through the ways his life has changed. He can’t do up his top button or shoelaces, and has had to forsake “proper shoes” for drawstring-laced trainers, because of the brace. He can’t yomp around Richmond Park any more, which is why he and Jackie sold their “very large – well, biggish” house in East Sheen for a smaller one in Primrose Hill, enabling him to walk to Broadcasting House or to Westminster (and hang out with new neighbours like Alan Bennett, Joan Bakewell and Baroness Kennedy). Cooking is “frankly dangerous as well as difficult, chopping things one handed with a sharp knife”. In restaurants, he has to have things like steak or pheasant cut up for him. He can’t swim, ski or cycle now. He has a new Mercedes automatic to get about in, following a disastrous experiment riding a tricycle. “They are less stable than you imagine,” he says. “I have to have my left foot tied onto the pedal, and if you are tied to a tricycle when it goes over there’s nothing you can do about it. I have on one occasion been rescued by the police, lying prone on my tricycle by the side of the road.” If he’d found he couldn’t paint, he says, that would have been “one ‘couldn’t’ too many”, although he’s switched from “classic Sunday painter” landscapes to abstracts. And he can, of course, still work. Staff at Charing Cross rigged up an autocue so he could practise speaking, and he returned to his Sunday show nine months after the stroke. He can’t type, but writes using Dragon Dictate voice-recognition software, which is “quite slow and you have to be very meticulous and very careful”. Painting in Marrakech Physiotherapy and strength training enabled him to get rid of his stick and walk fairly competently early on. But six months ago he hit his plateau and discerned no further improvement in his condition. The documentary sees him investigate treatments that might help. Functional Electrical Stimulation doesn’t work for him, “though it works for others”; stem-cell injections delivered directly into the brain “are going to be the big thing” but Marr found them “too invasive”. Finally, in Florida in December, he pays thousands of pounds for two injections of etanercept, an anti-inflammatory treatment that is administered by a former dermatologist. Marr says, “A lot of people said to me: ‘It’s not been passed by the FDA [Food and Drug Administration], not had double-blind trials, you’ve been fooled, what an idiot’.” But even his “drily sceptical” phsyiotherapist conceded that there was improved movement in his arm and fingers, and movement where there previously was none in his ankle. He now hopes he can dispose of his leg brace in a year, “and perhaps even cycle again”. Jackie supported his decision to try the treatment. How has his stroke affected their relationship? “It’s probably made it better and warmer actually,” he says. “I was very lucky with Jackie because she had grown up from when she was a young girl with a father [Labour politician and peer Jack Ashley, who died in 2012] who was deaf. You might think she has had the worst luck of all, having looked after her father, and then this happens to me. But she has been very good about shepherding me through the process.” In the film, Jackie says that once she learnt Marr would survive, it “wouldn’t matter” that he was disabled. But I wonder if Marr would have been so stoic and optimistic if his speech or paralysis had been worse? If he hadn’t been able to work, he concedes, it might have cast him down more: he is, he says, “not as much of a Spitfire pilot” as Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent, who is paralysed from the waist down and in chronic pain since he was shot by criminal al-Qaeda sympathisers in Saudi Arabia in 2004. ITV competitor Robert Peston interviewing George Osborne The biggest thing the stroke gave Marr was “a sense of mortality. I was very aware that I could have been dead at 53. In a way it’s like being shot into old age earlier than usual. You are physically frailer than you would normally be in your mid-50s, you have less energy and therefore the available amount of time matters more to you. Paradoxically – as everyone says the stroke was caused by me working too hard – I sort of want to cram a lot of things in.” He has a book about painting coming out and is getting “antsy” at not having written a major opus for a while, along the lines of his histories of modern Britain. (He has “decided to spare the world a third novel” after the critical reception of the first two.) He has only filmed documentaries within the UK rather than abroad since the stroke, and was therefore one of the few pundits who saw the “leave” vote coming in the EU referendum. He’s chairing the Forward Prizes for poetry this year – in Me and My Brain he refuses to read some verse he wrote in hospital, not because it offers a dark window on his soul, but because it is “doggerel”. And he still has his regular radio and TV gigs. He is frank about concealing the effects of the stroke on The Andrew Marr Show. “You don’t want people to think, ‘Ooh, how is his left hand doing?’ You want them to be thinking about the questions I am asking and more importantly, the answers I am or am not getting.” He would have loved to have covered the US election directly, but suggests his lack of expertise in American politics rather than his disability was the reason the BBC didn’t send him. Anyway, it is a thrilling, if alarming time to be a political journalist. Marr believes Donald Trump’s election, and Brexit, grew out of a distrust of elites: bankers and economists, politicians, but also the media. In the era of alternative facts, Marr thinks “the only thing we [the BBC] can do is to be incredibly old-fashioned, sober, calm, non-declamatory – don’t go for people, just be insistent about what is true and what is not true in a calm way.” Marr is often criticised for being a “soft” interviewer, especially in a Sunday market now crowded with his old colleague Robert Peston on ITV, new kid Sophy Ridge on Sky, and the rottweilerish Andrew Neil. “I would say people who think that don’t really understand the nature of interviewing and how it works,” he says smoothly. “I would say, look at the sheer number of news stories that come out of my show: it’s vastly more than anybody else’s. I think my job is to get the person in the studio to say the most interesting thing that he or she can say on the big subjects on that day. I think you get that by being polite.” After which, politely but firmly, he tells me he has to go: he’s seeing a gallerist about his first exhibition of paintings, to be mounted in Liverpool, with the proceeds going to charity. We say goodbye on the doorstep and I watch him head off up the road, limping but purposeful. Andrew Marr: My Brain and Me is on BBC2 tonight 9pm
Safari so good: You don't have to worry about spotting the wildlife in Botswana
As Botswana celebrates 50 years of independence, Nick Curtis travels to Africa's most luxurious game park
The 50th anniversary of Botswana’s independence is marked by a new film, A United Kingdom. David Oyelowu stars as Sir Seretse Khama, the Oxford-educated king of the Bamangwato tribe who became the country’s first president, and Rosamund Pike plays Ruth Williams, the white Englishwoman he married against the wishes of both his people and the colonial authorities. This remarkable couple laid the foundations for modern Botswana: a largely peaceful, prosperous democracy (though Seretse’s party and descendants still run the place, and there is a major HIV problem) blessed with diamond reserves and the sort of dramatic landscapes and wildlife that facilitate high-cost, low-volume tourism. The film, directed by Amma Assante, opens with Pike’s Ruth flying into Botswana over the country’s unique Okavango Delta, a beautiful flowering web of waterways. Having visited it in the year I too turned 50, I can tell you the Delta is just as striking at ground level. Rosamund Pike and David Oyelowu in A United Kingdom We were staying in two successive resorts run by Sanctuary Retreats: Stanley’s Camp on the Delta, named for the American journalist Henry Stanley who tracked down British explorer David Livingstone, and Chobe Chilwero Lodge, named for the nearby Chobe river, which becomes the Zambezi when it flows through neighbouring Zambia. “Camp” and “Lodge” are too-modest terms, really, for sumptuous complexes amid pristine national parks where almost everything – food, safari drives, “sundowner” drinks in the bush – is laid on, and where the authenticity of the African experience is tempered with levels of service to suit the pickiest American or European. In Stanley’s, we were at least in a tent, albeit one with foundations, plumbing and an adjacent bar/restaurant with a pool. On our first day our guide, Adam, whisked us off on a bush drive, where we were quickly blown away by the wildlife. Herds of incurious impala! The rump of a retreating hippo! Zebra, giraffe and warthog! Monkeys and baboons! And birdlife that made my previous most exotic holiday, to Australia, feel like a trip to a suburban back garden. Aerial view of the Okavango Delta But safaris are competitive, and we soon became jealous of other guests who had seen a lioness and cubs. At least, until we got up close to the three semi-tame elephants who live in the bush with Doug and Sandi Groves, an extraordinary pair who clearly prefer animals to humans. Walking, shaking trunks, and having lunch with the elephants costs extra, but is worth it. The next day, on another drive, Adam and his fellow guides brought us and two other Landcruisers of guests alongside a leopardess and her mature cub. We followed them for a magical 30 minutes as they lazily, lethally and gracefully ambled down a human-made track. Adam also found a stretch of the delta with just enough water on it to permit a ride in a mokoro canoe to a lagoon where crocs, hippos and elephants basked. An elephant in Chobe National Park The nights were beautifully tranquil and clear, the Milky Way plainly visible. We’d turn in early, sedated by barbecued meat and South African wine, and wake early too. We set off for our flight in a tiny plane to Chobe just after dawn, dropping in first on another camp, Chief’s, which is thronged with giraffe, zebra and rhino, and which has recently reopened after refurbishment. Chief’s is properly swanky, a string of huge lodges with their own plunge pools. Tom Felton (aka Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies) stayed here while filming his scenes in A United Kingdom; Harrison Ford has visited, too. Radio Times Travel offer: Victoria Falls, Botswana Safari and Cape Town, 10 nights from £2,499pp Chobe Chilwero feels almost European or South American by comparison, the cottages airy and hacienda-styled, looking directly down onto the glittering scroll of the river. Here, the excursions are split between water and land, and I could have gone home happy after we saw our first pod of hippos basking and snorting in the shallows, or the lunch on board a flat-bottomed boat with bright, blue-breasted sparrows swooping around the bow. But then, on a land trip, we passed a young female elephant who trumpeted and made a false charge to warn us away from her young, and a young male “in musth” raging by, crazed by hormones. A necessary corrective to the semi-tame beasts we’d met before, though we were safe at all times. Even when Poniso drove us into the shallows of the Chobe so we could goggle at and photograph a young male lion and four females idling on the shore. So happy anniversary and congratulations, Botswana, one of the success stories of Africa. A United Kingdom is in cinemas on 25 November. Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX5vI4osR50 Radio Times Travel offer: Victoria Falls, Botswana Safari and Cape Town, 10 nights from £2,499pp. We see one of the world’s finest natural wonders, the amazing Victoria Falls - three times as long and twice as high as Niagara. Nearby Botswana is a wild and beautiful country with some of Africa’s finest wildlife and the world’s largest concentration of elephants. Finally, we visit Cape Town, with the iconic Table Mountain, awesomely beautiful Winelands and a superb cosmopolitan atmosphere. Click here for the full itinerary and to book. 2nd passenger travels FREE in our November cruise sale. Click here for more details.
How different was BBC1's The Night Manager to its original book?
Fact or fiction? Here’s the truth behind John Le Carré’s spymaster stories, taken from his new memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life
Who would have thought that the BBC’s dramatisation of The Night Manager, the very model of a modern spy story, should have had its genesis almost 70 years ago? In 1947, a 16-year-old schoolboy is sent to Paris by his father to collect a debt from the Panamanian ambassador, Count Mario da Bernaschina. The debt is disputed, the boy is distracted by the count’s exotic female companion, and both his father and the count turn out to be con-men. The boy is David Cornwell, who would later become a spy and later still, under his pen-name John Le Carré, light upon Panama as the ideal playground for The Night Manager’s arms dealer, Richard Roper – and indeed, for the ambiguous protagonist of The Tailor of Panama. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-ZcaKdvML8 Le Carré’s new book, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, is a series of sketches and a companion – or counter – to Adam Sisman’s recent biography. Here, the author reveals the people and places that inspired many of his best-known fictions, and his encounters with potent figures from the world of Cold War espionage and the field of entertainment: I’ll leave you to guess which are the more duplicitous. The title refers to the tubes under the lawn of the Monte Carlo Sporting Club, through which birds were flushed to be shot. The image stands as a metaphor not just for the agents that security services send into hostile territories, but for the stories Le Carré sets loose into the world. Some chapters are devoted to the tortuous process by which his books were brought to the screen. Or, more often, not brought to the screen. We all know the successes – the peerless BBC adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, and the estimable 2011 film of Tinker Tailor; 2005’s The Constant Gardener; this year’s double-top of Susanne Bier’s The Night Manager and Susanna White’s film of Our Kind of Traitor; the 1965 screen version of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, on which Le Carré had a troublesome relationship with both director Martin Ritt and star Richard Burton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD_ubBlZ-FM We know the screen flops, too – Fred Schepisi’s turgid 1990 take on The Russia House, or The Little Drummer Girl, which Le Carré wrote for his actress half-sister Charlotte Cornwell, only to see the part go to Diane Keaton. Later, director George Roy Hill confessed: “David, I f***ed up your movie.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qcr-eJHMpio But it’s the phantom screen projects that really intrigue. What might Sydney Pollack’s proposed version of The Night Manager, with a script by Robert Towne, have looked like? Or Stanley Kubrick’s take on A Perfect Spy, had the BBC not discounted him for fear he’d deliver the series late and over budget? Or A Murder of Quality directed by Fritz Lang, had he not been “not bankable” when he proposed the project. Often, of course, Le Carré’s former and current occupations overlap. When Alec Guinness was preparing to play lugubrious spymaster George Smiley, Le Carré set up a lunch for him with the former security service chief Sir Maurice Oldfield. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCm3IrscqH8 He lovingly describes how Guinness absorbed and reflected back Oldfield’s manner and attitudes, conspiring with him to criticise Le Carré for his “misrepresentations” of the service, only to mine the old spy’s mannerisms and dress sense on screen. (Smiley’s rich but melancholic inner life, meanwhile, was inspired by Le Carré’s Oxford mentor, Vivian Green.) We meet the models for The Constant Gardener’s noble heroine, for Congolese warlords and Chechen idealists. Some real-life figures and events have no direct link to his fiction but they are included because they were important to him, or to everyone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l1lzzfpWFU There’s a witty lunch with the great dissident Andrei Sakharov; and a shorter one with Rupert Murdoch, who asks him who killed Robert Maxwell. Le Carré devotes a chapter to the double agent Kim Philby, concerned perhaps that we may forget the scale and murderous consequences of his treachery. As Le Carré is at pains to point out, though, he himself was an active spy for a very short time. So he researches meticulously. In Vientiane, opium strikes him as a drug that, “smoked by sensible people in sensible proportions, does you nothing but good”. On a 1993 trip to interview gangsters in lawless Moscow he takes his 20-year-old son along. A hazardous trip to Rwanda and Congo took place, amazingly, in 2006, when Le Carré was in his 70s. A knowledge of deceit and the ways of fabulation were instilled in Le Carré by his father, Ronnie, an utter crook and a rotter who still casts a shadow over his son. Ronnie gets his own late chapter here, and it’s as elegantly, surgically and humanely written as Le Carré’s best work. The Pigeon Tunnel is a delight because it’s fragmentary, a collection of highly polished oddments from a life, assembled to entertain and inform. It ends on a fabulously funny but downbeat climax, which I won’t spoil: some secrets should be kept.