Johnny Flynn drew on his own past – and anxieties – to play Goodbye June’s Connor
Goodbye June is in cinemas from 12 December and on Netflix from Christmas Eve On the day we meet, Johnny Flynn confesses to feelings of anxiety about the prospect of his family attending the premiere of Goodbye June, in which the 42-year-old turns in a quietly devastating performance as youngest brother Connor, who simply cannot cope with his mother’s terminal illness. As Flynn sees it, “This is somebody who doesn’t have a mask to put on in those situations. His mum is his guiding star, whereas his sisters have their kids and families.” Which brings us back to Flynn’s anxieties about the premiere. In attendance will be his own mother — “and for anyone of that generation, you know this is something that’s not far away”. This feels like new territory for Flynn, perhaps best known for his roles as Ian Fleming in Operation Mincemeat and Mr Knightley in the 2020 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, as well as his parallel career as an acclaimed singer/songwriter who’s made six albums. And as he felt his way into the role, he inevitably ended up drawing on memories of the passing of his own father when he was 18. “It totally brought back memories of waiting in hospital corridors and that hushed atmosphere that a family comes to around the death of a loved one. There was also a lot of me in moments when I’m thinking I haven’t got my s**t together. Like many people in my profession, I grapple with imposter syndrome.” And what did starring in a film alongside Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren, Andrea Riseborough, Timothy Spall and Toni Collette do for his imposter syndrome? “Well, it went through the roof, of course,” he says with a sheepish smile. “This is literally a bunch of names who would all be in my top ten favourite actors. But what can you do? You just have to go, ‘If this is it and I mess this up and this is the only chance I get to be with these wonderful people, then so be it.’” All of which couldn’t be more different to the job he’s just finished, playing Lucius Malfoy in the first instalment of the new Harry Potter TV series. “It’s a world away,” he laughs. “With Connor… well, I’m someone who is very familiar with panic attacks and stuff like that. So you’re going from that to Malfoy, trying to sound like the guy with the biggest balls in the room. That’s much more of a stretch for me!”
When Kate Winslet read a screenplay written by her son Joe, her first instinct was to share it with close friend Andrea Riseborough. They reveal how it became Winslet’s directorial debut
Goodbye June is in cinemas from 12 December and on Netflix from Christmas Eve. Add it to your watchlist "I promise you, I didn’t plan it this way,” exclaims Kate Winslet, and for a second, her slightly brisk response leads me to wonder if she has taken umbrage at my suggestion that, as Christmas approaches, she seems to have achieved full omnipresence. As we speak, a TikTok trend to land her the coveted Christmas number one spot is well under way, thanks to hundreds of clips of millennial Winslet fans miming to What If, the ballad featured on the soundtrack of her 2001 animated film Christmas Carol: the Movie. Another milestone from her past that looms large at this time of year is her 2006 romcom The Holiday, whose wholesome succour has turned it into something of a cult classic. Meanwhile, in cinemas from 19 December, you can catch her in the long-awaited third instalment of the Avatar franchise, Fire and Ash. Oh, and if you tune in to Radio 4 as you wrap your presents on 21 December, you can hear her selections on Desert Island Discs. But the reason she’s set aside a chunk of her afternoon to speak with Radio Times is a project that’s clearly closer to her heart. The film Goodbye June marks two significant firsts for Winslet and her family. The script was written by her 22- year-old son Joe Anders. And, as well as producing the film and starring in it, the movie also marks her directorial debut. If you’ve never found yourself blubbing at a film trailer, it might also mark a first for you. The sight of a dying Helen Mirren in a hospital bed, with her screen family – Winslet, Andrea Riseborough, Timothy Spall, Johnny Flynn and Toni Collette – all trying to come to terms with their imminent loss should just about do it. Winslet brightens at such an outcome. She’s fine with all of it, of course – even the revival of What If, which her husband, Edward Abel Smith, sometimes plays “for a laugh when we’re on family holidays and I least want him to do it.” She beams. “I’m lucky that I got to be across all of these things.” She insists that directing was never an itch she felt the need to scratch. By 2015, she had already won an Oscar for her role in The Reader as well as sundry Golden Globes and Baftas along the way – but it was on the set of Danny Boyle’s eponymous biopic of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs that the notion of directing was seeded in her. In a complex, multi-actor action shot that hit a sudden glitch – even as the cameras had to keep rolling – Winslet was able to see the exact point to which everyone would have to re-set. “I said, ‘Oh actually, if you come back here, we can cut around it.’ I was making sure it was usable. Danny just turned around to me and went, ‘Actors don’t do that,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, well I do!’ Since then film crew members, and some other actors, have also said to me, ‘You know, you should do it.’” So why now? Why this? Winslet, who recently celebrated her 50th birthday, talks about “a story that felt so important and personal to me, that when it was ready to send out to directors, I just couldn’t let it go.” Of course, part of the reason the story felt so personal is that it was literally so close to home. She’s aware of the optics here. Goodbye June – and Anders’s involvement in it – will be scrutinised far more closely as a result of the fact that Winslet is his mother. At the same time, anyone who has found themselves feeling helpless in a hospital waiting room as they prepare to see a loved one, perhaps for the final time, will recognise much in this big-hearted story about a family coming to the realisation that their mother’s final Christmas may have to take place around her hospital bed. Tiny details are painfully well observed – and you can’t help wondering if Flynn’s stunning portrayal of Mirren’s struggling son Connor is perhaps the one that cleaves closest to Anders’s own experience. Speaking about “this brilliant, clever young boy of mine”, Winslet (who has three children – actor Mia Threapleton, Joe, and 12-year-old Bear) talks about his response to the death of his grandmother – Winslet’s mother, Sally – in 2017, when he was still only 13. “It was the most significant thing that’s happened to Joe in his limited years and he remembers how everyone from our big family – nieces, nephews, siblings – came together, and just how almost geographically unusual that was.” Unsure of “where to place himself in the world” as Covid hit during his A-levels, Anders won a place on an intensive screenwriting course at the National Film and Television School as a result of a short film he had submitted. When he showed his mother his screenplay, her first instinct was to reach out to Riseborough, with whom she has been firm friends ever since they first spoke via FaceTime in advance of Riseborough’s involvement in Winslet’s Lee, her biopic of the photographer Lee Miller. Of that first meeting, Riseborough recalls, “It was a moment in my career and my life that was very important.” Speaking on the phone from London en route to a fitting, Riseborough talks about taking receipt of Anders’s screenplay from Winslet: “I read it and I immediately said, ‘Oh my goodness, let’s do this.’” Did it seem surprising to her that someone with relatively little life experience should have delivered such an emotionally intelligent story? “Certainly, in one sense,” she says, “but in another, no. I’ve known Joe for some years, I’ve seen him grow up, and I think he just has a huge amount of humility. He’s very permeable, in the most glorious way.” In Goodbye June, Riseborough’s uptight, unhappy Molly, stuck at home with her kids, envies Julia (Winslet) for somehow managing to juggle her high-powered job with motherhood. The longer Winslet talks about this dynamic as it plays out in the story, the harder it is to tell where Julia ends and Winslet begins: “It doesn’t matter how well-oiled the machine of our life is, there are things I have missed. Not long ago, my youngest son did a piano performance of a song that he had created himself from scratch –and having to watch that over FaceTime from another country, you know, it’s hard. “On social media, we’re constantly seeing people apparently pulling off this impossible balancing act. I wanted to punch through that and to show these two women, whose relationship has been completely misfiring for a bunch of reasons that neither can actually really remember.” For Riseborough, this was where the heart of the film lay. “You have this unbelievably tense relationship between Julia and Molly – and to show that with somebody I love so much was a bit of an honour. Because we tackled it with such care and gentleness and softness in the in-between moments – even though we had to get through some quite volatile and aggressive scenes.” Having worked with so many big-name directors – James Cameron, Woody Allen, Peter Jackson and Anders’s father Sam Mendes, to name a few – it’s perhaps surprising to note that the director Winslet cites as the biggest influence on Goodbye June was Mike Leigh – whom she has “never met or even had a conversation with. “For me there was something about the tone of Goodbye June that landed somewhere in that sweet spot between Secrets and Lies and Four Weddings and a Funeral.” And as with so many of Leigh’s films, Winslet encouraged improvisation – something necessary in a story that involved so many children. Look out, in particular, for the unscripted exchange between Winslet and Flynn, during which her on-screen son – played by five-year-old Benjamin Shortland – lay fast asleep in her arms. One might suppose that after three decades of landing lead roles, Winslet had her plum pick of supporting actors when casting for Goodbye June. In the event, she seems to perceive an unintended insinuation in the idea that she should (as I clumsily phrase it) “call upon” anyone to star alongside her. “You know, it’s not about ‘calling upon’ people, it’s really about establishing a degree of respect… and being in a position to make direct approaches.” Nevertheless, I wonder whether – having initially explained to Winslet that she makes it a rule never to play people who have cancer – Mirren would have been curious enough to take a look at the script if a lesser-known person had sent it to her. Winslet smiles as she recalls the follow-up call from Mirren: “She said, ‘I will break my rule, I do want to support you in doing this.’ When she said yes, I just couldn’t believe it.” Her delight was echoed by Riseborough, who remembers just what a steadying, supportive presence Mirren was, back in 2010, when she took on her first ever lead role in Brighton Rock. “I was very young and she was so encouraging. And she has continued to be incredibly supportive over the years, and is a champion of good writing. She has fantastic taste.” Winslet would rather that Goodbye June be seen as a movie that takes place over Christmas, as opposed to a Christmas movie. The charmed afterlife of The Holiday serves as a reminder that not all Christmas classics assume that status upon their arrival in the world. If that’s how it has to be, says Winslet, then fine – “but we just want people to see it now and watch it when it comes out. When I say ‘we’, I mean me and Joe – we really just hope that people see something of themselves in this story.” Back in Sussex at the Winslet homestead, an altogether more well-established seasonal tale is set to receive its traditional airing. “We always watch The Snowman at some point on Christmas Eve,” she says. As for the responsibility of making Christmas dinner, well, that’s one that she visibly relishes – even down to the lentil and walnut Wellington she makes for her vegan husband. “He can usually get about three days out of it, so he’s always delighted and very covetous.” This is a ritual clearly finessed over several years. “Well, there’s really nothing I don’t love about Christmas. The letters from Santa. The chaos of it and people going crazy. Pulling things out from underneath the tree.” All spoken with the zeal of someone who thrives on being in charge. When it comes to Christmas dinner, the director and star turn get to be one and the same. It’s a role to which Kate Winslet is singularly suited.
Harry Potter TV series star Johnny Flynn on how his new film role compares to playing Lucius Malfoy
The Goodbye June star has a very different role lined up next.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. On the day we meet, Johnny Flynn confesses to feelings of anxiety about the prospect of his family attending the premiere of Goodbye June, in which the 42-year-old turns in a quietly devastating performance as youngest brother Connor, who simply cannot cope with his mother’s terminal illness. As Flynn sees it, “This is somebody who doesn’t have a mask to put on in those situations. His mum is his guiding star, whereas his sisters have their kids and families.” Which brings us back to Flynn’s anxieties about the premiere. In attendance will be his own mother — “and for anyone of that generation, you know this is something that not far away”. This feels like new territory for Flynn, perhaps best known for his roles as Ian Fleming in Operation Mincemeat and Mr Knightley in the 2020 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, as well as his parallel career as an acclaimed singer/songwriter who’s made six albums. And as he felt his way into the role, he inevitably ended up drawing on memories of the passing of his own father when he was 18. “It totally brought back memories of waiting in hospital corridors and that hushed atmosphere that a family comes to around the death of a loved one. There was also a lot of me in moments when I’m thinking I haven’t got my s**t together. Like many people in my profession, I grapple with imposter syndrome.” And what did starring in a film alongside Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren, Andrea Riseborough, Timothy Spall and Toni Collette do for his imposter syndrome? “Well, it went through the roof, of course,” he says with a sheepish smile. “This is literally a bunch of names who would all be in my top ten favourite actors. But what can you do? You just have to go, ‘If this is it and I mess this up and this is the only chance I get to be with these wonderful people, then so be it.’” All of which couldn’t be more different to the job he’s just finished, playing Lucius Malfoy in the first instalment of the new Harry Potter TV series. “It’s a world away,” he laughs. “With Connor… well, I’m someone who is very familiar with panic attacks and stuff like that. So you’re going from that to Malfoy, trying to sound like the guy with the biggest balls in the room. That’s much more of a stretch for me!” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Goodbye June will be released in select UK cinemas on 12th December and on Netflix on Wednesday 24th December. 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.
Kate Winslet reveals why her film Goodbye June is so personal for her "brilliant, clever" screenwriting son
How Kate Winslet turned her son’s script into a moving family drama – and found a new creative calling.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. “I promise you, I didn’t plan it this way,” exclaims Kate Winslet, and for a second, her slightly brisk response leads me to wonder if she has taken umbrage at my suggestion that, as Christmas approaches, she seems to have achieved full omnipresence. As we speak, a TikTok trend to land her the coveted Christmas number one spot is well under way, thanks to hundreds of clips of millennial Winslet fans miming to What If, the ballad featured on the soundtrack of her 2001 animated film Christmas Carol: the Movie. Another milestone from her past that looms large at this time of year is her 2006 romcom The Holiday, whose wholesome succour has turned it into something of a cult classic. Meanwhile, in cinemas from 19 December, you can catch her in the long-awaited third instalment of the Avatar franchise, Fire and Ash. Oh, and if you tune in to Radio 4 as you wrap your presents on 21 December, you can hear her selections on Desert Island Discs. But the reason she’s set aside a chunk of her afternoon to speak with Radio Times is a project that’s clearly closer to her heart. The film Goodbye June marks two significant firsts for Winslet and her family. The script was written by her 22- year-old son Joe Anders. And, as well as producing the film and starring in it, the movie also marks her directorial debut. If you’ve never found yourself blubbing at a film trailer, it might also mark a first for you. The sight of a dying Helen Mirren in a hospital bed, with her screen family – Winslet, Andrea Riseborough, Timothy Spall, Johnny Flynn and Toni Collette – all trying to come to terms with their imminent loss should just about do it. Winslet brightens at such an outcome. She’s fine with all of it, of course – even the revival of What If, which her husband, Edward Abel Smith, sometimes plays “for a laugh when we’re on family holidays and I least want him to do it.” She beams. “I’m lucky that I got to be across all of these things.” She insists that directing was never an itch she felt the need to scratch. By 2015, she had already won an Oscar for her role in The Reader as well as sundry Golden Globes and Baftas along the way – but it was on the set of Danny Boyle’s eponymous biopic of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs that the notion of directing was seeded in her. In a complex, multi-actor action shot that hit a sudden glitch – even as the cameras had to keep rolling – Winslet was able to see the exact point to which everyone would have to re-set. “I said, ‘Oh actually, if you come back here, we can cut around it.’ I was making sure it was usable. Danny just turned around to me and went, ‘Actors don’t do that,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, well I do!’ Since then film crew members, and some other actors, have also said to me, ‘You know, you should do it.’” So why now? Why this? Winslet, who recently celebrated her 50th birthday, talks about “a story that felt so important and personal to me, that when it was ready to send out to directors, I just couldn’t let it go.” Of course, part of the reason the story felt so personal is that it was literally so close to home. She’s aware of the optics here. Goodbye June – and Anders’s involvement in it – will be scrutinised far more closely as a result of the fact that Winslet is his mother. At the same time, anyone who has found themselves feeling helpless in a hospital waiting room as they prepare to see a loved one, perhaps for the final time, will recognise much in this big-hearted story about a family coming to the realisation that their mother’s final Christmas may have to take place around her hospital bed. Tiny details are painfully well observed – and you can’t help wondering if Flynn’s stunning portrayal of Mirren’s struggling son Connor is perhaps the one that cleaves closest to Anders’s own experience. View Green Video on the source website Speaking about “this brilliant, clever young boy of mine”, Winslet (who has three children – actor Mia Threapleton, Joe, and 12-year-old Bear) talks about his response to the death of his grandmother – Winslet’s mother, Sally – in 2017, when he was still only 13. “It was the most significant thing that’s happened to Joe in his limited years and he remembers how everyone from our big family – nieces, nephews, siblings – came together, and just how almost geographically unusual that was.” Unsure of “where to place himself in the world” as Covid hit during his A-levels, Anders won a place on an intensive screenwriting course at the National Film and Television School as a result of a short film he had submitted. When he showed his mother his screenplay, her first instinct was to reach out to Riseborough, with whom she has been firm friends ever since they first spoke via FaceTime in advance of Riseborough’s involvement in Winslet’s Lee, her biopic of the photographer Lee Miller. Of that first meeting, Riseborough recalls, “It was a moment in my career and my life that was very important.” Speaking on the phone from London en route to a fitting, Riseborough talks about taking receipt of Anders’s screenplay from Winslet: “I read it and I immediately said, ‘Oh my goodness, let’s do this.’” Did it seem surprising to her that someone with relatively little life experience should have delivered such an emotionally intelligent story? “Certainly, in one sense,” she says, “but in another, no. I’ve known Joe for some years, I’ve seen him grow up, and I think he just has a huge amount of humility. He’s very permeable, in the most glorious way.” In Goodbye June, Riseborough’s uptight, unhappy Molly, stuck at home with her kids, envies Julia (Winslet) for somehow managing to juggle her high-powered job with motherhood. The longer Winslet talks about this dynamic as it plays out in the story, the harder it is to tell where Julia ends and Winslet begins: “It doesn’t matter how well-oiled the machine of our life is, there are things I have missed. Not long ago, my youngest son did a piano performance of a song that he had created himself from scratch –and having to watch that over FaceTime from another country, you know, it’s hard. “On social media, we’re constantly seeing people apparently pulling off this impossible balancing act. I wanted to punch through that and to show these two women, whose relationship has been completely misfiring for a bunch of reasons that neither can actually really remember.” For Riseborough, this was where the heart of the film lay. “You have this unbelievably tense relationship between Julia and Molly – and to show that with somebody I love so much was a bit of an honour. Because we tackled it with such care and gentleness and softness in the in-between moments – even though we had to get through some quite volatile and aggressive scenes.” Having worked with so many big-name directors – James Cameron, Woody Allen, Peter Jackson and Anders’s father Sam Mendes, to name a few – it’s perhaps surprising to note that the director Winslet cites as the biggest influence on Goodbye June was Mike Leigh – whom she has “never met or even had a conversation with. “For me there was something about the tone of Goodbye June that landed somewhere in that sweet spot between Secrets and Lies and Four Weddings and a Funeral.” And as with so many of Leigh’s films, Winslet encouraged improvisation – something necessary in a story that involved so many children. Look out, in particular, for the unscripted exchange between Winslet and Flynn, during which her on-screen son – played by five-year-old Benjamin Shortland – lay fast asleep in her arms. One might suppose that after three decades of landing lead roles, Winslet had her plum pick of supporting actors when casting for Goodbye June. In the event, she seems to perceive an unintended insinuation in the idea that she should (as I clumsily phrase it) “call upon” anyone to star alongside her. “You know, it’s not about ‘calling upon’ people, it’s really about establishing a degree of respect… and being in a position to make direct approaches.” Nevertheless, I wonder whether – having initially explained to Winslet that she makes it a rule never to play people who have cancer – Mirren would have been curious enough to take a look at the script if a lesser-known person had sent it to her. Winslet smiles as she recalls the follow-up call from Mirren: “She said, ‘I will break my rule, I do want to support you in doing this.’ When she said yes, I just couldn’t believe it.” Her delight was echoed by Riseborough, who remembers just what a steadying, supportive presence Mirren was, back in 2010, when she took on her first ever lead role in Brighton Rock. “I was very young and she was so encouraging. And she has continued to be incredibly supportive over the years, and is a champion of good writing. She has fantastic taste.” Winslet would rather that Goodbye June be seen as a movie that takes place over Christmas, as opposed to a Christmas movie. The charmed afterlife of The Holiday serves as a reminder that not all Christmas classics assume that status upon their arrival in the world. If that’s how it has to be, says Winslet, then fine – “but we just want people to see it now and watch it when it comes out. When I say ‘we’, I mean me and Joe – we really just hope that people see something of themselves in this story.” Back in Sussex at the Winslet homestead, an altogether more well-established seasonal tale is set to receive its traditional airing. “We always watch The Snowman at some point on Christmas Eve,” she says. As for the responsibility of making Christmas dinner, well, that’s one that she visibly relishes – even down to the lentil and walnut Wellington she makes for her vegan husband. “He can usually get about three days out of it, so he’s always delighted and very covetous.” This is a ritual clearly finessed over several years. “Well, there’s really nothing I don’t love about Christmas. The letters from Santa. The chaos of it and people going crazy. Pulling things out from underneath the tree.” All spoken with the zeal of someone who thrives on being in charge. When it comes to Christmas dinner, the director and star turn get to be one and the same. It’s a role to which Kate Winslet is singularly suited. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Goodbye June will be released in select UK cinemas on 12th December and on Netflix on Wednesday 24th December. 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.
Meet Mitchell and Webb’s band of quick-witted co-writers and stars
Add Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping to your watchlist Kiell Smyth-Bynoe You’ve hosted The Great British Sewing Bee and starred in Ghosts, Man like Mobeen and Stath Lets Flats, so this should be a walk in the park, right? Well, it’s Mitchell and Webb – which, in comedy terms, is next-level. It’s like getting to sit at the grown-ups’ table. Then you realise the grown-ups are just as funny and silly, and they’ll let you have a sip of advocaat. Given your TV ubiquity, did you get to bypass the audition stage? I’d worked with David before, when I did Would I Lie to You? I did an on-screen chemistry test with Rob. I’d also written with Stevie Martin before. I’ve never worked with Krystal, so that was really fun. And Lara’s pretty much all the things I find funniest of all in human form. You’re no stranger to sketch comedy. Your 2022 pilot sketch show Red Flag was a viral hit, and yet Channel 4 didn’t pick up the option. Does this make up for it? Everybody wanted Red Flag apart from those people who were in a position to make it. But the return of Mitchell and Webb after such a long absence makes you realise that, sometimes, you just need to be patient. Krystal Evans You’re from Washington state, a long way from the world of British sketch comedy. How did you end up here for Mitchell and Webb? Long before I even summoned the courage to try my hand at stand-up, I would have told you that Mitchell and Webb would be the two people I’d want to work with more than anyone else in the UK. Did that make the audition process nerve-racking? They gave me the option to do it over Zoom, because I live in Edinburgh. They said, “Don’t make a special trip.” Needless to say, I made a special trip. I was so nervous, I tipped over to the point of being numb. I was genuinely thinking, “How will my legs carry me into the room?” It all gets a bit meta in this series with sketches set in the writers’ room, which play off David and Robert’s public personas. Why were those sketches included? In the original sketch show, they had behind-the-scenes stuff where the sketch ends and they’re just standing in their costumes, chatting. It’s an extension of that. To do stand-up you need to be aware what people think of you, and then address that. In this sketch show the writers’ room allows you to do something similar – and have fun with it. Lara Ricote You seem to bring a lot of your own vigour to Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping — where does that come from? I have other comics to thank for that. I watch them to toughen up, get brave. I want to watch a comic and think, “I can’t believe they exist in this actual world!” Can you give us any examples? I watch [US musical comedian] Cat Cohen and she makes me feel like I can do what I do. Maria Bamford is another one, and Rory Scovel, too. Your mother Gabriela Rivero is a famous soap actor in Mexico, where you grew up. What was that like? Mexican soaps are very similar to each other. You have the rich family and the poor family, and then they fight. She had a huge part as a teacher in her 20s and people still call her by the teacher’s name in the street. She’s cool with that. Now, you’re based in London. Was that always the plan? Most of my favourite comics are here. I’ve just got my visa, which cost me a hundred million bucks, so I’m not going anywhere. Until recently, I was living in a house full of clowns – you know, the French clowns who go to clown school? Clown school is actually very serious. They cry more than anyone else I’ve ever met.
Robert Webb and David Mitchell are delighted to be back working together in their first sketch show for 15 years. So why the long faces?
Add Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping to your watchlist Hellos have barely been traded before David Mitchell and Robert Webb race straight to the point. “Have you seen it? You have?” asks Webb. It’s flattering, and a little endearing, how keenly they seek out feedback for their return to sketch comedy (of which, more later). But for now, walking into the sunlit loft of a photographer’s studio in north London, seeing this pair seated side by side – and visibly delighting in each other’s company – is as low-key reassuring as the sight of a salt grinder next to a peppermill, or Anita Dobson linking arms with Brian May.Mitchell in corduroy and wool; Webb in more weather-appropriate T-shirt and shorts. Side by side is still how we usually see these two comics in our mind’s eye, thanks to reruns of That Mitchell and Webb Look and Peep Show (Mitchell: “a sitcom so perfect that it scuppered all chances of us ever writing one ourselves”). In TV terms, though, the last time we glimpsed them in the same room was in 2021, when Mitchell sat in the front row of the Strictly Come Dancing studio audience and cheered on Webb as he danced to The Muppet Show theme tune dressed as Kermit the Frog. At that point, 11 years had elapsed since their sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look ran its course, a decision that the pair are keen to emphasise was out of their hands. Webb casts his mind back to the lunch where BBC commissioning editor for comedy Cheryl Taylor told them that their show wouldn’t get another series: “She talked for about 40 minutes about, ‘Various other projects that you might be interested in and where do you want to go from here,’ and blah-blah-blah, while I sat there like an eight-year-old boy. Finally she said, ‘So what would you like to do?’ And I went, ‘I’d like to do series five of That Mitchell and Webb Look, please.’” They can laugh about it now because (a) getting some sort of punchline out of tricky situations seems to be their default mode; and (b) however awkward that meeting was, it must have only served to sweeten the improbable afterlife that the duo’s sketches have enjoyed. Unless you’ve been living off-grid, you’ll be only too aware that – contrary to what the main channels decided – sketch comedy didn’t die. It just moved to YouTube, Facebook and TikTok, where you let the algorithms make you laugh all day. And amid the surfeit of new young comics armed merely with a phone, some editing software and a few funny ideas, there is a delicious twist: it turns out that several sketches from That Mitchell and Webb Look didn’t just fit this new world, they portended it. It’s not uncommon, in 2025, to hear someone respond to some impenetrable but significant statistic by explaining “That’s Numberwang!” – an allusion to the demented maths quiz depicted on the show. Another sketch has offered one of the most popular internet memes of the decade. In an era of confirmation bias and curated news, no newer sketch has felt quite as resonant as the sight of Mitchell’s SS officer turning to Webb’s Nazi colleague and asking, “Hans, are we the baddies?” The thrilling novelty of being, in some way, modern, isn’t lost on Mitchell – who, as a child, used to enjoy pretending to be “an elderly king” and remembers “feeling pleased” when he realised that if he didn’t dry his hands after washing them, they “resembled an old man’s hands”. Mitchell says that the first “incontrovertible” evidence that one of the duo’s sketches had re-entered the culture came with the ongoing love for their 2008 “Watch the Football!” sketch, in which we see fast-cut footage of an excitable host pacing around an empty stadium declaiming that “coming up midweek, the giants of Charlton play host to the titans of Ipswich, making them both seem normal-sized”. Earlier this year, Sky Sports even created its own pastiche. “I was delighted,” smiles Mitchell, “because they’d clearly watched the first one carefully. We didn’t have footage of matches on ours because we couldn’t clear any. But they could and they chose not to because they were trying to make it exactly like our one!” Still, despite this second life for their creations, when the duo received a call from Ian Katz from Channel 4 offering to revive their sketch show, their response was gratitude, if not outright shock. And tempting as it was to pick up where they left off in 2010, the changing comedy landscape that had played a part in bringing That Mitchell and Webb Look to an end needed to be reflected in its successor. So joining the team in the planning stages of Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping was comic Stevie Martin, who went viral with her sketch Verifying That You’re Not a Robot – a gloriously manic display immediately recognisable to anyone who has been barred from accessing their details online unless they can successfully click on all the squares that feature traffic lights. Completing the writers’ room with her were Kiell-Smith Bynoe (Ghosts, Stath Lets Flats) and relative newcomers Krystal Evans and Lara Ricote. Is it scary having to think of funny things in front of two comics like Mitchell and Webb, who helped shape your own comedy? “It certainly would be if they weren’t aware of that,” says Martin. Ricote agrees, noting that the pair were proactive in breaking the ice. “Robert would always say a really bad idea at the beginning – like some embarrassing thing you shouldn’t say. And from there, we were like, ‘That’s great. Now we can kind of say whatever we like.’” Whatever picture they have in their minds of a national treasure, Mitchell and Webb are in no rush to insert themselves into it. At 51 and 52, they’re still young enough to find themselves straining for the right words when confronted by their own heroes. Webb visibly clenches at the memory of meeting Rowan Atkinson a few years ago. “I just gushed,” he recalls. “I said, ‘This is amazing!’ and it was awful because he’s a very shy person. And I’m going, ‘Because I used to watch you when I was young and then…’ And he went, ‘And then you grew up.’” “Well, at least you say things,” reassures Mitchell, “I just go very quiet. Afterwards, I realise I didn’t say anything nice. Years ago – and this is still one of the most amazing things that ever happened to me – I was sitting in a pub in Kilburn and Michael Palin came in and, it turns out, knew who I was. So he came over to say hello, but I didn’t find an organised way of saying, ‘How nice of you to come over and say hello’ and ‘I’m a huge admirer of your work and the way you conduct yourself in the world’” – Mitchell is now sounding positively anguished – “and if I could have said those things, however eggy that would have been to say them, I would have felt… well, at least he knows that’s what I think about him.” Palin and Atkinson, of course, are two entertainers who got their start in sketch comedy, but soon moved on to other things. While Mitchell and Webb have seized other opportunities along the way – be it bestselling memoirs (Webb’s How Not to Be a Boy) or TV (Mitchell has chalked up more than 160 episodes of Would I Lie to You? and is set to film a second series of detective dramedy Ludwig) – you suspect that sketches are the main space into which they decant their affection for each other. Aged 17, still grieving the death of his mother from cancer, Webb applied to Cambridge University with the specific intention of finding a comedy partner. Unbeknown to him, Mitchell had arrived there with the same plan. By the time the pair set eyes on each other, Webb enjoyed a certain amount of status as the vice-president of Footlights. Reliving the moment he first saw Mitchell perform, he told Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs: “I’ve only had to be smart in my career once, and that was the decision not to compete with [him] but instead to capture him and take some of his goodness for myself.” Lest there be any doubt that this was the comedy equivalent of love at first sight, head to YouTube. You can actually see a glimmer of this burgeoning relationship in Pissed Grandmasters, a Footlights sketch filmed in 1995. In it, the duo play two inebriated chess players. While Webb looks like he’s come straight from a Suede gig, Mitchell doesn’t look a day over 14. It’s cute, but you can see why the middle-aged versions sitting before me might feel somewhat more comfortable in their own skin. Between then and now, they’ve been best men at each other’s weddings. At the home Mitchell shares with Only Connect presenter and professional poker player Victoria Coren Mitchell and their two daughters, screen time is spent swerving comedy because “it can feel a bit too much like a busman’s holiday”. Instead, he leans towards cosy crime. Watching him momentarily drift into a reverie as he says, “Imagine discovering a Morse you haven’t seen before…” might be the most David Mitchell thing you’ll ever see in your life. Meanwhile, at the house of Webb and his wife, writer and comedian Abigail Burgess, dinner happens “in front of the telly”, where Frasier, Friends and Derry Girls have been a hit with their daughters. But Peep Show remains a no-go because “there’s just too much me having sex with the camera”. And what will their families make of Mitchell and Webb Version 2.0? Well, they haven’t seen it yet. But I have – and, having watched the entire series, I’m happy to report that each episode yields a generous return in belly laughs. Incoming highlights include a imagined re-enactment of the moment Björn from Abba (Webb) hands Agnetha (Stevie Martin) the just-written lyrics to Thank You for the Music and she sees that they start with the lines, “I’m nothing special/In fact I’m a bit of a bore”; an alien race called The Goom who, in a desperate attempt to avert their imminent extinction, have pooled their depleted resources into making a teenage musical called High School Faux Pas; and, perhaps best of the lot, the therapist sketch, in which Webb’s patient comes to the realisation that his therapist, played by Mitchell, is relieving him of £300 a week so that he can offload responses that consist of variations on “That must be difficult”. Given that Webb has had experience of the therapy process and Mitchell has thus far avoided it, is it fair to surmise that the sketch might be viewed as a vessel for his suspicion that a lot of therapy might, for a minority of its practitioners, be a grift with no apparent end? “Well, of course it helps to talk about things,” says Webb, somewhat carefully, “but what I sometimes wonder is if it ever just comes to a point where you should just f***ing get over it – would they actually tell you to do that?” And besides, what could be more therapeutic than laughter itself? Back in 2009, Mitchell said he stuck by his childhood belief that “comedy, humour, is the cleverest, the highest human art, the greatest human achievement”. But now he can’t help noticing that not everyone agrees. “As a culture, we have to pretend it’s easy and trivial.” Webb: “…which is how you end up in a situation where Groundhog Day doesn’t get a single Oscar nomination and The Crying Game – which obviously isn’t s**t but isn’t Groundhog Day, one of the best films ever – gets loads.” Mitchell cites a section in one of the last episodes of Ben Elton’s Shakespeare sitcom Upstart Crow, in which Elton decides to forego any laughs and go for a moment of pure sadness, as Shakespeare (played by Mitchell) receives news of his son’s death: “When it ran, everyone said that it was brilliant and the thing they liked most about it was that ending. God knows we take praise where we can get it, but what you want to say is that we did joke after joke – tightly scripted episodes where a Shakespearean story is used to tell a different sitcom story. And that’s really, really difficult! What isn’t difficult is just a solemn bit on the end where you go, ‘It’s sad that a child died.’ That, comparatively speaking, is a piece of piss!” One wonders what a real psychotherapist – as opposed to the funny pretend one in their sketch show – might have to say about this militant aversion to seriousness. But David Mitchell, in full flight, is past caring. “As my wife once put it, there’s no funnier phrase than ‘This is no laughing matter’. The presence of seriousness means that there’s a big laugh somewhere, and that’s where, as comedians, you’re naturally tempted to go.” Based on this return, long may Mitchell and Webb continue to go there.
David Mitchell and Robert Webb talk reviving their sketch show and why Peep Show is a no-go for Webb’s daughters
Mitchell and Webb on their unlikely internet afterlife, new collaborators, and why seriousness is just a setup for the next big laugh.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Hellos have barely been traded before David Mitchell and Robert Webb race straight to the point. "Have you seen it? You have?" asks Webb. It’s flattering, and a little endearing, how keenly they seek out feedback for their return to sketch comedy (of which, more later). But for now, walking into the sunlit loft of a photographer’s studio in north London, seeing this pair seated side by side – and visibly delighting in each other’s company – is as low-key reassuring as the sight of a salt grinder next to a peppermill, or Anita Dobson linking arms with Brian May. Mitchell in corduroy and wool; Webb in more weather-appropriate T-shirt and shorts. Side by side is still how we usually see these two comics in our mind’s eye, thanks to reruns of That Mitchell and Webb Look and Peep Show (Mitchell: "a sitcom so perfect that it scuppered all chances of us ever writing one ourselves"). In TV terms, though, the last time we glimpsed them in the same room was in 2021, when Mitchell sat in the front row of the Strictly Come Dancing studio audience and cheered on Webb as he danced to The Muppet Show theme tune dressed as Kermit the Frog. At that point, 11 years had elapsed since their sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Look ran its course, a decision that the pair are keen to emphasise was out of their hands. Webb casts his mind back to the lunch where BBC commissioning editor for comedy Cheryl Taylor told them that their show wouldn’t get another series: "She talked for about 40 minutes about, 'Various other projects that you might be interested in and where do you want to go from here,' and blah-blah-blah, while I sat there like an eight-year-old boy. Finally she said, 'So what would you like to do?' And I went, 'I’d like to do series five of That Mitchell and Webb Look, please.'" They can laugh about it now because (a) getting some sort of punchline out of tricky situations seems to be their default mode; and (b) however awkward that meeting was, it must have only served to sweeten the improbable afterlife that the duo’s sketches have enjoyed. Unless you’ve been living off-grid, you’ll be only too aware that – contrary to what the main channels decided – sketch comedy didn’t die. It just moved to YouTube, Facebook and TikTok, where you let the algorithms make you laugh all day. And amid the surfeit of new young comics armed merely with a phone, some editing software and a few funny ideas, there is a delicious twist: it turns out that several sketches from That Mitchell and Webb Look didn’t just fit this new world, they portended it. It’s not uncommon, in 2025, to hear someone respond to some impenetrable but significant statistic by explaining "That’s Numberwang!" – an allusion to the demented maths quiz depicted on the show. Another sketch has offered one of the most popular internet memes of the decade. In an era of confirmation bias and curated news, no newer sketch has felt quite as resonant as the sight of Mitchell’s SS officer turning to Webb’s Nazi colleague and asking, "Hans, are we the baddies?" The thrilling novelty of being, in some way, modern, isn’t lost on Mitchell – who, as a child, used to enjoy pretending to be "an elderly king" and remembers "feeling pleased" when he realised that if he didn’t dry his hands after washing them, they "resembled an old man’s hands". Mitchell says that the first "incontrovertible" evidence that one of the duo’s sketches had re-entered the culture came with the ongoing love for their 2008 "Watch the Football!" sketch, in which we see fast-cut footage of an excitable host pacing around an empty stadium declaiming that "coming up midweek, the giants of Charlton play host to the titans of Ipswich, making them both seem normal-sized". Earlier this year, Sky Sports even created its own pastiche. "I was delighted," smiles Mitchell, "because they’d clearly watched the first one carefully. We didn’t have footage of matches on ours because we couldn’t clear any. But they could and they chose not to because they were trying to make it exactly like our one!" Still, despite this second life for their creations, when the duo received a call from Ian Katz from Channel 4 offering to revive their sketch show, their response was gratitude, if not outright shock. And tempting as it was to pick up where they left off in 2010, the changing comedy landscape that had played a part in bringing That Mitchell and Webb Look to an end needed to be reflected in its successor. So joining the team in the planning stages of Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping was comic Stevie Martin, who went viral with her sketch Verifying That You’re Not a Robot – a gloriously manic display immediately recognisable to anyone who has been barred from accessing their details online unless they can successfully click on all the squares that feature traffic lights. Completing the writers’ room with her were Kiell-Smith Bynoe (Ghosts, Stath Lets Flats) and relative newcomers Krystal Evans and Lara Ricote. Is it scary having to think of funny things in front of two comics like Mitchell and Webb, who helped shape your own comedy? "It certainly would be if they weren’t aware of that," says Martin. Ricote agrees, noting that the pair were proactive in breaking the ice. "Robert would always say a really bad idea at the beginning – like some embarrassing thing you shouldn’t say. And from there, we were like, 'That’s great. Now we can kind of say whatever we like.'" Whatever picture they have in their minds of a national treasure, Mitchell and Webb are in no rush to insert themselves into it. At 51 and 52, they’re still young enough to find themselves straining for the right words when confronted by their own heroes. Webb visibly clenches at the memory of meeting Rowan Atkinson a few years ago. "I just gushed," he recalls. "I said, 'This is amazing!' and it was awful because he’s a very shy person. And I’m going, 'Because I used to watch you when I was young and then…' And he went, 'And then you grew up.'" "Well, at least you say things," reassures Mitchell, "I just go very quiet. Afterwards, I realise I didn’t say anything nice. Years ago – and this is still one of the most amazing things that ever happened to me – I was sitting in a pub in Kilburn and Michael Palin came in and, it turns out, knew who I was. So he came over to say hello, but I didn’t find an organised way of saying, 'How nice of you to come over and say hello' and 'I’m a huge admirer of your work and the way you conduct yourself in the world'" – Mitchell is now sounding positively anguished – "and if I could have said those things, however eggy that would have been to say them, I would have felt… well, at least he knows that’s what I think about him." View oEmbed on the source website Palin and Atkinson, of course, are two entertainers who got their start in sketch comedy, but soon moved on to other things. While Mitchell and Webb have seized other opportunities along the way – be it bestselling memoirs (Webb’s How Not to Be a Boy) or TV (Mitchell has chalked up more than 160 episodes of Would I Lie to You? and is set to film a second series of detective dramedy Ludwig) – you suspect that sketches are the main space into which they decant their affection for each other. Aged 17, still grieving the death of his mother from cancer, Webb applied to Cambridge University with the specific intention of finding a comedy partner. Unbeknown to him, Mitchell had arrived there with the same plan. By the time the pair set eyes on each other, Webb enjoyed a certain amount of status as the vice-president of Footlights. Reliving the moment he first saw Mitchell perform, he told Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs: "I’ve only had to be smart in my career once, and that was the decision not to compete with [him] but instead to capture him and take some of his goodness for myself." Lest there be any doubt that this was the comedy equivalent of love at first sight, head to YouTube. You can actually see a glimmer of this burgeoning relationship in Pissed Grandmasters, a Footlights sketch filmed in 1995. In it, the duo play two inebriated chess players. While Webb looks like he’s come straight from a Suede gig, Mitchell doesn’t look a day over 14. It’s cute, but you can see why the middle-aged versions sitting before me might feel somewhat more comfortable in their own skin. Between then and now, they’ve been best men at each other’s weddings. At the home Mitchell shares with Only Connect presenter and professional poker player Victoria Coren Mitchell and their two daughters, screen time is spent swerving comedy because "it can feel a bit too much like a busman’s holiday". Instead, he leans towards cosy crime. Watching him momentarily drift into a reverie as he says, "Imagine discovering a Morse you haven’t seen before…" might be the most David Mitchell thing you’ll ever see in your life. Meanwhile, at the house of Webb and his wife, writer and comedian Abigail Burgess, dinner happens "in front of the telly", where Frasier, Friends and Derry Girls have been a hit with their daughters. But Peep Show remains a no-go because "there’s just too much me having sex with the camera". And what will their families make of Mitchell and Webb Version 2.0? Well, they haven’t seen it yet. But I have – and, having watched the entire series, I’m happy to report that each episode yields a generous return in belly laughs. Incoming highlights include a imagined re-enactment of the moment Björn from Abba (Webb) hands Agnetha (Stevie Martin) the just-written lyrics to Thank You for the Music and she sees that they start with the lines, "I’m nothing special/In fact I’m a bit of a bore"; an alien race called The Goom who, in a desperate attempt to avert their imminent extinction, have pooled their depleted resources into making a teenage musical called High School Faux Pas; and, perhaps best of the lot, the therapist sketch, in which Webb’s patient comes to the realisation that his therapist, played by Mitchell, is relieving him of £300 a week so that he can offload responses that consist of variations on "That must be difficult". Given that Webb has had experience of the therapy process and Mitchell has thus far avoided it, is it fair to surmise that the sketch might be viewed as a vessel for his suspicion that a lot of therapy might, for a minority of its practitioners, be a grift with no apparent end? "Well, of course it helps to talk about things," says Webb, somewhat carefully, "but what I sometimes wonder is if it ever just comes to a point where you should just f***ing get over it – would they actually tell you to do that?" And besides, what could be more therapeutic than laughter itself? Back in 2009, Mitchell said he stuck by his childhood belief that "comedy, humour, is the cleverest, the highest human art, the greatest human achievement". But now he can’t help noticing that not everyone agrees. "As a culture, we have to pretend it’s easy and trivial." Webb: "…which is how you end up in a situation where Groundhog Day doesn’t get a single Oscar nomination and The Crying Game – which obviously isn’t s**t but isn’t Groundhog Day, one of the best films ever – gets loads." Mitchell cites a section in one of the last episodes of Ben Elton’s Shakespeare sitcom Upstart Crow, in which Elton decides to forego any laughs and go for a moment of pure sadness, as Shakespeare (played by Mitchell) receives news of his son’s death: "When it ran, everyone said that it was brilliant and the thing they liked most about it was that ending. God knows we take praise where we can get it, but what you want to say is that we did joke after joke – tightly scripted episodes where a Shakespearean story is used to tell a different sitcom story. And that’s really, really difficult! What isn’t difficult is just a solemn bit on the end where you go, 'It’s sad that a child died.' That, comparatively speaking, is a piece of piss!" One wonders what a real psychotherapist – as opposed to the funny pretend one in their sketch show – might have to say about this militant aversion to seriousness. But David Mitchell, in full flight, is past caring. "As my wife once put it, there’s no funnier phrase than 'This is no laughing matter'. The presence of seriousness means that there’s a big laugh somewhere, and that’s where, as comedians, you’re naturally tempted to go." Based on this return, long may Mitchell and Webb continue to go there. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – <a class="_mizu194a _1ah31bk5 _ra3xnqa1 _128m1bk5 _1cvmnqa1 _4davt94y _4bfu1r31 _1hms8stv _ajmmnqa1 _vchhusvi _syaz14q2 _ect41gqc _1a3b1r31 _4fpr8stv _5goinqa1 _f8pj14q2 _9oik1r31 _1bnxglyw _jf4cnqa1 _30l314q2 _1nrm1r31 _c2waglyw _1iohnqa1 _9h8h16c2 _1053w7te _1ienw7te _n0fxw7te _1vhvg3x0" title="https://www.buysubscriptions.com/print/radio-times-magazine-subscription" href="https://www.buysubscriptions.com/print/radio-times-magazine-subscription" data-renderer-mark="true" data-is-router-link="false" data-testid="link-with-safety">subscribe here. Check out more of our Comedy 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.
'Why should I apologise for being working class?'
Pinter protégé, soap star, Rivals heart-throb, Bafta winner, rat-catcher, Lego lover – Danny Dyer is the master of all he touches and never fails to surprise
Add Mr Bigstuff to your watchlist We all think we know what it’s like to spend an hour in the company of Danny Dyer, but sometimes things don’t pan out the way you expect. On this sunny Friday morning, the Dyer that greets Radio Times seems distracted and, at times, prickly. Immediately after our chat, he’ll be boarding a train to go and watch Oasis opening their feverishly anticipated reunion tour. “It’s a shame it’s up in Cardiff,” he says. “It’s a bit of a mission for me, but I know Noel Gallagher and he invited me up there, so I thought, ‘I’ve got to see what the vibe is.’” The vibe, as it turns out, will be just fine. Later that night, Dyer’s pal, wrestler and Two Doors Down actor Graeme “Grado” Stevely, will post a selfie of the pair of them at the gig, and those images will end up on the websites of all the usual tabloids – more of the clickbait that seems to be getting him down on the morning of our encounter. “I find with journalism now, what even is it any more? It’s getting people to click a button and then you go on it and go, ‘Actually, that headline’s nothing like the article.’” It’s only natural, listening to the grouches of this weary national treasure – and at a mere 47 years old already a grandfather of three – to show sympathy, perhaps even want to help in some way. But, of course, you can’t control the internet any more than he can. So, what to do? Try and make our encounter sound tedious beyond belief? Well, the truth is you have to really go out of your way to make a Danny Dyer interview boring. Case in point: within seconds, he’s bringing his unfiltered energy to bear upon another aspect of online life, the algorithmically-tailored stream of content he finds it almost impossible to resist. Popping up in his feed the other day was a video of a rat catcher and his dog. “A geezer with a Jack Russell, and there was a rat stuck behind a television set. He comes in and his little dog can’t wait to go and get this f***ing rat.” That this is the online content he’s being served up is most likely down to Dyer’s own search history and the fact that the house he shares with his wife Jo and two of their three children backs onto Epping Forest and all the little cockney mice that live there. “I’ve become quite adept now at catching them. They can’t resist peanut butter. Sometimes they’ve got a little mate helping them, holding up the trap while they lick the peanut butter off, but if you put it in the sweet spot, they can’t help their little selves. And so I’ll kill them and chuck them in the forest so the foxes can have a little munch, instead of eating my grandkids’ nappies out of my dustbin.” Rodents to the left of him, tabloid scrutiny to the right, and here he is stuck in the middle with the man from Radio Times. When I put it to Dyer that he sounds sick of his own voice, he concedes the point – “a little bit, mate, you know?” – and in doing so, finally relaxes. You might say he’s having a moment. But the truth is that his “moment” hasn’t abated since 2022, when he left EastEnders, uncertain if there would be a place for him on our screens as anyone other than Queen Vic landlord Mick Carter. But the past 18 months have seen him harvest acclaim (and much female adoration) for his turn as Freddie Jones in Rivals on Disney+, for his Channel 4 documentary How to Be a Man and a lead role in Nick Love’s latest flick, Marching Powder. Then there’s also the matter of the Bafta he won back in May for best male performance in a comedy in Mr Bigstuff. Right now, it’s the latter that’s foremost in his thoughts. This week sees the return of Ryan Sampson’s chalk-and-cheese sitcom about the chaos that ensues when carpet salesman Glen Campbell – played by Sampson – has to deal with the sudden arrival of his estranged brother Lee into his life. As anyone who remembers Dyer’s 2018 “trotters up” Brexit tirade against David Cameron will attest, it boggles the mind to think that Mr Bigstuff is Dyer’s first major comedy role. View Green Video on the source website Perhaps surprisingly, he’s not a fan of “the canned laughter type of comedy of my youth – for me Only Fools and Horses doesn’t really work now”. But give him Bill Hicks or Ricky Gervais, stand-up comedy that “doesn’t give a f***”, and he’s happy. He still doesn’t think that Gervais, or anyone else, for that matter, has yet to match The Office – “this character that’s so obsessed with himself that he doesn’t realise what a dickhead he is.” However, by the end of the second series of Mr Bigstuff, there’s every chance that we might be speaking about Dyer in comparably hallowed terms. The first episode sets out its stall with what might be one of the all-time great establishing scenes – Dyer as self-styled recycling vigilante issuing instructions at the neighbours via a karaoke machine between bursts of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana. Sampson wrote the scene imagining what it might be like if Clint Eastwood had fallen on hard times on an Essex housing estate, a high watermark of silliness maintained by a succession of twists and turns, which include Glen’s fiancé Kirsty (Harriet Webb) trying to address his erectile dysfunction with a little Supernanny cosplay, and, perhaps best of all, a cameo from a sexually rapacious Rula Lenska that concludes with Lee coughing up a single red pubic hair. “Obviously we didn’t ask Rula for that,” explains Sampson. “That came from our make-up artist, Sam, who kindly snipped off a lock of her hair when the moment required it.” If the only thing that a comedy does is make you laugh, then job done. But for anyone who knows a little about Dyer’s life, it’s impossible to miss passing similarities to his own story. The fact that Glen and Lee’s father isn’t dead but living a secret life has echoes of Dyer’s own childhood when, aged nine, he discovered that his dad had a whole other family in Paddington. There are other points of intersection, too. If you watched How to Be a Man, you’ll know that, as a boy, Dyer struggled to gel with his more “feminine” brother, Tony. In the documentary we see a contrite Dyer tell him: “Never in a million years would I have had the bollocks to pick up a doll… It’s just not what boys do, you know? So I look back and think, ‘F***ing good for you, bruv.’” And perhaps the most touching moment in series two of Mr Bigstuff comes when Lee explains to Glen that even within the same family, people can have very different experiences of the same parent. And that’s OK: “Me and Dad, we’re the same. But he loves you. Do you know why I know that? Because I f***ing love you. You dickhead.” While Dyer takes the compliment, he adjusts the anglepoise onto the power in Sampson’s writing rather than anything that went on his own family. That’s hardly surprising given that it was Dyer who inspired Sampson to create Mr Bigstuff. The two met back in 2013 while filming in Bulgaria for ITV2’s Roman Empire comedy Plebs. Dyer’s arrival in Sofia caused something of a commotion thanks to his starring role as football hooligan Tommy Johnson in 2004’s The Football Factory, which was a huge hit in eastern Europe. Upon arrival, Dyer recalls the shock that greeted cast and crew as leaflets directed at Sampson, who is gay, were distributed, advising men not to hold hands in public. Dyer used his profile to ensure that no one in their party came to any trouble. “I got us into some nightclubs where the bouncers looked after us,” he recalls. The affection in which Sampson and Dyer continue to hold each other was evident during Dyer’s Bafta acceptance speech, which he used to call a tearful Sampson “one of the best actors this country’s ever produced”, adding “he’s never done the same thing twice, which is not something that I can say”. Of course, if the subtext of that joke were true, it’s almost certain that Dyer wouldn’t be enjoying his current exalted status. John Simm, Dyer’s friend and co-star in the pair’s breakthrough movie Human Traffic, says you underestimate Dyer’s versatility at your peril. “This idea that ‘range’ is what makes you a great actor is a bit simplistic,” he tells me, “Obviously you see a lot of Danny in any role he plays, but put Danny anywhere – theatre, comedy, soap, drama – and time and time again, he delivers.” Famously, Dyer was Harold Pinter’s muse during the latter years of his life, starring in three of his plays. Dyer says he had no idea who Pinter was before the Nobel-winning playwright invited him, aged 22, to audition for his play Celebration. At the end of its run, the cast presented Pinter with a signed poster. The message Dyer scrawled on it – to Pinter’s delight – was, “Harold, you’re the f***ing bollocks”. The continuing reverence in which Dyer holds Pinter is evident in his response when I ask him whether he has ever been approached about appearing on the New Year’s Honours list. “Have I f***! Harold was my hero and turned down a knighthood. He was anti-establishment as well, so I don’t think it’s for me.” If he hasn’t always been able to choose jobs that look good on his CV, he puts that down to the need to provide for the family he has had since he was 18, when he became father to his daughter Dani – winner of Love Island in 2018 and now a TV presenter herself. He briefly earned the nickname “DVD Danny”, because his stock-in-trade had become straight-to-DVD documentaries about hard men that played up to the working-class “geezer” stereotype. Not high art, but in getting him on the property ladder, they served a purpose. “Can the class thing be used against you?” he ponders. “Of course it can.” I tell Dyer that it was surprising to hear Louis Theroux describe him in a recent interview as “unapologetically working class”, and he tersely concurs. “You’re right. Why should I apologise or even think about it? It’s just who I am.” Though he’s itching to return to theatre, Dyer maintains there are some things he can never imagine himself doing. Although his Rivals co-star Alex Hassell is trying to convince him to do Shakespeare, he says, “whatever I do next, it won’t be f***ing Shakespeare, I’ll tell you that now. Maybe when I’m pushing 60 I’ll have a go at it, but at the moment, not for me.” In any case, he thinks that the pressure-cooker thriller he recently shot in Ireland “might turn out to be my Hamlet”. Rather like Robert Redford in All Is Lost, Dyer is the sole character in Three Quick Breaths, playing a football agent racing against the clock to land one last payday for his star player before his own life and his player’s reputation implodes. “Fifteen pages of dialogue a day. Crazy. We shot it in Dublin. I just sat in the hotel room with the script. Went crazy by the end. I believe they went to Gary Oldman first. They told me he wanted £2 million just to read it. But I was next in line, which I’m chuffed with. If you go Gary Oldman and I’m next, it’s because I’m obviously cheaper. I’m happy to be a cheaper version of Gary Oldman.” Dyer hasn’t had time to think about his impending 48th birthday on 24 July. But it will almost certainly be spent in Bristol where filming is under way for season two of Rivals. “I can’t reveal much,” he says, “but what I will say is that we’ve got no issues with the old second album syndrome. I’ve been blessed with a lovely character. He’s not the lead and he doesn’t need to be the lead, same as Katherine [Parkinson who plays his love interest, romance author Lizzie Vereker]. And yes, we do get a bit more Freddie and Lizzie this time around.” The sun shines through the skylight, prompting Dyer to reach for his shades. The clouds have also dispersed on his mood. He knows that when he gets to Cardiff tonight, he’ll have a blast, but right now, the greatest luxury he can think of is a week or two at home without the need to learn any lines. The last time that happened was back in 2020 when lockdown hit and he quickly needed something to occupy his “nutty brain”. Taking matters into his own hands, he bought a Lego Hogwarts Castle complete with classrooms, towers, Hagrid’s hut, five boats and Whomping Willow. Then he moved on to “a Lamborghini, which you assembled from, I don’t know, 35 bags...” And so now, his happy place is the loft where he dons circular LED magnifying spectacles designed for precision modelling or, as he calls it, “building shit”. “I recently built a library with staircases and little books in it and little lamps on the wall, but I f***ing broke the roof as I put it on. I was fuming.” Undeterred, as soon as he wraps on Rivals, he’s ready to embark on his next project: “A little 1940s train carriage with leather seats, with a conveyor belt that makes it look like the train’s moving.” Adorable, right? And the train sounds nice, too. 'It nearly killed me' Mr Bigstuff's Ryan Sampson on the perils of writing under pressure How did it feel when Danny won a Bafta for best male performance in a comedy for Mr Bigstuff and thanked you in his acceptance speech? When he won, we just hugged each other and I could feel us both shaking. I feel like he’s become a big brother character to me. People don’t know what he’s really like. He’s very, very loving and protective. I’m nervous and twitchy, and he’s understanding of that and wants to make sure that I’m all right. The series is loosely based on your family. How did they react to the first series? It’s based on elements from my family — I’ve laced into it quite a lot of little references to our life. So in series one, there’s an egg cup that their mum always really liked, and it’s the actual egg cup that my mum had, this weird little monk one. I was nervous about how they’d take it because sometimes the things that I’m writing can be a little bit confronting, but I think they understand that my way of getting my feelings out is by writing about them. What can we expect from series two? I only had four and a half months to write it because I was shooting Brassic, and you need a lot longer. So I had to write all day, every day, every weekend, for months. You don’t want to show you can do it in half the time but I nearly killed myself doing it. I really did. It’s not a good advert, is it? But weirdly, this season is definitely better. It’s significantly madder. Every episode has got this big, insane bit. I feel like I’m leaning into what I find funny, weird and strange. What was it like being back on set with Danny? It was a dream because this time I wasn’t as nervous, whereas last time I was s***ting myself. When you’ve written something and you’re filming it, there are thousands of things that could go wrong every day, and everyone’s trying to spin all the plates all the time. But coming back to a second series, it was fun instead of just being this terrifying rollercoaster. Did you watch Danny in Rivals? I watched it all. I think he and Katherine Parkinson stole the show. There are a lot of characters who are sexy and rakish, whereas their two characters are genuinely lovable. Some actors, it’s like they’ve got no skin. Emotion just permeates them and they’re being real in the moment. When you’ve got two actors who can do that, it’s magic. And have there been any conversations about a third season of Mr Bigstuff? I’m already coming up with ideas. We’ve got a kind of trajectory of where it goes. But we’ll see! ABBY ROBINSON
Danny Dyer: ‘My hero Harold Pinter turned down a knighthood – and I’d do the same’
Pinter protégé, soap star, Rivals heart-throb, BAFTA winner, rat-catcher, Lego lover... Danny Dyer is the master of all he touches and never fails to surprise.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. We all think we know what it’s like to spend an hour in the company of Danny Dyer, but sometimes things don’t pan out the way you expect. On this sunny Friday morning, the Dyer that greets Radio Times seems distracted and, at times, prickly. Immediately after our chat, he’ll be boarding a train to go and watch Oasis opening their feverishly anticipated reunion tour. “It’s a shame it’s up in Cardiff,” he says. “It’s a bit of a mission for me, but I know Noel Gallagher and he invited me up there, so I thought, ‘I’ve got to see what the vibe is.’” The vibe, as it turns out, will be just fine. Later that night, Dyer’s pal, wrestler and Two Doors Down actor Graeme “Grado” Stevely, will post a selfie of the pair of them at the gig, and those images will end up on the websites of all the usual tabloids – more of the clickbait that seems to be getting him down on the morning of our encounter. “I find with journalism now, what even is it any more? It’s getting people to click a button and then you go on it and go, ‘Actually, that headline’s nothing like the article.’” It’s only natural, listening to the grouches of this weary national treasure – and at a mere 47 years old already a grandfather of three – to show sympathy, perhaps even want to help in some way. But, of course, you can’t control the internet any more than he can. So, what to do? Try and make our encounter sound tedious beyond belief? Well, the truth is you have to really go out of your way to make a Danny Dyer interview boring. Case in point: within seconds, he’s bringing his unfiltered energy to bear upon another aspect of online life, the algorithmically-tailored stream of content he finds it almost impossible to resist. Popping up in his feed the other day was a video of a rat catcher and his dog. “A geezer with a Jack Russell, and there was a rat stuck behind a television set. He comes in and his little dog can’t wait to go and get this f***ing rat.” That this is the online content he’s being served up is most likely down to Dyer’s own search history and the fact that the house he shares with his wife Jo and two of their three children backs onto Epping Forest and all the little cockney mice that live there. “I’ve become quite adept now at catching them. They can’t resist peanut butter. Sometimes they’ve got a little mate helping them, holding up the trap while they lick the peanut butter off, but if you put it in the sweet spot, they can’t help their little selves. And so I’ll kill them and chuck them in the forest so the foxes can have a little munch, instead of eating my grandkids’ nappies out of my dustbin.” Rodents to the left of him, tabloid scrutiny to the right, and here he is stuck in the middle with the man from Radio Times. When I put it to Dyer that he sounds sick of his own voice, he concedes the point – “a little bit, mate, you know?” – and in doing so, finally relaxes. You might say he’s having a moment. But the truth is that his “moment” hasn’t abated since 2022, when he left EastEnders, uncertain if there would be a place for him on our screens as anyone other than Queen Vic landlord Mick Carter. But the past 18 months have seen him harvest acclaim (and much female adoration) for his turn as Freddie Jones in Rivals on Disney+, for his Channel 4 documentary How to Be a Man and a lead role in Nick Love’s latest flick, Marching Powder. Then there’s also the matter of the BAFTA he won back in May for best male performance in a comedy in Mr Bigstuff. Right now, it’s the latter that’s foremost in his thoughts. This week sees the return of Ryan Sampson’s chalk-and-cheese sitcom about the chaos that ensues when carpet salesman Glen Campbell – played by Sampson – has to deal with the sudden arrival of his estranged brother Lee into his life. As anyone who remembers Dyer’s 2018 “trotters up” Brexit tirade against David Cameron will attest, it boggles the mind to think that Mr Bigstuff is Dyer’s first major comedy role. Perhaps surprisingly, he’s not a fan of “the canned laughter type of comedy of my youth – for me Only Fools and Horses doesn’t really work now”. But give him Bill Hicks or Ricky Gervais, stand-up comedy that “doesn’t give a f***”, and he’s happy. He still doesn’t think that Gervais, or anyone else, for that matter, has yet to match The Office – “this character that’s so obsessed with himself that he doesn’t realise what a dickhead he is.” However, by the end of the second series of Mr Bigstuff, there’s every chance that we might be speaking about Dyer in comparably hallowed terms. The first episode sets out its stall with what might be one of the all-time great establishing scenes – Dyer as self-styled recycling vigilante issuing instructions at the neighbours via a karaoke machine between bursts of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana. Sampson wrote the scene imagining what it might be like if Clint Eastwood had fallen on hard times on an Essex housing estate, a high watermark of silliness maintained by a succession of twists and turns, which include Glen’s fiancé Kirsty (Harriet Webb) trying to address his erectile dysfunction with a little Supernanny cosplay, and, perhaps best of all, a cameo from a sexually rapacious Rula Lenska that concludes with Lee coughing up a single red pubic hair. “Obviously we didn’t ask Rula for that,” explains Sampson. “That came from our make-up artist, Sam, who kindly snipped off a lock of her hair when the moment required it.” If the only thing that a comedy does is make you laugh, then job done. But for anyone who knows a little about Dyer’s life, it’s impossible to miss passing similarities to his own story. The fact that Glen and Lee’s father isn’t dead but living a secret life has echoes of Dyer’s own childhood when, aged nine, he discovered that his dad had a whole other family in Paddington. There are other points of intersection, too. If you watched How to Be a Man, you’ll know that, as a boy, Dyer struggled to gel with his more “feminine” brother, Tony. In the documentary we see a contrite Dyer tell him: “Never in a million years would I have had the bollocks to pick up a doll… It’s just not what boys do, you know? So I look back and think, ‘F***ing good for you, bruv.’” And perhaps the most touching moment in series two of Mr Bigstuff comes when Lee explains to Glen that even within the same family, people can have very different experiences of the same parent. And that’s OK: “Me and Dad, we’re the same. But he loves you. Do you know why I know that? Because I f***ing love you. You dickhead.” While Dyer takes the compliment, he adjusts the anglepoise onto the power in Sampson’s writing rather than anything that went on his own family. That’s hardly surprising given that it was Dyer who inspired Sampson to create Mr Bigstuff. The two met back in 2013 while filming in Bulgaria for ITV2’s Roman Empire comedy Plebs. Dyer’s arrival in Sofia caused something of a commotion thanks to his starring role as football hooligan Tommy Johnson in 2004’s The Football Factory, which was a huge hit in eastern Europe. Upon arrival, Dyer recalls the shock that greeted cast and crew as leaflets directed at Sampson, who is gay, were distributed, advising men not to hold hands in public. Dyer used his profile to ensure that no one in their party came to any trouble. “I got us into some nightclubs where the bouncers looked after us,” he recalls. The affection in which Sampson and Dyer continue to hold each other was evident during Dyer’s Bafta acceptance speech, which he used to call a tearful Sampson “one of the best actors this country’s ever produced”, adding “he’s never done the same thing twice, which is not something that I can say”. Of course, if the subtext of that joke were true, it’s almost certain that Dyer wouldn’t be enjoying his current exalted status. John Simm, Dyer’s friend and co-star in the pair’s breakthrough movie Human Traffic, says you underestimate Dyer’s versatility at your peril. “This idea that ‘range’ is what makes you a great actor is a bit simplistic,” he tells me, “Obviously you see a lot of Danny in any role he plays, but put Danny anywhere – theatre, comedy, soap, drama – and time and time again, he delivers.” Famously, Dyer was Harold Pinter’s muse during the latter years of his life, starring in three of his plays. Dyer says he had no idea who Pinter was before the Nobel-winning playwright invited him, aged 22, to audition for his play Celebration. At the end of its run, the cast presented Pinter with a signed poster. The message Dyer scrawled on it – to Pinter’s delight – was, “Harold, you’re the f***ing bollocks”. The continuing reverence in which Dyer holds Pinter is evident in his response when I ask him whether he has ever been approached about appearing on the New Year’s Honours list. “Have I f***! Harold was my hero and turned down a knighthood. He was anti-establishment as well, so I don’t think it’s for me.” If he hasn’t always been able to choose jobs that look good on his CV, he puts that down to the need to provide for the family he has had since he was 18, when he became father to his daughter Dani – winner of Love Island in 2018 and now a TV presenter herself. He briefly earned the nickname “DVD Danny”, because his stock-in-trade had become straight-to-DVD documentaries about hard men that played up to the working-class “geezer” stereotype. Not high art, but in getting him on the property ladder, they served a purpose. “Can the class thing be used against you?” he ponders. “Of course it can.” I tell Dyer that it was surprising to hear Louis Theroux describe him in a recent interview as “unapologetically working class”, and he tersely concurs. “You’re right. Why should I apologise or even think about it? It’s just who I am.” Though he’s itching to return to theatre, Dyer maintains there are some things he can never imagine himself doing. Although his Rivals co-star Alex Hassell is trying to convince him to do Shakespeare, he says, “whatever I do next, it won’t be f***ing Shakespeare, I’ll tell you that now. Maybe when I’m pushing 60 I’ll have a go at it, but at the moment, not for me.” In any case, he thinks that the pressure-cooker thriller he recently shot in Ireland “might turn out to be my Hamlet”. Rather like Robert Redford in All Is Lost, Dyer is the sole character in Three Quick Breaths, playing a football agent racing against the clock to land one last payday for his star player before his own life and his player’s reputation implodes. “Fifteen pages of dialogue a day. Crazy. We shot it in Dublin. I just sat in the hotel room with the script. Went crazy by the end. I believe they went to Gary Oldman first. They told me he wanted £2 million just to read it. But I was next in line, which I’m chuffed with. If you go Gary Oldman and I’m next, it’s because I’m obviously cheaper. I’m happy to be a cheaper version of Gary Oldman.” Dyer hasn’t had time to think about his impending 48th birthday on 24 July. But it will almost certainly be spent in Bristol where filming is under way for season two of Rivals. “I can’t reveal much,” he says, “but what I will say is that we’ve got no issues with the old second album syndrome. I’ve been blessed with a lovely character. He’s not the lead and he doesn’t need to be the lead, same as Katherine [Parkinson who plays his love interest, romance author Lizzie Vereker]. And yes, we do get a bit more Freddie and Lizzie this time around.” The sun shines through the skylight, prompting Dyer to reach for his shades. The clouds have also dispersed on his mood. He knows that when he gets to Cardiff tonight, he’ll have a blast, but right now, the greatest luxury he can think of is a week or two at home without the need to learn any lines. The last time that happened was back in 2020 when lockdown hit and he quickly needed something to occupy his “nutty brain”. Taking matters into his own hands, he bought a Lego Hogwarts Castle complete with classrooms, towers, Hagrid’s hut, five boats and Whomping Willow. Then he moved on to “a Lamborghini, which you assembled from, I don’t know, 35 bags...” And so now, his happy place is the loft where he dons circular LED magnifying spectacles designed for precision modelling or, as he calls it, “building shit”. “I recently built a library with staircases and little books in it and little lamps on the wall, but I f***ing broke the roof as I put it on. I was fuming.” Undeterred, as soon as he wraps on Rivals, he’s ready to embark on his next project: “A little 1940s train carriage with leather seats, with a conveyor belt that makes it look like the train’s moving.” Adorable, right? And the train sounds nice, too. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what else is on. 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Lee Mack is Britain’s wittiest man and creator of the longest-running sitcom currently on TV. But is the secret of his success down to comedy genes, the hyperfocus of ADHD – or meditation and sobriety?
Add the new series of Not Going Out to your watchlist “Sorry, everyone! I had a prang!” announces Lee Mack on arrival at the studio where Radio Times is preparing to photograph him. He’s barely late, but by way of proof he unzips his bag and produces his wing mirror, the casualty of a misjudged reverse at his local station. As he explains, on hearing the clunk, he started to leave his details on the windscreen of the other car, only to realise it was his own vehicle he’d damaged. Because this is Lee Mack, mere seconds elapse before he’s exploring the comedic possibilities: in this case, the urban myths of motorists who seem to be doing the right thing, only for those notes to say, “I’m pretending to leave my details so that no one watching thinks I did a runner.” It’s precisely the sort of scenario you can imagine percolating into a future episode of Not Going Out – which returns to BBC1 this week for its 14th series with episode 101. And if the 56-year-old comic is to narrow the gap between his creation and Last of the Summer Wine’s record for sitcom longevity (295 episodes across 31 series), he’ll need to keep replenishing the pot. As it happens, the longer you spend with him, the more you realise that the everyday business of living is a constant source of fresh material. Last August, like millions of others, Mack found himself trying – and ultimately failing – to get tickets for the Oasis reunion gigs, when he realised “the one silver lining to this could be an episode about me trying to get tickets.” The result, four episodes into the new run, is Oasis, which finds Mack’s fictional namesake in the virtual queue to buy tickets for the Wembley shows. Desperate for the loo, Lee asks his wife Lucy (Sally Bretton) to make sure she doesn’t refresh the browser while he’s gone. Much of what ensues is exquisitely guessable, a gag-studded rumination on mid-life nostalgia for our carefree youth – and, in this case, a chance for Mack to pick up a guitar and unleash his preposterous approximation of the Liam Gallagher bellow. Given that Oasis were still three years off calling it a day when the first episode of Not Going Out aired, it’s a surprise to find Mack anything but complacent about the reception that awaits the new episodes. In the past, he hasn’t been afraid to reinvent the show in order to mirror the changes in his own 20-year marriage to Tara, with whom he has three children, Arlo, Louie and Millie. Hence what started as a cross between Men Behaving Badly and a British Seinfeld became a more traditional family sitcom. And now it’s all change once again. With the kids having flown the nest, the opening episode finds Lee and Lucy viewing new properties. But anyone expecting a slide into cosy dotage should think again. Lee’s attempt to repel a competing house viewer results in a misunderstanding over a missing watch, a Stannah stairlift face-off with the vendor’s mother and a bag of poo. The result is a riot of manic farce that feels like a hilarious, heartfelt love letter to Fawlty Towers. “Obviously, that’s music to my ears,” he says, more in relief than delight, “I still think that Fawlty Towers is the best ever studio sitcom, which, for me, is a separate thing to a sitcom made without an audience. The thing you always hear people saying about studio sitcoms is ‘they’re so 70s’. But then you ask people to name their favourite British sitcoms and they’re all from the 70s: Fawlty Towers! Dad’s Army! Steptoe and Son!” Mack has long passed the point where he needs to keep making Not Going Out in order to maintain his profile. With Would I Lie to You? and, latterly, The 1% Club ensuring his almost constant presence on our screens, it must be tempting to relinquish the long months in the shed at the bottom of his garden where he and co-writer Daniel Peak plot each episode. “But then again”, he says, “there’s nothing I love better than writing jokes”. The die was cast early. Mack grew up in Southport. His parents were pub landlords, and although they separated when he was 12, he doesn’t recall being affected by the split. He says his father could have just as easily been a comic and – as anyone who saw his Who Do You Think You Are? will know – comedy was what Mack’s great-grandfather actually did for a living. “Making people laugh,” he recalls, “was part of our shared language as a family. I always saw it as speed-dating but for friendship. You start at a new school and the ones that share your humour, you’re like, ‘OK. You, you and you. We’ll get along.’ And if you’re chatting someone up and they don’t find you funny, that’s the end of that.” For 14-year-old Mack, The Young Ones “was my punk” – with Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson his Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten. In 2010 when Mack interviewed Edmondson for Radio 4’s Chain Reaction, you can hear his starstruck inner teenager trying to hold it together. But people change, and you then notice Mack struggling to reconcile the Edmondson of his formative memories with the somewhat downcast character he’s in conversation with. “I remember that,” says Mack, “Didn’t he say something like, ‘One day, you realise there’s more to life than making people laugh’? Did I understand that at the time? Probably not. But I do now. I mean, have I changed? Yeah. It’s impossible not to.” Answering his own question, he sounds almost defensive. The idea that he might be turning into a “showbiz w****r” seems to weigh upon him. It’s a recurring worry in his 2012 memoir Mack the Life, and something he brought up at the outset of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha, the podcast he co-hosted with his friend Neil Webster, which explored their mid-life fascination with Buddhism – including meditation, of which Mack is a passionate exponent. “Well yes. I mean, I stopped drinking over ten years ago and you think, ‘Are these the clichés of being in our business?’” I suggest that meditation and abstinence are hardly abuses of fame, and he nods as though the thought never occurred to him. He says that in 2014, after his brother Darren died of a fatal overdose, he could certainly have used some of the tools subsequently given to him by Buddhism. “Absolutely. I weigh it all up and [Buddhism] just feels true to me. But maybe it’s a Lancashire working-class thing, that inner voice that makes you worry you’ve got ideas above your station.” That inner voice was there from the outset, he says, right from his first-ever TV job, hosting the Channel 4 stand-up showcase, Gas. “I got out of the car and someone said, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ And I remember my wife Tara saying, ‘Was that free?’ She was like, ‘That’s great, isn’t it?’ It was, but it was a bonus. And you’re always conscious that by the third series you could go from that to wondering why you’re not getting your coffee.” The other abiding memory of his early TV career revolves around his break as a writer-comedian in Channel 4’s The Sketch Show. He recalls that after his first day on set, the TV company left him a gift – a CD Walkman – “and the following week at the office, I said to everyone, ‘I just want to thank you for the gift and the lovely basket of fruit.’ And they go, ‘What basket of fruit?’ I said, ‘You know! The one with the cellophane on!’ And they went, ‘That’s just what was in your room!’ And I’d proudly taken it home! I mean, it’s a good job I didn’t take the fridge, the telly, the sofa and the lightbulbs, too.” For his memoir, Mack recorded a series of conversations with a psychiatrist, exchanges recounted throughout the book. “I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder],” he says, “but I did have this weird half-diagnosis from the psychiatrist. She said, ‘This isn’t how we diagnose it, but you’ve 100 per cent got it. So I believed her, but at the same time, would I take the tablets and go, ‘Are you telling me this is how people think when they haven’t got ADHD?’” A De Niro-ish shrug ensues. And you can see why – there’s too much to lose. Watching him in full flight on Would I Lie to You? is one of the wonders of the comedy world. Show host Rob Brydon called him the “quickest mind of anybody – and I mean anybody – I have ever met.” What you see in action is a sort of inspired overthinking. “Well, most Buddhists would say everyone overthinks. That’s both the superpower and the curse, you know? Certainly most problems in my life have come from overthinking, and most of the benefits have come from overthinking. When I’m on Would I Lie to You?, I feel like I’m tuned into five conversations at once.” If that’s the superpower, then what’s the curse? “If I’m not obsessionally writing jokes, I’m obsessionally worrying about something that is minuscule, but for the next 48 hours it’s all I’ll think about.” The ability to enter into a state of hyperfocus is a key characteristic of ADHD. It probably also came in useful on the day Mack – a lifelong darts fan – broke the official world records for the most bullseyes and number twos scored in one minute. It’s perhaps also possible to detect aspects of Mack’s obsessional nature in the constraints he imposed upon himself when writing Not Going Out. In the new series, every storyline unfolds in real time. “What I’m trying to do is get the audience involved, to make them feel like they’re witnessing an event that’s happened,” he explains. “And hopefully that carries over when you’re watching at home.” If he’s all but retired from straight stand-up, perhaps that’s because what you’re really getting with Not Going Out is stand-up comedy disguised as a sitcom. Even the table read – which, with almost all sitcoms happens behind closed doors – takes place before an audience in a Battersea pub. “I don’t disagree with that,” he concedes. “In the first series, I remember the director said to me and [his then co-star and fellow stand-up] Tim Vine, ‘You’re supposed to be having a conversation and you keep turning out to face the audience.’ Because our instincts were to play to the crowd.” Before I set out to meet Mack, a mutual friend advised against looking for “hidden depths” because I’m unlikely to find any. If Mack’s friend is correct and there really are no “hidden depths”, that’s perhaps because this unabashed comedy nerd – who won friends at school with his perfect Cannon and Ball impersonation and ended up casting Bobby Ball as his TV dad – got what he wanted. If there’s one thing he seems to like more than making people laugh, it’s laughing himself. He’ll spend five minutes explaining the set-up of his favourite Cannon and Ball gag only to crease up on the punchline – despite the fact that almost five decades have passed since he first saw them do it. He’s keen to participate in the next series of Amazon Prime’s all-star comedy variation on Big Brother, Last One Laughing, “because there’s nothing funnier than trying not to laugh.” And he hopes John Cleese makes another series of Fawlty Towers because, “if it’s only half as funny as the ones that exist, it’ll still be twice as funny as everything else.” For a while, he thought that, were he gifted enough, he would probably swap his comedy success for the career of a professional footballer, “but when I became friends with some of them and saw the sacrifices they make, I changed my view. I would have once settled for Darlington. Now it’s Barcelona or nothing!” Of course, had he done so, his footballing days would be long behind him. But a comic can go on indefinitely, right? “I was once at an awards ceremony with Jimmy Carr, back in the days when Bruce Forsyth was alive. And Jimmy said, ‘Isn’t our job brilliant? Look at Brucie over there, 80 and still doing it.’ And I thought, ‘Oh God, don’t tell me that.’ The idea of doing this when I’m 80 doesn’t fill me with joy. It’s the best job in the world, but it’s a job, and like all jobs, you want to retire at some point.” And what’s the retired Lee Mack doing with his days? “He’s almost certainly in the garden,” says the version seated before me. “I love my greenhouse, and my missus always takes the mickey out of me, because when we first met in our 20s, I said, ‘I’m looking forward to getting old, retiring and pottering down to the newsagent’s for my little bar of chocolate and walking back again,’ and it was the most undynamic thing a new relationship could start with.” So that’s still the plan? “That is still very much the plan. Just not yet.” Which, for the time being, is good news. After all these years, Lee Mack is still living his best life. And for as long as he’s willing to turn it into comedy, we get to live it too. Lee Mack also hosts a special edition of The 1% Club for Soccer Aid, Saturday 8.20pm ITV1
Lee Mack on the future of Not Going Out – and his hopes to join Last One Laughing for season 2
With Not Going Out returning to BBC One this week for its 14th season, Radio Times magazine caught up with creator Lee Mack.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. "Sorry, everyone! I had a prang!" announces Lee Mack on arrival at the studio where Radio Times is preparing to photograph him. He’s barely late, but by way of proof he unzips his bag and produces his wing mirror, the casualty of a misjudged reverse at his local station. As he explains, on hearing the clunk, he started to leave his details on the windscreen of the other car, only to realise it was his own vehicle he’d damaged. Because this is Lee Mack, mere seconds elapse before he’s exploring the comedic possibilities: in this case, the urban myths of motorists who seem to be doing the right thing, only for those notes to say: “I’m pretending to leave my details so that no one watching thinks I did a runner.” It’s precisely the sort of scenario you can imagine percolating into a future episode of Not Going Out – which returns to BBC One this week for its 14th season with episode 101. And if the 56-year-old comic is to narrow the gap between his creation and Last of the Summer Wine’s record for sitcom longevity (295 episodes across 31 seasons), he’ll need to keep replenishing the pot. As it happens, the longer you spend with him, the more you realise that the everyday business of living is a constant source of fresh material. Last August, like millions of others, Mack found hi mself trying – and ultimately failing – to get tickets for the Oasis reunion gigs, when he realised "the one silver lining to this could be an episode about me trying to get tickets". The result, four episodes into the new run, is Oasis, which finds Mack’s fictional namesake in the virtual queue to buy tickets for the Wembley shows. Desperate for the loo, Lee asks his wife Lucy (Sally Bretton) to make sure she doesn’t refresh the browser while he’s gone. Much of what ensues is exquisitely guessable, a gag-studded rumination on mid-life nostalgia for our carefree youth – and, in this case, a chance for Mack to pick up a guitar and unleash his preposterous approximation of the Liam Gallagher bellow. Given that Oasis were still three years off calling it a day when the first episode of Not Going Out aired, it’s a surprise to find Mack anything but complacent about the reception that awaits the new episodes. In the past, he hasn’t been afraid to reinvent the show in order to mirror the changes in his own 20-year marriage to Tara, with whom he has three children, Arlo, Louie and Millie. Hence, what started as a cross between Men Behaving Badly and a British Seinfeld became a more traditional family sitcom. And now it’s all change once again. With the kids having flown the nest, the opening episode finds Lee and Lucy viewing new properties. But anyone expecting a slide into cosy dotage should think again. Lee’s attempt to repel a competing house viewer results in a misunderstanding over a missing watch, a Stannah stairlift face-off with the vendor’s mother and a bag of poo. The result is a riot of manic farce that feels like a hilarious, heartfelt love letter to Fawlty Towers. “Obviously, that’s music to my ears,” he says, more in relief than delight, “I still think that Fawlty Towers is the best ever studio sitcom, which, for me, is a separate thing to a sitcom made without an audience. The thing you always hear people saying about studio sitcoms is ‘they’re so '70s'. But then you ask people to name their favourite British sitcoms and they’re all from the '70s: Fawlty Towers! Dad’s Army! Steptoe and Son!” Mack has long passed the point where he needs to keep making Not Going Out in order to maintain his profile. With Would I Lie to You? and, latterly, The 1% Club ensuring his almost constant presence on our screens, it must be tempting to relinquish the long months in the shed at the bottom of his garden where he and co-writer Daniel Peak plot each episode. “But then again”, he says, “there’s nothing I love better than writing jokes”. The die was cast early. Mack grew up in Southport. His parents were pub landlords, and although they separated when he was 12, he doesn’t recall being affected by the split. He says his father could have just as easily been a comic and – as anyone who saw his Who Do You Think You Are? will know – comedy was what Mack’s great-grandfather actually did for a living. “Making people laugh,” he recalls, “was part of our shared language as a family. I always saw it as speed-dating but for friendship. You start at a new school and the ones that share your humour, you’re like, ‘OK. You, you and you. We’ll get along.’ And if you’re chatting someone up and they don’t find you funny, that’s the end of that.” For 14-year-old Mack, The Young Ones “was my punk” – with Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson his Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten. In 2010 when Mack interviewed Edmondson for Radio 4’s Chain Reaction, you can hear his starstruck inner teenager trying to hold it together. But people change, and you then notice Mack struggling to reconcile the Edmondson of his formative memories with the somewhat downcast character he’s in conversation with. “I remember that,” says Mack, “Didn’t he say something like, ‘One day, you realise there’s more to life than making people laugh’? Did I understand that at the time? Probably not. But I do now. I mean, have I changed? Yeah. It’s impossible not to.” Answering his own question, he sounds almost defensive. The idea that he might be turning into a “showbiz w****r” seems to weigh upon him. It’s a recurring worry in his 2012 memoir Mack the Life, and something he brought up at the outset of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha, the podcast he co-hosted with his friend Neil Webster, which explored their mid-life fascination with Buddhism – including meditation, of which Mack is a passionate exponent. “Well yes. I mean, I stopped drinking over 10 years ago and you think, ‘Are these the clichés of being in our business?’” I suggest that meditation and abstinence are hardly abuses of fame, and he nods as though the thought never occurred to him. He says that in 2014, after his brother Darren died of a fatal overdose, he could certainly have used some of the tools subsequently given to him by Buddhism. “Absolutely. I weigh it all up and [Buddhism] just feels true to me. But maybe it’s a Lancashire working-class thing, that inner voice that makes you worry you’ve got ideas above your station.” That inner voice was there from the outset, he says, right from his first-ever TV job, hosting the Channel 4 stand-up showcase, Gas. “I got out of the car and someone said, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ And I remember my wife Tara saying, ‘Was that free?’ She was like, ‘That’s great, isn’t it?’ It was, but it was a bonus. And you’re always conscious that by the third series you could go from that to wondering why you’re not getting your coffee.” The other abiding memory of his early TV career revolves around his break as a writer-comedian in Channel 4’s The Sketch Show. He recalls that after his first day on set, the TV company left him a gift – a CD Walkman – “and the following week at the office, I said to everyone, ‘I just want to thank you for the gift and the lovely basket of fruit.’ And they go, ‘What basket of fruit?’ I said, ‘You know! The one with the cellophane on!’ And they went, ‘That’s just what was in your room!’ And I’d proudly taken it home! I mean, it’s a good job I didn’t take the fridge, the telly, the sofa and the lightbulbs, too.” For his memoir, Mack recorded a series of conversations with a psychiatrist, exchanges recounted throughout the book. “I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder],” he says, “but I did have this weird half-diagnosis from the psychiatrist. She said, ‘This isn’t how we diagnose it, but you’ve 100 per cent got it. So I believed her, but at the same time, would I take the tablets and go, ‘Are you telling me this is how people think when they haven’t got ADHD?’” A De Niro-ish shrug ensues. And you can see why – there’s too much to lose. Watching him in full flight on Would I Lie to You? is one of the wonders of the comedy world. Show host Rob Brydon called him the “quickest mind of anybody – and I mean anybody – I have ever met.” What you see in action is a sort of inspired overthinking. “Well, most Buddhists would say everyone overthinks. That’s both the superpower and the curse, you know? Certainly most problems in my life have come from overthinking, and most of the benefits have come from overthinking. When I’m on Would I Lie to You?, I feel like I’m tuned into five conversations at once.” If that’s the superpower, then what’s the curse? “If I’m not obsessionally writing jokes, I’m obsessionally worrying about something that is minuscule, but for the next 48 hours it’s all I’ll think about.” The ability to enter into a state of hyperfocus is a key characteristic of ADHD. It probably also came in useful on the day Mack – a lifelong darts fan – broke the official world records for the most bullseyes and number twos scored in one minute. It’s perhaps also possible to detect aspects of Mack’s obsessional nature in the constraints he imposed upon himself when writing Not Going Out. In the new season, every storyline unfolds in real time. “What I’m trying to do is get the audience involved, to make them feel like they’re witnessing an event that’s happened,” he explains. “And hopefully that carries over when you’re watching at home.” If he’s all but retired from straight stand-up, perhaps that’s because what you’re really getting with Not Going Out is stand-up comedy disguised as a sitcom. Even the table read – which, with almost all sitcoms happens behind closed doors – takes place before an audience in a Battersea pub. “I don’t disagree with that,” he concedes. “In the first series, I remember the director said to me and [his then co-star and fellow stand-up] Tim Vine, ‘You’re supposed to be having a conversation and you keep turning out to face the audience.’ Because our instincts were to play to the crowd.” Before I set out to meet Mack, a mutual friend advised against looking for “hidden depths” because I’m unlikely to find any. If Mack’s friend is correct and there really are no “hidden depths”, that’s perhaps because this unabashed comedy nerd – who won friends at school with his perfect Cannon and Ball impersonation and ended up casting Bobby Ball as his TV dad – got what he wanted. If there’s one thing he seems to like more than making people laugh, it’s laughing himself. He’ll spend five minutes explaining the set-up of his favourite Cannon and Ball gag only to crease up on the punchline – despite the fact that almost five decades have passed since he first saw them do it. He’s keen to participate in the next season of Amazon Prime’s all-star comedy variation on Big Brother, Last One Laughing, "because there’s nothing funnier than trying not to laugh". And he hopes John Cleese makes another season of Fawlty Towers because, “if it’s only half as funny as the ones that exist, it’ll still be twice as funny as everything else". For a while, he thought that, were he gifted enough, he would probably swap his comedy success for the career of a professional footballer, “but when I became friends with some of them and saw the sacrifices they make, I changed my view. I would have once settled for Darlington. Now it’s Barcelona or nothing!” Of course, had he done so, his footballing days would be long behind him. But a comic can go on indefinitely, right? “I was once at an awards ceremony with Jimmy Carr, back in the days when Bruce Forsyth was alive. And Jimmy said, ‘Isn’t our job brilliant? Look at Brucie over there, 80 and still doing it.’ And I thought, ‘Oh God, don’t tell me that.’ The idea of doing this when I’m 80 doesn’t fill me with joy. It’s the best job in the world, but it’s a job, and like all jobs, you want to retire at some point.” And what’s the retired Lee Mack doing with his days? “He’s almost certainly in the garden,” says the version seated before me. “I love my greenhouse, and my missus always takes the mickey out of me, because when we first met in our 20s, I said, ‘I’m looking forward to getting old, retiring and pottering down to the newsagent’s for my little bar of chocolate and walking back again,’ and it was the most undynamic thing a new relationship could start with.” So that’s still the plan? “That is still very much the plan. Just not yet.” Which, for the time being, is good news. After all these years, Lee Mack is still living his best life. And for as long as he’s willing to turn it into comedy, we get to live it too. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Not Going Out is available to watch on BBC iPlayer. Season 14 will air on BBC One on Friday 13th June 2025 at 9pm. The whole season will also be available as a box set on BBC iPlayer from then. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Brad Kella shares what he's been up to since The Piano
Add The Piano: the Final to your watchlist Fiddling with the zip of his grey hoodie, Brad Kella sits in his front room, recounting the call he got from America’s Got Talent after his first appearance on The Piano. “They wanted to fly me over to tell my story,” he says, “but the funny thing is that when I was 17, I had already tried to get on Britain’s Got Talent and I got knocked back. Basically, if I wasn’t playing the piano with one hand and juggling with the other, they weren’t going to accept me.” There’s no hint of rancour in the way he tells the story; more mild confusion at the idea that, to some people, the sight of someone playing a beautiful piece of music on the piano isn’t enough. Subsequent events justify his confusion. Since becoming the breakout star of series two of The Piano, life for the 23-year-old Liverpudlian has been a series of doors opening to increasingly spectacular opportunities. Next month, after completing an arena tour where he supports headliner Gary Barlow, he releases his album Phoebe’s Melody. Named after his two daughters, Phoebe and Melody, the record is made up of original pieces, many inspired by the struggles that he has faced. The one constant throughout it is the instrument that landed in his life six years after he and his twin, Aron, were fostered by Frank and Evelyn Kilmartin. Understandably, there are details concerning his mother’s situation (she died when Brad was a teenager) and “the rough council estate” where he grew up that he’d rather not revisit. In a sense, he doesn’t need to. The dispatches of devastation that make up his songs Shelter and Reverie of Isolation tell their own story. When Kella details the period leading up to the day The Piano contacted him (based on a YouTube video he’d made), the details sketch out a bleaker picture than anything that was in the show. Aged 17, he moved out of his foster parents’ house to live at the house of his girlfriend Abbie’s grandmother. But with Abbie expecting their first child and no available room, the pair were forced to declare themselves homeless. They would spend their days with their newborn, Phoebe, in cafés with pianos where Kella would busk for their next meal, and every evening they’d carry their possessions from one hostel to another. “The objective was to get money, obviously, so I’d play things like Purple Rain by Prince, but instead of the guitar in that, I’d add a massive piano solo in there. Boogie-woogie also drew people’s attention – and The Simpsons’ theme.” On the day he received the call from Channel 4, Kella also received one from Liverpool Council “saying they’d found a hotel room for us, a box room with one bed in there, and we basically cracked on”. By the time the wider world knew his story, every major record company had beaten a path to Kella’s door. But Kella duly declined all their overtures, opting instead to sign with Modern Sky, a Liverpool label. He’s happier in his hometown. “It’s nice to see new places,” says Kella, not entirely convincingly. “But everything I need is here.” In his life, the one obsession that precedes even that of the piano is his beloved Liverpool F.C. The newly crowned Premiership champions have honoured Kella’s success by extending an open invitation to their Legends Lounge. In return, Kella has already composed a piece for the club called Home to Me. I ask him, could he take it further – compose individual pieces of music for each player? What ensues is, frankly, incredible. As soon as I mention a name, it’s as if a waveform appears before Kella’s eyes. All he has to do is hit ‘play’. “Mo Salah? You’d do a bit where he’s tearing down the wing, he shoots, and at that point the music stops – and when the ball hits the back of the net, it starts again. Virgil van Dijk? Compact, solid. Bold chords. I’d use the bottom half of the piano, so immediately he’s at the bottom of our team at the back in defence.” With lifelong ambitions being ticked off at a mind-boggling velocity, what’s next? Well, since Kella was 12, Sam Raimi’s trilogy of Spider-Man films propelled him into an obsession with the scores of film composer Danny Elfman – which feels appropriate, given that he talks about the acquisition of his first keyboard after his mother’s death as though that was his superhero origin story. Of course, that’s exactly what it is. And it doesn’t stop with music. Lately, fellow Merseysider Stephen Graham has been speaking with him about the possibility of collaborating on a project. “Stephen grew up on a council estate up the road from me, and he totally gets me,” says Kella. So does this mean that there’s a Brad Kella biopic coming down the pipes? “What an amazing thing it would be, right? To be able to say I’ve written the score for a film about me – someone whose life’s ambition was to write film scores.”
As series three of The Piano reaches its moving crescendo, Mika, Jon and Claudia reveal their highs, lows and audition pieces
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in May 2025. Add The Piano: the Final to your watchlist "Giant button? Giant button? Giant button?” In her long and storied TV life, Claudia Winkleman has yet to establish a catchphrase. But the way things are going, that may change. Three hours before the series finale of The Piano, she scuttles between the crew with chocolate treats to top up everyone’s energy levels. Her flared trousers extend over her shoes, giving the impression that she’s gliding on tiny wheels around the huge Glasshouse International Centre for Music in Gateshead, like Doctor Who’s Davros or the robot Metal Mickey. She is, it ought to be said, measurably less terrifying than the former, and slightly shinier than the latter. View Green Video on the source website “You might wonder, throughout the course of today, whether I do anything other than hand out sweets and biscuits. And the answer is, very little.” Winkleman then links arms with me and pulls me over to a partitioned section where New Orleans piano polymath Jon Batiste and chart-topping pop star Mika are seated. “Have you met my little brothers?” she beams. The mood is celebratory and with good reason. Three years after first appearing on our screens, The Piano continues to defy the downturn in viewer demand for talent contests. Five weeks ago, over 2.5 million viewers tuned in to watch Mika and Batiste (who replaced outgoing mentor Lang Lang) gaze on from their secret vantage point as seven amateur pianists walked across the concourse at London’s Liverpool Street station to share their stories. That’s an increase of over half a million viewers on the number who watched the beginning of series two, which saw 23-year-old Liverpudlian Brad Kella ink a record deal on the back of an original composition dedicated to his foster parents, Eve and Frank. Viewers tuning into the finale of series three will no doubt be rooting for the pianist they want to see go on to similar success. Could it be Zak from Chapeltown in Leeds – known for its history of social deprivation and race riots – who likes to play in the key of C sharp minor because, “that’s what it feels like to live around here”. Or perhaps teenage Mia, who said she had googled ‘black, female composers’ because, “no one else who looked like me seemed to be [playing classical piano]”. Or the equally extraordinary Diana, who at 87, premiered her first composition, written in memory of Phil, her husband of 63 years who died of Parkinson’s? And, of course, sometimes it’s fine not to have a back story – such as the pianist last year who, when asked, “Has the piano ever helped you through a difficult time in your life?” replied, “No”. By contrast Mika and Batiste’s connection to the show is inextricably bound to their formative experiences with the instrument. The Mika of 20 years ago was, by his own admission, a very different creature. Born Michael Penniman, in Beirut, to an American father and Lebanese mother, he spent his earliest years in Paris, before a move to London precipitated “a little breakdown” and a period of elective mutism during which he stopped talking altogether. Oddly, as a chronically shy child born into a New Orleans musical dynasty, Batiste went through a similar period of self-imposed silence. When this is pointed out to them, they both turn to face each other in amazement. “I didn’t know that about you!” gasps Mika. “Well look at that!” purrs Batiste. “So, what happened to you?” “It was a combination. I went to this school [the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, a west-London state school for the children of French expatriates],” explains Mika. “And then the homophobic bullying started, and it was just… At a certain point, you say, ‘What’s the point? I only make things worse when I open my mouth’. And it’s just not true, but it’s what you think. And you?” “There was a lot happening internally,” recalls Batiste, “I felt like I was observing the world up until that point, as opposed to living in it. But when I finally discovered the piano, I became a performer.” For Mika, the transformative power of the piano isn’t just a theory. Smarting from a series of record company rejections, he sat at the keyboard and practically throttled his debut single Grace Kelly out of it (Sample lyric: “Why don’t you like me, why don’t you like me?”) in the process topping the charts for five weeks in 2007. If The Piano had existed at that time, he says he would have played either that song or something from Harry Nilsson’s 1967 album Pandemonium Shadow Show – an album that sounds like a 1960s prototype for everything that Mika has gone on to do. Batiste plumps for Labi Siffre’s somewhat less angry My Song, a plea for the wider world to find a place for its protagonist’s gifts. All of which leaves Claudia to reveal what she would play. There’s 20-year-old pre-fame, pre-fringe Claudia standing before the piano that can launch her into the affections of the viewing public… “You know I can’t play, right?” she asks. I wave an imaginary magic wand. She can now. “I can’t sing either,” she replies. I wave it a second time and warn her that she has one wish remaining. “OK. It would be As by Stevie Wonder. Because it would speak of the family that I hoped to have, and the family that I went on to have and how everything else is… croutons.” Batiste slaps his thigh with delight: “You’re speaking, Claude! See how she does that? It’s like she gives veteran icon energy. Anything you say, she can come with a witty response. How do you do that? What is that?” “I’m 52,” responds Claudia with deadpan severity, before turning to face me. “You’re sticking around for the show, right?” Three hours later, several hundred pairs of tear ducts are once again sent into overdrive as the full extent of Mika and Jon Batiste’s mentoring sessions with this year’s finalists is revealed. One person who seems to remain resolutely unmoved, however, is the presenter of the show. How on earth does Claudia’s mascara manage to defy the emotional whirlwind happening around her? “Because when somebody’s telling you their story and the power of it is overwhelming, my job is to give them some strength and safety. After my dad watched last year’s final, he phoned me up in tears and he said, ‘That is by far the best thing you have ever done’. And that’s enough for me, because I can never watch anything I’ve done back.”
Claudia Winkleman, Mika and Jon Batiste on The Piano – and the stories that stay with them
The season 3 finale is fast approaching.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. "Giant button? Giant button? Giant button?" In her long and storied TV life, Claudia Winkleman has yet to establish a catchphrase. But the way things are going, that may change. Three hours before the series finale of The Piano, she scuttles between the crew with chocolate treats to top up everyone's energy levels. Her flared trousers extend over her shoes, giving the impression that she's gliding on tiny wheels around the huge Glasshouse International Centre for Music in Gateshead, like Doctor Who's Davros or the robot Metal Mickey. She is, it ought to be said, measurably less terrifying than the former, and slightly shinier than the latter. "You might wonder, throughout the course of today, whether I do anything other than hand out sweets and biscuits. And the answer is, very little." Winkleman then links arms with me and pulls me over to a partitioned section where New Orleans piano polymath Jon Batiste and chart-topping pop star Mika are seated. "Have you met my little brothers?" she beams. The mood is celebratory and with good reason. Three years after first appearing on our screens, The Piano continues to defy the downturn in viewer demand for talent contests. Five weeks ago, over 2.5 million viewers tuned in to watch Mika and Batiste (who replaced outgoing mentor Lang Lang) gaze on from their secret vantage point as seven amateur pianists walked across the concourse at London’s Liverpool Street station to share their stories. That’s an increase of over half a million viewers on the number who watched the beginning of series two, which saw 23-year-old Liverpudlian Brad Kella ink a record deal on the back of an original composition dedicated to his foster parents, Eve and Frank. Viewers tuning into the finale of series three will no doubt be rooting for the pianist they want to see go on to similar success. Could it be Zak from Chapeltown in Leeds – known for its history of social deprivation and race riots – who likes to play in the key of C sharp minor because, "that’s what it feels like to live around here". Or perhaps teenage Mia, who said she had googled ‘black, female composers’ because, "no one else who looked like me seemed to be [playing classical piano]". Or the equally extraordinary Diana, who at 87, premiered her first composition, written in memory of Phil, her husband of 63 years who died of Parkinson’s? And, of course, sometimes it’s fine not to have a back story – such as the pianist last year who, when asked, "Has the piano ever helped you through a difficult time in your life?" replied, "No". By contrast Mika and Batiste’s connection to the show is inextricably bound to their formative experiences with the instrument. The Mika of 20 years ago was, by his own admission, a very different creature. Born Michael Penniman, in Beirut, to an American father and Lebanese mother, he spent his earliest years in Paris, before a move to London precipitated "a little breakdown" and a period of elective mutism during which he stopped talking altogether. Oddly, as a chronically shy child born into a New Orleans musical dynasty, Batiste went through a similar period of self-imposed silence. When this is pointed out to them, they both turn to face each other in amazement. "I didn’t know that about you!" gasps Mika. "Well look at that!" purrs Batiste. "So, what happened to you?" "It was a combination. I went to this school [the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, a west-London state school for the children of French expatriates]," explains Mika. "And then the homophobic bullying started, and it was just… At a certain point, you say, ‘What’s the point? I only make things worse when I open my mouth’. And it’s just not true, but it’s what you think. And you?" "There was a lot happening internally," recalls Batiste, "I felt like I was observing the world up until that point, as opposed to living in it. But when I finally discovered the piano, I became a performer." For Mika, the transformative power of the piano isn’t just a theory. Smarting from a series of record company rejections, he sat at the keyboard and practically throttled his debut single Grace Kelly out of it (Sample lyric: "Why don’t you like me, why don’t you like me?") in the process topping the charts for five weeks in 2007. If The Piano had existed at that time, he says he would have played either that song or something from Harry Nilsson’s 1967 album Pandemonium Shadow Show – an album that sounds like a 1960s prototype for everything that Mika has gone on to do. Batiste plumps for Labi Siffre’s somewhat less angry My Song, a plea for the wider world to find a place for its protagonist’s gifts. All of which leaves Claudia to reveal what she would play. There’s 20-year-old pre-fame, pre-fringe Claudia standing before the piano that can launch her into the affections of the viewing public… "You know I can’t play, right?" she asks. I wave an imaginary magic wand. She can now. "I can’t sing either," she replies. I wave it a second time and warn her that she has one wish remaining. "OK. It would be As by Stevie Wonder. Because it would speak of the family that I hoped to have, and the family that I went on to have and how everything else is… croutons." Batiste slaps his thigh with delight: "You’re speaking, Claude! See how she does that? It’s like she gives veteran icon energy. Anything you say, she can come with a witty response. How do you do that? What is that?" "I’m 52," responds Claudia with deadpan severity, before turning to face me. "You’re sticking around for the show, right?" Three hours later, several hundred pairs of tear ducts are once again sent into overdrive as the full extent of Mika and Jon Batiste’s mentoring sessions with this year’s finalists is revealed. One person who seems to remain resolutely unmoved, however, is the presenter of the show. How on earth does Claudia’s mascara manage to defy the emotional whirlwind happening around her? "Because when somebody’s telling you their story and the power of it is overwhelming, my job is to give them some strength and safety. After my dad watched last year’s final, he phoned me up in tears and he said, ‘That is by far the best thing you have ever done’. And that’s enough for me, because I can never watch anything I’ve done back." The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Piano is available to watch on Channel 4. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Jon Batiste, the new judge on The Piano, says he can spot a winner just from the way they walk
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in April 2025. Add The Piano to your watchlist It’s not hard to tell when Jon Batiste is excited. As he rocks back on his chair, his long legs rear up and, as they do so, his even longer arms follow suit. Watch it on television and you imagine, just out of shot, his limbs being controlled by a giant puppeteer. And, as he joins the third season of Channel 4’s The Piano as a new judge, the sight of an excited Jon Batiste is about to become a pleasingly frequent one. View Green Video on the source website The 38-year-old American singer/songwriter and virtuoso pianist says the prospect of replacing classical legend Lang Lang to join fellow judge Mika and host Claudia Winkleman on the hugely successful show was “a total no-brainer” – so much so that he didn’t watch a single episode before agreeing to participate. This afternoon, he’s speaking from the basement studio of the Brooklyn home he shares with his wife, the writer Suleika Jaouad – whose Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times movingly chronicled her fight against leukaemia – and their dog Lentil. Various Grammys (he has seven in total) and the Oscar and Bafta for his work on the Pixar animated film Soul can be seen in spaces not already taken up by crockery, “thrifted” ornaments and vinyl records. To Batiste’s long-time fans, his arrival on a show in which unknown musicians are let loose on pianos in train stations across the country won’t seem like quite such a left-field development. “I come from a family where music is something that happens in public locations – on the street, in the subway, you name it.” What Batiste modestly calls a family, others might term a dynasty. His grandfather was the avant-garde clarinettist Alvin Batiste, who taught many of the most celebrated American jazz musicians of the past hundred years. The younger Batiste grew up in the shadow of New Orleans brass bands, whose ranks were dotted with several musicians from his immediate and extended family. Aged eight, Batiste felt “like I was observing the world rather than participating in it”. For a time, the pressure of expectation overwhelmed him. Nothing truly made sense until, at the age of 11, his mother suggested he switch from percussion to piano. “Only at that point could I truly start to express who I was.” Given his own history, it’s perhaps no surprise that Batiste’s most memorable responses in the new series of The Piano happen when younger pianists take to the podium. At London’s Liverpool Street Station, we see 17-year-old Mia from south London talking about how, at the age of 11, she googled “black, female composers because no one else who looked like me seemed to be [playing classical piano]”. When she plays Troubled Water, Margaret Bonds’s piano piece based on an African-American spiritual, the power of what Batiste is hearing visibly runs through him like an electric current. In Brighton, when 12-year-old Marcus plays his own composition, Batiste has to run out and greet him. “How you learn that?!” he asks him. “You!” replies a starstruck Marcus, a longtime Batiste fan. Once again, this format – piano, train station, TV crew, Claudia – seems to yield stories you’d struggle to believe if someone wrote them in a script. Take, for instance, Zak from Chapeltown in Leeds – infamous for its history of social deprivation and race riots – who plays Chopin like a dream and hymns the beauty of C sharp minor because that’s the key that most mirrors “what it feels like to live around here”. When 12-year-old Anisa walks towards the piano, we see Batiste turn to Mika and pronounce her a candidate for the series finale. When I ask him how he could truly know that someone is about to blow him away before they’ve played a note, Batiste talks passionately about how it’s important to stop “intellectualism” silencing the “deep intuitive sensors that exist within all of us. It can be the way someone holds their instrument or something in the way they speak that is transmitting something that will inevitably come through the music.” You might think Batiste is almost a bit too cool to be taking part in a Channel 4 reality show – but the historical distinction between highbrow and lowbrow is something for which he has zero tolerance. A self-styled “computer game nut”, he learnt piano by transcribing the music from the video game Final Fantasy VII – and during his time leading the house band on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he performed music from that game and Song of Storms from The Legend of Zelda. Speaking about his new sidekick on The Piano, Mika tells RT: “Jon has managed to evade being pinned down, and that is what makes him so thrilling. Even though sometimes he could be a real pain in the ass, I know he’s such an artistic genius that I forgive him!” If Batiste is aware of his charm, it doesn’t diminish it. In fact, you suspect it’s that very awareness that recently gave him the moxie to stare straight into the barrel of a camera broadcasting to 127 million viewers when he delivered a jazz blues version of The Star-Spangled Banner at the US Super Bowl, with Donald Trump in attendance. What was in his thoughts as he sang those words? “In that moment? You just have to focus on what you represent. I’m walking in the shoes of a lot of different singers, who have performed that song there. They’re all pieces in the same puzzle.” Get Batiste onto the musicians who shaped his outlook, and you momentarily see the child still wondering how he can match up. Louis Armstrong is “one of the most fully aligned human beings in history… and the greatest jazz musician of all time.” Nina Simone is “the bravest and most underrated American artist of the 20th century, whose approach was so ahead of its time that its time has only just begun”. Batiste extends his hand to some imagined star through the stained-glass windows of his studio, indicating the place these artists hold in the pantheon of greats. “They had someone at the outset who believed in their gift,” he explains, “and perhaps I can be that person for the musicians I mentor on The Piano.” The process clearly took a lot out of him. If he commits to another series, he’d like the opportunity to show more of the “interactive community-based” side to his personality. That means “less time eating Gregg’s vegan sausage rolls in the back office of a train station and more dialogue with the actual musicians”. During filming, did he ever consider which song he would pick as his younger self stepping off the train and walking towards that piano for the first time? Silence. Jon Batiste pauses, and imagines himself at the age of 20, fresh out of Juilliard, trying to find an audience for his first compositions. “Do you know My Song by Labi Siffre?” Not for the first time, he picks up the blue melodica that he seems to use as something tantamount to a fidget spinner, and plays a few lines from it. Later that evening, I play back the audio and find the equivalent section from Siffre’s actual recording: “I wonder/If you know what it means/To find your dreams come true/This is my song/And no one can make it a lie.” You suspect Batiste had thought about the answer long before anyone asked him the question.
Since making her debut aged 20, Stacey Dooley has never shied away from a challenge – but after making a documentary about rape, would she report it, if it happened to her?
Add Stacey Dooley: Rape on Trial to your watchlist "Beauty spot?! What are you talking about?” chimes Stacey Dooley. Using the camera on her phone as a mirror, she peers into the screen and laughs before wiping her face and informing RT’s stylist that it’s actually balsamic glaze from the salad she wolfed down in the taxi on the way here. It is, she volunteers, “evidence” for anyone seeking to confirm that she’s no longer the working-class ingénue who first appeared on our screens 17 years ago – the breakout star of BBC documentary series Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts, in which six young fashion consumers were flown to India to see the conditions in which their clothes were manufactured. Of course, the other thing confirmed by Dooley’s hasty consumption of fancy salads in taxis is that when she’s in work mode, she simply doesn’t stop. Returning last night after a day of interviews and last-minute voiceovers ahead of her latest series of documentaries, she made the mistake of calling home for a pre-bedtime chat with her two-year-old daughter, Minnie. “I thought I’d catch her before my mum took her up for her bath, but I rang at the wrong time, because it reminded her that I wasn’t there to do bath time. And so she’s crying and then I’m crying. Everyone’s like…” Dooley slips into an impersonation of the startled commuters at her table trying to avert their gaze, only to emphasise that this scenario is “no different to what any working mum has to deal with.” Over the past 17 years, Dooley has placed ordinary women in extraordinary situations at the centre of her investigations. She’s shadowed battalions of female Kurdish soldiers fighting Isis in northern Iraq; she’s been detained by Tokyo police while investigating child exploitation; and she’s interviewed women like Heydi in Honduras, whose husband hacked off her feet with a machete to stop her leaving him. For all of that, Dooley’s latest series of documentaries (available on iPlayer from 13 March) reminds us that there are equally powerful stories to be told closer to home. Growing Up Gypsy opens a portal into the lives of three Romany women in the UK, all gently pushing against pernicious perceptions of their community. Meet the Shoplifters examines the shoplifting epidemic, from the perspective of perpetrators and the staff having to double up as security guards. While in Rape On Trial, undoubtedly the most powerful of the trio, Dooley follows three women as they attempt to bring their assailants to justice. The statistic that prompted Dooley into action was that, in this country, only around three per cent of reported rapes lead to a conviction. Bleak as the numbers are, what will leave a lasting impression on anyone who watches Rape On Trial is the toll that process – irrespective of outcome – takes on the women who waive their right to anonymity in order tell their stories. As is so often the case with Dooley’s work, it’s the almost incidental details she elicits from her subjects that leave you emotionally blindsided: Lauren talking about the “very charming, very charismatic” boyfriend who she says assaulted her, then asked if she fancied joining him for breakfast. Emma, who went to college to study music and says she was followed into a classroom by a boy in her year who orally raped her. Still in shock, she confided in another female student, who replied, “You’re lucky. He’s quite popular, you know.” After her resulting depression led to a suicide attempt that was averted by a passer-by, Emma’s father took to sleeping by the front door to stop it from happening again. The purgatorial, prolonged process of securing a conviction – delayed trial dates and last-minute postponements are common – is inadvertently illustrated by the physical transformations the participants underwent over the three years the documentary took to make. Hairstyles change; we see Dooley pregnant with Minnie. “It must have been a continuity nightmare for them to edit,” she says. “But it also brings home how long these women have to wait for some sort of closure.” In the final months of filming, in France the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 of the men who raped his wife Gisèle came to its conclusion and with it, Gisèle’s famous declaration: “Shame must change sides”. “Obviously, I think she’s a f***ing powerhouse,” says Dooley, “but I wonder if even she really understands the magnitude of what she’s done for other women. Because, with the women I spoke to, the concern was always, ‘If I go to the police, will they believe me?’ It’s one of the few crimes where your credibility is immediately brought into question. The bravery it takes is unbelievable. And, you know, it makes you think, when you’ve hung out with these women for as long as I have, and you’re sat in the back of the car after filming, ‘What would I do?’” Is there a difference between the sort of bravery that makes you report a rape to the police and the sort that sees you, say, shadowing police raids on violent Spanish drug cartels, as she did in 2020? The swiftness of Dooley’s answer suggests this is a subject she’s already given some thought. “If somebody raped me, I don’t think I would go to the police, which is so bleak and such a disappointing realisation… But in terms of what I’ve witnessed, I wouldn’t feel confident.” It isn’t hard to see why, when it comes to making documentaries, Dooley enjoys a free hand very few BBC journalists are allowed. She rates consistently highly, especially among younger viewers who tend to avoid traditional news formats, although her lack of formal training has, at times, put her under scrutiny. Back in 2019, hosting an episode of Panorama from a refugee camp in Syria, she erroneously claimed that jihadi brides were making an “IS salute” which – although recently commandeered by jihadi fighters – was actually a Muslim prayer gesture, more commonly used to signify the oneness of Allah. In one of the news reports that followed, The Times suggested that: “The incident raises questions about the decision to promote Dooley, a former shop assistant who has never trained as a journalist, to a senior investigative role.” Given that there could be dozens of people in the team behind a news programme, why did she feel she was singled out? Picking her words carefully, she says, “there has always been an element of snobbery surrounding who is entitled to take up space when covering current affairs-based issues. Did it niggle away at me? Yes, I think it used to. I was reminded by lots of middle-aged, middle-class men, for a long time, at the start of my ‘career’, that I was unusual.” Why the air quotes for career? “Well, because it’s funny that it’s played out the way it has. I can’t pretend I had this innate desire to be a storyteller.” Had former BBC3 controller Danny Cohen not seen that potential in her, Dooley says she’d still be stuck in Luton Airport selling cosmetics. She only realised how badly she wanted to succeed in television when, if some critics had their way, it might have just as quickly been taken away from her. What she knew, however, and what is apparent, is that her previous life has prepared her very well for this one. In Meet the Shoplifters, Dooley – who admits she went through a shoplifting phase in her youth – surveys the seemingly unending game of cat-and-mouse enacted on the shop floor of Bodycare in Manchester, as staff attempt to deal with the procession of teenagers who blithely stride in and help themselves to their favourite lipstick. When confronted, many of them respond in a manner best described as, well, gobby. Ring any bells? “I was… I would have been 13 or 14, max. So, I would’ve probably been quite robust. Perhaps tried to justify it in some way. But obviously, you look back and think, ‘What the f*** was I doing?” Dooley is at pains to point out that there were no potentially mitigating circumstances for what she did. “It was mainly clothes, blue eyeliner. Just shit I didn’t need.” She also says that if her mum Di had found out at the time, there’s no telling what she might have done. Dooley was just two when her parents separated, leaving her mother to singlehandedly raise her while running a pub in Luton. “My mum was pretty much as you’d imagine,” she says. “Really lairy. Outlandish, always had a cig on the go.” The two are still close. Dooley and Kevin Clifton – the professional dance partner who became her actual partner after the pair won Strictly Come Dancing in 2018 – have recently relocated to Liverpool, where her mother grew up. Di is a daily presence in the couple’s life, looking after Minnie while they are at work. When her victory on the ballroom dancing show was announced, Dooley recalls that the song played was Tina Turner’s Simply the Best, “which is pretty much the default theme of our family.” When her mum wasn’t pulling pints, she would sometimes wander over to the karaoke machine and belt it out for fun. “It was also the song my nan got cremated to. She went down in a blaze of glory. Literally, in her case.” It’s to Di that Dooley ascribes her work ethic and competitive streak. If she ever appears on the celebrity version of The Traitors, she says, “I think I’d be a good Traitor. It’d be much more fun than being a Faithful. Would I feel guilty? No, absolutely not! And I’d take all the money at the end. I’ve got a kitchen reno to pay for.” She was no less determined to triumph when she signed up for Strictly. Speaking to Radio Times, when that season’s contestants were revealed, she declared: “Of course I want to win. Anyone saying they don’t is fibbing!” She laughs as she remembers the “shy, nonchalant” Clifton – who she had only just met – “craning his neck, with a look of, ‘What the f*** are you like? That’s not the answer.’” But what’s wrong with being upfront about it? “I think you have to pretend to be a bit coy, don’t you? Especially as a young woman. In this country, you can’t be seen to fancy winning.” The experience clearly gave her sufficient confidence to expand her skills. And why not? So, when the West End came calling – in the form of Danny Robins’s award-winning play 2:22 A Ghost Story – she accepted the offer. Over nearly two decades, I’ve seen Dooley negotiate many challenges, but the only time I’ve ever seen her display the merest hint of imposter syndrome was on The One Show couch last year, when she found herself talking about her role in 2:22 while seated next to fellow guest Celia Imrie. “I know! You’re right. It was my first real gig. I was performing at the Gielgud, a beautiful old theatre in the heart of the West End. I had to audition, and I was so apologetic, prior to even saying any of the lines to the director.” When I relay her recollections to Robins, he bats away any notion that she was any less than deserving of the role: “When your work has been studying people, making documentaries, that helps with the process of taking on a character, inhabiting someone else’s thoughts and feelings. That instinct, the ability to deliver something that feels truthful and moving runs through Stacey’s veins.” She says it’s the work that drives her, not the recognition – which might sound like a platitude until you remember her saying, while dressed as a giant prawn on The Masked Dancer in 2022, that she still hadn’t got around to collecting the MBE she was awarded in 2018. Has she picked it up yet? She shoots the sort of look you might expect from someone who has just remembered a bag of groceries they left on the bus. “That’s daft isn’t it? But no, the only way you can get it is… you know, you have to book it in. There’s a whole ceremony, but I never got around to it. But I was flattered, you know?” With Clifton presently touring UK theatres starring as Billy Flynn in Chicago, it’s just her and Minnie this evening. Season six of Keeping Up with the Kardashians is on, so once the bedtime routine is done, it’s straight to the sofa. “That’s what works for me. The heavier the work in the daytime, the more I need that hit of escapism at night.” So fraught are the legalities involved in making Rape On Trial, that she expects to continue work on the documentary right up until transmission (13 March). In the meantime, spring sees her start filming another documentary that will see her through to the end of the summer – at which point rehearsals begin for a “straight” play in the autumn. Does it ever get a bit much? “Not really. In a parallel world right now, I’m standing at the cosmetics counter in Luton Airport asking people to show me their boarding passes. It was fine, but this…” She leans forward, as if to emphasise that this might be the truest thing she’ll ever tell me, “…this is a gift.” Clearly that trip to Buckingham Palace is going to have to wait a bit longer.
Stacey Dooley on proving the critics wrong and her powerful new documentaries: "This is a gift"
Dooley spoke with Radio Times magazine about her new set of BBC Three documentaries.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. "Beauty spot?! What are you talking about?" chimes Stacey Dooley. Using the camera on her phone as a mirror, she peers into the screen and laughs before wiping her face and informing RT’s stylist that it’s actually balsamic glaze from the salad she wolfed down in the taxi on the way here. It is, she volunteers, “evidence” for anyone seeking to confirm that she’s no longer the working-class ingénue who first appeared on our screens 17 years ago – the breakout star of BBC documentary series Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts, in which six young fashion consumers were flown to India to see the conditions in which their clothes were manufactured. Of course, the other thing confirmed by Dooley’s hasty consumption of fancy salads in taxis is that when she’s in work mode, she simply doesn’t stop. Returning last night after a day of interviews and last-minute voiceovers ahead of her latest series of documentaries, she made the mistake of calling home for a pre-bedtime chat with her two-year-old daughter, Minnie. “I thought I’d catch her before my mum took her up for her bath, but I rang at the wrong time, because it reminded her that I wasn’t there to do bath time. And so she’s crying and then I’m crying. Everyone’s like…” Dooley slips into an impersonation of the startled commuters at her table trying to avert their gaze, only to emphasise that this scenario is “no different to what any working mum has to deal with.” Over the past 17 years, Dooley has placed ordinary women in extraordinary situations at the centre of her investigations. She’s shadowed battalions of female Kurdish soldiers fighting Isis in northern Iraq; she’s been detained by Tokyo police while investigating child exploitation; and she’s interviewed women like Heydi in Honduras, whose husband hacked off her feet with a machete to stop her leaving him. For all of that, Dooley’s latest series of documentaries (available on iPlayer from 13 March) reminds us that there are equally powerful stories to be told closer to home. Growing Up Gypsy opens a portal into the lives of three Romany women in the UK, all gently pushing against pernicious perceptions of their community. Meet the Shoplifters examines the shoplifting epidemic, from the perspective of perpetrators and the staff having to double up as security guards. While in Rape On Trial, undoubtedly the most powerful of the trio, Dooley follows three women as they attempt to bring their assailants to justice. The statistic that prompted Dooley into action was that, in this country, only around three per cent of reported rapes lead to a conviction. Bleak as the numbers are, what will leave a lasting impression on anyone who watches Rape On Trial is the toll that process – irrespective of outcome – takes on the women who waive their right to anonymity in order tell their stories. As is so often the case with Dooley’s work, it’s the almost incidental details she elicits from her subjects that leave you emotionally blindsided: Lauren talking about the “very charming, very charismatic” boyfriend who she says assaulted her, then asked if she fancied joining him for breakfast. Emma, who went to college to study music and says she was followed into a classroom by a boy in her year who orally raped her. Still in shock, she confided in another female student, who replied, “You’re lucky. He’s quite popular, you know.” After her resulting depression led to a suicide attempt that was averted by a passer-by, Emma’s father took to sleeping by the front door to stop it from happening again. The purgatorial, prolonged process of securing a conviction – delayed trial dates and last-minute postponements are common – is inadvertently illustrated by the physical transformations the participants underwent over the three years the documentary took to make. Hairstyles change; we see Dooley pregnant with Minnie. “It must have been a continuity nightmare for them to edit,” she says. “But it also brings home how long these women have to wait for some sort of closure.” In the final months of filming, in France the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 of the men who raped his wife Gisèle came to its conclusion and with it, Gisèle’s famous declaration: “Shame must change sides”. “Obviously, I think she’s a f***ing powerhouse,” says Dooley, “but I wonder if even she really understands the magnitude of what she’s done for other women. Because, with the women I spoke to, the concern was always, ‘If I go to the police, will they believe me?’ It’s one of the few crimes where your credibility is immediately brought into question. The bravery it takes is unbelievable. And, you know, it makes you think, when you’ve hung out with these women for as long as I have, and you’re sat in the back of the car after filming, ‘What would I do?’” Is there a difference between the sort of bravery that makes you report a rape to the police and the sort that sees you, say, shadowing police raids on violent Spanish drug cartels, as she did in 2020? The swiftness of Dooley’s answer suggests this is a subject she’s already given some thought. “If somebody raped me, I don’t think I would go to the police, which is so bleak and such a disappointing realisation… But in terms of what I’ve witnessed, I wouldn’t feel confident.” It isn’t hard to see why, when it comes to making documentaries, Dooley enjoys a free hand very few BBC journalists are allowed. She rates consistently highly, especially among younger viewers who tend to avoid traditional news formats, although her lack of formal training has, at times, put her under scrutiny. Back in 2019, hosting an episode of Panorama from a refugee camp in Syria, she erroneously claimed that jihadi brides were making an “IS salute” which – although recently commandeered by jihadi fighters – was actually a Muslim prayer gesture, more commonly used to signify the oneness of Allah. In one of the news reports that followed, The Times suggested that: “The incident raises questions about the decision to promote Dooley, a former shop assistant who has never trained as a journalist, to a senior investigative role.” Given that there could be dozens of people in the team behind a news programme, why did she feel she was singled out? Picking her words carefully, she says, “there has always been an element of snobbery surrounding who is entitled to take up space when covering current affairs-based issues. Did it niggle away at me? Yes, I think it used to. I was reminded by lots of middle-aged, middle-class men, for a long time, at the start of my ‘career’, that I was unusual.” Why the air quotes for career? “Well, because it’s funny that it’s played out the way it has. I can’t pretend I had this innate desire to be a storyteller.” Had former BBC3 controller Danny Cohen not seen that potential in her, Dooley says she’d still be stuck in Luton Airport selling cosmetics. She only realised how badly she wanted to succeed in television when, if some critics had their way, it might have just as quickly been taken away from her. What she knew, however, and what is apparent, is that her previous life has prepared her very well for this one. In Meet the Shoplifters, Dooley – who admits she went through a shoplifting phase in her youth – surveys the seemingly unending game of cat-and-mouse enacted on the shop floor of Bodycare in Manchester, as staff attempt to deal with the procession of teenagers who blithely stride in and help themselves to their favourite lipstick. When confronted, many of them respond in a manner best described as, well, gobby. Ring any bells? “I was… I would have been 13 or 14, max. So, I would’ve probably been quite robust. Perhaps tried to justify it in some way. But obviously, you look back and think, ‘What the f*** was I doing?” Dooley is at pains to point out that there were no potentially mitigating circumstances for what she did. “It was mainly clothes, blue eyeliner. Just shit I didn’t need.” She also says that if her mum Di had found out at the time, there’s no telling what she might have done. Dooley was just two when her parents separated, leaving her mother to singlehandedly raise her while running a pub in Luton. “My mum was pretty much as you’d imagine,” she says. “Really lairy. Outlandish, always had a cig on the go.” The two are still close. Dooley and Kevin Clifton – the professional dance partner who became her actual partner after the pair won Strictly Come Dancing in 2018 – have recently relocated to Liverpool, where her mother grew up. Di is a daily presence in the couple’s life, looking after Minnie while they are at work. When her victory on the ballroom dancing show was announced, Dooley recalls that the song played was Tina Turner’s Simply the Best, “which is pretty much the default theme of our family.” When her mum wasn’t pulling pints, she would sometimes wander over to the karaoke machine and belt it out for fun. “It was also the song my nan got cremated to. She went down in a blaze of glory. Literally, in her case.” It’s to Di that Dooley ascribes her work ethic and competitive streak. If she ever appears on the celebrity version of The Traitors, she says, “I think I’d be a good Traitor. It’d be much more fun than being a Faithful. Would I feel guilty? No, absolutely not! And I’d take all the money at the end. I’ve got a kitchen reno to pay for.” She was no less determined to triumph when she signed up for Strictly. Speaking to Radio Times, when that season’s contestants were revealed, she declared: “Of course I want to win. Anyone saying they don’t is fibbing!” She laughs as she remembers the “shy, nonchalant” Clifton – who she had only just met – “craning his neck, with a look of, ‘What the f*** are you like? That’s not the answer.’” But what’s wrong with being upfront about it? “I think you have to pretend to be a bit coy, don’t you? Especially as a young woman. In this country, you can’t be seen to fancy winning.” The experience clearly gave her sufficient confidence to expand her skills. And why not? So, when the West End came calling – in the form of Danny Robins’s award-winning play 2:22 A Ghost Story – she accepted the offer. Over nearly two decades, I’ve seen Dooley negotiate many challenges, but the only time I’ve ever seen her display the merest hint of imposter syndrome was on The One Show couch last year, when she found herself talking about her role in 2:22 while seated next to fellow guest Celia Imrie. “I know! You’re right. It was my first real gig. I was performing at the Gielgud, a beautiful old theatre in the heart of the West End. I had to audition, and I was so apologetic, prior to even saying any of the lines to the director.” When I relay her recollections to Robins, he bats away any notion that she was any less than deserving of the role: “When your work has been studying people, making documentaries, that helps with the process of taking on a character, inhabiting someone else’s thoughts and feelings. That instinct, the ability to deliver something that feels truthful and moving runs through Stacey’s veins.” She says it’s the work that drives her, not the recognition – which might sound like a platitude until you remember her saying, while dressed as a giant prawn on The Masked Dancer in 2022, that she still hadn’t got around to collecting the MBE she was awarded in 2018. Has she picked it up yet? She shoots the sort of look you might expect from someone who has just remembered a bag of groceries they left on the bus. “That’s daft isn’t it? But no, the only way you can get it is… you know, you have to book it in. There’s a whole ceremony, but I never got around to it. But I was flattered, you know?” With Clifton presently touring UK theatres starring as Billy Flynn in Chicago, it’s just her and Minnie this evening. Season six of Keeping Up with the Kardashians is on, so once the bedtime routine is done, it’s straight to the sofa. “That’s what works for me. The heavier the work in the daytime, the more I need that hit of escapism at night.” So fraught are the legalities involved in making Rape On Trial, that she expects to continue work on the documentary right up until transmission (13 March). In the meantime, spring sees her start filming another documentary that will see her through to the end of the summer – at which point rehearsals begin for a “straight” play in the autumn. Does it ever get a bit much? “Not really. In a parallel world right now, I’m standing at the cosmetics counter in Luton Airport asking people to show me their boarding passes. It was fine, but this…” She leans forward, as if to emphasise that this might be the truest thing she’ll ever tell me, “…this is a gift.” Clearly that trip to Buckingham Palace is going to have to wait a bit longer. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Stacey Dooley's new season of documentaries starts at 9pm on Thursday 13th March on BBC Three. Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Despite a glittering career, Matthew Rhys can’t escape his impostor syndrome
Add Towards Zero to your watchlist It’s a clean-shaven and toned Matthew Rhys, taking time out from a family holiday in Mexico, who pops up via Zoom to speak with Radio Times. The star of HBO smash Perry Mason, who won an Emmy in 2018 for his role opposite his wife Keri Russell in espionage drama series The Americans, appears to be in rather better condition than his character in Towards Zero, Inspector Leach, who is racing against time to identify a murderer at Gull’s Point. The complexities of Leach, an ex-soldier with suicidal tendencies medicating his own survivor’s guilt with an ever-present bottle, were enough to attract Rhys to the role: “As an actor, you zone in on the cracks in a character’s personality because that’s also where the life is.” It isn’t hard to warm to Cardiff-raised Rhys, whose default mode when talking about his work is that of a competition winner who has won the chance to live his life for a day. The big-ticket jobs keep coming — a just-finished series for Netflix with Claire Danes called The Beast in Me, and an upcoming Apple TV+ project entitled Widow’s Bay. Impostor syndrome never quite leaves you, he says, but you have to keep it in check. It’s something he learnt the hard way, when he “over-prepared” for his role in the BBC’s 2012 Dickens’s adaptation, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. “I read the book religiously,” he recalls. “When it came to filming, I found myself saying things that weren’t in the script. So, ultimately, it messed me around.” Working with Anjelica Huston and Clarke Peters was, he adds, “fanboy catnip”. Upon meeting the latter for the first time: “I said, ‘I remember you playing Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre in 1996’. It was like he exploded onto the stage, a performance that stays with you for life.” Of Huston, Rhys says he is reminded of Kathleen Turner, with whom he starred on stage in The Graduate in 2000: “They both have a tenacity, a work ethic, they have ambition. You realise very quickly why they have become the women they are. And they did it when it was far harder, which I think has inspired the younger actors and directors who grew up watching them.” For Rhys, now 50, home is the apartment beside the Brooklyn Bridge he shares with his wife Keri Russell and their children. Asked if he pines for a permanent move back to the UK — especially Pennal, mid-Wales, where his father was born; Rhys led a campaign to stop the closure of the village pub — he says there’s no point in thinking about that while his kids are in the US school system. “Besides, I truly do love New York.” Once more, his inner competition winner resurfaces. “I step outside and I’m in a Scorsese movie. I take the kids to play football in our local park, right by the bridge. I told my oldest, ‘You’ll look back one day and say, My God, I played football with that view’, and he went, ‘What view?’ Because it’s all he knows. Heaven help me if I drag them away from that.”
New Yorker Clarke Peters was a fan of British acting long before making London his home
Add Towards Zero to your watchlist It falls to Clarke Peters, as Mr Treves, to deliver the line from which Towards Zero gets its name. “Every murder has its point of origin,” he gravely intones, “its point zero.” By the time he does so, we’re into the second episode of Agatha Christie’s 1944 murder mystery. The Tressilians’ family solicitor is forced to draw on hitherto untapped depths of duty, as the internecine love interests of the occupants of Gull’s Point start to claim lives. For all of that, when he read the part, the American actor — best known as Lester Freamon in The Wire and, more recently, for his acclaimed portrayal of Ken in Channel 4 drama Truelove — quickly connected with “a man who has been in the service of his adopted family for a long time”. It helps, he says, when it’s a costume drama, “because the very act of putting on that costume takes you out of yourself”. It’s a process that bears unlikely comparison to that undergone by a namesake from a very different world. “Well, yes, when Clark Kent removes his glasses, the metamorphosis to Superman starts straight away. And, you know, those 1940s costumes, when you’re all trussed up and suited… it changes the way you speak.” Peters, 72, says he had “no earthly reason to believe the work would keep getting better and better,” and yet, here he is. Although working with Anjelica Huston was “a dream”, bonding opportunities were thwarted by the fact that they needed to spend every free hour with voice coaches, finessing their British accents. To speak with a dressed-down Peters from the New Mexico dressing room where he has just wrapped on Netflix sci-fi series The Boroughs is to be reminded anew just how dramatically he differs from the buttoned-up Treves. It’s surprising to hear the actor talk about how getting the role made him “feel like the culture here has embraced me”. After all, as far back as 1990, his musical love letter to bandleader Louis Jordan, Five Guys Named Moe, started what was to become a five-year West End run. His Anglophilia predated his first spell here when he arrived as a singer, providing backing vocals to hits by Joan Armatrading and Cockney Rebel, and even now he divides his time between the UK and the Algarve, where he and his second wife Penny grow their own vegetables. “On my first visit here, I was expecting to see buildings covered in soot, but the fog had left and the pea-soupers were gone. I guess the Swinging Sixties had left their mark. It was all [switches to Cockney accent] ‘Welcome to London, mate!’” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/02/10-2CBBMJP-948dc62-e1740153997654.jpg" width="2328" height="1552" alt="WK10 Agatha Christie" title="USA. Sonja Sohn , Clarke Peters and Dominic West in the ©HBO TV series : The Wire - season 3 (2002-2008) . Plot: The Baltimore drug scene, as seen through the eyes of drug dealers and law enforcement. Ref: LMK106-J6720-050820Supplied by LMKMEDIA. Ed" /> Back when he was growing up in New Jersey, he would read newspaper and magazine interviews with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. “It wasn’t just the performances, but also how they embraced their craft as actors and storytellers. For me, the die was cast then.” As a connoisseur of the thespian tradition, did his preparations for the role take him to the previous 2007 TV adaptation of Towards Zero, in which his part was played by Tom Baker? “It was Tom, was it? Well, I’m in good company, then.” When Baker hears that Clarke Peters is following his turn, one imagines he’ll be swift to say the same. “You think so?” he smiles. “Now, that would be something.”
For Oscar-winner Anjelica Huston, starring in an Agatha Christie adaptation is a highlight in a career full of bespoke roles
Add Towards Zero to your watchlist “Nice work if you can get it!” laughs Anjelica Huston, as she reflects upon the job that brought her to British shores last summer. For the best part of a month, she would take breakfast in her hotel and then get into a waiting car that took her to the neo-Gothic pile of Tyntesfield, near Bristol. Once there, she would get back into bed for the rest of the day as she assumed the guise of Lady Tressilian in Towards Zero, the latest BBC Agatha Christie adaptation to hit our television screens. “Rather like my bed, this was a role that was made for me,” she says, and she isn’t wrong. It’s been 40 years since she stepped into the shoes of a mobster moll for her Oscar-winning turn in Prizzi’s Honor, a role that she still singles out as a “career highlight”. Since then, the actor’s best-bits montage has featured a malignant stepmother in Ever After: a Cinderella Story, a homicidal confidence trickster in Grifters, Morticia Addams in The Addams Family films and, more recently, a murderous “director” in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. If Huston, 73, is no less exquisitely formidable in Towards Zero, it ought to be added that the woman you get in person is almost the polar opposite. Twenty minutes into our conversation, when I fumble on one of my questions, she suddenly morphs into an encouraging aunt: “You’re doing very well!” she pipes supportively. It’s the first time she’s “done” Agatha Christie. It felt, she says, like both “a rite of passage and a privilege, because [Christie] wrote for women in a way that most writers don’t. Which means that almost a century later, it’s impossible for us to watch these events unfold and not notice how little things have changed.” For “events”, read the emotional toll exacted upon the women in the life of tennis star Nevile Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who heads off to spend the summer at the country manor of his bedroom-bound great aunt Lady Tressilian, accompanied by his ex-wife Audrey (Ella Lily Hyland) and his new wife Kay (Mimi Keene). “Shame is an emotion that men seem too keen to deflect onto women,” says Huston. She’s talking about poor Kay and Audrey, left hanging by a man who clearly enjoys the arrangement. However, from the remove of her upstairs bedroom, Huston would have had plenty of time to note the parallels between Strange and her ex-partner, and Prizzi’s Honor co-star, Jack Nicholson, whose philandering she reluctantly tolerated until he arranged a dinner date in order to tell her that another actress, Rebecca Broussard, was pregnant with his child. In fact, gazing at the Somerset countryside from her bed, “over the green fields and old trees outside”, Huston says her mind would stretch much further back to earlier, simpler times. Suddenly, she was six again, catapulted to the years her father, the director John Huston and her mother, socialite and model Enrica Soma, moved the family to a country house in rural Ireland. “In many ways, it wasn’t so different to shooting a period drama,” she says. “Long periods of very little punctuated by intense activity.” Somewhat lower stakes, though? “Well, day-to-day life was boring, but visitors from abroad were always fascinating.” The ensuing pause feels like an incitement to probe further. “Like who? Oh, you know. Marlon Brando, John Steinbeck…” She was only six when Brando rocked up, too young to know exactly what he did, but old enough to “remember looking up quizzically at him and thinking, ‘Hmm… this is Marlon Brando’. Not that I even knew what Marlon Brando should look like. He was very nice to me. He gave me a tortoiseshell ring and spent a little time with me. I remember appreciating him, but not finding him particularly beautiful.” Not like the author of Of Mice and Men, who stayed for Christmas and brought his own outfit. “John Steinbeck played Santa Claus. He didn’t have a sack of presents, but he got into it. I remember that. And he couldn’t have been nicer.” If Ireland elicits nostalgia, her ensuing years, packed off to London’s notoriously strict Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle school, left her feeling like a failure. So, when swinging London swung her way, she climbed aboard to see Jimi Hendrix at Earl’s Court: “I watched him as I rode on a carousel that they’d set up in the main hall. I think that’s as close as I ever got to heaven.” But none of this brought her any closer to knowing what adult life had in store for her. When her father cast her, aged just 18, as the aristocratic Claudia in A Walk with Love and Death, her eagerness to please him prompted her to give it her best shot. They would, of course, work together again on Prizzi’s Honor, but when A Walk with Love and Death emerged back in 1969, Huston’s performance was eviscerated by critics. Appearing on David Frost’s US talk show, just months after the death of her mother in a car accident, Huston took the extraordinary measure of issuing a public apology to her father. Once again, the conversation turns to shame. Her boyfriend at the time was the photographer Bob Richardson, “who emphasised that I should feel shame, so I think I was somewhat parroting what he’d said to me.” If we seem to be dwelling on the past more than either of us had expected, she says that’s perfectly fine – it’s a luxury she frequently allows herself. The music she mainly listens to is, “the Stones and Laurel Canyon stuff”; her current read is the memoir of her friend, actor Griffin Dunne (An American Werewolf in London), whose star rose in parallel to her own. She’s speaking from her ranch in the small Californian town of Three Rivers, having fled there from her home in LA two days previously. As the wildfires engulfed the city, she stayed until the last possible moment. Without a hint of drama, she reveals that “the fire had reached the house next door” before she packed a few of her most precious possessions and got in the car. What did she reach for first? “Well, my dogs, obviously. And then my photographs.” Later, she was told that her house had been spared. Gazing at the photos of her younger self among those she had grabbed, she struggled to understand why she was quite so hard on herself, even during her self-imposed exile from acting following A Walk with Love and Death, when she became a sought-after model. “I know, right? I was a strange dichotomy of both sort of happy with myself, pleased with the way I looked, and yet also uncomfortable. But somehow it all came together.” Perhaps it wasn’t just that “it all came together”. Looking at the arc of her career and the roles she’s attracted, especially in the past couple of decades, you sense that it took the next generation of directors, writers and actors to really grasp the breadth of Huston’s range, increasingly going so far as creating parts with a view to her playing them. Drew Barrymore herself went to the trouble of calling Huston up and love-bombing her into playing her wicked stepmother Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent in 1998’s Ever After. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson famously created the role of Etheline Tenenbaum for her, while in John Wick: Chapter 3, Keanu Reeves was rumoured to have pushed for her to be cast, later saying: “She’s a legend and to meet her and get a chance to act with her is something special.” None of which is surprising to Sam Yates, director of Towards Zero. My speculative message via Instagram prompts an almost instant response from Yates, who enthuses: “Anjelica was the only actor I had in my mind when I read Lady Tressilian in Towards Zero. Lady Tressilian is a woman who holds great secrets, and Anjelica brought with her mystery and a sense of fun that’s irresistible and felt just right for the role.” The other experience regrettably shared by Huston and Lady Tressilian is the fact that they have both had to deal with being widowed. Huston was happily married to sculptor Robert Graham for 16 years and, when she last spoke to Radio Times in 2012, in the wake of her fabulous turn as austerely bobbed theatre producer Eileen Rand in the musical drama series Smash, the shadow of their years together loomed large. She joked that “since my life always imitates art”, she had asked the show’s writer if she could give her “a lovely boyfriend”. So, has life imitated art? “Well, life is great, actually. And it will continue to be great as long as I can have my animals and do stuff like garden, or ride, or whatever my heart desires. As for a lovely boyfriend? Not so much! Not so much, but then you can’t have everything.” At this point, it feels salient to quote one of Huston’s own characters back at her. Repeating the words of Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent, I put it to her that nothing is final until you’re dead – and even then I’m sure God negotiates. “I see what you did there,” she laughs. “There’s some truth in that, though. When you’re young, you think you’re the author of your life, but really you’re just the main character. Sure, you feel free. But you don’t ultimately get to decide what happens next.”
Anjelica Huston on Towards Zero, fleeing the LA fires and childhood memories of Marlon Brando
The legendary actor spoke to Radio Times about her new Agatha Christie adaptation.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. "Nice work if you can get it!" laughs Anjelica Huston, as she reflects upon the job that brought her to British shores last summer. For the best part of a month, she would take breakfast in her hotel and then get into a waiting car that took her to Neston Park in Wiltshire. Once there, she would get back into bed for the rest of the day as she assumed the guise of Lady Tressilian in Towards Zero, the latest BBC Agatha Christie adaptation to hit our television screens. "Rather like my bed, this was a role that was made for me," she says, and she isn’t wrong. It’s been 40 years since she stepped into the shoes of a mobster moll for her Oscar-winning turn in Prizzi’s Honor, a role that she still singles out as a "career highlight". Since then, the actor’s best-bits montage has featured a malignant stepmother in Ever After: a Cinderella Story, a homicidal confidence trickster in Grifters, Morticia Addams in The Addams Family films and, more recently, a murderous "director" in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. If Huston, 73, is no less exquisitely formidable in Towards Zero, it ought to be added that the woman you get in person is almost the polar opposite. Twenty minutes into our conversation, when I fumble on one of my questions, she suddenly morphs into an encouraging aunt: "You’re doing very well!" she pipes supportively. It’s the first time she’s "done" Agatha Christie. It felt, she says, like both "a rite of passage and a privilege, because [Christie] wrote for women in a way that most writers don’t. Which means that almost a century later, it’s impossible for us to watch these events unfold and not notice how little things have changed." For "events", read the emotional toll exacted upon the women in the life of tennis star Nevile Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who heads off to spend the summer at the country manor of his bedroom-bound great aunt Lady Tressilian, accompanied by his ex-wife Audrey (Ella Lily Hyland) and his new wife Kay (Mimi Keene). "Shame is an emotion that men seem too keen to deflect onto women," says Huston. She’s talking about poor Kay and Audrey, left hanging by a man who clearly enjoys the arrangement. However, from the remove of her upstairs bedroom, Huston would have had plenty of time to note the parallels between Strange and her ex-partner, and Prizzi’s Honor co-star, Jack Nicholson, whose philandering she reluctantly tolerated until he arranged a dinner date in order to tell her that another actress, Rebecca Broussard, was pregnant with his child. In fact, gazing at the Somerset countryside from her bed, "over the green fields and old trees outside", Huston says her mind would stretch much further back to earlier, simpler times. Suddenly, she was six again, catapulted to the years her father, the director John Huston and her mother, socialite and model Enrica Soma, moved the family to a country house in rural Ireland. "In many ways, it wasn’t so different to shooting a period drama," she says. "Long periods of very little punctuated by intense activity." Somewhat lower stakes, though? "Well, day-to-day life was boring, but visitors from abroad were always fascinating." The ensuing pause feels like an incitement to probe further. "Like who? Oh, you know. Marlon Brando, John Steinbeck…" She was only six when Brando rocked up, too young to know exactly what he did, but old enough to "remember looking up quizzically at him and thinking, ‘Hmm… this is Marlon Brando.’ Not that I even knew what Marlon Brando should look like. He was very nice to me. He gave me a tortoiseshell ring and spent a little time with me. I remember appreciating him, but not finding him particularly beautiful." Not like the author of Of Mice and Men, who stayed for Christmas and brought his own outfit. "John Steinbeck played Santa Claus. He didn’t have a sack of presents, but he got into it. I remember that. And he couldn’t have been nicer." If Ireland elicits nostalgia, her ensuing years, packed off to London’s notoriously strict Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle school, left her feeling like a failure. So, when swinging London swung her way, she climbed aboard to see Jimi Hendrix at Earl’s Court: "I watched him as I rode on a carousel that they’d set up in the main hall. I think that’s as close as I ever got to heaven." But none of this brought her any closer to knowing what adult life had in store for her. When her father cast her, aged just 18, as the aristocratic Claudia in A Walk with Love and Death, her eagerness to please him prompted her to give it her best shot. They would, of course, work together again on Prizzi’s Honor, but when A Walk with Love and Death emerged back in 1969, Huston’s performance was eviscerated by critics. Appearing on David Frost’s US talk show, just months after the death of her mother in a car accident, Huston took the extraordinary measure of issuing a public apology to her father. Once again, the conversation turns to shame. Her boyfriend at the time was the photographer Bob Richardson, "who emphasised that I should feel shame, so I think I was somewhat parroting what he’d said to me." If we seem to be dwelling on the past more than either of us had expected, she says that’s perfectly fine – it’s a luxury she frequently allows herself. The music she mainly listens to is, "the Stones and Laurel Canyon stuff"; her current read is the memoir of her friend, actor Griffin Dunne (An American Werewolf in London), whose star rose in parallel to her own. She’s speaking from her ranch in the small Californian town of Three Rivers, having fled there from her home in LA two days previously. As the wildfires engulfed the city, she stayed until the last possible moment. Without a hint of drama, she reveals that "the fire had reached the house next door" before she packed a few of her most precious possessions and got in the car. What did she reach for first? "Well, my dogs, obviously. And then my photographs." Later, she was told that her house had been spared. Gazing at the photos of her younger self among those she had grabbed, she struggled to understand why she was quite so hard on herself, even during her self-imposed exile from acting following A Walk with Love and Death, when she became a sought-after model. "I know, right? I was a strange dichotomy of both sort of happy with myself, pleased with the way I looked, and yet also uncomfortable. But somehow it all came together." Perhaps it wasn’t just that "it all came together". Looking at the arc of her career and the roles she’s attracted, especially in the past couple of decades, you sense that it took the next generation of directors, writers and actors to really grasp the breadth of Huston’s range, increasingly going so far as creating parts with a view to her playing them. Drew Barrymore herself went to the trouble of calling Huston up and love-bombing her into playing her wicked stepmother Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent in 1998’s Ever After. In The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson famously created the role of Etheline Tenenbaum for her, while in John Wick: Chapter 3, Keanu Reeves was rumoured to have pushed for her to be cast, later saying: "She’s a legend and to meet her and get a chance to act with her is something special." None of which is surprising to Sam Yates, director of Towards Zero. My speculative message via Instagram prompts an almost instant response from Yates, who enthuses: "Anjelica was the only actor I had in my mind when I read Lady Tressilian in Towards Zero. Lady Tressilian is a woman who holds great secrets, and Anjelica brought with her mystery and a sense of fun that’s irresistible and felt just right for the role." The other experience regrettably shared by Huston and Lady Tressilian is the fact that they have both had to deal with being widowed. Huston was happily married to sculptor Robert Graham for 16 years and, when she last spoke to Radio Times in 2012, in the wake of her fabulous turn as austerely bobbed theatre producer Eileen Rand in the musical drama series Smash, the shadow of their years together loomed large. She joked that "since my life always imitates art", she had asked the show’s writer if she could give her "a lovely boyfriend". So, has life imitated art? "Well, life is great, actually. And it will continue to be great as long as I can have my animals and do stuff like garden, or ride, or whatever my heart desires. As for a lovely boyfriend? Not so much! Not so much, but then you can’t have everything." At this point, it feels salient to quote one of Huston’s own characters back at her. Repeating the words of Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent, I put it to her that nothing is final until you’re dead – and even then I’m sure God negotiates. "I see what you did there," she laughs. "There’s some truth in that, though. When you’re young, you think you’re the author of your life, but really you’re just the main character. Sure, you feel free. But you don’t ultimately get to decide what happens next." The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Agatha Christie's Towards Zero premieres on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday 2nd March 2025. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Matthew Rhys on Towards Zero and why working with its all-star cast was "fanboy catnip"
The Perry Mason star speaks to Radio Times about his latest project – a racy Agatha Christie adaptation.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It’s a clean-shaven and toned Matthew Rhys, taking time out from a family holiday in Mexico, who pops up via Zoom to speak with Radio Times. The star of HBO smash Perry Mason, who won an Emmy in 2018 for his role opposite his wife Keri Russell in espionage drama series The Americans, appears to be in rather better condition than his character in Towards Zero, Inspector Leach, who is racing against time to identify a murderer at Gull’s Point. The complexities of Leach, an ex-soldier with suicidal tendencies medicating his own survivor’s guilt with an ever-present bottle, were enough to attract Rhys to the role: "As an actor, you zone in on the cracks in a character’s personality because that’s also where the life is." It isn’t hard to warm to Cardiff-raised Rhys, whose default mode when talking about his work is that of a competition winner who has won the chance to live his life for a day. The big-ticket jobs keep coming — a just-finished series for Netflix with Claire Danes called The Beast in Me, and an upcoming Apple TV+ project entitled Widow’s Bay. Impostor syndrome never quite leaves you, he says, but you have to keep it in check. It’s something he learnt the hard way, when he "over-prepared" for his role in the BBC’s 2012 Dickens’s adaptation, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. "I read the book religiously," he recalls. "When it came to filming, I found myself saying things that weren’t in the script. So, ultimately, it messed me around." Working with Anjelica Huston and Clarke Peters was, he adds, "fanboy catnip". Upon meeting the latter for the first time: "I said, ‘I remember you playing Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre in 1996’. It was like he exploded onto the stage, a performance that stays with you for life." Of Huston, Rhys says he is reminded of Kathleen Turner, with whom he starred on stage in The Graduate in 2000: "They both have a tenacity, a work ethic, they have ambition. "You realise very quickly why they have become the women they are. And they did it when it was far harder, which I think has inspired the younger actors and directors who grew up watching them." For Rhys, now 50, home is the apartment beside the Brooklyn Bridge he shares with his wife Keri Russell and their children. Asked if he pines for a permanent move back to the UK — especially Pennal, mid-Wales, where his father was born; Rhys led a campaign to stop the closure of the village pub — he says there’s no point in thinking about that while his kids are in the US school system. “Besides, I truly do love New York.” Once more, his inner competition winner resurfaces. |I step outside and I’m in a Scorsese movie. I take the kids to play football in our local park, right by the bridge. I told my oldest, ‘You’ll look back one day and say, My God, I played football with that view’, and he went, ‘What view?’ Because it’s all he knows. Heaven help me if I drag them away from that." The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Towards Zero premieres on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday 2nd March 2025. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
It’s going to be a Christmas to remember for Saint Marie newbie Don Gilet
Add Death in Paradise to your watchlist “You’re probing, Pete, you’re probing into my life,” exclaims Don Gilet. The tone of voice, while ostensibly upbeat, comes with a slight undercurrent of three strikes and you’re out. The question that seems to have raised his defences? I wanted to know who’s cooking the Christmas dinner chez Gilet this year. Thankfully, there are other aspects of the coming holiday that the small-screen veteran is happier to enthuse about. Christmas brings with it our first chance to see him as Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson in a special feature-length episode of Death in Paradise, taking over from Ralf Little as the new lead detective on Saint Marie, the Caribbean island where mysterious murders seem to arrive with the clockwork regularity of Japanese bullet trains. It’s a massive deal and, to the former EastEnders and Holby City actor’s credit, he’s anything but coy about it. He says he would be lying if he said he hadn’t imagined himself as the show’s lead when he guest-starred alongside Kris Marshall in 2015. Back then, he was Andre Morgan, an employee of a murdered rum distillery owner: “Oh, of course. You’re watching Kris do the Poirot speech, where [Marshall’s DI] Humphrey is piecing it all together, and you can’t help but wonder, ‘How would I do that?’ I mean, that’s a huge amount of information and, as an actor, you have to get to that point where it stops being a memory test and you’re actually expressing yourself as a character.” Given that even the knottiest cases in Saint Marie are never left unsolved, it’s no great spoiler to reveal that Gilet is nothing short of electric tackling his first case, as he finally figures out how expat celebrity songwriter Tony Hurst (Steven Hartley), a holidaymaker called Stuart (Marcus Brigstocke) and luckless local Tyrus (Michael Salami) could all have been shot by the same gun at the same time. Yet, unlike the actor bringing him to life, Mervin Wilson doesn’t see much of a future for himself in Saint Marie. After a brief visit to the island for personal reasons, his plane is on the runway about to take him home for Christmas. But with a murder to solve, Saint Marie lacking a DI and strict instructions from his boss ringing in his ear, what ensues is a bumpy and, over time, emotional voyage of self-discovery. One of the most fascinating aspects of Death in Paradise’s “changeover” episodes is the sense of watching both actor and character simultaneously adapt to the intense heat and pace of life in the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, where the show is filmed. “I think you’re right,” says Gilet, “It’s what I call holiday heat – where you can choose to be in the shade or in the sun, you can choose to have a cocktail or a siesta. But of course, it’s a normal working day for me, as it is for Mervin.” If there seems to be significant overlap between Gilet and his character, that’s not altogether accidental, as his audition with the drama’s executive producer, Tim Key, subsequently informed the writing of the coming series. Also present at the audition was Don Warrington, aka Commissioner Selwyn Patterson, which, for Gilet, underscored just how special the moment was. “I thought, ‘If Don is taking the time to be in the room and read with me, I don’t want to be looking down at the script all the time. I’ve got to bring my A-game.’” There’s a presumption that, by the nature of what they do, actors must have pretty big egos. But surely the audition process, with its risk of exposure and rejection, runs counter to that? Gilet isn’t so sure. “Egos exist,” he says, “and will take you so far. In the same way, great looks will, too. But they never got me anywhere, which is why I’ve still had to wait this long to get a massive lead role.” Guarded as he tries to be, it’s at times like this that Gilet hints at undercurrents of frustration that a lead role commensurate to his experience has eluded him. It only takes one casting decision to vault you from acclaimed character actor to the lead in a ratings hit. But at a well- preserved 57, you sense Gilet had started to accept it might never happen. That suddenly he finds himself in this position informs the spirit in which his months on location were spent. Although the coconut palms, golden sands and breathtaking blue waters of Guadeloupe’s Basse-Terre Island lay a two-minute walk from his apartment, Gilet didn’t go in the water once. “I was like, ‘No, this could be time you study the script so that you know it inside out.’” Similarly, if any of his family – his dad and his sister, or his now grown-up son to his ex-wife, actor Tracy Whitwell – were expecting invitations to join him in the sunshine, none was forthcoming: “If people come out to stay with you, then some of your energy has to go towards looking after them. I thought, ‘I can’t do that this year. All I want to do is make sure that the execs and all the people who said yes, we’ll have him, don’t regret the choice they made.’” Some critics have bemoaned Death in Paradise’s perpetuation of the “white saviour” trope. The allegation runs that it’s an unwelcome anachronism to have black supporting actors relying on a white male lead to solve crimes. In fact, earlier this year, Tim Key conceded that “the world has changed a lot since the show was first commissioned and the show will continue to move with the times.” “There can be superficial ways one can be described and defined,” Gilet says. “If they were looking for the best actor to take on the mantle, a guy who can do a bit of comedy and a bit of serious, and fuse those together, then I’ll take that. The roles I go up for, they’re not black parts, they’re just parts, and when I don’t get them, it’s because that job wasn’t right for me. I have to say to myself, ‘It’s your job – own it.’ And if your efforts bear fruit, then you have to enjoy that.” Come Christmas, that’s exactly what Gilet will be doing. Even the prospect of driving from London to Walsall, where he grew up, visibly calms him. The actor’s teenage years coincided with the breakdancing boom. He reveals that, had you been walking through the newly paved urban architecture of Caldmore Green, you might have happened upon the young Gilet and his pals – or, as they called themselves, the Rock Sonic Crew – finessing their top rocks, crab freezes and coffee grinders. Alas, the Rock Sonic Crew have long dispersed, but Gilet’s father and sister are still there. Watching himself on screen is something he has avoided in the past, but some moments in life demand to be savoured. “Well, yes. And this is one I’m going to be sharing with so many people up and down the country. It makes me determined to make this Christmas even more relaxed than usual. The days of running around at the last minute because I haven’t got a present. I don’t have to buy for children any more. It’s just… Watch the telly. Enjoy.” Finally, he seems to be loosening up. I take my chances. So, come on, who’s cooking the Christmas dinner? “Well, OK. If you really want to know, I’m in charge of sprouts, for which I copy a Gordon Ramsay recipe with bacon and chestnuts. People take sprouts for granted, but you’ve got to put a bit of thought into it. Christmas is their big moment and you can’t screw it up.” The delivery is deadpan. As for the symbolism, it’s unclear whether it was intended. But either way, he’s got this.
Don Gilet on Death in Paradise: 'Watching Kris do the Poirot speech, I thought… how would I do that?'
Gilet lifts the lid on DI Mervin Wilson.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. “You’re probing, Pete, you’re probing into my life,” exclaims Don Gilet. The tone of voice, while ostensibly upbeat, comes with a slight undercurrent of three strikes and you’re out. The question that seems to have raised his defences? I wanted to know who’s cooking the Christmas dinner chez Gilet this year. Thankfully, there are other aspects of the coming holiday that the small-screen veteran is happier to enthuse about. Christmas brings with it our first chance to see him as Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson in a special feature-length episode of Death in Paradise, taking over from Ralf Little as the new lead detective on Saint Marie, the Caribbean island where mysterious murders seem to arrive with the clockwork regularity of Japanese bullet trains. It’s a massive deal and, to the former EastEnders and Holby City actor’s credit, he’s anything but coy about it. He says he would be lying if he said he hadn’t imagined himself as the show’s lead when he guest-starred alongside Kris Marshall in 2015. Back then, he was Andre Morgan, an employee of a murdered rum distillery owner: “Oh, of course. You’re watching Kris do the Poirot speech, where [Marshall’s DI] Humphrey is piecing it all together, and you can’t help but wonder, ‘How would I do that?’ “I mean, that’s a huge amount of information and, as an actor, you have to get to that point where it stops being a memory test and you’re actually expressing yourself as a character.” Given that even the knottiest cases in Saint Marie are never left unsolved, it’s no great spoiler to reveal that Gilet is nothing short of electric tackling his first case, as he finally figures out how expat celebrity songwriter Tony Hurst (Steven Hartley), a holidaymaker called Stuart (Marcus Brigstocke) and luckless local Tyrus (Michael Salami) could all have been shot by the same gun at the same time. Yet, unlike the actor bringing him to life, Mervin Wilson doesn’t see much of a future for himself in Saint Marie. After a brief visit to the island for personal reasons, his plane is on the runway about to take him home for Christmas. But with a murder to solve, Saint Marie lacking a DI and strict instructions from his boss ringing in his ear, what ensues is a bumpy and, over time, emotional voyage of self-discovery. One of the most fascinating aspects of Death in Paradise’s “changeover” episodes is the sense of watching both actor and character simultaneously adapt to the intense heat and pace of life in the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, where the show is filmed. “I think you’re right,” says Gilet, “It’s what I call holiday heat – where you can choose to be in the shade or in the sun, you can choose to have a cocktail or a siesta. But of course, it’s a normal working day for me, as it is for Mervin.” If there seems to be significant overlap between Gilet and his character, that’s not altogether accidental, as his audition with the drama’s executive producer, Tim Key, subsequently informed the writing of the coming series. Also present at the audition was Don Warrington, aka Commissioner Selwyn Patterson, which, for Gilet, underscored just how special the moment was. “I thought, ‘If Don is taking the time to be in the room and read with me, I don’t want to be looking down at the script all the time. I’ve got to bring my A-game.’” There’s a presumption that, by the nature of what they do, actors must have pretty big egos. But surely the audition process, with its risk of exposure and rejection, runs counter to that? Gilet isn’t so sure. “Egos exist,” he says, “and will take you so far. In the same way, great looks will, too. But they never got me anywhere, which is why I’ve still had to wait this long to get a massive lead role.” Guarded as he tries to be, it’s at times like this that Gilet hints at undercurrents of frustration that a lead role commensurate to his experience has eluded him. It only takes one casting decision to vault you from acclaimed character actor to the lead in a ratings hit. But at a well-preserved 57, you sense Gilet had started to accept it might never happen. That suddenly he finds himself in this position informs the spirit in which his months on location were spent. Although the coconut palms, golden sands and breathtaking blue waters of Guadeloupe’s Basse-Terre Island lay a two-minute walk from his apartment, Gilet didn’t go in the water once. “I was like, ‘No, this could be time you study the script so that you know it inside out.’” Similarly, if any of his family – his dad and his sister, or his now grown-up son to his ex-wife, actor Tracy Whitwell – were expecting invitations to join him in the sunshine, none was forthcoming: “If people come out to stay with you, then some of your energy has to go towards looking after them. I thought, ‘I can’t do that this year. All I want to do is make sure that the execs and all the people who said yes, we’ll have him, don’t regret the choice they made.’” Some critics have bemoaned Death in Paradise’s perpetuation of the “white saviour” trope. The allegation runs that it’s an unwelcome anachronism to have black supporting actors relying on a white male lead to solve crimes. In fact, earlier this year, Tim Key conceded that “the world has changed a lot since the show was first commissioned and the show will continue to move with the times”. “There can be superficial ways one can be described and defined,” Gilet says. “If they were looking for the best actor to take on the mantle, a guy who can do a bit of comedy and a bit of serious, and fuse those together, then I’ll take that. The roles I go up for, they’re not black parts, they’re just parts, and when I don’t get them, it’s because that job wasn’t right for me. “I have to say to myself, ‘It’s your job – own it.’ And if your efforts bear fruit, then you have to enjoy that.” Come Christmas, that’s exactly what Gilet will be doing. Even the prospect of driving from London to Walsall, where he grew up, visibly calms him. The actor’s teenage years coincided with the breakdancing boom. He reveals that, had you been walking through the newly paved urban architecture of Caldmore Green, you might have happened upon the young Gilet and his pals – or, as they called themselves, the Rock Sonic Crew – finessing their top rocks, crab freezes and coffee grinders. Alas, the Rock Sonic Crew have long dispersed, but Gilet’s father and sister are still there. Watching himself on screen is something he has avoided in the past, but some moments in life demand to be savoured. “Well, yes. And this is one I’m going to be sharing with so many people up and down the country. It makes me determined to make this Christmas even more relaxed than usual. The days of running around at the last minute because I haven’t got a present. I don’t have to buy for children any more. It’s just… Watch the telly. Enjoy.” Finally, he seems to be loosening up. I take my chances. So, come on, who’s cooking the Christmas dinner? “Well, OK. If you really want to know, I’m in charge of sprouts, for which I copy a Gordon Ramsay recipe with bacon and chestnuts. People take sprouts for granted, but you’ve got to put a bit of thought into it. Christmas is their big moment and you can’t screw it up.” The delivery is deadpan. As for the symbolism, it’s unclear whether it was intended. But either way, he’s got this. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Death in Paradise will air at 8:30pm on Sunday 22nd December on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. Season 1-13 are available to stream now on BBC iPlayer. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guideto find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
How Eurovision became the TV music event of the year, as Olly Alexander takes centre stage
This year's Eurovision Song Contest promises to be wilder than ever – just as well the UK is pinning its hopes on a proper pop star, writes Pete Paphides.
This article was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Britain for the win? Could it be Olly this year? It doesn't take a genius to figure out why the BBC Eurovision selection committee almost bit off Olly Alexander's hand when he dropped them a line last summer. Lest we forget, these past decades, the Chernobyl Tourist Board has had more luck filling charter flights than we've had at getting actual pop stars to compete in the event. Former pop stars? Well, that's a different story. Blue sang I Can in 2011, only to find that, actually, when it came to landing a top ten placing, they couldn’t. Bonnie Tyler spent much of the 2013 final holding out for something more than a zero, finally scraping a paltry 23 points. Future pop stars? Sure, Sam Ryder became a household name in 2022 thanks to his cosmological cri de coeur, Space Man. But when newly solo Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander takes to the stage in Malmo this Saturday to sing Dizzy, he will do so as someone whose band's most-recent album, Night Call, landed at number one in the first of its 23-week run in the UK charts. To understand why Eurovision can now attract a pop star at the top of his game, we need to step back and look at what, almost by stealth, Eurovision has become over the past 25 years. A tournament that was once a byword for naffness, synonymous with sexless balladeering, baffling schlager ditties and cabaret corn, has become the music television event of the year. In the UK last year, it secured its highest audience share since records began, while over in Sweden almost a third of the population saw their country triumph with Loreen's pneumatic power ballad, Tattoo. The staging of the event has evolved to mirror its growing importance, with this year's production designers having worked on Beyoncé's Renaissance tour and Abba Voyage. What you’ll see when you tune in is the most ambitious presentation the contest has ever seen: a cross-shaped stage positioned in the middle of the Malmo Arena made up of moveable LED cubes and floors. Right at the centre of that revolution is the music itself. As we go to press, the bookmakers’ favourite is Swiss offering The Code by singing, rapping, violin-playing force of nature Nemo, in which they detail the turbulent journey to realising their non-binary identity. Also in the frame is Croatia's Baby Lasagna, whose stirring immigration anthem Rim Tim Tagi Dim issues a powerful reminder that sublime and ridiculous don't have to sleep in separate beds. "Ay, I'm a big boy now," intones the Croat poet. "I'm going away and I sold my cow." When it comes to risk-taking pop, the Swiss and Croatian entries are by no means alone. As Eurovision memoirist William Lee Adams explains, "More than any other year, Eurovision 2024 is a wild rodeo ride. You've got Angelina Mango from Italy singing Cumbia music with hot, spicy passion and then there's Joost from the Netherlands with Europapa, a bonkers but passionate anthem to free movement around Europe." Perhaps it's finally time to set aside our accumulated memories of the whimsical commentary box put-downs that came as standard in the days when Terry Wogan was our guide to the madness on stage. Just because we thought that Eurovision was naff, it didn't mean other countries felt that way. According to Dr Dean Vuletic, author of Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest, the very question itself says a lot about the way we still view ourselves, with perhaps a certain sense of entitlement when it comes to our status as a pop nation. He mentions the response in 1968 when Cliff Richard’s Congratulations lost out to Spain by just one point, prompting newspapers to imply that Spanish state television had rigged the vote on behalf of General Franco's fascist regime: "All that soft power you didn't know you had, because you never lacked it? The visibility Britain had through its language and its pop culture – for other countries, there are few international platforms that allow them to have that same visibility." By contrast, Vuletic talks about the way Abba's Waterloo suddenly amplified Sweden's reach after the 1974 contest. "No country has done better out of Eurovision than Sweden with Abba. Prior to Abba, Sweden was not a power when it came to popular culture. Now its third-biggest export industry is popular music. And when you combine that with the soft power potential of companies such as H&M and Ikea, then that's pretty amazing." What Sweden seemed to realise accidentally with Abba's victory 50 years ago was something that the group themselves knew all along – that this could be the cannon that would blast them to huge international success. That when the world is watching, you need to supplant all their preconceptions about you and replace them with something way better. Abba studied the British pop charts and set about planning their moment like a world-class bank robber would plan a heist. Bjorn Ulvaeus recalls, "I know that we wanted to pack it with energy. It's all energy, energy, energy. That was during the glam-rock era and groups like Slade and Sweet, those British bands… All those records were so full of energy. And we wanted to pack that much energy into Waterloo as well." In a poll conducted by BBC One for the channel's 2020 TV special Eurovision: Come Together, Waterloo was voted the greatest Eurovision song of all time, followed by Conchita Wurst's 2014 winner Rise Like a Phoenix. What does that tell us about what it takes to come up with a winning formula in 2024? Not much, according to Katrina Leskanich of Katrina and the Waves, whose Love Shine a Light was the last British winner, back in 1997. "Was Love Shine a Light really the best song?" ponders the singer, most remembered for her group's 1985 hit Walking on Sunshine. "I'm not sure. I'll tell you something, though. It wasn't even written for Eurovision. It was written for the Swindon branch of Samaritans. Our drummer's brother worked there, and they needed a theme tune for their 50th-anniversary celebrations. So our guitarist Kimberley Rew wrote it and we shoved it in the bottom drawer, thinking it was too Eurovision to put on one of our records. So when we got an approach to submit a song, we submitted it." Leskanich remains proud of Love Shine a Light, but adds that "so much of what happens depends on the night, on what all the other songs are. There was a good feeling about the UK that week, because Tony Blair had just come to power and he was hugely popular across Europe. All that stuff plays a part." In other words, context and politics matter. Without it, would Ukraine's Kalush Orchestra have secured an outright win in 2022 for their entry Stefania? The prospect of three minutes broadcasting to an entire continent is a chance to influence the narrative – and occasionally, argues Adams, turn Eurovision into a propaganda tool. By way of example, he cites A Million Voices, Russia's 2015 near-winner by Polina Gagarina – who subsequently became a prominent figure at pro-Putin rallies – which promoted the notion that Russia was a peacemaker in that part of the world. The uneasy truce in the old Soviet Union was something that didn't go unnoticed by Terry Wogan back in 2008, when Russia received 12 points from Ukraine. In remarks that now seem prescient, he muttered: "Ukraine just want to be sure that the old electricity and the oil flows through." "Anyone who feels that politics has no place in Eurovision probably hasn't been paying that much attention," says Adams when asked about calls from Swedish musicians such as Robyn and First Aid Kit to exclude Israel's Eden Golan from this year's contest. Golan's song was originally called October Rain and featured lyrics directly referencing Hamas's 7 October attack on Israel, but was rejected by the Eurovision Broadcasting Union, prompting a new lyric that now answers to the name of Hurricane. Eurovision has always, to a greater or lesser extent, acted as a detailed tapestry of what's happening across the continent at any given time. That has been a constant going back to the very first contest in 1956, when West Germany fielded an entry by Holocaust survivor Walter Andreas Schwarz with a self-composed autobiographical song in the chanson style whose title translates as Luckily in the Waiting Room. So how best to think of Eurovision and the place it holds in the collective psyche? Rather like Camp chicory coffee and those people who walk around pubs with a tray of seafood, if we didn't already have it, no one would invent it. It's a space that exists to be claimed by anyone who needs it badly enough. And since 1998, when Dana International emerged victorious with Diva, the biggest driver of Eurovision's resurgence has been the visibility of LGBTQ+ singers in the contest. The sight of the Israeli singer emerging victorious that May night had an unforgettable effect on the then nine-year-old Rylan, watching in Stepney, east London. "I didn't entirely understand why it was such a big deal," recalls the Radio 2 presenter, who was a member of the UK’s song selection committee this year. "But then to find out, obviously, that Dana was trans… my brain was a bit, like, 'Oh, so that woman has not always been a woman'. That was my first connection with Eurovision, seeing everyone talking about it. It was fun, but also there was a sort of gravity to that moment." The success of Diva is a splash whose ripples continue to push outwards and was followed by winning turns from Serbia's Marija Serifovic in 2007 and Austria's Conchita Wurst in 2014. If anything, then, it feels overdue that finally in 2024 Britain gets to be represented in Eurovision by an LGBTQ+ singer. Russell T Davies, who selected Olly Alexander as the lead in his 2021 Channel 4 drama It's a Sin, says: "Look, I'm biased, I love the man. And I'm fascinated to see how much his appeal transcends borders. There's something so unusual about Olly, something shifting and elemental. He's like a sprite. Or a devil. I never quite know what's going on in his eyes. I wonder how that'll come across on a tough, huge production like Eurovision. "I worry that big, huge voices win on the night. He's more interesting than that. But Eurovision keeps changing – just when you think it's all about big ballads and key changes, along comes Netta [the defiantly outlandish Israeli 2018 winner]. So my hopes are high!" Read more: Eurovision 2024 contestants: All 37 countries and acts taking part Who is performing in the Eurovision 2024 interval? Alexander himself says he has "put all thoughts of winning to one side". Expectation management is wise at this stage. Although the surging happy-sad Europop of Dizzy will surely see his star rise across Europe – with a projected 200 million streams of the song on just that one night – current betting doesn't have Alexander right up there with the leaders. But as Rylan points out, "A lot can change in the fortnight leading up to the contest. Staging is definitely a factor." Regardless of what happens on the night, as Alexander says, "It really isn't about coming first. So many Eurovision moments that have stayed with me and inspired me happened with songs that didn't even go beyond the semi-finals. That's not what it's about." So what is it ultimately about? "It's not real life," says Adams. "It's the opposite. For three minutes on the Eurovision stage, everything is perfect. This is a moment where you can put aside all the drama, all the trauma, sing your heart out and be appreciated. Because every Eurovision performance – whether it's difficult, whether it's easy – ends with applause." The new issue of Radio Times magazine is out now – subscribe to Radio Times here. The Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final airs Saturday 11th May at 8pm on BBC One, BBC iPlayer, BBC Radio 2 and BBC Sounds. You can also check out the full list of Eurovision winners and how many times the UK has won Eurovision. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what else is on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.