Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2024-04-04T08:01:33.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Billie Piper on Scoop: "Telling their story felt important to me"
items: The Singapore Grip's Luke Treadaway explains why ITV empire drama is 'interesting, weird and dark'
items: Cheat's Tom Goodman-Hill: Playing an adulterer is “cathartic”
items: Ant-Man and the Wasp's Michael Douglas: "I thought I'd never act again"
items: Sir Patrick Stewart reveals his greatest fears – and a lifelong addiction to jigsaws
items: Mahershala Ali on faith, Moonlight and the impact of his absent father
items: NW author Zadie Smith on TV adaptations and Brexit Britain: "Sometimes it's good to be stressed out"
items: Helen Mirren: "I'm tired of being called 'sexy'"
items: David Harewood nearly quit acting before Homeland

Billie Piper on Scoop: "Telling their story felt important to me"
type: item
date: 2024-04-04T08:00:47.000Z
creator: Richard Godwin
subject: Movies
subject: Interview
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
description: Piper and Keeley Hawes spoke to Radio Times magazine about how the Netflix film tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Prince Andrew Newsnight interview.
encoded: This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. "I don’t know that I’ll ever see an interview like that again in my lifetime," says Billie Piper. "Especially nowadays, where everything is so censored and controlled. That access and exposure… that self-exposure." She pauses. "Actually, I’m not sure that I saw anything like that before." There is, of course, only one interview that Piper could be talking about – the fateful 22-minute conversation between Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis on Newsnight on 17th November 2019. It has become one of the most raked-over TV moments of our times. You might wonder if we really need to revisit it so soon. What can we possibly learn from a drama that we haven’t already seen ourselves? The interview largely came about because of two formidable women: the former Newsnight interviews producer Sam McAlister, played by Piper, and Amanda Thirsk, played by Keeley Hawes, who served as Andrew’s private secretary until 2020, and who met McAlister several times before the actual interview went ahead. Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil’s script, adapted from McAlister’s book Scoops, gives a fascinating insight into the workings of two troubled British institutions: the BBC and the royal family. "It’s a bit like The Crown," says Hawes. "What’s really interesting is seeing behind the curtains. And it read like a thriller! It was unlike anything I was expecting it to be." It’s a particularly great showcase for Piper, who says she had been following the Jeffrey Epstein story for many years – even before the Prince Andrew interview. "Whenever there’s a story about abuse of women, I pay attention," she says. "I’m an ambassador for Refuge [the domestic abuse charity], so this is something that I feel passionately about: the protection of women and children specifically." Still, she’s careful to point out that this isn’t a story about Epstein or his victims - rather about the women who brought a particular aspect of the story to our scre…

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The Singapore Grip's Luke Treadaway explains why ITV empire drama is 'interesting, weird and dark'
type: item
date: 2020-09-13T08:00:39.000Z
creator: Richard Godwin
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
subject: The Big RT Interview
description: Luke Treadaway tells Richard Godwin about ITV's new big budget show, The Singapore Grip.
encoded: Before he was cast as the idealistic son of a rubber magnate in The Singapore Grip, Luke Treadaway hadn’t given much thought to the Japanese invasion of Singapore in the Second World War. Nor, he admits, had he spent much time pondering the finer points of the colonial rubber trade, or the lives of British imperialists in the Malay Peninsula, or the people they were there to exploit. And, in fairness, how many British people have? “It’s not on the syllabus is it, the Fall of Singapore?” says the 36-year-old actor from his coronavirus retreat in rural Devon. He’s wearing a grey cap and sweatshirt, curls and beard untroubled since lockdown began, bearing the dreamy air of a child who has been yanked away from his game to say hello to a grown up. “We don’t go there in school, funnily enough. We dwell on the victorious battles,” he says. Having once played a prisoner in a Japanese internment camp in Angelina Jolie’s movie Unbroken, he was vaguely familiar with the history, but not the wider context. “So being in this was eye-opening to me.” The sumptuous new drama, adapted by Christopher Hampton from JG Farrell’s 1978 novel, ought to be eye-opening for TV audiences, too. In February 1942, 80,000 British, Indian and Australian soldiers surrendered to a Japanese force roughly half that size, thanks to a familiar combination of British hubris, aristocratic incompetence and casual racism. Winston Churchill called it “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”, and all those captured, soldiers and civilians alike, suffered some of the worst PoW conditions of the war at the hands of their Japanese captors. The surrender is often described as the “day the Empire died”, but given the depiction of those doing the surrendering in Farrell’s book, it’s hard to feel too sad about that part of it. “Empire”, as George Orwell had it, was “in essence nothing but mechanisms for exploiting coloured labour” – and there’s plenty of that going on in the rubber plantation…

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Cheat's Tom Goodman-Hill: Playing an adulterer is “cathartic”
type: item
date: 2019-03-14T20:23:27.000Z
creator: Richard Godwin
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The Humans actor reflects on how his real-life experiences informed his role in ITV's psychological thriller
encoded: "What is it, 12 and a half years before it’s irreversible?” Tom Goodman-Hill and I are sitting on a park bench in east London. It’s a glorious day and the unseasonable warmth has prompted thoughts of climate change and the imminent destruction of the planet. “It’s terrifying!” he says. “Waaaargh!” He performs an actorly shake-out of his features. I’m sure you would recognise them – the pale eyes and red beard – even if the name doesn’t trip off the tongue. The actor has had prominent roles in Humans and Mr Selfridge – mildly exasperated nice guys are a speciality. He has done acclaimed theatre work, too: Spamalot, Enron, Earthquakes... It was during that last production in 2010, Mike Bartlett’s play about climate change and intergenerational conflict, that he met his wife Jessica Raine, a former star of Call the Midwife and more recently in Baptiste. They married in 2015. Everything you need to know about ITV's Cheat Meet the cast of ITV's Cheat Follow our Instagram account for the latest TV and Entertainment news in pictures The fact that the relationship spelt the end of his marriage to his first wife, Kerry Bradley, the mother of his two children, and the fact that adultery is the central theme of his new four-part ITV drama, Cheat, might account for Goodman-Hill’s slight twitchiness today. He’s keen to stress how much “fun” Cheat is, which is strange as it’s actually rather dark. “We’re so happy with it,” he says. “It was such a lot of fun to do and, usually, there’s a weird law where the more fun you have, the worse the project turns out!” View oEmbed on the source website ITV has high hopes of the campus thriller, written by newcomer Gaby Hull and directed by Louise Hooper. It opens with sociology lecturer Leah (Katherine Kelly) and student Rose (Molly Windsor of Three Girls) talking to one another through prison glass. Later, we see the body of Leah’s husband Adam (Goodman-Hill) in a morgue. “You don’t know who did it or how or why,” he says. “There are two w…

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Ant-Man and the Wasp's Michael Douglas: "I thought I'd never act again"
type: item
date: 2018-08-03T09:28:23.000Z
creator: Richard Godwin
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: Sci-fi
subject: TV
description: The Marvel star talks surviving cancer, #MeToo, the role that rescued him... and Swansea City
encoded: “Oh God,” says Michael Douglas. “Oh Jesus.” He can’t quite believe what is happening to him. “This is terrible!” The American actor, 73, has scaled the heights of Hollywood and descended to the depths of despair in his long and eventful career. But it seems nothing – not surviving cancer; not seeing his son Cameron incarcerated for drug offences; not even coming up against Sharon Stone’s murderess in Basic Instinct or Glenn Close’s bunny boiler in Fatal Attraction – has prepared him for the glass of green juice that has just been placed in front of him. View oEmbed on the source website “Oh Jesus,” he says again. “This is punishment.” I personally found the kale-ginger-apple concoction to be quite pleasant. Douglas disagrees: “Nothing that tastes that bad can be good for you,” he says with a sly smile. And I suppose he’d know. Meet the cast of Ant-Man and the Wasp Paul Rudd admits the “ego blow” of being left out of Avengers: Infinity War RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website We’ve convened at a London hotel to discuss Douglas’s latest role: Dr Hank Pym in Ant-Man and the Wasp, the follow-up to Ant-Man (2015), which introduced the tiniest superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (played by Paul Rudd). I know what you’re thinking: what’s an actor of Douglas’s Academy Award-winning, era-defining calibre, doing wasting his time with this hokum? Isn’t it a bit depressing to see the man who played Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko reduced – boom boom – to this? I was thinking along those lines when I picked up my 3D glasses at Cineworld Imax in Leicester Square. But for two hours, I laughed like a tickled child with Douglas increasingly reminiscent of the late Robin Williams. “It’s truly a family picture,” says Douglas. “There was a lot of humour in the first one and that gave us the confidence to go more in that direction with this one.” Douglas saw this as an opportunity to impress his chil…

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Sir Patrick Stewart reveals his greatest fears – and a lifelong addiction to jigsaws
type: item
date: 2017-03-04T08:00:00.000Z
creator: Richard Godwin
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: The British acting veteran says he still gets afraid he won’t find work – but that Logan is the most interesting X-Men movie yet
encoded: A couple of weeks ago, Sir Patrick Stewart was sitting in his hot tub in the hills above West Hollywood, trying to set his racing cranium at rest. “I realised that what I was feeling wasn’t anxiety – it was actually fear,” says the 76-year-old actor. “I know this will sound crazy, but it was fear that I will not work again.” It is a surprising admission for a man who has just emerged from the most hectic year of his career. Stewart recently finished a rapturously received run of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land in the West End with his old friend Sir Ian McKellen. He is reprising his role as mutant mentor Professor Xavier in Logan, his seventh movie in the X-Men franchise. And his unabashed politics (he’s an ardent socialist, Remainer, feminist and anti-Trumper) have earned him 2.45 million followers on Twitter. And why wouldn’t you wish to see a knight of the realm tweet a picture of himself in a bath dressed as a lobster? This Yorkshireman always looks like he knows how to have fun. Nevertheless, when we meet at Soho House on Sunset Boulevard, Stewart is contemplating endings. Or rather his laptop. “Emails... Dreaded emails!” he intones when I arrive, snapping the damn thing shut. We’re here to talk X-Men, which he does with no less enthusiasm than if it were Pinter or Beckett. After all, he was only a middle-ranking, middle-aged member of the Royal Shakespeare Company when he was given the career-changing role of Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: the Next Generation in 1987. He only said yes because he was assured it would flop and he’d be able to get back to iambic pentameter forthwith. In the event, it ran for seven seasons and four films and made him a much wealthier – and healthier – man. He has a certain Californian radiance, and credits his wife, 38-year-old American musician Sunny Ozell, with keeping him on his toes. Of all the X-Men movies, Logan is the one that asked the most of him. It’s viscerally violent, the first in the series to have an R-rating in the St…

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Mahershala Ali on faith, Moonlight and the impact of his absent father
type: item
date: 2017-02-26T09:00:00.000Z
creator: Richard Godwin
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: The favourite for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars has become an overnight sensation – after decades of hard work
encoded: Mahershala Ali has waited so long to realise his potential, he’d pretty much ruled out the idea he ever would. When I meet the frontrunner for best supporting actor at this week’s Oscars, he has an air of being caught off guard, humbled beyond the usual platitudes by the acclaim he has won for his role as the conflicted mentor figure in coming-of-age drama Moonlight. “When you’re thinking about what you want to do in life, you ask yourself: What’s the highest point I can get to?” reflects the 42-year-old over coffee at the Montage hotel in Beverly Hills, California. “But having acted for 23 years, it feels strange to get any recognition. At a certain point, you cease to have that as a possibility.” He chooses his words deliberately – but then everything he does feels carefully weighted. Perhaps it comes with the territory, when you’re a Muslim of colour playing a drug dealer in a gay narrative in America, 2017. Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight Like all overnight sensations, Ali spent a long time getting here. After years of TV work and small parts in films, the role that really opened doors was conscience-struck lobbyist Remy Danton in Netflix’s House of Cards (2013-16). Now he has a memorable turn in Hidden Figures, the NASA drama that’s been a surprise hit, and he’s the villain in Netflix series Luke Cage, a reboot of Marvel’s Blaxploitation comics of the 1970s. But it’s his performance in Moonlight (from an autobiographical play by Tarell Alvin McCraney and now in cinemas) that means the most to him. Ali once had dreams of being a basketball player as well as a poet, and he thinks in a very physical way. As he talks, his huge hands slowly move as if sculpting thoughts into being. He feels that Moonlight’s message is “right for its time”. With its almost entirely African-American cast and its tough lyricism, Moonlight feels like a welcome expansion of the range of storytelling, particularly after last year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy. “I can’t say …

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NW author Zadie Smith on TV adaptations and Brexit Britain: "Sometimes it's good to be stressed out"
type: item
date: 2016-11-14T15:15:00.000Z
creator: Richard Godwin
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The novelist has swapped London for New York, but still can't quite let go of her home town as a new BBC2 adaptation airs
encoded: Zadie Smith feels bad for the people of Britain. Here she is, safely exiled in New York, with her stellar career, her beautiful family and her sparkling social circle. The one-time darling of the London literary scene, whose debut novel White Teeth was published in 2000, having gained her a £250,000 advance before she had even left Cambridge, nowadays teaches and writes in the US. The reviews for her fifth novel, Swing Time, are coming in and everyone agrees, it’s her “most mature work yet”, “a successful return to her roots”, “a reminder of why we need her”. For the homeland she left behind, there’s the feature-length BBC adaptation of her brilliant but bleak 2012 novel NW. “It’s pretty hardcore, isn’t it? I do feel sad I have to emotionally stress out viewers with it. I know this is a hard time for Britain and everyone wants to watch shows about baking. But what can I say, sometimes it’s good to be stressed out.” View oEmbed on the source website She admires how director Saul Dibb has captured her old manor of Kilburn in London with such an astute eye, his camera lingering lovingly on council bins, market barrows and bed frames propped up against walls. “They filmed in every street! I kept expecting to see my mum in the background.” And yes, she does worry what her social-worker mum Yvonne will say about her painting Kilburn as a place of irredeemable misery, but she admits that since moving to the US six years ago, she has developed a faintly apocalyptic vision of events back home. Nikki Amuka-Bird and Phoebe Fox star in NW Due to an illness in her husband Nick Laird’s family, she did relocate to London last year, but left again just after the EU referendum. In an essay for The New York Review of Books she reflected that the result felt like a rejection of the optimistic, multicultural world she grew up in – one that she celebrated (and lightly satirised) in her debut novel White Teeth in 2000. She has noted that since the vote to leave the EU, more of her compat…

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Helen Mirren: "I'm tired of being called 'sexy'"
type: item
date: 2016-04-21T08:00:00.000Z
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: The Oscar award-winning actress discusses opportunities for women, living in the digital age and the morals of war ahead of new movie Eye in the Sky
encoded: It’s unreasonably cold in LA, but this is the way that Dame Helen Mirren likes it. "I love it when it's raining here,” she says when we meet, the day after drizzle has dampened the West Coast vibe. “It was just like an English day yesterday, wasn’t it? And then it all clears and you have something like this.” She gestures to the fresh blue skies outside. We’re perched on a sofa at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and Mirren looks as dewy bright as the morning. She’s wearing a Ralph Lauren dress in imperial purple and a fake fur stole that has already been hailed as the latest in “airport chic” after she was papped travelling with her husband, American director Taylor Hackford. At 70, Mirren remains one of the most bank-able British stars – everyone who circles her seems delighted to be in her presence. An Oscar winner for The Queen back in 2007, she has added a Tony and an Olivier (as the Queen again in The Audience), plus enough Screen Actors Guilds, Golden Globes and Baftas to require a special wing. With recent roles as a waspish Hollywood gossip columnist in Trumbo, and a Jewish lady trying to recover family art stolen by the Nazis in Woman in Gold, she’s as prolific as ever – always radiating intelligence and elegance, but ever ready to subvert expectations. “Would you like me to say, ‘**** *** *** ****,’ is that it?” she purrs when I allude to her penchant for swearing – which she assures me she picked up from her years at the Royal Shakespeare Company. We’re here to talk about her latest role, as Colonel Katherine Powell in Eye in the Sky. Directed by the South African Gavin Hood (inspired by his own unhappy experience of national service), the film is a tense tale following a secret British/American drone strike in real time. “It looks at the morality and ethics and philosophy of warfare in a way that is... well, if not entertaining then very watchable,” says Mirren. “I think of it as a courtroom drama – and the audience is the jury.” Guy Hibbert’s script, …

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David Harewood nearly quit acting before Homeland
type: item
date: 2016-03-01T09:00:00.000Z
creator: Richard Godwin
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The actor talks about how he almost became a lorry driver, his career and the #OscarsSoWhite scandal
encoded: David Harewood is a failure. I’m sure the 50-year-old Birmingham-born actor won’t mind my saying that. In recent years, he’s had his fair share of success, too. Since he landed the role of CIA honcho David Estes in Homeland in 2011, his career revival has taken in a turn as Oberon in a New York production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as roles in Sacha Baron Cohen’s forthcoming film Grimsby and the cult US TV series Supergirl. However, as he makes clear in his forthcoming documentary, David Harewood’s F Word, an actor’s life is likely to contain many more lows than highs. The programme is part of Sky Arts’ Failure season, which examines the crucial role of rejection in artistic creation. Through interviews with fellow actors (including Damian Lewis, Olivia Colman, Eddie Izzard and Zachary Quinto) about their screw-ups and maulings, Harewood hopes to overturn preconceptions about his line of work. He gets Lewis to open up about his part in the disastrous Dreamcatcher, which one critic described as “a monster movie of stunning awfulness”. Colman tells him, surprisingly, that she didn’t get offered a thing for six months after Broadchurch, which ought to have been a career-defining success. “There’s this idea that we’re all choosing our roles and casting aside scripts we don’t like – but the reality is very different for most actors,” Harewood says. “We all face rejection.” We meet in Beverly Hills at “pilot season”, the time of year when most of the major American TV series are cast. “If you look around this area, it’s full of actors sitting in cars waiting for their auditions, mouthing their lines and trying desperately to keep their s*** together,” Harewood says. Last year, that was him – but now that he is taken up with season two of Supergirl (airing on Sky1 next month), he’s more laid-back. “Before Homeland, I had £80 in the bank and no idea what I was going to do,” he says. “I seriously considered giving it all up and getting a job as a lorry driver.” Ha…

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