Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2025-12-21T08:01:03.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Dame Mary Berry reveals her dos and don'ts for the perfect Christmas dinner
items: A very Mary Christmas
items: ‘It's good to listen'
items: Equal in arms
items: Mary, Queen of Cakes
items: Mary Berry reveals secret to happy marriage with 93-year-old husband – leaving the house when an argument starts
items: The Ultimate Italian job
items: The Night Manager's Tom Hollander and co-star Niamh Algar take us inside your next TV adventure
items: Girls just want to make runs
items: 'I would never want to be prime minister'
items: 'I think possibly the French are ready to elect a woman president'
items: Suranne Jones's political thriller Hostage affirms her key belief: “I would never want to be prime minister”
items: Ashley Thomas AKA Bashy reveals biggest hope for Netflix drama Hostage and how acting came before rapping
items: Hostage star Julie Delpy argues France is ready for a female leader - but not Marine Le Pen
items: 'We were covered with lice and had no proper clothes'
items: 'I'd never want to be Prime Minister!'
items: Look to the skies
items: 'I had burnout'
items: Gareth Malone on Messiah and why he walked away from US success: "I had a real case of burnout"
items: Back in the tribe
items: Bruce Parry: 'Killing a goat for new Tribe was difficult – but taking the bus harms planet more'
items: 'It's not just about throwing punches'
items: 'She does what she has to survive'
items: Just one last thing...
items: Women behaving badly
items: "Stealing diamonds was my drug"
items: Built to last
items: Grand Designs' Kevin McCloud wants to endure like David Attenborough
items: "I'm not a superhuman"
items: Sarah Storey on competing in her record-breaking ninth Paralympics

Dame Mary Berry reveals her dos and don'ts for the perfect Christmas dinner
type: item
date: 2025-12-21T08:00:23.000Z
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: Documentaries
subject: TV
subject: Christmas
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: We asked Mary Berry how she spends Christmas and she shared her favourite festive traditions, family moments and turkey tips.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. How will you be spending Christmas Day this year? At my son Tom’s, with his wife Sarah and their family. I bring the turkey – I have it ready by 11am and then I wrap it in foil, old clean towels and a sleeping bag without a zip, and put it in the boot of the car for the drive to my son’s house. It stays piping hot and the meat is rested, even after four or five hours, because of the bulk of the thing. Sarah’s mother will bake the Christmas cake and her father will do a topical quiz with pictures, all about what has happened during the year. After the King’s Christmas message at 3pm we will all go for a walk, with torches for the way back because it will be dark by then. What do you remember about Christmas as a child? Stockings – they were full of lots of little things, like playing cards, pencils and notebooks and a tangerine in the toe. Each gift was wrapped up by our mother, as a surprise. I received the present I treasured most when I was about eight. Our house was very cold and I always wanted a pair of gloves with a fur trim. I was so excited to get them. Do you have any dos and don’ts for Christmas dinner? I always use fresh herbs for the stuffing. I don’t like packet stuffing because the dry herbs are too strong. I make an open dish of apricots and chestnuts for vegetarians, it’s delicious. To give Christmas cake a difference from the pudding, I make it on the lighter side and fill it with apricots soaked in brandy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/12/A-Mary-Berry-Christmas-bd65af9.jpg" width="1802" height="1202" alt="TX DATE:17-11-2025,TX WEEK:46,EMBARGOED UNTIL:01-12-2025 00:01,DESCRIPTION:with her Fillet of Beef,COPYRIGHT:Banijay UK,CREDIT LINE:BBC/Sidney Street Productions for Darlow Smithson Productions/Banijay UK/Richard Hill" title="546588,TITLE:A Mary Berry Christmas" /> Do you approve of culinary shortcuts? Oh, yes. People don’t always grate their own chees…

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A very Mary Christmas
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: The culinary queen’s crucial ingredient? Just add family
encoded: A Mary Berry Christmas is on Sunday 21 December at 12 noon on BBC One and iPlayer. Add it to your watchlist How will you be spending Christmas Day this year? At my son Tom’s, with his wife Sarah and their family. I bring the turkey – I have it ready by 11am and then I wrap it in foil, old clean towels and a sleeping bag without a zip, and put it in the boot of the car for the drive to my son’s house. It stays piping hot and the meat is rested, even after four or five hours, because of the bulk of the thing. Sarah’s mother will bake the Christmas cake and her father will do a topical quiz with pictures, all about what has happened during the year. After the King’s Christmas message at 3pm we will all go for a walk, with torches for the way back because it will be dark by then. What do you remember about Christmas as a child? Stockings – they were full of lots of little things, like playing cards, pencils and notebooks and a tangerine in the toe. Each gift was wrapped up by our mother, as a surprise. I received the present I treasured most when I was about eight. Our house was very cold and I always wanted a pair of gloves with a fur trim. I was so excited to get them. Do you have any dos and don’ts for Christmas dinner? I always use fresh herbs for the stuffing. I don’t like packet stuffing because the dry herbs are too strong. I make an open dish of apricots and chestnuts for vegetarians, it’s delicious. To give Christmas cake a difference from the pudding, I make it on the lighter side and fill it with apricots soaked in brandy. Do you approve of culinary shortcuts? Oh, yes. People don’t always grate their own cheese, do they? They might buy a packet of ready-grated mature cheddar, which is fine. Early on in my television career [in the 1970s], most women were not working. They were at home, looking after their children. Nowadays most work and still enjoy cooking, but don’t have much time. So, shortcuts are very handy. You have some celebrities helping you in the k…

‘It's good to listen'
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: As The World at One turns 60, Sarah Montague reveals the secrets of its success — and the key to a good interview
encoded: The World At One is on Monday-Friday at 1pm on BBC Radio 4. Add it to your collection. A month after Radio 4’s The World at One turned 60, its host for the last seven years is bullish about the show known as WATO (pronounced “what-oh”). This is certainly no time for thoughts of pensioning off the lunchtime news analysis, says Sarah Montague. “People always talk about the challenge from news podcasts, but our figures are remarkably stable.” Which are? “They bounce around 3.4 million.” Montague, who also turns 60 in a few months’ time, came to the show after 18 years co-heading the big beast that is Today. A downscaling? Hardly. “When you’re the only presenter, you feel more responsible. It’s a liberation not to have immovable furniture, like Thought for the Day. Or the tyranny of set interviews having to run at a certain time. If it’s good, we run with it.” WATO is also more thoughtful, she says. “It’s on at a less angry time of day. People are having their lunch. Afterwards, you get emails, rather than social media from listeners. More light than heat, is what I always say.” I suggest that what makes her stand out amid a crowded field is that she keeps her questions short. “Really? I don’t think I think enough in advance about what I am going to ask. Oh, don’t be so self-deprecating,” she says, almost to herself. “The good thing is being able to listen.” Indeed, the mark of a classy interviewer. The show is probably the most dynamic of the four daily news sequences on Radio 4. If something is really good, Montague explains, the whole running order is ripped up. “It’s The World at One, not The World when We Had the 9am Meeting. You chuck things out of the window, lay the structure down, even as we’re on air. You’re trying to tell the story of the day.” Over the years, these have included some marvels, many of which have been replayed on WATO to mark the birthday: an interview with Cissie Charlton, mother of Bobby and Jack, the day before the 1966 World Cup final; Mic…

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Equal in arms
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Kevin Bazeley was thrown out of the RAF for being gay – now he’s helping the Armed Forces to embrace inclusion
encoded: Add Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance 2025 to your watchlist This year, an important anniversary is being acknowledged ahead of Remembrance Sunday. It’s been 25 years since the Government lifted the ban on gay people serving in the Armed Forces. For Kevin Bazeley, however, it was too late. The ban affected his entire life because when he was in the forces it was a criminal offence to be gay, punishable by court martial and even imprisonment. Bazeley’s story will be featured in the annual Festival of Remembrance event at London’s Royal Albert Hall. As well as the familiar poppy drop, commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, military music, the attendance of hundreds of members of the Armed Forces and performances by artists such as Sir Rod Stewart, the event will feature a film on how this most egregious of wrongs was put right a quarter of a century ago. “Joining the RAF was my childhood dream,” Bazeley tells RT, just before the unveiling in October of a memorial to LGBTQ+ members of the Armed Forces at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, which was attended by King Charles. Bazeley, too, was at the ceremony. “I was 18 when I joined in 1985, straight from school. I trained as a navigator and served in the first Gulf War. Then I went to RAF Kinloss in Scotland where I flew on Nimrod aircraft.” However, as the years went by and even though he was married with two daughters, he realised his true sexuality hadn’t been acknowledged, even by himself. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/11/483D19XAG-7cc04e2-e1762352558931.jpg" width="5600" height="3740" alt="Week 46 Remembrance" title="King Charles III (centre) during a visit to the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas, Staffordshire, for the dedication ceremony of the LGBT+ Armed Forces memorial, the UK's first national memorial commemorating LGBT+ people who have served and continue" /> “In 1993 I separated from my wife, but …

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Mary, Queen of Cakes
type: item
date: 2025-10-14T13:36:19.000Z
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: At 90, Mary Berry celebrates over 50 years on television with a new series – and is as passionate as ever about her mission to get the nation cooking
encoded: How to summarise Mary Berry? National treasure, inspirational cook. Yes, of course. But there’s more. Dame Mary is as strategically driven as any business tycoon. It’s just that we don’t consider white-haired ladies who love to cook in this sort of way, especially one who was paid a mere £4.75 for one of her very first TV appearances, demonstrating the principles of a freezer. We’re at a riverside club near her Oxfordshire home for our photoshoot and interview and it’s nice to be greeted by a woman with perfect manners, who looks as pleased to see you as she would when lifting a perfectly cooked chicken out of the oven. In her 91st year [her 90th birthday was on 24 March], she’s here with Freddie, one of her two working cocker spaniels, who, despite already having had an hour-long walk in the countryside, looks up at her imploringly. I know how you feel, Freddie. We all want to have a bit of attention from Dame Mary. I first met her 31 years ago when she was plain Mrs Berry and I attended an Aga cookery course at her home. Three decades on, she’s as beady as ever, inspecting what she’s about to wear and complimenting her assistant on her pink jumper. She’s filmed a new six-part series, Mary at 90: a Lifetime of Cooking, in which she looks back at her long career on television, as well as concocting modern twists to some of her own favourite recipes, with six famous faces, including Jamie Oliver, Gabby Logan and Tom Allen. ITV footage from the 70s shows Mary demure, round-faced, with perfect RP, in a chintzy blouse. But behind those periwinkle eyes and that fluting voice lies ferocious drive. “Life is competitive. And whether you’re going for a job, or playing a sport, it’s good to do everything well,” she says now. She is also a culinary time capsule, noting (and using) the advent of five spice, fennel, fresh ginger. She can pinpoint the arrival of tin foil. “I was working for Home and Freezer Digest, and I remember the editor coming in and saying, ‘Look what’s arri…

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Mary Berry reveals secret to happy marriage with 93-year-old husband – leaving the house when an argument starts
type: item
date: 2025-10-13T23:01:58.000Z
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: Entertainment
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: At 90, Mary Berry celebrates over 50 years on television with a new series – and is as passionate as ever about her mission to get the nation cooking.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. How to summarise Mary Berry? National treasure, inspirational cook. Yes, of course. But there’s more. Dame Mary is as strategically driven as any business tycoon. It’s just that we don’t consider white-haired ladies who love to cook in this sort of way, especially one who was paid a mere £4.75 for one of her very first TV appearances, demonstrating the principles of a freezer. We’re at a riverside club near her Oxfordshire home for our photoshoot and interview and it’s nice to be greeted by a woman with perfect manners, who looks as pleased to see you as she would when lifting a perfectly cooked chicken out of the oven. In her 91st year [her 90th birthday was on 24 March], she’s here with Freddie, one of her two working cocker spaniels, who, despite already having had an hour-long walk in the countryside, looks up at her imploringly. I know how you feel, Freddie. We all want to have a bit of attention from Dame Mary. I first met her 31 years ago when she was plain Mrs Berry and I attended an Aga cookery course at her home. Three decades on, she’s as beady as ever, inspecting what she’s about to wear and complimenting her assistant on her pink jumper. She’s filmed a new six-part series, Mary at 90: a Lifetime of Cooking, in which she looks back at her long career on television, as well as concocting modern twists to some of her own favourite recipes, with six famous faces, including Jamie Oliver, Gabby Logan and Tom Allen. ITV footage from the 70s shows Mary demure, round-faced, with perfect RP, in a chintzy blouse. But behind those periwinkle eyes and that fluting voice lies ferocious drive. “Life is competitive. And whether you’re going for a job, or playing a sport, it’s good to do everything well,” she says now. She is also a culinary time capsule, noting (and using) the advent of five spice, fennel, fresh ginger. She can pinpoint the arrival of tin foil. “I was working for Home and Freezer Digest, and I rememb…

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The Ultimate Italian job
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Sky’s new thriller sees Tom Hollander and Niamh Algar tearing through Italy’s most glamorous locations on a quest to crack a code – and save the world
encoded: Add The Iris Affair to your watchlist Tom Hollander may be many things: vulnerable (Rev); literary (Capote vs the Swans); ruthless (The Night Manager); dangerously louche (The White Lotus), but one thing he is not, is an action hero. He’s an Honorary Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge for goodness’ sake. He writes for The Spectator. He’s too learned, too urbane. Hence when Neil Cross, award-winning screenwriter and the man behind Luther, originally envisaged him starring in his new thriller The Iris Affair, it was more as a behind-the-desk mastermind than a fist-swinging, tweed-coat-donning anti-hero. More a fraught middleman. In a cardie. However, what the 58-year-old Hollander does find himself in is a semi-James Bond, semi-Severance eight-part high-tech escapade around Italy and Slovakia. It’s great fun in a witty British way. Hollander plays Cameron Beck, a maverick genius whose job it is to unlock the secrets contained in a giant computer and save the world. To do this, he enlists the help of Iris (Niamh Algar), a brainy Lara Croft type who loves unlocking codes and cracking puzzles. She’s also pretty handy with her fists, guns and syringes and at one point emerges from the waves like a modern-day Ursula Andress. Iris has all the fun. Whereas Hollander? He uses middle-class phrases such as “swapsies” and “thinking cap” and spends a lot of time drinking whisky. We meet on set during the shoot at the legendary Cinecitta Studios in Rome. “Cameron Beck is someone who is an enthusiast for brilliant people,” Hollander explains. “He’s financed the building of this brilliant computer, and he loves games. Now he needs to find someone to break a code that will solve all his problems.” Because if Beck doesn’t unlock the computer with the help of Iris, he will be killed. Hence all the car chases and derring-do? “Yes, there is a very long car chase, interspersed with some very clever philosophical speculation. But I don’t do very much of the former. Although we did go up i…

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The Night Manager's Tom Hollander and co-star Niamh Algar take us inside your next TV adventure
type: item
date: 2025-10-06T23:01:30.000Z
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
subject: NOW
subject: Sky Atlantic
description: Sky’s new thriller sees Tom Hollander and Niamh Algar tearing through Italy’s most glamorous locations on a quest to crack a code – and save the world.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Tom Hollander may be many things: vulnerable (Rev); literary (Capote vs the Swans); ruthless (The Night Manager); dangerously louche (The White Lotus), but one thing he is not, is an action hero. He’s an Honorary Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge for goodness’ sake. He writes for The Spectator. He’s too learned, too urbane. Hence when Neil Cross, award-winning screenwriter and the man behind Luther, originally envisaged him starring in his new thriller The Iris Affair, it was more as a behind-the-desk mastermind than a fist-swinging, tweed-coat-donning anti-hero. More a fraught middleman. In a cardie. However, what the 58-year-old Hollander does find himself in is a semi-James Bond, semi-Severance eight-part hi-tech escapade around Italy and Slovakia. It’s great fun in a witty British way. Hollander plays Cameron Beck, a maverick genius whose job it is to unlock the secrets contained in a giant computer and save the world. To do this, he enlists the help of Iris (Niamh Algar), a brainy Lara Croft type who loves unlocking codes and cracking puzzles. She’s also pretty handy with her fists, guns and syringes and at one point emerges from the waves like a modern-day Ursula Andress. Iris has all the fun. Whereas Hollander? He uses middle-class phrases such as “swapsies” and “thinking cap” and spends a lot of time drinking whisky. We meet on set during the shoot at the legendary Cinecitta Studios in Rome. “Cameron Beck is someone who is an enthusiast for brilliant people,” Hollander explains. “He’s financed the building of this brilliant computer, and he loves games. Now he needs to find someone to break a code that will solve all his problems.” Because if Beck doesn’t unlock the computer with the help of Iris, he will be killed. Hence all the car chases and derring-do? “Yes, there is a very long car chase, interspersed with some very clever philosophical speculation. But I don’t do very much of the former. Although w…

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Girls just want to make runs
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: When England cricketer Kate Cross helped coach a girls’ team with Freddie Flintoff, it wasn’t the teenagers’ lack of experience but self-doubt and broken nails that proved to be the real challenge
encoded: Add Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams: Ultimate Test to your watchlist With the Women’s Cricket World Cup taking place in Sri Lanka and India in October, and England among the favourites to win, it’s no surprise that cricketing legend Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff wanted to include a girls’ team in the latest series of Field of Dreams, the show in which Flintoff recruits young people for a cricket team and changes their lives along the way. As always, Flintoff hasn’t made life easy for himself, going to communities where cricket is virtually unknown to find players. Not only that, he’s never coached young women before, and he’s also head coach of the England Lions, developing emerging talent for the men’s national side, which means he’s rather busy. So he has drafted in England and Lancashire bowler Kate Cross, to give him a hand and offer a bit of insight. “Crossy” knew Flintoff from afar as a fellow Lancashire player. “Fred texted me, said he had never coached girls and could I help out,” she says. “By the way, this is my hero! He was my role model! So there was no chance I would say no.” While Flintoff goes to shape two groups of lads into viable cricket squads for his new league, Cross heads to South Shore Cricket Club in Blackpool to work with girls for whom team sport of any kind is a new endeavour. Despite being deeply committed to the game and the viability of the women’s sport, this still presented a challenge to the energetic Cross: could she coach 11 teenage girls, most of whom had never thrown a cricket ball? “Historically, cricket was only available in private schools, but what this series is trying to show is that all you need is a bat and a ball. You can play it on the beach or in the street. And so we went into a community where cricket isn’t the norm,” she says. “Team sport was a huge part of my upbringing because I grew up in a very sporty family,” adds Cross, whose father David played for West Ham and was in the team when the Hammers won the FA Cup i…

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'I would never want to be prime minister'
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: She’s at the top of her game as an actor — but run the country? No thanks. She’s in bed by 9pm
encoded: Add Hostage to your watchlist From Coronation Street to Downing Street. The rise and rise of Suranne Jones goes on, and now she’s in charge. And she didn’t even have to audition for the role of prime minister. “No!” she laughs, sitting in a fancy suite in London’s Netflix HQ. “Me and Matt Charman, the writer, have known each other for a long time. We always wanted to do a project together, and I suddenly got an urge to do a political drama. I’ve always loved shows that take the viewer into the halls of power. Matt had done Bridge of Spies and Treason, so I knew that he was the person to go to. We bounced ideas back and forth and then we came up with this idea of me as the prime minister.” But not a lone, Margaret Thatcher figure. “I didn’t want to be the only woman in a room full of men, but one working with another female leader. That’s the thing that’s different about it.” Hostage, a five-part political thriller produced for Netflix, hinges on the relationship between British prime minister, Abigail Dalton (Jones), and France’s female president, Vivienne Toussaint (played by Julie Delpy). Women working together, not pitted against one another. Eventually. “Women are always put against one another, and these two fall for it,” says Jones. “At first there’s a lot of game-playing, and it’s not until later on that they start to see each other properly and realise how they can help each other.” View oEmbed on the source website How did she research the role? “We spoke to people in positions of power. We went to the House of Commons, and we watched Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer battle against each other. We met with the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle. We looked at Nicola Sturgeon. And Jacinda Ardern [the former prime minister of New Zealand]. We looked at Theresa May. And Lucy Powell [MP for Manchester Central]. We had fun developing it. It made me think about what being a woman of power means, and what it costs.” Prime Minister Dalton comes with baggage: a husband (Ashley Thomas…

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'I think possibly the French are ready to elect a woman president'
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Women are held to a higher standard, says French star Julie Delpy – who has fought the patriarchy at every turn and now plays the President of France for Netflix
encoded: Add Hostage to your watchlist As Vivienne Toussaint, president of the French Republic, Julie Delpy is pitch perfect. Elegant, coiffed, robed in a beautifully cut white coat, she arrives at Downing Street to meet her British counterpart with a frisson of je ne sais quoi. But is it realistic? “I think possibly the French are ready to elect a woman president,” says Delpy, speaking to me on a Zoom call from Paris. “But not Marine le Pen.” Le Pen, the far-right candidate, ran last year, but her campaign has been somewhat derailed by financial irregularities. That, as far as Delpy considers, is le fin. “The French are more horrified by a money scandal than a sex scandal.” Well, of course. Delpy smiles. “Everyone thinks the French are very sexy, but it’s not that true. It’s not about having more sex. It’s more about the French public being more relaxed about their leaders having affairs.” Indeed. One thinks of President Mitterrand’s secret daughter, or President François Hollande on his “love scooter” coming from his love nest, or President Macron and his one-time drama teacher who is now his wife. Ooh la la, the heady stories within the Élysée Palace. “There are, however, some amazing female politicians out there,” Delpy adds, “such as Christiane Taubira (former minister of justice under Hollande). She’s my favourite person.” View oEmbed on the source website The strictures laid on female politicians resound with Delpy, who is a lauded screenplay writer and director. “In politics, women are far more quickly judged than men.” Perhaps this is intimated by a translation of her character’s name; Vivienne Toussaint (literally: living as a complete saint). “People forgive women less. In the film world, it’s the same. As a woman on set, you have to be perfect. Men are excused all sorts of behaviour, but a woman can never have a tantrum. I’m not a difficult person, or easily in a bad mood, but I know that, as a director, I can never raise my voice. It’s the same with politicians.…

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Suranne Jones's political thriller Hostage affirms her key belief: “I would never want to be prime minister”
type: item
date: 2025-08-11T23:01:54.000Z
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Magazine
description: She’s at the top of her game as an actor — but run the country? No thanks. She’s in bed by 9pm.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. From Coronation Street to Downing Street. The rise and rise of Suranne Jones goes on, and now she’s in charge. And she didn’t even have to audition for the role of prime minister. “No!” she laughs, sitting in a fancy suite in London’s Netflix HQ. “Me and Matt Charman, the writer, have known each other for a long time. We always wanted to do a project together, and I suddenly got an urge to do a political drama. I’ve always loved shows that take the viewer into the halls of power. Matt had done Bridge of Spies and Treason, so I knew that he was the person to go to. We bounced ideas back and forth and then we came up with this idea of me as the prime minister.” But not a lone, Margaret Thatcher figure. “I didn’t want to be the only woman in a room full of men, but one working with another female leader. That’s the thing that’s different about it.” Hostage, a five-part political thriller produced for Netflix, hinges on the relationship between British prime minister, Abigail Dalton (Jones), and France’s female president, Vivienne Toussaint (played by Julie Delpy). Women working together, not pitted against one another. Eventually. “Women are always put against one another, and these two fall for it,” says Jones. “At first there’s a lot of game-playing, and it’s not until later on that they start to see each other properly and realise how they can help each other.” How did she research the role? “We spoke to people in positions of power. We went to the House of Commons, and we watched Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer battle against each other. We met with the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle. We looked at Nicola Sturgeon. And Jacinda Ardern [the former prime minister of New Zealand]. We looked at Theresa May. And Lucy Powell [MP for Manchester Central]. We had fun developing it. It made me think about what being a woman of power means, and what it costs.” Prime Minister Dalton comes with baggage: a husband (Ashley Thomas), who is a…

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Ashley Thomas AKA Bashy reveals biggest hope for Netflix drama Hostage and how acting came before rapping
type: item
date: 2025-08-11T23:01:32.000Z
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: The award-winning rapper returns to acting, his first passion.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. In Netflix's new thriller Hostage, Ashley Thomas plays Dr Alex Anderson, the husband of Prime Minister Abigail Dalton and a medic with Médecins sans Frontières who is taken hostage while working in French Guiana. “I read War Doctor by David Nott [the lauded Welsh surgeon who has worked in disaster and war zones across the world] which sort of anchored my character. I also spoke to a doctor from Médecins sans Frontières, who had worked in Haiti. But they are also people with a regular life, and that helped me. At the bottom of it, Alex plays football, he goes to the pub and does what the rest of us do. It was about not getting drawn into acting like a doctor.” Many viewers will know Thomas as the rapper Bashy. Tracks from his debut album Catch Me If You Can were nominated for a slew of awards, and his 2024 album Being Poor Is Expensive won him both the MOBO [Music of Black Origin] album of the year, and best hip-hop act. This year, his track How Black Men Lose their Smile was nominated for a Novello for best contemporary song, and he also played Glastonbury in June. So, is he a rapper who acts on the side? Actually, it’s more the other way round. “I started out as an actor. My mum put me into acting workshops and then I trained as an actor at the Brit school. Acting was my first passion and music came later on.” He thinks that the racial diversity represented by his on-screen marriage to Suranne Jones is par for the course, pointing to the fact that the Conservative party had two people of colour as leader, one of whom was prime minister. “Hostage is art reflecting real life. My hope is that viewers will be open about it and people will just enjoy the characters. That’s what I want people to talk about. The characters and the powerful performances.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Hostage is coming to Netflix on Thursday 21st August. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is al…

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Hostage star Julie Delpy argues France is ready for a female leader - but not Marine Le Pen
type: item
date: 2025-08-11T23:01:17.000Z
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: Drama
subject: TV
subject: Magazine
subject: Netflix
description: Women are held to a higher standard, says the French star who has fought the patriarchy at every turn.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. As Vivienne Toussaint, president of the French Republic, Julie Delpy is pitch perfect in Hostage. Elegant, coiffed, robed in a beautifully cut white coat, she arrives at Downing Street to meet her British counterpart with a frisson of je ne sais quoi. But is it realistic? “I think possibly the French are ready to elect a woman president,” says Delpy, speaking to me on a Zoom call from Paris. “But not Marine le Pen.” Le Pen, the far-right candidate, ran last year, but her campaign has been somewhat derailed by financial irregularities. That, as far as Delpy considers, is le fin. “The French are more horrified by a money scandal than a sex scandal.” Well, of course. Delpy smiles. “Everyone thinks the French are very sexy, but it’s not that true. It’s not about having more sex. It’s more about the French public being more relaxed about their leaders having affairs.” Indeed. One thinks of President Mitterrand’s secret daughter, or President François Hollande on his “love scooter” coming from his love nest, or President Macron and his one-time drama teacher who is now his wife. Ooh la la, the heady stories within the Élysée Palace. “There are, however, some amazing female politicians out there,” Delpy adds, “such as Christiane Taubira (former minister of justice under Hollande). She’s my favourite person.” The strictures laid on female politicians resound with Delpy, who is a lauded screenplay writer and director. “In politics, women are far more quickly judged than men.” Perhaps this is intimated by a translation of her character’s name; Vivienne Toussaint (literally: living as a complete saint). “People forgive women less. In the film world, it’s the same. As a woman on set, you have to be perfect. Men are excused all sorts of behaviour, but a woman can never have a tantrum. I’m not a difficult person, or easily in a bad mood, but I know that, as a director, I can never raise my voice. It’s the same with politicians.…

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'We were covered with lice and had no proper clothes'
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: 13-year-old Olga Henderson was imprisoned in a camp in Singapore on VJ Day, 15 August 1945. Now, 80 years on, she tells her story of punishments, hunger and the undying dream of going home.
encoded: Add VJ Day: We Were There to your watchlist To some, the war in Japan is a distant appendage to the horrors of the Second World War in Europe. Not to Olga Henderson (née Morris). Now 93, she was interned aged ten, effectively as a civilian British prisoner of war along with her family. Olga, her parents and three siblings, Mary, Peter and George, were held captive for three years, first in Japan’s infamous Changi Prison, then in Sime Road Camp, a former RAF base in Singapore. It was little more than a couple of huts run under a system of starvation and fear. By the end of the war, these miserable barracks housed over 4,500 European civilians, including 328 children. On VJ Day, 15 August 1945, Olga was 13, filthy, emaciated, barefoot, her developing body clothed in nothing other than a pair of underpants and a dirty rag. “We were in front of the hut, where there was about eight feet of sandy mud, and we heard the plane,” she says. “What looked like confetti started raining down. But it wasn’t confetti. It was leaflets saying the Allies had won and the war was over. We started playing with the leaflets.” Her description of life at Sime is jawdropping. They ate nothing more than scraps of vegetables and scrapings of rice filched by her mother, who was the camp cook for the Japanese soldiers. “We were like walking bamboo sticks,” she says. “We were covered with lice. We had no scissors to cut our nails, no proper clothes and no food.” The trauma began in 1942 when she and her family were living in British Malaya (now Malaysia) when it and Singapore were both invaded by the Japanese. The family had to flee their home with half an hour’s notice. A British soldier knocked at the door and said the invaders were just behind. After failing to gain passage on an evacuation ship, the family were captured by the Japanese, held in a field and marched to Changi jail. Despite this trauma, she says the family never considered escaping from the camp. “Never. You never bothered planni…

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'I'd never want to be Prime Minister!'
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Take an exclusive first look at Suranne Jones as a British PM in Netflix's anticipated new thriller Hostage
encoded: Hostage will be on Netflix from 21 August. Fancy attending an exclusive screening in central London, followed by a Q&A with Suranne Jones and Julie Delpy and a drinks reception? We have a limited number of tickets to give away to RT readers for this Netflix event at the Ham Yard Hotel on Monday 18 August 2025 from 6.30pm to 10pm. Tickets will be allocated on a first come, first served basis (and a maximum of two per person). Click here. Mocking up 10 Downing Street was a crucial element to get right in the new Netflix thriller Hostage, in which Suranne Jones plays embattled Prime Minister Abigail Dalton. When her husband is thrown into mortal peril abroad, Dalton has to cope with personal dramas as well as a Cabinet that is ranged against her, while at the same time keeping a doubtful nation on side with regular press appeals from the Downing Street podium, a perfect replica of which was recreated for filming.“That was thrilling to do,” says Jones, who also executive produced the five-part series. “We built the outside of Downing Street so that we could have that interaction. It was just great, being outside No 10 with all the press attention, coming in and going out, recognisable moments that have been in all our lives. Standing at the lectern! Thrilling!” Did it give her a taste of what it would be like to be PM? “I would never want to be prime minister, not even for a day. It’s hard. And harder for women, as it is in most areas. We looked at Nicola Sturgeon, Theresa May, Jacinda Ardern, how they managed and at what cost. Breaking down the patriarchy is not an easy task.” The series features not one but two female world leaders, as it co-stars French film legend Julie Delpy as French President Vivienne Toussaint, who is on a state visit to London. So Delpy also gets to walk the most famous street in politics. View oEmbed on the source website Is the idea of a female French president realistic? “I think the French are possibly ready to elect a woman president,” say…

Look to the skies
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: The pressure of organising the RAF’s VE Day flypast sits lightly on Squadron Leader Dan Wilkes – but its significance is monumental
encoded: The 80th anniversary of VE Day is on Thursday 8 May, but will be marked throughout the week from 5 May. Add VE Day 80 to your watchlist There will be no witnesses, bar wind turbines and the odd fish. But at 12.45pm on Monday 5 May, high above the North Sea, an assembly of two dozen RAF planes will gather and fly towards London. At 1.45pm, the formation will fly down the Mall. The RAF VE Day flypast will be led by a sole Lancaster bomber, one of the few planes remaining from the original war fleet. Forty seconds behind will be three aircraft from the air mobility fleet. Then comes “the faster stuff”, according to event organiser Squadron Leader Dan Wilkes. Wilkes himself will be in third place, piloting a RC135 Rivet Joint surveillance plane with two smaller fighter aircraft on each side of him. That sounds pretty hairy. “Yes, the fighter planes will be about 20 feet from my wingtips,” says Wilkes calmly. But then Wilkes is a calm sort of guy. Now 32, he’s been flying since the age of 13. “My great grandfather was an engineer officer in the RAF,” he explains. “His job was to get Spitfires ready for the front line. My grandfather was also an engineer at RAF Cosford. I’d go there as a three-year-old to watch the RAF show from his house. All I wanted to do was join up.” So he did, signing up for the Air Cadets while he was at secondary school in Birmingham and achieving an RAF scholarship that sponsored him towards an aviation qualification. “I got my private pilot’s license when I was 16. I could fly my family around England before I could drive them,” he says. Based with 51 Squadron at RAF Waddington, Wilkes’s day job requires flying alongside other planes at a height of 40,000 feet at around 500mph. So, doing it over London is going to be a breeze? Not quite. There will be a lot to think about. As well as the Lancaster 40 seconds in front of him, and the fighter planes, there will be nine Red Arrows, with their trademark trails, 40 seconds behind him, and then, 40 se…

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'I had burnout'
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Gareth Malone is back with an Easter choir – but why did he disappear for five years? And how did JS Bach save him?
encoded: Add Gareth Malone's Messiah to your watchlist Gareth Malone is back conducting choral music on our screens; as infectiously enthusiastic and impossibly youthful-looking as ever. The Peter Pan of Do-Re-Mi is attempting to coax classical perfection from eight absolute beginners, who’ve never before sung in a classical choir. In just seven weeks from first audition, the novice singers will join the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales for a performance of Handel’s Messiah in Cardiff’s Llandaff Cathedral. It sounds like a huge undertaking, and one that the choirmaster takes very seriously. “It’s about eight people encountering Handel; I chose it because of that. It’s a very wholesome thing to do.” But it’s also embedded within his core: “Messiah is a text I’ve known my whole life. I was introduced to it by my parents; they would sing the Halleluiah Chorus while doing the washing up.” After listening to it on vinyl, he was taken to see Handel’s most famous oratorio performed. “I was seven or eight. I don’t wish to denigrate TV or radio, but it’s not the same as going to the Royal Festival Hall and hearing a massive orchestra play and a choir of 200 sing. “From an early age, I had very powerful reactions to music. I was overwhelmed by it. I still am. Handel comes from a deep place. It is sincere. It is considered, but there is also a lightness to it. He wrote it in a hurry; almost as if he had divine inspiration. You can see it from the score. It transmits that energy when you are conducting and performing it.” That energy is very much not the sort of thing you can get from artificial intelligence. “AI,” he snorts. “It’s a tool. So is a hammer, but you don’t use it all day. As a child, I grew cress. We made a sandwich with it, and I ate it. That was enormous for me. I did something in the real world, not via a screen. You can’t get a computer to sing Messiah and be in an orchestra. It’s organic, and real, and moving. Tech is useful, but when I turn to my piano, it’s…

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Gareth Malone on Messiah and why he walked away from US success: "I had a real case of burnout"
type: item
date: 2025-04-14T23:01:15.000Z
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: Entertainment
subject: TV
subject: BBC iPlayer
subject: BBC One
subject: Magazine
description: Malone is back with a new series.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Gareth Malone is back with an Easter choir – but why did he disappear for five years? And how did JS Bach save him? Gareth Malone is back conducting choral music on our screens; as infectiously enthusiastic and impossibly youthful-looking as ever. The Peter Pan of Do-Re-Mi is attempting to coax classical perfection from eight absolute beginners, who’ve never before sung in a classical choir. In just seven weeks from first audition, the novice singers will join the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales for a performance of Handel’s Messiah in Cardiff’s Llandaff Cathedral. It sounds like a huge undertaking, and one that the choirmaster takes very seriously. "It’s about eight people encountering Handel; I chose it because of that. It’s a very wholesome thing to do." But it’s also embedded within his core: "Messiah is a text I’ve known my whole life. I was introduced to it by my parents; they would sing the Halleluiah Chorus while doing the washing up." After listening to it on vinyl, he was taken to see Handel’s most famous oratorio performed. "I was seven or eight. I don’t wish to denigrate TV or radio, but it’s not the same as going to the Royal Festival Hall and hearing a massive orchestra play and a choir of 200 sing. "From an early age, I had very powerful reactions to music. I was overwhelmed by it. I still am. Handel comes from a deep place. It is sincere. It is considered, but there is also a lightness to it. He wrote it in a hurry; almost as if he had divine inspiration. You can see it from the score. It transmits that energy when you are conducting and performing it." That energy is very much not the sort of thing you can get from artificial intelligence. "AI," he snorts. "It’s a tool. So is a hammer, but you don’t use it all day. As a child, I grew cress. We made a sandwich with it, and I ate it. That was enormous for me. I did something in the real world, not via a screen. "You can’t get a computer t…

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Back in the tribe
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: From ritual vomiting to suffocating goats... Bruce Parry is pushing himself further than ever
encoded: Add Tribe with Bruce Parry to your watchlist There is vomiting, and then there is full-on, projectile expurgation. After the first episode of Bruce Parry’s new series, during which he is epically sick standing in a tributary of the Amazon river, I felt I knew the spew almost as much as the man. He didn’t even have a bug. Parry willingly drank a local concoction designed to detox the body in just this way. The likeable Parry, who first leapt onto our screens in a variety of skimpy loin cloths in the original Tribe two decades ago before quitting TV to make a feature film (Tawai: a Voice from the Forest), is back on our screens on the trail of radical tribal custom. It’s his first series since Arctic in 2011. Nothing, it seems, is too challenging. He’ll have his nose pierced with a bone, he’ll be sick in a river, he’ll sleep on a dung floor in a mud hut... Why go through it again? “Well, I am on a continuum,” says Parry, laughing. “I am still on this journey learning about how tribal people can offer some solutions to the world’s problems, and I wanted to share some of the things I have learnt. I feel very lucky they have allowed me back. So much of what indigenous people have to share actually feels more important now than it did the first time.” For the new BBC series, Parry is the first foreign visitor to live within the communities. Filming much of his experience with his own camera, he goes deep inside the Colombian rainforest to visit the Waimaha people, while the second episode sees him walking for a day to find the Mucubal, who live in the Namib desert, southern Angola, and the third follows him to a tropical island in Indonesia to stay with the Marapu. If you can manage the nasty details on top of all that vomiting (eating witchetty grubs, watching an 11-year-old child have her lower teeth knocked out without anaesthetic), you will learn a lot about people whose lifestyle is definitely different. Parry is an enthusiastic and winning guide, and willing to laug…

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Bruce Parry: 'Killing a goat for new Tribe was difficult – but taking the bus harms planet more'
type: item
date: 2025-03-25T00:01:00.000Z
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: Documentaries
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: Parry spoke with this week's issue of Radio Times magazine about his return to TV.
encoded: This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. There is vomiting, and then there is full-on, projectile expurgation. After the first episode of Bruce Parry’s new series, during which he is epically sick standing in a tributary of the Amazon river, I felt I knew the spew almost as much as the man. He didn’t even have a bug. Parry willingly drank a local concoction designed to detox the body in just this way. The likeable Parry, who first leapt onto our screens in a variety of skimpy loin cloths in the original Tribe two decades ago before quitting TV to make a feature film (Tawai: a Voice from the Forest), is back on our screens on the trail of radical tribal custom. It’s his first series since Arctic in 2011. Nothing, it seems, is too challenging. He’ll have his nose pierced with a bone, he’ll be sick in a river, he’ll sleep on a dung floor in a mud hut... Why go through it again? “Well, I am on a continuum,” says Parry, laughing. “I am still on this journey learning about how tribal people can offer some solutions to the world’s problems, and I wanted to share some of the things I have learnt. I feel very lucky they have allowed me back. So much of what indigenous people have to share actually feels more important now than it did the first time.” For the new BBC series, Parry is the first foreign visitor to live within the communities. Filming much of his experience with his own camera, he goes deep inside the Colombian rainforest to visit the Waimaha people, while the second episode sees him walking for a day to find the Mucubal, who live in the Namib desert, southern Angola, and the third follows him to a tropical island in Indonesia to stay with the Marapu. If you can manage the nasty details on top of all that vomiting (eating witchetty grubs, watching an 11-year-old child have her lower teeth knocked out without anaesthetic), you will learn a lot about people whose lifestyle is definitely different. Parry is an enthusiastic and winning guide, and willing…

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'It's not just about throwing punches'
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Facing Stephen Graham in the ring isn’t for the faint-hearted, says Malachi Kirby
encoded: Add A Thousand Blows to your watchlist The arrival of Hezekiah Moscow, played by Bafta winner Malachi Kirby, is the catalyst for the action as A Thousand Blows begins. Hezekiah is a young man on the make, fresh off the boat from Jamaica and keen to earn his fortune in Victorian London. He has ambitions to become a lion tamer but soon becomes embroiled in the world of bare-knuckle fighting, run by the fearsome Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham). To play Hezekiah convincingly, Kirby learnt how to box. “It’s not just about throwing some punches,” he explains. “You’ve got to know how to read people. You’ve got to know how to get out of the way and survive.” Especially if your opponent is Stephen Graham? “He’s menacing! When you’re standing opposite him, he’s fully in the zone, and so you’re in the zone, too. Of course, we’re not planning to hit each other. But also, you know, it wouldn’t be the first time stuff’s gone wrong on a set, so we’ve gotta take care of each other.” For London-born Kirby, working on a period drama set in the capital had a familiar air. “It didn’t feel like a stretch for me to go back to that period. I don’t really know how much has changed with regards to how working-class Londoners go about life, even down to how we sound.” Countering the observation that actors now only spring from privilege, the 35-year-old tells me how he started. “I grew up in a council flat in Battersea. I’d go past mansions on the way to school, but I didn’t notice them. They didn’t exist. There was Battersea Park, there was the council flat I lived in and there was school.” Yet one thing he shares with his character in A Thousand Blows is the gift of limitless expectations. He’s always had it. “Hezekiah has this fierce ability to dream, and is not defined by the way he looks or his circumstances. It’s the way I feel.” What gave him that confidence? “It’s down to my mama. I grew up as an only child. My dad passed when I was six, so it was just me and my mum. I had a v…

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'She does what she has to survive'
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Erin Doherty would sooner be the Queen of Crime than a real-life royal
encoded: Add A Thousand Blows to your watchlist If Erin Doherty wanted to show off her versatility, she couldn’t have picked a better follow-up. From playing Princess Anne in The Crown to thieving Mary Carr in A Thousand Blows, she has gone from cut-glass to criminal class in a single stride. Carr earned her place in history as the daring helmswoman of a feared squad of female thieves in London’s docklands in the late 1800s known as the Forty Elephants, and Doherty is scathing about why their legacy is not better known. “I just can’t fathom that we haven’t told their stories up until now. If this was an all-male gang, would we know about them more? What these women did was genuinely impressive, not that I am glamorising criminal activity.” Compared to Princess Anne, the role of Carr presented Doherty with quite a different accent to master, to say the least. “Yeah, she’s straight down the line,” says the 32-year-old of her rough-hewn character. “She’s not a villain in any way. She was just doing what she had to do to survive.” Carr, like the Princess Royal, would often be found in trousers – only in Carr’s case, they were kitted out with giant pockets in order to hide her loot. She was certainly smart. “I thought of her like a snake, constantly in the reeds, low to the ground, sensing what other people are doing before she makes her move,” says Doherty. It’s surely no coincidence that Carr and her all-female gang have been brought to light by Steven Knight, whose previous dramatic engagement with the criminal underclass gave us Peaky Blinders. A Thousand Blows is not, however, Blinders in skirts. “It’s a tribute to Steven’s brilliant writing that he never puts Mary, or any of the women in her gang, in a ‘female’ pigeonhole,” says Doherty. “He never sees them as anything other than ordinary, decent criminals. Their gender is secondary, and that’s so refreshing.” Carr says at one point: “I’m beyond men.” “It’s like Mary is saying, ‘Let’s all forget about our genders or what’s …

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Just one last thing...
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: As Michael Mosley’s final TV project receives a posthumous airing, his friend and longtime colleague Andrew Cohen pays tribute to the broadcaster
encoded: Add Michael Mosley: Just One Thing to your watchlist The tragedy of Dr Michael Mosley’s untimely death on the Greek island of Symi earlier this year is nowhere better demonstrated than by what the host of the wildly successful Radio 4 series and podcast Just One Thing with Michael Mosley left unfinished. Mosley was in the midst of shooting a ten-part series of the same name for television when he went on that fateful holiday with his wife, Dr Clare Bailey. Only two episodes were completed before his death in June, aged 67. Yet while they will be seen as a cruelly truncated project, they are also a tribute to the pioneering doctor and journalist whose favoured way of explaining science was to immerse himself in the science. So what are the final two “just one things” the good doctor was keen for us to try? The first is to have a cold shower for 30 seconds every morning; the second is to take up a new skill – music, a language, or pottery, for example. Naturally, Mosley himself takes his own medicine and one of the joys of the first programme is watching him shiver under a cold shower and sit in a tub of iced water in order to show how cold water immersion can help calm inflammation and boost our immune systems, mood and brain power. Andrew Cohen, head of BBC Studios’ Science Unit, which produced the show, says immersion in the science was Mosley’s great idea. “One of his earliest programmes as a producer was about a scientist who proved himself that bacterial infection could cause stomach ulcers. The concept of self-experimentation lodged in Michael’s brain and he later did a show where he infected himself with a tapeworm. It broke down the barriers and took away from the notion of a doctor telling patients what to do.” Of course, Mosley would later get us all onto the 5:2 diet, taking up intermittent fasting just as he had. And in these final episodes of Just One Thing, he is still encouraging members of the public to do as he does – in this case, prescribing cold s…

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Women behaving badly
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Lucy Worsley is fascinated by historic female criminals
encoded: Lady Swindlers with Lucy Worsley is on Radio 4 on Monday 30 September at 3.30pm. Add it to your collection. Your new radio series, Lady Swindlers, is a follow-up to your Lady Killers series — have you ever done anything illicit yourself? If you’re asking whether I have a criminal record, then the answer is no! But I did once steal an easel from London’s Somerset House. We were filming a pair of paintings there and we needed two easels, but we only had one. I had seen some in the restaurant, so I went and “borrowed” one. The next thing I know, the security guard’s radio crackled and a voice said, “A blonde woman has just stolen an easel from the restaurant, do you know where she is?” I have never done anything like that ever again! And yes, I returned it. You’re best known for your TV work; why did you choose to make this for radio? We are able to cover stories which would never get made on TV because they’re not mainstream. This isn’t about kings and queens, it’s about individual women who nobody has ever heard about. Each episode deals with an extraordinary woman — from 1920s shoplifter Alice Diamond to Mary Baker, who, in 1817, pretended to be the fictional Princess Caraboo from a far-off island kingdom… My Lady Swindlers all do something that they aren’t expected to do. All swindlers operate with stereotypes – you expect one thing, you get another. Perhaps there’s a thing about looking meek and unthreatening that women use to their advantage. One of our subjects is Madame Rachel. Part of the reason she was pilloried was not so much about her crimes, but her transgression of succeeding in the male world of business. Why was having an all-female team on the series so important to you? In “true crime” shows, often the woman is either dead, or running through woods, naked, with a killer on her trail. We thought it would be fun to fip that and have women experts doing the talking. Our in-house historian is Professor Rosalind Crone of the Open University, who knows eve…

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"Stealing diamonds was my drug"
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Joan Hannington was one of the UK’s most notorious jewel thieves. Anna Symon brings her powerful story to the screen and describes meeting her
encoded: Add Joan to your watchlist Ah, the glamorous 1980s. Shoulder pads, high heels, big hair, Madonna, Princess Diana. A time of opportunity, if you were a woman who wanted to make it – and Joan Hannington knew all about opportunity. Stealing cars, faking passports, swallowing loose diamonds to sell on the black market, in and out of prison; nothing, it seems, was off limits for Joan Hannington. Now in her late 60s, she lives quietly on the English south coast with her dogs, but her considerably unquiet story has been turned into a beguiling six-part series for ITV, starring Sophie Turner. Writer Anna Symon was given the task of transforming Hannington’s memoir, I Am What I Am: The True Story of Britain’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief, for the screen. “I was so intrigued by her as a character,” says Symon. “Strong, fierce, but a vulnerable woman with a terrible back story that scarred her deeply. She was very glamorous and beautiful, and used her feminine wiles, shall we say, to achieve her crimes.” This once-dangerous woman needed to agree to Symon’s script. “I met her in a café in north London,” explains the writer, who also adapted The Essex Serpent starring Tom Hiddleston and actor Ruth Wilson’s real-life family drama, Mrs Wilson. View oEmbed on the source website “It was terrifying. Although she was charming, it was clear she knew how to look after herself. You knew she was someone not to mess with. And she said, quite clearly, ‘I don’t want you to tell my story unless you include what I went through as a child.’ She was very severely beaten by her father. Amid all the glamour of fur coats and diamonds, there was this vulnerable person underneath.” Hannington gave Symon a unique chance to re-create London’s dangerous, gangland world of fake identities and stolen jewels – but with a woman, for once, at the helm. Quite a different proposition. “We hold female characters on TV to a higher standard; we have to decide whether we root for Joan, in a way that I don’t think wo…

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Built to last
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Kevin McCloud has been monitoring self-builds on Grand Designs for a quarter of a century — but are they now in danger of becoming too grand?
encoded: Add Grand Designs: 25 Years and Counting to your watchlist It’s well known that moving house is one of the most stressful things a human being can do. Building your own from scratch, however, is stress on another level. Welcome to the world of Grand Designs, which has now been on our TV screens for an astonishing 25 years. Possibly the only comforting thought for the people behind the projects – who remain remarkably naive, considering – is that the show is synonymous with its presenter Kevin McCloud. After a quarter of a century he now seems like an all-seeing saint of bricks and mortar – firm but fair, a calm, hard-hatted presence amid the rubble. In a world where mere makeover Johnnies have come and gone, Grand Designs has had an almost impossible duration on peak-time TV. Can McCloud quite believe it? “Well, it’s interesting how long it’s survived,” he says with impressive modesty. When it started, the show was an anomaly. “Back in the 1990s, the culture of TV was for half-hour makeover shows, which I felt were rather exploitative. These were shows in which you didn’t know the outcome and neither did the contestants.” Grand Designs was always a much gentler beast, possibly because the task was actually rather difficult and the stakes were so high. This wasn’t about using a staple gun to change the headboard in your bedroom; this was about reinforced steel joists and brick walls. “We got berated for making celebratory TV that didn’t exploit the contributors. But we were filming the real world. People build what they want to build. We were celebrating good buildings, not mediocre ones, and that was counter to the times.” Where was he for the first show? “I remember it well. We were on a field by the cliffs above Peacehaven in East Sussex, and a young couple were building their house. We started filming it 27 years ago and because it was episode one, we didn’t really know what we were doing. Do you know, I went back this year, and the same couple are still in the s…

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Grand Designs' Kevin McCloud wants to endure like David Attenborough
type: item
date: 2024-09-02T23:01:27.000Z
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: Entertainment
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: The Channel 4 series will be marking 25 years on air later this month.
encoded: This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. It's well known that moving house is one of the most stressful things a human being can do. Building your own from scratch, however, is stress on another level. Welcome to the world of Grand Designs, which has now been on our TV screens for an astonishing 25 years. Possibly the only comforting thought for the people behind the projects – who remain remarkably naive, considering – is that the show is synonymous with its presenter Kevin McCloud. After a quarter of a century, he now seems like an all-seeing saint of bricks and mortar – firm but fair, a calm, hard-hatted presence amid the rubble. In a world where mere makeover Johnnies have come and gone, Grand Designs has had an almost impossible duration on peak-time TV. Can McCloud quite believe it? "Well, it's interesting how long it's survived," he says with impressive modesty. When it started, the show was an anomaly. "Back in the 1990s, the culture of TV was for half-hour makeover shows, which I felt were rather exploitative. These were shows in which you didn’t know the outcome and neither did the contestants." Grand Designs was always a much gentler beast, possibly because the task was actually rather difficult and the stakes were so high. This wasn't about using a staple gun to change the headboard in your bedroom; this was about reinforced steel joists and brick walls. "We got berated for making celebratory TV that didn't exploit the contributors. But we were filming the real world. People build what they want to build. We were celebrating good buildings, not mediocre ones, and that was counter to the times." Where was he for the first show? "I remember it well. We were on a field by the cliffs above Peacehaven in East Sussex, and a young couple were building their house. We started filming it 27 years ago, and because it was episode 1, we didn’t really know what we were doing. Do you know, I went back this year, and the same couple are still in…

"I'm not a superhuman"
type: item
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Dame Sarah Storey is already Britain’s most decorated Paralympian. Now she’s about to make history by competing at her ninth Games
encoded: A s preparations go, it was hardly ideal. On a Sunday morning three weeks before the Olympics, Paralympian superstar Dame Sarah Storey was taking part in a charity ride on a country lane in Sussex. “There was a very impatient driver in a fast car behind us, and he wanted to teach us a lesson,” she remembers. “So he beeps his horn and shoots past us unnecessarily fast. He was too close, if something had been coming the other way, he would have caused a collision.” Did he have any idea who he was harassing? Possibly. “I was in my World Championships kit…” A collision with Storey and the others in her group – all fellow members of British Cycling – doesn’t bear thinking about. Weeks later, 46-year-old Storey is en route to her ninth summer Paralympics. No British athlete has ever competed in nine consecutive Games; her total of 28 Paralympic medals, including 17 golds, already makes her the most decorated British Paralympian of all time. And so Storey will approach the Paris circuit in the same manner she approached the road race at the Tokyo Games in 2021 when she won her 17th gold in spectacular fashion. Pelting rain meant the 66km circuit was near-impossible to read. But, having memorised it, Storey knew how to ride it, even with her eyes closed. On the final lap everyone else was nervously slowing down on a hill that had a corner with an overhanging tree. She took the descent at 80kmph and simply ducked the branches. Class. “I’ll be taking what I’ve been doing in the last 33 years to the start line,” she says. Does she visualise winning? “Absolutely not. One of the things that used to make us teenagers giggle was being told to lie down, listen to whale music and visualise ourselves winning. It’s unhelpful. What you have to do is visualise the process of winning, or the process of completing a race that you might win. Everybody is going for the same thing. All you can control is your process, like pieces in a jigsaw, one after the other.” We’re talking in Manchester…

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Sarah Storey on competing in her record-breaking ninth Paralympics
type: item
date: 2024-08-19T23:01:09.000Z
creator: Rosie Millard
subject: Sport
subject: TV
subject: Interview
subject: Magazine
description: "We have to change things piece by piece. Paris has the chance now to really move the dial."
encoded: This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. As preparations go, it was hardly ideal. On a Sunday morning three weeks before the Olympics, Paralympian superstar Dame Sarah Storey was taking part in a charity ride on a country lane in Sussex. "There was a very impatient driver in a fast car behind us, and he wanted to teach us a lesson," she remembers. "So, he beeps his horn and shoots past us unnecessarily fast. He was too close - if something had been coming the other way, he would have caused a collision." Did he have any idea who he was harassing? Possibly. "I was in my World Championships kit…" A collision with Storey and the others in her group – all fellow members of British Cycling – doesn’t bear thinking about. Weeks later, 46-year-old Storey is en route to her ninth summer Paralympics. No British athlete has ever competed in nine consecutive Games; her total of 28 Paralympic medals, including 17 golds, already makes her the most decorated British Paralympian of all time. And so Storey will approach the Paris circuit in the same manner she approached the road race at the Tokyo Games in 2021, when she won her 17th gold in spectacular fashion. Pelting rain meant the 66km circuit was near-impossible to read. But, having memorised it, Storey knew how to ride it, even with her eyes closed. On the final lap, everyone else was nervously slowing down on a hill that had a corner with an overhanging tree. She took the descent at 80kmph and simply ducked the branches. Class. "I’ll be taking what I’ve been doing in the last 33 years to the start line," she says. Does she visualise winning? "Absolutely not. One of the things that used to make us teenagers giggle was being told to lie down, listen to whale music and visualise ourselves winning. It’s unhelpful. "What you have to do is visualise the process of winning, or the process of completing a race that you might win. Everybody is going for the same thing. All you can control is your process, like …