Leaving the BBC has been a challenge for Mishal Husain, but at least she now gets to express her opinions – and have a Christmas lie-in!
After 26 years at the BBC, Mishal Husain left in 2025 to join Bloomberg. It’s been the greatest challenge of her career. “I have had to reinvent myself and that’s scary because you wonder, ‘Am I going to make a success of it?’” Husain presented the Today programme on Radio 4 for her final 11 years at the Beeb and was my favourite presenter on the show. While others tried to shout down interviewees, she researched meticulously, listened intensely, probed forensically and got results. Husain exposed inconsistencies, hypocrisies and plain old lies, fairly and without fanfare. But now she’s swapped short-form interviews for a weekly 40-minute podcast called The Mishal Husain Show, which started in October. Husain insists they’re worlds apart. “I’m discovering that doing one deep, really thoughtful interview a week is completely different and harder than being in daily news and getting up at 3am.” Harder? “It really is. But I’m loving it.” Off air, she still speaks with that limpid, head-girl voice, but her tone is a bit more sing-song; a bit more fun. What scared her most? “Starting from scratch. Starting from zero viewers and listeners.” The change in job has also meant a change in lifestyle. Workwise, Husain and her husband Meekal Hashmi (who have three sons born 18 months apart – the youngest two are twins – at university) are now in sync. “My husband’s finding it quite curious that for the first time in our married life I have normal office hours and we both have to share the bathroom in the morning. Suddenly we have parallel routines, which we’ve never had.” Does he like that? “I think he’s probably… we’re probably, adjusting to it.” Husain is a ridiculously youthful 52, and petite. With the familiar big bob, and a slight, strong frame, she’s got something of the superhero about her. Today, she’s racing up and down the extremely challenging stairs at Bloomberg, introducing me to the top floor with its magnificent view over St Paul’s and central London, down to the enticing (and free) pantry, then to the highly industrious newsroom. In the first few weeks she’s interviewed a mix of world leaders, aspiring world leaders and global influencers, including Canada’s prime minister and former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado, the recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She says patterns are beginning to emerge in the show, many of them reflecting the increasing schisms in the world. When we meet, Husain has just interviewed newly retired MI6 chief Richard Moore and she’s still thinking about it. “He said that the world today has never been more contested in his 38 years of intelligence. When I left university in the 90s it was before 9/11, and it was a more settled world order. Economically, it was a better time, too. Making sense of that world is one of those things I want to do. Mark Carney was our launch guest and he talked about a rupture. I thought, you’re a G7 leader, and you’re telling us what we’re going through is not just a blip and trade is possibly never going to go back to how it was.” Her fears for a world in crisis are written all over her face. When she interviewed Farage, she grilled him about his relationship with Russia (before the former leader of Reform UK in Wales, Nathan Gill, was jailed for 10 years for accepting pro-Russian bribes). Farage was so riled he responded, “Listen, love, you’re trying ever so hard.” She let it pass without a flicker. Was she tempted to say something? “No, because we would have stopped talking about Russia and we would have started talking about me and him, and I didn’t want that.” If that had been pre-recorded for Today, would it have been included in the show? “Probably not. We might have had to cut the interview down to five minutes, and it’s likely it would have been left on the cutting-room floor.” Now she’s left the Beeb she’s free to be more opinionated. But she says she’ll never be an open book. That’s just not her. However, when delivering this year’s prestigious Romanes Lecture she said she is less reluctant these days to talk about being a Muslim or her Anglo-Pakistani background. I ask why? “Because there’s a responsibility that comes with being in the public eye. We’re in a world where prejudice, discrimination and hatred is rising, so I do feel a sense of responsibility. “About eight years ago, there was a young Muslim journalist at the BBC who said to me, ‘I admire that you don’t hide that you’re Muslim’, and I thought how sad that he’s even saying that. That is one of the moments that brought home the sense of responsibility.” She smiles. “And look at my name. How could I hide the fact I’m Muslim?” We’re talking in the week that the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness resigned following an edit of one of Donald Trump’s speeches on the Panorama programme. Was she surprised? “I think what they were dealing with became too intense. I understand why it would have come to that.” Whether they should have had to is a different matter. The BBC has been accused of a left-wing bias, but Husain’s not buying that. “They [Davie and Turness] were dealing with a board that has individuals within it who are not impartial. I was always told as a BBC journalist you leave your opinions at the door. You do expect that from the board as well and I don’t think that happened.” She says being director-general is a tough job and she can’t fathom who’d want it. “It’s a brave person whoever they are.” Has she been in touch with former colleagues to offer support? “Yes. Of course. I’d have to be heartless not to be thinking about what it’s like. I saw quite a few serious issues and scandals play out from the inside, but none of them felt existential in the way this one does. It makes me worried for the future.” On a more positive note, she’s looking this sounds weird coming from a Muslim, but I love the religious side of Christmas. I find Midnight Mass or any kind of carol service deeply moving. The story of the birth of Jesus is beautifully told in the Koran, and I find the Christmas story so moving.” Is she religious? “I would say faith is a part of my life.” This Christmas should be more relaxing than previous years when she has often been working on Boxing Day. What will she be watching? “We’ll pick a few films. I’m a member of Bafta so I always have quite a few films to watch over Christmas.” She stops. “Radio Times will hate that because they’ll be wanting me to watch something actually on TV.” She asks if she can have another go. OK, I say. “I’ll be going through my Christmas issue of Radio Times to find out what to watch!” – and she dissolves into girlish giggles. The Mishal Husain Show is on podcast platforms on Fridays
Mishal Husain talks her new chapter, pressing Nigel Farage on Russia and the recent BBC troubles
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. After 26 years at the BBC, Mishal Husain left in 2025 to join Bloomberg. It’s been the greatest challenge of her career. “I have had to reinvent myself and that’s scary because you wonder, ‘Am I going to make a success of it?’” Husain presented the Today programme on Radio 4 for her final 11 years at the Beeb and was my favourite presenter on the show. While others tried to shout down interviewees, she researched meticulously, listened intensely, probed forensically and got results. Husain exposed inconsistencies, hypocrisies and plain old lies, fairly and without fanfare. But now she’s swapped short-form interviews for a weekly 40-minute podcast called The Mishal Husain Show, which started in October. Husain insists they’re worlds apart. “I’m discovering that doing one deep, really thoughtful interview a week is completely different and harder than being in daily news and getting up at 3am.” Harder? “It really is. But I’m loving it.” Off air, she still speaks with that limpid, head-girl voice, but her tone is a bit more sing-song; a bit more fun. What scared her most? “Starting from scratch. Starting from zero viewers and listeners.” The change in job has also meant a change in lifestyle. Workwise, Husain and her husband Meekal Hashmi (who have three sons born 18 months apart – the youngest two are twins – at university) are now in sync. “My husband’s finding it quite curious that for the first time in our married life I have normal office hours and we both have to share the bathroom in the morning. Suddenly we have parallel routines, which we’ve never had.” Does he like that? “I think he’s probably… we’re probably, adjusting to it.” Husain is a ridiculously youthful 52, and petite. With the familiar big bob, and a slight, strong frame, she’s got something of the superhero about her. Today, she’s racing up and down the extremely challenging stairs at Bloomberg, introducing me to the top floor with its magnificent view over St Paul’s and central London, down to the enticing (and free) pantry, then to the highly industrious newsroom. In the first few weeks she’s interviewed a mix of world leaders, aspiring world leaders and global influencers, including Canada’s prime minister and former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado, the recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She says patterns are beginning to emerge in the show, many of them reflecting the increasing schisms in the world. When we meet, Husain has just interviewed newly retired MI6 chief Richard Moore and she’s still thinking about it. “He said that the world today has never been more contested in his 38 years of intelligence. When I left university in the 90s it was before 9/11, and it was a more settled world order. Economically, it was a better time, too. Making sense of that world is one of those things I want to do. Mark Carney was our launch guest and he talked about a rupture. I thought, you’re a G7 leader, and you’re telling us what we’re going through is not just a blip and trade is possibly never going to go back to how it was.” Her fears for a world in crisis are written all over her face. When she interviewed Farage, she grilled him about his and Reform’s relationship with Russia (before the former leader of Reform UK in Wales, Nathan Gill, was jailed for 10 years for accepting pro-Russian bribes). Farage was so riled he responded, “Listen, love, you’re trying ever so hard.” She let it pass without a flicker. Was she tempted to say something? “No, because we would have stopped talking about Russia and we would have started talking about me and him, and I didn’t want that.” View oEmbed on the source website If that had been pre-recorded for Today, would it have been included in the show? “Probably not. We might have had to cut the interview down to five minutes, and it’s likely it would have been left on the cutting-room floor.” Now she’s left the Beeb she’s free to be more opinionated. But she says she’ll never be an open book. That’s just not her. However, when delivering this year’s prestigious Romanes Lecture she said she is less reluctant these days to talk about being a Muslim or her Anglo-Pakistani background. I ask why? “Because there’s a responsibility that comes with being in the public eye. We’re in a world where prejudice, discrimination and hatred is rising, so I do feel a sense of responsibility. “About eight years ago, there was a young Muslim journalist at the BBC who said to me, ‘I admire that you don’t hide that you’re Muslim’, and I thought how sad that he’s even saying that. That is one of the moments that brought home the sense of responsibility.” She smiles. “And look at my name. How could I hide the fact I’m Muslim?” We’re talking in the week that the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness resigned following an edit of one of Donald Trump’s speeches on the Panorama programme. Was she surprised? “I think what they were dealing with became too intense. I understand why it would have come to that.” Whether they should have had to is a different matter. The BBC has been accused of a left-wing bias, but Husain’s not buying that. “They [Davie and Turness] were dealing with a board that has individuals within it who are not impartial. I was always told as a BBC journalist you leave your opinions at the door. You do expect that from the board as well and I don’t think that happened.” She says being director-general is a tough job and she can’t fathom who’d want it. “It’s a brave person whoever they are.” Has she been in touch with former colleagues to offer support? “Yes. Of course. I’d have to be heartless not to be thinking about what it’s like. I saw quite a few serious issues and scandals play out from the inside, but none of them felt existential in the way this one does. It makes me worried for the future.” On a more positive note, she’s looking forward to Christmas. “I don’t know if this sounds weird coming from a Muslim, but I love the religious side of Christmas. I find Midnight Mass or any kind of carol service deeply moving. The story of the birth of Jesus is beautifully told in the Koran, and I find the Christmas story so moving.” Is she religious? “I would say faith is a part of my life.” This Christmas should be more relaxing than previous years when she has often been working on Boxing Day. What will she be watching? “We’ll pick a few films. I’m a member of Bafta so I always have quite a few films to watch over Christmas.” She stops. “Radio Times will hate that because they’ll be wanting me to watch something actually on TV.” She asks if she can have ans go. OK, I say. “I’ll be going through my Christmas issue of Radio Times to find out what to watch!” – and she dissolves into girlish giggles. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Audio coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
It helped him win Olympic gold – now Tom Daley is championing the benefits of knitting for all
Add Game of Wool: Britain's Best Knitter to your watchlist Tom Daley is taking over our TV screens. And there’s not a diving board in sight. In the first week of The Celebrity Traitors, the fabulously sceptical side eye he gave Kate Garraway became the talking point of an already much-talked-about show. And now the Olympic gold medallist is hoping to do for knitting what The Great British Bake Off did for the Victoria sponge. That’s why we’re here, on a gorgeous summer’s day in rural Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland, with Daley salivating about what’s in front of him – wools of all colours, textures and thicknesses, and knitting needles that range from pipe-cleaner thin to the positively pornographic. We’re in the “Yarn Barn” on a picturesque farm where Game of Wool is being filmed. The aim of the new Channel 4 reality series is to find Britain’s best amateur knitter. More than a decade since Daley made his TV reality-show debut in Splash!, mentoring celebrity divers, this is his first presenting gig, and he’s loving it. He tells me about the wonders of knitting and crochet and talks so fast I can barely keep up. “It’s amazing what you can achieve in such a short time with just two needles or a crochet hook, and the benefits you get from knitting and crochet are just unparalleled. “It’s the thing that allows me to get away from everything and be creative, present and to unwind. I stop thinking about all the things that have been in the past and are coming in the future, you’re just in the moment, and I think it’s the superpower that helped me get to an Olympic gold in Tokyo because there was so much time to overthink in the Covid Games, whereas when I was knitting I was able to stay focused and in the moment.” Finally, he takes a breath. Was he ever as enthusiastic about diving? “I don’t think so and that’s because diving always had pressure around it. Maybe the contestants will feel quite pressured in the Yarn Barn because they want to impress the judges, designers and knitting experts Di [Gilpin] and Sheila [Greenwell].” He’s right. I’ve seen the first two episodes and the show is surprisingly tense when the contestants face tough deadlines, find themselves out of their comfort zone, and realise they’re in danger of being knocked out. For them, this seems every bit as pressured as diving was for Daley at the Olympics. He has been through so much and has been in the public eye for so long, yet he still looks so boyish that it’s hard to believe he’s 31. There have been so many fantastic achievements and a fair few traumas along the way. Since he retired from diving last year, we are discovering more about the real Tom Daley. Not only are we seeing his fun side, he’s also now free to expose some of the more unsavoury aspects of elite sport. By the time Britain’s most decorated diver retired for real last year (his first, short-lived retirement was after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics; actually held in 2021 because of Covid), he’d competed in five Olympic Games, winning five medals (gold, silver and three bronzes). Astonishingly, he was only 14 when he made his Olympic debut in 2008. He won his first bronze at London 2012, finally clinched gold at Tokyo in the 10m synchro with Matty Lee, and finished as Britain’s most decorated diver with a silver in Paris last year. Does he find presenting easy compared with diving? “It’s a lot less physically demanding.” And less painful? “You don’t hurt your head as much! You don’t do belly flops and, as I’ve got to know the judges and the contestants better, it’s become like a family. A woolly family!” He smiles. “It’s been really nice to be able to unleash that different side of me.” He also hopes the show challenges sexist and ageist clichés about knitting. “It shouldn’t be boxed into a certain group of people. I think that’s what this show will prove.” He tells me about one of the contestants, Simon, a former marine who now works on building sites. “What he’s going to do for the stereotypes of knitting is amazing!” In the show, Simon admits that a stranger saw him knitting and told him that doing a puzzle would be more manly. Daley says he has never received disparaging remarks, but the very fact that his knitting at the Tokyo Olympics became headline news tells its own story. Knitting, he says, has become a metaphor for life. “Every time you unravel your knitting, you’re not starting from scratch, you’re starting from experience.” So rather than berating himself for making mistakes, as he did in the past, he embraced the learning curve. “I started being kinder to myself when I made those mistakes.” In a world where we are frequently being presented with disturbing images of toxic masculinity, it seems like a great time to show that real men knit. Would he encourage, say, Donald Trump and the tech “broligarchy” to take up knitting? “Are you asking if knitting is going to save the world?” He laughs. “Well, I don’t know if knitting’s going to help them.” Daley now lives in Los Angeles with his husband, the film-maker Dustin Lance Black, and their two sons, Robbie (seven) and Phoenix (two). He’s been an active campaigner for LGBTQ+ rights and has witnessed so much progress in his lifetime, but now worries about a backlash. Earlier this year, Trump announced he would dismantle diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives. “It’s a scary time for lots of minorities all over the world. And it’s certainly a scary time for minorities in the US. It does feel as if there’s a regression in people’s opinions and thoughts. LA is obviously a bubble compared with the rest of the States, but it’s a big adjustment culturally to move to the US.” I first interviewed Daley 13 years ago just before the London Olympics. He was a lovely, polite, buttoned up 17-year-old in turmoil, somehow smiling his way through it. His father Rob, who meant everything to him, had recently died from a brain tumour. Meanwhile, the public and the British Olympics team had huge expectations and he was desperate not to disappoint. “There was so much pressure. It was a home Olympic Games. When was I ever going to get a chance to dive in front of a home crowd again, with all my friends and family there? I was also aware that the funding of British diving was sitting on my shoulders because if we didn’t win a medal, funding for diving was going to be cut. So it was huge pressure and I struggled with all kinds of things in the build-up to that – eating disorder issues and anxiety issues.” He spoke about suffering from bulimia and body dysmorphia earlier this year in the documentary Tom Daley: 1.6 Seconds (the title refers to the duration of a 10m dive from take-off to entering the water). When did he realise he had an eating disorder? “At the end of 2011, I realised that people within British diving were looking at me as not just a diver, but also what I actually looked like. I got told I was overweight.’ That’s ridiculous, I say. “Yep.” He nods. I remember being shocked by how little there was of him at the time. Who told him he was overweight? “Alexei [Evangulov], the performance director.” Daley says it had a huge impact on him. “I had absolutely no idea what I was doing at that time, so I just cut out food. I was just not fuelling myself appropriately. I wasn’t giving myself enough calories to be able to properly train. I used to get so hungry that I’d binge. Then when I binged, I’d feel so bad that I was bulimic for a while. “It was a dark time because I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. Men weren’t meant to talk about their eating disorders back then.” His voice becomes louder as he becomes more passionate. “Or their feelings at all. It’s only as the years have gone by that it’s become easier to talk about these things. Once I was able to start sharing some of those things, I was able to get out of that spiral, but it was a year when I was really trying to figure out what I was doing with my body. It really does damage you for a long time.” He pauses. “I grew up in a time when coaches were able to shout at you,” he says. It was a bullying culture? “Yes. It’s very different now. And this has created a more empowered athlete.” Was it traumatic? “Yes. But I look at it now as something that made me. I wonder if I would have been as good an athlete if I hadn’t had that.” While athletes are treated more respectfully by coaches these days, it also means they are more reliant on self-motivation. “Now,” he says, pointing to his heart, “if you’re going to be the best athlete, you have to have it here and want to do it yourself.” Daley says he still struggles with body dysmorphia. “My husband’s been a huge support in that. I think it’s a big thing in the gay world, if I’m honest. Some people have very unrealistic body expectations.” He’d like to maintain the body of an athlete. Why? “One, mental health. I like exercising and I like being in shape. Now my training is not to be an Olympic athlete, it’s to be as fit and healthy to live longer for my kids. That’s the most important thing for me. Also whenever I have to do a photo shoot, I usually end up having to strip off at some point, so I have to feel confident enough to do so.” Despite being in great nick (as viewers of his shower scene on The Celebrity Traitors will attest), he still feels self-conscious at the gym. “As an Olympian, I go to the gym and I hate it because I’m like, ‘Oh my God, everybody’s judging me for how I’m doing this.’ I go to a gym called Equinox in LA, and everybody’s there. I find it intimidating. I always used to be given a workout in the diving gym and the exercises were very specific, so when I go to the gym now I don’t even know what to do with these machines. So I ended up getting my strength coach to write me some workouts each week.” Apart from maintaining his six-pack, he says he’s so much easier on himself than before. “I used to put all my self-worth and self-esteem into whether I was doing well or not at diving. As soon as I realised I was more than a diver, I was a parent, husband, friend, son, knitter, it gave me a different perspective and allowed me to flourish.” Did it take marriage and children to realise that? “Yes, I think so. The biggest wake-up call was going into lockdown. That was when the knitting journey started. It was realising that you can’t control everything, things can change at any moment, so you should appreciate the things that you do have. “When I went into competition after lockdown, I was grateful that the Olympics even happened, I was grateful that my family had got through the pandemic, and that I could stand on that platform and know that, regardless of whether I did well or terribly, my family was going to love me, whatever the outcome. It was so freeing. In my first few Olympics I tortured myself through the whole experience because I wanted to do well so badly.” In Tokyo, he simply felt, “I’m just going to enjoy it.” And that, of course, is when he won his gold medal. It’s mid-October, Daley is back in LA and we catch up via video link. The Celebrity Traitors (which was recorded earlier this year) is in its second week on TV, and he says he thoroughly enjoyed his time in it. I compliment him on the woollies he wore on the show, his own designs presumably? Thanks, he says, but he can’t take any credit – the BBC wouldn’t allow him to wear his own brand of knitwear. Did he knit during filming? “Yeah, any time I was in the hotel I was just knitting, knitting, knitting. You get your phone taken off you, you can’t talk to anyone, you’re just in your room, so I was very glad I had knitting because I think lots of people were bored.” Did he persuade his fellow contestants to knit? “Erm no,” he says diffidently. “We wanted to do a knitting lesson in our downtime, but we never quite got around to it.” He sounds worried that he’s giving too much away. (Spoiler – the night after we speak, he is murdered by the Traitors.) The great thing about his new TV career, he says, is that it’s fun for the family. “Robbie is a huge fan of The Traitors, and the boys spent some time on the Game of Wool set.” Can they knit yet? “Phoenix is only two! He’s definitely not into it yet. He likes grabbing the wool, then running away with it and unravelling everything. Robbie, to be fair, has made a hat with a knitting loom machine and has crocheted a chain.” What does he hope we get out of the series? “I’d love to think that more and more people after watching this show will want to get involved. At least try it, pick up a set of knitting needles, pick up a crochet hook and give it a go.” He says if somebody had told him five years ago that he’d become a knitting evangelist, let alone hosting a knitting competition on TV, he would have laughed at them. “But now it forms such a big part of my life. I look forward to it every evening when I sit down after the kids are in bed. Knitting has changed my life, and I think it can do a world of good for so many people.” GET KNITTING! Tom Daley has teamed up with RT for a festive jumper competition. ◼ Send us your design to be knitted (or crocheted) with details on thickness of wool, colours, size of needles (or hook) and tension, for a jumper that reflects Tom and which has a Christmas element. ◼ Email your design to feedback@radiotimes.com with Knitting Competition in the subject line. ◼ Tom will pick the winning jumper! Entries must be received before midnight on Monday 10 November. For terms and conditions go to radiotimes.com/knitting
Tom Daley reveals his fears for minority communities and how he's smashing knitting stereotypes
It helped him win Olympic gold – now Tom Daley is championing the benefits of knitting for all.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Tom Daley is taking over our TV screens. And there’s not a diving board in sight. In the first week of The Celebrity Traitors, the fabulously sceptical side eye he gave Kate Garraway became the talking point of an already much-talked-about show. And now the Olympic gold medallist is hoping to do for knitting what The Great British Bake Off did for the Victoria sponge. That’s why we’re here, on a gorgeous summer’s day in rural Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland, with Daley salivating about what’s in front of him – wools of all colours, textures and thicknesses, and knitting needles that range from pipe-cleaner thin to the positively pornographic. We’re in the “Yarn Barn” on a picturesque farm where Game of Wool is being filmed. The aim of the new Channel 4 reality series is to find Britain’s best amateur knitter. More than a decade since Daley made his TV reality-show debut in Splash!, mentoring celebrity divers, this is his first presenting gig, and he’s loving it. He tells me about the wonders of knitting and crochet and talks so fast I can barely keep up. “It’s amazing what you can achieve in such a short time with just two needles or a crochet hook, and the benefits you get from knitting and crochet are just unparalleled. “It’s the thing that allows me to get away from everything and be creative, present and to unwind. I stop thinking about all the things that have been in the past and are coming in the future, you’re just in the moment, and I think it’s the superpower that helped me get to an Olympic gold in Tokyo because there was so much time to overthink in the Covid Games, whereas when I was knitting I was able to stay focused and in the moment.” Finally, he takes a breath. Was he ever as enthusiastic about diving? “I don’t think so and that’s because diving always had pressure around it. Maybe the contestants will feel quite pressured in the Yarn Barn because they want to impress the judges, designers and knitting experts Di [Gilpin] and Sheila [Greenwell].” He’s right. I’ve seen the first two episodes and the show is surprisingly tense when the contestants face tough deadlines, find themselves out of their comfort zone, and realise they’re in danger of being knocked out. For them, this seems every bit as pressured as diving was for Daley at the Olympics. He has been through so much and has been in the public eye for so long, yet he still looks so boyish that it’s hard to believe he’s 31. There have been so many fantastic achievements and a fair few traumas along the way. Since he retired from diving last year, we are discovering more about the real Tom Daley. Not only are we seeing his fun side, he’s also now free to expose some of the more unsavoury aspects of elite sport. By the time Britain’s most decorated diver retired for real last year (his first, short-lived retirement was after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics; actually held in 2021 because of Covid), he’d competed in five Olympic Games, winning five medals (gold, silver and three bronzes). Astonishingly, he was only 14 when he made his Olympic debut in 2008. He won his first bronze at London 2012, finally clinched gold at Tokyo in the 10m synchro with Matty Lee, and finished as Britain’s most decorated diver with a silver in Paris last year. Does he find presenting easy compared with diving? “It’s a lot less physically demanding.” And less painful? “You don’t hurt your head as much! You don’t do belly flops and, as I’ve got to know the judges and the contestants better, it’s become like a family. A woolly family!” He smiles. “It’s been really nice to be able to unleash that different side of me.” He also hopes the show challenges sexist and ageist clichés about knitting. “It shouldn’t be boxed into a certain group of people. I think that’s what this show will prove.” He tells me about one of the contestants, Simon, a former marine who now works on building sites. “What he’s going to do for the stereotypes of knitting is amazing!” In the show, Simon admits that a stranger saw him knitting and told him that doing a puzzle would be more manly. Daley says he has never received disparaging remarks, but the very fact that his knitting at the Tokyo Olympics became headline news tells its own story. Knitting, he says, has become a metaphor for life. “Every time you unravel your knitting, you’re not starting from scratch, you’re starting from experience.” So rather than berating himself for making mistakes, as he did in the past, he embraced the learning curve. “I started being kinder to myself when I made those mistakes.” In a world where we are frequently being presented with disturbing images of toxic masculinity, it seems like a great time to show that real men knit. Would he encourage, say, Donald Trump and the tech “broligarchy” to take up knitting? “Are you asking if knitting is going to save the world?” He laughs. “Well, I don’t know if knitting’s going to help them.” Daley now lives in Los Angeles with his husband, the film-maker Dustin Lance Black, and their two sons, Robbie (seven) and Phoenix (two). He’s been an active campaigner for LGBTQ+ rights and has witnessed so much progress in his lifetime, but now worries about a backlash. Earlier this year, Trump announced he would dismantle diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives. “It’s a scary time for lots of minorities all over the world. And it’s certainly a scary time for minorities in the US. It does feel as if there’s a regression in people’s opinions and thoughts. LA is obviously a bubble compared with the rest of the States, but it’s a big adjustment culturally to move to the US.” I first interviewed Daley 13 years ago just before the London Olympics. He was a lovely, polite, buttoned up 17-year-old in turmoil, somehow smiling his way through it. His father Rob, who meant everything to him, had recently died from a brain tumour. Meanwhile, the public and the British Olympics team had huge expectations and he was desperate not to disappoint. “There was so much pressure. It was a home Olympic Games. When was I ever going to get a chance to dive in front of a home crowd again, with all my friends and family there? I was also aware that the funding of British diving was sitting on my shoulders because if we didn’t win a medal, funding for diving was going to be cut. So it was huge pressure and I struggled with all kinds of things in the build-up to that – eating disorder issues and anxiety issues.” He spoke about suffering from bulimia and body dysmorphia earlier this year in the documentary Tom Daley: 1.6 Seconds (the title refers to the duration of a 10m dive from take-off to entering the water). When did he realise he had an eating disorder? “At the end of 2011, I realised that people within British diving were looking at me as not just a diver, but also what I actually looked like. I got told I was overweight.’ That’s ridiculous, I say. “Yep.” He nods. I remember being shocked by how little there was of him at the time. Who told him he was overweight? “Alexei [Evangulov], the performance director.” Daley says it had a huge impact on him. “I had absolutely no idea what I was doing at that time, so I just cut out food. I was just not fuelling myself appropriately. I wasn’t giving myself enough calories to be able to properly train. I used to get so hungry that I’d binge. Then when I binged, I’d feel so bad that I was bulimic for a while. “It was a dark time because I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. Men weren’t meant to talk about their eating disorders back then.” His voice becomes louder as he becomes more passionate. “Or their feelings at all. It’s only as the years have gone by that it’s become easier to talk about these things. Once I was able to start sharing some of those things, I was able to get out of that spiral, but it was a year when I was really trying to figure out what I was doing with my body. It really does damage you for a long time.” He pauses. “I grew up in a time when coaches were able to shout at you,” he says. It was a bullying culture? “Yes. It’s very different now. And this has created a more empowered athlete.” Was it traumatic? “Yes. But I look at it now as something that made me. I wonder if I would have been as good an athlete if I hadn’t had that.” While athletes are treated more respectfully by coaches these days, it also means they are more reliant on self-motivation. “Now,” he says, pointing to his heart, “if you’re going to be the best athlete, you have to have it here and want to do it yourself.” Daley says he still struggles with body dysmorphia. “My husband’s been a huge support in that. I think it’s a big thing in the gay world, if I’m honest. Some people have very unrealistic body expectations.” He’d like to maintain the body of an athlete. Why? “One, mental health. I like exercising and I like being in shape. Now my training is not to be an Olympic athlete, it’s to be as fit and healthy to live longer for my kids. That’s the most important thing for me. Also whenever I have to do a photo shoot, I usually end up having to strip off at some point, so I have to feel confident enough to do so.” Despite being in great nick (as viewers of his shower scene on The Celebrity Traitors will attest), he still feels self-conscious at the gym. “As an Olympian, I go to the gym and I hate it because I’m like, ‘Oh my God, everybody’s judging me for how I’m doing this.’ I go to a gym called Equinox in LA, and everybody’s there. I find it intimidating. I always used to be given a workout in the diving gym and the exercises were very specific, so when I go to the gym now I don’t even know what to do with these machines. So I ended up getting my strength coach to write me some workouts each week.” Apart from maintaining his six-pack, he says he’s so much easier on himself than before. “I used to put all my self-worth and self-esteem into whether I was doing well or not at diving. As soon as I realised I was more than a diver, I was a parent, husband, friend, son, knitter, it gave me a different perspective and allowed me to flourish.” Did it take marriage and children to realise that? “Yes, I think so. The biggest wake-up call was going into lockdown. That was when the knitting journey started. It was realising that you can’t control everything, things can change at any moment, so you should appreciate the things that you do have. “When I went into competition after lockdown, I was grateful that the Olympics even happened, I was grateful that my family had got through the pandemic, and that I could stand on that platform and know that, regardless of whether I did well or terribly, my family was going to love me, whatever the outcome. It was so freeing. In my first few Olympics I tortured myself through the whole experience because I wanted to do well so badly.” In Tokyo, he simply felt, “I’m just going to enjoy it.” And that, of course, is when he won his gold medal. It’s mid-October, Daley is back in LA and we catch up via video link. The Celebrity Traitors (which was recorded earlier this year) is in its second week on TV, and he says he thoroughly enjoyed his time in it. I compliment him on the woollies he wore on the show, his own designs presumably? Thanks, he says, but he can’t take any credit – the BBC wouldn’t allow him to wear his own brand of knitwear. Did he knit during filming? “Yeah, any time I was in the hotel I was just knitting, knitting, knitting. You get your phone taken off you, you can’t talk to anyone, you’re just in your room, so I was very glad I had knitting because I think lots of people were bored.” Did he persuade his fellow contestants to knit? “Erm no,” he says diffidently. “We wanted to do a knitting lesson in our downtime, but we never quite got around to it.” He sounds worried that he’s giving too much away. (Spoiler – the night after we speak, he is murdered by the Traitors.) The great thing about his new TV career, he says, is that it’s fun for the family. “Robbie is a huge fan of The Traitors, and the boys spent some time on the Game of Wool set.” Can they knit yet? “Phoenix is only two! He’s definitely not into it yet. He likes grabbing the wool, then running away with it and unravelling everything. Robbie, to be fair, has made a hat with a knitting loom machine and has crocheted a chain.” What does he hope we get out of the series? “I’d love to think that more and more people after watching this show will want to get involved. At least try it, pick up a set of knitting needles, pick up a crochet hook and give it a go.” He says if somebody had told him five years ago that he’d become a knitting evangelist, let alone hosting a knitting competition on TV, he would have laughed at them. “But now it forms such a big part of my life. I look forward to it every evening when I sit down after the kids are in bed. Knitting has changed my life, and I think it can do a world of good for so many people.” Blue loopy jumper: Full look by Stella McCartney @stellamccartney. Green top, pink trousers: Full look by Drew Kent @drewkent_ Photography: Christina Kenohan @christinakernoha_photo; Styling: James Yardley @jamesyardley; Retouching by KickedPixel @kickedpixel; Photography assistant: Paul Reich @paulandrewreich; Styling assistant: Sasha Venn; Grooming: Ana Cruzalegui @anacruzmakeup. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Game of Wool: Britain's Best Knitter begins Sunday 2nd November at 8pm on Channel 4. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
No topic is off the table as Rob Rinder and Rylan Clark sit down with Simon Hattenstone ahead of their latest adventure in India
Add Rob and Rylan's Passage to India to your watchlist Rob and Rylan are back. After the success of last year’s Bafta-winning Grand Tour of Italy, TV judge Rob Rinder and radio and reality show presenter Rylan Clark have undertaken a Passage to India. Like the first travel series, it’s steeped in culture (thank you, Rob), pithy sayings and scatological wisdom (thank you, Rylan), and humour (thanks to both – but mainly Rylan). Because of their obvious differences, they work brilliantly together as a team: Rob is posh, urbane, wordy; Rylan is sweary, very Essex and straight to the point. Rylan is 36 and 6ft 4in, Rob is 47 and quite a few inches shorter. But the longer you watch them, the more you see their similarities. Which are not so much the obvious things (male, gay and single at the time), but the more subtle ones; Rylan can be as angsty as Rob in his own way, while Rob can be as potty-mouthed as Rylan. We meet at a café in London. They love their show and are keen to know what I think. “Did you like it? Honestly?” Rob asks me anxiously. “That means a lot to me.” “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Rylan adds. “The second album is always a worry!” These two were friends before they made the Italy series but didn’t know each other that well. By the time they had done India, they say they couldn’t have known each other better. Both say that, unlike so much documentary TV, there isn’t a single scene that is set up beforehand. So, when Rylan thinks he’s going to die travelling on a rickshaw in the Delhi traffic it’s honest and heartfelt. Ditto when Rob throws a tantrum at the thought of seeing street puppetry because it’s not true art (it turns out to be his highlight of the tour). Then there is the time they visit an astrologer. “That was without doubt the funniest moment in my life,” Rob says. “It’s not mine,” Rylan replies with a snarl. “F**king astrologer.” The astrologer in question tells Rob that he’s lovely when he’s in a good mood, but a horror when he’s not. “Yes, but that’s true and we both know that,” comments Rylan. “I felt seen,” adds Rob, before Rylan explains his side of the story: “Then he comes to me and says you’ve got psychiatric problems, you’re basically a slut, you’re going to get gout and you’ll never be happy!” “But you disproportionately took the negatives,” says Rob. “What were the positives in that?” replies Rylan indignantly. By this point, Rob is hooting with laughter just thinking about it. “Then Rylan said Russell Grant wouldn’t have said that to me…” “Well he wouldn’t,” says Rylan. “I think if you’re a psychic, and someone comes to you for a reading and you know they’re going to be hit by a bus and die you don’t tell them that. He should not have said them things to me. For someone who’s apparently the best in the world, he weren’t that nice.” Rob and Rylan’s Italian Grand Tour was broadcast last May and both men were recently divorced. “That was more about us realising who we were after shit times, and realising there’s a world out there,” Rylan says. “This is more about ‘now we know who we are, we’re finding out what we want to get out of life’.” He thinks the Grand Tour made the public see them differently. “It made people not look at Rob as just the judge who used to sit there on daytime TV and bang his gavel. And maybe it made people think I’m not as stupid as I make out.” Anybody who has followed Rylan’s career will realise there’s nothing stupid about the former X Factor contestant. He can be controversial, however, and while that is undoubtedly part of his charm, it also gets him into hot water. The week after we meet, he was a guest host on This Morning and caused a national hoo-ha during a segment on immigration by appearing to suggest that asylum seekers are routinely put up at swish hotels complete with games rooms, given iPads and access to the NHS on arrival and lead a cushy life in Britain. A somewhat simplified and inaccurate view of the facts. According to Refugee Action, asylum seekers are those who come to the UK seeking safety and many are not allowed to work. Those housed in hotels, where meals are provided, receive a weekly allowance from the Government of £9.95 or £49.18 if they are self-catering. Hardly the lap of luxury inferred by Rylan – who has presenting duties at ITV, is a voice at Radio 2, and has, in effect, played himself on Doctor Who – yet his comments had more impact than those of many politicians and show what an influential figure he is today. Some praised his plain speaking, but others accused him of fanning the flames of xenophobia – without a handle on the facts – in an already incendiary political environment. In what seems to have been an attempt to dampen the furore, he later posted on social media that “You can be pro-immigration and against illegal routes” and while he prefaced his comments on This Morning by saying this is “the narrative we are being fed,” he didn’t challenge it at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, Rylan may well wish he had had Rob by his side to temper his views. He was certainly glad to have his support when they arrived in India. Rob had been there before and he adores it. Rylan hadn’t and initially hated it. What does Rob love about it? He looks at Rylan. “I’m going to get into trouble with you for being twatty.” “Here we go!” says Rylan. “It’s just a rich tapestry of colour everywhere,” says Rob. “Here we go!” says Rylan once again. “I’m obsessed with it,” counters Rob. “The contrasts! I love smell and clunk and complexity and life and sound and India has all of that.” “I didn’t,” responds Rylan emphatically. “I got off the plane, went through passport control and got bit on my face. Then I was thrown into a rickshaw and I genuinely thought I was going to die. It was a huge culture shock. I’ve never been anywhere like that before in my life.” “You’re very adaptable,” say Rob. “I didn’t expect you to adapt as well.” Rylan nods. “Yeah, that’s what I learnt about myself. I didn’t expect to adapt so well either.” Of course, this being Rob and Rylan we get to learn plenty about the two of them. For example, their backgrounds are more similar than you’d think. Both were brought up by their mothers and are close to them. Rob admits that his poshness is a construct. He didn’t come from a well-to-do family, but he was determined to create a persona for himself. “It’s artifice,” he says. Rylan grins. “He’s as rough as arseholes, he is.” “Not quite arseholes,” replies Rob. “Dad’s a taxi driver. Rylan and I perceive the world in the same way. We’re born into similar values, similar views.” Rylan’s coke and burger arrives. “Is this real Coke or the Mickey Mouse coke?” he asks the waiter. “Mariah!” Rob proclaims, comparing Rylan with singer Mariah Carey, allegedly renowned for her diva-ish tendencies. “That’s his rider. It’s got to be proper Coca-Cola.” Is he more Mariah than you, I wonder, to which Rob replies, “Oh my God, yes!” Rylan interjects. “Ask Bea for real answers. She’s our makeup artist and our therapist.” Bea is sitting with us. She points to Rob. “Me more Mariah! Whaaaaaaat? Oh my God! In what way? We have different Mariahs.” “My Mariah is travel and accommodation,” explains Rylan. “I’ve got to travel comfortably. I don’t care where you put me in the day as long as I go back to a nice hotel suite. Everything else I can deal with.” “I want to be left alone to read,” says Rob. “And gym,” says Bea. “And swim,” adds Rylan. “And he gets up at 3am!” “I don’t sleep very much,” Rob concedes. As in Italy, they spend a lot of time viewing art, with Rob providing the commentary. Much of it revolves around sex and death, which is perfectly apt because they are two subjects that fascinate them. They visit the sites of ancient erotic art in Khajuraho and are entranced by the joyous depictions of sexuality. “We have so many conversations about sex and shame and the body, but at the centre of ancient Indian cultural and religious life is the celebration of sex,” Rob says. “And there are lots of feminist examples in the depictions of sex – women on top, for example.” Rylan nods enthusiastically, “I’ve never seen so many vaginas in stone.” They segue from sex to love and relationships. Rylan says he’d love to father children. “I really want to have kids. I’ve got a lot of love to give.” For Rob, it doesn’t seem so straightforward. “I’m over a decade older and when I came out that wasn’t on the buffet of possibility,” he says. “It wasn’t in the conversation. It was very rare.” Rylan reminds him he’s only 47. “And we live in a world where age isn’t really a problem no more. And sexuality isn’t a problem.” It’s funny, I say, that so many people assume you are in a relationship. “I’ll give you two reasons why,” Rylan says. “Everyone thinks we’re together because we’re doing this show and we show each other affection. And two, I think people still presume that two gay guys who get on must be together; that two gay men can’t just be mates. My mum gets people saying congratulations to her.” Rob nods. “People say Mazel Tov to my mum.” “He don’t help when we get pictures taken of us at events and he’s looking up at me adoringly,” quips Rylan. “How am I not supposed to look up?” wails Rob. “To look in your eyes, I need a step ladder.” “I love him,” Rylan assures me, “but if we were in a relationship I’d be in prison because I would have smothered him with a pillow by now. That’s what marriage is, isn’t it? Row all the time and don’t have sex. We’re in a proper marriage. Rob’s seen me naked, I’ve seen Rob naked, that’s how close we are. But nothing’s gone in anything.” “No way!” Rob squirms but Rylan out-squirms him. “It would feel like incest.” While making the series last year, they were both single. Are they still? For once, Rylan is discombobulated. “Yes. No. What?” he replies. “I’m single,” Rob says. “Rob’s single,” confirms Rylan, before pausing to say he’s the world’s worst liar. “OK, I am seeing someone and I’m happy.” How long has he had a boyfriend? “Nope, we’re not doing that,” he refutes before Rob assures me that this unnamed “boyfriend” is “nice” and Rylan agrees that he’s “content. At the moment”. Their mothers play a prominent role in the series, whether via video call or the men chatting about them. Both are clearly terrified of them dying. Rob says his terror of death in general has held him back from making the most of life. When they visit Varanasi, the city on the Ganges where thousands of people are cremated each year in DIY ceremonies and released into the river Ganges so they can reach Nirvana, it has a huge impact on both of them. “The dark shadow of death and the fear of it is a present force and has always been for me,” Rob says. “The looming idea it’s going to end. The unknown is the great terror. In my life one’s been taught to fear death, and to be confronted by it so viscerally and visually and literally, and to consequently have the strange epiphany that all of us are here in a fleeting way, there’s a real liberation in that. I’m obsessed with Shelley’s poem Ozymandias.” Rylan rolls his eyes. “It’s a love letter to time. The traveller from an antique land sees this great big deity. ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’” Rylan yawns. “And he walks off and just realises it’s a ruin and the desert is all boundless and bare,” Rob continues. “The point is you think everything that is permanent and causing you concern is going to fade and disappear.” For Rylan it’s all a bit simpler. “I’m more worried about losing my mum than losing my own life. I feel like coming back from Varanasi was eye-opening. It made me realise I’ve just got to enjoy things I’m doing, and if I’m not enjoying it, then don’t f**king do it.” However differently they express it, both say that India has taught them the importance of living in the present. I ask them what they find annoying about each other. Rob looks at Rylan. “That you will not read.” “I ain’t got time to read a book,” he replies. “Sometimes he will get so in his own head when he don’t need to. He will overthink and overcomplicate situations. So, I’ll see a path in front of us and there’s a bit of broken glass there, a couple of pissed-up people there, and a hole in the ground. And Rob will be: ‘We can’t do this! We can’t!’ And I’m like, ‘Rob, we walk around the glass and walk around those people.’ Rather than walk down the path and avoid the glass and stuff, he’ll get a book out to find out how do I get rid of broken glass, how do I fill a hole?’” Rob laughs. “It’s so true.” What do they love about each other? Rob on Rylan: “I love his natural intelligence.” Rylan on Rob: “What I love about Rob is that he’s a walking, talking encyclopaedia so you can say ‘That’s not right, why?’ and he can answer it. But he’s not seen it. So, then we go and see it. I take his books, and he takes my eyes.” “That’s such a clever way of putting it,” says Rob as he looks at Rylan affectionately. “You’d be here twice as long just with me – I’d be talking about Foucault and the origins of how shame emerges from sex through the Christian church. And you don’t need any of that.” Rylan grins; his teeth bright enough to see your reflection in. “Who?” he says.
Rob Rinder and Rylan speak openly on death, parenthood and how everyone thinks they’re together
No topic is off the table as Rob Rinder and Rylan Clark speak to Radio Times ahead of their latest adventure in India.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Rob and Rylan are back. After the success of last year’s BAFTA-winning Grand Tour of Italy, Rob Rinder and Rylan Clark have undertaken a Passage to India. Like the first travel series, it’s steeped in culture (thank you, Rob), pithy sayings and scatological wisdom (thank you, Rylan), and humour (thanks to both – but mainly Rylan). Because of their obvious differences, they work brilliantly together as a team: Rob is posh, urbane, wordy; Rylan is sweary, very Essex and straight to the point. Rylan is 36 and 6ft 4in, Rob is 47 and quite a few inches shorter. But the longer you watch them, the more you see their similarities. Which are not so much the obvious things (male, gay and single at the time), but the more subtle ones; Rylan can be as angsty as Rob in his own way, while Rob can be as potty-mouthed as Rylan. We meet at a café in London. They love their show and are keen to know what I think. “Did you like it? Honestly?” Rob asks me anxiously. “That means a lot to me.” “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Rylan adds. “The second album is always a worry!” These two were friends before they made the Italy series but didn’t know each other that well. By the time they had done India, they say they couldn’t have known each other better. Both say that, unlike so much documentary TV, there isn’t a single scene that is set up beforehand. So, when Rylan thinks he’s going to die travelling on a rickshaw in the Delhi traffic it’s honest and heartfelt. Ditto when Rob throws a tantrum at the thought of seeing street puppetry because it’s not true art (it turns out to be his highlight of the tour). Then there is the time they visit an astrologer. “That was without doubt the funniest moment in my life,” Rob says. “It’s not mine,” Rylan replies with a snarl. “F**king astrologer.” The astrologer in question tells Rob that he’s lovely when he’s in a good mood, but a horror when he’s not. “Yes, but that’s true and we both know that,” comments Rylan. “I felt seen,” adds Rob, before Rylan explains his side of the story: “Then he comes to me and says you’ve got psychiatric problems, you’re basically a slut, you’re going to get gout and you’ll never be happy!” “But you disproportionately took the negatives,” says Rob. “What were the positives in that?” replies Rylan indignantly. By this point, Rob is hooting with laughter just thinking about it. “Then Rylan said Russell Grant wouldn’t have said that to me…” “Well he wouldn’t,” says Rylan. “I think if you’re a psychic, and someone comes to you for a reading and you know they’re going to be hit by a bus and die you don’t tell them that. He should not have said them things to me. For someone who’s apparently the best in the world, he weren’t that nice.” Rob and Rylan’s Italian Grand Tour was broadcast last May and both men were recently divorced. “That was more about us realising who we were after shit times, and realising there’s a world out there,” Rylan says. “This is more about ‘now we know who we are, we’re finding out what we want to get out of life’.” He thinks the Grand Tour made the public see them differently. “It made people not look at Rob as just the judge who used to sit there on daytime TV and bang his gavel. And maybe it made people think I’m not as stupid as I make out.” Anybody who has followed Rylan’s career will realise there’s nothing stupid about the former X Factor contestant. He can be controversial, however, and while that is undoubtedly part of his charm, it also gets him into hot water. The week after we meet, he was a guest host on This Morning and caused a national hoo-ha during a segment on immigration by appearing to suggest that asylum seekers are routinely put up at swish hotels complete with games rooms, given iPads and access to the NHS on arrival and lead a cushy life in Britain. A somewhat simplified and inaccurate view of the facts. According to Refugee Action, asylum seekers are those who come to the UK seeking safety and many are not allowed to work. Those housed in hotels, where meals are provided, receive a weekly allowance from the Government of £9.95 or £49.18 if they are self-catering. Hardly the lap of luxury inferred by Rylan – who has presenting duties at ITV, is a voice at Radio 2, and has, in effect, played himself on Doctor Who – yet his comments had more impact than those of many politicians and show what an influential figure he is today. Some praised his plain speaking, but others accused him of fanning the flames of xenophobia – without a handle on the facts – in an already incendiary political environment. In what seems to have been an attempt to dampen the furore, he later posted on social media that “You can be pro-immigration and against illegal routes” and while he prefaced his comments on This Morning by saying this is “the narrative we are being fed,” he didn’t challenge it at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, Rylan may well wish he had had Rob by his side to temper his views. He was certainly glad to have his support when they arrived in India. Rob had been there before and he adores it. Rylan hadn’t and initially hated it. What does Rob love about it? He looks at Rylan. “I’m going to get into trouble with you for being twatty.” “Here we go!” says Rylan. “It’s just a rich tapestry of colour everywhere,” says Rob. “Here we go!” says Rylan once again. “I’m obsessed with it,” counters Rob. “The contrasts! I love smell and clunk and complexity and life and sound and India has all of that.” “I didn’t,” responds Rylan emphatically. “I got off the plane, went through passport control and got bit on my face. Then I was thrown into a rickshaw and I genuinely thought I was going to die. It was a huge culture shock. I’ve never been anywhere like that before in my life.” “You’re very adaptable,” say Rob. “I didn’t expect you to adapt as well.” Rylan nods. “Yeah, that’s what I learnt about myself. I didn’t expect to adapt so well either.” Of course, this being Rob and Rylan we get to learn plenty about the two of them. For example, their backgrounds are more similar than you’d think. Both were brought up by their mothers and are close to them. Rob admits that his poshness is a construct. He didn’t come from a well-to-do family, but he was determined to create a persona for himself. “It’s artifice,” he says. Rylan grins. “He’s as rough as arseholes, he is.” “Not quite arseholes,” replies Rob. “Dad’s a taxi driver. Rylan and I perceive the world in the same way. We’re born into similar values, similar views.” View oEmbed on the source website Rylan’s coke and burger arrives. “Is this real Coke or the Mickey Mouse coke?” he asks the waiter. “Mariah!” Rob proclaims, comparing Rylan with singer Mariah Carey, allegedly renowned for her diva-ish tendencies. “That’s his rider. It’s got to be proper Coca-Cola.” Is he more Mariah than you, I wonder, to which Rob replies, “Oh my God, yes!” Rylan interjects. “Ask Bea for real answers. She’s our makeup artist and our therapist.” Bea is sitting with us. She points to Rob. “Me more Mariah! Whaaaaaaat? Oh my God! In what way? We have different Mariahs.” “My Mariah is travel and accommodation,” explains Rylan. “I’ve got to travel comfortably. I don’t care where you put me in the day as long as I go back to a nice hotel suite. Everything else I can deal with.” “I want to be left alone to read,” says Rob. “And gym,” says Bea. “And swim,” adds Rylan. “And he gets up at 3am!” “I don’t sleep very much,” Rob concedes. As in Italy, they spend a lot of time viewing art, with Rob providing the commentary. Much of it revolves around sex and death, which is perfectly apt because they are two subjects that fascinate them. They visit the sites of ancient erotic art in Khajuraho and are entranced by the joyous depictions of sexuality. “We have so many conversations about sex and shame and the body, but at the centre of ancient Indian cultural and religious life is the celebration of sex,” Rob says. “And there are lots of feminist examples in the depictions of sex – women on top, for example.” Rylan nods enthusiastically, “I’ve never seen so many vaginas in stone.” They segue from sex to love and relationships. Rylan says he’d love to father children. “I really want to have kids. I’ve got a lot of love to give.” For Rob, it doesn’t seem so straightforward. “I’m over a decade older and when I came out that wasn’t on the buffet of possibility,” he says. “It wasn’t in the conversation. It was very rare.” Rylan reminds him he’s only 47. “And we live in a world where age isn’t really a problem no more. And sexuality isn’t a problem.” It’s funny, I say, that so many people assume you are in a relationship. “I’ll give you two reasons why,” Rylan says. “Everyone thinks we’re together because we’re doing this show and we show each other affection. And two, I think people still presume that two gay guys who get on must be together; that two gay men can’t just be mates. My mum gets people saying congratulations to her.” Rob nods. “People say Mazel Tov to my mum.” “He don’t help when we get pictures taken of us at events and he’s looking up at me adoringly,” quips Rylan. “How am I not supposed to look up?” wails Rob. “To look in your eyes, I need a step ladder.” “I love him,” Rylan assures me, “but if we were in a relationship I’d be in prison because I would have smothered him with a pillow by now. That’s what marriage is, isn’t it? Row all the time and don’t have sex. We’re in a proper marriage. Rob’s seen me naked, I’ve seen Rob naked, that’s how close we are. But nothing’s gone in anything.” “No way!” Rob squirms but Rylan out-squirms him. “It would feel like incest.” While making the series last year, they were both single. Are they still? For once, Rylan is discombobulated. “Yes. No. What?” he replies. “I’m single,” Rob says. “Rob’s single,” confirms Rylan, before pausing to say he’s the world’s worst liar. “OK, I am seeing someone and I’m happy.” How long has he had a boyfriend? “Nope, we’re not doing that,” he refutes before Rob assures me that this unnamed “boyfriend” is “nice” and Rylan agrees that he’s “content. At the moment”. Their mothers play a prominent role in the series, whether via video call or the men chatting about them. Both are clearly terrified of them dying. Rob says his terror of death in general has held him back from making the most of life. When they visit Varanasi, the city on the Ganges where thousands of people are cremated each year in DIY ceremonies and released into the river Ganges so they can reach Nirvana, it has a huge impact on both of them. “The dark shadow of death and the fear of it is a present force and has always been for me,” Rob says. “The looming idea it’s going to end. The unknown is the great terror. In my life one’s been taught to fear death, and to be confronted by it so viscerally and visually and literally, and to consequently have the strange epiphany that all of us are here in a fleeting way, there’s a real liberation in that. I’m obsessed with Shelley’s poem Ozymandias.” Rylan rolls his eyes. “It’s a love letter to time. The traveller from an antique land sees this great big deity. ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’” Rylan yawns. “And he walks off and just realises it’s a ruin and the desert is all boundless and bare,” Rob continues. “The point is you think everything that is permanent and causing you concern is going to fade and disappear.” For Rylan it’s all a bit simpler. “I’m more worried about losing my mum than losing my own life. I feel like coming back from Varanasi was eye-opening. It made me realise I’ve just got to enjoy things I’m doing, and if I’m not enjoying it, then don’t f**king do it.” However differently they express it, both say that India has taught them the importance of living in the present. I ask them what they find annoying about each other. Rob looks at Rylan. “That you will not read.” “I ain’t got time to read a book,” he replies. “Sometimes he will get so in his own head when he don’t need to. He will overthink and overcomplicate situations. So, I’ll see a path in front of us and there’s a bit of broken glass there, a couple of pissed-up people there, and a hole in the ground. And Rob will be: ‘We can’t do this! We can’t!’ And I’m like, ‘Rob, we walk around the glass and walk around those people.’ Rather than walk down the path and avoid the glass and stuff, he’ll get a book out to find out how do I get rid of broken glass, how do I fill a hole?’” Rob laughs. “It’s so true.” What do they love about each other? Rob on Rylan: “I love his natural intelligence.” Rylan on Rob: “What I love about Rob is that he’s a walking, talking encyclopaedia so you can say ‘That’s not right, why?’ and he can answer it. But he’s not seen it. So, then we go and see it. I take his books, and he takes my eyes.” “That’s such a clever way of putting it,” says Rob as he looks at Rylan affectionately. “You’d be here twice as long just with me – I’d be talking about Foucault and the origins of how shame emerges from sex through the Christian church. And you don’t need any of that.” Rylan grins; his teeth bright enough to see your reflection in. “Who?” he says. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Rob and Rylan's Passage to India airs on BBC Two on Sunday 14th September at 9pm (with all episodes on iPlayer). Add Rob and Rylan's Passage to India to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
'It's horrible to watch your child suffering'
Her daughter’s cancer diagnosis was horrific, admits Paula Radcliffe, so seeing her run this year’s London Marathon will make it even more poignant
Add the London Marathon to your watchlist Paula Radcliffe always finds the London Marathon emotional, whether competing, commentating or simply watching. But this year she’s going to need an extra pack of tissues. It’s 40 years since her father Peter, who died in 2020, ran his first London Marathon; 20 years since she broke the world record for a women-only marathon; and ten years since she ran her final London Marathon. But most significantly for Radcliffe, her 18-year-old daughter Isla, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2020, will be running her very first marathon. Britain’s most successful female distance runner is speaking by video link from her home in Monaco on a typically busy day. She has just been on a run and is squeezing me in before picking up Isla and her 14-year-old brother Raphael from school. Astonishingly, at the age of 51 and a decade since she retired, Radcliffe is also back running marathons. Although she’s not running in London this year, Radcliffe has been chronicling the build-up to the event with a podcast series, Paula’s Marathon Run Club, offering advice to runners at all levels. The series is, fittingly enough, sponsored by Children with Cancer UK, the charity Isla is raising money and awareness for. Before she was diagnosed in 2020 with a malignant dermal tumour in her right ovary, Isla used to run competitively. “Now she just runs for herself,” Radcliffe says. “She’s not trying to set any record, it’s just a part of her proving that she’s healthy enough to finish a marathon.” Isla was also aware of the anniversaries. “She was the one who said it will now be three generations who have run the London race, and 40 years since Grandad did it.” That marathon 40 years ago, when the 11-year-old Radcliffe not only watched her father run it, but also saw Norway’s Ingrid Kristiansen break the women’s world record, shaped her career. She dreamt of doing the same, first achieving her goal (in a mixed-gender race with pace-makers) in 2003, with a time of two hours, 15 minutes and 25 seconds. But it’s not records she’s thinking of today, she says. It’s something far more important – her daughter’s survival. Isla, who has now been clear of cancer for four years, was previously a fit and healthy girl. She’d won the regional under-13 cross country championships in 2020 and was also an excellent swimmer. Then suddenly, during the lockdown of 2020, she found herself permanently exhausted and was sleeping until noon. Radcliffe assumed she had just become a tricky teenager. But other symptoms became apparent. Isla had always enjoyed competing with Raphael to see how long they could swim underwater, but now she was losing her breath. She was getting terrible stomach aches because of the growing tumour, and then she started bleeding black blood. “That’s when we knew something wasn’t right, and we went to the paediatrician,” says Radcliffe. “It then moved very quickly. On the Tuesday she visited the doctor, we had a scan on the Wednesday and one week later we were already in the hospital starting the first round of chemo.” Was she always confident Isla would pull through? “I think you have to be. You have to not think of the alternative.” But, she says, watching her daughter go through three courses of chemotherapy was horrific. “It’s the hardest thing a parent can go through. You can support them and be with them the whole way through, but you can’t do that chemo for them. It’s horrible to watch your child suffering through that, but at the same time we believed that if it felt bad, it was killing the cancer.” And so it proved. The tumour shrank dramatically, and then Isla’s ovary was removed. After Isla was diagnosed, Radcliffe asked her gynaecologist if she could freeze her own eggs in case Isla was left infertile. “He just looked at me and said, ‘Look, she isn’t going to want your 47-year-old eggs!’” She laughs. Radcliffe also made another offer. “When she lost her hair, I said I would cut my hair off and get it made into a wig for her. She flat out refused that.” Why? “We’d not told many people at the time, and she didn’t want people asking why I’d done it.” However much she and Isla prepared themselves for losing her hair, it still came as a shock when it happened. “There are things you’re not ready for – either going through it or as a parent.” After three months off school, Isla returned on a part-time basis. The cancer has gone, but she still has psychological aspects to contend with. “She doesn’t know how it has affected her chances of becoming a parent,” says Radcliffe. “She now has a tendency under stress to get allergic reactions on her skin, and we don’t know whether that’s linked to the treatment.” But Radcliffe knows Isla is one of the lucky ones. She says it’s heartbreaking how many children don’t make it, primarily in low-income countries. “Childhood cancer should be beat-able. In the UK, 87 per cent of those diagnosed will make it, but in the less-developed world that figure is below 30 per cent.” The disparity is shocking, she says. Isla’s cancer has changed the family in so many ways. They learnt to embrace support from others in a way they never had before. Radcliffe says she wouldn’t have got by without it, not least because Raphael needed looking after while she concentrated on Isla. “There was a huge amount of mother’s guilt for the fact that you have to focus more on one child for that period of time.” But, actually, she says, it brought the best out in Raphael (who represented the Provence, Alpes and Côte d’Azur region in the under-15 national cross country championships in March). “He’s extremely empathetic, probably in a way that most 14-year-old boys are not, right now. I hope he doesn’t lose that because it’s really special. He’d even let Isla sit and curl his hair when she had no hair to curl, the only proviso being that he would brush it before he went out anywhere! He spent a lot of time with her and worrying about her, and they have a closer bond because of that.” The same is true of Isla and the children’s father, Gary Lough (who coached Radcliffe to the world record in 2003). “It was probably even harder for him than me because only one of us could be in the hospital,” Radcliffe reflects. As for her daughter, she says, Isla was forced to grow up quickly, and gained the kind of perspective that many people struggle to find even in adulthood. “Things that her peers might get really stressed about, she handles, because in her mind it’s not that big a deal.” Such as? “Fights among friends. She sees the bigger picture. She tells them to their face they’ve annoyed her and then moves on. She doesn’t worry about little teenage things like what you might wear.” Radcliffe is also convinced that the experience has improved Isla’s brain, because it was forced into overdrive when she was catching up. “She says she has a really strong memory now because she had to work so hard.” Isla is hoping to go to Durham University to study law. Radcliffe was always a positive person, but now is even more so. “You’ve got one life, so make the most of it. It really brings that home – value what you have,” she says. When she was feeling low, running helped. “It was my coping mechanism. Just being able to get out and run helped me to have more energy to give to Isla when I was back in the room.” She believes that’s an important lesson for parents – to look after yourself in order to be fit to help your sick child. Radcliffe expects Boston (on 21 April) to be her final marathon, which will mean that she has run in all six majors, the others being London, Berlin, New York, Chicago and Tokyo (which she ran in March in a time of two hours, 57 minutes and 26 seconds). Despite her world records and numerous medals, Radcliffe never stood on the podium at the Olympic Games. “Maybe I just wanted it too much, made it bigger than it should have been and pushed too hard for it. But that’s what’s so great about sport. There’s a lot of chance, a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, and it not working out makes it so much nicer when it does.” For the London Marathon, she’ll be commentating as part of the BBC team. Radcliffe knows she’ll have to focus on the elite pack, but she’ll doubtless be tracking Isla’s progress, and hopes to be there at the finishing line for her. “It’s an extremely emotional place to be anyway, when you see people turn that corner on the Mall and they realise they’ve done it. But when it’s your little girl doing it, that’s going to be a bit more emotional.” And I can already hear it in this proud mother’s voice.
Paula Radcliffe says London Marathon will be emotional as 18-year-old daughter runs after cancer diagnosis
Her daughter's cancer diagnosis was horrific, so seeing her run this year's London Marathon will make it even more poignant.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Paula Radcliffe always finds the London Marathon emotional, whether competing, commentating or simply watching. But this year she's going to need an extra pack of tissues. It's 40 years since her father Peter, who died in 2020, ran his first London Marathon; 20 years since she broke the world record for a women-only marathon; and 10 years since she ran her final London Marathon. But most significantly for Radcliffe, her 18-year-old daughter Isla, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2020, will be running her very first marathon. Britain's most successful female distance runner is speaking by video link from her home in Monaco on a typically busy day. She has just been on a run and is squeezing me in before picking up Isla and her 14-year-old brother Raphael from school. Astonishingly, at the age of 51 and a decade since she retired, Radcliffe is also back running marathons. Although she’s not running in London this year, Radcliffe has been chronicling the build-up to the event with a podcast series, Paula's Marathon Run Club, offering advice to runners at all levels. The series is, fittingly enough, sponsored by Children with Cancer UK, the charity Isla is raising money and awareness for. Before she was diagnosed in 2020 with a malignant dermal tumour in her right ovary, Isla used to run competitively. "Now she just runs for herself," Radcliffe says. "She's not trying to set any record, it’s just a part of her proving that she’s healthy enough to finish a marathon." Isla was also aware of the anniversaries. "She was the one who said it will now be three generations who have run the London race, and 40 years since Grandad did it." That marathon 40 years ago, when the 11-year-old Radcliffe not only watched her father run it, but also saw Norway's Ingrid Kristiansen break the women's world record, shaped her career. She dreamt of doing the same, first achieving her goal (in a mixed-gender race with pace-makers) in 2003, with a time of two hours, 15 minutes and 25 seconds. But it's not records she’s thinking of today, she says. It’s something far more important – her daughter’s survival. Isla, who has now been clear of cancer for four years, was previously a fit and healthy girl. She’d won the regional under-13 cross country championships in 2020 and was also an excellent swimmer. Then suddenly, during the lockdown of 2020, she found herself permanently exhausted and was sleeping until noon. Radcliffe assumed she had just become a tricky teenager. But other symptoms became apparent. Isla had always enjoyed competing with Raphael to see how long they could swim underwater, but now she was losing her breath. She was getting terrible stomach aches because of the growing tumour, and then she started bleeding black blood. "That’s when we knew something wasn’t right, and we went to the paediatrician," says Radcliffe. "It then moved very quickly. On the Tuesday she visited the doctor, we had a scan on the Wednesday and one week later we were already in the hospital starting the first round of chemo." Was she always confident Isla would pull through? "I think you have to be. You have to not think of the alternative." But, she says, watching her daughter go through three courses of chemotherapy was horrific. "It’s the hardest thing a parent can go through. You can support them and be with them the whole way through, but you can’t do that chemo for them. It’s horrible to watch your child suffering through that, but at the same time we believed that if it felt bad, it was killing the cancer." And so it proved. The tumour shrank dramatically, and then Isla's ovary was removed. After Isla was diagnosed, Radcliffe asked her gynaecologist if she could freeze her own eggs in case Isla was left infertile. "He just looked at me and said, 'Look, she isn’t going to want your 47-year-old eggs!'" She laughs. Radcliffe also made another offer. "When she lost her hair, I said I would cut my hair off and get it made into a wig for her. She flat out refused that." Why? "We’d not told many people at the time, and she didn’t want people asking why I’d done it." However much she and Isla prepared themselves for losing her hair, it still came as a shock when it happened. "There are things you’re not ready for – either going through it or as a parent." After three months off school, Isla returned on a part-time basis. The cancer has gone, but she still has psychological aspects to contend with. "She doesn’t know how it has affected her chances of becoming a parent," says Radcliffe. "She now has a tendency under stress to get allergic reactions on her skin, and we don’t know whether that’s linked to the treatment." But Radcliffe knows Isla is one of the lucky ones. She says it’s heartbreaking how many children don’t make it, primarily in low-income countries. "Childhood cancer should be beatable. In the UK, 87 per cent of those diagnosed will make it, but in the less-developed world that figure is below 30 per cent." The disparity is shocking, she says. Isla’s cancer has changed the family in so many ways. They learnt to embrace support from others in a way they never had before. Radcliffe says she wouldn’t have got by without it, not least because Raphael needed looking after while she concentrated on Isla. "There was a huge amount of mother’s guilt for the fact that you have to focus more on one child for that period of time." But, actually, she says, it brought the best out in Raphael (who represented the Provence, Alpes and Côte d’Azur region in the under-15 national cross country championships in March). "He’s extremely empathetic, probably in a way that most 14-year-old boys are not, right now. I hope he doesn’t lose that because it’s really special. He’d even let Isla sit and curl his hair when she had no hair to curl, the only proviso being that he would brush it before he went out anywhere! He spent a lot of time with her and worrying about her, and they have a closer bond because of that." The same is true of Isla and the children's father, Gary Lough (who coached Radcliffe to the world record in 2003). "It was probably even harder for him than me because only one of us could be in the hospital," Radcliffe reflects. As for her daughter, she says, Isla was forced to grow up quickly, and gained the kind of perspective that many people struggle to find even in adulthood. "Things that her peers might get really stressed about, she handles, because in her mind it’s not that big a deal." Such as? "Fights among friends. She sees the bigger picture. She tells them to their face they’ve annoyed her and then moves on. She doesn’t worry about little teenage things like what you might wear." Radcliffe is also convinced that the experience has improved Isla’s brain, because it was forced into overdrive when she was catching up. "She says she has a really strong memory now because she had to work so hard." Isla is hoping to go to Durham University to study law. Radcliffe was always a positive person, but now is even more so. "You’ve got one life, so make the most of it. It really brings that home – value what you have," she says. When she was feeling low, running helped. "It was my coping mechanism. Just being able to get out and run helped me to have more energy to give to Isla when I was back in the room." She believes that’s an important lesson for parents – to look after yourself in order to be fit to help your sick child. Radcliffe expects Boston (on 21st April) to be her final marathon, which will mean that she has run in all six majors, the others being London, Berlin, New York, Chicago and Tokyo (which she ran in March in a time of two hours, 57 minutes and 26 seconds). Despite her world records and numerous medals, Radcliffe never stood on the podium at the Olympic Games. "Maybe I just wanted it too much, made it bigger than it should have been and pushed too hard for it. But that’s what’s so great about sport. There’s a lot of chance, a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, and it not working out makes it so much nicer when it does." For the London Marathon, she’ll be commentating as part of the BBC team. Radcliffe knows she’ll have to focus on the elite pack, but she’ll doubtless be tracking Isla’s progress, and hopes to be there at the finishing line for her. "It’s an extremely emotional place to be anyway, when you see people turn that corner on the Mall and they realise they’ve done it. But when it’s your little girl doing it, that’s going to be a bit more emotional." And I can already hear it in this proud mother’s voice. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Sport coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Former Olympian Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill knows the courage it takes to excel on the world stage – but nothing prepared her for what she discovered on Who Do You Think You Are?
Add Who Do You Think You Are? to your watchlist Jess Ennis-Hill promised herself she wouldn’t cry on TV when she agreed to take part in the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? “I’m the kind of person who only cries behind closed doors,” the former golden girl of British athletics says. “When I was competing, I was a poker face. I wouldn’t give too much away.” But sure enough, she did break down in front of the cameras. And not surprisingly, given what she discovered about her family. We meet at a London studio for Ennis-Hill’s RT photoshoot. The 38-year-old mother of two is posing in a dazzling red suit and looks as athletic as she did when winning the heptathlon gold medal at the 2012 Olympics. Ennis-Hill, who also won three world championships, has a naturally sunny disposition, but even she has been challenged by the traumatic discoveries. “I didn’t imagine I’d find it so upsetting,” she says. Even as one of the toughest and most inspirational athletes in British history (the heptathlon consists of seven events over two days: 100m hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200m, long jump, javelin and 800m) – she admits she was terrified of taking part in the genealogy series, which is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. “They don’t tell you what you’re about to embark on and what they’ve found. What if they find something awful, like there’s a serial killer in the family? Because they go so far back I was nervous about what they could uncover. I spoke to my mum and she said even if they find something really bad, it’s not you.” She pauses. “But at the same time, it’s your bloodline isn’t it?” She had considered taking part in the show in previous series, but her anxiety got the better of her. So what changed? “The kids are that little bit older. My son turned ten a couple of days ago and my daughter’s six, so it felt like a good time to do it. They’re at an age when they’re taking so much on board and they want to know about their family.” Ennis-Hill was raised in Sheffield by her white British mother Alison, a social worker, and her black Jamaican father Vinnie, a painter and decorator, who moved to the UK aged 13. There is one question that has always fascinated her and that she hoped to answer from delving deep into her family history: where does her strength and athletics prowess come from? Her parents always said it was thanks to eating liquidised tripe – a Jamaican speciality –as a toddler. “My dad definitely thinks that’s why I’m so strong and why I’ve been a great athlete,” she says. But Ennis-Hill believed the secret to her success probably lay more in her ancestry, so she searched for other successful athletes down the Jamaican bloodline. Did she find any sporting greats in her family tree? She smiles. “No, there were no athletes or sportspeople.” But she did discover – on what was her first visit to Jamaica – an even more dramatic display of strength. In her episode, local historians trace her history back to her great-great-great- great-grandfather George Thomas White, who was enslaved on a sugar plantation. When she is taken to see the plantation she is clearly spooked by what she finds. “It was a very eerie feeling because it looked so beautiful, the house and the immaculate gardens, but then there’s this awful feeling of history there.” They discover that White, who was born into slavery in 1795 and spent years enslaved as a cooper making barrels for rum, ended up buying part of the land he had been enslaved on. At the formal end of slavery, the British government introduced an “apprenticeship” system whereby the enslaved still had to work 40.5 hours a week free for their owners but could earn a token wage as “hired hands” for any hours beyond that. White refused extra work on the plantation but managed to make money independently, eventually buying the land off his slaver for £160. Ennis-Hill left Jamaica feeling proud of White’s resilience. For the programme, she travelled to Jamaica with her dad Vinnie, who had not returned since leaving as a teenager. “I had wondered why he didn’t go back. But you don’t want to ask too many questions,” she says. Over the years, Vinnie had become more open about how difficult it had been to leave Jamaica and settle in Britain – he moved from a country he adored to one where he experienced racism and was made to feel like an outsider. What’s more, the move resulted in a painful family separation. “It was quite a traumatic experience for Dad moving to England. His parents came first and he was left behind with his brother, then he followed. Soon after his parents moved to America without him. Rather than return to Jamaica, he lived with his grandparents over here, so that was why he felt a disconnect and was anxious about going back.” Was returning cathartic for him? “Yes, 100 per cent,” she says. “He said it was the best experience. We flew out on his birthday and he’d found out that he had prostate cancer not long before we went. He had all these things going on, so for him it came at just the right time. Throughout he was going, ‘Wow Jess! This is amazing!’” Her face lights up at the memory. Her mother’s side presented another century-old mystery. Ennis-Hill and the family had always been told that her great-great-grandmother Maud had packed a suitcase and left in 1919, with no explanation, abandoning her young children with a kiss, never to see them again. But on the show, she discovers that Maud had in fact been committed in psychiatric hospitals until she died. No one knew of her fate. During the early days of her hospitalisation, her daughter died at the age of 11 but Maud was never told. It’s a heartbreaking story on many levels and with many victims, including Jess’s great-grandfather who never talked about his mother. Maud was never able to meet her grandchildren or great-grandchildren and Ennis-Hill finds it devastating just to think about it. “It made me think, ‘What if I was whisked off to an asylum and I never saw my kids again and my young daughter died while I was in there, and nobody told me.’ I couldn’t imagine that.” She was left wondering whether Maud was institutionalised simply because she was ill or because she was an independent-minded, unconventional woman. It was revealed that she had in fact taken her husband to court, alleging domestic abuse but she withdrew the case. “Some of her behaviour as a woman was just not acceptable to society,” she says. “Women were judged and expected to behave in a certain way and she didn’t conform to that. So part of me thought, has she ended up in this asylum because she’s just gone against the grain?” However, treatment notes say she had violent tendencies and back in Maud’s day, mental health was taboo. It appears to have been less shameful for her husband to tell their children that she’d walked out on the family than admitting she was in an asylum. By contrast, Ennis-Hill, who studied psychology at the University of Sheffield, has always realised the importance of talking openly about mental health. Throughout her career she got tremendous support from her family, coaches, physios and her therapist. Even so, she says she still suffered with anxiety. It’s almost impossible not to in such a stressful environment. “I’d always feel anxious and nervous as an athlete because of the unpredictability. I just wanted a crystal ball and someone to say, ‘This is going to happen and it’s going to work out OK.’” Today, she says her anxiety is reserved for her children’s welfare. “I think that takes you into a whole other stressful moment. I lie in bed and think about when they’re teenagers and what they’re going to be doing, and you just start spiralling.” But your kids are only ten and six, I say. “Yeah!” She laughs, embarrassed. Isn’t the worry a bit premature? “I know. That’s what my husband says. He’s like, ‘Why. Are. You. Even. Thinking. About. That?’ I think most mums do. They think about every little thing.” On the whole would she say she’s mentally healthy? “Yes definitely. Very happy, very content and I feel very lucky to have had the career I’ve had and come out of it pretty unscathed.” But she is less upbeat about the nation’s youngsters. “Mental health among children is worse than it’s ever been. We’re still seeing the knock-on effects of Covid,” she says, citing children refusing to go to school and the influence of social media. “My son wants a phone. And I’m like, no, not yet, because their brains aren’t developed enough. They’re addictive so you can’t help picking your phone up every two seconds and checking what’s happening. He’s not having one just yet. Definitely not until he’s at senior school and then I don’t know if it would be a smartphone.” When we meet, Ennis-Hill is just about to head out to Paris as part of the BBC’s Olympics commentary team. Does 2012 feel a long time ago? “Well, it does and it doesn’t. It feels like a couple of years ago. It’s still really fresh in my mind, but a lot has happened in 12 years. My life has changed in an amazing way.” For one thing, she says, it’s not all about her now. “Every day for me in 2012 and those few years after was all about this regimented structure of becoming the best for me. It was me, me, me.” Do you look back and think you were selfish? “Yeah, I was selfish. But you have to be selfish. You’re not going to be the best in the world if you’re not selfish. It has to be about your performance, whereas now it’s absolutely not. My priorities are the kids and how everything works around them.” In Who Do You Think You Are?, Jess comes across as exceptionally nice, self-aware and smart. When she finds out about her great- great-grandmother and her fourth-time great-grandfather, she sees a commonality in their lives that makes her aware of how lucky she is. “Both of my ancestors were stripped of their identity,” she says. “It was so hard to find names for my fourth-time great-grandfather. He was just a number; just enslaved. And then as soon as Maud was put into a hospital she was referred to by a number as well. There was no description of her as a person, it was just a patient number.” But in discovering how society tried to erase her ancestors, she also learnt about their resilience. Despite what Maud went through she was strong enough to survive an asylum for 50 years, and her son Jack (Jess’s beloved great-grand-father) was strong enough to build a good life for himself despite his troubled start. As for her fourth-time great-grandfather, she’s in awe of the mental reserves that he must have had to survive slavery. “The trauma of that could have a lasting negative effect on your family for so many years. But he used it and turned it around, and bought lots of land, including some of the land he was enslaved on, and made a great future for himself. So it’s a really inspiring story.” She might not have found elite athletes among her ancestors, but she does believe she’s uncovered the source of her strength. “That resilience and focus has got to be passed down in some way through the lines, whether that’s the way he brought up his kids and how they brought up their kids. And on and on and on it goes.” You can see the episode featuring Jessica Ennis-Hill’s story later in the series
Jessica Ennis-Hill on Who Do You Think You Are?: "I didn't imagine I'd find it so upsetting"
The former golden girl of British athletics speaks to Radio Times magazine.
This interview first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Jess Ennis-Hill promised herself she wouldn’t cry on TV when she agreed to take part in the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?. "I'm the kind of person who only cries behind closed doors," the former golden girl of British athletics says. "When I was competing, I was a poker face. I wouldn’t give too much away." But sure enough, she did break down in front of the cameras. And not surprisingly, given what she discovered about her family. We meet at a London studio for Ennis-Hill’s RT photoshoot. The 38-year-old mother of two is posing in a dazzling red suit and looks as athletic as she did when winning the heptathlon gold medal at the 2012 Olympics. Ennis-Hill, who also won three world championships, has a naturally sunny disposition, but even she has been challenged by the traumatic discoveries. "I didn't imagine I'd find it so upsetting,” she says. Even as one of the toughest and most inspirational athletes in British history (the heptathlon consists of seven events over two days: 100m hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200m, long jump, javelin and 800m), she admits she was terrified of taking part in the genealogy series, which is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. "They don’t tell you what you’re about to embark on and what they’ve found. What if they find something awful, like there’s a serial killer in the family? Because they go so far back I was nervous about what they could uncover. I spoke to my mum and she said even if they find something really bad, it’s not you." She pauses. "But at the same time, it’s your bloodline isn’t it?" She had considered taking part in the show in previous seasons, but her anxiety got the better of her. So, what changed? "The kids are that little bit older. My son turned 10 a couple of days ago and my daughter’s six, so it felt like a good time to do it. They’re at an age when they’re taking so much on board and they want to know about their family." Ennis-Hill was raised in Sheffield by her white British mother Alison, a social worker, and her black Jamaican father Vinnie, a painter and decorator, who moved to the UK aged 13. There is one question that has always fascinated her and that she hoped to answer from delving deep into her family history: where does her strength and athletics prowess come from? Her parents always said it was thanks to eating liquidised tripe – a Jamaican speciality –as a toddler. "My dad definitely thinks that’s why I’m so strong and why I’ve been a great athlete," she says. But Ennis-Hill believed the secret to her success probably lay more in her ancestry, so she searched for other successful athletes down the Jamaican bloodline. Did she find any sporting greats in her family tree? She smiles. "No, there were no athletes or sportspeople." But she did discover – on what was her first visit to Jamaica – an even more dramatic display of strength. In her episode, local historians trace her history back to her great-great-great-great-grandfather George Thomas White, who was enslaved on a sugar plantation. When she is taken to see the plantation, she is clearly spooked by what she finds. "It was a very eerie feeling because it looked so beautiful, the house and the immaculate gardens, but then there’s this awful feeling of history there." They discover that White, who was born into slavery in 1795 and spent years enslaved as a cooper making barrels for rum, ended up buying part of the land he had been enslaved on. At the formal end of slavery, the British government introduced an "apprenticeship" system whereby the enslaved still had to work 40.5 hours a week free for their owners, but could earn a token wage as "hired hands" for any hours beyond that. White refused extra work on the plantation but managed to make money independently, eventually buying the land off his slaver for £160. Ennis-Hill left Jamaica feeling proud of White’s resilience. For the programme, she travelled to Jamaica with her dad Vinnie, who had not returned since leaving as a teenager. "I had wondered why he didn’t go back. But you don’t want to ask too many questions," she says. Over the years, Vinnie had become more open about how difficult it had been to leave Jamaica and settle in Britain – he moved from a country he adored to one where he experienced racism and was made to feel like an outsider. What’s more, the move resulted in a painful family separation. "It was quite a traumatic experience for Dad moving to England. His parents came first and he was left behind with his brother, then he followed. Soon after his parents moved to America without him. Rather than return to Jamaica, he lived with his grandparents over here, so that was why he felt a disconnect and was anxious about going back." Was returning cathartic for him? "Yes, 100 per cent," she says. "He said it was the best experience. We flew out on his birthday and he’d found out that he had prostate cancer not long before we went. He had all these things going on, so for him it came at just the right time. Throughout, he was going, 'Wow Jess! This is amazing!'" Her face lights up at the memory. Her mother’s side presented another century-old mystery. Ennis-Hill and the family had always been told that her great-great-grandmother Maud had packed a suitcase and left in 1919, with no explanation, abandoning her young children with a kiss, never to see them again. But on the show, she discovers that Maud had in fact been committed in psychiatric hospitals until she died. No one knew of her fate. During the early days of her hospitalisation, her daughter died at the age of 11, but Maud was never told. It’s a heartbreaking story on many levels and with many victims, including Jess’s great-grandfather, who never talked about his mother. Maud was never able to meet her grandchildren or great-grandchildren, and Ennis-Hill finds it devastating just to think about it. "It made me think, 'What if I was whisked off to an asylum and I never saw my kids again and my young daughter died while I was in there, and nobody told me.' I couldn’t imagine that." She was left wondering whether Maud was institutionalised simply because she was ill or because she was an independent-minded, unconventional woman. It was revealed that she had in fact taken her husband to court, alleging domestic abuse, but she withdrew the case. "Some of her behaviour as a woman was just not acceptable to society," she says. "Women were judged and expected to behave in a certain way and she didn’t conform to that. So, part of me thought, has she ended up in this asylum because she’s just gone against the grain?" However, treatment notes say she had violent tendencies, and back in Maud’s day, mental health was taboo. It appears to have been less shameful for her husband to tell their children that she’d walked out on the family than admitting she was in an asylum. By contrast, Ennis-Hill, who studied psychology at the University of Sheffield, has always realised the importance of talking openly about mental health. Throughout her career she got tremendous support from her family, coaches, physios and her therapist. Even so, she says she still suffered with anxiety. It’s almost impossible not to in such a stressful environment. "I’d always feel anxious and nervous as an athlete because of the unpredictability. I just wanted a crystal ball and someone to say, 'This is going to happen and it’s going to work out OK.'" Today, she says her anxiety is reserved for her children’s welfare. "I think that takes you into a whole other stressful moment. I lie in bed and think about when they’re teenagers and what they’re going to be doing, and you just start spiralling." But your kids are only 10 and six, I say. "Yeah!" She laughs, embarrassed. Isn’t the worry a bit premature? "I know. That’s what my husband says. He’s like, 'Why. Are. You. Even. Thinking. About. That?' I think most mums do. They think about every little thing." On the whole, would she say she’s mentally healthy? "Yes, definitely. Very happy, very content, and I feel very lucky to have had the career I’ve had and come out of it pretty unscathed." But she is less upbeat about the nation’s youngsters. "Mental health among children is worse than it’s ever been. We’re still seeing the knock-on effects of Covid," she says, citing children refusing to go to school and the influence of social media. "My son wants a phone. And I’m like, no, not yet, because their brains aren’t developed enough. They’re addictive so you can’t help picking your phone up every two seconds and checking what’s happening. He’s not having one just yet. Definitely not until he’s at senior school, and then I don’t know if it would be a smartphone." When we meet, Ennis-Hill is just about to head out to Paris as part of the BBC’s Olympics commentary team. Does 2012 feel a long time ago? "Well, it does and it doesn’t. It feels like a couple of years ago. It’s still really fresh in my mind, but a lot has happened in 12 years. My life has changed in an amazing way." For one thing, she says, it’s not all about her now. "Every day for me in 2012 and those few years after was all about this regimented structure of becoming the best for me. It was me, me, me." Do you look back and think you were selfish? "Yeah, I was selfish. But you have to be selfish. You’re not going to be the best in the world if you’re not selfish. It has to be about your performance, whereas now it’s absolutely not. My priorities are the kids and how everything works around them." In Who Do You Think You Are?, Jess comes across as exceptionally nice, self-aware and smart. When she finds out about her great- great-grandmother and her fourth-time great-grandfather, she sees a commonality in their lives that makes her aware of how lucky she is. "Both of my ancestors were stripped of their identity," she says. "It was so hard to find names for my fourth-time great-grandfather. He was just a number; just enslaved. And then as soon as Maud was put into a hospital, she was referred to by a number as well. There was no description of her as a person, it was just a patient number." But in discovering how society tried to erase her ancestors, she also learnt about their resilience. Despite what Maud went through, she was strong enough to survive an asylum for 50 years, and her son Jack (Jess’s beloved great-grandfather) was strong enough to build a good life for himself despite his troubled start. As for her fourth-time great-grandfather, she’s in awe of the mental reserves that he must have had to survive slavery. "The trauma of that could have a lasting negative effect on your family for so many years. But he used it and turned it around, and bought lots of land, including some of the land he was enslaved on, and made a great future for himself. So it’s a really inspiring story." She might not have found elite athletes among her ancestors, but she does believe she’s uncovered the source of her strength. "That resilience and focus has got to be passed down in some way through the lines, whether that’s the way he brought up his kids and how they brought up their kids. And on and on and on it goes." Who Do You Think You Are? airs on BBC One and iPlayer. Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Clive Myrie says being nearly 60 and returning to his roots in the Caribbean have calmed his ambition – but with the election imminent, wouldn’t he still like the top job at BBC News?
So, Clive Myrie, what made you leave the BBC News studio to make a TV series about paradise on Earth, otherwise known as the Caribbean? “Ha-ha-ha-haaaa! The Mrs Merton question!” replies the News at Ten anchor. As with the legendary question asked of Debbie McGee by Caroline Aherne’s mock chat-show host Mrs Merton (“So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”), Myrie knows there’s no need to answer. Myrie has a great laugh – joyous, life-affirming, with a long trumpet blast on the final “Haaaaaaa!” for good measure. He’s at home in London when we Zoom. “Listen man, there are two sides to my personality. One is pretty serious, and that’s taken care of with the day job. But at the same time there’s a chunk of my personality that likes art and music and literature – and having a laugh, frankly. And it’s great to have that side of my personality taken care of with the other things I can do outside the day job.” Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure is a light and likeable BBC series that sees the man tipped to take the lead presenter role at News at Ten and co-host general election coverage with Laura Kuenssberg visiting his parents’ homeland of Jamaica, riding pillion with Che Guevara’s son in Cuba where Myrie’s grandfather emigrated, learning how to dance with true swag, and much more. He explores his roots the fun way. Myrie, aged 59, joined the BBC as a trainee in 1987 before making his name as a foreign correspondent covering war, natural disasters and mainstream politics in more than 90 countries. He was shot at in Iraq and escaped with a dislocated shoulder when his car somersaulted four times in Ukraine in 2022. His reporting is known for its integrity, depth and humanity. For the past 15 years, he has also presented the news. Last July he was presenting the flagship News at Ten when it was revealed that Huw Edwards, the show’s chief anchor for 20 years, was the BBC presenter at the centre of allegations about paying a young person for sexually explicit photos. For viewers, it was perhaps the most unlikely and surreal episode in the distinguished show’s 24-year history. Today, Myrie is the personification of the modern news presenter as multi-faceted personality. He hosts Mastermind, guest chairs Have I Got News for You, will present the Proms again this summer, and is now following up last year’s Italian Roadtrip with his Caribbean Adventure. When he started out as a journalist, did he have any idea that he could combine heavyweight reporting with being an all-round entertainer? Not at all, he says, journalism was a very different beast back then. “People can get their news from anywhere now. The idea that the bulletin at the end of the day is the bulletin of record is beginning to disappear, and I think the public want more of a relationship with their presenters. It’s less this idea that you’re handing down tablets of stone from on high – now we’re actually having a conversation.” For viewers, anchors have become more a family friend than a figure of authority. This, for Myrie, has opened up the world of broadcasting hugely. In the past it was thought inappropriate, or confusing, for news anchors to front other shows, but now it is de rigueur for them to have quiz, travel or culture shows. Or, in the case of Myrie, all three. And as far as he’s concerned, the better the viewer knows the presenter, the stronger the bond. “If you’ve got a sense of what I might be reading or what I listen to, I think it might cement a relationship when it comes to you trusting me when I’m coming out with this stuff about Rishi Sunak’s latest travails or what’s happening in Gaza.” Myrie grew up in Bolton, Lancashire. His parents had left his three older siblings in Jamaica with their grandparents when they emigrated here as part of the Windrush generation; they became British citizens under the British Nationality Act and Myrie was born in England, as were his three younger siblings. In 2023, Myrie said he felt “angry and also ashamed of my own country” after the Windrush scandal, which affected his older brothers Peter and Lionel, despite them having lived here since 1973. Both had entered the country on their parents’ passports as children and the Government had destroyed their landing card slips. Peter, who had prostate cancer, wanted to take his daughter to see Jamaica, but was unable to because he would not have been permitted to return on his Jamaican passport. He died before getting either a British passport or compensation. Lionel was denied benefits and healthcare, and has still not received compensation. Myrie has also detailed the racism he has faced throughout his career. In 2019, far-right extremist Ian Hargreaves was jailed after racially motivated threats culminated in him threatening to shoot Myrie. In 2020, Myrie said the abuse had become “more prevalent in the last few years”. Is that still the case? “On a personal level, I think there’s more cover for racists to come out these days because they can do it online, make up a handle and have a false name and just blurt out their bile. As a result, I think it’s more pervasive. Certainly my postbag with abuse, or on Twitter [now X] or whatever, is a little bit more acidic and arch than it would have been ten to 15 years ago. Sad losers used to wind me up; now I just think they’re sad losers.” Myrie spent ten weeks in the Caribbean filming the series. Did it teach him anything about himself? “What surprised me was how Caribbean I am. I am a proud Englishman, I’ll be there waving the flag of Saint George during the Euros. I am a Brit to the core. But at the same time, I’m Afro-Caribbean. My roots are in the Caribbean. And I realise going back there, that this part of my personality goes beyond supporting the West Indies and failing Norman Tebbit’s cricket test [in 1990, Conservative MP Norman Tebbit suggested that immigrants could not be loyal to Britain without supporting the England cricket team]. There’s actually something deeper than that in the rhythms of the Caribbean, in the whole atmosphere and attitude. I realised there is a lot more of that in me than I thought.” This trip – he only visited Jamaica once as a child – seems to have had a profound impact. Has it changed him? “I’m a little bit more relaxed about life. Less concerned about trying to move on up. I’m 60 this year, and I think I’ve probably just realised there’s more to life than trying to get to the front of the queue of stuff. That’s probably a product of age, but it might also be seeing a slightly slower pace of life in the Caribbean. I think that Caribbean sensibility has always been there, and it’s just bubbled up a bit more to the surface.” I tell him I’ve read that Myrie’s father has also returned to Jamaica. He laughs. “Ah. Don’t believe Wikipedia, man!” His father lives in Derbyshire, a couple of roads away from Myrie’s mother. His parents, who are divorced, never wanted him to be a journalist. They hoped he’d be a lawyer. And he looked as if he was going to fulfil their ambitions for him. He studied law at Sussex University and had a place at London’s Middle Temple to train as a barrister, but opted for the BBC’s training course instead. Myrie first got the journalism bug as a paper boy, realising that newspapers were a window into a wider world. He watched Alan Whicker’s travel shows on TV and wanted a bit of it for himself. But it didn’t seem possible. Whicker was white, suave and looked so different from him. And then he saw Trevor McDonald, ITN’s black news presenter, and realised it was possible after all. Myrie has endured many hairy moments as a war reporter; he says that at times he didn’t tell his mother where he was because he knew it would make her anxious. How did you pull that off when you were on the telly, I ask. Another roar. “Ha-ha-ha-haaaaaa! I know! I hope Mum’s out making a cup of tea when I pop up! You do what you can, man!” Was she right to be worried? “Yeah, if she loves me. Worried that some Iraqi might shoot my head off. But it’s a calculated risk you take. Over time, my wife [Catherine, an upholsterer and furniture restorer] has become, not inured to it, but she knows I’m not going to do anything stupid. So you’re taking a calculated risk and my parents sort of know that. But at the same time, they’d still rather I was a barrister.” So many war reporters have suffered from PTSD. Has he? “I haven’t been diagnosed with PTSD,” he says, a little uncertainly. “I haven’t been in a position where I have been unable to function because of a past experience or a trauma, and I think that is the definition of PTSD. Do images come back to me of situations I’ve been in? Absolutely.” Many war reporters seem to become addicted to danger zones. Was he ever in danger of that? “There is a fascination for the perils of danger, particularly when you’re younger, that some war correspondents have. I certainly had that to a degree.” What image returns most frequently? “The most immediate one is a woman I came across in Borneo. In 2003 I was covering the periodic flare-up of violence between the Madurese and the Dayaks, who chopped people’s heads off – they’re the original headhunters of Borneo. I met a woman whose whole family had been decapitated – sons, daughters, parents, grandparents, slaughtered. Headless bodies. She was nine months pregnant, in floods of tears. She had nobody, and she had this child. It was awful. When you think about dead people, they’re dead, if you know what I mean – their suffering is over. It’s the living who are suffering who make me choke up. I’ll never forget her face. To this day, 20 years on, I wonder about that child in her belly. Has it grown up? How is it doing?” In 2009, Myrie came off the road to become an anchor. What’s the best thing about presenting the news? “When they first asked me if I wanted to be a presenter, I said no. I said, ‘That’s boring, I like running around the world, I’m enjoying it.’ But for various reasons I ended up presenting on the BBC News channel.” What’s more, he says, he loved it. He talks about being in a position of trust; a conduit between what’s happening in the world and people receiving that news in their living room. I ask him about the night he presented News at Ten last year, when Huw Edwards was the main story. It was so discombobulating for viewers, I say, what was it like for you? “When you end up doing a story that involves you reporting on your colleagues, it’s weird. That’s actually the best description. It’s just weird. Because you’re not usually there to be talking about the staff in your newsroom. So it’s not just Huw. It’s Frank Gardner getting shot in Saudi Arabia, it’s all kinds of stuff. Another classic example is – I was the guy who announced the pay bands when BBC pay was revealed.” And did he make the highest salary band? “Nooooo!” In April, it was announced that Edwards had resigned from the BBC. So it appears that there is a vacancy for the chief anchor on News at Ten, currently being shared by Myrie and a number of others. I’m thinking of what he said earlier about no longer being so concerned about moving on up. Does he want the top job? He smiles. “Look, what I’m doing now is brilliant. I’m loving it. It’s amazing to be invited into people’s homes at 10pm. It’s also amazing to be invited into people’s homes because they love classical music. It’s amazing to go travelling and paint a picture of this wonderful part of the world called the Caribbean. What I have is a combination of activities and work and interests that is superb, so I am absolutely happy doing what I’m doing. That’s all I can say.” He grins. Clive Myrie, I’ll ask one more time – would you like the top job? “Ha-ha-ha-haaaaa! I’m incredibly pleased with what I’ve got. And given that my parents were convinced that I’d made a big old mess of my career choice, they’re now very proud of me.” And for Myrie, that seems more than enough.
Stephen Fry on celebrating gay war heroes in new documentary and why he quit Twitter
The comedian and actor speaks about Willem and Freida – the LGBTQ+ war heroes he's honouring in his latest Channel 4 documentary – as well as his relationship with social media and activism.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Stephen Fry has made a documentary about the most remarkable Second World War heroes you’ll have never heard of. Willem and Frieda are their names and, once you know of their deeds, you won’t forget them. Willem Arondeus, an artist and writer, and Frieda Belinfante, a cellist and conductor, lived in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and became prominent members of the Dutch resistance in the 1940s. Both were gay. At least 80 per cent of the Dutch Jewish community were murdered during the war, but Willem and Frieda helped hatch a plot to forge identity cards, saving thousands of Jewish lives. It was a brilliant scam, all the more impressive because Dutch identity cards, which contained their own watermark, were then the most sophisticated in the world. But the forgery was merely the start of one of the most audacious acts of sabotage in the Second World War. Willem and Frieda lived open gay lives in Holland – an act of astonishing bravery in itself at the time. Willem came out at the age of 17 to his father and was disowned by his family. Meanwhile, Frieda, who was Jewish, was invited to form a chamber orchestra at the prestigious Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and, in doing so, became the first female conductor and artistic director of a professional orchestra in Europe. Fry, an actor-writer-director famous for his knowledge, says what amazed him most about the story is that he had never heard of it. “I don’t pretend I know the story of every resistance cell in every occupied country of the war, but I know a bit about [French resistance movement hero] Jean Moulin and [British secret agent] Violette Szabo, people like that. This was all new to me, though, and it’s a story that really should be told. I felt it was something I had to do. It’s the least I could do for such extraordinary people. It’s quite shocking how unknown they are, even in Holland.” Fry is Zooming from Los Angeles, where he is shooting the latest series of The Morning Show with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. His hair is long and wild, his beard ragged, and he’s not looking his normal self. Fry apologises for his appearance, attributing it to another film he’s working on. It feels as if Fry was born to tell this story. The 65-year-old is gay, Jewish and lost family in the Holocaust. Even now, having finished the documentary, he cannot stop thinking about Willem and Frieda. The film asks big questions about character – what made them willing to risk their lives for others, and was their bravery related to their profession and sexuality? To his shame, Fry admits he was surprised that artists could be such heroes. He shouldn’t have been, he says. “After all, the first act of putting paint on the canvas or putting out a book or poem that you expect people to read is an act of courage.” It has also made him question his own courage. “Would I be that brave? In a peculiar way, I think I’m too much of a coward not to have got involved with the resistance. In other words, if I had a group of friends and they said to me, ‘We’re forming a resistance group and we need some of your skills and ideas, would you join?’, I’d be afraid because I’d be sticking my neck out to say yes. I’d be much more afraid to say no. What would I look like to these friends? It’s a social cowardice, which is strangely stronger than a military cowardice.” Would he have been courageous enough to initiate the resistance? “That I doubt. You’ve gone straight to the heart of it. I suspect I’d have to wait till somebody else suggested it.” Fry has been a prominent gay rights campaigner over the decades. He says he recently took an audit of his activism, and it proved his point about being a joiner but not a starter. “As the HIV crisis grew in the 1980s and '90s, I did a lot of shows and was in charge of the fundraising arm of the Terrence Higgins Trust, but would I go to the barricades like Peter Tatchell did? No. I’m not as brave as he is, and indeed a part of me thought, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, Peter.’ I now think, ‘I’m so glad you did that, you were right, I was wrong. I was a coward, you were brave. You saw with the clarity I could never have.’” He smiles. “But I’ve always been like that because I’m a liberal; a milksop hand-wringing liberal.” In November, Fry quit Twitter, where he had 12.5 million followers. Was that an act of resistance? “It had nothing to do with anything but Elon Musk’s takeover,” he says. “Twitter should not be in the hands of an individual. It should be in the hands of a grey board that tries to do the right thing. "Yes, it may be a furious, screaming crucible of culture war, but those who run it shouldn’t be involved in that. So I simply stepped away and said goodbye and left.” In the documentary, we see Willem and Frieda become ever more fearless. When they ran out of money to make forged documents, Frieda approached the brewer Henry Heineken to ask if he would help. She had no way of knowing whether he was sympathetic or a Nazi loyalist. Heineken, a music lover and instrument collector, told her he would like to help, but the Nazis scrutinised his beer company’s accounts and would notice if he withdrew a large amount from his account. Frieda suggested to him that he could buy her cello for a handsome sum. Is it a Stradivarius, Heineken asked her? No, she said, it’s worth hardly anything, but you can pretend it’s valuable. That money was used to keep the presses rolling as Willem and Frieda worked with a master printer on an industrial scale to produce around 70,000 duplicate identity cards. The story morphed into an espionage thriller when they discovered that their great work was about to be undone because the numbers on their forged identity cards didn’t match the numbers on the registration lists held at the Municipal Office for Population Registration in Amsterdam. There was only one thing for it, they decided – to destroy the registration office. Their plot involved drugging guards, stealing uniforms and ultimately blowing up the office while ensuring nobody got hurt. The documentary features archive interviews with Frieda from the 1990s. She has cropped white hair, wears a stylish suit, and exudes intellect, mettle and soul. “I tell you what, all my lesbian friends are going to have a new hero,” Fry says. “They’re going to have posters of her.” In the footage, Frieda describes how she helped mastermind the plot but wasn’t allowed to bomb the building because she was a woman. She wasn’t best pleased. After an accomplice was caught and gave away names, Frieda lived as a man for three months in Holland before escaping to California where she established herself as a conductor. Her disguise was so convincing that she lived on the same road as her mother, and frequently passed her unrecognised. Frieda Belinfante died in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1995, aged 90. As for Willem, he was caught and sentenced to death alongside 13 others. For much of his life Willem, who believed he was a mediocre artist, had been shrouded in self-doubt. But now he had found a purpose. He was happy to go to his death, knowing he had saved lives. He held parties in his cell, mocked his jailers, and made a wonderful defiant speech at his trial, saying: “Tell the world that homosexuals are not cowards, that they are no less courageous than anybody else.” In court, he pleaded guilty and insisted he was to blame for the plot. Fry says he is in awe of him. “I was thinking it was not enough that he did what he did. When he was caught, he was actually braver than when he was acting in the resistance.” On July 1st 1943, Willem Arondeus was executed, aged 48, alongside 11 conspirators (two of the group received clemency). Why does Fry think Willem and Frieda are not household names in Holland? “I’m afraid it really was inherent homophobia in Dutch government and establishment circles.” In 1970, a group of gay men wanted to highlight the role homosexuals played in the resistance. When they tried to put a wreath next to the monument celebrating resistance fighters at the annual National Commemoration in Amsterdam, they were arrested and the wreath was destroyed. Fry says the story of Willem and Frieda has made him more self-aware in surprising ways. Although he is friends with many artists, he is now more convinced than ever that he is not one himself. “I love artists and move with artists as it were, but know I’m not one. Artists don’t give a f**k what people think of them. I give all kinds of f**ks what people think of me. I’m an absolute wuss. I’m a people pleaser, and I’m an entertainer. An artist is more dangerous than that. Artists bite the hands that feed them.” Making the programme has also made Fry rethink his relationship with Judaism. While still an atheist, he feels more culturally Jewish than ever. In Iron Box, the film he’s grown his hair for, he plays an old Polish Jew who revisits Auschwitz and the horrors of his youth. “The fact I’m doing this film in Poland wasn’t irrelevant to having made this documentary. I’m not going to say I’ve become more Jewish than I was because I still have no sense of Judaic responsibilities to rabbis and synagogues, but you can’t let your identity be decided by your enemies. “If the Nazis would just take one look at my birth certificate and put me in a death camp, it’s absurd for me to say I’m not Jewish. I’m part of the Jewish race, and it gives me a glow – the Yiddish word is naches – when Jewish people do well. But also, when Jewish people let themselves down or misbehave, I think, ‘Oh God, this is going to give the antisemites such fuel; why does he have to behave like that or why does this country have to behave like that?’” What would he like us to take from Willem and Frieda’s story? Simple, he says – to recognise their courage and honour it. “I want people to join me in applauding and celebrating these unremembered people, and making sure they’ll never be unremembered again.” View Green Video on the source website Stephen Fry: Willem & Frieda - Defying Nazis airs on Channel 4 on Thursday 2nd March at 9pm. Try Radio Times magazine today and get 12 issues for only £1 with delivery to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Derren Brown on 20 years of blowing our minds and why he's planning to do less TV in future
The mentalist, illusionist and author speaks to Simon Hattenstone about his career over the last two decades.
Derren Brown is sitting at a whisky bar, reminiscing. It’s 20 years since the magician/mentalist established himself on TV with his Mind Control series; he’s now approaching 50 and it’s time to look back. Channel 4 is dedicating a night to doing just that with a new stunt from Brown (“It’s live – that’s all I can say,” he teases) and a documentary in which he reveals his favourite moments from his career. In the past, Brown has said he loathed his earlier self – or selves. “I find anything I did more than ten minutes ago acutely embarrassing,” he says today. Looking back was the last thing he fancied doing (“I thought I’d hate all of it”), but he has been pleasantly surprised by his encounter with his younger self. “I’m kind of fond of him in the way you’re fond of a child that is slightly lost. I didn’t know how to hold a conversation normally without trying to impress, but I get where it was all coming from.” And where he comes from, as Brown admits, is a little bit complicated. The whisky snug is upstairs in his London house. In the documentary we get a brief insight into the eccentricity of Brown’s home. Today, via Zoom, I get a bit more. A stuffed toucan hovers above his head. “I’ve got a lot of taxidermy, but I don’t tend to talk about it because it upsets some people.” He smiles. “It’s all ethically sourced! I’m looking at a couple of pickled brains at the moment.” We’ve barely started – there’s the eight-legged lamb, the two lambs that share one head and the two-headed cow. “Actually, I’ve got two-headed cows!” He gets the giggles. And when he giggles it reminds me of the cutaway shot you often see of Brown in his shows when the unwitting protagonists are about to make life-altering decisions. Derren Brown is just so… weird. And yet to talk to him, he is charming, kind, slightly introverted and boringly normal. He seems so different from the Brown of 20 years ago – the shock of hair, goatee and actorly voice have all gone. I ask him why he’s slimmed down in recent years. “That’s hilarious!” he says. “I haven’t, as far as I know.” Perhaps it’s yet another brilliant Brown optical illusion. He is, however, more at ease with himself than he was with his showy but angst-ridden younger self. Brown has made a living from understanding – and exploiting – character. Knowing what we’re all capable of in certain situations, it’s no surprise that he understands his own character perfectly. He talks about the young boy who was picked on at a private school in Croydon (where his father taught swimming); the student who read law and German at Bristol University and became an exhibitionist conjurer to hide his shyness; the closeted gay man who became a proselytising Christian and tried to train himself out of his homosexuality. He finally came out in 2007 and is now an atheist. Perhaps his struggle was a blessing. Without the identity crisis, we might not have had the performer. “If you’re uncomfortable with what comes from within you, you create these dazzling surfaces to deflect people’s interest and conversation from the stuff that feels uncomfortable inside. And magic is a very good way of doing that. It’s a very controlling and deflecting exercise. Once I’d come out, a lot of that self-consciousness went with it.” In his early days on TV, Brown was always the focal point – whether it be playing Russian roulette, guessing the winning Lottery numbers, painting a brilliant upside-down Elvis Presley while correctly guessing who an audience member is thinking of, or simply hypnotising audiences to stick to their seat. At times, he played God on stage, though he has always told us it’s just an illusion, a confidence trick. He mentions a faith-healing tour when audience members really did claim he had performed miracles. “A woman who had been paralysed since the age of four and was now 40 was in floods of tears because she had never been able to move her arm down one side of her body. I expected people with bad backs to say it feels a bit better, but this sort of thing was happening.” People got in touch to tell him they had been permanently healed. Do his powers disturb him? “No, they don’t. But that was the closest to anything like that and it made me aware of how extraordinary the psychological component of suffering is.” For a moment, he even considered becoming a faith healer. “I did think, ‘Well, I could offer this as a thing. I could take a stadium and say this isn’t like real evangelical healing, but it does have an effect on a certain percentage of people.’ Then I thought, ‘You can see how it could make you go mad because it isn’t acceptable’.” I ask him if he has a least favourite show. “How to Win the Lottery [2009],” he answers immediately. After having successfully predicted the winning Lottery numbers, there was supposed to be a twist in a second show that would have made sense of the stunt. But the first show had proved so controversial – there were questions asked in Parliament – that the “twist” was pulled, leaving only a fishy explanation of how he had done it – or the alternative, “that I’d fixed the whole thing”. Did he realise he would end up undermining the integrity of the Lottery when he did it? “Noooo! I just thought it would be a fun trick for fans of the show and no one would pay any more attention to that than anything else.” And was the whole thing just a con? “Well, it was a trick. A clever trick,” he says gnomically. It’s clear I’m getting no more out of him than this. Brown divides his TV career in two. The first half, he says, was all about the big-me showing off. “I think I would have been really insufferable if I’d just continued as a jobbing magician/mentalist,” he says. In the second half, he took a less prominent role and the stars became members of the public who were put through elaborate, gruelling scenarios that they thought were real (all had asked to be on his show, they just didn’t realise this was the show). His favourite is 2012’s Apocalypse (imagine The Walking Dead meets The Wizard of Oz) in which he convinced a complacent man the world has ended so he learns to value the life that he already has. Some of the shows are incredibly uplifting – as well as Apocalypse, there is 2010’s Hero at 30,000 Feet, when Brown convinced a man with a fear of flying to land a plane after the captain took ill. Some are hilarious, such as when he trained a bunch of pensioners to steal a valuable painting in 2013’s The Great Art Robbery. And occasionally they are horrifying. 2016’s Pushed to the Edge (currently airing on Netflix as The Push) showed how ordinary people can be engineered to commit murder. I tell him that if I had been on that show and done the dastardly deed, I don’t think I’d ever be able to live with myself. “From day one the people that have been in those things have just loved it and they all say it’s the best thing they’ve ever done,” he says. He insists that everybody has emerged from the shows enriched. In Pushed to the Edge, the show’s star, Chris, walked away from the crime. But three other members of the public pushed a man, Bernie, to his death, only to be told afterwards that it was an invented scenario. Does he worry about leaving people mentally scarred? “If I didn’t worry about that I’d be irresponsible. If you’re going to put somebody through a dark journey, you have an enormous duty of care to make sure they’re OK. Five seconds later they find out it was all safe. Then an independent psychologist spends time with them, as do I, and we make sure they know what the point of it was.” And what is the point of a show like Pushed to the Edge? Brown says he wants to expose how dangerously compliant people can be – rather than humiliate them for lacking courage or principle, the idea is that they learn a salutary lesson. “It’s not ‘look at you, you’ve done a bad thing’. You’ve done what people will do. What you now have is the advantage that you’ve been through this; you’ve been rehearsed in a situation that is safe, so if you ever find yourself in a situation where any sort of insidious compliance is going on, you’ll be ready for it,” he says. “These are important questions to ask, but no one in 20 years has been unhappy with it, which must mean something.” Not only are the participants helped in the immediate aftermath of the recording, Brown says, they are then prepared for fame when the show actually goes out. Because he only makes one a year at most, there is the time and resources to provide sufficient aftercare, he says. “It’s the makeover-type conveyor-belt shows that are more of a worry when there isn’t quite the same potential for aftercare.” He talks about the support group for people who have been on his shows and says many of them have ended up as personal friends. Pushed to the Edge is terrific entertainment, but I’m not convinced that it is as altruistic as Brown believes. His rationale even brings out the conspiracy theorist in me. Yes, the participants certainly do seem happy with their experience, but perhaps this is simply another exercise in compliance. They have been told that it’s good for them, so they believe it is good for them. But the idea that these shows are character-building – taking people who have low self-esteem, are too pliable or take things for granted, and showing them they can be heroic, resilient and appreciative – is all of a piece with his 2016 self-help book Happy. And it’s the writing that makes him happiest these days, he says. Whereas he likes to paint, writing has become a necessity. Brown has loved lockdown – which he spent with his partner, about whom he keeps schtum – partly because he is antisocial, and partly because he’s used the time to write. His new book, out in October, is a condensed and rewritten version of Happy called A Little Happier. You seem so content with life, I say. He nods and says it’s true. But there is a caveat. When I ask if he could imagine doing the same kind of TV shows in 20 years’ time, he looks horrified and tells me it’s already time for another reinvention. “The way you notice it is you feel a rumbling dissatisfaction with what you’re doing.” How long has he felt this dissatisfaction? “Years, I would think. But in this industry, you’re surrounded by people who are very eager for you to keep churning out what you’re churning out.” He’s wary of becoming lazy and complacent. So will he move away from TV? “Yes, it means less TV and more writing. That format has worked very well for me. It is fun, but I can feel myself at the edges of growing up a bit more.” When I ask what he thinks he will grow up into, he says he hasn’t a clue, but he’s looking forward to finding out. Surely, he must have a clue where he’s headed next – after all, Derren Brown knows everything. Ah, that’s the trick, he says. “My job is about seeming to control things that you can’t. It’s one bit of me that gets polished and rehearsed and is really fun to do. But I don’t think of the version of me that does those shows as me at all. It would be a terrible way of living, and it would make me unbearable to be around.” This interview originally appeared in Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy. If you’re looking for more to watch, check out our TV guide.
Diane Morgan: "Philomena Cunk is who I’d love to be if I had the balls"
Actor and comedian Diane Morgan discusses her brilliant BBC alter ego ahead of new BBC series Cunk on Britain
Diane Morgan sits shivering in a scorching hot east London restaurant, staring at the menu. The waiter asks if she would like her water still. “Yeah, or just tap please.” She looks at me. “See how down-to-earth I am?” Then back at the waiter. “Can I have a roast salmon fillet, please?” Back at me again. “Feel how cold my hands are. They go purple. I’ve got Raynaud’s [disease, which affects circulation]. That woman, Doctor Foster, has got it as well. What’s she called? Suranne Jones. Is it too hot for you in here?” Morgan is fast-talking and concerned, with a great hooting laugh. She could not be less like her alter ego, Philomena Cunk – the parody television presenter is slow, unconcerned and bored senseless by the people she interviews. Now Cunk, who first appeared as a character in Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, has been given her first series – a history of Britain. BBC reveals details of new five-part Philomena Cunk series Cunk on Britain Maxine Peake and Philomena Cunk star Diane Morgan join forces for new sister comedy View oEmbed on the source website And it’s brilliant. Cunk is as ill-informed as she is rude, and fabulously po-faced. Take Lucy Worsley, add sprinklings of Mrs Malaprop, Mrs Merton and Larry David and you might end up with Philomena Cunk. So, for example, she tells us why Henry VIII is such a memorable monarch. “Well for one thing, he was fat, so he takes up more room in the memory. He had six wives called Catherine and killed them all, hence Cath-olicism.” Yet, amazingly, the programmes are also educational. In the episode on the Victorians we learn about Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, Sherlock Holmes, music hall, Jack the Ripper and slavery. What really keeps you on your toes is the interplay between perfect sense and nonsense. “Music hall was the first genre named after a building, and was a huge influence on acid house,” Cunk says, without a hint of a smile. How would Morgan describe Cunk to somebody who had never seen her? “An idiot!” she says instantly. “But occasionally she’ll get things so right you think maybe she isn’t an idiot. Maybe she’s a genius! The best thing about her is she doesn’t care. We all wish we could be like that.” Is Morgan? “A little bit. She’s like an idiot twin sister. I feel protective towards her. Cunk is who I’d love to be if I had the balls.” View oEmbed on the source website Morgan did another wonderfully po-faced turn in Sharon Horgan and Graham Linehan’s sitcom Motherland, as chaotic single mum Liz. She can be so glamorous – as at today’s photoshoot – but Morgan also uses that downturned mouth, those huge blue eyes and flat Lancastrian vowels to convey indifference, incomprehension and disappointment superbly. She says it took her ages to realise her face could be her fortune. “I’ve just got a very still, deadpan face, and I know how to use it. When I was at drama school, people weren’t taking pictures of themselves every five minutes. So I didn’t realise how I looked. It was only when people started taking pictures of themselves that I looked at myself and thought: ‘Oh my God, I look really miserable.’ Even when I’m happy I look sad.” The daughter of a physiotherapist and stay-at-home mother, Morgan, 42, grew up in Bolton. As a child she was obsessed with comedy – particularly Peter Cook and Tony Hancock. She wanted to be a comedian, but she didn’t know how to go about it, and decided acting was the best route. “I told the careers person [at school] I wanted to be an actress and she looked at me like I said I’d like to be a mermaid. She told me it might be easier to go to somewhere like Snappy Snaps and work my way up. Hahahahaha!” As it happens, acting wasn’t such an outrageous ambition. Two distant relatives on her father’s side had been successful actors – Julie Goodyear, who played Bet Lynch in Coronation Street for many years, and Jack Wild, who was famously the Artful Dodger in the 1968 film Oliver! Morgan also had a great friend who was determined to make it as an actor – Maxine Peake. After both failed to get into drama school, they decided North-ism was holding them back, and it was time to get elocution lessons. “Neither of us could get into drama school and we thought it must be because of our accent. So we’d turn up at this little old lady’s house in Bolton, and sit on the sofa and go ‘Ommmmmm’.” Did it work? “No, we couldn’t do it. Especially Maxine. She sounds like Fred Dibnah!” Eventually Morgan did get into a drama school, East 15 in Essex, and she says it was a massive cultural shock. She had come from a family where feelings were best expressed with a firm handshake, and suddenly she was surrounded by touchy-feely types. “You’d get a lot of people just walk up to you and start massaging you. I’d be like, ‘Get off! What you doing?’ They’re a bit like hippies at drama school. They just want to touch you and interpret your dreams.” She chews on her salmon with distaste. “It was a southern thing, I thought, and a drama school thing. It was a completely different world.” And what about the accent – did it hold her back? “They felt you could move into different accents if you had a neutral accent, which was RP. And that is complete b******s, isn’t it? Because RP isn’t a neutral accent. My neutral accent is Bolton.” Did that annoy her? “It did a bit.” Morgan says that by the time she left drama school she was also a bit of a hugger. But it didn’t do her any good. She still couldn’t get acting work, so she spent her 20s in telesales. Her boss would listen to the funny comments she made and tell her she should go into stand-up. “He kept saying it and I kept saying no, but 30 was looming, so I thought, ‘Ah s**t, I’ve really got to do something with my life.’” Despite the fact that she had done nothing performance-wise for a decade, she always believed things would come good – that it was just a matter of biding her time. Is she from a family of optimists? “God, no. I’m from a long line of really negative people. Hahahaha! My dad’s terrible. ‘Never get your hopes up, then you won’t be disappointed’ is his motto.” She soon found she could make a living from stand-up – and a good one, at that. “I thought it was amazing that I could do 20 minutes a night and earn more in a week than I did in telesales. If you did a weekend you could get £400 a gig.” What was her comedy like? “Quite miserable. I suppose there was a tiny bit of stupid because I thought that was the only way you could do stand-up. You have to be fearless. So I’d go on looking as if I didn’t give a s**t. Really angry. Angry at life, angry at the things that have happened. And I’d always go on looking a bit s**t, too, like I’d had an awful day.” Was her act political? “No. I was never a political comedian. It would just be anger about biscuits or something, or teachers at school, that sort of thing.” I ask if she thinks comedy is going to have a #MeToo moment, like the film industry. She looks at me as if I’m mad. “I don’t think so.” Well, I say, I suppose it did a few years ago when TV panel shows were attacked for their lack of female representation. Yes, she says, there are fewer women comedians than men and she was invariably the only woman on the bill, but it’s hardly a bugbear for her. “Everyone has to have an opinion these days, don’t they? All I want to do is make people laugh.” I’m not sure I believe her. For one thing, she seems fairly opinionated in her insistence that she is not opinionated. Gradually she gave up standup for television as she was offered more acting roles (bit parts in the occasional TV series and comedies Phoenix Nights and Robert’s Web). Her major breakthrough wasn’t until 2013, when she debuted as Philomena Cunk, in Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe. Motherland has been a success, but the five-part Cunk on Britain is her most high-profile gig by far. Cunk’s mockumentary style is always at its funniest when real interviewees are bemused by or infuriated at Cunk’s ignorance. “The angriest was the one we did on Churchill. I asked [the expert] how come he invented Tippex, and apparently he had a black dog, what was his name? They had to stop filming because the guy looked as if he was going to hit me! But I think they’re always the best. They always work really well when they’re genuinely annoyed.” Now the danger is that Cunk will be a victim of her own success. In the new series it often looks as if the talking heads are in on the joke, and trying to keep a straight face. Morgan knows that this time many of the guests know what they’ve let themselves in for. “Some people will come in and go ‘Oh I love Cunk!’ and they know what’s going on. Some will say, ‘I don’t know what this is, but my daughter told me to do it.’ We need more history boffins who don’t watch telly.” But if Cunk becomes too well known to retain the surprise factor, that’s a small price to pay for success, Morgan says. “The show might have to move to America, where it’s warmer” – which, she points out, would also be good for the Raynaud’s. It’s weird that Morgan doesn’t get a writing credit when so much of the series is improvised (the credited writers are four men, including Charlie Brooker and her partner Ben Caudell, the former head of entertainment at Channel 4). “Well, I’m just happy to improvise the interview bits because then you can take it anywhere. That’s enough for me. I don’t want to take anybody’s job off them.” Anyway, she says, she has her own project on the go – she is writing a TV comedy for her and her friend Peake. “It’s the first long-form thing I’ve written so it’s really hard. I don’t know if anything will come of it. It’s about two sisters who are opposites.” She looks embarrassed. “That makes it sound boring. I’m really bad at describing it. I think if you tell somebody an idea, it dies in transit.” As we wrap up, I ask a few quick-fire questions. Who would she most like to work with? “Chris Morris. I saw him recently and was so shy I couldn’t even look at him. I pretended I hadn’t seen him.” What most annoys her? “People who walk slowly in the street.” She laughs. I give her a look. For the latest news and expert tips on getting the best deals this year, take a look at our Black Friday 2021 and Cyber Monday 2021 guides. Oh come on, there are some seriously bad things happening out there… And this time her answer is not only opinionated, but shockingly so. “I’d punch Jacob ReesMogg.” Why? “He winds me up. I’ve offered to go in a ring with him for Comic Relief and beat him up.” Are there are any Tories she likes? “I can’t think of one.” Are there any politicians on the left she likes? “Lots. I’m a big fan of Tony Benn. And I love Dennis Skinner, obviously.” Blimey. I think you’ve been pulling my leg about not being political haven’t you? She looks me in the eye, hoots, and repeats her mantra. “I’m not a political person. I just want to make people laugh!” Cunk on Britain begins Tuesday 3rd April at 10pm on BBC2
Christopher Eccleston: When it comes to disabilities, ethnic minorities and women on TV, we’re still dinosaurs
The A Word actor talks about the return of the BBC drama and the need for casting quotas to bring actors from different backgrounds into the industry
Christopher Eccleston has starred in a lot of groundbreaking TV drama, but nothing, he says, has had the impact of The A Word. “I’m a runner and people stop me in the street all the time – they stopped me about Our Friends in the North, they stopped me about Cracker, they stopped me about Doctor Who. But this is the one that I’ve got stopped for most. It has touched people.” Peter Bowker’s autism drama is back for a welcome second series. The A Word has had its critics – me included. After two episodes, my autistic daughter and I reviewed it, asking why autistic children were invariably portrayed as unusually gifted. In the case of The A Word, five-year-old Joe appears to know the words to every great song in pop history. But later episodes showed that his ability to recite lyrics didn’t make his life any less of a struggle. As the drama developed it became more and more accomplished – as a soap (about the interconnected lives of an extended family in the Lake District), as a sometime comedy (Eccleston’s well-meaning character Maurice has perfected the knack of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time), and as an exploration of special needs (as well as Joe, there are two other characters with learning disabilities). Today, Eccleston is with Leon Harrop who has Down’s syndrome and plays Ralph, and Pooky Quesnel who plays Ralph’s mother, Louise. In The A Word, Maurice has an on-off relationship with Louise, and offers Ralph a job in his brewery. It’s soon apparent that in real life the three actors have an unusually close relationship. If you didn’t know otherwise, you might well assume Eccleston and Quesnel are Harrop’s parents. “One of the strengths of The A Word,” says Eccleston, “is we’ve not just soapboxed and depressed everybody, we’ve celebrated the fact that people who have a child on the spectrum don’t stop living, they keep moving forward.” He’s also been so impressed by Harrop’s performance that he’d like to see the 25-year-old get his own TV series. “Leon has the ability and technical nous and work ethic to carry a show. He has what people in the comedic world call funny bones. Leon technically understands comedy in a way I don’t. Maurice has been a big leap for me so I’ve learnt from Leon in terms of timing of gags.” Harrop started acting at school in Oldham. He says he always thought he could become a professional actor because he has a positive attitude. Did he have role models? He thinks hard. “I saw a lad called Alex and he had special needs and he was in Coronation Street. And I said, ‘I want to be like him and be on TV.’” But apart from Liam Bairstow, who plays Alex, Harrop struggles to think of others. Which goes back to why Eccleston thinks so many people stop him to talk about The A Word. Representation. Or, rather, lack of it. He says the drama strikes a chord because we so rarely see people with special needs in TV drama. “Clearly there isn’t enough representation. Why is the BBC doing Howards End again?” He humphs. It’s 15 years since Eccleston appeared in Flesh and Blood, another drama written by Peter Bowker, in which he played a character whose parents had learning disabilities. Bowker, a former special needs teacher, also wrote Marvellous, the drama about Neil Baldwin, the former Stoke City kit-man. Eccleston says, largely thanks to Bowker, things are improving in terms of representing people with special needs. But he believes the change is too slow, and radical action is needed to remedy that. “The four main TV channels have to be politically pressured to have a certain number of story lines, a certain amount of programme time, devoted to programmes like The A Word. So people with special needs see themselves and their lives reflected in drama. I think writers are desperate to do it.” “It’s another aspect of life that’s great to explore,” says Quesnel. “There’s a perception of, ‘Oh we can’t write that because it won’t get commissioned’.” Eccleston nods. “There was a lot of, ‘We don’t want to see people like that on television.’” He pauses, and says he’s not just talking about special needs. “That’s true about race, about women… we’re dinosaurs. We’re still as prehistoric as the Weinstein scandal has shown us.” At times Eccleston and Quesnel finish off sentences for each other. Perhaps it’s not surprising. They go back a long way. At the age of 17, they were in the same drama group at Eccles Sixth Form College (as I was) and had a brief romance. Although they remained friends, they had to wait 30-odd years to be cast together. Eccleston says that if it hadn’t been for Quesnel he wouldn’t have pursued a career in drama. He was a working-class boy retaking (and refailing) his O-levels at college, she was a middle-class girl with academic parents on her way to Oxford university. Quesnel introduced him to Brecht and Stanislavsky and Eccleston was hooked. Quesnel says it’s not just drama they had in common. “We’re a bit intense. We’ve always been a bit rghhhhhhh!” She roars. Is Eccleston as intense as his reputation might suggest? He grins. “I’ve always been like this. I don’t really know what intense means. I have strong opinions, I feel things deeply, I drink two bottles of red wine not one, I have two pies not one, I run 20 miles not ten, if that’s intense, then guilty, yeah.” And there’s nothing he’s quite so intense about as the issue of class. He believes he wouldn’t stand a chance of even making it to drama school today. “I had no academic qualifications, but I didn’t need them because the grant from Salford Council was discretionary. They then offered a tax break called a covenant to my parents, which meant that I could go to drama school. There were 28 people in our year, and five of us were from working-class backgrounds.” Does Eccleston think there’s a danger of the upper middle-classes taking over acting? “There’s not a danger, it has been taken over. I’m 53, I’m going to play Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Company. How many people from my background, no education, no university, have played Hamlet or Macbeth at the RSC? And, more importantly, where are the people coming from who will do it after me? “The attitude is that Shakespeare should be done by white middle-class people, in a white middle-class voice. Why? Because the white middle-class face and voice ‘has the keys to intelligence, sensitivity and poetry’. That’s the message that kids of colour and kids like me are getting. It feels to me like in the last ten years it’s got worse in terms of class.” Again, he says a radical solution is needed. “It has to be policy. There has to be a quota for people like me who have not got academic qualifications, whose parents can’t afford the funding, drama schools have to accept them, channels have to make television about them.” And once there is a quota, writers will fulfill it, he says. “There was a culture within the BBC and even ITV when I was growing up that the channel’s remit was to reflect social-issue based dramas, like Play for Today. Everyone sat down and watched, say, Cathy Come Home. And we don’t have that now, do we – a weekly drama where the nation sits down and has a look at itself?” Eccleston realises he’s one of the lucky few who’ve made it despite their background. Not lucky simply for getting the opportunity to do Shakespeare but also to be in The A Word. I ask him why it has been so been important to him, and before he even touches on the subject he mentions the people he has worked with. “I’ve got Leon – we’ve got this great friendship. Me and Pooky get to work together having planned to be actors together years ago. That’s massive!” As for Harrop, he’s looking forward to seeing Eccleston in Macbeth, but he’s not interested in doing Shakespeare himself. “I’d love to do more drama with Chris and Pooky, but my big thing is to be in Corrie or Emmerdale.” Eccleston and Quesnel look like proud but slightly disapproving parents as he talks. “He’s a massive fan of Coronation Street, but we’re not going to let him do it because we want him to do films first,” Eccleston says. “And he needs his own show. Genuinely.” The A Word returns on Tuesday 7th November at 9pm on BBC1 By Simon Hattenstone
Paul O'Grady: "Love hasn't been the driving force of my life"
Blind Date’s new host on stepping into Cilla Black's shoes, living with grief, and modern dating
Paul O’Grady says it felt wrong the first time he stood in a TV studio presenting the new Blind Date. After all, this was the legendary dating show made famous by his great friend Cilla Black, who died less than two years ago. “It was a shock at first when I heard the music, and they said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your host, Paul O’Grady’. I thought, ‘This isn’t right, it’s so synonymous with Cilla, she should be here, not me.’ I felt like I shouldn’t be doing it. It was her show. But then I spoke to her sons and lots of people who knew her and they said, ‘You have to do it, because she’d want you to do it for everyone.’” Sixty-two-year-old O’Grady has been thinking a lot about Cilla. In fact he’s been thinking a lot about friends he has lost, in general. The chat show host, animal lover, comedian, former drag queen and successful memoirist prefers to natter rather than do a formal interview, and today he wants to natter about Cilla. He doesn’t need to say how much he misses her. It’s written all over his face. You almost wonder whether doing Blind Date is his way of staying close to her. Cilla gave up Blind Date 14 years ago – had he ever talked to her about the possibility of him taking over the show? “No. We never spoke about work, me and Cilla. We used to go out and enjoy ourselves. Work was the last thing on the agenda. We didn’t want to know. Too busy out having a bloody good time, because she came into her own when she hit 60, Cilla. She’d never been a party animal – she’d always done the show and gone home. After Bobby died she said she was sent a guardian angel but it had hooves and a tail, and that was me.” Within seconds O’Grady is transported back to the golden days with Cilla. They might have been united by grief (Cilla’s husband Bobby died 16 years ago; O’Grady lost his long-term partner Brendan Murphy 12 years ago) but it was a friendship cemented by laughter. Was she different from how we saw her? “Completely,” he says. “Very down to earth, and very very funny. A hoot.” What made him laugh most? “When she did her Gracie Fields impression in her dressing gown, haha! She’d stand there with a mug of tea and a piece of toast on top, ‘Here y’are Paul,’ and she’d start ‘Walter, Walter, lead me to the altar’.” O’Grady is singing and cackling with laughter at the same time. “This is nine o’clock in the morning, and you’d be lying in the bed crying laughing. She was a real good sport, and up for anything.” They were at their happiest, he says, when they went on holiday together, unknowns in foreign lands. They’d go around like a pair of kids, making ridiculous stuff up about their lives. “We were in America, and someone said, ‘What do you do?’ and I said, ‘Oh we’re undertakers, it’s a family firm, and my sister, Cilla, has just won embalmer of the year’, and Cilla would look at me with a poker face. It was a hoot because nobody knew who Cilla was, and if they didn’t know who Cilla was in the States they didn’t have a clue about me. That was the bliss of it. Afterwards we’d be laughing in the street.” There are so many stories of the things they got up to. “We were in Spain once and two Danish fellas were talking to us and she went off to the loo and I said, ‘You know she’s a notorious brothel madam’, and they went, ‘Really?!’ And she came back and another guy came over and said, ‘Cilla, I’d like to thank you for all the pleasure you’ve given me on a Saturday night over the years.’ And I said to these two Danes: ‘Told ya!’ I’d always send her up, and she was a great sport. “Mind you, what I used to dole out she used to dole out to me as well. She said I went to bed with a goat, which wasn’t true.” He clarifies: “I had a sick goat, a kid, and I put him in a box by the bed because I was bottle-feeding him, and she told the press I slept with a goat.” O’Grady worked as a barman, clerical assistant, assistant clerk at Liverpool Magistrate’s Court, abbatoir accountant and carer before finding success with his brilliantly grotesque creation Lily Savage in the clubs in the 1980s, then on mainstream TV in the 1990s. He says he and Cilla bonded over their working-class Liverpool background. “We knew where we were both coming from. We both knew what outside loos were. All the stereotypical stuff.” He’d happily talk about Cilla all day. And politics. He calls himself a socialist and says he’s terrified of what will become of the NHS (we’re talking before the election). “Soon when you ring for an ambulance they’re going to say, ‘Can I have your credit card please?’ That’s what will happen, and we can’t let that happen. What does he think of Theresa May? “She’s so bloody boring.” And Jeremy Corbyn? “His principles are good, but he’s weak. There’s no fire there. I’d like to see a socialist prime minister with backbone.” Lily Savage O’Grady has had two heart attacks and another scare three years ago, but today he looks svelte, fit and immaculate in his pinstripe suit. He admits he has been thinking a lot about death – but not his own. “It’s the grim reaper you’re looking at here. I’d be very careful if I were you!” A month after Cilla’s death, novelist Jackie Collins died. “I was in Borneo when I heard the news. I couldn’t believe it. She’d asked if we could have lunch, but I was off to Borneo. She said, ‘You’re always bloody off somewhere filming with animals’. And then she died. She was a great character. Bloody wonderful. You’d go into a restaurant with her and people would pay homage to her. She had this power in case she put them in her book. Or, worse, didn’t put them in.” Nothing can shock him, these days, he says. And nothing will ever be as bad as it was back in the Aids epidemic of the 1980s and 90s. “All my mates died. It was really traumatic. And there was no one you could talk to about it because there was such an awful stigma attached to it. So I’m visiting a friend who’s ill, ‘Oh hope you get better soon,’ and you’d get off the bus and think, ‘There’s no chance of them getting better.’ It was dreadful. You’d go from one to the other, then you’d have to see the families, sort their flats out and arrange funerals. God almighty it was bad.” How many people did he lose? “He exhales loudly. “About 50, 60. Everyone I knew, basically, was wiped out. Terrible.” O’Grady is a survivor. As he says, there has always been a toughness to him – it’s another thing he had in common with Cilla. “You’ve got to be tough in this game. I think the weak fall by the roadside. I don’t mean by being pushy, I think you’ve got to develop a thick skin and believe in yourself and get on with it.” There have been stories that he found Blind Date a harder gig than he thought it would be. Newspapers reported that he told the studio audience, “No wonder Cilla was on the coke when doing this show.” He laughs when I mention it. “It was a joke, like saying Julie Andrews is in a leather bar in Amsterdam. It’s ridiculous!” But yes, he says, he hasn’t found it easy. “There’s a definite skill. Because you’re not interviewing celebrities, like I used to. You’re interviewing the public, so they’re not as confident. You have to be easy on them. I don’t send them up because they’re sitting there on the stool, and the last thing they need is for me to devour them, so I’m very avuncular with them, I’m very kind. I’m like a brothel madam, really.” With Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall What’s surprised him most about Blind Date? “All the contestants are so bloody clever. When you say, ‘What are your hobbies?’, they’re like, ‘I play piano, oboe, violin, I speak six languages, I’ve got two university degrees,’ and I feel like saying, ‘Well, maybe you should keep your mouth shut and act dumb, you might just get a fella.’ If you said all that to me I’d say, ‘OK, I’m just going to the loo,’ and vanish.” Has he ever been on a blind date? “No, never. I wouldn’t turn up. I’d hide round the corner and have a peep and if I didn’t like the look of ’em I’d leg it. And if they were stunning I wouldn’t turn up either because I’d think I was inadequate. Hahahaha!” Why does he think the show was so successful? “I think it dates back to an innocent time when boy met girl – or boy met boy or girl met girl, which is what’s happening on the new show – at a party or in a bar rather than through a dating app like Tinder, Grindr and Bag of Fish, or whatever it’s called. This is the old-fashioned way of dating.” He comes to a rare stop. “I’m out of the dating game completely, so I don’t know what’s going on.” I ask how important love has been in his life. “It hasn’t been the driving force. For a lot of people that’s all they’re looking for, love and a happy ending. It’s certainly not been for me. Bit of a lone wolf, to tell you the truth. Always have been.” It’s answers like this that make O’Grady so interesting. He is refreshingly honest. View oEmbed on the source website O’Grady has been with his partner Andre Portasio since 2006. Is he a serial monogamist? “Yeah. I’m not very good at sleeping around.” Another pause. “Well I’m not too bad actually. Hahahaha!” He sleeps around now? “God no, I couldn’t do it now. Pick somebody up in a club and go back? No way, I’d die.” When was he in his promiscuous prime? “When I was a teenager. Remember I’ve got a daughter of 43 now." Did he just have girlfriends back then? “I had girlfriends and boyfriends.” Wow, I say, you were sophisticated – this was the early 1970s. “Wasn’t I!” He grins. “My mother used to say you never know where you are with our Paul.” Did he think of himself as bisexual? ‘’No, I didn’t know the meaning of the word. It was just the way I was. If I liked you I’d go to bed with you. I was way ahead of my time.” How would he define his sexuality now? “I’d say gay. I’m a burnt-out wreck of a once-glorious disco. The glitter ball’s hanging there, but don’t turn it on, please, because it will fall off!” Blind Date begins on Saturday 17 June at 7pm on Channel 5
James Nesbitt on work ethic, being a Lucky Man - and hair transplants
“How many Stan Lee characters get to say, ‘You fickin’ eejits’ in a Northern Irish accent? I like that collision”
James Nesbitt has done a lot of growing up recently. To be fair, he says, there was a lot to be done. Nesbitt, aged 52, used to say that he felt he was permanently aged 17. The Northern Irish actor says it was the return of Cold Feet after a 13-year gap that made him realise how much he’d changed. Nesbitt plays the charming if feckless womaniser Adam in the drama; many people assumed they were pretty much one and the same – including Nesbitt himself. Not any more, though. “This year I looked down and thought, ‘God, I’m not anything like him at all.’ I assumed I was quite like him because I would put an awful lot of me into him. But now I think there’s a real childishness to him; there’s a little lost boy thing to him that I don’t have that much.” The Cold Feet reunion Nesbitt is a great talker – open, expansive, thoughtful. He’s got views on pretty much everything, and you don’t have to spend long with him to realise many of them are shaped by his Northern Irish background. Take the chaotic state of the world. No, he’s not happy about it. “But it’s hard to focus everything on the worry of Brexit, extremism and Trump because at home we’re just enjoying what I suppose would be called a postwar optimism.” Or on coming of age as an actor, 15 years ago in the Paul Greengrass drama documentary Bloody Sunday: “Paul always said, ‘To a Northern Irish actor the Troubles were like Lear. You have to take it on at some point.’” Football? Like most Northern Irish men of a certain age raised on the feats of George Best he’s a Manchester United fan. Education? He just happens to be the chancellor of Ulster University. As for the latest series of Stan Lee’s Lucky Man, he says it’s a privilege to be able to play a superhero in his own accent. “How many Stan Lee characters get to say, ‘You fickin’ eejits’ in a Northern Irish accent? I like that collision.” In Lucky Man, Nesbitt plays Detective Inspector Harry Clayton, a gambling addict given an ancient bracelet that makes him unnaturally lucky. And lucky is a word that comes up often when he talks about his own life. Stan Lee's Lucky Man Nesbitt grew up in the village of Broughshane in County Antrim. He had three older sisters (all of whom became teachers), and was taught by his beloved father. Nesbitt started a degree in French at Ulster University and considered following in his father’s footsteps. “I didn’t go into teaching because I knew I couldn’t be the teacher my father was.” He was taught by him for four years at primary school. “It seems like such a different world – just over 30 in the school, the other children were the children of farmers. My father wanted to open windows into all sorts of things.” What made him such a good teacher? “There was no set syllabus. If it was a decent day we’d just go out into the fields. He believed in numeracy and literature and music and sport, but never in a heavy-handed way. He was loving, actually. He came alive in a classroom. We were all his children in the classroom. I just happened to be his child at home.” He talks so movingly about his parents. Four years ago he lost his mother to Alzheimer’s. As a child he spent so much time around her and his aunts, listening to their chatter, already easy in the company of women. It sounds an idyllic if solitary childhood. “I spent God knows how long until I was ten kicking a ball against a wall on my own. The house was attached to the school, but the garden backed onto a field.” He grins. “I’m just remembering this for the first time, the field belonged to Jim Hall the farmer next door, and he had Friesian cows. And I used to use them as goalposts.” Did he hit them? “No, I just used to fire the ball through them.” He dropped out of university after a year to study acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. After a period in theatre, he made his film debut in the movie Hear My Song, and there was no looking back. View oEmbed on the source website Acting came easy to him, he says. Too easy, perhaps. For a long time, Nesbitt was slightly embarrassed about his line of work. “Because I came from a Northern Ireland Protestant background, acting was considered a bit feminine, a bit worthless, not a real job. And for a long time I would have probably thought that. It was just something I did, just something I was quite good at. It felt like a hobby, it felt like I was getting away with something.” Why? “Maybe because it came so easy to me. It couldn’t possibly have been a real job because it was so enjoyable.” The writer AA Gill once said Nesbitt was in danger of becoming one of TV’s laziest actors. Not surprisingly, Nesbitt took umbrage. “I was filming Murphy’s Law at the time, and one day we were in Brick Lane in London having a curry, and he walked in. He saw me and I could sense him thinking, ‘Oh f***.’ And we had our curry and I said, ‘Right, time for Britain’s laziest actor to get back to work.’” He and Gill went on to become friends. With the benefit of hindsight, does he think Gill had a point? “No, I really do have a work ethic that’s ingrained in me.” He pauses. Maybe he was lazy in his choices, he says. “I wasn’t tackling where I came from. When I first started acting I was doing Boon and Lovejoy and Soldier Soldier, then Cold Feet. I was garnering quite a lot of attention and success and making money but I still felt that something was missing. And I think that’s why Bloody Sunday shook that. That was the first time I felt I could look at where I came from and what impact the job I did could have on it.” Bloody Sunday He also admits that after his initial success he became a little too fond of himself. “I thought, ‘Oh well that’s it, I’ve cracked it,’ but I found out quickly when I didn’t get jobs that everyone is replaceable, and that made me work harder.” How did he change? “You disappear a wee bit, you lose contact with yourself. Forget everyone else. You get disconnected from yourself. But there was only one job that I phoned in a performance a bit. It was a thing called Big Dippers. That’s when I thought I was an arsehole.” Did anybody tell him he had become one? “Yes – Ian Johnson, my PR and my best friend, told me I was being a bit of a knob.” In the Noughties, Nesbitt made the front pages of the tabloids after being the subject of a number of a kiss and tell stories. Around that time, he said he feared his behaviour might cost him his marriage to Sonia Forbes-Adam, with whom he has two daughters. Last year, he and Sonia divorced, after 22 years of marriage. Does he regret his past behaviour? “Well I certainly regret things, but I’m also aware that I can’t change them. You can try to learn from it. I regret any pain that was caused, of course. I also regret the amount of time I’ve put into work. It’s just time away from home. And that’s to do with work, that’s not to do with a mad life.” As an actor, Nesbitt has never been in more demand – in both light and heavy drama. Recently, he was seen in the first series of The Missing, the reprised Cold Feet, The Hobbit (which took him to New Zealand for a couple of years) and as the wife- murdering dentist in last year’s powerful ITV drama, The Secret. https://media.immediate.co.uk/volatile/sites/3/2017/08/131104.c749cd04-1f1d-4504-aa2e-72addecb1dc9.jpe The Missing Nesbitt has established himself as a regular leading man in his 50s. It would not be inconceivable to see him as James Bond. The chubby baldy of his 30s has morphed into a svelte sophisticate with a full head of hair. Has his hair transplant given him a new confidence? “Yeah! I’ve just had my last one.” He points to the nape of his neck where there is a strip of hair missing. “They take a strip from here, they then separate the hairs, clean the follicles and put them back in in twos or threes. The guy who does it is a genius.” How much does it cost? “It’s not cheap! Probably 20 grand.” Did you get it for free? “Well I went public with it. I was very happy to be open about it. I just thought, ‘Come on, somebody is going to say it before I say it’. It was something I struggled with. And that was probably the vanity in me. But also career-wise it had an impact; in terms of the range of leading roles I’ve had since then it’s probably helped.” Does he think men are now under the same kind of pressure as women to stay youthful? “Yes,” he says. Has he had plastic surgery? “No. But I think it’s such a shame that young men are thinking that. There always used to be the sense that age adds character. You look at Samuel Beckett when he was older, Richard Harris, but I think with younger men it seems to be a big pressure.” So much of the new Cold Feet is about people ageing together. Who has changed most? “The real hero in the renaissance of Cold Feet is John Thomson because he was in a pretty dark place and he has come back. And there are so many people who give up drinking and you think, ‘Ach I wish they’d have a bloody drink,’ and he is not that person. What he has achieved is heroic. I went to see him in Aladdin playing Abanazar on New Year’s Eve. I said to him, ‘God, times have changed.’ Because if John and me had ever been together before on New Year’s Eve it would have been a slightly different story.” Who indulged more back then? “We were pretty even. We had a great time.” But that was then, he says – when he was the eternal 17-year-old. Now he’s embracing adulthood. His two daughters are growing up (his oldest, Peggy, is at university), he is supremely fit, and taking his chancellorship of Ulster University seriously. What changed him most? “I think separating [from my wife] has an impact because you look at why it happened and you see mistakes that were made.” For a second, he sounds melancholy. But no, he says, he has been extremely fortunate – and remains so today. “I’m lucky enough to be able to look back at stuff and say, ‘Oh well that was then, I’ve had a good lash at that, and this is now.’” Stan Lee’s Lucky Man is on tonight at 9pm on Sky1
The Voice's Tom Jones and Gavin Rossdale talk love, loss, heartache and fame
After suffering death and divorce, the two singers and coaches reflect on marriage and the return of the ITV talent contest
Tom Jones and Gavin Rossdale are the first to admit they’ve had a terrible time of it recently. The two judges for ITV’s newly repackaged The Voice UK are sitting in Rossdale’s dressing room on a dark winter’s day talking with heartbreaking honesty about family life. In April, Jones’s much-loved wife of 59 years Linda died shortly after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Meanwhile, last year Rossdale, lead singer and guitarist with rock band Bush, was divorced by his popstar wife, Gwen Stefani, after she discovered he’d allegedly been conducting a three-year affair with the nanny of their three boys. Both men, in different ways, have been left distraught. And for both of them, The Voice could not have come at a better time. Jones was famously, and controversially, dropped by the BBC for the last series. Controversially because Jones, at 76, is a national treasure and many viewers regarded him as the show’s best judge. Jones and Rossdale seem to have a natural affinity – both are sex symbols, both have had colourful lives and both know what it’s like to experience deep personal lows. “I’ve been having a fantastic time with Tom,” says Rossdale. “I’ve just learnt how to be gracious.” Gracious is not a word many would associate with Rossdale, a well-spoken 51-year-old who could easily pass for his mid-30s. He accepts that his public image in the UK leaves something to be desired and sees The Voice as the perfect opportunity to do something about it. “I thought, selfishly, it was a chance to be seen as a human being, because having been through the whirlwind media frenzy of a divorce, you get reduced to a couple of sentences.” Rossdale says it was an easy decision, not least because his daughter Daisy Lowe (the result of a relationship with designer Pearl Lowe) lives in Britain. Rossdale talks of the model’s recent appearance on Strictly Come Dancing and says he could not be more proud. But his relationship with Daisy has been complex – he was her godfather, and it was only after she took a DNA test at 14 that he accepted he was her father. Does he think The Voice is his chance to build a better profile for himself? He laughs. “I’d use the word ‘only’.” He talks of other stars who were relatively unknown or appeared past their sell-by before being rescued by The Voice. “There’s Ricky Wilson from The Kaiser Chiefs, here. And Adam Levine from Maroon 5 in the US. They’ve all benefited.” “And there’s Blake Shelton,” adds Jones. “He was an average country singer. The same thing has happened to him. His personality has come across.” Rossdale squirms silently. Shelton is a coach on The Voice in the US alongside Gwen Stefani, Rossdale’s ex. Now they’re in a relationship. Gavin Rossdale and ex-wife Gwen Stefani Jones talks about how the revamped show will be different on ITV. They’re increasing the number of live shows from three to five so viewers can get to know the contestants better. And the record label Polydor will have a closer relationship as they bid to send the winner to the top of the charts – a common criticism of The Voice is that it has yet to produce a true star. I ask Jones whether he was upset when he was dropped from the BBC version. The singer has never minced his words, and he doesn't now. "I was p****d off. I I never got to the bottom of who made the decision. It was between the production company Wall to Wall and the BBC, and I still don’t know why. The first thing I thought was, ‘Why have they left it so late in the day?’ When we got the call, we said, ‘When did you make this decision?’ ‘Yesterday. And we’re going to give it to the press tomorrow.’ Oh, that’s nice! “Well of course that’s a kick in the b******s. When I used to work in factories or on a building site, you’d get a week’s notice at least! They don’t call you up the day before and say, ‘Sorry, don’t come in tomorrow.’ You don’t make a decision like that overnight. The decision was made earlier but they just didn’t let me know.” He admits that he wasn’t upset when the ratings for the show plummeted. “It took a dive afterwards. They were losing viewers, and I thought, ‘Well that’s OK!’ He he he! I think they lost two million viewers.” He says the person most upset by it all was Linda. “When my wife heard I wasn’t doing it, she said, ‘So you don’t want to do The Voice any more?’ I said, ‘It’s not my decision’. She said, ‘You must be joking!’ God bless her, she passed away before I was asked to come back. She would like the fact that I’m doing the show now.” Jones says Linda’s death has left him in pieces. At first, he says, he simply didn’t know what to do with himself – and for two months did nothing. “I was just in LA, trying to pull myself together. My son was with me [Mark is also his manager] and he said maybe we should get some musicians together and go to England and have a bit of a sing. At the beginning I didn’t know whether I’d be able to sing because if you get too emotional you can’t sing.” Did he have any idea how hard her death would hit him? “Yes because she had a bit of a scare six years ago, and I thought, ‘If anything happens to her I don’t know what I would do because she’s been there all my life.’ We grew up together as kids. But it happened so fast. By the time she found out she had lung cancer I was on the road. I got back to LA and it was eight days later when she went.” Did she know she was dying? “Yes. And she was very calm. They told her when she went in to the hospital. When I was talking to her on the phone I said, ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘Well, not good.’ And I said, ‘Well, what are they saying?’ And she said, ‘Things don’t look very good. I think this is going to be it, you know.’” The promoters asked him if he could do one more show before returning home. “I said, ‘I can’t, I can’t. My wife is terminally ill, I can’t sing.’ And I couldn’t. I didn’t know how I would be because I knew she was dying. And I got back to LA and we walked into the Cedars-Sinai hospital and the door was open, and she was sitting in the bed going ‘Hey!’ And I thought, ‘My God, this woman, she knows!’ And I said, ‘Linda I can’t believe this, I can’t get my head around it.’ And she said, ‘No, don’t worry, you’ll be all right.’ And I thought, ‘She’s telling me that I’m going to be all right.’ And that was it. She said, ‘You have Mark and Donna’ – our son and daughter-in-law – ‘and the grandkids, you’ll be OK.’ But she knew I was going to be shocked s**tless. And I was. I still am to a certain degree.” The room is so still as Jones talks and talks about Linda – quietly, lovingly, entirely unselfconsciously. Tom Jones and wife Linda in 1965 “My son said to me you love to sing, singing is your life. And my doctor in LA said if you stop singing you may as well just go in the corner and die because that’s what you do, so try and get back to it as soon as you can. So we did, slowly but surely. I got together with some of my musicians and I realised I could sing. And then another thing I realised, it was giving me strength. When I would sing I could see her. I had said to her, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ and she said, ‘You’ve got to sing.’ And I realised music would save my life as opposed to wondering whether I'd be able to do it or not." When he sees her, does he see the older or young Linda? “All kinds of images flash through my mind, but I always see her laughing. Because she loved jokes. When I was on the road she’d ask, ‘Have you heard any new jokes?’ We loved to laugh. With a marriage, being together so long, you have to have a sense of humour, you have to laugh a lot together.” ‘ Which song makes him most emotional to sing? “There’s a song on the last album I did, Long Lost Suitcase, called Tomorrow Night; an old song. And that’s the one she liked. Every time I’d do an album I would play it to her and she’d say, ‘That’s the one for me.’ That song is tremendous. So I do it on stage now. I have to do it, and I see her.” Rossdale stands up, and picks up the tissues on his dressing room table. He passes some to Jones, and keeps some for himself. Rossdale is in tears, Jones is just about holding on. You’ve had a tough time, too, haven't you, I say to Rossdale. “It’s very poignant for me to hear Tom talk about marriage lasting till one partner dies, as it’s meant to be; as I would have liked it to have been. So it’s upsetting for me to hear any of that really because I just sit here thinking I failed.” Does he blame himself? He snuffles, and smiles. “No because I’ve had enough psychiatrists around me to know every marriage is 50–50, or as my shrink says 70–30. I’ve found a way to forgive myself to a degree.” How? “I dedicate my life to my children.” He has the boys half the time. While Stefani was doing The Voice in the US he had to be flexible, and now it’s her turn to be accommodating. “She wrote to me, the only time she’s ever written to me outside of the kids, and said, ‘Congratulations on The Voice, you must be so excited!’ And I knew that took a lot for her to do.” I ask both men what advice they would give contestants on The Voice about fame, temptation, and how to cope if fans throw themselves at you. Rossdale says he wouldn’t presume to offer advice. “Well, you’ve got to realise why they are doing it,” Jones says. “You’ve got to understand what fame is. Realise that a lot of people are attracted to you because you are famous. Don’t get carried away thinking: ‘People love me!’ Yes, but why?” I ask Jones if Linda gave him instructions on how to conduct himself after she died. Did she give him her blessing to find a new Mrs Tom Jones? “No!” he roars. “Oh no!! OH NO!!! I only got married once, and that was it.” And now it’s his turn to reach for the tissues. The Voice UK begins on ITV on Saturday at 8pm
Sir Ben Kingsley's identity is as colourful as his characters
Krishna Bhanji became Ben Kingsley – and now he's Sir Ben. Just don't call him "babes"...
Sir Ben Kingsley sits on a sofa, smiling beatifically, hands pressed together like a little Buddha. I have been a fan of his ever since his epic portrait of Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s film of the same name (Saturday Movie Mix). Among younger people, he might be best known as the sociopath Don Logan in the film Sexy Beast – a man so twisted with rage that he terrified Ray Winstone’s tough ex-con. The roles couldn’t be more different. Sir Ben plays saint and psychopath equally convincingly. Now he’s back beneath the halo in Isabel Coixet’s lovely film Learning to Drive (already in cinemas). As Sikh cabbie/driving instructor Darwan, he rescues Patricia Clarkson’s high-flying literary critic Wendy from the despair of divorce with tender acts of kindness. Darwan is a refugee in contemporary New York where racial tensions run high and brown people are often regarded as terrorist threats. Even though Darwan is Sikh, he is abused, in ignorance, as a Muslim. Kingsley’s own identity is complex and colourful. A Quaker, he was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire and grew up in Manchester as Krishna Bhanji. His father, a doctor, came from Kenya and was a Muslim of Gujarati Indian descent. His mother was an English model and actress, and part Jewish (his maternal grandmother was made pregnant by a Russian Jewish immigrant who abandoned her and, according to Kingsley, she became a vile anti-Semite). By the age of 54, his father had drunk and smoked himself to death; his mother died aged 96 in 2010. As a young boy he was known to his friends as Krish. Krishna Bhanji was such a strange name, he says, a fiction in itself. “The first name is Hindu and the second name is Muslim. Such a name would never exist in the whole of the Indian sub-continent; it’s a nonsense name. It’s more invented than the name I chose.” Does he still think of himself as Krishna? “I don’t think I think of myself. When I was on stage, I thought of myself as a landscape painter. Now that I’m blessed with a film career, I see myself as a portrait artist, and for many, many years I have signed my portraits Ben Kingsley. That’s who I am.” After changing his name, he never looked back. “As soon as I changed my name, I got the jobs. I had one audition as Krishna Bhanji and they said, ‘Beautiful audition but we don’t quite know how to place you in our forthcoming season.’ I changed my name, crossed the road, and they said when can you start?” Was that just racism? “I suppose it says more about the 1960s than anything else. But the irony is of course I changed my clunky invented Asian name to a more pronounceable, and acceptable, universal name in order to play Mahatma Gandhi. There’s your irony.” Learning to Drive is partly about the treatment of refugees, I start to say... “Uhum, uhum,” he replies, but he is shaking his head. “It’s about two people who meet by accident and heal one another. That’s what it’s really about. I don’t honestly think it’s about immigration or refugees. I think it’s about the ferryman. You learn something from the ferryman that you would not have learnt had you not crossed the river with that particular person guiding the boat. That is the beauty of the story; it is about coincidence and healing.” “I agree,” I start to say, “but...” “Not but,” Sir Ben says. “And! Not but, because you’re agreeing with me.” He smiles. “Thank you for correcting me, Sir Ben,” I say. “And I also think it is about how we treat asylum seekers so it is very topical.” “Absolutely.” Does he think we treat asylum seekers with sufficient humanity? “I tend to see Europe as very much still resonating from Hitler and Stalin so that the miracle of the Kindertransport and the work that people did to make that happen, for me, has a beauty and a grace and an earnestness about it that we should be proud of for ever.” Do we live up to that legacy today? Suddenly, and quietly, Sir Ben explodes. “I will not make any comment to do with our political attitude to refugees today. All I’m saying is, that is our touchstone.” Why does he not want to comment? “Because anything I say can be misquoted and used against you and me. It’s not fair.” I promise him that the last thing I want to do is misquote him. “No,” he says conspiratorially, “what I’m saying is that people can read your article and take anything out of it and twist it. We live in very, very particular times. It’s nothing to do with the trust in this room. That’s the tragedy. So I’m afraid the current climate makes it very difficult for any interlocutor to say anything considered and thoughtful and earnest, because it gets strangled in minutes.” I’m so astonished by his response that I forget myself and my manners. “I promise you I’m not going to strangle your most earnest and considered thoughts. Trust me, babes.” He gives me a menacing look. I can’t believe I’ve called a knight of the realm “babes”. I try to recover and say: “I will not allow anyone to strangle our conversation.” “It’s not a matter of distrusting you. Look, I think it would be wonderful if I could just rest on what I have said. That the Kindertransport is something we must be eternally proud of.” And live up to? “I didn’t say that.” “I know,” I say. “I said that.” “Good,” he says, in his best Don Logan. We start to talk about family. Sir Ben has been married four times and has four children from two of his marriages. His sons Edmund and Ferdinand are actors, and he is hugely proud of them. Is it hard for them to follow in Sir Ben’s footsteps? “I can’t answer that. They seem to be very sublimely free of it. Sublimely free of it.” Did his parents ever tell him they were proud of his achievements? “I don’t think so.” Did he ask? “I think asking them would have been a terrible admission of their absence, so I never asked them because I didn’t want to hear the answer. You should never have to audition for your love.” Did he feel rage about his family? “Have you seen a film called Sexy Beast?” I nod. “There you go. I play a member of my family.” Your father? “I can’t pursue that any further. But it’s out there and getting it out there is wonderful.” I later discover that he is actually talking about his maternal grandmother. Rage has so often been a fuel in his work. I have read that, even when he was shaping the character of Gandhi, he drew from the thought of the young Mahatma having been pushed off a train, returning for his revenge. “That’s right,” he says now. “Inside all of us is a balance of all kinds of forces. We do not know how we would react until history corners us. So there is inside us the monster and the saint, Mother Teresa and Myra Hindley.” Sir Ben, aged 72, is not an easy interview. At times I feel as if I’m with Sexy Beast’s Don Logan, at others I could be starring in an episode of Extras with him playing a caricature of himself. He once said that his knighthood made up for the lack of love and acknowledgment from his parents; the Queen embraced him and became a mother figure in his eyes. Yes, he says, there is some truth in that. “I feel one is entrusted with something. I feel it as a great gesture of trust.” And is it important for you that others acknowledge your knighthood, that you are no longer just Krishna Bhanji, or even plain old Ben Kingsley, that you are Sir Ben — that you have achieved what you have achieved? “No, no, no,” he insists. The acknowledgment that really matters is more precious. “When I was playing Hamlet in Stratford, I used to go for walks around the countryside. One day I noticed a young woman across a field. She was determined to meet me, and she said something that I hope answers your question. She said ‘I saw Hamlet last night [by now, he is talking in a wondrous whisper], how did you know about me?’ That is the most important thing in the world to me. That as an actor, I can put my hand on somebody else’s shoulder and say, ‘I know’. That’s all that really counts.” And the beatific smile returns.
Dermot O'Leary on The X Factor: “If I was Simon I'd probably take it off air for a year"
The former host of the talent on where he thinks the X Factor audience has gone, why he won't be presenting The Voice on ITV and how he'd like his career to shape up in the future
There's something appropriate about Dermot O'Leary's new television series being called The Getaway Car. After eight years on The X Factor, he has made his getaway. Last March it was announced that he would not present the recently concluded series. And for all that he loved his time presenting the show, you can't help sensing his relief. In the past, O'Leary said he would never criticise The X Factor because it had been so good to him – career-wise and financially. But today he's more open about the show's failings – and why the time was right to leave. Controversially, he even suggests that if he were in charge he would rest it. We meet in a north London gastropub, and he is literally bouncing with enthusiasm about his new show. His handshake is firm, his smile wide, his hair short, and at 42 he still looks like a young squaddy in Civvy Street. O'Leary has got the knack of the golden soundbite. If TV ever failed him, there would always be a career for him in marketing. I ask him to describe The Getaway Car, which sees him move from ITV to BBC for a prestigious early Saturday-night slot. “At its heart, it's Total Wipeout with an element of Gogglebox chucked in.” Like Total Wipeout, contestants take on a number of assault courses. But here they are driving – sometimes blindfolded. For added drama, they are guided by their loved ones. It's a recipe for chaos, smashed cars and domestics galore. In the final round, the surviving contestants get to take on the Stig for a £10,000 prize. O'Leary admits they wrote off a handful of cars in the series, which was filmed in South Africa. It sounds like there's going to be a huge amount of tension in the show? “Yeeeeaaaaaah!” he roars. Are you out to destroy these poor families? He grins. “Only in a fun way. It's all very tongue in cheek. There's a real lovely warm feel to it.” O'Leary's language is interesting. It's not the only time in the interview he talks of the importance of a show having warmth – something he has by the bucketful. I begin to sense he's making comparisons with The X Factor. Or, at least, with what The X Factor has become. “The Getaway Car doesn't take itself too seriously, and it's just a lot of fun. When you do a show, sometimes you kid yourself [about it being fun]. It's a siege mentality, it's all of us together, whereas here everyone just enjoyed themselves, no one moaned about long hours, everyone just came to work with a smile on their face, going 'it's quite funny this, isn’t it?' And that's what I loved about it.” What he has loved is being involved right from the start. “It's the first show I've done since [Big Brother’s] Little Brother where you can set the tone of the show from day one. After three years of X Factor being made without me it took a while to put my stamp on it, whereas this.... it's a team, we all sing from the same hymn sheets, no one thought we were changing the world or lives. We were just having a good time.” One reason he wanted to leave was to mix things up. Did he feel he was becoming stale? “A little bit. I lived for the live shows. And I was still having fun doing them, but it got to the point where I couldn't develop anything else. And you've only got one life, haven't you?” There was a story that he jumped before being pushed after hearing they were looking for new presenters. Is that true? “No. I made the decision before that.” In the end, he says it was an easy decision. Not least because some of his closest colleagues had left. Is he talking about the judges? He bursts out laughing. “Judges! Oh God, no! It's like being a civil servant: 'Oh right, it's a Labour government, is it? Right, OK, what have I got to do with that?' People I worked with very closely left, like series producer Mark Sidaway. Sid left and about a week later there was just something in the water and I thought now's my time.” O'Leary appears to have chosen a good time to leave. Viewing figures were well down this past season – just over seven million watched the show's launch, compared with nine million in 2014. “If I'm honest, I don't know where those viewers have gone...” He pauses, and starts again. “Well I know where they've gone, they've gone and watched Strictly. But I don't know why they've gone.” It's a big admission from O'Leary. For so long Cowell et al have denied they have lost viewers to Strictly, arguing figures had fallen because viewers were watching on catch-up at their own convenience. O'Leary says he hasn't seen much of this series because he has been filming The Getaway Car in South Africa. Then, without being prompted, he talks about the show's failings. “I watched the final. I thought the show was great, but I don't think they can say things like 'Change my life forever' and 'Amazing!' Just use different language.” He's not complaining about the quality of contestants, though. “I think the talent's brilliant. Louisa's a great winner. Lauren could have been a great winner. I was cheering for Lauren.” If you were Simon Cowell, what would you do now? “If I was Simon I'd probably take it off air for a year. I'd rest it, and then I'd get back to the rooms. The room auditions are great. For me it was always room, arena, boot camp. Also I was really uncomfortable about the Six-Chair Challenge. I don't think it's a particularly nice bit of television. One of the reasons people like Strictly is because Strictly is a very warm show, and I think you've got to keep that in mind.” Again that word – warm. How does he get on with Cowell now? “I don't speak to Simon. But me and Simon barely talked when I was doing the show. We have a very professional relationship. We still do. We text from time to time. But I still care about the show and I want it to do well.” A couple of years ago O'Leary said that sometimes he thought a presenter's talent was taken for granted: “You never want other people to fail, but sometimes you need a few .... cock-ups to remind people that it's a finely honed craft.” Well, the presenters have certainly made a few mistakes in this year's X-Factor – not least when fellow Essex boy Olly Murs announced Monica Michael was going home before the official result had been announced. Did O'Leary experience any pleasure in that? “No!” he shouts. “No! Because they are my friends. All you do is feel for them. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to be missed but when it's your friends going through it, you just go, ‘Awwwww!’. I texted Olly straightaway...” The Voice UK, The X Factor's rival, will be transferring from the BBC to ITV next year. Would he present it if asked? “No.” Why? “Because I've done that kind of show for eight years and I do want to do something different now.” But O'Leary admits he can't get his head round the fact that The Voice has been criticised by some high up in the BBC who say that the Beeb's remit is not to provide popular and populist programmes. “I think it's good for the BBC to do a show like The Voice. It's a good thing that the BBC's popular.” O'Leary presents a popular Radio 2 show, and hears similar arguments. “I have the same thing at Radio 2, which gets it in the neck because a lot of people listen to it. You're sort of damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Radio 2 is the biggest radio station in Europe and that means it's serving a purpose. For me the greatest thing about the licence fee is that you've got 6 Music, you've got Radio 3, you've got Radio 2, the whole breadth of the BBC is important.” He sounds positively bewildered by the idea that The Voice was too successful for BBC. “The Voice was a successful show, which for me means it was doing something right. I don't think the BBC should get a kicking for that.” As well as light entertainment, he says he'd love to do a show that makes the most of his interviewing skills. He has always been fascinated by politics. He once described himself as a socialist, but today he says that wasn't quite right. “I'm left of centre.” This year he presented a special election Question Time for youngsters, and he'd love to do more political stuff. “I love politics. I get really annoyed if I miss Question Time, or if I miss Prime Minister's Question Time.” The problem is, he feels pigeonholed after The X Factor. “When you've done one of the country’s biggest shows for eight years, there aren't many downsides, but that is one of them.” Does he think it's possible to break that mould? “Yes. Look at Alexander Armstrong; someone who can do Pointless and do a documentary and then do Have I Got News For You. He makes great career choices and does what he wants.” Where would he like to be in five years’ time? “If I'm still working and I've got a good body of work, I'll be happy.” And outside work? Well, yes, he and his wife, TV producer Dee Koppang, would like children, but he prefers to keep his private life private. Since leaving The X Factor, we've seen little of him on telly. Has that been a deliberate decision? Absolutely not, he says. “Because I quit a bit earlier than I thought I would, I started from a standing start. I haven't done less, I've just developed more. I’ve actually been busier than I have been since I was 24. It's been like being a kid again. It's fantastic.”
Caroline Quentin and Martin Clunes have lived strangely parallel lives – now they're back on screen after 17 years
The Men Behaving Badly co-stars are reunited in tonight's episode of Doc Martin
Martin Clunes and Caroline Quentin are canoodling on a sofa, giggling and joshing like they’ve never been apart. In fact, it was the late 1990s when they last appeared together on TV as the couple Gary and Dorothy in the legendary sitcom Men Behaving Badly. Now, for the first time in 17 years, they are to be reunited on the small screen in an episode of Doc Martin. (Believe it or not, Sigourney Weaver makes a guest appearance too.) They might look a little more lived-in than they once did, but they have lost none of their zest. Quentin is looking at the photos that have just been taken of them, with Clunes wearing her dangly earrings. “Just look at us Martin, we’re too sweet for words!” she says rocking with joy. Clunes, 53, nods silently. “Well we are, aren’t we?” she shouts, in between giggles. “Particularly me. I look p***ed, obviously.” Ever since Men Behaving ended fans have been talking about a comeback, but Quentin, now 55, never wanted to do it. She couldn’t understand how the four friends (Neil Morrissey as feckless Tony who shared a flat with Gary, and Leslie Ash as girl upstairs Deborah) could be reunited gracefully. This episode of Doc Martin is probably the closest we’ll get. But the parts couldn’t be more different. Rather than lovers, they’re enemies; Quentin plays a vet who thinks Martin is a dysfunctional know-it-all – and she’s the daughter of the GP he replaced in the Cornish village of Portwenn more than a decade ago. The pair reunited in Doc Martin Though its taken them 17 years to reunite on screen, they have remained extremely close since the Men Behaving Badly days, and there is extraordinary symmetry to their lives. Both were divorced young and remarried, both left London to live on farms in the country. They became first-time parents within weeks of each other, and had daughters called Emily who are now 16, good friends and with them today. And both managed to keep on acting while turning their back on showbusiness. Clunes and Quentin couldn’t be more different from Gary and Dorothy. While Clunes is bumbling, gentle and at times sounds like Prince Charles, Quentin is a riot of laughter. Were you never a lager-swilling lad, I ask him? “Not at all,” he says. “Your colleagues in the media were insistent that we were. I would be described as ‘TV hell raiser’, that was the only vocabulary afforded us.” Quentin grins. “He’s a fine wine man and always has been. He knows his Merlot from his Cabernet Sauvignon. You were never a lager man, sweetheart.” As for Dorothy, Quentin didn’t much like her. “I always thought she was a killjoy, and I like to have as much fun as the next woman! I played a lot of bossy girlfriends, but I’ve never been bossy, have I Martin?” Silence. “Have I?” she repeats menacingly. “Hahahaha!” Not only were their personalities different, so were their lifestyles. Rather than flat sharing, both Clunes and Quentin were in their first marriages (Quentin to comedian Paul Merton, Clunes to actress Lucy Aston). With Neil Morrissey in Men Behaving Badly “We were acting out an adolescence,” says Clunes. Quentin nods. “We were acting everybody’s fantasy of living in a flat, and continuing your youth.” Both went on to enjoy success in long-running TV series – Quentin as the writer Maddy Magellan in Jonathan Creek, Clunes as the eponymous Doc Martin. The parallels in your life are amazing, I say, pointing to the two Emilys. Clunes’s Emily Kate is a talented showjumper, Quentin’s Emily Rose an actress who has appeared in Doc Martin. Clunes lives in Dorset, while Quentin is in Devon. Why did they move to the country? “My move came out of a love of gardening,” says Quentin. “You just love animals, don’t you?” “Yes, well, yes, umm, yes,” says Clunes, in prime Prince Charles mode. Who has more animals? “Martin,” Quentin says. “He’s got s**tloads more animals. We’ve only got six dogs and six cats.” “Well we farm,” says Clunes, who has 300 sheep, and 28 cattle. Don’t they both farm? “I used to,” says Quentin, “but my husband won’t allow me to have anything at the moment. I’m like, ‘Can we have more pigs?’, then I go away to work and leave him with more pigs.” Her husband, the appropriately named Sam Farmer, was a farmer, she says, but has retrained as a cosmetic scientist. Blimey, how do you go from being a farmer to cosmetic scientist? “You get a bee in your bonnet about the sexualisation of personal care products for young people, then you go and learn how to make them and create your own brand.” Quentin glows with pride. View oEmbed on the source website “He’s the most impressive man we know,” Clunes says. You’re a nifty businessman too, aren’t you, I say – after all, hasn’t Doc Martin been resold to numerous countries? They double up laughing. Clunes is giggling so much that Quentin has to answer for him. “No, it’s the wife [Doc Martin producer, Philippa Braithwaite],” she says. “Some people are just clever; there’s nothing she can’t do. We’ve both done well…” “We’ve both married above ourselves!” Clunes says. “It’s really, really true,” says Quentin. “Neither of us can quite believe how the other one has done so well!” Both were keen to escape the world of celebrity and believe their lifestyle has kept them sane. “The bit I like about acting is the verb,” Clunes says. “I love acting. I love filming. But the rest is meaningless. When we started out, being famous was a by-product of doing what you do. It wasn’t a goal in itself and now it is because you can be famous without doing anything.” “Fame is vacuous anyway,” Quentin says. “And most people who have anything to do with it for more than about 30 seconds find it boring, all that standing around in rooms in evening clothes with people you don’t know.” We talk about how they became famous. Why was Men Behaving Badly so successful? “Timing, alchemy,” Clunes says. They mention Simon Nye’s writing, its innocence, how well the cast got on together. “The criteria by which everything is judged has changed,” Clunes says. “You have to be a lot coarser than we were to be cutting edge. A drama has to have a dead child at the beginning. Comedy has to be more graphic.” Clunes says he never really understood why their sitcom did so well until he read a review by the TV critic Victor Lewis-Smith. “He said we were like an ensemble cast, and people don’t apply French words to sitcoms often. And that’s what it was; we all got on and knew our space and knew how to do our job.” They all trusted and liked each other, and that was reflected in the show, Quentin says. “If you’re really enjoying yourself and having fun, it’s tangible – you can sense it when you’re watching it on telly.’” What was it like working together after all these years? “We were laughing like idiots all day,” Clunes says. “It was as if no time had passed at all. We could have been doing a moment from Men Behaving Badly, and enjoying it just as much. We always found each other very funny.” Their closeness is obvious. At times I feel like a gooseberry sitting with them. Did they ever think of getting together in real life? “No!” Quentin says. “It was never a question…” She glances at the two Emilys. “The girls look horrified. Look at them! No, never. It was never like that, it was always like what you see now.” Do they still see Morrissey and Ash? For once the laughter stops. “We still see a bit of Neil, don’t we,” Quentin says. “I haven’t seen Leslie since we finished filming.” Why? “I think life just takes you in a different direction,” Quentin says quietly. “She’s in London. We’re country folk.” Neil Morrissey, Leslie Ash, Martin Clunes and Caroline Quentin Ash has had a tough time since Men Behaving Badly – plastic surgery that left her with a “trout pout”, rumours that she had been a victim of domestic violence, and catching the superbug MSSA in hospital. “She’s been very ill,” Clunes says. “She’s had terribly bad luck. I don’t think she’s ever going to recover from everything. Her balance is shot.” “Yes, very poorly,” Quentin says. “I think Neil has seen her from time to time. The last time he saw her he said she was looking quite a lot better.” “Oh good,” says Clunes. Quentin and Clunes say they have been so lucky in life. Do they think they have changed? “Martin hasn’t changed hugely. If anything I find him slightly soppier than he used to be. He’s always been a bit of a softy, but he’s got more so. So many people put up more barriers and get more brittle; Martin has done the opposite. I think that’s quite rare." How has Quentin changed? “Not at all.” He says she is so different from how she has often been cast – as tart, battle-axe or serious-minded carer. “The person I know is glamorous, funny, immensely clever and fast-thinking.” They agree that children have reshaped their priorities. “It puts dressing up and pratting around in perspective,” Clunes says. “Yes, you certainly take a step back and take a proper look at what you used to call a career,” Quentin says, “and you know it’s just a means of earning a living because you go home to people who have proper needs and desires and lives that are complicated.” They love being able to balance the intimacy of acting with the freedom of country life. When I ask Clunes what he likes most about farming, he says space. “In our job you literally have people in your face – touching your face, which is lovely because they’re all nice people you’ve chosen to do that with. But then to get out on days off and have miles of space is wonderful.” What would he rather have touching his face, another actor or a horse? “Always a horse!” he replies. And Quentin? “Oh, definitely an animal. A dog. I’ve got to go for a wee, I’ll be back.” With Quentin gone I ask Clunes if there’s anything else he’d like to say. “Yes!” he says, with a conspiratorial grin. “I never liked her. She made me do all kinds of things. My life was hell! That’s why it’s taken me 17 years to get over it. She always bullied me!” And by the time she returns he is choking on his laughter. Doc Martin is on Mondays at 9pm on ITV
Jerry Hall on her 23 years with Mick Jagger and why life is easier when you're beautiful
The model and actress tells Simon Hattenstone about her life-changing Who Do You Think You Are? experience and why she won't be getting back together with the Rolling Stones legend anytime soon
Jerry Hall enters the sunny hotel garden in huge sunglasses and a sprawling floor-length dress, with an exquisite Texan drawl, every inch the 6ft southern belle. The former supermodel, ex-Mrs Mick Jagger, actress, and aspiring poet, has a surprise announcement to make. “Ahv just discovered ahm actually English on both sides of my family.” She lights an organic cigarette, apologises, and settles down to reveal all. She’s just completed an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? and says it’s a life changer. She discovered that her father’s side of the family were Oldham mill workers, while her mother’s side moved from England to become pioneers in Kentucky. It’s the pioneer bit that has made sense of her life. Hall always thought that she and her four sisters were unusually adventurous, but now she realises it’s just part of the family package; it’s in the genes. “Apparently my six-time great-grand- father was a great shot.” She counts on her fingers, and says she thinks it’s six times. “He went round settling places. He then went and settled in Missouri.” She says he was a compassionate settler – “General Dodge was going to shoot men, women and children but my six-time great-grandfather said it would be inhumane to kill these people who are surrendering, and he helped bring about the Lewis and Clark peace treaty with the Indians.” Hall is 60 next year, wearing no make-up, and looks wonderful. It’s more than 40 years since Jerry Faye Hall left Texas for Europe. She and her twin sister were the last of the daughters to leave home. While her twin Terry Jaye headed off on the back of a sailor’s Harley-Davidson for San Francisco, Hall chose Paris and a career on the catwalk. Her mother made her some new dresses and sent her off with her love. "I left Texas with a backpack and sleeping bag, didn't know anyone, had no money and went to Paris at 16. It's a pretty crazy thing to do. Obviously, it was in my blood. Get up and go. The pioneer spirit." But there was another reason why the Hall girls wanted to be a new life for themselves. Their abusive father. Sergeant John Hall had fought with General Patton's men in Europe and returned from the Second World War a hero with a bronze star medal, having helped liberate a Nazi death camp. But he was traumatised by what he’d seen, unrecognisable from the man who had gone to war. “He said there was a hole with 18,000 dead people in it. He had tried to identify them, couldn’t and buried them. He said it was so traumatic, all these skinny people running and hugging him and kissing him. He had nightmares, gambled away our farm, and was violent.” These days, she says, soldiers with his condition would be treated for post- traumatic stress, but back then there was nothing. Men were supposed to bury their demons and get on with life. Was he violent to her? “Yes. He would blow his top. We were very careful to steer clear. But my mother loved him and stayed with him to the end.” Did he frighten her? “Yes, he was quite scary.” She pauses. “He was quite scary,” she repeats quietly. “He was violent to whoever happened to be in the way at the time he blew his top.” How would it express itself? “Very quickly. A whack here, or whatever. Yeah he was pretty bad.” But in many ways, she says, it was a happy childhood. She adored her mother and grandmother. The girls were true Texans, outdoor kids, who would ride every weekend in the rodeo. “I was pretty good. We’d ride 20 miles to get to the rodeo. My sister Cindy was girls champion bull rider and was an RCA [Rodeo Cowboy Association of America] champion, She was a great horsewoman.” Hall is a natural storyteller. She tells me how the girls would spend their summer with their grandmother and regularly attend strangers’ funerals. In fact, she’s had a poem published on this very subject. Can she recite it? “It’s pretty short if I can remember it right, it’s called Strangers’ Funerals... ‘My grandmother used to like to go to strangers’ funerals/Whenever she heard about one we would go./She used to say, well so and so knew them and it’s nice to have a good turnout./We would drive in her automobile while she was swatting flies, to little white plankboard churches in the middle of nowhere./Fifteen people in attendance./We would listen to the sermon and file by and look at the dead waxen face./Sometimes we’d cry./When we got back home, our granddad would be sitting on the porch saying, ‘You girls enjoy yourselves?’ ” She grins. “Anyway I write these poems and they’re dark and humorous and I enjoy it.” Hall shared an apartment with singer Grace Jones in Paris, and they performed in cabaret together. By the age of 19 she had appeared as a mermaid on the cover of Roxy Music’s album Siren, and by 20 was earning $1,000 a day as a model. She always wanted to be an independent woman, but admits she need never have worked. “When I was younger and modelling and travelling, I’d go out with people for dinner, once or twice, and sometimes they would propose. It was quite sweet. Beauty makes life easier. People want to do things for you. They want to marry you and pay for everything.” Then she met Rolling Stone Mick Jagger and entered a new stage of her life. Jagger wooed her away from Bryan Ferry, to whom she was then engaged. They married (or at least she thought they had), and had four children and the former supermodel became primarily known as Sir Mick’s missus. Was that frustrating? “It was slightly annoying but I was always very proud of the Stones and their musical genius. And I was still musing!” What does she mean? “You know, songs written about me.” Which is her favourite? “Miss You’s pretty good.” Didn’t Ferry also write songs for her? “Yes, quite a few. And Mick wrote quite a few. They always said they were all about me. Hehehe!” She takes her shades off, and reveals her astonishing blue eyes. The relationship with Jagger lasted 23 years. In the end, she gave up on him and his relentless straying when he had a baby with Luciana WMorad in May 1999. What is the best thing about Jagger? “I really loved hanging out with him, and now we’re such great friends. I recently went on holiday with him and the kids. We went to Mustique and had the best time.” Is she amazed she put up with him for 23 years? “Well, it seemed to go by quite quickly.” She snorts with laughter and lights another cigarette. “He’s very bright, very funny, and we get along. He never annoyed me. Not little things. I mean his actions with other women were pretty bad but that was the only thing that annoyed me. He didn’t annoy me day to day.” Did he admit it when he was seeing other women? “No, he denied everything to the last end.” He lied and lied and lied? “Well, I think most men do. He eventually had a baby with somebody else.” Is she truthful by nature? “Yes, very truthful.” So how did she cope with his lying? “I don’t know. I guess I just didn’t know from the beginning.” What hurt more, his faithlessness or the lying? “Well, the whole thing. It’s not pleasant for any woman. No one would like it.” Was it an open relationship? She looks shocked. “No, we didn’t have an open relationship.” Didn’t she want revenge? “I did. At one point I went off and had an affair with somebody else.” Who? “Robert Sangster. So lovely. Horse breeder. Then Mick would beg me back.” She says the affair made her feel good; empowered. How long did it last? “A couple of weeks.” Was that her only affair? “Yeah. The only big time. I thought Mick would eventually change, but he didn’t.” Is it true she called him a “sexual predator”? “Mmm, well I mean call it what you want. I mean he’s Mick Jagger and millions of girls throw themselves at him, and he’s in the position where he says yes.” Does he regret what he did? “Yes, I think so. I think he really loved me. And we love each other now. We actually have a really nice relationship now. All that stuff we managed to put in the past, which is pretty amazing. We don’t even bicker or fight any more. Nothing. We agree on everything about the kids.” Many people think there’s an inevitability about Hall and Jagger getting back together, but she’s not convinced. “I don’t think so... I don’t think so because I don’t think he would ever change. We’re just friends now. I’m happy the way things are.” The most horrific aspect of their separation was when the reputedly parsimonious Jagger claimed their wedding ceremony in Bali in 1990 hadn’t been legal, and the court annulled the marriage. She gives me a look that suggests this is hardly her favourite topic. “It was a lawyers’ thing to make sure. I didn’t... you know... I don’t think it was anything to do with Mick,” she says unconvincingly. It must have been upsetting, I say. “We were married, we had a ceremony, we did the whole thing,” she reiterates. “I think I could have fought that but I just decided, well it’s over. I’m a pacifist. I don’t like to get dragged down into nasty squabbles.” The end of their relationship heralded a new stage in Hall’s life. She established herself as an actor [below on Broadway], broke a Guinness record in 2004 by appearing in six West End musicals in one night, and appeared stronger, more independent and fun-loving than ever. Did the split from Jagger revitalise her? “Yes, I think so because I felt I was making a new life. It’s not easy making a new life. People don’t like you to do it. They like you to be stuck... especially the press; they like you to be who they think you are.” She says she has enjoyed remaking her life. “I’ve surprised myself with how I can manage. I've learnt a lot of DIY, and I’ve become a pretty good gardener.” Hall says she has no fear of turning 60, and wishes more women embraced their mature years. “So many women are being weak about ageing. I find it annoying. It’s ridiculous to imagine you can stay young for ever and live for ever. It’s taking away from young people. There’s a beauty and a respect in age. Magazines and media are disrespectful of age. I say it's lovely looking at a famous women her age who has not resorted to tucks or lifts. "Thank you, I haven't done a single thing to my face. Thank you. I do have line. I laugh a lot." Would she ever say there are too many lines, I;'m getting rid? "Never in a million years. You know some women take fat from their bottom and put it in their upper lip? She pauses. “Then you’re kissing their ass!” Is her aversion to plastic surgery political? “Yes it is. I think this ‘me society’ is very greedy! There’s a group in Japan called the Drop Down Dead Group and they think their generation has taken too much from young people, and they’ve decided if they had an illness that would be expensive to treat, they would not pursue that treatment. I think that’s interesting.” So what’s her recipe for looking good? “I do exercise, I do yoga, I put on face cream.” Meanwhile, she’s puffing away on another fag. She laughs. “I smoke, I drink, I have fun. Laughing a lot is really good for you, embracing your children’s future and embracing your grandchildren, and not having regrets and not being bitter and not being angry.” Last year it was reported that Hall had a new boyfriend, scientist Armand Leroi. Is she still seeing him? “No, we called it quits, but I had a very nice year.” So she’s happily single? “Yeah. I’m available for dates.” What does she look for in a man? She smiles into the distance. “A bit of pioneer spirit,” she says. Who Do You Think You Are is on Thursday 3rd September at 9pm You might like: Which celebrities are coming up in Who Do You Think You Are? 15 Who Do You Think You Are? revelations - from Boris Johnson's blue blood to David Tennant's footballing family
Greg Davies on Man Down, the death of Rik Mayall and losing his real father
Greg Davies was hit by a double shock last year when both his TV dad and then his real dad died – but now he’s back on top
It’s been a tough 12 months for Greg Davies. Last June, Rik Mayall, who played his father in the Channel 4 sitcom Man Down, died. Soon after that, his real father died. Not only were their deaths a shock to Davies, but they caused the stand-up comic a creative crisis. We meet in a pub close to his home in south London. There's something staggering about seeing him close up. He's six foot eight, 21 stone, with size 14 feet – more of an obstacle than a man. He cast Mayall because, despite the size difference, they bore an uncanny resemblance to each other – permanently raised eyebrow, quizzical mouth, a face made for mischief. At the time of Mayall’s death, Davies was halfway through writing the second series of Man Down. He pretty much had to start again. Then he was hit with the double whammy. “My dad died a couple of months after Rik. Yes, it was a difficult year.” He comes to an uncomfortable stop. Neither of us knows what to say. To lose your TV father and real father within months, I start to say... “Yeah, it’s a unique set of circumstances. It was incredibly sad.” He sips at his water. “I was very close to my dad.” Last year’s Christmas special concluded with a touching dedication to the two fathers he had only recently lost. Man Down is about drama teacher Dan, who is more childish than his pupils. (This isn’t the first time Davies has played a teacher; he’s possibly best known for his lunatic teacher Mr Gilbert in The Inbetweeners.) When faced with emotional crises, Dan will inevitably “man down” rather than man up – he tries to win his girlfriend back by doing “the helicopter” with his willy (best left to your imagination) or cooking her a bulk load of bargain mince (with nothing else). Rather than an alpha male, Dan is more of a delta. View oEmbed on the source website The relationship between Dan and his father in Man Down is bizarre – Mayall, as his dad, was always trying to humiliate him or brutalise him in one way or another, whether by whacking tennis balls at his goolies or mocking his uselessness. It is partly autobiographical, but Davies stresses he couldn’t have loved his father more. His real father wasn’t cruel, he says, though he was a little strange. "The dad in the show was exaggerated. My dad wasn't a psychopath. He didn't physically attack me, but he did constantly wind me up." In what way? "When I was in my 30s he hid in a bush for two hours with a sheet on his head waiting for me to come back from the pub, so he could jump out at me.” To scare you or to amuse himself? “To scare the s*** out of me primarily. Apparently, he came from a family where practical jokes were de rigueur.” Did he humiliate him? Well, he says, only for a laugh. “When he met my first girlfriend he said, ‘You know I used to have to wash his b******s for him?’" Davie's real father was also a terrific liar, constantly lying to his children to keep himself amused. “He had a goitre removed when he was in his 20s and he had a cartoon scar across his neck, and to the day he died he never admitted it wasn’t the result of a shark attack off the coast of Wales. He swore to us as children that’s what it was. My sister used to say, ‘Why d’you lie, why d’you lie?’ and he would say, ‘Because, my dear, the truth is so dull’ – which I think is lovely. I keep meaning to get that into the show, but I haven’t yet.” Raised in a working-class Welsh mining family, Davies’s father was a high achiever – he eventually became a senior lecturer in comparative education. But he retired early due to ill health, and wanted to have fun with his son. The 47-year-old comedian says it’s funny talking about his father now. “I haven’t spoken publicly about him since he died.” But you sense he wants to talk about both him and Mayall. In a way, it’s the only honourable thing to do when discussing Man Down – after all, the father-son relationship is at the heart of it. Before becoming a professional comic, Davies spent 13 years teaching drama. He says it was the one bit of advice his father gave him that he regrets following. But I’m not so sure that he would be enjoying such success today if he hadn’t taught. So much of his stand-up act is rooted in his experience, from the pathetic nicknames school kids are given (one boy was called Mumbo because his mother had BO) to the self-loathing he felt because he wasn’t doing what he wanted to. He rose up the teaching ladder, and by the time he quit, he was head of drama at a comprehensive. He wishes he could say he’d had a good time, but it wouldn’t be true. “I was lost at sea. I wasn’t happy where I was in life. If you’re not doing what you want to do in life, you’re just like a pinball, knocking around. In my 20s I was a huge drinker. We’d go out at weekends and get absolutely s***faced.” On a first date in Man Down, we see Dan ordering a pint of wine and downing it in one. Is that taken from life? “Oh yeah. When I was a teacher and went back to Shropshire to see my friends we’d start the night by drinking a bottle of sherry. Each. Just to get drunk quickly.” Was he as immature as Dan? “Yeah. Painfully immature. In fact my mother said to me last night, ‘Well, you’ve always been ten years behind where you should be.’ And I hold my hands up. That’s exactly right.” Was he as hopeless with women as Dan is? “Yes. As a young man I was an absolute idiot. I think my exes would say I was a likeable baby. I had a teenager’s bedroom when I was 32.” View oEmbed on the source website He knows it sounds funny in retrospect, but it wasn’t. “There wasn’t a day passed when I thought, ‘When am I going to have a go at the thing I’ve always wanted?’ ” How did that make him feel about himself ? “Awful. Absolute self-loathing. I was furious with myself for 13 years.” He bored his friends with his frustrations. He’d spend his life trying to make them laugh to prove a point. It’s such a relief that he doesn’t have to do that now, he says. “Some friends think I’m dull now. But I think it’s great that I’m no longer trying to make everyone laugh in the pub.” Davies started gigging on the stand-up circuit and within a couple of years was making enough money to give up the day job. I ask who his comic heroes are. This is where Mayall comes in again. “Rik was probably the first person who made me think, ‘Yeah, God, if I can get paid for that!’ ” What did he adore about him? “Just the absolute madness. As a young man, it blew my mind. I ran into school the day after every episode [of The Young Ones] to talk about it.” Davies found it hard to write after Mayall died. He had already sketched out five episodes of Man Down and didn’t really know how to start again. “Rik was the dream casting for me. He was a childhood hero of mine, and I look like him. And he was beloved, as you saw when he died. The adoration poured out for him. So never for a second did I think, ‘That’s OK, we’ll just get another dad in.’” Eventually he hit on the idea of substituting him with an eccentric aunt (played by Stephanie Cole). This time, though, she wasn’t based on a real relative. “I don’t have a battleaxe aunty, but I know some women in Shropshire who are that sort of stoic, get on with life even if your legs get chopped off, red-faced farmers’ wives...” Davies might be the inspiration for Dan, but he says since he became successful he has changed so much –and for the better. “I think you just calm down a little bit. It’s like an addiction. Once you’re getting your fix, you don’t need to be quite so full on. The simple thing that’s changed is that I’m doing what I never believed I’d do this for a living.” He says he’s matured, too – even emotionally. When MP Liz Kendall (below) recently announced she would be contesting the leadership of the Labour party, Davies’s personal life was splashed all over the papers – various reports said the two have been in a long-term relationship. For the latest news and expert tips on getting the best deals this year, take a look at our Black Friday 2021 and Cyber Monday 2021 guides. How long has he been with Liz, I ask? “Now you’re not going to like this, but I don’t talk about all that stuff in interviews. I don’t talk about my personal life at all.” It turns out that the couple split up last year. He later tells Radio Times: “We haven’t been together for some time, but it was all very amicable and she is a good friend.” Davies himself is a Labour voter – another thing he attributes to his father’s influence. He is so glad, he says, that his father was able to see him make something of himself. “Right up to the end when he was very ill and in a wheelchair, he was getting wheeled to my gigs, yeah. I was told from the moment I dared to do this that he was incredibly proud of me.” But even then, Davies admits, there was a competitive element. “There was a degree of irritation that I was doing what I was doing. He thought he could have done it better, and he was probably right. He was hilarious. I can’t think of anybody who’s made me laugh as much.” Man Down returns to Channel 4 tonight (Monday 1st June) at 10.00pm
Fonejacker Kayvan Novak on returning to the spotlight - and moving on from "brown parts"
Prank calls almost killed me, says Novak. So why is he returning to comedy with new series SunTrap?
Good question,” says Kayvan Novak, as if he’s been wondering the same thing. I’ve just asked the Fonejacker creator where he’s been. “It’s been a transitional period for me.” It’s nine years since the Bafta-winning animated comedy first appeared on E4, and three years since its follow-up, Facejacker, last aired. There has been the occasional acting role (notably in Chris Morris’s Four Lions, the ambulance drama Sirens and BBC4’s Asylum, which he co-wrote) as well as parts in the odd series (including Skins, Doctor Who, Rev and the voice of Brains in Thunderbirds Are Go), but little to write home about. But now Novak is back in SunTrap – a new BBC1 comedy series, and his first conventional lead part. Fonejacker and Facejacker were huge cult hits. In the first, Novak made prank phone calls as a variety of characters, from dodgy car salesman Terry “Talk to me” Tibbs to Nigerian “business- man” George Agdgdgwngo. The show was beautifully animated, politically incorrect, subversive and extremely funny. View oEmbed on the source website In Facejacker, Novak translated the characters into live situations – rather than hiding behind the phone, he appeared in the flesh, heavily disguised with prosthetics. So, for example, he visits his old art college disguised as pretentious art critic Brian Badonde and attempts to oust his former teacher from his class. Or as Terry Tibbs he hosts an episode of Come Dine with Me that results in the house being burnt down after an elaborate fireworks display goes wrong. His prosthetics in Facejacker are so accomplished that it’s a surprise when I see Novak in the flesh – a handsome 36-year-old who morphs into a young Robert De Niro when he smiles. Not an impression – he bears an uncanny resemblance to the actor. So where has he been? Well, he says, things haven’t always been easy. After years of struggle he thought he’d finally made it. Kids would stop him in the street, high-five him, tell him he was the Fonejacker fella and that they loved him. But not all TV executives felt the same. He did a pilot for a Terry Tibbs chatshow and that didn’t work out. He was asked to create new characters, and struggled. “I said OK, I’ll do some new characters, but certain characters are so good and just work in any environment.” He pauses. “Why did Barry Humphries play Dame Edna for so many years? Why is Steve Coogan still doing Alan Partridge? Because there are just one or two characters they love doing. I’m lucky enough to have six that I’m crazy about.” View oEmbed on the source website Novak is the son of Iranian parents – his father is a retired accountant, his mother a primary school teacher. He talks about how they worked their butts off so he could go to the north London private school Highgate, how he disappointed them by getting expelled in sixth form because he was bunking off and getting poor grades, how his father begged him not to bring up the expulsion in today’s interview (It’s not Kayvan’s fault, Dad – I brought it up). Last night, he was chatting with his mother about “the ups and the downs, the lucky breaks, the frustrations of showbiz”. He says he’s sure he would have given up if I hadn’t been for their love and support. But it’s struggle that has made him what he is today. If he’d had it easy there would have been no Fonejacker. He went to an arts college to complete his A-levels, and then on to drama school in London. He soon found himself working on films and TV shows, including Syriana, starring George Clooney, Spooks and The Government Inspector. There was only one problem – he was usually cast as a terrorist, with the odd Turkish pimp or doctor thrown in to spice things up. At first he thought he was lucky. “I had a niche. And my niche was that I was brown. So it’s like, great, I get to go up for all these ‘brown parts’. I call them ‘brown parts’ because that’s what they are. That’s not to be resentful because I loved playing those parts – I got to meet so many cool actors.” But, he says, it soon began to pall. “Playing the terrorists, the pimps, the doctors – it got to a point where I wanted more and I thought if I’m going to make it in this industry I can’t keep doing these parts because I’m just repeating myself.” He had been doing accents since he was three. As a child he loved comedy, and would recite by heart sketches from Blackadder, Fawlty Towers, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, The Two Ronnies... When the parts he was being offered narrowed in range, he decided to use his facility for voices. He phoned up numerous agencies and offered his services as a voiceover artist. They weren’t interested. He then rang up in character as a Texan actor looking for work. Great, they said, come and see us. Then he took it a step further. He phoned up the BBC as Kevin Spacey, saying he’d like to do Richard III for Radio 4. A short while later a thrilled executive returned his call to ask when they could meet. It was both exhilarating and frustrating. “For doors to open like that [is great], but you’re so far away from yourself! It got to this stage where Kevin Spacey is about to do Richard III for BBC Radio... but Kayvan isn’t.” And that was the genesis of Fonejacker. He went into a studio, recorded thousands of prank calls, put together a pilot, and Channel 4 loved it. Many of Novak’s characters were outsiders – foreigners who couldn’t be clearly understood, didn’t get British culture or were on the make. Although some critics accused the show of racism, it was anything but. Without being overtly political, Novak was presenting us with some of the crudest stereotypes and looking at how the public responds to them. Fonejacker won a Bafta, and Facejacker was nominated for one, but by the end Novak was exhausted. “I’m so glad I didn’t give up and quit because I wanted to. The second series of Fonejacker almost killed me. It was incredibly intense. Generating comic material can sometimes get the better of you.” View oEmbed on the source website But out of adversity has come opportunity. He’s delighted that Neil Webster and Ben Palmer (who have worked on Would I Lie to You and The Inbetweeners) have come up with SunTrap for him, which takes him back to his acting roots, and makes the most of his facility for mimicry. Novak plays Woody, a dodgy investigative journalist, down on his uppers, who gets many of his stories by adopting different disguises. He is particularly pleased that the casting has been colour-blind – not a hint of a terrorist or doctor. It’s strange, he says, but when he was growing up he didn’t label himself in any way, he just fitted easily into London’s rich melting pot. But since becoming an actor he has been more aware of his ethnicity. “As an ethnic actor I still feel I can’t be in Downton Abbey or in period dramas. The opportunities for me as an actor are narrow, but I’m lucky enough to have people like Neil and Ben creating roles for me that have nothing to do with where I’m from.” He points out that there are a number of black and brown British actors who have had to go to America to find success. “Look at The Wire, for example – one of the most amazing shows out of America, and the two leads are English.” But he’s not convinced that this is actually a sign of America being more liberal – it might be just another form of stereotyping. “I think that’s them thinking the best trained actors come from the UK, and the prettiest from Australia.” Does he think it’s harder to be brown than black as an actor today? “Possibly...” But in the end, he says, it’s better to be thankful for your luck than curse your misfortune. “Look at me. I’m starring in my own BBC1 series, I’m not the guy to ask. You can blame the industry, blame the landscape, blame the politics of it, but that’s just a waste of energy. You’ve just got to think, how can I move my career forward?” SunTrap begins on BBC1 tonight (Wednesday 27th May) at 10:45pm
Next stop USA: James Corden is packing up for Hollywood
Having lost six stone and gained a gig presenting the Late Late Show in America, the writer, actor and comedian is heading stateside
James Corden is so busy, he can't quite remember why he's here. He tells me how much he's enjoying promoting Into the Woods, the film of the Sondheim musical in which he stars with Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep. Although he's actually here to talk about Esio Trot, the adaptation of the Roald Dahl book in which he stars with Dustin Hoffman and Judi Dench. Corden is moving in elevated, Oscar-winning circles these days. And there’s more. He’s also made two one-hour specials of The Wrong Mans, the comedy drama he co-wrote and starred in with Mathew Baynton about two council workers unwittingly caught up in a world of international crime. But perhaps the most remarkable thing is that he’ll soon be off with his family to live in LA, where he will present the prestigious Late Late Showon CBS five nights a week from March. Corden, 36, looks happily exhausted. It’s not just the work schedule. A few weeks ago, his wife, Julia, gave birth to their second child. Things really couldn’t be better for him. Last time I met Corden he was also on top of the world – although the peak was somewhat less vertiginous back then. It was 2008 and he had just finished acting in and co-writing (with Ruth Jones) two hugely successful, award-winning series of the sitcom Gavin & Stacey. He was about to launch a sketch show with his Gavin & Stacey co-star, Mathew Horne, and had just completed the movie Lesbian Vampire Killers, again co-starring Horne. Both bombed. When I suggest this is a comeback, his hackles rise. “Well, if my career was in a bad place at a time when I was writing probably, give or take, the biggest comedy show in the country, I dread to think what everybody else’s career could possibly be like. And being in a film that doesn’t work, that’s the experience of most people. If somebody was with Michael Fassbender, they wouldn't say, 'Let's talk about The Counsellor,' which was an unmitigated disaster. If you were talking to Benedict Cumberbatch, you wouldn't go, 'Let's talk about The Fifth Estate,' which could not have been more hyped and then didn't perform. So I don't really know what there is to say about it." Does he think I’ve misrepresented his career? “No, because [that film and series] didn’t work. But you will not find any person who didn’t do two things that didn’t work, and mine just happened at the same time. That’s all it is. “But people seem to want to talk about my misses and they don’t want to talk about others, and that’s where I find it quite odd. We’re four minutes into this interview and we’re talking about things that haven’t worked, and I don’t think that would be the case if there were other people here.” Blimey. All I’d wanted to say was that it’s good to see you back again. But he’s not finished yet. “Yes, but there was nothing to come back from. Work didn’t stop. I was never not employed.” He has a point. If you’re in the creative industries, he says, you have to risk and embrace failure, and learn from it. But, I say, I thought there was an arrogance to the failures. While Gavin & Stacey had been beautifully crafted, the sketch show and Lesbian Vampire Killers were rushed and ill conceived. No, he responds, it was the opposite of arrogance. “I think it was more a fear of, ‘This is all going to disappear any minute.’” He takes me back to his first great success, in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. The play went from the National in London to Broadway, and a successful film was made of it. Corden was 21 stone at the time and, not surprisingly, played the fat boy. Equally unsurprisingly, casting directors continued to regard him in the same light. “There were eight boys in the play, and all the others were coming in with mounds of film scripts, saying, ‘I’ve got so many meetings and I don’t know which project to do,’ while you’re being sent the ‘guy who drops off the TV to Hugh Grant’ in a movie or ‘the newsagent’ in a TV series, because of how you look... It felt like people were going, ‘We think you’re quite good, but these are the roles that you’ll play and every now and again you might play a bubbly barrister in Judge John Deed.” So he went away, wrote Gavin & Stacey and the calls started rolling in. “Suddenly you’re shooting the cover of Esquire and you start to think, ‘This is going to all disappear, because I’m not supposed to be here.’ If your whole life you’ve felt as if you should be here and people have said, ‘Well, we don’t think you should,’ it can feel as if it’s going to evaporate at any time. And that’s why you say, ‘Yes, I’ll do this!’ because there’s a constant feeling in your stomach that this is just a passing thing.” But it wasn’t just his work that took a battering; it was also his character. The lovable Smithy of Gavin & Stacey quickly morphed into the annoying Corden who regularly embarrassed others, and himself, in public. There was the time he joked at the Empire Awards he was having sex with Keira Knightley, and the time he won two Baftas for Gavin & Stacey and whinged that he’d not won a third for best comedy. Perhaps the nadir came in a spat with Patrick Stewart when he was presenting another awards ceremony. Corden admits he reacted to Stewart’s heckling badly. “Oh my God, I wish I’d just laughed it off.” Rob Brydon, who also featured in Gavin & Stacey, warned him that he was on the verge of blowing all he had achieved. Despite the initial defensiveness, he seems much calmer today. Corden says, apart from that interlude, this is how he’s been all his life. He was brought up in High Wycombe by Salvation Army parents (his father is a Christian - book salesman, his mother a social worker) who taught him the values of decency and kindness. Yes, he says, there have been times he has let them down. He quotes the actor Bill Murray: “He said you’ve got to give anybody who becomes famous a year’s grace, because they’re being showered with so much praise it can go to their heads. “I used to feel that if you were doing interviews, you had to be in some way obnoxious. But I don’t think that it is necessarily in my nature.” Now, he explains, he’s more at ease with himself; more like the pre-celebrity Corden. One of the problems was when he became famous he had split up with his girlfriend of eight years and felt lost. He was often slumped in clubs in the early hours, because he didn’t feel there was anything to go home to. Not now, though. He says Julia has been a brilliant influence on him, partly because she did a proper job, for Save the Children, and was never going to be seduced by the celebrity world. Professionally, the turning point came when he played the lead in the play One Man, Two Guvnors in 2011. “It was hugely important for me because it was a play that was essentially written for me at the National Theatre. And if you’ve any aspirations to be an actor in the theatre, that’s just beyond anything you could ever comprehend.” The play transferred to Broadway, and Corden won a Tony for best actor. He started to lose weight – some six stone over a four-year period. Now he’s down to 15 stone, but says there’s still some way to go. “I’d like to lose another two stone, but it will gradually happen; that’s the sensible way to lose weight. Those diets eating watery soups every day, you will lose loads of weight, but six months later you’ll put it back on.” Has he been offered a wider range of parts since losing weight? “I don’t know that I’d be playing such a leading role in Into the Woods if I were 21 stone.” He says he has learnt so much from the likes of Hoffman and Streep over the past year. Not least about humility. “They are the best kind of actors. They take the work incredibly seriously and take them- selves not seriously at all. There’s nothing worse than an actor thinking they’re changing the world.” He adored working with Hoffman andsays they spent much of the time winding each other up. Hoffman emailed him after their first day, saying, “I just want to tell you I thought you were terrible in the read-through.” At the end of their shoot Corden told him, “Dustin, it’s been a great experience and I’m going to spread the word you’re a smashing little actor.” In America, he will be living around the corner from him. Corden has always suffered from confidence swings, and now he’s anxious about the new show in America. “It’s going to be a complete disaster,” he says. He assures me he’s not joking. “I mean that without wanting you to go, ‘No, it’s going to be great.’ I don’t see how it can be. I’m from High Wycombe. I don’t see how it can work. I haven’t done a pilot, they’ve never seen me interview anyone, it’s absurd!” He didn’t even know he was being considered as a replacement for the Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson, so it came as a shock when he was offered the show. Even though he was tempted to run a mile, he knew he couldn’t. But how will he distinguish himself from the other US chat shows? “We don’t just want to do chat, we want to do skits, songs and sketches. It might be the best thing I do, it might be the worst.” At least, he says, it should bring stability to family life. In recent times, he’s been all over the place working; now at least he will be settled in LA. “For us as a family it’s a no-brainer. Shooting The Wrong Mans, I was in South Africa skyping my son on my birthday. I don’t want to be a dad who disappears to Vancouver or wherever the new tax break is, to shoot something and then come back and go on the road with a play. I don’t think it’s fair on them. I really want to be a good dad, one who knows who my kids are as people.” Has he spoken to Piers Morgan, who was axed from his chat show on CNN? “I have. He just said, ‘Go for it and give it your best shot, but know that this is a piece of television real estate that Americans feel a sense of ownership over and they will come for you. There will be criticism, either way, whatever you do.’” If he could last three years as Morgan did, he would regard it as a success. “Piers said, ‘I loved it so much and you will love it, and you’ve got to go for these things, however scared you are.’ ”