'I was captivated... he changed my life'
Liz Bonnin will be among the stars marking Sir David Attenborough’s milestone birthday in a TV special hosted by Kirsty Young from the Royal Albert Hall
Add David Attenborough's 100 Years on Planet Earth to your watchlist It’s unlikely there will be any birthday banners, balloons or party poppers in the Attenborough household on Friday 8 May. For there’s one thing that centenarian-to-be Sir David isn’t a fan of, and that’s a fuss. Which is a shame. Because on this very special day in his extraordinary life he’s likely to be at the centre of quite a lot of it. His typically heavy postbag will be further swollen with cards from scores, perhaps hundreds, of well-wishers both familiar and unknown. There’ll be calls from family and from his many colleagues and, of course, messages from royal admirers to savour. And then there’s the birthday bash – the star-studded tribute, led by his good friend Kirsty Young, that’s being held in his honour at London’s Royal Albert Hall and will air that night on BBC One. “Oh, he is going to hate all of the attention,” laughs Liz Bonnin, who will be one of many people on stage and screen helping celebrate his birthday milestone. “He will not be comfortable with all the love and the gushing because he is just so modest.” One of the themes of the evening – which is likely to feature a few surprises alongside Chris Packham, Steve Backshall and music from the BBC Concert Orchestra – will be how Attenborough has changed not just attitudes about the environmental challenges we face, but the lives of those now responding to those challenges – Bonnin among them. “I was nine at the time and I remember Life on Earth being repeated on TV. “When the gorillas sequence came on, I was captivated by this man and how engaging he was. It changed my life.” So much so that Bonnin went on to gain a Masters in wild animal biology and later started work with the BBC. It was while she was still learning her craft that she was introduced to Attenborough for the first time. “I got the opportunity to say hello but I was overwhelmed and couldn’t string a sentence together. But I also remember feeling that everyone wanted a piece of him.” It was something she observed in later years after she’d got to know him much better and, in her eyes, made his star shine even brighter. They were both attending the reopening of the Cambridge Museum of Zoology and Attenborough was, as usual, in great demand. “Standing quietly in the corner of this busy room was the son of one of the curators,” she recalls. “I saw David clock the boy and just walk over and start talking to him. That humanity, that generosity of time. That was the day I realised who he truly was. It’s always stayed with me.” One memory that’s stayed with Attenborough is an incident that he described to Bonnin in an online interview he did with her in 2021. He revealed that when he was travelling through what was then British Guiana in the mid-1950s for his series Zoo Quest, he was handed a gun by a cattle rancher and invited to shoot a caiman – a south American alligator – that was resting in a swamp. “I foolishly, no innocently pulled the trigger,” he told her. “There was an explosion and the caiman arched into the air with a huge splash and the entire scene was destroyed. All the birds screamed and disappeared and I sat there appalled. It was the first and last time I shot anything. That moment of the wonder, of this community of diverse birds and reptiles and what I had done to it, has lingered in my mind ever since.” “It’s an extreme example,” says Bonnin, “but to have had that experience and for it to have stayed with him says a lot about who he is.” Who he is, as will be clear during the 90-minute, televised Royal Albert Hall celebration, is an inspiration to millions, particularly those working in conservation. Bonnin has seen first hand just what an impact a handshake or a quiet word has. “I don’t think many people realise how much time David has spent travelling the length and breadth of the country, and the globe, connecting with conservationists and policy workers.” So if, through Radio Times, Bonnin could send Attenborough a birthday greeting, what would she want to say? “It would be a little less happy birthday and more of a thank you. Thank you for inspiring us, thank you for your humanity, for being the voice of our conscience and the voice of our planet and thank you for showing us what we can be when we’re at our best.” terry payne
Liz Bonnin reflects on the moment David Attenborough was handed a gun to shoot a caiman - and an explosion followed
Liz Bonnin will be among the stars marking Sir David Attenborough’s milestone birthday in a TV special hosted by Kirsty Young from the Royal Albert Hall.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It’s unlikely there will be any birthday banners, balloons or party poppers in the Attenborough household on Friday 8 May. For there’s one thing that centenarian-to-be Sir David isn’t a fan of, and that’s a fuss. Which is a shame. Because on this very special day in his extraordinary life he’s likely to be at the centre of quite a lot of it. His typically heavy postbag will be further swollen with cards from scores, perhaps hundreds, of well-wishers both familiar and unknown. There’ll be calls from family and from his many colleagues and, of course, messages from royal admirers to savour. And then there’s the birthday bash – the star-studded tribute, led by his good friend Kirsty Young, that’s being held in his honour at London’s Royal Albert Hall and will air that night on BBC One. “Oh, he is going to hate all of the attention,” laughs Liz Bonnin, who will be one of many people on stage and screen helping celebrate his birthday milestone. “He will not be comfortable with all the love and the gushing because he is just so modest.” One of the themes of the evening – which is likely to feature a few surprises alongside Chris Packham, Steve Backshall and music from the BBC Concert Orchestra – will be how Attenborough has changed not just attitudes about the environmental challenges we face, but the lives of those now responding to those challenges – Bonnin among them. “I was nine at the time and I remember Life on Earth being repeated on TV. “When the gorillas sequence came on, I was captivated by this man and how engaging he was. It changed my life.” So much so that Bonnin went on to gain a Masters in wild animal biology and later started work with the BBC. It was while she was still learning her craft that she was introduced to Attenborough for the first time. “I got the opportunity to say hello but I was overwhelmed and couldn’t string a sentence together. But I also remember feeling that everyone wanted a piece of him.” It was something she observed in later years after she’d got to know him much better and, in her eyes, made his star shine even brighter. They were both attending the reopening of the Cambridge Museum of Zoology and Attenborough was, as usual, in great demand. “Standing quietly in the corner of this busy room was the son of one of the curators,” she recalls. “I saw David clock the boy and just walk over and start talking to him. That humanity, that generosity of time. That was the day I realised who he truly was. It’s always stayed with me.” One memory that’s stayed with Attenborough is an incident that he described to Bonnin in an online interview he did with her in 2021. He revealed that when he was travelling through what was then British Guiana in the mid-1950s for his series Zoo Quest, he was handed a gun by a cattle rancher and invited to shoot a caiman – a south American alligator – that was resting in a swamp. “I foolishly, no innocently pulled the trigger,” he told her. “There was an explosion and the caiman arched into the air with a huge splash and the entire scene was destroyed. All the birds screamed and disappeared and I sat there appalled. It was the first and last time I shot anything. That moment of the wonder, of this community of diverse birds and reptiles and what I had done to it, has lingered in my mind ever since.” “It’s an extreme example,” says Bonnin, “but to have had that experience and for it to have stayed with him says a lot about who he is.” Who he is, as will be clear during the 90-minute, televised Royal Albert Hall celebration, is an inspiration to millions, particularly those working in conservation. Bonnin has seen first hand just what an impact a handshake or a quiet word has. “I don’t think many people realise how much time David has spent travelling the length and breadth of the country, and the globe, connecting with conservationists and policy workers.” So if, through Radio Times, Bonnin could send Attenborough a birthday greeting, what would she want to say? “It would be a little less happy birthday and more of a thank you. Thank you for inspiring us, thank you for your humanity, for being the voice of our conscience and the voice of our planet and thank you for showing us what we can be when we’re at our best.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. 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.
Who needs the Galapagos? Sir David Attenborough revels in the wildlife on his London doorstep
Wild London is on New Year's Day 6.30pm BBC One. Add it to your watchlist It’s approaching 11pm on a May evening and in a west London garden Sir David Attenborough is stretched out on a picnic rug, swaddled in a heavy coat to protect him against the night-time chill. He’s almost nose to snout with a humble suburban hedgehog and the joy on his face, illuminated by TV lights that puncture the darkness, wouldn’t be any greater were he in Papua New Guinea observing his favourite bird of paradise. Instead, he’s in Ealing, and clearly relishing the moment. In a world that’s unsettled by division and disharmony, there’s something deeply comforting watching Attenborough, a man who will be 100 next year, talking to the animals. “I think they’re lovely things,” he chuckles as the hedgehog shuffles past him. “I used to have a hedgehog that lived in my garden all the time. But these days they’re a rare sight. Nonetheless urban areas are the one place where their numbers have stabilised and with a little help from us there’s hope they might increase.” Attenborough, out and about on location, is also a rare sight these days, but filming wildlife in the city he’s lived in for 70 years was too good an opportunity to turn down. And so, in Wild London, Attenborough is captured in various locations in the capital, including a north London allotment site waiting for some resident foxes to put in an appearance. Once again, his instinct is to engage with them. “Oh, here we are… Hello,” he announces as the foxes come out to play and, later, to forage. “Even though there are more wild foxes in London than almost any other big city, it’s still a huge thrill to see one emerging from the bushes,” he says. We also see him high up in the Houses of Parliament helping as a peregrine falcon chick, from a nest that’s been established there for 11 years, is ringed with a numbered identity tag. “There we are, there we are,” he says, as he gently cradles the four-week-old chick in his hands. “And now we can recognise you anywhere. Yes, you…” Daughter Susan accompanied her father on his trips around London, but did the film-makers have to make any concessions to his age? Like climbing all those stairs in Parliament? “David is always able to access more than you imagine,” laughs the film’s director, Joe Loncraine. “There was never anywhere we wanted him to go that he couldn’t. The main consideration at Parliament was where we could get our equipment in!” Attenborough was also filmed releasing a harvest mouse into a west London wood to help build a population there, and at a nearby wetlands reserve, where a family of beavers has been introduced. “If someone had told me when I first moved here that one day I’d be watching wild beavers in London, I would have thought they were mad,” he says. There are other wildlife surprises as well: a colony of 40 to 50 non-native, metre-long, Aesculapian snakes that have made their home among the trees and undergrowth alongside the Regent’s Canal, deer leaping gazelle-like to dodge east London traffic and, perhaps most surprising of all, a killer gull that stalks and drowns pigeons on the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park. “I know it’s gruesome, but it was a real thrill to film it,” says Loncraine. “It’s a hunting technique that this one gull has developed and he always takes them into the water.” The documentary’s message, says Loncraine, is that “you don’t have to get on a plane to discover the wonders of wildlife. You can do that on your doorstep, wherever that is.” It’s a point echoed by Attenborough, who cites the 2,500-acre Richmond Park, which is close to his home, as both a “refuge and a source of inspiration”. “I have been coming here ever since I moved to London over 70 years ago. Even after all that time, and after all of the places I have visited, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.” HELPING OUT David Mooney of the London Wildlife Trust has some tips 1. Insect café “Cut up your Christmas tree into foot-long lengths, dig a little hole and put in the logs upright, half cover with soil and let them rot. It will be a restaurant for insects, and once the insects come, the birds and mammals will come, too, and you will grow a thriving food web in your garden.” 2. Water park “If you haven’t got room for a pond, get yourself a washing-up bowl, sink it into the ground, put a couple of bricks in the bottom and fill it up with water. Invest in a plant from the local garden centre and watch what happens. Put water in your garden and wildlife will thrive.” 3. Leave the leaves “You are trying to create a mini eco-system in your garden and the best place to start is the decomposing material. Don’t pile the leaves in one place, leave them in small piles around your borders — it’s brilliant for insects.”
For more than 50 years broadcaster Kate Adie has brought us news of conflicts from around the world. And now these stories are more important than ever, she says
Listen to From Our Own Correspondent at 70 on Saturday at 8pm on Radio 4 There’s much that stands out in Kate Adie’s long BBC career. Terrifying brushes with death – a Tiananmen Square protestor died from a bullet that grazed her elbow – nights sleeping in a bath in Bosnia, interviews conducted at gunpoint, frontline dispatches that changed our understanding of conflicts… It’s those reports from places like Iraq and Afghanistan that help characterise Adie in our mind’s eye. But there’s more to her than desert boots and battledress. At the start of her career on local radio she drunkenly sang the weather forecast live on air. She once walked in the footsteps of Bristol sex workers to identify the men trawling for business. She received several offers. There was the occasion during a chaotic IRA funeral in Northern Ireland when she hit a priest who had punched her cameraman. And because she possesses intelligent curiosity she observed the open-casket bodies of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Belfast and of film star Gracie Fields on Capri. Such curiosity didn’t come naturally. It evolved during her fledgeling years as a broadcast reporter. “I felt my own ignorance keenly,” she says in her autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers. “I trained myself to stare at a street of houses and be nosy about what went on inside. What did a sheet hung up instead of curtains indicate? Why did half the country garden fanatically while others tolerated a wilderness of mud and tin cans and broken gates?” It’s that inquisitiveness – coupled with an enduring concern about a world so often in crisis – that has seen Adie helm Radio 4’s flagship series From Our Own Correspondent for the last 27 years. Both she and it have just celebrated big birthdays: she recently turned 80 and this week the programme, affectionately known as FooC, marks its 70th anniversary with a special hour-long episode recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre, featuring contributions from the BBC’s bestknown foreign correspondents. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/12/20242X69M7A-d9440d8.jpg" width="6720" height="4480" alt="Week 50 Radio Lead Kate Adie" title="SALISBURY, UK, 13th May, 2024, British journalist Kate Adie visiting Salisbury to talk about her career, which spans five decades and taken her to the worlds most volatile regions. Her reports of major conflicts such as the Gulf War, the Falklands War" /> Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet and Fergal Keane, among others, join Adie to recount stories from the front line. Keane describes how covering the Rwandan genocide, which claimed the lives of around 800,000 people in 100 days, destroyed his sense of idealism – “I went into a country that had been emptied of living people. It changed me because I saw the very worst that human beings could do.” Bowen admitted that he’d gone from being a young war reporter in 1989 who felt indestructible to one who now feels “thoroughly destructible”. “I have no appetite whatever for danger,” he tells the audience. But it was Adie who, on the night, provided the most powerful advocacy for foreign correspondents and the role they play. “You go into places which are knowingly dangerous but your absolute reason for being there is to get the story back. It is not to say, ‘I am here’, it is to say that what I have seen and what I am experiencing has to be seen by other people.” Such was the imperative during the Tiananmen Square massacre when she ran with a single cassette of film footage, dodging bullets and police, back to the Beijing Hotel where the rest of the BBC team were. “We saw people slaughtered… after thousands upon thousands of quiet, mild-mannered, reasonable students had asked for discussions about change… None of them talked about revolution. “I hear people saying today ‘I can’t bear to watch the news. It’s so awful. It’s depressing, it’s violent, why does it matter?’ China has become ever more authoritarian, and then you go to Russia, where people are denied the kind of freedoms which we take for granted and our old friend the United States… The country which has, as its emblem, a statue saying they wish to welcome the poor and dispossessed, is now rounding them up. These three huge countries have an effect on us. We’re tiny. That’s why we get these despatches.”
There are still questions following 1988’s mass poisoning in Camelford
Add Poison Water to your watchlist Some complained that the water pouring from their household taps had caused their skin to blister and peel. Others reported chronic vomiting and diarrhoea. Doug Cross’s wife Carole noticed that the soap she used while bathing had turned bright blue and that the water was “quite sting-y”. “I told her to get out of the bath immediately, because I knew there was something seriously wrong,” he says now. For two days the couple drank water from a well in their Cornish garden, but then came the advice from the water authority that, despite an outbreak of illness seemingly linked to the local supply, it was safe to drink. “Purely an aesthetic problem,” as one official put it. It was advice that Cross and his wife dutifully followed and that, he believes, was what ultimately killed her. The 1988 Camelford water scandal remains known as the worst case of mass poisoning recorded in the UK – 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate was mistakenly added to a drinking-water supply tank at a local treatment plant and piped into 20,000 homes. The story is revisited in a new BBC documentary, and 37 years on it’s clear that it still ignites sadness, anger and claims of a cover-up. As well as causing widespread sickness among people across north Cornwall, the contaminated water killed all the small animals at Camelford’s pet shop and livestock on nearby farms. Though it’s accepted it was an accident – albeit one that was demonstrably avoidable – what infuriated residents was that it was a full 16 days before the South West Water Authority came clean and announced in a local newspaper advert that aluminium sulphate was the source of the contamination. A coroner later said that delays in informing the public about the poisoning meant they were “gambling with as many as 20,000 lives”. Cross, a pollution scientist by profession, believes the reason for the delay became obvious. “It was a commercially driven cover-up,” he says, citing Margaret Thatcher’s much-heralded plans to privatise the water industry that were taking shape at the same time. “If this had got out, then it would have risked derailing the whole thing.” Throughout the early years after the July 1988 poisoning Cross, now 88 and a “citizen scientist” as he describes himself, was central to the campaign to get to the truth of the long-term effects of the poisoning. He retained, though, sympathy for the relief delivery driver whose mistake it was that caused the calamitous contamination. He’d arrived at the water-treatment site with a load of aluminium sulphate to find there were no members of staff on hand and none of the tanks were labelled. He ended up choosing the wrong tank to drop the chemicals into. “He was the first victim in all this, and for all of these years he’s had it on his conscience, but none of us blamed him,” says Cross. In 2004 Cross’s interest in the issue became tragically personal. Carole collapsed and was taken to hospital where she died, aged just 59. “The doctors asked me about any unusual events in her life and the only thing I could think of was the poisoning in Camelford. It was then the penny dropped. “I said we had to get the brain tissue samples off to find out what’s going on. It was horrendous, but we had to find out what the effect of this exposure was.” Because the precise cause of death remained unclear, the coroner, Michael Rose, ordered Carole’s brain to be examined by a neuropathologist. Tests revealed she died from a neurological disease linked to a rare form of Alzheimer’s, and that a “very elevated” level of aluminium was present in her brain. In his inquest verdict, the coroner wrote that while there was a “very real possibility” the aluminium contributed to her death, there was “only a slight possibility” it was the cause. “At the end of the day I can say that the incident may either have contributed to, or possibly caused, Mrs Cross’s death, but I do not have sufficient evidence to say so conclusively.” While Cross understands the coroner’s circumspection, his own view is that his wife was killed by the water poisoning and that upwards of “a dozen” others might also have died, though he accepts it would now be impossible to prove. In 2013, the Government apologised “unreservedly” for the mass poisoning. For Cross, the fight for the justice he believes has been denied the people of Camelford goes on. But there is, he says, a wider message triggered by this new documentary for us all to embrace. “When something happens and it’s obvious that the authorities are covering it up, get together and use whatever skills you have to find the evidence.”
A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis disrupted BBC correspondent Caroline Wyatt’s career. But 10 years on she’s unbeaten and still broadcasting
Saturday PM is on Radio 4 at 5pm on Saturday. Add it to your collection Caroline Wyatt uses the word “luck” a lot. Lucky to have started out in journalism at a time when the world seemed to be changing for the better. Lucky to still be broadcasting, even though it leaves her exhausted and bed-bound. And, yes, lucky to have only been struck down by what she describes as a “gentler” version of the chronic illness multiple sclerosis. “Some people get it very aggressively from the beginning, so yes, I have been so lucky with the way that my MS has developed.” She’s sunny and speaks with no hint of self-pity, even though she acknowledges, with almost a newsreader’s detachment, that her condition is deteriorating. “I am slowly getting worse and I have got to the stage where I’ve had all the drugs I’m eligible for with the NHS. The thing that I really notice now is the way my brain is changing. I can’t focus and concentrate as much… it’s like accelerated ageing.” She also has to contend with crushing fatigue. “You wake up in the morning feeling as if you haven’t been to bed. And the older I get [she’s 58], the worse it gets.” We last met 10 years ago in her central London flat, where she spoke for the first time about the hospital results confirming she had MS. Today, as that diagnostic anniversary approaches, we’re at the BBC’s HQ, from where she broadcasts a 30-minute version of Radio 4’s PM programme every Saturday. She laughs – as she does frequently – about the support she needs from colleagues in getting the programme on air. “My eyesight is really quite unreliable now, so if I’m nervous or have a lot of adrenaline in my system I find it really hard to read words on a screen. I ask the team to print out a script in big letters, which these days is the equivalent of saying I’m a dinosaur, but it just makes it a lot easier.” Today is also the day that Donald Trump is in town and the world’s broadcast media are in tow. Considering she was the BBC’s woman in Berlin not long after the reunification of East and West Germany, was Moscow correspondent at the time of Putin’s rise to power and the corporation’s first female defence correspondent covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, does she miss the cut and thrust of it all? “A bit,” comes the reply, quickly followed by a story – despite self-proclaimed memory failings she’s a wonderfully detailed storyteller – of why she took her leave of the front line. It was 2014, and in northern Iraq Isis was committing a genocide of the Yazidi people. Wyatt was there as religion correspondent and reporting, as she describes it, “appalling stories of rape, murder and retribution”. “I came home after that and decided I really can’t do that again. I think everyone has a limit and I had reached my limit of witnessing other people’s suffering. I just thought I am really pleased that I have these amazing colleagues who are going to carry on reporting wars and extreme situations, but I can’t do it any more.” Part of it, she acknowledges, was also physical. The as-yet undiagnosed MS was taking its toll. “In those situations you need to be fit enough to get out quite quickly. But I thought if they [Isis] did come to kidnap us, or worse, I couldn’t run.” These days she uses a walking stick to get about and admits to episodes of tripping over “because my foot doesn’t lift in the right way”. Her MS is now classified as “secondary, progressive”, so how does she manage the symptoms? “I try not to fight it and just acknowledge that I need a lot more rest and sleep. If I work on a Saturday, I try not to arrange too much on Sunday and Monday and hope that by Tuesday I can go and see friends. Pacing myself has been a massive lesson that I haven’t quite cracked yet. I still try to do too much and then I crash.” Does she ever despair? “Yeah, of course I get down and depressed and despondent.” What lifts her spirits? “I think friends and family… all the normal things. Being able to talk to other people who understand.” Cue more throaty laughter. “There are four of us women near where I live, all with MS. The hospital we go to got us together and we’re supposed to meet once a month, but because we’ve all got MS we cry off at least every other month!” Her Saturday stint on PM is, she agrees, a lifeline. For all its debilitating aftermath, she still enjoys the challenge of live broadcasting, though admits she had to step back from the hour-long show on Fridays because of exhaustion. “By the end of the programme I was gripping the desk to keep focused. “I feel so lucky to still be there and still working. But I don’t know how long it’s going to last, because I don’t know what’s going to happen in health terms or in BBC terms.” Her own future health may be as uncertain as the BBC’s, but she has faith in both. “There are lots of people at my stage of the disease where the thing you need most is hope – that something’s going to come along that will halt or slow down the progression. There’s lots of research going on. I just want them to hurry up.” And what of the BBC? Is it robust enough to withstand the body blows it’s receiving from all sides? “I think it is. I hope it is. I can see that the BBC is in the crosshairs a lot of the time – certainly on social media – but we do live in an age of partisan debate, and having something that’s available to everyone in a society that is increasingly atomised is really important.” What’s important to Wyatt is maintaining a sense of perspective and appreciating there’s much in life still to be enjoyed. Though she rarely travels abroad now, she’s enjoying discovering unfamiliar parts of the UK. A study of her social media feed on X reveals daily repostings of beautiful paintings. She explains: “Algorithmically, I was getting war, killing, death, doom and destruction, so to influence the algorithm I went to other stuff, and that way it feeds me beautiful pictures every morning. “Going to art galleries is one of the things I’ve started doing a lot more – sitting, looking and contemplating. It’s been a revelation. Although it’s quite knackering, they’ve got really good cafés – so tea and cake at the end!” More laughter. Her motto is simple: “Be glad, be grateful. One of the things the job taught me was how incredibly lucky we are.” There it is again, that word luck.
Dyslexia, racism, rough sleeping – nothing stands in the way of wildlife presenter Hamza Yassin and his love of Mother Nature
Add Hamza's Hidden Wild Isles to your watchlist Hamza Yassin is, by his own jokey admission, an old man living in a 35-year-old’s body. He’s spurned the bright lights that might attract someone of his age and profile for life in the remotest possible part of mainland Britain, where his core friendship group are of his parents’ generation and where a perfect Saturday night’s entertainment is inviting this “Scottish family” to his house for a film show. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t party. I didn’t understand people at uni going drinking, becoming absolutely mortal then waking up the next day saying, ‘I don’t want to go to the lecture because I’m hung over.’ We calculated back then that every lecture was costing us roughly £300, so why spend £300 lying in bed recovering from a hangover?” He delivers this message of temperance not with any finger-wagging disapproval, rather a sense of bewilderment that anyone would choose shots over shearwaters. “It just seems like a waste of time. Get up and go out into the countryside.” It’s a lifestyle mantra that’s served him well. Apart, of course, from exuberant spins beneath the Strictly glitterball (he won the show in 2022), the countryside is where he’s happiest, and where he is today, talking in the shade of a Scots pine, his calf-length hair tucked beneath a floppy green canvas hat and resting on a stout hazel stick carved 15 years ago when working as a ghillie’s assistant. His description of this period of his life – indeed pretty much the whole of his life in the UK – is a reminder of just how remarkable his personal journey has been. Arriving here from his native Sudan as an eight-year-old with only a handful of words of English (“please, thank you and pizza and chips”), the learning challenges that came with being diagnosed with severe dyslexia, through to sleeping in the back of a car for nine months while learning the fieldcraft skills he’s deploying on this balmy summer evening at the RSPB Arne Nature Reserve in Dorset. He’s fronting a night-time sequence on the elusive nightjar for a UK-based wildlife series, Hamza’s Hidden Wild Isles, though he insists it’s nature who’s the star. “I’m not a celebrity, I’m just the dude who has fallen in love with Mother Nature. She’s my second love after my mother.” The bond between son and mother is clear. It was her ambition that provided him with the passport – both literal and metaphorical – to the life he now enjoys. Working as a gynaecologist in Sudan, she was invited to the UK to take a job in the NHS. “My mum said I can’t go without my husband [also a doctor] and they said bring your husband along as well. They came here to make sure everything was right – that the NHS was giving them jobs – then a year later they sent for us. “They worked [on rotation] in Newcastle, Whitehaven, Carlisle and then we ended up in Northampton, where they still work very happily today. But it meant that every six to 12 months, we were changing schools.” That would be hard enough for any child, let alone one with limited English and, as yet, undiagnosed dyslexia. Within a few months he says he was forming fluent sentences that teachers could understand. But his reading wasn’t developing at the same speed as his speech. It led to some teasing and bullying, though he dismisses any lasting impact. “That’s just children, isn’t it? My schooling was beautiful and I will be for ever grateful for it.” It wasn’t until his parents arranged for him to attend the independent Wellingborough School and he came to the attention of a teacher called Mrs Strange that the penny dropped. “I remember Mrs Strange saying, ‘Hamza I think you’re dyslexic.’ I remember crying and saying, ‘When’s the wheelchair going to arrive?’ She said, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘You said I was dyslexic, which means I’ll be paralysed and in a wheelchair.’ And she said, ‘No that’s disabled, Hamza. It means it’s hard to read and write.’” The diagnosis was liberating. With strategies in place he sailed through exams that otherwise he would have found impossible. “I had a reader and a scribe in exams. Someone would read me the question, I would verbally tell them the answer and they would write it down. That’s the beauty of a teacher understanding that I wasn’t dumb. She’s the incredible person who figured how dyslexia is a superpower.” It’s a word he drops into our conversation frequently, though real-world challenges remain his kryptonite – travelling around London, for instance: “I remember being told to take a certain Tube line and change at Paddington, and I said: ‘Hang on, there are ten stations beginning with P. Which one is Paddington? I couldn’t read the map. I needed help.” Such support improves the further north you go, he says with a smile. Which is doubtless one of the reasons he ended up living in a village on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, the most westerly point of mainland Britain. “I saw my first ever minke whale there, a golden and white-tailed eagle and pine marten, so I knew this was the place to make my home. I was 20 at the time. “I told my parents that I lived in this beautiful, quaint cottage on the west coast of Scotland – in reality I was living in the back of my car for nine months. I would park the car at the ferry port and there was a sign saying ‘No overnight parking’, and I would reverse the car back up on that sign so I would block it and I would get up every morning before the first ferry arrived at 8am. “There was a toilet nearby, there were showers at the camp site. If I wasn’t hiking the hills filming, I was doing odd jobs for local people. I became a gardener; I cleaned houses for money; I chopped logs; I would move furniture – anything that allowed me to stay there.” Did the freezing weather never make him yearn for his native Sudan? His reply tells you much about his mindset. “No, because I thought the cold would make the barn owls want to come out and feed – there was always a positive side to everything.” Alongside his developing ability with a camera, he was also learning new skills. “I worked as a ghillie on a shooting estate where they would cull the deer, which I didn’t mind because deer need to be culled. If you have too many deer you just get a billiard-table landscape. Even though I’m anti- shooting – I want the wildlife to flourish. I was skinning and did a bit of butchery. But for me the main goal was to one day be a cameraman.” Which brings us back to the here and now and RSPB Arne. As we talk, his attention is constantly distracted by birds flying above. He takes pleasure in being able to identify them, mostly using their Latin names. How, if he still has difficulty reading, has he learnt those? “I just listened to the old guys at RSPB reserves and heard them using the names, so I memorised them. It’s a communal language. Does it make me a geek? Yeah, probably. But then a geek is what I aspired to be.” A geek who just happens to be black with dreadlocks – uncut for 23 years, washed twice a week, taking up to five hours to dry. “That was me just rebelling against my mum. Every three weeks we would get a new haircut – number two on the top, one on the side. It’s now part of me, I don’t notice it’s there.” Others do, so has he encountered any racism? “Hell, yeah!” is his instant response. He recalls being stopped by police when driving his mother’s car back in Northampton. He accepted the stop with equanimity. “A young guy with dreadlocks presuming he smokes weed,” he says of the likely police rationale. “Ring my mum if you want to know who the car belongs to,” he remembers telling them. “I was polite. Yes sir, no sir, absolutely.” Other race-based observations are more subtle. “People see me walking into an RSPB reserve and you know they’re thinking: ‘He’s lost.’ You can see the look on their face. I don’t need to bang a drum about it, just show and lead by example. “The people who say, ‘I don’t see colour,’ I say BS. You do see shades, though, and I’m a different shade. I’m not hiding behind it. It’s actually a power for me to be able to show people no matter what walk of life you come from, you can do the thing you love. Go and break the stereotypes. For me, experiencing racism didn’t affect me one bit. Yeah, I felt it. Yeah, it was stupid. Yeah, it was a sad day – but what am I going to do about it? I can sit and doom and gloom about it or I can go about my day and prove them wrong. Sweet. Let’s do the latter. “Racism is a thing. It will continuously happen and I worry for the young children who will suffer it, but my nieces and nephews who are mixed race will know that if Uncle Hamza did it, why can’t I?” Right now, as darkness descends, Yassin is proving his point as he and a five-strong crew film the newly arrived migrant nightjars as they feed on insects on the wing. Yassin has two cameras trained on him while he peers into a third that has the capability of filming in the dark. The rest of us swivel blindly while he describes sightings of the swooping birds, the distinctive rise and fall of their call piercing the heathland silence. It’s the kind of solitude that Yassin clearly craves. Tomorrow he turns the camera on ants who, he says, are “cooler” than humans, then he’ll be heading back to Scotland and the people he calls his “family away from family”. “They got me standing on my own two feet. If I had to write an email to the BBC, for example, they would check it for me. I have people looking after me. This is the beauty of a small community, you have to rely on each other for everything. Whereas people in the cities don’t know who their neighbours are, I can go through the whole village and tell you their names and their kids’ names and what illnesses they have,” he says, referencing work he did during Covid delivering medicines to locals. He still chops logs, gardens and lifts heavy furniture for the 150 people who live in and around the village, but is all this extracurricular activity replacing something that’s missing in his life? “I would love to find someone, but I’ve lived alone since I left uni, so I’m quite content in my own company. Not to say that I’m a loner, I just get on well with myself. But yes, I’d love to share a life with somebody – blonde, tall, short, I really don’t care – somebody who just has a joy for life.” His own joy is expressed with unfiltered passion and a childlike sense of wonder. In the first episode, he actually sees the beauty of nature through the eyes of children as he takes his nieces (then eight and 10) to observe badgers emerging from their sett. The joy in their eyes as the animals playfully romp will doubtless moisten yours – it’s one of the feel-good TV moments of the year. In fact, much like the solace provided by The Blue Planet in the aftermath of the horror of 9/11, this series feels like it’s arriving on our screens at just the right moment. Each seasonally themed episode is a tapestry of short films that are soothing, contemplative, at times deliberately quite slow. There’s a beguiling sequence of nothing but Dawn Chorus birdsong – reminding us of just how rich both countryside and city are with wildlife, much of it hidden – though some in plain sight, and often cherished by local enthusiasts (look out for Nigel, a tearful adder-lover). Yassin’s hope is simple. “If you see someone enthusiastically caring for the natural world, you might say, ‘I wonder what I can do to look after my local patch.’ That’s my aim, that’s my goal.”
Caroline Wyatt gets candid about life with MS - and why she thinks the BBC will endure
A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis disrupted BBC correspondent Caroline Wyatt’s career. But 10 years on she’s unbeaten and still broadcasting.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Caroline Wyatt uses the word “luck” a lot. Lucky to have started out in journalism at a time when the world seemed to be changing for the better. Lucky to still be broadcasting, even though it leaves her exhausted and bed-bound. And, yes, lucky to have only been struck down by what she describes as a “gentler” version of the chronic illness multiple sclerosis. “Some people get it very aggressively from the beginning, so yes, I have been so lucky with the way that my MS has developed.” She’s sunny and speaks with no hint of self-pity, even though she acknowledges, with almost a newsreader’s detachment, that her condition is deteriorating. “I am slowly getting worse and I have got to the stage where I’ve had all the drugs I’m eligible for with the NHS. The thing that I really notice now is the way my brain is changing. I can’t focus and concentrate as much… it’s like accelerated ageing.” She also has to contend with crushing fatigue. “You wake up in the morning feeling as if you haven’t been to bed. And the older I get [she’s 58], the worse it gets.” We last met 10 years ago in her central London flat, where she spoke for the first time about the hospital results confirming she had MS. Today, as that diagnostic anniversary approaches, we’re at the BBC’s HQ, from where she broadcasts a 30-minute version of Radio 4’s PM programme every Saturday. She laughs – as she does frequently – about the support she needs from colleagues in getting the programme on air. “My eyesight is really quite unreliable now, so if I’m nervous or have a lot of adrenaline in my system I find it really hard to read words on a screen. I ask the team to print out a script in big letters, which these days is the equivalent of saying I’m a dinosaur, but it just makes it a lot easier.” Today is also the day that Donald Trump is in town and the world’s broadcast media are in tow. Considering she was the BBC’s woman in Berlin not long after the reunification of East and West Germany, was Moscow correspondent at the time of Putin’s rise to power and the corporation’s first female defence correspondent covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, does she miss the cut and thrust of it all? “A bit,” comes the reply, quickly followed by a story – despite self-proclaimed memory failings she’s a wonderfully detailed storyteller – of why she took her leave of the front line. It was 2014, and in northern Iraq Isis was committing a genocide of the Yazidi people. Wyatt was there as religion correspondent and reporting, as she describes it, “appalling stories of rape, murder and retribution”. “I came home after that and decided I really can’t do that again. I think everyone has a limit and I had reached my limit of witnessing other people’s suffering. I just thought I am really pleased that I have these amazing colleagues who are going to carry on reporting wars and extreme situations, but I can’t do it any more.” Part of it, she acknowledges, was also physical. The as-yet undiagnosed MS was taking its toll. “In those situations you need to be fit enough to get out quite quickly. But I thought if they [Isis] did come to kidnap us, or worse, I couldn’t run.” These days she uses a walking stick to get about and admits to episodes of tripping over “because my foot doesn’t lift in the right way”. Her MS is now classified as “secondary, progressive”, so how does she manage the symptoms? “I try not to fight it and just acknowledge that I need a lot more rest and sleep. If I work on a Saturday, I try not to arrange too much on Sunday and Monday and hope that by Tuesday I can go and see friends. Pacing myself has been a massive lesson that I haven’t quite cracked yet. I still try to do too much and then I crash.” Does she ever despair? “Yeah, of course I get down and depressed and despondent.” What lifts her spirits? “I think friends and family… all the normal things. Being able to talk to other people who understand.” Cue more throaty laughter. “There are four of us women near where I live, all with MS. The hospital we go to got us together and we’re supposed to meet once a month, but because we’ve all got MS we cry off at least every other month!” Her Saturday stint on PM is, she agrees, a lifeline. For all its debilitating aftermath, she still enjoys the challenge of live broadcasting, though admits she had to step back from the hour-long show on Fridays because of exhaustion. “By the end of the programme I was gripping the desk to keep focused. I feel so lucky to still be there and still working. But I don’t know how long it’s going to last, because I don’t know what’s going to happen in health terms or in BBC terms.” Her own future health may be as uncertain as the BBC’s, but she has faith in both. “There are lots of people at my stage of the disease where the thing you need most is hope – that something’s going to come along that will halt or slow down the progression. There’s lots of research going on. I just want them to hurry up.” And what of the BBC? Is it robust enough to withstand the body blows it’s receiving from all sides? “I think it is. I hope it is. I can see that the BBC is in the crosshairs a lot of the time – certainly on social media – but we do live in an age of partisan debate, and having something that’s available to everyone in a society that is increasingly atomised is really important.” What’s important to Wyatt is maintaining a sense of perspective and appreciating there’s much in life still to be enjoyed. Though she rarely travels abroad now, she’s enjoying discovering unfamiliar parts of the UK. A study of her social media feed on X reveals daily repostings of beautiful paintings. She explains: “Algorithmically, I was getting war, killing, death, doom and destruction, so to influence the algorithm I went to other stuff, and that way it feeds me beautiful pictures every morning. Going to art galleries is one of the things I’ve started doing a lot more – sitting, looking and contemplating. It’s been a revelation. Although it’s quite knackering, they’ve got really good cafés – so tea and cake at the end!” More laughter. Her motto is simple: “Be glad, be grateful. One of the things the job taught me was how incredibly lucky we are.” There it is again, that word luck. 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.
Former Strictly favourite Hamza Yassin wants to find love - and shares his struggles with racism
Dyslexia, racism, rough sleeping – nothing stands in the way of wildlife presenter Hamza Yassin and his love of Mother Nature.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Hamza Yassin is, by his own jokey admission, an old man living in a 35-year-old’s body. He’s spurned the bright lights that might attract someone of his age and profile for life in the remotest possible part of mainland Britain, where his core friendship group are of his parents’ generation and where a perfect Saturday night’s entertainment is inviting this “Scottish family” to his house for a film show. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t party. I didn’t understand people at uni going drinking, becoming absolutely mortal then waking up the next day saying, ‘I don’t want to go to the lecture because I’m hung over.’ We calculated back then that every lecture was costing us roughly £300, so why spend £300 lying in bed recovering from a hangover?” He delivers this message of temperance not with any finger-wagging disapproval, rather a sense of bewilderment that anyone would choose shots over shearwaters. “It just seems like a waste of time. Get up and go out into the countryside.” It’s a lifestyle mantra that’s served him well. Apart, of course, from exuberant spins beneath the Strictly glitterball (he won the show in 2022), the countryside is where he’s happiest, and where he is today, talking in the shade of a Scots pine, his calf-length hair tucked beneath a floppy green canvas hat and resting on a stout hazel stick carved 15 years ago when working as a ghillie’s assistant. His description of this period of his life – indeed pretty much the whole of his life in the UK – is a reminder of just how remarkable his personal journey has been. Arriving here from his native Sudan as an eight-year-old with only a handful of words of English (“please, thank you and pizza and chips”), the learning challenges that came with being diagnosed with severe dyslexia, through to sleeping in the back of a car for nine months while learning the fieldcraft skills he’s deploying on this balmy summer evening at the RSPB Arne Nature Reserve in Dorset. View oEmbed on the source website He’s fronting a night-time sequence on the elusive nightjar for a UK-based wildlife series, Hamza’s Hidden Wild Isles, though he insists it’s nature who’s the star. “I’m not a celebrity, I’m just the dude who has fallen in love with Mother Nature. She’s my second love after my mother.” The bond between son and mother is clear. It was her ambition that provided him with the passport – both literal and metaphorical – to the life he now enjoys. Working as a gynaecologist in Sudan, she was invited to the UK to take a job in the NHS. “My mum said I can’t go without my husband [also a doctor] and they said bring your husband along as well. They came here to make sure everything was right – that the NHS was giving them jobs – then a year later they sent for us. “They worked [on rotation] in Newcastle, Whitehaven, Carlisle and then we ended up in Northampton, where they still work very happily today. But it meant that every six to 12 months, we were changing schools.” That would be hard enough for any child, let alone one with limited English and, as yet, undiagnosed dyslexia. Within a few months he says he was forming fluent sentences that teachers could understand. But his reading wasn’t developing at the same speed as his speech. It led to some teasing and bullying, though he dismisses any lasting impact. “That’s just children, isn’t it? My schooling was beautiful and I will be for ever grateful for it.” It wasn’t until his parents arranged for him to attend the independent Wellingborough School and he came to the attention of a teacher called Mrs Strange that the penny dropped. “I remember Mrs Strange saying, ‘Hamza I think you’re dyslexic.’ I remember crying and saying, ‘When’s the wheelchair going to arrive?’ She said, ‘What do you mean?’ And I said, ‘You said I was dyslexic, which means I’ll be paralysed and in a wheelchair.’ And she said, ‘No that’s disabled, Hamza. It means it’s hard to read and write.’” The diagnosis was liberating. With strategies in place he sailed through exams that otherwise he would have found impossible. “I had a reader and a scribe in exams. Someone would read me the question, I would verbally tell them the answer and they would write it down. That’s the beauty of a teacher understanding that I wasn’t dumb. She’s the incredible person who figured how dyslexia is a superpower.” It’s a word he drops into our conversation frequently, though real-world challenges remain his kryptonite – travelling around London, for instance: “I remember being told to take a certain Tube line and change at Paddington, and I said: ‘Hang on, there are ten stations beginning with P. Which one is Paddington? I couldn’t read the map. I needed help.” Such support improves the further north you go, he says with a smile. Which is doubtless one of the reasons he ended up living in a village on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, the most westerly point of mainland Britain. “I saw my first ever minke whale there, a golden and white-tailed eagle and pine marten, so I knew this was the place to make my home. I was 20 at the time. “I told my parents that I lived in this beautiful, quaint cottage on the west coast of Scotland – in reality I was living in the back of my car for nine months. I would park the car at the ferry port and there was a sign saying ‘No overnight parking’, and I would reverse the car back up on that sign so I would block it and I would get up every morning before the first ferry arrived at 8am. “There was a toilet nearby, there were showers at the camp site. If I wasn’t hiking the hills filming, I was doing odd jobs for local people. I became a gardener; I cleaned houses for money; I chopped logs; I would move furniture – anything that allowed me to stay there.” Did the freezing weather never make him yearn for his native Sudan? His reply tells you much about his mindset. “No, because I thought the cold would make the barn owls want to come out and feed – there was always a positive side to everything.” Alongside his developing ability with a camera, he was also learning new skills. “I worked as a ghillie on a shooting estate where they would cull the deer, which I didn’t mind because deer need to be culled. If you have too many deer you just get a billiard-table landscape. Even though I’m anti- shooting – I want the wildlife to flourish. I was skinning and did a bit of butchery. But for me the main goal was to one day be a cameraman.” Which brings us back to the here and now and RSPB Arne. As we talk, his attention is constantly distracted by birds flying above. He takes pleasure in being able to identify them, mostly using their Latin names. How, if he still has difficulty reading, has he learnt those? “I just listened to the old guys at RSPB reserves and heard them using the names, so I memorised them. It’s a communal language. Does it make me a geek? Yeah, probably. But then a geek is what I aspired to be.” A geek who just happens to be black with dreadlocks – uncut for 23 years, washed twice a week, taking up to five hours to dry. “That was me just rebelling against my mum. Every three weeks we would get a new haircut – number two on the top, one on the side. It’s now part of me, I don’t notice it’s there.” Others do, so has he encountered any racism? “Hell, yeah!” is his instant response. He recalls being stopped by police when driving his mother’s car back in Northampton. He accepted the stop with equanimity. “A young guy with dreadlocks presuming he smokes weed,” he says of the likely police rationale. “Ring my mum if you want to know who the car belongs to,” he remembers telling them. “I was polite. Yes sir, no sir, absolutely.” Other race-based observations are more subtle. “People see me walking into an RSPB reserve and you know they’re thinking: ‘He’s lost.’ You can see the look on their face. I don’t need to bang a drum about it, just show and lead by example. “The people who say, ‘I don’t see colour,’ I say BS. You do see shades, though, and I’m a different shade. I’m not hiding behind it. It’s actually a power for me to be able to show people no matter what walk of life you come from, you can do the thing you love. Go and break the stereotypes. For me, experiencing racism didn’t affect me one bit. Yeah, I felt it. Yeah, it was stupid. Yeah, it was a sad day – but what am I going to do about it? I can sit and doom and gloom about it or I can go about my day and prove them wrong. Sweet. Let’s do the latter. “Racism is a thing. It will continuously happen and I worry for the young children who will suffer it, but my nieces and nephews who are mixed race will know that if Uncle Hamza did it, why can’t I?” Right now, as darkness descends, Yassin is proving his point as he and a five-strong crew film the newly arrived migrant nightjars as they feed on insects on the wing. Yassin has two cameras trained on him while he peers into a third that has the capability of filming in the dark. The rest of us swivel blindly while he describes sightings of the swooping birds, the distinctive rise and fall of their call piercing the heathland silence. It’s the kind of solitude that Yassin clearly craves. Tomorrow he turns the camera on ants who, he says, are “cooler” than humans, then he’ll be heading back to Scotland and the people he calls his “family away from family”. “They got me standing on my own two feet. If I had to write an email to the BBC, for example, they would check it for me. I have people looking after me. This is the beauty of a small community, you have to rely on each other for everything. Whereas people in the cities don’t know who their neighbours are, I can go through the whole village and tell you their names and their kids’ names and what illnesses they have,” he says, referencing work he did during Covid delivering medicines to locals. He still chops logs, gardens and lifts heavy furniture for the 150 people who live in and around the village, but is all this extracurricular activity replacing something that’s missing in his life? “I would love to find someone, but I’ve lived alone since I left uni, so I’m quite content in my own company. Not to say that I’m a loner, I just get on well with myself. But yes, I’d love to share a life with somebody – blonde, tall, short, I really don’t care – somebody who just has a joy for life.” His own joy is expressed with unfiltered passion and a childlike sense of wonder. In the first episode, he actually sees the beauty of nature through the eyes of children as he takes his nieces (then eight and 10) to observe badgers emerging from their sett. The joy in their eyes as the animals playfully romp will doubtless moisten yours – it’s one of the feel-good TV moments of the year. In fact, much like the solace provided by The Blue Planet in the aftermath of the horror of 9/11, this series feels like it’s arriving on our screens at just the right moment. Each seasonally themed episode is a tapestry of short films that are soothing, contemplative, at times deliberately quite slow. There’s a beguiling sequence of nothing but Dawn Chorus birdsong – reminding us of just how rich both countryside and city are with wildlife, much of it hidden – though some in plain sight, and often cherished by local enthusiasts (look out for Nigel, a tearful adder-lover). Yassin’s hope is simple. “If you see someone enthusiastically caring for the natural world, you might say, ‘I wonder what I can do to look after my local patch.’ That’s my aim, that’s my goal.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Hamza'a Hidden Wild Isles begins at 6:15pm on Sunday 12th October 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 TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
She was an anti-science Creationist but Ella Al-Shamahi now champions palaeoanthropology and is making some startling discoveries about our ancestors
Add Human to your watchlist If it wasn’t a true story, you might think the philosophical transformation undergone by scientist-cum-comedian Ella Al-Shamahi was a tall tale from one of her stand-up routines. A Brummie of Yemeni/Syrian descent, Al-Shamahi was once an emboldened Creationist who toured the country trying to dismantle theories about evolution. This week she’s presenting a major new BBC2 series on, you’ve guessed it, human evolution. It’s the latest chapter in an eventful life story that started with a deeply conservative Muslim upbringing, her faith-over-science activism, an arranged marriage that ended in divorce, a breakdown and then, in her late 20s, embracing a secular lifestyle and latterly the job of palaeoanthropologist. “Yeah, it’s been a very complicated journey,” the presenter of documentaries like Neanderthals: Meet Your Ancestors (2018) admits with a smile that frequently bursts like a firecracker into uncontrolled laughter. Not an exclusively human trait, but one that disarmingly punctuates our conversation. To understand this latest stopping point on her remarkable journey – the five-part BBC2 documentary Human – we have to start with the teenage Al-Shamahi. So persuaded was she of the “lies” being spoken by scientists about evolution that she travelled the country with like-minded friends giving pro-faith, anti-science Creationist talks. Was she ever one of those door-to-door nuisances? “No, I never did door to door,” she howls hysterically. But what she did do, almost unbelievably, was sign up to a degree course in genetics and evolution just so she could, as she says, “destroy it from the inside”. It was, she admits now, the “arrogance” of youth. “I thought we were effectively being lied to and I could overturn the theory.” Where did such certainty come from? “I grew up in a Creationist community so the reason why I didn’t believe in evolution was because my community didn’t believe in evolution. I became a missionary and we were very devout and wished for other people to become more religious, much like missionaries in other religious groups.” It wasn’t until she was 28 that the doubts she’d been increasingly wrestling with finally transitioned into acceptance of the science she now champions. “There wasn’t one trigger. It was years of me looking at it and examining it. I realised it was a really solid theory and the data couldn’t be explained in any other way.” But she insists faith and evolutionary science can still happily co-exist. “Part of the reason I do this is that I don’t want people to feel like it’s either ideology or it’s science. There has to be a space for everybody.” Embracing the science she had been so defiantly dismissive of naturally put her at odds with those she had grown up with. “It did come at great personal cost to me,” she says. “It meant that I made the difficult decision to leave the missionary community I had belonged to.” Other changes were happening in her life too. She was starting to embrace a more western, liberal lifestyle, which meant learning a whole new set of social skills, as she told her friend Dan Schreiber on his podcast We Can Be Weirdos (well worth an hour of your time). Dating was a particular challenge. “Up until my 20s [in her book The Handshake she says it was 26] I wasn’t even shaking hands with men. I had no idea how to behave [on a date]. It was just terror. A friend of mine sort of took me on as a project. One of the things I was really stressed about was this kiss that’s supposed to happen at the end. When am I supposed to kiss him? I came from a world of rules, so I wanted rules. He literally had to give me a formula because it was the only thing I could understand. I am so glad that is over because that was too much.” If it was too much for her, it would unquestionably have been too much for her devout father. Already an emerging stand-up comedian, she adopted the stage name of Ella Murray because, as she told Schrieber, “I have really dodgy jokes and I didn’t want my dad to come across any of them.” Ironically, protecting him from the other excesses he would have observed in her new life was what persuaded her to find a parallel pathway between the science she was now immersed in and TV. That way, she thought, “when my parents watch my TV shows they’ll go, ‘Oh, she may be wearing a crop top, but at least she is talking about science.’ ” And talking about science – specifically the ascendancy of us Homo sapiens – is what she’ll be doing over the next five weeks on BBC2. The story starts 300,000 years ago with up to seven species of human, including us, Neanderthals and so-called Hobbits thought to be roaming the planet, though Al-Shamahi adds: “It’s worth saying that some of us really do think that’s the tip of the iceberg. That there’s more we will find.” The reasons why the Magnificent Seven became the Solitary One is what underpins the series and if your reaction to some of the anthropological inference is “how can they possibly know that?”, Al-Shamahi understands your scepticism. “I think it’s really important people ask that question. We are very careful in this series to never say for certain ‘this is definitely this’. None of us were there, sadly. Science is just a set of data points and this is our best interpretation at the moment.” That said, the scripts have been overseen by 20 different specialist consultants and the 3D representations of the human species we see on screen are said to be the most accurate to exist. Al-Shamahi is particularly intrigued by the fraternising now known to have occurred between Homo sapiens, who were migrating from what is now Africa and into Europe, and the Neanderthals who were already established there. Would they have known they were different, but related? “I think they must have seen themselves as different,” she says. “When you look at the fossil records, what you see is even if Neanderthal and Homo sapiens are in the same area they don’t mix, except that every so often they are interbreeding [most of us in the UK today have two per cent Neanderthal DNA]. And without getting too dark, what was that interbreeding about? Was it a survival thing or was it a thing with the bad boy next door? Would the mother have been like, ‘Oh my God, I hope that child doesn’t look too much like a Neanderthal.’ Would the child themselves have felt included or confused?” We now know that Neanderthals died out about 40,000 years ago, giving Homo sapiens a clear run at domination. But what caused them to become extinct? A bombshell awaits — a new-found ability to weave could have been one of the contributing factors! “The argument is that if you can weave, you not just have better fishing nets, but you can give your babies warmer clothes. Even a one per cent difference in survival rates back then, with such small populations, can equal a lot.” Al-Shamahi, who’s now 41 and in her spare time observes archaeological digs in politically hostile places, hopes the series will fire a new fascination with the story of humankind. “If there’s one thing, it’s just how absolutely epic and incredible our story is.” Not dissimilar to her own then.
Tom Parfett took his own life after joining a suicide forum and buying poison online. His father David is now on a mission to get answers
Add Poisoned: Killer in the Post to your watchlist David Parfett’s 22-year-old son Tom, described by his university as “exceptionally bright, much loved and with so much potential”, took his own life in October 2021. He had purchased a poisonous substance online that was delivered through the post in an A5-sized package and which he diluted, then drank, in the room of a Premier Inn hotel in Surrey. “It asphyxiates you from the inside,” Parfett, 57, says matter-of-factly, the language of paternal love displaced by that of cold pathology. “You are in agony for a while and then you fall unconscious. Within two or three hours you’ll be dead.” Parfett knew that his son was struggling with his mental health – a few weeks earlier he had expressed a wish to die – but he is adamant that, with the right support, Tom could have controlled his demons. “He was always going to have his challenges but there was so much going for him.” What Parfett didn’t know was that Tom had been a member of an online forum on which suicidal people were encouraged to kill themselves. Also, there was a man in Canada who was selling them the means with which to do so. “This guy knew what he was doing,” says Parfett. “He might not have been in the room to force the substance down my son’s throat, but near as damn it he was.” The man in question is Kenneth Law. In the UK alone, it’s thought that 97 people may have died as a result of buying this poison (which does have a legitimate commercial use but which we’re not naming) from him. Because of Parfett’s disquiet about the manner of his son’s death, and what he saw as a police failure in examining it more thoroughly, he contacted The Times newspaper. Their subsequent investigation led to Law being arrested by Ontario police. He’s now accused of 14 charges of first-degree murder and assisting suicide relating to deaths in the province. He has pleaded not guilty and is due to stand trial next year. A new two-part Channel 4 documentary follows Times journalist James Beal as he investigates the story. Eventually his digging leads him to Law. Posing as a potential customer, he quizzes Law over the phone about the effectiveness of the substance he’s selling. “What are the chances it will kill me?” Beal asks. “There’s a very, very high probability,” Law replies. “And people in the UK have died?” Beal follows up. “Yes. People in the UK have died. People in the US and Canada have died.” Later, when Beal flies to Toronto to challenge Law about his toxic trade, the hotel chef defends his actions, saying, “They are committing suicide for themselves. I am not doing anything. I am just selling a product.” It’s the online sale of such products that Parfett wants to see banned. “I want the social norm to be that you cannot do things on the internet that you can’t do on the high street. We have to ensure that products like this cannot be sold to individuals and that we regulate poisonous substances being imported from outside the UK.” He also wants the administrators of forums like the one his son joined to be charged with complicity in any resulting deaths. “They are normalising suicide and encouraging you to take your own life, to the extent that they celebrate when someone does take their life.” Parfett has seen a transcript of his son Tom’s final words, posted on the forum as he was dying. “I read those last words quite often,” he says. “I can almost hear him and in some ways that’s quite comforting.” However, it’s the endorsement of his son’s actions by others on the forum that has so angered him. As Tom describes taking the poison, his heart beating “fast” and having to “breathe really hard”, he is told, “See you on the other side.” “This is a man dying,” says Parfett. “Nobody looks to call an ambulance, nobody looks to help him. Those people would know there is an antidote that would work if administered within a couple of hours. And they do nothing. It does make you question humanity.” Last month Parfett, a head of data, remarried after separating from Tom’s mum ten years ago. It was a ceremony tinged with the sadness of loss. “The wedding gave me an opportunity to talk about my son. But the underlying emotion was, ‘Why isn’t he sitting here?’ He would be 26 now. He would be a different man to the 22-year-old we lost.” If you or someone you know is affected by the issues raised, Samaritans can offer support. Call free on 116 123
An award-winning film by Charlie Hamilton James explores the relationship between a wild otter and the man who saved her
Add Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story to your watchlist Film-maker Charlie Hamilton James made the first of many trips to Shetland as a 16-year-old to photograph otters. “I was a weird teenager. I craved the solitude I could find with nature and I was obsessed with otters!” His subsequent career has seen him behind the camera on some of David Attenborough’s biggest natural history series and, more recently, travelling the globe as a stills photographer with National Geographic magazine. View oEmbed on the source website However, it was because of his Shetland connections that Hamilton James – whom RT readers might remember from his BBC series My Halcyon River and Halcyon River Diaries made with his now ex-wife and former TV presenter Philippa Forrester – was made aware of an extraordinary relationship that was developing between an orphaned otter pup and a couple who discovered her near their waterside home on Shetland and named her Molly. So captivated was he by what he heard that he dropped everything and spent a year there filming. The award-winning result – Billy and Molly: an Otter Love Story – has just scooped the Golden Panda award at the wildlife equivalent of the Oscars, and tells the story of a young orphaned otter rescued by Billy Mail, a 57-year-old former oil industry engineer who found her weak and dying and, with his wife Susan, 59, helped bring her – and himself – back to health and happiness. BILLY'S STORY It was March 2021; I was looking out of the window and I saw this otter in the sea in front of the house, diving and catching food and taking it onto the pontoon and eating it. I could see she was really thin, you could see her bones sticking out, so for me it was natural to help her. I hate seeing animals suffering and I may be humanising them, but an animal can’t understand why a bad thing is happening to it — whereas a human being can rationalise it. I had no real idea what I was doing, but I knew feeding an animal that was going to die of starvation couldn’t be a bad thing. I started putting fish out and the fish would disappear. Within a month she got used to the idea that there was a human being who was giving her food. She was young, playful and curious — we even got the impression that she liked company. We’d be sitting on the lawn having a cup of tea and she would just come, lie on the lawn and roll on the grass — almost hanging out with us. To have something as unique as we had with Molly and to resist the temptation to domesticate her was quite hard. It’s difficult not to become affectionate and let her get under your skin and into your heart. But we knew that she was still a wild otter and, for her not to become dependent on us, I would need to stop feeding her. I had to let her go. Although she would frequently disappear for days, she did at one point go missing for weeks. Naturally, there was a worry that maybe she had died and I guess that, having stopped feeding her, I would have felt partly responsible for that. But then one snowy night she returned and it was just a lovely moment — it was almost like a reunion of friends. Award-winning film Billy & Molly explores the special bond between an otter and the man who saved hero help an animal go from the point of death to being a healthy functioning otter, and then to see her producing her own offspring, was so rewarding. I had helped her to become a happy, nurturing mother. I could never have children myself and I suppose the film does suggest Molly was filling a void in my life. But I have never been the kind of person to actively do something to fill that gap. I love wildlife… when they’re not present, dare I say it, there’s something missing. Today, Molly is older, a bit less playful, more serious. She still comes for food now and again, especially during winter. And she brings her youngster with her. It’s like she’s saying, “I remember what happened here”.
The Grand Tour producer talks bringing down the chequered flag on its motoring musketeers
As Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May drive off into the sunset, the showrunner behind their success, Andy Wilman, reflects on the trio's affectionate chemistry.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. And so here we wait at the finishing line, about to observe the last lap, the final flourish, of those three motoring musketeers Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. After 22 years of working together, and back at their favourite destination, they take the chequered flag with the promise that this truly is the end of the road. No reunions, no comeback specials – that's it. Job done. The fourth musketeer – and, like D'Artagnan, arguably the most important – says they didn't want to go out with a trademark big bang, but a warmly affectionate celebration of their friendship. And that's true. At times this final Grand Tour special feels like a love story that's taken two decades to consummate. "With this one we felt we should leave the dynamite at home, that no high jinks should get in the way of them saying goodbye," says Andy Wilman, the creative, behind-the-camera powerhouse for all those 22 years. "It's more gentle, more reflective and I think they brought their A game with their conversation and their banter, which was wonderful. Their friendship is fully on display." The depth of that friendship – underpinned by merciless mockery – is evident like never before. Richard Hammond will do well to unburden himself of the nickname Buttons, so called because of Clarkson and May's conviction that he will serve out his post-programme life in panto. That said, he does get to deliver one of the best lines of the show as he reflects whimsically on its demise. "We don't have to all go to the same old folks' home, do we?" It brought Wilman to tears, mostly the laughter sort. "I thought, 'I love you three, because only you three can say goodbye in this way. You are clearly sad, but you are robust about it. You are taking the piss to the very end.'" The backdrop to this final outing – and at two hours and ten minutes it’s a very long last lap – is an east-west drive across Zimbabwe in the three cars they've always wanted to get behind the wheel of – a Lancia Montecarlo (Clarkson) a Ford Capri (Hammond) and a Triumph Stag (May). It ends with a cross-border dash across the salt plains of Botswana to Kubu Island, a crescent-shaped area of rocks they last visited 17 years ago and a place they still cherish. As Wilman indicates, there are very few stunts. A VW Beetle is ritually sacrificed in an outrageous piece of mountainside theatre and there's a moment when the programme trolls itself with Clarkson being reprimanded by May for describing the inside of his car as "like the black hole of Calcutta". "You can't say that," May tells him, concealing a smirk. There are plenty of mechanical breakdowns and just as many ingenious solutions. There's also breathtaking scenery – perhaps it's a sign of his countryside conversion that Clarkson sighs longingly at the beauty of the Jacaranda trees outside Harare. The question is then, why quit now? Back to Wilman. "I think the most important reason, certainly for me, was that I know we're past our peak, but we're still standing and we're still wanted. "So, the natural thing then is to go – wouldn't it be amazing if we land the plane under our own terms rather than pilot it into a mountain with the viewers all going, 'Would you please just f**k off?' So, I'm very pleased that we've brought it to an end on our own terms and I'm very pleased that we will have an audience to watch it." Read more: Jeremy Clarkson says Top Gear wouldn't get made now with "3 middle-aged, middle-class men" Jeremy Clarkson reveals why he quit The Grand Tour after 8 years Wilman says that he attributes the audience's affection to the on-screen chemistry created among the three presenters, but it's right to say that's due in no small part to his special brand of editing alchemy. "As humans they're all on the same wavelength and are all fantastic at self-deprecation. They are male but they are never macho. If we'd had somebody macho that would have been a disaster. And they are not that. They came as a package that was very charming. "And I am massively generalising here, but girls do find nerds attractive. And that was Richard, James and Jeremy. People thought they were like Morecambe and Wise living in that house together in their striped pyjamas – slightly weird and harmless but quite funny." For a man who professes to be only "moderately interested" in cars and who failed his driving test three times, Wilman is an unlikely flag-bearer for Top Gear and, latterly, Grand Tour. But both shows bear his formidable imprint. In the 1990s, he was a presenter on one of the many incarnations of Top Gear, having been given a significant professional leg-up by his Repton schoolboy chum – and since lifelong friend – Clarkson. Wilman says that their shared experiences at Repton helped create the template for the Top Gear show they were to revive for the BBC in 2002 and subsequently with Amazon for Grand Tour after Clarkson was sacked by the BBC in 2015. "We both had egos and wanted to be liked and noticed. "We could make people laugh by getting into trouble. We were funnier than most with our getting into trouble and that carried on into the shows we made." Wilman accepts now that some of the trouble his Top Gear created was regrettable. Though if you'd like a fulsome apology he's probably the wrong person. "Sometimes we stepped over the line and we did need a proper slap, but most of the times when we got into trouble, the viewers were like, 'Well, nobody's died – it's fine.' "None of our shows were ever going to be vanilla. The amount of times people would say, 'Oh, would you do electric cars or alternative transport?' for balance. And you're like, 'We're making a f**king car show. Do the Two Fat Ladies do balance – do they make a salad after they've made a steak and kidney pie?' You know good telly only exists without balance. Leave that for the news." If you detect a bullish streak in Wilman's otherwise cheerily matey demeanour, you'd be right. He made it clear ahead of the interview that he had no interest in picking out highlights. So, what about low lights? He strikes a more sombre tone as he recalls the 2006 crash that almost cost Richard Hammond his life. "It's still burned in my brain. "I have never felt fear and panic like that. You are completely helpless and completely angry and frustrated that you're making an eight-minute TV item and he's a father, critically ill in a hospital bed." There are clear parallels with Freddie Flintoff's accident, which caused the BBC to suspend production of Top Gear. Does Wilman think it will come back? "What happened to Freddie was terrible and it's wonderful to see him back [with Freddie Flintoff's Field of Dreams]. "Top Gear coming back is a different question. I don't think the BBC has the will to make a car show. I don't think they're interested in the topic, or that there's anyone interested in doing it." Meanwhile, the closing scenes of this Grand Tour episode provide a fitting finale to the adventures of Clarkson, May and Hammond (the show is set to continue on Amazon Prime Video with Wilman involved but with new hosts). As all three race across the Botswana salt plains – car doors off, goggles and face scarves firmly in place for protection – Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms provides the soundtrack. Then, as the credits roll, with informal shots of the production team hugging and shaking hands, it's George Harrison's My Sweet Lord that plays out. Says Wilman: "I wanted something that had melancholy but that was uplifting and said, 'Hey, we had some great times,' and I thought My Sweet Lord did that. It gives you permission to lift. It's so beautifully written – you'll still have a tear in your eye." View oEmbed on the source website It was, says Wilman, a "weepy" last few days of filming. Even the normally stoney-faced Clarkson was moved. "The saddest I've seen Jeremy was when I sent him a cut of the film and he watched the ending and that really shook him." Wilman likens the production to a touring band – each series is a new album, each episode a new track. We continue the music analogy and I ask which band would Top Gear/Grand Tour be. The Beatles perhaps? He counters, laughing loudly, with "Eddie and the Hot Rods. I don't want a headline quoting me saying, 'We're as big as the Beatles.'" And, like all bands, presumably there were some disagreements? "We were grumpy at times and probably got on each other's nerves, but it was still a very tight, close-knit band – we would turn on anybody who came near us from the outside. It's a dysfunctional set-up, but it's our dysfunctional set-up." So is he certain that this Fab Four won't reunite for a 'one night only' revival? "There won't be any Status Quo farewell tour. There really won't. "We were scared we were running out of ideas. Jeremy says, 'I'm 63 and I've got a granddaughter,' and he's so happy on the farm. We will never do this again, but how lucky have we been." The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Grand Tour: One for the Road is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video. Try Amazon Prime Video for free for 30 days. Plus, read our guides to the best Amazon Prime series and the best movies on Amazon Prime. Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
As Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May drive off into the sunset, the showrunner behind their success, Andy Wilman, bids them a fond farewell
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in September 2024. The Grand Tour: One for the Road is available from Friday. Add it to your watchlist And so here we wait at the finishing line, about to observe the last lap, the final flourish, of those three motoring musketeers Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. After 22 years of working together, and back at their favourite destination, they take the chequered flag with the promise that this truly is the end of the road. No reunions, no comeback specials – that’s it. Job done. The fourth musketeer – and, like D’Artagnan, arguably the most important – says they didn’t want to go out with a trademark big bang, but a warmly affectionate celebration of their friendship. And that’s true. At times this final Grand Tour special feels like a love story that’s taken two decades to consummate. “With this one we felt we should leave the dynamite at home, that no high jinks should get in the way of them saying goodbye,” says Andy Wilman, the creative, behind-the-camera powerhouse for all those 22 years. “It’s more gentle, more reflective and I think they brought their A game with their conversation and their banter, which was wonderful. Their friendship is fully on display.” The depth of that friendship – underpinned by merciless mockery – is evident like never before. Richard Hammond will do well to unburden himself of the nickname Buttons, so called because of Clarkson and May’s conviction that he will serve out his post-programme life in panto. That said, he does get to deliver one of the best lines of the show as he reflects whimsically on its demise. “We don’t have to all go to the same old folk’s home, do we?” View oEmbed on the source website It brought Wilman to tears, mostly the laughter sort. “I thought, ‘I love you three, because only you three can say goodbye in this way. You are clearly sad, but you are robust about it. You are taking the piss to the very end.’” The backdrop to this final outing – and at two hours and ten minutes it’s a very long last lap – is an east-west drive across Zimbabwe in the three cars they’ve always wanted to get behind the wheel of – a Lancia Montecarlo (Clarkson) a Ford Capri (Hammond) and a Triumph Stag (May). It ends with a cross-border dash across the salt plains of Botswana to Kubu Island, a crescent-shaped area of rocks they last visited 17 years ago and a place they still cherish. As Wilman indicates, there are very few stunts. A VW Beetle is ritually sacrificed in an outrageous piece of mountainside theatre and there’s a moment when the programme trolls itself with Clarkson being reprimanded by May for describing the inside of his car as “like the black hole of Calcutta”. “You can’t say that,” May tells him, concealing a smirk. There are plenty of mechanical breakdowns and just as many ingenious solutions. There’s also breathtaking scenery – perhaps it’s a sign of his countryside conversion that Clarkson sighs longingly at the beauty of the Jacaranda trees outside Harare. The question is then, why quit now? Back to Wilman. “I think the most important reason, certainly for me, was that I know we’re past our peak, but we’re still standing and we’re still wanted. So, the natural thing then is to go – wouldn’t it be amazing if we land the plane under our own terms rather than pilot it into a mountain with the viewers all going, ‘Would you please just f *** off ’. So, I’m very pleased that we’ve brought it to an end on our own terms and I’m very pleased that we will have an audience to watch it.” Wilman says that he attributes the audience’s affection to the on-screen chemistry created among the three presenters, but it’s right to say that’s due in no small part to his special brand of editing alchemy. “As humans they’re all on the same wavelength and are all fantastic at self-deprecation. They are male but they are never macho. If we’d had somebody macho that would have been a disaster. And they are not that. They came as a package that was very charming. “And I am massively generalising here, but girls do find nerds attractive. And that was Richard, James and Jeremy. People thought they were like Morecambe and Wise living in that house together in their striped pyjamas – slightly weird and harmless but quite funny.” For a man who professes to be only “moderately interested” in cars and who failed his driving test three times Wilman is an unlikely flag-bearer for Top Gear and, latterly, Grand Tour. But both shows bear his formidable imprint. In the 1990s, he was a presenter on one of the many incarnations of Top Gear, having been given a significant professional leg-up by his Repton schoolboy chum – and since lifelong friend – Clarkson. Wilman says that their shared experiences at Repton helped create the template for the Top Gear show they were to revive for the BBC in 2002 and subsequently with Amazon for Grand Tour after Clarkson was sacked by the BBC in 2015. “We both had egos and wanted to be liked and noticed. We could make people laugh by getting into trouble. We were funnier than most with our getting into trouble and that carried on into the shows we made.” Wilman accepts now that some of the trouble his Top Gear created was regrettable. Though if you’d like a fulsome apology he’s probably the wrong person. “Sometimes we stepped over the line and we did need a proper slap, but most of the times when we got into trouble, the viewers were like, ‘Well, nobody’s died – it’s fine.’ “None of our shows were ever going to be vanilla. The amount of times people would say, ‘Oh, would you do electric cars or alternative transport?’ for balance. And you’re like, ‘We’re making a f ***ing car show. Do the Two Fat Ladies do balance – do they make a salad after they’ve made a steak and kidney pie?’ You know good telly only exists without balance. Leave that for the news.” If you detect a bullish streak in Wilman’s otherwise cheerily matey demeanour, you’d be right. He made it clear ahead of the interview that he had no interest in picking out highlights. So, what about low lights? He strikes a more sombre tone as he recalls the 2006 crash that almost cost Richard Hammond his life. “It’s still burned in my brain. I have never felt fear and panic like that. You are completely helpless and completely angry and frustrated that you’re making an eight-minute TV item and he’s a father, critically ill in a hospital bed.” There are clear parallels with Freddie Flintoff ’s accident, which caused the BBC to suspend production of Top Gear. Does Wilman think it will come back? “What happened to Freddie was terrible and it’s wonderful to see him back [with Freddie Flintoff ’s Field of Dreams]. Top Gear coming back is a different question. I don’t think the BBC has the will to make a car show. I don’ t think they’re interested in the topic, or that there’s anyone interested in doing it.” Meanwhile, the closing scenes of this Grand Tour episode provide a fitting finale to the adventures of Clarkson, May and Hammond (the show is set to continue on Amazon Prime with Wilman involved but with new hosts). As all three race across the Botswana salt plains – car doors off, goggles and face scarves firmly in place for protection – Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms provides the soundtrack. Then, as the credits roll, with informal shots of the production team hugging and shaking hands, it’s George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord that plays out. Says Wilman: “I wanted something that had melancholy but that was uplifting and said, ‘Hey, we had some great times,’ and I thought My Sweet Lord did that. It gives you permission to lift. It’s so beautifully written – you’ll still have a tear in your eye.” It was, says Wilman, a “weepy” last few days of filming. Even the normally stoney-faced Clarkson was moved. “The saddest I’ve seen Jeremy was when I sent him a cut of the film and he watched the ending and that really shook him.” Wilman likens the production to a touring band – each series is a new album, each episode a new track. We continue the music analogy and I ask which band would Top Gear/Grand Tour be. The Beatles perhaps? He counters, laughing loudly, with “Eddie and the Hot Rods. I don’t want a headline quoting me saying ‘We’re as big as the Beatles.’” And, like all bands, presumably there were some disagreements? “We were grumpy at times and probably got on each other’s nerves, but it was still a very tight, close-knit band – we would turn on anybody who came near us from the outside. It’s a dysfunctional set-up, but it’s our dysfunctional set-up.” So is he certain that this Fab Four won’t reunite for a ‘one night only’ revival? “There won’t be any Status Quo farewell tour. There really won’t. We were scared we were running out of ideas. Jeremy says, ‘I’m 63 and I’ve got a granddaughter,’ and he’s so happy on the farm. We will never do this again, but how lucky have we been.”
As Match of the Day turns 60, former presenter Des Lynam reflects on all things footie – from Gary Lineker to VAR and female pundits
Des Lynam is bemoaning the march of time. The twinkle-eyed charmer who once joked about a life of ‘fast women and slow horses’ is starting to creak. He stopped swimming in the sea off his south-coast home several years ago, now it’s the golf he’s had to pack up. “When you get to the age of 80 – I can’t believe I’m even saying it – the machinery starts breaking down. My eyesight’s not so good, my back’s gone… the body that you’ve been given to live in wasn’t designed to last this long, I don’t think.” It’s a rare maudlin moment. Lynam is actually 81 (he turns 82 in September) and while he’s happy to talk about the past he doesn’t want to live in it. I wonder, though, does he keep any mementos of all those special sporting occasions he had the privilege of observing during six decades of broadcasting? It turns out not. “We moved house recently and I dug out a box of all the press accreditations I had from all around the world. I threw them all out. The past is the past, I’m interested in the present and the future,” he says. OK, so for the time being let’s stick with the present. This month sees the 60th anniversary of Match of the Day. Lynam presented what has become the world’s longest running football show between 1988-1999. Is he still a fan? “I never miss it,” he says, then adds, “It’s a total misnomer, really, isn’t it? Match of the Day worked for Kenneth Wolstenholme, who presented it between 1964 and 1967 because they only did one match, but now it’s every match. So, it’s the wrong title, but they’re not going to change it now because it has such a great cachet.” And what does he make of Gary Lineker, who was a fresh-faced punditry sidekick when he was host, and after 25 years in the hot seat is, by quite some distance, the longest-serving MotD presenter. “He wasn’t comfortable (as a pundit) at the beginning,” says Lynam. “Of course he’s been highly critical of the England team in the Euros but when he first came on he wouldn’t criticise anybody. When I left, he immediately got the job and he grew into it very rapidly. I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but for my money I think he does a first-class job.” When Lynam quit, it was an audacious piece of cross-channel poaching by ITV. Does he regret his decision to jump ship? “They [the BBC] were overworking me at the time, I was doing everything, which was very complimentary but also wearing. ITV came in and offered much less work and extraordinary money, which I couldn’t refuse. With hindsight I should have thought about it a bit longer. I missed doing Match of the Day. It belongs there at the BBC. If they ever get rid of it, or can’t afford it, they’re finished.” Someone who is finished, at least on MotD, is the infectiously enthusiastic Ian Wright, known to colleagues as ‘Wrighty’, who left after 27 years on the team, saying that it was time to “have a break”. Lynam thinks he’ll be a big loss. “It’s a shame, because he has developed into a first-class broadcaster and pundit. He speaks from the heart and people like that. He’s never bland. He made his first appearance on MotD when I was there. He came on, as a player, and said ‘Des, this is my Graceland’ because he’d watched it since he was a boy.” So, which of the existing team should step up to fill his shoes? Speaking before it’s revealed that Joe Hart and Theo Walcott will be pundits/presenters, he names his favourite, although there’s a deliciously gentle, Lynam-esque, sideswipe. “I think it’s Micah Richards, isn’t it? He’s got a sense of humour and he knows football. Obviously he’s played for England and Manchester City, though he didn’t make a huge mark on me playing for either. I think he needs to calm down a little, but his opinions are quite solid, though I don’t think anybody can quite match Wrighty.” When Lynam first joined the BBC as a sports reporter aged 26 in 1969 his annual salary was £2,030. It’s a meaningless, though nonetheless entertaining, comparison, but Lineker, on £1.3million a year, makes in a few hours what it took Lynam 12 months to earn. Is he worth it? “I don’t suppose you can justify it in terms of what a nurse or firemen does, but it’s the market – that’s what the BBC feel they have to pay to get his services. You can’t say that anybody saying a few words into a television screen is worth more than someone who saves lives, but money dictates. He’s a very lucky chap. He’s had two great careers and the second one is helped along by the fact he had the first one.” Lynam’s own career is strewn with memorable sporting moments. Not just football, but the Olympics, Wimbledon… you name it and he’s pretty much done it. Apart from cricket, though. Stick to what you know about, he says. Out of all those wonderful occasions, is there one he cherishes the most? “I’d have to go right back to Ali versus Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa in 1974. I was a babe in arms at the time – I was thrown to the lions. In the build-up to the fight, Ali invited some British press guys to go to a bungalow he was staying in. There were only about five of us and because I had a tape recorder I was sitting next to Ali on a sofa. He was showing us how his jab was going to work against Foreman. He was jabbing away at my hooter and I was flinching and moving my head back and then I thought, ‘Bugger this, I’ll keep my head exactly where it is and if he hits me and makes my nose bleed I’ve got a scoop.’ “Of course with Ali’s immaculate timing he still stayed a quarter of an inch away from my nose, and then at the end he used that phrase he used many times with other people, ‘You ain’t as dumb as you look.’” Like Ali, Lynam was lauded for his good looks. He was dubbed the housewives’ favourite by the tabloids and even had a little paean coined by Rory Bremner…‘wine ’em, dine ’em, Lynam’. But unlike Ali, he claims not to have welcomed it. Of course, the best judges of attraction are those who profit from marketing it. Lynam was in great demand for product endorsement. He dyed his famous top-lip tuft purple to promote Nintendo’s Super Mario game and was signed up by the whiskey brand Jameson because they claimed that it was as smooth as he was. He recalls the photoshoot with relish. “We went to David Bailey’s studio and there were about ten people from the advertising company. But he chucked them all out. He took my photograph in a few minutes and then we proceeded to damage a bottle of Jameson’s.” Today, Lynam deflects any talk of his heartthrob status, claiming he was the “ugly duckling” sat between Ruud Gullit and Alan Hansen at the 1996 Euros and then reveals that his good friend Hansen is recovering well after being seriously ill in hospital. “I got a phone call the other day from Alan, who I’ve always remained in touch with. I was very concerned when I kept reading how ill he was. I couldn’t ring his wife in case the news was bad. We’d written her a note sending our love. Anyhow he rang me and we had a good conversation. He’s made a full recovery – he’s out on the golf course carrying his own bag.” Despite what he says about the past, you sense that Lynam misses the old days. Ask him about the modern game and he laments the influx of international players. “I’ve supported Brighton all my life, but I can’t name the team now. There’s only about two I know, the others are all foreign boys who have come from South America and all sorts of places.” The introduction of video assistant referees (VAR) also dismays him. “You can’t be offside by a fingernail. It might be factually correct but it’s not right in the ethos of the game. Scrap it altogether, go away and think about it and bring it back if it’s good enough when you’ve got it right. But at the moment it’s creating more dissension than we have ever had before.” Another change since Lynam’s day is the increase in the number of female football pundits. What does he think? “I’ve got no gripe with female presenters, but when you’re a pundit and you’re offering opinions about the game, you have to have played it at the level you are talking about – ie, the men’s game.” There is a long pause… “In my view.” There are few greater joys for a journalist than to talk to someone of Lynam’s experience. His body might be failing, his memory faltering but he retains a legendary status within the profession, although when marking his own career he downplays his achievements. “I’m proud of the work I’ve done up to a point, and then I realise it’s not that important. The fact I did quite well in broadcasting, well, I’m pleased with that.” When the epitaphs for Lynam are eventually written, “I did quite well” is unlikely to make an appearance.
Des Lynam on Gary Lineker, Ian Wright and 60 years of Match of the Day
The broadcaster spoke with Radio Times magazine about the 60th anniversary of Match of the Day.
Des Lynam is bemoaning the march of time. The twinkle-eyed charmer who once joked about a life of 'fast women and slow horses' is starting to creak. He stopped swimming in the sea off his south-coast home several years ago, now it’s the golf he’s had to pack up. "When you get to the age of 80 – I can’t believe I’m even saying it – the machinery starts breaking down. My eyesight’s not so good, my back’s gone… the body that you’ve been given to live in wasn’t designed to last this long, I don’t think." It’s a rare maudlin moment. Lynam is actually 81 (he turns 82 in September) and while he’s happy to talk about the past he doesn’t want to live in it. I wonder, though, does he keep any mementos of all those special sporting occasions he had the privilege of observing during six decades of broadcasting? It turns out not. "We moved house recently and I dug out a box of all the press accreditations I had from all around the world. I threw them all out. The past is the past, I’m interested in the present and the future," he says. OK, so for the time being let’s stick with the present. This month sees the 60th anniversary of Match of the Day. Lynam presented what has become the world’s longest running football show between 1988-1999. Is he still a fan? "I never miss it," he says, then adds, "It’s a total misnomer, really, isn’t it? Match of the Day worked for Kenneth Wolstenholme, who presented it between 1964 and 1967 because they only did one match, but now it’s every match. So, it’s the wrong title, but they’re not going to change it now because it has such a great cachet." And what does he make of Gary Lineker, who was a fresh-faced punditry sidekick when he was host, and after 25 years in the hot seat is, by quite some distance, the longest-serving MotD presenter. "He wasn’t comfortable (as a pundit) at the beginning," says Lynam. "Of course he’s been highly critical of the England team in the Euros but when he first came on he wouldn’t criticise anybody. "When I left, he immediately got the job and he grew into it very rapidly. I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but for my money I think he does a first-class job." When Lynam quit, it was an audacious piece of cross-channel poaching by ITV. Does he regret his decision to jump ship? "They [the BBC] were overworking me at the time, I was doing everything, which was very complimentary but also wearing. ITV came in and offered much less work and extraordinary money, which I couldn’t refuse. "With hindsight I should have thought about it a bit longer. I missed doing Match of the Day. It belongs there at the BBC. If they ever get rid of it, or can’t afford it, they’re finished." Someone who is finished, at least on MotD, is the infectiously enthusiastic Ian Wright, known to colleagues as 'Wrighty', who left after 27 years on the team, saying that it was time to "have a break". Lynam thinks he’ll be a big loss. "It’s a shame, because he has developed into a first-class broadcaster and pundit. He speaks from the heart and people like that. He’s never bland. He made his first appearance on MotD when I was there. He came on, as a player, and said 'Des, this is my Graceland' because he’d watched it since he was a boy." So, which of the existing team should step up to fill his shoes? Speaking before it’s revealed that Joe Hart and Theo Walcott will be pundits/presenters, he names his favourite, although there’s a deliciously gentle, Lynam-esque, sideswipe. "I think it’s Micah Richards, isn’t it? He’s got a sense of humour and he knows football. Obviously he’s played for England and Manchester City, though he didn’t make a huge mark on me playing for either. I think he needs to calm down a little, but his opinions are quite solid, though I don’t think anybody can quite match Wrighty." When Lynam first joined the BBC as a sports reporter aged 26 in 1969 his annual salary was £2,030. It’s a meaningless, though nonetheless entertaining, comparison, but Lineker, on £1.3million a year, makes in a few hours what it took Lynam 12 months to earn. Is he worth it? "I don’t suppose you can justify it in terms of what a nurse or firemen does, but it’s the market – that’s what the BBC feel they have to pay to get his services. "You can’t say that anybody saying a few words into a television screen is worth more than someone who saves lives, but money dictates. He’s a very lucky chap. He’s had two great careers and the second one is helped along by the fact he had the first one." Lynam’s own career is strewn with memorable sporting moments. Not just football, but the Olympics, Wimbledon… you name it and he’s pretty much done it. Apart from cricket, though. Stick to what you know about, he says. Out of all those wonderful occasions, is there one he cherishes the most? "I’d have to go right back to Ali versus Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa in 1974. I was a babe in arms at the time – I was thrown to the lions. In the build-up to the fight, Ali invited some British press guys to go to a bungalow he was staying in. "There were only about five of us and because I had a tape recorder I was sitting next to Ali on a sofa. He was showing us how his jab was going to work against Foreman. He was jabbing away at my hooter and I was flinching and moving my head back and then I thought, 'Bugger this, I’ll keep my head exactly where it is and if he hits me and makes my nose bleed I’ve got a scoop.' "Of course with Ali’s immaculate timing he still stayed a quarter of an inch away from my nose, and then at the end he used that phrase he used many times with other people, 'You ain’t as dumb as you look.'" Like Ali, Lynam was lauded for his good looks. He was dubbed the housewives’ favourite by the tabloids and even had a little paean coined by Rory Bremner…'wine 'em, dine 'em, Lynam'. But unlike Ali, he claims not to have welcomed it. Of course, the best judges of attraction are those who profit from marketing it. Lynam was in great demand for product endorsement. He dyed his famous top-lip tuft purple to promote Nintendo’s Super Mario game and was signed up by the whiskey brand Jameson because they claimed that it was as smooth as he was. He recalls the photoshoot with relish. "We went to David Bailey’s studio and there were about ten people from the advertising company. But he chucked them all out. He took my photograph in a few minutes and then we proceeded to damage a bottle of Jameson's." Today, Lynam deflects any talk of his heart-throb status, claiming he was the "ugly duckling" sat between Ruud Gullit and Alan Hansen at the 1996 Euros and then reveals that his good friend Hansen is recovering well after being seriously ill in hospital. "I got a phone call the other day from Alan, who I’ve always remained in touch with. I was very concerned when I kept reading how ill he was. I couldn’t ring his wife in case the news was bad. We’d written her a note sending our love. Anyhow he rang me and we had a good conversation. He’s made a full recovery – he’s out on the golf course carrying his own bag." Despite what he says about the past, you sense that Lynam misses the old days. Ask him about the modern game and he laments the influx of international players. "I’ve supported Brighton all my life, but I can’t name the team now. There’s only about two I know, the others are all foreign boys who have come from South America and all sorts of places." The introduction of video assistant referees (VAR) also dismays him. "You can’t be offside by a fingernail. It might be factually correct but it’s not right in the ethos of the game. Scrap it altogether, go away and think about it and bring it back if it’s good enough when you’ve got it right. But at the moment it’s creating more dissension than we have ever had before." Another change since Lynam’s day is the increase in the number of female football pundits. What does he think? "I’ve got no gripe with female presenters, but when you’re a pundit and you’re offering opinions about the game, you have to have played it at the level you are talking about – ie, the men’s game." There is a long pause… "In my view." There are few greater joys for a journalist than to talk to someone of Lynam’s experience. His body might be failing, his memory faltering but he retains a legendary status within the profession, although when marking his own career he downplays his achievements. "I’m proud of the work I’ve done up to a point, and then I realise it’s not that important. The fact I did quite well in broadcasting, well, I’m pleased with that." When the epitaphs for Lynam are eventually written, "I did quite well" is unlikely to make an appearance. 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.
His accident left him with flashbacks and scars, but Freddie Flintoff feels ready to face the world thanks to his ragtag cricket team
Add Freddie Flintoff's Field of Dreams to your watchlist Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff, casually dressed in dark blue track suit, white socks and white Crocs, squeezes into the second row of the screening room in a bijou central London hotel. Already seated in the row in front of him are nine animated young men from his home county of Lancashire, one of whom is still chomping on the burger he arrived with. He greets them all as he would old friends. The strength of their bond is strikingly evident. Flintoff is about to relive the aftermath of the crash in December 2022 in which he received severe facial injuries and that he now admits has changed his life for ever. The profound physical and mental impact of that Top Gear accident meant that filming the documentary series we’re here today to watch – an ambitious sequel to his heartwarming Field of Dreams – had to be postponed for more than a year to allow his recovery. Ultimately, it was this ragtag bunch of teenagers sitting in front of him – recruited by Flintoff from the streets of his native Preston and shaped into something approaching a cricket team – who helped pull him back from the brink and towards fulfilling his dream of a second series tour of India. As the film shows Flintoff in what appears to be a hospital bed talking about the crash, the former England all-rounder sitting directly in front of me in the screening room gathers his long legs up onto his seat and grasps them tightly. In the film, the extent of the injuries that he suffered – wounds to his nose and mouth – are now visible. The injuries are so significant that Flintoff’s words are, at times, barely discernible – “I genuinely should not be here with what happened,” he explains. By way of apology for having to postpone the India trip following his accident, Flintoff adds: “It’s going to be a long road back, and I’ve only just started. But I’ve got to look at the positives: I’m still here and I’ve got another chance to have a go at it. I’m looking forward to seeing the lads and being around them. I really am. This India trip is for me as much as them. I am determined.” Seven months later, after multiple operations to repair the facial injuries, we see him reflecting further in the film on the psychological damage caused by the crash. “I thought I could just shake it off… but it’s not been a case of that. It’s been a lot harder than I thought. As much as I’ve wanted to go out and do things, I’ve just not been able to. “I was full of anxiety. I had nightmares, I had flashbacks. It’s been so hard to cope with. But some of these lads have had a tough life. You’ve got to try and put it into perspective and I feel guilty I can’t do that. I don’t want to sit here and feel sorry for myself, I don’t want sympathy.” Anyone who knows the 46-year-old will tell you that he doesn’t do self-pity. But in the new series he admits he shut himself away as he tried to come to terms with what had happened. Deep down, though, he knew he had unfinished business and the loyalty he felt towards his Lancashire likely lads eventually propelled him out of the dark and into the dazzling light of Kolkata in India. So, a year after the crash, but with his facial scars still very visible, he travelled to Preston to tell them the tour was back on. It was an occasion that was charged with restrained emotion. “I missed you,” one of boys tells him. Another asks: “Are you feeling one hundred per cent?” “Not really,” comes the reply from Flintoff. “I don’t know if I will again, to be honest. I’m better than I was, but I don’t know what completely better is. I am what I am now. I’m different to what I was. It’s something I’ll have to deal with for the rest of my life. Better? No. Different.” Sean, the 17-year-old over-active joker in the pack, offers his own heartfelt verdict. “He’s all right, but he’s not perfectly fine. But he were there for us; we’ve now got to be there for him while he’s going through this.” It’s this chemistry – the powerful synergy between the humble, plain-talking, endlessly patient Flintoff and his wildly unpredictable, frequently immature, unworldly charges – that make this Indian rite-of-passage such an uplifting, frequently hilarious, and surely award-winning TV triumph. The culture shock is, of course, a film-maker’s gift. Flintoff challenges three of the boys to take control of the cooking for one night and despatches them to the city’s noisy and bustling market to buy some food. They return with chips, chicken nuggets, mozzarella dippers, chicken poppers and onion rings – all from the supermarket! Flintoff, showing the man-management skills that will serve him well in the coaching career in cricket that he still cherishes, plays a straight bat of gentle sarcasm infused with praise. “Lovely, this, an absolute treat. Nice to have an authentic Indian meal. But joking aside, you’ve had a go, you’ve put food on the table – seriously, thank you very much.” As the series unfolds the boys learn more about themselves, more about India and a bit more about their cricketing limitations. There were life lessons for Flintoff as well: “It’s so strange because I feel I’m father to nine lads at the minute. I feel really responsible. Elements of nerves as well, I must admit. I’ve not been away from home recently. When I left my four kids and the missus I wanted to have a good cry on the plane. So it’s mixed emotions for me, too.” Speaking at the post-screening interview, he adds: “I suppose I found a confidence out there again, which I’d been lacking in recent times.” When questioned, Flintoff also reflects on the changes he observed in the two-and-a-half weeks he had spent with the boys in India. “It’s been incredible. There’s a massive difference in how they are as people. The thing that was most pleasing was that wherever we went they just gave such a good account of themselves and where they were from. You just saw their confidence grow and grow and on the way back it was a different group. They’re young men now ready to tackle the world. They all came back with an idea of what they wanted to do with their life; before we left, not too many did.” It will be fascinating to see where they all are in five years, but for now they’re enjoying a day out in the capital. When the screening ends they spill out onto the streets of the West End to vape and let off steam. Two of them boisterously play-fight while one of two BBC publicists charged with chaperoning them screams, “Stay out of the road!” Just feet away, al fresco lunching ladies look up from their fishbowl-sized Camparis wondering what the rumpus is all about. “Of course, they’re a motley crew,” says Flintoff. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Who killed the man in the blood-soaked M&S pyjamas?
Add The Body Next Door to your watchlist When a sleepy Welsh village, whose name in English means graves, became the centre of a modern murder mystery, it sparked both anxiety and intrigue. A body had been found in macabre circumstances, wrapped in multiple layers of plastic, in the garden of a woman whose brazen exploits had alienated her from village folk. Leigh Sabine, the woman in question, was in her 50s when she arrived in Beddau in 1997, and is remembered for flouncing around in tight denim shorts and hitting on any man who caught her eye. There was even talk of her having abandoned her five children in New Zealand, but with Sabine the locals found it impossible to separate fact from fantasy. That she didn’t seem to be hewn from the same rock as those who inhabited the former pit village seemed obvious. But good people tend to be graciously forgiving at the end of life and so when Sabine died in 2015, aged 74, more than 50 locals gathered around her graveside and, as she’d instructed, sang the Gracie Fields wartime ditty Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye as her coffin was lowered. “Yes, she was very eccentric,” says pastor Mary West, who knew her as well as anyone. She conducted Sabine’s funeral service and appears in a three-part Sky documentary that reveals how the murderer was identified. “She just wanted to be noticed. She was always in outfits that were designed to attract attention. Any man who came into her orbit was immediately subject to her advances. My husband and my brother were really quite frightened of her. In fact, when she was in the hospice two days before she died, the oncologist bent over her and she tried to kiss him.” Losing its eccentric talking point following her death, the village quickly regained a peaceful normality, though first there was the job of sorting through her personal effects. Her husband had, apparently, left her soon after arriving in the village and with no other known family members the few mementos Sabine had in her small council flat were passed out to those who knew her. However, there was one bulky item in the garden that aroused curiosity. Sabine, a former nurse, had previously said it was a medical skeleton she’d bought in her student days. But after the 41 layers of plastic in which the skeleton had been tightly and meticulously wrapped were cut through, police launched a murder investigation. Inside the packaging was the body of a man. The condition of the body suggested he had died only weeks earlier. The blood-drenched, blue-striped Marks & Spencer pyjamas he was wearing were still totally intact. Although Sabine became, to use the jargon, a person of interest – albeit a dead one – the maths didn’t add up. At the estimated time of death she herself was weak and dying of brain cancer. Whoever the victim was, Sabine couldn’t possibly have killed him in the specified time frame. And so, as they often do in small communities, tongues started wagging. Back to Mary West. “It was a very unsettling time. There were rumours about who it could be and how it could have happened, and a general feeling of unease.” Police, desperate for leads, started interviewing the villagers, some as potential suspects. West, who had been a schoolteacher in the village for 30 years, was among them. “My name was brought up, which I thought was very strange. All these years later it’s something I still can’t get my head around. The police treated me very fairly, but other local people were interviewed at work and called at awkward times. A lot of people went through a very difficult time afterwards.” Today West, who still takes services at her local church of St Michael’s, says that people who live in the village are generally welcoming of the TV exhumation of a murder that shattered the calm of life in Beddau. “As much as people are getting on with their lives, it was always felt that more could be revealed.”
Frozen Planet II filmmaker: “We’re taking the audience to Narnia"
Documentary maker Mark Brownlow talks us through the highs and lows of filming in one of the most inhospitable landscapes on Earth.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Wildlife film-maker Mark Brownlow had encountered endless days of stomach-churning sickness while crossing the world’s roughest sea. He’d been so close to a killer whale that he could smell its breath, and he’d had a crushing encounter with dense pack ice on a boat whose engine had failed. Anxious moments all, though not the worst while making a landmark series set in the natural world. That, for Brownlow and his colleagues, was showing the work to David Attenborough. “The greatest moment when you make any series is when you show David what you’ve been up to,” says Brownlow. “It’s so important for us that we get his blessing.” And the great man’s verdict? “He was generous enough to be wowed.” There’s much in this six-part series (that Attenborough narrates) to excite a man who’s seen it all during a 70-year broadcast career. But there’s no escaping the fact that the many exhilarating highs are tempered by some conscience-challenging lows. Wherever you venture in the frozen parts of planet Earth, the consequences of climate change are there to be seen. It wasn’t considered so clear-cut in 2011, when the first instalment of Frozen Planet was broadcast. As Brownlow rather mischievously points out, as part of its coverage of that series, RT published the views of Nigel Lawson, who cast doubt on the very existence of global warming. We’ve come a long way since, as Attenborough attests in his opening remarks in the first scene-setting episode. “Looking down on our planet, it may come as a surprise to find just how much of it is blanketed in snow and ice. These vast frozen wildernesses cover more than a fifth of the Earth. Yet some areas are so remote and inhospitable that even today the closest we’ve come to exploring them is from space.” The first Frozen Planet examined life in the Arctic and the Antarctic. But the new series, says Attenborough, explores “all of Earth’s frozen habitats, from its highest peaks to its snowbound deserts, to deep beneath the ice. Between them they contain an astonishing array of animals, many that are found nowhere else on Earth. “And just as we’re beginning to understand its wildlife, we’re recognising an alarming truth. Our frozen wildernesses are disappearing at faster rates than ever before. Never has it been more important to understand what is going on in these icy territories.” One such territory, Wrangel Island in the Russian Arctic, creates an apocalyptic impression of life for creatures in the region. This desolate, fog-shrouded place (the Frozen Planet team had to wait three weeks at a Russian base before being helicoptered in) is an unlikely sanctuary for 1,000 polar bears, the greatest concentration on the planet, according to Brownlow. “They’re almost like climate refugees,” he says, as we see them fighting over whatever carrion the sea brings to shore, such as walrus and whale carcass. There’s a Lord of the Flies bleakness to it all and the reason they end up on this island of dark, forbidding cliffs and black sand is because the Arctic sea ice from which they hunt is, in the summer months, disappearing. “More and more of them are swimming for 14 days across hundreds of miles of ocean to wash up on the nearest piece of land,” says Brownlow. “Polar bears have evolved to hunt off the sea ice to capture seals; that’s what they’re designed for. “Today, with the loss of so much of the sea ice, they are going to have to adapt fast or we’re not going to see them in the future. You wouldn’t have had this scene on this scale 10 years ago.” Of course, as the storytelling see-saw plunges down, so it must also rise up – the scenes featuring two five-year-old bears on the winter ice will make your heart soar. “You think there’s going to be a fight. Instead, they start playing – they jump in the water together and slide around on the ice together. It’s a wonderful, magical, moment.” Is that transition from the gloomy to the glorious hard to get right? “Yes, it is,” Brownlow says. “First and foremost people want to come to these series to revel in the wonder, the awe, the majesty of these frozen worlds. But equally we have to tell the contemporary story of what’s happening. Long gone are the days when we could show you a paradise and forget about the issues – I think we’d be laughed out of the room if we didn’t nail climate change.” One scene that combines both magnificence and melancholy is that featuring killer whales targeting Weddell seals lazing on what, for them, must seem like the security of a large “raft” of floating ice. In animal intelligence terms it’s stunning; in purely emotional terms it’s heartbreakingly brutal. The 100-strong pod that roams the waters of Antarctica has evolved strategies to dislodge and kill these unsuspecting seals. Typically, they create a powerful wave that washes the seals off the ice, into the ocean and almost certain death. But if the ice block is too big, the orcas will shatter it from beneath and then ruthlessly deploy their wave-washing attack. We have seen it before, but not from above – the aerial perspective provided by drones reveals a military-type precision to the attack. “David was blown away by it,” says Brownlow. “From the air you can understand the relationship between the members of the pod and see how synchronised they are in terms of lining up and moving as one. It takes them 15 years just to learn the art of the wave wash and it’s all led by the matriarch, who could be 100-150 years old. “The big showy males with the huge fins do nothing – they wait for the matriarch to do the hard work, then they clean up. On the one hand it feels brutal because these seals are very lovable and you can’t help but empathise with them, but equally killer whales have family to feed.” View oEmbed on the source website But just when you think at least the killer whales are defying the odds, there’s another crash landing – Brownlow says scientists have seen evidence of emaciation among this group of whales because their seal-meal of choice is becoming more difficult to find. “Antarctica, particularly on the peninsula, is rapidly heating, which means fewer ice floes. The Weddell seals, which the killer whales primarily rely upon, are now hauling out on land rather than ice floes, so they’re harder to catch.” There’s a Disney-esque pathos to some of the stories. The harp seal pup has cuteness etched into its DNA, yet after being fed on its mother’s nutrient-rich milk for only 12 days – one of the shortest maternity shifts in the natural world –the pup is left to make its own way in life, alone and vulnerable on the floating ice. The look – and heart-piercing cry – of abandonment will destroy you, but is this just a character-building ploy? Once upon a time, maybe, but there are few fairy tales in a script that’s dominated by a warming planet. “Climate change is producing increased storms and larger waves and the baby seals are being tipped into the water before they’re ready to swim,” says Brownlow. “Despite everything, the wildlife is extremely well adapted to the harshness of the environment, but what they can’t cope with is the added extreme that is borne out of climate change.” There are, it should be said, many species that are coping; the series features stories that will have you cheering in admiration for the wildlife survivors who overcome the hostile environment they’re born into. Among them: ■ The baby hatchling turtles whose bodies shut down – in human terms they’d be clinically dead – over the winter months only to thaw out and come alive when spring arrives. ■ The queen bee who survives a Lapland winter in her underground burrow because of the thickness of her coat, emerging in spring to collect pollen, develop her ovaries and lay the eggs to start a whole new colony. ■ The Siberian tiger shown hunting its prey in the most unexpected places, filmed over three years using camera traps. ■ Amur leopards, snow monkeys in the Japanese Alps and kea parrots in the alpine region of New Zealand – all surviving with a combination of cunning and resourcefulness. Says Brownlow of the series: “We’re taking the audience to Narnia, with what I hope is going to be the right mix of wonder, entertainment and education. “There are a lot of new stories, breathtaking new drama, wonderful moments of humour, stunning landscapes, but underpinned with the message that these places are changing and changing faster than we ever imagined. We are capturing this fast-changing, dynamic world in its exquisite beauty but also telling the story of how these changes are impacting the wildlife.” Frozen Planet II ends with an episode devoted to the scientists who are working at the glacier’s edge of climate change research. And that work is so vital to nature’s survival. Attenborough is succinct in his verdict. “The animals that inhabit our frozen lands and seas need one thing more than any other – and that is for the planet to stop warming. It’s now up to us to make that happen.” Frozen Planet II continues to air on Sunday at 8:05pm on BBC One. Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight. The latest issue of Radio Times magazine is on sale now – subscribe now and get the next 12 issues for only £1. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey.
Animal Park's Megan McCubbin on dyslexia, climate hopes and Chris Packham
Megan McCubbin has overcome personal battles to become one of our most popular wildlife presenters.
This article was originally published in Radio Times magazine. In 2018 Megan McCubbin saw a random tweet posing the question: what were you told you’d never be able to achieve, but have since accomplished? The stepdaughter and sometime screen partner of Chris Packham responded: “My teacher told me I would never get a degree in science due to my dyslexia. I graduate tomorrow.” The accomplished 27-year-old Springwatch regular has continued the process of “graduating” ever since, this week joining the long-established pairing of Kate Humble and Ben Fogle on the popular BBC One daytime series Animal Park. If it’s been a battle she makes light of it, though she acknowledges why her teacher held such a pessimistic view of her prospects. “I struggled at school – I found it really, really difficult and was terrible at exams. “Complicated science was something that I struggled with initially because I had to find my own way to learn it. I don’t learn conventionally. After a class I might be able to relay the information and understand it, but there was no chance that I could retain it in the way that was asked of me. My brain definitely works very differently from other people’s – I retain information differently.” One of her coping strategies was to strip out some of the complex language she was presented with in order to absorb the core detail. It’s an approach she still uses today. “I think my dyslexia does change the way that I broadcast, because I try to speak about science in a way that I would have understood when I was younger. I’m like that with my writing – I’m a very slow writer. So I try to strip back the unnecessary complexities.” Does her dyslexia impact the way she works? Can she digest scripts, for instance? “I mean, I can. I did drama at A-level and I had to learn scripts for that – memorising them line by line if I needed to. But I try not to [for television work], because I think if you memorise a script and are going into a live broadcast, your head is so full of words that you trip yourself up. So I have to find a fundamental thread that sticks in my mind and then I work out from that in branches. As long as I’ve got the basic points, I just let my brain run with it.” When we speak, her brain is in coherent and confident free flow, which is particularly impressive given we’re talking in the stupefying heat of the warmest day ever recorded in the UK. Her environmental activism suggests that if she were wearing a collar, she’d be getting pretty hot underneath it. “This is not what summer in the UK should be like,” she says. “The scary thing is that we think this is hot now, but it’s only going to get hotter. It’s not just here. It’s the hottest it’s ever been in Portugal and Spain and it’s the coldest it’s ever been in parts of Australia. So this isn’t just about heating, this is about the occurrence of extreme weather events.” McCubbin, who made her debut on Springwatch in 2020 after moving in with Packham during the first lockdown and co-presenting the show from his New Forest home, accepts there is a parallel concern of eco-fatigue among the public. “That’s definitely a fear,” she admits. “We know from psychological studies that the human brain isn’t actually very good at processing the issues of climate change because they are seen as too big. So we have to take that down a notch and start talking about little steps, and then solutions that can make systematic change. Because that’s the change we need in order to prevent summers getting hotter, winters getting colder and wetter and more extreme weather events around the world.” What gives McCubbin most hope is the generation following her, those inspired by the likes of Greta Thunberg. “The younger generation is more motivated, knowledgeable and empowered than I think they’ve ever been. It really is a generation of action, so it’s brilliant to see young people engaging and being passionate and taking a stand and using their voice, because the most important tool that we all have is our voice. And we can use it wisely and kindly and get our message out there.” Of course, in the vanguard of the movement is her stepfather Chris Packham. Despite splitting up with Megan’s mother, nurse Jo McCubbin, when Megan was 12, he has remained at her side throughout her life and helped shape her interest in the natural world, which led to that degree in Zoology from the University of Liverpool in 2018. But she was very much an early adopter... You were interested in animals from a young age. Which were your favourites? “I loved snakes. I thought they were great. And I had a praying mantis, that was cool. Most young girls probably think it’s quite weird, but when I was younger it was the things that I could get my nose into.” Talking of using your nose, tell us about your encounter with the dik-diks at Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire, where Animal Park is filmed? “They are the smallest antelope that [in the wild] live out in the plains of Africa – adorable little things with really big eyes, very small bodies, very agile. They get a putty-like substance coming out of their eyes, which is full of lots of different scents that they use for communication. So this was kind of dotted around the enclosure and I immediately picked it up and had a sniff. I think that natural curiosity is important. I want to know how things sound, how they smell, how they move. You’d win a pub quiz, wouldn’t you, if you could tell what a dik-dik’s eye gloop smelled like!” Did you have any misgivings about filming with captive animals? “Honestly, it can be a complicated answer. I always say that it depends on the zoo and the sanctuary. For me, zoos and sanctuaries across the UK have a responsibility to educate everybody that walks through the doors. You want people leaving with more information, more facts, than they ever came in with. Animal Park is a fantastic way for Longleat to educate not only the people that visit and see the animals first-hand, but the nation as well. So it’s really important for me that the animals in captivity are fantastic ambassadors for their wild counterparts. That’s the most critical thing. Of course, their welfare as well. And that we are learning from them the best that we can.” Chris has supported you throughout your life and career. Does he still offer advice? “Yeah, all the time. We are very close – we’re very good friends more than anything. He’s been in the industry for a really long time and he’s a brilliant person to learn from and I will always continue learning from him. I actually got a message from him half an hour ago asking me to go and collect some red squirrel poo for him. So that’s a job for this afternoon.” Er, why? “He’s doing a talk that he wants me to bring it to. And then he also added, if I could get pine marten poo as well, that’d be great!” Animal Park airs weekday mornings at 9:15am on BBC One. Looking for something else to watch? Visit our TV Guide. The latest issue of Radio Times magazine is on sale now – subscribe now and get the next 12 issues for only £1. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey.
Sir David Attenborough on "hypnotic appeal" of nature docs like The Green Planet
We got the lowdown from the veteran broadcaster and naturalist
Picture the scene. It’s September 2019. A rowing boat eases its way steadily across a sparkling Croatian lake. Pulling purposefully on the oars is none other than David Attenborough, then a mere 93 years of age. But he has company. Hidden beneath a tarpaulin in the stern of the boat is not, as you might expect, an outboard motor, but Mike Gunton, the executive producer of the TV series Attenborough is making. He’s there as the health-and-safety contingency, but the purity of the shot (Attenborough alone, at one with nature) means he’s covered up. In any case, Attenborough is enjoying himself and, it turns out, has a point to prove. “No, I can do a bit more,” he insists, turning down the offer of rowing support from Gunton, who’s now emerged from beneath the tarpaulin. And on Attenborough rows. “When David was at Cambridge he was a rugby player and when I was at Cambridge many years later I was a rower,” explains Gunton. “He said, ‘We rugby players always thought we could row better than you rowers’ so this was him proving that we ‘wet bobs’ – as he calls us – weren’t as good at rowing as the rugby players. That is classic David.” This new series, The Green Planet, is also “classic David”. A largely unseen vocal guide to many of the most recent landmark natural history programmes, Attenborough is back on location for this stunning and thought-provoking deep dive into the world of plants. The filming schedule has taken him around the world – almost certainly the last time he’ll travel to so many far-flung places for one series. We see him in the freezing high Arctic, in the baking deserts of America, on a gondola high up in the tree canopy of Costa Rica and, closer to home, in Kew Gardens, the place, probably more than any other, where he feels most comfortable and where we catch up with him. Attenborough’s been here, as he was yesterday and the day before, since 6:30am. This morning he’s observing the awakening of the humble daisy. Thermal cameras show how the warming rays of the sun prompt the daisy to emerge from its petal-perfect slumber and invite the attention of pollinators. It’s simple, but beguiling stuff. Next, Attenborough is invited to perch on the exposed root of a 150-year-old oak tree. He remains awkwardly seated (on the face of it very patiently) for upwards of an hour delivering a few lines of dialogue while cradling a cross section of oak from another tree that, like him (it’s all in the planning), is 95 years old. View oEmbed on the source website Those of us observing from 50m away are stretching arms and legs in solidarity. His daughter Susan stands discreetly in the background with the offer of a warmer coat, but Attenborough ploughs on through script tweaks and multiple takes until everyone is happy with the final version. Why does he still do it? As ever, it’s the seductive appeal of having a gripping new story to tell, and new camera technology to tell it with. “That is what brings the thing to life and should make people say, ‘Good Lord, these extraordinary organisms are just like us.’ In the sense that they live and die, that they fight, that they have to learn to reproduce… but just that they do them so slowly, so we’ve never seen that before. And that has a hypnotic appeal.” The challenge for Attenborough and the rest of the Green Planet team, as it was 27 years ago for its forerunner The Private Life of Plants, has been to make the plant world every bit as intriguing, as precarious – even as brutal – as the animal world. With that in mind, they’ve even managed a nod towards that BAFTA-winning hands-over-the-eyes scene from Planet Earth II featuring the writhing mass of racer snakes. Immersive camera technology and painstakingly assembled time-lapse photography bring this alien world to life like never before. One cactus in the US had seven cameras trained on it continuously for three years, the longest ever time-lapse study undertaken by the BBC. For Attenborough, such star billing is long overdue. “The world has suddenly become plant-conscious. There’s an awareness that we would starve without plants, we wouldn’t be able to breathe without plants. And yet people’s understanding about plants, except in a very kind of narrow way, has not kept up with that. I think this will bring it home.” What it also promises to bring home is a new understanding of plants that’s not just spectacularly intriguing, but also philosophically challenging. For in revealing just how sophisticated plant communication actually is, it prompts the question of whether plants possess some form of that very human quality, intelligence. And if it isn’t intelligence (after all, plants don’t have brains), then what is it? Series producer Rupert Barrington believes our vocabulary hasn’t kept pace with our understanding of the plant world. “In some ways our language isn’t adequate – we struggle to know what to call this thing, which isn’t intelligence as we understand it, but something that’s a lot more sophisticated than previously thought.” The standout sequence of the opening episode observes how a voracious underground fungus “employs” (the word used in the narration) thousands of leaf-cutter ants to bring it foliage food. But when the tree under attack responds, by releasing toxins to protect itself, the insects recognise the threat these poisoned leaves pose to the fungus and so switch their attention to another tree. Such interconnected levels of communication seem barely plausible, but Barrington says we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of the underground “wood wide web”, as it’s known in scientific circles. For instance? “Well, certain species of fungi will plug into the roots of certain species of tree. The trees create sugars by photosynthesis that they feed to the fungi, the fungi get nutrients out of the soil that they feed to the tree.” So far, so believable. But delving deeper, we begin to inhabit a world popularised by the likes of John Wyndham. Says Barrington: “The trees also send signals down these cables very deliberately to each other and they’ll feed food down through those cables to their own offspring [saplings] – effectively caring for their young. Those trees are known as mother trees.” And if further proof were needed of the complex botanical chemistry that underpins plant life, there’s this from Barrington. “If a tree that’s connected into this network is dying – in some way it knows it’s dying – then it sends all its stored nutrients out to its own offspring, but also to other trees in the forest.” Barrington acknowledges that much of this new science is “mind-blowing”. “I think people are beginning to rethink the capabilities of plants,” he says, with some understatement. Attenborough observes one such example of those capabilities for himself at Kew Gardens. He uses a paintbrush to entice a Venus fly trap into believing an insect has ventured into its jaws. But the plant recognises that a single such encounter could be anything and doesn’t respond. It’s only when Attenborough repeats the trick a few seconds later that the plant concludes it must be a moving insect and snaps shut. Proving, it’s said, that this particular plant can count. “This is a parallel world which exists alongside us and which is the basis for our own lives and to which we have paid scant attention over the years,” is how Attenborough summarises it. Such life-giving significance was crystallised for Barrington in a sequence – his favourite of the series – filmed on a tributary of the Amazon. “We’d been told about plants that hyper-produce oxygen when the sun comes up. It’s this wall of bubbles of pure oxygen – utterly beautiful, like a river of champagne. You look at it and think, ‘This is profound’, because that plant is creating the atmosphere – you can actually see it producing the oxygen we need.” Attenborough embraces that sentiment. “Over half the population of the world, according to the United Nations, is urbanised, lives in cities, only sees cultivated plants and never sees a wild community of plants. But that wild community is there and we depend upon it. And we better jolly well care for it.” The Green Planet starts 9th January on BBC One at 7pm. To find out what’s on TV tonight, check out our TV Guide or visit our Documentaries hub for all the latest news. This feature originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy.
Andrew Neil on leaving the BBC, setting up GB News and those Piers Morgan rumours: 'We’re not building this channel around Piers!'
Andrew Neil rings, as promised, on the dot of 5pm. There’s a hint of fatigue in his voice that, in a previous professional incarnation, might have suggested an old-fashioned Fleet Street lunch. But Neil has just turned 72 and is in the chaotic throes of launching a new, and newsy, TV channel. “There’s a lot of the technology still to sort out, but rehearsals are underway and we’ll soon be in full dress rehearsals. The team are working around the clock.” As we speak, the launch of GB News is only 12 days away and the team he describes has only had two months to turn an empty west London office space into a broadcast-ready studio. Neil may have missed the hard-hat phase but, despite rumours to the contrary, he has arrived in London from his home in France to oversee the preparations and expects to remain in the capital for the “foreseeable”. He’ll present the launch programme on Sunday and then have his own 8pm show four nights a week. Broadcasting from 6am to midnight, GB News is, unashamedly, moulded around its star presenters. They are the lure Neil hopes will ensnare new viewers – not to mention a different way of packaging the news. “The one thing we know from America, which is always ahead of Britain in these things, is that whereas rolling news does not rate with audiences, appointment-to-view news programming built around colourful and characterful anchors does rate. View oEmbed on the source website “We won’t be doing rolling news, we won’t even be doing news bulletins. The content we select will be chosen by the presenters and their editors. It won’t be just the style of the shows that will be different, I think the content will be different.” So, for “colourful and characterful” read Simon McCoy, who jumped ship from the BBC and will co-present an afternoon show; Alastair Stewart, who parted company with ITV and has a weekend show; and Kirsty Gallacher from Sky, who heads up the breakfast team. They’re complemented by other presenters and journalists, upwards of 130 in total, both familiar and less familiar. But all itching, they tell us in the promotional videos, to rewrite the way news is delivered. It’s breakfast that’s the most fiercely fought-over ratings battleground. I suggest to Neil that despite the excellence of Gallacher, there’s a Piers Morgan-shaped hole in that breakfast presenting team. Have the two of them been in touch? “Yes, we have had conversations, but not about breakfast. All my indications are that Piers doesn’t want another breakfast show. But I think if he does any more British news TV it’s more likely to be with us than with anybody else. We’re in good discussions, we continue to stay in touch and he knows that we feel that he would be a great addition to the line-up.” Perhaps the 8pm berth that Neil is currently occupying might not feel quite so comfortable several months into the job? For the only time in the interview there’s a hint of Neil the ferocious interrogator. “We’re not building this channel around Piers! He has a different timetable to us. He wants to have a reasonably leisurely summer, and who can blame him? He doesn’t need the money! You don’t need everything for the launch. It’s always good to have a relaunch or a refreshment down the road and maybe Piers could be part of that. If he’s not with us on British news television, tell me who he’d be with?” As well as advising on presenter recruitment to the channel – “I’ve been involved in suggesting names, or saying that’s a name we shouldn’t be having” – Neil has had to spend much of his time on PR duties, distancing GB News (of which he’s chairman) from the shouty, right-wing channel in the US, Fox News. Country cousin it ain’t, he insists. “There are two groups who are going to be very disappointed,” he says. “Those who want us to be like Fox News and those who say we will be like Fox News. “If you’re on some fringe in Britain and expecting that we’ll be giving you fake news or disinformation or conspiracy theories, then we are the wrong channel for you. This is a journalistic-led endeavour and I am on a mission for better journalism.” So, having established what it isn’t, what exactly is GB News? Its on-screen persona will, of course, evolve but Neil says its vocal and cultural range has to encompass the whole of Britain, which is why presenters like Apprentice winner and Brexit supporter Michelle Dewberry, former Labour MP Gloria De Piero and Scottish historian (and anti-independence campaigner) Neil Oliver have been signed up. “If you close your eyes and listen to Sky, BBC or even ITV news you’re not sure which one you’re listening to,” says Neil. “They’re roughly the same voices with the same approach to stories. There would be no point in launching another channel simply to do what the incumbents already do. I hope we’ll be a bit of an insurgent and stir things up and actually improve what’s already available.” Where does he expect to pick up his viewers from? The Red Wall constituencies of northern England sound like one geographical target. “I think we’ll take some from Sky and the BBC, but I think most of our viewers will be people who have either stopped watching news programmes or don’t watch news programmes. “These are people who don’t necessarily expect that their voices should be on TV, but what they do expect is that what they think, what they believe, their attitudes, their outlook on the world, should be reflected on the TV that they watch – and they don’t get that at the moment. They just feel that too many of the voices they hear are in accents that are not theirs, are about concerns that are not theirs and about an agenda that is not theirs. I think we need to give them a fresh voice – if not speaking up for them, at least giving them a fair hearing.” But not by ignoring stories from Westminster, surely? How would he have covered the Dominic Cummings revelations, for instance? “The existing media is obsessed with Cummings. A year ago he was a Tory scumbag; the same media now regard him as the world’s greatest whistleblower. The truth is he’s neither. Of course we would look at some of the things he’s said, but people outside the metropolitan areas are not obsessed with him in the way the mainstream media is.” When RT last spoke to Neil in July 2020 he pondered that he might be “surplus to requirements” at the BBC. And so it came to pass. Had they shown greater loyalty towards him then would we be talking about GB News now, I ask? “Probably not, no. What they did was unnecessary and I left with a heavy heart. There was almost no contact with me whatsoever, which did rankle, but what’s done is done. I have not dwelt on it. I must be the only presenter on the BBC who has stepped down and not rushed in and given them a kicking. I’ve not done that and don’t intend to. I’ve no fight with the BBC.” Neil says that the new director-general Tim Davie “made a lot of effort” to keep him on but by then the conversations with GB News had already started. Does he think that another news provider joining an already congested broadcast environment places another nail on the surface of the coffin that is a licence fee-funded BBC? “I think we’re irrelevant to the future of the BBC. I hope we’ll take some audience from the BBC and I hope we’ll give the BBC a run for its money in terms of how the news is covered, but we are not a threat to the BBC. The BBC is often its own threat, and there are far bigger forces at work from Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney, which are a real threat to the BBC and its younger audience.” The week before we speak Neil celebrated his birthday with his wife and a couple of friends at their home in the south of France. Back in London he says GB News will be his last big challenge, happily reeling off those very considerable ones to which he has previously risen. 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. “My choice was either to step back and carry on with the speeches and the lectures and the Spectator magazine [of which he’s also chairman] or to have one final big throw of the dice. Sometimes I do shake my head and wonder why. But I do quite like doing things that everyone tells you not to do. “I was told we could never go to Wapping without the print unions, I was told that Sky would fail, I was told that no one wanted a New York Times-style multi-sectioned Sunday Times, I was told that I wasn’t really a BBC type and would never get on there. I suppose I do like to try to prove people wrong.” GB News is now live. If you’re looking for more to watch, check out our handy TV Guide. This edition of The Big RT Interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy.
Peter "the Human Cyborg" on his groundbreaking transformation: "I’m in uncharted territory – how cool is that?"
Peter Scott-Morgan was paralysed by Motor Neurone Disease – now, cutting-edge technology seems him "not just surviving" but "thriving".
As Peter Scott-Morgan, his paralysed body ravaged by Motor Neurone Disease, whispered a final “I love you” to his partner of 40 years he knew it would be the last time they spoke to each other, at least in any conventional sense. But then there’s nothing conventional about Scott-Morgan. Wheeled into a hospital theatre in Devon last October to voluntarily have his biological voice surgically removed, he knew it was not the end of anything, but a new, extraordinary, beginning. And the robotics expert in him was excited. He was transforming himself into a cyborg – as he put it ‘the end of Peter 1.0 and the start of Peter 2.0’. That transition had already begun with some complicated replumbing of his body - a colostomy for his bowels, a catheter for his bladder and a feeding tube directly into his stomach. But with his body under attack from MND he knew what would most likely kill him was pneumonia. And the way to prevent that was to undergo a laryngectomy, in which the oesophagus and trachea are separated. Life-saving perhaps, but it meant he would never be able to speak again. Scott-Morgan, who lives in Torbay, saw it as a challenge. Before having the operation he recorded his voice – tens of thousands of words - which now, using eye-tracking technology, can be converted into both verbal and written responses using just his eyes via the computer screen that’s fixed in front of him. Laser eye surgery has equipped him with perfect vision at 70cm - the distance from his computer screen – and because his facial muscles don’t work there’s an avatar which animates his responses. The voice, too, his is own. Not an unrecognisably synthesised version of it. His remarkable story is captured in a new Channel 4 documentary and using his ‘cyborg’ technology, he answers these questions for us... Explain in practical terms how you are responding to these questions - does the AI deal differently with that which is written and that which is spoken? Let me start by stressing that what’s shown in the documentary is just the start of a hugely exciting but long journey. So the answer to your question is changing by the month. At the moment, you can think of my AI as glorified text prediction – a highly personalised version of what you probably have on your phone. It’s constantly learning from what I speak. I start a word, and based on the initial letters, and what I’ve said so far, it offers me six options of how to continue. Almost always, I choose one of them. And usually these days it’s the first or second option, so it’s speeding me up a lot already. For the moment, my written text uses the same AI as my speech. But that’s only a temporary bodge. What we are aiming at is far more revolutionary. Even before the film crew first turned up, I envisioned an AI system that will listen to what is going on and then prompt me, rather like a SatNav, with say three alternative suggestions according to different criteria. I will then kick off the response I want my voice synthesiser to use in the background while I’m typing a customised insert to slot-in after the space-filler – using a hugely-predictive text engine customised to the current context and personalised to my individual style and, to your point, dependent on whether I’m chatting or giving a formal speech or composing an email or authoring a scientific paper. And even since filming stopped a few months ago, we have begun experimenting with an improved version of the voice you can hear singing in the documentary. So, to take full advantage of it, we now also envision the AI system being clever enough to judge which synthesised emotions it should use for different words – conversational, impassioned, intimate, etc. If we were to hear you speak, the voice would be a manifestation of your own but what of the words we hear? Is it an approximation of your thoughts and intentions or a replication of them? This is an area that I find tremendously exciting. It’s genuine cyborg territory! You see on the film the time when, talking with Lama – the wonderful researcher from Intel who worked with Stephen Hawking – I chose to give up my independence and instead increasingly partner with AI. I say, chose. But in reality it was that or give up any chance of spontaneous communication – at least until the next decade when direct brain-computer interfaces may become practical. My version of AI puts people in the driving seat. And this is where I think our research has the chance to prove a really important point. You see, to my mind, AI on its own is like a brilliant jazz pianist. But without anyone to jam with. It can give an impressive solo performance. Wow the audience. Yet even so, it’s nowhere near its full potential; if seamlessly merged with another talented performer with noticeably different skills the combined virtuoso performance would seem close to magic. At the heart of all the research I’m encouraging is Human-Centric AI – in other words, AI merged with people, neither the AI nor the individual giving a solo performance. A mutually dependent partnership, not a rivalry. Synergy, not a zero-sum game. A jazz combo. As a result, of course, what my synthesiser ends up saying may not be the response, the expressiveness, even the vaguely similar idea, I’d have said unaided. But I keep reassuring my colleagues that I have absolutely no qualms about such collaborative Human-AI technology potentially making me appear cleverer, or funnier, or simply less-forgetful, than I was before. So, in place of ‘Verbal Spontaneity’, read ‘Intelligence Amplifier’. As far as I’m concerned, bring it on! What are the shortcomings of the technology? Where can it improve? The technology you see at the end of the documentary is a great setup for throughout the typical day when I’m working in my study, for instance answering your questions. But it’s far from ideal all the rest of the time. So already I’ve started a parallel project with the AI team at the giant IT corporation DXC Technology and a research team at Drexel University. We’re experimenting with a cutting edge augmented-reality visor that projects some supercool computer graphics in front of me, like the head-up display that fighter pilots use. It’s exactly like the way Hollywood portrays the view that a cyborg sees – although, to be fair, my display is unlikely to flash the words ‘ hostile target’. That’s only the very beginning. All the wild ideas I proposed early in the film are now planned for the next several years. One that we’re just starting is around all aspects of AI controlled movement. As part of this major research challenge, we envision ‘wheelchairs’ taking on far greater responsibility – Robotic Mobility is in reality an AI challenge on wheels. We envision a user outside their house onboard their Wheelchair Accessible Vehicle using their eyes to click on an icon for ‘Bedroom’ and that is it – everything else is automatic until they are safely by their bed. Likewise, even in unfamiliar territory, they should be able to travel fast-but-safely thanks to a sophisticated collision avoidance system. We envision them eventually being able to speed through an obstacle course or safely make their way through a showroom of porcelain vases. [OK, that’s the advanced autonomous driving course.] Given the R&D costs involved is it realistic to believe this can be made available to other MND patients? From the start, this was always very much bigger than just me. And very much bigger than just MND. At the end of the day, as the title of the documentary suggests [the film was originally titled Peter the Human Guinea Pig], I’m just a human guinea pig to try out those of my ideas that would be too risky or unproven or initially unreliable to impose on a member of the public. There is a long tradition of scientists resorting to experimenting on themselves. I am no different. Although in my case, this is literally the experiment of my life. So, your question cuts to the core of the impact I desperately want to achieve. Frankly, if the only person to benefit from all this is me, then I will consider it a near total failure. Let me start my answer with a reassuring reminder of what you saw in the film: all of my pioneering surgery did not take place in an American medical institute, or a private healthcare establishment, or even a London teaching hospital. It all took place at my local NHS hospital in Torbay. So that at least is encouraging. And if you’d asked me when filming began how this sort of breakthrough would spread, I would have naively replied that the relevant government bodies and charities and medical communities with responsibilities for extreme disability would have all rallied around. But by the time we finished, I realised that they needed a bit of help. So as filming wrapped, Francis and I set up a charitable research body – The Scott-Morgan Foundation, registered by the Charity Commission (1187386) with the official objective: "For the public benefit, the advancement of science, health and education, by carrying out, promoting and publishing research into the ethical use of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, robotics, and other high-technology systems to enhance the capabilities and wellbeing of those restricted by age, ill health, disability or other physical or mental disadvantage." In less official language, every one of us that’s part of The Scott-Morgan Foundation is passionate about using AI and hi-tech to transform what it means to have Extreme Disability, whether through accident or disease or old age. And Francis and I have been unbelievably lucky in being able to interest some of the world’s top brains in getting involved, with a fully independent Board, to act as the focus for a hugely ambitious research program stretching across decades. We’re incredibly proud of it – it’s the only research foundation of its kind in the world. And we hope to attract more and more of the planet’s most free-thinking and innovative corporations and experts to join us in our mission to revolutionise the future of Extreme Disability, and in so doing, change what it means to be human. Our website will go live on the evening of transmission of the documentary: www.scottmorganfoundation.org And finally, here is the answer to your question: everything we do at The Foundation is for philanthropic purposes and to benefit the general public; we aim for all our key findings to be made open-source, freely available to everyone. So as far as is possible, I intend that the successful research will eventually benefit everyone. And ultimately, I mean everyone. MND is a great initial research focus because the challenges are so great. But the benefits will reach all extreme disability, even from ‘old age’. One day that may even include you… The moment in the film when you hear your voice for the first time, singing, is incredibly powerful. Describe what that moment meant to you. At school, I was in four choirs. I loved singing. All my life I tended to hum a lot when I was alone. Even sing if no one could hear. Until a bit over a year ago when my lung capacity got so low I could hardly speak, let alone sing. In one sense, losing the ability to sing should have been a trivial event in comparison with everything else I was losing that was truly disabling. However, maybe because it was ‘unimportant’ and only for silly fun since early childhood, it felt hugely symbolic. What you don’t see in the film is a bit more of the backstory to the moment you refer to. Months earlier, I’d met with [Dr] Matthew Aylett (the world expert on speech synthesis that you see early in the film, he works at Cereproc in Edinburgh ), and I’d said that with the new type of voice we were creating we one day should be able to get it to sing. And he’d agreed, said it was not quite doable yet, but that the perfect song for me would be Pure Imagination, because of the lyrics. He suggested I listen to it. Especially the line that went: ‘Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it.’ Then everything went quiet and I heard nothing more from him. Until I got an email saying to listen to my new voice. Some of my family were visiting at the time, and that’s the moment that was captured on film. What you don’t know, but what hit all of us, was that it actually sounded like me singing, even though I had never recorded the words, or ever recorded myself for our research singing a single note. What Matthew and his team had achieved was technically a marvel. But emotionally it was overwhelming. The moment you see on camera is when I gradually realise that all my hopes, all my dreams, really are going to eventually come true. With hindsight, it was the hugely symbolic turning point in my journey. In 2017 you were told you might only survive two years. You’ve beaten that. What’s a realistic expectation now? Realistically, I’m in uncharted territory – how cool is that?!? The point is that nearly everyone who dies of MND dies because they can’t eat or they can’t breathe. I’ve had surgery to overcome those hurdles. So what is left to kill me? Well, there is hardly any data. In the UK, a very recent survey conducted by my own NHS respiration expert showed that less than one percent of MND patients choose to have an operation to put a ventilation tube into their lungs. So our sample is already remarkably small. However, the most common reason they die is a form of pneumonia caused by inhaling things like saliva or particles of food straight into the lungs. But that can never happen to me because I persuaded the amazing NHS ENT surgeon in the film to separate my wind pipe from my throat so I can never have something ‘go down the wrong way.’ This was ground breaking. The only other person with MND that had this sort of surgery in the UK was a patient back in 1985. But that was an emergency, not elective surgery like mine. Coincidentally, it was another scientist. A guy called Stephen Hawking. So it’s now very unclear whether MND (which the medical textbooks classify as ‘invariably fatal’) will actually get the chance to kill me. Maybe it will be heart disease instead. Or cancer. Both my parents lived till their late nineties. I’ve always stayed slim and fit. And apart from MND, I’m very healthy. So the considered answer to your question is that I may still be around for decades. And here’s a thought that keeps playing in my mind. Already my diet has improved. I drink no alcohol, and I’m better hydrated (24 hours a day). Thanks to NHS healthcare funding I have people checking me every day. And increasingly I will be able to have technology monitor my life signs 24/7. Maybe, as a result of having MND, I’ll end up living even longer than I would have if I had never contracted it in the first place. Talk about silver linings… How would you describe your quality of life now? You would be forgiven for assuming my quality of life was not ideal. After all, I am answering your questions long after my body stopped working sufficiently well to keep me alive; these days I use sophisticated hi-tech to keep it going for its sole remaining purpose of providing a warm, wet, nutritious environment for my brain. I can no longer move. I can no longer breathe or eat very well or smell or taste properly. I have a heightened sense of touch, but can’t touch anything, so a downside of maintaining redundant limbs is that, although I feel every itch, I can’t scratch a single one. Only my eyes, ears and brain remain active, the three of us trapped together within the apparently claustrophobic straightjacket of our own living corpse. But you’d be mistaken. Despite these inconveniences, I feel incredibly lucky. I suspect the trick to enjoying total paralysis is simply to imagine you’re in a luxury spa hotel and the maître d insisted you put your feet up and don’t move a muscle. And my overall quality of life is exceptional. I have love. I have fun. I have hope. I have dreams. I have purpose. Oh, and did I mention, I’m still alive. I mean really alive. Not just one of the living dead. Not just surviving. Thriving! I get to luxuriate in constant social interactions with loved ones, family, friends, acquaintances. I get to laugh a lot (at least inside, I can’t physically laugh any more). And I manage to make people laugh. And I get to live in harmony with increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence that lets me speak in my old biological voice. And I get to express body language with an avatar that looks like me before my facial muscles withered – and which will become exponentially more powerful. And I’m only just getting going. What drives you, when many in your situation would have allowed nature to take its course or given nature a helping hand. Is it a desire to survive or a desire to innovate? Looking at the film a short while ago, I realised that it actually reveals two stories – the one I’d expected (jaw dropping technology and questions about what it means to be human), and the answer to your question. Which I hadn’t expected, but is in fact far more important to me than the first story. And ironically, it’s the second story that may be more relatable. I understand that what I have chosen to do may not make sense to everyone. But the reason why I did it will be obvious to anyone who has been in love. Francis and I are into our fifth decade of living as one. That’s all of our adult lives. And much of that time, it was us against the world. Always looking after each other, fighting all comers, back-to-back. Who would now expect me to do anything other than strive with every fibre of my being to still be around for him? From the moment we met, I would willingly have died for him. Now I realise that I will willingly live for him – whatever the cost… Do you fear death? Absolutely not! Only life can be scary. In truth, over the last three years, death and I have cultivated a healthy disrespect for each other: death keeps knocking at my door; I keep pretending I’m out. There are many obvious things about your old life that you’ll miss but what simple pleasures should we not take for granted? Reaching out and touching the people you love. It seems so trivial. So unnecessary. Yet it leaves an aching chasm when it’s gone. Do you ever get tearful or upset? What are the triggers? To be fair, I have never been the emotionless Mr Spock type of scientist. Indeed, when the movie Titanic first came out I developed the hypothesis that it was a surefire test of true love because any couple watching it that were meant for each other would inevitably be reduced to blubbing wrecks by the end. A lifetime later, I still get teary at poignant moments in movies. And poignant moments in The Scott-Morgan Show – but to my surprise, these latter triggers are getting fewer, not more frequent as I’d expected. I had predicted that in the six-months after filming stopped, having recently suffered the trauma of sacrificing my voice, I would go through patches of feeling pitiably sorry for myself. But the wallowing in self-pity never came. I occasionally felt really frustrated that my fancy hi-tech had crashed and I couldn’t make myself understood. It was stressful, certainly. But nothing near traumatic. To be fair, I spent all my life up till last year speaking far too much. So I’m really now only making up for lost silence. With that said, it would feel awful if (most of the time, when it works) I wasn’t able to generate my own voice using my eyes to spell out the words. Constantly speaking with what is recognisable as my voice, has totally taken the sting out of giving up my biological voice. But why is it that, against all common sense, as I ooze through the final muddy depths towards rock bottom, things are consistently feeling better? A lot better. All the obvious reasons revolving around Francis, my close family, the team looking after me, technology, unwarranted good fortune. But there is something more, which I consider a crucial discovery. Contrary to the torturous scare stories about how it feels being close to ‘locked-in’, under the right circumstances the brain moves on. It grieves a bit, and then, if you give it the chance, most of the time it forgets. Days may pass when I never once remember that in the past I could walk, or move, or (absurdly) even that I could talk. My brain has its own ‘new normal’. The plasticity of the brain to adapt in this way astounds me. It should also bring tremendous hope to anyone coming to terms with Extreme Disability, let alone MND. It certainly does to me. The COVID pandemic must have had an impact on how you live your day to day life. What gives you cause for optimism? I’ve just given you one immense cause for optimism. And there are others. But as you mentioned the pandemic, let’s start there because I think it’s an example of how you sometimes need to outsmart Fate and create your own causes for optimism. The beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak was a disruption. I quickly received an official letter saying I was ‘extremely vulnerable’. [This was actually sloppy science because no-one in fact knows how someone with MND and a laryngectomy is likely to react to a spectrum of respiratory infections, because we’ve never had a chance to study it before. But I let that pass.] What was illuminating came from some conversations with the NHS around the same time: even intensive care wouldn’t be able to look after me if I got ill. And no-one could visit us. We were on our own. So, we turned a liability into an asset and determined to set up our own intensive care unit at home. We were already part way there. When I’d returned from hospital after the second operation in the documentary (when I gave up my voice), we’d been provided by our wonderful NHS with hi-tech equipment ranging from ventilators and cough assist machines to oxygen cylinders, cuff manometers and blood oxygen monitors, so, along with my hospital-style bed, we already had the right props. And, just in case, since my operation Francis had got himself specialist medical training and was probably now one of the very few in the country who was officially signed off to replace the tubing into my bladder, my stomach, my colon, and my lungs. Also, thanks to NHS continuous healthcare funding, I already had a care team very carefully selected by Francis who we had steadily trained to a high standard; now we upped our game still further. We adopted ICU protocol, with everyone but me dressed in disposable apron, gloves and mask. And we kept progressing from there. Now, if I become seriously ill, we can manage without risk of me blocking an ICU bed. It’s an incredibly secure feeling. All thanks to coronavirus! And there are far broader causes for optimism. Ever since I knew that my final operation had been a success (I actually got out of hospital in record time), I’ve felt like I got a new lease of life. Realistically, my condition was getting so bad that, because of the form of my deterioration, without that last op, I’d have been unlikely to make it through last winter. Instead, I may now be around for decades. What’s not to feel upbeat about? Being alive is definitely up there. As is finding myself working seven days a week, harder than at any time in my career. And the extraordinary kindness of strangers should not be a surprise to me, although for some reason in the modern world it is. However, maybe the best thing, or at least the most pleasant surprise, is a bit bizarre. Statistically I should be dead, and according to the relentlessly depressing story of MND that everyone insists on pedalling, I should at the very least be feeling close to suicidal. But instead, I feel alive, excited, I’m really looking forward to the future. I’m having fun! And the most amazing feeling, my greatest cause of unrelenting optimism, is that thanks to the exponential growth in computing power, things will only get better. Every couple of years that I cheat death, my ability to enjoy life thanks to hi-tech will double. Just imagine what the pandemic would have been like even ten years ago without ubiquitous video conference. The next ten years will see just such leaps forward. And the decade after that. We are moving into extraordinary times. I intend to be around to see just how far we can push things. Peter: The Human Cyborg will air on Channel 4 later this month – check out what else is on with our TV Guide
Springwatch's Chris Packham: we need to save our birds before Britain falls silent
The Springwatch presenter says he believes environmental activism and working with the BBC are not compatible
It’s 8pm on a murky, rain-spattered, evening in central London. Chris Packham, just back from a filming trip to Tanzania, is holding court with a small band of dedicated supporters. The setting is the lyrical home of the nightingale, Berkeley Square, and for one night only its bewitching song will subdue the roar of the nearby traffic. Sadly, it’s merely a digital refrain. Spurred by Packham’s evangelical encouragement, phones are juggled with umbrellas and recordings of the nightingale song – likened by Shelley to the writing of poetry – cut through the gloom. This is an act of reverence, not rebellion. “When we did the Walk for Wildlife [last September] we were playing birdsong down through Piccadilly and it was magical,” says Packham. “We had 10,000 people all playing their birdsong and it was bouncing off buildings and we managed to transform the soundscape of London. It was such a simple idea I thought why not repeat it here in Berkeley Square, because of the popularity of that song.” Chris Packham and Jack Fincham are teaming up on a new BBC nature show David Attenborough talks climate change, vegetarianism – and working with Netflix Springwatch presenter Chris Packham warns of Britain's "ecological apocalypse" Packham cannot rest in his pursuit of causes that many worry are in danger of being lost. Nightingale numbers have plummeted by 90 per cent since the 1960s, and there are now fewer than 5,500 breeding pairs in the UK. View oEmbed on the source website “They are a migrant, so we have to accept that it’s not just due to what’s happening in the UK, but when I travel back here it’s like coming to a vacuum – silent springs have already fallen upon us. We know that the collapse in farmland and woodland bird numbers is severe, dangerous and ongoing. We’ve got to get people to engage with that fact.” Engagement is a vital part of Packham’s DNA and, while tonight’s event is as benign a gathering as it’s possible to imagine, he appears increasingly prepared to mix it up in ever more high-profile encounters, such as speaking from the top of a bus during the Extinction Rebellion protest. He also hit the headlines last month after a legal action by the campaign group Wild Justice (of which he is a co-director) ignited fury among sections of the rural community, leading to two dead crows being strung up on the gate to his New Forest home, an online petition being raised to get him sacked from the BBC (over 138,000 people had signed it as we went to press). Oh, and a death threat against him that’s being investigated by his local police force. View oEmbed on the source website The legal challenge means that farmers, gamekeepers and pest controllers can no longer routinely shoot a designated group of 16 birds – including crows, pigeons, jackdaws and magpies – that they say wreak havoc, particularly at this time of year. A general licence to cull, previously issued unilaterally by Natural England, has been revoked and replaced by individual licences that have to be applied for. Farmers say the expected delays in issuing the licences will lead to crops being damaged and, they point out angrily, the nests of the very small birds Packham is trying to protect being raided by predators like crows and magpies. This is not town versus country, but science versus experience. And Packham is convinced the science is on his side. “All the scientific studies show there is no relationship between an abundance of magpies and sparrowhawks, for instance, with a decline in songbirds. The decline in small birds is due to the way that we manage our landscape. The immense division that’s been generated by a tiny hostile faction of the shooting fraternity over this general licence thing has been entirely counter-productive. There are many farmers out there who I work very closely with and we support each other’s ideals. Now we have to go through a process of healing so we can keep going.” There’s no doubt talking to Packham tonight that he’ll keep going, but does the 57-year-old think his activism is actually increasing? He says not, but then goes on to say: “I am getting older, so my time is running out. I’m increasingly concerned that I have less time to achieve what I’m trying to do, so maybe on that count I am [campaigning more actively]. I’m certainly becoming more determined to make a difference, but I’ll only ever do that from a firm foundation of science, with rational arguments, hoping to generate change through dialogue.” Chris Packham reveals the reality of living with Asperger’s – and his “romantic plan” to be reunited with his dogs after he dies He’s also keen to point out that he isn’t opposed to all culling – nightingales would be better protected, he admits, by some selective shooting. “Evidence that I was reviewing this morning from the British Trust for Ornithology says overgrazing by deer is driving the decline in nightingales. Since we have no large predators – no lynx, no wolf, no bear – we have no choice in the UK but to manage our deer population otherwise we’ll lose nightingales. “Scientifically informed culling is unfortunately an artefact of our lives. If we want to preserve a rich mosaic of species and habitats, we have to accept that. I have never been opposed to culling, and I’ve never been opposed to shooting. The shooting that I am opposed to is the illegal persecution of birds of prey and the unsustainable shooting of endangered species such as woodcock and snipe which are declining rapidly. “What we are facing is an entrenched intransigence in a population of people who are not used to being asked to change, but the world is a changed place and we’re all going to have to change whether we like it or not. That’s clear.” What’s also clear, although perhaps a little fuzzy around the edges, is the careful line Packham has to tread in creating separation between the political nature of much of his campaigning and the impartiality he has to bring to his BBC work. Critics say it doesn’t matter if he’s unbiased on screen, the fact he’s on TV at all creates a profile that gives his off-screen words greater clout. It’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for Packham. In every way he is a force of nature, and a skilled communicator. He’s got plenty to say – if he does have a mute button it’s little used – but he’s aware of the potential conflict of interest. “As you know, I am a great champion of the BBC and its impartiality and I am in constant dialogue with them about how to make sure I maintain that impartiality. “I am not a BBC employee, I am a freelancer who’s recruited to talk about wildlife on TV because it’s a field of – and I use inverted commas here – expertise. BBC viewers expect to see people talking about their subject with authority, whether it’s history, music, cooking, gardening or natural history. And that’s what I continue to do. But you don’t hear me talking about any of this other stuff on Springwatch…” Ah, Springwatch, a three-week space in the TV calendar that he’s made his own, and which returns this week from the new location in the Cairngorms, first unveiled in January’s Winterwatch. Packham, with co-presenters Michaela Strachan and Gillian Burke, will once again be applying his knowledge of British flora and fauna to the storytelling, with an emphasis this year on how those of us with gardens can help experts better understand the role they play in supporting wildlife. It must be a welcome refuge from the storm that’s raging outside. But Packham remains sanguine. “All this antipathy just strengthens my resolve. For me it’s the result that counts and if the result of this hoo-hah is that we have gained better protection for British wildlife then all of that will have been worthwhile.” Springwatch begins Monday 27th May at 8.00pm on BBC2
Line of Duty's Vicky McClure: 'Music brings hope to those with dementia'
After watching her grandmother struggle with dementia, the Line of Duty star formed a choir to prove the value of music as therapy...
As a line of dialogue it could have come straight from the mouth of Vicky McClure’s Line of Duty character Kate Fleming. “We’ve got each other’s back, so we’ll be fine,” she says with confident conviction. But McClure isn’t seeking solidarity with her mates in AC-12, nor is there any dramatic bravura attached to the sentiment. Instead they are words of gentle encouragement to a 50-year-old woman with dementia trying to learn – and remember – the lines of a song the pair are preparing to duet on. These days Julie can’t remember what she’s doing from one moment to the next. “I don’t know how long I have got to remember things, so I need to pack in as much as I can,” she says of her reasons for joining a choir made up of people with dementia, formed by McClure in her home city of Nottingham for a new two-part BBC documentary, Our Dementia Choir. Anna Maxwell Martin will guest star in a "pivotal" role in the final two episodes of Line of Duty series five When is Our Dementia Choir with Vicky McClure on TV? McClure’s reasons are also personal: she lost her grandmother Iris to dementia in 2015. Now, she wants to bang the drum about the benefits music can bring to people with dementia. “I watched my nana being taken by dementia. I watched her personality slowly fade away – it’s one of the hardest things to watch a family member go through. But I also saw how music helped, changing her mood and, for a while, bringing us back the old Nana.” The youngest member of the 20-strong choir is 31, the oldest 87 – what connects them is a desire to find new purpose in their lives and help science understand better how music can help reawaken dementia-affected brains. McClure herself underwent a brain-imaging scan to illustrate how music affects neurological activity. As low-intensity sounds were played through her headset there was patchy acknowledgement of what she was hearing. But when her favourite Beatles song In My Life was played the sensory parts of her brain became stimulated, illuminating the scan with colour. The song takes on an anthem-type status for the choir for obvious reasons. Just take a look at the lyrics: There are places I’ll remember All my life, though some have changed Some forever, not for better Some have gone and some remain All these places have their moments With lovers and friends I still can recall Some are dead and some are living In my life, I’ve loved them all. John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s words had a tearful resonance for some of the 20-strong choir and their loved ones. “It’s too close to home,” sobbed the wife of one of the singers. Meet the cast of Line of Duty series five The choir will work with Professor Seb Crutch of University College London as part of a three-year research project into the benefits of singing for brain health. But even at this stage he’s in no doubt about its value. “We really do need to roll this out, because it is proven that it does have an effect on people’s lives.” And if it isn’t too crass a cliché, those words are music to McClure’s ears. “I think raising awareness and just telling your story is hugely important,” she says. “When you know somebody’s going through this with you, you feel less alone, and that’s what happened with the choir. “Music to me is as powerful as a drug. There isn’t medication to stop dementia, there isn’t anything currently to cure it, it’s about trying to live well with dementia. You will see the benefits of music on your family with your own eyes – you only have to put on their type of music.” The choir spent 12 weeks in rehearsal, preparing for a performance at Nottingham’s biggest venue, the Royal Concert Hall. Some found it daunting, others were exhilarated by the prospect. McClure, 35, who radiates down-to-earth likeability, was there to comfort and gently cajole, and while she tried to remain emotionally detached, the tears flowed freely. “At first I was doing all right, I wasn’t massively affected. Nobody seemed to me like they had dementia, they weren’t walking around saying they didn’t know who they were any more. And then one day I got back and I just lay on my bed and cried my eyes out.” Though the film was finished last year, McClure has remained friends with many of the choir members. “I stay in touch with the choir all the time, we’ve got a very funny Facebook group that everyone’s very active on. I went to see Daniel and Jordan [a young couple with twins] in their house for a coffee a couple of weeks ago. We all live in Nottingham, so it’s easy, and they’re the same age as me so we formed an ordinary friendship.” But the savage onslaught of dementia means that some of the connections she’s made have already been eroded. “Quite a few people are in homes now and some are deteriorating quite rapidly,” she says. “They still meet and I went to a singing session two weeks ago and saw some of the members and it was quite frightening because I can tell when people recognise who I am, and I can tell when they’re just being polite. It’s horrible, it’s really, really hard.” View oEmbed on the source website But her very personal understanding of dementia means her work continues beyond just making and publicising her film. “I want to keep going, I’m not going to make one two-part documentary and leave it there and say I’ve done my bit for dementia. There’s loads more to be discovered. The music side is the core of the show, and those living with dementia will tell you in their own words that it’s changed their lives, but the science side is crucial, too, because we don’t know what we might find, and we said that from the start. We had to give it a go.” Who is 'H' in Line of Duty? Meet the suspects Line of Duty writer Jed Mercurio has been planning the 'H' conspiracy from day one Giving it a go for McClure means lobbying for more research and more money. “The statistics for people doing music therapy in care homes is very low. That is something I would really push. “It’s clear that the Government don’t put enough funding into research. I am passionate about looking into that. It’s free to sing but to have a routine, to get people from A to B, providing tea and coffee, just the simple things, isn’t free. It has got to happen now on a realistic scale all over the country. It can be cheap and manageable and we have to work out ways to do that. I can’t do it, I need the backing of councils and government.” At the start of the film McClure asks her mum Carol whether she’s fearful about getting dementia. Carol replies, “I do worry that I will get it. I just hope I get looked after.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2019/04/17408875-low_res-line-of-duty-series-5-95921e4.jpg" width="2000" height="1334" alt="WARNING: Embargoed for publication until 00:00:01 on 02/04/2019 - Programme Name: Line of Duty - Series 5 - TX: n/a - Episode: Line of Duty S5 - Episode 2 (No. 2) - Picture Shows: ***EMBARGOED TILL 00:01 2ND APRIL 2019*** Steve (MARTIN COMPSTON), Kate (VICKY MCCLURE), Tatleen (TAJ ATWAL) - (C) World Productions - Photographer: Aiden Monaghan" title="Line of Duty S5 - Episode 2" /> Later, for this article, McClure is asked whether she, too, fears a familial link. “Yes, I do. I think of it being like a cancer, I’ve lost too many friends to cancer who had healthy lives. I don’t know what I’m going to die of, it could be dementia. But I can’t live my life between now and whenever, worrying about it to that degree. We did discuss in the documentary whether I wanted a test that can give you an idea as to whether or not you have the possibility of getting dementia, but I would rather not know. I want to let life do what it’s going to do.” And for the moment that means keeping the nation on the edge of its seat in Line of Duty and heaping praise on her dementia choir. “They’re all extremely proud [of what they’ve achieved]. They don’t realise it but they’re going to inspire other people and give people a bit of hope. Our Dementia Choir with Vicky McClure airs on Thursday 2nd May at 8pm on BBC1
'One of the most pressing issues of our time': BBC prioritises environment with new natural history programming
Chris Packham and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall were among the BBC presenters to reveal details of their upcoming shows
The BBC has assembled its largest ever panel of natural history TV presenters to put the environment firmly at the top of the broadcaster's agenda. Seven presenters, including Chris Packham, Liz Bonnin, Steve Backshall and Gordon Buchanan revealed details of programmes coming up in the next few months that will examine the threats posed to planet Earth. The BBC lines up Planet Earth III for 2022 The best TV shows airing in 2019 Listen to the RadioTimes.com Podcast now: subscribe on iTunes / subscribe on Google Podcasts The launch at Kew Gardens in London comes a month before Netflix broadcasts its own clarion call for the world with the eight-part series Our Planet, and will be interpreted in some quarters as the BBC asserting its authority in the area of natural history film-making. The BBC’s most senior television executive, director of content Charlotte Moore, said the environment was “one of the most pressing and important issues of our time”. She went on: “The audience really want to know more about the way our planet is changing. We feel that this is just the beginning of the conversation.” Each of the presenters outlined details of the programmes they’ve made, but it was Chris Packham whose documentary polemic on population growth produced the biggest reaction. “It is in my opinion the single most important thing to talk about,” he said. “We spend a lot of time worrying about climate change, but as a species we are enormously intelligent and adaptable and our species will survive the impact of climate change. The changes we will undergo will be catastrophic and life will be nothing like it is now, but we will survive.” But population growth poses a much bigger threat, said Packham, adding that the Earth’s population has doubled since 1968 “We are just simply running out of resources. We, here, survive on the resource poverty of other people in other parts of the world. There are too many of us and we need to have this discussion.” Packham said his programme – which is due to air in summer 2019 – will pose questions that viewers might find hard to deal with. “For instance,” he said. “Have you considered what measles and mumps and polio and smallpox were for? Because in nature nothing is redundant. If it exists there’s a purpose for it and the cold reality is that these diseases that we have so successfully beaten through fantastic advances in medical science were part of an ecological system that regulated human population size. We’ve beaten them and at no point in the film are we saying we should turn back the clock and allow people to die of diseases again, but that’s changed the shape of our population.” Packham spoke of his elderly and ailing father who he described as being regarded as a “burden on the NHS”. “My argument is that he is not a burden on the health service and what we should have been thinking about is how we deal with an ageing population.” Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall went on to speak about his film on plastics – a series that sees him empty a carrier bag of plastics on a table in front of Environment Secretary Michael Gove. He said that the public was “fired up and ready” to embrace ways of reducing plastic consumption, but there had to be the will from Government and big business as well. “People are starting to take direct action by dumping plastic at the supermarket. People are indignant and they want things to change.” Packham was asked whether he was optimistic about the future. He had an upbeat response: “I have got a sneaking suspicion that the best part of the human species time on earth is yet to come. At the moment we are making lots of mistakes but are reaching the time when we recognise that and are beginning to address that. Although the way we live on the planet will be very different due to climate change and due to excessive population, at a certain point in our future we will, perhaps, get back to a time when we can live in harmony with the planet. But I think there will be an enormous amount of discomfort for our species to get to that point. "When problems arise we solve them. We are brilliant at cure but terrible at prevention.”
How was Dynasties filmed? Behind the scenes on David Attenborough's new BBC natural history series
The broadcaster's new nature documentary focuses on five different species. But how did the wildlife filmmakers capture their incredible stories?
David Attenborough returns to present BBC1's new nature documentary Dynasties, centring on five endangered species: chimpanzees, tigers, emperor penguins, lions, and painted wolves. But how did the show's wildlife filmmakers capture their stories? Dynasties: first trailer released for the new landmark BBC natural history series David Attenborough shines a light on animal interactions and habitat loss in politically charged new series Dynasties Chimpanzees Where were they filmed? Senegal, West Arica How long did it take to film them? 309 days Meet David. An alpha male chimp who’s clinging on to power and all the benefits that being leader of the pack bestows. “He gets the best access to the food and the females,” says producer Rosie Thomas, who was part of a crew that filmed him and his group over two years in the border area of Senegal and Guinea But David’s three-year grip on power is under threat. Other males want a piece of his action and this episode follows them as the struggle for supremacy unfolds. “They are quite a unique group, in that there are many more males than females, so there’s a lot of aggression,” says Thomas. Observing the plotting and the treachery involved following the chimps on foot, sometimes up to 15 miles a day in temperatures of above 40° Celsius. “The physical demands were huge, but the rewards immense,” says Thomas. “You have to be careful not to anthropomorphise too much, but it was just like being in Number Ten watching them play all their games.” Some might say… Actually, no, let’s not go there. Emperor Penguins <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2018/11/16333463-high_res-dynasties-1531f4c.jpg" width="4282" height="2858" alt="WARNING: Embargoed for publication until 00:00:01 on 04/11/2018 - Programme Name: Dynasties - TX: n/a - Episode: Dynasties - Emperor (No. 2) - Picture Shows: **PRESS PACK EMBARGOED UNTIL SUNDAY 4TH NOVEMBER 2018** A pair of six-week-old chicks, left on their own by their parents, huddle together for warmth. Atka Bay, Antarctica. - (C) Stefan Christmann - Photographer: Stefan Christmann" title="Dynasties" /> Where were they filmed? Atka Bay, Antarctica How long did it take to film them? Eleven months on the ice shelf, six months filming Take three intrepid BBC film-makers, maroon them in Antarctica for the best part of a year and challenge them to bring back penguin footage that will blow our socks off. Will Lawson, Lindsay McCrae and Stefan Christmann flew into German research station Neumayer Station III in December 2016. When the last plane left ahead of the southern winter in February, they knew they and the nine German researchers stationed there were on their own until flights resumed nine months later. “We were told that the likelihood of us being evacuated [in the event of an emergency] was well below ten per cent,” says Lawson. “So, yes, that massive level of isolation was something that was very apparent.” The team spent the first few months getting used to their surroundings and equipment. Then, in April, the sea ice started to freeze and the penguins began to return to breed. But there was frustration. “In the first few weeks they came in long lines, hundreds and hundreds of them, all going back to the exact location where they had previously bred,” says Lawson. “But at that point the ice wasn’t thick enough for us to go on it.” View oEmbed on the source website When test drilling revealed the ice to be about 30cm thick, they were confident it was strong enough to support the team and their equipment. Descending the face of the ice shelf, using techniques they’d learnt on glaciers in Austria, they set off on skidoos on the one-kilometre trek to the penguin colony. By this time temperatures had plummeted, so two shipping containers — one holding a small kitchen and the other a toilet — were used for respite from the cold. “It was a great safety net, because when the temperatures got extremely low — and for three or four months they hovered around the minus 30 mark — you had to take a break just to warm up again. It was the wind and visibility that were the big limiting factors. If there was a white-out, we just couldn’t go out.” They did, however, have one piece of specific penguin behaviour they wanted to film — the penguin huddle — and that’s only observed in the most extreme of conditions. When freezing winds rage, the male penguins pack tightly together in order to incubate the eggs (the females have gone to sea to feed). And Lawson and co needed to be at the heart of that impending storm. “It took a lot of planning, because we had to wait for a developing storm, find the colony, film them and then get back to base before the wind speeds got too high and before it got too dark,” he says. But no amount of planning can eliminate all risk — and in Lawson’s case, it nearly proved catastrophic. A tiny gap in the padding of his goggles meant that every time he exhaled a breath into his face mask, the moisture crept into the goggles and froze. “The only way that you can deal with that is to take your goggles off and literally scratch the ice out. So we would all stop and I would scratch the ice out and we’d carry on. But the wind picked up and we couldn’t really speak over the sound of it. At one point Lindsay turned around, thought I’d scraped the ice out of my goggles and carried on. But I hadn’t cleared my goggles and within a couple of seconds he vanished into the white-out. “We were happy that Lindsay was safe, because he had the GPS operating and knew the way back. But when Stefan and I took a GPS out, which we’d switched off to reserve power, it wouldn’t turn on again. We always kept a battery in an inside pocket, but for a very short period of time there was a bit of a scramble for Stefan to get that spare battery out, replace it in minus 60 degrees and wind speeds that were rapidly increasing, in order to get the GPS working again. “As he got it going, Lindsay suddenly reappeared out of the white-out — he’d managed to find us. We made the rest of the way back without any problem, but the visibility was so poor that we only knew we were back at the station when the GPS told us we were. It was a very welcome sight." Lions Where were they filmed? Masai Mara Reserve, Kenya How long did it take to film them? 420 days Charm by name, fearsome by nature. This 14-year-old lioness proves that on the plains of east Africa, the term “king of the jungle” is a misnomer. For it’s females like Charm who are the force to be reckoned with. “They seem to be born with a lot more sense than the males, so the female lions grow up mimicking their mothers, whereas the males just sort of find their own way,” says Simon Blakeney, the producer who followed the pride over the course of two years. In Charm’s case she’s the perfect single-mum role model. Abandoned by the adult males of the group, she and her cousin Sienna both feed and fend for the ten-strong group. “The two of them had to care for the pride as well as hunt for them, so they had to do all the protecting and the muscle work as well,” says Blakeney. Despite the lions’ position at the top of the food chain, one scene in the film reveals just how vulnerable they are. Local herdsmen, frustrated by attacks on cattle, deliberately poison a carcass, with terrible consequences. “It was something we were aware could be a problem, but really it massively shocked us,” says Blakeney. “It really brings home the scale of the challenges facing lions today. They’re almost silently slipping away, literally slipping away.” Painted Wolves Where were they filmed? Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe How long did it take to film them? 669 days These pack predators have the reputation of being ferocious killing machines, but Nick Lyon hopes they will be viewed more sympathetically after people see his film. For a start, they’ve had bit of an image rebranding — they’re referred to as painted wolves rather than the more commonly used African wild dog. "I want the audience not to think of them just as predators,” says Lyon. “Yes, we show them hunting, and those sequences don’t pull any punches, but we really hope people will warm to them when they see that actually they’re something of an underdog. Crocodiles, lions and hyena are all threats — so you see how tough their lives really are.” The film follows a family pack led by an ailing matriarch, Tait. But her days seem numbered when daughter Blacktip ousts her from both den and hunting grounds. “The greatest challenge was just finding them, because they can cover such huge distances,” says Lyon. Yet there were moments of breathtaking closeness. “One day I walked into the water and they played all around me. It was an amazing, intimate, perspective. I hope people fall in love with them.” Tigers Where were they filmed? Bandhavgarh National Park, India How long did it take to film them? 220 days Loss of habitat is one of the key reasons why wild animals are under threat. But the tigers in this reserve in India face a bittersweet predicament — their numbers are booming, but there’s not enough space for them. “There are so many tigers that they have to move outside the park, and that’s when the problems begin,” says Theo Webb, whose film follows Raj Bhera as she gives birth to and raises four cubs. A remote-controlled camera on five-metre-high scaffolding peers into the birthing den on a rocky hilltop, operated by joystick in a hide 30 metres away. Problems start to arise when a daughter from a previous litter, named Solo, returns to try to seize control of her mother’s territory. “The park is surrounded by villages so there’s nowhere for Raj Bhera to go. She runs into humans, and that is a real moment.” So the jeopardy is very real, but so too is the joy. “It’s hard to make people love tigers more than they already do, but seeing the cubs play is incredibly joyful.” Dynasties is a five-part series airing on Sundays at 8.30pm on BBC1, beginning Sunday 11th November 2018 This article was originally published in November 2018
Meet Winterwatch's new presenter Gillian Burke
Kenyan-born Burke studied biology at Bristol University, became a natural history researcher, and then worked her way up as a producer
Talk to new BBC wildlife presenter Gillian Burke about diversity and you’ll most likely get a heartfelt piece of advocacy for the ladybird spider, the grass snake or the hermit crab. This is a woman who loves the variety of the British countryside. But mention it in conjunction with her elevation as an on-screen addition to the Springwatch team, and the simultaneous demotion of Martin Hughes-Games, and you ignite a different kind of debate, one of the most persistent in the broadcast industry at the moment. Is Hughes-Games being eased out to make the presenting team less white and help the BBC hit diversity targets? He says yes, though generously accepting it’s a good thing, the BBC says no. But more of that later. Burke, 42, is Kenyan born and now lives in Cornwall with her ten-year-old son and eight- year-old daughter. She says she was upset when the story broke suggesting she was ousting Hughes-Games from the team. “A friend texted me one Monday morning saying I was in the papers. Can you imagine the horror for me of apparently busting into the party and being blamed for breaking it up?” Happily, at least for the time being, that party is still in full swing as Hughes-Games is back in the field – and the studio – for this week’s Winterwatch from RSPB Arne in Dorset with Burke and programme co-hosts Chris Packham and Michaela Strachan. Have she and Hughes-Games spoken about it? She says not. But she hopes there isn’t a problem. “In many ways Martin and I have had a very similar journey. We both went to Bristol University, both did biology, both went into natural history as researchers and then worked our way up as producers.” The difference being, of course, that Hughes-Games’s route wasn’t via Nairobi and Vienna. Born just outside the Kenyan capital, Burke lived what she describes as a “very happily feral” childhood, hunting barefoot for insects outside their house – “I hated shoes and would kick them off as soon as I got home from school” – and going on trips with her mechanic dad into the game parks to observe the wildlife. That hands-on exposure to the natural world was underpinned by an awareness of conservation that came from her mum, who worked in Nairobi for the UN on environmental projects. The Winterwatch team (from left): Martin Hughes-Games, Michaela Strachan and Chris Packham Her ancestry is defined by the British Empire: her grandfathers are from Trinidad and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and grandmothers both from the Seychelles. They met in Kenya, then known as British East Africa. “There was a lot of movement at the time, which I think gets overlooked. Basically, skilled and unskilled people travelled around the British Empire where the work was required.” When she was just ten years old, Burke moved with her family to Vienna after the UN offered her mum a new role. “It didn’t register as a big shock then, but looking back it was. We were one of only two or three black families in the whole of Vienna so it was a massive contrast for us. There was no place at the international school so for a short while I went to an Austrian school where no one spoke English. But I picked up German very quickly and it meant that my experience wasn’t confined to being part of an ex-pat community.” After high school she won a place at Bristol University to study biology. “My plan was that I would do my degree and go back to Kenya and work in the game parks for the wildlife service. But walking up and down to lectures took me past the BBC’s Natural History Unit and I remember gazing at it and thinking, ‘Wow. That’s where I would like to work.’” She got her dream and today is as enthralled by the diversity of British countryside as that of her native Kenya, particularly those creatures she calls the underdogs (she once had an ant colony living at home with her and suggests we all pay more attention to the beauty of the common house spider). “I do think it’s important to get people to relate to members of the animal kingdom that aren’t easy to like. It’s the whole ecosystem we need to be interested in and look after. We cannot conserve on a selective basis. I feel very strongly about trying to get people to connect to the wildlife around them. I think there’s a big group of people who just aren’t sure whether, and how, they can make a difference. But it’s a bit like housework. It’s good to get everyone involved, but sometimes you just have to get on and do it yourself.” 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. So protect diversity in the natural world and improve it in the TV world? The BBC is, after all, committed to 15 per cent of its on-screen talent coming from the black, Asian and ethnic minority population by the end of this year. She politely sidesteps the question, though, saying that skin colour has never been an issue during her career. “I can totally understand why people would want to know where I’ve come from, the perception is that I’ve just shown up. But I’ve been doing this a long time. My first job in natural history was in the mid-late 90s and I’ve worked pretty solidly in it ever since. I have grown up alongside all the people involved in programmes like Planet Earth. I have my own story and my own journey and it’s taken me a long time to get here.” This article was originally published in 2017
David Attenborough talks alpha males, feminism – and new BBC documentary Dynasties
The 92-year-old documentary maker discusses his latest five-part series, which follows five endangered species as they attempt to secure the future of their offspring
David Attenborough is a wise observer of human behaviour. But there must be times when Homo sapiens (or, at least, the fourth estate) leaves him scratching his head in bewilderment. During a morning of interviews to promote his latest series, the five-part Dynasties, Attenborough is invited to ponder a disparate range of questions. Will he be donating his brain to science; is a dramatic scene of primate politics featuring David the chimp (opposite) a metaphor for Brexit; and what is he hoping to get for Christmas? Though aged 92, Attenborough is still agile enough to spot a headline masquerading as a question – and nimbly sidestep it. How, then, would we fare encouraging him to invoke his inner feminist? David Attenborough: The BBC doesn’t do enough for culture and the arts Dynasties: first trailer released for the new landmark BBC natural history series David Attenborough looks back on how TV has changed in the last 60 years It’s an approach that demands an explanation. If Dynasties underlines anything, it’s that in the animal kingdom females are generally, though not exclusively, much more useful than males. So, would he agree there are parallels in this regard between animal kind and humankind? View oEmbed on the source website “Yes, but you could also find the opposite. There are female-dominant societies both in human beings and in animals. I agree, though, they’re a minority.” There’s some anecdotal evidence that with lions, for instance, female cubs learn from their mothers, whereas boisterous young males learn from their mistakes. Any helpful clues there? “If you restrict it to mammals, then by and large it is true. Bull elephants, for example, don’t stick with the family. The females have all the wisdom. They bring up all the kids, they deal with the problems of drought and so on. The males dash around, trumpeting and copulating whenever they get the chance.” With girl power a mostly positive fact of life in the wild, might our society be a better place if more women had positions of influence? “Yes, I guess so, but we do have a female prime minister, and you have some women in Fleet Street who are fairly powerful. I think it depends on all kinds of things. One of the reasons society is changing so much is the development of the Pill. The huge dominant fact among mammals is how you rear the young. Now we have ways of dealing with that – one of which is not to have children until quite late in life [or not at all]. The responsibility of producing the next generation is now optional.” If Attenborough were an animal, he’d be a fox – and a particularly canny one. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2018/11/16378914-high_res-dynasties-ce93f14.jpg" width="4284" height="2856" alt="WARNING: Embargoed for publication until 00:00:01 on 04/11/2018 - Programme Name: Dynasties - TX: n/a - Episode: Dynasties - Generic (No. n/a) - Picture Shows: **IMAGE STRICTLY EMBARGOED UNTIL SUNDAY 4TH NOVEMBER 2018** Sir David Attenborough - (C) Nick Lyon - Photographer: Nick Lyon" title="Dynasties" /> One question on which he’s not at all evasive is about this new series he’s narrating. Dynasties does pretty much what it says on the label; it follows the fortunes of five groups of animals – indeed, bar the Emperor penguin, one specific family group – over the course of two years. “I don’t think anyone has dared to do this before,” says Attenborough. “When Mike [Gunton, the executive producer] first told me, I thought he was barmy – to devote two years to filming one group within one species and say ‘we will show exactly what happens’ is either very brave or very foolish, because supposing nothing happens? And in lots of instances in the natural world, nothing does happen.” Except in this case Gunton and his team had a hunch what might happen. Each of the featured groups were selected – or, as Gunton says, “cast” – because of what researchers on the ground had discovered. In the case of the tigers, mum Raj Bhera was due to give birth. With the lions, the dominant males had abandoned the group, leaving the two older females to act as protectors and providers. And, with the chimps, the ageing alpha male David – named not after the presenter, but by local scientists in Senegal – was thought to be facing a threat to his rule. Read a review of the first episode here. In David’s case, the tracking of the group by the film team produces one particularly memorable sequence. The adult chimp is the subject of a brutal coup attempt that leaves him grievously injured. The females tend his body before deserting him to move off in search of water. “They couldn’t stay, they had to abandon him and go to water,” says Attenborough. “They had no alternative and that happens to human beings, too – some of the northern tribes on migration do leave the old people behind.” Bingo. A chance to get Attenborough back to humankind and mortality, but Gunton senses the danger and intervenes. “What is fascinating is not the abandonment, it’s that the females initially didn’t abandon him – they wanted him to live.” And then, as we wrap up – and Attenborough unwraps his fourth or fifth Kit Kat of the morning – he mischievously, and I suspect very knowingly, throws out a teasing titbit. “Next time, let me tell you why female hyenas have male genitalia…” Dynasties is a five-part series airing on Sundays at 8.30pm on BBC1, beginning Sunday 11 November 2018 This article was originally published in the 10-16 November 2018 issue of Radio Times magazine
Manhunt writer admits filming in Walton-on-Thames on anniversary of Milly Dowler's disappearance was "unfortunate timing"
Manhunt screenwriter Ed Whitmore says he was right to revisit the site of the tragedy — but accepts the timing was insensitive
On 19 August 2004, 22-year-old French student Amélie Delagrange was attacked and left for dead while she was walking home through the west London suburb of Twickenham. On 24 April 2018, residents woke to discover police tape once again sealing off Twickenham Green, the place of her murder. Men in white protective suits, posters pinned to trees and “Can you help?” witness appeals all pointed to a gut-wrenching case of déjà vu. Except this time they were just props, used by the makers of ITV’s drama Manhunt in their depiction of the police investigation into Amélie’s death and the subsequent conviction of Levi Bellfield for her murder, and also the murders of Milly Dowler and Marsha McDonnell. What time is Manhunt on TV, and what’s it about? Everything you need to know about Grantchester series four Meet the cast of ITV's Manhunt View oEmbed on the source website “We took the decision to try to be as authentic as we possibly could,” says writer Ed Whitmore. “If you decide to be authentic about A, B and C, then why not D, E and F? If we had filmed somewhere else and called it Twickenham Green people would have said, ‘That’s not Twickenham Green’. If you call it something other than Twickenham Green you’re starting to stray away from the real story you’re telling. Then you’re in more treacherous waters because you could be accused of playing fast and loose with the truth, which is serious.” The truth about what really happened on Twickenham Green is, of course, appalling, and Whitmore accepts that a script so closely mirroring an awful, and still familiar, reality risks triggering renewed pain for the families of those involved, although the show’s executive has insisted it would never have gone ahead if any of them had objected. “Whenever you base a drama on real events you run that risk,” says Whitmore. “But if you can look yourself in the eye and say that you’re telling the story for a good reason and you’re doing so with integrity, respect and sensitivity, then I think it is legitimate.” The “reason” cited by Whitmore is an important one. For it’s right to point out this thoughtfully made drama is not a murder re-enactment. Based, as it is, on the memoirs of the detective who led the investigation, DCI Colin Sutton (Martin Clunes), it tells the story of one man’s tenacious pursuit of Amélie’s killer, a manhunt that led him to connect Bellfield to two previous murders. “This is not a thriller,” says Whitmore. “We took the decision very early on to take any melodrama out of it. Our fundamental aim was to put the audience in the shoes of Colin Sutton. When he got the case he said it would be the most important thing in his life. Whatever it took, he was going to bring Amélie’s killer to justice. It was a heroic line to take in many ways, and obviously there were repercussions to that.” Sutton’s marriage, shown to be under pressure in the drama, later collapsed. It’s true, also, that the retelling of this story — across three consecutive nights — will have repercussions for the three families involved. All have been consulted about the drama and consented — or rather didn’t dissent — to it being made. All three have been sent the film to watch and RT understands that the McDonnells and Dowlers have seen it, though have yet to comment. It’s reasonable to assume, however, that Milly’s family wouldn’t have been happy about a film crew returning to the precise spot in Walton-on-Thames where the 13-year-old was last seen, almost to the day of the 16th anniversary of her disappearance. Whitmore accepts that was wrong. “It’s unfortunate if you are insensitive in any way when making a drama like this because there is already the potential to cause upset. That was unfortunate timing, definitely.” He hopes, though, that the families and viewers will see the drama for what it is, a vindication of one man’s tireless pursuit of a brutal killer. “My overwhelming sense is that the families were supportive of seeing Colin’s story told, because to them he is a hero. He’s the man who caught Levi Bellfield, and that’s a story worth telling.” Manhunt airs nightly from Sunday 6th to Tuesday 8th January – at 9pm on ITV